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If you’re the founder of an early-stage startup here’s a big, fat reminder about one of the great experiences you can have at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. Apply to our TC Top Picks program for a chance to step into the startup spotlight.

If you’re selected, you’ll receive a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package and a bunch of other perks (more on those in a minute). Here’s the first low bar for entry.

TechCrunch editors will accept applications from early-stage startups that fall into one of the following tech categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, CRM/Enterprise and Education.

They’ll thoroughly review every application and then select up to five startups they feel represent the very best in each category. Want a sense of what our editors look for? Here’s the list of the TC Top Picks from Disrupt Berlin 2018.

Now, about those other perks we mentioned. All Top Picks get one full day to exhibit in Startup Alley, plus three Founder passes, access to the full conference and all programming across four stages, including Startup Battlefield, our epic pitch competition with a $50,000 prize. You’ll also receive invitations to VIP events, like the investor reception where you’ll have the opportunity to connect with top-tier investors and global press.

You also get the complete attendee list (via TC Events Mobile App) and CrunchMatch — our business networking platform, use of the Startup Alley Exhibitor Lounge and access to exclusive video content after the conference ends.

Here’s another huge perk — one that offers long-term marketing benefits.  Each Top Pick startup will be interviewed by a TechCrunch editor live on the Showcase Stage. We’ll record that interview and promote it on our social media platforms. That video will drive traffic to your site and be a great talking point whenever you pitch potential customers and investors.

And in a classic “but wait, there’s more” moment, every early-stage startup that exhibits in Startup Alley has a shot at being chosen as a Wild Card. Why is that a good thing? Because Wild Cards get to compete in the Startup Battlefield.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. Looking for investor love, media attention and international recognition? Then apply to be a TC Top Pick. We can’t wait to see what you’ve got.

Bonus: Want to launch your start up on a global stage? You can use the same application form to apply to Startup Battlefield.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Milkbasket, a Gurugram-based micro-delivery startup, is in talks to close a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprints in milk, groceries, fruits, and vegetables delivery market that has attracted the attention of many in recent months including Amazon India.

The four-year-old startup is in advanced stages of talks with private equity funds to raise more than $50 million, up from $26 million it has secured to date, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The round, Series C, is likely to close within the next two months, they said. A Milkbasket spokesperson declined to comment.

Milkbasket, which operates in Bangalore, Gurugram, Noida, and Ghaziabad, and Hyderabad, allows users to order their daily supplies until midnight and delivers it in the early morning hours. It has also started a subscription service for users who need the same set of items delivered to them everyday.

In a recent interview with Indian newspaper Economic Times (paywalled), the startup executives said they are not trying to get items instantly to customers but focus on recurring supplies that need to reach people’s doorsteps at certain hours of the day, thereby mimicking how a traditional milkman and paperboy operate to lower delivery costs.

The startup, which focused on just delivering milk in its early years, is increasingly exploring new categories to enter, and might soon begin delivering prescribed medicine in some cities, one of the people said. Milk delivery is now a small portion of the startup’s business.

It competes with BigBasket and Grofers, both of which are heavily backed and locked in a fierce battle to gain market share. Many more startups are entering micro-delivery territory. Naspers and Tencent-backed Swiggy launched a new service called “Go” yesterday that will enable people in Bangalore to have anything delivered to them.

Google-backed Dunzo is also increasingly gaining popularity and slowly expanding to more cities across India. FreshToHome, a startup that delivers meat and vegetables, recently started to offer milk delivery in select places.

Last month, Amazon launched Fresh to offer fresh fruits and vegetables in parts of Bangalore. The company is increasingly expanding its fulfilment centers across the nation to offer its customers a wider selection of items, Siddharth Nambiar, Director of Prime Now in India, told TechCrunch in a recent interview.

The foods and grocery market is growing in India. According to some estimates, it will reach $869 billion in sales in 2023, with digital-based services seen as an important vector for growth.

The African no-fee, cross-border payment startup Chipper Cash has expanded to Nigeria.

The San Francisco based startup, with offices in Ghana and Kenya, will offer its P2P payment service and app in Africa’s most populous nation in partnership with PayStack—the payment gateway company. Paystack CEO Shola Akinlade confirmed the collaboration.

Chipper Cash will establishe a company presence in Lagos and has hired a country manager, Abiodun Animashaun, co-founder of Lagos-based ride-hail startup Gokada.

Animashaun is one of two senior figures departing African tech ventures to join Chipper Cash. Alicia Levine will leave Nairobi based internet hardware and service startup BRCK to become Chipper Cash’s Chief Operating Officer, according to Chipper Cash CEO Ham Serunjogi.

The startup went live in October 2018, joining a field of fintech startups aiming to scale digital finance applications across Africa’s billion-plus population.

Chipper Cash was co-founded by Serunjogi (from Uganda) and Ghanaian Maijid Moujaled, both of whom emigrated to the U.S. to study and work in Silicon Valley.

The fintech company now has more than 70,000 active users and has processed 250,000 active transitions on its no-fee, P2P, cross-border mobile-money payments product.

The startup also runs Chipper Checkout: a merchant-focused, fee-based C2B mobile payments product that supports its no-fee mobile money business.

Chipper Checkout will make its debut in Nigeria several months after Chipper Cash’s mobile payments launch, according to Serunjogi.

The imperative to move to Nigeria was pretty straight-forward. “Nigeria is the largest economy and most populous country in Africa. Its fintech industry is one of the most advanced in Africa, up there with Kenya and South Africa,” he said.

“I think for any company doing fintech across borders, that is looking to be successful in Africa, it’s imperative that you have a presence in Nigeria.”

For some fintech startups, such as Chipper Cash, locating in Nigeria is not just strategic for expanding in Africa, but also to serve international ambitions.

Chipper Cash was recently profiled in an ExtraCrunch feature as one of three African fintech startups — with goals to scale globally — that has co-located in San Francisco with operations in Africa. The play is to tap the best of both worlds in VC, developers, and the frontier of digital finance.

Toward that end, Chipper Cash raised a $2.4 million seed round led by Deciens Capital this May.

The payments company also persuaded 500 Startups and Liquid 2 Ventures — co-founded by American football legend Joe Montana — to join the round.

Per stats offered by Briter Bridges and a 2018 WeeTracker survey, fintech now receives the bulk of VC capital and deal-flow to African startups.

A number of estimates show the continent’s 1.2 billion people represent the largest share of the world’s unbanked and underbanked population.

In addition to creating greater financial inclusion on the continent, African fintech products and solutions have also found traction internationally. Safaricom (M-Pesa), Flutterwave, Paystack, Paga, Mines, and Chipper Cash are among companies that offer or plan to offer their products in regions such as Asia, Europe, and Latin America.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Federal judge appointed by President George W. Bush has ruled that the “terrorist watchlist” database compiled by Federal agencies and used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security violates the rights of American citizens who are on it.

The ruling, first reported by The New York Times, raises questions about the constitutionality of the practice, which was initiated in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The Terrorist Screening Database is used both domestically and internationally by law enforcement and other federal agencies and inclusion on the database can have negative consequences — including limiting the ability of citizens whose names are on the list to travel.

The U.S. government has identified more than 1 million people as “known or suspected terrorists” and included them on the watchlist, according to reporting from the Associated Press.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga is the culmination of several years of hearings on the complaint, brought to court by roughly two dozen Muslim U.S. citizens with the support of Muslim civil-rights group, the Council on American Islamic Relations.

The methodology the government used to add names to the watch list was shrouded in secrecy and citizens placed on the list often had no way of knowing how or why they were on it. Indeed, much of the plaintiffs lawsuit hinged on the over-broad and error-prone ways in which the list was updated and maintained.

“The vagueness of the standard for inclusion in the TSDB, coupled with the lack of any meaningful restraint on what constitutes grounds for placement on the Watchlist, constitutes, in essence, the absence of any ascertainable standard for inclusion and exclusion, which is precisely what offends the Due Process Clause,” wrote Judge Trenga.

In court, lawyers for the FBI contended that any difficulties the 21 Muslim plaintiffs suffered were outweighed by the government’s need to combat terrorist threats.

Judge Trenga disagreed. Especially concerning for the judge were the potential risks to an individual’s reputation as a result of their inclusion on the watchlist. That’s because the list isn’t just distributed to federal law enforcement agencies, but also finds its way into the hands of over 18,000 state, local,  county, city,  university and college, and tribal and federal law enforcement agencies and another 533 private entities. The judge was concerned that mistaken inclusion on the watchlist could have negative implications in interactions with local law enforcement and potential employers or local government services.

“Every step of this case revealed new layers of government secrets, including that the government shares the watchlist with private companies and more than sixty foreign countries,” said CAIR Senior Litigation Attorney Gadeir Abbas. “CAIR will continue its fight until the full scope of the government’s shadowy watchlist activities is disclosed to the American public.”

Federal agencies have consistently expanded the number of names on the watchlist over the years. As of June 2017, 1.16 million people were included on the watchlist, according to government documents filed in the lawsuit and cited by the AP — with roughly 4,600 of those names belonging to U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents. In 2013, that number was 680,000, according to the AP.

“The fundamental principle of due process is notice and the opportunity to be heard,” said CAIR Trial Attorney Justin Sadowsky. “Today’s opinion provides that due process guarantee to all Americans affected by the watchlist.”

Five months after its planned launch, the Samsung Galaxy Fold is finally here. Well, almost. After offering a broad September time frame a few months back, the electronics giant just announced that the foldable foldable phone will be arriving in its native South Korea on September 6. Customers in the U.S. will have to wait a bit longer, with device arriving in “coming weeks.” Ditto for France, Germany, Singapore and the U.K.

The handset will be available in both black and silver options, along with a 5G version of the handset in “select countries,” marking the third Samsung device to offer up the next gen wireless technology.

If you follow the mobile space at all, you’re no doubt familiar with the saga. The company was targeting a spring timeframe for the launch of what is ostensibly the first consumer folding phone. The future, however, didn’t arrive as quickly as Samsung was hoping. Multiple review devices returned to the company broken. After initially blaming reviewers for the problems, the company ultimately accepted responsibility and went back to the drawing board for the 7.3 inch device.

“During the past several months, Samsung has been refining the Galaxy Fold to ensure it delivers the best possible experience,” the company explains. “Not only we improved the Galaxy Fold’s design and construction, but also took the time to rethink the entire consumer journey.”

Developing…

Representatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security met with counterparts at tech companies including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter to discuss election security, Facebook confirmed.

“The purpose was to build on previous discussions and further strengthen strategic collaboration regarding the security of the 2020 U.S. state, federal, and presidential elections,” according to a statement from Facebook head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher.

First reported by Bloomberg, the meeting between America’s largest technology companies and the trio of government security agencies responsible for election security is a sign of how seriously the government and the country’s largest technology companies are treating the threat of foreign intervention into elections.

Earlier this year the Office of the Inspector General issued a report saying that the Department of Homeland Security has not done enough to safeguard elections in the United States.

Throughout the year, reports of persistent media manipulation and the dissemination of propaganda on social media platforms have cropped up not just in the United States but around the world.

In April, Facebook removed a number of accounts ahead of the Spanish election for their role in spreading misinformation about the campaign.

Companies have responded to the threat by updating different mechanisms for users to call out fake accounts and improving in-house technologies used to combat the spread of misinformation.

Twitter, for instance, launched a reporting tool whereby users can flag misleading tweets.

“Improving election security and countering information operations are complex challenges that no organization can solve alone,” said Gleicher in a statement. “Today’s meeting builds on our continuing commitment to work with industry and government partners, as well as with civil society and security experts, to better understand emerging threats and prepare for future elections.”

Palo Alto Networks surely loves to buy security startups. Today it added to its growing collection when it announced its intent to acquire IoT security startup Zingbox for $75 million.

The company had raised $23.5 million, according to Crunchbase data. The three co-founders, Xu Zou, May Wang and Jianlin Zeng, will be joining Palo Alto after the sale is official.

With Zingbox, the company gets IoT security chops, something that is increasingly important as companies deploy internet-connected smart devices and sensors. While these tools can greatly benefit customers, they also often carry a huge security risk.

Zingbox, which was founded in 2014, gives Palo Alto a modern cloud-based solution built on a subscription model along with engineering talent to help build out the solution further. Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, certainly sees this.

“The proliferation of IoT devices in enterprises has left customers facing an enormous gap in protection against cybersecurity attacks. With the proposed acquisition of Zingbox, we will provide a first-of-its-kind subscription for our Next-Generation Firewall and Cortex platforms that gives customers the ability to gain control, visibility and security of their connected devices at scale,” Arora said in a statement.

This is the fourth security startup the company has purchased this year. It acquired two companies, nabbing PureSec and Twistlock, on the same day last Spring. Earlier this year, it bought Demisto for $560 million. All of these acquisitions are meant to build up the company’s portfolio of modern security offerings without having to build these kinds of tools in-house from scratch.

Reefknot Investments, a joint venture between Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign fund, and global logistics company Kuehne + Nagel, announced today the launch of a $50 million fund for logistics and supply chain startups. The firm is based in Singapore, but will look for companies around the world that are raising their Series A or B rounds.

Managing director Marc Dragon tells TechCrunch that Reefknot will serve as a strategic investor in its portfolio companies, providing them with connections to partners that include EDBI, SGInnovate, Atlantic Bridge, Vertex Ventures, PSA unBoXed, Unilever Foundry and NUS Enterprise, in addition to Temasek and Kuehne + Nagel .

Dragon, a veteran of the supply chain and logistics industry, says Reefknot plans to invest in about six to eight startups. It is especially interested in companies that are using AI or deep mind tech, digital logistics and trade finance to solve problems that range from analyzing supply chain data and making forecasts to managing the risk of financing trade transactions. Data from Gartner shows that about half of global supply chain companies will use AI, advanced analytics or the Internet of Things in their operations by 2023.

“There is a high level of expectation from vendors that because of technology, there will be new methods to do analytics and planning, and greater visibility in terms of information and product, materials and goods flowing throughout the supply chain,” says Dragon.

Reefknot will also establish a think tank that will work with industry experts and government organizations on forums, research and exploring new logistics and supply chain business models that startups can bring into fruition.

There’s an arms race in retail to produce better coffee, and one startup, Bellwether Coffee, thinks it has the solution for retailers to sell the very best beans.

The business, headquartered in Berkeley, is today announcing a $40 million Series B financing led by DBL Partners and SolarCity co-founders Peter and Lyndon Rive. The round brings its total funding to $56 million, including a $10 million Series A last summer.

The hardware and software business manufactures tech-enabled zero-emission commercial coffee roasters designed to sit in cafes, grocery stores, on college campuses and any other place people buy coffee. Purchase of a roaster, which are sold for $75,000 or leased for $1,000 per month, comes with access to an online marketplace for coffee beans. The goal is to give coffee shops the power to roast their own beans, forgoing the middle men that have historically sold wholesale pre-roasted beans at a premium to cafes around the world.

“We want to create this connected coffee experience from the farm in Ethiopia all the way to the roaster at the cafe and the customer,” Bellwether chief executive officer Nathan Gilliland tells TechCrunch.

With roughly 140 customers, Bellwether plans to expand manufacturing capabilities and grow its customer-facing team with the infusion of venture capital funding. After growing revenues 6x in 2019, the startup is also unlocking its global ambitions, with launches in Southeast Asia and Europe scheduled for next year.

Gilliland credits the company’s growth to a larger movement at play: The “premiumization of coffee,” in which consumers are in search of higher quality cups of joe.

“You saw it happen with wine, you saw it in craft beer,” he said. “You were drinking Bud Light and now you’re drinking craft beer. You see it in higher-end grocery stores pushing out these products; it’s the premiumization of the category.”

“Thirty years ago, everyone drank Folgers, then Starbucks changed how everyone thought about coffee in the 80s, then Blue Bottle took it to the next step and that’s the backdrop,” he added.

Bellwether was founded in 2013 by Ricardo Lopez. The company is also backed by FusionX, Congruent Ventures, Coffee Bell, Tandem Capital, Spindrift Equities, XN Ventures, Balius Partners and Hardware Club.

Nintendo Switch Online, the subscription-based online services component of Nintendo’s Switch console, will get SNES games starting on September 5 – yes, that’s right, the first game are available to play tomorrow. There are 20 games available initially, with more planned in future.

Alongside the new software, there’s also the new SNES system wireless controller for Switch, which charges via USB-C and retails for $29.99 directly from Nintendo.

The launch lineup for the SNES portion of Nintendo Switch Online looks pretty promising, and includes highlight favourites like Star Fox, Breah of Fire, F-Zero, Super Mario World and Super Metroid (you can see full list below).

We got a strong indication that this was happening earlier this month, thanks to an FCC fiing that detailed the SNES controller hardware. Nintendo likewise released an NES controller alongside its launch of the Nintendo Online Service when it debuted last year.

The best part about this surprise drop is that it’s available basically right now – check your Nintendo Online app on your Switch tomorrow to begin playing these nostalgic gaming classics.