Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Hedvig, a Swedish startup, is following in the footsteps of Lemonade building a new generation of insurance platforms that use AI to help evaluate customers and operate on a policy of using surplus for social good, and today the company announced the next stage of its growth. The startup has closed a SEK100 million ($10.4 million) round of funding to expand from its current offering of property insurance into a wider range of categories, and begin the costly process of expanding its business into more countries beyond its home market.

The funding values the company at SEK342 million ($35.5 million) — a modest figure considering Lemonade’s recent $300 million round, reportedly (per PitchBook) at a $2.1 billion post-money valuation — but helps position the company to set its sights on being a strong regional player (if not an acquisition target for Lemonade if it wants to quickly add on new regions: the latter kicked off its first services in Europe earlier this year, so its global aspirations are clear).

It currently has 15,000 customers in its home market of Sweden, who use it for property insurance on rented or owned apartments, and Lucas Carlsen, the co-founder and CEO, said in an emailed interview with TechCrunch that it “definitely” plans to expand that to houses as well as other categories. Home insurance also covers contents such as gadgets and travel, and Carlsen said that the former (gadgets) accounts for the majority of claims at the moment.

The round was led by Obvious Ventures, the venture fund co-founded by Twitter/Medium/Blogger co-founder Ev Williams, with D-Ax, the early stage investment arm of Swedish retail giant Axel Johnson Group, also participating, along with past investor Cherry Ventures.

“We are building a global company. We just started in Sweden since we happened to live here, and it serves as a good test market as we have some of the worlds’ most progressive and demanding consumers. Today, we do not have any news to share about future markets, but stay tuned!” said Carlsen.

“The new funding will mainly be used to fuel growth in Sweden, but we’ll also be looking at extending into new markets and insurance categories. Insurance is capital intensive and our new partners are committed to supporting our long-term vision,” he continued.

Indeed, getting an investor like Obvious (which published its own short announcement about the investment, on Medium) involved could open the door to introductions with a number of other investors down the road.

“Hedvig is harnessing its purpose, the power of AI, and its human-centered product to create a modern, full-stack insurance company. Their incredible team is delivering against the mission – to give people the world’s most incredible insurance experience – and we at Obvious are honored to help scale it further,” said Vishal Vasishth, one of Obvious Ventures’ other co-founders, in a statement.

Hedvig — named, Carlson said, after a legend of “someone who stood up for others and fought for their causes: that’s what we do,” — will sound familiar to you if you know Lemonade.

It follows in a wave of more socially-forward businesses that are being created, which are using technology to help disrupt the status quo but also to bridge the gap between building services that consumers need, and the principles that they would like to adhere to more if possible. (Other examples include the likes of Beyond Meat, which is also backed by Obvious; as well as the plethora of electric and hybrid vehicle makers; and more.)

In the case of Hedvig and the challenge of insurance, the proposition goes like this:

Hedvig uses technology and innovative algorithms to help assess a potential customer, who is then provided with lowest-cost, and often competitively priced, premiums. Then, as a “full-stack” digital company, it also uses its algorithms to help process claims. Then, after Hedvig uses its bigger pot of money to pay out claims, the annual surplus is donated to charities selected by its customers.

“By not pocketing this money ourselves we can focus on providing the best service possible to you and not on making more money from denying claims,” Carlson said.

Hedvig itself makes money by taking a cut off users’ monthly premiums (it doesn’t specify how much). To date, Hedvig has not disclosed how much it has been able to “give back” according to its business model. But the philosophy is that by digitising some of the more mundane processes that are relegated to human adjustors and customer agents at traditional agencies — and by not being inherently greedy — the startup is able to provide a more pleasant, more efficient, and more conscionable service.

Raisin, the well-capitalised fintech startup that offers a pan-European marketplace for savings and investment products, has acquired Fairr, a German startup disrupting the pensions industry. Terms remain undisclosed, although I understand the price was in the “double-digit Euro millions” range.

The majority of the deal was cash, although some Fairr investors exited with a mixture of cash and Raisin stock. Fairr’s investors included IBB Investitionsbank Berlin, Transamerica Ventures , Pro7Sat.1 Accelerator, and Söderberg & Partners.

Raisin says the acquisition of Fairr is part of a strategy to enter the €12 trillion European pension and retirement savings market, which is a natural extension to the fintech’s current focus on deposits and investments.

The idea is to be able to offer an all in one online marketplace that only needs to be signed up to once, including the mandatory regulatory checks, in order for customers to purchase savings, investments and now pension products.

Fairr’s founders are said to be staying on and will take leading roles in the newly formed investments and pension products division at Raisin, which will include Raisin’s existing investment product line WeltInvest. “The entire fairr team will also join them in becoming part of the larger Raisin family,” says the company.

Meanwhile, I’m told that one of the main reasons for choosing to acquire Fairr is that the startup has shown it can successfully streamline and digitise the heavily-regulated German pension market, including being able to offer a more cost-effective and flexible version of the German state-funded “Riester” pension product. It also offers products targeting company pensions and supplementary retirement savings.

“Just as Raisin focuses on providing savings that are more customer-friendly and more transparent than comparable products on the market, Fairr has been dedicated to doing the same with its own solutions in retirement savings,” says Raisin. “Fairr’s low-cost, fully digital offer is based on an ETF investment approach. The company has received multiple awards and seen its products recommended by both Germany’s premier financial advice publication and top consumer finance guide”.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Smartphone sales are down. Again. After years of growth, the smartphone market’s recent slide has continued into the second quarter of 2019, per numbers from analyst group, Gartner.

At 1.7% year over year, it’s not a huge slice of the overall pie, but it does point to a continued problem for manufacturers, dropping from 374 million to 368 million. The biggest hit continues to be in the high end of the market, as higher prices coupled with longer refresh cycles and fewer compelling features continue to contribute to the decline.

Of the top five markets, only China and Brazil saw growth. At 0.5%, however, China’s slight bump wasn’t enough to turn things around. Interestingly, Gartner notes that some of China’s growth may be due to manufacturers looking to move old flagship stock to make way for 5G models. Additional 5G phones, coupled with more carrier coverage, could drive sales a bit as well in future quarters.

The number two market, India, saw a 2.3% drop y-o-y, as consumer upgrades from feature phones to smartphones began to slow. The firm anticipates that sales will continue to remain slow through the end of 2019.

Apple continued to see declines, though those have slowed compared to the hit it took in the first quarter. Samsung and Huawei, meanwhile, were rare bright spots. Samsung’s growth was led primarily by mid-range and entry-level handsets like its Galaxy A series, while the deferment of Huawei’s U.S. ban helped boost its sale a bit for the quarter.

Festicket, the U.K.-headquartered festival booking platform, has acquired U.K.-based ticketing and cashless point-of-sale (POS) platform Event Genius. The sale also includes Event Genius’s consumer facing brand, Ticket Arena, while further terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed.

Founded by Reshad Hossenally, Event Genius offers a complete event solution for event organisers, spanning things like online ticket sales, POS software, ticket scanning, seat reservations, marketing and analytics. It has powered major events including Wales Rally GB, Motion Bristol, Annie Mac’s Lost & Found Festival, Summer Daze, Ibiza Rocks and BPM Festival.

Festicket co-founder and CEO Zack Sabban tells me that over the last couple of years the company has invested heavily in the B2C side of its platform to help users discover new festival experiences and book festival trips, and this year that has paid off with accelerated growth from long tail events. Therefore, in order to continue on this growth trajectory, it was agreed with the board that Festicket needed to invest more in B2B tools to operationally scale the way it works with its network of ~8,000 suppliers.

“Giving them more independence on the Festicket two-sided platform via self-service tools would allow us to be more deeply integrated into suppliers’ supply chains and ultimately optimise our units economics,” he says. The Event Genius acquisition is clearly the start of this.

To that end, the resulting “Event Genius by Festicket” will be an end-to-end platform for organisers and fans alike, says Festicket, providing a complete offering for the live entertainment industry.

The platform aims to bring together “technology and expertise” covering ticketing, accommodation, travel & packages, marketing, data & analytics, access control, POS/cashless payment services, fan engagement tools, and more.

Meanwhile, Event Genius’s 20+ staff, based in Leeds in the U.K., are joining Festicket. This also includes Event Genius founder Hossenally, who becomes Festicket Chief Supply Chain Officer.

Beam, a telepresence robot with a screen that a person can remotely control and use to communicate via video, became a breakthrough success in the world of robotics in part because of its role in helping high-profile, but movement-limited, people like Edward Snowden better communicate with the outside world, and disability rights activists meet with world leaders. Now, the control of Beam the product itself is changing: Suitable Technologies, the creator of the Beam, is selling it to Blue Ocean Robotics, a Denmark-based developer and incubator that describes itself as a “Robot Venture Factory.”

In an interview we conducted via a Beam robot — where I dialled into Blue Ocean’s offices and navigated a Beam from its docking station around the office and into a private room — Blue Ocean’s CEO and co-founder Claus Risager said his company is not buying Suitable itself: the deal includes only the IP, staff who work on Beam robots, hardware inventory and other related assets. Currently, there are a few versions of the Beam on the market: the two main categories are a smaller robot that is priced around $2,000-$4,000, and a larger Beam Pro that sells for around $15,000 per machine.

The key with Blue Ocean’s development to date is that it has built a “toolbox” (Risager’s term) that it uses to build different robotic hardware — one of its most successful has been its UVD Robot that can perform remote, ultra-violet-based disinfection in hospitals and other infection-prone environments — that it will be using to develop iterations of the Beam. That could mean that long-rumored ideas of the Beam getting robotic arms and other appendages could be coming at some point.

Suitable Technologies, meanwhile, was founded by Scott Hassan, a robot enthusiast that was an early investor in Google, a software engineer (he was a key figure in Google’s early search development and had built Yahoo Groups) and an entrepreneur who founded the now-defunct Willow Garage before Suitable Technologies: both Willow and Suitable have been privately financed by Hassan himself.

Hassan is known for being somewhat media shy, and he declined to respond to requests for comment on what will happen with Suitable Technologies now that the only product that it has developed and released to date is getting sold. Risager also declined to talk about why his company acquired just the product but not the company behind it, but he noted that the two companies had been working in partnership for some time already to help distribute the Beam in Europe, where it is used in settings like hospitals as well as other enterprise and industrial applications.

“Our logic behind the purchase is that we have a large customer base ourself and every one of them is buying more Beams and discovering more applications for it,” Risager said. “This is proof for us that there is big growth in this market and that is why we believe in it.”

In a statement provided by Blue Ocean, Hassan described the sale as a “multi-year partnership”, which seems to imply that Suitable will be sticking around for a while more, although it’s not entirely clear if he’s referring to the past or the present in the statement.

“Through our multi-year partnership, I am confident that Blue Ocean Robotics has the commitment, knowhow, and passion to support current Beam customers, acquire new customers, and build the business into new areas,” said Hassan.

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Blue Ocean has raised only around $15 million in funding according to PitchBook, although Risager said the actual figure is actually closer to $30-40 million. It has a number of enterprise products already on the market that Risager said have made the company profitable to date, and so the purchase of Beam, and future development, will be financed internally. Risager said his company plans to invest “several million dollars” into the development and future of Beam.

But at a time when robotics as a startup idea has had some significant setbacks — recent shutdowns include Rethink Robotics, Anki, Keecker and Jibo — it seems that this is not the rule for everyone in the field. Risager told me that he has daily emails from firms that would like to take stakes in the company, and it seems that the startup has engaged with more than one large tech company that has approached it with M&A in mind.

“We started six years ago and have three products today,” he said, “and we expect in two years’ time one of them will be acquired or something like that. It’s a part of our business model: at some point these will be worth more to a large global company than to us.

“Everyone understands that in the next 10-20 years the robotics field will grow a lot,” he continued. The professional service robotics market is doubling ever year at the moment. It is currently quite small, with sales of around 100,000 robots annually, but with companies like Amazon and Facebook taking interest, you can see how is potential for a bigger enterprise, but also consumer, push. “I could have a serious conversation with potential investors every day, if I wanted to,” he said.

Days after Google said YouTube was used in a coordinated effort to spread misinformation about protesters in Hong Kong, the platform has begun labeling videos uploaded by media organizations that receive government or public funding. While YouTube says the new feature, which is now live in 10 regions, including Hong Kong, is intended to provide more context about publishers, it is being criticized for not drawing a clear distinction between media that receives government funding, but are editorially independent, and ones that serve as government mouthpieces, like Xinhua News Agency or the China Global Television Network.

Organizations like BBC, DW and NPR are completely independent from the government despite being state-funded. The idea of public media in democratic countries should never be equated to propoganda machine like CGTN and RT.

— William Yang (@WilliamYang120) August 27, 2019

The feature was first spotted by app researcher Jane Manchun Wong. A YouTube policy update states that “if a channel is owned by a news publisher, that is funded by a government, or publicly funded, an information panel providing publisher context may be displayed on the watch page of the videos on its channel.”

The panels includes brief statements about how the publisher is funded and links to a Wikipedia entry about the publisher. They have been rolled out in the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, India, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland and Hong Kong. (On YouTube’s U.S. site, they can be seen on videos uploaded by publishers including the Voice of America, BBC, Xinhua and National Public Radio.)

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The new policy also adds that “this information panel providing publisher context is meant to give you additional information to help you better understand the sources of news content that you watch on YouTube. Inclusion of the information panel providing publisher context is based on information about the news publisher made available by Wikipedia and other independent third-party sources. It is not a comment by YouTube on the publisher’s or video’s editorial direction, or on a government’s editorial influence.”

The panels will not be displayed in YouTube search results or affect the video’s features or eligibility for monetization.

Last week, Google disabled 210 YouTube accounts that it said were used to spread misinformation about the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong. Facebook and Twitter took action against accounts that they said were part of a propaganda campaign.

Twitter also banned state-run media outlets from buying advertising on its platform after users spotted Xinhua News Agency using sponsored tweets to portray the demonstrations in Hong Kong, which have been mostly peaceful, as violent. Twitter said its new policy distinguishes between state-funded media organizations that don’t operate independently of the governments that fund them and ones that have editorial autonomy like the British Broadcasting Corporation or the Public Broadcasting Service.

TechCrunch has contacted Google for comment.

When is a game not a game? When you never win.

For years, virtualization software maker Parallels offered the chance to win a free product key if you “stump the KeyGenie,” a virtual robot which users can play against. Normally, users must buy a product key to run the software beyond its two-week free trial. But if you can make it through five questions without the robot guessing what you’re thinking, the robot says a key “may be yours.”

But it turns out it’s an impossibility.

Security researcher John Wethington alerted TechCrunch to the KeyGenie game more than a year after he told Parallels that the game was impossible to win. He examined the source code of the webpage to see how it worked. He quickly found that no matter what a user does, the code never allows a user to win a free product key.

“It’s to get people to sign up for a trial by pretending to give them a chance at a free license,” he said. “But the source code proves it never will.”

We asked three security researchers to independently verify our findings. Spoiler alert: they did.

Yonathan Klijnsma, a threat researcher at cyberthreat intelligence firm RiskIQ, looked at the code and found that the robot’s responses were hardcoded.

“There’s never any product key,” he told TechCrunch. “You have that winning screen but there’s never a product key on the page,” he said. “You can trigger the case for getting a key but there is no way to get to it.”

Though it’s possible to trick the game into thinking you’ve won, nothing happens — and no key is ever awarded.

A screencap of the KeyGenie game; no product key is ever produced (Image: TechCrunch)

“It’s a bunch of hardcoded if-else statements that just take you to the same widget in the end,” said Edwin Foudil, a security researcher who also performed a cursory review of the site. And Baptiste Robert, who’s known for finding security vulnerabilities in apps and websites, said his own checks show nothing is ever pulled from the server after the user wins, suggesting the winner is never served a product key.

“It seems to be a fake game,” said Robert.

We contacted Parallels prior to publication but spokesperson John Uppendahl did not comment. If that changes, we’ll update.

The KeyGenie site was born more than five years ago after Parallels found its popular desktop emulation software was regularly falling victim to software piracy. Hackers would crack the software’s product key algorithm, then build and share their product key generators — known as keygens — on file-sharing sites. Quickly, these keygens floated to the top of search engines, making user piracy even easier.

Parallels built the aptly named “KeyGenie” game so it would rise to the top of search results and replace the illegal keygen search results.

One of Parallels’ marketing agencies at the time published a blog post claiming that KeyGenie “will actually hand out keys,” and that the game was “programmed randomly.” The post, published seven months later, “generated dozens of trials” and “four-figures in revenue.”

The Federal Trade Commission, which regulates potentially deceptive advertising and marketing, did not comment outside business hours.

The Slovenian founders behind PredictLeads, another recent Y Combinator graduate, applied to the prestigious accelerator five times before they were admitted.

Their business, which helps venture capital firms and sales teams identify high growth companies, i.e. potential investments and potential customers, had come a long way since it was founded in 2016. And earlier this year — finally — YC gave them the green light to complete its three-month accelerator program.

“We almost ran out of money in 2017 and then I took a loan from my mother because that bank wouldn’t give me the loan at that point,” PredictLeads chief executive officer Roq Xever tells TechCrunch. “But by then, the data was getting much better and we were able to make higher-value sells and that got us to profitability.”

You read that right. Unlike most of today’s tech startups, PredictLeads is profitable, though, only out of pure necessity: “We didn’t know we would ever get into YC to raise the money we needed, so we structured the company to make more money than we spent.”

Xever leads the small PredictLeads team alongside marketing chief Miha Stanovnik and chief technology officer Matic Perovsek. Xever tells TechCrunch it wasn’t until they realized the opportunity to sell their product to VCs that YC became interested. Today, PredictLeads has eight venture firms as customers, the names of which they were not able to disclose.

The tool helps investors track companies they’ve considered in the past. PredictLeads notifies users if certain companies start getting traction so they can reevaluate the deal and helps investors become aware of startups they may not have otherwise heard of.

More and more venture capital firms are turning to third-party tools to help them make sense of and leverage data in the investment and company-tracking process, leading to the birth of new data-focused companies. Social Capital co-founder Chamath Palihapitiya is spinning out a company from his venture capital fund-turned-family-office, TechCrunch learned earlier this year. The new entity, temporarily dubbed CaaS (short for capital-as-a-service) Technologies, will focus on providing data-driven insights to VC firms, for example.

Startups have also realized the importance of data. Narrator, another recent YC graduate, is betting big on this trend. The startup wants to become the operating system for data science by providing companies software that claims to fulfill the same service as a data team for the price of an analyst.

PredictLeads, for its part, collects data from websites, press releases, news articles, blogs and career sites, then uses supervised machine learning to extract and structure the data. The startup tracks 20 million public and private companies.

Now that it’s a graduate of YC, the team is in the process of moving its headquarters to the U.S. Either New York or San Francisco, says Xever, who’s currently navigating the difficult visa application process.

The startup is today raising a $1.5 million seed financing at a $10 million valuation. They plan to use the capital to expand their service to cater to quant funds, build a Salesforce app to better support sales teams, and, of course, expand their small team.

The automotive industry has embraced — and advertised — self-driving cars as a kind of panacea that will solve numerous problems that modern society is grappling with right now, from congestion to safety to productivity (you can work while riding!).

Unfortunately, a very big question that has been almost entirely overlooked is: how long will these cars last?

The answer might surprise you. In an interview with The Telegraph in London, John Rich, who is the operations chief of Ford Autonomous Vehicles, revealed today that the “thing that worries me least in this world is decreasing demand for cars,” because “we will exhaust and crush a car every four years in this business.”

Four years! That’s not a very long lifespan, even compared with cars that undergo a lot of wear-and-tear, like New York City cabs, which were an average of 3.8 years old in 2017, meaning some were brand new and others had been in service for more than seven years.

It’s more surprising compared with the nearly 12 years that the average U.S. car owner hangs on to a vehicle. In fact, Americans are maintaining their cars longer in part because the technology used to make and operate them has advanced meaningfully. In 2002, according to the London-based research firm IHS Markit, the average age of a car in operation was 9.6 years.

So what’s the story with autonomous cars, into which many billions of investment capital is being poured? We first turned to Argo AI, a Pittsburgh, Pa.-based startup that raised $1 billion investment in funding from Ford three years ago and refueled this summer with $2.6 billion in capital and assets from Volkswagen as part of a broader alliance between VW Group and Ford. Argo is developing cars for Ford that it’s testing right now in five cities.

Since Ford will be operating the cars, Argo pointed us back to Ford’s Rich, who, while on the run, answered some our questions via email.

Asked how many miles Ford anticipates that the cars will travel each year — we wondered if this number would be more or less than a taxi or full-time Uber driver might traverse — he declined to say, telling us instead that while Ford isn’t sharing miles targets, the “vehicles are being designed for maximum utilization.

“Today’s vehicles spend most of the day parked. To develop a profitable, viable business model for [autonomous vehicles], they need to be running almost the entire day.”

Indeed, Ford right now plans to use the cars in autonomous fleets that will be used as a service by other companies, including as delivery vehicles. Asked if Ford also plans to sell the cars to individuals, Rich suggests it’s not in the plans right not, saying merely that Ford sees the “initial commercialization of AVs to be fleet-centric.”

We also wondered if Rich’s prediction for the lifespan of full self-driving cars ties to his expectation that Ford’s autonomous vehicles will be powered by internal combustion engines. Most carmakers appear to be investing in new combustible engine architectures that promise greater fuel efficiency and fewer emissions but that still require more parts than electric cars. (The more parts that are being stressed, the higher the likelihood that something will break.)

Rich says the idea is to transition to battery-electric vehicles (BEV) eventually, but that Ford also needs to “find the right balance that will help develop a profitable, viable business model. This means launching with hybrids first.”

In his words, the challenges with BEVs as autonomous vehicles right now: includes a “lack of charging infrastructure where we need to operate an AV fleet. Charging stations and infrastructure needs to be built that will add to the already capital-intensive nature of developing the AV technology and operations.”

Another challenge is the “depletion of range from on-board tech. Testing shows that upwards of 50 percent of BEV range will be used up due to the computing power of an AV system, plus the A/C and entertainment systems that are likely required during a ride hailing service or passenger comfort.”

Ford also worries about utilization, writes Rich, “The whole key to running a profitable AV business is utilization – if cars are sitting on chargers, they aren’t making money.”

And it’s worried about battery degradation, given that while “fast charging is needed daily to run an AV fleet, it degrades the battery if used often,” he says.

Of course, the world would be far better off without any combustion engine exhaust emissions, full stop. On the brighter side, while Ford’s cars may not be long for this world, between 80 and 86 percent of a car’s material can be recycled and reused. According to a trade group called the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), the U.S. recycles 150 million metric tons of scrap materials every year altogether.

Fully 85 million tons of that is iron and steel; the ISRI says the U.S. recycles another 5.5 million tons of aluminum, a lighter but more expensive alternative to steel that carmakers also use.

You really have to give Oracle a lot of points for persistence, especially where the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract procurement process is concerned. For more than a year, the company has been complaining  across every legal and government channel it can think of. In spite of every attempt to find some issue with the process, it has failed every time. That did not stop it today from filing a fresh appeal of last month’s federal court decision that found against the company.

Oracle refuses to go quietly into that good night, not when there are $10 billion federal dollars on the line, and today the company announced it was appealing Federal Claims Court Senior Judge Eric Bruggink’s decision. This time they are going back to that old chestnut that the single-award nature of the JEDI procurement process is illegal.

“The Court of Federal Claims opinion in the JEDI bid protest describes the JEDI procurement as unlawful, notwithstanding dismissal of the protest solely on the legal technicality of Oracle’s purported lack of standing. Federal procurement laws specifically bar single award procurements such as JEDI absent satisfying specific, mandatory requirements, and the Court in its opinion clearly found DoD did not satisfy these requirements. The opinion also acknowledges that the procurement suffers from many significant conflicts of interest. These conflicts violate the law and undermine the public trust. As a threshold matter, we believe that the determination of no standing is wrong as a matter of law, and the very analysis in the opinion compels a determination that the procurement was unlawful on several grounds,” Oracle’s General Counsel Dorian Daley said in a statement.

In December, Oracle sued the government for $10 billion, at the time focusing mostly on a perceived conflict of interest involving a former Amazon employee named Deap Ubhi. He worked for Amazon prior to joining the DOD, where he worked on a committee of people writing the RFP requirements, and then returned to Amazon later. The DOD investigated this issue twice, and found no evidence he violated federal conflict of interest of laws.

The court ultimately agreed with the DOD’s finding last month, ruling that Oracle had failed to provide evidence of a conflict, or that it had impact on the procurement process. Judge Bruggink wrote at the time:

We conclude as well that the contracting officer’s findings that an organizational conflict of interest does not exist and that individual conflicts of interest did not impact the procurement, were not arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law. Plaintiff’s motion for judgment on the administrative record is therefore denied.

The company started complaining and cajoling even before the JEDI RFP process started. The Washington Post reported that Oracle’s Safra Catz met with the president in April, 2018 to complain that the process was unfairly stacked in favor of Amazon, which happens to be the cloud market share leader by a significant margin, with more than double that of its next closest rival, Microsoft.

Later, the company filed an appeal with the Government Accountability Office, which found no issue with the RFP process. The DOD, which has insisted all along there was no conflict in the process, also did in an internal investigation and found no wrong-doing.

The president got involved last month when he ordered the Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper look into the idea that, once again, the process has favored Amazon. That investigation is on-going. The DOD did name two finalists, Amazon and Microsoft in April, but has yet to name the winner as the protests, court cases and investigations continue.

The controversy in part involves the nature of the contract itself. It is potentially a decade-long undertaking to build the cloud infrastructure for the DOD, involves the award of a single vendor (although there are several opt-out clauses throughout the term of the contract) and it involves $10 billion and the potential for much more government work. That every tech company is salivating for that contract is hardly surprising, but Oracle alone continues to protest at every turn.

The winner was supposed to be announced this month, but with the Pentagon investigation in progress, and another court case underway, it could be some time before we hear who the winner is.