Author : zebethcontrol

Intropic helps single-use plastics decompose from the inside out • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, bioplastics, Climate, Disrupt, Hardware, Intropic, StartupsNo Comments

Plastics are great for so many things, but they stay around for an awfully long time. Intropic leaps to the rescue with a set of enzymes that can be added to plastics at the very beginning of their life cycle, before it is even turned into products. The additives the company makes have been proof-of-concept tested and it wants to upend how plastics are made and disposed of. Intropic’s additives make many of the most commonly used plastics biodegradable in normal commercial composting. The enzymes are added to the pellets or powders that are used in the normal course of plastic production. This gives plastics new, biodegradable capabilities without changing the manufacturing processes used to create plastic products. At the end of the lifecycle, when it’s time to get rid of the material, the products can be composted into their component parts. Aaron Hall, CEO at Intropic, and Jolene Mattson, the company’s process engineer. Image Credits: Intropic Materials. The problem with current ways of disposing of plastics is that while materials made of plastic can decompose, nature does it from the outside in, and it takes a very long time. The innovation from Intropic, pitching in the Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022, is the additives are added to the plastic raw materials, which means that the materials dissolve through a process called depolymerization. Essentially, the polymer chains are reduced to monomers, which nature’s normal decomposition processes can take care of. The company claims that when the plastics are subjected to water and relatively low heat (40ºC / 104ºF), PLA and PCL plastics treated with the additives can break down 98% faster than without the additives. At an industrial scale (for example, when the plastics are cutoffs or leftovers from regular manufacturing processes), the water-and-heat bath can break down the plastics in less than 48 hours, which can then be further processed. For post-consumer plastics, those same conditions occur naturally in commercial composting. “The enzymes are activated by temperature and water, not one or the other. We need both. And that’s really important because if it were just temperature, you wouldn’t be able to put this in a truck or a warehouse in Arizona or Houston in the summer,” explains Aaron Hall, CEO and founder at Intropic. “If it were just water, when it gets humid, all of a sudden you’ve got things melting or degrading. For now, we need both, but in the future, there are angles that we can explore to create even more handles of control, which is a lot of the fun.” Because the additives are added before the manufacturers have started shaping the products, the possible use cases are vast, the company told me, and because the manufacturing process itself doesn’t change, it could, in theory, be rolled out very quickly. “We’re developing enzymatic additives that can go inside of plastics and enable them to self-degrade. There are many different application spaces where that is relevant,” says Hall. “Single-use packaging, especially food packaging, is an enormous space that we’re interested in, but there are lots of other single-use plastics that are also important, right? Think about all of the tech packaging. The plastics our headphones come in, all the little sleeves, shrink wrap, etc.” An undegraded film of PLA (polylactic acid) plastic, left, is shown with biodegraded fragments of PLA, right. Image Credits: Adam Lau/Berkeley Engineering The company is at the early stages of what it’s doing, but is making some very interesting progress. It has completed its proof-of-concept work and has published a few papers in academic papers to show that the technology works. Right now, Intropic is working to scale up its manufacturing to the kilogram scale. “We are not tied to this number, but for the sake of an example, let’s say we’re going to use 1% of additives. That means that one kilo of additive can equate to 100 kilos of the finished product,” Hall explains. “That’s more than enough to do testing and validation for the initial stages. From there, we’re looking to find partners.” The company is particularly focused on ensuring its product will work at enormous scales, to maximize its force for good, and tackle as much of the plastics problem as possible. “The way we’re looking to formulate is that we’re working on making this into a ‘master batch.’ It will be a powder or a pellet, depending on what our partners need. We’ll be able to add that at the beginning, which means we’ll be able to get into all sorts of products,” says Hall. “This could be anything from coatings, such as an aqueous coating or a solvent-based coating, all the way through to injection molding, roll-to-roll and lamination, covering the full spectrum of plastics manufacturing. That’s, ultimately, what’s really cool about this being an additive: That’s just naturally how the process flow goes, which means it’s fairly straightforward to integrate into many of these channels.” Image Credits: TechCruch The company is very careful about making universal declarations about its efficacy, explaining that the additives do need to be activated with heat and water for the rapid breakdown to occur. I asked whether there would be a benefit to having these plastic additives, even if the final product ends up in landfills, for example. “As a PhD-trained scientist, I’m going to be careful about making claims,” Hall laughs, “but having these enzymes inside could lead to something that has a much faster degradation even in a landfill environment with less-optimal conditions. That’s certainly a possibility, but something that we would want to validate before we make any strong claims about it. Having said that, it is exciting to entertain that thought, and there’s no reason to think it would absolutely not work.” What struck me the most about talking with the Intropic team is that it sees itself as part of a large, overall solution to the plastics problem. The team also spoke with great enthusiasm about other innovations in the materials space, especially

Tesla Q3 revenue falls short of expectations, while energy unit shows growth • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in earnings, Tesla, TransportationNo Comments

Tesla reported Wednesday reported revenue of $21.45 billion in the third quarter, another record-setting period that still missed analysts expectations. Shares fell 3.5% in after-hours trading following the earnings release. Tesla’s net income for the third quarter was $3.3 billion nearly double the $1.62 billion it earned in the same period last year. The company said profits were squeezed by increases in raw material costs as well as issues ramping up production at its Germany and Texas factories as well as 4680 battery cell production. Tesla also cited a strengthening dollar as another factor in its third quarter results. The company’s third-quarter letter to shareholders reiterated much of its guidance its Semi truck production target of December and its plan to achieve a 50% annual growth in vehicle deliveries. However, Tesla provided few details on its launch plans for Cybertruck, only saying it has made progress on its “industrialization” and that production would begin at its Texas factory subsequent to Model Y ramp. Tesla reported earnings, excluding some items, of $1.05 per share versus 62 cents per share in the same period last year. Automotive continued to be the largest piece of its business with revenue from that division coming in at $18.69 billion in the third quarter, a 55% pop from the same year-ago period. The company’s automotive gross margins were 27.9%, the same as last quarter and still lower than high of 32% reached early this year. Earlier this month, Tesla reported delivered 343,830 vehicles in the third quarter, a new record and a turnaround from earlier this year when a shutdown at its China factory and challenges around opening factories in Berlin and Austin affected how many vehicles it was able to get into customers’ driveways. Despite the rebound and record number, the third-quarter delivery figure still didn’t meet Wall Street forecasts, which ranged between 358,000 and 371,000 vehicles, depending on the polled group. There was also a larger-than-usual gap between production and delivery numbers. The company produced 365,923 vehicles in the third quarter. Energy unit growth Tesla’s energy unit, which has lagged in previous quarters, saw an appreciable increase in business. The company reported that energy storage deployments, which includes both Powerwall home batteries and utility-scale Megapacks, shot up 62% year over year, from roughly 1.29 GWh in Q3 2021 to 2.1 GWh in the same quarter this year. The firm called this “by far the highest level [of growth] we have ever achieved.”The news follows a September report that said Tesla had started requiring its solar roof customers to also buy a Powerwall for energy storage. The company’s large-scale batteries also recently made headlines, when a Megapack caught fire at a California power storage facility. The incident shut down a portion of Highway 1 and sparked a local shelter-in-place advisory in Moss Landing.

BetterData taps the blockchain to help create better synthetic data • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, BetterData, Crypto, Disrupt, StartupsNo Comments

As the global data privacy regulatory landscape gets more convoluted and constrictive, engineering teams looking to use structured data to improve their products and AI models are being pushed to jump through plenty of hoops to stay compliant. BetterData, which is launching onstage at the ZebethMedia Disrupt SF Battlefield startup competition, is aiming to help customers quickly generate representative, synthetic structured data so that technical teams can work with data in a compliant way without waiting for months to gain clearance to use actual user data or generate their own. The company’s product helps generate the AI data in a secure way that allows clients to upload real user data and securely transmit and convert it without a copy of the data landing on BetterData’s servers. User data is tokenized and stored on a blockchain which is only accessible with a user’s private encryption keys. Image Credits: BetterData The generative data copy maintains the key properties of the original structured data while anonymizing and scrambling the information. This enables teams to train models and create products that are capable of parsing organic user data, but helps them avoid lengthy bureaucratic processes often required to gain access to user data. The startup’s co-founders, CEO Uzair Javaid and CTO Kevin Yee, have backgrounds in AI data generation and blockchain security. They met at the Entrepreneur First program in Singapore. The duo have raised $770,000 in funding and grants so far and are in the process of closing a seed raise. “We’ve spoken to hundreds of data teams… and they all face the problem which is access to data,” Yee told ZebethMedia in an interview. “It takes a long time to access data under data protection rules… They’re trying to innovate, but it takes so much time.” Image Credits: ZebethMedia The company announced onstage that they will be expanding the private beta after a number of successful pilot programs. BetterData is particularly targeting customers in the Banking Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) world, as well as data and AI teams at tech companies. Yee and Javaid hope their product can not only help those teams stay compliant with the increasing sprawl of data privacy regulations but can also help them avoid data attacks and leakages by tapping encryption and the blockchain. The blockchain element will also allow customers to have an immutable access log and a full breakdown of data lineage so they can ensure that data is never being mishandled. For now the company’s product focuses exclusively on processing and generating structured data, but as they build out their functionality, they plan to start generating text data using natural language processing models. They are planning to launch a public beta of their cloud services solution by the end of this year.

Labby wants to make milk healthier and cows happier with better sensors • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in AgTech, Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Biotech & Health, Disrupt, Hardware, LabbyNo Comments

For most dairy farmers, milk flowing from their cows is tested by a traveling technician once per month. But in a world where bovine mastitis can appear from one day to the next, it is udderly ridiculous to test milk flowing from cows once per month. Today at ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield, Labby offered a different solution, with an inline optical sensor that can test cows every time they are milked. For now, the product detects potential issues early, but over time, the company believes it can start predicting issues before they occur. The company’s product is called MilKey and comes in two variants: a hand-held product that can be used anywhere, or an inline product that can be hooked into the milking machines, which enables daily farmers to test continuously. The main difference between the two products is also their strengths. The handheld device can be used by any technician out in the (literal) field; you select the cow you’re testing on a smartphone app, and the test results show up with the right animal. That’s great when a cow is wandering about or if you have suspicions about a particular animal having an illness. The inline device is fully automatic and works over Wi-Fi. For this device, the results need to be assigned to the right cow manually, but it makes it feasible to test every cow, every milking. Labby’s portable sensor. Image Credits: Labby. Labby tells ZebethMedia that the device takes spectral measurements of milk samples and uploads them to the cloud. From there, the company uses machine-learning models to take spectral readings as inputs. It can estimate the content of the milk, broken down into fats, proteins and somatic cell counts. Once the measurements are taken and assigned to an animal, the farmers can use an app or any web browser to see the full testing history of any animal, to ensure they are going a-bovine and beyond in terms of milk production. “Animal health records are like human records; they give critical indications about animal health and feed efficiency. It turns out that milk is the best biomarker for everything. Currently, the industry only tests once a month for each animal. We think this is a systemic failure for the farmers and for the animals,” says Julia Somerdin, CEO and founder of Labby, in an interview with ZebethMedia. “One complication for animal health is mastitis. It one of the most common yet expensive diseases, and it can change from day to day. So when they do 30-day testing, the test will tell you everything is fine, but the next day the animal could develop a case, which can be subclinical with no symptoms. So for farmers, between testing days, they have no idea how the animal is doing.” You may be wondering “who cares,” but dairy farming is a hell of an industry. There are 9 million cows across 40,000 farms in the U.S. Worldwide, there are 250 million cows across 115 million farms; it all adds up. Labby’s dashboard gives you unherd-of amounts of details, both for spot testing and trends for each animal in the herd. Image Credits: Labby. “With our solution, we can provide on-farm real-time testing to help provide the farmer with daily, weekly and monthly health records,” says Somerdin. “Animal health is the critical indicator that’s missing from today’s industry practices.” From the numbers and the impact, you’ll be unsurprised that there are big sums of money involved. The best milk gets farmers the best price, which means that milk quality is directly linked to revenue, the Labby team tells me. The benefit is two-fold: Healthier cows need less veterinary attention, and higher-quality milk nets the milk producers more money per gallon of milk delivered. “We can insert Labby in the value chain. Dairy is a very input-intensive industry so we have all kinds of suppliers that help farmers produce more and better milk, and then the dairy farmers sell their milk to dairy processors. With our service, the big battle, besides the money-saving aspect, is we create all this real-time data,” says Somerdin. “Animal genetics companies can use that data, helping them refine their algorithms. We can also bridge the gap between dairy producers and veterinarians, enabling telehealth for cows.” Labby’s inline milk analyzing sensor, MilKey. Image Credits: Labby. Apart from the fact that when I hear “telehealth for cows,” I giggle at the thought of a cow staring into a Zoom screen and talking about its feelings and its four upset stomachs, it’s easy to understand how Labby adds significant value and the ability to be an early warning system for animal health. “The most important thing is that you don’t need a technician to sample the milk anymore. The cleaning can also be integrated with the current system,” says Somerdin, explaining how the company has designed a set-it-and-forget-it approach to continuous testing. Labby was part of Techstars, and raised a total of $1.3 million from them and a number of other investors, including MIT Media lab’s E14 fund. The company officially started selling its products in early October, and has only just started shipping its products to customers. In the short term, it’s a hardware+SaaS business, but after that, it’s time to start milking the data itself for wisdom. “Our business model has three revenue streams. For the dairy farmers, they pay once for the hardware equipment, then monthly for us to provide the testing in the cloud. The farmer pays per cow per day,” says Somerdin. “In addition, we’re looking at data. We believe we are generating significant value for the industry, such as for genetic companies. We will have a data licensing fee, but we will wait to offer that until we have half a million cows on the platform.” Over time, the company hopes to be able to use big data to catch a glimpse of the future, too. “The data will help us develop a reliable benchmark for each animal,” says Somerdin, and suggests that deviations from

Watch Serena Williams talk about the biggest investment she missed out on and more • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Disrupt 2022, Serena Ventures, Serena Williams, VentureNo Comments

Serena Williams was our guest at ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022, and joined TC Deputy Editor-in-Chief Jordan Crook to talk about Serena Ventures, the investment firm she founded with Alison Rapaport Stillman. She talked to us at length about her approach to startup investing, including how much her investor persona differs from her tennis persona, and also about the one investment she really wished she’d managed to nail down — if she hadn’t been distracted by the French Open. Watch the whole discussion via the video above.

Stablecoin demand maintains pace as other cryptocurrencies tumble • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Crypto, crypto ecosystem, cryptocurrencies, EC Blockchain, EC Cryptocurrency, stablecoin, stablecoinsNo Comments

More investors are swapping cryptocurrencies for stablecoins, signaling a potential shift toward the less risky asset. Stablecoin dominance is near 16%, about 2.7 percentage points away from an all-time high set in mid-June. (This percentage is determined by how much of the total crypto market capitalization is made up of stablecoins; it is, from one perspective, a bearish indicator the stronger it becomes.) “Stablecoins have been growing independently of market cycles simply because of their ability to improve financial inclusion,” Paolo Ardoino, chief technology officer of the world’s largest stablecoin by volume, Tether, said to ZebethMedia. “Stablecoins are also created based on market supply and demand, so when some crypto prices fall, traders may see this as a buy opportunity to use stablecoin to move in and out of positions.” The total stablecoin supply peaked in early April around $182.6 billion but has since fallen about 22% to $141.3 billion as of October 18, data from The Block shows. Even with that said, stablecoins have expanded in volume vastly over the years, and will continue to grow as the crypto market develops, Ardoino added. “Stablecoins are able to make the economy much more efficient by bringing digital dollars to the real world, putting U.S. dollars on a blockchain, attracting liquidity to the currency and allowing it to increase its dominance.”

The Warriors’ Draymond Green will talk new media tomorrow at Disrupt • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in basketball, Disrupt 2022, Draymond Green, Media & EntertainmentNo Comments

Fresh off his fourth NBA ring and a blockbuster opening night, Golden State Warriors power forward and 4x NBA champion, Draymond Green, will help us kick off the final day of Disrupt in style. Join us tomorrow at 9AM PT at the Disrupt stage in-person, or catch it live on ZebethMedia’s homepage. Green has spent the last several years building up his resume off the court, including television production deals and, most famously, his podcast, “The Draymond Green Show.” Like Green himself, the show has courted some controversy, but it’s also offered a rare level of insight into an active NBA player and the various athletes and other legendary sports figures he invites on. We’ll discuss shows like “The Countdown,” which premiered ahead of Tuesday’s season opener, providing a behind-the-scenes look at the lead up to the 2022-23 NBA season. The first episode arrived in the wake of a highly publicized practice altercation with teammate Jordan Poole, and touches on the incident and subsequent fallout. At tomorrow’s panel, we’ll discuss Green’s work in the announcer chair for TNT, tech investing and what life might look life after the NBA. See you bright and early tomorrow morning!

Advanced Ionics teases electrolysis innovation ‘to clean up’ the filthy hydrogen business • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Advanced Ionics, Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Biotech & Health, Clean Energy Ventures, Climate, DisruptNo Comments

Advanced Ionics, a climate-tech startup that hails from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is striving to drive down the price of green hydrogen by slashing how much electricity is needed for electrolysis by as much as 50%. That’s an admirable goal, because despite all the talk of hydrogen as a “fuel of the future,” the industry is still filthy for the most part — driving climate chaos via pollution-spewing production methods. Most of the hydrogen gas that humans produce is “grey“; a classification that means the producers rely on methane (or worse, burning coal) to isolate the element for use in fertilizer and as fuel. But as awareness of climate change and interest in hydrogen-powered freight grows, so too has demand for an environmentally friendlier alternative. In contrast to the grey stuff, “green” hydrogen taps renewable energy and electrolysis to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. It’s a superior production method as far as the climate is concerned, but it is also costly because it demands a ton of clean energy. Image Credits: ZebethMedia As Advanced Ionics founder Chad Mason tells it, the startup’s coming electrolyzer will “use 35 Kilowatt-hours to make a kilogram of hydrogen by running at 300 Celsius,” while tapping industrial heat, non-ceramic materials (that work at lower than typical temperatures) and steam instead of liquid water. Per the CEO, “existing technologies are generally in the 45 to 60 [Kilowatt-hours] range, practically speaking.” The executive presented onstage today at ZebethMedia Disrupt Startup Battlefield in San Francisco. There are other ways to cut the cost of electrolysis, such as by manufacturing cheaper electrolyzers and limiting maintenance. “But if you don’t address electricity use and price of electricity, it doesn’t matter,” Mason told ZebethMedia. The company is targeting between 20% and 50% less electricity use. The CEO said his interest in electrolyzers was first sparked through anhydrous ammonia fertilizer, which his family applied to crops on their farm in North Dakota. “So I understood early on,” said Mason, “the importance of hydrogen to make all of these important commodities and chemicals that are also very polluting industries.” Armed with $4.2 million in seed funding from Boston’s Clean Energy Ventures and Texas-based SWAN Impact Network, Advanced Ionics has a ways to go. The company aims to deploy “demonstration units with a few partners” and kick off sales starting next year, and it is targeting 2025 for a commercial launch. Then, “we’re going to try to really hit the gas and produce as many of them possible, and try to have as big of an impact as possible as quickly as we can in the latter half of the decade,” said Mason.

Kayhan Space is making orbit safer with timely, automatic collision warnings for satellites • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 20, Disrupt, Kayhan Space, Space, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

The orbital economy is heating up, but the infrastructure that supports it is starting to creak. Kayhan Space is a startup that makes sure your satellite doesn’t crash into another — or a launch or piece of space trash, for that matter — using modern data crunching techniques and a web-accessible platform. Kayhan presented today at Disrupt SF as part of the Battlefield, and the business is considerably further along than when we first covered them; at the time, they were raising a pre-seed round, but now they’ve got their feet under them and are raising again. Founded by old friends Araz Feyzi and Siamak Hesar, who came together to the U.S. from Iran for school years ago, the company is taking on the natural result of the last decades order-of-magnitude increase in satellite launches: traffic. Space may seem like a big place, but low Earth orbit is actually pretty crowded, relatively speaking. With thousands of satellites zooming around on all kinds of trajectories, and tens of thousands of pieces of space junk as well, the chances your spacecraft will have to juke a bit to avoid a screw going 20,000 mph or so are getting higher. When orbits overlap to the point that a collision is possible, it’s called a “conjunction” — a more neutral term than “collision course,” certainly. “There are a lot of satellite-on-satellite conjunctions; it’s less than 10% today but the paradigm is shifting,” Feyzi told ZebethMedia. “The sheer number of conjunctions is increasing, because we’re tracking more objects and there are more active satellites — and we expect that to get worse.” Worse not just in terms of frequency, he explained, but in the decreasing amount of time before a potentially catastrophic event occurs. This lead time is very important, because last-minute maneuvers are both hair-raising and waste fuel — what could have been avoided by a tiny impulse hours ago becomes a longer emergency burn. Normally satellite operators report their positions and orbits to Space Command — sounds impressive, but imagine a control tower at an airport that suddenly grew to 10 times its normal size. They can only do so much, so fast, and they rely on operators calling in the latest data and changes. With thousands of satellites in the sky, de-conflicting orbits over a period of hours or days — and deciding what to do via phone call — is no longer a realistic option. Kayhan’s Pathfinder orbital tracking platform. Kayhan is working to automate the process as much as possible using the freshest data available. Some of that is the high precision object database maintained by the government, yes, but there are other tracking sources too, plus the real-time info coming from customers and anyone who makes it available. Their Pathfinder platform provides situational awareness, conjunction warnings, recommended new orbital paths — if you have the right thruster, it’ll even provide the impulse. “We use all of this data, and we’ve developed a large amount of proprietary algorithms and processes. For example, we’ve developed a modern prediction engine that predicts the paths of objects, that allows us to very rapidly calculate, simulate and re-simulate the motions of objects in space,” Feyzi said. The turnaround time for a conjunction response is measured in minutes instead of days, but it’s no less carefully considered, Feyzi continued: “When you go on Pathfinder and you look at the recommendations prepared for you, you can be sure they’re safe — we’ve screened them — and second, it’s feasible for you because it fits all the constraints you have: your propulsion system, your ground contacts.” Image Credits: ZebethMedia He also emphasized that these capabilities aren’t limited by, for example, how fast a radar dish can turn. Being a data-based product, it can scale arbitrarily. “The beauty of software, and the way we have designed our infrastructure is it is easily scalable. We could onboard every satellite available today and it wouldn’t be a problem for us,” Feyzi said. Integrations with other satellite and mission management platforms are coming as well — not everyone wants to work with a whole new tool, so the data will be available via SDK. You may wonder whether a pure data play is defensible as a business. Feyzi admitted that others may very well attempt the same type of system, but Kayhan’s head start and expertise is not to be underestimated. “We have five Ph.D.s in astrodynamics on our team today. The amount of data we process and the amount of processing we do is extremely heavy; unless you develop these core capabilities to run effectively and efficiently, you won’t be able to achieve what we are achieving,” he said. “If you have the data, the capital, the people, yes, maybe in two years, you could develop the platform — no one has done it so far, but where we’ll be in two years is very different from where we are today.” To that point, Kayhan itself is expanding its capabilities with a now product it calls Gamut, meant to offer the same kind of automated safety checks but for launches. Image Credits: Kayhan Space Scheduling launches isn’t just about waiting for good weather — you have to thread the needle to put the payload in the right orbit and place, perhaps among dozens or hundreds of peers. As the number of satellites rises, the prospect of a ride-share mission hitting several different orbits quickly becomes a very complex logistical problem. And the kicker is, if you miss your launch window by a few minutes, you need a new solution. “We invented a new method that leverages GPU processing to process launch screening an order of magnitude faster,” Feyzi said. That means launch companies can be prepared for more eventualities, and hit fast forward on the paperwork and other official processes one has to get through to send a rocket into space. Gamut is still in development and testing, but you can expect to hear more about it soon as

General Atlantic eyes increasing stake in Amazon-backed insurtech Acko • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 20, 2022Posted in acko, general atlantic, india, Startups, VentureNo Comments

General Atlantic is in talks to invest about $50 million in Acko, two sources familiar with the matter told ZebethMedia, doubling down on its bet on the Indian insurtech at a time when most investors are treading investment opportunities carefully. The New York-headquartered growth equity investor is positioning to lead a new financing round of about $100 million in the Indian startup, the sources said, requesting anonymity as the details are private. The new round — which is shaping up to be nearly entirely financed by existing backers — is likely to move ahead at a flat valuation of $1.1 billion, one of the sources said. The investment hasn’t closed, so terms of the deal may still change, the sources cautioned. Acko, which became a unicorn last year after securing a funding round led by General Atlantic, and the investment firm declined to comment Wednesday. The new deliberations follow Acko engaging with PayU earlier this year to raise a round of over $200 million at a valuation of $1.8 billion, one of the sources said. It’s unclear why those talks fell through. Indian newspaper Economic Times reported last month that PayU had offered a term sheet to Acko. Acko — which counts Lightspeed Venture Partners India, CPPIB, Amazon and Multiples Private Equity among existing backers — is among a handful of startups that is attempting to take on the country’s antiquated insurance industry with a digital-first product. It develops and sells bite-sized auto insurance products (aimed at drivers and others in transportation-related scenarios), healthcare protections to employers, as well as protection on gadgets. The startup has distribution partners with a number of firms including Amazon, which is an existing investor in Acko, as well as travel and hotel booking platform MakeMyTrip, ride-hailing firm Ola, insurance giant Bajaj Finance and Urban Company. Acko said last year that it covers nearly a million gig workers in the country through partnerships with companies including food delivery giants Swiggy and Zomato. Offering a large catalog of bite-sized insurance policies is crucial for firms in India. Only a fraction of the nation’s 1.3 billion people currently have access to insurance and most can’t afford sizable policies. According to rating agency ICRA, insurance products had reached less than 3% of the population as of 2017. An average Indian makes about $2,100 a year, according to the World Bank. ICRA estimated that of those Indians who had purchased an insurance product, they were spending less than $50 on it in 2017. Its new funding deliberations come at a time when the dealflow activity has taken a severe hit in the South Asian market as investors grow cautious of writing new checks and evaluate their underwriting models after valuations of publicly listed firms take a tumble. Indian startups raised $3 billion in the quarter that ended in September, down 57% from the previous quarter and 80% year-over-year, according to market intelligence platform Tracxn.