Author : zebethcontrol

SecuriThings is bringing order to IoT device management with $21M investment • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in edge devices, Enterprise, IoT, physical security, SecuriThings, usvpNo Comments

As companies deploy more security devices like cameras, access control systems, intercoms and many other tools throughout their organizations, they are often disconnected from traditional IT, and may lack any way of managing the equipment in a systematic way. SecuriThings has built a solution to solve this problem with a platform that helps building operations understand and control what’s happening on physical security devices across a company. Today the company announced a $21 million Series B. Roy Dagan, company CEO and co-founder, says that while companies are spending inordinate amounts of money on this equipment, they often don’t know if they are even working because they lack visibility. “We built the ultimate system to help them automate the management of these devices at scale, and really provide the equivalent of an IT type of system for managing these kinds of devices,” Dagan told ZebethMedia. The system automates a bunch of management tasks that are typically done manually including firmware upgrades, managing certificates and rotating passwords. What’s more, it can help find and troubleshoot issues with these devices as they happen. “It can also perform things like root cause analysis. So we can tell when an issue occurs, and we can tell you what’s at fault,” he said. “You may think it’s a [camera], but it’s actually a switch and it’s affecting 15 [cameras], which are all down. And that’s a problem because while building operations manages the broken cameras, the broken switch is under the purview of IT, and they need to know about it to fix it. SecuriThings includes ways to communicate with IT about these issues. “You can collaborate with your counterparts in IT. So it can be integrated with ServiceNow or other ticketing systems…and that helps you also start working better with the rest of the enterprise,” Dagan said. He believes that in spite of the economic uncertainty we are seeing, his company is well positioned to deal with it. “One of the cool business outcomes is really around cost reduction. Because if you look at the enterprise, and you look at the amount of spend they have today on these devices, and the way things are done manually and reactively, it’s almost a no brainer. The cost savings are huge,” he said. While he wouldn’t discuss revenue growth, he said the company currently has dozens of customers using the platform and the number of customers has grown over 300% year over year. The startup currently has 70 employees with plans to add more with the new investment. He says that being diverse is built into the company’s values. “So it’s just part of our culture, and it’s core to the company. It really is, and just looking at stats that we have today where 40% of leadership is female, and 40% of the company is female…But then also our HR team is constantly evaluating the numbers and looking at different opportunities and how we create that diversity even more,” he said. Today’s investment was led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and participation from Swisscom Ventures existing investors Aleph, Firstime VC and Cresson Management. The startup reports it has now raised a total of $39 million.

VUZ raises $20 million to scale its immersive social app • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in Media & Entertainment, Startups, VUZNo Comments

VUZ, a social app that allows users to stream and experience immersive realism in extended reality (XR) and metaverse digital experiences, has raised $20 million in Series B investment. Investors in the round include Caruso Ventures, Vision VC Fund, e& capital, investment pillar of e& (formerly known as Etisalat Group), DFDF (Dubai Future District Fund), WIN (Webit Investment Network), SRMG, Elbert Capital, and Yasta Partners, Faith Capital, Panthera Capital. Seven existing investors participated as well. The Dubai-based VUZ says that this round which has seen it onboard a mix of U.S.- and EMEA-based investors, will be pivotal to its international expansion. Founder and chief executive officer Khaled Zaatarah launched VUZ, formerly 360VUZ, as a platform to bridge the gap between physical and virtual worlds by offering premium immersive content to a global audience. The platform offers over 20,000 hours of content covering entertainment, creators, and sports, and XR, VR, and AR experiences virtually anywhere in the world. According to Zaatarah, VUZ’s vision is to connect people by providing “authentic immersive experiences while removing the constraints of travel, time, and access.” Users can access and engage different content — in addition to the aforementioned, live events, concerts, celebrity interviews and masterclasses, through its 360-degree live streams — by downloading VUZ’s iOS and Android apps. 70% of its content its free and VUZ monetizes through showing ads to users in this category; on the other hand, users are required to pay between $4-8 for its exclusive content. The company is planning to allow users access content via other media: Meta/Oculus headsets, Qualcomm, immersive avatars and a web platform, Zaatarah said to ZebethMedia. The web3 platform claims to have reached over 1 billion screen views from over 10 million users since its launch. 44% of these views come from the Middle East, 32% from the U.S. and 24% from Egypt. VUZ said it aims to reach 3 billion views in 2023 and double its user base 2x yearly. Creators’ immersive content collaborations have also been a core driver for VUZ content, where its top creators get over 100 million views globally. The funds will be used to fuel these plans, including improving its 10% month-on-month recurring revenue growth, investing in content, hiring additional key senior hires, new social features, launching Web3 products and NFT projects and scaling with asset-light operations into 8 new international markets. The investment will also see VUZ scale its Los Angeles office and scale with creators and content in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. “Our plans for the future are 10 times stronger than what we have been building for the past 6 years,” added the chief executive. “We have built the base and are now ready for sustainable scalability and growth at a scale-up stage,” Zaatarah adds. Telecoms are betting on immersive media and see it as one of the most robust use cases for 5G and the future of video streaming. Zaatarah said partnership and integration with 45 telecom operators is the backbone behind the company’s global expansion. Even Dan Caruso, the managing director of Caruso Ventures, said his firm invested in the company because it is uniquely positioned to build a global platform and partner with top telecom operators globally. One such partner is the newly rebranded UAE-based telecom operator, e&; its VC arm, e& capital launched a $250 million fund this week. VUZ, which has raised over $30 million since inception, is one of e& Capital’s maiden investments in the MENA region. The immersive media platform said it will leverage the telecom operators’ infrastructure to expand into countries in the Middle East and Africa. Speaking on the investment, Kushal Shah, the head of venture capital at e& capital said VUZ is in line with e& capital’s commitment “to collaborate with visionary tech businesses that we believe will contribute to building a better and brighter digital future. We will continue to invest into the company’s success, partnering with them to help them achieve growth and enable meaningful progress that moves this digital world forward.” He told ZebethMedia that his firm plans to make 20 investments across Series A and B-stage startups in the MENA region.

Nudge Security emerges from stealth to tackle cybersecurity’s people problem • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in SecurityNo Comments

Social engineering attacks are on the rise. These low-tech but high-impact attacks — where hackers manipulate employees into granting them access to companies’ services and data — increased by almost threefold last year, and have so far this year claimed several high-profile victims, from Twilio and Mailchimp to Revolut, and most recently Uber. As these big names demonstrate, these kinds of attacks can be hard for even the most well-resourced organizations to protect against. Now, cybersecurity startup Nudge Security is emerging from stealth to help organizations tackle what they think is the biggest cybersecurity weakness: people. The fully remote company — with outposts in Austin, Texas and Jackson, Wyoming — was founded in 2021 by ex-AlienVault software engineers Russell Spitler and Jaime Blasco who believe the only way to address the “people problem” is to make employees part of the solution. As its name suggests, its product does that by “nudging” employees towards optimal security behaviors, such as switching on multi-factor authentication (MFA) or changing their password if it has been involved in a breach. The company’s security offering continuously uncovers historical and new software-as-a-service assets across an organization, including SaaS supply chains and OAuth grants, without relying on network infrastructure, endpoint agents, browser extensions, or API integrations. When there’s a new “security critical” event, such as the creation of a new account or the installation of a new app, Nudge engages with that employee to ensure they are making good security choices. For example, if an employee downloads Dropbox but the organization uses Google Drive, Nudge will start a dialogue to understand why that decision has been made. “We act as a sidecar in a way that allows employees to engage with the security team and allows the centralized team to still have visibility into what’s going on, set policies, and have employees be part of that process in a way that doesn’t disrupt their work,” Nudge’s Spitler told ZebethMedia. “We believe that every employee has the potential to behave in ways that support and strengthen the organization’s cybersecurity posture, it’s just not always simple or straightforward to do so.” In order to ensure employees engage with these prompts, Nudge worked with Aaron Kay, a professor of psychology at Duke University, who showed the startup how it can take foundational research done in psychology in order to establish a relationship between our product and end users. “We’re trying to engage employees, and make sure we’re not coming across in a way that’s slapping your hands or waving a big red warning banner,” Spitler added. Nudge is not claiming that it could have prevented Uber’s hack or Revolut’s breach — Spitler told ZebethMedia, “we’ve been in the industry too long to make bold cases like that” — but that the company believes it can help organizations inform their risk posture not just in terms of who has access, but in terms of who has access to what and why. “Like in the case of Uber, one of the things that has been a trend for collapse over the past few months is the complexity of these organizations,” Spitler said. “Social engineering plus complexity means that even if one user gets compromised, all of a sudden the organization starts to fall apart.” “We also provide supply chain information,” added Blasco, Nudge’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “Let’s say your organization is using Slack, and they’re using Twilio, we’re able to tell you that Twilio is compromised.” Nudge is launching its product six months after it secured a $7 million seed investment from Ballistic Ventures, a new VC outfit solely dedicated to advising and funding early-stage cybersecurity startups. Since this investment, Nudge has onboarded 10 customers, with another dozen or so in the large enterprise pilot phase. “The product that we’ll be delivering this week is really our focus right now, and then we’ll be scaling up our marketing and sales efforts,” Splinter said. “When we start to expand on that front, we’ll probably look to raise another round.”

Analytics operating system Redbird makes data more accessible to non-technical users • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in analytics, data analytics, data science, redbird, StartupsNo Comments

Data engineers have a big problem. Almost every team in their business needs access to analytics and other information that can be gleaned from their data warehouses, but only a few have technical backgrounds. Redbird was created to help everyone in an organization create and run analytics without using code, therefore reducing the amount of bottlenecks that data engineers need to deal with. The New York-based startup announced today that it has raised $7.6 million in an oversubscribed seed round led by B Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Thomson Reuters Ventures, Alumni Ventures and Soma Capital, along with other funds and angel investors. Redbird, formerly known as Cube Analytics, serves as an analytics operating system by connecting all of an organization’s data sources into a no-code environment that non-technical users can use to perform analysis, reporting and other data science tasks. The new funding will be used to add more no-code capabilities. It also plans to build out its marketplace, where users and developers can exchange apps they create using Redbird. Founded by data analytics experts Erin Tavgac and Deren Tavgac, Redbird works with large enterprises in a wide array of verticals including consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, retail, media and agencies. Erin formerly worked at McKinsey, helping companies set up and run data analytics capabilities, while Deren was chief product officer at Saks Fifth Avenue. Erin told ZebethMedia that the two left their jobs to solve enterprise data analytics problems like lack of automation and advanced analytics that require coding skills. That means data engineering teams can’t meet all demand from stakeholders, leaving companies unable to manage the fragmented tools within a complex data stack. Redbird addresses these issues by enabling people without a technical background to create custom apps that automate analytics, breaking through bottlenecks for data engineering teams while giving everyone access to data analytics. Redbird’s peers in the enterprise data analytics space include basis analytic tools like Tableau, Looker and Microsoft Power BI, which Tavgac said Redbird does not consider direct competitors because they don’t automate complex workflows end-to-end, instead delivering generic data visualizations from datasets that have already been transformed. A closer rival are advanced automation platforms like Alteryx, but it has a couple drawbacks compared to Redbird. For one thing, it has less capabilities in collection, data science and visualization, which means customers can’t use it as a comprehensive analytics workflow solution, Tavgac said. It is also hard for non-technical users to adopt, a problem that Redbird was created to solve. Most of Redbird’s customers are large enterprises that make more than $1 billion in revenue. It is profitable, with seven-figure revenue and 9x revenue growth over the past year. Redbird monetizes through an enterprise SaaS model, with usage-based license fees. Some examples of how clients have used Redbird: a large media company created automation workflows that collect data from more than 10 sources, apply advanced analytics to them and generate thousands of custom reports to guide their ad sale activities. A global CPG brand is using Redbird to do digital brand health tracking across a wide variety of data sources, like social media, e-commerce review and Google search volume, and using advanced analytics to predict future sales trend. In a statement, B Capital general partners Karen Page said, “We believe Redbird will become a mission-critical platform for enterprises to manage complex data workflows. This investment underscores our strategy of working with innovative companies that enable rapid technological transformation across traditional industries.”

MoKo, Kenya’s home furniture startup, raises $6.5M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in Commerce, furniture, kenya, Moko, StartupsNo Comments

Kenya has the largest and most thriving furniture industry in East Africa, but the sector’s potential is hindered by several challenges among them production inefficiencies and quality concerns, forcing most major retailers to settle on imports. MoKo Home + Living, a Kenya-based home furniture manufacturer and omnichannel retailer, saw this gap and over several years set out to bridge it through quality and guarantees. The company is now eyeing its next phase of growth, following a $6.5 million series B debt-equity funding round, co-led by U.S based investment fund Talanton and Swiss investor AlphaMundi Group. Novastar Ventures, which co-led the firm’s Series A round, and Blink CV also made follow-on investments. Kenya’s Victoria Commercial Bank offered $3 million debt financing, $1 million of which is mezzanine financing – a debt that can be turned into equity. “We entered this market because we saw a real opportunity to guarantee and deliver quality furniture. We also wanted to bring convenience to customers, by making it easy for them to buy home furniture, the largest asset for most families in Kenya,” Eric Kouskalis, MoKo’s managing director, who co-founded the startup with Fiorenzo Conte, told ZebethMedia. MoKo was founded in 2014, initially as Watervale Investment Limited, an entity that sought to fix raw material supply issues for furniture manufacturers. However, in 2017 it pivoted and started a pilot for its first consumer product (a mattress), and then a year later launched the MoKo Home + Living brand to serve the mass market. The startup says it has grown five-fold over the last three years, and its products are currently in more than 370,000 homes in Kenya. It hopes to sell to millions of homes over the next few years, as it embarks on scaling up production and growing its product line. Among its current products is the popular MoKo mattress. “We plan to have an offering for each major piece of furniture in a typical home – bed frame, TV stand, coffee table, carpet. We are also developing even more affordable products in existing product categories – sofas and mattresses,” said Kouskalis. Digital-first brand MoKo is also planning to use the funding to grow its growth and presence in Kenya by tapping its online channels, building more partnerships with retailers and outlets to increase offline sales. It plans to also purchase more equipment. Already, MoKo is using digital technology in its production lines, having invested in “equipment that can take complex woodworking designs programmed by our engineers and execute them precisely in seconds.” This, they say, has helped the team to work efficiently and increase production. The “automated recycling technology and software that calculates optimal use of raw materials” has also helped them cut waste. “We were impressed by MoKo’s climate friendly local production capabilities. The company is a leading innovator in the industry because they’ve turned sustainability into a remarkable commercial advantage. Every step they’ve taken on this front not only protects the environment, it also improves the durability or affordability of MoKo’s offering to its customers,” said Miriam Atuya of the AlphaMundi Group. MoKo targets to enter three new markets by 2025 and to reach a wide pool of customers as furniture demand in the continent continues to grow, driven by population growth, urbanization and increasing purchasing power. “The potential for growth is what excites us the most. There’s still so much room to better serve millions of families in Kenya. That’s just the beginning – MoKo’s model is relevant for most markets in Africa, where families face similar obstacles in making comfortable, welcoming homes,” said Kouskalis.

Vedantu acquires majority stake in Deeksha for $40 million in offline push • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in byju's, india, Startups, Vedantu, VentureNo Comments

Indian edtech Vedantu has acquired a majority stake in education chain Deeksha for $40 million, the latest in local online learning platforms’ growing attempts at tapping opportunities in the offline market. The Bengaluru-headquartered Vedantu, which became a unicorn last year, said it will integrate its technology into offline centers of Deeksha as part of the strategic partnership to create a “scalable hybrid model.” Deeksha is a 22-year-old institution that operates 39 physical centers in three Indian states. Vedantu began experimenting with offline experience earlier this year and said in Deeksha, it found the right partner to maker deeper inroads in smaller Indian cities and towns. In an interview with ZebethMedia, Vedantu co-founder and chief executive Vamsi Krishna said he has been tracking Deeksha for 10 years and when they began exploring synergies together, it became clear that the two will immensely benefit from the partnership. Deeksha’s current topline revenue is between $10 million to $12 million and it’s operating at a 21% EBIDTA margin, according to a person familiar with the matter. Krishna declined to comment on Deeksha’s finances. Krishna, who is a teacher himself, has taken a slightly different approach to acquisition opportunities. The edtech market in India has witnessed over a dozen consolidation in the past two years, but Vedantu has largely avoided any participation in that game. “We are still open to acquiring more startups, but I don’t have a certain metric to hit. Acquiring firms is not a strategy for Vedantu,” he said. “When we say we are employing a hybrid strategy, we don’t mean pure offline centers. In fact, we don’t have any intention to ever open a pure offline center. We have always believed in creating access to quality teachers especially in tier 3 and tier 4 cities. Our vision is that students come to the center, but teachers are still teaching through streaming and other technologies. Indian edtech giants accelerated their growth during the pandemic – and raised record amounts of capital. But as schools reopen, the firms are increasingly finding it difficult to maintain the same growth. India is one of the world’s largest education markets with over 300 million school-going students and those preparing for competitive college exams. Only a sliver of this base is currently using any online education service. Offline coaching centers, in contrast, are growing and continue to remain far more popular among students. In the past two years, top edtech giants including Byju’s, Vedantu and Unacademy, some of which sought to displace the offline players by offering affordable and higher quality education, have renewed their efforts to more directly tap the offline market. Byju’s acquired Aakash, another physical online institute, for nearly $1 billion last year. Unacademy launched offline experience stores earlier this year. “Offline learning is not going away anytime soon. In fact, online complements offline really well, and together as a package, the omnichannel model is going to steer and be here for a long period of time,” GV Ravishankar, a partner at Sequoia India, said at an event earlier this year. “Through this partnership, we will leverage Vedantu’s LIVE Class platform for our students and provide a hybrid solution that maximizes learning outcomes through personalized learning algorithms. Vedantu’s hybrid learning model will also enable us to provide the same ‘Deeksha Experience’ to millions of students in smaller towns and cities at an affordable cost,” said Dr. Sridhar, co-founder of Deeksha, in a statement.

Zen Educate, a marketplace that matches schools with teachers, raises $21M to fuel U.S. expansion • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in Apps, Startups, Teacher recruitment, Zen EducateNo Comments

Zen Educate, an online marketplace that algorithmically matches schools with the best available teachers, has raised £19.3 million ($21 million) in a Series A extension round of funding. Founded out of London in 2017, Zen Educate is setting out to supplant the traditional approach to recruiting teachers, a system that typically involves third-party agencies and hefty fees. On top of that, working with agencies often entails analogue workflows, with paper-based timesheets and phone calls the order of the day. “Those agencies are incredibly expensive — the average U.K. education recruiter has a 30 to 35% margin,” Zen Educate cofounder and CEO Slava Kremerman explained to ZebethMedia. By cutting out these pricey intermediaries, Zen Educate promises to reduce many of the costs and administrative friction involved in hiring supply teachers, as well as full-time teachers and teaching assistants, through a self-serve platform that allows teachers and schools to manage their own profiles. However, it’s not a complete free-for-all, as the company says it uses its own proprietary technology to conduct “extensive checks” on teachers during the sign-up process. Zen Educate platform Image Credits: Zen Educate The main benefits Zen Educate touts is that it serves as a natural filter that algorithmically surfaces the most suitable teachers based on a range of criteria. “Rather than just seeing a universe of teachers and then randomly ‘guessing’ which ones to offer a role to, schools can see a curated list created by a match algorithm that factors in availability, skillset, proximity, the type of role, and previous feedback as well as numerous other factors,” Kremerman said. Schools can also create “favorite” lists of the most suitable teachers, so they can pool the best-performing substitutes based on previous experience, and easily rebook them when the situation requires it. Zen Educate platform Image Credits: Zen Educate Show me the money Kremerman said that his company has crunched the U.K. government’s own reported school financing data, and established that schools spend around £2 billion ($2.2 billion) annually on temporary staff, of which £600 million ($662 million) can be attributed to agency fees. And it’s these fees that Zen Educate wants to reduce — but not quite eliminate. Indeed, Kremerman says that his company charges a smaller markup, around 15-18%, on each hour or day that’s booked through its platform. And it claims to have already saved the U.K. education sector £10 million ($11 million) on “wasted recruitment agency fees.” “There’s a spread between what the teacher gets paid and what Zen Educate charges the school — the school saves money, and the teacher earns more,” he said. Zen Educate cofounders: Slava Kremerman (CEO) with Oren Cohen (chief customer officer) Image Credits: Zen Educate So far, Zen Educate has largely served schools in the U.K. cities of London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, and Leeds, though it actually soft-launched in the U.S. back in March starting in Minneapolis, where Kremerman says it’s currently powering around 7,000 hours of teaching cover per month. And with another chunk of change in the bank, it’s now well-financed to expand further into the U.S. market starting with Houston, Texas, later this month. While there have been some technology-focused attempts to counter the existing agency-based order in the U.K., nothing of note has gained any meaningful traction. And in the U.S., there are major players such as human capital management platform Frontline Education, which is currently in the process of changing ownership between two private equity firms as part of a $3.7 billion transaction. Elsewhere, Swing Education is doing something a little similar to Zen Educate, though with a specific focus on substitute teachers only. Whatever competition that does exist out there, with an estimated 1.2 million substitute teachers in the U.S. alone, there is more than enough room to accommodate several tech-infused marketplaces that bring teacher and school matchmaking into the 21st century. “The best metaphor is to imagine if you used Uber, and it just showed you a list of all taxis in London — but didn’t tell you whether they still worked, whether they were available, where they were, or what type of car it is,” Kremerman said. “That’s how supply teaching happens now.” Zen Educate had previously raised around £9.4 million ($10.4 million) in funding across several rounds since its inception, the most recent being a £6.8 million ($7.5 million ) Series A round spread between 2019 and 2020. Now, the company is adding a further £19.3 million to the pot, taking its total funding to £28.7 million, with backers including edtech-focused VC firm Brighteye Ventures, Adjuvo, Ascension Ventures, and a slew of angel investors. In addition to market expansion, Kremerman said the fresh cash injection will be used to double its headcount to 200 in the next six months, as well as acquire some incumbents in the market.

Open finance startup Ayoconnect’s APIs enable financial inclusion in Southeast Asia • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in Asia, Ayoconnect, financial inclusion, Fintech, Indonesia, open finance, Southeast Asia, StartupsNo Comments

Focused on Southeast Asia, Ayoconnect’s APIs make it faster for businesses to launch new financial services, instead of needing to build their own tech infrastructure. It is also licensed by Indonesia’s central bank, enabling it to offer more services. The open finance startup announced today it has closed a $13 million Series B extension round led by SIG Venture Capital, with participation from CE Innovation Capital and returning investor PayU, the payments and fintech business of Prosus. This brings its total raised to $43 million, including the oversubscribed first tranche of its Series B, which was led by Tiger Global and closed in January 2022. Founded in 2016, with a team of about 250 people, Ayoconnect is currently working toward more financial inclusion for Indonesian consumers and SMEs. It works with regulators and incumbent banks, and was recently awarded a Bank of Indonesia (BI) Payment Service Provider Category 1 license. Ayoconnect says it is the only open finance player in Indonesia to be licensed by the central bank. Ayoconnect’s new funding will be used for leadership hiring, and on its Ayoconnect’s product and technology, including new solutions for payments, data and banking and new APIs for account opening and card issuing. The startup recently launched automated recurring direct debit with seven of Indonesia’s largest banks (Mandiri, BRI, BNI, CIMB Niaga, Danamon, Bank Syariah Indonesia and Bank Neo Commerce). This allows Ayoconnect’s clients to use its direct debit API and get the ability to make recurring debits from customers’ savings accounts at multiple banks. Before starting Ayoconnect, founder and CEO Jakob Rost was a managing director at Lazada. After leaving Lazada, he spent several years living in Indonesia, where he saw how the country could benefit from more digital financial inclusion. For example, it is the fourth largest country in the world by population, but about half of people are unbanked, he said. It also has a complicated geography, resulting in a weak financial infrastructure, fragmentation and less standardization in the banking sector. Furthermore, Rost added, consumer-facing businesses in Indonesia don’t have the digital financial infrastructure to manage their own finances while serving customers. Ayoconnect raised again so soon after the initial close of its Series B because it was growing rapidly and also secured important strategic partnerships after receiving its BI license. Rost said the new capital will strengthen Ayoconnect’s balance sheet and prepare it for future growth over the next few years. The platform now serves 200 API customers, including large banks, financial institutions, tech unicorns and fintechs, and offers more than 4,000 embedded finance products. Its APIs are cover two categories: open banking APIs and payment services APIs, with the goal of building the most complete open finance stack in Southeast Asia. Some examples of financial services that Ayoconnect’s clients have launched include the aforementioned direct debit, embedded finance (it partnered with PT. Kereta Api Indonesia (KAI), the state-owned operator of railways in Indonesia) to launch new ticketing and productivity features in the KAI Access mobile app, which enables users to buy cellphone credits, internet data subscriptions and electricity tokens). It also partnered with Bank Syariah, Indonesia’s largest Islamic bank, to add new digital and mobile capabilities with the goal of greater financial inclusion and economic growth among its customers. Other Southeast Asian startups in the open finance space include Brick, Finverse, Brankas and Finantier as competitors? One way that Ayoconnect differentiate is by being the only licensed open finance platform in Indonesia, which enables it to offer solutions that aren’t available on the market yet. “While open banking and open finance are reasonably well-established in Europe and the US, the industry is still very young in Southeast Asia but is growing rapidly. In Indonesia, hundreds of millions are embracing new digital services while many more are still without access to basic financial services like bank accounts,” said Rost. “As such, there is huge potential for open finance in the region and a ton of opportunities for the sector to grow further. We’ve been really excited to see the activity in the space and to be playing a role in helping to move the ecosystem forward.” In a statement, SIG Venture Capital’s Akshay Bajaj said the Ayoconnect team “have been running high volume APIs for years and are incredibly well positioned to help customers launch compelling and profitable use cases quickly and securely. As a result of its expanding capabilities, Ayoconnect continues to experience strong and growing demand from banks and API clients. We love their vision and believe they have the potential to transform and enhance the future of payments in Southeast Asia.”

An ‘ambitious’ new D&D game is on the way from Invoke Studios, formerly Tuque Games • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 13, 2022Posted in Gaming, video games, Wizards of the CoastNo Comments

There’s a new D&D video game on the way from the Montreal studio formerly known as Tuque Games. Wizards of the Coast, which publishes Dungeons & Dragons, has relaunched the Canadian game developer as Invoke Studios — a revamped company with a focus on crafting big games out of the considerable source material that comes with the territory. Invoke and Wizards aren’t revealing much about the new game’s setting or genre, teasing only that it will be “built inside of the Dungeons & Dragons brand” and that the game will run on Unreal Engine 5. Invoke is led by Dominic Guay, a veteran producer from Ubisoft who worked as a senior producer on the Watch Dogs franchise. “First, we have a new mission: make ambitious, high quality AAA games,” Guay told ZebethMedia. “Who joins the studio, how we work and the means we have at Invoke are all defined and focused on our mission.” He notes that the studio formed a new “core team” over the last year comprised of committed veteran developers in order to steer toward its new goals. “We have the largest and most popular brand of fantasy role-playing games in Dungeons & Dragons,” Guay said in a press release. “Such a brand, with 50 years of history behind it, inspires developers and gives us enormous creative freedom.” The Invoke team currently boasts around 80 people, but plans to scale up to more than 200 within the next three years. Wizards, itself a division within game giant Hasbro, purchased Tuque Games in 2019 for an undisclosed amount to build out its roster of digital games. The studio released Dark Alliance, an action RPG set in D&D’s Forgotten Realms, last year. While reviews didn’t suggest that Dark Alliance broke much new ground, the relaunched studio’s aims for adapting the D&D source material at its fingertips sound loftier. Invoke is just one piece of the emerging digital game strategy within Wizards. The D&D publisher now boasts six different video game studios, including Austin-based Archetype Entertainment, which is working on a sci-fi RPG, Atomic Arcade, and Skeleton Key, a studio focused on suspense and horror games that’s helmed by a producer from Dragon Age. While Wizards is cranking up the intensity on its internal video game efforts, the most anticipated D&D game right now is Baldur’s Gate III, which is being developed through a licensing partnership with Larian, developer of the critical hit Divinity: Original Sin II. “We are proud to have a collection of first-class game developers heading up new studios around the world, including Invoke in Montreal led by Dom,” a Wizards of the Coast spokesperson told ZebethMedia in an emailed statement.