Author : zebethcontrol

Klarna brings its price comparison tool to Europe • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Amazon, Apps, Commerce, Google, Klarna, PriceRunnerNo Comments

Klarna is expanding into the competitive world of price comparisons, with the launch of a new tool that compares prices across thousands of retailers. The company quietly rolled out the price comparison service in the U.S. a few weeks back, and is now extending this into additional markets in Europe including The U.K. and the Nordics. The European “buy now, pay later” fintech has had a turbulent year, laying off 10% of its workforce in May followed by a second round of layoffs in September. Sandwiched in between, news emerged that Klarna had raised $800 million in funding, albeit at a valuation 85% lower than the previous year, a trend that has echoed elsewhere across the fintech sphere and beyond. With today’s announcement, Klarna is building on an acquisition that closed just six months ago, when it snapped up comparison shopping service PriceRunner in a $124 million deal. At the time, it said that it would use the acquisition to power new features in the core Klarna app, including produce search and price comparisons — and that is what it has been rolling out over the past few weeks. It’s a notable expansion for Klarna, which has hitherto been better known for a service that allows consumers to buy goods through third-party retailers in instalments. Moving forward, the Klarna app will not only serve as a payment network, but a “single shopping destination” for finding the cheapest deals and paying. Digging into the specifics, the new price comparison smarts allow customers to filter their searches by criteria such as size, color, ratings, availability, shipping options, and more. On top of that, Klarna shows shoppers historical pricing data, which shows how the cost has fluctuated over time and whether they should buy now, or wait a little longer to see if the price goes down. A ‘credible alternative’ The company said that the tool is designed to serve as a “credible alternative” to other shopping services from the likes of Google and Amazon. Indeed, PriceRunner is in fact in the process of suing Google for more than $2 billion in Europe, alleging that the internet giant continues to breach a 2017 antitrust enforcement order against Google Shopping. The long and short of that case involves Google allegedly giving prominence to its own comparison shopping service in Google Search results. And this is why Klarna is pushing the message here that its own price comparison product is “unbiased” in the results that it serves up. “You could spend the whole day comparing offers at conventional search engines or marketplaces, but you’ll always have doubts — have I really found the best product at the best price?,” Klarna cofounder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said in a press release. “Klarna’s new search and compare tool does the hard work for consumers and compares thousands of websites in real time to ensure they have all the information they need to make informed and confident purchase decisions.”

TuSimple co-founders clapback, consolidation continues and Waymo reaches two milestones • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in autonomous vehicles, The Station, Transportation, TuSimpleNo Comments

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive the full edition of the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. This is a shorter version of The Station newsletter that is emailed to subscribers. Want all the deals, news roundups and commentary? Subscribe for free. Welcome back to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B. This coming week I will be heading to Los Angeles to check out the LA Auto Show as well as a few EV and AV related events. Maybe I’ll see some of you there! Let’s get right to it. Got a news tip or inside information about a topic we covered? I’d love to hear from you. You can reach at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, opinions or tips. Or you can drop us a note at tips@techcrunch.com. If you prefer to remain anonymous, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and various encrypted messaging apps. Micromobbin’ Taur, a scooter company we wrote about in February, has launched its virtual showroom, a very cool interactive website that allows prospective scooter buyers to virtually test out different aspects of the scooter, from how to set up the foot platforms and activate the throttle to how to turn on the lights and charge the battery. I recently got the opportunity to try out one of Taur’s front-facing scooters, and I’ll admit it’s a very cool ride. The scooter doesn’t have a traditional board for your feet to balance on, but rather has a foot deck that lets riders face forward while riding. I found that this gave me greater visibility of my peripherals — having my left foot in front of my right on a traditional kick scooter meant I could see to my right quite well, but had less range of motion to look over my left shoulder. Whereas, facing forward on a Taur scooter meant I had equal range of motion to look over each shoulder. Perhaps the most interesting part of the ride was that it didn’t even feel like I was riding a scooter. It almost felt like I was riding a moped or a bike (maybe something to do with being front facing?) I kept mistakenly calling it “a great bike” — a term co-founder Carson Brown and head of marketing Ed Turner said they were also hearing from others. It might be more accurate to say that the movement of riding Taur’s scooter was similar to the movement of skiing, where you turn by pushing your weight off each foot, rather than by angling the handlebars. This gave me a better feeling of control and a sense that I could do some serious shredding on this thing. The fat tires certainly made for a bouncy experience. I rode the scooter over uneven roads in a parking lot in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and once I got used to the jostling, I felt safe enough to brave the meanest of potholes. Taur is focusing on launching in Los Angeles this year and will be running pop ups there over the next few months. The startup has almost 1,000 units to ship to LA this year to fulfill pre-orders and general sales. In other news … Amazon and other retailers are facing criticism for selling devices that allow e-bikes to be upgraded to illegal speeds for as little as $100. Bird is apparently launching in Qatar, which is weird because the company recently said it was exiting several dozen cities around the world, including in the Middle East. Honda is developing and testing a range of micromobility vehicles equipped with “cooperative intelligence,” a technology that combines cameras, voice recognition, AI and standard controls to enable more “human-like” cooperation between people and the vehicles. The vehicles would be able to generate a 3D map of their surroundings in real time. Revel is taking its e-mopeds out of Washington D.C. The company said it wanted to focus its attention on growing out its electric ridehail and EV charging businesses. You’re reading an abbreviated version of Micromobbin’. Subscribe for free to the newsletter and you’ll get a lot more. Deal of the week The wave of consolidation that has affected the autonomous vehicle industry has extended to lidar companies as well. For example, take this week’s merger of Ouster and Velodyne — two lidar companies that separately went public via special purpose acquisition companies. Under this all-stock transaction, both Ouster and Velodyne will maintain a 50% stake in the new company. Why are lidar companies sucked up into this wave of consolidation? Too many lidar companies are competing for a sliver of business from OEMs. (That whole supply-demand problem). Scaling up is also an expensive endeavor. Velodyne and Ouster have each snapped up lidar companies prior to this merger. Velodyne acquired in 2022 Bluecity.ai, and last year, Ouster bought lidar startup Sense Photonics. What lidar company is next? Other deals that got my attention this week … Acerta Analytics, an advanced analytics company that helps automakers and suppliers improve quality in manufacturing processes and support early defect detection, raised $10.4 million CAD. The Series B round was led by BDC Capital’s Industrial Innovation and Thrive Venture Funds with participation from existing investors OMERS Ventures and StandUp Ventures. Elon Musk nearly $4 billion worth of Tesla shares. Foxconn increased its investment in EV startup Lordstown Motors by buying $170 million in common stock and newly created preferred shares. Once the deal is complete, Foxconn will hold all of Lordstown’s outstanding preferred stock and 18.3% of its common stock on a pro forma basis. Foxconn will also have the right to two board seats. Kyte, the rental car delivery startup founded in 2019, raised $60 million in Series B round led by InterAlpen Partners, whose founder, Stephen George is joining Kyte’s Board. Other new investors include Valor Equity Partners, Anthemis, Citi Ventures, and Hearst

India lifts download ban on VLC • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Apps, india, Media & Entertainment, Videolan, VLCNo Comments

India has lifted the download ban on VLC media player, more than a month after the popular software’s developer filed a legal notice seeking explanation from the nation’s IT and Telecom ministries. The Ministry of Electronics and IT has removed its ban on the website of VLC media player, New Delhi-based advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation, which provided legal support to VideoLAN, said on Monday. VideoLAN confirmed the order. Indian telecom operators began blocking VideoLAN’s official website, where it lists links to downloading VLC, in February of this year, VideoLAN president and lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf told ZebethMedia in an earlier interview. India is one of the largest markets for VLC. The vast majority of people rely on VLC’s official website to download the popular application. “Most major ISPs [internet service providers] are banning the site, with diverse techniques,” Kempf said of the blocking in India. In light of the blocking, the site immediately observed a drop of 80% in traffic from the South Asian market, he told ZebethMedia. Last month, VideoLAN and Internet Freedom Foundation used legal means to get answers and redressal surrounding the ban. India’s IT ministry never made public the order of the ban, yet all telecom operators in the country complied with it. In its legal notice last month, VideoLAN sought a copy of the blocking order. Indian telecom operators never disclosed why they were blocking the VideoLan website, but some speculated that it could be because of a misinterpretation of a security warning from earlier this year. Security firm Symantec reported in April this year that the hacker group Cicada, which has ties with the Chinese government, was exploiting VLC Media Player as well as several other popular applications to gain remote access to the victim’s computers. Kempf said he was never contacted by any government agency. VLC, downloaded over 3.5 billion times worldwide, is a local media player that doesn’t require internet access or connection to any particular service online for the vast majority of its features. A block on its website didn’t considerably impact the existing install base of VLC. But by blocking the website, India was pushing its citizens to “shady websites that are running hacked version of VLC. So they are endangering their own citizens with this ban,” Kempf added.

Real-time data startup Quix raises a $12.9M Series A round led by MMC Ventures • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in big data, Enterprise, StartupsNo Comments

The complexity of streaming data technologies – not just streaming video but any kind of streaming data – has created a headache around dealing with that high speed data processing. Accordingly, companies like Spark, Flink have spring up to address this ksqlDB. Many are either either java-based solutions or SQL-based analytics solutions. However, UK startup Quix says it is a platform for developing event-driven applications with Python, which can have uses in, say, physics-based data modelling and anomaly detection in machine learning. It’s now raised a £11m / $12.9m Series A funding round led by London-based VC MMC Ventures, with participation from existing investors Project A Ventures (out of Berlin) and Passion Capital (London). The Quix founders are familiar with real-time decision-making, having worked in Formula 1, where success is based on milliseconds. In fact one of its customers is McLaren, as well as mobility startup Voi, and the National Health Service (UK), among others. In a statement, Mike Rosam, Co-Founder at Quix, said: “Many companies are struggling to combine raw technologies like Kafka into real-time data capabilities… This new capital will fuel our mission to simplify event-driven data engineering so that more companies can build modern data-intensive apps.” Oliver Richards, Partner at MMC Ventures, added: “We have been doing an increased amount of research in the data infrastructure space, it is clear that there is a growing demand for real-time streaming data, both across consumer and B2B use cases.”

GoFreight raises $28M to become the “Shopify of freight forwarding” • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Asia, Freight Forwarding, GoFreight, logistics, Startups, taiwanNo Comments

Unicorn Flexport is revolutionizing the world of logistics, serving as a freight forwarder with software that enables customers to manage their shipments. But there are still thousands of smaller freight forwarders, many running on outdated ERP software or spreadsheets. A startup called GoFreight wants to help them compete by providing the “Shopify of freight forwarding,” with backend software that makes their operations run more smoothly, and a frontend that lets them set up a storefront and provide quotes in a few minutes. The Los Angeles and Taipei-based startup has raised $23 million in Series A funding, co-led by Flex Capital and Headline. The round included participation from LFX Venture Partners, Palm Drive Capital and returning investors Mucker Capital, Cornerstone Ventures and Red Building Capital. GoFreight, which currently has about 1,000 customers, helps manage transportation of goods through ocean, air and land routes. It also lets them set up online storefronts with a few clicks. Potential customers can connect to freight forwarders by sending them an inquiry through storefront and getting a quotation within a few minutes, instead of the 24 to 48 hours usually necessary. Once a freight forwarding job is underway, shipments can be tracked with an EDI-integrated, real-time tool, so freight forwarders and customers know exactly where their shipment containers are. Tracking software also integrates with accounting tools on GoFreight’s platform, so users know how the performance of shipments is impacting their earnings. Co-founder and CEO Trenton Chen earned his Masters and PhD in the United States before returning to Taiwan to join TSMC. At that time, AppWorks and other startup programs were getting a lot of attention, and Chen decided he wanted to become an entrepreneur. He left TSMC (“it was a tough decision, because no one agreed with that,” he told ZebethMedia), and gave himself six months to find a viable idea. During that time, one of his co-founders was living in Los Angeles, working as an importer for a family business. “When I was in the States, I knew a lot of people in this industry as well. So many of our good friends asked us to go there and see how bad the software is. So in the last month of my six month period, I decided to give it an opportunity, bought a ticket for three months to go to LA and spend time with the first 10 freight forwarders, learning how they do business with software. We founded GoFreight after the first week we were there,” Chen said. Even though Chen says the global freight forwarding market is worth about $280 billion dollars, almost all the software it runs on is outdated. GoFreight’s goal is to empower traditional freight forwarders to stay competitive with the same quality of technology that Flexport has. “A freight forwarding business is about how to ship cargo from point A to point B. Software can really help, but that’s not their main business. The service itself is the main business and software cannot help minimize the shipping costs or get it there faster. But it can certainly help provide additional valuable information to customers, importers and exporters,” Chen said, adding, “We try to empower incumbents to compete with Flexport. That’s an approach to make this entire industry better and faster.” Chen says GoFreight differentiates from other freight forwarding software startups because most of them are trying to create new ERP system, or integrate with existing ones. This is challenging to do because many freight forwarders use ERP systems that are out of date, and it’s a fragmented market. Some don’t even use ERP systems; instead, they work off of spreadsheets or pen-and-paper systems. On the backend, GoFreight’s software has sales, operating and accounting tools, so when customers have an inquiry, freight forwarders can enter it into their system and then come back with a quotation. Once a job is confirmed, GoFreight manages bookings, real-time shipments and any necessary electronic filings. They can also generate and send invoices through GoFreight. “Very importantly, we’re trying to become the Shopify of the space, so in one-click they can open an online store, and their importers can use the online web portal to send an inquiry and it just pops up in the system, automatically with pricing and they can book their tickets online,” said Chen. “So the front end application is so important and we provide visibility solutions as well.” A major challenge that GoFreight wants to solve is the process of generating quotes, which can take a couple days since freight forwarding orders are complex. For example, if a customer wants to ship three containers from Shanghai to Los Angeles, freight forwarders need to check with overseas agents who are also freight forwarders. They also need to arrange trucking and warehouses. Another thing to consider is spot rates versus contract rates, since spot rates can be much lower. Most of this work is done through emails, phone calls and text messages, but a centralized customer-facing app means freight forwarders can complete the entire process, including checking with overseas agents, through GoFreight’s integrations, which Chen says reduces the process from two days to about 10 or 20 seconds. GoFreight is currently working with partners to build a network that connects customers with freight forwarders, and freight forwarders with carriers. GoFreight also provides a digital payment solution, since most payments were done by paper checks. This means freight forwarders can issue a link to customers, and once they click on that they are taken to GoFreight’s website, where they can decide what invoices to pay with credit cards or bank accounts. Then that information goes back into GoFreight’s ERP system. Analytics provided by GoFreight can help freight forwarders make more money, Chen said. For example, if they book a 40-foot container, GoFreight will record how much they paid for it and how much customers were charged. The system analyzes performance for top customers and overseas agents, uncovering hidden fees so freight forwarders have a better understanding of the real cost

The dilemma of Chinese startups going global • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Government & Policy, Startups, VentureNo Comments

One day in 2020, I published an article about a Chinese hardware maker which would have otherwise been a typical funding story. Instead, I got a complaint from its PR asking me to remove all mentions of “China” from the piece. The startup wanted to be called “American” on the basis of its having a small office in California. I declined, insisting on our duty to uncover relevant facts for readers. I never heard from the company again. That turned out to be just the beginning of a trend in my interaction with Chinese startups that are expanding abroad. “We don’t want to be seen as Chinese,” many of them tell me. My attitude has over time gone from disappointment at companies’ lack of respect for journalistic independence to a growing concern that my portrayal of them might unfairly prejudice their growth. By putting the Chinese label on them, these firms might lose business partners, get stricter oversight by app stores, and receive more scrutiny from local regulators. What used to be a no-brainer geographic categorization of a company — “it is Chinese/based in China” — has become politically charged. Five years ago, a Chinese firm would be boasting its “successful entry into Europe” as a Chinese firm. These days, with rising tensions between China and the West, many globalizing Chinese companies choose to bury their origin. They worry that their links to home — however it is defined — can be viewed as a national security threat to the foreign market they serve. “We are going from longing China to longing Chinese, like Eric Yuan.” As startups build increasingly distributed teams, it’s also become harder to put a geographic pin on them. The world’s largest crypto exchange Binance, which started out in China, famously doesn’t have a headquarters. “If you look at companies such as Tiktok, Binance, Grab…these startups all started from day one with a global market in mind and built with teams located in multiple jurisdictions. It is really difficult to label them as from a certain country” said Ron Cao, who’s an early investor in Pinduoduo and founder of Sky9 Capital, an early-stage VC with a presence in China, Singapore, and the U.S. But Chinese startups aren’t just concealing their origin. Many of them are in effect moving legally and operationally to distance themselves from their homeland to reassure foreign authorities that they aren’t beholden to Beijing. The upside of decoupling is companies end up investing more in localization, which is always conducive to overseas expansion. But in the process, they also risk losing some of the advantages of being Chinese. The journey of becoming less “Chinese” is long and complicated, and the extent to which companies choose to reduce their ties to home is playing out differently across sectors and the stage of their business. But there’s one overarching sentiment shared by the dozen entrepreneurs I spoke to: They have never felt more confident about competing with international rivals, thanks to the talent and knowledge they have accumulated at home. But they are also increasingly daunted by — and weary of the geopolitical uncertainty they face in the process. Decoupling from home U.S.-China relations sharply deteriorated under former President Trump’s reign from 2017 to 2021, and President Biden seems to be staying the course, taking a firm stance on China with a sweeping chip ban. Having seen how U.S. sanctions have kneecapped Huawei’s supply chains and the spate of regulatory scrutiny on TikTok in the West, startups fear that they might be the next to get caught between the two superpowers. Companies play down their Chinese association as a result. In the past, startups might get a pass by simply claiming they are Singapore or San Francisco-based without actually having a meaningful operation in those places. Shein, for example, used to bill itself as being “founded in L.A.” when in reality it started out in Nanjing and Guangzhou as a typical Chinese e-commerce exporter leveraging the country’s robust supply chains. But scrutiny by foreign politicians and the press are driving Chinese firms to ramp up their overseas footprint, especially when they reach a critical size. Recently, Shein announced plans to open major warehouses in North America. The company has moved most of its assets to Singapore and made the island nation — which is widely regarded as politically neutral — its headquarters. Sky Xu, the founder and CEO of Shein, is also reportedly seeking Singaporean citizenship. Several entrepreneurs told me that top VC firms in China now provide passport shopping as part of their post-investment service for founders targeting overseas markets in response to a new rule on offshore IPOs: last December, China’s securities authority proposed that a company, regardless of where it’s incorporated, must go through a filing process with the Chinese government if its main management mostly consists of Chinese nationals or executives who live in China, and whose main business operation is in China. “If you look at companies such as Tiktok, Binance, Grab…these startups all started from day one with a global market in mind and built with teams located in multiple jurisdictions. It is really difficult to label them as from a certain country.” Getting the overseas legal setup is just the first step. The greater challenge lies in winning the trust of local regulators and customers. The founder of a productivity app that is targeting the U.S. market told me that “everything we use at work is non-Chinese,” so all of its data, internally or those of its end users, are kept offshore. Rather than ByteDance’s Lark and Alibaba’s Dingtalk, the startup uses Notion and Slack for internal communication, AWS for data hosting, and Stripe for payments. The company was founded in Shenzhen but is in the process of setting up a Singaporean company to be its holding entity. For enterprise software providers, the need to localize is even more pressing. While consumer app developers might gain traction without having to leave their China office, as they can

Citi backs Indian SaaS startup Lentra as it plans to expand internationally • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in citi ventures, Fintech, india, SaaS, StartupsNo Comments

India initially made its name in the tech world years ago when it staked out reputation as a key hub for business process outsourcing. Now that legacy has taken a very different turn in fintech with outsourcing of a very different kind, with the emergence of embedded finance technology. In the latest development, Lentra, an Indian embedded AI-based finance startup, has raised $60 million — a Series B that values the startup at “over $400 million,” D Venkatesh, the founder and CEO of the startup, told ZebethMedia in an interview. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Susquehanna International Group (SIG) led the round with strategic participation also from Citi Ventures, a subsidiary of the New York-based investment banking giant Citigroup. This is Citi Ventures’ first investment in a fintech out of India, and that and this round overall underscores how far the fintech and embedded finance ecosystem have come along in recent years. Lentra, which is profitable, has been growing at a very fast clip. In 2019, its first year of operations, it registered $1 million from its “annual consumption rate” — this term relates to the amount of revenue Lentra makes based on usage of its APIs. As of this year, that figure is up to $10 million, and it is projected to hit $100 million in 2024. The Mumbai-based startup works with commercial banks to power their digital loan services. HDFC Bank, Federal Bank, Standard Chartered and IDFC First Bank are some of its key customers. Overall, Lentra has more than 50 clients and has processed over 13 billion transactions and $21 billion worth of loans since its launch. Venkatesh said the startup achieved all this growth without hiring a single sales executive until April this year. The company’s mission is not unlike that of a number of other fintechs that have thrown their hats into the ring to work with — rather than completely upend and disrupt — legacy financial services providers, which have found themselves unable to keep up with innovation from faster moving, tech based competitors. “We want to help and empower the banks, who are our clients, to lend better, lend completely on a digital platform and improve on all parameters,” said Venkatesh. Those parameters are the same for banks the world over. Yes, banks want to lend more, and to be more accessible to more potential borrowers — hence moving to digital platforms to help them scale and compete better against digital-first offerings. But banks have had their feet burned many a time already: they don’t want to take on a load of bad debt in the process of scaling, so they need better tech to improve how they vet borrowers, and also to have a better grip on forecasting what they might expect to get in returns (and losses) as a result. The four-year-old fintech helps them do this through a variety of loan tools. Lentra Lending Cloud, which gives ready-to-use third-party API connectors to various data sources, as well as a Loan Management System (LMS) and a no-code Business rules engine (BREx) with modules for clients to use out-of-the-box. The startup also has a platform called GoNoGo in its catalog that helps banks ascertain whether a loan should be given to a customer once they get their application. Venkatesh said that in India, 90% of lending frauds occur by way of ID proof thefts, where bad actors impersonate someone with a better credit record to get a loan quickly. Lentra uses AI to triangulate data to identify potential fraud attempts. “If you solve ID theft fraud, you minimize the approach or the stance that the bank will have towards a non-performing asset or bad loan,” the founder said. He claimed while banks had only been able to whittle down the loan process — applying, processing and approving or denying applications — to between six and seven days, Lentra’s technology has reduced that turnaround to a few seconds. Even though a number of startups are trying to ease lending for banks, interestingly Lentra sees Salesforce as one of its biggest competitors when it comes to loan origination. “Our number one target is anyone who’s using Salesforce for loan origination. We go, latch on to them, and then we convert them,” Venkatesh said. Citi is not just interested in tapping more into India’s tech ecosystem, but to leverage it for its own global growth, too. “Lentra is our first fintech investment in India, and we are very excited about the team’s ability to develop and scale low-friction software solutions for lenders,” said Everett Leonidas, Director & APAC Lead Investor for Citi Ventures, in a statement. “As a global bank, we look forward to Lentra scaling their products and platform internationally.” Venkatesh told ZebethMedia that Lentra plans to utilize the funding to continue updating its platform, add new features and make it more robust and faster. The startup is also set to expand beyond India and establish its business outside the country, starting with three economies in Asia: Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Post the initial expansion, the startup plans to go beyond Asia and enter the U.S. Offices in the three new Asian countries will become operational starting as early as January, the founder said. Lentra already has its presence in Singapore since it acquired an AI startup TheDataTeam in June this year that had an office in the Lion City. Venkatesh said that the office in Singapore would become the vehicle for the startup to go into the ASEAN economies. Alongside improving the offering and expanding the business, Lentra has plans to acquire complementary businesses. The founder told ZebethMedia that its acquisition plans focus on three areas — robotic process automation, payment systems or solutions that are not regulated entities and teams working on statistical modeling or building heuristics model within statistics. “Lentra is empowering lenders to fuel the dreams of millions with effective financial inclusion and credit decisioning,” said Vishal Gupta, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “We were really impressed with

Space and get a free pass to ZebethMedia Disrupt 2023 • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 13, 2022Posted in Space, TC Sessions: Space 2022No Comments

It takes a lot of people to bring a tech conference to life, and we’re looking for incredible people to support our events team and help make TC Sessions: Space an amazing experience for our attendees. If you’re incredible (heck, you know you are) or interested in space technology, tech startups, event planning — or all of the above — apply to volunteer at TC Sessions: Space, which takes place on December 6 in Los Angeles, California. It’s a great way to see what it takes to produce a world-class conference. We expect more than 1,000 people at this event, and volunteers will handle a variety of tasks. At any given time, you might help with registration, wrangle speakers, direct attendees, scan tickets or help with general event setup. What’s in it for you? Fair question. If you’re selected, not only will you get a behind-the-scenes look at how events are produced, but you’ll also earn a free pass to attend ZebethMedia Disrupt 2023 in San Francisco on September 19–21. Plus, when you complete your volunteer shift, you can attend the interviews, presentations and breakout sessions. Just some of the speakers gracing our stage include: Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary, Air Force for Space Acquisitions and Integration Steve Jurczyk, co-founder and CEO, Quantum Space Carolyn Mercer, chief technologist, NASA Melanie Stricklan, co-founder and CEO, Slingshot Aerospace Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, NASA And, of course, be sure to check out the early-stage startups exhibiting their latest space tech on the show floor. Volunteer spots are limited. If you want to gain valuable event experience, take in all the galactic goodness and earn a free pass to ZebethMedia Disrupt 2023, apply to volunteer at TC Sessions: Space by November 22 to be considered!

How the FirstBuild product co-creation studio is changing how new things are made • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 13, 2022Posted in consumer electronics, EC Hardware, EC venture capital, firstbuild, Gadgets, HardwareNo Comments

Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and small-batch production for the win If you are running R&D at a large appliance manufacturer, you have a challenge. You typically make products in enormous quantities at pretty slim margins. In order to recoup your development, tooling and launch marketing costs, you need to create and sell a huge number of products. To ensure that that’s possible, you’d probably end up doing a bunch of user and market research to ascertain that you have the highest chance of success with your products. That makes sense, but the very business model itself means that it’s hard to do something truly risky, which in turn means that mainstream manufacturers rarely come up with anything genuinely innovative. If there was a mushroom fruiting appliance, would a lot more people regularly be growing mushrooms at home? There was only one way to find out: to build one and to try and sell it. That’s where FirstBuild comes in. If you’re a small appliances nerd, you may have seen its Opal nugget ice maker, the studio’s first big breakthrough; the Mella mushroom fruiting chamber; its indoor pizza oven; or the Arden indoor smoker. I spoke with André Zdanow, president at FirstBuild, to figure out where these ideas came from and how the studio is working to try to replicate those successes. “The most famous example is probably the Opal nugget ice maker. At first, it wasn’t actually a product at all — it was a technology being worked on in the refrigeration division of GE Appliances,” Zdanow said, explaining that it turned out to be a head-scratcher. They wanted to put the “nugget ice” into a fridge but weren’t able to figure out exactly what the market size would be for such a thing. “It’s actually really complicated to put the technology into a refrigerator. In other words, it was really a great idea that engineers had been toying around with for years, but in the context of the focus and economics of a multibillion-dollar company, it wasn’t something that they could focus on.” The Opal nugget ice maker was FirstBuild’s first commercial success. Image Credits: FirstBuild In a parallel universe, that tech would never have seen the light of day, but instead, the engineers came to FirstBuild and wondered what would happen if they put the tech in a separate appliance, rather than into a full-size refrigerator. “We see lots of people go to the store and buy this type of ice. They call it Sonic ice or hospital ice. We decided to develop a prototype and see if people want it to be just an ice maker,” Zdanow explained. That was the genesis of the FirstBuild lab’s success. “It started with crude concepts that looked like an ice maker but had nugget ice in it. From there, it progressed through industrial design and ultimately to a $2.7 million crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter back in 2015.”

The power pendulum is swinging back to employers, isn’t it? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 13, 2022Posted in Carta, EC Future of Work, Layoffs, meta, Startups, Twitter, VentureNo Comments

Tech layoffs may get worse before they get better — which means that the next few months will be full of companies trying to pivot their way to survival during this extended downturn. At least that’s what entrepreneur Nolan Church, who helped lead Carta’s 2020 layoffs as its chief people officer, thinks. He estimates that another 30,000 to 40,000 tech employees around the world will be laid off in Q1 2023 — a number that follows the more than 100,000 layoffs so far in 2022, according to layoffs.fyi data. Church chatted with me on Equity this past week about how his experience in the people operations world, at both Carta and DoorDash, has influenced his perspective on the best playbook for layoffs. He’s also building Continuum, a venture-backed startup that wants to match executive talent with startups for full-time and fractional opportunities. Unsurprisingly, his vision for a more flexible workforce fits well into the fact that tens of thousands of employees are now looking for work after just this week’s layoff stampede alone. My entire conversation with Church lives now wherever you find podcasts, so take a listen if you haven’t yet. Below, we extracted four key excerpts from the interview, from canned CEO statements to how he’s thinking about Twitter’s workforce reduction. The conversation Let’s talk about Twitter and ownership. We saw Jack Dorsey tweet a few days after the layoff that he ultimately owns responsibility for the fact that Twitter overhired. That delay in his response created a lot of attention, which made me wonder if the bar is getting higher when it comes to the way that employees expect CEOs to take responsibility for large-scale layoffs. Over the last 12 years, the pendulum between who has power between employees and employers has drastically swung toward employees. Now we’re in a moment where the pendulum is swinging back. If I predict where the next five to 10 years are going, the best talent is ultimately always going to be sought after. And I think employees now will continue to hold more power as they go forward. And they will remember how companies handle this moment. To your point around Jack, very candidly, I thought [his statement] was so weak. He waited to say anything; he sent out like two sentences. As somebody who has followed Jack and has been a fan of Jack for a very long time, I thought that this was the definition of weak leadership. And I would have expected more from him. And if I was an employee thinking about working for Jack in the future, I would think twice about it.