Author : zebethcontrol

XPeng to begin autonomous driving public road tests in Guangzhou • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in autonomous vehicles, robotaxi, Robotics & AI, TransportationNo Comments

XPeng received a permit Monday to begin testing its G9 electric SUV as an autonomous vehicle on public roads in Guangzhou. The company will begin testing a small fleet as soon as possible with a human safety operator in the driver’s seat. This is a milestone for XPeng as it aims to use its vehicles for robotaxi operations in the future. The G9 is the first mass-produced vehicle to qualify for such tests in China, Xpeng claims. The company is pursuing an approach of using EVs off the shelf for dual purposes — autonomous applications and individual sales — to lower the cost of production and make its vehicles more commercially viable. This is especially salient in the wake of Argo AI’s shutdown, with Ford and Volkswagen pulling their investments in the company in order to prioritize nearer term bets like in-house built advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). The news follows XPeng’s announcement at its annual 1024 Tech Day that the G9 passed a government-led autonomous driving closed field test, which made it eligible for approval of further testing. Most, if not all, current autonomous vehicle operators rely on existing vehicle models that have been retrofitted with hardware and software suites to drive autonomously. In the U.S., Waymo uses Jaguar I-Paces and Cruise uses Chevrolet Bolts. XPeng’s G9, which was unveiled in September as a passenger vehicle, will be tested for robotaxi applications without any hardware modifications — higher-end versions of the G9 will be built with Nvidia’s Drive Orin chips and rely on 31 sensors, including a front-view camera and dual lidar sensors. That means the vehicle that’s being tested for robotaxi operations is the same vehicle that will be sold to private passengers. The only difference will be in the software. By early next year, G9s purchased by individuals in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Shanghai will have the option of downloading XNGP software, which is XPeng’s “full scenario” ADAS that promises to automate highway driving, city driving and parking tasks. The G9s XPeng will use for autonomous vehicle testing will be given an upgrade that allows them to perform Level 4 autonomy. Level 4 autonomy means the vehicle can drive itself without requiring a human safety operator to take over as long as it’s in certain conditions, like a geofenced area or time of day. XPeng will integrate data from both private passenger vehicles and autonomous test vehicles to continue to operate both systems in parallel, a spokesperson said. The company aims to test its vehicle for robotaxi applications over the next two to three years as it develops its next generation vehicle, with the goal of launching that by 2025 as one of the options, according to Xinzhou Wu, XPeng’s VP of autonomous driving. “Hopefully the software will be in good shape by then so we can at least see a limited scenario similar to what Cruise is doing now,” Wu told ZebethMedia. Wu said that while the new vehicle will have a full sensor suite, it probably won’t come in the form of a purpose-built AV — XPeng for now is sticking with a strategy of using the same mass-produced vehicle for passenger vehicle sales as it does for robotaxi operations. XPeng also doesn’t intend to run its own robotaxi operation in the future. The company envisions itself as more of a provider of the software, and possibly the hardware, stack for other ride-hail focused companies.

Digital card and gifting platform Givingli nabs $10M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Apps, Commerce, funding, gifting, Givingli, StartupsNo Comments

Three years ago, Ben and Nicole Green were planning their wedding and decided to go digital with registries to save on money and materials. But when it came time to gift others, while they preferred going the digital route — as they did with their wedding — they found that digital gifting platforms on the web didn’t meet their criterion. “We noticed there was no platform we would actually want to use,” Nicole Green told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “In combination, I recognized there was a gap in the market for a more genuine and authentic way for people to connect and celebrate one another in the digital age.” So in 2019, Ben and Nicole co-founded Givingli, an online gifting service that lets users customize digital greetings and send gifts to anyone. The company today announced that it raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Seven Seven Six, the VC firm founded by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, with participation from Shopify co-founder and CEO Tobi Lütke. The proceeds bring the 13-person, Los Angeles–based company’s total raised to $13 million. “We’re doubling down on Givingli because they’ve continued to not just organically grow, but thrive — even during these uncertain times — by productizing kindness & connection,” Ohanian told ZebethMedia via email. “This is as much a social network as it is a gifting platform and it’s been valuable for all sides: artists who design the gifts, brands who are partners, and ultimately the gift givers and receivers who keep coming back and spreading the word.” Image Credits: Givingli Indeed, Nicole sees Givingli as more than your average digital gift marketplace. The service offers messaging features, including group chats with family and friends, who can react with tokens of appreciation to e-cards and e-gifts. Users get reminders for friends’ and families’ birthdays. And for cards, which can be shared via email, text or social media, customers can choose from designs contributed by independent artists and brand partners such as Starbucks, Nike and Target — and add their own photos or videos in addition to writing text. In 2020, Givingli launched a partnership with Snap that brought its gifting service inside of Snapchat via an in-app integration. The company’s current focus is a desktop app, launching soon in early access, which Nicole says will “bring even more features for power gifters.” (Givingli was previously iOS only.) “People are looking for more accessible and practical options to stay connected and celebrate a special relationship in their lives. They’re looking to share love and words of compassion from a distance,” Nicole said. “Givingli is focused on the heart and sentiment of gifting, while sparing our customers from losing time on travel, waste and stress.” Will platforms like Givingli ever replace physical gifting? That seems unlikely (see American Greetings). But there are signs that the demand for digital gifting solutions is growing. A June 2022 survey from Incisiv — sponsored by digital gifting vendor GiftNow, granted — found that 67% of consumers prefer instant digital gifts. Allied Market Research estimates that the market for digital gift cards alone was worth $258.34 billion in 2020. Givingli makes money by charging users a monthly subscription fee for access to the platform, plus additional fees for premium cards. Nicole wouldn’t comment on revenue but said that “millions” of people have used the service to date. “The pandemic has sped things up and we’ve been moving fast to keep up,” Nicole said. “We’re going to use this latest funding round to create more of that value for all members of our community — from loyal and daily users to our trusted brand and loyal partners, with desirable cards and gifts on the platform.”

TouchBistro bakes CAD$150M into restaurant management tech recipe • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Enterprise, Francisco Partners, restaurant management, TouchBistro, VentureNo Comments

TouchBistro, an iPad-based restaurant management platform, secured CAD$150 million, or $110 million, in growth financing from Francisco Partners to accelerate its growth, expand its product pipeline and make some strategic acquisitions. It’s been a while since we checked in with the Toronto-based company, which was founded by Alex Barrotti and Geordie Konrad back in 2010. We first profiled the company in 2014 when it raised $1.5 million in funding and was processing around $500 million in transactions from more than 1,000 merchant clients. Both Barrotti and Konrad no longer manage the day-to-day operations of the company, having brought in Samir Zabaneh in 2021 and naming him CEO and chairman. The global pandemic was tough on restaurants, especially those that did not have capabilities to take online orders or manage deliveries. In an email interview, Zabaneh said that much of the adoption of cloud-based technology came during the pandemic so that restaurants could improve the guest experience while also helping their operations as labor shortages and food cost increases have inundated the industry. “We feel this restaurant industry trend is here to stay and the adoption of technology will only continue to increase,” he told ZebethMedia. Indeed, the global restaurant management software market size is forecasted to reach $14.7 billion by 2030. To adapt to those changes, TouchBistro integrated both marketing and customer relationship management capabilities into its suite of tools within the past two years while also increasing its cloud offerings, Zabaneh said. TouchBistro itself was not immune to some of that. The Globe and Mail reported in 2021 that the company’s “growth rate fell from about 50% to roughly 10% in 2020. It lost about a tenth of its customers, and hundreds more asked for a break in fees. It laid off 131 employees and introduced features such as virtual gift cards and online takeout and delivery options to help restaurants stay afloat.” However, it seems the company fought back to now serve over 16,000 restaurant customers to help them increase profitability and efficiency, while improving overall customer experience. TouchBistro has deployed more than 64,000 of its terminals that provide automated online ordering, menu and delivery management, contactless payments, marketing and customer engagement tools. It is also processing over $13 billion in payments annually, The company also acquired TableUp in 2020, a move in which Zabaneh said “became the foundation for our guest engagement, loyalty and marketing tools.” The company also offered online ordering at no cost to its customers while they couldn’t offer in-person dining. “While we are proud of our leadership position in Canada, we also expanded our distribution throughout the United States, where we have built a substantial business,” he added. “We integrated with key partners to provide our customers with best-in-class and complementary solutions, all integrated together on a single platform.” In total, the company has raised around CAD$430 million to date. Zabaneh declined to reveal TouchBistro’s valuation. Meanwhile, seeing the amount of technology adoption by the restaurant industry, the company felt it was the right time to accelerate its growth, he added. In addition to that, the new funding will be deployed into technology development, introducing new value-added and other integrated tools and to complete more strategic acquisitions. “Raising the capital from Francisco Partners provides us with the capital we need to achieve our strategic objectives, while adding deep domain expertise in technology and payments that will be invaluable as we continue this journey,” Zabaneh said. “Our vision is to become one of the most complete end-to-end restaurant management platforms, deliver best in class customer experience and help our customers be successful.”

Evolito, with an axial-flux motor lighter than Tesla’s, starts ramping up its team • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Hardware, Startups, TransportationNo Comments

Last year YASA, a British electric motor startup with a revolutionary “axial-flux” motor, was acquired by Mercedes-Benz to develop ultra-high-performance electric motors for Mercedes’s AMG.EA electric-only platform. YASA’s axial-flux electric motors had previously garnered a reputation for efficiency, high power density, small size, and low weight. However, the team behind YASA did something quite clever. While Mercedes acquired that automotive rights, they passed on the rights to an aerospace version of the engine. That was taken up by a new entity, complete with YASA’s founders, called Evolito, to develop an electric motor it described as ultra-high-performance, low-weight and best for future EV aircraft. Evolito’s lead investors are Waypoint Capital and Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE). YASA’s ‘axial-flux’ motors makes them one-third the weight of other electric motors, more efficient, and with 3x higher power densities than even Tesla’s, according to the company. It’s now emerged that former YASA CEO Dr. Chris Harris will lead Evolito on its path to commercialize electric flight. Chris Harris, Evolito Harris joined YASA in 2012, scaling the company from 20 employees to more than 300, following 15 years’ leading other high-growth businesses in the UK, Europe and US. He stepped down from his CEO role at YASA in September 2022, but will remain a Non-Executive Director at the wholly-owned Mercedes-Benz subsidiary. A director of Evolito since the company’s spin-out and incorporation, he now becomes Evolito CEO effective immediately. Evolito acquired UK battery company Electroflight in July 2022, which means it can also offer aerospace OEM & eVTOL customers fully-electric powertrain solutions. In a statement, Harris said: “Electric flight requires ultra high-power density, super low-weight electric powertrains. Evolito provides best-in-class powertrain solutions for OEMs, leveraging next-generation axial-flux electric motor technology that’s already proven in automotive.”

Meet Crowd.dev, an open source user-led growth platform for fostering developer communities • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Community-led growth, crowd-dev, open source, Social, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Community-led growth (CLG) has emerged as a popular mechanism for driving business, as companies strive to foster an ecosystem of fervent users that draws in new customers organically, serves as a support network for millions, and bangs a company’s drum completely off its own volition. Businesses such as Stripe, Slack, Canva, Notion, and Figma have grown substantially off the back of their respective communities, which in turn has led to a slew of new technologies dedicated to helping such businesses harness their fanbase, unearth their biggest advocates, and keep that CLG flywheel spinning. Investors have taken note, too: in the past year alone we’ve seen companies such as Commsor raise a $50 million Series B; Common Room secure $52 million; Threado draw in a $3.1 million seed round; and, more recently, Talkbase raise $2 million to power user-led growth for any company. Now, another new company has entered the community-led growth fray with a slightly different approach to the existing players, one focused on developer communities and with open source at its core. Founded out of Berlin in 2021, Crowd.dev brings together data from myriad developer communities including GitHub, Discord, Slack, Twitter, DEV, and Hacker News, and serves up analytics and workflow automations on top of this aggregated data. For example, a developer tool company might want to understand its users better and build relationships both with them and their employers to hone their product and find a better product-market fit. This might involve gathering and viewing all direct and indirect feedback in a single interface, or using one of Crowd.dev’s premium tools such as Eagle Eye which leans on natural language processing (NLP) to identify community discussions ripe for engagement. Crowd.dev: Eagle Eye app Image Credits: Crowd.dev To help take things to the next level, Crowd.dev has just raised €2.2 million ($2.2 million) in a pre-seed round of funding led by Seedcamp and Lightbird, with participation from Possible Ventures, Angel Invest, and a handful of angel backers. On top of that, the German startup has open-sourced its core platform, a move that goes some way toward differentiating itself in an increasingly crowded space. But first, it’s worth considering why developer-focused firms might need a dedicated platform to steer their community-led growth efforts, given that the incumbents can already be used for any community of users — including developers. Verticals Crowd.dev CEO and cofounder Jonathan Reimer argues that the word “community” has a broad gamut of connotations, and could mean anything from from social media influencers to online learning groups. Ultimately, a “one-size-fits-all” approach doesn’t work — a company laser-focused on attracting developers will probably need different tools to a company seeking to attract creators or crypto fans. “There has been hype around community, but also disappointment regarding new tools made to make community-building easier,” Reimer explained to ZebethMedia. “I have tried [existing] tools at previous jobs and was never satisfied as they didn’t match my use-case. Similar to CRMs (customer relationship management software), we believe there will be a verticalization in the community software space. We’re the first going in the developer space.” This “verticalization” is important in terms of building a platform that people actually want to use. In the case of Crowd.dev, which is aiming to create a product that suggests actions that a user can take based on developer community data, specializing in this way allows it to better tailor its product and “build more reliable model,” as Reimer puts it, for example in terms of detecting feedback or evaluating sentiment. “Achieving this for all kinds of communities at the same time would be incredibly hard,” Reimer said. “Developer communities have astonishing similarities, and especially for open source communities, we have access to a ton of historical training data.” Crowd.dev analytics Image Credits: Crowd.dev The open source factor Open source communities have long played a fundamental role in driving adoption of software, which is partly why a growing number of companies choose to make their products available under an open source license. If developers are able to tinker with software themselves with minimal friction, contribute some code, and even add new features, they are more inclined to use the software in their places of work — and thus, they are more inclined to convince their employers that it’s worth paying for premium features on top of the open source product. And this is the main driving force behind Crowd.dev’s focus on open source development communities, and its reasons for open-sourcing its own platform. “We believe that an essential tool for developer-focused, open source companies — as community management is — should be open source itself,” Reimer said. Transitioning to an open source platform may hold other benefits, too. For example, enterprises seeking greater transparency and control over their data can host Crowd.dev on their own infrastructure, and then pay Crowd.dev to unlock access to unlimited users and integrations. Or companies can elect to pay for the hosted incarnation of Crowd.dev, which includes a basic free tier in addition to more advanced enterprise plans. In its short lifespan so far, Crowd.dev claims a fairly impressive roster of customers such as The Linux Foundation and Microsoft, a company that has increasingly embraced open source over the past eight years after a somewhat frosty attitude toward community-driven software in years previous. Reimer said that Microsoft uses Crowd.dev to operate Flatcar Linux, a Linux distribution for container workloads it now operates after acquiring developer Kinvolk back in in 2021. “They use Crowd.dev mainly to analyze community members’ engagement, spot relevant stargazers on GitHub, and create reports,” Reimer said. In truth, Microsoft and its big tech ilk won’t be typical users, due to the fact that most of Crowd.dev’s target customers will be smaller companies seeking growth. But still, it’s an indication of the mindshare that Crowd.dev has managed to secure so far, with “several hundred organizations” joining the company’s beta product since March this year. “Eighty percent of our users are companies between Seed and Series B that see community

Volocopter raises $182M to bring air taxi closer to certification • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in TransportationNo Comments

Volocopter, a German startup building electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles, has secured $182 million for the second signing of its Series E round. That’s on top of the $170 million Volocopter raised for the same round in March at a $1.87 billion post-money valuation. Volocopter is currently in full swing testing its two-seater VoloCity air taxi based on the requirements set by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). The fresh funds will flow into the company’s testing regime to help bring it closer to Special Condition for small category VTOL aircraft certification, and by extension, commercialization. Volocopter hopes to certify its aircraft by the second half of 2023 and launch initial revenue-generating rides by 2024, the company said. So far, the EASA has granted Volocopter Design Organisation Approval in 2019 and Production Organisation Approval in 2021 — two prerequisites for obtaining type certification for the VoloCity and launching commercially. The additional funds to Volocopter’s Series E will also help prep the urban air mobility ecosystem — including infrastructure, integration with other mobility forms and raising public awareness — so when the VoloCity is certified, Volocopter can begin offering rides immediately, according to a spokesperson. “First commercial operations will be a small number of Volocopters flying on specific routes (maybe one or two) with paying customers,” Helena Treeck, Volocopter’s head of PR, told ZebethMedia via email. “From there, the network of routes will continuously grow to offer more and more routes and flights on connections, where we can really add value (beyond the fantastic view) to our customers, like time savings and predictability of services.” The VoloCity took its first crewed public test flight out of Rome’s Fiumicino Airport earlier this month, where the startup also demoed its VoloIQ digital platform that Volocopter says supports everything from customer bookings to managing flight operations. That might make Rome Volocopter’s first choice for market launch, but also on the table are cities like Singapore, Paris and Neom, a smart city being built north of the Red Sea in the Tabuk Province of Saudi Arabia. Neom came in on this round as a lead investor, alongside GLy Capital Management of Hong Kong, a Geely-backed private equity firm that focuses on smart cars, electrification and intelligent cities. Neom and Volocopter formed a joint venture company last December to integrate the VoloCity air taxi and the VoloDrone, the startup’s heavy load-lifting electric drone, into Neon’s connected mobility systems. The city has already placed an order of 15 Volocopter aircraft to begin initial flight operations within the next one to two years. Volocopter has also formed a JV with Geely Holding to bring urban air mobility to China. The JV signed an agreement last year to purchase 150 Volocopter aircraft, and Geely is expected to assist with production.

Unreveal Effects for Content Previews

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in page-transition, PlaygroundTagged unreveal animationNo Comments

Some explorations of page transitions using covering elements and CSS clip-paths. From our sponsor: Sell access to courses, classes, and community with Squarespace. Some time ago, we explored a cover page transition that would hide some initial content and show another level of content, i.e. “unreveal” it. Today I’d love to share some more ideas for showing another page or preview, including one that uses CSS clip-path to achieve the effect. This is our initial view: When clicking on an item, we hide the current content by covering it with an expanding circle. Then uncover the preview by expanding a clip-path. This is the next view: And this is how it all looks in action: There are three different effects. Hope you enjoy them and find them useful! Thanks for checking by! UI Interactions & Animations Roundup #26

Cover Genius lands $70M infusion to grow its embedded insurance business • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Commerce, Dawn Capital, Fintech, insurtech, King River Capital, startupNo Comments

In 2014, Angus McDonald, the former head of publisher partnerships at Yahoo (full disclosure: ZebethMedia’s parent company), teamed up with ex-Googler Chris Bayley to found Cover Genius, an insurtech platform that prices and handles claims for virtually any line of insurance or warranty. After expanding the business to all 50 U.S. states and more than 60 countries, Cover Genius is gearing up for its next phase of growth, McDonald says, fueled by significant fresh capital. Cover Genius today announced that it raised $70 million in a Series D round led by Dawn Capital with participation from Atlas Merchant Capital, GSquared and King River Capital. Bringing the 420-person company’s total raised to $165 million, McDonald tells ZebethMedia that the proceeds will be put toward “assisting business growth” and further expanding Cover Genius’ insurance distribution services. “We’ve co-created a wide range of protection solutions for partners across many verticals including several of the world’s largest airlines and travel companies, retailers and logistics players, mobility, auto and gig economy companies, banks, fintechs and proptechs and business-to-business software and event ticketing companies,” McDonald said in an email interview. “Having been bootstrapped in our early days, only raising $1 million from inception in 2014 to our Series B in 2018, we’ve been blessed to have significant partners to ensure a healthy and sustainable cash flow, while also carrying frugality in our DNA.” McDonald and Bayley were motivated to launch Cover Genius after encountering insurance challenges with their previous joint venture, an international online travel agency. They found that traditional insurers were difficult to work with because every country the co-founders wanted to target required a separate insurance agreement with separate country leads. In creating Cover Genius, McDonald and Bayley worked to gain licensing and approvals for embedded insurance in most major countries around the world. Unlike typical insurance plans, embedded insurance like Cover Genius’ is bundled with the purchase of a product or service, offered in real time or at the point of sale. Ridesharing app Ola uses Cover Genius to offer insurance to both drivers and riders. Betterplace, an India-based human resources management software provider, taps Cover Genius’ technology to provide healthcare to contract workers. As for buy now, pay later provider Zip, Cover Genius built an AI-powered tool that classifies insurable items (e.g. a power drill) to recommend warranties to e-commerce customers. Among the products Cover Genius offers is Shake Shield, earthquake insurance backed by Swiss Re. Image Credits: Cover Genius “We strongly believed in the embedded insurance model, which is the ability to protect customers at the point of sale or sign-up, and that there would be a major value shift away from direct-to-consumer and traditional insurers toward digital platforms partnering with insurtechs,” McDonald continued. “Customers gain access to tailored protection at the right time, removing the inconvenient need to take a second step to purchase protection. Partners achieve bottom-line growth and stickier customers and insurers benefit from a data-rich distribution channel.” There’s no doubt that embedded insurance is the hot new thing in insurtech. Startups in the space, many founded within the past five years, raised close to $800 million in VC funding in 2021. And a recent report from Simon Torrance, an embedded finance and app strategies advisor, estimates that embedded insurance in property and casualty alone could account for over $700 billion in gross written premiums by 2030, or 25% of the total market worldwide. New York-based Cover Genius has competition in insurance vendors like Extend and Bolttech. But it also has a robust client base, covering 10.5 million customers across merchant partners such as Intuit, Kayak, Booking Holdings, Priceline, Turkish Airlines, SeatGeek, Amazon, eBay and Wayfair. While Cover Genius was initially impacted by the pandemic — the company primarily offered travel insurance in 2020, when the industry took a hit — McDonald notes that it’s been able to branch into a range of new market segments over the past two years. The branching out came through a combination of product launches and acquisitions. In July, Cover Genius made a strategic investment in India-based insurtech Ensuredit and bought Booking Protect, a ticket refund protection startup that brought SeatGeek onto the Cover Genius Platform. And in June, Cover Genius launched a “price-optimized” warranty offering for small- and medium-sized ecommerce businesses. One hurdle on the path to expansion that Cover Genius will have to overcome is the general sentiment around insurance — which isn’t positive. A 2019 survey by the Geneva Association, a global association of insurance companies, found that more than half of people (53%) have had a bad insurance experience. In a separate report from IBM, less than half of customers said that they trust the insurance industry. McDonald says that Cover Genius’ products speak for themselves. “By delivering peace of mind and a high-quality customer experience, boosted by product relevance and seamlessness from the time of sale to claims, our partners get to enter new territory with their customers,” he said. “In the past, they’ve either had experience working with traditional insurers, who negatively impact the customer experience and invariably cause churn and backlash against their own brand, or they’ve tried to engage with traditional insurers and have given up because all the ‘heavy lift’ otherwise sits with them.”

Rapyd Ventures backs Indian fintech-as-a-service startup Decentro • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Fintech, india, rapyd, Startups, Y CombinatorNo Comments

India’s Decentro, the Y Combinator-backed startup that helps companies enter the fintech market by deploying its APIs, has raised $4.7 million in a Series A round. The Bengaluru-based startup offers banking and payments APIs that allow development of fintech products such as banking, payment cards, neobanking and collections and payout services in a short period of time. Decentro has partnered with scores of industry players including Axis Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Yes Bank, Visa, RuPay, Quickwork, Equifax, Aadhaar and National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) to offer solutions for prepaid payment instruments, no-code workflows, conversational banking via WhatsApp and enable document verification and KYC process. “Whenever a fintech startup or a company wants to launch a new product in the market, it takes them a minimum of a few months to launch. And it purely has to do with the bank processes, the way the bank runs the process, as well as the tech of the bank. It’s not so great. That’s essentially the problem we are solving,” said Rohit Taneja, co-founder and CEO, Decentro, in an interview with ZebethMedia. Taneja, who has previously co-founded social payments platform Mypoolin, which was acquired by Cupertino-based financial services company Wibmo, and spent eight years in the fintech market, co-founded Decentro with Pratik Daukhane in 2020 — after personally facing all the problems he wants to address. He considers Cashfree and PineLabs-owned Setu among the key competitors for the startup but believes that it’s differentiating with “solution-driven enterprise customer base” and “superior” product experience. The startup has already amassed over 250 customers in commerce and fintech sectors. Some of these include Freo, Mobile Premier League, FamPay, CreditWise, Uni Cards and BharatX. Decentro, which has a headcount of over 40 people, offers products to let companies create virtual, business and escrow accounts, enable payments and provide lending. The available products comply with all the latest regulations in the country, the startup said. The Series A round of Decentro is led by Rapyd Ventures, the venture arm of the UK fintech-as-a-service giant, along with participation from Leonis VC and Uncorrelated Ventures. Indian angel investors including CRED founder Kunal Shah, Groww co-founder and CEO Lalit Keshre, Gupshup co-founder and CEO Beerud Sheth and former CBO of BharatPe Pratekk Agarwaal also participated in the funding round. Taneja told ZebethMedia that the startup aims to utilize the fresh funding to go deeper into its partnership with banks and enter categories including large enterprises. It also plans to acquire licenses and launch in Singapore to expand beyond India eventually. “Building their innovation layer in India first gives Decentro a great base to build scalable innovations that can be expanded as other emerging markets modernize their own infrastructure. We’re excited to support Decentro as they scale and expand,” said Joel Yarbrough, MD of Rapyd Ventures and Rapyd’s VP of Asia Pacific, in a prepared statement. Before the latest funding round, Decentro had raised a total of $1.7 million in seed and angel rounds. The seed round, which closed in October 2020, included investments from Y Combinator and FundersClub. Since then, the startup claims its valuation has increased by 3.3X and revenues have grown by more than 35X. Taneja, however, did not reveal any specifics about the valuation. Dcentro’s API transactional volumes have also been growing by 50 to 70% every quarter since early 2021, with an average of 70 million annualized API transactions recorded over the last 12 months, it said. The startup is also profitable, the co-founder said.

Indonesia weighs blockchain-powered carbon trading scheme • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Climate, CryptoNo Comments

Indonesia wants to direct the blockchain craze toward greener use. The Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) has signed a memorandum of understanding with Metaverse Green Exchange (MVGX), a Singaporean startup that specializes in digital exchange technology. The intended collaboration centers around IDX’s emission trading scheme that is slated to launch in 2025, and MVGX’s job is to help IDX build a carbon registry and exchange with blockchain as the infrastructure layer. Using blockchain in carbon trading solves what’s called the double-counting problem where two entities or an entity and a country lay claim to the same climate action, Bo Bai, executive chairman and co-founder of MVGX, tells ZebethMedia. Founded in 2018, MVGX is licensed by Singapore’s finance authority to provide securities and custodial services. Offering SaaS to commercialize carbon credits, the startup’s focus is on “emerging markets seeking to offer access to their emission reduction projects internationally.” “The infrastructure also provides an immutable record of the creation and ownership of the credit, as well as a tamper-proof record of the performance of the green project with which the carbon credit is associated, to date,” explains Bai. Indonesia has joined a raft of countries ramping up their environmental accountability with a financial mechanism. As of July, 46 countries are pricing emissions through carbon taxes or emissions trading schemes (ETS), according to the International Monetary Fund. “The Indonesian government has recognized the vital role that the financial services industry can play in strengthening the country’s sustainability commitments. IDX is currently preparing for the possibility of becoming a carbon exchange in Indonesia and started discussions with several parties to deepen our knowledge,” says Jeffrey Hendrik, director of business development at IDX, in a statement. Carbon trading isn’t a panacea for climate change. The mechanism incentivizes carbon emitters to be less polluting or they’d need to buy from those with excess carbon credits to offset their carbon footprint. The capital generated from the sales of carbon credits can then go towards financing conservation efforts, at least in theory. But one of the biggest criticisms of the mechanism is that offsetting allows entities to claim carbon neutrality without making a significant effort to reduce emissions in the first place. While blockchain is believed to help create a streamlined public record for carbon trading, it doesn’t address the incentive issues around offsetting. Nor does it ensure the quality of emission reductions from credit issuers or whether these claims hold up in the long term. Crypto’s reception in the carbon trading world isn’t particularly warm, either. Startups that work to tokenize carbon credits have soared in popularity in the past year as they promise to entice more investors into the world of carbon exchange. One of the buzziest projects is Toucan, which started out late last year by bridging credits issued by Verra, the carbon trading industry’s standard bearer, onto the blockchain and “retiring” the credits as tradable tokens. In May, Verra banned the conversion of retired credits into cryptocurrencies “on the basis that the act of retirement is widely understood to refer to the consumption of the credit’s environmental benefit.” The backlash of Toucan hasn’t stopped countries from embracing blockchain carbon trading. Aside from the potential partnership with Indonesia, MVGX has also worked with carbon trading initiatives in China, including the Guizhou Green Finance and Emissions Exchange, and is in advanced conversations with relevant authorities in Malaysia and Taiwan to collaborate on infrastructure projects, according to Bai.