Blockchain ecosystem Topl has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round to help companies track and monetize social impact initiatives, the firm exclusively told TechCrunch.

The raise was co-led by Mercury, Republic Asia and Cryptology Asset Group. The company raised $5 million in a 2020 seed round, Chris Georgen, founder at Topl, shared with TechCrunch.

Its blockchain has been used by a range of entities looking to track products from conflict-free diamonds to ethically sourced coffee and fair-wage cocoa. 

“There are new markets, markets with not a lot of trust and markets that have hugely diverse actors,” Georgen said.

“So if I’m dealing with coffee supply chains I have individual small farmers and companies as large as Cargill. Or in the carbon credit space, there’s big and small projects; companies and individuals trying to off-set and they’re very diverse and nobody really knows what to do with each other,” Georgen noted. “There are new very untrustworthy markets and that’s where we think the blockchain is suited to come into. We think blockchain technology should be applied to new markets.”

Georgen said that over the next 12 months, the fresh capital will go towards three major aspects on Topl’s roadmap, in addition to hiring new talent.

The first is decentralizing its blockchain so that there’s community governance. The next two elements will consist of launching new blockchain-powered products: a traceability-as-a-service application, which will launch next month, and registry-as-a-service application for carbon credits, among other things, which will launch next year.

The company works with customers who utilize blockchain technology for things ranging from sustainability-focused startups launching carbon credits to move-to-earn applications where you can earn carbon credits by biking instead of driving a car to work, Georgen said. “We also have some Fortune 500 companies that are moving internal ESG reporting systems on the Topl blockchain so investors and the board can see how they achieve ESG milestones.”

“I think we’re still in the early days of blockchain adoption,” Georgen said. “As tech matures, the sign we’re looking for with blockchain adoption when it’s more silent and where things are powered by blockchain technology without it being front and center.”

By the end of the year, Topl expects to have about 40 to 50 projects on-chain.

“Through all these downturns, we still see adoption, building and enterprise projects continue and sometimes increase during these periods,” Georgen said. “From an adoption perspective, we saw no downturn in that…We don’t have bull markets and bear markets, we have bull markets and build markets.”

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/topl-blockchain-raises-15m-to-help-track-social-impact-initiatives/

Krafton, the brand behind some of the world’s most popular video games, says it has already deployed the $100 million it had committed to the Indian market two years ago in the South Asian nation and is gearing up to launch several new titles in the country.

The four-year-old South Korean firm, which went public last year, gained popularity with its shooter game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds — commonly called PUBG. The title, PUBG Mobile, amassed over 50 million monthly active users in India, becoming the most popular mobile game in the country, until it landed on the list of apps New Delhi ordered to block over national security concerns.

Unlike most other firms on the block list, Krafton has been able to relaunch a new title in India — called Battlegrounds Mobile India. The game, released in India in July last year, shares many similarities with PUBG Mobile, though the developer claims it has introduced many changes to address local concerns.

In November, Krafton brought PUBG: New State as its new game based on the same last-man-standing gameplay, also called battle royale amongst gamers, that is available on BGMI and PUBG Mobile. That new offering was renamed as New State Mobile in January — as a strategy to avoid getting into trouble for the issues raised against the PUBG title earlier.

In a wide-ranging interview with TechCrunch, Krafton’s India CEO Sean Hyunil Sohn said the New State Mobile has not grown as fast as BGMI and its retention has also not been that strong. He also said that BGMI complies with the local regulations in India, where the company employs about three dozen people, 70% of which manage its publishing operations.

The company also has more in the store for the country, including investments in local startups.

Krafton’s investments in India so far

• $22.5 million in Nodwin Gaming in March 2021
• $9 million in Loco in June 2021
• $48 million in Pratilipi in July 2021
• $6.5 million in Frnd in December 2021
• $5.4 million in Nautilus Mobile in Feb 2022
• $7 million in Kuku FM in March 2022
• Investment of an undisclosed amount in Lila Games in March 2022

Edited excerpts from the interview below.

How much has Krafton been able to spend out of its $100 million investment in India that was announced in 2020?

We did reach our target and have already spent $100 million from our original investment plan. We are working towards two–three deals that should hopefully be converted in August, pushing us towards roughly $140 million being invested in the country. There have been roughly eight investments in total in the last one or one-and-a-half years. We will keep investing in gaming, gaming-related and tech startups in the country. In 2022, we may invest another $100 million in total or more in the Indian market. Although we didn’t set up a fund separately for the Indian market, we are investing from our balance sheet. We have been a profitable company, especially following the IPO, and we have $2.5 billion …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/krafton-pubg-bgmi-battlegrounds-mobile-india-investments-startups-2022-target/

These tiny little guys are 3D printed glaucoma stents; a medical device that can be inserted into the eye to help treat glaucoma. You may recognize the base they are placed on: a penny. The

Boston Micro Fabrication — BMF among friends — is one of the biggest names in 3D-printing teeny-tiny things. The company just announced a Series C to continue its journey, as it announces it doubled its install base over the past year.

“Our business has scaled strongly, and we plan to use the new capital to further expand our capability,” stated John Kawola, CEO of BMF. “Our global reach has been appreciated and valued by our customers, and our systems are now being used all over the world to both prototype parts that previously could not be 3D-printed and drive end-use part production where conventional methods are difficult.”

The kind of 3D-printing processes BMF offers its customers are tailored to the small, high-precision markets. BMF’s machines use what the company calls Projection Micro Stereolithography (PµSL) tech, which uses light and photosensitive resins to create ultra-high-resolution parts — capable of details down to 2μm, and layer thicknesses of 5-20 μm.

It’s hard to describe in words how small parts like that are — hence the photo of the match and the tiny little gears at the top of this article. It boggles the mind, and it unlocks some pretty incredible use cases for 3D printing.

The company has seen some pretty extraordinary growth over the past year; it claims it doubled its install base, meaning that there are more than 200 customer locations around the world. BMF lists electronics, medical device, optical manufacturers, and advanced research labs as its biggest customer groups. It also expanded global operations, with facilities in Boston, Mass, USA, and Shenzhen, China, with additional locations in Chongqing, China, and Tokyo.

BMF today announced it closed a Series C round, totaling $43 million. The company was not willing to share terms or valuation of the round, which was led by Shenzhen Capital Group Co., Ltd. It will use the funding to advance product development, sales and marketing, and customer support as it continues to expand and serve its global customer base.

The company put together a video that shows what they do, which includes some pretty nifty 3D printer porn if that’s your thing like it is mine:

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/bmf-series-c/

Amazon has announced that it’s increasing the prices for its Prime subscription service in Europe, with fees rising by as much as 43% in some markets.

The announcement comes some six months after the ecommerce giant announced a similar price increase in the U.S., where the annual price jumped 17% from $119 to $139.

The latest Amazon Prime price hikes vary greatly between countries in Europe, with French customers paying an extra 43% on top of the current €49 they pay each year. In Germany, Amazon’s second biggest market after the U.S., subscribers will pay 30% more on the €69 they pay at present, while in the U.K. — Amazon’s third biggest market — an extra 20% will be added to the £75 fee.

The new prices will come into effect from September 15, 2022, and will impact all new members and renewals.

Amazon customers have started receiving emails confirming the price changes for their market, with U.K. customers receiving this message through the night:

Thank you for being a valued member of Amazon Prime. We are writing to you about an upcoming change to your membership.

As of 15 September 2022, the price of the monthly Prime membership will increase from £7.99 to £8.99, and the price of the annual Prime membership will increase from £79 to £95. The new price will apply to renewals starting 15 September 2022. You can view your next renewal date, manage, or cancel your membership by visiting your account.

We continue to focus on making Prime even more valuable for members. This is the first time we have changed the price of Prime in the UK since 2014. During this time, we have significantly increased the number of products available with unlimited, fast Prime delivery; added and expanded ultra-fast fresh grocery delivery; and added more high-quality digital entertainment, including TV, movies, music, games, and books. Prime Video in particular has increased the number of TV series and movies on offer, including Amazon Originals, as well as live sports coverage, such as the Premier League and Autumn Nations Series.

Perks and inflation

With its U.S. price increases earlier this year, Amazon said it was due to its expansion of Prime member benefits and an increase in costs, including wages and transportation. Amazon is painting a similar picture in Europe, where it says it has added a host of new perks to the Prime subscription since the last time it increased the prices, such as same-day grocery delivery. According to some reports, Amazon also pointed to “increased inflation and operating costs” as a driving force behind these increases.

This represents the first Prime price jump in eight years for U.K. users, while in Germany subscribers last saw their Prime fee change back in 2016.

With another six weeks until the new prices take effect, this could lead to a surge in annual signups for Prime as customers look to lock-in the current price for another 12 months.

Amazon also recently agreed to make it less confusing for customers in Europe to …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/amazon-hikes-prime-subscription-prices-in-europe-by-up-to-43/

The Fashion Kingdom (TFK), an Egyptian e-commerce marketplace for fashion, beauty and home accessories items, announced today that it has raised $2.6 million in seed funding led by CVentures, a corporate venture capital firm based in Egypt. A15, an early-stage VC in the MENA region that has backed the likes of Esaal, Paymob and Helios Investment Partners subsidiary, TPay, made a follow-on investment, according to TFK.

Fadi Antaki, co-founder and CEO of TFK, founded the company in January 2020 with Marianne Simaika and Karim Abd El Kader. They launched the e-commerce platform six months later. Antaki is also a general partner at A15. Antaki noticed a need for a platform that sold fashion products with fast deliveries, different payment methods, and a recommendation feature in Egypt. This opportunity made the chief executive tap into the knowledge he acquired as a kid born into a family with a long history in the apparel business to launch TFK.

“We established the company pre-COVID. And at the time, we saw a big gap or maybe a lack of focus on a place dedicated to selling fashion products, recommendations for what to wear, quick deliveries, and different payment methods. There wasn’t anyone focused on this, especially in fashion,” said Antaki.

TFK deals with a range of products–shoes, beauty products, personal care, accessories, home fashion, etc.–that cater to different demographics. The platform helps local and international brands grow their sales online through their curated marketplace that provides an omnichannel experience to customers: a place where shoppers can find all their fashion needs and exchange products when needed.

There are over 200 brands on the TFK platform, growing 10-15% month-over-month. It has more than 150,000 customers; every month, about 40% of its sales come from returning customers.

Not only does the platform enlist products of all these brands for customers’ viewing and buying pleasure, but it also provides ancillary services to them. TFK provides a virtual fitting room that helps brands get accustomed to their customers’ sizes and recommend outfits to customers for different occasions. Also, its “360-degree value proposition” for brands involves offering a one-stop-shop solution covering operations, co-marketing, and digital content creation services.

“Earlier this year, we found that one of the most important areas we thought we needed to focus on was the brand. There are good quality and price brands that don’t have the know-how to sell online. They need a lot of support in operation, fulfillment, warehousing, and digital production and photography,” the CEO said. “So besides selling their products, we help them with the different aspects that would then be able to sell well online, whether supporting the operation or the marketing side. And for us, it’s not just about reselling their products but also going in as their digital partners.”

The fashion e-commerce platform makes revenue via the traditional model where it counts a mark-up to products and a consignment model where it takes a commission. Supporting revenue streams come from additional services it provides to the brands, such as …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/the-fashion-kingdom-an-egyptian-fashion-e-commerce-startup-raises-2-6m-in-seed-funding/

Holey Grail Donuts started selling its hand-fried, made-to-order taro donuts on Sunday mornings out of a little red burger trailer in Kauai in 2018.

Four years and hundreds of long lines later, the truck is still there, but the company is taking on what co-founder Nile Dreiling calls “a stale $40 billion donut industry” by expanding its presence into brick-and-mortar locations in Los Angeles after raising $9 million in financing.

Dreiling, who was previously doing ecological engineering in Oregon, teamed up with his sister, Hana Dreiling, a private chef in Kauai, Hawaii, to start Holey Grail Donuts. They spent a lot of time reverse-engineering the donut to get the end product, which is a taro donut fried in organic, fair trade coconut oil versus palm and other oils “that often leave a waxy taste in your mouth,” Nile Dreiling told TechCrunch. He believes his company is the only one making its donuts in this sustainable way.

“We are taking something that everyone is familiar with, and reinventing it to meet our values, while essentially improving the tastes without the negative health and environmental consequences,” he said. “The process we incorporate yields a donut base that’s hot and crispy and not too sweet, which is the perfect vessel for essentially consistently rotating the garnishes. We currently have over 60 flavors that we’ve developed over the past couple of years.”

The fun part? The company uses a donut robot to make and fry the dough so one person isn’t constantly sitting in front of the fryer. That’s particularly helpful inside the food truck where there is limited space, and enables employees to serve a large capacity of customers quicker, Nile Dreiling said. Holey Grail Donuts also utilizes an app so people can order ahead of time.

Among the ever-rotating jukebox of flavors, popular toppings include L&L (lemon zest infused sugar, lime curd, finger lime caviar and begonia petals), North Shore (locally-grown turmeric, tangelo and freshly cracked black pepper) and Lydgate Farms (vanilla bean, single-origin cacao nibs and cherry).

As mentioned, the global donut industry is a $40 billion market, and Dreiling estimates the market is approaching $50 billion by 2025, with 30% of that growth attributed to North America’s love of the donut.

With that, changes are happening even at the highest levels in the industry with well-known brands like Dunkin’ and Krispy Kreme pivoting to supply and advertise new product ranges that meet the demands of people wanting to make healthier choices, he explained.

“What we’re doing at Holey Grail is approaching demand with a high level of integrity and a mission focused on creating healthier options with incredible taste,” Nile Dreiling added.

The company currently operates a food truck in Waikiki and recently opened a flagship store in Honolulu to complement a shop in Hanalei.

Nile Dreiling said he was not sharing specific details related to revenue or growth metrics at this time, but did say, “we have certainly …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/holey-grail-donuts-9m-los-angeles-retail-expansion/

The crypto hardware wallet industry, somewhat eclipsed as crypto exchanges gained in popularity, may be due for a gradual come-back. As some centralized crypto exchanges experienced difficulties in operations while crypto currencies plummeted in value and users clamoured to withdraw funds, this rise in instability may have boosted interest in the ‘cold wallet’ industry. According to a report, the global hardware wallet market reportedly reached a value of $252 million in 2021 and is expected to reach a value of $1.1 billion by 2027, or a CAGR of 27.2%. This would suggest it may outpace the reported 12.7% growth rate of crypto exchanges, with a predicted market revenue value of $675 million by 2028. Read into that what you will.

Suffice it to say that into this bear market is launching SF-based Hito, which is marketing itself as an ‘iPod for crypto’, Hito is size of a credit card, has a large multi-touch screen, and connects to devices wirelessly.

Hito may be pushing at an increasingly open door. Given two of the primary hardware wallets, Ledger and Trezor, have roughly 5 million users, there would appear to be plenty of room for growth, since that there are at least 295 million crypto holders who may decide to add hardware wallets to their portfolio.

Hito is priced at $149. This contrasts with – for example – the cheaper Ledger NANO S which comes in at around $65. Hito’s pitch for that extra cost is that transfers can be maid wirelessly using either Bluetooth or NFC, while updates and charging are also wireless. So I guess you are paying to remove the USB connector?

There are other features, however. These include a 2-inch multi-touch color screen which displays your crypto assets; support for over 600 digital assets, including Bitcoin, ETH, and ERC20 tokens; connections to other wallets such as WalletConnect, MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Argent, Gnosis Safe Multisig; a single System-on-a-Chip; support for multiple wallets and pin codes; and shielding from electromagnetic signal readers. 

If Hito is as simple to use as it claims to be, it may have a chance in the market, given current conditions. And it’s fair to say many hardware wallets require a lot more technical technical skills than the average person can muster, so any simplification is to be welcomed.

I asked founder Mike Kirillov, CEO and Founder of Hito why he thinks Hito has a shot in this current environment: “Previous hardware crypto wallets have been built for geeks and by geeks. They’re cumbersome, require technical skills, hard to interact with and always cause a feeling you’re about to do something wrong. Ultimately, they weren’t able to become a mainstream solution, meaning the funds of most crypto holders out there aren’t safe,” he said.

Kirillov claims his team spent three years building Hito in stealth mode as “a ubiquitous, easy-to-use device with great UX. It is stylish, intuitive, and ultimately protected hardware wallet that can that the mass audience can rely upon,” he claims.

Certainly the more mainstream Crypto …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/as-crypto-exchanges-struggle-in-a-bear-market-are-hardware-wallets-about-to-make-a-come-back/

Traumatized by an endless night of hellish flights, one writer found herself unable to enter airports again. To steel herself for future travel, she tested a digital headset alleged to soothe one’s brain. …read more

https://www.wsj.com/articles/headphones-for-travel-anxiety-11658347478?mod=rss_Technology

Best Buy is opening a new digital-first 5,000 square feet small store in Monroe, North Carolina on July 26. This store will have selected tech products like home theater and audio, computing, headphones, wearables, fitness, cell phones, cameras, smart home, and small appliances that shoppers can experience and purchase.

This is a departure from the company’s big box stores that are typical of 35,000-40,000 square feet in size. The company says while shoppers won’t be able to buy major appliances from this store, they can still place an order on the site, and pick them up from the Monroe store. What’s more, for regular-sized items, the company is placing pick-up lockers outside the store, so shoppers can grab online orders anytime.

Blue shirt employees and Geek Squad techs will staff the store for purchasing advice. Plus, shoppers can virtually contact experts through from its virtual store through voice calls, video calls, or chat.

Demos are a critical part of this format, and the firm said shoppers can try most of the products before buying them. Like Apple Stores, shoppers can purchase items from the show floor. Just scan a QR code next to the item, and Best Buy staff will bring the item from the backroom. Or if it’s a small item, like a charging cable, scan the QR code using the Best Buy app, and grab the item from the shelf.

Best Buy said last year it wanted to experiment with new store formats and this digital-first small store is a part of that project. The firm has experimented with small-format stores in the past with its mobile stores, but it closed them down in 2018. These stores, mainly located in shopping malls, were even smaller in size with an average footprint of less than 2,000 square feet.

Amazon has also been experimenting with brick-and-mortar stores by opening its first clothing store in May in Los Angeles. The company also introduced a new shopping cart earlier this month that allows customers to skip the checkout line.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/best-buy-is-testing-a-digital-first-smaller-retail-store/

CircleCI, the popular continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform, today announced a partnership with GitLab, the popular DevOps platform that also offers an integrated CI/CD service. That may seem like a bit of an odd match-up at first, but CircleCI argues that by providing support for GitLab SaaS customers, it can help those users manage software changes anywhere in the software ecosystem.

Specifically, this means developers can now trigger pipelines in CircleCI from GitLab forked merge requests, for example, and CircleCI will be able to provide performance and health metrics to its customers on GitLab SaaS, all while also benefitting from CircleCI’s permission models and existing toolchains.

“When we launched 11 years ago, the only flow that people really cared about was: a developer makes a change in code, they commit, they push. That was all that existed,” CircleCI CEO Jim Rose said. “And over the last 11 years, it’s just metastasized into all these other things.”

He acknowledged that for some users, simply using something like GitLab’s own end-to-end solution will work just fine for them. “That’s great for them,” he said. “I think in most situations, what we have found is that due to the complexity of the number of [version control systems] and due to the complexity of the number of deploy targets — most people we talk to are multi-cloud — you end up with a bit of a mishmash in the middle. And so we find our sweet spot is if you’re running multiple [version control systems] and multiple sources of change and you’re running multi-cloud, you may not benefit from attaching your build system to only one of those endpoints and then trying to stretch it out. Instead, what we try to do is go in as an agnostic broker and that allows you to make some of these different decisions individually.”

For CircleCI, it’s this focus on being the one service to manage code changes, something that becomes even more important as we’re moving to a world where an increasingly large part of a company’s infrastructure is managed by ‘[x] as code’ services, that allows it to occupy this neutral position where it can both partner and compete with the likes of GitLab, GitHub and Atlassian.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/26/circleci-partners-with-gitlab/