French startup Upway has raised a $25 million Series A round led by Exor Seeds and Sequoia Capital. The company sells second-hand electric bikes that have been refurbished and are ready to roll.

In many ways, Upway reminds me of online marketplaces for cars. The startup provides a seamless experience for buyers who want to buy an electric bike but don’t want to pay the full price of a new electric bike.

Behind the scenes, Upway buys electric bikes from both consumers and companies. The team brings those bikes to its warehouse, checks them, repairs them in some cases and lists them on their website. Of course, Upway tries to generate a small margin on every sale.

In addition to Exor Seeds and Sequoia Capital, Origins is also participating in today’s round. Origins is the VC firm backed by many professional soccer players, such as Blaise Matuidi, Olivier Giroud, N’golog Kanté, as well as Antoine Dupont (a rugbyman).

Existing investor Global Founders Capital is investing once again in the startup. Henri Moissinac, the co-founder and CEO of micromobility startup Dott, is joining the round as well.

Right now, the startup operates in its home country France and Belgium. Bikes are shipped directly to customers from the same warehouse in Gennevilliers near Paris. But the company is already thinking about its next moves.

Upway will soon launch its marketplace in Germany, the Netherlands and the U.S. By the end of 2022, the company will have three different warehouses.

Sales of electric bikes have been growing rapidly in Europe. Manufacturers are benefiting from this boom, including some startups that have raised massive rounds, such as Cowboy and VanMoof . But they remain expensive goods and they also suffer from supply chain constraints.

Bikes (electric or not) will play an important role in the future of urban mobility in major European cities. That’s why it’s important to provide new ways to access bikes. Electric bikes more specifically can even replace many car rides outside of major hubs.

Some cities have invested heavily in subsidized bike-sharing services, such as Vélib’ in Paris. Some companies, like Dott, are buying thousands of electric bikes for their free-floating bike rental services.

Companies like Swapfiets and Dance are also important when it comes to democratizing electric bikes. These startups let you rent a bike for a flat monthly subscription fee. When you cancel your subscription, you hand out the bike.

Coming back to Upway, people who want to use an electric bike to go to work or ride to school may consider getting their own bike. In addition to new bikes, it’s important to provide different offerings.

Upway makes electric bikes more affordable. All bikes come with a one-year warranty and there’s no stock issue as the company only lists electric bikes that it can sell right way. Some customers can also take advantage of Alma to buy now and pay later, in multiple installments without any interest.

The …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/31/upway-lands-25-million-to-sell-more-refurbished-electric-bikes/

Many businesses looking to set up pan-African operations are often met with the challenge of establishing payment services that are appropriate for each country they go to. Most of the payment services merchants working in the continent have solutions that are limited to specific regions, meaning that businesses have to sign deals with multiple providers to cater for the unique preferences of their users in different countries. This is a gap that Talk360 is looking to bridge as it creates a new payment platform that will integrate all available payment options across Africa. This product, it says, will open up businesses to the largest pool of localized payment options in Africa.

Meanwhile, the startup is also looking to expand its international calling operations across Africa after closing a $4 million seed funding round, led by HAVAÍC. HAVAÍC was joined by a number of angel investors that include Gaston Aussems (ex-Mollie), Robert Kraal (ex-Adyen), Gabriel de Montessuss (President WorldPay International) and Marnix van der Ploeg (ex-Booking.com and EQT).

While saying that the calling business will continue to grow in Africa, Talk360 co-founder and managing director for Africa Dean Hiine told TechCrunch he anticipates great growth for its payment platform, which he says will also make it easy for international merchants to sell to users in Africa too. He added that the startup decided to build its own payment platform informed by the need to make payment and checkout easy for its users in Africa.

Currently, the startup works through integrations with older payment service providers, which are majorly limited by region-specificity. Hiine says his new platform will bring all the “scattered payment methods” across Africa on a common platform, which he believes will positively impact Talk360’s bottom line, and that of other merchants that will use its platform.

Talk360 enables people to make international calls through its app for a fee, and it is built in such a way that only the initiator needs the app and internet – a smartphone– to make calls.

“In our calling business we identified some unique problems around digital payment in Africa. The payment methods are scattered and payment processes are lengthy…And we could see that this problem had a serious impact on our bottom line in terms of conversion rate we were seeing in Africa…It is a problem we experienced and we are trying to solve for other merchants with a presence in the continent too by making the process fast and easy,” said Hiine.

“We are building the platform to actually increase our conversion rate by giving the user experience one single checkout, and to some level, offer predictive analysis– to tell the preferred methods of payment for that region and offer them as top options for the user,” said Hiine.

The Talk360 calling app has connected over 2 million users in 170 countries so far, and this number is set to grow as the startup begins ramping up its marketing …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/31/south-africas-talk360-raises-4m-to-build-single-payment-platform-for-africa/

It’s a tough day for special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, which had already fallen out of favor after roughly 18 months in the limelight.

Senator Elizabeth Warren is planning a bill that targets the SPAC industry, her office announced today. Called the “SPAC Accountability Act of 2022,” the bill would expand the legal liability of parties involved in SPAC transactions, close loopholes that SPACs have “long exploited to make overblown projections,” and lock in longer the investors sponsoring a deal.

Even if the bill never passes, the SEC is today concluding a 60-day public comment period on a number of its own proposed guidelines for SPACs, specifically around disclosures, marketing practices and third-party oversight.

As TechCrunch noted in a weekend look at the astonishing number of electric vehicle SPACs to flounder, assuming the SEC’s rules are approved, the barrier of entry to going public via a SPAC will rise to the same level as companies choosing the more traditional IPO listing process, including to hold liable banks associated with SPACs for misstatements related to the merger. (To protect itself, Goldman Sachs has already said it’s no longer working with most SPACs that it took public and pausing work with new SPAC issuance.)

It’s not as if either initiative will abruptly stop SPACs in their tracks. They’d already begun losing momentum last year, when the SEC warned in March 2021 that SPACs weren’t accounting correctly for investor incentives called warrants. Indeed, while 247 SPACs were closed in 2020, most of the SPACs raised last year (613!) came together in the first half of the year, before the SEC made it quite so plain that it planned to do more on the regulatory front.

Now those many blank-check companies need to find suitable targets in a market turned bearish, and the clock is ticking. Given that blank-check companies are typically expected to find and merge with a target company within 24 months of investors funding the SPAC, if those hundreds of companies can’t complete mergers with candidate companies within the first half of next year, they’ll either have to wind down (which can means millions of lost dollars for SPAC sponsors) or else seek out shareholder approval for extensions.

It’s even worse than it sounds. With the time between when a deal is announced to when the SEC has time to review it taking up to five months, according to SPACInsider founder Kristi Marvin, even SPACs that strike a deal tomorrow couldn’t ask their shareholders to vote on it until roughly November.

In fact, while lawmakers and regulators seem late to the party, they will undoubtedly be watching for unnatural acts as SPAC sponsors do everything in their power to cross the finish line.

Already, a number of SPAC sponsors has already begun to ask their shareholders for more time to get a deal done, some of them apparently hoping investors might warm again to the once-obscure financial vehicles. Magnum Opus, the SPAC that planned to take Forbes to take it public, …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/31/spacs-hit-a-wall/

It’s no secret that I’m a sucker for photography — I’ve been known to take a photo or two in my time — and I have a hell of a weak spot for electronics, to boot. In the upcoming Open Circuits from No Starch Press, authors Windell Oskay, co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, and Eric Schlaepfer, creator of the popular collection of vintage competing Twitter account Tube Time, talk about the creative beauty (and beautiful creativity) of electronics.

Part history book, part coffee-table photo book and part journey into the inner lives of the electronics, Open Circuits is a fascinating journey through the history of electronics. The authors explore the visual landscape of electronics, including tearing apart a bunch of the components to take a look at what’s inside, and adding a description of how it all works.

Electronics nerds will have seen resistor arrays — these little colorful blocks on printed circuit boards (PCBs), but even though I must have soldered hundreds, if not thousands, of these in my time, I never stopped to think what’s happening on the inside. I found myself enraptured with intrigue to further explore the components. The authors took some of them apart to show off the simple, understated, elegant beauty of the components. For a brief moment, I was reminded that art is everywhere, even inside the electronics that surround us.

LED filaments contain hundreds of little LEDs in microscopic strip lights. The phosphor is agitated into glowing, which gives the individual strands the look of “filaments”. Image Credits: Eric Schlaepfer and Windell H. Oskay.

I love how the authors explore the components visually (and they are beautiful), and take the time to explain why the components look the way they look. Take the humble LED filament light bulb, for example — I’ve never paused to think how they are made or why they look the way they look. Now, I’ll never be able to see them the same way again.

Cheramic caps are probably among the simplest components there are. I never paused to think that they might actually be pretty, too.Image Credits: Eric Schlaepfer and Windell H. Oskay.

Orange Ceramic Disc Capacitors are a dime a dozen — almost literally, if you order them in big enough quantities — …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/31/open-circuits/

Refraction AI delivery robot in front of 6th and Congress Chick-fil-A in Austin, Texas. Image Credits: Refraction AI

When Refraction AI was founded in 2019, its goal was to use robotics to bring down the cost of last-mile delivery. Over the past couple of years, the startup has worked directly with restaurants in its hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, to offer its bike-lane bound robots as a logistics layer for customers, rather than trying to be another DoorDash or UberEats.

A little less than a year ago, Refraction moved its commercial operations down to Austin, Texas, where it continued cultivating individual relationships with restaurants. Along the way, the company learned that while offering customers favorable delivery rates was still a priority, Refraction’s real unique selling point is its ability to deliver a higher quality and scalable service.

“You can maybe negotiate great prices with DoorDash, but you can’t make DoorDash give you the A1 quality drivers that do a really good job and are always on time and never make you wait and the food always shows up hot,” Refraction chief technology officer and co-founder Matthew Johnson-Roberson told TechCrunch. “Because you control very little of that, even if you’re a restaurant chain as powerful as Chick-fil-A.”

Chick-fil-A, the fast food restaurant chain specializing in chicken sandwiches with a side of god, said on Tuesday that it enlisted Refraction AI to deploy a fleet of the startup’s self-driving vehicles to two of its restaurants in downtown Austin — at 6th & Congress, where the companies held initial testing, and on Martin Luther King boulevard. The commercial pilot will begin in late June, Refraction said in a statement.

“I don’t speak for [Chick-fil-A], but I get a sense that these experimentations are around trying to fill some gaps that still exist in the current offerings out there on the market that aren’t delivering the level of service they were looking for,” said Johnson-Roberson.

Refraction wouldn’t say exactly how many vehicles it would be delivering for Chick-fil-A, but it’s “an order of 10,” according to Johnson-Roberson.

The deal with Chick-fil-A is part of a larger set of tests Refraction is running to understand how it could serve quick service restaurants by maximizing the profitability and effectiveness of robotic delivery, said Johnson-Roberson. Working with a large chain, rather than individual restaurants, could easily fill up the startup’s fleet capacity for all the robots it has now “and probably other robots we could potentially build in the near to mid-term.”

The company is currently in the process of developing similar partnerships with retail and grocery delivery clients, a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Refraction’s REV-1 robot is affectionately referred to as the “Goldilocks of robotic delivery” because it’s not too small to only operate on sidewalks and not too big to only operate on streets. The robot was built on a bicycle foundation and as such operates in the bike lane …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/31/chick-fil-a-taps-refraction-ai-for-autonomous-delivery-pilot/

Sydney Thomas, who was the first hire at Precursor Ventures, a seed and early-stage focused fund that backs first-time founders, is starting her own venture firm. The investor is going from principal at the firm she joined 6 years ago to the solo-partner behind a new, unnamed firm. The job move may feel like a leap in this environment — as institutionally backed investors warn that emerging fund managers will struggle to raise debut funds given LP freeze-ups — but Thomas doesn’t quite agree.

“I think it’s crazy to start a fund in any environment,” Thomas told TechCrunch. “I haven’t paid a lot of attention to a lot of the discussions because I learned recently that early-stage markets have zero correlation to the stock market more generally; and the over-indexing, or over-correction that is happening in the stock market is not actually reasonable for early-stage investors.”

Thomas declined to share what type of fund she’s raising — if it’s a 506(c) or a 506(b) — or what her average check size could look like. Her firm doesn’t yet have a website or a name, but she’ll spend the next few months heading into builder mode before opening up the inbox for investments.

While her new gig is clearly still very early stage, Thomas will focus on addressing a gap she noticed during her 6 years — and 250 companies’ worth of experience — at Precursor. She wants to build a fund that backs founders at the pre-seed stage and then doubles down on them in the seed stage.

“It sounds very normalized, but it actually isn’t,” she said. “A lot of other firms and multi-stage firms outsource the pre-seed bucket to a Scout program, and so the partners that actually have the funds aren’t as intricately involved in a founder’s everyday.” This reality means that many of the startups that may turn to a multi-stage firm for their first checks will get lost in the sea as senior partners don’t really connect with them for follow-on funding. The investor thinks that founders are looking for a high-conviction, pre-seed partner who is interested in leading the next deal. “And given what I’ve seen in the landscape…that is novel,” she added.

As for if Thomas’ firm is competitive with her former employer, it’s too soon to tell. A lot of the specifics are still being figured out, but, similar to Precursor, she is focusing on first-check funding and early-stage entrepreneurs. The future firm could clearly differ by picking …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/31/precursor-ventures-sydney-thomas-new-firm/

Despite Washington’s recent attempts to expand cybersecurity rules and disrupt hacking gangs, ransomware continues to proliferate and executives report unease about their companies’ ability to ward off the threat. …read more

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cyber-defense-confidence-ebbs-as-ransomware-attacks-multiply-11653989400?mod=rss_Technology

While going to great lengths to promote itself as an environmentally conscious tech firm, Apple joined several industry associations that are “fighting efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” according to a new report from the Tech Transparency Project.

As recently as 2020, the company was an active member of several “business groups that seek to thwart action on global warming,” per to the report, which cites Apple’s memberships with Business Roundtable, BusinessEurope and the Texas Association of Business, among other associations with soot on their hands, so to speak. Apple did not respond to a request for comment on the report.

Business Roundtable was among the many corporate-backed groups to oppose the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget resolution last year, which featured a $150 billion plan to boost the development of electric cars and generate more renewable energy. Predictably, the trade group—which also counts Alphabet, Walt Disney and Salesforce as members—fought the legislation over corporate tax hikes.

Another group supported by Apple as recently as 2020, the Texas Association of Business (TAB), came out against the “use of environmental regulatory controls that have the specific effect of promoting an alternative energy policy” in a 2019 statement. The same document laid out the group’s opposition to stricter ozone and methane regulations.

“It’s not clear how Apple, which calls climate change ‘the defining issue of our time,’ is able to square its association with TAB with its environmental positions,” the Tech Transparency Project said. The advocacy group also called out Apple’s history of fighting back right-to-repair laws, which aim to curb e-waste.

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/31/report-calls-out-apples-membership-in-trade-groups-stalling-climate-efforts/

Tech companies got their way in Texas on Tuesday.

The Supreme Court just blocked a controversial law that allows Texas residents and the attorney general to sue social media companies over their content-moderation decisions. The law, HB20, prohibits tech platforms from removing or restricting content based on “the viewpoint represented in the user’s expression” and was designed with conservative claims of tech’s liberal ideological bias in mind.

HB20 passed in September, but has had a rocky ride through the courts in the months that followed. It was swiftly blocked by an injunction after passing, but a trio of federal appeals court judges paused the temporary injunction earlier this month in a surprise win for the law’s proponents.

The Supreme Court ruling isn’t the final word on HB20, which still faces a lawsuit from two tech industry groups, the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and NetChoice, challenging its constitutionality.

After the surprise decision by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unblocked the law earlier in May, the tech trade groups asked the Supreme Court to intervene with an emergency stay. Justice Samuel Alito reviewed the request and ultimately brought the case to the broader Supreme Court for the interim decision.

Justices John Roberts, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett voted to overturn the Fifth Circuit’s ruling. Justice Alito and Clarence Thomas, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch voted against vacating the ruling.

“While I can understand the Court’s apparent desire to delay enforcement of HB20 while the appeal is pending, the preliminary injunction entered by the District Court was itself a significant intrusion on state sovereignty,” Alito wrote in his dissent.

In a statement following the Supreme Court ruling, NetChoice celebrated the win while acknowledging that it is only “halfway there” as the case makes it way to district court.

“Texas’s HB 20 is a constitutional trainwreck,” NetChoice Counsel Chris Marchese said. “… We are relieved that the First Amendment, open internet, and the users who rely on it remain protected from Texas’s unconstitutional overreach.”

…read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/31/texas-social-media-law-supreme-court-hb20/

A diverse collection of students with big ideas will split about $95,000 in prize money after competing in T-Mobile’s Changemaker Challenge. $5-10K may not sound like a lot to companies pulling in tens of millions, but for a kid just starting out, it could be the difference between pursuing and abandoning a passion project.

The contest is nationwide, asking young folks age 13-18 to submit their project, company, or however they like to define it, and five each in three categories are awarded $5,000. A winner from each category gets an additional $5K plus a pitch-off with T-Mo brass, and a chance for a final $5K check. You’d think they would throw another five large out there to hit $100K even… maybe next year.

There are plenty such competitions out there (last week was Microsoft’s Imagine Cup) and the ideas that surface in them are always refreshingly human in scale and intention.

Take the finalist MedTechConnect, for instance. Sounds like middleware for hospitals, but it’s two teenage cousins in Louisville who have now helped over 2,000 senior citizens make vaccination and other healthcare appointments by walking them through the digital processes that might otherwise have puzzled them.

“Telehealth access is a basic human right. Solutions must be found, as telehealth will explode in the future… vulnerable people cannot be left behind,” they write. And they’re helping in a very hands-on way — volunteer work for the digital era, perhaps, but also just plain a good idea: a general “tech support for telehealth” for people who don’t have a savvy niece or nephew to consult on such things.

Just because folks like Jacqueline and Amelie aren’t yet quite at the Battlefield stage doesn’t mean we can’t applaud their initiative and insight. They do have one thing in common with many larger startups, however: a total lack of any plan for monetization. In this case however, that is probably a good thing.

Here’s the full list of finalists, by category with winners listed first (descriptions from T-Mo and the applicants themselves, links to their sweet little applications):

“Digital empowerment”:

• Safe Teens Online (Guaynabo, Puerto Rico) A global, youth-led peer-to-peer initiative that educates teenagers on online privacy and safety, encouraging inclusivity, safe habits, and emotional well-being.
• Bridge the Gap Initiative (North Royalton, Ohio) A student-run organization designed to help senior citizens navigate the digital world by teaching them valuable skills like texting and video calling using their smart phones.
• STEM for the South Bronx (Bronx, N.Y.) A high school robotics team with a vision to create an education center that is open to the public to explore the world of STEM.
• Scholars Program (Fairfax, Va.) An organization whose goal is to expand STEM education and STEM opportunities for minority groups underrepresented in the field.
• MedTechConnect (Louisville, Ky.) A group working to provide technical and personal support to ensure senior citizens are informed about and have access to vaccinations and basic healthcare …read more

  https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/31/student-social-good-startups-collect-95k-in-t-mobile-competition/