Privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo has followed Microsoft and Google to become the latest veteran search player to dip its beak in the generative AI trend — announcing the launch today in beta of an AI-powered summarization feature, called DuckAssist, which can directly answer straightforward search queries for users.

DDG says it’s drawing on natural language technology from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, an AI startup founded by ex-OpenAI employees, to power the natural language summarization capability, combined with its own active indexing of Wikipedia and other reference sites it’s using to source answers (the encyclopedia Britannia is another source it mentions).

Founder Gabe Weinberg tells TechCrunch the sources it’s using for DuckAssist are — currently — “99%+ Wikipedia”. But he notes the company is “experimenting with how incorporating other sources could work, and when to use them” — which suggests it may seek to adapt sourcing to the context of the query (so, for example, a topical news-related search query might be better responded to by DuckAssist sourcing information from trusted news media). So it remains to be seen how DDG will evolve the feature — and whether it might, for example, seek to ink partnerships with reference sites.

At launch, DuckAssist is only available via DDG’s apps and browser extensions — but the company says it plans to roll it out to all search users in the coming weeks. The beta feature is free to use and does not require the user to be logged in to access it. It’s only available in English for now.

Per Weinberg, the AI models DDG is (“currently”) using to power the natural language summarization are: The Davinci model from OpenAI and the Claude model from Anthropic. He also notes DDG is “experimenting” with the new Turbo model OpenAI recently announced.

It’s worth noting that DDG’s search engine does already have an Instant Answers feature which gets triggered for certain types of queries and also serves answers directly above the usual list of links. (Example scenarios include if you’re asking the search engine to sum basic calculations, display a calendar for the current month or asking for factual snippets of info.)

However DDG says that adding in generative AI summarization has enabled it to expand how many queries can be directly answered in this way — dubbing the addition of generative AI into the mix here a “fully integrated Instant Answer”.

“The two main benefits compared to other instant answers are that DuckAssist answers will be more directly responsive to user questions, and that DuckAssist can answer significantly more questions,” Weinberg tells us. “The generative AI behind DuckAssist generates new text for a particular query, where standard instant answers are generally pulling out quotes. In this way, DuckAssist can be more directly responsive to the query, quickly surface information buried in articles, and synthesize information from multiple Wikipedia snippets. As a result, it can answer a wider breadth of questions.”

DuckAssist is intended to help users of the search engine find factual information more quickly — hence it only appears as an option when the technology assesses it can help with a specific query.

“If you search for a question in any DuckDuckGo app or browser extension, and DuckAssist thinks it might be able to find an answer from Wikipedia, you may see a magic wand icon and ‘Ask Me’ button at the top of your search results,” DDG explains.

If an answer has previously been solicited by another DDG user the company says it will be displayed automatically — but it also notes that users can opt to disable Instant Answers (which includes DuckAssist) in the settings if they prefer not to be exposed to AI-generated summaries.

Weinberg says the feature works by using AI to generate new natural language responses “based on specific/relevant sections of Wikipedia articles” that DDG provides via its own scanning of sources. (He specifies DDG is using its own indexing technology “to identify the relevant chunks of text from Wikipedia, and then ask the models to format answers in a way that is directly responsive to the query”.)

Accuracy is one key concern being attached to applications of generative AI — given the technology can be prone to make up information and yet automated output that’s presented in a natural language wrapper can sound highly authoritative despite not being fact-checked.

On this, Weinberg says DuckAssist has been designed to boost the probability that it will give a correct answer while also providing users with information that the answer is automated — and pointing them to the reference sources where they can do their own fact-check (i.e. if it turns out DuckAssist is being more of an ‘ass’ than an assistant).

“A search engine’s job is to surface reliable information quickly. We designed DuckAssist in way that leverages what natural language technology does well while trying to increase the probability it will give a correct answer when it appears in search results. We did that by intentionally limiting the sources DuckAssist is summarizing from,” he says. “For now, DuckAssist is only pulling answers from Wikipedia and a handful of related sources, like Britannica. This greatly limits the probability DuckAssist will generate incorrect information or ‘hallucinate’, where the AI tool makes up random information.

“Nevertheless, we know it won’t be right 100% of the time — If we do not provide the most relevant text [to the AI] to summarize, for example, or if Wikipedia itself has errors. In any case, we label every answer as not independently checked for accuracy and provide a link to the most relevant Wikipedia article for more info.”

On the privacy side, DDG promises this search with AI feature is anonymous — and, in line with its headline privacy pledge, further emphasizes that no data is shared with any of the third parties it’s working with to integrate the generative AI capability into its search engine. (In the blog post Weinberg also specifies that users’ anonymous searches are not being used to train its suppliers’ AI models.)

It’s asking users to give feedback on the quality of the DuckAssist summaries — via a feedback link that’s displayed next to all DuckAssist answers, as part of its approach to tackling the generative AI accuracy issue — and says this feedback is anonymous too, with user reports also only sent to DDG itself, not to any third parties.

While the launch of DuckAssist means there will, inevitably, be more automated answers popping up in response to users’ queries, DDG notes the feature will still only be available for a minority of searches — since it’s only intended to help with relatively straightforward asks. Phrasing a search query as a question makes it more likely the feature will appear in search results, it adds.

“Generative artificial intelligence is hitting the world of search and browsing in a big way,” Weinberg writes in a blog post announcing what he says is “the first in a series of generative AI-assisted features we hope to roll out in the coming months”. “At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been trying to understand the difference between what it could do well in the future and what it can do well right now. But no matter how we decide to use this new technology, we want it to add clear value to our private search and browsing experience.”

More AI powered search and browser features are also in the works from DDG, with additional AI-related news slated for the coming months. (Although he won’t be drawn on what else it has cooking — saying only “stay tuned!”.)

Here’s a clip of the DuckAssist feature in action for a search query that asks “is antarctica a country” — which shows the user being promoted to activate DuckAssist (“ask”) and, on doing that, they receive a summarized natural language answer, displayed above the source (Wikipedia) and a reference to the section of the article it was sourced from:

In its blog post, DDG explains it selected Wikipedia as the main source for DuckAssist since the crowdsourced encyclopedia is already the primary source for its existing Instant Answers feature and, while not foolproof, it assesses it as “relatively reliable across a wide variety of subjects”.

It also points out Wikipedia has the added benefit of being a public resource “with a transparent editorial process that cites all the sources used in an article, you can easily trace exactly where its information is coming from”.

Plus Wikipedia is of course constantly being updated — expanding the queries DuckAssist can meaningfully respond to. That said, there is still a lag in the knowledge graph — as DDG notes that “right now” the DuckAssist Wikipedia index can be up to “a few weeks old”. (But it says it has plans to “make it even more recent”, in addition to adding more sources “soon”.)

It’s worth noting that DDG’s current gen Instant Answers aren’t always right, either.

At the time of writing, a DDG search for “people in space” generated a neat stack of ten cards of astronauts it suggested are currently up in orbit — however it displayed a photo of US astronaut Kayla Barron twice; once on her own card and once (incorrectly) paired with Germany astronaut Matthias Maurer’s card. So error-prone techie shortcuts are nothing new.

Still, the power of generative AI to automate far more interactions — and, in this case, respond to many more types of search queries — could cause a bigger skew in the information landscape by substantially expanding the ability of platforms to apply such shortcuts which boosts the probability of their users running into tech-generated errors.

DuckDuckGo dabbles with AI search by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/08/duckassist/

A group of U.S. senators unveiled new bipartisan legislation that would give the administration new powers when it comes to restricting or even banning foreign-based technologies. In particular, the bill could be used to ban TikTok in the U.S. if the administration considers that it causes national security threats.

Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) and Senator John Thune (R-SD) are leading the charge with support from 10 other senators. If the bill passes, the Department of Commerce will be able to “review, prevent, and mitigate” software, hardware or services that come from foreign adversaries.

The bill text names some of these adversarial nations — China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela. The maximum restriction would be a ban.

“Today, the threat that everyone is talking about is TikTok, and how it could enable surveillance by the Chinese Communist Party, or facilitate the spread of malign influence campaigns in the U.S. Before TikTok, however, it was Huawei and ZTE, which threatened our nation’s telecommunications networks. And before that, it was Russia’s Kaspersky Lab, which threatened the security of government and corporate devices,” Senator Warner said in a statement.

According to him, that’s why the U.S. needs a new systemic approach to foreign threats “so we aren’t playing Whac-A-Mole,” he said. While the new RESTRICT Act could potentially be used against a lot of different foreign companies, nearly all senators working on this bill mention TikTok as the main threat of the day.

TikTok is owned by a Chinese private company called ByteDance. Its growing popularity in the U.S. has also come with growing concerns about user data and foreign meddling.

White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan endorsed the bill. “This legislation would provide the U.S. government with new mechanisms to mitigate the national security risks posed by high-risk technology businesses operating in the United States,” he said.

“Critically, it would strengthen our ability to address discrete risks posed by individual transactions, and systemic risks posed by certain classes of transactions involving countries of concern in sensitive technology sectors,” he added.

This isn’t the first effort to pass a bill that would ban TikTok in the U.S. Last week, the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee voted in favor of the DATA Act. But Democrats opposed this different bill.

As for TikTok, representatives have said several times that American user data can’t be accessed by the Chinese government. “A U.S. ban on TikTok is a ban on the export of American culture and values to the billion-plus people who use our service worldwide,” Brooke Oberwetter, a TikTok spokesperson, told TechCrunch last week.

TikTok is already banned on government-issued devices in the U.S. Canada and the European Commission have also ordered staff to remove the social media app from their work phones.

Proposed US bipartisan bill could lead to TikTok ban by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/08/proposed-us-bipartisan-bill-could-lead-to-tiktok-ban/

La Famiglia, a Berlin-based VC fund (no, not the Mafia organization, in case there is any confusion) has raised €250 million for its combined third seed fund (which is €165 million) and its first growth co-investment fund (€90 million).

The fund has a vertical focus on ML and AI, data, logistics, and supply chains, consumerization of B2B, fintech and insurtech, sustainability, so-called “Industry 4.0”, as well as other new technology areas.

The firm currently has over 70 startups in its portfolio, including Deel (a payroll and HR platform, most recently pegged at a $12 billion valuation); Personio (HR management software); Forto (digital freight forwarding); as well as Y42 (data operations cloud), Sweep (carbon accounting platform, similar to Watershed in the US) and Buynomics (commercial operating system). To date, the fund has raised more than €350 million since its inception in 2017, when it closed its first €35 million seed fund. The second €60 million seed fund came in 2019.

The fund aims to invest up to €5 million in largely B2B startups. Zurich-based quality management platform Ethon.ai is the first investment from Fund 3.

Family offices behind brand names such as Valentino, Adidas, Swarovski, Hapag Lloyd, and Estée Lauder are LPs in Fund 3. Famiglia is also newly backed by entrepreneurs such as Ilkka Paananen (Supercell), Ross Mason (Mulesoft), and portfolio founders Qasar Younis (Applied Intuition), Hanno Renner (Personio), and Michael Wax (Forto).

It’s perhaps unsurprising that La Famiglia can reach LPs other VCs may find it difficult to reach. The family of Founding Partner, Dr. Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, owns the measuring technology company Krohne Messtechnik (annual revenues over $780 million), which puts them into fairly rarified circles in European high society. However, it must be said that Fürstenberg is a long-time investor herself, having backed AMAZE an an Angel (a shopping app for smartphones geared towards fashion bloggers) as well as worked more generally in tech businesses.

Fürstenberg told me over an interview: “I think we got lucky [with the fund raise] because we had really good performance figures for fund one. Fund one and two, were a lot harder [to raise] by comparison. And fund three just gave us a lot of performance, and kind of spoke for itself. Fundraising is always a lot of work, but I think it was just the easiest fundraise by far, in comparison.”

The team is also co-led by general partner Judith Dada, who previously ran Facebook’s VC Initiative, and earlier managed Amazon Europe’s marketing strategy.

Had they seen any problems fundraising given the issues surrounding today’s macro-economic environment? Dada responded: “It’s a conversation that we have continuously had… But I think overall, given that we’re investing in B2B technology companies, we see the issues in the market hitting us less hard, potentially, than other funds.”

“There’s still a lot of uncertainty but overall, just looking at the kind of fundamentals of the types of companies we invest in, maybe Europe won’t be home to the next Facebook or the next Amazon, but we will be home to the next Siemens or the next Mersk,” she commented.

Fürstenberg added that the downturn in tech stocks and layoffs had “actually been good for the ecosystem. We’re seeing a lot of great talent flow back into the market. So it’s getting easier to hire great people. And I think from a deal-flow perspective, the signal-to-noise ratio has gotten so much better. Plus, the quality of founders we’ve spoken to over the last three or four months is better too.”

Perhaps appropriate for International Women’s Day, La Famiglia’s senior investment team now comprises 60% women (50% of the total team) and 60% individuals with a migration background (30% of the total team).

SAP Hybris-founder and enterprise expert Carsten Thoma also joins La Famiglia as an advisor.

Berlin VC fund La Famiglia raises €250M for both Seed and Growth B2B startups by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/08/berlin-vc-fund-la-famiglia-raises-e250m-for-both-seed-and-growth-b2b-startups/

Garin Hess, a tech entrepreneur based in Utah, experienced what he calls the “demo bottleneck” at a previous software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup while pitching to potential customers. He theorized that a self-directed interactive demo, personalized to each stakeholder, could not only streamline the process and save time, but also help organically discover and engage other stakeholders who might not normally be reached.

That led Hess to found Consensus, a platform for interactive video demos, which today announced that it raised $110 million from Sumeru Equity Partners. Consensus lets engineering teams build a library of reusable, interactive video demos that sales teams can send out on demand.

“Consensus is like an ‘Iron Man mech suit’ for every sales engineer to be able to do more with what they have,” Hess told TechCrunch in an email interview. “For example, Consensus automates the routine ‘harbor cruise‘ demos so that consultants can spend more of their time doing what they do best: strategically helping buyers through complexity when buying solutions that have many pieces to the puzzle.”

Launched in 2013 and now with over $139 million in the bank (inclusive of today’s raise), Consensus allows users to build demo videos and then email those demos to prospects. Prospects pick what they want to learn about and get a personalized demo, which they can share with their wider teams and organization.

Throughout the process, Consensus tracks engagement and automatically finds new stakeholders by role and priority.

“Unlike generalized video platforms, Consensus tracks who engages and personalizes both a video demonstration and hands-on, click-through product tour experience based on answers to specific questions asked upfront,” Hess explained. “It uses a proprietary personalization engine, then gathers data analytics for the sales team to help drive alignment in the buying group.”

Of course, Consensus isn’t the only game in town when it comes to product demoing — far from it. There’s Arcade, a startup developing a Chrome extension for product demos, which raised $7.5 million last September. Another top rival is Demostack, which landed $34 million in April for its “demo experience” platform for SaaS sales teams.

To further set itself apart from the crowd, Consensus released Tours recently, which lets a salesperson demonstrate a product feature via video and then hand it off to a prospect so they can explore the same feature through a self-directed click-through experience.

“Millions of dollars of revenue are locked up in the inefficiencies of the traditional sales engineering model of doing live demo after live demo. It artificially stretches the buying cycle and adds risk to every deal, not to mention it is enormously expensive,” Hess said. “With Consensus’ intelligent demo automation platform, enterprise software sales teams not only improve their own efficiencies, but more importantly improve the target organization’s buying group efficiency, which automatically accelerates the buying process, reduces risk and results in more sales without adding headcount.”

Is that promising too much? Perhaps. But Consensus hasn’t had trouble attracting business, apparently. Consensus’ current customers span 15 of the 30 largest software companies, including Coupa, Oracle and Autodesk. According to Hess, revenue grew 60% in 2022.

“The pandemic helped move the ‘pre-sales’ profession from a focus on ‘have to be there in person’ to ‘Hey, we can do this remotely?’” Hess said. “This forcing function from the pandemic caused the entire sales industry to sit up and question the status quo, which has been helpful to opening minds to the usefulness of demo automation as part of the process. We believe Consensus is uniquely positioned to grow effectively in this slowdown because we are automating a function that for many enterprise software companies [has] never been automated before.”

Consensus raises $110M to inject automation into SaaS product demos by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/08/consensus-raises-110m-to-injection-automation-into-saas-product-demos/

Fake virtual identities are nothing new. The ability to so easily create them has been both a boon for social media platforms — more “users” — and a scourge, tied as they are to the spread of conspiracy theories, distorted discourse and other societal ills.

Still, Twitter bots are nothing compared with what the world is about to experience, as any time spent with ChatGPT illustrates. Flash forward a few years and it will be impossible to know if someone is communicating with another mortal or a neural network.

Sam Altman knows this. Altman is the cofounder and the CEO of ChatGPT parent OpenAI and has long had more visibility than most into what’s around the corner than most. It’s why more than three years ago, he conceived of a new company that could serve first and foremost as proof-of-personhood. Called Worldcoin, its three-part mission — to create a global ID, a global currency, and an app that enables payment, purchases and transfers using its own token, along with other digital assets and traditional currencies — is as ambitious as it is technically complicated, but the opportunity is also vast.

In broad strokes, here’s how the outfit, based in San Francisco and Berlin, works: To use the service, users must download its app, then have their iris scanned using a silver, melon-sized orb that houses a custom optical system. Once the scan is complete, the individual is added to a database of verified humans, and Worldcoin creates a unique cryptographic “hash” or equation that’s tied to that real person. The scan isn’t saved, but the hash can be used in the future to prove the person’s identity anonymously through the app, which includes a private key that links to a shareable public key. Because the system is designed to verify that a person is actually a unique individual, if the person wants to accept a payment or fund a specific project, the app generates a ‘zero-knowledge proof’ — or mathematical equation — that allows the individual to provide only the necessary amount of information to a third party. Some day, the technology might even help people to vote on how AI should be governed. (A piece in the outlet IEEE Spectrum better spells out the specifics of Worldcoin’s tech.)

Investors eager to be in business with Altman jumped at the chance to fund the outfit almost as soon as it was imagined, with Andreessen Horowitz, Variant, Khosla Ventures, Coinbase and Tiger Global providing it with $125.5 million. But the public has been more wary. When in June 2021, Bloomberg reported that Altman was at work on Worldcoin, many questioned its promise to give one share of its new digital currency to everyone who agreed to an iris scan. Worldcoin said it needed to be decentralized from the outset so it could deliver future currency drops as part of universal basic income programs. (Altman has long predicted that AI will generate enough wealth to pay every adult some amount of money each year.) From Worldcoin’s perspective, the crypto piece was necessary. Yet some quickly deemed it another crypto scam, while others questioned whether or not a nascent startup collecting biometric data could truly secure its participants’ privacy.

Altman later said the press owed to a “leak” and that Worldcoin wasn’t ready to tell its story in 2021. Now, reorganized under a new parent organization called Tools for Humanity that calls itself as both a research lab and product company, the outfit is sharing more details. Whether they’ll be enough to win over users is an open question, but certainly, more people now understand why proving personhood online is about to become essential.

It was in 2019, as Altman was leaving famed accelerator Y Combinator to become the CEO of OpenAI that he began interviewing people to lead a new organization he’d begun imagining. The first founder he brought into the fold, Max Novendstern, was a former investment associate at Bridgewater Associates and worked previously for a money transfer startup called Wave; the second founder who Altman brought on, Alex Blania, had been studying theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology and the Max Planck Society.

By early 2021, Novendstern had moved on to launch another startup. Blania stayed, however, becoming Worldcoin’s CEO.

Blania told me recently of Novendstern’s departure that he is “just incredible zero-to-one, very creative” but “not as operational as the company needs to be” at this point. Altman meanwhile has told me that he’s not “day-to-day involved” but thinks “super highly” of Blania’s now 120-person team, which collectively aims to create the “largest financial and identity system globally and make it fully privacy preserving and inclusive,” says Blania.

It’s a tall order. Currently, the outfit says it has 1.2 million users; to be truly effective, it needs more than a billion more, including people resistant to the idea of biometric technologies and all things crypto-related.

Altman — who remains on the board of Worldcoin — knows it’s a lot to overcome. At an evening event I hosted in January, he told the audience that the “need for systems that provide proof of personhood and the need for new experiments with wealth redistribution and global governance of systems” is growing because of developments in AI, but he also called Worldcoin an “experiment” that he is “very glad” is running.

Further, while Altman suggested that privacy concerns around Worldcoin were misguided, he also recognized that same evening that they might be insurmountable. “To me personally,” he’d said, “the amount of privacy you give up to use Facebook or something versus the amount of privacy you give up for a scan of your retina and nothing else —  I’d much rather have the latter. And many people won’t want that, and that’s fine. But I think more experiments about what problems we can solve with technology in this new world, like, [it’s] great to try that stuff.”

Blania, with much more riding on Worldcoin’s success than Altman, seems determined to execute on the company’s early vision, and one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is getting enough people in front of the “orbs” that are central to Worldcoin’s approach.

Right now, the orbs are “everywhere from universities in Kenya to shopping malls in Lisbon,” says Blania, who says it takes just 60 seconds currently for one to capture a high-definition iris scan, but penetration is far from where it needs to be.

Worldcoin has plans to solve this, Blania says, offering that in Lisbon, for example, where “less than 5%” of residents have had their irises scanned, users may eventually receive coupons or “access to certain loans” or even single-player games, enticing more users to make time for an iris scan.

A bigger driver of adoption will be the changing nature of the internet, Blania suggests. “It’s a very long road that we have to walk down, and yeah, it’s going to take a while,” he says. “But even a year from now, it’s not just going to be ‘people’ on Twitter offering scammy crypto giveaways” that are recognizable straightaway as bots. “Instead, imagine that you spend 10 hours a day on the internet and after you close your laptop, you have no idea if maybe you talked for five hours to neural networks of different forms and shapes and wasted your time. It will be terrible.”

In the meantime, Worldcoin is also embarking on an enterprise strategy that could be the most promising, and lucrative, way for Worldcoin to gain momentum. Indeed, a spokesperson for the company says Worldcoin is about to launch an SDK so that developers can program to its API and incorporate its tech into their own apps or platforms as a way to verify that their users are humans and to ensure a user can perform a particular action only once.

Stranger at the gate

And the applications for WorldCoin could continue to expand over time — if all goes as planned. Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz reportedly once told Blania: “This is super interesting tech, but I think you don’t understand what a big deal it actually is.”

Nevertheless, critics continue to doubt the company’s lofty objectives and its tech. One outstanding question is how people will use the actual Worldcoin currency they are given, and Blania doesn’t have a very satisfying answer at this point. “Due to regulatory considerations and that the token is not intended to be available in the U.S., I’m not in a position to speculate on how the token may potentially be used,” he says.

As for those skeptical of the potential of cryptocurrencies for boosting financial inclusion or enabling universal basic income, Blania suggests that critics are too focused on Worldcoin’s cryptocurrency instead of how its products complement each other to validate people as unique, then enable them to do things like send and receive funds.

In the meantime, a more immediate concern about Worldcoin’s approach is that because biometric authentication is a one-time process, there is no ongoing link between users and their World IDs. Asked if a key generated by Worldcoin can be sold or disposed of in any way people want, Blania first acknowledges that “no system is perfect” and that “it will never be possible to completely prevent this,” but he adds that “we expect impersonation to become very hard.”

As for competition — and Worldcoin has some — Blania expects that entrants taking different approaches to proof of personhood may fall away naturally over time.

While Worldcoin’s orbs are “a little bit out there,” he acknowledges, they give the company an advantage over platforms that try to solve the same problem fully online because of how rapidly the online world is changing. Says Blania, “I fundamentally believe they’re just going to get ripped apart by the next generation of [large language] models [like ChatGPT] that are going to come out over the next 12 to 24 months, because neither digital content nor intelligence will be good enough to discriminate [who is or isn’t human] anymore. You will need something that bridges to the physical world,” he adds. “Everything else will break.”

Worldcoin, cofounded by Sam Altman, is betting the next big thing in AI is proving you are human by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/worldcoin-cofounded-by-sam-altman-is-betting-the-next-big-thing-in-ai-is-proving-you-are-human/

Meet Elyn, a new French startup that recently raised a $2.7 million (€2.5 million) pre-seed funding round led by Headline and Sequoia Arc. The company wants to offer some flexibility when it comes to e-commerce online payments. Instead of paying for items before they are even shipped, Elyn lets customers try before you buy something.

This experience may sound familiar if you have bought items on Zalando, a popular e-commerce clothing retailer in Europe that has turned its try-before-you-buy option into one of its key selling points. Essentially, when it’s time to pay for items in your online cart, Zalando customers get multiple payment options. They can enter their card details or use PayPal like on any other website.

But they also have the option to pay later. This isn’t a Klarna-like ‘buy now, pay later’ option with the ability to spread a large payment over several installments. Users enter their payment card details and their card gets charged a few days after receiving the items.

This way, if you changed your mind and want to return an item, you can block the payment before it even occurs. This is particularly important when you’re selling clothes because it can be hard to pick the right size. Items may also look different when you can actually see them in person.

There are more than 300 people working for Zalando Payments specifically. That gives you a sense of the importance of the company’s in-house payment solution. If you can find the same T-shirt on Zalando or on another clothing store, you may decide to buy on Zalando based on this feature alone.

Making ‘try-before-you-buy’ mainstream

Many companies could benefit from this kind of payment experience. That’s why Elyn wants to offer try-before-you-buy to smaller retailers and brands. This is particularly important in France and other European markets where credit cards are nowhere as widespread as in the U.S. The product currently works with Shopify with other e-commerce platforms coming soon.

Once you start thinking about try-before-you-buy, you realize that it is intrinsically connected with returns. That’s why Elyn not only offers try-before-you-buy, but also handles the return system.

“With try-before-you-buy, you only pay for what you decide to keep,” Elyn co-founder and CEO El Mehdi Hachad told me. “We are also helping retailers with their returns so that return requests are turned into exchanges directly in the return interface that we provide.”

When a customer wants to return an item, Elyn asks you a couple of questions to narrow down the reason why you want to return something. Is it the wrong size or the wrong color? Do you want to get your money back? Do you want the same item in a different size? Do you want another item? Do you want a gift card?

If people just want to be reimbursed, Elyn will offer you a gift card with a bit more money than what you originally spent so that retailers don’t have to spend money from their cash balance.

If customers want the same item in a different size, Elyn can look in the retailer’s inventory directly and set the item aside if it’s available. Depending on the option that you select, Elyn can seamlessly adjust the upcoming card transaction. This is a smoother experience for the end customer as they don’t need to send something back, wait for the reimbursement and buy something else a week or two later.

By default, Elyn gives you five days to decide whether you want to keep something or not. The startup tracks packages so that it can send you an email when your package arrives to explain payment details and include a link to the return portal.

In order to avoid payment defaults, Elyn uses pre-authorization requests to verify the validity of Visa, Mastercard and CB cards. The startup charges transaction fees based on successful sales net of returns.

“The way we see the variety of payment options and services is that you want to offer something for every use case,” Hachad said. Some customers just want to enter their card details and move on. Others only want to pay with PayPal. Some people want to buy now and pay later using Klarna, Alma, Scalapay or another BNPL payment option. In some cases, customers like the convenience of Apple Pay.

And now, Elyn believes it can add another logo to the checkout flow for people who want to slightly delay their online payment. All these payment companies are tackling cart abandonment. Adding more options can improve the conversion rate. And it’s true that improving gross merchandise volume is a good way to convince online retailers that they should use your payment product.

In addition to Headline and Arc, Motier Venture (Galeries Lafayette owners’ family office), Financière Saint James, Marc Menasé (Founders Future) and Guillaume Princen also invested in the startup.

Elyn slightly delays online payments so you can try before you pay by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/elyn-slightly-delays-online-payments-so-you-can-try-before-you-pay/

Hotstar will lose HBO content at the end of this month in the latest setback for the Disney-owned on-demand video streaming giant that recently also lost rights for a popular cricket tournament in the country.

HBO’s catalog — shows such as Succession, The Last of Us, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Game of Thrones, Industry, Watchmen, The Wire and Veep — will leave Disney+ Hotstar starting March 31, the Indian streamer said in a tweet. Amazon may broaden its partnership with Warner Bros. in India to stream more HBO content in the country, industry analysts say.

The loss of premium offering from HBO will hurt Hotstar that used cricket and the international catalog as the pillars around which it courted loyal customer base in the South Asian market. Hotstar lost the bid to stream cricket in India for five years to Reliance last year.

As the newsletter The Signal wrote recently:

Some of Hotstar’s biggest ad campaigns in recent times in India have focused on driving potential subscribers to the platform by dangling HBO’s biggest hits: Game of Thrones and more recently, its prequel House Of The Dragon. These ad blitzes included a ‘Spoilers’ special ad campaign for the final season of Game Of Thrones in 2019, and another outdoor ad campaign last year for its much-awaited prequel. With ad revenue generating IPL already gone, where will the loss of these massive crowd-pleasers leave Hotstar’s attempts to sell premium subscriptions?

Originally part of Star India, Hotstar is one of the most popular streaming services in India. Under the helm of Ajit Mohan, who later moved to Meta and then Snap, Hotstar made a bet on cricket streaming at a time when very few Indians live-streamed any content. The bet worked: The firm invested hundreds of millions to secure rights to stream IPL cricket tourney, set global records for live streaming, and with tens of millions of subscribers, the streamer cemented its place as a crown jewel in Disney’s $71 billion purchase of Fox.

Hotstar still has about 50 million subscribers, but for the first time, it’s struggling to even retain them – let alone add new.

In the past two years, Disney has made broader changes within the company and visibly cut down the spendings on Hotstar. The firm also did renew the rights for Formula One. “We also obviously talked to Star and one or two other more traditional platforms and we felt that they didn’t value our rights in the way that we did,” Formula One’s director of media rights Ian Holmes told Reuters.

In the meantime, HBO has scraped plans to launch HBO Max in India. And last year, the firm signed a deal with Amazon for streaming rights of some HBO content. Amazon is one of the likely contenders to broaden a deal with Warner Bros., industry analysts say.

Soon, not streaming on Disney+ Hotstar: HBO content by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/soon-not-streaming-on-disney-hotstar-hbo-content/

Slice has acquired a 5% stake in the Indian bank North East Small Finance in what analysts say is a key step in the unicorn fintech startup’s journey amid mounting challenges from the central bank that has toppled many young firms.

The Bengaluru-headquartered startup invested $3.42 million for the 5% stake in the Guwahati-headquartered small finance bank in September, a regulatory filing showed.

The investment comes at a time when the Reserve Bank of India has clipped the wings of many fintech startups operating in cards and lending categories by mandating strict compliance with stringent new guidelines.

It’s unclear how a stake in a bank, admittedly a rare and ostensibly significant milestone by a startup, would be immediately beneficial to Slice, a $1.55 billion startup that counts Tiger Global, Insight Partners, Blume Ventures and Axis Bank among its backers.

The company did not respond to a request for comment.

The world’s second most populous nation is undergoing an interesting phase of time as banks and fintech startups explore ways to improve their engagements. Federal Bank and SBM Bank India have courted many startups as customers in recent years as they attempt to supercharge their businesses.

Slowly bigger banks, including HDFC and ICICI, have also expanded their deliberations with younger firms. HDFC, the largest private bank in India, recently backed Mintoak, a SaaS platform that provides merchant services in India and other markets.

The Indian arm of SBM Bank began engaging with investors to raise capital late last year, pitching the vision of becoming one of the top banking-as-a-service providers in the country, TechCrunch reported earlier. Accel and Quona backed Shivalik Small Finance Bank last year.

But a rise in proliferation of some predatory China-linked lending apps in recent years in the South Asian market has forced the hands of the central bank to introduce rules that have a far-reaching impact on many firms, including those not involved in bad-faith business practices.

Incorporated in 2016, North East Small Finance Bank is a subsidiary of RGVN (NE) Microfinance that serves customers in the north eastern region of the country. It counts Pi Ventures, SIDBI Venture Capital and Bajaj Group among its backers.

Indian fintech unicorn Slice acquires stake in a bank by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/slice-acquires-stake-in-a-north-east-bank/

Relativity Space will be attempting to make history with the first launch of the 110-foot-tall Terran 1 rocket tomorrow afternoon. The company, which was founded in 2015 by Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone, is best-known for its innovative 3D printing technology: Terran 1 is 85% 3D-printed by mass, and that even includes the rocket engines. The company’s made big bets and has even bigger ambitions, with Relativity CEO Tim Ellis echoing SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s Martian ambitions.

“Our long-term mission remains that we want to help build an industrial base on Mars and help make humanity multiplanetary,” Ellis told TechCrunch.

The company’s made a lot of headlines over its eight-year history. Here are the top 10 moments from the TC archives.

1. Our first story on Relativity (2017)

We wrote about Relativity for the first time back in 2017, when the company only had 14 (!) full-time employees. We note that the company wants to drive the cost of rocket launches down ten-fold using its 3D-print process.

2. Relativity lands its first launch facilities at Cape Canaveral (2019)

Relativity landed a multi-year contract from the U.S. Air Force to operate rocket launch facilities at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida — the very site from which Relativity hopes to launch Terran 1 tomorrow.

3. Relativity’s economic gamechanger (2020)

TC’s Darrell Etherington spoke to CEO Tim Ellis about the economics behind Relativity Space, just a few months after the company raised $140 million. (TC+)

4. Long Beach expansion (2020)

Riding high on momentum, Relativity announced its new digs: a massive warehouse-style building in Long Beach, California.

5. Relativity raises $500 million as it sets its sights on Mars (2020)

The company announced the massive raise in November 2020, which was shortly followed by an aggressive expansion in workforce, facilities and, well…everything.

6. The unveiling of Terran R (2021)

Relativity finally revealed what comes after Terran 1: Terran R, a much larger and even more ambitious 3D-printed rocket — with full reusability.

7. Another monster funding round and a $4.2 billion valuation (2021)

Less than a year after closing on $500 million, the company managed to raise another $650 million to scale the development of Terran R.

8. Introducing the 1 million-square-foot factory (2021)

Relativity boosted its footprint by a factor of 10 with a new 1 million-square-foot facility in Long Beach.

9. A OneWeb deal and $1.2 billion in Terran R launch contracts (2022)

We broke news last year that Relativity inked a huge deal with British satellite constellation operator OneWeb, plus that it had $1.2 billion in firm Terran R launch contracts — contracts that the company managed to land before sending even a single rocket to orbit.

10. Last but not least: A mission to Mars with Impulse Space (2022) 

Relativity announced new plans with startup Impulse Space, founded by SpaceX’s former CTO of propulsion, to land a spacecraft on Mars as early as 2024 (yes, you read that right).

Relativity Space has had a wild ride to launch by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/relativity-space-has-had-a-wild-ride-to-launch/

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

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Hellooooo, Crunchers! We’re back for another round of tech news from your very favorite news site. It’s been a busy news day, and Haje is on deadline trying to finish this week’s pitch deck teardown, so let’s not dilly-dally and get right to it! — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Like a student debt Superman: Candidly, a company that helps financial institutions and employers embed student debt and savings optimization products into employee benefits, swoops in with $20.5 million in new funding to pick up student debt relief where new U.S. policies leave off. Christine has more.
• Draw to your little heart’s contentDevin powers up reMarkable’s e-paper tablet and examined every inch to bring you a product review worthy of getting rid of paper for good.
• Then I saw your game, and now I’m a Believer: Believer scored $55 million in new funding from big names in venture capital, like Lightspeed and Andreessen Horowitz, to focus on a new approach to multiplayer gaming that Ingrid writes will start with “original IP and stories ‘where player choices matter.’”

Startups and VC

The economy is a bit better — kind of, maybe, sort of? While things appear to be trending in the right direction, it’s going to be a long road. Besides, if you’re unable to find work, positive macroeconomic trends are cold comfort. One of the nice things Brian enjoys about having a platform like TechCrunch is the opportunity to help people in that difficult position — so here is a list of robotics companies that are hiring.

The enterprise is about to get hit by the generative AI hype train, as Salesforce prepares to invest in startups developing what it calls “responsible generative AI,” Paul writes.

Here’s another fistful:

• I can see clearly nowBrian reports that Plus One raises $50 million for its parcel robotics vision systems.
• NFTs, get yer NFTsJacquelyn reports that Tensor raises $3 million for a Solana-focused NFT trading platform.
• What’s the catch?Christine reports that health benefits startup Catch is shutting down, according to its founders.
• This is the newsSarah takes a look at the tech behind Artifact, the newly launched news aggregator from Instagram’s co-founders.
• Wait, what was I doing?: Mike reports that ADHD startups are exploding, and now there’s even a dedicated browser.

Gatik’s Gautam Narang on the importance of knowing your customer

As the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, illustrates, our brittle legacy supply chains are long overdue for an overhaul.

Autonomous vehicle startup Gatik operates approximately 40 driverless heavy-duty semitrailer trucks on routes up to 300 miles long, connecting distribution centers with smaller hubs.

Rebecca Bellan interviewed Gatik CEO and co-founder Gautam Narang to learn more about the company’s operations and investor expectations, and how a shortage of human drivers is impacting growth.

“We have not done any free delivery ever,” he says. “So we have been doing commercial deliveries since 2019, meaning every trip that we have made, we have been paid for.”

Three more from the TC+ team:

• Modeling the future: The best way to start an AI project is to not think about the models, Eran Shlomo writes.
• Okay, fess upAlex wonders, Who’s to blame for all the SPAC implosions?
• Corporates march inDespite the downturn, CVC gains traction in Brazil’s startup ecosystem, Matheus Tavares Dos Santos writes.

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

Sonos is getting ready to launch two new speakers, so Brian got the scoop from company CEO Patrick Spence on right to repair, spatial audio and those never-ending lawsuits.

Speaking of Sonos, Brian also wrote about the company replacing its One with a spatial audio speaker called Era 100. Also, Sonos is adding support for spatial audio on Apple Music, Aisha reports.

Thank you for reading, and have a Sonos day!

It’s a busy day, so how about six more:

• Is that a banana in your pocket?: For those of you who like sunshine, daffodils and lemons, Apple has a new yellow iPhone 14 and 14 Plus that you need to get your hands on, Ivan writes.
• Talk to me: Ever wanted to chat face-to-face with photorealistic AI? Give D-ID’s new web app a whirl. Aisha has more.
• Smarty pants: Salesforce is getting into generative AI with some new technology it is calling “Einstein GPT,” Ron reports.
• App inside of an app: Even Facebook wants a redo every now and again. It’s testing bringing back in-app messaging, Aisha writes.
• Healthy competition: Kenya’s competition regulator is looking at online food delivery platforms to make sure they aren’t delivering more than just their orders, Annie writes.
• More job cuts: Atlassian cuts 5% of its workforce following a reorganization. Frederic has more.

Daily Crunch: AI-driven fintech Candidly nabs $20.5M Series B to help consumers ‘crush debt’ by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/07/daily-crunch-ai-driven-fintech-candidly-nabs-20-5m-series-b-to-help-consumers-crush-debt/