After decimating Twitter’s workforce, imperiling its infrastructure and emptying its ad coffers all within his first month at the company, it’s on to the next thing for Elon Musk.

The erratic billionaire picked a fight with Apple in a series of tweets on Monday, bracing for a battle — or perhaps just another volley of tweets — that would comfortably position the perpetually aggrieved Twitter owner as the David to Apple’s Goliath.

Musk is now claiming that Apple threatened to “withhold” Twitter from the App Store, implying that the iPhone maker might take action against the social app over changes under its new ownership without offering any evidence. TechCrunch has reached out to Apple for clarification, but for now we don’t know if Apple really contacted Twitter over content moderation concerns or something else entirely.

Twitter’s new owner also claims that Apple has pulled most of its advertising on the platform, which seems possible or even likely considering how many other major ad buyers have done the same since Musk’s takeover, citing concerns about brand safety and content moderation changes.

Whatever is really going on here, a few things are true. For one, Twitter needs to stay in the App Store and to do so it needs to clear Apple’s low bar for content moderation, which Truth Social and Parler — apps with far less mature algorithmic content moderation systems — have managed to do. Even with Musk’s threatened policy changes and his deep cuts to moderation teams, Twitter would likely still remain on Apple’s good side if those apps pulled it off.

It’s also true that Apple’s rules for what gets an app get kicked out of the App Store are vague and arbitrarily enforced. Apple warns against “content that is offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste, or just plain creepy,” which would seem to rule out a lot of social apps, pre-Musk Twitter included, if it really came down to it.

At the same time that Musk is portraying Apple as a censor, he’s also railing against the fees the company charges apps that operate in its ecosystem. Musk calls this a “secret 30% tax” but in reality Apple’s cut is well-documented and much discussed. Epic Games and Apple went to court over Apple’s fees in 2020, with Epic arguing that the iPhone maker wields monopoly power in the software market.

Whether intentional or not, Musk reigniting the App Store antitrust battle is timely. Epic’s ongoing fight with Apple is kicking off again in appeals court and Congress could be poised for another push to pass the Open Markets Act, a bipartisan bill that would crack open the App Store and “tear down coercive anticompetitive walls in the app economy,” according to its sponsors.

It’s also possible that Apple actually has cautioned Musk that reinstating thousands of accounts banned for stuff like hate speech and harassment might nudge the app afoul of the App Store’s actually quite lenient content moderation requirements. In that case, Musk could position himself as a high-profile champion of the anti-Apple crowd, joining Epic’s whole thing and making nice with regulators who are rightfully concerned over Musk’s Twitter plans (or lack thereof).

But even then, Twitter needs Apple in both the short- and long-term and Apple certainly doesn’t need Twitter. And fighting on yet another front would stretch Musk’s attention even more when he should probably be focused on the basics, like running his myriad other companies or, say, not bankrupting Twitter. You can be mad that Apple takes 30% of what you make on the iPhone, but 30% of zero is still zero.

At the end of the day, Musk, the world’s richest man and maker of luxury cars and spaceships, generally seems to enjoy portraying himself as a scrappy upstart fighting against larger powers that be. If Musk wants to re-create that dynamic at Twitter, Apple is arguably one of the only entities that can still make the hugely influential social media company look like the little guy. Musk might be the Twitter boss now, but he knows that turning everyone against the big boss is a good way to maintain the approval of the miscellaneous internet devotees who affirm his existing beliefs and vote in his deeply unscientific tweet polls, so maybe it’s just about that.

Whatever inspired his anti-Apple tirade, waging a war on Apple is probably a losing fight. But it’s a fresh conflict that diverts attention from Musk’s embarrassing and seemingly endless parade of catastrophes as he fumbles Twitter’s policy, personnel and product alike, possibly running one of the world’s biggest social networks into the ground in the process.

Elon Musk’s next trick? Picking a fight with Apple by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/elon-musk-twitter-vs-apple/

Operating experience has become a buzzword over the last few years as venture capitalists pump up their resumes in a quest to set themselves apart from other sources of startup capital. Now, it seems that we are seeing the next evolution of that trend.

This year has seen a wave of startup consultant firms looking to raise venture funds of their own to take stakes in companies they are already working with or that align with their practice. In theory, this makes total sense because both consultants and venture capitalists have the same goal at the end of the day: helping companies grow.

But why are so many consultant-led venture capital funds launching now? It’s a particularly rough time in the broader venture market, and economy in general, in addition to being one of the toughest periods for emerging managers and first-time fundraisers. It’s worth noting that all of these funds are raising outside capital as opposed to investing off their balance sheets.

For one thing, the startups they were already working with were asking them to.

Move over, operators — consultants are the new nontraditional VC by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/move-over-operators-consultants-are-the-new-nontraditional-vc/

Image Credits: Ihor Reshetniak (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Over the last two years, intelligent calendar platform Reclaim.ai raised $10 million “using a more incremental approach,” writes co-founder Henry Shapiro.

“We’ve done all this without giving up a single board seat, and Reclaim employees continue to own over two-thirds of the company’s equity,” rejecting conventional wisdom that founders should “raise as much as you can as fast as you can.”

In a TC+ post, Shapiro reviews the process they used to identify follow-on investors, shares the email template used to pitch the SAFE, and explains why “a larger cap table means more founder control.”

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

We’re joining the Cyber Monday fun with 25% off annual subscriptions to TechCrunch+ content and analysis starting today until Wednesday, November 30. Plus, today only, get 50% off tickets to discover the vast unknown and attend TechCrunch Sessions: Space in Los Angeles!

Okay, we haven’t done a newsletter since Wednesday, and while the U.S. team was chillin’ like villains, the rest of the team was hard at work, so here’s some of the highlights from the last half-week of TechCrunchy goodness! — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Talking to yourself just went digital: Instead of having that internal monologue stay in your head, now you can play out all of your thoughts to yourself in WhatsApp, Jagmeet writes. The messaging platform began rolling out an easier way to talk to yourself today after completing beta testing.
• “Great Wall of porn”: That’s how Rita and Catherine describe the bot surge in China that is making it difficult to get any legitimate Twitter search results when trying to find out something about Chinese cities. Why, you ask? Rita writes that “the surge in such bot content coincides with an unprecedented wave of (COVID) protests that have swept across major Chinese cities and universities over the weekend.”
• Your calendar, only more productive: Get ready for your calendar to be more than just a place to record things you have to do that day. Romain writes about Amie, a startup that grabbed $7 million to link your unscheduled to-do list with your calendar. The app also enables users to be social with coworkers.

Startups and VC

Dubai-based mass transit and shared mobility services provider SWVL has carried out its second round of layoffs, affecting 50% of its remaining headcount, Tage reports. The news is coming six months after SWVL laid off 32% (over 400 employees) of its workforce in a “portfolio optimization program” effort geared toward achieving positive cash flow next year.

There’s a couple of new funds in town, too! Harri reports that Early Light Ventures plots a second, $15 million fund for software ‘underdogs,’ while Mike writes that BackingMinds raises a new €50 million fund to fund normally overlooked entrepreneurs. He also writes about Pact, an all-women led VC for mission-driven startups, backed by Anne Hathaway.

And we have five more for you:

• AI just wanna take a closer lookIngrid reports that V7 snapped up $33 million to automate training data for computer vision AI models.
• Special delivery!Brian explores Bionaut Labs and the $43 million round it raised for its tiny drug-delivery robots.
• Let’s get touchy-feelyThis startup is bringing precision control for gamers to the humble keyboard, Haje writes.
• Sticking it to the card processorsCatherine reports that Atoa helps U.K. merchants cut down on card processing fees and raised $2.2 million in pre-seed funding.
• Dat Money for Dat BikeCatherine reports that Dat Bike gets another $8 million to put more e-bikes on Vietnam’s roads.

Lessons for raising $10M without giving up a board seat

Over the last two years, intelligent calendar platform Reclaim.ai raised $10 million “using a more incremental approach,” writes co-founder Henry Shapiro.

“We’ve done all this without giving up a single board seat, and Reclaim employees continue to own over two-thirds of the company’s equity,” rejecting conventional wisdom that founders should “raise as much as you can as fast as you can.”

In a TC+ post, Shapiro reviews the process they used to identify follow-on investors, shares the email template used to pitch the SAFE, and explains why “a larger cap table means more founder control.”

Three more from the TC+ team:

• A different valuation: Interim rate of return: A better approach to valuing early-stage startups, by Andrew Ritter.
• Mistakes not to make: 3 mistakes to avoid as an emerging manager, by Champ Suthipongchai.
• Growing with great efficiencyAnna writes that growing efficiently is no problem at all, at least if you’re bootstrapped.

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.

Amazon’s recent cost-cutting measures seem to be affecting more than just its delivery business. Manish writes that the company is shutting down its wholesale distribution business, called Amazon Distribution, in India. Amazon had started this unit to help neighborhood stores secure inventory. The company didn’t say why it was closing this particular business down, but Manish notes that this is the third such Amazon unit to be shuttered in India.

Meanwhile, Natasha L reports that Meta has gotten itself into trouble again with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (aka, the agency that regulates data protection). Facebook’s parent company is being hit with $275 million in penalties for what the agency said was breaches in data protection that resulted in some 530 million users’ personal information being leaked.

Now enjoy six more:

• UnBlocked: After weeks of reports claiming this would happen, BlockFi filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and it might be FTX’s fault. Jacquelyn writes that FTX was going to buy BlockFi, and then, well, you know what happened to them. Based on the bankruptcy filing, BlockFi owes some significant cash to creditors and is unfortunately now another high-valued, heavily backed crypto company that was unable to make it work in this environment.
• Into the sea, you and meHaje managed to talk Apple into giving him early access to the Oceanic+ app and took the Apple Watch Ultra into the deep blue sea for our world-exclusive review. He also got all excited about the pricing model the app uses.
• I spy: The U.S. government is banning telecommunications and video surveillance equipment from several Chinese brands, like Huawei and ZTE, citing protection of the nation’s communications network. Carly has more.
• Yahoola takes this company in holy partnership?: Yahoo invests a 25% stake in Taboola, an advertising network, in a deal that will marry the two companies for the next 30 years, Romain writes.
• Safety concerns: The U.K. government expands its Online Safety Bill to criminalize those who take to the internet to encourage self-harm, Natasha L reports.
• An Apple a day: For his newest trick, Musk is picking a fight with Apple, reports Taylor.

Daily Crunch: WhatsApp rolls out new ‘Message Yourself’ feature globally by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/daily-crunch-whatsapp-rolls-out-new-message-yourself-feature-globally/

Of all the venture capital funding invested in 2021, around one in every five dollars went to fintech. But this boom now seems behind us, as global fintech funding activity returned to pre-2021 levels.

Worse, fintech didn’t escape the recent waves of tech layoffs, with high-profile companies like Brex, Chime and Stripe making headlines for this disheartening reason over the last few weeks.

And yet, fintech startups are still getting founded and funded this year. Of the 223 companies in Y Combinator’s summer 2022 batch, 79 fell more or less into the fintech category.

Why are founders and investors still placing bets in fintech, and where? To find out more, we reached out to fintech-focused VC firm Fiat Ventures.

Fiat co-founders Alex Harris, Drew Glover, and Marcos Fernandez also run its sister arm, Fiat Growth, a growth consultancy working with fintech and insurtech clients. This enables them to comment not only on sector trends from an investor perspective, but also to share practical advice.

One of their key recommendations is for fintech startups to lean into customer acquisition channels whose cost is less variable or seasonal than others, but our exchange covered a wider range of topics, from financial inclusion to offline channels and more. Read on:

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Many of the linked companies are portfolio companies of Fiat Ventures or clients of Fiat Growth.

TC: What makes you say that “fintech acquisition funnels are too complicated”?

Alex Harris: Fintech products by nature have complicated acquisition funnels and enrollment flows. Some complications are unavoidable in a highly regulated environment, but superfluous complications can arise when rigorous testing is not applied and funnels include unnecessary bloat.

Even the smallest detail can generate friction. For example, in the know-your-customer (KYC) process, many fintechs will ask a customer for their entire Social Security Number. In most cases, for non-credit products, only the last four digits of the SSN are needed for identification purposes. While only a five-digit difference, this can have a meaningful impact on conversion rates that can save large sums of money at scale.

Data is certainly king, but there is a time and place for data collection and personalization. Too often, a well-intentioned data team will ask personalization and demographics questions directly in an enrollment process. However, these questions can most often come in a post-enrollment survey or periodically throughout the lifecycle of a customer. Even post-enrollment, these questions need to be thought out. We regularly see data collected for the sake of collecting it, without actionable insights derived from them.

On affinity-focused fintechs, the future of BNPL, and more by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/on-affinity-focused-fintechs-the-future-of-bnpl-and-more/

When it comes to performance issues, it’s hard to know where the problem lies. This is especially true when your monitoring dashboard shows an all-clear, yet you’re still hearing slow app complaints from your users. In these cases, there’s a good chance those problems could be related to an internet connection issue.

These kinds of issues are harder to track down because they vary so greatly and depend on a lot of factors that are mostly out of your control. Amazon wants to make it easier to track these kinds of issues on apps running on AWS infrastructure with a new service called Amazon CloudWorks Internet Monitor. It’s announcing the new service this week at AWS re:Invent.

As the name implies, it’s part of the CloudWorks monitoring tool, and it looks at internet connections around the world to find trouble spots.

“Internet Monitor uses the connectivity data that we capture from our global networking footprint to calculate a baseline of performance and availability for internet traffic,” Amazon’s Sébastien Stormacq wrote in a blog post announcing the new service.

The idea is to let you monitor problems related to internet connection problems with applications running on AWS infrastructure resources. Most major monitoring tools allow you to track various types of network traffic, but this one takes advantage of the same data AWS uses to monitor its own uptime, so presumably it’s pretty solid for those AWS-centric applications

You simply create a monitor and add some internet resources, and you can monitor from there when you’re getting performance complaints that you can’t pinpoint. Among other data, you can see a health score based on the quality of the connections on the resources you’ve added to your monitor.

The new service is available in public preview starting today across 20 regions. It’s free in public beta, but it’s worth noting that you could still be charged for log data the service is collecting as part of its monitoring process.

Amazon CloudWorks Internet Monitor lets you track connection-related performance issues by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/amazon-cloudworks-internet-monitor-lets-you-track-connection-related-performance-issues/

FrankieOne founders Simon Costello and Aaron Chipper

FrankieOne, a Melbourne-based startup that provides an API platform for identity verification and fraud detection, said it has added $23 million AUD (about $15.4 million USD) in a Series A+, taking its Series A’s total to $45 million AUD (about $30 million USD). FrankieOne says this is the largest amount of VC funding raised by an Australian regtech so far.

The funding included a group of returning investors, including led backers AirTree Ventures and Greycroft, and participants Reinventure (financial services company Westpac’s venture arm), Tidal Ventures and Apex Capital Partners, which are all also existing investors. New strategic investors include Binance Labs and Kraken Ventures.

Founded in 2019 by serial fintech entrepreneurs Simon Costello and Aaron Chipper, FrankieOne connects banking, fintech, crypto and gaming companies to hundreds of data sources and works with 170 financial institutions around the world. The startup says it has seen 4x revenue growth over the last 12 months and its customers now include Westpac, Shopify, Afterpay, Binance, Zipmex and Pointsbet. Its team doubled over the past year, and it opened a new office in San Francisco.

Costello told TechCrunch that FrankieOne grew out of a neobank venture he also founded with Chipper called Frankie. Costello and Chipper wanted Frankie to differentiate from the rest of the industry with the best onboarding experience, using the top identity and fraud prevention tools available, but “this process proved to be unnecessarily complicated, requiring multiple integrations and it was clear we would need to create our own risk-based onboarding,” Costello said. They realized other fintech companies also had the same problems.

As a result, FrankieOne was created to streamline processes around regulation and compliance. It now provides a single API that connects third-party vendors with over 350 data sources in 48 countries.

Costello explained that most fintechs, banks and crypto companies deal with shortfalls in match rates, coverage or ability to scale because they connect to a single vendor for their identity needs. This means their tech stacks also need constant maintenance.

FrankieOne solves this problem by connecting to hundreds of data sources from multiple vendor partners, which means their clients no longer have to rely on a single vendor. Its API’s connected vendors include established financial services companies like Equifax, Experian and Socure and fast-growth startups such as Sardine AI.

“What sets FrankieOne apart is it allows its customers to switch on vendors, create dynamic workflows, add in further fraud signals and add new markets, ensuring our customers can respond quickly to changing regulations and updated business requirements, without taking on any additional work burden,” Costello said.

FrankieOne’s customers are usually mid- to large-sized organizations in highly regulated industries that need to adapt to complex policies that frequently change, he added.

As an example of how FrankieOne has been used by its clients, Costello pointed to sports betting app Pointsbet, which previously used a single provider for customer onboarding, but dealt with high numbers of prospective users who couldn’t be verified in real time. This resulted in customer drop-offs, or further manual work to verify their details. Since working with FrankieOne, Pointsbet has been able to increase customers onboarding by 14%.

When Westpac began digitizing more of their financial services, they still used separate legacy systems and, as a result, needed to increase their pass rates to reduce drop-offs. They integrated FrankieOne’s platform for their KYC (know your customer) feature on their new BaaS (banking-as-a-service). This increased pass rates significantly, so the firm added FrankieOne across its entire group.

The latest round of funding will allow FrankieOne to scale more quickly, and expand in North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific. Costello said it will also enable FrankieOne to make a significant investment into its ecosystem of vendors, data sources and fraud capabilities, enabling it to grow its customer base.

AirTree and Greycroft return to lead Australian regtech FrankieOne’s Series A+ by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/frankieone-series-a-plus/

Convertible instruments, whether in the form of convertible notes, simple agreements for future equity (SAFEs) or otherwise, have long been used in the startup world to avoid a fundamental issue: the extreme difficulty associated with valuing early-stage companies. But what happens when the very mechanisms designed to address this problem become a part of it?

Valuation caps, for instance, are now employed in most early-stage convertible instruments. By imposing a ceiling on the price at which a convertible instrument converts to future stock ownership, valuation caps were intended to protect early-stage investors from extreme, unexpected growth (and, consequently, equity positions deemed excessively small by such investors).

However, valuation caps are increasingly being used as a proxy for the value of the company at the time of the investment — creating the very problem they were designed to help avoid, while adding unnecessary complexity for inexperienced founders and investors.

It isn’t surprising that founders and investors struggle to resist the lure to discuss present value when using valuation caps, despite efforts to push back against that use. This is especially true in contexts where the valuation cap “ceiling” expressly values the investment in a pre-conversion exit event (e.g., both the old pre-money valuation cap SAFEs and the newer post-money valuation cap SAFEs made available by Y Combinator).

Fortunately, there’s a better approach: the interim rate of return method.

The problem with early-stage valuations, or the crystal ball

Before we get to the solution, it’s useful to provide additional context on the problem — namely, why it’s so difficult to thoughtfully and rationally negotiate the value of early-stage companies.

Some will say that such valuations are difficult because early-stage companies don’t have meaningful (if any) revenue, have limited assets or are just an idea. Yet, while these arguments identify real issues, they miss what may be the most important one: Investors at the earliest stages are investing in a possible ownership structure that will typically only fully exist in the future upon completion of the founders’ vesting schedules.

Let’s say you’re an early-stage investor writing a $500,000 check for a startup at a stated pre-money valuation of $4.5 million, where 100% of the existing equity is held by a single founder and subject to a 4-year vesting schedule that just started.

On its face, that would entitle you to a 10% ownership in the company (i.e., the post-money value would be $5 million, with your capital representing 10% of the value). But your stake and the pre-money valuation at which you effectively invested depends on how much of the founder’s vesting schedule is actually completed, as shown by the following table:

Interim rate of return: A better approach to valuing early-stage startups by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/interim-rate-of-return-a-better-approach-to-valuing-early-stage-startups/

Cofactr co-founders Matthew Haber (l) and Phil Gulley (r). Image Credits: Cofactr (opens in a new window)

The investment round was led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, Broom Ventures, Cathexis Ventures, Sweet Spot Capital, Pioneer Fund, Seed River, Litani Ventures, Correlation Ventures and a few angel investors.

“The big players on the cap table are Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) and Y Combinator. YC helped us focus on finding and providing the things that people really loved about Cofactr and set us up to meet Ajay Agarwal at BCV, which immediately felt like a match. The BCV team understood the opportunities that can come out of a business that integrates hardware, logistics and software into a single solution, as well as the challenges that come with building in many areas simultaneously,” says Gulley.

Cofactr is a logistics and supply chain tech company that provides scalable warehousing and procurement for electronics manufacturers. The company today announced it raised a $6 million round of seed funding, to “lead the next generation of agile hardware materials management.” The company raised on a SAFE note with a $25 million cap. We spoke to the company’s team to learn more about its vision of the future.

Cofactr addresses a suite of challenges for electronics producers through pre-manufacturing, third-party logistics services and supply chain automation. By providing these products as a unified strategic solution, the goal is to enable hardware manufacturers the ability to get to production volume without investing in the specialized facilities or headcount historically needed to manage electronic components.

“Both Phil [Gulley, the company’s CRO and co-founder] and I are driven by the desire to solve problems. Before Cofactr, we were working on the engineering and solutions side of hardware with our previous company, BeSide Digital, starting off in the entertainment industry and growing to support companies like Zoox, Google and CrowdStrike across product and custom hardware for marketing,” said Matthew Haber, co-founder and CEO of Cofactr in an interview with TechCrunch. “A challenge we had, and saw reflected in the processes of our clients, was that building and scaling hardware felt incredibly laborious in comparison to software. After we sold BeSide, electronic supply chain and logistics was the biggest and most personal problem we could address.”

The company told me that the journey to Cofactr’s current state wasn’t entirely linear. The company initially built and ran a contract manufacturer for circuit board assembly, but realized that wasn’t the right context to tackle these problems. From there, the company evolved to build electronics-specific third-party logistics and procurement automation.

“Having worked in hardware and software we had the opportunity to experience both ecosystems and knew how easy things could be when technology bridges gaps between ideas and scale,” said Gulley. “That was the insight that Cofactr was born out of. It’s the company we wished existed when we were on the engineering side of the table.”

The investment round was led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, Broom Ventures, Cathexis Ventures, Sweet Spot Capital, Pioneer Fund, Seed River, Litani Ventures, Correlation Ventures and a few angel investors.

“The big players on the cap table are Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) and Y Combinator. YC helped us focus on finding and providing the things that people really loved about Cofactr and set us up to meet Ajay Agarwal at BCV, which immediately felt like a match. The BCV team understood the opportunities that can come out of a business that integrates hardware, logistics and software into a single solution, as well as the challenges that come with building in many areas simultaneously,” says Gulley.

The investors, in turn, see a future where the Cofactr team can put a dent in how electronics are manufactured.

“When we first met Cofactr founders, I was really impressed with their understanding of the challenges of electronic component procurement. We’ve never seen anything similar to the integrated software and logistics system they’ve built. It combines cloud procurement software, a network of suppliers and a turn-key logistics platform that handles shipping, customs management, counterfeit insurance, inventory, kitting and shipping management,” says Agarwal, partner at BCV, in an interview with TechCrunch. “With the Cofactr platform, hardware manufacturers can find electronic components, check pricing, order parts, handle replenishment and send parts to their partner manufacturers. Behind the scenes, Cofactr handles everything including the acquisition of the parts, storage and management of the inventory, control checks to ensure the inventory is not counterfeit and regular shipments of components to manufacturers.”

Cofactr appears to represent a continuation of BCV’s focus on logistics and supply chain. The investor has backed companies such as Kiva Systems (robotic fulfillment sold to Amazon); FourKites (supply chain visibility — which raised $30 million back in August); ShipBob (cloud fulfillment for e-commerce brands); TruckSmarter (mobile app to allow freight drivers to find and book their next load) and now Cofactr. In addition, it made an investment in Flux, which operates in a similar space, last year.

Of course, the pandemic, in particular, exposed many cracks in the supply chain. Ford, for example, warned its investors that it had to eat an additional $1 billion of costs in Q3 this year, largely due to supply chain challenges, and GM saw a 40% drop in profits in Q2 this year. It ain’t pretty out there, but that’s the fertile ground in which supply chain startups get to sow their opportunities.

“Electronics components were particularly hard to come by. That meant a lot of challenges for hardware companies, whether they’re building dishwashers, robots or smart speakers. In a handful of industries, we think there is an opportunity to create a vertically integrated software and logistics solution,” Agarwal explains. “A good example of this is ShipBob and what they built for mid-market e-commerce brands. Cofactr is doing this for procurement of electronic components, with a complete software-and-logistics solution for hardware manufacturers.”

The ultimate goal for Cofactr is to make hardware not-so-hard, the founders quip.

“There is starting to be a real groundswell of startups attacking the hardware engineering space, but we all have to interconnect and work together in the same way that software development tools do. You’ll be seeing more collaboration between Cofactr, other startups and well-established organizations that serve hardware,” says Gulley. “Fast-forward a few years and we see Cofactr as the cloud solution for pre-manufacturing infrastructure. Our vision feels something like the hardware manufacturing version of AWS; on-demand, cloud-based solutions for physical manufacturing. Today, companies can take a software product from MVP to massive scale without crippling infrastructure investments. In a decade, the same will be true for building hardware products and we believe that Cofactr will be a core enabler of that transformation.”

All of this makes a lot of sense in the context of the U.S. wanting to build a more reliable and resilient on-shore manufacturing capacity. The CHIPS act is making some real waves in the semiconductor industry, and there’s been a fair chunk of investment in logistics and electronics manufacturing in the past year. Last month, Makersite raised $18 million and Altana picked up $100 million.

Logistics and procurement on autopilot is the future Cofactr wants to live in by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/cofactr-seed-round/

Right on time for its annual post-Thanksgiving re:Invent festivities in Las Vegas, AWS last night announced its “AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge” — and before you click away, let me just point out that this is definitely more important than the prosaic name implies. As nations across the globe introduce legislation that governs how and where businesses can keep data on their local users, the large clouds either have to offer attractive solutions or run the risk of having their customers move to local clouds. Microsoft, with Purview, and Google, with Dataplex, also offer data governance tools, but none of them have gone quite as far as AWS in making digital sovereignty a core pillar of their cloud strategy.

Matt Garman, AWS’s senior vice president of Sales, Marketing and Global Services, notes that giving customers control over their data has always been a priority for AWS, but with constantly shifting and evolving legal requirements, managing all of this has become increasingly complex.

“In many places around the world, like in Europe, digital sovereignty policies are evolving rapidly. Customers are facing an incredible amount of complexity, and over the last 18 months, many have told us they are concerned that they will have to choose between the full power of AWS and a feature-limited sovereign cloud solution that could hamper their ability to innovate, transform, and grow. We firmly believe that customers shouldn’t have to make this choice,” he writes.

The idea of this pledge then is to tell these customers that AWS is fully committed to building out its set of sovereignty controls and features in its cloud. Some of these features are already here, including in AWS Control Tower, while others are obviously still in development. With re:Invent around the corner and this announcement preceding it, chances are we will hear a bit more about this later this week (or next year — AWS PR works in mysterious ways).

While the tools are still a work in progress, though, the pledge is not. The ideas here are straightforward, with AWS pledging to ensure that customers always have full control over the location of their data in AWS, with verifiable control over how it is accessed and the ability to encrypt it everywhere, be that in transit, at rest or in memory.

AWS also promises to make its cloud resilient against network disruptions and natural disasters. But that’s nothing new, of course, and in a way, neither are most of the other promises the company makes in this pledge. But it’s the fact that AWS spells all of this out that demonstrates that the company sees this as an opportunity to differentiate itself from the other cloud providers as it vies for lucrative public sector contracts. But it also clearly sees it as a threat, as these customers increasingly look to local cloud solutions that can help them navigate these data sovereignty challenges.

AWS announces Digital Sovereignty Pledge by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/aws-announces-digital-sovereignty-pledge/

To celebrate Cyber Monday, TechCrunch+ is having a sale! Until November 30th, take 25% off a subscription to secure access to all our work. 

TechCrunch+ is TechCrunch’s founder-focused analytical arm. We cover the trends behind the news, dig into venture capital numbers, report on how startups are executing today, and share advice and insight from tech operators. We’d love for you to join us.

You may have noticed more TechCrunch+ material on TechCrunch proper in the last few quarters. That’s thanks to our recently expanded staff. TechCrunch+ is obsessed with venture capital, climate, crypto, and reporting on who gets to build new companies.

We’re working to cover the startup market from a host of perspectives. Our goal is to better understand, to quote something dear to my heart, the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

We have big plans for 2023, including more reporters, more reporting, and more repartee. TechCrunch+ is a big tent — and one that we want to expand even further. So take advantage of our biggest sale of the year! We’re already hard at work to ensure you stay super informed about startups, tech, and venture.

Hugs, and happy holidays from myself and the TechCrunch+ crew,

Alex Wilhelm, EiC, TC+

Say hello to the TechCrunch+ Cyber Monday sale! by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/say-hello-to-the-techcrunch-cyber-monday-sale/