Category: TECHNOLOGY
Deepomatic wants to build the AI-based computer vision companion for field workers
French startup Deepomatic has raised a $10.5 million (€10 million) Series B funding round. While the founding round is relatively small, the startup has managed to convince some large-scale clients to use its visual automation platform. For instance, telecom companies use Deepomatic on the field to check that tasks have been completed successfully.
EnBW New Ventures and Orbia Ventures are leading the newly announced funding round, which Deepomatic closed in October. Existing investors Alven, Hi-Inov Dentressangl and, Swisscom Ventures are participating once again in a new round.
The startup has been around for a few years already as I first covered Deeepomatic back in 2015. The company has always been focused on deep learning for computer vision applications. The main issue is that it has been a long journey to find the right clients for this technology.
With the telecom industry, it seems like Deepomatic has finally unlocked its true potential. “We discovered an industry that very much needed what we were working on — and that was telecom companies,” co-founder and CEO Augustin Marty told me.
When a field worker is installing optical fiber cables or rolling out a new 5G tower, they have to fill out complicated forms to make sure that they followed some specific processes. It can be quite tedious as workers can be working for contractor companies. And those companies can be working with multiple telecom companies with different requirements.
It’s also easy to make a mistake when you are filling out a form. Sometimes, field workers can also say that something is working fine when it’s kind of working. It can create some QA issues, as we have seen in fiber concentration points.
That’s why many field service companies are also working with photos. When they are done installing something, they have to take a photo of their installation and their instruments proving that some new equipment is up and running with the right parameters. It means more work.
With Deepomatic, field service companies mostly use photos as their benchmark. Photos are automatically analyzed to extract some knowledge. Deepomatic can then send some alerts if something feels off and should be double-checked.
“We started with the most complicated part, which is identifying mistakes,” Marty said. On top of that, Deepomatic now sells an end-to-end platform so that field workers only have to use Deepomatic to get something done. It also integrates with specific enterprise tools like ERPs.
When the startup works with a new client, there is some integration work so that Deepomatic works exactly as expected. It involves adding control points, reusing some of the existing tasks in its computer vision library or training its algorithm on a new set of photos. Deepomatic algorithms are trained on the startup’s own infrastructure. But its product can run on the client’s own cloud infrastructure and in some cases on premise.
The company currently has around 20 large accounts, such as Bouygues Telecom, Swisscom and Movistar, as well as a bunch of smaller clients. As this is enterprise software, clients usually pay hundreds of thousands of euros per year to use Deepomatic.
Every month, Deepomatic monitors more than one million on-field operations. More than 20,000 field workers are taking photos with their phone and uploading them to a Deepomatic backend every day.
Up next, Deepomatic and its team of 70 employees want to enter new markets and new industries, such as renewable energy, electric mobility, construction, insurance, etc. Deepomatic wants to work with companies in Europe, the U.S. and South America.
Many governments and big companies are currently investing heavily to overhaul their infrastructure for the next few decades. At the same time, there is a talent shortage for field workers. It seems like Deepomatic is arriving at the right time on the market to become an essential tool for this infrastructure overhaul.
Deepomatic wants to build the AI-based computer vision companion for field workers by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch
Bionaut Labs gets $43.2M for its tiny drug delivery robots
Founded in 2017, Bionaut Labs arrived out of stealth in March 2021, with plans to commercialize longstanding research around drug delivery robots. The Los Angeles-based startup today followed up its initial $20 million funding announcement with a $43.2 million Series B, bringing its total raise up to – you guessed it — $63.2 million. This round was led by Khosla Ventures and featured new investors, Deep Insight, OurCrowd, PSPRS, Sixty Degree Capital, Dolby Family Ventures, GISEV Family Ventures, What if Ventures, Tintah Grace and Gaingels.
If you’ve followed the robots space, you’re likely familiar with the research that gone into these tiny, remote controlled medical robots. Bionaut’s own work now has a couple of deadlines in place, including 2023 pre-clinical studies, followed by clinical trials with human patients the follow years.
“There has been a dearth of innovation around treatments for conditions that cause tremendous suffering, in large part because past failures have discouraged even the best of researchers,” CEO and cofounder Michael Shpigelmacher says in a release. “Bionaut Labs remains committed to finding new ways to treat these devastating diseases, which are long overdue for a breakthrough.”
The startup’s magnetically driven robots of the same name are designed to deliver treatments to the midbrain – a more direct application than standard systemically delivered (intravenously, orally, etc.) drugs. The firm has its eyes on a number of extremely debilitating conditions, including Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease.
This round of funding, meanwhile, will be focused on treatments for malignant glioma brain tumors and Dandy-Walker Syndrome. The money will also go toward advancing R&D on its technology and hitting the aforementioned milestones.
Shpigelmacher and cofounder Aviad Maizels were both previously involved with PrimeSense, the Israeli-based 3D imagining firm behind Microsoft Kinect. That firm was acquired by Apple in 2013 and ultimately served as the foundation for its Face ID tech.
Bionaut Labs gets $43.2M for its tiny drug delivery robots by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/bionaut-labs-gets-43-2m-for-its-tiny-drug-delivery-robots/
Investors Are Losing Patience With Driverless Cars’ Slow Pace
Investors are getting impatient with the pace of driverless-car development, pressuring an industry that has had to scale back plans and retrench.
A scale story: TechCrunch’s parent company links up with Taboola
Folks often ask if Crunchbase and TechCrunch are still the same company (nope). Many express surprise that AOL was once this publication’s sole parent (yep). The saga of Who Owns TechCrunch is actually somewhat interesting. Various corporate developments over the last decade saw TechCrunch trade hands several times, including our most recent ejection from Verizon (long story) into the arms of private equity (shorter story).
Today we’re part of a reconstituted Yahoo, an entity that combines its historical assets — sans Alibaba — with AOL and other properties including this publication. I bring all that up because our parent company is in the news today. So much so that we’re pushing the value of a public company sharply higher by dint of our partnering with it, and taking a sizable stake in its equity at the same time.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
Because my employer is about to own just under a fourth of Taboola, I want to rewind the clock a bit today and recall how we wound up in a world where both Taboola and Outbrain — online advertising companies that you are familiar with, and have at times collected criticism — are public companies.
This should be lightweight and fun. Frankly, before today, I had never read a Taboola or Outbrain earnings report. We will explore together! Into the numbers!
A merger that didn’t
A scale story: TechCrunch’s parent company links up with Taboola by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/a-scale-story-techcrunchs-parent-company-links-up-with-taboola/
Meta Fined $276 Million in Europe for Data-Scraping Leak
The fine issued by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, Meta’s main privacy regulator in the European Union, is the latest sign of how authorities in the region are becoming more aggressive in applying the bloc’s privacy law to big technology companies.
BlockFi files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
This past year has been hectic for the crypto lending platform BlockFi and today is no different as the company shared an announcement that it filed for voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey.
On November 10 the crypto platform shared in a tweet that it paused activity, including withdraws, and stated on Monday that “activity continues to be paused at this time.”
The bankruptcy was commenced to “stabilize its business and provide the company with the opportunity to consummate a comprehensive restructuring transaction” for all its clients and other stakeholders.
BlockFi says it has $256.9 million in cash, which will be used to provide “sufficient liquidity to support certain operations during the restructuring process.”
The company said it will focus on recovering all obligations owed to BlockFi and counterparties like FTX.
In July, FTX signed a deal with the option to buy BlockFi for up to $240 million, the CEO of BlockFi Zac Prince tweeted. Since then, things have tumbled as FTX collapsed and also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, weeks before BlockFi. With that said, “the company expects that recoveries from FTX will be delayed.”
The company stated that it has a consolidated amount of over 100,000 creditors across a massive range of $1 billion to $10 billion in liabilities and assets, according to a court filing.
This news follows a number of crypto-focused companies, like Voyager and Celsius, which are also currently going through bankruptcy proceedings.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged BlockFi for failing to register its retail crypto lending product and violating the registration provisions of the Investment Company Act of 1940, according to a press release in February. To settle the charges, BlockFi agreed to pay a $50 million penalty to the SEC and an additional $50 million in fines to 32 U.S. states to settle similar charges.
BlockFi files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/blockfi-files-for-chapter-11-bankruptcy/
Cameroonian crypto and savings platform Ejara raises $8M, led by Anthemis and Dragonfly
Ejara, a Cameroonian fintech offering an investment app that allows users to buy crypto and save through decentralized wallets, has raised $8 million in Series A investment.
London-based venture capital firm Anthemis co-led the growth round alongside crypto-focused fund Dragonfly Capital. Anthemis is a follow-on investor in Ejara, having also led the fintech’s $2 million seed round announced last October.
Participating VC firms in this new financing include other follow-on investors Mercy Corps Ventures, Coinshares Ventures and Lateral Capital–and new investors such as Circle Ventures, Moonstake, Emurgo, Hashkey Group and BPI France. Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockwoks is one of the angels in the round.
Ejara wants to “democratize access to investment and savings products across the region, using blockchain technology.” While its recently launched savings product where it tokenizes government bonds is one of the ways it uses blockchain, so is its crypto product which was pivotal to the two-year-old startup raising $10 million in less than 18 months.
By providing users in Francophone Africa with an option to buy, sell, exchange and store their crypto investments, CEO Nelly Chatue-Diop and her co-founder Baptiste Andrieux saw an opportunity to increase crypto activity in the region. However, unlike most crypto platforms in Africa that provide custodial wallets to users, Ejara offered customers the option of non-custodial wallets so they could own and store their keys. That decision paid off, especially during this period when the collapse of FTX and other crypto organizations continue to underscore the need for customers to prioritize privacy and ownership when dealing with crypto and tokenized assets.
“When everyone was taking the other route and building centralized exchanges, we always thought that, if you want to own crypto, you need to own your keys. And that’s pretty much what’s saved us in turbulent times,” Chatue-Diop said to TechCrunch over a call.
Ejara’s crypto product has caught on fast with users in a region where access to financial products is limited to the most informed and wealthy. In addition to connecting their mobile money accounts and accessing crypto, users could also make cross-border transactions via stablecoins. As a result, users on the platform have grown in multiples over the last 14 months. Last October, it had 8,000 users from Cameroon, its first market and others including Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, and Senegal. Now, it counts over 70,000 users across nine Francophone African countries.
Chatue-Diop – who noted that Ejara has seen revenue growth 10x and achieved a 15% month-on-month transaction volume growth since last October despite crypto’s meltdown – expects users on the platform to reach 100,000 by the end of the year. Its savings product, which Ejara described, in a statement, as the first of its kind in the crypto world, was launched to get it there. “In an ecosystem where many people around the world are trying to find use cases for blockchain technology, Ejara has demonstrated that startups in emerging markets are likely to pioneer many such innovations in web3,” the company added.
With this product, the Cameroonian fintech asserts that users do not need to set up a bank account to access savings products but can instead start that journey with Ejara by downloading its app and depositing a minimum of 1,000 CFA franc (~$1.5). Users can earn up to 10% interest on their two-year deposits on the platform, said Chatue-Diop, while adding that Ejara is going up against traditional financial institutions with this product.
“The competition for treasury bonds is with the traditional asset managers and banks. And given the way they are structured, they mainly target high-net-worth individuals and institutions like other banks or insurance companies,” she commented. “Nobody is targeting the woman selling the markets or the man driving a motorbike for a living. And because we structure the product the way we do, we have many people come to our platform because they can save up to 1000 CFA franc daily.”
Both lead investors in this round recognize Ejara’s ambition to be a financial super app of some sort for users in French-speaking Africa and even those in the diaspora who send and invest money back home. Mia Deng, a partner at Dragonfly said Ejara is well-positioned to imitate the growth of China’s Alipay and WeChat Pay, two prominent web2 super apps based, in the early 2010s and help the Francophone region achieve a web3 financial leap in the coming years.
“Conscious of the challenges across the zone, Ejara does not intend to limit itself to being a crypto app, but rather to become a one-stop-shop for products tailored to the needs of Africans: a shop where a suite of financial products will be accessible at their fingertips, without the need for any crypto knowledge,” stated Ruth Foxe Blader, partner at Anthemis, on Ejara’s potential.
Ejara’s journey to a million users is somewhat dependent on how fast its target audience catches on to the nuances associated with crypto, savings and investments. It’s one reason why the fintech is championing a couple of non-profit initiatives to teach the public, particularly women, girls and orphans about crypto, savings, investments (it is yet to launch its fractional investing product) and financial education while prepping the market for its growth.
“The initiative we launched for women and orphans and girls is to improve their financial literacy and computer skills. When I think about Ejara, I think about an ecosystem and as a leveler to bring the community together, whether they are in Africa or the diaspora, whether they belong to the elites, or they are in the poorer layers of the community,” said the chief executive who also mentioned that Ejara recently obtained a license to extend its offerings to the French-speaking diaspora in Europe.
Last week, Djamo, an Ivorian fintech announced what seems to be the largest equity round in the country. At $10 million, Ejara is one of Cameroon’s most-funded companies (if not the most funded). That’s two similar events across different Francophone markets in quick succession. Though it’s too early to say, it appears the market is rapidly embracing innovation, and its ecosystem — which for the most part, embodies a strict regulatory landscape — is becoming more attractive to foreign venture capital despite the current global downturn.
Cameroonian crypto and savings platform Ejara raises $8M, led by Anthemis and Dragonfly by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch
Google, Microsoft-backed VerSe Innovation cuts 5% of workforce, reduces salaries
India’s VerSe Innovation — the $5 billion Indian startup behind news aggregator Dailyhunt, short-video platform Josh, and hyperlocal video app PublicVibe — has cut 150 employees, or 5% of its workforce of 3,000, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed.
The Bengaluru-based startup informed impacted employees on Friday and separately held a town hall meeting on Monday where it announced pay cuts to its remaining staff, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
It’s a major turn for VerSe Innovation, which is backed by the likes of Google and Microsoft and raised more than $800 million in fresh funding as recently as April of this year. The change speaks to just how much the bottom has fallen out from under the advertising market, how that’s impacting high-profile consumer businesses reliant on it, and how that’s stretching to even some of the fastest-growing digital markets like India.
“Given the current economic climate, like other businesses, we’ve evaluated our strategic priorities. Considering the long-term viability of the business and our people, we have taken steps to implement our regular bi-annual performance management cycle and made performance and business considerations to streamline our costs and our teams,” said Umang Bedi, co-founder of VerSe Innovation, in a prepared statement responding to queries originally sent on Saturday.
He also confirmed that the startup implemented an 11% salary cut for all remaining employees with salaries above $12,200 (10 lakh Indian rupees) per annum.
“We remain extremely committed and bullish across our entire family of apps — Josh, Dailyhunt and PublicVibe — to drive profitable growth,” he said.
In April, VerSe Innovation raised $805 million at a nearly $5 billion valuation in a Series J round led by Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments). Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers’), Luxor Capital, Sumeru Ventures, Sofina Group and Baillie Gifford.
The startup at the time said that its Josh app — one of the local alternatives to TikTok, which India banned in mid-2020 — had climbed to over 150 million users, including 50 million creators. Similarly, Dailyhunt grew its creator ecosystem to over 100,000 content partners and crossed the mark of 350 million users, while PublicVibe expanded its user base to over 5 million monthly active users.
Nonetheless, that growth did not help VerSe Innovation offset its losses.
In its regulatory filings, which Entrackr reported, the startup noted that its losses in the financial year 2021-22 grew over 217% to $314 million (2,563 crores Indian rupees) from $99 million (808 crores Indian rupees) in the previous year. However, its operating revenue reportedly increased about 45% to $118 million (965 crores Indian rupees) from $82 million (666 crores Indian rupees).
VerSe Innovation has become the latest Indian startup to cut its workforce due to ongoing economic uncertainties. In the last couple of months, Byju’s, Unacademy and Chargebee, among others, have laid off hundreds of employees.
Google, Microsoft-backed VerSe Innovation cuts 5% of workforce, reduces salaries by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/28/verse-innovation-layoff-salary-cut/
Cyber Insurers Turn Attention to Catastrophic Hacks
While cyber insurance has evolved significantly in recent years, insurers say they might still be unprepared for the fallout from a catastrophic cyberattack.
BlockFi Files for Bankruptcy as Latest Crypto Casualty
Cryptocurrency lender BlockFi filed for bankruptcy, making it the latest major digital assets company to fail since FTX, with which BlockFi is financially intertwined.