Архив рубрики: Startups

Daily Crunch: Embedded finance fintech Pezesha raises $11M pre-Series A equity-debt round

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The TechCrunch Top 3
Embed that finance: Pezesha, a Kenyan-based fintech startup, is flush with $11 million in new capital as it seeks to bridge the gap between access to financial products and what is a “$330 billion financing deficit for the small enterprises that make up 90% of Africa’s businesses,” Annie reports.
We’re all connected: If you haven’t yet seen yourself in one of your Twitter connection’s Circles, you may soon. The social media giant is launching the “Close Friends” features globally, Ivan reports. Add a bunch of people to your Circle and get tweeting.
No delivery for you: Delivery platform Gopuff has only been in Europe since November 2021, but Natasha L writes it made the decision to discontinue its service in Spain. She cites that perhaps this is to focus more on the United Kingdom market where revenue there is increasing 30% month over month.
Startups and VC
Initialized Capital was VC Garry Tan’s answer to a need first highlighted by Y Combinator. As a partner at the accelerator from 2010 to 2015, Tan spent time working with companies to better understand what they needed from investors after they graduated. This week, he announced he’s back at the helm at YC, and Natasha M interviewed him about what’s next for Y Combinator.
The company behind last summer’s hot social app, Poparazzi, appears to be readying a round two following its $15 million Series A announced in June. A new listing in the App Store under the developer’s account, TTYL, is teasing a pre-release app called Made with Friends, Sarah reports.
When the news hits your eye, like a big pizza pie, that’s a-more-news:
Notification bubbles: Devin reports that, at long last, there’s an underwater messaging app.
Money for laundering: Flush with fresh funds, U.K. “eco laundry” startup Oxwash raised $12 million to spin up its growth plans, Natasha L reports.
Faster when further afield: The U.K.’s £5 billion Project Gigabit gives out its first contract to connect rural areas to high-speed broadband, Paul reports.
PriceOye gets the Thiel seal of approval: Islamabad-based startup PriceOye offers a range of electronics products, including smartphones, TVs and home appliances. It just closed a round of funding from investors, including Peter Thiel, reports Jagmeet.
Dodging the SPAC bullet: Alex and Anna wrote a really interesting piece on TC+ (use “DC” for a 15% discount if you’re not a subscriber yet) about SPACs, how they are falling apart, and how Europe may have dodged a bullet on that front.
How to communicate to your crypto community when things aren’t going well
Image Credits: Peter Dazeley (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Because it’s a nascent industry that’s largely unregulated, crypto companies are not generally skilled at crisis communications. (We’re being generous here.)
When a bank or financial services company experiences a massive security failure or a volatility shock, federal laws dictate how it must communicate with its customers. Crypto startups, however, must rely on their own best judgment.
“There’s little benefit in declaring that the sky is falling and begging your community for investment, but an overly rosy outlook won’t fool anyone either,” says Tahem Verma, co-founder and CEO of Mesha.

How to communicate with your crypto community when things aren’t going well

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Big Tech Inc.
Last chance to get your game on in the Facebook Gaming app. The social media giant said it is shutting down its stand-alone app at the end of October, Aisha reports. Don’t worry, you can still find your games in Gaming on actual Facebook. When launching the separate app two years ago, it seemed to be more difficult than Facebook bargained for, so it decided to join ’em instead of beating ’em.
Data duh!: Millions of faces and vehicle license plates were leaked online in China, Zack writes.
Ghosts can drive?: A Tesla Model 3 owner filed a class action lawsuit against the electric vehicle maker alleging the car keeps “phantom braking,” Jaclyn reports. 
New security regime: Broadband and mobile carriers in the United Kingdom could face fines of up to $117,000 per day or 10% of their sales if they don’t abide by some new cybersecurity rules, Ingrid writes.
More Elon: Taylor has the 411 on Elon Musk’s new strategy for getting out of the Twitter deal — hint, it involves the company’s whistleblower. Meanwhile, Paul goes over the new subpoena related to the ongoing battle.

Daily Crunch: Embedded finance fintech Pezesha raises $11M pre-Series A equity-debt round

Pliops lands $100M for chips that accelerate analytics in data centers

Analyzing data generated within the enterprise — for example, sales and purchasing data — can lead to insights that improve operations. But some organizations are struggling to process, store and use their vast amounts of data efficiently. According to an IDC survey commissioned by Seagate, organizations collect only 56% of the data available throughout their lines of business, and out of that 56%, they only use 57%.

Part of the problem is that data-intensive workloads require substantial resources, and that adding the necessary compute and storage infrastructure is often expensive. For companies moving to the cloud specifically, IDG reports that they plan to devote $78 million toward infrastructure this year. Thirty-six percent cited controlling costs as their top challenge.
That’s why Uri Beitler launched Pliops, a startup developing what he calls “data processors” for enterprise and cloud data centers. Pliop’s processors are engineered to boost the performance of databases and other apps that run on flash memory, saving money in the long run, he claims.
“It became clear that today’s data needs are incompatible with yesterday’s data center architecture. Massive data growth has collided with legacy compute and storage shortcomings, creating slowdowns in computing, storage bottlenecks and diminishing networking efficiency,” Beitler told TechCrunch in an email interview. “While CPU performance is increasing, it’s not keeping up, especially where accelerated performance is critical. Adding more infrastructure often proves to be cost prohibitive and hard to manage. As a result, organizations are looking for solutions that free CPUs from computationally intensive storage tasks.”
Pliops isn’t the first to market with a processor for data analytics. Nvidia sells the BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU). Marvell has its Octeon technology. Oracle’s SPARC M7 chip has a data analytics accelerator coprocessor with a specialized set of instructions for data transformation. And in the realm of startups, Blueshift Memory and Speedata are creating hardware that they say can perform analytics tasks significantly faster than standard processors.
Image Credits: Pliops
But Pliops claims to be further along than most, with deployments and pilots with customers (albeit unnamed) including fintechs, “medium-sized” communication service providers, data center operators and government labs. The startup’s early traction won over investors, it would seem, which poured $100 million into its Series D round that closed today.
Koch Disruptive Technologies led the tranche, with participation from SK Hynix and Walden International’s Lip-Bu Tan, bringing Pliops’ total capital raised to date to more than $200 million. Beitler says that it’ll be put toward building out the company’s hardware and software roadmap, bolstering Pliops’ footprint with partners and expanding its international headcount.
“Many of our customers saw tremendous growth during the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks in part to their ability to react quickly to the new work environment and conditions of uncertainty. Pliops certainly did. While some customers were affected by supply chain issues, we were not,” Beitler said. “We do not see any slowdown in data growth — or the need to leverage it. Pliops was strong before this latest funding round and even stronger now.”
Accelerating data processing
Beitler, the former director of advanced memory solutions at Samsung’s Israel Research Center, co-founded Pliops in 2017 alongside Moshe Twitto and Aryeh Mergi. Twitto was a research scientist at Samsung developing signal processing technologies for flash memory, while Mergi co-launched a number of startups — including two that were acquired by EMC and SanDisk — prior to joining Pliops.
Pliop’s processor delivers drive fail protection for solid-state drives (SSD) as well as in-line compression, a technology that shrinks the size of data by finding identical data sequences and then saving only the first sequence. Beitler claims the company’s technology can reduce drive space while expanding capacity, mapping “variable-sized” compressed objects within storage to reduce wasted space.
A core component of Pliops’ processor is its hardware-accelerated key-value storage engine. In key-value databases — databases where data is stored in a “key-value” format and optimized for reading and writing — key-value engines manage all the persistent data directly. Beitler makes the case that CPUs are typically over-utilized when running these engines, resulting in apps not taking full advantage of SSD’s capabilities.
“Organizations are looking for solutions that free CPUs from computationally-intensive storage tasks. Our hardware helps create a modern data center architecture by leveraging a new generation of hardware-accelerated data processing and storage management technology — one that delivers orders of magnitude improvement in performance, reliability and scalability,” Beitler said. “In short, Pliops enables getting more out of existing infrastructure investments.”
Pliops’ processor became commercially available last July. The development team’s current focus is accelerating the ingest of data for machine learning use cases, Beitler says — use cases that have grown among Pliops’ current and potential customers.
Image Credits: Pliops
The road ahead
Certainly, Pliops has its work cut out for it. Nvidia is a formidable competitor in the data processing accelerator space, having spent years developing its BlueField lineup. And AMD acquired DPU vendor Pensando for $1.9 billion, signaling its wider ambitions.
A move that could pay dividends for Pliops is joining the Open Programmable Infrastructure Project (OPI), a relatively new venture under the Linux Foundation that aims to create standards around data accelerator hardware. While Pliops isn’t a member yet — current members include Intel, Nvidia, Marvell, F5, Red Hat, Dell and Keysight Technologies — it stands to reason that becoming one could expose its technology to a larger customer base.
Beitler demurred when asked about OPI, but pointed out that the market for data acceleration is still nascent and growing.
“We continue to see both infrastructure and application teams being overwhelmed with underperforming storage and overwhelmed applications that aren’t meeting company’s data demands,” Beitler said. “The overall feedback is that our processor is a game-changing product and without it companies are required to make years of investments in software and hardware engineering to solve the same problem.”
Pliops lands $100M for chips that accelerate analytics in data centers

Datch secures $10M to build voice assistants to factory floors

Datch, a company that develops AI-powered voice assistants for industrial customers, today announced that it raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Blackhorn Ventures. The proceeds will be used to expand operations, CEO Mark Fosdike said, as well as develop new software support, tools and capabilities.
Datch started when Fosdike, who has a background in aerospace engineering, met two former Siemens engineers — Aric Thorn and Ben Purcell. They came to the collective realization that voice products built for business customers have to overcome business-specific challenges, like understanding jargon, acronyms and syntax unique to particular customers.
“The way we extract information from systems changes every year, but the way we input information — especially in the industrial world — hasn’t changed since the invention of the keyboard and database,” Fosdike said. “The industrial world had been left in the dark for years, and we knew that developing a technology with voice-visual AI would help light the way for these factories.”
The voice assistants that Datch builds leverage AI to collect and structure data from users in a factory or in the field, parsing commands like “Report an issue for the Line 1 Spot Welder. I estimate it will take half a day to fix.” They run on a smartphone and link to existing systems to write and read records, including records from enterprise resource and asset management platforms.
Datch’s assistants provide a timeline of events and can capture data without an internet connection; they auto-sync once back online. Using them, workers can fill out company forms, create and update work orders, assign tasks and search through company records all via voice.
Fosdike didn’t go into detail about how Datch treats the voice data, save that it encrypts data both in-transit and at rest and performs daily backups.
“We have to employ a lot of tight, automated feedback loops to train the voice and [language] data, and so everyone’s interaction with Datch is slightly different, depending on the company and team they work within,” Fosdike explained. “Customers are exploring different use cases such as using the [language] data in predictive maintenance, automated classification of cause codes, and using the voice data to predict worker fatigue before it becomes a critical safety risk.”
That last bit about predicting worker fatigue is a little suspect. The idea that conditions like tiredness can be detected in a person’s voice isn’t a new one, but some researchers believe it’s unlikely AI can flag them with 100% accuracy. After all, people express tiredness in different ways, depending not only on the workplace environment but on their sex and cultural, ethnic and demographic backgrounds.
The tiredness-detecting scenario aside, Fosdike asserts that Datch’s technology is helping industrial clients get ahead of turbulence in the economy by “vastly improving” the efficiency of their operations. Frontline staff typically have to work with reporting tools that aren’t intuitive, he notes, and in many cases, voice makes for a less cumbersome, faster alternative form of input.
“We help frontline workers with productivity and solve the pain point of time wasted on their reports by decreasing the process time,” Fosdike said. “Industrial companies are fast realizing that to keep up with demand or position themselves to withstand a global pandemic, they need to find a way to scale with more than just peoplepower. Our AI offers these companies an efficient solution in a fraction of the time and with less overhead needed.”
Datch competes with Rain, Aiqudo and Onvego, all of which are developing voice technologies for industrial customers. Deloitte’s Maxwell, Genba and Athena are rivals in Fosdike’s eyes, as as well. But business remains steady — Datch counts ConEd, Singapore Airlines, ABB Robotics and the New York Power Authority among its clients.
“We raised this latest round earlier than expected due to the influx of demand from the market. The timing is right to capitalize on both the post-COVID boom in digital transformation as well as corporate investments driven by the infrastructure bill,” Fosdike said, referring to the $1 trillion package U.S. lawmakers passed last November. “Currently we have a team of 20, and plan to use the funds to grow to 55 to 60 people, scaling to roughly 40 by the end of the year.”
To date, Datch has raised $15 million in venture capital.
Datch secures $10M to build voice assistants to factory floors

PayTalk promises to handle all sorts of payments with voice, but the app has a long way to go

Neji Tawo, the founder of boutique software development company Wiscount Corporation, says he was inspired by his dad to become an engineer. When Tawo was a kid, his dad tasked him with coming up with a formula to calculate the gas in the fuel tanks at his family’s station. Tawo then created an app for gas stations to help prevent gas siphoning.
The seed of the idea for Tawo’s latest venture came from a different source: a TV ad for a charity. Frustrated by his experience filling out donation forms, Tawo sought an alternative, faster way to complete such transactions. He settled on voice.
Tawo’s PayTalk, which is one of the first products in Amazon’s Black Founders Build with Alexa Program, uses conversational AI to carry out transactions via smart devices. Using the PayTalk app, users can do things like find a ride, order a meal, pay bills, purchase tickets and even apply for a loan, Tawo says.
“We see the opportunity in a generation that’s already using voice services for day-to-day tasks like checking the weather, playing music, calling friends and more,” Tawo said. “At PayTalk, we feel voice services should function like a person — being capable of doing several things from hailing you a ride to taking your delivery order to paying your phone bills.”

PayTalk is powered by out-of-the-box voice recognition models on the frontend and various API connectors behind the scenes, Tawo explains. In addition to Alexa, the app integrates with Siri and Google Assistant, letting users add voice shortcuts like “Hey Siri, make a reservation on PayTalk.”
“Myself and my team have bootstrapped this all along the way, as many VCs we approached early on were skeptical about voice being the device form factor of the future. The industry is in its nascent stages and many still view it with skepticism,” Tawo said. “With the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent shift to doing more remotely across different types of transactions (i.e. ordering food from home, shopping online, etc.), we … saw that there was increased interest in the use of voice services. This in turn boosted demand for our product and we believe that we are positioned to continue to expand our offerings and make voice services more useful as a result.”
Tawo’s pitch for PayTalk reminded me much of Viv, the startup launched by Siri co-creator Adam Cheyer (later acquired by Samsung) that proposed voice as the connective tissue between disparate apps and services. It’s a promising idea — tantalizing, even. But where PayTalk is concerned, the execution isn’t quite there yet. 
The PayTalk app is only available for iOS and Android at the moment, and in my experience with it, it’s a little rough around the edges. A chatbot-like flow allows you to type commands — a nice fallback for situations where voice doesn’t make sense (or isn’t appropriate) — but doesn’t transition to activities particularly gracefully. When I used it to look for a cab by typing the suggested “book a ride” command, PayTalk asked for a pickup and dropoff location before throwing me into an Apple Maps screen without any of the information I’d just entered.
The reservation and booking functionality seems broken as well. PayTalk walked me through the steps of finding a restaurant, asking which time I’d like to reserve, the size of my party and so on. But the app let me “confirm” a table for 2 a.m. at SS106 Aperitivo Bar — an Italian restaurant in Alberta — on a day the restaurant closes at 10 p.m.
Image Credits: PayTalk
Other “categories” of commands in PayTalk are very limited in what they can accomplish — or simply nonfunctional. I can only order groceries from two services in my area (Downtown Brooklyn) at present — MNO African Market and Simi African Foods Market. Requesting a loan prompts an email with a link to Glance Capital, a personal loan provider for gig workers, that throws a 404 error when clicked. A command to book “luxury services” like a yacht or “sea plane” (yes, really) fails to reach anything resembling a confirmation screen, while the “pay for parking” command confusingly asks for a zone number.
To fund purchases through PayTalk (e.g. parking), there’s an in-app wallet. I couldn’t figure out a way to transfer money to it, though. The app purports to accept payment cards, but tapping on the “Use Card” button triggers a loading animation that quickly times out.
I could go on. But suffice it to say that PayTalk is in the very earliest stages of development. I began to think the app had been released prematurely, but PayTalk’s official Twitter account has been advertising it for at least the past few months.
Perhaps PayTalk will eventually grow into the shoes of the pitch Tawo gave me, so to speak — Wiscount is kicking off a four-month tenure at the Black Founders Build with Alexa Program. In the meantime, it must be pointed out that Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri are already capable of handling much of what PayTalk promises to one day accomplish.

The battle for voice recognition inside vehicles is heating up

“With the potential $100,000 investment [from the Black Founders Build with Alexa Program], we will seek to raise a seed round to expand our product offerings to include features that would allow customers to seamlessly carry out e-commerce and financial transactions on voice service-powered devices,” Tawo said. “PayTalk is mainly a business-to-consumer platform. However, as we continue to innovate and integrate voice-activated options … we see the potential to support enterprise use cases by replacing and automating the lengthy form filling processes that are common for many industries like healthcare.”
Hopefully, the app’s basic capabilities get attention before anything else.
PayTalk promises to handle all sorts of payments with voice, but the app has a long way to go

Why OSOM went web3

“I want to do some crazy stuff,” Jason Keats says with a laugh. “I want to bring back that GEM phone.”
He reaches behind him and pulls the strikingly slender device off a shelf. The battery’s dead, but as a prop, it still works. Essential released images of the prototype device in October 2019 — roughly four months before the company closed its doors. All that remains now are a handful of devices and the dreams of some of its co-creators like Keats, who would go on to found OSOM a few months after Essential’s demise.
“It’s a new way to interact with your device,” Keats explains. “It actually worked really well one-handed with a big screen, a quality camera. It was so easy to use. And the length allowed us to have a good diversity of antennas inside the device, even though it was a small form factor.”
Image Credits: Essential
OSOM’s first phone, unveiled late last year, shares more design DNA with Essential’s first handset, the PH1. From a pure hardware design perspective, it’s not especially adventurous. Keats notes, as an aside, that people have stopped him on the street to ask whether it’s the iPhone 14 while he’s using it.
“Our first product needs to be a more traditional device,” OSOM’s co-founder/CEO explains. “You can’t be like, ‘here’s a crazy brand with a crazy thing.’ You’re gonna sell like five.”
So the Bay Area company went for a far more straightforward design with the OV1. It’s a premium flagship, devoid of the glitz of, say, Nothing’s first product. It is, among other things, a pragmatic framework on which the firm can execute future experiments — a sign of a serious company selling a product on serious concerns like user privacy.
As we discovered last month, however, the OV1 will never see the light of day. In its place comes the Saga, a device branded by blockchain startup, Solana, that offers the promise of a web3-first mobile experience. It is, effectively, the OV1 with a slightly different paint job (one of Solana’s requests was the addition of green buttons to match the company’s branding) and the blockchain company’s web3 software stack.
Image Credits: OSOM
Keats says he was introduced to Anatoly Yakovenko through a mutual friend when the Solana Labs CEO explained that the company was looking for a hardware maker to bring its dream of a blockchain-focused mobile device to life. The pair chatted over Signal and met over coffee a week later.
“We realized there were such parallels between our fields and our visions for the future that meshed,” Keats says. “He needed someone who could build hardware and arrange for it to be manufactured, who knew the players in Asia to actually build a quality device. We needed a user and a customer base that was excited about consumer choice, self-custody and individual privacy.”
Keats won’t disclose specifics of the deal, only explaining that suddenly OSOM has far less concern about its future. “They’re our exclusive launch partner, and there are certain MOQs (minimum order quantity) that are involved in it. They’ve made an investment in the company that guaranteed our future.”
The deal finds the already-delayed device’s release moving from Q4 of this year to “early 2023.” With the additional months ahead of release, OSOM opted to improve the camera sensor and bump up the RAM and storage, from 8/128GB to 12/256GB. Those numbers came with a price increase, pushing the device from the earlier promise of “well under” $1,000 to right around it.
Image Credits: Solana
“I said, look guys, first device, sell it for $1,000 and show that you’re selling a $1,600 phone for $1,000,” Keats explains. “That says a lot about what we’re willing to do. We’re trying to build that community, and building a super premium phone. The other side of that is it leaves us a window to do a lower cost version in the future.”
OSOM’s decision to partner out of the gate is understandable. The U.S. phone market was regarded as nearly impossible to crack well before sales figures began dropping. Launching a new handset from a new mobile company seems like a recipe for disaster. Essential — with its pedigree and hype — reportedly sold fewer than 90,000 units its first year in existence.
Keats cites Nothing founder Carl Pei’s knack for building an organic fanbase as inspiration for OSOM’s attempts to break into the U.S. market (Nothing, too, is betting on crypto/web3 in a big way). The promise of a privacy-focused handset with good specs and vanilla Android sounds good, but does all of that add up to product that can truly differentiate itself in a mature and saturated market place whose sales have consolidated among a few big players?
Image Credits: OSOM
A crypto-focused deal differentiates the product in a crowded market without a radical Hail Mary like the GEM design, which can then be served up to Solana’s loyal fanbase. Keats says striking a deal wasn’t make or break at this early stage, but certainly gives OSOM a lot more breathing room than it might have otherwise.
How long the exclusivity deal with Solana will last isn’t clear. And while there’s some concern that focusing so heavily on the crypto market will serve to pigeonhole the product out of the gate, Keats notes that users can uninstall the Solana stack if they’re just looking for a new Android device without all of the web3 stuff. Availability will be limited at launch, regardless, as the companies focus on getting the product in developers’ hands. More general availability will follow later.
“In the next month or two, they’re gonna announce some pretty fun stuff for their developers and for early adopters,” Keats explains.
As for the future, alongside the wacky form factors, one can look toward various patents Essential was granted in its short life. The list includes several focused on imaging, including the drive to create an under-display camera that doesn’t suck.
“Some of [the patents] we own now,” says Keats. “The ones I cared about belong to OSOM. And we’ve filed 20 or 30 at this point, as well.”
Why OSOM went web3