UK tells messaging apps not to use e2e encryption for kids’ accounts

For a glimpse of the security and privacy dystopia the UK government has in store for its highly regulated ‘British Internet’, look no further than guidance put out by the Department of Digital, Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS) yesterday — aimed at social media platforms and private messaging services — which includes the suggestion that the latter should “prevent’ the use of end-to-end encryption on “child accounts”.

That’s right, the UK government is saying: ‘No end-to-end encryption for our kids please, they’re British’.

And while this is merely guidance for now, the chill is real — because legislation is already on the table.

The UK’s Online Safety Bill was published back in May, with Boris Johnson’s government setting out a sweeping plan to force platforms to regulate user generated content by imposing a legal duty to protect users from illegal (or merely just “harmful”) content.

The bill controversially bundles up requirements to report illegal stuff like child sexual exploitation content to law enforcement with far fuzzier mandates that platforms take action against a range of much-harder-to-define ‘harms’ (from cyber bullying to romance scams).

The end result looks like a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Except the ‘nut’ that could get smashed to pieces in this ministerial vice is UK Internet users’ digital security and privacy. (Not to mention any UK startups and digital businesses that aren’t on board with mass-surveillance-as-a-service.)

That’s the danger if the government follows through on its wonky idea that — on the Internet — ‘safety’ means security must be replaced with blanket surveillance in order to ‘keep kids safe’.

The Online Safety Bill is not the first wonky tech policy plan the UK has come up with. An earlier bid to force adult content providers to age verify users was dropped in 2019, having been widely criticized as unworkable as well as a massive privacy intrusion and security risk.

However, at the time, the government said it was only abandoning the ‘porn blocks’ measure because it was planning to bring forward “the most comprehensive approach possible to protecting children”. Hence the Online Safety Bill now stepping forward to push platforms to remove robust encryption in the name of ‘protecting children’.

Age verification technologies — and all sorts of content monitoring solutions (surveillance tech, doubtless badged as ‘safety’ tech) — also look likely to proliferate as a consequence of this approach.

Pushing platforms to proactively police speech and surveil usage in the hopes of preventing an ill-defined grab-bag of ‘harms’ — or, from the platforms’ perspective, to avoid the risk of eye-watering fines from the regulator if it decides they’ve failed in this ‘duty of care’ — also obviously conjures up a nightmare scenario for online freedom of expression.

Aka: ‘Watch what you type, even in the privacy of your private messaging app, because the UK Internet safety thought police are watching/might block you…’

Privacy rights for UK minors appear to be first on the chopping block, via what DCMS’ guidance refers to as “practical steps to manage the risk of online harm if your online platform allows people to interact, and to share text and other content”.

So, pretty much, if your online platform has any kind of communication layer at all then.

Letting kids have their own safe spaces to express themselves is apparently incompatible with ministers’ populist desire to brand the UK ‘the safest place to go online in the world’, as they like to spin it.

How exactly the UK will achieve safety online if government zealots force service providers to strip away robust security (e2e encryption) — torching the standard of data protection and privacy wrapping Brits’ personal information — is quite the burning question.

Albeit, it’s not one the UK government seems to have considered for even a split second.

“We’ve known for a long time that one of government’s goals for the Online Safety Bill is the restriction, if not the outright criminalisation, of the use of end-to-end encryption,” said Heather Burns, a policy manager for the digital rights organization Open Rights Group (ORG), one of many vocal critics of the government’s approach — discussing the wider implications of the policy push with TechCrunch.

“Recent messaging strategies promoted by government and the media have openly sought to associate end-to-end encryption with child abuse, and to imply that companies which use it are aiding and abetting child exploitation. So DCMS’s newly-published guidance advising the voluntary removal of encryption from children’s accounts is a precursor to it becoming a likely legal requirement.

“It’s also part of government’s drive, again as part of the Online Safety Bill, to require all services to implement mandatory age verification on all users, for all content or applications, in order to identify child users, in order to withhold encryption from them, thanks to aggressive lobbying from the age verification industry.”

That ministerial rhetoric around the Online Safety Bill is heavy on tub-thumping emotional appeals (to ‘protect our children from online nasties’) and low on sequential logic or technological coherence is not a surprise: Successive Conservative governments have, after all, had a massive bee in their bonnets about e2e encryption — dating back to the David Cameron years.

Back then ministers were typically taking aim at strong encryption on counter-terrorism grounds, arguing the tech is bad because it prevents law enforcement from catching terrorists. (And they went on to pass beefed up surveillance laws which also include powers to limit the use of robust encryption.)

However, under more recent PMs Theresa May and Boris Johnson, the child protection rhetoric has stepped up too — to the point where messaging channels are now being actively encouraged not to use e2e encryption altogether.

Next stop: State-sanctioned commercial mass surveillance. And massive risks for all UK Internet users subject to this anti-security, anti-privacy ‘safety’ regime.

“Despite government’s claim that the Bill will make the UK ‘the safest place in the world to be online’, restricting or criminalising encryption will actually make the UK an unsafe place for any company to do business,” warned Burns. “We will all need to resort to VPNs and foreign services, as happens in places like China, in order to keep our data safe. It’s likely that many essential services will block UK customers, or leave the UK altogether, rather than be compelled to act as a privatised nanny state over insecure data flows.”

In a section of the DCMS guidance entitled “protect children by limiting functionality”, the government department literally suggests that “private channels” (i.e. services like messaging apps) “prevent end-to-end encryption for child accounts”. And since accurately age identifying online users remains a challenge it follows that in-scope services may simply decide it’s less legally risky if they don’t use e2e at all.

DCMS’s guidance also follows up with an entirely bolded paragraph — in which the government then makes a point of highlighting e2e encryption as a “risk” to users, generally — and, therefore by implication, to future compliance with the forthcoming Online Safety legislation…

“End-to-end encryption makes it more difficult for you to identify illegal and harmful content occurring on private channels. You should consider the risks this might pose to your users,” the UK government writes, emphasis its.

Whether anything can stop this self-destructive policy train now it’s left the Downing Street station is unclear. Johnson has a whopping majority in parliament — and years left before he has to call a general election.

The only thing that could derail the most harmful elements of the Online Safety Bill is if the UK public wakes up to the dangers it poses to everyone’s security and privacy — and if enough MPs take notice and push for amendments.

Earlier this month the ORG, along with some 30 other digital and humans rights groups, called on MPs to do just that and “help keep constituents’ data safe by protecting e2e encryption from legislative threats” — warning that this “basic and essential” security protocol is at risk from clauses in the bill that introduce requirements for companies to scan private and personal messages for evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Zero access encryption is seen by the UK government as a blocker to such scanning.

“In order to do this, the use of end-to-end encryption is likely to be defined as a violation of the law,” the ORG also warned. “And companies operating in the UK who want to continue to defend user privacy through end-to-end encryption could, under the draft Bill, be threatened with partial shutdowns, being blocked from the UK, or even personal arrests.”

“We call on Parliament to ensure that end-to-end encryption must not be threatened or undermined by the Online Safety Bill, and that services utilising strong encryption are left out of the Bill’s content monitoring and filtering requirements,” it added in the online appeal.

DMCS has been contacted with questions on the logic of the government’s policy toward e2e encryption.

In a statement yesterday, the digital minister Caroline Dinenage said: “We’re helping businesses get their safety standards up to scratch before our new online harms laws are introduced and also making sure they are protecting children and users right now.

“We want businesses of all sizes to step up to a gold standard of safety online and this advice will help them to do so.”

UK publishes draft Online Safety Bill

UK quietly ditches porn age checks in favor of wider online harms rules

UK Online Safety Bill, coming next year, will propose fines of up to 10% of annual turnover for breaching duty of care rules

Yes, the U.K. now has a law to log web users’ browsing behavior, hack devices and limit encryption

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Device42 introduces multi-cloud migration analysis and recommendation tool

In 2020 lots of workloads shifted to the cloud due to the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean that figuring out how to migrate those workloads got any easier. Device42, a startup that helps companies understand their infrastructure, has a new product that is designed to analyze your infrastructure and make recommendations about the most cost-effective way to migrate to the cloud.

Raj Jalan, CEO and co-founder, says that the tool uses machine learning to help discover the best configuration, and supports four cloud vendors including AWS, Microsoft, Google and Oracle plus VMware running on AWS.

“The [new tool] that’s coming out is a multi-cloud migration and recommendation [engine]. Basically, with machine learning what we have done is in addition to our discovery tool […] is we can constantly update based on your existing utilization of your resources, what it is going to cost you to run these resources across each of these multiple clouds,” Jalan explained.

This capability builds on the company’s core competency, which is providing a map of resources wherever they exist along with the dependencies that exist across the infrastructure, something that’s extremely hard for organizations to understand. “Our focus is on hybrid IT discovery and dependency mapping, [whether the] infrastructure is on prem, in colocation facilities or in the cloud,” he said.

That helps Device42 customers see how all of the different pieces of infrastructure including applications work together. “You can’t find a tool that does everything together, and also gives you a very deep discovery where you can go from the physical layer all the way to the logical layer, and see things like, ‘this is where my storage sits on this web server…’,” Jalan said.

It’s important to note that this isn’t about managing resources or making any changes to allocation. It’s about understanding your entire infrastructure wherever it lives and how the different parts fit together, while the newest piece finds the most cost-effective way to migrate to the cloud it from its current location.

The company has been around since 2012, has around 100 employees. It has raised around $38 million including a $34 million Series A in 2019. It hasn’t required a ton of outside investment as Jalan reports they are cash flow positive with “decent growth.”

Big opening for startups that help move entrenched on-prem workloads to the cloud

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Former Zillow execs raise $70M seed round for Tomo, which wants to simplify the mortgage process

There are so many startups pledging to reinvent the mortgage process that it’s hard to keep up. But for anyone who has had to go through the process of applying for one, it’s clear that there’s plenty of room for improvement.

The latest startup to raise venture money with the goal of making the process “smarter and faster” is one that was founded by a pair of executives that spent years at real estate giant Zillow. Tomo is very early stage — so early stage that it is only launching operations in conjunction with announcing it has just raised $70 million in seed funding. That’s a massive seed round by any standards (the third-largest in the U.S., according to Crunchbase), but especially for the real estate tech space (perhaps the largest ever).

Ribbit Capital led the financing, which also included participation from DST Global, NFX and Zigg Capital.

Former Zillow executives Greg Schwartz and Carey Armstrong founded Stamford, CT-based Tomo in the fall of 2020 to take on big banks when it comes to providing mortgages to consumers. CEO Schwartz first joined Zillow in 2007, where he says he “built the sales and revenue operations from the ground up.” Armstrong, who serves as Tomo’s chief revenue officer, previously led business strategy, product strategy and core operations for Zillow’s $1 billion buyer services business. 

Launching today in Seattle, Dallas and Houston, Tomo says it will do things like issue fully underwritten pre-approvals “within hours, not days” and guarantee on-time closing. This is particularly important in competitive markets with multiple buyers making offers on homes.

It plans to use data to get homebuyers to closing in as little as 21 days, which they say is less than half of the industry average of 47 days. And, on top of all that, it claims it will offer “the lowest rates in the industry” with “customer-obsessed service.”

The company claims that besides having founders that have years of experience at a company with a reach like Zillow’s, they also aim to be different from other competitors in the space in that they are strictly focused on the buyer. For example, it won’t do any refinancing for existing homeowners but focus strictly on helping buyers secure new mortgage loans.

“The big banks have never made more money, yet an experience with their mortgage business has never been worse,” Schwartz told TechCrunch. “And it’s because the incumbents have no reason to fundamentally change.”

While it’s early days yet, only time will tell if Tomo can live up to its lofty goals. No doubt it has plenty of competition. In the past week alone, we’ve reported on two other digital mortgage startups raising significant funding rounds, including Lower and Accept.

In its first funding in 7 years, profitable fintech Lower raises $100M Series A led by Accel

Tomo’s investors are clearly confident about its potential.

Ribbit Capital’s Nick Huber said his firm had been connected to Schwartz and Armstrong prior to their even starting Tomo.

“When we learned that the two of them were working together, we immediately knew that we had to be a part of the journey,” he said. “We gained the conviction to lead the seed round as the team shared more of their vision for the future of home buying, which is a broken experience that they deeply understand and have the insight and relationships to fix.”

NFX founder and general partner Pete Flint has known Schwartz and Armstrong under a different capacity. They were once rivals. Flint co-founded another online real estate giant, Trulia and was its CEO and chairman from its 2005 inception until it was acquired by Zillow for $2.5 billion in 2015.

“We were initially competitors and then deep collaborators after the Trulia/Zillow merger,” Flint said. Once the pair formed Tomo, Flint says NFX “had not seen a team that was so experienced and thoughtful about the entire real estate experience that was going after the mortgage and home buying opportunity.”

In fact, the investment represents NFX’s largest initial investment to date.

“They are rethinking the entire software stack and building a modern fintech company, free of legacy constraints,” he added.

Digging into digital mortgage lender Better.com’s huge SPAC

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MKT1: Developer marketing is what startup marketing should look like

MKT1 is a strategic marketing firm founded by experienced startup executives that is everything but a marketing agency. It advises startups on marketing approaches, recruiting and mentoring workshops, with some angel syndicate investing as well. It also provides a job board, a newsletter, and workshops for marketers.

Founders Kathleen Estreich and Emily Kramer say they are responding to a few big trends in the startup world. These days, young companies are raising more capital than ever and facing increased pressure to maintain rapid growth, but founders are typically focused on technology and product problems. The result, as they have sometimes seen first-hand, is marketing coming in too early or too late to truly help a startup grow. Instead, Kramer and Estreich help companies make marketing a core part of how they execute from their early days.

Estreich, previously at Facebook, Box, Intercom and Scalyr, and Kramer, previously Ticktfly, Asana, Astro and Carta, were recommended to us through our survey seeking recommendations for top growth marketers in the startup industry. (If you have your own recommendation, please fill out the survey here.)

In the interview below, they share more about how they recruit startup marketers and advise founders to approach marketing based on needs and several other issues that are critical for early-stage startups.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

TC: You’re both accomplished marketers and have worked at big-name companies. What made you decide to leave that career and open your own marketing firm?

Estreich: It was different for both of us. I was working in sales, and I left actually and had a baby. COVID hit and we were uncertain… Emily and I have known each other for several years, so she and I started talking over a year ago about what we were up to and what we were thinking about.  One of the trends that we were seeing was a lot of the companies when we started were typical founders [focused on technology and product], and there was a gap around helping them go to market and helping them with marketing.

We started talking and realized that we love working with founders; we love working with early-stage companies. We wanted to do that full-time. So we started doing that fall of last year and it’s been awesome. We’ve gotten to work with a lot of interesting companies and we’re starting to see a lot of trends. Hiring is a huge, huge thing, and it’s figuring out who’s the right person, when do you hire them, how do you find them, and how do you hire them.

Kramer: It’s somewhat similar for me. I had been the first, or first-ish, marketer at TicketFly and then at Asana — I was a marketer there and built up a team to about 25 people. I really love building teams, and I like them at scale too. I love the puzzle that is building a marketing team with all of the different functions, whether its hiring or figuring out what to do strategically.

Then I joined a seed-funded company — again, because I love building — a company called Astro. I actually had this experience where they hired too senior, too early on the marketing side, which is also a mistake I see people making. While we were trying to find product-market fit, I realized I was probably too senior coming off my experience at Asana. I then went to Carta — but Carta was 300 people. We didn’t have marketing at all. They had stops and starts and had a large-scale organization, so I built that marketing team up — just much later [stage].

I ended up filing a lawsuit against Carta, that is fairly public, for discrimination on equal pay, retaliation, among other things [Ed. TechCrunch coverage here]. After an experience like that, you start to re-evaluate things. So Kathleen and I started advising companies together and it’s become more than just advising. We help early companies build their marketing functions across the board.

TC: You focus on SaaS companies. Is there a reason that you have that focus versus going broader?

Estreich: That’s been our experience. Since leaving Facebook, I worked at B2B SaaS companies, with different audiences and different stages, so that’s been my experience. I think there’s a huge opportunity for marketing and it is changing in the B2B SaaS world.

Kramer: While we do focus on SaaS marketing, I think our sweet spot is in modern marketing, and significantly, self-serve as well as a lot of developer marketing. We actually think that developer marketing is how all of our things should be. It focuses on adding value, and it focuses on treating people like humans.

TC: You’ve written extensively about how to think about marketing in the earliest stages of a company. So what are the biggest mistakes that you see founders still making in 2021?

Estreich: I would say either they go too early or too late with who they’re hiring. Or one of the things that we talked about is that your first marketers are actually your founders. They’re the ones who help tell your story and do your early marketing.

I think a big part of it is finding that right early team on, and one of the key insights that we’ve written about is that the first marketer should be really a pi-shaped marketer. It’s someone who has breadth and depth, who has experience with product marketing and growth marketing. It is your first marketing hire. Regardless of what you’re hiring them for, they do everything since you don’t have anyone else. They are the default of every aspect of marketing.

Kramer: It’s not necessarily that you’re an expert in two areas instead of all the areas — product marketing, growth marketing, content marketing. So two of those areas, and normally, that is growth marketing and product marketing, based on what they need.

Estreich: When you’re thinking about going to market, some companies think that content is going to be the most important thing, so your first marketer should be pretty competent in it.

Kramer: I think the number-one thing that we look for, when we help companies with job descriptions and planning, is someone that is strategic and scrappy. But they also need to be able to set their own goals and figure out what to do, because the other trend that we see in marketing and marketing hires, is that founders will give marketers goals like “write 10 blog posts.”

That’s not the goal. What are you trying to drive? Are you trying to drive web traffic, because it actually just disincentivizes me as a content person or as a marketer to write good content if I have to write 10 pieces. It instead drives 50,000 page views. I could go write one really amazing data study or well-researched piece that does all of that that drives way more than 10 shitty posts.

Estreich: You could do a smaller number of things better and get the same outcomes. So it’s really that balance of a bunch of things you could do. And one of the most common conversations Emily and I have with marketers right now is, “How do I prioritize? What should I do?”

Kramer: “How do I set goals really about prioritization and how do I have my goals set in a way that is focused on these different activities?” Find that sweet spot of someone who still wants to get their hands dirty and wants to go early but can think strategically about what we are doing uniquely and how are we going to have an impact.

Estreich: People who have experience with your business model is another thing that we look at. So if you’re a top-down enterprise sales company, the marketing function in various fields are very different than if you’re bottom, inbound-driven. So hiring someone that matches what you think your go-to-market is going to look like, I think, is an important thing. It’s a different way of viewing the world, and if you compare companies, they might hire someone who has done one or the other. But you want someone who actually is new because that’s more important than almost the industry experience.

Kramer: Sometimes consumer stuff might be more similar to your business model. To amplify what Kathleen was saying about the industry, I think a lot of times I work with tech companies and they’re like we need people that have done fintech or finance. Now, you’re narrowing an already small pool for an early-stage marketing role to an even smaller pool. Getting a person that’s not too senior in their career, that’s full of ambition and can learn quickly is worth it versus them having the experience. Your company should have other people that are experts in the areas.

Estreich: So I think part of that, too, is a willingness and excitement around the audience. Similar to Emily, I’ve worked in marketing for very different audiences in my career. And part of it is like, am I excited about diving in and learning about this space?

TC: What are the major trends that you’re seeing in marketer hiring right now?

Kramer: Companies are going to marketers early on. One reason is that companies are in the larger rounds earlier than ever before. When you have more money to spend on go-to-market and marketing earlier, you’re bringing on marketers while earlier on.

Now some founders still aren’t. And they’re like, “Oh, we don’t need marketing.” But founders that really know that they need to differentiate how they’re doing distribution — which in my opinion would be a company that’s successful — are like, “Oh, we have more money to hire earlier on.” So there’s a shortage [of marketers], I think. I imagine that we will start to see turnover right after Labor Day, when some companies make people go back to the office.

Estreich: Yeah, we’re keeping a very close eye on going back to the office.

Kramer: I think it’s harder than ever with early-stage marketing goals.

Estreich: There are many more companies that are starting earlier and getting funding, and then when you get that funding earlier, there’s pressure to grow earlier. You’re like, “OK, we need marketing help sooner.” And then the bigger companies are doing great, people are like, “I’m sitting on this large exit package — what’s my incentive to go?”

Kramer: And I think there is starting to be a little less stigma on the job bouncing; people are like, “This isn’t great, I’m super lonely and I’m at home, I’m not being treated great. … I’m going to go somewhere else.” I think there’s also just more attrition in marketing roles than in other roles. Because to be the head of marketing you typically need to understand these different areas of marketing, and if you’re at a large company then you’re going to get siloed and you’re not going to learn these things and you’re going to stifle your career.

Estreich: Yeah, being clear about the benefits and the downsides of a big job is important. I’ve always appreciated this about companies that I’ve talked to, or about joining, that tell me everything so that when I get there, I’m not surprised. Because if you try and surprise me, I’m gonna find out anyway. To the extent that, you know, you could learn as much as you can without joining.

I think that’s important. And that’s what we’re trying to do on both sides, like help companies, you know, set these jobs up for success. And then on the marketer side, help them know what it’s actually going to be like and to the extent that we can do some sort of matching to help find good people for these companies that we think are good fits.

In one of your Substack posts, you said that “marketing strategy needs to be a healthy mix of testing new things, scaling what works, and optimizing what’s already working. Setting goals is critical here.” How do you work with companies to ensure that their goals are appropriate for the stage that they’re at?

Kramer: There are things that we say “keep the lights on,” like traffic numbers, conversion numbers.

Estreich: The steady state of marketing.

Kramer: And then there are things that can cause step-change growth, if you measure to find them. If you’re measuring everything against the same measures/metrics, you’re never going to get there, because the tests are never going to perform as well as the stuff that has already been up and running.

So it’s also about breaking up your goals. “Here are the big steps we’re taking and here are the step-change drivers that we hypothesize are a good idea and here’s how we’re going to test these things.” It’s the balancing of these quick wins and things that keep the lights on and long-term projects and how to bite off a little bit to test it.

Estreich: “What are we trying to do?” And then, “What’s the action plan we need to put together?” Other than that, “What can we do in the next three months?” And then, “What do we need to do and invest in the next several months?”

Kramer: You know, this is why I always say there’s so many different things that you can do. And I don’t think founders realize how many things there are to do, because founders often think of marketing in a couple of pockets. They’re like, “Oh, it’s ads, PR.” But it’s a lot more than that; it’s many things that are going to drive growth, both short-term and long-term. That’s a very fast definition of marketing, but that’s basically what it is. But there’s so many different things to do.

You’re more than most agencies, you’re angel investors and advisers. Is that how you think about yourselves, are you an operator rather than a growth marketing agency?

Kramer: We’re not a marketing agency; we are strategic marketers. We’re going to recommend agencies that you should work with. Part of this is like, “Could we go be operator VCs? Could we go raise a fund?” Yeah, probably … we’re doing this as advising and investing. We actually treat a lot of what we’re doing like you would at a SaaS company. We realized everybody wants help with recruiting. So we iterated on some stuff [and] launched a new job board.

And then we do angel investing. We’re always interested in iterating on what we’re doing there. So yes, there’s a huge switch towards people raising money from operators who are definitely part of that shift. We want to help as many companies as [we can whose] values are mission-aligned. And we also want to elevate markers. … I’m a marketer. That’s what I do. It’s marketing.

So it’s a bad word and marketers are/aren’t angel investors, and marketers often get paid less and marketers are often thought of as second-class citizens in the company. So we want to elevate the role of marketing to and help other workers. As much as we want to help companies grow, we also want to help marketers. We’re still trying to figure out the best way to do all of those things.

Estreich: We started off like, “OK, what do we like to do? Where do we see the market?” We like helping founders sort of think through early-stage marketing jobs, as we could do that as advisers then, you know. What are the common themes that we’re seeing? Everyone needs help on recruiting: How can we help not just these companies, but generally as well, which is like the job board that we talked about.

And I think there is a need in the market, like we talked about at the beginning, where there are many companies that started earlier with technical founders dealing with exposure to a lot of the business side. Companies that have good marketing are going to be more successful. That’s why we’re advising them, and that’s why we’re working with those marketers. That’s a main reason we started what we’re doing.

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Kikoff raises $30M for its hybrid consumer-credit and financial-literacy service

Kikoff, a personal finance platform aimed at helping consumers build credit, announced today that it has raised $30 million in a Series B round.

The capital is in addition to the $12.5 million the startup raised across previously unannounced seed and Series A rounds, which were both led by Lightspeed Venture partners.

Portage Ventures led Kickoff’s Series B, which included participation from Lightspeed, GGV, Coatue and Core Innovation Capital. Previous backers of the company include NBA star Steph Curry, Wex CEO Melissa Smith and Teresa Ressel, former CFO of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

CEO Cynthia Chen and CTO Christophe Chong co-founded the San Francisco-based company in late 2019 with the goal of helping consumers without a credit history establish one, and helping those with credit histories to continue building credit. The pair came from “low to moderate income” families, Chen said, and say they want to help others who also come from similar economic backgrounds. Chen grew up in Beijing before coming to the U.S. for college on a scholarship and says she was struck by the experience of her parents having to borrow money from family and friends in order to purchase a TV.

While the company declined to reveal hard revenue figures, Chen did say that Kikoff has “hundreds of thousands” of customers after being out of beta for half a year.

Kikoff’s product, the “Kikoff Credit Account,” is the first of a planned suite of offerings all aimed at improving consumers’ financial health.

“There are many Americans who don’t come from affluent families and have tons of student loan debt,” Chen said. “For them and so many others, we wanted to create a better way to build good credit than existing offers in the market.” While anyone can use its platform, Chen says the vast majority of its customers are millennials and GenZers as they are most in need of a way to build credit.

Image Credits: Kikoff

With Kikoff, the pair aim to give people not only a way to build a credit history, but also a way to increase consumer financial literacy. Rather than provide a debit or credit card that can be used anywhere, Kikoff restricts the use of its line of credit to an online store it’s created. Users can purchase things like e-books covering a variety of finance-related topics such as how to plan and budget, or profit from trading bitcoin. It also has a selection of courses that it has purchased resell rights for, covering topics such as personal finance education, or how to set up an e-commerce store or even how to learn Python programming skills.

“When a consumer purchases something from our store, [that] item is going to help that person improve his or her financial habits or help him or her make money by making smarter investments, or setting up their small business or learning skills,” Chen told TechCrunch.

The company also does not charge any interest on its credit line or fees for the financing.

“There’s no cost of borrowing money,” she said. Instead, Kikoff collects revenue by taking the margin between the wholesale price for the items it sells in its store and the retail price that customers pay.

To sign up, customers first apply for a $500 revolving line of credit that can be used for purchases at Kikoff’s online store. The company touts that within months, its customers “can become eligible for better interest rates, competitive credit cards and home mortgages,” among other things within a relatively short period of about 45 days. 

Kikoff has intentionally worked to help its customers build credit in what Chen describes as “a very financially responsible way.”

“That’s why they are able to only use the product within our proprietary online store, and we have a number of affordable items in the store for them to purchase,” she told TechCrunch. “So it is relatively easy for them to not overspend or make any kind of impulse purchase that they later cannot really afford to pay.”

Lightspeed Partner Ansaf Kareem said he could empathize with the experiences of Chen and Chong in having to create and build credit for the first time, “especially as immigrants and first-generation Americans.”

“A credit score holds the keys to your financial future, yet so many Americans struggle with creating and building credit,” he said. “Adjacent products may let you check your credit score, but do not provide tools or guidance to improve it without charging fees or asking for a large up-front cash commitment,” he added. “Kikoff built a product that provides real value through a simple, no fee structure to initiate and build credit. And they are just getting started.”

Kikoff’s executive team certainly has an impressive background in fintech. Chen previously served as Figure’s Chief Risk Officer and she held senior executive roles at Capital One and OnDeck. Chong was former head of growth at Lime and led growth teams at Facebook and Square. Andrew Brix, Kikoff’s head of product was employee No. 15 at Credit Karma and served as its director of product management. He also was a senior product manager at E-Trade. Patrick Glover, head of marketing, worked at both Plaid and Square and Vinni Bala, head of operations, is former CMO and Chief Credit Officer at Deserve.

Other companies with similar goals that have raised venture funding as of late include Tomo Credit and Welcome Tech, among others.

TomoCredit raises $7M to help the cash rich and credit poor

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FightCamp punches its way to a $90M round

FightCamp, an interactive at-home training system for boxing/kickboxing, is announcing this morning that it has raised a $90M round from a long list of investors, including quite the roster of famous fighters.

FightCamp pairs smart sensors (“punch trackers” worn under your boxing gloves) with a subscription-based stream of training videos. As you punch your way through a session, it’ll track things like punch count and speed over time. To oversimplify it a bit, think Peloton for punching.

The company tells me that this round was led by NEA and Connect Ventures — the latter a two-headed beast made up of NEA and the Hollywood talent firm Creative Artists Agency. Also investing: Supercell CEO Iikka Paananen, ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman, Usher, and Katheryn Winnick (star of the TV series Vikings, not to mention a ridiculously accomplished martial artist.) Oh, and of course, a bunch of folks who are very well known for punching: Mike Tyson, Floyd Mayweather, Georges St-Pierre, and UFC heavyweight champ (and thrower of the world’s hardest punch, no joke) Francis Ngannou.

While FightCamp is currently iOS only, that’ll hopefully change before too long; in a press release about the round, the company says it plans to put the funds toward international expansion, growing its subscription content library, and building an Android offering.

 

Image Credits: FightCamp

The company’s kit costs anywhere from $439 – $1349, depending on what you need. $1219 gets you a free-standing punching bag, a mat to go beneath it, boxing gloves, and the punch trackers. Already have the rest of the gym gear, and just want the trackers? That drops the price down to $439. The monthly membership, meanwhile, costs $39.

FightCamp started its life in 2016 as “Hykso”, focusing initially on the sale of the punch tracking hardware. As the company shifted focus to include subscription content in 2018, the “FightCamp” name took over; now it seems to be used almost exclusively.

The company tells me that they’d raised $8M before this round, bringing its total funding to $98M.

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Xiaomi Mi Notebook Pro X debuts with 3.5K OLED display, 35W Intel CPU

Xiaomi announced its latest premium notebook offering, the Mi Notebook X Pro in China and it packs some impressive specs. In addition to the latest generation hardware from Intel and Nvidia, the device also flaunts a 15.6-inch 3.5K (3456 x 2160px) OLED display with going up to 600 nits peak brightness, offers Gorilla Glass protection and full DCI-P3 color gamut coverage. The display is surrounded by thin 4.03mm thin bezels and Xiaomi says it achieves 91% screen-to-body ratio. On the inside you get 11th Generation Intel Core i7 or Core i5 CPUs. Configurations go up to Core i7-11370H,...

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Sony Xperia 1 III earns a 6/10 repairability score in disassembly video

The Sony Xperia 1 III looks pretty old-school on the outside, but the inside is layer upon layer of modern components. What if one of them breaks? It will need to be replaced and the video below shows the disassembly process step by step. Sony didn’t do anything too crazy, everything is held down by Philips screws and a moderate amount of glue. However, there are multiple layers tied together with flex cables, which need to be taken apart. The good news is that if you need to replace the display, you only need to take apart the bottom assembly to reach the screen’s flex cable, you don’t...

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Watch Virgin Orbit’s first rocket launch live stream

Virgin Orbit is set to launch a payload that includes satellites it’s delivering for tis first commercial customers. The launch is set to happen sometime within a launch window that opens at 6 AM PT (9 AM ET) and continues through 8 AM PT (11 AM ET), taking off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.

This is the first mission following Virgin Orbit’s successful orbital demonstration launch in January, and also the first that the company will be live-streaming, providing never-before-seen views of its carrier aircraft and the mid-air launch of its LauncherOne two-stage rocket as they happen. Virgin Orbit’s launch system uses a modified 747 to carry its small rocket to a high altitude, where it releases the rocket from the aircraft’s wing, which then ignites its own engines and flies the rest of the way to its destination in low-Earth orbit (LEO).

Virgin’s approach is very different from the traditional vertical rocket launch employed by companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab, and after years of testing and development, the company opened the door for commercial operations with its demonstration launch earlier this year. As it ramps operations, it’s hoping that its launch model will demonstrate flexibility, since it can launch from almost any traditional runway, while meeting all the needs of small satellite companies looking to get their spacecraft to LEO.

The launch livestream above is set to begin at around 5:30 AM PT (8:30 AM ET).

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Dream Games raises $155M at a $1B valuation as its Royal Match puzzle game hits a royal flush

Istanbul in Turkey continues to prove itself as very fertile ground for casual gaming startups, which appear to be growing from small seedlings into sizable trees. In the latest development, Dream Games — a developer of mobile puzzle games — has raised $155 million in funding, a Series B that values the startup at $1 billion.

This is a massive leap for the company, which raised $50 million (the largest Series A in Turkey’s startup history) only 3.5 months ago. This latest round is being co-led by Index Ventures and Makers Fund, with Balderton Capital, IVP and Kora also participating. It also comes in the wake of a bigger set of deals in the world of gaming and developers in Turkey, the most prominent of which saw Zynga acquire Peak Games for $1.8 billion, amid other acquisitions. Dream is one of several startups in the region founded by alums from Peak.

The focus of the funding, and currently of Dream Games itself, is Royal Match, a puzzle game (iOS, Android) that launched globally in March.

The game has been a huge hit for Dream, with 6 million monthly active users and $20 million/month in revenues from in-game purchases (not ads), according to figures from AppAnnie. (A source close to the company confirmed the figures are accurate, but Dream did not disclose its revenue numbers or revenues directly.) This has catapulted it into the top-20 grossing games categories in the U.S., U.K., and Germany, the same echelon as much older and bigger titles like Candy Crush and Homescapes.

“The funding will be used for heavy user acquisition in every channel and every geography,” Soner Aydemir, co-founder and CEO, Dream Games, told me in an interview. He said Asia would be a focus in that, specifically Japan, South Korea and China. “Our main target is to scale the game so that it becomes one of the biggest games in the global market.”

The world of mobile gaming has in many respects been a very cyclical and fickle one: today’s hot title becomes tomorrow’s has-been, while for developers, they can go through dozens of development processes and launches (and related costs) before they find a hit, if they find a hit. The role of app-install ads and other marketing tools to juice numbers has also been a problematic lever for growth: take away the costs of running those and often the house of cards falls apart.

Aydemir agrees, and while the company will be investing in those aforementioned in-game ads to encourage more downloads of Royal Match, he also said that this strategy can work, but only if the fundamentals of the game are solid, as is the case here.

“If you don’t have good enough metrics, even with all the money in the world it’s impossible to scale,” he said. “But our LTV [lifetime value] is high, and so we think it can be scaled in a sustainable way because of the quality of the game. It always depends on the product.”

In addition to its huge growth, Dream has taken a very focused approach with Royal Match, working on it for years before finally releasing it.

“We spent so much time on tiny details, so many tests over several years to create the dynamics of the game,” he said. “But we also have a feel for it,” he added, referring to the team’s previous lives at Peak Games. “Our users really appreciate this approach.”

For now, too, the focus will just one the one game, he said. Why not two, I asked?

“We believe in Pixar’s approach,” Aydemir said. “When Pixar started, it was very low frequency, a movie every 2-3 years but eventually the rate increased. And it will be similar for us. This year we need to focus on Royal Match but if we can find a way to create other games, we will.”

He added that the challenge — one that many startups know all too well — is that building a new product, in this case a new game, can take the focus away when you are a small team and also working on sustaining and maintaining a current game. “That is the most difficult and challenging part. If we can manage it we will be successful; otherwise we will fail because our business model is basically creating new IP.” He added that it’s likely that another game will be released out into the world at the beginning of next year.

The focus, in any case, was one of the selling points for its investors. “The Dream Games team’s deep genre insight, laser-focus on detail and team chemistry has helped create the early success of Royal Match,” said Michael Cheung, General Partner at Makers Fund, in a statement. “We’re excited to be on the journey with them as they grow Royal Match globally.”

In terms of monetization, Dream Games is pretty firmly in the camp of “no ads, just in-app purchases,” he said. “It’s really bad for user experience and we only care about user experience, so if you put ads in, it conflicts with that.”

Some of the struggles of building new while improving old product will of course get solved with this cash, and the subsequent hiring that Dream Games can do (and it’s doing a lot of that, judging by the careers section of its website). As more startups emerge out of the country — not just in gaming but also areas like e-commerce, where startups like Getir are for example making big waves in instant grocery delivery — it will be interesting to see how that bigger talent pool evolves.

“Since its launch in early March, Royal Match has become one of the top casual puzzle titles globally, driven by once in a decade retention metrics. It speaks to the sheer quality of the title that the Dream Games team has built and the flawless polish and execution across the board,” commented Stephane Kurgan, venture partner at Index Ventures and former COO of King. Index is also the backer of Roblox, Discord, King and Supercell, in a statement.

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Noname Security closes $60M Series B to eliminate API flaws

Enterprise API security startup Noname Security has raised a $60 million Series B funding round, just six months after closing $25 million at Series A. 

The round was led by Insight Partners with Next47, Forgepoint, and The Syndicate Group (TSG) also participating, and brings Noname’s total funding to $85 million since emerging from stealth in December 2020.

The startup, which currently has a 70-strong workforce and offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, says it raised rapidly due to the fact the pandemic has fueled a growing dependence on APIs. Naturally, this proliferation of APIs has led to an increase in the number of API security incidents. Earlier this year, for example, an Experian API exposed the credit scores of nearly every American with one, and just weeks later a leaky Peloton API allowed anyone to grab users’ private account data directly from the company’s servers. Facebook, LinkedIn, Echelon, and Clubhouse have also fallen victim to scraping attacks that abuse access to APIs to pull in data about users on their platforms. 

“The need for API security was so strong and got super emphasized during the pandemic,” Oz Golan, CEO of Noname, tells TechCrunch. “We want to help organizations to leverage APIs securely, and we want to eliminate all of the API vulnerabilities out there. We don’t want another Experian incident.”

The Silicon Valley startup provides a holistic security platform that uses AI and machine learning to enable enterprises to see and secure managed and unmanaged APIs exposed by the organization, consumed by the organization, or used internally, thereby eliminating the API security blind spots. The majority of these flaws often go unnoticed for years, according to Noname, giving anyone who can find them unfettered access to an organization’s most sensitive operations.

“Even seasoned security professionals often have no idea how exposed their systems are,” Golan says.

In its six months since launch, the startup has amassed 40 technology, reseller, and channel partners, as well as “hundreds” of enterprise customers either in production or trialing the platform.

“Because of the huge traction that we have seen, we want to accelerate – expanding our sales team, marketing team, customer success, R&D. Basically growth, growth, growth,” says Golan, who previously served as director of engineering at NSO Group. 

Commenting on the funding round, Thomas Krane, principal at Insight Partners — which recently led a $75m Series C funding round in cybersecurity skills platform Immersive Labs — said: “The surging volume of APIs and the growing complexity of modern applications has led to an increase in cybersecurity obstacles. Noname came to market at just the right time with a fully realized, next-gen technology that’s making a big impact with global customers.”

API security is a hot ticket for investors right now. Last month, London-based 42Crunch raised a $17 million Series A, and just weeks later California-based Salt Security closed a $70 million Series C — bringing the total amount of funding the company has raised in the last year to $120 million.

API startups are so hot right now

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Shogun, a front end e-commerce page builder, nabs $67.5M as retailers look for alternatives to marketplaces

E-commerce marketplaces continue to play a major role in how consumers buy goods online and how retailers show off and sell goods to those consumers, accounting globally for 47% of all e-commerce sales. But today, one of the startups that has built technology to help retailers build and run more direct relationships — by way of zippy websites of their own — is announcing a big round of growth funding, a sign that the marketplace model is not for everyone, and that those catering to those retailers are finding traction.

Shogun — a platform to help e-commerce businesses of all sizes built on platforms like Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce easily design and run their own responsive storefronts — has raised $67.5 million. This Series C values Shogun at $575 million, a “nice markup” on its previous valuation, said Finbarr Taylor, the company’s co-founder and CEO, in an interview.

He added that the capital will be used both to continue building out its two main products — Page Builder, a drag-and-drop page builder for Shopify merchants; and Shogun Frontend, an end-to-end headless commerce solution — as well as business development, and to build out new tech, specifically in areas like first-party data and personalization.

“We want to help companies build a destination where they can control the experience,” he said, comparing it to the physical world and the difference between Nike shoes sold at the brand’s own store versus at a big retailer like Walmart. “In a Nike store you can design an experience. In Walmart you cannot.”

Led by Insight Partners — a new investor in the startup — it also included Initialized Capital, Accel and VMG Partners. Accel led Shogun’s previous round — a $35 million Series B — announced less than a year ago, in October 2020. The startup has now raised $114.5 million.

The hike in valuation, and the rapid succession of its fundraises, are two signs of how Shogun has been doing in the last eight months — a time when e-commerce has continued to perform strongly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Another is the company’s actual growth based on the idea of making front-end tools that used to be cost-prohibitive into something affordable for even the smallest merchant.

One of the selling points for Shogun up to now has been that pages and sites built on its platform run fast: a very key detail in the world of e-commerce where shopping cart abandonment is rife and often hinges on how long people have to wait for something to load.

Page Builder — the mass-market, drag-and-drop site builder for those creating sites on top of Shopify — is now used by around 20,000 business, Taylor said, ranging from small startups through to Fortune 500 companies, with customers including brands like K-Swiss, Leesa, Rumpl, BeardBrand, MVMT and Fila. He said that merchants collectively are seeing GMV (gross merchandise value, or total amount sold) in the “billions of dollars” through their sites.

(For a point of reference, Shogun told me it had 15,000 customers back in October; growing 5,000 in the last eight months is the same amount of growth as last year.)

Shogun’s newer product, Frontend, designed for mid-market to enterprise customers and positioned as a “headless” solution aimed more at web designers and others building more customized experiences, now has hundreds of customers and grew . “Apple’s site is beautiful, but it cost millions to make,” Taylor said. “We want anyone to be able to build those exceptional e-commerce experiences.” Frontend has grown 10x in the last year, Taylor said.

GMV across all of Shogun’s business grew by 255% in the last two years.

The rise of services like Shogun’s underscores a swing we have seen among e-commerce companies that are looking for a more autonomy and control in how they engage with customers. Sites like Amazon have long been seen as a way to tap into a large population of shoppers, as well as solid fulfillment and shipping infrastructure to store, package, distribute and deliver products.

There has even been a sharp rise in “roll-up” plays like Thrasio to help consolidate merchants on these platforms to leverage even better economies of scale on details like marketing, customer analytics and manufacturing, which marketplaces like Amazon do not (yet?) handle.

But none of that still replaces the ability to set your own destiny.

Now, the rise of services like Shopify, BigCommerce and Spryker (also backed by Insight Partners) to help manage the backend; Stripe, PayPal and others to manage payments; and others like ShipBob to manage the logistics, have made it increasingly less difficult to build and run your own online experience. That takes on a stronger priority as your business grows, but even for smaller merchants, the idea of controlling your own customer experience is a compelling one.

Services like Shogun (and others like fit into that latter trend, such as Squarespace or Wix but also others like Duda), which give merchants the tools to build their own e-commerce experiences as they would like them to look, are the front ends for that strategy. Opting to take the “headless” commerce approach, apparently, is an increasing trend.

And that individualism is also where Shogun plans to double down and build more tools for its users, Taylor said.

“It’s all about direct relationships with customers,” he said, pointing out that newer changes in privacy regulation and cookies going away mean retailers can no longer rely on third-party platforms as they used to. “It’s about first party relationships. The future is way more personalized shopping online.”

That vision is also what interested investors.

“Our investment in Shogun underscores the market’s desire to see headless commerce become merchant-focused,” said Matt Gatto, managing director at Insight Ventures, in a statement. “More brands want to be able to build headless progressive web apps in a low-code environment. Those on the forefront of e-commerce want to enable web teams to build truly unique, memorable shopping experiences. Shogun is well positioned to make flexible frontends accessible to brands in a whole new way, and we’re excited to be a partner in this journey.”

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Apple and Snap partner JigSpace, the ‘Canva for 3D,’ raises a $4.7M Series A

When former Art Director Zac Duff started teaching a game development course online in 2015, he faced the same challenges that teachers around the globe have become all too familiar with after a pandemic-induced lockdown. So, he used his experience in 3D design to build a virtual reality classroom to make remote learning more engaging for his students. Instead of entering yet another Zoom lecture, the school gave students VR headsets to transport themselves to the Ancient Greek-inspired classroom that Duff built.

Still, Duff knew that this learning model couldn’t be easily scaled — most schools don’t have VR headsets to send out, and most teachers don’t have over a decade of game design experience to whip up a classroom with green fields and butterflies (yes, Duff made that). But he saw that there was potential for a user-friendly program that lets anyone create 3D presentations and share information in AR.

“Right at the center of it is knowledge transfer. It’s about one person giving knowledge to another person in a really effective way,” Duff told TechCrunch. He referenced products like Microsoft Powerpoint and Canva, which make it easy for the average user to create presentations and graphics that communicate their ideas. “We have those systems in 2D, but in 3D, we just didn’t have it, and it was a really complex, expensive technical process that you had to go through to build anything, and that stuck with me.”

Image Credits: JigSpace

Soon after, Duff took a Friday off from work to outline the company that would become JigSpace, which is poised to set the standard for knowledge-sharing in 3D. After launching in 2017, the JigSpace platform now has over 4 million users with a 4.8 average rating on the App Store. When you download the JigSpace app, you can interact in AR with 3D models that show how to fix a leaky sink, repair a dry wall, or even build a Lego Star Wars spacecraft. There are also educational models, or Jigs, that show how a piano works, the anatomy of the human eye, and even how the coronavirus spreads. The potential use cases for JigSpace are expansive — Duff says he hopes to work with manufacturing companies to have them make Jigs of their products. That way, let’s say you want to replace your AC filter, you can look at a 3D model in AR, rather than a black and white 2D drawing in an instruction booklet.

Today, JigSpace announced that it raised $4.7 million in Series A funding led by Rampersand, with Investible and new investors including Vulpes, and Roger Allen AM, also participating. The JigSpace app is free to use, and anyone can combine presets and templates of 3D modeled objects to create their own Jigs — the more tech savvy among us can upload up to 30 MB of files to make more customized Jigs on the free version. But the money-maker for Jigspace is its Jig Pro platform, which is designed for commercial businesses and manufacturers. Jig Pro‘s subscription for individuals is $49 per month, while the price of the enterprise offering isn’t listed online.

Image Credits: JigSpace

“The best area for us has been in durable manufacturing, because almost all manufacturing products have CAD files, so the 3D already exists,” said Duff. “Then, we’re able to work with those companies to give them the tools to create knowledge material around their products.”

Right after JigSpace launched its Pro version, it was featured in Apple’s iPhone 12 Keynote, demonstrating how the iPhone 12’s LiDAR scanner and 5G capabilities could be used to save time and money in manufacturing. JigSpace also partnered with Snapchat to create a Lens that allows you to scan kitchen items to reveal 3D Jigs that show how stuff works, from your microwave to your coffee maker.

Jig Pro’s customer base has grown 40% month-on-month since it launched in mid-2020, with the average user logging into the app at least once per day. Companies like Verizon, Volkswagen, Medtronic, and Thermo Fisher Scientific use JigSpace to develop 3D models to present to stakeholders, customers, and remote colleagues. Especially as products like Apple’s Capture emerge, it will become even easier for people to import their own 3D models into JigSpace.

Despite its commercial potential, it’s important to Duff that JigSpace always retains a free version that makes learning through AR easy.

“We want to make sure that all of the people with information they want to share, those are the people we serve, not just the technical people at the top,” Duff says. “From the beginning, my co-founder Numa Bertron and I always wanted to have a free version. Knowledge should be accessible to people in the best way possible, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be.”

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Apple releases International Collection Watch bands for 22 countries

Apple has announced 22 new bands for the Apple Watch, themed with the flag colors of 22 countries. The breathable Sport Loop bands, cost $49 each and come in 40mm and 44mm sizes, making them compatible with Apple Watch Series 4, Watch SE and later. For each watch band there's a downloadable Stripes watch face with each country's specific color combinations. The countries are Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, and...

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Sustainable tech developer Turntide Technologies raises $225M

Turntide Technologies, a sustainable technology developer, has announced $225 million in convertible note financing that it says will help fund projects to reduce carbon emissions in the commercial buildings, agriculture and transportation industries.

Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board led the round, along with Monashee Capital Inc. and current investor JLL Spark. Other participating investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Millennium Management and Suvretta Capital Management, bringing Turntide’s total funding to $400 million. Convertible note financing is short-term debt that will convert to equity in the form of shares of preferred stock which Turntide says will happen at a future determined valuation.

“The addition of a major national pension fund fortifies Turntide with permanent capital as we expand into new markets like electrified transport,” said Ryan Morris, Turntide’s chairman and CEO, in a statement.

Earlier this month, Turntide announced the acquisition of Hyperdrive Innovation and BorgWarner Gateshead and the subsequent launch of Turntide Transport. Using the drivetrain tech from those two U.K.-based companies, this division of Turntide is focused on modernizing legacy motor systems in the commercial transportation industry such as those found in construction equipment, high-speed rail, autonomous robots, freight trucking and shipping and air cargo. The fresh funds will also go towards Turntide Transport’s goal of creating a “one-stop powertrain platform that includes battery pack, power electronics, motor, and connected intelligence,” according to the company. 

The company says its so-called “Smart Motor System” reduces energy consumption by nearly 64%, and will address the need for sustainably electrifying more challenging markets than passenger vehicles, where most of the progress has been made to date.   

Turntide says it is working with brands such as JCB, Hitachi Rail and Volkswagen’s MAN division to further develop a motor that doesn’t use environmentally damaging rare earth materials, and that can achieve net zero climate goals, which also makes it cheaper to produce. 

The $225 million will also finance the development of a cloud-based software platform that the company expects to be released this year. The platform will integrate the Smart Motor System into different built environments and electric vehicles in a way that’s user friendly. 

“Turntide’s technology combines a redesigned electric motor wrapped in intelligent automation with cloud connectivity to dramatically improve the efficiency of building controls, electric vehicles, and agriculture,” Morris told TechCrunch. “Today, half of the world’s energy is used by electric motors and nearly half of that energy consumption is being wasted due to inefficiency and lack of intelligent controls.” 

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Energizer Hard Case G5 is the brand's first 5G phone, Ultimate U680S (4G) also unveiled

Avenir Telecom unveiled its first Energizer-branded 5G phone, cleverly called the Energizer Hard Case G5. “Hard Case” means this is part of a rugged line of products that ranges from flashlights to smartphones. And “G5” is “5G” spelled backwards, get it? Jokes aside, this phone comes with an IP69 rating for dust and water resistance. It can go down to 1.2m depth (4 ft) for half an hour. The whole device is hermetically sealed to keep water out. The exterior is made out of several layers of solid industrial rubber, which makes the Hard Case G5 shock resistant and it can survive drops...

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Google tightens UK policy on financial ads after watchdog pressure over scams

The UK’s more expansive, post-Brexit role in digital regulation continues to be felt today via a policy change by Google which has announced that it will, in the near future, only run ads for financial products and services when the advertiser in question has been verified by the financial watchdog, the FCA.

The Google Ads Financial Products and Services policy will be updated from August 30, per Google, which specifies that it will start enforcing the new policy from September 6 — meaning that purveyors of online financial scams who’ve been relying on its ad network to net their next victim still have more than two months to harvest unsuspecting clicks before the party is over (well, in the UK, anyway).

Google’s decision to allow only regulator authorized financial entities to run ads for financial products & services follows warnings from the Financial Conduct Authority that it may take legal action if Google continued to accept unscreened financial ads, as the Guardian reported earlier.

The FCA told a parliamentary committee this month that it’s able to contemplate taking such action as a result of no longer being bound by European Union rules on financial adverts, which do not extend to online platforms, per the newspaper’s report.

Until gaining the power to go after Google itself, the FCA appears to have been trying to combat the scourge of online financial fraud by paying Google large amounts of UK taxpayer money to fight scams with anti-scam warnings.

According to the Register, the FCA paid Google more than £600,000 (~$830k) in 2020 and 2021 to run ‘anti-scam’ ads — with the regulator essentially engaged in a bidding war with scammers to pour enough money into Google’s coffers so that regulator warnings about financial scams might appear higher than the scams themselves.

The full-facepalm situation was presumably highly lucrative for Google. But the threat of legal action appears to have triggered a policy rethink.

Writing in its blog post, Ronan Harris, a VP and MD for Google UK & Ireland, said: “Financial services advertisers will be required to demonstrate that they are authorised by the UK Financial Conduct Authority or qualify for one of the limited exemptions described in the UK Financial Services verification page.”

“This new update builds on significant work in partnership with the FCA over the last 18 months to help tackle this issue,” he added. “Today’s announcement reflects significant progress in delivering a safer experience for users, publishers and advertisers. While we understand that this policy update will impact a range of advertisers in the financial services space, our utmost priority is to keep users safe on our platforms — particularly in an area so disproportionately targeted by fraudsters.”

The company’s blog also claims that it has pledged $5M in advertising credits to support financial fraud public awareness campaigns in the UK. So not $5M in actual money then.

Per the Register, Google did offer to refund the FCA’s anti-scam ad spend — but, again, with advertising credits.

The UK parliament’s Treasury Committee was keen to know whether the tech giant would be refunding the spend in cash. But the FCA’s director of enforcement and market insight, Mark Steward, was unable to confirm what it would do, according to the Register’s report of the committee hearing.

We’ve reached out to the FCA for comment on Google’s policy change, and with questions about the refund situation, and will update this report with any response.

In recent years the financial watchdog has also been concerned about financial scam ads running on social media platforms.

Back in 2018, legal action by a well-known UK consumer advice personality, Martin Lewis — who filed a defamation suit against Facebook — led the social media giant to add a ‘report scam ad’ button in the market as of July 2019.

However research by consumer group, Which?, earlier this year, suggested that neither Facebook nor Google had entirely purged financial scam ads — even when they’d been reported.

Per the BBC, Which?’s survey found that Google had failed to remove around a third (34%) of the scam adverts reported to it vs Facebook failing to remove well over a fifth (26%).

It’s almost like the incentives for online ad giants to act against lucrative online scam ads simply aren’t pressing enough…

More recently, Lewis has been pushing for scam ads to be included in the scope of the UK’s Online Safety Bill.

The sweeping piece of digital regulation aims to tackle a plethora of so-called ‘online harms’ by focusing on regulating user generated content. However Lewis makes the point that a scammer merely needs to pay an ad platform to promote their fraudulent content for it to escape the scope of the planned rules, telling the Good Morning Britain TV program today that the situation is “ludicrous” and “needs to change”.

'It's ludicrous. It needs to change.'@MartinSLewis calls for changes to be made to the Online Safety Bill to include the policing of scam adverts.

Dame Margaret Hodge agrees with Martin as she highlights that only 1% of police money and time is spent on tackling fraud. pic.twitter.com/PKI9obagmw

— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) June 30, 2021

It’s certainly a confusing carve-out, as we reported at the time the bill was presented. Nor is it the only confusing component of the planned legislation. However on the financial fraud point the government may believe the FCA has the necessary powers to tackle the problem.

We’ve contacted the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport for comment.

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