Spotify officially launches Blend, allowing friends to match their musical tastes and make playlists together

Spotify today is officially rolling out its shared playlist feature called Blend to global users, with a few changes. Earlier this summer, Spotify had first launched the new shared playlist experience into beta testing. The feature, which allows two people to combine their favorite songs into one shared playlist, uses the same music mixing technology that powers other multi-person playlists like Spotify’s Family Mix and Duo Mix. However, Blend allows any Spotify user, including both free users and paid subscribers, to merge their musical tastes, too.

The feature has been further developed since its beta release, Spotify says.

Now, users who create a Blend (aka their shared playlist) will get something called a “taste match score” that shows them how similar or different their listening preferences are, when compared with their friends. After the Blend is created for the first time, this taste match score is demonstrated as a percentage and will be accompanied by text that tells users which song brings them together.

Blends will also feature new cover art to help users find their playlists more easily.

Premium subscribers will get an extra perk, as well. On their version of a Blend, listeners will be able to see which of the user’s preferences contributed to each song on the playlist.

Spotify says during tests of Blend, Olivia Rodrigo took the top spot for the most-streamed artist on Blend playlists, followed by others like Doja Cat, Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, and Lil Nas X.

The feature isn’t only meant to be serve a fun addition to Spotify. It’s also a user acquisition strategy. Since free users are able to create or join a Blend, the feature can serve as a way to entice someone to join Spotify for the first time — even if they currently don’t pay for music, or if they subscribe to a rival service. But once they’re in Spotify’s app, they may decide to stay, the thinking goes.

Blend was announced in June alongside a new in-app experience called Only You, which focuses on your favorite music and how you listen — sort of like a mid-year version of Spotify’s popular annual retrospective, Spotify Wrapped. Like Only You, Blend includes support for social sharing. Users will be able to share Blend’s “data stories” across their social channels. This is the screen that pops up immediately after a Blend is created, but can also be accessed from any time within the Blend playlist itself.

Spotify’s bigger message with features like this, which are released at a fairly steady cadence, is about conveying to users and competitors alike that’s it’s further ahead when it comes to personalization technology. Even though rivals now dupe Spotify’s ideas for playlists, the company tends to have something new to release shortly after, whether that’s Only You, or a playlist aimed at commuters, those for the gym, or a collection of new mixes based on artists, genres and decades.

You can access Blend from the Made for You hub on Spotify’s mobile app. To get started, you’ll click “Create Blend” then “invite” to select a friend to join your Blend. When the friend accepts, Spotify will create the cover art, tracklists and display your taste match score. You can then click “Share this Story” to post your data story to your social networks.

Blend will begin rolling out to all users worldwide, starting today. Large-scale rollouts can take time, so you don’t see it immediately, just check back later.

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Xiaomi CC11 surfaces on TENAA with 64MP main camera, 6.55" AMOLED display

The CC11 series is expected to arrive with two models – vanilla and Pro – and should be available globally under the Note 11 (last year’s CC9 was exported as the Note 10 series). We’ve been hearing rumors about the devices, now TENAA has supplied some additional details about the vanilla phone. The Xiaomi CC11 features a 6.55” AMOLED display with 1,080 x 2,400 px resolution (that is 20:9). According to previous rumors, it will have a 90 Hz refresh rate. Unfortunately, there are no images attached to the listing yet, so we can’t tell if the display is curved or flat. The phone measures...

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Offchain Labs raises $120 million to hide Ethereum’s shortcomings with its Arbitrum product

As the broader crypto world enjoys a late summer surge in enthusiasm, more and more blockchain developers who have taken the plunge are bumping into the blaring scaling issues faced by decentralized apps on the Ethereum blockchain. The popular network has seen its popularity explode in the past year but its transaction volume has stayed frustratingly stable as the network continues to operate near its limits, leading to slower transaction speeds and hefty fees on the crowded chain.

Ethereum’s core developers have been planning out significant upgrades to the blockchain to rectify these issues, but even in the crypto world’s early stages, transitioning the network is a daunting, lengthy task. That’s why developers are looking to so-called Layer 2 rollup scaling solutions, which sit on top of the Ethereum network and handle transactions separately in a cheaper, faster way, while still recording the transactions to the Ethereum blockchain, albeit in batches.

The Layer 2 landscape is early, but crucial to the continued scalability of Ethereum. As a result, there’s been quite a bit of passionate chatter among blockchain developers regarding the early players in the space. Offchain Labs has been developing one particularly hyped rollup network called Arbitrum One, which has built up notable support and momentum since it beta-launched to developers in May, with about 350 teams signing up for access, the company says.

They’ve attracted some high-profile partnerships including Uniswap and Chainlink who have promised early support for the solution. The company has also quickly piqued investor interest. The startup tells TechCrunch it raised a $20 million Series A in April of this year, quickly followed up by a $100 million Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners which closed this month and valued the company at $1.2 billion. Other new investors include Polychain Capital, Ribbit Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Pantera Capital, Alameda Research and Mark Cuban.

Offchain Labs co-founders Felton, Goldfeder and Kalodner

It’s been a fairly lengthy ride for the Arbitrum technology to public access. The tech was first developed at Princeton — you can find a YouTube video where the tech is first discussed in earnest back in early 2015.  Longtime Professor Ed Felton and his co-founders CEO Steven Goldfeder and CTO Harry Kalodner detailed a deeper underlying vision in a 2018 research paper before licensing the tech from Princeton and building out the company. Felton previously served as the deputy U.S. chief technology officer in the Obama White House, and — alongside Goldfeder — authored a top textbook on cryptocurrencies.

After a lengthy period under wraps and a few months of limited access, the startup is ready to launch the Arbitrum One mainnet publicly, they tell TechCrunch.

This team’s scaling solution has few direct competitors — a16z-backed Optimism is its most notable rival — but Arbitrum’s biggest advantage is likely the smooth compatibility it boasts with decentralized applications designed to run on Ethereum, compared with competitors that may require more heavy-lifting on the developer’s part to be full compatibility with their rollup solution. That selling point could be a big one as Arbitrum looks to court support across the Ethereum network and crypto exchanges for its product, though most Ethereum developers are well aware of what’s at stake broadly.

“There’s just so much more demand than there is supply on Ethereum,” Goldfeder tells TechCrunch. “Rollups give you the security derived from Ethereum but a much better experience in terms of costs.”

Solana, a blockchain platform followed by top crypto investors, says it’s far faster than Ethereum

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Peak raises $75M for a platform that helps non-tech companies build AI applications

As artificial intelligence continues to weave its way into more enterprise applications, a startup that has built a platform to help businesses, especially non-tech organizations, build more customized AI decision making tools for themselves has picked up some significant growth funding. Peak AI, a startup out of Manchester, England, that has built a “decision intelligence” platform, has raised $75 million, money that it will be using to continue building out its platform as well as to expand into new markets, and hire some 200 new people in the coming quarters.

The Series C is bringing a very big name investor on board. It is being led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with previous backers Oxx, MMC Ventures, Praetura Ventures, and Arete also participating. That group participated in Peak’s Series B of $21 million, which only closed in February of this year. The company has now raised $118 million; it is not disclosing its valuation.

(This latest funding round was rumored last week, although it was not confirmed at the time and the total amount was not accurate.)

Richard Potter, Peak’s CEO, said the rapid follow-on in funding was based on inbound interest, in part because of how the company has been doing.

Peak’s so-called Decision Intelligence platform is used by retailers, brands, manufacturers and others to help monitor stock levels, build personalized customer experiences, as well as other processes that can stand to have some degree of automation to work more efficiently, but also require sophistication to be able to measure different factors against each other to provide more intelligent insights. Its current customer list includes the likes of Nike, Pepsico, KFC, Molson Coors, Marshalls, Asos, and Speedy, and in the last 12 months revenues have more than doubled.

The opportunity that Peak is addressing goes a little like this: AI has become a cornerstone of many of the most advanced IT applications and business processes of our time, but if you are an organization — and specifically one not built around technology — your access to AI and how you might use it will come by way of applications built by others, not necessarily tailored to you, and the costs of building more tailored solutions can often be prohibitively high. Peak claims that those using its tools have seen revenues on average rise 5%; return on ad spend double; supply chain costs reduce by 5%; and inventory holdings (a big cost for companies) reduce by 12%.

Peak’s platform, I should point out, is not exactly a “no-code” approach to solving that problem — not yet at least: it’s aimed at data scientists and engineers at those organizations so that they can easily identify different processes in their operations where they might benefit from AI tools, and to build those out with relatively little heavy lifting.

There have also been different market factors that have also played a role. Covid-19, for example, and the boost that we have seen both in increasing “digital transformation” in businesses, and making e-commerce processes more efficient to cater to rising consumer demand and more strained supply chains, have all led to businesses being more open to and keen to invest in more tools to improve their automation intelligently.

This, combined with Peak AI’s growing revenues, is part of what interested SoftBank. The investor has been long on AI for a while, but it has been building out a section of its investment portfolio to provide strategic services to the kinds of businesses that it invests in. Those include e-commerce and other consumer-facing businesses, which make up one of the main segments of Peak’s customer base. Notably, one of its big, recent investments specifically in that space was made earlier this year also in Manchester, when it took a $730 million stake (with potentially $1.6 billion more down the line) in The Hut Group, which builds software for and runs D2C businesses.

“In Peak we have a partner with a shared vision that the future enterprise will run on a centralized AI software platform capable of optimizing entire value chains,” Max Ohrstrand, senior investor for SoftBank Investment Advisers, said in a statement. “To realize this a new breed of platform is needed and we’re hugely impressed with what Richard and the excellent team have built at Peak. We’re delighted to be supporting them on their way to becoming the category-defining, global leader in Decision Intelligence.”

It’s not clear that SoftBank’s two Manchester interests will be working together, but it’s an interesting synergy if they do, and most of all highlights one of the firm’s areas of interest.

Longer term, it will be interesting to see how and if Peak evolves to be extend its platform to a wider set of users at the organizations that are already its customers.

Potter said he believes that “those with technical predispositions” will be the most likely users of its products in the near and medium term. You might assume that would cut out, for example, marketing managers, although the general trend in a lot of software tools has precisely been to build versions of the same tools used by data scientists for these tell technical people to engage in the process of building what it is that they want to use. “I do think it’s important to democratize the ability to stream data pipelines, and to be able to optimize those to work in applications,” he added.

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Kevala raises $21M to improve tools for managing energy grid infrastructure

Kevala, the startup that collects and analyzes energy grid infrastructure data for utility companies, renewable energy providers, EV charging companies, regulators and other energy industry stakeholders, has raised $21 million in a Series A round.

The company says it will use the funds to grow its team from 60 employees to around 100 by the end of 2021 and increase the deployment of its grid analytics tools. 

Kevala’s Assessor Platform, its interactive cloud-based grid analytics toolbox, allows a range of energy industry stakeholders to leverage massive quantities of data the company has collected from public sources, as well as from its clients, in order to predict and plan for things like “extreme weather events, renewable energy adoption and increasing demand from vehicle, building and industry electrification,” according to a statement released by the company. 

Today, there is a greater range of energy sources and receptors than ever before. There’s also more extreme weather conditions, with the latest power outages in New Orleans due to Hurricane Ida being a prime example of ways the current grid system falls short. Visualization software that uses AI to cross reference not only demand on the grid but also other relevant information, like demographics of a specific location, maps of electrical wires and locations of solar panels, is going to be essential for managing it all. Google’s moonshot arm, X, is starting to move into this space via a recent partnership with AES, an electricity distributor. The two will work together to simulate and virtualize AES’s distribution grids in Indiana and Ohio. While Google has big business muscle behind it, Kevala has been working in this space since 2014 and is potentially poised to become an industry leader. 

“Kevala has first mover advantage in providing comprehensive big data analytics on grid infrastructure,” said Zulfe Ali, managing partner at C5 Capital, in a statement. C5 Capital’s fund focused on data-driven technologies transforming critical infrastructure, C5 Impact Partners LP, led the Series A round alongside Thin Line Capital. Senior energy sector executives Tom Werner, current chairman and former CEO of SunPower Corp., and Mark Ferron, former California Public Utilities Commissioner, also participated in the round.

“We’re incredibly excited to partner with the company as it expands into new markets such as cybersecurity and national security, as well as new geographies outside of the United States,” continued Ali. 

Kevala already has nearly the entire country mapped in terms of above-ground distribution infrastructure, and is working on expanding its coverage internationally. The company’s data set, which Kevala founder and CEO Aram Shumavon says is in the terabytes range, is largely sourced from publicly available data. That can mean data that’s observable from satellite imagery or found in building permits that allow the company to see things like where wind turbines are located or where rooftop photovoltaic (PV), or solar powered, systems are. 

“We can take all the houses in a localized area, check it against the weather, and see what the energy consumption will be, what do we think the PV production would be for all of the PVs on those rooftops, and you can start to see how investments in different technologies will affect the overall loading and utilization of the grid and begin to better understand how resources could be utilized to drive cost savings, or alternatively, might increase the cost of that infrastructure as a whole,” Shumavon told TechCrunch.

During a walkthrough of Kevala’s dashboard, Shumavon explained how energy industry stakeholders might be able to, say, predict which neighborhood might see an increase in EV ownership based on household income and other demographics data. From there, visualizing the ratio of electricity to rooftop PVs to other renewable energy is helpful in predicting power usage, but Shumavon took it a step further by playing out a scenario of placing a battery in that location. 

Automotive startup Upstream raises $62M Series C to scale cloud-based security

“Could I reduce the cost of the grid in this area by limiting the need for building out new infrastructure in the form of wires, and instead shifting that load to another period of time?” said Shumavon. “And that savings can be also calculated for any investment that might be able to provide a similar service, whether it’s a battery or an investment in an energy efficiency measure, or potentially a rooftop PV system or a demand response program where you agree to not charge your car during peak hours.”

That’s just one example of the types of analyses Kevala is performing everyday. The startup also hopes to increase its cybersecurity services to help protect grid infrastructure. Shumavon said one area Kevala is particularly interested in is third-party devices that have the ability to be compromised and potentially used to destabilize the grid. For example, someone with malicious intent might hack into thousands of IoT-connected washing machines and suddenly turn on all of the heating coils in the machine, creating a drastically increased load that can affect both the supply and demand of electricity.

Monitoring a situation like this is usually outside the control of traditional utility control systems, but Shumavon says through overseeing energy use data, Kevala is able to observe anomalies and mitigate them when they happen, as well as plan for attacks on the horizon so stakeholders are ready with an appropriate response. Kevala is also focusing on data privacy.

“We’re seeing increasingly large amounts of information about end-use customers become potentially available when they use electricity and how advanced metering infrastructure, like smart meters, can contain very detailed information about when people consume electricity and how much,” said Shumavon. “Being able to make sure if those data need to be used by third parties that they’re not revealing information that would be considered personally identifiable is another area where we provide service, which is a strong corollary to cybersecurity work. We really see cybersecurity and privacy as two sides of the same coin.”

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Minnesota twins raise $3M to increase accessibility to disability care

Having a loved one with specialized care needs is incredibly challenging, but not something that people who have never had to deal with the issue would necessarily quite understand.

For anyone who has had to help care for someone with special needs, the lack of options out there to navigate finding access to care providers is almost shocking.

Twin sisters Melanie Fountaine and Melissa Danielsen know the problem firsthand, having helped take care of their brother, who had a developmental disability and severe epilepsy, for years.

“We saw the struggle for our family to find reliable care,” Danielsen told TechCrunch.

After he passed away 12 years ago at the age of 29, the siblings decided they wanted to dedicate their careers to making disability care accessible to families with complex care needs. They founded Josh’s Place, a company that provided group home accommodations and other services to adults across Minnesota, which ended up being acquired by REM Minnesota in early 2020.

The pair then came up with the concept behind Joshin, a digital care platform that aims to connect care providers to families with specialized care needs. (Both companies were named after the sisters’ brother, who was named Josh). And today, that startup is announcing it has closed on a $3 million seed round of funding co-led by Anthemis Group and The Autism Impact Fund.

Joshin started out as an app that creates a care plan that helps it match families to a “carefully vetted” trained caregiver. It has evolved to also include a corporate benefits program with Joshin partnering with companies who want to offer an inclusive care benefit to their employees.

Image Credits: Joshin

An estimated one in five families have complex health needs, ranging from children with neurodivergence to dependent adults with developmental and physical disabilities. The COVID-19 pandemic has only highlighted the need for support, making it even more difficult to find necessary care. As such, many people (most of which are women) are finding they have to leave jobs to become full-time caregivers.

“For too long, people with special health needs and their families have been underserved and had fragmented access to disability care providers,” said CEO Danielsen.

As ADA turns 30, tech is just getting started helping people with disabilities

COO Fountaine says that historically the care economy has focused on children under 12, or adults over 65 — childcare and eldercare, respectively.

“Joshin really is positioned to be the leader in that huge age gap that’s out there,” she said. “We work with people at all stages of life, and I think it’s unfortunate that until now, that’s been missing from the conversation. 

The company plans to use its new capital in part to grow its network of care providers. It also aims to expand its corporate benefits program.

“We’re continuing to scale our technology to lessen the burden of caregiving responsibilities for employees and their families,” added Danielsen.

Over the past 12 months, Joshin’s community of members and caregivers has grown 200%. With the new funding, the startup plans to expand its services to Los Angeles and Seattle. It is currently operational in its home base of Minneapolis, Minn., Chicago and New York City.  Joshin will be soft launching in 8 new markets over the next few weeks and hopes “to be national very soon,” Fountaine said.

The startup is starting with employers, and building up the data that it derives from that effort. Over the next year, it intends to partner with managed Medicaid organizations, and with both private and public insurance companies so that it “can get families access to this care, quickly,” said Danielsen.

“Our goal is to make this to make quality care free for families who need it,” she told TechCrunch.

Chris Male, co-founder of the Autism Impact Fund, said his organization backs companies that are addressing unmet needs of the autism community. Finding, retaining, and coordinating care are three of the biggest hurdles that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and their families face, according to Male.

“Joshin has a proven ability to provide a reliable means to source caregivers with diverse skill sets and potential to serve as a platform for streamlining access to a variety of critical yet highly fragmented services for the special needs community,” he said. “Given the current insurance payer landscape and employer emphasis on DEI, Joshin is not only generating strong impact for a large disability market, but is a monetizable opportunity as both a reimbursable service and as a benefit to employees.”

By partnering with employers, Male added, Joshin will help provide an environment of support that will allow “employees to quickly and easily access key resources and thus minimize downtime. “

Matthew Jones, managing director at Anthemis, said his firm doubled down on its investment in the startup because it saw in its founders “one of the strongest examples of founder-market fit out there.” (Anthemis also led the company’s $1.6 million funding round in July of 2020).

“The progress that they have made since our last investment – coupled with the insights that they have collected – led us to believe that doubling down in this round was a no-brainer,” he told TechCrunch.

Also, the complexity that comes with building technology in the space “makes the barriers to entry very high,” Jones added.

“The team’s grit, combined with their understanding of the problems and opportunities associated with disability-related care, set Joshin apart,” he wrote via email. “No other platform comes close in terms of having such specialized leaders at the helm, so it’s no surprise that corporates are lining up to add Joshin to their roster of employee benefits.”

Fable aims to make disability-inclusive design as simple as a service

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Hum Capital thinks the future of funding is a return to old school Wall Street

Hum Capital CEO Blair Silverberg thinks that the future of fundraising requires a return to old school Wall Street – sans the fraud.

Back in the day, he explained, people would go to Wall Street and request funding for different projects, such as a rail line from New Jersey to St. Louis or a new store. A banker would chat through all the financing options, analyze different tradeoffs, and eventually help business owners pick the best capital option for their goals.

“It was very, ‘let’s think about the problem we’re trying to solve, and then let’s make the financing fit,’” Silverberg said. “Today, we do the opposite.” Even with ample capital in the market, startup check-writing is still a game dictated by warm intros, cold pitches, and oftentimes, sheer luck that the founder bugged the right person in the right way at the right time.

Silverberg said the current climate forces founders and investors to do a “crazy adversarial dance” when it comes to partnerships, which feels “backwards.” He wants his startup, Hum Capital, to bring optionality back into the mix.

“The dream scenario is that any company in the world uses Hum to articulate what they’re trying to do with their mission, and then gets all the relevant forms of financing just sitting right there waiting for them to pick the one that makes the most sense,” he said. No term-sheets for term-sheets sake, but instead, Hum Capital can be a clear way to visualize and compare different financing options for a company’s goal.

The nod to nostalgia has helped the startup land fresh capitalization for the future. Hum Capital announced today that it has raised $9 million in a Series A round led by Steve Jurvetson’s Future Ventures. Jurveston was an early investor in SpaceX, Tesla and Memphis Meats, which Silverberg thinks symbolizes that “[Hum Capital is] an equally world changing company.”

At this stage, Hum Capital’s product is easy to explain: it uses artificial intelligence and data to connect businesses to the some available funders on the platform. The startup connects with a capital-hungry startup, ingests financial data from over 100 SaaS systems including Quickbooks, Netsuite and Google Analytics, and then translates them to the some 250 institutional investors on its platform.

It’s a navigation engine for startups that aren’t sure whether they should go for venture debt, traditional VC, revenue-share financing options, or others. The average deal size is $6.4 million, but Hum can help founders access checks up to $50 million for their businesses.

Image Credits: Hum

Hum is free for startups and investors to use for data-sharing purposes and eventual connections. The startup makes money by charging a 2% marketplace fee on capital raised whenever a deal is closed through its platform.

Founders could theoretically use Hum to meet investors and then close the deal offline to avoid the 2% fee. Silverberg said that most users to-date don’t do this because they want to be repeat customers during future fundraises.

Hum’s biggest challenge is that it isn’t human. In venture, especially at the earliest stages, most check-writing comes down to an investor believing in a person’s ambition (and maybe their pitch deck). Hum leans heavily on data as a determinant of success, and while numbers don’t lie, it could mean early ideas with big ambition are left without options.

Silverberg argued that Hum isn’t meant to replace chemistry, but can work to make sure that the business makes financial sense for an investor. Meetings still matter, but with Hum, he thinks a founder and investor can spend the 30 minute meeting talking about mission and vision, and skip other basics of the business.

Fair rebuttal aside, Hum could be limited in the sorts of startups that it funds long-term. It doesn’t need to find ways to fit into traditional VC – since most businesses aren’t venture-bacable, but it will need to find a way to make sure high-quality investors consistently use the platform for deal flow. Today, much of the investment on the platform is classified as venture debt.

Early adoption suggests some early trends. Companies from 46 states have uploaded data to its Intelligent Capital Market (ICM) platform, and nearly half of all companies on the platform come outside of California and New York.

To date, the platform has helped facilitate more than $400 million in capital transactions across 150 fee agreements. The majority of that money moved between March and now, with customers including SecurityScorecard, Evolv AI and Flaviar.

Hum Capital’s raise is announced in a time where traditional financing feels challenged: Carta just raised money off of a valuation it set for itself, Brex launched a $150 million venture debt business, and Clearco, an alternative to VC, raised money from VCs at an over a $2 billion valuation.

“[Resource allocation] as important as making the world multiplanetary, or global problems like climate change,” Silverberg said. “…We’re at the book sales stage of Amazon.”

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Owner.com serves up $10.7M so that independent restaurants can get cooking

Independent restaurants don’t typically have the luxury to create their own online food ordering and delivery capabilities or negotiate for lower rates from legacy ordering platforms like the large restaurant chains do.

Here’s where Owner.com comes in. The Beverly Hills-based company provides a free online ordering, delivery and marketing platform for independent restaurants that puts them on similar playing fields with the big guys. And unlike the legacy food delivery services, Owner.com restaurants own their customer data and can automate marketing campaigns.

Adam Guild is the company’s 21-year-old co-founder and CEO, a high school dropout and a Thiel Fellow, who originally started by assisting his mother’s dog grooming business that was having difficulties attracting customers. After stepping in with some online marketing methods, her business grew, and later expanded into multiple locations. Guild then wanted to work with a bigger group of people and stumbled across restaurants while helping some clients create online landing pages.

Starship Technologies is bringing food delivery robots to four more US college campuses this year

With consumer demand shifting to primarily online ordering and delivery over the past 18 months, online ordering revenue is expected to double from $248 billion in 2020 to $449 billion by 2025. Ordering platforms like Doordash, Uber Eats and Grubhub control 80% of orders and typically charge between 20% and 30% per order to restaurants and additional fees to consumers.

In contrast, Owner.com is free for restaurants and charges customers a flat $4 fee when they order from the website. Guild explained that larger restaurant chains have the buying power to negotiate lower rates, while independent restaurants do not. With the inability to keep up, some 110,000 restaurants in the U.S. closed in 2020.

Guild initially bootstrapped his company, working with large restaurant chains, like P.F. Chang’s, drive online orders. Then the global pandemic hit. He ended up losing all of his revenue and had to let all of his employees go but one. To add to his bad luck, he was then rejected from Y Combinator and other accelerator programs.

“For the first three days, I was depressed,” Guild told TechCrunch. “I had spent two years building a company and now it was dead. In the same way we were disrupted, I began to think there was no better position to be in than a scrappy startup. I didn’t know what the next business would look like, so I started cold-calling restaurant owners, asking how I can be helpful and what type of technology they were looking for. Many of them told me that online ordering sucked, but if they didn’t solve it soon, they would go out of business.”

One pivot and a year later with co-founder Dean Bloembergen, Owner.com closed on $10.7 million in seed funding led by SaaStr Fund, with participation from Redpoint Ventures and Day One Ventures, as well as a group of individual investors including Naval Ravikant, CNBC’s The Profit host Marcus Lemonis, The Kitchen Restaurant Group’s Kimbal Musk, DoNotPay founder Joshua Browder, Figma founder Dylan Field, The Chainsmokers and independent restaurant owners and customers of Owner.com.

Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr Fund, said restaurant SaaS was a space in which his firm was interested in investing, but thought it was a bit boring — there were already quite a few vendors in the space, like Toast and Grubhub, and most were just technology solutions. However, when he heard that Owner.com was a break-out company from the monotony, he said he had to take a look.

“The ability to own the customer relationship is that ultimate differentiation,” Lemkin said. “Their ultimate goal is to provide a robust technology platform to increase margins, have people order more and come back often.”

Meanwhile, Guild intends to use the new funding to continue product development and add new features like landing pages, the ability to make reservations and native apps for white-label service.

Since the launch last year, the company has reached a seven-figure run-rate and over 105% monthly revenue retention across over 700 restaurant locations, Guild said. To date, Owner.com has transacted over $18 million and helped its restaurant customers avoid paying $3 million to online order platform fees annually.

“It’s all about empowering the 40% of the restaurant industry that is run by people who started off in entry-level positions, and over the years, worked their way up to own the ‘American Dream,’ ” he added.

Europe’s quick-commerce startups are overhyped: Lessons from China

 

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It's official: The Realme 8i will run the new MediaTek Helio G96

The Realme 8i was a subject of an extensive leak last week along with an official-looking render. Most of the specs are already out there but today Realme and MediaTek themselves confirmed the chipset. #MediaTekHelioG96 brings an impressive breadth of features & capabilities to 4G smartphones to power premium user experience. It comes with an 120Hz display, 108MP Camera & #MediaTekHyperEngine 2.0 Lite gaming technologies. https://ift.tt/3zwxag5 #MediaTekHelioGSeries pic.twitter.com/XQpzyrb1gR— MediaTek India (@MediaTekIndia) August 31, 2021 As expected, the device will run on...

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Max Q: Astra’s launch goes sideways

Max Q is a weekly newsletter from TechCrunch all about space. Sign up here to receive it weekly on Mondays in your inbox.

We had a few launches this week, including SpaceX’s first one after one of its longer recent pauses in activity. Astra hoped to have its first commercial payload mission go well, but instead it had one of the more visually interesting takeoff mishaps in private spaceflight.

Astra’s launch drifts and then nearly recovers

Image Credits: Astra

Astra’s launch from Kodiak, Alaska was its first attempt since it nearly reached orbit with a successful test last year. The engines all lit as planned, but almost as quickly, one of those went out and the result was a rocket that nearly toppled over, before floating horizontally for a while, while the remaining engines redistributed power to ultimately start the vehicle climbing skyward.

It’s perhaps more impressive that the Astra rocket didn’t crash and burn right away, even if this was ultimately a failure. The rocket eventually climbed to an altitude of around 160,000 feet before Astra’s flight engineers issued an abort command and the vehicle returned safely to Earth after the engines cut off.

This was a disappointment because the mission was meant to be Astra’s first commercial flight, since it was carrying a simulated test payload on behalf of client the U.S. Space Force. But it also was still technically a test, and the company says it gathered a lot of valuable data from the roughly 2.5 minutes that the rocket was flying before the abort command was given.

While the newly public Astra’s share price took a hit on the news, I think the more instructive bit for the company’s long-term fortunes will be how long it takes to recover from this mishap and try again, and also what the result will be of that follow-up mission.

SpaceX breaks in its new landing barge

Image Credits: SpaceX

SpaceX’s return to flight was another of the Commercial Resupply Services flights it performs for NASA to the International Space Station, and this one went smoothly as usual. The cargo included a new robotic arm for use on the station, as well as interesting experiments including live ants.

The launch also saw SpaceX use its new ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas’ autonomous drone ocean landing ship for the first time. This is the third drone ship that SpaceX has in its fleet, and everything went smoothly with the landing for a successful recovery of the first stage booster used for the flight.

Blue Origin launches suborbital, non-crewed flight

Image Credits: Blue Origin

Blue Origin has launched its 17th New Shepard reusable rocket mission, though this one wasn’t as impressive as its last effort: No Jeff Bezos on board. Unlike that first human spaceflight, there weren’t any passengers in the capsule this go around, but there were a healthy collection of experiments.

One of those was a NASA experimental landing system component that’s going to be used eventually for the agency’s lunar landing vehicle. The interesting subtext here is that Blue Origin is actually suing the agency over its award process for the human lander contract, which selected SpaceX (and only SpaceX) as a lunar lander vehicle provider earlier this year.

Rocket Lab goes public

Image Credits: Rocket Lab

Rocket Lab is now a public company, trading under the name RKLB on the NASDAQ after a SPAC merger. This is one of the largest private space companies yet to go public via any means, and our own Aria Alamalhodaei spoke to Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck to get the low-down on the company and what it means to be a member of the public markets.

Meanwhile, ispace is creating a larger lunar lander that can make it through lunar nights. Its existing small lander design isn’t intended to last long in the dark, since its power reserves would deplete quickly and also the super low temperatures are not kind to most electronics.

Join us at TC Sessions: Space in December

Last year we held our first dedicated space event, and it went so well that we decided to host it again in 2021. This year, it’s happening December 14 and 15, and it’s once again going to be an entirely virtual conference, so people from all over the world will be able to join — and you can, too.

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Apple’s rumored iPhone satellite support may be for emergency calls and messages

Mariella Moon Contributor

Mariella Moon is an associate editor at Engadget.

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The rumored satellite features for future iPhones are reserved for emergency uses only, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. A few days ago, a report by well-known analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said the next iPhones will come with support for Low Earth Orbit satellite calls and messages. Gurman’s sources said, however, that Apple isn’t turning its devices into actual satellite phones, at least for now. Instead, the tech giant is reportedly developing at least two emergency-related features relying on satellite networks.

The first feature is called Emergency Message via Satellite and will be added as a third protocol, alongside iMessage and SMS, to the Messages app. It’s apparently codenamed Stewie inside the company and will allow users to text emergency services even when there’s no signal, which sounds especially useful during emergencies in remote locations, such as mountains and forests.

The tool will also give users a way to text their emergency contacts simply by typing Emergency SOS in the recipient line. Messages will be restricted to a shorter length, but the senders’ contacts will get a notification for them even if their phone is set to Do Not Disturb. Satellite messages will appear as gray bubbles instead of blue or green so they can be easily identified. Eventually, the feature could handle phone calls, as well.

Apple is also reportedly working on a second satellite feature that will allow users to report crisis situations like plane crashes and fires. This system will give users a way to report the incident at length and will ask them specifics, such as if anybody needs search-and-rescue services or if anybody in the vicinity is armed. It can also automatically send authorities the reporter’s location and their details from the Health app, such as their medical history, age, medications and information like height and weight. The feature can also a notify the reporter’s emergency contacts for them.

While both features sound useful, their availability is restricted by satellite location and reach. They might not work for some regions, and in some cases, users may have to walk outdoors in a certain direction where their iPhone can connect to a satellite. Also, Gurman’s sources said it’s unlikely that the features will be ready before the year ends, which means the next iPhones expected be announced sometime in September won’t be able to send messages via satellite yet.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget.

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Gatik expands autonomous box truck operations to Texas with $85 million in new funds

In the two years since Gatik AI came out of stealth, the autonomous vehicle startup has launched pilots with Walmart and Canadian retail giant Loblaw in its bid to prove that self-driving technology combined with box trucks is the secret economic sauce for hauling goods short distances.

Now, the company is expanding into Texas — its fourth market — with a fresh bundle of capital. Gatik said Tuesday it has raised $85 million in a Series B round led by new investor Koch Disruptive Technologies, the venture arm of Koch Industries. Existing investors Innovation Endeavours, Wittington Ventures, FM Capital, Dynamo Ventures, Trucks VC, Intact Ventures and others also participated. Gatik has raised $114.5 million to date.

“We are very much in expansion mode in growth mode and felt that Koch Industries would add the most value,” Gatik CEO and co-founder Gautam Narang said in a recent interview, adding that he views the company as a strategic investor.

Gatik has been shuttling goods as part of pilot programs for Walmart in Arkansas and Louisiana and in Ontario, Canada for Loblaw Companies Limited. Gatik also struck a manufacturing partnership with Isuzu in 2020 with an aim to mass produce medium duty autonomous trucks by early 2023.

Unlike other autonomous delivery companies, Gatik isn’t targeting consumers. Instead, the startup is using its autonomous trucks to shuttle groceries and other goods from large distribution centers to retail locations. For instance, Gatik uses about five box trucks to carry goods for Loblaw. On one route in Arkansas, Gatik has removed the human safety driver, which means some of the autonomous box trucks used to carry goods are now “driverless.” The goal is to remove safety operators from all of its box trucks.

Gatik said it has opened an autonomous trucking facility in the AllianceTexas Mobility Innovation Zone, a 26,000-acre industrial, mixed-use, and residential planned development in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that has become a hub of transportation and logistics. The company is already carrying freight for several customers, which it declined to name. Narang did say that the trucks deployed in Texas are based on the Isuzu platforms.

The company plans to have presence in multiple cities within Texas, Narang said.

Its move to Texas follows other autonomous vehicle technology companies such as Aurora, Kodiak Robotics, TuSimple and Waymo that have set up shop in the state. The decision to expand into Texas was driven by its status an international shipping hub, the regulatory environment that supports autonomous vehicle testing and deployment on public roads and favorable weather. Narang added that the abundance and variety of potential customers will also allow it to have a multi-tenant operation. This means it can use the same truck throughout the day for multiple customers.

The new funding will be used add more vehicles to its fleet of Class 3-6 multi-temperature autonomous box trucks and hire more employees, particularly in Texas. Today, Gatik’s roughly 70 employees are spread between its headquarters in Palo Alto, engineering center in Toronto and operations in Arkansas and Louisiana.

Narang said they plan to double the number of employees to around 150 people in the next six to nine months.

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Power Global eyes India’s auto rickshaw industry with swappable battery and retrofit kit

In India, a country that is more densely populated and has lower rates of car ownership, auto rickshaws and other two- or three-wheeled vehicles play a central role. While many auto rickshaws on Indian roads are already electric, they tend to rely on lead-acid batteries that need to be replaced every six to 11 months.

Power Global, a two-year-old startup, wants to disrupt the auto rickshaw market by offering a retrofit kit for diesel-powered vehicles and swappable battery pack to transition the more common lead-acid batteries to lithium-ion.

Power Global was founded by Porter Harris, who had previously engineered the batteries for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft. He also worked as the chief battery engineer at EV startup Faraday Future. Thus far, he estimates Power Global has been around 95% self-funded – thanks in part to the sale of his SpaceX stock.

“I’ve been looking at the Indian market now for about five years,” he told TechCrunch in a recent interview. The opportunity is certainly ripe, with some market research firms estimating that the electric rickshaw market in India will grow to $1.3 billion by 2025. It’s also dire: last year, 15 out of the top 20 most polluted cities in the world were in India, according to air quality technology company IQAir, and much of those emissions are due to transportation.

By offering two separate products for diesel-powered or electric rickshaws – the retrofit kit, which Harris said will fit over 90% of current models, and the “eZee” swappable battery – Power Global is aiming to capture almost the entire auto-rickshaw market.

Harris says the company already has around 48 dealers ready to sell their products, thanks largely to Power Global co-founder Pankaj Dubey’s extensive history working with Indian dealerships over his career with Hero Motors, Yamaha, and Polaris. And that’s a real benefit, because much of Power Global’s plan is dependent upon an extensive dealer network that can get people signed up to the swappable battery subscription model and help drivers buy and install the retrofit kits.

The main source of revenue will come from getting drivers on the energy-as-a-service monthly subscription model via Power Global’s “eZee” swappable batteries.

“It’s a totally different business model,” Harris said. “We can’t translate petrol or gas solutions and try and make that work for electric, it’s really a whole new thing. Our viewpoint is: a lot of kiosks, a small amount of [battery] modules per location.”

Image Credits: Power Global (opens in a new window)

The company wants to launch on the outskirts of New Delhi, National Capital Region to start, with the eventual goal of planning a kiosk every three kilometers or so. Drivers will also have the option to take the battery home and charge it using a Power Global home charger.

On the user side, the company’s also developing an app that will allow drivers to see stats like how many kilometers they’ve traveled that day, their remaining battery life and where they can find the nearest battery swapping kiosk.

Power Global expects its batteries to last four and a half to five years. The company plans to use the batteries for stationary energy storage application once they’re taken out of the eZee ecosystem. Harris said there are plans to eventually tie those batteries in with small solar panels to provide energy to rural areas. Once the battery has been completely depleted of all its useful life, Harris said it’ll be sent to a recycler.

The company aims to release its eZee swappable battery product in the first quarter of next year, followed by the retrofit kits. It has opened a battery production plant in Greater Noida, India, which it anticipates will produce about a gigawatt-hour – which is about 10,000 Model S packs –this time next year. That’ll make it one of the largest domestic manufacturers of lithium-ion batteries in the country. By the end of 2022, Power Global aims to have at least 10,000 vehicles on the eZee swappable system.

While Power Global is in discussion with some U.S.-based companies interested in the eZee product, Harris said the focus is ultimately further east. “Do we really need another solution for the top 10% of the world? No, we don’t. Let’s focus on the other 90% of the world and actually make a difference.”

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Bose QuietComfort 45 bring improved sound, USB-C and 24-hour battery life

Nearly four years after the debut of Bose’s QuietComfort 35 II the American audio brand released a successor dubbed QuietComfort 45. The new pair comes in black and white colors with a largely unchanged design and several improvements like USB-C charging, up to 24 hours of battery life and a fourth onboard mic for better voice pickup. Bose QuietComfort 45 (images: Bose) The active noise cancelation is still here and you get two modes - Quiet and Aware. The former isolates you from the noises in your surrounding area while the latter amplifies ambient noises so you’re more aware...

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Samsung Galaxy Watch4 and Watch4 Classic are getting another firmware update

Samsung issued the second update for the Galaxy Watch4 and Watch4 Classic following the one that came before they were even launched. The new firmware brings a couple of essential features, mostly related to the fitness tracking functions. The most notable thing about the update is the Samsung Health entry in the settings, allowing you easier management of your health-related features from the watch itself. Moreover, the firmware should improve the accuracy of calorie measurement of cycling exercises. Lastly, you can now switch off the automatic workout detection in case it bothers...

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US giants top tech industry’s $100M+ a year lobbying blitz in EU

The scale of the tech industry’s spending to influence the European Union’s tech policy agenda has been laid out in a report published today by Corporate Europe Observatory and Lobbycontrol — which found hundreds of companies, groups and business associations shelling out a total of €97 million (~$115M) annually lobbying EU institutions.

The level of spending makes tech the biggest lobby sector in the region — ahead of pharma, fossil fuels, finance, and chemicals — per the report by the two lobbying transparency campaign groups.

The EU has a raft of digital legislation in train, including the Digital Markets Act, which is set to apply ex ante controls to the biggest ‘gatekeeper’ platforms to promote fair competition in the digital market by outlawing a range of abusive practices; and the Digital Services Act, which will increase requirements on a swathe of digital businesses — again with greater requirements for larger platforms — to try to bring online rules in line with offline requirements in areas like illegal content and products.

Europe lays out its plan to reboot digital rules and tame tech giants

Tackling online disinformation and threats to democratic processes — such as by updating the EU’s rules for political ads running online and tighter regulation of online ad targeting more generally is also being eyed by Brussels-based lawmakers.

The bloc is also in the process of agreeing a risk-based framework for applications of artificial intelligence.

Data reuse is another big EU regulatory focus.

At the same time, enforcement of the EU’s existing data protection framework (GDPR) — which is widely perceived to have been (mostly) weakly applied against tech giants — is another area where tech giants may be keen to influence regional policy, given that uniformly vigorous enforcement could threaten the surveillance-based business models of online ad giants like Google and Facebook.

Instead, multiple GDPR complaints against the pair are still sitting undecided on the desk of Ireland’s Data Protection Commission.

A small number of tech giants dominant EU lobbying, according to the report, which found ten companies are responsible for almost a third of the total spend — namely: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Huawei, Amazon, IBM, Intel, Qualcomm and Vodafone — who collectively spend more than €32M a year to try to influence EU tech policy.

Google topped the lobbying list of Big Tech big spenders in the EU — spending €5.8M annually trying to influence EU institutions, per the report; followed by Facebook (€5.5M); Microsoft (€5.3M); Apple (€3.5M); and Huawei (€3M).

Unsurprisingly, US-based tech companies dominate industry lobbying in the EU — with the report finding a fifth of the companies lobbying the bloc on digital policy are US-based — although it suggests the true proportion is “likely even higher”.

While China (or Hong Kong) based companies were only found to comprise less than one per cent of the total, suggesting Chinese tech firms are so far not invested in EU lobbying at anywhere near the level of their US counterparts.

“The lobbying surrounding proposals for a Digital Services pack, the EU’s attempt at reining in Big Tech, provides the perfect example of how the firms’ immense budget provides them with privileged access: Commission high-level officials held 271 meetings, 75 percent of them with industry lobbyists. Google and Facebook led the pack,” write the pair of transparency campaign groups.

The report also shines a light on how the tech industry routinely relies upon astroturfing to push favored policies — with tech companies not only lobbying individually but also being collectively organised into a network of business and trade associations that the report dubs “important lobby actors” too.

Per the report, business associations lobbying on behalf of Big Tech alone have a lobbying budget that “far surpasses that of the bottom 75 per cent of the companies in the digital industry”.

Such a structure can allow the wealthiest tech giants to push preferred policy positions under a guise of wider industry support — by also shelling out to fund such associations which then gives them an outsized influence over their lobbying output.

“Big Tech’s lobbying also relies on its funding of a wide network of third parties, including think tanks, SME and startup associations and law and economic consultancies to push through its messages. These links are often not disclosed, obfuscating potential biases and conflicts of interest,” the pair note, going on to highlight 14 think tanks and NGOs they found to have “close ties” to Big Tech firms.

“The ethics and practice of these policy organisations varies but some seem to have played a particularly active role in discussions surrounding the Digital Services pack, hosting exclusive or skewed debates on behalf of their funders or publishing scaremongering reports,” they continue.

“There’s an opacity problem here: Big Tech firms have fared poorly in declaring their funding of think tanks – mostly only disclosing these links after being pressured. And even still this disclosure is not complete. To this, Big Tech adds its funding of SME and startup associations; and the fact that law and economic experts hired by Big Tech also participate in policy discussions, often without disclosing their clients or corporate links.”

The 14 think tanks and NGOs the report links to Big Tech backers are: CERRE; CDI, EPC, CEPS, CER, Bruegel, Lisbon Council, CDT, TPN, Friends of Europe, ECIPE, European Youth Forum, German Marshall Fund and the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies.

The biggest spending tech giants were contacted for comment on the report. We’ll update this article with any response.

We have also reached out to the European Commission for comment.

The full report — entitled The Lobby Network: Big Tech’s Web of Influence in the EU — can be found here.

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South Korea passes ‘Anti-Google law’ bill to curb Google, Apple in-app payment commission

After a number of delays, South Korea’s National Assembly today voted to approve the passage of its “Anti-Google law.” Nicknamed after the search giant but more wide-ranging, the law will prevent Google and Apple from forcing developers to use their in-app billing systems when building apps for their two market-dominating app stores .

This is the first time globally that a government has intervened to prevent Google and Apple from imposing their own payment rails on in-app purchases.

Google and Apple have been increasingly under scrutiny over the restrictive aspects of their respective systems in other market, and so now many will be looking to see if the move in South Korea becomes a tipping point, where the two might be subjected to similar measures in other countries. Most imminently, Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is also considering regulations for digital payments system of Apple, Google and WeChat, according to media reports.

South Korea’s preliminary committee voted on Wednesday, 25 August to proceed with the revised Telecommunication Business Act, seeking to restrict Google and Apple from charging app developer’s commission on in-app purchases.

Since August 2020, lawmakers in South Korea have proposed bills to prohibit the global tech companies from wielding their dominance in the app payment market.

Google in March 2021 reduced its commission to 15% from an original 30% for all in-app purchases to appease app developers. But four months later, it announced that it will push back its new in-app billing system to March 2022.

Meanwhile, Apple in August proposed a settlement in a lawsuit filed against it by software developers in the US that notes Apple will allow app developers to direct their payment options outside of their iOS app or the App Store, although it didn’t go as far as allowing developers to include alternative methods of payment within app themselves.

Apple said in its statement, “the proposed Telecommunications Business Act will put users who purchase digital goods from other sources at risk of fraud, undermine their privacy protections, make it difficult to manage their purchases, and features like ‘Ask to Buy’ and Parental Controls will become less effective.”

Google could not be reached.

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vivo X70 Pro+ leaks point to impressive camera setup, Snapdragon 888+

The vivo X70 series will arrive on September 9. The mightiest phone of the family will be the vivo X70 Pro+ which was already teased yesterday, and today a leakster revealed the full camera setup. The shooters, developed alongside Zeiss, will include a 50MP 1/1.31" main snapper and a periscope lens. The main camera will have a Samsung ISOCELL GN1 sensor. The ultra-wide-angle snapper will come with Sony IMX598 48MP sensor behind, while the third cam will be a dedicated shooter for portraits. Its sensor will be 12MP Sony IMX663 and will offer 2x magnification. The periscope cam will...

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LoftyInc Capital launches third fund at $10M for a more diverse portfolio of African startups

LoftyInc Capital, a pan-African VC firm, announced today that it is launching its third fund — LoftyInc Afropreneurs Fund 3 — at $10 million for tech startups in Africa.

The firm has reached the first close of $5.5 million. Some of the limited partners in the vehicle include those from its second fund, FBNQuest Funds, syndicates from The Green Investment Club, HNIs from multinationals like Google, Facebook, and ExxonMobil; and Andela CEO Jeremy Johnson, among others.

So far, LoftyInc has written checks to over 20 startups since it began raising money for the fund. They cut across various industries like e-commerce, fintech, healthcare, logistics, and media in different regions within and outside Africa.

In Francophone Africa, the company has invested in Afrikrea and Star News Mobile. Then in Omnibiz, RXAll, Sudo Africa, Tech Advance, Aladdin, Flex Finance, Star Kitchens Group, and EPump across West Africa.

For LoftyInc’s portfolio in North Africa, there’s Odiggo, Illa, Tagaddod, and Instadiet. Akiba Digital, Beamm, and Zazu Africa make up LoftyInc’s portfolio in South Africa, while Cashback and Dash are the startups funded in East Africa. LoftyInc also has Diasporan interests in OjaExpress and FitMatch.

LoftyInc runs three funds simultaneously. The second fund, which is its first formal VC fund, is largely focused on Nigeria. On the other hand, this third fund follows the thesis of LoftyInc’s first fund: investing in startups across different markets and sectors in Africa and the diaspora.

The fund says it wants to take big bets on markets outside the Big Four — Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, and Egypt.

Operating three funds

A month ago, TechCrunch covered one of Africa’s most important angel investors Olumide Soyombo. He is one of the few giants in a game that includes LoftyInc founder and general partner Idris Bello.

Bello likes to describe his 12-year venture into technology and entrepreneurship as an “Afropreneurship journey.” While in business school in the U.S, he realized that the next wave of innovation that Africa as a continent needed rested on the shoulders’ of up-and-coming founders.

With that in mind, Bello started LoftyInc Allied Partners alongside other entrepreneurs as an enterprise development company. It spun off a technology hub and venture accelerator called Wennovation Hub and also the venture arm called LoftyInc Capital.

In 2012, the firm launched the first fund — LoftyInc Afropreneurs Fund 1 — as its pre-seed stage investment vehicle. The fund act more like a syndicate or an angel group of which investors includes senior executives in key industries across Africa.

L-R: General partners [Marsha Wulff (sitting), Michael Oluwagbemi (standing), and Idris Bello (right)

Over 180 business angels are investing via the first fund and have collectively put more than $4 million into 40-plus startups across the continent. Some big names from Nigeria and Egypt origins include unicorn Flutterwave (pre-seed), soonicorn Andela, Trella, Chefaa, and Koniku.

Five years later, as the founding partner, Bello teamed up with a long-time advisor Marsha Wulff, an early investor in healthtech company Teladoc. They launched the second fund, LoftyInc Afropreneurs Fund 2, alongside Michael Oluwagbemi, who also acts as a general partner at the firm. 

From 2017 to 2020, LoftyInc wrote checks worth over $1.2 million in nine rounds to six Nigerian startups — Printivo, RelianceHMO, Epump, YouVerify, Shyft Power Solutions, and Flutterwave (at pre-Series A).

Flutterwave serves as LoftyInc’s first exit, one which Bello said returned 3x to its LPs. It was this successful exit that laid the foundation for the third fund.

“When we exited our Flutterwave stake in February, our LPs wanted us to raise and put together another fund because we made returns for them. At first, we wanted to do a $2.5 million fund but after making enquiries from LPs, it rose to $4 million. Then eventually we just decided to make it $10 million, so we could invest in more startups,” Bello said to TechCrunch.

But when you look at Bello’s status in the African tech ecosystem and what similar Africa-focused funds are raising these days, one may wonder why the investor isn’t raising more.

His answer to that:

“I always say this — my approach is very different. I’m quite organic which is evident in how we moved from a group of angels to LPs. I feel once you get up to $50m to $100m, your problem becomes good deployment, especially in Africa. And what I’m doing is to build a smaller base to a pyramid so when I’m raising a large fund, it won’t be a problem deploying the funds.”

Another point he makes has to do with the limited partners involved. Most of the firm’s LPs in this third fund hold C-suite and managerial positions in banks and other multinationals. Bello argues that if Fund 3 can make good on its promise to make fantastic returns for these individual LPs, it will be a no brainer to onboard the institutions they work with for a bigger fund.

“We want to build an ecosystem of African investors. After that, we’ll start building up the institutions to also partake in making investments.”

LoftyInc has a robust deal flow and views about 30 decks per week, according to Bello. He says the fund receives this much flow because the founders of portfolio startups are the firm’s strongest source of proprietary deals. And that’s what he thinks differentiates LoftyInc from other VC firms.

For instance, in a brief chat with TechCrunch, Andela CEO Jeremy Johnson mentioned that before anyone knew about his startup, LoftyInc already backed him. And to him, it only makes sense to do the same by sourcing deals and investing in the fund.

In addition, the firm, via its first fund, also has an extensive investor base of African origin who live in and outside the continent. Per Bello, this angel network double as venture scouts for the firm.

“We usually invest before any major investor does, hold the hand of new founders, source their initial clients within our large portfolio of over 65 African startups and our large African-based angel and LP network.

“We also provide meaningful introductions to regulators, partners, mentors, top hires and experienced board directors. Also, founders want us in their deals because they have seen us attract both early and later-stage investors to prior ventures.”

In terms of what LoftyInc looks for in companies it invests in, there’s a bias towards those who go for a large market with little or no competition, a product that users love, and execution.

As with most VC firms out there, LoftyInc claims to be sector agnostic. However, there’s some affinity towards startups playing in the IoT, fintech and healthtech space, Bello said. 

LoftyInc’s first fund, mostly catered to by angel investors, is most bullish at the pre-seed stage. This year alone, the group has done over 50 pre-seed deals. For the others, the focus is on seed to Series A deals with an average ticket size of $250,000. 

While LoftyInc’s target for Fund 3 is $10 million, Bello tells TechCrunch that the firm is hoping to achieve a final close above that figure before the end of Q4 2021.  

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