Ola Electric raises $200 million at $3 billion valuation

Ola Electric said on Thursday it has raised over $200 million in a new financing round at a valuation of $3 billion, up from $1 billion two years ago, as it looks to scale its electric vehicle manufacturing business in the South Asian market.

Falcon Edge Capital led the financing round, the Bangalore-based startup said. SoftBank participated in the new round. TechCrunch reported last month that the startup was in talks to raise at over $2.75 billion.

The fundraise follows Ola Electric recently launching its first electric scooter, called Ola S1, that is priced at 99,999 Indian rupees, or $1,350. The electric scooter offers a range of 121 kilometers (75 miles) on a complete charge. The startup said it had sold scooters worth $150 million in just two days.

The startup, which was once the part of the ride-hailing giant Ola, said it will deploy the fresh funds to accelerate development of other vehicle platforms including electric motorbike, mass market scooter and its electric car. It’s also setting up what is the world’s largest manufacturing factory for electric scooters. The 500-acre factory in the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu will have a capacity to produce roughly one electric scooter every two seconds.

“We’re proud to lead the EV revolution from India to the world. India has the talent and the capability to build technologies of the future for the industries of the future for the entire world. I thank our existing investors and welcome new ones to Ola. Together we will bring mobility to a billion and sustainability to the future,” said Bhavish Aggarwal, founder and chief executive of Ola, in a statement. Aggarwal, pictured above, is also the founder and chief executive of Ola Electric.

In recent quarters, Aggarwal has urged New Delhi, and players in the industry to evolve from using gasoline-powered vehicles and switch to those run by electric by 2025.

Meanwhile, Ola is seriously exploring the public markets and may file the paperworks for an initial public offering this year. Ahead of it, the startup recently closed a $500 million financing round from Temasek, Warburg Pincus, and Aggarwal.

India’s startup ecosystem, a journey which kickstarted in late 2000s, is finally beginning to produce firms that have matured to stages where they can become public companies. And retail investors are showing great interest, too.

Food delivery startup Zomato had a stellar debut on Indian stock exchanges earlier this year. Scores of other firms including Paytm, MobiKwik, CarTrade, Nykaa, and PolicyBazaar have filed the paperworks for their initial public offerings. Indian hospitality giant Oyo is expected to follow suit as soon as this week, TechCrunch reported earlier.

Barring Oyo publishing its IPO paperwork later today, Ola’s announcement caps a buzzy day for the Indian startup ecosystem. Social commerce firm Meesho earlier today said it had raised $570 million in a round led by B Capital Group and Fidelity. The round valued Meesho at $4.9 billion, up from $2.1 billion value it had been priced at in its previous funding round in April.

OfBusiness, a business-to-business commerce unveiled this afternoon that it had raised over $200 million, too, in a round led by Tiger Global. Like Ola Electric, OfBusiness is now also valued at $3 billion. The startup’s equity was priced at $800 million in April this year.

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Tiger Global backs India’s OfBusiness at $3 billion valuation

OfBusiness, a commerce startup that sells industrial goods and provides small businesses with credit, has doubled its valuation in less than two months to $3 billion, a top executive told TechCrunch.

Tiger Global led the six year-old startup’s $207 million Series F round, and SoftBank and Alpha Wave participated in it, OfBusiness co-founder and chief executive Asish Mohapatra told us. The new investment comes just two months after SoftBank led a $160 million round in OfBusiness at a $1.5 billion valuation.

Thursday’s announcement is the third financing round for OfBusiness this year. The startup, whose business has grown multiple folds this year, was valued at $800 million in April this year.

OfBusiness operates as a raw material aggregator and procurement finance provider. The startup works with banks to offer credit lines to small and medium enterprises that have an annual turnover of over $3 million.

The platform collects data on user activity that it relies on to underwrite loans to businesses that are using the OfBusiness platform for sourcing raw material and tenders. “This enables us to move from collateral based loans to cash-flow/ transaction-based lending – a key differentiator to banks,” Mohapatra told Bernstein analysts last year.

“The SMEs pay interest on their working capital loan (issued in form of card limits), and a margin on the raw material procured. Bid-Assist platform is a repository for SMEs to look up tenders suitable for their business. The tender sourcing and raw material margin provide better monetization and more importantly, predictive data useful for underwriting.”

The startup’s revenue run-rate is over $1 billion, and it’s profitable. By July this year, its loan book size had increased to $220 million.

“We provide credit lines, akin to cash-credit/ overdraft. Borrowers pay interest only on the limits drawn and are required to procure raw material from the platform. This provides us with a view on end-use of the loan and data for fresh underwriting and monitoring. Borrowers using leverage for inventory are better than those using loans to pay off old loans.”

The startup plans to deploy the fresh funds to expand its operations in India. OfBusiness is also eyeing merger and acquisitions opportunities, the startup said.

OfBusiness is Tiger Global’s latest investment in India. The New York-headquartered firm has backed nearly two dozen startups in the country this year, including Apna, BharatPe, Gupshup, DealShare, Classplus, Urban Company, CoinSwitch Kuber and Groww.

Tiger Global goes super aggressive in India

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Matternet’s automated drone-docking station makes its real-life debut in Switzerland

No one knows exactly how drone delivery will fit into the future of logistics, but one thing is for sure: the aircraft aren’t going to drop off important payloads directly onto someone’s lawn. Matternet’s Station, an automated landing space and payload control tower, may be the solution, and the flower-like structure has finally made the jump from render to reality at a medical facility in Switzerland.

The Station was teased early last year, but one never knows with these concept renders whether the final result will be anything like the idea. In this case it’s dead on, looking for anything like a prop from a ’60s sci-fi flick.

The unusual shape serves a purpose, however, providing a safe place for a cargo drone to land and swap its battery out, protected from the elements and the type of ne’er-do-wells who would snatch a medical payload from an innocent robot.

That package, in the case of this first installation, will be a temperature-sensitive hardshell case with numerous vials inside that would normally be transferred overland. These might be lab samples, blood, medications, anything that has a short shelf life and needs to travel between facilities for one reason or another.

Image Credits: Matternet

Inside the Station, the case is removed from the craft and stored for retrieval by someone authorized to take it — there’s a little collection door secured by the same kind of badge you might use to key into a restricted area at the hospital. The idea is to integrate it with the usual authentication systems, and make a drone delivery as simple as a pneumatic tube, cart, or manila envelope but without the necessity of being in the same building.

The first Station is in Lugano, at the EOC Hospital Group, but the first big deployment will be in Abu Dhabi, where the company will be working with SkyGo and the city’s health department to build a network of 40 Stations around the city. These would be used for the same general purpose — relatively lightweight and urgent medical deliveries — but on a larger scale:

Map of the proposed Matternet/SkyGo network in Abu Dhabi.

Last month Matternet became the first drone company to transport Pfizer vaccine doses between locations — the kind of short-term logistics any hospital network or health department would love to be able to pull off. Big rush on shots downtown? Airlift a couple hundred doses from the distribution center or a nearby clinic rather than sending people away.

Of course, the idea that such a valuable payload might just land in the courtyard or on a random roof is unacceptable — hence the Station as a prerequisite for this type of network. Don’t hold your breath on getting one in your back yard, though.

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Found comes out of stealth with $32M in funding, former Bumble exec as its new CEO

Found, a startup focused on weight care management, is emerging from stealth today with $32 million in total funding and the news that it has appointed former Bumble COO Sarah Jones Simmer as its new chief executive.

Found was incubated at Atomic, a San Francisco-based venture studio in the spring of 2020. Earlier this year, it raised $24 million in a Series A round led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Atomic, with participation from Define Ventures. And over the course of the last year, it raised $8 million in previously unannounced seed funding, largely from Atomic in addition to Define Ventures.

Jack Abraham, co-founder of Found and Atomic managing partner, said the startup was built to address the “challenging” issue of weight care while incorporating telehealth. (Abraham also is a co-founder of hims and hers, a telehealth service for wellness and care.)

“With over 70% of the population overweight or obese and these numbers increasing at a concerning rate, we saw a need for a personalized, science-based approach to help bend the curve,” said Abraham, who initially started Found with Atomic’s Emily Yudofsky.

And while some point solutions exist for a specific medication or treatment, Abraham added, Found was started in an effort to offer “a comprehensive, tailored, and precision-based solution to help anyone looking to lose weight.”

By comprehensive, he means that the startup draws from “dozens” of medications, supplements, diet plans, exercise routines and coaching programs to help its members achieve their personal weight and health goals.

Since its 2020 launch, Found has helped “tens of thousands” of members lose over 200,000 pounds, according to co-founder and COO Swathy Prithivi, who had served as the company’s interim CEO before Jones Simmer’s hiring earlier this month. It is currently available in 31 states at an “average” cost of $100 per month with a variety of plans.

“A lot of what spurred creating Found was that obesity is a disease, not a decision, and that it’s time that we modernized weight care so that obesity is treated like a disease and not a decision,” she told TechCrunch.

Weight, continued Prithivi, is “deeply stigmatized” as a category.

“We’ve all been told to eat less and move more, and then shamed for our lack of willpower when we don’t see success,” she said, “but there’s very little success to be seen when 50% of the U.S. is on diets but only 5% lose weight. And this is despite decades of research that show us that losing weight and keeping it off is more than just diet and working out.” 

Found, she said, aims to help people focus more on body positivity and what they can “find” — such as being able to finish a 5K or keeping up with their grandkids or a newfound confidence — during their weight management journey. And it does it by combining advice from clinicians, a community of others going through the same process and “prescription interventions” when deemed necessary. The company aims for a holistic, personalized and integrated approach that includes addressing sleep, “mindful” eating, movement, stress and a person’s biology.

Jones Simmer comes to Found from Bumble, where she essentially led that company’s entire initial public offering. During that process, she was battling Stage 3 breast cancer — doing drafts of the S-1 from a chemo chair and sending it to the board the morning of her double mastectomy.

The move to Found from a company she’d worked at from its early days of being founded out of a two-bedroom apartment was, in large part, a personal one that stemmed from her experience in fighting cancer. She was also drawn to the company’s mission to fight stigma around obesity and weight loss in a similar way that Bumble fought stigmas around online dating.

“I entered remission very shortly after the IPO, and after a pretty grueling year or so of treatment that I think was like, 20-plus rounds of chemo, multiple surgeries and 37 rounds of radiation,” Jones Simmer said. “ All of that really causes you to reflect on how you want to spend your days and what’s important to you.”

So despite her deep respect for Bumble CEO and founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, and love for the company and team, Jones Simmer left Bumble earlier this year because she wanted to “take a bet” on herself.

“At one point during my fight with cancer, my doctor gave me a timeline that made me reconsider whether I had a lifetime to achieve my personal and professional goals,” she said. “My prognosis looks better now, but my viewpoint has changed permanently.”

Plus, she says, she missed building and wanted to go back to something earlier stage.

“I wanted the chance to integrate the lessons I learned at Bumble and really think about building something else that had a similar opportunity for impact and that could touch people’s lives,” Jones Simmer told TechCrunch.

Today, Found has 130 employees, including its coaching staff, and a large part of its capital will go toward expanding its headcount. The company also announced today that it has named Alexandre Linares as its new chief product officer. Linares previously served as the VP of product at Headspace, where he oversaw product and growth for the app, which today serves an estimated 70 million people.

GV Partner Frederique Dame, who has also invested in the likes of Pill Club and Kindbody, has joined Found’s board as part of the Series A.

She said she backed Found because its mission resonated with her. 

“Found takes a fresh approach to helping people lose weight, bringing the weight clinic model online with personalized, evidence-based coaching designed to improve patient outcomes,” wrote Dame via email.

Also, Dame and Prithivi worked closely together at Uber from 2012 to 2016.

“I always admired her focus and dedication to operational excellence,” Dame said.

Found, she believes, is unique in two key ways. For one, its toolkit’s diversity, which includes medication tailored to one’s needs, coaching support and community. And second, its approach to stigma and attempting to shift the narrative around weight management.

“It’s the most integrated platform, and the most tailored to your needs,” Dame told TechCrunch. “And, Found makes access to care easy and convenient, while emphasizing body positivity and self acceptance.”

The article was updated post-publication to reflect that Austin is not its headquarters. Found is actually remote-first but its new CEO is based in Austin.

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DNA-based data storage platform Catalog raises $35M

Conventional electronic media like flash drives and hard drives require energy consumption to process a vast amount of high-density data and information overload and are vulnerable to security issues due to the limited space for storage. There is also an expensive cost issue when it comes to transmitting the stored data.

To solve the problems of traditional electronic media, a startup in Boston, Catalog, was founded in 2016 by MIT scientists including co-founder and CEO Hyunjun Park, developing an energy efficient, cost competitive, and more secure data storage and computation platform by using synthetic DNA.

The startup announced today it has secured a $35 million Series B round to continue developing its DNA-based data computation tools.

South Korea’s Hanwha Impact led the Series B round and was joined by existing backer Hong Kong-based Li Ka-Shing’s Horizons Ventures, CEO Hyunjun Park said in an interview with TechCrunch.

The latest funding will be used to accelerate development of Catalog’s synthetic DNA-powered computing platform, which enables data management, computation, and automation. Over the next two to three years, Catalog also plans to put more investment into developing computation functions, Park told TechCrunch. The platform is expected to be commercialized around 2025, Park said.

The company, which is a member of DNA Storage Alliance, will continue to support collaborators and partners of the DNA-based computing system for helping the industry grow, according to Park.

The Series B brings its total funding up to approximately $60 million; Park declined to disclose its valuation. This round comes after a $10 million Series A led by Horizons Ventures in 2020 and a $9 million seed round in 2018 co-led by New Enterprise Associates and OS Fund and other investors, Park said.

While the concept of using DNA as a medium for data storage and computing has been around for years, a lot of the work has been relegated to the academic realm. Catalog has discovered the means to incorporate DNA into algorithms and applications with potential widespread commercial use through its proprietary data encoding scheme to automation.

“Catalog’s proprietary approach to writing information into DNA, namely its encoding scheme, is revolutionary in that minimal de novo DNA synthesis is required to store a tremendous amount of information. Because the low speed and high cost of DNA synthesis have traditionally been the bottleneck in this field,” Park explained.

Catalog’s custom-developed DNA writer, Shannon, is capable of hundreds and thousands of chemical reactions per second. Shannon, which is designed to write at a speed of over 10Mb/sec at full capacity, stores up to 1.63Tb of compressed data in a single run.

Expected applications for Catalog’s technology include fraud detection in financial services, image processing for defect discovery in manufacturing, and digital signal processing such as seismic processing in the energy sector.

“Catalog has worked with companies in IT, media, entertainment, and energy sectors. Through this work, we have discovered the broad applicability of our [DNA-based data storage and computing] platform across industries and heavy data users,” Park said. He added that the dozen or so companies working as co-development partners and collaborators are based in the US and Europe.

The IT industry has witnessed a proliferation of purpose-fit technologies over the last several years, including accelerators (GPUs, FPGAs), quantum computers, as well as extreme parallel computers. The advent of the DNA-based computer complements this portfolio, emphasizing low-energy, spatially dense, and secure computing, divorced from the realities and limitations of electronic systems, as per its statement.

“As a reference point, the high-performance computing market is currently about $40 billion annually, and growing rapidly,” Park said when asked regarding the global market size.

“Companies including Microsoft, Twist, Illumina, and Western Digital formed the DNA Storage Alliance earlier this year. Catalog is a member of this organization and is taking this to the next level by focusing on computation and thereby enabling enterprises to generate business value from data that otherwise would have been thrown away or left in cold storage,” Park said.

“Catalog’s technology represents a viable pathway to solve the issue of not only mass data accumulation and preservation but more importantly, the effective usage of data,” said Nick Ha, vice president of Hanwha Impact Partners.

Early this year, Catalog opened an office in Seoul, South Korea, a wholly subsidiary of Catalog, for Asia expansion, Park noted.

Genetics startup Twist Bioscience is working with Microsoft to store the world’s data in DNA

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Spudsy bags $3.3M to turn ‘ugly’ sweet potatoes into snacks

Spudsy, a brand that upcycles imperfect sweet potatoes and turns them into plant-based snacks, announced Thursday that it raised $3.3 million in Series A funding in a round led by KarpReilly and Stage 1 Fund.

With the new funding, the company has raised a total of $6.5 million since the company was founded three years ago, Ashley Rogers, Spudsy founder and CEO told TechCrunch.

“Being a young brand, we don’t know everything, and these investors have a portfolio of food and beverage companies and have been doing this forever,” she said. “Their expertise and guidance has provided us checks and balances and connected us with Amazon and direct-to-consumer agencies.”

Rogers has been in the food industry for the past seven years and had founded another brand called Buff Bake, a protein cookie.

She sold her share of the company to her business partners and started Spudsy when she saw a white space in the market for a brand that focused on sweet potatoes to compete against others that were making snacks from other vegetables.

“We started with puff snacks — they were on trend and [we] saw no one else doing it,” she added.

In addition to the puff, which comes in five flavors, Spudsy launched a sweet potato “fry,” similar to a straw, in four flavors over the past year.

Spudsy claims that 150 million pounds of sweet potatoes end up in landfills due to minor imperfections like shape, size and color. The brand is currently working with a farm in South Carolina to use the potatoes left in the field and is on track to save 1 million of these so-called flawed sweet potatoes by the end of 2021, Rogers said.

Starting in the salted snack aisle made the most sense for the company. Salty snacks is one of the top-selling items in the snack category, accounting for $27 billion in sales in the United States in 2017, according to Statista. Rogers estimates that this has grown in the past four years to be between $30 and $36 billion.

However, her vision for the company is to “become a platform brand and live in different areas of the grocery store,” including frozen foods, bread, tortilla and any other carb. Spudsy products are already in Whole Foods, Kroger and Sam’s Club.

The company built out much of its executive suite last year and will focus some of the new capital to hiring, but most of it will go to supporting the “ton of national retailer” inquiries Spudsy is receiving and investing in store demonstrations.

Having launched the fries product line two months ago, most of the company’s focus is there for now, but Rogers is also looking at direct-to-consumer and Amazon sales.

“We have dabbled in DTC, but not focused on and plan to get that working next year,” she added.

Chinese startups rush to bring alternative protein to people’s plates

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Xiaomi is recruiting Android 12 testers for Mi 11, 11 Ultra and 11i

In a community forum post, Xiaomi announced the start of its beta testing program for Android 12 on some of its flagship devices, namely the Mi 11, Mi 11 Ultra and Mi 11i. This is for the global version of Xiaomi's MIUI, though, keep in mind. The company is recruiting a limited number of users to participate in the testing of the Global Stable ROM and the seats are limited to 200 for each device so you better hurry. You will find a detailed instructions of how to apply and install the ROM at the source link below. Keep in mind that Xiaomi's staff expects you to be active on its...

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Empathy raises $30M for a personal assistant that helps with the practical and emotional process of bereavement

Death is one of the hardest things to cope with in life, both from an emotional and organizational standpoint. And what’s worse is that the latter of these is inevitably compounded by the fact that those left behind are grieving and focused on that. Unsurprisingly, tech that is being built to help in these situations is seeing a lot of traction.

Empathy, a startup that emerged from stealth earlier this year with a digital assistant aimed at helping bereaving families navigate those choppy waters resulting from the death of someone close to them — with a diverse range of services, from providing links to counselling to helping plan estate paperwork and taxes — is capitalizing on that opportunity. It has now raised $30 million in funding on the back of some very strong interest in its services.

The Series A is coming just five months after Empathy announced a $13 million seed round. Entrée Capital led the latest investment, with previous backers General Catalyst and Aleph (which co-led the seed), LocalGlobe, Primetime Partners, and prominent angel investors including Shai Wininger (CEO & Co-Founder of Lemonade), Sir Ronald Cohen, John Kim (ex-President of New York Life), and Micha Kaufman (CEO & Co-Founder of Fiverr) all investing.

The company is not disclosing its valuation.

Part of the reason for the swift arrival of the Series A is to help Empathy keep up with what has proven to be strong early demand. The company’s tech was built in Israel but it chose to launch in the U.S. first, where co-founder and CEO Ron Gura tells me that it’s already amassed a “nice, single digit percent” of the market, in the form of seeing some 250,000 bereaved executors visiting and using Empathy’s services each month. Those services range from practical estate planning and tax tools through to links for counseling and other support.

“Some visitors are practical, and some come to find meaning,” he said. It’s a tricky balance when you think about it — having one side by side with the other inevitably might offend those looking specifically for one service, only to be confronted by another, so that Empathy has managed to build and operate such a platform is an achievement in itself.

It’s also building out its business by partnering increasingly with other stakeholders in the end-of-life process, be they hospice centers or funeral homes. To date, it has some 300 cemeteries and 72 funeral homes referring customers to Empathy, Gura told me. The reason for this is simple: bereaving families often start to ask questions of the people who are connected to those final stages, but those people’s focus is the job at hand, as much as they’d like to help with other aspects and to provide comfort.

“When families come into the hospice, the truth is around the corner,” Gura said, “and they turn to the coordinator. And the coordinators all want to do is help: they are usually good people who work in a complex field, but they have limited resources and capabilities as they need to move on to the next family.

“The funeral director is the closest thing to a concierge in this situation,” he added a little bit of irony, but also just talking straight.

It is indeed not an easy job, and not a glamorous one, but it has to be done, and so to have a company building some help that takes some of the pain of figuring things out for yourself, in a way that’s not an invasive and expensive business in itself (some services are totally free; others are not) is not such a bad thing.

“We are proud to continue to support Empathy as it strengthens its position as a market leader in the end-of-life industry and provides a service that is incredibly necessary for families struggling with loss,” said Joel Cutler, MD of General Catalyst, in a statement. “Empathy has proven both its commitment and its determination to reach as many families as possible, partnering with companies across different sectors to connect with diverse audiences, as well as recruiting the best and the brightest to further their mission. We look forward to seeing Empathy continue to prove how technology can make a major difference for bereaved families.”

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Elevation Capital, General Catalyst lead $12M round into health insurance startup Loop Health

Loop Health aims to be the “Oscar Health of India” and targets the country’s health insurance gap with its approach to primary care and insurance.

The Pune-based company is also the latest startup to raise funding in this area, bringing in $12 million in Series A funding in a round co-led by Elevation Capital and General Catalyst. Joining the two firms is Vinod Khosla, through Khosla Ventures, YC Continuity Fund, Tribe Capital and a group of angel investors, including NoBroker founder and CEO Amit Kumar Agarwal, Livspace founder and COO Ramakant Sharma, Meesho co-founders Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, Carbon Health co-founder and CEO Eren Bali, Codecademy co-founder and CEO Zach Sims and Maven Clinic founder and CEO Kate Ryder.

The new funding gives Loop Health a total of $14 million in funding since it was founded in 2018, Mayank Kale, co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch. This includes a previous $2.3 million seed raise. The company was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 accelerator program.

Kale, who was previously building digital patient health records across India, started the company with Ryan Singh, Amrit Singh, and Shami Raj to provide group health insurance plans from large insurers to companies of all sizes that includes a virtual primary care experience through Loop Health’s in-house medical team and network of service providers.

It is estimated that fewer than 15% of people in India have purchased healthcare insurance, and of those who have it, most plans only work on hospitalizations and medical procedures, Kale said. Loop Health aims to change that by providing ongoing care so that a person shouldn’t have to go into the hospital unless necessary.

“In talking to potential customers, half of them are buying insurance for the first time,” Kale added. “Now employees are asking for it so that the company is competitive with others providing the benefit, but then COVID made it one of the central benefits to people. The sentiment has flipped now.”

Loop Health app. Image Credits: Loop Health

Legacy insurance plans don’t typically provide coverage for most diseases for up to four years after purchasing it, but with Loop Health, 40% of Loop’s customers consult a Loop doctor in the first three months on the plan, Kale said.

Over the past 12 months, the company has begun working with over 150 companies that represent about 50,000 total members, including Shaadi.com, rediff.com, Helpshift, Knorr-Bremse, Shoptimize, Weikfield and Moonshine Meadery. Loop Health has a target to cover 1 million members by the end of 2022 and 5 million members across Southeast Asia over the next five years.

At the same time, the company has grown 50% month over month in revenue and went from 10 employees to about 80 operating in Pune, Mumbai and Bengaluru. That includes 15 care specialists, Kale said.

Khosla Ventures leads Even’s $5M seed to give India the kind of healthcare their insurance doesn’t

To keep the momentum going, he intends to use the new round of capital to onboard more members, build physical healthcare clinics, hire in sales, engineering and product development.

“We will keep growing quickly and are on track to onboard a couple hundred more companies over the next 18 months,” Kale said. “We are optimizing for trust. We want to be the trusted healthcare provider, and we will do that by providing a health concierge that responds to calls in 50 seconds, provides same-day consultations, personalized care plans for chronic disease and financial cover when patients need it.”

In addition to Loop Health, other startups are addressing health insurance in India. For example, this investment follows a seed round that Khosla Ventures made into healthcare membership startup Even. Meanwhile, Tiger Global led a $15.6 million Series A round into Plum, a startup enabling employers to provide insurance coverage to their employees, and Policybazaar raised $75 million this year for its insurance marketplace.

Mayank Khanduja, partner at Elevation Capital, considers Loop Health primarily a healthcare company that also provides insurance. Insurance is difficult to figure out, and many policyholders are even unsure of which hospital to even go to, he said.

He estimates the market to be valued at $3.5 billion and growing annually at 20% to 25%. It is a deep enough pool for someone like Loop Health to attack it and grow fast, especially with the push by employees driven by COVID.

“This was missing in India,” Khanduja added. “Insurance is sold in India as a commodity product — something to keep in the drawer to hold and hope you don’t have to use it. That is what is exciting to us about Loop Health. They are providing corporate insurance, but then also a full suite of primary care intervention, which will hopefully take care of you to where you don’t need hospitalization.”

Insurtech is hot on both sides of the Atlantic

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Speedata emerges from stealth with $70M and groundbreaking chip technology to accelerate big data analytics processing

Datacenters are taking on ever-more specialized chips to handle different kinds of workloads, moving away from CPUs and adopting GPUs and other kinds of accelerators to handle more complex and resource-intensive computing demands. In the latest development, a startup called Speedata, which is building a processor (fabless) to cover the specific area of big data analytics, is coming out of stealth and announcing $70 million in funding to continue building its product and embark on its first commercial deals. In a market that’s seeing a proliferation of purpose-built chipsets these days, Speedata claims to have, in its own words, “the world’s first dedicated processor for optimizing cloud-based database and analytic workloads.”

The news comes after a period in which Israel-based Speedata has piloted its tech with a mix of large companies — hardware makers, end users, big-name cloud providers — to show how it can speed up their workloads, which it has, by some two orders of magnitude, CEO and co-founder Jonathan Friedmann told TechCrunch. Speedata is a fabless chip startup, so the next steps will be to produce the chips and ink commercial deals, likely with some of those running tests with the company.

Speedata was founded in 2019 and has been in stealth since then, and so the funding getting announced today is actually in two parts. First, there is a $15 million seed round led by Viola and Pitango that dates from some time back. And second, a newer $55 million Series A led by Walden Catalyst Ventures, 83North, and Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), with Pitango and Viola participating, alongside Eyal Waldman, co-founder and former CEO of Mellanox Technologies.

Friedmann and others on the founding team — the other co-founders are Dan Charash, Rafi Shalom, Itai Incze, Yoav Etsion and Dani Voitsechov — have an impressive track record in the worlds of academia and the chip industry, with multiple exits and groundbreaking patents behind them — one key factor in the company accruing so much backing without a single commercial deal yet to its name. “We were grossly oversubscribed for this round,” he said.

The reason Speedata has focused on big data analytics is that, first of all, it’s been a hard problem to solve for the fragmentation in data sources (and before you wonder, the company is not disclosing how and why it was able to make this breakthrough now; the stealth element persists). And second of all, because, in Friedmann’s words, “it’s probably the biggest workload in the datacenter” and so is overdue for more dedicated processor attention beyond the CPUs and FPGAs that are currently being used to support it.

To be clear, its focus on big data analytics is not the same as computing AI workloads, an area currently dominated by Nvidia, although Nvidia also becomes a potential competitor as it expands its own horizons.

That is also why striking while the iron is hot is of the essence for Speedata right now, he added. One reason it has yet to be addressed is because it’s only really starting to emerge as a bottleneck now.

Data, and the generation of it in the enterprise, is currently exploding exponentially — Speedata cites research from IDC that projects the amount of data that will be created in the next three years will exceed the amount created in the past 30.

But analytics processing around that is no longer advancing at the rate it used to — in part because of that volume of data — and so looking at how to fix that by way of better processors is a multidisciplinary problem, Friedmann said. “It’s a human problem, but also one of networking improvements and needing a deep understanding of what is going on in the deep learning software,” he said.

“We really have a once in a lifetime opportunity,” he said. “We are approaching a huge, not niche, market. Analytics covers about 50% of the expense in a data center, so that is a huge market. There are so many things to do around that.”

The payoff of course is gaining much deeper insights and knowledge that can help in many areas such as medical research, financial services, cybersecurity, autonomous systems and more. Big data analytics is projected to be a $70 billion market by 2025, and that implies better hardware and services built to support that.

“Datacenter analytics are being completely transformed, and accelerated processors are set to play a substantial role in this revolution,” said Waldman in a statement. “Much like NVIDIA’s GPU revolutionized the AI space, Speedata’s unique APU will transform database computing. Data processing is a swiftly growing, multi-billion-dollar market in which acceleration will unleash the use of data in the applications of tomorrow and help countless entities reliant on big data innovate and compete. I look forward to supporting this extraordinary team as they reimagine big data processing for years to come.”

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Alphabet gives some Loon patents to SoftBank, open sources flight data and makes patent non-assertion pledge

Alphabet’s Loon was a stratospheric moonshot that saw the company fly high-altitude balloons to provide cellular network coverage to target areas. The project broke a lot of new ground, including developing technology that enabled balloons to navigate autonomously and stay in one area for long stretches of time, but ultimately came to an end. Now, Alphabet is divvying up the Loon assets, many of which are being either made available to others in the industry for free — or handed over to key partners and strategic investors.

SoftBank is one company that walks away with some intellectual property; the Japanese telecommunication giant gets around 200 of Loon’s patents related to stratospheric communications, service, operations and aircraft, which it says it will put to use developing its own High Altitude Platform Stations (HAPS) business. SoftBank was an erstwhile partner of Loon’s, having founded the ‘HAPS Alliance’ to further the industry. SoftBank’s own HAPS business focused on autonomous gliders, but it adapted its communications payloads to work on Loon’s balloons, too. SoftBank is also an investor in Loon, having put $125 million in the Alphabet company in 2019.

The other company to get a windfall of sorts out of Loon’s closure is Raven, another partner and a company that focuses on the manufacture of the high altitude balloons that the Alphabet moonshot operated. It picks up patents related specifically to balloon manufacturing. Neither SoftBank nor Raven had to fork over any money in order to pick up that IP.

Testing the impact of lightning on Loons hardware in the lab.

A significant chunk of the rest of Loon’s work and accomplishments will be made available generally to advance the state of the art in stratospheric science and industry. Alphabet has open sourced data from Loon’s collective 70 million kms or so of flight, including GPS and sensor data. The company also made a non-assertion commitment for 270 of its patents and patent applications, dealing with everything from balloon launching, to in-flight navigation, to managing balloon fleets and more. For would-be stratospheric balloon mavens, and the general public, Loon also compiled a book about the Loon experience, which is available as a free PDF embedded below.

The temptation to draw Icarus comparisons with this particular project is very high, but Alphabet’s moonshots have a higher than average possibility of failure baked in from the start so it’s not really that apt. Also, the fact that all of this IP and data gets made available to the public is a pretty good outcome for the scientific community, too.

View this document on Scribd

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iPhone 13 Pro Max supports up to 27W fast charging, the regular Pro goes up to 23W

Even though Apple doesn't advertise it, the iPhone 13 Pro and 13 Pro Max got an upgraded charging this year. According to ChargerLAB's tests, the iPhone 13 Pro Max can go up to 27W while the standard Pro peaks at 23W. This means that with appropriate USB Power Delivery charger with at least 30W output, the Pro Max can charge at 27W for a while before temperature constraints lead to throttling. And since the device doesn't ship with a charger at all, Apple is happy to sell you a $50 30W USB PD charger. The iPhone 13 Pro received some love as well and ChargerLAB says it can get up to...

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Motorola Moto Tab G20 launched with 8-inch LCD, Helio P22T chipset

As expected Motorola announced its Moto Tab G20 Android tablet earlier today. The device carries an 8-inch LCD with HD+ resolution, Helio P22T chipset and a 5,100 mAh battery. These specs sound familiar as they match Lenovo’s third-gen Tab M8 slate. The Moto Tab G20 comes in a single 3GB RAM and 32GB storage trim and it also has a microSD slot for expansion. Android 11 covers the software front and Motorola is also bringing a Kids Space mode. You get a 2MP front-facing cam and a 5MP sensor around the back. There’s also Dolby Atmos coming from the single bottom-mounted speaker. The...

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Fairphone adds a 5G smartphone, touting software support until at least 2025

Dutch social enterprise Fairphone has announced its first 5G smartphone, the Fairphone 4.

The ‘greentech’ mobile maker differentiates from almost the entire smartphone industry through a promise of sustainability via repairable modularity.

It combines this with a big push around socially responsibility and ethical electronics — touting fairly sourced materials and better conditions for workers (through a living wage program) across a supply chain that spans the dirty business of mining rare earth minerals and all the other components used in making mobile devices, as well as the handset manufacture itself.

The Fairphone 4 comes with a five year warranty and a guarantee of software support until the end of 2025 — including upgrades to at least Android 12 and 13. (It runs Android 11 out of the box.)

The startup also hopes to be able to extend the phone’s lifespan even further — saying its goal is software support until 2027 and upgrades to Android 14 and 15 too.

The new flagship follows the launch of the Fairphone 3+ last year — which enabled owners of its prior top-of-the-range handset to upgrade to for as little as €70 just by swapping out a few modules.

Fairphone’s new flagship, the 3+, costs just €70 as a modular upgrade

Prioritizing reuse to reduce e-waste is a key goal for Fairphone — so even though it’s announcing another new phone this year it is taking steps to avoid being accused of creating more e-waste by generating demand for new hardware.

The Fairphone 4 is the first it’s made that’s being billed as “electronic waste neutral” — as it says it will “compensate” users’ phones and spare parts by “responsibly recycling one phone (or an equal amount of small electronic waste) for every Fairphone 4 sold”. Or else take back and refurbish at least one other phone to prevent the production of a new one.

In another development towards its ambitious goal of making truly sustainable and ethical personal electronics, Fairphones notes that it’s been able to expand its list of fairly obtained materials, adding six new ones. In the Fairphone 4 these include Fairtrade-certified gold, aluminium from Aluminium Stewardship Initiative (ASI) Performance Standard certified vendors, fair tungsten from Rwanda, recycled tin, rare earth minerals and plastics.

Consumers have long been holding onto smartphones for considerably longer than upgrade cycles of the early years of the market as the space has matured and device refreshes have become increasingly iterative.

Simultaneously environmental concerns are also stepping up driving changes in how consumers buy and use mobile devices. So the new shiny thing, in consumer demand terms, might actually be keeping the old shiny thing for as long as possible and responsibly recycling it when it finally comes to the end of its run.

In Europe, lawmakers are also considering right to repair legislation.

Fairphone’s modular design, which allows the user to easily swap out and replace components (like the screen, battery and camera) if a part of the device breaks or malfunctions, may provide a glimpse of the future of consumer electronics — if regulators go down the path of mandating repairability in order to tackle e-waste and incentivize reduced consumption as part of measures to decarbonize the economy and respond to the climate crisis.

Image credits: Fairphone

Commenting on the launch of the Fairphone 4 in a statement, Eva Gouwens, CEO of Fairphone, said: “We want to challenge the traditional way of designing devices, including the notion that thinner is better. The starting point in development was to produce a premium sustainable smartphone that is future-proof, easily repairable, designed to last and therefore more circular and fair.”

The tech specs of Fairphone’s latest device have also had a boost vs the previous flagship — so as well as 5G the phone comes with either 6GB or 8GB of RAM and 128GB or 256GB of storage, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G chipset, beefed up rear & front cameras and a 6.3in display, among other tweaks.

The handset will be available for pre-order from today via Fairphone’s website and through selected partners, with RRP at €579 (for 6GB RAM/128GB) or €649 (8GB RAM/256GB).

The two variants will be released in Europe on October 25 through Fairphone’s network of regional distributors.

Available colors for the handset are grey for the 6GB device; and grey, green and green speckled (exclusively through Fairphone’s website) for the 8GB handset. 

Can Fairphone 3 scale ethical consumer electronics?

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VertoFX picks up $10M for cross-border payments play in emerging markets

VertoFX, a global B2B payments platform that allows small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to make payments to their suppliers, today announced that it has closed $10 million in Series A funding.

Quona Capital, an emerging fintech-focused venture capital firm, led the round. Other firms also participated, including The Treasury, founded by Betterment’s Eli Broverman and Acorns’ Jeff Cruttenden; Middle East Venture Partners (MEVP); U.K.-based TMT Investments; Unicorn Growth Capital; Zrosk Investments; and P1 Ventures. 

The lack of interoperability between African currencies is primarily behind why a Kenyan business owner who wants to pay an invoice to another business owner in South Africa with either shillings or rands ends up using the dollar — the currency that powers almost 80% of Africa’s bilateral trade.

As trade and supply chains become increasingly global, international payments remain a complicated and expensive proposition. The case is particularly problematic in emerging markets like Africa, where local currencies are less liquid than those in developed markets. 

While fintechs are creating solutions around peer-to-peer payments and remittances, most are consumer-focused. Meanwhile, the B2B market, accounting for 30% of the world’s global imports and 45% of total employment in emerging markets — is largely untouched.

Hence the reason why Ola Oyetayo and Anthony Oduwole started VertoFX in 2018. And instead of focusing on Africa, the two U.K.-based Nigerians took an emerging markets approach.

Initially, the YC-backed company acted as a currency exchange marketplace to help businesses transact illiquid currencies into liquid pairs. But upon gaining transaction and subsequently raising a $2 million seed round two years ago, feedback from users highlighted the importance of providing cross-border payments as well.

VertoFX raises $2M for its African and EM currency trading platform

It is not hard to see the value chain: a business going to a platform to swap or exchange one currency for another invariably does that intending to pay another business in a different country.

“We’ve now evolved more from not just being a currency exchange marketplace to a full suite of cross border payments product for businesses,” Oyetayo told TechCrunch.

On the VertoFX platform, businesses can exchange money in over 200 countries across 39 currencies, up from 120 countries and 19 currencies the last time the company spoke with us.

Per its website, VertoFX is designed for freelancers, SMEs and corporates, providing payments, exchange and multi-currency accounts to each segment.

These business owners can send cross-border B2B payments at FX rates up to nine times cheaper than they could through traditional banks, CEO Oyetayo said. And most importantly, without a fee.

A no-fee proposition has caught on well with a userbase of over 2,000 businesses, each transacting an average of $30,000. Together they have facilitated billions of dollars in transaction volume yearly, according to the company. 

The CEO says since the start of the pandemic, VertoFX’s user growth has grown 11x and 8x in revenue without giving specific numbers.

Similar to most fintechs, the company has benefited from a global shift of people moving to digital methods of payments and the fact that more homogeneous businesses in Africa are transacting with each other through digital channels.

Not only can businesses use VertoFX for their personal payments needs, but they can also piggyback on the company’s rails to build solutions for their end clients. For instance, an investment management platform that allows customers to buy stocks on its platform can use Verto to convert currencies and facilitate pay-ins and payouts.

“That solution is geared towards developing markets where it takes businesses to pay customers days or weeks to make payments,” said Oduwole. “Our in-house compliance solution allows them to transact and get settled instantly, or in some cases a couple of hours.”

If cross-border payments are free, how then does the company make money? VertoFX takes a small amount of commission when businesses use its currency exchange service and charges a 1% commission when they use its price discovery marketplace solution.

In the future, at some point, VertoFX “will potentially start making revenue of API calls, and also revenue off payments made on the platform,” the CEO said.

In a statement, Monica Brand Engel, the co-founder and managing partner at lead investor Quona Capital (also a backer of Nigeria’s Cowrywise), hails the platform’s ability to address problems businesses face with low visibility, slow speeds and high costs of cross-border payments. VertoFX is doing “important and impactful work,” she said.

Before the end of the year, VertoFX expects to increase the list of currencies on its platform to 51, CTO Oduwole said. The company will use the investment to achieve that while building its platform to enable businesses to move money across borders more efficiently, it added in a statement.

Interestingly, VertoFX has only six African currencies on its platform; they cover 60% of the continent’s GDP. And with the B2B global payments industry expected to grow to almost $200 trillion by 2028, VertoFX plans to accelerate its geographical expansion into more markets in Africa and the Middle East.

“We want to get to a point in the future where someone can easily swap a Ghanian cedi to rand without having to transact with dollars or euros,” the founders said.

They also pointed out that the company, in a way, drives financial inclusion for businesses that could not move money from, say, India to Turkey without going to a bank. VertoFX is placing businesses in underserved regions on an even playing field as their counterparts in developed markets, said the CEO.

“Ultimately, we want to help a business in an emerging market send money to another business elsewhere, as easy as sending a text message.”

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Nokia G300 5G leaks with Snapdragon 480 chipset, 720p+ display, 16 MP main camera

There is another affordable 5G Nokia phone on the way – two, in fact, but today the rumor mill surfaced detailed specs for only one of them. The Nokia G300 5G will be based on the same Snapdragon 480 that was used in the recent G50 as well as the X10 and X20 (speaking of, the other upcoming phone we mentioned is the Nokia X100). HMD Global never released a Nokia G30, so this isn’t a sequel. It’s not exactly an upgrade over the G20 either, at least as far as cameras and batteries are concerned. Though this one has a much more powerful chipset (it’s not hard to beat a Helio G35) and 5G...

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Seeking to respin Instagram’s toxicity for teens, Facebook publishes annotated slide decks

Facebook has quietly published internal research that was earlier obtained by the Wall Street Journal — and reported as evidence the tech giant knew about Instagram’s toxic impact on teenaged girls’ mental health.

The two slide decks can be found here and here.

The tech giant also said it provided the material to Congress earlier today.

However Facebook hasn’t simply released the slides — it has added its own running commentary which seeks to downplay the significance of the internal research following days of press commentary couching the Instagram teen girls’ mental health revelations as Facebook’s ‘Big Tobacco’ moment.

Last week the WSJ reported on internal documents its journalists had obtained, including slides from a presentation in which Facebook appeared to acknowledge that the service makes body image issues worse for one in three teen girls.

The tech giant’s crisis PR machine  swung into action — with a rebuttal blog post published on Sunday.

In a further addition now the tech giant has put two internal research slide decks online which appear to form at least a part of the WSJ’s source material. The reason it has taken the company days to publish this material appears to be that its crisis PR team was busy figuring out how best to reframe the contents.

The material has been published with some light redactions (removing the names of the researchers involved, for example) — but also with extensive ‘annotations’ in which Facebook can be seen attempting to reframe the significance of the research, saying it was part of wider, ongoing work to “ensure that our platform is having the most positive impact possible”.

It also tries to downplay the significant of specific negative observations — suggesting, for example, that the sample size of teens who had reported problems was very small.

“The methodology is not fit to provide statistical estimates for the correlation between Instagram and mental health or to evaluate causal claims between social media and health/well-being,” Facebook writes in an introduction annotation on one of the slide decks. Aka ‘nothing to see here’.

Later on, commenting on a slide entitled “mental health findings” (which is subtitled: “Deep dive into the Reach, Intensity, IG Impact, Expectation, Self Reported Usage and Support of mental health issues. Overall analysis and analysis split by age when relevant”), Facebook writes categorically that: “Nothing in this report is intended to reflect a clinical definition of mental health, a diagnosis of a mental health condition, or a grounding in academic and scientific literature.”

While on a slide that contains the striking observation that “Most wished Instagram had given them better control over what they saw”, Facebook nitpicks that the colors used by its researchers to shade the cells of the table which presents the data might have created a misleading interpretation — “because the different color shading represents very small difference within each row”. 

If the sight of Facebook publicly questioning the significance of internal work and quibbling with some of the decisions made by its own researchers seems unprepossessing, remember that the stakes of this particular crisis for the adtech giant are very high.

The WSJ’s reporting has already derailed a planned launch of a ‘tweens’ version of the photo sharing app.

While US lawmakers are also demanding answers.

More broadly, there are global moves put child protection at the center of digital regulations — such as the UK’s forthcoming Online Safety Act (while its Age Appropriate Design Code is already in force).

So there are — potentially — very serious ramifications for how Instagram will be able to operate in the future, certainly vis-a-vis children and teenagers, as regulations get drafted and passed.

UK publishes draft Online Safety Bill

Facebook’s plan to launch a version of Instagram for under 13s emerged earlier this year, also via investigative reporting — with Buzzfeed obtaining an internal memo which described “youth work” as a priority for Instagram.

But on Monday CEO Adam Mosseri said the company was “pausing” ‘Instagram kids’ to take more time to listen to the countless child safety experts screaming at it to stop in the name of all that is good and right (we paraphrase).

Whether the social media behemoth will voluntarily make that “pause” permanent looks doubtful — given how much effort it’s expending to try to reframe the significance of its own research.

Though regulators may ultimately step in and impose child safety guardrails.

“Contrary to how the objectives have been framed, this research was designed to understand user perceptions and not to provide measures of prevalence, statistical estimates for the correlation between Instagram and mental health or to evaluate causal claims between Instagram and health/well-being,” Facebook writes in another reframing notation, before going on to “clarify” that the 30% figure (relating to teenaged girls who felt its platform made their body image issues worse) “only” applied to the “subset of survey takers who first reported experiencing an issue in the past 30 days and not all users or all teen girls”. 

So, basically, Facebook wants you to know that Instagram “only” makes mental health problems worse for fewer teenage girls than you might have thought.

(In another annotation it goes on to claim that “fewer than 150 teen girls spread across… six countries answered questions about their experience of body image and Instagram”. As if to say, that’s totally okay then.)

The tech giant’s wider spin with the annotated slides is an attempt to imply that its research work shows proactive ‘customer care’ in action — as it claims the research is part of conscious efforts to explore problems experienced by Instagram users so that it can “develop products and experience for support”, as it puts it.

Yeah we lol’d too.

After all, this is the company that was previously caught running experiments on unwitting users to see if it could manipulate their emotions.

In that case Facebook succeeded in nudging a bunch of users who it showed more negative news feeds to to post more negative things themselves. Oh and that was back in 2014! So you could say emotional manipulation is Facebook’s DNA… 

But fast forward to 2021 and Facebook wants you the public, and concerned parents everywhere, as well as US and global lawmakers who are now sharpening their pens to apply controls to social media not to worry about teenagers’ mental health — because it can figure out how best to push their buttons to make them feel better, or something.

Turns out, when you’re in the ad sales business, everything your product does is an A/B test against some poor unwitting ‘user’…  

Screengrab from one of Facebook’s annotated slide decks released in response to the WSJ’s reporting about teen Instagram users’ mental health issues (Screengrab: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch.)

Instagram puts kids version ‘on ice’ after critical backlash

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Honda Motor Co announces plans for eVTOL, avatar robots and space technologies

Honda Motor Company announced plans to innovate in new business areas like electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft (eVTOL), bipedal robots and space technology.

Honda R&D Co., Honda Motor Company’s (HMC) innovations arm, will be leading the effort on “outside-the-box research on technologies that will bring about new value for people by expanding the potential of mobility into the third dimension, then the fourth dimension which defies the constraints of time and space, and ultimately into outer space,” according to the company.

It sounds like the stuff of a sci-fi novel, and indeed some of these innovations might not end up panning out in the end, but during Thursday’s briefing, the company demonstrated how its core technologies developed over the past 73 years – like combustion, electrification, control and robotics – could evolve to suit the purpose of a future world with vastly different mobility needs.

Hybrid eVTOLs and a corresponding mobility ecosystem

Image Credits: Honda Motor Company

The difference between an eVTOL and a helicopter is mainly that the former has multiple propellers, each of which have an independent motor driven by electricity from a battery, whereas the latter has one large, and loud, rotor at the top. As a result, eVTOLs are generally expected to be safer, quieter and cleaner.

While most of the eVTOL being developed around the world are all-electric, HMC aims to “leverage its electrification technologies and develop Honda eVTOL equipped with a gas turbine hybrid power unit,” according to a statement from the company. The company first announced its intentions to develop technologies in this space during a press conference in April, in which HMC also stated its goals to sell 100% EVs by 2050.

Marcos Frommer, manager of corporate communications at HMC, explained during the press briefing that all-electric eVTOLs have a very short range due to the battery capacity per mass, which means most use cases for these new vehicles will be limited to short distance flights, such as intercity transportation and shuttle flights. Even Joby Aviation, which recently announced plans to commercialize by 2024, only recently completed the longest test flight of an eVTOL to date, and that was about 150 miles on a single charge.

“According to the results of our market research, the largest demand for mobility by eVTOL aircraft is for longer distance such as intercity transportation with a range up to 250 miles,” said Frommer. “Due partly to the electrification of our automobiles Honda is putting its effort in research and development of lithium-ion batteries. However, advancement based on the current lithium-ion battery is expected to increase the energy density per capacity by only about several times in the next 20 years. So we believe that for mobility in the skies, which requires further weight reduction, it’s difficult to achieve long distance using batteries only.”

Frommer said if batteries advance more in the future, HMC can choose to make its eVTOLs all-electric by removing the gas turbine generator.

Honda Introduces Initiatives in New Areas, Taking on Challenges in New Areas while Leveraging Its Core Technologies

The company says it wants to create a new “mobility ecosystem” that features eVTOL at its core and is connected to mobility products on the ground. Per the animated example HMC showed during the briefing, a business executive living in Cape Cod might be able to use a single app to book a hybrid eVTOL to take him to his office in New York City, which would be a mere two hour commute by air. The app might be connected to his personal autonomous Honda vehicle, which would chat to him about the weather as it drove him to a mobility hub for takeoff. When he landed an autonomous shuttle would be there waiting in the Big Apple to take him to his office. After a day of easy commuting, he’d be home in time for dinner on the veranda with his family.

“By utilizing the Model Based Systems Engineering, or MBSE, method, this will be a challenge Honda will take on to transform ourselves from a conventional manufacturing company to a new company that will also design and commercialize systems and services,” said Frommer. “We will be able to deliver new value to our customers only when we complete one big system consisting of various elements, including a reservation system infrastructure, air traffic control, flight operation and existing mobility products such as automobiles. It’s impossible for Honda to handle all of these elements alone and we will need to collaborate with many companies and government agencies.”

HMC plans to conduct technology verification with prototypes in 2023, and conduct flight tests of a hybrid demonstration model in 2025. It will then make a decision on commercialization. If HMC decides to move forward, it hopes to obtain certifications by 2030 so it can launch in the following decade. The company told TechCrunch if it reaches commercialization, customers can expect prices for eVTOLs, which can more than seat four passengers at a time, to be lower than business class on commercial passenger planes.

Details about possible commercialization are still being discussed, however, we are striving to enable all customers to use our eVTOL aircraft at prices lower than the prices of flying business class on a commercial passenger plane. Frommer said HMC expects eVTOL to be the norm by 2040 and has forecasted a market size of about $269 billion by then.

Transcend time and space with the Honda Asimo robot

Honda avatar robot rendering allows a doctor to remotely help a struggling patient.

Honda’s avatar robot concept, Asimo, would allow the user to have a second self that performs tasks and experiences things without being there in person. Users connect and remotely control the avatar by wearing a VR headset and a tactile glove that will ultimately be able to mirror precise hand movements.

“We position this as four dimensional mobility, which transcends time and space going beyond 2D and 3D mobility,” said Frommer.

The company envisions Asimo robots being used for applications like remote surgery, which will likely be very popular in developing nations that don’t have access to world-class surgeons in the future, or space exploration, enabling an avatar version of a person to go to places that are uninhabitable or difficult to reach by humans.

“What will become the core of the realization of such an avatar robot is the multi-fingered robotic hand developed while leveraging  Honda’ strengths in robotics technologies and Honda’s original AI-supported remote control function,” according to the company.  “Therefore, Honda strived for an avatar robot that is capable of using its multi-fingered hand to make full use of tools designed for human use and performs complex tasks quickly and accurately based on the AI-supported and more intuitive control by the user.” 

Toyota also has a similar bipedal avatar robot controlled by telepresence called the T-HR3, and Tesla recently unveiled its plans for a humanoid robot, although the Tesla bot doesn’t appear to be based on remote controlled technology. If Honda goes through with its plans for Asimo, it stands to reason that it would use teleoperation both for easier manipulation and robotic learning. Showing a robot how to do something could just be the best way to train it.

Honda says it wants to put Asimo into practical use in the 2030s and is hoping to conduct testing before the end of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024.

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Ramping up space technology research and development

Circulative Renewable Energy System

Honda also announced plans to accelerate R&D in the field of space technology, specifically in lunar development. One theme Honda touched on briefly was its previously announced circulative renewable energy system. In June, Honda R&D Co. and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency announced a joint feasibility study on the system, which is designed to supply oxygen, hydrogen and electricity for human outposts and rovers on the moon so that people can live in space over an extended period of time. The system would leverage Honda’s existing fuel cell technologies and high differential pressure water electrolysis technologies, according to the company.

Honda also discussed using remote-controlled robots on the lunar surface to minimize the risks associated with astronauts being blasted into space and to even allow people to virtually explore the Moon from Earth. The moon robot would include the same multi-fingered hand technology and AI-supported remote control technology that’s being developed for the avatar robot, as well as torque control technology that Honda uses for collision mitigation.

The automaker also hopes to use its core technologies in fluid and combustion as well as guidance and control to build reusable rockets.

“If we can use such rockets to launch small low orbit satellites, we can expect to evolve our core technologies into various services, including connected services,” said Frommer. “All such services will be compatible with Honda technology.”

Frommer said Honda gave its “young engineers” with dreams of building a rocket the go ahead at the end of 2019 to begin R&D. Honda did not provide any further specifics about either of its space initiatives. 

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