5G services launched in India at IMC 2022 by PM Modi

Indian Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi officially launched the commercial 5G services in India today at the inauguration of the 6th edition of India Mobile Congress (IMC) held in New Delhi, which will conclude on October 4. PM Modi at the inauguration of IMC 2022 (Image source: Press Information Bureau of India) The 5G network will go live in 22 cities as a part of the first phase of rollout, including Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chandigarh, Chennai, Delhi, Gandhinagar, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Jamnagar, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, Pune, and Varanasi. The 5G services will be offered by...

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Web3 banking platform Juno raises $18 million, launches tokenized loyalty program

Juno, a startup that provides checking accounts to crypto enthusiasts and allows them to take their paychecks in digital tokens, has raised a new funding round as it expands its offerings to include a tokenized loyalty program.

The one-and-a-half-year old startup has amassed over 75,000 customers in the U.S. who take their salaries (some in entirety, rest in portions) in crypto and invest consistently in digital assets each month.

Customers are able to spend their crypto or cash using the startup’s Mastercard-powered debit card, make bill payments and easily move funds to and from traditional banks if they so desire. Juno also offers direct onramps to customers from a checking account to layer 2 blockchains such as Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism for zero fees.

The eponymous platform integrates with all popular payroll platforms in the U.S., making it easier for customers who are long term believers in crypto to keep doubling down on their bets without having to worry about manually moving funds to different exchanges. It also offers customers automated tax reporting through form 1099, freeing them from having to manually sift through their transactions and calculate gains.

On Saturday, Juno announced it has raised $18 million in a Series A financing round. The funding was led by ParaFi Capital’s Growth Fund and saw participation from scores of backers including Greycroft, Antler Global, Hashed, Jump Crypto, Mithril, 6th Man Ventures, Abstract Ventures and Uncorrelated Fund.

Juno – which also counts Sequoia India’s Surge, Dragonfly Capital, Polychain Capital, Consensys Ventures, Balaji Srinivasan, Surojit Chatterjee, Sandeep Nailwal and Ryan Selkis among its backers – has reached $1 billion in annualized transaction volume processing, Varun Deshpande, co-founder and chief executive of Juno, said in an interview.

“Crypto natives in the US are finding existing banks completely inadequate for everyday use of crypto. We are rebuilding a checking account from the ground up with crypto and web3 at its core. Juno empowers members to earn part of their paycheck in crypto and use crypto for everyday transactions like bill payments or buying coffee,” he said.

Juno’s eponymous app (Image credits: Juno)

Tokenized loyalty program

Juno, which raised a $3 million seed funding last year, is now ready for a new offering: an optional loyalty program. The startup is introducing an ERC20 token, called JCOIN, which will be rewarded to customers, if they so choose, based on their usage. Remarkably, Juno co-founders, employees and investors are not taking any allocation in the tokens to avoid conflict of interest in a move that is in contrast with how a significant number of industry players operate.

“We feel distributing tokens to founders, investors and team members creates misaligned incentives. Being market participants with privileged information creates distrust with community in the long term,” said Deshpande.

“The exit path for our company’s success remains developing successful products, and the path for our investors and team remains an IPO,” he said.

Juno took a snapshot of customers’ usage on Friday and has generated 150 million tokens that they are eligible for. Each dollar spent using the platform gives customers access to a token. Overtime, customers will have to spend more to receive the same amount of tokens as rewards, he said.

The startup, based in India, is part of a growing wave of fintech and software firms in the South Asian nation that are increasingly building for the global markets. Prior to starting Juno, Deshpande and other co-founders — Ratnesh Ray and Siddharth Verma — worked on Nuo protocol in 2019. They discontinued the protocol two years later to build something that is compliant with the growing regulatory environment.

Juno has a team that “deeply understand both fintech and crypto. Seamlessly integrating crypto and web3 in a checking account which is a trusted and familiar interface for millions of Americans can help onboard new users to web3,” said Ryan Navi, Principal at ParaFi Capital, in a statement.

“Their empathy towards users new to web3 and passion for creating beautiful crypto-native products with compliance at its core sets them apart. They are creating an entirely new category in neo banking and we are excited to back them.”

Web3 banking platform Juno raises $18 million, launches tokenized loyalty program by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

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Firefly Aerospace reaches orbit for the first time

There’s another space-proven private launch company in the club — Firefly Aerospace. The company’s small payload Alpha rocket reached orbit successfully early on Saturday morning after taking of from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

This is a major achievement for Firefly, which has been a lot to get here: The company originally began operations as Firefly Space Systems, which went bankrupt, and was then reborn as Firefly Aerospace after its assets were acquired by Max Polyakov’s Noosphere ventures in 2017.

Tom Markusic, who founded the company and led it as CEO, also departed the post in June. Markusic shifted into a technical advisory and full-time board member role, but his departure was preceded by the very public leaving of Max Polyakov, who in February shared a post pointing the finger at the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the Air Force and other U.S. agencies for his forced exit. Polyakov is a UK citizen but was born in the Ukraine.

Firefly launched its first Alpha rocket just over a year ago on September 2, 2021, but the launch vehicle exploded mid flight, prior to achieving orbit.

That launch, like today’s, carried a number of payloads for actual paying customers. The difference is that Firefly claimed “100% mission success” for today’s flight, including successful deployment of all three payloads on board to their target orbits.

Firefly now ranks among the small but slowly growing club of private space companies that have attained orbit, including SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit and Astra.

Firefly Aerospace reaches orbit for the first time by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch

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Realme 10's design and charging speed revealed by FCC

The Realme 10 (RMX3630) that's already been certified by a few certifying authorities, including NBTC, has now bagged FCC's certification, revealing its design and charging speed in the process while also corroborating the battery capacity. A schematic of the Realme 10 included in one of the documents on FCC's website reveals the smartphone will sport two cameras on the rear instead of three like the Realme 9. The position of the flash is also changed, and it's moved to the right side of the first camera. You can also see the Realme 10's right-side frame features the volume rocker. We...

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Samsung Galaxy S21 FE gets October 2022 Android security patch

Samsung released the October 2022 Android security patch for the Galaxy S21 and S22 series smartphones in some markets recently, and now it's the Galaxy S21 FE that's receiving the latest security patch with a new software update. The update comes with firmware version G990EXXU3CVI8 and is currently seeding in India for the Galaxy S21 FE units having model designation SM-G990E. However, the rollout should expand to other regions soon. If you live in India and haven't received the update on your Galaxy S21 FE yet, you can check for it manually by heading to the smartphone's Settings...

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Xiaomi 12 Pro long-term review

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HSBC invests in Singapore’s customer intelligence and risk assessment startup

HSBC Asset Management, the investment arm of Britain’s HSBC Group, has led a seed round of $4 million in Singapore’s customer intelligence and risk assessment startup Bizbaz, the two said Friday.

Founded in June 2019, Bizbaz offers its proprietary customer intelligence and risk management solutions to banks, insurance companies and fintech startups. The startup has attracted nearly 20 people with backgrounds in behavioral science, health tech, AI and data.

“The problem we’re trying to solve is to empower and enable whether they are a financial institution, a fintech company or any kind of a B2C company that’s trying to acquire or onboard new customers,” said Hayk Hakobyan, CEO and co-founder of Bizbaz, in an interview with TechCrunch.

In several Asian countries, as high as 80% of the local population does not have credit bureau data and scores to help banks and companies understand their financial position and efficiently underwrite their lending. Bizbaz is attempting to solve this issue by exploring alternative ways to build credit profile of individuals.

Several firms in Asia are taking a similar approach today, sifting through people’s social media profiles and telco records. Hakobyan said this kind of research requires high accuracy and some industry practices raise privacy concerns.

In contrast, Bizbaz looks at the available data attributes including social media profiles and the apps people have installed — and frequently use — on their smartphones. It can also assess someone’s personality and their ability to bear risk by speaking with them for 45 seconds if they don’t have a smartphone, Hakobyan claimed.

Analyzing individuals’ risk appetite through their multiple digital footprints helps the startup limit the instances of false positives and flag people trying to trick the system.

“Of course, false positives cannot be 0% because theoretically, you cannot eliminate all this kind of cases, but we do as most as can be done technologically to potentially eliminate or diminish the chances of that by very extensively training our data systems before even the test, during the test and by the time they reach the actual deployment,” Hakobyan noted.

Bizbaz has different templates based on countries and industries. It also tailor-made its solutions by incorporating data from its clients to meet their specific demands — rather than using a single offering for all its customers.

The development team at Bizbaz mainly works from Israel, while its data team is in India and its sales, business development and product teams operate from Israel, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia.

The investment from HSBC, which doesn’t typically backs early-stage startups, is noteworthy for Bizbaz. Hakobyan said the startup’s suite of solutions — and support from New Jersey-based VC firm SOSV — helped inked the deal.

“In ASEAN, the middle class is expected to more than double between now and 2030, to reach 334 million people. Financial services are likely to expand at the same pace if not faster. Our investment in Bizbaz provides a compelling exposure to this market shift in the region and other developing economies. It will support the development of its technology, which overcomes the major obstacle of on-boarding clients with no previous financial records,” said Remi Bourrette, Head of Venture Investments, HSBC Asset Management, in a prepared statement.

The startup is in talks to potentially deploy its solutions within parts of HSBC in Asia and Europe, Hakobyan said, adding that it would continue to have the autonomy and the ability to bring in other partners as well as customers including new banks and insurance companies.

Bizbaz plans to spend 20–30% of its fresh funding on outreach and marketing as it has so far generated sales through word of mouth and references. The startup also aims to upgrade its Web presence, recruit more data and software developers as well as data and behavioral analysts and spend some resources on product development, Hakobyan told TechCrunch.

Paul Redbourn, a senior advisor at Bizbaz, said the startup organically made a positive month-on-month growth in revenues.

The all-equity round also saw the participation of Southeast Asian venture capital firm Vynn Capital and new angel investors alongside follow-on investments from SOSV and existing angel investors. Before the latest round, Bizbaz raised $300,000 in an angel round.

HSBC invests in Singapore’s customer intelligence and risk assessment startup by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

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