Redmi Note 11T 5G launches in India with Dimensity 810 and 33W charging

Redmi India held their latest product launch keynote earlier today in India where we saw the debut of the Redmi Note 11T 5G. It’s a direct successor to last year’s Redmi Note 10T 5G and matches the vanilla Redmi Note 11 in all its key specs. Redmi Note 11T 5G in Aquamarine Blue, Stardust White and Matte Black Redmi Note 11T 5G brings a 6.6-inch IPS LCD with a 90Hz refresh rate and a punch-hole cutout for its 16MP selfie cam. It utilizes MediaTek’s Dimensity 810 5G chipset paired with 6/8GB RAM and 64/128GB storage. You only get a 50MP main shooter and an 8MP ultrawide snapper around...

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Student media giant Chegg acquires language learning startup Busuu for $436M

Chegg, the NYSE listed student media learning platform is acquiring Busuu, the online language learning startup established in Europe in 2008, for approximately $436 million (€385 million) in an all-cash transaction.

At its exit Busuu had raised only $16.1m in total, a tiny amount even I in European terms, and testament to the sheer grit of the founders who, by the end, had built a business that had reached over 120 million learners to date across more than 160 countries. Busuu provides courses in 12 different languages to over 500,000 paying subscribers.

The company’s last funding round was May 27, 2020 for $2m from GP Bullhound and ultra-high net worths. Prior to that the previous investors had consisted of Harold Primat, McGraw-Hill Education, PROfounders Capital, Martin Varsavsky and Johann “Hansi” Hansmann (according to CrunchBase).

Dan Rosensweig, President and CEO of Chegg said: “The addition of Busuu gives Chegg the unique opportunity to expand our business while also adding tremendous value to our existing users. It will allow us to drive further into international markets, as well as accelerate Busuu’s growth in the US market. Busuu’s team, who we have known for many years, are a great cultural fit. They have built an incredible learning service for the serious language learner, and we are excited to have them as part of Chegg.”

Chegg says it expects Busuu’s full-year 2021 revenue to be approximately $45 million with year-over-year growth of greater than 20%. The $17 billion digital language market is expected to triple in size in the next five years, said a statement by Chegg.

Founded in 2008 by Bernhard Niesner and Adrian Hilti, with offices in London, UK, and Madrid, Spain, Busuu has made a point of finessing its language-learning model and iterating every aspect of the platform, to the point where a study by ann academic at the University of Maryland, showed that users of Busuu needed only 13 hours of study in a two-month period to move up one college semester (typically 90-105 hours of instruction). The company offers free and paid subscriptions on a monthly, annual, and bi-annual basis.

Busuu is used by individuals but also offers corporate language training. Last year it added live language tutoring after acquiring Verbling.

Bernhard Niesner, CEO & Co-founder of Busuu, said: “We are proud and excited to be joining the Chegg family, a world-leading edtech company that puts students first. This partnership will give us an opportunity to leverage Chegg’s tremendous reach to fuel our expansion, particularly in the US. Our vision is to empower everyone in the world through languages, and we believe our relationship with Chegg will enable us to achieve this goal even faster.”

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Stellantis locks in lithium supply agreement to secure EV battery materials

Stellantis, the global corporation formed through a merger between Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and French automaker Groupe PSA, signed a binding agreement with a lithium producer as more automakers look to secure key parts of the battery supply chain. The agreement is one in a flurry of deals between automakers and suppliers as the demand for EVs rises.

Vulcan Energy Resources will produce battery-grade lithium hydroxide from a brine project in the Upper Rhine Valley in Germany. Generally, lithium is produced either via hard rock mining or from brine deposit extraction. While both have environmental drawbacks, Vulcan’s site will use renewable geothermal energy to power the lithium extraction process.

The project will also re-inject the spent brine in a closed-loop cycle, leaving no residual waste, such as production tailings. The project in Germany will use a fraction of water and land compared to other brine projects, such as those found in South America – which means a smaller carbon footprint and potentially a lower operational expenditure, the German-Australian company added on its website.

Under the five-year supply agreement, Vulcan will send shipments of lithium extracted in Germany to Stellantis beginning in 2026. Over the lifetime of the deal, Vulcan will supply between 81,000 metric tons and 99,000 metric tons of lithium hydroxide to the automaker. The two companies did not disclose financial terms of the deal, but it’s subject to both the commencement of commercial operations at the extraction site and product qualification.

The deal is part of Stellantis’ sweeping electrification strategy, which it outlined in July, that earmarks €30 billion ($35.5 billion) for EVs and new software over the next four years. The automaker aims to manufacture 130 gigawatt hours of battery capacity by 2025 and around 260 gigawatt hours across five factories in North America and Europe by 2030.

It’s the latest sign that global automakers are looking to secure their slice of finite raw materials like lithium, a key mineral in electric vehicle batteries. General Motors has made similar investments in a California lithium extraction project, while Tesla has inked its own supply deals for minerals like nickel.

Meanwhile, Renault signed its own agreement with Vulcan last week for up to 32,000 metric tons of European-made lithium.

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Upbound nabs $60M to grow its open source Crossplane multi-cloud management project

Companies today want to avoid the lock-in they faced in the past with a single vendor. As a result, they are hedging their bets with a multi-cloud strategy, but this creates a new problem around finding a single tool for managing it all. That’s where Upbound comes in with its open source Crossplane multi-cloud management tool.

It’s a big problem, and up until now, companies have relied on the cloud vendors themselves to manage each one separately. While some solutions like Google Anthos and Red Hat OpenShift have come along, there was a lack of open source tooling until Upbound released Crossplane in May 2020.

Investors recognized the need identified by Upbound and rewarded the company with a $60 million Series B to help build the open source project while looking to grow the commercial version of the product. Altimeter Capital led the round with participation from GV, Intel Capital and Telstra Ventures.

Upbound founder and CEO Bassam Tabbara said that while the market has attempted to find a solution to this management challenge, he believes that his company is the first to build an open source community with the hope of developing this single management console and single API to manage across cloud tools.

“There’s been a lot of efforts around trying to build a single point of control. None of them have attacked this problem from a community perspective, creating a universal control plane that enables that in [a] community, while [building] the convergence around it,” he said.

“I think of Crossplane as the first to get to a point where we actually now have a convergence effect around a single universal cloud API. This has never happened before. It’s truly the first time that we’ve gotten to one. You can go to Crossplane right now and you get one declarative API that can be used to address all cloud resources and infrastructure sources across all vendors.”

Tabbara points out that the project is fully cloud-native and is managed under the umbrella of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which manages Kubernetes and other key open source cloud-native technologies.

He said that Crossplane allows users to pick and choose the cloud vendors they want to use — whether cloud infrastructure vendors like AWS, Microsoft and Google or cloud-native tooling like Elastic, Confluent, Databricks and Snowflake — and manage all of that from a single API.

The company has grown and helped nurture the open source project and developed a commercial product in parallel called Upbound (like the company), which customers can install themselves in their cloud of choice or use a SaaS version that Upbound will manage for them.

It’s not only catching on with users. Tabbara said he has also been seeing major vendors like AWS, Azure, Equinix and IBM building integrations for Crossplane. He believes this is key, and it’s similar to the dynamic we saw in 2017 when the major cloud players began to rally around Kubernetes and the CNCF.

“It’s truly to the point where there is now a real convergence effect around Crossplane, not unlike the convergence effect that we saw around Kubernetes as a project, and not unlike the convergence we saw around Linux as a project,” he said.

It seems to be a project and a commercial vision with tremendous potential, one that investors see as a pivotal piece of the cloud puzzle and are willing to pour in significant capital to help build. If Upbound can execute on this vision, it may be onto something truly transformative, but only time will tell if they can make that happen.

What open source-based startups can learn from Confluent’s success story

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Honor 60 Pro, Honor 60 appear in live shots, reveal slight differences

The Honor 60 series will be introduced on Wednesday, and leaked live photos of the Honor 60 and Honor 60 Pro revealed new bits about them. The two phones will have largely similar internals, but the new photos reveal the Pro variant will have a curved top and bottom edges, making the tiny bezels even tinier. We can also see the Pro will be ever so slightly taller than its vanilla sibling, but will be similarly wide. Honor 60 Pro and Honor 60 The last time we saw renders with different bezels, we assumed one device would have a flat screen and it appears we got that...

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Francisco Partners flips Quest Software to Clearlake Capital in deal reportedly worth $5.4B

Francisco Partners bought Quest Software in 2016 when Dell was selling off some assets to help pay for the massive $67 billion EMC deal. Dell itself had purchased Quest in 2012 for $2.4 billion. Today, the company was on the move again, with Clearlake Capital picking it up this time.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the firm bought Quest for $5.4 billion. Reuters reported in 2016 that Francisco and Elliot Management paid around $2 billion for Quest and another asset, SonicWALL. If all of these figures are accurate, Francisco made a nice little profit off of its 2016 investment and managed to nurture the company to more than double its value. It’s worth noting that the parties have not officially acknowledged the price.

While a private company doesn’t have to reveal its financials, it seems likely that Quest has been doing pretty well since the 2016 transaction. Perhaps even more revealing is that Clearlake has decided to retain CEO Patrick Nichols and his entire management team.

Quest is your classic legacy security vendor. The company was founded in 1987 and has been shuffled between owners, modernizing along the way and managing to continually stay alive and increase in value.

Dipanjan “DJ” Deb, co-founder and CEO at Francisco Partners, is justifiably proud of building Quest into a more valuable property under its stewardship.

“We have a long and successful track record executing divisional carve-out transactions and are grateful to have had the opportunity to work with the Quest team to create value for the company, its customers and its partners,” Deb said in a statement about the deal.

The company has built up a stable of security products, including identity products One Identity and OneLogin. It also offers an endpoint solution and a Microsoft-focused security product, among other products and services. Clearlake certainly liked the broad portfolio and customer base that Quest is bringing to them.

“With a robust portfolio of market-leading software and SaaS solutions alongside a rich history of product innovation, we believe Quest is well-positioned to capitalize on emerging growth trends in identity-centric cybersecurity, data intelligence and IT operations management software markets,” Clearlake’s Prashant Mehrotra and Paul Huber said in a statement.

The deal is expected to close early next year pending standard regulatory approval.

Confirmed: Dell sells software division to Francisco Partners and Elliott Management

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eBay acquires the sneaker authentication business from partner Sneaker Con Digital

Online marketplace eBay is further investing in its sneaker business with today’s news that it’s acquiring Sneaker Con Digital’s authentication business, which verifies the authenticity of high-value footwear. The business has operations in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and Germany, and had been previously working with eBay to vet the sneakers being bought and sold on its platform.

Sneakers have become a large category on eBay’s marketplace, where today there are over 1.9 million pairs available to buy every day.

In October 2020, eBay launched an “Authenticity Guarantee” service in partnership with Sneaker Con, whose team of experts would verify the sneakers at no cost to sellers before items were shipped to the buyers. If the buyer then returns the sneakers, the authenticators would inspect them again before they’re sent back to the seller. This multi-point inspection system involves checking various aspects of the shoes in question, including the sizing, labels, stitching, logos, heel tabs, laces, and more, and even the box itself.

When the shoes were verified, the left sneaker is given an NFC-enabled tag that provides more detailed information about the sneakers’ authenticity when scanned. Verifiable listings also receive a blue check mark next to the item. The service was available for any sneaker over $100 being sold on eBay’s platform.

Many buyers and sellers preferred to shop sneakers through eBay as they’d be able to see photos of the exact shoes they’d be getting, instead of stock photos, and there were fewer fees compared with some rival sneaker marketplaces. Attracting this kind of buyer is also part of eBay’s larger strategy to drive enthusiasts to its site across various high-end categories, like handbags, watches, and sneakers, then benefit as they shop more items on eBay. The company recently noted the average sneaker buyer on eBay spends approximately $2,000 in other categories, for example.

Ebay says its Authenticity Guarantee service led to quarter-over-quarter category growth and, in just over a year, it’s authenticated over 1.55 million sneakers worldwide.

In its Q3 2021 earnings, eBay also noted its U.S. sneaker business was healthy and growing at double-digit rates, and it was expanding to other markets, including Germany. The company additionally announced plans to invest in 3D image capability on sneaker listings that would allow buyers to interact with a 360-degree view of the item they’re purchasing, as another means of instilling buyer confidence.

With the acquisition, eBay is bringing its partnered authentication business in-house where it will continue to build on its offerings to accommodate resale market trends, the company said about today’s news. Deal terms were not disclosed.

However, the deal is only for Sneaker Con’s authentication business — its events business will continue to operate separately. The deal was signed and closed on November 24, 2021, notes eBay.

“eBay has always been a vibrant community of enthusiasts, with deeply knowledgeable buyers, sellers and employees,” said Jordan Sweetnam, SVP and General Manager of eBay North America, in a statement. “We partnered with Sneaker Con to launch sneaker authentication on eBay last year because the team shared our passion for the category – with best-in-class capabilities to deliver what our customers want most. The response to our authentication offering has been overwhelming, and this acquisition allows us to continue to transform eBay and bring a higher level of trust and confidence to every transaction,” he added.

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