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In countries where English is not a main language, listed companies not only have to deal with financial disclosure regulations, but make sure their investor materials are available in English for global backers. WritePath make the process faster and scalable by combining its AI tech with human translators. The Taipei-based startup’s clients include Foxconn, ASUS, China Airline, the Taiwan Stock Exchange and Taiwan Mobile.

WritePath announced that it has raised $340,000 in pre-Series A funding, led by Quantum International Corp. CEO Alex Lee. The round also saw participation from angel investors like jobstreet.com founder Mark Chang. WritePath’s previous investors include byUDN.com, a subsidiary of United Daily, one of the largest media organization in Taiwan, and Singaporean translation firm Elite Asia.

TechCrunch first covered WritePath back in 2014 when it was an essay editing service for college applicants, technical writers and academic researchers. Founder and CEO Charles Chen said the company decided to switch focus because essay editing was labor intensive and hard to scale since it had to acquire new clients every year. WritePath originally offered B2C translation services, before its team saw that governments in Asia are implementing more English-language disclosure policies, including for listed companies.

The company’s platform combines tech like Warren, its in-house machine translation engine, with human translators. Warren was trained on a language corpus of several million Chinese-to-English sentences gathered from financial, annual and ESG reports.

One of the reason for new disclosure policies is investor activism and the passage of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) in the European Union. MiFID II is a legislative framework that calls for more transparency by companies, including regulatory reporting, to protect investors. Its trading rules included requiring brokers to charge funds for research separately from trading fees. Many funds started looking for information from listed companies’ IR and ESG departments, instead of relying on equity research reports.

“As a result, though, small and mid-cap companies may find themselves easily overlooked,” Chen said. “So having their information presented professionally in English helps give them a boost and ensure they don’t fall off the investment radar.” He added that more companies in Asia markets, including Taiwan, China, Korea and Southeast Asian countries, will start publishing disclosures in English as capital markets mature and grow.

Before turning to WritePath, many of its clients used traditional translation agencies or translation services offered by the Big 4 accounting firms to produce English-language reports. Chen said one of WritePath’s advantages is that its technology, including Warren and corpora management system T-Booster, maintains consistency in corporate language and terminology. This means its human translators can focus on the quality of content, reviewing sentences for accuracy.

WritePath also offers a “self-service” solution for material information that needs to be disclosed within 24 hours. This enables clients to order and manage translations through WritePath’s portal. Part of its new funding will be used to upgrade the portal so it can process multiple files and batches that come in at different times, but need to be delivered at once.

Chen said WritePath differentiates from financial printers like Toppan Merrill, R.R. Donnelly and Pronexus by combining human translators with AI tech in its workflow. EQS and MZ are online IR disclosure tools, but require translation help when they publish information in countries that don’t use English as a main language. Another company in the financial disclosure space is Fiscalnote, but it focuses on data, like ESG information, instead of translation.

The funding will used to expand WritePath’s translation services for listed companies and add more verticals, like design and layout for ESG reports.

Taiwanese startup WritePath’s AI tech speeds up financial disclosure translation by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Suplyd, a procurement platform for hotels, restaurants and catering (HoReCa) businesses in Egypt, has raised $1.6 million pre-seed funding from Endure Capital, Seedstars, Camel Ventures, Falak Startups, and a number of angel investors.

Founded in January this year, Suplyd’s B2B platform brings efficiency in the supply chain operations for businesses in the food service industry by allowing digital order procurement, payment, and fulfillment.

Through its platform, restaurants get access to a wide range of products on demand , saving them man hours wasted in sourcing for goods offline. It also ensures that the businesses acquire the goods at competitive prices.

Suplyd plans to use the new funding to scale its technology and expand within and beyond Cairo, and to explore other growth opportunities in Middle-East and North Africa (MENA) region in the near future.

“Restaurants’ supply chain is a global issue, where everyone right now is looking into how to cut costs and reduce waste. However, the Egyptian market is extremely big yet untapped, and that’s where we direct our efforts for the next phase before we expand to other global markets,” said Gohar Said, Suplyd CEO who co-founded the startup with Karim Selima, and Ahmed ElMahdy.

Said, a restaurateur for 12 years, Suplyd is bringing an e-commerce experience to the restaurant supply chain, by optimizing assets, reducing waste for the whole ecosystem, while saving the businesses time and effort used to communicate and follow up with suppliers.

The startup’s network of tech-enabled fulfillment centers, offers the Suplyd insights on demand patterns and trends that informs stocking, to ensure restaurants supplies needs are fulfilled on demand, and avoid waste on suppliers end too.

“In a normal scenario, restaurants have to go out to the market looking for suppliers for their SKUs, then they start validating their prices. If the right match happens, which is not always the case, the fulfillment risk takes place, whether because of tight delivery windows, order placement restrictions, or quantity issues,” said Said.

“What Suplyd is offering is a digital procurement engine, a platform where it makes it easy for restaurants to buy supplies at considerably cheaper rates than open market prices, exposes restaurants to a wide range of SKUs, guarantees fulfillment through a single platform, and simplifies the transaction and the delivery process. It also benefits suppliers with real-time analytics and actionable insights when it comes to demand patterns and trends,” he said.

Suplyd says it is currently serving 500 customers in greater Cairo, having grown by almost 50% month over month since launch. The startup, which is stepping up competition for players like OneOrder, expects greater growth over the next one year sustained by its expansion plans geared towards serving Egypt’s vast HoReCa industry, which is supported by over 400,000 restaurants.

Tarek Fahim, general partner at Endure Capital said: “Eating out is a major part of social life in the Middle East, but the supply chain that enables restaurants to serve customers is highly fragmented. We are thrilled to support the team and the platform Suplyd is building to digitize the supply chain for restaurants, improving efficiency and reducing food waste in our communities.”

Egypt’s Suplyd raises $1.6M to digitize restaurants supply chain by Annie Njanja originally published on TechCrunch

Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold over 20 million shares of the company stock between Monday and Wednesday. The sale is worth about $3.5 billion, according to a regulatory filing. Musk’s latest stock dump follows the nearly $4 billion worth of shares he sold last month.

Musk hasn’t provided a reason publicly for the share sell this time around, nor if he is done for the day. In April, he sold off $8.5 billion worth of Tesla stock, and in August Musk offloaded another $7 billion’s worth.

After Wednesday’s share sell, Musk owns roughly $66 billion worth of Tesla stock.

The sell comes as Tesla investors raise concerns over Musk’s involvement with Twitter, which the executive recently took over after a controversial, and expensive, purchase. Investors say Musk’s involvement with the social media platform is detrimental to Tesla, arguments they back by pointing to the company’s stock price. Trading at $156.80 after hours on Wednesday, Tesla stock is down 60.8% from January, and is on track for their worst full-year performance.

Some analysts speculate that today’s stock sell is Musk’s answer to some of the high interest debt he’s paying on his $44 billion Twitter deal. Twitter took on $13 billion in debt as part of that deal, including about $3 billion of unsecured debt on which Twitter pays an interest rate of 11.75%.

Investors say it doesn’t seem like the sell was planned, and it’s unclear if Musk is done selling. That said, Musk only has until Friday to sell more stock before Tesla goes into a quiet period for the end of the quarter. Some investors expressed frustration that Musk has been unpredictable when it comes to selling stock. Years ago he said he wouldn’t sell shares. When he went back on that earlier this year, Musk said he was done selling. But then lo and behold, he goes ahead and dumps stock again on three separate occasions.

The stock sell also comes as some of Tesla’s most hardcore investors beg Musk and the board to consider buying back shares as the company’s stock price continues to slump. Musk said during Tesla’s Q3 earnings that the company is likely to do a buyback next year, possibly between $5 billion and $10 billion.

Musk’s latest stock dump comes the same day that the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark interest rate to a range between 4.25% and 4.5%. Often, stock prices take a hit when interest rates rise, so Musk could have been selling in anticipation of Tesla stock losing more value in coming weeks.

Musk sells $3.5B worth of Tesla stock as investors voice concern over Twitter involvement by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch