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Bondaval, the London-based B2B insurtech that gives credit teams assurance that customers will fulfill their financial obligations, has raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Talis Capital. The round included participation from returning investors Octopus Ventures, Insurtech Gateway Ltd, Truesight and Expa, and new investors FJ Labs and Broadhaven Ventures. Talis Capital general partner Tom Williams will join Bondaval’s board.

TechCrunch last covered Bondaval when it announced its seed funding in October 2021. Since then, it’s expanded its reach to 31 countries in Europe and North America, and grown its team to 20 people, with plans to hire more. Its clients now include BP and Shell.

Bondaval’s new funding will be used on hiring, expanding into new international markets and adding more use cases for its platform. The startup has now raised $25 million since it was founded in 2020 by Tom Powell and Sam Damoussi.

Bondaval’s flagship product are MicroBonds, which serve as an alternative to traditional bank guarantees and trade insurance by fractionalizing the underwriting process. Since surety bonds are usually reserved for large scale transactions and contracts, that means their underwriting is lengthy and expensive. Bondaval speeds up the process and makes it more accessible through through its proprietary credit risk decision engine, which analyzes the probability of a default over a bond’s terms, and enables Bondaval to issue MicroBonds at scale. Customers buy MicroBonds to assure credit teams that they will fulfill the terms of a contract.

Without MicroBonds, credit teams have several options to mitigate risk. For example, they can decide not to extend credit and ask customers to pay upfront in cash, but that means both sides have less liquidity to grow their businesses. Credit teams can ask for collateral-based security, including bank guarantees, but those take about three to six months to enact, and also leave customers with limited liquidity. Another option is credit insurance; the drawback there is that those policies can be cancelled by insurers. Underwritten by S&P A+ insurers, MicroBonds seeks to solve all those problems by giving credit teams and their customers a faster, non-cancellable alternative that is available online.

When TechCrunch first covered Bondaval, it was focused on independent retailers and the supply chain. Small retailers can still benefit from MicroBonds because they only need to pay an annual premium instead of posting collateral-based security, which means more liquidity. But Bondaval has expanded into new use cases for credit managers at large companies, who need to secure payments on a portfolio basis. These include companies in the energy sector, like current clients Shell, BP, Highland Fuels and TACenergy.

In a statement, Williams said, “We are impressed by the opportunity for MicroBonds which can be applied in so many different ways, and the sheer size of the opportunity is mindblowing, to the point where it could transform credit. We see limitless potential for Bondaval and are delighted to be part of the journey.”

Bondaval raises $15M Series A for its alternative to traditional bank guarantees by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

UNESCO calls water pollution one of the main challenges facing societies, with 2 million tonnes of sewage entering the world’s water each day. Oxyle wants to help solve the crisis with a new wastewater treatment that removes micropollutants. The Zurich-based startup announced today $3 million in pre-seed funding that it will use to bring its tech to market. The round was led by Wingman Ventures with participation from SOSV, Better Ventures and another.vc.

The new capital brings Oxyle’s total raised so far to $7.4 million since it was founded in 2020. The startup’s customers include companies in the pesticide, chemical, textile pigments, electronics and pharmaceutical sectors that are regulated by strict discharge limits.

Oxyle’s wastewater treatment was developed five years ago by co-founder and CEO Dr. Fajer Mushtaq during her doctoral research at ETH Zurich. While earning her masters, Dr. Mushtaq worked with synthetic chemicals to develop new nanomaterials for biomedical applications. That resulted in wastewater containing toxic chemicals that needed special handling and disposal methods. Since there wasn’t an effective way to remove the chemicals, the wastewater had to be incinerated.

“For me, this way of handling water was not only costly, unsafe and very unsustainable, but it also completely got rid of one of our most precious resources,” Dr. Mushtaq said. “The more I researched this topic, the more I learnt about the immense scale at which incineration was practiced by small and large international companies.”

She decided to focus her doctoral research on developing novel catalysts to remove micropollutants. Dr. Mushtaq then worked with co-founder and CTO Dr. Silvan Staufert to integrate Oxyle’s water treatment solution into a scalable technology platform. Since then, Oxyle has completed paid pilots with industrial and municipal customers and increased its team to 17 people.

Oxyle’s wastewater treatment removes micropollutants including PFAS (chemicals found in products like cleaning solutions, water-resistant fabrics and nonstick cookware), pharmaceuticals, hormones and pesticides. It involves a nanoporous catalyst (a material with high surface area that takes energy) developed by Dr. Mushtaq. When the nanoporous catalyst is activated by water movements like bubbling or vibrations, it creates a chemical reaction. The chemical reaction generates oxidative radicals that break down organic pollutants into carbon, fluorides and other harmless minerals.

Oxyle uses modular reactors to deploy its tech. For companies that need to comply with discharge regulations, Oxyle also offers an analytics platform for real-time monitoring of micropollutants connected through its reactors.

The startup is continuing to perform on-site paid pilots with customers to get feedback on its technology. It has worked on projects with agrochemical companies whose production processes result in high levels of pesticides, herbicides and insecticides. That wastewater is usually sent for incineration, but Dr. Mushtaq said they were able to remove more than 95% of compounds by using Oxyle’s tech. The startup has also done environmental remediation projects with industrial customers to bring pollutants, including PFAS, in groundwater down to below detection limit.

Other wastewater solutions include activated carbon technology (to absorb pollutants) and membrane filtration (to filter out pollutants) technology, which are in wide use around the world to treat wastewater. But Dr. Mushtaq said that pollutants still remain on the used activated carbon or in concentrated water left over from the filtration process. These technologies also result in high operating costs, since the activated carbon or membranes need to be replaced.

Oxyle’s advantage is that it degrades micropollutants without resulting in secondary waste. Its nanoporous catalyst lasts for a long time, and is fully recyclable, Dr. Mushtaq added. But Oxyle sees filtration technologies as partners instead of competitors, since the highly concentrated wastewater they leave behind can be treated using Oxyle’s methods.

The startup is expanding its tech platform to cover more use cases, including flow-through systems (or artificial water channels), ultra-compact systems like those used in labs, large scale use cases like municipal wastewater and low-cost solutions for developing economies. Oxyle is also working with companies and R&D institutes to improve the speed and cost effectiveness of its pollutant analytics system.

In a statement, Wingman Ventures founding partner Alex Stöckl said, “Our freshwater resources are depleting at alarming rates and toxic micropollutants in water lead to severe damages in our health and environment. New regulations will demand companies to act. But additionally, we need to use sustainable technology to protect our precious water resources for us, and our future generations. We are proud to support Oxyle on their journey to address our global water problem in order to give everyone access to clean water.”

Oxyle’s tech uses water movement to remove pollutants by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Toxic and hateful comments on YouTube have been a constant headache for the company, creators and users. The company has previously attempted to curtail this by introducing features such as showing an alert to individuals at the time of posting so that they could be more considerate. Now, the streaming service is introducing a new feature that will more aggressively nudge such individuals of their abusive comments and take broader actions.

YouTube says it will send a notification to people whose abusive comments have been removed for violating the platform’s rules. If despite receiving the notification a user continues to post abusive comments, the service will ban them from posting any more comments for 24 hours. The company said it tested the feature before the rollout today and found that notifications and timeouts proved materially successful.

At the moment, the hateful comment detection is available only for English-language comments, but the streaming service aims to include more languages in the future. Notably, the pre-posting warning is available for English and Spanish.

“Our goal is to both protect creators from users trying to negatively impact the community via comments, as well as offer more transparency to users who may have had comments removed to policy violations and hopefully help them understand our Community Guidelines,” the company said.

If a user thinks that their comment has been wrongfully removed, they can share their feedback. The company, however, didn’t say if it will restore the comments after looking at the feedback.

Additionally, in a forum post, YouTube said that it has been working on improving its AI-powered detection systems. It has removed 1.1 billion “spammy” comments in the first half of 2022, the company claimed. YouTube has also enhanced its system to better detect and remove bots in live chat videos, it said.

YouTube and other social networks have been able to reduce spam and abusive content in part by relying on automated detection. However, abusers often use different slang or misspell words to trick the system. What’s more, it’s harder to catch people posting hateful comments in non-English languages.

The streaming company has tested a wide-range of tools in recent quarters to reduce hateful comments on the platform. These tests included hiding comments by default and showing a user’s comment history on their profile cards.

Last month, Youtube rolled out a feature that let creators hide a particular user from comments. This control applies to the whole channel, so even if the user posts hateful comments on another video, it won’t show up.

Platforms globally are grappling with the issue of curtailing the spread of hateful comments.

Instagram was a breeding ground for them when England footballers Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford, and Jadon Sancho were harassed for missing penalty kicks in last year’s Euro finals. A new report from GLAAD and Media Matters noted that Anti-LGBTQ slurs have skyrocketed after Elon Musk took over Twitter. While all these platforms have rolled out tools to mute or hide comments and restrict comments to certain folks, the amount of hateful and abusive comments remain a massive scale problem.

YouTube will send a notification to users if their comment is abusive by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Arcimoto, the maker of the three-wheeled electric Fun Utility Vehicles (FUVs), is teaming up with Faction to develop EVs that can be delivered to a customer’s hotel through a combination of low-level autonomy and tele-assist technology. The tie-up is part of an upcoming pilot in Las Vegas with GoCar Tours that will allow tourists to go sightseeing with Faction-powered FUVs.

Here’s how it’ll work: Arcimoto’s FUVs will be kitted out with Faction’s sensor suite of cameras and radar and its Level 2+ advanced driver assistance system, which handles tasks like lane assist and collision avoidance. The vehicles will also have a tablet that features GoCar’s GPS-guided tour of the Vegas strip (GoCar wants to eventually expand this tour to include Red Rock Canyon and the Hoover Dam). The vehicles will go from GoCar’s depot in the Arts District to various hotels along the strip — a straight, five-mile stretch of road with a 30 mile-per-hour speed limit. Tourists will then collect the FUVs and drive them along the tour route at their own pace before dropping themselves and the vehicles back at their hotels, whereupon the FUVs will “drive themselves” back to the GoCar depot.

I use quotations around “drive themselves” for a reason. Faction’s system can drive itself from A to B on a predetermined route and knows to stop itself if it encounters an anomaly or a task it’s not able to complete, like an object en route or an unprotected lefthand turn. But for judgement calls, it relies on the teleoperator. The teleoperator will remotely adjust the trajectory line that the vehicle is following to go around an object or into a parking lot and give the order to execute.

Arcimoto’s partnership with Faction and GoCar will originally involve about 20 vehicles starting in mid-2023, but the companies hope to expand the offering to an additional 290 vehicles across Vegas and other cities where GoCar operates, including San Francisco, San Diego and Barcelona.

Faction is a company that sees Level 5 autonomy as a research project that’s at least a decade out from actually commercializing, and teleoperation as a necessary component to scaling autonomous fleets today. The startup is building its business by focusing on doing “a right-sized tech stack with right-sized vehicles,” meaning Faction relies on a range of cameras, including a thermal camera, and radar to reach basic levels of autonomy, rather than fitting out a vehicle with expensive lidar and the latest compute systems.

“Right now our current vehicle systems are under $35,000,” Ain McKendrick, Faction’s CEO and founder, told TechCrunch. “We take about a $17,000 Arcimoto vehicle platform and we put on about $12,000 to $13,000 worth of tech. We’ve announced our partnership with Nvidia, but I don’t want their latest and greatest liquid-cooled Omniverse thing that’s going to take a trunk and a minivan to run. I want two generations back in their automotive-grade package that we can scale with.”

McKendrick said the benefit of being a “second wave autonomy company” is that Faction isn’t trying to solve for all of the edge cases just now. As it relates to its partnership with Arcimoto and GoCar, Faction is just trying to solve for replacing the human that would otherwise deliver those vehicles to customers’ hotels.

“Our goal is to be profitable at the $2 per mile price point out the gate, not to have the promise that it’ll be cost-reduced 10 years from now,” said McKendrick.

Aside from the gimmicky aspect of having a tour car drive itself to a customer’s hotel, GoCar is here for the potential cost-savings to its business.

“We’ve thought about the self-serve model where people can come and help themselves to a vehicle and drive off, and we used to have multiple locations, but the economies of having these multiple locations is challenging because you don’t know where the customer is going to be,” Nathan Withrington, GoCar founder, told TechCrunch. “We might have 10 cars available at one location and the other has a waitlist of 30 people. Then moving cars across town and everything is a nightmare.”

If customers can just summon a vehicle to them, where GoCar stores them becomes a lot less important. The company will get visibility from its cars just being on the road, and it’ll be easier to clean and prep them when they’re all accounted for.

GoCar has already been working with Arcimoto to offer FUVs to tourists. Withrington says FUVs are the first type of EV the company has put in its fleet that can actually handle the range it needs, can cross bridges and is highway legal. Plus, tourists love driving them.

For Arcimoto, the partnership is a chance to expand its reach as a tourist offering for vehicles, while also building on its current partnership with Faction. The two began working together last year to build the D1, a semi-autonomous delivery vehicle based on the FUV, and have been running pilots in the Bay Area since July, according to McKendrick.

Vegas visitors can take semi-autonomous EVs for a tour starting in 2023 by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch