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The general mood is mixed from startup founders in the mobility sector. But one theme keeps popping up in my conversations with them. The need for a bit more time. Time for the economic uncertainty to settle out; time to land more funding; and more time for their existing runway.

Brodmann17 co-founder and CEO Adi Pinhas shared many of those sentiments with me this week. His company — a six-year computer vision technology startup based in Israel — shut down. “We just needed more time,” he said.

Interestingly, I didn’t hear a lot of this last week during the TC Sessions: Space event in Los Angeles. Investors struck a bullish tone and founders seemed more optimistic.

Why, dear reader, do you think there is such a striking difference?

On a far rosier note, Rad Power Bikes launched what I think might be its most important product: an electric assist trike.

I can see you rolling your eyes. But hear me out. The trike, which I tried, is super accessible to a wide swath of people who might not otherwise ride a two-wheeled bicycle. It’s easy to get on and off, is stable and surprising adept at sudden and sharp turns. It even goes in reverse.

The RadTrike, as it is branded, has been in the works for years. Actually it’s been on the mind of its founder Mike Radenbaugh since at least 2007 when a couple of customers asked for a bike that was stable, had a low standover height, power, could carry items and was easy to use. The RadTrike has a range of between 20 and 35 miles, a top speed of 14 miles per hour and can be used by anyone over 4 feet 10 inches tall.

“There’s this category of vehicle that is completely underserved in this country, which is light electric vehicles with a mobility and utility focus,” Randebaugh told me in a recent interview.

Got a news tip or inside information about a topic we covered? I’d love to hear from you. You can reach at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, opinions or tips. Or you can drop us a note at tips@techcrunch.com. If you prefer to remain anonymous, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and various encrypted messaging apps.

Micromobbin’

Taur co-founder Carson Brown is the latest founder to chat with me for my ongoing series over at TC+. If you’re unfamiliar, Taur is the e-scooter company daring to be different with a front-facing scooter. We talked about why Taur’s scooters are designed to make people feel comfortable riding on the road (even when there are no bike lanes), why scooter ownership will far outpace shared scooters and how to use design to get people to adapt their mindsets and adopt scooters for daily use.

Berlin Senate’s Transport Administration has voted to allow cyclists and e-scooter riders to park for free in car parking spaces in a move to tackle improperly parked light electric vehicles. The rule goes into effect January 1.

Biomega, a Danish e-bike company, has come up with a “weightless trailer” to attach to your bike. It has a 250W motor and a battery with a 52 to 93 mile range that makes towing cargo or kids much easier.

European Bolt partnered with Drover AI to bring tech that detects and corrects sidewalk riding to e-scooters.

Dott is using virtual reality to test scooter sounds that will alert other road users to scooters without causing noise pollution.

Hived founder Murvah Iqbal talked to Micromobility Industries about why micromobility is great for last mile logistics.

Ola Electric CEO Bhavish Agarwal predicts nearly 100% of India’s two-wheeler market will shift to EVs in three years.

RideUp has launched a network of cycle centers offering bike subscriptions across the UK.

Shared micromobility in the United States is almost back to pre-pandemic levels, according to the latest Shared Micromobility in the U.S report by the National Association of City Transportation Officials.

Tier-owned Spin has exited 10 U.S. markets due to low demand and an annoying combination of over-regulated and under-regulated markets. The departure has resulted in 30 layoffs.

Voi is cutting another 13% of staff, or 95 workers, on top of the 35 that were laid off last month.

Deal of the week

Apart of Mobileye and Porsche, the IPO arena has been a bit meh lately — at least in the mobility sector. But one more snuck in before the end of the year.

I’m talking about Vinfast, the Vietnamese electric vehicle maker founded in 2017.

The company, which filed for an initial public offering in the United States, has been making a massive and aggressive push into this market. I can’t predict whether an IPO will speed up the process; it will certainly give the company more visibility.

The EV startup has been pursuing the U.S. market, most recently with a showcase offour SUVspresented at the LA Auto Show. Over the summer, VinFast received$1.2 billion in incentives to build a factory in North Carolina, where the automaker hopes to begin building cars by July 2024.

Other deals that got my attention …

Bumper, the UK-based car repairs payment platform, raised £26.1 million ($30 million) in investment from its Series A extension round with participation from Autotech Ventures, InMotion Ventures, ITOCHU and Revo Capital. As part of the Series A extension round, a new debt facility was agreed with Secure Trust Bank Commercial Finance worth £20 million ($23 million), with the additional investment coming in the form of equity.

Carvana’s troubles seem to be mounting, which is crushing its stock price. Some of its largest creditors including Apollo Global Management Inc. and Pacific Investment Management Co. (which hold around $4 billion in unsecured debt) signed a pact binding them to act together in negotiations with the online used-vehicle retailer.

Customcells raised a €60 million in a Series A round led by World Fund to advance its cell technology that’s focused on aviation. Abacon Capital, Vsquared Ventures and Porsche also chipped in.

Einride raised $500 million in equity and debt financing. The equity-based $200 million Series C portion came from backers including Northzone, EQT Ventures, Temasek, Swedish pension fund AMF, Polar Structure and Norrsken VC. The Swedish company also secured $300 million in debt funding led by Barclays Europe.

FreeWire Technologies, the EV charging station and energy management solutions company, acquired Mobilyze.ai, which developed an EV charging analytics and prediction software platform. Financial terms were not disclosed. As part of the acquisition, Mobilyze.ai’s founders, David Keith and James Long, are joining FreeWire’s product management team.

Helbiz scored another $5 million from Yorkville Advisors Global, but its stock is still in the $0.20 range.

Kodiak Robotics won a $49.9 million two-year contract from the the U.S. Department of Defense to help the Army automate future ground vehicles to conduct high-risk missions like reconnaissance and surveillance. Kodiak beat out 33 other companies to win the contract to develop, test and deploy autonomous software that can navigate complex, off-road terrain, diverse operational conditions and GPS-challenged environments.

Moove, a Nigerian mobility fintech startup, has raised $30 million to fund its expansion to UAE.

Onomotion, a German-based startup, raised 21 million euro to expand its e-cargo bike urban logistics business across Europe and the US.

Sonatus raised $75 million in a round led by Foxconn. The company wants to expand its software-defined vehicle tech into new markets. Sonatus’ platform is already in production in Hyundai, Kia and Genesis vehicles.

Notable reads and other tidbits

Autonomous vehicles

Perhaps one of the biggest AV news items this week (at least in my view) was the breakup between TuSimple and truck manufacturer Navistar.

The move to end the partnership comes less than a month after Cheng Lu returned to his role as CEO of TuSimple after previously being ousted. Lu returned after the company board fired co-founder Xiaodi Hou following an internal probe that showed certain employees having ties and sharing information with Hydron, a China-backed hydrogen-powered trucking company. Hou and co-founder Mo Chen then fired the board.

Uber and Motionallaunched a robotaxi service in Las Vegas — the first step in the companies’ 10-year plan to co-scale across major North American cities. While Motional has already launched similar services in Las Vegas on both the Lyft and Via networks, this is Uber’s first time offering autonomous rides (with a human safety operator behind the wheel, for now) to the public.

Electric vehicles, batteries & charging

American Battery Factory received the OK from city officials to locate its first plant in Tucson, Arizona. ABF says it will pump around $1.2 billion into the facility, claiming it will be the “country’s largest gigafactory” for lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells when it’s completed, with a footprint of about 2 million square feet.

BrightDrop, General Motors’ electric delivery van subsidiary, added DHL Express Canada to its portfolio of customers, marking the company’s entrance into its first international market.

GM said Canadian EV charging company Flo will provide the 40,000 Level 2 chargers it plans to install in communities (with help from its dealership network) across the U.S. and Canada. GM will cover the cost of the chargers and shipping, while dealerships will pay for things like cable management, maintenance and warranties.

GM workers at a battery plant in northeast Ohio voted in favor of representation with the United Auto Workers.

Sono Motors co-founders Jona Christians and Laurin Hahn are making a last-ditch effort to keep its Sion solar EV program alive. The publicly traded company has launched a 50-day campaign called #saveSion.

Weiming Soh, the Singaporean auto veteran who’s the current CEO of Renault China, is planning to build super-premium EVs that can monitor the health of its passengers.

Gig economy

Uber agreed to a $10 million settlement with the City of Chicago for listing local restaurants in the Uber Eats and Postmates food delivery apps without the restaurants’ consent, as well as for charging excess commission fees.

Miscellaneous

Google plans to combine the teams working on its Maps product and on Waze, a mapping service that Google acquired in 2013. Waze’s team of 500 employees will fall under Google’s Geo organization, which oversees Maps, Earth and Street View, starting Friday. Neha Parikh, Waze’s current CEO, will leave her role.

Navier, the electric leisure boat startup, managed to bring its concept hydrofoiling watercraft into reality, and has opened preorders.

Tesla plans to add a new radar product to its vehicles in mid-January, according to documents posted with the Federal Communications Commission.

Volkswagen Group CEO Oliver Blume will outline a new software and vehicle platform strategy to the automaker’s supervisory board on Dec. 15.

Vinfast takes the IPO path, TuSimple and Navistar break up and Rad Power Bikes makes its most important product yet by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

There’s no way for blockchain-based businesses, financial service providers or banks to bypass Know Your Customer (KYC) processes. But existing KYC solutions that have been developed over the years, such as manual and online identity verification, video and biometrics, have their drawbacks, including a high risk of error and effort duplication.

With the advent of blockchain technologies, companies are realizing that there are better, more efficient KYC solutions that let them avoid having to collect and store personal information.

Not your run-of-the-mill KYC solution

As blockchain technology matures, many people are looking toward decentralized identity or self-sovereign identity as an ideal — people will gain control over their digital identities and they’ll avoid having to provide excessive, unwarranted information.

Mechanisms already exist to help us reach that ideal. In web3, physical assets will eventually be owned by someone, but a digital-only relationship between the buyer and seller won’t suffice. There must also be a physical relationship so that a buyer has legal recourse to get this physical asset — a complexity most people are glossing over.

That’s where blockchain can be used to improve on traditional KYC providers. Typical KYC processes require people to upload their proof of identity to a verifier. However, businesses working toward becoming more decentralized shouldn’t need this extent of information, nor should they require custody of a person’s tokens. Businesses must be able to simply and credibly confirm that an account or digital wallet interacting with them has been verified.

There are a multitude of off-chain KYC solutions that come with different capabilities and price points. The difference comes down to what level of detail and scale a company needs. The major downside of all these operations is the storage requirement from a regulatory perspective. Often, KYC and AML (anti-money laundering) details have to be stored for a certain time period to meet reporting standards and in case there are irregularities. This presents a major weakness in the system, as a company’s customer data is stored by multiple parties whose cybersecurity mechanisms may vary in effectiveness.

Using the blockchain to enhance KYC processes for web3 businesses by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Nillion, a web3 startup aiming to build a non-blockchain decentralized network, closed an oversubscribed round of more than $20 million, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.

“Nillion is a deep technology infrastructure project,” Andrew Yeoh, the company’s founding chief marketing officer, told TechCrunch. “While blockchains decentralize finance, Nillion aims to decentralize everything else and the rest of data.”

The startup aims to provide a new internet infrastructure for securing storage and data computation. “Companies and competitors can collaborate without passing on key information,” Yeoh said.

Its decentralized network utilizes Nil Message Compute (NMC), a mathematical development that was created by the team’s chief scientist, Miguel de Vega. (In its white paper, the company calls NMC a “new cryptographic primitive,” which translates loosely to “new way of storing and securing stuff.”)

While Nillion’s model is not blockchain-based, it does have a decentralized component to it, meaning that it falls under the larger web3 banner by TechCrunch’s reckoning. It can be thought of as a way to provide decentralized computing power, more generally; the group’s early writings indicate that it will have a token in the future.

“Nillion allows for very fast computations of secured data and storage of that data that you can’t do with the blockchain,” Yeoh said. “We look at it as opening up an entirely new universe of web3 use cases that expands the ecosystem significantly.”

The startup was founded in November 2021 and has bootstrapped operations up until this point, with over 40 employees and no prior funding. The founders include ex-Uber, Indiegogo and Hedera Hashgraph employees, as well as executives from Coinbase and Nike.

The round was led by Distributed Global. Other investors include AU21, Big Brain Holdings, Chapter One, GSR, HashKey, OP Crypto and SALT Fund. There were over 150 investors who participated in the raise, in a “conscious decision” to prevent concentrated ownership, Nillion CEO Alex Page said in a statement.

“We were at a position where we could have internally funded this for decades, but we wanted to bring in strong strategic investors and a pool of people that could help this thing grow a lot,” Yeoh said. “We were able to raise a fairly significant amount of money in the middle of a bear market. Most of our checks and commitment came in after FTX, which is interesting, and we did it without a deck, which is also interesting.”

In the wake of the crypto bear market and the FTX collapse, Yeoh believes this capital raise points to the industry’s interest in web3 infrastructure and real use cases. “We’re building infrastructure that is inevitable. There’s no way web3 or anything hits the mainstream if they can’t handle private data.”

The capital will be put toward building technology on the network and hiring engineering talent, Yeoh said. To date, Nillion has signed over 30 letters of intent, he added.

“We’ve spoken to decentralized exchanges and applications as well as a couple layer 1 [blockchains] that are interested in handling private data on the blockchains,” Yeoh said. “On the Web2 side, we’ve spoken to AI machine learning companies, invited to speak at Amazon and interestingly enough, we’ve gotten a number of outreach from legal and healthcare companies because they deal with a lot of sensitive data.”

In the short term, Nillion plans on focusing on building out and supporting real use cases while launching its network alongside its initial suite of products.

“It’s like having an iPhone in 2007, which was amazing but only really had the camera app, mail app and messaging app,” at the time, Yeoh said.

In two weeks, the startup will have an end-to-end prototype. In 2023, it will turn into a public network and be launched by the end of next year, Yeoh shared. The long-term plan is to “not lose sight” of its mission to solve societal problems and build use cases.

Nillion raises over $20 million to build new web3 infrastructure by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

When news surfaced last week that activist investors were taking the unusual step of pressuring Coupa Software to not sell for less than $95 a share, it got our attention. You don’t normally see investors sending a letter asking a company to hold off on a sale. It’s typically the opposite.

But today, the company announced that Thoma Bravo was acquiring it for $8 billion. That works out to $81 a share, which still represents a 77% premium for shareholders, but well below what HMI Capital was asking for in a letter made public earlier this month.

The letter believed published rumors that another private equity company, Vista Equity Partners, was in the hunt to buy it, but in the end, Thoma Bravo was the buyer along with a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) also participating in the deal as a minority investor. Thoma Bravo has a long history of acquiring mature enterprise software companies and taking them private.

Coupa, which makes spend management software for large businesses, has been having a rough year in the stock market, like many SaaS companies, feeling the wrath of investors looking for profit over growth. The company’s stock price was down 64% year-to-date and was down over 2.5% in pre-trading, suggesting that perhaps investors aren’t happy with the deal.

Company CEO Rob Bernshteyn put a happy face on the deal as you would expect, saying that customers can expect a similar level of service, regardless of who the owner is signing the checks.

Roger Siboni, Coupa’s lead independent director said that the company took into consideration the current economic climate and decided it was a deal worth taking. “The Board evaluated the transaction against the company’s standalone prospects in the current macroeconomic climate and determined that the compelling and certain cash consideration in the transaction provides superior risk-adjusted value relative to the Company’s standalone prospects. The Board is unanimous in its belief this transaction is the optimal path forward and in the best interest of our shareholders,” he said in a statement.

While the board of directors has unanimously agreed to the terms, it should be interesting to see if the shareholders are as friendly to the deal when they meet early next year. It would seem that HMI Capital, which owns 4.8% of the Coupa stock, will lead the charge against the deal if the letter the firm published is any indication of its feelings about the company being undervalued at this price.

Should the deal pass muster with stockholders and regulators, it is expected to close in the first half of 2023. Surprisingly, given HMI’s letter, there is no go-shop provision with this deal, which would allow Coupa to keep looking for a better deal.

Thoma Bravo snags Coupa for $8B despite activist pressure to hold off for higher price by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

We all know that content is king when it comes to SEO. However, winning SEO strategies today demand more than just good textual content.

Good content today also includes video. A video SEO strategy is no longer optional to driving growth — it’s absolutely necessary.

So what’s an SEO strategist to do? How do you nail down a comprehensive strategy that will impress your boss and get results beyond your client’s expectations?

Video drives traffic and leads

Let’s get down to the basics for a second. Digital consumption is growing at an ever faster clip. People have access to more information than they ever did before, which has led to an inundation of content. Because content is plentiful, people don’t take that long to decide whether your content is worthy of their time.

One of the fastest ways to get people to notice your content is through video. In fact, the human brain processes images tens of thousands of times faster than text, and viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it on video compared to 10% when reading it.

What’s more, studies have shown that video consumption is not just for entertainment and amusing pet videos — 84% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video. Not only is it effective as a marketing tool, it also drives traffic and leads — 86% of video marketers say video has increased traffic to their website. The primary source of that additional traffic is, of course, Google search.

Getting a sustained jump in web traffic is every SEO strategist’s dream, and video is no-brainer way to do it. Take a look at what happened when we placed high-quality, relevant videos on a client’s website:

Why is video good for SEO?

These days, SEO is so much more than matching search queries to keywords on a page. Google aims to deliver content that best satisfies the user’s needs and considers the entire user experience. Google’s search quality evaluator guidelines place importance on the following when determining the quality of a website:

The purpose of a page.
E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness).
Main content.

Considering these points is essential to creating a good user experience with good content.

How to implement a video SEO strategy

The right video SEO strategy for you will largely be determined by the type of content you currently create for your user base. It’s worth taking the time to perform a content audit and determine the type of content you have. This can be the basis for your video content strategy.

This is also a great way to identify where you might have any gaps in your current strategy. Video can help fill that gap as well.

Watch out: A common mistake when implementing video SEO is creating a video that isn’t in line with your strategy at all. Instead, the video becomes something you do simply because you think you should. Whatever your growth goals, ensure the video(s) you create are a part of the greater strategy.

Different types of videos include:

How to implement a video SEO strategy by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch