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Uolo, an Indian edtech platform that works with private K-12 schools to offer online learning programs to middle and low-income families, has raised $22.5 million in a funding round led by UAE-headquartered VC fund Winter Capital.

The vast majority of edtech startups operate in a business-to-consumer model and spend on ads to reach the parents and guardians of the students.

Uolo says it is reducing that cost by operating in a business-to-business-to-consumer model, working with private schools to let them offer online learning programs to their students and levy the charges as part of the school fees. The startup’s programs are also designed in tandem with the curricula of the partnered schools, making it easier for students to double down on learning the same lessons.

The Gurugram-based startup develops and provides tailor-made learning programs in coding and English speaking. Students can access these programs on their parents’ smartphones.

“We take edtech to the masses of India. And when we do that, the idea is that you make it cheap enough, affordable enough for people to be able to take it for their children,” said Pallav Pandey, chief executive of Uolo, in an interview with TechCrunch.

He said that the startup is able to provide its offerings to students at much more affordable prices.

Schools tying up with Uolo get an ERP platform called the Uolo School Platform for free. It works as a unified platform where schools can access fee management, report card management and attendance management on a single dashboard.

The ERP platform functions as an entry gate for Uolo as it allows the startup to create an ecosystem once schools start using it. This encourages parents or guardians to use the app to receive communications directly from schools — instead of using typical communication channels such as WhatsApp groups.

“What we have been able to do is get schools and students on one end of the platform, so now we need to get digital learning to flow through us,” Pandey said.

Founded in September 2020 by Pandey and his brother Ankur, Uolo has partnered with more than 8,500 schools across India and currently reaches 3.7 million students.

The $22.5 million funding has come through an equity-debt mix Series A round, seeing participation from Uolo’s existing investors Blume Ventures and new Dubai-based fund Morphosis Venture Capital — alongside Winter Capital. Although exact details of the equity and debt percentage involved were not disclosed, Pandey told TechCrunch that the debt element was in the form of optionally convertible debentures that would convert into equity over time.

The startup, which employs about 350 individuals,plans to utilize the investment to widen its reach to 50,000 schools across India over the next four years and expand its learning programs with courses across STEAM subjects in the coming months. For the latter part, it is looking to partner with education companies as well as people and entities developing high-quality content.

“The first wave of edtech companies in India have proven consumer interest in online education. However, they lacked a cost-effective distribution. We believe that there will be a new generation of edtech companies capable of building organic, low-cost distribution, allowing students to study at $10 per year rather than $10 per hour. Our investment in Uolo is based on our confidence in this type of company,” said Anton Farlenkov, Managing Director of Winter Capital, in a prepared statement.

India’s Uolo raises $22.5M to bring edtech to the masses by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

There’s an ever-growing list of wearables that track people’s health, but what about a vehicle that monitors one’s blood pressure and heart rate with smart sensors and algorithms? That’s the vision of BeyonCa, a young super-premium electric vehicle startup founded by Weiming Soh, the Singaporean auto veteran who’s the current CEO of Renault China and helped bring Mercedes-Benz to China back in the 1990s.

The idea of tracking one’s health conditions inside a car perhaps sounds less wild if one considers how much time they spend driving. “Take Americans for example. They spend 70 billion hours a year driving cars, which makes 1 hour per day. That’s an enormous amount of time people spend in a car because of the spacious environment,” Shaoshan Liu, BeyonCa’s chief scientist and autonomous driving lead, who also founded the self-driving startup PerceptIn, said in an interview.

“We think it’s the best time to deliver this kind of [healthcare] services in the car,” he added. Still, I can’t help but question how many people want their luxury car to play the role of a family doctor.

But maybe there’s a market for BeyonCa’s targeted demographic of health-conscious, affluent consumers. While the startup won’t disclose its price range until its first model is ready to ship in a few years, Soh puts the company’s product in the same category as the Mercedes Benz S Class and BMW 7 Series, which generally have a starting price of around $100,000.

The startup finished its Series pre-A funding round in Q3 this year from investors including Dongfeng Motor, a Chinese state-owned automaker. When seeking investment, the firm was “at the same time open to both financial and investment partners that would provide more support,” said Soh.

EV as a service platform

Soh’s ambitions for smart vehicles extend beyond merely having AI voice assistants and autonomous driving capabilities. Software is “an important tool” for vehicles, but what eventually differentiates BeyonCa will be its “services”, said the founder.

Liu elaborated on the vision, explaining that the industry is entering the “third” stage of EV development.

“The first stage is electrification, such that you convert the car to be powered by electricity. Tesla is a pioneer in that. Then we enter the second stage of intelligence. Again Tesla is a pioneer, and then Chinese firms are catching up. Now we are entering the third stage, which I think is called the ecosystem, in which we provide different vertical services, very deep services. Health is one of these services.”

The chief scientist further compared the future of vehicles to smartphones today, arguing that smart cars will be able to offer a lot more than driving in the same way smartphones can now accomplish much more than their original purpose for calling.

BeyonCa’s super premium cars, which will be equipped with medical-grade sensors and radars, will detect the health conditions of the driver and passengers at all times using BeyonCa’s proprietary AI model. If the algorithms determine that the driver can no longer control the vehicle, smart driving will kick in. The well of data gleaned by the vehicle will then go to a team of in-house medical experts, who will be available through video calls and be able to refer physicians for further treatment if necessary.

Timeline

BeyonCa is unveiling the design of its first production car next spring while mass production is expected to take place in 2024. Unlike the “traditional” carmakers, “as a startup, we need to introduce the car to the market much earlier. We need to keep the market excited,” Soh said.

The firm plans to ship in both its home market China — one of the world’s largest premium auto markets — and abroad. It intends to have two factories. “We are a super premium car company, so we will most likely just have two factories in the world — one in China, and one outside. It can be in the Middle East, Europe, or Southeast Asia,” said Soh.

Soh is building BeyonCa against economic headwinds brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has significantly dampened the confidence of consumers and investors around the world. But he isn’t too worried, saying that when the economy is doing well, the startup can hasten development, but in times of an economic downturn, the company will simply need to “pace” itself.

Renault China boss is making super-premium EVs that monitor your health by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

According to Atomico’s new State of European Tech 2022 report, France has taken the UK’s title as the third largest listed tech nation, with Britain moving down to fourth. Nothing to do with Brexit, of course… Meanwhile, Sista, the Paris-based organisation which campaigns for more finds for female founders recently closed €30m of an intended €100m fund to power its aims. It would appear France is definitely on the rise in startup and VC terms.

Further evidence of this thesis has emerged this week with the news that France-based IRIS Capital has reach the €110m first close for its new €150m venture fund (IRIS Venture IV), and is planning to hold a second close in 3Q 2023.

The new fund will be Seed and Series A investment focused, looking at France, Germany and across Europe. This is the fourth early-stage fund raised by IRIS. The fund will invest in Seed and Series A rounds, from €1m to €8m.

LPs include French conglomerates such as Orange, Publicis and Bpifrance, as well as newcomers including Fred Potter, founder of Netatmo, Yannis Yahiaoui, cofounder of Adot, Amirhossein Malekzadeh, cofounder of Logmatic, Grégoire Delpit, cofounder of ProcessOut, Patrick Asdaghi, founder of FoodCheri or Adrien Nussenbaum, cofounder of Mirakl.

Commenting, Julien-David Nitlech, Managing Partners at IRIS, said in a statement: “With this new Seed and Early-stage fund we intend to pursue our successful journey of selecting, backing, and scaling differentiated tech platforms developed by out of the ordinary founders who know their market well. To do so, we have structured a new team of investors bearing our selective DNA and methods.”

To date IRIS has invested in companies such as Shift Technology (insurtech), Talend (software), Kyriba (fintech), Lumapps (HR), Jedox (software), industry 4.0 and logistics experts such Exotec (logistics), Braincube (manufacturing software), Forto (freight management), Spinergie (offshore), platforms such as Virtuo (mobility), Yubo (social) and data specialists like Talon.one (marketing), Red Points (brand protection) or Scality (cloud). Newer investments include Spinergie in France, Helu in Austria and 2 more to be announced early next year.

France’s IRIS Capital reaches €110M first close for its new €150M venture fund by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot is the hot new sensation in the tech town, garnering over a million users just days after the launch. The chatbot is delivering answers to a wide-range of questions, impressing many with its ability and speed while also sometimes leaving people amused and baffled with its take. You’ve likely seen scores of such screenshots on your Twitter timeline, and may have also captured and shared some answers and gotten in on the fun yourself. Now two developers — Steven Tey and Dom Eccelston — have made a Chrome extension called ShareGPT to make it easier to capture and share the AI’s answers with the world.

ShareGPT captures the full conversation with ChatGPT and generates a URL to share it with others. So instead of taking multiple screenshots of the conversation with the AI chatbot, you can directly share the URL (like this one).

Once you have installed the Chrome extension, head to the ChatGPT website and kickstart the conversation with the bot. After you have received the answer, you will see a Share button at the bottom. You can continue the chat or click on the Share button to generate a URL for the specific conversation.

The neat thing is that when you share the URL on Twitter, you will see a preview of the conversation with ChatGPT, so the visual element is not lost and people don’t necessarily need to head to the website to read short conversations.

ChatGPT, currently in research preview, is free to use. And while it has linguistic and factual limitations, it’s still a fun tool to use. It’s one of those tools that lets anyone try out AI’s prowess (or weaknesses) without having a lot of technical know-how.

ShareGPT lets you easily share your ChatGPT conversations by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch