Tech News

Carousell, a Singaporean consumer-to-consumer (C2C) service platform operating across Southeast Asia, is letting go of about 110 employees, or 10% of its total headcount, in an effort to reduce costs amid a challenging market condition for the tech industry.

The announcement came from the company’s blog on Thursday, posted by co-founder and CEO of Carousell Siu Rui Quek, saying, “I take responsibility for the decisions that have led us here. Parting with teammates, whom we are grateful to for joining us on this mission, is a very difficult decision.”

Carousell did not specify which business units or regional offices would be affected by the layoffs. The Singapore-headquartered company operates in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

In the statement, the company’s leaders had discussed finding ways, including moving to an inexpensive rental office and slashing co-founders and executives’ salaries voluntarily to save budgets without cutting staff. But that was “far from enough,” it said.

Quek also explained in the blog post that he “was too optimistic” about the recovery from the Covid pandemic and even doubled down on recruitment and investment for its business. “The reality is that we were quick to grow our expenses and hire, but the returns took longer than expected,” Quek wrote. “It is important to act swiftly, course correct, and right size our investment levels to better align with this new reality.”

The affected workers will receive at least three months’ salary and be able to extend their medical benefits and insurance coverage through June next year. According to the statement, the company will also pay out all remaining time off balances and offer career counseling and job search support, letting those laid-off workers keep their office laptop and LinkedIn Learning membership until June 2023.

Founded in 2012, Carousell, backed by Sequoia Capital India, Naver, 500 Global, and Rakuten Capital, has raised a total of $372.6 million since its inception,per Crunchbase.

Singapore-based e-commerce platform Carousell lays off 10% of staff by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch

Hello and welcome back toEquity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

For the last time in 2022, the whole Friday gang got together to chat through the latest and greatest in the world of technology and startup news. From here on out, Equity is heading into Holiday Mode. We have a regular Monday show for you next week, but past that we have a string of kick-butt end-of-year episodes planned for you. Onward!

And for those of you who just wanted the show notes, here you are:

ResortPass raises money.Mary Ann explains the business model.
Post.News raises money. Alex digs into what he likes and doesn’t like about the new Twitter competitor.
SBF wants you to know he had no idea what was going on. We are not so sure.
Venture red flags are great in hindsight, but would have been more useful last year.
Layoffs at DoorDash and Kraken are a reminder that we’re still in a risk-off environment when it comes to tech spending today.
Plus, the latest regarding Pipe, and Alex’s notes on Series A and C rounds.

Equity is not done for the year, but we are settling into our final 2022 groove. This is Alex writing this, and I wanted to take the moment to thank you for sticking around with us this year. Really. I think we broke a bunch of records in terms of downloads and the like. Wild that the show just keeps getting bigger. Hugs.

Are we bullfighting in Spain? Because that’s a red flag by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch

The Cuba ransomware gang extorted more than $60 million in ransom payments from victims between December 2021 and August 2022, a joint advisory from CISA and the FBI has warned.

The latest advisory is a follow-up to a flash alert released by the FBI in December 2021, which revealed that the gang had earned close to $44 million in ransom payments after attacks on more than 49 entities in five critical infrastructure sectors in the United States. Since, the Cuba ransomware gang has brought in an additional $60 million from attacks against 100 organizations globally, almost half of the $145 million it demanded in ransom payments from these victims.

“Since the release of the December 2021 FBI Flash, the number of U.S. entities compromised by Cuba ransomware has doubled, with ransoms demanded and paid on the increase,” the two federal agencies said on Thursday.

Cuba ransomware actors, which have been active since 2019, continue to target U.S. entities in critical infrastructure, including financial services, government facilities, healthcare and public health, critical manufacturing, and information technology.

In August this year, the gang was linked to a ransomware attack targeting the nation state of Montenegrothat targeted government systems and other critical infrastructure and utilities, including electricity, water systems, and transportation. At the time of the attack, the Cuba ransomware gang claimed it had obtained “financial documents, correspondence with bank employees, account movements, balance sheets, tax documents, compensation [and] source code” from Montenegro’s parliament.

Cuba was also linked to a breach of California’s Department of Motor Vehicles in April this year, which saw the attackers compromise California vehicle registration records that contain names, addresses, license plate numbers, and vehicle identification numbers.

FBI and CISA added that the ransomware gang has modified its tactics, techniques, and procedures since the start of the year and has been linked to the RomCom malware, a custom remote access trojan for command and control, and the Industrial Spy ransomware.

The advisory notes that the group — which cybersecurity company Profero previously linked to Russian-speaking hackers — typically extorts victims by threatening to leak stolen data. While this data was typically leaked on Cuba’s dark web leak site, it began selling stolen data on Industrial Spy’s online market in May this year.

CISA and the FBI are urging at-risk organizations to prioritize patching known exploited vulnerabilities, to train employees to spot and report phishing attacks and to enable and enforce phishing-resistantmulti-factor authentication.

The release of CISA and the FBI’s advisory comes as the Cuba ransomware gang continues to list new victims on its website. The most recent additions include Generator Power, a U.K.-based generator hire company, and German media monitoring firm Landau Media.

FBI, CISA say Cuba ransomware gang extorted $60M from victims this year by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

Just four days stand between you and a deep space exploratory mission right here on planet Earth. We’re talking about TechCrunch Sessions: Space, of course, which lifts off on December 6 in Los Angeles. There’s still time to join, learn from and network with the leading minds and makers building the new space economy.

Get on board: Buy your pass today, and then explore all the space tech opportunities in L.A.

Check out the conference agenda for the full list of interviews, panel discussions, fireside chats and breakouts. Right now, though, we want to highlight a session led by one of our partners. We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating:

TechCrunch partner companies do more than cut a check. They bring expertise, relevant content and resources that help early-stage founders increase their knowledge, skills and opportunities.

Here’s a fine example. Shahir Gerges, the director of business strategy at Orbital Reef, Blue Origin, will lead a session called “Growing the LEO Economy on Orbital Reef.” As we look to commercial successors to the International Space Station, we see new market opportunities emerging on low Earth orbit (LEO) destinations.

Learn more about how Orbital Reef, a commercial LEO destination ecosystem, is creating new opportunities in space and helping startups accelerate their businesses through Reef Starter, Orbital Reef’s newest initiative to lower barriers of entry to space for early-stage companies.

You’ll also hear about the first set of startups to win the Reef Starter Innovation Challenge and learn how to get involved in the future. We reckon this is a discussion you won’t want to miss.

Shahir Gerges serves as the director of business strategy for Orbital Reef, within Blue Origin. Orbital Reef is projected to be serving as a mixed-use space station in LEO for commerce, research and tourism by the end of this decade. Focused on long-term financial sustainability for Orbital Reef, Gerges develops new offerings to cultivate growth in new and emerging markets that would benefit from the on-orbit environment, including microgravity.

Before joining Blue Origin, Gerges worked as a strategy consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he advised industrial companies (including aerospace and defense) on market strategy decisions, internal operations strategy and multiple-deal due diligence. Gerges started his career at United Launch Alliance working in various engineering and strategy roles, as well as supporting government affairs.

Gerges holds a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology and an MBA from Georgetown University.

TC Sessions: Space takes place on December 6 in Los Angeles. Buy your pass today, and join us to learn about the latest space economy trends, see cutting-edge technology and network for opportunities to help you build a better, stronger startup.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Space? Contact our sponsorship sales team byfilling out this form.

Learn about Orbital Reef and the LEO economy at TC Sessions: Space by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch

Smoodi wants to see its smoothies in the hands of, well, everyone, and a new infusion of capital and distribution partnership has the startup well on its way.

Incubated out of Harvard’s Innovation Lab in 2018, CEO Pascal Kriesche and Morgan Abraham call their company a “healthy smoothie store-in-a-box” that is essentially a robot that mixes fruits, vegetables and add-ins like protein into a smoothie.

Robot food and cooking machines aren’t new… remember Chowbotics and Miso? However, Kriesche touts in an email interview that smoodi’s beverage vending machine not only self-cleans, it is also not the traditional “black box,” but is transparent so that customers can watch the frozen ingredients travel through the blending process and even watch the machine clean itself.

Smoodis range in price from $5.99 to $7.99 and come in flavors like Brain Boost, which is banana and berries; Green Energizer, made of spinach, banana, matcha and mango; and Tropical Vibes, which includes pineapple, mango and coconut.

Since its commercial market launch in 2021, smoodi grew its revenue by 25% monthly and had zero churn, with some convenience store chains asking for additional deployments following the initial pilot, Kriesche said. He forecasts 5x growth for 2023.

“This is a testament to our valued customer base who have recognized the shifting market trend in consumer’s demand for a healthy and delicious product,” he said. “The smoothie market has doubled over the last five years, and the trends for fresh, healthy and vegan are only accelerating.”

Leading the new $5 million Series A investment is a group formed by Keith Canning, a former distributor. Joining him were FCP Ventures, UnderscoreVC, Allston Venture Fund, WSPR Fund, Phoenix Club and a group of angel investors, including the former Nespresso president Frédéric Levy and Blue Rhino founder Billy Prim.

Kriesche and Abraham are deploying the new capital into scaling smoodi nationwide. That has so far included adding to the executive team with a chief revenue officer and chief operating officer, as well as regional managers, and scaling up production capacity of both equipment and consumables and go-to-market. The company’s production capacity is already at 200 units per month, and Kriesche expects consumables to grow 10x in the next six to nine months.

Smoodi is already in convenience stores, offices, restaurants and other retailers, but along with the investment, the company has a new partnership with food distributing giant Dot Foods.

Not only will this move help smoodi expand beyond convenience stores, but Dot Foods will eventually take over smoodi’s equipment distribution and enable the company to launch in new sites across North America in two days versus the three weeks it currently takes, Kriesche said.

Next up in 2023, the company plans to introduce new flavors, continue R&D on its machine to automate its drink booster dispensing and will test smoodi in Europe.

“We plan to get into thousands of locations through Dot Foods in the next 24 months and many more thereafter,” Kriesche added. “The biggest challenge in scaling a business like ours has always been the frozen supply chain. With Dot Foods, we have a partner that excels at that and has the best coverage in the food industry.”

Smoodi closes $5M to expand reach for its robotic smart blender by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Liquidity is your company’s lifeline. With it, you have a fighting chance of achieving your vision, but when you’re out of money, you’re on the course to ruin.

It’s no secret that the startup funding environment isn’t what it was a year ago. As interest rates have climbed, debt has become more expensive, and the bar for securing it has only grown taller. According to CB Insights’ latest State of Venture report, total venture funding declined 34% in Q3 2022 compared to the previous quarter.

The fundraising environment isn’t getting easier, and that’s adding even more pressure on founders and startup teams to make the most of their current cash reserves. Treasury management is one way to do that.

Whether you need to extend the runway you’ve secured so far or just closed an extension, here are a few reasons treasury management should be at the top of your list of priorities as a founder and what you can do today to get started with it if you haven’t already.

Your office space isn’t the only thing impacting your runway

Inflation has made everything more expensive, meaning your current cash reserves won’t go as far as they would have a few years ago.

Treasury management should be top of mind for startup founders by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

The digital loans business in India has been the subject of a lot of controversy, not least for over-predatory and un-transparent practices, yet that’s existed alongside the rise of a handful of startups that hoping to apply tech to build products that are clearly understood and fill a need in the market for quick, short-term access to capital. Today, one of these — KreditBee, which provides instant personal loans to users — is announcing that it has raised $80 million in a Series D funding round.

The funding is notable coming at a time when raising capital has become more complicated due to the economic slowdown in markets worldwide.The startup projects to cross an assets under management (AUM) mark of more than $1 billion over the next six to nine months; currently that figure is $492 million.

KreditBee has gained popularity in a market where a large number of people do not have a credit history. However, the startup has faced regulatory challenges as the central bank recently brought updates including the restriction for loading non-bank prepaid payment instruments (PPIs) using credit lines. It is also getting competition from several loan apps that are freely available in the market despite measures taken from the regulatory side and companies including Google due to their predatory behaviour.

Azim Premji’s Premji Invest, Motilal Oswal Alternates, TPG-backed NewQuest Capital Partners, and Mirae Asset Ventures — all previous backers — invested, as did Japan’s MUFG Bank. The company said it’s keeping the Series D open, meaning more might be coming into the round. It declined to provide further details on that front.

It’s also not disclosing its valuation. Dealroom pegged it at $375 million although a spokesperson said this figure was not accurate. KreditBee has to date provided loans to 6 million customers and said it currently has more than 2 million active loan customers.

Previously, in 2021, KreditBee raised $75 million in a Series C round. KreditBee has raised over $280 million to date. The startup said it is planning to use the fresh funds to invest in its product development, specifically to expand from unsecured personal loans to secured loans, home loans and credit lines, and to start work on adjacent services such as insurance, credit score reports and merchant-side offers. The platform said it reaches over 400 million users across India — although it’s not clear if that’s an active customer number — and that it has partnerships with more than 10 financial institutions.

“The investment adds more weight to our vision of encouraging financial independence through a smart digital experience, which is what India stands for today. With the current round, we look forward to expand our set of solutions to serve our growing consumer base,” Madhusudan E, co-founder and CEO, KreditBee, said in a statement.

“KreditBee is run on the ethos of enabling underserved customers an easy access to financial products through tech-enabled underwriting. We are very excited to partner with KreditBee in their growth journey of providing financial services to millions of customers,” said Shashank Joshi, Deputy CEO and Head Global Corporate Banking, MUFG India.

KreditBee today offers instant personal loans of up to $3,700 (3 lakhs Indian rupees) as well as loans for salaried individuals and purchases via e-commerce platforms. Providing a complement to the longer process of applying to banks directly for loans, to facilitate lending on its platform, KreditBee works both with non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) and banks registered with the Reserve Bank of India, including Krazybee Services, IIFL Finance, Incred Financial Services, Vivriti Capital, Northern Arc Capital, PayU Finance, Poonawalla Fincorp, Piramal Capital and Housing Finance and Cholamandalam Investment and Finance.

“The KreditBee growth journey since inception has been remarkable, and it has spearheaded many innovations in the consumer lending space. We’re confident of KreditBee further consolidating its market leadership position in the coming times,” mentioned Atul Gupta, a partner at Premji Invest.

India’s KreditBee raises $80 million from Azim Premji’s Premji Invest, Motilal Oswal Alternates, among others by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

India won’t enforce a cap on the market share for players operating on the homegrown payments network until December 31, 2024 in a surprising move that analysts say is a major a win for Google Pay and Walmart’s PhonePe.

The National Payments Corporation of India, the payments body that oversees the Unified Payments Interface payments network, said on Friday that it is taking the move in part to ensure existing players have enough time to comply with the rules.

“In view of significant potential of digital payments and the need for multi-fold penetration from its current state, it is imperative that other existing and new players (Banks and Non-Banks) shall scale-up their consumer outreach for the growth of UPI and achieve overall market equilibrium,” it wrote.

NPCI initially planned to enforce the market cap rules in January 2021, but has delayed the timeline several times since. It originally saw the need to enforce a market cap check to address the “risks” and “protecting the UPI ecosystem as it further scales up.”

UPI is a payments infrastructure built by large banks in India and is backed by the Indian government. It has become the most popular digital payments method in the country in recent years.

PhonePe and Google Pay command over 80% of the UPI market share. The new move is seen as a loss for rivals such as Paytm, which were hoping that the NPCI, which is a special unit of the country’s central bank, will introduce the rail-guards much sooner.

(More to follow)

India won’t enforce market share cap on UPI until 2025 in a win for Google and Walmart by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

In the last week or so, a web app named Instafest went viral. Instafest lets you generate festival posters from your Spotify listening history. Millions of people started generating their own festival posters before the official Spotify Wrapped dropped earlier in the week. In order to take advantage of the trend, the LineupSupply app — which lets you generate Spotify playlists from posters — added similar functionality.

To generate a new poster, go to the LineupSupply app, tap on the “Create Playlist” button, and select the “Rewind” option.

You can generate your Rewind for the last four weeks, six months or a lifetime based on your most listened artists on Spotify. The festival poster generated by the app is pretty basic compared to the Instafest poster. In terms of customization, you can just change the background color, the title, and hide your profile name.

The developer of the app, Brett Bauman, said that he’ll soon add different styles and an option to share the poster to your Instagram stories. He is also planning to introduce poster generation using top tracks instead of top artists in a future update.

Currently, LineupSupply only supports Spotify with support for Apple Music coming soon. In contrast, Instafest lets you generate posters through your Spotify, Apple Music, and your Last.fm listening history.

Bauman said that after Instafest was launched, he posted a TikTok on how to generate a playlist on LineupSupply through Instafest-generated posters. This resulted in a massive spike in the app’s downloads. He also gave a shoutout to Instafest developer Anshay Saboo for making poster generation a hit trend.

Conceptually, Instafest and LineupSupply are the Yin and Yang of the music festival generation. But with the latest update, LineupSupply users won’t feel left out.

LineupSupply updates its app to generate Instafest-styled posters via your Spotify by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

It’s probably not a secret to those doing a lot of focused work in the space, but when it comes to generative AI, it’s quickly becoming apparent that how a user interfaces with generative models and systems is at least as important as the underlying training and inference technology. The latest, and I think best example comes via OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which launched as a free research preview for anyone to try this week.

In case you haven’t seen the buzz around ChatGPT yet, it’s basically an implementation of their new GPT-3.5 natural language generation technology, but implemented in such a way that you just chat with it in a web browser as if you were slacking with a colleague or interacting with a customer support agent on a website.

OpenAI has already made waves with its DALL-E image generation technology, and its GPT series has drawn attention with each successive release (and occasional existential dread on the part of writers). But the latest chat-style iteration has seemingly broadened its appeal and audience, in some ways moving the conversation from “wow, undergrads are going to use this to submit bad but workable term papers” to “wow, this could actually help me debug code that I intend to put in production.”

Examples so far in the wild seem to show that it’s actually getting much better at the term paper thing, but that it still has work to do when it comes to avoiding a few typical pitfalls for AI chatbots, including presenting misinformation as fact. But obviously its engagement is through the roof, and people seem to be much more impressed with ChatGPT than they were with GPT-3, at least (though that is in part due to the fact that it’s a new release with improved core inference technology as well as a new interaction paradigm).

My own example of why I think this is so powerful is timely, if mundane: I asked ChatGPT to provide me with all the various Pokémon Type strengths and weaknesses, and it delivered exactly what I always hope Google will every time I enter a Tera Raid in the new Pokémon Scarlet game and have to try to remember what counters what.

To wit:Notice I wasn’t at all fancy with my query; it’s about as simple as I can get while still being clear about my request. And the result is exactly what I’m looking for — not a list of things that can probably help me find what I’m looking for if I’m willing to put in the time, which is what Google returns:

The potential for something like OpenAI’s ChatGPT to eventually supplant a search engine like Google isn’t a new idea, but this delivery of OpenAI’s underlying technology is the closest approximation yet to how that would actually work in a fully fleshed out system, and it should have Google scared.

ChatGPT is also the best yet expression of something startups and entrepreneurs looking at the space should already know: The gold rush in generative AI will be driven by developing novel, defensible businesses built around how it shows up, less so than what’s under the hood.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT shows why implementation is key with generative AI by Darrell Etherington originally published on TechCrunch