Tech News

Igloo, a Singapore-based insurtech focused on underserved communities in Southeast Asia, announced it has raised a Series B extension of $27 million, bringing the round’s total to $46 million. The first tranche of $19 million was announced in March, and led by Cathay innovation with participation from ACA and returning investors OpenSpace.

The newest round was led by the InsuResilience Investment Fund II, which was launched by the German development bank KfW for the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and is managed by impact investor BlueOrchard. Other lead investors were the Women’s World Banking Asset Management (WAM), FinnFund, La Maison and returning investors Cathay Innovation.

Igloo develops its insurance products and then partners with insurers who underwrite their policies. Igloo currently works with 20 global, regional and local insurers across Southeast Asia. It distributes its insurance products through partnerships, and is partnered with over 55 companies in 7 countries. It now offers 15 products, including policies for gig workers, gamers, cars and farmers in Vietnam, and says it has facilitated more than 300 million policies and increased gross written premiums by 30 times since 2019.

Co-founder and CEO Raunak Mehta told TechCrunch that Igloo decided to raise a Series B extension because of investor interest after the first tranche of funds. The extension will give the startup a multiyear runway and will be used for hiring, infrastructure and merger and acquisitions opportunities.

Mehta said that the penetration rate of insurance in much of Southeast Asia is low, less than $100 USD per capita across Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. Igloo was created to make insurance more affordable and relevant to the needs of communities in Southeast Asia. Igloo distributes insurance products that range from 2 cents USD for phone screen protection to $600 USD for comprehensive motor insurance.

Igloo provides the tech stack for its products across Southeast Asia, which Mehta says means the entire insurance value chain, from product discovery to claims, is available on one platform. This makes it faster for it to brings the policies it distributes to market more quickly, and significantly reduce the operational cost of claims.

Mehta said more than 80% of claims are currently managed in an automated or semi-automated way, and that big data management, along with machine learning and artificial intelligence, has enabled it to reduce anti-selection risks, false positives and fraudulent claims. By bringing down the cost of managing claims, Igloo is able to offer lower premium to customers.

An example of Igloo’s insurance policies include ones for gig economy riders that it sells through its partnership with Foodpanda in Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines, and Lozi and Ahamove Vietnam. Its policy for Foodpanda, called PandaCare, includes motor, personal accident and hospitalization income protection for workers.

Another, more recent one, is is Weather Index Insurance product in Vietnam. The policy uses blockchain-backed smart contracts and automates claims payouts by using pre-assigned values for crop losses caused by weather and other natural events. Igloo says the Weather Index Insurance is Vietnam’s first parametric insurance (or a policy that agrees to make pre-agreed payouts based on trigger events like a flood) and its first integration of smart contracts into insurance.

Igloo also provides products that Mehta says directly or indirectly benefits women, through a partnership with Philinsure in the Philippines. They have distributed more than 5 million policies that cover credit default, personal accident, family relief and natural calamity support to women micro-entrepreneurs and their families. In Vietnam, more than 65% of the agents who use Igloo’s Ignite digital platform to sell insurance policies are women, and they are also the main beneficiaries of the Weather Index Insurance product.

The insurtech’s distribution partners include telecoms like Telkomsel, AIS and Mobifone, and e-commerce platforms like Shopee, Lazada, Bukalapak and JD.ID. It also works with financial service providers, like AEON, Gcash and UnionBank, to sell policies for their customer base, and provides products for insuring goods in transit and protecting fleet drivers through logistics platforms like Ahamove, Shippit, Loship and Locad.

Other Southeast Asia-based insurtechs that want to increase insurance penetration in the region and have raised large Series B rounds include Indonesia’s Fuse and PasarPolis and Thailand’s Sunday.

Southeast Asia insurtech Igloo increases its Series B to $46M by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Faraday Future, the troubled EV startup-turned-publicly-traded company has shuffled its executive ranks once again.

The board fired its CEO Carsten Breitfeld, according to a regulatory filing posted Monday after the markets closed. Brietfeld, who was the former co-founder of failed EV startup Byton, took the leadership role at Faraday Future in September 2019.

The board said Monday it appointed Xuefeng Chen, a former and longtime Chery Jaguar Land Rover Automobile executive who most recently led the Faraday Future’s China-division, as its new CEO. As Faraday’s new global CEO, Chen will receive a base annual salary of $900,000, a performance-based bonus of up to $600,000, and a cash signing and retention bonus of $500,000. The retention bonus must be returned if Chen resigns or is terminated without cause in the next 36 months. Chen will also receive restricted stocks and performance-based restricted stock units.

The CEO upheaval is the latest in a string of internal drama and financial problems that have plagued the company for years. Even its public debut at CES 2016 was controversial.

The messiness at the company has only ramped up since it , wentpublic through a merger with Property Solutions Acquisition Corp. in July 2021. Investigations, a restructuring and a going concern warning are just a few of the dramatic turn of events in the past 18 months.

Brietfeld’s dismissal comes just a week since thecompany warned it might not be able to continue operating over the next year and that it was uncertain when its first FF 91 luxury EVs would be delivered.

The company has repeatedly delayed the FF 91 vehicle, which as of November 17, only had received 369 non-binding preorders. While Faraday Future did appear to snag a $350 million lifeline in recent weeks, it may not be enough to sustain its operations or deliver on its long-promised vehicle.

EV SPAC Faraday Future ousts its CEO by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

Hello and welcome back to Max Q. I hope everyone had a restful Thanksgiving with loved ones. As it was a holiday week, this is an abbreviated version of the regular newsletter, and I’m writing it on Wednesday, November 23. Before we get to the news, I wanted to give a heartfelt thank you to all Max Q subscribers. Doing this would be literally and figuratively pointless without you.

In this issue:

Orion greets the moon
News from ispace, Metaspectral and more

Orion, meet Moon. Moon, meet Orion.

The spacecraft Orion made a historic fly-by of the moon last week, completing a key maneuver as part of its 25-day test flight. The spacecraft, which NASA hopes will eventually carry astronauts, was carried to orbit by the super-heavy Space Launch System during the rocket’s maiden flight earlier this month.

Orion’s journey is at the heart of the Artemis I mission. Artemis is the name NASA has given to its human spaceflight program to the moon, and (as the name suggests) this mission is the first in what the agency hopes will be many — up to four in this decade alone. But before we go about launching up astronauts, NASA is using this first mission to test the Orion capsule and ensure it’s safe to carry humans.

What does Thanksgiving weekend have in store for Orion? Well, quite a lot. Read more by clicking on the link above.

Orion is due to make its splashdown to Earth on December 11, and that will be the capstone to the mission. During the return to Earth, NASA engineers will carefully monitor the performance of the heat shield and other critical components on the spacecraft. Once the capsule lands in the Pacific, it’ll be fished out and returned to the agency for further inspection.

More news from TC and beyond

CAPSTONEofficially entered its target orbit around the moon. The spacecraft will collect data on that orbit, which could be key for future Artemis missions. (NASA)
NASAselected Rocket Lab as its new launch parter for the TROPICS missions. The two launches, which will carry two satellites each to orbit, are expected to launch from Virginia no earlier than May 1. (TechCrunch)
Rosotics, a 3D printing startup, closed a $750,000 pre-seed round to develop a more efficient 3D printer. (Payload)
Rocket Labcompleted the launch rehearsal for the upcoming Electron mission on December 7. It will mark the first time the company has launched a rocket from U.S. soil. (Rocket Lab)
Starlinkis available across all of Alaska and Canada. (SpaceX)
Stells, a startup founded in 2021, is developing a rover called Mobile Power Rover (MPR-1) that would be able to provide power via wireless charging to lunar spacecraft. (TechCrunch)
The U.S. Space Force signed a cooperative research agreement, also known as a CRADA, with Blue Origin for development on the New Glenn rocket. (Satellite)

We’re offering to Max Q subscribers free tickets to TechCrunch’s in-person space event. Find out more about the event and get your free ticket by clicking here.

Max Q is brought to you by me, Aria Alamalhodaei. If you enjoy reading Max Q, consider forwarding it to a friend.

Max Q: Thank you by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

We’re joining the Cyber Monday fun with 25% off annual subscriptions to TechCrunch+ content and analysis starting today until Wednesday, November 30. Plus, today only, get 50% off tickets to discover the vast unknown and attend TechCrunch Sessions: Space in Los Angeles!

Okay, we haven’t done a newsletter since Wednesday, and while the U.S. team was chillin’ like villains, the rest of the team was hard at work, so here’s some of the highlights from the last half-week of TechCrunchy goodness! — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

Talking to yourself just went digital: Instead of having that internal monologue stay in your head, now you can play out all of your thoughts to yourself in WhatsApp, Jagmeet writes. The messaging platform began rolling out an easier way to talk to yourself today after completing beta testing.
“Great Wall of porn”: That’s how Rita and Catherine describe the bot surge in China that is making it difficult to get any legitimate Twitter search results when trying to find out something about Chinese cities. Why, you ask? Rita writes that “the surge in such bot content coincides with an unprecedented wave of (COVID) protests that have swept across major Chinese cities and universities over the weekend.”
Your calendar, only more productive: Get ready for your calendar to be more than just a place to record things you have to do that day. Romain writes about Amie, a startup that grabbed $7 million to link your unscheduled to-do list with your calendar. The app also enables users to be social with coworkers.

Startups and VC

Dubai-based mass transit and shared mobility services provider SWVL has carried out its second round of layoffs, affecting 50% of its remaining headcount, Tage reports. The news is coming six months after SWVL laid off 32% (over 400 employees) of its workforce in a “portfolio optimization program” effort geared toward achieving positive cash flow next year.

There’s a couple of new funds in town, too! Harri reports that Early Light Ventures plots a second, $15 million fund for software ‘underdogs,’while Mike writes that BackingMinds raises a new €50 million fund to fund normally overlooked entrepreneurs.He also writes about Pact, an all-women led VC for mission-driven startups, backed by Anne Hathaway.

And we have five more for you:

AI just wanna take a closer look: Ingrid reports that V7 snapped up $33 million to automate training data for computer vision AI models.
Special delivery!: Brian explores Bionaut Labs and the $43 million round it raised for its tiny drug-delivery robots.
Let’s get touchy-feely: This startup is bringing precision control for gamers to the humble keyboard, Haje writes.
Sticking it to the card processors: Catherine reports that Atoa helps U.K. merchants cut down on card processing feesand raised $2.2 million in pre-seed funding.
Dat Money for Dat Bike: Catherine reports that Dat Bike gets another $8 million to put more e-bikes on Vietnam’s roads.

Lessons for raising $10M without giving up a board seat

Over the last two years, intelligent calendar platform Reclaim.ai raised $10 million “using a more incremental approach,” writes co-founder Henry Shapiro.

“We’ve done all this without giving up a single board seat, and Reclaim employees continue to own over two-thirds of the company’s equity,” rejecting conventional wisdom that founders should “raise as much as you can as fast as you can.”

In a TC+ post, Shapiro reviews the process they used to identify follow-on investors, shares the email template used to pitch the SAFE, and explains why “a larger cap table means more founder control.”

Three more from the TC+ team:

A different valuation: Interim rate of return: A better approach to valuing early-stage startups, by Andrew Ritter.
Mistakes not to make: 3 mistakes to avoid as an emerging manager, by Champ Suthipongchai.
Growing with great efficiency: Anna writes that growing efficiently is no problem at all, at least if you’re bootstrapped.

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

Amazon’s recent cost-cutting measures seem to be affecting more than just its delivery business. Manish writes that the company is shutting down its wholesale distribution business, called Amazon Distribution, in India. Amazon had started this unit to help neighborhood stores secure inventory. The company didn’t say why it was closing this particular business down, but Manish notes that this is the third such Amazon unit to be shuttered in India.

Meanwhile, Natasha L reports that Meta has gotten itself into trouble again with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (aka, the agency that regulates data protection). Facebook’s parent company is being hit with $275 million in penalties for what the agency said was breaches in data protection that resulted in some 530 million users’ personal information being leaked.

Now enjoy six more:

UnBlocked: After weeks of reports claiming this would happen, BlockFi filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and it might be FTX’s fault. Jacquelyn writes that FTX was going to buy BlockFi, and then, well, you know what happened to them. Based on the bankruptcy filing, BlockFi owes some significant cash to creditors and is unfortunately now another high-valued, heavily backed crypto company that was unable to make it work in this environment.
Into the sea, you and me: Haje managed to talk Apple into giving him early access to the Oceanic+ app and took the Apple Watch Ultra into the deep blue sea for our world-exclusive review. He also got all excited about the pricing model the app uses.
I spy: The U.S. government is banning telecommunications and video surveillance equipment from several Chinese brands, like Huawei and ZTE, citing protection of the nation’s communications network. Carly has more.
Yahoola takes this company in holy partnership?: Yahoo invests a 25% stake in Taboola, an advertising network, in a deal that will marry the two companies for the next 30 years, Romain writes.
Safety concerns: The U.K. government expands its Online Safety Bill to criminalize those who take to the internet to encourage self-harm, Natasha L reports.
An Apple a day: For his newest trick, Musk is picking a fight with Apple, reports Taylor.

Daily Crunch: WhatsApp rolls out new ‘Message Yourself’ feature globally by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

It isn’t like Instagram is a beacon of truth as it is, but things are about to get a lot worse, as Nufa takes any image and sculpts you into the “after” picture dream that every gym owner wants to project into our souls as they continue on their mission to make us all look like body-building beasts with cleavage out the wazoo and abs for days.

The new mobile app “seamlessly transforms the human body into a picture in one click,” as it considers muscle structure, body type, skin color, body position and even tattoos to provide a “digital experience that hardly differs from real body transformation pics.”

“For women, we have an additional feature of transforming the breast from the 1st to the 5th size that works even with neckline clothes,” Nufa’s head of Analytics, Artem Petrikeev, said in an email to TechCrunch. “We are changing body pics similar to how Faceapp changes selfies.”

Can we be done making ourselves feel less than already?

But hey, if this is your jam, I guess you, too, can see what you’d look like if you conformed to completely unrealistic beauty standards. You do you, boo, but if you install this app, perhaps think about what it is you’re buying into. You’re perfect as you are, and if you don’t believe that, think about where that belief came from.

Nufa lets you live up to unrealistic beauty standards at the tap of an app by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

On the heels of Tumblr’s decision to integrate with ActivityPub — the social protocol powering the open-source Twitter alternative Mastodon and others — it appears that photo-sharing site Flickr is now considering doing the same. Flickr CEO Don MacAskill today began to actively poll users about whether or not they’d like to see Flickr support the protocol, too. If it moved forward with this plan, Flickr would be the latest larger company to commit to joining the “fediverse” — the interconnected group of independent servers across the globe running free, open-source software that allows their users to communicate and connect with one another.

The concept presents a challenge to modern-day social networks controlled by corporations — or billionaires like Elon Musk.

ActivityPub is a key component to the fediverse, powering not only Mastodon, whose popularity has grown in the wake of Musk’s Twitter acquisition, but also other alternative social platforms including the Instagram-like Pixelfed, video streaming service PeerTube, and others. If Flickr were to add support for ActivityPub, it would no longer function only as a photo-sharing site, but would become a part of a larger web of social networks where users could find, follow and engage with one another across platforms without having to create separate accounts for each service they choose to use.

MacAskill had already been weighing Flickr’s direction with regard to the fediverse before today. Last week, following the Tumblr announcement, the Flickr CEO had tweeted that his company had been internally discussing ActivityPub support, too.

“It might be right up our alley,” MacAskill said at the time.

But in a later tweet, he cautioned that taking this path would mean having to deprioritize other projects on Flickr’s roadmap — including those customers said they wanted. That’s why it makes sense that the exec would try to gauge consumer demand for the protocol’s adoption before actually making a commitment.

MacAskill today noted that there “appears to be a lot of interest” in seeing Flickr move forward with ActivityPub, but he wanted to first gauge the type of interest more specifically.

So far, the results of a poll he published on Twitter seem to be promising. As of the time of writing, only 8.9% of respondents have said “no” to the idea of ActivityPub integration.

38.2% said yes, but only if it was free. Meanwhile, two other groups indicated that ActivityPub support could become something that encouraged them to pay for Flickr, as 37.4% said yes, and said they already pay for Flickr, while 15.4% said yes, and said they might pay for Flickr if the protocol was supported.

MacAskill ran the same poll on Mastodon, where the interest towards making the support a part of a free product is so far running even higher, at 47%. 26% and 22% said yes and they even already pay for Flickr or would consider doing so if ActivityPub was added, respectively.

Though an older site, Flickr today claims it’s used by more than 60 million people per month, according to its Jobs listings page. That would bring a significant number of new people to the fediverse, if the company chooses to add support for ActivityPub.

Flickr, of course, could use a feature that encouraged more customer engagement and adoption. Once a prominent company in the Web 2.0 era, Flickr eventually lost out to other social photo-sharing platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, as well as to more utilitarian photo-hosting services, like Google Photos and iCloud.

In April 2018, Flickr sold to SmugMugand soon the company reduced the limits for free usage, began threatening to delete photos from non-paying users, and urged users to help it find more paying subscribers to keep it afloat. Earlier this year, Flickr also began paywalling the ability to upload NSFW photos to its site.

In more recent days, MacAskill has claimed Flickr is “healthy and growing again,” and noted it has established a non-profit to preserve its images in the event that the company again falls on hard times. Flickr didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on its ActivityPub plans, but a representative later noted MacAskill is a “wildly customer-centric leader and technologist with a long track record of successfully identifying meaningful innovations,” and, “This is potentially one of those innovations, which is why he’s exploring it publicly,” they said.

updated, 11/28/22, 5:19 pm with flickr comments

Flickr weighs support for ActivityPub, the social protocol powering Twitter alternative Mastodon by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

After decimating Twitter’s workforce, imperiling its infrastructure and emptying its ad coffers all within his first month at the company, it’s on to the next thing for Elon Musk.

The erratic billionaire picked a fight with Apple in a series of tweets on Monday, bracing for a battle — or perhaps just another volley of tweets — that would comfortably position the perpetually aggrieved Twitter owner as the David to Apple’s Goliath.

Musk is now claiming that Apple threatened to “withhold” Twitter from the App Store, implying that the iPhone maker might take action against the social app over changes under its new ownership without offering any evidence of that. TechCrunch has reached out to Apple for clarification, but for now we don’t know if Apple really contacted Twitter over content moderation concerns or something else entirely.

Twitter’s new owner also claims that Apple has pulled most of its advertising on the platform, which seems possible or even likely considering how many other major ad buyers have done the same since Musk’s takeover, citing concerns about brand safety and content moderation changes.

Whatever is really going on here, a few things are true. For one, Twitter needs to stay in the App Store and to do so it needs to clear Apple’s low bar for content moderation, which Truth Social and Parler — apps with far less mature algorithmic content moderation systems — have managed to do. Even with Musk’s threatened policy changes and his deep cuts to moderation teams, Twitter would likely still remain on Apple’s good side if those apps pulled it off.

It’s also true that Apple’s rules for what gets an app get kicked out of the App Store are vague and arbitrarily enforced. Apple warns against “content that is offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste, or just plain creepy” which would seem to rule out a lot of social apps, pre-Musk Twitter included, if it really came down to it.

At the same time that Musk is portraying Apple as a censor, he’s also railing against the fees the company charges apps that operate in its ecosystem. Musk calls this a “secret 30% tax” but in reality Apple’s cut is well-documented and much-discussed. Epic Games and Apple went to court over Apple’s fees in 2020, with Epic arguing that the iPhone maker wields monopoly power in the software market.

Whether intentional or not, Musk reigniting the App Store antitrust battle is timely. Epic’s ongoing fight with Apple is kicking off again in appeals court and Congress could be poised for another push to pass the Open Markets Act, a bipartisan bill that would crack open the App Store and “tear down coercive anticompetitive walls in the app economy,” according to its sponsors.

It’s also possible that Apple actually has cautioned Musk that reinstating thousands of accounts banned for stuff like hate speech and harassment might nudge the app afoul of the App Store’s actually quite lenient content moderation requirements. In that case, Musk could position himself as a high profile champion of the anti-Apple crowd, joining Epic’s whole thing and making nice with regulators who are rightfully concerned over Musk’s Twitter plans (or lack thereof).

But even then, Twitter needs Apple in both the short and long term and Apple certainly doesn’t need Twitter. And fighting on yet another front would stretch Musk’s attention even more when he should probably be focused on the basics, like running his myriad other companies or not bankrupting Twitter, say. You can be mad that Apple takes 30 percent of what you make on the iPhone but 30 percent of zero is still zero.

At the end of the day, Musk, the world’s literal richest man and maker of luxury cars and spaceships, generally seems to enjoy portraying himself as a scrappy upstart fighting against larger powers that be. If Musk wants to recreate that dynamic at Twitter, Apple is arguably one of the only entities that can still make the hugely influential social media company look like the little guy. Musk might be the Twitter boss now, but he knows that turning everyone against the big boss is a good way to maintain the approval of the miscellaneous internet devotees that affirm his existing beliefs and vote in his deeply unscientific tweet polls, so maybe it’s just about that.

Whatever inspired his anti-Apple tirade, waging a war on Apple is probably a losing fight. But it’s a fresh conflict that diverts attention from Musk’s embarrassing and seemingly endless parade of catastrophes as he fumbles Twitter’s policy, personnel and product alike, possibly running one of the world’s biggest social networks into the ground in the process.

Elon Musk’s next trick? Picking a fight with Apple by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch