Tech News

Komunal is reaching out to Indonesia’s rural customers by going where they are. The fintech partners with more than 220 banks in tier 2 and tier 3 cities spread through 19 provinces. Founded in 2019, the startup announced today it has raised $8.5 million in funding led by East Ventures Growth Fund, with participation from AlphaTrio Sustainable Technology Fund, Skystar Capital, Sovereign’s Capital, Ozora and Gobi Partners.

Komunal digitizes rural banks, called BPRs (Bank Perkreditan Rakyat) through its DepositoBPR platform, which lets users make deposits and apply for loans digitally without needing to visit their bank’s physical location. In addition to DepositoPR, Komunal also has a peer-to-peer lending platform that connects MSMEs with lenders.

The startup says that in 2022, its platform channeled IDR 3.6 billion, or about $230 million USD, in deposits and loans to BPRs and MSMEs, representing a 350% year-over-year growth from $50 million in 2021. It expects transaction volume to reach more than $500 million USD by this year, and has recorded positive EBITDA since October 2022.

Komunal was founded three years ago as an SME financing platform based in Surabaya, East Java. CEO Hendry Lieviant told TechCrunch that the startup initially benefited from little competition because most lending fintechs were based in Jakarta, but then they realized that lack of data and Indonesian SME culture might limit its scalability.

Another opportunity presented itself in the form of Indonesia’s 1,500 BPRs. “They have strong local connectivity, but their recent performance has been lukewarm, unable to catch up with digitalization,” said Lieviant. “Combined they only made up about 2% of the Indonesian banking market although they have much bigger potential.”

Customers access banks through the DepositoBPR app. From there, they are able to choose their rural bank and deposit product, create a virtual account and transfer money directly into it. Lieviant said they can also get government-guaranteed deposits with higher interest rates.

Komunal’s new funding will be used to market DepositoBPR and build its core banking system for rural banks. The company also announced it has appointed Dr. Peter Jacobs, a former executive director of Bank Indonesia, as its commissioner, and will continue to hire for senior positions.

Komunal raises $8.5M to digitize Indonesia’s rural banks by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

There’s no big Apple event today, but the company’s got quite a bit of news to share this morning. In addition to the new Mac Mini, a pair of new MacBook Pro just dropped, sporting souped up versions of the M2 chips.

The 14- and 16-inch versions of the company’s high-end laptops now ship with a choice of the M2 Pro and M2 Max chips. The new Mini sports an M2 Pro option (in addition to the default M2), but the new Pros are the first — and thus far only — system to get the M2 Max chip. The company says the top line system is ” up to 6x faster” than the last generation of Intel systems (if you’re able to remember back that far).

“MacBook Pro with Apple silicon has been a game changer, empowering pros to push the limits of their workflows while on the go and do things they never thought possible on a laptop,” Greg Joswiak says in a release. “Today the MacBook Pro gets even better. With faster performance, enhanced connectivity, and the longest battery life ever in a Mac, along with the best display in a laptop, there’s simply nothing else like it.”

Both models are available for pre-order today and are set to start shipping in exactly a week, on January 24.

Apple brings M2 Pro and Max chips to the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

Several years ago, co-founders Leena Joshi, Ben Cheung and Erik Buchanan experienced frustration with the amount of manual work they were putting into collecting information about sales and marketing accounts. The tools in the market were focused solely on the collection of information, they say, instead of curating what was actually relevant, actionable and up to date.

Cheung and Buchanan — drawing on their AI and machine learning expertise — saw the potential to boost sales and marketing productivity by applying AI algorithms to workflows. Their work, together with Joshi’s, spawned CloseFactor, a platform that aims to harvest actionable information about companies from disparate sources.

“Built to harness the vast potential in automating manual research by employing machine learning techniques at scale, CloseFactor helps business-to-business sales and marketing teams identify the right target accounts to go after — including the right people at those accounts — so go-to-market teams have the blueprint to execute their strategy and hit their goals,” Joshi said. “Our goal is to become the go-to-marketing operating system for revenue teams.”

Prior to co-launching CloseFactor in 2019, Joshi, Cheung and Buchanan had long been in the business of building business-to-business technologies. Joshi spent several years in senior roles at VMware, Splunk and Redis Labs while Cheung sold his first startup, virtual assistant platform Genee, to Microsoft for an undisclosed amount. Buchanan also held a role at Microsoft before joining Google and then moving to LinkedIn as head of machine learning for LinkedIn Talent Solutions.

CloseFactor identifies different accounts by analyzing attributes across closed won deals (deals in the final stage of the sales cycle), sales strategies and CloseFactor’s own data to identify an ideal customer profile and how many accounts fit that definition. On top of that, CloseFactor segments accounts by those readiest to buy by curating insights including hiring trends and new projects or initiatives a target business is undergoing.

CloseFactor also gives a bird’s-eye view of all accounts, stack-ranked by those readiest to buy.

“CloseFactor automates account research, giving you a deep dive into every one of your accounts — including current or future projects and initiatives, as well as the decision-makers and influencers you should be reaching out to,” Joshi said. “With CloseFactor, you can now engage the right buyers with the right message at the right time. No existing tools provide this type of automation or visibility at scale.”

CloseFactor, whose customers include LaunchDarkly, Chronosphere, Sourcegraph and Zuora, competes both with intent data providers and contact databases like ZoomInfo. But the platform’s momentum evidently has investors impressed. Vertex Ventures led a $15.2 million Series A round in CloseFactor with participation from Sequoia, bringing the startup’s total raised to $20.5 million.

Joshi said that the recent infusion will be put toward scaling up CloseFactor’s product development efforts and creating go-to-market team, as well as building several new workflow integrations.

“We’ve already grown 5,411% since our first revenue quarter and plan to continue to focus on solving problems for our customers,” he said. “The biggest competitor we face in deals today is the status quo. The way revenue teams define their ideal customer profile and target market is broken, leading to massive inefficiencies in their sales and marketing execution.”

Palo Alto, California-based CloseFactor currently has 20 employees and plans to hire this year.

CloseFactor raises $15.2M to automate repetitive sales processes by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

There is very, very little room for error in aerospace and defense (A&D) manufacturing. For companies that build products like missiles, rocket boosters and avionics, each part must not deviate more than a hairsbreadth from its technical specifications.

Despite the precise demands of the industry, however, parts ordering is generally done using systems that are only slightly better than carrier pigeon: generally some combination of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, long text PDFs attached to email, or an A&D company’s internal portal. Communication between companies and suppliers about these highly technical parts can also be bogged down by similarly low-tech, human-driven errors, like forgetting to copy someone on an email.

“I had this crazy theory that nothing can really move forward in terms of automation until all of that text, all of those decisions, get digitized,” Malory McLemore said in a recent interview with TechCrunch.

To solve this problem, McLemore and Anne Wen founded Stell, a startup that’s building a platform to bring new workflows to parts ordering. The company, which is less than six months old, just closed an oversubscribed $3.1 million pre-seed round led by Wischoff Ventures and Third Prime VC as it gears up expand its team and build out its product. The company is hoping that its platform can reduce error and improve efficiency – two variables that will be key to shoring up America’s industrial base.

Forming a plan

Stell was still just a “crazy theory” when McLemore embarked on an MBA at Harvard Business School. That’s where she met Anne Wen, a fellow graduate who had experience getting space startups off the ground. The idea continued to germinate, but ultimately both McLemore and Wen completed the program unsure of how to move forward.

“We left school feeling like we couldn’t figure out how to make this business work,” McLemore explained. “Selling software to aerospace and defense is hard. There aren’t a lot of solutions competing with the big guys for a reason.”

McLemore has seen how the A&D supply chain functions up close while working for both established aerospace behemoths and disruptive machining startups. Her experience includes stints at Airbus and Raytheon, where she helped build anti-ballistic missiles and airplanes. Most recently, she was machining-parts startup Hadrian’s first product manager.

This experience gave her a look into the parts ordering process from the perspective of the customer, at Raytheon, and the supplier, at Hadrian. On both ends, she was confronted with inefficiencies, missed deadlines, and pointless errors.

Even at a startup like Hadrian, with millions in funding from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz and Lux Capital, the same core issues with parts ordering persisted.

“Hadrian’s customers were still sending PDFs and emails to Hadrian,” she said. “Even if Hadrian builds this totally robotic, autonomous factory, all the inputs to the process are still broken.”

“So I called Anne, and I was like, I think I know how we can do this.”

Toward execution

When it comes to parts ordering in A&D, it is not only the technical specifications that need to be communicated to suppliers. Often, parts need to be inspected in certain ways, or tested; those results need to be communicated back to the customer. McLemore said Stell’s platform would also include room for these key deliverables and provide space for communication with customers directly within the software.

That the A&D industry has such outdated workflows may seem surprising, but up until now there has been very little pressure on the biggest companies to change their systems. McLemore pointed to the outsized power of this very small, very powerful group of primes relative to the suppliers.

But the landscape is changing: more venture capital is pouring into aerospace and defense startups, and there’s increasing pressure to secure these critical supply chains by bringing manufacturing back to American machine shops. Suppliers could have more leverage to demand better workflows, which McLemore says benefits both customers and suppliers.

Other things are changing too: legacy primes have historically been disincentivized from changing any process because it introduces uncertainty and risk. But Stell is hoping competitive pressure from outside the traditional industrial base will also nudge them to rethink their systems while not sacrificing mission assurance.

Right now, Stell is “running full speed,” Wen said; she and McLemore are in the process of onboarding Stell’s first dedicated software engineer and are thinking ahead to a design hire. They’re also planning on registering under the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), the series of regulations that govern technologies related to U.S. defense.

The company is aiming to get an alpha prototype to 1-2 customers by April. That test period will last until summer; once concluded, McLemore and Wen plan to launch to the industry at-large.

Stell wants to modernize the “unsexy” workflows slowing down America’s industrial base by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch

GoMechanic has laid off a significant number of its workforce as the Sequoia India-backed startup struggles to raise funds amid serious concerns of accounting troubles, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The Gurgaon-headquartered startup has cut 70% of the workforce and asked the remaining staff to work without pay for three months, Indian news outlet The Morning Context reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources.

GoMechanic did not respond to a request for comment.

The move comes as GoMechanic struggles to raise funds for over a year despite advanced stages of discussions with several investors. The startup was in talks early last year to raise a round of funding led by Tiger Global at over $1 billion valuation, TechCrunch reported.

The talks did not materialize into a deal after some discrepancy was found during the due diligence process, the source said. The startup later engaged with a number of investors including Malaysia’s Khazanah to raise a large round.

This round is also unlikely to go through as serious discrepancies have been found in its books, the source said, requesting anonymity speaking to the press. A recent probe into the startup, which counts Tiger Global among its backers, found that several of its garages were fictitious among other issues, the source said.

Sequoia India-backed GoMechanic faces severe trouble by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

“This is the next 20 years of my life. This is not like, build the company in four or five years and sell to Google. This is a big, long journey.”

Matt Rogers, who co-founded Nest with Tony Fadell back in 2010, was talking about his new startup, and he thinks it’ll be big. He’s probably right, but it’s also trash, in a way.

Today, Rogers, co-founder Harry Tannenbaum and the rest of the team at Mill Industries are launching their first product. At first glance, it doesn’t look like much, maybe a sleek trash can. That’s not an unfair assessment, but the Mill bin is a lot more than just a receptacle.

Mill’s kitchen bin gobbles up food scraps, dries them out and grinds them to bits overnight. It also neutralizes odors with a charcoal filter. When the bin is full, Mill automatically mails a box to return the waste back to the company, where it’s cleaned, sifted, pasteurized and bagged to be sold as chicken feed to farmers.

The goal is to eliminate the climate impact of food waste.

“This feels like the most tractable of all climate problems,” Rogers said. “We don’t need to invent nuclear fusion. We don’t need to figure out how to build a low weight aviation fuel. It’s just like, don’t put food in the trash.”

Nest co-founder Matt Rogers’ new startup is trash by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

On the heels of raising a big round of funding at a $1 billion valuation last week, DeepL is taking the wraps off a new language product, the first extension for a startup that made its name from its popular AI-based translation tools.

Write is a new tool that fixes your writing — catching grammar and punctuation mistakes, offering suggestions for clarity and more creative phrasing, and (soon) giving you the option to change your tone. Write is based on the same neural network that powers DeepL’s translator, and significantly, it is another step ahead in how artificial intelligence technologies, specifically those in natural language processing, are being used to alter how humans are communicating with each other, a big theme at the moment.

The functionality of Write may sound a little familiar to you. That’s because DeepL’s new service is going head to head with a popular product already on the market: Grammarly is currently leaned on by more than 30 million daily active users and some 50,000 businesses and teams.

If you don’t use Grammarly, chances are that you at least know about it — its YouTube ads are (in)famously ubiquitous. And at last count, despite much nay-saying from VCs about the pitfalls of features versus platforms, Grammarly, as of 2021, saw a huge spike in its valuation from $1 billion to a whopping $13 million.

DeepL’s mantra is to embrace competition and use it as a motivator to do things better. In its primary (and before today, sole) product, the company has long competed against two of the biggest tech companies in the world, Microsoft and Google, which both offer real-time translators for individuals and as a service used by third parties. (And that’s before considering the myriad other options out there for real-time translation.)

“We are always in race mode,” CEO and founder Jarek Kutylowski said of its flagship translation service. “We are accustomed to big adversaries, and part of our culture is to push forward through that.” Indeed, for many, DeepL’s neural network-based translator works better than these others, capturing certain nuances and meanings that rivals have missed.

That approach, it seems, is now the template for how DeepL will tackle new product frontiers, starting first with Write.

Launching initially in English and German and as a monolinguistic tool (you put in English writing and get English results), the plan is to see how Write is used across these two languages first, both to improve them and to figure out how to develop Write, whether that means new features or new languages. As with its basic translation tools, you can use Write free without needing to register (as you do with Grammarly to use its free tools).

Options, it seems, are at the crux of the service: in addition to snagging basic grammatical and punctuation errors, the focus will be on generating choices for users covering style, tone, phrasing and diction, rather than re-writing everything that’s entered into Write. In doing that, you might ask if Write is showing its limitations, or if its creators are making a conscious choice of where AI can help people do their best work. That’s a debate that definitely has opened up with the release of OpenAI’s GPT service, which takes a basic brief and writes everything for you based on that.

My initial test-drive of Write was a mixed bag and reveals that there is still room for learning and improvement. Write, ironcially, wasn’t very good (yet?) at guessing what I meant below when I wrote “right” instead of “write.”

But it did a good enough job of fixing my misuse of good.

Of all the directions that a AI-based translation startup could choose to go for its next product, Kutylowski told me that DeepL decided to work on Write because of patterns that it started to notice in how its translation product was being used (or misused as the case is here).

“People were misusing the translator to write texts in first in a different language from English, and then plugging them back into English assuming that they cold get the AI to write a better original version,” he said. The team decided to build Write to essentially improve that and cut out the translation middle step, which was skewing the results anyway.

The “AI writing companion,” as Kutylowski describes it, is aimed both at native speakers but perhaps even more at people who write passably if slightly awkwardly in a second language and are hoping to give their words that extra native shine. “The idea is we could help a student improve a grade by one,” in a manner of speaking, he added.

The next level of development, he said, will be to focus on the elusive qualities of tone, “not content but phrasing, creative input,” he said — but critically doing so while continuing to anchor that content in a person’s own words and ideas, not those generated by the AI from scratch.

DeepL takes aim at Grammarly with the launch of Write, to clean up your prose by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

The UK government has confirmed it will expand criminal liability powers contained in draft online safety legislation which is currently making its way through parliament with the aim of preventing platforms from intentionally flouting child-safety rules.

The current version of the (already muchamended) Online Safety Bill, which is set to return to parliament today for the report stage ahead of its third reading, does include criminal liability for execs who fail to comply with duties to provide the regulator, Ofcom, with information it requests from them.

However the government has now bowed to pressure from some its own backbenches — as well as calls from online child safety campaigners — to include expanded criminal liability provisions by making senior management at in-scope platforms criminally liable for repeat breaches of child safety duties.

This means that Ofcom will get additional powers that could — at least on paper — result in jail time for social media bosses who deliberately flout child safety rules.

The Telegraph broke the news of the looming government reversal late yesterday, reporting that Michelle Donelan, the secretary of state in charge of digital issues, had accepted changes to the bill which will make senior managers at tech firms criminally liable for persistent breaches of their duty of care to children.

A spokesman for the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) confirmed the development, telling TechCrunch that DCMS minister Paul Scully will set out details in a speech to parliament this afternoon. The development follows meetings between Donelan and backbench Conservative Party MPs who, in recent weeks, had been pushing a more wide-ranging amendment to expand criminal liability for senior execs.

The DCMS spokesman said backbench MPs have agreed to withdraw their amendment in exchange for the government introducing its amendment to expand criminal liability provisions.

The opposition Labour Party had signalled support for the backbenchers’ amendment, meaning the government could have faced an embarrassing defeat on the bill — hence it’s backing down to avoid a rebellion.

Backbench Conservative MPs have argued the legislation needs more teeth if it’s to rein in powerful tech giants and ensure children are protected from exposure to harmful content, with MPs pointing to other sectors — such financial services or construction — that already have criminal liability for senior execs and questioning why the execs in the tech sector should get a free pass.

In other recent changes late last year, the government revised the bill to remove a clause related to legal but harmful content — in response to concerns the legislation could have a chilling effect on freedom of expression.

However that move was decried by child safety campaigners and appears to have fuelled the backbench dissent on criminal liability.

The wording of the government amendment has not yet been published but DCMS’ spokesman emphasized that the expanded criminal liability will only apply for repeated breaches of child safety duties in the legislation — describing the target as execs who “go rogue” and “willingly ignore” Ofcom’s investigations and enforcement of child safety rules.

So a sort of ‘Elon Musk liability clause’, if you will.

The backbenchers’ proposed amendment would have gone further than that — extending criminal liability for any breaches of child safety duties. So the government appears to have won a concession by squeezing liability to deliberate breaches only. And DCMS’ spokesman suggested the amendment is “more targeted and proportionate to the risks” than the one proposed by rebel MPs.

The liability will kick in for senior management “if they repeatedly and knowingly and willingly ignore Ofcom’s enforcement notices in relation to their safety tech duties”, the DCMS spokesman added. “It will be commensurate to other senior manager liability provisions that are currently in law elsewhere… Senior manager liability was currently already in the bill if they failed to give Ofcom information when it was asking for it.”

“We’re confident that it won’t affect the UK’s attractiveness as a place to invest. Because it won’t penalize responsible and reactive tech bosses who are focused on making sure their platforms are safe. This is about people who are deliberately and willingly going against what Ofcom are telling them to do to make their sites safer for kids,” the spokesman also claimed.

“So it gives tech bosses a lot more certainty about when this could be used. And… as ever, with the fines that are in the bill — with Ofcom’s powers to fine them, with Ofcom’s powers to block access to sites [that break the law], these are a suite of powers that Ofcom has that it’s been very clear it will only use these in the worst case scenarios. In the extreme cases where it has to use these powers it will but it’s got a load of other options to use before that point.”

Since the deadline for introducing amendments in the House of Commons has passed, the government’s amendment to the bill will be introduced when scrutiny moves to the House of Lords next month — so full details remain to be seen.

We asked DCMS whether the expanded criminal liability provision for senior management will apply only to larger platforms (so called “category 1” services) — or whether all in-scope services (so, potentially, tens of thousands of companies and/or entities that provide user-to-user services) will face this risk — but the spokesman was unable to confirm how broadly the change will apply at this time.

While child safety campaigners are likely to welcome the government’s change of heart on beefing up criminal liability on tech bosses, digital rights groups are likely to be more cautious over risks to freedom of expression, with groups like the ORG also warning about the impact of compulsory age-gating on websites to access to content and to web users’ privacy.

Tech bosses who willingly flout UK online child safety rules to face criminal liability by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

Soundboxes — hardware used by merchants that emits sounds every time a mobile payment is made — have taken off in India, where point of sale activity can get busy and voice alerts from the soundbox help alert multitasking shopkeepers and assistants to a transaction going through. Now, to keep pushing ahead to build out its own payments business in the world’s second-largest internet market, Google is getting in on the act.

The internet giant, which is currently one of the mobile transaction leaders in India with Google Pay, is piloting a soundbox of its own in the country to alert sellers of confirmations for UPI payments — a mobile payment standard developed and now ubiquitous in India for instant payments and transfers between banks, or two mobile users, or a customer and a merchant. With UPI payments, providers typically do not take any cut on UPI transactions, so soundboxes have emerged not just as a convenience for merchants, but as a monetizing tool for payments providers, too.

Sources tell us that Google has started distributing its white-labeled speakers — branded Soundpod by Google Pay — in a few markets across North India, including New Delhi, working initially with a limited group of shopkeepers. Google’s soundboxes come with a QR code on the front — linked to the business owner’s bank-registered phone number — which can be used to make any UPI-based payment. These Soundpods are being built by Amazon-backed ToneTag, TechCrunch has learned.

The hardware features a built-in speaker that announces payment confirmations in different languages. Like its competitors’ soundboxes, Google’s device also includes a small LCD panel that shows the payment amount, battery and network status and manual controls. The soundbox is accompanied by a QR code of a merchant linked with their Google Pay for business account. Users can use any UPI-based app to make a payment by scanning the code. Typically, these soundboxes don’t support NFC payment as tap-and-pay is not a popular method for transactions in India. Plus, a lot of low-end smartphones don’t have integrated NFC hardware.

People familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that Google is distributing the speakers to selected merchants without any additional cost. In some instances, Google Pay representatives have given merchants a timeframe of some days to receive and set up the speakers at their registered location.

Google’s move into this piece of hardware is somewhat overdue.

The search giant has been slogging it out in India’s crowded payments landscape for some time now, and while a soundbox may sound novel to people outside of India, in the country it’s quickly become tablestakes in the mobile payments game. Google Pay competes directly with Paytm,Walmart-owned PhonePe and Tiger Global-backed BharatPe — all of which have already launched their own branded soundboxes with support for multiple languages.

That Google has had no presence on the soundbox front speaks (no pun intended) to how it has struggled to build fast enough to keep up with its rivals, and arguably to meet consumer demands in a timely way, too.

Roadside sellers, small merchants and hawkers have started using payment soundboxes to get audio confirmation of customer payments. And while the Google Pay for Business app already has an audio notification function, and Google also lets a business add an agent number so the agent can receive a confirmation on their phone; these features might not be helpful for a shop with multiple attendants and a loud environment, or where the cashier is not using a smartphone or tablet to facilitate transactions. In this scenario, a device that “announces” payments loudly can be useful.

Soundboxes also serve other roles to promote more and faster transactions for merchants. They typically support different languages — critical for a multilingual country like India — offer multi-day battery life and a quick daily transaction summary.

A Google spokesperson declined to comment for this story, but when we asked Sharath Bulusu, the director of product management for Google Pay at Google, about the development at the sidelines of a Google India event in December, he did not deny the effort and replied that the company piloted “all sorts of things.”

“If the person doesn’t have a smartphone, and they’re running a small business, the chances [are] that they will actually pay for a speaker product,” he said. “You can look up publicly available prices that Paytm has been using… I think the chances are low. So, that is not the way to solve it,” he said when asked whether Google targets the soundbox merchants who don’t have smartphones.

“But do we want to solve for that user? Yes,” he added.

Fintech startups take a low upfront fee and a monthly rental from merchants using their soundbox solutions. However, they also sometimes give the device away for free to many sellers to get them onboard. Paytm charges an average rental of $1.53 (125 Indian rupees) per month, while PhonePe charges $0.60 (49 Indian rupees) per month. The charges are relative to the merchant size and promotional schemes offered by agents.

According to data from the UPI-umbrella organization National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI transactions have seen significant growth, reaching 7.82 billion in December with a value of $157 billion. This represents a nearly 100% increase in transaction volume and a 55% increase in transaction value compared to December 2021. But despite this growth, companies facilitating UPI payments do not have a direct means of monetizing these transactions as they do not require merchants to pay a merchant discount rate or a small transaction fee.

Fintech companies have advocated for introducing transactional fees to change this model. Last week, the government announced spending $320 million to promote UPI transactions and its indigenous RuPay cards. However, the companies still have no direct avenue to generate revenues from UPI transactions.

As UPI has so far been a no-fee payments network, fintech players in this market offering compatible apps have to rely on other sources of revenue, such as lending and speaker rentals. In 2021, Google Pay started monetizing its service through user data, almost three and a half years after launching it in India.

Paytm was the first in the race to introduce soundboxes, which it did in 2020. That early mover status has been to its advantage so far: it is now a leader in the soundbox category, with the company claiming to have distributed more than 5.8 million devices to date. Earlier this month, the Indian payment company claimed it had distributed 1 million soundboxes each in its last two quarters.

Last September, Paytm said that its soundbox devices processed 5 billion transactions in FY 2022. A note from brokerage firm CSLA published last November noted that soundbox accounts for the company’s 38% net payment revenue.

Both Walmart-owned PhonePe and BharatPe launched their soundboxes last year. Last November, PhonePe said it deployed 1 million payment speakers across the country.

In addition to soundboxes, companies such as Google and Paytm provide businesses with QR code stickers and banners for easy UPI payments. However, there has been intense competition in the UPI market, as companies aim to reach the masses for small-ticket transactions, even without direct revenue generation. This is because the large user base can later be converted to customers for other products and services.

Per the National Payments Corporation of India, PhonePe and Google Pay command nearly 85% of the total UPI market in terms of transactions and own over 81% of the total UPI transaction volume. The government had planned to limit their market domination and provide other participants an opportunity to gain some share by setting a threshold of 30% of total UPI transactions per month. However, this rule was recently postponed until 2025.

Many merchants are eager to adopt the soundboxes once they understand their features, but some choose to return them once companies begin charging a rental fee. That points also to the issue of transparency and whether providers are being clear with customers over how fees are charged.

“I do not want it once I understood that the device is charging me over a hundred rupees a month just for speaking out payment updates,” said a chemist shop owner using a Paytm soundbox until last month.

Companies including PhonePe have begun taking cancellation fees in response to this behavior. Google’s model of how it will differentiate the game to retain merchants is yet to be revealed.

Google is piloting its own ‘soundbox’ in India for merchants to get audio-based payment alerts by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Alice Delahunt believes the future of fashion is in web3 and created Syky (pronounced “psy-key”) to put the wheels in motion.

She launched the company in November after a career in marketing at luxury fashion houses, serving in roles including chief digital and content officer at Ralph Lauren and digital and social marketing director at Burberry.

In 2017, Delahunt was at Ralph Lauren and had her first look at the blockchain, but it wasn’t until years later while working to pioneer some digital wardrobe projects with companies, like Snap, Bitmoji and Roblox, that she had an opportunity to see that web3 was going to be “more than a niche community” for luxury fashion.

“It felt like there was potential for virtual fashion and digital fashion to really take off,” she told TechCrunch. “I believe that the luxury fashion houses of tomorrow are being built today.”

That’s when Delahunt left Ralph Lauren and started developing Syky, which she said will serve as an incubator, marketplace and social community for the next generation of fashion designers and consumers.

As my colleague, Dominic-Madori Davis recently noted, “if there is one industry that could use web3, that industry is fashion,” especially when it comes to taking the industry in a new direction or helping it become more sustainable.

This is much of Delahunt’s focus. Her company’s name was inspired by the mythological Greek goddess of soul, Psyche, who she said personified “how designers use fashion to express the intangible parts of ourselves and themselves.”

“Designers inspire us to dream through fashion,” Delahunt added. “And those dreams come from the innermost parts of our psyche, so it was important for me for the name to reflect that.”

The company is kicking off the community part of its platform by releasing its first NFT, called The Keystone, of which 987 will be available on January 20. Fifty Keystones will be reserved for and granted to aspiring designers, Delahunt said.

The Keystone is a membership pass that provides exclusive access to Syky’s membership space, where they can network and collaborate with other creators and be able to attend digital and in-person fashion events. Keystone holders will also be the first to hear about designer collection drops, company alpha and beta feature releases and partner projects. In addition, they will receive periodic insights and reports on fashion and technology.

Syky is still very much in its early stages, but is buoyed by a $9 million Series A investment, led by Seven Seven Six, which also included Brevan Howard Digital, Leadout Capital, First Light Capital Group and Polygon Ventures.

The investment marks Seven Seven Six’s foray into web3 fashion, and Alexis Ohanian told TechCrunch via email that the attraction to Syky came from his obsession with the intersection of technology and culture.

“Creating and growing Reddit gave me a front-row seat to the power of culture creation through technology, even if it’s internet culture, and fashion is one more core element to that,” Ohanian added.

Meanwhile, Delahunt intends to deploy the new capital into building up the Syky team, incubating the designers into the community and on product and technology development.

She plans for the future marketplace to be a revenue driver for the company. It will be a place for emerging designers and unestablished designers to sell and trade their collections with consumers. It will also be a place where designers and consumers can curate spaces to showcase their fashion passions.

Delahunt was secretive about some of the next steps of the company, which includes an announcement for designers in February, and another part of the platform launching in the second quarter of this year.

“We’re going to build the luxury space environment in the digital world and then in the physical world,” Delahunt added.

Luxury fashion meets blockchain on Syky, the Seven Seven Six-backed web3 platform by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch