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Less than two months after announcing a new $9.2 billion valuation, TripActions said today it has secured $400 million in credit facilities from Goldman Sachs and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).

Specifically, TripActions has secured a warehouse debt facility from Goldman Sachs with a $200 million commitment and the potential to “flex up” to $300 million if needed, noted EVP Michael Sindicich, head of TripActions Liquid. The company also has landed an asset-backed lending facility of $100 million led by Silicon Valley Bank.

TripActions expanded from its core offering of travel expense management and accelerated the launch of its corporate card and general expense management offering, Liquid, in March 2020. Corporate travel had slid to a halt due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, taking the company’s revenue to zero. At that time, TripActions began underwriting businesses by funding their accounts with capital and giving them the opportunity to pay the company back at the end of their statement period, or billing cycle (typically a 30-day time frame).

Since that launch, the company’s Liquid offering has grown exponentially, with users such as payments giant Stripe, Canva, Carta, Toast, Patreon, Momentive.ai, Lyft, venture firm and investor Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Loom, Databricks and VaynerMedia. By leaning full force into thespend management space, TripActions has been competing with the likes of Brex, Ramp and Airbase, among others.

“We continue to grow at a rapid pace,” Sindicich told TechCrunch in an interview. “The facilities give us more ammo and buying power to bring on, and fund, more businesses as we’ve been scaling.”

TripActions saw the spend volume on its platform increase by 400%, or 5x, in the third quarter, according to Sindicich. The company saw 4.2x year-over-year revenue growth in the third quarter from its Liquid offering in particular, he added. That revenue is derived from a mix of interchange and subscription fees.

There’s no doubt that such growth factored into TripActions’ ability to raise an “up” round — $154 million in equity and $150 million in a structured financing deal — in an environment where many startups are either raising down or flat rounds, if they are able to raise at all.

The majority of TripActions’ new customers are signing up for corporate travel and TripActions Liquid to do their expense management and travel payments, according to Sindicich.

“There’s tons of spend management companies that have been created in the last few years and I think our unique value proposition is being able to combine the travel the corporate card and the expense piece all together because so much of employee expenses have to do in some way, shape or form with a trip,” he told TechCrunch.

In late September, TripActions was said to have filed confidentially to go public in the second quarter of next year at a $12 billion valuation. When asked about those plans this week, a company spokesperson said: “We are doing our part to be ready to go public when the conditions are right and the markets open up again but we can’t predict when that will be.”

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TripActions secures $400M in credit facilities from Goldman Sachs, SVB by Mary Ann Azevedo originally published on TechCrunch

Black Sheep Foods, a San Francisco–based food tech company that uses plants to create a similar flavor to animal meat, secured another funding round, this time $12.3 million in Series A capital.

The company is leaping over the traditional plant-based foods, like beef, chicken and pork, to focus on scaling production for its lamb-flavored product. The company’s patent-pending technology isolates flavor molecules that give animal meat its flavor, identifies the same molecules in plants and uses that to reconstruct the meat flavor, right down to mouthfeel and richness.

In January, we profiled Black Sheep Foods when it raised $5.25 million in seed funding. At that time, its lamb debuted in some San Francisco and Los Angeles restaurants late last year, including at Ettan, Black Sheep Foods co-founder and CEO Sunny Kumar told TechCrunch. Today that has grown to 44 restaurants.

Charles Bililies, founder and CEO of Greek restaurant Souvla, rolled out the product at six of Souvla’s restaurant locations this year and said the restaurant had been “thoughtful when selecting a plant-based meat partner.” Since then, Black Sheep’s lamb has yielded an “overwhelmingly positive response from our many loyal guests,” he added.

Venture capital into the food tech sector has been waning recently. However, by making flavors and also using them, Kumar believes Black Sheep Foods’ new funding is the result of setting the company up for a vertical integration approach that puts it in a unique space done only by Impossible Foods thus far. He adds the new round was planned and follows progress on some of the key things the company has set out to do in 2022, including the rate of product adoption and R&D milestones on its flavors.

“We had these two approaches, and when we launched with our lamb, we began seeing really good traction and sales growth month over month of 22%,” he added. “It was just this realization that we needed to go a little bit faster on this.”

The new funding is led by Unovis and includes Bessemer Ventures Partners, AgFunder, and KBW Ventures. It brings Black Sheep’s total funding to $18.05 million since its inception in 2019.

Kumar intends to deploy the capital into building up its product and R&D teams as well as sales and marketing.

Black Sheep was also limited at its production facility, where it was able to make only 5,000 pounds per month. Some of the capital will go to moving into a facility that will allow the company to make 16 million pounds per year. That increased production will likely start in the first quarter of 2023, he added.

Meanwhile, Prince Khaled bin Alwaleed, founder of KBW Ventures, participated in the round after tasting Black Sheep’s lamb.

“Black Sheep Foods’ lamb is shockingly good; as someone who has grown up with this taste profile, I couldn’t believe the authentic mouthfeel and flavor,” Prince Khaled said in a written statement. “With taste being a vital aspect of customer adoption, Black Sheep Foods will easily dominate amongst plant-based meats. Additionally, game meats are still a wide open playing field. There’s a whole range of taste profiles that Black Sheep will be able to explore, especially with the company’s technology, allowing for an amplified flavor, excellent texture and a strong nutritional profile.”

Black Sheep Foods grabs $12.3M to craft tastier plant-based meats by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Salesforce has always fashioned itself as a socially responsible company, and that includes working on a Net Zero carbon emissions goal. In fact, it launched Sustainability Cloud in 2019, a product for tracking customer Net Zero goals. This year, they are taking that idea a step further with a new product that incorporates not only the environmental pieces, but also social and governance goals, all of which fall under the ESG umbrella.

Ari Alexander, GM for Salesforce Net Zero Cloud and Net Zero Marketplace says that the idea is to take advantage of the range of Salesforce tooling from Mulesoft for connecting to data sources to Tableau for data visualization to help companies better understand their progress towards ESG goals.

“ESG is a broad and very important trend where our customers are looking for help, direction and solutions, and increasingly we started hearing that they needed help with reporting, both voluntary and regulatory,” he said.

The amount of information required to build such reports can be a daunting task for those charged with the reporting requirements. “The solution needed to reach across their business to bring in data from many different sources and streamline their reporting. And so we decided it was time to kind of bring the full power of Salesforce to that problem and extend our Net Zero Cloud to broaden into a full ESG solution.”

ESG reporting is challenging in its current state, particularly because there is no common regulatory reporting framework for all of this data, other than for greenhouse gas reporting. “Whereas the E part of ESG has the Greenhouse Gas Protocol to guide it, that’s a fairly well aligned as a global standard, when it comes to ESG reporting, that is very much still an alphabet soup of voluntary frameworks,” Alexander said.

What’s more, the regulatory bodies that are there are changing their requirements frequently, and it is expected that there will be in-country requirements in the not-too-distant future.

“So the specific kinds of data that we’re talking about whether it’s emissions data, whether it’s diversity, equity and inclusion data, whether it’s data about, suppliers and whether there are any kind of human rights flags or abuses anywhere deep in your supply chain, the kinds of things that companies are collecting or looking to put in one place and one single source of truth and report out on. There isn’t yet a clean and easy way to say this is good data or this is bad data on an unstructured data set [like this],” he said.

He says, the data can be reported to third-party auditors, however, and the tool is set up to allow that. “There is increasingly pressure on companies to take the data they’re reporting out more seriously, to provide some of the kinds of audit trails, so the Big Four audit firms can come in and look at enterprise data and have a point of view on whether the data that’s being shown to them is up to a certain standard when it comes to workflows and processes, transparency and being able to explain how you get to the kinds of numbers you report out on,” he said.

The full ESG reporting product is expected to be publicly available in the next couple of months.

Salesforce to expand Sustainability Cloud into full ESG reporting tool by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

North Korean state-sponsored hackers exploited a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer to target South Korean users with malware, according to Google’s Threat Analysis Group.

Google researchers discovered first discovered the zero-day flaw on October 31 when multiple individuals uploaded a malicious Microsoft Office document to the company’s VirusTotal tool. These documents purported to be government reports related to the Itaewon tragedy, a crowd crush that occurred during Halloween festivities in the Itaewon neighborhood of Seoul. At least 158 people were killed and 196 others were injured.

“This incident was widely reported on, and the lure takes advantage of widespread public interest in the accident,” Google TAG’s Clement Lecigne and Benoit Stevens said on Wednesday.

The malicious documents were designed to exploit a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer’s Script engine, tracked as CVE-2022-41128 with a CVSS severity rating of 8.8. Once opened, the document would deliver an unknown payload after downloading a rich text file (RTF) remote template that would render remote HTML using Internet Explorer.Although Internet Explorer was officially retired back in June and replaced by Microsoft Edge, Office still uses the IE engine to execute the JavaScript that enables the attack.

“This technique has been widely used to distribute IE exploits via Office files since 2017,” Lecigne and Stevens said. “Delivering IE exploits via this vector has the advantage of not requiring the target to use Internet Explorer as its default browser.”

The researchers added that Google reported the vulnerability to Microsoft on October 31 before it was fixed it a week later as part of Microsoft’s November 2022 Patch Tuesday security updates.

Google hasattributedthe activity to a North Korean-backed hacking group known as APT37, which has been active since at least 2012 and has been previously observed exploiting zero-day flaws to target South Korean users, North Korean defectors, policymakers, journalists and human rights activists. Cybersecurity company FireEye previously said it assessed with “high confidence” that APT37 activity is carried out on behalf of the North Korean government, noting that the group’s primary mission “is covert intelligence gathering in support of North Korea’s strategic military, political and economic interests.”

While Google researchers didn’t get a chance to analyze the malware APT37 hackers attempted to deploy against their targets, they note that the group is known for using a wide variety of malicious software.

“Although we did not recover a final payload for this campaign, we’ve previously observed the same group deliver a variety of implants like ROKRAT, BLUELIGHT, and DOLPHIN,” Lecigne and Stevens said. “APT37 implants typically abuse legitimate cloud services as a C2 channel and offer capabilities typical of most backdoors.”

Google TAG’s research comes after researchers at threat intelligence company Cisco Talos revealed that the North Korean state-sponsored Lazarus hacking group –also known as APT38 — is exploiting the Log4Shellvulnerability to target energy providers in the United States, Canada and Japan.

North Korean hackers exploited Internet Explorer zero-day to spread malware by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

Google plans to combine the teams working on its Maps product and on Waze, a mapping service that Google acquired in 2013. The merger comes as the search engine giant feels the pressure to cut costs and consolidate operations, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Waze’s team of 500 employees will fall under Google’s Geo organization, which oversees Maps, Earth and Street View, starting Friday. Neha Parikh, Waze’s current CEO, will leave her role.

Google told WSJ it plans to keep Waze as a standalone service — Waze is known for its crowd-sourcing of en route information like locations of speed cameras, cop cars and roadkill.

Google also said it didn’t expect any layoffs as part of the reorganization. However, layoffs abound in the tech world, whether you’re a startup or an Amazon. And they often hit the hardest where there are redundancies between teams. Indeed, Google said it expects the restructuring of the different mapping services to reduce overlap in mapmaking.

Google combines Maps and Waze teams as pressures mount to cut costs by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

Twitter Blue plan is on halt right now but when it resumes you will have to pay $11 per month if you subscribe from iOS, according to a report from The Information.

The report noted that the subscription plan will cost $7 per month if you purchase from the web. But it will be costlier on iOS to offset Apple’s App Store fees. Notably, Apple charges 30% fees to the developers for the first year of subscription, but it drops to 15% from the second year.

When Twitter launched its new subscription plan with a verification mark on November 9, it charged users $7.99 per month. If Twitter were to offset App Store fees, it should charge $10.38 — but the new $11 fee sounds like a rounded-off figure.

Twitter owner Elon Musk recently went on a tirade against Apple for pausing advertisements on Twitter, alleging them of hating “free speech in America.” Musk also accused the tech giant of threatening to “withhold Twitter from its App Store.” However, after Musk met Tim Cook on a tour of Apple’s Cupertino campus all things went back to being good and dandy.

Musk told the world that Cook clarified that there was no consideration to boot Twitter off the App Store. Plus, Apple resumed ads on the social media platform. Apple is a big spender on Twitter as The Platformer reporter Zoe Schiffer noted that the company buys ads worth nearly $100 million a year.

The Tesla CEO hasn’t been a fan of Apple’s App Store fees either. Last month, he described them as a “secret tax” levied by the iPhone maker. However, this is not the first time Musk has criticized the App Store commission. Last year, he sided with Epic in the game company’s battle with Apple and said that these fees are “a de facto global tax on the internet.”

However, just like many disgruntled companies like Spotify, Twitter will have to play by App Store rules if it were to offer subscriptions through iOS. As my colleague Taylor Hatmaker noted in her story last month, “You can be mad that Apple takes 30% of what you make on the iPhone, but 30% of zero is still zero.” That Blue tick is looking more expensive now.

Twitter will reportedly charge $11 on iOS for Blue subscription to offset App Store fees by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

There’s a lot of weird and wonderful uses for AI applications. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen AI powering better marketing emails, more smartly understanding the context of video content, and getting the most from customer feedback. It shows no sign of slowing: OpenAI announced it is pouring $10 million into the ecosystem to accelerate things further. Now, Kirill Zubovsky is taking on the challenge of picking the perfect domain name, with a service he calls Smartynames.com.

It’s free and super easy to use; you type in a prompt (say, “My company will be a news site that covers all things startups and technology”, just to pick something completely out of the air), and the AI will process the prompt and come up with a bunch of ideas for domain names, then check if they are available. The availability checker itself isn’t entirely reliable; it will show domains that are ‘for sale’ as ‘available’ – technically, that does mean they are available, of course, but it’ll be left as an exercise to the reader whether a domain that costs $10,000 is available or not.

The service is powered by OpenAI in the backend, more specifically by its GPT-3, which was recently launched version 3.5.

“You just tell it what your business is all about, and boom, you get domain names back. It’s not rocket science, but one a great way to use robots for something useful,” Zubovsky told TechCrunch. “that would have take humans hours of brainstorming and ideation.”

Unlike most other domain name searches, Smarty takes input in a form of a business description, and uses the AI tools to expand into core concepts and phrases that can make decent domain names, before doing a search to see if those domains are actually available.

“You don’t have to think of the words for your business, Smarty will do it for you,” Zubovsky writes.

He shares that more than 120,000 domain dames have been shown to experimenting customers on the first day of launching.

Zubovsky even has a simple business model for his novel approach to finding the perfect domain name: if you register one of the names through the registrars he recommends, he collects an affiliate finder’s fee. The cost of running the service is limited; for around 40,000 requests, he shares it cost him around $10 in OpenAI charges, and $100 or so for the service he uses to do domain availability checking.

Smartynames uses AI to find you the perfect domain name by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

To help electric planes take off, German battery company Customcells says it landed about $63 million (€60 million) in Series A funding from Porsche and several climate-tech investors.

World Fund, a one-year-old venture firm that backs European climate startups, led the deal. Abacon Capital and Vsquared Ventures also chipped in.

Customcells develops and recycles high-performance lithium-ion batteries that power products like cars, medical equipment and fossil fuel development (despite its stated decarbonization goals). The company also makes batteries for high-heat environments north of 122 degrees F. For this funding round, Customcells has a specific aim in mind: accelerating its push into “e-aviation” as well as its expansion outside of Germany and into the U.S. and Asia.

There’s no question that air travel is a serious climate change driver. Still, the sector is a long ways from decarbonization. A 2020 paper from researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University, NOAA and Oxford found that aviation represents 3.5% of all human activities that drive climate change, per NOAA. Air travel is almost completely reliant on kerosene, which spews greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide) and poisons folks with lead when it’s burned.

An alternative to this mess could be all-electric aircraft. Small electric planes are already feasible, yet researchers say batteries today are far too heavy to power larger planes on their own. The battery-weight challenge explains why some aviation startups are instead exploring alternative fuels, including hydrogen.

World Fund partner Daria Saharova called decarbonizing air travel “a huge uphill battle,” but argued in a prepared statement that the potential upsides were worth it. The startup’s chief executive, Dirk Abendroth, dubbed aviation the “next great decarbonisation challenge” in a separate statement on the new round.

Customcells has attracted more than just investors. Its current customers include small jet maker Lilium as well as “over half of Germany’s major automotive companies,” a spokesperson for the startup told TechCrunch. They declined to share names, citing NDAs, but we already know Porsche is among them.

Porsche, World Fund join $63M bet on batteries for electric planes by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch

UnaBiz, the Massive Internet of Things service provider andowner of Sigfox’s technology, announced today it has raised another $25 million in Series B funding. This doubles the round’s total amount to $50 million, after the first tranche was announced in October 2021. UnaBiz, which is based in Singapore, has now raised $60 million in total.

The funding was led by SPARX Group, an investment company based in Tokyo, with participation from G K Goh Holdings and Optimal Investment, all returning investors. A UnaBiz representative told TechCrunch that the new capital will prepare UnaBiz for its next stage of growth so it can focus on driving commercial activities and delivery to customers in 2023, regardless of economic conditions.

UnaBiz acquired Sigfox’s tech in April after the French IoT startup filed for bankruptcy protection. The acquisition doubled UnaBiz’s office locations and tripled its headcount to more than 240 employees. The UnaBiz representative said it has closed down SigFox’s loss-making entities and brought in new executives, including a chief customer officer to focus on pipeline and revenue streams, a chief operating officer to oversee operations stability and cost optimization and a chief technology officer. Its goal is to consolidate its business more quickly.

UnaBiz plans to invest in four verticals (utilities, security, facilities management and supply chain and logistics) across Latin America, APAC and EMEA. The funding will also be used on research and development for the company’s 0G capabilities and expand its product portfolio to include more LPWAN and satellite tech.

In a statement about its investment in UnaBiz, SPARX Group president and CEO Shuhei Abe said, “As the technology owner of the most energy-efficient LPWAN technology available on the market, UnaBiz is in a prime position to champion the convergence of Massive IoT communication technologies (from 0G to 5G) to help enterprises achieve their digitalization and sustainability goals.”

Sigfox tech owner UnaBiz doubles its Series B funding to $50 million by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

When Svetlana Kordumova was studying for her doctorate in AI and computer vision, she grew frustrated by the process of looking for items to buy online. Search results were often inaccurate, and she knew the tech she was learning could improve the experience. Pixyle AI was launched in 2019 to improve product discovery on e-commerce sites and today announced a €1 million seed round (about $1.05 million USD) from South Central Ventures.

The startup, which has offices in Amsterdam and North Macedonia, now works with over 20 clients, including Depop, Otrium and Minto. Over the past three years, it has tagged more than 250 million images and says its increased conversions for its retail customers by 10% on average.

Pixyle AI’s neural networks train its visual AI algorithms to not only identify fashion items in an image, but also categorize them by attribute, like color or pattern, that match the keywords shoppers use when searching for an item. The goal is to “see” images as a human would. For example, someone searching for a “short summer dress with flower print in pink and purple” would get results with all those attributes.

Kordumova, who earned her PhD from the University of Amsterdam, first created a visual search app for consumers before pivoting to B2B in 2019. She told TechCrunch that one of the biggest challenges faced by online retailers is cart abandonment, often because of poor site search and product discovery. Research from Google Cloud shows that even though more people than ever are shopping online because of the pandemic, 52% abandon their cart and go to another site if there is only one item they can’t find.

The reason for search results is usually bad data. Retailers often get incomplete and inaccurate product data from brands of people listing secondhand items for sale, which means items don’t show up in search results. Many retailers deal with that problem by manually entering better product data, but that process is labor-intensive, expensive and prone to human errors.

“Take the example of color attributes, what one person might assess as yellow, another person might find to be more orange,” said Kordumova. “In the case of secondhand marketplaces with millions of products being uploaded on the platform, it’s simply an impossible task to manually add attributes to the metadata.”

Pixyle AI automates the process of extracting detailed attributes from pictures, and now has a growing fashion taxonomy that already clocks in at more than 20,000 attributes, with the goal of covering all possible search queries about clothing.

The startup’s customers include online marketplaces, brick and mortar retailers and fashion tech startups like wardrobe cataloging app Whering, virtual fitting solution Virtusize and live shopping marketplace Galaxy. Pixyle AI has helped brands that moved from brick-and-mortar stores to “phygital,” or an omnichannel strategy that blends e-commerce with physical retail points, by automating product tagging. This increases the speed at which they are able to digitize their shopping experience.

Some examples of how Pixyle AI’s tech has been used include automating manual product entry and catalog standardization at Otrium. The end-of-season fashion marketplace had previously been manually tagging and processing product attributes, but was unable to keep up with their growing inventory. Kordumova says Otrium was able to improve its productivity by 65% after implementing Pixyle AI to automate color detection for its inbound logistics team.

For consumers, Pixyle AI offers a visual search tool that lets them upload an image of what they are looking for and get similar results. Kordumova says sustainable fashion marketplace Project Cece reported a 50% higher conversion rate to product outlinks after adding Pixyle AI’s visual search tool to its site.

Other companies that have developed visual AI-powered product discovery tools include Syte, Visenze, Vue.AI and Google, which recently launched a multi-search tool that lets people search using text and images at the same time. Kordumova says Pixyle AI differentiates by focusing on product data enrichment with detailed attributes, and giving its clients a high level of customization and tagging flexibility.

“In orders to make product data enrichment really work for each specific situation of our clients, we first let our teams align on what we’re trying to achieve, and make sure to set the right configurations before our AI models get to work,” she says. “This means we map taxonomies, configure cloud architectures and deploy customer and technical support teams to the exact needs of our customers, ensuring a successful implementation and usage of our platform to help them achieve long-term business goals.”

Pixyle AI plans to use its new funding to enhance its product offering, expand in the United States and Europe and move into new verticals. It will add new suites for industry segments and new offerings like product description generation and label detection using OCR tech that recognizes brands, material composition and size. It will also add “shop the look” and “multi-modal” search to its visual discovery product. For verticals, Pixyle AI plans to move into homeware and furniture by the last quarter of 2023.

In a statement about the investment, South Central Ventures managing partner Jan Kobler said, “A pivotal part of engaging online shoppers is product search, being able to find what you want easily and quickly. However, search has been hugely underserved and remains an unmet need for retailers and shoppers until now. Pixyle AI is laser focused on this opportunity and is already moving the dial with more sales for retailers. They have built a robust tech stack, which has been tried and tested in the market and is ready to scale.”

Pixyle AI wants to make visual search more intuitive for online retailers by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch