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Osome is a corporate “super app” that helps business owners with administrative tasks like payroll, accounting and tax reporting. The company announced today it has raised a $25 million Series B from Illuminate Financial, AFG Partners and Winter Capital. This brings Osome’s total raised since it was founded in 2017 to $51 million.

The company says revenues have doubled since its Series A announced in June 2021. It plans to become cash flow positive within the next 12 months, and recently announced a digital banking partnership with Singapore financial service corporation OCBC.

Osome currently serves more than 11,000 business in Singapore (where it is is headquartered), Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. It also offers business incorporation services in Singapore, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, and integrates with e-commerce platforms like Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Lazada, Etsy and Shopee.

Part of Osome’s new funding will be used to expand its operations in Asia by targeting side hustles and micro-entrepreneurs, in addition to its current customer base of SMEs.

Over the last year, Osome has launched an accounting platform to provide tax and financial reports, expenses and invoice management. It also runs a hybrid accounting service, called the Accounting Factory, that combines machine learning with human accountants and is meant to replace accounting software like Xero and Quickbooks. Machine learning is used to collect, extract and categorize financial data and reconcile it with bank transactions. Then Osome’s accountants look at that information and advise customers. Osome currently has more than 100 accountants and bookkeepers, who are full-time employees.

Other startups that offer corporate services include Sleek, Lanturn and BlueMeg. Osome founder Victor Lysenko said its building a competitive moats by providing a “set-up to scale-up service for businesses.”

“What business owners tell us is that they didn’t startup to do their own bookkeeping,” he said. “We take care of the bookkeeping so they can focus on their business. And we grow with them—our pricing model is based around revenue, not transactions, unlike our competitors.”

Singapore-based corporate services super app Osome raises $25M Series B by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

There’s a growing market for private cellular networks, or dedicated cell networks configured to support a company’s specific requirements within a confined area (think a warehouse or wind farm). For example, some mining and energy companies have adopted private cellular networks to help facilitate operations that span over significant distances, where the increased range of cellular offers advantages compared to the Wi-Fi alternatives.

A number of major vendors provide private cellular network services, including AT&T and T-Mobile, as do some startups, including Celona, Anterix and Airspan Networks. (Recently, asset management giant BlackRock announced that it’ll deploy a private network at its new headquarters in partnership with Verizon.) But that hasn’t stopped new ventures from cropping up to challenge the incumbents. See Expeto, which is developing a platform that allows corporate customers to extend their private networks via virtually any type of cellular connectivity.

Demonstrating that there’s investor appetite for upstarts in the market, Expeto this week closed a $13 million Series B round led by Sorenson Capital with participation from 5G Open Innovation Lab, Samsung Next and Mistral Venture Partners. Bringing Expeto’s total raised to over $25 million (inclusive of $5 million in debt financing), the proceeds will be put toward product R&D as well as customer and partner acquisition, according to CEO Michael Anderson.

“Large, mission-critical enterprises in sectors like energy, mining and manufacturing need mobile connectivity to support next-gen use cases. But today, mobile operator connectivity is hard to buy, integrate and manage,” Anderson told TechCrunch in an email interview. “If they want connectivity, enterprises have to deal with this mobile network operator (MNO) over here and that MNO over there … Expeto lets enterprises manage mobile connectivity as if it were part of their own network.”

Co-founded in 2015 by Terje Strand, Ryley MacKenzie and Brian Baird, with Anderson coming onboard in 2020, Expeto doesn’t sell cell service. Instead, it offers tools to enable companies to manage multiple private cellular networks, including 3G, 4G and 5G networks, from a single pane of glass. Expeto supports managing network policies in addition to monitoring network usage and performance, and it is designed to work from behind a corporate firewall, in a private or public cloud, at the edge or from a geographically remote site depending on the use case requirements.

“With Expeto, enterprises see just one network — no matter how many mobile network operators or deployment sites they’re managing,” Anderson said. “[They can deliver] mobility for any type of device using just a single SIM [card], maintain network device privileges across different connectivity types and physical sites [and] make real-time, self-service changes to the mobile networks they manage.”

Expeto currently has “more than” 20 customers supporting over 50 private wireless sites, according to Anderson, who wouldn’t reveal revenue figures when asked. He claims that the pandemic has driven “significant demand” for Expeto’s products as companies embrace automation and remote operations, even as some organizations look to reduce costs in the face of economic uncertainty.

To his point, there appears to be high interest among the enterprise in deploying private cell networks. A recent by TECHnalysis Research survey of over 600 IT decision-makers found that nearly three-quarters believe their company will eventually use a private 5G network. A separate reportfrom ABI Research estimates that the market for 5G private networks will reach $47.5 billion in 2030, up from $3.7 billion in 2021.

“Because Expeto’s use cases are associated with meaningful and relevant advances in operational efficiencies and growth initiatives, we have not experienced significant headwinds and we continue to sell on the basis of the savings and efficiencies Expeto’s platform uniquely enables,” Anderson said. “We plan to raise our next round of capital in the second half of 2024. We determined that the best approach to continue our high-growth momentum is a financial structure comprising equity and debt with focus and accountability to deliver differentiated growth, innovation and references from recognized leaders in multiple vertical markets.”

Samsung Next’s Andy Duong argues that Expeto is “uniquely positioned” to scale by leveraging its customer base as a distribution channel. The long-term play could be collaborating with cell providers to sell additional services; Expeto already works with Nokia and Ericsson for their radio access networks, the parts of mobile networks that connect devices like smartphones to the cloud.

“We invested in Expeto because it simplifies enterprise networking over private and public mobile networks,” he added. “While 5G’s network slices can be customized to meet the service-level agreement for emerging connected applications, they also bring additional complexities in network management. This is made easier thanks to Expeto’s cloud-based platform that enables hybrid private mobile networks for enterprise customers.”

Expeto, a startup selling tools to manage private cellular networks, raises $13M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Meet Cubzh, a new free-to-play video game that is all about user-generated content through a cube system. The company has designed a new platform from scratch and wants to empower creators with the ability to create new objects, build worlds and define games rules thanks to a scripting environment.

This summer, the company raised a $3 million seed round led by New Wave with several angels also participating, such as Docker founder Solomon Hykes and Sorare CEO Nicolas Julia.

“It’s a homemade engine. That’s why we have spent a long time in stealth mode making sure it works,” co-founder and CEO Adrien Duermaël told me.

This C/C++ engine runs on PC, macOS, iOS, Android and web browsers. In other words, if you are reading this post, chances are you have a device that can run Cubzh.

What you will play in Cubzh will depend on other users. Essentially, Cubzh is a gaming platform that can power different gaming experiences — a bit like Roblox.

“Players who can’t write scripts will be able to create objects, draw swords and vehicles. Soon, we will add an animation editor. Those who can code will be able to incorporate those objects in their games,” Duermaël said.

As for game development, Cubzh isn’t using a no-code approach. Everything is currently based on Lua scripting. Cubzh takes care of the basics, such as collisions and multiplayer code. The rest is up to the players’ imagination.

Right now, Cubzh is available as an alpha test. The company is thinking about web3 mechanisms as a monetization route. For instance, Cubzh could take a cut on primary and secondary sales of objects. Content creators would earn royalties on their creations based on usage.

But the company hasn’t launched a marketplace just yet. It doesn’t know if there will be a utility token either. Now that the basic features are here, the company will focus on all these upper layer features.

Eventually, Cubzh hopes that it can create a sort of digital version of Lego. And maybe some Minecraft creators will find Cubzh more interesting and move to this new game platform.

Cubzh wants to build the next-generation Minecraft by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch

Google is introducing a “Continuous Scrolling” feature on the desktop so users don’t have to navigate across pages to find the relevant search results for English-language queries in the U.S., expanding a feature the company has offered on mobile for some time.

Notably, users shouldn’t mistake continuous scrolling for infinite scrolling. With continuous scrolling, users can see up to six pages of search results by scrolling down before they see the “More” button to look for further results. On mobile, Google limits continuous scrolling to four pages of search results in one go.

Google has traditionally had a “paged” approach to search results. That means, up until this point, when users scrolled down the search result page and wanted to see more results, they had to click on the page number at the bottom.

The new feature can also provide more visibility to sites that did not rank high enough to be on the first page. People tend to avoid going to the second page and very few brave souls go to pages afterward — hence the joke: the best place to hide something criminally damaging is page 2 of Google search results.

The change comes at a time when many users complain that Google search results are degrading in quality. In response, Google has made a series of changes, including making search results more visual. In September, it also rolled out a feature that surfaced results from Reddit and Quora under a section called “Discussions and forums”.

While a lot of features have a mobile-first design, Google is also working on enhancing desktop search. The company has been testing widget-styled cards on the home screen to give users access to information like weather and stocks at a glance.

Google introduces “Continuous Scrolling” on desktop for Search by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Amazon is inching closer to launching Prime Gaming, its subscription service that offers free access to a number of titles and which ships bundled with Amazon Prime and Video plans, to its members in India, according to the company’s website.

“With Prime Gaming (included with your Prime membership) unlock instant access to tons of exclusive content for your favorite games and a rotating collection of PC games…each and every month,” the company describes on the site.

A support page on Prime Gaming website also mentions India as an operational market for the service, however users who’re currently attempting to access Prime Gaming are being redirected to a blank page.

After some users spotted and began tweeting references of Prime Gaming’s possible launch in India, Amazon quietly removed some of the references late Monday. [H/T Rishi Alwani.]

Prime Gaming is operational in several markets. The service, a revamped version of Twitch Prime, was originally launched in the US in 2016. It offers users a host several other perks including in-game loot at no additional cost and a range of Twitch-focused features.

The company, which has killed a number of its India businesses in recent weeks, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Amazon set to launch Prime Gaming in India by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Berlin-based Onomotion has come up with a scalable way to do micromobility-powered urban logistics — cargo e-bikes with built-in cover from the elements and attachable containers. Today, Onomotion has a couple hundred vehicles on the road in Germany with logistics partners like UPS, DPD and Hermes. Over the next few years, the company wants to expand to several thousands of vehicles across Europe and North America.

Onomotion just closed its Series A, with €6 million ($6.3 million) in equity and €15 million ($15.7 million) in debt. The equity comes from Proeza Ventures, Zu na mi GmbH, the European Innovation Council and existing investors; and the debt, in the form of a bond, comes from GLS Bank. Onomotion will pay GLS back after seven years, including a yearly interest rate of 5.5%, according to Beres Seelbach, co-founder and CEO. The executive said Onomotion will use the debt to purchase more vehicles so it can scale operations.

The funding comes as more cities and logistics companies move towards finding both more sustainable and efficient solutions for delivering packages in dense urban centers.

“We want to go to international markets in Europe like Paris or Brussels and then to North America, United States and Canada,” Seelbach told TechCrunch. “We want to improve the vehicle, make it even better by adding new features and building new versions, maybe with different modules. And of course, we would also like to invest into the marketing and sales team.”

Onomotion’s vehicle-as-a-service business model involves customers paying a monthly fee for vehicles, containers, chargers, maintenance and servicing. The startup also offers a fleet management program and provides over-the-air software updates so the vehicle mechanics can constantly improve, said Seelbach.

Since the company is largely vertically integrated — Onomotion designs its own vehicles and assembles them in Berlin — Onomotion is able to customize containers for different customer needs. For example, one IT customer uses a container that’s built with specific compartments to hold laptops and other gadgets securely, Seelbach said.

Most of Onomotion’s customers have their own delivery riders, but the startup is slowly growing another business unit that offers a logistics operations team.

“15% to 20% of our turnover this year will come from logistics-as-a-service,” said Seelbach. “Many of our customers have said it’s difficult to find a driver. It’s a big headache to organize the last mile logistics…So for some of our customers, we do everything, from giving them the vehicles to the drivers.”

Seelbach said Onomotion aims to expand that service to cities in Germany outside Berlin and Hamburg, where it’s currently offered.

“We have a pipeline of new customers for this business division,” he said.

Onomotion raises €21 million to expand e-cargo bike urban logistics business by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

The Indian arm of SBM Bank, one of the banks that has aggressively worked with fintech startups in the South Asian market, is engaging with investors to raise capital and pitching the vision of becoming one of the top banking-as-a-service providers in the country, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The Indian arm is in advanced stages of deliberations to raise between $50 million to $75 million at a pre-money valuation of about $200 million, the source said, requesting anonymity discussing private matters. The round hasn’t closed, so terms of the deal may change, the source said.

The firm sees its deep partnerships with fintech startups such as Bengaluru-headquartered fintechs Razorpay and Slice as a key growth pillar, according to an investor presentation seen by TechCrunch.

SBM Bank India declined to comment.

The bank has actively courted fintech startups as customers, offering them co-branded cards and powering their neobanks, as it sought to differentiate itself from the large competitors that for years avoided engaging with the younger firms.

Banks have long been a favorite investment for retail investors. Value of 100 rupees invested in HDFC and ICICI Bank shares on January 1, 2010 surged to — including with dividends — to over 1,039 and 672 rupees as of late last month, respectively, according to an analysis by Bernstein.

Some venture investors have also shown appetite to invest in banks in recent months – Accel and Quona recently backed Shivalik Small Finance Bank, for instance – but a growing number of other banks including RBL and Federal Bank have employed a similar strategy as SBM and courted many startups in the past two years.

Giant banks including HDFC and ICICI, at the same time, have have also somewhat reversed the course and are now not as hostile to startups anymore.

With the mounting pressure and local FDI rules, its valuation ask may rest on investors being convinced that it’s able to retain its business clients, their continued growth and it deepening its partnership with them to provide additional offerings.

The India arm generated a net revenue of $62.7 million in the financial year ending March this year, according to the presentation.

SBM Bank India, building BaaS platform, seeks funding at $200 million valuation by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

The real estate and infrastructure sectors contribute about 40% of global carbon emissions, and part of solving the climate crisis is fixing how those industries work. Accacia gives large property owners a way to track their carbon impact in real-time by integrating with ERPs and property management systems like Yardi. It’s already been deployed to over 20 million square feet of real estate in Asia and announced today $2.5 million in seed funding that will be used to expand across Southeast Asia, the Middle East, the United States and Canada.

The funding was led by Accel and B Capital. Participants included Blume Ventures, Good Capital, Zerodha’s Rainmatter Fund, Loyal VC and angel investors.

Founded in 2022 by Annu Talreja, Piyush Chitkara and Jagmohan Garg. Before Accacia, Talreja worked for more than 15 years in real estate, with companies like AECOM and Marriott.

During that time, she saw an evolution in how the industry was affected by climate-related events.

“Climate change-led flash floods, hurricanes and forest fires have impacted property prices globally and rising energy costs have necessitated the use of alternative energy sources,” she told TechCrunch. “Unlike many other sectors, the impact of climate change in real estate is ‘here and now’ and as someone who has worked on building design, construction and investments, the combination of my skill sets allowed me to look at this impact in a holistic way.”

Accacia’s target customers are large real estate owners and asset managers, including REITs, pension and sovereign funds, and developers. Most own and manage real estate AUMs of more than $1 billion. Accacia’s platform can track carbon emissions from all investment asset classes, including commercial, retail, multi-family housing and data centers. It is also used by consulting firms that are serving real estate and infrastructure companies that have set net-zero goals.

Emissions tracked by Accacia include Scope 1 (direct emissions), Scope 2 (indirect emissions from purchasing generated energy) and Scope 3 (emissions from a company’s value chain) for real estate, including embodied carbon, financed emissions and emissions from business operations.

An example of how Accacia can be used is a commercial real estate fund that has over 10 million square feet of assets. After it deployed Accacia, it was able to cut its direct emissions by 20% within the first six months of using the platform. Another client, a listed hotel company with more than 100 assets, used Accacia to reduce its Scope 3 emissions through the platform’s vendor recommendation engine.

In a statement about the investment, B Capital partner Karan Mohla told TechCrunch, “As an industry, real estate and infrastructure requires a nuanced and focused approach towards climate reporting, adaptation and mitigation. Accacia is taking a leadership role in building a global platform in solving this challenge. A B Capital. we believe in their vision of building a tech-led and scalable SaaS platform to get to net zero targets for real estate owners and asset managers.”

Accacia tackles the real estate industry’s massive carbon emissions problem by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

A group of about 300 quality assurance (QA) testers at video game company ZeniMax Media are seeking to form the first ever union at Microsoft, the parent company to their studio. ZeniMax includes subsidiaries like Bethesda Softworks and id Software, producing franchises like The Elder Scrolls, Doom and Fallout.

Union organizing has been on the rise in the video game industry, particularly among QA workers. QA testers at Activision Blizzard have successfully formed unions at Raven Software and Blizzard Albany through the Communication Workers Alliance (CWA), which will also represent ZeniMax’s union. But while Activision Blizzard has attempted to stall union organizing at every turn, Microsoft pledged in June that it would not stand in the way of employee organizing. So far, Microsoft has held true to its promise (and of course, that promise will get complicated if Microsoft’s $69 billion bid to buy Activision Blizzard closes).

On Friday, union organizers opened a portal where ZeniMax QA testers can vote yes or no to a union through the end of the month. If more than half of eligible workers vote yes, then — if the company stays true to its word — Microsoft will recognize the union without turning it over to an official, bureaucratic vote with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Zachary Armstrong, a senior quality assurance tester II at id Software, told TechCrunch that the unit is organizing to fight for better pay.

“Right now, we’re not being paid a wage that reflects the respect and the value that we bring to our company,” Armstrong told TechCrunch. “This is something that is the case across all video game QA.”

It’s not a coincidence that other major union pushes in gaming have also come from QA testers.

“QA testers are consistently placed at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to game development, to the point that we’re not even considered game developers.” Armstrong said. QA workers rigorously test all facets of video games to identify and resolve problems that impact user experience. “That’s reflected in our pay, and that’s reflected in our work, especially with regard to crunch.”

In the lead up to a major game release, QA testers are sometimes expected to work unsustainable hours, which is referred to as “crunch.” Before announcing their intent to unionize, the first major U.S. gaming union at Raven Software went on strike to protest layoffs affecting 12 contractors — before those contracts were terminated, the QA testers had been working overtime for five weeks straight.

Armstrong expects that the ZeniMax QA testers have the votes necessary to win their union at the end of December. For now, Armstrong is optimistic that Microsoft will continue to let the workers organize without interference.

“It’s made it a lot easier to reach out to people who are more concerned about retaliation and consequences for supporting a union,” Armstrong said about Microsoft’s union policies. “We understand that it’s been a lot more difficult at other studios, and the fact that we have not received that level of resistance has been a huge relief for us.”

If the union vote passes, the QA testers at ZeniMax will have formed the first union at Microsoft, as well as the largest U.S. video game union to date.

Microsoft could get its first official union as ZeniMax QA testers organize by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Autonomous trucking technology company TuSimple and truck manufacturer Navistar have scrapped their deal to co-develop self-driving trucks, the companies said Monday. Neither company provided a reason for ending the partnership.

Two years ago, TuSimple and Navistar had agreed to jointly develop and produce purpose-built autonomous semi trucks by 2024; this would be a move away from retrofitting existing trucks with autonomous sensors and technology. Navistar bought an undisclosed stake in TuSimple at the time.

TuSimple has received close to 7,000 reservations for its Navistar trucks with customers like DHL Supply Chain, Schneider and U.S. Xpress. It’s not clear if any of those orders will be fulfilled now. Neither company responded to TechCrunch for comment, but a statement from the companies states, “The decision to end the development agreement does not preclude the companies from working together in the future.”

TuSimple stated in October that it plans to achieve commercialization in 2023.

The move to end the partnership comes less than a month after Cheng Lu returned to his role as CEO of TuSimple after previously being ousted. The return of Lu came days after the company fired his predecessor following an internal probe that showed certain employees having ties and sharing information with Hydron, a China-backed hydrogen-powered trucking company.

TuSimple and Navistar end deal to co-develop autonomous trucks by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch