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Solana-centric crypto wallet Phantom is expanding its support to two other blockchains, Ethereum and Polygon, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.

By adding support for Ethereum and Polygon, Phantom is expanding users’ access from only Solana to all three of the ecosystems, Brandom Millman, CEO and co-founder of Phantom, said to TechCrunch. “We want to bring communities together from across web3 with a safe and easy to use self-custody product that is suitable for mainstream adoption.”

The new Ethereum and Polygon integrations are live in beta mode on Phantom’s browser and iOS and Android applications with an aim for a public launch in the first quarter of 2023, Millman said. This means users can trade, receive and swap tokens in its wallet as well as collect NFTs across all three blockchains.

“We’re graduating from a mono-chain wallet to a multi-chain wallet,” Millman said. “It was always our goal to bring Phantom to a multi-chain world. It was always our understanding that the world was moving to a more multi-chain world so it’s something that is more of a homecoming for us.”

The three co-founders —Millman, Francesco Agosti and Chris Kalani — used to work in the Ethereum ecosystem at 0x, an Ethereum-focused financial protocol, so integrating the blockchain into Phantom’s wallet was “always something we aspired to do,” Millman said.

Phantom currently has over 2.5 million user sessions per day and over 25 million on-chain decentralized application (dApp) transactions per month. In June, it launched an in-wallet token swapper where users could transfer tokens and has completed over $1 billion in swap volume to date, with each transaction costing less than 1 cent in network fees, it said.

In January, Phantom hit a $1.2 billion valuation after closing a $109 million funding round led by Paradigm. Other investors in the crypto wallet include Andreessen Horowitz, Jump Capital, Solana and Variant.

The crypto world is quickly evolving, Millman noted. “People didn’t really think multi-chain was going to be a thing and Ethereum was seen as the only place for users and developers to interact with the world of web3. But now it’s pretty accepted that the world is moving to a multi-chain world and there’s competitors to Ethereum and Solana coming out.”

While a number of blockchains are competing for market share, Millman doesn’t think the crypto ecosystem will head “toward a world with thousands of chains,” but one with about three to five major blockchains. “We’ll see consolidation around it.”

The Phantom team will work closely with Polygon to build out a wallet compatible with the layer-2 blockchain’s ecosystem, it said. “Working with Phantom will allow us to deliver a feature-rich wallet that’s ready for mainstream consumers to use when interacting with apps powered by Polygon,” Ryan Wyatt, CEO of Polygon Studios, said in a statement.

In the future, Phantom will consider making its crypto wallet native with other blockchains, Millman said. “I think the whole wallet space is going to be growing quite a bit, especially in the wake of some of the failures around centralized systems we’ve seen recently. Non-custodial and self-custodial systems are going to be in the forefront quite a bit.”

The non-custodial wallet also aims to focus on security and protecting users against spam NFTs and phishing attacks through its automated warnings of probable malicious transactions or websites that could compromise individuals’ wallets, assets or permissions.

“We’ve gone to great lengths to improve the experience around ‘transaction preview’ [and] the ability for a user to understand what they are authorizing when interacting with a web3 application,” Millman said. “Our transaction preview technologies have prevented over 20,000 wallets from being drained with over 3,000 unique users saved in the last month alone.”

Phantom has also gone to great lengths to take down fake phishing websites and has helped remove over 2,000 fake websites targeting Solana communities, Millman added.

In the long term, Millman believes Phantom will become the “onboarding point and discovery point for users entering web3,” similar to how Google Chrome is synonymous with the internet or Web 2.0. “That’s our aim with Phantom for Web3: If a user wants to interact with web3, we want their first instinct to be to download our app. That’s our goal and north star.”

Solana-focused crypto wallet Phantom adds Ethereum and Polygon support by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Coworking and warehouse space company Saltbox announced today the closing of a $35 million Series B led by Cox Enterprises and Pendulum Holdings. The news comes more than a year after Saltbox closed a $10.6 million Series A, bringing its total funding to $56 million.

As TechCrunch previously reported, Saltbox — which was founded in 2019 by Tyler Scriven, Maxwell Bonnie, and Paul D’Arrigo — is a pioneer of what it calls “co-warehousing.” With more than 10 facilities across the country, it allows small businesses and e-commerce outfits to ship and store goods all in one place. There are no lease requirements, and the company also offers integrated logistics services, like equipment rental.

Scriven, the company’s CEO, told TechCrunch that the company plans to use the extra capital to open at least three more locations, with two of those to open by the end of the year. The new Saltboxes are set to be situated in Miami, Minneapolis, and Phoenix. The company also wants to invest in software to create a more seamless logistics ecosystem.

“We’ve made a lot of progress over our first three years in physical infrastructure and service, and we are now going to increase our focus on software,” Scriven told TechCrunch. “Our goal is to create a frictionless end-to-end logistics ecosystem that is incredibly accessible and approachable to small businesses.”

Saltbox also faces the changing tides of the real estate and e-commerce markets. The former is up, while the latter is seeing a bit of a slowdown. Scriven said both situations helped businesses realize the need for Saltbox as they faced supply chain and logistics quandaries and the financial challenges of keeping a business afloat.

“Our customers made it clear to us that Saltbox was essential,” Scriven said, adding that the company hopes to educate and tap into the rising crop of digital entrepreneurs on the importance of having an ordered flow of logistics.

“One of the principal ways through which we are expanding our brand presence and brand awareness is through filling that knowledge gap,” he said. “Becoming not only an operational vendor and partner to these companies, but also a source of knowledge and inspiration, a source of confidence to approach this critically important aspect of their business.”

Saltbox’s Series B comes at what has been a daunting year for Black founders. TechCrunch previously reported that Black founders raised just 0.43% — or $187 million — of the nearly $43 billion in venture capital allocated this Q3. Scriven and Bonnie, who are Black, represent outliers in a year that saw many VCs retreat to their old networks amid an economic downturn.

Scriven said it took about four months to close this round and said the company heard “far more nos than yesses.” He added, though, that having an established reputation, good product fit, and resilience helped carry them through.

Saltbox already had an established relationship with its investors. Approaching new investors is difficult during challenging economic times, Scriven noted, which is why it was imperative to lean into their existing network.

“I feel very fortunate to not only have gotten this round done but also to have gotten it down with really phenomenal investors that we know well and trusted,” Scriven continued.

Robbie Robinson, the CEO and co-founder of Pendulum Holdings, said that Scriven and the Saltbox team have managed to tap a “strategic and unique opportunity” that sits at the “intersection of community and shared services in warehousing, inventory management, and fulfillment.”

“This is evident in the company’s growth, and its ongoing expansion across geographies speaks to the high demand for this differentiated bundling of services,” Robinson said. “I am excited to join Saltbox’s board of directors and continue Pendulum’s partnership with the team as they establish an infrastructure that supports emerging and fast-growing small to medium businesses that power our economy.”

“With its mission to power the next generation of entrepreneurs to launch, grow, and scale, Saltbox is a great partner to help continue Cox’s mission to contribute to the economic well-being of an increased number of businesses and their employees,” Evelyn Bolden, the senior director of strategy and investments for Cox Enterprises, said. “Saltbox is committed to helping e-commerce owners get the most out of their business in a community-focused workspace.”

Others in the round include Playground Global, Kapor Capital, and Lincoln Properties West.

Scriven said he hopes to stay focused on making the most impact he can. That means the company will double down on its mission to help small businesses adapt to the ever-changing retail economic landscape because, as Scriven puts it, “when small businesses are threatened, the core of our economy is threatened.”

“It’s a basic necessity to ensure that SMBs have access to a highly accessible, highly approachable, human-centric logistics platform that can really meet them where they are and ensure they remain not only competitive but ultimately thrive,” Scriven said. “This is a problem that must be solved, and it is not optional to solve the problem.”

‘Co-warehouse’ company Saltbox closes $35M Series B by Dominic-Madori Davis originally published on TechCrunch

There’s no question about it: The market going into 2023 isn’t going to be what it was when 2021 ended, when growth at all costs sometimes trumped common sense.

But the market isn’t as “down” as it may seem. There’s plenty of money to be invested, and founders who have the right mix of purpose, business model and traction need to remember that opportunities for funding can still be found.

Sky-high valuations and questionable investments in 2021 have brought investors back to Earth and prompted more thorough analysis of investment opportunities. This return to discipline, demonstrated by a more tempered and stabilized volume of investor weekly pitch deck interactions, isn’t a big surprise. The pace in 2021 was unsustainable and there was bound to be a slowdown in the funds invested. However, it’s not because there is no money left.

As of September, there was around $290 billion in “dry powder” floating around — enough to fuel startup investments for the next four years — but founders are finding it harder to raise money than they have in many years. Instead of demanding growth at all costs, VCs are taking a deep breath and erring on the side of patience.

Founders may be discouraged in this environment, but they need to remember that they have “currency,” too. Founders should do their own due diligence by identifying investors who best suit their needs and focus on their core strengths and value propositions.

Due diligence isn’t only for investors

Founders should always be eager to set up meetings with investors, but they should aim to reach out to a variety of investors, too.

Much as a product is dependent on its market, a founder is dependent on their investors. Not all investor meetings are equal, so founders need to research their potential investors thoroughly.

DocSend’s recent pre-seed report found that the average number of investors contacted dropped from 69 to 60 in 2022, but the average number of meetings scheduled increased from 39 to 52. This could be a sign that early-stage founders are starting to practice due diligence on their end as well, vetting investors and bringing different expectations to every meeting.

Early-stage founders still have currency: Fundraising in times of greater VC scrutiny by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Israeli urban trip planning app Moovit unveiled a new feature Tuesday that allows users to follow a transit line’s movements along the map in real time. The new feature, which is in addition to Moovit’s real time arrival countdown, brings a new level of accuracy and certainty to users’ commutes, the company says.

“Live Location offers the ability to see transit lines, displayed on the map as icons, move along the map as they progress (or are delayed) along their journey,” Yovav Meydad, Moovit’s chief growth and marketing officer, told TechCrunch via email. “The feature is accessible from every Moovit screen where the real-time arrival countdown is available via the Action Bar along the bottom of the screen.”

The live location feature is now available for buses, trains, trams, subways, ferries and cable cars — anything with GPS tracking installed — in more than 220 cities across 38 countries, and Moovit says more will follow.

It’s a handy feature, and one that Google Maps added to its own service about four years ago.

Riders who want to see where their line currently is need to tap on the ‘Live Location’ button on the bottom bar of the screen. A map will open and an icon will show up moving along the transit line, allowing Moovit users to stare at their phones in angst, watching the little bus icon inch closer and closer to their stop.

Riders will also be able to see when the tracking data was last updated and receive service alerts for that line, Meydad said, noting that users can view several lines moving on the map at the same time.

“This additional layer of context allows users to have all they need to compare options in real-time to make the best decision for them to easily reach their destination,” said Meydad.

Moovit users can now track transit vehicles on map in real time by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

Pearpop, a marketplace for social collaborations, announced today that it has raised an extension to its 2021-era Series A funding round. The company has added $18 million to its Series A, bringing its valuation to $300 million. Since its launch in October 2020, Pearpop has raised $34 million in funding.

The new investment includes funding from Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures and Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. Blockchange Ventures, Avalanche’s Blizzard Fund and C2 Ventures also participated in the round.

Pearpop allows creators and brands to buy collaborations with celebrities like Madonna and creators like Sommer Ray. These celebrities and influencers are able to sell the chance to collaborate with them on TikTok. Or, they can run “challenges” that invite people to use a specific sound on a TikTok for the chance to win cash. Pearpop has attracted numerous brands including Amazon, Netflix, Chipotle, Rakuten, Universal Pictures, Sonos and Beyond Meat, as well as celebrities like Doja Cat, The Weeknd, Madonna, Shawn Mendez and Post Malone.

“We’ve reached a critical mass on the creator side, as we now have more than 200,000 on our platform,” Pearpop CEO and founder Cole Mason told TechCrunch in email. “We’ve paid out over $10 million to creators, and we’ve been proud to see how Pearpop has opened up an opportunity for creators without a massive following: 71% of earnings have gone to creators with under one million followers.”

As for the new funding, Mason says Pearpop will use it to boost hiring, advance the platform’s current functionality, build out sales partnerships and more.

“We’re going to use the funding to accelerate our tech and engineering hiring as our product features and functionality get more advanced and we leverage intelligence and data in new ways our industry hasn’t seen,” Mason said. “Beyond that, we’ll continue to build out a strong sales and partnerships team capable of attracting and partnering with some of the biggest and most iconic brands in the world.”

In addition to the new funding, Pearpop is also announcing that it’s launching two new products called Ovation and Passport.

Ovation builds on Pearpop’s current Challenges product by allowing brands to turn customers into advocates. The product lets brands mobilize targeted audiences that have engaged with a product in the past. Mason says that every brand wants to incentivize their communities to advocate on their behalf, and Ovation makes this possible. On the other hand, customers will be able to monetize their social presence.

Passport uses blockchain technology to give creators visibility into audience engagement across multiple platforms and sources to allow brands to understand creator impact. Mason says Passport reflects Pearpop’s continued belief that data will be central to the growth of the creator economy. The platform aims to continue investing in data to support both brands and creators.

Earlier this year, Pearpop launched Pearproof, a web3 app that allows creators to mint NFTs of their social media posts. Pearproof’s NFTs use a proprietary algorithm that allows the assets to gain value as a post itself garners more social engagement. These NFTs start off at a “vinyl” level on a tier system that Pearproof developed. As it gets more popular, the NFT can “level up” to silver, gold, platinum and other levels. The creator can decide what rewards are associated with these levels. The project leverages the Solana blockchain, which Pearproof chose for its low transaction costs and lesser environmental impact.

Pearpopannounced $16 million in funding in April 2021, which was split between a $6 million funding round co-led by Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures and Slow Ventures, with participation from Atelier Ventures and Chapter One Ventures; and a $10 million additional investment led by Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six with participation from Bessemer.

“We have no shortage of ideas in the roadmap to help Creators earn a living doing what they love,” Mason said. “Our long-term vision is to continue to unlock the value of every social media user on the planet, while setting the standard for collaboration and creator monetization.”

Pearpop raises $18M at a $300M valuation to scale its social collaboration marketplace by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

SolarWinds and Log4j have made software supply chain security issues a topic of intense interest and scrutiny for businesses and governments alike.

SolarWinds was a terrifying example of what can go wrong with the integrity of software build systems: Russian intelligence services hijacked the software build system for SolarWinds software, surreptitiously adding a backdoor to a piece of software and hitching a ride into the computer networks of thousands of customers. Log4J epitomizes the garbage-in, garbage-out problem of open source software: If you’re grabbing no-warranties code from the internet, there are going to be bugs, and some of these bugs will be exploitable.

What’s less talked about, though, is that these attacks represent only a fraction of the different types of software supply chain compromises that are possible.

Let’s take a look at some of the lesser-known, but no less serious, types of software supply chain attacks.

Unauthorized commits

This class of attacks describes an unauthorized user compromising a developer laptop or a source code management system (e.g., GitHub) and then pushing code.

A particularly famous example occurred when an attacker compromised the server hosting the PHP programming language and inserted malicious code into the programming language itself. Although discovered quickly, the code, if not corrected, would have enabled widespread unauthorized access across large swaths of the internet.

Fortunately, recently developed tools like Sigstore and gitsign reduce the probability of this type of attack and the damage if such an attack does occur.

Publishing server compromise

Recently an attacker, potentially the Chinese intelligence services, hacked the servers that distribute the Chinese messaging app MiMi, replacing the normal chat app with a malicious version. The malware allowed the attackers to monitor and control the chat software remotely.

This attack stems from the fact that the software industry has failed to treat critical points in the software supply chain (like publishing servers or build systems) with the same care as production environments and network perimeters.

Open source package repository attacks

From the Python Package Index, which houses Python packages, to npm, the world’s software now literally depends on vast stores of software packages, the open source software programmer’s equivalent of the Apple App Store.

Software supply chain security is broader than SolarWinds and Log4J by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Deepgram, a company developing voice-recognition tech for the enterprise, today raised $47 million in new funding led by Madrona Venture Group with participation from Citi Ventures and Alkeon. An extension of Deepgram’s Series B that kicked off in February 2021, led by Tiger Global, it brings the startup’s total raised to $86 million, which CEO Scott Stephenson says is being put toward R&D in areas like emotion detection, intent recognition, summarization, topic detection, translation and redaction.

“We’re pleased that Deepgram achieved its highest-ever pre- and post-money valuation, even despite the challenging market conditions,” Stephenson told TechCrunch in an email interview. (Unfortunately, he wouldn’t reveal what exactly the valuation was.) “We believe that Deepgram is in a strong position to thrive in this tougher macroeconomic environment. Deepgram’s speech AI is the core enabling technology behind many of our customers’ applications, and the demand for speech understanding grows as companies seek greater efficiency.”

Launched in 2015, Deepgram focuses on building custom voice-recognition solutions for customers such as Spotify, Auth0 and even NASA. The company’s data scientists source, create, label and evaluate speech data to produce speech-recognition models that can understand brands and jargon, capture an array of languages and accents, and adapt to challenging audio environments. For example, for NASA, Deepgram built a model to transcribe communications between Mission Control and the International Space Station.

“Audio data is one of the world’s largest untapped data sources. [But] it’s difficult to use in its audio format because audio is an unstructured data type, and, therefore, can’t be mined for insights without further processing,” Stephenson said. “Deepgram takes unstructured audio data and structures it as text and metadata at high speeds and low costs designed for enterprise scale … [W]ith Deepgram, [companies] can send all their customer audio — hundreds of thousands or millions of hours — to be transcribed and analyzed.”

Where does the audio data to train Deepgram’s models come from? Stephenson was a bit coy there, although he didn’t deny that Deepgram uses customer data to improve its systems. He was quick to point out that the company complies with GDPR and lets users request that their data be deleted at any time.

“Deepgram’s models are primarily trained on data collected or generated by our data curation experts, alongside some anonymized data submitted by our users,” Stephenson said. “Training models on real-world data is a cornerstone of our product’s quality; it’s what allows machine learning systems like ours to produce human-like results. That said, we allow our users to opt out of having their anonymized data used for training if they so choose.”

Through Deepgram’s API, companies can build the platform into their tech stacks to enable voice-based automations and customer experiences. For organizations in heavily regulated sectors, like healthcare and government, Deepgram offers an on-premises deployment option that allows customers to manage and process data locally. (Worth noting, In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s strategic investment arm, has backed Deepgram in the past.)

Deepgram — a Y Combinator graduate founded by Stephenson and Noah Shutty, a University of Michigan physics graduate — competes with a number of vendors in a speech-recognition market that could be worth $48.8 billion by 2030, according to one (optimistic?) source. Tech giants like Nuance, Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Amazon offer real-time voice transcription and captioning services, as do startups like Otter, Speechmatics, Voicera and Verbit.

The tech has hurdles to overcome. According to a 2022 report by Speechmatics, 29% of execs have observed AI bias in voice technologies — specifically imbalances in the types of voices that are understood by speech recognition. But the demand is evidently strong enough to prop up the range of vendors out there; Stephenson claims that Deepgram’s gross margins are “in line with top-performing software businesses.”

That’s in contrast to the consumer voice-recognition market, which has taken a turn for the worse as of late. Amazon’s Alexa division is reportedly on pace to lose $10 billion this year. And Google is rumored to be eyeing cuts to Google Assistant development in favor of more profitable projects.

In recent months, Stephenson says that Deepgram’s focus has been on on-the-fly language translation, sentiment analysis and split transcripts of multiway conversations. The company’s also scaling, now reaching over 300 customers and more than 15,000 users.

On the hunt for new business, Deepgram recently launched the Deepgram Startup Program, which offers $10 million in free speech-recognition credits on Deepgram’s platform to startups in education and corporate. Firms participating don’t need to pay any sort of fee and can use the funds in conjunction with existing grant, seed, incubator and accelerator benefits.

“Deepgram’s business continues to grow rapidly. As a foundational AI infrastructure company, we haven’t seen a reduction in demand for Deepgram,” Stephenson said. “In fact, we’ve watched businesses look for ways to cut costs and delegate repetitive, menial tasks to AIs — giving humans more time to pursue interesting, consequential work. Examples of this include reducing large cloud compute costs by switching big cloud transcription to Deepgram’s transcription product, or in new use cases like drive-thru ordering and triaging the first round of customer service responses.”

Deepgram currently has 146 employees distributed across offices in Ann Arbor and San Francisco. When asked about hiring plans for the rest of the year, Stephenson declined to answer — no doubt cognizant of the unpredictability of the current global economy and the optics of committing to a firm number.

Deepgram lands new cash to grow its enterprise voice-recognition business by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Lyst, the UK fashion e-commerce site that last year raised funding at a $700 million valuation, is the latest tech startup to rein in spending by cutting staff. TechCrunch has learned that the company is in the process of laying off 25% of its employees, working out to about 50 people, as part of a larger restructuring to conserve cash flow and move to profitability.

The details were first leaked to us by way of an internal memo from the CEO, Emma McFerran, who took over the role of CEO from founder Chris Morton in July of this year. The company then confirmed the details to us. It’s not clear which departments will be most impacted, but the memo notes that some 85 people are being contacted who will be ‘impacted by this exercise.’

We understand from sources that the company had plans for an IPO next year but that these are now being pushed back, and that it might be looking for another round of funding to shore up its finances.

Lyst last raised money in May 2021, when the picture for e-commerce was rosily tinted, one of the ironic bright business spots in the largely otherwise devastating Covid-19 pandemic: fashion retailers in particular were seeing record-breaking revenues and business growth online as consumers turned away from shopping in person and use disposable income that they were no longer spending on going out. That made for buoyant sales, as well as very bullish prognostications: consumer shoppers, observers said, were unlikely to “go back” to physical shopping in the same numbers even after the pandemic subsided.

Lyst was a product of that: when it announced its $85 million raise, it planned for that to be its last fundraise ahead of an IPO, which it was planning potentially for London or New York as soon as this year.

At the time it said it had 150 million users and a catalog of 8 million products from 17,000 brands and retailers. That list of brands includes a number of high-end labels such as Balenciaga, Balmain, Bottega Veneta, Burberry, Fendi, Gucci, Moncler, Off-White, Prada, Saint Laurent and Valentino, and that combined with an active audience of shoppers led the company to strong growth. In 2020, gross merchandise value on Lyst was over $500 million. Between then and 2021, new user numbers grew 1100% and by the time the round was announced GMV was at more than $2 billion.

Fast forward to today, and the most optimistic and bullish prognostications in e-commerce have failed to play out: online sales have not continued with torrid growth, and people generally haven’t been spending as much online as a share of wallet with the return to in-store shopping.

That has led to some business contractions across the board. Amazon, the biggest of all e-commerce operations (which has been working to build out a strong line in fashion) may lay off as much as 10,000 staff and are cutting a lot of product lines. A more direct rival of Lyst’s, the high-end fashion e-commerce poster child Farfetch, currently has a market cap of just $2.9 billion, a giant drop compared to the $14 billion it commanded in May 2021.

Many look to the holiday season as a critical indicator of how well e-commerce companies are doing in the current economy, and this year so far, the figures are actually not as bad as many thought they would be: Adobe’s tracking of sales have shown big days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday both breaking sales records (respectively over $9 billion and over $11 billion).

Lyst itself has been seeing strong sales to kick off holiday shopping, posting its most profitable Black Friday weekend ever, with average order value up 15% — albeit with more discounting across the brands and stores that sell on the site to gin up activity.

But the bigger picture and the longer-term view are the factors driving today’s news. In addition to a focus on getting profitable, our source tells us that Lyst’s IPO was more recently targeted for 2023, but those plans have now been pushed back; and that it’s looking to do a new round of funding partly because it’s low on cash flow. (To be clear, the company would not comment on these facts.)

We’ll update this post as we learn more.

If you want to contact us with a story tip, you can do so securely here.

Lyst, the UK fashion marketplace, is laying off 25% of staff by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Kenya’s first fully electric taxi service, NopeaRide, is exiting the market after its parent company EkoRent OY failed to raise additional funding to keep it afloat.

NopeaRide said EkoRent Africa, the local subsidiary of the Finnish company, has filed for insolvency in Kenya, bringing to an end the operations of the all-electric vehicle taxi player, which sought to drive a shift to environmentally-friendly transport options, while stepping-up competition for early market entrants Uber and Bolt.

“We have taken our fleet of electric vehicles off the road and have notified our staff and corporate clients. We are now working with relevant authorities to ensure that our operations are wound up in accordance with local legislation,” said NopeaRide in a statement.

“We would like to extend our deepest regret to our dedicated team of staff and drivers. We would also like to thank our loyal NopeaRide customers, corporate clients and other partners who have supported NopeaRide’s vision for electric mobility in Africa,” it said.

Juha Suojanen founded EkoRent Oy in 2014 to develop solutions based on electric vehicles, and solar energy, which later led to the 2018 launch of NopeaRide in Kenya.

NopeaRide provided the charging network and the driver and rider apps, and sourced the electric vehicles. However, the drivers were expected to arrange their own financing frameworks.

The startup grew from three vehicles to 70 by the time of closure, and had also built a charging network across Nairobi after raising undisclosed funding in 2019.

Last year, NopeaRide also received €200,000 funding from EEP Africa, a financing facility for early-stage clean energy in Southern and East Africa, to build more solar charging hubs in Nairobi, and to make it possible for the company to increase its service radius in anticipation of growth.

The startup said it was on a path to recovery this year, after its business was badly hit by the Covid pandemic, which led to a dip in the number of rides as people worked from home.

“In the first half of 2022 our traffic numbers grew to about the same level as before Covid-19. We also started to put more effort in the corporate segment as their employees were returning to office and managed to sign contracts with a few big international companies, some of them potentially reserving the majority of available Nopea capacity,” it said.

“However, EkoRent OY went into insolvency in Finland and was unable to secure additional financing to grow the business in Nairobi to the next level.”

NopeaRide, Kenya’s first EV taxi service, shuts down by Annie Njanja originally published on TechCrunch

The UK government has completed a major revision to controversial but popular online safety legislation that’s been in the works for years — and was finally introduced to parliament earlier this year — but has beenpaused since this summerfollowing turmoil in the governing Conservative Party.

In September, new secretary of state for digital, Michelle Donelan, said the reshuffled government, under newly elected prime minister Liz Truss (who has since been replaced by another new PM, Rishi Sunak) would make certain edits to the bill before bringing it back to parliament.

The draft legislation is now due to return to the House of Commons next week when lawmakers will resume scrutiny of the wide-ranging speech regulation proposals.

The government says the changes its made to the Online Safety Bill are in response to concerns it could lead to platforms overblocking content and chilling freedom of expression online — largely focused on adult safety provisions related to so-called ‘legal but harmful’ content, which included mitigation requirements like transparency obligations but did not actually require such material to be removed.

Nonetheless the controversy and concern over this aspect of the bill has been fierce.

In a press release announcing the latest raft of tweaks, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and Secretary of state for digital issues, Michelle Donelan, wrote: “Any incentives for social media firms to over-remove people’s legal online content will be taken out of the Online Safety Bill. Firms will still need to protect children and remove content that is illegal or prohibited in their terms of service, however the Bill will no longer define specific types of legal content that companies must address.

“This removes any influence future governments could have on what private companies do about legal speech on their sites, or any risk that companies are motivated to take down legitimate posts to avoid sanctions. New measures will also be added to make social media platforms more transparent and accountable to their users, as a result of amendments the Government will propose.”

“Parents and the wider public will benefit from new changes to force tech firms to publish more information about the risks their platforms pose to children so people can see what dangers sites really hold. Firms will be made to show how they enforce their user age limits to stop kids circumventing authentication methods and they will have to publish details of when the regulator Ofcom has taken action against them,” DCMS added.

Over the weekend the government revealed another, related amendment to the legislation — saying it would make encouraging self harm a criminal offence, thereby taking that type of problem content out of the ‘legal but harmful’ bucket and meaning platforms will have a legal duty to remove it.

It also recently announced measures to beef up laws against abuse of intimate imagery, including criminalizing the sharing of deepfake porn without consent, among other recent changes.

DCMS is pitching its new approach with the Online Safety Bill as providing what it frames as a “triple shield” of online protection which is most strongly focused on children but still offers measures intended to help general consumers shield themselves from a range of online harms — with social media firms legally required to 1) remove illegal content, 2) take down material in breach of their own terms of service, and 3) provide adults with greater choice over the content they see and engage with.

Provisions in the revised bill could, for example, enable adult users to opt to see a filtered feed if they wish to limit their exposure to content that may be unpleasant to them but which does not meet the bill’s higher bar of being strictly illegal.

The government has also retained measures aimed at empowering adults to be able to block anonymous trolls — via using tools that the biggest platforms will need to offer to let them control whether they can be contacted by unverified social media users.

“To make sure the Bill’s protections for adults online strike the right balance with its protections for free speech, duties relating to ‘legal but harmful’ content accessed by adults will be removed from the legislation and replaced with the consumer-friendly ‘triple shield’,” DCMS wrote. “The Bill will instead give adults greater control over online posts they may not wish to see on platforms.

“If users are likely to encounter certain types of content — such as the glorification of eating disorders, racism, anti-semitism or misogyny not meeting the criminal threshold — internet companies will have to offer adults tools to help them avoid it. These could include human moderation, blocking content flagged by other users or sensitivity and warning screens.”

Donelan mounted an aggressive defence of the changes on BBC Radio 4’s Today program this morning, claiming the government has strengthened provisions to protect children at the same time as adapting it to respond to concerns over the bill’s impact on freedom of expression for adults.

“Nothing is getting watered down or taken out when it comes to children,” she argued. “We’re adding extra in. So there is no change to children.”

Platforms will still be required to prevent children from being exposed to ‘legal but harmful’ speech, she also suggested — arguing that much of the content of greatest concern to child safety campaigners is often prohibited in platforms’ own T&Cs and the problem is they do not enforce them. The legislation will require platforms to live up to their claims, she said.

Earlier in the program, Ian Russell, the father of Molly Russell — the 14-year-old British schoolgirl who killed herself five years ago after viewing social media content promoting self-harm and suicide on algorithmically driven platforms including Instagram and Pinterest — expressed concern that the bill is being watered down, questioning the government’s late stage decision to remove the ‘legal but harmful’ duties clause.

“It’s very hard to understand that something that was important as recently as July — when the bill would have had a third reading in the Commons and [this legal but harmful content was] included in the bill, it’s very hard to understand why that suddenly can’t be there,” he told the BBC.

Discussing why he feels so strongly about risks attached to ‘legal but harmful’ content spreading online, Russell referred to the inquest into his daughter’s death which surfaced evidence from the platforms that showed she had engaged with a lot of such content — giving an example of a pencil-style drawing of a sad girl captioned with the text “who would love a suicidal girl” as one of the pieces of content she had viewed that had particularly stayed with him.

“That in and on its own isn’t necessarily harmful but when the platforms’ algorithms send hundreds if not thousands of those posts or posts like it to someone — particularly if they’re young and vulnerable — then that content had to be regulated against,” he argued. “The algorithms have to be looked into as well. And that’s what the concern is.”

Russell also accused platforms of not taking strong enough measures to prevent minors from accessing their services. “The platforms have not taken seriously the advances in age verification and age assurance that tech now has — they’ve not paid enough attention to that. They’ve sort of turned a blind eye to the age of people on their platforms,” he suggested.

While not embracing the government’s edits to ‘legal but harmful’ duties in the bill, Russell did welcome DCMS’ drive to dial up transparency obligations on platforms as a result of revisions that will require them to publish risk assessments — when previously they may have had to undertaken an assessment but would not have been required to publish it.

Asked by the BBC about Russell’s criticism of the removal of the ‘legal but harmful’ clause, Donelan said: “Content that is harmful or could hurt children but is not illegal — so is legal — will still be removed under this version of the bill. So the content that Molly Russell saw will not be allowed as a result of this bill. And there will no longer be cases like that coming forward because we’re preventing that from happening.”

She also argued the revised bill would force platforms to enforce their own age restrictions — such as by making them explain how they are stopping minors from accessing their services.

“We’ve strengthened the bill,” she reiterated. “We’ve now introduced clauses where companies can’t just say yes we only allow children over 13 to join our platform — then they allow ten year olds and actively promote it to them. We’re stopping that from happening — we’re saying no, you’ve got to enforce that age restriction, you’ve got to tell parents how you’re doing that and everybody else. We’re saying you’ve got to work to the regulator with the children’s commissioner when you’re producing the guidelines and putting them in practice.”

Asked how the government can be sure platforms will really ban underage users, Donelan pointed to what she described as the “very punitive sanctions” still in the bill — including fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover, adding: “If a company breaches any aspect of the bill, including for children, they could face fines… [as large as] billions of pounds. That’s a really big incentive not to breach the bill.”

She said the government has also strengthened this aspect of the bill — saying companies “do have to be assured of the age of their users”.

“Now we’re not saying you have to use ‘X specific tech’ because it will be out of date by next week — this bill has to last the test of time — what we are saying is you could use a range of age assurance technology or age verification technology but whatever you do you’ve got to make sure you know the age of these users to know whether they’re 14 or whether they’re 45 — so you know the protection have got to be in place and I think that’s the right approach.”

This component of the bill is likely to continue to face fierce opposition from digital rights campaigners who are already warning that biased AIs will likely be the tech that gets applied at scale to predict users’ age as platforms seek to meet compliance requirements — and that the legislation therefore risks automating discriminatory outcomes…

Another notable revision to the bill the government confirmed today is the removal of a “harmful communications” offence that free speech campaigners had warned risked having a major speech chilling effect based on a disproportionate weighting on someone taking offence to public speech.

Offences on false and threatening comms have been retained.

“To retain protections for victims of abuse, the government will no longer repeal elements of the Malicious Communications Act and Section 127 of the Communications Act offences, which means the criminal law will continue to protect people from harmful communications, including racist, sexist and misogynistic abuse,” DCMS further notes.

There will also be a requirement for major platforms not to remove content that does not breach the law or suspend or ban users where there has not been a breach of their ToS — as another measure the government claims will help bolster freedom of expression online.

Further amendments are aimed at dialling up protections for women and girls online, with the government saying it will add the criminal offence of controlling or coercive behaviour to the list of priority offences in the Bill.

“This means platforms will have to take proactive steps, such as putting in measures to allow users to manage who can interact with them or their content, instead of only responding when this illegal content is flagged to them through complaints,” per DCMS.

Another change recognizes the Children’s Commissioner to the face of the bill as a “statutory consultee” to the regulator, Ofcom’s, codes of practice, which platforms will be required to cleave to as they seek to demonstrate compliance — casting a key child safety advocate in a core role shaping compliance recommendations.

The government has tabled some of the slew of latest amendments to the Bill in the Commons for Report Stage on December 5, when it returns to parliament — but notes that further amendments will be made at later stages of the Bill’s passage.

Commenting in a statement, Donelan added:

“Unregulated social media has damaged our children for too long and it must end.

I will bring a strengthened Online Safety Bill back to Parliament which will allow parents to see and act on the dangers sites pose to young people. It is also freed from any threat that tech firms or future governments could use the laws as a licence to censor legitimate views.

Young people will be safeguarded, criminality stamped out and adults given control over what they see and engage with online. We now have a binary choice: to get these measures into law and improve things or squabble in the status quo and leave more young lives at risk.”

UK confirms removal of Online Safety Bill’s ‘legal but harmful’ clause by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch