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Big thanks to Joyce Sidopoulos, Peter Barrett and Ken Goldberg for filling in the last few weeks. I’m excited by the boost this newsletter has been getting in recent months and wanted to keep the light on while I was out. Three weeks is the longest break I’ve taken for work in…ever, really.

Went to a bunch of museums (do yourself a favor and check out Edward Hopper at the Whitney and Morris Hirshfield at the American Folk Art Museum — can’t recommend them enough) and spent a few days in Aruba, of all places. Still not sure why flights were so cheap, but if you’re ever looking for a nice place to stay on the island for $150 a night, let me know. There’s also a great animal rescue. Go make friends with a miniature donkey.

The minute you get off the plane at JFK, however . . . Let’s just say the inner peace from meditating on a white sand beach every morning wears off even faster than the tan. Suddenly you’re tossed back into New York during travel season in 30-degree weather. If anyone in the Leeward Antilles is looking for someone to write a robot newsletter, hit me up.

The truth of it is, I’m back on the clock this week because we’re less than a week out from CES. I spent yesterday combing through 1,600 unread emails in an inbox that was zeroed out the day I left. Without giving the game away, I will say that there’s going to be a lot of fodder for Actuator at the show. Likely next week’s newsletter will be written from CES, about CES.

We’ve seen a slow creep of robotics in recent years, but this feels different. There’s the simple fact that I (and many other regulars) haven’t attended the show in a few years (January 2020 was very auspicious timing for an event that brought 171,000 people from all over the world into the same space). Robotics has had the beginnings of a renaissance during that time, so it follows that it will have a bigger presence at the biggest consumer electronics show.

To all of my fellow journalists covering the space, a word of warning: bad robots are nothing new. They tend to be more prevalent in the consumer space than anywhere else. People looking to spend a couple hundred bucks on a home robot likely don’t do the same level of due diligence that goes into choosing a $100,000 robotics system for your factory.

Claims get overblown, things don’t work out as promised, stuff breaks and there’s no one from the company ready to fly in to fix it. Be careful out there, folks. A lot of bad robots are going to be mixed in with the good ones. I’ve received multiple emails from companies claiming to be bringing the world’s first consumer robot to the show, and we all know how meaningless and wrong that claim is.

The other important element of this is the degree to which CES has become an automotive show over the past decades. The obvious import of this is that many automakers are getting aggressive about robots — either through investments or through their own divisions. Hyundai’s Boston Dynamics acquisition was very much in the limelight at last year’s show. There’s also the slightly more tenuous — but equally important — impact that innovations in autonomous driving systems have had on the industry. Vision systems, drones, Lidar and the like are all here, and the robots will follow.

I just received an email from the CTA titled “Start Your Year Off at CES 2023,” which I plan to do slightly begrudgingly. Even in normal years, CES can be soul-destroying chaos, but after several years away, it’s going to be a lot. The timing is always annoying from the standpoint of attempting to enjoy the holidays but makes sense as far as trying to be the tip of the spear for tech news. CES planted its flag as the first tech show of the year, and it’s not budging, even if means, somewhat ironically, being on a plane full of hungover people traveling to the show.

Due to the nature of the show, it’s almost inevitable that next week’s Actuator is going to be looking ahead at the year to come. Thankfully, a trio of much more qualified people gave their 2022 debriefs and 2023 predictions right here, but the week between Christmas and New Year’s is supposed to be about quiet reflection, so let’s do some of that now, and if a little bit of prediction seeps in, well so be it.

It’s overly dramatic to suggest that 2022 is the year that robotics came crashing back down to Earth, but there was undeniably a lot of market correction. That’s something that will certainly drag on into the new year. There was a nice little window in there for several months when robotics and automation seemed unfazed by macroeconomic forces, cruising on the forward momentum afforded them by the pandemic.

But it didn’t take a genius to see this coming. Those forces come for us all eventually. Here’s what I will say on a positive note: I’ve not yet found the person who suddenly changed course on robotics in all of this. There’s certainly some disagreement on the finer details, but people from all walks of life and business categories still believe the robotics ubiquity is an inevitability. That bodes extremely well for the space.

Ultimately, however, a year that crashed out of the gate on a bullish note has ended 2022 a bit worse for wear. That’s manifested itself in a number of different ways, from startup folding (we did a big piece on those here) due to an inability to raise sufficient funds to layoffs at big firms. We’re likely going to see continued consolidation of the industry, in the forms of shuttered projects and company closures (most startups fail — I don’t need to tell you that).

Of course, it’s never good when people lose jobs — I’ve been laid off a couple of times. It really hurts emotionally and financially and I don’t wish it on anyone. But there may be a silver lining of sorts in all of this. Founders have a way of overcrowding the market. Once it’s clear a product or concept brings in money, there’s a sudden land rush. This is how bubbles form. If you’ve got the right team and some luck, however, you can turn economic gloom into something great — whether it’s a pivot, a new company or combining forces with the right folks.

Ultimately, I see the industry emerging even stronger on the other side of this.

Acquisitions will be a big piece of this. There are, of course, various reasons a startup doesn’t see a viable path forward, and economic headwinds invariably magnify these problems. Meanwhile, the company with deep pockets understands that it’s often easier to simply acquire a company with a proven track record, rather than attempting to remanufacture that momentum. Given the time, resources and brain power involved in launching a robotics company, that’s especially applicable here.

Once more big companies have determined their robotics strategies, expect them to get even more aggressive with acquisitions. And hey, if a firm is struggling due to economic factors and generally bad timing, even more reason to swoop in. The two roadblocks here are that (1) even conglomerates are cutting spending and (2) the FTA has signaled that it plans to go after antitrust concerns more aggressively. As anticipated, the Amazon/iRobot deal announced back in August is facing exactly that.

Far and away, the biggest bit of robotics news I missed during my time off was Intrinsic’s acquisition of Open Robotics. Making a note for myself to talk to the parties involved after CES, but the deal is — at the very least — an interesting one. Alphabet/Google (by way of Intrinsic) has essentially bought the for-profit elements of the company, rather than Open Source Robotics Foundation, which is the steward of ROS.

Co-founder and CEO Brian Gerkey clarifies:

Intrinsic is acquiring assets from these for-profit subsidiaries, OSRC and OSRC-SG. OSRF continues as the independent nonprofit it’s always been, with the same mission, now with some new faces and a clearer focus on governance, community engagement, and other stewardship activities. That means there is no disruption in the day-to-day activities with respect to OSRF’s core commitment to ROS, Gazebo, Open-RMF, and the entire community.

So Google won’t own the open source operating system, but it is acquiring many of the brains that helped build it.

The other big thing I was slightly disappointed in not having been around to write about (nope, definitely not every dumb Elon tweet) was San Francisco’s reversal on the deadly force robotics clause. This is one of those cases where press coverage amplified an issue that authorities likely thought/hoped would go unnoticed. The city by the bay tapped into its activist roots (they’re there if you brush away some of the overgrowth and look closely enough), causing lawmakers to (at least temporarily) reverse course.

The story is an example where the things the clause represented — and the precedent it would create — were every bit as important to the story. Would the wording have directly led to bomb-strapped robots? Maybe. Maybe not. But I do believe that concern is justified here, and in a political environment where Democratic politicians went along with this over fear that blocking deadly robots might paint them as anti-policing, it’s a lot easier to give law enforcement power than to revoke it.

I’m glad the story caused more people to watch this space. The debate is very far from over — not just in San Francisco, but everywhere.

I would add all of the Ghost Robotics autonomous rifles into this bucket, as well as the opening letter signed by industry leaders calling for an end to weaponized general-purpose robots. The future didn’t look exactly like any of us expected (futures have a way of doing that), but it’s here nonetheless.

Labor is, of course, a big centerpiece to the robotics conversation. An inability to fill blue-collar jobs led to a bump in automation investment. This dovetails with ongoing labor struggles around things like living wages and unionizing that have been bubbling up in recent years. It’s an extremely important and nuanced conversation and one I fully expect to be covering in the years to come. Viewing history and past precedent is an important step in contextualizing this, but it’s also important to note the elements that are unprecedented.

There are reasons to be hopeful and reasons to be concerned, and anyone who tells you definitively how all of this shakes out is getting high on their own supply, so to speak. As ever, the one position I’m advocating here is unchanged: it’s our role as a society to speak for those who don’t have a voice. Whether short- or long-term, lives are going to impacted. If we truly believe the role of technology is the better of society, we need to make sure people don’t get caught under the wheels of this train.

I wouldn’t say that 2022 was a huge year for humanoid robotics, but we did see some important seeds planted. Tesla’s robot was pretty much what roboticists expected: a microcosm of every conversation you’ve ever had about why robotics is hard. The debut was important for two reasons. First, it reignited an important conversation around robotic form factors, and second, it reset a lot of expectations about what a robot is — and can be — in 2022.

A few more things to watch out for:

Resurgent agtech robotics
Prosthetic breakthroughs
Advances in bio-inspired and soft robots
Nano/microbotics, particularly in the medical field
Eldercare robots, which are finally having a moment

As someone said to me recently, it may feel like we’ve been doing this robotics thing forever, and certainly there were times when it felt like progress was moving at a glacial pace. But if you take the long view, it’s clear that we’re a hell of a lot closer to the beginning than the end — or even the middle — of this thing. If you’re here and reading this, congratulations, you’re in on the ground floor.

Strap in and put your helmet on, it’s going to be a fun ride.

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Reflecting on a roller coaster year for robotics by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

Ever since Elon Musk’s “be careful what you wish for” acquisition of Twitter, speculation about America’s first homegrown “super app” has soared.

In October, Musk tweeted: “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” According to Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood, Musk is “thinking about a super app like WeChat Pay.” Keep in mind that Musk founded X.Com and merged it with Confinity to create PayPal.

For context, China’s WeChat launched as a messaging service in 2011 and has since become a combination of Meta, Apple Pay, Venmo, Amazon, Uber, Robinhood, Rocket Mortgage, Kayak and Healthcare.gov — as well as more than 3.5 million partner “mini programs” that operate inside the app. PayPal and Walmart have been teasing their own versions of financial super apps since at least September 2021 but with much less fanfare.

Twitter, PayPal and Walmart could find themselves competing to monetize the financial lives of millions of people. That raises several questions: Why is now the moment for super apps in the West? How should we assess progress toward a super app? How are Twitter, PayPal and Walmart chasing this idea? Which one has the best odds of winning, or is there actually room for several leaders?

Why now?

Though popular throughout Asia, Latin America and Africa, super apps have failed to materialize in the U.S. and Europe. If Twitter, PayPal and Walmart are going to change that, we must ask why.

“Super apps took hold in Asia because Asian consumers owned under-powered smartphones that weren’t conducive to managing 40 to 50 separate apps,” according to Ron Shevlin, chief research officer at Cornerstone Advisors. In the U.S. and Europe, smartphones didn’t have the power or memory challenges typical of the hardware in less developed regions, so super apps were never a necessity.

Moreover, as Axios argues, data privacy fears, strict banking regulations, and Apple and Alphabet’s control over payments in their mobile operating systems have deterred would-be super apps.

A super app doesn’t solve an obvious problem for the Western consumer besides providing convenience and security (both debatable). That said, you could argue that such an app could bring finance, banking and credit-building opportunities to the underbanked or unbanked, who may be either excluded from mainstream financial services or fearful of them.

So why now?

Twitter has lost the digital advertising field to Alphabet, Meta and Amazon. PayPal is overdependent on payment processing, which is increasingly a crowded, competitive space. Walmart, always a step behind Amazon in digital, is overdue to try something its Seattle rival hasn’t tried.

Super apps represent a fresh and new pasture for these behemoths.

The process

Will Twitter, PayPal and Walmart compete to launch America’s super app? by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

This was a tumultuous year for micromobility, both within the shared and private spheres. As we predicted last year, 2022 brought with it a rise in the sale of electric bikes, the adoption of smarter e-scooters that can detect poor riding behavior and the drying up of VC funding for scooter and bike companies.

We also saw further consolidation happen in the shared micromobility industry, e-bikes and e-mopeds start to make a dent in delivery and logistics networks and a few promising policy initiatives that might just get people out of cars and onto smaller form factors.

With 2022 in our rearview mirror, we can now look to how technology, policy and public sentiment will drive 2023’s micromobility trends.

E-bike companies will start joining the public markets

E-bike maker Sonders filed for an IPO in October 2022. If and when the company goes public, it’ll be the first e-bike company in the U.S. to do so. Might other electric bike manufacturers follow suit in 2023 and beyond?

“The public markets are less about the biggest and baddest tech and more about something that’s perhaps simpler and proven to turn a profit,” James Gross, co-founder of Micromobility Industries, told TechCrunch. “Companies that are going public right now are companies that can show cash flow.”

Sonders’ S-1 showed a company that was operating at a net loss, but has the potential to become profitable. And unlike many of the electric vehicle companies that went public through special purpose acquisition mergers over the last couple of years, Sonders is already building and delivering vehicles.

Gross further speculated that Rad Power Bikes might be next to the public markets. In November, founder Mike Radenbaugh stepped down from his position as CEO and into a chairman role, putting the former president of Sony Electronics and Dyson America into his old seat. Gross said that was a “very strong proof point towards most likely a public market offering.”

More bike companies in the public markets could help push the narrative around e-bikes outselling electric cars in America.

“Part of being public is the professionalization of the category, and the reporting to show there’s more of these things shipping, maybe we should pay attention to them,” said Gross.

Further consolidation in the shared micromobility space

2022 was a year and a half for the shared micromobility space, and it started with at least one major acquisition.

Coming off the back of its acquisitions of Wind Mobility’s Italian subsidiary and bikeshare startup Nextbike, Germany-based Tier Mobility bought out Spin from Ford Motor in March. With each buy, Tier’s market reach over the shared micromobility landscape increased. Another notable buy in 2022 was Helbiz’s purchase of Wheels in October.

Beyond M&As, consolidation has come about for those that win by default, or those that have stuck around. Bolt Mobility ceded some ground this year after it up and disappeared, andBird has had to tighten its belt so significantly as to remove itself from several dozen U.S. markets, as well as Sweden, Germany and Norway.

At the same time, we’ve seen from Bird and Helbiz, the two public micromobilty companies, that this is a tough market to turn a profit in. And Tier, despite making a strong push into the U.S. via Spin, has actually decided to pull out of several American markets because they weren’t profitable.

So who will survive? The pool is getting smaller, but we think there’s still room for cuts. Only a few operators will remain by the end of 2023, and those will be very deeply entrenched with their markets.

Shared companies will force cities to adopt better regulation

One of the main reasons shared micromobility companies are dropping off is because it’s kind of an unsustainable business model. There are certainly ways to bring down CapEx and increase ridership, but nothing will help turn revenue into profit if the relationship most operators have with cities still verges on hostile.

Shared companies started out thinking that riders were customers, when really their customers are governments. Many companies have already come to this realization, but they’re still in the ass-kissing phase of the relationship. Operators have fallen over themselves trying to appease cities and win permits in a competitive land grab, and as a result have found themselves often in either over-regulated or under-regulated markets and operating at a loss.

2023 might be the year these companies set some ground rules for cities and their ridiculous RFPs so they can actually stand a chance at profitability.

“Most scooter tenders are trials or one or two-year tenders,” said Gross. “Most of the time, when you sell to government, you sell five- to 10-year-long projects. The idea that we would start on these short projects and see how they go has not worked well. It leads to a very hard structure for you to invest.”

“Imagine you’re a year into a tender, and now they want six new pieces of technology on a product,” Gross continued. “Have you forecasted that? Have you budgeted for that? It’s incredibly hard to actually build a business that way.”

In the past, governments knew these companies were chasing a growth model backed by VC funding, so they could ask for whatever they wanted. But now, as operators are actively leaving unprofitable markets, they’ll have to push back at governments and refuse to fill out RFPs that will lead to more of the same.

Trending toward ownership

We already know people are buying e-bikes, and it’s estimated that by the end of 2023, sales will have increased by 46% in North America compared to 2021.

Scooters — a cheaper electric mobility option that can be folded up and taken up stairs and on subways — will see a boost in sales next year. According to a Future Market Insights study, the folding e-scooter market is predicted to grow from $626.8 million in 2022 to $806.3 million in 2032. That uptick is in part thanks to the shared companies for bringing scooters into the mainstream. Now if you ride an e-scooter around, you don’t look like that much of a dork.

As we see more scooters come to market for private ownership, we’ll also start to see better, premium scooters. Taur, for example, builds a front-facing scooter that is fun and stable to ride (I know from experience) that’s in the $1,500 price range. Carson Brown, Taur’s co-founder, has told TechCrunch that while pricey at first, Taur’s scooters pay for themselves within a few months and provide the comfort and safety people need to rely on scooters for everyday use.

More subsidies at the grassroots level

In April 2022, Denver’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability & Resiliency funded an e-bike rebate program through a $9 million contract approved by the city council. The program was meant to finance e-bike incentives through 2024, but in less than six months, Denverites claimed all the available subsidies. The program is coming back in 2023 due to its wild success.

While President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act included incentives for buying electric cars, e-bikes and other small form factors were left out of the bill’s language. That doesn’t mean there’s no future for e-bike subsidies in the U.S. The Denver program can and will be a model for other cities and states looking to advance sustainability goals and get residents out of cars, and we expect to see more similar incentive programs being introduced at a grassroots level. Aside from Denver, Rhode Island already has a statewide e-bike subsidy program and states like California and Connecticut are working on theirs, too.

Advanced rider assistance systems on privately owned bikes

2022 saw an uptick in shared micromobility operators implementing scooter ARAS — systems that help detect and prevent sidewalk riding and parking. That same sort of tech is slowly making its way to privately owned e-bikes as the industry looks to convert would-be riders.

“There is a major convergence happening in which bike tech is quickly catching up to automobile tech. There are more connected bikes hitting the market everyday,” Will White, co-founder of Mapbox, an online map provider, told TechCrunch. “Bikes are already starting to ship with integrated ADAS features like radar for rear-vehicle detection, but this is just the beginning. Soon, we will start to see more technology to provide safety and comfort for riders, including AI-equipped cameras for hazard detection, and smarter turn-by-turn navigation that guides riders on the most comfortable route out of harm’s way.”

White said safety and security are the top concerns for prospective e-bike buyers. Aside from alerts to danger on the road, features like navigation to avoid dangerous roads and asset tracking to deter thieves and enable recovery of stolen bikes will help to spur greater adoption.

E-bike subsidies, consolidation and IPOs: Our 2023 micromobility predictions by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

It was a funny year in enterprise tech M&A, one in which the majority of activity came from private equity firms: As tech stock values plunged throughout the year, these companies went bargain hunting. They saw companies with lots of upside being vastly undervalued in the brutal market conditions of 2022.

But curiously, the year began with Microsoft announcing it was acquiring Activision Blizzard for a startling $69 billion in January, followed in April by Twitter being sold to Elon Musk for $44 billion. Neither of those deals made this list, however — they aren’t really enterprise companies. But they did show the promise and big money being tossed around this year.

After you discount those transactions, the top two deals still involved companies scooping up desirable properties for big bucks, but much of the top 10 is dominated by those private equity concerns, with Thoma Bravo attached to three of the top 10 and Vista Equity Partners in two. According to Crunchbase, Thoma tallied up six multibillion-dollar deals in 2022 and Vista three. That’s a lot of action for one year.

Consider that Google buying Mandiant for $5.4 billion and Intel nabbing Tower Semiconductor for the same price didn’t even make the list. This year required at least a $6 billion price tag to even make the top 10. That’s up from $5.4 billion last year and $3.5 billion in 2020. This year’s deals totaled $153.9 billion, compared with $121 billion in 2021 and $165 billion in 2020, a year in which a bunch of chip companies changed hands in a period of consolidation for the industry.

We saw a bunch of minor deals — minor in M&A money, that is — as companies scooped up smaller startups. Those deals didn’t make this list but included Celonis buying Process Analytics Factory for $100 million and Snowflake grabbing Streamlit for $800 million. Many other deals were so small that the companies didn’t have to reveal the buying price, like IBM buying Envizi or Zoom acquiring Solvvy.

A couple of large deals died on the vine this year, with Nvidia walking away from its $40 billion offer to buy Arm after it came under intense regulatory scrutiny. In addition, Zendesk scrapped its attempt to buy Momentive, the company behind SurveyMonkey, for $4.1 billion after investors rejected the deal. Eventually, Zendesk would get acquired and make our list.

Several deals in this list are facing intense regulatory scrutiny, including the top two, so it remains to be seen if all of these deals will make it to the finish line or join Nvidia in choosing to avoid the cost of fighting a government entity, whether in the U.S., the U.K. or the EU. That could be the real M&A legacy of 2022, but time will tell.

Without further ado, here are 2022’s top 10 enterprise M&A deals:

10. OpenText acquires Micro Focus for $6B
Not a huge deal in the scheme of things — a legacy software company buys a legacy software company — and truthfully, Micro Focus itself has acquired a bunch of legacy titles over the years, including Borland and Novell. It also partnered with HPE in 2016 in an $8 billion deal. As noted about the deal when it was announced, this was less about building out the catalog with a compatible product than it was simply to get bigger. Still, it was good for No. 10 on this year’s list.

Private equity dominated the top 10 enterprise M&A deals in 2022 by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

Thanks to a months-long shakeout, the crypto market experienced one of the most drastic drawdowns in its history in 2022. But questions are arising about when (if?) major cryptocurrencies will recover.

The global crypto market capitalization, which makes up the total value of all crypto assets (including stablecoins and tokens), has fallen roughly 64% from $2.2 trillion to about $797 billion year to date, according to CoinMarketCap data. The two largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, bitcoin and ether, have fallen 64% and 67%, respectively, during the same time frame.

With a loss of more than half their value, one could argue that these cryptocurrencies can’t recover. But when you zoom out and look at the overall picture, things aren’t that bad for bitcoin and ether, despite what transpired this year.

Let’s look at how significant crypto and global events from this year affected the two biggest cryptocurrencies.

When the Terra/LUNA ecosystem collapsed in early May, within about six weeks, over a billion dollars of the total crypto market cap was wiped out, dropping from about $1.8 trillion to about $820 billion, data shows. Comparing against the largest cryptocurrencies again, bitcoin and ether both fell over 50% in that period.

Just focusing on that event, the decline looks (and, fair enough, was) brutal.

Yet, since that big drop, both bitcoin and ether have held in the same range, even after FTX, one of the largest crypto exchanges, collapsed last month and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Will Bitcoin and Ethereum prices stagnate, sink or rebound in 2023? by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Spotify has launched a New Year’s Hub to help its users ring in 2023, the streaming service announced on Thursday. The company says the one-stop destination gives users access to classic party playlists and special takeovers from artists like Charli XCX, Rita Ora, N-Dubz and Céline Dion.

“We’ve got plenty of music to kickstart your celebration, and it’s all in our freshly launched New Year’s Hub,” Spotify wrote in a blog post. “Whether you want a low-key night or a heart-pounding dancefest, we have you set with featured playlists to match the vibe you’re channeling.”

The New Year’s Hub includes many up-beat playlists, including “Party Hits,” “Afro Party Anthems,” “Get Turnt” and more. On the other hand, there are also playlists for people who want to have a low-key New Year’s Eve, with playlists like “Chill Hits,” “Comfort Zone” and “Chillout Lounge.” The New Year’s Hub also includes many DJ mixes from artists like Tiësto, Hannah Laing and Benny Benassi.

The company also announced that starting on January 1, users will find content to help them set their resolutions on the app’s Home page. Although Spotify didn’t provide specifics about what this content will look like, it will likely include things like workout and meditation playlists.

Spotify says its platform always sees some level of anticipation around the new year, and that shows in the playlists users put together. Last year, 82,000 New Year’s Eve playlists were created between Christmas and January 31, with nearly 40,000 created on the night itself. Pop, hip-hop, trap, k-pop and indie pop were the top genres played worldwide. Genres that saw the most significant rises in listeners were cumbia, discofox, volksmusik, schlager and partyschlager.

“Hey Ya!,” “Uptown Funk” and “Mr. Brightside” were all popular among these playlists. Many of the songs that gained more streams were New Year-specific tracks like Mariah Carey‘s rendition of “Auld Lang Syne – The New Year’s Anthem” and ABBA’s “Happy New Year,” which was in the lead with a 2,205% increase in plays.

Spotify wants to help you ring in 2023 with its New Year’s Hub by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

India said on Thursday that under its ongoing G20 presidency, it will prioritize the development of a framework for global regulation of unbacked crypto assets, stablecoins and decentralized finance and will possibly explore their “prohibition” in a potentially large setback for the nascent industry.

India began its year-long presidency of the Group 20 early this month. The group, which comprises 19 nations across continents and the EU, represents 85% of the world’s GDP. It also invites non-member countries including Singapore and Spain and international organizations such as World Bank and the IMF.

The Reserve Bank of India, the Indian central bank, said in a report today that crypto assets are highly volatile and exhibit high correlations with equities in ways that dispute the industry’s narrative and claims around the virtual digital assets being an alternative source of value due to their supposed inflation hedging benefits.

The Indian central bank warned that policymakers across the globe are concerned that the crypto sector may become more interconnected with mainstream finance and “divert financing away from traditional finance with broader effect on the real economy.”

The Indian central bank is among one of the most vocal critics of the crypto industry. RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das warned last week that private cryptocurrencies will cause the next financial crisis unless its usage is prohibited.

“Change in value in any so-called product is the function of the market. But unlike any other asset or product, our main concern with crypto is that it doesn’t have any underlying whatsoever. I think crypto or private cryptocurrency is a fashionable way of describing what is otherwise a 100% speculative activity,” he said in a conference.

Das said crypto owes its origin to the idea that it bypasses or breaks the existing financial system. “They don’t believe in the central bank, they don’t believe in a regulated financial world. I’m yet to hear a good argument about what public purpose it serves,” he said, adding that he holds the view that crypto should be prohibited.

India is among the nations that has taken a stringent approach with cryptocurrencies. Earlier this year, it began taxing virtual currencies, levying a 30% tax on the gainsand a 1% deduction on each crypto transaction.

The nation’s move, alongside the market downturn, has severely depleted the transactions that local exchanges CoinSwitch Kuber, backed by Sequoia India and Andreessen Horowitz, and CoinDCX, backed by Pantera, process in the nation.

Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, founder and chief executive of the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance, told TechCrunch in a recent interview that the firm doesn’t see India as a “very crypto-friendly environment.” He said the firm is attempting to relay its concerns to the local authority about the local taxation, but asserted that tax policies typically take a long time to change.

“Binance goes to countries where regulations are pro-crypto and pro-business. We don’t go to countries where we won’t have a sustainable business — or any business, regardless of whether or not we go,” he said.

Coinbase, which has backed both CoinDCX and CoinSwitch Kuber, launched its crypto platform in the country earlier this year but quickly rolled back the service amid a regulatory scare. Coinbase co-founder and chief executive Brian Armstrong said in May that the firm disabled Coinbase’s support for local payments infra UPI “because of some informal pressure from the [central bank] Reserve Bank of India.”

With over 600 million connected users, India is the second largest internet market globally. The nation, home to one of the world’s largest startup ecosystem, has attracted over $75 billion investment from the likes of Google, Meta, Sequoia, Lightspeed and Tiger Global in the past decade.

India to explore prohibition of unbacked crypto in its G20 presidency by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

For organizations that do a good chunk of their work through virtual meetings, simply hitting record or taking notes isn’t enough to capture everything that’s said. Some build their own meeting integrations to capture data, but that’s time-intensive and costly. Recall.ai helps with a unified API that currently works with Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Team, and can be used to build apps that (among other use cases) automatically fill out CRMs or prompt customer reps during support calls. The San Francisco-based startup announced today it has raised $2.7 million in seed funding.

Participants in the round include Y Combinator, Cathexis Ventures, Pioneer Fund, Rebel Fund, Bungalow Capital, SV Tech Ventures and Starling Ventures. Backing also came from individual investors like Sentry CTO David Cramer, Doppler CEO Brian Vallelunga, Grain CEO Mike Adams, BloomTech CEO Austen Allred and Runway co-founder Siqi Chen.

Recall.ai’s unified API accesses meeting data, including real-time video and audio, who meeting participants are, when they spoke and joined or left the meeting and when screen sharing started and stopped. The company is currently in private beta, and its API is used by about 50 companies in a wide range of industries, including sales, customer support, hiring, user research, translation, education and healthcare.

Before launching Recall.ai, co-founders David Gu and Amanda Zhu worked on a research tool that produced real-time transcription from meeting recordings. Gu told TechCrunch that a lot of his team’s engineering time was spent on building and maintaining meeting integrations, which made them realize that other companies that want to work with meeting data faced the same challenge.

The key problem Recall.ai is solving is accessing raw video and audio data from video conferencing platforms. Gu said it takes about a year for companies to build infrastructure and integrations on their own. But that’s not their only challenge — companies also have to host the infrastructure for processing, which can involve hundreds to thousands of servers. This is labor-intensive, since engineering teams have to monitor and scale everything. Recall.ai’s API not only makes it faster to build meeting integrations, but also means companies can abstract away infrastructure.

A couple examples of how Recall.ai’s customers are using its platform include one that is taking audio streams from Zoom and transcribing it, then translating it to produce real-time translations. Another is using Recall.ai to capture video and audio streams from sales meetings to automatically fill in CRM software.

Recall.ai is currently making revenue and monetizes by charging customers per minute of audio and video processed through its platform. Its plans for expansion include adding more video conferencing and telephony system integrations.

Recall.ai helps companies make the most of virtual meeting data by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

In 2022, the crypto community rose to new heights — and then it crashed. We noted this as early as June 2022, before the FTX fiasco (which we’re using as the catchall term for the crash, alleged fraud, bankruptcy, congressional hearing, Sam Bankman-Fried‘s arrest in the Bahamas, the call for his extradition, etc.).

However, this isn’t supposed to be an article chronicling FTX’s downfall from the past year — it’s a recap of our 2022 crypto coverage, which could also be seen as a Jacquelyn Melinek highlights reel with a feature from Alex Wilhelm.

Here’s some of our top 2022 crypto coverage:

Terra community passes proposal to revive LUNA cryptocurrency following stablecoin-led implosion

In May, LUNA nosedived, and the market followed suit. Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon shared a plan to revive the Terra Ecosystem, including the formation of a new blockchain. Jacquelyn noted: “The launch of LUNA 2.0 will be a test of whether the community is as strong as it says it is. But many are wary of trusting Kwon and the Terra team again after the LUNA and UST downfall.”

Ethereum drops more than 17% after ‘way overhyped’ Merge

In early to mid-September, whispers of “the Merge” were everywhere we turned an ear. A quick refresher: The Merge was a highly anticipated event where Ethereum shifted from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. It may have been overhyped.

Blue-chip NFT owners explore alternative uses as sales decline

During the most recent crypto bull market, the NFT subsector also rose to new heights. As NFT sales slowed, blue-chip NFT holders began looking for new ways to profit. For the uninitiated: The term “blue-chip NFTs” derives from “blue-chip stocks,” which often refer to the most valuable companies on the market. In this case, they’re the most desirable or high-value NFTs. What are they worth amid crypto winter?

Terra’s UST crash will make life harder for crypto as regulation looms

In May 2022, Terra UST crashed, which led to a push for crypto regulation. “UST is an algorithmic stablecoin mainly backed by its sister cryptocurrency, LUNA, but was also backed by bitcoin. Founder Do Kwon previously told TechCrunch that plans were in place to back it with other cryptocurrencies over time. It’s unclear if that road map is still in place for UST as it tries to recover from its downfall,” Jacquelyn wrote. To regain the trust of traders and holders, the next move would be regulation … right?

Making sense of OpenSea at a $13B valuation

At the start of 2022, OpenSea raised a $300 million round at a $13.3 billion valuation. Alex did a deep dive to figure out how the new (in January 2022) OpenSea valuation squared up with its revenues. You can follow along with Alex’s collection of data and computations to determine whether the company is underpriced or overpriced.

How TechCrunch+ followed the roller-coaster crypto market in 2022 by Miranda Halpern originally published on TechCrunch

With over $9 billion in assets under management, GGV Capital is one of venture capital’s largest and most prominent players. The 22-year-old firm invests in startups from seed to growth stages across a variety of sectors, including consumer, internet, enterprise/cloud and fintech.

This year was one of the most difficult the startup world has seen in some time, as it forced investors and founders alike to adapt to a drastically different market than they enjoyed in 2021.

To better understand GGV’s position during a challenging venture environment, I sat down with managing partner Hans Tung to get his thoughts on the state of investing today, why he believes that there are “many more large fintechs yet to be built” and that raising a down round “is not the end of the world.”

Principal Robin Li also joined the conversation, sharing why she thinks embedded fintech is going to play a crucial role in financial services in the coming years.

An investor for over two decades, Tung has backed the likes of publicly traded BNPL giant Affirm, real estate fintech Divvy Homes, IDwall, Karat, Rupeek, Mexico’s Stori and Turtlemint. Having seen a few cycles, Tung is perhaps less spooked by the current downturn than some other VCs. Li has led Karat Financial and Novo.

[Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.]

How has this year been for you as an active fintech investor?

Tung: We don’t try to time the market. So last year, we didn’t over-invest. There was a lot of internal push away from keeping up pace with others. I think it worked out well since we have plenty of dry powder left and more time to be deliberate this year. We also have time to double down on our existing portfolio as well. That said, we have probably slowed our pace of investing in our global portfolio by about 50% this year versus last year.

Why GGV Capital’s Hans Tung is OK with 2023 being ‘the year of down rounds’ by Mary Ann Azevedo originally published on TechCrunch