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Autonomous vehicle technology may no longer be the fuel powering the hype machine. But companies applying the technology to agriculture, commercial and logistics applications are still attracting venture capital.

Take Outrider, a Golden, Colorado startup developing autonomous electric yard trucks, for example.

Distribution yards are the nerve center of the supply chain. Its where all those goods (like those ordered from Amazon and other e-commerce businesses) make the transition from long-haul trucks to warehouses, and eventually to the consumer. Workers today use diesel-powered yard trucks to move trailers filled with goods around the yard as well as to and from loading docks.

Outrider has developed an autonomous system that includes an electric yard truck, software to manage the operations and site infrastructure. While humans may still be needed at the distribution yard, the autonomous system handles the bulk of the work, including hitching and unhitching trailers, connecting and disconnecting trailer brake lines and monitoring trailer locations.

The revenue potential from this system — there are some 400,000 distribution yards in the U.S. alone — has caught the attention of a number of investors. Outrider recently closed a $73 million Series C round led by FM Capital and attracted new investors Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and NVIDIA’s venture capital group, NVentures. New investors B37 Ventures, Lineage Ventures, Presidio Ventures, the venture arm of Sumitomo Corporation and ROBO Global Ventures also joined along with existing backers Koch Disruptive Technologies and New Enterprise Associates.

Outrider has raised $191 million since its founding in 2017 under the name Azevtec.

The company has made some progress since its last raise in fall 2020. Outrider founder and CEO Andrew Smith told TechCrunch that the yard trucks have new hardware designed to handle harsh environments, including robotic arms. Outrider has 20 autonomous systems in use at customer sites and its test facility as the company finishes the final capabilities and proprietary safety mechanisms of the system, Smith said.

These final tweaks to the system will wrap up in 2023, he added. From there the focus will be launching commercial operations with its customers, which includes Georgia Pacific and other unnamed companies that have invested in joint product testing and pilot operations since 2019. Smith said Outrider’s customers represent more than 20% of all yard trucks operating in North America.

The new funds will be used to hire in the U.S. and internationally (beyond its 175-person workforce)and transition from testing and validation to commercial operations at scale, Smith said.

“It’s one thing to have a vehicle driving autonomously, it’s another thing to create a truly industrial system that can operate in a harsh environment over multiple years of time, 20 to 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” Smith said.” The productization of the system and the rolling in of these final capabilities will allow us to then scale to thousands of systems operating on Outrider software over the next few years.”

Outrider raises $73M to brings its autonomous electric yard trucks into the mainstream by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

The teenage market for apps is a tough nut to crack and stay relevant in. Just ask Snapchat. Equally, teens are going through a stage in life where almost every social interaction seems to carry portent of some kind of other. This would explain in part why apps like SendIt, NGL, and Nocapp (some are Snapchat connected tools) took off as ways for teens to anonymously comment on each other. And AskFM would probably like us all to forget the various suicides that occurred when it was released in its initial form, back in the day. (And you thought Instagram is bad for mental health…).

Meanwhile, somehow (somehow!?) a new startup has appeared with the idea that yet another app is going to help this dumpster fire of social interactions, but let’s hear them out before jumping to conclusions.

“Slay” bills itself as a “positive social media network for teenagers”. The reason we are talking about it today is that it’s grown like a weed after launching last year in Germany, where it reached Number 1 on the German iOS App Store four days after launch. It’s now claiming to have over 250,000 registered users and claims its gaining traction in other countries including the UK, where it recently launched.

So what’s the attraction here? When users open the app it shows users 12 questions which the user can only answer by choosing another user (from their school, class or peer group) to pay an anonymous compliment to (or “slay”). For example, the app may ask a user “Who inspires me to do my best?”. They can then choose from four other users from their school to pay this ‘slay’ to. They can then view compliments from other kids, provided they answer the 12 questions when logging on. The identity of those who sent the compliment remains hidden.

This reminds me of BeReal’s mechanic, where you can only see other people’s BeReal photos by uploading your own.

And Slay is also not dissimilar to Gas, the messaging platform popular among teens for its positive spin on social media, acquired by Discord yesterday. On Gas, anonymous polling is intended to boost users’ confidence.

The other reason Slay has popped onto the TC radar, is that its growth has attracted the interest of VCs.

It’s now raised a $2.63m (€2.5m) pre-seed funding round led by Accel. Also participating was 20VC. Additional investors including Supercell Co-Founder and CEO Ilkka Paananen, Behance founder Scott Belsky, football star Mario Götze, Kevin Weil (Scribble Ventures) and musician Alex Pall (The Chainsmokers).

Slay says it is aiming to reset the teen relationship with social apps by re-balancing things away from the negative sentiments on social platforms, by normalising the giving of compliments. It also says it’s been designed with safety, content moderation and teenage mental wellbeing built in. We shall see…

Digging into the app, one can see that it’s been built very simply as a ‘compliment app’. Whether that is going to be enough to keep users coming back is hard to say. Teenager behaviour is hard to second guess. Getting zero can also send a ‘signal’, for instance.

Suffice it to say, Slay claims it will “never sell or share personal data with third parties.” Given the history of social apps, let’s see how long this lasts.

There is also no direct messaging facility, although users will be able to add links to social media profiles, so clearly they will be able message each other eventually, off-app.

Adults are supposedly not allowed to ‘join’ schools, and approximate location is asked for to suggest nearby schools. Any questions and interactions are asked by the app, not by users themselves.

SLAY was founded in 2022 by a team of three 23-year old, Berlin-based co-founders: Fabian Kamberi, Jannis Ringwald and Stefan Quernhorst. The idea was Kamberi’s, who had been building consumer apps since he was a teenager, and says he was inspired by the experiences of his siblings struggled with the negativity of social media apps during the COVID-19 pandemic.

CEO and Co-founder Kamberi, told me via email: “We see Slay in the future not only as an anonymous polling app [referring to the aforementioned Gas], but as the go-to spot for teens to rediscover social interactions in various play modes.”

“Our app is similar to Gas, and their acquisition shows a great proof of what we have built and what is in store for the future in our space. However, apps that rely solely on anonymous Q&A, for example, carry a high cyberbullying risk, which – by contrast – we prevent through our rigorous content moderation as well as specially designed gamemodes,” he added.

But the question is, why does he think a social app can improve mental health when so many social apps have not?

“We have received thousands of feedback messages from users thanking us for making them feel valued in times of fast moving, negative social media interactions,” he told me.

He said the startup could well ship new features which might create more engagement but at the same time it might bring a risk for negativity: “So we focus very much on the individual experience that each user has, aiming to make it as positive as possible.” He said the startup’s job is “content safety.”

So what’s Slay’s business model? How will it make money? Kamberi says it will likely be premium features, services or tools which users pay for: “We are currently building several exclusive, paid play modes as well as add ons, which we will release through feedback cycles with users and supported by data.”

SLAY is available in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Julien Bek, Principal at Accel, added via a statement: “We’re extremely impressed by the SLAY app, both in its immediate popularity among teenagers and the team’s positive goal of improving teenage mental health in the digital world. Already, the SLAY team has seen almost half its active users use it every school day.”

German teens went crazy for this ‘compliments’ app, and now VCs are backing its next phase by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

Oro, an open source ecommerce platform co-created by Magento’s cofounder and former CTO, today announced it has raised $13 million in a strategic growth round of funding.

Founded in 2012, Los Angeles-based Oro’s platform constitutes a range of applications, including OroCommerce, its flagship B2B ecommerce platform for building storefronts and marketplaces; OroMarketplace, an end-to-end management platform specifically for marketplace businesses; a customer relationship management platform (CRM) called OroCRM; and OroPlatform, a rapid web app development platform.

While similar players in the space such as Shopify and Magento largely (though not exclusively) focus on B2C brands, Oro targets its ecommerce infrastructure squarely at B2B companies such as manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and wholesalers. This, according to Oro CEO and cofounder Yoav Kutner, is more complex to execute than B2C.

“B2B ecommerce has a very different dynamic to B2C commerce — instead of high-volume transactional purchases with a rotating cast of consumers, B2B brands focus on high-value deals with a smaller group of loyal customers,” Kutner told TechCrunch. “As such, B2B digital commerce solutions need to be able to accommodate the complex needs of business buyers, with large orders, split shipments, customized quotes, and many other capabilities, while also supporting rich ongoing customer engagement and personalized offerings.”

But on top of all that, B2B buyers now expect the kind of usability they have become accustomed to with B2C platforms they may use elsewhere in their everyday lives, which means that B2B merchants have had to up their game.

“One of the key challenges is delivering robust and feature-rich enterprise-grade sales tools, while also delivering a consumer-grade purchasing experience, with sleek and streamlined discovery, purchasing, and tracking options,” Kutner added.

Things get even more complex when you consider that a single seller might have completely different and distinct markets for their goods. Kutner cited an example involving a glassware manufacturer, who might have to introduce separate sales portals targeting the medical and catering sectors, for instance. This also might require the seller to set different pricing structures for each vertical, something that Oro enables through a so-called “dynamic pricing engine” that automatically calculates new prices or discounts based on pre-set rules and business logic defined by the seller.

“Coordinating those operations behind the scenes brings special challenges for B2B companies and ecommerce providers,” Kutner said.

The story so far

Alongside two cofounders Jary Carter and Dima Soroka, Kutner launched Oro a little more than a decade ago shortly after leaving Magento which he’d sold to eBay the previous year for around $180 million. Adobe ended up buying Magento for $1.68 billion in 2018 and rebranded it as Adobe Commerce.

Oro is a similar proposition to Magento in several ways, perhaps chief among them being its open source foundations which affords more flexibility over things like hosting and deployment, while also allowing companies to tweak and adapt things to their own use-cases.

This means that companies can host Oro on their own infrastructure if they wish, or deploy it across any combination of on-premises or public and private clouds.

“Users can also easily and rapidly switch between deployment models — for example, if an on-premises customer needs to rapidly scale up, and leverage private or public cloud infrastructure in response to a spike in web traffic,” Kutner said. “And our hybrid approach also puts customers in control of their data: if they want to run most workloads in the cloud, but operate their own secure data center, for instance, Oro makes that entirely possible. There’s really no limit to the ways that customers can leverage our hosting options to suit their needs.”

Prior to now, Oro had raised $12 million back in 2016, and with another $13 million in the bank, Kutner said that the company plans to “shake up the digital commerce industry for many years to come.”

Oro’s latest cash injection was led by Zubr Capital, with participation from existing investor Highland Europe.

Oro, an open-source B2B ecommerce platform from Magento’s cofounder, raises $13M by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

A day after launching an annual subscription for Twitter Blue, the social media company has extended the paid plan to users on Android. Individuals will have to pay $11 per month if they buy the Twitter Blue plan through Android. The pricing, same as that on iOS, is higher than the $8 offering for those who subscribe through a web browser.

It’s likely that Elon Musk & co. wants to avoid paying fees for in-app purchases to Google (as they did with Apple). So users will have to pay more.

To recap, the Twitter Blue plan is now available across platforms in six countries: the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.

Twitter Blue subscribers currently get features likethe blue verification mark, longer video uploads, andpriority ranking in conversation replies. Other features include a thread reader, the ability to edit tweet and custom icons and themes.

Twitter launched its annual subscription plan at $84 a year on Monday. It is the cheapest way to get the Blue subscription plan, but given how the company has pushed and pulled features, there is no guarantee that the current set of benefits will be available for a year.

Now that Twitter’s new paid plan is available on all platforms, we have to wait and see if it proves to be the big money maker that Musk has hoped for. Earlier this week, Financial Times reported that Twitter will be due for interest payment on the loans worth nearly $13 billion that Musk took to purchase the company by the end of the month. So Twitter would want its subscription revenues to up stat.

Twitter Blue is now available on Android at the same price as iOS by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

In recent years, working for, or banking with, a traditional financial institution was decidedly uncool. Far cooler was working for or banking with one of the many fintech startups that seemed to thumb their nose at stodgy bank brands.

Then the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates, stocks tanked, and a lot of fintech outfits that appeared to be doing well began looking far less hardy and hale. The question begged now is whether fintech as a theme has lost its mojo.

According to VCs Mercedes Bent of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Victoria Treyger of Felicis, and Jillian Williams of Cowboy Ventures, the answer is resoundingly “no.” In a panel discussion hosted by this editor late last week in San Francisco, however, the investors didn’t sugarcoat things. Led by moderator Reed Albergotti — technology editor of the news platform Semafor — all three acknowledged a variety of challenges in the industry right now, even as they outlined opportunities.

On the challenges front, startups and their backers clearly got ahead of themselves during the pandemic, Albergotti suggested, observing that fintech was “going gangbusters” when “everyone was working from home” and “using lending apps and payment apps” but that times have turned “tough” as Covid has faded into the background.

“SoFi is down,” he said. “PayPal is down.” He brought up Frank, the college financial aid platform that was acquired by JPMorgan in the fall of 2021 by blatantly lying to the financial services giant about its user base. Said Albergotti, “They don’t really have 4 million customers.”

Williams agreed, but said there are positives and negatives for fintechs right now. On the positive side, she said, “from a consumer standpoint, it’s still rather early days” for fintech startups. She said that “demand and desire from the consumer” still exists for new and better alternatives to traditional financial institutions” based on the data she has seen.

More problematic, said Williams, is “that a lot of these companies have to fix their business models, and a lot of the ones that went public probably should not have. A lot of the usage is still there, but some of the fundamentals need to be shifted.” (Many outfits, for example, spent too heavily on marketing, or right now face rising delinquency costs, having used comparatively loose underwriting standards compared with some of their traditional counterparts.)

Further, Williams added, “The banks are not dumb. I do think they have awakened and continue to wake up to things they can do better.”

Treyger also voiced concerns. “Certain sectors of financial services are going to have a brutal year ahead,” she said, “and in particular lending. We will see very large losses coming through in lending . . . because unfortunately, it’s like a triple whammy: consumers lose their jobs, interest rates [rise] and the cost of capital is higher.”

It’s a challenge for a lot of players, including bigger outfits, Treyger said, noting that “even the big banks announced that they are doubling their loan loss reserves.” Still, she said, it could prove worse for young fintechs, many of which have “have not managed through a downturn — they started lending in the last six years or so” and which is where she expects to “see the most casualties.”

Meanwhile, Bent, who leads a lot of Lightspeed’s Latin America investments and is on the boards of two Mexico-based fintechs, seemed to suggest that while U.S. fintechs may be facing serious headwinds, fintech outfits outside the U.S. are continuing to perform well, perhaps because there were fewer alternatives to begin with.

It “just depends which country you’re in,” said Bent, noting that the U.S. has “one of the highest adoptions of fintech and wealth management services, whereas in Asia, they are actually much higher in lending and their consumer fintech services.”

It’s not all doom and gloom, said all three. Treyger recounted, for example, that before becoming a VC, when she was part of the founding team at since-acquired SMB lender Kabbage. There, “once a month, we would meet with the new innovation arm that has just been formed by bank XYZ,” she said with a laugh. “And they would want to learn how you get ideas and how to drive innovation.”

What “happens in a downturn is CEOs and CFOs cut back on the areas that are not critical,” Treyger continued, “and I think what’s going to happen, is that all of these innovation arms are going to be cut.”

When they are, she said, it will create “significant opportunity for fintechs that are building products that basically add to the bottom line.” CFOs, after all, are “all about profitability. So, how do you reduce fraud rates? How do you improve payment reconciliation? That’s where I think there is a lot of opportunity in 2023.”

If you’re a fintech founder, investor, or regulator, you might want to catch the full conversation — which also touches on regulation, talent in the industry, and crypto — below.

A lot of fintechs “have to fix their business models,” say VCs who invest in fintechs by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch

PhonePe’s valuation has more than doubled to over $12 billion in a new funding round as the Indian fintech giant readies for life without parent firm Flipkart. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup said it has raised $350 million and anticipates raising up to another $650 million as part of the round in a remarkable feat at a time when fundraising activity has slowed down globally as investors become cautious.

General Atlantic led the first tranche of the investment. The company has not assigned a name to the funding round, but said it was valued at $12 billion pre-money. TechCrunch reported last month that PhonePe was finalizing a large funding round at $12 billion pre-money valuation.

$12 billion is a staggering valuation for PhonePe, which was valued at $5.5 billion in late 2020. PhonePe currently does less than $450 million in annual revenue. Publicly-traded rival Paytm, which expects to hit $1 billion in revenue in the financial year ending March 2023, currently has a market cap of $4.2 billion.

Walmart, a majority investor in PhonePe, is expected to participate in the current funding round, according to a source familiar with the matter.

PhonePe, to be sure, is a clear leader in the the mobile payments market on UPI, a network built by a coalition of retail banks in India. UPI has become the most popular way Indians transact online, and processes over 7 billion transactions a month. Seven-year-old PhonePe commands about 40% of all these transactions. The startup says it has over 400 million registered users and more than 35 million offline merchants rely on the platform.

A concern for PhonePe’s growth was Indian regulator enforcing a market cap check on each player, but the deadline for the new guidelines was extended last month and now won’t come into effect until 2025, giving PhonePe another two years of fast-growth.

“I would like to thank General Atlantic and all our existing and new investors for the trust they have placed in us. PhonePe is proud to help lead India’s country-wide digitization efforts and believes that this powerful public-private collaboration has made the Indian digital ecosystem a global exemplar. We are an Indian company, built by Indians, and our latest fundraise will help us further accelerate the Government of India’s vision of digital financial inclusion for all,” said Sameer Nigam, founder and chief executive of PhonePe, in a statement.

“We look forward to delivering the next phase of our growth by investing in new business verticals like Insurance, Wealth Management and Lending, while also facilitating the next wave of growth for UPI payments in India.’”

PhonePe was founded in 2015 and within a year was acquired by e-commerce giant Flipkart. The two parted ways last month and now Flipkart no longer owns a stake in the payments firm. The separation will have some impact on Flipkart’s valuation. In July last year, Flipkart Group raised $3.6 billion at a valuation of $37.6 billion. Flipkart doesn’t plan to re-enter the mobile payments market, TechCrunch earlier reported.

PhonePe said it will deploy the new funds to make significant investments in infrastructure, including in the development of data centers and build more financial services. The company also plans to invest in new businesses, including Insurance, wealth management, and lending.

“Sameer, Rahul and the PhonePe management team have pursued a clear mission to drive payments digitalization and significantly broaden access to financial tools for the people of India. They remain focused on driving adoption of inclusive products developed on the open API based ‘India stack,’” said Shantanu Rastogi, Managing Director and Head of India at General Atlantic, in a statement.

“This vision is aligned with General Atlantic’s longstanding commitment to backing high-growth businesses focused on inclusion and empowerment. We are excited to partner with the PhonePe team to help enable the next generation of digital innovation in India.”

(More to follow)

India’s PhonePe tops $12 billion valuation in new funding by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch