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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uolo, an Indian edtech platform that works with private K-12 schools to offer online learning programs to middle and low-income families, has raised $22.5 million in a funding round led by UAE-headquartered VC fund Winter Capital.

The vast majority of edtech startups operate in a business-to-consumer model and spend on ads to reach the parents and guardians of the students.

Uolo says it is reducing that cost by operating in a business-to-business-to-consumer model, working with private schools to let them offer online learning programs to their students and levy the charges as part of the school fees. The startup’s programs are also designed in tandem with the curricula of the partnered schools, making it easier for students to double down on learning the same lessons.

The Gurugram-based startup develops and provides tailor-made learning programs in coding and English speaking. Students can access these programs on their parents’ smartphones.

“We take edtech to the masses of India. And when we do that, the idea is that you make it cheap enough, affordable enough for people to be able to take it for their children,” said Pallav Pandey, chief executive of Uolo, in an interview with TechCrunch.

He said that the startup is able to provide its offerings to students at much more affordable prices.

Schools tying up with Uolo get an ERP platform called the Uolo School Platform for free. It works as a unified platform where schools can access fee management, report card management and attendance management on a single dashboard.

The ERP platform functions as an entry gate for Uolo as it allows the startup to create an ecosystem once schools start using it. This encourages parents or guardians to use the app to receive communications directly from schools — instead of using typical communication channels such as WhatsApp groups.

“What we have been able to do is get schools and students on one end of the platform, so now we need to get digital learning to flow through us,” Pandey said.

Founded in September 2020 by Pandey and his brother Ankur, Uolo has partnered with more than 8,500 schools across India and currently reaches 3.7 million students.

The $22.5 million funding has come through an equity-debt mix Series A round, seeing participation from Uolo’s existing investors Blume Ventures and new Dubai-based fund Morphosis Venture Capital — alongside Winter Capital. Although exact details of the equity and debt percentage involved were not disclosed, Pandey told TechCrunch that the debt element was in the form of optionally convertible debentures that would convert into equity over time.

The startup, which employs about 350 individuals,plans to utilize the investment to widen its reach to 50,000 schools across India over the next four years and expand its learning programs with courses across STEAM subjects in the coming months. For the latter part, it is looking to partner with education companies as well as people and entities developing high-quality content.

“The first wave of edtech companies in India have proven consumer interest in online education. However, they lacked a cost-effective distribution. We believe that there will be a new generation of edtech companies capable of building organic, low-cost distribution, allowing students to study at $10 per year rather than $10 per hour. Our investment in Uolo is based on our confidence in this type of company,” said Anton Farlenkov, Managing Director of Winter Capital, in a prepared statement.

India’s Uolo raises $22.5M to bring edtech to the masses by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to Atomico’s new State of European Tech 2022 report, France has taken the UK’s title as the third largest listed tech nation, with Britain moving down to fourth. Nothing to do with Brexit, of course… Meanwhile, Sista, the Paris-based organisation which campaigns for more finds for female founders recently closed €30m of an intended €100m fund to power its aims. It would appear France is definitely on the rise in startup and VC terms.

Further evidence of this thesis has emerged this week with the news that France-based IRIS Capital has reach the €110m first close for its new €150m venture fund (IRIS Venture IV), and is planning to hold a second close in 3Q 2023.

The new fund will be Seed and Series A investment focused, looking at France, Germany and across Europe. This is the fourth early-stage fund raised by IRIS. The fund will invest in Seed and Series A rounds, from €1m to €8m.

LPs include French conglomerates such as Orange, Publicis and Bpifrance, as well as newcomers including Fred Potter, founder of Netatmo, Yannis Yahiaoui, cofounder of Adot, Amirhossein Malekzadeh, cofounder of Logmatic, Grégoire Delpit, cofounder of ProcessOut, Patrick Asdaghi, founder of FoodCheri or Adrien Nussenbaum, cofounder of Mirakl.

Commenting, Julien-David Nitlech, Managing Partners at IRIS, said in a statement: “With this new Seed and Early-stage fund we intend to pursue our successful journey of selecting, backing, and scaling differentiated tech platforms developed by out of the ordinary founders who know their market well. To do so, we have structured a new team of investors bearing our selective DNA and methods.”

To date IRIS has invested in companies such as Shift Technology (insurtech), Talend (software), Kyriba (fintech), Lumapps (HR), Jedox (software), industry 4.0 and logistics experts such Exotec (logistics), Braincube (manufacturing software), Forto (freight management), Spinergie (offshore), platforms such as Virtuo (mobility), Yubo (social) and data specialists like Talon.one (marketing), Red Points (brand protection) or Scality (cloud). Newer investments include Spinergie in France, Helu in Austria and 2 more to be announced early next year.

France’s IRIS Capital reaches €110M first close for its new €150M venture fund by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch

There’s an ever-growing list of wearables that track people’s health, but what about a vehicle that monitors one’s blood pressure and heart rate with smart sensors and algorithms? That’s the vision of BeyonCa, a young super-premium electric vehicle startup founded by Weiming Soh, the Singaporean auto veteran who’s the current CEO of Renault China and helped bring Mercedes-Benz to China back in the 1990s.

The idea of tracking one’s health conditions inside a car perhaps sounds less wild if one considers how much time they spend driving. “Take Americans for example. They spend 70 billion hours a year driving cars, which makes 1 hour per day. That’s an enormous amount of time people spend in a car because of the spacious environment,” Shaoshan Liu, BeyonCa’s chief scientist and autonomous driving lead, who also founded the self-driving startup PerceptIn, said in an interview.

“We think it’s the best time to deliver this kind of [healthcare] services in the car,” he added. Still, I can’t help but question how many people want their luxury car to play the role of a family doctor.

But maybe there’s a market for BeyonCa’s targeted demographic of health-conscious, affluent consumers. While the startup won’t disclose its price range until its first model is ready to ship in a few years, Soh puts the company’s product in the same category as the Mercedes Benz S Class and BMW 7 Series, which generally have a starting price of around $100,000.

The startup finished its Series pre-A funding round in Q3 this year from investors including Dongfeng Motor, a Chinese state-owned automaker. When seeking investment, the firm was “at the same time open to both financial and investment partners that would provide more support,” said Soh.

EV as a service platform

Soh’s ambitions for smart vehicles extend beyond merely having AI voice assistants and autonomous driving capabilities. Software is “an important tool” for vehicles, but what eventually differentiates BeyonCa will be its “services”, said the founder.

Liu elaborated on the vision, explaining that the industry is entering the “third” stage of EV development.

“The first stage is electrification, such that you convert the car to be powered by electricity. Tesla is a pioneer in that. Then we enter the second stage of intelligence. Again Tesla is a pioneer, and then Chinese firms are catching up. Now we are entering the third stage, which I think is called the ecosystem, in which we provide different vertical services, very deep services. Health is one of these services.”

The chief scientist further compared the future of vehicles to smartphones today, arguing that smart cars will be able to offer a lot more than driving in the same way smartphones can now accomplish much more than their original purpose for calling.

BeyonCa’s super premium cars, which will be equipped with medical-grade sensors and radars, will detect the health conditions of the driver and passengers at all times using BeyonCa’s proprietary AI model. If the algorithms determine that the driver can no longer control the vehicle, smart driving will kick in. The well of data gleaned by the vehicle will then go to a team of in-house medical experts, who will be available through video calls and be able to refer physicians for further treatment if necessary.

Timeline

BeyonCa is unveiling the design of its first production car next spring while mass production is expected to take place in 2024. Unlike the “traditional” carmakers, “as a startup, we need to introduce the car to the market much earlier. We need to keep the market excited,” Soh said.

The firm plans to ship in both its home market China — one of the world’s largest premium auto markets — and abroad. It intends to have two factories. “We are a super premium car company, so we will most likely just have two factories in the world — one in China, and one outside. It can be in the Middle East, Europe, or Southeast Asia,” said Soh.

Soh is building BeyonCa against economic headwinds brought by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has significantly dampened the confidence of consumers and investors around the world. But he isn’t too worried, saying that when the economy is doing well, the startup can hasten development, but in times of an economic downturn, the company will simply need to “pace” itself.

Renault China boss is making super-premium EVs that monitor your health by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot is the hot new sensation in the tech town, garnering over a million users just days after the launch. The chatbot is delivering answers to a wide-range of questions, impressing many with its ability and speed while also sometimes leaving people amused and baffled with its take. You’ve likely seen scores of such screenshots on your Twitter timeline, and may have also captured and shared some answers and gotten in on the fun yourself. Now two developers — Steven Tey and Dom Eccelston — have made a Chrome extension called ShareGPT to make it easier to capture and share the AI’s answers with the world.

ShareGPT captures the full conversation with ChatGPT and generates a URL to share it with others. So instead of taking multiple screenshots of the conversation with the AI chatbot, you can directly share the URL (like this one).

Once you have installed the Chrome extension, head to the ChatGPT website and kickstart the conversation with the bot. After you have received the answer, you will see a Share button at the bottom. You can continue the chat or click on the Share button to generate a URL for the specific conversation.

The neat thing is that when you share the URL on Twitter, you will see a preview of the conversation with ChatGPT, so the visual element is not lost and people don’t necessarily need to head to the website to read short conversations.

ChatGPT, currently in research preview, is free to use. And while it has linguistic and factual limitations, it’s still a fun tool to use. It’s one of those tools that lets anyone try out AI’s prowess (or weaknesses) without having a lot of technical know-how.

ShareGPT lets you easily share your ChatGPT conversations by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch