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“This is the next 20 years of my life. This is not like, build the company in four or five years and sell to Google. This is a big, long journey.”

Matt Rogers, who co-founded Nest with Tony Fadell back in 2010, was talking about his new startup, and he thinks it’ll be big. He’s probably right, but it’s also trash, in a way.

Today, Rogers, co-founder Harry Tannenbaum and the rest of the team at Mill Industries are launching their first product. At first glance, it doesn’t look like much, maybe a sleek trash can. That’s not an unfair assessment, but the Mill bin is a lot more than just a receptacle.

Mill’s kitchen bin gobbles up food scraps, dries them out and grinds them to bits overnight. It also neutralizes odors with a charcoal filter. When the bin is full, Mill automatically mails a box to return the waste back to the company, where it’s cleaned, sifted, pasteurized and bagged to be sold as chicken feed to farmers.

The goal is to eliminate the climate impact of food waste.

“This feels like the most tractable of all climate problems,” Rogers said. “We don’t need to invent nuclear fusion. We don’t need to figure out how to build a low weight aviation fuel. It’s just like, don’t put food in the trash.”

Nest co-founder Matt Rogers’ new startup is trash by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

GoMechanic has laid off a significant number of its workforce as the Sequoia India-backed startup struggles to raise funds amid serious concerns of accounting troubles, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The Gurgaon-headquartered startup has cut 70% of the workforce and asked the remaining staff to work without pay for three months, Indian news outlet The Morning Context reported Tuesday, citing unnamed sources.

GoMechanic did not respond to a request for comment.

The move comes as GoMechanic struggles to raise funds for over a year despite advanced stages of discussions with several investors. The startup was in talks early last year to raise a round of funding led by Tiger Global at over $1 billion valuation, TechCrunch reported.

The talks did not materialize into a deal after some discrepancy was found during the due diligence process, the source said. The startup later engaged with a number of investors including Malaysia’s Khazanah to raise a large round.

This round is also unlikely to go through as serious discrepancies have been found in its books, the source said, requesting anonymity speaking to the press. A recent probe into the startup, which counts Tiger Global among its backers, found that several of its garages were fictitious among other issues, the source said.

Sequoia India-backed GoMechanic faces severe trouble by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

On the heels of raising a big round of funding at a $1 billion valuation last week, DeepL is taking the wraps off a new language product, the first extension for a startup that made its name from its popular AI-based translation tools.

Write is a new tool that fixes your writing — catching grammar and punctuation mistakes, offering suggestions for clarity and more creative phrasing, and (soon) giving you the option to change your tone. Write is based on the same neural network that powers DeepL’s translator, and significantly, it is another step ahead in how artificial intelligence technologies, specifically those in natural language processing, are being used to alter how humans are communicating with each other, a big theme at the moment.

The functionality of Write may sound a little familiar to you. That’s because DeepL’s new service is going head to head with a popular product already on the market: Grammarly is currently leaned on by more than 30 million daily active users and some 50,000 businesses and teams.

If you don’t use Grammarly, chances are that you at least know about it — its YouTube ads are (in)famously ubiquitous. And at last count, despite much nay-saying from VCs about the pitfalls of features versus platforms, Grammarly, as of 2021, saw a huge spike in its valuation from $1 billion to a whopping $13 million.

DeepL’s mantra is to embrace competition and use it as a motivator to do things better. In its primary (and before today, sole) product, the company has long competed against two of the biggest tech companies in the world, Microsoft and Google, which both offer real-time translators for individuals and as a service used by third parties. (And that’s before considering the myriad other options out there for real-time translation.)

“We are always in race mode,” CEO and founder Jarek Kutylowski said of its flagship translation service. “We are accustomed to big adversaries, and part of our culture is to push forward through that.” Indeed, for many, DeepL’s neural network-based translator works better than these others, capturing certain nuances and meanings that rivals have missed.

That approach, it seems, is now the template for how DeepL will tackle new product frontiers, starting first with Write.

Launching initially in English and German and as a monolinguistic tool (you put in English writing and get English results), the plan is to see how Write is used across these two languages first, both to improve them and to figure out how to develop Write, whether that means new features or new languages. As with its basic translation tools, you can use Write free without needing to register (as you do with Grammarly to use its free tools).

Options, it seems, are at the crux of the service: in addition to snagging basic grammatical and punctuation errors, the focus will be on generating choices for users covering style, tone, phrasing and diction, rather than re-writing everything that’s entered into Write. In doing that, you might ask if Write is showing its limitations, or if its creators are making a conscious choice of where AI can help people do their best work. That’s a debate that definitely has opened up with the release of OpenAI’s GPT service, which takes a basic brief and writes everything for you based on that.

My initial test-drive of Write was a mixed bag and reveals that there is still room for learning and improvement. Write, ironcially, wasn’t very good (yet?) at guessing what I meant below when I wrote “right” instead of “write.”

But it did a good enough job of fixing my misuse of good.

Of all the directions that a AI-based translation startup could choose to go for its next product, Kutylowski told me that DeepL decided to work on Write because of patterns that it started to notice in how its translation product was being used (or misused as the case is here).

“People were misusing the translator to write texts in first in a different language from English, and then plugging them back into English assuming that they cold get the AI to write a better original version,” he said. The team decided to build Write to essentially improve that and cut out the translation middle step, which was skewing the results anyway.

The “AI writing companion,” as Kutylowski describes it, is aimed both at native speakers but perhaps even more at people who write passably if slightly awkwardly in a second language and are hoping to give their words that extra native shine. “The idea is we could help a student improve a grade by one,” in a manner of speaking, he added.

The next level of development, he said, will be to focus on the elusive qualities of tone, “not content but phrasing, creative input,” he said — but critically doing so while continuing to anchor that content in a person’s own words and ideas, not those generated by the AI from scratch.

DeepL takes aim at Grammarly with the launch of Write, to clean up your prose by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

The UK government has confirmed it will expand criminal liability powers contained in draft online safety legislation which is currently making its way through parliament with the aim of preventing platforms from intentionally flouting child-safety rules.

The current version of the (already muchamended) Online Safety Bill, which is set to return to parliament today for the report stage ahead of its third reading, does include criminal liability for execs who fail to comply with duties to provide the regulator, Ofcom, with information it requests from them.

However the government has now bowed to pressure from some its own backbenches — as well as calls from online child safety campaigners — to include expanded criminal liability provisions by making senior management at in-scope platforms criminally liable for repeat breaches of child safety duties.

This means that Ofcom will get additional powers that could — at least on paper — result in jail time for social media bosses who deliberately flout child safety rules.

The Telegraph broke the news of the looming government reversal late yesterday, reporting that Michelle Donelan, the secretary of state in charge of digital issues, had accepted changes to the bill which will make senior managers at tech firms criminally liable for persistent breaches of their duty of care to children.

A spokesman for the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) confirmed the development, telling TechCrunch that DCMS minister Paul Scully will set out details in a speech to parliament this afternoon. The development follows meetings between Donelan and backbench Conservative Party MPs who, in recent weeks, had been pushing a more wide-ranging amendment to expand criminal liability for senior execs.

The DCMS spokesman said backbench MPs have agreed to withdraw their amendment in exchange for the government introducing its amendment to expand criminal liability provisions.

The opposition Labour Party had signalled support for the backbenchers’ amendment, meaning the government could have faced an embarrassing defeat on the bill — hence it’s backing down to avoid a rebellion.

Backbench Conservative MPs have argued the legislation needs more teeth if it’s to rein in powerful tech giants and ensure children are protected from exposure to harmful content, with MPs pointing to other sectors — such financial services or construction — that already have criminal liability for senior execs and questioning why the execs in the tech sector should get a free pass.

In other recent changes late last year, the government revised the bill to remove a clause related to legal but harmful content — in response to concerns the legislation could have a chilling effect on freedom of expression.

However that move was decried by child safety campaigners and appears to have fuelled the backbench dissent on criminal liability.

The wording of the government amendment has not yet been published but DCMS’ spokesman emphasized that the expanded criminal liability will only apply for repeated breaches of child safety duties in the legislation — describing the target as execs who “go rogue” and “willingly ignore” Ofcom’s investigations and enforcement of child safety rules.

So a sort of ‘Elon Musk liability clause’, if you will.

The backbenchers’ proposed amendment would have gone further than that — extending criminal liability for any breaches of child safety duties. So the government appears to have won a concession by squeezing liability to deliberate breaches only. And DCMS’ spokesman suggested the amendment is “more targeted and proportionate to the risks” than the one proposed by rebel MPs.

The liability will kick in for senior management “if they repeatedly and knowingly and willingly ignore Ofcom’s enforcement notices in relation to their safety tech duties”, the DCMS spokesman added. “It will be commensurate to other senior manager liability provisions that are currently in law elsewhere… Senior manager liability was currently already in the bill if they failed to give Ofcom information when it was asking for it.”

“We’re confident that it won’t affect the UK’s attractiveness as a place to invest. Because it won’t penalize responsible and reactive tech bosses who are focused on making sure their platforms are safe. This is about people who are deliberately and willingly going against what Ofcom are telling them to do to make their sites safer for kids,” the spokesman also claimed.

“So it gives tech bosses a lot more certainty about when this could be used. And… as ever, with the fines that are in the bill — with Ofcom’s powers to fine them, with Ofcom’s powers to block access to sites [that break the law], these are a suite of powers that Ofcom has that it’s been very clear it will only use these in the worst case scenarios. In the extreme cases where it has to use these powers it will but it’s got a load of other options to use before that point.”

Since the deadline for introducing amendments in the House of Commons has passed, the government’s amendment to the bill will be introduced when scrutiny moves to the House of Lords next month — so full details remain to be seen.

We asked DCMS whether the expanded criminal liability provision for senior management will apply only to larger platforms (so called “category 1” services) — or whether all in-scope services (so, potentially, tens of thousands of companies and/or entities that provide user-to-user services) will face this risk — but the spokesman was unable to confirm how broadly the change will apply at this time.

While child safety campaigners are likely to welcome the government’s change of heart on beefing up criminal liability on tech bosses, digital rights groups are likely to be more cautious over risks to freedom of expression, with groups like the ORG also warning about the impact of compulsory age-gating on websites to access to content and to web users’ privacy.

Tech bosses who willingly flout UK online child safety rules to face criminal liability by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

Soundboxes — hardware used by merchants that emits sounds every time a mobile payment is made — have taken off in India, where point of sale activity can get busy and voice alerts from the soundbox help alert multitasking shopkeepers and assistants to a transaction going through. Now, to keep pushing ahead to build out its own payments business in the world’s second-largest internet market, Google is getting in on the act.

The internet giant, which is currently one of the mobile transaction leaders in India with Google Pay, is piloting a soundbox of its own in the country to alert sellers of confirmations for UPI payments — a mobile payment standard developed and now ubiquitous in India for instant payments and transfers between banks, or two mobile users, or a customer and a merchant. With UPI payments, providers typically do not take any cut on UPI transactions, so soundboxes have emerged not just as a convenience for merchants, but as a monetizing tool for payments providers, too.

Sources tell us that Google has started distributing its white-labeled speakers — branded Soundpod by Google Pay — in a few markets across North India, including New Delhi, working initially with a limited group of shopkeepers. Google’s soundboxes come with a QR code on the front — linked to the business owner’s bank-registered phone number — which can be used to make any UPI-based payment. These Soundpods are being built by Amazon-backed ToneTag, TechCrunch has learned.

The hardware features a built-in speaker that announces payment confirmations in different languages. Like its competitors’ soundboxes, Google’s device also includes a small LCD panel that shows the payment amount, battery and network status and manual controls. The soundbox is accompanied by a QR code of a merchant linked with their Google Pay for business account. Users can use any UPI-based app to make a payment by scanning the code. Typically, these soundboxes don’t support NFC payment as tap-and-pay is not a popular method for transactions in India. Plus, a lot of low-end smartphones don’t have integrated NFC hardware.

People familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that Google is distributing the speakers to selected merchants without any additional cost. In some instances, Google Pay representatives have given merchants a timeframe of some days to receive and set up the speakers at their registered location.

Google’s move into this piece of hardware is somewhat overdue.

The search giant has been slogging it out in India’s crowded payments landscape for some time now, and while a soundbox may sound novel to people outside of India, in the country it’s quickly become tablestakes in the mobile payments game. Google Pay competes directly with Paytm,Walmart-owned PhonePe and Tiger Global-backed BharatPe — all of which have already launched their own branded soundboxes with support for multiple languages.

That Google has had no presence on the soundbox front speaks (no pun intended) to how it has struggled to build fast enough to keep up with its rivals, and arguably to meet consumer demands in a timely way, too.

Roadside sellers, small merchants and hawkers have started using payment soundboxes to get audio confirmation of customer payments. And while the Google Pay for Business app already has an audio notification function, and Google also lets a business add an agent number so the agent can receive a confirmation on their phone; these features might not be helpful for a shop with multiple attendants and a loud environment, or where the cashier is not using a smartphone or tablet to facilitate transactions. In this scenario, a device that “announces” payments loudly can be useful.

Soundboxes also serve other roles to promote more and faster transactions for merchants. They typically support different languages — critical for a multilingual country like India — offer multi-day battery life and a quick daily transaction summary.

A Google spokesperson declined to comment for this story, but when we asked Sharath Bulusu, the director of product management for Google Pay at Google, about the development at the sidelines of a Google India event in December, he did not deny the effort and replied that the company piloted “all sorts of things.”

“If the person doesn’t have a smartphone, and they’re running a small business, the chances [are] that they will actually pay for a speaker product,” he said. “You can look up publicly available prices that Paytm has been using… I think the chances are low. So, that is not the way to solve it,” he said when asked whether Google targets the soundbox merchants who don’t have smartphones.

“But do we want to solve for that user? Yes,” he added.

Fintech startups take a low upfront fee and a monthly rental from merchants using their soundbox solutions. However, they also sometimes give the device away for free to many sellers to get them onboard. Paytm charges an average rental of $1.53 (125 Indian rupees) per month, while PhonePe charges $0.60 (49 Indian rupees) per month. The charges are relative to the merchant size and promotional schemes offered by agents.

According to data from the UPI-umbrella organization National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), UPI transactions have seen significant growth, reaching 7.82 billion in December with a value of $157 billion. This represents a nearly 100% increase in transaction volume and a 55% increase in transaction value compared to December 2021. But despite this growth, companies facilitating UPI payments do not have a direct means of monetizing these transactions as they do not require merchants to pay a merchant discount rate or a small transaction fee.

Fintech companies have advocated for introducing transactional fees to change this model. Last week, the government announced spending $320 million to promote UPI transactions and its indigenous RuPay cards. However, the companies still have no direct avenue to generate revenues from UPI transactions.

As UPI has so far been a no-fee payments network, fintech players in this market offering compatible apps have to rely on other sources of revenue, such as lending and speaker rentals. In 2021, Google Pay started monetizing its service through user data, almost three and a half years after launching it in India.

Paytm was the first in the race to introduce soundboxes, which it did in 2020. That early mover status has been to its advantage so far: it is now a leader in the soundbox category, with the company claiming to have distributed more than 5.8 million devices to date. Earlier this month, the Indian payment company claimed it had distributed 1 million soundboxes each in its last two quarters.

Last September, Paytm said that its soundbox devices processed 5 billion transactions in FY 2022. A note from brokerage firm CSLA published last November noted that soundbox accounts for the company’s 38% net payment revenue.

Both Walmart-owned PhonePe and BharatPe launched their soundboxes last year. Last November, PhonePe said it deployed 1 million payment speakers across the country.

In addition to soundboxes, companies such as Google and Paytm provide businesses with QR code stickers and banners for easy UPI payments. However, there has been intense competition in the UPI market, as companies aim to reach the masses for small-ticket transactions, even without direct revenue generation. This is because the large user base can later be converted to customers for other products and services.

Per the National Payments Corporation of India, PhonePe and Google Pay command nearly 85% of the total UPI market in terms of transactions and own over 81% of the total UPI transaction volume. The government had planned to limit their market domination and provide other participants an opportunity to gain some share by setting a threshold of 30% of total UPI transactions per month. However, this rule was recently postponed until 2025.

Many merchants are eager to adopt the soundboxes once they understand their features, but some choose to return them once companies begin charging a rental fee. That points also to the issue of transparency and whether providers are being clear with customers over how fees are charged.

“I do not want it once I understood that the device is charging me over a hundred rupees a month just for speaking out payment updates,” said a chemist shop owner using a Paytm soundbox until last month.

Companies including PhonePe have begun taking cancellation fees in response to this behavior. Google’s model of how it will differentiate the game to retain merchants is yet to be revealed.

Google is piloting its own ‘soundbox’ in India for merchants to get audio-based payment alerts by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Alice Delahunt believes the future of fashion is in web3 and created Syky (pronounced “psy-key”) to put the wheels in motion.

She launched the company in November after a career in marketing at luxury fashion houses, serving in roles including chief digital and content officer at Ralph Lauren and digital and social marketing director at Burberry.

In 2017, Delahunt was at Ralph Lauren and had her first look at the blockchain, but it wasn’t until years later while working to pioneer some digital wardrobe projects with companies, like Snap, Bitmoji and Roblox, that she had an opportunity to see that web3 was going to be “more than a niche community” for luxury fashion.

“It felt like there was potential for virtual fashion and digital fashion to really take off,” she told TechCrunch. “I believe that the luxury fashion houses of tomorrow are being built today.”

That’s when Delahunt left Ralph Lauren and started developing Syky, which she said will serve as an incubator, marketplace and social community for the next generation of fashion designers and consumers.

As my colleague, Dominic-Madori Davis recently noted, “if there is one industry that could use web3, that industry is fashion,” especially when it comes to taking the industry in a new direction or helping it become more sustainable.

This is much of Delahunt’s focus. Her company’s name was inspired by the mythological Greek goddess of soul, Psyche, who she said personified “how designers use fashion to express the intangible parts of ourselves and themselves.”

“Designers inspire us to dream through fashion,” Delahunt added. “And those dreams come from the innermost parts of our psyche, so it was important for me for the name to reflect that.”

The company is kicking off the community part of its platform by releasing its first NFT, called The Keystone, of which 987 will be available on January 20. Fifty Keystones will be reserved for and granted to aspiring designers, Delahunt said.

The Keystone is a membership pass that provides exclusive access to Syky’s membership space, where they can network and collaborate with other creators and be able to attend digital and in-person fashion events. Keystone holders will also be the first to hear about designer collection drops, company alpha and beta feature releases and partner projects. In addition, they will receive periodic insights and reports on fashion and technology.

Syky is still very much in its early stages, but is buoyed by a $9 million Series A investment, led by Seven Seven Six, which also included Brevan Howard Digital, Leadout Capital, First Light Capital Group and Polygon Ventures.

The investment marks Seven Seven Six’s foray into web3 fashion, and Alexis Ohanian told TechCrunch via email that the attraction to Syky came from his obsession with the intersection of technology and culture.

“Creating and growing Reddit gave me a front-row seat to the power of culture creation through technology, even if it’s internet culture, and fashion is one more core element to that,” Ohanian added.

Meanwhile, Delahunt intends to deploy the new capital into building up the Syky team, incubating the designers into the community and on product and technology development.

She plans for the future marketplace to be a revenue driver for the company. It will be a place for emerging designers and unestablished designers to sell and trade their collections with consumers. It will also be a place where designers and consumers can curate spaces to showcase their fashion passions.

Delahunt was secretive about some of the next steps of the company, which includes an announcement for designers in February, and another part of the platform launching in the second quarter of this year.

“We’re going to build the luxury space environment in the digital world and then in the physical world,” Delahunt added.

Luxury fashion meets blockchain on Syky, the Seven Seven Six-backed web3 platform by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

In an age when almost everything can be bought online, watch resale is done in a surprisingly archaic way, namely, face-to-face with little price transparency. Wristcheck, a startup based out of Hong Kong, is taking a shot at digitizing the industry.

Traditional secondhand watch dealing is a “buy low sell high” business that often puts the buyer and seller in a “predatory” position, says Austen Chu, co-founder and CEO at Wristcheck, in an interview. An auction house, for example, typically charges the buyer up to 26% and up to 12% for sellers in transaction fees, he says.

“There’s no standardized way for buying and selling in the luxury watch space. Part of the reason is the high barrier to entry because it’s a super knowledge-based hobby,” the founder observes.

In comparison, Wristcheck takes 8% from the seller and 4% from the buyer. Rather than buying watches from sellers upfront, Wristcheck acts as a consignment platform and does away with inventory costs. The platform allows users to put in a bidding price for a watch they want — buyers know what sellers net, and sellers know what buyers pay.

The startup had been bootstrapping for the last three years or so until closing its first outside investment recently. It raised $5 million in a funding round led by Gobi Partners, a prominent Chinese venture capital firm that has in recent years focused more on the Greater Bay Area, which encompasses megacities like Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Singapore-based K3 Ventures also participated in the round.

Wrist awareness

Ever since he was given his first watch — a Flik Flak — at the age of five, Chu has been obsessed with watches. But collecting fine watches, like artworks, is too expensive for most young people, so the hobby is normally associated with an older, older crowd.

Wristcheck is attracting a different demographic. Forty-three percent of its customers are under 30 years old, according to Chu. While he’s not able to disclose the firm’s revenue size, he says the platform has sold “multiple watches that transacted over a million USD.” All told, Wristcheck has gathered a “community” of 80,000 members, meaning people it has interacted with online and at offline events.

“We see [Wristcheck] as the future for watch enthusiasts who can’t really get anything from retail,” Chu says. More young consumers are getting into watches, he adds, partly thanks to Apple. Contrary to the popular belief that Apple Watch spelled the end for the luxury watch industry, Chu argues that it actually helps raise “wrist awareness” among Gen Z who grew up with smartwatches.

“Apple Watch is the greatest thing that has happened to the watch industry,” the founder asserts.

Location matters

The company is strategically based in Hong Kong, known as the capital of watches thanks to its friendly tax policy. During COVID, the bulk of Wristcheck’s customers are local, but as Hong Kong reopens its border, the city is gradually welcoming back international travelers. Growing in tandem is the Wristcheck’s overseas consignors and buyers, which are seeing a big uptick.

As of today, over 15% of Wristcheck’s consigned pieces are from overseas customers. Many of its customers prefer to pick up their purchases in Hong Kong, taking advantage of the city’s tax-free scheme.

The city’s vicinity to the tech hub Shenzhen, which is just across the border in mainland China, will also make it easier for Wristwatch to hire engineers, a common strategy for Hong Kong-headquartered tech firms. As of today, the startup is actively looking for a CTO to build out its AI infrastructure.

Powered by AI

With the fresh capital boost, Wristcheck aims to develop its proprietary image recognition tool that can authenticate watches in photos uploaded by sellers. Secondhand watches, says Chu, are one of the most counterfeited categories across the board.

“The more zoomed in [a photo] is, the more obvious whether the watch is genuine. So we just need to train a collection of real and fake watches,” he explains. In addition, the platform cross-checks for stolen watches registered with police stations around the world.

Applying image recognition to e-commerce is nothing new. Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace has long let people look up products by uploading photos. But timing is key for digitizing luxury watch trading. During COVID, much of the luxury watch research and shopping moved online. At the same time, multimillion-dollar NFT sales have made consumers, especially Gen Z, more comfortable about spending large amounts of money online, Chu suggests.

Eventually, the startup aims to be the “benchmark for watch prices.” To that end, it plans to spend portions of its new funding on building an engine that gleans real-time as well as historical price data, which is supposed to bring more transparency to the used watch industry.

Wristcheck wants to make used luxury watches more affordable by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

Before founding The Edit LDN, Moses Rashid frequented sneaker festivals and exhibitions to buy limited edition shoes. But Rashid, who describes himself as a “huge sneakerhead,” was often disappointed by the shopping experience. “I found it crazy that I was dropping $850 on a pair of sneakers but I wouldn’t even get a bag to bring them home in!” he said. He started The Edit LDN out of his home two years ago to give other sneakerheads the kind of premium experience they’d expect from luxury brands like Louis Vuitton or Dior.

Now Rashid says The Edit LDN’s revenue is growing 525% year-over-year, hitting $12 million in 2022. The London-based platform, which carries sneakers, streetwear and collectibles from pre-vetted resellers, announced today it has raised $4.8 million in seed funding. The round will be used to expand into the United States and the MENA region, and was led by Regah Ventures, with participation from sports players like New York Giants captain Xavier McKinney, the Philadelphia 76ers’ P.J. Tucker and Premier League club Nottingham Forest’s Jesse Lingard.

Rashid compares The Edit LDN to designer clothing and bag platform Farfetch because both work with premium resellers, and have an audience of shoppers who are willing to spend a lot of a lot of money on fashion. The Edit LDN’s services include same-day shipping in the United Kingdom, which it plans to expand to five more countries this year, and a personal shopping team that helps customers find sneakers, put together outfits and pre-order items. Rashid said that The Edit LDN is able to source hard-to-find items, like Off-White X Air Jordan 1 High Chicagos signed by designer Virgil Abloh and Louis Vuitton Air Force 1s, which it got access to three months before they were released.

In 2022, The Edit LDN sold 20,000 pairs of sneakers and had 3,500 active sellers, who usually have more than 50 units for sale at a time and are able to get early access to products, Rashid said. The Edit LDN’s key demographic is aged 18 to 40 and split evenly between male and female. Customers buy up to five times a month, with an average order value of $425 per transaction. The startup’s goal is to double revenues in 2023 and grow to over $100 million over the next three years, with a partial exit proposed for 2026.

To enable The Edit LDN to scale, and resellers to sell faster, the platform has a proprietary tech stack, including a feature that automatically applies margins to products. When resellers use The Edit LDN’s selling app, it suggests prices based on historical sales data and market tracking through AI algorithms. It also performs attribution tracking to increase sales, and suggest products a reseller should carry. The performance of resellers is tracked, including sales, shipping time and fulfillment levels, and depending on how they are doing, they can unlock new benefits like lower seller rates, free storage and fulfillment and access to The Edit LDN’s concession stores in high-end department stores.

As with other high-value collectibles, an important part of selling premium sneakers is authentication. The Edit LDN’s in-house authentication team uses techniques like visual inspection, material and packaging checks, smell and UV/blacklight. Rashid said they can authenticate a product every one to three minutes.

The platform’s competitors include StockX and GOAT, other designer sneaker and streetwear marketplaces that have raised venture capital funding.

“The battleground for customers is providing a premium retail environment, user experience, product curation, speed and service,” said Rashid. He added that resellers are able to make a 10% to 20% higher pay out per product on The Edit LDN then other platforms, because it gives them administrative support, storage and fulfillment options and marketing through its personal shopping service.

The Edit LDN’s plans include expanding its product range and working with more retailers for physical locations. It currently has concessions in Galeries Lafayette, Harvey Nichols and Harrods.

In terms of geographical expansion, the U.S. was picked because items can be sent there from the U.K. in 24 hours for a $30 shipping fee. Rashid said the platform has gained traction among celebrity clients there and about 15% of its revenue now comes from the U.S. despite little marketing. MENA is its target for expansion because it has emerging markets that are growing quickly. The Edit LDN will launch next month in Galeries Lafayette in Doha and Harvey Nichols in Riyadh.

The Edit LDN raises seed round to serve sneakerheads around the world by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

Cumul.io, the company behind a low-code business intelligence (BI) analytics platform for software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, has raised €10 million ($10.8 million) in a Series A round of funding.

Founded out of Belgium in 2015, Cumul.io works in a similar space to well-established BI incumbents such as Tableau and Looker, but sets itself apart with a focus on bringing embedded analytics to SaaS applications specifically.

Embedded analytics, for the uninitiated, is where companies offer data reporting and visualizations directly inside their software, rather than having to use a separate, standalone BI application — this brings convenience and simplicity to growing companies that would rather focus their resources on their core competencies.

“More and more users of SaaS products or software platforms expect insights and data to be made available directly inside their core apps, as a native component,” Cumul.io CEO and cofounder Karel Callens explained to TechCrunch. “SaaS companies are looking for solutions that can be rolled out and marketed quickly, are easy to use, and can be scaled and adapted with minimal effort to keep costs low.”

With Cumul.io, its customers — which include venture-backed SaaS scale-ups such as Dixa — can integrate white-labeled analytics and dashboards into their software by connecting just about any data source, drag-and-drop specific features to customize their dashboards, and then copy-paste a snippet of code into their application to serve thousands of end-users.

Misconceptions

While Cumul.io is certainly comparable to the likes of Looker and Tableau in terms of the sphere in which it operates, Callens reckons its most direct competitor is actually engineering teams who might have a general aversion to third-party embedded analytics providers, choosing to stitch their own solution together instead.

“Many product and engineering teams still have the misconception that using an embedded analytics vendor will limit their flexibility, compared to building it out on their own,” Callens added. “There’s still a lot of education involved on how powerful and flexible low-code tools nowadays can be.”

Prior to now, Cumul.io had raised around €3.1 million ($3.4 million) in funding, and with its fresh cash injection the company said that it plans to bolster its headcount across its offices in Leuven and Genk in Belgium, as well as its New York hub. Indeed, the company said that more than a third of its revenue already emanates from the North American market.

Cumul.io’s Series A round was led by France-based early stage VC firm Hi Inov-Dentressangle, with participation from Axeleo Capital, LRM, and SmartFin.

Cumul.io, a low-code embedded analytics platform for SaaS companies, raises $10.8M by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

Cell phone connectivity from space

Multiple players in the industry have recently set their sights on direct-to-mobile connectivity from space. While it’s still a very early market with limited existing capabilities, companies such as Apple, T-Mobile, Globalstar, SpaceX, AST SpaceMobile and Lynk Global are targeting this area. Multiple mobile network operators are already on board, even before some of the first operational spacecraft have been launched.

Apple has partnered with Globalstar to provide SOS connectivity with its new iPhone 14, and T-Mobile is planning to begin low-earth orbit (LEO) connectivity in 2023 through SpaceX, which recently filed an application with the US FCC to include direct-to-cellular capabilities in its Gen 2 Starlink satellites. Amazon is also set to launch its first batch of LEO satellites for Project Kuiper.

Most of these early projects will not provide high-speed broadband from space, and will instead offer low-bandwidth connectivity suitable for emergency calls and texts. All of this aims to service the currently underserved population around the world, which does not live within reach of traditional cell tower networks.

Commercialization of the moon begins in earnest

Extensive government and commercial efforts are underway to head “back to the Moon” decades after the Apollo program finished in 1972. This has been kicked off by NASA’s Artemis program, which saw the Artemis 1 mission’s Orion capsule returning to Earth after spending almost a month traveling around the Moon.

At almost the same time, the first fully-privately-funded lunar mission was launched by SpaceX for Japanese company iSpace, which is taking a fuel-efficient trip to the Moon and is due to get there in April. This would be the first fully commercial mission to land on the Moon, a milestone in the cooperation between Japan and the U.S. in space. Other commercial companies, such as Intuitive Machines and Astrobotic, are also targeting Moon landings.

With the first commercial companies headed moonward alongside national efforts, we expect 2023 to be a breakthrough year for the cislunar ecosystem.

Three drivers underpin revenue growth

Developments in the defense, cybersecurity and climate sectors will prove to be strong tailwinds for revenues in spacetech in 2023. Record growth in defense budgets driven by the war in Ukraine and rising geopolitical tensions will drive business, and governments’ increasing desire for sovereign capability from space assets will lead to some huge orders in the sector. And, since cybersecurity is another tool in the geopolitical toolbox, satellite resilience against attacks is a priority.

A growing reliance on datasets generated in orbit means the security demands for the flow of data from the satellite to the cloud and ground stations are growing exponentially. We see 2023 as the year when the industry embraces quantum capabilities.

7 space tech predictions for 2023 by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch