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Soft Robotics raises $23 million from investors including industrial robot giant FANUC

Published January 20, 2020

Robotics startup company Soft Robotics has closed its Series B round of funding, raising $23 million led by Calibrate Ventures and Material Impact, and including participation from exiting investors including Honeywell, Yahama, Hyperplane and more. This round also brings in FANUC, the world’s largest maker of industrial robots and a recently announced strategic partner for Soft Robotics .

The company said in a press release announcing this latest round of funding that the round was oversubscribed, which suggests it isn’t looking to glut itself on capital investors, given that this $23 million follows a similarly sized $20 million round that closed in 2018 which it also referred to as “oversubscribed.” Prior to that, Soft Robotics had raised $5 million in a Series A round closed in 2015. It has plenty of large, global clients already, so it’s probably not hurting for revenue.

Soft Robotics is focused on developing robotic grippers that, as you might’ve guessed from the name, make use of soft material endpoints that can more easily grip a range of different objects without the kind of extremely specific and tolerance-allergic complex programming that’s required for most traditional industrial robotic claws.

With its 2018 funding raise, Soft Robotics said that it was expanding further into food and beverage, as well as doubling down on its presence in the retail and logistics industries. This round and its new partnership with FANUC (which involves a new integrated system that pairs its mGrip robotic gripper with a new Mini-P controller, all with simple integration to FANUC’s existing lineup of industrial robots) will give it strategic and functional access to what is the most influenentioal industrial robotics company in the world.

This round will specifically help Soft Robotics spend on growth, looking to increase its variability even further and work on expanding its food packaging and consumer goods applications, as well as diving into e-commerce and logistics – specifically to help automate and improve the returns process, a costly and ever-growing challenge as more retail moves online.

Odoo grabs $90M to sell more SMEs on its business app suite

Published December 17, 2019

Belgium-based all-in-one business software maker Odoo, which offers an open source version as well as subscription-based enterprise software and SaaS, has taken in $90 million led by a new investor: Global growth equity investor Summit Partners.

The funds have been raised via a secondary share sale. Odoo’s executive management team and existing investor SRIW and its affiliate Noshaq also participated in the share sale by buying stock — with VC firms Sofinnova and XAnge selling part of their shares to Summit Partners and others.

“Odoo is largely profitable and grows at 60% per year with an 83% gross margin product; so, we don’t need to raise money,” a spokeswoman told us. “Our bottleneck is not the cash but the recruitment of new developers, and the development of the partner network.

“What’s unusual in the deal is that existing managers, instead of cashing out, purchased part of the shares using a loan with banks.”

The 2005-founded company — which used to go by the name of OpenERP before transitioning to its current open core model in 2015 — last took in a $10M Series B back in 2014, per Crunchbase.

Odoo offers some 30 applications via its Enterprise platform — including ERP, accounting, stock, manufacturing, CRM, project management, marketing, human resources, website, eCommerce and point-of-sale apps — while a community of ~20,000 active members has contributed 16,000+ apps to the open source version of its software, addressing a broader swathe of business needs.

It focuses on the SME business apps segment, competing with the likes of Oracle, SAP and Zoho, to name a few. Odoo says it has in excess of 4.5 million users worldwide at this point, and touts revenue growth “consistently above 50% over the last ten years”.

Summit Partners told us funds from the secondary sale will be used to accelerate product development — and for continued global expansion.

“In our experience, traditional ERP is expensive and frequently fails to adapt to the unique needs of dynamic businesses. With its flexible suite of applications and a relentless focus on product, we believe Odoo is ideally positioned to capture this large and compelling market opportunity,” said Antony Clavel, a Summit Partners principal who has joined the Odoo board, in a supporting statement.

Odoo’s spokeswoman added that part of the expansion plan includes opening an office in Mexico in January, and another in Antwerpen, Belgium, in Q3.

This report was updated with additional comment

Accel closes new $550M fund for India

Published December 2, 2019

Accel, one of the world’s most influential venture capitalist firms, is getting more bullish on India.

The Silicon Valley-headquartered firm, which largely focuses on early-stage investments, said today it has closed $550 million for its sixth venture fund in India.

This is a significant amount of capital for Accel’s efforts in the country, where it began investing 15 years ago and has infused roughly $1 billion through all its previous funds.

Anand Daniel, a partner for Accel in India, told TechCrunch in an interview that the VC fund will continue to focus on identifying and investing in seed and early-stage startups.

But the fund realized it needed more money so it could actively participate in follow-on rounds (later-stage financing rounds) of its portfolio startups. The announcement today follows Accel’s similar recent push in Europe and Israel, where it closed a $575 million fund.

“We also selectively do growth investments for companies that are scaling well, such as Swiggy, UrbanClap, BlackStone and Bounce. We have continued to back them through Series B and Series C rounds,” he said.

At the risk of being accused of bias, I’ll say this: Accel India is a rare Indian fund that had credible exits and more promising exits in the pipeline. They’re also some of the nicest people to work with. https://t.co/aZGjDgSQKe

— JPK (@therealjpk) December 2, 2019

Like in many other markets, Accel’s track record in India is quite impressive. It participated in the seed financing round of e-commerce firm Flipkart, which was then valued at $4 million post-money. Walmart bought a majority stake in Flipkart last year for $16 billion. (This helped Accel net more than $1 billion in return from Flipkart.)

Accel, which has nine partners and more than 50 members in total in India, also invested in the seed round of SaaS giant Freshworks, which is now valued at more than $3 billion, food delivery startup Swiggy, also valued at north of $3 billion, and recently turned unicorn BlackBuck. Accel has been the first institutional investor for 85% of startups in its portfolio.

The VC firm says 44 of the 100-odd startups in its India portfolio today are valued at over $100 million each. In total, including Flipkart’s $21 billion market value, Accel’s portfolio firms have created $44 billion in market value.

Some of the investments Accel has made in India

“When we started our first fund in India in 2005, the world was a very different place. Just 1 in 50 Indians had access to the internet and mobile phone ownership was nascent. Yet we firmly believed that India was on the cusp of a big change,” the firm said in a statement.

“Today, the opportunity ahead is significantly bigger than when we started in 2005: India can now digitally identify 1.3 billion people, has 600 million internet users and 150 million online transacting customers with a national payments platform that processes $20 billion a month.”

Daniel said moving forward Accel will continue to focus on consumer, business-to-business, fintech, healthcare and global SaaS categories. “We have nine partners with their own areas of interest. They invest from their own conviction and finance seed rounds. If we see a particular sector evolving, then we do a deeper thesis work,” he said.

“We then develop deeper confidence for the space. For example, back in the day we invested in mobility startup TaxiForSure, long before Uber had arrived in India. That helped us understand mobility well. We have used those learnings to invest in several more mobility startups.”

Accel’s growing interest in India comes at a time when several other giants, including SoftBank and Prosus Ventures, have also become more active in the nation — though they tend to finance later-stage rounds.

For Indian startups that are already having their best year, this can only be good news.

Africa Roundup: Nigerian fintech gets $360M, mints unicorn, draws Chinese VC

Published December 2, 2019

November 2019 could mark when Nigeria (arguably) became Africa’s unofficial capital for fintech investment and digital finance startups.

The month saw $360 million invested in Nigerian-focused payment ventures. That is equivalent to roughly one-third of all the startup VC raised for the entire continent in 2018, according to Partech stats.

A notable trend-within-the-trend is that more than half — or $170 million — of the funding to Nigerian fintech ventures in November came from Chinese investors. This marks a pivot (to tech) in China’s engagement with Africa. We’ll get to that.

Before the big Chinese-backed rounds, one of Nigeria’s earliest fintech companies, Interswitch, confirmed its $1 billion valuation after Visa took a minority stake in the company. Interswitch would not disclose the amount to TechCrunch, but Sky News reporting pegged it at $200 million for 20%.

Founded in 2002 by Mitchell Elegbe, Interswitch pioneered the infrastructure to digitize Nigeria’s then predominantly paper-ledger and cash-based economy.

The company now provides much of the tech-wiring for Nigeria’s online banking system that serves Africa’s largest economy and population. Interswitch offers a number of personal and business finance products, including its Verve payment cards and Quickteller payment app.

The financial services firm has expanded its physical presence to Uganda, Gambia and Kenya . The Nigerian company also sells its products in 23 African countries and launched a partnership in August for Verve cardholders to make payments on Discover’s global network.

Visa and Interswitch touted the equity investment as a strategic collaboration between the two companies, without a lot of detail on what that will mean.

One point TechCrunch did lock down is Interswitch’s (long-awaited) and imminent IPO. A source close to the matter said the company will list on a major exchange by mid-2020.

For the near to medium-term, Interswitch could stand as Africa’s sole tech-unicorn, as e-commerce venture Jumia’s volatile share-price and declining market-cap — since an April IPO — have dropped the company’s valuation below $1 billion.

Nigeria’s Interswitch confirms $1B valuation after Visa investment

Circling back to China, November was the month that signaled Chinese actors are all in on African tech.

In two separate rounds, Chinese investors put $220 million into OPay and PalmPay — two fledgling startups with plans to scale in Nigeria and the broader continent.

PalmPay, a consumer-oriented payments product, went live last month with a $40 million seed round (one of the largest in Africa in 2019) led by Africa’s biggest mobile-phone seller — China’s Transsion.

The startup was upfront about its ambitions, stating in a company release its goals to become “Africa’s largest financial services platform.”

To that end, PalmPay conveniently entered a strategic partnership with its lead investor. The startup’s payment app will come pre-installed on Transsion’s mobile device brands, such as Tecno, in Africa — for an estimated reach of 20 million phones.

PalmPay also launched in Ghana in November and its U.K. and Africa-based CEO, Greg Reeve, confirmed plans to expand to additional African countries in 2020.

OPay’s $120 million Series B was announced several days after the PalmPay news and came only months after the mobile-based fintech venture raised $50 million.

Founded by Chinese-owned consumer internet company Opera — and backed by nine Chinese investors — OPay is the payment utility for a suite of Opera -developed internet-based commercial products in Nigeria. These include ride-hail apps ORide and OCar and food delivery service OFood.

With its latest Series A, OPay announced it would expand in Kenya, South Africa and Ghana.

Though it wasn’t fintech, Chinese investors also backed a (reported) $30 million Series B for East African trucking logistics company Lori Systems in November.

With OPay, PalmPay and Lori Systems, startups in Africa have raised a combined $240 million from 15 Chinese investors in a span of months.

There are a number of things to note and watch out for here, as TechCrunch reporting has illuminated (and will continue to do in follow-on coverage).

These moves mark a next chapter in China’s engagement in Africa and could raise some new issues. Hereto, the country’s interaction with Africa’s tech ecosystem has been relatively light compared to China’s deal-making on infrastructure and commodities.

There continues to be plenty of debate (and critique) of China’s role in Africa. This new digital phase will certainly add a fresh component to all that. One thing to track will be data-privacy and national-security concerns that may emerge around Chinese actors investing heavily in African mobile consumer platforms.

We’ve seen lines (allegedly) blur on these matters between Chinese state and private-sector actors with companies such as Huawei.

As OPay and PalmPay expand, they may need to do some reassuring of African regulators as countries (such as Kenya) establish more formal consumer protection protocols for digital platforms.

One more thing to follow on OPay’s funding and planned expansion is the extent to which it puts Opera (and its entire suite of consumer internet products) in competition with multiple actors in Africa’s startup ecosystem. Opera’s Africa ventures could go head to head with Uber, Jumia and M-Pesa — the mobile money-product that put Kenya out front on digital finance in Africa before Nigeria.

Opera’s Africa fintech startup OPay gains $120M from Chinese investors

Shifting back to American engagement in African tech, Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey was on the continent in November. No sooner than he’d finished his first trip, Dorsey announced plans to move to Africa in 2020, for three to six months, saying on Twitter, “Africa will define the future (especially the bitcoin one!).”

We still don’t know much about what this last trip — or his future foray — mean in terms of concrete partnerships, investment or market moves in Africa from Dorsey and his companies.

He visited Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and Ethiopia and met with leaders at Nigeria’s CcHub (Bosun Tijani), Ethiopia’s Ice Addis (Markos Lemma) and did some meetings with fintech founders in Lagos (Paga’s Tayo Oviosu).

I know pretty well most of the organizations and people Dorsey talked to and nothing has shaken out yet in terms of partnership or investment news from his recent trip.

On what could come out of Dorsey’s 2020 move to Africa, per his tweet and news highlighted in this roundup, a good bet would be it will have something to do with fintech and Square.

More Africa-related stories @TechCrunch

African tech around the ‘net

Equity Dive: Poshmark’s origin story with co-founder & CEO Manish Chandra

Published November 22, 2019

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

We have something a bit different for you this week. Equity co-host Kate Clark recently sat down with Manish Chandra, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Poshmark, and one of his earliest investors, NFX managing partner James Currier.

If you haven’t heard of Poshmark, it’s an online platform for buying and selling clothes. Basically, it’s the thrift shop of the 21st century. We asked Chandra how he and co-founders Tracy Sun, Gautam Golwala and Chetan Pungaliya cooked up the idea for Poshmark, what bumps they faced along the way, how they raised venture capital and, of course, what details of their upcoming initial public offering he could share with us. Meanwhile, Currier dished about the company’s early days, when the Poshmark team worked hard on the floor of Currier’s office.

Unfortunately, neither Chandra or Currier were willing to share deets about Poshmark’s IPO, reportedly expected soon. But they both shared interesting insights into building a successful venture-backed company, battling competition and putting your best foot forward.

Glad you guys came back for another episode, we’ll see you soon.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

This Week in Apps: Apple’s vaping app ban, Disney+ gets installed, apps gear up for Black Friday

Published November 16, 2019

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support, and the money that flows through it all. What are developers talking about? What do app publishers and marketers need to know? How are politics impacting the App Store and app businesses? And which apps are everyone using?

As mid-November rolls around, we’re looking at a few big stories, including Apple’s decision to ban an entire category of apps due to health concerns, the launch of Disney+ from an app perspective, what Black Friday will mean for e-commerce apps, and more.

Fast Facts

With Disney+’s huge launch (10+ million users!) on everyone’s minds, it’s time to think about what these streaming newcomers mean for the overall landscape and the app stores. In this case, it seems that Disney+’s user base was highly mobile. The company itself announced more than 10 million users, while data on the Disney+ app’s first few days indicates it now has over 10 million downloads. It seems like consumers definitely want to take their new streaming service with them everywhere they go.

In 2020, App Annie forecasts consumers will spend more than 674 billion hours in the Entertainment and Video Player and Editor categories worldwide on Android phones, up from an expected 558 billion hours in 2019. Thanks to Disney+, Apple TV+ and soon, HBO Max, Peacock and Quibi, to making the landscape both richer and more complicated.
On its launch day, Disney+ hit #1 by iPhone Overall downloads at 8 AM in the U.S. and at 11 AM in Canada — an indication of the ability that strong IP has can really excite consumers to come out in droves. (Unfortunately, that led to some launch day glitches, too.)
Apptopia estimated Disney+ was downloaded 3.2 million times in its first 24 hours. The firm also estimated users collectively spent 1.3 million hours watching Disney+ on day one — ahead of Amazon Prime Video, but well behind Netflix.

Sensor Tower waited to collect a little more data instead. It found that the Disney+ app was installed approximately 9.6 million times in all available markets (the U.S., Canada, and the Netherlands), since its U.S. launch on Tuesday, Nov. 12. For comparison’s sake, HBO Now’s U.S. launch only saw 180,000 installs in its first three days — or 2% of the Disney+ total. Combined with the test period installs in the Netherlands, the app has now been installed over 10 million times.
The hype around Disney+ has had a halo effect. Hulu and ESPN, which were offered in a bundle with Disney+, also grew as a result of the Disney+ launch. Sensor Tower found combined users of the apps in the U.S. and Canada were up 30% in the past week over the week prior.

Headlines

Apple removed all vaping apps from the App Store, citing CDC health concerns

The CDC says 42 people have died due to vaping product use and thousands more cases of lung injuries have been reported from 49 states. Now, Apple has made the controversial decision to remove all 181 vaping-related apps from its App Store — including those with news and information about vaping and even vaping-related games, Axios reported this week.

Some say Apple is helping to protect kids and teens by limiting their exposure to e-cigarette and vaping products, which are being used to addict a younger generation to nicotine and cause serious disease. Others argue that Apple is over-reaching. After all, many of the lung illnesses involve people who were vaping illegally obtained THC, studies indicated.

This isn’t the first time Apple has banned a category of apps because of what appear to be moral concerns. The company in the past had booted apps that promoted weed or depicted gun violence, for example. In the case of vaping apps, Apple cited the public health crisis and youth epidemic as contributing factors, telling Axios that:

We take great care to curate the App Store as a trusted place for customers, particularly youth, to download apps. We’re constantly evaluating apps, and consulting the latest evidence, to determine risks to users’ health and well-being. Recently, experts ranging from the CDC to the American Heart Association have attributed a variety of lung injuries and fatalities to e-cigarette and vaping products, going so far as to call the spread of these devices a public health crisis and a youth epidemic. We agree, and we’ve updated our App Store Review Guidelines to reflect that apps encouraging or facilitating the use of these products are not permitted. As of today, these apps are no longer available to download.

Existing users will still be able to use their apps, but new users will not be able to download the banned apps going forward.

Minecraft Earth arrives

Minecraft Earth launched early last week across 9 countries on both Android and iOS and now it’s come to the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and several other markets. Some expect the app will rival the success of the AR breakout hit, Pokémon Go, which was thought at the time to be the precursor to a new wave of massive AR gaming titles. But in reality, that didn’t happen. The highly anticipated follow-up from Niantic, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite didn’t come close to competing with its predecessor, generating $12 million in its first month, compared with Pokémon Go’s first-month earnings of $300 million. With Minecraft Earth now sitting at No. 2 (c’mon, you can’t unseat Disney+) on the U.S. App Store, it seems there’s potential for another AR kingpin.

App Annie releases a user acquisition playbook

A top name in App Store intelligence, App Annie this week released a new how-to handbook focused on user acquisition strategies on mobile. Sure the free download is just a bit of lead gen for App Annie, but the guide promises to fill you in on all you need to know to be successful in acquiring mobile users. The playbook’s arrival follows App Annie’s acquisition of adtech insights firm Libring this fall, as it expands to cover more aspects of running an app business. Just as important as rankings and downloads are the very real costs associated with running an app business — including the cost of acquiring users.

Source: Nike has picked up Russell Wilson’s Tally/TraceMe in a rare acquisition

Published October 11, 2019

Nike has long been synonymous with premium sneakers and other sports gear, but now it seems that the company could be extending its brand into another area — digital media — thanks to the rumored acquisition of a Seattle-based startup.

TechCrunch has learned from a source that the multibillion-dollar sports giant has acquired TraceMe, which originally built an app to let fans engage with sports stars and other celebrities before later pivoting into a service called Tally, a platform aimed at sports teams, broadcasters and venues to help fans engage around sporting events.

TraceMe was originally founded by Russell Wilson, the champion quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks, who was the executive chairman of the startup. The company had raised at least $9 million from investors that included the Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group and Bezos Expeditions (Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ fund), as well as YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley and others, and it was last valued, in 2017, at $60 million.

Our source said the deal closed in recent weeks and that “it was a good outcome” for the company and investors. It involved both IP — the main interest, the source said, was in TraceMe’s tech rather than Tally’s — and the team.

Indeed, at least eight of them, including TraceMe’s CEO Jason LeeKeenan, an ex-Hulu executive, are now listing Nike as their place of employment. LeeKeenan describes his new role as the head of Nike Seattle. Others on the team now have taken roles that include software engineers, head of product and product designers.

No one at TraceMe and Nike that we contacted has responded to our requests for comment, but just a little while ago GeekWire (which likely had the same tip we did) published a post noting that it had a source that confirmed the deal.

The athletic footwear giant Nike is no stranger to the world of technology: it has been a longtime collaborator with the likes of Apple to develop apps for its devices and has been an early mover on the concept of bringing and integrating cutting-edge (yes, possibly gimmicky) tech into its footwear and other gear. And that’s before you consider Nike as an e-commerce force.

But while the dalliance between sports, tech and fashion is well established, this deal opens up a different frontier for the company. It’s very rare for Nike to make an acquisition, but it makes sense that if it were going to do some M&A, it would be in the area of digital media and picking up engineers to execute on a wider vision in that area.

The company is best known, of course, for its shoes and related sporty clothes, which it has for a long time created in co-branding with the biggest sports stars and has more recently started to extend to a wider circle of celebrities and hot brands in a spirit of sporty street style. These have included the likes of so-cool Supreme, Travis Scott and seemingly tentative forays into music culture.

Nike overshadows all other sports shoe brands in size, with its current market cap at nearly $117 billion, more than twice that of its closest competitor, Adidas . But Adidas has been stealing a march when it comes to partnerships with a wide network of celebrities (even if Drake prefers checks over stripes).

While it isn’t clear yet how and if Nike will be using the startup’s existing services, you could see how a deal like this could help Nike start to think about how it might leverage the collaborations and endorsements it already has in place into experiences beyond shoes, advertising and athletic performance. In this age of Instagram and influencers playing a massive role in shifting consumer sentiment (and dollars), this could give Nike a shot at building its own media platform, independent of these, on its own terms.

This is a bigger trend that we’re seeing across a lot of digital media. Consider how companies like Spotify have extended beyond simple music streaming, investing in building tools to help artists on its platform with marketing and expanding their brands: selling shoes means selling a concept, and that concept needs to have a foothold in a digital experience.

Zola, the $650M wedding portal, taps the travel market with an expansion into honeymoons

Published October 3, 2019

The wedding industry is estimated to be worth some $100 billion in the U.S. alone, and now one of the fastest-growing companies in that space — the wedding planning site Zola — is making a move to augment its position with a sidestep into travel. Today at Disrupt (our conference in San Francisco), the company is announcing Honeymoons, which will let couples plan, book and raise money for their post-nuptial travels at the same time that they plan the main event.

The beta invite is open for those interested from today. To start off, couples will be able to plan itineraries and book accommodations, with flights getting added in after the launch as part of a bigger effort to own the end-to-end marriage experience.

“Over time, we want to book all your travel needs, both before and after the wedding,” said Shan-Lyn Ma, the company’s CEO and founder.

Zola’s business today is based around pre-wedding organization: users can set up free websites, design and print (paid) wedding invitations, and create Zola-based gift registries for family and friends to buy goods for the couple through the site — a business that has been successful enough to net the company more than $140 million in funding and a $650 million valuation.

But the average time spent planning weddings is 13-18 months, and so Honeymoons will be one way for Zola to extend that relationship not just in terms of money spent — honeymoons is estimated to be a $12 billion industry in the U.S. — but time spent using Zola, which in turn can help build a tighter relationship for whatever moves the company might make in the future. (One very obvious next step: parenting-related content and products.)

The Honeymoons feature also brings something else to Zola: a little breathing space. The online market for wedding planning is old and massive — it’s one of the first kinds of e-commerce sites that emerged with the rise of the world wide web itself, and as such there are a lot of large and incumbent competitors. However, “honeymoons” has been generally a more fragmented space, where people plan their own trips themselves via sites that cater to other kinds of travel like vacations, making “online honeymoon planning” far less of an industry per se, and making Zola’s move into the area relatively less pressured.

Ma said that the decision to launch the business came from couples requesting the feature, and it’s taking the rollout relatively slowly. The service will start with a limited number of markets that Zola chose based on them already being popular honeymoon destinations. The plan will be to expand the list to many more locations over time.

“We know where all the key destinations are based on demand from couples,” she added.

Within that list, Zola has negotiated special packages for accommodation and flights. It will also come with a personalized twist: couples input their preferences and are offered honeymoon packages designed to fit their tastes.

“Through our technology and our team of travel experts, couples can tell us, this is what they would love to do for their honeymoon,” explained Ma. “This is their general travel style, budget and dates. Then we will send back an itinerary…[and they can] book with us from there. At launch next month, it will be focused first and foremost on accommodation and experiences. Over time, we would aim to help you with everything you need to do on your honeymoon,” she said.

Ma said thousands of customers have already signed up for the waitlist for the new honeymoons product, which will officially launch next month.

Zola already has a strong connection to a wider marketplace that taps into how millennials and younger consumers, in general, like to shop today, offering a Houzz-style approach of letting users create “look books” for their aesthetics, and giving them flexibility to either register for specific items, or to cash out in gift cards that can be used on other goods and services.

The Honeymoons move will give the company an opening to working with other companies much more closely, specifically those in the travel industry, to create cohesive experiences. Given how many weddings today are focused around “destinations,” this also opens the door to planning events for more than just the couples involved.

Worried about a ‘no deal’ brexit? UK startups should check this guide

Published September 27, 2019

UK startups concerned the country is about to leave the European Union in just a little over a month’s time with nothing agreed to ensure a smooth transition should point their eyes at this guide — put together by startup policy advocacy group, Coadec.

While a ‘no deal’ brexit is still not inevitable the chances of it happening have stepped up sharply in recent months as the clock winds down towards exit day with no withdrawal agreement in place. Such an outcome has major implications for technology businesses, given the cross-border nature of services startups tend to provide.

“With the UK potentially just over a month away from exiting the EU, no deal remains the default option,” warns Coadec. “We are clear that no deal would be disastrous for the startup community…but that doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. That’s why we have teamed up with the UK Tech Cluster Group & Tech Nation to put together this guidance for the startup community.”

Under current prime minister, Boris Johnson, the UK government has sharply dialled up the brexit rhetoric. Johnson has said — in typical flashy fashion — that he’d rather be “dead in a ditch” than ask for an extension to the October 31st deadline for agreeing a deal with the European Union.

He has also prorogued parliament — illegally — in an attempt to bypass parliamentary scrutiny, which he described in an internal memo as “a rigmarole“.

The prorogation was quashed by the Supreme Court. But since parliament resumed this week ministers have been refusing to clearly state whether the government will abide by a law it passed just before it got closed down — which requires the PM to ask the EU for an extension if he fails to secure a withdrawal deal before October 19.

Speculation is therefore rife over what political chicanery the government might seek to pull to wiggle out of complying with the law and crash the UK out regardless.

Former UK prime minister, John Major, gave a speech this week warning that such a move would be unforgivable. But there are no signs the government is rethinking its approach.

Johnson has been splashing public money on an advertising campaign that instructs the country to “Get ready for brexit” (such as the billboard pictured above). The government also claims to have substantially ramped up domestic preparations for a no deal exit.

While it’s possible this loud show of bullying bravado is a theatrical tactic to try to pressure the EU into shifting position on contested brexit issues (primarily the Irish back-stop) — so Johnson can grab a deal which could pass a vote in parliament — it’s also possible the government isn’t that interested in a deal, and just wants to deliver brexit “do or die”, as the PM has also put it.

Even if it’s theatrics it doesn’t mean the whole high stakes game of chicken might not backfire — resulting in the UK actually crashing out with nothing on Halloween. The only robust legal certainty is that without an extension to Article 50 the UK will indeed leave the EU on October 31, deal or no deal.

Given rising political turmoil in the UK combined with a hard and fast-approaching brexit deadline, startups are well advised to prepare for the worst — which means leaving the EU with no contingencies in place beyond those you’ve put in place yourself.

Coadec’s guide presents a concise overview of ten issues the policy advocacy group believes should be front of mind for startups and scaleups thinking about how to manage no deal risk.

The guide does not (and is not intended) to replace professional legal advice but it does cuts through a lot of the noise and fuzz around brexit — so it’s well worth a read, especially if you’re trying to get up to speed fast.

Top of their list is data flows — a major consideration for tech businesses that receive personal data from the EU or EEA.

“Startups will need to create contract-based legal structures to replace the free flows of data we took for granted under the European system,” Coadec writes, noting that the UK’s data protection agency is advising startups to look at model clauses, binding corporate rules, codes of conduct or certification mechanisms as alternatives for their data flows.

“These complicated legal structures have typically been the preserve of larger businesses and corporations, not startups and scaleups — so will take time to put in place,” it warns. “If you haven’t started preparations for your post-brexit data flows, they should be a priority now.”

Other issues the guide deals with include immigration & visas; taxation & VAT; and the impact of a no deal on specific pieces of EU legislation and strategy that are relevant to startups — such as the e-Commerce Directive and Digital Single Market — as well as related pieces of legislation (such as ePrivacy) that risk being caught in limbo by brexit as they’ve not yet been passed.

There’s also advice for startups that have .eu domain names, and for those who’ve received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 R&D fund, as well as links to relevant government resources.

The guide can be downloaded as a PDF here.

How is your startup preparing for brexit? What’s your biggest ‘no deal’ concern? How much is it costing you to manage brexit risk? Let us know by emailing tips@techcrunch.com

How UK VCs are managing the risk of a ‘no deal’ Brexit

Alibaba unveils Hanguang 800, an AI inference chip it says significantly increases the speed of machine learning tasks

Published September 25, 2019

Alibaba Group introduced its first AI inference chip today, a neural processing unit called Hanguang 800 that it says makes performing machine learning tasks dramatically faster and more energy efficient. The chip, announced today during Alibaba Cloud’s annual Apsara Computing Conference in Hangzhou, is already being used to power features on Alibaba’s e-commerce sites, including product search and personalized recommendations. It will be made available to Alibaba Cloud customers later.

As an example of what the chip can do, Alibaba said it usually takes Taobao an hour to categorize the one billion product images that are uploaded to the e-commerce platform each day by merchants and prepare them for search and personalized recommendations. Using Hanguang 800, Taobao was able to complete the task in only five minutes.

Alibaba is already using Hanguang 800 in many of its business operations that need machine processing. In addition to product search and recommendations, this includes automatic translation on its e-commerce sites, advertising and intelligence customer services.

Though Alibaba hasn’t revealed when the chip will be available to its cloud customers, the chip may help Chinese companies reduce their dependence on U.S. technology as the trade war makes business partnerships between Chinese and American tech companies more difficult. It also can help Alibaba Cloud grow in markets outside of China. Within China, it is the market leader, but in the Asia-Pacific region, Alibaba Cloud still ranks behind Amazon, Microsoft and Google, according to the Synergy Research Group.

Hanguang 800 was created by T-Head, the unit that leads the development of chips for cloud and edge computing within Alibaba DAMO Academy, the global research and development initiative in which Alibaba is investing more than $15 billion. T-Head developed the chip’s hardware and algorithms designed for business apps, including Alibaba’s retail and logistics apps.

In a statement, Alibaba Group CTO and president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Jeff Zhang (pictured above) said, “The launch of Hanguang 800 is an important step in our pursuit of next-generation technologies, boosting computing capabilities that will drive both our current and emerging businesses while improving energy-efficiency.”

He added, “In the near future, we plan to empower our clients by providing access through our cloud business to the advanced computing that is made possible by the chip, anytime and anywhere.”

T-Head’s other launches included the XuanTie 910 earlier this year, an IoT processor based on RISC-V, the open-source hardware instruction set that began as a project at UC Berkeley. XuanTie 910 was created for heavy-duty IoT applications, including edge servers, networking, gateway and autonomous vehicles.

Alibaba DAMO Academy collaborates with universities around the world, including UC Berkeley and Tel Aviv University. Researchers in the program focus on machine learning, network security, visual computing and natural language processing, with the goal of serving two billion customers and creating 100 million jobs by 2035.