Wednesday, April 15, 2020
Apple launches its most-affordable iPhone in four years: All you need to know
E-commerce, supermarket players hiring people from other retailers
BBMP's home delivery diktat draws flak
Karnataka govt to decide soon on full e-commerce services
Tencent, Alibaba, and SoftBank invest heavily in popular fantasy sports and online rummy apps in India that use loopholes in anti-gambling laws to offer prizes (Bloomberg)
Tencent, Alibaba, and SoftBank invest heavily in popular fantasy sports and online rummy apps in India that use loopholes in anti-gambling laws to offer prizes — - Tech giants spending on Indian apps for fantasy sports, rummy — Ambani says business will be bigger than movies, TV and music
Alkira, which has raised $30M from KPCB, Sequoia, and GV, emerges from stealth with networking-as-a-service tech for building and deploying multicloud networks (Paul Gillin/SiliconANGLE)
Alkira, which has raised $30M from KPCB, Sequoia, and GV, emerges from stealth with networking-as-a-service tech for building and deploying multicloud networks — Alkira Inc., a company founded by a team of networking veterans and funded by blue-chip venture capitalists …
Covid-19 medicine: Dr Reddy’s Laboratories begins work on Gilead drug clone
AIIMS taps robots and telemedicine to cut contact risk
RIL, Facebook weigh creating a super app
Sources: Robinhood is raising $250M led by Sequoia Capital, at a pre-money valuation of about $8B (Katie Roof/Bloomberg)
Sources: Robinhood is raising $250M led by Sequoia Capital, at a pre-money valuation of about $8B — Robinhood Markets Inc., the online brokerage that's suffered repeated outages during recent market turmoil, is close to raising new funding at valuation of about $8 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
View, the dynamic glass company that raised $1.1 billion from SoftBank in 2018, is laying people off
View, a 13-year-old, Milpitas, Calif.-based company that makes dynamic glass designed to reduce heat and glare as well as lessen eyestrain, has cut an unknown number of employees, including at a plant in Olive Branch, Mississippi.
One employee of several years, an IT manager, wrote on LinkedIn that he was laid off owing to the pandemic. Another employee of the company for the better part of decade — an engineer and project manager — wrote on LinkedIn that he has also been laid off and that the company “really cleaned house.”
This individual added that several other “long timers” had also lost their jobs.
Efforts to reach former View employees was unsuccessful this afternoon. A request for help from the company’s head of communications also went unreturned today.
The company — which touts its glass as a way for real estate owners to attract commercial tenants as well to improve energy consumption by up to 20 percent — is among a large stable of companies that raised enormous amounts of capital from SoftBank’s Vision Fund over the last two years.
The funding that was provided by the outfit — $1.1 billion in early November 2018 — was notable at the time in part because it included no other investors.
The round was also announced at a trying time for the Vision Fund — roughly one month after the journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Instabul, Turkey, drawing unwanted scrutiny to both Saudi Arabia and to the Vision Fund.
As many industry watchers will know, the Japanese conglomerate had raised nearly half the capital for its massive Vision Fund from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. Though no one in Silicon Valley was willing to speak up at the time about the episode, SoftBank’s checks were presumably seen as radioactive in that moment to at least some founders.
At the time it was announced, CEO Rao Mulpuri told Bloomberg that the deal predated Khashoggi’s murder, explaining that, “Obviously, what happened in the region there is quite concerning. But, at the same time, we’ve now built a relationship of getting to know SoftBank over a long period of time, and we are quite comfortable moving forward with this investment.”
View has been selling its glass to building owners and commercial real estate developers. On its site, it features a testimonial from a 14-person development firm in Utah named Cottonwood Partners, for example.
Real estate, as with transportation and fintech, has been a major area of interest for SoftBank. Other related portfolio companies include Katerra, a tech-driven construction company that had run into troubles well before this year, according to several reports by The Information, and Opendoor, the home-buying company that earlier today announced that it was laying off 35 percent of its employees.
Though the construction industry has been hard hit since the coronavirus hit the U.S. market and largely shut the nation down, it is still operating in some pockets, saved by the belief in some states and cities that certain projects constitute essential business.
Earlier this month, for example, crews were at work on apartment buildings just south of West Hollywood. Asked by the New York Times to explain, officials agreed the work was essential, while a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department called what was happening “uncharted territory for all of us.”
Before SoftBank came onto the scene, View had raised about $800 million over the years, including from Corning, Madrone Capital Partners, TIAA Investments and a New Zealand sovereign wealth fund.
Heading into its current layoff, which was announced to employees yesterday, View had roughly 600 employees, according to LinkedIn.
Financial tech startup Previse raises $11 million to help suppliers get paid faster
Previse, a fintech focused on helping suppliers get faster payment, announced that it has raised $11 million in new funding led by Reefknot Investments and Mastercard. Returning investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Hambro Perks and Augmentum Fintech also participated.
Founded in 2016, Previse says it currently processes about 100,000 invoices a day, and its goal is to handle payments for five million suppliers within the next five years.
This round brings Previse’s total raised so far to more than $21.8 million and will be used to expand its InstantPay product to more corporate buyers around the world. Previse is taking part in Mastercard’s Start Path accelerator program. Reefknot was founded by Temasek Holdings and Kuehne + Nagel last year to invest in logistics and supply chain startups.
Paul Christensen, the founder and CEO of Previse, told TechCrunch that InstantPay allows corporate buyers to send quick payments to suppliers by using machine-learning based technology to analyze historical data and predict which invoices can be paid immediately, and which ones are potentially higher risk and need to be checked manually.
Traditional invoice payment methods used by large buyers can take up to months to complete, putting pressure on the cash flow of small- to medium-sized businesses. Christensen said this is due to a combination of corporate policy, including the terms and conditions of a sale, and the amount of administrative tasks, including inputting, checking and approving invoices, that need to be performed. InstantPay can reduce that timeframe down to a day.
Rapid payment to suppliers is even more important during the COVID-19 pandemic, he added.
“The pandemic has put a huge strain on the working capital of companies, large and small, all over the world, causing a severe cash crunch. Previse’s platform can unlock working capital, meaning that the tens of thousands of SME suppliers who supply to a large corporate chain can be paid on day one, rather than having to wait weeks or months,” he said.
“This is critical now when supply chains have been disrupted, but it will also be critical when we come out the other side and there is a demand surge and supplier supplies have to fulfill large orders.”
Wheels turn to wean away factories from China
Handset firms mull over greenlight
Fintech lenders turn tap off to new customers, conserve cash
MediaTek says it has started to use Intel Foundry's advanced chip packaging in addition to TSMC's, as the mobile chip designer bets on AI demand for growth (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)
Cheng Ting-Fang / Nikkei Asia : MediaTek says it has started to use Intel Foundry's advanced chip packaging in addition to TSMC's...
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Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
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The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
