Singapore-based Syfe, a robo-advisor with a human touch, raises $18.6 million led by Valar Ventures

Dhruv Arora, the founder and CEO of Singapore-based investment platform Syfe

Syfe, a Singapore-based startup that wants to make investing more accessible in Asia, announced today that it has closed a SGD $25.2 million (USD $18.6 million) Series A led by Valar Ventures, a fintech-focused investment firm.

The round also included participation from Presight Capital and returning investor Unbound, which led Syfe’s seed funding last year.

Founded in 2017 by chief executive officer Dhruv Arora, Syfe launched in July 2019. Like “robo-advisors” Robinhood, Acorns and Stash, Syfe’s goal is to make investing more accessible. There is no minimum amount required to start investing and its all-inclusive pricing structure ranges from .4% to .65% per year.

Syfe serves customers based in 23 countries, but currently only actively markets it services in Singapore, where it is licensed under the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Part of its new funding will be used to expand into new Asian countries. The startup hasn’t disclosed its exact user numbers, but says the number of its customers and assets under management have increased tenfold since the beginning of the year, and almost half of its new clients were referred by existing users.

Other Valar Ventures portfolio companies include TransferWise, Xero and digital bank N26. In a statement about Syfe, founding partner Andrew McCormack said, “The potential of Asia as a region, with a fast-growing number of mass-affluent consumers aiming to grow their wealth, combined with the pedigree of the team and strong traction, makes Syfe a very compelling opportunity.”

Before starting Syfe, Arora was an investment banker at UBS Investment Bank in Hong Kong before serving as vice president of product and growth at Grofers, one of India’s largest online grocery delivery services. While at UBS, Arora worked with exchange-traded funds, or ETFs.

“I could see how a lot of institutions and some ultra-high-net worth individuals who are clients of the bank were using the product, and I thought it was a great tool for individuals, too,” Arora told TechCrunch. “But what I realized was that people are actually not very aware of how to use ETFs.”

In many Asian countries, people prefer to put their money away in bank accounts or invest in real estate. As interest rates and property prices stagnate, however, consumers are looking for other ways to invest. Syfe currently offers three investment products. The first is a global diversified portfolio with a mix of stocks, bonds and ETFs that is automatically managed according to each investor’s chosen risk level. The second is a REIT portfolio based on the Singapore Exchange’s iEdge S-REIT Leaders Index. Finally, Syfe’s Equity100 portfolio consists of ETFs that include stocks from more than 1,500 companies around the world.

Other Asia-focused “robo-advisor” services include Stashaway and Kristal.ai, and Grab Financial also recently announced a “micro-investment” product. Arora acknowledges that in the future, there may be more entrants to the space. Right now, however, Syfe’s main competitor is the mindset that banks are still the best way to save money, he added. Part of Syfe’s work is consumer education, because “it was culturally ingrained in a lot of us, myself included, to keep your money in the bank.”

Syfe differentiates with a team of financial advisors, including former employees of Goldman Sachs, Citibank and Morgan Stanley, who are on hand for user consultations. Arora said most Syfe users talk to advisors when they first join the platform, and about 20% of them continue using the service. Questions have included if people should use a credit card to invest, which Arora said advisors dissuade them from doing because of high interest rates.

“We definitely want to be a tech-first platform, but we understand there is a value, especially as you deal with some of the older audiences who are in their 50s and 60s, who are still adapting to these technologies,” he said. “They need to know that you know there is somebody out there to look after their products.”

While Syfe’s average user is aged between 30 to 45, one growing bracket is people in their 50s who are motivated to save for retirement, or want to create a supplement to their pension plan. Users typically start with an initial investment of about SGD $10,000 (about USD $7,340), and about four out of five users regularly top up that amount.

Some users have tried other investment products, like investment-linked insurance plans, but for many, Arora says Syfe is their first introduction to investing in stocks, bonds and ETFs.

“We’ve realized that a fair number of them are quite well-to-do professionals in their field, in their mid- to late 30s, who amassed a significant amount of wealth but never really had a chance to invest, or the right advice on how to invest,” said Arora. “I think this has been one of the biggest revelations for us and it made us realize we should have a human touch in our platform.”

The platform manages its products with a mix of an investment team and algorithms that help avoid human bias, said Arora. Syfe’s algorithms take into account growth versus value, the market cap of a stock, volatility and sector momentum. To balance risk, it also analyzes how individual assets correlate with other assets in the same portfolio.

Arora said Syfe is currently in advanced talks with regulators in several countries and expects to be in at least two new markets by the end of next year. It also plans to double the size of its team and create more consumer financial products.

During COVID-19, Arora said Syfe’s portfolios experienced significantly lower corrections than indexes like the S&P, so only a few users withdrew their money. In fact, many invested more.

“I feel people have been rethinking their finances and the future,” he said. “As banks cut interest rates across the world, including in Singapore, many of them have started looking at other options.”

Manticore, a Roblox-like startup that enables users to quickly build multi-player desktop games, raises $15M led by Epic, bringing its total raised to $60M (Abram Brown/Forbes)

Abram Brown / Forbes:
Manticore, a Roblox-like startup that enables users to quickly build multi-player desktop games, raises $15M led by Epic, bringing its total raised to $60M  —  Manticore, a new gaming startup with software that enables users to quickly build high-resolution multi-player desktop games …

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Maria Deutscher / SiliconANGLE:
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Elon Musk reveals the Tesla Model S ‘Plaid’ slated for late 2021

Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed Tuesday the Model S Plaid, the newest variant to the company’s flagship sedan that boasts some eye-popping performance and range claims, including the ability to travel at least 520 miles on a single charge.

The Model S with this more powerful “Plaid” powertrain won’t be available until late 2021.  Tesla, however, has already opened up orders for the vehicle that starts just a skosh under $140,000.

In September 2019, Musk tweeted that “the only thing beyond Ludicrous is Plaid,” a teaser to a higher-performing vehicle and a nod to the movie “Spaceballs.” At the time, Musk said the new powertrain would go into production in about a year, which is right about now.

However, during the reveal, which was tucked in among the company’s so-called Battery Day, Musk announced that the Model S Plaid would go into production in late 2021. The Tesla website, which requires a $1,000 refundable deposit, says deliveries will begin in late 2021.

This new Plaid powertrain will have three motors, one more than the dual-motor system found in today’s Model S and X. The end result is a faster, longer range and more expensive version of the Model S. The powertrain produces 1,100 horsepower, achieves a top speed of 200 mph and can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in under 2 seconds, Musk said.

Last year Musk had indicated the Plaid powertrain would also be available in the Model X and the upcoming Roadster. Musk made no mention of whether these models would receive the beefier powertrain.

Musk showed a clip of the Model S Plaid at the Laguna Sega raceway completing a lap in 1:30.3. That’s a six-second improvement over a test Tesla made on its Plaid powertrain and chassis prototype last year.

Image Credits: Screenshot/Tesla

Papa, which connects elderly Americans with virtual and physical companions, raises $18M Series B led by Comcast Ventures, bringing its total raised to $31M (Jonathan Shieber/TechCrunch)

Jonathan Shieber / TechCrunch:
Papa, which connects elderly Americans with virtual and physical companions, raises $18M Series B led by Comcast Ventures, bringing its total raised to $31M  —  The Miami-based startup Papa has raised an additional $18 million as it looks to expand its business connecting elderly Americans …

Tesla claims it can drive battery costs down even lower with new material science innovations

Amid a packed afternoon of announcements from Tesla around innovations the company is pursuing to slash the cost of electric vehicle production and energy storage through better battery design, the company said it’s made new advancements in material science for anodes and cathodes — key components of the lithium-ion batteries that are the heart of all of its products.

Tesla took an all-of-the-above approach to improving its battery from the manufacturing process that is still under development to the materials used in cathode and anode, the basic building blocks of any battery system.

The upshot: a reduction in cost of the cathode and anode materials, while boosting performance that on its own could extend the range of its batteries by 20%, Tesla said.

On the anode side, the company is looking at ways to integrate more silicon into its batteries by using metallurgical grade silicon. One of the most abundant materials on earth, most of the silicon used in microchips, batteries, and even solar panels has been highly processed using expensive treatments to make it work for different applications. With batteries, the issue is its propensity to degrade when it’s fully charged with lithium.

“With silicon, the cookie crumbles and gets gooey,” said Elon Musk during the company’s “battery day” presentation. That gooeyness means that the material loses its energy retention and storage capacity. Every time a battery charges, the degradation means shorter life cycles for the battery.

That’s why most companies use some sort of treatment on silicon to make the material hardier — or use as little silicon as possible in their batteries. “They enable some of the benefits of silicon, but they don’t enable all of it and they’re not scalable enough,” said Andrew Baglino, the company’s SVP of powertrain and energy engineering.

Instead of throwing the silicon out, Tesla said it is working with a new treatment method that can take cheap, metallurgical grade silicon and incorporate that into its new battery designs.

“What we’re proposing is a step-change in capability and a step-change in cost and to go to the raw metallurgical silicon itself,” said Baglino. “Design for it to expand [and] think of it in the electrode design … If you use simple silicon it is dramatically less than the silicon that is used in batteries today.

Baglino expects that by using new treatment methods, the company could drop the cost to $1.20 a kilowatt hour.

That involves starting with raw, metallurgical silicon that’s stabilized with a low-cost, elastic, ion-conducting polymer that’s integrated into the electrode with a highly elastic binder. 

That innovation alone could increase the range of Tesla vehicles by 20%. “When we take that anode cost production, we’re look at a 5% dollar-per-kilowatt reduction at the battery pack level,” Baglino said.

But the company doesn’t intend to stop at the anode. It’s also looking at using different material science innovations to increase the efficiency of the cathode too.

Both the anode and the cathode need to be able to maintain their structure while having charged particles bounce off of them. They’re basically storage containers for electricity even as that electricity is moving around — charging and discharging.

Baglino and Musk likened the materials to bookshelves, where the charged particles are the books and the shelves are the cathodes.

Batteries in this analogy are basically libraries, where the cathodes store the books and the anodes are the librarians moving the books (energy) out into the world where they can be read or used (I think I’ve taken that analogy about as far as it can go).

“You need a stable structure to contain the ions. You want a structure that hold its shape with ion. As you move the ion back and forth you lose cycle life and your battery capacity drops very quickly,” said Musk. 

Several different materials can be used as cathodes, but the cheapest, by far, is nickel. It also has the highest energy density. But most batteries use cobalt because it’s a more stable material.

Tesla said today that it is working on a way to stabilize nickel for use as a more robust storage material. That means the nickel can store the energy (books) without the risk of toppling or degrading.

“We can get a 15% reduction in cathode dollar per kilowatt hour,” said Baglino.

Musk said that Tesla wouldn’t be throwing out its existing chemistries, but that the addition of new nickel-based batteries would enable the company to pursue some of its other goals.

“We need to have a three-tiered approach to batteries,” Musk said. “Iron — medium range, nickel manganese as medium-plus, and high nickel for the Cybertruck and the Semi.”

Tesla is building a cathode plant and getting into the lithium mining business

A little more than a year ago, during Tesla’s 2019 shareholder’s meeting, CEO Elon Musk said the company “might get into the business of mining minerals used in electric vehicle batteries.”

Today, during Tesla’s so-called Battery Day event, Musk confirmed that the company is officially getting into the mining business.

Tesla has secured the rights to a 10,000-acre lithium clay deposit in Nevada, Musk said during the event.

The lithium mine is just one piece of Tesla’s broader plan to build a cheaper, more efficient battery that will ultimately allow it to lower the price of its vehicles. It’s also another example of Tesla bringing its supply chain closer to its home.

Musk and Drew Baglino, the SVP of powertrain and energy engineering at Tesla, laid out the company’s plans and progress to eventually have 10 to 20 terawatt hours of annual battery production. At the heart of that plan is a new tabless battery cell that the company introduced at the event. But Baglino and Musk outlined other pieces to this larger mission, including a new manufacturing system that is still under development and plans to build infrastructure to support it.

The lithium mine as well as a cathode facility, both of which will be in North America, will be two new additions to Tesla’s growing portfolio of factories and operations.

“We’re gonna go and start building our own cathode facility in North America and leveraging all of the North American resources that exist for nickel and lithium, and just doing that just localizing our cathode supply chain and production, we can reduce miles traveled by all the materials that end up in the cathode by 80%,” Baglino said.

Next to the cathode plant will be a lithium conversion facility, according to Baglino, who added that the company is working on a new sulfate-free process that he claimed will reduce lithium costs by 33%.

It’s unclear where the cathode plant will be located. However, if the aim is to bring the supply chain close together, it might end up being next to the plot of lithium clay that Tesla recently bought the mining rights to.

Mining the reactive alkali metal does have an environmental cost. But Musk claims the company has found a better process. Traditionally, mining lithium takes a lot of water. Miners will drill a hole in the land and pump brine to the surface where it’s then left to evaporate. What’s left is a mix of minerals like manganese and lithium salts. Those continue to be filtered until the lithium can be extracted.

Musk said they have a new process that can extract the lithium from ore using sodium chloride, or table salt.

“Nobody’s done this before, to the best of my knowledge, nobody’s done this,” Musk said, adding that all of the elements in the process are reusable. “It’s a very sustainable way of obtaining lithium.” He then said the land where the mining will take place “will look pretty much the same as before.”

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Dan Primack / Axios:
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TransferWise reported annual revenues of £302.6M in FY ending March 2020, up 70% YoY, and net profit of £21.3M, says it has 8M customers globally, up 33% YoY (Alex Wilhelm/TechCrunch)

Alex Wilhelm / TechCrunch:
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New York Times:
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Morgan Beller, one of the founders of Facebook's Libra digital currency, has left the company to become a partner at VC firm NFX (Salvador Rodriguez/CNBC)

Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
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China’s electric carmaker WM Motor pulls in $1.47 billion Series D

Chinese electric vehicle startup WM Motor just pocketed an outsize investment to fuel growth in a competitive landscape increasingly coveted by foreign rival Tesla. The five-year-old company raised 10 billion yuan ($1.47 billion) in a Series D round, it announced on Tuesday, which will pay for research and development, branding, marketing and expansion of sales channel.

WM Motor, backed by Baidu and Tencent, is one of the highest funded EV startups in China alongside NIO, Xpeng and Li Auto, all of which have gone public in New York. With its latest capital boost, WM Motor could be gearing up for an initial public offering. As Bloomberg’s sources in July said, the company was weighing a listing on China’s Nasdaq-style STAR board as soon as this year.

Days before its funding news, WM Motor unveiled its key partners and suppliers: Qualcomm Snapdragon’s cockpit chips will power the startup’s in-cabin experience; Baidu’s Apollo autonomous driving system will give WM vehicles self-parking capability; Unisplendour, rooted in China’s Tsinghua University, will take care of the hardware side of autonomous driving; and lastly, integrated circuit company Sino IC Leasing will work on “car connectivity” for WM Motor, whatever that term entails.

It’s not uncommon to see the new generation of EV makers seeking external partnerships given their limited experience in manufacturing. WM Motor’s rival Xpeng similarly works with Blackberry, Desay EV and Nvidia to deliver its smart EVs.

WM Motor was founded by automotive veteran Freeman Shen, who previously held executive positions at Volvo, Fiat and Geely in China.

The startup recently announced an ambitious plan for the next 3-5 years to allocate 20 billion yuan ($2.95 billion) and 3,000 engineers to work on 5G-powered smart cockpits, Level-4 driving and other futuristic auto technologies. That’s a big chunk of the startup’s total raise, which is estimated to be north of $3 billion, based on Crunchbase data and its latest funding figure.

Regional governments are often seen rooting for companies partaking in China’s strategic industries such as semiconductors and electric cars. WM Motor’s latest round, for instance, is led by a state-owned investment platform and state-owned carmaker SAIC Motor, both based in Shanghai where the startup’s headquarters resides. The city is also home to Tesla’s Gigafactory where the American giant churns out made-in-China vehicles.

In July, the Chinese EV upstart delivered its 30,000th EX5 SUV vehicle, which comes at about $22,000 with state subsidy and features the likes of in-car video streaming and air purification. The company claimed that parents of young children account for nearly 70% of its customers.