Only Products and Other Stuff

DeLorean released fresh details and images of its Alpha 5 EV, a gull-winged electric vehicle that the company’s owners hope will resurrect the long defunct brand and possibly set the direction for more electric models. The company’s — and the EV’s — big public moment won’t come until later this summer at the Monterey Car Week. But the brand’s owners, anxious to capitalize on interest in EVs and perhaps spur a little momentum ahead of the event, released images and specs that reveal the Alpha 5 retains the gull-winged, two-door frame featured in the “Back to the Future” trilogy, but features a curvier, sleeker silhouette and room for four passengers. So far, the company’s intentions for reviving the DeLorean brand after a long hiatus — as well as how and where it will fund and built the Alpha 5 — are not clear. DeLorean CEO and former Karma Automotive executive Joost de Vries, who joined the company in December, is scheduled to speak Friday at the Electrify Expo EV festival in Long B...

Despite economic turmoil in the tech world, an Oakland-based startup shows that moonshots are still getting funded. Felt, co-founded by Sam Hashemi and Can Duruk , wants to disrupt the role of maps in society, and rethink how we think about the medium. The startup allows users to build a map with datasets integrated into it, and work with each other to showcase impact in a less static way than your average Google maps query. Despite a massive mission — proving that maps are a forgotten yet fundamental medium worth renovating — the co-founders cited proven business models from Figma and Notion, both valued in the billions, as reason to believe in their work. The aforementioned companies both succeeded in rolling out to users for personal use, then pivoting to the enterprise, a playbook that Felt wants to follow (and that VCs can certainly speak the language of). “That kind of business model and go to market is — I don’t want to say immune, but is a little bit removed from the kind o...

Cybersecurity continues to grow in complexity due to the ever-increasing threat landscape — more services in the cloud, more digital operations and more devices mean more attack surfaces and variations for malicious hackers to worm into networks, and thus more tools to fight this — and that is creating more work for operations teams tasked with responding to security threats. Today a startup called Seemplicity is emerging from stealth with $32 million in funding for a platform that it believes will help reduce that load. Funding for the Israel-based startup is coming in the form of a $6 million seed round and a $26 million Series A. Glilot Capital Partners, by way of its early growth fund Glilot+, is leading the Series A with new backers NTTVC  and  Atlantic Bridge and previous backers S Capital  and  Rain Capital also participating. S Capital led its seed round . Ravid Circus — Seemplicity’s CPO who co-founded the company with Yoran Sirkis (CEO) and Rotem Cohen...

SBI Holdings, a Japanese securities and banking giant that launched a crypto-asset fund for retail investors last year, has been actively investing in the infrastructure that will allow it to roll out more crypto products. The firm has recently made a strategic investment in Digital Asset, a New York-based startup known for building enterprise blockchain solutions, it said in an announcement . As part of the deal, the pair are launching a joint venture this year to operate across East Asia, which includes Japan and South Korea. The undisclosed round adds to the $300 million in funding that Digital Asset has raised since its founding in 2014 from the likes of IBM and Goldman Sachs, which is tokenizing assets with help from the blockchain company. The objective of the partnership is to bring programmable money , or digital money that can be coded to act in a certain way based on predetermined conditions, into the Japanese market, said Digital Asset in a separate statement . ...

Google-backed DotPe, which helps businesses in India go online and sell digitally , is in advanced stages of talks to raise about $50 million in a new financing round, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Temasek, the Singapore state-owned investment firm, is finalizing deliberations to lead the investment in the Gurgaon-headquartered startup, the source said, requesting anonymity as the details are private. Terms of the investment could change and the deal may end up not materializing at all, the source cautioned. Temasek declined to comment, while DotPe did not respond to a request for comment. The two-year-old startup, which also counts PayU and Info Edge Ventures as its backers, also helps brick and mortar stores get visibility on Google Search. Restaurants, which are some of the customers of DotPe, use the startup’s offering to scan their inventories to make them digitally accessible via WhatsApp. These offerings puts DotPe chasing a similar set of audiences as o...

HitPay has almost everything SMEs need to run their businesses. In addition to being an online payment gateway, it also offers tools like point-of-sale software with card readers, plugins, payment links and no-code online stores. The Y Combinator alum announced today that it has raised $15.75 million in Series A funding led by Tiger Global, with participation from returning investors Global Founders Capital and HOF Capital. It is currently used by over 10,000 merchants in Singapore and Malaysia, with plans to expand into more Southeast Asian markets, including Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. Co-founder and CEO Aditya Haripurkar told TechCrunch HitPay started in 2016 as an e-wallet, but then pivoted toward being a SME-facing platform in 2018 as a virtual POS product. As its team began to understand the needs of SMEs more, it started to develop the other tools on the platform. HitPay’s Series A funding will be used for building a payments infrastructure from the ground up, ...

So-called “tech for good” accelerators addressing such worthy-sounding subjects as ESGs and SDGs have appeared in the last few years. Some observers have dismissed these efforts as scalable only put to a point. However, the evidence is mounting that they are increasingly attracting some of the world’s best talent, because the world’s best talent does actually want to solve some of the planet’s biggest problems. And where the talent goes, the money and backing will follow. In Europe, Entrepreneur First (EF) and Antler have tried to scale their models as ‘talent investors’, while the Bethnal Green Ventures fund was even acquired and re-capitalized by its new owners. Clearly this approach is on something of a roll. Zinc is an accelerator which appeared back in 2017 when it was founded Ella Goldner , Paul Kirby and Saul Klein (LocalGlobe founder) and backed by its early investors including the London School of Economics. It went on to back over 220 diverse founders who built more than ...

Hello and welcome back to Max Q. There is SO much news this week, so let’s dive in. In this issue: Astroforge’s asteroid mining ambitions Boeing’s Starliner comes home News from Virgin Orbit, Rocket Lab and more Don’t forget to sign up to get the free newsletter version of Max Q delivered to your inbox. Astroforge closes $13M seed plus round for asteroid mining plans  Although we’ve long understood that asteroids are not simply the rubble of the universe, but potentially profitable stores of precious minerals, humanity has never been able to unlock this value. Y Combinator startup  Astroforge wants to succeed where other companies have failed, by becoming the first to mine an asteroid and bring the material back to Earth — and it’s aiming to do so as early as the end of the decade. (Yes, that is not a typo — end of the decade!) To start, Astroforge will be conducting a tech demonstration mission sometime next year. The company’s already booked a spot on a SpaceX Fa...

We’re just about two weeks away from our first foray into climate tech at TC Sessions: Climate & The Extreme Tech Challenge 2022 Global Finals on June 14 in Berkeley, California — with an online day to follow on June 16. It’s going to be an epic day all around for many reasons — did you know that Bill Gates is one of the featured speakers? Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from and engage with the new wave of climate-tech entrepreneurs, early-stage founders, CEOs, scientists, researchers, engineers and the VCs who fund them. You know what else you can’t afford to miss? Our 2-for-1 pass Memorial Day sale — it ends tonight at 11:59 pm (PT) . Buy your pass now and save! Pro Tip: Yes, TechCrunch editors will interview the leading voices in the fight against climate-change ( check out the event agenda ), but we’d be doing you a disservice if we didn’t remind you about our partner breakout sessions. These expert-led, topic-specific partner sessions give you time to lean in, ...

Indonesia’s sprawling archipelago has long been a headache for logistics companies, but there’s no lack of brave challengers. Jarkata-based Astro, which provides 15-minute grocery delivery, has recently closed a $60 million Series B financing round, lifting its total funding to $90 million since the business launched just nine months ago. The Series B round was led by Accel, Citius and Tiger Global, with participation from existing investors AC Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Lightspeed and Sequoia Capital India. The company declined to disclose its post-money valuation. The speed at which Astro is attracting investment goes to show the need for hefty upfront investment in the grocery delivery race, which is about establishing a logistics infrastructure quickly and locking in loyal customers ahead of rivals. Founded by Tokopedia veteran Vincent Tjendra , Astro plans to spend its funding proceeds on user acquisition, product development, and hiring more staff to add to its current ...

India has withdrawn a warning that asked users to not share photocopies of their national biometric ID following a widespread uproar from users on social media, many of whom pointed that this is the first time they were hearing about such a possibility. A regional office of UIDAI, the body that oversees the national biometric ID system Aadhaar, warned users on Friday that “unlicensed private entities” such as hotels and theatre halls are “not permitted to collect or keep copies of Aadhaar card,” a 12-digit unique number that ties an individual’s fingerprints and retina scan, and individuals should avoid sharing photocopies of their Aadhaar to prevent misuse. The warning prompted an immediate and wide backlash from individuals. “I might have stayed in almost 100 hotels who kept a copy of my Aadhaar! Now this,” an individual tweeted, summing up the dilemma of tens of millions of people in the country, if not more. UIDAI has now woken up after everyone's distributed photocopies o...

On the  Chain Reaction podcast this week, Lux Capital’s newest investor, Grace Isford, joined us to talk about the opaque but crucial world of web3 infrastructure. At Lux, Isford invests in the companies working behind the scenes to make sure crypto exchanges are secure and reliable enough to avoid being hacked. Before joining Lux this February, Isford was an investor at Canvas Ventures focused on enterprise software and fintech. A data infrastructure investment she worked on at Canvas revealed to her the opportunity in the web3 space for companies to “share data immutably at scale,” motivating her pivot to crypto, she said. “That led me down the rabbit hole, and then I ended up investing myself personally,” Isford said. “I got into yield farming, which coincided with my move to New York, where many of my friends are also in the crypto and VC ecosystem.” Isford says her investing approach in web3 is rooted in what she calls her “circle of competence,” or the area where she can...

As expected, the Broadcom-VMware deal is a go . The chip giant intends to snap up the virtualization software company for $61 billion in cash and stock, along with taking on $8 billion in VMware debt. It’s not an inexpensive transaction, but thanks to a “go-shop” provision that gives VMware 40 days to “solicit, receive, evaluate and potentially enter negotiations with parties that offer alternative proposals,” there’s market speculation that another bidder could enter the fray. After chewing through analyst notes on the deal, Ron and Alex wound up on opposite sides regarding whether a higher price or another bidder would make sense. Ron’s view is that the company’s value is higher than its recent financial results may imply, while Alex feels the company is not sufficiently performative to deserve a higher price. TechCrunch+ is having a Memorial Day sale. You can save 50% on annual subscriptions  for a limited time. We’ve long speculated who might buy VMware , and after Del...

Welcome to The Interchange, a take on this week’s fintech news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. We’ve all been keeping up with the recent drama of Stripe vs. Plaid . Rather than rehash all that here, I’ll point you to some of our recent articles on the topic and just summarize: The two fintech startups have recently grown (much) more competitive. If things weren’t turbulent enough, another startup has very publicly emerged as a formidable competitor to Stripe: Finix . Now, Finix is not coming out of nowhere. The SaaS startup — which started out in early 2020 by selling its payments tech to other businesses — raised a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia. In an unusual twist, Sequoia just 1 month later walked away from the deal in which it reportedly wrote the self-described payments infrastructure company a $21 million check. As TC’s Connie Loizos reported at the time, Finix told employees that  soon after issuing its check, Sequoia concluded that Finix ...

Enterprise productivity company Box reported results earlier this week  for the first quarter of its fiscal 2023, the three-month period ending April 30. Box managed to beat revenue expectations, though it missed on adjusted per-share profit. Shares of the company initially lost modest ground. You might read the above paragraph and wonder why we’re digging into a SaaS company that had a quarter that appeared to be somewhat mixed in results terms and largely neutral from an investor perspective. The reason is that Box is accelerating out of a period in which external investors took aim at its leadership over complaints about flagging growth; the company managed to fend off activist investor demands  and is now reaping the results of the work it did while out of favor with Wall Street. Box’s revenue expansion decelerated to single-digit percentage points. Since Box went through the activist wringer, we’ve seen other public software companies with similar growth rates come u...

It’s been a bumpy road for the electric vehicle startups that rushed to go public over the past two years by merging with a publicly traded shell company. Now, the SEC’s broadest attempt to crackdown on these so-called reverse mergers could put a few speed bumps on the road to becoming — and maintaining — a SPAC. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will conclude Tuesday a 60-day public comment period on a number of proposed guidelines for SPACs , specifically around disclosures, marketing practices and third-party oversight. If approved, the barrier of entry to becoming a SPAC will rise, putting it on par with the regulatory burden placed on companies that pursue the more traditional IPO path. The rules will “help ensure that investors in these vehicles get protections similar to those when investing in traditional initial public offerings,” SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said when the proposal was first released back in March. The rules, if approved, will also strengthen protect...

Hey all. Welcome back to Week in Review, the newsletter where we recap some of the top stories to cross TC’s front page over the last 7 days. The most read story on our site this week was about Flowcarbon — a new company and “blockchain-based redemption story” (as Anita put it) launched by WeWork founder Adam Neumann. The goal, writes Anita, is to “sell tokenized carbon credits to companies looking to reduce their carbon footprint,” to which the only response I can think of is that Jennifer Lawrence “ok” gif . Why is it on the blockchain? What’s a “Goddess Nature Token”? Find out in Anita’s post here , then listen to Lucas and Anita go deep on the topic on this week’s Chain Reaction podcast. other stuff Here are some of the other most read TC stories from this week: Jack Dorsey steps down from Twitter’s board:  For the first time since its founding in 2006, co-founder Jack Dorsey is no longer officially involved in the operation of Twitter. Late last year, he stepped away fro...