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Source: CNET
The auction sought dowry for a 16-year-old girl in South Sudan.
Source: CNET
Agora, a developer of cloud communication APIs, will create products for new markets and verticals after raising a $70 million Series C led by Coatue Management. Existing investors SIG, Morningside Capital and Shunwei Capital also returned for the round, which brings Agora’s total funding so far to $125 million.
The startup’s APIs are used by customers, including The Meet Group, Xiaomi, Hike Messenger and Momo, to insert voice, video and group calling or broadcasting features into their apps. Agora claims it recently surpassed two billion installations of its SDKs and routes through its 200 distributed data centers around the world an average of 10 billion minutes of live communications each month.
The company is raising capital at a relatively fast pace to support its growth goals. Agora’s last funding announcement was made five months ago, when Agora said it had added a $30 million extension to its Series B, bringing that round to a total of $50 million.
Agora was started in 2014 by CEO Tony Zhao, who was a founding engineer at online communication platform WebEx, acquired by Cisco in 2007, and former CTO of Chinese live-streaming video platform YY. Headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., with offices in Shanghai, Agora is a relatively new entrant to a market that includes competitors like Twilio and Tokbox.
Agora’s core product is an SDK that enables developers to insert into their apps voice, video and group calling, as well as interactive broadcasting features, but it also recently added SDKs designed specifically for game developers and Facebook’s React Native framework.
Source: TechCrunch
Uber has long received flack for its lack of widely available wheelchair-accessible rides. Today, Uber is taking steps to ensure riders who rely on wheelchairs can get rides when they need them, and without having to wait more than 15 minutes. That’s thanks to a partnership with MV Transportation, a paratransit service provider that operates across 30 states and Canada.
Through the partnership, Uber will be able to add hundreds of wheelchair-accessible vehicles (WAVs) to its platform across six markets. In New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Toronto, Uber riders can expect wait times of 15 minutes or less on average. Over the next year, the plan is to get average wait times in San Francisco and Los Angeles down to 15 minutes. Uber says rides in those eight cities account for half of all Uber trips in North America.
Because Uber doesn’t own any of the vehicles, the company has historically been dependent upon everyday people — many of whom do not have wheelchair-accessible vehicles.
“I think the reality is most folks who use folding wheelchairs have a good experience but our model doesn’t work for people who use powered wheelchairs,” Uber Head of Global Policy for Accessibility and Underserved Communities Malcom Glenn told TechCrunch.
So over the last couple of years, Uber has explored a variety of models, Glenn said.
“The model we think is going to be able to get a large supply of WAVs on the platform is through commercial relationships — working with transportation providers who already have access to a large supply of wheelchair-accessible vehicles,” Glenn said.
All of the rides offered via this partnership are operated in vehicles owned by MV and operated by their trained drivers. The cost for WAV riders via the MV partnership will be the same as the cost of UberX, Glenn said. But given the cost of buying, maintaining and modifying wheelchair-accessible vehicles, Uber is investing heavily in making sure MV can offer Uber riders what they’re looking for.
“We’re making a pretty significant investment in making sure there’s reliability,” Glenn said. “Uber invests heavily in MV to make sure we’re getting the reliability all parties want.”
He added, “It’s a quite sizeable investment that we’re making but we think it’s the right thing to do in the long term.”
Uber first launched a service geared toward people with disabilities in 2014, with the launch of Uber Access. Through Uber Access, passengers can request UberASSIST and UberWAV, which is geared toward people with wheelchairs. Though, Uber Access is not available in all of Uber’s markets and is dependent upon Uber’s ability to partner with commercial providers.
This partnership, for example, does not cover Jackson, Miss., where Uber faced a lawsuit last year over its lack of wheelchair-accessible rides.
“I think we chose the cities we chose for a couple of reasons,” Glenn said. “They’re among the largest cities in which we operate. When we launch in places with large operations, we cover more people. In terms of the specifics of where we’ll go and when, I think we’re committed to getting to as many places as is reasonable to be able to get the wait times we think people should be able to expect. We want to figure out how we can make sure the service works in as best a way as possible.”
Last year, Uber was sued many times over its lack of wheelchair-accessible rides. But Uber competitor Lyft has faced similar legal challenges. Earlier this year, Disability Rights Advocates filed a class-action lawsuit against Lyft alleging the ride-hailing company discriminates against people who use wheelchairs in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In addition to working with MV, Uber has additional accessibility partnerships in place. Uber, for example, also works with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority to operate a paratransit pilot.
“We’re committed to making accessibility a meaningful part of what we do, and we’re proud to be doing our part to enable improved access to transportation for people with disabilities,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote in a blog post. “We know there is still a long way to go—and that we’re at the beginning, not the end, of this journey.”
Source: TechCrunch
Our in-house Know-It-Alls answer questions about your interactions with technology.
Source: Wired
PlayVS, the company bringing esports infrastructure to high schools across the country, has today announced the close of a $30.5 million Series B financing. The round was led by Elysian Park Ventures, the investment arm of the L.A. Dodgers, with participation from five existing investors, including New Enterprise Associates, Science Inc., Crosscut Ventures, Coatue Management and WndrCo.
New investors also joined in on the round, including Adidas (the company’s first esports investment), Samsung NEXT, Plexo Capital, as well as angel investors such as Sean “Diddy” Combs, David Drummond, DST Global partner Rahul Mehta, Michael Dubin and others.
It’s certainly worth noting that PlayVS raised a $15 million Series A just six short months ago. Founder and CEO Delane Parnell explained that this Series B was an opportunistic raise, as the company received a lot of inbound from investors to get a slice of the next round.
“This gives us much more stability and runway so that we can hire more senior employees and leadership,” said Parnell. “It also gives us a bit of a war chest to let the team go out and work their strategies.”
Alongside the raise, PlayVS also announced new game partnerships, bringing Rocket League and SMITE into the company’s portfolio. Rocket League and SMITE join League of Legends, which was added to the platform two months ago.
PlayVS launched early this year with a relatively novel approach to the esports world. Instead of focusing on the current esports space, PlayVS realized there was a huge opportunity to bring infrastructure to the esports landscape in high school. As more and more esports careers are created through investment by colleges (via scholarships) and esports orgs, PlayVS gives students a place to show off their skills and get in front of recruiters.
The first step in the process was establishing a partnership between PlayVS and the NHFS, which is essentially the NCAA of high school sports. Through that partnership, PlayVS handles team schedules, district league schedules, coaching clinics and referees, and sets up an in-person live spectator event for the State Championship at the end of the year.
Right now, the company is in the midst of its Season Zero, testing out the platform with a small number of states — Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts and Rhode Island — in preparation for the official Inaugural Season, which will begin in 2019. Today, PlayVS is adding Alabama (AHSAA), Mississippi (MISSHSAA) and parts of Texas (TCSAAL).
But the growth of the company is largely dependent on states and school districts, which is why PlayVS is announcing the launch of Club Leagues. Club Leagues is identical to the PlayVS sports league product, except there is no State Championship at the end. Still, students who do not yet have access to the official PlayVS sports league can create teams, join up and play matches.
Eventually, Parnell says, the company will phase out Club Leagues as soon as official sports leagues are available to those players.
Source: TechCrunch
Two new reports show an uptick in sophisticated phishing attacks originating from—where else—Russia.
Source: Wired
Just days after a CIA report concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, SoftBank’s Vision Fund — the gargantuan investment vehicle anchored by a $45 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s PIF sovereign fund — is back in check-writing action.
Coupang, Korea’s largest e-commerce firm, revealed today that it has raised $2 billion from the Vision Fund. The investment comes weeks after SoftBank’s stake in Coupang was transferred over the Vision Fund, as the firm has done with a number of its investment.
No valuation was announced, but a source close to the deal told TechCrunch that it values Coupang at $9 billion post-money. This deal, which we understand is entirely new stock with no secondary sales, takes Coupang to $3.4 billion raised to date. Its last round was a $1 billion investment from SoftBank in 2015.
The deal is a massive validation for Coupang, which becomes the first Korean company to form a part of the Vision Fund, which SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son has championed as a network of global winners, but the link to the Khashoggi threatens to sour the achievement.
Prince Mohammed bin Salman is widely accused of ordering the killing of Washington Post reporter Khashoggi, an outspoken critic of the Saudi regime. A Saudi-led investigation exonerated the prince’s role, however the CIA report released over the last week places the blame fairly squarely on his shoulders — while others in the Saudi royal family are reportedly plotting to replace the prince as the next in line to the throne.
Son himself condemned the killing as an “act against humanity” but, in a recent analyst presentation, he added that SoftBank has a “responsibility” to Saudi Arabia to deploy the capital and continue the Vision Fund.
The PIF’s role in Vision Fund — it is the largest single investor — has threatened to taint its efforts, with voices in Silicon Valley suggesting that many founders would prefer to take money from less-tainted sources. However, SoftBank has announced a number of deals in recent weeks — including a $375 million investment in robotic food-prep startup Zume and $1.1 billion deal with glass maker View — which contradicts that. Son himself said he hadn’t heard of any cases of startups refusing an investment from the Vision Fund, but he did admit that there “may be some impact” in the future.
Those investments haven’t stopped Coupang from taking an investment from the Vision Fund, and announcing it publicly, too.
“The Vision Fund is a visionary fund [and] we’re proud to be selected to work in partnership with it,” Coupang CEO Bom Kim told TechCrunch in an interview.
Kim said he doesn’t expect a backlash from the investment, claiming that the tension around Khashoggi’s death “doesn’t represent us and doesn’t represent these companies.”
Taking a vast amount of money from a fund whose mainer backer is a country that (reportedly) murdered a journalist who dared criticize the regime isn’t a good look. But ultimately, it remains to be seen how that will shake out. As the world’s waits on a fuller investigation from the CIA and responses from the Saudi royal family and SoftBank’s Son, the incident certainly does have the potential to weigh on Coupang’s positive news.
Coupang CEO Bom Kim started the company in 2010, now it is valued at $10 billion. [Image via Coupang]
Operating relatively under the global radar, Coupang has become Korea’s largest e-commerce player and it is actively looking to expand into other areas.
Founded in 2010, Kim claimed the company is “approaching” $5 billion in revenue for 2018 with 70 percent annual growth. One in every two adults in Korea have the Coupang app on their phone, the company claims. The company operates only in Korea, but it does have engineering outposts in Beijing, LA, Seattle, Shanghai, Silicon Valley and Seoul.
That impressive revenue number has increased 14x since 2014 which Kim accounts to a moment of clarity which saw the company’s focused redirected.
“We had plans to go public and had gotten pretty far along in the process but we realized that wouldn’t fulfill of our vision,” Kim explained. “Instead, we saw an opportunity to make a long-term series of investments that would mean multi-year investment in tech platforms and infrastructure.”
That meant developing its own network of trucks and drivers, integrating technology at every level and making other changes to build the infrastructure and capacity to deliver items quickly to customers across Korea.
That’s helped Coupang roll out services like same-day delivery, overnight delivery and more. Coupang also has its own RocketPay payment service.
Kim explained that, for example, if a parent realized the night before school that their child needed a new rain jacket, they could receive it via Coupang before 7 am the next day if they ordered it before midnight. The overnight delivery service also includes fresh produce and “millions” of other items, he said. For that to happen, Coupang developed a cold chain logistics network in just one month.
Coupang said “millions” of customers use its service at least 50 times a year, i.e. on a weekly basis. Yes, it is a vague number and we don’t know what proportion of the overall customer base that represents, but it is an impressive snapshot nonetheless.
Kim revealed Coupang has “a lot of different plans” to spend this capital, although he declined to go into specific detail.
He didn’t rule out adjacent services like media — Amazon is, of course, a major name in video and music streaming — and he revealed that Coupang “intends to have a broad reach in more markets than just Korea” although, again, there’s no information on what countries and when.
The plan to go public is also likely to be revived, with the U.S. a more likely destination than a domestic IPO, although Kim said that there is “no specific timetable” for when that might happen.
Source: TechCrunch
As yourself, a squad member, and part of a larger multinational force, you’re implicated as a piece of the ever-charging global machine that fought World War Two.
Source: Wired
Opinion: Scientifically-backed software is shifting patient care from the hospital to the home.
Source: Wired