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Shares of One Medical are worth $19.50 this morning after the venture-backed unicorn priced its IPO at $14 per share last night. The company opened at $18 before rising further, according to Yahoo Finance data. At its current price, One Medical is worth about 40% more than its IPO price, a strong debut for the company.

The result is a boon for One Medical, which raised $532.1 million during its time as a private company. At $14 per share, the company was worth $1.71 billion. At 19.50, One Medical is worth $2.38 billion, a winning result for a company said to be worth around $1.5 billion as a private company.

For investors The Carlyle Group, J.P. Morgan, Redmile Group, GV and Benchmark (among others), the debut is a success, pricing their stakes in the company higher once again. For other unicorns, the news is even better. One Medical, a company with gross margins under the 50% mark, deeply minority recurring revenue and 30% revenue growth in 2019 at best is now worth about 8.5x its trailing revenues.

That is about as good a signal as one could imagine for venture-backed companies that aren’t in as good shape as Slack or Zoom were letting them know that now is the time to go public.

Unicorn directions

It’s possible to read One Medical’s new revenue multiple in a few ways. You can be positive, saying that its valuation and resulting metrics are signs of investor optimism for the medical service company. Or you could go negative and assume that its pricing looks like a case of the market being more excited about a brand than a set of accounting results.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Arvind Krishna will replace Ginni Rometty as IBM CEO in April

Krishna, IBM’s senior vice president for cloud and cognitive software, will take over on April 6 after a couple months of transition. Rometty will remain with the company as chairman of the board.

Krishna reportedly drove the massive $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat at the end of 2018, and there was some speculation at the time that Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst was the heir apparent. Instead, the board went with a more seasoned IBM insider for the job, while naming Whitehurst as president.

2. Apple’s redesigned Maps app is available across the US, adds real-time transit for Miami

The redesigned app will include more accurate information overall as well as comprehensive views of roads, buildings, parks, airports, malls and other public places. It will also bring Look Around to more cities and real-time transit to Miami.

3. Social media boosting service exposed thousands of Instagram passwords

The company, Social Captain, says it helps thousands of users to grow their Instagram follower counts by connecting their accounts to its platform. But TechCrunch learned this week Social Captain was storing the passwords of linked Instagram accounts in unencrypted plaintext.

4. Elon Musk just dropped an EDM track on SoundCloud

That is a real headline and I probably don’t need to say much else. Listen to the track, or don’t.

5. Being a child actress prepared me for a career in venture capital

Crystal McKellar played Becky Slater on “The Wonder Years,” and she writes about how that experience prepared her to be a managing partner at Anathem Ventures. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Moda Operandi, an online marketplace for high-end fashion, raises $100M led by NEA and Apax

High-end fashion might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about online shopping, but it has actually been a ripe market for the e-commerce industry.

7. Why Sony’s PlayStation Vue failed

Vue launched in March 2015, offering live and on-demand content from more than 85 channels, including many local broadcast stations. But it failed to catch on with a broader audience, despite — or perhaps, because of — its integration with Sony’s PS3 and PS4 devices, and it shut down this week. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

A pair of biomarkers of brain function — one that represents listening effort, and another that measures the ability to process rapid changes in frequencies — may help explain why a person with normal hearing may struggle to follow conversations in noisy environments, according to a new study led by Harvard Medical School (HMS) researchers at Massachusetts Eye and Ear.

Published Jan. 21 in eLife,the study could inform the design of next-generation clinical testing for hidden hearing loss, a condition that cannot currently be measured using standard hearing exams.

“Between the increased use of personal listening devices or the simple fact that the world is a much noisier place than it used to be, patients are reporting as early as middle age that they are struggling to follow conversations in the workplace and in social settings where other people are also speaking in the background,” said senior study author Daniel Polley, HMS associate professor of otolaryngology head and neck surgery and director of the Lauer Tinnitus Research Center at Mass. Eye and Ear. “Current clinical testing can’t pick up what’s going wrong with this very common problem.”

“Our study was driven by a desire to develop new types of tests,” added lead study author Aravindakshan Parthasarathy, HMS instructor in otolaryngology head and neck surgery and an investigator in the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories at Mass. Eye and Ear. “Our work shows that measuring cognitive effort in addition to the initial stages of neural processing in the brain may explain how patients are able to separate one speaker from a crowd.”

Hearing loss affects an estimated 48 million Americans and can be caused by noise, aging and other factors. Hearing loss typically arises from damage to the sensory cells of the inner ear (the cochlea), which convert sounds into electrical signals, or the auditory nerve fibers that transmit those signals to the brain. It is traditionally diagnosed by elevation in the faintest sound level required to hear a brief tone, as revealed on an audiogram, the gold standard test of hearing sensitivity.

Hidden hearing loss, on the other hand, refers to listening difficulties that go undetected by conventional audiograms and are thought to arise from abnormal connectivity and communication of nerve cells in the brain and ear, not in the sensory cells that initially convert sound waves into electrochemical signals. Conventional hearing tests were not designed to detect these neural changes that interfere with our ability to process sounds at louder, more conversational levels.

In the eLife report, the researchers first reviewed more than 100,000 patient records over a 16-year period, finding that approximately one in 10 of these patients who visited the audiology clinic at Mass. Eye and Ear presented with complaints of hearing difficulty, yet auditory testing revealed that they had normal audiograms.

Motivated to develop objective biomarkers that might explain these “hidden” hearing complaints, the study authors developed two sets of tests. The first measured electrical EEG signals from the surface of the ear canal to capture how well the earliest stages of sound processing in the brain were encoding subtle but rapid fluctuations in sound waves. The second test used specialized glasses to measure changes in pupil diameter as subjects focused their attention on one speaker while others babbled in the background. Previous research shows changes in pupil size can reflect the amount of cognitive effort expended on a task.

They then recruited 23 young or middle-aged subjects with clinically normal hearing to undergo the tests. As expected, their ability to follow a conversation with others talking in the background varied widely despite having a clean bill of hearing health. By combining their measures of ear canal EEG with changes in pupil diameter, they could identify which subjects struggled to follow speech in a noisy setting and which subjects could ace the test. The authors are encouraged by these results, considering that conventional audiograms could not account for any of these performance differences.

“Speech is one of the most complex sounds that we need to make sense of,” Polley said. “If our ability to converse in social settings is part of our hearing health, then the tests that are used have to go beyond the very first stages of hearing and more directly measure auditory processing in the brain.”

This study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grant NIDCD P50-DC015857).

Adapted from a Mass. Eye and Ear news release.

Today’s your last day to score early-bird pricing on tickets to TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020, which takes place on March 3. If you want to keep $150 in your wallet, beat the deadline and buy your ticket here before the clock strikes 11:59 p.m. (PT) tonight!

Our one-day conference dedicated to robotics and AI — the good, the bad and the challenging — features interviews, panel discussions, Q&As, workshops and demos. Join roughly 1,500 experts, visionaries, creators, founders, investors, researchers and engineers. Rub elbows, network and engage with current and aspiring leaders, as well as students poised to drive future innovation.

We have a stellar line up, and just because we’re biased doesn’t mean we’re wrong. I mean come on — assistive robots, ethics and AI, the state of VC investment and robot demos. And that’s just for starters. Here are a couple of specific examples, and you can peruse the full agenda right here.

• Cultivating Intelligence in Agricultural Robots: The benefits of robotics in agriculture are undeniable, yet at the same time only getting started. Lewis Anderson (Traptic) and Sebastien Boyer (Farmwise) will compare notes on the rigors of developing industrial-grade robots that both pick crops and weed fields respectively. Pyka’s Michael Norcia will discuss taking flight over those fields with an autonomous crop-spraying drone.
• Building the Robots that Build: Join Daniel Blank (Toggle), Tessa Lau (Dusty Robotics) and Noah Ready-Campbell (Built Robotics) as they discuss whether robots can help us build structures faster, smarter and cheaper. Built Robotics makes a self-driving excavator. Toggle is developing a new fabrication of rebar for reinforced concrete and Dusty Robotics builds robot-powered tools. We’ll talk with the founders to learn how and when robots will become a part of the construction crew.

And in case you haven’t heard, we’ve added Pitch Night, a mini pitch-off, into the mix this year. We’re accepting applications until tomorrow, February 1. This is no time for fence-sitting! Apply to compete in Pitch Night now. TechCrunch editors will review the applications and choose 10 startups to pitch at a private event the night before the conference. A panel of VC judges will select five teams as finalists. Those founders will pitch again the next day — live from the Main Stage. It’s awesome exposure that could take your startup to the next level.

If you love robots, you need to be at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 on March 3. And there’s no point paying more than necessary. Today’s the last day to buy an early-bird ticket. Buy yours before the deadline expires at 11:59 p.m. (PT) and save $150.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Robotics & AI 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

American tech companies almost did something neat today before messing it up.

After reporting earnings yesterday, Amazon’s shares shot higher this morning, pushing the company’s value north of $1 trillion. Its growth and profits proved toothsome to the investing classes, bolstering the Seattle area’s tech pedigree by adding a second trillion-dollar business to its rolls.

Microsoft and Apple, also flush after reporting their own well-received earnings, are also worth north of $1 trillion apiece. Amazon’s ascension would have brought the group of trillion-dollar American tech shops to four, if Alphabet hadn’t gone and spoiled the fun.

Here’s the chart, on which you can spot Alphabet’s dip back under the $1,000 billion mark:

So close, right?

Perhaps Google and its cadre of money-losing subsidiaries will manage to skate back over $1 trillion today, leaving only little Facebook out of the Cool Kid Clubhouse.

Get it together, Zuck! A billion dollars isn’t cool. You know what is? Being yet another trillion-dollar tech company. Gosh.

When analyzing the cloud market, there are many ways to look at the numbers; revenue, year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter growth — or lack of it — or market share. Each of these numbers tells a story, but in the cloud market, where aggregate growth remains high and Azure’s healthy expansions continues, it’s still struggling to gain meaningful ground on AWS’s lead.

This has to be frustrating to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who has managed to take his company from cloud wannabe to a strong second place in the IaaS/PaaS market, yet still finds his company miles behind the cloud leader. He’s done everything right to get his company to this point, but sometimes the math just isn’t in your favor.

Numbers don’t lie

John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research, says Microsoft’s growth rate is higher overall than Amazon’s, but AWS still has a big lead in market share. “In absolute dollar terms, it usually has larger increments in revenue numbers and that makes Amazon hard to catch,” he says, adding “what I can say is that this is a very tough gap to close and mathematically it could not happen any time soon, whatever the quarterly performance of Microsoft and AWS.”

The thing to remember with the cloud market is that it’s not even close to being a fixed pie. In fact, it’s growing rapidly and there’s still plenty of market share left to win. As of today, before Amazon has reported, it has a substantial lead, no matter how you choose to measure it.

Lip-syncing app Dubsmash was on the brink of death. After a brief moment of virality in 2015 alongside Vine (R.I.P), Dubsmash was bleeding users faster than it could recruit them. The app let you choose an audio track like a rap song or movie quote and shoot a video of you pretending to say the words. But there was nowhere in the app to post the videos. It was a creation tool like Hipstamatic, not a network like Instagram. There’s a reason we’re only using one of those today.

So in 2017 Dubsmash‘s three executives burned down the 30-person company and rebuilt something social from the ashes with the rest of the $15.4 million it’d raised from Lowercase Capital and Index Ventures. They ditched its Berlin headquarters and resettled in Brooklyn, closer to the one demographic still pushing Dubsmashes to the Instagram Explore page: African-American teenagers posting dances and lip-syncs to indie hip-hop songs on the rise.

Dubsmash stretched its funding to rehire a whole new team of 15. They spent a year coding a new version of Dubsmash centered around Following and Trending feeds, desperately trying to match the core features of Musically, which by then had been bought by China’s ByteDance. It’s got chat but still lacks the augmented reality filters, cut transitions, and photo slideshows of TikTok. But Dubsmash has the critical remix option for soundtracking your clip with the audio of any other video that sets it apart from Instagram and Snapchat.

Few social apps have ever pulled off a real comeback. Even Snapchat had only lost 5 million of its 191 million users before it started growing again. But in the case of Dubsmash, its biggest competitor was also its savior.

The pre-relaunch version of Dubsmash

In August 2018, ByteDance merged Musically into TikTok to form a micro-entertainment phenomenon. Instead of haphazardly sharing auto-biographical Stories shot with little forethought, people began storyboarding skits and practicing dances. The resulting videos were denser and more compelling than content on Snapchat and Instagram. The new Dubsmash, launched two months later, rode along with the surge of interest in short-form video like a Lilliputian in a giant’s shirt pocket. The momentum helped Dubsmash raise a secret round of funding last year to keep up the chase.

Now Dubsmash has 1 billion video views per month.

Dubsmash rebuilt its app and revived its usage

“The turnaround that we executed hasn’t been done in recent memory by a consumer app in such a competitive marketplace. Most of them fade to oblivion or shut down” Dubsmash co-founder and President Suchit Dash tells me. “By moving the company to the United States, hiring a brand new all-star team & relaunching the product, we gave this company & product a second life. Through that journey, we obsessed only on one metric: retention.”

Now the app has pulled 27% of the US short-form video market share by installs, second only to TikTok’s 59%, according to AppAnnie. Sensor Tower tells TechCrunch that TikTok has about 3X as many US lifetime installs as Dubsmash, and 11X more between when Musically became TikTok in August 2018 and now.

In terms of active users outside of TikTok, Dubsmash has 73% of the US market, compared to just 23% on Triller, 3.6% on Firework, and an embarrassing 0% on Facebook’s Lasso. And while Triller began surpassing Dubsmash in downloads per month in October, Dubsmash has 3X as many active users and saw 38% more first-time downloads in 2018 than 2019. Dubsmash now sees 30% retention after a month, and 30% of its daily users are creating content.

It’s that stellar rate of participation that’s brought Dubsmash back to life. It also attracted a previously unannounced round of $6.75 million in the Spring of 2019, largely from existing investors. While TikTok’s superstars and huge visibility could be scaring some users away from shooting videos while a long-tail of recent downloaders watch passively, Dubsmash has managed to make people feel comfortable on camera.

“Dubsmash is ground zero for culture creation in America—it’s where  the newest,  most popular hip-hop and dance challenges on the Internet originate” Dash declares.  “Members of the community are developing content that will make them the superstars of tomorrow.”

Being #2 might not be so bad, given how mobile video viewing is growing massively thanks to better cameras, bigger screens, faster networks, and cheaper data. Right now, Dubsmash doesn’t make any money. It hopes to one day generate revenue while helping its creators earn a living too, perhaps through ad revenue shares, tipping, subscriptions, merchandise, or offline meetups.

One advantage of not being TikTok is that the app feels less crowded by semi-pro creators and influencers. That gives users the vibe that they’re more likely to hit the Trending or Explore page on Dubsmash. The Trending page is dominated by hot new songs and flashy dances, even if they’re shot with a lower production quality that feels accessible.

Dubsmash tries to stoke that sense of opportunity by making Explore about discovering accounts and all the content they’ve made rather than specific videos. While popular clips might have tens of thousands of views rather than the hundred-thousand or multi-million counts on TikTok’s top content, there’s enough visibility to make shooting Dubsmashes worth it.

TikTok has already taken notice. Shown in a leak of its moderation guidelines from Netzpolitik, the company’s policy is to downrank the visibility of any video referencing or including a watermark from direct competitors including Dubsmash, Triller, Lasso, Snapchat, and WhatsApp. That keeps Dubsmash videos, which you can save to your camera roll, from going viral on TikTok and luring users away.

TikTok’s content moderation guidelines show it downranks content featuring the watermarks of competitors like Dubsmash

TikTok also continues to aggressively buy users via ads on competing apps like Facebook thanks to the billions in funding raked in by its parent ByteDance. In contast, Dash says Dubsmash has never spent a dollar on user acquisition, influencer marketing, or any other source of growth. That makes it achieving even half to a third of as many installs as TikTok in the US an impressive fete.

Why would creators choose Dubsmash over TikTok? Dash clinically explains that its a “decoupled audio and video platform that enables producers and tastemakers to upload fresh, original tracks that are utilized by creators and  influencers alike” but that it’s also about “Its role as a welcoming home for a community that’s underrepresented on social platforms.”

If Dubsmash keeps growing, though, it will encounter the inevitable content moderation problems that come with scale. It’s already doing a solid job of requiring users to sign up with their birthdate to watch or post videos, and it blocks those under 13. Only users who follow each other can chat.

Any piece of content that’s flagged by users is hidden from the network until it passes a review by its human moderation team that works around the clock, and it does proactive takedowns too. However, brigading and malicious takedown reports could be used by trolls to silence their enemies. Dubsmash is working off of a common sense model of what’s allowed rather than firm guidelines, which will be tough to keep consistent at scale.

“Being a social media app in 2020 means you need to take greater responsibility for the well being of the community” says Dash. “We decided upon relaunch to take a strict perspective. Our goal is to be intentional and proactive early, and invest in safety and healthy growth rather than growth at all costs. This may not be the most popular approach amongst the market, but we believe this is the most effective way to build a social platform.”

Dubsmash proves that short-form video is so compelling to teens that the market can sustain multiple apps. That will have to be the case given Instagram is preparing to release its TikTok clone Reels, and Vine’s co-founder Dom Hofmann just launched his successor Byte. The breakdown could look like:

• TikTok: A slightly longer-form combo of comedy, dance, and absurdity
• Dubsmash: Mid-length dance and music videos with a diverse community
• Byte: Super short-form comedy featuring slightly older ex-Vine stars
• Triller: Mid-length life blogging clips from Hollywood celebrities
• Instagram Reels: International influencers making videos for a mainstream audience

Perhaps we’ll eventually see consolidation in the market, with giants like TikTok and Instagram acquiring smaller players to grow their content network effect with more fodder for remixes. But fragmentation could breed creativity. Different tools and audiences beg for different types of videos. Make something special, and there’s an app out there to enter your into pop culture cannon.

Moda Operandi, an online marketplace that specialises in right-off-the-runway luxury fashion, accessories and home decor, is today announcing a high-priced event of its own: it’s raised $100 million, a mix of equity and debt that it will use to invest in its platform and technology as well as to continue growing business overall, which was founded in 2010 and today offers products from some 1,000 brands and designers and ships to 125 countries.

“For the past eight years, Moda has disrupted the way people shop for luxury fashion,” said Moda Operandi CEO Ganesh Srivats in a statement. “This investment will enable us to build on that innovation, investing further in the client and designer experience and connecting more of the world’s best fashion to more people.”

The financing is being co-led by NEA and Apax Partners, both previous investors in Moda Operandi, with participation also from the Santo Domingo Family (connected to Lauren Santo Domingo, who co-founded Moda with Aslaug Magnusdottir), Comerica Bank, TriplePoint Capital and other unnamed investors.

The company’s valuation is not being disclosed but in its last round, in 2017, Moda Operandi had a post-money valuation of $650 million, according to data from PitchBook. It has raised $345 million to date.

High-end fashion might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about online shopping, but it has actually been a ripe market for the e-commerce industry.

While those in the know (and in the money) might attend catwalk shows, and bijou boutiques in swish locales are likely to be around for many years to come, there is a massive population of people who have the income and inclination to shop for luxury fashion, but might not be in the right place, or have the time, to do so.

For these shoppers, websites, mobile apps — and most recently new channels like Instagram and messaging services — have become a key route to browsing and buying, leading to the rise of huge businesses like Farfetch, Net-a-Porter and more.

That trend has helped to buffer Moda Operandi up to now, but it’s also the one that will be interesting to watch down the line.

We’ve written about the rise of direct-to-consumer brands and how that has played out specifically in the world of fashion, which in turn becomes a new group of competitors to aggregating marketplaces like Moda Operandi.

Similarly, the growing trend of targeting consumers wherever they happen to be also represents a rival business model, with some fashion retailers now foregoing websites altogether in favor of using third-party messaging apps to reach their target customers. Will Moda Operandi change with the times to do more of this kind of selling, too? Like fashion, what’s in today might be out tomorrow, so even the best channels are moving targets.

In any case, Moda Operandi has most definitely shown that it’s prepared to evolve and upset the status quo. The company got its start in 2010 in part out of an aha-moment from Santo Domingo, a socialite, former model and former editor at Vogue.

As someone who had worked for years in the luxury fashion industry, fully immersed as a consumer to boot, she knew that only a small, rarefied group of people ever got full access to a designer’s runway collection.

Moda Operandi was her solution — a platform to broaden that out, giving access to a full trunkshows (as the runway collections are called) to a wider selection of possible buyers and improving revenues for designers and brands in the process, since they no longer had to rely just on more traditional channels, namely buyers for retailers. The site had some catches — for example, as we pointed out at the time, you could shop a runway look, but still had to wait months for the piece to actually arrive with you, since those items would have yet to be made; but it caught on with a loyal following.

Over the years, the site’s basic remit has expanded, covering not only runway collections but also extending into jewellery, accessories and home decor. (We asked what size the business is today, and whether Moda Operandi can share any details on how that has changed over time, but a spokesperson said the company would not be sharing these or other financial details today.)

In any case, it’s remained a compelling enough business to have brought in a hefty round of growth funding from its previous backers.

“We continue to be impressed with the power of Moda’s brand and its positioning in the luxury market,” said Dan O’Keefe, managing partner of Apax Digital, in a statement. “Moda has been enhancing its technology capabilities as a world leading platform for fashion discovery and is led by a world-class team. We look forward to continuing to support their expansion.”

“Moda Operandi has really disrupted the traditional ecommerce model, using technology to give people unprecedented access to fashion,” added Tony Florence, general partner and head of technology investing at NEA, in a statement. “It was a really big idea when we led the Series A, and today Ganesh and the team are executing on that data-enabled retail model at scale. We are thrilled to continue supporting the company in this latest round.”

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today we’re digging into One Medical’s IPO pricing, especially as it relates to the company’s valuation and resulting revenue multiples. Our goal this morning is to understand how the IPO process priced One Medical last night, and what its resulting value could mean for other tech-enabled companies.

One Medical, a popular and modern medical provider, is a venture-backed company now worth $14 per share, or about $1.7 billion. Is that a lot? Or do those metrics fit well next to its fundamentals? Let’s find out.

Pricing

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

It was yet another jam-packed week full of big news, IPO happenings, and venture activity. As always we’ve done our best to deliver the gist on what’s been going on. We had Alex Wilhelm and Danny Crichton on hand to handle it all, which went medium-good. In other Equity news, we’re back with guests over the next few weeks, so if you miss us having a venture capitalist along for the ride, fear not, their return is just around the corner.

Up top this week was Jon Shieber’s report that Kleiner Perkins has rapidly deployed its most recent fund, a $600 million vehicle. While the news felt surprising, digging back through our archives we were reminded that the firm had indicated it might put its capital to work quickly. Still, as Danny pointed out, it’s rare that venture capitalists have to go our raising from LPs on an annual basis.

After that, we turned to some funding rounds that held our attention, including the Free Agency round that is working to bring talent management to the technology industry similar to the sports and entertainment worlds.

The concept makes some sense as compensation packages for top talent in the industry can extend into the seven-figures (Free Agency takes a 5-10% cut of an employee’s income using the increasingly popular income-share agreements). Also this round felt a bit like a reminder that the labor market is tight at the moment.

We then moved on to Josh Constine’s story about “Ring for enterprise” startup Verkada, which raised a massive $80 million round at a $1.6 billion valuation. That’s eye popping, since the extremely small dilution implied with those numbers (5%) is very rare in the venture world.

After that we turned to a few rounds that Alex has had his eye on, namely the somewhat-recent Insurify round, the pretty-recent Gabi round, and the most-recent Policygenius. All told they sum to $150 million, which made us ask the question, why are venture capitalists so into insurance marketplace startups?

Finally, we touched on the latest from the intra-SoftBank delivery war between DoorDash and Uber Eats, including who is impacted, and what it means for future consolidation in the on-demand world. Or more precisely, why hasn’t there been more?

Finally, don’t forget that IPO season is upon us. Are you caught up?

Increasingly, the streets of Karachi and Lahore are being flooded with men riding bikes and wearing green T-shirts, a writer friend recently told me. In a sense, these men represent the emergence of Pakistan’s tech startups.

India now has more than 25,000 startups and raised a record $14.5 billion last year, according to government figures. But not all Asian countries are as large as India or have such a thriving startup ecosystem. Long overdue, things are beginning to change in bordering Pakistan.

Bykea, a three-year-old ride-hailing and delivery service, today has more than 500,000 bikes and cabs registered on its platform. It operates in some of Pakistan’s most populated cities, such as Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, Muneeb Maayr, Bykea founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.

Maayr is one of the most recognized startup founders in Pakistan, and previously worked for Rocket Internet, helping the giant run fashion e-commerce platform Daraz in the country. While leading Daraz, he expanded the platform to cater to categories beyond fashion; Daraz was later sold to Alibaba.

Friday typically brings a bunch of new music releases, but this Friday’s new drops includes a new track from an unlikely source – Elon Musk. The SpaceX and Tesla CEO said earlier this week he had written a new song called “Don’t doubt yer vibe,” to be released on “Emo G Records,” but as usual it was hard to tell if Musk was being serious or just having his evening internet fun.

Turns out, he was serious, and we didn’t have to wait long to hear the track. The lyrics probably didn’t take him too long to write – the whole song consists of “Don’t doubt your vibe / because it’s true / don’t doubt your vibe / because it’s you” repeated over and over. Musk says he performed the lyrics, which are modified and distorted to an airy electronic, supernatural sounding final product.

The track itself is backed by a pulsing, ambient kind of EDM arrangement, and all in all it’s not a bad representation of the genre. Listen for yourself and judge:

Musk also tweeted photos of himself in the studio actually recording the track, and shared that the process of putting together the song was maybe harder than he’d anticipated. In the midst of his music-making tweets, he also took time to educate some of his followers on why some of the more dire predictions floating around about the Coronavirus are blown way out of proportion.

No word on whether there’s going to be a full album, but Musk’s timing with this drop actually makes a lot of sense when you consider how things have been going for him lately: Tesla stock skyrocketed on positive earnings reported yesterday; he beat a defamation accusation in court last month; his Starlink project is coming together; and SpaceX is making good progress on its commercial crew flight program, nailing its last major test flight before crewed missions earlier this month.

After opening an office in the city last year, Indian ride-hailing firm Ola said it would officially begin operations in London on February 10. London is one of the world’s biggest markets for ride-hailing services, and the expansion is a key development in Ola’s international strategy as the company widens its competition with Uber, another SoftBank portfolio firm.

Ola said it will be “fully operational from day one” in London, where it has signed up over 20,000 drivers since late November.

The company, which has raised about $3.5 billion to date, emphasized that its platform offers a range of security features such as a 24/7 helpline for drivers and customers and an in-app emergency button.

Ola’s emphasis on safety comes as its rival Uber is engaging with London’s transport regulator to continue its operation in the city, which stripped the American giant of that license — for the second time — late last year. In November, TfL ruled that Uber did not meet the “fit and proper” requirements for private hire operators.

In the ruling, TfL noted that it had found more than 14,000 trips on Uber’s platform that were taken with drivers who had faked their identity. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi had expressed his disappointment at TfL’s decision. “This TfL decision is just wrong. Over the last 2 years we have fundamentally changed how we operate in London,” he said at the time.

Uber’s cabs remain operational in London as the company appeals the decision. Ola says it will continue its “collaborative approach with regulators and local authorities, as well as its clear focus on safety, drawing on industry-leading and global best practices.”

Additionally, Ola says to incentivize drivers on its platform, it will not charge them any commission for six weeks. The company, like Uber, roughly charges between 20% to 25% commission on the final fare paid by a passenger, for instance. (It is also offering £25 worth of ride credit to passengers who sign up in the first week after the launch.)

Simon Smith, Head of Ola International, said the platform has received “overwhelming positive” reception since launching in the UK in 2018. The startup is operational in 28 boroughs in the UK, including cities such as Birmingham, Coventry and Warwick, where it claims to have seen more than double-digit growth in rides in the last quarter. To date, Ola has provided over 3 million rides with more than 11,000 drivers already operating on the platform in the UK.

“We are working closely with drivers to build a high quality and reliable service for Londoners. Launching in London is a major milestone for us and we are keen to offer a first class experience for all our customers,” he said in a statement.

Expansion into the UK capital, one of the world’s most lucrative markets, is a major step for Ola, which has provided about 3 million rides in the UK to date with more than 11,000 driver partners. Over the years, Ola has also expanded to Australia and New Zealand. The company says it is operational in over 250 cities.

Twitter has confirmed it has temporarily suspended the account of controversial rightwing commentator, Katie Hopkins. The move was reported earlier by the BBC.

Hopkins, a former MailOnline columnist and presenter on LBC radio, is a veteran of the social media platform, joining Twitter just under a decade ago — and using it amplify her brand of far-right leaning, liberal-baiting politics. She regularly tweets anti-immigration and anti-Islam sentiments, and has claimed that white British people are now a discriminated against minority.

It’s not clear which of Hopkins’ tweets led Twitter to finally pull the trigger, although she had recently targeted black British rapper Stormzy for a series of abusive tweets.

In a statement confirming the account suspension, Twitter told us:

Keeping Twitter safe is a top priority for us — abuse and harassment have no place on the service. We take enforcement action against any account that is violative of our rules – which includes violations of our hateful conduct policy and abusive behaviour policy. These rules apply to everyone using our service — regardless of the account involved.

At the time of writing Hopkins’ account is still visible — although all but one of her tweets has been deleted.

It is not clear whether Hopkins herself deleted the majority of her tweets. Twitter pointed out that users may choose to delete their own Tweets at any time, including by using third-party services which provide the option of deleting all tweets

Two non-visible tweets on Hopkins’ feed are listed as ‘no longer available’ for violating Twitter’s rules.

The remaining visible tweet is a retweet of another user accusing her of inciting racial hatred — which contains a screengrab of a number of abusive tweets Hopkins made targeting Stormzy.

Hopkins’ Twitter biog lists her as “Milo’s Mum” — a reference to Milo Yiannopoulos, another controversial rightwing troll who Twitter banned in 2016 after he incited his followers to harass Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones.

Skymind Global Ventures (SGV) appeared last year in Asia/US as a vehicle for the previous founders of a YC-backed open-source AI platform to invest in companies that used the platform.

Today it announces the launch of an $800 million fund to back promising new AI companies and academic research. It will consequently be opening a London office as an extension to its original Hong Kong base.

SGV Founder and CEO Shawn Tan said in a statement: “Having our operations in the UK capital is a strategic move for us. London has all the key factors to help us grow our business, such as access to diverse talent and investment, favorable regulation, and a strong and well-established technology hub. The city is also the AI growth capital of Europe with the added competitive advantage of boasting a global friendly time zone that overlaps with business hours in Asia, Europe and the rest of the world.”

SGV will use its London base to back research and development and generate business opportunities across Europe and Asia.

The company helps companies and organizations to launch their AI applications by providing them supported access to “Eclipse Deeplearning4j”, an open-source AI tool.

The background is that the Deeplearning4j tool was originally published by Adam Gibson in late 2013 and later became a YC-backed startup, called Pathmind, which was cofounded to commercialize Deeplearning4j. It later changed its name to Skymind.

SGV is a wholly separate investment company that Adam Gibson joined as VP to run its AI division, called Konduit. Konduit now commercializes the Deeplearning4j open source tools.

Adam Gibson now joins SGV as Vice President, to run its software division, Konduit, which delivers and supports Eclipse Deeplearning4j to clients, as well as offering training development.

SGV firm says it plans to train up to 200 AI professionals for its operations in London and Europe.

In December last year “Skymind AI Berhad”, the Southeast Asia arm of Skymind and Huawei Technologies signed a Memorandum of Understanding to develop a Cloud and Artificial Intelligence Innovation Hub, commencing with Malaysia and Indonesia in 2020.

Think you’ve found a glaring security hole in Xbox Live? Microsoft is interested.

The company announced a new bug bounty program today, focused specifically on its Xbox Live network and services. Depending on how serious the exploit is and how complete your report is, they’re paying up to $20,000.

Like most bug bounty programs, Microsoft is looking for pretty specific/serious security flaws here. Found a way to execute unauthorized code on Microsoft’s servers? They’ll pay for that. Keep getting disconnected from Live when you play as a certain legend in Apex? Not quite the kind of bug they’re looking for.

Microsoft also specifically rules out a few types of vulnerabilities as out-of-scope, including DDoS attacks, anything that involves phishing Microsoft employees or Xbox customers, or getting servers to cough up basic info like server name or internal IP. You can find the full breakdown here.

This is by no means Microsoft’s first foray into bounty programs; they’ve got similar programs for the Microsoft Edge browser, their “Windows Insider” preview builds, Office 365, and plenty of other categories. The biggest bounties they offer are on their cloud computing service, Azure, where the bounty for a super specific bug (gaining admin access to an Azure Security Lab account, which are closely controlled) can net up to $300,000.

Just as Amazon was basking in the news of a massive earnings win, the tech giant quietly published — as it always does — its latest transparency report, revealing a slight dip in the number of government demands for user data.

It’s a rarely seen decline in the number of demands received by a tech company during a year where almost every other tech giant — including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter — all saw an increase in the number of demands they receive. Only Apple reported a decline in the number of demands it received.

Amazon said it received 1,841 subpoenas, 440 search warrants and 114 other court orders for user data — such as its Echo and Fire devices — during the six-month period ending 2019.

That’s about a 4% decline on the first six months of the year.

The company’s cloud unit, Amazon Web Services, also saw a decline in the number of demands for data stored by customers, down by about 10%.

Amazon also said it received between 0 and 249 national security requests for both its consumer and cloud services (rules set out by the Justice Department only allow tech and telecom companies to report in ranges).

At the time of writing, Amazon has not yet updated its law enforcement requests page to list the latest report.

Amazon’s biannual transparency report is one of the lightest reads of any company’s figures across the tech industry. We previously reported on how Amazon’s transparency reports have purposefully become more vague over the years rather than clearer — bucking the industry trend. At just three pages, the company spends most of it explaining how it responds to each kind of legal demand rather than expanding on the numbers themselves.

The company’s Ring smart camera division, which has faced heavy criticism for its poor security practices and its cozy relationship with law enforcement, still hasn’t released its own data demand figures.

During the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)’s 23rd annual Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Washington, D.C., one panel focused on the changing regulatory environment when it comes to private launch activities, and how those are integrated into existing rules and practices for managing commercial air transportation. Panelist Caryn Schenewerk, SpaceX senior counsel and senior director of space flight policy, emphasized that while the company always does the utmost to ensure safety in everything it does, the company also wants to focus on the actual state of the industry today and what it needs to grow as various partners work to establish new rules for the growing commercial launch sector.

“When aviation started, the Wright brothers weren’t flying over major populated cities,” Schenewerk pointed out. “They were outside Paris in an unpopulated field, and they were at Kitty Hawk on unpopulated beaches. And they were in Ohio in unpopulated areas.”

Schenewerk was directly addressing comments made by other panelists, and specifically ALPA Aviation Safety Chair Steve Jangelis, that suggested the emerging commercial launch industries may be looking far ahead to when they’re launching from spaceports located near populated areas, and launching with much more frequency than they are today. In general Jangelis was advocating for laying the groundwork now for high levels of cooperation and integration between aviation traffic management and rocket launch operators.

Schenewerk was reluctant to concede any kind of direct equivalency between the commercial air transportation industry and the space launch sector, given their relative dissimilarity.

She noted that in terms of sheer volume, there’s a massive difference, with roughly 40 to 50 launches set for 2020 compared to millions of flights for commercial air. Airlines also use essentially the same small handful of airframes from suppliers like Boeing and Airbus, while each launch company has their own, very different vehicle with different conditions for launch and flight. Overall, she suggested then that anticipating some potential future state where the industries were more similar could result in stifling progress toward that ultimate goal.

“I hope we get to that million launches at some point, but when we are at that point, it’s going to be because we worked our way up the safety trajectory in a way that allows us to operate that way,” Schenewerk said. “Today, SpaceX can’t fly from a spaceport in the middle of the country, because we won’t get through the safety approval. We literally will not be licensed by the FAA to operate from that site, because we will then be flying over large populations of people – and we aren’t at that level of reliability and safety in this industry to fly over large populations of people with these kinds of rockets. Could we get there someday? Yeah, we can get there someday when we’ve had a million flights, and a million prove-outs of our capability, when we have such repeatability that we’re in that level.”

Ultimately, Schenewerk’s comments and Jangelis’ responses illustrate that there are still a lot of places where younger companies and emerging technologies like reusable rocket launches are conflicting with the views of more established industries and players operating in some shared spaces.

FAA Administrator Steve Dickson also addressed the agency’s ongoing work to establish launch rules, which were released as a draft last year and which Dickson said will likely be finalized sometime this fall, once the FAA has incorporated industry comments and feedback.

“Let’s think about that big vision, that big day when lots of things are happening,” Schenewerk said. “But let’s also not yell at our kid for not being able to fly an airplane when they can barely walk – and I think that’s where we are right now: We’re still figuring out how to walk and run in this industry.”

There comes a time for many founders when they are ready to pass the baton of running their business to someone else. It’s a rare founder who wants to go from zero to running and scaling a large, long-term company. When that time comes — you may have expectations on what you would like to exit for, or have read stories about other company valuations — I thought it might be useful to share some of the other side’s viewpoint. So, here are some of the criteria we use at Scaleworks when evaluating a new opportunity.

Rule 1: Don’t lose money

The cliche is “rule number two: read rule number one.” Make sure any acquisition you consider is at a fair price and that you have identified some low-hanging fruit opportunities for improvement that you are confident in your ability to execute on.

What does a fair price mean?

For us, it means a price we have confidence we can either pay back over time from cash flow, or sell the business on a profit multiple for at least the same price we bought it for.

Over a hundred new emoji are on their way this year. The governing body in charge of official emoji, the Unicode Consortium, announced the addition of 117 new emoji for 2020, as part of Emoji 13.0. The expansion includes 62 brand-new emoji as well as 55 new gender and skin-tone variants, many of which are new gender-inclusive emoji. Other notable additions this year include the transgender flag — from a proposal co-sponsored by Google and Microsoft — as well as the new smiling face with tear, the two people hugging, pinched fingers, a disguised face, not to mention tons more animals, food items, and other objects.

This year, five of the new emoji — including several of the more inclusive options — were sponsored by Google.

The company is behind the proposals for the variants on person in veil and person in tuxedo, which now include emoji of people who look male, female, and non-binary in a range of skin tones. A gender-neutral Santa Claus was also added.

Above: Google’s new emoji for Android

Google also proposed the new “person feeding baby with a bottle” emoji.

“Until this year, the only emoji that depicts childcare is the ‘breastfeeding’ emoji,” explained Jennifer Daniel, Google’s Design Director for the Android Emoji Program. “Since an inability to breastfeed doesn’t preclude you from nurturing your child, we want to introduce an emoji that everyone can use,” she said.

Emoji have become more inclusive and representative in recent years, with additions in 2019 that offered a hearing aid, wheelchair, prosthetic arm, seeing-eye dog, and others, as well as a gender-neutral couple and more skin tone options.

Google also suggested new emoji focused on empathy for 2020, including two people hugging and a slightly smiling face with tear. The latter is something many people have wanted in order to be able to express a feeling of both appreciation and relief. Daniel noted this emoji works well for other times you are feeling a mix of goodness with a dash of sadness — like when you’re thinking of past memories (as with #tbt, for example) or thinking about good times from your childhood.

Above: Google’s new emoji for Android

A ninja is being added to the people emoji as well.

The animal lineup now includes a black cat, bison, mammoth, beaver, polar bear, dodo, seal, beetle, roach, fly, and worm.

For food, there’s bubble tea, blueberries, an olive, a bell pepper, flatbread, tamale, fondue, and a teapot.

Other additions include a feather, potted plant, rock, wood, hut, pickup truck, roller skate, magic wand, piñata, nesting dolls, sewing needle, knot, flip flop, military helmet, accordion, long drum, coin, boomerang, carpentry saw, screwdriver, hook, ladder, elevator, mirror, window, plunger, mousetrap, bucket, toothbrush, headstone, placard, transgender symbol, transgender flag, anatomical heart, and lungs.

With all the new emoji, what we may need soon is a better system for finding them. Predictive text and emoji suggestions only go so far. But when searching for an emoji you don’t use commonly, Apple’s emoji keyboard on iOS requires a lot of scrolling. And every new emoji addition makes this process more difficult. Google’s Gboard has the right idea, as it also adds a search box for finding emoji. In the meantime, third-party keyboards can help.

Image credits: Google & Emojipedia

Techstars Detroit, the accelerator that has funded 54 startups in the past five years, is shutting down, TechCrunch has learned.

In an email to supporters, Techstars Detroit managing director Ted Serbinski said the accelerator was not able to secure enough funding for 2020.

“It’s clear the entire automotive mobility industry is tightening as sales slump and we hit the trough of disillusionment with autonomy,” Serbinski wrote in the email. The sales and business development piece of the accelerator is working to build a new program in Detroit if “great corporates can be found,” he added.

Techstars isn’t disappearing from Detroit altogether. The company has a presence through events like Startup Week and Startup Weekends. Serbinski will continue to support the 54 startups that have come out of the program. A number of these startups are working on Series A rounds.

Serbinski will continue to work at Techstars, this time running an accelerator program focused on “quality of life” startups.

An excerpt from Serbinksi’s email:

An experiment for Techstars, Detroit showed you could build a world-class program in an emerging market, in a hyper-competitive industry, that was going through a transformational change.

More importantly, the program proved that wonderful and talented mentors from around the region and globe would graciously support the founders. Truly, an incredible community formed around this program and region. It’s wonderful to see all the new activity as Detroit continues to grow in startup and VC activity.

Techstars Detroit began in 2015 as Techstars Mobility, a mentorship-driven accelerator program that was supported by numerous corporate and auto-focused backers including Ford, Honda, Lear and Nationwide as well as global partners such as Amazon’s AWS, Silicon Valley Bank and Microsoft for Startups. The intent was to bring attention and business into Detroit, a strategy that Serbinksi told TechCrunch was successful.

“The Detroit program was an experiment from the start,” Serbinski said in an interview Wednesday. “The experiment was could TechStars run an accelerator with multiple corporate partners in an emerging market that had a lot of potential, but a significant amount of unknowns? Over the last five years, it became clear that you can work with multiple corporates, you can be in a hyper competitive auto industry, Detroit has momentum and Silicon Valley isn’t waiting anymore. A lot of that proved out.”

Serbinksi’s portfolio is diverse and global. For instance, the startups in the portfolio are from 11 different countries and 40% have female founders. Of the 54 startups Techstars Detroit invested in, just one is from Detroit and two are from Michigan. Serbinksi added that he was not tied to a single thesis that “autonomy is going to take over today” and instead focused on what would work “today and tomorrow.” In other words, he didn’t heavily weight the portfolio with startups focused autonomous vehicle technology, which could take 10 to 15 years to turn into a product.

The portfolio has had success with less than 10% of startups shutting down. Some of the successful accelerator graduates include Cargo, Acerta and Wise.

In 2019, Serbinski announced the name was changing to Techstars Detroit to diversify even more. The new broader aim was to look for startups “transforming the intersection of the physical and digital worlds that can leverage the strengths of Detroit to succeed.” It could be more than just mobility.

“The word mobility was becoming too limiting,” Serbinksi wrote in a blog post at the time. “We knew we needed to reach a broader audience of entrepreneurs who may not label themselves as mobility but are great candidates for the program.”

Even as the accelerator diversified, Serbinski said, it was becoming more difficult to attract investments from the automotive industry.

“We were talking to a healthy amount of new partners for this year and all of those conversations went to zero,” he said. “I’m seeing a tightening of innovation budgets around automotive and mobility  because we’re entering that trough of disillusionment for autonomy. And so, with less accessible money, it made it a lot harder for us to fill in that gap.”

After selling autonomous driving startup Scotty Labs to DoorDash just five months ago, entrepreneur Tobenna Arodiogbu is back with a new startup. This time, he’s focused solely on truck drivers and their businesses. CloudTrucks, which aims to help truck drivers earn more money, has closed a $6.1 million round led by Craft Ventures with participation from Khosla Ventures, Kindred Ventures and Abstract Ventures.

Described as a “business in a box,” CloudTrucks is designed to make it easier for truck owners and operators to run their businesses. Through software and data science, CloudTrucks aims to reduce operating costs for truck drivers and improve revenue, cash-flow and costs.

In the U.S., about 91% of fleets are small businesses, operating six or fewer trucks, according to the American Trucking Associations. Last year, almost 800 trucking businesses went bankrupt in the U.S. Analysts attribute that to a rise in insurance costs and excess supply, which drove shipping rates down. Additionally, operators are tasked with managing safety programs, invoicing and other paperwork. This is where CloudTrucks comes in.

“CloudTrucks focuses on the owner-operator and small trucking companies because they are the lifeblood of the industry and facing the largest pressures with fast-rising insurance rates, predatory factoring options and a quickly changing landscape,” Arodiogbu told TechCrunch.

Already, CloudTrucks has a small number of early customers to fine-tune the platform. The startup is accepting new customers on a case-by-case basis.

Prior to CloudTrucks, Arodiogbu co-founded Scotty Labs to enable humans to virtually control cars and trucks. The idea was to assist drivers in long-haul trips. Before DoorDash’s acquisition of the startup, Scotty Labs had raised $6 million in funding. Now, Arodiogbu serves as an advisor to DoorDash.

“Tobenna is a proven entrepreneur and product thinker with a clear vision of the problem CloudTrucks intends to solve, “ Craft co-founder and General Partner David Sacks said in a statement to TechCrunch. “Trucking is at the heart of the American economy and yet technology still plays a very small role. We are excited to support the entire CloudTrucks team as they build the platform that will increase revenue and efficiency for thousands of owner-operator truck drivers.”