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The UK’s more expansive, post-Brexit role in digital regulation continues to be felt today via a policy change by Google which has announced that it will, in the near future, only run ads for financial products and services when the advertiser in question has been verified by the financial watchdog, the FCA.

The Google Ads Financial Products and Services policy will be updated from August 30, per Google, which specifies that it will start enforcing the new policy from September 6 — meaning that purveyors of online financial scams who’ve been relying on its ad network to net their next victim still have more than two months to harvest unsuspecting clicks before the party is over (well, in the UK, anyway).

Google’s decision to allow only regulator authorized financial entities to run ads for financial products & services follows warnings from the Financial Conduct Authority that it may take legal action if Google continued to accept unscreened financial ads, as the Guardian reported earlier.

The FCA told a parliamentary committee this month that it’s able to contemplate taking such action as a result of no longer being bound by European Union rules on financial adverts, which do not extend to online platforms, per the newspaper’s report.

Until gaining the power to go after Google itself, the FCA appears to have been trying to combat the scourge of online financial fraud by paying Google large amounts of UK taxpayer money to fight scams with anti-scam warnings.

According to the Register, the FCA paid Google more than £600,000 (~$830k) in 2020 and 2021 to run ‘anti-scam’ ads — with the regulator essentially engaged in a bidding war with scammers to pour enough money into Google’s coffers so that regulator warnings about financial scams might appear higher than the scams themselves.

The full-facepalm situation was presumably highly lucrative for Google. But the threat of legal action appears to have triggered a policy rethink.

Writing in its blog post, Ronan Harris, a VP and MD for Google UK & Ireland, said: “Financial services advertisers will be required to demonstrate that they are authorised by the UK Financial Conduct Authority or qualify for one of the limited exemptions described in the UK Financial Services verification page.”

“This new update builds on significant work in partnership with the FCA over the last 18 months to help tackle this issue,” he added. “Today’s announcement reflects significant progress in delivering a safer experience for users, publishers and advertisers. While we understand that this policy update will impact a range of advertisers in the financial services space, our utmost priority is to keep users safe on our platforms — particularly in an area so disproportionately targeted by fraudsters.”

The company’s blog also claims that it has pledged $5M in advertising credits to support financial fraud public awareness campaigns in the UK. So not $5M in actual money then.

Per the Register, Google did offer to refund the FCA’s anti-scam ad spend — but, again, with advertising credits.

The UK parliament’s Treasury Committee was keen to know whether the tech giant would be refunding the spend in cash. But the FCA’s director of enforcement and market insight, Mark Steward, was unable to confirm what it would do, according to the Register’s report of the committee hearing.

We’ve reached out to the FCA for comment on Google’s policy change, and with questions about the refund situation, and will update this report with any response.

In recent years the financial watchdog has also been concerned about financial scam ads running on social media platforms.

Back in 2018, legal action by a well-known UK consumer advice personality, Martin Lewis — who filed a defamation suit against Facebook — led the social media giant to add a ‘report scam ad’ button in the market as of July 2019.

However research by consumer group, Which?, earlier this year, suggested that neither Facebook nor Google had entirely purged financial scam ads — even when they’d been reported.

Per the BBC, Which?’s survey found that Google had failed to remove around a third (34%) of the scam adverts reported to it vs Facebook failing to remove well over a fifth (26%).

It’s almost like the incentives for online ad giants to act against lucrative online scam ads simply aren’t pressing enough…

More recently, Lewis has been pushing for scam ads to be included in the scope of the UK’s Online Safety Bill.

The sweeping piece of digital regulation aims to tackle a plethora of so-called ‘online harms’ by focusing on regulating user generated content. However Lewis makes the point that a scammer merely needs to pay an ad platform to promote their fraudulent content for it to escape the scope of the planned rules, telling the Good Morning Britain TV program today that the situation is “ludicrous” and “needs to change”.

It’s certainly a confusing carve-out, as we reported at the time the bill was presented. Nor is it the only confusing component of the planned legislation. However on the financial fraud point the government may believe the FCA has the necessary powers to tackle the problem.

We’ve contacted the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport for comment.

It is no secret that healthcare in Nigeria and most parts of Africa is not easily available and a lot of work needs to be done in that regard. However, there are instances where accessibility is taken for granted. Take for instance Nigeria where a majority of the population with some form of healthcare access would rather treat diseases than prevent them in the first place.

As a result, people get to find out about life-threatening diseases, especially non-communicable ones (NCDs), much later in their lives. Access to diagnostics and preventive care is key to addressing this situation, and Nigerian-based diagnostic startup MDaaS Global is keen on making these services readily accessible. Today, the startup also announcing the launch of its product SentinelX, has closed a seed extension round of $2.3 million to scale across Nigeria.

MDaaS, an abbreviation for medical devices-as-a-service, started back in 2016. It operates a network of tech-enabled diagnostic centers across Nigeria. Two years ago, it raised a million-dollar seed round. And in addition to the other investments secured over the last five years, the healthtech startup has raised a total of $3.7 million.

The investors in the round include lead Newtown Partners, who invested via its Imperial Venture Fund, CRI Foundation, and return investors FINCA Ventures, Techstars, and Future Africa. 

The idea for MDaaS came when co-founder and CEO Oluwasoga Oni was tasked alongside his classmates at an MIT class to develop an idea that could impact a billion lives. Coming from a medical background, he chose the one he could relate to.

“I wanted to solve the problem close to me and my dad in my early years. He had a 30-bed hospital and struggled so hard to find medical equipment that was good for him and also at a good rate,” he said to TechCrunch.

Oni started MDaaS with Opeyemi Ologun, Genevieve Barnard Oni, and Joseph McCord. With their connections in the U.S., the founders began connecting secondary medical equipment marketplace in the U.S. to Nigeria. They would import equipment, provide service support, and deploy to hospitals via rent, lease, or outright sale.

The founders did this for a while until they realized that the core problem wasn’t providing equipment pieces; it was a matter of necessity. The money doctors spent on the pieces of equipment was more than the earnings from patients. Therefore it just didn’t make financial sense for doctors to own the equipment.

MDaaS decided to revert to an aggregation model where they would look at a clinically underserved area, build a centralized diagnostic center, and aggregate demand from small, medium-sized hospitals within that community. They launched the first center in the Nigerian southwestern city of Ibadan. The startup subsequently got into Techstars and has since added six other centers across other cities in Nigeria.

MDaaS co-founders (L-R) Oluwasoga Oni, Opeyemi Ologun and Genevieve Oni

MDaaS diagnostic centers offer a wide range of services. First, there are imaging services such as digital x-ray and ultrasound, cardiac services such as ECG and echo. Then the lab services ranging from chemistry analysis and immunoassay to hematology.

So how did SentinelX come about? Oni tells me that it was during the pandemic last year. As MDaaS helped out with testing for COVID in patients, it was also taking time to screen for underlying health conditions.

“We didn’t really find a lot of people that had COVID, but what we found was that a lot of people had underlying conditions like high blood pressure and high cholesterol that they didn’t know about. So we were really shocked about that.”

In the past two decades, NCDs have risen dramatically in sub-Saharan Africa. They are driven by a growing incidence of cardiovascular risk factors like unhealthy diets, reduced physical activity, hypertension, and diabetes. Statistics point out that by 2030, NCDs are set to become the leading cause of mortality on the continent. 

So far, MDaaS has done a reasonably good job with its diagnostic centers. To date, the healthcare startup has provided diagnostic services to over 40,000 patients in underserved communities. It has also performed over 80,000 diagnostics tests across cardiology, radiology, neurology, laboratory, and general health checks. Over 750 clinicians use its referral network, and it has locked partnerships with more than 500 health facilities and 10 HMO networks.

Therefore, building SentinelX on the infrastructure already put in place serves as an opportunity to provide more customer-centric products for its users. The platform acts as a personalized care program where patients pay a one-time fee of N35k (~$70) and access a doctor all year round.

At the moment, users can run through a series of tests ranging from 60 or 70 biomarkers to assess individual risk for a wide range of diseases, including cancers, diabetes, kidney disease, and heart diseases. Clinical and family history and demographic data are also taken into consideration as part of the comprehensive analysis. Meanwhile, MDaaS creates a care plan unique to customers should they have health concerns after screening.

Image Credits: MDaaS

SentinelX is currently in private beta. However, the plan is to go live in September 2021. One would argue that $70 for a year might be cheap for this kind of service, Oni concurs but says it’s all about the long game for MDaaS.

“What we’re trying to solve is non-consumption. Most people in Nigeria don’t go for annual screening, which is something meant to be routinely done. Instead, what we tend to have in Nigeria is that people wait till they get sick before going for checkups. By that time, it costs so much money to solve the problem,” Oni echoes on the lackadaisical effort some Nigerians place on their health. 

Through SentinelX, MDaaS is trying to get as many people as possible to cheaply pre-screen themselves for one year then pay for full value the next year after seeing the benefits of regular checkups. The service is one of many MDaaS can deploy on top of its diagnostic infrastructure built over the years. But getting to this point meant the startup had to scale through the capital-intensive hurdle associated with infrastructural plays. Moreover, defining what price to charge patients has even become more challenging due to the economic recession that has frequently plagued Nigeria.

“We have had to get very creative in the way we build things because we target low to middle-income patients. As a result, we’ve needed to customize our diagnostic infrastructure, especially as it relates to costs for the people we serve,” Oni added.

The economic recession has also affected one of MDaaS’ most priced assets: doctors. Brain drain is a major challenge facing the Nigerian health system right now. It has led to a dramatic reduction in the number of Nigerian doctors who leave for a better quality of life and pay, with some reports estimating that over 2,000 doctors leave annually.

“When you hear about it in the news, it seems like a theoretical thing. But for us, it is real because we have staff leaving to go abroad,” the CEO remarked. MDaaS tries to approach the situation by training younger doctors and deploying them to its centers. Still, there’s some commitment play as both parties agree on a period of time the doctor would work with the company.  

Per application of funds, MDaaS wants to scale its physical footprint across Nigeria by adding six more diagnostic centers this year. According to Oni, the healthtech startup wants to become one of Nigeria’s three largest diagnostic centers. The CEO also said MDaaS would consider a pan-African expansion to similar countries like Nigeria, although he gave no timeline. But by 2025, the company aims to operate 100 centers across the continent and serve a million patients per year. 

Speaking on the news, the managing partner at Newtown Partners, Llew Claasen, said, “Most consumers in sub-Saharan Africa receive suboptimal medical care because of infrastructure gaps, low physician density, delays in diagnostics, and a lack of health data visibility. We think the physical diagnostic infrastructure that MDaaS is building out, coupled with the means to collect data and deliver value-added software services, has the potential to completely change the way that physicians, clinicians, and pharmacists do their jobs and lead to better health outcomes for a huge number of previously underserved consumers.” 

London-based insurtech hyperexponential (“hx”) – which has a mathematical modeling software for the commercial insurance sector – has closed an $18m funding round led by growth capital fund Highland Europe.

Hxsays it helps companies build, deploy and update their insurance pricing models faster, via a SaaS platform called Renew which is aimed at actuaries, data-scientists and underwriters.

Amrit Santhirasenan, hx’s CEO and co-founder, said: “The insurance industry is experiencing unprecedented growth, with data and technology being critical strategic drivers. Our software provides the tools that new entrants to the sector need in order to get to market with best-in-class analytics, and the functionality that incumbent insurers require in order to transform.”

Launched in 2017 by Santhirasenan and co-founder Michael Johnson, both software engineers and qualified actuaries, it now services a client base in charge of $50bn worth of premium.

Laurence Garrett, Partner at Highland Europe, said: “We believe hx offers a unique combination of actuarial expertise and software engineering knowhow that delivers exactly the tools that commercial insurers need as their marketplace continues to evolve and transform. This is a sector that is changing very rapidly and hx has already demonstrated considerable growth; we want to help them bring their cloud-based tools and innovation to even more insurers and insurtech companies.”

IDnow, a German-based identity verification startup is acquiring ARIADNEXT, a French equivalent, specializing in remote identity verification and digital identity creation. A price was not released by either party but TechCrunch understands from sources that the deal was approximately $59 million / €50 million. Sources say IDnow is looking to do similar acquisitions.

IDnow says the combined entity will be able to provide a comprehensive identity verification platform, ranging from AI-driven to human-assisted technology and from online to point-of-sale verification options. IDnow offers its services into the UK, French and German, Spain, Poland, Romania, and other international markets, and says it expects to increase revenue 3x in 2021 versus 2019.

The startup also says the pandemic has meant usage of its products has gone up 200% more compared to last year as companies switch to digital processes.

Andreas Bodczek, CEO of IDnow said in a statement: “This combination with ARIADNEXT is an important step towards our vision of building the pan-European leader for identity verification-as-a-service solutions. With ARIADNEXT, in addition to our recent acquisition of identity Trust Management AG, IDnow can provide our customers with an even broader suite of products through a single platform with a seamless user experience.”

Guillaume Despagne, President of ARIADNEXT, said: “We are looking forward to joining a team of IDnow’s caliber, combining our experience and skills to work towards our shared vision of providing a pan-European secure and future-proof solution to customers.

IDnow will retain ARIADNEXT’s locations in Rennes, Paris, Madrid, Bucharest, Iasi, and Warsaw, as well as its over 125 employees. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals.

The acquisition means IDNow is now on a par with the other large player in Europe, OnFido. TechCrunch understands the company has done €50m+ revenue this year expect to over-perform its €100m revenue target for 2023.

Ably is a Pub/Sub messaging platform that companies can use to develop realtime features in their products. The company just raised a $70 million Series B funding round co-led by Insight Partners and Dawn Capital.

Every day, you use various apps that push and fetch data in realtime. When you send a message in your favorite chat app, when you edit a document collaboratively, when you start a video call or when you look at financial data, you expect to send and receive stuff in a fraction of a second. It should feel instantaneous otherwise it feels broken.

A popular system that lets you create realtime features is called Pub/Sub, as in publish-subscribe. As the name suggests, with that model, users publish and receive data through the same channel. Users who want to receive data in realtime establish a realtime connection saying that they want to receive new messages that are routed through that channel.

Whenever someone publishes a new message, the message is routed to subscribers as quickly as possible — ideally, the message arrives in a fraction of a second. Push notifications on your smartphone follow more or less the same logic, except that they eventually go through Google’s and Apple’s push notification services.

There are several realtime platform-as-a-service providers out there, including services developed by Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. And yet, Ably thinks it has the best technology platform out there and can build a large, standalone realtime API-based startup.

Existing investors Triple Point, Digital Horizon, Forward Partners and MMC also participated in today’s funding round.

“We thought realtime data would underpin experiences instead of enhance them,” co-founder and CEO Matthew O’Riordan told me. Ably customers currently contact the startup at different pain points. They may be using different services for their realtime features. Or maybe it doesn’t scale properly.

A good example of that is CRM, sales and marketing startup HubSpot. “They had realtime features across all their products and they were struggling specifically with the chat feature,” O’Riordan said. HubSpot looked at Ably to solve that problem in particular. And they’re now using Ably for all their products, from analytics to live chat and updates.

Ably has built a global network of data centers so that it can route messages as efficiently as possible. Just like content delivery network (CDN) companies try to minimize latency, Ably routes messages based on latency.

The startup also promises redundancy and reliability with a self-healing network. If a data center goes down, your realtime features still operate as usual. You can also store messages in a traditional message queue in case a user is offline and you want to deliver a batch of messages later when they come back online.

Clients include virtual event company Hopin, Bloomberg, Verizon and Tennis Australia (Verizon is also TechCrunch’s parent company). There are also some big customers in the social media space but Ably can’t disclose the names of all its customers. They pay depending on usage, such as the number messages, concurrent connections and channels.

Overall, Ably reaches 250 million devices per month. It currently has 65 employees. With today’s funding round, it expects to hire another 125 employees by the end of 2022.

The company’s vision is straightforward. It wants to build an infrastructure company that becomes an essential part of the services that you use every day. Ably could become the realtime network that delivers messages from point A to point B as quickly and as reliably as possible.

India-based technology startup Salesken.ai has secured an exposed server that was spilling private and sensitive data on one of its customers, Byju’s, an education technology giant and India’s most valuable startup.

The server was left unprotected since at least June 14, according to historical data provided by Shodan, a search engine for exposed devices and databases. Because the server was without a password, anyone could access the data inside. Security researcher Anurag Sen found the exposed server, and asked TechCrunch for help in reporting it to the company.

The server was pulled offline a short time after we contacted Salesken.ai on Tuesday.

Salesken.ai provides customer relationship technology to companies like Byju’s to engage better with customers. The Bengaluru-based startup raised $8 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital India in 2020, two years after the company was founded.

Much of the data contained on the exposed server pertained to WhiteHat Jr., an online coding school for students in India and the U.S., which Byju’s bought for $300 million in 2020. Byju’s is currently valued at more than $16 billion after raising $1.5 billion earlier this year.

The server contained the names and classes taken by students and email addresses and phone numbers of parents and teachers. The server also contained other data related to students, such as chat logs between parents — identified by their phone number — and WhiteHat Jr. staff, as well as comments recorded by teachers about their students.

The server also contained copies of emails containing codes to reset user accounts and other internal Salesken.ai data.

Surga Thilakan, co-founder and chief executive at Salesken.ai, told TechCrunch the startup was “evaluating” the security incident but did not dispute what kind of data was found on the exposed server..

“Our assessment suggests the exposed device appears to be a non-production, staging instance of one of our integration services having access to less than 1% of India based end-of-life sales logs for a fortnight,” said Thilakan. “Salesken.ai follows stringent data security norms and is certified under the highest standards of global security and safety. We have, in an abundance of caution, immediately severed access to the cloud device.”

Thilakan did not respond to a follow-up email from TechCrunch asking why real user data was stored in what the company claims is a “non-production, staging” server. The company also would not say if it has logs or any evidence to determine if data was accessed or downloaded as a result of the security lapse.

WhiteHat Jr. spokesperson Sameer Bajaj said the company is “currently communicating with Salesken.ai about the incident and will take appropriate action in accordance with our rigorous security policies.”

Sequoia Capital India has selected 23 early-stage startups for its fifth cohort of Surge, its accelerator program for India and Southeast Asia, at a time when dealflow activity is at its peak in the region.

The new cohort, Surge’s largest to date, have collectively raised $55 million, the storied investment firm said Wednesday. The cohort also includes 10 women founders, another record for the accelerator program which started its journey in March 2019.

The Surge program has enabled Sequoia Capital India — which has always backed early-stage startups but historically focused more on cutting checks for Series A and beyond rounds — to more aggressively identify promising startups while they are too young and increase the probability of broadening its portfolio with more winners, investors in the industry said.

And those odds have gotten much better in recent months. As Tiger Global and Falcon Edge begin to chase early-stage deals in India, both the firms have backed several Surge startups.

Sequoia said nearly 50% of startups from the first three cohorts have grown to raise their Series A financing rounds.

The Surge program, for which Sequoia raised an additional $195 million earlier this year, is now “tried, tested and proven to support founders through strategic mentorship from some of the world’s best startups and business minds, hands-on company building support, and a community of founder-to-founder support,” said the investment firm, which employs over 30 people in advisory roles in the region.

Some investors also said Sequoia, which offers very aggressive terms and a plethora of resources (App Annie subscription, for instance) to startups in Surge, that the accelerator program has diminished the significance of Y Combinator in India. (Rajan Anandan, who spearheads Surge, told me earlier this year that he doesn’t see Y Combinator and Surge as rivals.)

The new cohort, several names of which TechCrunch scooped early this month, includes 13 startups that are building services in fintech, payments, communications, logistics, and SaaS sectors, Surge said.

“We are incredibly proud of all 23 companies who have joined Surge 05 and the founders who have forged their businesses in sectors that have seen tremendous tailwinds. These leaders have displayed grit, exceptional talent, and relentless purpose in shaping the world,” said Anandan, who prior to joining Sequoia Capital India as MD led Google’s business in India and Southeast Asia.

“At this inflection point of global regrowth, we are excited to be part of the journey of our founders and their companies, many of which we believe will grow into large, enduring businesses,” he added.

The new cohort features the following startups as well as one that is operating in stealth mode.

• Absolute is building a plant bioscience and AI-driven adaptive platform for precision agriculture that helps horticulture growers radically transform yields, grade and nutritional value of produce. The startup has also received an investment from Lets Venture.
• ADPList is attempting to “democratise” mentorship and make it accessible for everyone through a community platform where people can find, book and meet mentors around the world.
• ApnaKlub is an agent-led business-to-business wholesale platform for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). The startup aims to encourage and empower people to set up their own hyper-local micro-distribution businesses by providing them with better profit margins, access to a large assortment of brands and SKUs, and supply consistency.
• Belora produces clean, high-performance, vegan makeup — free from toxins and harmful ingredients. The startup, which has also secured investment from DSG Consumer Partners, says it wants to create makeup that doubles up as skincare, so that women can wear products that are not only dermatologically tested, but also good for their skin.
• Durianpay is building an integrated and comprehensive payments stack that enables businesses to grow and scale.
• Dyte is a developer-friendly real time audio and video calling software development kit (SDK). The startup, which has also secured investments from Nexus Venture Partners and Y Combinator, allows developers to integrate live video into their apps in interesting and innovative ways. The SDK is simple, offers integrations within hours, and has a large number of plug-ins and configurations. These configurations provide developers with a quick and efficient way to embed audio and video calling, AI video augmentation, and collaboration features.
• Gumlet provides a new-age media delivery infrastructure that provides low code or no-code integration plugins, which automates the entire media publishing pipeline. Developers all over the world use Gumlet to automatically provide the lowest size images and videos with the best resolution and performance.
• Locad is making multi-channel e-commerce fulfilment easier than ever by offering a distributed warehousing network, which reduces shipping time and costs by storing products closer to customers. The startup has also secured investments from Antler and others.
• Mailmodo is an email marketing platform that helps marketers create app-like experiences within emails and increase conversions.
• Mesh is a new-age people management platform that makes it easy for employees to manage goals, get timely feedback, and grow faster. Y Combinator Continuity fund and RTP Global have also invested in Mesh.
• Multiplier is a new-age employer of record that simplifies international hiring. It counts Golden Gate Ventures, MS&AD Ventures, Picus Capital among its investors.
• OneCode is an app that connects companies with sales agents, giving these agents access to sell the products and services to less tech-savvy buyers. The startup’s mission is to digitise 50 million sales agents across India, and bridge the gap between brands and potential buyers who may need in-person interactions and physical touch points before committing to a purchase. Nexus Venture Partners and WaterBridge Ventures have also invested in the startup.
• Powerplay is a mobile-first, vernacular construction site management app that enables project managers and workers to communicate and collaborate more effectively. The startup, also backed by Accel, helps them track their progress, deliverables, and payments across projects.
• Pankhuri is a social community platform where women can network, learn and shop online through live streaming, chat, and micro courses.
• RaRa Delivery is attempting to reimagine instant delivery for e-commerce in Indonesia through data driven logistics. It also counts 500 Startups among its investors.
• Revery is using game thinking to revolutionise wellness, and the team is on a mission to make wellness affordable and accessible to anyone with a mobile phone. The startup has also secured funds from GGV Capital and Pascal Capital.
• TWID (That’s What I Do) is a rewards-based payment network that enables customer reward or loyalty points to be used as a payment instrument. (Beenext is a co-investor.)
• Vah Vah! is a live, online vocational training platform that offers professional beauty courses.
• Vara is an easy-to-use and lightweight staff management platform for SMEs across Southeast Asia. It enables small companies to effortlessly manage their attendance and payroll. The startup counts RTP Global and a number of other firms among its investors.
• Veera Health is on a mission to help women lead healthier lives. Veera’s first offering is a digital therapeutics platform that helps women identify and navigate Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), with a comprehensive offering of therapy, coaching and specialist support. Global Founders Capital, Harvard University, and Y Combinator have also backed Veera.
• Virtual Internships are redesigning internships for the 21st century workforce, mirroring the future of work.
• WATI helps companies have personalised conversations with customers at scale with an easy-to-use customer engagement software that’s built on WhatApp’s Business API.

Quizizz, an Indian startup that is making learning more interactive so that students find it compelling to spend more hours studying, said on Wednesday it has raised $31.5 million in a new financing round.

Tiger Global led the Series B financing round in the five-and-a-half-year-old startup. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and existing investors Eight Roads Ventures, GSV Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the new round.

Quizizz, which concluded its previous financing round in March this year, has raised $47 million to-date.

“When we were kids, it was so difficult to focus on studies. Our thesis has been that with kids now living in a world with so much distraction, there’s a need to make learning more interesting,” said Ankit Gupta, co-founder and chief executive of Quizizz, in an interview with TechCrunch.

Along with Deepak Cheenath, Quizizz’s other co-founder, Gupta started the startup’s journey in a non-profit school in Bangalore, where they built several prototypes. The same year — 2015 — the duo engaged closely with teachers and students in the U.S., and pivoted to Quizizz, said Gupta.

On Quizizz, teachers and the community develop gamified lessons for students. (Teachers don’t have to build these lessons. For the concepts that they want to explain to students, if lessons exist, many just use those instead. The platform has over 20 million quizzes today.)

These lessons have enabled students to find learning more engaging, said Gupta. The platform also enables teachers to identify in real-time students who are struggling with grasping any concept and then to address those gaps, he said.

The platform covers a range of subjects including computer science, english, mathematics, science, social studies, world languages, and creative arts.

Over the years, Quizizz has grown organically across the globe with many classrooms today using the platform, said Gupta. The platform is used by teachers in over 120 nations today with students answering more than 300 million questions on Quizizz each week. In the U.S., which is Quizizz’s largest market now, over 80% of K-12 schools use the platform, he said.

“During the pandemic, Quizziz made the transition to teaching online seamless. Now that we’re back in the building, I’ve used it almost exclusively. Making, finding, and altering lessons using Quizizz has become almost a hobby for me,” said Rory Roberts, a math teacher at Brigantine Community School, in a prepared statement.

“This week, we conducted user-testing with teachers in California, saw a video of students cheering on their classmates in an auditorium in Kenya, and got a thank you note from a group of teachers wearing Quizizz branded t-shirts in Indonesia. We’re incredibly proud of the role our growing team, and teacher community, have played in this movement,” said Quizizz’s Cheenath.

The startup plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand its team across both the U.S. and India to keep up with its growth. It is also looking to form partnerships to accelerate its international expansion.

Toca Football, a nine-year-old, Costa Mesa, Ca.-based company that operates 14 sports centers across the U.S. that are focused on soccer training, has raised $40 million in Series E funding to roughly double the number of facilities that are now up and running in the U.S., as well as to open a site in the U.K. that CEO Yoshi Maruyama describes as a “highly themed game-experiences-based dining and entertainment facility focused on soccer training.”

Maruyama knows a thing or two about building destinations to which people gravitate. Before joining Toca — which was founded by the American former soccer player Eddie Lewis (“toca” refers to the first touch of the ball in soccer) — Maruyama spent six years as the global head of location-based entertainment for Dreamworks. He spent 14 years before that as an SVP with Universal Parks & Resorts.

Indeed, he was brought into Toca in 2019 to transform it from a manufacturing business that sells Major League Soccer teams a ball-tossing machine that Lewis had developed, to the services business it has become.

On its face, its new model seems like a pretty smart one, given soccer’s growing popularity in the U.S. According to Statista, the number of participants in U.S. high school soccer programs recorded an all-time high in the 2018/19 season, with more than 850,000 playing the sport across the country.

But Toca isn’t built just for kids, even if kids — and their parents –are its primary customers. According to Maruyama, there are several populations that are coming to its various centers throughout the day. In the morning, the centers feature a curriculum for children up to age six to introduce them to soccer; the afternoons feature largely one-on-one soccer training programs where Toca is able to employ its touch trainer; and during the evenings, Toca operates a leagues business for both children and adults.

Some of the centers are huge, by the way. Among Toca’s newest sites, for example, in Naperville, Illinois, outside of Chicago, it has built a 95,000-square-foot facility that features four indoor, full-size soccer fields, as well as one-on-one individual training spaces. (Maruyama suggests the company has been able to take advantage of a depressed commercial real estate market over the last year or so.)

Little wonder that investors see a big opportunity potentially.

The newest round of funding for Toca comes from earlier investors WestRiver Group, RNS TOCA Partners, and D2 Futbol Investors; they were joined by new investors, including angel investor Jared Smith, the co-founder and former COO of Qualtrics.

The company — which plans to expand into Asia as quickly as possible (China has been mandated by the country’s leadership to become “a first-class football superpower” by 2050) —  has now raised $105 million in total funding.

As I’ve taken to online grocery shopping over the pandemic, I’ve always wondered why supermarkets didn’t offer simple ‘recipe’ features that would have automatically collected items for a homemade meal. It seemed an opportunity missed. But it is missed no more.

Lollipop AI, the new British online grocery marketplace, is launching its public beta today to do that, and it’s been created by a serial UK entrepreneur who was there at the start of successful UK startups Osper, Monzo and Curve.

Founder and CEO Tom Foster-Carter has envisaged a platform allowing people to build meal plans from recipes, assembling the ingredients automatically into their shopping basket, and suggesting remaining household essentials. He says could well help with health goals, improve culinary skills and minimize food waste. Built as a marketplace, it will be partnering with Sainsbury’s and BBC Good Food with more partners and fulfillment will be completed by retail partners. The business model will be taking a small commission from retail partners, allowing selected advertising, e.g. from CPG brand owners, and a Paid Premium tier later this year.

The site will be free to use, while a premium tier is planned. The first ten thousand Beta testers to sign up to the waitlist will be offered access to premium features “for life”, says the startup, which will offer prices at the same rate as normal supermarkets.

Foster-Carter, who had the idea after having a baby and realizing he was spending hours trying to use a normal supermarket, says the approach will save several hours a week for the average household. (We will briefly overlook the fact that a man had to create a site like this after doing the weekly shop…). Lollipop claims 80% of households spend over an hour a week meal-planning and online grocery shopping.

Lollipop MealPlanner

The founding team includes former employees of Monzo, Farmdrop, Amazon, Sainsbury’s and HelloFresh, such as cofounders Chris Parsons and Ib Warnerbring.

Although Foster-Carter is coy about how much he has raised for this approach, he says he has raised a pre-seed round backed by JamJar Investments, Speedinvest, and a “raft of grocery/technology big hitters” including Ian Marsh (former UK GM of HelloFresh) and former leadership and founders of online grocers in the UK and abroad plus ‘super-angels’ Charles Songhurst and Ed Lando.

In particular, the site is likely to appeal to people looking to lose weight, as meal planning would be simpler, and may even have an impact on recipe-box startups.

Lollipop is not alone in its ambitions. Jupiter.co in the US bills itself as “groceries on autopilot”; Jow is recipe-led shopping, as is Side Chef; while Cooklist is a meal-planner + cooking support, also in the US.

Foster-Carter told me: “It’s a marketplace so we could partner with traditional supermarkets (Sainbury’s, Tescos, Waitrose etc) + online retailers (Ocado, Amazon), direct to farm / organic (Riverford, Farmdrop), mission-led single component (Oddbox, Milk & More, etc); recipe boxes (Gousto, Hello Fresh, Mindful Chef etc); and rapid delivery (Gorillas, Getir, Weezy, etc).”

He said: “This is just the start… The plan is to be the single place you go to for all your food needs – we’ll enable you to order your Deliveroo or restaurant kit (e.g. Dishpatch) from us. Groceries are delivered by our partners and then when it’s time to cook you’ll be able to use a cooking companion app (due out next month). In the future you’ll be able to improve your cooking skills through Lollipop.”

Few players have nailed the ability to buy a lot of items (50-100+) really fast, not even Amazon – this might be Lollipop’s USP, if it can crack it.

Listen, it’s probably not the best sign when a show feels like it’s running out of steam on its first day. Mobile World Congress’ opening salvo was headlined by Samsung in an event that touched on some partnerships and spent equal time teasing an upcoming event where it will actually launch some hardware. It’s hard to get too down on the GSMA, and I really ought to preface all of these by reiterating that – even in a normal year – running an event is hard as hell. Canceling its flagship show last year had to be gut-wrenching, and deciding to go forward with this one must have also been – albeit for dramatically different reasons?

It’s not like the show didn’t come with some wins. What’s that? Elon Musk videoed in? That’s a pretty massive get by any measure, with all of the standard “whatever you think about the guy” preambles. Love him or hate, you’ve heard about him and probably have extremely strong feelings about the dude, one way or another.

Image Credits: Mobile World Congress (opens in a new window)

The High Priest of Dogeking beamed in to talk SpaceX StarLink. “To be totally frank, we are losing money on that terminal right now,” Musk said in the interview. “That terminal costs us more than $1,000, so obviously I’m subsidizing the cost of the terminal.” Good thing he’s got deep pockets.

He promised a new version of the company’s satellite next year, “which will be significantly more capable.”

Huawei thus far has focused much more on networking than consumer – it’s important to caveat this by adding that MWC is as much, if not more, a networking show, in spite of all of the press that tends to focus on consumer device launches. The company launched a bunch of 5G networking hardware, including several MIMO products.

Speaking of networks, I totally forgot to include this bit from TechCrunch parent co (you know, for now). Verizon trotted out a bunch of robots with 5G branding. The company was making a point about the importance of cellular for future robotics communication.

Here’s CSO Rima Qureshi, quoted by Reuters, “5G will make it possible for robots to connect with other robots and devices of all kinds in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.”

Image Credits: Huawei

Let’s be honest, though, mostly robots make for cool stage fodder. From what I can tell, the Boston Dynamics-esque quadruped was this bot from Ghost Robotics, which Verizon also trotted out (well, it trotted itself out, I suppose) at CES in January:

Given the choice, would I have put on an in-person event in Barcelona in the summer of 2021? No. Nuh-uh. No way. Did the GSMA feel like they had a choice financially or otherwise? That’s a much more difficult question to answer. When you’re a company that runs on events and partnerships, even canceling a single big show is a shock to the system.

I’m going back and forth on whether I’ll be doing any more of these roundups as the show progresses through Thursday. Definitely if some more interesting stuff shows up, or if there’s like video of Elon hoverboarding through the sparsely populated convention center halls or something. But I’m not holding my breath.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 29, 2021. Have you ever wanted to ditch civilization and move to the woods, but still be able to work? We have good news if that’s you. Below you’ll find lots more, including Facebook’s latest product offering and how one startup wants to save bees. Enjoy! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Duolingo is going public! Well-known edtech unicorn Duolingo is going public. TechCrunch has an overview of the IPO and a deeper dive into the company’s business health. Based on traffic to our coverage on the matter since last night, ya’ll are really into learning languages. Also make sure to check out the Duolingo EC-1.
• Facebook launches newsletters: Say hello to Bulletin, Facebook’s new newsletter service. Competing with Substack, Twitter’s Revu and other services, Facebook signed up a Boomer-friendly list of initial authors including Malcolm Gladwell. The social giant has a history of testing in-house versions of products that are successful externally. We’ll have to wait and see if Bulletin manages to survive on its own merit.
• SpaceX plans to spend billions on Starlink: According to Elon Musk, SpaceX is losing money on early Starlink connector kits. Starlink is the space company’s low-orbit satellite network that could bring about global internet connectivity. Per TechCrunch reporting of Musk’s comments, “SpaceX’s overall investment in the project could be between $5 billion-$10 billion initially and as much as $30 billion over time.” For the sake of freelancers everywhere, let’s hope the tech shakes out to match the investment.

Startups/VC

Up top today in our roundup of recent startup news is Beeflow. We’re putting it at the top of the list because (1) It’s about bees and (2) It’s called Beeflow. What’s not to love? Per Jordan Crook, the startup may have an answer to the decimation of the global bee population. And it might make money to boot.

Now, the rest of the news:

• Europe’s early-stage market is on fire: That’s the takeaway from a recent TechCrunch dig into the continent’s venture capital trade. So is Latin America’s and the United States’. In brief, the regional startup zones of the world are becoming increasingly blurred thanks to Zoom deal-making; what was once true in one place may now be the case in every hub.
• Zomato to drop $100M on Grofer: The Indian tech scene is busy these days, with Manish Singh reporting that IPO-headed food-delivery giant Zomato intends to invest $100 million in online grocer Grofer. Grofer would become a unicorn in the transaction.
• SentinelOne could be worth $10 billion in its IPO: That’s the latest on the SentinelOne public debut, which we’ve looked at here and dug into the pricing of here. The cybersecurity company’s IPO could help kick off a hot third quarter for IPOs more generally, especially at the prices at which it is set to debut.
• $10M to teach soft skills with VR: That’s the latest on Virti, which wants to turn “a lot of subjectively assessed skills into more objective and measurable” outputs. VR is cool, and soft skills matter. Let’s see what their union can bring. Please, no “Black Mirror” jokes.
• Givingli raises $3M for greeting card tech: Not every venture capital round is large. Some are small enough to fit into an envelope. That’s the case with Givingli’s latest round, which should give the digital card and gifting app more room to build out its service.

And I would be remiss to not mention that I covered venture capital rounds this morning from co-op and Arrows, along with news regarding Acceleprise’s rebrand.

How VCs can get the most out of co-investing alongside LPs

In a recent private equity survey, 80% of respondents said their co-investments with people outside traditional VC firms outperformed their PE fund investments.

Alternative investors are highly motivated, and because they’re seeking higher returns than are generally available in public markets, they are less daunted by risk. In return, they benefit from less expensive fee structures and develop close ties with VCs, enlarging the talent pool as they build investment skills.

These relationships have direct benefits for VCs as well, such as more flexibility with diversification and consolidated decision-making power.

“With the right deal structure, deal selection and deal investigation, co-investors can significantly increase their returns,” says C5 Capital Managing Partner William Kilmer, who wrote an Extra Crunch post for VCs considering an alternative path.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

Turning from the smaller upstarts to the megagiants, it’s been a good week to be a Big Tech company. Facebook crossed the $1 trillion market cap threshold, though it dipped back under the magic number this afternoon. Here’s what else is going on from the Bigs:

• Shopify cuts its cut to 0%: Shopify will charge zero for developers’ first million in revenue that they make on its application marketplace. The move fits into a larger trend of app stores lowering their cuts as Apple fights tooth and nail to avoid doing the same with its own application emporium. The Shopify news is probably more aimed at e-commerce rival Amazon than Apple, but the move still gently undercuts Cupertino’s argument that it deserves around a third of all commerce that happens on iOS.
• AI developers are coming: News out today from Microsoft’s GitHub product is notable, with the sub-org announcing an AI-powered tool that “suggests code as you type.” GitHub teamed up with OpenAI to build the tool. For beginners, the coding service could prove to be super freaking neat.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you’re a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we’d like to hear about why they loved working with you.

If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this interview Extra Crunch Managing Editor Eric Eldon did with Scott Tong, “The pandemic showed why product and brand design need to sit together.”

Mate Rimac’s founder story has the makings of automotive folklore. He started Rimac Automobili in his garage in 2009 as a literal one-person operation that has grown to a company with more than 1,000 employees, supply contracts with automakers like Porsche and a new electric hypercar moving into production.

What might not be known is how close the company came to failing. “It has been such a wild ride,” Mate Rimac said during an interview at at the virtual TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 event. “The first seven years, we were like out of money and technically bankrupt all the time.”

The founder and CEO of Croatian electric hypercar and components developer Rimac Automobili joined TechCrunch on our virtual stage to talk about the company’s new Nevera vehicle, his interest in electric robotaxis and the prospect of an acquisition of Bugatti. Throughout the interview, he gave a candid account of some of the company’s lowest points, how he and the company survived and what other founders can learn from his experience.

“It was quite a ride.”

Today, Rimac Automobili is a household name in Croatia with plans to grow even larger. Rimac is currently building a headquarters and technology campus on a 49-acre site that is slated to be completed in 2023. It was a far more solitary experience the first few years of Rimac Automobili’s existence. Even when it gained recognition, the company came close to failing numerous times, Rimac said in the interview.

It has been such a wild ride. And like the first seven years, we were like out of money and technically bankrupt all the time.

We had situations where I can’t even start to explain what we survived. I set out this company 12 years ago, I was alone for two years. The first employee joined me in 2011. So it was really built from a garage.

Yesterday, the team behind the parody Amazon Dating delivered us Postdates. It’s like Postmates, but for getting your stuff back from your ex.

Postdates looks like the actual Postmates website – you can select a type of relationship (“casually dated,” “lived together,” “one night stand,” etc.) like it’s a type of restaurant. Then, you can choose from preset items to retrieve (concert tickets if you were friendzoned, family heirlooms if you were divorced) or add a custom item. Delivery starts at $25 in LA and $30 in NY, along with an additional emotional labor fee of $3.99. Yes, you can actually use this service if you’re in one of these two cities, but Postdates isn’t here to stay — it’s a pop-up business. Or, as Postdates “founder” Ani Acopian puts it, “It’s kind of like watching a ‘Black Mirror’ episode, but it’s your real life.”

You might remember Elon Musk’s failed comedy start-up/”intergalactic media empire” Thud, which aimed to create immersive digital experiences that blurred the lines between what’s real and fake. Or, you might not remember Thud, since it failed spectacularly and wasn’t very funny. Postdates struck the satire gold that Elon Musk dreamed of with Thud, only they did it without $2 million dollars in funding from one of the richest men in the world.

TechCrunch talked to conceptual artist Ani Acopian, producer Suzy Shinn, and product developer Brian Wagner to get the low-down on just how legit Postdates is.

Image Credits: Postdates (opens in a new window)

TechCrunch: Why Postdates? How did the idea come about?

Suzy Shinn: At the start of quarantine when everything was falling apart, Ani and I made ScrubHub, like PornHub for hand washing. We raised $50,000 for charity.

Ani Acopian: I think we had this creative juice inside of us that we wanted to find an outlet for.

SS: Then, we had the Postdates idea, and we actually tried to get investors and artists to fund it, because we were like… This is going to cost something, we want to make it real and actually function. No one wanted anything to do with it, because they were like, “What’s the return?”

AA: And we were like, “Well, the return is that it’s a vibe.”

SS: No one wanted anything to do with us funding-wise, so we built it ourselves.

TC: So, you can actually use this?

AA: Yeah, we partnered with two local courier companies, Gourmet Runner in LA and Airpals in New York. We wanted to make sure we work with people that treat their workers right.

SS: You can put in a request, and the ex has to consent obviously and be like, “Yeah, I have this stuff for you, I’ll put it outside,” and our couriers have Postdates bags that we give to them. But legitimately, you can use it in both of those cities as long as you’re not sending a cat, or a child, or alcohol, or drugs, or something that won’t fit in a bag.

AA: We spent a lot of time on the workflow to make sure no addresses are shared, that everyone’s consenting to be involved, and we’re trying to keep it no-contact, so we’re asking people to put stuff on their door handle. You’re not charged until your ex accepts the order.

Image Credits: Postdates (opens in a new window)

TC: You just launched yesterday, but have people actually been using the service so far?

Brian Wagner: We had some people who would post a screenshot in response to Ani’s tweet and be like, “Oh snap, I actually got Postdated by my ex!”

SS: There’s about 30 to 40 pending requests, and we’ve gotten a handful that just as of this morning have been delivered successfully.

TC: Do you think this could be a viable business?

AA: Not everything needs to be a viable business. I would actually be… not surprised, but upset if this actually became a thing, because I don’t think the world needs that level of stuff, but I think we’re pretty much already there. All you can do is hold the mirror up.

Image Credits: Postdates (opens in a new window)

TC: As satire, what are you trying to say with Postdates?

SS: I think in the tech world, it seems like all of these tech startups get crazy amounts of funding, and they spend so much money, and they take themselves so seriously. The three of us, with the help of our friends, were able to do this, and we didn’t need $13 million in funding or five years. But we were staying up until like 5 AM, and we were like, “Can we hire someone to help us?” but we were like, “No, we can’t pay.”

BW: Especially with the rise of the gig economy, we’ve seen some positives and some pretty serious negatives, especially during quarantine. It helps people get the things that they need, but also, a lot of workers aren’t being paid fairly and don’t have health insurance. So there’s a sentiment a lot more often now that a lot of tech is redistributing labor, and you’re just paying for people to be moved around. So in a way, we’re sort of like… We’ve redistributed emotional labor here.

TC: There’s an emotional labor tax on the site, yeah.

BW: There’s a bit of poking fun of that, saying how far will we go in terms of actually moving labor along for money. Will people pay for someone else to deal with the emotional handling of a situation?

TC: How did Postdates build upon Amazon Dating?

AA: We’ve made two parody sites now, and we wanted to take that to the next level and make it experiential. It’s kind of like watching a Black Mirror episode, but it’s your real life.

SS: What is the literal price you will pay not to see someone? This is a real thing that happens all the time — my friends will be like, “I broke up with my girlfriend, I need you to go get my stuff,” and I’m like, “I don’t want to go get your stuff.”

AA: I don’t think we should outsource it, though.

TC: So you don’t think we should outsource it, but also, you made Postdates.

AA: I think that’s the whole…

TC: That’s the joke.

AA: Yeah.

TC: What does it say about startup culture to make a product that you don’t think should exist?

SS: Startups are so, so serious, there’s no humor in it, and they think it’s going to last forever. Well, we’re doing the opposite.  We’re going to make this last a couple of weeks for a limited time only, and then we’re gonna take it away. But we would love to keep doing these, making something where art meets tech meets entertainment.

BW: Companies and experiences can just be fun. They don’t have to be a billion dollar idea, they don’t have to be something that’s going to go on Shark Tank. Imagine us entering Shark Tank…

Ford and GM’s century-old battle for market share is no longer restricted to gas- and diesel-powered passenger car, truck and SUV sales. The hottest market in the next decade is commercial and electric.

In this new race, the two companies are taking different strategies as they square off against each other — along with a growing list of EV startups — to win over as many delivery and fleet-vehicle customers as possible.

GM’s weapon is BrightDrop, a new startup incubated and launched at CES 2021 by Chairman and CEO Mary Barra. The venture boasts an ecosystem of EV hardware and logistical software products aimed squarely at fleet and delivery companies. GM’s interest in the space is far from merely exploratory; it anticipates that the market for delivery, including food and parcels in the United States, will be more than $850 billion by 2025.

“Folks on the commercial side don’t really care about the technology — they care about the economics,” Brett Smith, director of technology at research firm CAR, told TechCrunch.

Electric vehicles might be more ecologically sound than traditional gas- or diesel-powered vehicles, but for fleet managers, it comes down to the numbers on a spreadsheet, and thanks to incentives and lower maintenance costs associated with EVs, vans that run on electrons instead of dead dinosaurs make financial sense.

The cool new thing on Facebook is for Mark Zuckerberg to drop product news in live audio rooms. So today, Zuckerberg took to his brand’s Clubhouse competitor to announce its next new thing: Bulletin, a newsletter platform.

Bulletin is built on a separate platform from Facebook — on its website, the FAQ states that this is to “enable creators to grow their audience in ways that are not exclusively dependent on the Facebook platform.” You don’t need a Facebook account to subscribe to a newsletter, but Bulletin relies on Facebook’s infrastructure, including the use of Facebook Pay to purchase premium subscriptions and join subscriber-only groups and live audio rooms.

Competitors like Substack take a “hands-off” approach to content moderation, allowing anyone to start a newsletter. But every writer currently on Facebook’s Bulletin was hand-picked to contribute. Still, Substack has received scrutiny for subsidizing anti-trans rhetoric through its controversial Substack Pro program, which commissioned particular writers to write on Substack. So, Bulletin won’t be immune to the issues that plague Substack despite its heavily curated model.

The initial slate of writers on Bulletin includes Malcom Gladwell, Mitch Albom, Erin Andrews, and Tan France — the FAQ also notes that its beta program is US-centric, with only two international writers at the moment (“We will look to include more international creators after our beta program launch,” Bulletin says.) Facebook is paying its writers up front for their contributions, and so far, doesn’t plan to take a cut of their profits. If writers choose to move off the platform, they will have the ability to take their subscriber lists with them.