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Endowus is the latest investment app in Southeast Asia to raise follow-on funding, adding $35 million SGD (about $25.6 million US) to its war chest. The round was led by Prosus Ventures, the venture firm majority-owned by Naspers, and EDBI. Participants included SoftBank Corp.-owned Japanese tech conglomerate Z Holdings.

Returning investors included UBS, Singtel Innov8 and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Endowus raised its $23 million SGD Series A just seven months ago, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and SoftBank Ventures Asia. The new round brings Endowus’ total funding to $67 million SGD (about $49 million USD) and puts it in the company of other apps that have quickly raised follow-on funding as appetite for retail investing grows in several Southeast Asian markets. These include Pintu, Syfe and Ajaib, all based in Indonesia; and Singapore-based Stashaway.

Co-founder and CEO Gregory Van told TechCrunch that Endowus raised again because it was approached by strategic investors “who really understood our long-term goals with a shared desire to accelerate our growth traction to help more people reach their financial goals. We believe we have discovered a strong product-market fit in Singapore, growing by over $1 billion SGD in assets in 2021 alone.” In terms of what stage Endowus is at now, Van said the new round “is between a Series A and B for us.”

“Until our first external fundraise earlier this year, Endowus was 100% employee-owned and incubated, so we are a bit off the standard cycle.”

Endowus, which launched full service less than two years ago, says it currently has $1.5 billion SGD in total assets under advice. One of the main ways Endowus is different from other investment apps in Singapore is that it is the only digital advisor in Singapore where users can manage both private cash and pension savings and get advice from financial experts, said co-founder and CEO Gregory Van. For example, it’s the only robo-advisor that can advise and help people invest in their national pension savings (Central Provident Fund), which Van says is “one of the key wealth pillars for Singaporeans with up to 37% mandatory contribution rates.”

The new funding will be used to speed-up Endowus’ growth in Singapore, hiring for geographic expansion and product development. The company recently surpassed 100 employees, and plans to double that over the next year.

“While we can reach profitability today by cutting back on some costs, we do not think it is the right strategy. More than anything we want more people to use Endowus digital wealth app to reach their financial goals,” Van said. “To that end, we will continue to pursue accelerated growth, with profitability to follow as the company scales rapidly.”

In addition to Endowus’ Core and Satellite portfolios, users also have the ability to “customize and build solutions with real-time advice on the platform with access to over 150 best-in-class funds,” he added, and can save up to 50% on annual investment costs with no sales fees and 100% trailer fee rebates.

Lightspeed China Partners, the China-focused vehicle of Lightspeed Venture Partners, said Tuesday it has closed the largest fundraising rounds in its history. The new injection came under three years after its last raise in early 2019.

The capital went towards two funds: Lightspeed China Partners V with $460 million for early-stage startups and Lightspeed China Partners Select II with $460 million for growth-stage opportunities. Both will be seeking investments in green tech, deep tech, enterprise tech, health tech and consumer tech, the firm said.

Lightspeed Venture Partners, rooted in Silicon Valley, started in 1999 and has gradually extended its footprint to Israel, India, Europe, Southeast Asia and China, where it began investing in 2006. Lightspeed China has since built up a local investment team like its counterparts IDG and Sequoia. In the past five years, the firm saw a number of notable IPOs, including e-commerce giants Pinduoduo and Meituan, freight matching platform Full Truck Alliance, and electric vehicle upstart Xpeng.

We’ve written some of its growth-stage portfolio companies, including Hesai, a major lidar maker in China, Laiye, which aspires to be China’s Uipath, and Starfield, one of the meat replacement startups that have emerged in China recently.

Alongside its landmark raise, Lightspeed China also added five new partners. Jia Zhu, Francis Kao and Jason Wang were promoted to partners. It also brought in two new partners — Wei Cai, who was previously responsible for Alibaba’s investment in deep tech, and Daniel Sun, who jointly led investments in the consumer and TMT (technology, media, and telecom) sectors at the China Renaissance New Economy Fund.

The firm’s two new funds were “oversubscribed”, which is “evidence of the strong support garnered from returning and new institutional limited partners across the U.S., Europe and Asia,” said James Mi, who helped Google build its China offshoot before founding Lightspeed China.

“As our society is facing the significant challenges of climate change and inequality, we believe it is important to focus on startup companies with innovative products and services that can bring positive impact to the world,” said Mi.

BMW couldn’t mark the 50th anniversary of its high-performance M division with any ol’ concept vehicle. Instead, the German automaker tapped into a rock star aesthetic that would make David Lee Roth proud with a plug-in hybrid concept that merges V8 power with next level M design.

The XM SUV plug-in hybrid concept — suitably codenamed “Rock Star” internally (we’ll get into that later) — is the second M-only vehicle ever.

The XM SUV, which TechCrunch got a peek earlier this month in Los Angeles, will not end up in the concept car dustbin. After some massaging to comply with regulations, it will go into production in 2022. And according to the automaker, the XM SUV will be pretty close to the outrageous concept shown off in Los Angeles earlier this month. Which is good news for extroverts.

The BMW XM takes cues from the automaker’s SUV lineup and M vehicle legacy, but supplements those designs with bravado. The lines are more aggressive. The rear end of the concept, which has cat-like LED lights, a BMW logo milled into the glass, and an M quad-exhaust, is unlike any other vehicle in the automaker’s line. Instead of the pipes situated horizontally, the hexagonal exhaust tips are mounted vertically on either side of a wide diffusers. Upfront, the large kidney grilles get their very own LED-outlined treatment.

Everything about the vehicle screams, “Look at me!” which is exactly what the automaker was going for.

Image Credits: BMW

“The feedback from our customers is that they really love our cars. But then the next step is they would like to have even more expressive luxury in the cars,” Franciscus van Meel, chairman of the board of BMW M, said during an unveiling of the vehicle.

These customers according to BMW are extroverted, expressive, non-conformists that would likely cross-shop the XM against the Lamborghini Urus and Mercedes G wagon, although BMW hasn’t shared pricing as of yet.

Then there’s the interior, which somehow manages to outshine the “look at me” exterior.

Image Credits: BMW

The exterior is essentially a mid-2000s Toyota Camry compared to what’s going on inside. The front row is covered in what BMW calls a “vintage brown” leather and is geared specifically for performance and the driver’s orientation. The rear seat? Imagine Russel Brand’s bedroom and that’s what BMW has done to the XM for rear passengers. The back seat and floor are covered in blue and green velvet respectively meant to convey a lounge. All that’s missing is a lava lamp and a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed.

Above the driver and passengers, is a crystal structure headliner. It’s indirectly illuminated from the sides and when lit up, it really does feel like a piece of art or at least it’s on par visually with the laser show of a planetarium.

If BMW can get the lights to sync up to Tame Impala’s latest album, it’s got a winner on its hands with a certain set of music and herbal-supplement fans.

Image Credits: BMW

The rolling music club is a merging of the automaker’s V8 and plug-in hybrid technology. Together, the powertrains output 750 horsepower and 737 pound-feet of torque. BMW didn’t share information about battery capacity, but did say it’s targeting an EPA-tested range of 30 miles in EV-only mode. Not exactly on pair with offerings from Toyota. But, more than enough to quietly pull away from the venue without sparking too much interest. Unless of course, anyone notices the design and shiny kidney grilles.

Image Credits: BMW

According to the head of BMW M design, Marcus Syring, the XM was always going to be something special. The BMW boardspecifically asked the designers to shock them with something they weren’t expecting.

“BMW is continuously doing these specific high-tech models and really exploring new areas with the i3 and i8 but also with the iX,” Syring told TechCrunch at the end of the evening. “We are exploring something. It’s the same with that car (XM). It’s very unique and we are trying out new things.”

In an industry that regularly calls on rock stars and their music to help sell a vehicle, BMW’s M division built the vehicle equivalent of former Van Halen frontman, David Lee Roth. It’s loud, flamboyant, ready to “bring it,” and at the end of the day, happy to embrace you in velvet.

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If you’re an entrepreneur looking to grow your business internationally, expanding into multiple countries can exponentially impact your bottom line business and brand, allowing you to grow efficiently. Scaling your business beyond borders, however, is a path riddled with bumps and obstacles.

In my previous role leading a food diagnostics company for more than 20 years, I guided its growth from one country to doing business in over a hundred. Our firm became a worldwide player and influencer in food safety diagnostics, and in a matter of years, 65% of our business was outside the U.S. We also achieved 38% market share globally.

We succeeded because we secured data through market research and used the data to inform our global strategy.

Here are a few key strategies to achieving this kind of international growth.

Research your market

The first step is to check relevant market research. You may need to hire a research firm to accurately gauge the geographic market for your industry and product. Be sure to tap into research that drills down into the intricacies of your vertical market and separates out the various geographic markets. I recommend research companies such as Frost & Sullivan, Nielsen, Statista and Gartner.

Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups.

Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody.

Research firms can detail the exact market size of specific geographic areas, competitors, market dynamics, expected growth rates and expected revenue — usually over 10 years. This data is critical when planning for an international rollout.

Market research reports are easily accessible online either as abstracts or the full report for a fee. If you want a custom report, research firms typically take 90-120 days or more to deliver a comprehensive report.

If you operate in a niche, this information is worth its weight in gold, and I recommend hiring a professional to secure the information you need. A customized market research report costs generally from $20,000 to $50,000, depending on the industry and market research organization.

As an example, the company I ran engaged a market researcher to determine which international market we should prioritize, and the present and future product demand for our current and future product pipeline. We also readjusted our product pipeline based on the demand in key international markets.

Prioritize international rollout based on ROI

In order to achieve international growth, you need to plan based on ROI estimates.

Narrow down the markets for the first phase of global growth by determining which is most viable and sizable for what you offer. Assess how easy or difficult it will be to enter a particular market, and whether its size justifies the effort it will take to establish a solid footprint.

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving-slash-holiday weekend. It’s more than a little mind-boggling that we’re reaching the end of 2021, but that only means one thing: TC Sessions: Space is almost here! You can still join us for the two-day event; more details are below.

As usual, send thoughts, comments and feedback to aria.techcrunch@gmail.com.

Don’t forget to sign up to get the free newsletter version of Max Q delivered to your inbox.

‘Armageddon Now’: NASA launches mission to test asteroid deflection

NASA is planning on crashing a spacecraft into a small asteroid to test whether this will meaningfully change its trajectory, in case Earth ever faces threat from a nearby space rock that wants to smashy-smash.

The Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission took off Wednesday early morning to much fanfare, and it’s not difficult to understand why: This is the first time humans have ever attempted to change the path of an asteroid! Thankfully, the target asteroid is very, very far away and poses no danger to us — so far away that it’ll take the spacecraft around 10 months to even reach it, let alone execute its mission.

Right before the spacecraft reaches its target — the smaller of two asteroids that are traveling in a binary system — it’ll have to very precisely execute a number of burns and thruster firings to ensure it actually collides with the smaller space rock. The impact should change the orbital speed of the asteroid by less than 1%, but that should be enough to alter its orbital period by several minutes.

“Planetary Defense has been working on the problem for, really, decades,” explained Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “It’s time to start getting together this toolset — it’s getting important for all our stakeholders. It’s really been in the last five years or so that the program has increased its support. And the target has been around for at least five years before that — people were talking about how this is really perfect, we can view its success from the ground, there’s no need for a second investigation.”

Watch an animation of the mission below, courtesy of NASA:

Post-launch debriefs with Astra’s Chris Kemp and Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck

Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck and Astra’s Chris Kemp each gave separate post-launch debriefs to reporters this week, where they shared more details about what’s next for their respective space companies.

First, Astra: The company recently experienced a major win when it successfully launched a rocket to orbit for the first time. Astra, which went public via a SPAC merger this summer, delivered a payload for the U.S. Space Force as part of the department’s Space Test Program.

According to Kemp, the company is now ready to commence commercial operations using its small launch vehicle (Rocket 3.3) and begin flight testing a larger rocket variation (Rocket 4.0) next year.

“This is really hard and all it takes is one thing to go wrong,” he said.

Video of our first orbital launch pic.twitter.com/t0FzJRhJsL

— Chris Kemp (@Kemp) November 22, 2021

Now let’s turn to Rocket Lab, which scored its own win last week when it successfully recovered a rocket booster for the third time. The next step in its recovery program: catching the booster in mid-air using a helicopter.

This has always been the ultimate aim of Rocket Lab’s reusability program, and the company has spent a lot of time preparing for this mission, which should take place sometime in the first half of next year, Beck said.

Eventually, around half of Electron launches will be reusable versus expendable, he added. This is different than the company’s plans for its forthcoming Neutron rocket, which is designed to be reusable each time it flies.

“I’m so thankful for all the reusability work that we’re doing on Electron today because there’s just so many lessons to learn that you can’t learn in a wind tunnel, you can’t learn in analysis, you just have to go and fly,” Beck said. “Electron has been a spectacular piece for us to learn so much about reentry, so much about controlling that reentry and managing those thermal loads, because reusability is not a structural problem to solve. It’s a thermal problem to solve and a control problem. And Electron has really enabled us to hone that.”

Rocket Lab’s next recovery vehicle, complete with an additional thermal protection system. Image Credits: Rocket Lab (opens in a new window)

Other news from TC and around the web

Blue Origin will be conducting its next crewed spaceflight mission on December 9. The manifest includes Good Morning America co-host Michael Strahan; Alan Shepard’s daughter Laura Shepard Churchley; Voyager Space CEO Dylan Taylor; Dick Holdings managing member Evan Dick; and father and child pair Lane Bess and Cameron Bess.

Pangea Aerospace, a Barcelona-based company working on an orbital launch vehicle, has successfully tested a small version of an “aerospike” engine. Aerospike engines are a type of rocket engine believed to be more efficient, but they have faced a number of design and fabrication challenges preventing their uptake.

SpaceX is undergoing a leadership shakeup, so anonymous sources tell CNBC. Apparently Will Heltsley, VP of propulsion, and Lee Rosen, VP of mission and launch operations, have left the company after multi-year tenures.

Voyager Space Holdings is snapping up yet another space company. This time it’s Space Micro, a manufacturer of orbital communications and digital subsystems for satellites. This marks Voyager’s sixth acquisition since its founding in October 2019, as the company seeks to become a full-service space firm offering everything from robotics to launch support to communications tech.

The early agenda for TC Sessions: Space is here

Last year we held our first dedicated space event, and it went so well that we decided to host it again in 2021. This year, it’s happening December 14 and 15, and it’s once again going to be an entirely virtual conference, so people from all over the world will be able to join — and you can, too.

Check out a sneak peek of the early agenda by clicking here. Suffice to say, you won’t want to miss it.

Read more stories on TechCrunch.com

When Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced today his plans to step down as CEO, he didn’t go quietly.

“There’s a lot of talk about the importance of a company being ‘founder-led,'” he wrote. “Ultimately I believe that’s severely limiting and a single point of failure. I’ve worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders.”

Dorsey added that he believes “it’s critical that a company can stand on its own, free of its founder’s influence or direction.”

We found this slightly rich, since Dorsey, who is also the CEO and co-founder of fintech giant Stripe, was Twitter’s first CEO before he stepped down and returned to the role after the five-year reign of Dick Costolo. That’s hardly a lack of founder control.

Still, his comments are pretty counter-narrative.

In today’s founder-friendly environment, venture investors often bet on early teams based entirely on their to-date product progress, and founders are increasingly likely to stay at the helm even after their companies have gone public. “[T]here aren’t many founders that choose their company over their own ego,” Dorsey wrote.

After a fun chat about the Dorsey decision on Equity, we hashed out our views about the value of founders who remain in leadership roles long after their companies have reached maturity:

• Alex Wilhelm: A call to return to the old normal from the new normal
• Natasha Mascarenhas: A reset would rewrite how VCs and entrepreneurs do business
• Amanda Silberling: Founders aren’t rockstars

Alex Wilhelm: A call to return to the old normal from the new normal

What’s somewhat incredible about this Dorsey take is that it’s utterly uncontroversial – 15 years ago. Today, sure, but that’s just a mark of how much things have changed.

Recall that investors made the Google founders bring on a business person to be their company’s CEO. You’ve heard of Eric Schmidt. It was commonplace in prior venture eras for founders to step aside from the top job once their company hit scale, as the thinking went that there were folks better suited for the role of scaling a tech company than founders.

What happened to that perspective? Two things. First, major returns from select founder-led businesses. Facebook has done well in financial terms under a single leader. You can throw in a few other names to the mix as well; Coinbase and Airbnb come to mind.

But more important is that venture capitalists have lost much of their prior influence. Gone are the days when VCs could sit in their suburban office parks throne rooms and force founders to come to them. Even more, the explosion in capital available to founders has rendered the core venture conceit – having money to invest – to commodity status. This means that venture folks can’t boss founders around as much as they once could thanks to lower leverage.

So founders get to stay in charge of their companies for as long as they want, often ensconced in a warm blanket of super-voting shares, ensuring lifetime control. Not every VC likes this! Not every VC wants to anoint a king instead of a CEO! And yet, you will not be able to get a single VC to push back on the idea of founder-friendliness, as they all want allocation in the next hot deal. And telling founders that their walking, talking piggy banks might have an opinion, let alone a view that they should be replaced with someone with more operational experience, would not be the move.

But Dorsey is just saying that there are times when founders are not the best folks to lead companies. This is true. While there are great examples of capital creation thanks to long founder tenures, there are perhaps even better examples of the opposite.

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

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for November 29, 2021! It’s Monday, we’re back, you are back and the news is back. If you had hoped that the post-Thanksgiving, pre-holiday break period was going to be relaxed, no dice. As you have already seen in the subject line, we have a lot to get into. —Alex

P.S. We’re having a little Cyber Monday sale for TechCrunch Sessions: Space tickets!

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Jack logs off: From Twitter’s CEO role, that is. This morning, double-CEO Jack Dorsey announced that he will bounce from his perch atop Twitter, handing off the chief executive reins to the company’s CTO. TechCrunch’s take is that the elevation of Parag Agrawal to the top role bodes well for the company’s larger crypto efforts.
• Clearview AI irks U.K.: While we may disagree with the United Kingdom on what to call the trunk of a car or its hood, we can agree with the island nation that Clearview AI is not our favorite company. The facial recognition shop has been given a “provisional notice” that it is to “stop further processing of U.K. citizens’ data and to delete any data it already holds.” It’s also set to receive a fine.
• Is e-commerce growth slowing? New data from the fake U.S. shopping holiday “Black Friday” showed lower digital spending than in 2020. TechCrunch added to that data point by trawling a series of recent disappointing earnings from e-commerce companies to wonder if the online market for selling stuff is seeing its growth slow.

Startups/VC

• Positive social networking? What if your social network was a series of self-improvement challenges that you could undertake and then share results with your friends? That’s what startup Alms is cooking up. It’s something akin to the anti-Twitter, we reckon.
• Yassir wants to build the North African super app: Flush with a $30 million Series A, Yassir’s service that provides things like ride-hailing and delivery is building a huge marketplace for its region. The “super app for geographic region X” is a fun model to take on, as it is good in that the TAM is huge, but tough in that point-solution competitors could prove tough to beat.
• Today in great opening paragraphs: Our own Rebecca Bellan has a brilliant way of explaining what Foundry Lab, which just raised an $8 million round and came out of stealth earlier today, is building. So, instead of paraphrasing, here is the paragraph in its entirety:

Remember Easy Bake Ovens? You’d mix up some colored powder and water until a dough or batter formed, put it in a mold, pop it in the oven and before you knew it — ding! A disgusting treat. Foundry Lab, a New Zealand-based startup with backing from Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck, has figured out how to do something similar, except instead of chemicals and an “oven,” it’s metals and a microwave.

• YallaMarket hopes that quick commerce is a global wave: Sure, there are 2,349 companies competing for quick delivery of goods in the U.K., but YallaMarket is betting that the model will also scale across the Middle East. It has raised just a few million thus far but is a company to keep tabs on.
• If cloud is good, are clouds better? One of our two enterprise gurus, Ron Miller, has a post up today about Upbound. The gist is that the company has built a tool that helps companies manage their multi-cloud setup. Why multi-cloud? Per Ron, because companies today don’t want to get locked into a single provider. Makes sense. Upbound just raised $60 million.
• Thought Machine raises $200M: B2B cloud banking concern Thought Machine is now a unicorn. Uncork the sparkling apple juice. We might yammer on more regarding the valuation threshold that the startup has reached, but, it was not alone:
• Today in Tiger: Two rounds today! First, Indian credit card startup Slice is now a unicorn. And, in evidence that no startup name can be too dumb to succeed — hello “Google” and “TechCrunch” — Mr Yum has raised $65 million for its mobile ordering service.
• I have to stop, but there was even more announced today, including rounds from FJDynamics and Motorway.

Product-led growth and signal substitution syndrome: Bringing it all together

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

Collecting data to optimize B2B marketing is notoriously difficult.

“Practitioners tend to see each new source of information about their potential buyers — each signal type — as a substitute for the last one that didn’t work,” according to Kerry Cunningham, senior principal at account engagement platform 6sense.

Embracing a product-led growth mindset allows organizations to look at users as signals, “just like form-fill leads, de-anonymized website traffic, visitors to your booth, and the rest,” says Cunningham.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Facebook whistleblower to chat about Section 230 with Congress: The leaker of a great number of internal Facebook documents will testify in front of Congress regarding U.S. laws relating to content moderation and the hosting of speech online. We are sure that Congress will ask substantive questions this time.
• AWS wants to help robots: The major cloud computing platforms are a lot more than store-and-compute services. AWS has a new project called RoboRunner that wants to help fleets of robots work together more intelligently, for example. Also keep in mind that both AWS and Azure offer “ground station as a service” for satellite companies.
• Today in big deals: One major bucket of hungry capital (Francisco Partners) is selling a morsel from its table (Quest Software) to another pile of cash (Clearlake Capital). The deal is worth $5.4 billion, far more than Francisco paid for the “legacy security vendor” back in 2012.

TechCrunch Experts

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

TechCrunch wants you to recommend software consultants who have expertise in UI/UX, website development, mobile development and more! If you’re a software consultant, pass this survey along to your clients; we’d like to hear about why they loved working with you.

The Miami City Commission voted on Monday to reinstate its e-scooter pilot program, which it had briefly banned due to safety concerns. Shared e-scooters from companies like Lime, Bird, Helbiz and Spin will return to Miami’s streets on January 15 following strict new safety measures.

The new program will see rules for operators and riders, according to CBS Miami: Riders must wear a helmet and observe a maximum speed limit of 10 miles per hour on sidewalks; side-by-side riding is prohibited; only two operators are to be permitted per block, down from four; and riders must be at least 18.

On November 18, Miami City commissioners had voted 4 to 5 to end the e-scooter pilot that had been in place since 2018, citing risks posed by scooters on sidewalks and untrained riders on busy streets. (In last weekend’s The Station newsletter, we noted the slight hypocrisy of removing the humble scooter from the streets when there are far more unsafe and environmentally unfriendly vehicles about.)

By midnight of November 19, micromobility operators had to disable their vehicles and collect them by 5 p.m. before the city impounded them.

Advocates for the e-scooter pilot have argued that not only has the program brought in $2.4 million in revenue that was used to create bike lanes, but also that their services help residents with first- and last-mile travel and generally reduce car usage and emissions.

The commission voted 3 to 1 on Monday to rescind the ban.

“Change is coming; it’s going to happen anyway. Regulate it,” Commissioner Alex Diaz de la Portilla said, according to WPLG Local 10, adding police officers can enforce rules such as speed limits.

In March, Okta completed a $6.5 billion acquisition of Auth0, an identity and access management platform. The deal surely brought a smile to the faces of Auth0’s investors.

On December 1 at 12p PT / 3p ET, we’ll sit down with Auth0 co-founder Eugenio Pace and investor Sunil Nagaraj of Ubiquity to learn for certain.

We’re amped to have Pace and Nagaraj join us for this upcoming episode of TechCrunch Live. Click here to register for free!

Eugenio Pace spent more than a decade at Microsoft before starting his journey with Auth0. Nagaraj, for his part, is founding partner at Ubiquity Ventures, which is a seed-stage firm with close to $100 million in AUM. Nagaraj sits on the boards of Esper, Halter, Kinetic, Parallel Domain, Revi, Safehub and others.

Nagaraj was an early investor in Auth0 and can share insight on how a company secures seed funding and grows at the rate that Auth0 has.

TechCrunch Live is all about helping founders build better venture-backed businesses. We do this by talking to founders and the investors who finance them to learn how they came together, why they chose to work with one another and how they overcome hurdles and scale together.

Sometimes, we even take a peek at the startup’s early pitch deck to hear what truly sang on the other side of the table.

TechCrunch Live also features the TCL Pitch-off, where founders in the audience can volunteer to hop on the virtual stage and pitch their product to our esteemed guests and hear their live feedback.

We look forward to seeing you on December 1st!

Amazon CloudWatch was introduced way back in 2009 to help AWS customers view data about their cloud usage and spending. Today at the dawn of AWS re:Invent, the company’s cloud customer conference taking place in Las Vegas this week, the cloud division announced a couple of enhancements to the product.

Amazon has been building on the types of data provided by CloudWatch, and today it added user monitoring. With Real User Monitoring, AWS customers can understand when there is a problem with a deployment and take corrective action before customers really begin to feel it.

“Amazon CloudWatch RUM will help you to collect the metrics that give you the insights that will help you to identify, understand, and improve this experience. You simply register your application, add a snippet of JavaScript to the header of each page and deploy,” Amazon’s Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post announcing the feature.

This doesn’t exactly fall under the category of stunning innovation. It’s something companies like AppDynamics and New Relic have been doing for years, but as with most things Amazon they are providing a soup-to-nuts experience for customers inside AWS, and this type of monitoring lets you know when things could be going wrong with your AWS application.

The other new feature is a new experiments tool called CloudWatch Evidently, which helps developers set feature flags and run A/B tests inside an application they are building on top of AWS. Rather than just updating an app for every user, developers may want to test it on a limited subset of users and see if the new feature breaks anything, or if users prefer a particular approach or design more.

They can limit the people who see a new feature by setting a feature flag in the code and setting up the parameters for that feature. In addition, you can do A/B testing, another form of experimentation, that lets you test features with a certain subset of users to see which feature or design people prefer.

Neither of these is new either. Companies like Split.io have been doing more broad feature flag management for some time, and companies like Optimizely have been building companies around A/B testing.

CloudWatch Evidently is already available in 9 Amazon cloud regions with pay-as-you-go pricing, while CloudWatch RUM is also available now in 10 regions at a cost of $1 per 100,000 events collected.

The director of the National Labor Relation Board’s 10th region has authorized a new union election for workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama fulfillment center. An NLRB representative has confirmed the decision with TechCrunch, which would see the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union getting a second chance to unionize workers at the site, following its defeat back in April.

The victory was a lopsided one for the mega-retailer, though the RWDSU immediately called shenanigans in what was expected to be a major test for unionizing efforts for blue collar tech workers. At the time, the union accused Amazon of “gaslighting” employees through “egregious and blatantly illegal action.”

Amazon naturally denied the accusations, stating, “It’s easy to predict the union will say that Amazon won this election because we intimidated employees, but that’s not true. Our employees heard far more anti-Amazon messages from the union, policymakers, and media outlets than they heard from us.”

RWDSU head Stuart Appelbaum said in a statement today that the new ruling serves as vindication for those earlier claims, “Today’s decision confirms what we were saying all along – that Amazon’s intimidation and interference prevented workers from having a fair say in whether they wanted a union in their workplace – and as the Regional Director has indicated, that is both unacceptable and illegal. Amazon workers deserve to have a voice at work, which can only come from a union.”

A date for a new election has yet to be determined. It will, however, no doubt become another national flashpoint for unionization efforts that have only grown in momentum during the pandemic and subsequent economic slowdowns.

“The National Labor Relations Board will conduct a second secret ballot election among the unit employees,” the board noted in its ruling. “Employees will vote whether they wish to be represented for purposes of collective bargaining by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The manner, date, time, and place of the election will be specified in a Notice of Second Election.”

Amazon expressed displeasure at today’s ruling. Spokesperson Kelly Nantel noted in a statement,

Our employees have always had the choice of whether or not to join a union, and they overwhelmingly chose not to join the RWDSU earlier this year. It’s disappointing that the NLRB has now decided that those votes shouldn’t count. As a company, we don’t think unions are the best answer for our employees. Every day we empower people to find ways to improve their jobs, and when they do that we want to make those changes—quickly. That type of continuous improvement is harder to do quickly and nimbly with unions in the middle. The benefits of direct relationships between managers and employees can’t be overstated—these relationships allow every employee’s voice to be heard, not just the voices of a select few. While we’ve made great progress in important areas like pay and safety, we know there are plenty of things that we can keep doing better, both in our fulfillment centers and in our corporate offices, and that’s our focus—to work directly with our employees to keep getting better every day.

Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen will go before Congress again this week, this time offering her unique perspective on the company’s moderation and policy failures as they relate to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the key legal shield that protects online platforms from liability for the user-created content they host.

The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology will hold the hearing, titled “Holding Big Tech Accountable: Targeted Reforms to Tech’s Legal Immunity,” this Wednesday, December 1 at 10:30 AM ET. Color of Change President Rashad Robinson and Common Sense Media CEO James Steyer will also testify on Wednesday.

The hearing is the latest Section 230-focused discussion from the House committee. In March, the chief executives of Facebook, Google and Twitter went before lawmakers to defend the measures they’ve taken to fight misinformation and disinformation — two major areas of concern that have inspired Democratic lawmakers to reexamine tech’s longstanding liability shield.

In an October Senate hearing, Haugen advocated for changes to Section 230 that would hold platforms accountable for the content that they promote algorithmically. While Haugen isn’t an expert on legislative solutions to some of social media’s current ills, given her time with Facebook’s since-dismantled civic integrity team, she’s uniquely positioned to give lawmakers insight into some of the most dangerous societal outcomes of algorithmically amplified content.

“User-generated content is something companies have less control over. But they have 100% control over their algorithms,” Haugen said. “Facebook should not get a free pass on choices it makes to prioritize growth, virality and reactiveness over public safety.”

Facebook’s former News Feed lead and current Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri is also set to testify before the Senate for the first time next week, addressing revelations in leaked documents that the company knows its business takes a toll on the mental health of some of its youngest, most vulnerable users.

In its announcement, the House Energy and Commerce committee cited four tech reform bills that Congress is currently mulling: the Justice Against Malicious Algorithms Act of 2021, the SAFE TECH Act, the Civil Rights Modernization Act of 2021 and the Protecting Americans from Dangerous Algorithms Act. The first bill, proposed by the committee holding Wednesday’s hearing, would lift Section 230’s liability protections in cases when a platform “knowingly or recklessly” recommends harmful content using algorithms.

A number of startups are experimenting with what a better social app could look like. For a startup called Alms, the answer is a social network that focuses on users’ well-being through participation in creator-led challenges in areas like personal growth, sustainability, and others with positive impacts. Instead of driving the collection “likes,” as on other social apps, Alms aims to encourage real-world engagement through its challenges and the specific steps and actions that must be taken.

The idea, explains Alms founder Alexander Nevedovsky, is to design an app that guides users to a happier and more meaningful life when they use it. That’s something modern social platforms can’t really promise to do.

Work on the project began during the early days of the pandemic in 2020, Nevedovsky says.

“A lot of us were feeling depressed and sad, at home without much access to friends and family,” he explains. “I felt like the world really needed something that’s a bit more than just meditation, journaling, or mood tracking — all those apps and techniques are great, but they’re not designed to improve your life on a day-to-day basis, interacting in the real world.”

However, the original version of Alms released last year was lacking something that would make the app “sticky.” Users would sign up because they liked the concept, but at some point would drop out and stop participating in the activities. The startup knew it needed something more to tie users to their journeys, which is why it has now shifted to become more of a social community.

Image Credits: Alms

When you first launch the newly designed Alms app, you’re taken through a brief onboarding process where you select your interests from three main topical areas: personal growth, sustainability, and impact. For example, “personal growth” interests may include things like mental health, wellness, spirituality, or relationships. “Sustainability” focuses on interests related to the environment and nature. And “impact” would wrap in things like activism, volunteering, local community, and more.

After setup is complete, you can follow creators who post challenges or choose to join individual challenges, each with their own set of steps that have to be taken in order to fully complete them. For instance, in a challenge focused on improving your work-from-home lifestyle, the steps guide users to take steps to improve their workspace and their work-life balance (by scheduling breaks and hard stops to their day, e.g.), and asks them to add physical activity to their routines, among other concrete actions.

As you participate in a challenge by completing and checking off each step, you’re prompted to post a story about that step in that challenge’s feed to inspire others, who may add an encouraging comment. But gathering likes and comments is not Alms’ goal, says Nevedovsky.

“We see tremendous possibility in allowing more and more people with expertise in these topics — personal growth, sustainability, and impact of various sorts — to basically try to scale their impact with us,” he notes. “We allow them to put all their knowledge or their content in a scalable way so that people can actually — not like it, not comment under it — but actually try to repeat it.”

At launch, Alms has around 30 creators sharing their content in the form of challenges on its app, and 15 more are in the pipeline. It hopes to reach a couple of hundred over the next few months. So far, the new version of the app has attracted a couple of thousand users, as well.

Image Credits: Alms

Many of the challenges on the app have been joined by hundreds of users, so you do feel some sense of participating in a larger event when you click to join. However, I’d personally prefer that posting a story and sharing it to the feed was optional — not every step deserves its own post, I feel. (And sometimes, you may not have anything to say about the minor steps you completed and end up feeling like you’ve cluttered the feed with less-than-helpful posts.)

Alms was co-founded with startup studio Palta, a home to apps like Flo.Health, Simple Fasting, and Zing Fitness Coach. Palta owns a majority stake in Alms, and the company has no other outside investment. A remotely distributed team of fourteen works on the Alms app, which isn’t currently monetized.

Nevedovsky says the team is considering adding some sort of token-based economy or perhaps a DAO which would convey some sort of real-world rewards. This could include being able to participate in Alms’ governance or joining a creator fund, for example. The tokens, at least in the near term, would not be tradeable. The company may also consider simpler ideas, like in-app tipping. But nothing has yet been determined as Alms is still working on product-market fit at this time, and scaling its userbase.

Overall, Alms seems like it could appeal to those who want to be more mindful and impactful about how they’re spending their time on social apps, but who are in search of inspiration that comes with more specific direction.

“I think, a lot of the time, people place hopes on what will happen in the future without actually influencing it. So I think that having an app that helps you with ideas and inspiration from people who know what they share, what they recommend, is super helpful — especially when it’s all about support,” notes Nevedovsky. “People [on Alms] actually care.”

The app, we found, is well-built and attractively designed. But it could still face the original issue of having users drop off, despite its new social components, given the competition for screen time on today’s mobile devices.

Alms is a free download on iOS only for the time being.

Yassir, an Algerian startup that provides on-demand services such as ride-hailing and last-mile delivery, has raised a $30 million Series A round.

The investment came from a long list of VCs and angel investors. VCs include WndrCo, DN Capital, Kismet Capital, Spike Ventures, Quiet Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, FJ Labs, VentureSouq, Nellore Capital and Moving Capital. The angel investors include Cleo Sham of Uber; Thomas Layton of Upwork, Opentable and Metaweb; Rohan Monga of Gojek; and Hannes Graah of Spotify and Revolut.

The company said in a statement that most of the investors from its $13.25 million seed round, which was previously undisclosed, participated as well.  

After earning a Ph.D. at Stanford and spending most of his professional life in Silicon Valley working at various companies, CEO Noureddine Tayebi returned to Algeria to get involved in the country’s nascent tech scene to start a company and build technical talent in the Maghreb region (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia).

Most people in French-speaking Africa are unbanked due to a lack of trust in incumbents and inefficient banking solutions. Tayebi felt that providing on-demand services — which solves essential needs and, more importantly, builds trust to then provide payment services — was the catalyst to enable financial inclusion in the region.

He founded Yassir with Mahdi Yettou in 2017. The company started with ride-hailing services because the cities it targeted had dense populations and inefficient transportation services. Yassir progressed to offer last-mile delivery services, creating a multi-sided marketplace that brings drivers, couriers, merchants, suppliers and wholesalers to individual users on one platform.

Yassir CEO Noureddine Tayebi. Image Credits: Yassir

According to Tayebi, the plan is to use the marketplace model to offer payment services to all parties involved and create a super app in the process.

“Our approach of solving the unbanked population problem is unique in the region by offering more of a ‘banking as a platform’ solution where daily services are at the heart of it all via a super-app marketplace,” he told TechCrunch.

“Such services not only build trust for all the sides of the marketplace but also use them as channels to offer these payment services, which we think is the approach that is most suited to the region. Most of our competitors are either on-demand services — ride-hailing or last-mile delivery only — or pure payment solutions. This gives us an edge over them as we build the network, the channels and the trust that are all key ingredients for the adoption of payment services at large scale.”

Yassir has seen exponential growth since launching four years ago. Last year, it was part of Y Combinator’s winter batch as the first Algerian startup in the accelerator. In terms of traction, over 3 million people and 40,000 partners in all its markets now use the platform. Tayebi said that Yassir generates revenues by taking a commission on the services it offers.  

This round of funding makes Yassir the most funded startup in Algeria and one of the most funded in the Maghreb and MENA region. Tayebi isn’t coy about saying his company aims for regional dominance in its category. Yassir also plans to gain market share outside the region into other markets, primarily sub-Saharan Africa and other “strategic geographies.”

The company will use the investment to achieve that as well as consolidate growth in its existing markets by launching new products and improving existing ones.

Yassir also plans to triple the size of its engineering team, a department the company is also particular about building locally.

“We are [a] 100% local champion, including tech talent, as we want to empower the tech talent in the region and hire them in each country we operate in. We want a success model that is fully from the region,” Tayebi said.

“Yassir is a natural evolution of companies seen elsewhere in the world,” WndrCo partner Anthony Saleh said in a statement. “The moment we met the team, we saw the opportunity of entering an enormous market with a service taking the best of models we have seen elsewhere. We’re thrilled to be part of this supercharged journey.”

Carolyn Mooney wants you to make your decision-making process code. She is the co-founder and CEO of Nextmv which helps companies make efficient decisions on a mass scale—think Amazon delivering packages or Uber plotting a route for an uber pool. In this week’s episode, she talks with Darrell and Jordan about Nextmv’s software that doesn’t just optimize decision making and route planning but also enables engineers to work on many different types of teams. Plus she talks about how coaching high school volleyball has made her a better leader and forced her to prioritize a work-life balance.

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Well, so much for a relaxed post-holiday week on Monday.

News broke this morning that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping down from the company entirely. The company’s CTO, Parag Agrawal, will be taking over at the helm. Saleforce exec Bret Taylor will take over as board chairman.

So, Amanda and Natasha and Alex jumped into onto the mics — and, ironically, a Twitter space — to riff on all things Jack and future of Twitter. From the show:

• Crypto and the CTO, what can we read from the tea leaves?
• Jack’s dual role, and its detractors.
• The fact that Twitter’s product work has been great lately, which we don’t want to stop. When is a good time to leave a company, is it on the up and up or when things are quiet?
• And, finally, Jack’s somewhat biting words regarding founder-led companies, which are, frankly, a bit at odds with his own behavior until now.

The show is back on Wednesday, unless some other major CEO resigns.

In 2019, AWS launched Braket, its quantum computing service that makes hardware and software tools from its partners Rigetti, IonQ and D-Wave available in its cloud. Given how quickly quantum computing is moving ahead, it’s maybe no surprise that a lot has changed since then. Among other things, hybrid algorithms that use classical computers to optimize quantum algorithms — a process similar to training machine learning models — have become a standard tool for developers. Today, AWS announced improved support for running these hybrid algorithms on Braket.

Previously, to run these algorithms, developers would have to set up and manage the infrastructure to run the optimization algorithms on classical machines and then manage the integration with the quantum computing hardware, in addition to the monitoring and visualization tools for analyzing the results.

Image Credits: AWS

But that’s not all. “Another big challenge is that [Quantum Processing Units] are shared, inelastic resources, and you compete with others for access,” AWS’s Danilo Poccia explains in today’s announcement. “This can slow down the execution of your algorithm. A single large workload from another customer can bring the algorithm to a halt, potentially extending your total runtime for hours. This is not only inconvenient but also impacts the quality of the results because today’s QPUs need periodic re-calibration, which can invalidate the progress of a hybrid algorithm. In the worst case, the algorithm fails, wasting budget and time.”

With the new Amazon Braket Hybrid Jobs feature, developers get a fully managed service that handles the hardware and software interactions between the classical and quantum machines — and developers will get priority access to quantum processing units to provide them with more predictability. Braket will automatically spin up the necessary resources (and shut them down once a job is completed). Developers can set custom metrics for their algorithms and, using Amazon CloudWatch, they can visualize the results in near real time.

“As application developers, Braket Hybrid Jobs gives us the opportunity to explore the potential of hybrid variational algorithms with our customers,” said Vic Putz, head of engineering at QCWare. “We are excited to extend our integration with Amazon Braket and the ability to run our own proprietary algorithms libraries in custom containers means we can innovate quickly in a secure environment. The operational maturity of Amazon Braket and the convenience of priority access to different types of quantum hardware means we can build this new capability into our stack with confidence.”

The space economy is booming and for the first time ever, there’s a fair amount of exit event activity. That should have later stage investors who focus on the area excited, and we’ll be able to ask them about it directly at our virtual TechCrunch Sessions: Space event on December 14-15.

Joining us for a panel focused on later stage investing in space tech, we’ll have Tess Hatch, partner at Bessemer Ventures, Sequoia’s Shaun Maguire and Lisa Rich of Xplore all on our stage at the event. We’ll look at the significant changes in the growth investment industry when it comes to space startups that have taken place this past year, and what it means to have a lot more companies actually shipping product and growing their customer base rather than being focused more on the research and development of groundbreaking tech.

Hatch, who herself has experience at both Boeing and SpaceX in addition to her investment experience, also stays close to the pulse of the industry (in addition to her investment work) by co-teaching a Stanford course on helping researchers commercialize their academic work.

Maguire’s focus as partner at Sequoia is on frontier tech, as well as fintech and enterprise (there’s a lot more crossover than you might expect!). His track record includes leading Sequoia’s investment in SpaceX, and he also led GV’s investment in Spinlaunch when he was a partner there prior to joining Sequoia in 2019.

Rich is herself an entrepreneur and founder, and has an extensive history of investing in both early stage and growth stage space companies, including Axiom Space, Made in Space, PlanetIQ and more. Rich’s own company, Xplore, also offers ‘space-as-a-service’ to customers, providing everything needed to host and operate a payload.

TC Sessions: Space 2021 takes place on December 14-15. Celebrate Cyber Monday and buy your 2-for-1 pass before November 29 at 11:59 pm (PT).

Is your company interested in speaking at TC Sessions: Space 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.