AI Company Beyond Limits Raises $133M Series C

Artificial intelligence company Beyond Limits has landed $133 million in its Series C round. 

The round was led by new investor Group 42 and existing investor BP Ventures. 

Beyond Limits is focused on industrial AI, more specifically energy, utility and power. The Series C round will help it expand globally in those sectors.

In an interview with Crunchbase News CEO AJ Abdallat said, “We are focused on customers globally in these sectors so that’s why we expanded into Asia and that’s why we’re expanding into the Middle East region and Africa….We’re going after big global brands. These are global players, these are not just players in the U.S., so we’re excited.” 

The company, which is based in the Los Angeles area, is planning on launching operations in Asia and expanding in the Middle East and Africa. Beyond Limits Asia will have its headquarters in Singapore with offices in Taipei, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

It will also be expanding in North America and Europe and invest in its product portfolio, focusing on repeatable software-as-a-service products, Abdallat said.

The company last raised a $20 million Series B led by BP Ventures in June 2017. The latest round brings Beyond Limit’s total funding to more than $158 million. With the Series C round, Abdallat said going with Group 42 as the lead investor was a good strategy for the company as it goes after the industrial space.

“I always was a big fan of strategic investors and this was very evident in our B round,” Abdallat said. “BP helped us understand products and the energy sector.”

Even with the COVID-19 pandemic, the company hasn’t changed its forecast for 2020 on the booking side, Abdallat said. The company is expecting more than $50 million in booking business in 2020 and expects to double that figure in 2021, owing to its global expansion. 

 Source. TechCrunch, Sophia Kunthara, September 22, 2020  

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London-based fintech Chip raises £7.3 million through angel and crowdfunding

Chip, the London-based fintech that created an automatic savings account, has raised £7.3 million, with £3.8 million crowdfunded by customers and the remainder from unnamed angel investors. The campaign ran for three weeks in September and is currently Crowdcube’s most participated-in crowdfund, with 7,182 investors.

The startup provides a free app “to make saving as easy as spending.” The AI-driven system calculates how much a user could save, gives the option to decline it, and then automatically transfers the amount to user’s Chip account. Chip has saved over £85 million for its users to date.

CEO Simon Rabin commented: “The most powerful way for Chip to grow is to have thousands of investors advocating for the product they believe in. It’s amazing to have this many Chip savers as investors in the company. We’ve proven there’s a big demand for Chip, and we’re ready to scale – we’re going to use our investment to grow and deliver a product that will fill a huge gap in the market. Many of the other big names in fintech are focussed on making spending easier. Monzo have the current account, Curve are disrupting credit cards, Revolut have the travel card, but Chip… Chip is for saving.”

The fintech will use the funds to increase the app’s capacity for large volumes of users, refining the infrastructure and expanding the team. THe plan is also to expand the product to offer access to FSCS protected accounts and deliver an in-app marketplace for returns products.

Already the company has made a number of senior hires, all fintech veterans: David Kavanagh (CTO), former CTO of Purplebricks; Sharon Miles (COO), former innovation director of B2B fintech unicorn Deposit Solutions, as well as Barclays and LeasePlan; Gerard Hurley (CCO), former compliance lead at Funding Circle and an ex-FCA regulator; Gary Dolman (Board Advisor), co-founder and recently retired CFO of Monzo.

New CTO David Kavanagh said: “The savings market is archaic, broken and ineffective. People want more from their savings accounts, so they are voting with their capital. Chip has raised VC-levels of funding from its users and supporters, demonstrating that what customers want is a market-changing product that is easy to use, helps them save, and offers the best possible rates in the market. It’s an incredibly exciting time for the company and I’m delighted to have joined it as such a pivotal stage. I look forward to working with the team at Chip to help set a new standard for savings apps.”

Source. Tech.Eu,. Annie Musgrove, November 6, 2019

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GM Cruise raises $1.15B at a $19B valuation from SoftBank and Honda

By Kirsten Korosec

GM Cruise has raised another $1.15 billion in new equity from a group of investors that includes T. Rowe Price Associates, Honda, SoftBank Vision Fund and its parent company GM, as the self-driving vehicle company pushes to launch a commercial autonomous ride-hailing service this year.

This investment increases Cruise’s post-money valuation to $19 billion, inclusive of SoftBank’s previously announced investment commitment. Cruise has secured capital commitments totaling $7.25 billion in the past year, according to the company.

“Developing and deploying self-driving vehicles at massive scale is the engineering challenge of our generation,” said Cruise CEO Dan Ammann . “Having deep resources to draw on as we pursue our mission is a critical competitive advantage.”

GM Cruise has one of the most aggressive timelines among companies hoping to deploy a commercial self-driving vehicle service. GM’s self-driving unit has stuck to its previously stated timeline to launch a commercial service “sometime in 2019.”

Cruise has grown from a small startup with 40 employees to more than 1,000 today at its San Francisco headquarters.

And Cruise isn’t curtailing that rate of growth; it’s accelerating it.

Cruise announced in November plans to expand to Seattle, in pursuit of more engineering talent to develop its technology. GM Cruise aimed to hire between 100 to 200 engineers by the end of 2019. The company, now led by Ammann, who left his post as president of GM to take the job, plans to hire at least 1,000 more engineers and other personnel by the end of the year. (Kyle Vogt, a Cruise co-founder who was CEO and also unofficially handled the chief technology officer position, is now president and CTO.)

Arden Hoffman, who helped scale Dropbox, left the file-sharing and storage company to head up human resources at Cruise and help the company scale quickly.

The GM subsidiary is expanding its office space in San Francisco to accommodate the growth. GM Cruise will keep its headquarters at 1201 Bryant Street in San Francisco. The company also will take over Dropbox headquarters at 333 Brannan Street some time this year, a move that will triple Cruise’s office space in San Francisco.

GM Cruise received a $2.25 billion investment by SoftBank’s vision fund in May 2018. That first SoftBank investment was cut into two parts, with the first tranche of $900 million made at the closing of the transaction. Once Cruise’s autonomous vehicles are ready for commercial deployment, SoftBank will complete the second investment of $1.35 billion, the companies said at the time.

A few months later, Honda committed $2.75 billion as part of an exclusive agreement with GM and Cruise to develop and produce a new kind of autonomous vehicle.

As part of that agreement, Honda will invest $2 billion into the effort over the next 12 years. At the time, Honda made an immediate and direct equity investment of $750 million into Cruise. Honda’s investment gives the automaker a 5.7% stake in Cruise.

Source. TechCrunch, Kirsten Korosec, May 6, 2019

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Onfido, which verifies IDs using AI, nabs $50M from SoftBank, Salesforce, Microsoft and more

By Ingrid Lunden

Security breaches, where malicious hackers obtain snippets of information that then get used to impersonate individuals in order to gain access to individuals’ and businesses’ sensitive financial and other private information, have become par for the course in the world of digital services. More than 2.7 billion records were  breached in a single incident this year in the US, and overall the damage from incidents like these potentially runs into the trillions of dollars globally.

Today, a startup called Onfido, which uses AI techniques combined with human verifiers to efficiently verify people are who they say they are when using digital services — is today announcing $50 million in funding to help address that ongoing — and growing — problem.

The funding comes on the heels of some very strong growth for the startup, which was founded in London but now operates most of its business out of San Francisco. In an interview, co-founder and CEO Husayn Kassai said that more than half of its customers, and most of its new growth, is coming out of the US.

Onfido uses computer vision and a number of other AI-based technologies to verify against some 4,500 different types of identity documents, using techniques like “facial liveness testing,” to see patterns invisible to the human eye, now has 1,500 businesses as customers, primarily in categories like marketplaces and communities, gaming and financial services, including companies like Remitly, Zipcar and Europcar; and in the last year, it had sales growth of 342 percent. Kassai said that it has to date verified “tens of millions” of IDs.

The money — a Series C2, technically — is coming from a group that includes top strategic tech investors. The round is being co-led by SoftBank Investment (SBI)and Salesforce Ventures, with M12 (the new name for Microsoft Ventures), FinVC and other unnamed new and previous investors are also participating. That’s a signal not just of how the biggest companies in that sector today are grappling with this problem, but also what approach they are using to solve it.

For SoftBank, the investment is separate from the Vision fund, founder and CEO Husayn Kassai noted, but it’s notable that a lot of the businesses that have been backed out of that fund — companies like Didi, Uber, Oyo, Lemonade, and others — fundamentally rely on people trusting that they are handling personal details securely while also carefully vetting suppliers on the platform (meaning, they need and use services like Onfido’s).

Meanwhile, both Microsoft and Salesforce have extensive enterprise businesses that could see multiple benefits from working with an identity verification provider, not just for their own purposes, but as a service that is sold on to its customers as part of a larger identity management and security offering.

The company is not revealing its valuation but has raised around $100 million to date and Kassai confirmed that it was an upround, with “a lot of happy investors.”

“We have strong metrics, and we have a long way to go in our growth,” he added.

There are a lot of companies today offering services to help offer secure services to authenticate users, for example, to help them log on to their work accounts or to access their online banking services. Onfido’s business focuses on the first step in all of this — customer onboarding — specifically around services geared towards consumers.

The opportunity that has opened up for it has been the result of more than just a rise in breaches. There’s also been a growing realization that a lot of the existing services that had been used for verification are simply not fit for purpose: either they too have been breached — as in the case of some of the bigger credit agencies like Equifax — or are not realistically efficient enough for how many online services run today, such as in the case of in-person verifications. (Onfido claims that its system can make a verification in as little as 15 seconds.)

Or, they are part of the new guard that has shifted its approach to the business of ID verificiation, either by choice or force. One would-be competitor from the past, Checkr, is now a partner of Onfido’s, Kassai noted. Others like Jumio — which is still grappling with the fallout from major illegal missteps from previous management — seem to still be trying to find their feet as standalone businesses.

“Fraud is rising and not going anywhere,” Kassai — who co-founded the company with Ruhul Amin and Eamon Jubbawy — said. “And the problem is that there are a dozen other companies that have not done a good enough job to detect it so far.” While no service is perfect — Onfido says that its “risk exposure” is 0.0195 percent — he says that the advantage of building its service on top of AI means that the algorithms use every experience to continue honing its accuracy. “What we learn from one client gets applied everywhere,” he notes.

“There has never been a more important time for companies to build trust with their customers by showing they are one step ahead of fraudsters,” said Frank van Veenendaal, the ex-vice chairman of Salesforce, who is joining the board with this round. “I believe Onfido has the unique opportunity to transform the digital identity market and deliver robust and scalable authentication-as-a-service, similar to how Salesforce transformed customer relationship management.”

Source. Techcrunch, Ingrid Lunden, April 2, 2019

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SoftBank's next bet: $940M into autonomous delivery Nuro

By Kirsten Korosec

Nuro the autonomous delivery startup, has raised $940 million in financing from the SoftBank Vision Fund, a whopping amount that will be used to expand its delivery service, add new partners, hire employees and scale up its fleet of self-driving bots.

Nuro has raised more than $1 billion from partners, including SoftBank, Greylock Partners  and Gaorong Capital.

“We’ve spent the last two and a half years building an amazing team, launching our first unmanned service, working with incredible partners and creating technology to fundamentally improve our daily lives,” Nuro co-founder Dave Ferguson said in a statement. “This partnership gives us the opportunity to take the next step in realizing our vision for local commerce and the broad application of our technology.”

Nuro’s focus has been developing a self-driving stack and combining it with a custom unmanned vehicle designed for last-mile delivery of local goods and services. The vehicle has two compartments that can fit up to six grocery bags each.

“Nuro’s world-class team has successfully scaled their self-driving technology out of the lab and into the streets,” Michael Ronen, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers said in a statement. “In just two years Dave, Jiajun and team have developed Nuro from a concept into a real business using robotics to connect retailers to customers.”

The company partnered in 2018 with Kroger  to pilot a delivery service in Arizona. The pilot, which initially used Toyota Prius vehicles, transitioned in December to the delivery bot. The autonomous vehicle called R1, is operating as a driverless service without a safety driver on board in the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale.

The autonomous delivery service might get all the attention. But Nuro’s decision to license its self-driving vehicle technology to Ike, an autonomous trucking startup, is just as notable.

Ike now has a copy of Nuro’s stack, which is worth billions, based on this latest round. Nuro also has a minority stake in Ike.

Ike, which announced its own $52 million funding round last week, doesn’t have an ongoing technical connection with Nuro. Ike co-founder and CEO Alden Woodrow has explained to TechCrunch before that this copy was a “hard fork.”

This licensing deal shows that Nuro’s leadership team has an appetite for diversifying the business.

Source. Tech Crunch, Kirsten Korosec, February 11, 2019