Startup inks $65M deal to help Air Force make ‘sustainable’ jet fuel on bases

Air Company, a startup that turns carbon dioxide into things like perfume, vodka, hand sanitizer and aviation fuel, is now on the U.S. Defense Department’s payroll, so to speak.

The JetBlue and Toyota-backed company struck an up-to $65 million deal to help the Air Force capture CO2 and turn it into “sustainable” aviation fuel on base.

Air Company said the carbon will initially come from industrial facilities — which is how the startup currently makes fuel at its “pilot plant” in Brooklyn, New York. But the startup also has its hands in direct air capture, which is “part of the technology that Air Company would be building out on site,” a spokesperson for the firm said.

The goal is not for Air Company to supply fuel but to provide the Air Force with tech to make the fuel itself. The company called this “harm reduction” to “avoid fuel transportation as a target for explosives.”

“The contract is tiered out over the next several years,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch, and Air Company aims to work with the Air Force to produce “tens of hundreds of gallons,” and later “tens of thousands of gallons,” of jet fuel.

The Department of Defense is both a notorious carbon polluter and cagey about how much fuel it burns. Researchers at England’s Lancaster University estimate that the DoD emits “more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries.” The same researchers argue that “action on climate change demands shuttering vast sections of the military machine.”

Sustainable aviation fuel can come from lots of things; feedstocks can include household waste, a variety of crops and used cooking oil. The source of the fuel, as well as how it’s produced and transported, determines whether it’s actually as sustainable as the name suggests.

Asked about its environmental impact, Air Company told TechCrunch that it exclusively uses renewable electricity to produce its fuel today, which it called “completely carbon neutral when burned.”

Startup inks $65M deal to help Air Force make ‘sustainable’ jet fuel on bases by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch

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Mozilla leads Mastodon app Mammoth’s pre-seed funding

Mammoth, a recently launched Mastodon app that’s trying to make it easier on users who want to join the decentralized social web, has a notable financial backer. The company confirmed that its leading pre-seed investor is Mozilla, a proponent of the open web, who invested in the company’s first general round alongside others, including Long Journey Ventures and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff.

The company has a unique founding story as well. The app was originally built by iOS developer Shihab Mehboob, the creator behind a number of apps including the whimsical music app Vinyls and the Twitter client Aviary 2. The latter was impacted by Elon Musk’s Twitter API changes which put an end to third-party Twitter clients, prompting Mehboob to turn his attention to the decentralized and open source Twitter alternative Mastodon.

Mammoth was the result of those efforts, but it has since been acquired by the company that’s now running the project, led by principal developer Bart Decrem.

Now, the team at Mammoth is just three full-time employees and a handful of contractors. And while the total investment round is undisclosed, Decrem characterized the pre-seed as a small amount — “a million or two is the general round” at this stage, he says.

Mammoth is a free Mastodon app for iOS that makes it easier to get started

The new Mammoth founder’s background is both in open source and consumer apps, in addition to entrepreneurship.

In ’99, Decrem worked on a Linux startup called Eazel which aimed to make Linux easier to use. While others on that project later ended up building Safari and other technology at Apple, Decrem found himself at the Mozilla Foundation ahead of the Firefox 1.0 launch. There, he ran marketing and business affairs and worked on branding and the international launch. He was also a part of the search monetization discussions, including the initial Google search deal.

He later went on to more entrepreneurial efforts including the VC-backed social web browser Flock (which received its fair share of TechCrunch coverage back in the day), followed by an early smartphone game maker Tapulous, makers of Tap Tap Revenge. The latter landed him at Disney following an acquisition, as the head of the mobile games group, which put out products like the “Where’s My Water” series and some “Temple Run” titles.

Some of these prior efforts had also involved the same approach of finding and partnering with existing developers, Decrem notes, including the original Tap Tap Revenge developer. Later at Disney, he found a developer in QA who had built a No. 1 game on the App Store, but not under Disney’s branding. Decrem brought the developer into his group and gave him the space to create what became “Where’s My Water?,” a title that’s seen a billion-some downloads by now.

“The way I like to do things is you find somebody special and then get out the way and support their vision,” Decrem explains. “I saw that spark in [Mammoth founder] Shihab [Mehboob], and that’s why we’re working together.”

The two were teamed up as Decrem was running a small lab that had been working on decentralization projects, including a crypto app called KyrptoSign, for legal documents on the blockchain, as well as an art collective. But when Mastodon came along, the team pivoted, acquired Mammoth and now it’s the group’s only focus.

Image Credits: Mammoth

For Decrem, the appeal of Mastodon was not just that it’s an open source Twitter clone — something he said only felt “mildly interesting” — but how it was a place where communities were forming.

“It reminded me of Firefox 0.7, which is what I got involved in Mozilla — the Firefox launch,” Decrem says. “I was like, there’s just people nerding out here, doing cool shit…that feels exciting and interesting and everything I like about the internet — communities building and organizing themselves.”

“This thing is half microblogging, but half people organizing communities — like Reddit, or maybe like Discord,” he continues. “This is like a digitally native social system. And it’s decentralized. That’s freaking cool.”

Other companies seem to think it’s cool too. Today, Flipboard announced it was joining the decentralized social web. Medium already has, and Tumblr said it would.

The challenge, of course, for Mammoth, will be not just making the decentralized social web more appealing to more newcomers but also successfully maintaining and generating revenue from the app itself. Decrem says the company plans to have a subscription plan available in a few months that will range from $3-5 per month, at least half of which will likely go toward its server bills.

But revenue is not the immediate focus — growing its user base comes first. As for now, Mammoth has at least a year’s worth of funding thanks to Mozilla’s backing, Decrem says. And they’re willing to be patient, he notes.

Mozilla leads Mastodon app Mammoth’s pre-seed funding by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

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Dish confirms ransomware attack allowed hackers to steal personal data

U.S. satellite television provider Dish confirmed that a ransomware is to blame for an ongoing outage and warned that intruders exfiltrated data from its systems.

The multiday outage, which began last Thursday and was confirmed by Dish on Monday, is affecting Dish’s main website, apps, and customer support systems, along with the company’s Sling TV streaming and wireless services.

Now, in a public filing published Tuesday, first spotted by Bleeping Computer, Dish said it had “determined that the outage was due to a cyber-security incident and notified appropriate law enforcement authorities.” Dish initially blamed the outage on “internal systems issues.”

The company goes on to say that the filing relates to expectations “regarding its ability to contain, assess and remediate the ransomware attack and the impact of the ransomware attack on the corporation’s employees, customers, business, operations or financial results.”

Dish said in the filing that the attackers extracted “certain data” from its IT systems, noting that this data may include personal information. It’s unclear whether this personal information belongs to Dish employees, customers, or both, and the scale of the data theft remains unclear. Dish has about 10 million customers across its streaming, satellite TV, and other services.

Dish spokesperson Edward Wietecha did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s questions.

The organization claims that while its “assessment of the impact of this incident is ongoing,” its Dish, Sling, and wireless and data networks “remain operational.” That said, TechCrunch has heard from multiple Dish customers that they have had no television service since last Thursday. Dish Network’s website is also still affected.

Dish also said Tuesday in its filing that its internal communications, customer call centers, and internal sites remain offline as a result of the incident. Employees have reported that they have been told not to log into Dish-issued devices or corporate VPNs, effectively preventing them from working.

One employee tells TechCrunch that staff are being kept in the dark about the incident and haven’t been told when they will be able to return to work.

It’s unknown who is behind the breach, and the attack has not yet been claimed by any major ransomware group. However, Bleeping Computer reports, citing sources, that the Black Basta ransomware gang is behind the attack, first breaching Boost Mobile and then the Dish corporate network.

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Do you work at Dish? Do you have more information about the Dish cyberattack? You can contact Carly Page securely on Signal at +441536 853968, or by email. You can also contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.

Dish hit by multiday outage after reported cyberattack

Dish confirms ransomware attack allowed hackers to steal personal data by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

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Tesla’s next factory will be in Mexico, president confirms

Tesla plans to build a new factory in Monterrey, Mexico, the country’s president said Tuesday confirming speculation that the automaker would set up shop there.

Notably, Tesla has agreed to use recycled water, addressing a major environmental concern in northern Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said.

Tesla will share more information about the new factory during its investor day event scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, said López Obrador who is also known as ALMO.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is expected present the long-awaited and often teased Master Plan 3 during the company’s investor day that will be held at the company’s Gigafactory Texas located near Austin. Investors will be able to see its production line and discuss with its leadership team topics like the company’s long-term expansion plans, generation 3 platform and capital allocation, according to the company.

Tesla has several factories in the United States, including in Fremont, California, where vehicles are assembled, a plant near Sparks, Nevada which is a joint project with Panasonic and its headquarters in Austin, Texas. Tesla also has factories near Berlin and Shanghai.

Mexico, particularly states near the U.S. border, has been a hotspot for automotive manufacturing for decades. U.S. automakers Ford, GM, German automaker Volkswagen and Japanese companies Honda, Nissan and Toyota have vehicle assembly plants in Mexico. GM, Kia and Stellantis have factories in Monterrey. Several automotive suppliers, including Continental and Faurecia have plants there, making Mexico critical to the industry’s supply chain network.

Tesla’s next factory will be in Mexico, president confirms by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

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Putting the Boston in Boston Dynamics

When you name your company Boston Dynamics, certain geographical constraints are inserted into the operation. While the Spot-maker is, by many accounts, a global brand, it’s one that remains deeply tied to Massachusetts, even as it’s changed hands between owners in California, Japan and, most recently, South Korea.

Headquarter a dozen miles outside of downtown Boston in Waltham, Massachusetts, the robotics firm’s roots are firmly planted in Beantown.

“I grew up in New Jersey, but my mother grew up here so I had a connection to Boston from a very early age,” founder and chairman Marc Raibert said in an interview at TechCrunch City Spotlight event. “I love Boston. I went to school here, left for 10 years, and eventually was faculty at MIT. I was a professor there for 10 years before starting Boston Dynamics. When we started, it was halftime Boston Dynamics, halftime MIT.”

It’s a connection that company has only further leaned into in recent years, perhaps most notably in the form of a 2022 local Superbowl ad that found Sam Adams’ Boston Cousin character partying at Boston Dynamics HQ with assorted robots.

Raibert, who currently runs the somewhat loosely affiliated Hyundai-funded Boston Dynamics AI Institute in Cambridge’s Kendall Square, notes that he left town for about a decade before the company’s founding. He spent that time working at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“It was fledgling, but they had a mockup of a Mars rover this back in the 70s,” he says of his time at JPL. “It looked like a car, and it had the old Stanford arms that had a sliding joint. It had some cameras, and there were a couple of different groups working on it.”

Raibert isn’t alone in that exodus, of course. Brain drain has been a long-standing concern for university cities like Boston, with many startup founders and other talent opting to leave for places like the Silicon Valley and New York. In spite of the lure, however, he explains that the phenomenon hasn’t been a major issue for Boston Dynamics, when it comes to recruiting.

“I don’t think we’ve lost too many people to the West Coast,” says Raibert. “Sometimes that happens. When we were part of Google, there was a group of us from Boston Dynamics who moved out to the West Coast, and I think most of those people stayed. When we got out of Google, they didn’t come back with us. But Boston has its own charms and attraction, and there’s lots of tech here. Lots of schools doing good stuff.”

Announced in August of last year, the AI Institute gets back to Raibert and Boston Dynamics’ research roots. It’s a move away from the company’s shift toward productization in recent years, which have found it bringing products like Spot and Handle to market. While Hyundai is currently the institute’s only stockholder, Raibert says there’s currently no push to productize its research for either the carmaker or its namesake robotics firm.

“You never know until later what the staying power is,” he explains, pragmatically. “Right now, my pitch is to avoid products, because products force you into quarterly and annual work. Products force you into all in the various needs of all the various customers. They have a lot of good information, but they also take you in lots of directions. If you want to do the vision of what’s going to come next, it has to come from the technical people who are developing it. I proudly say we’re not doing products. No one’s trying to steer me at the at the moment.”

There are plenty of options for the Institute’s future patents and other IP, including the possibility of developing its spinout startups.

“We have a multi-prong plan,” he adds. “We can do spinouts. For some, spinouts are seen as a way to commercialize. For me, it’s a way to protect the institute from products.”

Putting the Boston in Boston Dynamics by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

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Xiaomi unveils lightweight AR glasses with ‘retina-level’ display

While the chatter around the metaverse has slowed down, both social media companies and phone manufacturers have been experimenting with tech that could lead to commercial AR glasses. At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Xiaomi unveiled its new prototype Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition, which weighs 126 grams and has a “retina-level” display.

Xiaomi has used a pair of MicroLED screens with a peak brightness of 1,200 nits and free-form light-guiding prisms to recreate an image. The company said that when PPD (pixels per degree) reaches 60, humans can’t perceive individual pixels. The Xiaomi AR glass display boasts 58 PPD, so that’s close enough.

Xiaomi said it is using electrochromic lenses to adjust viewing in different light conditions. The glasses also have a complete blackout mode for a fully immersive experience — kind of making it like a VR headset.

The new AR glasses connect wirelessly to your phone, which should be a Xiaomi 13 series phone or any other Snapdragon Spaces-ready phone like the OnePlus 11. The device is using Xiaomi’s own communication link to achieve full link latency as low as 50ms.

Boasting a retina-level near-eye display for AR glasses, Xiaomi Wireless AR Glass Discovery Edition delivers a truly immersive visual experience. Moreover, our self-developed Xiaomi AR Gesture Control empowers effortless control between virtual and real space. pic.twitter.com/EipqBWxkpW

— Lei Jun (@leijun) February 27, 2023

Xiaomi’s latest AR device uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR 2 Gen 1 platform with support for the Snapdragon Spaces XR development platform to run different applications. Notably, the Meta Quest Pro announced last year also uses the same chip.

The company said that using the Mi Share’s application streaming capability, the AR glasses can let viewers watch content through apps like TikTok and YouTube. Users can rely on gestures to move around the interface and even interact with real-life objects. For instance, the device lets you turn on or turn off a smart lamp or “grab” a screencast from the TV to the glasses using gestures.

While all these features sound great on paper, it’s still a prototype. So it’s hard to tell how well the glasses fare in the real-world scenario.

Smartphone companies are still continuing to show off AR glasses in different shapes and forms, even if they are not available to all users. Xiaomi’s domestic rival Oppo is also showcasing its Air Glasses 2 — which were launched in China last year — at MWC. Naturally, all eyes are on Apple, which could reportedly unveil its mixed reality headset at the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June.

Xiaomi launched a bunch of devices at the event including the new the Xiaomi 13 Pro with a 1-inch camera sensor along with the 13 and the 13 lite. Plus, it announced the new Xiaomi Buds 4 Pro, Xiaomi Watch S1 Pro, and Xiaomi Electric Scooter 4.

Xiaomi unveils lightweight AR glasses with ‘retina-level’ display by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

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Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi are bringing satellite communication to their devices through Qualcomm

Qualcomm announced at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) that multiple phone makers including Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Motorola, Nothing and Honor are bringing satellite communication capabilities to their phones. However, manufacturers didn’t provide details about what devices will first have these features and when the companies would launch them.

Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon Satellite tech in partnership with satellite service provider Iridium at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last month. Using this solution, smartphones can have capabilities of two-way texting and other messaging applications using satellites in emergency situations.

The chipmaker said that Snapdragon Satellite will be available across upcoming RF modems and multiple models of 8 and 4 series processors for smartphones.

“By incorporating Snapdragon Satellite into next–generation devices, our partners will be able to offer satellite messaging capabilities thanks to a mature and commercially available global LEO constellation, which can allow subscribers around the world to communicate outdoors with emergency service providers, as well as family and friends,” Qualcomm vice president for product management, Francesco Grilli said in a statement.

Last year, Apple introduced satellite-based emergency communication features with the iPhone 14 series — first in the US and Canada, and later in France, Germany, Ireland, and the UK through Globestar’s satellite network. Last week, Samsung announced its own satellite tech as well with a promise to embed it in a future smartphone.

What’s more, British smartphone maker Bullitt — which also announced its own satellite tech at CES — announced a rugged smartphone with satellite connectivity a few days ahead of MWC. Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek is also set to showcase its satellite connectivity solution for smartphones at the event. This sets the groundwor6 for upcoming smartphones to have emergency satellite communication features for remote areas where network connectivity is not reliable.

Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi are bringing satellite communication to their devices through Qualcomm by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

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Mobile carriers team up with AWS, Microsoft to launch Open Gateway, a set of Twilio-like APIs to tap network services

APIs are the building blocks of how the world of technology works: used to integrate applications with each other, API calls make up the majority of global internet traffic these days. Now, telecoms carriers, often cut out of the march of tech but now looking for more ways to monetize next-generation networks like 5G, want to get in on he act.

Today the GSMA — the association representing the world’s major mobile operators — announced a new initiative with 21 carriers called Open Gateway, a framework to provide universal, open-source-based APIs into carrier networks for developers to access and use a variety of mobile network services like location or identity verificaiton and carrier billing, which previously would have been more complicated or more expensive (if not impossible) to integrate and use. The plan is to be able to kick off more development using APIs in applications like immersive mixed-reality experiences and web3 applications that will in turn give more 5G business to the mobile carriers.

Timed with the kick-off of GSMA’s big industry show, MWC in Barcelona, Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure were named as the first two big cloud providers working with carriers to provide access to APIs to developers.

Initial carriers that have signed up to Open Gateway are America Movil, AT&T, Axiata, Bharti Airtel, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, e& Group, KDDI, KT, Liberty Global, MTN, Orange, Singtel, Swisscom, STC, Telefónica, Telenor, Telstra, TIM, Verizon and Vodafone. These carriers have signed a memorandum of understanding, and the plan is to build and work on these APIs by way of CAMARA, an open source project co-developed by the Linux Foundation and the GSMA for this purpose: to help developers access “enhanced” network capabilities.

The carriers have invested billions in new networking technology, but they don’t really have a lot of usage on those networks. This move is being driven in part by them trying to kick-start activity on them.

“GSMA Open Gateway will enable single points of access to ultra-broadband networks and provide a catalyst for immersive technologies and Web3 – giving them the ability to fulfill their potential and reach critical mass,” said José María Álvarez-Pallete López, the chairman of the GSMA as well as the CEO and chairman of Telefónica. “Telcos have come a long way in developing a global platform to connect everyone and everything. And now, by federating open network APIs and applying the roaming concept of interoperability, mobile operators and cloud services will be truly integrated to enable a new world of opportunity. Collaboration amongst telecom operators and cloud providers is crucial in this new digital ecosystem.”

No details have been given about which services we might see rolled out first. Open Gateway is launching initially with API specifications for eight services: SIM swap (eSIMs to change carriers more easily; “quality on demand”; device status (to let users know if they are connected to a home or roaming network); number verify; edge site selection and routing; number verification (SMS 2FA); carrier billing or check out; and device location (when a service needs a location verfiied). There will be more APIs added this year, it saiid. Perhaps some of the names might also get tweaked. SIM swap, for example, already has a more nefarious connotation. The MWC event will feature a number of demos showing off how the APIs could be used.

The news is an interesting development given the history of mobile carriers and the role they’ve played particularly since the boom in smartphone usage.

Mobile carriers have long had a fear of becoming a “bit pipe” — a commodity with services sold at increasingly competitive (aka low margin) prices. That was a fate that seemed inevitable when smartphones and apps came along. New content was delivered over the top of mobile networks (not by the networks themselves). App stores controlled by phone makers (not the carriers) distributed that content, and charged for it. And companies like Apple and Google increasingly call the shots with how even network services themselves were getting provisioned.

Carriers have thought they could stave off bit-pipe relegation, though, by way of their advantages: they have the main relationship with users when it comes to getting basic services like voice and data, and their mobile networks have built into them a lot of different functionality on top of that basic provisioning that they’ve thought would give them openings to build their own app stores and more.

Various efforts however have had very mixed success. Now, the shift to opening up those mobile networks by creating APIs for third parties to use those tools more easily can either be in two ways: as revolutionary — telcos have always been very guarded about their networks, and now they are realizing that there is a value to thinking in a more modern way about this to bring more evolution and progress into the industry, giving developers a less fragmented, more scalable option by building APIs that work everywhere, in line with how people can roam easily between networks when travelling. Or, it could be read as a kind of defeat: if they can’t beat tech giants, join them.

Amazon and Microsoft have been building out a longer-term relationship with carriers, in part to create more trust with them after years of being seen as a threat. (Both have in the past posed their own competitive profiles to telcos, although Microsoft has a longer and more complicated history here, banked around its disastrous acquisition of Nokia.) Last week, as a precursor to today’s news, AWS announced a raft of new products to work with carriers to build and run mobile networks; and last night Microsoft released new services of its own for telcos.

The tech partners are, predictably for a GSMA event, singing the praises and potential of the deal.

“At Microsoft, we are focused on extending a distributed computing fabric from the cloud to the edge, together with our operator partners,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, Microsoft, in a statement. “We look forward to bringing the GSMA Open Gateway initiative to Microsoft Azure, to empower developers and help operators monetise the value of their 5G investments.”

Ishwar Parulkar, chief technologist for AWS’s telco business, likened the step being taken here as the next one in the progress started not by telcos but by tech companies, specifically Twilio with its groundbreaking APIs years ago to access SMS capabilities among developers.

“Its about network as a service,” he said in an interview. AWS has been working on 5G and cloud services for it back in 2019, and “One of the thoughts [even then] was that we could change the experience if we could add APIs into it.” It’s taken nearly four years, but that seems to be here.

There are, as with payments, location services and more these days, always going to be software solutions that will work around whatever the carriers do, so it’s a matter of who can do it first and most easily for developers and ultimately users to adopt.

“They know there is a lot of work to do and not a lot of guaranteed success but they have got to try,” Simon Buckingham, founder of 5G consultants Nonvoice, said in an interview. “With something like edge compute, if you can start charging for quality as a service, for telcos that have spent millions on infrastructure, if you can charge a premium for that, it can be a game changer. The question is are they going to be able to do it quickly and well enough than the hyper scalers,” as he calls the tech giants and startups of the world, “or will Google and Microsoft and the rest beat them to the punch?”

Mobile carriers team up with AWS, Microsoft to launch Open Gateway, a set of Twilio-like APIs to tap network services by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

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Indian fintech CRED adds buy now, pay later and tap to pay offerings

CRED is rolling out a buy now and pay later service and a tap to pay feature as the Indian fintech platform broadens its offerings to boost engagement and monetization on the platform.

Cred flash, the Bengaluru-headquartered startup’s foray into buy now and pay later category, will allow customers to make seamless payment on the app and across over 500 partner merchants including Swiggy, Zepto and Urban Company and clear the bill at no charge in 30 days.

The customized credit extended to customers will allow them to make bill payments and recharges and other expenses with a single swipe and without having to wait for an OTP authentication code, said the startup, which is valued at over $6 billion. The feature will initially roll out to a select group of customers, the startup said.

The BNPL product is the latest in a series of new offerings from CRED in recent years as it moves to make its eponymous fintech app a bigger part of its customers’ lives.

The startup, which also offers its customers the ability to lend to one another on the platform at “inflation beating” rates, last year launched Scan and Pay, its fast UPI QR payments that allows customers to earn rewards for each transaction they made to merchants and also protect their identity by using aliases.

CRED, which has amassed 16 million users, started its life as a utility tool for tracking and paying credit card bills. It serves some of India’s most trustworthy customers as the app only onboards those who have at least a 750 credit score. This threshold has made CRED a more feasible testbed for additional financial services, even if those offerings have existed on other platforms for years.

A handful of startups in India offer buy now and pay later services, but many of the prominent names in the category including Zip-backed ZestMoney are struggling financially as they mostly cater to an audience base with thin credit bureau history.

CRED said it is also rolling out a tap to pay feature that will allow users to make payments through their credit cards with their phones with a tap on the terminal machine. The feature, first rolling out to NFC-enabled Android smartphones, will require members to unlock their phone before they tap on the merchant’s PoS machine.

“Tap to Pay addresses CRED members’ need for a fast, simple, and safe offline payment experience. Tap to Pay uses secure card tokenization technology to store card tokens on the device.” the startup said.

The startup, backed by Sequoia India, QED, Tiger Global and Ribbit, is aggressively focusing on growing its revenue as it fires up more monetization engines, its founder and chief executive Kunal Shah said earlier this year in an interaction. “Members are engaged in multiple products. And, the monetization is kind of setting us in the right direction,” he said.

Indian fintech CRED adds buy now, pay later and tap to pay offerings by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

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Microsoft Azure expands its telco solutions

New smartphones may get most of the headlines at MWC, but at its core, the annual trade show is still a telco event. It’s maybe no surprise then that the large cloud providers, who are all vying for the lucrative telco market, also made a few announcements ahead of the event. AWS jumped ahead of its competitors by announcing its news a week early and today, it’s Microsoft’s turn. The new features the company today announced for telco’s using its Azure cloud services focus on four areas: network transformation, automation and AI, network-aware applications and what Microsoft calls “ubiquitous computing from cloud to edge.”

“The future hyperscale cloud is going to look a lot different than the cloud we have today,” Jason Zander, Microsoft’s EVP for Strategic Missions and Tech, told me. “Our expectation is that it’s going to expand; it will be a highly distributed fabric; it’s going to span from 5G to space. That future — this intelligent cloud, this intelligent edge — has to be powered by a modern network infrastructure. And it’s going to enable a new type of application and we need a new connectivity paradigm for that. We call that modern connected applications. Basically, we’re on track to give you applications that can be connected anywhere, anytime on the entire planet. That’s where we’re headed and we want to make sure that we are part of that future. And it’s a natural extension of the cloud and also an opportunity for us to partner with the telecommunications industry.”

As he noted, Microsoft believes that a modern network infrastructure will drive a lower total cost of ownership for its telco partners while also helping them modernize and monetize their existing infrastructure. To do so, Microsoft is launching Azure Operator Nexus today, its next-gen hybrid cloud platform for communication service providers. It allows these companies to run their carrier-grade workloads both on-premises and on Azure.

“AT&T made the decision to adopt Azure Operator Nexus platform over time with expectation to lower total cost of ownership, leverage the power of AI to simplify operations, improve time to market and focus on our core competency of building the world’s best 5G service,” said Igal Elbaz, Senior Vice President, Network CTO, AT&T.

It’s not just about software, though. Zander explained that when Microsoft first approached this space, the company thought that it could simply apply the same technology it had built for Azure and apply it to the telco space. But that didn’t work. “It’s a combination of hardware, hardware acceleration, and the software that goes with it,” Zander explained. “This is important, because Microsoft has a set of edge cloud hardware — but it’s not built for it. When you see vendors talking about using the same thing to run an IT workload as they are planning on running a telco network, it doesn’t work and it’s exactly why we’ve made this multi-year investment.”

As part of today’s announcements, Microsoft is also launching Azure Communications Gateway, its service for connecting fixed and mobile networks to Teams, into general availability and it’s launching Azure Operator Voicemail, a service that allows operators to migrate their voicemail (remember voicemail?) services to Azure as a fully managed service.

On the AI front, Microsoft is launching two new “AIOps” services — Azure Operator Insights and Azure Operator Service Manager. Operator Insights uses machine learning to help operators analyze the massive amounts of data they gather from their network operations and troubleshoot potential issues, while Service Manager helps operators generate insights about their network configurations.

With this announcement, Microsoft is also putting an emphasis on building network-aware applications. For the most part, this is about managing quality of service for specific applications. That may be 5G data from autonomous cars or connecting next-gen flying vehicles like the Volocopter, a company Microsoft has partnered with for a while, to the cloud. As Zander noted, this requires a back and forth between the carriers and developers — and since no developer is going to create a service that only works on one network, there needs to be some interoperability here. With the Linux Foundation’s Project Camara, Microsoft, Google Cloud, IBM, Ericsson, Intel and others have been working with carriers like AT&T, Deutsche Telecom, Orange, T-Mobile US, Telefonica, TELUS and Vodafone to create an open API standard for some of this work. “They get it. They know they want to differentiate — but they also know that if there’s fragment in the app ecosystem, it’ll just stall one way or the other,” said Zander.

Also new today is the general availability of the Azure Private 5G Core and Microsoft’s multi-access edge compute (MEC) service.

Microsoft Azure expands its telco solutions by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

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More layoffs at Twitter, and loyalist Esther Crawford isn’t spared

Twitter has laid off at least another 50 employees, according to a report from The Information and posts on social media from former workers.

And apparently not even Elon Musk loyalist Esther Crawford, the chief executive of Twitter payments who oversaw the company’s Twitter Blue verification subscription, was spared, according to Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer. Alex Heath of The Verge also confirmed that Crawford and most of the remaining product team were laid off this weekend, leading many to speculate that Musk is cleaning house to redecorate with a new regime.

Recall that Crawford had been swept up by Musk’s hardcore takeover of Twitter last year, even boasting on the platform about sleeping at the office to handle round-the-clock demands from her new boss.

When your team is pushing round the clock to make deadlines sometimes you #SleepWhereYouWork https://t.co/UBGKYPilbD

— Esther Crawford (@esthercrawford) November 2, 2022

 

The layoffs came this weekend after Twitter employees realized they had been cut off from using Slack. While it later came out that Twitter hadn’t paid its Slack bill on time, that’s not why the platform went down. The Platformer reported that someone at Twitter manually shut off access. Many employees worried that this was the first sign of layoffs to come, and while correlation does not equal causation, an entire company being cut off from their main mode of communication as layoffs started dropping like bombs caused confusion and panic all around.

“Slack is gone so noone know what is going on,” reads one post on Blind, an anonymous platform for verified workers. “People receive email at 2am on saturday and access cut immediately. This will go down as one of the most extreme layoff in entire corporate history”

The post went on to detail the extent of the layoffs: 50% in human relations, 60% in sales and marketing, 35% in engineering, 40% in finance and 80% in project management. Employees have received one month’s severance, the poster said. Twitter has not responded to requests for comment, nor has it released a public statement on the layoffs.

The Information’s report also notes that Twitter kicked off this round of layoffs by letting go of its ad sales staff on February 17.

A senior product manager, Martijn de Kuijper, tweeted that he found out about his own lack of a job after being locked out of his email account.

“Waking up to find I’ve been locked out of my email. Looks like I’m let go. Now my Revue journey is really over,” tweeted de Kuijper. The manager founded Revue, an editorial newsletter tool acquired by Twitter in 2021.

Since Musk took over Twitter in October last year, the company’s headcount has fallen by over 70%. This latest round of layoffs comes after Musk promised in November that no more layoffs were to come. But Musk has a reputation for making promises he can’t keep, whether it’s swearing that Tesla will solve full self-driving “next year” every year since 2014 or reassuring investors that he’s done selling Tesla stock, only to sell $3.5 billion more in Tesla stock.

Musk has not responded to TechCrunch’s request for comment, made via the Musk equivalent of a Hail Mary — through a tweet.

Twitter lays off employees in public policy, engineering

More layoffs at Twitter, and loyalist Esther Crawford isn’t spared by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

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Mapping out the future of AR, ThirdEye is taking on Google and Microsoft in real-life scenarios

It takes a particular kind of chutzpah go up against the behemoths, especially when it comes to AR glasses. We already have Microsoft’s Hololens and Google Glass is being marketed as an enterprise device. But ThirdEye thinks its up for the challenge.

ThirdEye is a spin-off of a project for the Department of Defense. Stealthily, it has been making steady in-roads into the AR smart glasses and the accompanying AI software space.

The ThirdEye glasses may look like safety goggles — and they are, to some degree — but they do much more. The company’s second-gen X2 MR lets people access documents or schematics hands-free while working on a project. Live digital information can be projected onto the user’s field of view; it can also relay live images to a tablet or phone, allowing colleagues to provide guidance or oversee an activity. There’s also a low-resolution thermal sensor built into the glasses. And they’re lightweight.

The company quickly found a customer in the military, which is making use of the tech for classified things. But, ThirdEye CEO Nick Cherukuri told TechCrunch that the glasses could be used for more mundane applications, as well, like helping technicians make repairs in remote settings.  

A combat medic gets instructions via the ThirdEye glasses. Image Credits: ThirdEye

And that’s just the beginning. ThirdEye’s technology became especially important during the pandemic; the glasses allowed for clearer treatment options and diagnoses without too many people having to come into contact with each other. ThirdEye saw its opportunity and developed HIPAA-compliant telehealth AR software to go with it. 

In August 2022, the U.K.’s National Health Service launched a trial where community nurses wore the goggles when making home visits. By transcribing a patient’s visit record directly to their notes (with their consent), the company says its glasses could reduce the amount of time nurses spent focusing on paperwork rather than with their patients.

The glasses could also help to reduce the need for doctors’ appointments or even hospital admissions by allowing health care professionals to share live footage with colleagues, giving patients an opportunity to get second opinions or more detailed diagnoses. The thermal imaging sensor can be used to assess wound healing, too.

Mapping out the future of AR, ThirdEye is taking on Google and Microsoft in real-life scenarios by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

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Xiaomi launches its 13 Pro flagship with a 1-inch sensor at MWC

The Xiaomi 13 Pro flagship made a global debut today at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) being held in Barcelona. With this device — which was launched in China in December — the company is banking on a 1-inch main sensor, Leica lenses, and 120W fast charging to make it a Samsung Galaxy series competitor.

With Android devices cutting close to each other in performance and display sections, the camera has been a major differentiating factor in today’s flagships. Xiaomi is using a massive 1-inch Sony IMX989 50-megapixel sensor with f/1.9 aperture to get the best and brightest photos in all lighting conditions. A couple of phone manufacturers including Xiaomi, Vivo, and Sharp have included this sensor in a few devices. The camera is capable of video recording in 8K resolution — 4K resolution at 60 fps if recording in Dolby Vision.

There is also a 50-megapixel telephoto camera with a “floating lens” element, which results in a 3.2x lossless zoom. Plus, the device has another 50-megapixel sensor in an ultrawide avatar. The 13 Pro has a 32-megapixel front camera with a night mode and dual-framing (0.8x and 1x) modes.

All this camera assembly with Leica lenses is placed in a massive square housing on the back. And while we have seen square camera bumps in many phones, this one looks a bit different due to its size.

Apart from the camera system, the Xiaomi 13 Pro’s spec sheet is fitting for an Android flagship of 2023. A Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, 6.73-inch WQHD+ AMOLED display with 120Hz refresh rate and 1,900 nits of peak brightness, support for Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and HLG HDR standards, 12GB LPDDR5X RAM, and USF 4.0 storage.

Xiaomi’s latest flagship has a 4,820 mAh battery that could be charged in minutes through a proprietary 120W charger. However, these charging bricks are huge and bulky and they are not often easy to carry in a backpack. The device supports 50W wireless charging with compatible charging pucks along with 10W reverse charging if you quickly want to top up the charge your earbuds.

The Xiaomi 13 Pro will be available in ceramic white and ceramic black colorways with 256GB and 512GB storage variants. The device will be available in Europe from March 8 with a base price of €1,200 ($1,373). Along with the new flagship, the company also launched the Xiaomi 13, with a starting price of €999 ($1,056) and the Xiaomi 13 Lite with a starting price of €499 ($527).

Xiaomi is in a peculiar position globally. The company has fallen behind Apple, Oppo, Vivo, and Honor in the domestic market. India, where the phone maker has dominated the phone shipment ranking for the past few years, has conceded the top position to Samsung in the last quarter. The company has also faced challenges in the South Asian country with the departure of top executives, anti-china sentiment, and tax investigations from regulatory bodies. Amid all this, Xiaomi is desperate to deliver a hit smartphone.

Xiaomi launches its 13 Pro flagship with a 1-inch sensor at MWC by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

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Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz invested more in fintech than any other sector in 2022

Welcome to The Interchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your vote of confidence. If you’re reading this as a post on our site, sign up here so you can receive it directly in the future. Every week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news of the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there and it’s my job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. — Mary Ann

Storied venture firms Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) invested more in fintech than any other category in 2022, according to research from CB Insights. I’m not going to lie — upon learning this, my fintech-loving ears perked up.

Sequoia apparently was fairly active overall last year despite the global downturn, with over 100 investments. And fintech represented nearly a quarter of the firm’s deals.

We saw a similar trend at a16z. According to CB Insights, of the 206 deals that a16z participated in last year, almost a quarter went to fintech companies — more than any other industry. Sixty percent of these fintech investments closed in the first half of 2022, with the remainder closing in the second half of the year.

Sequoia backed 25 companies in the financial services space last year. Its top three fintech targets, as identified by CB Insights, were capital markets, payments and payroll and benefits — with each category representing 16% of its investments.

A16z backed 49 companies in the fintech space last year and its top three fintech targets were payments (28%), blockchain (22%) and digital lending (12%).

Three out of Sequoia’s four deals in the capital markets space were follow-on investments, a reflection of the firm’s “faith in the future of capital markets tech,” noted CB Insights. Deals it participated in included Citadel Securities’ $1.2 billion round; Capitolis’ $110 million Series D; Watershed’s $70 million Series B; and Ledgy’s $22 million Series B.

More than a quarter (28%) of a16z’s fintech investments in 2022 went to the payments category. For example, it participated in SpotOn’s $300 million Series F; Jeeves’ $180 million Series C; and Tally Technologies’ $80 million Series C.

Meanwhile, Sequoia’s investments in payments tech companies spanned both consumer and business payments and operate in four distinct markets: buy now, pay later (BNPL), expense management, peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, and online payments acceptance. Two of the four deals are at the seed stage. Specifically, Sequoia participated in Klarna’s $800 million financing; Yokoy’s $80 million Series B; Telda’s $20 million seed round; and Cococart’s $4 million seed financing.

While blockchain and crypto arguably fall under the fintech category, I usually leave analysis of those segments to our crypto team, so I won’t go into a16z’s blockchain investments. But a16z’s third most popular fintech category in 2022 was digital lending companies, with the firm having participated in Point Digital Finance’s $115 million Series C; Valon’s $60 million Series B; and Vesta’s $30 million Series A.

Sequoia’s third most popular category was payroll and benefits, with the firm having backed four such companies — all at later stages — and participating in CaptivateIQ’s $100 million Series C; Rippling’s $250 million Series D; Remote’s $300 million Series C; and Truework’s $50 million Series C.

Now, we know that investments in fintech companies were far lower in 2022 compared to 2021. But wasn’t that true for every sector? Sequoia’s and a16z’s continued bets in the space are just one indication that fintech may be down, but definitely not out.

Weekly News

I interviewed Klarna CEO and co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski about the Swedish payment giant’s momentum in the U.S. Highlights of the interview, which you can read about in more detail here, include (1) the fact that the U.S. has overtaken Germany as Klarna’s largest market by revenue, (2) the company’s fastest-growing revenue stream is actually marketing, not BNPL and (3) Sebastian really views Klarna and Affirm as being “very different” companies in terms of loan duration and amount. On the topic of Klarna and Affirm, I also spoke this past week with Tyson Hendricksen, CEO and founder of a new company called Notice that tracks secondary market trade activity in the private markets. He told me that based on secondary market activity, Klarna appears to be currently valued at around $7.5 billion, which is actually higher than the $6.7 billion it was valued at last July, but also still significantly lower than the $45 billion it was valued at in 2021. By comparison, Affirm is currently valued at $3.84 billion. Below is a chart Hendricksen provided that illustrates trading activity at the two companies. Affirm is public so the chart shows share price as recorded in the public markets. It also shows a composite price for Klarna that takes into  account secondary market trades and open bids and offers. Says Hendricksen: “Think of it as an approximation of the current stock price and valuation using multiple private market data sets.”

To view it more interactively, click here.

Image Credits: Notice

Reports Tage Kene-Okafor: “African cross-border payments platform Chipper Cash conducted a second round of layoffs…just 10 weeks after it cut approximately 12.5% of its workforce (affecting its engineering team the most). The company’s VP of revenue shared the news on LinkedIn, saying “all areas” across Chipper Cash’s markets were impacted this time. “Friday was a sad day for Chipper Cash, as many talented people were let go,” his post read. More here.

Reports Manish Singh: “India and Singapore have linked their digital payments systems, UPI and PayNow, to enable instant and low-cost fund transfers in a major push to disrupt the cross-border flow of money between the two nations that amounts to more than $1 billion each year.” More here.

Reports Ingrid Lunden: “Stripe, the payments and financial services upstart, made waves in the world of mobile commerce last year when it became Apple’s first payment partner for “Tap to Pay,” the iPhone giant’s move to turn any iOS device into a payment-making or payment-taking terminal. Now, Stripe is expanding that business by a factor of googol. From today, businesses that use Stripe Terminal to take in-person payments now will be able to carry out Tap to Pay transactions on NFC-equipped Android devices, too.” More on that here.

MagicCube co-founder Sam Shawki points out in an email interview with me that Stripe is actually not the only payments company providing Tap to Pay on Android currently. He says that his startup, MagicCube, was first to market with Tap to Pay on Android devices in 2021 in the U.K., which has been transacting for a while now. Adds Shawki: “Since then we have many deployments around the world and a few new deployments in the US coming up shortly with major processors in the US, Canada and EMEA that are using Apple on iOS and MagicCube on Android.…We welcome Stripe to the market as it confirms our vision and lights the fire under other processors, merchant acquirers, and financial institutions to more quickly move to adoption in order to maintain their market share. We believe that this year will be the year of massive shift to using our product on Android and on Apple’s iOS to capture the $140 billion a year opportunity of Tap to Phone.” I wrote about MagicCube in 2021 here.

Samantha “Sam” Eisler has joined Lightspeed Venture Partners’ NYC fintech team. Prior to Lightspeed, which she joined in late 2022, Eisler was an investor at Tusk Venture Partners, where she focused on investments in fintech and digital health. Prior to that, she spent five years at Google, working on go-to-market strategies for the company’s machine-learning-driven ad solutions, as well as helping to build an accelerator program for startups in emerging markets. More here.

Reports Bloomberg: “JPMorgan Chase & Co. has curbed its staff’s use of the ChatGPT chatbot, according to a person familiar with the matter. The artificial intelligence software is currently restricted, the person said, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. The move, which impacts employees across the firm, wasn’t triggered by any specific incident.”

Varo Bank announced the appointment of Wook Chung as chief product officer. A statement from a spokesperson said that Chung will lead Varo’s product vision and strategy initiatives and will play a key role in the expansion of Varo Tech, the innovation arm of the company, “which meets at the intersection of product, technology, data, and design.” According to Varo, Chung has an “extensive background” in product management through roles at Facebook, Twitter, Google, and most recently SoFi. More here.

Across the sea, as reported by Silicon Canals, “Amsterdam-based challenger bank Bunq announced on Tuesday, February 21, that it has reached a pre-tax profit of €2.3M in the last quarter of 2022. In Q4 2022, Bunq’s net fee income grew by 37 per cent compared to Q4 2021, and user deposits grew by 64 per cent compared to €1.8B at the end of 2022.” More on Bunq here.

Mastercard has tapped five startups to participate in its Start Path Emerging Fintech program. Here are the five startups, as described by the credit card giant: EMERGE Esports (Singapore) provides its network of gaming content creators and brands across Southeast Asia with commercialization options through its talent database. Mintoak (India) provides a software-as-a-service platform that enables banks to expand their value proposition for merchants through payment acceptance and commerce enablement solutions. Optty (Singapore) offers a single integration and orchestration solution that connects merchants directly to buy now, pay later solutions; wallets; and other alternative payment methods globally. PayCaddy (Panama) offers an all-in-one banking-as-a-service solution for digital banking and express card issuance. Finally, Prosperas (United States) enables lenders to deliver credit opportunities directly to a mobile phone using anonymized, nonbiased data to match and prequalify consumers.

Rob Galtman, senior director of Fitch Ratings, noted that Block (formerly known as Square) had a “solid” Q4 despite macro- and recession-related fears. Via email, he added that the company is among other large tech players that have focused more on profitability in light of tougher capital market conditions, with management revealing slower hiring trends in 2023. Galman added: “Market concerns around BNPL are not evident to date, with loan loss rates remaining low. However, BNPL remains an area to focus on, given low-income consumers are especially pressured with inflation pressures. If a recession or macro pullback arrives, Block is well positioned given exposure to secular growth areas including digital payments and omnichannel commerce, as well as a strong balance sheet.”

Opendoor Technologies continues to face challenges. As reported by Barron’s: The real estate tech company “reported a narrower fourth-quarter loss than expected after the market closed on Thursday, February 23. The earnings beat caps a year of change in both the housing market and the company, which buys and sells houses. Opendoor (ticker: OPEN) said it lost 63 cents per share on revenue of about $2.9 billion in the quarter, beating consensus estimates…In full-year 2022, Opendoor lost $2.16 per share on revenue of about $15.6 billion. Consensus had anticipated a loss of $2.33 on sales of roughly $15.2 billion. While the fourth-quarter results beat estimates, they were down significantly from year-ago levels. The company lost 31 cents per share on sales of about $3.8 billion in the final quarter of 2021.”

Fundings and M&A

Seen on TechCrunch

YC-backed HR-payroll provider Workpay raises $2.7M to scale in Africa

Nestment raises $3.5M to help friends and family buy homes together

Trust & Will secures $15M after doubling revenue: Amex Ventures, USAA are among the digital estate planning startup’s new backers

Telecom giant Airtel eyes a stake in Paytm

And elsewhere

Marijuana fintech firm Green Check Verified raises $6 million

Mexican startups Minu and Plerk merge to strengthen the benefits market. TechCrunch covered Minu’s recent raise here.

Goldman Sachs’ One Million Black Women and Now®️ launch $225M credit facility to accelerate growth of small and historically underserved businesses. TechCrunch covered Now’s 2021 raise here.

Nuvei finalizes $1.3B Paya purchase

Fintechs that are hiring

The good news is that I was inundated with DMs and emails from people letting me know that their fintech company is hiring. The bad news is that there is no way I can include all of them in this week’s newsletter. So if you reached out and don’t see your company here, check out upcoming editions of The Interchange. I’m making my way down the list!

• Mesh Payments has about a dozen openings; the financial management startup announced a $60 million raise last September.
• Highnote, an embedded finance and payments technology company that emerged from stealth with $54 million in funding in September of 2021, is hiring for a head of customer success, senior core infrastructure engineer, senior data platform engineer, senior software engineer, and a technical writer. More details here.
• EarnIn is currently hiring across engineering, product, business development and finance among other departments in the U.S., LatAm, and Bangkok. It most recently raised a $125 million Series C.
• Branch, a full-stack home and auto insurer that leverages data and technology, currently has more than 30 open roles throughout the company. The company raised $147 million at a $1.05 billion valuation last June.
• Corporate spend management company Ramp, which was valued at $8.1 billion last year, is hiring for 30+ roles.
• NorthOne, a small business-focused neobank, is currently hiring for nine roles in product, engineering, marketing, and compliance. The company raised $67 million in Series B funding last October.
• Nova Credit, a consumer-permissioned credit bureau, has six open positions that are remote across engineering and marketing. In September, it received a $10 million investment from HSBC Ventures.
• Silicon Valley–based neobank Upgrade is hiring for over two dozen roles. The company raised $280 million at a $6 billion valuation in 2021 and says it offers “affordable and responsible” credit, mobile banking, and payment products to consumers.
• Prodigal, which has developed a cloud-based consumer finance intelligence solution that analyzes agent and customer conversations, is hiring for several roles across most of its departments, including for a VP of sales and chief of staff.
• Stake, a digital real estate investment platform in MENA that raised $8 million last August, has 13 current positions to fill between Dubai and Cairo. More details can be found on its careers page.
• Viva Wallet has a total of 188 openings across Europe. JPMorgan acquired a stake in the Athens-based SMB-focused fintech in early 2022.

It was a busy week in the world of fintech, so I’m looking forward to some downtime this weekend and hope you’re enjoying some, too! Let me end with a personal photo taken at the end of a walk the other day. Gotta admit that Austin sunsets are pretty breathtaking. Until next week, take good care. xoxoxo, Mary Ann

Image Credits: Mary Ann Azevedo / Austin sunset

Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz invested more in fintech than any other sector in 2022 by Mary Ann Azevedo originally published on TechCrunch

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Don’t leave developers behind in the Section 230 debate

Shelley McKinley Contributor

Shelley McKinley is chief legal officer at GitHub, home to more than 100 million software developers.

Last week marked the first time the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. In oral arguments in the Gonzalez v. Google case, important questions were raised about platform responsibility and the risk of viral content.

As the court grapples with these questions, it is an opportunity to reflect on why 230 was created in the first place, how it fosters innovation and what we all stand to lose if the protections embedded within 230 are narrowed.

Nicknamed the “26 words that created the internet” by Jeff Kosseff, Section 230 established a liability shield for platforms that host third-party content. In the nascent days of the internet, 230 created favorable legal conditions for startups and entrepreneurs to flourish, cementing the United States as a world leader in software.

While today’s tech landscape is dramatically different from the fledgling internet of the ’90s, the reasoning behind Section 230 still holds true today. The architecture of law creates conditions for innovation and can also chill it.

Seemingly lost in arguments taking aim at the outsized influence of large social media platforms is an appreciation of how Section 230 supports the broader online ecosystem, especially software developers. Developers are at the heart of our online world and at the forefront of creating solutions for global challenges, working to make the software that underpins our digital infrastructure more secure, reliable and safe.

Policymakers should recognize the critical role of developers and work to support them, not stifle innovation.

Developers rely on 230 to collaborate on platforms like GitHub and to build and operate new platforms rethinking social media. Narrowing 230 protections could have far-reaching implications, introducing legal uncertainty into the important work of software developers, startups and platforms that provide them the tools to realize their vision. As policymakers consider how to address new frontiers of intermediary liability, it’s essential to center developers in decisions that will shape the future of the internet.

Software developers contribute significantly to the United States’ economic competitiveness and innovation and are important stakeholders in platform policy. GitHub counts 17 million American developers on our platform — more than any other country. Their open source activity alone contributes more than $100 billion to the U.S. economy annually.

These developers maintain the invisible but essential software infrastructure that powers our daily lives. Nearly all software — 97% — contains open source components, which are often developed and maintained on GitHub.

As the chief legal officer at GitHub, a global community of over 100 million software developers collaborating on code, I know firsthand the importance of keeping 230 intact. While GitHub is a far cry from a general-purpose social media platform, GitHub depends on 230 protections to both host third-party content and engage in good-faith content moderation.

That’s especially important when a platform has over 330 million software repositories. GitHub has been able to grow while maintaining platform health thanks to intermediary liability protections. GitHub has a robust, developer-first approach to content moderation to keep our platform safe, healthy and inclusive while tailoring our approach to the unique environment of code collaboration, where the takedown of a single project can have significant downstream effects for thousands or more software projects.

When it comes to the specifics of the Gonzalez v. Google case, which asks the court to consider whether Section 230’s liability protections ought to include third-party content recommended by algorithms, a ruling in favor of the petitioners could have unintended consequences for developers. Recommendation algorithms are used throughout software development in myriad ways that are distinct from general-purpose social media platforms.

GitHub’s contributions to Microsoft’s amicus brief in the case outline our concerns: Recommendations powered by algorithms on GitHub are used to connect users with similar interests, let them find relevant software projects and are even used to recommend ways to improve code and fix software vulnerabilities. One such example is GitHub’s CodeQL, a semantic code analysis engine that allows developers to discover vulnerabilities and errors in open source code.

Developers are using GitHub to maintain open source projects that employ algorithmic recommendations to block hate speech and remove malicious code. A decision by the court to narrow 230 to exclude protection for recommendation algorithms could quickly ensnare a variety of societally valuable services, including tools that maintain the quality and security of the software supply chain.

A ruling in Gonzalez v. Google that seeks to pull back protections benefiting social media platforms has the potential to impact a much broader community. In the lead-up to the court hearing the case, a host of amicus briefs emphasized its far-reaching implications: from nonprofits (Wikimedia Foundation) to community content moderation (Reddit and Reddit moderators) and small businesses and startups (Engine).

While calls to narrow 230 focus mainly on putting Big Tech in check, doing so would unintentionally curb competition and innovation while creating additional barriers to entry for the next generation of developers and emerging providers.

These concerns are not hyperbole: In “How Law Made Silicon Valley,” Anupam Chander examines how the U.S. legal system created favorable conditions for internet entrepreneurship in contrast to Europe, where “concerns about copyright violations and strict privacy protections hobbled internet startups,” and Asia, where “Asian web enterprises faced not only copyright and privacy constraints, but also strict intermediary liability rules.”

Narrowing 230 wouldn’t just harm the United States’ global competitiveness; it would impede tech progress within the U.S. While GitHub has gone a long way from our startup beginnings, we’re committed to leveling the playing field so anyone, anywhere, can be a developer.

As we await the court’s decision in Gonzalez v. Google, it’s important to note that whatever the result of the case, there will surely be more efforts to narrow 230, whether they are taking aim at algorithmic recommendations, AI or other innovations. While these new technologies raise important questions about the future of intermediary liability, policymakers must strive to chart a path forward that creates a legal environment that supports developers, startups, small businesses and nonprofits that power so many socially beneficial parts of the internet.

Policymakers concerned about reducing harmful content can look to how developers are leading the way in content moderation. Developers use GitHub to develop valuable software projects, including open source content moderation algorithms that reflect policymakers’ calls for algorithmic transparency on platforms, such as the Algorithmic Accountability Act of 2022 and the Algorithmic Justice and Online Platform Transparency Act.

Platforms including Twitter, Bumble and Wikimedia have used GitHub to share the source code for algorithms that flag misinformation, filter lewd imagery and block spam, respectively. Open source is spurring innovation in content moderation while offering new models for community participation, oversight and transparency.

As we encounter new frontiers in intermediary liability, policymakers should recognize the critical role of developers and work to support — not stifle — innovation.

Don’t leave developers behind in the Section 230 debate by Walter Thompson originally published on TechCrunch

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