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Healios raises $10M to scale its mental health platform for children scarred by the COVID-19 pandemic

18 May 2021/0 Comments/in /by

By Mike Butcher

Heaven knows what will happen to the mental health of children who’ve gone through this past year but if there’s one thing we need right now it’s mental health provision for young people that can scale. And as much as some of us can’t bear the thought of another video call, a UK startup reckons it’s come up with the magic formula for online therapy for children.

Now, Healios has raised a £7 million ($10M) Series A round to expand its platform across the UK. If the roll-out is successful, the startup is looking at expanding internationally. The round was led by InHealth Ventures with participation from existing investors AlbionVC.

Healios will use the funding to expand its AI, machine learning, and data science expertise, as well as add to the team. Healios says its platform digitises the clinical pathway, enabling children, adults, and their family members to use clinical services at home.

According to UK government statistics, one in eight (12.8%) five to 19-year-olds in the UK have a mental health disorder but two-thirds are unable to access NHS care because of soaring demands. And the Covid-19 pandemic has made things worse.

Launched in 2013, Healios says it has now …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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JD Logistics, China’s answer to Amazon’s logistics ambitions, to raise $3.4B from IPO

17 May 2021/0 Comments/in /by

By Rita Liao

After operating in the red for 14 years, JD.com’s logistics subsidiary is getting ready for an initial public offering in Hong Kong. JD Logistics will price its share between HK$39.36 and HK$43.36 apiece, which could see the firm raise up to about HK$26.4 billion or $3.4 billion, according to its new filing.

JD.com, Alibaba’s e-commerce rival in China, began building its own logistics and transportation network from the ground up in 2007 and spun out the unit in 2017, following a pattern where major segments of the tech giant became independent, such as JD.com’s health and fintech units. JD.com is currently the largest shareholder of JD Logistics with an aggregate stake of 79%.

Unlike Alibaba, which relies on a network of third-party partners to fulfill orders, JD.com takes a heavy-asset approach like Amazon, building up warehouse centers and keeping its own army of courier staff. As of 2020, JD Logistics had over 246,800 employees working in delivery, warehouse operations among other customer services. Its total headcount was 258,700 last year.

A major strategic decision JD Logistics made once it became independent was opening its technologies to external customers beyond the scope of JD.com’s own demand, helping retailers like Skechers optimize their logistics …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Dear Startups: Don’t repaint, reinvent

15 May 2021/0 Comments/in /by

By Natasha Mascarenhas

I feel hungover. No, not in the traditional sense, but in the dizzying way you feel when half of your world is celebrating double vaccinations and no masks, and the other half, across the world, is mourning death and not a shred of light at the end of the tunnel. The privilege of watching this unfold is like playing the worst game of musical chairs, except some seats are clouds and others are simply rows of knives.

For tech, the questions that we will be debating are bigger than if “that conference will be virtual or in-person.” Instead, we’re now trying to figure out what the future of work and education are for the second time in a year. The United States is reopening and that means a lot of the culture of how we work will be rewritten. Shifting from an individual mindset to a collective, more distributed world is going to be harder than taking a mask off and popping an aspirin.

Startup founders new and old are about to start making decisions on how to lead in this changed world. They will have to consider things far more consequential than if free lunches come back. More serious questions abound: …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Solana, a blockchain platform followed by top crypto investors, says it’s far faster than Ethereum

15 May 2021/0 Comments/in /by

By Connie Loizos

Solana isn’t widely known yet outside of the crypto community. But insiders think the blockchain platform is interesting for a wide variety of reasons, beginning with its amiable founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, who spent more than a dozen years as an engineer working on wireless protocols at Qualcomm and who says he had a lightbulb moment at a San Francisco cafe several years ago following two coffees and a beer.

His big idea centered on creating an historical record to speed along “consensus,” which is how decisions are made on blockchains, which are themselves peer-to-peer systems.

Right now, consensus is reached on various blockchains when members solve a mathematical puzzle, a mechanism that’s called “proof of work.” These miners are rewarded for their efforts with cryptocurrency, but the process takes an hour in Bitcoin’s case and a minute in the case of Ethereum, and it’s insanely energy intensive, which is why neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum has proved very scalable. (Bitcoin’s heavy reliance on fossil fuel is the reason Elon Musk cited earlier this week to explain why Tesla is no longer accepting Bitcoin as payment for the company’s electric cars.)

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Why SPACs aren’t targeting African startups

14 May 2021/0 Comments/in /by

By Tage Kene-Okafor

One. That’s the number of African tech companies that have gone public on the NYSE in the last 10 years. Two, if you’re counting local exchanges. The former is African-focused e-commerce company Jumia and the latter is Egyptian fintech company Fawry.

As a tech company, Fawry’s listing on the Egyptian Stock Exchange is a rarity. Typically, most exchanges in emerging markets like Africa, India, and Latin America are filled with traditional companies in age-old sectors like banking, telecoms, manufacturing, and energy.

Unlike Fawry, what you see these days are new-age tech companies from these markets going public abroad, especially in the U.S. Due to the friendly nature of U.S. exchanges such as Nasdaq and the NYSE, and their history building up the FAANG and other multibillion-dollar companies, they have become the top destination for IPO-ready companies in emerging markets.

Last year, the U.S. IPO market was caught in a frenzy with a different way of going public: via special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). Although these acquisition vehicles have been around for quite some time, they’ve lacked the sensational attributes we’ve now become accustomed to. Public and influential entrepreneurs from Chamath Palihapitiya to Richard Branson have made sure …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Vietnamese flexible pay startup Nano raises $3M seed round

13 May 2021/0 Comments/in /by

By Catherine Shu

Nano Technologies, a startup that lets workers in Vietnam access their earned wages immediately through an app called VUI, has raised $3 million in seed funding. The oversubscribed round was led by returning investors Golden Gate Ventures and Venturra Discovery, and included participation from FEBE Ventures, Openspace Ventures and Goodwater Capital.

Nano recently took part in Y Combinator’s accelerator program. Golden Gate Ventures and Venturra Discovery both participated in its pre-seed funding. The startup was founded at the beginning of 2020 by Dzung Dang, formerly a general manager at Uber and chief executive officer of ZaloPay, and Thang Nguyen, who previously served as chief technology officer at Focal Labs and SeeSpace.

VUI launched six months ago, and now serves more than 20,000 employees from companies like GS25, LanChi Mart and Annam Gourmet. Nano Technologies claims that about 50% to 60% of employees sign up for VUI as soon as their employers offer it, and use the service about three times every month to withdraw their earned wages.

Disrupting the paycheck, Gusto’s Flexible Pay allows employees to pick when they get paid

<iframe sandbox="allow-scripts" security="restricted" title="“Disrupting the paycheck, Gusto's Flexible Pay allows employees to pick when they get paid” — TechCrunch" …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Vinted raises $303M for its 2nd-hand clothes marketplace, used by 45M and now valued at $4.5B

12 May 2021/0 Comments/in /by

By Ingrid Lunden

The circular economy — where consumers themselves are both the suppliers and buyers of goods and services — has come into its own in the last year of lockdown living as a popular and trusted way to buy and sell things. Now one of the larger players in that system — the clothes and home goods marketplace Vinted — is circling in on some very big money of its own. The European startup is today announcing that it has closed an all-equity round of €250 million ($303 million at today’s rates), funding that values the company pre-money at €3.5 billion ($4.2 billion, or $4.5 billion post-money).

The funding is being led by EQT Growth, with Accel, Burda Principal Investments, Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Sprints Capital — all previous backers — also participating. This is a big jump for Vinted, which was valued at $1 billion in its round at the end of 2019. That, of course, was just before the pandemic hit — a sign of how much the last year has positively impacted both Vinted and that business model as a whole.

It’s a huge deal for the company as well as the …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Exeger takes $38M to ramp up production of its flexible solar cells for self-powered gadgets

11 May 2021/0 Comments/in /by

By Natasha Lomas

Sweden’s Exeger, which for over a decade has been developing flexible solar cell technology (called Powerfoyle) that it touts as efficient enough to power gadgets solely with light, has taken in another tranche of funding to expand its manufacturing capabilities by opening a second factory in the country.

The $38 million raise is comprised of $20M in debt financing from Swedbank and Swedish Export Credit Corporation (SEK), with a loan amounting to $12M from Swedbank (partly underwritten by the Swedish Export Credit Agency (EKN) under the guarantee of investment credits for companies with innovations) and SEK issuing a loan amounting to $8M (partly underwritten by the pan-EU European Investment Fund (EIF)); along with $18M through a directed share issue to Ilija Batljan Invest AB.

The share issue of 937,500 shares has a transaction share price of $19.2 — which corresponds to a pre-money valuation of $860M for the solar cell maker.

Back in 2019 SoftBank also put $20M into Exeger, in two investments of $10M — entering a strategic partnership to accelerate the global rollout of its tech and further extending its various investments in solar energy.

The Swedish company has also previously received a loan from the Swedish Energy Agency, …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Telkomsel invests an additional $300 million in Gojek

10 May 2021/0 Comments/in /by

By Manish Singh

Telkomsel, a unit of Indonesia’s largest telecom operator Telkom, has invested an additional $300 million in ride-hailing and payments firm Gojek, the two firms said Monday, just months after the network provider wrote a $150 million check to the Southeast Asian firm.

The announcement comes amid Gojek working to seal a proposed merger with e-commerce platform Tokopedia. The $18 billion deal would result in a new entity called GoTo, according to media reports. Telkomsel’s investment today likely makes it one of GoTo’s top eight investors.

Gojek — which has raised over $3.45 billion to date from high-profile investors including Google, Facebook, PayPal, Visa, and Tencent — and Telkomsel said their strategic partnership will “open up new synergies as the two companies scale up digital services and deliver new, innovative solutions.”

The two firms have maintained a deal since 2018 to subsidize the cost of mobile data consumed by the ride-hailing firm’s driver partners.

With more than 170 million subscribers, Telkomsel is the largest telecom operator in Indonesia. In addition to ride-hailing, Gojek has expanded to several additional businesses, including digital payments and food delivery in Indonesia.

Today’s news follows a $150 million investment Telkomsel made in Gojek in November last year. The two …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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How Duolingo became a $2.4B language unicorn

08 May 2021/0 Comments/in /by

By Natasha Mascarenhas

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At the heart of Duolingo is its mission: to scale free education and increase income potential through language learning. However, the same mission that has helped it grow to a business valued at $2.4 billion with over 500 million registered learners, has led to tensions that continue to define the business.

How do you survive as a startup if you don’t want to charge users? How do you design a startup that isn’t too hard to lose people, but isn’t too easy to compromise education? How do you balance monetization goals while also keeping education as a product free?

For my first EC-1, I spent months with Duolingo executives, investors, and of course, competitors, to answer some of these questions.

One of my favorite details in the story that got left on the cutting room floor was Duolingo co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn comparing his company to the elliptical. I …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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