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Silexica, which optimises how disparate applications work together on autonomous cars, raises $18M

21 Jun 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Ingrid Lunden

As we inch closer to building increasingly autonomous cars, the complexities that these vehicles will present as programmable hardware are increasing, with some 250 applications ranging from cameras to navigation controls to weather sensors running on a typical high performance system today. Now, a startup that is building a system to help optimise that and let all of those vendors work together in a neutral way is announcing some funding to continue its growth. Silexica, a startup based out of Cologne, Germany, that has developed a set of tools to help map and optimise a wide range of applications across multicore processors — specifically the kinds of applications and computers that power self-driving cars — has raised $18 million.

The Series B is led by EQT Ventures, the newish firm that sits under the PE firm EQT Partners, based out of Stockholm. Existing investors Merus Capital, Paua Ventures, Seed Fonds Aachen (Silexica originally spun out of the University of Aachen) and DSA Invest all also participated in this round. The company has raised $28 million to date.

The funding, Silexica’s CEO Maximilian Odendahl (who co-founded the team with Johannes Emigholz and Weihua Sheng) told TechCrunch, will be used not just to …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Porsche just took a 10% stake in electric car maker Rimac Automobili

20 Jun 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Kirsten Korosec

Porsche AG is taking a 10% stake in Rimac Automobili, the Croatian hypercar and electric vehicle components company behind the world’s fastest electric car.

This isn’t just a big-storied-automaker-takes-an-interest-in-a-startup kind of story. Rimac has street cred and not just because of its latest electric hypercar, the C Two, which debuted at the Geneva Motor Show in March 2018.

The two-seater C Two is certainly a standout. The electric hypercar has a 1,914-horsepower engine that enables the vehicle to reaches a top speed of 256 miles per hour and accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 1.85 seconds. That’s faster than Tesla’s next-generation Roadster prototype that CEO Elon Musk unveiled in November. The Rimac’s battery is no slouch either and gets 405 miles to a single charge, nearly double other EVs on the market.

But Rimac Automobili is more than a startup that plans to produce 150 or so $2.1 million C Two hypercars. The company, which was founded by Mate Rimac in 2009, also engineers and manufactures high-performance electric vehicle powertrain systems and battery systems. The company has already worked with Renault, Jaguar, and Aston Martin. The company’s tech was even used in the E-Type …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Microsoft says it is “dismayed” by the forced separation of migrant families at the border

19 Jun 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Catherine Shu

Amid calls for a boycott and employee dissent over its cloud-computing deal with the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Microsoft issued a statement saying that the company “is dismayed by the forcible separation of children from their families at the border.” The ICE is currently under fire from both sides of the political spectrum for separating migrant parents from their children at the United States-Mexico border.

The controversy over Microsoft’s involvement with the ICE stems from an Authority to Operate (ATO) that the agency granted to Azure Government earlier this year. In a January blog post, Microsoft said the ATO would enable the ICE to deliver cloud-based identity and access services and “help employees make more informed decisions faster.” It also said that the use of its government compliant cloud computing software would allow ICE to “process data on edge devices or utilize deep learning capabilities to accelerate facial recognition and identification.”

Though the ATO has been public for six months already, it resurfaced as outrage grew over the separation of families, including those legally seeking asylum with children, with many social media users <a target=_blank …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Email security startup Tessian raises $13M led by Balderton and Accel

18 Jun 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Steve O’Hear

Tessian (formerly called CheckRecipient), the London-based startup that is deploying machine learning to improve email security, has raised $13 million in Series A funding. Leading the round is Balderton Capital, and existing backer Accel. A number of previous investors also followed on, including Amadeus Capital Partners, Crane, LocalGlobe, Winton Ventures, and Walking Ventures.

Founded in 2013 by three engineering graduates from Imperial College — Tim Sadler, Tom Adams and Ed Bishopon — Tessian is built on the premise that humans are the weak link in company email and data security. This can either be through mistakes, such as a wrongly intended recipient, or through nefarious employee activity. By applying “machine intelligence” to monitoring company email, the startup has developed various tools to help prevent this.

Once installed on a company’s email systems, Tessian’s machine learning tech analyses an enterprise’s email networks to understand normal and abnormal email sending patterns and behaviours. It then attempts to detects anomalies in outgoing emails and warns users about potential mistakes before an email is sent. This, the startup says, makes it different to legacy rule-based technologies and that Tessian requires “no admin from security teams and no end-user behaviour change”.

One neat aspect is that Tessian …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield is coming soon to Beirut, São Paolo and Lagos

17 Jun 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Ned Desmond

Everyone knows there are thriving startup communities outside of obvious hubs, like San Francisco, Berlin, Bangalore and Beijing, but they don’t always get the support they deserve. Last year, TechCrunch took a major page from its playbook, the Startup Battlefield competition, and staged the event in Nairobi, Kenya to find the best early stage startup in Sub-Saharan Africa, and also to Sydney, Australia, to find the same for Australia and New Zealand. Both were successes, thanks to talented founders and the hard traveling TechCrunch team. And now we’re pleased to announce that we’re stepping up our commitment to emerging ecosystems.

TechCrunch is once again teaming up with Facebook, our partner for last year’s Nairobi event, to bring the Startup Battlefield to three major cities representing regions with vital, emerging startup communities. In Beirut, TechCrunch’s editors will strive to find the best early stage startup in the Middle East and North Africa. In São Paolo, the hunt is for the best in Latin America. And in Lagos, Nigeria, TechCrunch will once again find the top startup in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Early stage startups are welcome to apply. We will choose 15 …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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UK report warns DeepMind Health could gain ‘excessive monopoly power’

15 Jun 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Natasha Lomas

DeepMind’s foray into digital health services continues to raise concerns. The latest worries are voiced by a panel of external reviewers appointed by the Google-owned AI company to report on its operations after its initial data-sharing arrangements with the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) ran into a major public controversy in 2016.

The DeepMind Health Independent Reviewers’ 2018 report flags a series of risks and concerns, as they see it, including the potential for DeepMind Health to be able to “exert excessive monopoly power” as a result of the data access and streaming infrastructure that’s bundled with provision of the Streams app — and which, contractually, positions DeepMind as the access-controlling intermediary between the structured health data and any other third parties that might, in the future, want to offer their own digital assistance solutions to the Trust.

While the underlying FHIR (aka, fast healthcare interoperability resource) deployed by DeepMind for Streams uses an open API, the contract between the company and the Royal Free Trust funnels connections via DeepMind’s own servers, and prohibits connections to other FHIR servers. A commercial structure that seemingly works against the openness and interoperability DeepMind’s co-founder Mustafa …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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AT&T completes its acquisition of Time Warner

15 Jun 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Jon Russell

AT&T has sealed the deal to buy Time Warner in a major piece of media and technology consolidation.

The deal — which is $85.4 billion and a total of $108 billion with debt — was first announced in October 2016 and, having passed a court approval earlier this week, it was completed on Thursday.

That’s a long cycle to complete a transaction, but this is a complicated one that sees AT&T take control of Time Warner, as well as HBO, Warner Brother’s film studio and its Turner channels. That’s likely to create a complicated web of conflicts, as both media distribution and content creation come together under the same parent.

“The content and creative talent at Warner Bros., HBO and Turner are first-rate. Combine all that with AT&T’s strengths in direct-to-consumer distribution, and we offer customers a differentiated, high-quality, mobile-first entertainment experience,” Randall Stephenson, chairman and CEO of AT&T, said in a statement. “We’re going to bring a fresh approach to how the media and entertainment industry works for consumers, content creators, distributors and advertisers.”

Netflix and Alphabet will need to become ISPs, fast

<iframe sandbox="allow-scripts" security="restricted" src="https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/12/netflix-and-alphabet-will-need-to-become-isps-fast/embed/#?secret=qFRfVlAVCU" data-secret="qFRfVlAVCU" width="800" …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Didi will resume late night Hitch rides, but only allow drivers to pick up passengers of the same sex

14 Jun 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Catherine Shu

Didi Chuxing‘s inter-city carpooling service will resume night operations on a limited basis about a month after a female passenger was allegedly murdered by an unregistered driver who accessed the platform using his father’s account. Called Didi Hitch, the service will return on June 15 with new safety measures, including one that only allows drivers to serve passengers of the same sex during late night hours. Didi Hitch will also began piloting a new feature later this month called “guardian mode” (not “escort mode” as reported by some publications) that automatically shares ride details with a passenger’s emergency contacts.

The company says Didi Hitch will resume partial nighttime service between the hours of 10PM to 12AM and 5AM to 6AM on June 15, but with what Didi says is a “tentative safety measure.” During those times, drivers will only be able to accept ride requests made by passengers of the same sex. In other words, male drivers can only accept male passengers, while female drivers can only accept female passengers.

Guardian mode will launch on June 22 as a smale-scale pilot. When a passenger turns it on, their route is automatically shared with their emergency contacts. Didi also says its …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Dutch payments company Adyen opens at €400/share, a pop of 67%, now valued at $15B

13 Jun 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Ingrid Lunden

After raising €1.1 billion in its initial offering and pricing its shares at €240 each last night, Adyen, the Dutch payments company went public today with a bang. It opened for trading this morning on Amsterdam’s Euronext exchange at €400 a share, an impressive jump of 67 percent.

The share price is currently €435, giving it a market cap of €12.367 billion, or $15 billion in current currency. It’s gone as high as €440 today. We’ll update this number periodically today.

This all represents a big jump on Adyen’s valuation. In a statement last night announcing its initial offer price of €240 per share, Adyen said this implied a market capitalization of €7.1 billion, based on the current number of Shares outstanding.

The writing may have been on the wall for its strong performance this morning even then. Adyen said yesterday that the offering was “multiple times oversubscribed… with strong demand from institutional investors globally.” Adyen is selling between 12 percent and 13.4 percent of its issued and outstanding shares, the latter figure representing if the over-allotment option is exercised in full.

Adyen’s strong performance underscores both the strength for tech IPOs at the moment, as well as the strength of …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Valve is bringing an official version of Steam to China

12 Jun 2018/0 Comments/in /by

By Jon Russell

Valve is officially bringing its Steam game platform to China as it aims to take a chunk of the world’s largest market of gamers.

Valve said it will work with local partner Perfect World, which it previously collaborated on to release major games Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Shanghai-based Perfect World will control local promotional, the selection of games and distribution. There’s no confirmed date for when the Steam China service will go live.

The move makes perfect sense. For one thing, Valve has a vast opportunity to tap into. China’s games market is booming, with Newzoo forecasting that it represented $32.5 billion in 2017, ahead of the U.S., Japan, Germany and the UK. PC gaming has always been the base for revenue, but mobile is growing fast with Tencent — one of the largest gaming firms on the planet — recently reporting that its mobile revenue has overtaken that of PC.

But, as with all things China, access is uncertain. Parts of Valve’s service were blocked in China last December, although the ability to guy games remained intact. It isn’t clear why …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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