The cultivated meat industry’s known struggles will take time to sort out, and maybe that’s OK

The Wall Street Journal went under the hood of the lab-grown meat industry, also known as cultivated or cell-cultured meat, and the struggles within.

The Journal particularly homed in on what’s going on at UPSIDE Foods, which received a blessing from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration related to its process for making cultivated chicken, essentially saying it was safe to eat and making it the first company to receive this approval. Eat Just, which has been selling its product in Singapore, the first nation to approve the sale of cultivated meat, followed, getting its “thumbs-up” from the FDA in March.

WSJ’s story pays particular attention to UPSIDE Foods’ success at making small batches of its chicken product, as well as its lack of being able to produce large amounts of product at a low cost, or at even price parity with traditional meat — and to be fair, most cultivated meat companies struggle with this too.

“Initially our chicken will be sold at a price premium,” UPSIDE founder and CEO Uma Valeti told TechCrunch in November. “As we scale, we expect to eventually reach price parity with conventionally produced meat. Our goal is to ultimately be more affordable than conventionally produced meat.”

UPSIDE Foods bites into $400M round to serve cultivated meat later this year

Companies in this sector make meat from animal cells that are fed growth factors. The production and pricing challenges presented in the WSJ story, however, are not new. “Is cell-culture meat ready for prime time?” wasn’t just a clever TechCrunch+ headline, but a legitimate question posed in early 2022 that still really hasn’t been answered.

Most cultivated meat stories in our archives include at least a sentence about how hard it is for companies to produce mass quantities and to create foods by this method so that the finished product is under $10 a pound.

The cultivated meat industry’s known struggles will take time to sort out, and maybe that’s OK by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

source https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/30/cultivated-meat-struggles-foodtech/

Warm intros are awful for diversity, so why do investors keep insisting on them?

There are oodles of advantages to having a diverse workforce, but, as inBeta founder James Nash points out, you can’t simply take your homogenous workforce, add diversity, stir and hope for the best.

Often, something subtle gets in the way of diversity at startups: Companies depend on employee referrals in the beginning, but if a startup’s makeup is already not diverse, referrals aren’t going to change that.

That’s for startups. In the world of venture capital, things are more pronounced: A warm introduction is the only way to get in front of investors at many VC funds. That’s great for people who are already hooked into the startup ecosystem, but you don’t have to look for very long to realize that this is not a very diverse group of people.

“We’d love to hear from you. The best way to reach us is through someone we mutually know.” A VC firm's website

For many companies, employee referrals are one of the main ways to attract new talent. That’s all good until you stop to think who your newest hire is likely to know best. It doesn’t take many rounds through that particular mill until you end up with a relatively homogenous group of people with similar education, socioeconomic backgrounds and values.

If that’s what you’re optimizing for, great! Well done. If it isn’t, perhaps it’s time to stop being lazy and question why warm intros are still common practice.

My question has long been: What are you optimizing for by relying on referrals? If you spend some time thinking about that, I bet you’d unearth some uncomfortable unintended consequences.

Let’s talk about what we can do about it.

The situation in VC

If you read any guides about startups or raising money (including my own, although I also try to cover cold emails and cold intros), you’ll find that you need a “warm introduction” to land a meeting with a VC. Given the above parallel with hiring, that’s a problem.

Warm intros are awful for diversity, so why do investors keep insisting on them? by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/5scADBM
via IFTTT

Warm intros are awful for diversity, so why do investors keep insisting on them?

There are oodles of advantages to having a diverse workforce, but, as inBeta founder James Nash points out, you can’t simply take your homogenous workforce, add diversity, stir and hope for the best.

Often, something subtle gets in the way of diversity at startups: Companies depend on employee referrals in the beginning, but if a startup’s makeup is already not diverse, referrals aren’t going to change that.

That’s for startups. In the world of venture capital, things are more pronounced: A warm introduction is the only way to get in front of investors at many VC funds. That’s great for people who are already hooked into the startup ecosystem, but you don’t have to look for very long to realize that this is not a very diverse group of people.

“We’d love to hear from you. The best way to reach us is through someone we mutually know.” A VC firm's website

For many companies, employee referrals are one of the main ways to attract new talent. That’s all good until you stop to think who your newest hire is likely to know best. It doesn’t take many rounds through that particular mill until you end up with a relatively homogenous group of people with similar education, socioeconomic backgrounds and values.

If that’s what you’re optimizing for, great! Well done. If it isn’t, perhaps it’s time to stop being lazy and question why warm intros are still common practice.

My question has long been: What are you optimizing for by relying on referrals? If you spend some time thinking about that, I bet you’d unearth some uncomfortable unintended consequences.

Let’s talk about what we can do about it.

The situation in VC

If you read any guides about startups or raising money (including my own, although I also try to cover cold emails and cold intros), you’ll find that you need a “warm introduction” to land a meeting with a VC. Given the above parallel with hiring, that’s a problem.

Warm intros are awful for diversity, so why do investors keep insisting on them? by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

source https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/30/warm-intros-suck-for-vc/

‘Buy American’ shouldn’t block our progress toward ‘Internet for All’

Kim Keenan Contributor

The first female co-chair of the DC-based Internet Innovation Alliance, Kim Keenan has fought for digital equity for more than a decade, previously serving as president and CEO of the Multicultural Media, Telecom & Internet Council (MMTC) and as general counsel and secretary of the NAACP.

The finish line is within sight. “Internet for All,” as the Biden administration put it, will soon be a reality if America keeps its priorities straight.

During his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden set a high bar, “We’re going to buy American,” as the U.S. spends billions of dollars on new broadband connections. This is a smart strategy to create American jobs and boost the U.S. economy, but our leaders must not sacrifice speed in the race to close the digital divide in cases where “Buy American” isn’t yet a realistic option.

Strengthened during the pandemic when all finally understood that broadband is a necessity, bipartisan cooperation brought America a once-in-a-generation opportunity to achieve universal connectivity. To date, more than $90 billion has been earmarked by Congress and the administration to finish the private sector’s work of connecting every home in America with broadband internet service.

During this sprint toward “Internet for All,” America’s leaders should avoid creating hurdles that will delay progress.

Under the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, for example, every participating state — as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia — will receive a minimum of $100 million for internet infrastructure, with more to be doled out based on each state’s proportional number of unserved locations. Cartesian estimates that fiber providers will contribute another $22 billion in funds for $64 billion in total, which is “sufficient to achieve the program’s availability goal” of making broadband service “available to all eligible locations.” That’s a first.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), signed into law by President Biden on November 15, 2021, also included $14.2 billion for the Affordable Connectivity Program, which has helped over 17 million American families pay for a home broadband connection that they otherwise would struggle to afford. What’s more, the bill set aside $2.75 billion for Digital Equity programs; $2 billion for the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program; $2 billion for the Rural Utilities Service Distance Learning, Telemedicine and Broadband Program; and $1 billion for a new Middle Mile grant program. This truly is broadband’s moment in the sun.

During this sprint toward “Internet for All,” America’s leaders should avoid creating hurdles that will delay progress. Every American deserves to have the chance to “attend class, start a small business, visit with their doctor, and participate in the modern economy.”

The Build America Buy America Act, which was enacted as part of the IIJA, requires infrastructure projects (including internet infrastructure funded by the BEAD Program) to use domestically sourced materials. But broadband networks are complex; they’re more than just fiber cables. Some essential pieces of the puzzle like certain electronic products aren’t currently manufactured in America and the components that make up those products are not available in the United States.

We should always do our best to honor President Biden’s goal to “Buy American,” but not at the expense of leaving Americans offline while they wait for every switch, router and radio to be made in the U.S. After all, the Government Accountability Office recently estimated that the BEAD Program alone could create 23,000 jobs for skilled telecommunications workers … just to build out the infrastructure. Spending will predominantly go toward U.S. paychecks and balance sheets, even if we need to rely on foreign manufacturers for a limited number of network components.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo recently announced that CommScope and Corning are investing nearly $550 million and creating hundreds of new jobs in America to build fiber optic cables. Although the Obama administration provided a blanket “Buy American” waiver for IT products in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), recognizing that the U.S. share of global computer and electronics output had dropped 8.2 percentage points between 1999 and 2009, the Biden administration is right to seek a solution that is balanced, maximizing U.S. production when possible while permitting select network components to be sourced from outside our borders when necessary.

There are so many good things happening to close the digital divide, including the Federal Communications Commission recently devoting $66 million to Affordable Broadband Outreach Grants. Let’s not lose that momentum. Let’s not sacrifice the great for the perfect.

It’s time for the Biden administration to guard against the unintended consequences of the “Buy American” ideal and keep its eye on the prize: Everyone in America — including communities of color, rural communities and older Americans — needs broadband now.

‘Buy American’ shouldn’t block our progress toward ‘Internet for All’ by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

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via IFTTT

Spend management space sees a large raise, and layoffs, in the same week

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, we’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 our job to stay on top of it — and make sense of it — so you can stay in the know. 

About a year ago, it seemed like myself and other colleagues were writing story after story about spend management companies raising tranches of venture capital — remember Mary Ann’s roundup story from basically this same time last year?

On Friday, PitchBook’s Q1 2023 B2B fintech investment report showed that investment into enterprise fintech was $11.8 billion. Though it is a decrease from the same quarter in 2022, it was above the first quarter of 2021. And compared to the shrinking of quarter-to-quarter investments for the rest of 2022, the $11.8 billion shows a boost of confidence from investors, and dare we say a comeback?

Those figures are certainly proving themselves in stories we’ve been working on lately that show some spend management companies continue to do well in raising money and generating revenue. One of those is Clara, a spend management company based in Mexico that announced $60 million in new funding last week. Gerry Giacomán Colyer, Clara’s co-founder and CEO, told me the company is working with over 10,000 customers across Latin America and that its annual run rate of 5 million credit card transactions is equivalent to $1 billion.

He also noted that “over 10x in transactional volume is coming from revenue. With Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, we are covering two-thirds of LatAm’s GDP.” Giacomán Colyer also expects continued 2x month over month growth through the end of the year.

Meanwhile, last month, Mary Ann wrote about Ramp’s 4x revenue growth in 2022. She spoke to co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman, who described the successful results “as a desire on the part of companies of all sizes and stages seeking to save money by managing their spend better.”

However, despite the seemingly good times the spend management sector is currently experiencing, we learned this week that not everyone is popping bottles. Axios reported last week that Teampay, a corporate card company, confirmed it laid off 30% of its 100-person staff “in two instances in recent months.”

This comes five months after colleague Kyle Wiggers reported that Teampay secured $47 million in equity and debt. Perhaps founder and CEO Andrew Hoag inadvertently forecasted the layoffs when he told Kyle, “Teampay’s software-led approach has proven resilient — as we saw in late 2020 to 2021, when the economy rebounds, Teampay benefits disproportionately through accelerated growth.” If that’s true, maybe the opposite is also true: When the economy doesn’t do so well, maybe Teampay doesn’t do so well either?

Despite Teampay’s setback, the numbers are showing it’s still a space to watch. We’ll keep an eye on it for you.

Now I’m throwing it over to Mary Ann, who got the scoop on Navan’s growth metrics. — Christine

Clara’s co-founders Diego Iván García Escobedo and Gerry Giacomán Colyer Image Credits: Clara

Navan’s chatbot, growth and IPO plans

A few weeks ago I talked to Ariel Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Navan (formerly TripActions), about that company’s growth. For the unacquainted, Navan was initially focused on travel expense management before accelerating efforts on its general spend management offering in 2020 after its revenue literally dropped to zero when the pandemic hit.

Highlights of the conversation include Ariel sharing some impressive growth metrics:

Spend volume processed via Navan Expense in the first quarter of 2023 grew more than 3x compared to Q1 2022 — and by 4.7x when looking at the 12 consecutive months ending in March 2023, as compared to the 12 months preceding. Also, the company touts that recent calendar year volume is nearly 80x that of the first full year of the Navan Expense product launch. Revenue-wise, Navan says it saw “3x YoY revenue growth.”

I also asked Ariel if Navan was still planning to go public considering it filed confidentially to do so in September of last year. His answer: “I think eventually we will be a public company. We’ve raised around $1.4 billion to date and maturity wise, we are there, to be public. Growthwise, we are growing extremely fast, and a lot of our metrics would support being public. I don’t think the market is there right now.”

I also got a demo from CTO and co-founder Ilan Twig of just how Navan is using ChatGPT within its new offering, which is essentially a CFO dashboard, the company says. It was very interesting to see firsthand how its chatbot, Ava, works. Ilan was almost like a child with a new toy, honestly, giddily showing me how the bot could provide insight as to which hotels employees had used the most within a given time period in a given city, and other details such as did they get a corporate negotiated rate, or not? It even produced graphs! At one point, Ilan did have to reword his prompt but it was cool to see how the chatbot could respond to questions sequentially based on previous prompts. Navan’s goal is to help replace data analysts at companies, it says, ultimately helping them save money in more ways than one.

A recent panel at Fintech Meetup in Las Vegas in March — made up of Mesh Payments co-founder and CEO Oded Zehavi; Michael Sindicich, EVP and general manager of Navan Expense; and Michael Tannenbaum, COO and CFO at Brex — also touched on the topic of innovation in the space — all agreeing on the importance of globalization, automation and travel expense as a category.

This quote from Zehavi of Mesh Payments (which raised its own $60 million funding round last September) sums up pretty well the potential for spend management companies: “We were all playing a game of musical chairs. When it was very happy music, many companies in our space got a lot of funding, even though their fundamentals were not so strong. And now the music has stopped, some of us have chairs, but others don’t…The fact that we are connected to the accounting system, we see all the employees, we sit in the middle between the employees, the finance team, and the vendors, is an amazing position for us to leverage and start offering more and more services under the stack of the CFO that we’ll be able to monetize.” — Mary Ann

Anthemis’ layoffs — an outlier or a ‘sign of what’s to come’?

Last week, I published a scoop on fintech-focused VC firm Anthemis having laid off 28% of its staff, or 16 people, earlier this year as part of a restructuring. While 16 people may not seem like a lot, when it comes to venture firms, it actually is. It’s not typical, or often, that we see such large cuts at one time. Anthemis is an active investor, having backed the likes of eToro and Betterment. It’s also had a couple of recent stumbles in Pipe and Daylight. So the news of its staff reduction came as a bit of a surprise. (These are among the least fun types of scoops.) One thing that struck me is that after publishing the story, a founder reached out expressing concern about perception around Farhan Lalji — a former managing director at Anthemis — being among those affected by the cuts. That founder wrote me a note saying that while at Anthemis, “Farhan was the first VC to believe in” his company. “And there’s no way we’d be where we are today without him,” he added. Anyway, I have since learned that Farhan has branched out to start his own firm, LTV Capital.

Interestingly, there was a lot of chatter on Twitter as to whether these layoffs were an outlier in the industry or “a sign of what’s to come.” It’s hard to say. There could be other similar cuts taking place at other venture firms, and we just don’t know about them. But as Alex pointed out in last week’s episode of the Equity podcast, if firms are investing less, wouldn’t it make sense that they would need less staff?

Meanwhile, a couple of days after my story ran, Anthemis announced that it secured additional capital from institutions such as Visa and BMO for its Female Innovators Lab (FIL) Fund. In a statement, the firm said: “Anchored by Barclays, with investment from Aviva, the fund now totals $50 million, making it the largest early-stage fintech fund focused on female founders. With this latest raise, the fund will invest in additional early-stage companies and continue its focus on designing, sourcing, and scaling female-founded embedded finance startups.” — Mary Ann

Ansa’s virtual wallet for merchants

Having covered fintech now for a few years, it’s less and less often that I come across companies building technology that feels, well, unique. But this week, I wrote about a startup building something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen before: virtual wallets for merchants. It sounds simple, right? But it’s not, or else we’d see a lot more of it outside the Starbucks of the world. Interesting backstory: Sophia Goldberg, a former Adyen product manager, had this idea for a company but was looking for a technical co-founder. Bain Capital Ventures partner Christina Melas-Kyriazi ended up introducing Sophia to JT Cho, a software engineer she’d worked with at Affirm.

The two self-proclaimed “payments nerds” hit it off famously and went on to raise $5.4 million for Ansa. Besides Bain, other backers include Nimi Katragadda at Box Group; Nichole Wischoff at Wischoff Ventures; Cambrian Ventures; the Fintech Fund; Susa Ventures; and angels such as Plaid co-founder and CEO Zach Perret; Gokul Rajaram and the founders of Alloy; among others. I tend to always root for the underdog, so the fact that Ansa aims to help small businesses like coffee shops and quick-service restaurants (and down the line, they say, enterprises) save money on fees and better retain customers made me happy. Read more here. — Mary Ann

Image Credits: Ansa

Other news

A super interesting feature from Catherine Shu: “Southeast Asia is already home to a thriving fintech scene, where Grab, GoTo and Sea have built super apps that encompass financial services, and startups like Xendit, Akulaku and Dana (to name a few) have raised hundreds of millions of dollars for payments, banking services and other financial tools. Indonesia and Malaysia, in the heart of Southeast Asia, are among the countries with the largest Muslim populations in the world. These factors are proving fertile ground for establishing and growing fintechs that focus exclusively on Islamic finance, offering products and services that follow shariah law.” More here.

Mary Ann wrote about how Shopify has teamed up with Israeli B2B payments startup Melio to launch a new bill pay tool designed to allow U.S.-based merchant customers to manage their expenses and vendors via its platform. It’s another step in Shopify’s plan to straddle the intersection of fintech and commerce, noted Shruti Patel, global head of merchant services partnerships and monetization at Shopify. The rationale behind the new feature plays to the notion that if merchants can spend less time on tedious tasks such as consolidating their invoices and paying bills, they can spend more time focusing on growing their businesses. It also was in part driven by merchants asking for money movement capabilities, Patel told TechCrunch in an interview. More here.

Smart analysis from Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm: “While the banking world watches American lender First Republic publicly convulse after its earnings report detailed a widespread evaporation of its deposit base, the startup world of neobanks is taking blows as well. Earlier this week, Revolut, a highly valued, U.K.-based neobank saw its valuation decline by some 46% in the eyes of one of its backers…Revolut’s revaluation raises a few questions: How much trimming is there left to do in the fintech world? And, are we likely to see something similar more generally in the neobanking startup sector?” More here.

Speaking of banks, Alex first took a look at First Republic’s tanking stock and deposits earlier in the week: “Shares of First Republic Bank are off 29% in early-morning trading Tuesday as investors digest its first-quarter earnings results, which came out Monday after the bell. The bank reported revenue and profit above analysts’ expectations, but for investors, other concerns outweighed the good results. Chief among those concerns is a massive decline in the bank’s deposit base. The bank closed 2022 with $176.4 billion worth of deposits against $166.9 billion in loans, but by the end of Q1 2023, it had $104.5 billion in deposits against $173.3 billion in loans.” More here.

By Friday, unfortunately for First Republic, the stock had tanked even further at the threat of government intervention. And, listen to Mary Ann, Alex and Natasha riff on just how much the Silicon Valley Bank debacle played a role in all this on the Equity podcast.

Contributor and fintech consultant Grant Easterbrook takes a look at three fintech concepts that, in his view, “initially seemed promising but largely failed to change the financial services industry.” You may agree. You may not. Either way, it’s a good read. More here.

Reports Rebecca Bellan: “Uber Freight, the logistics business spun out of Uber in 2018, is partnering with transportation fintech startup AtoB to offer carriers fuel cards and spend management software. AtoB, a four-year-old company that has been described as Stripe for transportation, offers an integrated financial platform based around its core product of a fuel card for truckers. Unlike other fuel cards offered by competitors like Brex and Fleetcor, AtoB’s fuel card is based on the Visa platform, so payments are more likely to be accepted at a wider range of fuel retailers. There are also no hidden or annual fees, according to the company.” More here.

Christine spoke with Stripe’s Vivek Sharma, head of revenue and finance automation, about the financial infrastructure company’s updates to its revenue and finance automation suite that included new billing features, tax API and revenue reporting tool. “It’ll lead us into the larger trend that’s happening in what we call the ‘revenue front office and finance back office,’” Sharma said. “These are considered to be disconnected systems, so Stripe has had a rare privilege of sitting right in the middle.” TechCrunch reported earlier this month that Stripe processed $817 billion in transactions in 2022 and is now valued at $50 billion after raising $6.5 billion in March.

More headlines 

PatientFi launches membership platform for aesthetics practices

Adyen, Olo to address financial challenges within hospitality

Female Invest: Meet the women taking on the gender finance gap

Wise launches new interest feature for US customers, bolstering multi-currency account (TechCrunch covered Wise’s name change from TransferWise amid the company going public in 2021.)

ACI and MagicCube to deliver ‘seamless’ contactless payments for commercial off-the-shelf devices (TechCrunch covered MagicCube’ $15 million raise and plan to ‘replace all chips’ in October of 2021.)

Frank founder moved millions of dollars out of JPMorgan after she was accused of defrauding the Wall Street giant—and put it in Signature Bank – The saga continues. Last we reported, Charlie Javice had been charged with fraud by the SEC.

Fundings and M&A

Seen on TechCrunch

Korean fintech Kakao Pay to acquire majority stake in US brokerage firm Siebert

Summer’s student debt repayment tools continue blooming with $6M Series A extension

And elsewhere

The Fintech Funding Crunch In 4 Charts

Financing platform Fairplay adds more than 100 million dollars to support new ventures (Christine covered the company’s January 2022 $35 million debt and equity raise here.)

Neobank creator Fintech Farm raises $22M

TheGuarantors snares $35m in growth financing

Digital insurance market Policygenius to be acquired by Eldridge’s Zinnia

Belvo acquires Skilopay to enter payments market in Brazil

Secro raises $3.6M in seed funding

Dori launches out of stealth with $2M in funding and a suite of VC automation products 

That’s it for this week! Thank you all again for reading, and for your continued support! Hope you’re having a fabulous and fun-filled weekend! xoxo, Mary Ann and Christine

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Spend management space sees a large raise, and layoffs, in the same week by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

source https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/30/spend-management-space-sees-a-large-raise-and-layoffs-in-the-same-week/

‘Buy American’ shouldn’t block our progress toward ‘Internet for All’

Kim Keenan Contributor

The first female co-chair of the DC-based Internet Innovation Alliance, Kim Keenan has fought for digital equity for more than a decade, previously serving as president and CEO of the Multicultural Media, Telecom & Internet Council (MMTC) and as general counsel and secretary of the NAACP.

The finish line is within sight. “Internet for All,” as the Biden administration put it, will soon be a reality if America keeps its priorities straight.

During his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden set a high bar, “We’re going to buy American,” as the U.S. spends billions of dollars on new broadband connections. This is a smart strategy to create American jobs and boost the U.S. economy, but our leaders must not sacrifice speed in the race to close the digital divide in cases where “Buy American” isn’t yet a realistic option.

Strengthened during the pandemic when all finally understood that broadband is a necessity, bipartisan cooperation brought America a once-in-a-generation opportunity to achieve universal connectivity. To date, more than $90 billion has been earmarked by Congress and the administration to finish the private sector’s work of connecting every home in America with broadband internet service.

During this sprint toward “Internet for All,” America’s leaders should avoid creating hurdles that will delay progress.

Under the $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program, for example, every participating state — as well as Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia — will receive a minimum of $100 million for internet infrastructure, with more to be doled out based on each state’s proportional number of unserved locations. Cartesian estimates that fiber providers will contribute another $22 billion in funds for $64 billion in total, which is “sufficient to achieve the program’s availability goal” of making broadband service “available to all eligible locations.” That’s a first.

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), signed into law by President Biden on November 15, 2021, also included $14.2 billion for the Affordable Connectivity Program, which has helped over 17 million American families pay for a home broadband connection that they otherwise would struggle to afford. What’s more, the bill set aside $2.75 billion for Digital Equity programs; $2 billion for the Tribal Broadband Connectivity Program; $2 billion for the Rural Utilities Service Distance Learning, Telemedicine and Broadband Program; and $1 billion for a new Middle Mile grant program. This truly is broadband’s moment in the sun.

During this sprint toward “Internet for All,” America’s leaders should avoid creating hurdles that will delay progress. Every American deserves to have the chance to “attend class, start a small business, visit with their doctor, and participate in the modern economy.”

The Build America Buy America Act, which was enacted as part of the IIJA, requires infrastructure projects (including internet infrastructure funded by the BEAD Program) to use domestically sourced materials. But broadband networks are complex; they’re more than just fiber cables. Some essential pieces of the puzzle like certain electronic products aren’t currently manufactured in America and the components that make up those products are not available in the United States.

We should always do our best to honor President Biden’s goal to “Buy American,” but not at the expense of leaving Americans offline while they wait for every switch, router and radio to be made in the U.S. After all, the Government Accountability Office recently estimated that the BEAD Program alone could create 23,000 jobs for skilled telecommunications workers … just to build out the infrastructure. Spending will predominantly go toward U.S. paychecks and balance sheets, even if we need to rely on foreign manufacturers for a limited number of network components.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo recently announced that CommScope and Corning are investing nearly $550 million and creating hundreds of new jobs in America to build fiber optic cables. Although the Obama administration provided a blanket “Buy American” waiver for IT products in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), recognizing that the U.S. share of global computer and electronics output had dropped 8.2 percentage points between 1999 and 2009, the Biden administration is right to seek a solution that is balanced, maximizing U.S. production when possible while permitting select network components to be sourced from outside our borders when necessary.

There are so many good things happening to close the digital divide, including the Federal Communications Commission recently devoting $66 million to Affordable Broadband Outreach Grants. Let’s not lose that momentum. Let’s not sacrifice the great for the perfect.

It’s time for the Biden administration to guard against the unintended consequences of the “Buy American” ideal and keep its eye on the prize: Everyone in America — including communities of color, rural communities and older Americans — needs broadband now.

‘Buy American’ shouldn’t block our progress toward ‘Internet for All’ by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

source https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/30/buy-american-shouldnt-block-our-progress-toward-internet-for-all/

As the US cracks down on crypto, Hong Kong extends a warm welcome

On a balmy day in mid-April, thousands of people queued in line to enter the Hong Kong Convention Center where the city’s inaugural web3 festival was underway. Most had flown in from mainland China, but many others had trekked from Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand and even the U.S. to see what the city had to offer to crypto ventures at a time regulation over digital assets is intensifying in the U.S.

In February, Hong Kong proposed a set of welcoming rules to regulate crypto-related activities. Under the new legal regime, retail investors will be allowed to trade certain digital assets on licensed exchanges, replacing a 2018 framework that restricted trading to only accredited investors.

The city is also paving the way to legalize stablecoins. One startup, which is backed by popular exchange KuCoin and USDC issuer Circle, recently launched an offshore Chinese yuan (CNH)-pegged stablecoin, the first of its kind in Greater China.

To create a favorable environment for web3 businesses, the city is facilitating communication between banks and crypto startups, many of which are scrambling to find alternatives following Silvergate Bank’s meltdown.

These moves are contrasting with Beijing’s heavy-handed crackdown on the crypto industry; they also highlight the degree to which the former British colony enjoys policy exceptions in certain areas, such as finance.

In 2021, China outlawed all forms of crypto transactions, sending the country’s web3 entrepreneurs fleeing to more web3-friendly jurisdictions like Singapore. With Hong Kong extending a welcoming hand to digital assets, many Chinese founders in self-exile are weighing the option of setting up in the city. Companies from the West are also evaluating Hong Kong as a potential outpost for their Asia expansion.

At the weeklong Hong Kong web3 festival, TechCrunch talked to a dozen participants from the web3 realm, including investors, nascent startups, and established players, as well as “traditional” web2 tech giants, to gauge Hong Kong’s attractiveness as the next crypto hub.

Some believe the new regulatory regime will spawn a new wave of crypto innovation. They feel reassured that they can now operate as a legitimate business on Chinese soil and are quick to tap the government’s policy support, such as subsidized office space for crypto ventures.

Others are more hesitant to accept the olive branch. As Asia’s financial center, Hong Kong doesn’t historically have a vibrant tech ecosystem and is too expensive for most scrappy startups, so the types of crypto businesses it attracts will likely be those serving and interfacing with traditional finance, they reckon.

The East rises

The timing is favorable for Hong Kong’s friendly move on crypto, said Shixing Mao, co-founder and CEO at Cobo, a Singapore-headquartered digital asset custody solution backed by DST Global.

“The tightening of regulation in the U.S. after the FTX implosion has a few consequences. In the past, several American banks played the key role of linking the traditional and crypto worlds, but that link is now broken, which presents a great opportunity for Hong Kong to step up,” said Mao, who is amicably known as ‘Discus Fish’ in the crypto community.

“Hong Kong has always been at the intersection of the East and West and played the important role as the bridge to enter China,” observed Lily King, chief operating officer at Cobo.

That advantage was already proven before. Hong Kong played an important role in the early development of the crypto industry by drawing once-influential exchanges like FTX and Bitmex to set up shops there. Following China’s crypto clampdown, FTX moved to the Bahamas for its friendlier and clearer regulatory stance towards the new asset class.

Hong Kong is regaining some attention from the West. Stephen Cheung, president at decentralized social network Bi.social, flew all the way from the U.S. east coast to Hong Kong to feel the pulse on the ground.

“As an American Born Chinese whose parents grew up in Hong Kong, I am extremely optimistic about the open door policy for crypto in Hong Kong,” he said. Nonetheless, Cheung believed that if American crypto firms are going to leave the country, “they will stay within the western hemisphere.”

“Hong Kong has the possibility [of attracting Western firms] only because the U.S. is currently openly hostile towards web3 companies,” he said, adding that the city will be more appealing to other Asia-based companies before it will have any significant influence on the West.

Indeed, Hong Kong is increasingly on the radar of crypto businesses in Singapore, many of which had come from China after the country’s crackdown on crypto. Now the tide is turning.

“After FTX’s implosion, the Singapore government has grown more cautious towards crypto. Hong Kong, on the other hand, is trying to attract talent and companies to build the basic infrastructure of the crypto industry,” said Luke Huang, director of business development at Safeheron, a digital asset self-custody solution provider that is based in Singapore but recently set up an office in Hong Kong.

Confidence booster

For the most part, people are praising the Hong Kong government for providing more regulatory clarity on the crypto industry. But they are interpreting Hong Kong’s open arms differently. Some view the move as a sudden shift in the government’s attitude, while others see it as a reflection of the city’s policy consistency.

HashKey Capital, one of the world’s largest web3 venture capital firms that recently closed a $500 million Fund III, belongs to the latter camp.

The fund, which is Ethereum’s first institutional investor, set up in Hong Kong back in 2017 and has kept its office there since. “What we have seen [in Hong Kong] over the years is a relatively consistent government direction and sustainable policy,” said Chao Deng, the firm’s CEO. “The latest move is more of an update of the licensing regime.”

Conflux, a Layer 1 blockchain that claims to be the only crypto company allowed to operate in China since the industry crackdown, was also put at ease after meeting various Hong Kong government delegates during the web3 festival.

“Hong Kong is showing a tremendous amount of support for web3 development,” said Zhang Yuanjie, co-founder at Conflux. “From legislators and InvestHK [the city’s department of foreign direct investment] to its financial secretary and monetary authority, everyone is serious about supporting the crypto industry.”

Even though Hong Kong’s new web3 regulation seems more favorable towards transaction-focused crypto services, there’s room for infrastructure builders, reckoned Huang from Safeheron.

“Anyone entering the crypto industry needs cybersecurity infrastructure, whether it’s a traditional or web3 native company. Now that Hong Kong’s financial institutions might start integrating crypto-related products, we can play the role of helping to onboard them,” he said.

China’s Big Tech is riding Hong Kong’s crypto wave, too. Alibaba and Tencent were both present at the web3 festival with representatives from their cloud computing units. Like AWS, they want to get a headstart and be the decentralized world’s go-to cloud provider. Even if the nascent industry won’t likely generate any meaningful revenue anytime soon, the tech giants evidently don’t want to miss out on an industry that keeps luring capital and talent from traditional industries.

Wait and see

The web3 festival, with its teeming conference room and lavish boat parties, appears to be a euphoric celebration of the city’s new crypto regime. But not all attendees are hot-headed. One investor from a prominent China-focused venture capital firm, who declined to be named, said he wasn’t looking to source deals at the event because “it’s not where the real technical developers hang out.”

Three Chinese web3 founders who have moved to Singapore and declined to be named said they were in Hong Kong simply to catch up with partners and investors and would “wait and see” before drawing any conclusion on the city’s level of crypto-friendliness.

Those who tend to be the most passionate about Hong Kong’s new crypto regulation are fund managers, stock traders, and others in traditional finance, observed Rachel Lin, CEO and co-founder of SynFutures.

“It’s not that they feel so much for crypto, but it’s more about looking for the next investable assets. Right now, the financial markets are slowing and they can’t find any other alternative assets,” said Lin. Prior to running the DeFi protocol, she worked in the global markets division at Deutsche Bank, managed overseas payments solutions at Ant Group and was a founding partner of major crypto lender Matrixport.

“Crypto is very much close to what they’ve been doing in finance, unlike AI or biotech, which is something remote for them. I think the positive signal from the government also boosts their confidence,” she said.

It comes as no surprise that Hong Kong is vouching for a fledgling industry that plays to its strength. In recent years, the city has seen an exodus of multinational corporations and local talent as it undergoes a string of political events.

“Hong Kong has hit a big bottleneck in traditional industries like finance and real estate, so it’s in dire need of young talent and new blood to revitalize its economy,” said King. “Given the foundation it laid for the finance sector, focusing on digital assets is its best and only option going forward.”

Hong Kong is charting its own web3 path despite China’s anti-crypto stance

As the US cracks down on crypto, Hong Kong extends a warm welcome by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

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Edtech giant Byju’s under India’s financial crime agency radar

India’s crime-fighting agency searched three premises of edtech giant Byju’s and its founder Byju Raveendran, it said Saturday, and seized various “incriminating” documents and digital data.

The Enforcement Directorate said it conducted the searches under the provisions of the nation’s anti-money laundering law, but declined to elaborate. The agency has conducted several similar probes in recent months, including at crypto firms WazirX and CoinSwitch Kuber, phonemaker Vivo and news broadcaster the BBC.

The agency said “various” complaints from private individuals prompted the investigation. As part of the probe into Byju’s, which is ongoing, ED said it summoned Raveendran “several” times but the founder “remained evasive and never appeared during the investigation.”

The probe has so far found that Byju’s raised about $3.4 billion in foreign direct investment during the period of 2011 to 2023. During this period, the startup remitted about $1.1 billion to foreign entities and labeled about $115 million as advertisement and marketing expense.

It appears that part of what prompted ED to conduct the investigation was the delayed filing of annual financials by Byju’s. The so-called findings — how much money Byju’s raised, and later invested in overseas units — have been widely disclosed by Byju’s and reported by media earlier.

“The company has not prepared its financial statements since financial year 2020-21 and has not got the accounts, audited which is mandatory. Hence, the genuineness of the figures provided by the company are being cross examined from the banks,” ED said in a statement Sunday.

The Bengaluru-headquartered Byju’s, which is India’s most valuable startup and which counts BlackRock, Sequoia India, Lightspeed Venture Partners India, UBS among its backers, termed the searches by the agency as “a routine inquiry,” and said the startup maintains complete transparency with the authorities.

“We have nothing but the utmost confidence in the integrity of our operations, and we are committed to upholding the highest standards of compliance and ethics. We will continue to work closely with the authorities to ensure that they have all the information they need, and we are confident that this matter will be resolved in a timely and satisfactory manner. We want to emphasize that it is business as usual at Byju’s,” a spokesperson of Byju’s legal team said in a statement.

“We are committed to delivering high-quality educational products and services to our customers across India and the world. We remain focused on our mission to transform the way students learn and prepare for their future.”

ED’s statement comes at a time when Byju’s is closing a large funding round and is gearing up for the IPO of its subsidiary unit physical tutor chain Aakash.

Edtech giant Byju’s under India’s financial crime agency radar by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

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Edtech giant Byju’s under India’s financial crime agency radar

India’s crime-fighting agency searched three premises of edtech giant Byju’s and its founder Byju Raveendran, it said Saturday, and seized various “incriminating” documents and digital data.

The Enforcement Directorate said it conducted the searches under the provisions of the nation’s anti-money laundering law, but declined to elaborate. The agency has conducted several similar probes in recent months, including at crypto firms WazirX and CoinSwitch Kuber, phonemaker Vivo and news broadcaster the BBC.

The agency said “various” complaints from private individuals prompted the investigation. As part of the probe into Byju’s, which is ongoing, ED said it summoned Raveendran “several” times but the founder “remained evasive and never appeared during the investigation.”

The probe has so far found that Byju’s raised about $3.4 billion in foreign direct investment during the period of 2011 to 2023. During this period, the startup remitted about $1.1 billion to foreign entities and labeled about $115 million as advertisement and marketing expense.

It appears that part of what prompted ED to conduct the investigation was the delayed filing of annual financials by Byju’s. The so-called findings — how much money Byju’s raised, and later invested in overseas units — have been widely disclosed by Byju’s and reported by media earlier.

“The company has not prepared its financial statements since financial year 2020-21 and has not got the accounts, audited which is mandatory. Hence, the genuineness of the figures provided by the company are being cross examined from the banks,” ED said in a statement Sunday.

The Bengaluru-headquartered Byju’s, which is India’s most valuable startup and which counts BlackRock, Sequoia India, Lightspeed Venture Partners India, UBS among its backers, termed the searches by the agency as “a routine inquiry,” and said the startup maintains complete transparency with the authorities.

“We have nothing but the utmost confidence in the integrity of our operations, and we are committed to upholding the highest standards of compliance and ethics. We will continue to work closely with the authorities to ensure that they have all the information they need, and we are confident that this matter will be resolved in a timely and satisfactory manner. We want to emphasize that it is business as usual at Byju’s,” a spokesperson of Byju’s legal team said in a statement.

“We are committed to delivering high-quality educational products and services to our customers across India and the world. We remain focused on our mission to transform the way students learn and prepare for their future.”

ED’s statement comes at a time when Byju’s is closing a large funding round and is gearing up for the IPO of its subsidiary unit physical tutor chain Aakash.

Edtech giant Byju’s under India’s financial crime agency radar by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

source https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/28/edtech-giant-byjus-founder-under-india-crime-fighting-agency-radar/

OpenAI closes its monster $10B funding round at $27B-29B valuation

OpenAI, the startup behind the widely used conversational AI model ChatGPT, has closed its new funding round of over $10.3 billion, TechCrunch has learned.

VC firms including Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global are in the round, according to documents seen by TechCrunch. A source tells us Founders Fund is also investing. Altogether the VCs have put in just over $300 million at a valuation of $27 billion – $29 billion. This is alongside a big investment from Microsoft announced earlier this year, a person familiar with the development told TechCrunch. The size of Microsoft’s investment is believed to be around $10 billion, a figure we confirmed with our source.

If all this is accurate, this is the closing of the round that the Wall Street Journal reported was in the works in January. We confirmed that was when discussions started, amid a viral surge of interest in OpenAI and its business.

While Microsoft’s investment comes with a strong strategic angle — the tech giant is working to integrate OpenAI’s tech across a number of areas of its business — the VCs are coming in as financial backers.

From what we understand, the term sheets have been signed by investors and the money’s been transferred; still to come is countersigning from OpenAI. The plan was to make this investment public next week.

Altogether, outside investors now own more than 30% of OpenAI.

According to PitchBook data, it appears that Peter Thiel had already been a backer but it seems this is the first time Founders Fund will be investing; K2 Global, a firm with just one partner, Ozi Amanat, and Thrive are also first-time backers of the startup. From PitchBook data, it looks like Sequoia, A16Z and Tiger Global had been earlier investors in the company but they’d sold stakes; this latest investment would bring them back in.

A number of firms, including Tiger and Sequoia, have had some knocks as a result of the financial crisis the tech sector has seen in the last year; in general, a number of VCs have massively slowed down their investing pace, sitting on so-called “dry powder” waiting for a better climate, and maybe better opportunities.

So at a moment when investors are on the hunt for interesting AI startups to back, OpenAI is likely seen as the kind of opportunity that looks good right now.

“They’re probably trying to use this [funding] to say hey, look, we found a golden apple,” a source said of the decision to back OpenAI here and now. “Venture is a very strange place where anything can happen. You can go big to broke to big again, at any time.”

OpenAI has an army of technical teams working across a range of areas, but the area that has attracted a lot of attention of late is GPT, short for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which is OpenAI’s family of large language models used by third parties by way of APIs.

There is also ChatGPT, the generative AI service that OpenAI released at the end of November 2022 based on GPT that lets anyone type out a natural question and get a cogent, detailed answer. ChatGPT has been a certifiable hit, with more than 1 billion visitors to its website in February, says SimilarWeb — and that’s not including those using that tech via third parties.

Generative AI is very much all the rage right now, but OpenAI has its controversies, too, with many focused on that buzzy, consumer-facing ChatGPT product. People have questioned whether it lies, whether it is a “virus“, how it handles privacy, if it can be manipulated to be toxic, or commit libel; and in the wake of so many more rushing into AI development, even the very nature of how “open” OpenAI’s GPT branding will be longer term has come up for discussion.

In fairness, OpenAI has acknowledged the work that still needs to be done, and meanwhile it’s continued to develop services and iterate. In February, the startup introduced a paid version of ChatGPT, called ChatGPT Plus with a faster user experience. It was upgraded with multimodal LLM GPT-4 in March.

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

Key to the proposition, OpenAI’s valuation, and the likely interest of investors is that, alongside the technology, there is also a rapidly developing ecosystem around that tech.

In addition to the hundreds of millions of people who have played around with ChatGPT, hundreds of businesses large and small have started deploying GPT and ChatGPT into their products and services. That has also been a fillip to other big tech companies speed up the roll out of their own efforts in generative AI. Google has launched Bard and Meta also introduced LLaMA to take on GPT with its proprietary LLM.

OpenAI, however, has some undeniable gravity amidst the competition, not least because of its singular focus on the AI space since its founding in 2015. That’s been even as it has gone through some significant changes — including shifting from its original non-profit model. We don’t really know if AI will precipitate the seismic shift that many say it will, but as one person put it: OpenAI may be the closest thing we have to a winner in the space right now.

“We’ve been working on it for so long, but it’s with gradually increasing confidence that it’s really going to work,” co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said at an AI conference earlier this month. “We’ve been [building] the company for seven years. These things take a long, long time. I would say by and large in terms of why it worked when others haven’t: It’s just because we’ve been on the grind sweating every detail for a long time. And most people aren’t willing to do that.”

In addition to ChatGPT, OpenAI has its AI-based image-generation tool called Dall-E that received a significant update in July last year. It also has speech recognition model Whisper AI.

Microsoft’s efforts have included integrating OpenAI’s APIs with its Azure infrastructure to support the computational requirements of the models. It also in March announced a GPT-4 integration to supercharge Bing, part of Microsoft’s longstanding efforts to make a dent in the dominance of Google’s search services.

We have reached out to the investors named here, as well as to OpenAI, for comment and will update this story as we learn more.

Sam Altman: Size of LLMs won’t matter as much moving forward

OpenAI closes its monster $10B funding round at $27B-29B valuation by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

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OpenAI closes its monster $10B funding round at $27B-29B valuation

OpenAI, the startup behind the widely used conversational AI model ChatGPT, has closed its new funding round of over $10.3 billion, TechCrunch has learned.

VC firms including Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global are in the round, according to documents seen by TechCrunch. A source tells us Founders Fund is also investing. Altogether the VCs have put in just over $300 million at a valuation of $27 billion – $29 billion. This is alongside a big investment from Microsoft announced earlier this year, a person familiar with the development told TechCrunch. The size of Microsoft’s investment is believed to be around $10 billion, a figure we confirmed with our source.

If all this is accurate, this is the closing of the round that the Wall Street Journal reported was in the works in January. We confirmed that was when discussions started, amid a viral surge of interest in OpenAI and its business.

While Microsoft’s investment comes with a strong strategic angle — the tech giant is working to integrate OpenAI’s tech across a number of areas of its business — the VCs are coming in as financial backers.

From what we understand, the term sheets have been signed by investors and the money’s been transferred; still to come is countersigning from OpenAI. The plan was to make this investment public next week.

Altogether, outside investors now own more than 30% of OpenAI.

According to PitchBook data, it appears that Peter Thiel had already been a backer but it seems this is the first time Founders Fund will be investing; K2 Global, a firm with just one partner, Ozi Amanat, and Thrive are also first-time backers of the startup. From PitchBook data, it looks like Sequoia, A16Z and Tiger Global had been earlier investors in the company but they’d sold stakes; this latest investment would bring them back in.

A number of firms, including Tiger and Sequoia, have had some knocks as a result of the financial crisis the tech sector has seen in the last year; in general, a number of VCs have massively slowed down their investing pace, sitting on so-called “dry powder” waiting for a better climate, and maybe better opportunities.

So at a moment when investors are on the hunt for interesting AI startups to back, OpenAI is likely seen as the kind of opportunity that looks good right now.

“They’re probably trying to use this [funding] to say hey, look, we found a golden apple,” a source said of the decision to back OpenAI here and now. “Venture is a very strange place where anything can happen. You can go big to broke to big again, at any time.”

OpenAI has an army of technical teams working across a range of areas, but the area that has attracted a lot of attention of late is GPT, short for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, which is OpenAI’s family of large language models used by third parties by way of APIs.

There is also ChatGPT, the generative AI service that OpenAI released at the end of November 2022 based on GPT that lets anyone type out a natural question and get a cogent, detailed answer. ChatGPT has been a certifiable hit, with more than 1 billion visitors to its website in February, says SimilarWeb — and that’s not including those using that tech via third parties.

Generative AI is very much all the rage right now, but OpenAI has its controversies, too, with many focused on that buzzy, consumer-facing ChatGPT product. People have questioned whether it lies, whether it is a “virus“, how it handles privacy, if it can be manipulated to be toxic, or commit libel; and in the wake of so many more rushing into AI development, even the very nature of how “open” OpenAI’s GPT branding will be longer term has come up for discussion.

In fairness, OpenAI has acknowledged the work that still needs to be done, and meanwhile it’s continued to develop services and iterate. In February, the startup introduced a paid version of ChatGPT, called ChatGPT Plus with a faster user experience. It was upgraded with multimodal LLM GPT-4 in March.

ChatGPT: Everything you need to know about the AI-powered chatbot

Key to the proposition, OpenAI’s valuation, and the likely interest of investors is that, alongside the technology, there is also a rapidly developing ecosystem around that tech.

In addition to the hundreds of millions of people who have played around with ChatGPT, hundreds of businesses large and small have started deploying GPT and ChatGPT into their products and services. That has also been a fillip to other big tech companies speed up the roll out of their own efforts in generative AI. Google has launched Bard and Meta also introduced LLaMA to take on GPT with its proprietary LLM.

OpenAI, however, has some undeniable gravity amidst the competition, not least because of its singular focus on the AI space since its founding in 2015. That’s been even as it has gone through some significant changes — including shifting from its original non-profit model. We don’t really know if AI will precipitate the seismic shift that many say it will, but as one person put it: OpenAI may be the closest thing we have to a winner in the space right now.

“We’ve been working on it for so long, but it’s with gradually increasing confidence that it’s really going to work,” co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said at an AI conference earlier this month. “We’ve been [building] the company for seven years. These things take a long, long time. I would say by and large in terms of why it worked when others haven’t: It’s just because we’ve been on the grind sweating every detail for a long time. And most people aren’t willing to do that.”

In addition to ChatGPT, OpenAI has its AI-based image-generation tool called Dall-E that received a significant update in July last year. It also has speech recognition model Whisper AI.

Microsoft’s efforts have included integrating OpenAI’s APIs with its Azure infrastructure to support the computational requirements of the models. It also in March announced a GPT-4 integration to supercharge Bing, part of Microsoft’s longstanding efforts to make a dent in the dominance of Google’s search services.

We have reached out to the investors named here, as well as to OpenAI, for comment and will update this story as we learn more.

Sam Altman: Size of LLMs won’t matter as much moving forward

OpenAI closes its monster $10B funding round at $27B-29B valuation by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch

source https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/28/openai-funding-valuation-chatgpt/

EV owners in Texas face $200 annual fee

States have taxed motorists at the pump for more than a century. Yet, as electric cars gain ground, what happens when folks stop refueling altogether?

State lawmakers are increasingly imposing annual fees on EV owners, arguing they should pay up because they still rely on public infrastructure to get around. Texas is on track to become the latest state to levy such a tax, following more than a dozen others, including Georgia, Michigan and Ohio.

The Texas Senate passed SB 505 at the end of March. This week, the state’s House has cleared a similar bill, sending it on to Gov. Greg Abbott’s desk. The latest version of the bill lays out a $200 yearly registration fee for electric vehicles, with exceptions carved out for slow “Neighborhood Electric Vehicles,” as well as autocycles, mopeds and motorcycles. The bill states that the resulting fees “must be deposited to the credit of the state highway fund.”

Though Texas is certainly not alone in moving forward with such a bill, its $200 fee is on the high end, matching only Georgia. Colorado is the state with the lowest EV fee (excluding states that have no fees), at $50 per year.

Speaking against the bill in a statement to local media outlet KRLD, Environment Texas director Luke Metzger argued the $200 fee is punitive and “will make it harder for Texans to afford these clean vehicles which are so critical to reducing air pollution in Texas.”

Electric cars are still priced out of reach for many Americans. In September 2022, the average price for EVs sat at $65,291, versus $48,094 for gas guzzlers, per Cox Automotive.

EV owners in Texas face $200 annual fee by Harri Weber originally published on TechCrunch

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