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Friday, June 1, 2018

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, plans $1 billion investment fund

 

The upstarts of crypto aren’t just aiming to disrupt the startup status quo, some are rivaling traditional venture capital investors, too. That’s particularly evident today after Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange based on daily trade volumes, announced a $1 billion fund to back blockchain and crypto startups.

The ‘Community Influence’ fund, which will be denominated in Binance’s BNB coin, will be aimed at nascent startups and also funds themselves, Ella Zhang — who heads the Binance Labs division — revealed today in an online web broadcast held today in Chinese. For fund of funds investments as an LP, Binance is looking to back funds with at least $100 million in capital and, of course, a focus on blockchain and crypto.

The firm will also launch a Binance Ecosystem Fund which it said will include 20 partners. A Binance spokesperson told TechCrunch that further details of both initiatives will be released soon.

Data from Coinmarketcap.com ranks Binance as the world’s most active crypto exchange, with over $5 billion of crypto traded in the past 24 hours hours at the time of writing. The company calls Hong Kong home but it is in process of relocating to Malta, where it has been welcomed by regulators after it was forced out of Japan when regulators cracked down on its business.

Catch Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao at TechCrunch’s blockchain event on July 6

This isn’t Binance’s first run at investment, it has already made deals via its Labs division, which was unveiled earlier this year and is described by Zhang as a “social impact fund.” It led a $30 million investment in MobileCoin — a startup that’s advised by Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of encrypted messaging app Signal and Open Whisper Systems — and it is establishing an incubator that will nurture ideas and young projects with financial backing and mentorship.

The company revealed today that its first incubation project will be Dache Chain, a new blockchain-based ride-hailing service in China. The company is already getting hype because one co-founder is Chen Weixing, the CEO of app development startup Funcity who initially founded Kuaidi Dache, a Chinese ride-hailing startup that eventually became Didi Chuxing, the country’s dominant service that forced Uber’s exit from China.

“This project will utilize blockchain technology to redesign the relationship between the interests and power of entrepreneur, labors, consumers, investors, and organizers. Dache Chain will establish a community ecosystem with value anchoring, and it is expected to achieve a pure shared ecosystem and solve the problem of unfair distribution of productivity and wealth,” Binance said in a statement.

Binance also revealed that, besides MobileCoin, it has made investments in smart contract startup Oasis Labs, verification service Certik, and crowdfunding platform Republic.

This initiative is another example of a major crypto company using its wealth to become an investor and grow its platform through deals with younger companies. I wrote about the trend earlier this year, and since then we’ve seen some notable vehicles emerge including the Ethereum Community Fund, Ripple’s Xpring initiative and EOS-creator Block One’s $1 billion commitment, which has birthed multiple funds that cover some $600 million.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

Box acquires Progressly to expand workflow options

 

Box announced today that it has purchased Progressly, a Redwood City startup that focuses on workflow. All 12 Progressly employees will be joining Box immediately. They did not disclose the purchase price.

If you follow Box, you probably know the company announced a workflow tool in 2016 called Box Relay along with a partnership with IBM to sell it inside large enterprises. Jeetu Patel, chief product officer at Box says Relay is great for well defined processes inside a company like contract management or employee on-boarding, but Box wanted to expand on that initial vision to build more complex workflows. The Progressly team will help them do that.

Patel said that the company has heard from customers, especially in larger, more complex organizations, that they need a similar level of innovation on the automation side that they’ve been getting on the content side from Box.

“One of the things that we’ve done is to continue investing in partnerships around workflow with third parties. We have actually gone out and built a product with Relay. But we wanted to continue to make sure that we have an enhancement to our internal automation engine within Box itself. And so we just made an acquisition of a company called Progressly,” Patel told TechCrunch.

That should allow Box to build workflows that not only run within Box, but ones that can integrate and intersect with external workflow engines like Pega and Nintex to build more complex automation in conjunction with the Box set of tools and services. This could involve both internal employees and external organizations and moving content through a much more sophisticated workflow than Box Relay provides.

“What we wanted to do is just make sure that we double down in the investment in workflow, given the level of appetite we’ve seen from the market for someone like Box providing a solution like this,” Patel explained.

By buying Progressly, they were able to acquihire a set of employees who have a focussed understanding of workflow and can help continue to build out that automation engine and incorporate it into the Box platform. Patel says how they could monetize all of this is still open to discussion. For now, the Progressly team is already in the fold and product announcements based on this acquisition could be coming out later this year.

Progressly was founded in 2014 and was headquarted right down the street from Box in Redwood City. The company has raised $6 million, according to data on Crunchbase.

Bitcoin exchange abandons Poland even as the government invites it to a working group

 

In a delightful bit of irony BitBay, a Central European exchange, has shut down operations in Poland even as it received an invitation by the Polish government to participate in a national blockchain working group. The news, which appeared in a Tweet, states that the group will assess regulations for cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and ICOs.

“Our exchange has received an invitation from the PFSA to participate in the Blockchain Working Group. 💪 As we have recently said, we do not want to abandon crypto activity in the Polish community,” wrote BitBay.

Poland has had an odd relationship with Bitcoin. First, some of the central banks funded a YouTube propaganda video that showed a person losing plenty of cash in crypto. Further, the community is fighting back but releasing counter-propaganda to the central bank’s policies.

After being shut out by Polish banks, BitBay moved its headquarters to Malta and stopped serving Polish customers.

 

Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

Count your bees with this Raspberry Pi project

 

Bees need all the help they can get. Thus programmer Mat Kelsey created a bee counter to see just how many of his winged honeymakers are hanging out in his hives. His system, which uses a Raspberry Pi and a machine learning algorithm that recognizes the number of individual bees entering a hive, is used to see bee trends over time and see just how the bees are faring.

“The first thing I thought when we setup our beehive was ‘I wonder how you could count the number of bees coming and going?'” wrote Kelsey. “After a little research I discovered it seems no one has a good, non-intrusive system for doing it yet. It can apparently be useful for all sorts of hive health checking.”

The system looks at sets of pictures of the hive door taken every 10 seconds. It then extrapolates out the background, assesses the objects that have moved in the frame, and then counts the things that are likely to be bees. It’s a fascinating problem to solve since the bees are constantly moving and because it can also ignore bees that are coming out of the hive.

You can download the source on Github and check out his detailed blog post here. Given the need for bee protection as we enter an era of colony collapses, tools like this one are wildly important. Plus it’s cool to see a Raspberry Pi do something so complex.

SV Angel says it won’t be raising another fund from outside investors

 

SV Angel, the seed-stage investment firm, announced today that it’s getting out of the traditional venture business. At least, said the firm, going forward, its founders, meaning famous angel investor Ron Conway and his son Topher, will be investing their own money in startups.

In a follow-up email exchange with TechCrunch, Topher Conway explained that several of the firm’s most recent checks, including to the chatbot startup Hugging Face, the hormone-testing company Modern Fertility, and to the electric skateboard company Boosted Boards, came from SV Angel’s existing, outside-investor-backed funds. He added that those existing funds will now no longer make new investments, but that SV Angel will continue to invest in follow-on rounds in its existing portfolio companies.

The outfit had closed its last fund with $53 million in late 2016. It will now part ways with partners Brian Pokorny, Kevin Carter and Robert Pollak, who it says will remain advisors to SV Angel.

Meanwhile, Ron and Topher Conway will be writing smaller initial checks than they have in recent years — $25,000 to $100,000, says their post —  to “align” themselves better with the “thousands of firms and individuals” who are now investing in seed rounds.

As SV Angel hints at in its new post (and has come up increasingly in our discussions with seed-stage investors), it has grown challenging for  any one outfit to write big checks to the most promising seed-stage companies. There’s simply too much money sloshing around.

SV and its outside investors may also have simply grown wary, with the small outfit going through several iterations over time, some of them more challenging than others.

To wit, when SV Angel was established nine years ago, Conway teamed up with former Googler David Lee, who’d helped lead certain aspects of the search giant’s business development and seemingly took over management of SV Angel with Conway’s blessing.

Soon, it was Conway; Lee; Brian Pokorny, himself a former Googler who’d also worked with Lee at Baseline Ventures for a spell; and one of Conway’s sons, Topher.

Pokorny left SV Angel in 2010 to head up a startup, returning in 2013. In the meantime, despite a growing collection of enviable stakes — including Airbnb, Snap, and Pinterest — not all was well inside SV Angel. Lee and Conway were instead moving toward an acrimonious split that eventually led to a breach-of-contract lawsuit that was filed last seven months ago in which Lee alleged that Conway was withholding millions of dollars from him.

Conway denied the allegations and said he would “vigorously defend” against Lee’s “meritless claims.” No court filings have appeared since, but one can imagine the whole thing leaving a bad taste with the Conways, not to mention outside investors, eager as they may to continue funding tech startups.

Lee, in fact, today runs an L.A.-based seed-stage outfit called Refactor Capital that closed its debut fund with $50 million last year.

Either way, SV Angel’s newest move is, in large part, a return to Conway’s roots. Dating back to 1998, Ron Conway used to write checks, largely on his own behalf, including making early investments in Google and PayPal that established his early reputation as an investor with all the right connections.

There’s a sort of symmetry in the firm’s return to a family business now.



Thursday, May 31, 2018

Come mix your realities at our AR/VR event in LA in October

 

TechCrunch is hosting one of our single-topic Sessions events centered on AR/VR and mixed reality in Los Angeles on October 18th at UCLA’s Royce Hall. We’re going to be doing some very cool stuff that we’re not quite ready to talk about, but at the core we’re looking to have incredible discussions with the best and brightest in reality creation.

The goal is to get folks into one room to see some demos, hear some talks and take part in a salon of sorts about the state of AR/VR. We’ll talk shop, philosophy, hardware, software and inclusion.

As someone who has logged hundreds of hours in a headset, reported on the space and been an advocate of what augmented and virtual realities could do for us, I’m pretty excited. I’ll be programming the event personally, along with our crack reporter in the space, Lucas Matney. The show promises to be bang-up cool with attention paid to the hardware and software that will enable the next generation of experiences in the augmented reality and virtual reality worlds, as well as some more metaphysical chit chat about how we all go about building these worlds.

Check out the site for Sessions: AR/VR 2018; we’ll be fleshing it out with speakers and more details as we lock them down. You can grab early tickets here for $95, which includes access to all the day’s talks and demos and, if you’re a student, we’ve got special tickets just for you here for $45.

More to come soon. See you in October!

Steve Case and JD Vance are speaking at Disrupt SF on startup opportunities outside of Silicon Valley

 

We’re excited to announce Steve Case and JD Vance will sit down for a fireside chat at Disrupt SF this September. There’s plenty to talk about, too, including the pair’s latest venture: A massive $150 million seed fund backed by an impressive group of investors that are targeted at startups outside of Silicon Valley.

As The New York Times put it after the fund’s announcement, the complete list of investors in the Rise of the Rest fund “may be the greatest concentration of American wealth and power in one investment fund.” It includes among others Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Jim Breyer, Dan Gilbert and members of the Walton, Koch and Pritzker families.

This fund is core to what Case and Vance are championing at Revolution. The Washington, D.C.-based venture capital firm primarily backs companies outside of major tech hubs. At Disrupt New York in May, Case told the audience that many regions are overlooked simply because investors can’t “get in their cars and drive to those companies” and he wants to convince other VCs to look outside of their comfort zones.

In August of 2017 Steve Case, founder of AOL and Revolution, tapped JD Vance to run Revolution as its Managing Partner.

“I don’t know if I’m ever going to be comfortable with being the media-dubbed spokesperson,” Vance told TechCrunch at the time. “But I do think you can talk about the issues and try to raise awareness or you can do something about the issues — my goal here is to try to do both. There’s an opportunity I’ve been given here with the platform the book has afforded.”

Vance is seemingly of the same mind as Case. In his book, which is a must read by the way, Hillbilly Elegy, he lays out his upbringing in Appalachia’s working class and explains the importance of striving to overcome obstacles — and startups outside the Valley have different obstacles to overcome than those located around San Francisco. As the managing partner of Revolution, we hear he has a keen focus that resonates with founders. Vance served in the Golf War, eventually graduating from The Ohio State and Yale and went on to serve as a law clerk and a principle at Peter Thiel’s  VC firm, Mithril Capital Management LLC.

Steve Case spoke at Disrupt NY last year about his current passion in shining a light on startups outside traditional tech hubs.

“It’s worth remembering that Detroit 75 years ago was like the Silicon Valley,” said Case at Disrupt NY in 2017. “At the time, it was the hottest innovation city in the country, because the automobile was the hot new technology at the time. Silicon Valley was like fruit orchards. These things change. But they lost their way. Detroit lost 60 percent of its population in the last 50 years and they went bankrupt because they lost their entrepreneur mojo.”

Case’s fireside chat was fascinating and we’re thrilled to have him back with Revolution’s managing partner, JD Vance. While Disrupt SF happens in the heart of Silicon Valley, there are plenty of founders, developers and investors who are constantly looking for opportunities in new regions — just like Steve Case and JD Vance.

If you’re looking to purchase tickets to Disrupt, you can grab those right here.



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