Author: skeptic

Augment provides an MBA-like program, but exclusively online

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French startup Augment has seen the incredible rise of online courses and edtech companies, as well as its potential when it comes to reinventing education at scale. That’s why the startup has been working on highly polished online courses sold as a package. Augment thinks its main program could potentially become an alternative to traditional Masters of Business Administration (MBA). Augment has recently raised a $6 million seed round led by RTP Global with other funds also participating, such as Motier Ventures, Origins Fund, Kima Ventures, Bpifrance and Financière Saint James. Several angel investors also invested in the startup, such as Thibaud Elziere and Roxanne Varza. The startup’s main program is called the Augment MBA. It is an opinionated and differentiated take on MBAs as everything happens online with a mix of videos from inspiring business leaders, case studies, quizzes, written assignments, downloadable handbooks, etc. I haven’t enrolled in Augment’s program so I can’t tell you if it’s an effective way to learn new business skills. A few months ago, the Augment team showed me …

Wind.app makes DeFi accessible to the average consumer

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Hussain Elius is best known as the co-founder of Pathao, one of Bangladesh’s top ride-sharing apps. For his latest startup, however, Elius is exploring the world of DeFi with Wind.app, a self-custodial, smart contract wallet with three main features. The first is enabling businesses to send payments to remote employees around the world. The second is allowing people to use Wind.app as a virtual bank account. And the third is is the on-ramp/off-ramp infrastructure that the company is building to enable users to change their crypto holdings for fiat or vice versa. So far, Wind.app has facilitated over $3 million in annualized gross transaction volume (GTV) within a few months of its launch. The Singapore-based startup announced today that it has raised $3.8 million in pre-seed funding co-led by Global Founders Capital and Spartan Group, with participation from backers like Saison Capital, Alumni Ventures and Tiny VC. By the time Elius left Pathao, it had become one of the most dominant consumer tech companies in Bangladesh and Nepal, offering food delivery, payments and BNPL, aside …

Amazon announces three new serverless offerings to kick off re:Invent

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Amazon kicked off AWS re:Invent, its annual customer conference, in Las Vegas tonight with a few new serverless offerings designed to make it easier to manage Aurora, Elastic Cache and Redshift serverless services. Matt Wood, AWS VP, says that Aurora Serverless is great for getting up and running very quickly with a cloud database, but over time, once you get to very, very high scale, and you’re  dealing with tens of millions of customers, or millions of different records, it becomes challenging for customers to deal with those kinds of numbers, forcing them to break the database into multiple pieces. “What you have to do as a customer to be able to kind of handle that scale, is you’ve traditionally had to split the data up into smaller and smaller segments, and then manage those segments independently. It’s called sharding. And it’s kind of a pain in the butt,” Wood told TechCrunch. “We’re announcing a limitless database, which handles all of that sharding for you under the hood completely automatically. So as a customer as …

Paris-based startup studio Hexa raises some funding to launch even more startups

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You might not be familiar with Hexa, the Paris-based startup studio that has launched dozens of B2B software companies, but some of its portfolio companies have become well-known unicorns, such as Front, Aircall and Spendesk. And it turns out that Hexa itself could be considered as a startup as the company just raised a funding round of $22 million in fresh capital (€20 million). This isn’t the first time Hexa raises outside capital. But it’s the company’s first round since 2016. “We’ve got a few family offices investing, but we’ve mostly got local entrepreneurs investing like Luc Pallavidino (Yousign), Adrien Van Den Branden (Canyon), Paul Vidal (Collective) and Arnaud Schwartz (Marble),” Hexa co-founder Thibaud Elzière told me. In other words, Hexa is raising from its own community of founders and friends. And this is just a first step as the company promises that there will be more funding in the coming months. “This marks our initial close, and we anticipate a subsequent round in the new year. Our aim is to welcome even more family …

Apple partner Foxconn to invest $1.5 billion in India

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Foxconn plans to invest $1.54 billion in India, the latest in its growing expansion plan, following a surge in revenues in the South Asian market. Foxconn said in a stock exchange filing that the investment will help it fulfil “operational needs.” The investment comes two months after the Taiwanese firm said it plans to double its workforce and investment in India by next year. Foxconn works with many firms including Apple and assembles their devices in plants in India as many tech giants look to shift part of their manufacturing base to India in a move that analysts describe as “China+1.” The investment from Foxconn, which is the largest EMS provider globally, into China climbed in 2001-2017 or over 15 years, and has slowed down since 2018, given the US-China trade tension. The company, which operates three manufacturing campuses in India, pulled out of a $19.5 billion chipmaking joint venture with Vedanta earlier this year, but said it remains “confident” about India’s ambitions. “Building fabs from scratch in a new geography is a challenge, but …

Inflow connects small fashion brands with manufacturers in Vietnam

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Textiles and garments contribute 16% of Vietnam’s total GPD, but it’s challenging for small garment brands to take advantage of the country’s manufacturing prowess. Inflow is stepping into the gap, with a platform that gives small brands visibility into manufacturers’ supply chains and the design-to-production cycle. It also helps them meet manufacturers who are willing to produce smaller quality of garments. Inflow announced today it has raised $2 million in seed funding. Investors included AppWorks, 500 Global, January Capital, Spiral Ventures and Saison Capital. The company says that over the last year, its revenue has grown by more than 15x, and it’s now used by more than 80 fashion brands across Southeast Asia. The startup’s production network currently includes over 150 manufacturers and suppliers. It typically works with brands that have a yearly revenue of $200,000 and above. Small brands get the benefit of Inflow’s platform, showing them inventory forecasts, data-driven factory matching and merchandise management. This meant to help them compete against larger brands. The company says that its platform and factory matching services …

European startup funding halved to $42B in 2023, says Atomico

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The downturn in the technology sector — dragged by inflation, higher interest rates and geopolitical events — continues to persist, and one of the most acutely impacted areas has been VC funding for startups, particularly those outside the U.S. According to VC firm Atomico, companies in Europe are on track to raise just $42 billion this year — less than half the $85 billion that startups in the region raised in 2022. The figures come from Atomico’s big report on the state of European tech, which it publishes annually. It also found that startups in the region are raising less at each stage of funding from Seed through to Series C (and beyond), with later stage and larger companies feeling a particular pinch: just 7 “unicorns” (startups with a valuation of more than $1 billion) are set to emerge this year in Europe, compared to 48 in 2022 and 108 in 2021. Image Credits: Atomico (opens in a new window)(opens in a new w But there is a silver lining in the story. While overall …

Cradle’s AI-powered protein programming platform levels up with $24M in new funding

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Biotech and AI startup Cradle is finding success with its generative approach to protein design, landing big customers and a hefty $24 million of new investment. The company exited stealth a little over a year ago, just as the hype around large language models was really heating up. Many AI companies in biotech train models to natively understand molecular structure; Cradle’s insight was that the long sequences of amino acids that make up the proteins in our bodies are akin to “like an alien programming language.” It may not be possible for a person to learn that language, but an AI model could — and a person could work with that instead. While they still couldn’t just say “make a protein that does this,” they could ask which of 100 interesting proteins looks most likely to survive at room temperature or an acidic environment. The approach seems to have caught the eye of major drug development companies like Johnson & Johnson and Novozymes. Creating a useful and functional protein from scratch is generally a pretty …

Quiet Competence Could Cost Joe Biden the Election

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. The Power of Magical Thinking I realize that to note that Joe Biden is boring is not exactly breaking news. Michael Schaffer of Politico wrote more than a year ago that Biden not only kept his promise to be unexciting but also “over-delivered.” My friend Molly Jong-Fast this fall noted for Vanity Fair that “[Team Biden’s] superpower, its ability to slide under the radar while getting a lot done for the American people, may also be its Achilles heel, holding back the administration from getting the credit it deserves.” She places much of the blame on the media—a fair cop—but I think a lot else is going on that has less to do with Biden and more to do with the voters themselves. The deeper problem is that America years ago entered a “post-policy” era, in which the voters …

Amazon’s iRobot purchase sucks up formal competition concerns in EU

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European Union regulators have sent Amazon a formal statement of objections setting out competition concerns over its proposed acquisition of robot vacuum maker, iRobot. The step does not confirm the EU will seek to block the deal but it shows antitrust regulators do remain concerned. It could therefore push Amazon to offer remedies to EU authorities to settle the investigation and avoid the risk of the acquisition being blocked. Amazon has already lowered its acquisition price for iRobot — which was originally an all-cash offer of $1.7BN back in August 2022 — by 15% owing to increased debt taken on by its target while regulatory snags delayed closing the deal at the original purchase price. The bloc has been closely scrutinizing the Amazon-iRobot deal since July when the EU announced its in-depth probe. The Commission said at the time it was worried the transaction would allow Amazon to restrict competition in the market for robot vacuum cleaners (RVCs) and strengthen its position as online marketplace provider in a number of ways. Today’s announcement by the EU, …