One Thing Today in Tech

Accel, one of the top global venture capital firms, best known in India for backing Flipkart and Freshworks, has raised a $4 billion fund to invest in what it calls later-stage ventures. Britain has declared a ‘national incident’ after a rare discovery of a ‘vaccine-derived’ polio virus in sewage samples in London. And the cost of raw materials needed for EVs has doubled during the pandemic, according to AlixPartners, a consultancy.

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Accel, one of the top global venture capital firms, has raised a $4 billion fund to invest in what it calls later-stage ventures. The firm expects to provide “expansion capital” to promising companies within its portfolio worldwide, as well as companies that are new to the firm, it said in a blogpost yesterday.

“Our decades-long experience has also taught us the importance of patience and discipline — especially during periods of volatility and change like we are experiencing today,” the VC firm said in the blog post.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, software giant Microsoft, Japan’s Sony, and IKEA are among some 37 global companies that have come together to form the Metaverse Standards Forum to develop common standards for the online world of avatars and 3D experiences.

Open to any organisation at no cost, the Forum will focus on pragmatic, action-based projects such as implementation prototyping, hackathons, plugfests, and open-source tooling to accelerate the testing and adoption of metaverse standards, while also developing consistent terminology and deployment guidelines, it said in the post.

Notably, Google and Apple aren’t participating yet.

British health authorities are urgently investigating a rare polio virus discovery in sewage samples in London, potentially putting Britain’s polio-free status at risk for the first time in almost two decades, CNBC reports.

Several waste samples from the Beckton sewage treatment work in Newham, east London tested positive for vaccine-derived polio virus between February and May, the UK Health Security Agency said in a statement. The agency has declared a national incident and informed the World Health Organisation of the situation.

Leap Finance, which gives student loans to those aspiring to higher education abroad, has raised $75 million in a round led by Owl Ventures, with participation from new investors Steadview Capital and Paramark Ventures, as well as existing investors Jungle Ventures and Sequoia Capital India, Economic Times.

Raw material costs for electric vehicles more than doubled during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report by AlixPartners, a consultancy, CNBC reports. EV-specific costs have increased to $4,500 from roughly $2,000 in the past two years, according to the report.

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US President Joe Biden yesterday announced his intent to nominate Indian American engineer, Dr Arati Prabhakar, to serve as Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and once confirmed to this position, also as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology. Google ended a two-year fight against France, agreeing to a fine and stipulations over deals with news publishers.

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US President Joe Biden yesterday announced his intent to nominate Indian American engineer Dr Arati Prabhakar to serve as Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). And once confirmed to this position, also as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, according to a statement by the White House.

In this capacity, Dr Prabhakar will be the President’s Chief Advisor for Science and Technology, a co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and a member of the President’s Cabinet.

Google agreed to negotiate license deals fairly with a broader array of news publishers in France, to end a dispute with French regulators and avoid further fines, Wall Street Journal reports.

The deal comes after the French regulator fined Google 500 million euros, equivalent to about $525 million, last year, for not negotiating deals with publishers in good faith. As part of the deal, Google has dropped its appeal against the fine.

DocuSign CEO Dan Springer is stepping down effective immediately, the company announced on Tuesday, CNBC reports. The decision comes after the e-signature software maker lost more than 60 percent of its value year to date, CNBC reports.

Springer became CEO in 2017 and took the company public in 2018.

Ericsson, a leading telecom equipment maker, said on Tuesday, it expects global 5G mobile subscriptions to surpass 1 billion in 2022, helped by higher adoption in China and North America, Reuters reports.

A weaker global economy and the uncertainties caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine lowered its estimate for 2022 by around 100 million, the Swedish company said in its biannual Mobility Report.

Stashfin, a Singapore-based fintech startup that offers credit cards to lower-income users in India, has raised $270 million in new funding round, to expand to Southeast Asia and other South Asian markets, TechCrunch reports.

The startup has raised $70 million against equity and $200 million as debt as part of its Series C funding round, Stashfin said.

Matrix Partners India, a US VC firm that has invested in several Indian startups, is looking to raise $450 million for its fourth India fund, according to an SEC filing. It is joining several other VC investors who have recently announced large India-focused funds.

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Tata Consultancy Services, which recently extended its contract to operate India’s passport services, expects to roll out chip-based e-passports by the end of the year, Economic Times reports. Volvo Trucks is testing hydrogen fuel cells that could offer ranges up to 1000 km, CNBC reports. And scientists have shown that machine learning can help detect autism in children by studying their speech.

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Tata Consultancy Services, which recently extended its contract to operate India’s passport services, expects to roll out chip-based e-passports by the end of the year, Economic Times reports. TCS is also setting up a command and control centre with the Ministry of External Affairs, and a data centre to support the backend requirements of the project, Tej Bhatla, the head of the company’s public sector business unit, told ET.

Platform.sh, a web hosting platform provider, has raised $140 million in series D funding, led by Digital Partners, with participation from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and others, TechCrunch reports.

This brings Platform.sh’s total funding to $187 million. Co-founder and CEO Fred Plais told TechCrunch the Paris-headquartered company will use the money for hiring and deepening automation capabilities.

Volvo Trucks has begun to test vehicles that use fuel cells powered by hydrogen, with their range extending to as much as 1000 km, CNBC reports, citing a statement from the Swedish company.

Volvo Trucks said refuelling the vehicles would take under 15 minutes. Customer pilots are set to begin in the next few years, with commercialisation planned within the next 10 years, according to CNBC.

Fuel cells for the vehicles will be provided by Cellcentric, a joint venture with Daimler Truck that was established in March 2021, according to CNBC.

The Nadathur S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning, the innovation and entrepreneurship hub of the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, has launched a rural entrepreneurship incubation programme. The programme aims to focus on action for balanced, inclusive development and to bridge socio-economic gaps, creating sustainable livelihoods and employment opportunities in remote rural areas, the centre said in a press release.

A new study led by Northwestern University researchers used machine learning to identify speech patterns in children with autism, and showed that the patterns were consistent between English and Cantonese, suggesting that features of speech might be a useful tool for diagnosing the condition, Neuroscience News reports.

Undertaken with collaborators in Hong Kong, the study yielded insights that could help scientists distinguish between genetic and environmental factors shaping the communication abilities of people with autism, potentially helping them learn more about the origin of the condition and develop new therapies, according to Neuroscience News.

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Apple is facing another claim of nearly a billion dollars, that it knowingly throttled the performance of older iPhones, this time in Britain. Telegram, a messaging app rival to WhatsApp, said it now had 700 million monthly active users and launched a premium subscription plan. And Khumbu glacier, on which Mt. Everest’s base camp is located, is melting away at an alarming rate, BBC reports.

Notes:

Apple is facing another claim that it knowingly throttled the performance of older iPhones, this time in Britain. Justin Gutmann, a consumer rights champion in the UK, is taking Apple to court, seeking damages of around £768 million ($939 million) for up to 25 million iPhone users in the country, BBC reports.

Gutmann’s claim comes two years after a similar case was settled in the US. In 2020, Apple agreed to pay $113 million to settle allegations that it slowed down older iPhones. Thirty-three US states claimed that Apple had done this to push users into buying new devices.

Telegram now has 700 million monthly active users, the company said in a blog post yesterday. The messaging app rose to prominence on the promise of privacy and security, especially after changes were announced last year by Meta’s WhatsApp on how it will share user data.

Telegram also announced a premium subscription that offers doubled limits, 4 GB file uploads, faster downloads, exclusive stickers and reactions, improved chat management and other ‘resource heavy’ features, according to the blog post. All existing features will remain free.

Telegram didn’t provide details about the pricing of the subscription plan in the blog post, but the plan will likely cost about $5 a month, according to TechCrunch.

India’s open network for digital commerce, or ONDC, has partnered with the country’s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development, or Nabard, to extend the reach of the ecommerce enabling the network to the agriculture sector, Economic Times reports.

To begin with, ONDC and Nabard have announced a hackathon that has drawn 400 entries so far, including from several agri-tech startups, according to ET.

Khumbu glacier, home to the Everest base camp in the Himalayas, is fast melting due to global warming and human activity, BBC reports. The melting is creating crevasses overnight, including in areas where people at the camp could be sleeping, and causing hazardous rock falls.

The Nepalese government is now planning to shift the base camp to a different location at a lower altitude, according to the report. The current camp is at an altitude of 5,364 metres above sea level. The new one could be 200-400 metres lower, according to the report.

Climate change and human activity is causing the glacier to lose 9.5 million cubic metres of water a year, researchers at Leeds University told BBC. In addition to global warming, human activity at the camp itself, which can have as many as 1,500 people during the March-May climbing season, is exacerbating the problem.

These people generate 4,000 litres of urine a day and the fuel they use for cooking and staying warm also contributes to the melting, according to the report.

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Tata Consultancy Services rose 12 positions from last year to rank number 46 on Kantar BrandZ’s annual list of global brands. Rival Infosys debuted on the list, joining the top 100, ranking at number 64 on the widely followed ranking of the world’s biggest brands every year. Accenture improved its ranking by one spot to place at number 26. Microsoft, Zara and IBM, however, lead the list on a new sustainability index that Kantar has started this year.

Notes:

Tata Consultancy Services rose 12 positions from last year to rank number 46 on Kantar BrandZ’s annual list of global brands. Rival Infosys debuted on the list, joining the top 100, ranking at number 64 on the widely followed ranking of the world’s biggest brands every year. Accenture improved its ranking by one spot to place at number 26. Microsoft, Zara and IBM, however, lead the list on a new sustainability index that Kantar has started this year.

This year, the number of Indian brands in the Global Top 100 rose to four: Tata Consultancy Services, HDFC Bank, Infosys, and LIC. That’s more than the amount that Japan, Italy, and the UK placed — combined, Kantar said in its report. Formerly a challenger brand, TCS now isn’t far from Accenture by market value, the report notes.

TCS and Infosys also made it to the top 20 brands under the business solutions and technology providers category, while IBM and Accenture continue to rank higher on this list as well.

Microsoft, Zara and IBM lead the way in the new Kantar Sustainability BrandZ Index, which shows sustainability accounts for 3 percent of brand equity and is expected to rise. Consumer sustainability perception rose significantly in recent years, with Chinese consumers ranking second, next only to the Americas, according to Kantar.

Wipro, India’s fourth-biggest IT services company, and Eros Investments, a portfolio of media and entertainment businesses, have signed an alliance agreement to develop an artificial intelligence and machine learning-based content localisation solution. It will automate the time-consuming manual content localisation process of subtitling and dubbing with near human-level accuracy, delivering cost and time savings for global media organisations, post-production, and direct-to-consumer over-the-top streaming platforms, the companies said in a press release.

Ecozen has raised Rs. 54 crore of additional funding as part of its Rs. 200 crore Series C round. The new funding round was led by Dare Ventures, the venture capital arm of Coromandel International, with participation from existing investors Caspian and Hivos-Triodos Fonds.

Northern Arc, UC Inclusive Credit, Maanaveeya, and Samunnati also participated with debt funding. Early investors in Ecozen include IFA and Omnivore.

Ecozen makes motor controls, IoT devices, and energy storage devices for agriculture, irrigation and cold chains. Headquartered in Pune, Ecozen was founded on-campus by three IIT Kharagpur alumni, Devendra Gupta, Prateek Singhal and Vivek Pandey.

Fanbuff Technology India, better known as FanClash, a two-year-old Indian fantasy esports startup, has raised $40 million in series B funding from investors including Alpha Wave Global, Sequoia Capital India, Info Edge and Polygon, TechCrunch reports, citing the company’s founder and CEO Richa Singh.

FanClash previously raised $10.5 million, including a $10 million Series A round.

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SatoriXR, a tech startup in Chennai that offers 3D and augmented reality technologies for engineering design and manufacturing, has won Grameen Foundation India’s first Tech4Inclusion challenge. And entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala’s UpGrad has doubled its private valuation in new funding round, ET reports.

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SatoriXR, a tech startup in Chennai that offers 3D and augmented reality technologies for engineering design and manufacturing, has won Grameen Foundation India’s first Tech4Inclusion challenge, the foundation said in a LinkedIn post yesterday.

With a grant from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Grameen conceptualised the Technology for Growth and Inclusion Challenge and announced it in August last year. Competitors were invited to work in the Augmented Reality and Machine Learning space to design a mobile application for educating rural customers and banking agents.

SatoriXR, founded by Mahesh Ramamurthy in 2018, built the prototype for a gamified AR learning application, to facilitate financial literacy and inclusion on its eponymous SatoriXR platform. The company will now be awarded the contract to build the full-scale application for Grameen, which will then be used by its banking correspondent partners.

SatoriXR was picked from among three finalists. The other two were Deeploop Technologies and MuCrest Technologies.

Clari, a Silicon Valley company that makes a revenue tracking software platform for businesses, has acquired India’s Wingman, a conversational AI provider for sales teams, the companies said in a press release yesterday. Clari didn’t reveal the terms of the deal, but the entire team of Wingman, including its three founders, is expected to join the US company, according to the press release.

The acquisition of Wingman gives Clari’s revenue collaboration and governance platform the ability to analyse customer and employee conversations, extract valuable AI-based insights, and reliably predict all revenue outcomes. Wingman goes beyond the limits of similar conversation intelligence tools by helping revenue-critical teams act in the moment when it matters, the companies said in the release.

Wingman, a Y Combinator portfolio company, was founded in 2018 by Shruti Kapoor, Muralidharan Venkatasubramanian and Srikar Yekollu. The company had raised $2.3 million in 2019 from investors including early-stage deep tech VC firm Speciale Invest.

UpGrad Education, founded by Ronnie Screwvala, has raised $225 million in funding from investors including billionaire James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems and US testing and assessment provider Educational Testing Service, Economic Times reports.

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Coinbase is laying off almost a fifth of its workforce amid a collapse in its stock and crypto prices, CNBC reports.

The cryptocurrency exchange will cut 18 percent of full-time jobs, according to an email sent to employees on Tuesday. Coinbase has roughly 5,000 full-time workers, translating to a head count reduction of around 1,100 people, according to CNBC.

Google, has suspended an AI engineer, Blake Lemoine, for claiming that an artificial intelligence he helped to develop had become sentient, The Washington Post reports.

“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a seven-year-old, eight-year-old kid,” Lemoine told the Post.

Lemoine himself released transcripts of conversations with the AI, called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), in which it appears to express fears of being switched off, talks about how it feels happy and sad and attempts to form bonds with humans by mentioning situations that it could never have actually experienced, The New Scientist reports.

Meanwhile, more than 400 AI researchers, including several from Google, have proposed an update to the famous Turing Test. British Mathematician Alan Turing first proposed a test for machine intelligence in 1950. Now researchers at Google and their partners have created a suite of 204 tests to replace it, covering subjects such as mathematics, linguistics and chess.

HDFC Bank yesterday announced the signing a memorandum of understanding with 100X.VC, an early-stage venture capital firm, to engage more deeply with startups in India.

With this MoU, 100X.VC will recommend HDFC Bank as the primary Bank to all its portfolio companies. HDFC Bank and the Mumbai VC firm will conduct joint programmes for startups such as Master Classes. The bank will also evaluate startups referred to it by 100X.VC for investment and extending loans.

Groyyo, a Mumbai startup in the B2B Manufacturing and Supply Chain Enablement space, has raised $40 million in a combination of equity and debt in its Series A round, the company said in a press release. The round of funding was led by Tiger Global with participation from early investors Alpha Wave Global.

Terra.do, a Silicon Valley startup that offers an immersive programme to equip anyone interested in climate action with the tools to pursue that interest, has launched a mobile app. People can use the app to find jobs, or recruits, in the climate economy, network with like-minded professionals through multiple communities and learn more.

The app is available on both iOS and Android.

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Infosys is setting up four more delivery centres in India’s tier-2 cities to allow staff to work closer to their hometowns, and tap a wider talent base, Economic Times reports, citing Krishnamurthy Shankar, the IT services company’s head of human resources. Sequoia raises its largest India fund yet. And Spotify adds a voice AI team and tech via an acquisition.

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Infosys is setting up four more delivery centres in India’s tier-2 cities to allow staff to work closer to their hometowns, and tap a wider talent base, Economic Times reports, citing Krishnamurthy Shankar, the IT services company’s head of human resources.

These centres will be 1000-seaters and will be ready by the end of the next fiscal quarter, Shankar told ET. The company, which has nearly 40 percent of its staff as women, is particularly focusing on getting women to come back, Shankar told ET, after many left during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Sequoia India and Sequoia Southeast Asia have collectively raised $2.85 billion across a set of funds, including India venture and growth funds and an $850 million Southeast Asian fund — Sequoia’s first dedicated fund for the region, the venture capital firm said in a blog post.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Sequoia as a global firm, 16 years in India, and 10 in Southeast Asia.

The region’s startup ecosystem has grown rapidly in the last decade, thanks to the acceleration of digital adoption and rising consumer incomes. Last year, India emerged as the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world, after the US and China. Southeast Asia, meanwhile, is on track to becoming a $1 trillion digital economy by 2030, the VC firm notes in its blog post.

Spotify is acquiring Sonantic, the UK-based voice AI company behind the tech that simulated actor Val Kilmer’s voice in the Hollywood blockbuster Top Gun Maverick, TechCrunch reports.

“We’re really excited about the potential to bring Sonantic’s AI voice technology onto the Spotify platform and create new experiences for our users,” Ziad Sultan, Spotify’s Vice President of Personalisation, said in a blogpost. “This integration will enable us to engage users in a new and even more personalised way,” Ziad added.

At Spotify, we’ve identified several potential opportunities for text-to-speech capabilities across our platform, and we believe that over the long term, high-quality voice will be important to growing our share of listening. For example, this voice technology could allow us to give context to users about upcoming recommendations when they aren’t looking at their screens, the company said in the blog post.

And here’s the Val Kilmer connection. In real life, the actor is unable to speak as he did in the past as a result of throat cancer. Therefore, for the Top Gun sequel, in which he reprised his role as a foil (and now friend) to Tom Cruise, his condition, and the simulated voice Sonantic created, were both written into the plot of the film, TechCrunch explains.

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Google has agreed to pay $118 million to settle a class-action gender discrimination lawsuit with around 15,500 women, according to a statement from the law firms representing the women. Meanwhile, The UK’s competition regulator wants to investigate how Apple and Google use their mobile phone dominance to kill competition. And an ed-tech company’s co-founder wants to blacklist teachers if they seek better prospects, ET reports.

Notes:

Google has agreed to pay $118 million to settle a class-action gender discrimination lawsuit with around 15,500 women, according to a press release on June 10, from the law firms representing the women who took Google to court four years ago.

The lawsuit first emerged in 2017 after three women filed a complaint accusing the company of underpaying female workers in violation of California’s Equal Pay Act, citing a wage gap of around $17,000, according to The Verge. The complaint also alleged Google locks women into lower career tracks, leading to less pay and lower bonuses when compared with their male counterparts.

The plaintiffs won class-action status last year.

The UK’s competition regulator wants to investigate how Apple and Google might be using their dominance of the mobile phone market to kill competition, ramping up global antitrust scrutiny of the largest US technology companies, Wall Street Journal reports.

Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority said on Friday that it intends to initiate market investigations into how the companies control web browsers for mobile devices, as well as complaints that Apple restricts cloud gaming on its devices. Under UK rules, market investigations can lead to binding orders to change practices, but no fines.

Shares of DocuSign plunged 24 percent on Friday after the e-signature software maker posted fiscal first-quarter earnings that fell short of analysts’ estimates, CNBC reports.

DocuSign’s adjusted earnings per share of 38 cents missed analysts expectations of 46 cents, according to CNBC. That pushed shares down even though DocuSign’s revenue for the quarter, at $588.7 million, beat analysts estimates of $581.8 million.

Brajesh Maheshwari, co-founder and director of test preparation coaching provider Allen Career Institute has threatened teachers working with the company with ‘blacklisting,’ if they move to rival offline coaching platforms set up by ed-tech startups, in a video statement released by him, Economic Times reports.

Among Allen Career Institute’s biggest investors is Bodhi Tree, formed by Lupa Systems founder and CEO James Murdoch and Uday Shankar, the former head of Star TV and Disney India. Bodhi Tree announced an investment of $600 million in Allen Institute in May, according to ET.

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Reserve Bank of India, the country’s central bank has proposed allowing integration between India’s Unified Payments Interface and credit cards, TechCrunch reports.

“UPI facilitates transactions by linking savings or current accounts through users’ debit cards. It is now proposed to allow linking of credit cards on the UPI platform,” Shaktikanta Das, the governor of Reserve Bank of India said at a briefing, according to TechCrunch. To begin with, the RuPay credit cards will be linked to UPI, he said.

RuPay is India’s homegrown card network, which is promoted by the National Payments Corporation of India, a special body of RBI that also oversees UPI payments.

Infosys has won a contract from TK Elevator that expands the Indian IT services giant’s engagement with the German maker of lifts, the company said in a press release yesterday. The seven-year contract involves providing AI-powered IT helpdesk services, digital workplace management, and network services, using automation solutions from Infosys Cobalt, the company’s suite of cloud technologies, products and services.

NASA is putting together an independent team of researchers to study sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, the updated term now used to refer to UFOs, the American space agency said in a blog post yesterday. NASA says it plans to study these sightings from a scientific perspective but also stressed that “there is no evidence UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin,” The Verge reports.

The study team is to be led by astrophysicist David Spergel under NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. It will attempt to identify what data is out there on UAPs and figure out how to best capture data on UAPs in the future. NASA noted that the limitations in sightings make it hard to come to logical conclusions about where UAPs come from.

The study will be open and unclassified, according to Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for science at NASA, according to The Verge.

SolarSquare, a Mumbai-based startup, has raised $4 million led by Google Capital, with participation from US investor Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital, Singapore based Symphony Asia and Nithin Kamath’s Rainmatter Foundation.

The round also saw participation from Better Capital, Climate Angels and several angel investors. This investment mark’s the $1 billion Lowercarbon Capital’s first Indian investment, according to SolarSquare’s press release. SolarSquare was founded in 2015 by Neeraj Jain and Nikhil Nahar, and Shreya Mishra joined them as co-founder.

The company, originally started as a B2B solar venture, is rapidly expanding its B2C operations, and the fresh funds will help SolarSquare to go faster in that direction.

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