Yahaha, a Helsinki- and Shanghai-based immersive, user-generated, low-code gaming platform founded by a group of Chinese gaming vets, made a splash in January when it announced a cumulative $50 million in funding ahead of its alpha launch in April. Now, with 100,000 creators and hundreds of thousands of players, it’s raised a further $40 million to continue building out its product — specifically to bring in monetization features and more social hooks — as well as to hire more talent and for business development.

Yahaha is describing this as an extension to its previous round, specifically a “Series A+.” We are asking for an updated valuation, but for some context, when it announced funding 11 months ago, I was told that the valuation was a “few hundred million” (so in the wide range of $300-500 million). The raise and valuation both stand out against a backdrop of slim fundraising, especially for consumer startups.

Yahaha styles itself as a dual-headquartered company, but its investors in this latest raise are all out of China and greater Asia.

Singapore’s Temasek and Chinese internet giant Alibaba are co-leading this investment, with another Chinese company, 37 Interactive Entertainment, also participating. Previously the company had raised funding from 5Y Capital, HillHouse, Coatue, ZhenFund, Bertelsmann Asia Investments, BiliBili and Xiaomi.

The company said it now has more than 150 employees, with offices in Helsinki, Seoul and Shanghai. LinkedIn, which shut down operations in China last year, notes that about half of the company’s employees registered on its platform identify as based out of Shanghai.

“Metaverse” as a concept has seen a lot of hype, especially earlier this year — spearheaded in no small part by one of the biggest consumer internet businesses of our time, Facebook, rebranding itself as “Meta” and going all-in on the concept.

A lot of that has not come to much so far, one big bellwether being Meta itself knocking back an own-goal in its own efforts.

However, most universally agree that gaming has been one of the few highlights, with gamers willing to pay for and use hardware and software to improve the immersive-ness of their experiences.

Yahaha is tapping into that opportunity and coupling it with another couple of big trends.

User-generated content has long been a popular aspect of gaming and entertainment overall, but more recently it’s taken on a more sophisticated, businesslike aspect: people who in the past might have created media for fun have now become “creators” who see business opportunities in building content and and using it to connect with audiences. Not all of those creators — not many of them at all, in fact — are “technical”, so that is leading to attention (and funding) for companies that are building platforms to help creators create and spin up their business opportunities without a lot of heavy technical lifting.

And that’s where Yahaha comes in. The company’s founders — Chris Zhu (CEO), Pengfei Zhang (COO) and Hao Min (CTO) — all worked together as engineers at cross-platform gaming engine Unity — indeed Yahaha has been described to me as being built in partnership with Unity — and their low-code platform aims to do all that heavy lifting behind the scenes.

With an eye to creators and the businesses they are building, the new features the product will be getting will include more “monetization modules” and other commercial developments, said Zhu.

“We’ve seen fantastic growth in YAHAHA throughout the Early Alpha stage, and with over 100,000 creators signing up to make content with us, we are building on a strong foundation,” Zhu said in a statement. “This round of funding signifies the next step we are taking with YAHAHA, opening up more creator experiences monetization modules. We are also continuing to pioneer by investing in key areas of the community and by building relationships with brands that share our values, aligning ourselves with experts in the fields of game development, 3D asset creation and more. With YAHAHA, we’re not just ushering in the next generation of entertainment, we’re supporting the next generation of creators and giving them the tools and the integrated virtual world platform they need to make great content. There is a litany of opportunities that await us in the virtual world, and we want to be on the cutting edge of it with YAHAHA. To do this, it’s imperative we continue investing in our team and in the community that got us to where we are right now.”

The big questions will be whether those noodling around in the early version will stay with Yahaha as monetization comes in, whether that monetization works, whether games are entertaining enough to get players to engage, and of course whether metaverse establishes itself as a permanent fixture in the market, rather than a passing stage, as gamers progress to the next level.

Yahaha raises $40M more for its user-generated, low-code immersive gaming platform by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

An incoming privacy policy change announced by TikTok yesterday for users in Europe — which, for the first time, names China as one of several third countries where user data can be remotely accessed by “certain” company employees to perform what it claims are “important” functions — has landed months ahead of expected movement on a year+ long investigation into the platform’s data exports to China under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The GDPR probe into the legality of the video sharing platform’s data transfers to China is being led by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), TikTok’s lead privacy regulator in the region, which opened the inquiry just over a year ago. The DPC told TechCrunch today that it expects its TikTok data transfers inquiry to progress to the next stage in the coming months — with a draft decision slated to be sent to other EU DPAs for review in the first quarter of next year.

This ‘Article 60’ review process could lead either to an affirming of Ireland’s draft decision — which would then, in relatively short order, allow for a final decision to be issued (potentially before the middle of next year, judging by past inquiry timelines). However if other EU regulators raise objections to Ireland’s draft decision the inquiry would have to move to an ‘Article 65’ dispute resolution process — which could add many more months to the process before a final decision could be issued as the bloc’s regulators seek consensus.

It’s not clear whether TikTok’s announcement of the privacy policy tweak relates to this overarching GDPR investigation. The incoming changes — which are due to apply from December 2 — do also include an update on how the platform collects users location information so they are not wholly focused on data transfers.

But the disclosure of China staffers accessing European user data could also be a not-very-subtle attempt to pre-empt regulatory enforcement over its data transfers — and try to soften a future blow by being able to point to steps already taken to improve its transparency with European users. (Not that that is the only potential issue of regulatory concern vis-a-vis data exports, though.)

A spokesman for TikTok declined to comment on whether its updated privacy policy is in any way linked to the GDPR inquiry — saying it could not do so as the inquiry remains ongoing.

However in a blog post announcing the update, the company claimed the changes “include greater transparency into how we share user information outside of Europe”.

That’s notable because transparency is a key principle of the GDPR — while infringements of the transparency principle can lead to stiff penalties (such as the $267M fine for Meta-owned WhatsApp last year, after an Ireland-led inquiry found a string of transparency breaches).

Claiming you’re being transparent and actually being transparent are not necessarily the same thing, of course. So it’s worth noting that TikTok’s updated privacy policy appears to atomize key bits of information — such as the full list of third countries countries where employees may remotely access European users’ data and for what specific reasons — across a number of collapsable menus and hyperlinks spread throughout the policy, thereby requiring a user to click around, follow multiple links and basically hunt for relevant intel amid a larger morass of data in order to piece together a comprehensive view of what’s happening with their data (rather than clearly articulating and collating everything into a single, easy to digest view…).

So, if it’s transparency TikTok is really shooting for here it still looks like it has work to do.

Also still a work in progress for TikTok: A data localization project to store European users’ data in the region — which, earlier this year, it announced had been delayed again (until 2023).

Thing is, if TikTok intends to continue to allow employees located in third countries with no EU adequacy agreement affirming they have essentially equivalent data protection standards as the bloc to have remote access to European users’ information then questions over the legality of its international data transfers are likely to persist.

As well as China, TikTok’s privacy policy names Brazil, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and the US (which has only a preliminary agreement with the EU for a fresh data transfer agreement atm) as countries where employees have remote access to European user data without the cover of an adequacy agreement — saying it’s relying on standard contractual clauses (SCCs) for these transfers.

But, as the EDPB guidance on data transfers points out, each transfer to a third country must be individually assessed and some may not be possible legally, even with supplementary measures applied. So every single one of these transfers will need to stand up to regulatory scrutiny.

Given so many third country transfers, TikTok’s European data localization project can only — at least for now — be considered a PR exercise. And/or an attempt to curry favor with local regulators in the hopes they take a kinder view of ongoing data exports. Unless or until it ceases data exports to third countries and finds a way to fully firewall its parent entity in China from being able to access any European users’ data in the clear.

TikTok’s spokesman declined to comment on any future plans it may have to further adapt its data transfers in light of these challenges but he pointed back to its blog post — which describes its approach to data governance in Europe as being “centred on limiting the number of employees with access to European user data, minimising data flows outside of the region, and storing European user data locally”.

TikTok’s wider problem is that it’s facing dialled up regulatory scrutiny across the Western world more generally as a result of security concerns attached to the Chinese state’s ability to gain access to data commercial platforms/services hold on their users — with national security laws in its home country overriding the usual standard contractual protections.

Its platform also collects an awful lot of user data — which only fuels concerns about its capacity to be repurposed as a data honeypot for state surveillance or even for ‘soft power’ foreign influence ops.

While its tracking and profiling of users invites further specific regulatory headaches in Europe — on the privacy and consumer protection side — which are applying some limits on how it can operate.

For example, TikTok recently agreed to freeze a controversial change to the legal basis it relies upon to run targeting advertising after a formal warning from the Italian DPA — and some follow-up “engagement” from the DPC — over a plan to remove consent (and claim a legitimate interest to run targeted ads). So its profiling and ad targeting model is facing challenges on a number of fronts, even as it tries to defend its business against wider, geopolitical-related security concerns.

TikTok privacy update in Europe confirms China staff access to data as GDPR probe continues by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch

The third quarter was far from favorable for Chinese startups looking to raise money. Data shows that for upstart tech companies in the country, Q3 2022 was the worst time to raise venture capital since Q1 2020, with far less capital invested than either the rest of 2020 and 2021, or for most of 2018 and 2019.

China is hardly alone in seeing its domestic startup scene see slowing capital inflows, but recent news puts the country-specific information into new context: Given today’s Chinese tech share sell-off, there is fresh pressure on technology companies’ valuations in the country, and that could impact startup fundraising.

If China saw fundraising decrease 10% in Q4 2022 from Q3 2022 — measured in dollar terms, not the number of funding events — we’d see startups facing the slowest quarter since the onset of 2018, according to CB Insights data. A steeper decline would put Q4 2022 as the nadir in the nation for the last five years.

Why are Chinese tech stocks suffering today? After a period when the sale of the nation’s equities onshore was at least somewhat meddled with, the value of major and minor Chinese tech companies fell today in the wake of the Chinese Communist Party’s every-five-year confab. This time ’round, current Chinese Premier Xi Jinping secured not only another five years in power, he also solidified a cabinet of like-minded allies.

The context is clear: The Xi method of managing China remains ascendant. And investors in tech companies, still licking wounds brought on by a regulatory barrage led by Xi — which included some reasonable ideas like dismantling certain anti-competitive practices along with some less enticing policies — are not enthused.

The result? A bloodbath (American share price changes as of the time of publishing):

The seas are getting even rougher for Chinese startups by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

We are back from Disrupt, which means we’re picking up the pieces of our work lives, getting back on track. Equity is now on its regular schedule, which is good. A big thanks to the entire podcast production crew for making last week happen.

Now! What did we get into this morning? The following:

• Stocks rallied around the world, but fell in China. Chinese equities suffered under investor pessimism at the cementing of Xi Jinping’s authority over the country’s economy. Elsewhere, hope that central bank policies would not carry as much teeth in the future as we have seen in recent months sent stocks higher.
• The finalists from the recent Startup Battlefield competition were all pretty freaking great, especially the focus that several had on making our home planet a bit cleaner, or better. Commercial solutions will be required for us to do any damn thing about the planet, so, here’s to the companies working on it.
• Minerva Lithium wound up winning, which seemed legit given the sheer need we have as a people for lithium these days (it figures in battery production).
• Other points of conversation: No Instacart IPO coming, Yat Siu is still bullish on crypto games, and it is earnings season!

Ok, chat soon!

Seeing startups tackle the health of our planet is giving me life by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

As iOS 16 Lock Screen customization takes off, an iPhone personalization app called Top Widgets has soared to the No. 1 spot on the U.S. App Store’s top free apps list, displacing BeReal. The Sichuan, China-based app maker first introduced Top Widgets in August 2020 to capitalize on the introduction of Home Screen widgets with the release of iOS 14. With its newly added support for iOS 16’s Lock Screen widgets, the app has gained approximately 1.3 million downloads in the two days following Monday’s iOS 16 launch.

That’s up 1,812% from the two days prior to iOS 16’s release, when the app saw approximately 68,000 installs, according to data from mobile intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

To date, Top Widgets has topped 30 million worldwide installs, the firm says. The majority are from the company’s home country of China, which accounts for around 25.8 million lifetime downloads, or 86% of the total. The U.S., by comparison, is a smaller market for this app, with some 730,000 installs to date, or 2% of the total.

In addition to ranking in the No. 1 position on the U.S. App Store as of Thursday, the app is also No. 1 in 58 other global markets. It’s the No. 1 app in the Utilities category in 80 markets.

Top Widgets is similar in some ways to other popular widget designers, like Widgetsmith — one of the more successful apps to emerge from the original iPhone customization craze, thanks to its DIY tools for creating custom widgets that match your overall iPhone theme, wallpaper and icons. (In fact, Top Widgets even stuffs the keyword “widgetsmith” into its App Store description!)

Image Credits: Top Widgets

Like other widget markers, Top Widgets’ tools allow users to select from a range of common Home Screen widget types, like photos, clocks, calendars, weather, reminders, and more.

But it also includes a few features that differentiate it from other widget apps on the market, including a transparent widget type that doesn’t block your iPhone’s background wallpaper as well as a variety of “quick launcher” widget styles that let you put tappable access to favorite apps in a widget format — which offers more customization possibilities compared with the use of app icons.

@itshibazia a tutorial on how to actually get your apps like this… you don’t need ios 16 #topwidgets #topwidgetstutorial #ChewTheVibes #fyp #iphonetutorial #applewatch #iphoneorganization #iphoneapps #tech #apple #ios16 #iphonehacks #iphonetutorials ♬ original sound – Hiba Zia

In addition, the app includes an interesting widget type it calls “x-panel,” which puts a variety of informational blocks — like battery percentage, storage space used, Wi-Fi toggles and more — into a single dashboard-like widget that can be pinned to your Home Screen.

With its iOS 16 release, this x-panel style widget has now been ported to the Lock Screen, providing a tiny dashboard of information about your phone you can view without having to unlock your device. This could be useful for those who want more at-a-glance information available, since the current Lock Screen design limits the number of widgets that can be added. (But you’ll need good eyesight to read it!)

The iOS 16 version of the Top Widgets app also offers a number of other Lock Screen widget types — like animations and cartoons that cleverly use the Lock Screen’s rectangular widget designs to create an image stretched across two widgets placed side-by-side.

For example, you can add two Lock Screen widgets with a cupid shooting his arrow through a beating heart or watch as a bunny inflates a balloon. Or, if you prefer to use square widgets, the app offers a set of smaller emoji-like widgets that could to be added together in a row, including things like a smiley, heart, and little chick.

These sorts of widgets have an obvious appeal to a younger, Gen Z crowd, who may be more interested in personalizing their Lock Screen with cute characters, designs and animations, rather than the sort of “boring” information an adult would want to see — like their next calendar appointment, emails, or reminders, for instance.

Naturally, this found the app featured in a variety of TikTok videos this week, including one top viral video that’s now pulled in over 514,000 views and has been bookmarked 87.4K times.

@tinylittleangel.77 I’m in love &lt3 APPS USED: TOP WIDGETS #ios16 #ios16features #iosupdate #ios14homescreen #ios16new #iphone #iphone11 #topwidgets #widgetsmith #fyp #fypage #xyzbca ♬ there is a light and it never goes out spedup – posh

While the App Store’s Top Charts algorithm has historically relied on factors like the number of installs and the velocity of those installs, among other factors, it’s now being regularly manipulated by TikTok-based marketing efforts. It’s likely this viral video and others featuring the widget are behind many of Top Widgets’ new U.S. installs these past few days.

The app itself is published under the developer name of Chengdu Guluoying Technology Co. and points to the website xiaozujian.com. No developer names or contact information, beyond a postal mailing address, is provided on its site. TechCrunch attempted to reach the company through various standard email addresses ahead of publication. We did not hear back.

‘Top Widgets’ soars to No 1 on the App Store, displacing BeReal, as iOS 16 customization takes off by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Last year, TikTok quietly updated its privacy policy to allow the app to collect biometric data on U.S. users, including “faceprints and voiceprints” — a concerning change that the company declined to detail at the time, or during a subsequent Senate hearing held last October. Today, the tech company was again asked about its intentions regarding this data collection practice during a Senate hearing focused on social media’s impact on homeland security. 

TikTok’s earlier privacy policy change had introduced a new section called “Image and Audio Information” under the section “Information we collect automatically.” Here, it detailed the types of images and audio that could be collected, including: “biometric identifiers and biometric information as defined under U.S. laws, such as faceprints and voiceprints.”

The policy language was vague as it didn’t clarify whether it was referring to federal law, state laws, or both, nor did it explain why, exactly, this information was being collected, or how it might be shared.

To learn more, Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) today asked TikTok’s representative for the hearing, its Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas, if the biometric data of Americans had ever been accessed by or provided to any person located in China.

She also wanted to know if it was possible for this biometric data to be be accessed by anyone in China. 

Pappas didn’t directly answer the question with a simple yes or no, but rather went on to clarify how TikTok defines biometric data. 

Noting that everyone has their own definition of what “biometrics” means, Pappas claimed TikTok did not use “any sort of facial, voice or audio, or body recognition that would identify an individual.”

She further explained that such data collection was only used for video effects and stored locally on users’ devices, where it’s subsequently deleted.

“…the way that we use facial recognition, for example, would be is if we’re putting an effect on the creator’s video — so, you were uploading a video and you wanted to put sunglasses or dog ears on your video — that’s when we do facial recognition. All of that information is stored only in your device. And as soon as it’s applied — like that filter is applied and posted — that data is deleted,” Pappas said. “So we don’t have that data.”

In other words, the TikTok exec saying that ByteDance employees in China would have no way of collecting this data from TikTok’s U.S. users in the first place, because of how this process works at a technical level. (TikTok, of course, has hundreds of filters and effects in its app, so analyzing how each one works independently would take technical expertise and time.)

Notably, this is the first time the company has responded to U.S. Senators’ inquiries about the app’s use of biometrics, as the question brought up during the October 2021 hearing was essentially dodged at the time. When Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) followed up with TikTok for more information after that hearing, the question about facial recognition and voiceprints hadn’t been included on the list of questions TikTok returned to her office later that year in December.

The biometrics issue also didn’t come up in the letter TikTok sent to a group of U.S. senators in June 2022, to answer follow-up questions about Chinese ByteDance employees’ access to TikTok U.S. users’ data, after BuzzFeed News’ damning report on the matter. Instead, that letter was focused more on how TikTok had been working to move its U.S. users’ data to Oracle’s cloud to further limit access from staff in China.

The lack of understanding about TikTok’s use of biometrics aspect raised further concerns in April 2022, when the ACLU pointed out that a new TikTok trend involved having users film their eyes up close, then using a high-resolution filter to show the details, patterns and colors of their irises. At the time of its report, over 700,000 videos had been created using the filter within a month’s time, it said. (Today, TikTok’s app reports only 533,000+ videos.) In an email to TechCrunch, the ACLU had also suggested taking a look at Oracle’s biometric technology, given its plans to host TikTok user data.

In addition to questions about biometric data collection, TikTok was also asked in today’s hearing whether or not it was tracking users’ keystrokes.

This related to an independent privacy researcher’s finding, released in August, which claimed the TikTok iOS app had been injecting code that could allow it to essentially perform keylogging. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission also requested a meeting with TikTok after this research was released.

At the time, TikTok explained the report was misleading, as the app’s code was not doing anything malicious, but was rather used for things like debugging, troubleshooting and performance monitoring. The company also said that it used keystroke information to detect unusual patterns to protect against fake logging, spam comments and other behavior that could threaten its platform.

At today’s hearing, Pappas again stressed that TikTok was never collecting the content of what was being typed, and that, to her knowledge, this had been “an anti-spam measure.”

TikTok claims it’s not collecting U.S. users’ biometric data, despite what privacy policy says by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

The wheels of global commerce continue to turn, through wars, pandemics and economic downturns; and today a startup taking a new tech approach to improve the workings of one of the more antiquated aspects of that industry — shipping — is announcing a big round of funding to double down on growth.

Xeneta — a startup out of Oslo, Norway, that applies innovations in crowdsourcing to the fragmented and often murky world of shipping to build transparent data and analytics for the industry — has raised $80 million, money that it will be using to build out its datasets and customers across more global routes.

Xeneta has already amassed 300 million data points from “several hundred” of the world’s biggest shipping companies, which contribute and subsequently source source data from the Xeneta platform to figure out if they are paying market prices for their shipping on particular routes. And more than $40 billion in procurement sitting on the platform to date. This is all just the tip of the iceberg, however: Patrik Berglund, Xeneta’s CEO and co-founder, said in an interview with TechCrunch that combined procurement across air and sea (the two channels Xeneta covers today) totals between $600 million and $900 million depending on the season; and there are thousands more shipping companies and other shipping players out there.

“We believe we will have 1,000 of them on Xeneta in the near future,” he said. It has aimed for the biggest first: current customers include Electrolux, Unilever, Nestle, Zebra Technologies, Thyssenkrupp, Volvo, General Mills, Procter & Gamble, and John Deere.

The funding values Xeneta at $265 million, the company has confirmed.

Apax Digital, the growth equity arm of PE firm Apax, is leading the round, with Lugard Road Capital also participating. Lugard is an affiliate of a previous backer of the company, Luxor, and other existing investors include Creandum, Point Nine and Smedvig. Prior to this round, the company had raised around $55 million over a series of rounds starting in 2013.

Innovations in e-commerce and fintech have sped up how the world finds and pays for goods and services, but when it comes to getting items from A to B to turn the wheels of that ecosystem, the journey is a little less zippy: shipping remains a fragmented and — subject to economic, climate and social changes — often unpredictable ecosystem. 

There have been a number of tech startups emerging over the last several years targeting opportunities to bring more modern approaches to the antiquated and un-streamlined world of shipping. PayCargo is building new payment products; companies like sennder, Zencargo and Flexport have zeroed in on freight forwarding; Flock Freight is applying a carpooling ethos to trucking; Convoy is also applying a new touch to logistics; Fleetzero believes there’s mileage in electric freight ships; and so on.

Xeneta is in yet another distinct category of freight and shipping services: business intelligence for the companies working within the industry.

As Berglund explained it, it’s a somewhat ranging and unstructured market: for starters, you have thousands of small and big shipping companies and the partners they use to carry out their work, as well as hundreds of thousands of businesses using those services. Added to that, those interactions are often analogue and impacted by a multitude of factors that can affect pricing and overall operations. Those who are looking to book a shipping job might not know what the going price might be for a particular route, or whether it can be approached in a different way more cheaply. Those with space on freighters don’t know the best prices to offer potential customers. 

Xeneta’s breakthrough was to build a platform where all of those players could essentially share what prices they are paying at any given moment for a particular route. Its system then orders that data and applies analytics around it to model how pricing is moving, and what it might mean for related routes elsewhere.

As with other crowdsourced logistics platforms (Waze is an apt example here), the more data that is fed into the system, the more powerful it becomes. Today, Xeneta has most definitely crossed over into the self-feeding category in that regard, although earlier years when the company was just starting out were definitely more challenging.

Initially, the company covered just one route — from a port in Norway to a port China. But getting its first customers to make the leap to provide data for that one passage to prove Xeneta’s value turned out to be a winner: Berglund said that things quickly picked up as those customers input more data, and others started to as well, in order to get better insights into how much they were paying, what routes they were using and so on. The data now is based on a 70/30 split between sea and air shipping (it doesn’t cover ground routes at this point) and the data feed is active enough that when you visit Xeneta’s site, you see it passing ticker-style as it gets updated, more like a stock exchange. Interestingly, it seems that those who are submitting data are less concerned about the competitive aspect of divulging their own data to would-be rivals: the value gained from knowing the bigger picture seems to outweigh this fact.

The company, interestingly, isn’t in the business of booking shipping routes, nor does it want to be, Berglund said.

“My background is in freight forwarding,” he said, and so he knows the benefit of being someone that can provide that group with more data to do the job better. “Whether its a new digital freight forwarder, or a legacy player, they are all in need of better data to run their businesses more efficiently.” He added that 95% of the market still mainly uses Excel spreadsheets to parse historical and current data.

“I’m just flabbergasted that they still use that, and fax machines.”

And just to be clear, it’s not the only one that has realized the potential of offering more intelligence tools to this eventually modernizing industry. Others like Freightview are also building tools to make it easier for those booking shipping to get a sense of market pricing.

“Buyers and sellers of freight have been flying blind in a complex and opaque market. Xeneta’s world-leading dataset and cutting-edge platform provide unique access to granular real-time information and insight, enabling data-driven freight sales and purchases,” said Mark Beith, a partner at Apax Digital, in a statement. “This delivers compelling value for their blue-chip customer base – not just in sales or procurement, but also in budgeting and reporting, and increasingly in ESG monitoring. We’re thrilled to partner with Patrik and the Xeneta team and help deliver their vision.” Beith is joining Xeneta’s board with this round.

Xeneta makes a splash with $80M on a $265M valuation to scale its crowdsourced sea and air freight analytics by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Oracle has begun auditing TikTok’s algorithms and content moderation models, according to a new report from Axios out this morning. Those reviews began last week, and follow TikTok’s June announcement it had moved its U.S. traffic to Oracle servers amid claims its U.S. user data had been accessed by TikTok colleagues in China.

The new arrangement is meant to allow Oracle the ability to monitor TikTok’s systems to help the company in its efforts to assure U.S. lawmakers that its app is not being manipulated by Chinese government authorities. Oracle will audit how TikTok’s algorithm surfaces content to “ensure outcomes are in line with expectations,” and that those models have not been manipulated, the report said. In addition, TikTok will regularly audit TikTok’s content moderation practices, including both its automated systems and its moderation decisions where people are choosing how to enforce TikTok policy.

TikTok’s moderation policies have been controversial in years past. In 2019, The Washington Post reported TikTok’s U.S. employees had often been ordered to restrict some videos on its platform at the behest of Beijing-based teams, and that teams in China would sometimes block or penalize certain videos out of caution about Chinese government restrictions. That same year, The Guardian also reported TikTok had been telling its moderators to censor videos that mentioned things like Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong, per a set of leaked documents. In 2020, The Intercept reported TikTok moderators were told to censor political speech in livestreams and to suppress posts from “undesirable users” — the unattractive, poor or disabled, its documents said.

All the while, TikTok disputed the various claims — calling leaked documents outdated, for instance, in the latter two scenarios. It also continued to insist that its U.S. arm didn’t take instructions from its Chinese parent, ByteDance.

But a damning June 2022 report by BuzzFeed News proved that TikTok’s connection to China was closer than it had said. The news outlet found that U.S. data had been repeatedly accessed by staff in China, citing recordings from 80 TikTok internal meetings.

Following BuzzFeed’s reporting, TikTok announced that it was moving all U.S. traffic to Oracle’s infrastructure cloud service — a move designed to keep TikTok’s U.S. user data from prying eyes.

That agreement, a part of a larger operation called “Project Texas,” had been in progress for over a year and was focused on further separating TikTok’s U.S. operations from China, and employing an outside firm to oversee its algorithms.

Now, it seems Oracle is in charge of keeping an eye on TikTok to help prevent data emanating from the U.S. from being directed to China. The deal steps up Oracle’s involvement with TikTok as not only the host for the user data, but an auditor who could later back up or dispute TikTok’s claims that its system is operating fairly and without China’s influence. 

Oracle and TikTok have an interesting history. Towards the end of the Trump administration, the former president tried to force a sale between the two companies, bringing in long-time supporter, Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison to help broker the deal for his company. That deal eventually fell apart in February 2021, but the story didn’t end there, as it turned out.

But while this new TikTok-Oracle agreement has significance in terms of the tech industry and in politics, Oracle’s deal with TikTok doesn’t necessarily make the firm a more powerful player in the cloud infrastructure market.

Even with TikTok’s business, Oracle’s cloud infrastructure service represents just a fraction of the cloud infrastructure market. In the most recent quarter, Synergy Research, a firm that tracks this data, reported the cloud infrastructure market reached almost $55 billion with Amazon leading the way with 34%, Microsoft in second with 21%, and Google in third place with 10%. Oracle remains under 2%, says John Dinsdale, who is a principal analyst at the firm.

“Oracle’s share of the worldwide cloud infrastructure services market remains at just below 2% and has shown no signs of meaningful increase. So Oracle’s cloud revenue growth is pretty much keeping pace with overall market growth,” Dinsdale told TechCrunch. Synergy defines “cloud infrastructure services” as Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and hosted private cloud services. Dinsdale points out that Oracle’s SaaS business is much stronger.”

No one expects every startup worth $1 billion to be ready to go public, but the collection of billion-dollar startups that are ready to list is larger than you might think. So much so that when the IPO window finally does reopen, we could be faced with a veritable torrent of public technology companies.

A programming note: I am off this week. The excellent Anna Heim, who often helps write The Exchange and recently took over its weekend newsletter, will be filling in. She’s the best! I’m back on the 22nd!

As the saying goes, don’t threaten me with a good time. But TechCrunch’s general hunger for new S-1 filings and the data that they include is not what we need to talk about today. Nope, we need to discuss pace.

When the levee breaks

Alex and Grace are back to cover the biggest and most interesting technology, startup and markets news. This morning was a fun mix of stuff that we don’t always get to, so strap in for the following:

• Stocks and cryptos are mostly higher today, meaning that most listeners of the show are now richer than they were Friday. Congratulations!
• Coinbase earnings on the horizon, but we got word today from Palantir and SoftBank. Palantir’s stock is off due to a guidance miss, while SoftBank reported massive losses from its Vision Fund efforts.
• Also, it turns out that SoftBank is of the perspective that startup founders are not yet willing to accept valuation cuts to bring the value of their startups in line with market conditions. That’s not good.
• And there was a hugevis PE deal today, Avalara being taken over by Vista Equity Partners in a $8.4 billion deal.
• What else? Self-driving cars from Baidu are now taking passengers in China, Lyft is building a media business, and India is cutting back on buying Chinese smartphones.

We are back Wednesday! Chat soon!

Although the mobile app boom driven by pandemic lockdowns has long since passed, consumers’ mobile usage is still growing. According to new data released today by app intelligence firm data.ai (previously App Annie), consumers in over a dozen worldwide markets are now spending four to five hours per day in apps.

While the daily time spent in apps varies by country, there are now 13 markets where users are spending more than 4 hours per day using apps. These include Indonesia, Singapore, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, India, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Russia, Turkey, the U.S. and the U.K. And, in three of those markets — Indonesia, Singapore, Brazil — mobile users are spending more than 5 hours per day in apps.

Image Credits: data.ai

While the growth in app usage has slowed a bit from the second quarter in 2020, it’s worth noting that two years ago was the height of Covid lockdowns which drove app usage to spike across all categories as users worked, shopped, banked, gamed, as well as studied and attended meetings, school and events from home.

Still, the data suggests the pandemic may have led to longer-lasting impacts on app usage. It seems mobile consumers who adopted new apps and behaviors during the pandemic may have kept at it, despite the so-called “return to normal” in 2022.

Illustrating this point, some markets saw significant gains in app usage over the past two years. In the second quarter of 2020, Singapore users were spending 4.1 hours in apps. Now that’s grown to 5.7 hours, the report says. In Australia, users went from 3.6 hours to 4.9 hours from Q2 2020 to Q2 2022.  Both represent a 40% rise in time spent.

Other markets saw slower growth including Indonesia (+10%), India (+5%), Japan (+5%), Canada (+20%), Russia (+10%), the U.S. (+5%), U.K. (+5%), China (+5%), and Germany (+10%). A few markets saw no growth or a bit of a slowdown, such as Mexico (0%), Turkey and Argentina (both at -5%) — but again, comparisons to peak Covid timeframes indicate that trends are simply normalizing to pre-Covid levels.

The firm’s report also included the top ranked apps and games for the second quarter, which saw Instagram in the top spot worldwide by downloads and TikTok at No. 1 by consumer spend, in terms of non-gaming apps. Facebook was still No. 1 by monthly active users, ahead of WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, TikTok, Telegram, Amazon, Twitter, Spotify and Netflix.

Image Credits: data.ai

Notable movers in the quarter included Indian e-commerce app Meesho, which jumped to No. 8 by downloads; the multiplayer party knockout game Stumble Guys, which rose 23 places; and hyper casual game Fill The Fridge, which moved up 84 places. Meanwhile, Pokemon Go saw a boost in usage thanks to the new season that launched on June 1 ahead of the Pokemon Go Fest  in early June.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

Alex and Grace are back to cover the biggest and most interesting technology, startup and markets news. Sitting as we are on the precipice of a huge data dump, we had lots to chat through!

• Stocks are mixed around the world, while crypto selloff modestly after some recovery gains. In general, the value of securities are down in recent weeks and months, and now, frankly, quarters.
• This is Earnings Week: Yes, friends, get ready to hear from Alphabet and Amazon and Meta and Microsoft and Apple. The Big Five are reporting this week, providing us a glimpse into the health of a host of businesses. Recall that we have seen the major slow hiring lately, perhaps a harbinger of the (meager) feast to come?
• Cartona is building something neat in Egypt, TechCrunch reports. And there is still venture capital money flowing in China, despite, you know, all the stuff going on there.
• Zomato is sinking, Voyager is biting the hand that wants to feed it at least a little, and it turns out that the grocery delivery war is only heating up.

No live show this week, just three episodes! Hang in there we got you!