News reports surfaced over the past 24 hours that the $40 billion Nvidia-Arm deal, which ranks among the most expensive tech deals ever, is in peril. Nvidia is reportedly ready to walk away due to regulatory pressure. The question is, what does it mean for tech M&A if this deal falls apart?

Let’s not forget that last year at this time Visa shut down a $5.3 billion deal to acquire Plaid after the U.S. Justice Department gave it a closer look than made the credit card giant comfortable. Just last month, the U.K.’s antitrust watchdog announced it was holding up Microsoft’s proposed $20 billion acquisition of Nuance Communications. That deal remains in limbo while it decides what to do with it, and there is also a possibility that the country’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) will open an investigation as well.

It’s worth noting that EU authorities cleared the deal last month without conditions.

Now we have Nvidia facing much broader regulatory scrutiny as international regulators worry about the combined companies shifting the competitive balance in the chip market.

Geoff Blaber, Chief Executive Officer at analyst firm CCS Insight says that this deal faced tough regulatory headwinds since it was announced, and it’s not surprising to him that Nvidia would decide to walk away.

“The Nvidia–Arm deal has faced intense scrutiny and pressure from the start and it’s no surprise the deal is in danger of collapse. Finding a way to appease regulators whilst maintaining the value and justifying the $40 billion price tag has proven overwhelmingly challenging,” Blaber said.

He added that the company could try an alternate exit, but it won’t provide the same rate of return for investors that the Nvidia deal would have. “It has also proven disruptive to Arm and its ecosystem in the process. An IPO is an alternative path, but is unlikely to provide Softbank (Arm’s primary investor) a comparable return.”

Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insight & Strategies agrees that it puts Arm in a more difficult financial position, but he sees Nvidia coming out pretty much unscathed, even if it was not able to get the company it wanted.

“For Arm, it means an IPO and a slightly weaker company without Nvidia’s capitalization. For Nvidia, it’s business as usual. Nvidia gets an architectural license if the deal falls apart which means it can, for no license fee, create its own custom CPUs,” putting the company in good shape no matter what happens in this deal.

That could be a big part of why Nvidia with so much regulatory scrutiny simply decided it was no longer worth the effort, especially since it could essentially have its cake and eat it too and it could put that $40 billion into other areas of investment to drive growth in the future.

It could be that this is a unique situation and that it doesn’t really have much impact on the broader M&A landscape, but as we see more careful oversight of deals, and the on-going antitrust efforts in the U.S. involving big tech, it certainly feels like there could be more here than one company growing tired of a bureaucratic process.

There has been talk of governments in general looking at tech deals more closely than in the past, but with the EU all but rubber stamping the Microsoft-Nuance deal, it could depend on the mechanics of each deal, the companies involved, and especially the perceived impact on competitive balance.

Sylvera, a UK-based startup which uses machine learning technology to analyze a variety of visual data like satellite imagery and Lidar with the goal of boosting accountability and credibility around carbon offsetting projects, has fast followed a $5.8 million seed round in May last year by closing a $32M Series A.

The round was co-led by Index Ventures, which also led Sylvera’s seed, along with New York-based global private equity and VC firm Insight Partners. Also participating in the round: Salesforce Ventures, LocalGlobe and a number of angel investors.

The 2020-founded startup has now raised a total of $39.5M to date.

It says the Series A will be used to fuel further business expansion, including by further expanding the team and beefing up technical leadership.

Expanding the platform to include universal coverage of all offsets is also on the cards.

Commenting in a statement, Dr. Allister Furey, co-founder and CEO, said: “The market is one of the world’s most powerful tools against climate change. But we need reliable data to determine the quality of carbon offsets, in order to incentivize people to invest in the projects that are actually doing good — and to reward the project developers doing good work.

“That’s why we’re building the most accurate ratings for the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM). We’ll use the funding to expand our coverage so that, with our ratings, corporate sustainability leaders, carbon traders, and policymakers will have clarity, confidence and choice when evaluating and investing in carbon projects. This is how you move billions of dollars into carbon abatement, sequestration and removal.”

Sylvera is not disclosing how many customers it has for its ratings — which it makes available via a web app and API — but says customers so far span a mix of industries, and include the likes of Delta Airlines, Cargill, CBL (an Xpansiv market), and Bain & Company.

“We have a mix of customers spanning corporate buyers, traders and exchanges,” it adds. “Our customers are typically large institutions who have made net zero commitments, and who are the biggest buyers of carbon credits in the market.”

While Sylvera’s ratings framework is proprietary, the startup says it’s committed to publishing details of how it makes project assessments to support its goal of becoming a leading trusted source of carbon offsetting data (importantly it does not trade carbon offsets itself to avoid direct conflicts).

Its pitch is “independent, in-depth and up-to-date assessments of carbon projects” — a worthy-sounding goal in a space rife with bogus offsets and greenwashing — albeit a claim that will need independent, in-depth and up-to-date external verification of the methods, data and algorithms involved if it’s to actually gain trust.

“We are working towards making Sylvera the most trusted source of truth on carbon offsets across all types of offsets within the next two years,” the startup notes when we ask about this, adding: “To be a trusted source of data, we must be transparent. This is why we will publish our ratings framework, our model accuracy assessment protocols, and underlying model accuracy figures. We will be also publishing peer-reviewed academic papers on our advanced biomass inference work later this year with our partner researchers at leading universities around the world.”

Commenting on the Series A round in a statement, Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, partner at Index Ventures and Sylvera board member, added: “We won’t stand a chance of reducing the world’s carbon emissions without a well-functioning carbon offset market. Billions are spent on carbon offsets every year, yet there is a lack of transparency and accountability and, therefore, a lack of trust. Trust is absolutely essential to reach the scale required to address the climate emergency. As an independent data provider, Sylvera has seen exponential growth in demand from some of the world’s largest companies, governments, and other entities. It highlights how critical their work is, and we’re excited to expand our partnership with Sylvera.”

Data lake platform Dremio today announced that it has raised a $160 million Series E funding round led by Adams Street Partners. Existing investors Sapphire Ventures (which also led the company’s $135 million Series D round last year), Insight Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Cisco Investments also participated in this round.

The company says this preemptive round now brings Dremio’s valuation to $2 billion, up from $1 billion when it raised its Series D round just over a year ago.

“We live in what’s called the SQL lakehouse world,” explained Dremio CEO Bill Bosworth, who joined the company almost exactly a year ago, after eight years as Datastax’s CEO. “What we do is provide technology that allows end-users to access their data in their data lakes directly via SQL — and they can do this in a way that delivers mission-critical BI. What that means is [we’re] giving you the performance that you need to run things like mission-critical dashboards that have sub-second response time capabilities. You can have thousands of analysts hitting the same datasets at the same time with no performance penalty, we call that high concurrency throughput. This is the area that Dremio has been focused on for some time now. We’re going to continue to take that position to the future with a lot of exciting new growth and capabilities in the coming year.”

Dremio — as well as competitors like Databricks — is playing in a newly invigorated market. While data lakes and data warehouses, for the longest time, looked like they would remain useful for a set of relatively limited use cases, the idea of the lakehouse — which was first popularized by Databricks — is meant to signal that this new class of technologies now allows enterprises to do far more with this data.

“The technology has advanced so much that we felt like there was a need to sort of shift people’s thinking in what those capabilities could be,” Bosworth said. “So by using the term lake house, really, it’s just a connotation that says, ‘oh, so what you’re suggesting is that things that I could do previously only in my data warehouse, are now made possible on data lakes.'”

Unlike Databricks, Dremio’s focus is squarely on SQL workloads, business analysts and mission-critical business intelligence. There is some overlap there with the competition, but Dremio’s mission is quite a bit more focused right now.

“A top priority for every business leader today is to become a data-driven company,” said Brian Dudley, Partner at Adams Street Partners. “But data teams are being asked to do the impossible: provide faster time to insights, make all data consumers more self-sufficient, ensure data governance and security, and promote an open architecture to avoid vendor lock-in, all while reducing infrastructure complexity and costs. We believe Dremio is leading the way to empower companies to become data-driven, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with Billy and the Dremio team on its mission!”

This new funding, of course, gives Dremio a lot of room to aggressively pursue this mission. In addition to expanding its engineering team, the plan is to triple the company’s sales capacity and Bosworth specifically noted that the team plans to greatly expand its go-to-market in Europe this year. But he also noted that having raised this much capital, the company now has the runway to weather any potential headwinds in the global markets for quite some time.

“I think everybody who studies this even for five minutes understands that there are some questions ahead in terms of inflation and what that’s going to do to tech valuations,” he noted. “Nobody knows the answer. The best economists I listened to seem to be all over the map, but the good news is, for us, with this kind of the balance sheet, we can execute independently of whatever inflationary winds might hit the markets in the coming years.”

Meet Zoi, a new French startup that wants to combine routine medical checkups with preventive care through a mobile app. The startup has been co-founded by Ismaël Emelien, former special advisor to Emmanuel Macron during the early days of its presidency, and Paul Dupuy, who previously worked on Workwell.

Before I tell you more about the product and vision, it’s also worth noting that the company has raised an impressive seed round of $23 million (€20 million) from business angels exclusively.

Zoi is a healthcare startup that focuses on preventive care. The company isn’t working on new treatments, medicines or vaccines. Instead, Zoi wants to give you personalized insights so that you can improve your overall health over the long run.

How does Zoi gather data exactly? “It’s a hybrid model that is physical and digital — we’re going to open centers and we’re going to collect data ourselves,” co-founder and CEO Ismaël Emelien told me.

Once you start your subscription and become a member, the startup will send you an invite to tell you that it’s time to visit a Zoi health center. The company will get blood samples, check your vision, your hearing, your heart and more.

Based on that first checkup, Zoi will use data science to process that data. “We’re going to create the tools that will lead us to predictive algorithms. We’ll be able to improve our data analysis continuously,” co-founder Paul Dupuy told me.

But instead of sending you a 30-page document with a bunch of information, Zoi thinks it’s more efficient to rely on nudge, a popular concept in behavioral sciences. Zoi users will receive messages and content that gently push them to do the right thing for their health.

“At the end of the day, we don’t tell you that you should exercise more and eat healthier — but what kind of sports you should practice for instance,” Emelien said. Zoi users could interact with the app a little bit every day to learn more about their health.

The startup expects to launch its first clinic by the end of the year. There will be a testing phase before Zoi starts accepting a large number of patients. But the business model scales quite well as you can imagine a capacity of tens of thousands of potential patients per clinic.

At first, Zoi is going to be quite expensive as this type of preventive process isn’t covered by France’s national healthcare system. The company compares its offering with checkup centers in Paris, such as the checkup center of the American Hospital in Paris. These processes can cost thousands of euros.

Zoi wants to be a bit cheaper than these existing centers. Over time, the startup also hopes that it can lower its subscription price thanks to economies of scale.

In addition the two co-founders I mentioned already, there are three other members of the founding team. Cédric Carbone and Fabrice Bonan already know each other well as they used to be the CTO and CPO of Talend respectively. On the healthcare side, Dr Claude Dalle is going to act as Zoi’s Chief Scientific Advisor.

Individual investors only

On the investment front, Zoi chose to rule out VC money on purpose. “We were only looking for private investors who could be extremely involved. We asked for a minimum investment that was quite high with €1 million per investor so that they can support us completely,” Dupuy said.

Two persons in particular put more money on the table than the rest — Jean-Claud Marian, the founder of Orpea, a leading healthcare real estate company, as well as Stéphane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna. “He considers that preventive medicine is the solution to 90% of health issues,” Emelien said when talking about Stéphane Bancel.

But the list of investors doesn’t stop there. Other men in the round include Xavier Niel, Rodolphe Saadé, Jean-Marie Messier, Jean Moueix, Hassanein Hiridjee, Emmanuel Goldstein and Patrick Levy-Waitz.

There are two concerns with Zoi as it stands. First, with an expensive introductory subscription price, it could create a divide between people who can afford a product like that and everyone else.

Some would say that entrepreneurs should focus more on reducing inequalities in health status and life expectancy. In France, according to a 2018 study, the richest 5% of men live 13 years longer than the poorest 5% of men. When you compare the richest 5% of women and poorest 5% of women, the gap is smaller but there’s still an 8-year difference in life expectancy.

Second, while the startup relies heavily on nudge, Zoi isn’t going be an easy sell for people who don’t live in Paris near Zoi’s inaugural center. To be fair, the startup already plans to expand beyond Paris and the annual checkup only takes a few hours. So you could technically live in the middle of the Alps and get checked once a year.

But I still believe Zoi is tackling preventive care from the right angle. “Conceptually, we put users at the center,” Emelien said. “We don’t start with tech, nor with healthcare. We combine tech with healthcare around users.”

Zoi’s founders are also well aware that preventive care doesn’t stop diseases altogether. It’s all about increasing your odds of living a longer, healthier life. And this sort of methodical, data-driven approach to preventive care combined with the right level of skepticism with technological solutions could definitely have a positive impact on many people’s lives.

Mental health app Intellect’s founder and CEO Theodoric Chew

Intellect, the Singapore-based mental health startup focused primarily on Asia-Pacific markets, announced today it has raised a $10 million Series A. The company’s services, including self-directed mental wellness programs in 15 languages and online therapy sessions, are available through two channels: as an employee benefit and through Intellect’s consumer app.

The round, which Intellect claims is the largest Series A ever raised by a mental health startup in Asia, was led by HOF Capital. New investors included Headline, East Ventures, MS&AD Ventures, DG Daiwa Ventures, Pioneer Fund and existing backer Insignia Ventures Partners also returned.

Intellect claims its year-on-year revenue grew by over 20x in 2021, due in large part to new enterprise clients like foodpanda, Shopback, Singtel, Kuehne & Nagel and Schroders. It also partners with insurers and benefits brokers like Mercer.

Co-founder and CEO Theodoric Chew told TechCrunch that Intellect differentiates from other employee wellness programs because “Intellect’s vision isn’t simply to be a self-care app or an employee benefits platform solely, but a full mental healthcare system for Asia. That drives a differentiated approach in how we build our platform which caters from the smallest of daily struggles through self-guided programs, all the way to clinical therapy for chronic issues.”

The company, a Y Combinator alum, will use the capital to increase its product, engineering and commercial teams as it continues expanding into new markets. It currently has about three million registered users, in a total of 20 countries, with a strong commercial presence in Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia, said Chew.

The new round brings Intellect’s total raised since its launch in 2020 (when TechCrunch first profiled the company) to $13 million and also included angel investors like Shopback co-founder and CEO Henry Chan; Cathay Innovation’s Rajive Keshup; former Headspace VP of Engineering Neel Palrecha; Forge co-founder Samvit Ramadurgam; Peak co-founder Sagi Shorrer; Snap Inc. Director of Southeast Asia Anubhav Nayyar; and Tinder and Match Group general manager of Southeast Asia Gaurav Girotra.

The startup says that among companies that offer it as an employee benefit, adoption rates consistently range between 20% to 40%, much higher than traditional employee assistance programs.

The startup is participating in 10 clinical studies in collaboration with academic institutions, including the National University of Singapore, King’s College London, University of Queensland and the Singapore General Hospital, and says some of them have already shown that Intellect improves stress, anxiety and depression among users.

In a statement about the investment, HOF Capital partner Victor Wong said, “The need for mental health support is exceedingly timely today and it continues to rapidly grow in demand across the world. Intellect has grown to over 3 million individuals and enterprises across 20 countries in just under 2 years and we’re very excited to back them for the long term as they continue to transform millions of lives through inventing a new mental healthcare system for workforces and individuals across Asia.”

Codenotary, a service that makes it easier for development teams to build transparent software supply chains (and also the company behind the popular open source immudb immutable database), today announced that it has raised a $12.5 million Series B round from new and existing investors like Bluwat, Elaia and others. This new round brings the company’s total funding to $18 million, including last July’s $5.5 million Series A round.

Founded by CEO Moshe Bar, who previously co-founded Qumranet, and CTO Dennis Zimmer, Codenotary helps people identify and track all of the components in their DevOps cycle. This means that when there is an attack on the supply chain or a vulnerability like Log4j, it’s far easier for a company to figure out where these libraries are being used and mitigate the potential blast radius. Because all of this sits on top of immudb, a ledger database that provides a tamper-evident history system (without any blockchain voodoo), users should be able to fully trust this information. After adding Codenotary to their software supply chain, the service automatically creates a bill of materials based on what it is seeing.

Image Credits: Codenotary

“Our mission is to make sure that we can trust the artifacts that we use in the development of applications throughout any organization, whether it’s open source or an internal enterprise organization,” Bar said. “When we started the company, we were looking for ways to make sure that the information that we store — about who worked on which artifact, when and how and what did they do to it — will be safe from tampering.” Since there was no database available at the time that fulfilled Codenotary’s requirement, the team wrote its own. Bar noted that immudb provides the same cryptographic verification you could get from a blockchain, but in the form of a far more performant database.

“Codenotary offers a solution which allows organizations to quickly identify and track all components in their DevOps cycle and therefore restore trust and integrity in all their myriad applications,” said Pascal Blum, senior partner at Bluwat AG in Switzerland, an early investor in Codenotary. “Combined with Codenotary’s leading immutable database, immudb, the company has achieved a leader position in this new market.”

The service currently has more than 100 customers and, while it is not able to disclose most of these names, the team noted that it includes some of the world’s largest banks.

According to Zimmer, most of Codenotary’s customers first implement the service in the software pipeline to be able to establish the provenance of their software from source to production. That customer base, he also noted, varies from small software development shops to large ERP companies, which often use the service to disclose the quality assurance work they put into a new release, for example, and to provide a bill of materials for external customers that use their software. As Bar added, it’s often financial organizations and government agencies that are at the forefront of thinking about these issues.

Codenotary plans to use the new funding to accelerate its product development and expand its marketing and sales worldwide.

Well, here we are.

The bad things are still happening: The U.S. stock market opened in the red this morning, with broad indices losing ground (the S&P 500 is off 2.3%) and the tech-heavy Nasdaq taking even more punishment (off 2.7%).

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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Closer to home for startups are cloud stocks, a collection of companies that sell software along modern lines — read: SaaS via public cloud. They’re taking even heavier blows, with one key index off 3.33% at the moment I write this to you.

But that damage is modest compared to what is going on in the decentralized world, with major cryptos falling sharply, again, adding to their seven-day losses. A quick (rounded) update on the red ink:

• Bitcoin: -3% last 24 hours, off 20% in the last week
• Ether: -7% last 24 hours, off 30% in the last week
• Cardano: -7% last 24 hours, off 32% in the last week
• Sol: -11% last 24 hours, -39% in the last week

That screaming sound you hear in the background is every trader who was holding leveraged longs on decentralized assets. If you bought the last dip, you just got punched. If you bought the dip with extra hot sauce, you took an even greater loss. (I don’t mean to make light here; if you are seriously taking hits, care for yourself, and remember that all money is an invention.)

The result of the carnage is that late-stage valuations are starting to stutter. The Wall Street Journal interviewed Mary D’Onofrio of Bessemer Venture Partners — a regular here on The Exchange — about the selloff last week, before today’s added pain. She said the following:

The public market reset is affecting how we think about our private-market entry prices for VC deals.

D’Onofrio is a growth-stage investor, so her notes here carry quite a lot of weight. More simply, the translation from public market pullback to private market reset is already underway, but on enough of a time delay that the earlier stages of startup investment are unlikely to feel it for a while yet.

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

If you own stuff, I am sorry to report that you are probably poorer today than you were on Friday, and even less wealthy than you were the Friday before. Things are selling off and we had to talk about it:

• Stocks are down, and cryptos are getting utterly hammered. It’s a bad time to own equities, but worse if you are invested in digital assets. Bitcoin, ether, and Solana are taking body-blows while the stock market wilts. I guess this means that all our 401k contributions will be cheaper in February? Small wins, but still.
• Swiggy raised a huge round at a simply enormous price, which is good for the company but has us asking questions. OfficeSpace raised $150 million, which caught our eye, and the recent Spectrum Labs appears to make good sense.
• And to close out we asked is the party over? This MG Siegler piece was in our brain as we chewed over the situation. The dissonance between the public and private markets feels peak, and we aren’t sure how quickly their diverging velocities can keep up the tension.

Regardless of how the selloff is impacting you, we hope that you have a lovely week and stay warm. Hugs!

German startup Gorillas has announced that it plans to acquire Frichti, a French startup that delivers both ready-to-eat meals and groceries. The acquisition hasn’t closed just yet but both companies have entered exclusive discussions.

“We don’t share details about the deal itself, especially as it isn’t completely signed,” Frichti co-founder and co-CEO Julia Bijaoui told me. “But it is correct to say that these are negotiations that should lead to Frichti getting acquired by Gorillas.”

When asked when the transaction is supposed to close, she told me it could take “a few weeks or a few months”, it’s still hard to tell exactly. Over the years, Frichti had raised around €100 million in total ($114 million at today’s exchange rate).

Gorillas is part of a group of startups that are trying to reinvent grocery deliveries in Europe. The company has raised nearly $1 billion in its most recent funding round and is already operating in eight markets — including France.

It competes with Flink, Zapp, Cajoo, Getir and Gopuff (following Dija’s and Fancy’s acquisitions). With these apps, customers can buy everything they would find in a small grocery store. And they all promise near-instant deliveries so that you don’t have to plan in advance when you need to order groceries.

In addition to this new crop of startups, other well-established companies are trying to position themselves as competitors to instant grocery startups. For instance, Deliveroo and Uber Eats are both emphasizing grocery deliveries in their respective app.

Frichti, on the other hand, has been around since 2015, but with a different positioning. In the article that I wrote back in 2015, I called the startup a full-stack food delivery startup. The startup designs its own recipes, cooks ready-to-eat meals in its own kitchens, stores food in its own micro-fulfillment centers and handles deliveries with its own delivery service.

The result is a complete end-to-end service with a strong brand and reasonable prices. Over the past few years, the company has expanded to include fruits, vegetables, grocery items and private label products. It has served 450,000 customers in total across eight different cities in France and Belgium.

The subcontracting incident of summer 2020

It’s a graceful exit for Frichti and the acquisition makes a ton of sense for Gorillas. Gorillas is acquiring a strong brand, a network of micro-fulfillment centers and a different segment in the delivery space.

Frichti and Gorillas will still operate as two different services in Frichti’s existing markets France and Belgium. As for Gorillas’ six other markets, the company could choose a different path.

“Honestly, we haven’t decided yet but it’s more likely that we scale many of the building blocks of Frichti’s product — but under an umbrella brand that could be Gorillas,” Frichti’s Julia Bijaoui said.

And because Frichti has been around for so long, Gorillas could learn a thing or two from Frichti. “We have had six years to build this model of quick commerce,” Bijaoui said. “We’re generating an operating profit, which is quite unusual in this industry.”

But the past 18 months haven’t been so easy for Frichti. In June 2020, Libération’s Gurvan Kristanadjaja reported that some of Frichti’s deliveries were handled by undocumented workers. According to Frichti’s founders, the startup wasn’t aware of that. Instead, Frichti, like all delivery companies, relied on subcontracting companies to hire delivery people and handle some deliveries for the platform.

And one of those subcontracting companies lured undocumented immigrants and told them that they could make money with Frichti deliveries. There was no work contract, no minimum pay.

That was just one example that highlighted a much bigger problem. Frichti checked the status of all its delivery partners to make sure that they have a proper working permit and get paid properly. The company underestimated the issue.

Hundreds of delivery people realized that they would lose their source of income. So they decided to protest and they blocked access to Frichti’s micro-fulfillment centers. During several weeks, Frichti simply couldn’t operate normally.

According to Libération, 200 out of 500 delivery persons working with Frichti didn’t have a residence permit.

That incident became a serious crisis that could have led to Frichti’s bankruptcy. A few weeks later, around half of the undocumented migrants who handled Frichti deliveries received a residence permit.

“We’ve had this incident during the summer of 2020. Clearly, we had some flaws in our process to check the identity and the permits of our delivery partners. It’s something that we have completely fixed today. We make sure that our delivery people have a residence permit and work in optimal conditions,” Bijaoui said.

“It’s an event that taught us a lot and I think we came out of it stronger because we partnered with them and helped them get residence permits,” she added.

Instead of blaming Frichti, this crisis highlights a widespread problem with the subcontracting model and app-based gig work. Account renting and dishonest subcontracting companies have been an issue for years.

And yet, both regulators and companies have been slow when it comes to implementing changes for the better. I’m sure the Frichti team is glad that it has turned this page of the company’s story, but I’m also sure there are other companies who will face similar incidents.

After years of exploding growth, there has been some consolidation in the food and grocery delivery space — as today’s acquisition proves once again. Let’s hope that these newly formed delivery giants won’t turn a blind eye on exploitation in the gig economy.

Weather forecast company AccuWeather is acquiring French startup Plume Labs — terms of the deal are undisclosed. Originally founded in 2014, Plume Labs has gradually expanded its product offering to offer three different products focused on air pollution data.

First, the startup launched a mobile app for iOS and Android that gives you information about air quality. At first, it was a simple city-level air pollution forecasting app. The company would aggregate data from different sources to predict how pollution would evolve over time.

Over time, Plume Labs improved its forecasting abilities as it can now predict air quality for the next few days. Plue Labs uses some machine learning models for its predictions. It now also offers detailed maps with street-by-street information. This way, if you’re commuting to work on a bike or a moped, you know that you should avoid a busy street in particular.

Plume Labs then wanted to empower its users by making air quality tracking visual and actionable. That’s why it designed its own air quality tracker that connects to your smartphone using Bluetooth Low Energy.

The second-generation device can track particulate matter (PM1, PM2.5 and PM10) as well as polluting gases (nitrogen dioxide and volatile organic compounds). It’s been relatively successful as there are currently more Plume Labs devices being used than government-supported monitoring stations.

Finally, Plume Labs started offering air pollution data as an API. The company has aggregated thousands of environmental monitoring stations around the world and applied its machine learning model on this data. This way, Plume Labs customers get a head start if they want to integrate air quality data in their products. They don’t have to deal with different data sources and unify these data sets into a single set. Similarly, they don’t have to allocate resources on machine learning applied to air pollution.

In January 2020, AccuWeather integrated Plume Labs’ data in its weather forecasting products. The weather forecasting company used that opportunity to acquire a stake in Plume Labs. And now, AccuWeather is going one step further and acquiring the rest of the company.

“Air quality plays an intrinsic role in AccuWeather’s mission of saving lives and helping people prosper, and this acquisition will help us provide users and customers with an even more personalized experience as well as a 360-degree understanding of the impact of weather on their wellness,” AccuWeather president Steven R. Smith said in a statement. “Our exclusive alliance delivered on the promise to help put our users in greater control of their health, and we are committed to that goal even more firmly with this new strategic direction.”

Plume Labs will become the center for climate and environmental data for AccuWeather. This acquisition proves that air pollution is becoming a key metric for many industries.

“Seven years ago, David Lissmyr and I launched Plume Labs to make air quality information accessible to everyone,” Plume Labs co-founder and CEO Romain Lacombe said in a statement. “Since then, our work has helped galvanize the fight for clean air by making the health impact of climate change personal. Joining forces with AccuWeather now is an extraordinary opportunity to amplify our impact at planetary scale and help 1.5 billion people avoid air pollution around the world.”

Up next, the Plume Labs team and technology will continue to operate and expand its work to other environmental risks, such as wildfires. Climate risk forecasting is still in its early days, but today’s acquisition confirms that it is going to become more important over time.

Berlin-based startup Moss has announced earlier this week that it has closed a new $86 million Series B funding round (€75 million). The company offers corporate credit cards for small and medium companies so that they can more easily spend and track their spending.

Following today’s funding round, Moss has reached a valuation of $573 million (€500 million). Tiger Global Management is leading the Series B with A-Star also participating. Overall, the company has raised nearly $150 million in total (€130 million).

Moss could be considered as a spend management platform. It competes with other European players, such as Spendesk, Pleo and Soldo. What sets Moss apart from its competitors is that it offers credit cards, not debit cards. But transactions still show up in your Moss dashboard seconds after each payment.

In addition to physical cards, employees can also generate virtual cards for online payments. Every time they make a purchase, Moss customers get 0.4% in cashback on all expenses.

This way, small companies don’t have to share one corporate card for all expenses. Team leaders can set budgets for each employee and track expenses more easily.

For employees themselves, corporate cards aren’t that common in Europe. By switching to Moss they don’t have to pay out of pocket for employee expenses. They can use a Moss card and attach the receipt to the transaction. And if a restaurant doesn’t accept card payments, Moss also handles cash expenses and reimbursements.

In addition to card payments, you can rely on Moss for other types of payments by centralizing all your invoices in your Moss account. Moss users can set up approval rules and export payments lists for the business bank account.

Finally, Moss can speed up accounting tasks as it integrates with Datev, a popular accounting software on the German market. Going forward, the startup is going to make its product more modular. You won’t have to use the entire spend management stack if you don’t need everything.

Overall, Moss has processed 250,000 transactions and issued 20,000 cards. The product is live in Germany and the Netherlands. The company now plans to expand to the U.K.

Since the Ant Group IPO was canceled by central authorities, China’s government has been on a regulatory tear.

You know the broad outlines: After a lengthy period of growth, capital investment and aggressive business practices, China’s central government spent much of 2021 reining in its technology sector. While some of the actions were reasonable from an antitrust perspective, many of the changes to the country’s tech sector appeared more punitive toward entities viewed as too powerful.

The for-profit edtech sector got hit. Didi was effectively executed after it had the audacity to go public in the United States. Video game time for kids was cut, gaming titles left unapproved, algorithms put under the microscope, and more. The business climate for building tech companies under the new “Common Prosperity” push in the country appeared to take a dramatic turn for the worse.

As a result of the changes, the value of many well-known Chinese technology companies suffered.

Although the exit window for China-built tech companies is seemingly constricting to only domestic exchanges, and the space made available in the economy for tech companies to build and innovate apparently shrinking, venture capital activity was strong last year in the country.

We were surprised to see it as 2021 entered its final months, just as we were surprised when we got the full-year numbers.

But there was more. ByteDance recently “dissolved its strategic investment team, sending worrying messages to other internet giants that have expanded aggressively by investing in other companies,” TechCrunch reported. Why did TikTok’s parent company do so? We explained:

At the beginning of this year, ByteDance reviewed its “businesses’ needs” and decided to “reduce investments in areas that are not key business focuses,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. …

The “restructuring” still stirred up a wave of panic in the industry. China’s cyberspace regulator has drafted new guidelines that will require its “internet behemoths” to get its approval before undertaking any investments or fundraisings, Reuters reported. Some Chinese media outlets reported similar drafted rules.

Hot damn.

Obviously, we’re still sorting out precisely what is going on, but it appears that the ability of large Chinese tech companies to deploy capital at will into smaller companies is rapidly coming to a close.

From this juncture, our question is simple: Will government regulations slowing Big Tech investments into smaller companies in China shake up its larger venture capital market? Let’s talk about it.

Tracking corporate venture capital investment in China

The answer to our question is yes, but perhaps not lethally.

Tracking just how important corporate venture capital is to the Chinese VC scene is an interesting problem to crack. One way to view the data is to look at the list of most active investors in private Chinese tech companies in the last year.