President Donald Trump said has has given his stamp of approval “in concept” on the Oracle bid for the U.S. operations of the wildly popular social media app, TikTok, according to a report from Bloomberg.

According to the Bloomberg report Trump said, “I have given the deal my blessing,” as he left the White House for a campaign rally in North Carolina on Saturday.

“I approved the deal in concept,” Trump reportedly said.

The spinout of TikTok’s U.S. operations from its parent company Bytedance was something that Trump administration had demanded on the grounds that the company’s data handling policies and popularity in the U.S. posed a national security threat.

The President’s push to sever the applications ties to China also followed TikTok users’ alleged prank that turned what was supposed to be a triumphal rally for the President in Oklahoma City into a Presidential campaign embarrassment that cost the job of Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale.

That said, the U.S. has been looking to curtail the operations of several Chinese technology companies on the grounds that they pose security threats to the U.S. Indeed, the Presidential order that demanded TikTok’s spinout also called for the discontinuation of the U.S. operations of the messaging service WeChat, which is owned by Tencent — one of China’s largest technology companies. And the U.S. government has also put a target on the telecommunications and networking technology developer, Huawei.

With the TikTok deal set to be approved, a new company called TikTok Global will be created as part of the deal, according to statements from Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, earlier this week.

Bloomberg reported that Trump said the new company would be headquartered in Texas, would hire as many as 25,000 people and would contribute $5 billion toward U.S. education.

The bulk of TikTok’s U.S. operations are now in Los Angeles.

As the Trump Administration continues its push to disrupt the operations of Chinese tech companies in the U.S., strange bedfellows are uniting to voice opposition to the deal.

On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union and the head of Facebook’s Instagram subsidiary both came out with statements opposing the proposed transaction.

“This order violates the First Amendment rights of people in the United States by restricting their ability to communicate and conduct important transactions on the two social media platforms,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, in a statement on Friday.

And the dragnet against Chinese influence through ownership of U.S. technology companies has reportedly widened to include many of the top U.S. gaming companies, which have been backed (or are wholly owned) by Tencent.

All of this could be exceptionally bad for U.S. technology businesses, as Instgram’s chief, Adam Mosseri pointed out in a series of Friday tweets.

“A US ban of TikTok would be meaningful step in the direction of a more fragmented nationalized internet, which would be bad for US tech companies which have benefited greatly from the ability to operate across borders,” Mosseri wrote.

Some of the biggest names in online gaming in the United States have received letters from the U.S. government requesting information about their relationship with the multibillion-dollar Chinese technology company, Tencent, according to reports.

Even as the U.S. Department of Commerce moves to block new downloads of the Chinese company’s popular messaging and payment app, WeChat, it has sent out letters to U.S. gaming companies like Epic Games, Riot Games, and others about their data-security protocols and their relationship to Tencent, according to a report in Bloomberg.

Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which is chaired by the Treasury Department, is looking for information about how these companies handle the personal data of their U.S. customers.

Mobile games maker Supercell has been one of the great, understated, breakthroughs of the European startup world. The Helsinki-based mobile games maker built an empire out of Clash of Clans, raking in tons of money and catching the eye of world class investors and eventually a new strategic majority shareholder in the form of Tencent at a $10.2 billion valuation.

That was in 2016. So how does a hot startup keep its edge?

As part of this year’s virtual Disrupt,we sat down to talk with the company’s founder and CEO, Ilkka Paananen, about that and the other challenges and opportunities facing the company, and asked for his tips and opinion on spinning up and running startups in Europe today.

Times are definitely not easy right now: all of us are living through a global health pandemic, and economies as a result of that are teetering; and there is an interesting sea change happening as gaming companies (along with other content makers) face off against big tech, where question of whether platforms or the games themselves have the upper hand. (The most visible and recent example of that: the counter-lawsuits between Epic and Apple over in-app payments.)

For Supercell specifically, its majority owner, Tencent, is in hot water in the US (a major market for Supercell); and it’s sitting on a still-popular but now-ageing game franchise that you could argue is in the middle of its own Battle Royale against the many other big games that are vying for people’s attention (and spending power to keep playing and levelling up). In short, the company itself, now 10 years old, may itself be facing more existential questions of, who are we now, and what comes next?

As you’ll see in the video below, Paananen is very Finnish, which is to say sanguine and calm, about a lot of this.

Even without the experience thus far of Supercell under his belt, he has been in the industry for years. Supercell is his second big hit company: before that he founded Sumea, which was acquired by Digital Chocolate, where he became president in the now-defunct bigger studio’s heyday. And, he has been and is an investor, too: most recently Paananen backed Zwift, the gamefied home fitness startup, in its most recent, $450 million round, which included him joining the company’s board. All of this is to say that he can see the bigger picture.

The Tencent issues in the US, he said, are something that the company is watching. But not only are they unresolved — indeed just this week, ahead of any proposed bans on Tencent properties and WeChat in particular, the US government issued more clarification on how people are liable for using WeChat. In any case, Paananen said in the interview that he believes that Supercell doesn’t fall under the US executive order to be shut down, since Tencent is only a shareholder, not a full owner. He’s still waiting to see how it all plays out.

Similarly, Paananen is not overly concerned about the fact that its big hit, while still big, is getting on and slowly bringing in less revenues. Judging by the fact that Supercell has yet to follow up with another successful franchise, and has killed quite a few attempts in the meantime, the process to produce a hit, in fact, still seems to be as elusive to a company that has produced a hit already as it is to those that have not.

“It would be nice to be always on this kind of a growth curve, but the reality is… it’s very much about hits or misses,” he said. “Sometimes figures go up, and sometimes they go down [so] what’s your time horizon? We never ever think about the next quarter, and very, very rarely think about it and maybe next year, I think that’s a target in itself, you know. We try to think in decades. Our dream is to build a game so as many people as possible will play for a very long time. We are inspired by companies like, say, Nintendo. And if you’re going to take that… then that changes your perspective.”

That follows through too, it seems on investing in people who can produce interesting games that Supercell can throw up and see if they stick.

Indeed, it seems that most valuable thing Paananen has learned, it turns out, is the thing that continues to be his top priority: building the right team for the long haul. Making sure you have a group that can work together, inspire each other and be productive has been the constant, one that perhaps means even more as the company grows bigger and we continue to work under very decentralised circumstances.

Hear about all this, plus Paananen’s opinion on raising money and more, below.

In a Wednesday filing in federal court, the United States government said that users who use or download WeChat “to convey personal or business information” will not be subject to penalties under President Donald Trump’s executive order banning transactions with the Tencent-owned messaging app.

Trump issued the executive order against WeChat on August 6, the same day he issued a similar one banning transactions with ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, claiming national security concerns. Both orders caused confusion because they are set to go into effect 45 days after being issued, but said that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross will not identify what transactions are covered until then.

With that deadline now looming at the end of this week, WeChat users in America are still uncertain about the app’s future. Though WeChat is the top messaging app by far in China, where it also serves as an essential conduit for payments and other services, the U.S. version of the app has relatively limited features. It is used by Chinese-Americans, and other members of the Chinese disapora in the U.S., to keep in touch with their family and other people in China. With other popular messaging apps, like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, banned in China, WeChat is often the most direct communication channel available to them.

The U.S. government’s filing (embedded below) was made as part of a request for a preliminary injunction against the executive order brought by the U.S. WeChat Users Alliance, a non-profit organization initiated by attorneys who want to preserve access to WeChat for users in the U.S. A hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

In it, attorneys from the Justice Department said the U.S. Commerce Department is continuing to review transactions and will clarify which ones are affected by Sept. 20, but “we can provide assurances that [Secretary Ross] does not intend to take actions that would target persons or groups whose only connection to WeChat is their use or downloading of the app to convey personal or business information between users, or otherwise define the relevant transaction in such a way that would impose criminal or civil liability on such users.”

But in a response (also embedded below), the U.S. WeChat Users Alliance said that the Department of Justice’s filing instead demonstrates why a preliminary injunction is necessary. “Having first failed to articulate any actual national security concerns, the administration’s latest ‘assurances’ that users can keep using WeChat, and exchange their personal and business information, only further illustrates the hollowness and pre-textual nature of the Defendants’ ‘national security rationales.'”

The U.S. WeChat Users Alliance filed for the injunction on August 21. In an open letter published on its site, it said a complete ban of WeChat “will severely affect the lives and the work of millions of people in the U.S. They will have a difficult time talking to family relatives and friends back in China. Countless people or businesses who use WeChat to develop and contact customers will also suffer significant economic losses.”

The group also believes that the executive order “violates many provisions of the U.S. Constitution,” and the Administrative Procedure Act.

Unity, the company founded in a Copenhagen apartment in 2004, is poised for an initial public offering with numbers that look pretty strong.

Even as its main competitor, Epic Games, is in the throes of a very public fight with Apple over the fees the computer giant charges developers who sell applications (including games) on its platform (which has seen Epic’s games get the boot from the App Store), Unity has plowed ahead narrowing its losses and maintaining its hold on over half of the game development market.

For the first six months of 2020, the company lost $54.2 million on $351.3 million in revenue. The company narrowed its losses compared to 2019, when the company lost $163.2 million on $541.8 million in revenue, and 2018 when the company lost $131.6 million on $380.8 million in revenue. As of June 30, 2020 the company had total assets of $1.29 billion and $453.2 million in cash.

Increasing revenue and narrowing losses are things that investors like to see in companies that they’re potentially going to invest in. Another sign of the company’s success is the number of customers that contribute more than $100,000 in annual revenue. In the first six month of the year, Unity had 716 such customers, pointing to the health of its platform.

The company will trade on the NYSE under the single-letter ticker ‘U’. The NYSE only has a few single letters left to offer, although Pandora gave up the letter P when it was bought by Liberty Media back in 2018.

Unlike Epic Games, Unity has long worked with the major platforms and gaming companies to get their engine in front of as many developers as possible. In fact, the company estimates that 53 percent of the top 1,000 mobile games on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store and over 50 percent of mobile, personal computer and console games were made with Unity.

iQiyi and Tencent’s WeTV, two of China’s most popular streaming services, may be banned in Taiwan next month as the government prepares to close regulatory loopholes that enabled them to operate through local partnerships.

In an announcement posted this week, Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs said Taiwanese companies and individuals will be prohibited from providing services for OTT firms based in mainland China. The proposed regulation will be open to public comment for two weeks before it takes effect on Sept. 3.

Though Taiwan, which has a population of about 24 million people, is self-governed, the Chinese government claims it as a territory. The proposed regulations means Taiwan is joining other countries, including India and the United States, in taking a harsher stance against Chinese tech companies.

iQiyi and Tencent’s WeTV set up operations in Taiwan through “illegal” partnerships, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said in its announcement, working through their Hong Kong subsidiaries to strike agreements with Taiwanese companies.

In April, the NCC declared that mainland Chinese OTT firms are not allowed to operate in Taiwan under the Act Governing Relations between People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area. Cabinet spokesperson Kolas Yotaka said at the time that Chinese firms and their Taiwanese partners were operating at “the edges of the law.”

But NCC spokesperson Wong Po-Tsung said the proposed regulation isn’t targeted solely at Chinese OTT operators. According to the Taipei Times, he stated “the act was necessary because the cable television service operators have asked that the commission apply across-the-board standards to regulate all audiovisual service platforms, which should include OTT services. It was not stipulated just to address the problems caused by iQiyi and other Chinese OTT operators.”

Wong added that Taiwan is a democratic country and its government would not block people from watching content from iQiyi and other Chinese streaming services. For example, they can still access them by using cross-border payment services to pay for subscriptions in China.

Once the act is passed, Taiwanese companies that break it will face fines of NTD $50,000 to NTD $5 million [about USD $1,700 to USD $170,000].

TechCrunch has contacted iQiyi and Tencent for comment.

With a slew of partnerships with large pharmaceutical companies under its belt and the successful spin out of at least one new company, Atomwise has already proved the value of its machine learning platform for discovering and commercializing potential small molecule therapies for a host of conditions.

Now the company has raised $123 million in new funding to accelerate its business.

“Scaling the technology and scaling the team and scaling what we’ve been doing with it,” says chief executive officer Abe Heifets when asked about what comes next for the eight year old business.

Atomwise has already signed contracts worth $5.5 billion with corporate partners that include Eli Lilly & Co., Bayer, Hansoh Pharmaceuticals, and Bridge Biotherapeutics. Smaller, earlier stage companies like StemoniX and SEngine Precision Medicine are also using Atomwise’s tech.

Now the company will look to capture more of the value of drug discovery for itself, looking to develop and commercialize its discoveries by taking over more of the development process and working with manufacturers at a later stage, according to Heifets.

Atomwise tipped its new strategy last year when it announced a partnership with Velocity Drug Development and a $14.5 million investment to create x-37, a spinoff that’s developing small molecule therapies for endodermal cancers, which include cancers of the liver, pancreas, colon, stomach, and bladder.

“We have something like 750 projects running today around the world,” says Heifets. “These comprise more than 600 unique targets and that’s with a vast range of partnerships.”

The power of Atomwise’s drug discovery platform is its ability to harness machine learning to structure new proteins that have never existed — and ensure that they’re able to reach precise target receptors to accomplish a desired task.

Here, the x-37 spinoff is especially illustrative. One line of research the company is conducting into molecules that can target the PIM3 protein receptor. If a drug can block PIM3, it can kill cancerous endodermal cells, according to Heifets. However, if the molecules bind to another, similar target, PIM1, the therapy can cause heart attacks and kill patients.

“This is a challenge and empirically was considered undruggable,” says Heifets. Atomwise’s company screened 11 billion potential molecules against the targets to come up with 500 potential therapies. They’re now working on refining the therapy to bring something to market.

And x-37 is only one of the companies that Atomwise has created to commercialize various new molecules. There’s also Atropos Therapeutics, Theia Biosciences and vAIrus.

Atomwise is far from the only company to think that the application of machine learning technologies to drug discovery is a winning combination. Menten.ai is a company that’s taken the new technology developments one step further and added quantum computing to the mix to come up with new drugs.

“The market opportunity we’re going after is four times the value of the entire pharma industry today,” said Heifets. “Here’s what that’s about. There’s 20,000 human genes and only 4% have ever been drugs. Another 16% have been evidenced. But the opportunity of drugging the undruggable is way bigger than the entire pharma industry.”

Unlocking that opportunity is going to take lots of capital. That’s why B Capital and Sanabil Investments combined to lead Atomwise’s Series B round. It’s also why companies like DCVC, BV, Tencent, Y Combinator, Dolby Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures and two, undisclosed, insurance companies have invested in the company’s latest round.

 with a goal to commercialize high potential candidates through the drug development process. The company plans to continue to expand its work with corporate partners, which currently include major players in the biopharma space including Eli Lilly and Company, Bayer, Hansoh Pharmaceuticals, and Bridge Biotherapeutics, as well as emerging biotechnology companies like StemoniX and SEngine Precision Medicine. Atomwise has signed approximately $5.5 billion in deal value with corporate partners to date.

To date, Atomwise has worked with 750 academic research collaborations addressing over 600 disease targets, to model and screen over 16 billion new molecules for virtual screening. These molecules have generated 17 pending patent applications and several peer-reviewed publications. There are 285 active drug discovery partnerships with researchers at top universities around the world, and recently announced 15 research collaborations with global universities to explore broad-spectrum therapies for COVID-19, targeting 15 unique and novel mechanisms of action.

“New technologies are enabling better and faster R&D for the life science industry,” said Raj Ganguly, co-Founder and Managing Partner at B Capital Group . “The advancements Atomwise has made with its computational drug discovery platform have effectively cut months or even years off of the R&D lifecycle. More importantly, however, they are solving biology problems previously believed to be unsolvable by researchers and delivering that capability to everyone from academics to big pharma. We’re excited to continue to partner with the Atomwise team on its mission to develop new, more effective therapies.”

For lead investor, B Capital, the Atomwise investment is part of a thesis around lowering the cost of care and improving outcomes.

“Companies like Atomwise that are improving the cost curve are in the same vein of bringing therapies to market faster and cheaper. Which means you can improve access and improve costs and address things like rare diseases,” said Adam Seabrook, a principal at B Capital focused on healthcare.

Trump escalates his campaign against Chinese tech companies, Facebook extends work from home until the middle of 2021 and Netflix adds support for Hindi. Here’s your Daily Crunch for August 7, 2020.

The big story: Trump signs orders banning US business with TikTok owner ByteDance and Tencent’s WeChat

Both orders will take effect in 45 days, but its specific impact is unclear since Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross will apparently not identify what transactions are covered until then.

This comes after Trump had already said that he was banning TikTok unless the app is sold to an American owner. (Specifically Microsoft, which has acknowledged that it’s in acquisition talks.)

TikTok hit back against the order by saying that it was “issued without any due process” and would risk “undermining global businesses’ trust in the United States’ commitment to the rule of law.”

The tech giants

Facebook extends coronavirus work from home policy until July 2021 — Facebook has joined Google in saying it will allow employees to work from home until the middle of next year as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

Netflix’s latest effort to make inroads in India: Support for Hindi — Netflix has rolled out support for Hindi, a language spoken by nearly half a billion people in India.

Judge says Uber, Lyft preliminary injunction ruling to come in ‘a matter of days’ — Lyft argued that reclassifying drivers as employees would cause irreparable harm.

Startups, funding and venture capital

The rules of VC are being broken — The latest episode of Equity discusses “rolling funds” and how they could change the VC landscape.

Mashroom raises £4M for its ‘end-to-end’ lettings and property management service — The startup pitches itself as going “beyond the tenant-finding service” to include the entire rental journey.

Wendell Brooks has resigned as president of Intel Capital — Anthony Lin, who has been leading mergers and acquisitions and international investing, will take over on an interim basis.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

How to pick the right Series A investors — It’s important for founders to get to know the people coming onto their board, and Jake Saper of Emergence Capital has some thoughts on how to do that.

IoT and data science will boost foodtech in the post-pandemic era — Three “must-dos” for post-pandemic retail grocers: rely on the data, rely on the biology and rely on the hardware.

Survey: Tell us what you think of Extra Crunch — Like Extra Crunch? Don’t like Extra Crunch? Tell us why!

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Civic tech platform Mobilize launches a census hub for the 2020 count’s critical final stretch —The new site, GetOutTheCount.com, will amplify nonprofits’ census efforts and collect them in one place.

Federal judge approves ending consent decrees that prevented movie studios from owning theaters — U.S. District Court Judge Analisa Torres cited the rise of streaming services like Netflix as one of the reasons for her decision.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday banning transactions with ByteDance, the parent company of popular app TikTok . The White House also announced that he signed a similar order banning transactions with Tencent-owned WeChat, a messaging app that is ubiquitous in China, but has a much smaller presence than TikTok in the United States, where it is used mainly by members of the Chinese diaspora. Both orders will take effect in 45 days.

INBOX: @realDonaldTrump has signed an executive order to ban TikTok in 45 days. pic.twitter.com/1zR4HgCPVj

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) August 7, 2020

MORE: @realDonaldTrump has also signed a similar order banning transactions with WeChat. pic.twitter.com/Y4nVlCVBke

— Andrew Feinberg (@AndrewFeinberg) August 7, 2020

The orders cite the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act.  It is important to note that naming the apps’ operations in the United States as a national emergency is an act that is highly unprecedented and the legality of the orders will likely be challenged. ByteDance is currently pushing back against the Indian government’s July decision to ban TikTok along with 59 other apps; like the U.S., India also cited national security concerns around user data collection.

Microsoft announced over the weekend that it is in negotiations to buy TikTok from ByteDance, naming September 15 as a deadline for negotiations. The order would take affect shortly after the deadline set by Microsoft for the deal. ByteDance reportedly agreed to give up its entire ownership in the app even though it had previously wanted to maintain a minority stake.

Trump announced at the end of last month that he planned to ban TikTok through the use of an executive order. The president and government officials, including Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, have made escalating comments over the past few weeks alleging that TikTok is a threat to national security. While TikTok is owned by ByteDance, the Beijing-based company (which also operates a Chinese version of the app called Douyin) has taken steps to distance TikTok from its Chinese operations, and claims that its data is stored outside of China.

The executive order on ByteDance said that “the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China…continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States. At this time, action must be taken to address the threat posed by one mobile application in particular, TikTok.”

In 45 days, transactions by any person or property subject to U.S. jurisdiction with ByteDance or any of its subsidiaries will be prohibited “to the extent that they are permitted under applicable law.” The order claims that TikTok’s access to user data including location, browsing and search histories “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to American’s personal and proprietary information–potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”

Trump’s executive order on WeChat was less expected, but not a complete surprise because Pompeo named the messaging app earlier this week when he said Trump was planning to take action “shortly” on TikTok and other Chinese companies. Like ByteDance, Trump claims WeChat’s data collection is a national security threat and may give the Chinese Communist Party access to user information. The order also cites WeChat’s censorship of material deemed politically sensitive by the Chinese government.

TechCrunch has contacted ByteDance, TikTok, WeChat and Microsoft for comment.

This story is developing and will be updated.

Augmented Reality technology did not, it turned out, light the touch paper on a booming new industry. What we got instead was a few cute applications on smartphones and devices like Microsoft’s Hololens, which has seen pretty limited success.

Where AR has proved that it may have a future is in industry, allowing workers to look at plans whilst they assemble something, for instance.

A new UK startup hopes to nudge that future on further with a radical new technology which, although it resembles the Hololens, is in fact a highly accurate helmet-mounted screen which enables construction workers to place beams or bricks in exactly the right locations, thus introducing significant savings in time normally lost due to mistakes.

To further boost its efforts, XYZ Reality has closed a £5 million Series A funding round, led by Amadeus Capital Partners and Hoxton Ventures, with participation from Adara Ventures and J Coffey Construction. The company will build out its AR cloud and software platform and build its team to serve the EU market and expand to US and Asia.

The idea behind it is highly innovative. A dedicated helmet with an attached visor projects a highly accurate hologram — based on laser positioning — in front of the wearer’s face, allowing them to place objects precisely according to plans projected in front of their eyes.

The company claims its HoloSite headset is the “world’s first engineering-grade Augmented Reality device,” that allows construction workers to view Building Information Models on-site to a 5-millimeter accuracy.

The problem it’s solving is an age-old one. In today’s construction industry buildings are designed in 3D and then converted into 2D drawings. But tradespeople are asked to interpret those 2D drawings and turn them into 3D buildings within construction “tolerances”. This process creates inefficiencies that mean up to 80% of the construction being “out-of-tolerance”. It’s estimated that 7-11% of project costs are wasted this way and, of course, in mega-projects like huge bridges, this amounts to an average of over $100 million.

Founder, CEO and builder David Mitchell, who has spent his career in the construction industry, says: “Works are currently validated after the fact through laser scanning. But 80% of the time the construction fails to meet acceptable tolerances. With HoloSite, we can prevent errors happening in the first place.”

Mitchell came up with the idea of eliminating 2D designs after the 2008 recession devastated the industry.

I tried out the headset for myself and found that I could complete a basic assembly of bricks according to the plans projected in front of my eyes with a reasonable degree of accuracy, from scratch.

XYZ says it was possible to build a bathroom in two hours using the headset, versus a day without it, using the technology.

The hope is that that as this technology improves, any tradesperson would be able to work on a construction site with less need for training in 2D plans, but still with a high degree of accuracy.

The project is not without risk. Daqri, which built enterprise-grade AR headsets for construction, shuttered its HQ last year. Earlier, Osterhout Design Group unloaded its AR glasses patents after acquisition talks with Magic Leap, Facebook and others stalled. Meta, an AR headset startup that raised $73 million from VCs, including Tencent, also sold its assets earlier this year after the company ran out of cash.

But Amadeus is bullish. Nick Kingsbury, Partner, Amadeus Capital Partners said: “Construction is a sector that’s ripe for radical innovation. This technology has the potential to revolutionize how the construction industry sets out and validates its work, reducing costs and the chance of project slippage from mistakes.”

After investing nearly $2 billion of its Innovation Fund in Latin America in 2019, Softbank announced this month that it would add an additional $1 billion into the fund to continue supporting tech startups across the region. While the Japanese investor faces the challenge of raising a second global fund after its Vision Fund, Softbank is still investing heavily in Latin America. 

One of its early Latin American investments – and the first in Colombia – Ayenda Rooms, is performing particularly well, raising $8.7 million from Kaszek Ventures this month. Ayenda is the local version of Oyo Rooms, one of Softbank’s biggest bets in India, which has looked to expand into Mexico despite a financial crunch last month. In fact, the fund recently came under scrutiny by the Wall Street Journal for funding similar delivery competitors Uber, Rappi, and Didi, suggesting a conflict of interest. 

Most recently, Softbank invested $125 million in Mexico’s lender, Alphacredit, and they reportedly plan to continue investing in that niche. The firm currently oversees over 650 companies in Latin America, largely concentrated in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, and plans to invest $100-150M in seventeen firms and two VCs by the end of the year. To date, over 50% of Softbank’s investments have been into Brazil, most of which exist in the fintech sector. 

Mexican neobank Stori raises $10 million Series A

In a self-fulfilling prophecy, Mexico’s neobank market became all the more competitive this month with the addition of a new player: Stori. Within the past few months, both TechCrunch and Business Insider pointed to Mexico’s neobank market as the one to watch in Latin America as startups like Albo, Klar, and Nubank battle for market share. In February, digital bank Stori joined the conversation with a $10 million Series A from Bertelsmann Investments (BI) and Source Code Capital, along with an existing investor, Vision Plus Capital.

This round of funding, led by Chinese investors, is part of a growing trend of foreign funds waking up to the Latin American startup ecosystem, Asian VCs in particular. Tencent has invested in Brazil’s Nubank, which has since expanded to Mexico, and in Argentina’s Uala, which is considering a similar move. Softbank has investments in the largest lending and credit startups in Brazil and Mexico, as well. 

Stori will use the investment to improve its AI technology as it tries to reach over 100,000 Mexicans through its inclusive digital banking services. The neobank has raised over $17 million from investors since it was founded in 2018.

Grow Mobility pulls out of 14 cities

In January, Rappi and Lime pulled back their operations in Latin America in order to focus on technology over rapid growth. Brazil’s top mobility startup, Grow Mobility (which rose out of a merger between e-scooter companies Grin from Mexico and Yellow from Brazil) also pulled back. The startup, which provides e-scooters and bikes shares across Brazil, took bicycles out of operation and removed its scooters from 14 cities. 

Grow also restructured its operations through layoffs that affected employees across Brazil, although they did not comment on how many people were affected. Grow Mobility’s scooters will now only operate in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Curitiba. 

This pattern of pull-back following explosive growth has become more common among Latin America’s biggest startups, pushing these early stage companies to focus on technological solutions that boost revenue, rather than blitzscaling measures that only buy market share.

Amazon Web Services doubles down on Brazil

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced it would invest $236 million (R$1 billion) into Sao Paulo over the next two years to strengthen its Latin American infrastructure. This effort may be a part of Amazon’s work to consolidate market share in Latin America’s increasingly competitive e-commerce market, where legacy players like MercadoLibre still dominate. This investment will enable Amazon to expand its Brazilian data centers and improve local service offerings to both private and public partners. 

Amazon also announced that it would build a new distribution center in Pernambuco in the north of Brazil to support sales across the country. Brazil accounts for almost 40% of Latin America’s e-commerce market, making the country vital to Amazon’s positioning in the region.

News and Notes: Weel, Global 66, Yuca, and Memed 

Weel, a Brazilian accounts-receivable management platform, announced an $18.4 million investment from Banco Votorantim, Brazil’s seventh-largest bank, in February 2020. This investment was Banco Votorantim’s second in the startup after a $6 million contribution in 2019. Weel will use the investment to explore expansion across Brazil, as well as exploring Chilean and Mexican markets. 

Chilean international transfer startup Global 66 received $3.25 million in February from UK investor Venrex, to continue its expansion across the region. The startup currently offers rates up to eight times better than existing transfer services, especially for the Latin American region. Global 66 recently opened new offices in Peru and plans to expand to Colombia, Argentina, and Mexico within the next two years. Within just two years of operations, Global 66 has processed transactions for over 25,000 users across 60 cities worldwide.

Yuca, a Brazilian proptech, raised $4.7 million from Monashees, ONEVC, and Creditas to help fight housing crises in Brazil’s largest cities. As Brazil’s cities sprawl – Sao Paulo is one of the largest in the world – Yuca creates central co-living spaces for young people that want to shorten their commutes. Inspired by Chinese startup, Ziroom, Yuca currently manages 18 apartments for 80 students and plans to scale to 500 apartments by the end of the year.

Brazil’s digital prescription startup, Memed, recently raised $4.5 million from DNA Capital and Redpoint eVentures to improve the local prescription system for doctors and patients alike. Today, Memed has over 80,000 registered doctors who have created over 10 million prescriptions worth more than $237 million. Memed’s 100% digital prescriptions are said to improve security and efficiency in Brazil’s complex, bureaucratic healthcare system.

While Brazil is still at the forefront of Latin America’s tech ecosystem, Mexican fintechs are edging up, especially with additional support from international investors. 2020 is off to a strong start, hinting at another potential record-breaking year for Latin American tech investment.

The New York Times  published an in-depth report on Oyo, a tech-enabled budget hotel chain and rising star in the Indian tech community. The NYT wrote that Oyo offers unlicensed rooms and has bribed police officials to deter trouble, among other toxic practices.

Whether Oyo, backed by billions from the SoftBank  Vision Fund, will become India’s WeWork is the real cause for concern. India’s startup ecosystem is likely to face a number of barriers as it grows to compete with the likes of Silicon Valley.