Category: Tech news

That anxiety has spawned an onslaught of books: Some try to convince you that your job can get better, while others argue that the machines will simply take them all away.

Having you been scoping out a new mattress or a Nintendo Switch game? It’s Leap Day, and there are a lot of great sales going on.

Regulators have been hands-off on autonomous vehicles, even after deaths and injuries. But they acted quickly after a woman was hurt in Columbus this week. 

The retail giant says it penalizes sellers who violate its policies, but some merchants say enforcement seems haphazard.  

Organizers of the Game Developers Conference postponed the event after a series of big-name companies like Amazon and Blizzard pulled out citing health concerns.

The proposed fines—against T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint—total more than $200 million for their role in breaches of privacy.

News reports claim that a Japanese patient was reinfected with Covid-19. But there are other possibilities, like a bad test or a flare-up of the original disease.

Letting a company know about flaws in their products has gotten easier since 2003—but not by much.

*Plague Inc*. saw a spike in popularity around the world following initial reports of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Dangerzone takes potentially malicious files and safely sanitizes them for you.

A striking overlap exists between the path of today’s viral spread and the path of the Black Death in the 1300s.

Antitrust regulators say they’re interested in data-driven mergers. Now we’ll see how serious they are.

Because volcanic eruptions are tricky to predict, some Neapolitans—who are sandwiched between two volcanoes—take solace in Catholic miracles.

After claiming that it would only sell its controversial facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies, a new report suggests that Clearview AI is less than discerning about its client base. According to BuzzFeed News, the small, secretive company looks to have shopped its technology far and wide. While Clearview counts ICE, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the retail giant Macy’s among its paying customers, many more private companies are testing the technology through 30-day free trials. Non-law enforcement entities that appeared on Clearview’s client list include Walmart, Eventbrite, the NBA, Coinbase, Equinox and many others.

According to the report, even if a company or organization has no formal relationship with Clearview, its individual employees might be testing the software. “In some cases… officials at a number of those places initially had no idea their employees were using the software or denied ever trying the facial recognition tool,” BuzzFeed News reports.

In one example, the NYPD denied a relationship with Clearview, even as as many as 30 officers within the department conducted 11,000 searches through the software, according to internal logs.

A week ago, Clearview’s CEO Hoan Ton-That was quoted on Fox Business stating that his company’s technology is “strictly for law enforcement” — a claim the company’s budding client list appears to contradict.

“This list, if confirmed, is a privacy, security, and civil liberties nightmare,” ACLU staff attorney Nathan Freed Wessler said of the revelations. “Government agents should not be running our faces against a shadily assembled database of billions of our photos in secret and with no safeguards against abuse.”

On top of its reputation as an invasive technology, critics argue that facial recognition tech isn’t accurate enough to be used in the high-consequence settings it’s often touted for. Facial recognition software has notoriously struggled to accurately identify non-white, non-male faces, a phenomenon that undergirds arguments that biased data has the potential to create devastating real-world consequences.

Little is known about the technology that powers Clearview’s own algorithms and accuracy beyond that the company scrapes public images from many online sources, aggregates that data and allows users to search it for matches. In light of Clearview’s reliance on photos from social networks, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have all issued the company cease-and-desist letters for violating their terms of use.

Clearview’s small pool of early investors includes the private equity firm Kirenaga Partners and famed investor and influential tech conservative Peter Thiel. Thiel, who sits on the board of Facebook, also co-founded Palantir, a data analytics company that’s become a favorite of law enforcement.

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 more than 650 companies in Latin America, largely concentrated in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, and plans to invest $100-150 million in 17 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, São 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 São 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 U.K. 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 — São 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.