Ideaforge

Lana, a new startup based in Madrid, is looking to be the next big thing in Latin American fintech.

Founded by a serial entrepreneur Pablo Muniz, whose last business was backed by one of Spain’s largest financial services institutions, BBVA; Lana is looking to be the all-in-one financial services provider for Latin America’s gig economy workers.

Muniz’s last company, Denizen, was designed to provide expats in foreign and domestic markets with the financial services they would need as they began their new lives in a different country. While the target customer for Lana may not be the same middle to upper-middle-class international traveler that he had previously hoped to serve, the challenges gig economy workers face in Latin America are much the same.

Muniz actually had two revelations from his work at Denizen. The first — he would never try to launch a fintech company in conjunction with a big bank. And the second was that fintechs or neobanks that focus on a very niche segment will be successful — so long as they can find the right niche.

The biggest niche that Muniz saw that was underserved was actually in the gig economy space in Latin America. “I knew several people who worked at gig economy companies and I knew that their businesses were booming and the industry was growing,” he said. “[But] I was concerned about the inequalities.”

Workers in gig economy marketplaces in Latin America often don’t have bank accounts and are paid through the apps on which they list their services in siloed wallets that are exclusive to that particular app. What Lana is hoping to do is become the wallet of wallets for all of the different companies on which laborers list their services. Frequently, drivers will work for Uber or Cabify and deliver food for Rappi. Those workers have wallets for each service.

Lana wants to unify all of those disparate wallets into a single account that would operate like a payment account. These accounts can be opened at local merchant shops and, once opened, workers will have access to a debit card that they can use at other locations.

The Lana service also has a bill pay feature that it’s rolling out to users, in the first evolution of the product into a marketplace for financial services that would appeal to gig workers, Muniz said.

“We want to become that account in which they receive funds,” he said. “We are still iterating the value proposition to gig economy companies.”

Working with companies like Cabify, and other, undisclosed companies, Lana has plans to roll out in Mexico, Chile, Peru, and eventually Colombia and Argentina.

Eventually, Lana hopes to move beyond basic banking services like deposits and payments and into credit services. Already hundreds of customers are using the company’s service, through the distribution partnership with Cabify, which ran the initial pilot to determine the viability of the company’s offering.

“The idea of creating Lana was initially tested as an internal project at Cabify,” Muniz wrote in an email. “Soon Cabify and some potential investors saw that Lana could have a greater impact as an independent company, being able to serve gig economy workers from any industry and decided to start over a new entrepreneurial project.”

Through those connections with Cabify, Lana was able to bring in other investors like the Silicon Valley-based investment firm Base 10.

“One of the things we’ve been interested in is in inclusion generally and in fintech specifically,” said Adeyemi Ajao, the firm’s co-founder. “We had gotten very close to investing in a couple of fintech companies in Latin America and that is because the opportunity is huge. There are several million people going from unbanked to banked in the region.”

Along with a few other investors Base 10 put in $12.5 million to finance the Lana as it looks to expand. It’s a market that has few real competitors. Nubank, Latin America’s biggest fintech company, is offering credit services across the continent, but most of their end users already have an established financial history.

“Most of their end users are not unbanked,” said Ajao. “With Lana it is truly gig workers… They can start by being a wallet of wallets and then give customers products that help them finance their cars or their scooters.”

The ultimate idea is to get workers paid faster and provide a window into their financial history that can give them more opportunities at other gig economy companies, said Ajao. “The vision would be that someone can pug in their financial information for services. If they’re working for Rappi and have never been an Uber driver and they want to be an Uber driver, Lana can use their financial history with Rappi to offer a loan on a car,” he said.

That financial history is completely inaccessible to a traditional bank, and those established financial services don’t care about the history built in wallets that they can’t control or track. “Today if you’ve been a gig worker and you go to a bank, that’s worth nothing,” said Ajao.

Source: Tech Crunch

Microsoft’s new Flight Simulator is a technological marvel that sets a new standard for the genre. But to recreate a world that feels real and alive and contains billions of buildings all in the right spots, Microsoft and Asobo Studios relied on the work of multiple partners.

One of those is the small Austrian startup blackshark.ai from Graz that, with a team of only about 50 people, recreated every city and town around the world with the help of AI and massive computing resources in the cloud.

Ahead of the launch of the new Flight Simulator, we sat down with Blackshark co-founder and CEO Michael Putz to talk about working with Microsoft and the company’s broader vision.

Blackshark is actually a spin-off of game studio Bongfish, the maker of World of Tanks: Frontline, Motocross Madness and the Stoked snowboarding game series. As Putz told me, it was actually Stoked that set the company on the way to what would become Blackshark.

“One of the first games we did in 2007 was a snowboarding game called Stoked and S Stoked Bigger Edition, which was one of the first games having a full 360-degree mountain where you could use a helicopter to fly around and drop out, land everywhere and go down,” he explained. “The mountain itself was procedurally constructed and described — and also the placement of obstacles of vegetation, of other snowboarders and small animals had been done procedurally. Then we went more into the racing, shooting, driving genre, but we still had this idea of positional placement and descriptions in the back of our minds.”

Bongfish returned to this idea when it worked on World of Tanks, simply because of how time-consuming it is to build such a huge map where every rock is placed by hand.

Based on this experience, Bongfish started building an in-house AI team. That team used a number of machine-learning techniques to build a system that could learn from how designers build maps and then, at some point, build its own AI-created maps. The team actually ended up using this for some of its projects before Microsoft came into the picture.

“By random chance, I met someone from Microsoft who was looking for a studio to help them out on the new Flight Simulator. The core idea of the new Flight Simulator simulator was to use Bing Maps as a playing field, as a map, as a background,” Putz explained.

But Bing Maps’ photogrammetry data only yielded exact 1:1 replicas of 400 cities — for the vast majority of the planet, though, that data doesn’t exist. Microsoft and Asobo Studios needed a system for building the rest.

This is where Blackshark comes in. For Flight Simulator, the studio reconstructed 1.5 billion buildings from 2D satellite images.

Now, while Putz says he met the Microsoft team by chance, there’s a bit more to this. Back in the day, there was a Bing Maps team in Graz, which developed the first cameras and 3D versions of Bing Maps. And while Google Maps won the market, Bing Maps actually beat Google with its 3D maps. Microsoft then launched a research center in Graz and when that closed, Amazon and others came in to snap up the local talent.

“So it was easy for us to fill positions like a Ph.D. in rooftop reconstruction,” Putz said. “I didn’t even know this existed, but this was exactly what we needed — and we found two of them.

“It’s easy to see why reconstructing a 3D building from a 2D map would be hard. Even figuring out a building’s exact outline isn’t easy.

“What we do basically in Flight Simulators is we looking at areas, 2D areas and then finding out footprints of buildings, which is actually a computer vision task,” said Putz. “But if a building is obstructed by a shadow of a tree, we actually need machine learning because then it’s not clear anymore what is part of the building and what is not because of the overlap of the shadow — but then machine learning completes the remaining part of the building. That’s a super simple example.”

While Blackshark was able to rely on some other data, too, including photos, sensor data and existing map data, it has to make a determination about the height of the building and some of its characteristics based on very little information.

The obvious next problem is figuring out the height of a building. If there is existing GIS data, then that problem is easy to solve, but for most areas of the world, that data simply doesn’t exist or isn’t readily available. For those areas, the team takes the 2D image and looks for hints in the image, like shadows. To determine the height of a building based on a shadow, you need the time of day, though, and the Bing Maps images aren’t actually timestamped. For other use cases the company is working on, Blackshark has that and that makes things a lot easier. And that’s where machine learning comes in again.

“Machine learning takes a slightly different road,” noted Putz. “It also looks at the shadow, we think — because it’s a black box, we don’t really know what it’s doing. But also, if you look at a flat rooftop, like a skyscraper versus a shopping mall. Both have mostly flat rooftops, but the rooftop furniture is different on a skyscraper than on a shopping mall. This helps the AI to learn when you label it the right way.”

And then, if the system knows that the average height of a shopping mall in a given area is usually three floors, it can work with that.

One thing Blackshark is very open about is that its system will make mistakes — and if you buy Flight Simulator, you will see that there are obvious mistakes in how some of the buildings are placed. Indeed, Putz told me that he believes one of the hardest challenges in the project was to convince the company’s development partners and Microsoft to let them use this approach.

“You’re talking 1.5 billion buildings. At these numbers, you cannot do traditional Q&A anymore. And the traditional finger-pointing in like a level of Halo or something where you say ‘this pixel is not good, fix it,’ does not really work if you develop on a statistical basis like you do with AI. So it might be that 20% of the buildings are off — and it actually is the case I guess in the Flight Simulator — but there’s no other way to tackle this challenge because outsourcing to hand-model 1.5 billion buildings is, just from a logistical level and also budget level, not doable.”

Over time, that system will also improve and since Microsoft streams a lot of the data to the game from Azure, users will surely see changes over time.

Labeling, though, is still something the team has to do simply to train the model, and that’s actually an area where Blackshark has made a lot of progress, though Putz wouldn’t say too much about it because it’s part of the company’s secret sauce and one of the main reasons why it can do all of this with just about 50 people.

“Data labels had not been a priority for our partners,” he said. “And so we used our own live labeling to basically label the entire planet by two or three guys […] It puts a very powerful tool and user interface in the hands of the data analysts. And basically, if the data analyst wants to detect a ship, he tells the learning algorithm what the ship is and then he gets immediate output of detected ships in a sample image.”

From there, the analyst can then train the algorithm to get even better at detecting a specific object like a ship, in this example, or a mall in Flight Simulator. Other geospatial analysis companies tend to focus on specific niches, Putz also noted, while the company’s tools are agnostic to the type of content being analyzed.

And that’s where Blackshark’s bigger vision comes in. Because while the company is now getting acclaim for its work with Microsoft, Blackshark also works with other companies around reconstructing city scenes for autonomous driving simulations, for example.

“Our bigger vision is a near-real-time digital twin of our planet, particularly the planet’s surface, which opens up a trillion use cases where traditional photogrammetry like a Google Earth or Apple Maps is doing is not helping because those are just simplified for photos clued on simple geometrical structures. For this we have our cycle where we have been extracting intelligence from aerial data, which might be 2D images, but it also could be 3Dpoint counts, which are already doing another project. And then we are visualizing the semantics.”

Those semantics, which describe the building in very precise detail, have one major advantage over photogrammetry: Shadow and light information is essentially baked into the images, making it hard to relight a scene realistically. Since Blackshark knows everything about that building it is constructing, it can then also place windows and lights in those buildings, which creates the surprisingly realistic night scenes in Flight Simulator.

Point clouds, which aren’t being used in Flight Simulator, are another area Blackshark is focusing on right now. Point clouds are very hard to read for humans, especially once you get very close. Blackshark uses its AI systems to analyze point clouds to find out how many stories a building has.

“The whole company was founded on the idea that we need to have a huge advantage in technology in order to get there, and especially coming from video games, where huge productions like in Assassin’s Creed or GTA are now hitting capacity limits by having thousands of people working on it, which is very hard to scale, very hard to manage over continents and into a timely delivered product. For us, it was clear that there need to be more automated or semi-automated steps in order to do that.”

And though Blackshark found its start in the gaming field — and while it is working on this with Microsoft and Asobo Studios — it’s actually not focused on gaming but instead on things like autonomous driving and geographical analysis. Putz noted that another good example for this is Unreal Engine, which started as a game engine and is now everywhere.

“For me, having been in games industry for a long time, it’s so encouraging to see, because when you develop games, you know how groundbreaking the technology is compared to other industries,” said Putz. “And when you look at simulators, from military simulators or industrial simulators, they always kind of look like shit compared to what we have in driving games. And the time has come that the game technologies are spreading out of the game stack and helping all those other industries. I think Blackshark is one of those examples for making this possible.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT). Subscribe here.

There are few things that US political leaders can agree on these days, but one of them thankfully appears to be 5G. Manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, health care and many other industries are beginning to incorporate the fast, device-to-device connectivity provided by the fifth-generation wireless standard. But the key 3.5 GHz band of spectrum had been reserved for military and government use. Following years of congressional and most recently executive-branch action, it will now be auctioned off in early 2021. The marketing fluff will finally make way for the technology’s promise(s). More analysis from Danny Crichton:

There has been growing pressure on U.S. government leaders in recent years over the plodding 5G transition, which has fallen behind peer countries like China and South Korea. Korea in particular has been a world leader, with more than two million 5G subscribers already in the country thanks to an aggressive industrial policy by Seoul to invest in the country’s telecommunications infrastructure and take a lead in this new wireless transition.

The U.S. has been faster at moving ahead in millimeter (high frequency) spectrum for 5G that will have the greatest bandwidth, but it has lagged in midband spectrum allocation. While the announcements today is notable, there will also be concerns whether 100 Mhz of spectrum is sufficient to support the widest variety of 5G devices, and thus, this allocation may well be just the first in a series.

Nonetheless, additional midband spectrum for 5G will help move the transition forward, and will also help device and chip manufacturers begin to focus their efforts on the specific bands they need to support in their products. While it may be a couple of more years until 5G devices are widely available (and useful) in the United States, spectrum has been a key gating factor to reaching the next-generation of wireless, and a gate that is finally opening up.

All sorts of IPOs

“Today, it’s nearly hard to recall the fear that took over startup-land,” Alex Wilhelm writes in a review of recent unicorn news for Extra Crunch. “Sure, there are warning signs about cloud growth rates, but for many unicorns, we still live in boom times.” Indeed, two of the biggest names in pre-public startups appear once again track for IPOs. Airbnb could file to go public this month, despite pandemic losses to its business. Payments provider Stripe seems to be headed that way, too. The Valley’s oldest unicorn, Palantir, may finally do that direct filing. In the meantime, Accenture spinout Duck Creek Technologies had its big liquidity event for its private equity owners yesterday, with a 50% pop — Alex did a closer look at the insurtech company’s financials on Monday for Extra Crunch, and predicted events basically:

[T]o understand its revenue base, we’ll need to annualize the nine-month period that ended May 31, 2020 (ew), and use that to extrapolate a (kinda) revenue multiple using a set of metrics that we don’t tend to use for such things (yuck).

• Duck Creek nine-months’ revenue for period ending May 31, 2020: $153.35 million.
• That figure, annualized: $204.5 million.
• Implies revenue multiple at its two IPO valuations: 11.9x, and 13.2x.

Those seem somewhat reasonable? Maybe a little expensive given the company’s slow aggregate revenue growth and lower-than-average SaaS gross margins?

By that logic, the company will raise its IPO range, price above the boosted interval, and quintuple on its first day’s trading…

Want more zingers like this? He’s busy covering the 2020 unicorn-to-IPO path through all its twists and turns over on The Exchange, which subscribers can get as a daily post and as a weekly newsletter coming out every Saturday.

Don’t let a TechCrunch reporter accidentally crash your company meeting

Our security editor Zack Whittaker had a first-person situation this week with poor security practices at a startup. And not just any kind of startup:

I got a tip about a new security startup, with fresh funding and an idea that caught my interest. I didn’t have much to go on, so I did what any curious reporter would do and started digging around. The startup’s website was splashy but largely word salad. I couldn’t find basic answers to my simple questions. But the company’s idea still seemed smart. I just wanted to know how the company actually worked.

So I poked the website a little harder.

Reporters use a ton of tools to collect information, monitor changes in websites, check if someone opened their email for comment, and navigate vast pools of public data. These tools aren’t special, reserved only for card-carrying members of the press, but rather are open to anyone who wants to find and report information. One tool I use frequently on the security beat lists all the subdomains on a company’s website. These subdomains are public but deliberately hidden from view, yet you can often find things that you wouldn’t from the website itself.

Bingo! I immediately found the company’s pitch deck. Another subdomain had a ton of documentation on how its product works. A bunch of subdomains didn’t load, and a couple were blocked off for employees only. (It’s also a line in the legal sand. If it’s not public and you’re not allowed in, you’re not allowed to knock down the door.) I clicked on another subdomain. A page flashed open, an icon in my Mac dock briefly bounced, and the camera light flashed on. Before I could register what was happening, I had joined what appeared to be the company’s morning meeting….

Founders, lock up those docs!

Studying up on diversity

Megan Rose Dickey, who has started writing weekly column about tech labor called Human Capital, put together a quick set of resources for companies including a glossary of terms and key organizations, as well as key issues and data points for context. Here’s more:

After Minneapolis police killed George Floyd and the subsequent racial justice uprising, many people in tech shouted from the rooftops that “Black Lives Matter,” despite having subpar representation of Black and Latinx folks at their companies. In some cases, these companies’ proclamations of ‘Black Lives Matter’ felt especially performative in contrast to their respective stances on Trump and selling their technology to law enforcement agencies.

Still, this has led to an increased focus on diversity, inclusion and equity in the tech industry. If you’re wondering things like, “Where do I find Black and brown talent?” or saying, “I’d invest in Black and Latinx people if I could find them!,” then this is for you.

Below, you’ll learn about some of the issues at play, some of the key organizations doing work in this space and access a glossary of frequently used terms in the realm of diversity, equity and inclusion in tech.

Minimum viable email and other growth marketing tips

Lucas Matney took a look through three growth marketing talks at early stage to glean key tactics for those who didn’t attend. Along discussions around SEO and landing pages, here’s a big presentation from Sound Venture’s Susan Su about growing a business through email marketing in 2020. Here’s an excerpt:

“The first role email plays in growth is as a tool to help you accelerate your reinforcing feedback loops. For example, email growth can help you expand LTV if you’re building a consumer e-comm or it can help you shorten your sales cycle if you’re a B2B, or enterprise SaaS business. It’s also really powerful for reducing attrition or churn, which is key, obviously, and sometimes it’s an overlooked way of actually increasing growth.”

The second role that [email] plays in growth is as a two-way channel connecting your product and your user, and that channel can carry information either about your product value from your brand out to your user, or it can carry information about your users needs and preferences from them to you.”

Check out her full talk, which was moderated by your faithful correspondent, for advanced topics like how to improve the credibility of your domain with spam filters.

Around TechCrunch

Save with group discounts to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

Ready, set, network: CrunchMatch is open for Disrupt 2020

We’re exploring the future of SaaS at Disrupt this year

Waymo COO Tekedra Mawakana is coming to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020

Rep. Zoe Lofgren to talk privacy and policy at Disrupt 2020

Across the week

TechCrunch

Facebook launches support for paid online events

Digitizing Burning Man

The robots occupying our sidewalks

Beware bankers talking TikTok

Kamala Harris brings a view from tech’s epicenter to the presidential race

Extra Crunch

Building a fintech giant is very expensive

Minted.com CEO Mariam Naficy shares ‘the biggest surprise about entrepreneurship’

IoT and data science will boost foodtech in the post-pandemic era

What’s different about hiring data scientists in 2020?

No pen required: The digital future of real estate closings

#EquityPod

From Alex:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week we had the full crew around once again — Natasha Mascarenhas, Danny Crichton, Chris Gates and myself. And as always, it was key to have the full crew as there was an ocean of news to get through. Before we get into the show, make sure you’ve checked out Danny’s latest work on the TechCrunch List… now, let’s get to it:

• The TikTok saga continues: This week we spent a few minutes discussing why bankers are incentivized to make the proposed TikTok-Microsoft deal as competitive as possible. Or at least make it look as competitive as possible. And, there’s some data from inside Microsoft about how the deal is being viewed.
• Airbnb could file to go public this month! It might go public before the year is out! That’s way better than we expected. (Bloomberg got its Q2 finances.)
• Palantir could file for a direct listing next month! That’s great. We wanted to know what Palantir really is, namely a consultancy or a tech company. And then we played valuation bingo so we can look back later and mock ourselves.
• I was very excited about the Duck Creek IPO. Few of my friends joined me in being excited.
• The three of us also took a minute to riff on the latest Pinterest news, namely that it’s poorly run and is sexist per its now-former COO. We’d love to stop covering these stories, but they keep happening so, on we go.
• Danny had some neat SPAC data to share, helping illustrate that SPACs are not merely a meme, they are a real, driving force of public company action this year. As was Tesla’s announced stock split, which led us to ask why a few times.
• Next up, Natasha walked us through her latest work digging into how Gen Z is shaking up the funding world. We framed the changes in some historical context, and decided that really in the end the kids are alright.
• Danny brought us to a close, with a note on Conduit (connecting founders and early-stage investors) and Circle (creator software). Both are worth your time.

And that was our show! We are back Monday morning. Stay cool!

Source: Tech Crunch