Photomath just raised a $6 million funding round from Goodwater Capital, with Learn Capital also participating. Photomath has created a hugely successful mobile app for iOS and Android with 100 million downloads so far.

Photomath first launched at TechCrunch Disrupt London back in 2014. The company was working on text recognition technology. Photomath was just a demo app to promote that technology.

But the startup accidentally created a consumer success. The app instantly attracted millions of downloads from many desperate students willing to learn math with their phones.

Years later it is still one of the most downloaded apps in the App Store and Play Store. And the reason it’s been so successful is that it’s a simple concept.

After downloading the app, you just have to point your phone at a math problem. It can be in a book, or it can recognize your own handwriting. The app then gives you a step-by-step explanation to solve the problem.

Combining these two things is what makes Photomath useful. WolframAlpha can solve equations, and Evernote can recognize your handwriting. But nobody thought about combining these things.

Typing an equation can be hard, so it makes a ton of sense to bridge the gap between the physical world and smartphones. Before everybody started talking about augmented reality, Photomath was already taking advantage of the system-on-a-chip in your phone.

Photomath is also capable of generating graphs and supports advanced problems, such as limits, integrations, complex numbers, etc. The app solves around 1.2 billion math problems per month.

GPS is too inaccurate to tell if a scooter is being driven or parked in off-limits areas. But as scooter startups compete for permits from city governments, they need a way to prove their riders play by the rules. That’s where Fantasmo’s new scooter positioning camera comes in.

The augmented reality mapping startup had been building the Camera Positioning Standard to give self-driving cars, robots and AR games a dynamically updated understanding of the real world around them. But now Fantasmo is focusing on the urgent use case of scooter accountability.

Its camera attaches to personal electric vehicles, captures video and matches that against Fantasmo’s map to reliably identify if a scooter is being illegally ridden on the sidewalk or parked in the middle of the walkway. Scooter companies could make their vehicles beep and slowly lose acceleration where not allowed, issue fines for parking in the wrong spot, notify redistribution teams to move errant vehicles or ban riders who consistently break their terms.

The tech could even make maps of available scooters more precise so you’re not wandering around searching. And scooter companies could use Fantasmo’s data to demonstrate that their riders are the most respectful.

[Update: Lime’s VP of Global Expansion Caen Contee says that the personal vehicle rental giant has been looking at Fantasmo and researching similar technologu. He provided this statement: “We believe that mapping, 3D-imaging, and AR are amazing tech levers to drive scooter behavior change in a scalable, low-infrastructure way. We have been investing in this area among others in our quest to create the best urban mobility experience.” That means we might see cameras on Lime scooters and bikes at some point.]

“Scooters are under threat unless they find ways to work with cities to prevent sidewalk riding and make sure they’re parked in places the cities deem appropriate. 2D image capture can be leveraged to build out semantic, 3D maps of cities and provide a hyper-accurate position of the scooter,” says Fantasmo co-founder Jameson Detweiler. “So-called visual positioning is more precise than GPS and has centimeter level accuracy in dense urban environments — a notoriously bad environment for GPS. Visual positioning is accurate enough that a scooter can know when it is in a prohibited zone even if the zone is only as wide as a sidewalk.”

You can see in the video below how GPS can’t tell the difference, while Fantasmo shows green icons when the scooter is on the street and red ones when on sidewalks.

Originally founded in 2014 to build AR games, Fantasmo was started by Detweiler, who’d previously built startup website builder LaunchRock, and electrical engineering PhD Dr. Ryan Measel. Fantasmo has raised $2.2 million in funding, led by TenOneTen Ventures, to build decentralized 3D maps of the world. Instead of expensive LIDAR sensors like for autonomous vehicles, a simple 2D camera with the right software is sufficient for positioning.

So why wouldn’t scooter companies just launch their own camera systems? Well, beyond Fantasmo’s specialized expertise from years working on AR positioning, it benefits from network effect. Each client from across industry verticals contributes data they collect to Fantasmo’s collaborative maps. That means if construction or an event changes a street’s layout, the first Fantasmo camera that comes across it updates everyone else’s maps. An individual mobility startup might end up with less accurate maps while wasting resources far outside their core purpose. Developers and personal vehicle companies that want to work with Fantasmo can apply for beta access on its website.

The vision is to build “a next-generation Open Street Map that gets all the inputs to work together,” Detweiler explains. “Eventually you’ll have self-driving scooters to do redistribution,” he says, rather than having humans load them in trucks and place them where they’ll get rented next. Without super accurate maps, the idea of passenger-less scooters rampaging through cities is terrifying. “There’s definitely a horror movie or three in that concept right there.”

If a more open AR map like Fantasmo’s doesn’t win, we could end up with a tech giant like Google hoarding this data. “I think the crowd of all these devices will be more powerful,” Detweiler concludes. “It might take time, but that network effect would be hard to beat.

We are experimenting with new content forms at TechCrunch. This is a rough draft of something new. Provide your feedback directly to the authors: Danny at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or Arman at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you like or hate something here.

Today, we are focused on SoftBank .

The Wall Street Journal and others reported that Masayoshi Son, the founder and CEO of SoftBank, will take into account the killing of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi when considering whether to receive additional investment from Saudi Arabia in future Vision Funds. Saudi Arabia is the largest investor in the current Vision Fund, having pledged $45 billion of the $98 billion fund.

The political risk surrounding the Kingdom made us curious: why the obsession with Saudi money, beyond the obvious that they write monster checks?

The answer turns out that it’s not just that the country can write large checks, it is that they are willing to write large checks to one of the most heavily levered companies in the world. SoftBank — including its Vision Fund — has engorged itself on massive levels of debt in order to increase returns — often at the expense of operational stability.

First, take the Vision Fund. According to PitchBook, most of the fund is underwritten by SoftBank itself ($28 billion), Saudi Arabia ($45 billion) and Abu Dhabi ($15 billion). But, the fund has also been on a huge debt binge in order to juice returns. As reported by Mayumi Negishi and Phred Dvorak at the WSJ:

Around 60% of the money promised to the Vision Fund by investors other than SoftBank takes the form of debtlike securities that earn a 7% fixed return annually. That is an unusual structure for a fund that backs young, unprofitable companies, where it is unclear when—or if—investors will make money.

On top of that, the Vision Fund and its affiliate have been borrowing money: They had around ¥636 billion ($5.6 billion) in debt as of the end of September, up 28% in the past six months, according to SoftBank filings. That money has partly been going to pay the returns promised the funds’ investors, the filings say.

And SoftBank is planning to have the Vision Fund borrow an additional $9 billion or so to boost the fund’s returns further and make more investments, Mr. Son told The Wall Street Journal after the press conference.

That’s $14.6 billion in debt for a $98 billion fund.

That’s not insane by any measure, even if the use of debt is relatively unusual for venture firms (unlike in private equity, where debt is very standard). The Vision Fund invests at a much later stage than most startup investors, and its term sheets — from what I hear — are heavily laden with economic terms that give SoftBank huge downside protection. It’s hard to believe that the GPs could invest $98 billion and not find at least $14.6 billion in returns to cover their debt repayments.

Here’s the thing though: SoftBank is the second largest LP in the SoftBank Vision Fund, and that contribution itself is also funded by a balance sheet that is staggering in its debt load.

Earlier this week, SoftBank announced profit levels that blew analyst estimates out of the water, reporting a profit of $6.2 billion in the company’s second quarter. The stock rose despite broad unease from investors around the company’s deep ties to Saudi Arabia and the continuing political fallout of that situation.

The bigger number, though, is sitting on the liabilities side of the company’s balance sheet. As of the end of September, SoftBank had around 18 trillion yen, or about $158.8 billion of current and non-current interest-bearing debt. That’s more than six times the amount the company earns on an operating basis, and just slightly less than the public debt held by Pakistan.

And though SoftBank’s sky-high debt balance tends to be a secondary focus in the company’s media coverage, it’s a figure that SoftBank’s top brass is well aware of, and quite comfortable with. When discussing the company’s financial strategy, Softbank CFO Yoshimitsu Goto stated that the company is in the early stages of a transition from a telco holding company to an investment company, and as a result is “likely to be perceived as a corporate group with significant debt and interest payment burden” with what is “generally considered a high level of debt.”

The hope for the company is that as investors recognize it as an investment business, the way SoftBank’s creditworthiness will be evaluated will change and it should be able to operate with more flexibility around leverage levels as Bloomberg’s Shuli Ren outlined in a feature on the company earlier this year:

For acquisitive globetrotters, being labeled an investment firm means having a lot more room to issue debt. In January, Fosun was upgraded one level by Moody’s, which didn’t seem at all concerned by the Shanghai-based company’s debt pile. It noted only that Fosun had no liquidity issues considering it held 61 billion yuan ($9.6 billion) of cash and marketable securities against 35 billion yuan of short-term liabilities.

As SoftBank becomes an investment company, leverage is no longer an appropriate measure, CFO Yoshimitsu Goto was cited as saying in a cover story in the Nikkei Asian Review last weekend. SoftBank’s Vision Fund and Delta Fund mean the firm can use debt without damaging its balance sheet, he said. In effect, SoftBank has already started to resemble the likes of HNA, using complex instruments and margin loans backed by its shares in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to finance more startup acquisitions.

But the lack of an “investment company” label has never stopped SoftBank from pursuing aggressive expansion with a highly levered balance sheet in the past. SoftBank has in fact had a deep history of operating at debt levels well above industry averages, dating back to the mid-1990s, following the company’s 1994 IPO.

At the end of 1998, SoftBank had around $5 billion in debt on its balance sheet and was using three times as much debt to finance its operations versus equity. The company continued to use debt as a means of financing an ambitious M&A strategy, which included the $20 billion acquisition of American telco Sprint in 2012-13, which led to the downgrade of SoftBank’s credit ratings to junk by both Moody’s and S&P, where they’ve remained since.

Junk-rated credit still didn’t stop SoftBank, with the company spending around $32 billion to buy U.K. chip designer ARM Holdings in 2016. At the end of that year, SoftBank had a debt balance of around $125 billion.

Then in early 2017, SoftBank announced plans for its Vision Fund, which would effectively allow the company to continue making sizable investments despite having an overstretched balanced sheet. According to the Financial Times:

A person involved with the fund’s creation says the structure was designed to address the challenges of placing major bets on technology start-ups. While traditional private equity funds often borrow against their purchases to boost their firepower, Mr Son would likely struggle to raise leverage against companies that have little to no cash flow.

The creation of the Vision Fund led S&P to revise the credit rating outlook for SoftBank from stable to negative. And as the Vision Fund has lined up commitments to borrow another $9 billion, some lenders have started to view SoftBank’s strategy with more caution, such as Bank of America, which decided not to provide $1 billion in the financing arrangement two weeks ago due to concerns that the lending terms were too risky.

Again, SoftBank’s reliance on debt isn’t new, with some Japanese investors and bondholders even applying a “Masayoshi Son discount” to the company’s securities. And SoftBank has proven its ability to operate, and operate well, under such conditions, surviving and growing substantially over the past two decades amidst several market turnovers and crises.

Nonetheless, when a company is operating with such high leverage, risks are amplified and even modest bumps in micro and macro conditions can have serious implications for investors, startups and the broader investment ecosystem.

What’s next

Probably going to look at SoftBank some more. Have thoughts? Reach out to us directly.We are still spending more time on Chinese biotech investments in the United States (Arman wrote a deep dive on this).We are exploring the changing culture of Form D filings (startups seem to be increasingly foregoing disclosures of Form Ds on the advice of their lawyers).India tax reform and how startups have taken advantage of it.

Reading docket

Danny had 8 hours of meetings yesterday and read about one page of any of this, despite his best intentions:

Bloomberg’s piece called “The $6 Trillion Barrier Holding Electric Cars Back”The New Yorker piece called “Why Doctors Hate Their Computers”Eliot Peper’s new science fiction novel BorderlessA new report about China’s military and its deep connections into American academic research“LA Is Trying to Fix its Prostitution Problem by Banning Right Turns at Night—and it Might be Working” — intriguing headline, let’s see if it follows throughThe Information’s deep dive into white-collar crime and lack of prosecution thereof in Silicon Valley

French startup Lydia is launching an insurance product for your mobile phone. For €4.29 per month ($4.89), you can insure your phone from the Lydia app.

Lydia is one of the most popular peer-to-peer payment apps in Europe, with 1.5 million users. Think about it as a sort of Venmo or Square Cash for Europe. More recently, the company started offering more options to manage your money with a premium subscription and additional features.

While Lydia doesn’t want to replace your bank and insurance company, the company is offering an insurance product for the first time. Lydia is partnering with its investor CNP Assurances — having an insurance company as an investor has a few advantages.

So here’s what you get. You’re instantly covered against cracked screens, liquid damage and accidental damage. There’s no excess, but you’re limited to one claim per year. Phones now cost a small fortune, but you’re limited to €500 ($570) per claim.

Optionally, you can subscribe to a better insurance product for €9.99 per month ($11.39). In addition to phone insurance, your laptop, tablet, Nintendo Switch, Kindle, camera and other electronics are covered. You can make two claims per year and you can get back up to €500 for your phone and €1,800 for other devices. More importantly, you’re also covered against theft.

Many phone carriers sell mobile phone insurance. But they usually cost more than that. In most cases, you also need to subscribe for at least one year. In Lydia’s case, you can cancel your subscription whenever you want in the app.

If that product sounds familiar, it’s because Revolut offers a similar feature (with some drawbacks). You can subscribe to mobile phone insurance from Revolut’s mobile app.

Pricing isn’t as straightforward with Revolut, as Premium subscribers get a discount. For an iPhone X, the insurance product costs as much as €9.58 per month ($10.92) without a Revolut Premium account, or as little as €6.67 per month ($7.60) if you pay upfront and you have a Revolut Premium account.

It’s a 12-month contract with a €125 excess and no theft protection. You also need to start insuring your phone quickly after buying (within six months), otherwise you aren’t covered. Revolut works with Allianz and Simplesurance for this insurance product.

Lydia may have borrowed the idea from Revolut, but I’m not sure why you’d choose Revolut’s insurance product over Lydia’s product.

It’s interesting to see that fintech companies are creating alternative revenue streams with insurance products. Subscribing to an insurance product is quick and painless, as they already manage your money and have your card on file.

Taranis, an ag-tech startup that uses aerial scouting and deep learning to identify potential crop issues, announced today that it has raised a $20 million Series B led by Viola Ventures. Existing investors Nutrien (one of the world’s largest fertilizer producers), Wilbur-Ellis venture capital arm Cavallo Ventures and Sumitomo Corporation Europe also participated.

Tel Aviv-based Taranis says its aerial imaging technology, carried on high-speed drones or manned aircraft, is currently used by farms in Argentina, Brazil, Russia, Ukraine and the United States. It plans to expand into more countries with this round of funding, including Australia.

Founded in 2015 by Ofir Schlam, Asaf Horvitz, Eli Bukchin and Ayal Karmi to increase food production, Taranis’ software targets commodity crops like corn, cotton, wheat, soybean, sugarcane and potatoes. It identifies potential crop issues, including insect damage, nutrient deficiencies and diseases, and provides farmers with magnified, high-resolution images that are detailed enough to (for example) let them see what bugs are eating their plants.

In a press statement, Viola Ventures partner Zvika Orron said “After analyzing the digital farming industry, we proudly chose Taranis to be our first investment in this space. Taranis has all the necessary ingredients to become the leader in farm digitalization: a comprehensive precision agriculture solution, leading industry partners to scale and penetrate the market and a passionate team making it all happen.”

Traditional crop monitoring is labor-intensive and not always accurate, even with the use of sensors to track soil quality, fertilizer levels, insects and other issues. Other venture capital-backed startups using computer vision and AI-based technology to make the process more efficient (a growing field referred to as “precision farming”) include Prospera, which is also based in Tel Aviv, Arable and Ceres Imaging.

Agricultural giants have also started shopping for precision farming startups. For example, over the past 12 months, Deere agreed to buy Blue River, and Brazilian startup Strider was purchased by Syngenta.

Fintech startups are growing rapidly in Europe. But it doesn’t mean that the fintech revolution is limited to Europe. That’s why I’m glad to announce that Lizzie Chapman from ZestMoney is coming to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to talk about her unique Indian startup.

ZestMoney wants to make it easier to lend money to buy goods online. In the U.S., the vast majority of people have a credit card and a credit score. But India is a different market, and ZestMoney is trying to replace the credit card altogether.

When you shop on an e-commerce website in India, such as Amazon or Flipkart, you can get a voucher on ZestMoney’s website to check out on those websites. You’ll then pay back this voucher with monthly installments. In some cases, interests are refunded as cashback.

You don’t need to get a credit card to open a ZestMoney account. After opening an account, your EMI credit limit is shared across all ZestMoney partners.

Some websites feature a deeper integration with ZestMoney. For instance, on Xiaomi’s website, you can pay your phone in multiple installments using Mi Finance. Behind the scene, ZestMoney powers this service.

This is an interesting time for ZestMoney as the company is facing increased competition. Amazon just launched EMI options for Amazon Pay in India. You can now take a loan directly on Amazon’s checkout page.

Chapman is also an interesting British entrepreneur. As TechCrunch’s Jon Russell wrote, she moved to India in 2011 to work for payday loan startup Wonga’s Indian division. Years later, even though Wonga didn’t work out, she’s still betting on India.

If you want to hear Chapman tell you more about what she’s been working on, you should come to Disrupt Berlin. The conference will take place on November 29-30 and you can buy your ticket right now.

In addition to fireside chats and panels, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield Europe to win the highly coveted Battlefield cup.

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Lizzie Chapman

CEO & Co-founder, ZestMoney

Lizzie Chapman is the co-founder and CEO of ZestMoney, FinTech startup of 2017. Zestmoney is India's largest digital lending platform that introduced the concept of cardless EMI to make life more affordable in India.

Lizzie is a leading figure in the digital lending landscape of India since 2011 when she moved from UK to spearhead the India operations for digital lender Wonga.com. In 2013, she joined Development Bank of Singapore to help launch ‘digibank’ – mobile-only virtual bank of India. Her passion about the potential of technology to disrupt the delivery of financial services prompted Lizzie and her co-founders to start ZestMoney. She was selected as FinTech Woman of 2017.

A CFA Charterholder and BSc from Edinburgh University, Lizzie started her career at Goldman Sachs in equity research and asset management. She then became an investor for The Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest endowments, focused on financial services and Indian investments. She is an Investment Committee member of the early stage fund India Quotient and sits on the board of IndiaMart – India's leading SME marketplace and classified site.

Other than working extensively on understanding Indian consumer behavior and building superior credit products, Lizzie is a mother and a marathon runner. She was one of three runners from India to complete the 42.2 kms Antarctic Ice Marathon in 2011.

TechCrunch Startup Battlefield returns to Africa next month, and we have an agenda chock-full of interesting panels and our premier startup competition.

Joining us in Lagos, Nigeria on December 11 for a couple of those aforementioned panels will be Chris Folayan, the founder and CEO of Mall for Africa; Nichole Yembra, chief financial, risk and investment officer for Venture Garden Group (VGG) and a managing partner at GreenHouse Capital; and Olaoluwa Samuel-Biyi, co-founder at SureRemit.

Chris Folayan, who is originally from Nigeria, graduated from California State University, San Jose, and founded and sold several companies globally. He also established new companies in Africa, the U.S., the Middle East and Asia. Mall for Africa is a global economy e-commerce infrastructure company enabling Africans to purchase items directly from international online retailers in the U.S. and Europe, as well as local online retailers in Africa.

At VGG, Nichole Yembra is responsible for investor relations and the financial strategy of the seven technology companies under its umbrella as they serve public and private clients across the aviation, power, education, financial services, and social investment sectors. Through GreenHouse Capital, Nichole takes on fintech-enabled portfolio companies looking to transform the education, renewable energy, big data and fintech ecosystems.

The portfolio companies’ products have connected over 3,000 students to tutors, revolutionized off-grid solar solutions and increased banking services of Nigeria’s nearly 84.6 million unbanked population. In addition to this work, Nichole is committed to making gender diversity a priority within the fintech space in Nigeria and enhancing opportunities for women in leadership.

Olaoluwa Samuel-Biyi is a co-founder of SureGifts, a Nigeria-based gift card retailer and technology provider. Olaoluwa joined the founding team of Jumia in 2012 to work on business intelligence and commercial planning, before leaving to build SureGifts. He also consults on investment and financial strategy for Venture Garden Group. He studied Accounting and Finance at the University of the West Indies, Barbados.

And of course, the main event will be Startup Battlefield. Fifteen companies will compete in front of a live audience and top judges for a shot at US$25,000 USD in no-equity cash plus a trip for two to compete in Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch’s flagship event, Disrupt in 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at this time).

Startup Battlefield Africa is right around the corner and you can get your tickets here.

Transit, a company that built a mobile app designed to help people in cities live without cars, has raised $17.5 million from two automakers in a Series B round.

The round was led by RenaultNissan-Mitsubishi’s joint investment arm Alliance Ventures. InMotion Ventures, Jaguar Land Rover’s venture capital fund, also joined the round, as well as two past investors, Accel and Real Ventures.

RenaultNissan-Mitsubishi and Jaguar Land Rover’s investment would have seemed counterintuitive five years ago. But this is 2018. It’s the year of the scooter wars and micro-mobility; it’s also a time of transition for automakers that are looking to diversify their traditional business of building and selling cars.

Founded in 2012, Transit started as an app to help people check departure times for buses and trains. It’s grown into a mobile app platform that enables multi-modal transportation, integrating public transit, ride hailing, bike sharing and scooter sharing. The mobile app, which provides real­-time data from transit agencies with user crowdsourcing, gives users notifications from their ride. The app then tracks the real-time location of the vehicle and notifies the user when to leave for their stop, when to disembark. and sends adjusted ETAs. Transit is now used by transit agencies, including Boston’s MBTA, Baltimore’s MDOT MTA, Silicon Valley’s VTA, Tampa Bay’s PSTA and Montreal’s STM.

The company wants to be transit and company agnostic, so, it’s a big proponent of open APIs. Montreal, where the company is based, is a model of what Transit wants to be everywhere. In Montreal, people can use the app for car sharing, bike sharing, to order an Uber or use public transit, COO Jake Sion explained.

Transit, which operates in 175 cities globally, will use the injection of capital to scale operations and improve the platform by integrating various services and payment methods on the app.

“This investment, which will advance Transit’s efforts to make mobility seamless and accessible in cities, fits with the Alliance 2022 strategy to become a leader in robo-vehicle ride-hailing mobility services and a provider of vehicles for public transit use and car-sharing,” François Dossa, Alliance Global vice president of ventures and open innovation, said in a statement.

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You probably don’t know how much it should cost to get your home’s windows washed, yard landscaped or countertops replaced. But Setter does. The startup pairs you with a home improvement concierge familiar with all the vendors, prices and common screwups that plague these jobs. Setter finds the best contractors across handiwork, plumbing, electrical, carpentry and more. It researches options, negotiates a bulk rate and, with its added markup, you pay a competitive price with none of the hassle.

One of the most reliable startup investing strategies is looking at where people spend a ton of money but hate the experience. That makes home improvement a prime target for disruption, and attracted a $10 million Series A round for Setter co-led by Sequoia Capital and NFX. “The main issue is that contractors and homeowners speak different languages,” Setter co-founder and CEO Guillaume Laliberté tells me, “which results in unclear scopes of work, frustrated homeowners who don’t know enough to set up the contractors for success, and frustrated contractors who have to come back multiple times.”