Metaboards, an Oxford-based startup that is developing new wireless charging technology, has secured $5 million in funding. The round is led by Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI), with participation from RT Capital Management, and Woodford Investment Management. The burgeoning company will use the new funds to expand the team with the aim of bringing its patented ‘metamaterials’-based wireless charging tech to market.

Founded in 2016 by professors and published researchers from Oxford University, Metaboards is applying the use of ‘metamaterials’ to potentially create a much-better wireless charging solution that would negate some of the shortcomings of today’s tech. This will include removing the need for alignment between the charger and device, and the ability to charge multiple devices without multiple charging points.

More broadly, metamaterials are new types of materials made up of compounds such as plastics or metals that are arranged in ‘geometric structures’ that have properties not found in nature. The most extreme example could be an ‘invisibility’ cloak! However, metamaterials are a hot area of industrial research that has a plethora of more tangible applications. Metaboards thinks wireless charging is definitely one of them.

In a brief call, Metaboards CEO Nedko Ivanov, who previously led audio and haptics company Redux — which we reported was acquired by Google last year — told me the startup already has a working prototype that it will demo at the next CES and Mobile World Congress. It is also in discussions with various OEMs to explore ways to bring products to market based on the tech.

As well as negating the need for alignment, which, Ivanov notes, means that current wireless charging solutions aren’t that different to actually plugging a device into a charger, Metaboards’ solution has much better vertical reach/penetration. So, for example, rather than having to drill into a table to retro-fit a charging solution, in theory Metaboards’ technology could be placed on the underside of a table and effectively charge through it. Add in the ability to charge multiple devices on the same surface and things get interesting.

“Metaboards’ technology makes it possible to charge tablets, games consoles and controllers, computers and any other non-metal electronic device at the same time and on the same surface,” says the company. It also points to a recent report from Grand View Research that predicts that the global wireless charging market will be worth $22.25 billion by 2022.

Adds Ivanov in a statement: “This investment will help us to grow the company and extend our capabilities across all wireless power technology platforms to ensure we offer universal capabilities. We already have interest from companies looking into licensing the technology in the next six to 12 months”.

“The next hundreds of millions of riders for us are going to come from outside of the United States”, Uber’s head of rider experience Peter Deng tells me. The transportation giant already sees 75 million riders per month and 15 million rides per day. But to grow in the developing world, it had to rethink its app to work on the oldest phones and slowest networks. So Deng’s team traveled the globe asking people what they needed from Uber, but also what they didn’t.

The result is Uber Lite.

It’s launching today in India before rolling out to more countries, though there’s still a waitlist form instead of a download link. The Android app takes up just 5 megabytes. “You delete three selfies, you have room for Uber” Deng laughs. 300-millisecond response time means its quick to hail a ride, even for the 4 percent of users in India on sluggish 2G networks. And by streamlining the design and only showing maps by request, it won’t burn much data for users on a budget.

Uber needs to score growth in developing markets after retreating while cutting deals with local winner like Didi in China, Grab in Southeast Asia, and a forthcoming arrangement with Yandex in Russia. India’s Ola rideshare service already has a ‘Lite” app that’s just 1 megabyte and a 45% share of the taxi market, compared to Uber’s 35%. Uber has reported has talked with Ola about a possible merger in India, sources have told TechCrunch and others. With the country making up 10% of Uber’s rides, it’s a market it can’t forfeit.

To reach its full potential, Uber has to start out-competing homegrown competitors. Success with Uber Lite could give it leverage with Ola and path to gaining more of it around the world.

“We know we’re not just a U.S. company, we’re a global company. Not only have we built this for the world, it was built in India” Deng tells me. Deng came to Uber in March 2017 after 10 years at Facebook’s various companies. It was early to the “Lite” idea, with its shrunken app reaching over 200 million users. 

But Deng says Uber Lite didn’t come from stripping down the main app, but building it up from scratch. “The team has traveled to markets around the world to do in home interviews to understand the needs of the customers.”

Compared to the 181 megabyte standard version, Uber Lite is a lot easier for low-storage phones to handle. Uber Lite launches not to a map or a text entry box, but instead a suggested nearby business or landmark based on your GPS. “You have to do less typing and can do more tapping” Deng explains. It also tries to guess your destination based on pre-cached popular city spots. You can input addresses, but Uber Lite won’t load a data-heavy map unless you purposefully grab for it. ‘Tap for map’.

Same goes for your driver’s ETA. After you’ve selected your vehicle type and hailed, you’ll just get a countdown to their arrival unless you tap to see them on their way. Payment for now is cash only. But soon Uber plans to add India’s popular Paytm payment platform and credit card options. It’s also still lacking notifications, which seem worth the data. More languages will come too.

Uber wouldn’t explain how, but it also revealed that it plans to offer offline hailing, possibly through some peer-to-peer Bluetooth mesh network or other technology. One other interesting test its running in India lets users punch in a code found at a bus stop to instantly hail a ride there. Another lets older or less phone savvy users phone in to an accessibility team that can hail a ride for them. It’s already offered web bookings. “The whole charter is to allow everyone around the world to experience Uber” Deng says.

What Uber wouldn’t skip in v1 was the in-app support and a way to share your ETA with loved ones so they can watch out for you. “We knew how important safety was in these markets. I’m really proud we took additional steps to empathize” Deng says.

The company is clearly trying to put the darker moments of its past behind it. While cynics might take the compassion talk as just lip service like the company’s big apology ad campaign, it’s also the reason some tech talent has stayed at or joined Uber. If the company is going to be unavoidable, making it secure and accessible is a pretty good reason to wake up in the morning.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down into some of these trends areas. Since you started talking about Freshdesk, we know that case study very well. Freshdesk is cloud-based customer support for...

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Prøhbtd, a startup that CEO Drake Sutton-Shearer said is designed to “build a bridge” between the cannabis industry and mainstream culture, is announcing that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding.

It’s not the only cannabis-focused digital media company out there; I wrote about the initial funding for Herb last year. But Sutton-Shearer argued that Prøhbtd is creating premium content with a unique voice.

For one thing, he said Prøhbtd’s isn’t focused exclusively on cannabis. Instead, the goal is to create a diverse slate of lifestyle- and culture-related content, with cannabis as the hook.

Take, for example, Edibles, a video series hosted by Birdie Harrelson (niece of Woody Harrelson) — the series includes recipes for creating cannabis-infused baked goods, but as Sutton-Shearer put it, when each episode opens, “She’s not talking about weed, she’s going to bakeries.”

The company says that its video content (which is available on both the Prøhbtd website and on devices like Apple TV and Roku) saw 21 million views in May, with an average view time of 3 minutes and 45 seconds.

Sutton-Shearer said one of his priorities is forging “mainstream partnerships” like Prøhbtd’s deal with Advertising Week. The company also works with more than 60 cannabis brands — not just on branded videos and sponsorships, but more broadly on product development, design and marketing.

Asked whether this creates a potential conflict with the editorial side of the business, Sutton-Shearer pointed out that plenty of other digital media companies (like BuzzFeed and Vice) run their own branded content studios.

“Today’s younger consumer, I don’t think they really care that much whether something’s branded or not,” he said. “They do want to know if it’s entertaining and thoughtful.”

Prøhbtd had previously raised $4 million in seed funding from investors including actor/musician Donald Glover. The new round was led by Serruya Private Equity, The Delavaco Group and Cresco Capital.

“We’ve seen every media opportunity in the cannabis industry but none of them compare to what the team at PRØHBTD has built,” said Serruya Private Equity’s Aaron Serruya in the funding announcement. “We expect great things from the company and we’re excited to support the team’s global vision.”

Speaking of that vision, Sutton-Shearer said Prøhbtd is exploring international opportunities, including in Canada, Australia and Latin America, with plans for a Canadian public offering.

“We’re very strategically looking at the rest of the world, but there’s still a lot to be done in the U.S.,” Sutton-Shearer said.

Byton, a Chinese electric car startup, has secured a $500 million Series B funding round to fuel the development of smart, connected cars. Investors include FAW Group, Tus-Holdings and CATL. Byton also announced the opening of a new HQ in Nanjing, China. This is on top of Byton’s research and development center in Santa Clara, Calif.

“By combining our expertise in R&D and traditional car-making with innovative Internet technologies, we aspire to pioneer a smart mobility revolution,” Byton CEO and co-founder Dr. Carsten Breitfeld said in a statement.

At the Consumer Electronics Show, Byton unveiled its all-electric SUV concept. Earlier this year, Byton also announced a partnership with self-driving car startup Aurora. The terms of the partnership entail Aurora powering Byton’s autonomous driving features via a pilot deployment in the next couple of years. Byton plans to roll out its first batch of prototypes in April 2019 with the goal of Q4 2019 for the launch of a mass-produced model.

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you seeing in the entrepreneurs who are coming to you for funding? What kinds of entrepreneurs are coming? What resonates with you? Aniruddha Malpani: As I said, the...

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For many architects, the hardest part of their job starts after they finish designing a building, when the onerous process of code compliance begins. Written to ensure the safety and accessibility of buildings, codes dictate everything from the height and depth of stairs and where railings end, to the amount of floor space in front of toilets and the height of windows. Regulations are constantly updated, which means that even the most diligent team of architects often miss violations, resulting in costly delays. Y Combinator alum UpCodes wants to help them by using artificial intelligence, including natural language processing, to create what the San Francisco-based startup describes as “the spellcheck for buildings.”

Called UpCodes AI, the program is a plug-in that scans 3D models created with building information modeling (BIM) data and alerts architects about potential issues. It draws on the same backend as UpCodes’ first product, an app that compiles regulations into a constantly updated, searchable database with collaboration tools. UpCodes AI, which launched to the public last week, currently supports recent versions of Autodesk Revit and will add ARCHICAD, Sketchup and IFC in the future.

“This is like Grammarly for the construction industry. By highlighting code errors in real-time, the software acts as a code consultant working beside you at all times,” UpCodes co-founder and CEO Scott Reynolds tells TechCrunch.

UpCodes was founded in 2016 after Reynolds became so frustrated by traditional code compliance while working as an architect that he switched career paths and launched the startup with his brother Garrett, a former software engineer at PlanGrid, to fix the process.

Building codes change so often that they are sometimes referred to as “living documents.” UpCodes’ database draws directly on regulations put online by municipalities and is updated almost in real-time. This eases a major pain point because many architects who thought they had followed regulations find out too late that they missed an amendment. In worst case scenarios, completed work needs to be torn out and rebuilt, potentially costing tens of thousands of dollars. This is a frequent occurrence and Scott Reynolds points to studies by McKinsey and the National Association of Home Builders that cite the complexity of code compliance as a major reason for reduced productivity in the construction industry and rising home prices.

Automating code compliance may also make it easier for architects to expand their practices, since regulations can vary dramatically between jurisdictions. UpCodes currently covers building codes in 26 states and the District of Columbia. Though UpCodes AI is still in its early stages, Reynolds tells TechCrunch that during its private beta it identified an average of about 27 violations per project.

One of its private beta users was Nicholas LoCicero, a designer with CallisonRTKL, an architecture firm known for retail design. LoCicero told TechCrunch in an email that the company used UpCodes AI on two retail locations that needed brand updates. Accessibility, which includes making sure that there are unobstructed ways of exiting a building from any point within it, is one of the most important parts of code compliance, and LoCicero said UpCodes AI was able to flag issues with door clearance, depth on stairs and tread width more quickly than the typical compliance process.

The program “definitely has the potential to save us hours of time with smart egress and accessibility tools and components that will help us develop projects faster during different phases of design” while ensuring that compliance is maintained, he added.

So far, UpCodes has raised $785,000 in funding from angel investors, as well as Y Combinator and Foundation Capital. It now has over 100,000 monthly active users and recently hired Mark Vulfson, former senior manager of engineering at PlanGrid, to serve as UpCodes AI’s technical lead.

Though the adoption of BIM data has made planning buildings more efficient, that’s “only a modest use of BIM’s full potential,” Reynolds says. He notes that it’s just within the past few years that more than 50% of American architecture firms have started using 3D information-rich modeling instead of 2D modeling. Programs like Revit and ARCHICAD, and new developments in APIs, finally made automated code compliance possible.

The use of AI in architecture is still new, but there are already several companies, including Autodesk and CoPlannery, exploring how to apply AI technologies to solve common problems in design, construction and engineering. Since AI is used in other major industries, including finance and healthcare, to automate compliance, it makes sense to assume that somewhere down the line, another company might try to build a competitor to UpCodes AI.

Reynolds believes that the UpCodes team’s combined industry and technical expertise will give it an edge over future rivals. He says his brother Garrett has a background in diffusion MRI analyzing large 4D data sets, while Vulfson brings “extensive experience deploying client side and web-based products” to the startup. UpCodes also works with a building code consultant who is based in New York City.

“The whole industry of code compliance has been neglected by software engineers for so long that it’s hard to imagine someone else doing what we’re doing,” Reynolds says.

“Building codes are a creativity killer.  These regulations are one of the most restrictive components of design,” he adds. “Imagine restricting every brush stroke an artist makes with ten thousand rules–that’s what building codes feel like to an architect. That’s why I quit my career to do this. I want to take away that frustration and make architecture more fun, like it is in school.”

Jared Feldman, CEO of Canvs, said he has a big goal: “I think there needs to be a Google for emotions … where you can see how people feel about everything.”

Feldman argued that by creating such a product, Canvs can not only help businesses make better decisions, but also contribute to “a more empathetic world.”

(When I pointed out that not everyone is comfortable with the idea of for-profit businesses having a detailed understanding of their emotions, particularly post-Cambridge Analytica, Feldman noted that Canvs isn’t involved in any kind of user targeting or attempts to change user behavior — instead, it’s all about “clarifying how people really feel about things.”)

Canvs’ first product was focused on helping TV networks understanding the social media conversation about their shows, with what Feldman said is much greater nuance than normal social sentiment analysis. Now the company is taking the next step with the launch of Canvs Surveys.

Using this product, researchers collect survey data the way they normally do, but they can then upload an Excel spreadsheet of open-ended responses and quickly get a detailed breakdown of how people responded, in aggregate, to different characters, storylines and so on.

Feldman explained that while surveys are a common research tool for businesses, open-ended questions can be a big problem. Not only can it take an enormous amount of time to classify and tabulate all the different responses, but it also involves a degree of subjectivity, based on how individual researchers interpret each answer.

At the same time, it’s the open-ended questions that can provide the most meaningful insights. For example, Feldman said Canvs works with NBCUniversal and found that three of the network’s pilots got similar responses when it came to the “closed ends” (namely, the survey questions where respondents choose from a menu or numerical scale of possible answers).

It was only in the open-ended questions that you could see meaningful differences — Feldman said that ultimately, it turned out that the shows that “overperformed for ‘enjoyment’ and underperformed for ‘interesting'” did well with viewers, while the shows that respondents saw as more interesting than enjoyable did poorly in the ratings.

Feldman argued that this is an insight that applies to companies beyond TV.

“For every single industry now, because of the Internet, because of how many choices we have, the only thing that gets people to do something is an emotional connection,” he said. “That’s the rub.”

He added that a tool like Canvs Surveys doesn’t replace the work of researchers. Instead, he argued that it reduces the “manual work” and makes them “more focused on what they’re really good at, which is insights and storytelling.” (Plus, researchers who want to go deeper can dig into the individual responses and flag answers that weren’t classified correctly.)

It seems that NBCUniversal is happy with the results. The company’s senior director of program research Benoit Landry said in the announcement:

Having just wrapped up our first pilot testing using Canvs Surveys, I can say with confidence this isn’t an iterative improvement for the research community, it’s a first-ever. We went from spending 16 hours trying to hand sort open-ended survey responses, down to one hour with Canvs, and that’s in addition to never-before-seen normative insights across pilots. It’s an extraordinary efficiency gain and cost savings for NBC for something we do dozens of times each year.

Canvs Surveys is available for free for researchers analyzing up to 5,000 open-ended responses.

In March, Billion Dollar Unicorn and enterprise cloud security firm Zscaler listed successfully on NASDAQ under the ticker ZS. Last week, its first earnings report as a public company blew past all...

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In a DevOps world, the operations part of the equation needs to be on call to deal with issues as they come up 24/7. We used to use pagers. Today’s solutions like PagerDuty and VictorOps have been created to place this kind of requirement in a modern digital context. Today, Splunk bought VictorOps for $120 million in cash and Splunk securities.

It’s a company that makes a lot of sense for Splunk, a log management tool that has been helping customers deal with oodles of information being generated from back-end systems for many years. With VictorOps, the company gets a system to alert the operations team when something from that muddle of data actually requires their attention.

Splunk has been making moves in recent years to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help make sense of the data and provide a level of automation required when the sheer volume of data makes it next to impossible for humans to keep up. VictorOps fits within that approach.

“The combination of machine data analytics and artificial intelligence from Splunk with incident management from VictorOps creates a ‘Platform of Engagement’ that will help modern development teams innovate faster and deliver better customer experiences,” Doug Merritt, president and CEO at Splunk said in a statement.

In a blog post announcing the deal, VictorOps founder and CEO Todd Vernon said the two companies’ missions are aligned. “Upon close, VictorOps will join Splunk’s IT Markets group and together will provide on-call technical staff an analytics and AI-driven approach for addressing the incident lifecycle, from monitoring to response to incident management to continuous learning and improvement,” Vernon wrote.

It should come as no surprise that the two companies have been working together even before the acquisition. “Splunk has been an important technical partner of ours for some time, and through our work together, we discovered that we share a common viewpoint that Modern Incident Management is in a period of strategic change where data is king, and insights from that data are key to maintaining a market leading strategy,” Vernon wrote in the blog post.

VictorOps was founded 2012 and has raised over $33 million, according to data on Crunchbase. The most recent investment was a $15 million Series B in December 2016.

The deal is expected to close in Splunk’s fiscal second quarter subject to customary closing conditions, according to a statement from Splunk.

While Uber has changed the way that many think about transportation, it’s also changed the way that many drunk people find their way home at night. Rather than haphazardly hailing a cab or driving home under the influence, Uber provides a relatively safer way to get from point A to B on an indulgent evening.

The company has been curious about its drunk users, applying for a patent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for a system that would use machine learning to determine the ‘state’ of a passenger.

While the patent limits itself to a dry discussion of ‘user state,’ it seems that what Uber is really interested in is detecting the difference between users of sound mind and users who are under the influence.

CNN first spotted the patent, which describes a method of measuring the user’s behavior on their phone against their usual behavior, using information like location, data input accuracy, data input speed, interface interaction behavior, the angle at which the user is holding their device, or even the speed at which they’re walking.

The patent also describes a system that would notify drivers of the passenger’s ‘state’, theoretically letting them prepare for the adventure ahead.

The patent says that riders in a particularly unusual state may be matched with drivers who have special training or expertise, or may not be provided service at all.

In the vast majority of cases, hailing an Uber is one of the safest ways for a drunk person to get home. On the other hand, Uber has run into issues with drivers who have sexually assaulted passengers. CNN reports that at least 103 Uber drivers in the US have been accused of sexually assaulting or abusing passengers in the last four years, with many of the police reports noting that the passengers were inebriated or had been drinking before getting into the car.

Notifying drivers when a passenger is drunk could save those drivers the headache of hauling around an out-of-control passenger, or prevent drivers from dealing with passengers who puke in their car, which may lead to disputed charges. But the system described in this patent could also allow for predatory behavior by malicious drivers.

There is also the broader implications of Uber knowing when you’re drunk. The company has not been a beacon of trust with regards to user data, having to pay $20,000 for using “God View” to spy on users and reportedly paying to cover up a massive data breach.

Of course, only a fraction of a company’s patents ever make it into the final product. Only time will tell if Uber’s idea to monitor the state of passengers will end up in the app.

This interview is an interesting window into how financial technology is addressing specific niches within the banking sector. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and...

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Forty-seven and a half million dollars is a big commitment to African technology companies — even with the recent uptick in VC investment on the continent.

But for the Kenyan-based fintech firm Cellulant, whose digital payments platform processed 7 million transactions worth $350 million across 33 African countries in the last month alone, raising that amount in a series C round led by TPG Growth’s Rise Fund just makes sense.

In 2017, the company processed $2.7 billion in payments, said chief executive, Ken Njoroge.

Clients include the continent’s largest banks: Barclays Bank, Standard Chartered, Standard Bank, and Ecobank. Cellulant also has multiple revenue streams and is EBITDA positive, according to its CEO.

So what does an African technology company do with $47.5 million? “The round is to accelerate our growth of around 20 percent…north of 50 percent,” said Njoroge. “Most of the investment is to scale out our existing platform in Africa and build usage on our existing network.”

Founded in 2004, Cellulant offers Person-to-Business, B2B, and P2B services on its Mula and Tingg products. It’s also developing a blockchain based Agrikore product for agriculture related market activity.

On Africa’s digital payments potential, “We’ve built internal value models that estimate the size of the market at somewhere between $25BN and $40BN,” said Njoroge.

He differentiates Cellulant’s focus from Safaricom’s M-Pesa –one of Africa most recognized payment products — by transaction type and scope. “Kenya’s M-Pesa is optimized as a P2P platform in a few African countries. We’re optimized as a P2B platform and single pipe into multiple countries across Africa,” he said.

One of those countries is economic and population powerhouse Nigeria — where Cellulant offers both its Ting and Agrikore apps. Nigeria is also home to notable digital payment companies Paga and Interswitch, the latter of which has expanded across Africa and is considered a candidate for a public offering.

On a future Cellulant initial public offering, “it’s too early,” said Njoroge. But he doesn’t rule it out. “When you look at the size of the payments business, you could say we have fairly strong prospects to go in that direction.”

Meanwhile, the Nigerian investment startup Piggybank.ng closed $1.1M in seed funding and announced a new product — Smart Target, which offers a more secure and higher return option for Esusu or Ajo group savings clubs common across West Africa.

The financing was led by a $1 million commitment from LeadPath Nigeria, with Village Capital and Ventures Platform joining the round.

Founded in 2016, Piggybank.ng offers online savings plans — primarily to low and middle-income Nigerians — for deposits of small amounts on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual basis. There are no upfront fees.

Savers earn interest rates of between 6 to 10 percent, depending on the type and duration of investment, Piggybank.ng’s Somto Ifezue explained in this TechCrunch exclusive.

The startup generates returns for small-scale savers (primarily) through investment in Nigerian government securities, such as bonds and treasury bills.

Piggybank.ng generates revenue through asset management and from the float its balances generate at partner banks.

The Lagos based startup will use its $1.1M in new seed funding for “license acquisition and product development,” according to company COO Odunayo Eweniyi.

Piggybank.ng looks to grow clients across younger Nigerians and the country’s informal saving groups and has taken preliminary steps to launch in other African countries.

Lead investor and LeadPath Nigeria founder Olumide Soyombo was attracted to Piggybank.ng as an acquisition target.

“The banks have been slow to try new things in this savings space. Piggybank is coming in…and filling a particular need, so they are in a very acquisitive space.”

More Africa Related Stories @TechCrunch

African Tech Around the Net

This feature from Mashable covers the highlights of the recent 2018 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference held in San Jose last week. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links. Tech...

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Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Anand Daniel of Accel Partners was recorded in May...

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Sramana Mitra: To net it out, you are agnostic to B2B or B2C. You are really interested in learning about something new. That’s your primary motivator. Aniruddha Malpani: I’ve been doing this for 30...

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A man uses his phone as he walks past ATM machines for digital currency Bitcoin in Hong Kong on December 18, 2017. ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP/Getty Images)