Oculii, a software startup that aims to improve the spatial resolution of radar sensors by up to 100-fold, has scored a new investment from General Motors. The new funding, which the two companies say is in the millions, comes just months after Oculii closed a $55 million Series B.

Oculii and GM have already been working together “for some time now,” CEO Steven Hong told TechCrunch in a recent interview. While he declined to specify exactly how GM plans to use Oculii’s software, it could be used to bolster the capabilities of the automaker’s hands-free advanced driver assistance system known as Super Cruise. Hong added that the company is also working with a few other OEMs, including one on the cap table.

“When a company like GM says, this is great technology and this is something that we potentially want to use down the line, it makes the entire supply chain take notice and effectively work more closely with you to adopt the solution, the technology, into what they’re selling to the OEMs,” he said.

The startup has no intention of building hardware for its auto clients (though it does work with robotics companies for whom the company does manufacture sensors, a company spokesperson said). Instead, Oculii wants to license software to radar companies. The startup claims it can take low-cost, commercially available radar sensors — sensors that weren’t designed for autonomous driving, but rather for limited scenarios like emergency breaking or parking assist — and use its AI software to enable more autonomous maneuvering, Hong said.

“We really believe that the way to deliver something that’s scalable is through software, because software fundamentally improves with data,” he said. “Software fundamentally improves with better hardware in each generation that’s released. Software fundamentally over time gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, much faster than hardware, for example.”

The news is certainly bullish for radar, a sensor that is generally used for assistive capabilities because of its imaging limitations. But if Oculii can actually improve the performance of radar, which tend to be much cheaper than lidar, it could mean massive cost savings for automakers.

Tesla, the largest electric vehicle maker by sales volume in the world, recently nixed radar sensors from its advanced driver assistance system, in favor of a “pure vision” approach that uses cameras and a supercomputer-powered neural network. Hong said that the radar Tesla eliminated was very low resolution, and “wasn’t really adding anything to their existing pipeline.”

But he doesn’t think the company would always necessarily count out radar, should the technology improve. “Fundamentally, each of these sensors improves [the] safety case and gets you closer and closer to 99.99999% reliability. At the end of the day, that’s the most important thing, is getting as many nines of reliability as you can.”

The story was updated to include clarification on the company’s hardware manufacturing. 

BitSight, a startup that assesses the likelihood that an organization will be breached, has received a $250 million investment from credit rating giant Moody’s, and acquired Israeli cyber risk assessment startup VisibleRisk for an undisclosed sum.

Boston-based BitSight says the investment from Moody’s, which has long warned that cyber risk can impact credit ratings, will enable it to create a cybersecurity risk platform, while the credit ratings giant said it plans to make use of BitSight’s cyber risk data and research across its integrated risk assessment product offerings.

The investment values BitSight at $2.4 billion and makes Moody’s the largest shareholder in the company.

“Creating transparency and enabling trust is at the core of Moody’s mission,” Moody’s president and CEO Rob Fauber said in a statement. “BitSight is the leader in the cybersecurity ratings space, and together we will help market participants across disciplines better understand, measure, and manage their cyber risks and translate that to the risk of cyber loss.”

Meanwhile, BitSight’s purchase of VisibleRisk, a cyber risk ratings joint venture created by Moody’s and Team8, brings in-depth cyber risk assessment capabilities to BitSight’s platform, enabling the startup to better analyze and calculate an organization’s financial exposure to cyber risk. VisibleRisk, which has raised $25 million to date, says its so-called “cyber ratings” are based on cyber risk quantification, which allows companies to benchmark their cyber risk against those of their peers, and to better understand and manage the impact of cyber threats to their businesses.

Following the acquisition, BitSight will also create a risk solutions division focused on delivering a suite of critical solutions and analytics serving stakeholders, including chief risk officers, C-suite executives and boards of directors. This division will be led by VisibleRisk co-founder and CEO Derek Vadala, who previously headed up Moody’s cyber risk group.

Steve Harvey, president and CEO of BitSight, said the company’s partnership with Moody’s and its acquisition of VisibleRisk will expand its reach to “help customers manage cyber risk in an increasingly digital world.”

BitSight was founded in 2011 and has raised a total of $155 million in outside funding, most recently closing a $60 million Series D round led by Warburg Pincus. The startup has just shy of 500 employees and more than 2,300 global customers, including government agencies, insurers and asset managers. 

Two major private tech companies announced IPO price ranges this morning, with Toast targeting a market value of nearly $18 billion at the top end of its range and Freshworks looking to price its equity between $28 and $32 per share. TechCrunch calculates that the company would be worth around $8.9 billion at $32 per share, not employing a fully diluted share count.

Inclusive of shares represented by fully vested options and the like, Freshworks’ valuation could reach $9.6 billion, Renaissance Capital reports.

Unlike Toast, with a revenue mix including four distinct products, Freshworks is a more straightforward software company. That means we can do much more interesting work to understand its valuation. So, this morning, let’s unpack how Freshworks is considering valuing itself in its IPO at its present range, look at some market comps and come to a conclusion regarding whether we expect the unicorn to raise its valuation before it floats.

Lies, damned lies and revenue multiples

As a refresher, in the first half of 2021 (Q1 and Q2), Freshworks posted revenues of $168.9 million. That annualizes to $337.9 million, thanks to numerical rounding.

At a valuation of $9.6 billion — recall that simple IPO valuations for the company and lower share-price points from its IPO range generate lower valuations and therefore more conservative multiples than what we’ll be discussing here — Freshworks would be worth 28.4x its current revenue run rate, set during H1 2021.

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China is becoming a superpower in the tech industry. According to Straits Times, China is the only place in the world where it takes less than six years for a startup to become a unicorn — it takes seven years in the U.S., eight years in the U.K. and 11 years in Germany. Despite geopolitical tensions and recent amendments in CFIUS, it is hard to ignore China.

When I joined Runa Capital almost a year ago, my task was to help our portfolio companies enter the Chinese market, find the right partners and raise funding from Chinese investors. And almost on every call with our startups, colleagues from Runa or other global VCs, I heard: Is it a good idea to raise from a Chinese VC? Is it OK to co-invest with Chinese investors? I was surprised to learn that there is little research answering such questions, as there is a lack of adequate information in English about Chinese investments.

So as a Mandarin-speaking specialist, I decided to fill this gap by conducting a study based on Chinese VC database ITjuzi (the Chinese version of Crunchbase) with the help of our powerful data science resources developed by Danil Okhlopkov.

Below, I will try to answer the following questions using statistics and a case-based approach:

How much do Chinese funds invest abroad?What is the current trend?Can Chinese investors bring any value to Western startups?Who are the most active Chinese investors abroad?In which areas can Chinese funds bring the most value?What value can Chinese investors bring?When is it better to invite a Chinese investor?

Chinese investors are interested in Western startups

After studying data from ITjuzi, we estimated that Chinese funds invested around $250 billion in 2020 (three times higher than the figure reported in Crunchbase). This figure puts Chinese VC investments only 30% lower than investments by U.S. funds, but three times that of U.K. funds and 12.5 times more than German funds.

However, only 15% of investments in 2020 and 17% of investments in the first half of 2021 were in companies outside China, significantly lower than in 2019. This appears to be because during COVID, China’s economy recovered much faster than other countries’, so many Chinese investors preferred to redirect their capital flows to the domestic market.

On the other hand, there is great potential for overseas investments to rebound as soon as the borders reopen and the global economy starts to recover.

We can also see that Chinese investors are eyeing European startups favorably, which is related to U.S.-China geopolitical tensions as well as the fact that the European VC market is becoming mature.

Both as a term and as a financial product, “buy now, pay later” has become mainstream in the past few years. BNPL has evolved to assume various forms today, from small-ticket offerings by fintechs on consumer checkout platforms and marketplaces, to closed-loop products offered on marketplaces such as Amazon Pay Later (which they are now extending for outside use as well). You can also see some variants offered by companies that want to expand the scope of consumption and consumer credit.

Globally, BNPL has seen the most growth in the consumer segment and has driven retail consumption and lending over the past few years. Consumer BNPL offerings are a good alternative to credit cards, especially for people who do not have a credit history and can’t get credit from banks. That said, a specific vertical of BNPL products is gaining traction — one targeted toward small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This new vertical is known as “SME BNPL.”

B2B commerce in India is moving online

E-commerce has seen tremendous growth in India over the past decade. Skyrocketing smartphone and internet penetration led to rapid growth in e-commerce across large cities and smaller towns alike. Consumer credit has also taken off in parallel as credit cards and digital lending spurred credit-based consumption across offline and online stores.

However, the large B2B supply chain enabling the burgeoning retail market was plagued by bottlenecks and inefficiencies because it involved a plethora of intermediaries and streamlining became a big problem. A number of tech players responded by organizing the previously disorganized B2B commerce market at various touch points, inserting convenience, pricing and easier product access through tech-enabled logistics and a modern supply chain.

India’s B2B e-commerce space has developed rapidly since 2020. Small businesses have moved from using paper to smartphone apps for running a significant part of their day-to-day business, leading to widespread disruption in how businesses transact today. The COVID-19 pandemic also forced small businesses, which were earlier using physical means to procure goods and services, to try new and online models to conduct their affairs.

Moreover, the Indian government’s widespread promotion of an instant payments system in the form of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has changed how people send money to each other or pay merchants for their goods and services. The next step for solving the digital B2B puzzle is to embed credit inside every transaction and invoice.

If we compare online B2B transactions to the offline world, there is only one missing link: The terms offered to small businesses by their supplier/distributor or vendor. Businesses, unlike consumers, must buy goods and services to eventually trade them, or add value and sell to consumers or others down the value chain. This process is not immediate and has a certain time cycle attached.

The longer sales cycle means many small businesses require credit payment terms when buying inventory. As B2B commerce scales and grows through digital means, a BNPL product that caters to the needs of SMEs can support their growth and alleviate the burden on their cash flows.

How does consumer BNPL differ from SME BNPL?

An SME BNPL product is a purchase financing product for small businesses transacting with suppliers, distributors, aggregator platforms or B2B marketplaces.

China’s first data privacy laws go into effect on November 1, 2021. Will your company be in compliance?

Modeled after the EU’s GDPR, the new regulations “[introduce] perhaps the most stringent set of requirements and protections for data privacy in the world,” writes Scott W. Pink, special counsel in O’Melveny’s Data Security & Privacy practice.

In a comprehensive overview, he explains its key requirements and compliance steps for U.S.-based firms that service Chinese consumers.

“American firms doing business in China or with companies inside China will need to immediately start assessing how this new law will impact their activities,” he advises.

Now that the world has embraced remote work, are visas as critical for startup founders who want to succeed in the United States?

On Tuesday, September 14, at 2 p.m PT/5 p.m. ET, Managing Editor Danny Crichton and immigration law attorney Sophie Alcorn will discuss the matter on Twitter Spaces.

Join @DannyCrichton on Tuesday, September, 14 at 2 p.m. PT/5 p.m. ET as he discusses if remote work will make H-1B visas redundant with @Sophie_Alcorn https://t.co/SCMUiqUj8J

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) September 10, 2021

They’ll take questions from the audience, so mark your calendar and follow @techcrunch on Twitter to get a reminder before the chat.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch; I hope you have a great weekend.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Fintech is transforming the world’s oldest asset class: Farmland

Whether or not he actually said it, “buy land, they ain’t making any more of it,” is one of Mark Twain’s best quotes on capitalism.

Past recessions and the ongoing pandemic have created real uncertainty about the future of commercial and residential real estate, but farmland is “historically stable,” says Artem Milinchuk, founder and CEO of FarmTogether.

Anatomy of a SPAC: Inside Better.com’s ambitious plans

Online mortgage company Better.com isn’t waiting to complete its SPAC merger before making big moves: Ryan Lawler reported that it purchased Property Partners, a U.K.-based startup that offers fractional property ownership.

It’s the second company Better bought in recent months: In July, it snapped up digital mortgage brokerage Trussle.

“We aren’t so easily categorized,” said Better CEO Vishal Garg, who told Ryan that the company plans to soon expand into traditional financial services like auto loans and insurance.

Said CFO Kevin Ryan, “a lot of people have their niches in the way they’re attacking this, but we feel like we’re on a path to being full stack where everything’s embedded in the same flow.”

5 factors that can make or break a startup’s growth journey

If you don’t have a good story to share, it doesn’t matter how big your marketing budget is.

“Paid marketing can be a useful tool in your toolkit to accelerate an already humming flywheel. Just don’t let it be the only one,” suggests Brian Rothenberg, a two-time founder who’s now a partner at Defy.

Drawing from his time as VP of growth for Eventbrite, he shares five critical factors for kick-starting, maintaining and measuring growth over the long term.

Debt versus equity: When do non-traditional funding strategies make sense?

Many potential founders are well-versed in startup economics — and many are completely green.

When it comes to raising funds, understanding the relative benefits (and limitations) of debt and equity financing is required knowledge, however.

Founders who are less willing to dilute their control may be willing to use debt financing to fund their capital expenditures, “but it doesn’t make sense for everyone,” says six-time entrepreneur David Friend.

Investors are doubling down on Southeast Asia’s digital economy

Last year, startups based in Southeast Asia raised more than $8.2 billion, a 4x increase from 2015.

In the first half of 2021, regional M&A has increased 83% to a record $124.8 billion.

It’s not just venture capitalists and Big Tech who are beefing up their presence in the region.

“Over 229 family offices have been registered in Singapore since 2020, with total assets under management of an estimated $20 billion,” writes Amit Anand, a founding partner of Jungle Ventures.

Edtech leans into the creator economy with cohort-based classes

Natasha Mascarenhas examined the parallels between edtech and the creator economy, both of which boomed amid the pandemic — and blurred amid the rise of cohort-based classes.

“Edtech and the creator economy certainly differ in the problems they try to solve: Finding a VR solution to make online STEM classes more realistic is a different nut to crack than streamlining all of a creator’s different monetization strategies into one platform. Still, the two sectors have found common ground in the past year.”

Meet retail’s new sustainability strategy: Personalization

Were the shoes, jacket and makeup that looked so good on Instagram (and in your shopping cart) disappointing when you put them on for the first time?

Due to buyer’s remorse, it’s not uncommon for apparel or beauty products to languish in the back of a drawer or end up as gifts, but there are also serious consequences.

“The beauty industry produces over 120 billion units of packaging every year, little of which is recycled. Globally, an estimated 92 million tons of textile waste ends up in landfills,” Sindhya Valloppillil, founder and CEO of Skin Dossier, notes in a guest column.

The answer to bringing sustainability to the industry, she says, is using tech to personalize the retail experience:

AR virtual try-on with shade matchingAdvanced virtual fitting rooms with VR/AR for fashionSmart packaging with IoT and distributed ledger technology

Plentywaka founder Onyeka Akumah on African startups and global expansion

Twenty million people live in Lagos, Nigeria, and each day, 14 million of them use the city’s transit system.

Travelers rely on overcrowded public buses that navigate congested routes: What should be a 30-minute trip is often a three-hour journey, but Treepz CEO and co-founder Onyeka Akumah “has big plans to ameliorate the public transport infrastructure in Africa and beyond,” writes Rebecca Bellan.

“We wanted to give people a better way to commute with predictability, where they can know when the bus will get here, the certainty that they will have a seat in a vehicle, that it’s a decent vehicle and a safe one where you can bring your laptop,” said Akumah.

“Those are the things we said we wanted to change.”

Dear Sophie: When can I apply for my US work permit?

Dear Sophie,

My husband just accepted a job in Silicon Valley. His new employer will be sponsoring him for an E-3 visa.

I would like to continue working after we move to the United States. I understand I can get a work permit with the E-3 visa for spouses.

How soon can I apply for my U.S. work permit?

— Adaptive Aussie