Roundup of news and ideas from the world of startups – Week ending 10th June 2018
News you can use
How This Startup, Along With Dropbox and Facebook, Is Lowering Barriers to Entry for People With Criminal Records – Tech-enabled background check company Checkr has vowed that 5 percent of its workforce will be ex-offenders. For the founder of a hot San Francisco startup with $150 million in venture funding, Daniel Yanisse has an unusual goal: By the end of this year, he wants 5 percent of his workforce to be ex-offenders. When Yanisse launched his tech-enabled background-check company Checkr in 2014, all he knew about criminal records was that clients didn’t like them. Back then, Yanisse and his team spoke on the phone to job applicants, and “we heard hundreds of stories about people who committed very minor crimes 20 years ago and were trying to get a new start,” says Yanisse. “They were being rejected for the wrong things.”
Scaling Startups Are Setting Up Secondary Hubs In These Cities – A recent article in Crunchbase (link) examines how mayors in cities across the U.S. are trying to curry favor with startups.
HSBC Accelerator 2030 Program selects 5 FinTech Startups -T-Hub and HSBC Bank, under its fintech focussed Accelerator 2030 Program, has announced the names of the final five startups. These startups, selected on basis of their innovative products and solutions for improved banking operations, will undergo eight-week-long training, mentorship and workshops by senior HSBC leadership.
Alibaba and RoboSense Announce World’s First Solid-State LiDAR Driverless Vehicle – Pioneers Unmanned Delivery Vehicles – Hangzhou, China –Alibaba Group’s Cainiao Network and RoboSense jointly released today G Plus, the world’s first solid-state LiDAR unmanned logistics vehicle. Announced at Alibaba Group’s Cainiao Network 2018 Global Smart Logistics Summit held today in Hangzhou, China, the most important feature of the newly announced G Plus driverless delivery vehicles is the solid-state LiDAR technology, the RS-LiDAR-M1Pre, developed by China’s RoboSense. This is the first time that solid-state LiDAR has been officially used in the development of an unmanned vehicle, heralding the beginning of a new solid-state LiDAR era in driverless vehicles.
5 Ways Merging Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain Technology is Finally Rectifying Egregious Marketing Gap – One of the biggest challenges marketers face today is customer acquisition and retention. The key to both acquiring new customers and retaining current customers is possessing the critical data that can help you, one, communicate effectively with the highest qualified contact possible and, two, further identify the needs of your current customers to foster long-term loyalty. Unfortunately, the today’s data industry is both far too complicated and highly fragmented, offering a confusing glut of choices that are overwhelming marketers who are in desperate need of this mission-critical information. The existing data marketing ecosystem of data and direct marketing list owners, managers and brokers is wildly inefficient and often ineffective, costing businesses untold millions in unnecessary time and money, and untold more in opportunity loss.
Corporate M&A
Visa invests in LatAm m-payments startup YellowPepper – The deal is the first of its kind for Visa and aims at increasing mobile payments in the region.Visa led a funding round in Latin America-focused mobile payments startup YellowPepper. The first of its kind for Visa in the region, the strategic $12.5 million Series D investment in the startup will go towards growing opportunities for tokenized payments in the region, as well as increased access to Visa APIs and further the usage of push payments via Visa Direct.
Blockchain Startup Got $4B Funding Without Product – A Cayman Island-based blockchain startup is on track to dwarf the world’s largest initial public offerings (IPO) in 2018 with a fresh $4 billion in funding raised over the year through the sale of its digital coin, EOS. Block.one’s initial coin offering (ICO) more than doubles the next largest digital token sale, and marks a huge vote of confidence from backers who have yet to see a flagship product go live. (See also: Japanese Bank to Offer Blockchain Payments in 2020.)
Startup shut and failed last week
Lessons learned from a failed startup – Starting a company is hard. But “failure” definitely isn’t one of the words I’d use to describe my experience.