Tag: China

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Cathay Innovation leads Laiye’s $35M round to bet on Chinese enterprise IT

For many years, the boom and bust of China’s tech landscape have centered around consumer-facing products. As this space gets filled by Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and more recently Didi Chuxing, Meituan Dianping, and ByteDance, entrepreneurs and investors are shifting attention to business applications.

One startup making waves in China’s enterprise software market is four-year-old Laiye, which just raised a $35 million Series B round led by cross-border venture capital firm Cathay Innovation. Existing backers Wu Capital, a family fund, and Lightspeed China Partners, whose founding partner James Mi has been investing in every round of Laiye since Pre-A, also participated in this Series B.

The deal came on the heels of Laiye’s merger with Chinese company Awesome Technology, a team that’s spent the last 18 years developing Robotic Process Automation, a term for technology that lets organizations offload repetitive tasks like customer service onto machines. With this marriage, Laiye officially launched its RPA product UiBot to compete in the nascent and fast-growing market for streamlining workflow.

Gartner finds RPA is fastest growing market in enterprise software

“There was a wave of B2C [business-to-consumer] in China, and now we believe enterprise software is about to grow rapidly,” Denis Barrier, co-founder and chief executive officer of Cathay Innovation, told TechCrunch over a phone interview.

Since launching in January, UiBot has collected some 300,000 downloads and 6,000 registered enterprise users. Its clients include major names such as Nike, Walmart, Wyeth, China Mobile, Ctrip and more.

Guanchun Wang, chairman and CEO of Laiye, believes there are synergies between AI-enabled chatbots and RPA solutions, as the combination allows business clients “to build bots with both brains and hands so as to significantly improve operational efficiency and reduce labor costs,” he said.

When it comes to market size, Barrier believes RPA in China will be a new area of growth. For one, Chinese enterprises, with a shorter history than those found in developed economies, are less hampered by legacy systems, which makes it “faster and easier to set up new corporate software,” the investor observed. There’s also a lot more data being produced in China given the population of organizations, which could give Chinese RPA a competitive advantage.

“You need data to train the machine. The more data you have, the better your algorithms become provided you also have the right data scientists as in China,” Barrier added.

However, the investor warned that the exact timing of RPA adoption by people and customers is always not certain, even though the product is ready.

Laiye said it will use the proceeds to recruit talents for research and development as well as sales of its RPA products. The startup will also work on growing its AI capabilities beyond natural language processing, deep learning, and reinforcement learning, in addition to accelerating commercialization of its robotic solutions across industries.

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India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications

India may have plans to follow France’s footsteps in building a chat app and requiring government employees to use it for official communications.

The New Delhi government is said to be pondering about the need to have homegrown email and chat apps, local news outlet Economic Times reported on Thursday.

The rationale behind the move is to cut reliance on foreign entities, the report said, a concern that has somehow manifested amid U.S.’s ongoing tussle with Huawei and China.

“We need to make our communication insular,” an unnamed top government official was quoted as saying by the paper. The person suggested that by putting Chinese giant Huawei on the entity list, the U.S. has “set alarm bells ringing in New Delhi.”

India has its own ongoing trade tension with the U.S. Donald Trump earlier this month removed the South Asian nation from a special trade program after India did not assure him that it will “provide equitable and reasonable access to its markets.” India called the move “unfortunate”, and weeks later, increased tariffs on some U.S. exports.

The move to step away from foreign communication apps, if it comes to fruition, won’t be the first time a nation has attempted to cautiously restrict usage of popular messaging apps run by foreign players in government offices.

France launched an encrypted chat app — called Tchap — for use in government offices earlier this year. Only those employed by the French government offices can sign up to use the service, though the nation has open sourced the app’s code for the world to see and audit.

Of course, a security flaw in Tchap came into light within the first 24 hours of its release. Security is a real challenge that the government would have to tackle and it might not have the best resources — talent, budget, and expertise — to deal with it.

China, which has restricted many foreign companies from operating in the nation, also maintains customized versions of popular operating systems for use in government offices. So does North Korea.

It won’t be an unprecedented step for India, either. The nation has been trying to build and scale its own Linux-based desktop operating system called BOSS for several years with little success as most government agencies continue to use Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

Even as India has emerged as the third-largest startup hub in the world, the country has failed to build local alternatives for many popular services. Facebook’s WhatsApp has become ubiquitous for communication in India, while Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows power most smartphones and computers in the nation.

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Warburg Pincus announces new $4.25 billion fund for China and Southeast Asia

Warburg Pincus, the private equity fund with over $60 billion under management, is doubling down on Asia after it announced a $4.25 billion fund dedicated to China and Southeast Asia.

The firm has been present in China for 25 years, and it has invested over $11 billion in a portfolio of over 120 startups that includes the likes of Alibaba’s Ant Financial and listed companies NIO (a Tesla rival), ZTO Express (a courier firm)among others. The new fund will work in tandem with the firm’s $14.8 billion global growth fund which was finalized at the end of last year.

What’s particularly interesting about the new fund is that it has expanded to include Southeast Asia, where internet adoption is rapidly expanding among 600 million consumers, for the first time. It is the successor to Warburg Pincus’ previous $2.2 billion ‘China’ fund and, with the addition of Southeast Asia, it’ll aim to build on initial investments in the region that have included Go-Jek in Indonesia (although it is going regional) and Vietnamese digital payment startup Momo from its Singapore office.

Indeed, the firm’s head of Southeast Asia — Jeff Perlman — said in a statement that Southeast Asia is “exhibiting many of the strong investment themes and trends which have driven our China business over the last 25 years.”

While there is plenty of uncertainty around China, and more widely Asia, due to the ongoing trade battle with the U.S. — which has ensnared Huawei and other tech firms — Warburg Pincus said it had received strong demand for LPs whilst out raising this new fund.

Though it declined to provide details of its backers — and you’d wager that few, if any, are U.S-based — it said it surpassed its initial target of $3.5 billion for the China-Southeast Asia fund. That’s despite evidence suggesting that China’s investment space is experiencing a slowdown in total funding raised despite more deals.

In terms of target investments, the firm said it intends to focus on areas including consumer and services, healthcare, real estate, financial services and TMT — technology, media and telecommunications.

Warburg Pincus is already one of the largest investors in Southeast Asia in terms of potential check size, although it has been fairly selective on deals at this point. The fund’s move to include the region alongside will be a boon for companies looking for growth-stage deals that are hard to find in the current venture capital ecosystem.

More broadly, it is also a major endorsement for Southeast Asia as a startup destination. The region has long been seen as having immense growth potential, but it often sits in the shadows of more mature regions like India and China.

Warburg isn’t alone in grouping Southeast Asia with another region. Sequoia’s India fund reaches into Southeast Asia — alongside its recently-launched accelerate program — as does the most recent fund from Vertex Ventures.

On the other side, a number of Chinese funds are increasingly doing deals in the region and setting up shop in Singapore. Those include GGV which has backed startups like fintech company Thunes, Ant Financial-backed fund BAce Capital and ATM Capital, which helps Chinese companies expand into and localize in Southeast Asia.

Google report: Southeast Asia’s digital economy to triple to $240 billion by 2025

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Pinduoduo cements position as China’s second-largest ecommerce player

Alibaba and JD.com have been in a war over the Chinese e-commerce space for a decade or so, but a third player called Pinduoduo has managed to shake up the duopoly in recent times. The startup, which was founded in 2015 by an ex-Googler and went public on the Nasdaq last July, has further flexed muscles during the recent “6/18” shopping spree.

According to data provider QuestMobile, Pinduoduo’s daily active users have outnumbered JD’s for at least the past 12 months, and it came out of the mid-year sales festival — first popularized by JD as a counterpart to archrival Alibaba’s “11/11” shopping day — with 135 million DAUs.

JD, in comparison, ended with 88 million DAUs and Alibaba’s Taobao retained its top spot at 299 million. That result further solidified Pinduoduo’s position as China’s second-biggest ecommerce company by number of users.

The boom of Pinduoduo is in part attributable to ties with its investor Tencent — also a backer of JD — which enables it to sell via WeChat’s lite app and tap the giant’s vast social network. Alibaba, on the other hand, has for years been prevented from selling through WeChat.

In terms of sales, Pinduoduo still remains some miles behind JD, which focuses on large-ticket items like home appliances and targets China’s urban, deep-pocketed shoppers. Pinduoduo took a more rural tack and has built a reputation for hawking ultra-cheap goods at small-city consumers.

In 2018, Pinduoduo racked up 471.6 billion yuan ($68.6 billion) in gross merchandise volume, a somewhat problematic term for gauging sales as it totals the value of orders placed, regardless of whether they are actually sold, delivered or returned. (Alibaba stopped revealing GMV a few years ago.) JD’s GMV was almost four times that of Pinduoduo at 1.68 trillion yuan ($243.9 billion) last year.

One has to keep in mind that JD is a 21-year-old firm born out of the PC era, whereas Pinduoduo has been up and running on mobile for less than four years. The startup’s continued growth is undeniable. In a March report, investment bank UBS’s Evidence Lab predicted that Pinduoduo could overtake JD in GMV as early as 2021.

But Pinduoduo’s story is not all roses. Currently trading at $20.54, its stock has plunged about 35 percent since a March high. The online marketplace has also been chided for selling counterfeits and subpar goods, an endemic problem that’s long plagued Chinese e-commerce. This year Pinduoduo was put on the U.S. government’s “notorious” blacklist alongside rival Alibaba for selling fakes, while the company claims it’s actively working to root out problematic listings.

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Europe should ban AI for mass surveillance and social credit scoring, says advisory group

An independent expert group tasked with advising the European Commission to inform its regulatory response to artificial intelligence — to underpin EU lawmakers’ stated aim of ensuring AI developments are “human centric” — has published its policy and investment recommendations.

This follows earlier ethics guidelines for “trustworthy AI”, put out by the High Level Expert Group (HLEG) for AI back in April, when the Commission also called for participants to test the draft rules.

The AI HLEG’s full policy recommendations comprise a highly detailed 50-page document — which can be downloaded from this web page. The group, which was set up in June 2018, is made up of a mix of industry AI experts, civic society representatives, political advisers and policy wonks, academics and legal experts.

The document includes warnings on the use of AI for mass surveillance and scoring of EU citizens, such as China’s social credit system, with the group calling for an outright ban on “AI-enabled mass scale scoring of individuals”. It also urges governments to commit to not engage in blanket surveillance of populations for national security purposes. (So perhaps it’s just as well the UK has voted to leave the EU, given the swingeing state surveillance powers it passed into law at the end of 2016.) 

“While there may be a strong temptation for governments to ‘secure society’ by building a pervasive surveillance system based on AI systems, this would be extremely dangerous if pushed to extreme levels,” the HLEG writes. “Governments should commit not to engage in mass surveillance of individuals and to deploy and procure only Trustworthy AI systems, designed to be respectful of the law and fundamental rights, aligned with ethical principles and socio-technically robust.”

The group also calls for commercial surveillance of individuals and societies to be “countered” — suggesting the EU’s response to the potency and potential for misuse of AI technologies should include ensuring that online people-tracking is “strictly in line with fundamental rights such as privacy”, including (the group specifies) when it concerns ‘free’ services (albeit with a slight caveat on the need to consider how business models are impacted).

Last week the UK’s data protection watchdog fired an even more specific shot across the bows of the online behavioral ad industry — warning that adtech’s mass-scale processing of web users’ personal data for targeting ads does not comply with EU privacy standards. The industry was told its rights-infringing practices must change, even if the Information Commissioner’s Office isn’t about to bring down the hammer just yet. But the reform warning was clear.

As EU policymakers work on fashioning a rights-respecting regulatory framework for AI, seeking to steer  the next ten years+ of cutting-edge tech developments in the region, the wider attention and scrutiny that will draw to digital practices and business models looks set to drive a clean up of problematic digital practices that have been able to proliferate under no or very light touch regulation, prior to now.

The HLEG also calls for support for developing mechanisms for the protection of personal data, and for individuals to “control and be empowered by their data” — which they argue would address “some aspects of the requirements of trustworthy AI”.

“Tools should be developed to provide a technological implementation of the GDPR and develop privacy preserving/privacy by design technical methods to explain criteria, causality in personal data processing of AI systems (such as federated machine learning),” they write.

“Support technological development of anonymisation and encryption techniques and develop standards for secure data exchange based on personal data control. Promote the education of the general public in personal data management, including individuals’ awareness of and empowerment in AI personal data-based decision-making processes. Create technology solutions to provide individuals with information and control over how their data is being used, for example for research, on consent management and transparency across European borders, as well as any improvements and outcomes that have come from this, and develop standards for secure data exchange based on personal data control.”

Other policy suggestions among the many included in the HLEG’s report are that AI systems which interact with humans should include a mandatory self-identification. Which would mean no sneaky Google Duplex human-speech mimicking bots. In such a case the bot would have to introduce itself up front — thereby giving the human caller a chance to disengage.

The HLEG also recommends establishing a “European Strategy for Better and Safer AI for Children”. Concern and queasiness about rampant datafication of children, including via commercial tracking of their use of online services, has been raised  in multiple EU member states.

“The integrity and agency of future generations should be ensured by providing Europe’s children with a childhood where they can grow and learn untouched by unsolicited monitoring, profiling and interest invested habitualisation and manipulation,” the group writes. “Children should be ensured a free and unmonitored space of development and upon moving into adulthood should be provided with a “clean slate” of any public or private storage of data related to them. Equally, children’s formal education should be free from commercial and other interests.”

Member states and the Commission should also devise ways to continuously “analyse, measure and score the societal impact of AI”, suggests the HLEG — to keep tabs on positive and negative impacts so that policies can be adapted to take account of shifting effects.

“A variety of indices can be considered to measure and score AI’s societal impact such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Social Scoreboard Indicators of the European Social Pillar. The EU statistical programme of Eurostat, as well as other relevant EU Agencies, should be included in this mechanism to ensure that the information generated is trusted, of high and verifiable quality, sustainable and continuously available,” it suggests. “AI-based solutions can help the monitoring and measuring its societal impact.”

The report is also heavy on pushing for the Commission to bolster investment in AI — calling particularly for more help for startups and SMEs to access funding and advice, including via the InvestEU program.

Another suggestion is the creation of an EU-wide network of AI business incubators to connect academia and industry. “This could be coupled with the creation of EU-wide Open Innovation Labs, which could be built further on the structure of the Digital Innovation Hub network,” it continues. 

There are also calls to encourage public sector uptake of AI, such as by fostering digitalisation by transforming public data into a digital format; providing data literacy education to government agencies; creating European large annotated public non-personal databases for “high quality AI”; and funding and facilitating the development of AI tools that can assist in detecting biases and undue prejudice in governmental decision-making.

Another chunk of the report covers recommendations to try to bolster AI research in Europe — such as strengthening and creating additional Centres of Excellence which address strategic research topics and become “a European level multiplier for a specific AI topic”.

Investment in AI infrastructures, such as distributed clusters and edge computing, large RAM and fast networks, and a network of testing facilities and sandboxes is also urged; along with support for an EU-wide data repository “through common annotation and standardisation” — to work against data siloing, as well as trusted data spaces for specific sectors such as healthcare, automative and agri-food.

The push by the HLEG to accelerate uptake of AI has drawn some criticism, with digital rights group Access Now’s European policy manager, Fanny Hidvegi, writing that: “What we need now is not more AI uptake across all sectors in Europe, but rather clarity on safeguards, red lines, and enforcement mechanisms to ensure that the automated decision making systems — and AI more broadly — developed and deployed in Europe respect human rights.”

Other ideas in the HLEG’s report include developing and implementing a European curriculum for AI; and monitoring and restricting the development of automated lethal weapons — including technologies such as cyber attack tools which are not “actual weapons” but which the group points out “can have lethal consequences if deployed. 

The HLEG further suggests EU policymakers refrain from giving AI systems or robots legal personhood, writing: “We believe this to be fundamentally inconsistent with the principle of human agency, accountability and responsibility, and to pose a significant moral hazard.”

The report can downloaded in full here.

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Splyt wants to connect the world’s ride-hailing apps for easy international roaming

The vision of a universal global ride-hailing service is over. Uber’s decision to exit markets like China, Southeast Asia and Russia coupled with the failure of its rivals to develop a proposed roaming system, means that global travelers must install multiple apps if they are to take advantage of on-demand taxis. That’s unless a little-known startup can turn a bold plan into reality.

In the world of ride-hailing and its billion-dollar investment checks, an $8 million capital raise may not be a big deal but it does represent a coming-out for Splyt, a UK-based startup that is aiming to help make global ride-hailing roaming a reality — and not just within ride-hailing apps.

The four-year-old company announced this week that it closed an $8 million Series A round from a range of undisclosed (and existing) family offices and angel investors. In addition, the round included participation from Southeast Asian ride-hailing company Grab, the firm valued at $14 billion which acquired Uber’s regional business last year.

The deal will see Grab become a Splyt partner and it comes hot-on-the-heels of a similar rollout with Alipay, the digital wallet app run by Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial.

In both cases, Splyt is hooking Alipay and Grab up to its ride-hailing networks to allow users to book (and take) a taxi from another provider within the Alipay or Grab app.

Splyt allows users of Alipay to book taxis on the Grab network in Southeast Asia without downloading Grab’s app

The integration is already live within Alipay for Southeast Asia — Grab is scheduled to work overseas from early 2020 — and it means that users can book and manage rides directly from the payment app thanks to Splyt’s system. In other words, Alipay users can take rides through Grab without having to download the Grab app.

Splyt is not visible to the consumer’s eye. Instead, it lurks behind the scenes acting as the interconnecting services. In that respect, it is much like digital banking services that provide the infrastructure that enables banks to offer digital services. In Splyt’s case, it provides connections for ride-hailing services outside of their markets, but beyond them it allows other apps to access ride-hailing booking features, too.

Relationships are the key part of this offering, beyond Grab and Alipay, Splyt has partnerships with Chinese travel app Ctrip, Careem — the Middle East-based service being acquired by Uber — Gett and car rental service Cartrawler, which added ride-hailing via the tie-up.

“There’s a long way to go to get comfortable with where we are and how close we are to our vision,” Splyt CEO Philipp Mintchin said, admitting that the goal is for all major ride-hailing firms to join.

That said, the existing partner base already gives Splyt reach into some 2,000 cities. The deal with Grab, in particular, will help allow Alipay and Ctrip — two popular services — to open up ride-hailing in Southeast Asia, a region that is an increasingly popular travel destination for Chinese tourists.

Indeed, such is the focus on Asia at this point that Splyt has opened an office in Singapore. Mintchin told TechCrunch that he expects headcount in Singapore will reach 15 this year, mostly on the tech side, while overall the company is predicted to grow to 50 people by the end of this year.

“Most of our business and partners are based out of Asia,” he added of the new office.

Splyt Team

The Splyt Team at the company’s office in London

While connecting ride-hailing services and popular apps makes absolute sense for consumers who can enjoy the convenience of roaming, navigating and securing partnerships is not straightforward in today’s ride-hailing world. Aside from a network of complicated relationships — Uber and Didi, in particular, are investors in many competing services and each other — many companies are also developing new features behind simply taxis.

Mintchin declined to discuss potential deals but he did tease that Splyt is working to onboard a number of new partners this year.

“In this industry, everyone is talking to everyone,” he said of the partnership push.

Mintchin admitted that the “politics of the ride-hailing industry” mean that some companies refuse to work with others — no names named, alas — and others prefer to work with specific firms, too. Then there’s also an element of trust involved with giving a third party access to a service which ends up being used by yet another third party.

“We are here to partner and benefit each other rather than to try to steal a fleet and run our own app,” he said of Splyt’s neutral position and its role as the behind-the-scenes integrator. “We are not all of a sudden going to influence the partners we work with… the partners make decisions.”

It’s a patient game, but already Splyt is seeing growth double on a weekly basis since May. In some areas, Mintchin said that the service is seeing a 90 percent repeat use through its partners. Going forward, he added, the Series A funding will go towards closing those supply gaps to make the service more usable in more locations.

It’s an audacious vision but, given the balkanization of the industry in recent years, it remains the best hope that travelers have of delivering on the vision of using their favorite ride-hailing app anywhere in the world.

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Huawei says two-thirds of 5G networks outside China now use its gear

As 5G networks begin rolling out and commercializing around the world, telecoms vendors are rushing to get a headstart. Huawei equipment is now behind two-thirds of the commercially launched 5G networks outside China, said president of Huawei’s carrier business group Ryan Ding on Tuesday at an industry conference.

Huawei, the world’s largest maker of telecoms gear, has nabbed 50 commercial 5G contracts outside its home base from countries including South Korea, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Finland and more. In all, the Shenzhen-based firm has shipped more than 150,000 base stations, according to Ding.

It’s worth noting that network carriers can work with more than one providers to deploy different parts of their 5G base stations. Huawei offers what it calls an end-to-end network solution or a full system of hardware, but whether a carrier plans to buy from multiple suppliers is contingent on their needs and local regulations, a Huawei spokesperson told TechCrunch.

In China, for instance, both Ericsson and Nokia have secured 5G contracts from state-run carrier China Mobile (although Nokia’s Chinese entity, a joint venture with Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell, is directly controlled by China’s State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission).

Huawei’s handsome number of deals came despite the U.S’s ongoing effort to lobby its allies against using its equipment. In May, the Trump administration put Huawei on a trade blacklist over concerns around the firm’s spying capabilities, a move that has effectively banned U.S. companies from doing businesses with the Shenzhen-based giant.

Huawei’s overall share in the U.S. telecoms market has so far been negligible, but many rural carriers have long depended on its high-performing, cost-saving hardware. That might soon end as the U.S. pressures small-town network operators to quit buying from Huawei, Reuters reported this week.

To appease potential clients, Huawei has gone around the world offering no-backdoors pacts to local governments of the U.K. and most recently India.

Huawei is in a neck and neck fight with rivals Nokia and Ericsson. In early June, Nokia CEO Rajeev Suri said in an interview with Bloomberg that the firm had won “two-thirds of the time” in bidding contracts against Ericcson and competed “quite favorably with Huawei.” Nokia at the time landed 42 5G contracts, while Huawei numbered 40 and Ericsson scored 19.

Huawei’s challenges go well beyond the realm of its carrier business. Its fast-growing smartphone unit is also getting the heat as the U.S. ban threatens to cut it off from Alphabet, whose Android operating system is used in Huawei phone, as well as a range of big chip suppliers.

Huawei CEO and founder Ren Zhengfei noted that trade restrictions may compromise the firm’s output in the short term. Total revenues are expected to dip $30 billion below estimates over the next two years, and overseas smartphone shipment faces a 40% plunge. Ren, however, is bullish that the firm’s sales would bounce back after a temporary period of adjustment while it works towards self-dependence by developing its own OS, chips and other core technologies.

Huawei says US ban will cost it $30B in lost revenue

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Indonesia’s Kopi Kenangan raises a sweet $20M to expand its coffee business

Kopi Kenangan, a startup that wants to make quality, fresh coffee affordable to Indonesian consumers, has raised $20 million as it begins to consider overseas expansion in Southeast Asia.

The round comes courtesy of Sequoia India and Southeast Asia, via the $695 million investment fund it closed last year. Kopi Kenangan previously raised $8 million from Alpha JWC Ventures.

Started in 2017 by Edward Tirtanata and James Prananto, the company aims to bridge the gap between cheap street vendor coffee and drinks priced at the higher end of the spectrum from international chains such as Starbucks — the ‘sweet spot,’ you might say. That delta is a major reason why Indonesia, which is the world’s fourth-largest coffee exporter, has Southeast Asia’s lowest coffee consumption per person, Tirtanata argued.

Kopi Kenangan is also unashamedly local. Rather than lattes, mochas or flat whites, its top-selling drink is ‘Es Kopi Kenangan Mantan,’ a sweet Indonesian coffee that uses palm sugar, among other local Southeast Asian beverages. Ingredients are sourced locally, including four different coffee blends from across the country and organic palm sugar. Tirtanata told TechCrunch that the raw materials aren’t cheap, but they are essential for a “customer-first” company.

Already, Kopi Kenangan has an impressive retail footprint, including 80 stores across eight cities. The company makes use on-demand services like Go-Jek (GoFood) and Grab (GrabFood) which account for one-third of all orders, according to Tirtanata, rather than running its out fleet as some competitors.

Impressively, the business is profitable thanks to a managed inventory and a focus on waste that sees neighboring branches share resources. Tirtanata said that keeping the business sustainable is a key focus even though it is now flush with new capital.

With this new funding under its belt, the company is eying significant expansion both nationally and internationally. Tirtanata said the plan is to reach 500 stores by next year, which, he claimed, will include locations in two overseas markets. He declined to name them, but did reveal that hiring is already underway in both countries.

As well as growing its commercial footprint, Kopi Kenangan will use the capital to build out its logistics to support the projected rise in business. (It claims to sell “close to” one million cups of coffee per month, up from 175,000 cups in October.)

Chief on the list is logistics to track coffee supplies and shipments — Tirtanata admitted it’s natural that there will occasionally be some beans that are sub-standard, and this will help root them out — using RFID and other tech. The startup’s development team is also poised to work on a new internet-of-things feature, details of which will come later, and improvements to the Kopi Kenangan apps and digital service.

Unlike newer competitors like Fore Coffee, which takes its cues from China’s Luckin by placing emphasis on digital delivery, Kopi Kenangan is content to use third-party on-demand apps and its own ‘new retail’ experience. Its app enables customers to pre-order coffee for collection at their nearest branch. If they are in an unfamiliar location, it will guide them to the store.

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FedEx sues the Department of Commerce after incident involving misrouted Huawei packages

FedEx is suing the United States Department of Commerce, claiming that it has been “essentially deputize[d]” to enforce its trade blacklist. The lawsuit comes a month after Huawei said it is reassessing its relationship with the delivery giant after several packages meant for shipment within Asia were instead diverted, or erroneously marked for delivery, to the U.S. FedEx claimed the packages (which Huawei said did not contain any technology covered by the trade ban imposed against it by the Trump administration) had been misrouted by accident.

In a statement today about the lawsuit, FedEx said that the current export ban “places an unreasonable burden on FedEx to police the millions of shipments that transit our network every day.” Filed on Monday, the lawsuit asks the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia to stop the Department of Commerce from enforcing prohibitions in the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) against FedEx.

FedEx said in its court filing that it has “developed a sophisticated proprietary risk-based compliance system” to adhere to U.S. export laws by screening for senders or recipients on the list of entities believed to pose a national security risk. Huawei, which was not mentioned by name in either FedEx’s announcement or its complaint against the U.S. government, was added to that list last month. But FedEx says the U.S. government expects it to perform a “virtually impossible task, logistically, economically, and in many cases, legally” since it handles million of packages each day and most of them are sealed by customers before being given to the company. Therefore, the company argues that EAR violates its rights to due process under the Fifth Amendment.

China is an important growth market for FedEx, but earlier this month its future there was put in jeopardy when the Chinese government said it was under investigation for violating laws and regulations after the incident involving Huawei’s packages. Last year the company was forced to cut its 2019 earnings guidance. FedEx’s chairman and CEO Frederick Smith blamed “bad political choices” around the world, including Brexit, state-owned enterprises and China and U.S. tariffs, for hurting its business.

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JD.com’s logistics arm raises a $218 million investment fund

The logistics division of JD.com, Alibaba’s closest e-commerce competitor in China, has raised 1.5 billion yuan (about $218 million) to invest in logistics-related companies and technology. Limited partners in the new fund include JD Logistics and JD.com, as well as undisclosed listed companies and government-led funds, reported Reuters.

JD Logistics, which became a standalone subsidiary in April 2017, has a lot to prove. The unit raised $2.5 billion last year from Hillhouse Capital Group, Sequoia Capital and Tencent, among other investors, in its first major outside funding at a valuation of about $13.5 billion and is also eyeing a potential public offering.

But two months ago, JD.com CEO Richard Liu said in an internal memo that JD Logistics would enact several cost-cutting measures after losing 2.8 billion yuan (about $420 million) last year. These include getting rid of a basic salary for its couriers and instead pay them based on how many packages they deliver. JD.com owns a 81.4 percent stake in the business.

JD Logistics competitors include Alibaba’s Cainiao, which raised undisclosed funding at a reported valuation of $7.7 billion in 2016. Ensuring speedy, cost-efficient deliveries is especially important to JD.com’s business because it carries its own inventory and performs both in-house logistics and service for third parties.

TechCrunch has reached out to JD.com to ask about possible investments. JD Logistics has focused on testing drone deliveries, furthering logistics automation and smart vehicles and backed several companies in Southeast Asia.