Truphone raises $38M at $516M valuation as its eSIM business crosses 4M profiles

Truphone, a UK-based startup that provides voice and data services for phones, tablets and IoT hardware by way of eSIM software integrated directly into the devices, has raised another round of funding to continue expanding its business. The company, which told TechCrunch today that it counts Apple as a key partner, has raised another £30 million, valuing Truphone at £410 million (or $38 million at a $516 million valuation at current rates).

Truphone said it would use the money to continue investing in software development and network upgrades “to ensure the business is equipped to deliver on further acceleration; and to support an expanding worldwide presence, particularly in North America and Asia Pacific.”

The company said it has now provisioned some 4 million eSIM profiles globally and is seeing further eSIM downloads of 20,000 daily.

Although eSIM technology was conceived as a quick way to switch carriers without physically changing fiddly, tiny physical cards (and subsequent carrier contracts), it’s an interesting datapoint right now, given that we are seeing a big focus on technology and transactions that can be run in a contactless way (thus avoiding the spread of the novel coronavirus).

“We have long championed eSIM as the superior method of connectivity, and it’s immensely rewarding to reap the benefits of this decision,” said Ralph Steffens, CEO of Truphone, in a statement. “We are delighted that our investors continue to support us as we develop this technology which is maturing and accelerating all the time. Backed further by our investors, the future looks bright for Truphone, our partners, customers and a better-connected world.”

Truphone did not disclose the specific names of investors but we have confirmed that the majority of the funds are coming from Vollin Holdings and Minden Worldwide — two investment firms with ties to Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch who also owns the Chelsea football club, among other things.

Collectively, Abramovich-connected entities controlled more than 80 percent of the company when Truphone last raised funding in 2018: part of its large shareholding also stems from an earlier fundraise, when the company raised 9 million to retire existing debt in 2017.

For some additional context, the company was valued at £386 million in its last fundraise in 2018, making this latest raise effectively a slight down round.

Truphone is not a startup in the “young” sense. It has actually been around since 2006, starting out originally as a provider of SIM cards that travellers could use in their phones to get cheap calls and data while roaming outside their home countries. That legacy MVNO business reached breakeven in September 2019, it said today.

In more recent years, it has pivoted to focusing squarely on eSIM services, taking advantage of the advances in hardware design that make it easier to switch carriers (and use cheaper data plans) without physically replacing a SIM card.

It was an early partner of Apple’s — a supporter of eSIM developments, first for its iPad tablets — and said today that in the last year has secured deals with 25 “major operator customers across four continents”, covering some 200 million customers, to expand its network of coverage to allow users to more easily switch between carriers, and seek out cheaper data deals. Its growth, Truphone said, makes it one of the three biggest eSIM providers now globally.

The company today says it provides several flavors of eSIM services. The first of these, an eSIM operating system that it calls SIM OS, works with eUICC and iUICC hardware, and “is a component-oriented, high-performance embedded operating system, fully compatible with most international and industry standards such as ISO, GSMA, Oracle’s Java, Global Platform, 3GPP and ETSI.”

The second of these is a secure remote SIM provisioning service. “Truphone’s platform works with any mobile network operator, is interoperable with any eSIM and supports consumer and M2M eSIM deployments” through this service, it said.

It also launched an entitlements server, an operator-focused service that allows carriers to enable the use, for example, of Apple Watch devices and other connected devices and objects on their networks.

Apple said to be planning fall iPhone refresh with iPad Pro-like design

Apple is readying a new iPhone for fall to replace the iPhone 11 Pro this fall, Bloomberg reports, as well as follow-ups to the iPhone 11, a new smaller HomePod and a locator tag accessory. The top-end iPhone 11 Pro successors at least will have a new industrial design that more closely resembles the iPad Pro, with flat screens and sides instead of the current rounded edge design, and they’ll also include the 3D LIDAR sensing system that Apple introduced with the most recent iPad Pro refresh in March.

PlayStation 5’s new DualSense controller is a sleek and futuristic gaming accessory

Sony has revealed the design of the PlayStation 5‘s controller — a follow-on to its popular DualShock line that takes on a new name for a new generation: DualSense.

The DualSense controller is kitted out in black and white, and in some ways looks like a futuristic, plastic armor-plated robot companion more than a gamepad. It’s still recognizably a product of the DualShock legacy, however, and has the same familiar button layout as previous PlayStation controllers. The DualSense incorporates haptic feedback, however, for what Sony says will be a heightened sense of immersion in gaming.

Haptic feedback should be an improvement over the relatively general and non-specific rumble vibration of current generation controllers, and Sony has also added more tactile response thanks to new L2 and R2 “adaptive triggers” that provide different kinds of tension response when performing in-game actions, like “drawing a bow to shoot an arrow,” the company says.

The resulting physical design is a bit chunkier than the DualShock 4, with more room needed inside the case for that adaptive trigger tech. Still, Sony said that it has redesigned the component angles to produce a controller that feels a lot lighter in the hand than it looks.

This controller also does away with the dedicated “Share” button, but replaces it with a “Create” button that sounds like it should offer similar features and much more, though Sony isn’t yet ready to tip its hand as to exactly what that entails, and promises more details to follow.

Meanwhile, there’s a new built-in mic array for voice chat without any headset required — though it sounds like this is intended primarily as a “you have it in case you need it” feature than a dedicated input, since Sony is still advocating use of a headset for longer play sessions.

From a pure looks perspective, Sony clearly decided it wanted to go a bit more bold than its standard all-black look for the first version of a new controller it ships with a console. The two-tone, Stormtrooper palette is complemented by a new light bar that lines both sides of the central touchpad.

Personally, I love this look — and the USB-C port that you can spy at the top of the controller for charging. I don’t even know if I’m all that interested in a new generation of console, but the controller alone might convince me to upgrade.

Bidet startup Tushy scales up to meet demand amid toilet paper shortage

Business at Tushy is booming.

While the circumstances that led to the boom are sobering, the bidet company needed to adapt its strategy after seeing an uptick in business amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Other companies in this cohort include video conferencing service Zoom, meal kit service Blue Apron and Facebook, thanks to its social network, video hardware Portal and Oculus Quest VR headset. These companies all have something in common — they offer solutions to problems that, until recently, were not all that urgent.

Founded in 2015 by Thinx founder Miki Agrawal, Tushy aims to replace toilet paper, CEO Jason Ojalvo tells TechCrunch. Ojalvo, who joined the company as CEO in 2018, says North America has been a holdout when it comes to bidets. As a result, the nation flushes about 15 million trees down the toilet every year.

Tushy, which has raised $2.9 million since its founding, has been profitable for the last two years. That’s in part thanks to the company’s focus on sustainability — not just from an environmental standpoint, but from a business one, Ojalvo says. That means not over-hiring or spending too much on marketing.

“We’re really careful about doing it in a way so we won’t explode like some other direct-to-consumer companies can do when they raise too much money and they over-hire and then they have to let people go,” Ojalvo says. “That’s just a debacle that I’ve seen first hand and I don’t want to be part of it. Not only do I not want to be part of it but I don’t want to be the leader of the company that does that.”

Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Tushy saw its growth double year-over-year. Ojalvo says that’s partly been a result of having customers who evangelize on their behalf. Fast-forward to around March 9, when sales really started to double beyond the norm; a few days later, Tushy was having days where it brought in $500,000 in sales.

heartscan2

R&D Roundup: Ultrasound/AI medical imaging, assistive exoskeletons and neural weather modeling

In the time of COVID-19, much of what transpires from the science world to the general public relates to the virus, and understandably so. But other domains, even within medical research, are still active — and as usual, there are tons of interesting (and heartening) stories out there that shouldn’t be lost in the furious activity of coronavirus coverage. This last week brought good news for several medical conditions as well as some innovations that could improve weather reporting and maybe save a few lives in Cambodia.

airtags-1

Apple accidentally confirms the existence of an unreleased product, AirTags

Whoops! Apple inadvertently revealed the existence of an unreleased product, AirTags, in a support video uploaded to its YouTube account today. The video, “How to erase your iPhone,” offers a tutorial about resetting an iPhone to factory settings. Around the 1:43 mark, it instructs users to turn off “Find my iPhone” as part of the process. On the Settings page that then appears, another option for “Enable Offline Finding” is shown, and beneath that, the text references AirTags by name.

Specifically, it says: “Offline finding enables this device and AirTags to be found when not connected to Wi-Fi or cellular.”

The discovery was first spotted by the eagle-eyed blog Appleosophy.

Apple has since pulled the video. (A copy of the video is embedded below.)

AirTags, essentially Apple’s Tile competitor, were already known to be in the works. Based on details and assets found in Apple’s iOS code, AirTags are believed to be small tracking tiles with Bluetooth connectivity that can be used to find lost items — just like Tile.

The difference is that Apple’s AirTags will benefit from deeper integration with iOS, including within its “Find My” app. There, the tags will show up in a new “Items” tab allowing you to keep track of items that tend to get lost or stolen — like your keys, wallet or even your bike.

According to reports from MacRumors, the tags will feature a removable CR2032 coin cell battery, also similar to Tile.

Apple’s intention to copy Tile’s concept has not gone unnoticed by Tile.

The company on Wednesday told a congressional panel that Apple’s anticompetitive behavior has “gotten worse, not better.”

During the hearing, Tile referenced Apple’s plans to integrate its own product into the “Find My” app. Tile and other Bluetooth trackers won’t be able to do the same. They also have to ask for background location access repeatedly, while Apple’s AirTags, presumably, will not. That gives Apple’s own product an advantage as it owns the platform.

Apple has been asked for comment.


Image credits: Apple, via YouTube; MacRumors 

2020-04-01_1515.9cde674554848342595a23c4e3d40bbce836006e

You can now buy AWS’ $99 DeepComposer keyboard

AWS today announced that its DeepComposer keyboard is now available for purchase. And no, DeepComposer isn’t a mechanical keyboard for hackers but a small MIDI keyboard for working with the AWS DeepComposer service that uses AI to create songs based on your input.

First announced at AWS re:Invent 2019, the keyboard created a bit of confusion, in part because Amazon’s announcement almost made it seem like a consumer product.

DeepComposer, which also works without the actual hardware keyboard, is more of a learning tool, though, and belongs to the same family of AWS hardware like DeepLens and DeepRacer. It’s meant to teach developers about generative adversarial networks, just like DeepLens and DeepRacer also focus on specific machine learning technologies.

Users play a short melody, either using the hardware keyboard or an on-screen one, and the service then automatically generates a backing track based on your choice of musical style.

The results I heard at re:Invent last year were a bit uneven (or worse), but that may have improved by now. But this isn’t a tool for creating the next Top 40 song. It’s simply a learning tool. I’m not sure you need the keyboard to get that learning experience out of it, but if you do, you can now head over to Amazon and buy it.

Why AWS is selling a MIDI keyboard to teach machine learning