To fill its empty CMO position, Facebook just promoted to the C-suite a longtime Facebook executive focused on product growth.
Former VP of product growth and analytics Alex Schultz, who has been with the company since 2007, announced the move Tuesday in a Facebook post. Schultz will fill the position left open by Antonio Lucio, who joined the company from HP in 2018 and announced his departure last month. Lucio said he was leaving the company to “dedicate 100% of my time to diversity, inclusion and equity.”
In his Facebook post, Schultz said he planned to bring “experience in segmentation, targeting, and measurement” to the table to extend Facebook’s already massive reach. Schultz, who is the executive sponsor of Facebook’s LGBTQ resource group, added a personal note to the news, writing that Facebook is the first workplace where he has “truly safe to be gay and be open about it.”
Stepping into the role late in the U.S. election, an intensely consequential time for the company, Schultz acknowledged Facebook’s precarious position in the public eye. Touching on Facebook’s failures around platform enforcement, Schultz mentioned that he spent “most of my energy” over the last four years working on safety at the company. That work includes projects like Facebook’s community standards enforcement report, a new quarterly accounting of the company’s efforts to rid its platform of hate speech, harassment and other rule-breaking behavior.
“I believe deeply in the good Facebook’s products do,” Schultz said in his Facebook post. “We have all seen it through this pandemic as billions of people have connected with family and friends socially online while staying physically apart and slowing the spread of the virus. At the same time I think scrutiny of any new technology is appropriate and there are ways we can, and should, improve without losing all the good.”
XtalPi, an American-Chinese biotech firm that focuses on AI-assisted drug discovery, has raised a $319 million round C from a slate of enthusiastic investors led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund. It joins numerous others with 9-figure rounds in what is clearly a valuable and competitive space.
XtalPi works with major pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer that need to identify promising new drug-like molecules and learn as much about them as possible. It’s very much a race, so companies claiming to use AI to speed up the process have attracted major funding. Though there have been no prominent breakthroughs to speak of resulting from the space, it’s hard to imagine any major player can afford to ignore it.
This company, founded in 2014, purports to offer extremely low-level simulation and prediction of target molecules, both simulating the physics at atomic levels and doing the more traditional data science work that eliminates dead ends and points towards more fruitful avenues for investigation.
Although these advances are in the digital space, the companies still need a large staff of skilled scientists who can verify and advance the results — as well as the facilities to support them. It may help speed up the slow-paced pharmaceutical industry, but that doesn’t mean it’s cheap or easy to do so.
AI-enhanced (which is really to say using machine learning techniques) biotech firms have attracted huge funding rounds and lucrative (or potentially lucrative) partnerships as pharma’s biggest companies place their bets. (Insitro founder Daphne Koller spoke on this topic just two weeks ago at Disrupt.)
XtalPi plans to use the money as you might expect: To scale its existing operations with improved algorithms, more data, and additional computing power.
“We believe AI holds the answer to solving pharma’s productivity challenge,” said chairman and co-founder Shuhao Wen in a press release. “More specifically, XtalPi’s AI-powered platform can improve the industry’s research efficiency and success rate in order to lower costs for discovering and developing new drugs. We look forward to applying our platform to help clients bring more first-in-class and breakthrough drugs to the market and address significant unmet medical needs to benefit patients on a global scale.”
Softbank led the round, with PICC Capital and Morningside making up the larger remaining part, as well as follow-ons from existing investors Tencent, Sequoia China, China Life, and SIG.
A month after completing Y Combinator’s accelerator program, BukuWarung, an financial tech startup that serves small businesses in Indonesia, announced it has raised new funding from a roster of high-profile investors, including partners of DST Global, Soma Capital and 20VC.
The amount of the funding was undisclosed, but a source told TechCrunch that it was between $10 million to $15 million. The new capital will be used to hire for BukuWarung’s technology team. TechCrunch first profiled BukuWarung in July.
Angel investors in the round include several high-profile founders and executives: finance technology platform Plaid’s co-founder William Hockey; Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen; Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra; Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky; Clearbit chairman and startup advisor Josh Buckley; former Uber chief product officer Manik Gupta; Spotify’s former head of new markets in Asia Sriram Krishnan; 20VC founder Harry Stebbings; Nancy Xiao, an investor with Bond Capital; and Fast co-founder Allison Barr Allen. Angel investors from WhatsApp, Square and Airbnb also participated.
Launched last year by co-founders Chinmay Chauhan and Abhinay Peddisetty, BukuWarung is targeted at the 60 million “micromerchants” in Indonesia, including neighborhood store (or warung) owners. The app was originally created as a replacement for pen and apper ledgers, but plans to introduce financial services including credit, savings and insurance. In August, the company integrated digital payments into its platform, enabling merchants to take customer payments from bank accounts and digital wallets like OVO and DANA. BukuWarung’s goal is to fill the same role for Indonesian merchants that KhataBook and OKCredit do in India.
One of the reasons BukuWarung launched digital payments was in response to customer demand for contactless transactions and instant payouts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since introducing the feature, the company said it has already processed several million U.S. dollars in total payment volume (TPV) on an annualized basis. The company says it now serves about 1.2 million merchants across 750 locations in Indonesia, focusing on tier 2 and tier 3 cities.
Digital payments is also the first step into building out BukuWarung’s financial services, which will help differentiate it from other bookkeeping. The payments features is currently free and BukuWarung is experimenting with different monetization models, including making a small margin on fees.
“The reason why we launched payments is also very strategic, because there is a lot of pull in the market. We have already seen several millions annualized TPV in less than a month, because the payments we offer are cost-efficient as well and cheaper than to get from a bank,” Chauhan told TechCrunch.
“If you look at the Indian players, like Khatabook, they have also launched digital payments. The reason for that is because it’s a very essential step for building a business and monetization,” he added. “If you don’t have payments, you can’t do anything like that.”
Chauhan added that building a financial services platform is the difference between providing a utility app that replaces bookkeeping ledgers, and becoming an essential service for merchants that will eventually include lending for working capital, savings and insurance products. The bookkeeping features on BukuWarung will feed into the financial services aspect by providing data to score creditworthiness, and help small merchants, who often have difficulty securing working capital from traditional banks, get access to lines of credit.
Microsoft said it’s investigating an authentication outage with Office 365, preventing users from accessing some of the company’s most widely used services, including Office.com, Outlook.com, and Teams.
The company’s status dashboard said the issue started at 2:25pm PT, and has impacted mostly consumer users across the globe for the last few hours. Some government users may also be impacted, the company said.
In a series of tweets, Microsoft said that it tried to fix the issue, but was forced to roll back its changes after the fix failed.
For now, Microsoft said it was “rerouting traffic to alternate infrastructure to improve the user experience while we continue to investigate the issue.”
But that leaves millions on the U.S. west coast and users in Australia still unable to access their online services.
TechCrunch will keep you posted with developments. In the meantime, feel free to catch up with some of the bigger stories of the day.
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