Adfin wants to fix bill payments for sole traders and small companies

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Image Credits: Adfin

Meet Adfin, a new U.K.-based fintech startup that wants to help companies get their invoices paid — whatever it takes. Founded by two fintech experts, the company is starting with a problem and building a product around it. The problem is that it’s still hard to get paid if you’re set up as a sole trader or even a small company that doesn’t have a person dedicated to administrative tasks.

The process of getting paid for work for small businesses and sole traders like lawyers, accountants, consultants, tradespeople and so on typically entails sending the customer an invoice with your bank information. But you also have to track incoming payments and reconcile them to make sure you’ve received the money. Add to that, the experience isn’t that great for your customers.

For returning customers, you can try and set up a direct debit. But it may be hard for these sorts of businesses to convince their customers to let them withdraw money directly from their bank account. As for card payments, it often leads to high processing fees.

“The average consumer only makes 21 e-commerce purchases a year,” Adfin co-founder and CEO Tom Pope (pictured left) told TechCrunch. He previously worked for Tink, the open banking startup that was acquired by Visa. “All the buzz has been around e-commerce, but for your average legal practice or accountancy firm, their payments are stuck in the ’90s — bank transfers, card payments taken over the phone, paying really high fees.”

Adfin argues sole traders and small businesses don’t necessarily want to think about the most appropriate payment method. Instead, they just want to get paid and move on. At its core, the startup is building an invoice management platform and a payment platform to simplify critical admin and make getting paid less of a headache.

After uploading invoices to Adfin, its customers can use the platform to send payment requests via email, WhatsApp or SMS.

Adfin then automatically decides the payment method to display, depending on various factors, such as whether it’s a returning customer, a small invoice, etc. The company supports pay-by-bank using open banking and card payments, including Apple Pay and Google Pay. If the customer doesn’t pay right away, Adfin automates sending reminders too.

“Our customers are not payments nerds. They don’t have to be payments nerds. And I think the fact that they are not payments nerds has probably led to them being a little bit taken advantage of, if I’m honest,” Pope said.

“With Adfin, we just offer you payments. We get you paid and we will handle the payment mix. And obviously, it’s in our interest to be trying to get your success rate as high as possible and your costs as low as possible,” he added.

As Adfin acts as a central repository for all your invoices, companies can check all pending invoices and see if they’ve been paid or not. Adfin currently charges 1% per payment. It doesn’t matter which payment method was used; it’s always going to be 1%.

“As a merchant, everybody wants to get paid as fast as possible, as cheap as possible and with less efforts from your side,” Adfin co-founder and CTO Ciprian Diaconasu (pictured right) told TechCrunch. He previously spent 12 years working for Mambu, a cloud-based banking platform. “So it’s a bunch of capabilities that we’re building that just maximize the timing when you get paid and minimize the cost of that.”

The startup has already raised $4.9 million in seed funds, co-led by Index Ventures and Visionaries Club. Several business angels also participated in the round, including Thijn Lamers (Adyen founding team); Guillaume Pousaz (Checkout.com founder); Eugene Danilkis (Mambu co-founder); Ferdinand Meyer (Moss co-founder); David de Picciotto (Pledge co-founder); Maximilian Eber and Maik Wehmeyer (Taktile co-founders); and Josef Bovet (Tiller co-founder).

Ecovacs says it will fix bugs that can be abused to spy on robot owners

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A dog seen through a hacked Ecovacs device.

Image Credits: Dennis Giese and Braelynn

Earlier this month, security researchers warned that a series of security flaws in vacuum and lawn mower robots made by Ecovacs could allow hackers to spy on their owners through the devices’ microphones and cameras. 

At the time, Ecovacs told TechCrunch it concluded that the flaws found by the researchers “are extremely rare in typical user environments and require specialized hacking tools and physical access to the device.”

“Therefore, users can rest assured that they do not need to worry excessively about this,” read the emailed statement, declining to commit to fixing the vulnerabilities. 

Two weeks later, Ecovacs changed its mind, telling the researchers and TechCrunch that, actually, the company will fix the bugs.

“We have conducted an in-depth verification and self-examination. We have identified several areas where there is room for improvement,” Martin Ma, the director of Ecovacs’ security committee, told TechCrunch in an email. “In response, we have initiated targeted improvements and addressing the issues highlighted.”

Contact Us

Do you have more information about flaws in Ecovacs or other internet-connected home robots? From a non-work device, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or email. You also can contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.

On August 10, security researchers Dennis Giese and Braelynn gave a talk about their research into Ecovacs’ home robots at the annual hacking Def Con conference in Las Vegas. The two said they analyzed 11 Ecovacs devices and found several flaws. 

The most impactful vulnerability, they said, allows anyone using a phone to connect to an Ecovacs robot via Bluetooth from as far as 450 feet — around 130 meters — and take control of the devices. That flaw would then let the hackers monitor the robots from anywhere because the robots are connected to the internet via Wi-Fi. 

Other flaws included a bug that would allow someone to access a robot vacuum after selling it and deleting their account, meaning they could then spy on a device’s new owners, according to the researchers.    

In an email to Giese on August 16 and shared with TechCrunch, Ecovacs’ Ma mentioned that the researchers’ talk at Def Con “has captured my attention.” That’s why, the email continued, Ma asked the Ecovacs security team to retrieve the correspondence the company had with the researchers. Ma said that the company “inadvertently overlooked” the researchers’ emails from December 2023. 

“We have carefully reviewed your points raised in the previous emails and the Demos at Def Con 2024, and conducted an in-depth verification and self-examination,” Ma said, adding that the company will fix issues in two Ecovacs models — the Goat G1 and the X1 — and in the Ecovacs app. 

“Your analysis has been greatly valued and appraised by our technical team. Your insights are invaluable in safeguarding the security and integrity of our products, and they contribute significantly to the consumer electronics industry as a whole,” Ma wrote. “Ultimately, it is the general consumers who will benefit most from your dedication.”

Adfin wants to fix bill payments for sole traders and small companies

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Adfin

Meet Adfin, a new U.K.-based fintech startup that wants to help companies get their invoices paid — whatever it takes. Founded by two fintech experts, the company is starting with a problem and building a product around it. The problem is that it’s still hard to get paid if you’re set up as a sole trader or even a small company that doesn’t have a person dedicated to administrative tasks.

The process of getting paid for work for small businesses and sole traders like lawyers, accountants, consultants, tradespeople and so on typically entails sending the customer an invoice with your bank information. But you also have to track incoming payments and reconcile them to make sure you’ve received the money. Add to that, the experience isn’t that great for your customers.

For returning customers, you can try and set up a direct debit. But it may be hard for these sorts of businesses to convince their customers to let them withdraw money directly from their bank account. As for card payments, it often leads to high processing fees.

“The average consumer only makes 21 e-commerce purchases a year,” Adfin co-founder and CEO Tom Pope (pictured left) told TechCrunch. He previously worked for Tink, the open banking startup that was acquired by Visa. “All the buzz has been around e-commerce, but for your average legal practice or accountancy firm, their payments are stuck in the ’90s — bank transfers, card payments taken over the phone, paying really high fees.”

Adfin argues sole traders and small businesses don’t necessarily want to think about the most appropriate payment method. Instead, they just want to get paid and move on. At its core, the startup is building an invoice management platform and a payment platform to simplify critical admin and make getting paid less of a headache.

After uploading invoices to Adfin, its customers can use the platform to send payment requests via email, WhatsApp or SMS.

Adfin then automatically decides the payment method to display, depending on various factors, such as whether it’s a returning customer, a small invoice, etc. The company supports pay-by-bank using open banking and card payments, including Apple Pay and Google Pay. If the customer doesn’t pay right away, Adfin automates sending reminders too.

“Our customers are not payments nerds. They don’t have to be payments nerds. And I think the fact that they are not payments nerds has probably led to them being a little bit taken advantage of, if I’m honest,” Pope said.

“With Adfin, we just offer you payments. We get you paid and we will handle the payment mix. And obviously, it’s in our interest to be trying to get your success rate as high as possible and your costs as low as possible,” he added.

As Adfin acts as a central repository for all your invoices, companies can check all pending invoices and see if they’ve been paid or not. Adfin currently charges 1% per payment. It doesn’t matter which payment method was used; it’s always going to be 1%.

“As a merchant, everybody wants to get paid as fast as possible, as cheap as possible and with less efforts from your side,” Adfin co-founder and CTO Ciprian Diaconasu (pictured right) told TechCrunch. He previously spent 12 years working for Mambu, a cloud-based banking platform. “So it’s a bunch of capabilities that we’re building that just maximize the timing when you get paid and minimize the cost of that.”

The startup has already raised $4.9 million in seed funds, co-led by Index Ventures and Visionaries Club. Several business angels also participated in the round, including Thijn Lamers (Adyen founding team); Guillaume Pousaz (Checkout.com founder); Eugene Danilkis (Mambu co-founder); Ferdinand Meyer (Moss co-founder); David de Picciotto (Pledge co-founder); Maximilian Eber and Maik Wehmeyer (Taktile co-founders); and Josef Bovet (Tiller co-founder).

Boomerang, startups, AI

Can AI fix lost and found?

by with No Comment Tech

Boomerang, startups, AI

Image Credits: Courtesy of Boomerang.

Losing stuff sucks. It’s even more frustrating when something isn’t really lost, but rather left behind in a location, like an airport or sports stadium, which makes it hard to get back. My friend Caitlin knows this all too well; she’s yet to be reunited with the phone she lost at Oktoberfest on September 27, despite confirming in November that they have it.

While Oktoberfest is a more extreme example, people leave a lot of things behind in hotels, on transportation and at events. For example, the MTA transit system in New York collected more than 18,000 lost items from 2018 to 2023 — and that time includes when people were sheltering in place for the pandemic. Boomerang thinks AI can fix lost and found.

The Miami-based startup built software that uses machine learning to match pictures and descriptions of lost items. Customers, which can range from gyms to theme parks, upload pictures and descriptions of their lost and found while consumers do the same for the item they’ve lost. If there is a match, consumers can choose to pick up their items or have them shipped.

This model hopes to get consumers their items back faster while replacing the current system of people calling customer service desk phone lines repeatedly for updates on their items, according to Boomerang co-founder and CEO Skyler Logsdon.

The idea for the company came a few years ago when the co-founders were on a trip together to Cabo, Logsdon said. His friend, former founder of song discovery service Shazam, Philip Inghelbrecht, mentioned that his two young daughters were constantly losing things, bringing into focus how frustrating and fragmented lost and found is. This was really driven home when Inghelbrecht’s fiancée lost her ring in the Cabo airport leaving the trip.

Logsdon said they decided to build Boomerang on the same concept as Shazam: matching. Logsdon said this algorithm has to get each match exactly right, and just like Shazam, it can’t be something close enough or a guess.

“It’s not helpful [if it said] it could be one of these 10 songs,” Logsdon said regarding Shazam. “Shazam can’t get it wrong. They show you one song and that’s it.”

Boomerang announced a $4.9 million seed round this week. The round was led by LightShed Ventures with participation from GGV and SeventySix Capital, among other firms and angel investors like Drake and NFL player Christian Kirk. Logsdon said the funding will go toward onboarding new partnerships. The company currently works with a number of organizations, including State Farm Arena, home of the Atlanta Hawks, and Universal Studios Hollywood.

While I totally get why consumers would be interested in a better system for lost and found, I was less sure on why organizations — that pay for the software — would sign up. Do they really care if people get reunited with their things? Plus, would someone never go see their favorite sports team play at their home stadium again because of a bad experience with the building’s lost and found?

Logsdon said that improving this system is a pretty easy way to improve customer satisfaction, but lost and found is more of a logistical nightmare for many of these places than I guess I realized. Logsdon said that some venues collect thousands of items each event, and their customer service can’t spend the needed time to work with folks calling and emailing repeatedly to get them back.

Plus, Boomerang works with hotels and airports and other types of venues where people do leave things worth getting back, like computers, medical devices or power tools — true story, according to Logsdon — and not just a $20 water bottle or a hat.

Boomerang is also an interesting use case of applying machine learning and AI to modernize a legacy industry. A lot of AI innovation centers on making digital processes move faster, but Boomerang is using AI to automate a phone and email process. While people are still needed to upload the items to the platform, that’s a very different workload than parsing through thousands of calls and emails after each event.

Maybe Boomerang can help out Oktoberfest.

“Boomerang is [fixing] such a clear problem, it hits home for everyone,” Logsdon said. “Most people have lost something, most have been there. How does technology not solve this today? How is there not a better solution than calling?”

MWC 2024 Demis Hassabis

Google hopeful of fix for Gemini's historical-image diversity issue within weeks

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MWC 2024 Demis Hassabis

Image Credits: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch

Google is hopeful it will soon be able to “unpause” the ability of its multimodal generative AI tool, Gemini, to depict people, per DeepMind founder, Demis Hassabis. The capability to respond to prompts for images of humans should be back online in the “next few weeks,” he said today.

Google suspended the Gemini capability last week after users pointed out the tool was producing historically incongruous images, such as depicting the U.S. Founding Fathers as a diverse group of people, rather than only white men.

Hassabis responded to questions about the product snafu during an onstage interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today.

Asked by a moderator, Wired’s Steven Levy, to explain what went wrong with the image-generation feature, Hassabis sidestepped a detailed technical explanation. Instead he suggested the issue was caused by Google failing to identify instances when users are basically after what he described as a “universal depiction.” The example points to “nuances that come with advanced AI,” he also said.

“This is a field we’re all grappling with. So if you, for example, put in a prompt that asks for, ‘give me a picture of a person walking a dog or a nurse in a hospital,’ right, in those cases, you clearly want a sort of ‘universal depiction.’ Especially if you consider that as Google, we serve 200+ countries, you know, every country around the world — so you don’t know where the user’s coming from and what their background is going to be or what context they’re in. So you want to kind of show a very sort of universal range of possibilities there.”

Hassabis said the issue boiled down to a “well-intended feature” — to foster a diversity in Gemini’s image outputs of people — having been applied “too bluntly, across all of it.”

Prompts that ask for content about historical people should “of course” result in “a much narrower distribution that you give back,” he added, hinting at how Gemini may tackle prompts for people in the future.

“We care, of course, about historical accuracy. And so we’ve taken that feature offline while we fix that and we hope to have that back online in the next — in very short order. Next couple of weeks, next few weeks.”

Responding to a follow-up question about how to prevent generative AI tools from being misappropriated by bad actors, such as authoritarian regimes looking to spread propaganda, Hassabis had no simple answer. The issue is “very complex,” he suggested — likely demanding a whole-of-society mobilization and response to determine and enforce limits.

“There’s really important research and debate that needs to happen — also with civil society and governments, not just tech companies,” he said. “It’s a social technical question that affects everyone and should involve everyone to discuss it. What values do we want these systems to have? What would they represent? How do you prevent bad actors accessing the same technologies and, what you’re talking about, which is repurposing them for harmful ends that were not intended by the creators of those systems.”

Touching on the challenge of open source, general-purpose AI models, which Google also offers, he added: “Customers want to use open source systems that they can fully control  . . . But then the question comes is how do you ensure what people use downstream isn’t going to be harmful with those systems as they get increasingly more powerful?

“I think, today, it’s not an issue because the systems are still relatively nascent. But if you wind forward three, four or five years, and you start talking about next generation systems with planning capabilities and being able to act in the world and solve problems and goals, I think society really has to seriously think about these issues — of what happens if this proliferates, and then bad actors all the way from individuals to rogue states can make use of them as well.”

During the interview, Hassabis was also asked for his thoughts on AI devices and where the mobile market may be headed as generative AI continues to drive fresh developments here. He predicted a wave of “next generation smart assistants” that are useful in people’s everyday lives, rather than the “gimmicky” stuff of previous AI assistant generations, which he suggested may even reshape the mobile hardware people choose to pack on their person.

“I think there’ll be questions about what is the right device type, even,” he suggested. “But in five plus years’ time, is the phone even really going to be the perfect form factor? Maybe we need glasses or some other things so that the AI system can actually see a bit of the context that you’re in and so be even more helpful in your daily life. So I think there’s all sorts of amazing things to be invented.”

Google pauses AI tool Gemini’s ability to generate images of people after historical inaccuracies

Read more about MWC 2024 on TechCrunch

Seso, agtech, venture capital, startups

Seso is building software to fix farm workforces and solve agriculture's HR woes

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Seso, agtech, venture capital, startups

Image Credits: David S. Holloway / Contributor / Getty Images

Migrant workers are a critical labor force for U.S. farms, but getting them here on proper H-2A visas can be complicated, and the compliance surrounding these employees is taxing for farms. Seso was founded five years ago to help streamline that process and now looks to expand into a one-stop-shop HR platform for the agriculture industry.

Michael Guirguis co-founded the startup after his cousin asked for his advice on whether her organic farm should expand. Despite demand for her harvests, Guirguis, whose entire career has involved job creation and the labor market, told her expanding wouldn’t be smart because the industry’s labor shortage would make hiring enough workers hard. That inspired Guirguis to found Seso to automate the H-2A visa process to help fix that issue and help farms stay compliant. Once he started talking to potential farm customers, he realized that farms could use a lot more help with their HR beyond just finding workers.

“When it comes to the back office, every farm we visited had thousands of filing cabinets,” Guirguis said. “It’s one of the most laggard industries in the U.S. That was the eye-opening moment. We can address the labor shortage and build an end-to-end modern operating system starting with HR and modernize a lot of these really complex tasks.”

The startup just raised $26 million to expand its platform’s capabilities. The Series B round was led by Bond’s Mary Meeker with participation from Index Ventures, NFX, SV Angel, several Seso customers, and others. The company doubled its customer base in 2023 and works with 27 of the largest 100 agriculture employers in the U.S.

While agriculture is a massive industry ripe for disruption, it’s been relatively reticent to adopt new technology, he said. Guirguis thinks Seso has been successful in selling to farms so far, when many other startups haven’t been, because Seso isn’t trying to change the actual farming process, something farmers made clear to him that they weren’t ready for yet. Adopting back office tech is an easier sell.

“Your HR team is in the back office doing traditional HR work,” Guirguis said. “That is who we are trying to change behavior for, which is easier than for someone 50 years in the field still using pen and paper. They can still keep doing their process we have built products to adapt. You can take a picture of a [handwritten] time sheet and then use AI to make sure that is accurate.”

Guirguis’s focus on getting feedback from farmers directly is what pushed Nina Achadjian, a partner at Index Ventures, to invest. Achadjian initially passed on Seso when it first tried to raise from Index, but how the company sells and interacts with farmers changed her mind.

“I remember this one customer call, I got chills,” Achadjian told TechCrunch. “[He said], ‘I get pitched by these Silicon Valley entrepreneurs all the time and they show up at your farm and they are like, ‘Here is how you should run their business.’ I always ask each of them to come and spend a day and work alongside me so they can understand what is a day in the life of the end customer and they never show up. Michael was the only one who showed up at 4 a.m. in the freezing cold, in the dark, to pick artichokes.’”

That feedback from farmers is why the company is expanding into automating payroll next. Guirguis said due to various agriculture employment laws, farm payroll is incredibly complicated. Workers are paid for how much crop they pick, Guirguis said, and the rate for each crop picked is different for a migrant worker versus a domestic worker and different again if migrant workers and domestic workers are picking from the same field. Guirguis sees numerous ways to expand after that.