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Caesar Sengupta, the long-time head of Google’s Next Billion Users initiative, is leaving the company next month, he said Monday. Sengupta, who additionally also led the company’s payments business in the past three years, is leaving the firm after nearly 15 years.

A regular fixture at Google’s events in India, Brazil, and Indonesia, Sengupta (pictured above) is best known outside the company for leading the company’s Next Billion Users unit, an initiative to make internet and services more accessible to users in developing markets.

As part of Next Billion Users initiative, Google brought internet connectivity to hundreds of railway stations and other public places in India and other markets (then shut down Station), launched Google Pay in India (which unlike Google Pay in the U.S., wasn’t developed atop credit cards) and built several products such as Android Go, Datally, Kormo Jobs and the Files apps.

Prior to Next Billion Users unit, Sengupta served as VP and Product Lead at ChromeOS, the company’s desktop operating system that powers Chromebooks.

“After 15 years with Google, Caesar Sengupta has made a personal decision to leave the company and start something entrepreneurial outside of Google. Through his time at Google, Caesar has played a key role in starting, building and leading initiatives such as ChromeOS, Next Billion Users and Google Pay. We are excited to see what he builds next and wish him the best in his new journey,” said a Google spokesperson in a statement. Sengupta’s current position at the firm is VP and GM of Next Billion Users and Payments.

“To the many, many Googlers working in Africa, APAC, LATAM and MENA, it has been inspiring to hear your voices take more weight in the products Google builds. I know there is so much more work to do,” Sengupta wrote in an email to his colleagues, which he also shared publicly.

“But we are light years ahead of where we were just a short time ago. You’ve helped digitize your economies, made Google feel local and driven Google’s investment into your countries to unprecedented levels,” wrote the Asia-based executive. Sengupta didn’t share what he plans to do next.

Under Sengupta’s watch, Google also made several investments in startups in Asia. Some of these investments include Bangalore-based delivery startup Dunzo, Android lockscreen developer Glance, and popular news and entertainment app Dailyhunt.

M Capital Management founding partners Joachim Ackermann (left) and Mayank Parekh (right)

M Capital Management, a Singapore-based venture capital firm, announced today it has closed its debut fund, M Venture Partners (MVP), totaling $30.85 million USD. It plans to invest in 40 early-stage startups, primarily seed and pre-Series A, with an average initial check size of about $500,000.

M Capital Management was founded by Mayank Parekh, whose investment experience includes launching Grange Partners and leadership positions at Southern Capital Group and McKinsey & Company, and Joachim Ackermann, former managing director of Google Asia Pacific. Other senior team members include Dr. Tanuja Rajah, previously Entrepreneur First’s launch manager, and Chethana Ellepola, former research director at Acquity Stockbrokers.

MVP, a sector-agnostic fund, has already invested in 11 companies, including one, 3D Metal Forge, that recently went public on the Australian Securities Exchange.

Other portfolio companies include behavioral health coaching startup Naluri; AI-enabled lending and credit-as-a-service company Impact Credit Solutions; alternative investment fund aggregator XEN Capital; and Cipher Cancer Clinics, which is focused on making oncological care more affordable and accessible in India.

Parekh told TechCrunch that M Capital Management was launched because “we believe that the early-stage investing space in our region has substantial room for growth. A decade ago there were very few unicorns. This has changed substantially more recently, not only because of obvious advancements bringing online previously underserved or untapped populations, but also because they venture system has developed nicely in Singapore and, for that matter, across the region with support from institutional VCs at various stages of funding need, government agency support, the advent of local accelerators and rapidly growing network of angel investing bodies.”

Parekh added that he expects to see more unicorns and “soonicorns” (or companies expected to hit unicorn valuation in the near future) emerge.

As early-stage, sector-agnostic investors, Parekh said MVP’s focus is on founders, specifically those who have “pedigree professional experience and strong academic backgrounds.” For example, Naluri chief executive officer Azran Osman-Rani was previously founder of AirAsiaX, guiding it from launch to its 2013 initial public offering in six years.

MVP will focus mostly on Singapore-based startups because it invests primarily in B2B or B2B2C companies. “We need a fertile ground for our chosen startups to launch their business models with leading corporate or business partners,” said Parekh. “Singapore provides just that. It’s the hub for market leading institutions and it’s not uncommon to see them creating opportunities for new technology or disruptive ideas.”

Most of MVP’s portfolio companies have “regional or global aspirations, leveraging Singapore as the core launch platform,” he added. MVP has also already made investments in Malaysia and India, and is actively looking at companies in Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia.

Kate Hiscox is having a moment. Her company, Sivo, founded eight months ago, has already raised $5 million from investors at a post-money valuation of $100 million, and she is in active talks with others who would like her to consider accepting Series A funding from them.

Partly, the attention owes to the fact that Hiscox is part of the newest graduating class of the popular accelerator Y Combinator, along with roughly 350 other companies, and if there’s anything venture capitalists like, it’s freshly minted YC grads.

They also like what Sivo aims to do, which is to strike deals with debt providers for gigantic credit lines that it will then, through its API, work with many companies, big and small, to disburse via their own lending products. Yes, Sivo is making interest off money that it is simply divvying up into smaller amounts. But the real magic, says Hiscox, is in the risk management that Sivo provides. It doesn’t just parcel out debt; it helps its customers that don’t have their own risk management practices figure out who is worthy of a loan and how much.

Hiscox — who has founded a number over the years, one of which she took public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2018 — calls it a Stripe for debt. But one question is how Stripe itself might feel about Sivo. Stripe was also once a YC company, it also lends debt to its customers, and it seemingly doesn’t like when its investors fund potential rivals. Another question is how a company like Sivo fares when interest rates rise and the debt it borrows is no longer cheap.

Hiscox suggests she’s not worried about either scenario right now. We talked with her on Friday about the company in a conversation that follows, edited lightly for length and clarity.

TC: You’re building what you describe as Stripe for debt. But isn’t Stripe’s loan business competitive with yours?

KH: No. Sivo is the first YC company that’s building debt as a service.

The reason why [we are] is that it’s very difficult for fintechs and neobanks and gig platforms to be able to raise that capital to be able to lend money to their users at scale; that generally takes a couple of years. What we’re building out is essentially Stripe for debt, which gets these companies access to debt capital on day one. Our team has decades of experience with risk and raising debt and building enterprise tech at companies like Goldman Sachs and NASA and Revolut and Citigroup.

TC: Give me a use case.

KH: So we have more than 100 companies now in our customer pipeline, including Uber. In the case of Uber, they want to be able to offer financial products to their drivers. Maybe it’s to fund a vehicle or provide a payday advance. But Uber really can’t do that because it doesn’t want to look like an employer, and it also doesn’t want to necessarily deal with risk modeling, meaning who in their big driver base has the right risk profile [to rationalize a loan]. You plug in Sivo, and we will cycle through the Uber driver base to figure out to whom it makes sense to make a loan offer, and we do it all this through API.

TC: But Uber is not yet a paying customer?

KH: No, we go live next month; that’s an example of how Uber would use us. There are also a lot of neobanks that are three to five years old and want to start lending and really don’t know have that risk experience they need to get access to debt capital in order to have the money to be able to lend to their customers. So with something like Sivo, they’re able to integrate our service through our API, and we’re able to pretty much tell them who they should be lending to, how much they should lend, and then we offer the debt funding.

TC: Do have any debt deals in place?

KH: We signed a debt deal last week for $100 million and we’re working on another debt deal for close to $1 billion that will be announced next month.

TC: Who is your debt partner and how have you convinced them to lend so much to such a young outfit?

KH: I’m not sure I can say publicly yet who we’re working with, but we source our capital through all the usual suspects — mutual funds, pension funds, banks — and we’re able to do because as soon as we announced that we were going to start doing this as a product, we had tons of customers come and say, ‘I want this. [Trying to do this ourselves] is long and complex and painful, and we want just want to be able to do it in a simple way, like we would use Stripe for payments.’

I also have a lot of experience because I’d taken a company public and have lots of connections in the capital markets, and so does our CFO.

And there are actually a lot of banks that would love more exposure to fintechs and to a basket of YC-backed fintechs in particular because they can get yield, but the check sizes are too small for a bank. There’s also concern that the fintechs don’t really have a lot of risk experience. Meanwhile, our team has a lot of gray hair as far as risk is concerned.

TC: What kind of economic agreement do you have with that debt lender and what percentage of each loan will you charge your customers?

KH: I really can’t tell you, including because it’s going to vary from fintech to fintech; some have more complicated user models, some have bigger user bases, some operate in different regions around the world. What I can say is that it’s an incredible time for us to access debt capital from institutions because interest rates are so low and even negative in some parts of Europe. You just have to have the right team to know where to go and get it.

TC You’re also raised $5 million in seed equity funding already at a post-money valuation of $100 million, including from Andre Charoo of Maple VC, who says he’s written you his biggest check yet. Are you done raising equity funding for now? That’s already a very high valuation.

KH: We’re trying to decide now if we’re going direct to a Series A. This is our first raise, but everybody ‘gets’ our business model, so we’ve had an avalanche of investors, and some very big VCs now have reached out.

TC: Obviously, interest rates will go up. What then?

KH: When interest rates go up, all lending gets more expensive. I mean, there’s a pandemic right now and a lot of cash in the system, and there’s some talk about inflation, but we don’t really see interest rates going up for a few years.

Of course they will eventually rise, but when that happens, everybody’s rates will go up, whether you borrow on a credit card or from a traditional bank or a fintech.

Energy consumption has become the latest flashpoint for cryptocurrency. Critics decry it as an energy hog while proponents hail it for being less intensive than the current global economy. 

One such critic, DigiEconomist founder Alex de Vries, said he’s “never seen anything that is as inefficient as bitcoin.” 

On the other side of the debate, research by ARK Investment Management found the Bitcoin ecosystem consumes less than 10% of the energy required for the traditional banking system. While it’s true the banking system serves far more people, cryptocurrency is still maturing and, like any industry, the early infrastructure stage is particularly intensive.

The cryptocurrency mining industry, which garnered almost $1.4 billion in February 2021 alone, is not yet unusually terrible for the environment compared to other aspects of modern life in an industrialized society. Even de Vries told TechCrunch that if eco-conscious regulators “took all possible actions against Bitcoin, it’s unlikely you’d get all governments to go along with that” mining regulation.

“Ideally, change comes from within,” de Vries said, adding he hopes Bitcoin Core developers will alter the software to require less computational energy. “I think Bitcoin consumes half as much energy as all the world’s data centers at the moment.”    

According to the University of Cambridge’s bitcoin electricity consumption index, bitcoin miners are expected to consume roughly 130 Terawatt-hours of energy (TWh), which is roughly 0.6% of global electricity consumption. This puts the bitcoin economy on par with the carbon dioxide emissions of a small, developing nation like Sri Lanka or Jordan. Jordan, in particular, is home to 10 million people. It’s impossible to say how many people use bitcoin every month, and they certainly use it less often than residents in Amman use Jordanian dinars. But CoinMetrics data indicates more than 1 million bitcoin addresses are active, daily, out of up to 106 million accounts active in the past decade, as tallied by the exchange Crypto.com. 

“We get the total population of unique bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) users by counting the total number of addresses from listed exchanges, subtracting addresses owned by the same users on multiple exchanges,” said a Crypto.com spokesperson. “We then further reduce this number by accounting for users who own both ETH and BTC.”

That’s a lot of people using these financial networks. Plus, many bitcoin mining businesses rely on environmentally friendly energy sources like hydropower and capturing natural gas leaks from oil fields. A mining industry veteran, Compass Mining COO Thomas Heller, said Chinese hydropower mines in Sichuan and Yunnan get cheaper electricity during the wet season. They continue to use hydropower all year, he added, although it’s less profitable during the annual dry season. 

“The electricity price outside of May to October [wet season] is much more expensive,” Heller said. “However, some farms do have water supply in other parts of the year.”

Basically, cryptocurrency mining doesn’t inherently produce extra carbon emissions because computers can use power from any source. In 2019, the digital asset investing firm CoinShares released a study estimating up to 73% of bitcoin miners use at least some renewable energy as part of their power supply, including hydropower from China’s massive dams. All of the top five bitcoin mining pools, consortiums for miners to cooperate for better profit margins, rely heavily on hydropower. This statistic doesn’t impress de Vries, who pointed out that Cambridge researchers found renewable energy makes up 39% of miners’ total energy consumption. 

“I put one solar panel on my power plant, I also have a mixture of renewable energy,” de Vries said. 

In terms of geographic distribution, Cambridge data indicates Chinese bitcoin mining operations represent around 65% of the network’s power, called hashrate. In some regions, like China’s Xinjiang province, bitcoin miners also burn coal for electricity. Beyond cryptocurrency mining, this province is known for human rights abuses against the Uighur population, which China is violently suppressing as part of a broader struggle to capitalize on the region’s natural resources. When critics sound the alarm about cryptocurrency mining and energy consumption, this is often the dynamic they’re concerned about. 

On the other hand, North American miners make up roughly 8% of the global hashrate, followed closely by miners in Russia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia and Iran. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called for the creation of a national bitcoin mining strategy in 2020, aiming to grow the Islamic nation’s influence over this financial system despite banking sanctions imposed by the United States. 

Wherever nations and organizations offer the most profitable mining regulations, those are the places where bitcoin mining will proliferate. Chinese dominance, to date, can be at least partially attributed to government subsidies for the mining industry. As such, nations like China and Norway offer subsidies that incentivize bitcoin miners to use local hydropower sources. 

As the Seetee research report by Aker ASA, a $6 billion public company based in Norway, said: “The financiers of min­ing op­er­a­tions will in­sist on us­ing the cheap­est en­er­gy and so by de­f­i­n­i­tion it will be elec­tric­i­ty that has no bet­ter eco­nom­ic use.”

The best way to make cryptocurrency mining more eco-friendly is to support lawmakers that want to encourage mining in regions that already have underutilized energy sources. 

When it comes to North America, Blockstream CEO Adam Back says his company’s mining facilities, with 300 megawatts in mining capacity, rely on a mix of industrial power sources like hydropower. He added Blockstream is exploring solar-powered bitcoin mining options as a sort of “retirement home” for outdated machines. 

“With solar energy, if you’re only online 50% of the time, that’s something to consider in terms of the cost analysis,” Back said. “That’s a better option for older machines, after you’ve already recouped the costs of the equipment.”

Due to surging cryptocurrency prices, there’s now a global shortage of bitcoin mining equipment, Back added, with demand outpacing supply and production taking up to six months per machine. Emma Todd, founder of the consultancy MMH Blockchain Group, said the shortage is driving up the price of mining machines. 

“For example, a Bitmain Antminer S9 mining machine that used to cost $35 – $55 in July 2020 on the secondary market, now costs about $275 – $300,” Todd said. “This means that most, if not all mining companies looking to purchase new or secondary equipment, are all experiencing the same challenges. As a result of the global chip shortage, most new mining equipment that is scheduled to come out in the next few months, will almost certainly be delayed.”

Critics like de Vries point out that, due to market forces, industrial miners are unlikely to reduce their power consumption with new machines, which are more efficient. 

“If you have more efficient machines but earn the same money, then people just run two machines instead of one,” de Vries said. 

And yet, because cryptocurrency prices are rising faster than new miners can be constructed, Back said “retiring” old machines with renewable energy sources becomes more profitable than simply abandoning them for new equipment. In addition, Back said, robust bitcoin mining infrastructure can support communities rather than draining resources. This is because bitcoin miners can help store and arbitrage energy flows. 

“You can turn miners on and off if you get to a surge prices situation, you can use the power for people to heat their homes if that’s more urgent or more profitable,” Back said. “Bitcoin could actually support power grids.” 

Meanwhile, just north of the Canadian border, Upstream Data president Steve Barbour said a growing number of traditional oil and gas companies are quietly ramping up their own bitcoin mining operations. 

“Right now it’s hydro and coal. That’s the majority of the big industrial mining. But on the global scale, that’s going to shift more toward any cheap power, including natural gas,” Barbour said. “Oil fields already have cheap energy with the venting flares, the waste gas, there’s potential for approximately 160 gigawatts [of mining power] this year.”

Upstream Data helps oil companies set up and operate bitcoin miners in a way that captures waste and low quality gas, which they couldn’t sell before, totaling 100 deployments across North America. These companies rarely go public with their bitcoin mining operations, Barbour said, because they’re concerned about attracting negative press from Bitcoin critics. 

“They are definitely concerned about reputational risk, but I think that’s going to change soon because you have big, credible companies like Tesla involved with Bitcoin,” Barbour said. 

Even within the cryptocurrency industry, there are many people who dislike how power-intensive bitcoin mining is and are experimenting with different mining methods. For example, the Ethereum community is trying to switch to a “proof-of-stake” (PoS) mining model, powering the network with locked up coins instead of Bitcoin’s intensive “proof-of-work” (PoW) model. 

As the name might suggest, PoW requires a lot of computational “work.” That’s what miners do, lots and lots of math problems that are so difficult the computers require a lot of electricity. With regards to Ethereum, which currently runs on PoW but will theoretically run on PoS in a few years, there are hundreds of thousands of daily active addresses, sometimes half as many as Bitcoin. Like Bitcoin, a few industrial mining projects with facilities in China generate more than half of the Ethereum network’s power. Each Ethereum transaction requires nearly as much energy as two American households use per day. 

“What I like about the Ethereum community is at least they are thinking about how to solve the problem,” de Vries said. “What I don’t like is they’ve been talking about it for a few years and haven’t been able to actually do it.”

The Ethereum ecosystem uses enough energy every year to power the nation of Panama. Like Bitcoin, each Ethereum transaction costs enough for electricity costs that the money could also buy a nice lunch. Both of these networks require enough power to fuel small countries, although Ethereum usually has less than half of the million daily users that Bitcoin has. It’s clear cryptocurrency transactions require more power than Visa transactions. However, a cryptocurrency isn’t just a payments company. It is a whole currency system. 

If the bitcoin market cap were ranked as a country, by the value of the money supply, Bitcoin would come in fifth place behind Japan. And that’s not even considering adjacent ecosystems like Ethereum. In short, power consumption in the global Bitcoin economy is comparable to that of some other industrialized financial systems. It is inefficient, as de Vries points out, as are many of the systems used in emerging economies. Out of millions of users, thousands of people around the world rely on cryptocurrency for income. They are generally optimistic about the cryptocurrency ecosystem, believing it will become more efficient as the technology matures. 

“I see Bitcoin mining increasingly playing a role in the transition to a clean, modern and more decentralized energy system,” said one such Canadian business consultant, Magdalena Gronowska. “Miners can provide grid balancing and flexible demand-response services and improve renewables integration.”  

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here.

Earnings season is coming to a close, with public tech companies wrapping up their Q4 and 2020 disclosures. We don’t care too much about the bigger players’ results here at TechCrunch, but smaller tech companies we knew when they were wee startups can provide startup-related data points worth digesting. So, each quarter The Exchange spends time chatting with a host of CEOs and CFOs, trying to figure what’s going on so that we can relay the information to private companies.

Sometimes it’s useful, as our chat with recent fintech IPO Upstart proved after we got to noodle with the company about rising acceptance of AI in the conservative banking industry.

This week we caught up with Yext CEO Howard Lerman and Smartsheet CEO Mark Mader. Yext builds data products for small businesses, and is betting its future on search products. Smartsheet is a software company that works in the collaboration, no-code and future-of-work spaces.

They are pretty different companies, really. But what they did share this time ’round the earnings cycle were macro notes, or details regarding their forward financial guidance and what economic conditions they anticipate. As a macro-nerd, it piqued my interest.

Yext cited a number of macroeconomic headwinds when it reported its Q4 results. And tying its future results somewhat to an uncertain macro picture, the company said that it is “basing [its] guidance on the business conditions [it sees for itself] and [its] customers currently, with the macro economy, which remains sluggish, and customers who remain cautious,” per a transcript.

Lerman told The Exchange that it was not clear when the world would open — something that matters for Yext’s location-focused products — so the company was guiding for the year as if nothing would change. Wall Street didn’t love it, but if the economy improves Yext won’t have high hurdles to jump over. This is one tack that a company can take when it talks guidance.

Smartsheet took a slightly different approach, saying in its earnings call that its “fiscal year ’22 guidance contemplates a gradual improvement in the macro environment in the second half of the year.” Mader said in an interview that his company wasn’t hiring economists, but was instead simply listening to what others were saying.

He also said that the macro climate matters more in saturated markets, which he doesn’t think that Smartsheet is in; so, its results should be more impacted by things more like “the secular shift to the cloud and digital transformation,” to quote its earnings call.

What the economy will do this year matters quite a lot for startups. An improving economy could boost interest rates, making money a bit more expensive and bonds more attractive. Valuations could see modest downward pressure in that case. And venture capital could slow fractionally. But with Yext forecasting as if it was facing a flat road and Smartsheet only expecting things to pick up pace from Q3 on, it’s likely that what we have now is mostly what we’ll get.

And things are pretty damn good for startups and late-stage liquidity at the moment. So, smooth sailing ahead for startup-land? At least as far as our current perspective can discern.

We still have a grip of notes from Splunk CEO Douglas Merritt on how to take an old-school software company and turn it into a cloud-first company, and Jamf CEO Dean Hager about packaging discrete software products. More to come from them in fits.

Various and sundry

There were rounds big and small this week. Companies like Squarespace raised $300 million, while Airtable raised $277 million. On the smaller-end of the spectrum, my favorite round of the week was a modest $2.9 million raise from Copy.ai.

But there were other rounds that TechCrunch didn’t get to that are still worth our time. So, here are a few more for you to dig into this weekend:

• A so-called pre-Series A round for Lilli, a U.K.-based startup that uses sensors and other tech to track the well-being of folks who might need help to live on their own. Using tech to take care of folks is always good by me. The deal was worth £4.5 million, per UKTN.
• An IPO for Tuya, a Chinese software company that raised $915 million in its American debut. Chinese IPOs on American indices were once a big deal. They are less frequent now. Surprised that I missed this one, but, hey, there’s been a lot going on.
• And the Republic round, worth $36 million, that is banking on the recently-expanded American crowdfunding regulations. Some startups have seen success with the approach, including Juked.gg.

Upcoming attractions

Next week is Y Combinator Demo Day week, so expect a lot of early-stage coverage on the blog. Here’s a preview. From The Exchange we’re looking back into insurtech (with data from WeFox and Insurify), and talking about Austin-based software startup AlertMedia’s decision to sell itself to private-equity instead of raising more traditional capital.

And to leave you with some reading material, make sure you’ve picked through our look at the valuations of free-trading apps, the issues with dual-class shares, the recent IPO win for the New York scene and how unequal the global venture capital market really is.

Closing, this BigTechnology piece was good, as was this Not Boring essay. Hugs, and have a lovely respite,

Alex