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EVgo, the wholly owned subsidiary of LS Power that owns and operates public fast chargers for electric vehicles, has reached a deal to become a publicly traded company through a merger with special-purpose acquisition company Climate Change Crisis Real Impact I Acquisition Corporation.

The combined company, which will be listed under the new ticker symbol “EVGO” will have a market valuation of $2.6 billion. LS Power and EVgo management, which today own 100% of the company will be rolling all of its equity into the transaction. Once the transaction closes in the second quarter, LS Power will hold a 74% stake in the company.

EVgo has raised about $575 million in proceeds through the business combination, including a $400 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE. Investors include Pacific Investment Management Company LLC (PIMCO), funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Wellington Management, Neuberger Berman Funds and Van Eck Associates Corporation, according to the announcement.

EVgo’s leadership will remain intact, with Cathy Zoi continuing as CEO of the combined company.

The deal is the latest in a long string of electric vehicle-related companies to merge with so-called blank check companies, eschewing the traditional path to an IPO. Arrival, Canoo, ChargePoint, Fisker, Lordstown Motors, Proterra and The Lion Electric Company are some of the companies that have merged with SPACs — or announced plans to — in the past eight months.

EVgo is not a new entrant to the electric vehicle industry. The company was founded in 2010 and has spent better part of the decade scaling up its infrastructure. Today, EVgo has chargers in more than 800 locations in 67 major metropolitan markets across 34 states. The company has landed a number of partnerships, including with Albertsons, Kroger and Wawa to locate its chargers at these properties.

EVgo has also struck deals with automakers such as GM and Nissan as well as ride-hailing companies Lyft and Uber. In July, GM and EVgo announced plans to add more than 2,700 new fast chargers over the next five years.

While electric vehicles still make up just a fraction of total cars, trucks and SUVs on today’s roads, the industry has forecast that the EV market will increase more than 100-fold between 2019 and 2040, EVgo said. The funds raised through the public market will be used to accelerate its expansion, according to the company.

“Just a few years ago, electric vehicles were considered niche,” EVgo CEO Cathy Zoi said in a statement. “Today, improved technology, lower costs, greater selection and a better appreciation for the performance of EVs is increasingly making them the vehicle technology of choice. With that, the need for fast charging is on the rise.”

Zoi noted that public charging will essential to meet the needs of the estimated 30% of Americans who do not have access to at-home charging as well as the growing number of fleets that are switching to electric vehicles.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/22/evgo-to-go-public-via-spac-in-bid-to-power-ev-charging-expansion/

Pinterest is expanding its virtual makeup try-on capabilities with today’s launch of a new augmented reality feature that allows online shoppers to virtually try on new eyeshadow. Initially, Pinterest is allowing try-on with 4,000 shades from brands like Lancome, YSL, Urban Decay, and NYX Cosmetics.

The feature leverages Pinterest’s existing Lens visual search technology, its skin tone ranges feature, and computer-vision powered recommendations, the company says. We also understand Pinterest is incorporating elements from data partner ModiFace, including digitization parameters that ensure the products recognized are mapped to ModiFace’s database for higher-quality rendering.

This not Pinterest’s first virtual makeup feature. The company had previously launched an AR try-on experience for lipstick a year ago, which has now grown to include 10,000 shades, discoverable from 48 million beauty pins from brands like Estée Lauder, bareMinerals, Neutrogena, NARS, Cle de Peau, Thrive Causemetics, NYX Professional Makeup, YSL Beauté, Lancôme, and Urban Decay. Retailers, including Kohl’s, have also used AR try-on to reach consumers.

With the newly launched eyeshadow try-on, users can filter the product search results by factors like color, price range, and brand. if they find something they like, they can then purchase it immediately, save it to a board, or browse a “more like this” section to find more Pins offering similar shades.

Image Credits: Pinterest

The expansion to eyeshadow means users can now experiment with more of a full makeup look, rather than just try on individual shades. There’s a toggle that lets users switch between lipstick and eyeshadow to try on multiple products at once, Pinterest says.

AR-powered virtual makeup experiences have been growing in popularity over the years, thanks in part to AR beauty apps  like ModiFace’ YouCam Makeup, Sephora’s Virtual Artist, Ulta’s GLAMLab and others. L’Oréal has also offered Live Try-On on its website, and partnered with Facebook to bring virtual makeup to the site. Target’s online Beauty Studio also offers virtual makeup.

More recently, Google entered the AR virtual makeup space, initially with the launch of a more limited feature on YouTube that allowed some beauty influencers to incorporate an AR try-on experience for products in their videos. In December 2020, however, Google more fully embraced AR try-on with the launch of virtual makeup try-on within Google Search, also in partnership with ModiFace.

But Pinterest’s expansion to eyeshadow means it’s once again ahead of Google when it comes to visual search technology and virtual makeup. Not only does it offer more lipstick shades than Google, it now also offers eyeshadow try-on.

Pinterest says the AR try-on feature is being made available for free to brands who want to create visual shopping experiences and reach customers earlier in their decision-making process. The company says it continues to generate revenue through ads, including shopping ads, and not by monetizing its AR features or doing any revenue share on the try-ons that turn into sales.

“As we make Pinterest more shoppable through products like AR Try on, the platform becomes more engaging and actionable to Pinners, which can result in increases in usage and click-through of ads,” a spokesperson explains. “Organic features like Try on and ingestion of catalogs to create Product Pins can oftentimes complement a paid strategy where brands drive traffic across the site,” they noted.

The support for eyeshadow try-on is timely. Some beauty brand sales have been depressed by the pandemic, and particularly lipsticks, since it makes no sense to use lip color when your face is under a mask. Instead, current beauty trends have shifted to highlighting the eyes, with bright and bold colors for eyeshadow shades, the wild floating eyeliner look, large false lashes, and more — trends that are also designed to look good when filmed for social media posts, of course.

Pinterest says it has indications that its AR features are converting undecided shoppers to customers. In 2020, Pinterest found that users would try-on an average of 6 lipstick shades once they began the AR try-on experience, and then were 5 times more likely to show purchase intent on try-on compared with standard Pins.

The new eyeshadow try-on is live starting today using the Lens camera in the Pinterest app for iOS and Android.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/22/pinterest-launches-an-ar-powered-try-on-experience-for-eyeshadow/

Google today announced a subtle but welcome refresh of its mobile search experience. The idea here is to provide easier to read search results and a more modern look with a simpler, edge-to-edge design.

From what we’ve seen so far, this is not a radically different look, but the rounded and slightly shaded boxes around individual search results have been replaced with straight lines, for example, while in other places, Google has specifically added more roundness. You’ll find changes to the circles around the search bar and some tweaks to the Google logo. “We believe it feels more approachable, friendly, and human,” a Google spokesperson told me. There’s a bit more whitespace in places, too, as well as new splashes of color that are meant to help separate and emphasize certain parts of the page.

Image Credits: Google

“Rethinking the visual design for something like Search is really complex,” Google designer Aileen Cheng said in today’s announcement. “That’s especially true given how much Google Search has evolved. We’re not just organizing the web’s information, but all the world’s information. We started with organizing web pages, but now there’s so much diversity in the types of content and information we have to help make sense of.”

Image Credits: Google

Google is also extending its use of the Google Sans font, which you are probably already quite familiar with thanks to its use in Gmail and Android. “Bringing consistency to when and how we use fonts in Search was important, too, which also helps people parse information more efficiently,” Aileen writes.

In many ways, today’s refresh is a continuation of the work Google did with its mobile search refresh in 2019. At that time, the emphasis, too, was on making it easier for users to scan down the page by adding site icons and other new visual elements to the page. The work of making search results pages more readable is clearly never done.

For the most part, though, comparing the new and old design, the changes are small. This isn’t some major redesign but we’re talking about minor tweaks that the designers surely obsessed over but that the users may not even really notice. Now if Google had made it significantly easier to distinguish ads from the content you are actually looking for, that would’ve been something.

Image Credits: Google

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/22/google-refreshes-its-mobile-search-experience/

Wrapping our look at how the venture capital asset class invested in 2020, today we’re taking a peek at Europe’s impressive year, and Asia’s slightly less invigorating set of results. (We’re speaking soon with folks who may have data on African VC activity in 2020; if those bear out, we’ll do a final entry in our series concerning the continent.)

After digging into the United States’ broader venture capital results from last year with an extra eye on fintech and unicorn investing, at least one trend was clear: venture capital is getting later and larger (as expected).

Record dollar amounts were being invested, but across falling deal volume. More money and fewer rounds meant larger rounds, often going to the late and super-late stage startups in the market.

Unicorns are feasting, in other words, while some younger startups struggle to raise capital.

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There have been some encouraging signs of seed activity, mind, but full-year data made it clear that in America, the more mature startups had the best of it.

But what about the rest of the world? After parsing KPMG data concerning both how VCs invested in Europe (here) and Asia (here) last year, there are clear echoes. But not entire reproductions.

Let’s discuss key data points from the two reports. This will be illustrative, brief and painless. Into the data!

European VCs: Rich, but not evenly distributed

Compared to historical investment levels, KPMG’s European VC report describes a venture capital scene at its peak. Q4 2020 saw $14.3 billion invested into EU startups across 1,192 deals, the highest dollar amount charted and a modest besting of the previous record set in Q3 2020.

However, despite impressive investment totals, the number of deals that the money was spread over proved lackluster.

The Q4 2020 deal count was the lowest on record since the continent’s deal peak in Q1 2019. Squinting at the provided chart, it appears that deal volume in Europe has fallen from around 2,200 in that peak quarter, to Q4’s fewer than 1,200 deals.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/22/how-vcs-invested-in-asia-and-europe-in-2020/

A month before the COVID-19 pandemic had spread to North America, auto fintech startup MotoRefi — newly armed with nearly $9 million in venture capital — was preparing to bring its refinancing platform to the masses.

CEO Kevin Bennett, and the investors behind the company, saw the opportunity to service Americans who collectively hold $1.2 trillion in auto loans. What they didn’t anticipate was the sudden uptick in demand fueled by COVID-19 and the uncertainty and chaos that the pandemic created.

MotoRefi, which was born out of QED Investors in 2017, developed an auto refinancing platform that handles the entire process, including finding the best rates,  paying off the old lender and re-titling the vehicle. The company has benefitted from the convergence of two trends sparked by COVID-19 that has turbocharged its business: an accelerated adoption of fintech across the economy and growing attention towards personal finance. 

Now, investors are pouring more money into the startup to help it make the most of the spike in demand for auto refinancing.

MotoRefi said Friday it has raised $10 million in a round led by Moderne Ventures. Liza Benson, a partner at Moderne Venture, will join the board.

“Many people are looking around saying how can they save money?” Bennett said, commenting on the events of the past year. “And while auto refinance historically is in a relatively low awareness category of personal finance, that interest has really grown and accelerated through 2020.”

For instance, Google searches for auto refinance increased about 40% in 2020 over the previous year, he added.

The company said its revenue rose by sixfold, its workforce tripled to more than 150 people and the number of lenders on its platform doubled over the past year. MotoRefi said it refinanced more than $250 million of auto loans in 2020.

“We actually weren’t planning on raising twice in a year,” Bennett said. “But the growth had been pretty noticeable from the investor standpoint in the market.”

That new capital will be used to hire more employees and expand its offerings, according to Bennett, who noted that MotoRefi now operates in 42 states and Washington DC.

MotoRefi has raised more than $24 million to date. The company raised last February $8.6 million in a Series A funding round. That round, which would later grow to $9.4 million, was co-led by Accomplice and Link Ventures. Motley Fool Ventures, CMFG Ventures (part of CUNA Mutual Group) and Gaingels also participated in the round. The Series A round followed $4.7 million in seed funding that MotoRefi announced in March 2019.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/22/motorefi-raises-10m-to-keep-pedal-on-auto-refinancing-growth/