Technology

Even in a bear market, investors see money in crypto.Crypto exchange Coinbase says it is now valued at over $8 billion after it closed a new $300 million round of fundingto &accelerate the adoption of cryptocurrencies and digital assets.&

The U.S. company said this Series E investment was led byTiger Global with participation from Y Combinator Continuity fund and Wellington Management — a $1 trillion fund that recently got into crypto — alongside Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain among others.

The deal takes Coinbase to $525 million from investors to date, while the valuation represents a huge jump on the $1.6 billion it was deemed to be worth when it previously raised — that was $100 million back in August 2017.

The company has made a big push in the past year to broaden its services from consumers to catering to institutional investors, and it said that it plans to use this new capital to continue that strategy.

In addition, the firm plans to broaden its focus outside of the U.S. to offer fiat-to-crypto exchanges services in other parts of the world. Thatin line with other exchanges, including Binance. Initially famous for crypto-to-crypto trading, Binance, the worldlargest exchange based on trading, has plans to open at least 10 fiat-to-crypto exchanges worldwide by the end of next year.

The capital will also go towards &the groundwork to support thousands& more tokens in the future.Coinbase currently allows trading to just a handful of cryptocurrencies, but it has long harbored ambitions to expand beyond that. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco in September, CEO Brian Armstrong revealedthat he sees a future in which every cap table will have its own token. Based on that, he said he believes that Coinbase couldhost hundreds of tokens within &years& and even potentially &millions& in the future.

Coinbase recently introduced aUSDC stablecoin earlier this monthand it plans to offer further ‘utility applications& this like this in future,Asiff Hirji — Coinbase present and COO — said in the blog post announcing the new funding.

At Disrupt, Armstrong also said he would love to one day run a public company. It remains to be seen what the companylong-term plan for an IPO is.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

On October 28, far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro won the Brazilian elections, after one of the most polarizing campaigns of the last decades.

For months before the result, the economy was destabilized by an unpredictable race during which Mr. Bolsonaro was stabbed during a rally and the main challenger, center-left candidate Fernando Haddad, entered the campaign after the original candidate, the now incarcerated former president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, was pulled from the race.

The uncertainty caused by the elections hit Brazilcurrency and M-A and IPO markets, but in the middle of all of this, the Brazilian innovation ecosystem blossomed.

Technology companies continued to do well despite all the uncertainty, including the recent public offering of Stone, one of the leaders of the credit card processing market. Stone raised $1.5 billion in its initial public offering on the Nasdaq.

Private technology companies are also benefitting. According to LAVCA (Latin America Private Equity - Venture Capital Association), the country accounted for 45.4% of all tech deals in 2017, with $859 million invested across 113 deals. Anjos do Brasil (the Brazilian Angel Association) also reported a 16% increase in angel investment in 2017, with deals representing almost $250 million.

Attendant with that pace of investment activity around innovative companies is the need for a quantum leap in regulations for the industry.

Indeed, regulators have struggled to balance an innovation-oriented posture with the possible unintended costs of disruption. Lawyers are racing to develop legal solutions in a legal landscape filled with obstacles and entrepreneurs have reported that the regulatory environment is the main burden for innovation in Brazil, according to a research published by ABStartups (Brazilian Startup Association).

Recent regulatory developments

There is some good news, certainly. In the past few years, regulators have been setting up task forces to understand major innovations and their legal impact.

In 2016, both CVM (the Brazilian Securities Exchange Commission) and BCB (Brazilian Central Bank) developed working groups focused on financial technologies. The results are already here, since these groups had a major role in recent developments, such as the equity crowdfunding regulation and the seed funds normative instruction, both issued by CVM in 2017, and the p2p and online lending rule, enacted by BCB in early 2018.

On a federal level, awareness of the importance of the sector has also thrived.

In early 2018, the Brazilian presidency enacted Decree n. 9.319/18, which outlines the Brazilian Digital Transformation Strategy, aiming to standardize all the initiatives of the federal bureaus related to the innovation ecosystem. Following the publication of the decree, the federal government created the Subcommittee on Startups Regulation, bringing together public officials and representatives of the civil society to discuss the further legislative developments for technology-oriented companies.

However, some recent initiatives failed to address significant changes.

The Complementary Law n. 155 introduced a new kind of contract, the angel investment agreement (contrato de participação de investimento-anjo), whose adoption by the market was limited, due to both its complexity and the lack of tax incentives associated with it. And the recently published amendment to Law 8.248 (Lei de Informática) allowed research and development tax credits to be employed in funds that invest intechnologycompanies, but there are still tough limitations related to the nature of such credits. Finally, the labor law reforms in 2017 failed to address concerns related to vesting agreements for sociedades limitadas, which are currently drafted under some legal uncertainty for founders and investors.

Bolsonaro and his proposals for innovation and entrepreneurship

For years, several countries have developed regulatory models geared toward high-impact entrepreneurship. However, most of the general policies adopted in Brazil in the last decades are based on outdated assumptions and do not respond to the complexity of the challenges that affect startups.

Bolsonaro has addressed some issues that may have a direct impact on the entrepreneurship ecosystem. In his proposals, he highlights the importance of partnerships between businesses and universities, mentioning that the latter must develop practical solutions to improve productivity, wealth and the well-being of the population, citing Israel and the United States as examples, while stimulating entrepreneurship education. One of the proposals includes, for instance, establishing a mandatory entrepreneurship course for all federal undergraduate schools.

The president-elect also advocates for the open market as the main engine of innovation, through what he calls a &positive technological shock&. His proposals also emphasize the importance of innovation in the agriculture and industry sectors, as well as the importance of promoting startups in partnership with private capital market institutions.

Unfortunately, the policies are vague, and do not seem to be priorities in his agenda. The attention is now focused on the reform of the Social Security system, and on the implementation of policies that are more immediate and urgent for the population, such as public safety, health, education and employment.

A field to play on but not enough guidelines for the game

The playing field is designed, but the rules that will genuinely change the innovation game in Brazil have yet to come. Whilst countries such as Italy and Australia have recently enacted robust regulations, there is still room for a convincing ground-breaking legislative initiative, as Marco Civil da Internet was for the digital environment in 2014.

Some of the challenges are clear and include changing our Corporations Law (Lei das Sociedades Anônimas) to include a simplified corporate type for startups, creating tax benefits for both startups and angel investors, promoting flexibility with labor agreements and expanding our R-D tax credits policy.

Politicians in Brazil, regardless of party or ideology, must play the game. The future government and its office must invest time to learn the business and the regulatory framework, aiming to provide real value to the ecosystem. As emerging technologies drive new business models, regulation should also keep pace with todaytough environment, thus fostering better conditions for startups and innovation in our country.

HeadSpin has closed a $20 million Series B, valuing the provider of mobile application performance software at $500 million. New investors ICONIQ Capital, Battery Ventures and EQT Ventures participated in the funding round, as well as existing backers GV, Telstra Ventures, Danhua Capital, Nexus Ventures Partners and NextWorld Capital.

The company emerged from stealth last year withManish Lachwani at the helm. Lachwani was the formerprincipal architect of the Amazon Kindle, chief technology officer of mobile gaming company Zynga and co-founder and chief technology officer of Google-acquired Appurify, which helped developers automate testing and optimization of their mobile apps and websites.

Hebeen in the application performance management business for a long time; under his leadership, Palo Alto-based HeadSpin has quickly grown into one of the fastest growing, though relatively unknown, startups in Silicon Valley.

&What HeadSpin has been able to achieve in its first three years is remarkable, and it has already attracted dozens of major clients across the mobile ecosystem,& ICONIQ partner Will Griffith said. &The company is quickly becoming the new standard of record for all mobile ecosystem players going forward. Itone of the fastest-scaling software companies we&ve seen.&

HeadSpin works with Tinder, DocuSign and some 200 other app providers, allowing the companiesto test and monitor their apps in real-time and on real devices before, during and after an app is released. The AI-enabled platform gives developers the ability to experience their app just as any regular user would and highlights high priority issues so companies can quickly resolve customerproblems at scale.

Founded in 2015, HeadSpin says it expects to double revenue in 2018 but did not disclose any financial metrics.

Chief technology officerBrien Colwell is the other half of the companyfounding team. Colwell is the founder and former CEO of Nextop.io, a Y Combinator graduate and app optimization startup. Colwell and Lachwani are joined by HeadSpinhead of productSriram Krishnan, Tinderformer head of international growth.Krishnan joined HeadSpin in January after working with HeadSpintoolset in his role at the app-based dating company.

&When I signed up for HeadSpin, I found out how phenomenal the product was,& Krishnan told TechCrunch .

&A lot of what we built was predicated on the fact that the mobile ecosystem is still very new,& he added. &If you think about the apps world, itonly been around 10 years … Itthe Wild West out there when it comes to understanding performance.&