Technology

We already knew that veteran venture capitalist Fred Destin had teamed up with podcaster-turned-VC Harry Stebbings to raise a fund of their own, but now more details have emerged, including that the new VC firm has reportedly achieved its first closing.

According to my sources, Stride.VC — as the VC is to be called — has already closed £40 million, with a final target of £50 million or more. I&m told that LPs include a number of notable U.K. founders, although I&ve yet to peg who, along with the usual mix of institutional VC investors and family offices.

One name that has surfaced, however (via a Companies House regulatory filing) is Delin Capital, the investment vehicle of Russian-born entrepreneur Igor Linshits. He previously backed Mail.ru alongside Yuri Milner of DST fame, amongst many other investments spanning petrochemical, commodities trading, and tech. According to Wikipedia, he immigrated to the U.K. in 2009, where he became a British citizen and founded Delin Capital.

Delincore businesses are DCAM, one of Europeleading e-commerce logistics real estate players, and Delin Ventures, which supports emerging venture fund managers and makes direct investments in early-stage companies.

People with knowledge of Stride.VCstrategy and investment remit say the new firm is targeting seed stage startups with a strong focus on the U.K., where both Destin and Stebbings are based. It will remain §or agnostic,& however, and is looking to partner with &contrarian entrepreneurs& who are attempting to reshape various industries.

Destin has always maintained that at the earliest of stages it is less about a companystrategy — which at seed is based on limited data and clearly subject to change — and more about a teamconviction and determination. It is perhaps why a number of VCs and founders I talk to have always thought he was an odd fit at Accel in London, where he was most recently a partner. Accel typically doesn&t invest in seed and is known to be extremely data-driven.

However, although it wouldn&t normally come as a surprise to see a VC with Destinexperience and track record raise a fund of his own — having previously backed successful companies such as Zoopla, Secret Escapes, Carwow, Deliveroo, DailyMotion, Integral Ad Science, and Pillpack — it was reported by Bloomberg last July that Stride.VCfundraising efforts were facing additional scrutiny after an accusation of inappropriate behaviour by Destin towards a female founder at a conference in 2013.

In a subsequent report in Business Insider, Destin issued a statement saying that he had &on occasion acted without awareness at parties and been flirty& and that if he had &offended anyone or made anyone feel uncomfortable in any way, I am truly sorry&. He also told BI that he had never used his position as a VC inappropriately.

Meanwhile, although only 21 years old, Stebbings has already packed a lot in for such a short career. He is best known as the founder and host of the popular &The Twenty Minute VC& podcast, which he still publishes. He was also most recently an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Atomico, the VC firm founded by SkypeNiklas Zennström, and has no doubt built up an impressive network in the U.K. and across the pond.

As I previously reported, the two met when Destin was interviewed by Stebbings on one of the earlier episodes of &The Twenty Minute VC& and after the show had finished being recorded, the two continued to chat. This led to Destin agreeing to be Stebbings& VC mentor. They have since become close friends, including getting to know each other and their respective families outside of work, and this eventually resulted in the idea of doing a fund together.

Lastly, Stride.VC may have already written its first cheque, backing a yet-to-launch London fintech startup. Who that is, I haven&t been able to confirm, although if my information is correct it broadly plays in the home financing space.

At Disrupt SF (September 5-7), TechCrunch is running two big stages and doubling the amount of programming compared to past years. The goal is to cover more of the ever-expanding startup ecosystem, including those amazing founders aiming to get off planet earth and tap the vast domain of space (Yes, the final frontier!).

Space startups will also have a dedicated section of Startup Alley. (Founder tip: TechCrunch is offering five free exhibition spots in the space section of Startup Alley as part of our Top Picks program. Apply here— applications are open until June 29. Or lock in your spot in Startup Alley spot now.)

We have enlisted great speakers to talk space, and we&re especially excited to announce Alan Stern, co-author of the recently released &Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto,& and also an engineer and planetary scientist, who has held executive roles at NASA and now leads New Horizons, NASAmission to the Pluto system and the Kuiper Belt. He has served as a consultant to private space exploration projects, including Jeff Bezos& Blue Origin and Richard BransonVirgin Galactic, and he is a co-founder of World View Enterprises, which has raised $42 million to provide an accessible, affordable way to access nearspace with high-altitude balloons.

In addition to a fireside chat onstage, Stern will participate in a separate Q-A session and sign copies of his new book.

We&re also very pleased to announce three speakers who are building the ecosystem of companies and technologies to reach and exploit the earthorbit and beyond, a play investors are betting will become big business in the years ahead.

Natalya Bailey,co-founder and CEO of Accion Systems, a startup spun out of MITSpace Propulsion Laboratory, has developed an ion propulsion system that is the size of a postage stamp and is designed to power small satellites. The company has raised a total of $12.5 million in 2016 in an A round led by Shasta Ventures. Bailey earned her PhD in AeroAstro at MIT.

Peter Beck is CEO and founder of Rocket Lab, which is a small launch provider offering access to low-Earth orbit for small satellites from a private orbital launch site based in New Zealand.Beckpassion for rockets goes back to his youth, when he built a rocket to power his bicycle, a feat he somehow survived. In 2009, Beck lead the development and launch of Atea-1, the first rocket to reach space from the Southern Hemisphere. Rocket Lab has raised $148 million in rounds led by Promus Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Data Collective and Bessemer Venture Partners. The company placed customer payloads in orbit for the first time in January this year and plans to reach monthly launch cadence by the end of 2018.

Will Marshall is co-founder and CEO of Planet, a company that &builds small satellites and delivers information about the changing planet.& Marshall was a scientist at NASA/USRA where he was deputy systems engineer on lunar orbiter mission &LADEE,& and received his PhD in Physics from the University of Oxford. Planet has raised more than $183 million in rounds led by DFJ, International Finance Corporation and Data Collective.

You&ll also be able to continue the conversation with these panelists as they will be taking attendee questions on our intimate Q-A Stage after their Main Stage panel discussion.

You don&t want to miss all this, as well as Disrupt SFmany other features, including 14 tracks of content across four stages, ranging from AI to new retail to robots, CrunchMatch, Startup Battlefield and much more. Get your early-bird tickets today.

The weekend provided no rest to news-wary reporters, with major announcements coming from Xiaomi, SoftBank and the Chinese government the past few days that will continue to change the global tech landscape.

Xiaomi Chinese Depository Receipts

One of the most important yet underreported stories of 2018 has been the development of Chinese Depository Receipts (known as CDRs). I wrote a comprehensive primer on the investment mechanism a few weeks ago, but the summary is that CDRs will give mainland Chinese investors access to overseas-listed stocks that set up the right custodian accounts. Due to domestic capital controls and relatively weak stock exchange rules in China, many Chinese tech giants are listed on overseas stock exchanges in New York and Hong Kong.

Beijing-based Xiaomi, which produces a line of phones and offers mobile software services, is launching one of the most anticipated IPOs of the year, with a valuation expected to top tens of billions of dollars. In its official filing, the company targeted a fundraise of $10 billion. While Xiaomi is a sterling example of the potential success of Chinese entrepreneurs, local retail buyers would likely have had no access to buy the stock, which will be listed in Hong Kong.

Fiona Lau and Julie Zhu at Reuters are now reporting that Xiaomi could be one of the first companies to take advantage of the new CDR mechanism, potentially reserving 30 percent of its new issue for CDR buyers. That would be about $3 billion if the assumptions of the fundraise play out.

If the CDR mechanism works as expected, Chinese companies and potentially many others could suddenly tap a vast new pool of capital, either in the IPO process or more generally. That could push valuations for many of these issues higher than they might otherwise go, since Chinese mainland investors have limited ability to invest in overseas stocks due to capital controls. A valuation that might cause a New York-based money manager to flee might be more than palatable to a Chinese investor.

While Chinese tech giants are likely to quickly offer CDR options to take advantage of their local brand power and increase upward pressure on their stock prices, the bigger question in my mind is how long it will take overseas companies to offer similar measures and get access to this capital market. While companies like Facebook and Google are blocked or mostly blocked from mainland China, other companies like Apple have strong brand presence in the country, and could theoretically offer a CDR as it strives for a $1 trillion valuation. There are huge legal and policy roadblocks to overcome of course, but such a debut would be a major milestone in Chinafinancial development.

SoftBank executive changes

JapanSoftBank Group, which owns a set of major tech and finance companies, announced a new group of senior execs late on Friday that sets up something of a leadership contest to succeed the groupfounder, Masayoshi Son.

Several years ago, Son had indicated that Nikesh Arora, who had spent a decade at Google and eventually rose to be the companychief business officer, would succeed him. Arora became president and chief operating officer of SoftBank, but would last less than two years before heading out from the role. As a sort of coda to that chapter, we learned late last week that Arora has joined Palo Alto Networks as its CEO.

Now, SoftBank has announced that three people will take leadership roles in the company, and all three will join its board of directors. Rajeev Misra, who runs the $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund, will become an executive vice president (EVP) while maintaining his duties to the fund.

Katsunori Sago, who until recently was the chief investment officer of Japan Post, Japanlargest savings bank with a $1.9 trillion portfolio, will join SoftBank as an EVP and chief strategy officer. Sago had been rumored to be considering leaving Japan Post just a few weeks ago. Finally, former Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure was named an EVP and SoftBanknew chief operating officer. Claure was elevated to executive chairman of Sprint last month, while stepping down as CEO.

Each of the three are positioned around the key tentpoles of SoftBank. SoftBankcore business remains telecom, on which Claure will presumably spend significant time. The groupfinancial interests, which includes a 100 percent stake in Fortress Investment Group, will likely get significant attention from Sago. And the SoftBank Vision Fund, which has received splashy headlines with its massive investments in global unicorn startups, is obviously a key future pillar of the company, giving Misra a powerful perch in the group.

Masayoshi Son is 60 years old today. While retirement seems to be the least likely course of action for the energetic entrepreneur, clearly he is starting to think through succession in a more robust way than he did before with Arora. That should make SoftBank investors far more content, and also provide a little bit of a competitive dynamic at the top of the organization to drive the groupresults in the years to come.

China initiates investigation into Samsung and other chip companies

The chip wars between China and the rest of the world continue to heat up. Now, it looks like Samsung, the worldlargest chipmaker, is in the crosshairs of Beijing,according to a Wall Street Journal report by Yoko Kubota. In addition to Samsung, Micron and SK Hynix were also ensnared in the investigation.

China has made building a strong indigenous chip industry a core pillar of its economic development strategy. In addition to a comprehensive plan known as Made in China 2025, the country has also been attempting to put together the worldlargest semiconductor venture capital investment fund, which in aggregate could have tens of billions of dollars in capital at its disposal.

The investigations against Samsung and the two chipmakers comes at the same time that China has also once again delayed the close of Qualcommacquisition of NXP Semiconductors. Qualcomm has been waiting for months to get Beijingapproval on that deal, which would provide the company a fresh source of revenue and a renewed product mix in strategic areas like automotive.

The use of economic investigations to help and hurt Chinese companies and their competitors is starting to become a mainstay. The United States used the negative conclusions of its investigation into Chinese telecommunications company ZTE in order to cut off its export licenses, practically killing the company. While the U.S. has now started to walk back that threat by floating the option of a large fine, it is clear that these sorts of tit-for-tat investigations are going to continue into the future.