TechCabal Daily – Where are the flying cars?

I’m currently publishing a series of podcast episodes for The Flip, in which we explore the entrepreneurs and startups digitizing analog and fragmented industries across the continent.

The challenge is not only the work itself but the difficulty of overcoming inertia and status quo bias, to move consumer behaviour, corporates, or sectors in the direction we wish to go.

To be sure, this doesn’t happen overnight, and it still feels like it’s pretty early days in the ecosystem. For fintechs, their main competition is still with cash, not with each other. But simply creating digital versions of the analog world is not enough.

First, Mark Cuban (and Russ Hanneman) made their billions by putting the radio on the Internet. Now we have Spotify.

Newspapers initially leveraged the Internet to draw attention to their news stories, monetized by placing advertisements next to them. Now, we have social media feeds, which are uniquely enabled by digital.

I try to think about innovation through the lens of form versus function.

What looks like innovation is often an iteration of previous forms rather than an improvement of the core function… When most people envision the future, they project the current form forward rather than projecting the function forward and abandoning the form. For instance, when criticizing technological progress some people ask, “Where are the flying cars?” Here’s the thing: We have flying cars. They’re called airplanes. People who ask this question are so focused on form (a flying object that looks like a car) that they overlook the function (transportation by flight).

This raises a question – is the digitization we’re seeing in the ecosystem a focus on form or function?

Let’s use insurance as an example. It’s one thing to issue policies or process claims digitally (form). Insurance-as-a-service platforms, on the other hand, enable underwriters or other financial service providers the ability to offer entirely new products, uniquely enabled by digital (function), such as insurance embedded or bundled with a remittance payment.

Herein lies the opportunity – not only to build digital products but build products that are uniquely enabled by digital.

How this looks in practice is, however, beyond the scope of this newsletter. Read more here: Where are the Flying Cars?

Not many deals have gone down this week, but even with the small number of rounds raised, three of them have been major.

Here are the funding deals for this week:

• Starsight Energy raised $10,000,000 from Finnfund and Norfund
• MooMe secured an undisclosed amount from Maxula Seed fund
• uLesson raised $7,500,000 from Owl Ventures
• Aerobotics secured $17,000,000 from Naspers.

That’s it for this week. See you next week.

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