Month: April 2018

Digital music giant Spotify is joining the stock market on Tuesday, making it the biggest consumer tech company to go public since Snap debuted early last year.

But unlike Snap, Spotify isn’t doing an IPO. The “o” part of IPO stands for offering and Spotify isn’t raising any money.

Instead, existing Spotify shareholders will be selling shares directly onto the stock market. This means that employees, venture capitalists or anyone else who managed to buy Spotify shares on the  “secondary markets” can make money right away. But Spotify doesn’t know yet how many will want to sell their shares.

In fact, no one really knows how this “direct listing” is going to go. Even in Spotify’s prospectus, the company acknowledged that what it’s doing is “risky.” Smaller companies have listed without an IPO, but for a company of Spotify’s size, this is unprecedented.

Co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek claims that they are doing things differently because “Spotify has never been a normal kind of company.” In a release today, he wrote that “our focus isn’t on the initial splash. Instead, we will be working on trying to build, plan, and imagine for the long term.”

In a recent investor presentation, Ek said Spotify is doing this because of “our desire to become more transparent and more accessible.” Unlike a traditional IPO where employees don’t sell shares for months, known as a “lock-up,” Spotify insiders can sell on day one.

But like a typical IPO, Spotify will still be working with “market makers” to help determine the price that the company should begin trading. I’m told that this could anytime during the trading day on Tuesday.

Spotify doesn’t know how many people will be selling shares. If few people opt to sell, it will drive the share price up, because of limited supply. If a lot of people sell, the reverse could happen, if investor demand doesn’t match it. It’s likely that this process will lead to increased volatility in the first few days or weeks of trading.

But in the long-run, Spotify’s performance in the stock market will largely depend on investor philosophies about the company and its business model.

Some are concerned that Spotify will run the course of competitor Pandora, which has struggled on the stock market, partly due to hefty artist fees. Others argue that Spotify could be viewed as a Netflix, which has been successful at its entertainment licensing agreements.

But regardless of what happens Tuesday, Ek said that listing day is not time to celebrate. “You won’t see us ringing any bells or throwing any parties.”

from TechCrunch

Insider, a service that aims to help brands go about their internet marketing with greater efficiency and success, has landed an $11 million investment led by Sequoia India.

The startup is originally from Turkey where it began life in 2012 as a platform that helped optimize online marketing campaigns. Now at 240 staff across 16 markets, it recently moved HQ to Singapore and today it launches its new ‘Growth Management Platform.’

Those three words together don’t really tell much about Insider’s new product, the aim of which is to help brands, marketers and website owners generally serve dynamic content that is tailored to their visitors. The idea according to Insider CEO Hande Cilingir — who is one of six co-founders of the business — is to give a visitor the most optimized version of the site based on who they are. In many ways, it is similar to LiftIgniter, the U.S. startup that raised $6.4 million last year and was a finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt London 2016.

Insider goes about that task by collecting pieces of data about the visitor — the 90-odd parameters include obvious things include location, the website they are visiting from, the device they are on, etc — all of which is used to showcase the most relevant content or information to ensure that this visitor gets the best experience. Insider said it uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to boost its model, too, helping match potential similarities between users to build a wider and more intelligent picture about the type of people visiting a website.

The goal is really quite simple: keep people more engaged on a website and help website owners with their call to action, whatever that may be. Insider believes it can help lower customer acquisition costs through increased efficiency, while also boost existing conversion rates through customization.

Insider’s six co-founders

In the case of internet marketing, it is most often to e-commerce or other types of purchases.

That’s strongly reflected in the customer base that Insider claims. The company has put a big focus on Asia’s growing internet market — hence the move to Singapore — and publicly-announced clients for the startup include Singapore Airlines, Indonesian e-commerce firm Tokopedia, UNIQLO, Samsung, McDonald’s, Nissan and CNN.

Sequoia could help open doors, too, since the firm has invested in major consumer names in Asia such as Go-Jek, Carousell and Zomato.

“We were impressed with Insider’s AI platform, and the profound impact on their customer’s key metrics: lower customer acquisition costs, higher retention, faster growth. These customers quickly started to use more and more products from the Insider platform. That has put Insider on a fast growth trajectory, especially in Asia,” said Pieter Kemps, principal at Sequoia India.

Cilingir said the new funds will go towards expanding Insider’s sales team and hiring data scientists and machine learning engineers to develop the platform. The headquarters may be in Singapore now, but Istanbul remains the base for product development while the company’s core tech team is located in Ukraine.

The team is firmly focused on developing its business in Southeast Asia, she added, but it is also eying potential expansions with China and the U.S. among the more audacious new markets that it is considering at this point.

Already, Cilingir said the startup is on track to hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2018 while it is bullish that there’s more to come. Marketing giant Group M predicts that this is the year that online advertising spend overtakes TV for the first time in 17 countries worldwide and she’s optimistic that there will be a greater need for Insider’s products among brands and major consumer names worldwide.

Alongside Sequoia, Insider said that its existing investors Wamda Capital and Dogan Group also took part in the newest round, which is its Series B. The company previously raised a $2.2 million Series A in September 2016 to fund its initial foray into emerging markets.

from TechCrunch

Walmart is in discussions to acquire medication delivery service PillPack for “under $1 billion,” reports CNBC. CNBC’s sources said the deal isn’t final yet, but talks have been going on for months and Amazon was also a potential suitor for the startup, which delivers medications to tens of thousands of customers in the United States.

Launched in 2013, PillPack has raised $118 million in funding from investors including Accel Partners, Atlas Venture and CRV. PillPack doesn’t just fill prescriptions. It also helps patients manage their medications by sorting pills into packets for individual doses, automatically delivering refills to homes and providing 24/7 customer service, which is a major selling point for seniors and people with multiple conditions. Last year, PillPack also unveiled prescription management software called PharmacyOS which it described as “the first backend pharmacy system designed specifically for customers with complex medication regimes.”

Last November, co-founder and chief executive officer T.J. Parker, who trained as a pharmacist, said PillPack would do over $100 million revenue in 2017. It has a loyal customer base, who helped PillPack win a public relations battle in 2016 with Express Scripts, the country’s largest pharmacy-benefits manager. After Express Scripts cut off its partnership with PillPack, claiming that the company needed to be licensed as a mail-order operation instead of a retail pharmacy, PillPack said this would force it stop delivering to a third of its customers. It also accused Express Scripts, which runs its own home delivery service, of trying to block competition. Online outcry by customers, driven by a PillPack campaign, forced Express Scripts to back down.

Both Walmart and PillPack declined to comment on a potential acquisition to CNBC.

Amazon is said to be working on its own prescription delivery service, after launching a line of over-the-counter health products like allergy treatments. If its pharmacy business comes to fruition, that means Amazon will compete even more closely with Walmart, putting increasing pressure on the big-box store chain.

Walmart is also reportedly in talks to acquire health insurer Humana.

from TechCrunch