Author: Thomas Crown

For the longest time, chips were a little bit boring. But the revolution in deep learning has now opened the market for startups that build specialty chips to accelerate deep learning and model evaluation. Among those is Israel-based Hailo, which is building deep learning chips for embedded devices. The company today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series A round.

Investors include Israeli crowdfunding platform Ourcrowd, Maniv Mobility, Next Gear, and a number of angel investors, including Hailo’s own chairman Zohar Zisapel and Delek Motors’ Gil Agmon.

Hailo tells me that it will use the new round, which brings its total funding to $16 million, to further develop its deep learning processors. The company expects samples to rich the market in the first half of 2019. Those chips will be able to run embedded AI applications in a wide range of settings, including drones and cars, as well as smart home appliances and cameras.

The key market for Hailo is the car industry, though. In that respect, it’s following in the footstep of other Israeli startups like Mobileye, which Intel eventually acquired.

“The 70-year old architecture of existing processors is inadequate to meet today’s deep learning and AI processing needs,” says Orr Danon, Hailo CEO. “Hailo is revolutionizing the underlying architecture of the processor to boost deep learning processing by several orders of magnitude. We have completely redesigned the pillars of computer architecture – memory, control and compute – and the relations between them.”

from TechCrunch

Drag-and-drop app builder startup Thunkable has launched a cross-platform version of its product that lets users create apps that work across Android and iOS.

The app builder is targeted at non-coders and first time developers, with the bold claim that the platform lets “anyone create beautiful and powerful apps”.

Users can choose from a variety of features and integrations for their apps, including Google Maps, Microsoft Image Recognition, payments through Stripe, and other APIs — and its capabilities like these that underpin Thunkable’s claim their app builder platform is superior to rival builders which only let people create apps using templates with limited capabilities. 

We covered the YC-backed startup back in 2016 when it had just launched its Android app builder platform, after forking the original interface the team had helped developed at MIT .

The team went on to secure additional seed funding after graduating YC, and now say they’ve raised a total of $3.3M — from Lightspeed Venture Partners, NEA, SV Angel, Y Combinator, PJC, Mandra Capital, Joe Montana’s Liquid 2 Ventures and ZhenFund. 

An iOS beta platform was also subsequently launched, in September 2017 — mainly, according to co-founder and CEO Arun Saigal, to get feedback on what would become the new cross-platform version — which they’re calling Thunkable ✕. (To be clear, that’s not a ‘X’ but a special character intended to denote the cross platform element.) The prior Android app builder is still available — but now called Thunkable Classic Android.

“Traditionally, building an app requires hundreds of thousands of dollars and two teams of engineers — one team for Android and one team for iOS. But now, non-coders can easily build their own apps on one platform, and these apps will work on Android devices, iPhones and iPads,” says Saigal in a statement. 

When we spoke to Thunkable in 2016 their app builder had around 50,000 users. It’s now up to more than 500,000, with more than 1M apps built using its drag-and-drop blocks style interface — apps which have a combined total of 16M monthly active users, across 195 countries.

“Thunkable ✕ is very robust in terms of ecosystem compatibility,” Saigal tells us. “All apps built on Thunkable ✕ are packaged natively for both Android and iOS operating systems, and are compatible with all Android and iOS devices.

“Specifically, Thunkable is compatible with all Android devices that are running Android 4.1 and above and all iOS devices that are running iOS 8.0 and above.”

“Our users have always built a wide variety of apps,” he adds. “On iOS, both the usage and types of apps have been similar to what we have seen on Android.”

Examples of apps built using the DIY platform which the team flags up include a dice throwing app (called Dice), built by two teenagers from Oregon which has gained more than 500,000 downloads on the Google Play Store; an app built by a user in India to help people study for the Indian Railway Exams — which has more than 1M MAUs; and an app created by a teacher from Iraq to help students learn how to speak English, which they say has been downloaded “thousands” of times and is being used throughout Iraq. 

Saigal says they’re seeing “major opportunities for first-time app developers all over the world” — emphasizing what he describes as “tremendous growth” in both emerging and developed markets.

He also says the “vast majority” of developers who come to Thunkable are still looking to build native mobile apps — playing down the notion that interest might be shifting away from building native apps to developing apps for the big tech platforms that are increasingly boxing up mobile users’ attention.

from TechCrunch

If you thought price comparison type online marketplaces were a done deal, you’re clearly mistaken. Motorway, a new startup from the team behind Top10 — the mobile and broadband comparison site that exited to uSwitch in 2011 — are back again, and this time they want to make it infinitely easier to sell your used car online.

To help with that mission, the young company, which formally launched in July 2017 after it had tested an MVP, has raised £2.75 million in seed funding led by LocalGlobe, and Marchmont Ventures (the VC fund of Hugo Burge, former CEO of Momondo, which sold to Priceline last year). Zoopla founder Alex Chesterman also participated.

Motorway had previously raised an angel round of £500,000 in the autumn of 2017 after the product had launched and was showing traction. Angel investors in that round included Duncan Jennings (founder of VoucherCodes.co.uk), Shakil Khan (early Spotify investor) and Christian Woolfenden (CEO of Photobox).

Tom Leathes, Motorway co-founder and CEO, says there are more than 8 million used cars sold annually in the U..K — which is more than 3x the number of new cars sold, apparently — but that the process of selling a car has gone largely unchanged for decades. This sees motorists having to visit multiple car dealers to negotiate a sale, or list privately on websites like AutoTrader or eBay. The other option is to use one of a number of online car buyers, such as WeBuyAnyCar, that provide a quick disposal option but in return prices paid are typically low. The London-based startup wants to provide a fourth option.

Namely — in classic price comparison fashion — Motorway makes it simple to compare the market and find the best deal for your car. In return, dealers get connected with motivated sellers instantly. Always be closing, as they say.

“Motorway makes selling a car faster by bringing the options online and enabling easy price comparison,” says Leathes. “Consumers enter their car’s registration number and mileage to instantly see multiple offers from car buying services, specialist dealerships and even vehicle recycling firms. They can then compare headline offers, read buyer reviews, collection criteria, fees and payment methods before choosing their best deal. By comparing offers, consumers can get up to £1,000 more than going directly to one buyer, and sell their car in 24 hours”.

In terms of typical customer, so far Motorway seems to have run the whole gamut of car owner. I’m told customers using the site have sold lots of Fords, Audis, VWs and Vauxhalls of all ages as well as Aston Martin DB9s, Porsche 911s and various Ferraris. “We’re building Motorway to help anyone looking to sell a car they own – no matter how old, its mileage, what brand or where it’s located,” adds the Motorway CEO.

Leathes cites competitors as established brands such as Auto Trader, We Buy Any Car, eBay and Gumtree, which are popular websites in the U.K. to sell your car. He says there are also a couple of early-stage startups in the space, but that none of these services offers a transparent price comparison experience with instant offers to buy your vehicle.

The revenue model is simple, too. The startup is paid a commission by the buyer when a car is purchased from a seller that found their offer through Motorway. “This means we’re aligned squarely with both consumers and car buyers, as we only make money when we successfully connect sellers with buyers and a deal is completed,” Leathes says. “Motorway’s goal is to help everyone find great offers for their car instantly. There’s a real perception that you need to be a car expert to get a good deal, and we think that needs to change”.

With over 25,000 customer sales enquiries per month, Motorway says the new funding will enable the startup to further develop its software platform, expand the network of buyers, and to market the service more widely.

Adds ​Suzanne Ashman, Partner at LocalGlobe: “Creating a compelling experience for people selling their cars is hard. The potential buyers are fragmented with many different online and offline options. Information about the sale process is difficult to find and pricing is often unclear. Motorway’s technology is exceptional and will bring much-needed transparency for car owners”.

Despite having three successful (or at least, moderately successful) exits behind them, the Motorway founders are used to doing hard things. A fourth venture — a hotel comparison site launched after they successfully bought back the Top10 domain name and subsequently backed by Accel and Balderton — shut down in 2015.

“Having had three successful startups before Top10, it was obviously a tough outcome for all of us. We built an amazing product and had decent growth, but it wasn’t 10x better than the competition, which it had to be to win in such an established market,” Leathes tells me. “After that we took almost a year working on ideas before deciding on Motorway. And we were pretty ruthless about launching something ourselves, proving it works and scaling it before raising any funding”.

from TechCrunch

WeWork is setting its sights on Southeast Asia, but that isn’t stopping local rivals from building up there business. In Indonesia, EV Hive — a co-working brand first started by a VC firm — has pulled in $20 million for expansion as its U.S.-based rival increases its focus on Indonesia.

The company was founded in 2015, by seed-stage investment firm East Ventures and a few friends, and today it counts 21 locations across Indonesia with eight more in development right now. This Series A round was led by Softbank Ventures Korea with new investors H&CK Partners, Tigris Investment, Naver, LINE Ventures and STIC Investments taking part.

Added to those names, a range of existing backers also put into the round, including East Ventures, SMDV, Sinar Mas Land, Insignia Venture Partners, Intudo Ventures and angel investors Michael Widjaya and Chris Angkasa.

EV Hive CEO Carlson Lau told TechCrunch that the firm plans to add 20 more locations next year as it expands its focus from Jakarta and Medan to cover more of the country, which is the world’s fourth largest with a population of over 250 million people. Further down the line, it aims to reach 100 spaces by 2022 with moves into markets like Thailand and Vietnam. The company makes its mark with large spaces — typically over 7,000 square meters per location — and it sees vast untapped potential in Indonesia, where Lau said there are 10 cities with populations of two million or more.

Lau said the company is already fielding expansion requests from overseas but for now the focus is growing a presence in Indonesia. The startup is also looking to do more for its members, which number some 3,000 plus as of May.

Not unlike WeWork, it is building out a services play which includes a member-based marketplace that lets fellow members sell services to each other. Typically, Lau said, the focus is areas like accounting, branding and marketing but where there are gaps, EV Hive is stepping up to offer its own services, too. The goal there is to increase revenue and broaden the services on offer.

“A a lot of co-working spaces compete on the same plain, whether it is design or giving away freebies, but we feel we have strong execution,” Lau said. “We fill out at the fastest space and the lowest cost. The nearest competitor has four spaces and just one-tenth of our floor space.”

“We’re also in a good position with a lot of top VCs invested in us and we’ve built an ecosystem of different community partners,” he added.

Lau ruled out potential acquisition-led expansion — that’s a route WeWork took to enter Southeast Asia, and it has also done the same in China — but he did concede that the co-working market in the region is getting crowded, particularly as those who started out “thinking the business is cool” begin to realize it is tougher than it looks.

“There will be a wave of consolidation in the coming months,” the EV Hive CEO predicted.

from TechCrunch

Grab, the ride-hailing firm that acquired Uber’s Southeast Asia business, is aiming to catalyze the early-stage startup scene in Southeast Asia after it launched an accelerator and investment unit called Grab Ventures.

The six-year-old company has already made investments and acquisitions — backing startups like Drive.ai and buying Indonesia’s Kudo and India-based iKaaz — and Grab Ventures will build on that by making 8-10 investments over the coming 24 month period, but it is also offering different kind of support. The firm will offer an accelerator program for “growth-stage” companies and play a hand incubating new services inside Grab, according to Chris Yeo, Head of Grab Ventures.

That accelerator effort — called ‘Velocity’ — will launch its first intake before the end of the year with around four to six companies per batch.

“It’s time for us to reflect on the tremendous support we’ve seen over the years and give back to the community,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. “We have a responsibility to empower the next generation of startups in Southeast Asia. We have a strong belief in taking a partnership approach, we know we can’t do it alone.”

On the partner side, Grab has recruited Singapore government agencies Info-communications Media Development Authority of Singapore (IMDA) and Enterprise SG to aid its efforts.

Taken together, Grab said it is aiming to help build an ecosystem of companies in Southeast Asia, a region of over 600 million consumers where the internet economy is tipped to grow from $50 billion per year in 2017 to over $200 billion by 2025, according to a recent report authored by Google. Ride-hailing as a segment is forecast to rise to $20 billion by 2025 up from $5 billion last year.

Grab believes that now it has reached scale with over 100 million downloads and more than 200 cities, the firm can help other startups rise up.

“Our object is to build new startups inside Grab and scale existing promising growth-stage startups. “Our hope for them is to grow from local leaders to regional champions and maybe global challengers,” said Yeo.

Grab Cycle is one business that Grab Ventures has incubated

Unlike traditional accelerator programs, Velocity isn’t aimed at a particular type of company while it is fairly general in terms of the stages that they are at. Yeo said the idea is to be flexible and work with companies that can benefit from Grab’s regional business and its various business units, which beyond taxis include food delivery, mobile payment and financial services.

“[Selection] depends on the startup, sector and industry,” Yeo explained. “Ideally they’ve got funding and are looking to scale up their business — which means typically going into more countries or accessing a larger customer base.”

However, Velocity will not take equity/offer investment as part of the program, although there may be investment opportunities with Grab Ventures further now the line, according to Yeo.

On the investment side, the focus is also broad, too.

Yeo said that Grab ventures isn’t a dedicated VC arm. There’s no set check size per investment (nor a total fund size) but it is broadly looking to back 8-10 companies in areas that align with Grab’s business, although financial services looks like being a major focus since Grab has already built a strong business in taxis, logistics and (most recently) food delivery.

Yeo said Grab would back more startups than that target if it finds the right opportunities. He said the business will identify opportunities using its teams in the eight markets that Grab is present. While Singapore, where Grab is based, is a key focus for the business alongside Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s fourth most-populous country, Yeo said Grab Ventures will look for investment opportunities across the Southeast Asian region.

from TechCrunch

Barcelona-based online travel agency Exoticca — which sells “affordable luxury” holidays to popular destinations such as India, Kenya, Brazil, Thailand and South Africa — has closed a €3.5 million (~$4.1 million) Series A to expand into more markets.

The lead investor is early-stage Madrid-based VC K Fund, with existing investors Sabadell Venture Capital and Grupo Palau also participating, along with new investors Nero Ventures, Palladium Corporate Venture and Smartech Capital.

Exoticca was founded in 2013 and currently operates in three European markets: Spain, France and the U.K. The new funding will be put toward expanding that tally — with the German market next in line, and a launch into the U.S. and Canada also on the horizon. Funds will also be funneled into further developing the platform.

“The company spent the first couple of years developing the technological platform and sales have grown very rapidly since then (€4.4 million in 2016, €10.5 million in 2017 and a budget of more than €20 million for 2018),” says CEO Pere Valles, a recent recruit to the business and previously CEO of Scytl.

Valles argues that Exoticca’s progress to date proves both the profitability of its business model — noting that Spain was “the first market which Exoticca launched is already profitable” — and its replicability. “Last year we launched the U.K. and France and the U.K. is already bigger than Spain,” he says, adding: “In July, we are launching in Germany and we have plans to open in the U.S. and Canada in 2019.”

Valles says the market Exoticca is operating in is one of the few travel market segments that has not yet been digitized — with people still purchasing these types of trips in traditional “offline” travel agencies, owing to relative complexity, with the holidays typically having multiple legs and components, perhaps including international and domestic flights, land transportation, hotels in different locations, tour guides and so on.

Exoticca’s platform allows users to buy such trips online in a single visit, thanks to a proprietary booking engine that integrates with all the various providers — enabling real-time pricing for each component (so no need to phone up for an actual price before being able to book, for example).

“There is nobody else who provides real-time pricing for these types of trips through an online platform,” argues Valles. “Our competition uses internet only to generate leads and then close the sale either on the phone or in a store while we allow our customers to do the entire purchase process online in a single visit.”

There are some differences versus traditional bricks-and-mortar travel agents, though. Exoticca customers can’t spec out a very bespoke holiday in discussion with an agent, for example.

Rather it offers an inventory of around 50 trip packages in its permanent portfolio, covering what are described as “the most popular destinations” for its target travel category. (Though Valles points out it does offer a degree of light personalization — such as being able to pick a hotel category and optional excursions, for example.)

If you’re content to choose from the selection, Exoticca claims the trips are 30 percent cheaper on average versus “traditional providers” — as a consequence of the disintermediation process (i.e. it acting as both wholesaler and retailer).

“Each one of these trip packages is our ‘own’ product in the sense that we are the ones who ‘build’ it by engaging directly with the provider of each component,” says Valles, adding: “We also give our own personal touch to the tours in each one of these destinations.”

There’s a pretty striking branding style on show too — which features 1950s-esque graphics illustrating elements of the holiday packages and service…

Presumably the hope is the retro styling will resonate with the older adults who are the demographic most likely to be in the market for long-haul, luxury trips.

“We have customers in all age groups but those between 45 and 65 tend to be ‘overrepresented,’ ” agrees Valles.

He says the company is generally targeting a similar customer profile to that of GV-backed members-only travel club Secret Escapes.

Though they are not like-for-like competitors, with Exoticca’s product certainly having more of a focus on, well, exotic holidays — versus Secret Escapes offering hotel getaways to almost anywhere (so long as the hotel is up to snuff).

Other European online travel agency startups include the likes of Dreamlines, which is focused exclusively on cruise holidays to address a distinct market segment; and Evaneos, a marketplace for tailored travel experiences that connects travelers directly with a community of local travel agents — so is doing the lead generation Exoticca’s approach avoids.

Valles says the packages it sells are with “high-quality providers” (4- and 5-star hotels) but offered at “discounted prices” intended to appeal to a mass market of middle- and upper-class travelers.

The overall aim is to “democratize” this segment of the travel market. (“A great experience at a reasonable cost” is the pitch.) Though if they really succeed in widening the funnel they may end up undermining their luxury promise. But clearly that’s not something they have to worry about yet.

Funding wise, Valles says Exoticca previously raised €1 million in two seed rounds, one with F&F and another with Sabadell Venture Capital. The business is not breaking out any user or usage metrics at this stage, five years in.

from TechCrunch