Author: Thomas Crown

India’s PolicyBazaar, which runs a digital insurance business of the same name and a lending marketplace called PaisaBazaar.com, is the latest company to join SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund after it announced a new funding round of over $200 million.

The deal was led by the Vision Fund with participation from existing investors including InfoEdge, the company behind jobs platform Naukri.com. The startup’s other investors count Softbank, Temasek, Tiger Global and True North, but an announcement from PolicyBazaar didn’t specifically mention if any of those names took place in this latest round.

This new round takes PolicyBazaar to nearly $350 million to date. The deal is another investment in India for the Vision Fund, which so far has backed OYO Rooms, Flipkart and Paytm parent One97 Communication among others.

PolicyBazaar was founded in 2008 initially as an information portal for learning about insurance and insurance programs. Today, the company operates its own digital insurance brand and a marketplace that aggregates and selects deal from across the industry.

Across both services, PolicyBazaar claims to process 100 million visitors in website traffic per year with a transaction volume that’s approaching 300,000 per month. More broadly, the company estimates that PolicyBazaar.com is used to purchase over 20 percent of life insurance coverage in India and seven percent of the country’s retail health coverage.

Going forward, PolicyBazaar is targeting 10 million transacting customers by 2020, which it believes it can reach by growing at a compound annual growth rate of 80 percent.

“Over the last decade, PolicyBazaar has become synonymous with online insurance shopping in India. We believe that the Indian insurance market continues to remain massively under-developed and PolicyBazaar, supported by SoftBank’s capital and ecosystem, is uniquely positioned to dramatically increase the adoption of insurance products in the country,” Munish Varma, partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said in a statement.

PolicyBazaar’s closest ideological rival is Acko, but the two companies are quite contrasted.

While PolicyBazaar is a decade old, Acko is very much a newcomer which has raised $42 million since its launch some 18 months ago. Most recently, Acko added Amazon after the U.S. retail giant led a $12 million investment that was announced last month. In addition, Acko founder Varun Dua is a co-founder of Coverfox, an online insurance policy aggregator that also rivals PolicyBazaar.com.

from TechCrunch

It’s not often you can get three cloud giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce to agree on much of anything, but today they were all part of a $27 million Series C investment in Tact.AI, a startup that has been trying to change the way sales people interact with information in CRM systems using voice.

Amazon Alexa Fund, Salesforce Ventures and M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) joined Comcast Ventures as strategic investors in the company this round. Traditional VCs Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Upfront Ventures also participated. Tact has now raised over $53 million, according to Crunchbase.

Amazon is of course deeply invested in voice interfaces and has recognized what Tact is trying to do in an enterprise setting with this investment. In fact, Tact was one of the first services to launch as part of Alexa for Business last fall. “Just as people were quick to adopt voice technology in the home, we see an enormous opportunity for voice services in the enterprise,” Paul Bernard, Director of the Amazon Alexa Fund said. He sees Tact on the forefront of that movement.

As though to prove Amazon’s point, the company also announced a product enhancement to improve the voice experience in the car. The feature dubbed ‘Voice Intelligence’ acts like a car-based virtual assistant. Sales people spend much of their time in the car, and the tool can not only give them the basics about the next meeting, it can also provide details about the deal and other relevant information, such as recently filed service tickets. All of this info can arm the salesperson for a potentially more effective meeting, Tact CEO Chuck Ganapathi explained.

“We want sales professionals who are on the road, keeping their eyes on the road ahead, so we are pushing information to them and initiating a conversation, which is exactly what a human assistant would do,” he said.

Ganapathi understands the limitations of CRM tools perhaps better than anyone. That’s because before he started Tact, he had been helping build them for more than 20 years — first custom systems with Ernst and Young, then on prem with Seybold Systems and finally with Salesforce in the cloud.

CRM’s value proposition has always been that it provides companies with a central place for storing customer data, an electronic rolodex of sorts, but entering and retrieving data has mostly been a chore for busy sales people. Ganapathi launched Tact in 2012 with the vision of using voice to help make it easier to interact with these tools. He was clearly ahead of his time, but the technology has finally caught up with his idea, and the strategic investors in this deal certainly recognize the value of a voice interface for sales people.

Ganapathi says the idea behind Tact is to reduce the friction involved in adding and retrieving information from the database, and making life easier for sales to do their job. If sales pros can get the information they need, they can potentially make more sales and that’s a fairly compelling argument for any company.

from TechCrunch

After months of speculation, Meituan, the largest service booking app in China, confirmed that it has filed for a public offering. The company’s IPO application was submitted to the Hong Kong stock exchange earlier today and is being sponsored by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. A spokesperson for Meituan said the company is currently not disclosing information about fundraising amount or valuation. Reuters reports that Meituan wants to raise more than $4 billion.

Meituan was created after Meituan and Dianping, two competitors in the group deals space, merged in 2015 (it is still formally known was Meituan Dianping). Since then, the company has added more services to become China’s leader in O2O (online-to-offline), a catchphrase for goods and services that are purchased online, but bring people into brick and mortar businesses, like movie ticket bookings.

One interesting aspect of the merger is that it brought together two archrivals, Alibaba and Tencent. Alibaba was one of Meituan’s investors, while Tencent backed Dianping. Since then, Alibaba has sold off most of its Meituan Dianping stake to focus on Koubei, its own O2O app, while Tencent has maintained an investment relationship with the company. For example, it led Meituan’s $4 billion Series C last October.

Meituan initially focused on restaurant reservations and food delivery, before expanding into more local services to create what it describes as a “one-stop super app” that allows users to buy movie tickets, make spa and salon appointments, book transportation and hotel rooms, and even pay for bike-sharing program MoBike, which Meituan acquired for $2.7 billion in April. The company says one advantage of its business model is customer conversion between verticals. For example, it claims over 80% of its new hotel booking consumers first began using the app for food delivery or restaurant reservations.

In its announcement today, Meituan said it currently has 310 million transacting users and 4.4 million active merchants. Over the past three years, its revenue grew from 4 billion RMB in 2015, to 13 billion RMB in 2016, before hitting 33.9 billion RMB (about $5.2 billion) in 2017. Meanwhile, its gross transaction value went from 161 billion RMB in 2015 to 237 billion RMB in 2016, then 357 billion RMB (about $54.8 billion) in 2017. Meituan also said that it’s adjusted net loss dropped from 5.9 billion RMB in 2015 to 2.9 billion RMB (about $430 million) in 2017.

from TechCrunch

Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Longreads, Simplenote and a few other things, is acquiring Brooklyn-based startup Atavist.

Atavist has been working on a content management system for independent bloggers and writers. With an Atavist website, you can easily write and publish stories with a ton of media.

You might think that this isn’t particularly groundbreaking as anyone can create a website on WordPress.com or Squarespace and do the same thing. But the company also lets you create a paywall and build a subscription base.

Many writers don’t want to deal with the technical details of running a website. That’s why Atavist gives you the tools so that you can focus on your stories.

Atavist is also running a publication called Atavist Magazine. The publication is also joining Automattic. It’s unclear if it’s going to be part of Longreads or remain its own thing.

The CMS itself won’t stick around. Automattic said that the publishing platform will be integrated into WordPress. And this is the interesting part.

While WordPress is probably a much more solid CMS than Atavist, it could mean that Automattic wants to start offering subscriptions and paywalls. You can imagine WordPress.com websites that offer monthly subscriptions natively.

30 percent of the web runs on WordPress. Many of them are open source instances of WordPress hosted on their own servers. But many websites are hosted by WordPress.com, including TechCrunch.

Subscriptions on WordPress.com is good news for the web. Medium abruptly canceled its subscription program leaving many independent publications in the dust. So it’s hard to trust Medium when it comes to providing enough revenue to independent writers.

Automattic could create a seamless portal to manage subscriptions to multiple publications. And this could lead to less advertising and better content.

from TechCrunch