Author: Thomas Crown

Sinovation Ventures, one of China’s prominent funds which is helmed by former Google China head Kaifu Lee, has announced a new investment fund that’s targeted at a total raise of $900 million.

This newest fund is the firm’s fourth, and it promises to be its largest to date. Sinovation is a little different from other firms in that it raises its fund using one U.S. dollar vehicle and another in Chinese RMB to give founders currency options, one of its competitive advantages.

The firm confirmed today that it has closed the $500 million USD fund, and it has kicked off the process to raise an additional 2.5 billion yuan, or around $400 million, in Chinese currency to round out this new vehicle.

The addition of that U.S. capital means it now has $1.7 billion under management across six funds, four of which are in U.S. dollars and two are Chinese RMB.

The firm has invested in over 300 companies, some of which include Meitu (Hong Kong IPO), bike sharing startup Mobike (which sold to Meituan this month), AI firm Face++, English language learning service VIPKid and crypto mining giant Bitmain.

Lee has made his mark in many ways, but in recent years he’s become recognized as an authority on artificial intelligence, both on tracking promising companies in the space and looking into the future at where the tech is headed. So it isn’t a huge surprise that this new fund is heavily focused on what the firm sees as the huge opportunity for AI, as well education and robotics.

The focus on deals is at seed and Series A stage, and, while Sinovation operates in the U.S., it is strongest in the Chinese market.

“The investment ratio is probably 90 percent China,” Lee — Sinovation’s chairman and a managing partner — told TechCrunch in an interview. “We think we have a unique offering in the U.S. because we can help our companies into China to combine the best of the U.S. and China, but to be frank we are a long way from being considered a tier-one investor in the U.S. We have a ways to go.”

Lee previously spoke of his firm’s then-new fund at TechCrunch’s Beijing event in 2016

Investing in AI

One major factor that does separate Sinovation from other VCs is that Lee and co aren’t just putting money into AI, they are walking the walk, too. The firm created its own AI ‘institute’ last year, and today Lee said it counts around 60 employees of which half are engineers and a quarter are Ph.D. graduates.

It is becoming increasingly common for VC firms to have technical teams in-house, but I’ve not heard of a firm with such a large team. Lee explained that the institute is deployed directly to help portfolio companies and perform due diligence as you’d expect, but it also offers consulting work that brings in revenue for the firm and, by developing IP and experience, it could be used to spin-out future companies.

“We have worked on 15 implementation deals so far, with portfolio companies, potential investments, strategic relationships and purely commercial partners,” Lee explained.

“Nobody knows what the AI product of the future quite looks like, so our approach is to learn more about the needs, partner closely to build domain expertise and develop solution packages that can become products,” he added. “We want to be both a student and a teacher.”

The Sinovation head revealed that a first spin-out company is likely to be announced within the next month, but he declined to give further details at this point.

Lee is more forthcoming on where he sees AI headed, and where the fund is looking to make its mark.

While some major AI startups have blossomed in China — including SenseTime, which recently landed investment led by Alibaba at a valuation of over $4.5 billion, and Sinovation’s own investment Face++ — Lee said that “the AI monoliths haven’t come out yet” even though the early leaders have shown promise in areas like facial recognition.

Enabling education and e-commerce

In particular, he sees a future in which AI solutions are customized and tailored to a longer tail of real-life uses. In China, Lee believes that education and offline retail are two very key areas where AI is poised to have a transformation impact, all of which means there’s vast potential for new companies.

“Autonomous stores and schools aren’t the core strengths [of existing AI companies.] You look at other cases where you need AI and there will be customized solutions, it’s not all about facial recognition, there’s intent, estimation and more. Then you have sensor networks being upgraded and cameras will capture things involving 3D construction,” he said.

“AI will have another decade of application opportunities as the technology matures, while more data is collected and more application areas become feasible over time. We see, for example, autonomous vehicles going from L2 to L4, the use of camera-based tech developing from face recognition to very intelligent autonomous stores, speech recognition developing from speech-to-text to speech-to-meaning, and more.”

Kaifu Lee on stage at TechCrunch Beijing 2016

Lee suggested that, with this new fund, Sinovation could invest in unconventional areas such as retail stores, or educational centers and then “inject” AI into the businesses, as well as capital, to scale their reach.

China’s offline retail push is very real, and a key focus for e-commerce giants like Alibaba and JD.com, which have set up staff-less kiosk projects and made moves to integrate their online services with offline shopping. Alibaba itself has paid out billions to buy pieces of established offline retailers with AI a key component, but Lee sees a gap for enabling smaller players to take advantage of the trend, too.

Education is another area he is bullish on in China, simply because “Chinese parents will pay whatever is needed to advance their child and most only have one child.”

That’s also down to the growth of mobile payment services like Tencent’s WeChat Pay and Alibaba’s Alipay has made buying services easier than ever before but, beyond enabling parents to spend on shopping or educational services, Lee sees wider implications when looking at the rush of “largely middle-aged women (and also men) coming online in smaller cities with the family purse strings.”

“The fact that 700 million people in China can pay each other with no commission, will enable so many business opportunities, essentially it’s a new kind of entrepreneur,” he said.

“Businesses used to require getting a lot of users, making them active and then figuring how to make money later, but now payment is just two buttons away. We’ll see companies profitable in their first year with substantial revenue in their first six months.”

Listening to Lee talk about the future demonstrates why his opinion is so highly respected and it also goes some way to explaining how the firm was able to close the US dollar segment of its largest fund to date at rapid speed.

The firm said that it reached its target commitment from investors within just one month of fundraising. Aside from returning backers, which include a sovereign fund, family offices and a global manufacturer, Sinovation snagged capital from Spanish bank BBVA and an unnamed “leading global automobile corporation” both of which are making their first investments in China through the deal.

from TechCrunch

Fat Lama, the startup that offers a fully insured peer-to-peer rental marketplace for almost anything, is getting a little fatter. The London-based company has raised $10 million in Series A funding in a round led by Ophelia Brown’s recently outed Blossom Capital, with participation from Niklas Zennström’s Atomico and existing backer Y Combinator.

Aiming to do for rentals what eBay did for buying and selling used items, Fat Lama was conceived in early 2016 after the experience its founders had renovating an office space in London. They found themselves spending almost a third of their budget on what co-founder and CEO Chaz Englander describes as “single-use” items that were difficult to rent, such as power tools, tile-cutters, and industrial vacuums.

“The probability was that the majority of those items were lying around unused in the same block we were working in,” he says, “but our only option to hire was to go to a rental shop on the other side of town, during working hours, to pay a premium for commercial hire. That was when we had the first conversations about creating a rental marketplace”.

To enable Fat Lama to have chance of succeeding where older rental startups had failed, the team figured out that a number of problems beyond simply matching supply with demand would need to be solved. Traditional rental companies typically require the borrower to leave quite a large cash deposit in case an item is broken, lost or stolen. Like-wise, equipment-sharing websites that don’t require a deposit can be perceived as too risky for the lender.

Fat Lama’s solution is to fully insure each item rented for an amount up to $30,000, something Englander tells me took nine months to secure and is a major differentiator from competitors. Borrowers are still liable for the full value of an item if they break or lose it, but the insurance will reimburse the lender if there’s a dispute between the borrower and Fat Lama, or if the borrower simply refuses (or can’t) pay. To further manage this risk, Fat Lama requires users to pass identity checks, in addition to employing risk-profiling technology.

“Put simply, we don’t think it makes sense for people to have to buy the things they only use occasionally. And what we’re seeing, whether it’s environmentally or financially driven, is that globally, people are less and less interested in owning things,” says the Fat Lama CEO. “Fat Lama is connecting people with spare stuff to those that need it. By using a combination of risk-profiling technology and insurance, we’re making it not just possible, but safe and seamless, for anyone to have access to almost any item, potentially within minutes”.

There is a community aspect to Fat Lama, too, which is something Englander is keen to protect even as the company scales. Currently lenders and borrowers hand over and collect items in person, where they often share expertise on how to get the most out of an item.

“The breadth of rental categories obviously means that we have an incredibly broad user base in terms of demographics,” he adds.

One obvious demographic is creative professionals, such as DJs, music producers, filmmakers, photographers and art directors, all of whom have “project-driven, often last-minute demands” for niche equipment. “Many are also sitting on big inventories of gear which they rarely use, from which they’re now generating an income in the thousands,” notes Englander.

Meanwhile, after a successful launch in New York earlier this year, including seeing over 6,000 items listed on the site (supply in New York is said to be growing more than three times as fast as it originally did in London), Fat Lama is planning to use the new Series A funding to further grow across the pond. As part of this effort, the U.K. startup is hiring U.S. city managers, as well as investing in its product, engineering and operations teams back in London.

from TechCrunch

Pusher, the London startup that provides tools and cloud infrastructure for developers to add real-time functionality to their apps, such as push notifications and messages, has pulled in $8 million in Series A funding. The round was led by London VC firm Balderton Capital, with participation from Heavybit, the San Francisco-based investor that specialises in helping developer product companies scale.

Founded in 2011 — off the back of a modest $1 million in seed funding — Pusher aims to significantly lower the barriers for developers who want to build real-time features into their websites and apps. This was originally delivered via a general purpose realtime API and supporting cloud infrastructure, enabling app developers to more easily build things like rich push notifications, live content updates, and various real-time collaboration and communication features.

However, more recently the company has began rolling out additional offerings dedicated to specific real-time functionality. The first of those is Chatkit, an API and SDK intended to do a lot of the heavy lifting required to add chat functionality to an app or service.

In a call, Pusher co-founder Max Williams told me the startup’s Series A will be used to continue building new developer products and to establish a bigger presence in the U.S. so that it can be closer to customers.

Pusher already has a small team working out of Heavybit’s San Francisco office, but in line with growth it plans to eventually set up a bigger office on the West Coast and aims to have up to 30 people working in the U.S. by the end of the year. These will be in sales, marketing and customer support.

In addition, a significant amount will be invested in R&D, too, with Pusher’s own London-based engineering team being bolstered accordingly. Pusher currently employs 60 people.

To that end, Williams says that the new capital will enable Pusher to move a lot faster, in recognition that the real-time developer tool space has not only grown exponentially in the last few years but is also becoming more competitive. He feels that for Pusher to fully take advantage of the opportunity ahead, organic growth — and in turn the company growing at the same pace as revenue — wasn’t going to cut it. Prior to this round of funding the startup had only raised $2.5 million in debt in addition to its original $1 million seed round.

Meanwhile, Pusher says that more than 200,000 developers worldwide are using Pusher’s products and more than 40 billion messages per day are now sent using APIs provided by the company, “connecting more than eight billion devices per month”. Customers include The New York Times, which uses Pusher for updating its realtime news feeds; Mailchimp, which uses it for internal collaboration tools; and DraftKings, which uses Pusher for updating its realtime leaderboards.

from TechCrunch

Clark, one of a plethora of so-called ‘insurtech’ startups offering something akin to a digital insurance brokerage all delivered through a convenient mobile app, has closed a hefty $29 million in Series B funding.

The round was led by fintech investor Portag3 Ventures, and VC fund White Star Capital, with participation from a number of existing investors including Coparion, Kulczyk Investments, and Yabeo Capital. It brings Clark’s total funding to $45 million.

Founded in July 2015 — and originally out of fintech company builder Finleap — Frankfurt and Berlin-based Clark has built what it describes as an “insurance­ robo-­advisor”. Once you’ve given the startup a mandate to act as your insurance broker, the Clark iOS, Android and web apps let you manage and purchase various insurance products, spanning the full gamut of life, health, and property insurance.

Specifically, its algorithms analyze your current insurance situation and automatically propose ways to improve your coverage or get a better deal than the one you are currently on. It makes the majority of its revenue from management and admin fees paid by insurance companies on its platform, but also via commission on any new policy taken out.

To date, Clark says it has acquired close to 100,000 customers for its digital insurance services, making it one of the largest digital insurance players in Europe. This, we’re told, translates to $310 million in contract volume, which the insurtech startup says is a ten-fold increase from the contract volume it managed in 2016 at the time of its Series A.

Some of that growth appears to have come from partnerships with a number of banks in Germany, including challenger N26, and incumbents ING-DiBa, and DKB. I’m also told Clark has started working on a B2B line, offering Clark technology to banks and other insurance companies as a white-label product. Four deals with leading companies have been signed and are “in development”.

“Over the next few years, we will continue to focus on growth to cement our digital insurance management as the standard in Europe,” says Dr. Christopher Oster, CEO and co-founder of Clark, in a statement. “To drive Clark’s development, we will invest in our team in both Frankfurt and Berlin, especially in technology and marketing”.

from TechCrunch

Groupon founder Andrew Mason’s audio tour startup Detour has been sold to Bose. The acquisition, which involves only the software and tour content – not the team – was quietly announced on Detour’s blog a few days ago, followed by an email to customers. Bose, initially, seems like an unlikely acquirer for an app designed to help people discover a city through narrated walking tours. But its interest in the product has to do with its upcoming AR platform, which involves audio experiences delivered through a pair of sensor-laden glasses.

Bose is now “actively looking for a partner to host the Detour content,” and make it available to its customers, including those on Bose AR.  The Detour app itself will soon shut down.

Mason says he may help Bose a bit in the process of finding that third party, but his focus is on his new company, Descript.

Detour had launched a few years ago, and was entirely self-funded by Mason. Its goal was to offer tourists and locals alike a way to discover a city’s hidden gems, like its off-the-beaten-track shops and alleys – things other tours would overlook. The service arrived to the public with tours in San Francisco starting in 2015, before later expanding to other markets, including international destinations, all available as in-app purchases.

The app, at the time of sale, had around 120 available tours.

A tour of the Marina’s sweets shops in Detour, narrated by a German philosopher

As part of the creation of its tours, Detour had also developed some interesting technology – like a tool to transcribe audio that lets you edit the audio file by editing the written transcription, and a way to add music and sound to a narrative by adding it to the transcription.

This technology has now been spun off as a new startup, Descript. The Detour team, including Mason, have been working on Descript for around six months now. Descript, which aims to make editing sound files as easy as editing a Word document, launched in December with $5 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz.

Given Mason’s current focus, it’s not surprising that Detour was shutting down. But it is a little surprising it found an acquirer.

The app was never able to gain a sizable following on the scale of other travel guides. (It had been ranking in the 400’s to 700’s in the App Store’s “Travel” category as of late – meaning, practically invisible.) However, its tours were unique and interesting and had been designed with features others at the time lacked – like location awareness or the ability to sync with multiple people in a group, for example.

The Detour app will remain available until May 31, 2018, and all tours will be free through then. Afterwards, the app will be removed from the App Store.

“Thank you to the producers, engineers, designers, and storytellers that made Detour what it is over the last four years. I’m excited to see where Bose takes it,” wrote Mason, on Detour’s blog.

Pitchbook claims Detour had raised funding, but Mason says that’s incorrect.

“Detour is self-funded (by me) and we never disclosed how much,” he says. But he did confirm that Mihir Shah, a friend, had invested a “some token number of thousands of dollars in the very beginning,” which is why the investment is listed on Shah’s LinkedIn.

Deal terms were not available, but it was likely a small exit.

It’s unclear when Detour would arrive on Bose AR, as Bose is still in the process of finding a third party to continue with Detour, and hasn’t yet shipped test builds of its AR glasses to developers.

from TechCrunch

Etleap is a play on words for a common set of data practices: extract, transform and load. The startup is trying to place these activities in a modern context, automating what they can and in general speeding up what has been a tedious and highly technical practice. Today, they announced a $1.5 million seed round.

Investors include First Round Capital, SV Angel, Liquid2, BoxGroup and other unnamed investors. The startup launched five years ago as a Y Combinator company. It spent a good 2.5 years building out the product says CEO and founder Christian Romming. They haven’t required additional funding up until now because they have been working with actual customers. Those include Okta, PagerDuty and Mode among others.

Romming started out at ad tech startup VigLink and while there he encounter a problem that was hard to solve. “Our analysts and scientists were frustrated. Integration of the data sources wasn’t always a priority and when something broke, they couldn’t get it fixed until a developer looked at it.” That lack of control slowed things down and made it hard to keep the data warehouse up-to-date.

He saw an opportunity in solving that problem and started Etleap. While there were (and continue to be) legacy solutions like Informatica, Talend and Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services, he said when he studied these at a deeply technical level, he found they required a great deal of help to implement. He wanted to simplify ETL as much as possible, putting data integration into the hands of much less technical end users, rather than relying on IT and consultants.

One of the problems with traditional ETL is that the data analysts who make use of the data tend to get involved very late after the tools have already been chosen and Romming says his company wants to change that. “They get to consume whatever IT has created for them. You end up with a bread line where analysts are at the mercy of IT to get their jobs done. That’s one of the things we are trying to solve. We don’t think there should be any engineering at all to set up ETL pipeline,” he said.

Etleap is delivered as managed SaaS or you can run it within your company’s AWS accounts. Regardless of the method, it handles all of the managing, monitoring and operations for the customer.

Romming emphasizes that the product is really built for cloud data warehouses. For now, they are concentrating on the AWS ecosystem, but have plans to expand beyond that down the road. “We want help more enterprise companies make better use of their data, while modernizing data warehousing infrastructure and making use of cloud data warehouses,” he explained.

The company is currently has 15 employees, but Romming plans to at least double that in the next 12-18 months, mostly increasing the engineering team to help further build out the product and create more connectors.

from TechCrunch