Author: Thomas Crown

Founded in 2010 as an online loyalty card service, Punchh has since grown into a marketing platform serving more than 115 restaurant chains, including Pizza Hut and Quiznos. Now it’s raised a $20 million Series B to expand into more retail verticals and increase the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in its cloud software. The funding was led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from returning investor Cervin Ventures.

Along with its angel and Series A financing, this brings Punchh’s total funding so far to about $31 million. The startup says its goal is to give brick-and-mortar stores the same level of data analytics as e-commerce giants like Amazon.

Punchh’s platform enables restaurants to digitize their customer loyalty programs and complements that with tools like Punchh Acquire, which is designed to help businesses turn casual customers into regulars by promoting offers through multiple channels, including email, SMS, social media, Apple Pay and eClub.

The company currently has 145 employees and is based in San Mateo, California, with offices in Austin, Texas and Delhi. This is Punchh’s first funding announcement in three years and the startup’s largest round of financing by far (it raised $9.5 million Series A in 2015).

Co-founder and chief executive officer Shyam Rao says the time was right for Punchh to raise again because it already serves many of the biggest restaurant chains, with 34,000 locations between them, and wanted to tap into demand from retailers in other verticals.

Punchh is now focusing on convenience stores, gas stations and health and beauty brands (clients already include Fantastic Sams hair salons and TruFusion, a chain of fitness studios). The company competes with other digital loyalty and marketing platforms like Stamp Me, LoyalZoo and Stocard. Rao says Punchh’s ability to create campaigns that target a very specific audience sets it apart from rivals. Punchh’s algorithms pulls together data from several sources, including event calendars, weather, local demographics and the purchasing history of individual customers, for what it describes as “micro-moment marketing.”

For example, if cold weather is expected over a holiday weekend, it might send offers for a discounted hot soup and tea set to mothers between the ages of 30 to 55. Punchh claims it increases spending at its customers’ restaurants by 10% to 20%.

“Imagine trying to manage that process of using mountains of data to build customer relationships and tailor every experience, at scale across hundreds of locations. That’s what Punchh does,” says Rao.

In a statement, Jai Das, Sapphire Ventures managing director said “Punchh is already a global leader in digital marketing solutions for restaurants, which alone would be a fantastic reason to invest in the company, but the scope of their technology goes far beyond just restaurants and encompasses all brick-and-mortar stores with a POS.”

from TechCrunch

East Meet East, a New York-based matchmaking service focused on connecting Asian people in the U.S., is expanding its focus to go after dating opportunities in Asia after it raised a $4 million Series A funding round.

The money comes from existing backer 500 Startups and new investors Asahi Medialab Ventures, DG Lab Fund (a joint effort from Japan’s Digital Garage and Daiwa Securities), Mobile Internet Capital, internet ad firm Septeni. The startup previously raised $1 million in November 2016.

East Meet Eat CEO Mariko Tokioka told TechCrunch in an interview that the company is testing a service in the Philippines with a view to expanding across other Southeast Asian markets, which could potentially include Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia. The immediate next step would be a fuller launch in the Philippines — which was selected due to its close following of U.S. culture — with the potential for local offices to open in the region further down the line.

Unlike its core product in the U.S. — which matches Asian men and women; men pay but women use the service for free — East Meet East’s Southeast Asia -based offshoot is aimed at matching people of all races, hence it is called West East Dating.

“Matching Asian people in North America is still our main product, but 60 percent of the world’s population is in Asia so in order for us to become a much bigger company and help more people find their life partner, it makes sense to enter Asia,” Tokioka explained to TechCrunch.

Beyond the expansion, the company is also working to enable smarter matching. That’s where DG Lab Fund — which is backed by well-known Japanese firm Digital Garage, which has worked with the likes of Twitter and Square — comes into play.

DG Lab is developing an artificial intelligence engine in partnership with companies — a number of which it has invested in — and East Meet East is among those that signed up to provide data that enables the AI engine to learn and develop. (Tokioka pointed out that data is anonymized when we raised the question.)

So, essentially, DG Lab gets more data to crunch to build its smarts, and East Meet East gets an enhanced AI system that will help its product work better for users, in theory at least.

“Matching and AI are undoubtedly a natural fit. Users are constantly acting and interacting on the matching platform, which provides an abundance of data for Love.AI to refine its learning,” DG Lab Fund partner Masahito Okuma said in a statement.

from TechCrunch

Billie, a New York-based startup that wants to fight the “pink tax” on goods marketed to women, announced today that it has closed a $6 million seed round. The funding was led by Silverton Partners, with participation from returning investors including Female Founders Fund and Lakehouse Ventures, and will be used to grow Billie’s team and increase inventory.

Launched in November by co-founders Georgina Gooley and Jason Bravman, Billie currently offers subscriptions for razors and other body products like shaving cream, body wash and lotion. The two told TechCrunch in an email that Billie was created because “shaving companies have traditionally been created for men and women have largely been an afterthought in this category.”

While many services and products aimed at women, including clothing, haircuts and essential toiletries, are often more expensive than similar (or even near-identical) goods marketed to men, razors and dry cleaning are “the two worst offenders,” said Gooley and Bravman. The price difference between razors is especially egregious because most use blades made by the same types of machines.

But many women already save money by buying “men’s” razors or using the Dollar Shave Club, the popular low-priced razor subscription service acquired by Unilever in 2016 for a reported $1 billion, so what does Billie offer them?

The startup’s founders say its razors, which were designed specifically for the company, shave larger areas more comfortably then razors designed just for facial hair, but still cost about the same as men’s razor subscriptions. Billie’s blade cartridges have rounded edges to fit in areas like armpits and are encased in shaving soap since shaving cream rinses off too quickly in the shower. There is also more space between each cartridge’s five blades to keep hair and lather from gunking it up. In addition to the Dollar Shave Club, Billie is up against Oui Shave, another women’s shaving product startup. Billie’s founders say one of its main differentiators will be offering much lower prices than its rivals.

In a prepared statement, Silverton Partners general partner Mike Dodd, who is joining Billie’s board, said the startup is “standing in front of a huge untapped market driven by two outstanding founders who have created a brand that speaks perfectly to this opportunity.”

from TechCrunch

WeWork is buying up one of its largest competitors in China after it announced a deal to acquire Naked Hub.

The deal was widely reported by Chinese media yesterday, but WeWork has now confirmed it through a blog post from its CEO Adam Neumann. Terms of the transaction are not disclosed but Bloomberg reported that it is worth around $400 million.

Naked Hub is an offshoot of China-based luxury resort company Naked Group that was started in 2015 by Grant Horsfield and Delphine Yip-Horsfield. The company is primarily anchored in China, with most of its locations in Beijing and Shanghai, but it has expanded into Australia, Hong Kong and Vietnam. All told, it claims to have 10,000 members across its 24 office locations.

Even though a deal to merge with Singapore-based JustCo was called off, Naked Hub had emerged as one of WeWork’s fiercest competitors in China with the ambition to continue that battle in Southeast Asia and other markets, as I wrote last year.

WeWork isn’t commenting at this point about how it plans to integrate the two brands, but its CEO Neumann paid tribute to the Naked Hub business.

“We have found an equal who shares our thinking about the importance of space, community, design, culture, and technology. Together, I believe we will have a profound impact in helping businesses across China grow, scale, and succeed,” he wrote.

“China-born naked Hub and WeWork may come from vastly different backgrounds, but there is more that binds us than separates us. The values we share toward creating a vibrant community for our members by using design, technology, and hospitality are core to how both companies are successful,” said Horsfield, Naked Group’s founder and chairman.

Naked Hub may be a growing threat to WeWork China, but it is far from the only major competitor. Unicorn Ucommune — which changed its name from URwork following a lawsuit from WeWork — is perhaps the largest profile Chinese challenger.

WeWork launched in China in 2016 via Shanghai. Today it said it has 13 locations in Greater China with plans to increase that to more than 40 by the end of this year. That’s a move that it said will quadruple its membership numbers in China from 10,000 to 40,000.

The deal is WeWork’s second acquisition of a competitor in Asia, its first being a deal to buy SpaceMob, a then 1.5-year-old company in Singapore, last year.

The company has been lining its pockets to fuel a big push into Asia.

Last year, the firm span out a WeWork China entity backed by $500 million from investors, while capital also went to WeWork Japan — a unit that investor SoftBank owns half of — and WeWork Pacific, its business focused on Southeast Asia and other parts of the region which also got a $500 million to spend. All of that capital was part of a $4.4 billion investment round in WeWork from SoftBank.

from TechCrunch

Cluno, a startup operating out of Munich that offers what it calls a “car subscription” service, has raised €7 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Acton Capital Partners, with participation from previous investor Atlantic Labs.

Founded in 2017 by the same team behind easyautosale, which exited to Autoscout24 in 2015, Cluno lets you subscribe to a car for a fixed and all-inclusive monthly fee as an alternative to car ownership or a more restrictive lease. It’s a similar proposition to Drover, the London startup that raised £5.5 million ‘seed’ funding last month.

“Our vision is to give people smarter access to unrestricted, personalised mobility,” says Cluno co-founder Nico Polleti. “We still see a lot of people who want to have their car in front of their home every day. But in a smarter way than today! Carsharing is not the answer for the mass market. That’s why car subscription or smart ownership solutions will completely change the way people get access to everyday mobility”.

The Cluno service works as follows: You visit the Cluno website and choose the vehicle you want to subscribe to for a minimum period of six months. You then pay a setup fee, and a fixed monthly fee dependent on the model you have chosen, which covers the vehicle, insurance, breakdown cover, tax, and maintenance. The idea is that the only cost you are left with is fuel. You are also free to upgrade or downgrade your car after six months or can pause/cancel the subscription altogether.

“Why do customers have to buy, finance or lease a car for several years?” asks Polleti rhetorically. “People’s lives and needs change and so should their cars. We take care of the whole process… Our customers subscribe and get a car “ready-to-drive” and home delivered”.

To that end, Polleti cites the startup’s main competition as “buying, financing or leasing a car,” and says that typical Cluno customers have usually considered traditional ways of accessing a car. “Then they find us and see the huge advantage of flexibility and an all-inclusive rate. I think, that’s the big difference and main reason to choose a Cluno car,” he says.

Dr. Christoph Braun, Managing Partner at Acton Capital, echoes this sentiment, noting that the notion of mobility is changing, and argues that technologies such as electric vehicles or self-driving cars will no longer be bought or leased in the traditional way.

“In just a few months, Cluno has created an attractive car subscription model that makes these new technologies easily accessible. While traditional leasing offerings are characterised by rigid contracts and lack of transparency, Cluno relies on a flexible model, digital-first customer experience with transparent all-inclusive pricing,” he says.

from TechCrunch