Companies

FinCompare, the German fintech startup that offers a comparison platform for SME financing, has closed €10 million in Series A funding. The round is led by ING Ventures, the venture capital arm of dutch bank ING. The company’s previous backers Speedinvest, and UNIQA Ventures also followed on.

The comparison site currently only operates in Germany and since entering the market in February 2017 says it has attracted more than 2,500 customers and has processed more than one billion Euros. The new capital will be used by FinCompare to invest in its IT platform, including expanding the team, and for further European expansion.

The FinCompare platform itself follows a pretty traditional price comparison model, letting small to medium-sized businesses find, compare and even close a variety of financing options such as credit, leasing, factoring and finetrading. The products on offer are from more than 200 banks, alternative financial service providers, and development banks online.

The comparison platform claims to be independent, even if — like most comparison sites — FinCompare receives a kick back for any brokered loan or other financing solution in the form of commission from its financing partners. The fintech is also keen to talk up its independence in light of backing from ING Ventures, noting that remaining neutral in terms of the products it pushes is essential for any comparison platform.

ING’s investment in FinCompare is being positioned as part of the bank’s wider digitalization strategy: “ING Ventures was founded with the aim to invest in fintechs who establish a unique customer experience. Further, the investment in FinCompare enables us to expand our presence in the SME-segment in Germany,” says Benoit Legrand, CEO of ING Ventures.

Legrand also says the German SME industry is among the most attractive in Europe. “Here we can set incentives together with FinCompare and make life easier for businesses. This investment helps ING in the implementation of the bank’s strategy to become the market-leading platform for financing needs,” he adds.

Meanwhile, I understand FinCompare’s planned European expansion will see it eye up the german speaking markets of Austria and Switzerland during the next few months. Netherlands and Poland are also on the list, along with the U.K. “We are planning to launch in the U.K. in 2019, perhaps even through an acquisition,” FinCompare founder and CEO Stephan Heller tells me. Competitors in the U.K. include Fundingoptions, and Capitalise.

from TechCrunch

Locus, a three-year-old startup that helps companies map out their logistics, has pulled in $4 million in funding to grow its global footprint outside of its native India.

The round is described as pre-Series B and it was provided by Rocketship.vc, Recruit Strategic Partners, pi Ventures and DSP Group’s Hemendra Kothari. Existing backers Blume Ventures, Exfinity Venture Partners, BeeNext and growX ventures also took part. Bengaluru-based Locus previously raised a $2.75 million Series A in 2016.

The company was founded in 2015 by Nishith Rastogi and Geet Garg, two ex Amazon engineers who met when working on machine learning for AWS. Initially the duo developed a safety app that mapped out optimal routes to let a ride-hailing customer sense if their driver was going rogue and not sticking to the designated trip, but it later pivoted into logistics tracking after feedback from enterprise users.

Today, Locus is focused on helping customers optimize the operational side of their logistics, whether that is moving people, goods or more at scale. It doesn’t cover ride-hailing and it isn’t necessarily focused on ensuring the faster route. Instead, it tackles complex challenges such as helping FCMGs optimize travel for their management — the key focus being on spending as much time in stores for meetings — or helping organizations move large orders by figuring out how many trucks are needed, which routes are optimal, etc.

Co-founder and CEO Rastogi described the role as that of “chief supply chain officer.”

“We want to automate all human decisions around logistics,” he explained to TechCrunch in an interview, adding that the business makes use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to suss out routes and operational approaches.

He added that the machine-based approach can trump human logic in some cases, thanks to the sheer amounts of data it is based on. In one example, he explained how the Locus system had advised trucks taking a long haul trip to return to the client HQ using a different route. Initially the team figured there was a problem, but on closer inspection they found that the return route cut out a steep hill which, while fine to travel down on the outbound led, was best avoided on the return trip.

That decision, Rastogi said, was based on travel data that the system had observed and might not ordinarily have been made by human-based analysts. To help with the system, the company also provides a $500-priced scanner — “SizeUp,” pictured below — for measuring packages. The idea is to not only make the tech portable but affordable enough that it can be used companies of all sizes.

The company began to expand to overseas markets this year with moves into North America — both Canada and the U.S. — and Southeast Asia. Rastogi said the new capital will go towards expanding its presence in those markets. Later this year, he said, Locus plans to raise a “significant” Series B round, among the objectives for that is a dedicated technical team in Tel Aviv to complement the work happening in India.

from TechCrunch

The upstarts of crypto aren’t just aiming to disrupt the startup status quo, some are rivaling traditional venture capital investors, too. That’s particularly evident today after Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange based on daily trade volumes, announced a $1 billion fund to back blockchain and crypto startups.

The ‘Community Influence’ fund, which will be denominated in Binance’s BNB coin, will be aimed at nascent startups and also funds themselves, Ella Zhang — who heads the Binance Labs division — revealed today in an online web broadcast held today in Chinese. For fund of funds investments as an LP, Binance is looking to back funds with at least $100 million in capital and, of course, a focus on blockchain and crypto.

The firm will also launch a Binance Ecosystem Fund which it said will include 20 partners. A Binance spokesperson told TechCrunch that further details of both initiatives will be released soon.

Data from Coinmarketcap.com ranks Binance as the world’s most active crypto exchange, with over $5 billion of crypto traded in the past 24 hours hours at the time of writing. The company calls Hong Kong home but it is in process of relocating to Malta, where it has been welcomed by regulators after it was forced out of Japan when regulators cracked down on its business.

This isn’t Binance’s first run at investment, it has already made deals via its Labs division, which was unveiled earlier this year and is described by Zhang as a “social impact fund.” It led a $30 million investment in MobileCoin — a startup that’s advised by Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of encrypted messaging app Signal and Open Whisper Systems — and it is establishing an incubator that will nurture ideas and young projects with financial backing and mentorship.

The company revealed today that its first incubation project will be Dache Chain, a new blockchain-based ride-hailing service in China. The company is already getting hype because one co-founder is Chen Weixing, the CEO of app development startup Funcity who initially founded Kuaidi Dache, a Chinese ride-hailing startup that eventually became Didi Chuxing, the country’s dominant service that forced Uber’s exit from China.

“This project will utilize blockchain technology to redesign the relationship between the interests and power of entrepreneur, labors, consumers, investors, and organizers. Dache Chain will establish a community ecosystem with value anchoring, and it is expected to achieve a pure shared ecosystem and solve the problem of unfair distribution of productivity and wealth,” Binance said in a statement.

Binance also revealed that, besides MobileCoin, it has made investments in smart contract startup Oasis Labs, verification service Certik, and crowdfunding platform Republic.

This initiative is another example of a major crypto company using its wealth to become an investor and grow its platform through deals with younger companies. I wrote about the trend earlier this year, and since then we’ve seen some notable vehicles emerge including the Ethereum Community Fund, Ripple’s Xpring initiative and EOS-creator Block One’s $1 billion commitment, which has birthed multiple funds that cover some $600 million.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

from TechCrunch

Box announced today that it has purchased Progressly, a Redwood City startup that focuses on workflow. All 12 Progressly employees will be joining Box immediately. They did not disclose the purchase price.

If you follow Box, you probably know the company announced a workflow tool in 2016 called Box Relay along with a partnership with IBM to sell it inside large enterprises. Jeetu Patel, chief product officer at Box says Relay is great for well defined processes inside a company like contract management or employee on-boarding, but Box wanted to expand on that initial vision to build more complex workflows. The Progressly team will help them do that.

Patel said that the company has heard from customers, especially in larger, more complex organizations, that they need a similar level of innovation on the automation side that they’ve been getting on the content side from Box.

“One of the things that we’ve done is to continue investing in partnerships around workflow with third parties. We have actually gone out and built a product with Relay. But we wanted to continue to make sure that we have an enhancement to our internal automation engine within Box itself. And so we just made an acquisition of a company called Progressly,” Patel told TechCrunch.

That should allow Box to build workflows that not only run within Box, but ones that can integrate and intersect with external workflow engines like Pega and Nintex to build more complex automation in conjunction with the Box set of tools and services. This could involve both internal employees and external organizations and moving content through a much more sophisticated workflow than Box Relay provides.

“What we wanted to do is just make sure that we double down in the investment in workflow, given the level of appetite we’ve seen from the market for someone like Box providing a solution like this,” Patel explained.

By buying Progressly, they were able to acquihire a set of employees who have a focussed understanding of workflow and can help continue to build out that automation engine and incorporate it into the Box platform. Patel says how they could monetize all of this is still open to discussion. For now, the Progressly team is already in the fold and product announcements based on this acquisition could be coming out later this year.

Progressly was founded in 2014 and was headquarted right down the street from Box in Redwood City. The company has raised $6 million, according to data on Crunchbase.

from TechCrunch

If you’ve ever been in a pointless meeting at work, odds are you’ve spent part of the time responding to messages or just putzing around on the Internet — but Klaxoon hopes to convert that into something a bit more productive with more interactive meetings.

The French startup today said it’s raised $50 million in a new financing round led by Idinvest Partners, with early round investors BPI, Sofiouest, Arkea and White Star Capital Fund also participating. The company offers a suite of tools designed to make those meetings more engaging and generally just cut down on useless meetings with a room of bored and generally unengaged people that might be better off working away at their desk or even taking other meetings. The company has raised about $55.6 million in total.

The whole point of Klaxoon is to make meetings more engaging, and there are a couple ways to do that. The obvious point is to translate what some classrooms are doing in the form of making the whole session more engaging with the use of connected devices. You might actually remember those annoying clickers in classrooms used to answer multiple choice questions throughout a session, but it is at least one way to engage people in a room — and offering a more robust way of doing that may be something that helps making the session as a whole more productive.

Klaxoon also offers other tools like an interactive whiteboard (remember Smartboards, also in classrooms?) as well as a closed networks for meeting participants that aims to be air-gapped from a broader network so those employees can conduct a meeting in private or if the room isn’t available. All this is wrapped together with a set of analytics to help employees — or managers — better conduct meetings and generally be more productive. All this is going to be more important going forward as workplaces become more distributed, and it may be tempting to just have a virtual meeting on one screen while either working on a different one — or just messing around on the Internet.

Of course, lame meetings are a known issue — especially within larger companies. So there are multiple interpretations of ways to try to fix that problem, including Worklytics — a company that came out of Y Combinator earlier this year — that are trying to make teams more efficient in general. The idea is that if you are able to reduce the time spent in meetings that aren’t really productive, that’ll increase the output of a team in general. The goal is not to monitor teams closely, but just find ways to encourage them to spend their time more wisely. Creating a better set of productivity tools inside those meetings is one approach, and that’s what Klaxoon seems to hope is the one that plays out.

from TechCrunch

Scout.fm wants to change the way people listen to podcasts. Instead of scouring through the over 500,000 available shows available in your current podcast app, this startup’s new curated podcast service will just ask you a few questions to find out what you like, then create a podcast station customized to you. The experience is primarily designed for use on smart speakers, like Amazon’s Alexa-powered Echo devices, but is also available as iOS and Android applications.

The company was founded just over a year ago by Cara Meverden (CEO), previously of Google, Twitter, Indiegogo, and Medium; along with Saul Carlin (President and COO), previously Head of Publisher Development at Medium, and before that, Politico; and Daniel McCartney, (CTO) previously an engineer at GrubHub, Klout and Medium.

At Medium, Meverden explains, they saw an explosion of people creating great written content; but now those publishers had begun to create great audio content, as well.

But unlike on Medium, which helps to guide readers to topics they like, people today have to seek out new podcasts for themselves. Scout.fm wants to offer a better system, and hopefully bring more listeners to podcasts as a result.

“We want to take podcast listening mainstream,” she says. “We think the key to that is making podcasts as easy to listen to as the radio – and we think that’s even more critically important, as we enter the smart speaker era.” 

The Scout.fm service began as a series of experiments on Alexa.

The company launched over 30 Alexa skills, including a “Game of Thones”-themed podcast radio that was popular while the show was airing on HBO. The goal was to test what worked, what topics and formats drew listeners, and gain feedback through calls-to-action to participate in user surveys.

The result is Scout.fm, a curated podcast service that’s personalized to your listening preferences – and one that improves over time.

Here’s how it works on the Alexa platform. You first launch the app by saying “Alexa, open Scout.fm.” The app will respond (using a human voice actor’s voice, not Alexa’s) by explaining briefly what Scout.fm does then asks you to choose one of three types of talk radio stations: “Daily news, brain food, or true stories.”

The first is a news station, similar to Alexa’s “Flash Briefing;” the second, “brain food,” focuses on other interesting and informative content, that’s not day-to-day news; and the last is a true crime podcast station.

The voice app will then ask you a few more questions as part of this setup process to find out what other subjects appeal to you by having you respond, on a scale of one to ten, how much of a history buff you are, or how much you’re interested in culture, like art, film and literature, for example.

On subsequent launches, the app will simply ask if you want to return to your “Brain Food” (or other selected) station. If you say no, you can try one of the other options.

However, once the setup process is over, the experience becomes very much like listening to talk radio.

A podcast will begin playing – Scout.fm favors those without ads at the very beginning – allowing you to listen as long as you’d like, or say “next” to move to the next one. Each new podcast episodes has a brief, spoken introduction that Scout.fm handwrites, so you know what’s coming up. Your listening can go on for hours, offering you a hands-free means of switching podcasts and discovering new favorites.

The app will also adjust to your preferences over time, removing those you tend to skip – much like how the thumbs down works on Pandora.

Scout.fm doesn’t include every podcast that’s out there. Instead, it’s a curated selection of a few hundred with high production values, narrative storytelling and tight editing.

“So if we listen to something and the two co-hosts kind of go on for half an hour at the beginning, that’s not a great podcast for this format,” Meverden says. “We want shows where they’re going to get right into it. That right away limits things, but there’s still an abundance of content.”

For example, some of the podcasts Scout.fm includes come from The Wall St. Journal, The New York Times, ESPN, and podcast networks like Gimlet, Wondery, Parcast and others.

The same curated selection of podcasts is also available in Scout.fm’s mobile apps for iOS and Android, which work with the voice assistant on the phone. (For example, you can tap your AirPods to wake Siri then say “Next” to move between podcasts.)

“If you’re jogging, our apps are an excellent companion because you don’t have to go back to your phone and try to find a new thing to listen to,” notes Meverden.

Since Scout.fm’s launch, it has accrued 1.5 million minutes listened across its network of experimental apps ahead of today’s public debut. The Alexa user base listened for twice as long as mobile users.

Currently, the service is not generating revenue, but, in the future, the team envisions call-to-action ads that could work with the Alexa app to share more information about the products, as well as ways it could utilize the newer in-app purchase mechanisms for Alexa skills.

The company is backed by $1.4M in seed funding from Bloomberg Beta, Precursor Ventures, Advancit and #Angels.

“The Scout team’s unique insight is that podcasts, no matter how good, won’t go mainstream until it is much simpler for consumers to find and listen to the content that’s right for them,” said Charles Hudson, managing partner at Precursor Ventures, in a statement about the investment. “The fast adoption of smart speakers changes this. We can open up podcasts to an entirely new audience,” he said.

Scout.fm is available on Alexa, iOS and Android.

from TechCrunch

Neighborhood Goods, a startup rethinking the traditional department store experience, is announcing that it has raised $5.75 million in seed funding.

Co-founder and CEO Matt Alexander told me via email that while the largely static layout and offerings of a department store provide a degree “consistency and reliability,” they’re also “dull and unchanging,” as well as “fairly transactional with little more to provide.”

So instead, Neighborhood Goods will allow around 15 brands to create their own “activations,” each highlighting the aesthetic and products that the brands choose. (Bulletin is another startup looking to bring a pop up approach to traditional retail.) The store will also have a restaurant and bar, and communal spaces that could be used for things like speaking events or art installations.

“At Neighborhood Goods, we’re creating something more social and communal around an ever-changing landscape of products,” Alexander said, later adding, “Neighborhood Goods ostensibly takes the polish and approachability of the typical department store, but combines it with the dynamism and community of a pop-up store or pop-up marketplace.”

He also said technology will play a big role in the experience — particularly with an iOS app that will allow customers to learn more about the brands, text the staff, have products brought to them and make purchases.

The funding was led by Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Maveron, CAA Ventures, Global Founders Capital, NextGen Venture Partners, Dollar Shave Club founder Michael Dubin and Retail Connection co-founder Alan P. Shor (who’s also joining the board of directors).

“Community and emotional connection are a big part of what drives consumer spending — something Matt and [co-founder Mark Masinter] understand wholeheartedly,” said Forerunner’s Kirsten Green in the funding announcement. “The delicate balance of both experience and discovery is reshaping the retail industry as shoppers crave brands that are unique and worth getting excited over.”

Neighborhood Goods plans to open its first location — a 13,000-square-foot store in Plano, Texas — this fall. Asked why he chose Plano, Alexander said:

Specifically, we’re able to tap into an aggressive consumer market, whilst bringing brands closer to exceptional customers. And we’re able to do so without the brands having to invest exorbitant amounts, hiring extensive retail teams, or developing marketing initiatives from the ground-up in new markets … That’s not to say we won’t look at markets like LA, NY, and SF in future, but, as a launchpad for a new concept, Plano is uniquely good for us today.

from TechCrunch

Fresh from agreeing its largest acquisition to date with a deal to buy European payment firm iZettle for $2.2 billion, PayPal is on the investment hunt once again after it backed India’s Pine Labs with a $125 million round.

The financing jointly comes from PayPal and Temasek, the sovereign investment fund from the Singaporean government with over $200 billion in assets. Both will take undisclosed “minority shares” in Pine Labs. Sequoia made a seed investment in 2009 and it remains the startup’s largest-single investor, the VC firm said.

The new deal takes New Delhi-based Pine Labs to $208 million raised from investors to date. It previously closed an $82 million investment from PE funds Actis and Altimeter Capital in March of this year at a reported valuation of $900 million. Recent reports speculated on the Temasek investment (but not PayPal) which would give Pine Labs a valuation of over $1 billion, thus vaulting it into the global ‘unicorn’ club. A spokesperson declined to give a confirmed valuation for the latest deal.

Like iZettle, Pine Labs offers a point-of-sale device that covers debit and credit cards, as well as new and increasingly popular digital payment methods that include mobile wallets, and services that support Indian government project UPI. Rather than other traditional POS devices that are common across India, Pine Labs’ is smart and cloud-based.

While that product gives it distribution, the company offers a suite of services for retailers and SMEs which include customer analytics, a transaction dashboard, and loan services. The company’s notable public-facing clients include retailer Croma, Nike, McDonald’s, Apple, KFC, Sony and Samsung.

Since that last investment in March, there’s been a change at the top. Pine Labs appointed board member Vicky Bindra, a former executive with Visa, MasterCard and GE Capital, as its CEO in April to go after international expansion and new services for consumers and banks. That’s also how this new capital will be spent, the company confirmed in an announcement.

In a statement, Bindra said Pine Lab’s annualized transaction volume is $15 billion through a base of around 300,000 payment points. He added that the business is “on track to originate over $1 billion USD of instant loans at point-of-sale terminals for card issuers and partner NBFCs this fiscal year.”

“We’re teaming up with Temasekand PayPal at a time when the Indian payments market is at an inflexion point. We are a leader in the offline payments space, a position that is critical in enabling the ecosystem of online payment products. The investments will help us move a step closer to our vision for building a world-class merchant-centric payments ecosystem,” Pine Labs founder Lokvir Kapoor added via a statement.

from TechCrunch

While coding bootcamps may be in the middle of a shakeout, technology companies around the world are still going to be struggling to fill slots with people equipped with the skills to tackle real-world problems right from the get-go — and Dan Sommer hopes the answer is through universities.

That’s the premise behind Trilogy Education, which today said it is raising another $50 million round after raising $30 million last year. This round is led by Highland Capital Partners, with participation from new investorsDan Sommer and Macquarie Group. The company works with around 35 universities to identify skills gaps that they can fill with programs — such as through continuing education — that can get students ready to work at a variety of technology companies right away. Throughout all this, the startup works to collect data and feedback on each course and tune it as workforce needs change over time.

“The mission of these institutions through these programs is to open access to new types of learning,” Sommer said. “The average age of the student that takes one of these programs is approximately 32. We have students in classes that are 19 and some that are 76. If you zoom out and you think about the transformation that’s happening overall in the workforce, and you think about the number of open positions in the areas, that’s where we focused. I believe universities are the place where individuals should go to learn new skills.”

All this is increasingly relevant as tasks that machine learning-driven tools can tackle — such as autonomous driving — may end up displacing millions of jobs and requiring those individuals to learn a new set of skills in order to find some new employment. Companies are internally recognizing that in some ways, such as through tools like Degreed, which look to help employers identify those same skills gaps and find ways to train their own employees to fulfill those more complex knowledge worker roles. Degreed raised $42 million earlier this year, and there are still other programs like MissionU (which raised $8.5 million late last year) looking to rethink education as the tech economy booms.

Still, there has indeed been a shakeout in the coding bootcamp world. Whether a product of just not keeping up with workforce demands or struggling business models, there have been several that have shut down. Galvanize in August last year said it would lay off around 11% of its staff, while Dev Bootcamp and Iron Yard shut down altogether. And for some employers, all it takes is a few bad interviews from one of those bootcamps to lay down a layer of pessimism across the board, depending on who you talk to out here in the Valley.

That may be why Trilogy Education is partnering directly with universities. By doing that and running the programs through those universities, it can piggyback on the substantial brand equity they’ve built up over time. Trilogy Education says it gathers feedback from each class — either through surveys or other data points — and uses that to provide its university partners with robust reports on ways to tune the model and what specific roles to go after for potential programs. Trilogy Education works with programs in UI/UX, data analytics and visualization, cybersecurity and web development. The curriculum itself is developed centrally in Github. The goal here is to ensure that the programs are future-proofed and to “teach students how to learn,” Sommer said.

That software extends to the programs’ connections with students as well. Trilogy Education helps track student performance, helping universities identify which students might be falling behind and need additional tutoring. For students that are outperforming, it helps connect them with the resources to progress even faster and potentially begin teaching some elements themselves as a way to acquire additional soft skills in addition to the core program.

“The sincerest sign of learning is when a student that has learned Angular in class all of the sudden builds a portfolio project in React,” he said. “We’re focused on teaching people how to learn more so than teaching people how to learn any particular technology or skill. We’ve made over 7,000 changes to the curriculum over the last 3 years. It’s truly a piece of software, it changes over time. We bring in a market-driven curriculum fully vetted through the institution.”

from TechCrunch

New York-based chore wizard Hello Alfred is about expand its mission to make life easier, one to-do list at a time. The company commands a small army of thoroughly trained home helpers who take care of domestic tasks like sorting mail, taking out the trash and picking up groceries. Those helpers pop by on a weekly basis, and subscribers pay a monthly subscription fee to free their lives of little things that tend to add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Now, with a new $40 million Series B round, Hello Alfred is set to scale. The round was led by investors including real estate developers Divco West and Invesco. Spark Capital and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) also participated in the $40 million round after previously investing in the company. The company won our Startup Battlefield at Disrupt in 2014, back when it was just “Alfred .”

With its Series B, Hello Alfred will execute its plan to expand from serving 10,000 homes (some in Alfred partnered apartment buildings) to serving 100,000 by the end of the year. The company also intends to invest further in its technology data operations and its own line of home goods, known as Alfred Home Essentials.

Hello Alfred began in New York and currently operates in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Boston, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Chicago and Los Angeles with planned launches in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Miami, Portland, Raleigh and San Jose on the horizon. The company also intends to double the size of its team in 2018 while continuing to expand partnerships with vendors and products and real estate developers that fit its brand.

While many startups work to to automate away the human aspect of their business, Hello Alfred is all about the human touch. Instead of relying on contractors à la TaskRabbit or so many other services in the on-demand economy, Hello Alfred’s “Home Managers” are all full-time W-2 employees. Those workers get to know their clients, developing familiarity that ideally leads to even better hospitality over time.

Another thing that sets Hello Alfred apart: It’s profitable. The company opted to scale slowly, paying employee salary out of the profits it’s been generating since launch. With investors interested and a sustainable business model that could do without them anyway, Hello Alfred seems to be hitting its stride.

from TechCrunch