U.S. job hunting service Glassdoor, which is best known for providing insight into company working cultures, has been acquired for $1.2 billion in cash by Recruit, a $39 billion Japanese corporate that specialises in HR and recruitment services.
Glassdoor raised a total of just over $200 million from investors, with its most recent round a $40 million Series H in March 2016. That last investment gave Glassdoor a valuation of around $1 billion. That’s not a huge amount more than what Recruit is paying, which suggests that the last couple of years haven’t been so spectacular for Glassdoor in terms of growth.
Nonetheless, this deal looks like a win for those backers, particularly the earlier stage investors such as Benchmark and Battery Ventures .
Ten-year-old Glassdoor says it is used by 59 million people each month, many of whom come to the service to read about how companies are rated by the people who work, or worked there. While it is headquartered in the U.S., Glassdoor says it has information on more than 770,000 companies across 190 countries worldwide, including 40 million reviews covering company culture, CEO ratings, salary information and more.
Glassdoor’s revenue comes from recruitment services, and it claims to work with some 7,000 employees and 40 percent of the Fortune 500.
Recruit may not be a well-known name in the U.S. but the Japanese firm is huge, and it is history as a purchaser of overseas businesses.
The firm — which was founded in 1960 — is listed on the Toyko Stock Exchange and it has 45,000 employees across 60 countries.
As Slack looks to woo larger and larger companies with the prospect of a simpler workplace collaboration tool, the company said it has now hit 8 million daily active users.
The company said it also has 3 million paid users. A darling in Silicon Valley, Slack was initially able to capitalize on pent-up demand for workplace communications tools that were much simpler and easy to use. Companies like Yammer, Microsoft, and others looked to remake internal communications in ways that looked more like consumer tools in the Web 2.0 era, but Slack came out with an approach that was initially just a slick chat and team communications tool. That helped it rocket to a $5.1 billion valuation and drive its initial adoption among smaller companies and startups.
Slack in September said it had around 6 million daily active users, 50,000 teams and 2 million paid users, and around $200 million in annual recurring revenue. So it’s a pretty significant jump over the past nine months or so, though the company still has to break from the perception that it’s a tool that’s just good for startups and smaller companies. The larger enterprise deals are the ones that tend to drive larger contracts — and additional revenue — as it looks to build a robust business. More than half of Slack’s users are outside the U.S., a signal that it looks to continue to expand into new regions that may demand tools like Slack beyond just domestic markets.
Slack has been trying to roll out additional tools to support those larger companies, rather than just operate as a chat tool that can get out of control when companies have thousands of employees. The company has invested heavily in machine learning tools to make it easier to search for answers that may already exist in some Slack channel or direct message. Slack also rolled out threads, a long-awaited feature that users often demanded though it wasn’t clear how that would exist in Slack’s simpler interface.
There are already startups looking to pick away at niches that the company might not necessarily fill, too. Slite, a startup looking to build a simpler notes tool that would create a smarter internal wiki of sorts, raised $4.4 million last month. There’s also Atlassian’s Stride, which opened up to developers in February this year. And Microsoft has its own Slack competitor, Teams, that continues to get pretty big updates. Slack clearly exposed a lot of pent-up demand for similar tools, and now faces a lot of competition going forward.
Slack started the Slack Fund as a way to woo developers to build tools for Slack, and early last year invested in 11 new companies. The company has been trying to create a robust ecosystem where developers can fill the niches that the company might be missing, but has looks to focus on its core products. The company says there are now more than 1,500 apps in the Slack directory.
Dreamlines, which claims to be Europe’s largest online travel agency specialising in cruise-related travel, is disclosing that it has raised €45 million in series E funding. The round is led by Princeville Global, with participation from existing investors that include Holtzbrinck Ventures, Target Global, Dimaventures, Hasso Plattner Ventures, TruVenturo, and Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital.
Founded by Felix Schneider in 2012, Hamburg-based Dreamlines can be thought of as a Booking.com or Expedia but for cruise holidays and other cruise line type travel. The OTA connects customers to what it says is the largest portfolio of cruises around the world, including holiday packages exclusive to Dreamlines.
Meanwhile, unlike other forms of holiday and travel, the cruise industry is only more recently being digitised, a sentiment echoed by Emmanuel DeSousa, Managing Partner of Princeville Global, who joins the Dreamslines board.
“The cruise industry is the last sizable, global travel segment to be disrupted by a tech-focused online booking platform,” he says. “Under the leadership of its visionary founders, Dreamlines is uniquely positioned to continue transforming the cruise industry to an online model, leading in Europe and expanding around the world”.
To that end, Dreamlines says the investment will support its continued growth and international expansion. The company currently operates in 10 countries, partnering with over 100 cruise operators, and has raised around €110 million to date.
Adds Christian Saller, General Partner at HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and the Dreamlines chairman: “As an early investor, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures has seen Dreamlines grow by a factor ten since its initial investment into the European market leader. The new investment will allow Dreamlines to continue this success story”.
Alibaba has expanded its e-commerce empire into South Asia after the Chinese internet giant acquired Daraz in an undisclosed deal.
Daraz was founded in 2012 by Rocket Internet and today it operates in Pakistan as well as Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Rocket said in a statement that Alibaba has acquired the entire Daraz business. The deal is the second time Alibaba has bought a Rocket company, the first being Lazada in Southeast Asia two years ago.
Rumors of a deal have been rife for the past couple of months, with Bloomberg reporting in March that acquisition talks were ongoing.
The deal is part of Alibaba’s second wave of international expansions which see it enter South Asia.
The company initially focused on India — where it has backed Paytm — and Southeast Asia with Lazada, but this year it has spread its wings into lower profile but hugely populous countries in South Asia. Pakistan, for example, has a population of over 190 million. The acquisition of Daraz follows a fintech investment from Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial, which runs Alipay and other Alibaba financial services.
Back in March, Ant paid $184.5 million for a 45 percent stake in Telenor Microfinance Bank, a fintech division from Norwegian operator Telenor, which operates Pakistan’s second largest telco. That one-two punch of e-commerce and fintech (particularly payments) is a common move from Alibaba-Ant, which has made similar deals in India and across Southeast Asia.
Beyond Pakistan, it looks like Alibaba is also eying nearby Bangladesh, which has a popular of over 160 million and rising internet adoption.
According to reports last month, the Chinese firm is pushing to buy a 20 percent chunk of payment firm bKash, a move that would again push its reach deeper into South Asia.
ShopBack said today it has picked up Seedly, a fellow Singaporean startup that offers a personal finance service, in an undisclosed deal. The entire team will move over and Seedly will continue as a business under ShopBack’s management.
The ShopBack service is an e-commerce aggregator that helps online sellers reach customers and incentivizes consumers with cash-back rewards. Seedly, meanwhile, is designed to simplify finance for millennials and young people across Southeast Asia. It was founded two years ago and raised seed funding from East Ventures (also a ShopBack investor) and NUS Enterprise in 2016, it also graduated Singapore bank DBS’s “hotspot” pre-accelerator program.
The deal is a fairly rare example of a smaller startup in Southeast Asia being acquired by a larger one for more than just talent, and there seems to be plenty of potential synergies between the two services.
ShopBack aspires to have close touchpoints with how young consumers in Southeast Asia spend their money online, so helping them to manage it plays into that focus. Meanwhile, Southeast Asia isn’t blessed with many local consumer finance services — despite more than 330 million internet users — so the Seedly business can benefit from ShopBack’s regional presence for expansion.
Treating issues with mental health can be a daunting and very sensitive task for anyone that is suffering from any kind of mental illness — but the problem for many is that a lot of patients just don’t know where to start, according to David Ebersman.
That’s where Lyra Health hopes to help. The service works with employers to offer a tool to their employees that helps them securely and confidentially begin to understand what kind of treatment they need to seek if they feel like they are suffering from any mental health problems. Employers naturally have a stake in this as they want their employees to stay health, but the goal is to offer a sort of safe space where users can benefit from years of growth in pattern matching and data to help them figure out where to start. The company said it has raised $45 million in a new financing round including Tenaya Capital, Glynn Capital Partners, Crown Ventures, and Casdin Capital. Existing investors that include Greylock Partners, Venrock, and Providence Ventures also participated in the funding round.
“We felt it was important to build an offering that would be helpful to all of the people who work at these companies and are suffering from a mental health condition like depression, or anxiety, or substance abuse,” Ebersman said. “A lot of the people we want to help don’t know where they’re starting. Trying to build and market something narrowly to a subset of the audience requires the audience to know they’re in that subset. Trying to build something more welcoming and engaging for a broader set of conditions felt to us to be a realistic response to the fact that not everyone can self identify. Fortunately technology really helps us with this — we can build a secure and confidential place where an employee can go and answer some questions that relate to their symptoms, severity, treatment preferences and use technology to match them for the right care.”
Lyra Health first starts off working with employers to figure out a plan to communicate to employees that the tool actually exists. But that’s one of the biggest challenges, as mental health issues — like anxiety or depression — can be very sensitive subjects for employees. Lyra Health has to work with employers to convince to give them confidence to explore it as a safe and confidential place, where they can put in information about some of their symptoms while feeling like that information is going to locked down.
From there, Lyra takes a close look at that data and then build a set of recommendations for the patients based on what they think some of their symptoms correlate to. Lyra Health has a network of around 2,500 therapists, most of which don’t participate in traditional health plans, Ebersman said. Lyra Health then connects patients with those therapists, and they can schedule the appointment online and get started right away. Lyra Health then periodically checks in with the patients to see how they are doing and ensuring they feel like they are getting better — another data point that helps the company figure out if its recommendations are working.
“We really believed that the experience that we give to patients today could be dramatically improved,” Ebersman said. “This is part of the healthcare system that’s really hard to understand, it’s hard to navigate, and there are a bunch of different types of solutions for a variety of different conditions. We felt that trying to build a comprehensive solution that would make it easy for clients to find the care that was matched correctly to their needs and preferences was a tech problem we could start grappling right away.”
Ebersman previously oversaw the initial public offering of Facebook as its CFO, but the challenge Lyra Health entails is one that may be just as complex. Not only does the company have to establish and maintain that network of high-quality doctors and therapists, it also has to ensure that it builds and maintains a robust data set that ensures that its recommendations are actually on point — and get better over time. If it ends up as a bad product, employees won’t use it, and the recommendations can’t improve at any point. And amid all of this, the experience has to feel like a good and approachable one, even though it’s partially tackled through machine learning.
“I think we are able to successfully communicate to employees what Lyra does in a way that doesn’t seem intimidating or stigmatized,” Ebersman said. “I think the experience of exploring what your care options are using technology is a little easier for people. I think there are places where technology plays a critical role in this journey. One is creating a safe environment where you can dip your toe in the water. I also think a technology based experience can give you confidence that the best care for what you need is out there. I do believe that for most people in the care journey, interacting with a human who is warm and who you can relate to, and who has skills to help you, improve is an important piece. But if you think comprehensively from the beginning to the end of someone’s care journey, there’s a critical set of roles technology can play to ensure that more people engage and have a better experience.”
Ebersman hopes Lyra Health is riding a wave of increased awareness and attention for mental health. That could encompass anything from apps like Lyra Health to companies that are focusing on wellness like meditation apps like Calm (which is reportedly valued over $250 million). All of these companies have been able to raise pretty significant rounds of financing, but it also means that there will be a lot of activity — and a bit of a race to get adoption and build up the kind of robust data sets you need to have a formal defensibility in the marketplace. There are other approaches to mental health like Huddle, but the trick will be figuring out how to get people on board and spin up that flywheel that will make the experience better and better.
” Many people with mental health conditions don’t ever engage with the system, or if they do, are quickly intimidated with how confusing and frustrating it can be,” he said. “We believe if we build a simple and warm tech-based experience that’s confidential and secure, we can get more people engaged with the mental health system. Our engagements are about seven times higher than the companies were seeing with the solutions they had before they launched Lyra.”
iPrice, a service that aggregates Southeast Asia’s e-commerce websites in a single destination, has pulled in new funding led by messaging app Line’s VC arm, Line Ventures.
The round is officially undisclosed, but TechCrunch understands from a source close to negotiations that it is worth around $4 million. Existing iPrice backers Cento Ventures (formerly known as Digital Media Partners) and Venturra Capital also took part in this round.
The company was started in 2015 in response to the growing number of e-commerce companies in Southeast Asia, and in particular the increasing number of vertical-specific options. Even though there are some giants, such as Alibaba’s Lazada, the region has a number of smaller players that can struggle for visibility. iPrice was initially a coupon site, before pivoting into an aggregation model which essentially acts as a destination for shoppers to then go on and purchase items from e-commerce retailers.
In a way, it is much like flight booking sites — such as Skyscanner — which ask a customer where they want to go before scouring the web for the best travel deals. iPrice does this for e-commerce in Southeast Asia. It hopes that simplifying things through a single destination portal can make it the go-to online buying site for the region, which now has over 330 million internet users — more than the population of the U.S. — according to a recent report co-authored by Google.
iPrice on the web, although its mobile app and mobile browser version are more used
Today, iPrice claims to offer over 500 million SKUs across Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Hong Kong. The company said that over 50 million people visited its site since December 2016, and this year alone it is aiming to grow to 150 million visitors.
The company said electronics has been a particular driver while, outside of working with e-commerce firms to drive business, it has developed a B2B business with media groups and brands, including Mediacorp in Singapore and Samsung in Indonesia, who pay to tailor its service. Last year, it developed an insightful report on the state of e-commerce in Southeast Asia.
The deal makes sense for Line Ventures because of the unique vantage point that iPrice occupies, while it also ties into parent company Line’s desire to go beyond being a messaging app and build out a mobile ecosystem. That’s seen it develop services such as food delivery, ride-hailing, payments and e-commerce, although it has struggled in the latter category. A relationship with iPrice might give it greater insight for future e-commerce ventures in Southeast Asia.
As SoundHound looks to leverage its ten-plus years of experience and data to create a voice recognition tool that companies can bake into any platform, it’s raising another big $100 million round of funding to try to make its Houndify platform a third neutral option compared to Alexa and Google Assistant.
While Amazon works to get developers to adopt Alexa, SoundHound has been collecting data since it started as an early mobile app for the iPhone and Android devices. That’s given it more than a decade of data to work with as it tries to build a robust audio recognition engine and tie it into a system with dozens of different queries and options that it can tie to those sounds. The result was always a better SoundHound app, but it’s increasingly started to try to open up that technology to developers and show it’s more powerful (and accurate) than the rest of the voice assistants on the market — and get them to use it in their services.
“We launched [Houndify] before Google and Amazon,” CEO Keyvan Mohajer said. “Obviously, good ideas get copied, and Google and Amazon have copied us. Amazon has the Alexa fund to invest in smaller companies and bribe them to adopt the Alexa Platform. Our reaction to that was, we can’t give $100 million away, so we came up with a strategy which was the reverse. Instead of us investing in smaller companies, let’s go after big successful companies that will invest in us to accelerate Houndify. We think it’s a good strategy. Amazon would be betting on companies that are not yet successful, we would bet on companies that are already successful.”
This round is all coming in from strategic investors. Part of the reason is that taking on these strategic investments allows SoundHound to capture important partnerships that it can leverage to get wider adoption for its technology. The companies investing, too, have a stake in SoundHound’s success and will want to get it wherever possible. The strategic investors include Tencent Holdings Limited, Daimler AG, Hyundai Motor Company, Midea Group, and Orange S.A. SoundHound already has a number of strategic investors that include Samsung, NVIDIA, KT Corporation, HTC, Naver, LINE, Nomura, Sompo, and Recruit. It’s a ridiculously long list, but again, the company is trying to get that technology baked in wherever it can.
So it’s pretty easy to see what SoundHound is going to get out of this: access to China through partners, deeper integration into cars, as well as increased expansion to other avenues through all of its investors. Mohajer said the company could try to get into China on its own (or ignore it altogether), but there has been a very limited number of companies that have had any success there whatsoever. Google and Facebook, two of the largest technology companies in the world, are not on that list of successes.
“China is a very important market, it’s very big and has a lot of potential, and it’s growing,” Mohajer said. “You can go to Canada without having to rethink a big strategy, but China is so different. We saw even companies like Google and Facebook tried to do that and didn’t succeed. When those bigger companies didn’t succeed, it was a signal to us that strategy wouldn’t work. [Tencent] was looking at the space and they saw we have the best technology in the world. They appreciated it and were respectful, they helped us get there. We looked at so many partners and [Tencent and Midea Group] were the ones that worked out.”
The idea here is that developers in all sorts of different markets — whether that’s cars or apps — will want to have some element of voice interaction. SoundHound is betting that companies like Daimler will want to control the experience in their cars, and not be saying “Alexa” whenever they want to make a request while driving. Instead, it may come down to something as simple as a wake word that could change the entire user experience, and that’s why SoundHound is pitching Houndify as a flexible and customizable option that isn’t demanding a brand on top of it.
SoundHound still does have its stable of apps. The original SoundHound app is around, though those features are also baked into Hound, its main consumer app. That is more of a personal assistant-style voice recognition service where you can string together a sentence of as many as a dozen parameters and get a decent search result back. It’s more of a party trick than anything else, but it is a good demonstration of the technical capabilities SoundHound has as it looks to embed that software into lots of different pieces of hardware and software.
SoundHound may have raised a big round with a fresh set of strategic partners, but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s a surefire bet. Amazon is, after all, one of the most valuable companies in the world and Alexa has proven to be a very popular platform, even if it’s mostly for nominal requests and listening to music (and party tricks) at this point. SoundHound is going to have to convince companies — small and large — to bake in its tools, rather than go with massive competitors like Amazon with pockets deep enough to buy a whole grocery chain.
“We think every company is going to need to have a strategy in voice AI, jus like ten years ago everyone needed a mobile strategy,” Mohajer said. “Everyone should think about it. There aren’t many providers, mainly because it takes a long time to build the core technology. It took us 12 years. To Houndify everything we need to be global, we need to support all the main languages and regions in the world. We built the technology to be language independent, but there’s a lot of resources and execution involved.”
Xiaomi’s much-speculated IPO process has kicked off officially after the Chinese smartphone giant filed to go public on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
The first draft of its filing does not include proposed financial details of its listing, but the South China Morning Post reports that the company is shooting to raise $10 billion at a valuation of $100 billion. Beyond the year’s largest IPO, it would make Xiaomi China’s third largest technology company based on market cap.
Xiaomi operates differently to most companies in that beyond selling smartphones and smart devices, it operates its own retail business and internet services such as payments and streaming. That strategy — which CEO Lei Jun calls a “triathlon” — is focused on services for growth since Xiaomi has capped its maximum net profit for hardware at five percent.
The financials are impressive on paper.
The company booked sales of 114.6 billion RMB ($18 billion) in 2017, up from 68.4 billion RMB in 2016 and 66.8 billion in 2015.
Xiaomi posted a 43.9 billion RMB ($6.9 billion) loss in 2017 on account of issuing preferred shares to investors (54 billion RMB) but the growth story is healthy. Operating profit jumped to 12.2 billion RMB ($1.92 billion), up more than three-fold on the previous year.
Smartphones continue to represent the bulk of sales at 70 percent, with smart devices pulling in 20 percent more and services responsible for the remainder.
China is, as you’d expect, the primary revenue market but Xiaomi is increasingly less dependent on its homeland. For 2017 sales, China represented 72 percent, but it had been 94 percent and 87 percent, respectively, in 2015 and 2016. India is Xiaomi’s most successful overseas venture, having built the business to the number one smartphone firm based on market share, and Xiaomi is pledging to double down on other global areas.
Interestingly there’s no mention of expanding phone sales to the U.S., but Xiaomi has pledged to put 30 percent of its IPO towards growing its presence in Southeast Asia, Europe, Russia “other regions.” Currently, it said it sells products in 74 countries, that does include the U.S. where Xiaomi sells accessories and non-phone items.
Another 30 percent is earmarked for R&D and product development, while a further 30 percent will be invested in Xiaomi’s internet of things and smart product ecosystem. The remaining 10 percent is down for working capital.
Xiaomi isn’t disclosing the exact percentage stakes that its major investors hold, but CEO Lei Jun is believed to be one of the most significant shareholders. The IPO could make him China’s richest man, according to reports which suggest he controls a stake of over 75 percent.
While the mid 2010s were filled with massive financing rounds for companies looking to shift business models like Instacart, Uber, and others along those lines, today’s hottest sector is a more technical one: artificial intelligence.
That’s required a different approach to building companies. As tools become more and more powerful, and frameworks like TensorFlow become more robust, building a company centered around AI — and the big technical problems that either feed it or stem from it — are powering the next wave of potentially massive startups. That’s why Lu Zhang and Homan Yuen, two Stanford technical graduates, are raising a big fund based on their extensive technical experience to find companies that have that strong technology backbone that will become the next big startup.
The pair are raising $85 million for a new fund called Fusion Fund. Fusion Fund’s companies are going to be focused on connected industries, networking technology like communications protocols, data-rich AI products and some health and medical devices. That third bit — investing in AI — is what pretty much every fund is doing, though Yuen made it clear the company isn’t investing in just algorithms, which are eventually going to be a race to the bottom.
“We noticed there weren’t many venture capitalists focusing on technology companies and actually have technical backgrounds,” Yuen said. “We thought, that’s a good opportunity to help early stage companies that need different help, and advice, and connections.”
Zhang and Yuen are two technical founders that sold their companies and were looking to figure out what to do after that. In Zhang’s case, with a masters in material science, she was approached by investors to do a fund, while Yuen had known her at Stanford and ended up syncing up to work on the fund, he said. The fund will be focused on seed-stage companies, looking to write checks between $500,000 and $1 million for companies with technical founders and a pretty difficult problem to solve that requires that expertise.
“We’re not funding science products, or expedition missions, we want clear vision in building a business on the technical advantages,” Yuen said. “Part of our thesis is, over the last five to ten years, we saw a lot of investment into business model innovation. We decided it was time to flip back to tech and infrastructure investing.”
On that front, a lot of these areas are going to get a lot more interesting as time goes on. The tech industry is in the early stages of 5G development and rollout, and once there are more rigorous standards, there will likely be a lot of activity in that space, such as new connection protocols. There’s also a strong security element to that, and all of this requires heavy technical expertise to build something pretty defensible, Yuen said.
But if you want just one example — and this is one where Yuen is sitting on the sidelines for now — on how technical these problems are getting, you can look at the rapid emergence of the custom AI chip space. That problem requires an expertise in rethinking the actual silicon where operations happen to more efficiently tackle machine learning problems, whether that’s focusing on speed, lowering the power consumption, reducing the overall space the processors take up, or getting the cost down to something more reasonable than a bleeding-edge GPU. Right now the space has a ton of VC money flowing into it, and given the size of the checks Yuen is looking to write, it’s an area where the firm has to be more thoughtful about the companies it picks.
This is actually Fusion Fund’s second fund, as it previously went under a different name. First called NewGen Capital, Zhang and Yuen raised $17 million in its first fund and backed 36 seed-stage companies in companies like TVision Insights, Stratifyd, Paperspace, MissionBio, and Paradromics.
