Deals

The Europas Unconference & Awards is back on 3 July in London and we’re excited to announce more speakers and panel sessions as the event takes shape. Crypto and Blockchain will be a major theme this year, and we’re bringing together many of the key players. TechCrunch is once again the key media partner, and if you attend The Europas you’ll be first in the queue to get offers for TC events and Disrupt Europe later in the year.

You can also potentially get your ticket for free just by sharing your own ticket link with friends and followers. See below for the details and instructions.

To recap, we’re jumping straight into our popular breakout sessions where you’ll get up close and personal with some of Europe’s leading investors, founders and thought leaders.

The Unconference is focused into zones including AI, Fintech, Mobility, Startups, Society, and Enterprise and Crypto / Blockchain.

Our Crypto HQ will feature two tracks of panels, one focused on investing and the other on how blockchain is disrupting everything from financial services, to gaming, to social impact to art.

We’ve lined up some of the leading blockchain VCs to talk about what trends and projects excite them most, including Outlier Ventures’ Jamie Burke, KR1’s George McDonaugh, blockchain angel Nancy Fenchay, Fabric Ventures’ Richard Muirhead and Michael Jackson of Mangrove Capital Partners.

Thinking of an ICO vs crowdfunding? Join Michael Jackson on how ICOs are disrupting venture capital and Ali Ganjavian, co-founder of Studio Banana, the creators of longtime Kickstarter darling OstrichPillow to understand the ins and outs of both.

We’ve also lined up a panel to discuss the process of an ICO – what do you need to consider, the highs, the lows, the timing and the importance of community. Linda Wang, founder and CEO of Lending Block, which recently raised $10 million in an April ICO, joins us.

We are thrilled to announce that Civil, the decentralised marketplace for sustainable journalism, will be joining to talk about the rise of fake news and Verisart’s Robert Norton will share his views on stamping out fraud in the art world with blockchain. Min Teo of ConsenSys will discuss blockchain and social impact and Jeremy Millar, head of Consensys UK, will speak on Smart Contracts.

Our Pathfounders Startup Zone is focused purely on startups. Our popular Meet the Press panel is back where some of tech’s finest reporters will tell you what makes a great tech story, and how to pitch (and NOT pitch them). For a start, TechCrunch’s Steve O’Hear and Quartz’s Joon Ian Wong are joining.

You’ll also hear from angels and investors including Seedcamp’s Carlos Eduardo Espinal; Eileen Burbidge of Passion Capital; Accel Partners’ Andrei Brasoveanu; Jeremy Yap; Candice Lo of Blossom Capital; Scott Sage of Crane Venture Partners; Tugce Ergul of Angel Labs; Stéphanie Hospital of OneRagtime; Connect Ventures’ Sitar Teli and Jason Ball of Qualcomm Ventures.

Sound great? You can grab your ticket here:

Early bird ticket sales end on Friday! Remember, you can end up getting your ticket for free.

All you need to do is share your personal ticket link. Your friends get 15% off, and you get 15% off again when they buy.

The more your friends buy, the more your ticket cost goes down, all the way to free!

The Public Voting in the awards ends 11 June 2018 11:59: https://ift.tt/2sqYJX3

We’re still looking for sponsor partners to support these editorially curated panels.

Please get in touch with Petra@theeuropas.com for more details.

SPEAKERS SO FAR:

Jamie Burke, Outlier Ventures

Jeremy Millar, ConsenSys

Linda Wang, Lending Block

Robert Norton, Verisart

George McDonaugh, KR1

Eileen Burbidge, Passion Capital

Carlos Eduardo Espinal, Seedcamp

Sitar Teli, Connect Ventures

Michael Jackson, Mangrove Capital Partners

Min Teo, ConsenSys

Steve O’Hear, TechCrunch

Joon Ian Wong, Quartz

Richard Muirhead, Fabric Ventures

Nancy Fechnay, Blockchain Technologist + Angel

Candice Lo, Blossom Capital

Scott Sage, Crane Venture Partners

Andrei Brasoveanu, Accel

Tina Baker, Jag Shaw Baker

Jeremy Yap

Candice Lo, Blossom Capital

Tugce Ergul, Angel Labs

Stéphanie Hospital, OneRagtime

Jason Ball, Qualcomm Ventures

The Europas Awards
The Europas Awards are based on voting by expert judges and the industry itself. But key to the daytime is all the speakers and invited guests. There’s no “off-limits speaker room” at The Europas, so attendees can mingle easily with VIPs and speakers.

Vote for your Favourite Startups

Public Voting is still humming along. Please remember to vote for your favourite startups!

Awards by category:

Hottest Media/Entertainment Startup

Hottest E-commerce/Retail Startup

Hottest Education Startup

Hottest Startup Accelerator

Hottest Marketing/AdTech Startup

Hottest Games Startup

Hottest Mobile Startup

Hottest FinTech Startup

Hottest Enterprise, SaaS or B2B Startup

Hottest Hardware Startup

Hottest Platform Economy / Marketplace

Hottest Health Startup

Hottest Cyber Security Startup

Hottest Travel Startup

Hottest Internet of Things Startup

Hottest Technology Innovation

Hottest FashionTech Startup

Hottest Tech For Good

Hottest A.I. Startup

Fastest Rising Startup Of The Year

Hottest GreenTech Startup of The Year

Hottest Startup Founders

Hottest CEO of the Year

Best Angel/Seed Investor of the Year

Hottest VC Investor of the Year

Hottest Blockchain/Crypto Startup Founder(s)

Hottest Blockchain Protocol Project

Hottest Blockchain DApp

Hottest Corporate Blockchain Project

Hottest Blockchain Investor

Hottest Blockchain ICO (Europe)

Hottest Financial Crypto Project

Hottest Blockchain for Good Project

Hottest Blockchain Identity Project

Hall Of Fame Award – Awarded to a long-term player in Europe

The Europas Grand Prix Award (to be decided from winners)

The Awards celebrates the most forward thinking and innovative tech & blockchain startups across over some 30+ categories.

Startups can apply for an award or be nominated by anyone, including our judges. It is free to enter or be nominated.

Instead of thousands and thousands of people, think of a great summer event with 1,000 of the most interesting and useful people in the industry, including key investors and leading entrepreneurs.

• No secret VIP rooms, which means you get to interact with the Speakers

• Key Founders and investors speaking; featured attendees invited to just network

• Expert speeches, discussions, and Q&A directly from the main stage

• Intimate “breakout” sessions with key players on vertical topics

• The opportunity to meet almost everyone in those small groups, super-charging your networking

• Journalists from major tech titles, newspapers and business broadcasters

• A parallel Founders-only track geared towards fund-raising and hyper-networking

• A stunning awards dinner and party which honors both the hottest startups and the leading lights in the European startup scene

• All on one day to maximise your time in London. And it’s sunny (probably)!

That’s just the beginning. There’s more to come…

from TechCrunch

There’s been an explosion of medical startups centering their tools around machine learning to help doctors with predictive tools — and now Netflix’s former chief product officer Neil Hunt wants to enter the fray with one that hopes to get the right information from patients themselves.

That’s the hope for Curai, a machine learning-driven startup that helps patients deliver the right information to doctors to help medical professionals figure out the best diagnosis — and reduce the overhead for doctors such that they can work with more patients without the grunt work. Patients can send photos of rashes, describe their symptoms, or MRI results and help navigate those results to come to the best conclusion with doctors and have more readily available access. And the hope is that Curai will also develop into a system that can detect potential problems from symptoms that a patient might not even realize are relevant.

“We want to build a patient-facing system to commoditize healthcare knowledge, that helps patients and their doctors know and understand the decisions they ought to make, whether those are simple questions about health, diagnostic or treatment, in lots of different ways,” Hunt said. “[It’s based on] idea that you let computers do what computers are good at, and that’s data and knowledge and reasoning and logic. You let doctors do the things that humans are good at: coaching, intuition, empathy, and helping patients make decisions.”

Hunt was previously the chief product officer at Netflix. Curai’s other cofounders include Xavier Amatriain, the former VP of engineering at Quora, and Neal Khosla, a previous startup founder with a history at Stanford and Google. The company said it has raised around $10.7 million in a round that includes General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures and a variety of other angels.

In a lot of ways, Curai — and other startups focusing on machine learning to empower doctors to make better decisions — is a response to people just searching around the Web and getting answers from Doctor Google. That, in the end, generally ends up with what can be frightening results that are probably out of line with reality, Hunt said. The idea is that if patients can give a more robust history and set of symptoms, Curai can help doctors sift out what are some of the real underlying causes.

It then takes all that and packages it together in a sensible way for doctors, who will work with those patients to figure out the best treatment options. It’s supposed to be a way to get around a doctor having to pull up a medical history, which might contain either too much information — or just a record so large that they have to invest a lot of time trying to sift through everything. As the company is able to collect more data (like other startups, Hunt said that’s locked down and following typically strict regulations around healthcare), those algorithms improve over time, though getting enough quality data is part of the critical process of building a competitive moat in an otherwise increasingly competitive space.

“In some ways, the challenge with healthcare on the web is, you tend to discover you have cancer or diabetes, and they have nothing to do with what you came in for,” Hunt said. “If you imagine a system that can engage with the patient and [surface] the real facts and take those into consideration, like the history that a patient might not realize, it can point you to relevant information that’s something a bit more balanced.”

But getting that information may be a bit of a tall order, especially for more sensitive cases where patients might not want to disclose information. I’ve actually asked about this before of David Ebersman, who runs a startup called Lyra Health focusing on mental health, and he said the challenge is giving patients the confidence that they’re navigating a safer space to operate — which might help them be even more willing to work with a tool rather than expose some of those deeper problems face-to-face with someone. (Lyra Health recently announced it raised $45 million.)

“There’s a good degree of evidence that suggests an impersonal consumer facing product might be easier to talk to with things like drinking or sexual partners or thing that you might be embarrassed about, or that you might feel some difficulty talking to your doctor,” Hunt said. “Certainly in some of the work we’ve done so far, there’s a much bigger lean toward the embarrassing to talk about situations than you would expect if you were a practicing physician. I would suspect people are more ready and talk sooner to an impersonal interface than they would talk to a human doctor.”

There are certainly a lot of startups looking to take some of the pressure off doctors when it comes to more menial tasks — ones that could easily be accomplished by computers, but haven’t quite been tackled in medical offices — that come in a lot of different flavors. There are tools like Lyra Health, or a sort of “Alexa for doctors” from startups like Suki, which has also raised $20 million. All of this is designed to help take some of the workload of doctors and assist in building a better pattern-matching system, which gives them more time to work with patients.

from TechCrunch

SQream CEO and co-founder Ami Gal

SQream, the GPU database developer, will deepen its focus on China after raising a $26.4 million Series B led by Alibaba Group. The round also included investors Hanaco Venture Capital, Sistema.vc, World Trade Ventures, Paradiso Ventures, Glory Ventures and Silvertech Ventures.

The startup describes the funding, which brings its total raised to a little over $40 million, as a strategic investment from Alibaba. Earlier this year, SQream and Alibaba Cloud announced a new agreement that will give Alibaba Cloud users access to the GPU database starting in October.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Chaoqun Zhan, director of Alibaba Database Business, said “Alibaba Cloud and SQream announced a collaboration in February and this investment deepens our relationship, and together we aim to provide the best cloud solutions to all kinds of businesses to enable their success in this digital age.”

Based in Tel Aviv, SQream was founded in 2010. Its SQL analytical database, called SQream DB, uses thousands of parallel processing cores in NVIDIA GPUs to allow large companies to perform big data analytics more quickly and cheaply (SQream claims its clients can “analyze up to 20 times more data, up to 100 times faster, at as little 10% of the cost”).

SQream co-founder and CEO Ami Gal told TechCrunch that one of SQream’s main differentiators from other GPU databases, like Kinetica and MapD, is its ability to adapt to increasingly massive hoards of data. Kinetica and MapD use in-memory storage, so while they can analyze up to about 5 terabytes of data extremely quickly, their scalability is limited. On the other hand, SQream was created to handle data stores of up to hundreds of terabytes.

The company’s Series B capital is being used to add new feature to SQream DB and grow its sales, marketing and delivery teams as it focuses on the Chinese market and other regions. In addition to Alibaba Cloud, SQream’s other new customers in Asia include Thai mobile operator AIS and India’s ACL Mobile, an enterprise messaging service.

from TechCrunch

Madrid-based OnTruck, which has built a “haulage tech platform” to better match supply and demand in the road freight industry, has picked up €25 million in Series B funding.

The round is led by global venture capital fund Cathay Innovation, with participation from an array of existing and new investors that includes Atomico, Idinvest, All Iron Ventures, Total Energy Ventures, GP Bullhound, Point 9 Capital, and Samaipata Ventures. In other words, several of OnTruck’s Series A backers are doubling down.

Founded in 2016, OnTruck is one of numerous startups attempting to ‘digitise’ the freight market, which it traditionally quite an arcane and opaque industry. It enables companies who have road freight shipping needs in Spain and more recently the U.K. to connect with the startup’s network of over 2,200 lorry drivers operating in both countries.

For the truck drivers themselves, many of whom are owner-operator businesses, OnTruck offers a steady stream of readily priced work. Its logistics platform also claims to make haulage journeys more efficient.

Specifically, OnTruck describes its technology as automating the matching of loads to trucks, and providing real-time GPS tracking of all shipments. The company’s algorithms also attempt to dispatch work in a way that significantly cuts down on empty return journeys, which is a particularly common problem for the regional and short-haul market OnTruck is targeting.

“Regional trucking is where shippers and truck drivers suffer from the most inefficiency, with over 40% of kilometers driven empty,” says OnTruck CEO Iñigo Juantegui. “This is where OnTruck’s technology and our shipper and driver app can add the most value to lower supply chain cost for shippers and empty kilometres driven by truckers.”

OnTruck clients include large multinationals such as Procter & Gamble, and Decathlon, in addition to over 400 mid-sized companies in the U.K. and Spain. Juantegui says the new funding will be used to consolidate its market positions in those two countries, and to expand to more of Europe. This, I’m told, is likely to include France and Germany.

from TechCrunch

There’s a new unicorn in the global ride-hailing space after Taxify, a startup born in Estonia that does battle with Uber across Europe and Africa, closed $175 million in new funding that takes it valuation to the $1 billion mark.

Daimler, the German automotive giant which owns Mercedes-Benz among other things, led the round. The investment also featured participation from new backers Europe-based Korelya Capital and Taavet Hinrikus, founder of billion-dollar Estonian fintech startup Transferwise. Taxify said that China’s Didi Chuxing was among the returning investors to join.

The company said it plans to deploy the capital to develop its technology and make further expansions in Europe and Asia.

Beyond its automotive business, Daimler has taken a role in ride-hailing already. Its investments in the space include the acquisition of car-sharing business car2Go and German car-pooling startup Flinc, while it has put money into Europe-based car-pooling company Via and Turo, another car-sharing service which took on Daimler’s rival service Croove. More widely, Daimler and BMW consolidated their mobility businesses — which include parking apps, charging solutions, ride-hailing and more — in a consolidation move made in March of this year. Now, added to that, Daimler will take a seat on the Taxify board.

Given its extensive interest in mobility, it makes sense that Daimler is backing Taxify, which has emerged as the main contender battling Uber in Europe and Africa, while it has also forayed into Australia, too. Surprisingly, the round is the first major fundraising moment for Taxify, which had raised just €2 million ($2.4 million) prior to Didi’s undisclosed investment last year.

“We’re on a mission to build the future of mobility, and it’s great to have the support of investors like Daimler and Didi,” said CEO and co-founder Markus Villig in a statement. “This is just the beginning as more and more people give up on car ownership and opt for on-demand transportation.”

The ride-sharing space has homogenized somewhat in recent years with most companies offer the same services, so against that backdrop Taxify has something of a unique story. The startup was founded in Estonia in 2013 — the home of tech giant Skype — but brothers Markus Villig, then 19 years old, and his brother Martin, who had worked for Skype.

Villig junior is now just 24 years old which makes him one of the youngest heads of a billion-dollar company in the world. OYO founder Ritesh Agarwal is one month older, although he did lead a unicorn at an even younger age. Still, it’s quite an achievement however you mix it.

His original vision was to build a service for his native Estonia using money borrowed from his parents, but that vision expanded and the service is now present in over 25 countries, predominantly in Europe and Africa. Markus Villig said today that the company has more than 500,000 drivers and over 10 million users, a big jump on the 2.5 million users it claimed back in August. Villig added that Taxify’s ride volumes grew ten-fold last year, although he did not provide a raw figure.

Taxify CEO and co-founder Markus Villig

Markus has explained in the past that Taxify’s strategy focuses on being the second mover, most often behind Uber .

“We go into markets where ride-sharing is already a proven concept… we come in and we improve on that by having just cheaper commissions and giving more back to the riders and drivers. We don’t want to get into this regulatory troubles and be wasting millions in lobby battles,” he told Bloomberg in an interview last year.

A key moment for Taxify was snagging investment from Didi Chuxing, the Chinese firm that acquired Uber’s China business and removed it from the country.

Didi backed Taxify via an undisclosed “eight-figure U.S. dollar sum” last August but, beyond capital, gave it access to its network of knowledge and experience, particularly around operations.

This kind of deal is common for Didi, which raised a $4 billion investment at the end of last year for expansion purposes and has backed Uber rivals across the world with capital and mentoring. Didi’s investments include Lyft in the U.S., Grab in Southeast Asia (which recently bought out Uber’s local business), Ola in India, Careem in the Middle East and 99 in Brazil, which Didi itself acquired in January 2018 for its first international expansion move.

Note: The original version of this article was updated to correct the number of Taxify drivers and that Ritesh Agarwal’s age.

from TechCrunch

When Collaborative Fund is looking at whether to invest in a company, it’s looking for a startup that’ll be able to accomplish some kind of social good — but also actually make money and be a real business. It’s that theory that’s led the fund for eight years, and Collaborative Fund is going to keep going now with the announcement of closing its fourth fund.

Collaborative Fund has closed its fourth fund, this one a $100 million fund that includes LPs like Quora founder Adam D’Angelo, former Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson, Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow, former Sequoia partner Tom McMurray, and Indeed founder Rony Kahan. At a time when there are plenty of questions as to where the actual exits are going to happen in venture — including some kinds of creative activity by some firms or necessary ones by larger startups like Uber — Collaborative Fund is doubling down on its strategy of investing early in those companies, which has checked off a number of successful investments thus far.

Collaborative Fund raised its last fund in 2015, when it put together a $70 million fund. Since then, there’s been plenty of activity in some of its investments — perhaps one of the biggest events being Blue Bottle Coffee’s big exist in September last year. Collaborative Fund also includes investments in a number of other companies including  Kickstarter, Lyft, Reddit, Quora, Tala, Science Exchange, LTSE, and Outdoor Voices. The fund led (or co-led) 13 seed rounds, including Ava Winery, Spruce, Dandelion Energy.

“Our thesis works best when there’s clear alignment between founders and investors,” Collaborative Fund founder Craig Shapiro said. “…There’s a growing acceptance and excitement for our thesis. Eight years ago it was obscure and even belittled. More people understand it today.”

In addition, Taylor Greene will be Collaborative Fund’s new partner. Green was previously a partner at Lerer Hippeau Ventures. Shapiro said he’d known Greene for around five years (and competed on many investments, in addition to co-investing in some rounds). “It was through these experiences that I saw firsthand his work ethic, people skills, and steady hand,” Shapiro said. The firm announced it had added Lauren Locktev from New Island Capital around the time it announced its last fund.

Looking at those investments kind of gives a sense of what the firm is looking to accomplish: a company like Lyft has the potential to change the way we move around cities, reduce drunk driving, and have other substantial effects — but at the same time it has to figure out how to run it as a real business if it’s actually going to remain active. Lyft most recently raised $1 billion from Alphabet in a round that valued it at $11 billion.

from TechCrunch

Alibaba is doubling down on logistics after it led a $1.38 billion investment in Chinese courier firm ZTO Express alongside Alibaba logistics affiliate Cainiao.

ZTO went public on the NYSE in 2016 raising $1.4 billion from what was the year’s largest IPO in the U.S. The Shanghai-based company claims to be one of China’s largest logistics firms via a partner-based network. Its clients include Alibaba and rival e-commerce firm JD.com . There’s plenty more overlap between the two, ZTO CFO Huiping Yan previously spent two years working for Cainiao.

Alibaba, Cainiao and other undisclosed investors will buy around 10 percent of the company through the deal, which is expected to be completed in June. ZTO’s stock price closed at $17.30 on Friday (before the long weekend) which represented an all-time high since its IPO in October 2016, when it opened at $18.40 before dropping 15 percent on day-one.

The deal is focused on Alibaba’s ‘new retail’ version which merges e-commerce and offline retail. The idea is to marry the speed and ease of e-commerce with the advantages of brick and mortar, such as being able to touch and feel products and customer care. Alibaba has already introduced hybrid stores in parts of China, and fast logistics represents an important part of the plan.

Alibaba said in a statement that the investment will “deepen their collaboration” between ZTO, Cainiao and Alibaba.

“This investment will enable Cainiao and ZTO to supercharge joint innovation and development to accelerate digitalization of the industry,” Cainiao President Lin Wan said in a statement.

Cainiao was started in 2013 by Alibaba and eight other backers to bring organization in Chinese logistics, particularly around e-commerce deliveries. Last year, Alibaba agreed to pay over $800 million to take majority ownership in the business, which works closely with the Chinese firm’s business units and services to enable fast delivery. Cainiao is valued at around $20 billion based on its most recent fundraising activity.

Despite a large IPO, ZTO has attracted controversy. U.S. pension fund Birmingham Retirement and Relief System sued the business alleging that it exaggerated profit margins to lure investors to its listing in 2016. The company has denied the claims.

from TechCrunch

Flock, a London-based startup that has created a data-driven insurance product for drones, has picked up £2.25 million in seed funding. Leading the round is fintech and insurtech VC fund Anthemis, with participation from Silicon Valley’s Plug and Play, Seed and Speed, and previous backer Downing Ventures. A number of unnamed angel investors also took part.

Describing itself as “pioneering the use of real-time data in insurance,” Flock’s drone insurance has its roots in the academic studies of founder Antton Pena. He wrote his thesis on the use of real-time data to quantify drone flight risks, and began building the first version of the Flock platform at the Data Science Institute at Imperial College London with help from a post-doctoral researcher in artificial intelligence.

Likewise, while studying at Cambridge University, Flock CEO Ed Leon Klinger focused on the future of the autonomous world, writing and publishing papers on driverless vehicles, AI safety, and autonomous drones. This included a paper on the future of the drone industry in which he identified the same solution that Antton had already begun building: the idea that real-time data could be leveraged to identify and quantify the risks of drone flights.

To that end, Flock’s first product, dubbed “Flock Cover”, is a ‘pay-as-you-fly’ insurance app that allows drone pilots to insure flights for a minimum of one hour. It aggregates real-time data, including hyperlocal weather conditions, population density, proximity to high-risk areas (such as airports), and more. Flock’s algorithms then analyse this data, coupled with other data points, such as the weight of the drone, to quantify the risk of any given drone flight. The insurance itself is offered through a partnership with Allianz.

“The problem we’re solving in the drone industry is that drone flight risks are unpredictable, complex, and not particularly well understood by insurers,” explains Klinger. “The result of this is overpriced, cumbersome, but often compulsory insurance policies that are not fit for purpose (in the U.K. drone insurance is a legal requirement for commercial pilots)”.

In contrast, Flock’s use of real-time (and static) data enables the startup to offer pricing that is “risk-dependant,” says Klinger, “so the safer you fly, the less you pay. Our safest pilots now pay less for their insurance than their morning coffee!”.

The company says that 1,000 commercial drone pilots now use Flock Cover, which launched earlier this year in the U.K., representing a departure from flat-rate annual premiums in favour of Flock’s on-demand model.

With that said, the Flock CEO concedes that there are a number of other on-demand drone insurance products already on the market, even if traditional insurers remain the startup’s main competition. “These insurers have been going for longer than us, and they certainly have bigger budgets. What they don’t have is real-time data on their side. They cannot differentiate between high-risk and low-risk customers or flights, so they simply charge everyone roughly the same amount for an annual policy,” he says.

Meanwhile, it would appear that drone insurance is just the beginning, as Klinger and Pena eye up other areas of cover where Big Data can be utilised to offer more flexible and better value insurance.

“As the world becomes increasingly autonomous, from the cars on our streets to the robots in our homes, we can expect to see a whole new set of risks emerge,” adds Klinger. “Here at Flock we’re using cutting edge data science to identify, quantify and insure these risks for drones, but we’re just getting started. Our wider vision is ultimately to bridge the gap between today’s insurers and tomorrow’s technologies, pioneering the use of Big Data in insurance for an autonomous future”.

from TechCrunch

Amazon appears to be restarting its funding efforts in India after Acko, the digital insurance startup in India, confirmed that the U.S. retail giant led a new round of funding for its business.

Amazon — which has been linked with an Acko investment since the start of this year — backed lending startup Capital Float last month, and now it has led a $12 million funding round for Acko alongside Ashish Dhawan, the founder of PE firm ChrysCapital, and existing backer Catamaran Ventures. The deal takes Acko to $42 million raised to date.

Acko was founded in late 2016 by Varun Dua, one of the co-founders of insurance comparison site Coverfox. With Acko, Dua is taking a deeper step into insurance with a digital-only business aimed at disrupting the $10 billion industry in India by leveraging the growth of internet access in India to democratize coverage and develop more relevant products.

Significant funding and big name partners

The company got off to a good start when investors pumped $30 million into it last year, before it had even acquired a license to offer insurance. (That came in September.) Fast-forward 12 months to today, and Acko has covered the traditional space of automobile insurance policies, and a newer category ‘internet economy’ since January. It’s that latter focus that appeals to Amazon via this deal, which Dua told TechCrunch came about after Acko began talking to Amazon as a potential insurance partner.

Acko has gone after big name partnerships in its pursuit of internet economy deals, which Dua said primarily consists of e-commerce, ride-hailing and travel site-focused products. In April, Acko launched passenger insurance for Uber-rival Ola’s ride-hailing service, which covers riders for obvious items like minor accidents, and eventualities like missing a flight due to traffic delays. The insurance claim system is built into the Ola app to simplify the process for users.

“We know from user behavior experience that passengers tend to contact Ola when they have issues, so we wanted to set up a pretty seamless claims process that’s reasonable integrated,” Dua told TechCrunch in an interview, adding that Acko has covered more than 10 million Ola trips so far.

The company is likely to work with Amazon around e-commerce coverage — the first focus of which will be around gadget protection — although nothing is set in stone yet.

“The idea is to find some way to collaborate in the future,” Dua explained. “We’re a new age insurance company and [Amazon] believes it can create value. They see that bundling financial service or something in the lending space [may] happen [in the future] given the data and numbers of users they sit on.”

Acko already offers special deals for Amazon customers

Despite a fierce e-commerce battle in India, Acko isn’t restricted by this deal with Amazon.

Dua said Amazon “completely wants [Acko] to grow independently and it hasn’t laid down any conditions” that might prevent it from working with rivals like Flipkart. Indian media reported that Acko had been in investment talks with Flipkart — which Amazon’s U.S. foe Walmart has agreed to buy a majority stake in — but Dua declined to comment on that rumor.

India has emerged as a key market for Amazon, yet it has backed fewer than half a dozen startups, including home services company HouseJoy, financial comparison service BankBazaar and gift card startup QwikCilver, and acquired just one: payment platform Emvantage in 2016. However, with Capital Float in April and Acko in May, Amazon may be back with renewed vigor.

Dua confirmed that this newest funding round “wasn’t an extremely planned capital raise” but adding Amazon gives the business a further validation.

He said that Acko is aiming to raise a significant funding round next year which would be used to give it a war chest — capital is an important requisite for an insurance provider — and execute on its strategy for the following three years or so. The company has held ongoing talks with undisclosed global insurance firms, Dua said, and that may manifest in a participation in the planned round.

Working with regulators

Part of the current focus is bringing a new online approach to traditional insurance, whilst also figuring out new types of cover that apply to today’s digital age. That’s necessitated a relationship with Indian regulators, and an avoidance of traditional startup practices like the hackneyed (but often true) ‘move fast and break things’ approach to product development and user growth.

“A lot of the thing we want to attempt are new and the regulation isn’t always there,” Dua told TechCrunch. “We have to ensure regulators are on board rather than jumping the gun and facing any backlash later.”

Dua added that typically regulators require two months to sign off on new products — like the Ola micro-insurance for passengers — but that communication lines remain ongoing, and often further clarification is required on Acko’s part.

The company’s Bombay office directs the regulator dialogue and related areas such as compliance, finance and auditing. Acko’s other office in Bangalore houses product development, marketing and tech teams. The startup’s total headcount has grown to around 100, Dua said, with a tech team of around 40 whose priorities include developing claims systems, pricing models and integrating with partners such as Ola and potentially Amazon and Flipkart further down the line.

Acko was one of the first insurers to go all in on digital — certainly at its scale — and Dua said over the past year he has heard of new challengers lining up funding, whilst traditional insurers are taking aim at online by breaking out new business units. In his eyes, Acko has a head start on other digital-only outfits — in terms of timing and funding — while he believes traditional players typical struggle with tech talent and have their eyes on legacy businesses which bring in the bulk of their revenue.

Still, he sees these moves as further validations of Acko’s goal of fully digital insurance.

“I genuinely think it’s possible to create a billion-dollar income in five to six years,” he said. “There have been three insurance model generations world: the global retail commercial risk like AIG, progressives such as DirectLine and now there’s a third-way with the likes of [$3 billion-valued U.S. startup] Oscar, [SoftBank-backed] Lemonade and [China’s] Zhong An.

“When we look at India as a market, generation two and three are both missing — there’s a lot of innovation potential in terms of pricing, distribution, claims efficiency and more.”

from TechCrunch

French startup Riminder recently raised a $2.3 million funding round from various business angels, such as Xavier Niel, Jean-Baptiste Rudelle, Romain Niccoli, Franck Le Ouay, Dominique Vidal, Thibaud Elzière and Fred Potter. The company has been building a deep learning-powered tool to sort applications and resumes so you don’t have to. Riminder participated in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield.

Riminder won’t replace your HR department altogether, but it can help you save a ton of time when you’re a popular company. Let’s say you are looking for a mobile designer and you usually get hundreds or thousands of applications.

You can then integrate Riminder with your various channels to collect resumes from various sources. The startup then uses optical character recognition to turn PDFs, images, Word documents and more into text. Riminder then tries to understand all your job positions and turn raw text into useful data.

Finally, the service will rank the applications based on public data and internal data. The company has scraped the web and LinkedIn to understand usual career paths.

Existing HR solutions can integrate with Riminder using an API. This way, you could potentially use the same HR platform, but with Riminder’s smart filtering features.

With this initial sorting, your HR team can more easily get straight to the point and interview the top candidates on the list.

While it’s hard to evaluate algorithm bias, Riminder thinks that leveraging artificial intelligence for recruitment can help surface unusual candidates. You could come from a different country and have a different profile, but maybe you have the perfect past experience for a particular job. Riminder isn’t going to overlook those applications.

With today’s funding round, the company is opening an office in San Francisco to get some clients in the U.S.

from TechCrunch