Comet.ml allows data scientists and developers to easily monitor, compare and optimize their machine learning models. The New York-based company is launching its product today, after completing the TechStars-powered Amazon Alexa Accelerator program and raising a $2.3 million seed round led by Trilogy Equity partners, together with Two Sigma Ventures, Founders Co-Op, Fathom Capital, TechStars Ventures and angel investors.
The service provides you with a dashboard that brings together the code of your machine learning (ML) experiments and their results. In addition, the service also allows you to optimize your models by tweaking the hyperparameters of your experiments. As you train your model, Comet tracks the results and provides you with a graph of your results, but it also tracks your code changes and imports them so that you can later compare all the different aspects of the various versions of your experiments.
Developers can easily integrate Comet into their machine learning frameworks, no matter whether they use the Keras API, TensorFlow, Scikit Learn, Pytorch or simply like to write Java code. To get started, developers simply add the CometML tracking code to their apps and run their experiments as usual. The service is completely agnostic as to where you train your models and you can obviously share access to your results with the rest of your team.
Ideally, this means that data scientist can stick with their existing workflow and development tools, but in addition to those, they now have a new tool that gives them better insights into how well their experiments are working.
“We realized that ML teams look a lot like software teams looked ten or fifteen years ago,” CometML co-founder and CEO Gideon Mendels told me. While software teams now have version control and tools like GitHub to share their code, ML teams still often share data and code by email. “The main issue isn’t discipline but the state of tooling,” said Mendels. “Current tools like GitHub are a great solution for software engineering, but for ML teams — even though code is a main component — it’s not everything.”
Mendels tells me that the team signed up about 500 data scientists (including from some top tier tech companies) during its closed beta. So far, these users have developers about 6,000 models on the platform.
Looking ahead, the CometML team plans to give developers more tools to build better and more accurate models, though as Mendels noted, to do that, the company had to get this first building block in place.
CometML is now available to all developers who want to give it a try. There’s a free tier that allows for unlimited public projects and, similar to GitHub, a number of paid tiers for teams that want to keep their project private.
The investment was led by Insignia Ventures, the new firm started by ex-Sequoia venture partner Yinglan Tan. Phillip Private Equity, X Capital Ventures, K3 Venture’s Kuok Meng Xiong, angel investor Koh Boon Hwee, and existing backer Wavemaker Partners also took part.
The company is a rare example of a hardware startup coming out of Southeast Asia with a global presence.
Inspired by the rise of Airbnb and hosts on the platform, Igloohome sells a range of key-less products that include digital locks, digital deadbolts and a digital safety deposit box. The products are notable because they work offline, requiring either a manually entry pin code or ‘Bluetooth key’ on a phone to unlock. Despite that, owners can still control access remotely, while there’s a physical key just in case.
The Igloohome team
The company said that the new funding will go towards R&D for new products, and developing solutions for commercial projects, which could include hospitality, student accommodation and warehouse projects. The company is already a partner seller of Airbnb, rival HomeAway, and China’s Xiaozhu which helps it reach a very targeted audience. Outside of those relationships, it sells directly to consumers in over a dozen countries via the likes of Amazon, Walmart and Home Depot while there are online options for other global markets.
“We are very encouraged by the support provided by our investors. We believe that together, we will be able to bring even more innovative products and services to the table, and grow the Igloohome name into a lifestyle brand,” Anthony Chow, CEO and co-founder of Igloohome, said in a statement.
Grab declined to comment for this story. An Alibaba spokesperson said the company “doesn’t confirm on market rumors.”
Alibaba and Grab first held talks over an investment last summer but a deal never materialized after the Chinese firm became pre-occupied chasing an investment in Tokopedia, the Indonesia-based e-commerce unicorn. That deal was prioritized because Alibaba’s arch-rival Tencent was in advanced talks over an investment that could give it a foothold in Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s fourth most populous country.
Alibaba leaned heavily on its long-time ally SoftBank — an early backer of Tokopedia and Grab — to get the Tokopedia deal ahead of Tencent. That’s despite Tokopedia’s own founders’ preference for Tencent due to Alibaba’s ownership of Lazada, an e-commerce rival to Tokopedia. SoftBank, however, forced the deal through.
“It was literally SoftBank against every other investor,” a separate source with knowledge of negotiations told TechCrunch.
TechCrunch understands that one condition SoftBank attached to the Tokopedia deal was that Alibaba would invest in Grab when the time was right. SoftBank is widely seen to have been the deal-maker in the recent Grab-Uber consolidation and now, with that transaction agreed, Alibaba’s investment will follow.
The timing may be ideal for Grab. While it has plenty of money in the bank from past investments, Indonesian rival Go-Jek is preparing to expand into regional markets so the firm will need to brace itself for a new wave of competition.
Despite the background, this is far from Alibaba being strong-armed into an investment, a deal with Grab makes plenty of sense for the firm.
It has been actively seeking investment deals in Southeast Asia’s top internet companies for some time, and Grab clearly fits the bill. In particular, Grab’s focus on payments and its recently-announced financial services play is aligned with Alibaba and its fintech arm Ant Financial’s goals, too.
Last year, Ant Financial went on an investment spree which included multiple investments deals across Southeast Asia and the failed acquisition of MoneyGram. Involvement in Grab Pay, which is shaping up to be a major payment player across the region, would massively boost Alibaba and Ant’s objective.
Finally, there’s the good old competition factor. With Tencent an investor in Grab rival Go-Jek, Alibaba has motivation enough to back a horse in Southeast Asia’s ride-hailing space.
As I wrote last year, the two Chinese internet giants have been carving up Southeast Asia’s most promising startups in search of investments that give them a good position as the region’s internet economy grows.
A report co-authored by Google last year forecast that Southeast Asia’s internet economy will grow to $200 billion in 2025 from $50 billion in 2017. Right now, it is Chinese companies, not those from the U.S., that are seizing the opportunity.
Many will rightly say that raising money as a startup in Southeast Asia is no easy thing, but up-and-coming online fashion service Zilingo sure doesn’t seem to have problems on that front.
The round was led by new investor Sofina — an investor in Flipkart-owned fashion site Myntra among others — and existing backers Burda and Sequoia India. Zilingo’s other existing investors, including Tim Draper, SIG, Venturra, Beenext, Manik Arora, all took part with Amadeus Capital joining the party, too.
Raising this much money is rare over the lifecycle of any startup in Southeast Asia, but to do it less than 2.5 years after launching your product is unprecedented.
E-commerce is a hot space in the region but few companies have made the jump to Series B and beyond with success, in order to make the leap Singapore-headquartered Zilingo has gone about things in a different way to others in its immediate space.
Beyond consumer sales
The company started out in Thailand in 2015 when it was founded by Ankiti Bose (CEO) and Dhruv Kapoor (CTO). Bose, a former analyst with Sequoia India and McKinsey, had the idea of bringing traditional sellers online after visiting Bangkok and marveling at the rich variety of fashion items being sold at street markets.
Now, however, the company has risen above online sales to a position as a platform that caters to merchants, retailers and brands for both B2C and B2B sales. That’s been enabled by an early focus on providing basic services for retailers beyond just an online storefront.
We noted when we first wrote about Zilingo that the company offered a seller management tool which handled processes like inventory management, stock and sales for small retailers who might not already be digital. Aside from boosting touch points with merchants, its key target, these services have evolved over time and become both an additional revenue generator and an important defensive moat for Zilingo’s business, while not to mention providing insight and direction for product development.
Zilingo’s e-commerce site sells directly to consumers in Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, and it ships internationally to four more countries. Its tech team is in India while it has supply bases in Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Cambodia, but it has pushed on.
With financial services from third parties, a ‘style hunter’ that aggregates upcoming trends from fashion watchers and icons, product sourcing, and content and photography services, the targets have expanded to include professional fashion sellers, SMEs, brands, and B2B buyers located outside of Southeast Asia.
The idea is no longer just about bringing the longtail of market sellers online, but instead to enable increased efficiencies for all. That means organization services, financial products and sales for the longtail merchants, but trend analysis, B2B sales/sourcing and more advanced options to the more sophisticated end of brands and larger retailers.
Zilingo co-founders Ankiti Bose and Dhruv Kapoor
“We realized that the longtail is a good way to start, but if you want to build the biggest player in this space, then you have to have all the supply,” Bose told TechCrunch. “The reason they’d stay with us is because they have a dependence with us.”
Bose said that Zilingo doesn’t pressure its merchants to use Zilingo.com for consumers sales — although it is obviously preferential — which means it has a potential in that allows it to start working with those who are on rival services, which chiefly includes Rocket Internet’s well-funded Zalora business.
So a brand using Zalora for sales, for example, might source its products or materials from sellers on Zilingo. Further down the line, Zilingo could use that relationship to persuade it to open a Zilingo.com store.
That has seen revenue skyrocket. While Bose isn’t revealing exact sales figures, she said that revenue has grown “over 10X” in the last 12 months with more than 10,000 sellers and two million products now on the Zilingo.com platform.
That jump is primarily thanks to a move into Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy, the emergence of B2B sales — i.e. labels or merchants using Zilingo to buy fashion items to then sell to consumers — and some of the optional, paid-for services such as loans or credit. Now, Bose said, the once-core B2C business from Zilingo.com accounts for just 40 percent of the revenue.
That platform strategy goes some way to explaining why investors are doubling down on the business despite a “bloodbath” — as Bose puts it — in the B2C fashion commerce space in Southeast Asia.
Zalora is the big player, while others include JD.com-backed Pomelo and Singapore’s Love Bonito, both of which have raised low double-digit USD rounds to move into brick and mortar retail. Zilingo, meanwhile, has transcended the sales race by building a product that can live without a dependency on its Zilingo.com e-commerce service.
Looking to U.S. and Europe
The company is putting that to the test this week with the launch of a B2B service for U.S. and Europe-based fashion sellers and labels.
ZilingoAsiaMall.com is a destination where smaller retailers and other B2B buyers can source fashion items from Southeast Asia-based resellers for similar prices to that which top global fashion names enjoy, but without the commitment of massive order volumes.
Zilingo Asia Mall
“Major global fashion brands source most apparel from Asia at $1.5/piece for massive quantities of over a million pieces,” a Zilingo representative explained. “We saw how Zilingo could leverage its existing Asian supply chain network built from its consumer business to drive value for the American and European fashion businesses. ZAM has figured out how retailers can source quality, current products at $2/piece for quantities as low as 200 and also make it an easy experience.”
“Some 49% of all exports globally in fashion come from ASEAN, China and Bangladesh [so] we are basically sitting at the source,” Bose told TechCrunch.
“Merchants want to buy from our B2B platforms and sell on B2C channels, Zilingo could be one of them,” she added. “It’s a high margin profitable business and we want to scale that up.”
Future plans
Zilingo said it still has its Series B round in the bank so that, combined with this newest funding, gives it quite the war chest for investment.
Aside from pushing its international strategy, the company plans to add more tech services to its merchant ecosystem while also expanding its Zilingo.com e-commerce site deeper into Southeast Asia. The Philippines is top of the list, but opening up in Vietnam and Malaysia is also on the planner.
The company will also continue to build its brand and market share in its existing Southeast Asian markets. There’s a particular focus on Indonesia where it recently signed up actress Pevita Pearce to front its first TV ad campaign.
As for raising more money right after the Series B, Bose said that the timing felt right.
“The logic behind raising this round is that Southeast Asia is heating up but fashion doesn’t have a big leader because Zalora is stumbling, but it is also the only high margin vertical in e-commerce,” she said.
“When things are going well, there’s momentum, and we figured that we might as well use that because this is a fantastic time to be running a startup in Southeast Asia — people are taking the region seriously,” she added, referencing increased investments from Tencent and Alibaba.
Unbelievably, Zilingo closed the Series C round “weeks” after its Series B, according to Sequoia India managing director Shailendra Singh. Bose explained that investors had begun to see the results of the B2B push and were keen to double down right there and then.
Luckily for the rest of the market, there are no imminent Series D plans at this point… apparently.
As the e-commerce industry continues to explode, one startup that’s benefitting is Boston-based 6 River Systems.
The business, which builds robots that speed up production in warehouses, has raised $25 million Series B financing in a round led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Norwest Venture Partners, Eclipse Ventures and iRobot.
6 River says it has gained early traction with its robot, “Chuck.” Jerome Dubois, founder and CEO said that he believes 6 River has built “the first and only collaborative robot with the associates in the aisles doing the work.” In other words, 6 River aims to help humans be more efficient.
Chuck keeps warehouse employees on task by guiding them through the facility through each step of the packaging process. It can glide around the room and also has a touchscreen to help workers locate items. Chuck uses sensors to help detect worker productivity. It’s also been designed to help with employee training.
6 River isn’t worried about eliminating humans and instead believes that there is an opportunity to help industries that have a “massive labor shortage” for warehouse suppliers. “There aren’t enough people to fill the jobs,” Dubois claims.
Right now 6 River has deployed 600 robots to 30 sites. These robots have helped pack medical supplies, retail products and “nuts and bolts” in industrial spaces.
There’s “been very little automation outside of conveyor belts,” said Matt Murphy, at Menlo Ventures, about why he invested. Murphy, who’s on the board at 6 River, “there needed to be a second generation robotics system to replace what Amazon started six years ago when they bought Kiva.”
6 River is particularly focused on building relationships with Fortune 100 businesses and offers its robots through SaaS licensing. They can also be rented for a one or two-year term.
The startup plans to use the funding to build out its own software. It also wants to expand to Europe.
It is normal for VC firms to work closely with big corporates as LPs that supply money for their funds — the Middle East has proven to be fertile hunting ground for the likes of 500, Uber and Softbank — but direct investment in parents is not common in VC-land. ADFG has been an LP with 500 for some time and Christine Tsai, who heads the VC firm up, said there is “strong alignment on vision and complementary strengths” between the two.
Founded in 2011, ADFG claims to have $6 billion in assets under management via offices in the UAE, UK and Eastern Europe. The firm covers public markets, private markets, real estate and debt investments.
500 isn’t saying what size ADFG’s investment other than it will lead to “substantial capital” being injected into the firm to “accelerate the growth of our key initiatives, expand into new markets, and anchor future 500 funds.”
ADFG will also get a board seat at 500, Tsai confirmed.
Meituan Dianping, the fast-growing Chinese firm valued at $30 billion, is buying Mobike, a Chinese startup that helped pioneer bike-sharing services worldwide, in a major piece of consolidation.
The deal was heavy rumored yesterday and TechCrunch has today confirmed with a source that it has been concluded at a price of $2.7 billion.
TechCrunch understands that the deal will be officially announced today, but already key personnel have let the cat out of the bag on social media. Mobike President and co-founder Hu Weiwei posted a cryptic WeChat message about “a new beginning,” as our Chinese partner Technode noted, while SCMP reported that Meituan CEO Wang Xing said the company will “build a new future with Mobike.”
Representatives from Meituan Dianping and Mobike did not respond to requests for comment.
Meituan Dianping is best known for food deliveries via electric bike, but that is just one part of its platform which connects local retailers to consumers via a so-called offline to online, or O2O, platform. The company was formed through a multi-billion dollar merger between China’s largest group buying services in 2015 and it has since raised boat-loads of capital from investors, including $4 billion last October, to expand into new areas.
These new forays might lead to an IPO. A host of Chinese firms have jumped into the public markets lately, and Bloomberg recently reported that Meituan Dianping hopes to join them with a listing that could value it as high as $60 billion.
The deal will also be a major win for Tencent against its long-time foe Alibaba.
Mobike and Ofo pioneered bike-sharing in China and the rest of the world. Mobike raised nearly $1 billion from investors that, Tencent aside, include Temasek, Foxconn, Hillhouse Capital and Vertex Ventures.
Mobike has been an investment and acquisition target for many.
Last year, a deal to merge with close rival Ofo was widely speculated. Ultimately, reports suggest that it fell through out of fear that Didi Chuxing, the ride-hailing giant that invested in Ofo, would become too powerful if the two bike-sharing firms tied up. That theory seemed to have its merits after Didi rolled out a hostile bike-sharing platform that sits inside its hugely popular ride-hailing app and is aimed at extinguishing the threat of Ofo, Mobike and others by simply turning them into features rather than fully-fledged rivals.
Spotify is done with its long-awaited “direct listing” experiment. The music streaming company went public without the IPO.
After completing its first trade halfway through the day at $165.90, Spotify fell to $149.01, 10% beneath the open. It was a down day on the stock market, but at a $26.5 billion market cap, it’s up from the private market trading that happened in the months leading up to the IPO.
The top end of that range, $132, was used as a “reference point,” valuing the company at $23.5 billion. Since there was no IPO price, that demarcation is being used to say that Spotify traded up about 13% on its first day.
Yet while it achieved a desirable market cap, some on Wall Street are puzzled as to why Spotify would want to go public without raising money.
One myth that’s been floating around is that Spotify did this to avoid paying bankers. In fact, they worked with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Allen & Co. in the lead up to the debut.
They did not eliminate the investment banks, but they did manage to avoid the dreaded “lock-up” expiration, which is when most employees and insiders are allowed to sell shares. This is usually about six months after an IPO and it often puts downward pressure on the stock, in anticipation of the event.
Some are wondering if Spotify’s debut will be replicated in the future.
“The direct listing is really interesting as a potential roadmap for future companies because the price that Spotify now trades it as a real price without any of the distortions which come from a lockup or a banker-managed process,” said Chi-Hua Chen, managing partner at Goodwater Capital. Chen invested in Spotify when he was at Kleiner Perkins. He believes that “the price is as real an expression of the value of the company as possible, which makes it an interesting case study for future companies moving into the public markets.”
Apart from the change in process, this debut also felt different from IPOs because there was no celebration. There was no bell-ringing ceremony and no Spotify employees were present to cheer from the floor.
Outside the New York Stock Exchange, there was a Spotify banner to commemorate the event. And next to it, there was a Swiss flag meant to honor them. The only problem is, Spotify is Swedish.
Spotify opened on the New York Stock Exchange at $165.90, giving the company a market value of $29.5 billion.
The first trade didn’t happen until 12:45pm Eastern. This is halfway through the trading day, and a record for the latest opening time for a public debut.
Spotify isn’t selling its shares on the stock market, meaning the company isn’t raising any money today. Instead, the event known as a “direct listing,” is a collection of transactions from existing shareholders (like employees and investors) selling shares directly to stock market investors. It took a while for the market makers to sort this out.
Spotify is basically trying to recreate the secondary market activity that happened before it went public. The company says that in 2018, shares traded on the private markets between $90 and $132.50. Since Spotify didn’t do an IPO, it set a “reference price” of $132 per share, which would have given the company a valuation of $23.5 billion.
Unlike a traditional IPO where employees don’t sell shares for months, known as a “lock-up,” Spotify insiders are already allowed to sell.
If few people opt to sell, it will drive the share price up, because of limited supply. If a lot of insiders sell, the reverse could happen, if investor demand doesn’t match it. This process may lead to increased volatility in the first few days or weeks of trading.
In the long-run, Spotify’s performance in the stock market will largely depend on its business performance and outlook.
Some investors are concerned that Spotify will run the course of competitor Pandora, which has struggled as a public company, partly due to hefty artist fees. Others argue that Spotify could be viewed as a Netflix, which has been successful at its entertainment licensing agreements.
It’s certainly a big and growing business.
The company says it is present in 61 countries and its platform includes 159 million monthly active users and 71 million premium subscribers.
Spotify had 4.09 billion Euros in revenue last year (or close to $5 billion), compared to 2.95 billion Euros (about $3.6 billion) the year before. 2015 saw 1.94 billion Euros in revenue (about $2.38 billion).
Losses for last year were 1.2 billion Euros ($1.47 billion), which compares to 539 million Euros ($661 million) the year before.
Spotify previously raised about $2.7 billion in both debt and equity financing. Tencent, Tiger Global, Sony Music and Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) are amongst its largest shareholders.
SoftBank is at it again giving money companies that rival startups it has already invested in.
The Japanese firm and its long-time ally (and existing Paytm backer) Alibaba have come together to invest $450 million more into Paytm’s e-commerce business, Paytm Mall, as first reported by Mint. The deal is said to value the business at $1.6-$2 billion, with SoftBank providing around $400 million of the committed investment.
Alibaba meanwhile has been behind the core Paytm business, which specializes in mobile payments with plans for financial services, having invested $1.4 billion into parent firm One97 Communications last year. This new deal signals its crossing into the e-commerce business, too.
“This latest investment led by Softbank and Alibaba reaffirms the strength of our business model, growth trajectory, execution capability and the potential of India’s massive O2O model in the retail space,” Amit Sinha, Paytm Mall COO, told Mint in a statement.
SoftBank added: “Paytm Mall’s offline-to-online operating model, combined with the strength of the Paytm ecosystem, is uniquely positioned to enable India’s 15 million offline retail shops to participate in India’s eCommerce boom.”
Alibaba’s involvement in Paytm has seen the business — or rather, its many businesses — become proxies for Alibaba in India.
Paytm Mall has linked up with Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace in China to extend the reach of Chinese merchants into India. Similar arrangements have also been reached in Southeast Asia via Alibaba’s Lazada e-commerce business.
Indeed, it was through investments by Ant Financial that Alibaba first became associated with Paytm. It’s not a huge surprise, then, to see that SoftBank — often a co-investor — is also spreading its influence across the Paytm business. After all, Alibaba needs all the help it can get to battle Amazon directly in India.
