Month: July 2018

The European Union’s antitrust authorities have issued a series of penalties, fining consumer electronics companies Asus, Denon & Marantz, Philips and Pioneer more than €110 million (~$130M) in four separate decisions for imposing fixed or minimum resale prices on their online retailers in breach of EU competition rules.

It says the four companies engaged in so called “fixed or minimum resale price maintenance (RPM)” by restricting the ability of their online retailers to set their own retail prices for widely used consumer electronics products — such as kitchen appliances, notebooks and hi-fi products.

Asus has been hit with the largest fine (€63.5M), followed by Philips (€29.8M). The other two fines were €10.1M for Pioneer, and €7.7M for Denon & Marantz.

The Commission found the manufacturers put pressure on ecommerce outlets who offered their products at low prices, writing: “If those retailers did not follow the prices requested by manufacturers, they faced threats or sanctions such as blocking of supplies. Many, including the biggest online retailers, use pricing algorithms which automatically adapt retail prices to those of competitors. In this way, the pricing restrictions imposed on low pricing online retailers typically had a broader impact on overall online prices for the respective consumer electronics products.”

It also notes that use of “sophisticated monitoring tools” by the manufacturers allowed them to “effectively track resale price setting in the distribution network and to intervene swiftly in case of price decreases”.

“The price interventions limited effective price competition between retailers and led to higher prices with an immediate effect on consumers,” it added.

In particular, Asus, was found to have monitored the resale price of retailers for certain computer hardware and electronics products such as notebooks and displays — and to have done so in two EU Member States (Germany and France), between 2011 and 2014.

While Denon & Marantz was found to have engaged in “resale price maintenance” with respect to audio and video consumer products such as headphones and speakers of the brands Denon, Marantz and Boston Acoustics in Germany and the Netherlands between 2011 and 2015.

Philips was found to have done the same in France between the end of 2011 and 2013 — but for a range of consumer electronics products, including kitchen appliances, coffee machines, vacuum cleaners, home cinema and home video systems, electric toothbrushes, hair driers and trimmers.

In Pioneer’s case, the resale price maintenance covered products including home theatre devices, iPod speakers, speaker sets and hi-fi products.

The Commission said the company also limited the ability of its retailers to sell-cross border to EU consumers in other Member States in order to sustain different resale prices in different Member States, for example by blocking orders of retailers who sold cross-border. Its conduct lasted from the beginning of 2011 to the end of 2013 and concerned 12 countries (Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway).

In all four cases, the Commission said the level of fines were reduced — 50% in the case of Pioneer; and 40% for each of the others — due to the companies’ co-operation with its investigations, specifying that they had provided evidence with “significant added value” and had “expressly acknowledg[ed] the facts and the infringements of EU antitrust rules”.

Commenting in a statement, commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who heads up the bloc’s competition policy, said: “The online commerce market is growing rapidly and is now worth over 500 billion euros in Europe every year. More than half of Europeans now shop online. As a result of the actions taken by these four companies, millions of European consumers faced higher prices for kitchen appliances, hair dryers, notebook computers, headphones and many other products. This is illegal under EU antitrust rules. Our decisions today show that EU competition rules serve to protect consumers where companies stand in the way of more price competition and better choice.”

We’ve reached out to all the companies for comment.

The fines follow the Commission’s ecommerce sector inquiry, which reported in May 2017, and showed that resale-price related restrictions are by far the most widespread restrictions of competition in ecommerce markets, making competition enforcement in this area a priority — as part of the EC’s wider Digital Single Market strategy.

The Commission further notes that the sector inquiry shed light on the increased use of automatic software applied by retailers for price monitoring and price setting.

Separate investigations were launched in February 2017 and June 2017 to assess if certain online sales practices are preventing, in breach of EU antitrust rules, consumers from enjoying cross-border choice and from being able to buy products and services online at competitive prices. The Commission adds that those investigations are ongoing.

Commenting on today’s EC decision, a spokesman for Philips told us: “Since the start of the EC investigation in late 2013, which Philips reported in its Annual Reports, the company has fully cooperated with the EC. Philips initiated an internal investigation and addressed the matter in 2014.”

“It is good that we can now leave this case behind us, and focus on the positive impact that our products and solutions can have on people,” he added. “Let me please stress that Philips attaches prime importance to full compliance with all applicable laws, rules and regulations. Being a responsible company, everyone in Philips is expected to always act with integrity. Philips rigorously enforces compliance of its General Business Principles throughout the company. Philips has a zero tolerance policy towards non-compliance in relation to breaches of its General Business Principles.”

Anticipating the decision of the EC, he said the company had already recognized a €30M provision in its Q2 2018.

The Defense Department’s research arm, DARPA, is throwing a event around its “Electronics Resurgence Initiative,” an effort to leapfrog existing chip tech by funding powerful but unproven new ideas percolating in the industry. It plans to spend up to $1.5 billion on this over the years, of which about $75 million was earmarked today for a handful of new partners.

The ERI was announced last year in relatively broad terms, and since then it has solicited proposals from universities and research labs all over the country, arriving at a handful that it has elected to fund.

The list of partners and participants is quite long: think along the lines of MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, the UCs, IBM, Intel, Qualcomm, National Labs, and so on. Big hitters. Each institution is generally associated with one of six sub-programs, each (naturally) equipped with their own acronym:

• Software-defined Hardware (SDH) — Computing is often done on general-purpose processors, but specialized ones can get the job done faster. Problem is these “application specific integrated circuits,” or ASICs, are expensive and time-consuming to create. SDH is about making “hardware and software that can be reconfigured in real-time based on the data being processed.”
• Domain-specific System on Chip (DSSoC) — This is related to SDH, but is about finding the right balance between custom chips, for instance or image recognition or message decryption, and general-purpose ones. DSSoC aims to create a “single programmable framework” that would let developers easily mix and match parts like ASICs, CPUs, and GPUs.
• Intelligent Design of Electronic Assets (IDEA) — On a related note, creating such a chip’s actual physical wiring layout is an incredibly complex and specialized process. IDEA is looking to shorten the time it takes to design a chip from a year to a day, “to usher in an era of the 24-hour design cycle for DoD hardware systems.” Ideally no human would be necessary, though doubtless specialists would vet the resulting designs.
• Posh Open Source Hardware (POSH) — This self-referential acronym refers to a program where specialized SoCs like those these programs are looking into would be pursued under open source licenses. Licensing can be a serious obstacle to creating the best system possible — one chip may use a proprietary system that can’t exist in concert with another chip’s proprietary system — so to enable reuse and easy distribution they’ll look into creating and testing a base set that have no such restrictions.
• 3-Dimensional Monolithic System-on-a-chip (3DSoC) — The standard model of having processors and chips connected to a central memory and execution system can lead to serious bottlenecks. So 3DSoC aims to combine everything into stacks (hence the 3D part) and “integrate logic, memory and input-output (I/O) elements in ways that dramatically shorten — more than 50-fold — computation times while using less power. The 50-fold number is, I’m guessing, largely aspirational.
• Foundations Required for Novel Compute (FRANC) — That “standard model” of processor plus short term and long term memory is known as a Von Neumann architecture, after one of the founders of computing technology and theory, and is how nearly all computing is done today. But DARPA feels it’s time to move past this and create “novel compute topologies” with “new materials and integration schemes to process data in ways that eliminate or minimize data movement.” It’s rather sci-fi right now as you can tell but if we don’t try to escape Von Neumann, he will dominate us forever.

These are all extremely ambitious ideas, as you can see, but don’t think about it like DARPA contracting these researchers to create something useful right away. The Defense Department is a huge supporter of basic science; I can’t tell you how many papers I read where the Air Force, DARPA, or some other quasi-military entity has provided the funding. So think of it as trying to spur American innovation in important areas that also may happen to have military significance down the line.

A DARPA representative explained that $75 million is set aside for funding various projects under these headings, though the specifics are known only to the participants at this point. That’s the money just for FY18, and presumably more will be added according to the merits and requirements of the various projects. That all comes out of the greater $1.5 billion budget for the ERI overall.

The ERI summit is underway right now, with participants and DARPA reps sharing information, comparing notes, and setting expectations. The summit will no doubt repeat next year when a bit more work has been done.

General Motors is launching a new service in Chicago, Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan that will let owners rent out their personal GM-branded vehicles through its Maven car-sharing platform.

The peer-to-peer car rental service, similar to how Turo and Getaround works, is a departure from Maven’s existing business model.

This isn’t the first time Maven has been tweaked and broadened since it first launched in January 2016.

The mobility division initially launched as a car-sharing service akin to Zipcar . The company owns a fleet of GM vehicles and developed an app that let customers rent the cars when they want and for short periods of time. In 2017, the company launched Maven Reserve in Los Angeles and San Francisco to allow customers rent its GM-branded vehicles for a month at a time. It also has a program called Maven Gig that rents out vehicles to ride share and delivery drivers who use apps like Uber, Lyft, and UberEATS.

But all of those programs involved GM-owned cars. This new peer-to-peer service, rumors of which have been swirling for months,  will allow owners and eligible lessees to earn money by renting their personal Chevrolet, Buick, GMC or Cadillac car or truck. There are restrictions to the service. Consumers can’t rent out their old Saturn, for example. To qualify, the vehicles must be a GM model year 2015 and newer.

The service, branded as Peer Cars, will be available to existing Maven members, which now exceed more than 150,000 people. All vehicles rented out on the service will be insured by GM.

Peer Cars is just a test product for Maven. At least for now. But the company said it may launch in other U.S. cities this fall.

Xiaomi gave Google’s well-intentioned but somewhat-stalled Android One project a major boost last year when it unveiled its first device under the program, Mi A1. That’s now joined by not one but two sequel devices, after the Chinese phone maker unveiled the Mi A2 and Mi A2 Lite at an event in Spain today.

Xiaomi in Spain? Yes, that’s right. International growth is a major part of the Xiaomi story now that it is a listed business, and Spain is one of a handful of countries in Europe where Xiaomi is aiming to make its mark. These two new A2 handsets are an early push and they’ll be available in over 40 countries, including Spain, France, Italy and 11 other European markets.

Both phones run on Android One — so none of Xiaomi’s iOS-inspired MIUI Android fork — and charge via type-C USB. The 5.99-inch A2 is the more premium option, sporting a Snapdragon 660 processor and 4GB or 6GB RAM with 32GB, 64GB or 128GB in storage. There’s a 20-megapixel front camera and dual 20-megapixel and 16-megapixel cameras on the rear. On-device storage ranges between 32GB, 64GB and 128GB.

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The Mi A2 Lite is the more budget option that’s powered by a lesser Snapdragon 625 processor with 3GB or 4GB RAM, and 32GB or 64GB storage options. It comes with a smaller 5.84-inch display, there’s a 12- and 5-megapixel camera array on the reverse and a front-facing five-megapixel camera.

The A2 is priced from €249 to €279 ($291-$327) based on specs. The A2 Lite will sell for €179 or €229 ($210 or $268), against based on RAM and storage selection.

The 40 market availability mirrors the A1 launch last year, but on this occasion, Xiaomi has been busy preparing the ground in a number of countries, particularly in Europe. It has been in Spain for the past year, but it also launched local operations in France and Italy in May and tied up with CK Hutchison to sell phones in other parts of the continent via its 3 telecom business. While it isn’t operational in the U.S., Xiaomi has expanded into Mexico and it has set up partnerships with local retailers in dozens of other countries.

Xiaomi has been successful with its move into India, where it one of the top smartphone sellers, but it has not yet replicated that elsewhere outside of China so far.

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.

A report into the pay and conditions for riders delivering food for gig economy platform Deliveroo has urged the company to commit to offering a form of worker status to those riders who form the backbone of its workforce, arguing that the current reality is a dual labour market — which works very well for some riders but very poorly for others.

Far from Deliveroo’s model representing a hyper modern form of disruption, the report draws a parallel between the five-year-old startup’s ‘flexible work’ model and casual labor practices at British dockyards until the middle of the 20th century — “where workers would gather around the dock gate desperately hoping that they would be offered work”, and where only some workers were fortunate to be offered fairly regular shifts, while others were offered no work at all. 

From the report:

The inquiry was conducted by UK MP Frank Field who took evidence from 179 Deliveroo riders for the report — some put forward by the company itself, and some by unions.

For those riders who require greater stability and certainty in their work, Field is recommending that Deliveroo provides guarantee hourly pay rates of no less than the UK’s National Living Wage for all the time people are logged in and available for work — urging the company to recognize “the responsibilities they hold to those workers whose lives are made very difficult and insecure by both their existing rates of pay and working conditions, as well as the lack of alternative jobs to fit their circumstances”.

For those Deliveroo riders who prize flexibility and only wish to work a smaller number of hours — i.e. to suit their needs or wrap around other jobs — Field suggests they should be able to continue with the current model, which the report notes enables Deliveroo to “expand and contract its workforce when needed”. So he is also urging the government and the company preserve “the flexibility that so many riders have said they value” — recognizing that the gig economy is working for some, while arguing that it should not be at the expense of others.

Commenting on the findings in a statement, Field said: “The self-employed status and part-time nature of much gig economy work has given the labour market a flexibility that is still relatively new. Some of those workers who are keen to seize this opportunity view it as a short-term option while they develop their longer term earning power — setting up their own business, starting on an artistic career and the like.

“But for an unknown number of workers these imposed self-employment opportunities are all there is on offer, even though their need is for stable work for at least the level of the National Living Wage. It is this group that we are concerned about in this report and have been in each previous report we have published on the gig economy.”

The inquiry found that Deliveroo riders’ hourly pay ranges from £0 (nothing) to upwards of £20 — with average rates “tending to hover a little above, a little below, or at the level of the National Living Wage”. 

The lowest earnings reported to the inquiry included hourly amounts of nothing, £2, £3, £4.25, £5 and £6; while average earnings reported included hourly amounts of £5, £6, £6.83, £7, £8, £8.50, £9, £10, and £12; and the highest earnings reported included hourly amounts of £9, £10, £12.75, £15, £16, and £17.

Meanwhile, the company’s turnover increased from £16M in 2015, to £72M in 2016, while its global revenues increased over the same period from £18M, to £128M — and its net assets increased from £90M, to £168M.

A common ‘Catch 22’ style complaint raised by riders speaking to the inquiry relates to steps the company takes to control its workforce — which in turn appear to undermine its mooted ‘flexible work’ claim. Such as Deliveroo only allowing riders with the best delivery statistics to get first pick at booking shifts in advance (i.e. in the areas where it offers booking zones).

Riders who could not access first pick booking told the inquiry they were typically left with few or no bookable shifts — yet without the guarantee of being able to carry out deliveries they found it hard or impossible to improve their Deliveroo statistics in the way required by the platform to unlock access to bookable shifts. Hence the Catch 22.

While Deliveroo has said it welcomes Field recognizing “the benefits that working in the gig economy can bring” the company has rejected his recommendations — arguing the changes he suggests would “remove the flexibility that riders value”.

It also claims his report contains “a number of claims that are incorrect and overlooks the extent to which riders value flexible working” — rejecting, for example, the accusation that the platform deliberately maintains an oversupply of riders and thereby puts rider earnings at risk.

In a statement responding to the report, a company spokesperson told us:

Deliveroo is proud to offer flexible well-paid work where riders on average earn well over £10 an hour, well above the National Living Wage.

In the modern economy people want to fit their work around their lives, not the other way round. This is why working with Deliveroo is so popular as it gives riders total flexibility. Riders choose how much they want to work and when, and are very clear they want to protect the flexibility that self-employment provides.

Deliveroo believes more can be done to increase the security for riders while protecting their ability to be their own bosses, which is why we have introduced free, market-leading insurance for all, covering riders in case anything goes wrong.

But we want to go further, and have called on the Government to update employment rules to end the trade-off between flexibility and security and enable platforms to offer riders even more benefits without putting their employment status at risk.

The UK government is currently consulting on a package of labor market reforms intended to expand rights to millions of workers, with the reforms intended to respond to changing working patterns driven by the rise of so-called gig economy platforms — following rising political pressure over precarious work and unsafe conditions for the people whose labor underpins the gig economy.

At the same time, a series of UK court and employment tribunal rulings in recent years have also bolstered the case against gig economy platforms as being predicated on exploitation of a workforce via circumvention of workers’ rights.

Uber continues to appeal (so far unsuccessfully) against a 2016 employment tribunal ruling which found that a group of Uber drivers were in fact workers and therefore entitled to rights such as holiday and sick pay.

While last month the UK Supreme Court backed a similar workers’ rights case brought against Pimlico Plumbers.

Also last month a group of couriers who had been defined as self-employed by the delivery company Hermes won their employment tribunal fight to be classed as workers.

Deliveroo has had more success at fending off employment classification challenges — although last month the UK High Court granted a union permission to challenge the company’s opposition to collective bargaining for its couriers on human rights grounds.

Last year the union challenged the company’s employment classification of couriers but a tribunal found they were independent contractors on the grounds that they had a genuine right to find a substitute to do their job for them.

Although the union disputes the sufficiency of the substitution clause in Deliveroo’s contract, and argues that rather than there being a trade-off between flexibility and worker rights in UK law — as the company has sought to claim — there is already an employment status that allows for both.

On substitution, Field’s report notes: “We did not pick up from our evidence a great need or want among riders to use substitutes to cover their orders and Deliveroo was unable to tell us how many riders use substitutes.”

We also asked Deliveroo how many riders use substitutes but the company said it could not provide a figure — telling us: “Riders can freely engage substitutes to work on their behalf at any time, using their rider account, without needing to inform Deliveroo.”

Another of Field’s recommendations is for The Director of Labour Market Enforcement to conduct deep dives into sectors offering platform jobs — and report on “both levels of pay for different groups of workers as well as the reality of the self-employed status and the validity of each firm’s defence of that status, such as workers being able to substitute somebody else’s labour for their own and remain on the company’s books”.

We’ve reached out to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy for a comment on the report recommendations and will update this story with any response.

Yesterday, ahead of the publication of Field’s report, Deliveroo sought to put its own spin on the findings — proposing in a newspaper article what it described as a “new Charter to allow companies to give greater security to the self-employed” by providing benefits to its workforce “without compromising their self-employment status”.

It argues that the manner in which benefits such as entitlement to annual leave are currently calculated for employees and workers is “not appropriate for the on-demand economy”. And its suggestion for the Charter is to make clear that such benefits “can be accrued on the basis of earnings rather than on hours or days work”.

​”This new proposition would both harness the desire for flexibility and address the need for more security, allowing on-demand companies to continue to prosper and make a significant contribution to the UK economy,” it adds.

ScaleFactor, the Techstars alumnus that’s selling accounting and payroll management software as a service, has raised $10 million in a new round of funding as it looks to scale up its sales and marketing efforts.

Founded by longtime accountant, Kurt Rathmann, the Austin-based company has created a software service that collects and analyzes data from point of sale systems, bank accounts, credit cards and billing systems, to automate recordkeeping and payroll functions.

Rathmann, a former KPMG employee, started ScaleFactor after seeing the lack of innovation in the backoffice functions that are really the engine of any small business.

“Around the tech stack, accounting and financials were lacking the most,” Rathmann says. So he left his job at KPMG and started ScaleFactor Consulting out of his garage in Austin in 2014.

After a few years of basically going door-to-door (a throwback to Rathmann’s first company as an 18-year-old selling outdoor lighting in suburban Dallas) to find out what small businesses needed from an accounting software solution, ScaleFactor developed the API toolkit and management software that would become the services it’s pitching today.

After graduating from TechStars’ Austin accelerator, the company was able to nab $2.5 million in a seed financing round that included TechStars Ventures, NextCoast Ventures, and two Kansas City-based investment firms — Firebrand Ventures and Flyover Capital.

While the initial services business holds a lot of value and has managed to attract scores of small businesses, both Rathmann and his new investors led by Canaan Partners and including Citi Ventures and Broadhaven Capital see bigger opportunities down the road for ScaleFactor.

With the window that the company has into the operations of small businesses around the country, ScaleFactor can serve as an unimpeachable source of information for small business lenders.

With insight of (and control over) payroll management, billpay, cash approvals, cash accounting, and an ability to project forward cash flows (along with invoicing and tax management for part time employees), ScaleFactor will be able to offer lending services to smooth bumps in a company’s progress. 

“Bookkeeping and accounting is really the nucleus,” says Michael Gilroy, a principal with Canaan Partners. 

While Square has moved into lending services (and now is on the hunt for a banking license) through its window into a company’s revenues through point-of-sale devices, a company like ScaleFactor has a more holistic view of the health of a business, says Gilroy.

Equipped with that information ScaleFactor software can do things — like prompt business owners of the revenue targets they need to hit each month or suggest lending options to cover shortfalls — that better equip business owners to handle disruptions. 

“With our foundation established, a big part of our Series A is how do we power the business owner past bookkeeping & accounting? We see many opportunities to help further and our next steps will include things like lending, payments and many other activities that take a business owner/operators focus away from driving their business forward,” Rathmann wrote in an email.

Kano has been an undeniable success story. The company, which began life as a Kickstarter project, had shipped north of 200,000 of its Raspberry Pi coding kits by the end of last year. 2017 also saw the company raise a $28 million round and get backing from Sesame Street’s Sesame Ventures.

Today, the company is announcing another key licensing deal that brings one of kids’ lit’s most beloved characters to the hardware ecosystem. And unlike the Sesame Street announcement, this one is launching with a hardware product in tow. The Harry Potter Kano Coding Kit is more than just a branded version of the standard kit, however.

The system is built around a “build it yourself” wand that utilizes an on-board gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer to interact with coding content on-screen. That are 70-plus “wizard challenges” that utilize various pieces of Harry Potter IP. The young coders create different lines that associate actions with wand movements. So, lift the wand and owls appear. Twist it and a bell rings. You get the basic drift.

The kit is the first piece of Harry Potter merchandise aimed at helping kids learn STEM. It’s compatible with iOS and Android tablets and Windows and Mac computers. It’s up for pre-order and will hit retail October 1, priced at $100. That’s about half the price of the full Kano Computer Kit.

League, an online platform that wants to reduce the strain of managing health benefits for companies and employees alike, announced today that it has raised a $62 million Series B. The round was led by TELUS Ventures, with participation from Wittington Ventures and returning investors OMERS, Infinite Potential Group, RBC Ventures and BDC Ventures.

The Toronto-based startup’s last round of funding was a $25 million Series A two years ago. With clients like Uber, Shopify and Unilever, League is currently one of the bigger players in the “employee wellness space,” which encompasses a roster of startups dedicated to boosting retention and productivity rates by improving health benefits. The growth of the sector is fueled by competition for top talent, the rising cost of healthcare and increasing awareness of mental health issues.

League was launched in 2014 by serial entrepreneur Michael Serbinis, who was previously founder and CEO of Kobo, the Kindle competitor acquired by Rakuten in 2011. Serbinis tells TechCrunch that his interest in health technology was sparked by a conversation about healthcare inefficiencies with Patrick Soon-Shiong, the pharmaceutical entrepreneur and NantHealth founder probably better known outside of biotech circles as the newest owner of the Los Angeles Times. Serbinis says Soon-Shiong told him that the healthcare system needed to be fixed by someone outside of the industry, who was able to take a fresh, consumer-driven approach.

“I got into it naively not being a healthcare person, with not even a biology class anywhere in my past, and I very quickly realized that most people think about healthcare through the lens of health insurance, i.e. can I do it, can I afford it?” Serbinis, League’s CEO, says. “The more I learned about it, the more I realized how broken it is. In the U.S. and Canada and Western European nations, healthcare gets more expensive, but you get less and less, and no one loves the experience.”

He notes that health benefits “are a top three requirement for anyone seeking a new job in the U.S. today and for millennials it’s the top one or two, depending on the survey.” At the same time, healthcare is also one of the top three expenses for companies.

While there is a growing roster of startups, including Spring Health, Lyra Health and Lumity, tackling different corporate healthcare issues, Serbinis felt the space was still missing “an end-to-end platform that fits on top of health insurance providers and underwriters, to give employers a way to offer a competitive solution in the war for talent and saving money.”

League’s mission is to let employees take more control over their health plans, while reducing costs for companies by providing a HIPAA-compliant platform that connects all benefits. This enables employees to manage their health plan and benefits with League’s chat-based online assistant and a digital wallet. They also gain more transparency into things like health insurance pricing and flexible spending accounts. League partners with other companies to offer perks like ClassPass or Headspace discounts, prescription delivery services or access fertility treatments that aren’t covered by traditional insurance plans.

On the other end, companies get analytics to help them design healthcare plans and see if the benefits they offer are actually improving employee morale.

Serbinis says League’s ease of use is proven by its high engagement rate. The company claims three-quarters of users log onto the platform each month, and of that number, many access it five to 20 times a month.

One interesting aspect of League’s story is that Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan are currently making headlines for a new joint health care initiative. While the venture will start by overhauling health benefits at those three organizations, it is being closely watched because of its potential influence on the health care industry. Thanks to Kobo, which was once Kindle’s top competitor, Serbinis already has experience going head-to-head with Amazon.

After learning about the triumvirate’s plans, Serbinis says he emailed Bezos. “I said I love the initiative and would love to help out, because for the most part, what people expect in the short-term is really aggregate purchasing power and driving costs down there. But ultimately, I expect a lot more from them, and the idea of bringing strategic assets and capability, a big pool of employees and technology together is the right strategy,” he says. “I can see Amazon looking for a partner like League.”

He adds that the joint initiative will light a fire in the sector. “I see new entrants into this market accelerate because of Amazon. It really has opened people’s eyes to the idea that this is a massive problem,” Serbinis says. “I see a lot of people getting into the game because of Amazon leading the way, and what I’ve seen already is incumbent players trying to speed up and accelerate their innovation programs.”

In a media statement, TELUS Ventures managing partner Rich Osborn said “We believe that innovative companies like League–which deliver compelling, consumer-centric experiences–will not only drive high employee and employer engagement, but will also deliver fundamental improvements in health outcomes for Canadians through their carrier-friendly open platform.”

The company’s Series B will be used to open offices in San Francisco, New York and London. League launched in the United States in 2017, starting with an office in Chicago, and is now licensed to operate in all 50 states. Serbinis says one of the markets that will help its American expansion are employers with less than 50 “full-time equivalent” employees who aren’t mandated to provide coverage under the Affordable Care Act, but still need to offer health benefits in order to attract talent. Another new opening is the recent Department of Labor ruling on “association health plans” that makes it easier for small businesses in the same sector to team up and buy employee health insurance together.

League also plans to begin operating in the United Kingdom and European Union next year, which will make it easier to attract multinational clients who want to use the same platform to manage health benefits in different countries.

“When you think about the future of health insurance, it’s easy to think about more of the same, but with a better website or app,” says Serbinis. “But the fact is that the future of health insurance is not just about insurance, but health and there is the idea of focusing on consumers and delivering personalized experiences, a digital experience that is data driven and helps them every day, instead of waiting to the point where they are sick and have to go to a website under duress to find out what to do.”

WeWork may be doubling down on Asia, having initially focused its efforts on China, but that isn’t stopping local players from hatching ambitious expansion plans of their own.

One of those eying new markets is Hong Kong-based Campfire, which tries to stand out from the crowd with industry-focused spaces. Today, the startup announced it has raised an $18 million Series A ahead of planned expansions to three overseas countries: Singapore, Australia and the UK. It previously raised $6 million in March 2017.

Two-year-old Campfire’s business right now is in Hong Kong, where it has eight locations which include co-education, co-retail and co-living sites, as well as more standard co-working venues. In the case of its fashion-focused location, that even includes runway, photo studio, fabric facility and 3D printer.

The new capital comes from a trio of real estate firms in Hong Kong, they are Kwai Jung Group, Fast Global Holdings — which is a subsidiary of Rykadan Capital — and Sa Sa. In the latter case, Sa Sa is actually a cosmetics brand that operates across Greater China and parts of Southeast Asia, but the firm owns a significant retail footprint. That includes the building that houses Campfire’s ‘V Point’ space in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong, so the relationship is already well advanced.

A Campfire representative confirmed that the capital is all provided up front and equity-based, in other words it is an investment in the business not specific locations or joint ventures, as is sometimes the case with investment deals in co-working firms.

Going beyond Hong Kong, the group is set to open its first overseas space in London (Shoreditch) with co-working locations in Melbourne, Sydney and Singapore planned thereafter. Further down the line, it is looking to move into “global gateway cities,” with the likes of Tokyo, Osaka, Bangkok and Brisbane among those that are on the list.

Co-working is sufficiently developed worldwide that most countries across Asia have a number of local players who compete with WeWork, the global leader valued at $35 billion, either now or else soon in the future. Some of the more developed of that bunch include Singapore’s JustCo, EV Hive in Indonesia and China’s Ucommune. WeWork has actually been busy consolidating its position, having snapped up Spacemob in Southeast Asia and its main rival in China, Naked Hub.

Israel-based AllCloud, a professional services provider for Salesforce users and businesses who want a bit of help in managing their application on AWS and Google Cloud, today announced that it has acquired Figur8, another professional services company with a focus on Salesforce consulting, implementations and development services.

While the two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, the deal was at least partly enabled by AllCloud’s new $7 million funding round led by the company’s existing investors and new investors Discount Capital and Hallett Capital. With this, AllCloud has now raised a total of $15 million.

And to cap things off, AllCloud also today announced that that it is bringing on Eran Gil, the co-founder of Cloud Sherpas (which was acquired by Accenture in 2015), as its new CEO. The company’s current CEO, Ronit Rubin, will remain at the company, but become GM of EMEA.

“The acquisition of Figur8 provides us the ability to better support our customers’ digital transformation efforts on a global scale,” said Gil in today’s announcement. “The new capital provides us the flexibility to grow organically or, if we prefer, through more acquisitions. With a seasoned management team and plenty of resources, AllCloud is in a very strong position to serve our customers wherever and however they need us.”

AllCloud was an early Salesforce partner, so today’s acquisition strengthens its expertise in this area. What’s maybe just as important, though, is that this acquisition gives AllCloud a foothold in North America, thanks to Figur8’s offices in San Francisco, New York, Toronto and Vancouver. These will complement the company’s existing offices in Israel, Munich and Berlin. Figur8’s co-founders, Ojay Malonzo and Richard Lockson, who started the company in 2012, will remain at AllCloud as SVP Sales North America and SVP Delivery North America, respectively.