Month: July 2018

The TechCrunch crew is practically giddy to be heading to São Paulo, Brazil to host the inaugural Startup Battlefield Latin America on November 8, 2018. This is the first time we’ve hosted an event in Latin America, and we’re stoked to cover and support the region’s fast-growing startup scene.

We’re looking for 15 of Latin America’s best pre-Series A startups to go head-to-head in our premier startup pitch competition. The application deadline is August 6 at 5 p.m. PST, but if your company fits our description, why wait? Apply now to participate in Startup Battlefield.

Here’s how it all works. You must meet certain eligibility requirements — see that info listed below. Our crack team of TechCrunch editors (seriously, they have mad skills when it comes to spotting potential-laden startups) review every eligible application and will select 15 companies to join us onstage at São Paulo’s Tomie Ohtake Institute.

Each team receives free pitch-coaching from TechCrunch editors, so they’ll be primed and ready to do their best come the big day. The competition begins with three preliminary rounds — five startups per round will each have just six minutes to pitch their company and present their product demo to top-tier VC judges in front of a live audience of 500 people.

The judges have six minutes following each pitch to ask the team probing questions. Of the 15 startups, a fortunate five will be chosen to move on to the finals and pitch again — this time to a fresh set of judges. And from those five finalists comes one shining startup to be named champion of the first Startup Battlefield Latin America.

The winning founders receive US$25,000, plus a trip for two to the next TechCrunch Disrupt, where they can exhibit for free in Startup Alley. Who knows? They might even qualify to participate in that Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield.

Just participating in Startup Battlefield offers big perks — no winning required. Media exposure is almost as important as cold, hard cash at this startup stage, and we’ll record every Startup Battlefield session on video and post them all on TechCrunch.com. Marketing professionals start your engines!

Plus, every Battlefield competitor becomes part of the Startup Battlefield alumni community. This group of more than 750 companies — including Dropbox, Yammer, Mint, Getaround, Cloudflare, Vurb and many more — has collectively raised more than $8 billion and created more than 100 exits. We can’t wait to add 15 great Latin American founders to that elite cohort.

OK, let’s talk eligibility. These are the requirements founders need to meet:

• Have an early-stage company in “launch” stage
• Be headquartered in one of these countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela, (Central America) Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Panama (Caribbean — including dependencies and constituent entities) Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
• Have a fully working product/beta reasonably close to, or in, production
• Have received limited press or publicity to date
• Have no known intellectual property conflicts
• Apply by August 6, 2018, at 5 p.m. PST

Startup Battlefield Latin America takes place on November 8, 2018 at the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo, Brazil. If you think your pre-Series A startup has what it takes to win our premier startup pitch competition, don’t wait another minute. Take your shot at making your startup dreams come true — and make some TechCrunch history in the process. Apply to Startup Battlefield Latin America today.

Snowflake, the cloud data warehouse, announced a partnership with Microsoft today to expand their offering to the Azure cloud. The new product is still in Preview for now.

Given that Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia worked at Microsoft for more than 20 years, it’s certainly not surprising that Microsoft is the company’s second partner after working with only Amazon since its inception. But Muglia says it was really about seeing customer demand in the marketplace more than any nostalgia or connections at Microsoft. In fact, he says the company is on boarding one to two new Azure customers a day right now.

The plan is to open up a private preview today, then become generally available some time in the fall when they work out all of the kinks involved with porting their service to another provider.

The partnership didn’t happen overnight. It’s been developing for over a year and that’s because Muglia says Azure isn’t quite as mature as Amazon in some ways and it required some engineering cooperation to make it all work.

“We had to work with Microsoft on some of the things that we needed to make [our product] work [on their platform], particularly around the way we work with with Azure Blob Storage that we really had to do a little differently on Azure. So there are changes we needed to make internally in our product to make it work,” he explained.

Overall though the two company’s engineers have worked together to solve those issues and Muglia says that when the Azure version becomes generally available in the Fall, it should basically be the same product they offer on Amazon, although there are still some features they are trying to make work on in the Preview. “Our goal is to have literally the same product on Azure as on Amazon, and we are very confident we’ll get there with Microsoft,” he said.

For Snowflake of course, it represents a substantial market expansion because now they can sell to companies working on Azure and Amazon and that has opened up a whole new pipeline of customers. Azure is the number two cloud provider behind Amazon.

The interesting aspect of all this is that Amazon and Microsoft compete in the cloud of course, but Snowflake is also competing with each cloud provider too with their own product. Yet this kind of partnership has become standard in the cloud. You have to work across platforms, then compete where it makes sense.

“Almost all of the relationships that we have in the industry, we have some element of competition with them, and so this is a normal mode of operation,” he said.

Pointy​,​ the​ ​startup​ ​that​ offers tech to help ​bricks and mortar​ ​retailers put their stock online so that it can be discovered via search engines, has picked up $12 million in new funding. The Series B round is led Polaris Partners and Vulcan Capital, and brings total funding for the Irish company to $19 million.

Founded on the premise that people often resort to e-commerce behemoths like Amazon because they can’t find the same item locally, Pointy has developed a hardware and cloud software solution that makes it easy to create a bespoke website as means of making local stock discoverable online. Specifically, the ​”Pointy​ ​box”​ hardware ​gadget connects to a store’s barcode scanner and automatically puts scanned items on a Pointy-powered website for the store.

Store pages are then optimised for search engines, so that when you search for products locally — say your favourite artisan beer — a Pointy-powered result shows up and encourages you to visit the store and make a purchase. In other words, this is about helping local retailers drive more footfall, but with very little additional overhead.

Pointy CEO and co-founder Mark Cummins says the Series B round will be used by the startup to accelerate growth and build on an increased uptake by U.S. retailers. It currently counts 5,500 retailers using Pointy in total, with 70 percent from the U.S, and the remaining in Canada, U.K. and Ireland. “To put the U.S. number in context, just under 1 in 200 U.S retailers is now using Pointy,” a company spokesperson tells me.

Since we last covered Pointy, the started has extended its reach considerably with partnerships with Lightspeed, Clover and Square, which allows retailers using these POS systems to use the Pointy platform for free because it doesn’t require the purchase of the $499 Pointy device. It has also partnered with Google via the search giant’s new See What’s In Store (SWIS) program so that shoppers can discover what a store sells within Google’s search and maps pages.

“For all the hype around e-commerce and the media narrative of ‘Retail Apocalypse’, people still make the vast majority of their purchases in local stores,” adds Cummins in a statement. “But local retailers have lost out in not having their products visible online – we solve that problem for them”.

Meanwhile, Point’s previous backers include Draper Associates, Frontline Ventures, and notable angel investors such as Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress), Lars Rasmussen (co-founder of Google Maps), Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of TransferWise), and Michael Birch (co-founder of Bebo).

Tiger Global has poured more than $1 billion into SoftBank Group, according to the Financial Times. The newspaper reports that the firm told investors SoftBank’s shares are “meaningfully undervalued.”

In response to a request for comment, SoftBank sent the same statement to TechCrunch as other media outlets: “We continue to believe the market significantly undervalues our stock and we welcome the support from a sophisticated institutional investor like Tiger Global.”

Tiger Global and SoftBank share several investments in common, including Alibaba, Flipkart and Uber. According to a quarterly investor letter obtained by the Financial Times, Tiger Global wrote that “the combination of a world-class set of assets trading at a record discount to net asset value strikes us as an odd anomaly that is unlikely to exist forever.”

It also said that “in our view, the opportunity to buy the shares cheaply exists today because SoftBank’s stock has not appreciated in nearly five years, even though the value of its Alibaba stake has increased by over $90 billion, more than SoftBank’s entire market capitalization.”

The Financial Times reports that Tiger Global believes SoftBank can create an additional $73 billion of value before tax if its $100 billion Vision Fund returns 2.5 times its original investment over the next seven years. Other growth prospects it cited include the upcoming initial public offering of SoftBank Mobile, its Japanese telecoms unit, and the potential merger of Sprint, which SoftBank holds a majority stake in, and T-Mobile, pending regulatory approval.

What do you do when you’ve raised nearly $100 million and you want to grow as quickly as possible? In Doctolib’s case, the startup is acquiring its main competitor MonDocteur. Together, the two companies work with tens of thousands of doctors and get tens of millions of unique visitors every month.

Doctolib has developed an online scheduling platform for all sorts of doctors, from your physician next door to the hospital in the big city.

Instead of creating integrations with existing calendars and software solutions, Doctolib is replacing your doctor’s scheduling system altogether. After signing up, you can create your profile and manage your calendar from Doctolib directly.

This way, patients can look at their doctor’s calendar on Doctolib’s website and find a time slot that works for everyone. But doctors even use Doctolib for patients who call them directly as it replaces the entire calendar system.

MonDocteur started five years ago with the exact same idea in mind. Over time, the two companies have significantly grown and convinced more and more doctors. You can’t use both solutions, so each doctor had to decide between Doctolib and MonDocteur.

Here are some numbers:

• MonDocteur has 150 employees, while Doctolib has 450 employees.
• MonDocteur works with 10,000 health professionals and Doctolib has signed up 45,000 health professionals.
• MonDocteur costs €106.80 per month, Doctolib costs €109 per month in France.
• MonDocteur gets 4 million visitors per month on its website. Doctolib now attracts 16 million visitors.

So it’s clear that MonDocteur was smaller than Doctolib, but not really an order of magnitude smaller. These two startups will form a big company after the acquisition with 600 employees. It will also lead to a huge jump in monthly recurring revenue.

It’s clear that Doctolib now has nothing to worry about in France. The startup also recently launched its service in Germany. Now, it’s all about convincing new doctors in France and Germany to join the platform. The company could also expand to new services to create new revenue streams.

For now, both MonDocteur and Doctolib will stick around. If you’ve been using one of those two sites, nothing will change. Doctors will also remain segmented between the two sites. Eventually, there will be just one service.

The United States government has made a deal with Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE that, once completed, will lift the ban preventing the company from working with American suppliers. The agreement eases tensions in the U.S.-China trade war because the seven-year denial order, which the Trump administration imposed in April after ZTE violated sanctions against North Korea and Iran, was a major point of contention between the two countries.

Our statement on #ZTE and the escrow agreement: pic.twitter.com/w0Bbej1mAU

— U.S. Commerce Dept. (@CommerceGov) July 11, 2018

According to a statement from the Commerce Department, once ZTE completes a $400 million escrow payment, the department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) will lift the ban. The Commerce Department says “the ZTE settlement represents the toughest penalty and strictest compliance regime the Department has ever imposed in such a case. It will deter future bad actors and ensure the Department is able to protect the United States from those that would do us harm.”

Many U.S. lawmakers are still concerned about the security repercussions of the deal, however, and a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation last week that could potentially restore some of the penalties imposed on ZTE.

The denial order was imposed because the Commerce Department claimed that ZTE violated U.S. laws against selling equipment containing American technology to Iran and North Korea, and not only failed to follow the terms of a 2017 agreement with the Department of Justice, but also lied to the U.S. The ban cut off access to several of ZTE’s key suppliers, including Qualcomm, and was severe enough that it was described as a “death penalty” for the company, which reportedly expected to lose $3 billion as a result.

But ZTE quickly became a pawn in the U.S-China trade wars and the Trump administration said in May that the company could continue buying from U.S. suppliers if it paid a fine of at least $1.3 billion and replaced its senior management and board. ZTE’s new management team was put into place last week, with new CEO Xu Ziyang promising stronger compliance procedures.

If you’re sick of hearing about esports, you need to get over it. The space continues to grow, inching its way into the traditional media landscape. Today, in fact, Activision Blizzard announced that the Overwatch League playoffs will be aired on ESPN and Disney XD.

The Overwatch League in itself is a huge step for esports, as it’s the first true city-based league for a competitive video game. While most esports leagues consist of privately owned teams with little or nothing to do with geography, Overwatch League is a pro league made up of city-based teams such as the Dallas Fuel or the San Francisco Shock. Many of these teams are owned by big names in the traditional sports world, such as Robert Kraft (CEO and owner of New England Patriots, who owns the Boston Uprising) and Jeff Wilpon (COO of the New York Mets, who owns the New York Excelsior).

The agreement, which also includes a recap/highlights package from 2018 Grand Finals coverage on ABC on July 29, marks the first time that live competitive gaming has aired on ESPN in prime time, and will be the first broadcast of an esports championship on ABC. Activision Blizzard said in the announcement that this is just the start of a multi-year agreement.

That said, EA’s Madden NFL 18 did broadcast an esports tournament on ESPN2 and Disney XD earlier this year.

Overwatch League playoffs begin tonight at 8pm ET, and will culminate in the Grand Finals, taking place in the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, on July 27 and July 28.

Here’s what Justin Connolly, EVP of Affiliate Sales and Marketing at Disney and ESPN, had to say in a prepared statement:

The Overwatch League Grand Finals is by far our most comprehensive television distribution for an esports event over a single weekend: 10 total hours over four networks and three days. This overall collaboration with Disney/ABC, ESPN and Blizzard represents our continued commitment to esports, and we look forward to providing marquee Overwatch League coverage across our television platforms for fans.

The rise of Twitch stars, like Ninja, and the growth of the competitive gaming scene have paved the way not only for a new type of sports media, but for a growing new economy. While challenges remain around monetizing the content, the pieces of the puzzle are slowing coming together to create an audience large enough to incentivize advertisers to spend big money.

In fact, sponsorship revenue and ad spending revenue are expected to hit $655 million and $224 million, respectively, by 2020, according to Newzoo. That doesn’t sound like much when you think about the NFL, which raked in $1.3 billion in revenue in 2017 alone. But, like this deal proves, the esports space is growing and working its way into the mainstream, hoping to get the attention of young men between 18 and 34 who have become increasingly difficult to reach via traditional advertising.

Alongside the live TV broadcast of the Overwatch League playoffs on ESPN and Disney XD, the playoffs will also be live-streamed via Twitch, MLG.com and on the ESPN app and DisneyNOW.

A couple of weeks ago, Airbnb announced some major changes to the ways it compensates employees before it goes public.

At least two former Airbnb employees and a longtime VC will be ready to fund those who leave when it does. They’ve been waiting on this moment since last summer, in fact. That’s when former Airbnb data scientist Riley Newman left the firm to start work on a venture firm, quickly enlisting the help of his colleague of several years, Sara Adler (Airbnb’s former head of corporate development) and former Madrona Venture Group principal David Rosenthal. What they set out to do with that fund, Wave Capital, is fund marketplace startups, including — especially, even — those founded by other former employees of the home-rental giant.

It’s an idea that has resonated with investors. Wave just closed its debut fund with $55 million in capital commitments, slightly more than the three were targeting. They’ve already begun putting it to work, too. To find out more about those bets, and where the three expect to shop next, we asked them for a few more details. Our chat has been edited for length.

TC: How exactly did this firm come to pass?

DR: Riley is really the hub for all of us; his wife and mine grew up together in Marin and have remained best friends since early childhood. As Riley’s career at Airbnb progressed and my career in VC progressed, we talked about doing something together at some point in time.

RN: Meanwhile, Sara and I sat beside each other and together reported to the person who was effectively Airbnb’s CTO and we were part of a number of working groups together. David and I started talking about doing something together and we quickly drew Sara into our plans.

TC: “Marketplaces” is both a huge mission for a venture fund and a narrow one. Why pursue it?

DR: For me, when I was at Madrona, we incubated the [dog services company] Rover.com and I saw the power of marketplaces and the importance of helping them get off the ground. And Riley and I talked a lot over the years about how he watched Greg McAdoo [formerly of Sequoia Capital and now of the venture firm Bolt] work with Airbnb in the early days, and the importance of a true lead board member. And we thought that between our three collective experiences, we could play that role.

SA: As a member of the corp dev team at Airbnb and at Dropbox and Facebook before that, I could also see the impact of investors even on the final stages of companies’ journeys.

TC: You’ve now fully closed the fund from institutional investors, including the fund-of-funds Cendana Capital. How many companies do you expect to support with it?

DR: We think roughly 18 to 20 companies. We intend to lead every round and to take board seats. We want to play the same role as Greg did at Airbnb.

SA: We expect for each partner to do one to two deals per year.

TC: You haven’t invested together in the past, and establishing an investing history together is usually really important to institutions that invest in venture funds. How did you persuade them that this wasn’t an issue?

RN: It was definitely a process. [Laughs.] We were told no multiple times. We had not invested together and it did come up quite a bit and was a disqualifying thing for people who care a lot about that. We underwent a monster due diligence process with [the investment consulting company] Cambridge Associates that thankfully put us on [institutional investors’] buy list. But we dealt with every flavor of [no] before that. I think what won everybody over were the skill sets that each of us have, and how well-rounded they are in combination with one other.

SA: I think our approach [appealed to investors], too. It’s kind of like what venture used to be 20 years ago, both in terms of the size of the investments we plan to make and the time and energy we intend to spend with the companies we fund.

TC: How many investments have you made so far, and how dependent on Airbnb are you for your deal flow? I know Nate Blecharczyk, Airbnb’s co-founder and chief strategy officer, is an advisor to Wave.

RN: Alma was our first investment. We spent months with [co-founder] Dan Hill [who was formerly a director of product and performance marketing at Airbnb and whose startup connect prospective donors with local philanthropies]. We helped them firm up their marketplace design and design a long-term strategy and our [check] was built around a financial model that we built for them to get them from seed to a Series A round.  We’ll have to go out and execute on that, but that process determined what they needed.

We have another investment at the finish line.

SA: Airbnb will be a big part of our network, especially with our first fund, because we know exactly who the great people are at the company, which you only know by working with them. But across my time at Airbnb and Dropbox and Facebook, I’ve been a part of acquiring 30 companies and I’ve interacted with thousands more during the evaluation process, so there’s a deep network of founders for us to draw from.

TC: There’s so much late-stage capital sloshing around. Do you think about how it will impact what you’re doing at the earliest stages of these companies’ lives?

DR: The tail is really wagging the dog in a lot of cases right now. I don’t necessarily see so much capital as good or bad; what’s important to us is that founders use their capital as a tool to accomplish their aims. When you let capital start driving your decisions, there are very real unforeseen circumstances.

TC:  Are there any sectors about which you’re particularly excited?

DR: We’re sector agnostic. We believe in the business model, whether it’s consumer or b2b or healthcare. Crypto, we’re a little scared by, but I suppose those are marketplaces, too.

The former Tesla employee who was fired and then sued by the electric vehicle automaker has filed a formal whistleblower tip to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleging the company has misled investors and put its customers at risk.

Martin Tripp has retained Meissner Associates, a whistleblower, securities, investment  fraud and employment law firm to represent him before the SEC. Tesla did not respond to questions about the whistleblower tip.

The filing is the latest blow in a bout between Tesla, its CEO Elon Musk and Tripp.

Tesla filed a lawsuit on June 20 against Tripp for $1 million, alleging the man, who worked as a process technician at the massive battery factory near Reno, hacked the company’s confidential and trade secret information and transferred that information to third parties, according to court documents. The lawsuit also claims the employee leaked false information to the media.

A mere 24 hours later and a combative email exchange between Musk and Tripp emerged. Tesla also notified police based on a tip to its customer service line that Tripp had allegedly told a friend he was going to attack the company’s Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada. Tripp has denied this and the Storey County Sheriff’s department, which  investigated, told TechCrunch they found no credible threat.

Tripp is turning to an attorney with a successful whistleblower track record. The firm obtained a more than $22 million judgment from the SEC on behalf of a Monsanto whistleblower in 2016.

Tripp’s whistleblower tip, which was filed July 6, alleges that Tesla knowingly manufactured batteries with punctured holes possibly impacting hundreds of cars on the road; misled the investing public as to the numbers of Model 3s actually being produced each week by as much as 44 percent; and lowered vehicle specifications and systemically used scrap and waste material in vehicles, all so as to meet production quotas, according to a statement from Meissner Associates.

Tesla has said in the past that Tripp’s allegations are false and contend that he is not a whistleblower, but someone who hacked and stole confidential information.

Tripp says he has been threatened and harassed in the days since he revealed information about Tesla to the media.

“Getting the truth out has become a nightmare. While we have had to relocate due to threats and harassment, both online and offline, making it difficult to press on, my family and I have also received a ton of support, which keeps us going,” Tripp said in a statement. “I hope that, in the end, my fight will make it easier for future whistleblowers to come forward without fear of repercussions like those I have endured.”

Meissner will not handle the federal lawsuit that Tesla filed against Tripp. He is currently looking for an attorney to represent him in the case, firm’s managing member Stuart Meissner told Techcrunch

Meissner, a former Assistant District Attorney in Manhattan and Assistant New York State Attorney General, said Tesla filed its’ lawsuit against Tripp and engaged in a PR campaign to defame him in a calculated effort to ruin his reputation and silence him and other potential Tesla whistleblowers from coming forward.

Telemedicine startup Nurx recently closed a $36 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins. As part of the investment, Kleiner Perkins General Partner Noah Knauf is joining the startup’s board of directors, along with and Chelsea Clinton .

With this new funding, CEO and co-founder Hans Gangeskar told TechCrunch that the startup plans to scale its clinical teams, pharmacies and geographic reach in the coming year.

“We have a new site in Miami where we have a team of nurses being on-boarded, [we’re] building out our engineering and design teams and really just [working to] increase the pace of everything that we’re doing” Gangeskar said.

The startup launched in 2014 with the goal to make reliable access to contraceptives as easy as opening your web browser. After plugging your information into its online app, users are connected with physicians, given a prescription and Nurx prepares their product for delivery.

Since its launch, this California-based startup now operates in 17 states, and has expanded its products to include not only contraceptives (such as pills, patches, injectables and products like Nuva Ring) but the anti-HIV medication PrEP as well. Gangesker says the company is also preparing to launch an at-home lab kit soon for HIV testing.

For Gangeskar, creating affordable access to contraceptives is a first step to changing how patients interact and receive medication from their physicians.

“Birth control is one of the fundamental functions of any health care system [so] for us its a natural place to start,” said Gangeskar.

To help advance its plans to redefine this space, Gangeskar says Nurx is excited to welcome public health veteran Chelsea Clinton to its board.

“Her experience in public health and global health from the Clinton Global Initiative has been really valuable, [particularly learning about] rolling out preventative services in large scales, because really that’s the potential of our platform — [to reach] populations that can’t be reached by the conventional medical system.”

While Washington looks to make cuts to American’s health care access, startups like Nurx offer a fresh perspective on this critical space.