Month: August 2018

It’s a story that any urban millennial can (and will) complain about. You are looking for a non-caffeinated beverage, so you walk into a juice shop only to be shocked at the $13 price point for a couple of apricots and kale mixed in a blender.

Yes, there is an intentional premium signaling going on, but there is also a much deeper challenge that goes all the way back to the ground where that kale came from. Farms are throwing away produce that doesn’t meet the aesthetic standards of grocery stores, and that means perfectly edible and delicious vegetables are completely lost. Some studies show that a majority of all food weight is lost before it even leaves the farm. Yet, there are no easy ways to sell those loose leaves of romain — at least, not yet.

San Francisco-based Full Harvest is building a B2B marketplace that connects large-scale farms with companies like retail juice franchises, who seek excess produce in order to make their products more affordable. The marketplace, which TechCrunch has discussed before, has closed an $8.5m series A round led by Spark Capital, with agriculture-focused venture shop Cultivian Sandbox Ventures joining the round.

Full Harvest is the brainchild of Christine Moseley, who worked for more than a decade in the logistics and food industries, including a stint at retail juice chain Organic Avenue. As she was thinking about potential startups, she learned about the incredible food waste that takes place every day in America.

While spending time at a farm “knee-deep in romaine,” she saw farmers throwing away lettuce that would have been perfect for her former employer. “They were leaving 75% behind on the ground, and after all of those water resources were spent,” Moseley said. For farmers, “they are really dictated by what those big grocery stores are demanding, because consumers are becoming pickier and pickier, so the supermarkets are getting more picky,” she continued.

Full Harvest then is designed to bridge the gap, connecting farms to businesses that don’t need the same aesthetics. The startup focuses on vegetable farms greater than 1000 acres and fruit farms larger than 100 acres and then connects them to customers. The company has developed a set of quality standards to make buying and selling more fluid, and it is focused on “the foundational large-volume items that these food and beverage companies buy,” Moseley said. Today, the company brokers 40 items.

Moseley says that buyers and sellers both need better pricing. For farmers, many of whom are struggling with their own economics, a marketplace allowing them to get some value for produce they are currently throwing away could be a critical source of incremental revenue. For buyers, lower prices could mean cheaper product prices, increasing profits and driving sales to consumers.

Excess produce is the focus of several startups. Imperfect Produce and Hungry Harvest are focused on the B2C market of delivering excess produce straight to consumers. In comparison, Full Harvest doesn’t work with consumers at all, and instead focuses on large commercial buyers.

A series A venture round is by no means uncommon today, but it is rarer for solo founders, rarer still for female founders, and even rarer in the agricultural space. Moseley said that she was “pleasantly surprised” that being a solo female founder in a space like agriculture wasn’t the focus of her investors, and that they instead focused on “execution and market opportunity.” At the start, “It’s a lot to handle on your own,” Moseley said, but “now we are scaling, and it’s gotten very manageable.”

Spark’s John Melas-Kyriazi and Cultivian’s Dan Phillips will join Full Harvest’s board. In addition to the two funds, Jenny Fleiss, Jon Scherr, and Adam Zeplain joined the round along with former seed investor Wireframe Ventures.

This appears to be the Fitbit Charge 3 and, if it is, several big changes are in the works for Fitbit’s premier fitness tracker band.

The leak comes from Android Authority which points to the changes. First, the device has a full touchscreen rather than a clunky quasi-touchscreen like the Charge 2. From the touchscreen, users can navigate the device and even reply to notifications and messages. Second, the Charge 3 will be swim-proof to 50 meters. Finally, and this is a bad one, the Charge 3 will not have GPS built-in meaning users will have to bring a smartphone along for a run if they want GPS data.

Price and availability was not reveled but chances are the device will hit the stores in the coming weeks ahead of the holidays.

This is a big change for Fitbit. If the above leak is correct on all points, Fitbit is pushing the Charge 3 into smartwatch territory. The drop of GPS is regrettable but the company probably has data showing a minority of wearers use the feature. With a full touchscreen, and a notification reply function, the Charge 3 is gaining a lot of functionality for its size.

Noisy open offices don’t foster collaboration, they kill it, according to a Harvard study that found the less-private floor plan led to a 73 percent drop in face-to-face interaction between employees and a rise in emailing. The problem is plenty of young companies and big corporations have already bought into the open office fad. But a new startup called ROOM is building a prefabricated, self-assembled solution. It’s the Ikea of office phone booths.

The $3495 ROOM One is a sound-proofed, ventilated, powered booth that can be built in new or existing offices to give employees a place to take a video call or get some uninterrupted flow time to focus on work. For comparison, ROOM co-founder Morten Meisner-Jensen says “Most phone booths are $8,000 to $12,000. The cheapest competitor to us is $6,000 — almost twice as much.” Though booths start at $4,500 from TalkBox and $3,995 from Zenbooth, they tack on $1,250 and $1,650 for shipping while ROOM ships for free. They’re all dividing the market of dividing offices.

The idea might seem simple, but the booths could save businesses a ton of money on lost productivity, recruitment, and retention if it keeps employees from going crazy amidst sales call cacophony. Less than a year after launch, ROOM has hit a $10 million revenue run rate thanks to 200 clients ranging from startups to Salesforce, Nike, NASA, and JP Morgan. That’s attracted a $2 million seed round from Slow Ventures that adds to angel funding from Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen. “I am really excited about it since it is probably the largest revenue generating company Slow has seen at the time of our initial Seed stage investment” says partner Kevin Colleran.

“It’s not called ROOM because we build rooms” Meisner-Jensen tells me. “It’s called ROOM because we want to make room for people, make room for privacy, and make room for a better work environment.”

Phone Booths, Not Sweatboxes

You might be asking yourself, enterprising reader, why you couldn’t just go to Home Depot, buy some supplies, and build your own in-office phone booth for way less than $3,500. Well, ROOM’s co-founders tried that. The result was…moist.

Meisner-Jensen has design experience from the Danish digital agency Revolt that he started befor co-founding digital book service Mofibo and selling it to Storytel. “In my old job we had to go outside and take the class, and I’m from Copenhagen so that’s a pretty cold experience half the year.” His co-founder Brian Chen started Y Combinator-backed smart suitcase company Bluesmart where he was VP of operations. They figured they could attack the office layout issue with hammers and saws. I mean, they do look like superhero alter-egos.

Room co-founders (from left): Brian Chen and Morten Meisner-Jensen

“To combat the issues I myself would personally encounter with open offices, as well as colleagues, we tried to build a private ‘phone booth’ ourselves” says Meisner-Jensen. “We didn’t quite understand the specifics of air ventilation or acoustics at the time, so the booth got quite warm – warm enough that we coined it ‘the sweatbox.'”

With ROOM, they got serious about the product. The 10 square foot ROOM One booth ships flat and can be assembled in under 30 minutes by two people with a hex wrench. All it needs is an outlet to plug into to power its light and ventilation fan. Each is built from 1088 recycled plastic bottles for noise cancelling so you’re not supposed to hear anything from outsides. The whole box is 100 percent recyclable plus ith can be torn down and rebuilt if your startup implodes and you’re being evicted from your office.

The ROOM One features a bar-height desk with outlets and a magnetic bulletin board behind it, though you’ll have to provide your own stool of choice. It actually designed not to be so comfy that you end up napping inside, which doesn’t seem like it’d be a problem with this somewhat cramped spot. “To solve the problem with noise at scale you want to provide people with space to take a call but not camp out all day” Meisner-Jensen notes.

Booths by Zenbooth, Cubicall, and TalkBox (from left)

A Place To Get Into Flow

Couldn’t office managers just buy noise-cancelling headphones for everyone? “It feels claustrophobic to me” he laughs, but then outlines why a new workplace trend requires more than headphones. “People are doing video calls and virtual meetings much, much more. You can’t have all these people walking by you and looking at your screen. [A booth is] also giving you your own space to do your own work which I don’t think you’d get from a pair of Bose. I think it has to be a physical space.”

But with plenty of companies able to construct physical spaces, it will be a challenge for ROOM to convey to subtleties of its build quality that warrant its price. “The biggest risk for ROOM right now are copycats” Meisner-Jensen admits. “Someone entering our space claiming to do what we’re doing better but cheaper.” Alternatively, ROOM could lock in customers by offering a range of office furniture products. The co-founder hinted at future products, saying ROOM is already receiving demand for bigger multi-person prefab conference rooms and creative room divider solutions.

The importance of privacy goes beyond improved productivity when workers are alone. If they’re exhausted from overstimulation in a chaotic open office, they’ll have less energy for purposeful collaboration when the time comes. The bustle could also make them reluctant to socialize in off-hours, which could lead them to burn out and change jobs faster. Tech companies in particular are in a constant war for talent, and ROOM Ones could be perceived as a bigger perk than free snacks or a ping-pong table that only makes the office louder.

“I don’t think the solution is to go back to a world of cubicles and corner offices” Meisner-Jensen concludes. It could take another decade for office architects to correct the overenthusiasm for open offices despite the research suggesting their harm. For now, ROOM’s co-founder is concentrating on “solving the issue of noise at scale” by asking “How do we make the current workspaces work in the best way possible?”

Tencent, Asia’s most valuable tech firm, delivered a surprise drop in profit on account of lower investment gains.

The firm recorded strong growth with revenue up 30 percent year-on-year to reach 73.7 billion RMB ($10.7 billion) in Q2 2018. But net profit slipped by two percent annually to reach 17.9 billion RMB, or around $2.6 billion.

That breaks a growth streak that stretches back more than a decade and, more crucially, it comes at a time of relative crisis for Tencent . The company became Asia’s first $500 billion tech business last November, but it has endured a torrid 2018 with its share price slipping more than 25 percent since a January high — controversy around a banned game knocked it down further this week.

Gaming has always been Tencent’s strongest point — it helped the firm log a 60 percent profit jump in the previous quarter — but there are concerns.

Sources told Bloomberg that there has been a freeze in awarding game licenses in China as part of changing within the agency that approves them. That’s impacted mobile, PC and console and it has particularly rattled Tencent, which is one of the major players.

Not only did China clamp down on popular title Monster Hunt, but Tencent still doesn’t have approval to bring PUBG or Fortnite to PC in China, and its financial results show some slowing. Its PC gaming business recorded a five percent yearly drop to 12.9 billion RMB. The smartphone games business — which includes smash hits PUBG and Fortnite — posted 19 percent year-on-year growth to hit sales of 17.6 billion RMB, but that was done 19 percent on that previous blockbuster quarter.

“In China, DAU for our smartphone games grew at a double-digit rate year-on-year, but monetization per user declined as users shifted time to non-monetised tactical tournament games,” Tencent said in a filing.

The company has vowed to “reinvigorate” the mobile games until through a mix of more monetizing, deeper engagement and widening its selection on the market. The firm also said it will push its successful China games overseas, presumably into other parts of Asia where Tencent has seen traction and revenue before.

Those strategies will take some time to generate results, but for now the company said it is happy with user engagement, and particularly the daily gamer numbers.

That hasn’t impressed investors, who sent the stock price lower following the announcement of these financials.

Daniel Kim and Jay Lee, the two founders of AuditBoard, a Los Angeles-based provider of a risk and compliance software service for large businesses, grew up middle school friends in Cerritos, Calif.

It was from their hometown Los Angeles exurb, that Kim and Lee first began plotting how they would turn their experience working for PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young (respectively) into the software business that just managed to rake in $40 million in financing led by one of venture capital’s most-respected firms, Battery Ventures.

Kim, who had moved on from the world of the big four audit firms to take positions as the head of global audit at companies as diverse as the chip component manufacturer, International Rectifier and the surf and sportswear-focused clothing company, Quiksilver, had complained to his childhood friend about how little had changed in the auditing world since the two men first started working in the industry.

For Kim, the frustration that systems for accounting for risk and compliance — requirements under the Sarbanes Oxley Act passed in 2002, were still little more than Excel spreadsheets tracking information across different business lines.

He thought there had to be a better way for companies to manage their audit and compliance processes. So with Lee’s help, he set out to build one. The two men touted the company’s service and its ability to create an out-of-the-box system of record for all internal audit, compliance and risk teams.

“It had been ten years since I had left audit. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t a software for compliance and risk,” Lee said. “Companies still manage Sarbanes-Oxley in Excel.”

There are other tools out there, IBM has OpenPages and ThomsonReuters developed a tool for audit and risk and compliance, but these software services pre-dated Sarbanes-Oxley, and were not made with a modern organization in mind, according to Lee and Kim.

The company counts major clients like TripAdvisor, Lululemon, HD Supply, Express Scripts and Spirit Airlines, among its roster of customers and will use the funding led by Battery to further expand its sales and marketing and product development efforts.

“We were impressed with AuditBoard’s product and its customer traction. With more CFOs now turning to dedicated, cloud-based software tools for various tasks, from ERP to tax compliance to procurement, we see a big opportunity for AuditBoard to continue to grow,” said Michael Brown, a general partner with Battery Ventures and the latest board member on AuditBoard’s board of directors. “We have invested before in similar companies that sell technology to CFOs — ranging from Avalara* and Intacct* to Outlooksoft* and Bonfire*– and we are excited to partner with Daniel, Jay and their team, who have already built a significant business in a short amount of time.”

AuditBoard raised a small seed round from friends and family, and followed that up with Donnelly Financial Solutions, a strategic investor who partnered with AuditBoard in 2017 to further develop its Securities and Exchange Commission reporting and Sarbanes-Oxley toolkit.

Now, AuditBoard joins a growing list of Los Angeles business-focused software companies that are beginning to scale dramatically in the city.

Long known for its advertising, marketing, and entertainment technology companies, large business-to-business software vendors are cropping up across the Los Angeles region. In addition to AuditBoard’s big round, companies like ServiceTitan, which raised $62 million in funding through an investment round led by Battery Ventures earlier in the year, are also making a splash in the Los Angeles business tech scene.

Earlier big rounds for companies like InAuth, the security firm; Factual, a location-based targeting service; PatientPop, the management tool for physicians offices; RightScale, a cloud management and cost optimization service; and Oblong Industries, a collaboration and computer interface developer, all speak to the breadth of the business-to-business talent that’s emerging from Hollywoodland.

Uber agreed to sell its Southeast Asia business in March, but it isn’t leaving the region. In fact, the U.S. firm is doubling down with plans to more than double its staff in Singapore.

That’s right. Uber is currently in the midst of a major recruitment drive that will see Singapore, the first city it expanded to in Asia, remain its headquarters for the Asia Pacific region despite its local exit. Unfortunately for customers who miss having a strong alternative to Grab, Uber won’t be bringing its ride-hailing app back in Singapore or anywhere else in Southeast Asia.

Uber’s own job portal lists 19 open roles for Singapore, but the company has contacted headhunting and recruitment firms to help fill as many as 75 vacancies, three sources with knowledge of Uber’s hiring plans told TechCrunch.

The new hires will take Uber’s headcount in Singapore to well over 100 employees, the sources claimed.

Ironically, of course, Uber let most of its staff in Southeast Asia leave when it stopped serving customers across its eight markets in Southeast Asia in April — although it was forced to extend into May in Singapore. As part of its exit deal, Grab got first dibs on 500 or so Uber Southeast Asia staff but that strategy didn’t pan out as planned, as TechCrunch previously reported. Indeed, a recent report suggested that fewer than 10 percent of ‘Uberites’ moved over to become ‘Grabbers’.

And yet, here we are, Uber is aggressively hiring in Singapore — but why?

The original plan following the Grab deal was for Uber to relocate its regional headquarters to either Japan or Hong Kong, two sources told TechCrunch, but in recent months that strategy has shifted. Just weeks ago, the remaining Singapore Uber collective — which consists of managers and executives — secured budget to staff up and find a larger office in the name of creating a support team for its remaining Asia Pacific markets.

The plan is for the Singapore-based employees to provide services such as HR, accounting, admin, marketing and PR across Uber APAC, which includes Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Australia and India — although the latter has more sovereignty with its own president who reports into the U.S..

An Uber spokesperson acknowledged that the company is in the process of hiring in Singapore, but declined to provide further details.

Sources with knowledge of discussions inside the company told TechCrunch that the decision to stay in Singapore is down to a number of reasons.

Hong Kong, which had been a frontrunner to become Uber’s new APAC HQ, was ruled because Uber’s legal status in the country is unclear — a number of drivers have been prosecuted — while Japan and Australia were deemed to be too remote to be regional hubs. That left Singapore, as an established city for business with an existing Uber staff, as the remaining option.

Sources also told TechCrunch, however, that a degree of self-service was involved. Those executives and managers who managed to remove themselves from the “shame” of being shipped to Grab dug their heels in to avoid relocating their lives and families elsewhere, two sources claimed.

Talking to TechCrunch, some former Uber staff questioned whether the remaining Asian markets require remote services from Singapore, which is one of the world’s most expensive cities. Together the countries are hardly huge revenue generators for Uber and could be handled locally or other global cities. There’s certainly an argument that the continued investment in Singapore is at odds with the widely-held theory that Uber left Southeast Asia, a money-losing market, to clean up its balance sheet ahead of a much-anticipated IPO next year.

One former Uber employee who did transition to Grab noticed that the U.S. firm is now hiring for their previous role. That situation is made worse by a ban that prevented Uber’s Southeast Asia employees from applying to transfer to other parts of the firm’s global business. That’s despite many being allowed to do so in the case of previous Uber exit deals in China and Russia.

The result is that Uber is hiring in Singapore, a market where it no longer offers its service and gave up most of its staff to its rival. Anything can happen in the ride-sharing space!

Anyone with even a tangential relationship to the European tech startup scene knows that Startup Battlefield is one of the most effective launching pads for early-stage startups. All the pitch-competition drama and excitement goes down at Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30. If you want to spotlight your startup in front of the continent’s brightest innovators, investors and influencers, you have only one week left to submit your application — right here.

Last year at Disrupt Berlin 2017, Lia Diagnostics —  makers of the first flushable pregnancy test — won the Startup Battlefield and walked away with the Disrupt Cup, the $50,000 grand prize and an incredible amount of media coverage and investor interest. Could 2018 be your year?

Here’s what you need to know about competing in Startup Battlefield.

Our TechCrunch editors, steeped in the ways of identifying hot prospects since 2007, will review every application and select approximately 15 early-stage startups. Our acceptance rate typically hovers around three percent.

Participating founders receive free pitch coaching — again, from our Battlefield-tested editors — and they’ll be thoroughly prepped to step onto the TechCrunch Main Stage. That’s when the fun really starts. Teams have just six minutes to present a live demo to a distinguished panel of investors and entrepreneurs. Following each pitch, the judges have six minutes to grill the team with probing questions. That pitch coaching will come in handy, you betcha!

Only five teams move on to pitch a second time to a new panel of judges, and — after much discussion, conferring of notes and maybe an arm wrestle or two — the judges will choose one Startup Battlefield champion.

The entire competition takes place in front of a live audience — filled with thousands of people, including potential investors and customers. And plenty of media outlets, of course. Plus, we live-stream Startup Battlefield to a global audience (and make it available later, on-demand) on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

That kind of exposure carries long-term benefits for all participating startups — not just the winner. It even has the potential to be life-changing.

And, because TechCrunch doesn’t charge any application or participation fees and we don’t take any equity from startups, you literally have nothing to lose by applying. Worse-case scenario: you don’t get to compete. Best-case scenario: your startup grows into the next unicorn. Hey, it could happen.

Startup Battlefield takes place at Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30. This is the perfect opportunity to introduce your startup to influencers across Europe and beyond. You have one week left before the application window closes. Apply to compete in Startup Battlefield today.

Karma, the Stockholm-based startup that offers a marketplace to let local restaurants and grocery offer unsold food at a discount, has raised $12 million in Series A funding.

Swedish investment firm Kinnevik led the round, with participation from U.S. venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners, appliance manufacturer Electrolux, and previous backer VC firm e.ventures. It brings total funding to $18 million.

Founded in late 2015 by Hjalmar Ståhlberg Nordegren, Ludvig Berling, Mattis Larsson and Elsa Bernadotte, and launched the following year, Karma is an app-based marketplace that helps restaurants and grocery stores reduce food waste by selling unsold food at a discount direct to consumers.

You simply register your location with the iOS or Android app and can browse various food merchants and the food items/dishes they have put on sale. Once you find an item to your liking, you pay through the Karma app and pick up the food before closing time. You can also follow your favourite establishments and be alerted when new food is listed each day.

“One third of of all food produced is wasted,” Karma CEO Ståhlberg Nordegren tells me. “We’re reducing food waste by enabling restaurants and grocery stores to sell their surplus food through our app… Consumers like you and me can then buy the food directly through the app and pick it up as take away at the location. We’re helping the seller reduce food waste and increase revenue, consumers get great food at a reduced price, and we help the environment redistributing food instead of wasting it”.

Since Karma’s original launch in its home country of Sweden, the startup has expanded to work with over 1,500 restaurants, grocery stores, hotels, cafes and bakeries to help reduce food waste by selling surplus food to 350,000 Karma users. It counts three of Sweden’s largest supermarkets as marketplace partners, as well as premium restaurants such as Ruta Baga and Marcus Samuelsson’s Kitchen & Table, and major brands such as Sodexo, Radisson and Scandic Hotels.

In February, the company expanded to the U.K., and is already working with over 400 restaurants in London. They include brands such as Aubaine, Polpo, Caravan, K10, Taylor St Barista’s, Ned’s Noodle Bar, and Detox Kitchen.

Ståhlberg Nordegren says Karma’s most frequent users are young professionals between the age of 25-40, who typically work in the city and pick up Karma on their way home. “Students and the elderly also love the app as it’s a great way to discover really good food for less,” he adds.

Meanwhile, will use the funding to continue to develop its product range, especially within supermarkets, and to expand to new markets, starting with Europe. The company plans to expand from 35 people based in Stockholm today to over 100 across 5 markets by the end of next year and over 150 by mid 2020.

Twitter has finally taken action against Infowars creator Alex Jones, but it isn’t what you might think.

While Apple, Facebook, Google/YouTube, Spotify and many others have removed Jones and his conspiracy-peddling organization Infowars from their platforms, Twitter has remained unmoved with its claim that Jones hasn’t violated rules on its platform.

That was helped in no small way by the mysterious removal of some tweets last week, but now Jones has been found to have violated Twitter’s rules, as CNET first noted.

Twitter is punishing Jones for a tweet that violates its community standards but it isn’t locking him out forever. Instead, a spokesperson for the company confirmed that Jones’ account is in “read-only mode” for up to seven days.

That means he will still be able to use the service and look up content via his account, but he’ll be unable to engage with it. That means no tweets, likes, retweets, comments, etc. He’s also been ordered to delete the offending tweet — more on that below — in order to qualify for a fully functioning account again.

That restoration doesn’t happen immediately, though. Twitter policy states that the read-only sin bin can last for up to seven days “depending on the nature of the violation.” We’re imagining Jones got the full one-week penalty, but we’re waiting on Twitter to confirm that.

The offending tweet in question is a link to a story claiming President “Trump must take action against web censorship.” It looks like the tweet has already been deleted, but not before Twitter judged that it violates its policy on abuse:

Abuse: You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. We consider abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.

When you consider the things Infowars and Jones have said or written — 9/11 conspiracies, harassment of Sandy Hook victim families and more — the content in question seems fairly innocuous. Indeed, you could look at President Trump’s tweets and find seemingly more punishable content without much difficulty.

But here we are.

The weirdest part of this Twitter caning is one of the reference points that the company gave to media. These days, it is common for the company to point reporters to specific tweets that it believes encapsulate its position on an issue, or provide additional color in certain situations.

In this case, Twitter pointed us — and presumably other reporters — to this tweet from Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson:

WTF, Twitter…

U.S. accelerator Y Combinator is expanding to China after it announced the hiring of former Microsoft and Baidu Qi Lu who will develop a standalone startup program that runs on Chinese soil.

Shanghai-born Lu spent 11 years with Yahoo and eight years with Microsoft before a short spell with Baidu, where he was COO and head of the firm’s AI research division. Now he becomes founding CEO of YC China while he’s also stepping into the role of Head of YC Research. YC will also expand its research team with an office in Seattle, where Lu has plenty of links.

There’s no immediate timeframe for when YC will launch its China program, which represents its first global expansion, but YC President Sam Altman told TechCrunch in an interview that the program will be based in Beijing once it is up and running. Altman said Lu will use his network and YC’s growing presence in China — it ran its first ‘Startup School’ event in Beijing earlier this year — to recruit prospects who will be put into the upcoming winter program in the U.S..

Following that, YC will work to launch the China-based program as soon as possible. It appears that the details are still being sketched out, although Altman did confirm it will run independently but may lean on local partners for help. The YC President he envisages batch programming in the U.S. and China overlapping to a point with visitors, shared mentors and potentially other interaction between the two.

China’s startup scene has grown massively in recent years, numerous reports peg it close to that of the U.S., so it makes sense that YC, as an ‘ecosystem builder,’ wants to in. But Altman believes that the benefits extend beyond YC and will strengthen its network of founders, which spans more than 1,700 startups.

“The number one asset YC has is a very special founder community,” he told TechCrunch. “The opportunity to include a lot more Chinese founders seems super valuable to everyone. Over the next decade, a significant portion of the tech companies started will be from the U.S. or China [so operating a] network across both is a huge deal.”

Altman said he’s also banking on Lu being the man to make YC China happen. He revealed that he’s spent a decade trying to hire Lu, who he described as “one of the most impressive technologists I know.”

Y Combinator President Sam Altman has often spoken of his desire to get into the Chinese market

Entering China as a foreign entity is never easy, and in the venture world it is particularly tricky because China already has an advanced ecosystem of firms with their own networks for founders, particularly in the early-stage space. But Altman is confident that YC’s global reach and roster of founders and mentors appeals to startups in China.

YC has been working to add Chinese startups to its U.S.-based programs for some time. Altman has long been keen on an expansion to China, as he discussed at our Disrupt event last year, and partner Eric Migicovsky — who co-founder Pebble — has been busy developing networks and arranging events like the Beijing one to raise its profile.

That’s seen some progress with more teams from China — and other parts of the world — taking part in YC batches, which have never been more diverse. But YC is still missing out on global talent.

According to its own data, fewer than 10 Chinese companies have passed through its corridors but that list looks like it is missing some names so the number may be higher. Clearly, though, admission are skewed towards the U.S. — the question is whether Qi Lu and creation of YC China can significantly alter that.