Month: August 2018

Klook, a Hong Kong-based startup developing a travel activities platform, has pulled in $200 million in new capital to fuel a major expansion into the U.S. and Europe. A spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the round values the company at more than $1 billion, although the company didn’t provide an exact figure.

Klook sets out to make booking travel activities as easy as arranging flights and hotels. That could mean visits to adventure parks, scuba diving, more localized tours or basics such as train travel, food or airport transfers, all of which can be found, paid for and taken using Klook’s platform. The company claims to offer more than 50,000 activities and services from 5,000 partners in over 200 destinations across the world. The startup claims its platform is on track to gross $1 billion in bookings — which is not take home revenue — for this year.

That booking milestone is “not just a representation of how Klook has grown but also a representation of this space,” Klook co-founder and COO Eric Gnock Fah told TechCrunch in an interview. “A lot of people thought this was a very niche sector, but it is proving to be a very valuable industry [and] we’re glad to be the leader.”

There’s plenty of evidence to support that. Travel giant Booking.com jumped into the space via an acquisition earlier this year, while TripAdvisor and Airbnb are pushing the activities side of their businesses, too. More direct competition to Klook includes Taiwan’s KKday, which is aligned with Japanese travel giant H.I.S., U.S.-based Peek, Culture Trip, GetYourGuide and Headout.

Klook is the best-funded by some mile, having raised plenty of capital over the past year or so. It closed a $30 million Series B in March 2017 before adding a $60 million Series C the following October, and this new round takes it to nearly $300 million to date.

The new deal sees existing backers Sequoia China, Matrix Partners, and Goldman Sachs return to put in more capital. They’re joined by first-time investors China’s Boyu Capital, Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) — which has backed Airbnb among others — and Israel’s OurCrowd, while an undisclosed Asian sovereign wealth fund and unnamed family offices also took part.

Four-year-old Klook has been in expansion mode for the past year, opening offices in London and Amsterdam and growing its headcount to 600 staff across 16 offices, predominantly in Asia. That’s up from 400 people across 13 offices last October.

Now, the company is eying the U.S. and a greater share of Europe. That’s not new, per se, Gnock Fah last year told us that North America was in the roadmap, but now the company has confirmed it’ll open a U.S. office before the end of 2018.

“It’s very likely to be East Coast — New York — where we’d start off in the U.S., but I believe we’ll scale up to have teams on the West Coast and probably mid-West, too,” Gnock Fah said. “We also continue to be expanding in Europe and look for the next location to set up more offices.”

This goal push is two-fold. It’s aimed at tapping into the increased demand for global travel from Asian tourists, and particularly those in China, whilst also bringing Western travelers to Asia where they can tap into Klook’s ecosystem of activities and services.

“This round is really gearing up to global expansion,” Gnock Fah said. “There’s still plenty of growth in Asia but now we will be really accelerating our growth into the U.S. and Europe. We’re really entering the global stage [and attracting an investor like] TCV is a testament to what we’re looking to achieve as a global player.”

The Klook COO also added that the company is seeking to open a new R&D center to supplement its existing tech hub that’s located in Shenzhen. The location for that new office is likely to be in Asia, he added, although its efforts will support the business worldwide.

All of the good press the June Intelligent Oven got when it launched in late 2016 was overshadowed by one key thing: that ridiculously high price tag. The startup drew comparisons to the now defunct train wreck that was Juicero, with one review going so far as calling it “everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley.”

That was way harsh — overly so, in fact. There’s a lot to like in the promise of June’s oven, but yeah, that price…

It’s no surprise, then, that the company is leading with its price tag, this time out. The second-gen June Oven isn’t cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but with a starting price of $599, it’s a fraction of the cost of its predecessor’s $1,500. There’s also a limited-time $100 discount for the smart appliance’s pricier SKU ($799), so now’s as good a time as any to make the leap, if you’ve been considering it.

This certainly looks like a bit of course correction for the company, but June co-founder and CEO Matt Van Horn told TechCrunch that lowering the cost of the device was the plan from the outset.

“None of it is responding to feedback,” he said. “This has always been part of the plan. We’ve always described this as our first product would be the Tesla Roadster. The new June oven is the Model S.”

The much higher-cost version of the oven helped the company ramp up and learn how to scale first-generation hardware. The Tesla comparison isn’t entirely apt, however, as June will effectively be sunsetting the previous version to make way for the new, lower-cost model. The basics of the oven are the same as the last generation.

Asked what separates the $599+ June from a toaster oven, Van Horn told TechCrunch, “The June oven inspires people to cook things they might not normally cook and to trust the oven. Who cooks a steak in the oven? People don’t normally cook a steak in the oven.”

I should probably point out that at this point in the conversation Van Horn was cooking a piece of steak in a June on the other side of our Google Hangout.

The model has 100 cook programs built-in, allowing it to wear a bunch of hats. It can operate as a convection oven, slow cooker, broiler, toaster, warming drawer, dehydrator and air fryer, making it a compelling choice for small kitchens or college dorms. As someone who eats takeout on the regular, I’d certainly be willing to give it a go, if I had $600 burning a figurative hole in my pocket.

The oven also uses on-board cameras with food recognition AI to determine what you’re cooking and pre-heat its carbon-fiber heating coils accordingly. The company promises precision and speed, cooking food up to three times faster than standard ovens. I’ll say that I’m not fully convinced that the aforementioned food recognition system isn’t a bit of overkill, but at the very least, I suppose it will save you time from having to scroll through all of those touchscreen menus to find the right setting. On-board cameras also mean you can watch your food’s progress remotely — though the top-down view isn’t the most appetizing.

Oh, and it supports Alexa, obviously.

One of the more compelling features contained here-in is June’s software update pushes, which are delivered over Wi-Fi. That means those who spent an arm and a leg on the last generation will continue to get updates.

The $599 will get you the oven, a cooking pan, roasting rack, wire shelf and crumb tray. An additional $200 gets you an extended warranty, three-year subscription to the company’s recipes and three baskets for air frying.

Japan-based accounting software company Freee, one of the country’s most-prominent startups, has raised a $60 million Series E funding round as it bids to expand its services into other areas of management for its customers.

Freee was founded six years ago — we wrote about the startup when it raised a Series A in 2013 — which makes it one of the ‘oldest’ startups in Japan, while this round is also a large one for the country, too. Japan’s startup ecosystem has a culture that encourages founders to take their companies’ public earlier than in most parts of the world, to mitigate some risk, but there are signs of alternative approaches that include this round and of course the recent IPO of Mercari, which went public this summer and raised over $1 billion.

“Japan is a country that respects precedent a lot,” Freee founder and CEO Daisuke Sasaki told TechCrunch in an interview. “Having present cases will change [the culture] a lot, we are staying private and investing in growth. The ecosystem isn’t changing [yet] but [startups, founders and VCs] now have more options.”

Free was one of the first Japanese startups to raise from overseas investors, a move that helped get Japanese VCs interested in enterprise and Saas, and this time around it has pulled in capital from a bunch of big names: Chat app company Line, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) — Japan’s largest bank — consumer credit firm Life Card and “several [unnamed] international institutional investors.”

DCM and Infinity Investments are among the startup’s earliest backers.

Today, Freee offers cloud-based accounting and HR software and it claims to have over one million business accounts. It has over 5,000 certified accountant advisors — who help it reach new customers and also use it for their own work — and the company said that over 3,500 apps and services, including mainly financial products, are integration with its software.

Going forward, Sasaki — who is a former Googler — said Freee will use this new capital to build out an API ecosystem to enable more integrations — some of its practical ones right now include Slack and Salesforce — while it is planning a major collaboration with Line to allow Line business customers to integrate their use of the app with Free, while it is exploring how it can collaborate around Line Pay.

Freee founder and CEO Daisuke Sasaki

Freee is also focused on expanding the scope of its services to branch out into products that help with more general management and operational tasks.

“We want to focus not only on back office but also to add value to customers to make their businesses better through dashboards, reporting and insight. Customers who use the [existing business] reports grow faster. Our vision is to give much better insight and business advice through AI [and] to do that we need more data, not just back office but front line too,” Sasaki said.

Finally, the startup is exploring ways it can enable banks and financial organizations to work more closely with its customer base. Already customers can share data within Freee to banks for assessment for loans and other credit products, and the company is exploring the potential to introduce a marketplace that would give its customers a place to scout out financial products at more preferential rates.

“Initially we focused on small business but now our biggest customers have a couple of hundred employees so we are going upmarket,” Sasaki told TechCrunch.

One area Freee won’t be moving into is overseas markets. Yet at least. Sasaki explained that the company wants to build out that vision of an expanded ecosystem of connected services and more in-depth business tools before branching out into new countries.

SmartHR, a younger rival to free which specializes in HR as the name suggests, raised $13.3 million earlier this year to push on into areas such as payroll and more. That could begin to pose a threat to Freee, particularly since SmartHR a developer platform to hose third-party applications and services.

Flux, the London fintech that has built a software platform to offer merchants digital receipts, loyalty, card-linked offers and analytics, continues to sign new partnerships in a bid to solve its ‘chicken and egg’ problem. That is, it needs bank integrations to sign up merchants and it needs merchant integrations to sign up banks.

The latest to partner with Flux is the U.K. food chain itsu, which sells Asian-inspired fast food. Under the deal — positioned as a trial for now — the food merchant will use Flux to power paperless receipts across all 72 of its U.K. stores. Customers paying with cards issued by Flux partner banks who have opted-in will receive digital itemised receipts directly into their banking apps when they shop at itsu.

Founded by former early employees at Revolut, the Flux platform bridges the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up on your bank statement or mobile banking app. Off the back of this, it can also power loyalty schemes and card-linked offers, as well as give merchants much deeper POS analytics via aggregated and anonymised data on consumer behaviour, such as which products are selling best in unique baskets.

On the banking side, it currently partners with challenger bank Starling, and has a closed trial with Monzo. After graduating from Barclay’s fintech accelerator, Flux also recently got added to Barclays via its Launchpad app, which is used by a subset of customers who want to get in on the bank’s latest innovations early.

On the merchant side, in addition to today’s announced itsu partnership, Flux works with EAT and pod in the U.K., and has an upcoming trial with Costa Coffee.

Asked how Flux is overcoming its chicken and egg problem, and how conversations with banks and merchants have changed over the last few months, Flux co-founder Veronique Barbosa says the startup faces the same challenge as any marketplace. However, she believes the company has built a solid foundation for what she dubs the “Flux Flywheel”, borrowing from Amazon’s Amazon Flywheel concept.

“For every bank we add on, we unlock the opportunity to provide Flux to those cardholders. With increasing access to cardholders, we can attract more retailers. With more retailers we can engage the banks, as their cardholders now have more places to use Flux. And so the cycle begins again,” explains Barbosa.

“We are now at the stage where in addition to our partnership with Starling Bank, for example, we’re integrated and live with one of the largest consumer banks in the U.K., Barclays, via their Launchpad app. On top of that we recently announced the largest coffee chain in the U.K. will trial Flux… We are having very different conversations now than we were even three months ago. The conversation has changed from why should I be interested in this to how could I tailor this for my business given the validation that inevitably comes with partnering with such familiar brands”.

However, despite the undoubted progress Flux has made, it is notable that a number of partnerships have launched as a trial only, suggesting both banks and merchants are being a little tentative in how they deploy the startup’s technology. Barbosa says that isn’t unusual, especially when deciding to invest in nascent technology from a relatively small startup.

“What we’re building is completely new as we’re liberating receipt level data at scale, and so it’s not unusual for our partners to want to test out the waters and describe our work together as a trial before entering a longer term commitment,” she says. “The main reason being, how do they know if their customers will love it? What’s exciting is we’ve now entered a phase where we’ve generated more than enough proof points to dispel that concern from the get go”.

Whether by plane, train or autobahn, thousands of early-stage startup founders, investors, tech-heads and entrepreneurs will travel to Germany to attend TechCrunch’s Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30. But here’s a question specifically for the founders of pre-Series A startups: Why just attend when you can compete — in Startup Battlefield? You can apply right here.

It won’t cost you a thing to apply or participate in our premier pitch competition, but the selection process is highly competitive. Our TechCrunch editors have been choosing early-stage startups for Startup Battlefield since 2007, and they’ve developed an uncanny knack for spotting hot prospects.

They’ll review all applications and select approximately 15 startups to compete. The skilled TechCrunch bunch provides free pitch coaching to the founders of each team, and Battlefield teams will be ready to handle the pressure when they step onto the Main Stage at Disrupt Berlin.

Teams have just six minutes to demo their product and dazzle a panel of judges, which consists of well-known investors and entrepreneurs. Following each pitch, the judges have six minutes to conduct a rigorous Q&A.

Only five teams make the cut and move on to the final round of pitches and questions in front of a new set of judges. And only one will emerge the victor, winning the Disrupt Cup and a $50,000 non-equity cash prize — that’s a nice chunk of change. Possibly even more valuable than cash: a metric ton (give or take) of media coverage and investor interest.

The entire pitch-off takes place in front of a huge, enthusiastic audience consisting of those media outlets and investors we mentioned, along with influential technologists and potential customers. Plus, we live-stream the whole shebang around the world on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (it’s also available later on demand).

That Startup Battlefield exposure can be a life-changing experience for all the competitors — not just the winner. All participating founders become part of our Battlefield alumni community. We’re talking more than 750 companies that have gone on to collectively raise $8 billion in funding and generate 102 exits. You might recognize some of the names like Vurb, TripIt, Dropbox, Mint, Yammer and more. That’s a rich mine for networking.

Do you love details? Read the Startup Battlefield FAQ.

You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by competing in the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30. Join us for a chance to launch your startup to a global audience. Apply today.

The UK is getting a new alternative to Uber after India-based ride-hailing company Ola announced plans to expand to the country, which will become its first market in Europe.

Ola was founded in 2010 and it covers over 110 cities in India where it offers licensed taxis, private hire cars and rickshaws through a network of over one million drivers. The company has raised around $3 billion from investors that include SoftBank, Chinese duo Tencent and Didi Chuxing and DST Global . It was last valued at $7 billion. Ola ventured overseas for the first time when it launched in Australia earlier this year — it is now in seven cities there — and its move into the UK signals a further expansion into Europe.

Ola’s UK service isn’t live right now, but the company said it will begin offering licensed taxi and private hire bookings initially in South Wales and Greater Manchester “soon.” Ola plans to expand that coverage nationwide before the end of this year. That will eventually mean taking on Uber and potentially Taxify — another unicorn startup backed by Didi which is looking to relaunch in the UK — in London and other major cities.

So, why the UK?

Ola CEO and co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal called the country “a fantastic place to do business” and added that he “look[s] forward to providing a responsible, compelling, new service that can help the country meet its ever demanding mobility needs.”

It’s no secret that Uber has struggled in London, where its gung-ho attitude to business — ‘launch first, apologize later’ — has seen it run into issues with regulators. Uber (just about) won a provisional 15-month transport license earlier this year following an appeal against the city’s transportation regulator, Transport for London (TfL) earlier rejected its application.

The’ New Uber’ — under CEO Dara Khosrowshahi — is trying to right the wrongs of the past, but compliance with regulators takes time and requires wholesale changes to business, operations and company culture.

Ola isn’t commenting directly on its rivalry with Uber — we did ask, but got a predictable “no comment” — but the tone of its announcement today shows it is focused on being a more collaborative player than Uber.

Indeed, there’s been much groundwork. Aggarwal met with regulators in London last year and he said in a statement released today that he plans “continued engagement with policymakers and regulators” as the Ola service expands across the UK.

International expansion is very much part of Ola’s ambition to go public, which Aggarwal recently said could happen in the next three to four years. But Ola isn’t alone in looking overseas. Didi, the firm that defeated Uber in China and has backed Ola, Taxify and many others, has also been busy moving into new markets.

Last year, the firm raised $4 billion to double down on technology, AI and go overseas and it has come good on that promise by entering Mexico, Australia and Taiwan. It also landed Brazil through the acquisition of local player and Uber rival 99 and it is preparing to go live in Japan, where it will operate a taxi-booking service through a joint venture with SoftBank.

SpaceX is sending of one of newest Falcon 9 rockets back into space for the second time this early morning U.S. time.

The Falcon 9 ‘Block 5’ rocket is designed to be able to go into space and return 100 times, but these are early days. The rocket leaving today is taking Indonesian satellite Merah Putih in what will be its second trip — a re-flight — into space. If all goes well and the SpaceX robotic drone successfully collects the rocket off the Florida coast as planned, then this particular vehicle will be the first Block 5 to manage a repeat lift-off following a previous trip in May.

The next major focus for the firm is to reduce the preparation time and cost required between the relaunch of rockets. Obviously, there’s plenty of benefits for faster turnaround time and the cost-savings associated. But first thing is first and the vehicle out today could become the first Falcon 9 to go into space three times.

The launch happened a few minutes ago, but you can keep up with progress via the SpaceX live feed above.

Amazon said today it is working with the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation into consumer fraud allegedly committed by Sellers Playbook, a Minnesota-based business that claimed to help Amazon sellers make more money.

FTC and the state of Minnesota announced today that they have charged Sellers Playbook and its owner Jessie Tieva and CEO Matthew Tieva, a married couple who are not affiliated with Amazon.com, with running a large business opportunity scheme. Specifically, the FTC and the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office allege Sellers Playbook deceived consumers with a “get rich scheme,” marketing a system that it claimed could enable purchasers to make thousands of dollars per month selling products on Amazon.

In their complaint, the FTC and state of Minnesota wrote the defendants “lure[d] consumers into purchasing expensive business opportunities by deceptively offering consumers a ‘full-service, turnkey package’ for getting their ‘piece of the $400 Billion Amazon Pie,” but few, if any, of the system’s users achieved those earnings. In reality, most lost money.

Meanwhile, Jessie Tieva and Matthew Tieva allegedly made more than $15 million between April 2017 and May 2018, with some consumers forking over more than $32,000.

The FTC says Jessie Tieva and one of her businesses, Exposure Marketing Company (also known as Sellers Online and Sellers System), previously promoted and sold a similar “how to make money on Amazon” scheme called FBA Stores, which also resulted in many purchasers losing large amounts of money. Tieva “routinely made false and unsubstantiated earnings claims during her sales presentations at FBA Stores’ live events,” the FTC wrote in its complaint against Sellers Playbook.

FBA Stores stopped operating in March after reaching a settlement with the FTC that included a judgement of more than $102 million. Amazon and the state of Washington also filed separate lawsuits against FBA Stores, accusing it of “preying” on consumers. (The Tievas are not defendants in the FBA Stores case).

In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said “the entrepreneurs and small businesses selling on Amazon are incredibly important to us and our customers, and we aggressively pursue those that attempt to harm their selling experience. We invest heavily to protect the integrity of our stores and take action to protect customers and sellers, including working with consumer protection agencies and law enforcement. We have zero tolerance for fraud and abuse and will continue to cooperate with law enforcement to pursue criminals.”

TechCrunch has reached out to Sellers Playbook for comment.

Streaming adult video site YouPorn, announced today that it has banned Alex Jones from its platform, following actions against the conspiracy-monger by tech companies including Apple, Facebook, YouTube and Spotify—but notably, not Twitter. Before you go “wtf,” there were indeed (non-porn) Alex Jones videos on YouPorn (people often take advantage of relatively lax copyright policing on various porn sites to upload non-pornographic content). YouPorn said it’s also removed spoof videos of Jones and will not allow him to host any content on the platform moving forward.

So naturally the next question is…is there lots of Alex Jones content on porn sites? AS IT TURNS OUT THE ANSWER IS YES PLS HELP pic.twitter.com/WSgFUpyi2e

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) August 6, 2018

In a statement, YouPorn vice president Charlie Hughes said “Following news that YouTube, Spotify and Facebook have banned Alex Jones from their platforms, team YouPorn is joining in solidarity and announces we are banning his content as well. As one of the largest user-generated content platforms in the world, we have already removed his videos that have violated our terms of service. As an inclusive platform, hate has no place on YouPorn.”

It’s easy to dismiss YouPorn’s ban as a publicity grab, but it underscores the fact that Twitter’s lack of action is became increasingly notable, even though last December it said it would take a harder stance against hate speech. Alex Jones’ verified Twitter profile, with 838,000 followers, is still up, with one of his recent tweets complaining about “being banned on the Internet.”

For those that need a refresher, Alex Jones frequently broadcasts hate speech and played a major role in propagating some of the most harmful conspiracy theories in recent years, including Pizzagate and the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism. His support of theories that the Sandy Hook and Parkland shootings were faked resulted in harassment against the families of victims (Jones is currently trying to get a defamation lawsuit brought against him by some Sandy Hook parents dismissed).

Yesterday, YouTube removed Alex Jones’ channel, which had 2.4 million subscribers, for violating its community guidelines, after issuing it a strike last month. On the same day, Apple removed Alex Jones’ podcasts from iTunes, following similar actions from Spotify and Stitcher, and Facebook removed four Infowars pages for violating its policies against graphic violence and hate speech. Pinterest also took down Infowars’ profile following an inquiry from Mashable.

This now makes Twitter an outlier, one that apparently has lower standards than YouPorn, which, after all, simply streams adult videos instead of arguably sheltering hate speech and bullies. With many of his most active social media outlets removed or suspended, Jones now has two main platforms: the Infowars site and Twitter.

Twitter has promised to do a better job of protecting users, but a lot of its actions come across as more hemming and hawing while real damage is being done through its platform (for example, President Donald Trump retweeting Islamophobic posts from the deputy leader of hate group Britain First’s account, which Twitter only suspended three weeks later despite massive uproar and concern that it would trigger more violence and harassment against Muslims).

With Apple (now America’s largest company by market capitalization), some of the biggest social media platforms and even YouPorn taking a stand against Alex Jones and Infowars, the pressure on Twitter is increasing. TechCrunch has reached out to Twitter and Infowars for comment.

Some numbers published in a report from The Information reveal that very few owners of Alexa-powered devices use them for shopping. Of about 50 million Alexa users, only about 100,000 reportedly bought something via voice interface more than once. It’s not exactly surprising, but it may still harm the narrative of conversational commerce that Amazon and others are trying to advance.

The Amazon Echo and its brethren are mostly used for the expected everyday purposes of listening to music, asking what the weather will be like tomorrow and setting timers. All of these things are obviously things that phones do as well, but there’s something to be said for having a stationary hub for the more domestic tasks.

But part of the expectation of seeding the home with these devices has been that users would also make purchases using them: “Alexa, order more Oreos,” or “Alexa, buy a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones.” This always seemed rather odd, as people tend to want to look at items before buying them, to check reviews, to shop around for better prices and so on. Who would just buy something by telling their Echo that they want to?

Hardly anyone, it seems. That said, it would be a bit disingenuous to pretend that conversational commerce is anything other than one point in a litany of proposed uses for the likes of Alexa, running the gamut of credibility.

As a hub for increasingly common smart home devices, Alexa is a great choice and a common one. And although groceries and impulse purchases may not be something people do via voice, an Echo is a great seller of subscriptions like Spotify and Audible, not to mention future possibilities from queries like “Alexa, call me a plumber.” And of course there’s the whole behind-the-scenes industry of ads, promotions and clever use of voice data.

Why would anyone use these devices to shop? It’s like using a laptop as a hammer. Possible, but not recommended. The other stat The Information mentions is that a million people have tried buying stuff but only 100,000 continued. It may be that this side of e-commerce is merely not “mature,” that catch-all term that could mean so many things. But it may also just be that it’s not something people want to do.