Year: 2018

Brazil’s macroeconomic picture may be gloomy, but technology investors still see hope in the nation’s burgeoning technology sector — and a recent $124 million financing for the mobile conglomerate Movile is the latest proof that that the pace of investment isn’t slowing down.

Brazil was already the hottest spot for technology investment throughout Latin America — with Sao Paulo drawing in the majority of the record-breaking $1 billion in financing that the region’s startups attracted in 2017. And with this latest funding for Movile, led by Naspers, that trend looks likely to continue.

Indeed, Naspers investments in Movile (supplemented by co-investors like Innova, which participated in the most recent round) have been one of the driving forces sustaining the Brazilian startup community. In all, the South African technology media and investment conglomerate has invested $375 million into Movile over the course of several rounds that likely value the company at close to $1 billion.

Another Brazilian tech company, the financial services giant Nubank, has raised around $528 million (according to Crunchbase) and is valued at roughly $2 billion, putting it squarely in the “unicorn club”, as the Latin American Venture Capital Association noted, earlier this year.

Both chief executive Fabricio Bloisi and a spokesperson from Naspers declined to comment on Movile’s valuation. “My dream is not to become a unicorn my dream is to become much bigger than that,” Bloisi said in an interview.

Nubank and Movile are the two most recent privately held independent companies to achieve or approach unicorn status in Brazil, but they’re not alone in reaching or approaching the billion dollar threshold in Latin America. MercadoLibre was an early runaway success for the region (hailing from Argentina) and the ride hailing service 99Taxis was acquired by the Chinese ride-hailing behemoth Didi for a roughly $1 billion dollar valuation last year.

All of this points to an appetite for Latin American tech that Movile is hoping it can seize upon with its new $124 million in financing.

The company is looking to expand its food delivery business iFood, its payment company, Zoop, and its ticketing platform, Sympla.

Both Movile and Naspers look to Chinese companies as their model and inspiration for growth, with Bloisi saying that he’s eyeing the eventual public offering for Meituan — the Chinese online retailer as the company to emulate in the market these days.

“The Chinese companies are doing extremely well and Movile is very similar to a Chinese company,” says Bloisi. And the company’s buy and build strategy certainly mirrors that of a tech business in the world’s largest emerging market economy moreso than it does a typical U.S. startup.

That extends to Movile’s investment in the tech ecosystem in its native Brazil and the broader Latin American region. Already the company boasts 150 million users per month across its application ecosystem. Through on-click payment services provided by Zoop, Movile offers a WePay and WeChat like experience for buyers in Latin America, Bloisi said.

It’s a playbook that the company’s backers have run before — with WeChat. Naspers came to prominence and untold riches by being an early backer of Tencent who’s WeChat and WePay applications have become the backbone of mobile commerce in China.

Now it’s looking to replicate that with Movile in Brazil and beyond. Like its Chinese counterparts, Movile is more than just one of the largest startup companies in the Brazilian ecosystem… it’s also a big investor. Indeed, subsidiaries like iFood began as small investments the company made in promising businesses.

It was with its last $82 million round of financing from Naspers and other co-investors that Movile backed Mercadoni, a Colombian grocery business, and its payment services play in Brazil — Zoop (which is one of the company’s main areas of interest going forward).

For Bloisi, that future outlook seems pretty bright. “Our confidence is extremely high,” he says of the recent financing. “For me it’s an indicator that things are growing. There was a hot moment in Latin America in 2010-2012. Then there was a recession, now while Movile is raising more there are also many more players,” who are coming to market with convincing offerings for investors. 

Movile itself isn’t afraid to let its checkbook do the talking for it when it comes to confidence in the market for online retail and commerce in Brazil. Bloisi estimates that his company has made nearly 35 transactions over the past few years, and will continue to invest heavily in the sector.

“Many of our business are growing at over 100% per year,” Bloisi said.

Investors like Martin Tschopp the chief executive of Naspers can’t complain about that kind of growth across multiple business units.

As the executive said in a satement:

“Naspers has been a long-term partner of Movile because of its ability to build transformative mobile businesses in Latin America and beyond. Movile has great expertise in identifying high-potential companies in consumer segments with opportunity for massive growth, including food delivery with iFood, which is why we continue to support the company.”

That sentiment, an optimism about the future of technology enabled businesses in Brazil and the broader Latin American region has captured investors’ imagination from billionaire backed offices like the Russian investment firm DST and large multinational U.S.-based players like Goldman Sachs.

As HIllel Moerman, head of Goldman’s private capital investment group told The Financial Times, “The [venture capital] ecosystem is still nascent compared to the US and other international markets — therefore there is a large opportunity for start-ups.”

Beyond the relative maturity of the venture community, there are macroeconomic forces at play that continue to make the Brazilian market attractive.

“Brazil has a large market, a pretty tech savvy population with attractive demographics and decent engineering and computing talent. You have all the right ingredients for an ecosystem to develop,” Tom Stafford, an investor with DST Global, told the British paper in an interview.

 

Finding the right talent is a make-or-break situation for any company — especially smaller ones, which might not have the robust tools (or pocket books) of larger companies like Google that have a complete system in place. Recruiting platform Greenhouse hopes to make that process a little bit easier, and it has caught the attention of investors.

The company said it has raised a new $50 million financing round from Riverwood Capital, bringing its total funding to $110 million. Greenhouse definitely isn’t the only company that’s starting to pick up a significant amount of funding recently by trying to crack open the process of talent acquisition and make it a little more data-driven. But as the cost and difficulty of collecting enormous amounts of data on different kinds of human activity has dropped with the emergence of new machine learning tools, the problems behind recruiting may also be one that can get a lot of help from employing the same data science rigor that powers a smart Google search result.

“Hiring tools and software in the market had been built for the previous generation, with an applicant tracking mindset to cover the basics of collecting resumes on your website,” Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait said. “We saw that winning companies in the talent market were ones who were able to attract the right talent, identify difference makers in a sea of LinkedIn profiles, make really smart decisions in who to hire, deliver winning experiences, use data to optimize. They needed tools to accomplish those goals and much broader than the recruiting software.”

The typical consumer’s experience with Greenhouse has probably been a bunch of job listings on a website somewhere, where an employee can submit an application or additional information that the company wants. Under the hood, Greenhouse provides companies with ways to find the right funnels for their applications — whether that’s something like GlassDoor or smaller niches on the Internet with more isolated pockets of talent — and discover the right employees for the roles that are available. Data is collected on all this behavior, which in turn helps Greenhouse give better recommendations for companies as to where to find potential recruits that fit their needs.

All that has to be packaged together with a generally nice user experience, both for the typical consumer and for the companies. That can boil down to actually understanding the right questions to ask, the right requirements to post in a job listing, and also making sure the process is pretty quick for people that are applying for jobs. Greenhouse implements scorecards to help interviewers — which can turn out to be a big group, depending on the position — determine whether or not candidates are the right person for the job in a more rigorous manner. And Greenhouse also hopes to work with companies with its tools to eliminate bias in the recruiting process to produce a more diverse set of hires.

“Companies are continuing to invest in recruiting and talent acquisition software,” Chait said. “As issues of talent and hiring have become more central at the C-suite, companies continue to invest in this area. Companies are starting to see the difference between HR and talent acquisition as its own specialty. If you’re a big company that has an all-in-one HR suite, it’s all well and good to have payroll and benefits in your org chart in one place, but when it comes to hiring, iit’s very dynamic.”

Greenhouse is still pretty dependent on its partners, but the startup has a wide array of companies that it works with to ensure that all the right tools are available to clients to find the right candidates. If a change is coming on LinkedIn — one of the biggest homes of candidate profiles on the planet — Greenhouse is going to work with the company to ensure that nothing breaks, Chait said. Greenhouse provides an API-driven ecosystem to ensure that its tools reach all the right spots on the Internet to help companies find the best talent.

But Greenhouse isn’t the only recruiting-driven company to attract a significant round of funding. It isn’t even the only one to do so in the last month — Hired, another recruiting platform, said it raised $30 million just weeks ago to create a sort of subscription model to help funnel the right candidates to companies. But all this interest, including Greenhouse, is a product of attempts to try to find the right talent in what might be unexpected spots powered by machine learning tools that are now getting to the point where the predictions are actually pretty good.

Have you ever wondered why photos on Airbnb, UberEats and your favorite hotel platform always look so good? French startup Meero has been working on a marketplace and AI-powered technology to make it easy to get good photos of products and places.

The company has raised a new $45 million round led by Alven Capital and Idinvest. Eight months ago, Meero already raised $15 million from Global Founders Capital, Aglaé Ventures, Alven Capital and White Star Capital.

“We focused on this idea because we wanted to make the web beautiful,” co-founder and CEO Thomas Rebaud told me last year. “We realized that we are all on Instagram and that photos are beautiful. But then, you go on a marketplace and photos aren’t great.”

The company first looked at the real estate market and partnered with real estate companies to optimize the photography process as much as possible.

It starts with finding a photographer. Instead of working with hundreds of photographers in hundreds of cities, Meero lets you find a photographer in over a hundred countries. Prices, contracts and processes are all standardized in order to avoid any surprise. Meero takes a cut on every transaction.

After the shooting, photographers usually have to spend hours selecting and editing the best photos. This usually takes even longer than the shooting itself.

Meero has been working on AI-powered algorithms so that you don’t have much to do. You upload your photos, and the service will automagically take care of the editing. By speeding up this process, a photographer can work on more projects. And Meero can also cut variable costs drastically — this is key when it comes to Meero’s scalability.

With today’s funding round, the startup is going to open new offices in the U.S. and somewhere in Asia. Meero will also hire more computer vision experts in France.

Meero currently has 40,000 clients and processes a new transaction every 30 seconds. Clients usually get photos within 24 hours. The company now also lets you order videos from the same platform.

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.