Year: 2018

Welcome to Bag Week 2018. Every year your faithful friends at TechCrunch spend an entire week looking at bags. Why? Because bags — often ignored but full of our important electronics — are the outward representations of our techie styles, and we put far too little thought into where we keep our most prized possessions.

Leather bags are the best bags. That’s a fact. Pad & Quill has been making some fine leather products for years and the new Heritage Leather Satchel is stunning. I love it.

This bag is constructed out of tough leather. It’s thick, well conditioned and sturdy. It smells like a artisanal boot store in Austin, Texas and that’s the best smell in the world. That’s also a fact.

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The bag is styled in a modern craftsmen look. It doesn’t exactly look like a horse riding bag, but it approaches the look with exposed contrasting stitching and roll top design. I dig it, but it might not be for everyone. There are other leather satchels from Pad & Quill that forgo the stitching for a cleaner, hipper look. For me, it’s a nice balance of frontier charm and modern lines.

There’s plenty of room inside the bag. During my time testing the Heritage Satchel, I was easily able to fit my 15-inch MacBook Pro, a couple books and a DSLR in the bag without it bulging at the seams. And yet, even when I wasn’t carrying the camera, the bag didn’t feel too large just to hold a laptop and notebook. That’s a delicate dance and this bag preforms it well. It’s not too big and not too small.

Inside is a laptop sleeve and a zippered pouch. That’s it. It feels a bit spartan for a bag of this size and I wish there was at least couple pen loops and a keychain lanyard.

There’s a newspaper pocket on the backside below the handle. It’s perfect for carrying a magazine, or you know, a newspaper.

The bag lets me down with the hardware. The hardware feels of a lower quality than the leather. The clasps and rivets on the straps just feel cheap but so far during my weeks with the bag they’ve performed without issue.

This is a solid bag that I completely recommend. It’s a great size, able to hold most everything I threw at it while not being too big to carry even when lightly packed. After a few months with the bag, it’s aged nicely and is starting to feel like a well-worn pair of denim jeans. The leather is still delicious and seems durable enough to withstand a person’s daily grind.

Photos taken at Cafe Rhema in Flint, MI where they make a killer iced latte.

Read other Bag Week reviews here.

Crate.io, the winner of our Disrupt Europe 2014 Startup Battlefield competition, today announced that it has raised an $11 million Series A round. In addition, the company also launched its ‘Crate Machine Learning Platform’ today, a new hosted solution for businesses that want to use the company’s SQL-based database platform for working with IoT data.

The new funding round was led by Zetta Venture Partners and Deutsche Invest Equity, with participation from Chalfen Ventures, Momenta Partners and Charlie Songhurst. Existing investors, including Draper Espirit, Vito Ventures and Docker founder Solomon Hykes also participated.

Crate co-founder and CEO Christian Lutz told me that over the course of the last year or so, the company has seen a large increase in paying customers, which now tally up to about 30. That has also allowed Crate to grow its revenue beyond $1 million in annual run rate. He attributed the current success of the startup to its renewed focus on machine data, something the team wasn’t really focused on when it first launched its product.

It was also this focus that made fundraising easier, Lutz told me. “What made the difference no is that very strong focus on machine data — in combinate with delivering sales,” he said. The fact that Crate now also has a number of well-known reference customers, including the likes of Skyhigh Networks and ALPLA, a packaging manufacturer that you have probably never heard of but that produces virtually all the bottles for Coca-Cola and Unilever for the U.S. market (as well as a bunch of other bottles that you probably have at home).

Unsurprisingly, the company, which now has over 30 employees, plans to use the new funding to expand its marketing and sales efforts, as well as to expand its core engineering team.

Talking about engineering. With its Machine Platform, Crate also today launched its first hosted offering, which lives on Microsoft’s Azure platform. That’s not a major surprise for two reasons: a) many of Crate’s industrial customers are already betting on Azure anyway and, b) Crate was part of the 2017 class of the Microsoft Growth Accelerator in Berlin. The focus of the new platform is to provide businesses with a single solution for ingesting large amounts of data from IoT devices. The platform supports real-time analytics and allows users to set up their own rules to trigger workflows and alerts as necessary. The platform itself handles all of the scaling (which is handled by the popular Kubernetes container orchestration tool), as well as backup, archiving and the usual role-based security functions.

Crate also today launched version 3.0 of its open source offering. While the company’s commercial focus is obviously on the value-added features for enterprises, it continues to actively develop the open source version, too and Lutz noted that this new version offers a 100x performance increase for some types of queries.

 

Sherpa, a personal assistant startup that has carved out a niche for itself by focusing on the Spanish-language market (alongside English) and predictive suggestions, is expanding. The company is launching a set of APIs called the Sherpa Platform, which will let other businesses tap into its predictive recommendations and use them in their own consumer-facing services. Sherpa — based out of Bilbao, Spain and Palo Alto — is also announcing its a customer for the service: Porsche, which plans to use the service in its connected car services in its luxury vehicles.

In addition to the automotive sector, Sherpa plans to target the home and mobile segments with its Platform APIs, and it has some deals specifically with other automotive companies and telecoms carriers in the works.

The expansion comes at the same time that Sherpa has passed three million downloads of its app, which currently has 800,000 active users, with 80-90 percent of those Spanish. Founder and CEO Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria said that growth has been largely word-of-mouth, and that the primary aim up to now has been not scaling out — the app has been free and not trying to monetise — but gathering enough users to help train its systems as it continued to build out its product.

“There were two reasons for launching Sherpa Platform: one to start monetising since we hadn’t before,” said Uribe-Etxebarria, “and two because we saw that we had a lot of interest from telcos and car manufacturers for a B2B2C product.”

It’s also in the process of raising money. Sherpa has so far grown up on a very modest $6.5 million of funding, from Alma Mundi Innvierte Fund, FCRE, and unnamed private investors (“celebrities” says Uribe-Extebarria). The company is close to completing a bridge round for later this year of around $8 million, ahead of a larger Series B. Uribe-Extebarria says he has spoken to “all the usual names” in the US — he splits his time between Spain and California — and also a number of investors in Europe.

There have been a number of companies doubling down on using machine learning and natural language processing to develop personal AI systems that respond to voice commands to either provide information or carry out simple digital tasks, either on their own devices or on those of third party hardware makers: Amazon has its Echo speakers and Alexa; Apple has Siri and a range of hardware that runs it; Google’s Assistant goes everwhere that Android does; Microsoft has Cortana; and even Samsung (once a close partner of Sherpa’s) has rolled out its own Bixby assistant.

Sherpa has, in that context, worked to differentiate itself in a few ways.

The first of these was being an early mover — Sherpa was founded in 2012 — in building out a system for Spanish speakers, covering a number of different regional dialects in what is considered to be the world’s second-most popular language after Chinese. Several of the large tech companies that have built personal assistants, such as Google, Apple and Microsoft, all now also support Spanish, although Alexa does not; but none have as extensive support as Sherpa, which currently has seven types of Spanish dialects, and four for English. “We are focusing more on quality than quantity of languages,” he said. That said, the company does have plans to add more languages next year — an effort that it will be raising money to target 

The second of these has been a focus on predictive technology, not just answering questions dictated into the app, or carrying out small tasks, but also providing a voice-based interface that talks to the user in the same way that a human personal assistant might do: it learns what kinds of things you might want to know about, and then it proceeds to tell you about these, before you ask. This could be notifications about new incoming emails from specific people that are then read out to you — a handsfree experience that comes in handy in situations like driving — or news about subjects that you follow.

Uribe-Etxebarria says that the predictive engine is currently the crux of the company’s technical development: it actually uses third-party technology for automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech capabilities. “What we focus on is using natural language processing for predictive recommendations and conversation,” he said. “For us, the other tools are now commodities, since there are other companies that do these well, and their are cheap. That’s why we want to focus on things that others do not do, and providing recommendations, and cross-domain recommendations, is what we are good at.”

The third way that Sherpa has differentiated itself to date is that it doesn’t have any skin in the game in the way that the other businesses that have launched personal assistants do.

“We only focus on personal assistants that provide predictive capabilities,” he said. “And I’m sure that the others will do this better and better, so even this isn’t our complete advantage. Ours is that we are an independent platform. It means that companies like Porsche or others do not see us as a potential competitor, but a partner.” This is especially notable, considering that the larger tech companies have long been seen as competitors among carriers, and now more recently automotive makers, who may need to rely on them for some connected car capabilities but do not want to fully relinquish ownership of their customers in the process.

 

 

 

Peek, a U.S. startup aiming to digitize the travel activities industry, has pulled a $23 million Series B round of financing and uncorked a partnership with Google that will help increase its visibility.

Founded in 2012 by Ruzwana Bashir (CEO) and Oskar Bruening (CTO), the startup describes itself as “OpenTable for the activities market” in that it aims to make booking activities as seamless and straightforward as a restaurant or even a flight.

Peek raised $10 million two years ago, and this new round is led by Cathay Innovation with participation from existing backers that include ex-Yelp COO Geoff Donaker, Kayak founder Paul English, 2BF and Manta Ray. Peek has plenty of well-known angel backers, including Pete Flint — founder of Trulia and NFX — former Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. This new round takes it to $40 million from investors to date.

In addition to the money, the startup has announced a tie-up with Google that will see its inventory added to Google Search, Google Maps and Google Trips. That’s sure to help visibility and spike bookings, and it adds to other partnerships that Peek has struck with platforms that include Yelp.

Peek is taking aim at the global activities market which Bashir estimates is worth some $150 billion, with the U.S. being the most lucrative market on the planet.

“It hasn’t gone through the analog-to-digital transition like other industries,” she told TechCrunch in an interview. “So we’re building the infrastructure and software that emerged in other industries ten years ago.”

Peek’s business model is similar to two well-backed Asian companies, Klook — which has raised over $90 million from the likes of Sequoia China and Goldman Sachs — and KKDay, which was recently backed by Japanese travel giant H.I.S.. Despite that, Bashir said that the problem of digitizing the space isn’t just limited to Asia or emerging markets.

“When you look at businesses in the U.S., over 70 percent don’t have real-time online booking, you still have to call the business or email them,” she explained.

That’s an important point, and it underlines the approach that Peek has taken. Unlike its Asia-based rivals, the company has a double-sided business which starts by offering booking software that allows travel companies to enable bookings and sales on their own website. It also allows them to run their businesses from mobile, which is increasingly important for businesses that exist outdoors, as is common in travel and activities.

That’s the hook that gets them into Peek, and from there the company offers more services under its ‘Pro’ service and also the consumer-facing platform that service providers can join. That’s the platform that travelers (or, rather, action-seekers) use to book activities. That distinction on ‘travelers’ is important since Bashir said that around one-third of Peek bookings come from people doing things in their own town, so not everyone is traveling.

Peek claims to offer 10,000 experiences in the U.S. and Mexico, as well as spots like Paris and London. It has 500,000 reviews and ratings, each of which is verified since users can only leave them if they have booked, paid-for and completed their activity.

Bashir said, in addition, that the company’s software has scaled to handle “hundreds of millions of dollars” in booking volume. She declined to give specific financial details, including revenue and profit/loss, but did say that the company’s unit economics are “highly profitable” but it is seeking growth right now.

“Part of this round is allowing ourselves to go out and reach more businesses,” she added.

For now, Peek is keeping its focus on the U.S. but it has also expanded into Mexico since that is a well-trodden destination for U.S.-based travelers. That focus will continue following this round, with Bashir adamant that with an estimated two percent of activity spend booked online, there’s plenty of potential growth to be had at home before tackling international markets.

She did, however, say that the decision to work with Cathay Innovation — which raised its inaugural $320 million fund last year — was partly borne out of an awareness that when it is time to venture overseas, the firm has experience and networks that will be helpful.

Alexa is coming to your hotel room. Amazon this morning is announcing a new program called Alexa for Hospitality, designed to bring its voice assistant technology to everything from chain hotels to vacation rentals. The system can be customized to include key guest information, like checkout time or pool hours; allows guests to request services like housekeeping or room service; and can be configured to control “smart” hotel room functions, like adjusting the thermostat or raising the blinds.

Marriott is Amazon’s launch partner on the new platform, which is notable not only for the potential scale of this rollout, but also because the hotelier had been testing both Siri and Alexa devices ahead of today’s news.

According to Amazon, Marriott International will introduce the new Alexa experience at select properties in Marriott Hotels, Westin Hotels & Resorts, St. Regis Hotels & Resorts, Aloft Hotels, and Autograph Collection Hotels starting this summer.

The system will also be available by invitation to other hospitality providers beginning today.

Alexa for Hospitality works over Echo devices installed in guest rooms which will be customized for the hotel. Currently, supported devices include the Amazon Echo Dot, Echo and Echo Plus.

Via the Echo, guests will be able to ask Alexa for information about the hotel itself – like where the fitness center is located, when the pool is open, and other general information. But they’ll also be able to contact services like in-room dining, the concierge, the front desk, housekeeping, the spa, and so on, just by speaking to Alexa.

Amazon says the system will also work with existing hotel technology, including DigiValet, Intelity, Nuvola, and Volara. This allows guests to say things like “Alexa, order wine” or “Alexa, book a spa appointment,” and then have those requests routed to property management, point of sale, and guest request systems for fulfillment.

Alexa can partially take the place of the in-room telephone, too, as a promo video Amazon shared showed how a guest called her kids at home from her hotel room using just the Echo.

If the hotel desires it, the Alexa system can be customized further to control various “smart home” features like the lights, blinds, the thermostat, and even the TVs.

Specifically, it works with guest room entertainment providers World Cinema and GuestTek for voice control of TV experiences, and offers in-room control of connected devices using Crestron and Inncom by Honeywell, Amazon says.

In addition, the guests will be able to play music and radio over iHeartRadio and TuneIn, which can be set up to play music stations that match the hotel’s brand. (The hotel can control the volume, too, so guests can’t blast their neighbors.)

Guests can access third-party apps for things like workouts, airport wait times, meditation, white noise and more, including custom skills that may tie into a hotel partnership – as with Marriott Hotels’ partnership with TED. In those locations, guest can ask Alexa for a TED Talk on mindfulness, creativity or leadership.

The Alexa for Hospitality system isn’t just the Echo devices in the room, however – it’s a suite of tools for configuring the Echo devices, available via a dashboard where hotels can update their information, enable skills, adjust settings and track usage.

Amazon says the devices are designed to be provisioned in minutes, and can alert an admin if they go offline.

They’ll also allow the hoteliers to measure guest engagement through analytics and reporting, allowing the hotel to adapt its own systems accordingly.

Though not available at launch, the platform will be updated in the future to allow guests to personalize their in-room Echo further by temporarily connecting their own Amazon account for the length of their stay.

This may be the most compelling feature of all.

Hotels are famous for rolling out technology in an effort to cater to their guests’ needs that’s never really used – for example, those in-room Android tablets with hotel info that are too locked-down to enjoy; or those fancy clock radios you unplug so you can instead sleep in the dark with your smartphone by your side.

But with the ability to turn your hotel room Alexa into “your” Alexa, you’d be able to play your own personal music from services like Amazon Music, Spotify and Pandora or continue to listen to your audiobooks from Audible, Amazon says.

Plus, let’s be honest – hotels will be able to capitalize on the fact that Alexa owners have grown so comfortable using Amazon’s virtual assistant, they’ve probably already called out for Alexa by mistake when traveling, forgetting for a moment that she’s not there.

Except now she will be.

Amazon says it’s also working with vacation rental companies like RedAwning, and boutique lifestyle properties within the Two Roads Hospitality portfolio including Thompson Hotels, Joie de Vivre, Destination Hotels and Alila to test out the new platform.

The company declined to share pricing information for the system, nor what (if any) bulk discount the hotels would be getting on their device orders.

“Marriott has a long track record of innovating for our guests, and we’re thrilled to be among the first to offer Alexa for Hospitality,” said Jennifer Hsieh, Vice President Customer Experience Innovation, Marriott International, in a statement about the launch.

“So many of our guests use voice technology in their home, and we want to extend that convenience to their travel experience. Guests of Charlotte Marriott City Center and Marriott Irvine Spectrum will be among the first to experience a curated list of Alexa for Hospitality features. We will be evaluating guest feedback and adoption to inform how we expand the skills, features, and functionality offered through Alexa in our hotels,” she added.

Marriott says that Alexa for Hospitality will be rolled out to ten properties across the U.S. this summer.

This includes the Charlotte Marriott City Center in North Carolina and the Marriott Irvine Spectrum in California where the company often features its latest innovations, as Hsieh noted. It will also be deployed in eight other properties across Westin Hotels & Resorts, St. Regis Hotels & Resorts, Aloft Hotels, and Autograph Collection Hotels brands.

While Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi were giving up on their augmented reality startup inside Y Combinator and figuring out what to do next, they saw their batch mates struggling to get even the most basic corporate credit cards — and in a lot of cases, having to guarantee those cards themselves.

Brex, their new startup,  aims to try to fix that by offering startups a way to quickly get what’s effectively a credit card that they can use without having to personally guarantee that card or wade through complex processes to finally get a charge card. It’s geared initially towards smaller companies, but Dubugras expects those startups to grow up with it over time — and that Brex is already picking up larger clients. The company, coming out of stealth, said it has raised a total of $57 million from investors including the Y Combinator Continuity fund, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, Yuri Milner, financial services VC Ribbit Capital and former Visa CEO Carl Pascarella. Y Combinator Continuity fund partner Anu Hariharan and Ribbit Capital managing partner Meyer Malka are joining the company’s board of directors.

“We want to be the best corporate credit card fro startups,” Dubugras said. “We’re don’t require a personal guarantee or deposit, and we can give people a credit limit that’s as much as ten times higher. We can get you a virtual credit card in literally 5 minutes, versus traditional banks, in which you’d have to personally guarantee the card and get a low limit and it takes weeks to approve.”

Startup executives go to Brex’s website, sign up, and then put in their bank account info. They then use that banking information to underwrite the card, with the idea being that the service can see that the start has raised millions of dollars and doesn’t have the kind of wild liability that those banks think they might have given how young they are. Once the application is done, companies get a virtual credit card, and they can start divvying up virtual cards with custom limits for their employees. The company says it has attracted more than 1,000 customers and is now opening up globally.

The cards are designed to have better spending limits, and also offer company executives more granular ways to assign those limits to employees. The cards have to be paid off by the end of the month, and the rolling balance for those cards is dependent on the amount of capital each startup has available. The total limit available is, instead, a percentage of the company’s cash balance available. So rather than having to go through the process of getting approved for a card, the service can look at how much money is in a startup’s bank account and adjust the spending limit for all those cards accordingly.

Another aspect is automating the whole expense and auditing process. Rather than just going through typical applications like Concur and inputting specifics, card users can send a text message of a receipt through Brex associated with each transaction. Users will just get a text message about a charge — like a cup of coffee for a meeting with a potential business partner — and reply to that text with a message of the receipt to log the whole process. Everything is geared toward simplifying the whole process for startups that have an opportunity to be a bit more nimble and aren’t bogged down with complex layers of enterprise software. Each expense is looped in with a vendor, so executives can see the total amount of spending that’s happening at that scale.

The ability to have those dynamic spending limits is just one example of what Dubugras hopes will make Brex competitive. Rather than slotting into existing systems, Brex has an opportunity to recreate the back-end processes that power those cards, which larger institutions might not be able to do as they’ve hit a massive scale and get less and less agile. Dubugras and Franceschi previously worked on and sold Pagar.me, a Brazilian payments processor, where they saw firsthand the complex nature of working with global financial institutions — and some of the holes they could exploit.

“It’s not like we’re two geniuses that came up with a lot of things that no one came up with,” Dubugras said. “Implementing them with third-party processors is hard, but we didn’t have any of [those integrations], so we can rebuild them from scratch. It’s hard for banks to throw money at a problem and build those tools. We’ve rebuilt the way that these things work internally — they’d have to change fundamentally how the system works.”

While there are plenty of startups looking to quickly offer virtual cards, like Revolut’s disposable virtual card service, Brex aims to be what’s effectively a corporate card — just one that’s easier to get and works basically the same as a normal card. Users still have to pay off the balance at the end of the month, but the idea there is that Brex can de-risk itself by doing that while still offering startups a way to get a card with a high limit to start paying for the services or tools they need to get started.

Chinese smartphone giant Xiaomi has shelved a plan to sell shares in China in conjunction with its imminent Hong Kong IPO. The company will instead go public in Hong Kong first and consider the potential for a Chinese offering at a later date.

The change in strategy was confirmed in a message posted to Xiaomi’s Weibo account without specific explanation. Reuters reported that the move was down to a dispute over valuation. Xiaomi declined to comment further when asked by TechCrunch.

The news is a blow to China, which is reportedly scouting out promising tech companies with a viewing to issuing China depositary receipts (CDRs) on Chinese stock exchanges. Recent laws paved the way to allow CDRs, which is tipped to create a trillion-dollar wealth-generation opportunity. Certainly, snagging Xiaomi would have given the initiative a flying start, but other companies including Baidu are said to be the subject of aggressive courtship so big names will likely gather sooner rather than later.

Xiaomi’s IPO is set to happen this month and it is poised to raise as much as $10 billion, potentially, and at a valuation that could reach as high as $100 million. There have, however, been suggestions that the top number won’t be reached. Still, the listing is shaping up to be the world’s largest since Alibaba’s record-breaking IPO in New York in 2014.

In filing for CDRs, Xiaomi gave away a little more financial information ahead of its public market debut. Chiefly, it revealed that it made a big $1.1 billion loss for Q1 but that was mainly down to one-off charges. The company actually posted a 1.038 billion RMB ($162 million) profit for the quarter when those items are excluded, and that included impressive revenue growth to give encouragement to investors.

Still, it’s hard not to feel a little disappointed by the company’s recent Mi 8 flagship device, which bears more than a passing resemblance to Apple’s iPhone X. Yes, Xiaomi is known to aggressively ‘borrow’ for others in the mobile space — as do many in the industry — but the fact that the phone was celebrating its eighth anniversary and that it has made independent design strides in recent times raised expectations that the company didn’t deliver on. This is, after all, a company that’s shooting for a $100 billion valuation.

Apple has been fined AUS$9M (~$6.6M) by a court in Australia following a legal challenge by a consumer rights group related to the company’s response after iOS updates bricked devices that had been repaired by third parties.

The Australian Competitor and Consumer Commission (ACCC) invested a series of complaints relating to an error (‘error 53’) which disabled some iPhones and iPads after owners downloaded an update to Apple’s iOS operating system.

The ACCC says Apple admitted that, between February 2015 and February 2016 — via the Apple US’ website, Apple Australia’s staff in-store and customer service phone calls — it had informed at least 275 Australian customers affected by error 53 that they were no longer eligible for a remedy if their device had been repaired by a third party.

The court judged Apple’s action to have breached the Australian consumer law.

“If a product is faulty, customers are legally entitled to a repair or a replacement under the Australian Consumer Law, and sometimes even a refund. Apple’s representations led customers to believe they’d be denied a remedy for their faulty device because they used a third party repairer,” said ACCC commissioner Sarah Court in a statement.

“The Court declared the mere fact that an iPhone or iPad had been repaired by someone other than Apple did not, and could not, result in the consumer guarantees ceasing to apply, or the consumer’s right to a remedy being extinguished.”

The ACCC notes that after it notified Apple about its investigation, the company implemented an outreach program to compensate individual consumers whose devices were made inoperable by error 53. It says this outreach program was extended to approximately 5,000 consumers.

It also says Apple Australia offered a court enforceable undertaking to improve staff training, audit information about warranties and Australian Consumer Law on its website, and improve its systems and procedures to ensure future compliance with the law.

The ACCC further notes that a concern addressed by the undertaking is that Apple was allegedly providing refurbished goods as replacements, after supplying a good which suffered a major failure — saying Apple has committed to provide new replacements in those circumstances if the consumer requests one.

“If people buy an iPhone or iPad from Apple and it suffers a major failure, they are entitled to a refund. If customers would prefer a replacement, they are entitled to a new device as opposed to refurbished, if one is available,” said Court.

The court also held the Apple parent company, Apple US, responsible for the conduct of its Australian subsidiary. “Global companies must ensure their returns policies are compliant with the Australian Consumer Law, or they will face ACCC action,” added Court.

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on the court decision and will update this post with any response.

A company spokeswoman told Reuters it had had “very productive conversations with the ACCC about this” but declined to comment further on the court finding.

More recently, Apple found itself in hot water with consumer groups around the world over its use of a power management feature that throttled performance on older iPhones to avoid unexpected battery shutdowns.

The company apologized in December for not being more transparent about the feature, and later said it would add a control allowing consumers to turn it off if they did not want their device’s performance to be impacted.

Penta, the German fintech startup that offers a digital bank account targeting SMEs, has launched multi-card support to make it easier to manage company expenses.

Dubbed ‘Team Access,’ the new feature — which affords similar functionality to the likes of Pleo, Spendesk, and Soldo — lets business owners issue multiple MasterCards to employees who need to make purchases on a company’s behalf.

Each card is linked to a business’ Penta account but can have custom rules and permissions per card/employee, in terms of how much money can be spent and where. More broadly, the feature is designed to cut down the time and cost of expense management for SMEs.

“As business owners know, it can take weeks of daunting paperwork to get another debit card from a legacy bank. The alternative solution for a business owner is to apply for a business credit card which has a predefined credit limit. Most early stage businesses aren’t credit-worthy, and therefore can’t get a second card,” explains the company.

To help with expense management, Penta already lets you categorise transactions and export them to various accounting software. On the public roadmap is “automated accounting,” which will offer the ability to sync your account to third-party accounting tools.

Meanwhile, Team Access is being rolled out in two stages. As of today, users will be able to issue team debit MasterCards and give account access to founders/Managing Directors. In the “coming weeks,” the option to issue Penta cards and give account access to all employees will be added.

The two-stage roll out is likely related to Penta’s recent scaling issues that saw it initially struggle to open new accounts in a timely manner due to high demand. The fintech startup runs on top of Banking-as-a-Platform solarisBank (rather than holding a banking license of its own), and I understand the bottleneck, which has now been cleared, was related to solarisBank’s account verification processes.