Year: 2018

Flipdish, the online ordering and loyalty platform for takeaways and restaurants, has closed a €4.8 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital, with participation by existing investor Elkstone.

Founded in 2015, Flipdish enables restaurants to directly accept online orders and manage their online presence and operations, in a bid to help wean them off over reliance (or order hijacking) by takeout marketplaces and aggregators, such as Just Eat or Deliveroo.

Specifically, the Irish startup enables individual restaurants and restaurant chains to compete with takeout aggregators by accepting online orders directly from customers with “lower costs and a higher control over the customer experience”. The proposition is similar to a crop of new startups that are helping hotels secure more direct bookings online rather than perpetually giving away a large part of their margins to the likes of Booking.com.

“In the last 10 years there’s been a sudden shift in the importance of technology: people who used to phone takaways to place orders, now will only order online,” Flipdish CEO Conor McCarthy tells me.

“The largest food companies are able to facilitate this by putting huge resources into development, but small and medium businesses aren’t able to put millions of euro into developing their own software. We are levelling the playing field by making this technology available to all sized businesses and giving them the tools to compete and win online.

Those tools include an online loyalty system and ordering platform, which comes with automated re-marketing and retention features. “Ensuring that this is all automated means the restaurants and takeaways can focus on creating great food and we will take care of their online presence,’ adds McCarthy.

Noteworthy is that Flipdish isn’t generating revenue through a subscription-based offering. Instead, it charges a fee for each order placed through the platform. The idea is that the success of restaurants offering direct online ordering is tied to Flipdish’s own success

“If they don’t receive online orders, then we don’t make any money,” quips the Flipdish CEO. “I think this structure sets us apart from our competitors. Companies who charge a flat fee are incentivised to do as much as possible to sign up customers but have little incentive to help them receive orders. Like gyms are incentivised to sign up as many customers as possible but don’t actually want them use the gym”.

On that note, McCarthy argues that Flipdish’s biggest competitor is still the telephone line, as a significant portion of takeaways aren’t aware yet that there are affordable online ordering platforms out there and so rely on customers phoning them. In the software space, Olo and ChowNow are also well-funded direct competitors.

Meanwhile, Flipdish says the latest funding round comes on the back of “outstanding growth” this year with revenue up more than 3x compared to 2017, although without breaking out the numbers this is pretty meaningless. With that said, the company is disclosing that it currently powers over one thousand restaurants across Europe and has enabled more than €25 million in online orders to date.

To that end, Flipdish says the new funding will be used to help accelerate growth by building out its product line and delivering greater service to its expanding worldwide customer base.

Looker has been helping customers visualize and understand their data for seven years now and today it got a big reward, a $103 million Series E investment on a $1.6 billion valuation.

The round was led by Premji Invest with new investment from Cross Creek Advisors and participation from the company’s existing investors. With today’s investment Looker has raised $280.5 million, according the company.

In spite of the large valuation, Looker CEO Frank Bien really wasn’t in the mood to focus on that particular number, which he said was arbitrary, based on the economic conditions at the time of the funding round. He said having an executive team old enough to remember the dot-com bubble from the late 1990s and the crash of 2008, keeps them grounded when it comes to those kinds of figures

Instead, he preferred to concentrate on other numbers. He reported that the company has 1600 customers now and just crossed the $100 million revenue run rate, a significant milestone for any enterprise SaaS company. What’s more, Bien reports revenue is still growing 70 percent year over year, so there’s plenty of room to keep this going.

He said he took such a large round because there was interest and he believed that it was prudent to take the investment as they move deeper into enterprise markets. “To grow effectively into enterprise customers, you have to build more product, and you have to hire sales teams that take longer to activate. So you look to grow into that, and that’s what we’re going to use this financing for,” Bien told TechCrunch.

He said it’s highly likely that this is the last private fund-raising the company will undertake as it heads toward an IPO at some point in the future. “We would absolutely view this as our last round unless something drastic changed,” Bien told TechCrunch.

For now, he’s looking to build a mature company that is ready for the public markets whenever the time is right. That involves building internal processes of a public company even if they’re not there yet. “You create that maturity either way, and I think that’s what we’re doing. So when those markets look okay, you could look at that as another funding source,” he explained.

The company currently has around 600 employees. Bien indicated that they added 200 this year alone and expect to add additional headcount in 2019 as the business continues to grow and they can take advantage of this substantial cash infusion.

After a few days with the game, I’m no expert. Hell, I’m not even entirely sure I’m confident enough to take on all comers. I am, however, most definitely hooked. This scrappy little gaming upstart just might have a future ahead of it, after all.

I admit that I’ve not played a Smash Bros. title in…well, it’s been a while, aside from the little bit of game time I’ve had with Ultimate in various demos since the game was unveiled at E3 earlier this year. If you find yourself in a similar boat, the title plays like a fun bit of chaos out of the box.

Try to remember just how much Nintendo managed to pack into previous installments. Now multiply that by a few orders of magnitude, and you should begin to approximate how much is packed into a single screen for Ultimate. I recommend playing the first couple of rounds alone in the comfort of your own home, where no one can make fun of you.

After a few times knocked into the abyss, however, this will come back to you. The button scheme, the combos, how to rebound after some adorable Pokémon hurls you over the side like a mustachioed rag doll.

Of course, one of the series’ hallmarks has always been its ability to appeal to the button mashers as much as the hardcore gaming crowd. That holds with Ultimate. You can still inflict a fair bit of damage on the opposing side with some ham-handed controller slamming. Heck, with enough finesse, you might even trick them into believing you’ve got some clue about what you’re doing.

Once you’ve mastered the basics, be prepared to be overwhelmed. One of the fundamental keys to Nintendo’s prolonged success is maintaining the basic building blocks of IP, while upping the ante with each subsequent interaction. Like Zelda Breath of Wild and Super Mario Galaxy, Nintendo’s done its best to make the title as expansive as possible. Of course, that plays out quite different with a fighting game than an open-ended sandbox title.

Here that means a ridiculous 74 characters at launch (including downloadable content). The list includes all characters from past versions, with several new additions. The series has always played into that old fanfic favorite of getting all of your favorite characters in one place to beat the ever-living snot out each. With Ultimate, the selection spans a broad array of popular franchises, including Mario, Zelda, Street Fighter, Metroid, Sonic, Mega Man, Pokémon and Donkey Kong.

The list goes on and on and on, but here’s a pretty handy guide, including in which installment a given character was introduced.

Ultimate also features modes galore. The basic, however, is the most familiar. Simply stated, you choose a stage and a fighter and do whatever you can to knock your opponent off the platform. The more times you connect, the more damage you do — and the more likely you are to deplete their life force with every subsequent toss.

The stages (100 in all) themselves are as diverse as the fighters, each playing out like a love letter to Nintendo’s past. And there are some pretty deep cuts, from the Living Room in Nintendogs to a level of the 1984 primary colored Pac-Man arcade title, Pac-Land (I could’ve sworn I was the last person alive who had any recollection of that game).

The levels are as dynamic as the fighters. That ranges from the simple speeding freight in Zelda’s Spirit Train, to, in many cases, having the ground seismically shift beneath your feet. The touches are clever in many cases, including Dream Land GB (Game Boy) and Flat Zone X (Game & Watch), which maintain the monochrome screens of their predecessors and allow you to play in — and in some cases around — the old-school console. The developers appear to have had every bit as fun designing the levels as players will have playing them.

Add to that a huge arsenal of items, from Pokeballs to Nintendogs who temporarily block the action, and you’ve got a lot jam-packed into a single frame. Sure, one of the Switch’s best features is the ability to play on the go, but you’re really going to want to experience this thing plugged into a bigger screen.

Between stages, you’ll find yourself pitted against a new challenger. Defeat them in a quick one-on-one, and they’ll be added to your roster. Lose, and they’ll come around for another challenge later on.

A few days in, and I’ve barely even begun to scratch the service on this thing. Devin’s getting ready to do a much deeper dive on the title, including the half-dozen different modes, featuring things like Spirits, collectable characters that add attack and defense bonuses to your fighters.

Sure, things don’t always turn out well when nerds get exactly what they want, but Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is fan service in the best possible sense of the term. The title offers longtime Nintendo devotees exactly what they’re looking for — and then some.

Lyft has filed a draft registration statement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for its long-awaited initial public offering, Lyft wrote in a press release today. However, the exact timing of the offering is unclear.

In a confidential filing with the SEC, Lyft did not state the number of shares it expects to offer, nor the price range. But Lyft says it expects to make its initial public offering after the SEC finishes its review process.

Lyft was last valued at about $15 billion, while competitor Uber is valued north of $100 billion. Uber, of course, is also expected to go public sometime next year. According to Reuters, Lyft’s IPO will happen during the first half of 2019 and be underwritten by JPMorgan Chase, Credit Suisse and Jeffries.

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As we approach the new year, it’s time to be reminded how many times we all listened to “thank U, next” in 2018. How? With Spotify’s Wrapped, which is now live on the music streaming app.

For the last few years, Spotify has made it very easy to re-experience all the great music and podcasts its users have enjoyed — using Wrapped, its annual feature that gives listeners insights into what they streamed on the platform over the past 12 months.

Spotify will tell you the number of new artists you discovered, your most-played songs and artists, top genres and, of course, help you share these fun facts to Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, giving them some nice free advertising in the process. On top of that, this year Spotify will be sharing some of its listeners Wrapped data in prominent places around the world, like in Times Square or London’s Piccadilly Circus.

Spotify has a special page for artists, too, where they can learn which of their songs were most popular by month, total hours of music streamed by fans and more. Plus, a playlist of 2018’s top hits, which, unfortunately, includes seven Post Malone songs.

It’s been a good week for Japanese startups. Fresh from Google making a rare investment in the country when it backed AI startup Abeja, so Salesforce — another U.S. tech titan — has announced a $100 million fund for enterprise startups in Japan.

The Japan Trailblazer Fund is Salesforce Venture’s first local fund in Asia. The firm’s VC arm has backed 40 startups in Japan since 2011, that’s a fractional of its portfolio of over 275 startups. While, at $100 million, the Japan fund is also a small part of the overall investment thesis which has seen Salesforce Ventures plow over $1 billion into companies worldwide.

Nevertheless, the dedicated focus on Japan is positive news for the country, which has struggled to attract overseas investors despite running the world’s third-largest economy based on GDP. For Salesforce, Japan’s public cloud services market is expected to increase more than two-fold to reach $13 billion by 2022, according to figures from IDC.

Salesforce Ventures’ existing portfolio includes startups like accounting service Freee, which raised $60 million in August, and contact management business Sansan, which this week closed $26.5 million for expansion into Southeast Asia.

M17, the Taiwanese streaming company that controversially priced on the NYSE but didn’t list, has returned to the private markets after it raised a $25 million funding round.

The round was led by Terry Tsang — CEO of Hong Kong-based games company Madhead — with participation from Pavilion Capital, Stonebridge Ventures and existing investors. This new investment follows a $35 million investment in June, which came just a week after the botched IPO. There’s likely more coming: M17 said it expects to receive “additional funding” in the next two months.

When it filed to go public back in June, M17 originally aimed to raise $115 million but weak interest saw that figure cut to $60 million. (That sum is matched by these two rounds.) But even that didn’t happen as the company priced, rang the bell (with photos) but ultimately didn’t debut. It officially blamed “settlement issues” although founder Jeffrey Huang took to Facebook to lash out at investment banks Citigroup and Deutsche Bank who he blamed.

Back to the here and now, M17 said that it is on target to book $170 million in sales for this year. That’s up from $79.5 million in 2017, although the business posted an overall loss of $36.4 million for the year. The company didn’t give guidance on its expected profit/loss for the year.

M17 is the company’s most lucrative unit, but it does also other services including dating via Paktor — which merged with M17 last year. Overall, M17’s revenue grew impressively to reach $37.9 million in the first quarter of 2018 but that came with a $24.8 million loss, according to the listing document, which underlined the challenge of making the business profitable.

Added to that, finances were (likely still are) tight.

At the time of its listing application, M17 said it had $31.4 million in cash and cash equivalents so these funding rounds are fairly critical to the firm. Nonetheless, the company said it plans to invest the capital on growth, including infrastructure and features, resources and “training,” and expansion into the U.S.

M17 has released two new apps, a TikTok -like short video service called PiePie and, for the U.S. market, a streaming app called LiveAF. In case, you’re wondering, that’s Live Artistic Freedom rather than any other words you might be thinking of.

The company said it has some 600 employees spread across seven offices in Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, the U.S, and Malaysia.

LeanIX, the Software-as-a-Service for ‘Enterprise Architecture Management’, has closed $30 million in Series C funding.

The round is led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from previous investors Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners (DTCP), Capnamic Ventures, and Iris Capital. It brings LeanIX’s total funding to nearly $40 million since the German company was founded in 2012.

Operating in the Enterprise Architecture space, previously the domain of a company’s IT team only, LeanIX’s SaaS might well be described as a “Google Maps for IT architectures”.

The software lets enterprises map out all of the legacy software or modern SaS that the organisation is run on, including creating meta data on things like what business process it is used for or capable of supporting, what tech (and version) powers it, what teams are using or have access to it, who is responsible for it, as well as how the different architecture fits together.

From this vantage point, enterprises can not only keep a better handle on all of the software from different vendors they are buying in, including how that differs or might be better utilised across distributed teams, but also act in a more nimble way in terms of how they adopt new solutions or decommission legacy ones.

In a call with André Christ, co-founder and CEO, he described LeanIX as providing a “single source of truth” for an enterprise’s architecture. He also explained that the SaaS takes a semi-automatic approach to how its maps out that data. A lot of the initial data entry will need to be done manually but this is designed to be done collaboratively across an organisation and supported by an “easy-to-use UX,” while LeanIX also extracts some data automatically via integrations with ServiceNow (e.g. scanning software on servers) or Signavio (e.g. how IT Systems are used in Business Processes).

More broadly, Christ tells me that the need for a solution like LeanIX is only increasing, as enterprise architecture has shifted away from monolithic vendors and software to the use of a sprawling array of cloud or on-premise software where each typically does one job or business really well, rather than many.

“With the rising adoption of SaaS, multi-cloud and microservices, an agile management of the Enterprise Architecture is harder to achieve but more important than ever before,” he says. “Any company in any industry using more than a hundred applications is facing this challenge. That’s why the opportunity is huge for LeanIX to define and own this category”.

To that end, LeanIX says the investment will be used to accelerate growth in the U.S. and for continued product innovation. Meanwhile, the company says that in 2018 it achieved several major milestones, including doubling its global customer base, launching operations in Boston, and expanding its global headcount with the appointment of several senior-level executives. Enterprises using LeanIX include Adidas, DHL, Merck, and Santander, with strategic partnerships with Deloitte, ServiceNow, and PwC, among others.

“For businesses today, effective enterprise architecture management is critical for driving digital transformation, and requires robust tools that enable collaboration and agility,” said Teddie Wardi, Principal at Insight Venture Partners, in a statement. “LeanIX is a pioneer in the space of next-generation EA tools, achieved staggering growth over the last year, and is the trusted partner for some of today’s largest and most complex organizations. We look forward to supporting its continued growth and success as one of the world’s leading software solutions for the modernization of IT architectures”.

AsiaYo, a travel accommodation booking platform based in Taipei, Taiwan, has raised a $7 million Series B led by Alibaba Taiwan Entrepreneurs Fund, a non-profit initiative run by the Chinese e-commerce giant, and China Development Financial. Darwin Ventures and Delta Ventures also participated in the round, which brings AsiaYo’s total raised since its launch in 2014 to $10 million, including a $3 million Series A.

Founded by CEO C.K. Cheng, AsiaYo has grown over the past four years to a team of about 100 people and now claims about 300,000 members on its site. In addition to Taiwan, the platform also operates in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, and Thailand, and says overseas bookings account for 60% of its business. AsiaYo’s new funding will be used to launch in new markets, with operations in Singapore and Malaysia and a new Japanese website slated to launch next year. Cheng told TechCrunch that it picked Singapore and Malaysia as its newest markets because of the amount of travel between the two countries, which are next to one another.

AsiaYo works with 50 partners, including Hong Kong Airlines, KKday, and Rakuten LIFULL STAY, to provide reward programs and deals on vacation bookings. The website is currently available in English, Chinese, and Korean and claims 60,000 listings across 60 cities. The startup targets younger tourists traveling within Asia with what it calls “hyper-personalized journeys” created with the help of its AI-based algorithm AYSort, which analyzes user behavior to provide booking suggestions.

In a press statement, Alibaba Taiwan Entrepreneurs Fund executive director Andrew Lee said “With rapid economic development across Asia, we have seen a significant rise in inter-regional tourism. AsiaYo has capitalized on this trend, demonstrating its growth potential. We’re currently working with AsiaYo to further develop technological capabilities in the travel industry.”

AsiaYo’s listings include a combination of rooms, apartments, hostels, and hotels, which means it competes against a wide variety of other accommodation booking sites, like Airbnb, Agoda, and HotelQuickly. The startup differentiates, however, by verifying listings with landlords before they go live for quality assurance and to “inspire travelers to step out of their comfort zone,” said Cheng. The company also provides multi-lingual customer support through several channels, including Line, Facebook, WeChat, and its own helplines.

Startup Battlefield Africa in Lagos, Nigeria, is coming up fast. As usual, we have a great lineup of panels that will include investors and founders discussing issues such as blockchain, raising venture capital on the continent and beyond and more.

And of course companies will compete in Startup Battlefield, our premier startup competition. Startup Battlefield consists of 15 teams competing in three preliminary rounds — five startups per round — which have only six minutes to pitch and present a live demo to a panel of expert technologists and VC investors. Five of the original 15 startups will be chosen to pitch a second time to a fresh set of judges. One startup will emerge the winner and receive a US$25,000 no-equity cash prize and win a trip for two to compete in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at the time). The event is now sold out, but keep your eyes on TechCrunch for video of all the panels and the Battlefield competition.

And now to announce our next batch of judges who will be grilling the startups after their pitches. See you next week!

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Jason Njoku, Iroko

Jason Njoku is the founder and CEO of Iroko, the home of Nollywood content. He has pioneered the African digital content market by bringing Nollywood (Nigerian cinema) to a global audience, and in the process has raised more than $40 million in investment from international VCs, including Tiger Global, Kinnevik, RISE Capital and Canal+.

In 2013, Njoku was crowned as the CNBC Africa West Africa Young Business Leader, and in 2014, he was recognized as one of Fast Company’s Top 1000 most Creative People in Business.

Dapo Olagunju, J.P. Morgan

Dapo Olagunju is head of West Africa at J.P. Morgan. In this capacity, he represents J.P. Morgan’s global platform to clients, regulators and other stakeholders in the region.

Prior to joining J.P. Morgan, he was a general manager at Access Bank Plc where he oversaw the financial markets division of the bank. He was a member of the bank’s Digital Council, which had overall responsibility for the bank’s digital strategy, approved partnership with fintech companies and monitored the implementation of digital initiatives. He was, at different times, a consultant on peacekeeping financing at the United Nations in New York and chief dealer at Investment Banking & Trust Company Limited (now Stanbic IBTC Bank Plc, a member of the Standard Bank Group). He was also co-founder of 234Give.com — an online fundraising platform.

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Facebook

Konstantinos Papamiltiadis is the director of developer platforms and programs for Facebook, supporting the company’s product and platform strategy through partnerships with technology companies and programs for startups.

Prior to that he supervised product and engineering at Taptu (sold to Mediafed) a Cambridge, U.K.-based startup. Prior to Taptu, he led the Yahoo EMEA mobile product team. His team supervised the development and launch of mobile sites for Search, Mail and IM across Europe, as well as News, Sports and Finance for iPhone and Blackberry apps. Before joining Yahoo he was a product manager at Skype and Vodafone R&D.

Bosun Tijani, Co-Creation Hub

Bosun Tijani is the co-founder and CEO of Co-Creation Hub, a social innovation center based in Nigeria dedicated to accelerating the application of social capital and technology for economic prosperity. In pursuit of an active lifestyle, he also founded and serves as the CEO and founder of Truppr, an emerging fitness brand in Africa that connects users to fitness events across the world. In addition, he is a partner at Growth Capital, Nigeria’s first social innovation fund for high-potential, early-stage businesses.

He has more than 15 years of experience across public and private corporations, including Pera Innovation Network (U.K.), Hewlett Packard (EMEA) and International Trade Centre (UNCTAD/WTO), both in Geneva, Switzerland.