Year: 2018

Before we automate hotels with AI and robots (which will almost certainly happen) the first wave of this revolution will be brought by the software that runs hotels with humans.

Thus it is that
Mews, the hotel property management platform, has closed a €6m Series A funding round. The round was led by Notion.vc Capital, with participation from HenQ and Thayer Ventures.

The funding will be used to accelerate the business and open new offices around the world to support its global customer base.

Mews’ platform automates check-ins and payments as also covering booking management and staff training. It’s designed to be an open platform allowing other tools and apps to connect through its API. So, think ‘Slack for hotels’, perhaps.

Mews was founded in 2012 by entrepreneur and ex-hotelier Richard Valtr. Customers include Different Hotels, Machefert, Clink and Wombats, or 43,000 beds in 350 properties.

Valtr said: “Mews’ mission is to help hotels and hostels automate their operations so they can focus on their guests. We want to build the nervous system for hotels that all apps and tools for both guests and hosts can be plugged into. Until recently hoteliers were forced to rely upon a closed one-stop-shop PMS offered up by incumbent players who have held a luddite attitude towards the hospitality industry for years.”

Jos White, General Partner at Notion commented: “We think the hotel industry is at a tipping point in terms of the way it uses technology to better manage their operations and transform the guest experience.”

We are T-minus 48 and counting, folks. That’s when TC Tel Aviv officially blasts off on a day-long conference exploring all things related to the advances, challenges and opportunities related to mobility tech. It all happens June 7 at the Tel Aviv Convention Center, so don’t waste any more time: buy your ticket today.

Mobility tech’s growing at a rapid pace world-wide, and nowhere is that truer than in Israel, where startups stand on the leading edge of what’s possible. Seriously, what’s more leading edge than flying cars?

Two of the men behind this mind-bending aerial transportation alternative will grace the TC stage. Omer Bar-Yohay is a former member of the U.S. government’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s On-Demand Mobility Working Group and the current co-founder and chief executive of Eviation, an electric aircraft manufacturer. He’ll be joined by Rafi Yoeli, who is considered a founding father of the unmanned aerial vehicle. His company, Urban Aeronautics, is working on developing flying vehicles as viable alternatives to buses; talk about taking on a challenge.

On another aerial note, you can expect to hear a lot about the state of commercial drones from Yariv Bash of Flytrex (the world’s first on-demand drone delivery service) and Ran Krauss of Airobotics (a pilotless drone solution).

If investing in mobility tech is more your thing, TC Tel Aviv will not disappoint. Mike Granoff of Maniv Mobility will join Chemi Peres of Pitango Venture Capital and Yahal Zilka of Magma Venture Partners in a conversation about investing in Israeli tech.

And if business growth is on your mind, you won’t want to miss Mor Assia of iAngels, Shuly Galili of Upwest Labs and Shelly Hod Moyal of iAngels as they discuss issues related to scaling up and moving abroad.

That’s just the tip of the mobility iceberg. You can check out the full conference agenda here. And don’t forget about Startup Alley, where 100 early-stage startups will display an amazing array of technology relating to cybersecurity, AR/VR, robotics, fintech, biotech, artificial intelligence, blockchain and more.

TechCrunch Tel Aviv takes place on June 7, 2018 at the Tel Aviv Convention Center, Pavilion 10. That sound you hear is the 48-hour clock ticking. Get your general admission tickets today.

If you thought price comparison type online marketplaces were a done deal, you’re clearly mistaken. Motorway, a new startup from the team behind Top10 — the mobile and broadband comparison site that exited to uSwitch in 2011 — are back again, and this time they want to make it infinitely easier to sell your used car online.

To help with that mission, the young company, which formally launched in July 2017 after it had tested an MVP, has raised £2.75 million in seed funding led by LocalGlobe, and Marchmont Ventures (the VC fund of Hugo Burge, former CEO of Momondo, which sold to Priceline last year). Zoopla founder Alex Chesterman also participated.

Motorway had previously raised an angel round of £500,000 in the autumn of 2017 after the product had launched and was showing traction. Angel investors in that round included Duncan Jennings (founder of VoucherCodes.co.uk), Shakil Khan (early Spotify investor) and Christian Woolfenden (CEO of Photobox).

Tom Leathes, Motorway co-founder and CEO, says there are more than 8 million used cars sold annually in the U..K — which is more than 3x the number of new cars sold, apparently — but that the process of selling a car has gone largely unchanged for decades. This sees motorists having to visit multiple car dealers to negotiate a sale, or list privately on websites like AutoTrader or eBay. The other option is to use one of a number of online car buyers, such as WeBuyAnyCar, that provide a quick disposal option but in return prices paid are typically low. The London-based startup wants to provide a fourth option.

Namely — in classic price comparison fashion — Motorway makes it simple to compare the market and find the best deal for your car. In return, dealers get connected with motivated sellers instantly. Always be closing, as they say.

“Motorway makes selling a car faster by bringing the options online and enabling easy price comparison,” says Leathes. “Consumers enter their car’s registration number and mileage to instantly see multiple offers from car buying services, specialist dealerships and even vehicle recycling firms. They can then compare headline offers, read buyer reviews, collection criteria, fees and payment methods before choosing their best deal. By comparing offers, consumers can get up to £1,000 more than going directly to one buyer, and sell their car in 24 hours”.

In terms of typical customer, so far Motorway seems to have run the whole gamut of car owner. I’m told customers using the site have sold lots of Fords, Audis, VWs and Vauxhalls of all ages as well as Aston Martin DB9s, Porsche 911s and various Ferraris. “We’re building Motorway to help anyone looking to sell a car they own – no matter how old, its mileage, what brand or where it’s located,” adds the Motorway CEO.

Leathes cites competitors as established brands such as Auto Trader, We Buy Any Car, eBay and Gumtree, which are popular websites in the U.K. to sell your car. He says there are also a couple of early-stage startups in the space, but that none of these services offers a transparent price comparison experience with instant offers to buy your vehicle.

The revenue model is simple, too. The startup is paid a commission by the buyer when a car is purchased from a seller that found their offer through Motorway. “This means we’re aligned squarely with both consumers and car buyers, as we only make money when we successfully connect sellers with buyers and a deal is completed,” Leathes says. “Motorway’s goal is to help everyone find great offers for their car instantly. There’s a real perception that you need to be a car expert to get a good deal, and we think that needs to change”.

With over 25,000 customer sales enquiries per month, Motorway says the new funding will enable the startup to further develop its software platform, expand the network of buyers, and to market the service more widely.

Adds ​Suzanne Ashman, Partner at LocalGlobe: “Creating a compelling experience for people selling their cars is hard. The potential buyers are fragmented with many different online and offline options. Information about the sale process is difficult to find and pricing is often unclear. Motorway’s technology is exceptional and will bring much-needed transparency for car owners”.

Despite having three successful (or at least, moderately successful) exits behind them, the Motorway founders are used to doing hard things. A fourth venture — a hotel comparison site launched after they successfully bought back the Top10 domain name and subsequently backed by Accel and Balderton — shut down in 2015.

“Having had three successful startups before Top10, it was obviously a tough outcome for all of us. We built an amazing product and had decent growth, but it wasn’t 10x better than the competition, which it had to be to win in such an established market,” Leathes tells me. “After that we took almost a year working on ideas before deciding on Motorway. And we were pretty ruthless about launching something ourselves, proving it works and scaling it before raising any funding”.

After announcing its intention to go public in May, today Adyen published more details with the finances filled in. The Netherlands-based payments startup — which competes against the likes of PayPal and Stripe to power payment services both to online and physical retailers — said that it will be raising between €922 million and €947 million (approximately $1 billion and $1.1 billion) June 5-12, before it opens for trading on the Euronext Amsterdam on June 13 trading as “ADYEN.” If all goes to plan, the sale will give Adyen a market capitalization of between €6.5 billion and €7.1 billion ($7.6 billion – $8.3 billion).

The 4,189,102 shares being sold bvalued at €220 and €240 per share represent 12.7 percent of the company’s issued and operating share capital, Adyen said.

The figures speak both to the generally strong climate for tech IPOs at the moment, and the strength of Adyen’s business and business prospects.

“We feel that we are still in the early stages of a remarkable journey. Our focus remains on building new functionality and on helping our merchants grow,” said Adyen’s CEO and co-founder Pieter van der Does, in a statement. “This offering provides us with the freedom to keep building the company, while offering our shareholders a path to liquidity. Adyen will remain a company that is driven by a long-term vision and strategy”.

Indeed, the rise in e-commerce — where some or all of a purchase by a customer is made either online or by mobile — has been a swift one globally, and Adyen has been one of the companies riding that wave by helping to reduce the friction between a company choosing to take payments online, and actually being able to do it.

Nevertheless, there is still a long way to go before e-commerce is ubiquitous. Figures from the U.S. Census for the first quarter of 2018 show that e-commerce sales accounted for less than 10 percent of all sales in the U.S., which is one of the more mature markets for digital transactions.

Adyen says that for the year ended December 31, 2017, it generated net revenue of €218 million, a rise of 38 percent over the year before, with EBITDA of €99 million, giving it an EBITDA margin of 45.5 percent. Processed volumes on its platform were €108 billion in the period, compared to just €66 billion in 2016, up 63 percent.

For some more context, Adyen last confirmed its valuation publicly back in 2015, when it raised funding from Iconiq, the investment firm that manages funds from Mark Zuckerberg’s family and other high-net-worth tech leaders, at a $2.3 billion valuation.

Adyen to date has raised $266 million in outside funding, with other investors including Index (its largest shareholder with a 16.86 percent holding of the company, the filing revealed today), Felicis, Temasek and General Atlantic.

Adyen competes against the likes of PayPal, Stripe and more — who are all also ramping up their businesses and ubiquity to rise to the opportunity. Recently, PayPal announced it would acquire iZettle, another Europe-based financial startup that focuses primarily on mobile point-of-sale payments to physical SMB merchants, although it has also been expanding into other segments. It has also recently announced a deeper integration with Google to accept payments more directly across Google services. Similarly, Stripe and others are also expanding on other platforms like Microsoft’s, all adding up to more ubiquity and less friction for making financial transactions online.

More to come.

The ASUS event today at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan had three main hooks: health, ergonomics and, most importantly, second screens. The headliner was the premium ZenBook Pro 14 and 15 (pictured above), the latest versions of ASUS’ premium notebook that feature a touchscreen where the touchpad would usually be

Meant to increase the laptops’ multitasking possibilities, the 5.5-inch ScreenPad functions as a second screen for things like messaging or apps including a calculator, a video and music player or calendar. It can also be used as a launchpad for apps on the ZenBook Pro’s main display or serve as a function command screen for Microsoft Office programs.

During his presentation, ASUS global PC and phone marketing senior director Marcel Campos said the ZenBook Pro 15 was designed with three kinds of professionals in mind: video makers, photographers and 3D designers. It has a 15.6-inch 4K UHD NanoEdge display with Delta E<2 Color Accuracy (ASUS says the Pro 15’s display has been validated by Pantone) and runs on an Intel Core i9 processor, 16GB of memory, a 1TB PCIe SSD and a GTX 1050 Ti graphics card. The Pro 15 is 18.9mm thick and weighs 1.88 kg. It will go on sale in mid-July starting at $2,299.

The 14-inch ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 also has a 5.5-inch ScreenPad and boosts an Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of memory, a 1TB PCIe SSD and GTX 1050 MAX-Q GPU. It is 17.9 mm thick and weights in at 1.6kg.

Both of the latest Zenbook Pro models are built with a new hinge design ASUS calls ErgoLift, which props the laptop’s keyboards up at 5.5 degree angle when it is opened. ErgoLift is also built into the latest models of ASUS’ Zenbook and VivoBook series.

ASUS ZenBook S

The ZenBook S is 12.9-mm thick and weighs 1 kg and runs on an Intel Core i7 processor, with 16GB of memory, a 1TB PCIe SSD and up to 13.5 hours of battery life. It has a 4K UHD, 331ppi NanoEdge display and 2 USB-C drives. ASUS claims up to 13.5 hours of battery, which will be released on June 11 for $1,199.

ASUS VivoBook S15

The latest iterations of the VivoBook series, the 14-inch screen S14 and 15.6-inch S15, will come in 5 colors and also feature ErgoLift hinges. The S14 weights 1.4 kg and is 18-mm thick, while the S15 is 1.8 kg, 18-mm. Both have Intel Core i7-8550U or Intel Core i3-8130U processors, a NVIDIA GeForce MX150 or MX130 GPU and up to 16 GB of memory. The S15 will launch in the United States for $699 later this year.

ASUS VivoWatch

Other notable launches by ASUS include a blood pressure monitor that the company says is not a smartwatch or fitness tracker, even though it looks a lot like one. Called the ASUS VivoWatch, the wearable delivers real-time blood pressure data in 15 seconds, has a Gorilla Glass screen and ECG sensor on front of device and claims non-stop 28 day battery life.

Like last year, ASUS didn’t debut new ZenFones, though it did show off a collaboration with Intel and Microsoft called Project Precog, the main fruit of which will be a dual-screen laptop with AI-powered features that is supposed to launch next year. ASUS also held an event on Monday before the official start of Computex today, focusing on its Republic of Gamers line of PCs and peripherals. There it debuted the ROG phone, a rival to the Razer Phone for gamers, that also has a 90Hz display, meant for smoother display of animations, and a 2.96GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chip. This was in addition to new gaming laptops, the Strix Scar II, which starts at $1,999, and the Strik Hero II, which will start at $1,699. Both have six-core Intel Coffee Lake Core i7-8750H or Core i5-8300H processors, 15.6-inch 144Hz 1080p “IPS-level” displays, up to 32GB of RAM, with a standard GPU of GTX 1060.

Udacity today announced a new partnership with Google that will make a number of career courses freely available to recent graduates and mid-career professionals. The free career courses, which mark a first for Udacity, will focus on helping employees improve their chances of getting a job, no matter whether that’s a first job or we are talking about a mid-career course change.

The two companies trialed this approach with the “Networking for Career Success” course, which launched in March. At the time, they made that course available to 60,000 Grow with Google scholars and it’s now part of the 12 courses Udacity and Google are launching together.

The new courses cover a wide swath of topics that range from helping you refresh your resume and write a cover letter to giving you tips for optimizing your GitHub profile and strengthening your LinkedIn Network. But there also are more technical topics, and Udacity will offer a “Data Structures and Algorithms in Python” class, as well as a course on using Swift for technical interviews.

“This next generation of talent will enter the job market possessing a diverse range of skills, but facing a lot of competition, and a rapidly-shifting hiring landscape,” writes Udacity VP of Careers Kathleen Mullaney. “They’re going to need every resource they can get to make sure they’re able to compete successfully for available roles. They are not alone in benefiting from this kind of support. Mid-career professionals pursuing career change, older workers returning to the workforce, and anyone looking ahead to a job search, will find these courses valuable as well.”

Udacity has long partnered with industry partners, so it’s no surprise the company is now working with Google again. Google itself has worked with both Udacity and its competitor Coursera over the years for launching both career-oriented courses and more technical classes that range from introductions to programming and IT skills classes to in-depth machine learning courses.

WeWork is setting its sights on Southeast Asia, but that isn’t stopping local rivals from building up there business. In Indonesia, EV Hive — a co-working brand first started by a VC firm — has pulled in $20 million for expansion as its U.S.-based rival increases its focus on Indonesia.

The company was founded in 2015, by seed-stage investment firm East Ventures and a few friends, and today it counts 21 locations across Indonesia with eight more in development right now. This Series A round was led by Softbank Ventures Korea with new investors H&CK Partners, Tigris Investment, Naver, LINE Ventures and STIC Investments taking part.

Added to those names, a range of existing backers also put into the round, including East Ventures, SMDV, Sinar Mas Land, Insignia Venture Partners, Intudo Ventures and angel investors Michael Widjaya and Chris Angkasa.

EV Hive CEO Carlson Lau told TechCrunch that the firm plans to add 20 more locations next year as it expands its focus from Jakarta and Medan to cover more of the country, which is the world’s fourth largest with a population of over 250 million people. Further down the line, it aims to reach 100 spaces by 2022 with moves into markets like Thailand and Vietnam. The company makes its mark with large spaces — typically over 7,000 square meters per location — and it sees vast untapped potential in Indonesia, where Lau said there are 10 cities with populations of two million or more.

Lau said the company is already fielding expansion requests from overseas but for now the focus is growing a presence in Indonesia. The startup is also looking to do more for its members, which number some 3,000 plus as of May.

Not unlike WeWork, it is building out a services play which includes a member-based marketplace that lets fellow members sell services to each other. Typically, Lau said, the focus is areas like accounting, branding and marketing but where there are gaps, EV Hive is stepping up to offer its own services, too. The goal there is to increase revenue and broaden the services on offer.

“A a lot of co-working spaces compete on the same plain, whether it is design or giving away freebies, but we feel we have strong execution,” Lau said. “We fill out at the fastest space and the lowest cost. The nearest competitor has four spaces and just one-tenth of our floor space.”

“We’re also in a good position with a lot of top VCs invested in us and we’ve built an ecosystem of different community partners,” he added.

Lau ruled out potential acquisition-led expansion — that’s a route WeWork took to enter Southeast Asia, and it has also done the same in China — but he did concede that the co-working market in the region is getting crowded, particularly as those who started out “thinking the business is cool” begin to realize it is tougher than it looks.

“There will be a wave of consolidation in the coming months,” the EV Hive CEO predicted.

Grab, the ride-hailing firm that acquired Uber’s Southeast Asia business, is aiming to catalyze the early-stage startup scene in Southeast Asia after it launched an accelerator and investment unit called Grab Ventures.

The six-year-old company has already made investments and acquisitions — backing startups like Drive.ai and buying Indonesia’s Kudo and India-based iKaaz — and Grab Ventures will build on that by making 8-10 investments over the coming 24 month period, but it is also offering different kind of support. The firm will offer an accelerator program for “growth-stage” companies and play a hand incubating new services inside Grab, according to Chris Yeo, Head of Grab Ventures.

That accelerator effort — called ‘Velocity’ — will launch its first intake before the end of the year with around four to six companies per batch.

“It’s time for us to reflect on the tremendous support we’ve seen over the years and give back to the community,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. “We have a responsibility to empower the next generation of startups in Southeast Asia. We have a strong belief in taking a partnership approach, we know we can’t do it alone.”

On the partner side, Grab has recruited Singapore government agencies Info-communications Media Development Authority of Singapore (IMDA) and Enterprise SG to aid its efforts.

Taken together, Grab said it is aiming to help build an ecosystem of companies in Southeast Asia, a region of over 600 million consumers where the internet economy is tipped to grow from $50 billion per year in 2017 to over $200 billion by 2025, according to a recent report authored by Google. Ride-hailing as a segment is forecast to rise to $20 billion by 2025 up from $5 billion last year.

Grab believes that now it has reached scale with over 100 million downloads and more than 200 cities, the firm can help other startups rise up.

“Our object is to build new startups inside Grab and scale existing promising growth-stage startups. “Our hope for them is to grow from local leaders to regional champions and maybe global challengers,” said Yeo.

Grab Cycle is one business that Grab Ventures has incubated

Unlike traditional accelerator programs, Velocity isn’t aimed at a particular type of company while it is fairly general in terms of the stages that they are at. Yeo said the idea is to be flexible and work with companies that can benefit from Grab’s regional business and its various business units, which beyond taxis include food delivery, mobile payment and financial services.

“[Selection] depends on the startup, sector and industry,” Yeo explained. “Ideally they’ve got funding and are looking to scale up their business — which means typically going into more countries or accessing a larger customer base.”

However, Velocity will not take equity/offer investment as part of the program, although there may be investment opportunities with Grab Ventures further now the line, according to Yeo.

On the investment side, the focus is also broad, too.

Yeo said that Grab ventures isn’t a dedicated VC arm. There’s no set check size per investment (nor a total fund size) but it is broadly looking to back 8-10 companies in areas that align with Grab’s business, although financial services looks like being a major focus since Grab has already built a strong business in taxis, logistics and (most recently) food delivery.

Yeo said Grab would back more startups than that target if it finds the right opportunities. He said the business will identify opportunities using its teams in the eight markets that Grab is present. While Singapore, where Grab is based, is a key focus for the business alongside Indonesia, Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s fourth most-populous country, Yeo said Grab Ventures will look for investment opportunities across the Southeast Asian region.

A group of Apple developers recently banded together as a group called “The Developers Union” in order to plead with Apple, en masse, to allow them to offer free trials of their apps to end users. While not a traditional union with dues, it represented the first time a large group of developers pushed back at Apple’s control of the App Store’s policies. Today, it seems, the developers are having their voices heard.

In Apple’s newly updated App Store guidelines, the company has changed its policy around free trials. Previously, it allowed free trials of subscription-based apps, but now any app can offer a free trial.

The change, spotted by 9to5Mac, clarifies how this system will operate.

Apple says developers of non-subscription apps may offer a “free time-based trial period” before presenting a full unlock option by setting up a non-consumable in-app purchase that doesn’t cost any money.

The in-app purchase must specify the time frame the trial is being offered, and clearly explain to users what content and services it includes.

While Apple may have already been considering support for free trials for all apps, it’s notable that the change followed The Developer Union’s open letter on this matter. That gives the appearance, at least, that the developers had some sway. This is important because the group says they plan to advocate for other changes in the future, including a “more reasonable revenue cut” and “other community-driven, developer-friendly changes.”

As for the request for free trial support, there are currently 636 apps backing this cause on the union’s website – and the majority are indie developers looking to grow their businesses, not the major players.

Their letter specifically asked Apple to commit to “allowing free trials for all apps for the App Stores before July 2019.”

The updated support for free trials wasn’t the only significant change in the new App Store guidelines.

Apple also added a new section that requires apps to implement “appropriate security measures” for handling user data – a rule that could allow it to boot out shadier applications. Another privacy-related change said in-app ads can’t target “sensitive user data” and have to be age-appropriate.

The company addressed the situation with the rejection of the Steam Link app, as well, by saying that cross-platform apps may allow users to access content acquired on the other platforms, but only if it’s also available as an in-app purchase.

And Apple spelled out that apps cannot mine for cryptocurrency in the background, and explained how crypto apps should operate:

(i) Wallets: Apps may facilitate virtual currency storage, provided they are offered by developers enrolled as an organization.

(ii) Mining: Apps may not mine for cryptocurrencies unless the processing is performed off device (e.g. cloud-based mining).

(iii) Exchanges: Apps may facilitate transactions or transmissions of cryptocurrency on an approved exchange, provided they are offered by the exchange itself.

(iv) Initial Coin Offerings: Apps facilitating Initial Coin Offerings (“ICOs”), cryptocurrency futures trading, and other crypto-securities or quasi-securities trading must come from established banks, securities firms, futures commission merchants (“FCM”), or other approved financial institutions and must comply with all applicable law.

(v) Cryptocurrency apps may not offer currency for completing tasks, such as downloading other apps, encouraging other users to download, posting to social networks, etc.

 

No matter how you slice it, the Ionic was a rough start for Fitbit’s first true dive into the world of smartwatches. It was met with lukewarm reviews, and the company has since been fairly candid about the fact that sales figures simply weren’t what it was hoping/expecting.

Announced in March, the Versa was the Fitbit’s second shot at the category, designed to appeal to a more mainstream audience. From the look of it, the company is faring a lot better this time out. Fitbit announced today that it has shipped more than one million devices since the watch hit retail in mid-April.

Is that enough to right the Fitbit ship entirely? Not really, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction, especially given the sort of hail Mary pass involved here, with the purchase of several companies, including Pebble, Coin and Vector. It also presents a glimmer of hope that someone outside of Apple can have some real success in the smartwatch category. 

Among other things, the hardware was a much better fit for a larger swath of users than the bulky Ionic — the square design clearly took a page directly out of Pebble’s playbook. Fitbit has also been investing a lot in helping grow the watch’s native app store — the primary reason behind the Pebble purchase.

Also of note, the company’s women’s health tracker has been a success among early adopters, with more than 2.4 million users adding the feature to their app. That number includes 1.8 million users who have added one or more periods to their calendar. It’s certainly a sign that a feature like this was in-demand — how many users actually stick with the tracking after a month is another question entirely, however.

The news was met with a healthy stock bump, as well, representing some good news after what’s been a rough couple of years for the company and wearable makers in general.