Year: 2018

European startup studio eFounders is slowly but surely building a portfolio of successful software-as-a-service startups. The company is behind some of the most promising enterprise startups in recent years.

Over the past six months, six eFounders startups have raised $120 million in total, with Front and Aircall leading the pack with a $66 million and a $29 million round. Spendesk raised $9.9 million. Forest, Slite and Station raised seed rounds.

Some of them also attended Y Combinator’s most recent batch. Finally, Technicis acquired TextMaster for an undisclosed sum.

If you don’t know the eFounders model, it’s quite simple. At first, the core eFounders team comes up with an idea and hires a founding team. In exchange for financial and human resources, eFounders keep a significant stake in its startups.

After a year or two, startups should have proven that they can raise a seed round and operate on their own. This way, eFounders can move on to the next project and start new companies.

eFounders currently lists 14 companies on its website. In addition to the ones I already mentioned, there are Mailjet, Mention, Foxintelligence, Forest, Hivy, Folk, Upflow, Briq and Illustrio.

Based on this list, you’d think that eFounders has a nearly perfect track record. But eFounders had to stop a couple of projects, such as PressKing and Muxi. Illustrio seems to be on pause right now as well.

Nevertheless, it’s clear that eFounders has cooked up a secret playbook for software-as-a-service startups. More importantly, it’s also clear that eFounders managed to attract some talented entrepreneurs to lead those startups and transform them into their own startups.

Overall, eFounders companies have raised $175 million in total, have 100,000 clients and 500 employees. Together, they generate $50 million in revenue. eFounders itself has raised $11.4 million.

It’s going to be a long play for eFounders as the company only generates revenue when there’s an exit or a secondary market transaction. As long as startups keep raising more money, eFounders doesn’t get anything, and its stake gets diluted. It’ll only make money when there’s a significant acquisition or an IPO. But the valuation of eFounders’ portfolio also keeps growing, so the outcome looks more and more positive.

One week, seven days or 10,080 minutes. No matter how you slice it, time is running short if you want to compete in Startup Battlefield — the premier startup-pitch competition taking place at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7. Applications close in just one week, so get yourself together and apply right now.

Why wouldn’t you? It won’t cost you anything to apply or to participate. No fees, that’s our motto. And because this is our biggest Disrupt event ever, we celebrated by supersizing the grand prize to a very hefty $100,000 (that’s equity-free cash, folks).

Still need not sure the benefits of competing outweigh the effort of applying? Startup Battlefield is the best platform for launching your company to the world. And that’s not just our opinion. Cathy Han is the CEO of 42 Technologies, an online retail analytics platform. Here’s what she says about her company’s Startup Battlefield experience.

“Launching on Battlefield helped us rise above the noise, and it put us on the radar of customers, investors and talent early on. We also met a community of amazing founders and the family at TechCrunch, who have helped us grow ever since. If you’re launching a new company or product, this is the stage you want to be on.”

If you’re selected by our team of highly discriminating editors, you’ll receive expert pitch coaching to get you primed and ready to do battle. Teams get six minutes to make their pitch to an expert panel of judges — and then answer any questions the judges may have for them.

The Battlefield stage has a live audience packed with literally thousands of entrepreneurs, tech founders, investors and media. We also live-stream it to the world on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. And it’ll be available later, on demand. It’s the kind of exposure startup founders dream of experiencing.

And if you do compete, your company becomes part of a very exclusive club: The Startup Battlefield alumni community. This group of more than 800 companies has collectively raised more than $8 billion in funding and produced more than 100 exits. You may recognize a few of them: Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, Fitbit, Getaround and Cloudflare. That’s some rarified company.

Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place on September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. You have just one week left to apply. Why not take your shot? Apply to Startup Battlefield today.

Madrid-based OnTruck, which has built a “haulage tech platform” to better match supply and demand in the road freight industry, has picked up €25 million in Series B funding.

The round is led by global venture capital fund Cathay Innovation, with participation from an array of existing and new investors that includes Atomico, Idinvest, All Iron Ventures, Total Energy Ventures, GP Bullhound, Point 9 Capital, and Samaipata Ventures. In other words, several of OnTruck’s Series A backers are doubling down.

Founded in 2016, OnTruck is one of numerous startups attempting to ‘digitise’ the freight market, which it traditionally quite an arcane and opaque industry. It enables companies who have road freight shipping needs in Spain and more recently the U.K. to connect with the startup’s network of over 2,200 lorry drivers operating in both countries.

For the truck drivers themselves, many of whom are owner-operator businesses, OnTruck offers a steady stream of readily priced work. Its logistics platform also claims to make haulage journeys more efficient.

Specifically, OnTruck describes its technology as automating the matching of loads to trucks, and providing real-time GPS tracking of all shipments. The company’s algorithms also attempt to dispatch work in a way that significantly cuts down on empty return journeys, which is a particularly common problem for the regional and short-haul market OnTruck is targeting.

“Regional trucking is where shippers and truck drivers suffer from the most inefficiency, with over 40% of kilometers driven empty,” says OnTruck CEO Iñigo Juantegui. “This is where OnTruck’s technology and our shipper and driver app can add the most value to lower supply chain cost for shippers and empty kilometres driven by truckers.”

OnTruck clients include large multinationals such as Procter & Gamble, and Decathlon, in addition to over 400 mid-sized companies in the U.K. and Spain. Juantegui says the new funding will be used to consolidate its market positions in those two countries, and to expand to more of Europe. This, I’m told, is likely to include France and Germany.

In light of the massive data scandal involving Cambridge Analytica around the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a lot of people wondered how something like that could’ve happened. Well, Facebook didn’t see it coming, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said at the Code conference this evening.

“If you go back to 2016 and you think about what people were worried about in terms of nations, states or election security, it was largely spam and phishing hacking,” Sandberg said. “That’s what people were worried about.”

She referenced the Sony email hack and how Facebook didn’t have a lot of the problems other companies were having at the time. Unfortunately, while Facebook was focused on not screwing up in that area, “we didn’t see coming a different kind of more insidious threat,” Sandberg said.

Sandberg added, “We realized we didn’t see the new threat coming. We were focused on the old threat and now we understand that this is the kind of threat we have.”

Moving forward, Sandberg said, Facebook now understands the threat and that it’s better able to meet those threats leading in to future elections. On stage, Sandberg also said Facebook was not only late to discovering Cambridge Analytica’s unauthorized access to its data, but that Facebook still doesn’t know exactly what data Cambridge Analytica accessed. Facebook was in the midst of conducting its own audit when the U.K. government decided to conduct one of their own, therefore putting Facebook’s on hold.

“They didn’t have any data that we could’ve identified as ours,” Sandberg said. “To this day, we still don’t know what data Cambridge Analytica had.”

There’s a new unicorn in the global ride-hailing space after Taxify, a startup born in Estonia that does battle with Uber across Europe and Africa, closed $175 million in new funding that takes it valuation to the $1 billion mark.

Daimler, the German automotive giant which owns Mercedes-Benz among other things, led the round. The investment also featured participation from new backers Europe-based Korelya Capital and Taavet Hinrikus, founder of billion-dollar Estonian fintech startup Transferwise. Taxify said that China’s Didi Chuxing was among the returning investors to join.

The company said it plans to deploy the capital to develop its technology and make further expansions in Europe and Asia.

Beyond its automotive business, Daimler has taken a role in ride-hailing already. Its investments in the space include the acquisition of car-sharing business car2Go and German car-pooling startup Flinc, while it has put money into Europe-based car-pooling company Via and Turo, another car-sharing service which took on Daimler’s rival service Croove. More widely, Daimler and BMW consolidated their mobility businesses — which include parking apps, charging solutions, ride-hailing and more — in a consolidation move made in March of this year. Now, added to that, Daimler will take a seat on the Taxify board.

Given its extensive interest in mobility, it makes sense that Daimler is backing Taxify, which has emerged as the main contender battling Uber in Europe and Africa, while it has also forayed into Australia, too. Surprisingly, the round is the first major fundraising moment for Taxify, which had raised just €2 million ($2.4 million) prior to Didi’s undisclosed investment last year.

“We’re on a mission to build the future of mobility, and it’s great to have the support of investors like Daimler and Didi,” said CEO and co-founder Markus Villig in a statement. “This is just the beginning as more and more people give up on car ownership and opt for on-demand transportation.”

The ride-sharing space has homogenized somewhat in recent years with most companies offer the same services, so against that backdrop Taxify has something of a unique story. The startup was founded in Estonia in 2013 — the home of tech giant Skype — but brothers Markus Villig, then 19 years old, and his brother Martin, who had worked for Skype.

Villig junior is now just 24 years old which makes him one of the youngest heads of a billion-dollar company in the world, although OYO founder Ritesh Agarwal is slightly younger and led a unicorn at an even younger age. Still, it’s quite an achievement.

His original vision was to build a service for his native Estonia using money borrowed from his parents, but that vision expanded and the service is now present in over 25 countries, predominantly in Europe and Africa. Markus Villig said today that the company has more than 100,000 drivers and over 10 million users, a big jump on the 2.5 million users it claimed back in August. Villig added that Taxify’s ride volumes grew ten-fold last year, although he did not provide a raw figure.

Taxify CEO and co-founder Markus Villig

Markus has explained in the past that Taxify’s strategy focuses on being the second mover, most often behind Uber .

“We go into markets where ride-sharing is already a proven concept… we come in and we improve on that by having just cheaper commissions and giving more back to the riders and drivers. We don’t want to get into this regulatory troubles and be wasting millions in lobby battles,” he told Bloomberg in an interview last year.

A key moment for Taxify was snagging investment from Didi Chuxing, the Chinese firm that acquired Uber’s China business and removed it from the country.

Didi backed Taxify via an undisclosed “eight-figure U.S. dollar sum” in August 2016 but, beyond capital, gave it access to its network of knowledge and experience, particularly around operations.

This kind of deal is common for Didi, which raised a $4 billion investment at the end of last year for expansion purposes and has backed Uber rivals across the world with capital and mentoring. Didi’s investments include Lyft in the U.S., Grab in Southeast Asia (which recently bought out Uber’s local business), Ola in India, Careem in the Middle East and 99 in Brazil, which Didi itself acquired in January 2018 for its first international expansion move.

Much like the unique and forking joy of catching an eevee you plan to evolve, Poké trainers have some exciting branching paths ahead of them.

In a dedicated press event in Tokyo, the Pokémon Company, Nintendo and Niantic announced three new Pokémon games with another on the way in late 2019. The first game, a casual “free to start” RPG called Pokémon Quest, is already available for download on the Nintendo Switch.

Pokémon quest revisits the well loved core cast of ‘mons from the Kanto region (think Pokémon Red, Blue and Yellow era) but with a cubist twist. The game will hit the Switch first (it’s already there!) before expanding to iOS and Android later in June. Cube charizard, be mine.

Beyond the cute cubey apéritif, a beginner-friendly set of games called Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! will hit the Switch on November 16. According to its creators, the two titles “bring the experience of a classic Pokémon RPG to Nintendo Switch with gameplay that is easily approachable for newcomers to the series, but is also deep enough to keep veteran Trainers on their toes.” We’ll see about that.

The Pokémon Company also explained that the two games will tie into the hit mobile experience of Pokémon Go, though we don’t know the full extent of what that looks like yet:

“There is a deep connection between Pokémon GO and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Pikachu! and Pokémon: Let’s Go, Eevee! For one thing, Pokémon originally discovered in the Kanto region that you have caught in Pokémon GO can be brought into these two new Nintendo Switch games. That’s not all, though. Look forward to more details at a later date.”

Beyond the crowd-pleasing option to center either pikachu or eevee (let’s be real, you’re picking eevee), the Let’s Go games will showcase a new peripheral for the Switch known as the Poké Ball Plus that’s designed to simulate the evocative gesture that seasoned trainers know so well. Apparently, Nintendo put plenty of thought into that experience, so we’re hoping that it really brings to life the sensation of a wild animal wriggling rhythmically as its freedom seeps away, second by second.

Again, these games aren’t the core handheld title that diehard pokéfans are after, but if you’re going to have to wait until 2019 for a proper main series Pokémon RPG experience on the Switch, today’s news should offer plentiful snacks to tide you over.

At the end of the day, there are a lot of processes running on a smartphone-optimized chipsets that aren’t really necessary for the average virtual joe’s experience in a face computer. While tacking on more and more power to these headsets has generally been the dominating wisdom of the past five years, it’s getting to a point where the hardware that can be built has reached the good-enough stage and it’s time to bring costs down and focus on shipping units.

To herald in this necessary step, Qualcomm announced today that it has built a dedicated chipset for standalone headsets. The Snapdragon XR1 is the company’s first chipset focused exclusively on AR and VR, which the company is collectively referring to as “XR”.

Users will be able to enjoy experiences like streaming 4K 30fps content on XR1-powered devices. The company had a number of headset manufacturers onstage for the announcement, including HTC Vive, Vuzix, Meta and Pico. The number of headsets being shipped today are quite small, but Qualcomm is preparing for a near future where it believes unit sales will cross into the hundreds of millions.

Qualcomm was mostly mum on details of how this chipset performs relative to the newly-released Snapdragon 845 — which has its own VR reference design — but it seems fair to assert that the XR1 is probably a lower-cost option for hardware manufacturers that know exactly what they need and don’t want to pay to for an architecture that’s built around handling tasks that there devices won’t tackle.

While the Snapdragon 845 is looking to push headsets towards the capabilities offered by PC-tethered systems, the XR1 is looking at low-cost devices that have a better chance at making it on shelves in the near-term. The XR1 won’t support free-moving 6DoF like the 845, but will support tighter movements like its 835 VR platform did.

In an email responding to questions from TechCrunch, Qualcomm XR lead Hiren Bhinde said that the new chipset “will handle fewer workloads as opposed to the 845 for similar power and thermal benchmarks,” while noting that, “[t]here are also some AR customers who don’t need the high graphics or memory bandwidth supported in 845 for their devices, which is what makes the XR1 a perfect fit for them.”

When compared to some of today’s standalone VR headsets, many current untethered consumer AR headsets are lightweight in their compute demands because they’re not focused on replicating the world to the fidelity that VR is attempting. Headsets that simply offer a heads-up display and a voice assistant like those being shown off by Qualcomm XR1 partner Vuzix differ from what Magic Leap and Microsoft are pursuing with their “mixed reality” devices which enable sophisticated environment mapping so that digital objects can find a natural place in a viewer’s periphery.

By building a chipset with lower-cost mass-market headsets in their sights, Qualcomm seems convinced that the time to strike is now and that the XR1 could give manufacturers in the AR/VR space the added boost they need to start shipping hardware.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel spoke a bit about some of the cultural issues at the company, going public and competition with Facebook at Recode’s annual Code Conference this evening in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.

Earlier today, Cheddar reported how a former Snap engineer criticized the company for a “toxic” and “sexist” culture that is not welcoming to women and people of color. In an email former Snap engineer Shannon Lubetich wrote in November, she described how Snap is not adequately promoting diversity at the company.

“The letter was a really good wake-up call for us,” Spiegel said.

Spiegel described how, in light of the letter, Snap hired external consultants to help the company figure out areas in which to improve. Snap also ran a company-wide survey and changed its promotion structure, Spiegel said. He later added that he’s “proud” of the progress Snap has made over the last few months.

In the letter, Lubetich also described a scenario in which scantily clad women, hired by Snap, dressed up in deer costumes.

“People are going to make mistakes and I was frustrated, to say the least, to see people dressed up as deer at a holiday party,” Spiegel said.

In addition to cultural issues, Snap has also struggled on the public market. Snap’s Q1 2018 earnings, for example, showed lackluster user growth numbers amid a rocky redesign and increased competition from Facebook. Still, Spiegel said the redesign was the right way to go, as was going public.

“I think this was the logical step forward in being an independent company,” Spiegel said about going public.

Meanwhile, Snap is constantly fending off competition from Facebook. Spiegel initially joked, “I think it bothers my wife more than it bothers me.”

But in all seriousness, Spiegel said Snap’s values of deepening relationships with the people closest to you is “really hard to copy.” Facebook, on the other hand, is more about having people compete online for attention, Spiegel said.

He also joked, in light of Cambridge Analytica scandal, that Snap would “appreciate it if [Facebook] copied our data protection practices as well.”

A trade group representing big tech’s interests in Washington reached out to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on Tuesday to weigh in on proposed regulation that would affect the disclosure of funding for online election ads.

While traditional forms of media like TV and radio face strict rules for disclosing election campaign ad funding, social media and web advertising is now under similar scrutiny following revelations about Russian social media influence campaigns during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Tech companies are warming up to proposed regulation in Congress known as the Honest Ads Act, but the FEC is working on a new ruleset of its own regarding funding disclosures for election ads as well.

In its new comments, the Internet Association (which represents companies including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Snap and more) argued that such disclosures should be allowed to live one click away from the ads, pushing against proposals that would force disclosure to be displayed on an ad itself. The IA said such requirements would be limiting for innovation in the ad industry.

“IA also believes that technology plays an important role in providing information, and that rollovers, click-throughs, and other technology yet to be developed, can provide far more meaningful information to users than traditional ‘in the box’ disclaimers,” said IA President and CEO Michael Beckerman.

In the filing, the IA further elaborated on its position in favor of what it calls adaptive disclaimers:

“Rather than trying to fit a ‘paid for by’ notice on an ad that may change in size when delivered on different platforms or devices, the adaptive disclaimer would be inserted into the ad and be visible and accessible in all formats.”

Instead of traditional on-ad disclosures, the IA suggested a more flexible approach to implementing these regulations that would accommodate the wide range of ad types that the internet makes possible. In its comments, the IA argues that the FEC should “require internet ads to include a one-click away disclaimer or a disclaimer within the frame of the ad itself” to allow disclaimers to appear in hover-over text or in text below videos, among other less traditional ad formats.

After pleading guilty in November, the Canadian hacker at least partially to blame for the massive Yahoo hack that exposed up to 3 billion accounts will face five years in prison. According to the Justice Department, the hacker, 23-year-old Karim Baratov, worked under the guidance of two agents from the FSB, Russia’s spy agency, to compromise the accounts.

Those officers, Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin, reside in Russia, as does Latvian hacker Alexsey Belan who also was implicated in the Yahoo hack. Given their location, those three are unlikely to face consequences for their involvement, but Baratov’s Canadian citizenship made him vulnerable to prosecution.

“Baratov’s role in the charged conspiracy was to hack webmail accounts of individuals of interest to his coconspirator who was working for the FSB and send those accounts’ passwords to Dokuchaev in exchange for money,” the Justice Department described in its summary of Baratov’s sentencing.

Acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California Alex G. Tse issued a stern warning to other would-be hackers doing a foreign government’s dirty work:

The sentence imposed reflects the seriousness of hacking for hire. Hackers such as Baratov ply their trade without regard for the criminal objectives of the people who hire and pay them. These hackers are not minor players; they are a critical tool used by criminals to obtain and exploit personal information illegally. In sentencing Baratov to five years in prison, the Court sent a clear message to hackers that participating in cyber attacks sponsored by nation states will result in significant consequences.

In addition to his prison sentence, Baratov was ordered to pay out all of his remaining assets up to $2,250,000 in the form of a fine. As part of his plea, Baratov also admitted to hacking as many as 11,000 email accounts between 2010 and his arrest in 2017.

Baratov’s crimes include aggravated identity theft and conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.