Month: June 2019

Yesterday, Tally, the startup looking to automate consumers financial lives, announced it had raised a $50 million Series C round led by Andreessen Horowitz and with participation from Valley heavy hitters Kleiner Perkins, Shasta Ventures, Cowboy Ventures and Sway Ventures.

On the back of the announcement, TechCrunch’s fintech contributor Gregg Schoenberg sat down with Tally’s founder and CEO Jason Brown to discuss the round, Tally’s growth strategy and the company’s vision for an automated financial future.

Gregg Schoenberg: I never like to congratulate people when they raise a big load of capital, because if anything, the pressure is on even more. But just to level set real quickly, are there any numbers you can share that Andreessen Horowitz and the other investors saw that underscored your traction?

Jason Brown: So I agree with you. Internally, the metaphor I use is that it’s kind of like going on a long road trip where you’re stopping in the gas station to get more fuel so you can make it to your destination. You should really celebrate when you’re delivering value to customers.

Schoenberg: In terms of total credit card debt you’re managing, you were at $250mm towards the end of last year.

Brown: Yes. Now, we’re getting close to $400mm.

Schoenberg: And the savings vehicle – it’s new and totally free?

Brown: Yes, it’s completely free and just to recap, it takes 35-45 seconds to set-up, it automates the process of setting money aside every week and it gives you points. It’s still in beta, but we’re getting close to the end of beta, and have over 30,000 people on the waitlist.

Schoenberg: With respect to the fundraise you just announced, the big takeaway I got was your aspiration to automate people’s entire financial lives. That’s big talk.

Brown: That is big talk.

Schoenberg: You obviously knew what you were doing when you decided to frame it that way. Where do you go from here? Obviously, credit card payments and the savings vehicle are good, but there are many other financial services out there that you’ll need to tackle.

Brown: Well one of the key portions of the investment thesis for Andreessen Horowitz is actually what’s under the hood. So we actually took three years to build the underlying infrastructure to automate the pay off my cards job. And there are two fundamental layers to the tech.

There’s the “decide what’s best for me,” which addresses the complexity of ingesting data across your entire financial life, and being able to validate that it’s accurate and consistent, and then having algorithms that can make sense of it and figure out what’s best for you. The next layer is actually doing what’s best for you, which involves being able to move money around and lend money.

Whitebox, a startup that CEO Marcus Startzel said is working to “power the direct-to-consumer economy,” has raised $5 million in Series A funding.

The company works with both startups and more established brands, giving them the tools they need to run direct-to-consumer e-commerce businesses. Customers include McCormick, Starbucks, KitchenAid, Bare Bones and Super Coffee-maker Kitu.

As Startzel put it, “All our clients need to do is send us their product, and then we take care of everything.” That includes listing the products on different online marketplaces, promoting those listings with ads and actually sending the products to customers once they’ve been purchased.

According to Startzel, while there are other companies building tools around Amazon listings and ads, and still others focused on logistics, Whitebox is unique because “we’re selling stuff and we’re moving stuff.” He argued the company can tap into sales opportunities that its competitors can’t, thanks to a “technology platform that connects to both sides” and allows Whitebox to find the best way to sell a brand’s products, for example in multi-packs and variety packs.

Asked whether this approach — in which Whitebox handles physical fulfillment from its own warehouse space — means that the company will need a lot more funding to grow, Startzel first praised his “world-class warehouse team,” then said, “I’m not actually buying warehouses. I’m leasing space, but within weeks of us setting up operations in a warehouse, it’s profitable. It’s not a drag on our business, it’s a huge accelerant to our business.”

Startzel previously worked as a digital ad executive before joining Whitebox earlier this year. Since then, the company has grown to 42 full-time employees (from less than 30) and opened a second fulfillment center.

The new funding was by TDF Ventures, with participation from Merkle CEO David Williams, Millennial Media co-founder Chris Brandenburg and others.

“Our investment signifies our confidence in the team, growth to date, the company and its market potential,” said TDF Ventures Managing Director James Pastoriza in a statement. “By Q1 of 2019, more brick-and-mortar store closings have been announced in the U.S. than in all of 2018, which clearly demonstrates the opportunity in the fast-growing eCommerce market.”

For e-reader devotees, it doesn’t get better than the Kindle Oasis. Amazon’s the last giant player standing in the category (unless you consider what Barnes & Noble is doing “standing”), and the Oasis is ounce for ounce the best Kindle device it has produced. I reviewed the last iteration of the device back in late 2017 and thoroughly enjoyed my time with it.

Amazon’s keeping the dream alive with an update to the device. Though be forewarned, like the recent standard Kindle upgrade, it’s pretty minor. From the looks of things, the new Oasis maintains all of the good bits with its predecessor, including the nice 7-inch, 300ppi display, coupled with physical page-turn buttons.

The big change here is the ability to adjust the color tone of the front light, to go easier on your eyes during the day — and to help you get to sleep better at night. There’s also a built-in option here that will automatically adjust the tone throughout the day.

Honestly, that’s the main new addition here. There’s also a new generation of E Ink tech, which maintains the same resolution as before, but should offer an increased refresh rate, resulting in faster page turns (I’ll report back more on that later). It’s all part of the tech’s slow creep toward faster speeds. I probably don’t need to go into the marked benefits of the technology here — that’s been pretty well documented over the years.

Other features from the earlier version include IPX8 water proofing (that’s up to two meters for up to an hour). There’s built-in Bluetooth for listening to audio books via Audible and a premium design with a metal backing.

Like the 2017 model, it starts at $250 for the 8GB version and $280 for the 32GB model (more if you want to get rid of special offers. That comes with six months of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service. It’s up for pre-order starting today and starts shipping July 24, along with a bunch of different covers.

Netflix has a tradition, in practice since 2015, of annually proclaiming which TVs, of all the TVs in the land, are best suited to serving you its content. The streaming company’s criteria for determining ‘best’ is different from what you’d expect from The Wirecutter or Consumer reports – but if you’re a Netflix ride-or-die level fan, they might be the only criteria you really care about.

Without further ado, here’s the list of 2019’s Netflix Recommended TVs:

• Samsung Q60R/Q70R/Q80R/Q90R/Q900R series, RU8000, The Serif and The Frame devices
• Sony BRAVIA X85G/X90G series and A9G series
• Panasonic VIERA GX700/GX800/GX900 series

That list may seem short, and it is, relative to the number of TVs on the market that offer Netflix directly on device. But Netflix points out that the list can grow throughout the year depending on device and software update availability.

If, like me, you are an informed consumer who does a lot of research before making a large purchase like, say, a big-screen TV, you might be curious at the omission of LG’s OLED series, the 2019 iteration of which came to market just a couple of months ago. For a possible answer, let’s take a look at the criteria Netflix uses to make their list. (Note: I asked Netflix directly about LG and they provided a generic answer about brands dropping from the list year-to-year on occasion based on criteria and performance requirements).

Essentially, landing an official Netflix nod means that a TV can provide its user access to Netflix “within just a few seconds,” that it allows you to “quickly and easily” navigate between different apps, that it provides access to the most up-to-date version of Netflix, and that it gives you access to all Netflix’s laters features “for a better browsing experience.” In total there are 7 criteria, and a TV must meet 5 to be eligible for a Netflix recommendation.

One criteria that’s new this year might be the one that’s put the ‘Recommendation’ out of reach for LG and webOS – it’s called ‘Always Fresh,” and it requires that a TV keep Netflix awake for an occasional background refresh, meaning it’s always primed and ready to go, with more or less instant playback regardless of network connection speed.

It’d be easy to knock Netflix for making this one of the conditions of receiving its recommendations (which are based solely on testing and meeting its standards – the company told me no money changes hands in this program), but it’s not barring companies that don’t meet these criteria from offering its service. And it’s using its market weight to help motivate TV makers to provide an experience that will genuinely be better for consumers.

Echo, the U.K. startup that offers an app to help you manage your medication and order repeat prescriptions for delivery, has been acquired by healthcare company McKesson, owner of LloydsPharmacy.

Terms of the deal remain undisclosed. However, I understand the buyout sees all of Echo’s existing investors exit, with McKesson becoming the majority shareholder and the remaining shares divided amongst Echo management and other staff. Echo was backed by White Star Capital, MMC Ventures, Rocket Innternet’s GFC, Hambro Perks, Public.io, and LocalGlobe.

Echo was founded in 2015 by Sai Lakshmi, who previously worked in biz dev for Apple, and Stephen Bourke, who (notably) was previously a manager at Lloyds Pharmacy’s online doctor service. Lakshmi stepped down as CEO of Echo in August last year and was subsequently replaced by ex-HelloFresh International COO Roger Hassan.

The Echo app for iOS and Android lets you order NHS prescriptions and get your medication delivered to your door. You simply tell the app the name of your GP and what repeat medication you take, which can be input using your phone’s camera and with the help of Echo’s NLP tech.

The app also alerts you when you need to take your medicine and when you are running low. When a new prescription is required, under your instruction Echo will send the appropriate request to your doctor and nominate a pharmacy partner on your behalf. Once approved by your GP, your medicine is dispatched by 2nd class post and you pay the standard NHS charge if applicable.

All of this is enabled by the way echo has deeply integrated with the NHS Electronic Prescription Service (EPS), meaning that it works with existing GP NHS England practice systems and tech, and doesn’t require extra work on the GP surgery’s part. The idea is to make medication management, especially for people who have chronic conditions and take regular medicine, as hassle-free as possible.

Meanwhile, the acquisition by McKesson creates a number of obvious and not so obvious synergies. With only an estimated 1% of prescriptions in the U.K. having moved online, the digital pharmacy market is still quite a nascent one but it certainly feels likely that more digitisation is inevitable.

Arguably, purchasing medication online has as much in common with e-commerce than health tech and the U.K. is one of the biggest e-commerce markets in the world. As another reference point, Amazon acquired U.S.-based Pillpack roughly a year ago to this day for just shy of $1 billion. In that sense, this deal could be seen as McKesson placing a bigger bet on digital in a bid to avoid innovator’s dilemma. Via LloydsPharmacy, McKesson has a lot of brick ‘n’ mortar stores.

However, as explained in a call with Echo CEO Roger Hassan, McKesson is very much in the pharmaceutical wholesale business, too, and is the wholesaler that Echo uses to purchase much of the medicine it dispenses. Buying medicine is Echo’s main cost, and the difference between wholesale price and how much the NHS will reimburse for a particular medication is where Echo creates margin. Now it is owned by McKesson there are more opportunities for economies of scale.

Another aspect that will be explored post-acquisition, is how best to leverage the Echo and LloydsPharmacy brands. One of Echo’s challenges over the years has been convincing customers that an app can be trusted to send vital medication through the post in time. This has meant the market needs to be created as much as competed for. A closer brand association with LloydsPharmacy (which along with a significant offline presence also has its own tentative online pharmacy), could help with this.

There may well be opportunities to drive Echo customers to LloydsPharmacy stores, too. This could include a click and collect scenario for customers who are nervous about delivery or for other services that can only be conducted face to face, such as basic tests, advice or things like quit smoking coaching.

Catherine McDermott, chief digital officer at McKesson UK, comments in a statement: “We know that our customers are always looking for ways to make their lives easier by managing more things online. That’s why growing our digital capabilities is one of our top priorities. Our goal is to develop innovative technologies that enable us to better serve our customers and patients by providing them with added choice and convenience”.

WeWork’s battle to win co-working in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, is intensifying after one of the U.S. firm’s key rival announced a slew of announcements to double down on its business.

EV Hive, an Indonesia-based co-working startup, said today that it has raised $13.5 million and expanded into new verticals. The company is putting off plans to foray into new countries in order to prioritize growth opportunities at home.

The four-year-old company, which started out as a project for seed stage VC firm East Ventures, has rebranded to CoHive as part of the strategy to diversify its business. That’ll see it add new services for living spaces (CoLiving) and retailers (CoRetail), in addition to its core co-working and events businesses.

“We’re the number one player in the market and our goal now is to use the capital and offer more services and products,” Jason Lee, CoHive’s CFO, told TechCrunch in an interview.

As for the new funding, that’s a first close of the firm’s Series B and it is led by Korea’s Stonebridge Ventures. That money takes CoHive to over $37 million to date — it last announced a $20 million raise one year ago — and there’s more to come.

Lee told TechCrunch that he expects the round to wrap up and fully close in “the next few months.” According to Lee, the company is in talks with local and international investors as it aims to bring “strategic investors” on board to provide more benefits than simply capital.

The new services divisions are challenging expansions for a co-working company.

CoHive already claims to be the market leader in Indonesia — where it says it has 9,000 members from some 800 paying companies — and now it is responding to feedback from members by adding retail and living.

The thought of living close to your place of work may inspire dread from many an office worker, but in Jakarta — one of the world’s most jammed cities — many people are crying out for a short commute, according to Lee.

“There’s huge demand in the market,” he told TechCrunch. “There’s a shortage of affordable housing [in Jakarta] and the traffic is the worst in the world [so] people want to leave near their workplace… they value the convenience because of the traffic.”

CoLiving was first announced a year ago, and now CoHive has opened its first such property, a joint development with Singaporean developer Keppel. The maiden property — Tower Crest West Vista in West Jakarta — has 64 rooms across a total 2,800 sqm living space. Lee said the first phase of offers, which targeted individuals and small businesses, sees the building 90% occupied. CoHive plans to offer the remainder to larger companies.

On the retail side, the objective is to develop an alternative to malls that will allow experimentation, Lee said.

“Traditional malls are outdated with long leases and high upfront rental costs,” he explained, pointing out that a year of rent is typically required for retail leases.

Instead, CoHive wants to offer a more flexible option that will allow new retail companies and startups to “test products and innovative before they take them to market.”

Already, Lee claimed, there are six large tenants that plan to use CoRetail, which will include a mix of temporary pop-ups, Instagram ‘box shops’ and permanent retail space.

“They are trying to find a place to showcase and actualize their products without having to pay so much money,” he added.

The double down on Indonesia means that CoHive has shelved previous plans to enter new markets in Southeast Asia. When it raised $20 million last year, CEO Carlson Lau told TechCrunch of a plan to reach 100 spaces by 2022 with moves into markets like Thailand and Vietnam, but that appears to be on hold.

“We’re not ruling it out of the pipeline [but] at least for next 12 months, we’ll be focused on Indonesia,” Lee said.

That’ll primarily mean that the business expands into tier-two cities. Indeed, in a number of locations, Lee revealed, they are in the design phase of developing buildings.

With a population of over 250 million, Indonesia is the largest single consumer market in Southeast Asia and that has made it the priority in the region for most tech companies, including ride-hailing firms Grab and Go-Jek, which are valued at $14 billion and $9 billion, respectively. That extends across various tech segments, including co-working.

“We see the market in Indonesia as very large,” explained Lee. “There’s so much demand.”

WeWork is, like others, prioritizing Indonesia. It extended its presence in Southeast Asia through the 2017 acquisition of startup SpaceMob, which also saw it pour $500 million in resources into Southeast Asia and Korea.

Lee, as you might expect, believes that there’s space for multiple players, and he sees CoHive and WeWork as operating in different areas.

“WeWork is trying to be that Mercedes…. we’re not competing,” he said, comparing his company to Toyota, a brand that is widely popular in Indonesia since it is more affordable.

Postman, a five-year-old startup that is attempting to simply development, tests, and management of APIs through its platform, has raised $50 million in a new round to scale its business.

The Series B for the startup, that began its journey in India, was led by CRV and included participation from existing investor Nexus Venture Partners. The startup, with offices in India and San Francisco, closed its Series A financing round four years ago and has raised $57 million to date.

Postman offers a development environment which a developer or a firm could use to build, publish, document, design, monitor, test, and debug their APIs. Postman, like some other startups such as RapidAPI, also maintains a marketplace to offer APIs for quick integration with other popular services.

The startup was co-founded by Abhinav Asthana, a former intern at Yahoo. Asthana was frustrated with how APIs were an afterthought for many developers as they usually got around to building them in the eleventh hour. Additionally, developers were relying on their own workflows and there was no organized platform that could be used by many, he explained in an interview with TechCrunch.

Even big software firms have not looked into this space yet, and many have instead become a customer of Postman. “We are solving a fundamental problem for the technology landscape. Big companies tend to be slower as they have many other things on their plate,” said Asthana.

Five years later, Postman has grown significantly. More than 7 million developers and 300,000 companies including Microsoft, Twitter, BestBuy, AMC Theaters, Paypal, Shopify, BigCommerce, and DocuSign today use Postman’s platform.

The modern software development relies heavily on APIs as more businesses begin to talk with one another. According to research firm Gartner, more than 65% of global infrastructure service providers’ revenue will be generated through services enabled by APIs by 2023, up from 15% in 2018.

Asthana said the startup intends to use the fresh capital to scale its startup, products, and grow its team. “We are scaling rapidly across all dimensions. There are many use cases that we still want to address over the coming months. We will also experiment with sales and invest in improving user experience,” he added.

Postman offers some of its services in limited capacity for free to users. For rest, it charges between $8 to $18 per user to its customers. That’s how the company generates revenue. Asthana declined to share the financial performance of the startup, but said its customer based was “growing phenomenally.”

Postman said CRV General Partner Devdutt Yellurkar has joined its board of directors.

Facebook unveiled a cryptocurrency called Libra yesterday as well as the Libra Association, a not-for-profit that will oversee all things Libra. While Libra’s white paper draws a lot of inspiration from other cryptocurrencies, the current governance model and blockchain implementation remind me of banks more than bitcoin.

Permissioned blockchain

The Libra blockchain is designed like a true blockchain with a Byzantine Fault Tolerance approach, the use of Merkle trees to guarantee the integrity and a network of nodes.

And yet, unlike popular blockchains, such as the bitcoin blockchain or the Ethereum blockchain, you won’t be able to run a node in your backyard. Only founding members of the Libra Association will be able to run a node. There are currently 28 members, such as Vodafone, Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, Uber and Spotify.

In other words, it looks like a blockchain but it’s not a real blockchain. It’s not truly decentralized. It’s not truly open as the ledger of transactions will be accessible to Libra Association founding members exclusively — unless Facebook or another founding member builds a public-facing API of some sort.

Facebook is well aware of that as the company says it plans to let anyone run a node at some point over the next five years.

“To ensure that Libra is truly open and always operates in the best interest of its users, our ambition is for the Libra network to become permissionless. The challenge is that as of today we do not believe that there is a proven solution that can deliver the scale, stability, and security needed to support billions of people and transactions across the globe through a permissionless network. One of the association’s directives will be to work with the community to research and implement this transition, which will begin within five years of the public launch of the Libra Blockchain and ecosystem.”

Authorized resellers

The Libra cryptocurrency is a stablecoin as it is tied to a basket of fiat currencies and securities. So it requires a lot of oversight to make sure that every time the Libra Association mints a Libra, they buy and store the equivalent in fiat currencies and securities in a bank account.

Similarly, every time someone converts Libra into, say, USD, the Libra Association has to issue a selling order on the equivalent in fiat currencies and securities.

That’s why the Libra Association will work with a list of authorized resellers. It creates a barrier to entry and transforms the Libra Association into a regulatory body for the Libra ecosystem.

Once again, this works against decentralization as only trustworthy partners will get a license to operate as an authorized reseller. Small financial institutions will have no choice but to work with an authorized reseller if their clients want to get paid back in Libra for instance. All the founding members become a sort of Visa or Mastercard for the 21st century.

Other stablecoins, such as USDC, work in a similar fashion. If you want to support USDC on your exchange or payment service, you have to become a member of the CENTRE Consortium.

But anybody can look at the USDC ledger as USDC is an ERC-20 token built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. If you run an Ethereum node, you indirectly contribute to USDC transactions. And there are a ton of partner exchanges that open up a lot of opportunities.

Shadow bank

There’s a reason why French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told Europe 1 that Libra can’t “become a sovereign currency.” In some countries with high inflation rates, Libra could become an instant hit and power many of the peer-to-peer and even business-to-customer transactions.

But central banks that issue currencies and conduct monetary policies are members of the International Monetary Funds. They also have different objectives compared to private entities.

Given the current nature of the Libra Association, there’s a chance that Libra becomes a quasi-sovereign currency in Venezuela, Argentina, Turkey or South Africa — but it would be controlled by private companies that don’t care about monetary policies.

There’s a reason why the European Union is moving toward a single market but can’t agree at all on budget, tax harmonization and debt. Similarly, China cracked down on the shadow banking system because it caused systemic risks.

Governments will want strict oversight on the Libra Association because the association could change its goals overnight. What if they remove a fiat currency from the basket of fiat currencies and securities? What if they start issuing credit?

Essentially, the Libra Association is now in charge of a quasi-fiat currency and will face a ton of challenges on the regulatory front. It comes down from its governance structure and technical implementation.

$7 billion, that’s the valuation of UiPath following its latest funding round. Born in Romania and now headquartered in New York, the company represents a true European success story. That’s why I’m excited to announce that UiPath founder and CEO Daniel Dines is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

The reason why UiPath is growing so quickly is that it has developed a killer software solution for enterprise clients. The startup focuses on repetitive tasks and helps customers automate as many actions as possible using UiPath.

If you’re a back-office employee working in accounting, human resources paperwork or claims processing, chances are you could use a robotic process automation solution to save time.

It’s easy to switch to UiPath as it integrates seamlessly with your existing tools. Essentially, the service acts as a robot on your computer clicking around, searching for a contact, copying files, extracting content from documents and more. Companies can design those robots using a visual editor. You can drag and drop blocks that each represent an action.

Customers love it as it greatly increases the overall productivity. They save money while employees can focus on the most rewarding and less repetitive tasks. Clients include Google, McDonalds, NHS Shared Business Services, NTT Communications, Orange, Uber, the U.S. Navy, etc.

But it doesn’t mean that UiPath has been an overnight success. Daniel Dines first started the company nearly 15 years ago. And I can’t wait to hear him talk about his journey as I’m sure he has thought about automation a lot more than the vast majority of people.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to win the highly coveted Battlefield cup.

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Daniel Dines is the founder and CEO of UiPath, the fastest growing and leading provider of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and AI software worldwide. Dines started UiPath in 2005 with the goal of building a solution that could help humans reduce the time and stress that come from menial, administrative business tasks. Today, Dines’ vision is to make software robots, powered by computer vision and AI, as common as PCs in the workplace – a vision dubbed One Robot for Every Person.

Dines is committed to ushering in the “automation first” era, helping businesses of all sizes digitize everyday business operations and apply AI to drive true digital transformation. This era brings tremendous value to businesses and new career opportunities for people – which is why Dines aims to democratize RPA via free training and software, as well through UiPath’s Academic Alliance program, which trains and certifies university students, youth, and traditionally underrepresented groups – with an eye toward preparing people for the jobs of the future.

Since incorporating UiPath in 2015, and moving its headquarters to New York in 2017, Dines has led the company through substantial growth – delivering intelligent automation solutions to thousands of companies around the world, including government agencies and many of the Fortune 500. He has raised more than $400M from top-tier venture capital firms, with a company valuation of more than $3B.

Dines began his engineering career at Microsoft where he designed and developed the SQL Server Agent. Still a hacker at heart, he is active in driving the company’s RPA platform and supporting the 250,000 developers who are building automations on UiPath’s RPA platform.

Ten months ago London startup hinted that it would be “a new way to book travel online, aiming at the booking experience ‘end to end’”, announced a healthy $4.7M funding round, but not much else.

Today it goes further, announcing a $21.5m in Series A funding from VC giant Benchmark, which also backed Snap, Twitter and Uber. Benchmark is joined by Blossom Capital and Index Ventures, who participated in Duffel’s $4.7m seed round last year.

With this news, we at least get a little more detail. It will be a B2B offering, allowing individual travel agents to large online travel management companies and tour operators to offer a “seamless travel experience” to their end customers, making the booking experience simpler, faster and cheaper.

Is this a new Sabre? Steve Domin, co-founder and CEO of Duffel, hints that it is: “The travel industry is underpinned by archaic software and processes that are fundamentally prohibitive for the modern day traveler. We are reinventing the underwiring between online agents and the providers – airlines, hotels, transport operators – in much the same way that the payments world is changing for merchants, because of tools like Adyen and Stripe.”

In other words, Duffel appears to be building a new software stack for travel, in the same way that challenge banks started from scratch to make themselves more agile than the laggard, incumbent banks.

Duffel was one of the Y Combinator S18 cohort and have put together a team drawn from their alumni companies including GoCardless, Gitlab and Turo. It plans to launch this Autumn.

Chetan Puttagunta, general partner at Benchmark, said: “We have been watching Duffel from a distance and we are incredibly excited by the possibility it has to create something valuable for customers and travel providers alike. Duffel is focused on providing a better booking experience by building a platform that is easy to use with deep functionality.”

Ophelia Brown, founder of Blossom Capital, said: “Duffel has been clear on its vision to improve the travel experience for everyone from day one. This is a great example of the way that European founders are becoming more ambitious than ever before.”

The market is waiting with baited-breath to find out if Duffel’s stellar fund-raising capabilities can eventually match the claims made for the product.