Year: 2019

In an era when validation-seeking venture capitalists are lauded as much as high-flying founders, Maverick Ventures’ small team of investors have opted to stay quiet.

Now, the years-old firm is ready to publicize its successes and shed some light on its global strategy. Today, Maverick is disclosing for the first time the size of its evergreen venture fund: a $382 million early-stage vehicle.

Launched in 2015 as the venture arm of 25-year-old hedge fund Maverick Capital, San Francisco-based Maverick has funneled cash into direct-to-consumer wellness brand Hims, new-age insurer Devoted Health and primary care services provider One Medical. Led by David Singer (pictured above, center), the former chief executive officer of genetics company Affymetrix and drug developer Genesoft Pharmaceuticals, Maverick has oft supported healthtech startups.

“We are thematic, but this business is all about opportunism,” Singer told TechCrunch. “The whole challenge of venture is to figure out what’s next and that, by nature, doesn’t fit into one bucket.”

With that in mind, Maverick has deviated from healthcare, a decision that led it to some of its biggest successes. The firm became the first institutional investor in Coupang, Korea’s largest e-commerce business, which recently brought in $2 billion from SoftBank’s Vision Fund at a reported $9 billion valuation and is poised for a multi-billion exit. It also supported the Tencent-acquired video streaming platform Youku and the now-public Korean texting service Kakao.

Grocery delivery service FreshDirect, facial recognition startup D-ID and cloud-based software firm Aptible are also among its non-healthtech portfolio companies.

In total, Maverick has helped build 13 unicorns across a portfolio of 100 companies. The firm, Singer explained, almost always provides its companies follow-on capital, beyond the seed, Series A or Series B investment they initially provide. Why? Because they believe in their companies, as any good VC should, but also because Singer admittedly has a hard time saying no to Maverick’s startups.

“I’ve lost money from being too emotionally invested,” he said. “We are old-school. We feel this is a business to help build strong companies. It’s not a quick flip. For better or for worse, that’s what we like doing.”

In addition to Singer, Maverick’s investment team includes former Bessemer Venture Partners vice president Ambar Bhattacharyya and Oscar’s former director of finance Prateesh Maheshwari.

Pandora today announced the launch of its own, in-app voice assistant which you can call up at any time by saying “Hey Pandora,” followed by a request to play the music or podcasts you want to hear. The feature will allow you to not only control music playback with commands to play a specific artist, album, radio or playlist, but will also be capable of delivering results customized to you when responding to vague commands or those related to activity or mood. For example, you’ll get personalized results for requests like “play something new,” “play more like this,” “play music for relaxing,” “play workout music,””play something I like,” and others.

The company reports strong adoption of its service on voice-activated speakers, like Amazon Echo devices, where now millions of listeners launch Pandora music by speaking – a trend which inspired the move to launch in-app voice control.

“Voice is just an expected new way that you engage with any app,” notes Pandora Chief Product Officer Chris Phillips. “On the mobile app, we’re doing more than just your typical request against the catalog… asking: ‘hey, Pandora,’ to search and play or pause or skip,” he says.  “What we’re doing that we think is pretty special is we’re taking that voice utterance of what someone asks for, and we’re applying our personalized recommendations to the response,” Phillips explains.

That means when you ask Pandora to play you something new, the app will return a selection that won’t resemble everyone else’s music, but will rather be informed by your own listening habits and personal tastes.

The way that result is returned may also vary – for some, it could be a playlist, for others an album, and for others, it could be just a new song, a personalized soundtrack, or a radio station.

“Play something new” isn’t the only command that will yield a personalized response, Pandora says. It will also return personalized results for commands related to your mood or activity – like workout music, something to relax to, music for cooking, and more.

For podcasts, it can dig up episodes with a specific guest, play shows by title, or even deliver show recommendations, among other things.

Voice commands can be used in lieu of pressing buttons, too, in order to do things like add songs to a playlist or giving a song you like a thumbs up, for instance.

The new feature, called “Voice Mode,” taps into Pandora’s machine learning and data science capabilities, which is an active battleground between music services.

Spotify, for example, is well known for its deep personalized with its Discover Weekly and other custom playlists, like its Daily Mixes. But its own “voice mode” option is only available for its Premium users, according to a FAQ on the company’s website.

Pandora, meanwhile, is planning to roll out Voice Mode to all users – both free and paid.

For free users, the feature will work in conjunction with an existing ad product that allows users to opt in to watch a video in order to gain temporary access to Pandora’s on-demand service.

While this option is not live at launch, the plan is to allow any user to use the “Hey Pandora” command, then redirect free users with a request to play music on demand to instead play the opt-in ad first.

Pandora Voice Mode will launch today, January 15 to a percentage of the iOS and Android user base – around a million listeners. The company will track the speed, accuracy and performance of its results before rolling it out more broadly over the next couple of months.

Users with a Google Home device can also cast from their Pandora app to their smart speaker, and a similar feature will arrive on Alexa devices soon, the company believes.

Pandora works with  Siri Shortcuts, too. That means you can now use voice to launch the app itself, then play a personalized selection of music without having to touch your phone at all.

Voice Mode will be available in the Pandora app via the search bar next to the magnifying glass.

 

You might not know Amadeus by name, but hundreds of millions of travelers use it each year.

Whether you’re traveling for work or vacation, most consumers book their flights through one of a handful of bespoke reservation systems used across the commercial aviation industry. Amadeus is one of the largest reservation systems, serving customers of Air France, British Airways, Icelandair, and Qantas and more. And each reservation system has to be able to talk to each other through the global distribution system backchannel.

Without these interconnected systems, most governments have no idea who’s coming and going.

Even in this day and age of passwords for everything and facial recognition at the departure gate, all that sits between you and someone rebooking a flight is a passenger’s surname and the booking reference on your ticket, known as the passenger name record — or PNR.

But these outdated and archaic passenger records systems needed to share travelers’ data internationally never considered security on the scale that’s needed today, and are woefully inadequate in keeping passenger records safe.

Israeli security researcher Noam Rotem knows all too well.

He found that any airline using Amadeus made it easy to edit and change someone’s reservation with just their booking reference number. No surname needed. In some cases, he didn’t even need to obtain someone’s booking number.

Rotem explained in a write-up, shared with TechCrunch before his public disclosure, that he could plug in anyone’s booking reference in a buggy web address on Israeli airline El Al’s website — in spite of being required to enter a surname on the website’s check-in page.

That not only lowers the bar for someone wanting to manipulate a person’s booking, such as changing seats and rerouting frequent miler numbers, said Rotem, but it’s also easy to obtain a person’s personal information, such as their phone number, and email and home addresses, from the airline.

How secure is the six-digit booking reference itself? History says that it’s still far too easy to obtain.

If your six-digit booking reference isn’t already on your boarding pass, ticket or luggage tag, you’ll still find it embedded in the barcode. That barcode, decrypted several years ago, can be easily read by most mobile barcode apps, making it easy for criminals to walk around the check-in area or departure’s lounge and scan a photo of your ticket when you’re not looking.

Worse, the average hacker wouldn’t have to leave their house. Dozens of people post their boarding passes — and their barcodes — to Twitter and Instagram every day, under the hashtags #boardingpass and #planetickets.

But Rotem said that inherent weaknesses in how reservation systems generate passenger name record numbers in the first place made it easy to brute-force any Amadeus-linked airline website with a hacker’s own generated booking references.

Because Amadeus’ system didn’t limit how many requests could be processed at any given time, Romet could run a script generating booking references at random, which he says were “simply guessed,” then plugging them into the vulnerable web address and waiting for a positive response to return.In some cases, the script found booking references attached to real customers. Because parts of each Amadeus-generated booking references are sequential, it makes it easy to continue the attack on passengers with similar or the same surname. And, there were no rate limits, allowing the researcher to run as many requests each minute as he wanted, speeding up the process. (TechCrunch saw a short video of the script generating booking reference numbers, but didn’t verify any as logging in with someone else’s booking reference would be unlawful.)

A skilled attacker could, for example, use this technique to book their own flights or siphoning off accumulated air miles. A bored hacker, however, could wreak havoc on any number of passengers’ credit cards.

In all, Amadeus’ website claims it supports more than 200 airlines. We were curious how far the vulnerability went.

Using cookie data collected from El Al, TechCrunch was able to find dozens of other affected airlines using data collected by RiskIQ, a cyber threat intelligence firm, which scours the web for information. “During RiskIQ’s crawls, our crawlers act like the browser they are instructed to emulate, which means they will maintain cookies and other site-specific metadata,” said Yonathan Klijnsma, a threat researcher at RiskIQ.

We reached out to several of the larger airlines believed to be affected by the vulnerability, but nobody from Air France, British Airways, Icelandair, and Qantas commented when reached prior to publication.

When reached, Amadeus confirmed it was alerted to an issue and took “immediate action,” said a spokesperson. “We are working closely with our customers and we regret any disruption this situation may have caused.”

“We work with our customers and partners in the industry to address PNR security overall. The airline industry relies on IATA standards that were introduced to improve efficiency and customer service on a global scale. Because the industry works on common industry standards, including the PNR, further improvements should include reviewing and changing some of the industry standards themselves, which requires industry collaboration,” the statement added. “At Amadeus, we give security the highest priority and are constantly monitoring and updating all of our products and systems.”

Rotem suggested bot protection mechanisms and limits to how many requests can be submitted during a certain period of time could prevent automated attacks in the future, but that the underlying problems remain. That isn’t likely to change without an industry-wide effort to change how reservations are made.

In reality, we’re stuck with PNR for a while — and it’s a problem that’s not going away any time soon.

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For decades, women in business have lacked the resources necessary to navigate to or sustain executive roles. Finally, venture-funded projects have emerged to fill this gap.

The latest is Chief, a private network for New York-based women in senior roles in tech, retail, enterprise, finance, media and more. The company launches today with $3 million in venture capital funding to provide its 200 members access to a Tribeca clubhouse, monthly executive coaching and leadership development sessions and a salon series, which includes “intimate dinners with captains of industry” and celebrity fireside conversations.

The catch? Chief membership costs $5,800 per year for members with a vice president-level job title and even more for those in the C-suite at $7,800. Its founders, Carolyn Childers and Lindsay Kaplan, say the ideal is for companies to pay the way for members, similar to how a startup might pay to send one of its employees to a conference.

Chief and its investors, Primary Venture Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, Accel, Box Group, Able Partners, XFactor Ventures, Silas Capital and BBG Ventures, are betting the company’s coaching sessions, clubhouse, mobile application and network of successful women will keep its members coming back every year — $5,800 check in hand.

“Companies are looking for something like this,” Kaplan, the former VP of communications at Casper, told TechCrunch. “They have these amazing women, they know there is a problem with equality up top and this isn’t something they can provide within their own four walls.”

Though Chief’s initial 200-person cohort does not include any men, the group is open to all genders. Given the controversy surrounding The Wing’s former membership policy, which barred men from entry, Chief’s decision to accept anyone ready “to fight the 200-year gap in gender equality,” in the words of Kaplan, will probably save them a headache down the line.

“We are a very mission-based company,” Childers, the former VP of operations at household services marketplace Handy, told TechCrunch. “If a man is inspired to help women get to the C-suite, they can apply and become a part of Chief.”

Though Chief wasn’t able to provide specific data on membership diversity, Childers and Kaplan did say its “top of mind” and when I first spoke with the pair this fall, months before launch, they said they planned to offer grants to members who are unable to pay the annual fee.

“We don’t want to see a 1 percent increase in female management in 10 years,” Childers said. “We want to close that gap as quickly as possible.”

The startup seems to have the best of intentions, though what Chief appears to be is an expensive networking opportunity for New York’s existing elite. With that said, if Chief only helps the existing 1 percent of women in business maintain executive roles, at least its helping move the needle ever so slightly.

Qualcomm has had a patent lawsuit against Apple dismissed by a court in Mannheim, Germany, as groundless (via Reuters).

The chipmaker had argued Intel -powered iPhones infringed a transistor switch patent it holds. But in an initial verbal decision the court disagreed. Qualcomm has said it will appeal.

In a statement, Don Rosenberg, Qualcomm’s executive VP and general counsel, said: “Apple has a history of infringing our patents. While we disagree with the Mannheim court’s decision and will appeal, we will continue to enforce our [intellectual property] rights against Apple worldwide.”

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment. Update: The company told us: “We are happy with the decision and thank the court for their time and diligence.  We regret Qualcomm’s use of the court to divert attention from their illegal behavior that is the subject of multiple lawsuits and proceedings around the world.”

The pair have been embroiled in an increasingly bitter and global legal battle in recent years, as Apple has shifted away from using Qualcomm chips in its devices.

Two years ago the FTC also filed charges against the chipmaker accusing it of anticompetitive tactics in an attempt to maintain a monopoly (Apple is officially cited in the complaint). That trial began early this month.

Cupertino has also filed a billion-dollar royalty lawsuit accusing Qualcomm of charging for patents “they have nothing to do with”.

While the latest court decision in Mannheim has gone in Apple’s favor, a separate ruling in Germany late last year went Qualcomm’s way. And earlier this month Apple was forced to withdraw the iPhone 7 and 8 from its retail stores in Germany, after Qualcomm posted €1.34BN in security bonds to enforce the December court decision — which related to a power management patent.

Although the affected iPhone models remain on sale in Germany via resellers. Apple is also appealing.

Qualcomm also recently secured a preliminary injunction banning the import and sales of some older iPhone models in China. Again, Apple is appealing.

It turns out Stride.VC isn’t going to focus exclusively on the U.K. after all. Pia d’Iribarne is leaving Accel to join Stride.VC as a partner.

Stride.VC was originally co-founded by former Accel partner Fred Destin along with Harry Stebbings, producer of “The Twenty Minute VC” podcast. Back in October, when TechCrunch’s Steve O’Hear covered the official closing of the £50 million fund, the pair said that they would focus on the U.K. at first. Arj Soysa also joined the firm as operating partner around the same time.

“Currently, the firm is 100 percent focused on the U.K., but Destin and Stebbings say they will relax that rule once Stride.VC’s operations are well honed,” my colleague wrote.

And it’s happening a bit sooner than expected — d’Iribarne is going to spend most of her time in Paris and travel back and forth between Paris and London. The firm’s new partner d’Iribarne worked at Accel for three and a half years, including a couple of years with Destin. Before that, she worked at Felix Capital and McKinsey.

At Accel, she worked on many interesting deals for the VC firm, particularly on the French market — Doctolib, Shift Technology, Selency, PayFit, Framer and Zenaton. She has sourced and has been a board observer at PayFit, Selency and Shift Technology.

But Accel is also a well-oiled machine. While d’Iribarne loved working there, she couldn’t miss today’s opportunity. For instance, she spotted PayFit way before Accel invested in the Series B round — it is now one of the most promising software-as-a-service startups in Paris. Being able to invest at the seed level with more flexibility is exactly what she was looking for.

“I learned so much there but I had the urge to invest at an earlier stage and do something more entrepreneurial,” d’Iribarne wrote in an email. “I am very grateful for the incredible exposure I got at Accel and am proud I was able to contribute some meaningful opportunities to the firm, but it was time for me to branch out and go earlier stage.”

Stride.VC is focusing on seed rounds that are slightly larger than your typical seed round. With such a small team, the firm doesn’t want to spread itself too thin across dozens of investments. It isn’t going to invest all over Europe — the U.K. and France remain the focus for now. So far, Stride.VC has officially announced two investments — Forward Health and Cazoo.

Prior to the closing of Stride.VC’s initial fund, Bloomberg reported in July 2017 that Destin was facing an accusation of inappropriate behavior with a female founder at an event in 2013. Destin later issued a statement and apologized. Stride.VC told us it was not specifically looking to hire a woman for this role.

“[Gender balance] is an important topic for our industry and I’m delighted that more and more of us are in a position to make investment decisions; having said that I will hopefully be known for being a great VC, not just a great woman VC!” d’Iribarne said.

Natasha Lomas contributed reporting to this article.

Quinyx, the cloud-based workforce management solution, has raised a further $25 million in funding. The investment was led by the startup’s existing investors Alfvén & Didrikson, Battery Ventures, and Zobito.

Founded in 2005 by Erik Fjellborg, Quinyx’s CEO, after he spent the summer working at McDonald’s, the company’s workforce management software helps businesses of all sizes manage employee scheduling, communication, task-management and payroll integration.

Quinyx’s core focus is shift-based or ‘flexible’ workers, including but not limited to those operating in the fast-food industry. Clients include McDonald’s, London City Airport, Burger King, Rituals, Swarovski, IHG, and Boots. I’m told that more recent wins include Daniel Wellington, and Odeon Cinemas Group.

The software’s feature-set includes scheduling, shift planning and swapping, timesheet functionality via workers checking in using Quinyx’s mobile apps, and budget forecasting.

To give you a better idea of the company’s scale: it currently has close to 500,000 employees on its platform. Its core customer base is in Europe, and Quinyx has offices in U.K., Sweden, Finland, Germany, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Meanwhile, the global workforce management market is estimated to be worth $2.4 billion overall.

To that end, Quinyx says the new funding will be used to further accelerate Quinyx’s roll-out of “innovative features and new AI technologies” that will automate and streamline workforce management processes. This will include developing and embedding new technologies into the platforms “to unlock the full potential of the flexible workforce,” says Fjellborg.

Adds Michael Brown, general partner of Battery Ventures: “Having joined the board at Quinyx when we invested in the company last year, I’ve seen first-hand the ambition and drive Erik and his team have shown in going after this large market. Quinyx has made significant progress in the last year by continuing to focus on the strength of its technology. This new investment will help take Quinyx’s business to the next level”.

Online tax filing and accounting service, Contabilizei, has raised $20 million in a new round of financing led by Point72 Ventures, the early stage investment arm associated with hedge fund guru Steven Cohen’s Point72 Asset Management.

Smart money in both the venture and private equity space has been long Brazil for a bit, and the new investment provides even more firepower to the thesis that Brazil’s startup ecosystem is on the move.

“For the Brazilian ecosystem, the investment represents the trust and the opportunity that we have here in the Brazilian market. For quite some time it was difficult to attract this kind of investment from abroad,” says Contabilizei chief executive Vitor Torres. Even though we had a recession there are technology companies that are growing,” Torres says, saying that the company has already staved off acquisition offers and will eventually eye a potential public offering in U.S. or domestic markets.

Though it was only founded five years ago, the company already has 200 employees and more than 10,000 customers throughout Brazil.

Contabilizei has already audited more than 2 billion reals in customer revenue and saved its users over 500 million reals in taxes. For new companies, Contabilizei will also offer free business registration and formation filings. So far, the company has helped 5,000 new businesses get their paperwork done around the country.

“In Brazil, one of the greatest frictions for a small company is meeting its tax reporting requirements,” said Pete Casella, Head of Fintech & Financial Services Investments at Point72 Ventures. “By building an automated tax accounting service that can deliver services at a fraction of the cost of a traditional accountant, we believe that Contabilizei has established the high trust relationships that will enable it to serve customers in many new ways over the coming years.”

New investors also contributed to the round including the International Financial Corp., an investment arm of the The World Bank, and Quona Capital, Quadrant, and the Fintech Collective. They joined existing company backers Kaszek Ventures, e.Bricks, Endeavor Catalyst, and Curitiba Angels.

“Our goal is to simplify the entrepreneur’s routine so they can focus on their own business and not on bureaucracy. We are only at the beginning, and in three years we want to grow 15 times more,” said Vitor Torres, chief executiver and founder of Contabilizei, in a statement. “We were pioneers in the debureaucratization of accounting in the country and we managed to do it with a quality that surpasses 98% of our customers’ satisfaction.”

Digital insurance firm Singapore Life has started 2019 with a bang after it raised $33 million across two investments as it eyes new market expansions in Southeast Asia.

The company pulled in $20 million from NYSE-listed Aflac Investment on December 31 and then it added a further $13 million this week via an investment from Aberdeen Standard Investments, a Scotland-based asset management firm with 50 offices worldwide. These deals take the company to $97 million to date, which included a massive $50 million Series A last year.

Singapore Life was started in 2014 by Walter de Oude, who left HSBC after seven years in charge of its insurance business in Singapore. The idea is a 100 percent digital insurance firm that removes piles of paperwork and passes the cost savings from dispensing with traditional business models on to users. The firm secured a license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore in 2017. It went live later that year and then gathered steam through the acquisition of Zurich Life Singapore’s business portfolio.

Today, its services including life insurance, family coverage, endowment plans, wealth portfolio services and more. The company also offers digital-focused products that includie an activity tracker and fitness program, a chatbot service and flash sales.

Singapore Life said that both of these new deals are strategic in nature. Aflac said it has inked a reinsurance agreement with the company “on certain protection products” while Aberdeen Standard Investments is “exploring new opportunities to bring our asset management expertise to a broader client base in the region,” according to Hugh Young, its head of Asia Pacific.

With this new money in the bank, Singapore Life is planning to expand into other markets in Southeast Asia, the fast-growing digital region with over 600 million consumers. The company said it plans to begin expanding into new markets and other verticals “over the coming year,” although no further details were provided.

In addition to competing with traditional insurers, Singapore Life’s rivals include venture-backed CXA Asia. Digital insurance and financial services has taken off in some Western markets and, of course, China, where internet giants like Alibaba and Tencent have jumped in. Elsewhere in Asia, Hong Kong is welcoming digital-only brands that include Bowtie and OneDegree, both of which have raised capital from VCs.

Facebook plans to make a significant investment in local news over the next three years, with $300 million going to a variety of initiatives and organizations.

The company has had a rocky relationship with news publishers recently. While it’s funded programming from partners like CNN and Fox News, it’s also played a role in some of the industry’s most dispiriting trends, like the so-called “pivot to video” — and several of the digital publishers that bet big on the platform have been struggling (to say the least).

So initiatives like this one (and a similar investment that Google announced last year) can seem like attempts to ameliorate the damage that the big digital platforms have already done to the news ecosystem. Or perhaps they’re simply protecting an important content source at a time when the local news business is under tremendous pressure.

Regardless of motivation, if it helps, it helps.

As for why Facebook is focusing on local news specifically, Vice President of Global News Partnerships Campbell Brown said in a blog post that after examining “what kind of news people want to see on Facebook” and talking to industry partners, “We heard one consistent answer: people want more local news, and local newsrooms are looking for more support.”

Brown said the investments will go into two broad areas — supporting journalists and newsrooms in the newsgathering process, and helping them build sustainable business models. More specifically, the company says it will invest:

• $5 million in the Pulitzer Center (with a $5 million matching gift from Emily Rauh Pulitzer) to launch “Bringing Stories Home,” an initiative offering reporting grants to cover topics that affect local communities.
• $2 million in Report for America, an initiative to place 1,000 journalists in local newsrooms across America over the next five years.
• $1 million for the Knight-Lenfest Local News Transformation Fund, which is trying to create a hub for evaluating and improving how technology is used in U.S. newsrooms.
• a $1 million investment in the Local Media Association and the Local Media Consortium, to helping their 2,000-plus member newsrooms develop branded content revenue streams (both on and off Facebook).
• a $1 million commitment to the American Journalism Project, which is using “venture philanthropy” to support local news organizations.
• $6 million for the Community News Project, which is partnering with U.K. publishers to recruit trainee “community journalists” and place them in local newsrooms over a two-year period.
• More than $20 million to expand Facebook’s Accelerator program to help local publishers with their membership and subscription models.

“We are grateful for Facebook’s commitment to helping us meet the challenges of today’s journalism, especially in smaller cities where the survival of news outlets depends on new models of reporting and community engagement,” said Pulitzer Center founder and executive director Jon Sawyer in a statement. “We also applaud Facebook’s commitment to the editorial independence that is absolutely essential to our success.”