Year: 2019

We’re excited to announce an addition to the Extra Crunch community perks. Starting today, annual Extra Crunch members can get 100,000 Brex Rewards points after signing up for a Brex corporate credit card. This offer is worth about $1,000 in credit card points.

Brex’s corporate credit card is designed for startups, and Extra Crunch was built for the startup ecosystem. We understand that startups are trying to be as frugal as possible with spending, and we felt that the Brex corporate credit card was the perfect way to stretch those valuable dollars.

Brex gives startup founders and finance teams higher credit limits than what they would get with any other business credit card option, and it does so without requiring a personal credit check or security deposit during the application. There are some impressive reward multipliers across categories like rideshare, travel, and restaurants. It also comes with $50,000 worth of partner offers from AWS, Salesforce and many more.

Full benefits with the Brex for Startups credit card include:

• 100,000 Brex Rewards points upon signup (equal to about $1,000)
• 7x points on ridesharing app charges
• 4x points on travel charges, including Airbnb
• Miles transfer program to six airlines (including Singapore Airlines, Qantas, Air France and more) and their loyalty programs
• 3x points on restaurant charges
• 2x points on recurring software charges like Salesforce, Slack and GitHub
• 1x points on all other charges
• Discounts on the top services for startups, including Zendesk, Google Ads, SendGrid, AWS, WeWork and more
• Automated receipt-capture and expense matching with the Brex mobile app, or via text and email
• Built-in integrations with QuickBooks and Xero
• And more

In order to qualify for the Brex credit card, companies need at least $100,000 in the bank and must meet Brex’s other qualification requirements. This offer is only available to annual Extra Crunch members in the United States. You can sign up for annual Extra Crunch membership here.

Extra Crunch membership offers exclusive access to analysis of successful startups, original research and reporting, resources on company building, lists of verified experts in key services, no banner ads on TechCrunch.com, conference calls with our writers and more. You can take a look at the types of articles we produce for Extra Crunch by heading here.

After signing up for an annual Extra Crunch membership, you’ll receive a welcome email with a link to the Brex offer. If you are already an annual Extra Crunch member, you will receive an email with the offer at some point today. If you are currently a monthly Extra Crunch subscriber and want to upgrade to annual in order to claim this deal, head over to the “my account” section on TechCrunch.com and click the “upgrade” button.

Once you receive the link, you’ll have the opportunity to sign up for the credit card. As a reminder, companies must have at least $100K in the bank to qualify, be based in the U.S., and meet Brex’s other qualification requirements. 

This is one of several new community perks we’ve been working on for Extra Crunch members. In addition to the Brex offer, Extra Crunch members also get 20% off all TechCrunch event tickets (email extracrunch@techcrunch.com with the event name to receive a discount code for event tickets). You can learn more about our events lineup here.

Expect to see more perks and deals like this in the near future. If there are other community perks you want to see us add, please let us know by emailing extracrunch@techcrunch.com.

Sign up for an annual Extra Crunch membership today to claim this community perk. You can purchase an annual Extra Crunch membership here.

Fifty attorneys general are pushing forward with an antitrust investigation against Google, led by the Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

In an announcement on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court building, Paxton and a gathering of attorneys general said that the focus of the investigation would be on Google’s advertising practices, but that other points of inquiry could be included in the investigation.

The investigation into Google comes as big technology companies find themselves increasingly under the regulatory microscope for everything from anticompetitive business practices to violations of users’ privacy and security, to accusations of political bias.

Last week, the New York State Attorney General launched an investigation into Facebook. Action from the states follows movement from the federal government which is investigating just about every major technology company including Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.

This story is developing.

Fifty attorneys general are pushing forward with an antitrust investigation against Google, led by the Texas state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

In an announcement on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court building, Paxton and a gathering of attorneys general said that the focus of the investigation would be on Google’s advertising practices, but that other points of inquiry could be included in the investigation.

The investigation into Google comes as big technology companies find themselves increasingly under the regulatory microscope for everything from anticompetitive business practices to violations of users’ privacy and security, to accusations of political bias.

Last week, the New York State Attorney General launched an investigation into Facebook. Action from the states follows movement from the federal government which is investigating just about every major technology company including Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook.

This story is developing.

In 2001, Naspers, a media company that launched in 1915 and later evolved into a media holding company with pay TV interests, agreed to invest $32 million for a 46.5% stake in Tencent. The China-based company had been founded just three years earlier, and, as Quartz notes in a 2014 story about the deal, Tencent wasn’t a brand that many aside from users of its instant messaging platform, QQ, knew at the time.

Of course, given Tencent’s wild growth, it has largely come to define Naspers . Consider that today, Tencent is a roughly $410 billion company, and though Naspers has sold off some of its holdings in the company over the years, it still owns a little more than 30% of Tencent for a stake currently worth roughly $120 billion.

The story is not so unlike that of SoftBank, which made an early, $20 million bet on a nascent China-based company called Alibaba in 2000. Though SoftBank has sold some of its ownership in the company, including to fund an acquisition of acquisition of the British chip designer ARM in 2016, it maintains a 26% stake worth roughly $100 billion.

The bets have proved a blessing but also a challenge for both companies as they work to create valuable portfolios that correlate less closely with these home runs.

For its part, Naspers is finding a number of ways to buffer itself, including, most notably, carving out a new holding company called Prosus NV that’s due to list in Amsterdam this week and that features Nasper’s stakes in the online classifieds business OLX, the Craigslist competitor Letgo, as well as Nasper’s massive piece of Tencent.

Prosus also holds stakes in numerous social networking, food delivery, payments, online travel bookings, and other companies, packaging together its shares in roughly 20 different companies altogether.

It’s a huge deal for Naspers, which is spinning off Prosus to lessen its own dominance of Johannesburg’s stock exchange where it trades, and to minimize the valuation gap between itself and its stake in Tencent. It’s also a highly unusual listing, including because the value of the shares is largely established already (given that they currently trade within Naspers).

Luckily, CEO Bob Van Dijk is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt in early October to talk about Naspers and Prosus and to help us understand this fairly novel and important effort for the company.

Yet that’s not all we want to know.  We want to better understand how the company thinks about new investments, including how it views different sectors and different geographies. We want to hear what Naspers thinks of the SoftBank’s investing strategy. (Among other things, the two coinvested in Flipkart, which proved a lucrative bet for both. Naspers sold an 11% stake in the company last year for $2.2 billion after investing $616 million. SoftBank sold its 20% stake for roughly $4 billion after investing $2.5 billion into the company.)

We also want to learn more about Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa, the recently appointed CEO of Nasper’s South African unit (and the company’s first female and first black chief executive.)

For these reasons and many others, we can’t wait to sit down with Van Dijk during our upcoming show. If you’re curious about where the big money is moving around the world, this is one conversation you won’t want to miss. Disrupt SF runs October 2-4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available here.

In 2001, Naspers, a media company that launched in 1915 and later evolved into a media holding company with pay TV interests, agreed to invest $32 million for a 46.5% stake in Tencent. The China-based company had been founded just three years earlier, and, as Quartz notes in a 2014 story about the deal, Tencent wasn’t a brand that many aside from users of its instant messaging platform, QQ, knew at the time.

Of course, given Tencent’s wild growth, it has largely come to define Naspers . Consider that today, Tencent is a roughly $410 billion company, and though Naspers has sold off some of its holdings in the company over the years, it still owns a little more than 30% of Tencent for a stake currently worth roughly $120 billion.

The story is not so unlike that of SoftBank, which made an early, $20 million bet on a nascent China-based company called Alibaba in 2000. Though SoftBank has sold some of its ownership in the company, including to fund an acquisition of acquisition of the British chip designer ARM in 2016, it maintains a 26% stake worth roughly $100 billion.

The bets have proved a blessing but also a challenge for both companies as they work to create valuable portfolios that correlate less closely with these home runs.

For its part, Naspers is finding a number of ways to buffer itself, including, most notably, carving out a new holding company called Prosus NV that’s due to list in Amsterdam this week and that features Nasper’s stakes in the online classifieds business OLX, the Craigslist competitor Letgo, as well as Nasper’s massive piece of Tencent.

Prosus also holds stakes in numerous social networking, food delivery, payments, online travel bookings, and other companies, packaging together its shares in roughly 20 different companies altogether.

It’s a huge deal for Naspers, which is spinning off Prosus to lessen its own dominance of Johannesburg’s stock exchange where it trades, and to minimize the valuation gap between itself and its stake in Tencent. It’s also a highly unusual listing, including because the value of the shares is largely established already (given that they currently trade within Naspers).

Luckily, CEO Bob Van Dijk is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt in early October to talk about Naspers and Prosus and to help us understand this fairly novel and important effort for the company.

Yet that’s not all we want to know.  We want to better understand how the company thinks about new investments, including how it views different sectors and different geographies. We want to hear what Naspers thinks of the SoftBank’s investing strategy. (Among other things, the two coinvested in Flipkart, which proved a lucrative bet for both. Naspers sold an 11% stake in the company last year for $2.2 billion after investing $616 million. SoftBank sold its 20% stake for roughly $4 billion after investing $2.5 billion into the company.)

We also want to learn more about Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa, the recently appointed CEO of Nasper’s South African unit (and the company’s first female and first black chief executive.)

For these reasons and many others, we can’t wait to sit down with Van Dijk during our upcoming show. If you’re curious about where the big money is moving around the world, this is one conversation you won’t want to miss. Disrupt SF runs October 2-4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available here.

Root Insurance,  lang="EN">an Ohio-based car insurance startup that uses smartphone technology to understand individual driver behavior, said Monday it has raised $350 million on a $3.65 billion valuation in a Series E funding round. 

The amount of the round was reported last month, citing anonymous sources. This official announcement fills in the remaining details, including that DST Global and Coatue led the funding round. Existing investors Drive Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Ribbit Capital, Scale Venture Partners, and Tiger Global Management all participated in this round, along with several new investors, according to the company.

The car insurance company, founded in 2015, has now raised $523 million with an additional $100 million in debt financing. The funding will be used to scale up in the 29 U.S. states where it currently operates and expand into new markets. The additional capital will also be used to develop new product lines, Root said.

The company said last year it planned to be in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., by the end of 2019. 

“Root is transforming auto insurance, the largest property and casualty insurance market in the U.S., by leveraging technology and data to offer consumers lower prices, transparency, and fairness,” Tom Stafford, managing partner of DST Global, said in a statement.

Root provides car insurance to drivers. The company has differentiated itself by using individual driver behavior along with other factors to determine the premium customers pay.

Drivers download the Rootmobile app and take a test drive that typically lasts two or three weeks. Root provides a quote that rewards good driving behavior and allows customers to switch their insurance policy. Customers can purchase and manage their policy through the app.

Root has said its approach allows good drivers to save more than 50 percent on their policies compared to traditional insurance carriers. The company uses AI algorithms to adjust risk and sometimes provide discounts. For example, a vehicle with an advanced driver assistance system that it deems improves safety might receive further discounts.

The company’s business model has attracted customers. Root wrote more than $187 million in insurance premiums in the first six months of 2019, 824% growth over the same period in 2018.

Ad platforms create equal opportunities for businesses but not equal outcomes.

They’re mostly marketed as self-service and easy to use, however, there are new features added regularly and open-ended ways to set, structure and target. Meaning, countless ways to spend—creating winners and losers in advertising.

This is where machines and digital advertisers are needed, to provide a profitable outcome.

Enter AI, ML and experts as freelancers, via agencies or housed in some of the world’s biggest companies, equipped with ample data, tech and educational resources to match people with companies via ads on search, social, and elsewhere on the web.

But, are the machines still in infancy or too heavily relied upon and do the experts always get it right?

Well, how often are you seeing ads that are irrelevant to what you wanted or where you were or who you are?

An irrelevant ad is an ad paid for by the company advertising but can return zero value as it’s of no use to the person receiving the ad.

As a digital advertiser via my company Adboy.com, I’m always curious as to why I was served an ad and if the company paying makes or loses money from it.

Something I’ve noticed is that in easily avoidable errors, ads can be served to existing customers, people with irrelevant needs and people that can’t be or are far less likely to become customers.

With this article, I’m going to give you the lenses of a fastidious digital advertiser. You’ll spot errors like these for yourself and know how they could occur, what the negative impact could be and how they can be avoided.

Advertising to existing customers

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Joi Ito resigns as MIT Media Lab head in wake of Jeffrey Epstein reporting

Joi Ito and the MIT Media Lab were already facing criticism for the funding they’d received from disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, and the criticism intensified after a New Yorker piece reported that Ito and others at the media lab worked to conceal Epstein’s contributions.

In an email to the university administration, Ito wrote, “After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks, I think that it is best that I resign as director of the media lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately.”

2. Fitbit Versa 2 review

The Versa gave Fitbit a way forward beyond simple fitness trackers, and Brian Heater says the new smartwatch is a worthy update.

3. The Vivaldi browser lands on Android

Vivaldi for Android retains the desktop browser’s look, feel and speed without getting bogged down trying to bring all of its features to mobile.

4. Top VCs say the landscape for enterprise startups is changing

We sat down with Jason Green of Emergence Capital, Rebecca Lynn of Canvas Ventures and Maha Ibrahim of Canaan Partners, who said that startups shouldn’t expect a big M&A event right now. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

5. AppZen nabs $50M to build AI tools for expenses and other finance team work

To date, AppZen’s biggest product has been a service that automatically audits expenses — comparing, for example, an employee’s charges with the travel they’ve undertaken.

6. Pagerduty’s Jennifer Tejada and Box’s Aaron Levie will talk IPOs at TC Disrupt SF

Tejada and Levie both guided their companies to successful IPOs, with Box going public in 2015 and Pagerduty listing its stocks only a few months ago.

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

Speaking of Box, the latest edition of Equity includes a discussion of why the content management company is underappreciated, while the Original Content team reviews the Amazon series “Carnival Row.”

Microsoft several years ago acquired the popular iOS app Wunderlist with the intention of building out its own list-making productivity app that brings the best of Wunderlist’s feature set to a larger group of mobile consumers. This is a similar path as Microsoft took with email app Accompli, which later became Microsft Outlook for mobile devices. In the case of Wunderlist, Microsoft didn’t just rebrand the app — it built a new one called Microsoft To Do. With Wunderlist up and running for years alongside To Do, its founder wants to know if he can just have it back.

The founder of Wunderlist maker 6 Wunderkinder, Christian Reber, recently tweeted a desire to buy his app back from Microsoft just as the company is launching a new version of To Do. 

According to the tweets, Reber says he’s serious about reacquiring Wunderlist and wants to make it open-source and free. He even tweeted a list of upgrades he’d like to build, including features like shared folders and cross-team collaboration, among other things.

The founder doesn’t come across as having sour grapes exactly. He just says he’s sad that his plans for Wunderlist didn’t work out, but he’s grateful for the Microsoft exit.

If anything, it seems to be just remorse over the fact that Wunderlist itself will be shut down.

Microsoft had said years ago this was its intention, but also that it would hold off until it felt it has a competitive product that Wunderlist’s users would love.

On Monday, Microsoft unveiled another upgrade for Microsoft To Do, which hints that the Wunderlist shut down could be nearing.

The upgrade delivers a more polished look-and-feel with a wider range of backgrounds, including the Berlin TV tower theme that was popular in Wunderlist.

The app also includes smart lists and a personalized daily planner that offers smart suggestions of tasks that need to be accomplished, Microsoft reminded its users, and it’s supported across a variety of platforms including iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac.

The app is now also integrated with other Microsoft apps like Outlook, Microsoft Planner, Cortana, and Microsoft Launcher on Android, among others. And it works with Alexa, if you prefer.

With the release, Microsoft is again pushing users to migrate from Wunderlist to To Do to gain access to these features.

It did not, however, give an end-of-life date for Wunderlist, which is remarkably still a top 100 Productivity app in the U.S. App Store, according to data from App Annie, over four years after its acquisition.

We’ve asked Microsoft if it will share more details around its plans for Wunderlist and if it has any response to Reber’s request. We’ll update if the company comments.