Year: 2019

Love it or hate it, networking is a necessary part of business — especially for early-stage startup founders searching for investors, customers and collaborators. When you head to Disrupt Berlin 2019 this December, you can relax a bit because we have a networking tool to help you make the most of two very full days. More on that in a moment.

Shameless plug meets helpful tip: Late registration pricing ends 10 December at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). If you haven’t already done so, buy your late registration pass to Disrupt Berlin before the deadline and you can save up to €200.

That tool we mentioned? We’re talking about CrunchMatch, of course. Our free business match-making service — available to all Disrupt Berlin attendees — takes the pain out of networking and helps you zero in on the people who can help you advance your business interests. Das ist gud! Seriously, with thousands of people and hundreds of startups, CrunchMatch gives you both room to breathe and viable leads.

Plenty of founders and investors rely on CrunchMatch to find each other, but every attendee can use it to their strategic advantage. Whether you’re looking for developers, new customers, service providers, mentors or marketing help, CrunchMatch delivers the goods. Here’s how it all works.

After you register for Disrupt Berlin, we’ll send you an email to explain how to access the platform. You create your profile with specific business criteria, goals and interests. The CrunchMatch algorithm kicks into high gear to find and suggest matches. With your approval, CrunchMatch proposes meeting times and sends out meeting requests.

Last year alone, CrunchMatch facilitated more than 3,000 meetings — and 97 percent of the people who used it said they’d use it again. Here’s what Michael Kocan, managing partner at Trend Discovery, told us about his experience using CrunchMatch.

“If I see an interesting company pitch at Startup Battlefield, CrunchMatch lets me quickly schedule a meeting with them for later that day. It makes vetting deals extremely efficient.”

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December. Don’t waste your valuable time talking to the wrong people. Let CrunchMatch do the heavy lifting while you enjoy networking the way it should be — easy and efficient.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Last year at AWS re:invent, the company’s massive customer conference, Amazon launched a new miniature race car and a racing league, all designed to teach developers about machine learning in a fun way. Today, ahead of next week’s re:Invent conference, the company announced some enhancements including an improved car and expanded racing schedule.

“We are adding more chances to compete at AWS events and at your own events, more chances to win with new races, including head-to-head multi-car competitions, and an upgraded DeepRacer car with new sensing capabilities,” AWS’s Jeff Barr wrote in the company blog announcing the updates.

For starters, there is a new car called DeepRacer Evo that builds on the original model that came out last year. This one includes a new stereo camera and a Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) sensor. Barr says these added sensors are more than window dressing.

“The added sensors will enable DeepRacer Evo to skillfully detect and respond to obstacles, including other DeepRacers. This will help you to learn even more about the exciting field of reinforcement learning, which is ideal for use in autonomous driving,” he wrote.

You can retro fit your existing car with a sensor upgrade kit, or buy a new DeepRacer Evo. Both will be available early next year, according to the company.

One added element in offering a car like this is building in competition, and that’s where the racing league comes in. The company plans to expand the opportunities to compete next year with more races — and they are expanding the race types. While last year the races were all about speed, they are adding two new categories next year including one to take advantage of the new sensors to detect and avoid obstacles, and head-to-head racing against other cars. Last year’s race involved a single car on the track competing to get the fastest time.

As Ryan Gavin, AWS general manager for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning marketing told TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois earlier this year, this is really about helping developers learn more about advanced technologies.

“We’ve always asked ourselves what are the ways we can take interesting and new and hot technologies in the world of machine learning and find ways to bring those to developers,” he told Lardinois. He added, “And we saw them instantly playing with these deep racers and then starting to race. And it was just kind of that little moment of ‘Oh, this is a really fun and peculiar way to extend what we think is an interesting way to bring reinforcement learning to developers,’ but then extend that to this idea of a competition — this first global autonomous racing league — where developer can pit their skills against one another from around the globe.”

Next week at re:Invent, there will plenty of DeepRacer action including the league qualifying races and the championship cup competition for folks already immersed in this. For those who want to learn more or get started, AWS will offer DeepRacer bootcamps and workshops.

Chefclub hasn’t attracted a lot of headlines over the years as it has only raised $3.5 million. But it is slowly building a major media brand on social media platforms as it now competes directly with Tastemade and Tasty.

Compared to more traditional recipe websites and brands, Chefclub focuses exclusively on the intersection of food and entertainment. If you’ve watched a few Chefclub videos, your reaction is probably something along the lines of “oh no they didn’t.”

You’ll see a lot of melted cheese, and somehow cooking often involves deep frying all the things. Some people around me are obsessed with those videos even though they’d never consider watching a cooking show on TV.

“We are normal people, we don’t have the same cooking skillset that you can see on TV and in books. We opened up the kitchen cabinet and used everyday ingredients. That positioning has always been there and hasn’t changed,” Chefclub co-founder Thomas Lang told me.

And it’s been working incredibly well. The company now has 75 million followers across multiple social media platforms. It generates a billion video views per month and reaches 200 million people. The startup has never spent a cent in paid media to grow this user base.

Due to its lean culture, there are “only” 50 people working for Chefclub. The entire team is based in Paris, with one third of them who are not French. Despite this very French DNA, Chefclub has noticed that you don’t necessarily have to adapt all your content to different geographies. 70% of videos work well across the globe.

Chefclub optimizes its content for Facebook first and foremost. As many publishers told me, it has become increasingly harder to work around Facebook’s algorithm to reach a large audience on Facebook. But the startup has been through all the ups and downs of Facebook’s algorithm. Those relentless efforts have been key to the company’s growth as many media brands simply gave up on Facebook.

Other social networks seem way easier when you compare them to Facebook. Chefclub is now also active on YouTube, Snapchat (Discover partnership in France and Germany), Instagram and TikTok. The startup says that it is the leader in Europe and Latin America. In the U.S., the company is still in the growth phase — it is close to reaching 1 billion views in the U.S. in 2019.

So how do you turn a successful media strategy into a business? Chefclub is betting heavily on the Direct-to-Consumer wave. The company first started with a recipe book. You can scan QR codes in the book to play the video on your phone. It has sold half a million cookbooks directly on its website.

More recently, Chefclub has introduced Kiddoz, a cooking kit for kids. There’s a book with 20 recipes, easily identifiable measuring cups and an app.

Up next, Chefclub wants to partner with retailers to license its brand and sell branded products. You could imagine buying Chefclub-branded appliances and toys in the near future.

“We have another revenue source that we call ‘the cherry on the cake,’” Thomas Lang said. Chefclub generates revenue from preroll ads on YouTube and other social platforms with revenue-sharing deals. While this is not a focus, Chefclub gets $200,000 in ad revenue per month with no additional effort.

Finally, Chefclub wants to open up content creation to community members. In order to scale its content, Chefclub wants to become a platform that broadcasts user-generated content to other community members.

Mojichat, the Los Angeles startup which makes full-body, animated emojis, is launching a partnership with Streamlabs to offer gamers an opportunity to sell customized emojis to fans and potential sponsors.

Viewers can create customized Mojichat emotes that can be displayed in chat boxes next to their names, that will appear in-stream if they donate to gamers, or be integrated into a livestream in front of viewers.

The partnership driven by Streamlabs exclusive agreement with Mojichat, is designed to increase engagement among the streaming communities, the companies said in a statement.

Users need to download the Streamlabs app to create their customized Mojichat character — designing the character with their choice of face shapes, hair, skin types, hairstyles, clothes, and animation options.

Use their Mojichat avatar on any streaming video gaming platform like Facebook, Twitter, Twitch or Mixer.

“For streamers, it’s a way to substantially augment their income as well as create a unique gaming persona without the expense of hiring a graphic designer,” says Mojichat chief executive Jeremy Greene. “For viewers, it’s a way to be more than a name on the chat interface and even participate in the stream. These are firsts that will change the game – literally.”

Lego seems to have been inspired by recent events to bring its own vision fo the truck of the future to the world – behold this bold design statement in all its glory. Clearly, Lego is having a go at Elon Musk and the Tesla Cybertruck that he unveiled last week – which was… divisive in its reception, to say the least.

The Lego version is “guaranteed shatterproof,” Lego notes on Twitter, which is a jab at the failed demo wherein Musk had designer Franz von Holzhausen hurl a large metal ball at the driver and rear passenger windows of the Cybertruck, only to have them smash instantly upon contact. Musk has since said that this only happened because Holzhausen’s prior sledgehammer strikes to the driver door panel undermined the structure of the windows, but it was still highly memorable and memeable moment.

Despite launch day hiccups and a lot of poking fun at its looks, Musk has said that so far, more than 250,000 customers have signed up and put down a refundable $100 deposit for the Cybertruck, so it’s garnering enough interest for at least that level of commitment.

No word on Lego’s truck availability or pre-orders, but maybe they’ll challenge Ford to a truck duel, too.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

We had a lot to get through this week and may have ran over our time a little bit but it was worth it. First, we discussed Weekend Fund’s second effort, a $10 million vehicle targeting early-stage upstarts. Led by Product Hunt founder and CEO Ryan Hoover, Weekend Fund raised a smaller debut angel fund a few years ago. Now they’re back at it after deploying capital to Girlboss, TTYL, Headspin and more.

Next, we turned to some upsetting news, at least for the employees and venture capitalists behind the startup Omni. After raising a total of $35 million in VC funding, Omni announced this week it was shutting down, with 10 of its engineers moving over to Coinbase. It appears the company struggled to make the economics of equipment rentals and physical on-demand storage work out. It’s another victim of a venture capital-subsidized business offering a convenient service at an unsustainable price.

Far from shuttering, we also spoke about Cocoon, a new company that wants to help you stay in touch with those who matter most. The company graduated from Y Combinator and has since raised $3 million in venture funding. The startup was founded by former Facebook employees, hence the headline, and is hoping to create the dedicated software that you use for that most important group chat in your life. The iOS-only app is a bit of a cross between Life360, Slack and Path.

Finally, we closed the episode with some Airbnb news and the New York Stock Exchange’s interesting plans to alter direct listings.

Glad you guys came back for another episode, we’ll see you soon.

Amazon helped pioneer and now dominates the online marketplace business model, where a variety of merchants post items for sale on its platform for billions of consumers to discover and buy them. Today, a London startup that’s taken that idea but is applying it to a far more curated set of retailers and goods has raised some money to fuel its international growth.

Trouva, which provides an online marketplace for brick-and-mortar independent boutiques selling “beautiful” and hard-to-find pieces — think Farfetch but less fancy and less high-end design — has raised £17 million ($21.8 million) in funding, money that it will be using to expand outside of the UK on the back of a strong launch in its Berlin last year, as well as to continue building out more technology on its platform, specifically around inventory and logistics management.

The funding is being led by Octopus Ventures, C4 Ventures (the venture firm launched by Apple vet Pascal Cagni) and Downing Ventures. BGF and LocalGlobe were also in the round, which brings the total raised to about $36 million. Mandeep Singh, who co-founded the company with Alex Loizou and Glen Walker, said in an interview that the startup is not disclosing valuation. 

Amazon may dominate our consciousness (and for some of us, our wallets, with its sticky Prime perks) when it comes to browsing for a variety of goods online, buying them, and getting them delivered to us in an efficient way.

But the Amazon way leaves a lot out of the proposition: for retailers it doesn’t give them a lot of leeway in how they present items, and they have to compete with many thousands of other offers (including Amazon itself) to get their products seen.

More generally for both sellers and buyers, the ethos of the platform is that of an “everything” store with little in the way of focus or curation: you can watch movies or listen to music, or you can buy an HDMI cable, or you can buy food, or you can buy a book, or you can buy a vase… and so on. That in a way makes it more of a functional rather than pleasurable experience.

This opens the door to a multitude of different competitors, and there is where Trouva has stepped in. Where Amazon gives us the promise of everything, the smaller startup has effectively incorporated scarcity into its DNA.

“We are very picky,” Singh said. “We have to turn down the majority of applications from stores that want to sell on our site. We are looking for the very best curators. Having every single vase in the world is less important than having the best one, curated by an expert.”

While we are continuing to see a surge of purchasing via the web and apps — a trend that will get played out during holiday shopping in the weeks ahead — analysts estimate that some 85% of retail is still happening offline.

Within that group there is an interesting core of brick-and-mortar independent shops: At a time when large chains and the likes of Amazon are shifting the sands for how people sell things — and certainly how people shop — there remains a large group of independent retailers — “curators,” as Singh describes them. These shops target consumers with disposable income, people who are looking for more unique things to buy with their money.

The challenge of the ‘High Street’

Independent stores are often under threat in cities like London. First, they pop up in areas where rents are not as high, with like-minded people congregating to live in the same neighborhoods for the same reason. There, they sell a small selection of not-cheap clothes, interesting home goods, a variety of tchotchkes, or quirky gifts and develop a local following.

But their emergence can also often signal wider tides of gentrification. Ultimately, that shift is what moves those stores out as the rents subsequently go up, and bigger chains and fancy boutiques move in. (SoHo in NYC is another classic victim of this trend.)

Be that as it may, Singh notes that there are still more than 20,000 independent shops in the UK. “And we are working with 500 of the very best,” he added.

The company’s biggest competition, to my mind, are other players that are also looking to target the same kinds of shoppers online, for example, another UK site, Not On The High Street, or Etsy, which focuses less on retailers and more on makers. Similarly, there is the prospect of stores building their own sites, although that comes with its own set of headaches that independent shopkeepers may be less inclined to deal with.

“Yes, it’s very easy for an independent brick-and-mortar boutique to set up an online shop. That’s the easy part,” Singh said. “But what you find with independents is that building a website doesn’t help drive customers. There is a range of backend technology that we take care of, including inventory management software and handling the logistics of shipping. All of those can be difficult for a [physical] boutique to do on its own. It’s easy to sell online but you still need someone who has the economies of scales to pick up and deliver.”

On the other hand, he notes that “Amazon definitely doesn’t worry us.”

“We position ourselves as the complete opposite. Giants like that are too focused on categories that work well,” he added. Notably, he believes that the biggest threats are the same ones that threaten the independent stores that use Trouva to sell online: “Offline chains, those who sell homewares and clothes. The big guys.”

Trouva has no plans to move into selling its own goods, or to work with other online retailers, although it might consider down the line how it could leverage warehouse space to help its retailers with their inventory management (since many of these shops are very small indeed). “One hundred percent of our supply comes from our brick and mortar store partners,” he said.

Nor does it currently have anything like a Prime-style loyalty program. It does work with retailers and shipping partners to provide an end-to-end shipping service from store to buyer, with options for next-day delivery if it’s necessary.

“The relationship is mutually symbiotic with the boutiques, who benefit from a broader customer base, better priced and efficient delivery and stock tracking and management software from Trouva, and in turn higher revenues and improved profitability,” said Jo Oliver, a venture partner at investor Octopus. “As more boutiques are added the customer proposition becomes more and more attractive, particularly as Trouva’s footprint expands internationally.”

Singh notes that there is “exclusivity” for the shops that eventually come on to Trouva, although that’s almost by default since they are the kinds of small operations that are unlikely to be in the business of trying to expand their online presence.

Amazon has been working hard to improve how it interfaces with and curates items on its site to provide products, and a marketplace selling service, to the same consumer and retailer demographics that Trouva (and others) target. That’s unlikely to disappear over time, especially since Amazon plays the long game, where it will gradually tinker with an idea while at the same time quietly shift our shopping habits to match what it is producing.

“Online sellers like Amazon and eBay have tried to make a better experience, but it’s very hard for a business to change its DNA,” Singh said.

Updated with investor comment.

A joint investigation by watchdogs in Canada and British Columbia has found that Cambridge Analytica-linked data firm, Aggregate IQ, broke privacy laws in Facebook ad-targeting work it undertook for the official Vote Leave Brexit campaign in the UK’s 2016 EU referendum.

A quick reminder: Vote Leave was the official leave campaign in the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union. While Cambridge Analytica is the (now defunct) firm at the center of a massive Facebook data misuse scandal which has dented the company’s fortunes and continues to tarnish its reputation.

Vote Leave’s campaign director, Dominic Cummings — now a special advisor to the UK prime minister — wrote in 2017 that the winning recipe for the leave campaign was data science. And, more specifically, spending 98% of its marketing budget on “nearly a billion targeted digital adverts”.

Targeted at Facebook users.

The problem is, per the Canadian watchdogs’ conclusions, AIQ did not have proper legal consents from UK voters for disclosing their personal information to Facebook for the Brexit ad blitz which Cummings ordered.

Either for “the purpose of advertising to those individuals (via ‘custom audiences’) or for the purpose of analyzing their traits and characteristics in order to locate and target others like them (via ‘lookalike audiences’)”.

Oops.

Last year the UK’s Electoral Commission also concluded that Vote Leave breached election campaign spending limits by channeling money to AIQ to run the targeting political ads on Facebook’s platform, via undeclared joint working with another Brexit campaign, BeLeave. So there’s a full sandwich of legal wrongdoings stuck to the brexit mess that UK society remains mired in, more than three years later.

Meanwhile, the current UK General Election is now a digital petri dish for data scientists and democracy hackers to run wild experiments in microtargeted manipulation — given election laws haven’t been updated to take account of the outgrowth of the adtech industry’s tracking and targeting infrastructure, despite multiple warnings from watchdogs and parliamentarians.

Data really is helluva a drug.

The Canadian investigation cleared AIQ of any wrongdoing in its use of phone numbers to send SMS messages for another pro-Brexit campaign, BeLeave; a purpose the watchdogs found had been authorized by the consent provided by individuals who gave their information to that youth-focused campaign.

But they did find consent problems with work AIQ undertook for various US campaigns on behalf of Cambridge Analytica affiliate, SCL Elections — including for a political action committee, a presidential primary campaign and various campaigns in the 2014 midterm elections.

And, again — as we know — Facebook is squarely in the frame here too.

“The investigation finds that the personal information provided to and used by AIQ comes from disparate sources. This includes psychographic profiles derived from personal information Facebook disclosed to Dr. Aleksandr Kogan, and onward to Cambridge Analytica,” the watchdogs write.

“In the case of their work for US campaigns… AIQ did not attempt to determine whether there was consent it could rely on for its use and disclosure of personal information.”

The investigation also looked at AIQ’s work for multiple Canadian campaigns — finding fewer issues related to consent. Though the report states that in: “certain cases, the purposes for which individuals are informed, or could reasonably assume their personal information is being collected, do not extend to social media advertising and analytics”.

AIQ also gets told off for failing to properly secure the data it misused.

This element of the probe resulted from a data breach reported by UpGuard after it found AIQ running an unsecured GitLab repository — holding what the report dubs “substantial personal information”, as well as encryption keys and login credentials which it says put the personal information of 35 million+ people at risk.

Double oops.

“The investigation determined that AIQ failed to take reasonable security measures to ensure that personal information under its control was secure from unauthorized access or disclosure,” is the inexorable conclusion.

Turns out if an entity doesn’t have a proper legal right to people’s information in the first place it may not be majorly concerned about where else the data might end up.

The report flows from an investigation into allegations of unauthorized access and use of Facebook user profiles which was started by the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC in late 2017. A separate probe was opened by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada last year. The two watchdogs subsequently combined their efforts.

The upshot for AIQ from the joint investigation’s finding of multiple privacy and security violations is a series of, er, “recommendations”.

On the data use front it is suggested the company take “reasonable measures” to ensure any third-party consent it relies on for collection, use or disclosure of personal information on behalf of clients is “adequate” under the relevant Canadian and BC privacy laws.

“These measures should include both contractual measures and other measures, such as reviewing the consent language used by the client,” the watchdogs suggest. “Where the information is sensitive, as with political opinions, AIQ should ensure there is express consent, rather than implied.”

On security, the recommendations are similarly for it to “adopt and maintain reasonable security measures to protect personal information, and that it delete personal information that is no longer necessary for business or legal purposes”.

“During the investigation, AIQ took steps to remedy its security breach. AIQ has agreed to implement the Offices’ recommendations,” the report adds.

The upshot of political ‘data science’ for Western democracies? That’s still tbc. Buckle up.

Back in 2010, the web performance and security company Cloudflare launched in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Battlefield competition. The company came in second. Earlier this year, Cloudflare IPOed. To talk about this journey, Cloudflare CEO Matt Prince will join us on the main stage at Disrupt Berlin on December 12. He’ll also participate in a panel about building successful SaaS companies on the Extra Crunch stage, together with Red Point’s Laura Urquizo and Point Nine Capital’s Christoph Janz.

Cloudflare IPOed successfully in September, with its stock rising about 20 percent that day and topping out at just under $21 a few days later. Since then, though, the stock has seen its ups and downs. In our chat, we’ll talk about how a CEO should handle this, whether it opens up Cloudflare to be an acquisition target for a larger company, and his plans for the future of the company. An IPO is only the beginning of a company’s story, after all.

Besides the company’s journey to an IPO — and what comes next, there’s plenty of other things to talk about with Prince. These days, after all, a large percentage of the web’s traffic flow through Cloudflare’s servers. That makes it a valuable company but also open to criticism because, without its protection for DDoS attacks, any site can easily be taken down by an attacker. The company’s general stance has always been to protect free speech — and hence any website — from attacks. Over the course of the last few years, it did decide to ban forums like 8chan from its platform, however. At the time, Prince said that “no one should have that power” to do so.

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 compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

Big bucks are pouring to get you through the chaotic traffic on Indian roads.

Bounce, a Bangalore-based startup that operates over 17,000 electric and gasoline scooters in three dozen cities in India, has raised about $150 million as part of an ongoing financing round led by existing investors Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital and Accel Partners India, two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The new financing round, dubbed Series D, values the startup “well over $500 million,” the people said requesting anonymity. This is a significant increase since the five-year-old startup’s Series C financing round, which closed in June, when it was worth a little over $200 million.

A spokesperson of Bounce declined to comment.

Bounce, formerly known as Metro Bikes, allows customers to rent a scooter for as little as Rs 15 (21 cents) an hour. Once the ride has been completed, customers can drop the scooter at any nearby parking spot.

The startup, which had raised $92 million prior to the new financing round, said last month that it has amassed 1.2 million customers.

The affordability of these rides is one of the selling points for smart electric and gasoline bikes in India. The other perk is the increasingly growing realization that two wheels warp through much faster in crowded traffic than four.

In this way, smart scooters are posing a challenge to Ola and Uber, both of which have invested billions of dollars to populate more than 100 cities with hundreds of thousands of cabs. In an interview with the New York Times, Bounce co-founder and chief executive Vivekananda Hallekere said earlier that “traditional”model of Uber and Ola is reaching its limits.

“You can’t make it affordable with a driver,” Hallekere told the Times. “And if users know how to use a scooter, why do you need a driver?”

Both Ola and Uber have taken notice.

Bounce competes with a handful of local players including Vogo, which is heavily backed by ride-hailing giant Ola, and Yulu, which maintains a partnership with Uber and closed an $8 million Series A funding this week.

Hallekere told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this year that Bounce, which currently offers IoT hardware and design for the scooters, is working on building its own form factor for scooters.

India is the world’s largest market for two-wheelers. According to industry estimates, more than 200 million people have a license to ride a two-wheeler vehicle in the country. And about 20 million new motorcycles and scooters are sold in the nation each year.