Year: 2019

Showfields, which helps online brands move into offline, brick-and-mortar retail, is announcing that it’s raised $9 million in seed funding.

“Our thesis was simple: Make the process of becoming physical as easy as becoming digital,” co-founder and CEO Tal Zvi Nathanel told me.

I’ve written about other companies, like Bulletin, promising a more flexible approach to real-world retail. But one of the things that’s impressive about Showfields is the sheer size of its flagship space — Nathanel said the company has signed a lease for 14,000 square feet in New York City’s NoHo neighborhood.

When I visited the Showfields store last week, only the first floor was open, but it’s already home to a number of brands, ranging from mattress company Boll & Branch, to fitness company Cityrow, to toothbrush company Quip.

Each brand gets their own separate, dedicated space. For example, in the Cityrow space, I got to sit down and try out the rowing machine, while the Quip area had a mock-up bathroom sink to display the toothbrushes.

“This space is about [the brand], not about Showfields,” Nathanel said. “We really look at ourselves as a stage.”

He added that brands can sign-up online to create a pop-up store, providing input while Showfields designs and builds the space. The brand also decides which goods to sell in the store, and which ones to highlight via a touchscreen display. And they can choose whether to have a dedicated staff member, or to share staff with neighboring brands.

Nathanel said the spaces can be designed around different goals — one brand might focus on driving sales, while another might simply want to grow consumer awareness. In each case, Showfields will also provide data sow they can see how the space is performing.

The brands pay Showfields a monthly fee, with a minimum four-month commitment. Nathanel emphasized that Showfields doesn’t make any money on the product sales, which he said allows the company to offer a more “curated” and “customer-centric experience.”

Ultimately, Nathanel said the Showfields approach can also result in a more varied and dynamic retail environment (after all, Showfields bills itself as “the most interesting store in the world.”) And naturally, he’s hoping to bring this to additional cities, though he declined to offer specifics, beyond saying, “Before the end of the year, we’re hoping to have more Showfields.”

The seed funding was led by Hanaco Ventures, with participation from SWaN & Legend Venture Partners, Rainfall Ventures, Communitas Capital and IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond.

In a statement, Hanaco General Partner Lior Prosor predicted the rise of “experiential retail,” which will be “focused on doing everything that e-commerce cannot do well – enabling discovery, trial, and the use of all five senses to come to a purchasing decision.”

“We truly believe that by being consumer-centric at their core, [Showfields’] founding team and product will make them a category leader in this space,” Prosor said.

Circle makes a fantastic screen time management tool and today the company announced a round of funding to help fuel its growth. The $20 million series B included participation from Netgear and T-Mobile, along with Third Kind Venture Capital and follow-on investments from Relay Ventures and other Series A participants.

With this round of funding, Circle has raised over $30 million to date including a Series A from 2017.

According to the company, Circle intends to use the funds to expand its product offering and form new partnerships with hardware makers and mobile carriers.

The timing is perfect. Parents are increasingly looking at ways to make sure children and teenagers do not become addicted to screens.

Circle works different from other solutions attempting to limit screen time. It’s hardware based and sits plugged into a home’s network. It allows an administrator, like a parent, to easily restrict the amount of time a device, such as an iPhone owned by a child, is able to access the local network. It’s easy and that’s the point.

Circle sits in a small, but growing field of services attempting to give parents the ability to limit their child’s screen time. Some of these solutions, like Apple’s, sits in the cloud and thought works well, is limited to iOS and Mac OS devices. Others, like those on Netgear’s Orbi products, offer a similar network-wide net, but is much harder to use than Circle.

In my household we use tools like Circle. The lure of the screen is just too great and these solutions, when used in combination with traditional parenting, ensure my children stare into the real world — at least for a few minutes a day.

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

What a week. It had looked a bit quiet with just a few big rounds to cover. I was looking forward to a relaxed episode, frankly. But no, as Kate and I were prepping the show notes, the News Gods opened the heavens and dropped a fifty-weight of mana right on our heads.

It was a lot of news.

In quick order, here’s what we tried to run through while keeping it brief:

• Pinterest has filed to go public, albeit privately. At long last, Pinterest’s IPO is underway. The social company is gunning for liquidity this year, could go public in June and is not targeting a down IPO. It’s looking like $12 billion and up for Big Pint.
• Lyft’s IPO is racing along. Lyft filed to go public back in December, dropping private filings neck-and-neck with Uber. The two ride-hailing companies are both slated to get out this year, but it seems that Lyft is going to lead the way. Even more, it’s tipped to get out at a $20 billion to $25 billion valuation. As grounding, here’s the best math I could come up with concerning those numbers.
• DoorDash gets $400 million more. The rumored DoorDash round has landed, though it’s shaped a bit differently than we expected. DoorDash did not raise $500 million at a $6 billion valuation, it instead picked up $100 million less, but at a stronger $7.1 billion valuation. And, of course, the Vision Fund was involved.
• More Vision Fund largesse lands on Clutter and Flexport. What’s a week with just one Vision Fund round? A waste, of course. So, here are two more. Clutter picked up $200 million while Flexport raised a much more impressive $1 billion. Clutter has now raised around $300 million while Flexport’s capital sheet is flush now to the tune of $1.3 billion. As we touched on during the show, the two companies are now going to have more money than they have ever had before to use; let’s hope that that goes well.
• Speaking of which, what about those valuations? Two quick things to wrap up here. First, discontent among Vision Fund investors. The Vision Fund’s LPs (the sources of its capital) aren’t perfectly happy with some of its choices. That, and what happened to people not taking blood money? We asked that again, probably shouting into the wind while we do so.

As it turns out Silicon Valley capitalism isn’t a New Man; it’s just the same old capitalism in a sweater vest.

All that and it was good to be back. Chat you all in a week’s time!

Crypto market prices may be down significantly, but new investors continue to enter the blockchain space. The latest is Recruit Holdings, the $45 billion Japanese internet giant that owns Glassdoor among other things, which quietly launched a $25 million fund.

The fund is based out of Singapore and it closed in November 2018, but its existence was only made public this week following the announcement of its maiden deal, an undisclosed investment in Beam. Recruit has been very vocal about its intention to offer a crypto fund — I interviewed SVP Youngrok Kim at a Coindesk event in Singapore last year — while it has made equity investments in blockchain companies through its central corporate fund, Recruit Strategic Partners (RSP).

Now, with the crypto fund, Kim — who operates within both RSP and the new fund — said that Recruit is free to do deals in both tokens and equity and generally dive deeper into blockchain.

“When we had an equity fund we weren’t as flexible as we wanted to be,” Kim told TechCrunch in a phone interview this week. “We weren’t in a position to buy tokens and assets. We will continue to have two vehicles, we will use the crypto fund and the RSP fund in tandem as needed.”

That’s all well and good but, with the bubble popped, the number of ICOs is down but not quite out. The dynamics have certainly changed, with token sales now almost universally conducted privately rather than publicly, and for full-time investors and professionals rather than anyone. Still, Kim still sees ample reasons to operate a token-based fund.

“We still see a lot of ICOs, the relative number is smaller but we still see a good amount of deal flow for token and equity raising. We are positive with the outlook,” he explained. “We’re a strong believer in blockchain and decentralized technology.”

Beyond direct investments, the fund will also invest in other funds as an LP to help spread its reach.

“Our investment area is broad, covering deep tech to the application layer too,” Kim explained. “We’re still conducting research to understand core technology and its potential.

“We’re going to very cautious spending the fund, we seek to discover companies that will have a real impact and society and where we can contribute as Recruit,” he added, claiming that there are a number of upcoming deals in the pipeline.

Recruit came on the radar for many in the U.S. through its acquisition of Glassdoor for $1.2 billion last year, but it is already a major name in digital space in Japan, as a recent Bloomberg profile story explained in some detail.

Founded in 1960, it is listed on the Toyko Stock Exchange and valued at over $45 billion. It isn’t just big in Japan, though, and Recruit has some 45,000 employees across 60 countries worldwide.

Its core services are recruitment and HR, but it also operates in the real estate, travel, dining and other segments. It has a history of acquisitions, some of which have included U.S-based Indeed.com (2012) and  Simply Hired (2016) as well as European services restaurant site Quandoo (2015), hair and beauty service Wahanda (2015) and education technology company Quipper (2015).

Despite that, Kim said that he doesn’t anticipate that Recruit will acquire blockchain companies that the fund invests in because it is still early days for the technology in terms of development, adoption and monetization. But, with the fund, Recruit is determined to keep an eye on developments to ensure it doesn’t miss out on potentially significant innovation.

Recruit isn’t the only corporate to start a crypto token fund. Line, another Japanese company that’s best known for its messaging app, launched a $10 million crypto fund last year while Korean rival Kakao has a blockchain consultancy and it is actively doing deals. Kakao made its first blockchain investment in December when it backed Israeli-based Orbs in an undisclosed deal.

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

Apple is looking to get over its sales woes in China but offering prospective customers interest-free financing with a little help from Alibaba.

Apple’s China website now offers financing packages for iPhones that include zero percent interest packages provided in association with several banks and Huabei, a consumer credit company operated by Alibaba’s Ant Financial unit, as first noted by Reuters.

The Reuters report further explains the packages on offer:

On its China website, Apple is promoting the new scheme, under which customers can pay 271 yuan ($40.31) each month to purchase an iPhone XR, and 362 yuan each month for an iPhone XS. Customers trading in old models can get cheaper installments.

Users buying products worth a minimum of 4,000 yuan worth from Apple would qualify for interest-free financing that can be paid over three, six, nine, 12 or 24 months, the website shows.

Apple is also offering discounts for customers who trade in devices from the likes of Huawei, Xiaomi and others.

The deals are an interesting development that comes just weeks after Apple cut revenue guidance for its upcoming Q1 earnings. The firm trimmed its revenue from the $89 billion-$93 billion range to $84 billion on account of unexpected “economic deceleration, particularly in Greater China.”

Offering attractive packages may convince some consumers to buy an iPhone, but there’s a lingering sense that Apple’s current design isn’t sparking interest from Chinese consumers. Traditionally, it has seen a sales uptick around the launch of iPhones that offer a fresh design and the current iPhone XR, XS and XS Max line-up bears a strong resemblance to the one-year-old iPhone X.

The first quarter of a new product launch results in a sales spike in China, but Q2 sales — the quarter after the launch — are where devices can underwhelm.

It’ll be interesting to see if Apple offers similar financing in India, where it saw sales drop by 40 percent in 2018 according to The Wall Street Journal. Apple’s market share, which has never been significant, is said to have halved from two percent to one percent over the year.

Finance is a huge issue for consumers in India, where aggressively priced by capable phones from Chinese companies like Xiaomi or OnePlus dominate the market in terms of sales volume. With the iPhone costing multiples more than top Android phones, flexible financing could help unlock more sales in India.

China, however, has long been a key revenue market for Apple so it figures that this strategy is happening there first.

Viber, the messaging app down by Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten, is poised to implement a controversial new strategy that will see it charge companies that run chatbots on its platform.

The conventional wisdom is to work with content companies to help bring users to messaging platforms and keep them engaged but Viber, which has struggled to keep up with rivals like WhatsApp and Line, is turning that on its head.

Starting April 1, Viber will charge chatbot operators $4,500 per month for the ability to send up to 500,000 messages to users. Those who exceed that range will be eligible to send up to one million messages per month for $6,500. The new fees are being communicated to companies that operate Viber chatbots, but Viber hinted at its new monetization plans in an email to TechCrunch.

“Bots can be published for free; however, to ensure the highest discoverability and quality of content for bots, we will be introducing a commercial commitment in the coming months. A key aim with this move is to ensure that users are presented with a steady stream of highly relevant and relatable content and a commercial commitment is one key tool for ensuring a quality experience for users,” Debbi Dougherty, head of B2B Marketing & Communications for Viber, explained.

This is a risky strategy that is likely alienate companies that operate chatbots on Viber as well a brands who bought into a bot strategy.

These costs have come out of the blue, much to the surprise of startups that spent time developing chatbots for the Viber platform.

“For an early stage startup, this isn’t going to work,” Edmundas Balčikonis, co-founder of Eddy Travels — a travel concierge service that took part in Techstars’ Toronto program — told TechCrunch by phone.

Balčikonis said his startup was attracted to the Viber platform because it provided all the necessary documentation and APIs to build a chatbot up front and in public. Having spent eight months developing its Viber bot, Eddy Travels plans to double down on its efforts with Facebook Messenger and Telegram where its bot-based service runs without charge and has seen multiples more users and engagement.

“Viber encouraged us to built the bot, but never discussed the price and there’s no price in the website documentation,” he said. “Messenger is showing way more traction for us… we didn’t get any significant engagement on Viber.”

Indeed, the strategy seems to be quite the opposite that Viber needs to take if it is to gain marketshare from the chat app leaders. WhatsApp — the world’s largest messaging service with over 1.6 billion monthly active users — doesn’t currently support chatbots, but instead of playing to its strengths, Viber is trying to squeeze additional revenue here under the cloak of “a quality user experience.”

Times are already hard though at Viber. TechCrunch spoke to six chatbot startups who develop a range of services for customers, including banks, insurance companies and media, but we found that none run any projects on Viber. Each said their desire to work on the Viber platform would diminish further if they were forced to pay for the privilege.

The Viber service is popular in pockets of the world, including the Philippines, Myanmar and some Eastern European markets. Current CEO Djamel Agaoua, a seasoned advertising executive, promised to work on the revenue and business model when he took the helm in 2017. Under his leadership, Viber has pushed its communities chat feature for brands and tried to tap into e-commerce, but little is known of how that has progressed.

Rakuten’s recent 2018 financial report was released this month and it made scant reference to Viber, other than to note that the service and Rakuten Mobile, the company’s MVNO offering in Japan, had “substantially increased revenue thanks to their full-scale aggressive sales activities.”

No raw figures were provided but Rakuten’s ‘Internet Services’ division, which houses Viber and Rakuten Mobile, saw its annual revenue increase by 15.9 percent to 788.4 billion JPY. That’s around $7.1 billion and it sounds impressive, but the bulk of that revenue is from Rakuten Mobile, which has teamed up with traditional operator KDDI to take a crack at Japan’s mobile market.

What we know about Viber is that it has increased its content monetization — which included advertising, sponsored stickers and more — and that now accounts for the bulk of its revenue having surpassing income from Viber VoIP calling packages.

But, again, there’s no raw revenue data here. Rakuten also no longer provides active user information for Viber, which it said said has registered over one billion users since its creation in 2011. That’s not an informative statistic.

Things seem to be so bad that Viber doesn’t even provide an active user number to advertisers, according to a pitch deck seen by TechCrunch. The data shown includes a selection of actions that Viber claims happen per minute, including 1.2 million logins, but there’s no headline monthly active user statistic. Barcelona, which counts Rakuten as a sponsor, and Coke are among the brands that use Viber.

Now the service’s content monetization push has extended into chatbots, but the obvious risk is that companies and brands will simply go elsewhere where, frankly, they already have a larger and more captive audience.

Rakuten bought Viber for $900 million in January 2014, just one month before Facebook forked out $19 billion to acquire WhatsApp. The Viber deal seemed prescient. Sure it didn’t have the same scale as WhatsApp but it was comparable — 300 million registered compared to WhatsApp’s 450 million active — and teaming with a major internet company would bring a larger budget and opportunities.

The sad reality of today, however, is WhatsApp has grown into one of the world’s most important social services but Viber has floundered. Policies that are as short-sighted as monetizing chatbots will ensure Viber continues to be an also-ran. That surely wasn’t how Rakuten envisaged its acquisition progressing.

Residents of even the tiniest far-flung villages in China may soon be able to pay on their phones to run daily errands as Beijing announced this month that it aims to make mobile payments ubiquitous in rural areas by the end of 2020.

The plan arrived in a set of guidelines (document link in Chinese) jointly published by five of China’s top regulating bodies, including the central bank, the Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, the Securities Regulatory Commission, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, in a move to make online financial services more accessible to rural residents.

The hope is that by digitizing the lives of the farming communities, from getting loans to buy fertilizers to leasing lands to city developers, China could bolster the economy in smaller cities and countryside hamlets. Hundreds of millions of rural Chinese have migrated to large urban centers pursuing dreams and higher-paying jobs, but 42 percent of the national population remained rural as of 2017. While scan-to-pay is already a norm in bigger cities, digital payments still have considerable room to grow in rural towns. All told, 76.9 percent of China’s adults used digital payments in 2017. That ratio was 66.5 percent in rural parts, according to a report released by the central bank.

Following the digital payments pledge was the release of the annual Number One Document (in Chinese) that outlines China’s national priorities for the year. Over the past 16 years, China has devoted the paper to its rural economy and this year, digital integration continues to be one of the key goals. More precisely, Beijing wants rural officials to ramp up internet penetration, the digitization of public services, sales of rural produce to city consumers, and more.

Those directives usher in huge opportunities for companies in the private sector. Tech heavyweights such as Alibaba and JD.com were already looking outside megacities a few years ago. Both have set up online channels enabling farmers to sell and buy as well as working with local governments to build up logistics networks.

Alibaba notably invested in Huitongda, a company that provides merchandising, marketing and supply chain tools to rural retail outlets. Despite posting the slowest revenue growth in three years, Alibaba saw exceptional user growth in rural regions. Similarly, JD’s daily orders from smaller Tier 3 and 4 cities were growing 20 percent faster than those in Tier 1 and 2 cities like Beijing and Hangzhou, the company said in 2017.

Other players went with a rural and small-town play early on. Pinduoduo, an emerging ecommerce startup that’s close on the heels of Alibaba and JD, gained a first-mover advantage in these less developed regions by touting cheap goods. Kuaishou, a Tencent-backed video app that rivals TikTok’s Chinese version Douyin, has proven popular in the hinterlands as farmers embrace the app to showcase the country life and sell produce through live streaming.

Vynn Capital, a new entrant to Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem, is gearing up to close its maiden fund after it landed an undisclosed sum from Malaysia Venture Capital Management Bhd (MAVCAP) as one of its anchor LPs.

Founded by former Gobi Ventures VC Victor Chua and Singaporean investor Darren Chua (no relation) one year ago, Kuala Lumpur-based Vynn is targeting a $40 million fund for Southeast Asia. The firm has already made four investments and, on the LP side, gone after traditional businesses and Southeast Asia’s family corporations. Landing MAVCAP — which is Malaysia’s largest investor has backed VC funds including Gobi — is a major coup for a debut fund.

“The investment from MAVCAP is a very good validation for Vynn Capital,” said Victor Chua, who is Malaysian. “Personally, having been active in the local and regional ecosystem, I’ve benefited from the growth trajectory of the ecosystem and am now able to launch a new fund that is addressing the need of the traditional businesses to be innovative.”

“The thesis of the fund is Southeast Asia, but through our investment we are focused on how it will be invested in Malaysian deals,” MAVCAP’s Shahril Anas told TechCrunch in an interview. “We have some carry and expect returns that we can invest into local entrepreneurs in Malaysia, we are also keen to look at how other countries’ economies interact with startups.”

Anas said the approach is to be very hands-off, MAVCAP has various other fund investments, but he reiterated that there may be specific data or insight that the organization looks to glean.

Southeast Asia is emerging from the shadows of China and India to become a target market for startups and, by extension, the investors who write the checks to finance them.

Beyond a cumulative population of over 600 million people, the region’s ‘digital economy’ is tipped to grow to $240 billion by 2025 from $31 million in 2015, according to a report from Google and Singapore sovereign fund Temasek.

Some of the other investors vying for a slice of the opportunity include new funds from Openspace Ventures ($135 million), Indonesia-focused Intudo ($50 million), Qualgro ($100 million) and Golden Gate Ventures ($100 million) and Sequoia India ($695 million).

Uber has said adamantly that it won’t exit India (or any more markets) following a hattrick of retreats from China, Russia and Southeast Asia, but does that include its food delivery business?

The answer could well be yes. If media reports are right, Uber is on the cusp of a tactical exit from India’s food delivery industry.

India’s Economic Times is reporting that Uber is in the final stages of a deal that would see Swiggy, the food delivery service that recently raised $1 billion and expanded to general deliveries, eat up Uber Eats in India in exchange for giving the U.S. ride-hailing firm a 10 percent share of its business. Swiggy was most recently said to be valued at $3.3 billion following that billion-dollar round, which was led by Naspers and added Tencent to its cap table.

Uber Eats is touted as a major revenue generator for the company, The Information previously reported that it grossed $1.5 billion in sales in the first quarter of 2018 alone, and the company has pushed expansion hard in Asia. Uber Eats landed in India nearly two years ago but it finds itself in the middle of a dogfight between Swiggy, which raised capital three times last year, and Zomato, which is backed by Alibaba.

Already, the battle has taken its toll on peripheral players that include FoodPanda, the service acquired by Uber rival Ola in late 2017. Ola is reported to have slashed costs at FoodPanda and shift the focus to a more sustainable cloud kitchen strategy. Yet Zomato and Swiggy continue to be aggressive.

Based on that backdrop, and Uber’s upcoming IPO, it would make sense to consolidate costs and yet retain a stake in the market. Uber did exactly that through its exit deal with Grab in Southeast Asia, which saw it hand over its transport and food delivery businesses in exchange for a 27.5 percent stake in Grab. That deal, which I argued was a win not a loss for Uber, got the company out of an expensive subsidies war and gave it a stake in a growing business. It could well be a recipe that Uber repeats for India’s food delivery space.

Uber has said adamantly that it won’t exit India (or any more markets) following a hattrick of retreats from China, Russia and Southeast Asia, but does that include its food delivery business?

The answer could well be yes. If media reports are right, Uber is on the cusp of a tactical exit from India’s food delivery industry.

India’s Economic Times is reporting that Uber is in the final stages of a deal that would see Swiggy, the food delivery service that recently raised $1 billion and expanded to general deliveries, eat up Uber Eats in India in exchange for giving the U.S. ride-hailing firm a 10 percent share of its business. Swiggy was most recently said to be valued at $3.3 billion following that billion-dollar round, which was led by Naspers and added Tencent to its cap table.

Uber Eats is touted as a major revenue generator for the company, The Information previously reported that it grossed $1.5 billion in sales in the first quarter of 2018 alone, and the company has pushed expansion hard in Asia. Uber Eats landed in India nearly two years ago but it finds itself in the middle of a dogfight between Swiggy, which raised capital three times last year, and Zomato, which is backed by Alibaba.

Already, the battle has taken its toll on peripheral players that include FoodPanda, the service acquired by Uber rival Ola in late 2017. Ola is reported to have slashed costs at FoodPanda and shift the focus to a more sustainable cloud kitchen strategy. Yet Zomato and Swiggy continue to be aggressive.

Based on that backdrop, and Uber’s upcoming IPO, it would make sense to consolidate costs and yet retain a stake in the market. Uber did exactly that through its exit deal with Grab in Southeast Asia, which saw it hand over its transport and food delivery businesses in exchange for a 27.5 percent stake in Grab. That deal, which I argued was a win not a loss for Uber, got the company out of an expensive subsidies war and gave it a stake in a growing business. It could well be a recipe that Uber repeats for India’s food delivery space.