Month: September 2020

It’s been a big year for online learning companies — and it sounds like Thinkific is no exception. The Vancouver-based startup is announcing that it has raised $22 million in new funding.

Thinkific different from businesses like MasterClass (which raised $100 million this year) and Skillshare (which raised $66 million) because it doesn’t create, distribute or monetize online classes itself. Instead, it’s built a platform where anyone can create their own courses, then sell them on their own websites.

Co-founder and CEO Greg Smith said that when someone builds a course with Thinkific, it’s usually when they “want control over their brand, they really want to own that customer relationship, they want people coming back to their website … building their own sustainable businesses.”

When I asked whether this model puts more of a burden on the creators to promote their courses, Smith said the company aims to help those creators find success, and it has used the platform itself to create its educational content for them. But he also said he wants to avoid any model where Thinkific is distributing and selling the courses itself.

“We really don’t take a cut of the revenue,” he said. “We let the course creator own and run their business.”

The idea from the company came from Smith’s time as a law student and LSAT instructor, when he wanted to offer an LSAT class online and his brother Matt Smith offered to build it for him. Eventually, they (along with co-founders Miranda Lievers and Matt Payne) created Thinkific to allow others to create courses of their own.

Thinkific’s founders

Thinkific only raised $3 million before the latest funding, and it says it became profitable in 2018. However, Smith said decided to raise a larger round because he wanted to expand the team (the plan is to triple the workforce by hiring 350 people in the next 18 months) and pursue the opportunities created as the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift to online learning.

The startup says that more than 50,000 entrepreneurs and businesses have created courses using the Thinkific platform — and there’s been a 200% increase in courses created since March. Thinkific also says these courses have brought in $650 million in revenue to their creators so far this year.

Smith added that he expects the shift to continue even after in-person learning becomes more feasible.

“Let’s say you have a martial arts dojo, and you went and added online courses,” he said. “You’ve gone from teaching 100 people in your community to teaching thousands around the world. Even when that dojo opens back up again, they’re going to want to keep this additional revenue stream.”

The funding was led by Rhino Ventures, which was already an ivnestor.

“Working with Thinkific over the past four years has been nothing short of exceptional,” said Rhino Managing Partner Fraser Hall in a statement. “It’s no secret that its business model, user numbers, and ~ 150% year-over-year revenue growth, is tracking, by stage, very closely to Shopify which is now Canada’s most valuable public company … It’s a model that is undoubtedly shaping a new world of knowledge entrepreneurship and one that’s accessible to any individual or organization that wants to add education as a new revenue channel.”

Huboo, the U.K.-headquartered startup that offers an end-to-end fulfilment service for online retailers of all sizes, has raised £14 million in Series A funding.

The round is led by Stride.VC, with participation from Hearst Ventures. Existing investors, including Episode 1, Maersk Growth, Ada Ventures, and True Capital all followed on, bringing Huboo’s funding to £18 million to date.

Launched in November 2017 by Martin Bysh and Paul Dodd after the pair had run a number e-commerce experiments, Huboo aims to solve the fulfilment pain point that most online stores face. Using what it calls a “micro-warehousing” and a vertical software model, the full-stack service promises to store your stock, and then “pick, pack and deliver it” automatically as customer orders are placed.

The Huboo dashboard provides stock control, order tracking and billing information. It is also integrated with third-party sales channels and marketplaces, such as Amazon, eBay and Shopify. This enables Huboo to directly receive and process its customers’ orders in real-time.

The idea is that by “democratising” fulfilment, online shops can focus on the parts of the business where most value is added, such as customer service and choosing which products to develop and/or sell.

“The vast majority of independent retailers are currently moving online,” says Huboo CEO Martin Bysh. “The pandemic has provided the catalyst for a mass shift into multi-channel commerce over the next five years”.

In addition, he says the direct-to-consumer (D2C) “revolution” is rapidly gaining pace, “with a new breed of agile young D2C businesses bypassing conventional retail channels to engage directly with consumers”. At the same time, retail fulfilment is becoming more complex as customers continue to demand faster delivery times.

“The composition of supply chains is changing due to the pandemic, with retailers forced to pay more attention to where they’re sourcing their products and how to build more robust supply chains,” adds Bysh.

To that end, Huboo will use the new funding to support what its CEO describes as three strategic priorities: software development, U.K. expansion, and establishing an on-the-ground European presence as Brexit hardens.

This will see Huboo increase its software development team ten-fold in the next year to further expand the capabilities of its fulfilment software platform. To support client growth, the startup will also be opening a third U.K. warehouse in October 2020 with a fourth warehouse planned to open in January 2021.

With lockdowns around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the travel industry especially hard. In Asia, however, several startups are adapting by focusing on domestic activities (or “staycations”) instead of international travel. They include Taipei-based KKday, which announced today that it has closed a $75 million Series C led by Cool Japan Fund and the National Development Fund of Taiwan. Existing investors Monk’s Hill Ventures and MindWorks Capital also returned for the round.

Founded in 2014, KKDay will use its new funding on Rezio, a booking management platform it began piloting in March, starting with Japan and Taiwan.

Created for tour operators and activity providers, especially those who previously operated mostly offline, Rezio can help reduce operational costs by allowing its users to set up a booking website that works with different payment gateways and manage availability by tracking bookings from different channels. The latter is especially important during the pandemic because many venues have set up capacity limits.

The company says that Rezio has served over 150,000 customers so far, and will be launched in more Asian markets with its Series C funding. KKDay currently has more than five million users on its platform, and has hosted more than 30,000 tours and other activities so far in 92 countries.

In May 2020, the company began seeing more demand for local travel in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. This parallels Klook, which also saw an increase in demand for “staycations” bookings that helped it recover after its business was hurt during the early stages of the pandemic in Asia.

In a statement, Cool Japan Fund managing director Kazushi Sano said his firm invested in KKDay because “we believe that KKDay’s strong execution and innovative mindset will drive the tourism industry in Japan even under adverse conditions.”

With lockdowns around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the travel industry especially hard. In Asia, however, several startups are adapting by focusing on domestic activities (or “staycations”) instead of international travel. They include Taipei-based KKday, which announced today that it has closed a $75 million Series C led by Cool Japan Fund and the National Development Fund of Taiwan. Existing investors Monk’s Hill Ventures and MindWorks Capital also returned for the round.

Founded in 2014, KKDay will use its new funding on Rezio, a booking management platform it began piloting in March, starting with Japan and Taiwan.

Created for tour operators and activity providers, especially those who previously operated mostly offline, Rezio can help reduce operational costs by allowing its users to set up a booking website that works with different payment gateways and manage availability by tracking bookings from different channels. The latter is especially important during the pandemic because many venues have set up capacity limits.

The company says that Rezio has served over 150,000 customers so far, and will be launched in more Asian markets with its Series C funding. KKDay currently has more than five million users on its platform, and has hosted more than 30,000 tours and other activities so far in 92 countries.

In May 2020, the company began seeing more demand for local travel in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong. This parallels Klook, which also saw an increase in demand for “staycations” bookings that helped it recover after its business was hurt during the early stages of the pandemic in Asia.

In a statement, Cool Japan Fund managing director Kazushi Sano said his firm invested in KKDay because “we believe that KKDay’s strong execution and innovative mindset will drive the tourism industry in Japan even under adverse conditions.”

Meet Multis, a French startup that is building business bank accounts, except that it lets you store, send and receive cryptocurrencies. The startup just raised a $2.2 million seed round.

Investors in today’s funding round include White Star Capital, Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, eFounders, Greenfield One and Digital Currency Group.

“It’s very complicated to manage crypto as a company. As soon as you want to hold crypto or start paying employees and contractors, it’s a giant mess,” co-founder and CEO Thibaut Sahaghian told me.

If you’re familiar with startups working on business banking, such as Qonto, you already know what to expect from Multis. It’s a software-as-a-servie product designed for teams.

Image Credits: Multis

After creating a Multis account, you can add other team members and set permissions and limits. Behind the scene, Multis is a multisignature Ethereum wallet. The company doesn’t control the keys, which means Multis can’t access your funds.

“From a regulatory point of view, it’s been very useful because we don’t hold assets and we can’t review and block transactions,” Sahaghian said.

Thanks to the multisignature design, you can create an approval workflow so that each transaction needs to be approved by a certain number of people on the team.

Multis supports Ethereum-based ERC20 tokens, which means you can also use stablecoins, such as USDC and DAI. This way, you’re not exposed to cryptocurrency volatility when you choose to keep all your assets in USDC for instance. You can swap tokens from Multis directly.

Once you have assets in your Multis account, you can issue payments to employees, contractors, partners, suppliers, etc. You can save addresses and other relevant information to streamline payments in the future.

Centralizing all your crypto transactions on Multi can be useful when you need to file your taxes. You can export all your transactions and hand them over to your accountant.

And if you have too many assets on your hands, you can invest some assets and earn interests thanks to DeFi products. The company uses Compound for that feature.

Right now, Multis clients are mostly companies working on blockchain products, generating revenue in cryptocurrencies or paying people using stablecoins. But the company wants to simplify its product by adding EUR and USD accounts with cards and IBANs.

Multis could act as a bridge between fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies. Companies with offices in multiple countries could use it to save money on intercompany fees. The startup is still working on those new features, but it could lead to some interesting use cases.

Meet Multis, a French startup that is building business bank accounts, except that it lets you store, send and receive cryptocurrencies. The startup just raised a $2.2 million seed round.

Investors in today’s funding round include White Star Capital, Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, eFounders, Greenfield One and Digital Currency Group.

“It’s very complicated to manage crypto as a company. As soon as you want to hold crypto or start paying employees and contractors, it’s a giant mess,” co-founder and CEO Thibaut Sahaghian told me.

If you’re familiar with startups working on business banking, such as Qonto, you already know what to expect from Multis. It’s a software-as-a-servie product designed for teams.

Image Credits: Multis

After creating a Multis account, you can add other team members and set permissions and limits. Behind the scene, Multis is a multisignature Ethereum wallet. The company doesn’t control the keys, which means Multis can’t access your funds.

“From a regulatory point of view, it’s been very useful because we don’t hold assets and we can’t review and block transactions,” Sahaghian said.

Thanks to the multisignature design, you can create an approval workflow so that each transaction needs to be approved by a certain number of people on the team.

Multis supports Ethereum-based ERC20 tokens, which means you can also use stablecoins, such as USDC and DAI. This way, you’re not exposed to cryptocurrency volatility when you choose to keep all your assets in USDC for instance. You can swap tokens from Multis directly.

Once you have assets in your Multis account, you can issue payments to employees, contractors, partners, suppliers, etc. You can save addresses and other relevant information to streamline payments in the future.

Centralizing all your crypto transactions on Multi can be useful when you need to file your taxes. You can export all your transactions and hand them over to your accountant.

And if you have too many assets on your hands, you can invest some assets and earn interests thanks to DeFi products. The company uses Compound for that feature.

Right now, Multis clients are mostly companies working on blockchain products, generating revenue in cryptocurrencies or paying people using stablecoins. But the company wants to simplify its product by adding EUR and USD accounts with cards and IBANs.

Multis could act as a bridge between fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies. Companies with offices in multiple countries could use it to save money on intercompany fees. The startup is still working on those new features, but it could lead to some interesting use cases.

NtechLab, a startup that helps analyze footage captured by Moscow’s 100,000 surveillance cameras, just closed an investment of more than 1RUB billion ($13 million) to further global expansion.

The five-year-old company sells software that recognizes faces, silhouettes and actions on videos. It’s able to do so on a vast scale in real time, allowing clients to react promptly to situations It’s a key “differentiator” of the company, co-founder Artem Kukharenko told TechCrunch.

“There could be systems which can process, for example, 100 cameras. When there are a lot of cameras in a city, [these systems] connect 100 cameras from one part of the city, then disconnect them and connect another hundred cameras in another part of the city, so it’s not so interesting,” he suggested.

The latest round, financed by Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Russian Direct Investment Fund, and an undisclosed sovereign wealth fund from the Middle East, certainly carries more strategic than financial importance. The company broke even last year with revenue reaching $8 million, three times the number from the previous year, ane expects to finish 2020 at a similar growth pace.

Nonetheless, the new round will enable the startup to develop new capabilities such as automatic detection of aggressive behavior and vehicle recognition as it seeks new customers in its key markets of the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America. City contracts have a major revenue driver for the firm, but it has plans to woo non-government clients, such as those in the entertainment industry, finance, trade and hospitality.

The company currently boasts clients in 30 cities across 15 countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) bloc, Middle East, Latin America, Southeast Asia and Europe.

These customers may procure from a variety of hardware vendors featuring different graphic processing units (GPUs) to carry out computer vision tasks. As such, NtechLab needs to ensure it’s constantly in tune with different GPU suppliers. Ten years ago, Nvidia was the go-to solution, recalled Kukharenko, but rivals such as Intel and Huawei have cropped up in recent times.

The Moscow-based startup began life as a consumer software that allowed users to find someone’s online profile by uploading a photo of the person. It later pivoted to video and has since attracted government clients keen to deploy facial recognition in law enforcement. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian government uses NtechLab’s system to monitor large gatherings and implement access control.

Around the world, authorities have rushed to implement similar forms of public health monitoring and tracking for virus control. While these projects are usually well-meaning, they inspire a much-needed debate around privacy, discrimination, and other consequences brought by the scramble for large-scale data solutions. NtechLab’s view is that when used properly, video surveillance generally does more good than harm.

“If you can monitor people quite [effectively], you don’t need to close all people in the city… The problem is people who don’t respect the laws. When you can monitor these people and [impose] a penalty on them, you can control the situation better,” argued Alexander Kabakov, the other co-founder of the company.

As it expands globally, NtechLab inevitably comes across customers who misuse or abuse its algorithms. While it claimed to keep all customer data private and have no control over how its software is used, the company strives to “create a process that can be in compliance with local laws,” said Kukharenko.

“We vet our partners so we can trust them, and we know that they will not use our technology for bad purposes.”

French startup Exotec has raised a $90 million Series C round led by 83North, with existing investors Iris Capital and Breega also participating. Other existing investors include 360 Capital. The company has been working on semi-automated warehouses for e-commerce clients.

The system is based on tiny robots called Skypods. They roam the floor and go up and down racks to pick up standardized bins of products.

The company also provides logistics software to coordinate all those robots through the warehouse. As you scale, you can add more robots and more racks without any downtime.

It’s not going to replace humans altogether as you still have to pick up goods from the bin and pack stuff. But human operators can stay at a workstation while robots take care of all the roaming.

You can use a workstation to pick up goods but also to replenish bins. The idea is that you never have to enter the Exotec area. It’s a robot-only zone.

In addition to productivity gains, you can also increase your storage capacity by switching to Exotec thanks to tall racks and narrow aisles.

The company now has teams in Atlanta and Tokyo — it plans to produce 4,000 robots per year by 2021. Everything is manufactured in Lille, France in a 6,000 square-meter plant. The company currently has fourteen running systems around the world. Clients include Carrefour, Leclerc, Cdiscount and Fast Retailing (Uniqlo).

Exotec has previously raised $17.7 million in 2018 and $3.8 million (€3.3 million) in 2016.

Image Credits: Exotec

XtalPi, an American-Chinese biotech firm that focuses on AI-assisted drug discovery, has raised a $319 million round C from a slate of enthusiastic investors led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund. It joins numerous others with 9-figure rounds in what is clearly a valuable and competitive space.

XtalPi works with major pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer that need to identify promising new drug-like molecules and learn as much about them as possible. It’s very much a race, so companies claiming to use AI to speed up the process have attracted major funding. Though there have been no prominent breakthroughs to speak of resulting from the space, it’s hard to imagine any major player can afford to ignore it.

This company, founded in 2014, purports to offer extremely low-level simulation and prediction of target molecules, both simulating the physics at atomic levels and doing the more traditional data science work that eliminates dead ends and points towards more fruitful avenues for investigation.

Although these advances are in the digital space, the companies still need a large staff of skilled scientists who can verify and advance the results — as well as the facilities to support them. It may help speed up the slow-paced pharmaceutical industry, but that doesn’t mean it’s cheap or easy to do so.

AI-enhanced (which is really to say using machine learning techniques) biotech firms have attracted huge funding rounds and lucrative (or potentially lucrative) partnerships as pharma’s biggest companies place their bets. (Insitro founder Daphne Koller spoke on this topic just two weeks ago at Disrupt.)

XtalPi plans to use the money as you might expect: To scale its existing operations with improved algorithms, more data, and additional computing power.

“We believe AI holds the answer to solving pharma’s productivity challenge,” said chairman and co-founder Shuhao Wen in a press release. “More specifically, XtalPi’s AI-powered platform can improve the industry’s research efficiency and success rate in order to lower costs for discovering and developing new drugs. We look forward to applying our platform to help clients bring more first-in-class and breakthrough drugs to the market and address significant unmet medical needs to benefit patients on a global scale.”

Softbank led the round, with PICC Capital and Morningside making up the larger remaining part, as well as follow-ons from existing investors Tencent, Sequoia China, China Life, and SIG.

A month after completing Y Combinator’s accelerator program, BukuWarung, an financial tech startup that serves small businesses in Indonesia, announced it has raised new funding from a roster of high-profile investors, including partners of DST Global, Soma Capital and 20VC.

The amount of the funding was undisclosed, but a source told TechCrunch that it was between $10 million to $15 million. The new capital will be used to hire for BukuWarung’s technology team. TechCrunch first profiled BukuWarung in July.

Angel investors in the round include several high-profile founders and executives: finance technology platform Plaid’s co-founder William Hockey; Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen; Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra; Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky; Clearbit chairman and startup advisor Josh Buckley; former Uber chief product officer Manik Gupta; Spotify’s former head of new markets in Asia Sriram Krishnan; 20VC founder Harry Stebbings; Nancy Xiao, an investor with Bond Capital; and Fast co-founder Allison Barr Allen. Angel investors from WhatsApp, Square and Airbnb also participated.

Launched last year by co-founders Chinmay Chauhan and Abhinay Peddisetty, BukuWarung is targeted at the 60 million “micromerchants” in Indonesia, including neighborhood store (or warung) owners. The app was originally created as a replacement for pen and apper ledgers, but plans to introduce financial services including credit, savings and insurance. In August, the company integrated digital payments into its platform, enabling merchants to take customer payments from bank accounts and digital wallets like OVO and DANA. BukuWarung’s goal is to fill the same role for Indonesian merchants that KhataBook and OKCredit do in India.

One of the reasons BukuWarung launched digital payments was in response to customer demand for contactless transactions and instant payouts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since introducing the feature, the company said it has already processed several million U.S. dollars in total payment volume (TPV) on an annualized basis. The company says it now serves about 1.2 million merchants across 750 locations in Indonesia, focusing on tier 2 and tier 3 cities.

Digital payments is also the first step into building out BukuWarung’s financial services, which will help differentiate it from other bookkeeping. The payments features is currently free and BukuWarung is experimenting with different monetization models, including making a small margin on fees.

“The reason why we launched payments is also very strategic, because there is a lot of pull in the market. We have already seen several millions annualized TPV in less than a month, because the payments we offer are cost-efficient as well and cheaper than to get from a bank,” Chauhan told TechCrunch.

“If you look at the Indian players, like Khatabook, they have also launched digital payments. The reason for that is because it’s a very essential step for building a business and monetization,” he added. “If you don’t have payments, you can’t do anything like that.”

Chauhan added that building a financial services platform is the difference between providing a utility app that replaces bookkeeping ledgers, and becoming an essential service for merchants that will eventually include lending for working capital, savings and insurance products. The bookkeeping features on BukuWarung will feed into the financial services aspect by providing data to score creditworthiness, and help small merchants, who often have difficulty securing working capital from traditional banks, get access to lines of credit.