Month: September 2020

As the Labor Day weekend winds down here in the states, so too does our flash sale and your chance to save $100 on a Digital Pro pass to Disrupt 2020. Fight off your holiday food coma long enough to buy your pass before 11:59 p.m. (PT) tonight.

Disrupt 2020 takes place September 14-18, and you can’t afford to miss this global opportunity to learn new startup skills, add to your investment portfolio, build brand awareness, expand your network and do whatever it takes to drive your business forward.

We’re also celebrating 10 years of Disrupt. How crazy is that? As part of the celebration, we formed the TC10 — a remarkable group of entrepreneurs and investors who’ve been a big part of Disrupt for the past 10 years. Meet the TC10 here.

They’ll show up throughout Disrupt 2020 and play an important role in our newest event, the Pitch Deck Teardown sessions. Throughout Disrupt, top VCs and entrepreneurs will look at submitted pitch decks, dissect them slide-by-slide and discuss what works and what doesn’t. Want the Teardown treatment? Submit your pitch deck here.

What else can you do with your Digital Pro pass? Take a deep dive into the Disrupt 2020 agenda where you’ll find an incredible line up of experts, founders, investors, tech icons and visionaries. You’ll lean in and learn from folks like Bumble CEO, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Cloudflare Co-founder, Michelle Zatlyn and Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha. You’ll even hear from celebrities like Kerry Washington, who’s making quite a name for herself as a tech investor.

Explore hundreds of early-stage startups — including the TC Top Picks —  in Digital Startup Alley. Our virtual venue makes it easy to find them and connect.

Take your networking global. The virtual nature of Disrupt 2020 allows anyone from any location to participate, and that spells exponential opportunity. Keep organized and on schedule with CrunchMatch, our AI-powered platform that doesn’t just connect you with people, it connects you with the right people. Simply answer a few quick questions during registration, and you’re ready to schedule 1:1 virtual meetings with founders, investors or other Disrupt attendees.

There’s a metric ton more — the Extra Crunch Stage, Startup Battlefield, interactive Q&As and breakout sessions. TL;DR — you can’t afford to miss the abundant opportunities waiting for you at Disrupt 2020. Buy your Digital Pro Pass before the flash sale ends tonight at 11:59 p.m. (PT) and save $100.

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Italy’s competition authority has opened an investigation into cloud storage services operated by Apple, Dropbox and Google, in response to a number of complaints alleging unfair commercial practices.

In a press release announcing the probe, the AGCM says it’s opened six investigations in all. The services of concern are Google’s Drive, Apple iCloud and the eponymous Dropbox cloud storage service.

As well as allegations of unfair commercial practices, the regulator said it’s looking into complaints of violations of Italy’s Consumer Rights Directive.

A further complaint alleges the presence of vexatious clauses in the contract.

We’ve reached out to the three tech giants for comment.

All three cloud storage services are being investigated over complaints of unfair practices related to the collection of user data for commercial purposes — such as a lack of proper information or valid consent for such commercial data collection — per the press release.

Dropbox is also being accused of failing to clearly communicate contractual conditions such as procedures for withdrawing from a contract or exercising a right to reconsider. Access to out-of-court dispute settlement mechanisms is also being looked at by the regulator.

Other contractual conditions probed over concerns of unfairness include clauses with sweeping rights for providers to suspend and interrupt the service; liability exemptions even in the event of loss of documents stored in the user’s cloud space; the possibility of unilateral modification of the contractual conditions; and the prevalence of the English version of the contract text over the Italian version.

In recent years the European Commission has made a pan-EU push for social media firms to clarify their T&Cs — which led to Facebook agreeing to plainer worded T&Cs last year, as well as making some additional tweaks, such as amending its power to unilaterally amend contracts.

More personnel changes at Revolut are in motion, as a key member of the leadership team leaves for Barclays, and two former Amazon staffers join the London headquartered neoank.

TechCrunch understands that Chris Sing, Revolut’s head of regulatory compliance is leaving to take up the position as Barclays’s new chief of staff to the group chief compliance officer. He joined Revolut in December 2018 and has spent a little under two years at the multi-unicorn fintech.

In a gamekeeper-turned-poacher styled career move, prior to Revolut, Sing was a manager at U.K. regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). During his long stint at the FCA, he also did a secondment at incumbent bank Santander.

Revolut have confirmed Sing’s departure, whose direct responsibilities are being taken on by group head of compliance assurance, Harinder Gill, until a replacement is recruited.

Noteworthy, though not surprising given that Revolut is no longer an early-stage startup, Sing adds to a number of senior staff that have departed in recent months. Most high profile is Richard Davies, CEO Bankng, who left to join Allica Bank as CEO. Another is Andre Muhammad, head of trading — destination unknown (although we can be sure it isn’t Freetrade).

Meanwhile, Revolut is on the verge of announcing two senior hires from Amazon, TechCrunch has learned. They are Steven Harman, who joins as the neobank’s new group COO; and Jim McDougall, who becomes Revolut’s new chief people officer. Harman was most recently Amazon’s VP of continental europe customer fulfillment, and McDougall held the position of director or HR services transformation.

The key operational hires and departure of Revolut’s head of regulatory compliance come at an interesting time for the neobank. The company raised a $580 million Series D at a $5.5 billion valuation in the spring. It also made some cost cutting measures, including a plethora of layoffs in a bid to shore up finances amid the current economic downturn/coronavirus crisis.

The coronavirus global health pandemic — and the new emphasis on social distancing to slow down the spread of COVID-19 — has put healthcare and tech services used to enable healthcare remotely under the spotlight. Today a startup that’s building microinsurance and healthcare services specifically targeting emerging markets is announcing a round of funding to meet a surge in demand for its services.

BIMA, a startup that provides life and health insurance policies, along with telemedicine to support the latter, all via a mobile-first platform targeting consumers in emerging markets whose primary entry point to online services is via phones, not computers, is today announcing that it has raised $30 million in funding, a growth round that the Stockholm/London-based startup plans to use to double down on its health services in the wake increased demand around COVID-19.

The company currently provides telemedicine as a service connected to its health insurance, and it has expanded to include health programs for managing illnesses and offering discounts for pharmacies, and the plan seems to be to bring more services into the mix.

This is the same approach we’re seeing from other insurance startups targeting emerging economies, including China’s Waterdrop, which recently raised $230 million. Looking at the network of services Waterdrop is building, including crowdfunding, gives you an idea of what else BIMA might potentially look to add in, too.

The round is being led by a new investor — China’s CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund (CEFIF) — with previous backers LeapFrog Investments and insurance giant Allianz (who were in BIMA’s previous, $97 million round) also participating.

We’re asking the startup about its valuation, but in its previous round the company was valued at $300 million, and it has grown considerably since then.

BIMA has now clocked up 2 million tele-doctor consultations and has some 35 million insurance and health policies on its books, growing its customer base by some 11 million people in the last two years. It’s now active in 10 countries — Ghana, Tanzania and Senegal in Africa; and Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines and Sri Lanka across Asia.

At a time when we have seen a number of insure tech startups emerge in the US and Europe — with some, like Lemonade, growing into publicly-listed companies — BIMA is very notable in part because of who it targets.

It’s not higher economic brackets, or necessarily segments with disposable income, or those in developed markets with stable economies. Rather, its focus is, in its words, underserved families that typically live on less than $10 per day and are at high risk of illness or injury, with 75% of its customers accessing insurance services for the very first time, BIMA notes.

Aiming at developing economies where middle classes are still only materialising, currencies are potentially unstable, and there is still a lack of infrastructure means that BIMA is contending with a combination of factors that makes the bar high for entry, but it’s also potentially more rewarding because of the lack of competition and tapping a demand that is still rapidly growing.

“The onset of COVID-19 has brought home the value of telemedicine, to help prevent the spread of disease, and the importance of insurance, for peace of mind,” said Gustaf Agartson, the CEO of BIMA who co-founded the company with Mathilda Strom, in a statement.

“Through digital solutions, and a human touch, we’ve been able to serve hard to reach communities with tools and services that bring them a sense of security at such a challenging time. The funds we have raised will allow us to expand our operations and further invest in our product offering that will help us scale quickly to meet the unprecedented demand for our services.”

It’s interesting to see CreditEase, a Chinese investor, as part of this round: the idea of all-in, full service health services companies banked around the insurance proposition has been one cultivated in the Chinese market. But even with the development of HMOs in the US, it’s interesting that there have been relatively few startups around the world trying to develop similar models. BIMA stands out in part because of that.

“We are very impressed by BIMA’s innovative integration of micro insurance and tele-doctor services, which provide critical coverage to meet large unmet demand in emerging markets, and whose value is accentuated further by the current pandemic,” said Dennis Cong, managing partner at CEFIF, in a statement. “We are very happy to have the opportunity to join this meaningful journey, along with the established leading shareholders, and support the company to grow its business and expand its leadership position in its served markets.”

“The market that BIMA is serving is vast and demand for health services is tremendous,” added Stewart Langdon, a partner at LeapFrog Investments. “BIMA’s unique digital capabilities empower emerging market consumers to access many health and insurance services on a single, easy to use platform. That includes protection for millions of first-time buyers of insurance who would otherwise remain unprotected and at risk.”

“We are happy to continue our partnership with BIMA and jointly deliver telemedicine and remote healthcare services in developing markets,” said Nazim Cetin, CEO at Allianz X, in a statement. “We believe the demand for these services will continue to increase and want to manifest BIMA’s leading position in the market by providing support with our experience and network.”

China’s enthusiasm for teaching children to code is facing a new roadblock as organizations and students lose an essential tool: the Scratch programming language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab.

China-based internet users can no longer access Scratch’s website. Greatfire.org, an organization that monitors internet censorship in China, shows that the website was 100% blocked as early as August 20, while a Scratch user flagged the ban on August 14.

Nearly 60 million children around the world have used Scratch’s visual programming language to make games, animations, stories and the likes. That includes students in China, which is seeing a gold rush to early coding as the country tries to turn its 200 million kids into world-class tech talents.

At last count, 5.65% or 3 million of Scratch’s registered users are based in China, though its reach is greater than the figure suggests as many Chinese developers have built derivatives based on Scratch, an open-source software.

Projects on Scratch contains “a great deal of insulting, fake, and libelous content about China,” including placing Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan in a dropdown list of “countries”, a state-run news outlet reported on August 21.

The article added that “any service distributing information in China” must comply with local regulations, and Scratch’s website and user forum had been shut down in the country.

The Scratch editor, which claims coders in every country in the world and available in more than 50 languages, is downloadable and used offline. That means Chinese users who have installed the software can continue using it for now. It’s unclear whether the restriction will extend to and hamper the software’s future version updates.

The Scratch team cannot be immediately reached for comment. Its ban in China, if proven permanent, will likely drum up support for home-grown replacements.

“Scratch is very widely used in China by student users. Inside schools, it’s used in many official information technology textbooks for primary school students,” said Anqi Zhou, chief executive of Shenzhen-based Dream Codes True, a coding startup targeting primary and secondary school kids. “There are many coding competitions for kids using Scratch.”

Indeed, the infiltration of Scratch into the public school system is what had initially alarmed the Chinese authority. An article published August 11 on a youth-focused state outlet blasted:

“Platforms like Scratch have a large number of young Chinese users. That’s exactly why the platform must exercise self-discipline. Allowing the free flow of anti-China and separatist discourse will cause harm to Chinese people’s feelings, cross China’s red line, and poison China’s future generation.”

The article headline captured Beijing’s attitude towards imported technologies, including those that are open-source and meant to be educational and innocuous: An open China is not “xenophobic” but must “detoxify”.

Regardless of the “problematic” user-generated content on Scratch, China will likely encourage more indigenous tech players to grow, as it has done in a sweeping effort to localize semiconductors and even source code hosting.

Outside textbooks, Scratch had also found its way into pricey afterschool centers across China. Some companies attribute Scratch’s open-source codes as their foundation while others build lookalikes that claim to be in-house made, several Chinese founders working in the industry told TechCrunch.

“Scratch is like the benchmark for kids’ programming software. Most parents learn about Scratch from extracurricular programs, which tend to keep all the web traffic to themselves rather than directing users to Scratch,” said Yi Zhang, founder of Tangiplay, a Shenzhen-based startup teaching children to code through hardware.

Despite Scratch’s popularity in China, competitors of all sizes have cropped up. That includes five-year-old Code Mao, a Shenzhen startup that’s an early and major player in the space — and well-financed by venture capital firms. With its own Kitten language “more robust than Scratch,” the startup boasts a footprint in 21 countries, over 30 million users, and about 11,000 institutional customers. Internet incumbents NetEase and Tencent have also come up with their own products for young coders.

“If it’s something permanent and if mainstream competitions and schools stop using it, we too will consider stopping using it,” said Zhou, whose startup is also based in Shenzhen, which has turned into a hub for early coding thanks to its emerging players like Code Mao and Makeblock.

HumanForest, a dockless, shared and ad-supported e-bike service which began trialling a service in London this June, has taken in its first tranche of external funding. The £1.8 million (~$2.3M) investment comes from backers in the mobility space, including Juan de Antonio and Vicente Pascual, founders of ride-sharing app Cabify.

As part of the investment, Cabify’s Pascual has joined the HumanForest board along with Stefan Tilks, ex-Volvo president and CEO of NEVS AB, a Swedish electric car manufacturer. HumanForest’s co-founder and CEO, Agustin Guilisasti, is a former Cabify country manager.

HumanForest’s e-bike sharing service is limited to London for now, and journeys must also be terminated within just two boroughs in North London (Islington and Camden) though it’s aiming to expand parking to other boroughs within the capital as it scales.

It says the new funding will be used to grow its bike fleet to 1,000 at the end of this month — and is aiming to have 2,000 e-bikes in London within a year.

E-bike sharing has exploded in recent years, with ride-hailing giants like Uber jumping into the category as mobility players seek to diversify. And while Uber soon offloaded its Jump bike assets in Europe to micromobility player Lime, after making a major investment in the e-scooter rival, service gaps in key commuter cities are quick to attract new rivals — such as Bolt now pushing an e-bike offering in Paris.

Despite all this activity, HumanForest reckons there’s still room to innovate on the e-bike sharing model.

Its flagship pledge is it’s London’s only “free” shared e-bike service — as it offers users 20 free minutes of ride time per day. The free ride minutes are supported by ads shown via the HumanForest app. Pricing thereafter is £0.12 per minute though HumanForest says users may be able to gain further free ride minutes via promotions and competitions.

Partner companies for HumanForest’s digital marketing platform, which includes the likes of Whole Foods and Rude Health at this starter stage, are thus subsidising free trips in exchange for pushing their marketing message within a social impact product.

Another strand to its model is a subscription e-bike service for corporates — with HumanForest spying an opportunity to offer Londoners an alternative and green means of commuting to work in the post-COVID-19 era that avoids the need to pack onto public transport.

HumanForest’s e-bikes are powered by a rechargeable battery pack that’s good for 80km on a single charge. It takes care of charging and swapping the packs — and touts that both batteries and its service vehicles are changed with certified renewable energy sources.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Pascual said: “I worked with the team at HumanForest for ten years at Cabify and I believe that this is another disruptor. It is three disruptors in one; it provides free mobility for users through its partnership model, protects the planet and appeals to partner companies who seek to demonstrate their social impact. We are already seeing the success of the model and I am excited to be involved in its future growth.”

While shared mobility services have also been hit by concerns related to risk of exposure to the novel coronavirus, bikes are at least used outdoors where there are no worries about lack of ventilation.

On sanitation, an FAQ on HumanForest’s website notes that disinfectant spray is provided with each e-bike. It recommends users wipe down the handlebars and brake handles before and after riding, as well as suggesting the wearing of gloves.

Based in Bangkok, Freshket simplifies the process of getting fresh produce from farms to tables. Launched in 2017, the startup has now raised a $3 million Series A, led by Openspace Ventures.

Other participants included Thai private equity firm ECG-Research; Innospace; and Pamitra Wineka and Ivan Sustiawan, the co-founders of Indonesian agriculture technology startup TaniHub. French-Singaporean food conglomerate Denis Asia Pacific and Thai family office Seedersclub, who made previous investments in Freshket, also returned for the Series A.

Freshket’s technology includes an e-commerce marketplace that connects farmers and food processors to businesses, like restaurants, and consumers in Thailand. The startup was co-founded by chief executive Ponglada Paniangwet and chief marketing officer Tuangploi Chiwalaksanangkoon, who each worked in marketing before launching Freshket three years ago.

Paniangwet told TechCrunch she wanted to enter agritech because her family has worked in the agriculture business for 25 years. “I grew up learning a lot about what worked and didn’t work in the industry,” Paniangwet said. “Overall, the industry is tedious, messy and highly manual.”

Freshket’s goal is to become “an enabler for the entire food supply chain,” she added.

Before Freshket, Paniangwet started a processing center, which sources, cuts and trims fresh produce at wholesale fresh markets before delivering them to restaurants and other customers. She realized technology could be used to simplify the supply chain, increasing farmers’ incomes and the quality of produce received by customers.

There is also ample market opportunity. According to an April 2019 Euromonitor International report, the food service market in Thailand is worth over $7.7 billion in annual purchases, made by more than 200,000 restaurants (link in Thai).

Chiwalaksanangkoon, who was already good friends with Paniangwet, left her position at one of Thailand’s largest banks to co-found Freshket. The company’s platform pull together Thailand’s fragmented produce supply chain by bringing together processing centers and suppliers, and connecting them directly with farmers, who usually rely on middlemen. Freshket also provides its users with data to help them predict supply and demand for their crops.

The expenses of operating a delivery business, especially for perishable goods, can be very high. To stay cost-efficient, Freshket itself doesn’t stock fresh produce. Instead, Freshket tells its network, including farmers, how much product they will need to provide on a daily basis, so they can plan their supply chains.

Paniangwet also said the B2B food delivery business has high average order values, fortifying its unit economics. Freshket’s order, warehouse and logistics management systems are all linked together and “because of that, we are able to control the flow of goods, limit additional and labor costs and keep our overall cost base manageable,” she said.

Freshket’s main rivals in the B2B space are traditional supply chain businesses; in the consumer space, it is up against include grocery delivery startups. It competes with delivery apps by offering lower retail prices, since Freshket is already tapped into a streamlined supply chain. For B2B customers, Freshket’s selling points include more precise delivery, a wider variety of products and produce gradings.

Freshket’s new funding will be used to upgrade its supply management technology. In the future, Paniangwet said the company plans to add more services, like financing, demand forecasting and price matching.

Freshket is among several startups in Southeast Asia markets focused on streamlining the food supply chain in different countries. Others include TaniHub and Eden Farm in Indonesia, Agribuddy in Cambodia and Singapore-based Glife.

This is the third agritech investment Openspace Ventures, which focuses on early-stage companies in Southeast Asia, has made (the other are TaniHub and Singaporean grocery platform RedMart).

In a press statement about the investment, Openspace Ventures founding partner Hian Goh said, “As Openspace Ventures’ second investment in Thailand this year, Freshket reflects our growing conviction in the potential of the Thai market for high quality and innovative startups.”

Daybridge, a productivity and time management app by former Monzo engineer Kieran McHugh, has picked by £750,000 in a seed round led by early Monzo backer, Passion Capital.

Also participating is a number of London-based angel investors — including, I understand, other Monzo alumni. Passion Capital’s Eileen Burbidge has joined the Daybridge board.

Started as a side project while McHugh was still heading up Monzo’s open banking team, Daybridge’s ambition is to create a digital assistant to help people better manage their time. Yet to publicly launch, the app’s functionality spans a calendar, to-do app, journal, event planning, and time-tracking.

The broader vision, McHugh tells me, is for Daybridge to become an app users can “lean on as a source of truth” for how they’ve been spending their time and plans they have coming up.

“I started Daybridge because I became increasingly frustrated with the lack of progress and innovation in productivity and time management apps,” he says. “I felt that there was nothing available on the market that even remotely met my needs as an individual wanting to get organised. The apps already out there felt so antiquated and far removed from real life that I decided to throw everything out and design an ambitious new app from first principles”.

Image Credits: Daybridge

McHugh spent almost 6 months refining the idea, building prototypes, and putting together a design system, before at some point realising he hadn’t actually shown his work to anyone else or sought feedback. So, to help validate the idea, he put together a landing page and tweeted it out in mid-June. “Needless to say, I was quite overwhelmed by the response,” he recalls, “we’ve had over 10,000 sign-ups to the waiting list”.

That was enough to give McHugh the confidence he needed to leave his job to focus on Daybridge full-time. “Leaving Monzo was a really tough decision, but the team were incredibly supportive and excited for me. Working there for three years was probably the best education in building highly scalable user-focussed products that anybody could ever ask for. I think I’m well positioned to take a piece of Monzo’s culture and their approach to engineering and design, and apply that in a whole new context”.

Right out of the gate, McHugh is sure about one thing: an app alone can’t make you productive or organised, “in the same way that banking apps can’t make you good with money”. Instead, he believes that a really well designed app can provide “the rails, tools, and nudges to help you keep on top of things and form healthier habits”.

Meanwhile, in the short term, McHugh expects early users of Daybridge to be “prosumers,” who he characterises as people that already have a pretty strong grasp of their time. “They probably already have some sort of digital productivity system, or maybe they use a bullet journal,” he says.

In the longer term, however, Daybridge isn’t intended to be a prosumer or enterprise product, but something lots of people will rely on every day to help manage their time.

Adds the Daybridge founder: “This is going to mean re-engaging people who’ve tried and failed to get traction and build habits with other products because the amount of effort required to maintain them just isn’t worth the payoff. I think there are a lot of people out there on the hunt for an app like Daybridge — they just haven’t found it yet”.

Vodafone Idea, one of the largest telecom operators in India, has rebranded as ‘Vi’ as it looks to better leverage the unified venture between British telecom giant Vodafone Group’s India business and billionaire Kumar Mangalam Birla’s Idea Cellular two years after they merged in the country.

“As the integration of two businesses is now complete, it’s time for a fresh start. That’s why we believe that now is the perfect time to launch Vi, one company which provides the strength of Vodafone India and Idea,” Vodafone Group CEO Nick Read said at a virtual conference on Monday.

Vodafone Idea, once the largest telecom operator in the country with over 400 million subscribers, has lost more than 100 million subscribers in recent years to new comer India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani’s telecom venture Jio Platforms as it scaled to the top with its cut-rate mobile data tariff.

“India is the second largest telecom market and the largest data consumer, globally. With 1.2 billion Indians accessing voice and data services at the world’s lowest tariffs across 500,000 villages, the ubiquitous wireless network in India is unmatched for its reach and impact in people’s lives.. With our new brand — Vi, we stand committed to partner with government to accelerate India’s progression towards a digital economy, enabling millions of citizens to connect to the digital revolution and build a better tomorrow,” said Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chairman of Aditya Birla Group and Vodafone Idea, at the press conference.

Vodafone Idea — or Vi,  has yet to turn a profit since it joined forces. The company said it will continue to invest in 4G wireless technology, which now reaches more than 1 billion people in India, double the coverage at the time of merger announcement.

Last week, the company received approval from shareholders to sell stake worth $3.4 billion by selling shares and raising debt. The company received a much needed relief in India earlier this month after nation’s apex court granted Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel, another giant telecom operator in India, with 10 years to pay billions they owe to the government.

Meet Lokalise, a Latvian startup that focuses on translation and localization of apps, websites, games and more. The company provides a software-as-a-service product that helps you improve your workflow and processes when you need to update text in different languages in your product.

The company just raised a $6 million funding round led by Mike Chalfen, with Andrey Khusid, Nicolas Dessaigne, Des Traynor, Matt Robinson and others also participating.

When it’s time to ship an update, many companies waste time at the last minute as they still need to translate new buttons and new text in other languages. It’s often a manual process that involves sending and incorporating files with long lists of text strings in different languages.

“As a matter of fact, the most popular tools used in localisation processes are still Excel and Google Sheets. Next come internally-built scripts and tools,” co-founder and CEO Nick Ustinov told me.

Lokalise is all about speeding up that process. You can either manually upload your language files or integrate directly with GitHub or GitLab so that it automatically fetches changes.

You can then browse each sentence in different languages from the service. Your team of translators can edit text in the Lokalise interface. As a web-based service, everybody remains on the same page.

Image Credits: Lokalise

Some productivity features let you collaborate with other team members. You can comment and mention other people. You can assign tasks and trigger events based on completed tasks. For instance, Lokalise can notify a reviewer when a translation is done.

When everything is completed, you can use Lokalise to dynamically deliver language files to your mobile apps using SDKs and an API, or you can simply upload to an object storage bucket so that your app can fetch the latest language file from a server.

If you’re a small company and don’t have a team of translators, Lokalise lets you use Google Translate or a marketplace of professional translators. It works with Gengo or Lokalise’s own marketplace. There are some built-in spelling and grammar features to help you spot the most obvious errors.

“Most customers work with internal or external individual translators or language service providers (LSPs) directly,” Ustinov said. “The SaaS product generates 90% of our revenue — the revenue breakdown between the SaaS product and the marketplace of translation services is 90%/10%.”

The startup now has 1,500 customers, such as Revolut, Yelp, Virgin Mobile and Notion. It currently generates $4 million in annual recurring revenue.

Overall, Lokalise solves a very specific need. It is probably overkill for many companies. But if you ship often and you have customers all around the world, it could speed up the process a little bit.

Image Credits: Lokalise