Year: 2020

Unfold, the social media startup acquired by Squarespace last year, is launching a new tool for users to share all the links that are important with them.

This is the first step Unfold has taken beyond its story-format authoring tools. Co-founder Andy McCune told me that the team has a bigger vision now — just as Squarespace has become “the all-in-one platform for your web presence,” Unfold aims to become “the all-in-one platform for your social presence.”

“We’re both playing in very saturated spaces with a lot of competitors,” McCune said. “We both stand out because we appeal to the person that cares about design. That’s always been the North Star.”

In the case of the new Bio Sites, he said one of the goals is to help Unfold users — whether they’re individuals or large brands — become less reliant on a single social media platform. After all, he noted that when you build a following on Instagram, you’re building on “borrowed territory,” and “you don’t really own your audience.”

Image Credits: Unfold

By creating a simple profile that highlights the links of your choice, then by linking your Instagram and other social profiles to your Bio Site, you can then point audiences to other channels where you have more control — or at least diversify the platforms that you’re relying on.

McCune and his co-founder Alfonso Cobo aren’t the first ones to think of this idea. For example, Linktree raised funding earlier this year, and there are other startups creating similar products. But Cobo said Bio Sites benefit from Unfold’s design-centric approach, allowing users to create simple profiles that aren’t just functional, but also looks great and reflect their personality.

Cobo also noted that Bio Sites are created from the Unfold native app — it’s launching on Android today, with plans for iOS in January. The feature will be available available to all Unfold users, including free users, but subscribers to the premium Unfold+ and Unfold for Brands tiers get additional features like custom URLs.

“We’re really going to be expanding in the next few weeks with presence and expressibility tools to help users stand out in different ways,” Cobo said. “We’re also very interested in commerce and will be exploring that route in the future, too.”

In a return to active launch, constellation satellite operator OneWeb has sent 36 new satellites to join its existing spacecraft on orbit. This is the third large batch of OneWeb satellites to be delivered, after an initial launch of six in 2019, and then a second and third launch of 34 satellites each in February and March of this year. The company then ran into financial difficulties that led to its filing for bankruptcy protection in March, before emerging from said bankruptcy in July thanks to a deal funded in part by the UK government, and in part by Bharti Global. In short, it’s been a year for OneWeb.

Today’s launch took off from the Vostochny cosmodrome, and used a Russian Soyuz-2.1b rocket to make the trip. This is the first ever commercial launch from Vostochny (prior commercial launches handled by Roscosmos have used the Baikonur cosmodrome), and it meant that OneWeb could launch 36 satellites instead of 34, because of its position relative to OneWeb’s target orbit.

OneWeb is building a constellation of low-Earth orbit satellites that will provide high-bandwidth connectivity for use in Earth-based networks. The company aims to ultimately have 648 satellites on orbit, and intends to speed up the pace of its launches in order to achieve its target by 2022, which will enable it to offer global network coverage to its customers.

Getting ramped and operational is key to OneWeb being able to generate revenue from its offering. The company is also competing with major, well-capitalized LEO networks being created by both SpaceX and Amazon – but we heard from Amazon’s Dave Limp just this past week at TC Sessions: Space that there should be plenty of room for multiple winners in the LEO broadband market, since there’s no shortage of demand for high-quality connectivity at a global scale.

While OneWeb’s arrangement with Bharti and the UK has helped it emerge from bankruptcy, Bharti founder and Chairman Sunil Mittal noted earlier this week that the company will likely need to raise a total of $2.5 billion to finish its constellation – half of which is provided by the UK/Bharti consortium.

We’ve seen a big wave of proptech startups emerge to reimagine how houses and bought and sold, with some tapping into the opportunity with distressed property, and others exploring the “iBuyer” model where houses are bought, fixed up and resold by a single startup to homeowners who don’t want to invest in a fixer-upper. But the vast majority of homes are still sold the traditional way, by way of a real estate agent working via a broker.

Today, a startup is announcing that it has raised seed funding not to disrupt, but improve that basic model with a more flexible approach that can help agents work in a more modern way, and to ultimately scale out the number of people working as agents in the market.

Avenue 8, which describes itself as a “mobile-first residential real estate brokerage” — providing a new set of tools for agents to source, list and sell homes, and handle the other aspects of the process that fall between those — has raised $4 million. This is a seed round, and Avenue 8 plans to use it to expand further in the cities where it is already active — it’s been in beta thus far in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas — as well as grow to several more.

The funding is notable because of the backers that the startup has attracted early on. It’s being led by Craft Ventures — the firm co-founded by David Sacks and Bill Lee that has amassed a prolific and impressive portfolio of companies — with Zigg Capital, and Good Friends (an early-stage fund from the founders of Warby Parker, Harry’s, and Allbirds) also participating.

There has been at least $18 billion in funding raised by proptech companies in the last decade, and with that no shortage of efforts to take the lessons of tech — from cloud computing and mobile technology, through to artificial intelligence, data science, and innovations in e-commerce — and apply them to the real estate market.

Michael Martin, who co-founded Avenue 8 with Justin Fichelson, believes that this pace of change, in fact, means that one has to continually consider new approaches.

“It’s important to remember that Compass’s growth strategy was to roll out its technology to traditional brokerages,” he said of one of the big juggernauts in the space (which itself has seen its own challenges). “But if you built it today, it would be fundamentally different.”

And he believes that “different” would look not unlike Avenue 8.

The startup is based around a subscription model for a start, rather than a classic 30/70 split on the sales commissions that respectively (and typically) exist between brokers and agents.

Around that basic model, Avenue 8 has built a set of tools that provides agents with an intuitive way to use newer kinds of marketing and analytics tools both to get the word out about their properties across multiple channels; analytics to measure how their efforts are doing, in order to improve future listings; and access to wider market data to help them make more informed decisions on valuations and sales. It also providers a marketplace of people — valets — who can help stage and photograph properties for listing, and Avenue 8 doesn’t require payments to be made to those partners unless a home sells.

It also provides all of this via a mobile platform — key for people in a profession that often has them on the move. 

Targeting agents that have in the past relied essentially on using whatever tools the brokers use — which often were simply their own sites plus some aggregating portals — Avenue 8’s pitch is not just better returns but a better process to get there.

“We’ve heard time and time again that agents struggle to identify and leverage the technology and tools to successfully manage their relationships and properties. Changing buyer/seller expectations have accelerated the digital transformation of most agents’ workflows,” said Ryan Orley, Partner at Zigg Capital, in a statement. “Avenue 8 is building and integrating the right software and resources for our new reality.”

What’s also interesting about Avenue 8 is how it can open the door to a wider pool of agents in the longer run.

The real estate market has been noticeably resilient throughout the pandemic, with lower interest rates, a generally lower overall home inventory, and people spending more time at home (and wanting a better space) creating a high level of demand. With a number of other industries feeling the pinch, a flexible platform like Avenue 8’s creates a way for people — who have taken and passed the certifications needed to become agents — to register and flexibly work as an agent as much or as little as they choose, creating a kind of “Uber for real estate agents,” as it were.

That scaling opportunity is likely one of the reasons why this has potentially caught the eye of investors.

“Avenue 8’s organic growth is clear evidence that the market demands a mobile-first, digital platform,” said Jeff Fluhr, General Partner at Craft Ventures, in a statement. “Michael and Justin have a clear vision for modernizing real estate while keeping agents at the center. Avenue 8’s model helps agents take home more even in today’s environment where commissions are compressing.”

Interestingly, just as Uber’s changed the way that on-demand transportation is ordered and delivered, Avenue 8 is starting to see some interesting traction in terms of its place in the real estate market. Although it was originally targeted at agents with the pitch of being like “a better broker” — providing the services brokers are regulated to provide, but with a more modern wrapper around it — it’s also in some cases attracting brokerages, too. Martin said that it’s already working with a few smaller ones, and ultimately might consider ways of providing its tools to larger ones to manage their businesses better.

We’ve seen a big wave of proptech startups emerge to reimagine how houses and bought and sold, with some tapping into the opportunity with distressed property, and others exploring the “iBuyer” model where houses are bought, fixed up and resold by a single startup to homeowners who don’t want to invest in a fixer-upper. But the vast majority of homes are still sold the traditional way, by way of a real estate agent working via a broker.

Today, a startup is announcing that it has raised seed funding not to disrupt, but improve that basic model with a more flexible approach that can help agents work in a more modern way, and to ultimately scale out the number of people working as agents in the market.

Avenue 8, which describes itself as a “mobile-first residential real estate brokerage” — providing a new set of tools for agents to source, list and sell homes, and handle the other aspects of the process that fall between those — has raised $4 million. This is a seed round, and Avenue 8 plans to use it to expand further in the cities where it is already active — it’s been in beta thus far in the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas — as well as grow to several more.

The funding is notable because of the backers that the startup has attracted early on. It’s being led by Craft Ventures — the firm co-founded by David Sacks and Bill Lee that has amassed a prolific and impressive portfolio of companies — with Zigg Capital, and Good Friends (an early-stage fund from the founders of Warby Parker, Harry’s, and Allbirds) also participating.

There has been at least $18 billion in funding raised by proptech companies in the last decade, and with that no shortage of efforts to take the lessons of tech — from cloud computing and mobile technology, through to artificial intelligence, data science, and innovations in e-commerce — and apply them to the real estate market.

Michael Martin, who co-founded Avenue 8 with Justin Fichelson, believes that this pace of change, in fact, means that one has to continually consider new approaches.

“It’s important to remember that Compass’s growth strategy was to roll out its technology to traditional brokerages,” he said of one of the big juggernauts in the space (which itself has seen its own challenges). “But if you built it today, it would be fundamentally different.”

And he believes that “different” would look not unlike Avenue 8.

The startup is based around a subscription model for a start, rather than a classic 30/70 split on the sales commissions that respectively (and typically) exist between brokers and agents.

Around that basic model, Avenue 8 has built a set of tools that provides agents with an intuitive way to use newer kinds of marketing and analytics tools both to get the word out about their properties across multiple channels; analytics to measure how their efforts are doing, in order to improve future listings; and access to wider market data to help them make more informed decisions on valuations and sales. It also providers a marketplace of people — valets — who can help stage and photograph properties for listing, and Avenue 8 doesn’t require payments to be made to those partners unless a home sells.

It also provides all of this via a mobile platform — key for people in a profession that often has them on the move. 

Targeting agents that have in the past relied essentially on using whatever tools the brokers use — which often were simply their own sites plus some aggregating portals — Avenue 8’s pitch is not just better returns but a better process to get there.

“We’ve heard time and time again that agents struggle to identify and leverage the technology and tools to successfully manage their relationships and properties. Changing buyer/seller expectations have accelerated the digital transformation of most agents’ workflows,” said Ryan Orley, Partner at Zigg Capital, in a statement. “Avenue 8 is building and integrating the right software and resources for our new reality.”

What’s also interesting about Avenue 8 is how it can open the door to a wider pool of agents in the longer run.

The real estate market has been noticeably resilient throughout the pandemic, with lower interest rates, a generally lower overall home inventory, and people spending more time at home (and wanting a better space) creating a high level of demand. With a number of other industries feeling the pinch, a flexible platform like Avenue 8’s creates a way for people — who have taken and passed the certifications needed to become agents — to register and flexibly work as an agent as much or as little as they choose, creating a kind of “Uber for real estate agents,” as it were.

That scaling opportunity is likely one of the reasons why this has potentially caught the eye of investors.

“Avenue 8’s organic growth is clear evidence that the market demands a mobile-first, digital platform,” said Jeff Fluhr, General Partner at Craft Ventures, in a statement. “Michael and Justin have a clear vision for modernizing real estate while keeping agents at the center. Avenue 8’s model helps agents take home more even in today’s environment where commissions are compressing.”

Interestingly, just as Uber’s changed the way that on-demand transportation is ordered and delivered, Avenue 8 is starting to see some interesting traction in terms of its place in the real estate market. Although it was originally targeted at agents with the pitch of being like “a better broker” — providing the services brokers are regulated to provide, but with a more modern wrapper around it — it’s also in some cases attracting brokerages, too. Martin said that it’s already working with a few smaller ones, and ultimately might consider ways of providing its tools to larger ones to manage their businesses better.

I was made aware of Surrogate.tv’s work earlier this year when the site released a Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit tournament. Nintendo’s IRL take on its popular racing title was a great showcase for the technology — though, admittedly, there was enough lag in the remote operation to make control something of an issue.

Of course, Mario Kart is just one of the experiences the platform offers. It’s a pretty broad range, all told, from pinball to battling robots to claw machines. The diversity of experience is probably the service’s biggest strength, all told.

Today the Finnish startup announced that it has closed a $2.5 million seed round, led by Supernode Global and followed by PROfounders, Brighteye Ventures and Business Finland. The latest sum joins a $2 million pre-seed announced by the company last year.

The company’s big play is an ultra-low-latency streaming and robotics bundle that lets users remotely control real-world objects in the manner of a streaming gaming service. Another recent example is a partnership with Ubisoft, where users raised miniature Viking ships against strongman Hafþór Björnsson, for some reason. 2020, I guess.

Image Credits: Surrogate.tv

“Previously, such teleoperation technology would be accessible only for very specific, mainly enterprise, applications,” CEO Shane Allen said of the seed raise. “With this second round of funding, we will be able to launch a string of exciting initiatives that will enable people to create experiences that have never been possible before, all using our technology.”

It seems clear that Surrogate.tv is looking to expand beyond its own entertainment site, offering up its teleoperation technology to interested third-parties. It’s something many have no doubt been investigating in a year when in-person events have been largely off limits.

After spending more than a decade disrupting the neighborhood stores in the U.S. and several other markets, Amazon and Walmart are employing an unusual strategy in India to face off this competitor: Friending them.

Walmart and Amazon, both of which face restrictions from New Delhi on what all they could do in India, have partnered with tens of thousands of neighborhood stores in the world’s second-largest internet market this year to leverage the vast presence of these mom and pop stores.

In June this year, at the height of the pandemic, Amazon announced “Smart Stores.” Through this India-specific program, for instance, Amazon is providing physical stores with software to maintain a digital log of the inventory they have in the shop and supplying them with a QR code.

When consumers walk to the store and scan this QR code with the Amazon app, they see everything the shop has to offer, in addition to any discounts and past reviews from customers. They can select the items and pay for it using Amazon Pay. Amazon Pay in India supports a range of payments services, including the popular UPI, and debit and credit cards.

The world’s largest e-commerce giant also maintains partnerships that allow it to turn tens of thousands of neighborhood stores as its delivery point for customers — and sometimes even rely on them for inventory.

India has over 60 million small businesses that dot the thousands of cities, towns and villages across the country. These mom and pop stores offer all kinds of items, are family run, and pay low wages and little to no rent.

This has enabled them to operate at an economics that is better than most — if not all — of their digital counterparts, and their scale allows them to offer unmatched fast delivery.

Krishna Shah, a New Delhi-based doctor, on paper is one of the perfect customers of e-commerce services. She lives in an urban city, uses digital payments apps and her earnings put her in the top 5% income level in the country. Yet, when she needed to buy food for her cats and needed it as soon as possible, she realized the major giants would take hours, if not longer. She ended up placing a call to a neighborhood store, which delivered the item within 10 minutes.

That neighborhood store, which employs fewer than half a dozen people, was competing with over a dozen giants and heavily funded startups including Grofers and BigBasket — and it won.

At stake is India’s retail market, which is estimated to be worth $1.3 trillion by 2025, from about $700 billion last year, according to Boston Consulting Group and the Retailers’ Association India. E-commerce, by several estimates, accounts for just 3% of the retail market in the country.

If that figure wasn’t small enough already, consider this: Some of the biggest customers of Flipkart and Amazon are these small retail stores. An executive with direct knowledge of the matter told TechCrunch that during some sales, as high as 40% of all smartphone units are bought by physical stores. The idea is, the executive said, to buy the devices at a discounted price, sit on them for a few days and when Amazon and Flipkart are done with their sales, sell the same phones at their standard prices.

Sujeet Kumar, co-founder of Udaan, a Bangalore-based startup that works with merchants, said that even as smartphones and the internet have reached all corners of India, e-commerce hasn’t been able to disrupt the retail market.

“The problem is that it is very difficult for e-commerce companies to build a supply chain and distribution network that is more efficient than those established by neighborhood stores. These mom and pop stores operate on an insanely different kind of cost economics. E-commerce companies are not able to match it,” he said.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), China’s top chipmaker, is under mounting pressure as reports of its CEO’s looming departure and a potential U.S. sanction concern investors.

The U.S. Commerce Department is looking to add dozens of companies, mostly Chinese and including partially state-owned SMIC, to its trade blacklist, Reuters and The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The move would effectively restrict SMIC from buying key components from U.S. suppliers to build advanced chipsets.

Telecoms equipment and smartphone making giant Huawei, which counts SMIC as a supplier, has been struggling with phone production after the Trump Administration added it to the trade blacklist and cut off its key chip access.

Last month, the U.S. government reportedly added SMIC to its defense blacklist, which would bar American investors from buying securities from the company.

SMIC and the Commerce Department cannot be immediately reached for comment.

The reports arrived amid SMIC’s management shakeup and what appears to be internal politics at the chipmaking firm. SMIC recently appointed Chiang Shang-Yi, formerly a co-chief operating officer at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), as vice-chairman. Days later an alleged resignation letter from Liang Mong Song made rounds online, and in it, the co-chief executive of SMIC said he was unaware of Chiang’s appointment and the hiring had prompted him to quit.

SMIC subsequently issued a statement saying it is “verifying” the executive’s intention to quit, sending the company’s shares plummeting.

The fate of SMIC and TSMC is tightly linked to that of Huawei. TSMC, once an important supplier to Huawei, reportedly halted orders from the Chinese firm following new U.S. export controls. There were hopes that SMIC could be a replacement, but industry observers have long argued that the Chinese chipmaker is years behind its Taiwanese rival on making state of the art chipsets for phones.

Sony has pulled “Cyberpunk 2077,” one of the most anticipated games in recent years, from its PlayStation Store after a flood of complaints and ridicule over compatibility issues and bugs from customers.

The gaming giant said it is offering full refunds to any customer who purchased CD Projekt’s title from the PlayStation Store — though customers need to ask for it. Last week, CD Projekt announced that “Cyberpunk 2077” had been pre-ordered more than 8 million times. A day later (Friday), the company said its revenue from digital pre-order sales alone exceeded all of Cyberpunk 2077’s production, marketing, and promotional costs.

Daniel Ahmad, Senior Analyst at Niko Partners, said the delisting of a much-anticipated title is unprecedented in the gaming industry. “I don’t think we’ve ever really seen something like this in the industry before. The only thing that comes close is when Warner Bros. delisted ‘Batman Arkham Knight’ from PC due to technical issues, but that was from the publisher themselves. This is the platform holder delisting the game.”

He said CD Projekt could have delayed the release of “Cyberpunk 2077” by another year and avoided the situation it has landed itself in. “’Cyberpunk 2077′ was expected to become a 30 million+ seller prior to launch. But the state of the game and CDPR’s handling of the situation post launch has led to this.”

CD Projekt released “Cyberpunk 2077,” a game that was first unveiled seven years ago, on December 10 following multiple delays. Shares of CD Projekt were down more than 13% at the time of publishing.

Sony Interactive Entertainment “strives to ensure a high level of customer satisfaction, and we will begin to offer a full refund for all gamers who have purchased Cyberpunk 2077 via PlayStation Store and want a refund,” the company said Friday.

Earlier this week, CD Projekt acknowledged that more attention should have been paid to make the game “play better on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.” The company also said it would offer refund to unsatisfied customers, but many users said they had not received their money back.

“It’s not like people didn’t see this coming for a few months now,” said Niko Partners’ Ahmad. “From the many delays of the game prior, to developers and QA pointing out issues, to last gen footage of the game being deliberately hidden / taken down (as admitted by CDPR) and more. There are multiple lessons to learn from this.”

“An important one being that management /production processes need to improve. It turns out crunching non stop for months doesn’t make a game good. It negatively impacts not just the health of devs, but the game too There will also be wider impacts on the industry when it comes to guidelines for marketing, certification and refunds from a publisher and platform holder level Anyway, will be interesting to see how CDPR respond and how they can salvage the lost goodwill they built up over years,” he added.

Tencent is further strengthening its ties with music giant Universal Music Group as it continues to dominate the Chinese music streaming market.

A consortium led by Tencent and comprising Tencent Music Entertainment, the internet giant’s music spinoff, is set to buy an additional 10% equity stake in UMG from French media conglomerate Vivendi SA, TME said on Friday.

The round values UMG at 30 billion euros, or $36.8 billion, and will increase the consortium’s stake in the music company to 20%. TME continues to hold a 10% equity interest in the consortium, of which other members are not disclosed.

“The transaction reinforces TME’s commitment to strengthening its strategic partnership with UMG. TME looks forward to an ongoing and deeper collaboration with UMG as both companies work together to bring unparalleled service and product offerings to artists and fans in China’s booming music entertainment market,” the company said.

The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2021 and is subject to regulatory approvals, TME noted.

In August, TME and UMG said they were launching a joint label to discover, develop and promote Chinese artists domestically and to the world.

Tencent has been pally with all three music label giants, which have been licensing content to the Chinese firm’s music-focused apps. Both Warner Music and Sony Music Entertainment bought shares in TME when the latter went public in Hong Kong.

Warner Music’s SEC filing earlier this year showed that it had sold a small stake to Tencent. And one should be reminded that Tencent also had a deal with Spotify from 2017 when the two swapped stakes.

When an accident on a building site resulted in the death of their friend, the founders of Safesight were inspired to launch the platform to digitize safety programs for construction. The data from that gave birth to a new InsurTech startup this year, Foresight, which covers workers’ compensation. The startup has now released, for the first time, news that it raised a $15 million funding round back in May this year, with participation from Blackhorn Ventures and Transverse Insurance Group. To date, it has raised $20.5 million from industrial technology venture capital firms, led by Brick and Mortar Ventures and Builders VC.

Foresight launched in August of this year but has already covered $30M in risks. The company says it is now on pace to reach $50M in underwritten premium in 2021. By leveraging the data from sister company Safesite, the platform says it has been able to reduce workers comp incidents by up to 57% in a study conducted by actuarial consulting firm Perr & Knight.

Foresight’s algorithm leverages Safesight data to predict incidents, highlight risks, and informs underwriting. By wrapping Safesite risk management technology and services into every policy, Foresight provides a path to lower incident rates and lower premiums for customers.

Of the $57Bn national workers compensation market, Foresight focuses on policies ranging from $150K to $1M+ in annual premiums. The company says this segment has been largely overlooked by well-funded InsurTech startups such as Next Insurance and Pie, which provide small business policies under $50K in annual premiums.

Foresight and Safesite were developed by longtime friends and co-founders David Fontain, Peter Grant, and Leigh Appel.

Fontain said: “Foresight strengthens the correlation between safety and savings while providing the fast and easy user experience InsurTechs are known for. We leverage purpose-built technology to drive behavioral shifts and provide an irresistible alternative to traditional workers compensation coverage.”

Darren Bechtel, the founder and managing director at Brick & Mortar Ventures commented: “We first invested in 2016 and have known the founders since 2015 when it was just the two of them, squatting at a couple of empty desks inside another portfolio company’s office. Their initial vision was both elegant and powerful, and the demonstrated impact of their solution on safety performance, even in early interactions with the product, was impossible to ignore.”

Foresight now covers Nevada, Oklahoma, Arizona, Arkansas, Louisiana, and New Mexico. The company expects to launch workers compensation in the eastern US and a general liability line in early 2021.