Year: 2020

Multimodal travel platform Omio (formerly GoEuro) has raised $100M in late stage funding to help see its business through the coronavirus crisis. It also says it’s eyeing potential M&A opportunities within the hard-hit sector.

New and existing investors in the Berlin -based startup participated in the late stage convertible note, although omio isn’t disclosing any new names. Among the list of returning investors are: Temasek, Kinnevik, Goldman Sachs, NEA and Kleiner Perkins. Omio’s business has now pulled in around $400M in total since being founded back in 2013 — with the prior raise being a $150M round back in 2018.

In a supporting statement on the latest raise, Georgi Ganev, CEO of Kinnevik, said: “We are very impressed how fast and effective Omio adapted to such an unprecedented crisis for the global travel industry. The management team has delivered quickly and we can see the robustness of the business model which is well diversified across markets and transport modes. We are looking forward to supporting Omio on its way to become the go-to destination for travellers across the world.”

While COVID-19 has thrown up major headwinds to global tourism and travel — with foreign trips discouraged by specific government quarantine requirements, and the overarching requirement for people to maintain social distancing meaning certain types of holidays or activities are less attractive or even feasible, Omio is nonetheless sounding upbeat — reporting a partial recovery in bookings this summer in Europe.

In Germany and France it says bookings are above 50% of the pre-COVID-19 level at this point, despite only “marginal” marketing spend over the crisis period.

Its business is likely better positioned than some in the travel space to adapt to changes in how people are moving around and holidaying, given it caters to multiple modes of transport. The travel aggregator platform spans flights, rail, buses and even ferry routes, allowing users to quickly compare different modes of transport for their planned journey.

More recently Omio has added car sharing and car rentals to its platform, including via a partnership with rentalcars.com. So as travellers in Europe have adapted to living with COVID-19 — perhaps opting to take more local trips and/or avoiding mass transit when they go on holiday — it’s in a strong position to cater to changing demand through its partnerships with ground transportation networks and providers.

“That diversification in terms of not depending on a single mode of transport has really helped the business come back much stronger, because we’re not depending on — for example — air or bus,” CEO and founder Naren Shaam tells TechCrunch. “The diversification has helped us.”

“People will travel a lot more to smaller regions, explore the countryside a little more,” he predicts, suggesting the current dilution of travel focus it’s seeing — away from usual tourist hotspot destinations in favor of a broader, more rural mix of places — augurs a wider shift to more a diversified, more sustainable type of travel being here to stay.

“It’s not longer just airport to airport travel,” he notes. “People are traveling to where they want to go — and it’s a lot more distributed across geographies, where people want to explore. A platform like ours can accelerate this behaviour because we serve, not just flights, but trains, buses, even ferries etc, you can actually reach any destination with us.”

Direct booking via Omio’s platform is possible where it has partner agreements in place (so not universally across all routes, though it may still be able to offer route planning info).

Its multimodal booking mix extends to 37 countries in Europe and North America — where it launched at the start of this year. Last year it acquired Rome2Rio, bulking out its global flight and transport planning inventory. The grand vision is “all transport, end to end, in a single product”, as Shaam puts it — although executing on that means continuing to build out partnerships and integrations across its market footprint. 

Asked whether the new funding will give Omio enough headroom to see it through the current coronavirus crisis, Shaam tells TechCrunch: “The unknown unknown is how long the crisis lasts. But as we can see if the crisis lasts a couple of years we will make it through that.”

He says the raise will help the business come out of the crisis “stronger” — by enabling Omio to spend on adapting its product to meet changing consumer demand, such as the shift to ground transportation. “All of those things we can use these capital to shape the future of how the travel industry actually interacts with consumers,” he suggests.

Another shift in the industry that’s been triggered by the coronavirus relates to consumer expectations around information. In short, people expect a lot more travel intel up front.

“We have hypotheses on what comes back [post-crisis]. I think travel will be a lot more information centric, especially coming out of COVID-19. Customers will seek clarity in the near term around basic information around what regions can I travel to, do I need to quarantine, do I need to wear a mask inside the train etc,” he says.

“But that’ll drive a type of consumer behavior where they are seeking more information and companies will need to provide this information to satisfy the consumer needs of the future. Because consumers are getting used to having relevant information at the right point in time. So it’s not a data dump of all information… it’s when I get to the train station, what do I need to do?

“Each of those is almost hyperlocal in terms of information and that’s going to drive a change in consumer behaviour.”

Omio’s initial response to this need for more information up front was the launch of a hub — called the Open Travel Index — where users can look up information on restrictions related to specific destinations to help them plan their journey.

However he admits it’s a struggle to keep up with requirements that can switch over night (in one recent example, the UK added France to a list of countries from which returning travellers must self quarantine for two weeks — leading to a mad dash by scores of holidaymakers trying to beat a 4am deadline to get back on UK soil).

“This is a product we launched about a month and a half ago that tells you, if you’re based in the UK, where you can go in Europe,” he says. “We need to update it faster because information’s changing very, very quickly — so it’s on us now to figure out how to keep up with the constant changes of information.”

Discussing other COVID-19 changes, Shaam points to the shift to apps that’s being accelerated by the public health crisis — a trend that’s being replicated in multiple industries of course, not just travel.

“More than half of the ground transport industry was booked at a kiosk at a station [before COVID-19]. So this will drive a clear change with people uncomfortable touching a kiosk button,” he adds, arguing that that shift will help create better consumer products in the sector.

“If you imagine the kind of consumer products that the app/web world has created you can imagine that should come to the consumer experiences in travel,” he suggests. “So these are the things, I think, that will come in terms of consumer behavior and it’s up to us to make sure that we lead that change as a company.”

“We’re investing quite heavily in some of the other shifts that we’re seeing — in terms of days to departure, flexibility of fares, more insurance type products so you can cancel,” he adds. “We’re also trying to help customers in terms of whether they can go.

“We’re investing heavily in routing so you can connect modes of transport, not just flights, so you can travel longer distances with just trains. And we’re also in talks with all our suppliers to say hey, how can we help you come back — because not all suppliers are state monopolies. There’s a lot of small, medium suppliers on our product and we want to bring them back as well so we’re investing there as well.”

On M&A, Shaam says growth via acquisition is “definitely on the radar for us”. Though he also says it’s not top of the priority list right now.

“We’ve actively got our ears out. More so now, going forward, than looking back — because the last four months, imagine what we went through as a travel company, I just wanted to stablize that situation and bring us to a stable position,” he says.

“We are still in COVID-19. The situation’s not yet over, so our primary goal coming out of this is very much investing in the shifts in consumer behavior in our core product… Any M&A acquisitions we’ll do is more opportunistic, based on [factors like] pricing and what’s happening in the industry.

“But more of our capital and my time and everything will go a lot more to build the future of transport. Because that’s going to change so much more for so many millions of consumers that use our product today.”

There is still plenty of work that can be done on Omio’s core proposition — aka, linking up natural travel search for consumers by knitting together a diverse mix and range of service providers in a way that shrinks the strain of travel planning, and building out support for even more multifaceted trips people might wish to take in future.

“No one brings the natural search for consumers. Consumers just want to go London to Portsmouth. They don’t say ‘London Portsmouth train’. They do that today because that’s what the industry forces them to do — so by enabling this core product to work where you can search any modes of transport, anywhere in Europe, one click to buy, everything is a simple, mobile ticket, and you use the whole product on the app — that’s the big driver for the industry,” Shaam adds.

“On top of that you’ve got shifts towards ground transport, shifts towards app, shifts towards sustainability, which is a big topic — even pre-COVID-19 — that we can actually help drive even more change coming out of this. These are the bigger opportunities for us.”

Uncertainty clearly remains a constant for the travel sector now that COVID-19 has become a terrible ‘new normal’. So even with an unexpected summer travel bump in Europe it remains to be seen what will happen in the coming months as the region moves from summer to winter.

“In general the overall business outlook we’re taking is purely something of more caution,” says Shaam. “We just don’t know. Anything at all with respect to COVID-19, no one knows, basically. I’ve seen a number of reports in the industry but no one really knows. So in general our outlook is one of caution. And that’s why we were surprised in our uptick already through the summer. We didn’t even expect that kind of growth with near zero marketing spend levels.”

“We’ll adapt,” he adds. “The business is high variable costs so we can scale up and down fairly easily, so it’s asset light and these things help us adapt. And let’s see what happens in the winter.”

Over in the US — where Omio happened to launch slightly ahead of the COVID-19 crisis — he says it’s been a very different story, with no bookings bump. “No surprise, given the situation there,” he says, emphasizing the importance of government interventions to help control the spread of the virus.

“Governments play a very important role here. Europe has done a superior job compared to a lot of other regions in the world… But entire economies [in the region] depend on tourism,” he says. “Hopefully entire [European] countries shouldn’t go into shutdowns again because the systems are strong enough to identify local spike in cases and they ring fence it very quickly and can act on it. It’s the same as us as a company. If there’s a second wave we know how to react because we’ve gone through this horrible phrase one… So using those learnings and applying them quickly I think will help stabilize the industry as a whole.”

In Indonesia, about half of adults are “underbanked,” meaning they don’t have access to bank accounts, credit cards and other traditional financial services. A growing list of tech companies are working on solutions, from Payfazz, which operates a network of financial agents in small towns, to digital payment services from GoJek and Grab. As a result, financial inclusion is increasing for consumers and small businesses in Southeast Asia’s largest country, but one group remains underserved: schools.

InfraDigital was founded in 2018 by chief executive officer Ian McKenna and chief operating officer Indah Maryani. Both have backgrounds in financial tech, and their platform enables parents to pay school tuition with the same digital services they use for electricity bills or online shopping. The startup currently serves about 400 schools and recently raised a Series A led by AppWorks.

Many Indonesian schools still rely on cash payments, which are often delivered by kids to their teachers.

“My kid had just started school, and one day I spotted my wife giving him an envelope full of cash for tuition. He was only three years old,” McKenna said. “That triggered my curiosity about how these financial systems work.”

To give parents an easier alternative, InfraDigital, which is registered with Indonesia’s central bank, partners with banks, convenience store chains like Indomaret, online wallets and digital payment services like GoPay to allow them to send tuition money online.

“The way you pay your electricity bill, it’s likely that your school is already there, regardless of whether you have a bank account or live in a really remote place” where many people make cash payments for services at convenience stores, McKenna said. The startup is now working on a system for schools in areas that don’t have access to convenience store chains and banks.

Before building InfraDigital’s network, McKenna and Maryani had to understand why many schools still rely on cash payments and paper ledgers to manage tuition.

“Banks have been trying to tap into the education market for a long time, 12 to 15 years probably, but no one has become the biggest bank for schools,” said Maryani. “The reason behind that is because they come in with their own products and they don’t try to resolve the issues schools are facing. Since they are focused on the consumer side, they don’t really see schools or other offline businesses as their customers, and there is a lot of customization that they need to do.”

For example, a school might have 2,000 students and charge each of them about USD $10 a month in school fees. But they also collect separate payments for books, uniforms, and building fees. InfraDigital’s founders say schools typically send out an average of about 2.5 invoices a month.

Digitizing payments also makes it easier for schools to track their finances. InfraDigital provides its clients with a backend application for accounting and enrollment management. It automatically tracks tuition payments as they come in.

“People don’t get paid that much and they are ridiculously busy taking care of thousands of kids. It’s really, really tough,” McKenna said. “When you’re giving them a solution, it’s not about features, it’s not about tools, it’s about the practicalities of their day-to-day life and how we are going to assist them with it. So you remove that burden from them.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in movement restriction orders in different areas of Indonesia, InfraDigital’s founders say the platform was able to forecast trends even before schools officially closed. They started surveying schools in their client base, and sent back data to help them forecast how school closures would affect their income.

“From the school’s perspective, it’s a really damaging situation, with 30% to 60% income drops. Teachers don’t get paid. If the economy goes down, parents at lower-income schools, which are a big part of our client base, won’t be able to pay,” McKenna said. “It’s built into the model, and we’ll continue seeing that however long the economic impact of COVID-19 lasts.”

In Indonesia, about half of adults are “underbanked,” meaning they don’t have access to bank accounts, credit cards and other traditional financial services. A growing list of tech companies are working on solutions, from Payfazz, which operates a network of financial agents in small towns, to digital payment services from GoJek and Grab. As a result, financial inclusion is increasing for consumers and small businesses in Southeast Asia’s largest country, but one group remains underserved: schools.

InfraDigital was founded in 2018 by chief executive officer Ian McKenna and chief operating officer Indah Maryani. Both have backgrounds in financial tech, and their platform enables parents to pay school tuition with the same digital services they use for electricity bills or online shopping. The startup currently serves about 400 schools and recently raised a Series A led by AppWorks.

Many Indonesian schools still rely on cash payments, which are often delivered by kids to their teachers.

“My kid had just started school, and one day I spotted my wife giving him an envelope full of cash for tuition. He was only three years old,” McKenna said. “That triggered my curiosity about how these financial systems work.”

To give parents an easier alternative, InfraDigital, which is registered with Indonesia’s central bank, partners with banks, convenience store chains like Indomaret, online wallets and digital payment services like GoPay to allow them to send tuition money online.

“The way you pay your electricity bill, it’s likely that your school is already there, regardless of whether you have a bank account or live in a really remote place” where many people make cash payments for services at convenience stores, McKenna said. The startup is now working on a system for schools in areas that don’t have access to convenience store chains and banks.

Before building InfraDigital’s network, McKenna and Maryani had to understand why many schools still rely on cash payments and paper ledgers to manage tuition.

“Banks have been trying to tap into the education market for a long time, 12 to 15 years probably, but no one has become the biggest bank for schools,” said Maryani. “The reason behind that is because they come in with their own products and they don’t try to resolve the issues schools are facing. Since they are focused on the consumer side, they don’t really see schools or other offline businesses as their customers, and there is a lot of customization that they need to do.”

For example, a school might have 2,000 students and charge each of them about USD $10 a month in school fees. But they also collect separate payments for books, uniforms, and building fees. InfraDigital’s founders say schools typically send out an average of about 2.5 invoices a month.

Digitizing payments also makes it easier for schools to track their finances. InfraDigital provides its clients with a backend application for accounting and enrollment management. It automatically tracks tuition payments as they come in.

“People don’t get paid that much and they are ridiculously busy taking care of thousands of kids. It’s really, really tough,” McKenna said. “When you’re giving them a solution, it’s not about features, it’s not about tools, it’s about the practicalities of their day-to-day life and how we are going to assist them with it. So you remove that burden from them.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in movement restriction orders in different areas of Indonesia, InfraDigital’s founders say the platform was able to forecast trends even before schools officially closed. They started surveying schools in their client base, and sent back data to help them forecast how school closures would affect their income.

“From the school’s perspective, it’s a really damaging situation, with 30% to 60% income drops. Teachers don’t get paid. If the economy goes down, parents at lower-income schools, which are a big part of our client base, won’t be able to pay,” McKenna said. “It’s built into the model, and we’ll continue seeing that however long the economic impact of COVID-19 lasts.”

In recent years, China’s online shopping titans have been muscling into the prescription drug market. When JD.com, Alibaba’s archrival, realized the health market spans well beyond retail, it spun out its healthcare unit into a subsidiary last May for a potential initial public offering. That startup, JD Health, gained a staggering valuation of $7 billion fresh off its $1 billion Series A round in November.

In less than a year, another massive check is on its way as JD Health announced it has entered into a definitive agreement with private equity firm Hillhouse Capital, which plans to shell out over $830 million for the infant company’s Series B financing.

The deal with Hillhouse, an early backer in JD.com and an aggressive pursuer of opportunities in healthcare, is expected to occur in Q3 this year. JD.com will remain the majority shareholder upon the transaction.

JD Health is now a multifunctional health platform, providing everything from 30-minute pharmacy delivery, telemedicine service that saw surging usage during the COVID-19 pandemic, consumer-related health services such as genetic testing, through to solutions to digitize hospital systems. The business ‘achieved profitability’ last year, its chief executive Xin Lijun claimed.

The health unit is yet another effort from JD.com, the closest Amazon equivalent in China for its control over the supply chain, to branch out of online retail. JD.com also oversees an independent fintech subsidiary and a separate logistics business, both of which have plans to go public.

Alibaba has made a similar move into the healthcare sector with its part-owned Alibaba Health, a Hong Kong-listed firm with a current market cap of about $34 billion.

The company’s earnings report sheds some light on the breadth of its reach: annual active consumers of its online drugstore exceeded 190 million as of May, with recent growth sparked by the pandemic.

It’s unclear how many users JD Health has amassed for its online pharmacy, the ‘main business’ of the company according to its CEO, but it has disclosed stats on other segments. Since the COVID-19 outbreak, over 1.7 million patients have used its diagnosis service, which now sees over 100,000 inquiries every day. JD Health’s latest pledge, announced this week, is to construct an online family doctor service to target as many as 50 million Chinese families.

Dutchie, a nearly three-year-old, Bend, Ore.-based software company focused on connecting consumers with cannabis dispensaries that pay it a monthly subscription fee to create and maintain their websites, process their orders, and track what needs to be ready for pickup, has raised $35 million in Series B funding. The capital came both new investors Thrive Capital and Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, along with earlier backers, including Kevin Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures and the cannabis-focused fund Casa Verde Capital.

The money comes hot on the heels of Dutchie’s first major round of funding — $15 million that it closed last September — and suggests that the cannabis industry has fared better during the COVID-19 pandemic than people outside the industry might imagine.

We had a fast chat yesterday with the company’s cofounder and CEO, Ross Lipson, about the year that Dutchie is having.

TC: I’d seen recently that Dutchie has added contactless payments.

RL: Yes, when the pandemic hit, virtually all of our dispensaries shifted to a curbside pickup model. We built a solution that allows customers to select curbside at checkout, and also includes a way to notify the dispensary when they arrive and provides them information on how to locate their vehicle.

TC: A year ago, there were more than 30 states where cannabis was either medically legal or that had legalized the recreational use of marijuana. How has that changed?

RL: We now work with over 1,300 dispensaries in 32 markets. By comparison, a year ago we were only operating in 9 markets. Nationwide, 47 out of 50 states now allow some form of legal cannabis, and 2020 could bring full legalization in major markets such as New Jersey and Arizona.

TC. Can you put that into context? How many dispensaries are there in the U.S.?

RL: Dutchie processes 10% of all legal cannabis sales worldwide and powers over 25% of dispensaries. That’s more than 75,000 orders a day.

TC: You had 36 employees the last time we talked. What’s that number now?

RL: We currently have 102 employees and we aim to double our team by the end of 2021.

TC: Aside from helping dispensaries shift to a curbside model, how has the pandemic impacted your business?

RL: Virtually all states deemed cannabis dispensaries as essential businesses [once COVID took hold]. Many still had to comply with state laws and close their physical stores, though, leaving only one option for sales – online ordering. We saw dispensaries shift from about 30% of overall sales coming from Dutchie to upwards of 100%, and our business grew 600% in roughly one month.

Overall, we’ve seen a 700% surge in sales volume during the pandemic. We had to scale quickly to deal with six times the load on our technology.

TC: Think those numbers will shift around as some parts of the country open up?

RL: Dispensaries are poised to keep online ordering and e-commerce options available because it is part of what their customers now expect.

Pictured, left to right, above: Ross and Zach Lipson (Zach, Ross’s brother, is the company’s cofounder and chief product officer).

The food blogging community in China is booming, and many creators have been cashing in big time by touting food products to loyal followers, a business model that has lured investors.

This week, Hong Kong-based startup DayDayCook announced that it has raised $20 million to expand its multifunctional food platform, whose users mainly come from mainland China. The company founded by banker-turned food blogger and entrepreneur Norma Chu offers a bit of everything: an app featuring recipes and food videos, cooking classes in upscale malls, and a product line of its own branded food products sold online, which makes up 80% of its revenues.

London-based Talis Capital led the funding round, with participation from Hong Kong’s Ironfire Ventures. The eight-year-old startup has raised a total of $65 million to date from investors including Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, the e-commerce giant’s not-for-profit effort to support young entrepreneurs in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

The selling point of DayDayCook products is their carefully crafted brand stories. Users first consume the content put out by the startup across social channels, and then they become customers of DayDayCook’s ready-to-eat or to-cook food packs, kitchenware, and more.

“We really believe in the content-to-commerce model,” said Matus Maar, managing partner at Talis Capital.

He went on to explain that as content creation becomes easier thanks to an abundance of mobile editing tools, “even one person in rural China can make amazing content that creates a huge following.” He was referring to China’s reclusive influencer Li Ziqi who rose to stardom by posting videos on Youtube and domestic sites about her rural self-sufficiency.

“That goes hand in hand with people not wanting to see content that is super polished or comes out of mega agencies. People on the internet want to see authenticity. They want to see people doing real things,” suggested the investor.

While there is a legion of food influencers out there, not all are equipped to build a money-making venture. Matus believes DayDayCook has all the pieces in place: suppliers, distribution, logistics, and shipment. By developing its private label products, the startup is also able to sell at higher margins.

Chu said her company has amassed 2.3 million registered users on its own app. Its paid users, ordering through e-commerce channels like JD.com and Alibaba’s Tmall, grew 12 times year-over-year to 2.2 million.

DayDayCook’s content has a wider reach, garnering 60 million followers across microblogging platform Weibo, TikTok’s Chinese edition Douyin, Tencent’s video site, and more. That may not seem like a lot in the influencer era — Li Ziqi herself has nearly 12 million subscribers just on YouTube.

The first all-virtual Democratic National Convention is in full swing, but don’t expect fireworks. The event runs through Thursday in a truncated-for-TV two hours a night that’s apparently not setting any viewership records, even with most Americans stuck at home.

It likely won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed former Vice President Joe Biden’s unlikely rise to the top of the party this year, but this year’s unusual DNC doesn’t inject any interesting social media twists or pull off any amazing technical feats of virtual presence.

Like we saw in the race for the Democratic nomination, what works appears to have prevailed — even if it doesn’t excite. And if the week continues without any viral gaffes or technical failures, the Democrats’ big event will serve as a solid virtual baseline for comparison with next week’s sure-to-be-wild Republican nominating convention. The main objective of the nominating event this year seems to be making it through without any notable catastrophes, which in 2020 is actually a pretty lofty goal.

This year the DNC is being held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but nearly all of its speakers are being beamed in from elsewhere in the country. Musical performances from Leon Bridges on a rooftop and an oceanside Maggie Rogers broke up some of the stiffer portions, but broadcasts still abruptly cut away from them for commentary.

The DNC’s first night relied heavily on pre-recorded video, from effectively dramatic montages about a nation in crisis to Michelle Obama’s emotional appeal against four more years of Trumpism. Large chunks of the programming were pre-recorded — a wise move for avoiding technical glitches but one that considerably dampened the electricity. In spite of the format challenges, a handful of powerful moments still managed to stir emotions for the sofa-bound.

In the first night’s early moments, the brothers of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man brutally killed by Minnesota police officers, called for the country to maintain momentum in the racial justice movement that followed their brother’s tragic death.

“We must always find ourselves in what John Lewis called, ‘good trouble’ for the names we do not know, the faces we’ll never see, those who can’t mourn because their murders didn’t go viral,” Philonise Floyd said, leading into a moment of silence.

The ever-fiery former Biden rival Sen. Bernie Sanders was another exception to the lull of a not-quite-live event. Addressing the nation live from a wood pile in his Vermont home, the senator warned of a dark future if the national slide into authoritarianism deepens through Trump’s reelection. “Nero fiddled while Rome burned,” Sanders said. “Trump golfs.”

Other moments managed to break through too. Michelle Obama’s words felt just as urgent and immediate as any live speech and are definitely worth watching. In another emotionally-charged moment, Kristin Urquiza, the daughter of a man who died from COVID-19, channeled national anger at the failed U.S. response to an epidemic that’s completely upended daily life and claimed more than 170,000 American lives.

“His only pre-existing condition was trusting Donald Trump,” Urquiza said of her father, her anger palpable.

While the first night of the DNC elevated the national protest movement against police violence and anti-Black racism, its second night lineup looks less inspired. But considering that Monday gave generous screen time to Republican John Kasich’s appeal against Trump, the convention’s focus on the center of the political spectrum likely won’t come as a shock.

In a weird moment for both tech and politics, Quibi CEO Meg Whitman, the Republican former chief executive of HP, made her own unlikely anti-Trump cameo.

“I’m a longtime Republican and a longtime CEO — and let me tell you, Donald Trump has no clue how to run a business, let alone an economy,” Whitman said. Tech didn’t have many other moments, unless you count the suitcase with the iPhone.

Between the lack of spontaneous moments and the scarcity of speakers further left, young and otherwise left-leaning viewers might only tune in for a few moments Tuesday. One of those is bound to be the controversially brief slot allotted to progressive star Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who will deliver one minute of prepared remarks. Tuesday will also feature Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, who ran for governor in 2018 and now continues her advocacy work with Fair Fight, her voting rights organization. Abrams won’t appear solo though — in lieu of a proper second night keynote, she’ll be joined by 16 other young rising figures in the Democratic party who will share the time.

Anyone wistful for Democratic eras gone by can watch former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter speak Tuesday along with former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. The DNC’s second night also looks set to dive a bit deeper into policy, with two segments refreshingly focused on Joe Biden’s plans for governing, one on healthcare and one on national security.

If you can stomach some primetime politics in the midst of colliding national crises, catch up on the first night here or tune into night when the stream begins at 6PM PT below.

Kentaro Kawamori and Jason Offerman, the co-founders of new startup Persefoni, which aims to make carbon reporting easier for large corporations, know a few things about carbon emissions.

The two men met at Chesapeake Energy Corp., an Oklahoma City-based energy company focused on oil and gas extraction that ranks as one of the biggest polluters in the world.

Kawamori, whose colorful career includes no more than two-year stints at companies including Accenture, Insight, SoftwareONe, and Major League Gaming, before ascending to the Chief Digital Officer role at Chesapeake Energy, LinkedIn page met Offerman at the energy company just as the company was helping the US assume a dominant position in the oil and gas energy world.

Offerman, a longtime employee of the energy company had spent thirty years in operations and enterprise resource planning, before finding himself working under Kawamori. Together, the two men left to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and linked up with a family office called Rice Investment Group, in late 2019.

Their timing proved to be fortuitous as Chesapeake Energy was forced to declare bankruptcy less than a year later. But even as Chesapeake was hitting hard times, Offerman and Kawamori were ramping up their work on Persofoni, which was officially incorporated in January.

The company provides businesses with the equivalent of enterprise resource planning software to set up the scope fo their carbon reporting based on established guidelines and provide a window into a company’s emissions profile.

While many companies have tried to pitch similar products in the past, they were working to overcome institutional inertia that had many companies convinced that they could ignore their environmental impact. In the current business climate, that attitude is no longer acceptable to some of the major investors that companies rely on for liquidity in stock markets.

“Institutional investors are getting aggressive on requiring companies to disclose their sustainability metrics,” said Kawamori, who serves as Persefoni’s chief executive.

It’s not only institutional investors that are getting more stringent with their reporting requirements around sustainability. Kawamori expects that the European Union will pass tough regulations similar to the privacy requirements under GDPR to mandate clear reporting around emissions.

Investors backing the company include the Rice Investment Group, which led the round, with participation from Carnrite Ventures and some undisclosed angel investors. Daniel Rice, the co-founder and partner at Rice Investment Group, and a former oil and gas executive at Rice Energy, has joined the company’s board of directors.

While Persefoni uses standardized reporting metrics, the company’s software only enables reporting based on the criteria that companies establish for their metrics. These self-reporting mechanisms could obscure more than they reveal if company’s aren’t transparent about how they decide to measure their emissions profiles and what data they’re actually including in those measurements.

“Ultimately, Persefoni wants to make measuring and tracking every organization’s carbon footprint as ubiquitous as managing their financial performance,” Kawamori said in a statement. “Financial ERP systems did that for financial data decades ago and the same need to manage carbon inventories and transactions has emerged for organizations.”

Kentaro Kawamori and Jason Offerman, the co-founders of new startup Persefoni, which aims to make carbon reporting easier for large corporations, know a few things about carbon emissions.

The two men met at Chesapeake Energy Corp., an Oklahoma City-based energy company focused on oil and gas extraction that ranks as one of the biggest polluters in the world.

Kawamori, whose colorful career includes no more than two-year stints at companies including Accenture, Insight, SoftwareONe, and Major League Gaming, before ascending to the Chief Digital Officer role at Chesapeake Energy, LinkedIn page met Offerman at the energy company just as the company was helping the US assume a dominant position in the oil and gas energy world.

Offerman, a longtime employee of the energy company had spent thirty years in operations and enterprise resource planning, before finding himself working under Kawamori. Together, the two men left to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities and linked up with a family office called Rice Investment Group, in late 2019.

Their timing proved to be fortuitous as Chesapeake Energy was forced to declare bankruptcy less than a year later. But even as Chesapeake was hitting hard times, Offerman and Kawamori were ramping up their work on Persofoni, which was officially incorporated in January.

The company provides businesses with the equivalent of enterprise resource planning software to set up the scope fo their carbon reporting based on established guidelines and provide a window into a company’s emissions profile.

While many companies have tried to pitch similar products in the past, they were working to overcome institutional inertia that had many companies convinced that they could ignore their environmental impact. In the current business climate, that attitude is no longer acceptable to some of the major investors that companies rely on for liquidity in stock markets.

“Institutional investors are getting aggressive on requiring companies to disclose their sustainability metrics,” said Kawamori, who serves as Persefoni’s chief executive.

It’s not only institutional investors that are getting more stringent with their reporting requirements around sustainability. Kawamori expects that the European Union will pass tough regulations similar to the privacy requirements under GDPR to mandate clear reporting around emissions.

Investors backing the company include the Rice Investment Group, which led the round, with participation from Carnrite Ventures and some undisclosed angel investors. Daniel Rice, the co-founder and partner at Rice Investment Group, and a former oil and gas executive at Rice Energy, has joined the company’s board of directors.

While Persefoni uses standardized reporting metrics, the company’s software only enables reporting based on the criteria that companies establish for their metrics. These self-reporting mechanisms could obscure more than they reveal if company’s aren’t transparent about how they decide to measure their emissions profiles and what data they’re actually including in those measurements.

“Ultimately, Persefoni wants to make measuring and tracking every organization’s carbon footprint as ubiquitous as managing their financial performance,” Kawamori said in a statement. “Financial ERP systems did that for financial data decades ago and the same need to manage carbon inventories and transactions has emerged for organizations.”

SpaceX raises a huge funding round, Apple launches new radio stations and we review the Samsung Galaxy Note 20. This is your Daily Crunch for August 18, 2020.

The big story: SpaceX raises its biggest round yet

The $1.9 billion round was disclosed in an SEC filing. Bloomberg had previously reported that the round was in the works and would value the Elon Musk-led space launch company at $46 billion.

This comes after SpaceX successfully completed the first-ever private human spaceflight mission to take off from U.S. soil. It’s also in the middle of what’s likely to be a capital-intensive process of deploying its massive Starlink satellite constellation.

The tech giants

Amazon will add 3,500 tech and corporate jobs across six US cities — The list of cities includes Dallas, Detroit, Denver, New York, Phoenix and San Diego, accounting for around 900,000 square feet of office space in all.

Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra review — Brian Heater says it’s excellent hardware with a great camera, at a truly premium price.

Apple launches Apple Music Radio with a rebranded Beats 1, plus two more stations — The change more closely associates the station with the company’s subscription-based streaming music service, Apple Music.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Chamath Palihapitiya’s next big Hustle — The investor tells TechCrunch that he has acquired Hustle, a startup backed by Insight Venture Partners, Google’s GV and Salesforce Ventures.

Attabotics raises a $50M Series C for its warehouse fulfillment robots — The round was led by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, Canada’s largest pension plan.

Movable Ink raises $30M as it expands its personalization technology beyond email marketing — The company said it now works with more than 700 brands, and in the run up to the 2020 election, its customers include the Democratic National Committee.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

The ‘right’ way to downsize — Isaac Roth shares what he’s learned from years of working with startups.

Despite booming consumer demand, VC interest in e-commerce startups falls in 2020 — While Q2 2020 was a bit better than Q1 for e-commerce VC results, it wasn’t much of a comeback.

How to diagnose and treat machine learning models afflicted by COVID-19 — The pandemic’s impact has been particularly significant on many machine learning models that companies use to predict human behavior.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Pandemic helped drive Walmart e-commerce sales up 97% in second quarter — Walmart’s investments in e-commerce, including online grocery delivery and pickup, are continuing to pay off.

Learn how COVID-19 has disrupted the startup world — Sign up today for an interactive webinar scheduled for August 19th at 1 p.m. Pacific.

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