Month: March 2021

At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced the launch of Azure Managed Instance for Apache Cassandra, its latest NoSQL database offering and a competitor to Cassandra-centric companies like Datastax. Microsoft describes the new service as a ‘semi-managed offering that will help companies bring more of their Cassandra-based workloads into its cloud.

“Customers can easily take on-prem Cassandra workloads and add limitless cloud scale while maintaining full compatibility with the latest version of Apache Cassandra,” Microsoft explains in its press materials. “Their deployments gain improved performance and availability, while benefiting from Azure’s security and compliance capabilities.”

Like its counterpart, Azure SQL Manages Instance, the idea here is to give users access to a scalable, cloud-based database service. To use Cassandra in Azure before, businesses had to either move to Cosmos DB, its highly scalable database service which supports the Cassandra, MongoDB, SQL and Gremlin APIs, or manage their own fleet of virtual machines or on-premises infrastructure.

Cassandra was originally developed at Facebook and then open-sourced in 2008. A year later, it joined the Apache Foundation and today it’s used widely across the industry, with companies like Apple and Netflix betting on it for some of their core services, for example. AWS launched a managed Cassandra-compatible service at its re:Invent conference in 2019 (it’s called Amazon Keyspaces today), Microsoft only launched the Cassandra API for Cosmos DB last November. With today’s announcement, though, the company can now offer a full range of Cassandra-based servicer for enterprises that want to move these workloads to its cloud.

Microsoft today announced Power Fx, a new low-code language that takes its cues from Excel formulas. Power Fx will become the standard for writing logic customization across Microsoft’s own low-code Power Platform, but since the company is open-sourcing the language, Microsoft also hopes that others will implement it as well and that it will become the de facto standard for these kinds of use cases.

Since Power Platform itself targets business users more so than professional developers, it feels like a smart move to leverage their existing knowledge of Excel and their familiarity with Excel formulas to get started.

“We have this long history of programming languages and something really interesting happened over the last 15 years, which is programming languages became free, they became open source and they became community-driven,” Charles Lamanna, the CVP of Power Platform engineering at Microsoft, told me. He noted that even internal languages like C#, TypeScript or Google’s Go are good examples for this.

“That’s been an ongoing trend. And what’s interesting is: that’s all for pro devs and coders. If we go back and look at the low-code/no-code space, there actually are programming languages, like the Excel programming language, or in every low-code/no-code platform has its own programming language. But those aren’t open, those aren’t portable, and those are community-driven,” Lamanna explained.

Microsoft says the language was developed by a team led by Vijay Mital, Robin Abraham, Shon Katzenberger and Darryl Rubin. Beyond Excel, the team also took inspiration from tools and languages like Pascal, Mathematica and Miranda, a functional programming language developed in the 1980s.

Microsoft plans to bring Power Fx to all of its low-code platforms, but given the focus on community, it’ll start making appearances in Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents and elsewhere soon.

But the team clearly hopes that others will adopt it as well. Low-code developers will see it pop up in the formula bars of products like Power Apps Studio, but more sophisticated users will also be able to use it to go to Visual Studio Code and build more complex applications with it.

As the team noted, it focused on not just making the language Excel-like but also having it behave like Excel — or like a REPL, for you high-code programmers out there. That means formulas are declarative and instantly recalculate as developers update their code.

Most low-code/no-code tools these days offer an escape hatch to allow users to either extend their apps with more sophisticated code or have their tool export the entire code base. Because at the end of the day, you can only take these tools so far. By default, they are built to support a wide range of scenarios, but since every company has its own way of doing things, they can’t cover every use case.

“We imagine that probably the majority of developers — and I say ‘developers’ as business users to coders that use Power Platform — will ultimately drop into writing these formulas in some form. The idea is that on that first day that you get started with Power Platform, we’re not going to write any formulas, right? […] It’s a macro recorder, it’s templates. Same thing for Power Apps: it’s pure visual, drag and drop, you don’t write a single formula. But what’s great about Power Platform, in week number two, when you’re using this thing, you learn a little bit more sophistication. You start to use a little bit more of the advanced capabilities. And before you know it, you actually have professionals who are Power Platform or low-code developers because they’re able to go down that spectrum of capability.”

It’s (virtual) Microsoft Ignite this week, Microsoft’s annual IT-centric conference and its largest, with more than 26,000 people attending the last in-person event in 2019. Given its focus, it’s no surprise that Microsoft Teams is taking center stage in the announcements this year. Teams, after all, is now core to Microsoft’s productivity suite. Today’s announcements span the gamut from new meeting features to conference room hardware.

At the core of Teams — or its competitors like Slack for that matter — is the ability to collaborate across teams, but increasingly, that also includes collaboration with others outside of your organization. Today, Microsoft is announcing the preview Teams Connect to allow users to share channels with anyone, internal or external. These channels will appear alongside other teams and channel and allow for all of the standard Teams use cases. Admins will keep full control over these channels to ensure that external users only get access to the data they need, for example. This feature will roll out widely later this year.

What’s maybe more important to individual users, though, is that Teams will get a new PowerPoint Live feature that will allow presenters to present as usual — but with the added benefit of seeing all their notes, slides and meeting chats in a single view. And for those suffering through yet another PowerPoint presentation while trying to look engaged, PowerPoint Live lets them scroll through the presentation at will — or use a screen reader to make the content more accessible. This new feature is now available in Teams.

Also new on the presentation side is a set of presentation modes that use some visual wizardry to make presentations more engaging. ‘Standout mode’ shows the speakers video feed in front of the content, for example, while ‘Reporter mode; shows the content above the speaker’s shoulder, just like in your local news show. And side-by-side view — well, you can guess it. This feature will launch in March, but it will only feature the Standout mode first. Reporter mode and side-by-side will launch “soon.”

Another new view meant to visually spice up your meetings is the ‘Dynamic view.’ With this, Teams will try to arrange all of the elements of a meeting “for an optimal viewing experience,” personalized for each viewer. “As people join, turn on video, start to speak, or begin to present in a meeting, Teams automatically adjusts and personalizes your layout,” Microsoft says. What’s maybe more useful, though, is that Teams will put a gallery of participants at the top of the screen to help you maintain a natural eye gaze (without any AI trickery).

As for large-scale meetings, Teams users can now hold interactive webinars with up to 1,000 people inside and outside of their organization. And for all of those occasions where your CEO just has to give a presentation to everybody, Teams supports broadcast-only meetings with up to 20,000 viewers. That’ll go down to 10,000 attendees after June 30, 2021, based on the idea that the pandemic will be mostly over then and the heightened demand for visual events will subside around that time. Good luck to us all.

For that time when we’ll go back to an office, Microsoft is building intelligent speakers for conference rooms that are able to differentiate between the voices of up to 10 speakers to provide more accurate transcripts. It’s also teaming up with Dell and others to launch new conference room monitors and speaker bars.

This morning Beam, an insurtech startup that provides dental coverage to corporate employees, announced that it has closed an $80 million Series E. Mercato-affiliated Traverse led the investment, with Nationwide insurance joining the deal. Both are new investors in Beam. Prior investors Drive Capital and Georgian Partners also put capital into the funding event.

The investment comes after rapid growth at the company, a common theme amongst neo-insurance providers. The startup cohort often leans on digital information collection to better information on consumer behavior. The information allows companies like Beam, and auto-insurers incent behaviors that lower costs like brushing, or safe driving, while having more information to inform their risk underwriting activities.

Once the neo-insurers have enough data to prove their underwriting models, they can rapidly scale their businesses, something investors covet.

Beam CEO Alex Frommeyer said in an interview that the dental insurance business, which lacks the occasional catastrophic impact of a home insurer having to cover the cost of a house, for example, is an attractive slice of the coverage market. Per Frommeyer, his company has “sub-70s” loss ratios, meaning that it spends less than $0.70 per dollar of premium it receives on paying claims.

We lack specifics on its combined loss ratio and loss adjustment expenses, but the loss ratio itself points to enough margin in Beam’s core insurance product to possible create an attractive business; some neo-insurnace providers that have been well received by investors are struggling to get their numbers to even similar levels of performance. Add in Beam’s self declared revenue growth of 600% in the last three years, and “net revenue retention rate of 100%,” and it’s not hard to see why investors wanted to put more capital to work in the company.

Beam’s business is interesting for more reasons than merely its economics. It is also a consumer hardware player, manufacturing its own toothbrush to track, and encourage via promotions, its covered members to brush as frequently correctly. And the company’s software for enrollment, claims, and the like has become popular enough that Beam offers other insurance products via its platform to some customers, in addition to its own dental coverage.

Regarding its new investment, Frommeyer said that thanks to dental insurance’s lack of mega-claims, it doesn’t require as large a capital reserve as some insurance types. That means its new funding is largely earmarked for growth. The cash is likely welcome. After doubling its member base in both 2019 and 2020, the company has an upward climb ahead of if it wants to match the result again in 2021.

While the insurtech market has proven attractive for public investors in some cases — Lemonade’s post-IPO performance, and Root’s IPO pricing, say — there have been bumps. Root’s share price has taken a beating in recent months, and MetroMile, which went public via a SPAC, has lost ground in recent trading sessions.

Still, the market for insurance is huge, and with startups trying to apply tech solutions and modern digital software to the market, there’s plenty for investors to favor. Let’s see how far Beam can get with another huge check.

Last week the mobile charging battery company SparkCharge announced a partnership agreement with AllState that expands the company’s reach into vehicle services, driving the company further down the road toward its goal of making electric vehicle charging the next gig economy job.

The company, which has developed, designed and is commercializing a mobile vehicle charger is also in the process of closing a $5 million round led by Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban and others as it brings its new mobile charging device, called the Roadie, to market.

SparkCharge’s 120 kilowatt fast charger can be delivered on-demand through a network of partners that now includes AllState and the Durham, N.C. vehicle services startup, Spiffy. Customers can choose to top up with between 50 miles and 100 miles of charge using the Roadie, which is the lynchpin in a broader charging network that SparkCharge’s founder, Joshua Aviv, envisions.

“You can say I want a charge at this point in time at this location and this much range,” Aviv said. “You pay and have the charge delivered all on one app.”

So far, the agreement between AllState and SparkCharge covers four cities: Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, Calif., and the insurance and roadside assistance provider has ordered roughly twenty portable chargers.

Working through companies like Spiffy and AllState is one way to get to market, but SparkCharge’s chief executive thinks that independent workers could start up their own businesses offering on-demand charging to customers.

On-demand charges cost roughly 50 cents per mile and a customer can get a significant enough charge for as little as $10, according to Aviv.

“We’re basically creating a whole new [charging] network,” said Aviv. “This isn’t a network meant to be a stopgap. It’s a network that’s always on, always available and better and faster than [traditional chargers]… we don’t need permits, we don’t need construction. With our unit, you take it out fo the box you plug it into the car you push a button and begin charging. With us, every parking spot, every location — that’s now a charging station. That’s a much better network than the legacy.”

Folks who wanted to offer the charging services would pay roughly $450 per month for the equipment and that would give them the battery and the equipment they would need to start their own on-demand EV charging business.

“It’s a business designed to allow people to service EV owners,” said Aviv. 

The Somerville, Mass.-based company was born from Aviv’s own fascination and frustration with the current state of electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, the lack of charging infrastructure is one of the major obstacles that electric vehicles have to overcome for them to achieve mass adoption.

In a survey of 3,500 electric vehicle drivers, cited by the Journal, which was conducted in September and October of last year by the advocacy group Plug In America, over half of respondents reported having problems with public charging. Those problems are worse for drivers who don’t own Teslas.

Whatever else may be true about the EV that Elon built (along with thousands of workers and a slew of additional innovators and company founders), Tesla’s emphasis on having mostly adequate charging infrastructure to support its customers has paid huge dividends. And other carmakers, retailers, and standalone charging service providers are only beginning to catch up.

Companies ranging from oil majors like Shell to automakers like Volkswagen, who spent $2 billion to build out an electric vehicle charging network as part of the settlement from its diesel emissions chicanery, have networks built out or in the pipeline.

For Aviv, who has owned an electric vehicle since 2013 when he bought a Chevrolet Volt, the problem was clear. He began working on the company in 2014 while still a student at Syracuse University. A professor and advisor at the university had previously served on the board of the Environmental Protection Agency and was a huge proponent of electric vehicles.

After college Aviv continued to work on the business developing a portable charging station and then creating a platform for distribution and sales and a network of service providers on top of it. That’s how SparkCharge was built.

In the early days, the company received assistance from groups like the Los Angeles Clean Technology Incubator and investors like Techstars Boston, Techstars, Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest fund and his Revolution investment firm, PEAK6 Investments, and the Buffalo, NY-based accelerator 46North, along with investors like Cuban.

“I saw that the current [charging] infrastructure that we have has a lot of flaws,” Aviv said. They include the downtime between charging infrastructure upkeep, the time it takes to grow the charging network and the lack of maintenance and support for chargers. 

“There’s a huge push to move these chargers,” he said.”You don’t want these EV drivers to drive around a city with no guarantee of infrastructure. It’s an interesting tug of war that’s going on that we’re going to see unfold and consumers might be more persuaded to drive an EV [with SparkCharge] because not only can you deliver range but you can request it on demand.”

The on-demand grocery delivery industry in Europe (and beyond) continues to heat up amidst the pandemic, including a plethora of startups taking a vertical approach by operating their own delivery only — or “dark” — stores. The latest to show its hand is Berlin-based Flink, which today is announcing that it has raised a hefty $52 million in seed financing.

The round is led by Target Global and existing investors Northzone, Cherry Ventures, and Silicon Valley-based debt provider TriplePoint Capital. Cristina Stenbeck from Kinnevik also joins the round in a personal capacity.

TriplePoint’s inclusion is notable, since debt financing makes sense for these types of capital intensive businesses, including those that need to build out actual stores, albeit dark ones, and other deep logistics infrastructure.

To that end, the injection of capital — which brings total funding to date to $64 million — coincides with Flink’s expansion into the Netherlands and France, and follows the opening of ten dark stores in a number of German cities. They include Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Nuremberg, Dusseldorf, and Cologne, with more planned.

Officially launched just six weeks ago, Flink, which means “quick” in German, claims to deliver groceries from its own network of fulfilment centres in under 10 minutes. That puts it up against dark store competitors including Berlin’s much-hyped Gorillas and London’s Dija and Weezy, and France’s Cajoo, all of which also claim to focus on fresh food and groceries.

There’s also the likes of Zapp, which is still in stealth and more focused on a potentially higher-margin convenience store offering similar to U.S. unicorn goPuff. (Related: goPuff itself is also looking to expand into Europe and is currently in talks to acquire or invest in the U.K.’s Fancy, which some have dubbed a mini goPuff).

However, based on today’s funding round and an extremely experienced founding team, Flink is certainly one to watch. The rather stealthy company was founded in late 2020 by Oliver Merkel (former Bain & Company partner who led the firm’s retail practice in Germany), Christoph Cordes (former co-CEO of home24 which IPO’d in 2018), and Julian Dames (former co-founder of Foodora, CMO at foodpanda and VP at Delivery Hero, and most recently at Softbank). Founder-market-fit? Check.

As noted, Flink is pitching itself very much as a grocery solution, similar to Dija and Gorillas, for example, meaning that the real competition — in the short to mid-term, at least — is traditional supermarkets that do scheduled delivery that isn’t typically on-demand. However, delivering just-in-time fresh food poses many logistical challenges, such as the supply chain and ensuring you actually stock the products customers want when they want them. That’s a slightly different challenge to focusing on convenience store items such as beer, chocolate and snacks or cigarettes etc., which is closer to the original goPuff model.

In a brief call last night with Christian Meermann, founding partner at Cherry Ventures, he told me that he believes truly on-demand groceries can be made to work, including the unit economics, but concedes it is a huge challenge logistically. But he also pointed out that the prize is potentially much bigger for whichever team can figure it out, since grocery shopping can easily happen multiple times per week and basket sizes can soon add up. Meermann isn’t convinced the same can be said of a pure convenience store offering, but of course there is overlap between the two.

Jessica Schultz, general partner at Northzone and previously a co-founder of HelloFresh, agrees. She says that instant shopping delivery will become “the new standard” in shopping more generally, and that groceries is the perfect category to start in, due to the nature of the products and frequency of consumption (e.g. perishables, waste, snacking, three meals per day etc.).

“Getting all your groceries, and not only convenience items but also your fresh herbs, your fruits, your bread… in less than 10 minutes is truly a wow experience,” she tells me. “I’m incredibly impressed with what the Flink team has achieved to date in this very fast-moving industry. I’m not sure I’ve seen such a rapid growth, or clean and strategic approach before. Their deep understanding of the core market dynamics is what will make them succeed”.

Schultz also argues that existing supermarket infrastructure can’t deliver on express grocery shopping and that large incumbent don’t have the skillset or agility to build on-demand groceries. “Instant delivery requires the build out of new infrastructure (micro-warehouses, hub & spoke) as well as a fully vertically integrated approach,” she adds.

Meanwhile, the new financing will be used to expand further within Germany and into additional European markets this year. “In Q2 2021, Flink will roll out its first stores in the Netherlands and France, beginning in cities like Amsterdam and Paris,” says the 120-person company.

Comments Flink founder Oliver Merkel: “Consumers absolutely love to get their grocery shopping done in 10 minutes,” says founder Oliver Merkel. “We’ve received fantastic NPS feedback and see people using Flink multiple times a week. With the additional funding, we can roll out Flink even faster in Europe.”

The Future Africa Fund kicked off in 2015 when Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and Nadayar Enegesi, co-founders of US-based and African-focused talent company Andela, wrote checks to African startups as angel investors. This continued even as Aboyeji joined and left Flutterwave, the fintech company he co-founded.

In January 2020, the pair made the fund official, with Aboyeji as general partner and Enegesi as limited partner. Simultaneously, they announced that the fund had invested $1.5 million across 19 African companies.

The idea for a syndicate fund would come in the following months as the pandemic disrupted investment activities worldwide.

In the past year, syndicates have been emerging as a key force for investing — and for startups seeking capital to get going — on the continent. This is because most of the capital in Africa for promising startups is typically distributed among many investors. Syndicates are now emerging as one way of bringing the long tail together for more equity firepower.

During the onset of the pandemic, Aboyeji, via his blog post, said Future Africa Fund was looking to raise institutional investment. However, the whole process proved difficult and the fund wasn’t able to because he was stuck in Nigeria and could not visit London, New York and Washington DC, “where institutional and development finance capital sits.”

But in April, the fund decided to improvise by launching a syndicate arm called the Future Africa Collective.

“There’s a massive early-stage funding gap for African startups. All the data we were looking at pointed to the fact that work needed to be done to bridge that gap,” Aboyeji told TechCrunch. “We simply couldn’t go on the journey alone to fix the gap and decided to build Future Africa Collective to democratize access to African startups. We think of ourselves as pioneers in this field.”

Here, Future Africa acts as the syndicate lead sourcing investments, conducting due diligence, and securing allocations for investors called backers.

It’s a similar model employed by AngelList, the company founded by Indian-American entrepreneur Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi as a fundraising platform for startups to raise money from angel investors. Over the years, the angel network has based its infrastructure on syndicates — investment vehicles that allow investors, referred to as backers, to co-invest with prominent investors — known as leaders.

Syndicate leads are often experienced angel investors or successful startup founders. They have a wealth of knowledge from playing different roles in the building of a startup ecosystem. On the other hand, backers don’t have much experience investing in startups most times, and for some that do, they will rather allow syndicate leads choose startups to invest in and manage their investments.

On AngelList, there are over 200 active syndicate leads listed with a typical check size ranging from $200,000 to $350,000. Collectively, they have invested more than $2 billion in startups globally.

Adopting syndicate funds for African startups

Like Aboyeji, two other Nigerian tech entrepreneurs — Bosun Tijani and Jason Njoku — have also launched syndicate funds within the past year.

Tijani is the co-founder and CEO of Co-Creation Hub (CcHub), a pan-African innovation hub with offices in Lagos and Nairobi. He is also an angel investor, and via CcHub’s accelerator programme and a partner fund called Growth Capital Fund, Tijani has invested in more than 40 startups.

So why launch a syndicate given the success of the other funds? According to Tijani, the syndicate hopes to solve the challenges that exist with traditionally structured investment vehicles. Here’s what he means.

In 2019, Nigeria accounted for more than 53% of the diaspora remittances to the African continent. Primarily, these remittances are channelled for domestic consumption. Tijani wants the CcHub Syndicate to be an avenue where a percentage of these remittances can come in to deepen the quality of capital available to local entrepreneurs. He believes the syndicate will help Africans in the diaspora who are passionate about nation-building but do not have the capacity to be limited partners in a typical fund structure, to co-invest alongside CcHUB in high growth tech companies across Africa.

“We see the syndicate as a complementary vehicle to our VC fund as it deploys bridge financing to companies with proven traction seeking to raise funds to meet critical milestones ahead of their next funding cycles,” he said.

But before CcHub launched its $500,000 accelerator programme and Aboyeji founded Andela in 2014, Jason Njoku of iROKO had already begun to invest in startups.

Two years after launching the African entertainment company in 2011, Njoku and his co-founder Bastian Gotter launched Spark, a self-described company builder and a $2 million fund. The fund whose LPs were HNIs investing between $100,000 to $500,000 has gone through several iterations to stay alive.

The fund is currently in harvest mode but that hasn’t stopped Njoku from investing personally. His personal portfolio and Spark’s successful exit in Paystack has earned him a reputation that allows him to run some online communities where he charges people for his insights as an angel investor. 

He tells me that Investzilla came into play when a couple of investors wanted to access his deal flow after Paystack’s acquisition.

“I have been advising and referring investors into companies informally for the last few years, so this just formalizes it,” he said. “Investzilla investors wouldn’t consider themselves HNIs but have the ambition to invest $3-10k in several early-stage companies annually. Investzilla is focused on unlocking that opportunity for them.”

In a nutshell, the Future Africa Collective, CcHub Syndicate, and Investzilla want to improve access to financing for African founders. The plan is to reduce venture flight which has become prevalent in the ecosystem in recent times. But how do they work, and what progress have they made so far?

The nitty-gritty details

Typically, leads allow backers to join the syndicate via an application. After vetting and then approving these backers, they gain access to the syndicate’s deal flow and can pick investments on a deal-by-deal basis. Also, they are mandated to pay a one-time fee to join.

For Investzilla, backers pay a membership fee of $500. Thereafter, investors can put between $5,000 to $15,000 checks in more than 10 early-stage companies annually. While there has been no public announcement yet on its launch, Njoku says the syndicate soft-launched with 20 investors in January, and deals are waiting to be completed in the pipeline.

CcHub Syndicate, on the other hand, launched in December 2020. Tijani doesn’t state how much the syndicate’s administration fee costs but says the minimum backers can invest is $5,000.

So far, the syndicate has signed up more than 400 individuals, investing groups and institutional investors. Out of that number, a little above 30 investors have undertaken the syndicate’s KYC (Know Your Customer) process. Last month, it announced that a total of $267,500 had been raised to support three Nigerian startups’ bridge financing rounds.

Meanwhile, the Future Africa Collective charges a membership due of $1000 a year and four times a year; it selects some backers to the syndicate. Each quarter, backers are presented with five startups they can invest in with a minimum of $5,000. In less than a year, Future Africa Collective has grown to over 160 members. Collectively, they have invested over $1 million in 14 startups across Africa.

One important thing to note is that a transaction fee prorated by their check size is charged for every deal a backer makes across all three syndicates.

The three syndicates also charge carry, which is a cut of positive returns generated by the investment. For instance, Future Africa has a 20% carry. If a backer invests $5,000 in the syndicate and the investment returns $20,000, the syndicate would earn $3,000 in carry, leaving the backer with $12,000 profit. Like Future Africa, Investzilla charges a 20% carry, but CcHub Syndicate does 15%.

As to when the return on investments is scheduled to be made, Aboyeji says the Future Africa Collective is designed to return upon secondaries.

“We hold the right to decide when to exit, but if there are any opportunities, we discuss them with the syndicate. Returns are disbursed to the syndicate members who invested in specific startups should there be an exit,” he said.

And the timeline for this across the syndicates is designated around 5 to 10 years.

That said, with Africa’s seed-stage funding gap not closed enough yet, the founders believe that there will be increased participation from more players with varied syndication models. 

Njoku, who is enthused about more capital being pumped into Africa’s tech ecosystem, says if these syndicates can get more than 200 angels to commit between $3,000 to $10,000 in at least five startups in a year, the continent might start to see more high net worth individuals participate in tech investments. 

“If we can unlock that, then it would be $2 million to $10 million in early-stage funding annually, which may or may have been attracted in the first place. Like Iyin and Bosun, founders who have created a lot of wealth with African tech feel comfortable and breed confidence. That’s an attractive asset class for executives or HNIs.”

TikTok is bringing in external experts in Europe in fields such as child safety, young people’s mental health and extremism to form a Safety Advisory Council to help it with content moderation in the region.

The move, announced today, follows an emergency intervention by Italy’s data protection authority in January — which ordered TikTok to block users it cannot age verify after the death of a girl who was reported by local media to have died of asphyxiation as a result of participating in a black out challenge on the video sharing platform.

The social media platform has also been targeted by a series of coordinated complaints by EU consumer protection agencies, which put out two reports last month detailing a number of alleged breaches of the bloc’s consumer protection and privacy rules — including child safety-specific concerns.

“We are always reviewing our existing features and policies, and innovating to take bold new measures to prioritise safety,” TikTok writes today, putting a positive spin on needing to improve safety on its platform in the region.

“The Council will bring together leaders from academia and civil society from all around Europe. Each member brings a different, fresh perspective on the challenges we face and members will provide subject matter expertise as they advise on our content moderation policies and practices. Not only will they support us in developing forward-looking policies that address the challenges we face today, they will also help us to identify emerging issues that affect TikTok and our community in the future.”

It’s not the first such advisory body TikTok has launched. A year ago it announced a US Safety Advisory Council, after coming under scrutiny from US lawmakers concerned about the spread of election disinformation and wider data security issues, including accusations the Chinese-owned app was engaging in censorship at the behest of the Chinese government.

But the initial appointees to TikTok’s European content moderation advisory body suggest its regional focus is more firmly on child safety/young people’s mental health and extremism and hate speech, reflecting some of the main areas where it’s come under the most scrutiny from European lawmakers, regulators and civil society so far.

TikTok has appointed nine individuals to its European Council (listed here) — initially bringing in external expertise in anti-bullying, youth mental health and digital parenting; online child sexual exploitation/abuse; extremism and deradicalization; anti-bias/discrimination and hate crimes — a cohort it says it will expand as it adds more members to the body (“from more countries and different areas of expertise to support us in the future”).

TikTok is also likely to have an eye on new pan-EU regulation that’s coming down the pipe for platforms operating in the region.

EU lawmakers recently put forward a legislative proposal that aims to dial up accountability for digital service providers over the content they push and monetize. The Digital Services Act, which is currently in draft, going through the bloc’s co-legislative process, will regulate how a wide range of platforms must act to remove explicitly illegal content (such as hate speech and child sexual exploitation).

The Commission’s DSA proposal avoided setting specific rules for platforms to tackle a broader array of harms — such as issues like youth mental health — which, by contrast, the UK is proposing to address in its plan to regulate social media (aka the Online Safety bill). However the planned legislation is intended to drive accountability around digital services in a variety of ways.

For example, it contains provisions that would require larger platforms — a category TikTok would most likely fall into — to provide data to external researchers so they can study the societal impacts of services. It’s not hard to imagine that provision leading to some head-turning (independent) research into the mental health impacts of attention-grabbing services. So the prospect is platforms’ own data could end up translating into negative PR for their services — i.e. if they’re shown to be failing to create a safe environment for users.

Ahead of that oversight regime coming in, platforms have increased incentive to up their outreach to civil society in Europe so they’re in a better position to skate to where the puck is headed.

 

Humaans, a London-based HR startup, has raised $5 million in seed funding to accelerate the development of its employee on-boarding and management platform. Backing the round is Y Combinator, Mattias Ljungman’s Moonfire, Frontline Ventures and former head of Stripe Issuing, Lachy Groom.

A number of other investors, made up of seasoned entrepreneurs and startup operators, also participated. They include LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner (via Next Play Ventures), Stripe COO Claire Johnson, Figma CEO Dylan Field, Intercom co-founder Des Traynor, former Workday CTO David Clarke, former Benchmark GP Scott Belsky, Notion COO Akshay Kothari, Qubit co-founder Emre Baran, Evervault CEO Shane Curren and Stripe head of security Gerardo Di Giacomo.

Founded by former Qubit employees Giovanni Luperti and Karolis Narkevicius, Humaans came into existence formerly in April 2020 after the pair quit the product agency they had founded together. With a soft launch the previous year while bootstrapping, and with validation from early users, Luperti and Narkevicius decided they had found enough product-market fit to focus on the startup full-time.

“We bootstrapped Humaans by reinvesting capital from the previous businesses we co-founded,” explains CEO Luperti. “After gaining initial commercial traction, we decided to raise capital and brought a number of investors and operators onboard, and joined Y Combinator”.

Pitching itself as a central hub for employee on-boarding and management — or a single source of truth for staffing — Humaans aims to play nicely by integrating with other existing SaaS used across the “HR stack”. This is because scaling companies are increasingly rejecting all-encompassing HR software and using the best modern SaaS offerings for various different functions.

“Companies are frustrated with poorly integrated HR stacks, making processes slow while exposing them to compliance risks,” says Luperti. “This is why the adoption of point solutions is increasing dramatically. Companies are adopting what’s best based on their needs and stage of growth to address their people needs”.

For example, a company may choose an applicant tracking system, a performance management system, contract management software and an employee engagement platform, and so on. “This makes the ‘all-in-one’ model antiquated, creating the opportunity for a solution like Humaans to emerge. We’re building a layer of infrastructure for all employee data”.

This is seeing Humaans attempt to bring together the full HR stack and automate processes like on-boarding, off-boarding and compensation management with fast workflows that can be set up not dissimilar to an IFTTT or Zapier-style type of interaction model.

“If you ask around, most employees dislike their HR software,” says Luperti. “HR tools have historically been clunky, slow and not good at providing a good user experience. Existing players focused more on sales and acquisition than retention through product. But HR buyers today are more sophisticated than ever and have an appetite for best in class. We’re building the Slack of HR… an employee management platform that’s both delightful and very powerful”.

To that end, Humaans says it grew 3x in the past few months and is popular amongst distributed companies, such as Pleo, ChartMogul, Bombinate, HeySummit and Pento.

Adds the Humaans CEO: “There are two segments of existing players: those targeting SMEs, and those working with corporations. Serving the companies in the middle is the opportunity we’re going after”.

Crisp, an Amsterdam-based, online-only supermarket focused on fresh produce, has raised €30 million in a Series B financing led by leading Target Global and joined by Keen Venture Partners and the co-founders of Adyen and Takeaway.com. Crisp has now raised a total of €42.5 million to date. It plans to use the money to expand in the Netherlands, and eventually across Europe.

Crisp says its USP is seasonal products sourced directly from 600+ small and high-quality producers at an affordable price in the Netherlands. Customers order through a smartphone app and deliveries are the next day within a 1-hour time slot. It also uses a 100% electric fleet serving big cities and suburbs, and its model is to have zero food waste.

The European grocery market is currently worth €2 trillion, but access to customers for high-quality, smaller producers is still tricky and blocked by incumbents. Crisp is taking advantage of consumers moving online, and wanting fresher food.

Tom Peeters, CEO and co-founder of Crisp, told my via online interview that “the differentiation on our model is that we offer quality and convenience. So, fish is super fresh fruits and produce is super fresh, etc. We basically stay away from the standard supermarket proposition that everything is always there, and you manage long shelf life. We’d rather build a very short chain sourcing directly at the source and bringing it in a very convenient way to you.”

He said it’s not a 15 minute delivery but the next day in order to ensure freshness. “The typical customer is a young family. An average order is 45 products and rather than offering all the brands, we on-boarded the long-tail of food producers in our digital marketplace, so we sourced from over 600 sources of food.”

He said: “Food in Holland is 40 billion euros, in Germany it is 200 billion. I think Europe combined it’s over two or 3 trillion. So that means basically we don’t need to spread thin over many countries in order to build a healthy business, not just healthy products, so we make money on every customer order.”

Founded in 2018, by serial entrepreneurs Tom Peeters, Michiel Roodenburg and Eric Klaassen Crisp claims to be now one of the fastest-growing supermarkets in the Netherlands, with a seven-fold in sales in 2020 and more than 85% of sales coming from repeat customers, it says.

Bao-Y van Cong, Investment Director at Target Global, headquartered in Berlin, said: “Crisp is building a world-class technology platform that is of value to both consumers and producers. The way we buy our food has not changed a lot since the 1950’s, creating inefficiencies in quality, affordability, and convenience. Crisp reflects the changing relationship that consumers today have with food: The European market for grocery shopping is starting to move online fast, super-accelerated by the pandemic. At the same time, we see a massive surge in demand for fresh and transparently sourced food.”