Year: 2021

Shared micromobility operator Veo has raised $16 million in new funding as the company ramps up its expansion plans in the United States. The Series A funding round, which follows permit awards in Santa Monica, San Diego and New York, will be used to expand Veo’s fleet and focus on developing city and community partnerships.

Veo, which was founded in 2017, has sought venture funding a bit later in the game than other micromobility companies. Veo’s co-founder and CEO Candice Xie has been vocal about creating a sustainable business model that’s profitable on its own before seeking external funding, which the company says it’s done. But as Veo expands its footprint, it needs the additional funds to purchase the vehicles necessary to deploy in new markets, according to the company. 

“We want to make sure we have very high-quality vehicles as well because vehicle depreciation cost is a huge factor in unit economics, and we have a very good control of that,” Edwin Tan, co-founder and president of Veo, told TechCrunch. “By leveraging our design and supply chain, we want to show that we can continue to develop high quality, long-lasting vehicles.”

The company, which has always designed and manufactured its own electric scooters and bikes rather than partnering with a manufacturer, recently rolled out its newest Astro 4, which Tan said can last about three years. Veo’s previous vehicle generation can last two years.

New features on the vehicle can help greatly reduce operational costs and help users get more for their money, said Tan. The Astro 4 is the first shared e-scooter with turn signals, according to Veo. It will also feature a new lighting feature that asks passerby to “Please pick me up” on the bottom of the board if knocked over — an effort to alert people with disabilities to the presence of the scooter while solving the public nuisance problem. A brighter headlight, decklight and taillight have also been added along with and other features like improved suspension and IoT will be helpful in keeping costs down, Tan said.

“We are expanding out R&D budget,” said Tan. “We want to make sure we can create new technology or a new product that can solve for new form factors. We believe this industry is still very early, and think we can create more form factors and really change how people move around with different vehicles. That unmet demand is really important for us.”

Veo averages one new vehicle each year, according to Tan. The company plans to launch a new vehicle in the first quarter of 2022 that will solve for the “winter problem” and overcome the seasonality of rides. The company said it already has a solution for that but isn’t ready to share more details. 

Veo also wants to address the needs of people who don’t feel safe or comfortable riding a stand-up kick scooter or a bike. Veo’s Cosmo model, which is a sit-down scooter design, is an example of the company’s attempt to meet that demand. Veo plans to offer additional models that are accessible to a wider range of people, a move that aligns with requests from cities. 

The funding round was led by Autotech Ventures, with participation from UP Partners, FJ Labs and Interplay Ventures.

Endgame, enabling software companies to turn customer observations into go-to-market strategies, announced Tuesday it raised a total of $17 million in back-to-back seed and Series A funding rounds.

The $12.25 million Series A was led by Menlo Ventures, while the $5 million seed round was led by Upfront Ventures. Also participating in the round are a group of investors including Todd and Rahul’s Fund, Liquid 2 Ventures and Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta.

Los Angeles-based Endgame was founded in 2020 and provides a self-service look at what’s happening in a software trial so that a sales team can prioritize accounts based on user behavior signals and act on them faster without having to be a data scientist or engineer.

Company CEO Alex Bilmes told TechCrunch that the concepts of product-led sales and product-led growth have taken over the sale of software. Today’s customers sign up for a trial, and if they like it, they invite their friends to try it.

However, at a certain point, some sales pressure is needed to close the deal. That’s where Endgame comes in: It shows who is doing what, and what features are being used — data that is typically opaque to sales and revenue teams.

Traditional customer relationship management systems are designed to be user-driven, meaning the sales rep is responsible for adding notes. It’s simpler if a rep only has a few accounts, but across tens of millions of users, Endgame analyzes the data and identifies which accounts are most likely to convert, who are the users to engage, what makes a good customer and how to take action with the right people.

Endgame is not competing against other companies so much as in-house developers that are cobbling a bunch of apps together in efforts to create a system that works for them, Bilmes said.

“Most of this is solved with do-it-yourself,” he added. “I have built Endgame a number of times at other companies using databases and other piece-meals to put together something so I could mash data from lots of places and build subscriptive views for revenue teams. We compete with those data scientists and internal teams stitching together horizontal tools.”

Endgame is pre-revenue and is already catering to a group of beta customers like Figma, Loom, Airtable, Clubhouse, Mode, Retool and Algolia that are looking for a dedicated software platform to capture product-led value.

Bilmes said the customer relationship management market, both huge and fast-growing at 35% annually, is expected to reach $114 billion by 2027. To meet demand, he intends to use the new funds to continue hiring aggressively. He has already tripled the size of the team to nine in the past few months, and expects to double that in the coming year. In addition, funds will go toward R&D and to further define the product-led sales landscape.

Growth over the next year will be customer-focused as Endgame works to get into the hands of the right customers and making it as accessible as possible for people to begin doing product-led motions.

“Our efforts are product-focused,” Bilmes said. “We’ve seen more demand than we can possibly hope to fill given the problem is so real for so many.”

As part of the investment, Upfront Ventures Partner Kara Nortman and Menlo Ventures Partner Naomi Ionita will join Endgame’s board of directors. Sandhya Hegde, partner at Unusual Ventures, which also participated in both rounds, joins as a board observer to create an all-women investor board.

When Endgame was raising its seed fund, it wanted to work with Nortman, who has expertise in applying consumer concepts to enterprise, Bilmes said. When it came to the Series A, Bilmes said he felt Ionita was the perfect partner due to her similar background to Bilmes and expertise in teaching salespeople how to engage.

Ionita told TechCrunch she learned about Endgame from Nortman, with whom she has invested in other startups. The company understands the pain point and is also providing something self-serve that gives the “why and how.”

“This intelligence doesn’t exist, and I know that because I lived it — building in-house or seeing companies flying blind,” she added. “Alex just gets this, and I see Endgame being the system of record and intelligence for bridging self-serve. They will be the final bridge that needs to exist between product teams and product-facing sales reps for which accounts to address and why.”

 

For many of us, going to work these days no longer means going into a specific office like it used to; and today one of the startups that’s built a platform to help cater for that new, bigger world of employment — wherever talent might be — is announcing a major round of funding on the back of strong demand for its tools.

Remote, which provides tools to manage onboarding, payroll, benefits and other services for tech and other knowledge workers located in remote countries — be they contractors or full-time employees — has raised $150 million. Job van der Voort, the Dutch-based CEO and co-founder of New York-based Remote, confirmed in an interview that funding values Remote at over $1 billion.

Accel is leading this Series B, with participation also from previous investors Sequoia, Index Ventures, Two Sigma, General Catalyst and Day One Ventures.

The funding will be used in a couple of areas. First and foremost, it will go towards expanding its business to more markets. The startup has been built from the ground up in a fully-integrated way, and in contrast to a number of others that it competes with in providing Employer of Record services, Remote fully owns all of its infrastructure. It now provides its HR services, as fully-operational legal entities, for 50 countries has a target of growing that to 80 by the end of this year. The platform is also set to be enhanced with more tools around areas like benefits, equity incentive planning, visa and immigration support and employee relocation.

“We are doubling down on our approach,” Van der Voort said. “We try to fully own the entire stack: entity, operations, experts in house, payroll, benefits and visa and immigration — all of the items that come up most often. We want to to build infrastructure products, foundational products because those have a higher level of quality and ultimately a lower price.”

In addition, Remote will be using the funding to continue building more tools and partnerships to integrate with other providers of services in what is a very fragmented human resources market. Two of these are being announced today to coincide with the funding news: Remote has launched a Global Employee API that HR platforms that focus on domestic payroll can integrate to provide their own international offering powered by Remote. HR platform Rippling (Parker Conrad’s latest act) is one of its first customers. And Remote is also getting cosier with other parts of the HR chain of services: applicant tracking system Greenhouse now integrating with it to help with the onboarding process for new hires.

$150 million at a $1 billion+ valuation is a very, very sizable Series B, even by today’s flush-market standards, but it comes after a bumper year for the company, and in particular since November last year when it raised a Series A of $35 million. In the last nine months, customer numbers have grown seven-fold, with users on the platform increasing 10 times. Most interestingly, perhaps, is that Remote’s revenues — it’s packages start at $149 per month but go up from there — have increased by a much bigger amount: 65x, the company said. That basically points to the fact that engagement from those users — how much they are leaning on Remote’s tech — has skyrocketed.

Although there are a lot of competitors in the same space as Remote — they include a number of more local players alongside a pretty big range of startups like Oyster (which announced $50 million in funding in June), Deel, which is now valued at $1.25 billion; Turing; Papaya Global (now also valued at over $1 billion); and many more — the opportunity they are collectively tackling is a massive one that, if anything, appears to be growing.

Hiring internationally has always been a costly, time-consuming and organizationally-challenged endeavor, so much so that many companies have opted not to do it at all, or to reserve it for very unique cases. That paradigm has drastically shifted in recent years, however.

Even before Covid-19 hit, there was a shortage of talent, resulting in a competitive struggle for good people, in company’s home markets, which encouraged companies to look further afield when hiring. Then, once looking further afield, those employers had to give consideration to employing those people remotely — that is, letting them work from afar — because the process of relocating them had also become more expensive and harder to work through.

Then Covid-19 happened, and everyone, including people working in a company’s HQ, started to work remotely, changing the goalposts yet again on what is expected by workers, and what organizations are willing to consider when bringing a new person on board, or managing someone it already knows, just from a much farther distance.

While a lot of that has played out in the idea of relocating to different cities in the same country — Miami and Austin getting a big wave of Silicon Valley “expats” being two examples of that — it seems just a short leap to consider that now that sourcing and managing is taking on a much more international provide. A lot of new hires, as well as existing employees who are possibly not from the US to begin with, or simply want to see another part of the world, are now also a part of the mix. That is where companies like Remote are coming in and lowering the barriers to entry by making it as easy to hire and manage a person abroad as it is in your own city.

“Remote is at the center of a profound shift in the way that companies hire,” said Miles Clements, a partner at Accel, in a statement. “Their new Global Employee API opens up access to Remote’s robust global employment infrastructure and knowledge map, and will help any HR provider expand internationally at a speed impossible before. Remote’s future vision as a financial services provider will consolidate complicated processes into one trusted platform, and we’re excited to partner with the global leader in the quickly emerging category of remote work.”

And it’s interesting to see it now partnering with the likes of Rippling. It was a no-brainer that as the latter company matured and grew, that it would have to consider how to handle the international component. Using an API from Remote is an example of how the model that has played out in communications (led by companies like Twilio and Sinch) and fintech (hello, Stripe), also has an analogue in HR, with Remote taking the charge on that.

And to be clear, for now Remote has no plans to build a product that it would sell directly to individuals.

“Individuals are reaching out to us, saying, ‘I found this job and can you help me and make sure I get paid?’ That’s been interesting,” Van der Voort said. “We thought about [building a product for them] but we have so much to do with employers first.” One thing that’s heartening in Remote’s approach is that it wouldn’t want to provide this service unless it could completely follow through on it, which in the case of an individual would mean “vetting every major employer,” he said, which is too big a task for it right now.

In the meantime, Remote itself has walked the walk when it comes to remote working. Originally co-founded by two European transplants to San Francisco, the pair had first-hand experience of the paradoxical pains and opportunities of being in an organization that uses remote workforces.

Van der Voort had been the VP of product for GitLab, which he scaled from 5 to 450 employees working remotely (it’s now a customer of Remote’s); and before co-founding Remote CTO Marcelo Lebre had been VP of engineering for Unbabel — another startup focused on reducing international barriers, this time between how companies and global customers communicate.

Today, not only is the CEO based out of Amsterdam in The Netherlands and CTO in Lisbon, Portugal, but New York-based Remote itself has grown to 220 from 50 employees, and this wider group has also been working remotely across 47 countries since November 2020.

“The world is looking very different today,” Van der Voort said. “The biggest change for us has been the size of the organization. We’ve gone from 50 to more than 200 employees, and I haven’t met any of them! We have tried to follow our values of bringing opportunity everywhere so we hire everywhere as we solve that for our customers, too.”

France has hit Google with a fine of half a billion euros after finding major breaches in how it negotiated with publishers to remunerate them for reuse of their content — as is required under a pan-EU reform of digital copyright law which extended neighbouring rights to news snippets.

The size of the fine is notable as it’s over half of the entire $1BN news licensing pot that Google announced last October — when it said it would be paying news publishers “to create and curate high-quality content” to appear on its platforms.

At the time, the move that looked intended to shrink Google’s exposure to legal mandates to pay publishers for content reuse by pushing them to accept commercial terms which give it broad rights to ‘showcase’ their content.

France’s watchdog has now called out — and sanctioned — the practice.

The half a billion euro penalty is also notable for being considerably more than Google had already agreed to pay French publishers, according to Reuters — which reported, back in February, that the tech giant had inked a deal with a group of 121 publishers to pay them just $76M over three years.

France’s competition authority said today that it’s applying the sanction of €500 million ($592M) against the tech giant for failing to comply with a number of injunctions related to its earlier, April 2020 decision — when the watchdog ordered Google to negotiate in good faith with publishers to remunerate them for displaying their protected content.

Initially, Google sought to evade the neighbouring news right by stopping displaying snippets of content alongside links it showed in Google News in France. But the watchdog found that was likely to be an abuse of its dominant position — and ordered Google to stop circumventing the law and negotiate with publishers to pay for the reuse in good faith.

The Autorité de la Concurrence is not happy with how Google has gone about this, though.

A number of publishers complained to it that the negotiations were not carried out in good faith and that Google did not provide them with key information necessary to inform payments.

The Syndicate of magazine press publishers (SEPM), the Alliance de Presse d’Information Générale (APIG) and Agence France Presse (AFP) made complaints in August/September 2020 — kicking off the investigation by the watchdog and today’s announcement of a major penalty.

Further fines — of up to €900,000 per day — could be headed Google’s way if it continues to breach the watchdog’s injunctions and fails to supply publishers with all the required information within a new two-month deadline.

In a press release detailing its investigation, the Autorité said Google sought to unilaterally impose its global news licensing product, aka ‘Showcase’, under a partnership the tech giant calls Publisher Curated News — in negotiations with publishers — pushing for the legal neighbouring right to be incorporated as “an ancillary component with no separate financial valuation”.

Publishers requests to break out copyright remuneration negotiations were denied, per the watchdog’s investigation.

It also found Google “unjustifiably” reduced the scope of negotiations with regard to the scope of income derived from the display of protected news content — with Google telling publishers that only advertising income from Google Search pages posting news content should be taken into account in determining the level of remuneration due.

The authority found this exclusion of income from other Google services and all indirect income related to this content to be in breach of the copyright law and its earlier compliance order.

Google also “deliberately circumscribed” the scope of the law on neighboring rights by excluding titles that do not have a Political and General Information certificate — which the watchdog couched as a “bad faith” interpretation of the code on intellectual property.

It also found the tech giant sought to exclude press agencies from renumeration related to their content when used by third party publishers — highlighting that as another breach of its April 2020 decision, by further noting: “The French legislator has been very explicit on the need to include press agencies.”

In another finding, it said Google had only provided publishers with “partial” and “insufficient” information for a “transparency assessment of renumeration due”; and further accused the tech giant of delaying until just a few days before the injunction deadline to provide it — so of being “late” too.

The authority’s investigation highlights compliance problems with another injunction — related to an obligation of neutrality in how protected content is presented on Google’s platforms — with the watchdog writing on that: “The strategy put in place by Google has thus strongly encouraged publishers to accept the contractual conditions of the Showcase service and to renounce negotiations relating specifically to the current uses of protected content, which was the subject of the Injunctions, under penalty of seeing their exposure and their remuneration degraded compared to their competitors who would have accepted the proposed terms. Google cannot therefore claim to have taken the necessary measures to prevent its negotiations from affecting the presentation of protected content in its services.”

Another injunction sought to prevent Google from seeking to leverage its dominance by offsetting remunerations paid to publishers for the neighbouring rights.

On this the watchdog also took issue with its approach — noting that its Showcase product requires publishers to make not just snippets of their content available for display on Google’s platforms but “large extracts” and even whole articles.

It also found that Google linked participation in the Showcase program to subscription to another service called Subscribe with Google (SwG) — enabling it to link negotiation on neighboring rights with the subscription of new services that could financially benefit its business.

Under a subhead which denounces what it found as “extremely serious practices”, the authority goes on to accuse Google of “a deliberate, elaborate and systematic strategy of non-compliance” — and of continuing an already years-long “opposition strategy” to the principle of neighbouring rights; and then, after they’d been baked into EU and French law, seeking to “minimize the concrete scope of those rights as much as possible”.

Google has, the authority asserts, sought to use a global strategy to close down publishers’ ability to negotiate for remuneration for their content reuse at a national level — using its Showcase product as a cloak for “avoiding or limiting as much as possible” payments to publishers; and, simultaneously, seeking to use negotiations on neighboring rights as an opportunity to obtain access to new content by press publishers that could allow it to collect additional income, such as from subscriptions to press titles.

“The sanction of 500 million euros takes into account the exceptional seriousness of the breaches observed and that the behavior of Google has further delayed the proper application of the law on neighboring rights, which aimed to better take into account the value of content from publishers and news agencies included on the platforms. The Authority will be extremely vigilant about the correct application of its decision, as non-execution can now lead to periodic penalty payments,” added the watchdog’s president, Isabelle de Silva, in a statement (which we’ve translated from French).

The half a billion euro fine and the warning to Google that its practices will attract daily fines if it persists in ignoring the injunctions put the tech giant on notice that the detail of commercial deals won’t be allowed to fly under the radar in France.

Any more attempts to shape a self-serving version of ‘compliance’ are likely to attract further sanction from the watchdog — which also recently applied a number of interoperability requirements on Google’s ad business (and slapped it with a $268M fine), also acting on complaints from publishers.

While anything Google agrees to in France on the neighbouring rights issue is likely to set the bar for what it can achieve with commercial deals elsewhere — at least in other EU markets, where the copyright extension also applies (once it’s been transposed into a Member State’s national law).

In a statement responding to the authority’s sanction, Google expressed disappointment with the outcome of the investigation — claiming to have acted in good faith throughout negotiations with publishers:

“We are very disappointed with this decision — we have acted in good faith throughout the entire process. The fine ignores our efforts to reach an agreement, and the reality of how news works on our platforms. To date, Google is the only company to have announced agreements on neighbouring rights. We are also about to finalize an agreement with AFP that includes a global licensing agreement, as well as the remuneration of their neighbouring rights for their press publications.”

The tech giant went on to suggest that the authority’s decision is “primarily” related to negotiations in France which took place between May and September 2020, further claiming it has continued to engage with publishers and press agencies since then to find “solutions”.

By way of example it pointed to a January 2021 framework agreement inked with the Alliance de la Presse d’Information Générale — which it claims covers every IPG title (Information de Presse Générale) in a “transparent and non-discriminatory way”. It also pointed to agreements it has inked with other publications in the market, including Le Monde, Courrier International, L’Obs, Le Figaro, Libération, and L’Express.

Google also reiterated its confident it can sign a global licensing agreement with Agence France Presse — which it said it also wants to include remuneration of neighbouring rights for press publications from the agency.

“Our objective remains the same: We want to turn the page with a definitive agreement,” it added, saying it would take the French Competition Authority’s “feedback into consideration and adapt our offers” and that: “We are already engaging with press publishers and agencies beyond IPG, by covering publications that are recognised by the CPPAP as ‘online press services’, and we reiterate our offer to have an independent third party in a position to evaluate our offers and allow us to base our discussions on facts.”

Other major fines for Google in France in recent years include the aforementioned $268M for adtech abuses last month; $120 for dropping tracking cookies without consent back in December; $166M in December 2019 for opaque and inconsistent ad rules; and $57M for privacy violations in January 2019.

Beyond the EU, Australia recently passed a law which requires tech giants, Google and Facebook, to enter mandatory arbitration with publishers for reuse of their content if they fail to agree commercial terms on their own.

Its law has attracted considerable attention worldwide as legislators grapple with how to rein in powerful tech platforms and ensure the sustainability of traditional news businesses whose revenues have been hit by the Internet-driven shift to digital publishing.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has, for example, described Australia’s backstop of mandatory arbitration if commercial negotiations fail as a “sensible” approach — at at time when the government is working on shaping an ex ante regulation regime to enable competition authorities to pro-actively tackle abuses by platforms with strategic market power.

Ahead of Australia’s law being passed, Google had warned that it might have to close its services in the country if legislators went ahead and also suggested the quality could degrade or that it may have to start to charge for products. In the event, it did not shut up shop down under.

The tech giant was also an active lobbyist against the EU’s plan to extend digital copyright to cover snippets of news content — and, as recently as 2019, it was vowing never to pay for news.

A few years later it announced the $1BN pot to pay publishers to licence content. But Google’s eventual bill for its ad business piggybacking upon others’ journalism may be rather larger than that.

Moving services giant Updater is bringing on the team from Dolly as the New York company looks to expand its scope of offerings with the acquisition of the on-demand startup known for helping consumers execute small-scale moves.

Dolly connects users in need of moving a large item like a piece of furniture with a contractor ready to lend a hand. Like competing services such as Lugg, the app has been a popular solution for picking up items from peer-to-peer marketplaces like Craigslist. Dolly boasts a partnership with Facebook Marketplace that has allowed its users to coordinate picking up items with the service, available in 45 major cities across the US, according to their website.

In addition to its user-facing service, Dolly has also built a major business partnering with retailers directly allowing them to tap into their mover network and coordinate same-day delivery for customers. Dolly’s retail partners include companies like Costco, Lowe’s and The Container Store.

A price tag for the deal wasn’t disclosed and couldn’t be learned. Dolly raised $17.2 million over several rounds, including a $7.5 million Series B in May of 2019. The startup’s backers include Maveron, Hyde Park Venture Partners and Version One Ventures.

As part of the acquisition, Dolly will be living on an independent, wholly-owned subsidiary of Updater.

The SoftBank-backed Updater is an “invite-only” service focused on building a more premium end-to-end moving experience. The team has partnered with a number of major brokerage firms whose customers are given the option to use Updater’s services to coordinate their move, pairing them with moving companies who use Updater’s MoveHQ software platform. Today, a quarter of US household moves are facilitated using one of Updater’s products, the company says.

The firm has raised nearly $200 million since its founding in 2010. Dolly’s acquisition will allow Updater to expand their services to customers that are “conducting a small move or don’t want to book a full-service moving company,” CEO David Greenberg tells TechCrunch. “We want to be the go-to place for Americans to conquer their move.”

United Arab Emirates-based shared micromobility operator Fenix is expanding the use of its electric scooters and back-end logistics to not only move people, but also to move goods. On Tuesday, the company announced the launch of a 10-minute fresh grocery delivery service on Reem Island, a dense, mixed-use development off the coast of Abu Dhabi. 

Fenix’s new service, F10, will utilize available vehicles from the operator’s normal shared fleet for deliveries. Delivery riders will also be considered shared resources with Fenix’s e-scooter service, taking turns between making fast deliveries and swapping batteries. The company is building a single integrated platform to manage the fleets and services.

The shared e-scooter business is still new and has not yet been incredibly profitable for existing operators due in large part to the low life expectancy of the vehicles and the cost of paying workers to swap batteries. Fenix’s expanded business model is a novel way to make the most out of the sunk cost of its hardware and employee base while also exploring a market that is expected to grow by nearly $632 billion over the next three years, according to market research and advisory company Technavio.

Logistically speaking, Fenix might be onto something. Its “dark stores,” or compact, private retail facilities, are scattered around Reem Island in optimized locations, each with a large catchment area that falls within a narrow delivery radius, according to Jaideep Dhanoa, co-founder and CEO of Fenix. Dhanoa did not reveal how many dark stores the company has placed throughout the island.  

“For Fenix, the dark store is also a distributed charging center for our swappable battery e-scooter operations, which allows us to share the real estate costs between the two businesses and also increase the productivity of our e-scooter operations via more distributed charging locations,” said Dhanoa.

Dhanoa said Fenix’s full-time employees, who are all company stakeholders, are trained to accept, pick and pack items for delivery in the dark stores within two minutes before relaying the goods to a rider who has a mere eight minutes to make it to the customer. Not a stressful situation at all! It wouldn’t be surprising to see Fenix’s next funding round focus on R&D for robots that will gather groceries faster and without the pressure of human error.

Such quick delivery couldn’t be done without urban density, which is largely what drew Fenix to Reem Island. The small island, which is one of the only free zones in the city where foreign nationals can buy property, holds a residential population of about 100,000 people. Dhanoa said the island also presents multiple use cases in the form of residential and commercial towers and shopping malls. 

“Wherever there is a dense population, there will be a market for F10,” said Dhanoa. 

The new business expansion was in part funded by an undisclosed round that was recently raised from existing investors, like Maniv Mobility, the Israeli venture firm that also funded electric mobility company Revel and invested $3.8 million in Fenix’s seed round last November. (Maniv Mobility’s investment in Fenix was the first time an Israeli firm invested in a business from the UAE, a sign that companies are making good on the Abraham Accords’ promise to normalize relations between the two countries.) But Dhanoa told TechCrunch that the costs of launching the F10 delivery service didn’t require deep pockets, “given the unique synergies with our existing micromobiltiy business.”

The F10 app can be downloaded in the Google Play Store and the iOS App Store. To kick things off, Fenix is offering new users their first order up to AED 50 (~$14 USD) for free.

The pandemic’s effect on the global app market has not been hard to miss. In the first quarter and first half of this year, consumer spending in mobile apps hit new records at $32 billion and $64.9 billion, respectively.

In Africa, it can be tough to call out exact numbers on consumer spending because the continent gets hardly a mention in global app market reports. Yet, other metrics are worth looking at, and a new report from AppsFlyer in collaboration with Google has some important insights into how the African app market has fared since the pandemic broke out last year.

The report tracked mobile app activities across three of Africa’s largest app markets (Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa) between Q1 2020 and Q1 2021.

From the first half of 2020 to the first half of 2021, the African mobile app industry (which is predominantly Android) increased by 41% in overall installs. This was analyzed from 6,000 apps and 2 billion installs in the three markets. Nigeria registered the highest growth, with a 43% rise; South Africa’s market increased by 37% and Kenya increased 29%.

Lockdown numbers

On March 22, 2020, Rwanda imposed Africa’s first lockdown. Subsequently, other countries followed; (those in the report) Kenya (March 25), South Africa (March 27), and Nigeria (March 30).

As more people spent time at home from Q2 2020, app installs increased by 20% across the three countries. South Africans were the quickest to take to their phones as the lockdowns hit with installs increasing by 17% from the previous quarter.

On the other hand, Nigerians and Kenyans recorded a 2% and 9% increase, respectively. The report attributes the disparity to the varying levels of restrictions each country faced; South Africa experienced the strictest and most frequent.

Per the report, gaming apps showed strong performance between Q1 and Q2 2020. The segment experienced a 50% growth compared to an 8% increase in nongaming apps pulled. It followed a global trend where gaming apps surged to a record high in Q2 2020, at 14 billion downloads globally.

In-app purchasing revenue and almost year-on-year growth

According to AppsFlyer, the biggest trend it noticed was in in-app purchasing revenue. In Q3 2020, in-app purchasing revenue numbers grew with a staggering 136% increase compared to Q2 2020, and accounted for 33% of 2020’s total revenue, “highlighting just how much African consumers were spending within apps, from retail purchases to gaming upgrades.”

In-app purchasing revenue among South African consumers increased by 213%, while Nigeria and Kenyan consumers recorded 141% and 74% increases, respectively.

On the advertising front and on an almost year-on-year basis, in-app advertising revenue also increased significantly as Africans were glued to their smartphones more than ever. Per the report, in-app advertising revenue increased 167% between Q2 2020 to Q1 2021.

For gaming and non-gaming apps, which was highlighted between the first two quarters, they both increased by 44% and 40% respectively in Q1 2021 compared to Q2 2020.

Fintech and super apps

In the last five years, fintech has dominated VC investments in African startups. It’s a no brainer why there is so much affinity for the sector. Fintechs create so much value for Africa’s mobile-first population, with large sections of unbanked, underbanked and banked people. This value is why all but one of the continent’s billion-dollar startups are fintech.

African fintechs have grown by 89.4% between 2017 and 2021, according to a Disrupt Africa report. Now, there are more than 570 startups on the continent. Many fintechs are mobile-based, therefore reflecting the number of fintech apps Africans use each day. Consumers in South Africa and Nigeria saw year-on-year growth in finance app installs by 116% and 60%, respectively.

AppsFlyer says that like fintech apps, super apps are on the rise as well. These “all-in-one” apps offer users a range of functions such as banking, messaging, shopping and ride-hailing. The report says their rise, partly due to device limitations on the continent, owes much to the same conditions that have led to a surge in fintech apps: systemic underbanking.

“Super apps remove some of the barriers that these users face, as well as providing a level of customer insight and experience that traditional banks cannot,” the report said.

Daniel Junowicz, RVP EMEA & Strategic Projects for AppsFlyer, commenting on the trends highlighted in the report said, “…The mobile app space in Africa is thriving despite the turmoil of last year. Installs are growing, and consumers are spending more money than ever before, highlighting just how important mobile can be for businesses when it comes to driving revenue.”

As financial crime has become significantly more sophisticated, so too have the tools that are used to combat it. Now, Quantexa — one of the more interesting startups that has been building AI-based solutions to help detect and stop money laundering, fraud, and other illicit activity — has raised a growth round of $153 million, both to continue expanding that business in financial services and to bring its tools into a wider context, so to speak: linking up the dots around all customer and other data.

“We’ve diversified outside of financial services and working with government, healthcare, telcos and insurance,” Vishal Marria, its founder and CEO, said in an interview. “That has been substantial. Given the whole journey that the market’s gone through in contextual decision intelligence as part of bigger digital transformation, was inevitable.”

The Series D values the London-based startup between $800 million and $900 million on the heels of Quantexa growing its subscriptions revenues 108% in the last year.

Warburg Pincus led the round, with existing backers Dawn Capital, AlbionVC, Evolution Equity Partners (a specialist cybersecurity VC), HSBC, ABN AMRO Ventures and British Patient Capital also participating. The valuation is a significant hike up for Quantexa, which was valued between $200 million and $300 million in its Series C last July. It has now raised over $240 million to date.

Quantexa got its start out of a gap in the market that Marria identified when he was working as a director at Ernst & Young tasked with helping its clients with money laundering and other fraudulent activity. As he saw it, there were no truly useful systems in the market that efficiently tapped the world of data available to companies — matching up and parsing both their internal information as well as external, publicly available data — to get more meaningful insights into potential fraud, money laundering and other illegal activities quickly and accurately.

Quantexa’s machine learning system approaches that challenge as a classic big data problem — too much data for a humans to parse on their own, but small work for AI algorithms processing huge amounts of that data for specific ends.

Its so-called “Contextual Decision Intelligence” models (the name Quantexa is meant to evoke “quantum” and “context”) were built initially specifically to address this for financial services, with AI tools for assessing risk and compliance and identifying financial criminal activity, leveraging relationships that Quantexa has with partners like Accenture, Deloitte, Microsoft and Google to help fill in more data gaps.

The company says its software — and this, not the data, is what is sold to companies to use over their own datasets — has handled up to 60 billion records in a single engagement. It then presents insights in the form of easily digestible graphs and other formats so that users can better understand the relationships between different entities and so on.

Today, financial services companies still make up about 60% of the company’s business, Marria said, with 7 of the top 10 UK and Australian banks and 6 of the top 14 financial institutions in North America among its customers. (The list includes its strategic backer HSBC, as well as Standard Chartered Bank and Danske Bank.)

But alongside those — spurred by a huge shift in the market to relying significantly more on wider data sets, to businesses updating their systems in recent years, and the fact that, in the last year, online activity has in many cases become the “only” activity — Quantexa has expanded more significantly into other sectors.

“The Financial crisis [of 2007] was a tipping point in terms of how financial services companies became more proactive, and I’d say that the pandemic has been a turning point around other sectors like healthcare in how to become more proactive,” Marria said. “To do that you need more data and insights.”

So in the last year in particular, Quantexa has expanded to include other verticals facing financial crime, such as healthcare, insurance, government (for example in tax compliance), and telecoms/communications, but in addition to that, it has continued to diversify what it does to cover more use cases, such as building more complete customer profiles that can be used for KYC (know your customer) compliance or to serve them with more tailored products. Working with government, it’s also seeing its software getting applied to other areas of illicit activity, such as tracking and identifying human trafficking.

In all, Quantexa has “thousands” of customers in 70 markets. Quantexa cites figures from IDC that estimate the market for such services — both financial crime and more general KYC services — is worth about $114 billion annually, so there is still a lot more to play for.

“Quantexa’s proprietary technology enables clients to create single views of individuals and entities, visualized through graph network analytics and scaled with the most advanced AI technology,” said Adarsh Sarma, MD and co-head of Europe at Warburg Pincus, in a statement. “This capability has already revolutionized the way KYC, AML and fraud processes are run by some of the world’s largest financial institutions and governments, addressing a significant gap in an increasingly important part of the industry. The company’s impressive growth to date is a reflection of its invaluable value proposition in a massive total available market, as well as its continued expansion across new sectors and geographies.”

Interestingly, Marria admitted to me that the company has been approached by big tech companies and others that work with them as an acquisition target — no real surprises there — but longer term, he would like Quantexa to consider how it continues to grow on its own, with an independent future very much in his distant sights.

“Sure, an acquisition to the likes of a big tech company absolutely could happen, but I am gearing this up for an IPO,” he said.

Those who’ve followed Nintendo with any sort of frequency over the years know the gaming giant has a tendency to be extremely protective with its IP. Ultimately, it’s probably for the best that the market wasn’t flooded with cheap Mario knickknacks the way it easily could have been.

In recent years, however, the company has seemingly loosened its approach, more readily embracing brand partnerships in ways it has shunned in the past. Heck, we’ve even gotten a bunch of mobile games and a theme park out of the deal.

Today, it takes the wraps off of one of the more surprising brand partnerships in recent memory, in a deal with Swiss watch company TAG Heuer, which makes very nice — and extremely expensive — timepieces. The “long-term collaboration” is kicking off with a limited-edition (2,000 units) Mario smartwatch that will set you back $2,150.

Clearly there’s a bit of a disconnect between the pricing on the TAG Heuer Connected and the sort of accessibility the company offers with hardware like the Switch. In fact, you can buy six of the high-end new OLED Switches for the price of a single Mario-branded smartwatch — or, for that matter, five Apple Watch Series 6s.

I will give it this — it’s a pretty sweet-looking watch. And, given the barrier of entry, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be the only person you know who owns one (forget for a moment that, unlike expensive analog watches, smartwatches aren’t designed to last forever). The hook here are little Mario animations that pop up throughout the day as you hit your step count and meet other goals. It’s fun and something that would play really well on a fitness watch for kids (for, one imagines, a fraction of the price).

The watch is, effectively, a redesigned version of the TAG Heuer Connected, a $2,000 Wear OS device that launched last April. The timepiece got high marks for design quality — as one would expect from the company. This version adds touches like a Mario “M” on the dial, red accents throughout and a matching red rubber strap (along with a black leather version).

The case measures 45mm in diameter and the watch sports a 430 mAh battery the company says should get you between six and 20 hours of life, depending on usage. That’s due in part to the inclusion of GPS and a heart rate monitor.

It’s available starting July 15.

It’s clear that there is an enormous and growing appetite amongst consumers to switch to products and services which address some of the biggest issues of our era, whether it be climate change or problems with society. So we’ve seen the rise of ethical investing apps, or ways to reduce our carbon footprint, or shop more ethically. so it follows that VC should come up with funds to invest in these consumer spaces.

That’s been the focus of UK-based Eka Ventures ventures since started investing in April 2020, prior to today’s announcement of the fund’s closing.

It’s now reached a final close on its $95m (£68m) fund, and now claims to be the “largest impact-driven early-stage venture capital fund focused on the UK” although TechCrunch was unable to verify that claim.

Investors in the fund include British Business Bank, BSC, Isomer, Guys and St Thomas Foundation, Planet First Partners, Draper Esprit, Snowball and others. It’s also backed, it says, by 24 entrepreneurs, 12 of whom are founders the Eka partners have previously backed either at fund or individual level.
 
Eka’s aim will be to invest in consumer technology companies focused on sustainable consumption, consumer healthcare, and the ‘inclusive economy’. The fund will focus on the UK at between £500k and £3m per deal.
 
Founders Jon Coker, Camilla Dolan and Andrew Richardson has previous experience in venture where they were involved in VC deals for Gousto, Bloom & Wild, Peak and Elder. Coker was previously with London-focused VC MMC Ventures.
 
Jon Coker, General Partner of Eka told me: “We only invest in companies where we see a clear impact directly connected to the product or service that they sell. So as they grow, the impact grows with the company. We won’t invest in companies where we don’t see that. We’ve said to all of our investors that we will only invest in companies where that is delivered. We’re assessing companies we look for founder alignment, so understanding how the founders are thinking about building their company and the impact that’s delivered through the products and services. Once we’ve gone through that process of alignment and assessment we then measure that impact over time. We will also co invest with investors that don’t have a specific impact focus on their fund.”

I asked him how they expect to measure the impact of their investments: “We use a framework called the Impact management project framework which is trying to create an industry-standard around the measurement of impact in venture. It looks at different dimensions to identify the specific impact that the company you’re investing in is creating. When you’re backing really early-stage companies, you can measure the impact that their product is currently having but you also want to measure progress against projects that will deliver future impact. We have a number of impact-focused LPs in the fund who have done a lot of work with us actually on helping us think about this framework.”
 
Camilla Dolan, general partner of Eka, said: “One of our first investments was Urban Jungle insurance. This is an example where we think about it as being inclusive, as they saw a big opportunity to try and serve the segment that has historically been underserved. They do that through underwriting using behavioral characteristics rather than demographic characteristics, which is how the incumbent industry does it. This excludes a lot of the customers. They’re now launching a social housing-specific product because they had so many testimonials from social housing.”

She added: “When it comes to working with companies, we are clear in our desire for scale, and we will do everything in our power to help the founders we work with achieve their ambitious goals. We are looking for entrepreneurs who set the bar for impact-driven innovation high and who are focused on fundamentally changing or creating a category, in the same way Tesla has single-handedly propelled the electric vehicle industry forward. We set Eka up to back companies with that level of ambition.”
 
Timo Boldt, Founder of Gousto said: “Jon and Camilla are two of the best investors a founder could possibly hope for. They supported Gousto with our Series A back in 2013 and have been cheerleaders ever since. Their new venture, Eka, is tightly aligned with our own philosophy because of their focus on sustainability. Much like them, we believe in the power of people to drive change.”
 
Ken Cooper, Managing Director, Venture Solutions, British Business Bank said: “The Bank’s Enterprise Capital Funds programme is a key tool in helping to develop and maintain an effective venture capital provision in the UK, lowering the barriers to entry for emerging fund managers and for those targeting less well-served areas of the market.  Our commitment [of £36m] to Eka Ventures, will enable them to support new and growing sustainable consumer technology businesses in the UK.”