Year: 2021

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The saying goes that, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” That may or may not be true, but at least one “old dog” is working hard to disprove that saying.

Western Union has been operating in the cross-border payments space for nearly 150 years (yes, you read that right – 150 years) and today, globally, it serves almost 150 million customers – representing senders and receivers.

In recent years, a number of fintech startups have emerged to challenge Western Union in the massive space – from Wise (formerly TransferWise) to Remitly to WorldRemit. But the payments giant seems up for the challenge and has been investing heavily in its digital operations in an attempt to beat fintechs at their own game. 

As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a massive acceleration of the trend of all things moving to digital in nearly all industries. Money transfer was no exception. In 2020, Western Union benefited from that acceleration. Its overall digital money transfer revenues – including WU.com and its digital partnership business – climbed by 38% to more than $850 million, up from over $600 million in 2019. 

Speaking of WU.com, the company’s online transactions site, it saw a nearly 30% gain in annual active customers to 8.6 million. 

This year, the company recently projected that its digital money transfer revenues are on track to exceed $1 billion in 2021 after first-quarter revenue growth of 45% to a new quarterly high of $242 million.

Today, Western Union claims to hold the largest cross-border, digital, peer-to-peer payments network in terms of scale, revenue and channels.

The emphasis on beefing up its digital operations – an initiative that actually began in the second half of 2019, according to the company – and expanding those digital offerings to more countries led to Western Union’s overall business profile shifting over the past 15 months. 

Digital channels in 2020 made up 29% of transactions and 20% of revenue for the company’s consumer-to-consumer (C2C) business, up from 16% and 14%, respectively, in 2019.

Western Union also “open sourced” its platform to third-party financial institutions in a move it says is a “step towards creating an end-to-end payments processing hub.”

TechCrunch talked with Shelly Swanback, Western Union’s president of product and platform, about the company’s digital strategy and what’s next beyond payments for the company (hint: it involves banking products). 

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

TC: Let’s start out by hearing how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted your business, and what kinds of steps you took as a company to adapt?

Swanback: As COVID started playing out, just like any other company, I thought ‘What do we need to do to rally around our customers because our customers who rely on retail locations may not be able to get to their retail location as the COVID lockdowns started happening?’

One of the things we learned from that experience is this notion of everyday innovation. Innovation isn’t always blockchain or some emerging technology. Sometimes the best innovation is just about innovating every day with the products and services that you have. 

For example, we had some places in the world where we actually needed to figure out how we could do home delivery of cash. Delivering cash is different than delivering pizza as you can imagine, as there are a whole lot of regulatory items and security items. We very quickly figured out how we can deliver cash in Sri Lanka and Nepal, Jordan and some other places across the world. 

Another example lies in addressing how some folks were just a little intimidated by digital technology. I thought, ‘What if we set up a video digital location we called it where people could call in and do a video call with us and we could help them with their money transfer?’ It turned out that there actually wasn’t as much customer demand for that as we might have thought. 

But the great news — and this is a good lesson, I think, for many organizations — is what we actually did there in terms of KYC (Know Your Customer), which is a big thing in the financial services industry. So, all the technology we set up for this digital location for customers to upload their documents electronically and not have to be in front of an agent, we’re using today, just in a different way.

TC: I know Western Union has touted the fact that it has such a strong physical presence in so many locations actually benefits the growth of its digital operations as well as an expansion into other offerings beyond payments. Can you elaborate on that?

Swanback: The success and acceleration that we’re having in our digital business and of course the quarterly results are great, and we want to continue to do that. But for me, what’s most exciting is just the solid foundation and the basis gives us to build toward this idea of having a more meaningful account-based relationship with our customers and ability to offer them more than just money transfer. 

We have the fortune of having a trusted brand that’s known globally and trusted for something that’s very near and dear to our customers. What we’re hearing from our customers is they would trust us to provide additional services. So one of the things that we’re beginning to put plans in place for, and beginning to do some market tests on, is building an ecosystem or building a marketplace if you will. It will all be catered around the 270 million migrants across the world and really connecting them to each other, connecting them to their families and connecting them to merchants who want to sell them goods or provide them services that are very culturally relevant to them,  either where they happen to be living and working or providing them services back home to their families. 

Later in the fall, we’re going to be launching our first market test in Europe. We’re going to be offering a bank account, debit card, and multi-currency accounts tied of course into our money transfer services, as well as a few other things as we get closer to the market launch. But this really is our first test around providing a more comprehensive set of services.

TC: You recently announced a tie-up with Google Pay and some others. What is the significance of those partnerships?

Swanback: We want to be able to offer our cross-border capabilities and platform in more of a co-branded or white-label fashion, so that we can reach those customers that might still prefer to just be a customer of a bank. As an example, we recently announced that Google Pay users can log in to their app and can do cross-border transfers.

I think that’s an important part of our strategy– going after the direct relationship with customers and at the same time being able to offer our platform to others who already have a direct relationship with our customer. This is also part of our whole technology modernization right now of course. We’re very, very strong in the C2C segment, but the way we’re going about our technology modernization is one that provides us optionality to continue to expand in other segments  – whether it be consumer to business or business to consumer, or even business to business.

TC: Tell me more about this “modernization.”

Swanback: Like many financial organizations and many existing global organizations, part of our massive technology modernization program is moving to the cloud. So we were well on our way from migrating many of our applications to an AWS Cloud Platform. We’re pretty excited about the progress that we’re making there.

Also, over the last 12 to 18 months, we’ve migrated a good portion of our customer agent transactions, like the core of our data, to Snowflake. We;’ve mined 33 data warehouses, and we’ve got 20 petabytes of data in the cloud. And so, that in itself is just this is just the starting point. We’re modernizing our apps on top of this data foundation and really starting to use artificial intelligence and machine learning. But we’re not using it in the back end processes like many other organizations who were using it for operational interactions with our customers. We’re using it in the front office. For example, we launched a telephone money transfer product where a customer talks to a virtual assistant and it’s 100% digitized. It’s actually one of the best customer experiences we’ve seen.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here.

First, happy belated birthday to Chris Gates, one of the founding members of the show. His birthday was yesterday, and while he’s on vacation for two weeks, we still wanted to give him a shoutout. Chris is a very good person, a good friend, a good father, a good partner. He’s kind, supportive, and hilarious. And he has a very good beard.

But Equity waits for no single person, regardless of their merit, so on we went! Here’s today’s show:

• Stocks are a bit blah this morning, though set to rise in the United States. Cryptos are up a little.
• From the weekend, Venmo is getting into ecommerce, and Apple loves Surface.
• From this morning: Binance is beefing with the United Kingdom, and appears to be winning, which is somewhat humorous.
• On the funding round beat, Slice raised $20 million, Botrista raised $10 million, and Thursday raised $3.5 million.
• We wrapped with this.

The Equity crew is back on Wednesday for our deep-dive, this week focusing on the creator economy which should be good fun. Chat then!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!

Honda said Monday it will sell its first electric SUV in North America in early 2024, part of the automaker’s push to shift away from gas-powered vehicles before the middle of the decade. The new car’s name, Prologue, is meant to signify the beginning of what the company called its “new electrified era.”

Prologue is one of two forthcoming Honda vehicles that will use General Motors’ Ultium Cells EV platform and battery packs. The other, yet unnamed car, will be under the Acura brand and will also debut in 2024. GM will also manufacture the two vehicles at its North American facilities, as part of a long-running partnership between the two OEMs.

The automaker is keeping quiet about key details of the new SUVs, including the price and even what the car will look like. But it will enter a competitive electric SUV market, up against rivals such as Tesla’s Model Y, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, and Volkswagen’s ID.4.

Honda joined other automakers, including GM and Volvo, in setting ambitious electrification targets. GEO Toshihiro Mibe in April set an escalating target for its global battery and fuel cell electric sales of 40% by 2030, 80% by 2035 and completely phasing out internal combustion engine sales by 2040. As part of that target, Honda said it has plans to develop its own EV platform, dubbed e:Architecture, for EV models launched in the second half of the decade.

Honda separately announced on Monday that it had entered into an agreement with Battery Resourcers to recycle batteries from Honda and Acura EVs. These batteries will initially be processed at the recycling firm’s site in Worcester, Massachusetts, and then at a commercial scale plant that the company says will be operational in 2022. Battery Resourcers recently raised a $20 million Series B to scale its operations, including opening the new plant.

Honda said Monday it will sell its first electric SUV in North America in early 2024, part of the automaker’s push to shift away from gas-powered vehicles before the middle of the decade. The new car’s name, Prologue, is meant to signify the beginning of what the company called its “new electrified era.”

Prologue is one of two forthcoming Honda vehicles that will use General Motors’ Ultium Cells EV platform and battery packs. The other, yet unnamed car, will be under the Acura brand and will also debut in 2024. GM will also manufacture the two vehicles at its North American facilities, as part of a long-running partnership between the two OEMs.

The automaker is keeping quiet about key details of the new SUVs, including the price and even what the car will look like. But it will enter a competitive electric SUV market, up against rivals such as Tesla’s Model Y, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, and Volkswagen’s ID.4.

Honda joined other automakers, including GM and Volvo, in setting ambitious electrification targets. GEO Toshihiro Mibe in April set an escalating target for its global battery and fuel cell electric sales of 40% by 2030, 80% by 2035 and completely phasing out internal combustion engine sales by 2040. As part of that target, Honda said it has plans to develop its own EV platform, dubbed e:Architecture, for EV models launched in the second half of the decade.

Honda separately announced on Monday that it had entered into an agreement with Battery Resourcers to recycle batteries from Honda and Acura EVs. These batteries will initially be processed at the recycling firm’s site in Worcester, Massachusetts, and then at a commercial scale plant that the company says will be operational in 2022. Battery Resourcers recently raised a $20 million Series B to scale its operations, including opening the new plant.

Honda said Monday it will sell its first electric SUV in North America in early 2024, part of the automaker’s push to shift away from gas-powered vehicles before the middle of the decade. The new car’s name, Prologue, is meant to signify the beginning of what the company called its “new electrified era.”

Prologue is one of two forthcoming Honda vehicles that will use General Motors’ Ultium Cells EV platform and battery packs. The other, yet unnamed car, will be under the Acura brand and will also debut in 2024. GM will also manufacture the two vehicles at its North American facilities, as part of a long-running partnership between the two OEMs.

The automaker is keeping quiet about key details of the new SUVs, including the price and even what the car will look like. But it will enter a competitive electric SUV market, up against rivals such as Tesla’s Model Y, the Ford Mustang Mach-E, and Volkswagen’s ID.4.

Honda joined other automakers, including GM and Volvo, in setting ambitious electrification targets. GEO Toshihiro Mibe in April set an escalating target for its global battery and fuel cell electric sales of 40% by 2030, 80% by 2035 and completely phasing out internal combustion engine sales by 2040. As part of that target, Honda said it has plans to develop its own EV platform, dubbed e:Architecture, for EV models launched in the second half of the decade.

Honda separately announced on Monday that it had entered into an agreement with Battery Resourcers to recycle batteries from Honda and Acura EVs. These batteries will initially be processed at the recycling firm’s site in Worcester, Massachusetts, and then at a commercial scale plant that the company says will be operational in 2022. Battery Resourcers recently raised a $20 million Series B to scale its operations, including opening the new plant.

UK-based robotics company CMR Surgical this morning announced a $600 million Series D. This latest round, led by Softbank’s Vision Fund 2 and co-led by Ally Bridge Group, joins an existing $384.8 million already raised by the Cambridge firm. It values the company at $3 billion.

CMR’s flagship product is Versius. The robotic system is designed to perform minimally invasive keyhole surgery, primarily focused on serious conditions like bowel disease or bowel cancer. The platform has been used globally and has thus far been involved in 1,000 surgeries, according to CMR’s numbers.

Four NHS (National Health Service) hospitals in the U.K. have enlisted the surgical platform, along with a slew of other locations in Europe, India, the Middle East and Australia. As CMR notes, the pandemic has resulted in a massive backlog in surgical procedures.

Like many other robotic surgical platforms, one of Versius’s primary appeals is a sense of accessibility – essentially helping level the playing field for complex procedures. The system is modular and portable compared to a number of competitors, further increasing that accessibility. The company says funding will go toward accelerating the platform’s global roll out.

“This latest financing equips CMR with significant funds to accelerate our mission of bringing Versius to hospitals worldwide, whilst providing full flexibility to achieve our goals,” CEO Per Vegard Nerseth said in a release tied to the news. “This major injection of capital that now values us at $3billion not only reflects the level of interest we have seen in our product, but also the scale of the business, and will enable significant technology developments and global expansion.”

Surgical robotics have been an increasingly popular category for VC funds of late. Recent rounds include $96 million for Memic, $10 million for ForSight and $15 million for Activ. Even by those standards however, this is a massive round for the category.

The U.S. Department of Transportation launched a Smart City Challenge in 2015, which asked mid-sized cities across the country to come up with ideas for novel smart transportation systems that would use data and tech to improve mobility. Out of 78 applicants, Columbus, Ohio emerged as the winner.

In 2016, the city of just under a million residents was then awarded a $50 million grant to turn its proposal into a reality. $40 million came from the DOT, and $10 million from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. 

In mid-June, the program ended, but Columbus said the city would continue to work as a “collaborative innovation lab,” using city funds to integrate technology to address societal problems. But what does that mean in reality? 

Columbus’s ‘Smart City’ looks nothing like the rapidly developing prototype Toyota is developing, Woven City, at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan, but it’s not supposed to. 

“We really focus on not just demonstrating technology for technology’s sake, but to look at the challenges we are facing in our city around mobility and transportation and use our award to focus on some of those challenges,” Mandy Bishop, Smart Columbus program manager, told TechCrunch. 

Those challenges involve lack of accessibility to mobility options, areas underserved by public transit, parking challenges, and terrible drivers with high collision rates. As you might expect, a lot of startups are involved in solving those challenges; Here’s who’s involved and what they bring to the table. 

The Pivot app, built by Etch

Etch is a Columbus-based geospatial solutions startup. Founded in 2018, the company cut its teeth with Smart Columbus, creating a multi-modal transport app that helps users plan trips throughout central Ohio using buses, ride hailing, carpool, micromobility or personal vehicle. 

“The mobility problem in Columbus is access to mobility and people not understanding or knowing what options are available to them,” Darlene Magold, CEO and co-founder of Etch, told TechCrunch. “Part of our mission was to show the community what was available and give them options to sort those options based on cost or other information.”

The app is based on open source tools like OpenStreetMap and OpenTripPlanner. Etch uses the former to get up-to-date crowdsourced information from the community about what’s happening in a given area, similar to Waze. The latter is used to find itineraries for different forms of mobility.

“Because we are open source, the integration with Uber, Lyft and other mobility providers really gives users a lot of options so they can actually see what mobility options are available, other than their own vehicle if they have one. It takes away that anxiety of traveling and using that mixed mode of travel, knowing in real time where the bus is or where to find a scooter, and  like using Uber or renting a bike or scooter.”

$1.25 million of the total federal funds went to the Pivot app, which has 3,849 downloads to date, and the city will continue to fund the development and use of Pivot.

Smart Columbus Operating System, made by Pillar Technology

Columbus hired local smart embedded software company Pillar Technology, which was acquired by Accenture in 2018, to further develop the existing Smart Columbus operating system. The $15.9 million open source platform that hosts the city’s mobility data, including over 2,000 datasets and 209 visualizations, launched in April 2019. 

“The program will continue through at least January 2022 as Columbus works to develop mobility and transportation use cases and further define the value and use of the operating system,” said Bishop.

The Smart Columbus OS invites others to add their data to the set while also calling for crowdsourced solutions to problems like how to bring down crash rates or how to optimize city parking. 

Park Columbus, made with ParkMobile

ParkMobile is an Atlanta-based provider of smart parking solutions. For Smart Columbus, the startup created Park Columbus, an event parking management app, to help free up traffic and pollution from cars circling around looking for parking. Users can find, reserve and pay for parking all on the app. 

Smart Columbus’s event parking management program built enhancements within ParkMobile’s existing offering, according to a spokesperson for the city. The $1.3 million project had over 30,000 downloads from October 2020 to March 2021. The city will continue to fund the app which will also display on-street parking via predictive analytic technology. 

Smart Mobility Hubs, built by Orange Barrel Media

The Smart Mobility Hubs are interactive digital kiosks designed by Orange Barrel Media, a company that builds media displays to integrate into urban landscapes. The hubs bring the city’s transportation options together at a single location, like a physical manifestation of the Pivot app, which can actually also be accessed via the kiosks. The kiosks, which took another $1.3 million chunk out of the total federal grant pool, also have free WiFI and listings of restaurants, shops and activities. 

Orange Barrel’s media displays can vary from something community oriented like its kiosks to advertising to art. According to Smart Columbus, the kiosks, placed at six key locations, had over 65,000 interactions from July 2020 to March 2021, but the city hopes that number will drastically increase in the post-pandemic era. The hubs also include the city’s bike share program, CoGo, which offers both pedal and e-bikes, bike racks, designated dockless scooter share and bike share parking, rideshare pickup and drop off zones, car sharing parking and EV charging stations.

Connected vehicle environment, in partnership with Siemens

Ohio has some of the worst drivers in the nation. This year, the state highway patrol released details about distracted driving in the state, and found 70,000 crashes attributed to distracted driving since 2016, with more than 2,000 involving serious injuries or fatalities. In 2019, an insurance agency rated Columbus the fourth worst driving in the country.

This might explain why the city wanted to experiment with connected vehicles. From October 2020 to March 2021, Columbus partnered with Siemens who provided both onboard and roadside units in creating a Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) environment. Connected vehicles would “talk” to each other and to 85 intersections, seven of which have the highest crash rates in central Ohio. The project cost about $11.3 million. 

“We were looking at 11 different applications including red light signal warning, school zone notifications, intersection collision warning, freight signal priority and transit signal priority, using the connected vehicle technology,” said Bishop. 

“We deployed about 1,100 vehicles in a region that has about a million residents, so we did not anticipate seeing a decreased crash rate, but we did see drivers using the signals coming from the connected vehicle environment to not run traffic signals, so we’re really seeing improvements in driver behavior, which ultimately we would anticipate long term to effectively improve safety.”

Linden LEAP, made by Easy Mile

Smart Columbus’s autonomous shuttle service, the Linden LEAP, cost about $2.3 million and ran from February 2020 until March 2021, with some breaks in between. Initially, two shuttles hitting four stops operated in the Linden neighborhood to provide transportation to underserved communities. That only lasted about two weeks before a passenger was somehow thrust from their seat when the vehicle, going no more than 25 miles per hour, stopped short. Then the pandemic happened, and it was a human shuttle service no longer. From July until the end of the program, the Linden LEAP pivoted to deliver 3,598 food pantry boxes or almost 130,000 meals. 

The city will not continue to pay for the autonomous shuttle service now that federal funding has ended. 

“The city is not historically a transit operator, so we’re really staying close to how CoTa looks to incorporate connected and autonomous and electric technology into their fleets moving forward,” said Bishop. “Our anticipation is that the next demonstrations would be private sector led or ultimately led by our transit authority.”

French startup Easy Mile ran the Level 3 autonomous technology behind the shuttle, according to a spokesperson for the company. The Society of Automobile Engineers describes Level 3 as still requiring a human operator in the driver’s seat. 

Columbus’s dalliance with autonomy initially began in late 2018 when Smart Columbus partnered with DriveOhio and May Mobility to launch the Smart Circuit, the city’s OG self-driving shuttle. The shuttle ran a 1.5 mile route circling the Scioto Mile downtown, giving out over 16,000 free rides to certain cultural landmarks until September 2019. 

Smart Circuit only cost about $500,000, but the city spent another $400,000 on general development for the entire autonomous shuttle program.

Prenatal Trip Assistance, built by Kaizen Health

Kaizen Health, a woman-owned technology firm, built its initial application after being dissatisfied with transportation options available to people undergoing health treatments. The Chicago-based company applied its model of streamlining the experience of ordering non-emergency, multimodal medical transportation for pregnant women and families.  

The program got $1.3 million in Smart Columbus funds from June 2019 to January 2021, but only had about 143 participants due to the pandemic, but that includes over 800 medical care trips and over 300 pharmacy, grocery or other service-related trips. In a state that averaged 6.9 deaths for every 1,000 babies the year this program began, it’s a good thing the participating Medicaid managed care organizations are now modernizing how they deliver non-emergency transportation services, including access to such a mobile application.

Mobility assistance for people with cognitive disabilities, in partnership with Wayfinder

The tech partner for the final project was Wayfinder, a navigation app that was acquired by Vodafone in 2019. The Mobility Assistance for People with Cognitive Disabilities (MAPCD) study worked with Wayfinder to create a highly detailed, turn-by-turn navigation app specifically built for those who have cognitive disabilities, making it safer for those people to be more independent. 

The pilot cost nearly $500,000 and lasted from April 2019 to April 2020. Thirty-one participants used the app to get more comfortable using public transport. According to a spokesperson for the city, Columbus is working with potential partners to find a way to sustain the program. 

Looking towards the future

One of the focuses of Smart Columbus was also electric vehicle adoption and charging infrastructure. The money from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation and AEP Ohio, the state’s utility provider, helped incentivize and encourage multi-unit dwellings, workplaces and public sites to install charging stations. Smart Columbus exceeded its goal of 900 EV charging stations, as well as its goal for 1.8% of new car sales to be electric, reaching 2.34% in November, 2019.

“In the future I think something that’s here to stay is really ensuring that we’re solving resident challenges in a way that makes sense for our community,” said Bishop.

On the heels of Etsy’s huge deal to acquire Depop to open the door to more social selling, targeting younger users, and deeply expand in Europe, the crafty marketplace has announced another significant deal to build out its reach, this time in Latin America. Etsy has announced that it will acquire Elo7 — commonly referred to as the “Etsy of Brazil” for its popular marketplace for crafty creators — for $217 million.

Etsy was already active in Brazil, but Elo7, one of the 10 biggest e-commerce sites in the region with 1.9 million active buyers, 56,000 active sellers and some 8 million items for sale, will give Etsy a significantly bigger presence in the market.

As with Depop (which was a $1.6 billion acquisition for Etsy) and Reverb (a musical instruments market Etsy acquired in 2019), Elo7 will remain a standalone brand and continue to be operated by its current management team out of its HQ in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The deal underscores an interesting playbook under Etsy CEO Josh Silverman, who has a long history in the world of e-commerce, including years with eBay during that company’s more acquisitive heydays.

“Elo7 is the ‘Etsy of Brazil,’ with a purpose and business model similar to our own,” Silverman said in a statement. “Following our recent agreement to purchase Depop, we’re excited to bring another unique marketplace into the Etsy family. This transaction will establish a foothold for us in Latin America, an underpenetrated ecommerce region where Etsy currently does not have a meaningful customer base. We look forward to welcoming Elo7’s talented leadership team and employees to the Etsy family.”

It’s an interesting turn also for Etsy as it goes into a more aggressive growth mode. A lot of the earlier days in the world of e-commerce were marked by companies expanding inorganically — specifically, by picking up market share through acquisitions of similar players in their own or new geographies the acquirer wants to enter. This was the playbook followed at times by eBay, Amazon, Groupon and more.

These days, maybe because e-commerce has matured and, well, Amazon is such a behemoth that the barrier to entry becomes harder, you see a lot less of that, and there has even been something of a stigma attached to companies that you could call “clones” of models already started and scaled elsewhere, just not in your patch of the world.

So it’s interesting to see Etsy buying into that quite specifically in this case, with its announcement pointing out all the synergies of the two companies’ business models making it an easy one to bring into the fold. It’s something also highlighted by Elo7.

“Etsy has always been an inspiration and a reference for us, and we’re excited to continue our growth journey as part of Etsy – a company whose mission and culture so closely match our own,” said Carlos Curioni, Elo7’s longtime CEO. “We’re looking forward to leveraging Etsy’s product and marketing expertise to help the Elo7 marketplace, community and team achieve our full potential in Brazil.”

Brazil is really a prime market to follow the inorganic acquisition strategy. The country is one of the biggest e-commerce markets in the world in terms of both population, buying power and digital device penetration (particularly smartphones). At a time when many mature markets are seeing e-commerce growth slow — excepting the 44% bump in Covid-19 spending in 2020, typically US consumers were seeing e-commerce growth of around 15% and slowing year-on-year pre-pandemic — Brazil has been booming, since penetration is still pretty low but all the right factors for growth are there. Etsy cites figures that project it will grow 26% by 2024.

“We’re excited to announce this purchase of Elo7 following our recent announcement of the Depop transaction – two exciting businesses that meet Etsy’s very high bar for use of capital,” said Rachel Glaser, Etsy, Inc. CFO, in. statement. “In addition to job one, which is continuing to drive growth in our core Etsy.com marketplace, we will now focus on integrating Depop and Elo7 into the Etsy family. Reverb, Depop and Elo7 will each continue to be run by their talented and empowered management teams, and we’ll connect key functions across the brands in a way designed to accelerate value creation and make the whole worth more than the sum of its parts.”