Author: azeeadmin

Banned Chinese apps are beginning to disappear from India’s app stores, Palantir is raising more funding and Venmo starts testing Business Profiles.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for July 2, 2020.

1. Apple and Google block dozens of Chinese apps in India

Two days after India blocked 59 apps developed by Chinese firms, Google and Apple have started to comply with the government’s order and are preventing users in the world’s second-largest internet market from accessing those apps.

UC Browser, Shareit, Club Factory and other apps are no longer listed on Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store. In a statement, a Google spokesperson said that the company had “temporarily blocked access to the apps”on Google Play Store as it reviews the order.

2. SEC filing indicates big data provider Palantir is raising $961M, $550M of it already secured

Palantir, the controversial and secretive big data and analytics provider, has reportedly been eyeing up a public listing this autumn. But in the meantime it’s also continuing to push ahead in the private markets.

3. Venmo begins piloting ‘Business Profiles’ for small sellers

Business Profiles offer small sellers and other sole proprietors the opportunity to have a more professional profile page on its platform. Sellers can share key business details like address, phone number, email, website and more.

4. Tesla delivered 90,650 vehicles in second quarter, a smaller than expected decline

Tesla said Thursday that it delivered 90,650 vehicles in the second quarter, a 4.8% decline from the same period last year, prompted by challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic — like suspending production for weeks at its main U.S. factory. But the company still managed to beat expectations despite the headwinds.

5. Top LA investors discuss the city’s post-COVID-19 prospects

From larger fund investors like Mark Suster and Kara Nortman at Upfront Ventures to Dana Settle at Greycroft Partners; to early-stage investors like Will Hsu at Mucker Capital; TX Zhuo at Fika Ventures, the responses were generally upbeat about the future opportunities for Los Angeles startups. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Dish closes Boost Mobile purchase, following T-Mobile/Sprint merger

T-Mobile today announced that it has closed a deal that divests Sprint’s pre-paid businesses, including Boost and Virgin Mobile. The whole thing was a key part of T-Mobile’s bid to merge with Sprint.

7. AR 1.0 is dead: Here’s what it got wrong

Many AR startups made huge promises and raised huge amounts of capital before flaring out in a similarly dramatic fashion. Lucas Matney argues that a key error was thinking that an AR glasses company should be hardware-first, when the reality is that the missing value is almost entirely centered on first-party software experiences. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

The art of the pitchdeck. Few things are more critical to the success of startups seeding capital. And make no mistake, it is an art.

At TechCrunch Early Stage, our two-day virtual event focused on giving entrepreneurs all the resources they need to build incredible, high-growth early stage companies, we have plenty of content dedicated to the pitchdeck.

From a session on how to think like a PM for VC pitch success led by Lo Toney, to a session on how to time your fundraising sprint led by Jake Saper, to seed funding tips and tricks from Jeff Clavier, there’s something for everyone. Even if you don’t have a product, Charles Hudson will teach you how to sell your idea to investors.

The cherry on top of that pitch perfect sundae? The Pitchdeck Teardown.

Accel’s Amy Saper and Bessemer’s Talia Goldberg will lead the Pitchdeck Teardown, going over the look, feel and information provided within individual pitchdecks to share what they look for, what they don’t want to see, and how to get the best outcome when you send a VC your deck.

The coolest part is that the pitchdecks aren’t theoretical. Early Stage attendees can submit their pitchdecks ahead of time for a chance to see those decks critiqued live on stage.

Interested in being a part of it? Submit your pitchdeck here. But remember, you must be registered as an attendee of Early Stage to be selected.

TC Early Stage has so much to offer. The show will bring together 50+ experts across startup core competencies, such as fundraising, operations, and marketing. Cyan Bannister is set to explain how to get an investor to say yes to your startup. Asher Abramson will be sharing how to create growth assets for paid channels, lawyers James Alonso and Adam Zagaris will share how to draw up your first contracts, and Priti Choksi is hosting a session on how to get a company acquired rather than selling.

The two-day show features more than 50 sessions, but don’t worry; attendees will get transcripts for all of them. What’s more, most of the speakers, who happen to be investors, are participating in TechCrunch’s CrunchMatch, our platform that connects founders to investors based on shared interests. 

Here’s the fine print. Each of the 50+ breakout sessions is limited to around 100 attendees. We expect a lot more attendees, of course, so signups for each session are on a first-come, first-serve basis.

Buy your ticket today, and you can sign up for the breakouts we are announcing today, as well as those already published. Pass holders will also receive 24-hour advance notice before we announce the next batch. (And yes, you can “drop” a breakout session in favor of a new one, in the event there is a schedule conflict.)

Get your TC Early Stage pass today and jump into the inside track on the sessions we announced so far, as well as the ones to be published in the coming weeks.

Possible sponsor? Hit us up right here.

Most people would agree that a chief revenue officer is a pretty significant hire, but I have yet to meet mine in person. Right now, our only face-to-face interaction is over video. In fact, that’s how our relationship began — like many business leaders during this pandemic, I had to hire Todd through a series of video calls.

The pandemic has caused me to question and reevaluate many of my own assumptions. This not only led me to hire our CRO remotely, but it is ultimately why I also decided to allow employees to work from home until 2021.

While it’s tempting to call this a pivot, those who have worked with me would probably describe it more accurately as a flip-flop. I used to believe that you could build an in-person culture or a remote work culture, but that a hybrid of the two was destined to fail.

The realities of COVID-19 have not just changed my outlook, but transformed the way I think about how work should get done —and how leaders need to show up for their team, even if they can’t “show up” in any physical sense.

The remote work debate changed in an instant

Before the pandemic, the debate over remote work revolved around its perceived impact on productivity, collaboration, employee engagement and culture.

Facebook accidentally allowed around 5,000 developers to access data from their app’s inactive users, even though that access should have been cut off. The company explained on Wednesday it recently discovered an issue that had allowed app developers to continue receiving this information beyond the 90 days of inactivity that is meant to cut off data access until the user returns to the app and again re-authenticates.

In 2018, Facebook had announced a change to the way app developers would be able access Facebook user data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal which saw the personal data of 87 million Facebook users compromised. Among many new restrictions to Facebook’s API platform, it introduced a stricter review process for the use of Facebook Login for apps and said it would block apps’ access to user personal data after three months of non-use.

This latter change is the one that was not adhered to, in the case of this latest data sharing incident.

Facebook Login, by way of background, gives app developers a way to make it easier for users to sign into apps using their Facebook sign-in credentials. But it also allows developers to request access to a subset of that person’s data on Facebook, including things like email, user likes, gender, location, birthday, age range, and more. It’s unclear among the 5,000 apps how many access which specific user details. Facebook says apps accessed “for example, language or gender” but Facebook Login isn’t limited to just those two attributes when requesting user data.

According to Facebook’s announcement, the issue didn’t impact all apps using Facebook Login but only occurred in certain circumstances. For example, it said, if someone used a fitness app to invite friends to a workout, Facebook didn’t recognize that some of those invited friends had been inactive for many months — meaning, beyond the cutoff data of 90 days.

This new issue is not the same as the one that occurred during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when an app’s user provided access to their all their friend network’s user data, due to the app’s shady use of access permissions. But it is another example of how Facebook’s friend network leads to data being compromised through someone’s personal associations. In this case, the user data was inadvertently shared with developers because of a user’s connection to a friend who used an app and invited them to try it, too.

Facebook said the issue has since fixed and it’s continuing to investigate.

Related to this, the company also introduced new Platform Terms and Developer Policies to push more of the data-minding aspects, legally speaking, into developers’ hands. The terms now limit the information developers can share with third-parties without explicit consent from users, strengthen data security requirements, and clarify when developers must delete data.

For instance, the terms now require developers to delete data that’s no longer required for a legitimate business purpose, if the app is shut down, if Facebook tells them to, or if data was received in error, the announcement states.

Those last two stipulations are interesting, as Facebook could reach out to developers in the future if it noticed other data access problems, like this latest, and inform the developer that they’ve received user data in error. Facebook’s Terms also allow Facebook to audit third-party apps by requesting either remote or physical access to the developers’ systems, according to these terms, to ensure compliance with its policies. Facebook could then ask the developer to delete the data that is non-compliant, as required by these new Terms.

To what extent the wider world would know about any later issues would be up to Facebook to disclose, as it does today by blog posts.

Developer policies were only one area that received an update. Facebook also updated its Business Terms, including its Business Tools Terms, to also cover data involved with certain usages of the Facebook SDK, Facebook Login, and social plugins. It’s making changes to its Commercial Terms to make the terms clearer, as well, it says.

It will take time to fully analyze what loopholes Facebook is closing with an comprehensive update to terms like this and how these will impact user data and transparency about subsequent data access issues.

Facebook says the new policies and terms will go into effect August 31, 2020. Developers don’t have to take any action to agree to the updates.

Just ahead of the Fourth of July weekend, Walmart announced a partnership with Tribeca Enterprises (most notably the purveyors of the film festival of the same name) that’s set to convert 160 store locations into makeshift drive-in movie theaters.

The move is an extension of the existing Tribeca-led Drive-In program that has already announced events for a handful of cities, including Los Angeles, New York, Arlington, TX, Miami and Seattle, with help from IMAX and AT&T. The Hollywood Reporter has a bit more detail about the new initiative. Details are still pretty thin, but the involvement of such a ubiquitous retailer could help extend the program to communities outside of the aforementioned urban centers.

Walmart Drive-In follows a number of smaller scale initiatives that have helped the largely extinguished category see a resurgence as consumers are understandably wary of returning to an indoor theater experience as COVID-19 continues to spike across the country. Most theaters have relied on older films — in fact, Jurassic Park recently hit number one at the U.S. box office nearly 30 years after its release on the strength of the new trend.

The Walmart screenings are set for August through October, with Tribeca at the helm of the film selection. No word yet on the schedule, but Tribeca’s previously announced selection includes Selena, The Bodyguard, Straight Outta Compton, Creed, Jerry Maguire, Space Jam, Love & Basketball, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Back to the Future, Mean Girls, Superbad, Girls Trip, Bridesmaids, Talladega Nights, The Fast and The Furious, Goldfinger, Casino Royale,  Inside Out, The Lego Movie and Spy Kids.

QuestDB, a member of the Y Combinator summer 2020 cohort, is building an open source time series database with speed top of mind. Today the startup announced a $2.3 million seed round.

Episode1 Ventures led the round with assistance from Seedcamp, 7percent Ventures, YCombinator, Kima Ventures and several unnamed angel investors.

The database was originally conceived in 2013 when current CTO Vlad Ilyushchenko was building trading systems for a financial services company and he was frustrated by the performance limitations of the databases available at the time, so he began building a database that could handle large amounts of data and process it extremely fast.

For a number of years, QuestDB was a side project, a labor of love for Ilyushchenko until he met his other co-founders Nicolas Hourcard, who became CEO and Tancrede Collard, who became CPO, and the three decided to build a startup on top of the open source project last year.

“We’re building an open source database for time series data, and time series databases are a multi-billion dollar market because they’re central for financial services, IoT and other enterprise applications. And we basically make it easy to handle explosive amounts of data, and to reduce infrastructure costs massively,” Hourcard told TechCrunch.

He adds that it’s also about high performance. “We recently released a demo that you can access from our website that enables you to query a super large datasets — 1.6 billion rows with sub-second queries, mostly, and that just illustrates how performant the software is,” he said.

He sees open source as a way to build adoption from the bottom up inside organizations, winning the hearts and minds of developers first, then moving deeper in the company when they eventually build a managed cloud version of the product. For now, being open source also helps them as a small team to have a community of contributors help build the database and add to its feature set.

“We’ve got this open source product that is free to use, and it’s pretty important for us to have such a distribution model because we can basically empower developers to solve their problems, and we can ask for contributions from various communities. […] And this is really a way to spur adoption,” Hourcard said.

He says that working with YC has allowed them to talk to other companies in the ecosystem who have built similar open source-based startups and that’s been helpful, but it has also helped them learn to set and meet goals and have access to some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, including Marc Andreessen, who delivered a talk to the cohort the same day we spoke.

Today the company has 7 employees including the three founders, spread out across the US, EU and South America. He sees this geographic diversity helping when it comes to building a diverse team in the future. “We definitely want to have more diverse backgrounds to make sure that we keep having a diverse team and we’re very strongly committed to that.”

For the short term, the company wants to continue building its community, working on continuing to improve the open source product, while working on the managed cloud product.

Venture capital is “not the only fruit” for entrepreneurs, as the often quieter ‘Growth Capital’ can also see great returns for entrepreneurs who prefer to retain a lot of ownership and control but are also willing to bootstrap over a longer period in order to reach revenues and profits. With the COVID-19 pandemic pushing millions of people online, tech investors of all classes are now reaping the dividends in this accelerated, Coronavirus-powered transition to digital.

Thus it is that Kennet Partners, a leading European technology growth equity investor, has raised $250m (€223m) for its fifth fund, ‘Kennet V’, in partnership with Edmond de Rothschild Private Equity, the Private Equity division of the Edmond de Rothschild Group.

Kennet is perhaps best know for its involvement in companies such as Receipt Bank, Spatial Networks and its exist from Vlocity, IntelePeer, and MedeAnalytics. It’s also invested in Eloomi, Codility, Nuxeo and Rimilia. In raising this new fund, Kennet says it exceeded its target and secured new investors from across Europe and Asia.

The Kennet V fund has already started to deploy the capital into new investments in B2B, SaaS across the UK, Europe and the US.

Typically, Kennet invests in the first external funding that companies receive and is used to finance sales and marketing expansion, particularly internationally. It’s cumulative assets managed are approximately $1 billion.

Hillel Zidel, managing director, Kennet Partners, told me by phone that: “We were fortunate in that most of the capital was raised just before Covid hit. But we were still able to bring additional investors in. Had we been designing a fund for now, then this would have been it, because people have rushed towards technology out of necessity. So this has brought forward digitization but at least five years.”

Johnny El-Hachem, CEO, Edmond de Rothschild Private Equity said in a statement: “We partnered with Kennet, because we liked the dynamism of the team coupled with their strategy of financing businesses providing mission-critical technology solutions. The COVID crisis has underscored the importance of many of these tools to business continuity.”

If you’d predicted in late March and early April that Q3 would kick off with a wide-open IPO market and receptive investors, I doubt anyone would have believed you. If you suggested that valuations would look pretty good as well, you might even have been laughed at.

And yet, here we are.

The Exchange is a daily look at startups and the private markets for Extra Crunch subscribers; use code EXCHANGE to get full access and take 25% off your subscription.

Yesterday Lemonade and Accolade priced above their expected ranges, with Lemonade pricing above its raised range and Accolade selling more shares than expected. It’s hard to read the moves as anything other than the market demanding growth-oriented equities and not worrying too much about profitability.

Or more precisely: it’s the golden moment to go public for unprofitable unicorns seeking liquidity but worried about defending their private-market valuations. This sentiment is backed up by Agora’s solid pricing and explosive debut in recent days.

How long this public market moment will last is not clear. With the United States recording 50,000 new COVID-19 cases in a single day yesterday and the national economy beginning to slow once again, perhaps the window is short. Perhaps not — we were wrong before about the IPO market in 2020, so let’s not get too hasty to make more predictions — but it is clear that Q4 2019 wasn’t the only time when unicorns might have been able to attract the prices they wanted.

This morning let’s briefly go over the final pricing for Lemonade and Accolade, and give them new revenue multiples ahead of their first days as trading entities. We need to start their public life knowing how they were valued ahead of their debut so that we can better understand the next set of companies that are bold enough to get off their backside and go public.

Roll out the welcome mat

We’ve abused every possible IPO metaphor in recent weeks. Open windows. Warm waters. But without cliché, we can state that IPOs are performing very well in recent weeks, with IPO Boutique reporting this morning that 17 of the last 27 IPOs have priced above the range that they first set.

When it comes to venture capital, Los Angeles is a city on the rise.

In the past year, it’s seen one of the most profitable venture-backed exits of any tech ecosystem (with the $4 billion sale of Honey to PayPal) and investors are minting billion-dollar companies in the region at a torrid pace. It’s also the city where investors are spending the most money outside of venture capital’s big major hubs: San Francisco, Boston and New York.

While Los Angeles has a lot going for it, that also means it potentially has a lot to lose in the current economic downturn. California continues to be hard-hit by COVID-19, despite local and state officials working to reopen businesses.

TechCrunch surveyed some of the city’s leading investors in sectors like property technology and cannabis to get their take on how the city may survive — and potentially thrive — in a new era ushered in by the response to the pandemic.

From larger fund investors like Mark Suster and Kara Nortman at Upfront Ventures to Dana Settle at Greycroft Partners; to early-stage investors like Will Hsu at Mucker Capital; TX Zhuo at Fika Ventures, the responses were generally upbeat about the future opportunities for Los Angeles startups.

Even specialist fund investors like Karan Wadhera of the cannabis-focused investment firm Casa Verde Capital and Brendan Wallace at the real estate-focused firm Fifth Wall believe that Los Angeles will thrive in the post-COVID world.

As Mucker Capital co-founder Hsu writes, “There are far more great companies than there are venture dollars here in LA. Investors in other cities should continue to see LA as an underserved ecosystem with huge opportunities.”

• Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures
• Kara Nortman, partner, Upfront Ventures
• Will Hsu, Mucker Capital
• Dana Settle, Greycroft Partners
• Karan Wadhera, Casa Verde Capital
• Brendan Wallace, Fifth Wall
• TX Zhuo, Fika Ventures

Image Credits: Getty Images/ROBYN BECK/AFP

Mark Suster, managing partner, Upfront Ventures

How much is Upfront focused on investing in the local LA ecosystem versus less geographically focused? 

Upfront invests about 40% of its investment dollars in the great LA market and invests about 40% split between the Bay Area and NYC. Upfront has always invested nationally and internationally with the final 20% and we have produced significant exits in Chicago, Baltimore, Paris, London and Las Vegas to name a few.

Where we do invest outside of LA of course we bring all of our contacts and relationships to bear, which makes us a logical choice for any startup raising capital where having access to the biggest influencers, media companies, academic institutions and medical professionals can help propel the company’s success.

How do you think COVID-19 will change entrepreneurial activity in Los Angeles?

It’s true that some startup businesses have been impacted by this pandemic but as we’re learning a few short months in, there has been much more acceleration of the trends leading toward technology growth that were already in place.

Specifically addressing some LA-based companies we can share with you the trends we see directly with demand data:

We already knew that telemedicine made sense for doctors and patients and now this trend has accelerated, regulations being lessened and cultural barriers overcome. We see a huge growth in food production and preservation (Apeel Sciences, for example) and food distribution (such as ChowNow). The need to reduce people in warehouses has propelled demand for robotics/automation for companies like inVia Robotics and the need for remote monitoring has helped LA-based DroneBase.

Ad measurement company DoubleVerify announced this morning that it has a new: CEO Mark Zagorski, who was most recently president and COO of adtech company Rubicon Project.

DoubleVerify’s previous CEO Wayne Gattinella stepped down earlier this year following a troubling New York Post report claiming that he had been engaged in an extramarital affair with a woman who was found dead in 2018. (Gattinella accused The Post of making “factually false and defamatory statements.”)

Since then, board member Laura Desmond has served as the company’s interim CEO.

In addition to his roles at Rubicon, Zagorski has also served as CEO of Telaria, where he led the merger with Rubicon, and as CEO of eXelate, where he led the company’s sale to Nielsen. He’ll be based in DoubleVerify’s New York office (at least, whenever that office reopens) and will lead a workforce of more than 550 employees.

“DoubleVerify is the industry leader in powering media quality and performance – giving global brands the confidence and clarity needed to make advertising investments on every digital platform,” he said in a statement. “Through their innovative service and solutions, DV has developed deep customer relationships and an outstanding market reputation. There is a huge opportunity to continue to grow the business, and I am energized and excited to leverage my experience in CTV, data and analytics to make this happen.”

DoubleVerify’s technology is supposed to help advertisers eliminate fraud and ensure brand safety. The company launched a product earlier this year that was more focused on measuring ad effectiveness.