Author: azeeadmin

Target Global is backing a €1 million support fund for tech talent in Spain laid off or furloughed as a result of the coronavirus crisis. The aim is to provide pre-seed financing to help crisis-hit tech workers switch gears and build out a startup concept over the next four to six months, covering living expenses plus enough funds to get going on a business idea.

The VC firm says they’ll be cutting checks of at least €25k/€35k up to €50k for “qualified applicants” — meaning the initiative could support between 20 and 30 local tech workers who have found themselves sat at home without a job as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Target Global, which has some €700M under management, will contribute €500,000 to the early stage support initiative — with a further €500,000 chipped in from local founders, including entrepreneurs behind AlienVault, TravelPerk, Job & Talent, Badi and Adyen.

“The idea is to cap it at €1M for now,” says Target Global investment director, Lina Chong . “We don’t know where the end of the tunnel is but for now let’s say we cap it at that.”

“We want to give between 20 and 30 safe notes that are really super easy to deploy… which should be enough for one or two people to cover their living costs for four to six months… It’ll also cover initial startup costs. So found an entity, work with a designer and engineer. Develop your idea or concept into an actual beta or some sort of prototype and test some of your early assumptions, and get it ready for, essentially, a pre-seed round.”

“We’re calling it super seed,” she adds. “It’s like a real first check just to get you started.”

She says the VC firm will be putting up a landing page for the initiative shortly — this week or next, per Chong — to begin taking applications for the ‘safe notes’.

In terms of requirements, applicants must be located in Spain, and will be asked to specify a few categories their concept falls into; plus whether they’ve built anything yet; whether they have users; whether they’ve incorporated yet, and so on.

“All of those things can be ‘no’ — that’s totally fine,” Chong tells TechCrunch. “We will ask for your LinkedIn because we do want to have this go towards people in tech. We want to see some minimum amount of experience in startups or in technology — but you yourself don’t have to be an engineer.

“And of course the idea has to be pretty bold and ambitious… That’s going to be the bulk of our work — filtering through candidates where we feel they have the relevant background, plus what they’re thinking about it something really relevant and big.”

“We’re not looking to fund the next sunglasses shop,” she adds. “But if you have a different way to engage with government… [or] think about even media. There’s so many things up for grabs right now. There’s going to be a host of security, identity, so many issues. And that’s the stuff we’re looking for — real, big, global problems.”

Chong confirms that some of TargetGlobal’s own portfolio startups have had to lay off or furlough staff themselves during the crisis — including flatshare finder business Badi and business travel booking platform TravelPerk. Both of which are types of businesses that are very exposed to the national population lockdowns that have been imposed over most of Europe. (The travel sector has of course been especially hard hit.)

“Every business that’s been affected by shelter in place have had to let go of staff,” adds Chong, suggesting portfolio layoffs have been up to around a third for the worst affected startups.

Local founders have therefore been keen to support the initiative, not only to help the wider tech ecosystem in Spain, but as something they can point furloughed or laid off staff to as an opportunity.

“Everyday we’re getting more sign ups,” she adds, noting that founders can also choose offer mentorship/advice as well as chipping into the fund.

Target Global dialled up its focus on Spain last year, when it opened a country office in Barcelona. Though Chong, who is normally based in Barcelona, has been spending the lockdown period in Berlin, after returning to Germany from a trip to the US in March.

“For me this [crisis] is super unfortunate because one of the reasons we made a bet so early on Spain is because of exactly this talent — Typeform and all the gaming studios, and Facebook and Amazon in Madrid . Let’s say priming the early generation workforce. And giving them the ideas how to be in a tech company, how an organization runs, how to build product, how to think of marketing — all of this stuff. So I think it’s a big shame,” she says.

“Clearly Spain has a highly entrepreneurial spirit. They’ve come out of the last crisis… with a very ‘we make our own reality’ view of the world. And I think the same will happen in this crisis so we thought why won’t we just allocate a small amount of money — for our early stage fund it’s a relatively small check — it’s a very exploratory one.”

In terms of the business opportunities that may open up as a result of the societal and economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Chong suggests “a new way of thinking about consumer products and service” is certainly coming down the pipe.

“I would be shocked if there isn’t a plethora of ideas coming on how to rethink brick and mortar and rethink retail or consumer goods,” she says.

“This is a clear trend that brick and mortar, as a model, is not working. In the US, around the world, you see everything from massive shopping malls to main street small shops, owner-operated shops, all shuttering doors. And I think it’s a big opportunity — whether the entrepreneur decides to tackle this opportunity from a pure digital play to maybe it’s a turn on real estate? Maybe there’s a new model of thinking about shop ownership or what to do with that space? Because consumers are pretty fickle. They’re used to entirely new experience with Amazon. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there for sure. The specific form or shape of that opportunity — I leave it to the wild imaginations of entrepreneurs.”

She also points to the whole value chain around retail — from supply chains to marketing, to manufacturing to getting the goods and services into consumers hands — as ripe for rethinking right now, adding: “I’m hoping there’s going to be a lot of innovation around even the supply chain aspects.”

Entrepreneurs in the country may also do well to focus their energy on ideas around reskilling/upskilling the large numbers of people who suddenly find themselves unable to do their usual work because of the impact of social distancing on traditional businesses and ways of working. Spain’s bar culture, for example, looks set to be very heavily hit by the coronavirus.

“How do we manage ourselves? How do we manage others in a remote working environment?” posits Chong. “There’s such a huge population of people where — it’s becoming pretty clear — that if you can’t work remote, if you’re not a knowledge worker, there’s a huge question mark over your ability to maybe more into those knowledge worker/desk type roles. And that’s a lot of value that’s left on the table. That’s human brains and muscle — just so much energy and potential that’s just kind of left out there.

“I would argue that a real forward thinking entrepreneur can think of ways to help utilize and bring meaning to these people’s skill sets.”

The terms of the safe notes will be “flexible”, according to Chong, though there will be a provision for investors to get a discount on the next round, i.e. if there is one. 

“You don’t have to pay it back if there’s no financing afterwards,” she says. “So far we really do want to keep it case by case — so it’s super flexible. It’s essentially like ‘hey, we want the option not the obligation to follow on in the next round’.

“Clearly, we’ll decide on that case by case. Anything beyond that we want to make sure that terms of the next fund — it’s likely going to be seed funds that come in at that next stage of the company life — we want to be able to keep the slate relatively clean in order for those funds to feel comfortable coming on board. So there’s not too much stipulated at the moment in the safe note.”

“It’s an amount. We can help you incorporate. It’s an option to the next round. There’s going to be a minimum discount — probably pretty standard, like 20%. And that’s pretty much it,” she adds.

Even amid a pandemic, there’s a race on to create a powerful, global private securities marketplace where private shares are traded as freely as public company shares on the Nasdaq .

In one lane is Carta, an eight-year-old maker of cap table management software with big ambitions to create a kind of private company stock market, one that the startup tells the Financial Times could debut this summer.

Nasdaq itself is in the race, having acquired in 2015 an earlier broker of private shares called SecondMarket. It has since used its Nasdaq Private Market business to provide software to private companies and investment funds that looking to do tender offers or share buybacks.

Now, two other companies that were long competing against one another are now coming together to boost the odds that they can survive and maybe thrive against the others. Pending regulatory approval, Forge, founded as Equidate in 2014, and Sharespost, founded in 2009, will join forces under the Forge brand, after agreeing to a $160 million cash-and-stock deal. (The companies are declining to share more financial specifics than that.)

Forge’s CEO, Kelly Rodrigues, will run the combined company, while Sharespost’s founder and CEO, Greg Brogger, becomes an advisor to the company and joins its board of directors.

Forge has raised $109 million to date, including an expansion of its Series B round that helped pay for the acquisition. SharesPost has raised $38 million from investors over the years. The combined company will have close to 200 employees across five offices, including New York, San Carlos, San Francisco, South Dakota, and Hong Kong.

If any layoffs are planned, Forge isn’t talking about that yet, with Rodrigues telling us in an email exchange last night that the combined company right now has 200 employees and that it will, until the deal closes at least, continue to manage the Forge and SharesPost businesses “as is,” in terms of people and locations.

He does say he expects that Sharespost — which will contribute anywhere from 25% to 30% percent of Forge’s revenue going forward —  will complete the picture, so to speak. While Forge has been trying to make inroads with institutional investors, SharesPost has focused on serving the needs of individual investors. “By coming together, we are able to optimally address the needs of the entire market,” says Rodrigues.

In fact, Rodrigues doesn’t sound concerned about how — even after taking out one rival — Forge can effectively compete going forward against Carta and Nasdaq, not to mention other outfits like EquityZen and other players that actively buy and sell secondary shares like Industry Ventures and Scenic Advisement.

“There will be lots of different models created that try to compete here,” says Rodrigues. “What we know is that who wins will have to have scale; the richest data and most transparency into pricing; and the tech platform to make trading easy, fast and that serves private companies.  Forge is way ahead when it comes to all of these.”

Rivals like Carta might beg to differ. After all, Carta was valued at $3.1 million in a funding round this month and argues that it is best positioned as a private company marketplace because it already houses data on hundreds of startups that use its platform.

Either way, it has strengthened its position as it chases after a market that has ballooned in size over the last decade or so, as fewer companies have opted to go public.

Whether COVID-19 and its abrupt impacts on the IPO market — freezing it overnight — will change that calculation remains to be seen.

Certainly, one could argue that Airbnb and its employees might be better positioned right now had it not waited for exactly the right time to become a publicly traded outfit.

The retirement wars are heating up.

As millions of baby boomers leave their jobs in the coming years and transition into retirement, there is a huge competition for who will manage their savings. On one hand are traditional wealth managers, firms like Edward Jones, who either employ full-time human financial advisors or empower independent contractors to help clients plan through their finances. On the other side has been the rise of “roboadvisors” like Wealthfront that use algorithms and simple financial products like ETFs to advise people at lower cost.

VCs have been bullish on roboadvisors — startups like Wealthfront and Personal Capital have each raised more than $200 million according to Crunchbase — but there has been less investment activity trying to help the financial advisors themselves. After all, aren’t all these folks supposed to be automated away by algorithms?

Vise (from “advise”) is taking a bit of a contrarian bet: its founders Samir Vasavada and Runik Mehrotra believe that humans — augmented with the right AI tools — can prove even more adept at handling the financial affairs of their clients than an app.

The company debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt SF last year, and we wrote up an in-depth profile of its journey from self-funded startup to our stage. Well, according to the founders, it just so happens they met Sequoia at the firm’s Disrupt happy hour, and one thing led to another and Vise is now announcing a $14.5 million Series A term sheet led by Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire.

Previous investors including Keith Rabois through Founders Fund and Ben Ling at Bling Capital filled out the round, and the startup’s total fundraise haul is now at $16 million.

For the founders, the main goal for Vise has been to build a new product using the best practices from the AI and machine learning worlds and converge on a platform that helps independent financial advisors come up with their own ideas to communicate to clients. “Our big thesis was, we want to think about things that are different in this industry — we don’t want to build a product that’s the same as how every other product has been built in the space,” Vasavada said. “We want to build a radically different product, and the way in which we do that is bringing in a diverse team.” That’s included everyone from product folks at notable Silicon Valley companies, AI researchers, and financial services experts.

Financial advisors already rely on a suite of software from CRMs to investment analysis platforms to perform their jobs, but those tools have rarely been integrated into one place. That’s made the existing market for software here quite fragmented. “Number one is it’s too bloated. There’s just too many tools and they don’t do enough and don’t provide much value add. It’s expensive. It’s hard to manage. And the most important thing is it is not at all personalized to the advisor or personalized to the client,” Vasavada said.

Instead, Vise aims to be a one-stop shop for all the needs in the daily workflow of an investment advisor. That includes determining different investment options in a clean interface, personalizing those options for individual clients, and even helping guide investment advisors through the talking points on why certain investment decisions make sense compared to others given a client’s context.

In their views, Vasavada and Mehrotra see the wealth advisory market dividing into several buckets, with independent wealth advisors who target $500,000 to $2 million in assets per client as the sweet spot for Vise. Those customers have more specific needs and require more personalization than clients with less assets and so are ill-served by roboadvisors, while at the same time, major institutional players find them too small to handle given the fee structures they have at their scale.

Ultimately, Vise is a pure B2B play, and the founders want to maintain that focus into the future. They believe that wealth advisors have special knowledge of their clients needs and the relationships to match, which Vise can’t compete with.

In addition to Sequoia, Founders Fund, and Bling, Human Capital, Lachy Groom, Steve Chen, and Jon Xu joined the round according to the company.

The developer of a machine learning enhanced baby monitor, Nanit, has managed to nab $21 million in financing even amid the teeth of an epidemic that has slowed venture financing across the board.

The round came from existing investors including: Jerusalem Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures, RRE Ventures, and Rho Capital Partners, and brings the company’s total capital to $50 million.

Nanit said it would use the financing for continued product development and global expansion.

For Nanit, the social distancing required to stop the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic has proven to be a huge boost for business. Families with grandparents, aunts, and uncles make up 20 percent of the company’s active users, according to a statistic provided by Nanit.

The company didn’t even have to tap outside investors or go on a road show for its recent raise, according to chief executive Sarah Dorsett. So far, Nanit has sold over 150,000 cameras and has at least twice as many users who are accessing the company’s app for remote monitoring of newborns and one year olds.

Prices for the sleep monitoring and video device range from $299 for a wall mounted camera to $379 for one attached to a floor stand. Currently, Nanit sells its monitoring devices in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

The company’s app is free for the first year and then costs $5 per month to connect three users to the app. Upgrades are available for $10 per month for more users or $30 per month for unlimited users. And the company’s new line of wearable breathing bands, swaddles and sleeping bags range from $19.99 to $59.99.

Nanit does more than just provide a live, shareable feed of movements. The company is getting set to launch a new feature that would capture when a baby smiles or when they begin to move around in a crib, according to Dorsett.

“The company has experienced incredible growth from 2018, and our recent funding points to the confidence and demand in the marketplace for innovative consumer products,” Dorsett, said in a statement. “Having a baby is one of the most significant life moments not only for parents but for the entire family. We are so fortunate to be able to use our technology to keep families connected and sharing in this precious new journey, no matter where they are.”

Nanit has also launched a new line of wearables called, Breathing Wear, that track their infant’s breathing motion by reading the pattern printed on the fabric without putting sensors on their skin.

“Nanit has solved the age-old problem of teaching your baby to fall asleep. The company’s products are expanding our understanding of “life in the crib” and giving families more ways to share in the joy of parenting. The company has achieved incredible product-market fit and we believe Nanit is well-positioned to address a wide range of health and wellness questions for families and physicians,” said Will Porteous, General Partner, RRE Ventures, in a statement.

Yubico, a maker of security keys, has launched a new service that lets enterprise customers ship its YubiKey security keys directly to their employees, partners and customers — even to their homes.

The service, dubbed YubiEnterprise Delivery, is a cloud-based dashboard that is available from anywhere. IT staff can log in, check their inventory levels and request and ship out security keys to staff either in bulk or on a case-by-case basis.

Any employee who urgently needs a new security key to access their work account can get one shipped to them without delay. It also means IT staff can ship out the newest YubiKeys to their employees as soon as they become available.

Security keys are small enough to fit on a keyring but provide some of the strongest defenses against a variety of sophisticated threats to online or corporate accounts by offering a physical method of two-factor authentication. Instead of having a text message or a code sent to your phone, users plug in their security key to their computer or phone to “prove” to the server that it’s really you.

Most people won’t need to use a security key, but they offer significantly greater security for high-risk users, like journalists, politicians and activists, who are frequently targeted by hostile nation-state hackers.

Yubico’s new key-delivery service could not come at a more important time. Even as some countries eye lifting their lockdown protocols, vast swathes of the world are still working from home.

Guido Appenzeller, Yubico’s chief product officer, said its new service will allow enterprise customers to quickly distribute YubiKeys to its employees without having to downgrade to lesser-secure options.

The current state of our COVID-19 world has underscored more than ever before the need for reliable delivery and e-commerce services: consumers sheltering in place are shopping more than ever online and getting items brought directly to their homes; and retailers urgently need platforms that can help them manage, sell and bring their goods to those people via the web — for many now the only way they can do business. And businesses that are helping make those transactions work are doubling down.

DispatchTrack, which provides a platform for last-mile deliveries, specifically to help companies mimic Amazon-like experiences for themselves by planning and tracking deliveries more easily, has closed a $144 million investment, its first-ever funding after scaling up as a bootstrapped startup to support more than 60 million deliveries per year.

The funding is coming from a single, high-profile investor, Spectrum Equity. It is being termed by the company as an investment rather than an acquisition, although I’ll note here that PitchBook has also described it alternately as a leveraged buyout in its database.

DispatchTrack was founded in 2010 in San Jose by a husband and wife team — Satish Natarajan (now CEO) and Shailu Satish (now COO) — who also happened to work in tech, after the pair grew frustrated with how badly home delivery services worked for themselves.

DispatchTrack today works with retail and wholesale companies across a number of verticals including furniture and appliance businesses, food distributors, healthcare companies, consumer retailers, and building suppliers, as well as field service businesses and third-party logistics (3PL) providers that use DispatchTrack to power their services. The company equips its customers – including retailers, wholesalers, grocers, restaurants, food and beverage distributors, field service businesses, third-party logistics (3PL) companies and others

The platform itself is a kind of all-in-one logistics and delivery toolkit designed for ecosystems that include  physical storefronts, warehouses, drivers and end customers, which have a common thread running through them: the businesses are not fundamentally tech companies, yet may have staff who handle logistics; and they need technology to do their jobs — but don’t necessarily want to bring in more costly system integrators to develop or operate those systems on their behalf.

It includes features for managing routing and planning (including telematics and compliance), customer communication (including reservation systems for delivery slots), driver communication (via a mobile app), billing, social reviews, and omnichannel order tracking.

These services may not be the first that you think of when you consider products that you might buy to get delivered — you as a consumer are considering the product and its price and how fast you can get it, most likely — but they collectively constitute a huge part of the cost of providing the product, and typically are not done very well. (DispatchTrack cites CapGemini Research Institute that estimates that together they account for 41% of all supply chain costs.) It’s not the only company providing tools to fill these needs. Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, Amazon and many others also provide software to retailers, but DispatchTrack would argue that its solution is the more comprehensive and focused solely on delivery and logistics.

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“We are thrilled to partner with Spectrum Equity in this new stage of our growth,” said Natarajan in a statement. “We built DispatchTrack to help businesses large and small provide superior delivery experiences, streamline operations and maintain coordination and transparency across all constituents in the last mile. With Spectrum’s support, we will continue our rapid pace of innovation and be able to bring best-in-class solutions to more businesses, industries and geographies.”

Choosing to pick up investment happened ahead of COVID-19 — it seems the first tranche of the funding was secured back in December 2019 — but it comes at a timely moment, when companies like Instacart are seeing all-time peaks of usage from customers who are no longer doing grocery shopping in physical stores because of the coronavirus outbreak. While DispatchTrack’s own trajectory was in place before now, this gives it an even stronger mandate to invest in growth.

“We look forward to supporting DispatchTrack’s commitment to solving complex problems by building elegant, powerful products that are easy to adopt, configure and scale,” said Vic Parker, MD at Spectrum Equity, in a statement. “The DispatchTrack platform is an exceptionally valuable solution for businesses that recognize the strategic imperative to optimize the delivery experience. We look forward to helping DispatchTrack transform the last mile for more businesses across categories and around the world.” Parker and Spectrum VP Adam Gassin are joining DispatchTrack’s board of directors with this investment.

PlayPlay, the Paris-based startup behind a video creation tool that enables comms, marketing and social media teams to produce high-quality video content “in minutes”, has raised €10 million in funding. Leading the Series A round is Balderton Capital, with participation from Point Nine, and Kerala Ventures.

Founded in 2017 by ex-Eurosport social media director Thibaut Machet, and former Eurosport colleagues, Aurélien Dayres and Clément Moracin, PlayPlay has set out to democratise video creation. The idea is to enable people without filming or editing skills to “harness the power of video” to inform and entertain audiences i.e. for content marketing and other business goal purposes.

“Video is the king of content on digital platforms (the most impactful, the most engaging etc.), but it’s very complex and expensive content to produce,” Machet tells me. “Thus, communications and marketing people know they should post more video, but they simply can’t. Today, they have only ‘bad’ options. Either they go through agencies that charge a lot and can create a lot of friction in the creation process. Or they can use online video makers, where the production value drastically drops, with very basic video quality, storytelling and branding”.

To solve this, PlayPlay’s design relies on three key pillars. First is the “extreme simplicity” of the product, which, Machete says, requires zero editing skills and no training. Second is the production quality of videos via PlayPlay’s motion design technology, which claims to reach agency standards in terms of animations, transitions, effects and so on. Third is “storytelling,” delivered through a library of 200 video templates designed for brands and organisations.

“There is a real ‘wahoo effect’ when people create their first video, usually, we hear them say ‘did I just create that by myself?!’, says Machet.

Typical PlayPlay customers are described as communication, marketing and social media teams in mid to large companies, brands and organizations.

“Big brands such as Axa, Heineken, and Orange use PlayPlay every day to feed their communities; their fans on Facebook and Instagram, stakeholders on Linkedin or employees on their website and intranets,” says the PlayPlay co-founder. “We also have clients using PlayPlay for their outdoor screen advertising (cities, shopping centres etc)”.

Although there are a myriad of video making tools at the lower end of the market, Machet says PlayPlay most directly competes with agencies that create high quality custom videos but are very expensive. In addition, there a few more high end tools, such as Wibbitz and Wochit.

“At PlayPlay, we offer the best of both worlds: a very simple product (no equivalent on the market) and the same video quality an agency offers,” he says.

Meanwhile, the SaaS business model is simple enough. Two pricing tiers are available. “Business” costs €200 per month/user. “Enterprise” starts at €500 per month/user. “Basically, for the price of one or two videos produced by an agency, our users can create unlimited videos for a year,” adds Machet.

Canadian coffee-and-doughnut chain Tim Hortons has secured a heavyweight partner to further its China expansion. The company announced on its social media account (in Chinese) on Tuesday that it has landed funding from Tencent, the Chinese social networking and gaming giant, without disclosing the size of the proceeds.

Tim Hortons did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment. A spokesperson for Tencent declined to comment on the investment.

The 55-year-old Canadian coffee chain entered China in February 2019. With Alibaba already tapped by Starbucks, its archrival Tencent became an obvious ally for Tim Hortons. The coffee firm said the fresh capital will go towards setting up digital infrastructure, such as a WeChat-based mini app, and opening more storefronts. It currently counts about 50 locations in China, most of which are in Shanghai, and aims to reach 1,500 stores without specifying a deadline for the plan.

Investors and businesses have in recent years been jostling to convert a nation of tea drinkers into coffee consumers by merging online and offline retail. Starbucks palled up with Alibaba on a series of “new retail” efforts, which include shared membership perks between the two, delivery carried out by Alibaba’s Ele.me, voice ordering, and a distribution partnership with Alibaba’s omnichannel supermarket Hema. Coffee upstart Luckin, which is recently ensnarled in an accounting scandal, was digital from day one and focuses on app orders and 30-minute delivery.

Construyo, a Berlin-based startup that offers a “holistic” project management service that connects the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry, has raised €2 million in seed funding.

The round is led by Talis Capital, and follows €300,000 of previous backing from Florian Swoboda, founder of Liberty Ventures; Florian Leibert, founder of D2iQ, and Jan Kanieß, co-founder of Payone.

Founded in 2018 by Leonhard Jeub and Fabian Müller, Construyo’s mission is to bring the construction industry into the digital age. It does this with a mixture of project consultancy, project management software, and a marketplace/network of architecture, engineering and construction providers. The goal is to increase transparency, lower the cost, and increase efficiencies when renovating and building properties.

“Anyone who has built a house can tell how complicated and chaotic the process is,” says Construyo co-founder Leonhard Jeub. “There are many stakeholders involved and they are typically needed one after another. Nearly all projects struggle with inefficient sequencing of required services and an immense friction of information between everyone involved”.

For example, an architect might need information from a specialised engineer, but the engineer can only deliver that information weeks later. This then becomes a big problem as everyone further down the value chain is affected. Worse still, if the work subsequently carried out is been based on an incorrect version of the plan, it can become pretty expensive.

To remedy this, Construyo has built a technology platform that connects homeowners and developers with “trusted professionals” from the AEC industry. “We capture all relevant information on a central platform, which allows for a smooth flow of data and information between professionals,” explains Jeub. “We leverage this data to help optimise project schedules, so projects can be finished on time and on budget. By allowing all stakeholders to communicate through our platform, we provide the single source of truth for construction projects”.

The idea is to provide a much greater level of transparency and connect the different stakeholders so that they can more easily communicate with one another. In turn, there should be fewer delays, and lower costs — including those associated with building work overrunning.

With regards to competitors, Jeub concedes that there are other solutions that focus on matchmaking for the construction sector, but claims these still leave homeowners and developers left in the dark when it comes to managing their actual project. “Construyo provides end to end care to ensure that every project step becomes a success,” he says.

Meanwhile, the company’s revenue model sees it take a percentage of each transaction that is processed through the Construyo platform.

Listeners of podcasts, audiobooks and other audio shows are estimated to number 542 million in China this year, according to a third-party survey by marketing firm iiMedia. It’s a healthy jump from the 489 million users recorded in 2019, and it no doubt has attracted new players to the game.

That includes Tencent Music Entertainment (TME), the Tencent spin-off that is sometimes regarded as the Spotify of China but differs on many fronts in practice. The group’s main line of businesses goes beyond music streaming to encompass virtual karaoke, live streaming and audio content, a category that has recently seen a big push from the firm.

In its newly released quarterly report, TME said it has made “significant progress in expanding” its audio library by adding thousands of new adaptions from popular IP pieces and works from independent producers. This intensifies competition in what is already a crowded space.

Like Spotify, TME is late to voice-based content, an umbrella term that can include everything from podcasts, audiobooks, radio stations to more innovative listening experience like audio live streaming. This sector in China has for years been occupied by leading companies Ximalaya, the main investor in San Francisco-based podcasting firm Himalaya, and Nasdaq-listed Lizhi.

TME’s thrust into audio content holds no immediate promise, for there is still no obvious path to profitability. Chinese users are known to be reluctant to pay for digital content, and when they do, say, for educational and self-improvement podcasts, the enthusiasm tends to fade quickly. Deep-pocketed platforms often resort to offering content for free to gain market share, relentlessly forcing out smaller contestants. The result is that everyone needs to find more indirect ways to monetize.

Lizhi, for instance, primarily generates revenues by selling virtual items through its live, interactive audio sessions, while the contribution from user subscriptions and advertising remains paltry. The seven-year-old company hasn’t turned a profit, recording a net loss of 133 million yuan or $19.1 million last year.

Indirect monetization is nothing new in China’s internet industry. Tencent, most famous for its WeChat messenger, notably relies on gaming revenues that its social networking products help drive. TME, similarly, gets the bulk of its money by selling virtual items in music-themed live streams, while only 6% of its 657 million monthly active users on music streaming apps are paying. The MAU growth has also come to a standstill as China’s online music market saturates; from 2017 to 2020, TME added only 50 million new users to its music streaming services. The question is whether the music titan can breathe new life into the adjacent audio sector.