Author: azeeadmin

Own a classic Porsche? Who doesn’t? The German automaker today unveiled a line of head units designed to replicate the vintage look while still featuring modern connectivity such as Bluetooth, DAB+, and Apple CarPlay.

These radios are official Porsche hardware and are available in 1-DIN or 2-DIN variants, allowing them to fit in vehicles from the ‘60s to the ‘90s.

Sure, a touchscreen-only interface would look a little out of place in a ’76 911 Carrera, which is why the units come equipped with buttons and dials to help complete the vintage look. In the ‘90s, Porsche moved to a larger, 2-DIN design, and for these models, the available head unit features a much-larger touchscreen along with buttons and dials.

Both units are available from Porsche dealers and represent the German automaker’s stance keeping vintage Porsches on the road as long as possible. With these units, owners can retrofit vehicles to have the convenience of the latest technology. Automakers have long offered parts for classic cars but few are bringing modern connectivity to the driver.

Own a classic Porsche? Who doesn’t? The German automaker today unveiled a line of head units designed to replicate the vintage look while still featuring modern connectivity such as Bluetooth, DAB+, and Apple CarPlay.

These radios are official Porsche hardware and are available in 1-DIN or 2-DIN variants, allowing them to fit in vehicles from the ‘60s to the ‘90s.

Sure, a touchscreen-only interface would look a little out of place in a ’76 911 Carrera, which is why the units come equipped with buttons and dials to help complete the vintage look. In the ‘90s, Porsche moved to a larger, 2-DIN design, and for these models, the available head unit features a much-larger touchscreen along with buttons and dials.

Both units are available from Porsche dealers and represent the German automaker’s stance keeping vintage Porsches on the road as long as possible. With these units, owners can retrofit vehicles to have the convenience of the latest technology. Automakers have long offered parts for classic cars but few are bringing modern connectivity to the driver.

At a time where all of the news seems to point toward negative economic activity, Synergy Research released a report today that data center M&A activity made a strong showing this quarter, already surpassing 2019 levels.

The surge was mostly related to the $8.4 billion Interxion acquisition by Digital Realty, which Synergy says was the largest data center deal ever. It pushed the deal total this quarter to almost $15 billion on 28 closed deals.

2017 was the best year ever since Synergy has tracked these deals with more than $20 billion trading hands. That record could easily be within reach this year if this level of investment continues.

Of course, in the current economic situation, there is no guarantee that will happen, but it is clear that cloud usage is going strong and data center demand is something that’s not likely to abate any time soon. In fact, Synergy’s chief analyst John Dinsdale believes the numbers will continue to climb with lots more deals ready to close soon. He says that should make it a bumper year for data center M&A activity.

“In less than four months, the M&A value has already surpassed 2019, in addition to which we are aware of 17 more agreed deals that are pending closure plus a few other potential multi-billion dollar deals,” Dinsdale said in a statement.

He added, “Outsourcing trends and the aggressive growth in cloud services are driving ever-growing demand for data center capacity, which in turn is fueling both industry restructuring and a need to find new sources of investment capital.”

Synergy has been tracking the data center M&A market since 2015. Since that time, it has identified 388 deals totaling over $90 billion. Looks like that number is only going to keep growing this year in spite of external economic factors.

In a blog post today, Google’s Director of Product Management, Ads Integrity. John Canfield, announced that the company will be extending its identity verification policy for all advertisers. Introduced in 2018, the feature required political advertisers to go through a verify their identity, which was then displayed as part of the ad itself.

The process was designed to created increased transparency, amid growing mistrust around the sources behind political ad buys in recent years. Moving forward, the company will make identity verification a required part of the ad buying process, regardless of topic.

Personal identification and business incorporation documents will be required for all parties buying an ad on Google’s network. That information will begin popping up in the ad unit units over the summer, letting users click through to view information including the name and location of the party that purchased the ad.

“This change will make it easier for people to understand who the advertiser is behind the ads they see from Google and help them make more informed decisions when using our advertising controls,”  Canfield writes. “It will also help support the health of the digital advertising ecosystem by detecting bad actors and limiting their attempts to misrepresent themselves.”

The political verification process is currently in place in 30 countries. The wider push will begin in the U.S. and build out from there. Google says it expects the entire thing to take “a few years” to be in place globally, given the massive scale of its advertising network. Once advertisers have been notified, they will have 30 days to fill out the form. The documents will then be vetted by a Google employee.

Tying advertisements to real people and businesses could go a long way in identifying bad actors on the massive network.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today we’re taking a look at a bit of data on the European venture capital scene in Q1. As with our looks at other locales like Silicon Valley and other bits of the United States, we’re taking stock of what happened in the first quarter. Q1 2020 includes pre-COVID-19 results, though as some European countries began to lock-down before the United States, there may be more pandemic-impact in the following results than we’ve seen domestically thus far.

Today’s grip of data is via the folks over at PitchBook, who compiled a venture-focused dig through the continent’s first three months of the year. Let’s parse the top numbers, make a comparison or two and then look to what’s next.

Q1: An ok quarter

Despite COVID-19, China’s broad shuttering and an aged bull market deep, Europe’s venture capital activity in Q1 2020 was mostly fine. It wasn’t great, and there were some less-than-winsome results that could be chalked up to the pandemic, but the first quarter provided an alright start to the year.

One of Colorado’s fastest-growing cannabis companies has a new look. Medicine Man Technologies (MMT) is announcing a new brand, Schwazze, which will be an overarching parent company for MMT and its collection of brands. The publicly-traded company is now listed under the OTC ticker symbol “SHWZ.”

Schwazze refers to a cultivation process, and the company’s new CEO told TechCrunch the name change reflects the company’s focus. “It is the core process within nurturing and growing a plant by taking the leaves off very carefully to allow the trunk to grow and widen, providing more nutrients to the flower in the canopy.”

“It’s incredibly important. It spurs growth and health,” Schwazze CEO Justin Dye said, referring to the Schwazze method.

The company will keep the Medicine Man Technologies brand as its professional services arm.

In late 2019 the company announced a handful of planned acquisitions and hired Dye as its new CEO. This week, Dye announced the company had purchased Mesa Organics and Purplebee’s, both Colorado-based cannabis companies founded by James Parco, Ph.D., a tenured professor at Colorado College. Parco is joining Schwazze’s management team. This purchase adds several dispensaries and an advanced extractor to Schwazze’s portfolio.

“They’re [Mesa Organics and Purplebee’s] a great company,” Dye said, “They’re growing quickly, they’re very profitable and have a great management team. They have a great leader who’s joining our team.”

Schwazze isn’t letting the COVID-19 crisis slow its growth. The company intends to scoop up additional dispensaries, cultivators, and manufacturers as it grows with Colorado.

The race to win neighborhood stores is on in India. A day after Facebook invested $5.7 billion in Reliance Jio Platforms to serve tens of millions of neighborhood stores in the country, the world’s largest e-commerce firm has launched “Local Shops on Amazon.”

The program will help customers discover products from local shops in their city. These shops will deliver the items themselves. In the event they want to service customers outside their serviceable area, they can work with Amazon to fulfill those orders, the company said.

“This is expected to be a win-win, as customers benefit from access to greater selection, faster deliveries, and additional value-added services, and local shops can transform themselves into digital stores,” said Gopal Pillai, VP of Seller Services at Amazon India, in a statement.

Amazon said it piloted the “Local Shops on Amazon” program six months ago and has already on-boarded 5,000 local shops and retails from over 100 cities across India.

These shops can list a variety of items on Amazon including products ranging from consumer electronics to mattresses, kitchen items to grocery and consumables, apparel and shoes to gifts, and even fresh flowers and cakes.

It’s not the first time Amazon has moved to work with neighborhood stores, locally known as kiranas. In January this year, Amazon announced the “I have space” program wherein it had partnered with thousands of neighborhood stores across India to use them to store and deliver goods.

Amazon also maintains an India-specific program called Amazon Easy that allows customers in smaller markets to get access to the convenience of online shopping. Under the Amazon Easy umbrella, Amazon India helps break down various transaction barriers for first-time online shoppers like trust, lack of internet access, language as well as digital payments, to embrace e-commerce.

The company said today that new shops can also sign up for “I have space” and “Amazon Easy” programs.

These efforts from Amazon and other firms underscore just how vital neighborhood stores remain for shoppers in the country.

These mom-and-pop stores offer all kinds of items, pay low wages and little to no rent. Since they are ubiquitous (there are more than 30 million neighborhood stores in India, according to industry estimates), no retail giant can offer a faster delivery. And on top of that, their economics is often better than most.

On Wednesday, Facebook said it would explore ways to integrate WhatsApp with JioMart, a joint venture between telecom network Reliance Jio and Reliance Retail, the largest retail chain in the country with presence in over 6,500 cities and towns. Both Jio and Retail are subsidiaries of Reliance Industries, India’s most valued firm.

The collaboration may allow users to find local stores around them on WhatsApp, talk to store operators and place orders from within the Facebook-owned instant messaging service, said Ajit Mohan, a Facebook VP who spearheads the company’s business in India, in an interview with TechCrunch.

“You can browse shops and talk to the shop owner. And ultimately, where we do want to take this flow is for you to be able to place your orders,” he said.

E-commerce is still at an early stage in India, accounting for just 3% of total retail sales, according to industry estimates.

Miro is a company in the right place at the right time. The makers of a digital whiteboard are seeing usage surge right now as businesses move from the workplace and physical whiteboards. Today, the company announced a hefty $50 million Series B.

Iconiq Capital led the round with help from Accel and a slew of individual investors. Today’s investment brings the total raised to around $75 million, according to the company. Among the company’s angel investors was basketball star Steph Curry.

What’s attracting this level of investment is that this is a product made for a moment when workers are forced to stay home. One of the primary complaints about working at home is the inability to sit in the same room with colleagues and brainstorm around a whiteboard. This reproduces that to an extent.

What’s more, Miro isn’t simply light-weight add-in like you might find built into a collaboration tool like Zoom or Microsoft Teams; it’s more of a platform play designed to integrate with many different enterprise tools, much like Slack does for communications.

Miro co-founder and CEO Andrey Khusid said the company planned the platform idea from its earliest days. “The concept from day one was building something for real-time collaboration and the platform thing is very important because we expect that people will build on top of our product,” Khusid told TechCrunch.

Image Credit: Miro

That means that people can build integrations to other common tools and customize the base tool to meet the needs of an individual team or organization. It’s an approach that seems to be working as the company reports it’s profitable with more than 21,000 customers including 80% of the Fortune 100. Customers include Netflix, Salesforce, PwC, Spotify, Expedia and Deloitte.

Khusid says usage has been skyrocketing among both business and educational customers as the pandemic has forced millions of people to work at home. He says that has been a challenge for his engineering team to keep up with the demand, but one that the company has been able to meet to this point.

The startup just passed the 300 employee mark this week, and it will continue to hire with this new influx of money. Khusid expects to have another 150 employees before the end of the year to keep up with increasing demand for the product.

“We understand that we need to come out strong from this situation. The company is growing much faster than we expected, so we need to have a very strong team to maintain the growth at the same pace after the crisis ends.”

TechCrunch recently asked a number of venture capitalists who invest in fintech to share their thoughts about the state of the industry; they pulled us into the present moment, drawing from their portfolio companies, deal flow and inboxes.

Today, we asked them to look into the future.

Although it looks like the COVID-19 pandemic has clipped the tails of many unicorns, this era won’t last forever. Investors expect the domestic and global economy to recover, perhaps starting in late 2020 or early 2021, though those timelines could be aggressive.

TechCrunch wanted to find out what improving macro conditions in the future might mean for fintech startups, a cohort that has attracted huge checks and even larger expectations from its backers and founders. To better understand what is coming, we reached out to a group of VCs we selected based on their experience and their firm’s investing history to predict what’s beyond the horizon.

Here’s our group for today:

• Matt Harris, Bain Capital Ventures
  
• Charles Birnbaum, Bessemer Venture Partners
  
• Jackson Gates, Manresa Ventures
• Rob Moffat, Balderton Capital
  
• Brendan Dickinson, Canaan
• Yann Ranchere, Anthemis
• Cherry Miao, Accel

As always, we will distill and discuss key trends from their responses before sharing their responses in full, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Consolidation, the power of cash, who is doomed and far-off IPOs

Our first theme is that consolidation is generally expected and could come broadly in the diverse fintech space. Digging through the answers, most said they believed the maturation of the fintech industry is upon us. Horizontal mergers might happen at a faster pace than before as companies struggle and acquisitions become cheaper.

Investors largely noted that startups in the lending space will not come out of this crisis unscathed, so expect forced combinations in that sector, as well as companies that target SMB customers.

The second trend we noted deals with who lives and who dies. The answer, contrary to our guess, doesn’t deal with stage but, instead, runway. Preparing this particular survey we had a hunch that later-stage fintech startups would have a better shot at staying alive, given their history of huge capital raises. That was nearly correct, it turned out.

However, instead of stage, our investor group generally agrees that runway matters more; older startups raised more, but they also may have far worse burn rates. In this vein, one investor noted that super early-stage fintech startups that just raised should do fine, as they’ll just build straight through the downturn.

Our third trend deals with which cohort of fintech startups will fare the worst. We had the investors rank a number of types of companies and some categories fared poorly. Consumer lending fintech shops do not inspire investor confidence, nor did consumer-oriented payments companies. Business lending was probably around third from the bottom.

There will naturally be some startups in those categories that do fine, but that’s almost more a comment on the total number of fintech startups than it is a commentary on the viability of any particular sector.

Trend number four: fintech IPOs are on hold for quarters, if not years. If you were hoping for a quick return to fintech liquidity, prepare to be let down. The investors we questioned said that we might see one in Q4, but that public debuts for fintech players are probably more of a 2021 affair.

We also asked if the Bill.com IPO — which went well — had any impact on fintech exits. Not really, was the answer, aside from one note that it might have helped drive some later, pre-COVID-19 M&A activity.

Our final trend: expect doom and gloom for interchange revenue.

The investors we chatted with said they largely think we’ll see a sharp drop in revenue from interchange fees, a slice of the pie that many card issuers take per transaction. This means that the startups that bet on IC revenue to fund their nifty why-not consumer debit cards will see a drop in their ability to issue. And that hurdle could mean startups struggle to make their credit card bets stay a reality, which brings us back to the first theme we talked about: further consolidation.

All this said, but one investor disagreed. You’ll have to read the piece to find out which one and why.

Today SingleOps, an Atlanta-based software startup, announced that it has raised $6 million in new capital. The startup’s service is built to support companies that deal with outdoor work like landscaping, tree care and lawn maintenance. It’s an example of the vertical SaaS trend that has come to the fore in recent years, with startups building software services tailored to particular business categories.

The market that SingleOps is focused on isn’t small, mind. The company claims it’s worth $100 billion each year. And that means there is lots of room for SingleOps to grow.

Before this new $6 million round, SingleOps had raised just $2.5 million, using that to scale up to 30 staff (its software team is remote, making the company more prepared for COVID-19 than most) and around 400 customers. How did it do that in an era when most startups raised $2.5 million to clean their offices? According to the company’s CEO Sean McCormick and president Taylor Gould in an interview with TechCrunch, being capital-efficient has been part of the company’s modus operandi since its early days. (You can build SaaS with limited capital if early customers write you checks, it turns out.)

The SingleOps team, via the company.

But toward the end of 2019, SingleOps reviewed its SaaS metrics and, deciding that things looked good, aimed to accelerate by bringing on new capital. The $6 million was led by Kansas City-based Five Elms Capital, with the firm taking a board seat in the transaction. According to McCormick and Gould, they liked Five Elms’ focus on B2B SaaS companies like their own. Diligence with existing Five Elms portfolio companies also helped them in making the choice.

SingleOps’ product, notably, isn’t narrow. Instead, the company’s service can log leads, handle scheduling, help provide estimates, has a mobile app and deals with scheduling, cost tracking and invoicing and payments. With a little tact, the self-described “green industry” that SingleOps works with is not renowned for being on the cutting edge of technological change; by offering a broader feature set, SingleOps can sell a single service to bring businesses in its target niche all the way into the cloud era.

The package of features is sitting well with the market so far, with SingleOps growing both GAAP revenue and ARR by “well over” 100% in the last 12 months, per its executives. And for the SaaS fans out there, SingleOps averaged 120% net retention over the last 12 months.

It was the first call for TechCrunch that I’ve had that involved several mentions of tree climbing as part of a startup’s go to market motion. As such, we had no choice but to write about the company, as it’s different than most startups we talk to, and therefore rather interesting.