Author: azeeadmin

Fetch Package, a last-mile package delivery company for apartment communities, has raised $50 million in a Series C round of funding and closed on a $10 million venture debt facility.

Michael Patton founded Fetch in May 2016 after being frustrated by having packages lost at the apartment community in which he was living. 

“I took the time to research how communities were handling packages. What I found was that some communities are receiving up to 300 to 400 packages a week and trying to manage that volume manually, adding a significant time burden on the team,” he told TechCrunch. “I knew there had to be a better way and that solution needed to be one that could easily handle the future of package delivery as e-commerce was gaining significant traction.”

Fetch launched its operations in Dallas in February of 2017 with the goal of solving “the package problem” for apartment communities. The startup, which later moved its headquarters to Austin, has seen impressive growth.

By the end of 2017, the SaaS company was servicing approximately 2,000 apartments in the Dallas area. Over the next three years that number grew to almost 150,000 doors being serviced out of 25 warehouses in 15 markets, including Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Orlando, Portland, Phoenix, Arizona and Seattle.

Fetch currently has just over 200,000 doors, or around 700 communities, across the country under contract. It says it works with seven of the top 10 nationally recognized apartment management companies in the country, in addition to “a majority of the largest owners and developers.” Last December, it inked a national preferred vendor agreement with management giant Greystar. Fetch delivered about 3.5 million packages in 2020, and hit the 2.5 million mark for volume in June 2021. The company says it’s currently on track to deliver more than 8 million packages by the end of the year. 

While the company would not disclose hard revenue figures, Patton says it tripled its year-over-year ARR (annual recurring revenue) in 2020 and GAAP revenue grew 6x year-over-year. Over the last two years, Fetch has seen “record sales,” he added, and is on pace to surpass 300,000 units by year’s end. Austin-based Ocelot Capital led its Series C round, which also included participation from Greenpoint Partners, Alpaca VC and Rose Park Advisors. Existing backers Iron Gate Capital, Signal Peak Ventures, Venn Ventures, Pando Ventures and Seamless also put money in the round. 

In addition to the equity raise, Signature Bank provided the company with a $10 million venture debt facility. The latest financing brings Fetch’s total funding to more than $92 million, and triples its valuation from its $18 million Series B raise last August.

Andrew Townsend, managing member at Ocelot Capital, believes that Fetch is “solving for a major bottleneck within the supply chain that is often overlooked.”

“We expect e-commerce delivery volume to continue to grow for the foreseeable future and Fetch is the only scalable solution available to multifamily operators,” he said. 

What makes Fetch stand out, in his view, is that the company can “efficiently” manage the fluctuations in package volume in ways that traditional parcel storage solutions cannot. It also provides apartment residents with the “unique convenience of on-demand doorstep delivery that aligns with the varied schedules of apartment dwellers,” Townsend added.

All packages at Fetch’s client communities are sent to the company’s facilities using a unique code identifier. The company then coordinates scheduled, direct-to-door delivery with residents directly via its app in a time frame that it says “works best for their schedule.”

“This takes the property out of the package management business and provides residents with a convenient amenity,” Patton said.

Fetch works with a mix of W2 employees as well as 1099 contractors to fulfill their service. On the W2 side, Fetch has had a 50% increase in total employees since the middle of last year, with about 350 employees today. This is in addition to the “thousands” of independent contractors/gig economy workers who also serve as drivers in all their markets.

Looking ahead, Fetch will use its new capital primarily to expand into new markets, with plans to launch in South Florida, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Nashville, Minneapolis and a “few other markets” over the next two quarters. Over the next 18 months, the company intends to launch around 20 new markets. The money will also go toward investing in its tech stack and operational infrastructure, Patton said.

Just as many other employee services have gone digital, so too is mental health. In the consumer space there are growing startups like Equoo, but the race is now on for the employee.

And since telemedicine has gone digital and video-based, so too is mental health provision. A number of companies are already playing in this space, including Spill Chat, On Mind, Lyra Health, Modern Health, Ginger and TalkSpace For Business.

Oliva’s take on this is not to create a marketplace or pre-recorded videos, but to put trained professionals in front of employees to talk directly to them. And there is even science to back it up. Indeed, some research suggests Psychotherapy via the internet is as good if not better than face-to-face consultations.

Oliva’s on-demand, professional-led mental healthcare for employees and managers has now attracted investment to the tune of a $2.2m pre-seed investment round, led by Moonfire Ventures, the new seed-stage VC firm from Atomico co-founder Mattias Ljungman.

The UK and Spain-based startup has also attracted angel investment from tech executives from Amazon, Booking.com, DogBuddy, Typeform, Hotjar, TravelPerk, and more.

Oliva is founded by Javier Suarez, who previously co-founded TravelPerk, and Sançar Sahin, who previously led marketing teams at Hotjar and Typeform, so both are well blooded in startups.

Suarez says he was inspired to create a mental health startup after the rigors of TravelPerk: “Employees are a company’s greatest asset – the better they feel, the better your company performs. But organizations are not set up to support their employees’ mental health in and outside of the workplace, which creates a massive problem for teammates, managers, and the organization as a whole. We’ve launched Oliva to give employees access to comprehensive online mental healthcare and to help organizations overcome the related challenges—from attracting & retaining talent and training managers to supporting remote workers.”

Privacy is addressed via the use of a secure and encrypted personal portal, where employees can chat with a care provider who matches them with a professional. They get 1-to-1 video therapy sessions from a range of mental health professionals, and can also track their progress. 

The team has also attracted Dr. Sarah Bateup, who has spent over two decades teaching and training mental healthcare professionals, who is now Chief Clinical Officer.

She said: “Oliva improves the way mental healthcare is accessed, supported, and paid for, while also adding more ongoing oversight and accountability to the process. Our ambition is for Oliva to be viewed as a badge of quality and set a new standard for workplace mental healthcare.”

Mattias Ljungman, Founder at Moonfire Ventures, added: “Mental health has been an overlooked area of care and wellbeing, especially in the workplace. Oliva’s founders are the only team we’ve seen taking a holistic, impact-driven approach to supporting mental health. While employer-funded mental health is becoming a well-established model in the US, Oliva is the first to bring a truly comprehensive approach to UK and European businesses.”

Oliva platform is integrated with Slack, providing employees with mental health drop-in sessions, therapy courses, and dedicated training and support for managers.

What with the planet collapsing and democracy under constant attack from all quarters – you know, just the usual – one or two members of the global population have, idly or not, wondered if the private sector might want to step up? I mean, as well as shooting billionaires into space. At the same time, even! Luckily, many businesses want to do better. But there are one or two hurdles. Incorporating “purpose” into their digital offering, such as donating to a non-profit at the end of a moving documentary, is harder than it looks. Businesses don’t have the capacity to build in donation software; they can’t continually verify and audit good causes; and processing donations is fraught with legal complications, compliance, and regulatory risk. What is to be done?


Pennies is one organization that bills itself as the digital equivalent of the traditional charity collection box. However, perhaps what we need is… drum roll… an API?

Step forward Percent. Founded in 2017, Percent provides an API allowing firms to customers to donate to good causes, matching a donation made when making a payment, or rounding up a financial transaction, for instance.

It’s now closed a $5M venture round led by Morpheus Ventures, allowing it to expand in the US, as well as its existing presence in the UK and Australia. The UK’s Nationwide Building Society – also an early investor and customer of the product – is a co-investor in the round.

The company says its API-first platform takes care of auditing and compliance processes to prevent fraud and money-laundering whilst also parsing tax-efficient disbursements of funds into 200 countries worldwide. It says 7 million non-profit causes have been added to the platform and it’s vetted the potential recipients of donations.

Henry Ludlam, Founder, and CEO of Percent, said: “Percent was founded to become the global API-first infrastructure behind all giving. This will be the foundation for a better, fairer future of capitalism in which every financial transaction has social and environmental good built into it.”

In an interview I asked him if the pandemic had accelerated the opportunity: “Because of COVID, suddenly now we have brands that are really desperate to build purpose into their business in a way that they just weren’t doing 18 months ago. It’s really been an amazing shift. We’ve just seen a huge shift in what consumers expect from businesses. Consumers expect businesses to build purpose into what they do now.”

He said that the product could be even built into – surprise! – streaming services: “Say you’ve seen a documentary. And at the end of the documentary, you feel particularly moved, like you watched a David Attenborough or something like that. You could then actually be able to quickly and easily build donations into the end of it. So using our API, it would pull up a list of nonprofits, so right there and then the customer could make a donation. We’re also working with a crypto platform where you can round down your transactions and donate to any nonprofit as well. There’s loads of really cool stuff we are working on which is coming out soon.”
 
Kristian Blaszczynski, Managing Partner of Morpheus Ventures, said: “With the events of the last several years, it has become more apparent that aligning brands with purpose is driving consumer behavior and spend. However, today, the process of donating to non-profits is incredibly archaic, manual, and inefficient… Percent’s API-first platform abstracts away all of these complexities and automates the processes, allowing businesses to align closer to their stakeholders and focus on their core business.”

Percent could well be pushing at an open door. Kantar Research says that only 22% of people could name a brand they thought was doing a good job addressing issues such as climate change, plastic waste, and water pollution. On the flip side, 95% of businesses think that “purpose” is at the heart of what they do. The disparity could not be more stark.

Is Percent the stripe for donations? We’re about to find out.

Fintech startup Yapily has raised a $51 million Series B funding round led by Sapphire Ventures. The company has been working on a single, unified open banking API for several European markets. Developers can leverage that programming interface to interact with third-party bank accounts directly from their own products.

“The core difference between us and most of the players in the space is our focus on the infrastructure,” founder and CEO Stefano Vaccino told me. Unlike Tink or TrueLayer, Yapily operates in the background. You never see a Yapily logo anywhere and the company provides no front-end interface.

Another difference is that Yapily focuses exclusively on API integrations. Due to recent regulatory changes in Europe (PSD2), banks now have to offer official APIs to integrate with third-party services. While some still don’t offer APIs, many of them are now complying with the rules.

By focusing on official APIs, Yapily can offer a snappier and more reliable experience. Other startups working on unified open banking APIs rely on a mix of official APIs, screen scraping and private APIs. Screen scraping can be particularly slow and private APIs sometimes stop working overnight.

When it comes to coverage, Yapily supports more than 1,500 banks across eight different countries. “We have between 90 and 99% coverage in the U.K., France, Spain, Germany, Ireland, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands,” Vaccino said. You can see the full list of banks on this page. According to Vaccino, only Tink has a similar level of coverage in Europe.

You can use Yapily’s API for several different purposes. For instance, the API lets you check the balance on a bank account, check the account holder name and fetch the last two years of transaction.

But the startup has also noticed that more and more customers rely on open banking to initiate payments from a bank account. Compared to card payments, account-to-account payments are cheaper. Cards also expire, leading to churn. Yapily’s API can be used for one-time payments, international payments, bulk payments and recurring payments.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to expand its commercial presence across Europe. In addition to the U.K., Germany and Italy, Yapily will hire new team members focused on France and Spain.

The startup will also build integrations with banks in new markets in Northern Europe and the Baltics — and then beyond Europe. “At the beginning of next year, we’re going to look at Latin America and especially Brazil,” Vaccino said. Brazilian banks already have a lot of open banking APIs.

Right now, Yapily has around 100 customers, such as American Express, QuickBooks, Bux, Vivid Money, Volt and Moneyfarm. By focusing on the infrastructure layer, other fintech startups are taking advantage of Yapily to build applications on top of the startup’s API. It’s an interesting go-to-market strategy and it seems to be working well.

Expense management has long been a pain point for employees and accounting departments: for many, tracking and parsing how money is spent on behalf of a company is just too bogged down in legacy software ill-equipped to handle more modern demands. Today, a UK startup building solutions to bring the process into the 21st century is announcing a major round of funding to double down on its growth.

Soldo, which provides a platform to issue employees with prepaid company cards that are linked through to an automated expense management system, has closed $180 million in funding. Soldo currently has some 26,000 customers, ranging from small medium-sized businesses, through to mid-market enterprises and up to large multinationals across 30 countries, with Mercedes Benz, GetYourGuide, Gymshark, Bauli, and Brooks Running among some of the more popular of them. Alongside that, by way of APIs, it also integrates with the popular accounting packages used by organizations today — NetSuite, QuickBooks, Zucchetti, and Xero, along with options to connect Soldo to more than 50 expense management platforms including Concur and Expensify.

The round, a Series C, is being led by Singapore’s Temasek, with Sunley House Capital, Advent International’s crossover fund, Citi Ventures, and previous backers Accel, Battery Ventures and Dawn Capital, also participating. Silicon Valley Bank also provided debt financing of an undisclosed amount.

London-based Soldo also did not disclose its valuation is in a statement on this latest investment, but as a point of reference, when it started to raise this money, back in December, the company was valued at around $278 million, according to PitchBook data. In the event, Soldo said the round was oversubscribed on the back of strong growth for the company: spend volume on its platform has grown four-fold since its series B, a $61 million round in 2019. (Note: Soldo’s main operations are in London, but it also has a small corporate HQ is in Dublin, as it picked up an e-money license in Ireland in 2019, part of its Brexit hedging.)

More generally — and perhaps because many of us are spending more time away from the head office, or perhaps because some of us are finally getting out on the road again to meet people — expense management is getting a lot of attention at the moment. Just earlier this month, one of Soldo’s bigger competitors, Denmark’s Pleo, raised $150 million at a $1.7 billion valuation.

It is a massive market to play for: Europe’s addressable market for expense management runs at $170 billion, the company said.

The crux of the challenge that Soldo aims to fix is that expenses is usually a very fragmented, non-digitised business, and employees that rack up expenses are usually not accountants: that is to say, handling them correctly is not one of their core competencies. The expenses themselves, meanwhile, have evolved to cover a lot of different things, a by-product of everything becoming easier to buy online and also how we work today: they might include subscriptions, travel and entertainment, office supplies for your home office, and making purchases on behalf of your company for marketing campaigns or online advertising, and more.

When expenses are happening digitally, they are easier to track, but very often they are for services or goods being purchased IRL, and that is when the other issues arise: people often forget to get receipts, or lose them before they fill out their reports, or pay for things out of their own pocket, and more.

And on top of that, expenses are made on corporate cards, or by way of bank transfers. The former can be expensive and hard to control, while the latter has its own challenges: it’s a slow process and often requires multiple people to clear a payment.

Soldo’s approach to fixing this is to first of all make it easier to issue employees with cards, prepaid in order to control spend on them better. It then links the card to an app, which creates automatic prompts that pop up for you every time you make a purchase with a card, to be reminded to capture a receipt and upload it.

“Soldo’s vision is manage the total spend across the breadth of a company, whether that be advertising, software subscriptions, travel and entertainment, vendor management or salaries across all payment methods. When we look at this way, expense management is only one of the many possible use cases and cards are only one of the many ways that a company might transfer money to suppliers,” Carlo Gualandri, CEO and founder of Soldo, told TechCrunch in an email. In contrast to competitors like Pleo, he noted “that we have a broader and more complete focus on managing all the possible needs of a company, way beyond travel and expenses. This is important because the value for the customer of using a spend management platform increases as a more significant share of company spend gets moved onto it.”

Without a doubt, the company’s growth since being founded five years ago hit a big speed bump in the form of Covid-19. Its recovery from that is a testament to how it’s found a place even in the current market.

“The pandemic did almost completely wipe out travel and expenses as a use case of companies’ spend – given limited numbers of workers were travelling, or expensing lunches, for example, in lockdown,” said Gualandri. “It was quite shocking to see all of Europe switch off, country by country, in the first weeks of March of last year as the lockdown kept people in their homes. And with that, a significant part of our financial services revenues also disappeared because business travel is the most common and widespread use of corporate cards.” But then, two things happened, he continued:

“The number of other company spend use cases grew significantly. We saw the global shift to ecommerce and the digitalisation of the finance department.  From supporting workers at home to other business activities there was a definite move toward online procurement and that requires a card for the payment,” he said. “Also, many companies started distributing their products or services online and with that they shifted a large share of their spend toward online marketing, an example of a key spend which is normally paid for using cards.  So, there was definitely a case of certain spend categories going down and others going up and rapidly so. A number of pandemic related problems emerged that we realised we could solve.”

“Our experience in software and payments technology gives us deep insight and we are confident Soldo stands at the forefront of finance digitalisation,” said Simon Lambert, a director at Sunley House, Advent International’s crossover fund, said in a statement. “The company operates in a large and fast-growing market, and we are thrilled to partner with its outstanding management team as they seek to build Europe’s leading pay and spend automation platform.”

The University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners (UTEC) is launching a new program to address a problem the venture capital fund says many deep-tech founders face. They may raise pre-seed capital from an incubator or accelerator program, but reach a funding gap before moving on to early-stage rounds. Without financial resources, it takes longer to commercialize their technology, no matter how promising.

UTEC, an independent venture fund associated with The University of Tokyo and other academic institutions, created the UTEC Founders Program (UFP) to address that gap. It offers two tracks: equity, which invests up to $1 million with flexible terms, and grants, a non-dilutive donation of about $50,000 (or occasionally up to $100,000) awarded to recipients every six months.

UFP’s applications are open to deep-tech researchers and founders anywhere in the world.

UTEC launched a $275 million fund in May, and typically writes first checks of about $1 million to $5 million. Its aggregated assets under management are about $780 million, which the firm says makes UTEC the largest venture capital fund in Japan for science and tech companies, and one of the largest deep-tech funds in Asia.

After getting feedback from deep-tech researchers and entrepreneurs, the fund’s partners realized that even though they might have developed potentially impactful tech, it might not be immediately ready for seed funding. Many teams would also benefit from swift funding to continue preparing their tech for commercialization, instead of waiting through a lengthy due diligence process.

In an email, UTEC principals and UFP leads Hiroaki Kobayashi and Kiran Mysore told TechCrunch, “Just like entrepreneurs who create new product offerings to cater to unmet market needs, we at UTEC endeavor to be more nimble and offer new investment products to serve science and technology researchers and entrepreneurs. UFP is UTEC’s attempt to channel over 15 years of deep-tech investing experience and learnings into an early-stage technology commercialization initiative.”

The equity track is primarily for seed and pre-Series A startups, and offers flexible investment terms like SAFE notes, KISS and J-KISS (the Japanese version of Keep It Simple Security), convertible notes and bonds, or common stocks. It accepts applications throughout the year, and successful candidates are contacted for a first interview within three days. Mysore said that the entire due diligence and investment committee process will be completed within four weeks of the first interview.

The grant track is aimed at pre-launch or early-stage startups, and the funds can be used for things like prototyping, testing the market and recruitment. Applications are opened every six months, with about five teams selected each time. The deadline for the first batch of applicants is July 31 and decisions will be made in September.

Deep-tech teams who participate in UFP also get access to UTEC’s network of more than 115 Japanese and global startups, academic institutions, government organizations and corporations.

 

Samsung just sent out invites for its next Unpacked event. There are those companies that like to sneak hints into their invites — and then there’s Samsung. The note leads with the big, bold words “Get ready to unfold” and features a pair of flat-colored objects that can reasonably be said to resemble the form factors of the Galaxy Z Fold and Flip, respectively.

In keeping with…the general state of the world over the past year-and-a-half, the event will be held virtually on Wednesday, August 11. Interestingly, the company is also opening up preorders on its “next flagship,” sights and specs unseen. Perks for early preorders include “12 free months of Samsung Care+, up to an extra $200 trade-in credit and a special pre-order offer.”

But honestly, it’s generally best to wait until you actually see the thing and maybe even read a review or two.

There’s a lot to unpack (so to speak) ahead of the event. First, I’m probably not alone in expecting that the company would focus its next big event on the upcoming Galaxy Watch. The big event at MWC was a bit of a dud (not unlike MWC itself), offering up more information on the upcoming wearable partnership with Google, in lieu of announcing any hardware.

As the company noted at the time, “The upcoming One UI Watch will debut at an upcoming Unpacked event later this summer, sporting the new UI, as well as the forthcoming joint Samsung/Google platform.”

It seems reasonably likely that this will be the event where that will occur, even if the new watch doesn’t get top billing. For one thing we’re running out of summer. For another, rumors have the new Galaxy Watch set for a late-August (the 27^th) release.

All told, this could well be a pretty huge summer event for the company, bucking last year’s trend of meting out devices one by one at virtual invents. Word on the street is we could be seeing a Galaxy Watch 4, Galaxy Z Fold 3, Galaxy Z Flip 3, Galaxy S21 FE (“Fan Edition” — basically the latest version of the company’s budget flagship) and even the Galaxy Buds Pro, which will more directly take on the AirPods Pro (which are getting a bit long in the tooth).

What’s missing in all of this? No points if you said the Note. Samsung’s well-loved phablet is reportedly not coming this year, as chip shortages continue to plague the industry. That would be a big hit to Samsung’s six-month cycle, though we’ll see how that all plays out soon enough.

The August 11^th event kicks off at 10AM ET / 7AM PT.

Tesla will allow other electric vehicles to access its global network of chargers later this year, CEO Elon Musk tweeted Tuesday. The comment follows years of chatter by Musk that signaled the company was amenable to the idea.

Until now, there has never been any details about how or when the company would open up its SuperCharger network of 25,000 chargers. Details are still slim. For instance, it’s unclear where it would initially open up, which automakers have reached agreements with Tesla and whether Tesla owners would get priority. However, Musk did finally attach a timeline of sorts by noting this would kick off before the end of 2021.

He later added in another tweet that its network would eventually be open to other EVs in every country that it has chargers. Tesla SuperChargers are located in North America, Asia and Europe as well as Middle Eastern countries UAE and Israel.

 

Musk has talked about either sharing the technology behind his Tesla Superchargers or opening them up for use to other EVs for years now. Way back in 2014, Musk said he’d be willing to open up the designs in order to build a standard that can be used interchangeably across the industry. This would allow competing electric car models to charge up at the Supercharger network.

He has mentioned some version of this at various events and during earnings calls ever since. In 2018, Musk said in response to a question during an earnings call that the Supercharger network is not a walled garden, a reference meant to express that it is not designed to prevent other EVs from using. However, it should be noted that Superchargers are not compatible to other EVs.

“We’ve always said that we’re — this is not intended to be a walled garden, and we’re happy to support other automakers and let them use our Supercharger stations,” Musk said in 2018. “They would just need to pay the share of the cost proportionate to their vehicle usage. And they would need to be able to accept our charge rate or at least — and our connector, at least have an adaptor to our connector. So this is something we’re very open to, but so far none of the other car makers have wanted to do this. But it’s like not because of opposition from us. This is not a walled garden.”

The two common connectors used for rapid charging are Combined Charging System (CCS) or CHAdeMO. CCS, a direct current connector that is an open international standard that in recent years has gained popularity in Europe and North America.

Tesla has its own connector, which means automakers would have to provide or sell an adapter to owners of its EVs to access the SuperCharger network. It’s a different story in Europe. Tesla uses the CCS direct current connector in Europe, making this the most likely region for Tesla to open up first.

 

 

Instagram is giving its users a tiny bit more power to see what they want — and not see what they don’t want — in its content discovery hub. The company introduced a new toggle called “Sensitive Content Control” on Tuesday that allows anyone to screen posts that it thinks could be offensive, hiding them from the Explore tab.

The new feature appears in the settings menu and lets users choose to either allow more content that could be “upsetting or offensive,” limit that content or “limit even more.” The phrasing is kind of weird but it acknowledges that the company’s moderation efforts aren’t perfect, and that’s realistic at least.

“You can think of sensitive content as posts that don’t necessarily break our rules, but could potentially be upsetting to some people – such as posts that may be sexually suggestive or violent,” Instagram explained in the announcement.

TechCrunch asked the company to expand on what kinds of posts are screened out under each category and if human or algorithmic moderation determines what is sensitive but did not receive a response.

We also asked if the company has any plans to create separate toggles for violence and sexual content, considering that a lot of people comfortable with the latter might be less inclined to see violence bubble up among the app’s makeup tutorials and influencer junkets.

On Instagram, “sensitive” content is a massive catch-all category for stuff it allows but doesn’t want to be seen as directly promoting. In its own guidelines on content it recommends, Instagram states that sexually suggestive content like “pictures of people in see-through clothing” aren’t eligible for the Explore tab. Instagram’s definition of sensitive content also includes dangerous forms of content like “exaggerated health claims” and posts promoting weight loss supplements.

Instagram is notorious for over-policing content that the platform deems to be sexual. A campaign from Black plus-size model Nyome Nicholas-Williams successfully pressured the platform into relaxing one of its overly restrictive nudity rules last year.

Instagram contextualized the new content controls part of a new effort to give users more power to determine what shows up in their feed. “We believe people should be able to shape Instagram into the experience that they want,” the company wrote in a blog post, noting that recent changes like being able to disable comments also give users more choice.

While the company is giving users more control over its algorithm in some small ways, it’s also considering giving them less. Last month, Instagram began testing algorithmic suggestions mixed into the main feed, a design choice that would let the company inject the platform with even more of what it wants you to see.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 20, 2021. The markets have been active in the last few days, with stocks dropping yesterday before rebounding today. Cryptos have also been suffering from ups and downs. A bit like Jeff Bezos, though his were planned. More on that in a second. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Bezos blasts off: The billionaire space race reached its second stage today, as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos left the planet for a few minutes. There was a livestream, though the Blue Origin space company was a bit more salesy than I was comfortable with. Regardless, the humans went up and came down, and the rocket and everyone aboard survived. The crew was pretty stoked about it all.
• European startups are thriving: Of all the startup markets in the world, Europe’s is among the very hottest. And according to venture capitalists that TechCrunch spoke with, the pace of investing activity on the continent is not set to slow much in the back half of 2021. This year will set all-time records in the European startup market for capital raised.
• Square builds a business bank: What has lots of small-biz customers and big fintech aspirations? Well, a lot of tech companies, but also Square. The company has put together a business bank for its business customers. How long until Square is simply a bank for individuals and companies alike? A good rule of thumb for fintech: No matter where a startup starts in financial technology, it will end up doing all things. Or die trying.

Startups/VC

Holy heck there were a lot of funding rounds announced today. TechCrunch covered a huge chunk of the total, so many that we can’t get to them all here. But after checking in on China, we have your speed-read all the same. Let’s go!

• All about the Chinese startup scene: Are you a little behind on China’s technology regulatory crackdown? Don’t worry if so. Our own Rita Liao is on the case and has a brilliant roundup of what’s going on with Didi and other China-based companies that went public on the U.S. market. The gist is that data may not be the new oil, as some liked to say a few years back, but data is proving to be a geopolitical flashpoint. As it turns out, the Europeans were early on this one.

Now, the venture capital rundown, in brief format to allow for the inclusion of more items:

• Taking on counterfeit drugs in Africa: That’s what RxAll is doing, and it has landed $3.15 million to pursue its vision. Launched in 2016, the company wants to combat fake drugs and the health problems that they cause.
• Charging consolidation: TechCrunch covered the deal between ChargePoint and the frustratingly punctuated has·to·be, in which the first company spent $295 million to buy the latter. Our read is the deal will allow ChargePoint “a boost in its pursuit to gain market share beyond North America” in the EV charging market.
• Titan raises $58M to bring active wealth management to the masses: If Robinhood did a good job making retail investing open to the masses by cutting fees to zero, Titan wants to pull a similar trick with the active-management world of wealth management. The company raised a $12.5 million Series A earlier this year.
• $44M for Little Spoon’s baby food mission: Feeding children is a daily challenge. Finding good things for them to eat that they will actually consume is even harder. Little Spoon wants to solve the matter by helping parents of young kids subscribe to D2C baby foods while also selling vitamins and the like.
• Path Robotics raises (again): The Ohio-based Path Robotics is back at the fundraising well this week, picking up a $100 million Series C. The round comes after the startup raised a $56 million Series B in May. What does it do? Welding robots!
• More money raised to buy SaaS revenue: Capchase has put together a $280 million round of funding (debt and equity) to grow its business of buying future software revenues for present-day cash. It’s a big market that Pipe also plays in.

To close out our startup and venture capital news, some updates on venture capitalists that want to fund startups:

• Hyper’s $60M concept: Part venture firm, part venture-funded media group, the Product Hunt sister company is looking to put capital and connections to work. TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino has the details.
• New Boston funds: Pillar VC has raised new capital in two chunks, including $169 million for its Pillar III capital pool and a $23 million second fund. The VC firm intends to invest broadly, including into SaaS, hardware and other categories. The investing group is perhaps best known for buying common stock in companies it backs.

For the operators out there, TechCrunch has a chat with Maya Moufarek, the founder of Marketing Cube, who spent more than 15 years working for companies like Google and American Express before launching her own growth consultancy about startup marketing. Enjoy!

How we built an AI unicorn in 6 years

Few startups go to market with the exact product their founders first envisioned.

Today, Tractable is known for developing tech that allows drivers to upload photos of their vehicles after a collision so its AI can assess the damage. Its first paying customer, however, used Tractable to inspect plastic pipe welds.

As fate would have it, that customer also fired them just as the founders were raising their first round.

“We struck gold with car insurance,” says co-founder Alex Dalyac, as it was “a huge and inefficient market in desperate need of modernization.”

In an Extra Crunch guest post, he shares several takeaways from the last six years spent scaling a unicorn that have value founders of all stripes. Step one?

“Search for complementary co-founders who will become your best friends,” advises Dalyac.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Facebook is really doing the newsletter thing: The newsletter push is not slowing down, with Facebook’s Bulletin service bringing on 31 new writers. That’s a pretty big haul. Of course, Facebook is using the service as a way to drive Facebook Pay usage, among other goals. But as a writer, seeing major companies argue over my professional cohort is certainly a turn of the tables.
• Venmo admits that its default-public feed was bad: Ah, the public Venmo activity feed. It never made sense, but Venmo stuck to it through thick and thin until now. Now you will merely see a more friend-focused feed. Progress!
• YouTube embraces tips: Want to tip a YouTube creator for their work? You will be able to thanks to a new feature on the social video service called Super Thanks. It’s a one-time tip of between $2 and $50. Hopefully this helps musical groups that use the platform for distribution.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

We’re reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices. Fill out the survey here.

Read one of the testimonials we’ve received below!

Marketer: Illia Termeno, founder of Extrabrains

Recommended by: Anonymous

Testimonial: “T-shaped expertise with focus on strategy and long-term ROI.”

Tomorrow! XTC Global Finals. The No. 1 purpose-driven startup event. Free registration

XTC Global Finals is the world’s largest startup ecosystem for powering a better world via purpose-driven innovation and technology, inspired by the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It’s free to attend. Sign up today and join the show tomorrow starting at 9 a.m. PDT!