Author: azeeadmin

Over the course of last year, Amazon began rolling out a new worker safety wearable to 25+ sites. From the looks of it, the Robotic Tech Vest is really more like a pair of suspenders  attached to to an electronic utility belt. The Amazon Robotics-designed product was created to keep workers safe when they need to enter a space in order to fix a robotic system or retrieve fallen items. Built -n sensors alert Amazon’s robotic system’s to the wearer’s presence, and they slow down to avoid collision.

The vest is designed to work in tandem with the robots’ existing obstacle avoidance detection.

“All of our robotic systems employ multiple safety systems ranging from training materials, to physical barriers to entry, to process controls, to on-board,” Amazon Robotics VP Brad Porter told TechCrunch. “In the past associates would mark out the grid of cells where they would be working in order to enable the robotic traffic planner to smartly route around that region. What the vest allows the robots to do is detect the human from further away and smartly update its travel plan to steer clear without the need for the associate to explicitly mark out those zones.”

Safety has, of course, become a major concern when it comes to dealing with human/robotic interactions at the work place. As OSHA notes, “Studies indicate that many robot accidents occur during non-routine operating conditions, such as programming, maintenance, testing, setup, or adjustment. During many of these operations the worker may temporarily be within the robot’s working envelope where unintended operations could result in injuries.”

In December, two dozen Amazon warehouse employees were sent to the hospital in a bear repellant-related incident in which a robot may have been involved. As robot and human collaborations become increasingly commonplace, it’s a good idea to take a better safe than sorry approach to working alongside these big, metal machines.

Porter notes that tests with the vest have a “huge success,” with “more than one million unique activations” having been recorded with the systems it’s deployed thus far. 

One of America’s oldest universities is launching a school for one of the world’s youngest disciplines.

The University of Virginia announced today that it has received a $120 million private donation to endow a new School of Data Science. The donation is the largest in the university’s history, and will create the twelfth school at the university.

The donation was offered by the Quantitative Foundation, which is based in UVA’s hometown of Charlottesville. Jaffray Woodriff, the founder and CEO of Quantitative Investment Management, is the trustee of the foundation, where his wife Merrill is a director. QIM is one of the hedge fund leaders in quantitative trading, and Bloomberg noted that the fund saw investment returns of 55% in the first few months of 2017.

UVA’s administration said that the School of Data Science intends to offer a range of degree programs from the bachelor’s to the doctoral level as well as to be a center for research on data science. It massively expands UVA’s current Data Science Institute, which was opened in 2013 and also funded by a $10 million grant from the Quantitative Foundation. The school is pending approval from internal UVA governance committees as well as the state of Virginia before launching.

In its release, UVA explained the unique design of the school:

The school will have satellites and centers instead of departments. The satellites will be embedded in other schools to facilitate collaborative data science work in those disciplines, and the centers will be theme-based with focus areas to include data acquisition; engineering; analytics; visualization and dissemination; and ethics, policy and law.

UVA is not the first university to offer a dedicated (or rebranded) school of data science, but it is certainly among the most prominent.

Large donations to universities have been trickling in the past year, with many of the donations focused on generating interest in technical fields as well as medicine. Facebook’s first full-time employee Taner Halicioglu donated $75 million to the University of California San Diego focused on data science in early 2017.

Late last year, MIT announced that it had received $350 million for a new computing-focused school from investment manager Stephen A. Schwarzman, while Harvard received $100 million for mathematics and the sciences from an anonymous donor.

UVA’s announcement is the first large university donation announced in 2019.

Y Combinator-backed startup Whyd is pivoting from hardware to software. The startup had been working on a connected speaker with a voice-control interface specifically designed for music. But a couple of years later, it’s clear that subsidized voice assistant devices from Google and Amazon have taken over the market.

Whyd is only keeping its own software platform and partnering with other companies. In other words, if you’re working on an app, a website or a skill for the Amazon Echo or Google Home, you can create your own voice assistant to interact with your content.

This way, your users get the same experience across all platforms and you don’t have to rely on Amazon’s or Google’s services.

“We let you integrate with a database of millions of items, create a custom agent and release it,” Whyd co-founder and CEO Gilles Poupardin told me. You can think about it as a sort of Algolia for voice queries. Instead of limiting yourself to basic queries (“play my favorite playlist”), you can handle complicated queries (“I want to dance on electronic music”).

In particular, Whyd focuses on the cloud infrastructure behind your voice assistant. The company doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel and lets you use any speech-to-text SDK. But Whyd can then interpret your query and give you results in little time.

The startup has already worked with 8tracks on its voice assistant. You can now search for music playlists in the mobile app using a voice assistant now. Whyd has developed different models for other verticals. You can imagine a voice assistant for video on demand, e-commerce and other services.

This is what happens between your database and your front end when users interact with their voice:

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

We’re back! After what I think was our first-ever break, Kate Clark and I sat down to dig into the latest startup venture news. There was a lot. We had to skip a few rounds to squeeze the show down to size, but we still hit the biggest stories.

First, Lime and Bird are raising again. In Bird’s case, the company is sticking around its last valuation, adding a few hundred million to its coffers. Lime is said to be raising a hundred million more, bringing its valuation in line with Bird’s own. When all this is said and done, and what’s expected to happen actually does, Bird and Lime could add $700 million to their bank accounts, making both scooter shops double unicorns.

Next we tucked into the Chariot shutdown. Ford’s decision to shutter its bus-van-techie-transport startup that it bought back in 2016 was surprising news. (Chariot vehicles have become a regular part of the San Francisco cityscape over the years.) The company is shuttering its UK operations first, followed by its U.S.-based routes.

Pivoting back to our regular fare, Slack’s financials partially leaked. Early-2018 era projections aren’t the best tool for figuring out how a company is performing today, but it’s better than nothing. Slack has lots of cash, is growing very quickly, and is climbing toward the $500 million mark this year, if it’s old growth expectations hold up. (I tacked on Palantir’s latest into this segment as well.)

Finally, the government is partially shut down as you’ve heard. It’s blocking IPO progress for a host of companies, many of whom come from tech. How long this pileup builds will determine how soon any tech shop can debut.

It’s good to be back, and I promise to never mention Peloton again. If for no other reason than making our beloved producer laugh is verboten. Stay cool!

Stuff You Should Know, the explainer podcast hosted Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant (pictured on the left above), has now surpassed one billion total downloads.

The podcast is published by How Stuff Works/Stuff Media, which was acquired by iHeartMedia last fall. The company says this is the first podcast to cross the billion-download threshold. (Publishers including Stuff Media have previously hit that number across all their titles — but if any individual podcast reached that milestone before, they’ve kept quiet about it).

How big an achievement is this in the broader podcast landscape? Well, Apple announced last year that all the podcast content in iTunes and the Podcasts app had been downloaded and streamed a total of 50 billion times.

While Stuff You Should Know remains one of the most popular podcasts around — iHeartMedia declined to provide download numbers for individual episodes, but said the show has been averaging 30 million downloads per month — it also has the advantage of a deep archive and a head start over many other high-profile series. In fact, it first launched back in April 2008 and has subsequently published more than 1,000 episodes, with recent segments covering everything from air bags to the Spanish flu to assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler.

The podcast was also adapted into a TV show that aired for one season on the Science Channel.

In a statement, Clark said:

“Stuff You Should Know” was born out of a curiosity that Chuck and I both have about everything. We aren’t experts on any of the topics we discuss on the show, we just happen to be good at talking together about what we’ve dug up and I think that makes the podcast accessible and enjoyable for everyone. Reaching one billion downloads has really validated what we’ve built over the past 10 years and it makes us excited about the next 10 too. It’s an amazing milestone for us and we’re grateful to all the listeners around the world who helped grow that number.

A surge of audio services using AI are giving voice a boost in customer service, but when it comes to communications in the age of mobile, messaging continues to be a critical platform. Now, a startup called Zipwhip, which provides a platform for businesses to interact with customers by text messages from any business line — landline, VoIP, or toll-free — is announcing funding of $51.5 million to capitalise on that push to bring more text-based messaging into customer service.

This round, a Series D, is being led by Goldman Sachs, with participation from previous investors OpenView, M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) and Voyager Capital, and it brings the total raised by the startup to $92.5 million. John Lauer, co-founder and CEO of the Seattle-based company, said in an interview that it’s not disclosing valuation with this round but the figure is “absolutely higher than before.”

This is a growth round, and that’s what Zipwhip has mainly been doing since it last raised money, $22.5 million in September 2017.

Its revenues have grown by 80 percent in the last year as its customer base has hit 3.3 million phone numbers across 20,000 businesses (compared to 6,500 in 2017), including 100 large enterprises, and it’s inked deals with all the major carriers in the US in order to be able to interconnect business landlines to answer questions, sell things, and take complaints, all by text.

With the rest of the world’s carriers and business users still to tackle, there is a lot of growth at home left for the startup: it estimates that there are about 200 million business phone numbers in North America alone.

The opportunity and gap in the market that Zipwhip and companies like it — and there are others like OpenMarket (Lauer’s former company), MessageBird, Twilio to an extent and more — are attempting to tackle is that while a lot of businesses have set up the infrastructure to communicate with customers by phone, email and websites to sell them things, to receive complaints, to solve technical problems and other scenarios that require interactions, a lot of those customers are using text messaging in the rest of their lives, and ideally would prefer to have it as an option for all of those business interactions too.

In fact, Lauer notes that there is already a big swathe of missed contacts as a result of people who unwittingly try to send text messages to numbers that are in no way capable of receiving them, or are sending text replies to organizations that have texted them. But those messages are not going through because those numbers that do not take replies.

In other words, many assume that a Zipwhip style service already exists in more places than it does.

(Anecdotally, this has happened to me a number of times, and I’m guessing I’m not the only one.)

Zipwhip aims to solve that problem by letting an organization to use its platform to activate whatever telephone numbers they’re using for customer service.

Then, when a text comes through on that number — this is where the carrier integration is essential — it gets routed it through the Zipwhip platform so that it appears on an agent’s or sales person’s or tech support dashboard in order for the latter group to read and respond.

Typical use cases are for basic customer service and support, but he notes sports teams have signed on as customers have started using the platform for ticket sales and other use cases as well.

For now, all of these are routing back to humans with only the smallest amount of bot-ification (or using automated responses often based around some loose natural language-based machine learning) thrown in. For example: if a text is sent out of office hours, you might get a response saying someone will get in touch when the office opens again, or get given the option to get basic information through the text platform, if that’s all that’s needed.

“It’s still early innings, but the current feedback is that businesses and customers hate chatbots,” he said. “Yes, it’s a mixed bag, and the future will be exciting, but I do not think there is much that can replace humans today.”

(Pricing for Zipwhip is based on volume and ranges in monthly tiers of $35 for one line, $100 for multiple lines and priced to order for high volume enterprise services.)

Of course, when we talk about messaging in the modern phone, we’re often talking about smartphones and the use of apps like Faebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp, Viber, WeChat, Instagram and more. Many of these have started to realise the opportunity of tapping into the B2B2C opportunity. WhatsApp has started to roll out its WhatsApp for Business API, for example, to companies to help them answer queries, send them information they’ve requested and so on; and Messenger has dabbled in letting businesses interact around simple Q&A or purchases by way of bots, and more.

Interestingly, Zipwhip is taking a very different approach in that it has not integrated yet with any of these apps. Instead, it focuses on whatever the native texting app happens to be for a phone. Lauer said that this is partly the result of research that the company has conducted to help with product development.

Despite the efforts from messaging apps to make business messaging in their apps a thing, he said, “What we have found is that users are not instinctively using Messenger or WhatsApp when they think of texting a business. It’s so easy to use text messaging — and this is where a business would contact a user — that it becomes the default.”

It’s had a nudge to do that from the big platform players, too. Zipwhip was one of the first partners for Business Chat, the new service from Apple to let businesses communicate with customers and make purchases via iMessage, although that initiative hasn’t really seen much activity in recent times.

“Apple is dong a great job and we’re excited to get more involved,” Lauer said diplomatically when I asked him about it.

More substantial has been Zipwhip’s work with Google, which has been pushing its RCS standard for years now, to promote the idea of bringing more app-like interactivity and experience to basic text messaging, first on Android devices, as a way of helping Google and carriers better combat the rise of messaging apps — another reason why Zipwhip may be less inclined to integrate with them as well.

“Google is a customer and partner of ours. RCS was really the thing we needed, and the reason it’s happening is because of Google,” Lauer said. While there are not that many handsets out there yet that have been activated to work with RCS, this is coming, he added. “What we’re hearing is that more carriers will deploy more updates over the air to turn it on.”

As a customer, he notes that Google does a lot of text messaging to enable things like AdWords and all that runs through Zipwhip’s platform.

Lauer said that fundraising has gotten “a lot easier” as the company has grown and shown investors that despite the huge surge of popularity of apps, there’s still life an opportunity left in humble text messaging.

“Zipwhip sits at the powerful intersection of a huge addressable market, a proven history in industry innovation and an agile SaaS-based approach that will allow the company to grow and evolve for the foreseeable future,” said Dorr. Hillel Moerman, Head of Goldman Sachs’ Private Capital Investing group, said in a statement. “The product, team and corporate vision behind Zipwhip position the company to continue its successful trajectory. We look forward to working with Zipwhip’s leadership team as they meet the growing demand for a better way for businesses and consumers to communicate.”

Still, there will be more convincing to do beyond VCs. “For us the challenge going forward is getting businesses to be more aware that they can actually do this, add texting into their solutions,” he said. “It’s still early days.”

H. Moser & Cie. Swiss Alps is back with another Apple Watch lookalike. The $350,000 Watch Concept Black is a ludicrous take on the classic minute repeater design. And on this version, the wearer can only tell the time by chiming the watch.

These sort of watches have a storied history that predate wristwatches by hundreds of years. Called minute repeaters they allow the wearer to hit a button, and the watch will respond with chimes indicating the time of the day. The movements were developed before artificial illumination made it possible for watchmakers to add glow-in-the-dark markings. But this is far from a working man’s watch. H. Moser worked with Manufactures Hautes Complications SA to develop the custom movement for this watch.

Flip the watch over, and the watch’s cost is explained in the custom movement. This minute repeater has a rectangular-shaped movement. It’s special. To chime two small hammers strike a gong that runs around the outline of the rectangle casing. Despite the odd shape, the watch is capable of producing a chime Hodinkee calls “crisp, clear, and resonant, with none of the dampening you’d expect from a heavy precious metal case.”

To set the time, the wear chimes the watch using the slide on the side of the casing. Then the wearer adjusts the time using markers on the crown. I like it. It’s a simple and clever way to set a watch without hands.

This watchmaker started using the Apple Watch’s design in 2016 and now has a range of timepieces that mimic the rounded square look in its Swiss Alp Watch line.

H. Moser is known for its concept watches. Don’t expect this watch to be in your local Tourneau. It’s a publicity stunt for H. Moser’s custom watch business that lets the ultra-rich develop one-off timepieces. As for this concept, I’m a fan. The watch demonstrates everything special about the watch industry right now. After years of getting beat up from the Apple Watch, it’s finding its grove in producing both beautiful and affordable mechanical watches and wonderful unattainable timepieces. To be justified, watches do not have to have apps; they just have to delight the wearer and this $350,000 watch does just that.

Fintech in Southeast Asia continues to pique the attention of global investors. Alibaba, Tencent and others have jumped into the region and deployed hundreds of millions of dollars, and now Warburg Pincus is joining them. The U.S-headquartered PE firm has led a Series C investment in Vietnam’s Momo, which claims to be the country’s largest mobile wallet company with 10 million downloads.

Momo already has some big-name investors; Standard Chartered led a $28 million round in 2016 while Goldman Sachs invested $5.7 million back in 2013.

The size of this new round isn’t being disclosed, but Pham Thanh Duc, CEO of M-Service — the parent company of Momo — said it is a record deal for an e-commerce or fintech startup in Vietnam. A lot of the biggest deals in Vietnam have been undisclosed, but one of the largest from last year was a $50 million-odd investment in e-commerce company Tiki from China’s JD.com which gives an indication of the size. The deal might even be as high as $100 million, that’s according to a Deal Street Asia report, although Pham declined to comment on the figure.

M-Service was founded over a decade ago, Momo is its take on digital payments in Vietnam, a market of nearly 100 million people, one-quarter of whom are aged under 25.

Momo started out offering digital payment via an e-wallet app. It has since expanded into utility bill payments and mobile top-up, as well as areas like movie tickets, airline flights and payment for goods and services at 100,000 payment points nationwide, including popular chains. The service recently began offering bill payment for loans, and Pham said it is developing a credit scoring system that will allow it to introduce financial services to users in partnership with financial institutions.

The playbook, he said, is very much based upon the success of Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay services in China, which went from payments to loans and investing and more.

While both of those Chinese internet giants have stepped into Southeast Asia with fintech investments in markets like Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, neither has entered Vietnam at this point. Pham said Momo has an ongoing dialogue with Alibaba, but there’s been no investment. Since neither Alibaba nor its fintech affiliate Ant Financial has an operating presence in Vietnam, he said the relationship is “just conversations” at this point. That’s certainly a pairing that is worth keeping an eye on as Alibaba aims to enlarge its presence in Southeast Asia, which — with a cumulative population of 600 million people, growing middle classes and rising internet access — is seen as a growth opportunity by Chinese tech companies.

Partner-wise, Momo works with the likes of Facebook and Google to provide payment for their services and it will soon begin working with Apple, Pham revealed.

While other businesses may be looking region-wide, Momo is not entertaining new market expansions at this point.

“For the next two to three years, we are still very focused on the domestic market,” Pham told TechCrunch in an interview. “There’s no short-term plan to expand to other countries [and] our main effort is focused on user base expansion in Vietnam.”

But, Pham said, he does expect that overseas players will enter Vietnam.

Grab Pay and GoPay [from ride-hailing duo Grab and Go-Jek) will come soon and even Alipay, but I think that for the last five years we have been the number one e-wallet provider,” he said. “We care much about competitors because we are leading the market… other players have had to imitate our model.”

Estimating that nearest-competitor ZaloPay, from Vietnam’s top chat app Zalo, may have around “one-tenth” of the user base Momo, Pham explained that he believes his company is around 12-18 months ahead of the competitor.

This new investment — which was led by a Warburg Pincus affiliate in Vietnam and closed last year — is aimed at fortifying that lead and grabbing a much larger slice of the Vietnamese population, which is tipped to rocket past 100 million by 2025.

Tesla is cutting 7% of its full-time workforce. The company disclosed the headcount reduction in an update emailed to all employees and also posted to its website.

In the email, CEO Elon Musk says the focus must be on delivering “at least the mid-range Model 3 variant in all markets”. He also warns those employees not set to be axed that there are “many companies that can offer a better work-life balance, because they are larger and more mature or in industries that are not so voraciously competitive”.

“We unfortunately have no choice but to reduce full-time employee headcount by approximately 7% (we grew by 30% last year, which is more than we can support) and retain only the most critical temps and contractors,” he writes.

“Tesla will need to make these cuts while increasing the Model 3 production rate and making many manufacturing engineering improvements in the coming months. Higher volume and manufacturing design improvements are crucial for Tesla to achieve the economies of scale required to manufacture the standard range (220 mile), standard interior Model 3 at $35k and still be a viable company. There isn’t any other way.”

Last October Musk tweeted that Tesla’s headcount was 45,000 — suggesting some 3,150 jobs are set to go.

The move follows a number of cost-cutting efforts at the electric car maker, including an announcement this week that a long-running buyer referral program will end this month. Musk said the program was adding too much cost to the cars.

Three months ago Tesla also announced a new, cheaper mid-range battery version of the car — starting at $45,000; though still not the $35,000 base-spec Model 3 (before incentives) that was originally promised.

His full note to employees is pasted below.

CNBC reports that Tesla shares fell almost 6% in premarket trading following the news.

Company Update

January 18, 2019

This morning, the following email was sent to all Tesla employees:

As we all experienced first-hand, last year was the most challenging in Tesla’s history. However, thanks to your efforts, 2018 was also the most successful year in Tesla’s history: we delivered almost as many cars as we did in all of 2017 in the last quarter alone and nearly as many cars last year as we did in all the prior years of Tesla’s existence combined! Model 3 also became the best-selling premium vehicle of 2018 in the US. This is truly remarkable and something that few thought possible just a short time ago.

Looking ahead at our mission of accelerating the advent of sustainable transport and energy, which is important for all life on Earth, we face an extremely difficult challenge: making our cars, batteries and solar products cost-competitive with fossil fuels. While we have made great progress, our products are still too expensive for most people. Tesla has only been producing cars for about a decade and we’re up against massive, entrenched competitors. The net effect is that Tesla must work much harder than other manufacturers to survive while building affordable, sustainable products.

In Q3 last year, we were able to make a 4% profit. While small by most standards, I would still consider this our first meaningful profit in the 15 years since we created Tesla. However, that was in part the result of preferentially selling higher priced Model 3 variants in North America. In Q4, preliminary, unaudited results indicate that we again made a GAAP profit, but less than Q3. This quarter, as with Q3, shipment of higher priced Model 3 variants (this time to Europe and Asia) will hopefully allow us, with great difficulty, effort and some luck, to target a tiny profit.

However, starting around May, we will need to deliver at least the mid-range Model 3 variant in all markets, as we need to reach more customers who can afford our vehicles. Moreover, we need to continue making progress towards lower priced variants of Model 3. Right now, our most affordable offering is the mid-range (264 mile) Model 3 with premium sound and interior at $44k. The need for a lower priced variants of Model 3 becomes even greater on July 1, when the US tax credit again drops in half, making our car $1,875 more expensive, and again at the end of the year when it goes away entirely.

Sorry for all these numbers, but I want to make sure that you know all the facts and figures and understand that the road ahead is very difficult. This is not new for us – we have always faced significant challenges – but it is the reality we face. There are many companies that can offer a better work-life balance, because they are larger and more mature or in industries that are not so voraciously competitive. Attempting to build affordable clean energy products at scale necessarily requires extreme effort and relentless creativity, but succeeding in our mission is essential to ensure that the future is good, so we must do everything we can to advance the cause.

As a result of the above, we unfortunately have no choice but to reduce full-time employee headcount by approximately 7% (we grew by 30% last year, which is more than we can support) and retain only the most critical temps and contractors. Tesla will need to make these cuts while increasing the Model 3 production rate and making many manufacturing engineering improvements in the coming months. Higher volume and manufacturing design improvements are crucial for Tesla to achieve the economies of scale required to manufacture the standard range (220 mile), standard interior Model 3 at $35k and still be a viable company. There isn’t any other way.

To those departing, thank you for everything you have done to advance our mission. I am deeply grateful for your contributions to Tesla. We would not be where we are today without you.

For those remaining, although there are many challenges ahead, I believe we have the most exciting product roadmap of any consumer product company in the world. Full self-driving, Model Y, Semi, Truck and Roadster on the vehicle side and Powerwall/pack and Solar Roof on the energy side are only the start.

I am honored to work alongside you.

Thanks for everything,
Elon

 

The chances are you may be familiar with Tokopedia, especially after it commanded a $7 billion valuation last November when it raised $1.1 billion from investors like Alibaba and SoftBank’s Vision Fund, but fewer people outside of Indonesia are aware of another sizable local online retail unicorn: Bukalapak.

Smaller than Tokopedia in size, the company is valued at $1 billion — it became Indonesia’s fourth unicorn one year ago. The country, which is Southeast Asia’s largest economy and has a population of over 260 million, also counts Tokopedia, Go-Jek and Traveloka in the billion-dollar club.

Founded in 2010, Bukalapak claims an impressive two million orders per day and 50 million registered users. On the seller side, it said its core e-commerce business covers products from four million SMEs, 500,000 kiosk vendors and 700,000 ‘independent’ micro-businesses in Indonesia. Bukalapak means ‘open a stall’ in Indonesia’s Bahasa language, and anyone can open a shopfront on the platform.

This week, Bukalapak landed another notable funding milestone after it raised $50 million Series D round from the Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund, a joint vehicle operated by Korean mutual fund Mirae Asset and Naver, the firm whose businesses include popular messaging service Line. This is the first time Bukalapak has disclosed the size of an investment in its business, although it did not give an updated valuation. The startup counts Alibaba’s Ant Financial, Indonesia telco Emtek, Sequoia India and Singaporean sovereign fund GIC among its existing backers.

Bukalapak said it plans to use its new funds to grow opportunities for its SME retail partners and build out its tech platform, that’s likely to mean digital services such as insurance and a mobile wallet.

The company made a major push last year to partner with local ‘warung’ kiosk store retailers — who sell items much like street vendors — in a bit to differentiate itself from Tokopedia, which is much like Alibaba’s Taobao service for Indonesia, and develop an offering for consumers.

Beyond its e-commerce marketplace, Bukalapak also offers streaming and fintech products.