Author: azeeadmin

High-profile investors are doubling down on their bets to explore the future of social commerce in India. DealShare said on Thursday it has raised $144 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its presence in the South Asian market and eye opportunities in international markets.

The new financing round, a Series D, was led by Tiger Global and valued the Indian startup at $455 million (post-money), up from the pre-money valuation of $50 million in Series C. TechCrunch reported in April that the New York-based hedge fund was in talks to lead a large round in the Bangalore-headquartered startup.

WestBridge Capital, Alpha Wave Incubation (a venture fund backed by ADQ, and managed by Falcon Edge Capital), Z3Partners, Partners of DST Global, and Alteria Capital also participated in the new round, third in the last seven months and which brings the startup’s to-date raise to $183 million.

Even as Amazon and Flipkart have been able to create a sizeable market in the urban Indian cities, much of the nation remains still underserved. (Fun fact: DealShare kickstarted its journey the day Walmart acquired Flipkart.)

DealShare, which began as an e-commerce platform on WhatsApp, where it offered hundreds of products to consumers, is attempting to reach consumers in smaller Indian cities and towns. The startup says customers on its platform buy curated items in groups, which makes purchases “highly competitive” in affordability.

The startup, which competes with SoftBank and Prosus Ventures-backed Meesho, offers “high quality, low priced essentials coupled with a gamified, fun and virality-driven vernacular shopping experience that makes it easy for first-time internet users to experience online shopping,” its executives said.

The community purchasing, they said, enables “ultra-low-cost delivery mechanism” and ensures “best-in-class unit economics.” DealShare has amassed over 1000+ micro-entrepreneurs partners who help it promote the community group buying model in the country.

“We plan to strengthen our network further and increase it to 5000+ by this year-end. Along with this, we are planning to fuel the growth by building State-of-the-art technology and infrastructure-related assets which will ensure efficiency,” said Sankar Bora, Founder, Chief Operation Officer, DealShare.

“We are excited to partner with DealShare as they grow the Indian E-commerce market. DealShare’s unique approach combines discovery-led social sharing, group buying, and a gamified shopping experience with a simple consumer interface. They are well positioned to power the next wave of Indian ecommerce growth,” said Griffin Schroeder, Partner at Tiger Global, in a statement.

DealShare expects to break-even in the next 12 months and will also expand to international markets, said Navroz Udwadia, co-founder and chief executive of Falcon Edge Capital. The expansion will start with the UAE, he added.

Zomato, a food delivery startup in India, said on Thursday it has boosted its plan to raise $1.3 billion in its initial public offering, which opens on July 14 and closes July 16.

The loss-making startup said it will price its shares in the range of 72 Indian rupees (96 cents) to 76 ($1) and is targeting an upper limit valuation of $8.56 billion.

Zomato, which competes with Swiggy — the market leader according to several industry estimates — said after a successful IPO it will have about $2 billion in the bank. It plans to list on Indian stock exchanges.

The 12-year-old Gurgaon-headquartered Indian startup — which counts Info Edge, Temasek, Tiger Global, and Ant Group among its largest investors and has raised over $2.2 billion to date — is the first high-profile tech startup in India to explore the public markets.

In a virtual press conference on Thursday, the startup executives said Zomato, which has search and discovery in nearly two dozen markets, will focus largely on India and will explore categories such as online grocery delivery in the future.

The executives dismissed Amazon as a serious competitor for now. “There’s no major impact on market share from Amazon so far,” the company’s chief financial officer said. Amazon entered the food delivery market last year and is operational in just Bangalore for now.

Zomato also revealed its latest financial on Thursday. For the financial year that ended in March this year, its revenue was down 23% to $283 million, and it also shrunk its losses to $110 million, down 66% from the same period a year ago.

As most Indian edtech startups work on broadening their catalog with live and recorded courses for students, some are beginning to take a different approach to tackle the South Asian nation’s large education market.

Teachmint, a one-year-old startup, is betting on empowering teachers to create their own virtual classrooms with a few taps on their smartphone.

The startup, which started its journey during the pandemic, has developed what it calls a mobile-first, video-first tech infrastructure to help teachers take online classes, engage with students virtually, assign them tasks, conduct attendance and also collect fees.

Teachmint’s offering has already amassed over 1 million teachers from over 5,000 Indian cities and the usage is growing over 100% each month, said Mihir Gupta, co-founder and chief executive of Teachmint, in an interview with TechCrunch.

Last month, students consumed over 25 million live classes on Teachmint, he said. Naturally investors are paying attention, too.

On Thursday, the startup said it has raised $20 million in a new investment led by Learn Capital and with participation from CM Ventures. The new investment, dubbed Pre-Series B, comes in less than two months after the startup closed its $16.5 million Series A funding.

Other than taking a different approach to tackle the education space in India, where over 250 million students go to schools, another key thing that differentiates Teachmint is its in-house prowess with tech infrastructure.

Most startups today rely on scores of technology vendors for streaming their videos, cloud storage and processing tasks, and collecting fees. “Zoom and Google Meet are great services for talking to people. But they are not fundamentally designed to solve the needs of teachers and students,” said Gupta.

By not relying on other tech providers, Teachmint, which counts Lightspeed India Partners and Better Capital among its investors, has also been able to optimize its offerings more aggressively, said Gupta.

Through its proprietary approach, Teachmint said it is able to significantly control and improve the interactiveness in these classrooms. Having in-house technology offering also helps the startup spend only a fraction on each class, he said.

“We have created a new category altogether. Any teacher can download the Teachmint app and create their first classroom within minutes. This ease of digitization of classroom didn’t exist before Teachmint,” he said, adding that more than 75% teachers on the platform use their smartphones to conduct classes.

Teachers on Teachmint can also create public links of their classrooms and share it on Facebook and other platforms to create additional distribution channels.

Students also don’t need to jot down the entire session. Teachmint delivers the notes that teachers go through during their classes in real-time with students. This way, “teachers also don’t have to recreate their notes,” he said.

The app, which supports 10 Indian languages (in addition to English), is just 14 megabytes in size and consistently ranks at — or among — the top education apps in Play Store in India.

On Thursday, the startup also announced a new product to serve schools and colleges. The product, called Teachmint for Institute, offers educational institutes a platform to conduct and monitor all their online classes and institute activities.

The expansion to this new category came after Teachmint, which consults with many teachers for building products and new features, learned that schools were struggling to collect fees from students amid the pandemic, said Gupta. And the pandemic, which last year prompted New Delhi to close schools, also made it less transparent for institutes to have visibility into how their classes were being conducted.

“In just 12 months, Teachmint has blossomed from a nascent idea to the #1 ranked education app in India – an unprecedented growth narrative for an Indian edtech company,” said Vinit Sukhija, Partner at Learn Capital, in a statement.

“This market resonance is a testament to the Teachmint team’s ongoing commitment to authentically incorporating teachers’ perspectives into the company’s ever-expanding suite of market-pioneering digital teaching tools. Having inaugurated its partnership with Teachmint just several months ago, Learn Capital is thrilled to now augment its partnership at this critical juncture in the company’s trajectory as it plans for exciting new product launches and international expansion.”

The startup will deploy the fresh funds to continue to expand its product offerings and hire talent, said Gupta. But more interestingly, he said, Teachmint is ready to expand outside of India and serve teachers in international markets.

With a flip of a switch, Gupta said he will make the offering available globally. “We don’t create content, so product is geography agnostic,” he said.

French startup Younited Credit has raised a $170 million funding round. Goldman Sachs is leading the round with existing investors Eurazeo, Bpifrance and AG2R La Mondiale also participating. The company offers several credit products to European consumers. It also has a diversified distribution strategy.

Consumer credit in Europe is completely different from consumer credit in the U.S. Many countries don’t rely on a central credit score system to assess your credit worthiness. Similarly, most people don’t have a credit card. Financial institutions that want to offer credit lines have to evaluate the potential risk behind a credit application. It can be a complicated and tedious process.

Younited Credit differentiates itself from legacy players with a data-driven, AI-based approach. Instead of sending a ton of documents to your banker, Younited Credit tries to automate request processes as much as possible.

The company takes advantage of DSP2 regulation and open banking APIs to ingest data. As the startup has facilitated a huge volume of credit offering, it can also leverage past data for machine learning risk models.

So far, Younited Credit has granted more than €2.4 billion in credit ($2.8 billion at today’s exchange rate). It operates in five European countries. France is still the company’s leading market as Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany represent 40% of Younited Credit’s revenue.

More recently, the company started embedding its product into third-party products. For instance, banks and fintech companies offer credit products in their apps thanks to partnerships with Younited Credit. Examples include N26, Lydia, Orange Bank and Fortuneo. In 2021, the B2B offering represented 30% of Younited Credit’s net banking income.

Right now, Younited Credit has 440 employees. It plans to hire another 200 people over the next 18 months. The company wants to double down on European markets.

Up next, Younited Credit wants to double down on embedded finance with credit products that appear on the checkout page of popular e-commerce websites and apps. The company will compete with ‘buy now, pay later’ companies, such as Klarna, Floa, Oney, Scalapay, etc.

Named Younited Pay, the company plans to offer a wide range of options with payment terms spread over 3 to 48 months. Some companies are already using Younited Pay, such as Free, Micromania and LDLC.

The startup is offering this payment solution online and in brick-and-mortar stores. Once again, Younited Credit tries to find customers where they are already. And it seems like a smart move as physical points of sales represent over 50% of Younited Pay payments this year.

Many teachers and parents in Indonesia rely on WhatsApp to keep in touch, creating “multiple groups that often become messy and highly ineffective, and result in confusion or lost threads,” says Rizky Aniez, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Gredu. The Jakarta-based startup was created to give everyone involved in the educational process—school administrators, teachers, parents, guardians and students—apps that let them keep track of everything and communicate with one another. Today it is announcing a $4 million Series A, led by Intudo Ventures, an Indonesia-focused venture capital firm, with participation from returning investor Vertex Ventures. 

While some teachers use Google Classroom, Gredu was created to work with Indonesia’s K-12 National Curriculum and Islamic Curriculum programs, used in both private and public schools. The startup is also developing new verticals, including software for preschools and university programs. 

Founded in September 2016, Gredu is now used by more than 400 schools, with a total of 400,000 users.  Its Series A will be used to expand in the Greater Jakarta Region and into major cities throughout Indonesia, plus product development and hiring. 

Gredu’s subscription software is centered around a management system that lets administrators and teachers keep on touch of all their their tasks—including syllabuses, teaching schedules and communicating with parents and students. Aniez told TechCrunch that the onboarding process is simple, and “in an ideal solution, it can be done within hours.” Gredu was designed to be modular, so it can be customized to a school or district’s needs. 

The platform currently has four main parts. Gredu School Management System was created for administrators, while Gredu Teacher lets educators track student attendance, create and score exams and arrange class activities. Gredu Parents enables parents and guardians to keep track of their kids’ performance and talk to teachers. Gredu Student, meanwhile, lets students look up their test scores, attendance records and school activities. 

Gredu launched an Online Assignment feature before COVID-19 and during the pandemic, it added Interactive Class to enable remote learning. Aniez said the company plans to add new features and adapt Interactive Class for other uses once in-person schooling becomes the norm again. “We believe that many of the digitization in schools adopted during the pandemic will continue to be used for the future, changing the way administrators manage schools and improving transparency for local education authorities, teachers and parents,” he added.

Gredu is part of a crop of Indonesian edtech startups that have recently raised funding, including tuition platform InfraDigital; homework help and tutoring app CoLearn; and ErudiFi for education financing. 

In a statement, Intudo Ventures founding partner Patrick Yip said, “Working with school districts and administrators, GREDU provide innovative solutions specifically tailored to enhance the quality, transparency and effectiveness of Indonesia’s education system. We are proud to support GREDU at this critical juncture as they help more schools digitize their operations and create positive impact for students throughout Indonesia.” 

A group of 37 attorneys general filed a second major multi-state antitrust lawsuit against Google Wednesday, accusing the company of abusing its market power to stifle competitors and forcing consumers into in-app payments that grant the company a hefty cut.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is co-leading the suit alongside with the Tennessee, North Carolina and Utah attorneys general. The bipartisan coalition represents 36 U.S. states, including California, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Colorado and Washington, as well as the District of Columbia.

“Through its illegal conduct, the company has ensured that hundreds of millions of Android users turn to Google, and only Google, for the millions of applications they may choose to download to their phones and tablets,” James said in a press release. “Worse yet, Google is squeezing the lifeblood out of millions of small businesses that are only seeking to compete.”

In December, 35 states filed a separate antitrust suit against Google, alleging that the company engaged in illegal behavior to maintain a monopoly on the search business. The Justice Department filed its own antitrust case focused on search last October.

In the new lawsuit, embedded below, the bipartisan coalition of states allege that Google uses “misleading” security warnings to keep consumers and developers within its walled app garden, the Google Play store. But the fees that Google collects from Android app developers are likely the meat of the case.

“Not only has Google acted unlawfully to block potential rivals from competing with its Google Play Store, it has profited by improperly locking app developers and consumers into its own payment processing system and then charging high fees,” District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine said.

Like Apple, Google herds all app payment processing into its own service, Google Play Billing, and reaps the rewards: a 30 percent cut of all payments. Much of the criticism here is a case that could — and likely will — be made against Apple, which exerts even more control over its own app ecosystem. Google doesn’t have an iMessage equivalent exclusive app that keeps users locked in in quite the same way.

While the lawsuit discusses Google’s “monopoly power” in the app marketplace, the elephant in the room is Apple — Google’s thriving direct competitor in the mobile software space. The lawsuit argues that consumers face pressure to stay locked into the Android ecosystem, but on the Android side at least, much of that is ultimately familiarity and sunk costs. The argument on the Apple side of the equation here is likely much stronger.

The din over tech giants squeezing app developers with high mobile payment fees is just getting louder. The new multi-state lawsuit is the latest beat, but the topic has been white hot since Epic took Apple to court over its desire to bypass Apple’s fees by accepting mobile payments outside the App Store. When Epic set up a workaround, Apple kicked it out of the App Store and Epic Games v. Apple was born.

The Justice Department is reportedly already interested in Apple’s own app store practices, along with many state AGs who could launch a separate suit against the company at any time.

A new pilot program from TikTok would inject a little LinkedIn into the youthful video-based social network.

TikTok announced that, starting today, it will invite users to submit video resumes to participating companies, including Target, Chipotle, Shopify, Meredith, NASCAR and the WWE. The company encourages applicants to show off their skills in a creative way while tagging the content with the hashtag #TikTokResumes.

The pilot program is TikTok’s latest effort to streamline the relationship between brands and creators, giving both even more reason to invest time and cash into the platform.

“#CareerTok is already a thriving subculture on the platform and we can’t wait to see how the community embraces TikTok Resumes and helps to reimagine recruiting and job discovery,” TikTok Global Head of Marketing Nick Tran said of the pilot.

The new pilot program will be discoverable through the dedicated hashtag and on standalone site tiktokresumes.com, which also has some tips for applying and sample videos. On that site, anyone can browse job listings by employer and fill out a short questionnaire, attaching their video link. And yes, for better or worse, pointing potential employers to your LinkedIn profile is still encouraged.

TikTok views the new pilot as a “natural extension” of its college ambassador program, which recruits students to serve as on-campus representatives promoting the social network’s brand. The pilot program will accept TikTok resumes through July 31.

Of the participating brands listed on the new site, many openings are just for regular ol’ jobs, like NASCAR seeking a sales rep and Target hunting for hourly warehouse workers to cover the night shift. (Should we really be encouraging unemployed people to jump through more hoops to land gigs like this?)

Some listings are more tailored to the TikTok skill set, like an opening at All Recipes for on-camera talent to teach viewers how to make fluffy biscuits or a supervising social producer role at Popsugar.

The traditional resume hasn’t changed much over the years — list the stuff you did, keep it on one page — but any brand hiring a social media manager or any other kind of content creator could be well served by TikTok’s latest creator economy experiment.

A new pilot program from TikTok would inject a little LinkedIn into the youthful video-based social network.

TikTok announced that, starting today, it will invite users to submit video resumes to participating companies, including Target, Chipotle, Shopify, Meredith, NASCAR and the WWE. The company encourages applicants to show off their skills in a creative way while tagging the content with the hashtag #TikTokResumes.

The pilot program is TikTok’s latest effort to streamline the relationship between brands and creators, giving both even more reason to invest time and cash into the platform.

“#CareerTok is already a thriving subculture on the platform and we can’t wait to see how the community embraces TikTok Resumes and helps to reimagine recruiting and job discovery,” TikTok Global Head of Marketing Nick Tran said of the pilot.

The new pilot program will be discoverable through the dedicated hashtag and on standalone site tiktokresumes.com, which also has some tips for applying and sample videos. On that site, anyone can browse job listings by employer and fill out a short questionnaire, attaching their video link. And yes, for better or worse, pointing potential employers to your LinkedIn profile is still encouraged.

TikTok views the new pilot as a “natural extension” of its college ambassador program, which recruits students to serve as on-campus representatives promoting the social network’s brand. The pilot program will accept TikTok resumes through July 31.

Of the participating brands listed on the new site, many openings are just for regular ol’ jobs, like NASCAR seeking a sales rep and Target hunting for hourly warehouse workers to cover the night shift. (Should we really be encouraging unemployed people to jump through more hoops to land gigs like this?)

Some listings are more tailored to the TikTok skill set, like an opening at All Recipes for on-camera talent to teach viewers how to make fluffy biscuits or a supervising social producer role at Popsugar.

The traditional resume hasn’t changed much over the years — list the stuff you did, keep it on one page — but any brand hiring a social media manager or any other kind of content creator could be well served by TikTok’s latest creator economy experiment.

We’ve been hearing about BMW’s electric city scooters, not to be confused with electric kick scooters, for years. The German automaker came out with the BMW Motorrad Concept Link in 2017, a concept vehicle that imagines the future of expensive micromobility. After revealing the latest concept scooter, the CE 04, in November 2020, BMW is now actually going through with production.

On Wednesday, the company announced the new CE 04 will officially be a part of its 2022 lineup, with an expected global market launch of Q1. It’s a sweet-looking ride, with a decidedly retro-futuristic vibe, harkening back to what people in the 70s or 80s might have thought a “futuristic” vehicle would look like.

This is not the first electric scooter BMW has sold. Back in 2014, it came out with the C Evolution, which never really took off in the States. Maybe it was because it was ahead of its time. Maybe it’s because it cost $13,000.

The CE 04 starts at just around $12,000. Now, the whole point of the BMW Motorrad Concept Link is to provide “a vision of what will be important in the urban environment in the future,” so maybe BMW doesn’t care if it doesn’t crush it with sales. But until BMW produces something much cheaper than its gas equivalents (you can buy a new Vespa for under $5,000), the automaker’s new scooter is not guaranteed to take cities by storm.

With a 8.9 kWh battery pack, compared to the Evolution’s 12.7 kWh pack, BMW should be able to produce this vehicle and turn a profit for a lot less than it’s selling it for. Especially given the automaker’s access to higher quality technology and the cheaper price of batteries today when compared to five years ago.

A spokesperson for BMW Motorrad told TechCrunch the CE 04 is priced in the mid-range of the motorcycle market, and is still much less expensive than an electric car.

“This could be an entryway to electric mobility at a fraction of the cost for some people,” he said.

Of course, the fanboys will go for it, like the one BMW fictionalized in a strange press release we’re trying really hard not to make fun of. Here’s a snippet:

“It’s early in the morning. The city is awakening. On the way to my garage I breathe in the still cool air. I’m wear [sic] a casually cut parka that’s both fashionable and functional at the same time. The protectors are inconspicuous but give me a sense of security. I’m ready for the day to start.”

Wait, there’s more:

“The first birds are chirping, the urban jungle is awakening. The sounds of the city begin to swell. Everything is set in motion. People move – with each other and in parallel. Paths cross.

What will the new day bring? Tapas with friends at the little bar by the river? Or the exhibition at the modern art museum? First of all there are appointments at the office. Workshops, meetings, customer visits. This is what life feels like.

I pair my smartphone with the scooter, and with a flick of my wrist I activate the parka. Its LEDs light up. I’m quiet, but I want to be seen. It’s all so simple and smooth.

We’re off again at last. Even when I was having my breakfast, I couldn’t wait. Not even the birds notice me. I glide almost silently through my neighbourhood. I’m a part of the city again.”

One with the city

[gallery ids="2174848,2174845,2174842,2174841,2174846,2174847,2174849,2174850"]

 

“The new BMW CE 04 is the logical and at the same time rethought continuation of BMW Motorrad’s electromobility strategy,” said Florian Römhild, project manager of the BMW CE 04, in a statement. “Urban areas are its element. This is where it sets a new benchmark – in terms of both technology and visual style.”

For the European and Asian markets, the CE 04 will be marketed as an urban vehicle, but in the U.S., where that category barely exists, the scooter will try to reach the urban commuter.

The CE 04 has a maximum output of 42 horsepower and a maximum speed of 75 miles per hour, meaning it can go on highways, the clogged arteries of America. It can ride for an estimated range of 80 miles and can be charged in under two hours using an at-home level 2 charger or any public charging station. Riders can choose ECO mode, Rain mode or Road mode to make driving efficient, and for those who want to kick it up a notch, there’s the Dynamic mode, part of the Premium package which costs an extra $1,650.

The avant-garde form follows function with the flat battery, which is placed in the middle of the vehicle, for smooth, low rides, as well as design freedom to include a storage compartment for the helmet and charging cable, which can be reached while sitting. The regenerative braking system helps feed energy back into the battery, which is likely to happen a lot if the rider is driving in the city.

As all modern vehicles should have, there’s a 10.25-inch color screen on the handlebars with integrated navigation and connectivity to the rider’s device, and there’s even a USB-C charging port.

The vehicle comes standard in “light white,” but to have the way more badass “Magellan grey metallic avant-garde” coloring, it’ll cost you an upgraded $225. Either way, both come with bright orange accents.

More to come?

“Our CEO said that because it’s an 04, there’s space under and over the 4, so I’d say there’s space for more electrified scooters in our future,” said the spokesperson.

BMW has no other specific models in the works, or timing on when they will be produced, but the CE 04 is part of BMW’s overall plan to have delivered about 2 million full-electric vehicles to customers by 2025 and 10 million by 2030.

“Things are moving so quickly we may see new additions to the CE range within a year or two,” said the spokesperson.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 7, 2021! Today was a doozy, with everything from global startup fundraising news to frivolous lawsuits attacking tech companies all the way back to European unicorn liquidity. Hope you’re ready! Also, Early Stage is tomorrow. See you there! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3 5

• Former U.S. president needs money: The previous U.S. president, Donald Trump, made a laughingstock of himself today by announcing lawsuits against major social media companies. His arguments were instantly ridiculed. But Trump is already fundraising off his attempt to slander private companies, the media and generally anyone who doesn’t bow to his wishes. That’s what today’s brouhaha was actually about.
• Why Microsoft’s big cloud deal fell apart: We noted yesterday that the big Microsoft-U.S. military cloud deal was kaput. Today, Ron Miller explained why, namely that by trying to find a single vendor for the $10 billion deal, it was doomed from the start. Maybe the Department of Defense can figure out a multicloud approach. I bet there are a few startups willing to help if that’s the case.
• India’s bonkers startup ecosystem: TechCrunch’s Manish Singh has been a force of nature since he joined, covering the Indian startup market with verve. Today he wrote “Dispatch from Banaglaore.” It’s amazing. Details include that India produced 16 unicorns this year and that its startups raised $10.46 billion in the first six months of 2021. Wild.
• How European unicorns are looking for exits: U.S. companies are going public. European companies are going public. Chinese companies were going public. But the SPAC boom seems to be largely an American affair. Is that set to change? TechCrunch investigates.
• $100M for mmhmm: Remember mmhmm, the startup that made neat Zoom tools earlier in the pandemic? It just raised a $100 million round. That’s a pile of ducats for the company. Let’s see what it can do with nine figures worth of capital. Also, Darrell’s headline was lovely for this piece — we awarded him 10 points.

Startups/VC

Sure, we had to expand the TechCrunch Top 3 to five entries, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t another mountain of news to cover. Here’s your startup and venture capital highlight reel:

• Turning IRL surgery into a VR game: News broke today that Osso VR, a San Francisco-based startup, raised $27 million to “upend modern surgical instruction with a virtual-reality-based solution that allows surgeons to interact with new medical devices in 3D space.” That means we can train more surgeons faster, right? If so, this is good news.
• In which Alex tried to cover developer tools. Again. Today r2c, a startup that is building a SaaS service around the Semgrep open-source project, raised a preemptive Series B. I wrote about it, trying to explain a developer cybersecurity tool in the process. I give myself a B-, mostly for effort. The round is cool, though.
• Today’s Tiger deal is Unit21: It wouldn’t be a weekday without a Tiger-led deal, right? Unit21 announced that the ever-present investing group led a $34 million Series B into its business, valuing it at around $300 million. The no-code, anti-fraud startup raised its Series A less than a year ago.
• Opioid-treatment apps are being a bit too free with their data collection: TechCrunch was not enthused.

Pakistan’s growing tech ecosystem is finally taking off

So far this year, startups in Pakistan are on track to raise more than in the previous five years combined, according to Mikal Khoso, an early-stage investor at Wavemaker Partners.

“Even more excitingly, a large portion of this capital is coming from international investors from across Asia, the Middle East and even famed investors from Silicon Valley,” he notes in a guest post for Extra Crunch.

He’s identified three factors that are fueling investor interest: rapidly expanding mobile connectivity, an improved security situation, and critical legal and regulatory changes that are making the country more startup- and VC-friendly.

Drawing a map of Pakistan’s tech ecosystem, Khoso identifies local companies trying to grab a slice of grocery delivery, e-commerce, ride-hailing and other sectors before examining the challenges still in place.

“The segments in Pakistan that are likely to attract the best entrepreneurs and most investor capital in the years to come will be fintech, e-commerce and edtech,” says Khoso.

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

Big Tech Inc.

Still here? Good. There’s even more news to get through. Let’s talk big companies:

• Satellite SPACs are here: Beep beep beep everyone, both Satellogic and Planet are going public via blank-check companies. Sure, you are tired of SPACs. But these deals are out of this world! Har har har.
• $200M for Outbrain before it goes public: Ye olde bridge round is still a thing, it turns out. Outbrain, which TechCrunch described as “an adtech company that provides clickbait ads below news articles,” put together a huge round before its own debut.
• India’s tech oversight is shaking up: Keep an eye on what comes next.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you’re a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we’d like to hear about why they loved working with you.

If you’re curious about how these surveys are shaping our coverage, check out this interview Anna Heim did with Peep Laja: “To stay ahead of your competitors, start building your narrative on day one.”

TC Eventful

If you’ve been waiting to get your ticket to TC Early Stage – Marketing & Fundraising, well today just might be your lucky day! We’re giving the first 10 Daily Crunch readers a free ticket to attend the event, which kicks off tomorrow. Simply click this link and select the free ticket type to redeem. But you’ll want to hurry because once they’re gone, they’re gone! Register now.