Author: azeeadmin

Move over stickers and games: Japanese messaging app firm Line has announced it’s raising around 148.1 billion yen ($1.33BN) through convertible bonds to fund aggressive expansion into the financial services business, Reuters reports. 

Line said it plans to spend most of the money on promoting its Line Pay service and for other new financial services by the end of 2021.

The messaging platform has been involved in payment offerings for some years, launching Line Pay at the end of 2014 — to let users make payments through the app at affiliated online and offline stores by registering their credit cards.

Line Pay also supports p2p payments between users of the platform, which has some 164M monthly active users in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia.

While popular in parts of Asia, the messaging platform has failed to grow usage beyond its core regions — unsurprisingly given how fiercely competitive the space is — with the likes of China’s WeChat and Facebook owned WhatsApp standing in its way. But while user growth has stalled, Line has managed to grow revenue from its existing user base. And doubling down on financial services looks to be its growth strategy going forward.

It has recently started experimenting with crypto — announcing the forthcoming launch of a cryptocurrency token (called Link) late last month, and developing its own blockchain to power it, in what looks to be a bid to drive user engagement on its platform. Though it has long used a digital currency (Line Coins) on its platform.

Earlier this year Line also announced the launch of a Singapore-based crypto exchange, called BitBox.

It’s not doing an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for the Link token launch, presumably to side-step the legal questions around token sales. So the convertible bond sale looks to be its alternative (traditional) route for raise funds for the push to grow its financial services business.

In a statement today Line said it would issue zero coupon convertible bonds maturing in 2023 and 2025.

Reuters reports that a portion of the bonds will be issued to its South Korea-based parent Naver Corp to maintain its ownership above a certain level.

It added that Naver’s stake would fall to 70.42 percent from the current 72.86 percent when all the bonds are converted into stock.

Berlin based Internet of Things (IoT) startup relayr, whose middleware platform is geared towards helping industrial companies unlock data insights from their existing machinery and production line kit by linking Internet connected sensors and edge devices to platform controls, has been acquired by insurance group Munich Re in a deal which values the company at $300 million.

relayr was founded back in 2013 with the initial aim of helping software developers hack around with hardware, at a time when developer interest in IoT was just taking off.

The startup went on to pass through startupbootcamp and crowdfunded a cute looking chocolate-bar shaped hardware starter kit before expanding into building a hardware agnostic cloud services platform to act as a central hub for data flows. relayr then further honed its focus to the needs of industrial IoT, and its platform — which is now used by around 130 businesses — offers end-to-end middleware combined with device management and IoT analytics, and can operate in the cloud, on-premise or a hybrid of both depending on customers needs.

We first covered the Berlin-based startup back in 2014 when it closed a $2.3M seed round. It’s raised $66.8M in total, according to Crunchbase, which includes a $30M Series C round in February led by Deutsche Telekom Capital Partners.

relayr did not disclose the investors in its 2014 seed at the time, saying only that they were unnamed U.S. and Switzerland-based investors. But Kleiner Perkins and Munich Re (via its HSB subsidiary which is acquiring relayr now) were named as investors in later rounds, along with Deutsche Telekom .

Insurance giants and telcos have a clear strategic interest in IoT — with the technology promising to drive network usage and utility on the telco side, and offering transformative potential for the insurance industry as data streams can be used to monitor equipment performance and predict (and even steer off) costly failures.

Munich Re said today that its HSB subsidiary is acquiring 100% of relayr in a deal that values the business at $300M. (It’s not clear if it’s all cash or a mix of cash and stock — we’ve asked). It says the deal will help it “shape opportunities in the fast-growing IoT market”, and is envisaging a joint business model with the combined pair developing not just tech solutions for clients but risk management, data analysis and financial instruments.

“IoT is already significantly changing our world and has the potential to disrupt the traditional insurance and reinsurance industry through new business models, services and competitors,” said Torsten Jeworrek, member of Munich Re’s board of management in a statement. “I am truly happy to announce this acquisition, as it supports our strategy to combine our knowledge of risk, data analysis skills and financial strength with the technological expertise of relayr. This is our basis to develop new ideas for tomorrow’s commercial and industrial worlds.”

“We are delighted to strengthen our relationship with Munich Re/HSB to push digitalization in commercial and industrial markets and strive for our mission to help commercial and industrial businesses stay relevant,” added relayr CEO, Josef Brunner. “The unique combination of the companies demonstrates the importance to deliver business outcomes to customers and the need to combine first-class technology and its delivery with powerful financial and insurance offerings. This transaction is a great opportunity to build a global category leader.”

The pair have been partnered since 2016, when the insurance firm invested in relayr’s Series B, but say they see the acquisition strengthening Munich Re’s financial and insurance offerings while also offering a route to expand relayr’s middleware business via leveraging the insurance group’s large client base.

“Back in 2016, HSB invested in relayr in an effort to harness the strategically significant business potential offered by IoT. relayr’s end-to-end IoT solutions for the industrial and commercial sectors are an ideal addition to our Group’s capabilities,” said Greg Barats, president and CEO of HSB, and the person responsible for Munich Re’s IoT strategy, in another supporting statement. “HSB has always focused on insurance and technology… relayr will help us to rapidly implement our global strategy to develop new IoT solutions for our clients. Digital transformation in the industrial and commercial sectors offers opportunities for new services and financial applications.”

relayr says it already offers industrial companies which are seeking to digitalise their businesses a “comprehensive range of services” — such as being able to extract and analyse data from machines and equipment to determine when a machine is likely to fail (and it touts cutting costs, increased energy efficiency and product quality improvement as among the benefits its platform offers) — but says the acquisition will allow it to develop its “innovative value stack”, by enabling new revenue models, cost reduction, and “increased effectiveness across industries”.

It also sees benefit in sitting under the established Munich Re umbrella — as a way to convince customers it will be a long-term business partner. It adds that it will continue to maintain its current focus on IoT for the industrial sector.

Atlassian today announced the first beta of a new edition of its flagship Jira project and issue tracking tool that is meant to help ops teams handle incidents faster and more efficiently.

Jira Ops integrates with tools like OpsGenie, PagerDuty, xMatters, Statuspage, Slack and others. Many teams already use these tools when their services go down, but Atlassian argues that most companies currently use a rather ad hoc approach to working with them. Jira Ops aims to be the glue that keeps everybody on the same page and provides visibility into ongoing incidents.

This is obviously not the first time Atlassian is using Jira to branch out from its core developer audience. Jira Service Desk and Jira Core, for example, aim at a far broader audience. Ops, however, goes after a very specific vertical.

“Service Desk was the first step,” Jens Schumacher, Head of Software Teams at Atlassian, told me. And we were looking at what are the other verticals that we can attack with Jira.” Schumacher also noted that Atlassian built a lot of tools for its internal ops teams over the years to glue together all the different pieces that are necessary to track and manage incidents. With Jira Ops, the company is essentially turning its own playbook into a product.

In a way, though, using Jira Ops adds yet another piece to the puzzle. Schumacher, however, argues that the idea here is to have a single place to manage the process. “The is that when an incident happens, you have a central place where you can go, where you can find out everything about the incident,” he said. “You can see who has been paged and alerted; you can alert more people if you need to right from there; you know what Slack channel the incident is being discussed in.”

Unlike some of Atlassian’s other products, the company doesn’t currently have any plans to launch a self-hosted version of Jira Ops. The argument here is pretty straightforward: if your infrastructure goes down, then Jira Opes could also go do down — and then you don’t have a tool for managing that downtime.

Jira Ops is now available for free for early access beta users. The company expects to launch version 1.0 in early 2019. By then Atlassian will surely also have figured out a pricing plan, something it didn’t announce today.

Tresorit, the Swiss-Hungarian company that provides end-to-end encrypted “file sync and sharing” for businesses, has closed €11.5 million in Series B financing. The round is led by European growth capital investor 3TS Capital Partners, alongside PortfoLion, a Central European venture capital.

A number of existing investors also participated, such as Andreas Kemi, an early investor in LogMeIn and co-founder of Scala Business Solutions, and Márton Anka, founder of LogMeIn. I also understand the round included some secondary funding, meaning not all of the cash has entered Tresorit’s balance sheet.

Operating in the enterprise cloud storage and collaboration market, Tresorit provides what it describes as zero-knowledge encryption technology and unique encryption key management. The high level pitch is that the company is able to offer on-premise equivalent security for businesses while offering the type of simple user experience we have come to expect in consumer apps. It serves more than 17,000 customers and says it has grown recurring revenue by an average of 3x every year in the last three years.

Meanwhile, Tresorit will use the new Series B funding to further accelerate this growth by tapping into what it says is rising demand for secure cloud solutions, in light of a plethora of high profiles security breaches seen at major enterprises in recent years. This will include beefing up its management team with the aim of scaling up marketing and sales, and establishing new channel partners.

“We are at an inflection point with our business as awareness regarding data protection and cybersecurity threats is getting stronger and demand is set to grow exponentially for our service in and outside of Europe,” says Tresorit founder and CEO Istvan Lam.

He also says there is large market potential in channeling traditional IT expenditure into the cloud, citing a recent Deloitte survey indicating that traditional IT expenditure still accounts for two-thirds of all IT spending, while only one-third goes towards IT-as-a-service.

“Many enterprises are holding back from migrating to the cloud due to security and privacy concerns. With security guaranteed by end-to-end encryption, more businesses can and will choose Tresorit’s cloud solution,” adds Lam.

To that end, Tresorit recently launched a Beta version of “Tresorit Send,” a standalone file sharing product that offers a secure and encrypted alternative to unreliable file transfer sites and email attachments. The idea, presumably, is for the product to act as a shop window for the Tresorit user experience and the company’s broader end-to-end encryption offering.

Tresorit, the Swiss-Hungarian company that provides end-to-end encrypted “file sync and sharing” for businesses, has closed €11.5 million in Series B financing. The round is led by European growth capital investor 3TS Capital Partners, alongside PortfoLion, a Central European venture capital.

A number of existing investors also participated, such as Andreas Kemi, an early investor in LogMeIn and co-founder of Scala Business Solutions, and Márton Anka, founder of LogMeIn. I also understand the round included some secondary funding, meaning not all of the cash has entered Tresorit’s balance sheet.

Operating in the enterprise cloud storage and collaboration market, Tresorit provides what it describes as zero-knowledge encryption technology and unique encryption key management. The high level pitch is that the company is able to offer on-premise equivalent security for businesses while offering the type of simple user experience we have come to expect in consumer apps. It serves more than 17,000 customers and says it has grown recurring revenue by an average of 3x every year in the last three years.

Meanwhile, Tresorit will use the new Series B funding to further accelerate this growth by tapping into what it says is rising demand for secure cloud solutions, in light of a plethora of high profiles security breaches seen at major enterprises in recent years. This will include beefing up its management team with the aim of scaling up marketing and sales, and establishing new channel partners.

“We are at an inflection point with our business as awareness regarding data protection and cybersecurity threats is getting stronger and demand is set to grow exponentially for our service in and outside of Europe,” says Tresorit founder and CEO Istvan Lam.

He also says there is large market potential in channeling traditional IT expenditure into the cloud, citing a recent Deloitte survey indicating that traditional IT expenditure still accounts for two-thirds of all IT spending, while only one-third goes towards IT-as-a-service.

“Many enterprises are holding back from migrating to the cloud due to security and privacy concerns. With security guaranteed by end-to-end encryption, more businesses can and will choose Tresorit’s cloud solution,” adds Lam.

To that end, Tresorit recently launched a Beta version of “Tresorit Send,” a standalone file sharing product that offers a secure and encrypted alternative to unreliable file transfer sites and email attachments. The idea, presumably, is for the product to act as a shop window for the Tresorit user experience and the company’s broader end-to-end encryption offering.

Tencent-backed Maoyan Weiying, China’s largest online movie ticketing service, has filed for a public offering on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The company, which submitted a prospectus under the name Entertainment Plus, didn’t say when the IPO will be or valuation details, but reports earlier this year said Maoyan aims to raise up to $1 billion.

The timing of Maoyan’s IPO is noteworthy because it comes as another Tencent investment, Meituan-Dianping, is preparing for its own debut (Meituan is also one of Maoyan’s investors). Both Meituan and Maoyan are key chess pieces in Tencent’s online-to-offline services rivalry with Alibaba. Meituan holds the leading market share for online services in China by market volume, though Alibaba wants to challenge that with Ele.me and Kuobei, which it recently raised $3 billion for after consolidating the two into one holding company. Likewise, Maoyan is the largest online movie ticketing app service in China, but is up against Alibaba’s Tao Piao Piao.

Last November, Maoyan raised RMB 1 billion (about $150 million) from Tencent at a RMB 20 billion valuation, a couple of months after merging with Weiying, another ticketing service backed by Tencent. In addition to Tencent and Meituan, Maoyan’s investors include Beijing-based Enlight Media. It also co-finances and distributes movies in China, such as Paramount’s “Transformers: The Last Knight.”

Both Maoyan and Tao Piao Piao are fighting for domination of what is set to become the world’s biggest market for movies. In its prospectus, Maoyan cited findings from iResearch that show China’s entertainment market is currently second only to the United States, but is expected to become larger by 2019. It reached a market size of RMB 76.1 billion in 2017 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20.7% to RMB 194.5 billion by 2022.

Maoyan says its revenue grew to RMB 2.54 billion in 2017 from RMB 596.7 million in 2015, with a CAGR of 106.6%. In the first half of this year, it recorded revenue of RMB 1.9 billion and a net loss of RMB 231 million.

Maoyan says it held market share of 60.9% by gross merchandise volume in the first half of 2018, according to iResearch. The public offering will led by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley.

French startup Shine is raising a $9.3 million (€8 million) Series A round. The company is building an alternative to traditional bank accounts for freelancers working in France.

XAnge is leading today’s round with existing investor Daphni also participating, as well as business angels Gilles Samoun and Ed Zimmerman. The company previously raised $3.3 million (€2.8 million) from Daphni, Kima Ventures and various business angels.

While it’s pretty easy to get started as a freelancer in many countries, France is not one of them. You need to register a “micro-company”, report your earnings for corporate taxes, report sales tax collection in some cases and more.

Arguably, it has gotten much easier recently with a ton of resources to get started. But Shine wants to go one step further and package everything you need in an app.

Shine starts by helping you register your company. After downloading the app, the company will guide you through the process — you need to take a photo of your ID and fill out a form. It feels like signing up to a social network. Compared to the official process, Shine’s process is less intimidating and easier to understand.

You can send and receive money from your Shine account just like in any banking app. Shine gives you your own banking information (IBAN) to receive payments and pay using direct debit. A few days later, you receive a debit card. You can temporarily lock the card or disable some features in the app, such as ATM withdrawals and online payments.

Shine doesn’t handle IBAN and cards directly. The company partners with Treezor for those banking features.

If you’re a rider on Deliveroo and UberEats, or if you work with a freelancer marketplace, such as Malt, Side, Upwork and Brigad, all you need to do is enter your Shine IBAN on those platforms. If you work with clients directly, Shine has an integrated invoicing system. It generates a web page and a PDF that you can send to your clients. When a client opens the page, you get a notification. They can pay with a card.

Finally, Shine reminds you when you have to pay your taxes and has a customer support team that can help you figure out what you need to do. They’re slowly building a comprehensive knowledge base on being a freelancer in France.

Shine is free for everything I just described except if you choose to accept card payments on your invoices. But even for that feature, it remains quite cheap.

The company plans to launch a premium plan in the coming months with advanced accounting features. So far, 25,000 freelancers are using Shine in France. And 10 percent of new freelancers (“micro-entrepreneurs”) register their company through Shine.

While challenger banks, such as N26 and Revolut are widely successful, it’s great to see some companies focus on niche markets with the same approach. Shine is a breath of fresh air for freelancers in France. The company is making the process so much easier for newcomers.

Meituan-Dianping is reportedly aiming for a $55 billion valuation in its upcoming initial public offering in Hong Kong, but the company’s net losses and increasing competition from Alibaba are already raising questions about whether that is too ambitious, despite the company’s market leadership in China. Meituan-Dianping, which bills itself as a “one-stop super app” that offers everything from food delivery to travel bookings, has set an IPO price range of HK$60 to HK$72 (about $7.64 to $9.17), with a valuation of $46 billion to $55 billion, according to Reuters.

That is still less, however, than the valuation of about $60 million it targeted earlier, according to a June 25 report from the Wall Street Journal. Meituan-Dianping runs the leading online marketplace for services in China by gross transaction volume and also acquired bike-sharing startup Mobike earlier this year.

Meituan-Dianping was said to be valued at as much as $30 billion when it raised a $4 billion Series C round led by Tencent in October 2017.

But the company’s tight margins and losses, much of which were incurred on marketing and user acquisition, are raising concerns about Meituan-Dianping’s valuation, especially after Xiaomi’s underwhelming debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in July. Despite reports that it sought a valuation of $100 billion, Xiaomi ended up with a $54 billion valuation after raising $4.7 billion.

A document filed today with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange didn’t provide more information about IPO pricing or valuation, but it did give some insights into the company’s financials. It said that Meituan-Dianping’s total revenues increased by 161.2% to RMB 33.9 billion in 2017, and by an additional 94.9% from RMB 8.1 billion in the four months ending in April 30, 2017 to RMB 15.8 billion in the same period of 2018.

In 2017, the platform generated over 5.8 billion transactions, totalling RMB 357 billion in gross transaction volume. It served 310 million transacting users and 4.4 million active merchants, with each transacting user making an average of 20.3 transactions in the 12 months ending April 30, 2018.

Meituan-Dianping recorded a gross margin of 9.3% for food delivery in the four months ending on April 30, 2018, while its second-largest business segment, in-store, hotel and travel services, recorded gross margin of 88% in the same period. Overall, the company had gross margin of 25.5% in that time frame.

In the same periods, however, it also recorded high net losses. In 2017, the company said it recorded net losses of RMB 19 billion, as well as net losses of RMB 8.2 billion and RMB 22.8 billion for the four months ending on April 30 2017 and 2018, respectively. Meituan-Dianping said the losses were due in changes to the fair value of its preferred shares, user acquisition expenses, including incentives to attract users and delivery riders, and new product launches.

The pressure of acquiring new users and marketing expenses probably won’t ease up anytime soon, as Meituan-Dianping faces down rivalry from Alibaba. The e-commerce giant used to be an investor in Meituan-Dianping, but offloaded its shares to focus on building its own online-to-offline services, including a combination of Ele.me and Koubei which recently raised $3 billion from investors including SoftBank.

TechCrunch has contacted Meituan-Dianping for comment.

Some topics are so politically charged that even to attempt a discussion online is to invite toxicity and rigid disagreement among participants. But a new study finds that exposure to the views of others, minus their political affiliation, could help us overcome our own biases.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, led by sociologist Damon Centola, examined how people’s interpretations of some commonly misunderstood climate change data changed after seeing those of people in opposing political parties.

The theory is that by exposing people to information sans partisan affiliation, we might be able to break the “motivated reasoning” that leads us to interpret data in a preconceived way.

The data in this case was a NASA study indicating that sea ice levels will decrease but frequently misinterpreted as suggesting the opposite. The misunderstanding isn’t entirely partisan in nature: 40 percent of self-identified Republicans and 26 percent of Democrats polled in the study adopted the mistaken latter view.

The NASA graph used in the study. As you can see it’s not crazy to think that the sea ice levels would increase, though it is incorrect.

Thousands from both parties, recruited via Mechanical Turk, were asked to indicate whether sea ice levels were rising or falling, and how much. After their initial guess, they were shown how others had answered and allowed to adjust their answer afterwards. Some were shown their peers answers with those peers’ political affiliation, and some were shown it without.

When political party was not attached to the answers, there was a considerable effect on people’s answers. Republicans jumped from about 65 percent getting it right to around 90, and Democrats went from 75 to 85 percent. When party was shown, improvements were much smaller; and when people were only exposed to those from their own party, there was practically no improvement at all.

Obviously this isn’t going to fix the problem of viral misinformation or the near-constant flame wars raging across every major online service. But it’s amazing that doing something as simple as stripping the political context from communications may lead to those communications being taken more seriously.

Perhaps something along these lines could help put the brakes on runaway articles: showing highly-cited views from people with no indication of their political beliefs. Will you be so quick to dismiss or accept someone’s argument if you can’t be sure of their agenda? At worst it may force people to take a second and evaluate those ideas on their merits, and that’s hardly a bad thing.

The study was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Reporting the news isn’t illegal, unless you’re in Myanmar. The Southeast Asian country this week sentenced two reporters from Reuters to seven years in jail in response to an investigative report that uncovered atrocities committed against Rohingya Muslims by the army.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, the two Reuters staffers, have been in custody since December. They were arrested for possession of official government documents which had been given to them by a member of the police force as part of the investigation. That puts them in violation of the colonial-time Official Secrets Act which bars civilians from accessing government information.

The landmark decision has been derided worldwide. Critics argue that the Reuters reporters are being made an example of because they surfaced the untold story of an atrocity that involved the military, which controlled Myanmar for nearly 50 years until general elections were introduced in 2015.

The ethnic tension for the Rohingya in Myanmar has gained global awareness in recent years, but less is known about the role that the military has played in both escalated tensions and also through outright atrocities. The Reuters report which the duo contributed to detailed how members of the army, alongside Buddhist villagers, killed 10 Rohingya men in a coastal village.

“Today’s appalling verdict has condemned two innocent men to years behind bars. Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo face lengthy jail terms simply because they dared to ask uncomfortable questions about military atrocities in Rakhine State. These convictions must be quashed, and both men immediately and unconditionally released,” Tirana Hassan, Amnesty International’s Director of Crisis Response, said in a statement.

“The outrageous convictions of the Reuters journalists show Myanmar courts’ willingness to muzzle those reporting on military atrocities. These sentences mark a new low for press freedom and further backsliding on rights under Aung San Suu Kyi’s government,” said Bill Adams, Human Rights Watch’s Asia director.