Author: azeeadmin

Latin American small businesses just got a big boost with a new commitment for a $200 million lending joint venture between the Bogota-based startup Portal Finance and Latin America’s largest financial services institution, BTG Pactual.

For Portal Finance, the deal with BTG caps a meteoric rise, which has seen the company raise $1.5 million at a $60 million valuation and move from a small $5 million lending pilot to a $200 million deal in the span of two years.

“A year ago we were four guys in a closet. Now we’re 70 people,” says Diego Caicedo, the company’s chief executive and co-founder. 

The company’s success is a testament to the changing fortunes of many Latin American economies and the role that venture capital is playing. For the last several years Colombia’s economic fortunes have been rising since the successful conclusion of peace talks with the country’s largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, brought an end to 50 years of civil war.

Meanwhile, investment firms like Magma Partners, which led the pre-seed and seed rounds for Portal Finance are linking innovative companies in places like Buenos Aires, Bogota, and Lima with Chile’s stable economic base to provide a market where innovative startups can gain traction.

It’s also a sign of the significant demand for small business loans across Latin America. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis small businesses found their credit lines pulled as banks refused to take on the risks associated with lending to small businesses.

That left businesses with only supply chain financing and factoring as the only alternatives. With interest rates that are typically between 20% and 50% annually. These rates are being charged even though invoices can be used as collateral and default rates hover at around 1% per year.

Portal Finance, and other companies like it, solve the problem by giving banks a better window into their borrowers finances by tackling the problem from three ways. The first is by working with factoring firms who were the lenders of last resort to companies who needed cash for operations and improvement and could not take out loans or raise equity financing. Second, the company has a window into the receivables of small businesses through the large corporate customers they supply. Finally, the company has reached out to the small businesses themselves to collect additional data, giving lenders a complete view of the borrowers’ financing.

That “full-stack” approach to small business financial statements was the vision that Caicedo had for his company from the moment he and his co-founders Felipe Puntarelli and Nicholas Bohorquez, took their first financing — $50,000 from Magma Partners (a Latin American focused venture capital firm).

The opportunity was so great that he was able to convince his eventual Charlie Cliff, a former defense contractor in the aerospace industry, to come down to Bogota without knowing a single word of Spanish to help jumpstart the business as Chief Technology Officer. Cliff, who was connected to Caicedo through Magma Partners’ managing director and co-founder Nathan Lustig, flew down after three phone calls.

Caicedo and Cliff first tackled the problem for the factoring firms that would lend money to businesses off of the projected income for accounts receivable. It was the first product that Portal Finance brought to market when it launched in 2016.

By 2017, it expanded its products to include an offering for large corporations to help them manage their payments to small businesses.

With that information in hand, Caicedo reached out to financial services firms to set up a lending operation. BTG Pactual agreed to a pilot in Chile in January, and expanded to the $200 million lending joint venture in July that covers both Chile and Colombia.

Caicedo called the program the largest investment in a fintech startup by a Latin American financial services firm. So far, the company has issued 200 loans in Chile and 500 in Colombia. On the heels of that investment, Caicedo says that the company expects to close an additional $2.5 million in financing soon and will be profitable by the end of November.

2018 has been an incredibly strong year for IPOs, particularly in the technology sector. Among the brand names this year that have made their public debuts are Dropbox, Xiaomi, Spotify (through a direct listing), DocuSign, Carbon Black, Zuora, among many, many others.

Given the strength of these numbers through the first eight months of this year, the key question for the public markets is whether the year will close out just as strongly or die in a whimper.

It’s a decidedly mixed picture right now. The positives for the tech industry are an extremely robust pipeline of unicorns and growth-stage companies as well as soaring stock prices and strong economic data encouraging investors to seek additional risk in new issues in order to drive returns.

Yet, there are serious headwinds operating against new issues that could increase friction for startups for the remainder of the year. The first is that there doesn’t look like there will be a marquee startup debuting this fall to drive excitement. China trade tensions could complicate the picture for Chinese tech companies, which have been major drivers of the IPO pipeline this year. And then there is the on-going questions of alternatives — direct listings and potentially wider usage of private investment with new rules being discussed by the SEC.

Lyfting up the IPO picture

One major question hovering over the fall is whether any of the largest private tech companies by valuation will decide to go public. So far, Eventbrite and SurveyMonkey have filed their S-1s with the SEC to debut, but the two are targeting low billions for their market caps.

While companies generally demur on questions around their IPO schedules, both Uber and Airbnb look ill-prepared to do a public debut in the short run. Uber just hired a CFO — it’s first in years — a little more than a week ago. Airbnb has been more blunt, commenting that it is targeting 2019 or 2020 for a public launch. Other highly-valued companies like SpaceX, WeWork, and Palantir also don’t look set to IPO in the short term. Lyft has recently hired a new advisor, and could target a launch early in 2019, beating Uber in the process.

This is all a bit shocking considering the robust economic picture of the public markets. These advantageous windows don’t stay open for long, and it’s a bit surprising how few of these large companies are prepared to take advantage of the environment. That could leave companies like Dropbox in March and Xiaomi in June as the largest tech issues of 2018.

It’s certainly been received wisdom in the Valley for the past decade that tech startups should delay going public as much as private investors will allow it. But the fact that executive teams haven’t been rounded out and revenues and expenses aren’t ready for scrutiny should be a note of caution for startup founders and venture capitalists to work harder to better prepare their companies.

The China challenge

Chinese IPOs had been expected to be a major force in the IPO pipeline all year. Now, with trade tensions flaring and the Chinese Communist Party changing its policies, that robust pipeline is staring to look significantly less rosy.

The tariffs are easy to understand. The Trump administration has said recently that it intends to put tariffs on another $200 billion of Chinese goods. Given the constantly changing scale and scope of these tariffs, the resulting uncertainty has clouded Chinese capital markets and made public debuts much more complicated.

The debut of Chinese Depository Receipts (CDRs) earlier this year was also expected to drive attention to Chinese tech stocks by allowing mainland Chinese investors to invest in companies traded on overseas exchanges like NASDAQ.

Yet, policy shifts by Beijing have undermined that surge of interest. The country is in the midst of a video game and entertainment crackdown, causing Tencent to face a profit drop for the first time in more than a decade, and creating a cascade of concern for other high-flying Chinese consumer tech companies. Other policies around corporate control and governance are complicating the picture as well.

We will quickly learn how the markets perceive these challenges when NIO, a Chinese automotive startup, and Meituan-Dianping, a consumer Yelp and Groupon-like platform, go public in the next few weeks. NIO is targeting a valuation of $8 billion, and Meituan is targeting a whopping $55 billion in its debut.

Given the rout around Xiaomi’s IPO earlier this summer, a strong performance by either one of these companies would put some wind in the sails of other Chinese unicorns and could help them overcome some of the policy changes that are dampening the enthusiasm in the equity markets.

Further public delays

The last macro wrinkle for the fall is around a circulating discussion at the SEC of expanding access to private companies to the general public. SEC chairman Jay Clayton recently asked whether ownership rules could be expanded for later-stage private companies so that retail investors could have access to pre-IPO issues.

Like Spotify’s direct listing process earlier this year, expanding the pool of capital that can invest in private companies reduces the need to conduct a classic IPO. It may not literally “kill” the IPO, but it could certainly dampen enthusiasm for the public markets, which are already lacking excitement for many CEOs in the first place.

Any changes to ownership rules would likely take significant time to complete. Nonetheless, rule changes could affect the the major tech companies who are delaying to late 2019 or 2020 and allow them to stave off the public markets for just a bit more.

Altogether, the economic environment couldn’t be more robust for companies to go public, but a diverse set of macro factors are clouding the picture, and that could make the rest of 2018 much less robust for IPOs than the first eight months.

When you’re primarily a storage company with enterprise aspirations, as Dropbox is, you need a layer to to help people use the content in your system beyond simple file sharing. That’s why Dropbox created Paper, to act as that missing collaboration layer. They announced some enhancements to Paper to keep people working in their collaboration tool without having to switch programs.

“Paper is Dropbox’s collaborative workspace for teams. It includes features where users can work together, assign owners to tasks with due dates and embed rich content like video, sound, photos from Youtube, SoundCloud, Pinterest and others,” a Dropbox spokesperson told TechCrunch.

With today’s enhancements you can paste a number of elements into Paper and get live previews. For starters, they are letting you link to a Dropbox folder in Paper, where you can view the files inside the folder, even navigating any sub-folders. When the documents in the folder change, Paper updates the preview automatically because the folder is actually a live link to the Dropbox folder. This one seems like a table stakes feature for a company like Dropbox.

In addition, Dropbox now supports Airtables, a kind of souped up spreadsheet. With the new enhancement, you just grab an Airtable embed code and drop it into Paper. From there, you can see a preview in whatever Airtable view you’ve saved the table.

Finally, Paper now supports LucidCharts. As with Airtables and folders, you simply paste the link and you can see a live preview inside Paper. If the original chart changes, updates are reflected automatically in the Paper preview.

By now, it’s clear that workers want to maintain focus and not be constantly switching between programs. It’s why Box created the recently announced Activity Stream and Recommended Apps. It’s why Slack has become so popular inside enterprises. These tools provide a way to share content from different enterprise apps without having to open a bunch of tabs or separate apps.

Dropbox Paper is also about giving workers a central place to do their work where you can pull live content previews from different apps without having to work in a bunch of content silos. Dropbox is trying to push that idea along for its enterprise customers with today’s enhancements.

When you’re primarily a storage company with enterprise aspirations, as Dropbox is, you need a layer to to help people use the content in your system beyond simple file sharing. That’s why Dropbox created Paper, to act as that missing collaboration layer. They announced some enhancements to Paper to keep people working in their collaboration tool without having to switch programs.

“Paper is Dropbox’s collaborative workspace for teams. It includes features where users can work together, assign owners to tasks with due dates and embed rich content like video, sound, photos from Youtube, SoundCloud, Pinterest and others,” a Dropbox spokesperson told TechCrunch.

With today’s enhancements you can paste a number of elements into Paper and get live previews. For starters, they are letting you link to a Dropbox folder in Paper, where you can view the files inside the folder, even navigating any sub-folders. When the documents in the folder change, Paper updates the preview automatically because the folder is actually a live link to the Dropbox folder. This one seems like a table stakes feature for a company like Dropbox.

In addition, Dropbox now supports Airtables, a kind of souped up spreadsheet. With the new enhancement, you just grab an Airtable embed code and drop it into Paper. From there, you can see a preview in whatever Airtable view you’ve saved the table.

Finally, Paper now supports LucidCharts. As with Airtables and folders, you simply paste the link and you can see a live preview inside Paper. If the original chart changes, updates are reflected automatically in the Paper preview.

By now, it’s clear that workers want to maintain focus and not be constantly switching between programs. It’s why Box created the recently announced Activity Stream and Recommended Apps. It’s why Slack has become so popular inside enterprises. These tools provide a way to share content from different enterprise apps without having to open a bunch of tabs or separate apps.

Dropbox Paper is also about giving workers a central place to do their work where you can pull live content previews from different apps without having to work in a bunch of content silos. Dropbox is trying to push that idea along for its enterprise customers with today’s enhancements.

Just about a month after the merger of the short-form video apps Musical.ly and TikTok, the app is introducing a new social feature, allowing users to post their reactions to the videos that they watch.

Instead of text comments, these reactions will take the form of videos that are essentially superimposed on top of existing clips. The idea of a reaction video should be familiar to anyone who’s spent some time on YouTube, but TikTok is incorporating the concept in way that looks like a pretty seamless.

To post a reaction, users just need to choose the React option in the Share menu for a given video. The app will then record your audio and video as the clip plays. You can also decide where on the screen you want your reaction video to appear.

If you don’t recognize the TikTok name, that’s probably because the app only launched in the United States at the beginning of August, but it’s been available in China for a couple of years.

Back in 2017, Bytedance — the Chinese company behind TikTok as well as news aggregator Toutia — acquired Musical.ly for around $1 billion. It eventually merged the two apps to combine their audiences and features; Musical.ly users were moved over with their existing videos and settings.

The company says Reactions will be available in the updated app on Google Play and the Apple App Store over the next day or two.

Looks like Sujeet Kumar, Amod Malviya and Vaibhav Gupta’s decision to jump ship from Flipkart to focus on their own venture is paying off.

The trio announced this morning that their B2B e-commerce startup Udaan had raised $225 million in Series C funding co-led by DST Global and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with capital coming out of the latter’s growth fund. The cash infusion, according to Indian media reports, makes Udaan the fastest-ever Indian startup to be valued at over $1 billion.

Flipkart, one of the most successful e-commerce platforms out of India, sold to Walmart in a $16 billion deal earlier this year. Kumar, Malviya and Gupta, which were the former president of operations, CTO and SVP of business finance and analytics at Flipkart, respectively, departed the company in 2016.

Shortly after setting up the B2B marketplace, the three raised $10 million in a Series A led by Lightspeed in late 2016—then another $50 million earlier this year, also led by Lightspeed, with participation from the venture capital firm’s India office.

Bejul Somaia, a managing director at Lightspeed India that’s been on the Bengaluru-based company’s board since that A round, confirmed the latest funding to TechCrunch.

“We have been fortunate to see the company scale very rapidly from close quarters,” Somaia told me via email. “We’re drawn to the company’s first-principles approach to solving significant problems that are unique in the Indian context.”

Udaan’s mobile app connects 150,000 traders, wholesalers and retailers in India, enabling small- and medium-sized businesses to do business directly with manufacturers. Right now, electronics and consumer goods are for sale on the app, with plans for the company to make industrial goods, fresh fruits and vegetables, office supplies and more available soon.

At just 26 months of age, there are few companies that have raced—or shall we say trotted—into the unicorn club at such a speed. Recent examples include the 3D printing company Desktop Metal, which crossed the threshold 21 months after its founding. Plus, there’s the Craigslist competitor Letgo; it became a unicorn in just two years.

Indian startup unicorns, of which there are fewer, have historically taken longer to earn their unicorn horns.

On-demand delivery platform Swiggy, for example, became a unicorn earlier this year, about four years after it was founded. Zomato, another delivery app, garnered a $1.4 billion valuation in 2017 after nearly 10 years in business.

Audi began production of its first all-electric SUV on Monday, three years after the German automaker unveiled a concept version of the vehicle at the International Motor Show in Frankfurt.

The company won’t reveal the production-version of the Audi e-tron SUV until Sept. 17, in a what promises to be a splashy event in San Francisco.

Audi, which is owned by Volkswagen Group, has been working towards mass production of the e-tron quattro for years now, offering periodic updates and teasers on the pricing, range, and interior design. The Audi e-tron is being produced at Audi’s factory in Brussels, which has been undergoing an extensive renovation since 2016 to prepare for the new vehicle. The Brussels factor has become the cornerstone of Volkswagen Group’s electric vehicle plans.

Audi rebuilt the body shop, paint shop and assembly line at the Brussels factory, the company said. It also set up its own battery production there.

The five-seater SUV will have DC fast-charging capability of up 150 kilowatts. The company has previously said the SUV would have a 95 kwh battery with a range of more than 500 kilometers (about 310 miles). That range has since been adjusted to somewhere around 250 miles, although the global reveal later this month should provide finalized numbers. Sales of the e-tron SUV are expected to begin by the end of the year.

The VoCore2 is a Wi-Fi capable computer with a 580 MHz CPU and 128 RAM that supports video, USB, and Ethernet. And it plays Doom. That’s right: this is a computer you can easily swallow and allow your biome flora to play a hard core FPS while you slowly digest the package.

The product started life on Indiegogo where it raised $100,000. Now it’s available for $17 for the barebones unit or $24 for the unit with USB and MicroSD card. You can also buy a four inch display for it that lets you display video at 25fps.

What is this thing good for? Well, like all single board computers it pushes the limits on what computing means in the 21st century. A computer the size of a Euro coin could fit in all sorts of places and for all sorts of weird projects and even if you don’t use it to build the next unmanned Red-Tailed Hawk nest surveillance drone it could be cool to blast some demons on a computer the size of a joystick button.

The VoCore2 is shipping soon and is available for purchase here.

As cryptocurrencies emerge from the speculative bloodletting of the past months, believers in the promise of distributed ledger technologies for business and consumer applications are casting about for what comes next.

On our stage at Disrupt San Francisco we’ll be welcoming some of the leading thinkers in how distributed ledgers can create an entirely new architecture for computing and new processes for almost every conceivable transaction framework.

For Brian Behlendorf, the executive director of Hyperledger, distributed ledger technologies represent a powerful path for the future of networked computing — no matter the underlying technology.  That’s why Behlendorf –through the Linux Foundation — is investing resources in ensuring that viable open source distributed ledger projects are supported and coming to market for any number of applications for businesses and consumers.

One of the leading lights of the internet revolution, Behlendorf’s career shaping the future of the networked world began in 1993 when he co-founded Organic Inc. — the first business dedicated to building commercial websites. Going on to become one of the foundational architects of the Apache http protocol, Behlendorf has served as the chief technology officer of the World Economic Forum and as an executive director for the technology investment fund, Mithril Capital.

Meanwhile, Parity Technologies is attempting to ensure that businesses don’t need to worry about the underlying technologies at all. Selling a suite of services that are all enabled by distributed ledger technologies and cryptographic computing, Jutta Steiner is giving businesses a way through the maze of competing protocols with a service that can enable the creation and adoption of distributed apps for businesses.

“We see it as a way for people to build blockchains that fulfill their particular needs,” Steiner told our own Samantha Stein at our Blockchain event earlier this year in Zug. “One of the challenges we’re addressing in this is to come up with a scalable framework.”

Before Parity, Steiner was responsible for security and partner integration within the Ethereum Foundation when the public blockchain first launched in 2015. Steiner also co-founded Project Provenance — a London based start-up that employs blockchain technology to make supply chains more transparent.

Supply chains are at the heart of Tradeshift’s offerings — and the company is hoping that distributed ledgers will be too. That’s why the company created Tradeshift Frontiers, an innovation lab and incubator that will focus on transforming supply chains through emerging technologies, such as distributed ledgers, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.

“The use cases we’re working through Frontiers cover a very wide variety of themes, including supply chain financing, asset liquidity, and supply chain transparency,” said Gert Sylvest, co-founder and GM of Tradeshift Frontiers, at the time. “There is so much more potential than just cryptocurrencies.”

That potential will be one of the things that Sylvest, Steiner, and Behlendorf discuss. We’ll hope you’ll be in the audience to listen.

Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.

Editor’s note: This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and TechCrunch may earn affiliate commissions.

Headphones keep us connected to our favorite music, podcasts, and audiobooks. They make sure we don’t drop an important phone call. As our devices ditch the headphone jack and Bluetooth technology improves, more and more people will need to upgrade to something that offers great sound, solid performance, and helpful features.

We’ve tested hundreds of wireless earbuds and headphones, and whether your budget is $30 or $300, we’ve found a pair to fit your needs.

 

Bluetooth earbuds: Skullcandy Ink’d Bluetooth

For the cheapest option that still offers good sound quality, the Skullcandy Ink’d Bluetooth earbuds are the best wireless earbuds under $50. They come with a collar that’s equipped with large control buttons, but it’s so light you’ll forget that it’s around your neck. The Ink’d Bluetooth are comfortable and made to fit all but the largest ear canals. Plus, they’re water-resistant.

The Ink’d Bluetooth’s battery will get you through a full day before it’s time to recharge. During testing, we were able to walk two rooms away from our connected smartphone before experiencing a signal drop.

Workout headphones: Aukey Latitude EP-B40

When it’s time to focus at the gym, there’s no better way to tune out distractions than a reliable pair of earbuds. For a cheap but comfortable pair that can handle casual workouts and a bit of sweat, we recommend the Aukey Latitude EP-B40. They’re the best workout headphones under $50 and they offer more than eight hours of battery life, which is enough for a few gym sessions before recharging.

Silicone tips and wings help with keeping them secured during high-intensity activities. The cable that connects the earbuds is longer than we’d like, but the Latitude EP-B40 are a better option for working out than similarly priced wired earbuds, and they offer good sound quality.

Budget Bluetooth wireless: Jabra Move Wireless

For some, earbuds just don’t cut it. The Jabra Move Wireless are the best Bluetooth wireless headphones under $100. They’re ideal for someone who prefers over-ear headphones and doesn’t want to spend a lot of money. The Move Wireless sound almost as good as Bluetooth headphones that cost four times as much—without sacrificing solid basic features like intuitive and easily accessible controls. The Move Wireless’ pivoting earcups and a padded headband add to comfort.

True Wireless: Jabra Elite 65t

If keeping up with the latest tech gear is important to you, you’ve probably already done your research on true wireless headphones. The majority of them are still first-generation models and come with a few kinks. Still, the Jabra Elite 65t perform just as well as standard Bluetooth earbuds—offering great sound, battery life, and comfort—without a wire connecting each earpiece.

The Elite 65t usually block out a good amount of noise, but you have the option of using the mics to hear your surroundings by activating transparency mode. We like that these headphones work with voice assistants (Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa) and they have both track and volume controls. During testing, the Elite 65t’s Bluetooth 5.0 offered seamless and stronger connections than competitors, making calls sound especially clear. For a true wireless workout version of these headphones, we recommend the Jabra Elite Active 65t.

Bluetooth Wireless: Sony H.ear On WH-H900N

If you’re ready to invest in a pair of high-end Bluetooth wireless headphones that come with the best features, we recommend the Sony H.ear On WH-H900N. You’ll get above-average active noise cancelling, long-lasting battery life, a clear mic for voice calls, and, most importantly, a pair of headphones that sound great.

During testing, the H.ear On WH-H900M sounded better than competitors (with or without noise cancelling) and the bass added a noticeable boost that didn’t overpower vocals. We like that these headphones are lightweight, comfortable to wear for long periods of time, and that they come in a variety of colors.

These picks may have been updated by Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and TechCrunch may earn affiliate commissions.