Author: azeeadmin

Last month, Instapaper spun out from Pinterest – two years after being acquired – to again become its own independent “read later” service. Today, the new company is announcing a plan that will allow it to sustain itself in the years ahead: yes, its subscription service has returned. The company is relaunching its Instapaper Premium subscription service for $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year. This offers a variety of upgraded features to Instapaper users, including an ad-free website, full-text search, and more. It’s also live again in the EU, as it has now become GDPR compliant.

Instapaper’s relaunched Premium service will include the following:

• Full-text search for all articles in your account
• Unlimited Notes
• Text-to-Speech playlists on mobile
• Speed reading to get through all of your articles up to 3x faster
• An ad-free Instapaper website
• “Send to Kindle” using a bookmarklet or our mobile apps

These are the same features that Instapaper had made free for all, directly following its acquisition by Pinterest.

In doing so, Instapaper became a more compelling alternative to rival Pocket, which continued to charge for things like ad-free browsing and full-text search. But it also raised the question as to what Pinterest aimed to do with Instapaper going forward – if it wasn’t bringing in its own revenues, there was concern the service was being put in maintenance-only mode.

In truth, Instapaper never quite made sense for Pinterest, beyond both sharing a similar focus in allowing users to save pieces of the web to their personal collections – in Instapaper’s case, articles to be read; for Pinterest, just about anything else. Of course, it also brought to Pinterest a valuable team of engineers.

The companies had said at the time of the acquisition they would work on the development of Rich Pins. Pinterest today offers Article Pins that let users save stories they want to read. But it has never become known as an Instapaper alternative.

Instapaper has lived through several ownership changes since being first founded by Marco Arment. It was later sold to Betaworks, and then to Pinterest. Now the same team who have been working on Instapaper since the sale to Betaworks in 2013 are back in charge of the new company called Instant Paper, Inc.

They’ve spent the last two months working on becoming GDPR-compliant, and today say they’ve again made the service available to European Union users as a result.

“We are very sorry for the extended downtime and, as a token of our apology, we are giving six months of Instapaper Premium to all EU users affected by the outage,” the company apologized in its announcement.

“We’ve updated our privacy policy to include the rights afforded to EU users under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Additionally, in the interest of transparency, we are posting our privacy policy to GitHub where you can view a versioned history of all the changes to our privacy policy.” the blog post also noted.

Those interested in upgrading to Instapaper Premium can do so here.

WhoCanFixMyCar, the U.K. online car repair marketplace, has secured £4 million in new funding. Backing the startup is Shell Ventures — the corporate venture arm of Shell — in addition to chairman Sir Trevor Chinn (who previously chaired the boards ofAA, Kwik Fit and RAC), Active Partners, and Venrex Investment Management.

Launched in 2011 by former investment bankers Al Preston and Ian Griffiths, WhoCanFixMyCar.com claims to be the biggest online marketplace in the U.K. for matching car owners with repair garages (although the likes of ClickMechanic might not agree, despite having slightly different models).

Specifically, the company, which has offices in Newcastle upon Tyne, London and Kiev, operates a local garage and mechanic online comparison service, allowing drivers to post jobs and receive quotes from local garages and mechanics.

The platform currently has 11,500 garages registered to the site, and says it has processed 1 million repair requests from U.K. drivers and receives circa 60,000 new job requests from drivers every month.

This, I’m told, has seen single site garages obtaining around 600 new customers per year on average through WhoCanFixMyCar, with top regional garage groups securing 3,000-4,000 bookings per year.

Furthermore, Shell’s investment via Shell Ventures follows the development of the Shell Helix Service Specialist Network, a recently launched scheme which allows independent workshops on the WhoCanFixMyCar.com site to be officially associated with Shell. In other words, strike this up as potentially quite a strategic investment for Shell.

Armed with a cash injection, Al Preston, co-founder of WhoCanFixMyCar.com, says that the plan it to keep scaling the startup’s activities and consolidate its position in the UK.” We are also focusing on new products and solutions that will further benefit our garage network and provide car owners with a better, richer experience when it comes to car maintenance and repairs,” he says.

Maybe a year and a half after Russian interference was believed to have a key impact on the election of a U.S. president isn’t the best time to be floating new voting technologies. Not if you’re looking to avoid some major skepticism, at least.

But West Virginia is going ahead with plans to allow some limited voting through a smartphone app called Voatz, nonetheless. The plan, spearheaded by West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner, will utilize the Boston-based startup’s technology to allow troops stationed abroad to vote in the upcoming November midterm.

Both Voatz and Warner, naturally, tout the security of the app. Indentification requires a user to take a selfie, which is matched with a state I.D. using facial recognition. Ballots are then anonymous and recorded with blockchain tech.

Naturally, not everyone is thrilled about the idea.

“Mobile voting is a horrific idea,” the Center for Democracy and Technology’s Joseph Lorenzo Hall, told CNN. “It’s internet voting on people’s horribly secured devices, over our horrible networks, to servers that are very difficult to secure without a physical paper record of the vote.”

Not a fan, apparently.

The state has been testing the tech, and Warner says that paper will still be an option for those serving abroad, even as it offers access to smartphone voting. The lack of paper trail for electronic voting, however, is generally considered a bit of a nonstarter, and recent events will likely only make security experts more wary of adopting new tech.

The number of tech platforms taking action against Alex Jones, the far right InfoWars conspiracy theorist and hate speech preacher, has been rising in recent weeks — with bans or partial bans including from Google, Apple and Facebook.

However, as we noted earlier, Twitter is not among them. Although it has banned known hate peddlers before.

Jones continues to be allowed a presence on Twitter’s platform — and is using his verified Twitter account to scream about being censored all over the mainstream place, hyperventilating at one point in the past 16 hours that ‘censoring Alex Jones is censoring everyone’ — because, and I quote, “we’re all Alex Jones now”.

(Fact check: No, we’re not… And, Alex, if you’re reading this, we suggest you take heart from the ideas in this Onion article and find a spot in your local park.)

We asked Twitter why it has not banned Jones outright, given that its own rules service proscribe hate speech and hateful conduct…

Abuse: You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so. We consider abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.

Hateful conduct: You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease. Read more about our hateful conduct policy.

Add to that, CEO Jack Dorsey has made it his high profile mission of late to (try to) improve conversational health on the platform. So it seems fair to wonder how Twitter continuing to enable a peddler of toxic lies and hate is going to achieve that?

While Twitter would not provide a statement about Jones’ continued presence on its platform, a spokesman told us that InfoWars and Jones’ personal account are not in violation of Twitter (or Periscope’s) ToS . At least not yet. Though he pointed out it could of course take action in the future — i.e. if it’s made aware of particular tweets that violate its rules.

Twitter’s position therefore appears to be that the content posted by InfoWars to other social media platforms is different to the content Jones posts to Twitter itself — ergo, its (hedgy & fudgy) argument essentially boils down to saying Jones is walking a fine enough line on Twitter itself to avoid a ban, because he hasn’t literally tweeted content that violates the letter of Twitter’s ToS.

(Though he has tweeted stuff like “the censorship of Infowars just vindicates everything we’ve been saying” — and given the hate-filled, violently untruthful things he has been saying all over the Internet, he’s essentially re-packaged all those lies into that single tweet, so… )

To spell out Twitter’s fudge: The fact of Jones being a known conspiracy theorist and widely visible hate preacher is not being factored into its ToS enforcement decisions.

The company says it’s judging the man by his output on Twitter — which means it’s failing to take into account the wider context around Jones’ tweets, i.e. all the lies and hate he peddles elsewhere (and indeed all the insinuating nods and dog whistles he makes to his followers on Twitter) — and by doing so it is in fact enabling the continued spread of hate via the wink-wink-nod-nod back door.

Twitter’s spokesman did not want to engage in a lengthy back and forth conversation, healthy or otherwise, about Jones/InfoWars so it was not possible to get a response from the company on that point.

However it does argue, i.e. in defense of its fudged position, that keeping purveyors of false news on its platform allows for an open, real-time debate which in turn allows for their lies to be challenged and debunked by people who are in their right minds — so, basically, this is the ‘fight bad speech with more speech argument’ that’s so beloved of people already enjoying powerful privilege.

The problem with that argument (actually, there are many) is it does not factor in the human cost; the people suffering directly because toxic lies impact their lives. Nor the cost to truth itself; To belief in the veracity and authenticity of credible sources of information which are under sustained and vicious attack by anti-truthers like Jones; The corrosive impact on professional journalism from lies being packaged and peddled under the lying banner of self-styled ‘truth journalism’ that Jones misappropriates. Nor the cost to society from hate speech whose very purpose is to rip up the social fabric and take down civic values — and, in the case of Jones’ particular bilious flavor, to further bang the drum of abuse via the medium of toxic disinformation — to further amplify and spread his pollution, via the power of untruth — to whip up masses of non-critically thinking conspiracy-prone followers. I could go on. (I have here.)

The amplification effect of social media platforms — combined with cynical tricks used by hate peddlers to game algorithms, such as bots retweeting and liking content to make it seem more popular than it is — makes this stuff a major, major problem.

‘Bad speech’ on such powerful platforms can become not just something to roll your eyes at and laughingly dismiss, but a toxic force that bullies, beats down and drowns out other types of speech — perhaps most especially truthful speech, because falsehood flies (and online it’s got rocket fuel) — and so can have a very deleterious impact on conversational health.

Really, it needs to be handled in a very different way. Which means Twitter’s position on Jones, and hateful anti-truthers in general, looks both flawed and weak.

It’s also now looking increasingly isolated, as other tech platforms are taking action.

Twitter’s spokesman also implied the company is working on tuning its systems to actively surface high quality counter-narratives and rebuttals to toxic BS — such as in replies to known purveyors of fake news like InfoWars.

But while such work is to be applauded, working on a fix also means you don’t actually have a fix yet. Meanwhile the lies you’re not stopping are spreading on your platform — at horrible and high cost to people and society.

It’s hard to see this as a defensible position.

And while Twitter keeps sitting on its fence, Jones’ hate speech and toxic lies, broadcast to millions as a weapon of violent disinformation, have got his video show booted from YouTube (which, after first issuing a strike yesterday then terminated his page for “violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines”).

The platform had removed ads from his channel back in March — but had not then (as Jones falsely claimed at the time) banned it. That decision took another almost half year for YouTube to arrive at.

Also yesterday, almost all of Jones’ podcasts were pulled by Apple, with the company saying it does not tolerate hate speech. “We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions,” it added.

Earlier this month, music streaming service Spotify also removed some of Jones’ podcasts for violating its hate-speech policy.

Even Facebook removed a bunch of Jones’ videos late last month, for violating its community standards — albeit after some dithering, and what looked like a lot of internal confusion.

The social media behemoth also imposed a 30-day ban on Jones’ personal account for posting the videos, and served him a warning notice for the InfoWars Facebook Page he controls.

Facebook later clarified it had banned Jones’ personal profile because he had previously received a warning — whereas the InfoWars Page had not, hence the latter only getting a strike.

There have even been bans from some unlikely quarters: YouPorn just announced action against Jones for a ToS violation — nixing his ability to try to pass off anti-truth hate preaching as a porn alternative on its platform.

Pinterest, too, removed Jones’ ‘hate, lies & supplements’ page after Mashable made enquiries.

So, uh, other responses than Twitter’s (of doing nothing) are widely possible.

On Twitter, Jones also benefits from being able to distinguish his account from any would-be imitators or satirists, because he has a verified account — denoted on the platform by a blue check mark badge.

We asked Twitter why it hasn’t removed Jones’ blue badge — given that the company has, until relatively recently, been rethinking its verification program. And last year it actively removed blue badges from a number of white supremacists because it was worried it looked like it had been endorsing them. Yet Jones — who spins the gigantic lie of ‘white genocide’ — continues to keep his.

Twitter’s spokesman pointed us to this tweet last month from product lead, Kayvon Beykpour, who wrote that updating the program “isn’t a top priority for us right now”.

Beykpour went on to explain that while Twitter had “paused” public verification last November (because “we wanted to address the issue that verifying the authenticity of an account was being conflated with endorsement”), it subsequently paused its own ‘pause for thought’ on having verified some very toxic individuals, with Beykpour writing in an email to staff in July:

Though the current state of Verification is definitely not ideal (opaque criteria and process, inconsistency in our procedures, external frustration from customers), I don’t believe we have the bandwidth to address this holistically (policy, process, product, and a plan around how & when these fit together) without coming at the cost of our other priorities and distracting the team.

At the same time Beykpour admits in the thread that Twitter has been ‘unpausing’ its pause on verification in some circumstances (“we still verify accounts ad hoc when we think it serves the public conversation & is in line with our policy”); but not, evidently, going so far as to unpause its pause on removing badges from hateful people who gain unjustified authenticity and authority from the perceived endorsement of Twitter verification — such as in ‘ad hoc’ situations where doing so might be terribly, terribly appropriate. Like, uh, this one.

Beykpour wrote that verification would be addressed by Twitter post-election. So it’s presumably sticking to its lack of having a policy at all right now, for now. (“I know this isn’t the most satisfying news, but I wanted to be transparent about our priorities,” he concluded.)

Twitter’s spokesman told us it doesn’t have anything further to share on verification at this point.

Jones’ toxic activity on social media has included spreading the horrendous lie that children who died in the Sandy Hook U.S. school shooting were ‘crisis actors’.

So, for now, a man who lies about the violent death of little children continues to be privileged with a badge on his not-at-all-banned Twitter account.

Two of the parents of a child who died at the school wrote an open letter to Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, last month, describing how toxic lies about the school shooting spread via social media had metastasized into violent hate and threats directed at them.

“Our families are in danger as a direct result of the hundreds of thousands of people who see and believe the lies and hate speech, which you have decided should be protected,” wrote Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, the parents of Noah, who died on 14 December, 2012, at the age of six.

“What makes the entire situation all the more horrific is that we have had to wage an almost inconceivable battle with Facebook to provide us with the most basic of protections to remove the most offensive and incendiary content.”

Even Financial, a fintech startup that connects the disparate entities of the financial services industry, recently raised a $18.8 million Series A round led by GreatPoint Ventures with participation from Goldman Sachs, Canaan Partners, F-Prime Capital, Lerer Hippeau and others.

The close of its Series A comes on the heels of a $3 million investment from American Express Ventures, Plug & Play and Arab Angels in February.

“The round is notable because it signifies the buy-in we’re seeing from the largest institutions in the country,” Even co-founder and CEO Phillip Rosen told TechCrunch. “This is really about the maturation of the fintech ecosystem.”

Even offers products like a pre-approval API, real-time pricing, machine learning optimization, a product comparison and recommendation engine for consumers and more.

“We provide a Twilio-style API for any consumer facing app or site to integrate,” Rosen said. “Ideally, a consumer doesn’t know Eden Financial exists.”

In March, for example, Even expanded its partnership with Credit.com to power its personal loans marketplace. Credit.com offers consumers credit scores, as well as offers and loans. Other Even partners include The Penny Hoarder and Transunion, which Even connects with financial institutions like Prosper, Lending Club and Marcus by Goldman Sachs.

Eden is currently doing over $40 million a month in personal loan funding and it’s ramping up partnerships with credit card companies like American Express.

“It’s now a time to take advantage of this rapid growth,” Rosen said. “We have an opportunity to build out an infrastructure play, similar to what we’ve seen in travel search.”

Evolute, a 3-year old startup out of Mountain View, officially launched the Evolute platform today with the goal of helping large organizations migrate applications to containers and manage those containers at scale.

Evolute founder and CEO Kristopher Francisco says he wants to give all Fortune 500 companies access to the same technology that big companies like Apple and Google enjoy because of their size and scale.

“We’re really focused on enabling enterprise companies to do two things really well. The first thing is to be able to systematically move into the container technology. And the second thing is to be able to run operationally at scale with existing and new applications that they’re creating in their enterprise environment,” Francisco explained.

While there are a number of sophisticated competing technologies out there, he says that his company has come up with some serious differentiators. For starters, getting legacy tech into containers has proven a time-consuming and challenging process. In fact, he says manually moving a legacy app and all its dependencies to a container has typically taken 3-6 months per application.

He claims his company has reduced that process to minutes, putting containerization within reach of just about any large organization that wants to move their existing applications to container technology, while reducing the total ramp-up time to convert a portfolio of existing applications from years to a couple of weeks.

The second part of the equation is managing the containers, and Francisco acknowledges that there are other platforms out there for running containers in production including Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration tool, but he says his company’s ability to manage containers at scale separates him from the pack.

“In the enterprise, the reason that you see the [containerization] adoption numbers being so low is partially because of the scale challenge they face. In the Evolute platform, we actually provide them the native networking, security and management capabilities to be able to run at scale,” he said.

The company also announced that it been invited to join the Chevron Technology Ventures’ Catalyst Program, which provides support for early stage companies like Evolute. This could help push Evolute to business units inside Chevron looking to move into containerization technology and be big boost for the startup.

The company has been around in since 2015 and boasts several other Fortune 500 companies beyond Chevron as customers, although it is not in a position to name them publicly just yet. The company has 5 full time employees and has raised $500,000 in seed money across two rounds, according to data on Crunchbase.

Klook, a Hong Kong-based startup developing a travel activities platform, has pulled in $200 million in new capital to fuel a major expansion into the U.S. and Europe. A spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the round values the company at more than $1 billion, although the company didn’t provide an exact figure.

Klook sets out to make booking travel activities as easy as arranging flights and hotels. That could mean visits to adventure parks, scuba diving, more localized tours or basics such as train travel, food or airport transfers, all of which can be found, paid for and taken using Klook’s platform. The company claims to offer more than 50,000 activities and services from 5,000 partners in over 200 destinations across the world. The startup claims its platform is on track to gross $1 billion in bookings — which is not take home revenue — for this year.

That booking milestone is “not just a representation of how Klook has grown but also a representation of this space,” Klook co-founder and COO Eric Gnock Fah told TechCrunch in an interview. “A lot of people thought this was a very niche sector, but it is proving to be a very valuable industry [and] we’re glad to be the leader.”

There’s plenty of evidence to support that. Travel giant Booking.com jumped into the space via an acquisition earlier this year, while TripAdvisor and Airbnb are pushing the activities side of their businesses, too. More direct competition to Klook includes Taiwan’s KKday, which is aligned with Japanese travel giant H.I.S., U.S.-based Peek, Culture Trip, GetYourGuide and Headout.

Klook is the best-funded by some mile, having raised plenty of capital over the past year or so. It closed a $30 million Series B in March 2017 before adding a $60 million Series C the following October, and this new round takes it to nearly $300 million to date.

The new deal sees existing backers Sequoia China, Matrix Partners, and Goldman Sachs return to put in more capital. They’re joined by first-time investors China’s Boyu Capital, Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) — which has backed Airbnb among others — and Israel’s OurCrowd, while an undisclosed Asian sovereign wealth fund and unnamed family offices also took part.

Four-year-old Klook has been in expansion mode for the past year, opening offices in London and Amsterdam and growing its headcount to 600 staff across 16 offices, predominantly in Asia. That’s up from 400 people across 13 offices last October.

Now, the company is eying the U.S. and a greater share of Europe. That’s not new, per se, Gnock Fah last year told us that North America was in the roadmap, but now the company has confirmed it’ll open a U.S. office before the end of 2018.

“It’s very likely to be East Coast — New York — where we’d start off in the U.S., but I believe we’ll scale up to have teams on the West Coast and probably mid-West, too,” Gnock Fah said. “We also continue to be expanding in Europe and look for the next location to set up more offices.”

This goal push is two-fold. It’s aimed at tapping into the increased demand for global travel from Asian tourists, and particularly those in China, whilst also bringing Western travelers to Asia where they can tap into Klook’s ecosystem of activities and services.

“This round is really gearing up to global expansion,” Gnock Fah said. “There’s still plenty of growth in Asia but now we will be really accelerating our growth into the U.S. and Europe. We’re really entering the global stage [and attracting an investor like] TCV is a testament to what we’re looking to achieve as a global player.”

The Klook COO also added that the company is seeking to open a new R&D center to supplement its existing tech hub that’s located in Shenzhen. The location for that new office is likely to be in Asia, he added, although its efforts will support the business worldwide.

All of the good press the June Intelligent Oven got when it launched in late 2016 was overshadowed by one key thing: that ridiculously high price tag. The startup drew comparisons to the now defunct train wreck that was Juicero, with one review going so far as calling it “everything that’s wrong with Silicon Valley.”

That was way harsh — overly so, in fact. There’s a lot to like in the promise of June’s oven, but yeah, that price…

It’s no surprise, then, that the company is leading with its price tag, this time out. The second-gen June Oven isn’t cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but with a starting price of $599, it’s a fraction of the cost of its predecessor’s $1,500. There’s also a limited-time $100 discount for the smart appliance’s pricier SKU ($799), so now’s as good a time as any to make the leap, if you’ve been considering it.

This certainly looks like a bit of course correction for the company, but June co-founder and CEO Matt Van Horn told TechCrunch that lowering the cost of the device was the plan from the outset.

“None of it is responding to feedback,” he said. “This has always been part of the plan. We’ve always described this as our first product would be the Tesla Roadster. The new June oven is the Model S.”

The much higher-cost version of the oven helped the company ramp up and learn how to scale first-generation hardware. The Tesla comparison isn’t entirely apt, however, as June will effectively be sunsetting the previous version to make way for the new, lower-cost model. The basics of the oven are the same as the last generation.

Asked what separates the $599+ June from a toaster oven, Van Horn told TechCrunch, “The June oven inspires people to cook things they might not normally cook and to trust the oven. Who cooks a steak in the oven? People don’t normally cook a steak in the oven.”

I should probably point out that at this point in the conversation Van Horn was cooking a piece of steak in a June on the other side of our Google Hangout.

The model has 100 cook programs built-in, allowing it to wear a bunch of hats. It can operate as a convection oven, slow cooker, broiler, toaster, warming drawer, dehydrator and air fryer, making it a compelling choice for small kitchens or college dorms. As someone who eats takeout on the regular, I’d certainly be willing to give it a go, if I had $600 burning a figurative hole in my pocket.

The oven also uses on-board cameras with food recognition AI to determine what you’re cooking and pre-heat its carbon-fiber heating coils accordingly. The company promises precision and speed, cooking food up to three times faster than standard ovens. I’ll say that I’m not fully convinced that the aforementioned food recognition system isn’t a bit of overkill, but at the very least, I suppose it will save you time from having to scroll through all of those touchscreen menus to find the right setting. On-board cameras also mean you can watch your food’s progress remotely — though the top-down view isn’t the most appetizing.

Oh, and it supports Alexa, obviously.

One of the more compelling features contained here-in is June’s software update pushes, which are delivered over Wi-Fi. That means those who spent an arm and a leg on the last generation will continue to get updates.

The $599 will get you the oven, a cooking pan, roasting rack, wire shelf and crumb tray. An additional $200 gets you an extended warranty, three-year subscription to the company’s recipes and three baskets for air frying.

Japan-based accounting software company Freee, one of the country’s most-prominent startups, has raised a $60 million Series E funding round as it bids to expand its services into other areas of management for its customers.

Freee was founded six years ago — we wrote about the startup when it raised a Series A in 2013 — which makes it one of the ‘oldest’ startups in Japan, while this round is also a large one for the country, too. Japan’s startup ecosystem has a culture that encourages founders to take their companies’ public earlier than in most parts of the world, to mitigate some risk, but there are signs of alternative approaches that include this round and of course the recent IPO of Mercari, which went public this summer and raised over $1 billion.

“Japan is a country that respects precedent a lot,” Freee founder and CEO Daisuke Sasaki told TechCrunch in an interview. “Having present cases will change [the culture] a lot, we are staying private and investing in growth. The ecosystem isn’t changing [yet] but [startups, founders and VCs] now have more options.”

Free was one of the first Japanese startups to raise from overseas investors, a move that helped get Japanese VCs interested in enterprise and Saas, and this time around it has pulled in capital from a bunch of big names: Chat app company Line, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) — Japan’s largest bank — consumer credit firm Life Card and “several [unnamed] international institutional investors.”

DCM and Infinity Investments are among the startup’s earliest backers.

Today, Freee offers cloud-based accounting and HR software and it claims to have over one million business accounts. It has over 5,000 certified accountant advisors — who help it reach new customers and also use it for their own work — and the company said that over 3,500 apps and services, including mainly financial products, are integration with its software.

Going forward, Sasaki — who is a former Googler — said Freee will use this new capital to build out an API ecosystem to enable more integrations — some of its practical ones right now include Slack and Salesforce — while it is planning a major collaboration with Line to allow Line business customers to integrate their use of the app with Free, while it is exploring how it can collaborate around Line Pay.

Freee is also focused on expanding the scope of its services to branch out into products that help with more general management and operational tasks.

“We want to focus not only on back office but also to add value to customers to make their businesses better through dashboards, reporting and insight. Customers who use the [existing business] reports grow faster. Our vision is to give much better insight and business advice through AI [and] to do that we need more data, not just back office but front line too,” Sasaki said.

Finally, the startup is exploring ways it can enable banks and financial organizations to work more closely with its customer base. Already customers can share data within Freee to banks for assessment for loans and other credit products, and the company is exploring the potential to introduce a marketplace that would give its customers a place to scout out financial products at more preferential rates.

“Initially we focused on small business but now our biggest customers have a couple of hundred employees so we are going upmarket,” Sasaki told TechCrunch.

One area Freee won’t be moving into is overseas markets. Yet at least. Sasaki explained that the company wants to build out that vision of an expanded ecosystem of connected services and more in-depth business tools before branching out into new countries.

SmartHR, a younger rival to free which specializes in HR as the name suggests, raised $13.3 million earlier this year to push on into areas such as payroll and more. That could begin to pose a threat to Freee, particularly since SmartHR a developer platform to hose third-party applications and services.

Flux, the London fintech that has built a software platform to offer merchants digital receipts, loyalty, card-linked offers and analytics, continues to sign new partnerships in a bid to solve its ‘chicken and egg’ problem. That is, it needs bank integrations to sign up merchants and it needs merchant integrations to sign up banks.

The latest to partner with Flux is the U.K. food chain itsu, which sells Asian-inspired fast food. Under the deal — positioned as a trial for now — the food merchant will use Flux to power paperless receipts across all 72 of its U.K. stores. Customers paying with cards issued by Flux partner banks who have opted-in will receive digital itemised receipts directly into their banking apps when they shop at itsu.

Founded by former early employees at Revolut, the Flux platform bridges the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up on your bank statement or mobile banking app. Off the back of this, it can also power loyalty schemes and card-linked offers, as well as give merchants much deeper POS analytics via aggregated and anonymised data on consumer behaviour, such as which products are selling best in unique baskets.

On the banking side, it currently partners with challenger bank Starling, and has a closed trial with Monzo. After graduating from Barclay’s fintech accelerator, Flux also recently got added to Barclays via its Launchpad app, which is used by a subset of customers who want to get in on the bank’s latest innovations early.

On the merchant side, in addition to today’s announced itsu partnership, Flux works with EAT and pod in the U.K., and has an upcoming trial with Costa Coffee.

Asked how Flux is overcoming its chicken and egg problem, and how conversations with banks and merchants have changed over the last few months, Flux co-founder Veronique Barbosa says the startup faces the same challenge as any marketplace. However, she believes the company has built a solid foundation for what she dubs the “Flux Flywheel”, borrowing from Amazon’s Amazon Flywheel concept.

“For every bank we add on, we unlock the opportunity to provide Flux to those cardholders. With increasing access to cardholders, we can attract more retailers. With more retailers we can engage the banks, as their cardholders now have more places to use Flux. And so the cycle begins again,” explains Barbosa.

“We are now at the stage where in addition to our partnership with Starling Bank, for example, we’re integrated and live with one of the largest consumer banks in the U.K., Barclays, via their Launchpad app. On top of that we recently announced the largest coffee chain in the U.K. will trial Flux… We are having very different conversations now than we were even three months ago. The conversation has changed from why should I be interested in this to how could I tailor this for my business given the validation that inevitably comes with partnering with such familiar brands”.

However, despite the undoubted progress Flux has made, it is notable that a number of partnerships have launched as a trial only, suggesting both banks and merchants are being a little tentative in how they deploy the startup’s technology. Barbosa says that isn’t unusual, especially when deciding to invest in nascent technology from a relatively small startup.

“What we’re building is completely new as we’re liberating receipt level data at scale, and so it’s not unusual for our partners to want to test out the waters and describe our work together as a trial before entering a longer term commitment,” she says. “The main reason being, how do they know if their customers will love it? What’s exciting is we’ve now entered a phase where we’ve generated more than enough proof points to dispel that concern from the get go”.