Author: azeeadmin

Exabeam, a late-stage startup that helps organizations detect advanced cybersecurity threats, has landed a new $200 million funding round that values the company at $2.4 billion.

The Series F growth round was led by the Owl Rock division of Blue Owl Capital, with support from existing investors Acrew Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners.

The announcement of Exabeam’s latest funding, which the company says will help it on its mission to become “the number one trusted cloud SeCops platform in the market”, coincides with the news that CEO Nir Polak, who co-founded the company in 2013, will be replaced by former ForeScout chief executive Michael DeCesare.

DeCesare is a big name in the cybersecurity space, with more than 25 years of experience leading high-growth security companies. He joined ForeScout as CEO and president in February 2015 after four years as president of McAfee, which at the time was owned by Intel. Under his leadership, ForeScout raised nearly $117 million in an upsized IPO that valued the IoT security vendor at $800 million.

Polak, meanwhile, will shift to a chairman role at Exabeam and “will continue on as an active member of the executive team and remain at the company,” according to the funding announcement.

“Nir has built an incredibly robust, diverse and inclusive culture at Exabeam, and I am committed to helping it flourish,” said DeCesare. “I’m thrilled to join Nir and the whole leadership team to help drive the company through its next phase of growth.”

Exabeam, which has now raised $390 million in six rounds of outside funding, says it expects to use the new money to fuel scale, innovate and extend the company’s leadership. “It gives us the opportunity to triple down on our R&D efforts and continue engineering the most advanced UEBA, XDR and SIEM cloud security products available today,” commented Polak.

The company adds that it has made significant investments in its partner program over the last 12 months, which now includes more than 400 reseller, distributor, systems integrator, MSSP, MDR and consulting partners globally. Exabeam also has more than 500 technology integrations with cloud network, data lake and endpoint vendors including CrowdStrike, Okta and Snowflake.

It’s clearly expecting these investments to pay off, describing its “outcome-based approach” to external security as perfectly suited to support organizations as they manage exponential amounts of data and return to the post-COVID workplace in a variety of hybrid scenarios. After all, hackers are already beginning to target employees who have started making a return to the office, and this threat is only likely to increase as more companies begin to dial back on remote working and start welcoming staff back into workplaces.

“Exabeam is poised to be the next-gen leader in the cloud security analytics, XDR and SIEM markets,” Pravin Vazirani, Blue Owl Capital’s managing director and co-head of tech investing, said in a statement. “We led this round of funding to provide the company with the resources necessary to support its sustainable, long-term growth and value creation.”

Facebook, Nextdoor, and many others in tech have focused on the concepts of community and neighborhoods to build connections between people and in turn offer services relevant to them. Today, a startup called Venn, which is bringing a new approach to that concept — it’s focusing first on apartment dwellers and cutting deals with building landlords to supply social networking services to their tenants — is announcing $60 million in growth funding to expand its business to more cities.

This round, a Series B, is being led by Group 11, with “significant” participation also from Pitango, Hamilton Lane, and Bridges Israel, and it brings the total raised by Venn — not to be confused with the LA gaming startup with the same name — to $100 million to date.

Venn is not disclosing its valuation but Or Bokobza, Venn’s CEO who co-founded the startup with Chen Avni, confirmed in an interview that it’s an upround. For some context, in the startup’s last round of funding — Pitango previously led a $40 million round in 2019 — PitchBook estimated its valuation to be over $400 million ($439 million to be exact). We’re still digging on this detail and will update when/if we learn more. For some further context, Venn said that it saw user growth boom by 1,200% in 2020.

Co-headquartered in Tel Aviv and New York, Venn has been around since 2017 and has built out services in three areas to date, its two HQ cities (specifically Bushwick, Brooklyn in NYC) and Berlin, with Kansas City, a West Coast location, and more cities getting officially added to the list soon. It doesn’t disclose how many users in total are on the platform but says that on average, a “cell” on Venn will have around 5,000 users and 3,000 apartments contained within it.

Venn’s business model has been described as based around the idea of a kibbutz and bringing that into a more modern context: it provides not just a way to connect with neighbors and know who they are, but also to provide those users with a way of selling items or offering services to each other, and also organizing community activities, whether that’s a playgroup for children, a small concert at a park or cafe, or a yoga class or something else.

Bokobza said that the idea for the company first came to him and Avni long before they had actually thought of building a startup like Venn. The pair had moved to a neighborhood in Tel Aviv that was, in his words, “neglected” — off the grid and yet to gentrify. Yet they saw that there were others like them also moving in, so they built a platform and started to coordinate people to join it to communicate better with each other and build the community that was lacking.

“There was something magical about this journey,” he said, “and at a certain point people approached us and said we could productize this into a platform where every neighborhood could be a part of it. That was the moment when we realized we wanted to build a neighborhood platform. This is how Venn was born. You live more in a neighborhood than you do in a city, and we wanted to build a unique platform that combined something real, something human, with technology.”

Companies like Facebook have been doubling down on building more locally focused groups, but what is notable about Venn is how it has approached growing. Bokobza said that it’s focusing just on urban areas where there are large apartment buildings, and is forging deals with landlords of these buildings to build links to their tenants (those deals, in turn, are part of how it makes money).

This is an interesting idea. On one side, building communities around multi-dwelling units plays into one of the salient qualities of apartment communities. Despite, or maybe because of, the close proximity of so many people, they are often very anonymous.

On the other, it plays into how landlords have turned to services to help differentiate their apartments from others on the market. If you are trying to market “home” and “welcome to your neighborhood” to people, especially those who are just moving to an area, giving them access to a hyperlocal community of interesting activities and services and like-minded people is a way to bridge some of the less-familiar aspects of urban dwelling.

These hyperlocal communities are not run by the landlords, however. Venn hires (and pays) “hosts” who help administrate local sites, including creating and facilitating content, who use a digital assistant (called “Vinny”) to help moderate and approve posts before they go up. There are also voluntary hyperlocal hosts who are unpaid who also help out.

The concept, of course, has taken on a more timely and interesting profile in the last year, as people have turned towards more local activities and shopping smaller as part of their efforts to reduce social distancing, to comply with stay-in-place orders, and to help offset the spread of the Covid-19.

“Loneliness was an epidemic long before COVID-19. Over the past 30 years, it’s become easier to connect with strangers around the world than our neighbors around the corner. Remember when we used to be able to walk down the street and run into our friends? Or go to the grocery store and be greeted by name? We’ve lost touch with something elemental and vital for our lives and progress: the idea of ‘Neighborhood.’ This is the problem that Venn was built to solve,” Bokobza said in a statement. “We are using the power of community to build better neighborhoods for neighbors, property developers, and local businesses alike, and our work is more important now than ever before.”

Group 11, a VC firm that has backed a number of other interesting Israeli-founded startups (they include the likes of Lili, a banking service aimed at freelancers, which also recently raised a round), see what Venn is doing as a unique enough concept that stands apart from other community platforms, and makes not just interesting business sense but possibly achieves a higher goal.

“You don’t need data to know that people crave connection, but Venn’s numbers speak volumes. People want to live in communities that make them feel that they belong, and Venn has found a way to achieve that through its technology, expertise, and experiences,” said Dovi Frances, managing partner at Group 11, in a statement. “We aren’t just investing in a business–we’re investing in people–and we’re honored to lead this round with Venn as it continues to fulfill its mission.”

These days, investing goes way beyond the stock market. And in recent years there’s been a growing number of startups which aim to give more people access to a wider array of investment opportunities. Today, one of those startups has raised a significant round of funding to help it achieve its goals.

Yieldstreet — which provides a platform for making alternative investments in areas like real estate, marine/shipping, legal finance, commercial loans and other opportunities that were previously only open to institutional investors — announced Tuesday that it has raised $100 million in a Series C funding round.

Former E*TRADE CEO Mitch Caplan, of Tarsadia Investments, led the round. Other participants include Alex Brown (a division of Raymond James), Kingfisher Capital, Top Tier Capital Partners and Gaingels. Existing backers Edison Partners, Soros Fund Management, Greenspring Associates, Raine Ventures, Greycroft and Expansion Capital also put money in the round, which brings Yieldstreet’s total raised to $278.5 million since its 2015 inception.

Milind Mehere and Michael Weisz co-founded Yieldstreet with the mission of making investing more inclusive for non-institutional investors. In an interview with TechCrunch, CEO Mehere declined to say at what valuation the Series C was raised other than to say “near unicorn.”

What he did share is that Yieldstreet has funded nearly $1.9 billion on its platform and has about 300,000 consumers signed up on its platform. That’s up from $600 million invested on its platform from more than 100,000 members in February 2019, at the time of its last raise. Also since that time, Yieldstreet has seen its investor base climb by 350%, he said. And this year, the company is expecting “over 50% revenue growth,” compared to 2020.

Since its inception, Yieldstreet says it has provided nearly more than $950 million in principal and interest payments to its investors.

And, both the number of investment requests and new investors surged by more than 250% from January to April 2021 compared to the same period in 2020, with new investors already exceeding all of last year, according to the company.

Mehere also shared that Yieldstreet is considering going public via a SPAC (special purpose acquisition vehicle) sometime in the next year or two.

“We are growing extremely fast and a few SPACs have approached us,” he told TechCrunch. “We are on a great path to potentially explore some of those options in the next 12 to 24 months. I think the public markets would be great for a company like Yieldstreet, purely because that gives you the visibility to expand your consumer growth but also gives you access to equity to pursue growth strategies such as potential acquisitions and other things.”

So far, Yieldstreet has acquired two companies (both in 2019): WealthFlex and Athena Art Finance. 

Some context

At a very high level, Yieldstreet aims to give consumers access to invest in asset classes outside of the stock market.

“These are investments that generate passive income. For example, we do a bunch of things in real estate such as financing warehouses, multifamily and distribution centers,” Mehere told TechCrunch. “We also do art, auto loans or equipment finance. These are typically investments done by institutions and what we’re trying to do is really fractionalize them and get them to real estate investors. A lot of this stuff is asset-backed and it’s generating cash flow.”

In an effort to help people understand just exactly what they’re putting their money into, Yieldstreet aims to provide “a ton of investor education,” Mehere added, in the form of content such as articles, blog posts and infographics.

The company also aims to have its portfolios working “around the clock” to automatically apply earned income toward everyday expenses — a concept conceived by Mahere as “self-driving money.”

Yieldstreet will use its new capital to expand its user base, develop new investment products, explore international expansion and pursue strategic acquisitions, according to Mehere. Outside of its New York City headquarters, Yieldstreet also has offices in Brazil, Greece and Malta.

“Alternative investing has generally been restricted to very high net worth individuals. This is not just a U.S. problem, but a worldwide one. In Europe, especially, it is exacerbated by a negative interest rate,” he said. “So it’s even more compelling to them to tap into U.S. assets.” As such, Yieldstreet plans to expand into Europe and Asia as part of its growth strategy.

Tarsadia Investments (and former E*TRADE CEO) President Caplan believes the company is “uniquely positioned” to “achieve significant growth in revenue while ultimately achieving tremendous scale.”

“Everything begins and ends with the management team,” he told TechCrunch. “Yieldstreet’s management team’s vision for the future of digital investing aligned perfectly with that of our organization at Tarsadia. Yieldstreet is building the future of investing.”

Locus, a startup that uses AI to help businesses map out their logistics, said on Wednesday it has raised $50 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its presence.

The new round, a Series C, was led by Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC. Qualcomm Ventures and existing investors Tiger Global Management and Falcon Edge also participated in the round, which brings the startup’s to-date raise to $79 million. The new round valued the startup, which was founded in India, at about $300 million, said a person familiar with the matter.

Angel investors Amrish Rau (CEO of Pine Labs), Kunal Shah (CEO of CRED), Raju Reddy (founder of Sierra Atlantic), and Deb Deep Sengupta (former President and MD of SAP in South Asia) also participated in the round.

Locus helps its clients automate their logistics workload — tasks such as planning, organizing, transporting and tracking of inventories, and finding the best path to reach a destination — that have traditionally required intensive human labor, said Nishith Rastogi, CEO of Locus, in an interview with TechCrunch.

“When you order from Licious or BigBasket, for instance, they need to decide each day at their centres how many vehicles they need to use, and what size of vehicles they need to go with,” Rastogi explained. These clients, he said, also need to assign drivers based on how familiar they are with the delivery area, and factor in the traffic to determine at what time they should leave for delivery.

“We help our clients move beyond visibility into all of these decision makings,” he said, adding that the startup uses proprietary algorithms and deep machine learning.

The startup, which operates in North America, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Indian subcontinent, says it has helped its customers save over $150 million in logistics costs, and shaved tens of millions of kilometres off their journey that they would have travelled otherwise.

Rastogi said the vast majority of the startup’s revenue today comes from international markets, especially North America. The startup said its platform is especially popular among FMCG and e-commerce firms as well as those who need distribution partners.

Locus enters into categories where the cost of logistics is a big portion of cost of goods sold and where the profit margin is thin, he said. “At many distribution or e-commerce companies, the cost of logistics can be 40% of the good sold. This gives our clients a huge incentive to make some changes,” he said.

“Locus’ smart product suite is optimizing supply chain efficiencies by using machine learning to deliver real-time tracking and insights for the last mile fulfillment,” said Varsha Tagare, Sr. Director at Qualcomm Technologies and Managing Director at Qualcomm Ventures, in a statement. “We’re excited to invest in Locus to enable logistics as a service and support their journey to become a global last-mile automation leader.”

The startup plans to deploy the new capital to expand to additional markets and also broaden its technology team.

Rocket Lab has already received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to resume its launch activities, following a failure during the second stage burn of its 20th Electron rocket mission that resulted in the loss of the payload. That’s a testament to Rocket Lab’s safety systems design, and everything working as intended when it encountered an anomaly, meaning that while the mission failed, it did so safely and without any risk to ground crew, the general population or other orbital objects.

This doesn’t mean Rocket Lab will actually resume launches immediately; while the FAA has determined that its existing launch license is still in good standing after the incident, the company itself will continue its investigation into the cause of the problem. Rocket Lab CEO and founder Peter Beck called the ongoing effort to determine the cause of the second stage engine shutdown “an intricate and layered fault analysis,” but also noted that they have already replicated the error in testing.

Now, the focus will be on working out exactly the sequence of events and figuring out what exactly caused what that led to the automatic safety shut-off. That process is expected to be done sometime “in the coming weeks,” and then at that point the company will proceed with resuming active flight activities.

Rocket Lab didn’t reference an earlier mission failure from last July in this update. It ultimately concluded that anomaly was the result of a bad electrical connection, but which had similar results with a second stage engine safety shutdown.

The company did note that the information collected from the first stage of the Electron rocket that it recovered after the launch indicates that everything went as planned with that part of the mission. Rocket Lab is in the process of adding reusability to its Electron first stage booster, and had implemented a new atmospheric re-entry and splashdown process test in this one, which went smoothly. The company added that the new heat shield it used for this flight worked as intended, and that it now plans to do hot fire testing on the engines from the recovered first stage to see how they perform.

Very big news today coming out of Europe in the world of e-commerce. Etsy, the New York-based marketplace where crafty creators and those interested in their styles can discover and buy those goods, today announced that it is acquiring Depop, a London-based marketplace targeting millennial and Gen-Z consumers with a new take on social shopping. Etsy is paying $1.625 billion for the company, in what Etsy is describing as a mostly-cash deal.

This is not just Etsy’s biggest acquisition to date by some margin — it’s made seven other deals but all for well under $1 billion — but a huge acquisition for e-commerce in Europe, and also a massive endorsement of companies that are building business models, namely commerce models, specifically targeting younger and/or more creative users.

Some 90% of Depop’s users are under the age of 26, and this will give Etsy a sizeable opportunity both to tap them and their community in Depop itself, but also as a bridge to bringing more content and younger shoppers to Etsy, which may have started skewing younger but has also a huge number of older users now, too. The company is publicly traded and has a market cap of over $20 billion currently.

Depop last raised money, it seems, in 2019 (a $62 million round) and was on a roll at the time, with 13 million users and growing very fast in the U.S. Today, some two years later, its user numbers have grown to over 21 million stylists, designers, artists, collectors, vintage sellers and more, with an especially strong audience in the U.S. (Etsy’s biggest market) and its home market of the UK (which is also strong for Etsy).

This is a volume game for Etsy, not necessarily an initially profitable one: Depop in 2020 saw gross merchandise sales of $650 million but revenues of only $70 million, both up 100% on the year before. Depop’s ethos fits squarely into a lot of the tastes of the moment. 2020 was a year that saw not just a huge surge of e-commerce, but also the flourishing of a lot of smaller businesses and cottage industries as a swathe of people opted to shop locally and support individuals, and to buy more used goods — both areas where Depop plays very strong.

“We are simply thrilled to be adding Depop—what we believe to be the resale home for Gen Z consumers—to the Etsy family. Depop is a vibrant, two-sided marketplace with a passionate community, a highly-differentiated offering of unique items, and we believe significant potential to further scale,” Josh Silverman, Etsy, Inc. CEO, said in a statement. “Depop’s world-class management team and employees have done a fantastic job nurturing this community and driving organic, authentic growth in a way that aligns well with Etsy’s DNA and mission of Keeping Commerce Human. We see significant opportunities for shared expertise and growth synergies across what will now be a tremendous ‘house of brands’ portfolio of individually distinct, and very special, e-commerce brands.”

Depop’s CEO Maria Raga added: “We’re on an incredible journey building Depop into a place where the next generation comes to explore unique fashion and be part of a community that’s changing the way we shop. Our community is made up of people who are creating a new fashion system by establishing new trends and making new from old. They come to Depop for the clothes, but stay for the culture. We’ll now take an exciting leap forward as part of the Etsy family, benefiting from Josh’s and his team’s expertise, and the resources of a much larger company whose values are so aligned with ours here at Depop.”

More to come. Refresh for updates.

The European Commission has announced a partnership with Bill Gates’ sustainable energy funding vehicle with the goal of unlocking new investments for clean tech and sustainable energy projects totalling up to $1BN (€820M) over five years (2022-2026).

EU-based projects the partnership will focus on initially fall into four sectors which are being prioritized for their potential to deliver substantial reductions in regional emissions — namely:

• Green hydrogen;
• Sustainable aviation fuels;
• Direct air capture;
• Long-duration energy storage.

The goal is to scale technologies which are currently too expensive to compete with fossil fuel-based incumbent technologies.

The pair said they will continue to work on setting up the program over the coming months, with an eye on having something further to announce at the COP-26 conference in November.

It’s not the first time the Commission and Gates’ Breakthrough Energy organization have worked together on funding sustainable investment. But the scale of this latest partnership dwarfs the €100M fund the EU established back in 2019 with its venture investment funding arm.

Now the Commission has partnered with Breakthrough Energy Catalyst — a financing program within Gates’ organization that aims to accelerate the development and adoption of technologies needed to underpin a low-carbon economy — to mobilize up to 10x more than the earlier fund to build large-scale, commercial demonstration projects for clean technologies.

The overarching goal is of course to lower the costs and accelerate deployment of clean tech in order to deliver significant reductions in CO₂ emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.

The bloc is a major emitter of CO₂ but has committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, under the European Green Deal.

Gates’ philosophy with his 2015-founded Breakthrough Energy vehicle, meanwhile, is that renewables alone won’t be enough to avert catastrophic climate change — and investments in a range of high risk but potentially high reward technologies is also needed.

But given the lengthy time-scales needed for a return on these types of investments public-private partnerships look like a key piece of the financing puzzle.

Commenting on the partnership announcement in a statement, EU president Ursula von der Leyen, said: “With our European Green Deal, Europe wants to become the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. And Europe has also the great opportunity to become the continent of climate innovation. For this, the European Commission will mobilise massive investments in new and transforming industries over the next decade. This is why I’m glad to join forces with Breakthrough Energy. Our partnership will support EU businesses and innovators to reap the benefits of emission-reducing technologies and create the jobs of tomorrow.”

In another supporting statement, Gates, founder of Breakthrough Energy, added: “Decarbonising the global economy is the greatest opportunity for innovation the world has ever seen. Europe will play a critical role, having demonstrated an early and consistent commitment to climate and longstanding leadership in science, engineering, and technology. Through this partnership, Europe will lay solid ground for a net-zero future in which clean technologies are reliable, available, and affordable for all.”

On the EU side, funding for the partnership is expected to come from the bloc’s flagship R&D fund, Horizon Europe, and also via the low-carbon-focused Innovation Fund within the framework of the InvestEU program.

Breakthrough Energy Catalyst will mobilise equivalent private capital and philanthropic funds to finance selected projects.

The partnership will also be open to national investments by EU Member States through InvestEU or at project level, the Commission noted. It added that a call for expressions of interest for potential InvestEU implementing partners is currently open until June 30 2021.

Renewable energy and clean(er) transport were also key focus areas for the massive €750BN ‘Next Generation EU’ coronavirus recovery fund put together by the Commission last year — which said it would borrow money on the financial markets through the issuance of bonds for post-pandemic recovery — with that money pegged to be channelled through EU programs between 2021 and 2024.

The bloc’s lawmakers have also suggested that digitization and AI technologies — which are other areas it’s pegged for major investment — will play a key supporting role in Europe’s green transition.

 

Berlin-based Tier Mobility has raised $60 million to help the e-scooter company expand its fleet and its network of battery charging stations in 2021.

The funds, which come from investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, come just weeks after Tier was awarded the London e-scooter pilot permit, alongside Lime and Dott. With a major new city on the horizon and hints of further expansion plans, Tier will need a significant upfront investment to cover everything from fleet orders to local warehouses to new teams.

In November, Tier also closed a $250 million Series C funding round, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The latest funds are asset-backed financing, meaning Goldman Sachs is essentially providing Tier with a loan that is secured by one of the company’s assets, probably its scooters. Tier did not respond to a request for specifics on the loan.

“The size of this highly scalable asset-backed debt facility is a game-changing first in micro-mobility, accelerating our expansion and cementing our market leadership in Europe,” said Alex Gayer, Tier’s chief financial officer, in a statement. “This facility leverages our recent equity raise and will enhance our capital-efficient growth.”

In addition to London, over the past year, Tier has added the coveted cities of Dubai and Paris to its list. It’s available in over 100 cities across 12 countries in Europe and the Middle East. With the fresh capital, Tier plans to extend its international coverage and invest in its multi-modal fleet, adding bicycles and mopeds to the mix.

The Goldman Sachs-backed funding will also enable Tier to expand its Tier Energy Network, a venture to place battery charging stations in retail stores across its coverage area. The energy network would provide an incentive structure for riders to take a minute at the end of their ride to swap the scooter’s battery and earn free credit, while shops can enjoy the extra foot traffic.

“Even amid a global pandemic, TIER has established a proven track record of profitable unit economics and asset longevity,” said Ben Payne, managing director at Goldman Tier, in a statement. “We are excited to help the European leader extend sustainable mobility to more people across the world.”

Home services marketplace Urban Company said on Wednesday it has raised $255 million in a new financing round and confirmed a valuation of $2.1 billion, joining over a dozen other startups in India that have earned the unicorn status this year.

The new financing round — a Series F — was led by Prosus Ventures, Dragoneer and Wellington Management, while Vy Capital, Tiger Global and Steadview participated in it. The Gurgaon-headquartered startup said* the new round features a primary capital infusion of $188 million while the rest of the capital came through a secondary sale by some angel and other early investors.

Formerly known as UrbanClap, the seven-year-old startup offers a range of home services on its platform. Does your AC need maintenance work? Is the TV not working? The house needs a fresh coat of paint? Plumbing issues? Need your cleaned and disinfected? How about a haircut done at a place of your choosing?

These are just some of the services Urban Company offers to its customers, who can place an order using the startup’s app or the website and pick a good time and venue.

The idea of the startup came from its three co-founders, who in their early 20s were puzzled why nobody else was trying to take a stab at the industry, which remains largely unorganized, said Raghav Chandra, a founder of Urban Company, in an interview with TechCrunch.

What started as an idea is now a unicorn. The startup today operates in 35 cities in India, Singapore, Australia, the UAE, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. More than 35,000 service partners are active on the platform, said Chandra, who serves as Urban Company’s Chief Technology Officer.

“Urban Company is disrupting a large, fragmented industry that has seen low digital adoption until now,” said Ashutosh Sharma, Head of Investment for India at Prosus Ventures.

Through their technology-enabled platform and keen focus on providing high-quality, trained service partners, Urban Company has been able to achieve the very difficult task of productizing services. In addition, the initial traction with international expansion in geographies we know well is encouraging and presents an opportunity for significant growth into the future,” he added.

The startup’s fast-growth was abruptly punctuated last year after New Delhi enforced a nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Chandra said the startup began seeing recovery last year after the nation started to open up again and had its best month to date in March this year.

Chandra said the startup will deploy the fresh capital to further expand in the markets where it operates, and work on ways to supercharge onboarding, training, and safety of service workers on the platform. It is also looking to expand its technology team.

Urban Company spends weeks on training and upskilling the workers that join its platform, said Chandra. The startup today also enables workers with expertise in one category to learn about other categories, hence increasing their odds of getting more work and earning more. Chandra said offering upskilling courses to the workers will remain one of the key areas as the startup expands.

*The startup had disclosed the new fundraise in a filing with local regulator in April, but co-founder and chief executive Abhiraj Singh Bhal declined to comment at the time, citing the rising coronavirus cases in the country.

Amazon confirmed its annual sales event known as Prime Day will be held on Monday, June 21 and Tuesday, June 22. Bloomberg had previously reported these same dates, citing leaked records. The once-a-year mega sale had typically been held in July, when the shopping season goes through its usual lull. But due to the COVID-19 pandemic, last year’s Prime Day was delayed until October in most markets, including the U.S.

Despite the changes, Amazon said small and midsize businesses generated mo0re than $3.5 billion during the Prime Day event, Amazon said, up 60% from the year prior. However, it didn’t disclose its total Prime Day figures.

This year, Amazon will kick off Prime Day early with a new promotion aimed at supporting small businesses. Starting June 7 and running up until Prime day’s start, when Prime members spend $10 on items sold by a participating small business, they’ll receive a $10 credit they can later spend during the Prime Day event.

This deal will run in select markets, including the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan, and is the big promotion for small businesses in Amazon’s history, the company noted. More than 300,000 selling partners are participating.

Prime Day was originally conceived as a way to push more Amazon shoppers to convert to paying Amazon Prime subscribers by luring them with deep discounts across categories — including Amazon’s own consumer hardware devices, like Echo smart speakers or Fire TV devices, which have been regular best sellers.

This will again be the case, as Amazon promises savings and discounts across home, electronics, beauty, fashion and Amazon devices. And it will again extend sales to other areas of Amazon’s business, like Prime Video, Amazon Music, Prime Gaming and others.

One of those deals is live now, as Prime members are offered a four-month free trial for its on-demand music streaming service, Amazon Music Unlimited, which offers up to 70 million songs. The company recently added lossless streaming support as a free upgrade, following Apple’s move to do the same for its own Music subscribers.

While Prime Day has been running since 2015, Amazon has more recently begun using the event to put a stronger spotlight on how it helps small businesses in light of increased regulatory scrutiny and antitrust investigations over its business practices.

In addition to Congressional hearings which saw Amazon founder and (soon to be former) CEO Jeff Bezos hauled in to testify, DC’s Attorney General Karl Racine last month filed an antitrust suit against Amazon, accusing the retailer of stifling competition by exerting control over third-party sellers. The suit alleges Amazon fixed prices on its retail platform by prohibiting sellers from selling products for less elsewhere, creating an artificially high price floor across the online retail market.

The company is also facing antitrust investigations abroad, including in the E.U. The retailer has been accused of harming small businesses by leveraging nonpublic data from its third-party sellers who use its marketplace in order to copy the best-selling products and undercut its selling partners.

This reality stands in sharp contrast as to how Amazon presented itself during an upbeat press briefing, where it had leveraged actress Kristen Bell’s (“The Good Place”) likeability factor to promote how well small businesses were doing on Amazon. During the event, she “interviewed” favorite sellers, like dog food seller Pawstruck and artisanal self-care product maker Live by Being, who had nothing but great things to say about working with Amazon.

Bell, along with Karamo Brown and Mindy Kaling, will also be highlighting some of their favorite sellers on Amazon’s video shopping service, Amazon Live.

Amazon also gave a broader update on its small business sellers and related efforts. The retailer noted that, last year, it delivered more than 250 new tools and services to help its selling partners reach 300 million customers globally.

“It’s pretty incredible to think in the past year in the U.S. alone, our small and medium-sized selling partners sold more than 3.7 billion products as more than 7,200 products, every minute,” said Keri Cusick, head of Small Business Empowerment at Amazon, in a press briefing. “Overall, they average $200,000 in sales, up from about $150,000, and more than 27,000 American sellers had over half a million dollars in sales,” she added.

Amazon didn’t offer specifics about its upcoming Prime Day deals, but said that it will host hundreds of thousands of deals leading up to Prime Day from companies including Le Creuset, Tommy Hilfiger, Lego, Mattel and Black & Decker.

Alexa device owners can also shop early, starting on Friday June 18, by asking “Alexa, what are my deals?”

Prime Day will be available on Amazon.com or regional websites, on Amazon.com/espanol for Spanish-language speakers and in Amazon’s physical retail stores.