Author: azeeadmin

At the end of March, TechCrunch reported that buzzy startup Pipe — which aims to be the “Nasdaq for revenue” — had raised $150 million in a round of funding that values the fintech at $2 billion.

Well, that deal has closed and in the end, Miami-based Pipe confirms that it has actually raised $250 million at a $2 billion valuation in a round that was “massively oversubscribed,” according to co-founder and co-CEO Harry Hurst.

“We had originally allocated $150 million for the round, but capped it at $250 million although we could have raised significantly more,” he told TechCrunch.

As we previously reported, Baltimore, Maryland-based Greenspring Associates led the round, which included participation from new investors Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global, CreditEase FinTech Investment Fund, Horizon Capital, 3L and Japan’s SBI Investment. Existing backers such as Next47, Marc Benioff, Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, MaC  Ventures and Republic also put money in the latest financing.

The investment comes about 2 ½ months after Pipe raised $50 million in “strategic equity funding” from a slew of high-profile investors such as Siemens’ Next47 and Jim Pallotta’s Raptor Group, Shopify, Slack, HubSpot, Okta and Social Capital’s Chamath Palihapitiya. With this latest round, Pipe has now raised about $316 million in total capital. The new funding was raised at “a significant step up in valuation” from the company’s last raise.

As a journalist who first covered Pipe when they raised $6 million in seed funding back in late February 2020, it’s been fascinating to watch the company’s rise. In fact, Pipe claims that its ability to achieve a $2 billion valuation in just under a year since its public launch in June of last year makes it the fastest fintech to reach this valuation in history. While I can’t substantiate that claim, I can say that its growth has indeed been swift and impressive.

Hurst, Josh Mangel and Zain Allarakhia founded Pipe in September 2019 with the mission of giving SaaS companies a way to get their revenue upfront, by pairing them with investors on a marketplace that pays a discounted rate for the annual value of those contracts. (Pipe describes its buy-side participants as “a vetted group of financial institutions and banks.”)

The goal of the platform is to offer companies with recurring revenue streams access to capital so they don’t dilute their ownership by accepting external capital or get forced to take out loans.

More than 4,000 companies have signed up on the Pipe trading platform since its public launch in June 2020, with just over 1,000 of those signing up since its March raise, according to Hurst. Tradable annual recurring revenue (ARR) on the Pipe platform is in excess of $1 billion and trending toward $2 billion, with tens of millions of dollars currently being traded every month. When I last talked to the company in March, it had reported tens of millions of dollars traded in all of the first quarter.

“Growth has been insane,” Hurst told TechCrunch. “This speaks to why we managed to raise at such a high valuation and attract so much investor interest.”

Image Credits: Pipe

Over time, Pipe’s platform has evolved to offer non-dilutive capital to non-SaaS companies as well. In fact, 25% of its customers are currently non-SaaS, according to Hurst — a number he expects to climb to over 50% by year’s end.

Examples of the types of businesses now using Pipe’s platform include property management companies, direct-to-consumer companies with subscription products, insurance brokerages, online pharmacies and even sports/entertainment-related organizations, Hurst said. Even VC firms are users.

“Any business with very predictable revenue streams is ripe for trading on our platform,” Hurst emphasizes. “We have unlocked the largest untapped asset class in the world.”

He emphasizes that what Pipe is offering is not debt or a loan.

“Other companies in this space are dealing in loans and they’re actually raising debt and giving companies money — like reselling debt,” Hurst said. “This is what differentiates us so massively.”

The startup has been operating with a lean and mean strategy and has a current headcount of 34. Pipe plans to use its latest capital in part to double that number by year’s end.

“We haven’t actually spent a penny of our prior financing,” Hurst told TechCrunch. “But we’re seeing huge demand for the product globally, and across so many different verticals, so we’re going to use this capital to not only secure the future of business obviously but to continue to invest into growing all of these different verticals and kick off our global expansion.”

Image Credits: Pipe co-founder and co-CEO Harry Hurst / Pipe

Ashton Newhall, managing general partner of Greenspring Associates, described Pipe as “one of the fastest-growing companies” his firm has seen.

The startup, he added, is “addressing a very large TAM (total addressable market) with the potential to fundamentally shift the financial services landscape.”

In particular, Greenspring was drawn to Pipe’s alternative financing model.

“While there are many companies that service specific niches with traditional lending products, Pipe isn’t a lender,” Newhall told TechCrunch. “Rather, it’s a trading platform and does not actually raise any money to give to customers. Instead, Pipe connects customers directly with institutional investors to get the best possible pricing to trade their actual contracts in lieu of taking a loan.”

European startup studio eFounders has now been around for 10 years. And because a birthday sounds like a good opportunity to share some metrics, the portfolio companies have reached a valuation of $2 billion together — only 18 months after reaching $1 billion.

eFounders says it is focused on building the future of work. In practical terms, it means the company is building B2B SaaS startups with a focus on productivity and workflows. For instance, Front, Aircall and Spendesk all started with eFounders.

There have been a few exits, such as TextMaster, Mention, Mailjet, Hivy and Briq. Those exits are included in the total valuation of eFounders companies —  exit values are freezed as of date of exit. But Front, Aircall and Spendesk could represent even more massive successes down the road.

“When we started in 2011, there was an existing model that was Rocket Internet. We liked the entrepreneurship spirit but we didn’t like the philosophy,” co-founder and CEO Thibaud Elzière told me.

Instead of copying Rocket Internet altogether, they altered the business model quite drastically on three different aspects:

• They try to come up with original startup ideas, not copycats;
• They want to work with entrepreneurs, not consultants-turned-entrepreneurs;
• Their portfolio companies should be able to operate on their own after 12 to 18 months.

When eFounders come up with a new project, they act as a sort of third co-founder. The startup studio tries to find a CEO and a CTO. In exchange for a third of equity, the eFounders core team helps take the project off the ground. When the startup raises a seed round, eFounders moves on from day-to-day activities and focuses on new projects.

And it’s been working well. With 30 portfolio companies, there are now 1,500 people working for an eFounders-backed company. Combined, they generate $131 million in annual recurring revenue.

As for the next 10 years, Elzière doesn’t think eFounders can simply increase the cadence and launch more and more projects. “It’s a model that isn’t scalable — it’s hand crafted,” he said.

There are two ways to expand. First, eFounders is going to focus on more verticals. That’s why the startup studio partnered with Camille Tyan so that he would be in charge of fintech projects. You can imagine another studio for blockchain startups, another one for AI startups, etc.

“We want to remain focused on software with a B2B angle — not enterprise but long-tail B2B. We don’t pretend to be a general-purpose studio, but we can acquire specific skills and knowledge on specific topics,” Elzière said.

If there are some liquidity events with some of the most successful eFounders companies, the startup studio is also going to use part of its cash to invest in other companies. This eFounders fund would focus on seed investments in SaaS companies with a hands-on approach.

But having more money isn’t necessarily a bad thing as SaaS products today don’t look like SaaS products from ten years ago.

“Creating a SaaS company today is a lot more complicated and more expensive,” Elzière said. “People who use Notion tell you that Notion is slow because it takes more than 100 milliseconds to load a page. People expect the same thing in consumer apps and in SaaS when it comes to performance, design and experience.”

“Companies raise more and more money because there’s a lot of money available, but also because it takes more and more time and skills in order to build a product,” he added.

End-to-end encrypted email provider ProtonMail has officially confirmed it’s passed 50 million users globally as it turns seven years old.

It’s a notable milestone for a services provider that intentionally does not have a data business — opting instead for a privacy pledge based on zero access architecture that means it has no way to decrypt the contents of ProtonMail users’ emails.

Although, to be clear, the 50M+ figure applies to total users of all its products (which includes a VPN offering), not just users of its e2e encrypted email. (It declined to break out email users vs other products when we asked.)

Commenting in a statement, Andy Yen, founder and CEO, said: “The conversation about privacy has shifted surprisingly quickly in the past seven years. Privacy has gone from being an afterthought, to the main focus of a lot of discussions about the future of the Internet. In the process, Proton has gone from a crowdfunded idea of a better Internet, to being at the forefront of the global privacy wave. Proton is an alternative to the surveillance capitalism model advanced by Silicon Valley’s tech giants, that allows us to put the needs of users and society first.”

ProtonMail, which was founded in 2014, has diversified into offering a suite of products — including the aforementioned VPN and a calendar offering (Proton Calendar). A cloud storage service, Proton Drive, is also slated for public release later this year.

For all these products it claims take the same ‘zero access’ hands off approach to user data. Albeit, it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison to compare e2e encrypted email with an encrypted VPN service — since the issue with VPN services is that they can see activity (i.e. where the encrypted or otherwise packets are going) and that metadata can sum to a log of your Internet activity (even with e2e encryption of the packets themselves).

Proton claims it doesn’t track or record its VPN users’ web browsing. And given its wider privacy-dependent reputation that’s at least a more credible claim vs the average VPN service. Nonetheless, you do still have to trust Proton not to do that (or be forced to do that by, for e.g., law enforcement). It’s not the same technical ‘zero access’ guarantee as it can offer for its e2e encrypted email.

Proton does also offer a free VPN — which, as we’ve said before, can be a red flag for data logging risk — but the company specifies that users of the paid version subsidize free users. So, again, the claim is zero logging but you still need to make a judgement call on whether to trust that.

From Snowden to 50M+

Over ProtonMail’s seven year run privacy has certainly gained cache as a brand promise — which is why you can now see data-mining giants like Facebook making ludicrous claims about ‘pivoting’ their people-profiling surveillance empires to ‘privacy’. So, as ever, PR that’s larded with claims of ‘respect for privacy’ demands very close scrutiny.

And while it’s clearly absurd for an adtech giant like Facebook to try to cloak the fact that its business model relies on stripping away people’s privacy with claims to the contrary, in Proton’s case the privacy claim is very strong indeed — since the company was founded with the goal of being “immune to large scale spying”. Spying such as that carried out by the NSA.

ProtonMail’s founding idea was to build a system “that does not require trusting us”.

While usage of e2e encryption has grown enormously since 2013 — when disclosures by NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, revealed the extent of data gathering by government mass surveillance programs, which were shown (il)liberally tapping into Internet cables and mainstream digital services to grab people’s data without their knowledge or consent — growth that’s certainly been helped by consumer friendly services like ProtonMail making robust encryption far more accessible — there are worrying moves by lawmakers in a number of jurisdictions that clash with the core idea and threaten access to e2e encryption.

In the wake of the Snowden disclosures, ‘Five Eyes’ countries steadily amped up international political pressure on e2e encryption. Australia, for example, passed an anti-encryption law in 2018 — which grants police powers to issue ‘technical notices’ to force companies operating on its soil to help the government hack, implant malware, undermine encryption or insert backdoors at the behest of the government.

While, in 2016, the UK reaffirmed its surveillance regime — passing a law that gives the government powers to compel companies to remove or not implement e2e encryption. Under the Investigatory Powers Act, a statutory instrument called a Technical Capability Notice (TCN) can be served on comms services providers to compel decrypted access. (And as the ORG noted in April, there’s no way to track usage as the law gags providers from reporting anything at all about a TCN application, including that it even exists.)

More recently, UK ministers have kept up public pressure on e2e encryption — framing it as an existential threat to child protection. Simultaneously they are legislating — via an Online Safety Bill, out in draft earlier this month — to put a legally binding obligation on service providers to ‘prevent bad things from happening on the Internet’ (as the ORG neatly sums it up). And while still at the draft stage, private messaging services are in scope of that bill — putting the law on a potential collision course with messaging services that use e2e encryption.

The U.S., meanwhile, has declined to reform warrantless surveillance.

And if you think the EU is a safe space for e2e encryption, there are reasons to be concerned in continental Europe too.

EU lawmakers have recently made a push for what they describe as “lawful access” to encrypted data — without specifying exactly how that might be achieved, i.e. without breaking and/or backdooring e2e encryption and therefore undoing the digital security they also say is vital.

In a further worrying development, EU lawmakers have proposed automated scanning of encrypted communications services — aka a provision called ‘chatcontrol’ that’s ostensibly targeted at prosecuting those who share child exploitation content — which raises further questions over how such laws might intersect with ‘zero access’ services like ProtonMail.

The European Pirate Party has been sounding the alarm — and dubs the ‘chatcontrol’ proposal “the end of the privacy of digital correspondence” — warning that “securely encrypted communication is at risk”.

A plenary vote on the proposal is expected in the coming months — so where exactly the EU lands on that remains to be seen.

ProtonMail, meanwhile, is based in Switzerland which is not a member of the EU and has one of the stronger reputations for privacy laws globally. However the country also backed beefed-up surveillance powers in 2016 — extending the digital snooping capabilities of its own intelligence agencies.

It does also adopt some EU regulations — so, again, it’s not clear whether or not any pan-EU automated scanning of message content could end up being applied to services based in the country.

The threats to e2e encryption are certainly growing, even as usage of such properly private services keeps scaling.

Asked whether it has concerns, ProtonMail pointed out that the EU’s current temporary chatcontrol proposal is voluntary — meaning it would be up to the company in question to decide its own policy. Although it accepts there is “some support” in the Commission for the chatcontrol proposals to be made mandatory.

“It’s not clear at this time whether these proposals could impact Proton specifically [i.e. if they were to become mandatory],” the spokesman also told us. “The extent to which a Swiss company like Proton might be impacted by such efforts would have to be assessed based on the specific legal proposal. To our knowledge, none has been made for now.”

“We completely agree that steps have to be taken to combat the spread of illegal explicit material. However, our concern is that the forced scanning of communications would be an ineffective approach and would instead have the unintended effect of undermining many of the basic freedoms that the EU was established to protect,” he added. “Any form of automated content scanning is incompatible with end-to-end encryption and by definition undermines the right to privacy.”

So while Proton is rightly celebrating that a steady commitment to zero access infrastructure over the past seven years has helped its business grow to 50M+ users, there are reasons for all privacy-minded folk to be watchful of what the next years of political developments might mean for the privacy and security of our data.

After IFA became one of an extremely small number of in-person trade shows in 2020, the gfu Consumer & Home Electronics GmbH is pulling the plug on this year’s event. Initially planned for September 3-7 at the Messe in Berlin, the large-scale consumer electronics trade show is going on hiatus.

Among other concerns, organizer are citing the emergency of Covid-19 variants and concerns around the speed and consistency with which vaccines have been rolled out globally.

“Ultimately, several key global health metrics did not move as fast in the right direction as had been hoped for – from the rapid emergence of new COVID-19 variants, for example in South Asia, to continued uncertainties about the speed of the rollout of vaccination programmes around the world,” the organization said in a press release. “This in turn is adding uncertainty for the companies that were committed or interested in coming to Berlin, as well as media and visitors – all of whom have to plan well ahead with regards to budgets, investments and travel – not just for IFA, but all similar events around the world.”

Another key issue here is the Messe Berlin (convention center) has been – and continues to be – used as both an emergency medical facility and a vaccination center. The planned Berlin Photo Week at ARENA Berlin and SHIFT Mobility events will continue. IFA, meanwhile, is set to return on September 2, 2022.

The news comes as a number of high profile exhibitors have opted not to exhibit in-person at MWC late next month in Barcelona. The list, thus far, includes Qualcomm, Google, IBM, Nokia, Sony, Oracle, Ericsson, Samsung and Lenovo. As with IFA before it, MWC’s organizers are citing a number of safety precautious and likely – given travel restrictions, MIA exhibitors and a general sense of caution even among vaccinated people – a scaled back event.

MWC will be something of a hybrid event, with both online and in-person exhibits. IFA, meanwhile, appears to be canceled outright. The Berlin show is notably different than other consumer trade shows in that it is partially open to the public.

The past year has been utterly devastating to the music industry generally, and live music in particular. Artists who make a living touring have been forced to find alternative ways to make ends meet, while those among us who once frequented live events have been looking for ways to plug the hole created by wide-scale shutdowns.

A number of music-related platforms have spent much of the pandemic looking to offer some semblance of the concert-going experience, ranging from live venues to services like Bandcamp. Today, Spotify is announcing the launch of a new feature designed to provide a live-show experience remotely. Venues in many areas are beginning to reopen, but even fans may be cautious to return to packed, indoor events.

The streaming service is announcing a series of shows starting with dates this month and next, including names like The Black Keys, Rag’n’Bone Man, Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff, Leon Bridges and girl in red. Spotify is billing them as “prerecorded livestreams” — a bit of an oxymoron, that. I recognize that livestream has become kind of a catchall, but it loses some meaning when the thing isn’t, you know, live.

Rather than streaming straight from a venue, the service is taking the somewhat novel approach of letting the artist choose the spot for the pre-recorded show. That means live-show venues in the case of The Black Keys and something more creative for Antonoff, who shot his segment on a bus traveling from Brooklyn to Springsteen’s old stomping ground, Asbury Park, New Jersey (greetings).

“We have always been a band that loves to play live in venues of all shapes and sizes,” The Black Keys said in a release tied to the news. “The past year has been tough for musicians and fans alike, so we wanted to find a way to share this live performance of songs from our new project, Delta Kream, from a place we love, the Blue Front Café, the oldest active juke joint in America. We’re excited to be a part of this new initiative with Spotify that will give fans a great way to connect with their favorite artists.”

The shows run 40-75 minutes and run $15 a pop. The price seems a bit high to stream a pre-recorded concert, but fans of the groups will likely appreciate what’s being billed as an “intimate” look at one of their favorite artists — though intimacy is, in part, limited as the company will be selling unlimited tickets to the events. The service isn’t revealing how large of a cut artists will get, simply telling TechCrunch, “All artists will receive a guaranteed fee for their participation in the livestream.”

Streaming the shows requires a Spotify account — either premium or free.

With security top of mind in many companies these days, especially given how many staff work at home, there is one area that remains chronically ignored: that of the world of APIs which power all of the platforms we all use every day.

Now, a significant player in the cybersecurity of APIs is super-charging its offering. 42Crunch, an API security startup, has raised $17 million in a Series A round led by Energy Impact Partners. Adara Ventures also participated.

42Crunch has a ‘micro firewall’ for APIs which aims to protect against attacks listed in the OWASP Top 10 for API Security. It is used by companies such as Mulesoft, Ford Motors, and Qualys.

CEO and Co-Founder of 42Crunch, Jacques Declas said: “What do the recent data breaches at Tesla, Facebook, and Clubhouse have in common? They all came about due to API vulnerabilities. 83% of internet traffic now comes from APIs but traditional firewall approaches are not adapted to cope with the specific threats that APIs create.”

The three French co-founders came up with the idea after being the number of APIs used by customers proliferate.

The normal approach to firewalls – relying on patterns and signatures to detect potential incursions – does not work when it comes to API traffic. 42Crunch claims its platform can individually protect each API, and prevent common cyber-attacks such as injections but also API-specific attacks.

Isabelle Mauny, Co-founder and CTO of 42Crunch, said: “Protecting APIs from threats at runtime is only part of the story. APIs will only be truly secured when security becomes part of the developer’s flow, rather than an afterthought.”

Nazo Moosa, Co-Managing Partner, Energy Impact Partners added: “42Crunch’s ‘shift-left approach’ to the creation of secure-by-design APIs fits strongly with EIP’s vision of protecting global critical infrastructure. The company’s six-digit customer wins last year were catalytic to our decision to lead the round.”

If you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance you have a LinkedIn profile with your digital resume and hundreds — if not thousands — of professional connections. But how many of those people do you actually know well, and, more importantly, do you ever connect with them and meet others from their networks?

“You don’t go to LinkedIn to meet people. You don’t hang out and spend meaningful time there,” said Alex Taub, co-founder and CEO of Upstream, a new professional networking platform that just closed a $2.75 million seed round, bringing their total raised to $3.25 million. The round was led by Ibex Investors and managing partner Nicole Priel (who joins the board) and includes participation by 8-Bit Capital, Human Ventures, NYVP, Converge Venture Partners and a number of angel investors.

“Your LinkedIn network is not a good representation of who you actually know and how well you know them. We see these places that LinkedIn isn’t particularly focused [on] and believe there are opportunities for multiple big companies to better serve the needs of professionals,” Taub added.

Unlike LinkedIn, Upstream focuses on generating meaningful connections between its members, and one way they go about it is by hosting digital events that start with a speaker, followed by breakout matched sessions that are five minutes each.

To get a sense of the product, Upstream invited me to be the speaker at last Friday’s “Upstream Social,” where I talked about my work as a journalist and then coincidently got matched with two founders — one in Brazil and the other in Boston. The week before, the guest speaker was U.S. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.

To me, the experience felt like LinkedIn meets Clubhouse meets Hoppin.

Upstream, which is pre-revenue and is Miami-based, is a company whose founder was attracted to the Sunshine State from NYC during the pandemic. Taub and his family signed a two-year lease here and plan to reevaluate their residence in the summer of 2022; they are one of the movers who are cautiously optimistic about the tech industry’s recent explosion in the Magic City.

The origin story

Taub and his co-founder, Michael Schonfeld, are both serial entrepreneurs, having built and sold Social Rank for an undisclosed amount before launching Upstream in October 2020. The impetus for the company came as a solution to a struggle Taub faced in his daily life.

“Throughout my life, regardless of the job I’ve been in, I spend my time making introductions, connecting people and helping friends hire rock-star talent. Like many people, I get energy from helping others,” Taub said. “When COVID-19 hit and the job market took a dive last March, the number of requests for help I received increased 100X. I noticed quickly that my speed of responding to emails and brain capacity to connect the dots became the limiting factor in getting people help,” he added.

So it’s no surprise that Upstream started as a product where people could ask for help, and others from the community pitched in. The company now has more than 200 communities (similar to LinkedIn groups), and about 75% of the people who attend an initial Upstream event return for a second one.

“I joke that we are building a product that people need because I need it. We feel that we are the right team to solve this problem because we so desperately want it ourselves,” Taub said.

The Indian government is not pleased with WhatsApp’s new privacy policy. The nation’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has once again directed the Facebook-owned company to withdraw the planned update.

In a letter to WhatsApp on Tuesday — which was read to TechCrunch — MeitY has given the popular instant messaging provider seven days to offer a “satisfactory” response. Failure to do so, the ministry warned, will prompt lawful measures.

“In fulfilment of its sovereign responsibility to protect the rights and interests of Indian citizens, the government of India will consider various options available to it under laws in India,” the letter reads.

The letter comes at a time when the ministry is also pursuing a legal case on this matter in the Delhi High Court — and  the second largest internet market is also conducting an antitrust probe on the subject.

This is not the first time New Delhi has issued a notice to WhatsApp about the new privacy terms. Earlier this year, in a similar letter,” the Indian government had expressed “grave concerns” about the planned update.

Following backlash from several governments and users, WhatsApp earlier this year delayed enforcement of the privacy update by three months — to May 15. Last week, it somewhat relaxed the deadline, though users need to still need to comply to access some basic features.

A spokesperson at the time told TechCrunch that the vast majority of users who had seen the new privacy terms on the app had accepted it.

With over 450 million users, India is WhatsApp’s biggest market by users.

The ministry in its notice this week has asked WhatsApp why it needs to enforce the new changes to its terms of service — the first major update in years — to users in India when those in the EU have been exempted from it.

The updated privacy terms grant WhatsApp the consent to share some personal information — such as their phone number and location — with parent firm Facebook. WhatsApp has clarified that communication between two individuals remains just as private as before.

“It is not just problematic, but also irresponsible, for WhatsApp to leverage this position to impose unfair terms and conditions on Indian users, particularly those that discriminate against Indian users vis-à-vis users in Europe,” the ministry wrote in the letter.

In response to a petition filed in the Delhi High Court earlier this month, WhatsApp argued that many Indian firms maintain similar policies and share more data. In the petition, WhatsApp had identified food delivery startup Zomato, ride-hailing giant Ola, online grocer BigBasket, as well as Swedish giant Truecaller, which counts India as its largest market by users, as some examples.

Walmart-backed payments services firm PhonePe is in advanced stages of talks to acquire Samsung-backed Indus OS, a startup that operates an eponymous third-party Android app store, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The deal values Indus OS at $60 million, the source said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private. The deal has yet to close. PhonePe and Indus OS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Indian news outlet Entrackr first reported about the development.

Indus OS powers several popular third-party Android stores including Samsung’s Galaxy Store and provides partners with localized content and apps.

Late last year, Indus OS said it offered its partners 400,000 apps in English and 12 Indian languages. The seven-year-old startup, which has raised about $21 million to date and monetizes through ads, has amassed over 100 million users.

The startup plans to launch an app store for individual users once Google begins accepting third-party app stores, another source familiar with the matter said.

It remains unclear why PhonePe is interested in Indus OS’ offering. The Bangalore-based startup has long offered its own mini app store on its app. A handful of firms — including PhonePe rival Paytm — have either launched or explored launching their own mini app stores in recent months.

Walmart-backed payments services firm PhonePe is in advanced stages of talks to acquire Samsung-backed Indus OS, a startup that operates an eponymous third-party Android app store, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The deal values Indus OS at $60 million, the source said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private. The deal has yet to close. PhonePe and Indus OS didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Indian news outlet Entrackr first reported about the development.

Indus OS powers several popular third-party Android stores including Samsung’s Galaxy Store and provides partners with localized content and apps.

Late last year, Indus OS said it offered its partners 400,000 apps in English and 12 Indian languages. The seven-year-old startup, which has raised about $21 million to date and monetizes through ads, has amassed over 100 million users.

The startup plans to launch an app store for individual users once Google begins accepting third-party app stores, another source familiar with the matter said.

It remains unclear why PhonePe is interested in Indus OS’ offering. The Bangalore-based startup has long offered its own mini app store on its app. A handful of firms — including PhonePe rival Paytm — have either launched or explored launching their own mini app stores in recent months.