Author: azeeadmin

Your clients might not demand 24/7 customer service yet, but they are certainly hoping for it. It’s easier said than done: how can a startup with a lean staff provide round-the-clock customer care? There are several options available, but more than ever, outsourcing is one of them.

When should your startup consider outsourcing its customer care? And what should you look for in a provider? Here are some insights on what Customer Care as a Service (CCaaS) can do for you, and how fast-growing startups have been leveraging this new class of partners to boost customer satisfaction.

Addressing customer care pain points

Customer Care as a Service (CCaaS) can address several pain points, which recent trends have made more common, such as the need to provide support outside of business hours.

The COVID-19 crisis has significantly increased the share of e-commerce in total retail in recent months, and these new purchasing habits are mostly likely to stick, the OECD pointed out in a recent report. This led many small retailers to discover the reality that e-commerce startups already know well: when you are an online business, working hours aren’t really a thing.

Instead, many shoppers are making purchases on evenings and weekends, and will abandon their carts if nobody is around to answer their doubts. New clients aside, existing customers also hope to get responses outside of typical business hours whenever needed.

And it’s not just e-commerce; from SaaS to mobility services, there is a growing range of startups for which always-on customer service is nothing but a luxury. French CCaaS provider Onepilot knows it first-hand: during its beta program, its ‘support heroes’ were available from 7am to 1am, but it is now moving to 24/7 coverage as clients requested, co-founder Pierre Latscha told Extra Crunch.

French micromobility startup Pony is one of Onepilot’s clients, With floats of dockless bikes and scooters in several cities, it needed reliable customer care, but couldn’t justify the expense of an in-house hire: “We didn’t have enough demand to have someone take care of customer service full-time,” Pony explained to French newspaper Les Échos (translation ours).

In this context, outsourcing to a partner like Onepilot can save costs when demand isn’t high enough. It can also help when demand isn’t constant, whether it’s because it is seasonal; or simply because it is growing faster than the startup can address it.

The latter was the case with SPRiNG, a French subscription service for eco-friendly laundry detergent and cleaning products which has also been using Onepilot. Since its launch in the summer of 2020 and thanks to €2.1 million in seed funding, its team tripled; but with “tens of thousands of clients”, it soon felt the need for more support to handle the growing volume of requests, co-founder Ben Guerville told us via email.

AfterShip launched in 2012 to help online sellers track packages across different carriers, but since then it has built a suite of data analytics tools covering almost every step of the shopping experience, from email marketing to customer retention. The Hong Kong-headquartered startup announced today it has raised a $66 million Series B led by Tiger Global, with participation from Hillhouse Capital’s GL Ventures.

AfterShip’s last round of funding was a $1 million Series A in 2014. Co-founder Andrew Chan told TechCrunch that the company has been profitable since its launch and grew mainly through word-of-mouth referrals and partnerships, like a Shopify integration, that boosted its profile. But the company recently added a sales team and will use its latest capital on international hiring for sales and customer support. It also plans to launch new products and expand further in the United States, where about 70% of AfterShip’s customers are located.

The company’s software enables sellers to track shipments made through more than 740 carriers and handles more than 6 billion shipments each year. AfterShip’s partners with about10,000 companies, including some of the biggest names in e-commerce: Shopify (where it is used by 50,000 merchants), Magento, Squarespace, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Groupon, Rakuten, Wish and retail brands like Dyson and Inditex.

A branded shipment tracking page and email created with AfterShip’s software

AfterShip’s core product is its shipment tracking platform, but it also makes apps for shoppers, including self-service returns and package tracking, and sales and marketing tools for merchants that let them get more use out of data from shipments. Chan explained that package tracking is also a user engagement tool for sellers that lets them show more product recommendations and promotions to shoppers. AfterShip’s tools enables merchants to create their own branded tracking pages and notifications. Other features allow them to track the performance of different carriers, create email marketing campaigns and increase customer retention.

Its CRM capabilities help AfterShip differentiate from other shipment tracking aggregator providers.

“When we think of our vision, we look at what Salesforce is doing, but is there an e-commerce Salesforce that can cover more topics for sales people to use,” Chan said.

In press statement, Pangfei Wang, global partner at Tiger Global, said, “AfterShip leads the charge in making the shipping process more transparent and reliable for consumers and companies alike. As growth in e-commerce spirals ever upward, we are excited to partner with AfterShip and its leadership team as they continue to advance technology in this critical and expanding industry.”

Google today announced a sizable update to its Anthos multi-cloud platform that lets you build, deploy and manage containerized applications anywhere, including on Amazon’s AWS and (in preview) and Microsoft Azure.

Version 1.7 includes new features like improved metrics and logging for Anthos on AWS, a new Connect gateway to interact with any cluster right from Google Cloud and a preview of Google’s managed control plane for Anthos Service Mesh. Other new features include Windows container support for environments that use VMware’s vSphere platform and new tools for developers to make it easier for them to deploy their applications to any Anthos cluster.

Today’s update comes almost exactly two years after Google CEO Sundar Pichai originally announced Anthos at its Cloud Next event in 2019 (before that, Google called this project the ‘Google Cloud Services Platform,’ which launched three years ago). Hybrid- and multi-cloud, it’s fair to say, takes a key role in the Google Cloud roadmap — and maybe more so for Google than for any of its competitors. And recently, Google brought on industry veteran Jeff Reed to become the VP of Product Management in charge of Anthos.

Reed told me that he believes that there are a lot of factors right now that are putting Anthos in a good position. “The wind is at our back. We bet on Kubernetes, bet on containers — those were good decisions,” he said. Increasingly, customers are also now scaling out their use of Kubernetes and have to figure out how to best scale out their clusters and deploy them in different environments — and to do so, they need a consistent platform across these environments. He also noted that when it comes to bringing on new Anthos customers, it’s really those factors that determine whether a company will look into Anthos or not.

He acknowledged that there are other players in this market, but he argues that Google Cloud’s take on this is also quite different. “I think we’re pretty unique in the sense that we’re from the cloud, cloud-native is our core approach,” he said. “A lot of what we talk about in [Anthos] 1.7 is about how we leverage the power of the cloud and use what we call ‘an anchor in the cloud’ to make your life much easier. We’re more like a cloud vendor there, but because we support on-prem, we see some of those other folks.” Those other folks being IBM/Red Hat’s OpenShift and VMware’s Tanzu, for example. 

The addition of support for Windows containers in vSphere environments also points to the fact that a lot of Anthos customers are classical enterprises that are trying to modernize their infrastructure, yet still rely on a lot of legacy applications that they are now trying to bring to the cloud.

Looking ahead, one thing we’ll likely see is more integrations with a wider range of Google Cloud products into Anthos. And indeed, as Reed noted, inside of Google Cloud, more teams are now building their products on top of Anthos themselves. In turn, that then makes it easier to bring those services to an Anthos-managed environment anywhere. One of the first of these internal services that run on top of Anthos is Apigee. “Your Apigee deployment essentially has Anthos underneath the covers. So Apigee gets all the benefits of a container environment, scalability and all those pieces — and we’ve made it really simple for that whole environment to run kind of as a stack,” he said.

I guess we can expect to hear more about this in the near future — or at Google Cloud Next 2021.

Nearly exactly one month ago, digital real estate platform Loft announced it had closed on $425 million in Series D funding led by New York-based D1 Capital Partners. The round included participation from a mix of new and existing investors such as DST, Tiger Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Fifth Wall and QED, among many others.

At the time, Loft was valued at $2.2 billion, a huge jump from its being just near unicorn territory in January 2020. The round marked one of the largest ever for a Brazilian startup.

Now, today, São Paulo-based Loft has announced an extension to that round with the closing of $100 million in additional funding that values the company at $2.9 billion. This means that the 3-year-old startup has increased its valuation by $700 million in a matter of weeks.

Baillie Gifford led the Series D-2 round, which also included participation from Tarsadia, Flight Deck, Caffeinated and others. Individuals also put money in the extension, including the founders of Better (Vishal Garg), GoPuff, Instacart, Kavak and Sweetgreen.

Loft has seen great success in its efforts to serve as a “one-stop shop” for Brazilians to help them manage the home buying and selling process. 

Image courtesy of Loft

In 2020, Loft saw the number of listings on its site increase “10 to 15 times,” according to co-founder and co-CEO Mate Pencz. Today, the company actively maintains more than 13,000 property listings in approximately 130 regions across São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, partnering with more than 30,000 brokers. Not only are more people open to transacting digitally, more people are looking to buy versus rent in the country.

“We did more than 6x YoY growth with many thousands of transactions over the course of 2020,” Pencz told TechCrunch at the time of the company’s last raise. “We’re now growing into the many tens of thousands, and soon hundreds of thousands, of active listings.”

The decision to raise more capital so soon was due to a variety of factors. For one, Loft has received “overwhelming investor interest” even after “a very, very oversubscribed main round,” Pencz said.

“We have seen a continued acceleration in our market share growth, especially in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the two markets we currently operate in,” he added. “We saw an opportunity to grow even faster with additional capital.”

Pencz also pointed out that Baillie Gifford has relatively large minimum check size requirements, which led to the extension being conducted at a higher price and increased the total round size “by quite a bit to be able to accommodate them.”

While the company was less forthcoming about its financials as of late, it told me last year that it had notched “over $150 million in annualized revenues in its first full year of operation” via more than 1,000 transactions.

The company’s revenues and GMV (gross merchandise value) “increased significantly” in 2020, according to Pencz, who declined to provide more specifics. He did say those figures are “multiples higher from where they were,” and that Loft has “a very clear horizon to profitability.”

Pencz and Florian Hagenbuch founded Loft in early 2018 and today serve as its co-CEOs. The aim of the platform, in the company’s words, is “bringing Latin American real estate into the e-commerce age by developing online alternatives to analogue legacy processes and leveraging data to create transparency in highly opaque markets.” The U.S. real estate tech company with the closest model to Loft’s is probably Zillow, according to Pencz.

In the United States, prospective buyers and sellers have the benefit of MLSs, which in the words of the National Association of Realtors, are private databases that are created, maintained and paid for by real estate professionals to help their clients buy and sell property. Loft itself spent years and many dollars in creating its own such databases for the Brazilian market. Besides helping people buy and sell homes, it offers services around insurance, renovations and rentals.

In 2020, Loft also entered the mortgage business by acquiring one of the largest mortgage brokerage businesses in Brazil. The startup now ranks among the top-three mortgage originators in the country, according to Pencz. When it comes to helping people apply for mortgages, he likened Loft to U.S.-based Better.com.

This latest financing brings Loft’s total funding raised to an impressive $800 million. Other backers include Brazil’s Canary and a group of high-profile angel investors such as Max Levchin of Affirm and PayPal, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and David Vélez, CEO and founder of Brazilian fintech Nubank. In addition, Loft has also raised more than $100 million in debt financing through a series of publicly listed real estate funds.

Loft plans to use its new capital in part to expand across Brazil and eventually in Latin America and beyond. The company is also planning to explore more M&A opportunities.

The race to decarbonize aviation got a boost this Earth Day with the announcement of a $20.5 million Series A round by Universal Hydrogen, a San Francisco-based startup aiming to develop hydrogen storage solutions and conversion kits for commercial aircraft.

“Hydrogen is the only viable path for aviation to reach Paris Agreement targets and help limit global warming,” said founder and CEO Paul Eremenko in an interview with TechCrunch. “We are going to build an end-to-end hydrogen value chain for aviation by 2025.”

The round was led by Playground Global, with an investor syndicate including Fortescue Future Industries, Coatue, Global Founders Capital, Plug Power, Airbus Ventures, Toyota AI Ventures, Sojitz Corporation and Future Shape.

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The company’s first product will be lightweight modular capsules to transport “green hydrogen,” produced using renewable power to aircraft equipped with hydrogen fuel cells. The capsules will ultimately be available in different sizes for aircraft ranging from VTOL air taxis to long-distance, single-aisle planes.

“We want them to be interchangeable within each class of aircraft, a bit like consumer batteries today,” says Eremenko.

To help kickstart the market for its capsules, Universal Hydrogen is developing one such plane itself, a modified 19-seat turboprop capable of regional flights of up to 700 miles. The effort is a collaboration with Plug Power, which will supply the hydrogen and fuel cells, and seed investor magniX, which develops motors for electric aircraft.

Eremenko hopes to have the plane flying paying passengers by 2025, and ultimately to produce kits for regional airlines to retrofit their own aircraft.

“We want to have a couple of years of service to de-risk hydrogen certification and passenger acceptance before Boeing and Airbus decide on the airplanes they are going to build in the early 2030s,” says Eremenko. “It’s imperative that at least one of them build a hydrogen airplane or aviation is not going to hit its climate goals.”

Universal Hydrogen is not alone in betting on hydrogen. ZeroAvia in the U.K. is developing its own regional fuel cell aircraft on an even more ambitious timeline, and Airbus in particular has been working on hydrogen aircraft concepts.

Eremenko hopes that producing a simple and safe hydrogen logistics network will soon attract new entrants.

“It’s like the Nespresso system. We have to make the first coffee maker or nobody cares about our capsule technology, but we don’t want to be in the coffee maker business. We want other people to build coffee with our capsules.”

Universal Hydrogen will use the Series A funds to grow its current 12-person team to around 40 and accelerate its technology development.

30kW sub-scale demonstration of Universal Hydrogen’s aviation powertrain, with Plug Power’s hydrogen fuel cell and a magniX motor.

The burgeoning climate focused portfolio from early stage investor SOSV Investments has managed to raise nearly $2 billion in follow on financing since the startup companies graduated from the investment firm’s various accelerator programs. Taken together those companies have a collective market capitalization of nearly $6 billion.

Ahead of Earth Day this year, the early stage investor responsible for a series of accelerators including HAX, IndieBio, Chinaccelerator, and Food Labs, tallied up the results of the $89 million the firm has committed to these companies and the results, were impressive — especially considering the average age fo a company in the portfolio is only four years old.

SOSV tallied the companies into the Climate Tech 100 and divided them into categories that included startups developing technologies and services that have a direct impact on the planet and those that are adjacent to carbon removal — a further bucket was a group of startups that developed marketplaces for low carbon goods and services.

This all starts from trying to do meaningful things and purposeful things. We are trying to invest in these unstoppable forces and unstoppable trends and there has never been a more unstoppable force than climate change,” said SOSV Investments founder Sean O’Sullivan. “What we discovered we were in the right place at the right time in the climate.”

In the six years since the firm launched IndieBio with Arvind Gupta (now at the Mayfield Fund), SOSV’s life sciences accelerator had a dual focus on human and planetary health. By pursuing both areas, the firm was able to see the wave of climate tech applications in life sciences begin to rise and crest — and that’s led to early investments in companies like Perfect Day, Memphis Meats, Geltor, and MycoWorks, which are all companies using biological materials to replace traditional animal products.

“Planetary health is very much our thesis here. Arvind didn’t have to talk Sean into putting $100 million at the time,” said IndieBio’s new head Po Bronson (a longtime business writer who co-authored “Decoding the World” with Gupta and partnered with him at IndieBio).

SOSV Investments founder Sean O’Sullivan

The emphasis on food, Bronson said, was because it was an area where consumers were putting pressure on companies by changing their own habits and looking for alternatives. The decision to move to plant based products is one consumer choice that can make a significant difference in planetary health — as well as their own individual health. Other systems are much harder to change without legislation or industrial support, said Bronson.

Meanwhile, the hardware group in HAX Shenzhen run by Duncan Turner is beginning to see industrial companies embrace the demands for more sustainable manufacturing practices. Indeed, the 3D printing company Formlabs is another startup that’s brought in big dollars with a process that directly impacts the carbon footprint of manufacturing.

“How we make things used to be invisible before. Every publicly traded company has to do some sort of accounting in this space,” said Bronson. “The entire manufacturing sector is being interrogated on ths front. It’s coming through and it’s driving adoption.”

Looking ahead, Bronson sees opportunities in green chemistry to move the needle beyond life sciences applications in the food space. Those new technologies include services on offer from startups like Zymochem which is making a biorecyclable material for diapers that’s better for the planet, or Pili, which is making biologically based dyes and pigments. Bronson is also looking for biological solutions that can create massive, passive systems to sequester greenhouse gases in oceans or in soil.

Meanwhile, Turner is hoping to find companies like Socure, which removes the need for a chemical separation agent for oil separation; or DivyGas, which has a method for manufacturing green hydrogen.

“Not only are the opportunities available, but this is a way people can make money,” said O’Sullivan. “Our net IRR is in the 30% plus range. You can make money in climate tech. So don’t be afraid to invest in these companies.” 

Brazilian mobile payments app PicPay filed an F-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an IPO valued at up to $100 million on Wednesday. The company plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol PICS.

PicPay operates largely as a financial services platform that includes a credit card; a digital wallet similar to that of Apple Pay; a Venmo-style P2P payments element; e-commerce, and social networking features.

“We want to transform the way people and companies interact, make transactions, and communicate in an intelligent, connected, and simple experience,” said José Antonio Batista, CEO of PicPay, in a statement.

While the company is based in Sao Paulo now and operates across Brazil, PicPay originally launched in Vitoria in 2012, a coastal city north of Rio. In 2015 the company was acquired by the group J&F Investimentos SA, a holding company owned by Brazilian billionaire brothers Wesley and Jose Antonio Batista, which also own the gigantic meatpacker JBS SA.

2020 was an explosive year for PicPay as the company saw its active userbase grow from 28.4 million to 36 million as of March 2021. According to the company’s 2020 financial report, which PicPay shared with TechCrunch, the company’s revenues also grew drastically from $15.5 million in 2019, to $71 million in 2020. The company is not yet profitable, however, and PicPay shelled out $146 million in 2020 to fuel its growth.

“We believe that the growth of our base and user engagement in our ecosystem demonstrates the scalability of our business model and reveals a great opportunity to generate more value for these customers,” Batista added.

Fintech is one of the most popular sectors in Brazil today, because there’s a lot of room for improvement in the region. The country has traditionally been controlled by four major banks, which have been slow to adapt to technology and also charge very high fees.

PicPay’s IPO is being led by Banco Bradesco BBI, Banco BTG Pactual, Santander Investment Securities Inc., and Barclays Capital Inc. 

*The Brazilian Real was valued at 5.50 to $1 USD on the date of publication.

With the spring comes color from Apple. The new iMacs are offered in 7 different shades including a nice deep purple. As a refresh to the lineup, Apple has also released an iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini in a purple hue as well. I have a preview unit in hand to look at and so look at it I did. The color is great, closer to a violet on the sides and a lilac on the back.

This is a great color. In my opinion probably the best color of iPhone 12 released so far. Apple releasing this new purple shade also, to me, says to the people that love the mini: don’t worry this will still be available for a while. But, conversely, it could be a sign that this version of the mini might be the only one we get for a while. Maybe I’m reading into it too much and this is a ‘because we could’ thematic tie-in that offers a new option for spring buyers. Either way, it’s a really nice looking phone that ties into the ‘millenial purple‘ (read: lilac) trend that is booming in design and fashion right now. Apple’s color theory team is always pretty well on trend, so no change here.

Apple has also released a nice purple silicon case which complements it well.

If you want a deep dive on the seriously capable offering that the iPhone 12 mini is, feel free to reference our review from late last year.

Here are some nice pictures of the purple iPhone 12 mini for you to look at:

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Israeli startup WhizzCo says it’s time for publishers to take the programmatic, auction-based approach to the ads in content recommendation widgets like Outbrain and Taboola.

After all, publishers regular employ this approach for most of the ads on their websites. But co-founder and CEO Alon Rosenthal said that when trying to monetize his own websites, he discovering for himself that it was “impossible” to maximize the revenue from those widgets in the same way.

“That was our real pain,” he said.

So with WhizzCo, Rosenthal and his team have built what they call a Content Recommendation Yield Platform, pulling native advertising from more than 40 different content recommendation providers, predicting which one will deliver the highest revenue for a given impression (whether that’s measured in CPM, CPC or CPA) and then delivering the ad from that provider.

Rosenthal added that WhizzCo works with publishers to ensure that the recommendation widgets and ads look like they’re a native part of a page, and that their appearance doesn’t change regardless of where the ad comes from He also said the publishers implement WhizzCo’s JavaScript on “not in the header, but on the actual code of the site — by doing that, we eliminate any loading problems whatsoever.”

Although WhizzCo is coming out of stealth now, it was actually founded in 2017 and has already worked with a number of publishers, including Penske Media Corporation’s She Media. In a statement, She Media Senior Vice President of Operations Ryan Nathanson said, “WhizzCo’s platform allowed us to create a competitive ecosystem, which has enabled tighter customization, competition and editorial guideline control, yielding a 75% increase in content recommendation CPM.”

And Rosenthal said that on average, WhizzCo customers see a 37.7% lift in content recommendation revenue.

“Our motto is that no one delivers 100 percent performance, 100 percent of the time,” he said. “No matter who you are, even if you’re Google [or any of the other big ad companies,] you cannot perform best at all times. That’s where we come in with our technology.”

The global venture capital market had a cracking start to the year. Coming off a 2020 high, VC totals in the United States, in Europe, and among competitive verticals like insurtech and AI are on pace to set new records in 2021.

The rapid-fire dealmaking and trend of larger venture checks at higher valuations that The Exchange has tracked for some time require private-market investors to make decisions faster than ever. For venture capitalists, the timeline for reaching conviction around a startup’s thesis and executing due diligence has become compressed.

Some venture capitalists are turning to data to move more quickly. Some are spending more time preparing to be vetted themselves. And some investors are simply doing the work beforehand.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

We were tipped off to the concept of pre-diligence during the reporting process for a look into recent fundraising trends in the AI/ML space. Sapphire investor Jai Das, when asked about how he was handling a competitive and swiftly moving market for AI startup investments, said that “most firms are completing their due diligence way before the financing actually happens.”

How does that work in practice? Per Das, startups that raise quick Series A and B rounds are “tracked by [early-stage] investors as soon as they raise their seed financings. So there is no need to do any due diligence during the financing and hence most of these financings are pre-emptive.”

Venture capital: Now more about sales than ever before!

This morning, The Exchange is digging into the question of how VCs are handling diligence in a world where the most attractive deals can open and close faster than ever, and old models of deep diligence and paced dealmaking are outmoded.

Getting to yes

One way that investors are betting on themselves in a bid to speed their diligence and decision-making is by investing in their own tech. That may sound obvious, given that venture capital dollars often land in the accounts of tech-focused companies, but in a business that was previously known for its relationship focus — more on that shortly — the trend is worth considering.