Author: azeeadmin

Ryu Games, a startup that helps developers add cash tournaments to their mobile games, announced this morning it has raised $2.3 million in a seed round. The funds came from a number of investors, including Side Door Ventures, MGV Capital, Velo Partners and Citta Ventures.

In addition, 500 Startups participated in the round. To see the accelerator take part in the funding round is not a surprise, as TechCrunch first caught wind of Ryu during its participation in the most recent 500 Startups demo day. At the time, we were enthused by the idea of gamers wagering money to go head-to-head with other players on mobile devices. Investors appear to back our first impression of the company.

The gist behind our bullishness on the company’s idea is that esports is cool. And though your humble servant is sufficiently ancient as to favor PC-based esports, younger folks are into mobile gaming esports. Fair enough. Now mix in the sports-betting frenzy that we’ve seen in the United States, and you have a potentially potent cocktail.

TechCrunch caught up with Ryu Games co-founder and CEO Ross Krasner to dig in a bit more. It turns out that the original esports-y model that we envisioned for Ryu was a bit off. Instead, players will often go toe-to-toe in an asynchronous fashion, betting high scores in a game against one another. So, competitive “StarCraft II” this is not. But “StarCraft” is famously difficult to be even mediocre at, while mobile games are simpler by nature, and thus more popular.

Perhaps your parents will square off against office friends in cash-fueled solitaire tournaments.

The money setup is simple, with Krasner likening it to a poker tournament. You wager a set amount, and then play. Ryu collects a fee for hosting, and then players get to it.

Ryu hopes to be present on a few dozen games this year. One matter that could slow adoption, however, is that games it partners with tend to relaunch a version of their title with Ryu’s SDK built in. The startup bites back against the work that partner-developers have to undertake by cross-promoting titles that use its system. So, if you sign up, you can do more than generate revenue. Your game might also find a new audience.

Like with most seed-stage startups, Ryu Games is more of a bet on the future than proof of a new trend. Let’s see how far it can get with this set of capital, especially as vaccines take larger and larger bites out of the pandemic that has kept us locked up for so very long.

Online branded payments now run the gamut of anything from Spotify vouchers, Netflix vouchers, Neosurf, PaySafe cards, and everything in between. Consumers use them to pay for a variety of things. In Europe, they are an increasingly big business. Now, European branded payments company Recharge.com has raised €10m ($11.8m) in a debt funding round led by London-based Kreos Capital, a growth debt provider for high-growth companies. In 2019 the Dutch fintech Creative Group, which owns the Recharge.com and Rapido.com brands, took investment of €22m from Prime Ventures.

Recharge has also appointed Michael Kent – who previously founded payments companies Small World and Azimo, along with UK neobank Tandem – as its non-executive chairman.

Recharge.com says it plans to use the funding to extend its mobile offering, product range, and expand in regions such as North America, Latin America and the GCC. It’s also aiming for sales of €450m in 2021.

Günther Vogelpoel CEO of Recharge.com said in a statement: “We live in a world of instant wish fulfillment, from taxis that appear on demand to same-day delivery of consumer goods. Recharge.com gives customers a fast, safe and simple way to fulfill their wishes, whether that’s an essential remittance or access to digital goods and services.”

Commenting, Kent said: “The era of supermarket gift cards and mobile top-ups is drawing to a close. Branded payments have exploded during the global lockdown as consumers seek digital alternatives to the high street. People are now aware that online branded payments are safe, fast, and convenient.”

Through a range of digital vouchers from brands including Apple, Google, Spotify, Xbox and PlayStation as well as cross-border remittances of call, data credits etc Recharge is attacking the market from the consumer angle.

The biggest company in this space is Blackhawk networks which is owned by private equity group Silverlake. It’s considered a large player in Europe which has a direct-to-consumer model.

As Kent told me over a Zoom call: “Nobody actually owns the consumer side of this business globally so that’s the big opportunity.”

What happens to hot fintech startups that have benefited from a rise in consumer trading activity if regular folks lose interest in financial wagers?

That’s the question facing Robinhood, Coinbase and other trading platforms that have ridden an upward cycle. Each has performed well in recent quarters: Robinhood by securing huge payment-for-order-flow revenues, while Coinbase’s trading fees have proven incredibly lucrative, something we learned when it filed to go public.

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According to recent reporting, the consumer trading frenzy could be slowing: Bloomberg recently noted that options trading volume is slipping, Robinhood’s app store ranking is falling, and some alternative assets are also losing steam. Other reporting from the publication notes that many SPAC shares are underwater while Google trends data indicates falling consumer trading interest, perhaps limiting the inflow of new users for equities-focused apps.

There are other indications that the red-hot speculative consumer market is cooling. Bitcoin is off around 10% in the last week after a blistering rise in recent quarters. Hot stocks like Peloton, once a darling of traders, fell more than 10% yesterday alone.

But looking past price declines and other signals of market chop, volume itself at some well-known exchanges could be falling.

There’s a historical precedent for such declines. Coinbase’s historical revenues, to pick an example, have proved variable based on consumer interest in cryptocurrencies, with the company benefiting from rising demand and trading activity and seeing its top line decline in periods of restrained enthusiasm.

Robinhood and its fellow free-trading apps have yet to undergo a similar rise-and-fall in trading volume, I’d reckon. At least of the sort of extreme up-and-down that Coinbase endured after the 2017-2018 bitcoin boom. Our question is, what would happen to Robinhood and its cohorts if the apparent cooling in consumer trading demand continues? Let’s talk about it.

Coinbase’s historical revenue declines, and the Robinhood example

Coinbase was a famously lucrative organization during the 2017/-2018 bitcoin boom.

Indeed, we can see from the following chart from its S-1 filing that the company’s Monthly Transacting Users (MTUs) dropped sharply into 2018. The percentage decline from 2.7 million to 800,000 is just over 70%.

And in case you think we’re being rude, we have a related chart from the same SEC filing that shows trading volume falling over the same period, not merely MTUs. We’re not picking a loose proxy to merely infer that trading revenue dipped at Coinbase. We can show it:

Gorillas, the Berlin-HQ’d startup that promises to let you order groceries and other “every day” items for delivery in as little as ten minutes, has raised $290 million in Series B funding, at a valuation that surpasses $1 billion.

The round is led by Coatue Management, DST Global, and Tencent, with participation from Green Oaks, and Dragoneer. Previous backer Atlantic Food Labs also followed on.

Noteworthy, Gorillas CEO and co-founder Kağan Sümer tells TechCrunch the round is “100% equity” (i.e. without a debt component). Asked if it includes any secondary funding — seeing existing shareholders liquidate a portion of their shares — Gorillas declined to comment.

Having become one of the fastest European startups to have achieved so-called “unicorn” status — a valuation of $1 billion or more — Gorillas says it will reward its rider crew and warehouse staff with $1 million in bonuses. However, the company isn’t disclosing how this one-off bonus breaks down per worker, and it isn’t clear if the bonus is cash or stock or a mixture of both.

“In contrast to established gig economy models, we employ more than a thousand riders directly,” says Sümer. “Therefore, we invest in a strong career development program, rider security and a healthy working environment. Beyond that, all riders will receive a once-off payment”.

Founded last May by Kağan Sümer and Jörg Kattner in Berlin, Gorillas has already expanded to more than 12 cities, including Amsterdam, London and Munich. The company lets you order groceries and other household items on-demand with average delivery time of ten minutes.

To do this, it operates a vertical or “dark store” model, seeing it set up its own micro fulfillment centers, which currently total 40, spread across Germany, U.K., and the Netherlands. Customers are charged just over $2 per delivery and can order from “more than 2,000 essential items at retail prices”.

“We believe that the weekly grocery run is outdated because people’s lives are increasingly spontaneous and shopping habits change accordingly,” says Sümer, noting that while access to supermarkets has increased, the space we have to store goods has decreased as people in cities are living in smaller spaces.

“Additionally, this pandemic has accelerated the need for grocery deliveries. If we can order clothes and trinkets and have them delivered to our door, the same should be said for our essential needs. Gorillas helps customers get what they need when they need it, whether this is their weekly grocery list or the tomatoes they forgot for tonight’s pasta recipe”.

Sümer says that the service initially attracted typical early adopters because it was a radically new experience and the app was only available in English. He claims that Gorillas has since gained a “very broad” base of users that are “extremely loyal”. “With geographical expansion and the rapid increase of word-of-mouth, we now cater to pretty much anyone you’d meet in a supermarket,” he says.

Asked to share what a typical basket looks like, and therefore what kind of existing grocery habits Gorillas is displacing, Sümer says that users increase their basket size over time as they gain trust in the service and its products. “Simultaneously, customers are integrating an increasing share of their typical supermarket purchases within their Gorillas orders. This includes fresh goods like fruit and vegetables, as well as products of local suppliers”.

Meanwhile, dark store competition in cities like London — where Gorillas recently expanded and counts as a key market — continues to ramp up. This is seeing operators issue vouchers and offer sizeable discounts in a bid to acquire customers fast, while VCs are pumping huge amounts of early-stage cash into a space where unit economics aren’t yet definitively proven.

Earlier this month, Berlin-based Flink announced that it had raised $52 million in seed financing in a mixture of equity and debt. The company didn’t break out the equity-debt split, though one source told me the equity component was roughly half and half.

Others in the space include London’s Jiffy, Dija, and Weezy, and France’s Cajoo. There’s also London-based Zapp, which remains in stealth, and heavily backed Getir, which started in Turkey but recently also came to London.

Meanwhile, U.S.-founded goPuff — which this week raised another $1.15 billion in funding at a whopping $8.9 billion valuation (compared to $3.9 billion in October) — is also looking to expand into Europe and has held talks to acquire or invest in the U.K.’s Fancy.

The curbside is being squeezed as the number of commercial vehicle operators and gig economy workers battle over this increasingly scarce real estate — a problem that has been compounded by an uptick in on-demand delivery services fueled by the pandemic.

A number of startups such as Coord and curbflow have popped up in recent years, all aiming to solve this supply and demand problem. One entrant, the three-year-old startup Automotus, is beginning to rack up deployments in zones within cities like Santa Monica, Pittsburgh, Bellevue, Washington and Turin, Italy. A project in Los Angeles is also in the works.

Investors have taken notice as well. The company, which developed video analytics technology to monitor and manage curbsides for cities, said in February it had raised $1.2 million in a seed round led by Quake Capital, Techstars Ventures, Kevin Uhlenhaker (the co-founder & CEO at NuPark, which was acquired by Passport) and Baron Davis. CEO Jordan Justus told TechCrunch the company’s total raise is now $2.3 million. New investors include Ben Bear, Derrick Ko, and Zaizhuang Cheng of micromobility company Spin.

The startup is still small, with just 11 full-time employees. However, Justus said the newly raised funds are being used to expand into new markets and to hire more employees.

Automotus uses computer vision technology to capture video of parking zones — places that might be designated for only zero-emissions vehicles or commercial deliveries. Their software handles a variety of functions, including analysis and enforcement. Cities are able to access analytics through a web app. Commercial fleets are able to access information about parking zones via open APIs and in some cases a mobile app, according to Justus.

Image Credits: Automotus

For instance, one newly announced pilot project with Santa Monica and Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator will monitor a one-square-mile zero-emissions delivery zone in the city. Automotus will provide anonymized data for evaluating the zone’s impacts on delivery efficiency, safety, congestion and emissions, and will make real-time parking availability data available to all zero-emissions delivery zone drivers.

The startup, which was founded in late 2017 and is a Techstars alum, makes its money primarily through revenue sharing on its enforcement feature. Automotus gets a slice of the payment commercial customers are automatically charged when parking in specific zones, as well as transaction fees on parking violations. While the analytics might help cities set policy or designate pick-up and drop-off zones, it’s the enforcement feature that Justus says offers the biggest opportunity.

Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles used Automotus’ tech to fully automate parking enforcement. Automotus said enforcement efficiency and revenue increased by more than 500%, and added that implementing these measures led to a 24% increase in parking turnover and a 20% reduction in traffic.

This morning CoScreen, a startup that helps teams share screens and collaborate in real-time, formally launched its product to market. It also disclosed that it has raised $4.6 million to date.

Unusual Ventures led its Seed round. Till Pieper, CoScreen’s co-founder and CEO told TechCrunch in an interview that it raised the bulk of its capital pre-pandemic, with the rest coming during 2020 in smaller chunks. A number of angels took part in funding the company, including GitHub CTO Jason Warner.

Why is screen-sharing worth millions in funding, and the time and attention of a whole team? It’s a good question. Happily the CoScreen team have built something that’s could prove more than a bit better than what you currently use in Zoom to share puppy pics with your team during meetings.

What’s CoScreen?

CoScreen provides screen-sharing capabilities, but in a neat manner. Let’s say you are on a Mac at your house, and I’m on a PC at mine. And we need to collab and share some work. I have a document you need to help me edit, and you have an image you want me to view. Using CoScreen, with one click according to Pieper, we can share the two apps across the Internet. Yours will appear on my screen as it was native, and vice versa, and we can both interact with them in real-time.

Or as close to real-time as possible; Pieper told TechCrunch that latency is something that CoScreen will work on forever. Which makes sense, but what the company has built it thinks is good enough to take to market. So, today it’s launching the service after a period of time in beta for both Windows and Mac.

CoScreen also has audio and video-chatting capabilities. With limits. You can’t make video windows too big, for example, helping to keep the mental-load of chatting low. As someone with regular Zoom poisoning, that makes sense.

The startup’s project hits me as one of those things that sounds easy but isn’t. Remember Google Wave? It allowed for instantaneous co-writing. It was amazing. It died. And its successor-of-sorts Google Docs is a laggy mess to this day that feels more quarter-baked than half-done. Real-time tech is not simple.

Is the market too full of apps that allow a version of what CoScreen does for the startup to succeed? Maybe, maybe not. Zoom stormed the already-mature video chat market with a product that actually worked. And so software that I have used has been very good at screen-sharing, let alone sharing and collaborating. So if CoScreen’s tech is good, the company should have a shot at broad adoption.

Which it is banking on. The startup is currently offering its product for free for a few weeks. It will focus on monetization later, Pieper explained. Making money is just not a burning desire for the firm at the moment, which implies both confidence in its product and bank account.

Closing, the startup is targeting engineers and other agile teams, though I suspect that its product will have wider market remit in time.

At this juncture, we’ll have to wait for numbers to see what’s ahead for CoScreen. The company didn’t share much in the way of usage metrics, which was reasonable given its recent beta status. We’ll expect more hard figures the next time we chat.

Skycatch today announced a $25 million raise, led by ADB Ventures and Waymaker. Founded in 2013, the Bay Area-based company provides centimeter-accurate 3D scanning services, primarily for construction sites and mining operations.

The service has already been rolled out in a number of different locations around the world — with north of 10,000 sites, according to founder and CEO Christian Sanz. The list includes Chile, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Australia, Canada, the U.S. and Japan. In particular, the company is seeking to work with sites where connectivity is limited.

“The process of generating high-precision, centimeter-accurate data is extremely difficult. It typically is owned by the laser scanning market,” says Sanz. “Drones, in general, out of the box are not able to achieve that. We saw the true value prop for Skycatch is operating in edge environments where there’s no connection to internet. That’s where we saw the most demand, initially. That is typically mining companies, operating in all of these remote regions.”

Image Credits:

The company’s technology works with off-the-shelf drones, including ones manufactured by DJI. It provides the 3D mapping software, as well as a base station with an edge processor, known as the Edge 1. Skycatch is also working with off-the-shelf lidar companies to help capture data in more difficult environments, including underground for mining operations.

“Asian Development Bank (ADB) aims to play a catalytic role to enable technology in infrastructure projects, which result in reduced carbon footprints and increased safety and operational efficiency,” ADB’s Daniel Hersson said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “The enterprise-grade Skycatch technology for capturing, processing and analyzing high accuracy 3D drone data is a critical part to accomplishing that mission.”

The funds will go toward expanding the 50-person company’s sales and marketing team — both of which have been fairly small portions of the company’s overall headcount.

Before even taking its first deposit, Greenwood, the digital banking service targeting Black and Latino individuals and business owners, has raised $40 million — only a few months after its launch.

Coming in to finance the new challenger bank are six of the seven largest U.S. Banks and the payment technology developers Mastercard and Visa.

That’s right, Bank of America, PNC, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Truist, are backing a bank co-founded by a man who declared, “I’m with the revolutionary. I’m with the radical policy,” when stumping for then Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Joining the financial services giants in the round are FIS, a behind-the-scenes financial services tech developer; along with the venture capital firms TTV Capital, SoftBank Group’s SB Opportunity Fund, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Sports investors Quality Control and All-Pro NFL running back Alvin Kamara also came in to finance the latest round.

Atlanta-based Greenwood was launched last October by a group that included former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young and Bounce TV founder, Ryan Glover.

“The net worth of a typical white family is nearly ten times greater than that of a Black family and eight times greater than that of a Latino family. This wealth gap is a curable injustice that requires collaboration,” said \ Glover, Chairman and Co-founder of Greenwood, in a statement. “The backing of six of the top seven banks and the two largest payment technology companies is a testament to the contemporary influence of the Black and Latino community. We now are even better positioned to deliver the world-class services our customers deserve.”

Named after the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Okla., which was known as the Black Wall Street before it was destroyed in a 1921 massacre, the digital bank promises to donate the equivalent of five free meals to an organization addressing food insecurity for every person who signs up to the bank. And every time a customer uses a Greenwood debit card, the bank will make a donation to either the United Negro College Fund, Goodr (an organization that addresses food insecurity) or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In addition, each month the bank will provide a $10,000 grant to a Black or Latinx small business owner that uses the company’s financial services.

“Truist Ventures is helping to inspire and build better lives and communities by leading the Series A funding round for Greenwood’s innovative approach to building greater trust in banking within Black and Latino communities,” said Truist Chief Digital and Client Experience Officer Dontá L. Wilson who oversees Truist Ventures, in a statement. “In addition to the opportunity to work with and learn from this distinguished group of founders, our investment in Greenwood is reflective of our purpose and commitment to advancing economic empowerment of minority and underserved communities.”

So far, 500,000 people have signed up for the wait list to bank with Greenwood.

When the world shifted toward virtual one year ago, one service in particular saw heated demand: digital notary services.

The ability to get a document notarized without leaving one’s home suddenly became more of a necessity than a luxury. Pat Kinsel, founder and CEO of Boston-based Notarize, worked to get appropriate legislation passed across the country to make it possible for more people in more states to use remote online notarization (RON) services. 

That hard work has paid off. Today, Notarize has announced $130 million in Series D funding led by fintech-focused VC firm Canapi Ventures after experiencing 600% year over year revenue growth. The round values Notarize at $760 million, triple which is triple its valuation at the time of its $35 million Series C in March of 2020. This latest round is larger than the sum of all of the company’s previous rounds to date, and brings Notarize’s total raised to $213 million since its 2015 inception.

A slew of other investors participated in the round, including Alphabet’s independent growth fund CapitalG, Citi Ventures, Wells Fargo, True Bridge Capital Partners and existing backers Camber Creek, Ludlow Ventures, NAR’s Second Century Ventures, and Fifth Wall Ventures.

Notarize insists that it “isn’t just a notary company.” Rather, Canapi Ventures Partner Neil Underwood described it as the ‘last mile’ of businesses (such as iBuyers, for example). 

The company has also evolved to “also bring trust and identity verification” into those businesses’ processes.

Over the past year, Notarize has seen a massive increase in transactions and inked new partnerships with companies such as Adobe, Dropbox, Stripe and Zillow Group, among others. It’s seen big spikes in demand from the real estate, financial services, retail and automotive sectors.

“In 2020, the world rushed to digitize. Online commerce ballooned, and businesses in almost every industry needed to transition to digital basically overnight so they could continue uninterrupted,” Kinsel said. “Notarize was there to help them safely close these deals with trust and convenience.”  

The company plans to use its new capital to expand its platform and product and scale “to serve enterprises of all sizes.” It also plans to double down on hiring in the next year.

“Notarize is disrupting outdated business models and technologies, and there’s massive potential, particularly in the financial services space, as more companies will need to offer secure digital alternatives to in-person transactions,” Canapi’s Underwood said.

Notarize’s success comes after a difficult 2019, when the company saw “critical financing” fall through and had to lay off staff. Talk about a turnaround story.

Data centers and bitcoin mining operations are becoming huge energy hogs and the explosive growth of both risks undoing a lot of the progress that’s been made to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. It’s one of the major criticisms of cryptocurrency operations and something that many in the industry are trying to address.

Enter LiquidStack, a company that’s spinning out from the cryptocurrency hardware technology developer Bitfury Group with a $10 million investment.

The company, which was formerly known as Allied Control Limited, restructured as a commercial operating company headquartered in the Netherlands with commercial operations in the U.S. and research and development in Hong Kong, according to a statement.

It was first acquired by Bitfury in 2015 after building a 2-phase immersion cooling 500kW data center in Hong Kong, that purportedly cut energy consumption by 95% versus traditional air cooling technologies. Later, the companies jointly deployed 160 megawatts of 2-phase immersion cooled data centers.

“Bitfury has been innovating across multiple industries and sees major growth opportunities with LiquidStack’s game-changing cooling solutions for compute-intensive applications and infrastructure,” said Valery Vavilov, CEO of Bitfury. “I believe LiquidStack’s leadership team, together with our customers and strategic support from Wiwynn, will rapidly accelerate the global adoption and deployment of 2-phase immersion cooling.”

The $10 million in funding came from the Taiwanese conglomerate, Wiwynn, a data center and infrastructure developer with revenues of $6.3 billion last year.

“Wiwynn continues to invest in advanced cooling solutions to address the challenges of fast-growing power consumption and density for cloud computing, AI, and HPC,” said Emily Hong, chief executive of Wiwynn, in a statement.

In a statement, LiquidStack said its technology could enable at least 21 times more heat rejection per IT rack compared to air cooling — all without the need for water. The company said its cooling method results in a 41 percent reduction in energy used for cooling and a 60 percent reduction in data center space.

“Bitfury has always been focused on leading by example and is a technology driven company from the top of the organization, to its grass roots,” said Joe Capes, co-founder and chief executive of LiquidStack, in a statement. “Launching LiquidStack with new funding enables us to focus on our strengths and capabilities, accelerating the development of liquid cooling technology, products and services to help solve real thermal and sustainability challenges driven by the adoption of cloud services, AI, edge and high-performance computing.”