Author: azeeadmin

Montreal-headquartered Inovia Capital has raised $450 million for Growth Fund II, the firm’s second growth-stage investment fund. The close of this funding comes just a little over two years after the announcement of its first in February 2019, a $400 million pool of investment capital that marked Inovia’s first foray beyond the early stage deals it originally focused on.

Inovia now has investments across every stage of a company’s development — including retaining stakes in some of its portfolio companies that have had successful exits to the public markets, like Lightspeed, the point-of-sale and commerce company that went public in a nearly $400 million public offering on both the NYSE and the TSX last year.

As with Growth Fund I, the goal of Growth Fund II is to invest in companies with a focus primarily on Canadian startups, but also looking to targets in the U.S. and EU, where Inovia also maintains offices. The firms’ partners, including Chris Arsenault, Dennis Kavelman, and former Google CFO Patrick Pichette, have focused on building out a team of experienced operators to help their portfolio companies, and invest specifically in areas of particular need for startups outside the Valley, like sourcing high-demand, senior talent with high-profile tech industry experience.

Inovia’s original Growth Fund was based on an assumption that the firm could leverage its relationships and its experience to deliver value to its portfolio companies not just when they’re starting out, but across their growth cycles. Arsenault explained in an interview that Fund I was kind of a proof point that that this assumption was correct, which then paid big dividends when the firm went out to raise Fund II last year.

“We basically built the team around Dennis, Patrick and myself,” he said. “We really followed through on our key assumptions over why it made sense for Inovia to use its platform to actually build a growth stage fund that would benefit not only from insights into the portfolio, but also all of the relationships and the platform that we built over the last decade.”

What needed proving, Arsenault said, was that Inovia could stand toe-to-toe with the growth-focused firms that had acted as follow-on investors for its early stage deals over the years. That was no easy task, when you consider that Inovia provided deal flow to some of the most respected venture firms in technology, including Bessemer, KKR, TA Ventures and Sequoia.

Inovia hired a lot of operators with experience at high-growth companies, and focused on being able to shepherd its investments through challenges like building a real board, and engineering a cap table to properly manage and prepare secondary sales. With a plan to invest in between 10 to 12 companies with the $400 million in Fund I, Inovia began making deals – the first was with Lightspeed, and then they got into Forward (tech-enabled primary health care), Hopper and Snaptravel (two travel industry startups) and more.

Inovia Capital growth partners Chris Arsenault, Dennis Kavelman and Patrick Pichette (left to right)

Most of the companies that Lightspeed picked with Fund I (it did 10 deals in total) ended up having a very strong 2020 – including, surprisingly, all the travel-focused startups. Based on the strength of their performance, Arsenault and his partners decided to accelerate their timetable for raising Fund II, and found LPs more than willing. They ended up capping the fund at $450 million (with a target of between 10 to 12 investments, as with Fund I) given what Arsenault says felt like the right size for managing across the investment and operating team, despite available demand to likely raise quite a bit more.

Arsenault noted that most of the LPs contributing to this fund also had capital in the first, though some new investors have also signed on. And while Inovia’s focus is not strictly Canadian, he added that the firm’s success, along with the makeup of its investment partners and portfolio (two-thirds of the companies it has backed are Canadian) tells a story of a changing investment landscape north of the border.

“The majority of our LPs are Canadian, and I take it to heart that it’s important to create patterns of success, so that people can look towards models and either replicate or adapt to their own situation,” Arsenault said. “I think that we need more success stories that people can look at and say, ‘I can do the same thing, or I can do better.’ And the fact that our LPs came back with us, and when you look at, you know, what Georgian [Partners] is doing, and what Novacap is doing, and what OMERS Growth – this is nothing like the VC ecosystem and industry that I was in 10 years ago, right? We’re definitely on another level now in Canada.”

He added that there are examples at every stage of company-building, citing the new Backbone Angels collective led by a number of post and current Shopify employees including Arati Sharma, Atless Clark, Lynsey Thornton and Alexandra Clark. Arsenault also pointed to Lightspeed’s decision to list first on the TSX before the NYSE as a sign of newfound tech industry maturity in the Canadian context.

Finally, Arsenault credits an unusual ‘X’ factor in how Inovia has been able to put together this second fund and manage deep involvement in its very active portfolio companies over the last year: the mostly remote conditions brought on by the necessities of the pandemic.

“It would have been impossible to do what we did within the portfolio, with the portfolio, fundraising a new fund, generating our best year, in terms of exits last year, we had the New York Stock Exchange IPO for Lightspeed, we had a dozen transactions of acquisitions where our portfolio companies are doing the acquiring,” he said. “I don’t know how we would have done what we’ve done, had we been traveling and had a normal life.”

Montreal-headquartered Inovia Capital has raised $450 million for Growth Fund II, the firm’s second growth-stage investment fund. The close of this funding comes just a little over two years after the announcement of its first in February 2019, a $400 million pool of investment capital that marked Inovia’s first foray beyond the early stage deals it originally focused on.

Inovia now has investments across every stage of a company’s development — including retaining stakes in some of its portfolio companies that have had successful exits to the public markets, like Lightspeed, the point-of-sale and commerce company that went public in a nearly $400 million public offering on both the NYSE and the TSX last year.

As with Growth Fund I, the goal of Growth Fund II is to invest in companies with a focus primarily on Canadian startups, but also looking to targets in the U.S. and EU, where Inovia also maintains offices. The firms’ partners, including Chris Arsenault, Dennis Kavelman, and former Google CFO Patrick Pichette, have focused on building out a team of experienced operators to help their portfolio companies, and invest specifically in areas of particular need for startups outside the Valley, like sourcing high-demand, senior talent with high-profile tech industry experience.

Inovia’s original Growth Fund was based on an assumption that the firm could leverage its relationships and its experience to deliver value to its portfolio companies not just when they’re starting out, but across their growth cycles. Arsenault explained in an interview that Fund I was kind of a proof point that that this assumption was correct, which then paid big dividends when the firm went out to raise Fund II last year.

“We basically built the team around Dennis, Patrick and myself,” he said. “We really followed through on our key assumptions over why it made sense for Inovia to use its platform to actually build a growth stage fund that would benefit not only from insights into the portfolio, but also all of the relationships and the platform that we built over the last decade.”

What needed proving, Arsenault said, was that Inovia could stand toe-to-toe with the growth-focused firms that had acted as follow-on investors for its early stage deals over the years. That was no easy task, when you consider that Inovia provided deal flow to some of the most respected venture firms in technology, including Bessemer, KKR, TA Ventures and Sequoia.

Inovia hired a lot of operators with experience at high-growth companies, and focused on being able to shepherd its investments through challenges like building a real board, and engineering a cap table to properly manage and prepare secondary sales. With a plan to invest in between 10 to 12 companies with the $400 million in Fund I, Inovia began making deals – the first was with Lightspeed, and then they got into Forward (tech-enabled primary health care), Hopper and Snaptravel (two travel industry startups) and more.

Inovia Capital growth partners Chris Arsenault, Dennis Kavelman and Patrick Pichette (left to right)

Most of the companies that Lightspeed picked with Fund I (it did 10 deals in total) ended up having a very strong 2020 – including, surprisingly, all the travel-focused startups. Based on the strength of their performance, Arsenault and his partners decided to accelerate their timetable for raising Fund II, and found LPs more than willing. They ended up capping the fund at $450 million (with a target of between 10 to 12 investments, as with Fund I) given what Arsenault says felt like the right size for managing across the investment and operating team, despite available demand to likely raise quite a bit more.

Arsenault noted that most of the LPs contributing to this fund also had capital in the first, though some new investors have also signed on. And while Inovia’s focus is not strictly Canadian, he added that the firm’s success, along with the makeup of its investment partners and portfolio (two-thirds of the companies it has backed are Canadian) tells a story of a changing investment landscape north of the border.

“The majority of our LPs are Canadian, and I take it to heart that it’s important to create patterns of success, so that people can look towards models and either replicate or adapt to their own situation,” Arsenault said. “I think that we need more success stories that people can look at and say, ‘I can do the same thing, or I can do better.’ And the fact that our LPs came back with us, and when you look at, you know, what Georgian [Partners] is doing, and what Novacap is doing, and what OMERS Growth – this is nothing like the VC ecosystem and industry that I was in 10 years ago, right? We’re definitely on another level now in Canada.”

He added that there are examples at every stage of company-building, citing the new Backbone Angels collective led by a number of post and current Shopify employees including Arati Sharma, Atless Clark, Lynsey Thornton and Alexandra Clark. Arsenault also pointed to Lightspeed’s decision to list first on the TSX before the NYSE as a sign of newfound tech industry maturity in the Canadian context.

Finally, Arsenault credits an unusual ‘X’ factor in how Inovia has been able to put together this second fund and manage deep involvement in its very active portfolio companies over the last year: the mostly remote conditions brought on by the necessities of the pandemic.

“It would have been impossible to do what we did within the portfolio, with the portfolio, fundraising a new fund, generating our best year, in terms of exits last year, we had the New York Stock Exchange IPO for Lightspeed, we had a dozen transactions of acquisitions where our portfolio companies are doing the acquiring,” he said. “I don’t know how we would have done what we’ve done, had we been traveling and had a normal life.”

Ikigai, a London fintech founded by former McKinsey partners, thinks there’s room in the crowded challenger market for a new premium offering that combines digital banking with wealth management.

Targeting future and present high-net-worth individuals, Ikigai is iOS-only for now and consists of a current account and savings account, with adjacent wealth management features, all combined in a single app and card. The thesis, says the founding team, is that currently there is very little on the market that provides a modern digital-first banking experience and the kind of premium banking services typically offered by legacy banks to their more affluent customers.

“Our typical client is young — usually in their late twenties or thirties,” explains Ikigai co-founder Edgar de Picciotto. “They’re entering their prime spending and earning years, and are looking to secure their financial future. Although they’re not high-net-worths yet, they have aspirations and goals — and they want to do more with their money”.

Rather than a freemium model, Ikigai charges a flat subscription fee from the get-go, and new users gain access to a relationship manager, which differentiates it from most digital-first banking. Features include an “everyday” spending account, and a saving section of the app, dubbed “nest”. The latter is separate from the spending account, including having its own account number, but can be easily topped up from the everyday account.

So far, quite me-too, you might conclude. However, where some more differentiation arguably comes into play is that Ikigai also offers “fully managed, globally diversified investment portfolios” under the wealth section of the app. Portfolios are built and managed by Ikigai in collaboration with asset manager BlackRock, and take into account both risk appetite and the nature of what users want to achieve.

“We say it a lot but Ikigai was very much born from personal frustration,” says de Picciotto. “Everything on the market seemed to be slow, impersonal, full of attempts to sell lending and debt products. It felt like either the tech was there or the humanity, never both. That was the first thing we knew we wanted to solve”.

“Banking can also be way too time-consuming, investing even more so,” adds Maurizio Kaiser, Ikigai’s other co-founder. “There is so much for people to do when they have to do it themselves. It can basically become a second job if you’re constantly looking at different stocks and shares working out if the value is under this or over that. No one really has time for that — I certainly didn’t”.

Once the pair dug deeper, as management consultants are wont to do, they say they also discovered “interesting behavioural trends,” particularly when it comes to young and affluent people.

“This group are entering their prime earning and spending years, and they expect so much more from their banks than previous generations,” says de Picciotto. “Not only do they expect faster, fairer and better experiences, they have specific expectations and demands that current financial providers just don’t meet. This includes things like approaching personal finance as an act of self-care, like lifestyle banking over lifestage banking, and aligning their money with their goals and sense of purpose”.

Notably, unlike many of the first wave of challenger banks that made a virtue out of claims to be building their own core banking technology, Ikigai is primarily partnering with technology providers, including Railsbank and WealthKernel.

“Going with banking-as-a-service providers actually makes it easier to execute on our vision,” claims de Picciotto. “It allows us to focus on what we are good at and really matters to our customers: the user experience”.

On banking competitors, Ikigai’s founders argue that existing incumbents and challengers both have “significant” failings.

Incumbents are too dependent on branches or telephone services, and are premised on cross-selling and up-selling services, particularly lending products, in order to make money on loss-making current accounts.

Challengers, on the other hand, are “faster and more accessible”. However, in a bid to keep their cost-base low, they are increasingly automating their chat support and, in some cases, hiding live chat features.

“Delivering a high-quality service is obviously at odds with their aim of offering banking for free,” concludes Kaiser.

SumUp, a London-based startup that helps businesses power revenues through card payments — by way of physical readers, online payments and invoices — is itself powering up in a big way. Today it announced funding of €750 million (around $895 million at today’s rates), money that it will be using to continue expanding its business — specifically, for acquisitions; to launch in new markets in Europe, Latin America and Asia; and to build out the suite of services that it provides to businesses. The company is already active in 33 countries (most recently Chile, Colombia, and Romania) and has some 3 million businesses as customers.

The funding is coming from Goldman Sachs, Temasek, Bain Capital Credit, Crestline, and funds managed by Oaktree Capital Management. SumUp confirmed that the financing is coming in the form of debt, not equity, so there is no formal valuation of the company to disclose. To date, it’s one of the biggest financings, debt or otherwise, for any startup (that is, any privately-backed tech company) in the region.

Notably, Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital led a $371 million round of debt for the company in 2019.

Marc-Alexander Christ, one of SumUp’s co-founders (the company does not seem to use formal titles like “CEO”), said that the company opted for debt over equity because it could.

“We have very stable cash flow, which allows us to take on take on debt,” he said in an interview. Debt is often a route taken by bigger, scaled up companies, especially those generating a lot of cash. No dilution also means the cost of capital is lower, too.

The company got its start back in 2012 as one of a wave of so-called Square “clones” — companies being founded in and mostly outside of the U.S. basing their service around small card payment dongles that attached to phones or tablets and targeting businesses that were either not yet accepting card payments because they were too expensive or complicated, or were using costly traditional alternatives from banks.

As with Square, iZettle (eventually acquired by PayPal) and many others in the space, over time SumUp diversified into a range of other card- and payment-related services for business, including online transactions, invoicing, gift cards and wider point-of-sale solutions.

It’s also emerged as something of a consolidator in the space: in 2016 it acquired one of its bigger competitors, the Rocket Internet-backed Payleven, which helped expand its footprint to a wider set of markets. Over the years, it’s picked up a number of other startups, including most recently the business-focused mobile banking platform Paysolut in Lithuania, as well as Goodtill and Tiller to expand into point-of-sale for bigger venues.

Those deals also speak to how SumUp is approaching its product expansion strategy. The company’s business model is predicated primarily on taking a cut of transactions made on its platform, and so for now, its strategy is about more services for businesses and scaling up that rate of transactions, not a move into more financial services for consumers.

That is in contrast to companies like Square, which has picked up more than 7 million consumer customers to date by way of Square Cash; or iZettle, which never directly launched services for consumers but was acquired by one of the biggest consumer-facing digital wallet companies, PayPal.

Nor is SumUp interested in cryptocurrency, another area where the other two have been active.

“Square has had one of the easier onboarding experiences when it comes to making Bitcoin investments,” Christ said. “But it’s mainly a customer acquisition tool. They make some money on Bitcoin but not a lot. So I don’t think we will get to that space super soon because it doesn’t represent value for customers. It engages users logging in just to check their accounts but not doing anything else.”

That focus has not just helped the company steadily grow at a time when more transactions are moving online and away from cash — two trends giving a major fillip by the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced stores to close in many countries, made people more reluctant to shop in person, and got everyone using cash less to contain community transmission — but it also helped it attract this funding.

“We’re proud to be backing SumUp once again and we recognise the truly impressive strides made by the company over the past couple of years. We have huge admiration for what SumUp is doing for small businesses across the world in helping them to keep trading and flourishing in some of the most trying economic circumstances imaginable,” said Tom Maughan of Bain Capital Credit in a statement. “The doubling down of our investment in SumUp in this round is both a demonstration of our confidence in the company today and its strong future.”

It is nearly impossible for businesses in some African countries to receive money from PayPal. While the payments giant has not given reasons why this is so, speculation hints at factors like insufficient regulation and poor banking security in said countries. 

That might be a thing of the past for some businesses as African payments company Flutterwave today is announcing a partnership with PayPal to allow PayPal customers globally to pay African merchants through its platform.

Via this partnership, businesses can connect with the more than 377 million PayPal accounts globally and overcome the challenges presented by the highly fragmented and complex payment and banking infrastructure on the continent.

According to CEO Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola, this will happen via a Flutterwave integration with PayPal so merchants can add PayPal as a payment option when receiving money outside the continent. The service, which is already available for merchants with registered business accounts on Flutterwave, will be operational across 50 African countries and worldwide, the company claims. Flutterwave hopes to roll out this service to individual merchants on the platform as well.  

“In a nutshell, we’re bringing more than 300 million PayPal users to African businesses so they can accept payments across the continent,” he said to TechCrunch. “Our mission at the company has always been to simplify payments for endless possibilities, and from when we started, it has always been about global payments. So despite having the largest payment infrastructure in Africa, we want to have arguably all the important payments systems in the world on our platform.”

Since PayPal’s expansion to Africa, it has maintained a one-sided relationship with most countries on the continent, allowing them only to send money. And according to its website, only 12 African countries can send and receive money on the platform, but to varying degrees. They include Algeria, Botswana, Egypt, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, Seychelles and South Africa.

Users in countries who are not afforded the luxury to do so have to rely on using the PayPal account of a friend or family, based in countries where payments can be received. Next, they request the funds via bank transfer, leading to more incurred costs or use other cross-border money platforms like WorldRemit.

This is a pain point for these businesses, particularly in Nigeria. PayPal finally arrived Africa’s most populous country in 2014 and a year later, it became the company’s second-biggest market on the continent.

But despite its fast adoption rate and large fintech appetite, merchants cannot still receive payments from other countries on the platform with various sources alluding PayPal’s decision to the country’s history with internet fraud.

Fraud or not, Nigeria’s e-commerce and that of the continent at large continues to grow at a breathtaking pace. In 2017, Africa generated $16.5 billion in revenue, and by 2022, it is expected to reach $29 billion. With numbers like this, it isn’t hard to see why PayPal wants to get in on the action, albeit not completely. Hence, the partnership with Flutterwave.

The company, via its APIs, offer payment services to individuals and businesses across the continent. Since launching in 2019, the African payments company has partnered with Visa to launch Barter; Alipay to offer digital payments between Africa and China; and Worldpay FIS for payments in Africa.

But this partnership with PayPal is arguably its biggest one yet. Now, African businesses have more access to sell to global customers using PayPal to receive and send payments online. 

In a way, Flutterwave absorbs most of the risk PayPal thinks it will incur if it makes its platform more open to merchants in these countries. But at the same time, the collaboration solidifies Flutterwave’s position in the eyes of multinationals looking to enter the African market.

Like when its partnership with Worldpay FIS coincided with its Series B funding, this announcement is also coming on the back of a raise. Last week, the payments company closed a $170 million Series C led by Avenir Growth Capital and Tiger Global, becoming a billion-dollar company in the process.

In hindsight, the mammoth raise suggests that there are a couple of projects in the company’s pipeline. Going by this partnership, we can expect the majority of them to be global plays.

Yet, these questions remain top of mind — What happens when PayPal automatically allows businesses from these neglected African countries to start receiving payments? Will both services continue to coexist if that happens? We’ve reached out to PayPal for comment.

However that plays out, this is a step forward in the right direction for Flutterwave, which has shown time and time again the length it is willing to go for its 290,000 merchants and the ongoing quest to become a global payments company.

“By working with PayPal, we can further strengthen our commitment to our customers and service users as we will be enabling them to transact and expand their business operations to reach new markets. PayPal’s global reach is unrivalled, and collaborating with them allows our customers to explore new markets where PayPal is embedded,” the CEO said.

One of the bigger startups in Europe operating a trading platform for cryptocurrency has closed a big round of funding on the heels of very rapid growth and plans to open its platform to a wider stream of assets.

Bitpanda, a “neobroker” that wants to make it easier for ordinary people to invest not just in bitcoin and other digital assets, but also gold, and any established stock that takes their interest, has picked up $170 million, a Series B that catapults the company’s valuation to $1.2 billion. Bitpanda is based in Vienna, Austria and says that this equity round makes it the country’s first “unicorn” — the first startup to pass the $1 billion valuation mark.

“We are shifting to become a pan-investment platform, not just a crypto broker,” said Eric Demuth, the CEO of Bitpanda who co-founded it with Paul Klanschek and Christain Trummer. Bitpanda’s focus up to now has been primarily on building a platform to target investors in Europe, a largely untapped market, as it happens. “In the EU, we probably have less than 10% of the population owning stocks. Our growth goes hand in hand with that.”

In addition to Austria, Bitpanda is live in France, Spain, Turkey, Italy and Poland with plans to expand to more markets this year, building hubs in Madrid, Barcelona, London, Paris and Berlin. New investment options to back ETFs and “fractional” trades, which will let people invest small amounts of money in whichever stocks they would like to back, are due to be added in April, the company says.

The round is being led by Valar Ventures — the fund backed by Peter Thiel — with participation also from unnamed partners from DST Global (Yuri Milner’s fund). Both have been building name for themselves as significant backers of crypto startups. Valar is also an investor in Robinhood, and most recently, earlier this month the pair co-invested in a $350 million round for BlockFi, which provides financial services like loans to crypto traders.

While DST is a new investor in Bitpanda, Valar also led a round for Bitpanda just six months ago — a $52 million Series A. Since then, Demuth and Klanschek say that the company has seen growth skyrocket (not unlike the price of bitcoin itself).

KPIs like revenue and customer numbers “have been roughly 10x,” Klanschek said. “Very soon we will cross the €100 million revenue mark for the first few months of this year.” Annualized it will work out to around €300-400 million, he added. While the bulk of its trading is for individuals, it’s not only focused on single investors, September, the company’s trading volume for its “Pro” tier for companies, daily trading on the platform was $2 million. Now, it is over $25 million.

Bitpanda’s growth and enthusiasm taps into a much bigger trend in the world of trading. One of the byproducts of the Covid-19 pandemic has been consumers becoming more engaged in their own personal finance.

With interest rates down, professional futures less certain for some, a plethora of apps out there to do more with your money, a whole new set of investing classes thanks to cryptocurrency, and (last but not least) the juggernaut that is social media to help concepts go viral, people are dabbling in a wider range of activities, some having never done more than simply keep their money in a bank account before, and shuffling off a bit of money to their 401k’s or other pension funds.

Bitpanda made a decision last year to start to get more aggressive in its own fundraising to ride that wave.

“We are profitable, and we have been for four years, but in September we changed strategy and wanted to become ‘the’ investment platform for all of Europe,” Demuth said. “We needed more partners and more capital to get more top talent and this is why we did the Series A last year. Then over the past two months, we talked to our investors and said what do you think, it seems like there is some momentum. They said ‘we are in.” No roadshow needed, we will help you. We will call our contacts and they’ll join, too.”

There has been a huge wave of hype around crypto, although in the wider sense it’s still primarily an adopter phenomenon, far from being a mainstream investment, with most people having no idea how it works. Ironically, this is not that dissimilar to much of the stock market for most people although the difference these days is that apps like Robinhood, Square Cash and Bitpanda are making it easier to engage with crypto and other trading by lowering the barrier to entry, both in terms of actually putting money into the system, and also by making it possible to get engaged with only a small amount of money.

Whether cryptocurrency bears out in the longer term, it’s likely that the democratization will stay and become a part of the bigger process of how people manage their own money, if not by gambling all-in, then at least by creating a little diversification for themselves.

That doesn’t excuse the ridiculous hype merchants on social media that potentially exploit these new traders, nor the fact that there is still a very long way to go in regulators getting better oversight of how these new exchanges work, but it does point to an interesting future and more opportunities longer term for organizations and individuals to do more with their money and their assets (NFTs being an example on the other side, of how to build assets and value for investing in the first place).

“In today’s financial world everything is connected,” said Klanschek. “We saw huge growth on Bitpanda after the Covid stock crash in March 2020.” Crypto dropped then too, with “interest high but price very low.” Yet with saving accounts and other traditional, low-key ways for people to growth their money yielding nothing, “it eventually led to huge interest in financial markets, with crypto being established as its own financial asset, its own category.”

While there are a number of platforms emerging for people to engage of that, the pace of adoption for Bitpanda in Europe is what attracted investors here.

“Since we joined the board last September, we have continued to be impressed with the work that Eric, Paul and the team are doing. One of the positive changes caused by the pandemic was an increased interest in personal finance, and Bitpanda’s broad offer and commitment to demystifying investing for a new breed of retail investors means it is perfectly positioned to take advantage of the trend,” said James Fitzgerald, Founding Partner of Valar Ventures, in a statement. “With over 700,000 new users in just 6 months, we know that people want access to the platform, and we’re excited to bring Bitpanda to every investor in Europe.”

Chinese users of the instant messenger Signal knew that good time wouldn’t last long. The app, which is used for encrypted chats, is unavailable in mainland China as of Tuesday morning, a test by TechCrunch shows. The website of the app has been banned in China since Monday, according to censorship tracking website Greatfire.org.

More to come…

Over the years, Jack Ma has accumulated a media portfolio in China that rivals that of Jeff Bezos in the United States. But now the future of Ma’s media empire is in the crosshairs of the Chinese government, which is wary of the billionaire’s increasing media clout.

The Chinese authorities have ordered Alibaba to divest some of its media assets due to growing concerns about the company’s sway over public opinion in the country, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reported citing sources.

Alibaba’s expeditions in media investments came under scrutiny when the firm announced the buyout of the South China Morning Post, an English-language newspaper launched 118 years ago in Hong Kong. Its notable media holdings in mainland China include New York-listed technology news site 36Kr, which is backed by Alibaba’s fintech affiliate Ant Group, as well as state-owned Shanghai Media Group, which has a strategic agreement with Alibaba.

Critics have questioned Alibaba’s stake in the South China Morning Post, a prominent paper in Asia. To assuage worries, Jack Ma has pledged to preserve the editorial independence of the news outlet.

In other media deals, Alibaba often focuses on the potential for digital collaboration with the publications. For example, it promised to utilize its data and cloud computing expertise to help the Shanghai Media Group, an influential financial media conglomerate, develop a financial data platform.

Alibaba has also sought out new media upstarts, taking substantial stakes in China’s Twitter equivalent, Weibo, and a video site popular amongst Chinese youths, Bilibili, which counts Alibaba nemesis Tencent as a major shareholder.

Concerns grew when Weibo appeared to have deleted scores of posts about an Alibaba executive‘s extramarital affair last June. Soon after, China’s top internet regulator reprimanded Weibo for “interfering with online communication order” without identifying a case.

The Chinese government has already initiated a wave of crackdown on concentrated power in the internet economy. In December, antitrust regulators slammed a small fine on Alibaba and Tencent respectively for failing to report past acquisitions for clearance. It remains to be seen which of Alibaba’s prized media assets needs to be shed.

Shared micromobility startup Bird said it is investing $150 million into a European expansion plan that will including launching in more than 50 cities this year, a move that it says will double its footprint in the region.

This growth plan is already underway with Bird recently bringing its scooters to Bergen, Norway, Tarragona, Spain and Palermo, Italy.

Bird emphasized that its European expansion will be more than just a geographic one. Bird said it is adding more scooters to its fleets in existing cities, which is nearing 50. The company also made several other promises as part of its announcement, including plans to launch new mobility products and safety initiatives, “the next generation of recycling and second-life applications for vehicles,” investing in equity programs and “securing partnerships across the region.”

It isn’t clear what these new mobility products or initiatives around safety or recycling will be. A Bird spokesperson said these will be new vehicles and “transport modes” in the region. Bird didn’t provide details about what it means by securing partnerships, a phrase that could mean an extension of its franchise program called the Bird Platform or some other kind of arrangement with local governments or operators.

Bird did say plans will include programs like the subsidized ride passes it announced last week.

Bird has promoted company insiders Renaud Fages to head of operations and Brendan O’Driscoll to global head of product to lead the effort.

How Bird will pay for this expansion is as interesting as what it plans to do. A Bird spokesperson told TechCrunch it’s using “existing resources” to fund these various initiatives. However, the pandemic, its acquisition of Circ and its effort to launch operations in new cities while maintaining existing fleets have depleted its funds. The company’s last public fundraising announcements were more than a year ago. The company raised $275 million in a Series D round back in September 2019. That round was later extended to $350 million.

Bird was reportedly close to accessing new funds, according to a report from The Information. The media outlet reported in January that Bird was in the midst of finalizing a deal to raise more than $100 million in convertible debt, led by existing investors Sequoia Capital and Valor Equity Partners.

Shared micromobility startup Bird said it is investing $150 million into a European expansion plan that will including launching in more than 50 cities this year, a move that it says will double its footprint in the region.

This growth plan is already underway with Bird recently bringing its scooters to Bergen, Norway, Tarragona, Spain and Palermo, Italy.

Bird emphasized that its European expansion will be more than just a geographic one. Bird said it is adding more scooters to its fleets in existing cities, which is nearing 50. The company also made several other promises as part of its announcement, including plans to launch new mobility products and safety initiatives, “the next generation of recycling and second-life applications for vehicles,” investing in equity programs and “securing partnerships across the region.”

It isn’t clear what these new mobility products or initiatives around safety or recycling will be. A Bird spokesperson said these will be new vehicles and “transport modes” in the region. Bird didn’t provide details about what it means by securing partnerships, a phrase that could mean an extension of its franchise program called the Bird Platform or some other kind of arrangement with local governments or operators.

Bird did say plans will include programs like the subsidized ride passes it announced last week.

Bird has promoted company insiders Renaud Fages to head of operations and Brendan O’Driscoll to global head of product to lead the effort.

How Bird will pay for this expansion is as interesting as what it plans to do. A Bird spokesperson told TechCrunch it’s using “existing resources” to fund these various initiatives. However, the pandemic, its acquisition of Circ and its effort to launch operations in new cities while maintaining existing fleets have depleted its funds. The company’s last public fundraising announcements were more than a year ago. The company raised $275 million in a Series D round back in September 2019. That round was later extended to $350 million.

Bird was reportedly close to accessing new funds, according to a report from The Information. The media outlet reported in January that Bird was in the midst of finalizing a deal to raise more than $100 million in convertible debt, led by existing investors Sequoia Capital and Valor Equity Partners.