Category: UNCATEGORIZED

SpaceX and NASA have completed the multi-year certification program for the Falcon 9 and Dragon spacecraft launch system, the first ever human-rated commercial space system to be developed. The final stage in the certification process was the Demo-2 mission that SpaceX launched earlier this year, carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the International Space Station on May 30, 2020, and now all necessary review of the results of that successful mission is complete.

NASA announced the milestone via its official blog, noting that this certification included a Flight Readiness Review in preparation for the first ever official ISS crew mission of the Falcon 9 and Dragon, which is set for this Saturday, November 14 – weather permitting. That will carry four astronauts, including three from NASA and one from Japan’s space agency, to the ISS for an official full-length stay conducting experiments and maintaining the orbital station.

This is the final step in the multi-mission certification process, which included a number of previous launches including an uncrewed ISS docking mission, which ran fully automated, and a launch pad abort test to demonstrate how the launch vehicle’s safety system would work in the unlikely event of an accident following launch but prior to reaching orbit. SpaceX also developed and extensively tested a new parachute system for controlling the descent of the Dragon crew capsule upon it’s return from the station to Earth.

NASA says that it and SpaceX performed an “extensive analysis of the test flight data” following the Demo-2 mission, which concluded in August with a successful return to Earth carrying Behnken and Hurley back from the station.

As the coronavirus pandemic evolved into a genuine threat, offices closed to limit spread and people suddenly had to download Zoom and work from home. In the months since, many offices have remained closed. And with the number of coronavirus cases growing at a rapid clip, it’s not clear when, or even if, offices will reopen.

Jesse Chambers, the founder and CEO of wrkfrce, thinks there’s an opportunity for a media publication dedicated solely to helping workers navigate what he thinks is an irreversible shift.

Launching today, wrkfrce will offer content, job postings and consulting services to help workers understand how to adapt and thrive in a remote-work environment. The site is starting with 60 articles and will post more information daily, on topics like how to adapt as a parent to the best way to ask for vacation time as a remote worker.

In addition to its articles, the company is creating documentary-style video content in collaboration with a Los-Angeles based studio. The videos will cover the troves of buzzy enterprise remote work tools out there to add some clarity to the now noisy space.

Beyond the content library, wrkfrce dedicates a portion of its site to job listings for remote-only gigs. The job board has more than 217,000 listings with jobs across the spectrum, from tech to blue-collar industries.

All three products work in tandem to create what Chambers hopes will be a one-stop shop for anyone in a flexible working situation. And it’s a subtweet at the old structure of offices.

“The 9 to 5 in-the-office model is a relic of the Industrial Revolution,” Chambers said. “But the reality is that professionals these days are not assembling Model Ts.”

While the company is exiting stealth amid a pandemic, the platform has been in the works for more than a year. Chambers worked as the vice president of monetization for AOL when it still owned TechCrunch for over a decade. When Verizon acquired Yahoo and merged with AOL, Chambers saw an opportunity to try a new path. He went on a job search that would allow him to have flexibility to work from home. He couldn’t find much.

“I had about 35 seconds of frustration,” he said. “Before I said to myself ‘wait a minute, you know, Jesse, you know a few things about building digital media brands.’ ”

The company isn’t competing with any publications, as most cover remote work as one topic of many. Still, to acquire readers, Chambers said he is not putting the content behind a paywall. Instead, wrkfrce makes money through affiliate links on its job board, advertising remote-work tools and consultancy fees it charges companies that ask for advice on how to scale a remote team. It declined to disclose how much it will charge companies.

The biggest challenge ahead for wrkfrce, according to Chambers, is building a healthy and sustainable audience.

The strategy of targeted, niche advice blogs has worked well in categories that never lose importance, such as personal finance or mental wellness. Currently, wrkfrce’s total addressable readership is larger than ever because of the pandemic, but that could all change once offices reopen and people head back to work.

But the pandemic puts Chambers, like any founder launching a remote-work startup during this time, in the same, complicated spot: While demand surges right now, what if it’s all a fad? None of these founders can predict the future, but they all offer some version of the same argument, which is that millions of people have tasted flexibility and will now demand it going forward.

To prove his bullishness on remote work, Chambers has lived it. The founder traveled across the country with his wife Lindsey in a 27-foot Airstream for the past two years. He is launching the remote work company while working remotely, and is self funding the business entirely.

The pandemic is an accelerant of his vision, but not a catalyst.

“The digital evolution has brought us to this point where distributed work is totally possible,” he said. “If the pandemic had happened five to seven years ago, this would be a completely different situation.”

Some techies have approached remote work by recreating hacker homes. While some remote-work enthusiasts think these homes are the future, others think the approach is attention-seeking and, at times, tone deaf as the pandemic continues to rage on. Chambers thinks that the coastal elite tech worker approach might brand remote work as cliché, when in reality, it’s broader than the singular experience.

“The reality is, for the vast majority of people, even if they want to pick up and go take a laptop to Fiji, they couldn’t do it,” Chambers said. “They’ve got kids, they’ve got familial responsibilities.” Chambers wants to write for those remote workers, the enthusiasts, the haters and everyone in between.

The fact that millions of people around the world finally adopted remote work because they had to is not lost on him. But, he does see a future where people hybridize their workflows.

“We’re not beating a drum for totally remote work only,” he said. “It’s really about the whole spectrum of flexibility.”

 

At its (virtual) NextGen 2020 event, BMW today announced that the BMW iX, its new all-electric flagship previously known as the iNext, will launch at the end of 2021. Based on BMW’s fifth-generation eDrive technology, the iX will get a new look — and new kidney grille design — but its dimensions will be similar to the existing X5 or X6 SUVs. The company promises about 300 miles of range and 0-60 mph times of just under five seconds.

BMW has not released any pricing for the iX yet. Rumors earlier this year pegged it at close to $100,000.

The company says it will have more than a million electrified cars on roads by the end of 2021. Right now, about 13% of all BMW and MINI models registered in Europe are either all-electric or plug-in hybrids, and the expectation is that by 2030, that number will increase to 50%.

Coming next year, that lineup will include a number of new additions to the company’s electrified fleet, but the iX is clearly the focus here, though the next-generation eDrive system will also feature in the 2021 i4, for example, and BMW is experimenting with a 5-Series model that features three of these new motors for a maximum power output of 720 hp (we’re still talking about a company that made its name by combining performance and luxury, after all).

With DC fast charging at up to 200 kW, the iX should be able to charge from 10 to 80% in about 40 minutes. A 10-minute top-off at a fast-charging station should be enough for about 75 miles. For the most part, that’s in line with comparable electric cars, though Tesla’s V3 Supercharging promises somewhat faster recharge times and others can charge at more than 200 kW.

In addition to being BMW’s electric flagship, the iNext/iX unsurprisingly also showcases the company’s latest technology innovations. That’s obviously no surprise, given that BMW has used various iterations of its iNext concept car to think about how to best integrate new technologies into its next-generation of vehicles.

For the iX, these include all the standard driver assistance systems you’d expect today (though details there are scarce), a head-up display and large screens with a 12.3-inch instrument cluster and a 14.9-inch control display. But what’s maybe even more interesting here is the company’s over philosophy which the company describes as “shy tech.”

“Shy tech refers to technology that remains largely in the background and only reveals its functions when they are being used,” the company says in today’s announcement. “On entry into the car, the function in question is the electrically powered door locks. The interior welcomes the occupants of all five seats with a luxurious lounge-style ambience, and provides the space required to explore new ways of using time spent inside the car.”

For the most part, the user interface also strips away all distractions to allow the driver to focus on the road.

It’s no secret that BMW would like to — at some point — allow drivers to lounge in their self-driving cars. BMW hasn’t talked about the car’s driver assistant features yet, so that future hasn’t quite arrived just yet, but the company argues that by leaving out the usual center tunnel, it can provide a more “airy and specious feel” that “accentuates the lounge-style ambience and long-distance comfort provided by the interior.”

In many ways, the iX is the current apotheosis of BMW’s electric ambitions, and it is worth noting that, unlike others, the company is keeping a lot of the development in-house. That includes its Dingolfing plant, but as the company noted today, it is also developing its own battery cells and a new pilot plant for building its batteries near Munich should open in 2022. “This pilot plant will make BMW the first carmaker to cover the entire process chain for electric driving in-house,” BMW argues.

This wouldn’t be a major tech launch if it didn’t also feature a 5G aspect and indeed, the iX will feature built-in 5G connectivity, which should make it among the first — if not the first — 5G-enabled production car. Ideally, that means higher bandwidth and lower latency when the car needs to connect to the BMW cloud. But as we’ve all learned from recent phone launches, 5G is currently more of a buzzword than game-changing technology. What’s maybe more important here is that it may enable new C-V2X (Cellular Vehicle to Everything) solutions that will allow vehicles to communicate with each other and nearby smartphones — even without a mobile network.

French startup Molotov provides a TV streaming service in France that replaces the traditional set-top box. You can access live TV, subscribe to premium channels, watch content after they air and record content in the cloud. Today, the company is launching a different service, its own ad-supported on-demand streaming service — or AVOD service for short.

Mango features a thousand movies, TV shows, documentaries and kid shows. The company has partnered with copyright holders that want to find a new distribution channel for their content. Partners include Kabillion, Zylo, ACI, FIP, ZED, Ampersand, Sonar, ITV, Mediawan, Trade Media & Dynamic and Crome Films. Molotov is also currently negotiating deals with Sony Pictures, Endemol, Lionsgate and Wild Bunch.

“Today, there’s no legal and free cinema offering [in France],” co-founder and CEO Jean-David Blanc told me.

The result is a library of content that you can watch whenever you want from the Molotov app. Mango content is accessible from a dedicated hub. You can also find content when you browse categories or search for something in the app.

You’ll find some obscure movies but also some well-known names, such as Sex Therapy with Marc Ruffalo and Gwyneth Paltrow, Suspicion with Morgan Freeman and Monica Bellucci, and The Perfect Weapon with Steven Seagall and Bruce Lee.

When it comes to advertisement, the company has put together its own commercial team. They want to sign deals with traditional TV advertisers as well as content creators. The idea is that you’ll get a movie trailer (or a teaser for a new Netflix show for instance) before your movie. After that, you’ll get a few ad breaks in the middle of your movie with ads for various products.

When Molotov doesn’t have enough inventory of in-house ads, the company has partnered with third-party ad network FreeWheel. Ads will be personalized based on your profile and the ads you’ve seen already. They are directly inserted in the server-side stream, which means that it’ll work on all platforms that currently support Molotov, from mobile apps to connected TVs.

If Mango works well in France, Molotov plans to expand its AVOD service to other European countries in the near future. And it makes a ton of sense to start with such a service as TV distribution deals are incredibly tedious.

With 13 million users, Molotov already has a comfortable audience to get started with Mango. Arguably, it could quickly become the most successful ad-supported streaming service in France.

This year, more than ever before because of the Covid-19 pandemic, huge droves of workers and consumers have been turning to the internet to communicate, get things done, and entertain themselves. That has created a huge bonanza for cybercriminals, but also companies that are building tools to combat them.

In the latest development, an Israel-hatched, Mountain View-based enterprise startup called SentinelOne — which has built a machine learning-based solution that it sells under the brand Singularity that works across the entire edge of the network to monitor and secure laptops, phones, containerised applications and the many other devices and services connected to a network — has closed $267 million in funding to continue expanding its business to meet demand, which has seen business boom this year. Its valuation is now over $3 billion.

Given the large sums the company has now raised — $430 million to date — the funding will likely be used for acquisitions (cyber is a very crowded market and will likely see some strong consolidation in the coming years) as well as more in-house development and sales and marketing. Earlier this year, CEO and founder Tomer Weingarten told me that an IPO “would be the next logical step” for the company. “But we’re not in any rush,” he said at the time. “We have one to two years of growth left as a private company.”

SentinelOne contacted TechCrunch with the above details but said that an official press release was due only to be released at 3pm UK time. We’ll update with more details if they’re available when they are published. In the meantime, other outlets such as Calcalist in Israel (in Hebrew) have also published these details. And it should be noted that the round was rumored for almost a month ahead of this, although the sums raised were off by quite a bit: the reports had said $150-200 million.

(Sidenote: Why the pointless games with timings and exclusives? Who knows — I certainly don’t. )

This round included Tiger Global, Sequoia, Insight Partners, Third Point Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures. It looks like Sequoia — which is currently building up a new European operation to look more closely at opportunities on this side of the globe — is the only new name in that list. The others have all backed SentinelOne in previous rounds.

In the world of startups, we are firmly living in a time when investors are looking for strong opportunities to back companies that are shining in a market that is particularly challenging. Covid-19 has all but decimated the travel industry and live in-person event industry, among others.

But services that are helping people continue to live their lives, and those that are helping find a cure or at least solutions to minimise the impact, are very much in demand.

The curecybersecurity market — in particular for companies that are providing solutions that can immediately prove to be effective in what is an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape — is incredibly active right now, even more than it already was. It was only in February of this year that SentinelOne had raised $200 million at a $1.1 billion valuation.

Within that, endpoint security, the area where SentinelOne concentrates its efforts, is particularly strong. Last year, endpoint security solutions was estimated to be around an $8 billion market, and analysts project that it could be worth as much as $18.4 billion by 2024.

While SentinelOne has a lot of competitors — they include Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Kaspersky, McAfee, and Symantec — it is also a strong player in the market. Relying on the advances of AI and with roots in the Israeli cyberintelligence community, its platform is built around the idea of working automatically not just to detect endpoints and their vulnerabilities, but to apply behavioral models, and various modes of protection, detection and response in one go.

“We are seeing more automated and real-time attacks that themselves are using more machine learning,” Weingarten said to me this year. “That translates to the fact that you need defence that moves in real time as with as much automation as possible.”

As of February, it had 3,500 customers, including three of the biggest companies in the world, and “hundreds” from the global 2,000 enterprises, with 113% year-on-year new bookings growth, revenue growth of 104% year-on-year and 150% growth year-on-year in transactions over $2 million. Those numbers will have likely grown significantly since then. (We’ll update as and when we learn more.)

European pre-seed and seed-stage VC Seedcamp has reached £78M in the first and final close of its fifth fund, ‘Seedcamp V’, its largest to date.

The round was backed by investors including British Patient Capital, Legal & General, TIFF, LGT, Vintage IP, Isomer Capital, OMERS. VC backers include Index, Sequoia, Underscore VC, Northzone, Atomico and Draper Esprit. Angel backers include Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise), Daniel Dines (UiPath), David Helgason (Nordic Makers/Unity) and Shakil Khan (Spotify).

The new fund comes three years on from the close of Fund IV, at £60M, and this new fund increases the amount of capital it will invest in pre-seed and seed-stage companies, as well as reserving capital for follow-on rounds up to Series B.

Seedcamp backed Hopin, the virtual conferences platform which made hay during the pandemic and recently raised $125m giving it a $2bn valuation.

Index Ventures, the London and San Francisco-headquartered venture capital firm that primarily invests in Europe and the U.S., has recruited its latest investment partner.

Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, who is currently the COO of London-based fintech GoCardless and was previously the chief product officer of Skyscanner, is joining Index in January, TechCrunch can reveal.

For those not in the know, Gonzalez-Cadenas is a seasoned entrepreneur and operator, but has also become a prolific angel investor over the last three years — making more than 50 angel investments in Europe in total, I’m told. And while I can’t say I’m aware of every single one of those investments, it hasn’t gone unnoticed how often Gonzalez-Cadenas’ name seems to crop up on a European funding announcement or when I ask founders to list their earliest backers. The transition to a full-time role in venture capital, therefore, feels like it makes quite a lot of sense.

“I’ve been an angel investor for the last three years and this is something that has basically grown for me quite organically,” he tells TechCrunch. “I started doing just a handful and seeing if this is something I like and over time it has grown quite a lot and so has the number of entrepreneurs I’m partnered with. And this is something I’ve been increasingly more excited to do. So it has grown organically and something that emotionally has been getting closer and closer as time has passed”.

Related to this, Gonzalez-Cadenas describes himself as “quite a curious person” and says that investing gives him the opportunity to learn about lots of different sectors and different ways of building businesses. “That is something that I enjoy a lot,” he says.

At Index, partners work across both of its funds — venture and growth — and collaborate as one team straddling Europe and the U.S., which is something Gonzalez-Cadenas says attracted him to the firm. Partners also don’t strictly specialise, even if each one may have their own passion areas.

“At Index, all partners have a bit of a centre of gravity from their perspective, but I think we are still relatively broad,” he explains. “In terms of me, it’s something we’re still figuring out from our perspective, but I’m likely going to be more gravitating towards the software space, say SaaS plus enterprise plus a bit of deep tech, machine learning and artificial intelligence. That’s probably going to be my focus, and I’m primarily focused on Europe”.

In 2008, Gonzalez-Cadenas founded Fogg, a travel business which he sold to Skyscanner five years later. He then became Skyscanner’s chief product officer and helped drive its “five-fold growth,” international expansion and the development of its product offering.

Before stepping into the role of COO at GoCardless, he was the fintech’s CPO and CTO, working alongside founder Hiroki Takeuchi. During this time, GoCardless has grown into a 400-person scale-up, with significant international and product expansion.

Gonzalez-Cadenas says another thing that made him choose to join Index is that the firm isn’t afraid to invest early, including an increasing number of seed deals, even if those deals aren’t always disclosed at the time.

“I think Index is quite an entrepreneurial approach in terms of taking risk,” he says. “If you think about the percentage of companies that today are massive successes in Index’s portfolio — so, for example, Revolut, Robinhood, Deliveroo, Adyen, Figma. All these companies, Index invested really, really early in the seed round, or, you know, the A, but the vast majority of those were in the seed round. And this is something that I think is super exciting, because it aligns a lot with what I do. I’m more of a entrepreneurially minded person that wants to invest heavily in the journey of entrepreneurs and take fundamental bets, as opposed to just waiting until the numbers are perfect and invest then. That’s not the type of investing that I like”.

India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which oversees programs beamed on television and theatres in the country, will now also regulate policies for streaming platforms and digital news outlets in a move that is widely believed to kickstart an era of more frequent and stricter censorship on what online services air.

The new rules (PDF), signed by India’s President Ram Nath Kovind this week, might end the years-long efforts by digital firms to self-regulate their own content to avoid the broader oversight that impacts television channels and theatres and whose programs appeared on those platforms. (Streaming platforms may continue to self-regulate and report to I&B, similar to how TV channels follow a programming code and their self-regulatory body works with I&B.)

For instance, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting currently certifies what movies hit the theatres in the country and the scenes they need to clip or alter to receive those certifications. But movies and shows appearing on services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video did not require a certification and had wider tolerance for sensitive subjects.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has previously also ordered local television channels to not air sensitive documentaries.

India’s Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology previously oversaw online streaming services, but it did not enforce any major changes. The ministry also oversees platforms where videos are populated by users.

Officials of India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting have previously argued that with proliferation of online platforms in India — there are about 600 million internet users in the country — there needs to be parity between regulations on them and traditional media sources.

“There is definitely a need for a level playing field for all media. But that doesn’t mean we will bring everybody under a heavy regulatory structure. Our government has been focused on ease of doing business and less regulation, but more effective regulation,” said Amit Khare, Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, earlier this year.

The move by the world’s second largest internet market is bound to make players like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney’s Hotstar, Times Internet’s MX Player, and dozens of other streaming services and web-based news outlets more cautious about what all they choose to stream and publish on their platforms, an executive with one of the top streaming services told TechCrunch, requesting anonymity.

Netflix, which has poured over half a billion dollars in its India business, declined to comment.

Digital news outlets and platforms that cover “current affairs” will now also be overseen by India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Over the years, the Indian government has pressured advertisers and indulged in other practices to shape what several news channels show to their audiences.

Information and Broadcasting minister Prakash Javdekar is expected to address this week’s announcement in an hour. We will update the story with additional details.

India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which oversees programs beamed on television and theatres in the country, will now also regulate policies for streaming platforms and digital news outlets in a move that is widely believed to kickstart an era of more frequent and stricter censorship on what online services air.

The new rules (PDF), signed by India’s President Ram Nath Kovind this week, might end the years-long efforts by digital firms to self-regulate their own content to avoid the broader oversight that impacts television channels and theatres and whose programs appeared on those platforms. (Streaming platforms may continue to self-regulate and report to I&B, similar to how TV channels follow a programming code and their self-regulatory body works with I&B.)

For instance, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting currently certifies what movies hit the theatres in the country and the scenes they need to clip or alter to receive those certifications. But movies and shows appearing on services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video did not require a certification and had wider tolerance for sensitive subjects.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has previously also ordered local television channels to not air sensitive documentaries.

India’s Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology previously oversaw online streaming services, but it did not enforce any major changes. The ministry also oversees platforms where videos are populated by users.

Officials of India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting have previously argued that with proliferation of online platforms in India — there are about 600 million internet users in the country — there needs to be parity between regulations on them and traditional media sources.

“There is definitely a need for a level playing field for all media. But that doesn’t mean we will bring everybody under a heavy regulatory structure. Our government has been focused on ease of doing business and less regulation, but more effective regulation,” said Amit Khare, Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, earlier this year.

The move by the world’s second largest internet market is bound to make players like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney’s Hotstar, Times Internet’s MX Player, and dozens of other streaming services and web-based news outlets more cautious about what all they choose to stream and publish on their platforms, an executive with one of the top streaming services told TechCrunch, requesting anonymity.

Netflix, which has poured over half a billion dollars in its India business, declined to comment.

Digital news outlets and platforms that cover “current affairs” will now also be overseen by India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Over the years, the Indian government has pressured advertisers and indulged in other practices to shape what several news channels show to their audiences.

Information and Broadcasting minister Prakash Javdekar is expected to address this week’s announcement in an hour. We will update the story with additional details.

Heroes, a European e-commerce business operating a similar model to unicorn Thrasio in the U.S. — with a strategy of acquiring and scaling high performing Amazon businesses — has raised $65 million in funding round.

The round — a mixture of equity financing and debt — is co-led by 360 Capital and Fuel Ventures, with participation from Upper90, an alternative capital provider for e-commerce assets. Angel investors in the company include Matt Robinson, co-founder of GoCardless and Nested, and Carlos Gonzales, COO of GoCardless.

“Debt will play an important role in the growth of our business going forward,” explains ex-EQT VC Riccardo Bruni, who co-founded Heroes with his brother Alessio. “Ultimately, it is a significantly cheaper form of capital which is non-dilutive, allowing our team and our investors to retain ownership in Heroes in the long term”.

With the goal of becoming Europe’s largest acquirer and operator of ‘Fulfillment by Amazon’ (FBA) brands, Heroes plans to roll up high performing FBA businesses from a range of different sectors, spanning baby, pets, homeware, kitchenware, garden, DIY, sports and outdoors categories. The idea is to provide these types of founders with an exit opportunity, while leveraging Heroes’ infrastructure to hopefully scale these FBA companies internationally via its in-house team of experts.

“The problem with ‘traditional’ D2C is that product-market fit is a huge unknown,” says Alessio Bruni. “Over the past decade, venture capital funds have invested billions of dollars into D2C businesses and only a very few of those have actually managed to hit product-market fit. In most cases, the startups end up spending too much money to convince customers to buy their product. As a result, you have customer acquisition costs (CAC) far exceeding customer lifetime values (LTV)”.

Conversely, outside of the world of venture capitalism lies a $300 billion industry, he says, “built on the back of hard-working people who have built profitable businesses on Amazon without ever having given away a share of their business to investors”. What often started as a side-hustle to make some extra money towards rent can sometimes turn into a profitable multi-million dollar business.

“What becomes evident to many founders at this point is that running a >$1 million business on Amazon is no longer a side-hustle. It requires significant resources to be dedicated to administrative tasks, tax filings, accounting, staff management, supply chain, logistics, cash-management, marketing etc. And some of these founders find themselves out of depth to manage such a big undertaking”.

This, of course, is where Heroes and its competitors come in, promising to give founders the ability to exit and cash in on the benefits of their hard work.

“What we love about these brands is that they have already hit product-market fit and we just need to focus on growth,” adds Bruno. “So in some ways, we are turning around the traditional D2C equation. We start with product-market fit and don’t have to worry about spending millions just to hit it”.

To that end, Heroes says the new funding will be used to continue hiring the early team and to support the first few acquisitions.

Meanwhile, on U.S. competitors, Ricardo Bruni had this to say: “Both Thrasio and Perch are based out of the U.S. and focus predominantly on the U.S. market. We are London-based and focus on the European market. The European market is significantly more fragmented than the U.S. one, with each country having its own dedicated Amazon marketplace.

“We believe that this fragmentation in itself creates a huge opportunity; one where localised knowledge, expertise and language is required”.