Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Kara Nortman has always been dedicated to supporting women in technology and in startups.

As one of the founders of the All Raise, the organization dedicated to supporting gender equity in venture capital and technology, a director for Times Up and as the co-founder of the Los Angeles-based expansion women’s soccer team, Angel City, Nortman has been a voice for equality in her professional and personal life.

Now with her promotion to co-managing partner at Upfront Ventures, Nortman (and her firm) are taking another big step to advance women in the industry. Her promotion represents what is likely the first time that a large venture capital firm has promoted a woman to the position of co-managing partner.

Historically women in the venture capital industry have had to launch their own funds to assume a leadership role in the industry. Norton’s promotion flies in the face of that — likely as a recognition that times have changed and firms need to adapt to a world where entrepreneurs are often choosing to take capital from firms that align with their values as much as their strategic vision.

For Upfront’s newest co-managing partner, the path to leadership at a fund with roughly $2 billion in assets under management began with late nights as an associate with Battery Partners in Massachusetts.

“I was the 23 year-old at the office reading MassSciTech and Red Herring until 10 at night,” Nortman recalled. “There wasn’t a ton of data to scrape and pull and run algorithms against.”

At Battery, Nortman focused on enterprise software before moving over to the corporate world as an executive at Interactive Corp. The Los Angeles native has been a partner at Upfront since 2014 where she’s invested in retail companies like Parachute Home (her first Upfront investment) and more recently in enterprise software companies like OpenRaven and Fleetsmith (which was acquired by Apple in her first big exit as an Upfront partner).

“My personal portfolio is about 30% consumer and 70% deeptech enterprise,” said Nortman. “I did all enterprise and infrastructure early in my career at Battery … because that’s all there was. There was no consumer to invest in 1999… Webvan and Pets.com were not good ideas.”

At Upfront Nortman will continue to work alongside managing partner, Mark Suster, leading the firm’s fund investment activities.

“If I had a dollar for every founder or VC who told me how much they loved Kara I’d have a 10x fund,” Suster said in a statement. “Kara is a natural leader as evidenced by her role as a founding member of All Raise, a board member of TIMES UP and in bringing the women’s professional soccer team, Angel City Football Club, to Los Angeles. Our giving her more leadership inside of Upfront is just a recognition of the role she already plays here.” 

Nortman is universally respected in the Los Angeles venture community with several investors saying that the move was an excellent strategic choice for the firm. It’s also (as far as I can tell) a historic one.

While there have been amazingly talented and qualified women working in venture capital for decades, few if any were able to assume leadership positions by being promoted from within. Jennifer Fonstadt and Theresia Gouw left DFJ and Accel (respectively) to launch their own fund. And Trae Vassallo, Aileen Lee and Beth Seidenberg all spent time at Kleiner Perkins before striking out on their own to launch independent funds.

Nortman said there won’t be any other changes to the partnership whose roster of partners includes Kobie Fuller, Greg Bettinelli, Aditi Maliwal and Michael Carney.

Nor will there be any changes to the strategy which has seen the firm invest roughly half of its capital in the greater Los Angeles region with the rest spread across deals in the U.S., Europe and Israel. 

Upfront’s success has tracked the broader expansion of the tech ecosystem in Los Angeles with big exits coming from hometown heroes like Ring, TestFlight and Maker Studios along with investments in rising Southern California stars like Bird, Apeel Sciences, and GOAT.

For Nortman, who has seen a lot of changes in the industry, the biggest is the need for specialization as firm’s grow. “It used to be that you could just hustle,” Nortman said. “You have to be really disciplined about how you build brands.”

Beyond that, there’s a need for investors to be more strategic about picking their investments, because hold periods are longer and the markets companies are tackling are exponentially larger than 20 years ago.

“I’m the first board member of almost every company I join. And I may be on the board for ten to 15 years,” Nortman said. “These days you need to be faster to make decisions and build brand but the commitment level is much much longer.”

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode that includes some high-quality Quibi jokes, if I recall correctly.

• Headlines this morning that caught our eye included falling global stock markets in the wake of rising COVID-19 cases; SAP torched tens of billions of market cap by missing earnings expectations and cutting its forecast; and Ant Group will raise a bajillion dollars in its impending IPO.
• In unicorn news, Databricks is prepping an IPO that we already know a lot about. And Airbnb’s shares are splitting ahead of its own IPO, a deal that we are expecting any day now.
• The PrimaryBid round was super cool, with TechCrunch covering the $50 million deal. I spoke with the company’s CEO last week about the deal, sharing some of those notes on the show. And VSPN raised nearly $100 million in an esports round that was more than cool.
• On the SAP front, here’s the question: Is the earnings miss and forecast miss a one-off, or something that a number of tech companies are going to suffer from? If the former, it’s not that big of a deal. If the latter, SAP could be the harbinger of a reset in tech valuations.

Shoutout Lewis Hamilton and that G2 series. Ok, chat Thursday!

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode that includes some high-quality Quibi jokes, if I recall correctly.

• Headlines this morning that caught our eye included falling global stock markets in the wake of rising COVID-19 cases; SAP torched tens of billions of market cap by missing earnings expectations and cutting its forecast; and Ant Group will raise a bajillion dollars in its impending IPO.
• In unicorn news, Databricks is prepping an IPO that we already know a lot about. And Airbnb’s shares are splitting ahead of its own IPO, a deal that we are expecting any day now.
• The PrimaryBid round was super cool, with TechCrunch covering the $50 million deal. I spoke with the company’s CEO last week about the deal, sharing some of those notes on the show. And VSPN raised nearly $100 million in an esports round that was more than cool.
• On the SAP front, here’s the question: Is the earnings miss and forecast miss a one-off, or something that a number of tech companies are going to suffer from? If the former, it’s not that big of a deal. If the latter, SAP could be the harbinger of a reset in tech valuations.

Shoutout Lewis Hamilton and that G2 series. Ok, chat Thursday!

Last year, Dropbox talked about making a shift to Shingled Magnetic Recording or SMR disks for short because of the efficiency they can give a high volume storage platform like theirs. Today, Western Digital announced that Dropbox was one of the first companies to qualify their Ultrastar® DC HC650 20TB, host-managed SMR hard disks.

Dropbox’s modern infrastructure story goes back to 2017 when it decided to shift most of its business from being hosted on AWS to building their own infrastructure. As they moved through the process of making that transition in the following years, they were looking for new storage technology ideas to help drive down the cost of running their own massive storage system.

As principal engineer James Cowling told TechCrunch last year, one of the ideas that emerged was using SMR:

What emerged was SMR, which has high storage density and a lower price point. Moving to SMR gave Dropbox the ability to do more with less, increasing efficiency and lowering overall costs — an essential step for a company trying to do this on its own. “It required expertise obviously, but it was also exciting to bring a lot of efficiencies in terms of cost and storage efficiency, while pulling down boundaries between software and hardware,” Cowling said.

As it turns out, Dropbox VP of engineering Andrew Fong says that the company has been working with Western Digital for a number of years and the new SMR technology is the latest step in that partnership.

Western Digital says that these drives deliver this cost savings through increased storage density and lower power requirements. “When considering exabyte-scale needs, and associated capital and operating cost of the data center, the long-term value in terms of lower cost-per-TB, higher density, low power and high reliability can help benefit the bottom line,” the company said in a statement.

Time will tell if these disks deliver as promised, but they certainly show a lot of potential for a high volume user like Dropbox.

Simple, link-centric user profiles might seem might not seem like a particularly ambitious idea, but it’s been big enough for Linktree.

The Melbourne startup says that 8 million users — whether they’re celebrities like Selena Gomez and Dua Lipa or brands like HBO and Red Bull — have created profiles on the platform, with those profiles receiving more than 1 billion visitors in September.

Plus, there are more than 28,000 new users signing up every month.

“This category didn’t exist when we started,” CEO Alex Zaccaria told me. “We created this category.”

Zaccaria said that he and his co-founders Anthony Zaccaria and Nick Humphreys created Linktree to solve a problem they were facing at their digital marketing agency Bolster. Instagram doesn’t allow users to include links in posts — all you get is a single link in your profile, prompting the constant “link in bio” reminder when someone wants to promote something.

Meanwhile, most of Bolster’s clients come from music and entertainment, where a single link can’t support what Zaccaria said is a “quite fragmented” business model. After all, an artist might want to point fans to their latest streaming album, upcoming concert dates, an online store for merchandise and more. A website could do the job in theory, but they can be clunky or slow on mobile, with users probably giving up before they finally reach the desired page.

Linktree founders Anthony Zaccaria, Alex Zaccaria and Nick Humphreys

So instead of constantly swapping out links in Instagram and other social media profiles, a Linktree user includes one evergreen link to their Linktree profile, which they can update as necessary. Selena Gomez, for example, links to her latest songs and videos, but also her Rare Beauty cosmetics brand, her official store and articles about her nonprofit work.

Zaccaria said that after launching the product in 2016, the team quickly discovered that “a lot more people had the same problem,” leading them to fully separate Linktree and Bolster two years ago. Since then, the company hasn’t raised any outside funding — until now, with a $10.7 million Series A led by Insight Partners and AirTree Ventures.

“We had the option to just continue to grow sustainably, but we wanted to pour some fuel on the fire,” Zaccaria said.

In fact, Linktree has already grown from 10 to 50 employees this year. And while the company started out by solving a problem for Instagram users, Zaccaria described it as evolving into a much broader platform that can “unify your entire digital ecosystem” and “democratize digital presence.” He said that while some customers continue to maintain “a giant, brand-immersive website,” for others, Linktree is completely replacing the idea of a standalone website.

Zaccaria added that Instagram only represents a small amount of Linktree’s current traffic, while nearly 25% of that traffic now comes from direct visitors.

Image Credits: Linktree

Black Lives Matter has also been a big part of Linktree’s recent growth, with activists and other users who want to support the movement using their profiles to point visitors to websites where they can donate, learn more and get involved. In fact, Linktree even introduced a Black Lives Matter banner over the summer that anyone could add to their profile.

Linktree is free to use, but you have to pay $6 a month for Pro features like video links, link thumbnails and social media icons.

Zaccaria said that the new funding will allow the startup to add more “functionality and analytics.” He’s particularly eager to grow the data science and analytics team, though he emphasized that Linktree does not collect personally identifiable information or monetize visitor data in any way — he just wants to provide more data to Linktree users.

In a statement, Insight Managing Director Jeff Lieberman said:

As the internet becomes increasingly fragmented, brands, publishers, and influencers need a solution to streamline their content sharing and connect their social media followers to their entire online ecosystem, ultimately increasing brand awareness and revenue. Linktree has successfully created this new “microsite” category enabling companies to monetize the next generation of the internet economy via a single interactive hub. The impressive traction and growing number of customers Linktree has gained over the last few months demonstrates its proven market fit, and we could not be more excited to work with the Linktree team as they transition to the ScaleUp phase of growth.

Water quality and logistics monitoring software Ketos has raised $15 million from a group of investors to take advantage of the growing demand for better water management tools and technologies.

The potential for more stringent regulatory oversight of industrial water use and wastewater management from local, state and federal government coupled with increasing consumer and investor demands for better corporate environmental stewardship is driving an unprecedented adoption of technology and services aimed at increasing conservation and reducing waste across industries.

Water monitoring can also provide relevant information to public officials about the potential for disease outbreaks and other health related issues in a population.

Recently, monitoring wastewater streams have been used to detect outbreaks of the virus that causes COVID-19.

The renewed attention on water is one reason why an investment arm of the banking giant Citi joined lead investor Motley Fool Ventures and Illuminated Funds Group to come as new investors into Ketos. They joined existing backers like Ajax Strategies, Better Ventures, Broadway Angels, Plum Valley Ventures, and Rethink Impact.

Silicon Valley Bank provided the company with $3 million in debt financing.

The company said it would use the funding to develop new capabilities for its combined hardware and software service that provides information into water quality and the existence of potential damage to water pipes for distribution and disposal of water.

“Creating one of the largest centralized data lakes of water quality insights — with information on heavy-metal toxins, coupled with location-based mapping and potential contamination sources — the potential for what machine learning and artificial intelligence can achieve is limitless,” said Meena Sankaran, the company’s founder and chief executive.

One other selling point is the company’s use of machine learning to predict where problems with water systems might arise — avoiding the need for more costly investments into infrastructure.

“KETOS is truly disrupting the water intelligence industry with the data it captures autonomously (remotely controlled) and makes available to its customers for forecasting water management issues, which is even more top of mind as the world battles COVID,” said Ollen Douglass, Managing Director of Motley Fool Ventures, in a statement. “For the first time, it is possible to use predictive modeling and much needed mission-critical insights with $0 capital infrastructure investments, to build, take action and make informed decisions about a water network.”

Facebook will soon be the latest tech giant to enter the world of cloud gaming. Their approach is different than what Microsoft or Google has built but Facebook highlights a shared central challenge: dealing with Apple.

Facebook is not building a console gaming competitor to compete with Stadia or xCloud, instead the focus is wholly on mobile games. Why cloud stream mobile games that your device is already capable of running locally? Facebook is aiming to get users into games more quickly and put less friction between a user seeing an advertisement for a game and actually playing it themselves. Users can quickly tap into the title without downloading anything and if they eventually opt to download the title from a mobile app store, they’ll be able to pick up where they left off.

Facebook’s service will launch on the desktop web and Android, but not iOS due to what Facebook frames as usability restrictions outlined in Apple’s App Store terms and conditions.

With the new platform, users will  be able to start playing mobile games directly from Facebook ads. Image via Facebook.

While Apple has suffered an onslaught of criticism in 2020 from developers of major apps like Spotify, Tinder and Fortnite for how much money they take as a cut from revenues of apps downloaded from the App Store, the plights of companies aiming to build cloud gaming platforms have been more nuanced and are tied to how those platforms are fundamentally allowed to operate on Apple devices.

Apple was initially slow to provide a path forward for cloud gaming apps from Google and Microsoft, which had previously been outlawed on the App Store. The iPhone maker recently updated its policies to allow these apps to exist, but in a more convoluted capacity than the platform makers had hoped, forcing them to first send users to the App Store before being able to cloud stream a gaming title on their platform.

For a user downloading a lengthy single-player console epic, the short pitstop is an inconvenience, but long-time Facebook gaming exec Jason Rubin says that the stipulations are a non-starter for what Facebook’s platform envisions, a way to start playing mobile games immediately without downloading anything.

“It’s a sequence of hurdles that altogether make a bad consumer experience,” Rubin tells TechCrunch.

Apple tells TechCrunch that they have continued to engage with Facebook on bringing its gaming efforts under its guidelines and that platforms can reach iOS by either submitting each individual game to the App Store for review or operating their service on Safari.

In terms of building the new platform onto the mobile web, Rubin says that without being able to point users of their iOS app to browser-based experiences, as current rules forbid, Facebook doesn’t see pushing its billions of users to accessing the service primarily from a browser as a reasonable alternative. In a Zoom call, Rubin demoes how this  could operate on iOS, with users tapping an advertisement inside the app and being redirected to a game experience in mobile Safari.

“But if I click on that, I can’t go to the web. Apple says, ‘No, no, no, no, no, you can’t do that,’ Rubin tells us. “Apple may say that it’s a free and open web, but what you can actually build on that web is dictated by what they decide to put in their core functionality.”

Facebook VP of Play Jason Rubin. Image via Facebook.

Rubin, who co-founded the game development studio Naughty Dog in 1994 before it was acquired by Sony in 2001, has been at Facebook since he joined Oculus months after its 2014 acquisition was announced. Rubin had previously been tasked with managing the games ecosystem for its virtual reality headsets, this year he was put in charge of the company’s gaming initiatives across their core family of apps as the company’s VP of Play.

Rubin, well familiar with game developer/platform skirmishes, was quick to distinguish the bone Facebook had to pick with Apple and complaints from those like Epic Games which sued Apple this summer.

“I do want to put a pin in the fact that we’re giving Google 30% [on Android]. The Apple issue is not about money,” Rubin tells TechCrunch. “We can talk about whether or not it’s fair that Google takes that 30%. But we would be willing to give Apple the 30% right now, if they would just let consumers have the opportunity to do what we’re offering here.”

Facebook is notably also taking a 30% cut of transaction within these games, even as Facebook’s executive team has taken its own shots at Apple’s steep revenue fee in the past, most recently criticizing how Apple’s App Store model was hurting small businesses during the pandemic. This saga eventually led to Apple announcing that it would withhold its cut through the end of the year for ticket sales of small businesses hosting online events.

Apple’s reticence to allow major gaming platforms a path towards independently serving up games to consumers underscores the significant portion of App Store revenues that could be eliminated by a consumer shift towards these cloud platforms. Apple earned around $50 billion from the App Store last year, CNBC estimates, and gaming has long been their most profitable vertical.

Though Facebook is framing this as an uphill battle against a major platform for the good of the gamer, this is hardly a battle between two underdogs. Facebook pulled in nearly $70 billion in ad revenues last year and improving their offerings for mobile game studios could be a meaningful step towards increasing that number, something Apple’s App Store rules threaten.

For the time being, Facebook is keeping this launch pretty conservative. There are just 5-10 titles that are going to be available at launch, Rubin says. Facebook is rolling out access to the new service, which is free, this week across a handful of states in America, including California, Texas, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia and West Virginia. The hodge-podge nature of the geographic rollout is owed to the technical limitations of cloud-gaming– people have to be close to data centers where the service has rolled out in order to have a usable experience. Facebook is aiming to scale to the rest of the U.S. in the coming months, they say.

One of the biggest trends in the world of fintech in the last several years has been the emergence (and surging popularity) of startups building platforms that help more people take a more proactive role in the world of financial services. Today, one of the more promising hopefuls building an investing service in the UK is announcing a significant growth round after seeing a surge of attention this year in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

PrimaryBid, which allows retail investors (that is, ordinary and not professional investors) the ability to invest in new shares issued by public companies, has raised $50 million in new funding of its own. The funding comes on the heels of the startup working alongside larger investment banks to get retail investors in on 41 capital raising efforts for UK publicly-listed companies and trusts since April 2020.

“The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the effectiveness of the public markets, with companies recapitalising quickly and efficiently,” said Anand Sambasivan, CEO of PrimaryBid, in a statement. “Our technology has allowed thousands of retail investors to participate on equal terms with institutional investors, unlocking a large and important source of liquidity and long-term share ownership for corporate issuers. The response from Boards and their advisers to our solution has been excellent: they recognise our digital solution for retail inclusion brings together both good governance and best execution.”

PrimaryBid plans to use the funds to hire more talent, invest in its tech platform, build out more partnerships and expand internationally.

Unlike the investors on its platform, this Series B is coming from a list of big-name strategic players and VCs. They include the London Stock Exchange Group, Draper Esprit, OMERS Ventures, Fidelity International Strategic Ventures and ABN AMRO Ventures, as well as previous backers Pentech and Outward Ventures.

The LSE Group might provide a clue to which geographies might be future targets for PrimaryBid: the Borsa Italiana exchange in Italy, as well as the Turquoise pan-European equities market are also part of the group’s footprint.

“This investment builds on our collaboration with PrimaryBid and is part of London Stock Exchange Group’s commitment to broadening retail investor access to public equity markets,” said Charlie Walker, Head of Equity and Fixed Income, Primary Markets at London Stock Exchange plc, in a statement. “Through PrimaryBid’s innovative offering, retail investors have been able to access capital raisings on the same terms as institutional investors, supporting the U.K.’s public companies by providing additional capital and liquidity. PrimaryBid has become an important part of the U.K.’s capital raising ecosystem and we look forward to working with them to further enhance retail investor access to capital markets within the U.K. and globally.”

The startup is not disclosing its valuation with this round, which follows a Series A in September 2019 of $8.6 million. This latest Series B has been the subject of rumors since this summer (and most recently a report last night that the round had finally closed),

PrimaryBid’s growth comes at a time when a number of startups have been building investment services targeting niche opportunities, and services for those who are underserved. Rally last month demonstrated that there is definitely money and opportunity in providing a way to invest in (not buy) collectibles; Yieldstreet has built a platform to introduce investors to new investment classes too like shipping; and companies like Stash, Revolut and Robinhood are also bringing trading and investing to a new class of consumers.

That doesn’t mean that new entrants focusing on smaller investors and niche opportunities in the investment market are without their own challenges. Revolut has faced controversies around the conduct of executives (however, these appear to have been resolved: it’s still raising hundreds of millions of dollars). YieldStreet recently sued (and won) a case against a ship recycling company, but at the same time it appears to be under investigation for some of its practices. And Robinhood indefinitely postponed its plans to launch in the UK after putting its expansion plans on hold earlier this year.

PrimaryBid’s recent growth has come on the back of a choppy year in the public markets and the world of investment.

Just as Covid-19 disrupted other aspects of our life, the early months of the pandemic saw a major freeze descend on the world of trading. With many unsure of how future months might play out in terms of local and global economics, the IPO market all but dried up and trading slowed down.

Then, things began to thaw, with activity picking up gradually and effectively under new terms: for now, everything is remote. And what’s more, the new playing field means a new opportunity for new players.

This is where PrimaryBid has been stepping in. The startup has built a platform that makes it easier for retail investors to participate in new share issues, and it has been around since 2016, but it has found its groove at a time when companies raising money might be looking to cast their nets a bit wider than usual.

The startup led a big campaign in April to highlight the role that retail investors can play in helping getting the stock market back to active levels. And the companies that have provided access to their new share issuances since the start of the pandemic have included the Compass Group, Ocado, Taylor Wimpey and Segro.

Retail investors are, in essence, a long-tail play. While individually they will invest considerably less than high net-worth individuals or institutional investors, collectively they account for a substantial amount of activity. The latest figures from the UK’s office of national statistics, from 2018, estimate that retail investors account for some 13.5% of the UK’s share capital, although within the FTSE 250 that is closer to 20% and in some AIM companies it can be as high as 30% or more, according to PrimaryBid.

There are a number of other platforms for ordinary people to buy and trade shares, but what is different with PrimaryBid is its focus on new share issuances, not sells and trades in existing shares. In theory, a company could also allocate shares to be sold on via PrimaryBid for IPOs, but, as a spokesperson described it, “The real innovation is getting retail involved in ‘accelerated’ follow-on raises (which are around five times the size of IPOs in equity issuance terms), and which have never been open to retail (whereas some IPOs have historically).”

It’s a forumula that has resonated with investors and strategic partners.

Vinoth Jayakumar, Partner at Draper Espirit, said: “Our investment in PrimaryBid aligns with part of our wider investment thesis to democratise retail investors access to public markets as well as modernise market infrastructure software. For us, both our companies are anticipating the direction of travel of the future of finance.”

OMERS Ventures, the investment arm of the prolific pension fund out of Canada, said it’s part of the groups focus on fintech. “As fintech specialists it’s been impossible to ignore the rise of PrimaryBid in 2020 and its success championing retail investors in the capital markets,” said Tara Reeves, Partner at OMERS Ventures, in a statement. “PrimaryBid’s technology sits at the intersection of powerful trends in financial services – regulation, digitalisation and democratisation – and OMERS Ventures is delighted to support the team’s mission to put individual investors on equal terms with institutions. PrimaryBid is now well integrated at the highest levels of the U.K.’s capital raising ecosystem, and we look forward to helping the team realize their ambitions internationally.”

“We are excited to be partnering with PrimaryBid to enhance fairness, inclusivity, and transparency in capital markets,” said Michael Sim, Vice President, Fidelity International Strategic Ventures, in a statement. “Anand and the team have built unique technology infrastructure that is redefining the way issuers access capital markets; seamlessly connecting everyday retail investors with public companies. As the economy roils from the impact of coronavirus, it is imperative retail investors get a seat at the table as companies recapitalise and the process of economic recovery begins.”

About a month after outting an open API platform for its customers to augment their apps, business trip SaaS startup TravelPerk has launched a standalone API product aimed at helping the wider travel industry provide up-to-date information on travel restrictions and risks related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The TravelSafe API is a monthly subscription product that lets travel providers integrate pandemic-related information on point to point restrictions between destinations during the booking process — with the service pulling data from official sources and local governmental websites that TravelPerk says is cross referenced by its own customer care agents.

It’s also calculating the risk level for travel to a particular country which it says is based on real-time analysis of the reproductive rate of the epidemic (R0).

The API launch follows TravelPerk’s acquisition of risk management startup Albatross in July, as the pandemic has pushed it to build out its travel risk management offerings.

Travel startups have of course been among the hardest hit by the pandemic, with the virus decimating demand for international trips and wiping out huge swathes of the business travel market. And, while domestic staycationing does appear to have offset some of the vacation-related demand crunch, it’s still a tough outlook for business tips — as scores of information workers Zoom into meetings from home.

TravelPerk’s response to the COVID-19 demand shock has been to focus on product development — and today’s launch of a subscription API looks like an attempt to find a business opportunity amid the travel crisis, while also offering a service it hopes will support the wider industry to reboot stalled demand.

The API has also been developed out of necessity, with TravelPerk initially putting the service together for its own customers, as it sought to provide them with the reassurance they needed to make a booking.

Now it’s opening access to the wider ecosystem of airlines, travel agents and booking platforms as a standalone product available via monthly subscription (without the need to lock into a contract).

“Access to TravelSafe is not dependent upon being a pre-existing TravelPerk customer. The TravelSafe API is a standalone product available to any company,” confirms CEO and co-founder Avi Meir. “We built this technology for our own platform initially, because we knew that in such an uncertain time our customers and travelers really needed accurate, up-to-date information. However, we quickly realised that this same need exists across the sector and that what we’d built for ourselves could be really valuable across the travel industry.”

“Our goal is to become the most open travel management platform, and this is the first step towards us building an ecosystem of travel services that lets other travel companies, and the industry as a whole, benefit from our technology investments,” he adds.

Meir says TravelPerk is expecting the strongest demand to come from mid-sized travel management companies — given the “developer-friendly” nature of the product (he touts ease and speed of integration as big draws) — and also because the content is “unique to TravelSafe and updated in real-time”. (That said, when we ask about the risk scoring element he confirms the information the TravelSafe API offers is “an aggregation of the best data and information available, rather than our subjective assessment”.)

“This is vital given the pace of change in the travel industry at the moment,” he adds.

Keeping travel guidance up-to-date with a highly volatile pandemic that’s complicated by a lack of access to data (and/or good quality data) about how the virus is spreading in different regions is clearly a major challenge.

Nonetheless Meir reckons technology can help an inherently uncertain situation via tools that collate and surface the best of the information that’s out there. (He also disputes there’s any tension in a travel company offering risk assessment advice on travel, arguing its incentives are aligned with ensuring safe travel.)

“We cannot improve the quality or the accuracy of the data that exists on Covid-19 globally, but we can make it much easier for travelers to access and understand the information that is available,” says Meir. “Currently, travelers are really struggling to find clear, digestible, and accurate information on the rules that apply to them. People often have to read multiple articles and go to many different sources just to understand what the local guidelines are, the risk-level, whether they must quarantine upon return and so on.

“To solve this problem, we invested in developing advanced information processing tools, automated daily updates of risk levels using R-rates computation, and internal tools to facilitate the checking and updating of this data by our policy analysts. This allows the TravelSafe API to offer safe, concise, and accurate information even amongst so much change and uncertainty.”

Asked about TravelPerk’s own API-based platform — following the launch last month — he describes the market response as “phenomenal”. “Since we launched three weeks ago, we saw 50 new partners reach out to begin building integrations, one full integration with Payhawk went live, and a number of other partners coming close to finishing their integration and getting ready to go live with the platform,” he says, adding: “We’re really pleased with both the level of interest so far and how easy our partners have found it to use the API.”

Epic Games, the game engine developer and creator of the wildly popular Fortnite game, is keeping the focus squarely on antitrust issues in its lawsuit against Apple as pressures mount to rein in anti-competitive practices of the world’s largest tech companies.

Antitrust arguments are gaining ground on both sides of the political spectrum, which could present a more favorable environment for Epic to make its case.

Earlier this month the Trump Justice Department filed its antitrust case against Google even as Congress laid out its roadmap for how to limit the monopoly power of a quartet of trillion-dollar companies: Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Alphabet (the parent company behind Google).

Epic’s lawyers acknowledged in the filing that the company breached its contract with Apple, but said that it only took that step because Apple’s contract restrictions are illegal, according to the company.

“When Epic took steps to allow consumers on iOS devices to make those payments directly, it breached some of the contractual restrictions that Apple imposes on iOS developers,” the lawyers wrote. “Epic did so because those contractual restrictions are unlawful. Epic chose to take a stand against Apple’s monopoly to illustrate that competition could exist on iOS, and that consumers would welcome and benefit from it. Epic did so without advance notice to Apple because Apple would otherwise have used its monopoly control to prevent that competition from happening.”

Ultimately, the argument comes down to whether Apple can claim ownership of commerce occurring on the phones they make and through the marketplace that companies are forced to use to access the users of those phones.

“It’s a crazy, misguided view,” according to a tweet from Epic Games founder and chief executive, Tim Sweeney.

The argument that Epic is making to the court is that Apple’s contractual restrictions are anticompetitive and deny choice to developers and consumers.

From Epic’s perspective, it took the steps it did in creating an in-game marketplace that its players could access directly, to prove that the App Store is not a necessary part of the iOS ecosystem; “they are just the tools Apple uses to maintain its monopoly,” the company’s lawyers wrote.

“Apple has no right to the fruits of Epic’s labor, other than the rights arising under a contract. Consumers who choose to make in-app purchases in Fortnite pay for Epic’s creativity, innovation and effort—to enjoy an experience that Epic has designed,” the company claimed in its filing.

The legal confrontation between one of the world’s most valuable tech company and one of the tech industry’s rising (and incredibly popular) stars began in August when Epic Games introduced a new payment mechanism to its Fortnite app allowing gamers to purchase its in-game currency directly and bypass Apple’s in-app purchase framework.

The company pushed the same update to its Android game, as well. Both Apple and Alphabet responded by taking down the company’s Fortnite game from its app stores.

Earlier this month, Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers, kept a temporary restraining order issued in September in place which simultaneously protected Epic’s Unreal Engine from retaliation by Apple, while allowing Apple to keep Epic’s Fortnite game off of its App Store.