Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Moteefe, the e-commerce platform for on-demand production of merchandise, has raised $11 million in what, according to filings, appears to be part one of a Series B. Leading the round is BGF, with participation from existing investors including Gresham House Ventures and Force Over Mass Capital.

The injection of capital will be used by Moteefe to continue scaling and meet growing demand from entrepreneurs and retailers that want to offer customised products to their customers. This increasingly includes larger retailers that are using the platform to test new product styles and categories, which, says Moteefe, outdated systems and supply chains are ill-equipped to handle.

Launched in early 2016, Moteefe provides an “end-to-end” technology solution for entrepreneurs, influencers and micro to large retailers wanting to design, create and sell customised products, such as printed t-shirts or engraved jewellery. The platform enables brands to design merchandise and sell it via their own white-labelled Moteefe store or through their own site, app or other marketing channels.

You upload your design to the Moteefe site and the company takes care of printing, the store, payments, customer service and fulfillment globally. Moteefe then takes a small commission on sales. However, unlike some traditional marketplaces, users can launch their own store with their own domain, maintaining the customer relationship and data.

The draw is that with no minimum production run, Moteefe’s platform removes “the risk, wastage and upfront cost” normally associated with testing ideas, geographies and markets. It also claims to improve supply chain efficiency and sustainability by working with local fulfilment partners to minimise shipping distances.

“Retailers of all sizes have total flexibility: they can use the Moteefe platform either as a fully integrated end to end service, or just pick and choose the parts they need,” says the company. “And as Moteefe is whitelabelled, the retailer owns the customer relationship and can use the data to drive repeat sales”.

To date, Moteefe says it has more than 5,000 retailers, from indie entrepreneurs to high street brands, using the platform.

“At a time when global retail has been suffering and supply chains have virtually ground to a halt, we have seen a doubling in users and strong customer demand for our retailers’ products,” says Mathijs Eefting, CEO of Moteefe, in a statement. “This increased demand enabled us to grow our team and increase our production throughput, benefitting our entire network and creating high quality jobs internationally. “We have moved beyond our original goal to help anyone set up a store and sell globally. We now are able to support innovative retailers of all sizes to respond to entirely new e-commerce demands and opportunities”.

Indian food delivery startup Zomato has raised $62 million from Singapore’s Temasek, resuming a financing round that it originally expected to close in January this year.

Singapore’s state investment arm Temasek financed the capital through its unit MacRitchie Investments, a regulatory filing showed. Business intelligence firm Tofler shared the filing with TechCrunch.

A Zomato spokesperson in India did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday afternoon.

Zomato kickstarted its new financing round about a year ago, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The company has met with several investors but talks have not materialized.

The food delivery startup, which has improved its financial performance in recent quarters despite the coronavirus outbreak, announced in January that Ant Financial had committed to provide it with $150 million.

But Ant Financial has yet to deliver two-thirds of the committed capital, Zomato investor Info Edge said in late July. In its IPO prospectus late last month, Ant Financial cited regulatory changes in India as a reason for it not being able to invest.

In April this year, India made a change to its foreign investment policy that requires Chinese investors — who have ploughed billions of dollars into Indian startups in recent years — to take approval from New Delhi before they could write new checks to Indian firms. It’s very common for investors to finance their committed capital to startup in several tranches.

Reuters reported last month that Alibaba Group and its affiliates including Ant Financial will not invest in Indian startups for at least six months.

In January, Zomato chief executive Deepinder Goyal said the company expects to close a round of up to $600 million by the end of the month. In the same month, Zomato acquired the Indian food delivery business of Uber. In early April, he told TechCrunch that he was expecting to close the round by mid-May, attributing delays to the coronavirus outbreak.

Lise Buyer has been advising startups on how to go public for the last 13 years through her consultancy, Class V Group. She built the business after working as an investment banker, and then as a director at Google, where she helped architect the company’s famously atypical 2004 IPO.

It’s perhaps because Google’s offering was so misunderstood that Buyer has come to think more highly of traditional IPOs over the years, likening herself to a golf caddie who has “played the course a whole lot of times” and can tell a management team what will happen in different circumstances.

Indeed, while Buyer says she is “paid the same regardless” of whether a team chooses a regular IPO, an auction model, a SPAC or a direct listing, she doesn’t believe the world needs direct listings or SPACs nearly as much as the investors forming them have made it seem. Rather, she thinks the traditional IPO process has been unfairly maligned in recent years, helped along by an outraged Bill Gurley.

(If you somehow missed it, the famed VC began pushing back very publicly on IPOs last year, calling them a “bad joke” because of the pre-IPO stakes handed by banks to favored institutional investors, who sometimes reap tens of millions of dollars from a company’s first day on the public market — money that would otherwise go to the issuers themselves. Gurley even hosted an invitation-only event in San Francisco last fall called “Direct Listings: A Simpler and Superior Alternative to the IPO.” )

Certainly, it irks Buyer that companies that choose the traditional route have been made out more recently to be “morons” that are taken advantage of by the investment banks that underwrite their deals.

“It’s so much more nuanced than that,” she says. “It’s a little pathetic that the conversation has evolved the way it has.”

What is it these discussions that do not ring true to her? Primarily, she says, these first-day “pops” are sanctioned by management teams. “It’s not up to Bill Gurley to choose the right price,” she says. It “isn’t just bankers [who] come in and say, ‘We think you’re worth $40 [per share] you’re going to sell at $20 [per share]. Have have it.” It is “up to the management team, which generally has to think about much more than just day one. Some want a pop, some don’t. It’s their call.”

Buyer points to the videoconferencing company Zoom, whose shares soared 72% on the day of its April IPO last year (and have kept surging through this pandemic). CEO Eric Yuan and the executive suite he’d built “knew the stock was going to jump” and agreed to the stock’s pricing anyway, according to Buyer.  They wanted to set realistic, achievable expectations, rather than begin racing to meet inflated ones.

Management “doesn’t want to be on the hook just because the market is temporarily willing to pay something astronomical — by in in many cases, people who really don’t understand the fundamentals,” she says. Otherwise, she continues, “when three months later the company comes out with a forecast that doesn’t match [those] crazy expectations, management has to live with that for very long time.”

Similarly, Buyer highlights the software company Bill.com, which saw its shares jump 60% on the day of its IPO this past December.  While there might have been hand-wringing over money left on the table, she thinks it was the right move and one for which the company was quickly rewarded.

“With Bill.com, management knew that demand dramatically outstripped supply and they could have priced that deal significantly higher,” she says. They didn’t raise their shares pricing because they didn’t want to “message anything unusual about Wall Street,” she continues, but also the company already had in mind its secondary stock sale. Indeed, in June, with Bill.com’s business accelerating and its shares ticking upward, management sold a much larger percentage of the company — at a much higher price.

One could argue the company benefited unexpectedly from the pandemic, as have many software businesses. Buyer sees it differently, though. “Because they’d previously established a good rapport and trust with investors with that lower priced IPO, such that they were able to raise so much more money and take less dilution four months later, who’s to say they made a mistake [on opening day], giving the public pension funds a little bit of a jump?”

Whether one of the most highly anticipated IPOs of the year — Airbnb — chooses a traditional path for some of these same reasons should become apparent soon enough. It was reported by Bloomberg just today that the company rebuffed a takeover by the SPAC of hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman in favor of a traditional IPO.

In the meantime, the accommodations giant is far from alone in having to decide right now on the best way forward for its business. SPACs in particular right now are capturing the imagination of founders and investors alike. Says Buyer of her own clients, “There are folks who were not considering a SPAC six weeks ago who are getting tapped on the shoulder now and are trying to evaluate the specific terms — and the specific trade-offs — of these potential merger-partner-slash acquirers.”

As for direct listings — which have been lauded as a less expensive way to go public and, as of an SEC order last week, will allow companies to raise money as they are making that shift — Buyer isn’t exactly on the fence when it comes to these, either.

“With a direct listing that includes primary raise, it will be interesting to see if the company engages underwriters as opposed to advisors, and therefore if the expenses are lower – or perhaps even higher – than [with] an IPO. It could be either, we just don’t know yet.

“Again,” Buyer adds, “I have no horse in the hunt. I just see this as a solution desperately in search of an actual, as opposed to drummed-up, problem.”

Facebook has banned a politician from India’s ruling party, Bharatiya Janata Party, for violating its policies against hate speech on its platform, the company said today, weeks after inaction on the politician’s posts landed the social giant in hot water in its biggest market by users.

The company said it had removed profiles of T. Raja Singh, who had posted about Rohingya Muslim immigrants to be shot among other anti-Muslim sentiments. Singh will no longer be allowed to create profiles across Facebook services and unofficial groups and posts affiliated to him will also be nuked.

Singh, termed as a “dangerous individual” by Facebook, has a history of voicing problematic and hateful views on social platforms and in public appearances. Several of those posts, for which Facebook has banned him, remain online on Twitter and YouTube.

Today’s move comes weeks after the Wall Street Journal reported that a top Facebook executive in India had chosen to not take any actions on Singh’s posts because she was afraid it could hurt the company’s business prospects in the country.

A person familiar with the matter and local media reports claim that Facebook had removed some of Singh’s posts in the past. The Wall Street Journal also reported that the aforementioned Facebook executive — Ankhi Das — also showed support to BJP’s Narendra Modi before he was elected as Prime Minister in 2014 and disparaged the opposition party, Indian National Congress.

“We have banned Raja Singh from Facebook for violating our policy prohibiting those that promote or engage in violence and hate from having a presence on our platform. The process for evaluating potential violators is extensive and it is what led us to our decision to remove his account,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch.

In the last few weeks, Facebook has received some of the harshest criticism to date in India, where it reaches more than 400 million users. Politicians from both sides — the opposition and ruling party — have accused the company of having political biases.

In a letter to Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, India’s IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad earlier this month expressed concerns about the alleged political leanings of the company’s staff and accused them of suppressing pages that support right-wing views.

Southeast Asia’s leading property listing company PropertyGuru is making great strides across the region as it secures a fresh investment of SG$300 million ($220 million), it announced this week.

The proceeds, financed by existing investors KKR and TPG, both buyout titans, will fuel PropertyGuru’s already ambitious push across its main market Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia, where it operates country-specific real estate portals.

The private funding arrived almost a year after the online realtor pulled its plan to list on the Australian Stock Exchange. The company, launched in 2007, was reportedly aiming to raise up to $275 million at the time. And it has been nearly two years since the firm raised $144 million from KKR.

Growth has been encouraging for PropertyGuru in 2019, with a 24% year-over-year revenue growth that beat its own forecasts. The company calls itself Southeast Asia’s largest player, but it’s up against some formidable opponents, including a joint venture set up by close rivals 99.co and iProperty last year. 99.co is itself backed by prominent investors like Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Sequoia Capital and East Ventures.

Online realtors have been making aggressive expansion in Southeast Asia as the region becomes an attractive destination for real estate investors who want to tap the region’s relatively low investment threshold and high rental yield. Many come from neighboring China, which has reined in property speculation in recent years.

PropertyGuru has kept itself busy in 2020 so far, launching a mortgage marketplace in Singapore and a virtual walkthrough feature for property developers as well as seekers at a time when traveling is unsafe or unattainable. Every month, 24.5 million property seekers use the company’s various products to find homes, which number 2.7 million across the region at the time of its latest funding news.

“Our strong financial performance over the last few years has enabled us to invest aggressively and smartly, to build what is today an integrated and differentiated technology platform that caters to the unique opportunities in Southeast Asian markets,” chief executive Hari V. Krishnan said in a statement.

Biofourmis, which combines AI-based data analytics and biosensors to monitor the progress of medical treatments, has raised funding from one of the world’s most high-profile investors. The digital therapeutics company, which launched in Singapore and is now headquartered in Boston, announced today it closed a $100 million Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from returning investors Openspace Ventures, MassMutual Ventures, Sequoia Capital and EDBI.

The company’s last funding announcement was in May 2019 for a $35 million Series A led by Sequoia India and MassMutual, the venture capital arm of Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company.

Biofourmis’ platform combines AI-based health analytics and wearable sensors to help healthcare providers gauge patient progress and the effectiveness of drugs and other treatments. The company, founded in 2015 by chief executive Kuldeep Singh Rajput and managing director Wendou Niu, said this is the largest funding for a healthtech startup in Southeast Asia to date. In addition to Boston and Singapore, Biofourmis also has offices in Switzerland and India.

Since its Series A funding, Biofourmis has grown through a series of partnerships with seven pharmaceutical companies and 10 health systems, including Novartis, AstraZeneca, and Mayo Clinic. Biofourmis also made several acquisitions, including wearable biosensor startup Biovotion and Gaido Health, a digital therapeutics company for cancer patients.

The funding will be used to validate and bring new digital therapeutic solutions for cardiology, respiratory, oncology and pain treatments to the market. Biofourmis also plans to expand in the United States and Asia-Pacific markets including China and Japan.

Biofourmis also said today that it is realigning its internal operations into two verticals: Biofourmis Therapeutics, which partners with companies like AstraZeneca and Chugai to created software that can help increased the efficacy of drug treatments, and Biofourmis Health, a “home hospital” platform that allows health providers to monitor patients remotely as they transition out of acute care. Biofourmis Health focuses on heart failure, coronary artery disease, respiratory illnesses and cancer.

EDBI is an investment firm linked to Singapore’s government, and looks for startups that can help advance the country’s industries, including healthcare. Biofourmis’ funding from EDBI is a strategic investment, and its technology is being used in Singapore as it copes with repeated outbreaks of COVID-19.

Announced last July, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 launched with $108 billion to invest in AI-based technology. The first Vision Fund is coping with heavy losses stemming in large part from its investments in WeWork and Uber, so the performance of Vision Fund 2’s focus on markets including healthtech (its other investments in the space include pharmaceutical delivery startup Alto and life sciences company Karius) is being closely watched.

In a press statement, SoftBank Investment Advisers partner Greg Moon said, “We believe predictive health is the future of medicine and Biofourmis is a leader in using AI and machine learning-based models to advance digital therapeutics.”

The U.S. government rolled out a new online tool Wednesday designed to give the public insight into where and who is testing automated vehicle technology throughout the country.

The official name of the online tool — Automated Vehicle Transparency and Engagement for Safe Testing Initiative tracking tool — is a jargony mess of a word salad. Fortunately, its mechanics are straightforward. The online tool gives users the ability to find information about on-roading testing of automated vehicles in 17 cities throughout the United States. The public can find out information about a company’s on-road testing and safety performance, the number of vehicles in its fleet as well as AV-related legislation or policy in specific states.

The AV tracking tool is part of the Automated Vehicle Transparency and Engagement for Safe Testing  Initiative, called AV TEST for short, that was announced in June. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is overseeing the AV TEST Initiative.

The online tool is hardly comprehensive, but it’s a start and continues to expand. The tool currently shows data in 17 cities, including Austin, Columbus (Ohio), Dallas, Denver, Jacksonville, Orlando, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. The data might include testing activity as well as dates, frequency, vehicle counts and routes, NHTSA said.

 

The information on the interactive webpage is based on information that companies have volunteered. In other words, companies testing automated vehicle technology are not required by the federal government to provide data.

However, a growing number of AV founders and engineers understand that public education and acceptance will be necessary if they ever hope to commercially deploy their technology. Ten companies and nine states have already signed on as participants in the voluntary web pilot. The participating companies, to date, are Beep, Cruise, FCA, LM Industries, Navya, Nuro, Toyota, Waymo and Uber Advanced Technologies Group. The online tool also contains voluntarily submitted safety reports from Aurora, Ike, Kodiak, Lyft, TuSimple and Zoox.

NHTSA has limited the number of companies submitting data during the pilot phase, Dr. Joseph M. Kolly, the agency’s chief safety scientist said during a briefing earlier Wednesday.

“The more information the public has about the on-road testing of automated driving systems, the more they will understand the development of this promising technology,” NHTSA Deputy Administrator James Owens said in a statement. “Automated driving systems are not yet available for sale to the public, and the AV TEST Initiative will help improve public understanding of the technology’s potential and limitations as it continues to develop.”

India continues to crack down on Chinese apps, Microsoft launches a deepfake detector and Google offers a personalized news podcast. This is your Daily Crunch for September 2, 2020.

The big story: India bans PUBG and other Chinese apps

The Indian government continues its purge of apps created by or linked to Chinese companies. It already banned 59 Chinese apps back in June, including TikTok.

India’s IT Ministry justified the decision as “a targeted move to ensure safety, security, and sovereignty of Indian cyberspace.” The apps banned today include search engine Baidu, business collaboration suite WeChat Work, cloud storage service Tencent Weiyun and the game Rise of Kingdoms. But PUBG is the most popular, with more than 40 million monthly active users.

The tech giants

Microsoft launches a deepfake detector tool ahead of US election — The Video Authenticator tool will provide a confidence score that a given piece of media has been artificially manipulated.

Google’s personalized audio news feature, Your News Update, comes to Google Podcasts — That means you’ll be able to get a personalized podcast of the latest headlines.

Twitch launches Watch Parties to all creators worldwide — Twitch is doubling down on becoming more than just a place for live-streamed gaming videos.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Indonesian insurtech startup PasarPolis gets $54 million Series B from investors including LeapFrog and SBI — The startup’s goal is to reach people who have never purchased insurance before with products like inexpensive “micro-policies” that cover broken device screens.

XRobotics is keeping the dream of pizza robots alive — XRobotics’ offering resembles an industrial 3D printer, in terms of size and form factor.

India’s online learning platform Unacademy raises $150 million at $1.45 billion valuation — India has a new startup unicorn.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

The IPO parade continues as Wish files, Bumble targets an eventual debut — Alex Wilhelm looks at the latest IPO news, including Bumble planning to go public at a $6 to $8 billion valuation.

3 ways COVID-19 has affected the property investment market — COVID-19 has stirred up the long-settled dust on real estate investing.

Deep Science: Dog detectors, Mars mappers and AI-scrambling sweaters — Devin Coldewey kicks off a new feature in which he gets you all caught up on the most recent research papers and scientific discoveries.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

‘The Mandalorian’ launches its second season on Oct. 30 — The show finished shooting its second season right before the pandemic shut down production everywhere.

GM, Ford wrap up ventilator production and shift back to auto business — Both automakers said they’d completed their contracts with the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Facebook’s video destination, Facebook Watch, is introducing a new feature called “Your Topics” that will allow you to tailor its feed to include more of the content you want to see. Currently, Facebook leverages its existing understanding of each viewer’s interests to personalize the Watch Feed. Topics, however, will allow users to more explicitly tell Facebook what sort of things they like by exploring and subscribing to various content categories.

The feature has been quietly rolling out to Facebook users in recent days, and now some portion of the user base already has the feature in their own Facebook app.

Among the first to notice the new addition was Twitter user @whimchic, who regularly spots updates and changes to mobile applications before they’re made public.

They were alerted to the feature through a pop-up within Watch on the Facebook mobile app, we’re told. Here, a message explained that Facebook will now focus on showing more of the videos related to the #Topics you follow.

“Due to the many different ways your Watch feed is determined and how videos get categorized, you may see videos in your Watch feed that you aren’t interested in,” the message also warned. “Some videos related to the #Topics or Pages you follow may not appear in your Watch feed,” it noted.

If you have the feature, you can access it for yourself by clicking on the Profile icon in the Facebook Watch tab on mobile, then clicking on the link to “Your Topics” to browse the available categories.

The subcategories which you can actually follow or unfollow are grouped underneath broader category pages, like Animals, Art & Design, Books, Business, Education, Fashion & Style, Food, Games, History & Philosophy, Home & Garden, Music, Performing Arts, Science & Tech, Sports, Travel & Leisure, TV & Movies, and Transportation.

However, you can’t follow these high-level categories themselves — you have to click inside them to follow the individual topics. These can be very specific. For example, within Animals, you could follow #EndangeredSpecies or #GoldenRetrievers. Within Travel & Leisure, you could follow #TravelOceania or #WinterActivities. And so on.

But the subcategory listings are not comprehensive. Upon testing the feature within the Facebook app on my iPhone, a search for many other possible topics yielded no results. (What, no #Corgi videos?!) This, of course, could change in time as the feature is expanded.

Once you follow a topic, a message will confirm your choice and then the topic will appear under “Topics You Follow” in the Your Topics section of Facebook Watch.

From here, you can choose to unfollow the topic later on if you decide you want to see less of it in your feed. And if you want to watch only videos from a given topic, you can tap the topic to delve into a customized feed.

 

The feature is now one of several ways users can personalize and filter their broader Facebook Watch feed.

You can also filter the feed by Live, Music, Following, Shows, Gaming and more, by tapping on the buttons at the top of the screen or from the What’s on Watch category picker that shows up as you scroll further down the Watch Feed.

Facebook also adds groupings like its editorially curated “Get Caught Up” section with videos from paid partners, or those groupings that are more algorithmically sorted, like the one with videos that got the most “HaHa’s” or “Loves” this week, or those that are popular with friends.

The new feature could make Facebook Watch more competitive with YouTube, where there’s historically been a heavier focus on connecting users with individual channels to subscribe to. But YouTube has also embraced Topics in its own way, with broad categories like “Gaming” and “Fashion & Beauty” that are now a part of its main navigation. And it puts personalized topics at the top of the home page directing signed-in users to categories of videos they tend to watch.

Twitter, of course, has its own Topics feature, too, which showcases top tweets that match a particular interest. These may or may contain videos, however.

Reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed the addition of Topics, saying “we’re working on more ways to connect people with videos that match their interests.” No further details were provided.

 

Yesterday’s overflow Galaxy Unpacked event was about one thing and one thing alone: the Galaxy Z Fold 2. Honestly, it was a bit anticlimactic after its predecessor found Samsung unveiling five new devices. But the singular focus wasn’t for lack of new stuff to show off. In fact, the company just unleashed a whole slew of new products across a wide range of categories, including a gaming monitor, charging pad, refrigerator and washing machine.

There are two in particular I’d like to break out here, however: the new Galaxy Fit 2 band and A42 5G handset. The latter in particular is worth highlighting, given the company’s huge push into 5G this year. Samsung is betting big on pushing early and hard on the next-generation wireless tech.

Early this year, the company announced that it would be standardizing 5G across its flagship products. The company has also made a major push toward embracing the tech on its budget devices, including the A7 and now the A42. 5G hasn’t quite turned out to be the market correction the industry was banking on, due in no small part to a slowdown in sales from the pandemic. Certainly few banked on that. But while Apple has yet to announce a 5G iPhone (give it a month or two, mind), Samsung’s already loaded up.

And importantly, the A42 looks like it may be Samsung’s cheapest 5G offering (though we’re still waiting on exact pricing). Honestly, Samsung wasn’t particularly chatty about the device during an IFA-tied event. Though we do know there’s a quad-camera system and a 6.6-inch display. Honestly, one of the most remarkable things about 5G is how quickly affordable devices have hit the market, thanks in part to the efforts of component makers like Qualcomm.

The Galaxy Fit 2 is notable mostly for the inclusion of a 15-day battery (per Samsung). It can autodetect five different kinds of workouts and monitors sleep. It’s nice to see Samsung still offering something up to the dwindling tracker market, even as its (and the world’s) focus has clearly shifted over to smartwatches.