Category: UNCATEGORIZED

TikTok fights its U.S. ban, Twitter takes action against another Trump tweet and Unity files to go public. This is your Daily Crunch for August 24, 2020.

The big story: TikTok sues the U.S. government

TikTok is fighting back against the Trump administration’s decision to ban the popular video app in the U.S. market (unless it’s sold to an American buyer). The company filed a lawsuit today claiming that the president’s executive order was signed without evidence or due process.

In its suit, the company argued:

The executive order seeks to ban TikTok purportedly because of the speculative possibility that the application could be manipulated by the Chinese government. But, as the U.S. government is well aware, Plaintiffs have taken extraordinary measures to protect the privacy and security of TikTok’s U.S. user data including by having TikTok store such data outside of China (in the United States and Singapore) and by erecting software barriers that help ensure that TikTok stores its U.S. user data separately from the user data of other ByteDance products.

The tech giants

Twitter hides Trump tweet behind notice for potentially dissuading people from voting — In the tweet, posted on Monday, Trump claimed mail drop boxes are a “voter security disaster” and also said they are “not COVID sanitized.”

Zoom meetings hit by outage — Don’t worry, the outage has been resolved.

Facebook to pay $125 million in back taxes in France — French tax authorities raided Facebook’s offices in Paris in 2012 and later opened an investigation on unpaid taxes covering activities between 2009 and 2018.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Sequoia strikes gold with Unity’s IPO filing — After much anticipation, video game engine Unity filed its Form S-1 with the SEC as it prepares a roadshow to go public in the coming weeks.

SugarCRM acquires Node to gain predictive customer intelligence — The acquisition will add a customer prediction element to Sugar’s platform.

With $11 million in fresh capital, Bolt Bikes rebrands to Zoomo — The new name is meant to reflect a customer base that has expanded beyond gig economy workers to include corporate clients and everyday consumers.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Five VCs discuss how no-code is going horizontal across the world’s industries — Few topics garner cheers and groans quite as quickly as the no-code software explosion.

Red Antler’s Emily Heyward explains how to get people obsessed with your brand — Heyward’s branding company has worked with some of the most iconic startups of the past decade, such as Casper, Allbirds, Brandless and Prose.

Unpacking the Sumo Logic S-1 filing — The company’s showing strong growth for a business now comfortably into the nine-figure annual revenue range.

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

Everything else

Conan is coming to Disrupt 2020 — Conan O’Brien will be discussing his shift to podcasting, and more.

Original Content podcast: On Netflix’s ‘Selling Sunset’, everyone’s a villain — Speaking of podcasts, we’ve got a review of the evil-but-addictive Netflix reality show “Selling Sunset.”

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.

Today is the day for huge VC returns.

We talked a bit about Sequoia’s coming huge win with the IPO of game engine Unity this morning. Now, Sequoia might actually have the second largest return among companies filing to go public with the SEC today.

Snowflake filed its S-1 this afternoon, and it looks like Sutter Hill is going to make bank. The long-time VC firm, which invests heavily in the enterprise space and generally keeps a lower media profile, is the big winner across the board here, coming out with an aggregate 20.3% stake in the data management platform, which was last privately valued at $12.4 billion earlier this year. At its last valuation, Sutter Hill’s full stake is worth $2.5 billion. My colleagues Ron Miller and Alex Wilhelm looked a bit of the financials of the IPO filing.

Sutter Hill has been intimately connected to Snowflake’s early buildout and success, providing a $5 million Series A funding back in 2012, the year of the company’s founding according to Crunchbase.

Now, there are some caveats on that number. Sutter Hill Ventures (aka “the fund”) owns roughly 55% of the firm’s total stake, with the balance owned by other entities owned by the firm’s management committee members. Michael Speiser, the firm’s partner who sits on Snowflake’s board, owns slightly more than 10% of Sutter Hill’s stake directly himself according to the SEC filing.

In addition to Sutter Hill, Sequoia also got a large slice of the data computing company: its growth fund is listed as having an 8.4% stake in the coming IPO. That makes for two Sequoia Growth IPOs today — a nice way to start the week this Monday afternoon.

Finally, Altimeter Capital, who did the Series C owns 14.8%, ICONIQ owns 13.8%, and Redpoint, who did the Series B, owns 9.0%.

To see the breakdown in returns, let’s start by taking a look at the company’s share price and carrying values for each of its rounds of capital:

On top of that, what’s interesting is that Snowflake broke down the share purchases by firm for the last four rounds (D through G-1) the company fundraised:

That level of detail actually allows us to grossly compare the multiples on invested capital for these firms.

Sutter Hill, despite owning large sections of the company early on, continued to buy up shares all the way through the Series G, investing an additional $140 million in the later-stage rounds of the company. Adding in the entirety of its $5 million Series A round and a bit from the Series B assuming pro rata, the firm is looking on the order of a 16x return (assuming the IPO price is at least as good as the last round price).

Outside Sutter Hill, Redpoint has the best multiple return profile, given that it only invested $60 million in these later-stage rounds while still maintaining a 9.0% ownership stake. Both Sutter Hill and Redpoint purchased roughly 20% of their overall stakes in these later-stage rounds. Doing some roughly calculating, Redpoint is looking at a return of about 12-13x.

Sequoia’s multiple on investment is capped a bit given that it only invested in the most recent funding rounds. Its 8.4% stake was purchased for nearly $272 million, all of which came in these late-stage rounds. At Snowflake’s last round valuation of $12.4 billion, Sequoia’s stake is valued at $1.04 billion — a return of slightly less than 4x. That’s very good for mezzanine capital, but nothing like the multiple that Sutter Hill or Redpoint got for investing early.

Doing the same back-of-the-envelope math and Altimeter is looking at a better than 6x return, and ICONIQ got 7x. As before, if the stock zooms up, those returns will look all the better (and of course, if the stock crashes, well…)

One final note: The pattern for these last four funding rounds is unusual for venture capital: Snowflake appears to have “spread the love around,” having multiple firms build up stakes in the startup over several rounds rather than having one definitive lead.

Snowflake filed to go public today joining a bushel of companies making their S-1 documents public today. TechCrunch has a longer digest of all the IPO filings coming soon, but we could not wait to get into the Snowflake numbers given the huge anticipation that the company has generated in recent quarters.

Why? Because the cloud data warehouse company has been on a fundraising tear in recent years, including a $450 million Series F in late 2018 and a $479 million Series G in February of this year. The latter round valued the mega-unicorn at around $12.5 billion. More on this later.

Snowflake is, then, one of the world’s most valuable former startups that is still private. Its public debut will make a splash. But what did its $1.4 billion in capital raised (Crunchbase data) build? Let’s take a peek at the numbers.

Growth

Even glancing at the Snowflake S-1 makes it clear what investors are excited about it when it comes to the big-data storage service: It’s growth. In its fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, for example, Snowflake had revenue of $96.7 million. A year later that number was $264.7 million, or growth of around 150% at scale.

More recently the company’s growth has remained impressive. In the six months ending July 31, 2019, Snowflake’s revenue was $104.0 million. A year later, those two quarters generated revenues of $242.0 million. That’s growth of 132.7% on a year-over-year basis. Impressive, and just the sort of top line expansion that private investors want to staple their wallet to.

So, lots of growth. But how high-quality is the revenue?

Margins

Let’s take a look at the company’s gross margins over different time periods. The data will help us better understand the company’s value, and its gross margin improvement, or impairment over time. Given Snowflake’s soaring valuation over time we are expecting to see improvements as time passes:

• Fiscal year ending January 31, 2019: 46.5%
• Fiscal year ending January 31, 2020: 56.0%
• Six months ending July 31, 2019: 49.4%
• Six months ending July 31, 2020: 61.6%

Et voilà ! Just like we expected, improving gross margins over time. Recall that the higher (stronger) a company’s gross margins are, the more if its revenue it gets to keep to cover its operating costs. Which is, notably, where the Snowflake story goes from super-exciting to slightly harrowing.

Let’s talk losses.

Losses

In no way does Snowflake’s operations pay for themselves. Indeed, the company is super unprofitable on both an operating, and net basis.

In its fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, Snowflake lost $178.0 million on a net basis. A year later the figure swelled to $348.5 million. In the six months ending July 31, 2019, the company’s net loss was $177.2 million. In the same two quarters of this year, it was slightly lower at $171.3 million.

And that’s why the company is probably trying to go public. Now that it can point to falling net losses as its revenues grow and its gross margins improve, you can chart a path to breakeven. And Snowflake’s operations are burning less cash over time. The pace was north of $50 million a quarter in the two three-month periods ending July 31, 2019, for example.

And even more, if we look inside the last two quarters, the most recent period (three months ending July 31, 2019) is larger than the one preceding it in revenue terms ($133.1 million vs. $108.8 million), and its net loss is smaller ($77.6 million vs. $93.6 million). This lowered the company’s net margin from -86% to -58%. Still bad! But far less bad in short order, which could cut worries about Snowflake’s enormous history of unprofitability at scale.

How we got here

Since Snowflake first appeared in 2012, its ability to take the idea of a data warehouse, a concept that has existed on prem for years, and move into a cloud context had great appeal — and it attracted great investment.

It started slowly at first with $900,000 in seed money in February 2012, followed quickly by a $5 million Series A later that year. Within a few years investors would handing the company bundles of cash, first with former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia at the helm, and more recently with former ServiceNow CEO Frank Slootman in charge.

By 2017 there were rapid fire rounds for big money: $105 million in 2017, $263 million in January 2018, $450 million in October 2018 and finally $479 million this past February. With each chunk of money came gaudier valuations with the most recent weighing in at an eye-popping $12.4 billion. That was triple the company’s $3.9 billion valuation in that October 2018 investment.

Telegraphing the inevitable

In February, Slootman did not shy away from the IPO question. Unlike so many startup CEOs, he actually embraced the idea of finally taking his company public, whenever the time was right, and apparently that would be now, pandemic or not.

He actually almost called the timing in a conversation with TechCrunch at the time of the $479 million round:

“I think the earliest that we could actually pull that trigger is probably early- to mid-summer timeframe. But whether we do that or not is a totally different question because we’re not in a hurry, and we’re not getting pressure from investors,” he said.

All money talk aside, at its core, what Snowflake offers is this ability to store vast amounts of data in the cloud without fear of locking yourself in to any particular cloud vendor. While all three cloud players have their own offerings in this space, Snowflake has the advantage of being a neutral vendor — and that has had great appeal to customers, who are concerned about vendor lock-in.

As Slootman told TechCrunch in February:

“One of the key distinguishing architectural aspects of Snowflake is that once you’re on our platform, it’s extremely easy to exchange data with other Snowflake users. That’s one of the key architectural underpinnings. So content strategy induces network effect which in turn causes more people, more data to land on the platform, and that serves our business model,” he said

So what?

When it rains it pours. Unity filed. JFrog filed. We still need to talk X-Peng. Corsair has filed as well. And there are still a host of companies that have filed privately, like Airbnb and DoorDash, that could drop a new filing at any moment. What an August!

Snowflake filed to go public today joining a bushel of companies making their S-1 documents public today. TechCrunch has a longer digest of all the IPO filings coming soon, but we could not wait to get into the Snowflake numbers given the huge anticipation that the company has generated in recent quarters.

Why? Because the cloud data warehouse company has been on a fundraising tear in recent years, including a $450 million Series F in late 2018 and a $479 million Series G in February of this year. The latter round valued the mega-unicorn at around $12.5 billion. More on this later.

Snowflake is, then, one of the world’s most valuable former startups that is still private. Its public debut will make a splash. But what did its $1.4 billion in capital raised (Crunchbase data) build? Let’s take a peek at the numbers.

Growth

Even glancing at the Snowflake S-1 makes it clear what investors are excited about it when it comes to the big-data storage service: It’s growth. In its fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, for example, Snowflake had revenue of $96.7 million. A year later that number was $264.7 million, or growth of around 150% at scale.

More recently the company’s growth has remained impressive. In the six months ending July 31, 2019, Snowflake’s revenue was $104.0 million. A year later, those two quarters generated revenues of $242.0 million. That’s growth of 132.7% on a year-over-year basis. Impressive, and just the sort of top line expansion that private investors want to staple their wallet to.

So, lots of growth. But how high-quality is the revenue?

Margins

Let’s take a look at the company’s gross margins over different time periods. The data will help us better understand the company’s value, and its gross margin improvement, or impairment over time. Given Snowflake’s soaring valuation over time we are expecting to see improvements as time passes:

• Fiscal year ending January 31, 2019: 46.5%
• Fiscal year ending January 31, 2020: 56.0%
• Six months ending July 31, 2019: 49.4%
• Six months ending July 31, 2020: 61.6%

Et voilà ! Just like we expected, improving gross margins over time. Recall that the higher (stronger) a company’s gross margins are, the more if its revenue it gets to keep to cover its operating costs. Which is, notably, where the Snowflake story goes from super-exciting to slightly harrowing.

Let’s talk losses.

Losses

In no way does Snowflake’s operations pay for themselves. Indeed, the company is super unprofitable on both an operating, and net basis.

In its fiscal year ending January 31, 2019, Snowflake lost $178.0 million on a net basis. A year later the figure swelled to $348.5 million. In the six months ending July 31, 2019, the company’s net loss was $177.2 million. In the same two quarters of this year, it was slightly lower at $171.3 million.

And that’s why the company is probably trying to go public. Now that it can point to falling net losses as its revenues grow and its gross margins improve, you can chart a path to breakeven. And Snowflake’s operations are burning less cash over time. The pace was north of $50 million a quarter in the two three-month periods ending July 31, 2019, for example.

And even more, if we look inside the last two quarters, the most recent period (three months ending July 31, 2019) is larger than the one preceding it in revenue terms ($133.1 million vs. $108.8 million), and its net loss is smaller ($77.6 million vs. $93.6 million). This lowered the company’s net margin from -86% to -58%. Still bad! But far less bad in short order, which could cut worries about Snowflake’s enormous history of unprofitability at scale.

How we got here

Since Snowflake first appeared in 2012, its ability to take the idea of a data warehouse, a concept that has existed on prem for years, and move into a cloud context had great appeal — and it attracted great investment.

It started slowly at first with $900,000 in seed money in February 2012, followed quickly by a $5 million Series A later that year. Within a few years investors would handing the company bundles of cash, first with former Microsoft executive Bob Muglia at the helm, and more recently with former ServiceNow CEO Frank Slootman in charge.

By 2017 there were rapid fire rounds for big money: $105 million in 2017, $263 million in January 2018, $450 million in October 2018 and finally $479 million this past February. With each chunk of money came gaudier valuations with the most recent weighing in at an eye-popping $12.4 billion. That was triple the company’s $3.9 billion valuation in that October 2018 investment.

Telegraphing the inevitable

In February, Slootman did not shy away from the IPO question. Unlike so many startup CEOs, he actually embraced the idea of finally taking his company public, whenever the time was right, and apparently that would be now, pandemic or not.

He actually almost called the timing in a conversation with TechCrunch at the time of the $479 million round:

“I think the earliest that we could actually pull that trigger is probably early- to mid-summer timeframe. But whether we do that or not is a totally different question because we’re not in a hurry, and we’re not getting pressure from investors,” he said.

All money talk aside, at its core, what Snowflake offers is this ability to store vast amounts of data in the cloud without fear of locking yourself in to any particular cloud vendor. While all three cloud players have their own offerings in this space, Snowflake has the advantage of being a neutral vendor — and that has had great appeal to customers, who are concerned about vendor lock-in.

As Slootman told TechCrunch in February:

“One of the key distinguishing architectural aspects of Snowflake is that once you’re on our platform, it’s extremely easy to exchange data with other Snowflake users. That’s one of the key architectural underpinnings. So content strategy induces network effect which in turn causes more people, more data to land on the platform, and that serves our business model,” he said

So what?

When it rains it pours. Unity filed. JFrog filed. We still need to talk X-Peng. Corsair has filed as well. And there are still a host of companies that have filed privately, like Airbnb and DoorDash, that could drop a new filing at any moment. What an August!

Unity, the company founded in a Copenhagen apartment in 2004, is poised for an initial public offering with numbers that look pretty strong.

Even as its main competitor, Epic Games, is in the throes of a very public fight with Apple over the fees the computer giant charges developers who sell applications (including games) on its platform (which has seen Epic’s games get the boot from the App Store), Unity has plowed ahead narrowing its losses and maintaining its hold on over half of the game development market.

For the first six months of 2020, the company lost $54.2 million on $351.3 million in revenue. The company narrowed its losses compared to 2019, when the company lost $163.2 million on $541.8 million in revenue, and 2018 when the company lost $131.6 million on $380.8 million in revenue. As of June 30, 2020 the company had total assets of $1.29 billion and $453.2 million in cash.

Increasing revenue and narrowing losses are things that investors like to see in companies that they’re potentially going to invest in. Another sign of the company’s success is the number of customers that contribute more than $100,000 in annual revenue. In the first six month of the year, Unity had 716 such customers, pointing to the health of its platform.

The company will trade on the NYSE under the single-letter ticker ‘U’. The NYSE only has a few single letters left to offer, although Pandora gave up the letter P when it was bought by Liberty Media back in 2018.

Unlike Epic Games, Unity has long worked with the major platforms and gaming companies to get their engine in front of as many developers as possible. In fact, the company estimates that 53 percent of the top 1,000 mobile games on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store and over 50 percent of mobile, personal computer and console games were made with Unity.

Unity, the company founded in a Copenhagen apartment in 2004, is poised for an initial public offering with numbers that look pretty strong.

Even as its main competitor, Epic Games, is in the throes of a very public fight with Apple over the fees the computer giant charges developers who sell applications (including games) on its platform (which has seen Epic’s games get the boot from the App Store), Unity has plowed ahead narrowing its losses and maintaining its hold on over half of the game development market.

For the first six months of 2020, the company lost $54.2 million on $351.3 million in revenue. The company narrowed its losses compared to 2019, when the company lost $163.2 million on $541.8 million in revenue, and 2018 when the company lost $131.6 million on $380.8 million in revenue. As of June 30, 2020 the company had total assets of $1.29 billion and $453.2 million in cash.

Increasing revenue and narrowing losses are things that investors like to see in companies that they’re potentially going to invest in. Another sign of the company’s success is the number of customers that contribute more than $100,000 in annual revenue. In the first six month of the year, Unity had 716 such customers, pointing to the health of its platform.

The company will trade on the NYSE under the single-letter ticker ‘U’. The NYSE only has a few single letters left to offer, although Pandora gave up the letter P when it was bought by Liberty Media back in 2018.

Unlike Epic Games, Unity has long worked with the major platforms and gaming companies to get their engine in front of as many developers as possible. In fact, the company estimates that 53 percent of the top 1,000 mobile games on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store and over 50 percent of mobile, personal computer and console games were made with Unity.

Triller, an app that functions similarly to TikTok, has inked a strategic partnership with a platform owned by India’s richest man to cash in on the Chinese app’s ban in its biggest international market.

The Los Angeles-headquartered firm said on Monday it has partnered with Reliance’s JioSaavn music app to embed Triller videos into the streamer “front and center.”

As part of what Triller said was the “first of many announcements to come from these two digital powerhouses,” JioSaavn app will also provide a “prominent” button on its main screen that will enable its users to create a triller video, the American firm said.

The announcement comes as scores of local startups have rushed to fill the void New Delhi’s ban on TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps over cybersecurity concerns created at the end of June this year.

Some of the local firms that are attempting to cash in on TikTok’s absence include on-demand video streaming service Zee5, news aggregator app DailyHunt, and Times Internet’s music streaming service Gaana and video streamer MX Player.

So Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s JioSaavn, one of the largest music streaming services in India, showing user-generated videos doesn’t sound like an absurd idea anymore.

Triller claims JioSaavn has amassed over 300 million users in India. I don’t think so: Its Android app had fewer than 30 million weekly active users earlier this month, according to one of the top mobile insight firms. And a press release from two months ago on JioSaavn’s website says it had over 104 million monthly active users.

But what is more interesting about this partnership is that it exists at all. As of early this month, Reliance Industries, the firm that runs telecom giant Jio Platforms, was in early-discussions with ByteDance to invest in TikTok’s operations in India. (Jio Platforms, which has raised over $20 billion from Facebook and a dozen other investors this year, operates a bouquet of digital services including JioTV, JioCinema, and Haptik.)

At any rate, Rishi Malhotra, co-founder and chief executive of JioSaavn, said the partnership with Triller will enable “artists to create and express our culture in the most innovate ways. We are confident that this partnership will exponentially grow both companies.”

Bobby Sarnevesht, executive chairman of Triller, said he was pleased, too, in a statement.

Travel has undoubtedly been one of the industries hardest hit in the coronavirus pandemic, constrained by restrictions on how people can move between and within countries, many venues closing, new rules to minimise gatherings, shrinking economies, and a general reluctance among consumers to engage in getting out and about. One startup in the space has been acquired in the wake of that.

IfOnly — an “experiences” marketplace based around access to exclusive, and often expensive, events and people, with a portion of the proceeds that a guest pays for the experience going towards good causes — was quietly acquired and shut down by credit giant Mastercard for an undisclosed sum. Mastercard told TechCrunch that it has folded the tech and team into Priceless — its own experiences marketplace — after initially leading a strategic investment in the company in 2018.

“At the end of last year, IfOnly, whose technology helps to power Priceless.com, became part of the Mastercard family, bringing their expertise and know-how in-house,” a spokesperson said. “The IfOnly platform will continue to help advance our Priceless strategy and our combined team will be even better positioned and equipped to deliver exclusive experiences for cardholders globally.”

IfOnly had been founded and previously led by Trevor Traina, a businessman, member of one of the wealthiest families in the US, and a well-connected Trump supporter. Traina eventually left the role of CEO when Trump appointed him ambassador to Austria in 2018. He was replaced by John Boris, who had been the CMO of Shutterfly. He still lists the CEO role of IfOnly as his current gig.

Mastercard had been just one of IfOnly’s big strategic investors; others were Hyatt Hotels, Sotheby’s and American Express, while financial backers investors included the likes of Founders Fund, NEA and Khosla. Together, investors had collectively put nearly $50 million into the startup. IfOnly was last valued at about $105 million, according to PitchBook data.

While Mastercard said that it had acquired the company at the beginning of the year, it turned out to be a soft landing for the startup, given the global turn of events and how it has impacted the travel industry.

It was only in July of this year that IfOnly had posted a notice on its site announcing the closure and acquisition. (A reader tipped us on the development last week.)

But before that, IfOnly’s business had ground to a halt in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. In the archived pages of the site (via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine) the company announced months ago that it would be pausing the availability of its experiences “due to the COVID-19 situation”, saying it would update as it learned more.

The sale (and closure) puts an end to a startup that began life with exclusive experiences that appeared to be aimed squarely at the one percent. One offer (on an archived page) for example offered “a family weekend feasting in Florence, Italy” starting at €62,851 (about $74,000) for four people, and tours of the Champagne region in France.

But the startup appeared to want to widen that out. Another offer included a session with the founders of “Goat Yoga” in Las Vegas for a private feeding and yoga session with baby goats (yes, this is a thing), starting at about $33 per person, depending on group numbers and presumably the number of goats and other parameters. Each experience was tied to a particular charity that would benefit from the purchase.

It also looks like IfOnly had also expanded into single, virtual experiences and those that could be bid on, both directly on its site and in partnership with auctioneers Sotheby’s. These included having customised voicemails created by Susan Sarandon, or bidding on a lunch with Mary Kay Place.

But the writing may have been on the wall, with the startup not formulating any kind of “plan B” on its site in the wake of the global health pandemic. Others that have built businesses around experiences — visiting places, going on tours, meeting famous people and doing other things to engage people in something new either close to home or further afield — have had to completely rethink their approach.

Airbnb — which had moved aggressively into experiences some years ago to complement and expand its accommodation booking platform — in April launched Airbnb Online Experiences, offering virtual tours and other video-based engagements to users.

GetYourGuide, the very well-capitalised Berlin-based startup offering unique tours and other travel-based experiences, has brought in pay cuts and reassessed its business model essentially around the idea of writing off 2020 (that is, assuming no one books for this year), in hopes of a turnaround in the longer term.

Meanwhile, Klook resorted to cutting staff. And yet others like Omaze — which like IfOnly also ties in its experiences with raising money for charity — are still raising money and operating, albeit currently needing to delay some of the experiences they’re selling.

For Mastercard, the Priceless platform is part of the company’s wider efforts to expand its business beyond basic card services. (That’s something that has seen companies like Mastercard, Visa and Amex expand into services for businesses, too, such as Mastercard’s purchase of B2B payments company Nets, and Amex’s purchase of SMB loans platform Kabbage.) Services like Priceless also help Mastercard create more brand loyalty with its customers, and to potentially make better revenues per user through more direct retailing.

As with other experience purveyors like Airbnb, it seems like the Priceless offerings have moved into the completely virtual sphere, selling people a chance to meet sports celebrities online, go backstage at famous theatres, and learn how to mix drinks with well-known mixologists. These may now be powered by IfOnly, but only in part: the option to give to charities doesn’t appear to have carried over with the deal.

Bolt Bikes, the electric bike platform marketed to gig economy delivery workers, has a new name and a fresh injection of $11 million in capital from a Series A funding round led by Australian Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

The round also included equity from Hana Ventures and existing investors Maniv Mobility and Contrarian Ventures, together with venture debt from OneVentures and Viola Credit.

The Sydney, Australia-based startup that launched in 2017 is now called Zoomo, a change that aims to better reflect a customer base that has expanded beyond gig economy workers to include corporate clients and everyday consumers. Mina Nada, co-founder and CEO of the newly named Zoomo, also told TechCrunch that he wanted to ensure the company wouldn’t be confused by other similarly named businesses.

“When we set up Bolt back in 2017, the name was fine in Australia, but as we’ve gone international we’ve come up against at least three other companies called Bolt, two of them in the mobility space,” Nada explained. On-demand transportation company Taxify rebranded as Bolt in May 2020. Another company known as Bolt Mobility provides shared scooter services.

Zoomo, which has operations in Australia, the UK, New York and soon in Los Angeles, sells its electric bikes or offers them as a subscription. Its primary business has been subscriptions for commercial use, which includes the electric bike, fleet management software, financing and servicing. Subscribers get 24-hour access to the bike. A battery charger, phone holder, phone USB port, secure U-Lock and safety induction is included.

Zoomo has sales and service centers in the markets where it offers subscriptions, which includes Sydney, New York and the UK. The company plans to use the new funding to expand its subscription footprint — which means adding physical sales and service centers — to Los Angeles and Brisbane as well as within New York.

The company’s strategy is to slowly expand where its subscription service is offered, while ramping up direct sales. The need for physical locations limits how quickly Zoomo can expand its subscription product. Selling the bikes to corporations and other users allows the company to generate more revenue, grow its geographic reach and build brand recognition as it slowly expands its more capitally intensive subscription service.

Zoomo also plans to use the funding to add new corporate categories such as parcel, mail and grocery deliveries that its bikes can be used for as well as other models better suited for individual consumers.