Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Consolidation continues apace in the world of e-commerce, and today it was the turn of the classified ads market. Today, eBay announced that it had reached a deal to sell off its Classifieds business unit to Adevinta, a Norway-based classified ads publisher majority owned by Danish publisher Schibsted. The deal is valued at $9.2 billion, which includes eBay getting $2.5 billion in cash and 540 million Adevinta shares. The deal makes eBay a 44% owner of Adevinta, with a 33.3% voting stake.

Adevinta’s interest in eBay was reported earlier in the week, but with the deal coming at a much lower valuation, of $8 billion.

More generally, it caps off months of speculation about the future for the classifieds business, which has come out of long-term pressure spurred by activist investors for eBay to rationalise what had once been a sprawling e-commerce business empire (advocating for a reverse Amazon, I guess you could say). That included not just its marketplace, but classified ads, payment services (PayPal, which got spun out as a separate company), and ticketing (Viagogo acquired its Stubhub business in a $4 billion deal last year, although that is now facing some regulatory scrutiny.).

Now, all three of those business units are no longer a part of eBay.

Adevinta is in 15 countries and today 35 digital products and websites. eBay meanwhile owns 12 brands in 13 countries around the world, but the business has been hard-hit by the coronavirus crisis. In the last quarter, eBay said that it brought in revenues of just $248 million, down 3% on an as-reported basis and remaining flat on a FX-Neutral basis. For some context, the marketplace brought in revenues of $1.9 billion in the same period.

The overlap will mean a classified ad footprint of  20 countries, and the companies believe that some $150 million – $185 million in synergies will be reached through the combination.

“We are pleased we reached an agreement with Adevinta that brings together two great companies,” said Jamie Iannone, CEO of eBay, in a statement. “eBay believes strongly in the power of community and connections between people, which has been essential to our Classifieds businesses globally. This sale creates short-term and long-term value for shareholders and customers, while allowing us to participate in the future potential of the Classifieds business.”

With little needed but text and a search facility to create a very basic classifieds list, classifieds were one of the first early “hits” of the internet, disrupting newspapers and one of their traditionally most consistent revenue streams (not so anymore, of course).

Over the years, the tech behind what constitutes a “classified ad” has changed, but those in the market are now competing with a wide plethora of alternatives that leverage social and geographical networks to connect people to things or services they might like to buy or rent, including the likes of Facebook’s Marketplace but also a lot of mobile apps and more. And some of these completely undercut the business model of the original disruptors.

That has meant that those who have established themselves in the space have played on consolidation to grow and improve their economies of scale.

“With the acquisition of eBay Classifieds Group, Adevinta becomes the largest online classifieds company globally, with a unique portfolio of leading marketplace brands. We believe the combination of the two companies, with their complementary businesses, creates one of the most exciting and compelling equity stories in the online classifieds sector,” said Rolv Erik Ryssdal, CEO of Adevinta, in a statement.

“We have been impressed with eBay Classifieds Group’s achievements in recent years, leading across markets with nationally recognized brands including Mobile.de, Gumtree, Marktplaats, dba, Bilbasen, Kijiji, 2dehands, 2ememain, Vivanuncios, Automobile.it, Motors.co.uk, Autotrader (Australia), Carsguide (Australia), and eBay Kleinanzeigen, and innovating consistently across its product portfolio and advertising technology platform.”

For now there are no announcements of layoffs or other moves, with eBay’s classifieds executive team coming over with the deal.

“This deal is a testament to the growth and potential of the eBay Classifieds business,” said Alessandro Coppo, SVP and GM, eBay Classifieds Group. “We are excited for our local classifieds brands to join Adevinta and shape a global leader in an industry full of potential.”

The deal is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2021, subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals.

As part of, Schibsted will acquire eBay Classifieds’ Danish business once the deal closes.

“Schibsted’s Board of Directors and management strongly supports the agreement between Adevinta and eBay, as we are confident that it will further strengthen the value creation potential for Schibsted and the rest of Adevinta’s shareholders. Schibsted intends to continue to contribute to the value creation for all Adevinta shareholders as a significant long-term anchor shareholder,” said Kristin Skogen Lund, CEO of Schibsted in s a statement.

 

Plum, the London and Athens-based fintech that offers a ‘smart’ money management app to help you improve your “financial resilience,” has raised a further $10 million in funding, as it gears up for European expansion.

The new round is led by Japan’s Global Brain, and the European Bank for Research and Development, which has participated in previous Plum funding rounds.

In addition, the company has received further funding from early backer VentureFriends, matched by the U.K. taxpayer via the U.K. government’s Future Fund scheme. Plum has raised $19.3 million in total since being founded by Victor Trokoudes (an early TransferWise employee) and Alex Michaelin in 2016.

Launched in the U.K. the following year, Plum is one of a number of fintech startups that is vying to become a user’s financial hub or control centre, in a way that goes far beyond the first generation of personal finance manager apps and bank account aggregators.

You link the app to you bank account and gain access to a range of functionality including savings, investments and analysis of your utility bills to help you make better purchasing decisions. Like similar apps, Plum’s “artificial intelligence” also deems what you can afford to save by analysing your bank transactions. It then puts money away each month in the form of round-ups and/or regular savings.

You can open an ISA investment account and invest based on themes, such as only in “ethical companies” or technology. Another related feature is “Splitter,” which, as the name suggests, lets you split your automatic savings between Plum savings and investments, selecting the percentage amounts to go into each pot from 0-100%.

In a call with Trokoudes, he talked me through a spew of recent Plum updates that he says bring it much closer to fulfilling its financial control centre mission and being a candidate to replace your individual banking apps.

Crucially, you can now link all of your accounts to Plum, whereas previously Plum only let you access a single linked bank account. This gives you “full visibility” of your saving, spending and investments all in a single app.

One the roadmap is also the ability to make payments via Open Banking — and Trokoudes doesn’t rule out a Plum card in the future as a complimentary feature with additional benefits, not a core offering, unlike numerous competitors.

More immediately, Plum is launching interest for savers who use Plum to set money aside but don’t want to invest any or all of it. Paid users are being offered an interest rate of 0.6% for instant access savings and 0.75% for 95 days notice. Plum users on its free tier can earn 0.35% interest.

Trokoudes explained that there’s also the option to split a percentage of the money put aside automatically, allocating deposits between the new interest-bearing account and Plum-powered investments.

Meanwhile, armed with fresh capital, Plum plans to launch in Spain and France by the end of 2020. The company claims 1 million registered users in U.K., and now employs more than 60 people split across London, U.K. and Athens, Greece. Trokoudes tells me it will scale up further to 80 employees by the end of 2020 and is aiming for 5 million users across Europe by the end of 2021.

Adds Naoki Kamimaeda, partner and Europe office representative at Global Brain Corporation: “More users have started using fintech apps and personal financial management apps across the globe, to be more efficient and be better off. Among these fintech apps, Plum has a very unique position and very bold ambition to be a partner of individuals to save more money and manage their financial life in an easier and more effective manner”.

A number of ride-sharing companies are feeling the strain from reduced business, with many consumers still reluctant to travel, and especially to travel in surroundings that might increase the risk of spreading or catching the novel coronavirus. But today, one of the startups in the space is announcing a significant round of funding to continue growing in its target sector of corporate travel, underscoring where there may still be some existing and growing opportunities.

Gett, the London and Israel-based ride-sharing company that competes with the likes of Uber and many others to provide private car rides on-demand, has raised $100 million. Gett’s CEO and founder Dave Waiser told TechCrunch that it is all primary equity capital, and the company says it plans to use it to continue investing in its B2B business, which has been growing — not shrinking or staying flat — in the midst of the global health pandemic.

“The way people move around in cities is changing dramatically as a result of COVID-19 and businesses are seeking to optimise costs and to put in place efficient and safe ground travel solutions for their employees,” said Waiser, in a statement. “Our mobility software is helping businesses thrive by empowering people to be their best on the go. Being fully funded and reaching a key milestone in our profitability journey is an important step for the Company. The proceeds will help us grow our unique corporate SaaS platform internationally, while we consider an IPO in the future, to further accelerate our expansion.”

The company turned operationally profitable in December 2019 and had said it planned to go public in 2020, but it sounds like that timeline, if it happens, has now been pushed back to 2021. Gett says it has met its “original financial targets that were set pre-COVID-19.” It also reached profitability in each of its core markets in June, and is on target now to be cashflow positive in 2021, ahead of a “potential” IPO.

“It’s a luxury, enabling flexibility for the company to go public when it’s best, rather than from the cash needs reasoning as many (money losing) companies have to do nowadays,” Waiser said.

Gett is not disclosing the names of any of its investors in this round except to note that it’s a mix of new and existing backers, nor is it disclosing its valuation.

Waiser said the reason for that is that the round is still open and oversubscribed, so it plans to announce a list of investors after it closes.

For some context, though, Gett has now raised $750 million with investors including VW, Access and its founder Len Blavatnik, Kreos, MCI and more, and its last valuation was $1.5 billion, pegged to a $200 million fundraise in May 2019.

Gett started operations years ago serving both consumers and corporate users but in recent years has honed its focus specifically on business accounts. No surprise, when you think about it, considering the capital intensiveness, competitiveness, and subsequent poor unit economics of scaling a consumer-focused ridesharing business (a confluence of factors we’ve seen played out at Uber, Lyft, Grab and many others).

Gett’s turn to B2B has seen it pick up some 15,000 corporate customers, including one-third of the Fortune 500. What has been interesting too is the approach Gett has taken to scale: today, it provides rides in some 1,500 cities, but a part of that footprint is served not directly by Gett but in a partnership with Lyft — the result of a deal Gett inked with the company in November 2019 after the former shut down its Juno operations in New York City. It’s been expanding that list to include other third-party partnerships in the mix.

While partnerships may not yield margins as strong as those Gett has in direct operations, it provides a plethora of analytics and invoicing services around the actual ride, and secures the corporate accounts, which provides other revenue streams to offset that. It claims that its services ultimately undercut other ground transportation options for corporates by about 25%.

While a lot of consumers may have curtailed their Uber rides in recent months, the business market has had seen a turn to ensuring that the travel that its users are taking is well-controlled when it has to be done, specifically to meet specific safety standards. That has been the sweet spot for Gett, with its very specific B2B approach.

“The completion of the fundraising during the pandemic is a clear expression of confidence by our shareholders and new investors in Gett’s vision to focus on the corporate market and its plan to expand globally, as well as in the Company’s strong operational and financial performance,” said Amos Genish, Gett chairman, in a statement.

In what could be a starting gun for the commercialization of the cell-based meat business, upstart cultivated meat company Higher Steaks said it has managed to produce samples of its first products — bacon strips and pork belly made in a lab from cellular material.

With the revelation, Higher Steaks, a bootstrapped Cambridge, UK-based company, leapfrogs into a competitive position with a number of far larger companies that have raised far more capital.

“There’s still a lot of work until it’s commercial,” said Higher Steaks chief executive Benjamina Bollag, but the revelation of a pork belly product that’s made from 50 percent cultivated cells and a bacon product which contains 70 percent meat grown from a cell material in a laboratory is something of a milestone for the industry.  

The remaining ingredients in Higher Steaks bacon and pork belly are a mixture of plant based, proteins, fats, and starches to bind the cellular material together. To achieve this first step on its road to commercialization, HIgher Steaks tapped the expertise of an undisclosed chef to formulate the meat into an approximation of the pork belly and bacon.

At this stage, the pilot was more to show what Higher Steaks can do rather than what the company will do, said Bollag.

“In the future it will be scaffolding,” said Bollag. “It’s more showing what our meat can do and what we’re working on. In the future it will be with scaffolding.”

A number of companies including Tantti Laboratories, Matrix Meats, and Prellis Biologics all make the kind of biomaterial nano-scale scaffolding that could be used as a frame on which to grow structures equivalent to the fibrous textures of muscle.

The commercial viability of products from companies like Higher Steaks, Memphis Meats, Aleph Farms, Meatable, Integriculture, Mosa Meat and Supermeat, depends on more than just companies like Tantti and Matrix. but also on the ability of Thermo Fisher, Future Fields, and Merck to bring down the cost of the cell cultures that are required to grow the animal cells.

In all, some thirty cell-based meat startups have launched globally since 2014 and they’re all looking for a slice of the $1.4 trillion meat market.

Meanwhile demand for pork continues to rise even as supplies have been decimated by an outbreak of African Swine Fever that could have killed as much as 40 percent of China’s population of pigs in 2019.

“Our mission is to provide meat that is healthy and sustainable without the consumer making any sacrifices on taste,” said Bollag in a statement. “The production of the first ever cultivated bacon and pork belly is proof that new techniques can help meet overwhelming demand for pork products globally.”

Given the highly capitalized competitors that Higher Steaks faces off against, the company is looking for industry partners to help commercialize its technology.

To improve its competitive position, Higher Steaks recently hired Dr. James Clark, the former chief technology officer of PredictImmune.

“I was always quite intrigued by cultured meat production, a mix of both science and food production. In 2013 I watched the first cultured meat burger from Mark Post costing £250k, cooked on the BBC,” said Clark. “I was approached about joining Higher Steaks earlier this year and was attracted to joining primarily by the science along with the ambition and energy of the Higher Steaks founder Benjamina Bollag. I believe Higher Steaks is a company with a technology to be disruptive in the cultured meat area and at my career stage I was looking for a challenge.”

Brought in to scale the cultivated meat process at Higher Steaks, Clark has led the development of biotech and pharma products at early stage and publicly traded companies.

“The addition of Dr James Clark to the team gives Higher Steaks a significant advantage,” said Dr. Ruth Helen Faram, Head of R&D. “Cultivated pork belly and bacon have never been demonstrated before and Higher Steaks is the first to develop a prototype containing over 70% cultivated pork muscle, without the use of bovine serum.”

Consumers shouldn’t expect to see Higher Steaks’ pork belly on store shelves or in restaurants anytime soon, Bollag cautioned. “We’re still in the thousands of pounds per kilogram.”

The company does expect to have a larger tasting event later this year.

You’ve heard of e-bike and e-scooter rentals startups spreading across cities. But today three veterans of the startup world will launch what appears to be a brand new take on the “e-revolution” sweeping cities in the wake of the global pandemic: subscription e-bikes, or, if you will, ‘EaaS’ or ‘E-bikes-as-a-Service”. The previous founders of Soundcloud and Jimdo will today launch Dance, a new subscription e-bike service, backed by a stellar line-up of European investors.

The invite-only program kicks-off first in Berlin with an all-inclusive service package and its own design of e-bike. The founders’ goal is to emphasize the community aspects of the rental service, just as they did with Soundcloud.

Dance is co-founded by SoundCloud founders Eric Quidenus-Wahlforss and Alexander Ljung, together with the co-founder of Jimdo, Christian Springub. While Quidenus-Wahlforss and Ljung are best known for co-founding Soundcloud over ten years ago as CTO and CEO respectively, Quidenus-Wahlforss is taking the CEO role this time, while Ljung will be chairman. Ljung remains chairman of Soundcloud in the meantime.

The main institutional backer is Berlin-based VC BlueYard Capital, together with entrepreneurs and investors such as Ilkka Paananen (Founder & CEO Supercell), Jeannette zu Fürstenberg (La Famiglia), Kevin P. Ryan (Founder & CEO, AlleyCorp), Neil Parikh (Founder & CSO Casper), Bjarke Ingels (Founder & CEO BIG Architects), Boyan Slat (Founder & CEO The Ocean Cleanup) and several others.

Here’s how it will work: A fully assembled e-bike is delivered to a subscriber within 24 hours. If the bike needs maintenance or gets stolen, it is replaced “immediately”. That’s more or less it. Here’s the current design of the bike:

Eric Quidenus-Wahlforss, co-founder and CEO of DANCE said: “Dance means having a state-of-the-art e-bike always and only available to you, but without the hassle of buying and owning it… Dance is the perfect solution for those who are looking for a healthy, environmentally friendly, time-saving and joyful form of mobility.”

“We are convinced that DANCE provides the missing piece of the puzzle at the right time to accelerate a broad and lasting movement from individual car ownership to daily use of e-bikes,” he added.

The startup notes that 45 percent of Germans are interested in owning an e-bike, while the European market is projected to double by 2025, according to some estimates.

This could be a disruptive moment in the e-bike space. E-bikes are generally considered the fastest and most efficient means of individual urban transport on routes up to 10 kilometres, but the pandemic has put new emphasis on their utility.

But with an average purchasing price of 2,300 Euros, e-bikes can be expensive and have a higher probability of being stolen, leaving many consumers out of the market.

At the same time more than 930 kilometres of new cycling infrastructure have been implemented in Europe since March due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which has shifted populations away from ‘risky’ public transport.

Ljung commented: “You save time and you save the environment. You exercise, but you don’t sweat. And besides that, riding an e-bike is simply joyful. Music was one of the first industries to experience the shift from ownership to subscription. At Soundcloud we helped usher in this transformation… Now we want to transfer this experience to the mobility space and start a movement that will ultimately make our cities more livable.”

Springub added: “We have carefully analyzed the mobility market in the past years and we are deeply concerned that despite the new options out there and the clear necessities set by climate protection, car ownership continues to be high, along with all its negative implications such as congestion and pollution.”

Amazon’s annual sales holiday, Prime Day, has typically been a global event — one so big, it often crashes the Amazon retail website as consumers. This year, however, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the retailer’s plans. Today, Amazon officially confirmed reports that it will delay Prime Day in the U.S. until sometime later this year. It will also host a Prime Day in India next month, from August 6 through August 7.

This will be the first time that Prime Day didn’t occur on the same day for all participating markets — a list that has been gotten longer over the years, as Amazon expanded Prime Day outside the U.S.

Prime Day 2019, for example, brought the sales event for the first time to the United Arab Emirates, which then joined other markets, including the U.S., U.K., Spain, Singapore, Netherlands, Mexico, Luxembourg, Japan, Italy, India, Germany, France, China, Canada, Belgium, Austria, and Australia.

It’s already clear that Prime Day was running late. Last year’s event was held July 15 through July 17, and prior events were also held around the same time frame.

It’s not surprising the COVID-19 pandemic shifted Amazon’s focus. Instead of needing a special event to boost otherwise slower summer sales, Amazon was hit with a deluge of online orders as U.S. government lockdowns kicked in, that it initially had to limit shipment of some items in order to keep up with demand for household staples, medical supplies, and other frequently-ordered products. In addition, Amazon announced on April 30 it had hired over 175,000 additional people to work in its fulfillment and delivery network to meet the increased customer demand.

The overall e-commerce market is surging due to the pandemic. According to eMarketer, e-commerce sales will climb by 18% in 2020 to reach $709.78 billion, representing 14.5% of total U.S. retail sales. Amazon, as a result, will also increase its market share to 38% this year, the firm estimated.

In other words, Amazon doesn’t really need a Prime Day this year. It’s doing just fine, thank you very much.

News of a Prime Day delay have been making the rounds for months.

In April, Reuters reported Amazon delay Prime Day due to coronavirus until at least August. In July, CNBC said Prime Day had been pushed to October.

Amazon says it still intends to host the U.S. Prime Day this year, but isn’t saying when. It also wouldn’t confirm if other non-U.S. markets will be held at the same time as the U.S. Prime Day, as before, or if they will each see their own, individual Prime Day events, like India.

The Prime Day event in India will start at midnight on August 6 and run until August 7, offering deals and savings, including those on entertainment offerings, Amazon says.

“Over the last five years, Prime Day has become a special celebration and time for Prime members to shop incredible deals for themselves and for friends and family – and it’s something we look forward to every year,” an Amazon spokesperson said, in a statement about the new dates.”This year we’ll be holding Prime Day later than usual, while ensuring the safety of our employees and supporting our customers and selling partners. We are excited Prime members in India will see savings on August 6-7, and that members all around the world will experience Prime Day later this year. We look forward to sharing more details soon,” they added.

 

Indonesia-based ride-hailing company and “super app” Gojek said today that it has named a new chief technology officer. Severan Rault, who previously held leadership positions at Amazon and Microsoft, takes over the role from Ajey Gore, who announced last month he was leaving for personal reasons.

In a statement, the company said Rault will oversee Gojek’s engineering teams in Southeast Asia and India and report to co-chief executive officer Kevin Aluwi.

Rault has a long history of leading engineering teams at large tech companies, as well as his own startups.

Before joining Gojek, Rault worked at Betawave, a virtual reality studio he founded in 2016. During his stint at Amazon, Rault was one of the founders of Prime Air, the company’s drone delivery program. At Microsoft, he was the principal architect of Bing, the company’s search engine. Rault’s other experience include founding Kikker Interactive, a wireless solutions provider that was acquired by Microsoft in 2008.

Rault’s appointment comes at a critical time for Gojek as it faces competition from rival Grab and deals with the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last month, Gojek said it was laying off 430 employees, or about 9% of its workforce, and closing GoLife, its lifestyle services division, to focus on its core payments, transportation and food delivery businesses as part of its long-term response to the pandemic.

Founded in 2010 as a motorcycle ride-hailing company, Gojek has since transformed itself into a “super app” that offers online payments and a roster of on-demand services, including transportation, ecommerce deliveries and logistics. Gojek recently added Facebook and PayPal to a list of high-profile investors, including Google and Tencent.

Gojek disclosed in March that it is valued at $10 billion and now has over 170 million users, but it faces fierce rivalry from Grab, another Southeast Asian on-demand ride-hailing and logistics platform that is also building an online financial services business. With a valuation of $14 billion, Grab is the larger company. Earlier this year, reports emerged that the two were discussing a merger, which Gojek denied and Grab declined to comment on.

In statement, Rault said, “It is a time like no other to be at Gojek. The company is entering a critical phase as it moves from startup to maturation and it’s special to be a part of that. Building systems and processes for a business of Gojek’s scale and complexity is a challenge one rarely enjoys in their career and I’m grateful for the opportunity.”

A new policy-focused nonprofit that emerged from the recent wave of big tech scrutiny is calling for members of Facebook’s Oversight Board to either step up or step down. In an open letter, Accountable Tech urges the five U.S.-based Facebook Oversight Board members to “demand the Board be given real authority” or quit their positions.

“Each of you were selected to serve on this Board because of your outspoken commitment to free expression, human rights, and democratic values,” the letter’s authors write. “Now is the time to uphold those principles. We humbly ask that you refuse to be complicit in this Facebook charade –– that you demand sweeping and immediate changes, or walk away.”

Accountable Tech is a progressive project founded by grassroots campaign organizer and director of the 2017 Tax March Nicole Gill and Jesse Lehrich, who served as foreign policy spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid. Lehrich worked on the Clinton campaign’s response to Russian disinformation efforts that year, giving him a front row seat to emerging online threats to U.S. elections.

“Facebook specializes in window dressing,” Gill told TechCrunch. “They have been touting the Oversight Board for years as this grandiose solution, but the platform’s problems are more urgent than ever, and the Board is powerless.”

A handful of other groups also signed the open letter, including the Center For American Progress Action Fund, Free Press and the Sierra Club. The letter cites findings from Facebook’s recent civil rights audit that cast doubt on the board’s real power and also notes the oversight body’s delayed timeline. First announced in late 2018, the board won’t be up and running in time for the 2020 election.

Because it is ostensibly tasked with making decisions about what content should be removed from Facebook and Instagram, in theory the board could have played a role in ridding those platforms of election-related misinformation — a looming threat with November around the corner. But restrictive bylaws coupled with a focus on reviewing content takedowns rather than content left up meant the oversight effort was widely regarded as toothless from the outset.

Board aside, Facebook is making some efforts to at least disseminate useful voting information to users, a defensive posture the company feels more comfortable in compared to playing offense against potential rule breaking. Last week, the company rolled out info labels that link to vetted election information on all voting-related posts from federal elected officials, a feature that will soon expand to all voting posts in the U.S.

In early June, Accountable Tech launched a memorable Facebook ad campaign targeting the company’s employees on their own platform. The ads, which urged Facebook workers to hold the company to account, came a day after some employees staged a virtual walkout to protest a now-infamous post in which the president threatened to shoot people protesting the police killing of George Floyd.

Facebook also faced scrutiny recently for hosting Trump’s false claims about mail-in voting and those falsehoods remain live on the platform without context or correction. These instances and others are cause for concern as the stakes for social platforms during the 2020 election inch higher and higher, worries made explicit by the open letter’s authors.

“As we enter an unprecedented election season—amid a global pandemic, an inflection point for racial justice, and a crisis of truth—we cannot accept Facebook’s toxic status quo, much less a toothless Oversight Board that lends it a false air of legitimacy.”

Founded by former Apple engineers, a new app called Struck wants to be the Tinder for the Co-Star crowd. In other words, it’s an astrology-based matchmaker. But it took close to 10 attempts over several months for the startup to get its app approved by Apple for inclusion in the App Store. In nearly every rejection, app reviewers flagged the app as “spam” either due to its use of astrology or, once, simply because it was designed for online dating.

Apple continually cited section 4.3 of its App Store Review Guidelines in the majority of Struck’s rejections, with the exception of two that were unrelated to the app’s purpose. (Once, it was rejected for use of a broken API. Another rejection was over text that needed correction. It had still called itself a “beta.”)

The 4.3 guideline is something Apple wields to keep the App Store free from what it considers to be clutter and spam. In spirit, the guideline makes sense, as it gives Apple permission to make more subjective calls over low-quality apps.

Today, the guideline states that developers should “avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated,” and reminds developers that the App Store has “enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already.”

In the document, Apple promises to reject anything that “doesn’t offer a high-quality experience.”

This guideline was also updated in March to further raise the bar on dating apps and create stricter rules around “fortune-telling” apps, among other things.

Struck, unfortunately, found itself in the crosshairs of this new enforcement. But while its app may use astrology in a matchmaking process, its overall design and business model is nowhere close to resembling that of a shady “fortune-telling” app.

In fact, Struck hasn’t even implemented its monetization model, which may involve subscriptions and à la carte features at a later date.

Rather, Struck has been carefully and thoughtfully designed to provide an alternative to market leaders like Tinder. Built by a team of mostly women, including two people of color and one LGBTQ+ team member, the app is everything mainstream dating apps are not.

Struck doesn’t, for example, turn online dating into a Hot-or-Not style game. It works by first recommending matches by way of its understanding of users’ detailed birth charts and aspects. But you don’t have to be a true believer in astrology to enjoy the experience. You can use the app just for fun if you’re open-minded, the company website says. “Skeptics welcome,” the website advertises.

And while Tinder and others tend to leverage psychological tricks to make their apps more addictive, Struck aims to slow things down in order to allow users to once again focus on romance and conversations. There are no endless catalogs of head shots to swipe upon in Struck. Instead, it sends you no more than four matches per day and you can message only one of the four.

The app’s overall goal is to give users time to analyze their matches’ priorities and values, not just how they appear in photos.

If anything, this is precisely the kind of unique, thoughtfully crafted app the App Store should cater to, not the kind it should ban.

“We come from an Apple background. We come from a tech background. We were very insistent on having a good, quality user interface and user experience,” explains Struck co-founder and CEO Rachel Lo. “That was a big focus for us in our beta testing. We honestly didn’t expect any pushback when we submitted to the App Store,” she says.

But Apple did push back. After first submitting the app in May, Struck went through around nine rounds of rejections where reviewers continued to claim it was spam simply for being an astrology-based dating application. The team would then pull out astrology features hoping to get the app approved… with no luck. Finally, one reviewer told them Struck was being rejected for being a dating app.

“I remember thinking, we’re going to have to shut down this project. There’s not really a way through,” recounts Lo. The Struck team, in a last resort, posted to their Instagram page about their struggles and how they felt Apple’s rejections were unfair given the app’s quality. Plus, as Lo points out, the rejection had a tinge of sexism associated with it.

“Obviously, astrology is a heavily female-dominated category,” she says. “I took issue with the guideline that says ‘burps, farts and fortune-telling apps.’ I made a fuss about that verbiage and how offensive it is for people in most of the world who actually observe astrology.”

Despite the founders’ connections within the technology industry, thanks to their ex-Apple status and relationships with journalists who would go on to plead their case, Struck was not getting approved.

Finally, after several supporters left comments on Lisa Jackson’s Instagram where she had posted about WWDC, the app was — for unknown reasons — suddenly given the green light. It’s unclear if the Instagram posts made a difference. Even the app reviewer couldn’t explain why the app was now approved, when asked.

The whole debacle has soured the founders on the way Apple today runs its App Store, and sees them supportive of the government’s antitrust investigations into Apple’s business, which could result in new regulations.

“We had no course of action. And it felt really, really wrong for this giant company to basically be squashing small developers, says Lo. “I don’t know what’s going to become of our app — we hope it’s successful and we hope we can build a good, diverse business from it,” she continues. “But the point was that we weren’t even being given the opportunity to distribute our app that we had spent nine months building.”

Though Apple is turning its nose up at astrology apps, apparently, you don’t have to take astrology to heart to have fun with apps like Struck or those that inspired it, such as Co-Star. These newer Zodiac apps aren’t as obsessed with predicting your future as they are with offering a framework to examine your emotions, your place in the world and your interpersonal relationships. That led Co-Star to snag a $5 million seed round in 2019, one of many astrology apps investors were chasing last year as consumer spend among the top 10 in this space jumped 65% over 2018.

Struck, ultimately, wants to give the market something different from Tinder, and that has value.

“We want to challenge straight men since it is — quote unquote — a traditionally feminine-looking app,” says Lo. “For us, it’s 2020. It’s shocking to us that every dating app looks like a slot machine. We want to make something that has a voice and makes women feel comfortable. And I think our usership split between the genders kind of proved that.”

Struck is live today on the App Store — well, for who knows how long.

It initially caters to users in the Bay Area and LA and will arrive in New York on Friday. Based on user feedback, it will slowly roll out to more markets where it sees demand.

SpaceX has managed a first – catching both halves of the fairing used on one of its Falcon 9 rocket launches, according to CEO and founder Elon Musk. The fairing is a two-piece protective cover that surrounds the cargo on the launch vehicle as it ascends through Earth’s atmosphere on its way to space. SpaceX has been attempting to recover the fairing using two ships equipped with special nets designed to catch them as they fall, but this is the first time that the company has managed to actually catch both, rather than just one.

SpaceX attempts to reduce the cost of its launches by building In as much reusability as it can, which is why it has engineered a way to propulsively land its first stage rocket boosters back on Earth for refurbishment post launch. That part has been refined and is now fairly reliable, with SpaceX having landed a total of 57 of its spent first stages so far, including the one from today’s launch.

The fairing recovery attempts have not been as successful so far. While the company has recovered fairing halves from the ocean, and even reused them it after retrieving them from the ocean, it has only caught single fairing halves previously using the ships at sea, with a first catch on the STP-2 mission last June, and another in January.

SpaceX estimates that it can save as much as $6 million per launch by recovering and reusing the fairing halves – another considerable savings on top of the reused boosters. Catching them using the nets rather than retrieving them from the ocean after a controlled soft landing saves them a lot of time, effort, cost and risk to personnel, making it a much more effective way to reuse that component provided they can ensure the ships are able to reliably catch the fairings as they descend.

The fairing halves don’t have any propellant systems to control their landing like the Falcon 9 first stages do – instead, they’re slowed via parachutes, meaning there’s a bigger reliance on the ships to actually be positioned correctly to anticipate their fall, since it’s not specifically programmed. But there’s another big reason Musk and SpaceX want to get this aspect of the launch system right: Musk has said previously that he’d potentially consider adapting the fairing catching ships to also catch Crew Dragon capsules as they return to Earth, reducing risk for astronauts and recovery crews who currently have to collect them from the Ocean.