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Fintech startup N26 now has a proper funding war chest to face the economic downturn. The Berlin-based startup has extended its Series D round with another $100 million of funding at the same valuation of $3.5 billion. In total, N26 has raised $570 million as part of its Series D round.

N26’s Series D seems like a never-ending list of big numbers. In January 2019, the company announced a $300 million Series D at a $2.7 billion valuation. In July 2019, the company added $170 million at a $3.5 billion valuation. And now, here comes another $100 million.

Like the last extension, there’s no new investor on board. Major investors in the company participated in the extension funding.

You may have noticed that the valuation didn’t go up this time. “I’d say it’s a very good valuation,” co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf told me. While N26 started the fundraising process before the economic downturn, the company thinks it’s already quite an achievement that the valuation didn’t go down.

When the crisis arrived, it made even more sense to go ahead and extend the Series D round. Stalf called it an “opportunity without a lot of effort.”

Like most challenger banks, N26 generates revenue from premium subscriptions, interchange fees, and third-party and in-house financial products that induce fees, such as overdraft and credit.

The startup noticed a huge shift away from cash as people use their debit card and contactless payment even more than before. Online payments have been on the rise. Overall, spending volume has been down “20 to 30% depending on the market,” Stalf said. Revenue from interchange fees has been down.

Conversely, account balances have been going up as people are postponing payments. N26 says that subscriptions are “quite stable” and churn isn’t higher than usual.

With today’s new funding, the company wants to double down on its most promising markets — Europe, the U.S. and Brazil. Earlier this year, N26 shut down its operations in the U.K.

“Unfortunately, we were all surprised by the clearness of the election that happened around the new year with a fast Brexit,” Stalf said. He then said that it would have required a big investment to apply to a new banking license in the U.K. and adapt the product to work with the new system.

“For me, it was a super clear decision. I would have loved to stay in the UK,” Stalf said. “But there are more attractive markets out there like the U.S. and Brazil,” he added.

In the U.S., N26 is iterating to adapt its product to the market. You can now leverage ACH transfers to top up your N26 account using another bank account. N26 said it had 250,000 customers in the U.S. back in January.

In Brazil, the company applied to a fintech license. “We hope to obtain a license within six months, maybe earlier,” Stalf said. But the company will assess the situation when it has secured its license as N26 could postpone its launch in Brazil due to the economic crisis.

I asked the company about potential layoffs and hiring freeze. “We're much more selective on hiring. We're still hiring but we're a little bit more picky,” Stalf said. Some employees, such as office managers and event staff, are now covered by short-time working in Germany. “They still get the majority of their pay but they don't need to work full time for you,” Stalf said.

Glance, which serves media content, news, and casual games on the lock screen of Android -powered smartphones, has amassed 100 million daily active users, it said today.

The subsidiary of ad-firm InMobi Group reached the milestone in 21 months in what appears to be the shortest duration for any popular internet service to gain their first 100 million daily active users, said Naveen Tewari, founder and chief executive of InMobi Group, in an interview with TechCrunch.

Glance uses AI to offer personalized experience to its users. The service replaces the otherwise empty lock screen with locally relevant news, stories, and casual games. Late last year, InMobi acquired Roposo, a Gurgaon-headquartered startup, that has enabled it to introduce short-form videos on the platform.

“Introducing short-form videos and games on Glance has helped us increase the engagement level. About 25% of our users actively play games on Glance,” said Tewari. The firm is now working to make these short-form videos available in many local languages. (You can also try the service on your mobile web browser.)

In addition to offering a standalone app on Google Play Store, Glance ships pre-installed on several smartphone models. InMobi Group maintains tie-ups with nearly every top Android smartphone vendor including Xiaomi, the top player in India, and Samsung.

But users can easily disable the service, said Tewari, adding that the 100 million users the firm is reporting today are those who consciously engage with content on Glance. Users spend about 25 minutes consuming content on Glance each day, he said.

Sitting on the lock screen, perhaps the most coveted real estate on a smartphone to reach a user, has allowed Glance to deliver any information to a very large number of users in a short time. Tewari said more than 40 million users reacted to Glance informing them about India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech last month surrounding the lockdown in the country, for instance.

“We are not just a short-form video platform. We are not just a gaming platform nor one that serves just news. Given where we sit, we cater to nearly everything that is out there across the world. So everyone has something to consume,” he said.

The service is currently available in India, its biggest market with more than 80 million users, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Tewari said the firm plans to roll out Glance across the globe in the next two years.

Glance, which raised $45 million last year, is currently not monetizing its users. Tewari said he has experimented with a few ideas, but won’t make any push on this front for another one to two quarters.

French startup Back Market has raised a new $120 million funding round from Goldman Sachs, Aglaé Ventures and Eurazeo Growth. The company operates a marketplace for refurbished smartphones and electronics devices.

Back Market doesn’t refurbish devices in house. Instead, it partners with certified sellers and let them list their items on the site. The startup requires a 12-month warranty in order to reassure sellers and sell on the platform.

There are now 1,000 certified sellers using Back Market to sell refurbished goods. In other words, refurbishment used to be a fragmented industry and Back Market is aggregating offer and demand on a single online platform. It is currently live in the U.S., France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the U.K. and Austria.

With today’s funding round, the startup doesn’t want to expand to a ton of new countries. Instead, it’ll double down on core markets, starting with the U.S., the U.K. and Germany.

The company will expand its quality control team and introduce new services around refurbishments in order to control a bigger chunk of the stack. You can think about sourcing spare parts for sellers, introducing test protocols, etc.

Refurbished smartphones and gadgets represent a huge opportunities for the coming years. First, demand for new smartphones have been steadily going down for a while. It’s hard to justify buying a brand new phone when your existing phone is still insanely fast and capable.

Second, many consumers have been looking at ways to reduce their environmental footprint. While smartphone manufacturers greatly emphasize their recycling processes, a used device is always going to win against a brand new device.

Third, Samsung, Apple and other smartphone manufacturers now sell ultra-premium models that cost a small fortune. Many simply can’t afford to buy a device that costs more than $1,000. But those same devices are going to cost less in a couple of years on Back Market.

French startup Back Market has raised a new $120 million funding round from Goldman Sachs, Aglaé Ventures and Eurazeo Growth. The company operates a marketplace for refurbished smartphones and electronics devices.

Back Market doesn’t refurbish devices in house. Instead, it partners with certified sellers and let them list their items on the site. The startup requires a 12-month warranty in order to reassure sellers and sell on the platform.

There are now 1,000 certified sellers using Back Market to sell refurbished goods. In other words, refurbishment used to be a fragmented industry and Back Market is aggregating offer and demand on a single online platform. It is currently live in the U.S., France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the U.K. and Austria.

With today’s funding round, the startup doesn’t want to expand to a ton of new countries. Instead, it’ll double down on core markets, starting with the U.S., the U.K. and Germany.

The company will expand its quality control team and introduce new services around refurbishments in order to control a bigger chunk of the stack. You can think about sourcing spare parts for sellers, introducing test protocols, etc.

Refurbished smartphones and gadgets represent a huge opportunities for the coming years. First, demand for new smartphones have been steadily going down for a while. It’s hard to justify buying a brand new phone when your existing phone is still insanely fast and capable.

Second, many consumers have been looking at ways to reduce their environmental footprint. While smartphone manufacturers greatly emphasize their recycling processes, a used device is always going to win against a brand new device.

Third, Samsung, Apple and other smartphone manufacturers now sell ultra-premium models that cost a small fortune. Many simply can’t afford to buy a device that costs more than $1,000. But those same devices are going to cost less in a couple of years on Back Market.

Omilia, a company headquartered in Greece that has built a conversational AI for customer support, has raised $20 million in its first ever funding round, having been bootstrapped since 2002.

Backing comes from Grafton Capital and will be used to invest in further growth, after Omilia grew revenue by “more than” 100% in 2019, with the majority of new customers based in the U.S.

Founded by Dimitris Vassos (CEO and Chief Architect), Pelias Ioannidis (Partner and CFO) and John Nikolaidis (Partner and Chief Commercial Officer), Omilia offers a customer care virtual assistant that uses machine learning to offer what it claims is a more “human-like” experience.

It works on all platforms – phone, web chat, social networks, SMS, email, smart speakers and apps – and integrates with existing customer support systems. The technology has also been adapted for 21 languages, including regional dialects and accents.

“Having seen first-hand the pain points — but also the many benefits — of speech technology, we founded Omilia to effectively destroy the traditional ‘IVR’ [interactive voice response technology], which everyone loved to hate, and re-invent it as a truly customer-centric solution,” Omilia co-founder Dimitris Vassos tells me. “Our mission was to evolve and adapt the technology so that users don’t have to”.

When Omilia first launched, Vassos says that although speech recognition tech was pitched as a way to increase call centre efficiency, many companies didn’t know what to do with it or how to get the best from it.

“They were just putting it out into the market and relying on users to adapt,” he recalls. “This led to what we see in many call centres today: a clunky, automated and frustrating experience. ‘Press 1 or say balance’ to get your balance… and so on. This not only gives customers a poor opinion of brands, but it lowers trust, and doesn’t actually solve the problem of call centre demand. With such systems, people get frustrated and press 0 or repeatedly say ‘advisor’ until they’re connected with a human”.

In response, the Omilia team aimed to build a system that people didn’t need to learn or adapt to, and one that was as close to speaking to a human as possible. The resulting product combines a number of technologies into a single omni-channel conversational platform called DiaManT.

“It uses a natural language engine, trained via machine learning, to listen and respond to queries and uses voice biometrics to verify callers as they speak,” explains the Omilia CEO. “Each process has been built in such a way that the technology is invisible to the final user; as far as they know, they’re getting great customer care, whether that’s from a machine or a human”.

Enterprise-friendly, DiaManT can either be installed on-premise or via the Omilia Cloud Platform, and claims to be agnostic with regards to which contact centre provider or systems a company is using.

Having been trained on “tens of millions” of interactions across multiple industries, Vassos says Omilia’s technology already understands thousands of queries across healthcare, banking, insurance, travel and more, and can easily be tailored to include new or different business rules.

“Plus, because it learns via machine learning, the longer it’s used within these businesses, the more queries and conversations it’s able to handle,” he says. “For instance, if an insurer is getting an increase in calls due to the coronavirus, Omilia knows enough about the business rules to answer and help customers now while constantly evolving as the virus and its impact evolve”.

In addition, Omilia’s platform features “deepVB technology,” which uses voice biometrics to verify callers. The deepVB engine samples the speaker’s voice, and computes the speaker’s voiceprint in real-time. DiaManT then compares the speaker’s current voiceprint with the verified voiceprint it has stored.

“This removes the need for the caller to verify their identity at various points in the call,” adds Vassos. “The advantage of deepVB over competitive offerings is that we can do a very accurate reading with very little speech sample, and in the background. Users don’t need to say anything special. Therefore, we can seamlessly blend this technology in our AI voice bots”.

Beyond Omilia’s full enterprise product, the company offers a “plug-and-play” conversational AI solution dubbed “miniApps,” which can be deployed without any coding or training. They consist of independent natural language components, configurable to different business rules and designed to handle single tasks. Examples include recognising when customers are providing addresses, telephone numbers and dates of birth; credit card details; arranging appointments, confirming information and offering generic multiple choice options.

Meanwhile, Vassos describes Omilia’s typical customer as any company providing front-facing customer care, but says to date this has mainly been banks, insurance firms, telecoms, healthcare, and travel companies.

Ninja Van, a Singapore-based logistics startup, has secured an additional $279 million in fresh funding as it works to scale its operations to keep up with the surge in e-commerce deliveries in six Southeast Asian countries.

Europe’s GeoPost, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group, Monk’s Hill Ventures, Carmenta, Golden Gate Ventures Growth Fund, Intouch Holding, Grab, and two sovereign wealth funds put money in the six-year old startup’s Series D financing round.

The startup, which has raised about $400 million to date, did not disclose its valuation — but an analysis of an early tranche of this round coupled with today’s announcement suggests that Ninja Van is now valued at about $750 million.

Ninja Van claims it delivers more than a million packages across Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. It works with several major e-commerce firms including Shopee, Alibaba’s Lazada, Indonesia’s Tokopedia.

In a statement, Ninja Van said it planned to use the fresh capital to make further inroads into the business-to-business sector, while also growing its other existing services.

Ninja Van, a Singapore-based logistics startup, has secured an additional $279 million in fresh funding as it works to scale its operations to keep up with the surge in e-commerce deliveries in six Southeast Asian countries.

Europe’s GeoPost, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group, Monk’s Hill Ventures, Carmenta, Golden Gate Ventures Growth Fund, Intouch Holding, Grab, and two sovereign wealth funds put money in the six-year old startup’s Series D financing round.

The startup, which has raised about $400 million to date, did not disclose its valuation — but an analysis of an early tranche of this round coupled with today’s announcement suggests that Ninja Van is now valued at about $750 million.

Ninja Van claims it delivers more than a million packages across Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. It works with several major e-commerce firms including Shopee, Alibaba’s Lazada, Indonesia’s Tokopedia.

In a statement, Ninja Van said it planned to use the fresh capital to make further inroads into the business-to-business sector, while also growing its other existing services.

At its Think Digital conference, IBM and Red Hat today announced a number of new services that all center around 5G edge and AI. The fact that the company is focusing on these two areas doesn’t come as a surprise, given that both edge and AI are two of the fastest-growing businesses in enterprise computing. Virtually every telecom company is now looking at how to best capitalize on the upcoming 5G rollouts, and most forward-looking enterprises are trying to figure out how to best plan around this for their own needs.

As IBM’s recently minted president Jim Whitehurst told me ahead of today’s announcement, he believes that IBM (in combination with Red Hat) is able to offer enterprises a very differentiated service because, unlike the large hyper clouds, IBM isn’t interested in locking these companies into a homogeneous cloud.

“Where IBM is competitively differentiated, is around how we think about helping clients on a journey to what we call hybrid cloud,” said Whitehurst, who hasn’t done a lot of media interviews since he took the new role, which still includes managing Red Hat. “Honestly, everybody has hybrid clouds. I wish we had a more differentiated term. One of the things that’s different is how we’re talking about how you think about an application portfolio that, by necessity, you’re going to have in multiple ways. If you’re a large enterprise, you probably have a mainframe running a set of transactional workloads that probably are going to stay there for a long time because there’s not a great alternative. And there’s going to be a set of applications you’re going to want to run in a distributed environment that need to access that data — all the way out to you running a factory floor and you want to make sure that the paint sprayer doesn’t have any defects while it’s painting a door.”

BARCELONA, CATALONIA, SPAIN – 2019/02/25: The IBM logo is seen during MWC 2019. (Photo by Paco Freire/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

He argues that IBM, at its core, is all about helping enterprises think about how to best run their workloads software, hardware and services perspective. “Public clouds are phenomenal, but they are exposing a set of services in a homogeneous way to enterprises,” he noted, while he argues that IBM is trying to weave all of these different pieces together.

Later in our discussion, he argued that the large public clouds essentially force enterprises to fit their workloads to those clouds’ service. “The public clouds do extraordinary things and they’re great partners of ours, but their primary business is creating these homogeneous services, at massive volumes, and saying ‘if your workloads fit into this, we can run it better, faster, cheaper etc.’ And they have obviously expanded out. They’ve added services. They are not saying we can put a box on-premise, but you’re still fitting into their model.”

On the news side, IBM is launching new services to automate business planning, budgeting and forecasting, for example, as well as new AI-driven tools for building and running automation apps that can handle routine tasks either autonomously or with the help of a human counterpart. The company is also launching new tools for call-center automation.

The most important AI announcement is surely Watson AIOps, though, which is meant to help enterprises detect, diagnose and respond to IT anomalies in order to reduce the effects of incidents and outages for a company.

On the telco side, IBM is launching new tools like the Edge Application Manager, for example, to make it easier to enable AI, analytics and IoT workloads on the edge, powered by IBM’s open-source Open Horizon edge computing project. The company is also launching a new Telco Network Cloud manager built on top of Red Hat OpenShift and the ability to also leverage the Red Hat OpenStack Platform (which remains to be an important platform for telcos and represents a growing business for IBM/Red Hat). In addition, IBM is launching a new dedicated IBM Services team for edge computing and telco cloud to help these customers build out their 5G and edge-enabled solutions.

Telcos are also betting big on a lot of different open-source technologies that often form the core of their 5G and edge deployments. Red Hat was already a major player in this space, but the acquisition has only accelerated this, Whitehurst argued. “Since the acquisition […] telcos have a lot more confidence in IBM’s capabilities to serve them long term and be able to serve them in mission-critical context. But importantly, IBM also has the capability to actually make it real now.”

A lot of the new telco edge and hybrid cloud deployments, he also noted, are built on Red Hat technologies but built by IBM, and neither IBM nor Red Hat could have really brought these to fruition in the same way. Red Hat never had the size, breadth and skills to pull off some of these projects, Whitehurst argued.

Whitehurst also argued that part of the Red Hat DNA that he’s bringing to the table now is helping IBM to think more in terms of ecosystems. “The DNA that I think matters a lot that Red Hat brings to the table with IBM — and I think IBM is adopting and we’re running with it — is the importance of ecosystems,” he said. “All of Red Hat’s software is open source. And so really, what you’re bringing to the table is ecosystems.”

It’s maybe no surprise then that the telco initiatives are backed by partners like Cisco, Dell Technologies, Juniper, Intel, Nvidia, Samsung, Packet, Equinix, Hazelcast, Sysdig, Turbonomics, Portworx, Humio, Indra Minsait, EuroTech, Arrow, ADLINK, Acromove, Geniatech, SmartCone, CloudHedge, Altiostar, Metaswitch, F5 Networks and ADVA.

In many ways, Red Hat pioneered the open-source business model and Whitehurst argued that having Red Hat as part of the IBM family means it’s now easier for the company to make the decision to invest even more in open source. “As we accelerate into this hybrid cloud world, we’re going to do our best to leverage open-source technologies to make them real,” he added.

Brothers Martin, Meti and Massi Basiri all left Iran to study abroad in Canada. After struggling with every aspect from the visa process to grade conversions, the brothers saw an opportunity to make the transition to study internationally more seamless. So, they started Applyboard in 2015 at University of Waterloo’s Velocity Garage.

ApplyBoard has two main parts of its business. First, the company helps international students search and apply from a single platform to universities and colleges across the world. Similar to how American students use the Common App to apply to schools, ApplyBoard seeks to be the college undergrad application for international students, and serve as a marketplace. It is free for students.

The other part of ApplyBoard’s business is on the university side. The startup makes money from revenue-sharing agreements with colleges and universities. If a student attends a college from using their services, ApplyBoard gets a cut of the tuition.

While the SaaS-enabled startup did not disclose revenue, it said it took in $300 million in sales last year.

Five years after founding, ApplyBoard has helped assist over 100,000 students across 110 countries to study internationally. Today, the Ontario-based startup announced it raised $75 million (USD) at a $1.5 billion valuation, making it the latest edtech unicorn.

Unlike most of the reported rounds we’ve been covering these days, this round was closed at the end of March in the thick of the pandemic for Canada, co-founder Martin Basiri told TechCrunch . It means that ApplyBoard’s new valuation is yet another example of how edtech as a sector is feeling dollar sign momentum from COVID-19.

The pandemic has forced millions of students to learn from home, putting tech companies at the forefront of making remote education possible. ApplyBoard, said Basiri, had a 200% month-over-month surge of new schools signing up for its service.

“A lot of investors noticed the importance of our digital platform that can do such an important job,” said Basiri.

While most unicorns in the edtech space hail from the B2C space, like Duolingo and Udemy, the story with ApplyBoard shows that there is promise in selling to large businesses. Across the world, colleges have been turning to alternative marketing channels as campus tours and limited travel hurts their exposure to international students.

The new round was led by Drive Capital. Other participating investors include Fidelity Investments Canada ULC, Business Development Bank of Canada, Anthos Capital, Artiman Ventures, and Plug and Play Tech Center. ApplyBoard plans to hire 100 more employees, atop its existing 400 staff.

WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann accused SoftBank Group of abusing its power in a new lawsuit filed Monday that alleges breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty for pulling a $3 billion tender offer for WeWork shares.

The lawsuit, filed in Delaware Court of Chancery, included a motion to consolidate his case with a lawsuit filed last month by a Special Committee of WeWork’s board. Both lawsuits focus on Softbank Group and its Vision Fund’s decision to back out of a deal to buy shares of the co-working company.

Softbank Group pulled its $3 billion tender offer for WeWork shares April 1, citing COVID-19’s impact on the business but also closing conditions not being met. Specifically, it pointed to outstanding regulatory investigations, a growing body of litigation against the company, and the failure to restructure a joint venture in China as reasons to torpedo the agreement.

“SoftBank will vigorously defend itself against these meritless claims,” Rob Townsend, senior vice president and chief officer at SoftBank, said in a statement. “Under the terms of our agreement, which Adam Neumann signed, SoftBank had no obligation to complete the tender offer in which Mr. Neumann – the biggest beneficiary – sought to sell nearly $1 billion in stock.”

A deal was struck in October 2019 to buy out some of the equity held by Neumann, as well as the venture capital Benchmark Capital and many individual company employees. Neumann was set to receive almost $1 billion for his shares.

WeWork and Neumann gave control of the company to SoftBank, which increased its ownership at a significantly reduced price, according to the complaint.

“SoftBank has abused its position of power to “renege on its promise to pay [Neumann, shareholders, and hundreds of employees] for the benefits it already received,” the complaint said. The lawsuit claims that SoftBank was “secretly taking actions to undermine it” by pressuring investors not to waive certain rights and preventing the China roll-up transaction from closing.

The lawsuit further alleges that SoftBank’s financial condition influenced the company’s decision to terminate the tender offer.

The lawsuit alleges that SoftBank “abused its power” after WeWork’s special committee filed a lawsuit by insisting that only the board, which is controlled by Softbank, could take legal action.

“In real time, Softbank Group and Softbank Vision Fund are abusing their control of WeWork in an effort to stop the Special Committee’s meritorious lawsuit from being heard,” the complaint reads.