Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Early this afternoon Shippo, a shipping software and services company, announced that it has closed a $30 million Series C. The funding round roughly doubles the capital that the firm has raised to-date, from a little over $29 million to just under $60 million.

The round, however, wasn’t put together recently. As is often the case with funding events, Shippo raised its capital a while back and is only announcing it now. According to its CEO, Laura Behrens Wu, her startup started raising its Series C in late Q4 2019, with the capital hitting its accounts the day after Christmas. So, Shippo started 2020 well capitalized, and should have a comfortable capital base heading into this year’s economic uncertainty.

The funding round was led by a new investor, D1 Capital Partners, and participated in by a number of prior investors including Uncork Capital (which led a 2014 Seed investment into the company), Union Square Ventures (which led the company’s Series A in 2016) and Bessemer (which led its 2017 Series B).

Growth, margins

Shippo sits between retailers and consumers, helping sellers ship goods to buyers quickly and, it promises, inexpensively. The startup works with nearly five dozen shipping partners around the world, and plugs into the merchant worlds of Amazon, Shopify, Wix and others.

Like a number of successful startups, Shippo is trying to take something that is complex, and make it simple while generating revenue along the way. There are a number of loose examples we can lean on. For example, Plaid took all the complexity of talking to different financial institutions and shoved it into an accessible API. Twilio did something similar for telephony. Stripe made payments simple for others to integrate. You get the idea. Shippo wants to the same for shipping.

So far its model has good momentum. Heading into its funding round the firm had doubled (“100% growth,” Behrens Wu) in the preceding year, the sort of expansion that investors covet. It’s never bad to raise on the back of aggressive growth, as Shippo’s Series C shows; the company’s new valuation is “slightly higher” than TechCrunch’s estimate of $150 million, according to its CEO.

And even more, Shippo’s hybrid software and sales model (it charges for access to its shipping software and generates revenue from select shipping spend) creates attractive economics. Shippo’s gross margins are right around 80%, according to the startup, putting the company in the middle-upper tier of SaaS firms. Its growth isn’t based on the upselling shipping by a few points at volume; Shippo does have venture-ready economics.

It might seem odd to stress that point, but after WeWork’s implosion, it’s worth checking to make sure that startups raising as if they have strong revenue quality actually do.

Shippo has big aspirations, as you’d expect. “When you think about shipping software,” Behrens Wu told TechCrunch during an interview, “most people, even in tech, can’t name a single shipping software company, but everyone can name one or two payment companies. Everyone knows PayPal, Stripe, maybe Adyen or Braintree.” She wants to make Shippo as well known for shipping as Stripe is for payments.

There was secular movement towards her vision even before the pandemic. Today, online shopping — the grist for Shippo’s mill — is even more important. And it’s likely to become even more so over time, if growth shown by Amazon and Shopify in recent quarters is any indication of what’s to come, which means that the market for Shippo’s services will grow in time, and it’s always easier to grow in an expanding market than to claw for share in a stagnant pool.

Finally, in addition to its new capital and raised valuation, Shippo also announced that it has hired Catherine Stewart, former chief business officer at WordPress juggernaut Automattic, to be its COO. If Shippo is hiring a COO now, then we expect to see a CFO added around the time of its Series D. And then we get to start annoying the company about its IPO timeline.

Shippo is one of the lucky startups that raised right before the world changed. Now it’s up to the startup to conserve cash while continuing to grow while the global economy struggles. Let’s see how it performs.

The fintech wars continue to heat up with another major exit in the space.

Consumer financial services platform SoFi announced today that it is acquiring payments and bank account infrastructure company Galileo for $1.2 billion in total cash and stock. The acquisition is dependent on customary closing conditions.

Salt Lake City-based Galileo was founded in 2000 by Clay Wilkes and was bootstrapped to profitability over the intervening two decades. My colleague Jon Shieber wrote a profile of Galileo back in November after the company announced its first round of external funding, a $77 million Series A check from Accel, which was led by growth partner John Locke.

Galileo provides APIs that allow fintech companies like Monzo and Chime to easily create bank accounts and issue physical and virtual credit cards, among a myriad of other services. While simple in theory, banking regulations and financial rules place a huge regulatory burden on fintech companies, burdens that Galileo takes on as part of its platform.

The company has found particular success in the United Kingdom, where all five of the country’s largest fintechs are customers. Globally, it processed an annualized $45 billion in transaction volume last month, up from $26 billion in October 2019 — nearly doubling in just six months.

From a strategic perspective, SoFi’s objective is that Galileo will help power its expanding suite of finance products and offer it another revenue source outside of consumer services. While SoFi was founded a decade ago to offer ways to secure better financial terms for student loans, it now offers a bevy of consumer financial options, including loan, investment and insurance products as well as cash and wealth management tools. With Galileo, it now has a clear B2B revenue component as well.

SoFi, which is now led by ex-Twitter COO Anthony Noto, has also raised hundreds of millions of new capital from the likes of Qatar in recent years. The company was most recently valued at $4.3 billion.

Galileo will operate as an independent division of SoFi, and will be continuing its operations with founder Wilkes remaining as chief executive.

As fintech valuations have rapidly expanded in recent years, the companies that empower those fintechs have increasingly become strategic for investors. Earlier this year, Visa bought Plaid for $5.3 billion, in what was considered a key exit for a finance infrastructure company. That exit brought acute investor and strategic interest to the space, interest that almost certainly accrued to Galileo as well and helps explains the company’s relatively quick exit from its funding round last year.

As for Accel, the firm has long had a strategy of investing in bootstrapped companies, sometimes a decade or more after their founding, with examples outside of Galileo including 1Password, Qualtrics, Atlassian, GoFundMe, and Tenable. Accel also led this type of round into payments platform Braintree, where the firm met the startup’s GM Juan Benitez, who also joined Galileo’s board in November along with Accel’s Locke.

Accel’s valuation of the deal was not publicly disclosed in November, but a source with knowledge of the acquisition today characterizes the firm’s return as more than 4x. Given that Accel held the equity for roughly half a year, that’s quite the IRR multiple in an otherwise challenging global macro context.

Galileo was represented by Qatalyst in the transaction.

Given the rise in online shopping attributed to the coronavirus outbreak which has forced consumers to stay home from stores, Pinterest today is launching a new way to shop on its platform. Now, Pinterest users will be able to browse in-stock inventory from newly added “Shop” tabs on Search and on Pinterest boards. The company has also improved visual search to make more products shoppable from Pins.

The new Shop tab on Search will help users to find in-stock items from retailers when they perform a search query, like “spring outfits,” “home office décor,” or “kitchen remodel,” among other things. Before, users would have to scroll through a variety of search results, only some of which may have been shoppable.

In addition, when a Pinterest user now visits one of their boards containing shoppable items, they’ll see a new Shop tab here, too.

This will let them shop the products from the Pins on their board plus those that are “inspired” by the Pins. Again, this connects users to in-stock inventory for the items in question.

The new Shop tabs leverage Pinterest’s existing Product Pin technology which links a Pin directly to the checkout page on the e-commerce website, encouraging transactions.

Turning inspiration into conversations that complete with a checkout transaction has been Pinterest’s holy grail and its pitch to advertisers. The idea is that people come to Pinterest early on in their shopping journey — when they’re just collecting ideas and thinking about what they want to buy. But eventually, those idle thoughts will turn into sales, Pinterest believes. So it created technology to help facilitate the transaction.

In another change, Pinterest has updated visual search to make more products shoppable within Pins. Now, when you hover over a Pin, you can click “Shop similar” to see related in-stock products for looks and rooms.

While making Pins more “shoppable” is something that has worked for larger retailers like IKEA, Wayfair, Target, Pottery Barn, Walmart, and others, it’s not something that has reached as many smaller to medium-sized retailers due to the effort involved.

Today, retailers must first upload their product feeds through Pinterest’s Catalogs feature, then organize their products into smaller groups, and optionally launch ads. Pinterest says in light of the COVID-19 outbreak, it’s been working with SMBs to learn more about their current needs. It’s also been releasing a series of resources — like videos and webinars — to help retailers new to Pinterest learn how to list their online products for sale.

In addition the new Shop tabs, Pinterest today is also debuting curated style guides that appear on some home-related searches like “living room.” These guides let users browse specific, popular ideas across styles like mid-century, contemporary, and rustic.

The company says, overall, demand for shoppable products on its platform is rising.

The number of Shoppable Product Pins has increased by 2.5 times since last year, and Pinterest drove a total increase in traffic to retailers by 2.3 times since last year. In addition, the number of users engaging with Shopping on Pinterest has grown by 44% year-over-year.

However, specific terms have seen spikes following the COVID-19 outbreak, which has forced consumers to stay home under government orders and self-quarantines. For example, searches for “home office” grew by 70% over the past weeks, and searches for gifts like “employee gifts” and “care package ideas” grew by 4x.

The advantage for smaller businesses getting their products on Pinterest to be made shoppable is that they gain an even playing field. Pinterest says 97% of its users’ searches are unbranded — meaning people are looking for ideas using general terms or browsing visually, but don’t yet have a specific brand in mind. That means a smaller retailer’s product could even rank higher in search results than a larger retailer’s product, if it’s a better match.

Of course, there’s a limit to how much people are able to shop for non-essential items at this time, given the rise in unemployment related to the government-mandated business closures that have put millions in the U.S. out of work. Pinterest’s updates very much cater to those with the ability to now redecorate their homes or shop cute spring dresses, for example — not those struggling to get their basic needs met in a time of crisis. For the latter, Pinterest will remain what it often is — a dream board filled with wishful thinking and “maybe one day” ideas.

The Shopping updates are rolling out today across Pinterest.

After raising $8 million in November to roll up top Amazon marketplace companies, the new New York-based startup Perch has begun putting that money to work in its first few deals.

The brainchild of Chris Bell, formerly Wayfair’s head of logistics and a Bain & Co. analyst, Perch is pretty well-positioned to serve as unifier of a bevy of disparate products in one nest.

The company’s recent acquisition include brands selling a sand anchor for beach umbrellas (Beachr), a waterproof apron for cooking, a hip sciatica brace (Bodymate), and other similar products that wouldn’t be out of place in a late night informercial or on the Home Shopping Network.

“We believe that the future of product R&D is entrepreneurs that are closest to the problems,” says Bell in an interview. “We look for products that are top three in their niche… [Their founders] want some liquidity and we can bring that onto our platform and add price optimization, ad-spend optimization and cross-geography marketing.”

In a way, Perch is tapping into a similar urge to give America’s huge population of tinkerers and inventors better access to market and a chance to monetize their ideas a la Quirky, the failed attempt by GE to turn gadget ideas into new product lines for GE. 

By contrast, Perch waits for the businesses to gain traction, then offers to buy the products off of their owners hands and give them up to two years participation in any upside that the product generates at certain milestones that Perch sets for the entrepreneurs that sell.

“Three years ago I would not have started this business,” says Bell. “Amazon has made this a much more defensible place.” 

The Amazon marketplace remains somewhat of the wild west, where intellectual property rights are often ignored and successful products are copied at lightning speed by vendors with access to the same commoditized supply chains. It’s really marketing muscle and an ability to get better margins through scale that creates winners, it seems, and Perch is using its technical know-how to get to the top. 

Acquisitions can range from $750,000 to $2 million upfront with the upside on the backend still to come, according to Bell. Financing this operation is a $4.5 million equity round and $3.5 million in debt financing by some of the nation’s leading venture firms. Perch won’t buy any company that’s doing less than $250,000 in revenue.

Spark Capital led the deal for Perch, with general partner Alex Finkelstein taking a seat on the company’s board of directors. Tectonic Ventures also participated. Finkelstein, who led Spark’s investment in Wayfair, was introduced to Bell through Wayfair’s chief operating officer. He immediately saw the potential in Perch’s pitch.

“If you look at it from a macro standpoint. Amazon is growing very quickly and the third party marketplace is growing very quickly. Within the next year we’re going to have a large portfolio and it’ll do well in any environment,” Finkelstein said. 

Amazon’s third party sellers are a $200 billion market and the largest single vendor is a $500 million seller, Bell noted, and that, is an opportunity that a well-capitalized company can exploit.

“We’re going to be managing hundreds of micro-brands and the only way to do that is through a technology platform,” Bell said. “They’re generally niche products that are not big enough that Amazon Basics would come into that category. We’re competing in smaller categories, but even some of these niche categories are tens of millions to hundreds of millions in revenue.”

While Perch has seen some impacts from the economic shutdown caused by the government response to the COVID-19 epidemic, the company expects the shift in consumer behavior to be the wind beneath its wings, rather than against its branches.

“Medium-term it’s pushing more people to buy online,” says Bell. And Perch isn’t slowing its pace of acquisitions. “We made two acquisitions in March and we’re likely going to close another two in the next two weeks.”

Securitization is a critical function of the modern financial system. Banks “package” individual loans, say a mortgage or an auto loan, into a group with similar characteristics and sell them to other investors. That gets the debt off the originator’s balance sheet so that they can offer more loans, while also offering private investors alternative investment opportunities to buy up.

Despite the scale of the market — the trade association SIFMA’s research shows that the volume for asset-backed securities reached more than $300 billion in 2019 (excluding mortgages) — much of that structuring remains relatively ad hoc, with structuring agents and buyers constantly seeking each other out.

Much in the way that real estate and startup crowdsourcing platforms democratized access to those alternative investments, Cadence wants to expand access to securitized products while increasing the velocity of transactions for originators and lowering prices. Founder and CEO Nelson Chu said that “our job is to bring transparency and efficiency to this market and through all the various things that we do.” The company operates on top of the Ethereum blockchain network.

Founded in 2018 and launched publicly in 2019, the New York City-based capital markets startup has now structured $88 million in notes across 76 offerings and 12 originators according to the company. The firm’s public leaderboard shows that the largest originators were Sellers Funding with more than $23 million and Wall Street Funding with almost $26 million in transaction volume. Chu said that “I think we are the 21st largest structuring agent the United States in 2020 so far,” which is not a bad place to be for a young startup in a massive multi-trillion dollar market.

In addition to that $88 million volume processed on the company’s retail platform, Cadence also structured a $40 million whole business securitization with FAT Brands, the owner of restaurant chains like Fatburger and Yalla Mediterranean. The company notes that the structuring reduced the company’s interest costs by $2 million.

The company has hit a number of milestones over the past two years. It closed a seed round of $4 million in December led by Revel VC, with Revel’s Thomas Falk, Navtej S. Nandra, former President of E*Trade, and portfolio manager Oliver Wriedt joining the company’s board.

In addition, back in 2019, the company said that it also became the first digital asset company to launch a digital asset ticker on Bloomberg Terminal and also the first to join the Bloomberg App Portal. It also secured the first financial debt rating for a digital asset.

The company has a variety of revenue streams from different areas of its platform. It takes transaction fees on each deal, but also derives revenues from hosting data related to the performance of the underlying loans. Given the company’s technology stack, it has better and more verified data about how the underlying assets that back each security are performing, giving all investment holders a much more robust look at the health of their portfolio.

Longer term, Cadence’s goal is to move to a mostly SaaS model for originators and buyers. “We can be very, very beneficial to every single counterparty involved when we become that,” Chu said, adding “we essentially are Switzerland … because our incentives are all aligned.”

I asked about how the company is responding to the COVID-19 situation, and Chu said that as the world saw in the 2008 global financial crisis, “there are pockets of opportunity here that we continue to find, and we allow retail, accredited investors to get access to that.” Chu gave the example of game developers waiting on payments from Apple and Google who need short-term loans to cover costs.

In addition to Revel, other investors in the seed round included Morgan Creek Digital, Nimble Ventures, Argo, Tuesday Capital, Manatt, and Recharge Capital.

CircleCI, an early adherent to the notion of continuous delivery when it launched in 2011, announced a $100 million Series E investment today. It comes on top of a $56 million round last July.

The round was led by IVP and Sapphire Ventures, and under the terms of the deal Cack Wilhelm will be joining the CircleCI board. Jai Das from Sapphire will also be joining the board as an observer.

Today’s investment brings the total raised to $215 million, according to the company with $156 million coming over the last 8 months. The company did not want to discuss its current valuation.

Circle CI CEO Jim Rose says with so much uncertainty because of COVID-19 he welcomes not only the money, but the quality of the firms and people involved in the investment.

“We’re really excited to get both IVP and Sapphire because they’ve seen all of it all the way through public and beyond. Given all of the nuttiness over the last few months obviously having cash on the balance sheet is extremely helpful, but the other part too is that this a time when you want to have more brains around the table, not fewer. And so being able to get people to help out and just think about the problems that we’re encountering right now is really helpful,” Rose told TechCrunch.

Rose recognizes the huge challenge everyone is facing, but he sees this switch to remote workforces really driving the need for more automation, something his company is in a position to help DevOps teams with.

“What we’ve seen from a DevOps perspective is that this forced migration to remote-only for so many organizations has really driven the urgency for more automation in the DevOps pipeline,” he said.

He said this has led to a huge surge in usage on the platform in recent weeks, and today’s investment will at least partly go towards making sure there are enough resources in place to keep the platform stable whatever comes.

“When we think about money and we think about where we’re investing in the near term, we’re investing a lot in making sure that the platform is stable and available and supporting all of our customers as they go through this. You know this is a difficult time, a difficult transition and we’re trying to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to support our customers through that process,” Rose said.

Many companies at this stage of startup maturity begin to look ahead to an IPO, but Rose isn’t ready to discuss that, especially in the current economic climate. “We’re going to have to get folks to some kind of liquidity at some point, but I think right now our focus is on really investing in the platform and investing in our customers and then we’ll let the market clear out and figure out what the new normal looks like,” he said.

The company would consider making some acquisitions with its base of capital if the right opportunity came along. “We’re always evaluating and always looking around. One of the interesting things about our space is that it’s flooded with new and innovative approaches to point problems. There are a lot of companies that are interesting, so we’re definitely always looking around,” he said.

Quibi, the oddly-named mobile streaming service founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, was downloaded over 300,000 times on launch day, according to preliminary data from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. That’s only 7.5% of the approximately 4 million installs Disney+ saw when it launched in the U.S. and Canada on November 12, 2019. However, it was enough to send Quibi’s app to nearly the top of the charts on the App Store. Today, Quibi is the No. 3 app on the Apple App Store, but only No. 29 on Google Play.

The bigger jump up the charts on iOS could be attributed to Quibi being heavily promoted by App Store editorial across a number of sections at launch. This includes in a large, scrollable banner at the very top of the “Apps” page on the App Store, as well as inclusion in the curated “Apps We Love Right Now” collection directly below. That likely drove a number of day one downloads from curious App Store visitors.

Apple’s interest in promoting Quibi has to do with it being a subscription-based product, which is a source of revenue for the App Store. Though Quibi’s streaming service is available for the first 90 days for free and free for a year for T-Mobile unlimited wireless customers, it will later require an in-app purchase of either $4.99 per month or $7.99 per month for either its ad-supported or commercial-free streaming plan, respectively.

Sensor Tower also noted that Quibi’s debut was far ahead of HBO NOW’s launch back on April 7, 2015, five days before the “Game of Thrones” Season 5 premiere. But that’s perhaps not the best comparison. Not only did that event take place several years ago, HBO NOW was then only one of several ways to watch HBO content. The majority of the network’s viewers at the time already had access to HBO through their pay-TV subscription — and if they wanted to watch on mobile, they could use the existing HBO GO app to do so.

Quibi, on the other hand, is only available through mobile. So this 300K figure represents its total customer base at launch, not just some small portion looking for an over-the-top option.

Before yesterday’s debut, Quibi had offered its app for pre-order through the App Store in an effort to boost day one downloads. It’s unclear how well that effort paid off, but Sensor Tower says it front-loaded a “significant number” of launch day downloads.

The app itself offers a lot of star power with big names including Sophie Turner, Liam Hemsworth, Chance the Rapper, Jennifer Lopez, Chrissy Teigen, and others appearing in Quibi’s shows available today. And thanks to Katzenberg’s connections and (Quibi’s massive $1.75 billion in funding) Quibi promises content from filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Lena Waithe and Catherine Hardwicke and other stars will arrive soon.

But consumer demand for a mobile streaming service designed for our busy, on-the-go lives where we only have minutes of downtime to spare is something that’s no longer relevant in the quarantine era where we have endless hours to binge TV at home. And Quibi is currently without an AirPlay or Chromecast option, which makes it a poor choice for stay-at-home viewing.

The 300K downloads is an early figure, to be fair. It won’t be clear until the 90-day trial wraps how many stay with Quibi, choosing to pay. But Qubi’s launch numbers don’t indicate a breakout success, either. Quibi may be at the top of the charts for now, but still has a lot to prove.

Spot & Tango, the D2C pet food brand, has today announced the launch of a new line of pet food called UnKibble. Alongside the announcement of the launch, the company has also closed on a $4.2 million seed funding round led by Guild Capital.

Spot & Tango launched 2018 with a line of fresh, wet dog-food recipes. Competing with Farmer’s Dog, Spot & Tango developed customized meals for pups using fresh ingredients fine enough for human consumption, taking into account the dog’s weight, age, breed and activity level. Thus far, the startup has delivered more than 1 million meals to pups and their owners, quadrupling the size of the business in the last six months.

With today’s launch of UnKibble, the company looks to bring a slightly more convenient alternative to market without sacrificing quality.

Unlike most dry pet food, which is made using processed powdered meat and artificial additives, UnKibble uses a unique Fresh Dry process to preserve only whole food ingredients, with no artificial additives or coloring.

This is done by mixing whole ingredients and forming them into bite-sized pieces, which are then gently heated very slowly in a vacuum chamber to maintain freshness. This process removes water content and any potential pathogens and bacteria without extracting nutritional value. The bags are then sealed to remove oxygen and keep the UnKibble fresh.

Spot & Tango subscriptions for UnKibble start at $9/week, with three different options: Beef & Barley, Chicken & Brown Rice, and Duck & Salmon. The startup sends a scooper along with the UnKibble that is perfectly portioned to a single serving for your specific dog, ensuring you don’t over- or underfeed the little one.

The company also looks to be as eco-conscious as possible, shipping in bulk to delivery partners using recyclable and compostable materials.

Founder and CEO Russell Breuer explained that Spot & Tango is looking to be a health and wellness platform for pet parents.

“Whether it’s treats or other products or services, ultimately we’re building a brand around health and wellness and making it accessible for all pet parents in as many formats as required,” said Breuer. “Fresh food may not be a ubiquitous product for every single household in America. Dry food may not be, either. Maybe treats are a preference for some families. We want to be able to serve as many needs as possible under the health and wellness umbrella.”

Spot & Tango plans to use the funding to expand its R&D capabilities and build out the team.

Shipt shoppers, which began organizing in February, are staging their first action today. Yesterday, a group of Shipt shoppers, who shop and deliver orders from Target and other stores, announced their plans to walk off today. The walk-off is in protest of the way Shipt has treated its shoppers amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Vice first reported.

“Unless you get tested for COVID-19 or you’re half dead, Shipt’s not going to care,” Iowa-based Shipt shopper Angie Kufner tells TechCrunch.

Kufner hasn’t been working for the past couple of weeks because she’s been feeling ill, but Shipt has not provided her with sick pay, even though Shipt provides workers diagnosed with COVID-19 up to two weeks worth of sick pay. Kufner’s experience is just one example of why shoppers are demanding the company extend that policy to include those who are immunocompromised or have a note from a doctor telling them to stay home. Currently, Shipt says it determines eligibility for sick pay on a case by case basis.

“I guarantee you there are a lot more people who have felt like crap,” Kufner says. “The stores are totally unsafe. It’s not worth the $6 they’re going to pay you to go in the store.”

In addition to extending the sick pay policy, shoppers at Ship are demanding hazard pay of $5 per order and personal protective equipment for everyone. Additionally, Shipt shoppers are demanding the company reinstate its original transparent pay structure, make tips transparent and stop exploiting new workers.

“To me, they’ve proven it’s profit over people,” Kufner says of Shipt and Target . “They don’t care about shoppers or the customers because at this point they’re putting customers at risk when these shoppers aren’t protected themselves inside the stores. It’s frustrating because Target and Shipt are both making a fortune with all the new customers and all the new orders and they’ve done almost nothing to support the shoppers.”

In an updated blog post yesterday, Shipt said all shoppers will be provided with gloves and a mask within the next two weeks. Shipt says it has also sent its most active shoppers information on how to claim a free kit that includes gloves and hand sanitizer.

Prior to the pandemic, Shipt shoppers had begun expressing their dismay toward the company. In January, Shipt started testing a new pay structure where, instead of basing it on cart size, Shipt takes into account the time it takes to complete and deliver an order.

Prior to the changes, shoppers had received a $5 flat rate and 7.5% of the total store receipt, one shopper, who asked to remain anonymous, previously told TechCrunch.

“We are losing money as shoppers at a ridiculous rate,” a shopper from Kalamazoo previously told TechCrunch. “A very good, close friend of mine told me in the three weeks since the new structure was implemented, she has lost the equivalent of a car payment. It is a lot of money. Our best guestimation is, we’re all losing about 30% or more. I did four orders this past weekend and I lost money on every single one.”

Now, Shipt workers have joined the likes of workers at Instacart, Amazon, Whole Foods and others that are demanding better protections during this global health crisis.

Amid strikes from workers at Instacart, the company began implementing some changes but still has yet to meet all of their demands. A few days ago, Instacart finally began offering shoppers face masks, hand sanitizers and thermometers. One day later, DoorDash said it was investing in getting more personal protective equipment for its delivery workers.

It’s now widely understood that gig workers are providing essential services during these times, as many cities have enacted shelter-in-place ordinances and as vulnerable people are remaining at home in order to reduce their risk of exposure to the virus.

“Shipt has lowered pay, used shoppers vehicles without fuel or maintenance reimbursement, ignored a faulty rating system, and never paid for healthcare or insurance,” one Shipt shopper said in a statement. “Now they are sending shoppers into stores during a pandemic with no pay increase, no PPE, and no guidance. Shipt is treating it’s shoppers as expendable while advertising to customers as a personal concierge service.”

In addition to the walk-off, organizers are calling for customers to boycott the app on Friday, April 10.

Last year, The Information reported that CNN was working on a new digital news service to compete with the likes of Apple and Facebook. Today, some of those plans are taking shape. The Turner-owned news broadcaster has acquired Canopy, an all-purpose content personalisation that uses human curation, on-device machine learning and differential privacy to help readers discover things they actually want to see, while at the same kind keeping personal data private. The startup will become an anchoring part of CNN’s upcoming news project.

Canopy was founded in 2018, and to date its only product and commercial example of how it would work was an app that it had launched itself called Tonic. That app, Canopy tells me, will be wound down over the coming months, as the team and assets of the Boston/Brooklyn-based startup are integrated into its new parent.

CNN is not disclosing any of the financial terms of the deal, except to confirm that it is a full acquisition of talent (15 people in all), IP and other assets. Canopy — which was led and co-founded by Brian Whitman, the former co-founder of Echo Nest (the content recommendation company that became the basis of Spotify’s recommendation engine after it acquired the company) 00 had raised $4.5 million from Matrix Partners and E14.

Nor is CNN talking much yet about its new project, currently codenamed “NewsCo”, except to say that it is a “news and information platform connecting users to trusted sources, storytellers and creators across a wide range of topics.”

The initiative is part of a bigger plan at the company to build new products and services to meet the tastes, interests and needs of current but also new consumers. In that, it underscores a bigger, and longer-term, push from across all of the media industry to chase and capture ever-elusive audience, and the money that comes with it in the form of advertising, paid subscriptions, and more.

That “more” in many cases, controversially, has included data, which is swapped and sold across a range of known and less-known entities. And it seems that here CNN is drawing a line to see how and if it can build a service that doesn’t cross it. At least, that seems to be the hope here.

“There has never been a more crucial time to help people discover trusted sources around topics and issues that matter most to them,” said Whitman in a statement. “We’re incredibly excited to join the team at CNN to build some amazing products for their millions of global users.”

It’s notable that this is not CNN’s first rodeo when it comes to making an acquisition of a startup focused on content personalisation. Way back in 2011, the company acquired Zite, another company with a similar aim, reading what you read and watch to help you find more articles like it.

From what I understand, that deal was made by a previous leadership team, in a time when there wasn’t a bigger plan for how and where it would fit into the bigger picture. Zite was eventually sold three years later to Flipboard.

“Timing, in life and in business, is everything,” a spokesperson at CNN told TechCrunch. “We didn’t get Zite quite right, because candidly, we didn’t have all the pieces in place at the time to be able to fully leverage the capabilities for which we acquired them. We made the right decision in selling Zite to Flipboard. It was the right outcome for everyone. And the lessons we learned helped us evolve as an organization.”

You might wonder why Canopy decided to sell up rather than partner, which had been the company’s original business model in building a recommendation engine that could be used for different kinds of content plays. The company notably had not picked up any customers that it’s talking about, nor had it raised money. It may be that it’s just too challenging to scale that kind of play as a standalone service if your aim is to be used by many.

“Our long term dream is to reach millions of people and help them navigate the increasingly complex world in a way that can only help them,” said Whitman in an emailed response. “This acquisition takes the big dream of Canopy and makes it much bigger. We’re going to build new ways for millions of people to connect with news and information while keeping their data safe and secure.”

Canopy had never released user numbers for Tonic, but it confirms that its data security expertise was part of the attraction for CNN, so expect to see more on that, with a product launch date “expected within a year,” Whitman said.

“This acquisition enables us to light up in a single transaction a proven, best-in-class team whose deep knowledge and skill sets would’ve taken many months or even years to assemble,” said CNN EVP & Chief Digital Officer Andrew Morse in a statement. “Canopy’s culture of fast-cycle, iterative software and product development will enable us to more rapidly realize our ambitions and deliver against our goals.”