Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Proportunity, the startup that provides “help to buy”-style equity loans primarily for first time property buyers, has raised £2 million in additional funding.

Billed as a seed round, backing comes from Anthemis, the fintech investor, and Axel Springer Digital Ventures, the early stage venture arm of European digital publisher Axel Springer. The startup and Entrepreneur First alumni had previously raised £1.7 million in equity and a credit line of debt financing.

Previous investors include Global Founders Capital, Concrete VC (backed by Starwood Capital Group), Savills, EF, Trusted Insights, and Le Studio VC, along with angel investors Matt Robinson (Nested), Chris Mairs (EF) , Charlie Songhurst, Nicolas Berggruen, and Julian Critchlow.

Founded in 2016 by Vadim Toader and Stefan Boronea, Proportunity wants to help first time buyers purchase a home that is more suited to their needs than a mortgage alone might afford.

It does this by providing an equity loan of up to 15% of a property’s value to enable the home buyer to effectively put down a bigger deposit and therefore secure a more competitive mortgage. This, claims the startup, also enables the home buyer to potentially purchase a larger or better located property, and reduce the amount of interest charged by the mortgage lender in the long term.

The way it works, therefore, is quite similar to the U.K. government’s “Help To Buy” scheme, except it isn’t restricted to a new build and you have to pay monthly interest on the loan from the get-go. Like Help To Buy, when you sell the house or remortgage it in five years time, you have to repay the Proportunity equity loan at 15 percent of the current market price.

Therefore, if the price of the house has gone up, the amount you pay back will have also increased. In the event that the price has gone down, the startup loses money.

All of this is backed up by Proportunity’s machine learning-based forecasting technology, which claims to be able to identify good value properties in up-and-coming areas. The idea is that better use of data — from crime and school ratings to broadband speeds and pollution — can help reduce the risk of equity-based property loans both for the lender and borrower.

With regards to how many homes Proportunity has helped finance, the startup isn’t breaking out the exact numbers. However, co-founder Vadim Toader tells me it is “more than 20 and less than 100”.

He also says that 2 of the top 5 high-street lenders in the U.K. have lent alongside Proportunity on multiple homes, proving that the model can be made to work (a year ago it wasn’t clear how the market would respond to Proportunity’s equity loan offer). The company is currently working with 12 mortgage brokers in total.

“We’ve made partnerships with real estate agencies, and their mortgage broker arms, so they can refer the first time buyers that come to them directly,” says Toader.

Meanwhile, I asked Toader to run through what assumptions have proven true so far or haven’t panned out.

He says that the team thought it would prove to be a complicated proposition to explain to customers, but actually they tend to get it quickly due to awareness of the U.K. government’s Help to Buy scheme.

He also thought Proportunity could help speed up the home-buying process, but a few parts, such as conveyancing, can still take a few months.

And despite Proportunity’s data play, “people do get emotionally attached to properties. Data helps them detach a bit, but not that much”.

Nigeria’s #StopRobbingUs campaign to curb police harassment of techies could grow into a formal lobbying group for the country’s tech sector, according to founders Bosun Tijani and Jason Njoku.

Tijani, the CEO of Lagos based innovation center CcHub and now Kenya’s iHub, helped spearhead the movement last month in response to detainment and extortion of tech workers by local authorities.

He joined Njoku — CEO of Nollywood VOD venture IROKO — and 29 other Nigerians to release a statement condemning police abuse of the country’s tech workers.

The language called for “an end to the common practice where Nigerian police stop young people with laptops and unlawfully arrest, attack or, in extreme circumstances, kidnap them, forcing them to withdraw funds from their bank accounts in order to regain their freedom.”

The campaign coined the #StopRobbingUs hashtag as a digital rallying point.

The statement went on to say the #StopRobbingUs movement would “consider a Class Action Lawsuit on police brutality.”

Energy for the campaign reached critical mass after Toni Astro, a Lagos-based software engineer, was reportedly beaten, arrested, detained and then extorted out of money by Nigeria’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad [SARS] the last week of September. He tweeted about the ordeal.

On the impetus for forming #StopRobbingUs, “We just got tired of [the harassment]. I personally got tired of it, which is why I spoke out and with other people decided to take action,” Tijani told TechCrunch on a call.

He described the shakedown of techies as the best and worst of Nigeria colliding, when it comes to shifting perceptions and stereotypes of the country.

“They’re taking one of the most positive things that’s happening on the continent, but also Nigeria in the last 10 years, and turning it into self-destruction,” Tijani said of the law enforcement maltreatment of tech sector workers.

“It’s a gross abuse of police stop and search…The people that are supposed to protect use are ultimately harassing us and robbing us,” iRoko CEO Jason Njoku said of the profiling and extortion of young Nigerians with laptops and smartphones.

He characterized the theft of laptops as taking away the means for techies to earn a living.

“A lot of people can work around not having a laptop, but if you’re a developer, how do you code without a laptop,” he said.

Njoku, Tijani and members of #StopRobbingUs have been talking to senior members of Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari’s Enabling Business Environment task force and the Governor of Lagos State — the geographic district in Nigeria where much of the country’s tech activity takes place.

“We’re looking to set up some kind of fund, which does advocacy and…also lines up lawsuits…to force the issue in a more formal way,” said Njoku.

“It’s also an education thing. We’re reaching out to the powers that be, to engage and educate them to find some kind of solution to this.”

Both Njoku and Tijani see the #StopRobbingUs movement as a forerunner to an innovation industry advocacy group in Nigeria to speak to the broader needs of the country’s tech community.

The West African country is home to the continent’s largest economy and largest population of 200 million.

In addition to still being known for large-scale and petty corruption, Nigeria has made strides in improving infrastructure and governance and has one of Africa’s strongest tech scenes.

The country is now a focal point for VC, startup formation, and the entry of big global tech companies in Africa.

“I still see a bright future for fintech and internet companies in Nigeria. I think it makes sense for use to be much more vocal on the things that may or may not make sense to us. Technology, media, and entertainment right now is the hope for a lot of young people in this country,” Njoku said.

He added his company, IROKO, and startups he’s invested in account for roughly 1000 jobs.

“We’ll get to the point where tech will become one of the biggest drivers of employment in this country,” Njoku said.  “It makes sense for us to demand the respect and recognition from government to…do the right thing to give us that fertile ground to keep building these companies.”

CcHub’s Bosun Tijani is in accord with Njoku on the necessity of an tech industry advocacy group in Nigeria.

“We do need a voice at the table, a voice that can contribute to getting what we need from government…and the #StopRobbingUs campaign may be the trigger,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

Zoho may be one of the most underrated tech companies. The 23-year-old company, which at this point offers more than 45 products, has never taken outside funding and has no ambition to go public, yet it’s highly profitable and runs its own data centers around the world. And today, it’s launching Catalyst, a cloud-based developer platform with a focus on microservices that it hopes can challenge those of many of its larger competitors.

The company already offered a low-code tool for building business apps. But Catalyst is different. Zoho isn’t following in the footsteps of Google or Amazon here and offering a relatively unopinionated platform for running virtual machines and containers. Indeed, it does nothing of the sort. The company is 100% betting on serverless as the next major technology for building enterprise apps and the whole platform has been tuned for this purpose.

“Historically, when you look at cloud computing, when you look at any public clouds, they pretty much range from virtualizing your servers and renting our virtual servers all the way up the stack,” Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s chief evangelist, said when I asked him about this decision to bet on serverless. “But when you look at it from a developer’s point of view, you still have to deal with a lot of baggage. You still have to figure out the operating system, you still have to figure out the database. And then you have to scale and manage the updates. All of that has to be done at the application infrastructure level.” In recent years, though, said Vegesna, the focus has shifted to the app logic side, with databases and file servers being abstracted away. And that’s the trend Zoho is hoping to capitalize on with Catalyst.

What Catalyst does do is give advanced developers a platform to build, run and manage event-driven microservice-based applications that can, among other things, also tap into many of the tools that Zoho built for running its own applications, like a grammar checker for Zoho Writer, document previews for Zoho Drive or access to its Zia AI tools for OCR, sentiment analysis and predictions. The platform gives developers tools to orchestrate the various microservices, which obviously means it’ll make it easy to scale applications as needed, too. It integrates with existing CI/CD pipelines and IDEs.

Catalyst also complies with the SOC Type II and ISO 27001 certifications, as well as GDPR. It also offers developers the ability to access data from Zoho’s own applications, as well as third-party tools, all backed by Zoho’s Unified Data Model, a relational datastore for server-side and client deployment.

“The infrastructure that we built over the last several years is now being exposed,” said Vegesna. He also stressed that Zoho is launching the complete platform in one go (though it will obviously add to it over time). “We are bringing everything together so that you can develop a mobile or web app from a single interface,” he said. “We are not just throwing 50 different disparate services out there.” At the same time, though, the company is also opting for a very deliberate approach here with its focus on serverless. That, Vegesna believes, will allow Zoho Catalyst to compete with its larger competitors.

It’s also worth noting that Zoho knows that it’s playing the long-game here, something it is familiar with, given that it launched its first product, Zoho Writer, back in 2005 before Google had launched its productivity suite.

 

Pensando, an edge computing startup founded by former Cisco engineers, came out of stealth mode today with an announcement that it has raised a $145 million Series C. The company’s software and hardware technology, created to give data centers more of the flexibility of cloud computing servers, is being positioned as a competitor to Amazon Web Services Nitro.

The round was led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lightspeed Venture Partners and brings Pensando’s total raised so far to $278 million. HPE chief technology officer Mark Potter and Lightspeed Venture partner Barry Eggers will join Pensando’s board of directors. The company’s chairman is former Cisco CEO John Chambers, who is also one of Pensando’s investors through JC2 Ventures.

Pensando was founded in 2017 by Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero and Soni Jiandani, a team of engineers who spearheaded the development of several of Cisco’s key technologies, and founded four startups that were acquired by Cisco, including Insieme Networks. (In an interview with Reuters, Pensando chief financial offier Randy Pond, a former Cisco executive vice president, said it isn’t clear if Cisco is interested in acquiring the startup, adding “our aspirations at this point would be to IPO. But, you know, there’s always other possibilities for monetization events.”)

The startup claims its edge computing platform performs five to nine times better than AWS Nitro, in terms of productivity and scale. Pensando prepares data center infrastructure for edge computing, better equipping them to handle data from 5G, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things applications. While in stealth mode, Pensando acquired customers including HPE, Goldman Sachs, NetApp and Equinix.

In a press statement, Potter said “Today’s rapidly transforming, hyper-connected world requires enterprises to operate with even greater flexibility and choices than ever before. HPE’s expanding relationship with Pensando Systems stems from our shared understanding of enterprises and the cloud. We are proud to announce our investment and solution partnership with Pensando and will continue to drive solutions that anticipate our customers’ needs together.”

Rocket Lab has added another successful commercial launch to its track record: The rocket startup’s ‘As The Crow Flies’ mission took off today from its LC-1 launch site in New Zealand as planned. The rocket took off at 9:22 PM ET (6:22 PM PT), during its second launch opportunity of the day after the first window was pushed due to high altitude winds.

This is the ninth Electron launch for the company thus far, and the eighth mission for a commercial customer (the first was a test mission in 2017) since it began ferrying payloads for paying clients in 2018. Today’s launch carried a satellite called ‘Palisade’ for client Astro Digital, which is a technology demonstrator that will test the company’s next-generation geocommunications satellite design.

This mission was a late-stage substitute, swapping in for another Rocket Lab client who had to delay their own launch. Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck told TechCrunch that “Electron is a launch on demand service — we’re ready when the launch customer is,” highlighting the flexibility of the launch service they offer to adapt to the needs of their customers.

After successful launch and kick stage separation, the Astro Digital satellite now awaits its final deployment into its target orbit, which should happen in the next few hours. We’ll update with the results of that maneuver.

Rocket Lab is launching its ninth Electron rocket today, with the launch set for 00:41 UTC (8:41 ET/5:41 PT). The mission, called “As The Crow Flies,” will be taking off from the company’s LC-1 launchpad in New Zealand, carrying a payload from Astro Digital to orbit.

The launch was actually supposed to take a different spacecraft up to low Earth Orbit, but the payload was swapped late last month – an unusual move for a rocket launch, and one that Rocket Lab is using to demonstrate the flexibility of its commercial service model. Rocket Lab’s other customer had a delay, and Astro Digital was ready to send up one of its ‘Corvus’ imaging satellites, so it got to move up the timing of its launch as a result.

Rocket Lab is currently on track to launch as planned, and the launch stream for the mission will be live above starting at around 20 minutes out from the T-0 launch window.

In August, after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the venture-backed shoe startup Rothy’s, shoe giant Steven Madden filed a pre-emptive lawsuit asking a federal court to rule that its Rosy Flat shoes don’t copy design elements of the Point ballet flat that Rothy’s began selling soon after its 2016 launch. More, it asked that seven related patents that Rothy’s has been issued — and that Rothy’s accused Madden of infringing — be declared invalid.

Now, Rothy’s is batting back again, today filing counterclaims of design patent and trade dress infringement, trademark dilution, and unfair competition while also managing to get in a sick burn, writing in its filing that instead of “pursuing independent product development, Madden has chosen to slavishly copy Rothy’s product design in violation of Rothy’s valuable intellectual property rights.”

It’s hard to argue they aren’t copycats once you see both shoes. Nearly as galling to Rothy’s, Steve Madden’s shoes retail for half the price. (Rothy’s charges $145 for its shoes. Steve Madden sells its version for $70, and unlike Rothy’s, which are never discounted, Steve Madden’s version of the show is currently for sale at Nordstrom Rack for $39.99.)

Steve Madden — now a 29-year-old company that’s publicly traded, valued by investors at $3 billion, and largely still run by Steve Madden himself (he’s its creative and design chief) — is known for finding inspiration in the work of other brands that wish it would not. Among a handful of companies to tangle legally with the shoe titan in recent years is venture-backed Allbirds, which accused Steve Madden of copying its wool trainer in 2017.

AllBirds soon settled its lawsuit with the company. Alas, now AllBirds is reportedly fighting an Austrian footwear company, Giesswein Walkwaren, for making and selling sneakers that are “identical in all material respects” to Allbirds’s wool runners.

Meanwhile, Rothy’s just last month settled with a company, OESH, against which it had separately filed a patent and trade dress infringement lawsuit alleging its round-toe ballet flats are too similar to Rothy’s own.

Neither is an uncommon situation. Instead, both underscore that for young retail brands, fending off competitors both big and small can prove both expensive and distracting. Indeed, the question begged is whether it’s worth engaging.

While that’s something that usually be determined only in hindsight, not everyone thinks it makes sense to spend the time and resources battling knock-offs. When we talked earlier this year with the venture-backed slipper-shoe startup Birdies, cofounder Bianca Gates noted that Target had already begun offering a similar slipper at a cheaper price point. “Everybody copies everybody,” she said.

The company could have used some of its funding to wage war, but she thought focusing on the company’s product made more sense. “It’s our job to create a brand beyond the silhouette of a slipper, because that can be knocked off, it’s not defensible. What is defensible is why [a customer] is buying Birdies, and why she is telling her friends to shop us.”

MyGate, a Bangalore-based startup that offers security management and convenience service for guard-gated premises, said today it has bagged over $50 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprint in the nation.

Chinese internet giant Tencent, Tiger Global, JS Capital, and existing investor Prime Venture Partners funded the three-year-old startup’s $56 million Series B financing round. The new round pushes MyGate’s total fundraise to-date to $67.5 million.

MyGate offers an eponymous mobile app that allows home residents to approve entries and exits, communicate with their neighbors, log attendance, pay society maintenance bills and daily help workers.

The startup says it is operational in 11 cities in India and has amassed over 1.2 million home customers. Its customer base is increasing by 20% each month, it claimed. The service is handling 60,000 requests each minute and clocking over 45 million check-in requests each month.

The idea of MyGate came after its co-founder and CEO, Vijay Arisetty left Indian armed force. In an interview with TechCrunch, he said his family was appalled to learn about the poor state of security across societies in India.

“This was also when e-commerce companies and food delivery firms were beginning to gain strong foothold in the nation. This meant that many people were entering a gated community each day,” he said.

MyGate has inked partnerships with many e-commerce players to create a system to offer a silent and secure delivery experience for its users. The startup also trains guards to understand the system.

According to industry estimates, more than 4.5 million people in India today live in gated communities, and that figure is growing by 13% each year. The private security industry in the country is a $15 billion market.

Arisetty says he believes the startup could significantly accelerate its growth as its solution understands the price sensitive market. Using MyGate costs an apartment about Rs 20 (28 cents) per month. Even at that price, the startup says it is making a profit. “Today, we are seeing more demand than we can handle,” he said.

That’s where the new funding would come into play for the startup, which today employs about 700 people.

The startup plans to use the fresh capital to expand its technology infrastructure, its marketing and operations teams and build new features. The startup aims to reach 15 million homes in 40 Indian cities in the next 18 months.

In a statement, Sanjay Swamy, Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, said, “it’s been great to see a fledgling startup execute consistently and holistically, and grow into a category-creating market-leader.”

Over the past few years, gig economy companies and the treatment of their labor force has become a hot button issue for public and private sector debate.

At our recent annual Disrupt event in San Francisco, we dug into how founders, companies and the broader community can play a positive role in the gig economy, with help from Derecka Mehrens, an executive director at Working Partnerships USA and co-founder of Silicon Valley Rising — an advocacy campaign focused on fighting for tech worker rights and creating an inclusive tech economy — and Amanda de Cadenet, founder of Girlgaze, a platform that connects advertisers with a network of 200,000 female-identifying and non-binary creatives.

Derecka and Amanda dove deep into where incumbent gig companies have fallen short, what they’re doing to right the ship, whether VC and hyper-growth mentalities fit into a sustainable gig economy, as well as thoughts on Uber’s new ‘Uber Works’ platform and CA AB-5. The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Where current gig companies are failing

Arman Tabatabai: What was the original promise and value proposition of the gig economy? What went wrong?

Derecka Mehrens: The gig economy exists in a larger context, which is one in which neoliberalism is failing, trickle-down economics is proven wrong, and every day working people aren’t surviving and are looking for something more.

And so you have a situation in which the system we put together to create employment, to create our communities, to build our housing, to give us jobs is dysfunctional. And within that, folks are going to come up with disruptive solutions to pieces of it with a promise in mind to solve a problem. But without a larger solution, that will end up, in our view, exacerbating existing inequalities.