Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Social networking platform for neighbors, Nextdoor, today announced it has secured additional funding to close out its $170 million growth round. The new financing includes the $123 million Nextdoor raised in May from new investor Riverwood Capital along with existing investors Benchmark, Tiger Global Management and Kleiner Perkins. The additional funding announced today comes from Mary Meeker’s tech investment firm, Bond.

As a result of the new investment, Meeker will join Nextdoor’s board.

Meeker had left Kleiner Perkins last year, where she was well-known for her popular Internet Trends Report, released annually. She has since founded Bond, taking Kleiner’s entire former growth team with her, and raised $1.25 billion for Bond’s debut growth fund. 

As of the May 2019 round, Nextdoor was valued at $2.1 billion for its neighborhood-level networking platform which today generates revenue from sponsored posts and its real estate vertical for local agents. The company had said it was on track to double its revenue in 2019.

We understand the valuation remains at $2.1 billion, even with the additional funding.

Since its 2010 founding, the Nextdoor platform has grown to over 247,000 neighborhoods across 10 countries. Its international growth potential appears to be of interest to Meeker, as does the verification process Nextdoor uses to ensure its users actually live in the neighborhoods they join.

This is not how Facebook’s Groups product works, where verification is left up to individual Group admins. That results in neighboorhood groups filled with people who are just looking to research the area, those who used to live there but have since moved, businesses looking to advertise to locals, people who live nearby but don’t have a neighborhood group of their own, and various other non-neighbors.

“Nextdoor has proven itself as the leader in local connectivity. Nextdoor is built on trust – verifying each members’ name, address, and neighborhood – which creates the transparency and accountability that is core to building communities,” Meeker said. “Nextdoor is connecting people to the information and services that matter most, and I am excited to work with this impressive team to help expand Nextdoor’s local utility as well as it’s growing global footprint,” she added.

In recent months, Nextdoor has also grown its team with new hires Antonio Silveira as its head of engineering; Tatyana Mamut, head of product; Bryan Power, head of people; and Craig Lisowski, head of data, information systems and trust.

“We could not be more thrilled to welcome Bond to our family of investors. Mary Meeker has been a strong supporter of Nextdoor for many years and is deeply knowledgeable about consumer technology,” stated Sarah Friar, CEO of Nextdoor, in a statement. “At Nextdoor, we believe that change starts with each of us opening our front doors and building deeper connections with the people nearest to us: our neighbors. We’re thrilled and honored to partner with all of our forward-looking investors to catalyze neighbors’ ability to connect with relevant local conversations, organizations, and businesses, engage in real-world interactions, and unlock the global power of local.”

 

HashiCorp has had a free tier for its Terraform product in the past, but it was basically for a single user. Today, the company announced it was expanding that free tier to allow up to five users, while also increasing the range of functions that are available before you have to pay.

“We’re announcing a pretty large expansion of the Terraform Cloud free tier. So many of the capabilities that used to be exclusively in our Terraform enterprise product, we’re now bringing down into the Terraform free tier. It allows you to do central actual execution of Terraform and apply the full lifecycle as part of the free tier,” HashiCorp co-founder and CTO Armon Dadgar explained.

In addition, the company announced a middle tier aimed at SMBs. Dadgar says the new pricing tier helped address some obvious gaps in the pricing catalogue for a large sets of users, who outgrew the free product, yet weren’t ready for the enterprise version.

“We were seeing was a lot of friction with our SMB customers trying to figure out how to go from one-user Terraform to a team of five people or a team of 20 people. And I think the challenge was that we had the enterprise product, which in terms of deployment and pricing, is really geared toward Global 2000 kinds of companies,” Dadgar told TechCrunch.

He said, this left a huge gap for smaller teams of between five and 100 user teams, which forced those teams to kludge together solutions to fit their requirements. The company thought it would make more sense to have a paid tier specifically geared for this group that would create a logical path for all users on the platform, while solving a known problem.

“It’s a logical path, but it also just answers the constant questions on forums and mailing lists regarding how to collaborate [with smaller teams]. Before, we didn’t have a prescriptive answer, and so there was a lot of DIY, and this is our attempt at a prescriptive answer of how you should do this,” he said.

Terraform is the company’s tool for defining, deploying and managing infrastructure as code. There is an open source product, an on prem version and a SaaS version.

Clubhouse — the software project management platform focused on team collaboration, workflow transparency and ease of integration — is taking another big step towards its goal of democratizing efficient software development.

Traditionally, legacy project management programs in software development can often appear like an engineer feeding frenzy around a clunky stack of to-dos. Engineers have limited clarity into the work being done by other members of their team or into project tasks that fall outside of their own silo.

Clubhouse has long been focused on easing the headaches of software development workflows by providing full visibility into the status of specific tasks, the work being done by all team members across a project, as well as higher-level project plans and goals. Clubhouse also offers easy integration with other development tools as well as its own API to better support the cross-functionality a new user may want.

Today, Clubhouse released a free version of its project management platform, that offers teams of up to 10 people unlimited access to the product’s full suite of features, as well as unlimited app integrations.

The company also announced it will be launching an engineer focused collaboration and documentation tool later this year, that will be fully integrated with the Clubhouse project management product. The new product dubbed “Clubhouse Write” is currently in beta, but will allow development teams to collaborate, organize and comment on project documentation in real-time, enabling further inter-team communication and a more open workflow.

The broader mission behind the Clubhouse Write tool and the core product’s free plan is to support more key functions in the development process for more people, ultimately making it easier for anyone to start dynamic and distributed software teams and ideate on projects.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Clubhouse also discussed how the offerings will provide key competitive positioning against larger incumbents in the software project management space. Clubhouse has long competed with Atlassian’s project management tool “Jira”, but now the company is doubling down by launching Clubhouse Write which will compete head-on with Atlassian’s team collaboration product Confluence.

According to recent Atlassian investor presentations, Jira and Confluence make up the lion’s share of the Atlassian’s business and revenues. And with Atlassian’s market capitalization of ~$30 billion, Clubhouse has its sights set on what it views as a significant market share opportunity.

According to Clubhouse, the company believes it’s in pole position to capture a serious chunk of Atlassian’s foothold given it designed its two products to have tighter integration than the legacy platforms, and since Clubhouse is essentially providing free versions of what many are already paying for to date.

And while Atlassian is far from the only competitor in the cluttered project management space, few if any competing platforms are offering a full project tool kit for free, according to the company. Clubhouse is also encouraged by the strong support it has received from the engineering community to date. In a previous interview with TechCrunch’s Danny Crichton, the company told TechCrunch it had reached at least 700 enterprise customers using the platform before hiring any sales reps, and users of the platform already include Nubank, Dataiku, and Atrium amongst thousands of others.

Clubhouse has ambitious plans to further expand its footprint, having raised $16 million to date through its Series A according to Crunchbase, with investments from a long list of Silicon Valley mainstays including Battery Ventures, Resolute Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, RRE Ventures, BoxGroup, and others.

A former CTO himself, Clubhouse cofounder and CEO Kurt Schrader is intimately familiar with the opacity in product development that frustrates engineers and complicates release schedules. Schrader and Clubhouse CMO Mitch Wainer believe Clubhouse can maintain its organic growth by that staying hyperfocused on designing for project managers and creating simple workflows that keep engineers happy. According to Schrader, the company ultimately wants to be the “default [destination] for modern software teams to plan and build software.”

“Clubhouse is the best software project management app in the world,” he said. “We want all teams to have access to a world-class tool from day one whether it’s a 5 or 5,000 person team.”

Last week, when the popular payments startup Stripe made some waves with its first move into money lending through the launch of Stripe Capital, we reported that the company was also soon going to be launching a credit card. Now, that news is official. Today, the company is doubling down on financing with the launch of corporate cards for business customers.

Announced officially today to coincide with the company’s developer event Stripe Sessions, the Stripe Corporate Card — as the product is officially called — is a Visa that will be open to businesses that are incorporated in the US, although they can operate elsewhere.

Notably, users are expected to pay their balance in full each month, so for now there is no interest rate, or fee, to use the card, with Stripe making its money by way of the interchange fee that comes with every transaction using the card.

“We’re not freezing cards based on late or no payments,” Cristina Cordova, the business lead overseeing the launch, said in an interview. “A pretty common reason for non-payment is that a person switched bank accounts and forgot to update the information. But we think we’ll have fewer problems because we have banking information for accepting revenue, by way of our payments business.”

The move is another major step ahead for Stripe as it continues to diversify its business and bring on more financial products to become a one-stop shop for e-commerce and other companies for all the transactions they might need to make in the course of their lives. It is a little ironic that it’s taken years for credit cards to get added into the mix, considering Stripe’s earliest homepages and marketing efforts were built around the design of a credit card (a reference to taking payments online, not issuing credit, of course).

In any case, the list of products now offered by Stripe is long — longer, you might say, than it takes to incorporate a Stripe service into a developer workflow. In addition to its API-based flagship payments product — which is available as a direct service or, via Stripe Connect, for third parties via marketplaces and other platforms — it offers billing and invoicing, in-person payment services (via Terminal), business analytics, fraud prevention on transactions (Radar), company incorporation (Atlas), and a range of content around business strategy.

Some of these Stripe products are free to use, and some come at a price: the main point for offering them together is to build more engagement and loyalty from customers to keep them from migrating to other services. In that regard, credit cards are a cornerstone of how businesses operate, to handle day-to-day expenses in a more accountable way, and this is an area that is already well-served by others, including startups like Brex but also a plethora of challenger and traditional banks. So as much as anything else, this is a clear move to help stave off competition.

At the same time, it underscores how Stripe is leveraging the huge amount of data that it has amassed about its users and payments on the platform: it’s not just about enabling single services, but about using the byproducts of those services — data — to put fuel into new products.

Today, to underscore its global ambitions in that regard, Stripe is adding some expansions to several of its existing products. For example, it will now allow businesses to make payouts in local currencies in 45 countries (an important detail, for example, for marketplaces and network-based companies like ridesharing businesses).

The credit card product will follow a model similar to that of Stripe Capital. As with the lending product, there is a single bank issuing the credit and the card. Amber Feng, head of financial infrastructure for Stripe, confirmed to me that it is actually the same bank that’s providing the cash behind Stripe Capital. Stripe is still declining to name the bank itself, but hints that we may hear more about it soon, which leads me to wonder what news might be coming next.

(Funding perhaps would make sense? The company has raised a whopping $785 million to date and has a valuation of $22.5 billion at the moment. Given that Stripe has made indications that a public listing is not on the cards soon, that might imply, with the launch of these new financing products, that more capital might be raised soon.)

Also similar to Stripe Capital, the underwriting of the card is based on Stripe data. That is to say, business users are verified and approved based on turnover (revenues) as measured by the Stripe payments platform itself; and in cases where applicants are “pre-revenue”, they can be evaluated based on other data sources. For example, if they have used Stripe Atlas to incorporate their businesses, the paperwork supplied for that is used by Stripe to vet the customer’s suitability for a credit card.  

Notably, the cards will be delivered in the spirit of instant gratification: if you are applying and get approved, you can download a virtual card within minutes to your Apple Wallet as you await the physical card to arrive in the post.

Stripe is big on data in its own business, and it’s bringing some of that into this product with spending controls that can be set by person and by category; real-time expense reporting by way of texts; rewards of 2% back on spending in the business’s most-used categories; and integration with financial software like Quickbooks and Expensify.

Rivian, the adventure-minded electric automaker that plans to produce a pickup truck and SUV, has raised $350 million from global automotive services company Cox Automotive.

The two companies said Tuesday they will also “explore partnership opportunities in service operations, logistics, and digital retailing.” Further details weren’t provided. However, a statement from Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe suggests the partnership will help the EV startup provide services to its customers.

“We are building a Rivian ownership experience that matches the care and consideration that go into our vehicles,” Scaringe said. “As part of this, we are excited to work with Cox Automotive in delivering a consistent customer experience across our various touchpoints. Cox Automotive’s global footprint, service and logistics capabilities, and retail technology platform make them a great partner for us.”

And Cox Automotive, as well as its parent company Cox Enterprises, has the reach Rivian is looking for. Cox Enterprises owns nearly 30 automotive brands, including Autotrader, Kelley Blue Book, Pivet, RideKleen and Manheim, which transports, services, and auctions vehicles across more than 150 global locations.

The Cox Automotive partnership follows two other eye-popping investments this year. In February, Rivian raised $700 million in a round led by Amazon. Two months later, the company announced a $500 million investment from Ford Motor.

Despite all of these big-name investors, Rivian says it will remain an independent company, a desire repeated to TechCrunch on several occasions over the past year by Scaringe. Cox Automotive will add a representative to Rivian’s board.

“With the electrification of vehicles set to play a significant role in the new mobility future, this partnership opens another channel of discovery and learning for Cox Automotive,” Joe George, president of Cox Automotive Mobility Group said in a statement. “Advancements in battery technology and the electrification of fleets are two of our primary focus areas, and we believe this relationship will prove to be mutually beneficial.”

Rivian spent the majority of its life in the shadows until November 2018 when it revealed its all-electric R1T pickup and R1S SUV at the LA Auto Show. Scaringe launched the company as Mainstream Motors in 2009. By 2011, the name changed to Rivian and moved out of Florida. Today, the company has more than 750 employees split between four development locations in the U.S. and an office in the U.K. The bulk of its employees are in Michigan to be close to an expansive automotive supply chain.

The company also has operations in San Jose and Irvine, Calif., where engineers are working on autonomous vehicle technology. Rivian also owns a factory in the Normal, Ill. that was once owned by Mitsubishi in a joint venture with Chrysler Corporation called Diamond-Star Motors.

Deliveries of these vehicles to customers in the U.S., which use a flexible skateboard platform, are expected to begin in late 2020.

Today, social networks Twenty and Mappen are joining together in a merger under the Twenty brand.

From the beginning, Twenty’s goal has been to get young people off of their phones and out in the real world with their friends. Twenty connects users with their friend groups and lets them browse fun experiences, from concerts to sports games to movies, with an easy UI for coordinating a group and making it happen. In fact, Twenty has forged relationships with orgs like Live Nation, Endeavor, Roc Nation, and Tao, which collectively produce 10,000+ events a year with an audience of over 100 million fans.

Mappen, on the other hand, is a location-based social network that let users share what they were doing (and where they were doing it) with their friends. For example, users could give a status update using a Fortnite emoji tagged to their house, inviting friends to come over and play a few games.

The two companies have been in talks, and collaborating, for the past nine months looking for ways to bring the experiences together. Where Twenty has relationships with experience providers, Mappen had the audience of young people looking to connect with each other.

The end result is an all-stock deal that unifies the user experience under the Twenty brand name.

Though the announcement of the merged app didn’t go down until today, the two apps have been combined for a while and CEO Diesel Peltz says the new app has seen 33 percent month over month growth in new users. Hangouts have increased 50 percent from July to August. Peltz will lead the combined company as CEO.

For now, the new Twenty does not have a business model in place. However, the plan is to use the event partnerships to generate revenue as opposed to ads, which relies on eyeballs on screens.

“If the model is solely based on ads, you want the users to spend as much time on the platform as possible,” said Peltz. “We’re looking to create a different opportunity for people to access these experiences.”

Thus far, the combined Twenty has raised approximately $40 million from partners including Accel, Maveron, 500 Startups, Sound Ventures, as well as Roc Nation, Live Nation and Endeavor.

Brianne Kimmel had no trouble transitioning from angel investor to general partner.

Initially setting out to garner $3 million in capital commitments, Kimmel, in just two weeks’ time, closed on $5 million for her debut venture capital fund Work Life Ventures. The enterprise SaaS-focused vehicle boasts an impressive roster of limited partners, too, including the likes of Zoom chief executive officer Eric Yuan, InVision CEO Clark Valberg, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Cameo CEO Steven Galanis, Andreessen Horowitz general partners’ Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, Initialized Capital GP Garry Tan and fund-of-funds Slow Ventures, Felicis Ventures and NFX.

At the helm of the new fund, Kimmel joins a small group of solo female general partners. Dream Machine’s Alexia Bonatsos is targeting $25 million for her first fund. Day One Ventures’ Masha Drokova raised an undisclosed amount for her debut effort last year. Sarah Cone launched Social Impact Capital, a fund specializing in impact investing, in 2016, among others.

Meanwhile, venture capital fundraising is poised to reach all-time highs in 2019. In the first half of the year, a total of $20.6 billion in new capital was introduced to the startup market across more than 100 funds.

For most, the process of raising a successful venture fund can be daunting and difficult. For well-connected and established investors in the Bay Area, like Kimmel, raising a fund can be relatively seamless. Given the speed and ease of fund one in Kimmel’s case, she plans to raise her second fund with a $25 million target in as little as 12 months.

“The desire for the fund is to take a step back and imagine how do we build great consumer experiences in the workplace,” Kimmel tells TechCrunch.

Kimmel has been an active angel investor for years, sourcing top enterprise deals via SaaS School, an invite-only workshop she created to educate early-stage SaaS founders on SaaS growth, monetization, sales and customer success. Prior to launching SaaS School, which will continue to run twice a year, Kimmel led go-to-market strategy at Zendesk, where she built the Zendesk for Startups program.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

available offline #google #remote

A post shared by Work Life Ventures (@worklifevc) on Aug 17, 2019 at 8:09pm PDT

“You start by advising, then you start with very small angel checks,” Kimmel explains. “I reached this inflection point and it felt like a great moment to raise my own fund. I had friends like Ryan Hoover, who started Weekend Fund focused on consumer, and Alexia is one of my friends as well and I saw what she was doing with Dream Machine, which is also consumer. It felt like it was the right time to come out with a SaaS-focused fund.”

Emerging from stealth today, Work Life Ventures will invest up to $150,000 per company. To date, Kimmel has backed three companies with capital from the fund: Tandem, Dover and Command E. The first, Tandem, was amongst the most coveted deals in Y Combinator’s latest batch of companies. The startup graduated from the accelerator with millions from Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation north of $30 million.

Dover, another recent YC alum, provides recruitment software and is said to be backed by Founders Fund in addition to Work Life. Command E, currently in beta, is a tool that facilities search across multiple desktop applications. Kimmel is also an angel investor in Webflow, Girlboss, TechCrunch Disrupt 2018 Startup Battlefield winner Forethought, Voyage and others.

Work Life is betting on the consumerization of the enterprise, or the idea that the next best companies for modern workers will be consumer-friendly tools. In her pitch deck to LPs, she cites the success of Superhuman and Notion, a well-designed email tool and a note-taking app, respectively, as examples of the heightened demand for digestible, easy-to-use B2B products.

“The next generation of applications for the workplace sees people spinning out of Uber, Coinbase and Airbnb,” Kimmel said. “They’ve faced these challenges inside their highly efficient tech company so we are seeing more consumer product builders deeply passionate about the enterprise space.”

But Kimmel doesn’t want to bury her thesis in jargon, she says, so you won’t find any B2B lingo on Work Life’s website or Instagram.

She’s focusing her efforts on a more important issue often vacant from conversations surrounding investment in the future of work: diversity & inclusion.

Kimmel meets with every new female hire of her portfolio companies. Though it’s “increasingly non-scalable,” she admits, it’s part of a greater effort to ensure her companies are thoughtful about D&I from the beginning: “Because I have a very focused fund, it’s about maintaining this community and ensuring that people feel like their voices are heard,” she said.

“I want to be mindful that I am a female GP and I feel honored to have that title.”

Caper wants to deliver a major update to the self checkout aisle without keeping its dreaded catchphrases, i.e. “Unknown item in the bagging area,” “Please place the item in the bag.”

The New York startup is tapping some of Silicon Valley’s more recognizable VC firms to fund their dreams for a shopping cart of the future that uses computer vision and other sensors to let shoppers quickly scan items as they drop them into their carts.

The company is announcing that they’ve closed a $10 million Series A led by Lux Capital. The round also saw participation from First Round Capital, Y Combinator, Hardware Club, FundersClub, Sidekick Fund and Red Apple Group.

Caper closed its $2.15 million seed round led by First Round earlier this year. The startup has now raised $13 million to date. The startup’s leadership plans to use the capital to bring their smart grocery carts to more locations.

The startup says its tech could help grocery store chains bring more seamless checkout processes to customers as the groups aim to keep pace with Amazon which has doubled down on physical retail automation with its Amazon Go convenience stores.

While Amazon’s small stores rely on a complex web of cameras and sensors tracking your purchase habits, Caper’s solution is more insular focusing only on what’s happening inside a shopper’s cart.

“Instead of monitoring an entire store, we’re monitoring this very small cart. Our computation is faster, our cameras are a lot closer and we’re able to scale much faster because we don’t need to implement any infrastructure inside the store,” Yang tells TechCrunch.

The company declined to detail exactly how pricey these carts were for a store. When asked whether rollouts would costs “thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Yang told TechCrunch that a full rollout at a grocery store would “probably be within the hundreds of thousands range though it could be less.”

Alternatively, Bloomberg reported that the Seattle’s first Amazon Go store required $1 million worth of hardware.

Caper isn’t expecting physical retailers to go all-in and toss out their old-school grocery carts when they become customers. Part of Caper’s advantage is that it doesn’t alienate customers who don’t want to bring AI into their process, those people can just grab an old cart and check out the regular way if the don’t feel like pushing around a computer.

The credit card reader, barcode scanner and image recognition cameras are just a slice of the sell for investors backing Caper. It’s less about streamlining checkout than it is finding a new way to bring AI-driven online retail conventions into physical stores. Personalized recommendations, shopping lists and recipes could eventually find their way onto the built-in touchscreen, Yang says.

“Our vision is ultimately to build a platform layer on retail that never existed before.”

Timed with World Suicide Prevention Day, Facebook is tightening its policies around some difficult topics including self-harm, suicide, and eating disorder content after consulting with a series of experts on these topics. It’s also hiring a new Safety Policy Manager to advise on these areas going forward. This person will be specifically tasked with analyzing the impacts of Facebook’s policies and its apps on people’s health and well-being, and will explore new ways to improve support for the Facebook community.

The social network, like others in the space, has to walk a fine line when it comes to self-harm content. On the one hand, allowing people to openly discuss their mental health struggles with family, friends, and other online support groups can be beneficial. But on the other, science indicates that suicide can be contagious, and that clusters and outbreaks are real phenomena. Meanwhile, graphic imagery of self-harm can unintentionally promote the behavior.

With its updated policies, Facebook aims to prevent the spread of more harmful imagery and content.

It changed its policy around self-harm images to no longer allow graphic cutting images which can unintentionally promote or trigger self-harm. These images will not be allowed even if someone is seeking support or expressing themselves to aid their recovery, Facebook says.

The same content will also now be more difficult to find on Instagram through search and Explore.

And Facebook has tightened its policy regarding eating disorder content on its apps to prevent an expanded range of content that could contribute to eating disorders. This includes content that focuses on the depiction of ribs, collar bones, thigh gaps, concave stomach, or protruding spine or scapula, when shared with terms related to eating disorders. It will also ban content that includes instructions for drastic and unhealthy weight loss, when shared with those same sorts of terms.

It will also display a sensitivity screen over healed self-harm cuts going forward to help unintentionally promote self-harm.

Even when it takes content down, Facebook says it will now continue to send resources to people who posted self-harm or eating disorder content.

Facebook will additionally include Orygen’s #chatsafe guidelines to its Safety Center and in resources on Instagram. These guidelines are meant to help those who are responding to suicide-related content posted by others or are looking to express their own thoughts and feelings on the topic.

The changes came about over the course of the year, following Facebook’s consultations with a variety of the experts in the field, across a number of countries including the U.S., Canada, U.K. Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, India, Mexico, Philippines, and Thailand. Several of the policies were updated prior to today, but Facebook is now publicly announcing the combined lot.

The company says it’s also looking into sharing the public data from its platform on how people talk about suicide with academic researchers by way of the CrowdTangle monitoring tool. Before, this was made available primarily to newsrooms and media publishers

Suicide helplines provide help to those in need. Contact a helpline if you need support yourself or need help supporting a friend. Click here for Facebook’s list of helplines around the world. 

As the antitrust investigations stack up on US tech giants’ home turf there’s no sign of pressure letting up across the pond.

European Commission president-elect Ursula von der Leyen today unveiled her picks for the next team of commissioners who will take up their mandates on November 1 — giving an expanded role to competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager. The pick suggests the next Commission is preparing to dial up its scrutiny of big tech’s data monopolies.

Under the draft list of commissioners-designate, which still needs to be approved in full by the European Parliament, Vestager has been named executive VP overseeing a new portfolio called ‘Europe fit for the digital age’.

But, crucially, she will also retain the competition portfolio — which implies attention on growing Europe’s digital economy will go hand in glove with scrutiny of fairness in ecommerce and ensuring a level playing field vs US platform giants.

“Executive vice-president Margrethe Vestager will lead our work on a Europe fit for the digital age,” said von der Leyen at a press conference to announce her picks. “Digitalization has a huge impact on the way we live, we work, we communicate. In some fields Europe has to catch up — for example in the field of business to consumer but in other fields we’re excellent. Europe is the frontrunner, for example in business to business, when we talk about digital twins of products and procedures.

“We have to make more out of the field of artificial intelligence. We have to make our single market a digital single market. We have to use way more the big data that is out there but we don’t make enough out of it. What innovation and startups are concerned. It’s not only need to know but it’s need to share big data. We have to improve on cyber security. We have to work hard on our technological sovereignty just to name a few issues in these broad topics.

“Margrethe Vestager will co-ordinate the whole agenda. And be the commissioner for competition. She will work together with the commissioner for internal market, innovation and youth, transport, energy, jobs, health and justice.”

If tech giants were hoping for Europe’s next Commission to pay a little less attention to question marks hanging over the fairness of their practices they’re likely to be disappointed as Vestager is set to gain expanded powers and a broader canvas to paint on. The new role clearly positions her to act on the review of competition policy she instigated towards the end of her current mandate — which focused on the challenges posed by digital markets.

Since taking over as Europe’s competition chief back in 2014, Vestager has made a name for herself by blowing the dust off the brief and driving forward on a series of regulatory interventions targeting tech giants including Amazon, Apple and Google . In the latter case this has included opening a series of fresh probes as well as nailing the very long running Google Shopping saga inherited from her predecessor.

The activity of the department under her mandate has clearly catalyzed complainants — creating a pipeline of cases for her to tackle. And just last month Reuters reported she had been preparing an “intensive” handover of work looking into complaints against Google’s job search product to her successor — a handover that won’t now be necessary, assuming the EU parliament gives its backing to von der Leyen’s team.

While the competition commissioner has thus far generated the biggest headlines for the size of antitrust fines she’s handed down — including a record-breaking $5BN fine for Google last year for illegal restrictions attached to Android — her attention on big data holdings as a competition risk is most likely to worry tech giants going forward.

See, for example, the formal investigation of Amazon’s use of merchant data announced this summer for a sign of the direction of travel.

Vestager has also talked publicly about regulating data flows as being a more savvy route to control big tech versus swinging a break up hammer. And while — on the surface — regulating data might sound less radical a remedy than breaking giants like Google and Facebook up, placing hard limits on how data can be used has the potential to effect structural separation via a sort of regulatory keyhole surgery that’s likely to be quicker and implies a precision that may also make it more politically palatable.

That’s important given the ongoing EU-US trade friction kicked up by the Trump administration which is never shy of lashing out, especially at European interventions that seek to address some of the inequalities generated by tech giants — most recently Trump gave France’s digital tax plans a tongue-lashing.

von der Leyen was asked during the press conference whether Vestager might not been seen as a controversial choice given Trump’s views of her activity to date (Europe’s “tax lady” is one of the nicer things he’s said about Vestager). The EU president-elect dismissed the point saying the only thing that matters in assigning Commission portfolios is “quality and excellence”, adding that competition and digital is the perfect combination to make the most of Vestager’s talents.

“Vestager has done an outstanding job as a commissioner for competition,” she went on. “At competition and the issues she’s tackling there are closely linked to the digital sector too. So having her as an executive vice-president for the digital in Europe is absolutely a perfect combination.

“She’ll have this topic as a cross-cutting topic. She’ll have to work on the Digital Single Market. She will work on the fact that we want to use in a better way big data that is out there, that we collect every day — non-personalized data. That we should use way better, in the need for example to share with others for innovation, for startups, for new ideas.

“She will work on the whole topic of cyber security. Which is the more we’re digitalized, the more we’re vulnerable. So there’s a huge field in front of her. And as she’s shown excellence in the Commission portfolio she’ll keep that — the executive vice-presidents have with the DGs muscles to deal with their vast portfolios’ subject they have to deal with.”

In other choices announced today, the current commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, Mariya Gabriel, will be taking up a new portfolio called ‘Innovation and Youth’. And Sylvie Goulard was named as ‘Internal Market’ commissioner, leading on industrial policy and promoting the Digital Single Market, as well as getting responsibility for Defence Industry and Space.

Another executive VP choice, Valdis Dombrovskis, looks likely to be tackling thorny digital taxation issues — with responsibility for co-ordinating the Commission’s work on what’s been dubbed an “Economy that Works for People”, as well as also being commissioner for financial services. 

In prepared remarks on that role, von der Leyen said: “We have a unique social market economy. It is the source of our prosperity and social fairness. This is all the more important when we face a twin transition: climate and digital. Valdis Dombrovskis will lead our work to bring together the social and the market in our economy.”

Frans Timmermans, who was previously in the running as a possible candidate for Commission president but lost out to von der Leyen, is another exec VP pick. He’s set to be focused on delivering a European Green Deal and managing climate action policy.

Another familiar face — current justice, consumer and gender affairs commissioner, Věra Jourová — has also been named as an exec VP, gaining responsibility for “Values and Transparency”, a portfolio title which suggests she’ll continue to be involved in EU efforts to combat online disinformation on platforms.

The rest of the Commission portfolio appointments can be found here.

There are 26 picks in all — 27 counting von der Leyen who has already been confirmed as president; one per EU country, with the UK having no representation in the next Commission given it is due to leave the bloc on October 31, the day before the new Commission takes up its mandate.

von der Leyen touted the team she presented today as balanced and diverse, including on gender lines as well as geographically to take account of the full span of European Union members.

“It draws on all the strength and talents, men and women, experienced and young, east and west, south and north, a team that is well balanced, a team that brings together diversity of experience and competence,” she said. “I want a Commission that is led with determination, that is clearly focused on the issues at hand — and that provides answers.”

“There’s one fundamental that connects this team: We want to bring new impetus to Europe’s democracy,” she added. “This is our joint responsibility. And democracy is more than voting in elections in every five years; it is about having your voice heard. It’s about having been able to participate in the way our society’s built. We gave to address some of the deeper issues in our society that have led to a loss of faith in democracy.”

In a signal of her intention that the new Commission should “walk the talk” on making Europe fit for the digital age she announced that college meetings will be paperless and digital.

On lawmaking, she added that there will be a one-in, one-out policy — with any new laws and regulation supplanting an existing rule in a bid to cut red tape.