Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Employee engagement isn’t just about the morale of individual workers—it also enables broader workforce productivity and leads to better business outcomes. In fact, research conducted by The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) argues that an understanding of the role employee engagement plays in driving morale and productivity is critical to business success.

At Slack, my team of researchers and analysts spends time studying how people work and what they need to do their best work. We consistently find that an important signal of employee engagement lies in how people feel about the tools they use at work.

Good tools can enable both productivity as well as increase morale. We’ve done research to learn more about successful and thriving Slack teams, and what it is about Slack that enables them to do better work.

These teams don’t just talk about how Slack improves efficiency, but also how it builds community and in some ways modernizes the company. We also found that the top three emotions people associate with Slack are happy, fun and easy, which you might not expect from a productivity tool.

Technology overall has impacted how, for how long, and from where we work, as well as our efficiency in getting things done. Engaging employees with technology isn’t just about supplying more robust software, but giving people tools that they look forward to using everyday as much as their preferred personal apps.

When products and technology reflect the nuances of human communication, while at the same time making information more accessible, employees feel more connected — both with the workplace and with their co-workers – resulting in a stronger, more trusting relationships and better performance.

So, how can we challenge ourselves to set higher expectations for the work products we build and use every day, and what would it look like to bring more humanity, fun and delight into the tools we use for work? Here are some principles to keep in mind.

Add emotional context to improve communication

TechCrunch Sessions is back! On September 5, we’re taking on the ferociously competitive field of enterprise software, and thrilled to announce our packed agenda, overflowing with some of the biggest names and most exciting startups in the enterprise industry. And you’re in luck, $249 early bird tickets are still on sale — make sure you book yours so you can enjoy all the agenda has to offer.

Throughout the day, you can expect to hear from and partake in discussions about the potential of new technologies like quantum and AI, how to deal with the onslaught of security threats, investing in early-stage startups, and plenty more. 

We’ll be joined by some of the biggest names and the smartest and most prescient people in the industry, including Bill McDermott at SAP, Scott Farquhar at Atlassian, Julie Larson-Green at Qualtrics, Wendy Nather at Duo Security, Aaron Levie at Box, and Andrew Ng at Landing AI.

Our agenda showcases some of the powerhouses in the space, but also plenty of smaller teams that are building and debunking fundamental technologies in the industry. We still have a few tricks up our sleeves and will be adding some new names to the agenda over the next month so keep your eyes open. In the meantime, check out these agenda highlights:

AGENDA

Investing with an Eye to the Future
Jason Green (Emergence Capital), Maha Ibrahim (Canaan Partners) and Rebecca Lynn (Canvas Ventures)
9:35 AM – 10:00 AM

In an ever-changing technological landscape, it’s not easy for VCs to know what’s coming next and how to place their bets. Yet, it’s the job of investors to peer around the corner and find the next big thing, whether that’s in AI, serverless, blockchain, edge computing or other emerging technologies. Our panel will look at the challenges of enterprise investing, what they look for in enterprise startups and how they decide where to put their money.

Talking Shop
Scott Farquhar (Atlassian)
10:00 AM – 10:20 AM

With tools like Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence, few companies influence how developers work as much as Atlassian. The company’s co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar will join us to talk about growing his company, how it is bringing its tools to enterprises and what the future of software development in and for the enterprise will look like.

Q&A with Investors 
10:20 AM – 10:50 AM

Your chance to ask questions of some of the greatest investors in enterprise.

Innovation Break: Deliver Innovation to the Enterprise
DJ Paoni (SAP), Sanjay Poonen (VMWare) and Shruti Tournatory (Sapphire Ventures)
10:20 AM – 10:40 AM

For startups, the appeal of enterprise clients is not surprising — signing even one or two customers can make an entire business, and it can take just a few hundred to build a $1B unicorn company. But while corporate counterparts increasingly look to the startup community for partnership opportunities, making the jump to enterprise sales is far more complicated than scaling up the strategy startups already use to sell to SMBs or consumers. Hear from leaders who have experienced successes and pitfalls through the process as they address how startups can adapt their strategy with the needs of the enterprise in mind. Sponsored by SAP

Coming Soon!
10:40 AM – 11:00 AM

Box’s Enterprise Journey
Aaron Levie (Box)
11:15 AM – 11:35 AM

Box started life as a consumer file storage company and transformed early on into a successful enterprise SaaS company, focused on content management in the cloud. Levie will talk about what it’s like to travel the entire startup journey — and what the future holds for data platforms.

Bringing the Cloud to the Enterprise
George Brady (Capital One), Byron Deeter (Bessemer Venture Partners) and speaker to be announced
11:35 AM – 12:00 PM

Cloud computing may now seem like the default, but that’s far from true for most enterprises, which often still have tons of legacy software that runs in their own data centers. What does it mean to be all in on the cloud, which is what Capital One recently accomplished. We’ll talk about how companies can make the move to the cloud easier, what not to do, and how to develop a cloud strategy with an eye to the future.

Keeping the Enterprise Secure
Martin Casado (Andreessen Horowitz), Wendy Nather (Duo Security) and speaker to be announced
1:00 PM – 1:25 PM

Enterprises face a litany of threats from both the inside and outside the firewall. Now more than ever, companies — especially startups — have to put security first. From preventing data from leaking to keeping bad actors out of your network, enterprises have it tough. How can you secure the enterprise without slowing growth? We’ll discuss the role of a modern CSO and how to move fast… without breaking things.

Keeping an Enterprise Behemoth on Course
Bill McDermott (SAP)
1:25 PM – 1:45 PM

With over $166 billion is market cap, Germany-based SAP is one of the most valuable tech companies in the world today. Bill McDermott took the leadership in 2014, becoming the first American to hold this position. Since then, he has quickly grown the company, in part thanks to a number of $1B+ acquisitions. We’ll talk to him about his approach to these acquisitions, his strategy for growing the company in a quickly changing market and the state of enterprise software in general.

How Kubernetes Changed Everything
Brendan Burns (Microsoft), Tim Hockin (Google Cloud), Craig McLuckie (VMWare), and Aparna Sinha (Google)
1:45 PM – 2:15 PM

You can’t go to an enterprise conference and not talk Kubernetes, the incredibly popular open source container orchestration project that was incubated at Google. For this panel, we brought together three of the founding members of the Kubernetes team and the current director of product management for the project at Google to talk about the past, present and future of the project and how it has changed how enterprises think about moving to the cloud and developing software.

Innovation Break: Data Who Owns It
(SAP)
2:15 PM – 2:35 PM

Enterprises have historically competed by being closed entities, keeping a closed architecture and innovating internally. When applying this closed approach to the hottest new commodity, data, it simply does not work anymore. But as enterprises, startups and public institutions open themselves up, how open is too open? Hear from leaders who explore data ownership and the questions that need to be answered before the data floodgates are opened. Sponsored by SAP.

AI Stakes its Place in the Enterprise
Bindu Reddy (Reality Engines), Jocelyn Goldfein (Zetta Venture Partners) and speaker to be announced
2:35 PM – 3:00 PM

AI is becoming table stakes for enterprise software as companies increasingly build AI into their tools to help process data faster or make more efficient use of resources. Our panel will talk about the growing role of AI in enterprise for companies big and small.

Q&A with Founders
3:00 PM – 3:30 PM

Your chance to ask questions of some of the greatest startup minds in enterprise technology.

The Trials and Tribulations of Experience Management
Julie Larson-Green (Qualtrics), Peter Reinhardt (Segment) and speaker to be announced
3:15 PM – 3:40 PM

As companies gather more data about their customers, it should theoretically improve the customer experience, buy myriad challenges face companies as they try to pull together information from a variety of vendors across disparate systems, both in the cloud and on prem. How do you pull together a coherent picture of your customers, while respecting their privacy and overcoming the technical challenges? We’ll ask a team of experts to find out.

Innovation Break: Identifying Overhyped Technology Trends
James Allworth (Cloudflare), George Mathew (Kespry), and Max Wessel (SAP)
3:40 PM – 4:00 PM

For innovation-focused businesses, deciding which technology trends are worth immediate investment, which trends are worth keeping on the radar, and which are simply buzzworthy can be a challenging gray area to navigate and may ultimately make or break the future of a business. Hear from these innovation juggernauts as they provide their divergent perspectives on today’s hottest trends, including Blockchain, 5G, AI, VR and more. Sponsored by SAP.

Fireside Chat
Andrew Ng (Landing AI)
4:00 PM – 4:20 PM

Few technologists have been more central to the development of AI in the enterprise than Andrew Ng .  With Landing AI and the backing of many top venture firms, Ng has the foundation to develop and launch the AI companies he thinks will be winners. We will talk about where Ng expects to see AI’s biggest impacts across the enterprise.

The Quantum Enterprise
Jim Clarke (Intel), Jay Gambetta (IBM), and Krysta Svore (Microsoft)
4:20 PM – 4:45 PM

While we’re still a few years away from having quantum computers that will fulfill the full promise of this technology, many companies are already starting to experiment with what’s available today. We’ll talk about what startups and enterprises should know about quantum today to prepare for tomorrow.

Overcoming the Data Glut
Benoit Dageville (Snowflake), Ali Ghodsi (Databricks), and speaker to be announced
4:45 PM – 5:10 PM

There is certainly no shortage of data in the enterprise these days. The question is how do you process it and put it in shape to understand it and make better decisions? Our panel will discuss the challenges of data management and visualization in a shifting technological landscape where the term ‘big data’ doesn’t begin to do the growing volume justice.

Early bird tickets are on sale now for just $249. That’s a $100 savings before prices go up – book yours today.

Students save big with our super discounted $75 ticket when you book here.

Are you a startup, book a demo table package for just $2000 (includes 4 tickets) – book here.

A new report could ultimately prove another bombshell in Huawei’s on-going conflicts with the U.S. government. New documents obtained by The Washington Post tie the Chinese hardware giant to North Korea’s commercial 3G wireless network.

If proven, the ties would be yet more fodder for the U.S., which has already dinged the company over charges of violating Iran sanctions. The government has also been investigated potential ties between Huawei and North Korea for years, though concrete links have apparently remained elusive.

This latest report arrives by way of a former Huawei employee, with confirmation and supporting documents from other sources who have also requested to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. For its part, Huawei has stated that it has “no business presence” in the embattled country.

“Huawei is fully committed to comply with all applicable laws and regulations in the countries and regions where we operate, including all export control and sanction laws and regulations,” it said in a statement offered to the press. Notably, the statements appear to apply primarily to its current business offerings, while declining to comment on the past.

The specifics of the dealings are a touch complicated. According to the documents, Huawei partnered with Panda International Information Technology, a state-owned Chinese communications company. Huawei reportedly used the firm to send networking equipment to the country in order to launch wireless carrier, Koryolink over a decade ago.

The company has been under additional scrutiny recently as carriers have begun to roll out 5G networks across the globe.  We’ve reached out to Huawei for additional comment.

Serverless development has largely been a lonely pursuit until recently, but Serverless, Inc has been offering a free framework for intrepid programmers since 2015. At first, that involved development, deployment and testing, but today the company announced it is expanding into monitoring and security to make it an end-to-end tool — and it’s available for free.

Serverless computing isn’t actually server-free, but it’s a form of computing that provides a way to use only the computing resources you need to carry out a given function and no more. When the process is complete, the resources effectively go away. That has the potential to be more cost-effective than having a server that’s always on, regardless of whether you’re using it or not. That requires a new way of thinking about how developers write code.

While serverless offers a compelling value proposition, up until Serverless, Inc came along with some developer tooling, early adherents were pretty much stuck building their own tooling to develop, deploy and test their programs. Today’s announcement expands the earlier free Serverless, Inc Framework to provide a more complete set of serverless developer tools.

Company founder and CEO Austen Collins says that he has been thinking a lot about what developers need to develop and deploy serverless programs, and talking to customers. He says that they really craved a more integrated approach to serverless development than has been available until now.

“What we’re trying to do is build this perfectly integrated solution for developers and developer teams because we want to enable them to innovate as much as possible and be as autonomous as possible,” Collins told TechCrunch. He says at the same time, he recognizes that operations needs to connect to other tools and the Serverless Framework provides hooks into other systems as well.

The new tooling includes an integrated environment, so that once you deploy, you can simply click an error or security event and drill down to a dashboard for more information about the issue. You can click for further detail to see the exact spot in the code where the issue occurred, which should make it easier to resolve more quickly.

While no tool is 100 percent comprehensive, and most large organizations, and even individual developers, will have a set of tools they prefer to use, this is an attempt to build a one-stop solution for serverless developers for the first time. That in itself is significant as serverless moves beyond early adopters and begins to become more of a mainstream kind of programming and deployment option. People starting now probably won’t want to cobble together their own toolkits and the Serverless, Inc. Framerwork gives them a good starting point.

Serverless, Inc. was founded by Collins in 2015 out of a need for serverless computing tooling. He has raised over $13.5 million since inception.

Slack is launching a major update to its web and desktop today that doesn’t introduce any new features or a new user interface. Instead, it’s almost a complete rebuild of the underlying technology that makes these two experiences work. Over the course of the last year or so, Slack worked on shifting the web and desktop clients (which essentially use the same codebase) to a modern stack and away from jQuery and other technologies it used when it first introduced these tools in 2012.

“We want people to be able to run Slack alongside anything else they’re using to get their job done and have that be easy, uncumbersome, delightful even. So we took a look at the environment we’re in,” Jaime DeLanghe, Director of Product Management at Slack, told me. “I think the other thing to note is that the ecosystem for client-side development has just changed a lot in the past five years. There have been some major updates to JavaScript and new technologies like React and Redux to make it easier to build dynamic web applications. We also wanted to update our stack to fit in with the modern paradigm.”

Over the course of the last few months, the team actually quietly rolled out a lot of the prep work for this move, though the full extent of the work is only going to become apparent once you update the client to the latest version as its the new Electron app that will bring it all together.

Slack promises that this new version will use up to 50 percent less memory than before and that Slack will load 33 percent faster. Joining an incoming call will also be ten times faster now.

A lot of these changes will be especially apparent to users who are part of multiple workspaces. That’s because, as DeLanghe stressed, the team designed the new architecture with the assumption that many users are now part of multiple workspaces. Those used to take up a lot of memory and CPU cycles when you switched between them, as each workspace used to get its own Electron process in the old app.

In the updated app, Slack went with React to build all of the UI components and instead of waiting for all the data to load before displaying the UI, the new app now lazily loads data as it becomes available.

The result of this is an experience that also now allows you to at least read previously opened channels and conversations when you are offline.

What’s maybe even more important, though, is that Slack now has a modern client to build on, which should speed up feature development going forward. “I’m not going to over-promise,” DeLanghe said. “This removes one of the barriers that any company that’s scaling and building features at the same time has to think about. […] This makes that tradeoff a little bit easier.”

The update will roll out to all users over the course of the next few weeks. That’s because this is a two-part change.  You’ll need both the new desktop application and become eligible for the new version. Some of this is out of Slack’s hands, as your IT department may decide how it rolls out updates, for example.

Another hopeful among Europe’s so-called challenger banks — startups taking on the big names in consumer banking by targeting niche groups of users with a more modern set of tools to manage users’ money — has raised a sizeable round of funding to expand its business.

Atom Bank — which targets mainly millennial-aged consumers (current slogan: “It’s all about you, you, you”) with mobile-first savings accounts and mortgages as well as small business loans — has raised a further £50 million in funding. It’s not disclosing its valuation officially but sources confirm it’s £530 million (or around $660 million at current rates), up from £450 million previously.

“What’s important to customers is good products, good service and good value so that’s where we’ve spent the majority of our time and energy,” said Mark Mullen, Atom’s CEO, in a statement. “We’re growing our team here in the North East and will add 50 new roles this year to help us expand the range of products and services we offer, starting with Instant Access savings in the autumn. More than ever we are convinced of the importance of Atom’s role to drive positive change in UK banking.”

This latest round included investments from banking giant BBVA — which led its last round of £149 million in 2018 — as well as Toscafund, Woodford Patient Capital Trust and funds advised by Perscitus LLP. Other high-profile investors have included the likes of musician and embracer of all things future technology, Will.i.am.

The startup was co-founded by one of the industry’s earlier “banking disruptors” — Anthony Thomson, who had previously co-founded one of the first entities to challenge the dominance of high street banks in the UK, Metro Bank. Atom’s rise mirrors a larger trend in Europe, and especially in the UK, of what are collectively referred to as challenger banks.

Atom, founded several years ago, was one of the first, but there are now a number of others building banking offerings — sometimes on top of more legacy infrastructure, which they take as white-label services — that appeal to younger earners and savers because of lower fees, more flexibility in how money can be moved and borrowed, and perks aimed specifically at their demographic. Others include Monese, Monzo, Revolut, Starling, N26 and Tandem.

Atom says that in the last year its total lending, covering both homeowners and small businesses, was up by 76% to £2.4 billion, with deposings accounting for £1.8 billion of that (up from £1.4 billion). Atom says it gets applications of up to £20 million of business loans and £10 million of residential mortgage each week.

All good signs, but the crowded market of challengers, alongside bigger banks finally getting their new business strategies in order, is in part what is spurring this investment and what the company plans to do with it.

In November 2018, Atom announced that it would be partnering with a fintech startup called Thought Machine — founded by an ex-Googler several years ago — to migrate all of its banking technology to Thought Machine’s Blockchain-based platform called Vault. The plan has been to move Atom’s operations into the cloud, and to a much more modern set of infrastructure, to reduce the costs to run it, and also to start to introduce new services — although Atom doesn’t specify when.

Still, it appears that the company’s current metrics and the progress it’s had so far in its Thought Machine migration is encouraging investors.

“This latest raise recognises the enormous progress that we have made on our journey to disrupt UK banking, and is a clear signal of our investor’s support for our future plans,” said Bridget Rosewell, Atom’s chairwoman, in a statement.

Tokyo’s 2020 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games are fast-approaching, and Toyota is playing a key role in on-site mobility and transportation. The Japanese automaker has unveiled five robots it’s also going to be bringing to the games, which will each help in some way to support athletes and attendees at avenues get around, get information, experience the games remotely, ferry food, drinks an equipment and much more. The robots range from humanoid to strictly purpose-built and functional in design.

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First up are two robot designs based on Tokyo’s official Olympic mascots, Miraitowa and Someity. These blue and pink big-eyed bots will be on-site at official venues acting as greeters and photo-ops, but they’re equipped with cameras and digital eyes that can offer expressions in response to human interaction. They’ll also be able to move their arms and legs, and part of the plan for deploying them is to potentially distribute them across Japan to offer kids in other cities a chance to get a taste of the games from afar.

T-HR3 offers a similar set of features, albeit in a very different design. This humanoid robot is a lot less ‘cute’ than the mascot bots, but has a lot more potential in terms of articulation. It’s also intended to provide a remote experience of what it’s like to be at the games, and can reproduce the movements of its mascot robot counterparts in real-time. T-HR3 can also stream images and sounds from the remote locations back to the Olympic site, acting as telepresence bots for Olympic fans off-site and mirroring their movements – they can “converse with and high-five athletes and others,” Toyota says specifically.

Next up is T-TR1, a more traditional kind of telepresence robot that has a wheeled base, cameras ad a super large vertical display. It can show people at basically life-size scale, and let remote people chat in real-time with Olympic athletes and fans on-site to really feel like they’re there.

This next robot is actually a pair – Human Support Robot (HSR) and Delivery Support Robot (DSR). The HSR is basically a robotic usher, providing guidance to seats for guests at venues, and also transporting some snacks, souvenirs and other light cargo to them at their seat while they watch the games. DSR, which is all-new for the Olympics, is more dedicated to delivering drinks and concessions to attendees on-site at venues, with people being able to order from a dedicated tablet – a modern replacement for hawkers walking the stands with trays of popcorn, peanuts and drinks.

Last but not least is Field Support Robot (FSR). This box-on-wheels should actually play an instrumental role, specifically supporting those game that involve hurling something as far as you can throw it. FSR’s entire purpose is to take the best route possible to retrieve things like javelins and shot-puts and return them to where they’re needed once thrown and recorded. They live to fetch.

Sadly, we’re not yet at the point where the robots are actually competing against the humans in a ‘winner-takes-all’ battle for the future of the planet. But these should nonetheless provide a look at what our future might be when robots are much more common in daily life, supporting humans in similar ways when there isn’t an international competition of the best-performing athletes in the world going on.

Amazon this morning announced its intentions to open a pair of robotic-powered fulfillment centers in Ohio. The two warehouses — both larger than 700,000 square feet — will be located in the north of the state, in Akron and Rossford, respectively.

They’ll function much like Amazon’s other shipping centers, providing a collaborative workspace between human employees and the company’s growing army of shipping robots. You can get a better look at how that goes down in this piece from our recent visit to a Staten Island location.

The company’s become accustomed to getting out in front of the conversations about automation taking away human jobs, noting than the two spaces will combine to create more than 2,500 full-time positions. Last year’s pushback from Senator Bernie Sanders also means that the full-time gigs will qualify for its $15 minimum wage.

The new locations should also help the company as it pushes into one-day shipping across the U.S. There’s been a fair amount of concern over how much strain such a move will ultimately put on human employees, who are already reportedly strained to hit their current goals.

The additional 2,500 jobs brings Amazon’s total employment up to 8,500 in the midwestern state. No exact word on timing for the two warehouses. 

Just Eat, the publicly-listed takeout marketplace that has faced fierce competition from UberEats and Deliveroo in recent years, has made a round of layoffs in the U.K. and Ireland, TechCrunch has learned.

Announced internally late on Friday, the redundancies are part of a reorganisation that is seeing Just Eat’s customer and restaurant operation teams merged. It it not clear exactly how many employees are being laid off, although I understand it is several dozen, while one source says it could be as many as 100 staff.

Confirmed the re-org, a Just Eat spokesperson declined to comment on the exact number. Instead, the company provided TechCrunch with the following statement:

“At our full year results we talked about organising and energising the business to execute our strategy at pace. In order to ensure our operations are set up to deliver the best possible service we have merged our existing customer and restaurant operations teams into one global unified team. This has resulted in a number of redundancies in the UK and Ireland. Our people are a priority for us and we will of course support all those affected during this time.”

Separately, while Just Eat remains without a permanent CEO after Peter Plumb stepped down in January and was replaced by interim CEO Peter Duffy, TechCrunch has learned that Graham Corfield, previously UK Managing Director, has been appointed as Just Eat Chief Operating Officer. The promotion also sees Andrew Kenny, previously UK Commercial Director, moved into the role of UK Managing Director.

In a further statement issued to TechCrunch, Duffy said: “I am delighted to confirm Graham Corfield’s appointment to Chief Operating Officer for Just Eat. Graham joined the business in 2011, and as UK MD for the past six years, has overseen countless success stories for us including driving UK order growth, evolving the Just Eat brand to be the nation’s favourite takeaway destination, and championing our restaurant partners to drive their success”.

More to follow…

Luckin continues to expand at jaw-dropping speed as it announced plans to open shop overseas for the first time. On Monday, the Starbucks challenger from China said it has signed a memorandum of understanding to set up a joint venture with Americana Group, a major international food group.

The deal will see Luckin launch a new retail coffee business in the Greater Middle East region and India, said the company that just took its 18-month-old business public in May. Its partner has a far longer track record. Founded in Kuwait more than 50 years ago, Americana owns the local franchises of KFC, Pizza Hut, Friday’s, Costa Coffee and other prominent casual dining brands across the Middle East and North Africa.

Luckin did not provide further details of this new venture and a spokesperson for the company declined to comment when contacted by TechCrunch.

But there’s still a lot to read into its international foray. For one, Chinese companies have had a growing presence in the Middle East and India in recent times as Beijing puts forward its Belt and Road infrastructure development and investment initiative. Notably, the MoU between Luckin and Americana was signed with both Chinese and Arab government officials in attendance.

Chinese tech giants have already taken notice of the regions. Alibaba is active in the Middle East with its cloud computing business. Up-and-coming Chinese app developers such as ByteDance run the immensely popular TikTok and Helo in India. 

These countries are also blessed with emerging middle-class populations, the demographic that Luckin targets back home. In China, the coffee startup is known for shelling out large subsidies to lure millions of tea drinkers into trying its coffee beverages. Instead of attracting them to sit and relax at Starbucks-like retail stores, Luckin relies on a massive network of pickup points and delivery staff — which allows it save on rent and take advantage of China’s relatively cheap labor — to complete orders.

Luckin also owns a massive amount of user data, as all orders and payments take place over its app. It can be imagined how the Chinese startup sets out to replicate this digital-first model in places with booming internet populations.

Like China, India is historically a nation of tea lovers that’s experiencing rapid growth for coffee consumption. The beverage scene is crowded with popular tea brands like Chaayos and foreign players team up with local companies to gain an upper hand. Even international coffee behemoth is no exception as it works closely with Indian conglomerate Tata to operate more than 130 stores.

“We at Americana believe this MoU will revolutionize the food and beverage retail industry in the Greater Middle East and India, regions that provide promising prospects for new retail growth and expansion,” said Americana Group chief executive officer Kesri Kapur in a statement.

Luckin CEO Qian Zhiya noted that her company looks “forward to further expanding the freshly brewed coffee market internationally as we realize the incredible growth opportunities available to us through our innovative business model.”

The startup has indeed recorded months of stunning growth, but it is also facing skepticism from investors who are put off by its continued cash burn with no plans to achieve profitability on the horizon. Luckin is aiming to double its China-based operations from just over 2,000 locations to 4,500 by 2019, and its new global ambition is set to even further test investor patience.