Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The return of Palm has been a strange one. It’s the small device no one knew they needed — and to be honest, probably didn’t. When I first showed it to some coworkers, they were actually pretty psyched. If nothing else, the 3.3-inch in device was an interesting one. The design was nice, too — if only because it was a pretty straightforward iPhone knockoff.

But enthusiasm died quickly as the reality of the product set in. Among the many complaints was the fact that Palm and Verizon were positioning it exclusively as a secondary device. Users had to tie it to an existing account, which meant two phones with two monthly fees, both tied to the same carrier.

That issue, at least, has finally been addressed. Palm announced today that it can be purchased as used as a primary device. You’ll have to do it through Verizon or US Mobile, but for a limited you can get it for $199 with a two-year plan, which knocks $150 off the standard price.

Whether you should is a different question altogether, of course. I wanted to like the Palm . I really did. Heck, I even attempted to turn the thing into the standalone MP3 player I sorely missed, but there were ultimately too many downsides to the tiny product.

For what it’s worth, Palm is slowly making it better. It’s bringing a software update that promises to fix battery life. That was another one of the device’s big downsides, and would have been doubly so for anyone attempting to make it a daily driver. Fixes are also apparently coming for the device’s subpar camera performance.

Of course, a lot of these problems can be chalked up to being the first gen product from a new company. But hey, investor and very good basketball player Steph Curry seemed to like it, so that’s something.

Global money mover Western Union is commonly a target for fintech companies, but the firm is teaming up with a startup to help increase its presence in the world’s third-most lucrative remittance market: the Philippines.

Coins, the Manila-based fintech startup that was recently acquired by $10 billion ride-hailing company Go-Jek, said today that it will integrate Western Union, which is valued at $8 billion on the NYSE, into its app to allow Philippines-based users to receive money sent to them from overseas.

The Philippines is a mighty country when it comes to money transfers. There are some 10 million Philippines nations based overseas and a recent World Bank report ranked the company the world’s third-most lucrative corridor with an estimated $34 billion sent home from overseas last year. (That’s the same as Mexico, with the Inda and China in first and second place, respectively.)

The partnership means Coins users — the company claims five million downloads to date — whose receive money via Western Union won’t need to trudge out and wait in line to collect it. Instead, it can be remitted to the Coins app, from where it can be transferred on to other people (peer-to-peer transfers are free) or used on the Coins platform for other payments. Money in the app can be used to pay for utility bills, mobile top-up, public transport trips and at merchants that support its payment service.

One thing the alliance doesn’t do, however, is to remove Western Union fees, but Coins founder and CEO Ron Hose is optimistic that the deal brings value for both parties and consumers in the Philippines.

“Our mission is working with banks and financial service providers to bring services to people who don’t have access,” he told TechCrunch in an interview.

Hose declined to comment on Western Union payments — which are routinely seized upon by startups that look to offer more transparent and cheaper overseas transfers — but, in theory, moving money digitally could pave the way for retail-based remitters, like Western Union, to reduce operational costs and potentially make their service cheaper for consumers in the future.

Western Union already operates its own apps, but, like a number of ‘old school’ global money platforms, its business is inherently a retail one rather than a tech one. That’s because has a strong physical presence — with over 500,000 location worldwide and some 12,000 in the Philippines alone — which brings with it operational costings, while there is also KYC and other anti-laundering processes that increase expenditure.

It remains to be seen where the Coins-Western Union deal will head. Parent company Go-Jek is busily expanding into Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore while it has a strong base in its native Indonesia so there could be potential for further alliances in the future.

The Philippines is part of the broad “Middle East, Africa, and South Asia” region in Western Union’s financial reporting. The company reported flat growth in the region last year, with it accounting for 15 percent of all revenue. It grossed $1.4 billion in sales in the final quarter but that as down three percent year-on-year. On the positive side, Western Union said its online service grew to 12 percent of consumer sales in the quarter — deals like the Coins partnership are aimed at finding its digital future.

If you emailed your local or federal lawmaker in the last couple of years about legislative reform, there’s a good chance you sent your message through a form built by a little-known Washington D.C.-based political group.

VoterVoice says its “grassroots advocacy system” allows lobbying firms and groups to alert concerned citizens about hot-topic issues — as well as messaging their lawmakers as part of a coordinated campaigns. To most, it’s little more than filling out a form on a website with a prewritten statement, sign your name, and hit send. The company says to date more than 21 million people have sent 36 million messages.

But the company’s exposed storage server has exposed hundreds of thousands of email addresses and other campaign data.

Security researcher John Wethington found the exposed storage server and passed details to TechCrunch in an effort to get the data secured. Despite efforts, VoterVoice stopped responding to our emails and made no efforts to secure the data.

The storage server had thousands of individual folders for each campaign, containing more than 300,000 unique constituent email addresses, as well as home addresses, phone numbers and other personal information that could indicate political persuasions and religious beliefs, said Wethington. Many of the files also contained their corresponding messages to lawmakers and other advocacy and political action groups.

One file alone seen by TechCrunch contained 4,392 unique names, phone numbers and email addresses of Americans with the same four-paragraph text sent to lawmakers to lobby for Medicare reform. The spreadsheet kept a record of every person who made a submission and to which lawmaker their message was delivered.

“Organizations that provide platforms for outreach, advocacy, and lobbying hold some of the most sensitive information about the individuals and clients their platforms support,” said Wethington. “Exposure of this information allows malicious actors to target individuals easily. One can easily imagine a scenario where an extremist group with access to this type of information could identify individuals based on any of these private attributes.”

“Theres so much data exposed that we may never know the full breadth and depth of risk these users were exposed to,” he said.

It’s not known for how long the storage server was exposed. The server was created by a VoterVoice staffer, who was rolled into FiscalNote after its acquisition of VoterVoice in 2017.

When reached, VoterVoice founder Neal Fuller said he was “not really in any position to confirm” whether the server was exposed during his tenure as chief executive. “I sold VoterVoice to FiscalNote in July 2017,” he told TechCrunch, and said he has not been involved in the company since.

We’ll update if we hear back from FiscalNote.

Farmers markets have become a staple presence in many US cities, where there is a steady supply of smaller, often organic farmers and other food producers wanting a more direct channel to sell their goods, and a steady demand from foody types who like having the option of bypassing bigger grocery stores to amble around a group of stalls with a wider choice of items to cook and eat. Now, one of the startups that has turned that model into a profitable on-demand delivery business has raised some funding as it continues its expansion in the US, and beyond, en route to an IPO filing, potentially as soon as this year.

GrubMarket, which works with smaller farms and other suppliers to sell and deliver their items by way of its online store both to business — such as restaurants and stores of different sizes — and consumer customers, has raised $25 million in an oversubscribed C1 round of funding (it was originally only going to be $15 million).

The investment is being led by WI Harper Group and Digital Garage, with participation from other new investors Evolv Ventures, University Growth Fund, Arancia International Inc, CentreGold Capital and existing investors ACE & Company, GGV Capital, Fusion Fund, Bascom Ventures, along with other unnamed participants.

Mike Xu, GrubMarket’s CEO and founder, would not comment on its valuation, but starting from its earliest days as a member of the Winter 2015 cohort of Y Combinator, the startup has raised $89 million. And according to PitchBook figures — which we have confirmed with a close source — the pre-money valuation in this round was $230 million, which would put the post-money at $255 million.

Xu said the company is currently operating on a $150 million annual run rate — versus $100 million when it raised $32 million nine months ago — and it continues to be profitable. Because of this, Xu said GrubMarket doesn’t need any working capital. It plans to use this $25 million instead to invest in more technology and acquisitions.

There have been advances on both of these fronts even before the funding.

GrubMarket has built its own SaaS platform to manage and plan its accounts, CRM and suppliers and now — taking a page from the Amazon playbook — offers it as a product to other food industry suppliers and vendors.

It’s also continued to make acquisitions in markets like Los Angeles and San Diego, consolidating local B2B competitors that, like GrubMarket, also worked with farmers and wholesalers and connected them to restaurants, schools and other organizations. It’s also expanded organically (so to speak) laying down roots in New York and New Jersey to grow business there, but buying up and rolling up will be a key focus as it looks to bump up its valuation ahead of a public listing.

“We have a few more major acquisitions to close within the next a couple months,” Xu said.

The list of investors that GrubMarket is attracting speaks to some of the opportunities for it in the years ahead. Evolv is a $100 million fund backed by none other than food giant Kraft Heinz that invests interesting food startups. And Xu told TechCrunch that having Digital Garage — the Japanese marketing, payment and internet services holding company co-founded by MIT’s Joi Ito — in the round is the startup’s first step to working on expanding GrubMarket into Asia.

“Digital Garage has access to most of the restaurants in Japan through its business there,” Xu said, “and ours is a model that could be populated there.”

Hungry for growth

GrubMarket’s rise is coming at an interesting time in the food industry.

“Farm-to-table” and organic eating — where you can trace the origins of a meal’s ingredients as part of a bigger emphasis on higher-quality and healthier dishes and supporting smaller producers — have become popular themes both at restaurants and among consumers and what they look for when they shop, but it’s inefficient in many cases for businesses to always go out and source each food item they use or sell themselves.

GrubMarket, with its network of producers, meets that demand with economies of scale that benefits both sides of its marketplace. On the buying end, brings together demand from both small and large customers: one of the startup’s biggest store customers in California is Amazon-owned Whole Foods. There are also examples of how the economies of scale work on the supplier end: GrubMarket has become the biggest mushroom supplier and Hawaiian produce supplier in Northern California.

Not all trends work in its favor, though.

One of the biggest themes in food has been the explosion of services that make it possible (and in some cases financially viable) for people to reduce the work involved in cooking, or to opt out of cooking altogether but still continue to eat well.

Targeting consumers who are not physically going to restaurants for every meal, we’ve seen a huge rise in the number of delivery services like Postmates and Doordash, which help people order essentially anything they want to eat from a wide range of eateries, at the tap of a button.

For those who still want to cook but don’t want to shop, think of what they want to eat or how to make it, there are now many choices of meal kits from the likes of Blue Apron.

All these become competitors to GrubMarket, but also areas that GrubMarket might potentially enter down the line.

“We are familiar with meal kit companies because we supply a lot of them,” he said. “The business has good customer demand but also it’s fairly difficult to maintain that retention, and we are focusing on building a sustainable business.” 

For those who are still buying groceries, but also are tapping into the convenience of having them brought to their doors instead of going out, we have grocery deliveries directly from stores or by way of third party services like Instacart, and those that directly compete with GrubMarket like GoodEggs or PeaPod. And for those who are still going out to buy groceries like in the old days, there’s a chance that Amazon still has your number.

“If Amazon started to focus more on food logistics and working with the kinds of businesses we do, I would definitely be worried,” Xu said with a little laugh. “But right now there is a very high bar of entry to get involved in that and in food, I think Amazon is still more focused on consumers.”

The wider context for food and meal startups has been a little dicey, all the same, and some have definitely not been able to make the economics of their businesses work.

BlueApron has been struggling since going public and just this week appointed a new CEO in an effort to turn things around (HelloFresh, its main rival, is one of GrubMarket’s customers). Munchery (which had been a customer of GrubMarket’s), shut down earlier this year. Chef’d, Maple, Sprig and others all failed to make ends meet in their own takes on food delivery.

One thing that GrubMarket has been doing differently from the start is developing two different lines of business. One is B2C that sells directly to consumers themselves. And the other is B2B2C, where it serves restaurants, schools, stores and other large organizations that in turn serve consumers — meaning that even those who are potentially competitors on the consumer side potentially can become GrubMarket’s customers on the B2B side.

Xu said that the B2B2C remains the bigger and faster-growing part of its business, but it still very much has its eye on the consumer part and plans to focus on growing it more, likely after it goes public, which remains the company’s long-term goal.

“I think this company has the potential to make $100 billion in e-commerce by buying from farmers and selling to the kinds of customers we serve today, but even if we came close to that, we’d still only have a single-digit percentage of the $1 trillion+ food retail industry,” he said. Overall, the value of the food and agriculture industry globally was $8.7 trillion in 2018. “That likely means you’ll have multiple Amazon-style companies existing,” he added.

The HomePod got a healthy little price drop today, bringing Apple’s premium smart speaker down to $299. Announced in mid-2017 and released in early-2018, the Siri-powered product brought a very Apple approach to the category dominated by Amazon and Google, with premium sound and design at a very premium price of $349.

The $50 price drop, first noted by 9 to 5 Mac, puts the product under $300 — though it’s still pretty steep, so far as the category goes. The product got an even steeper discount to $249 from a number of third-party retailers over the holiday. Apple has confirmed with TechCrunch that this price cut is a permanent one.

$299 was formerly the refurbished price for the device through Apple. That’s since dropped to $259, though both versions of the HomePod are currently sold out on the site. All of this, naturally, has led to speculation that a sequel could be on the way.

HomePod 2 rumors have been swirling around for some time now, but we haven’t had too much insight on that front, beyond a a few fun recently discovered patents that bring more functionality to the speaker’s top display.

Reliance Jio, the telecom operator that has revolutionized India with its generous data plans, has its eye on the next generation of internet users with its latest acquisition. The company said today that it has bought a majority stake in Haptik, a startup that develops ‘conversational’ platforms and virtual assistants, in a deal worth $100 million overall.

The transaction will see Jio will take an 87 percent stake in the company, with the remaining shares left for Haptik’s founding team and staff. The deal includes 230 crore ($33 million) to buy out existing backers and an investment of 470 crore ($67 million). Haptik, which was formerly a chatbot platform, had raised just over $12 million from investors, including a 2016 Series B worth $11 million from media investor Times Internet.

Haptik will continue to offer its enterprise service — which helps corporations develop and roll out voice- and text-based platforms — but it will also focus on helping Jio reach an increased audience of consumers in India, Haptik co-founder Aakrit Vaish told TechCrunch in an interview.

“As we go beyond [the current] 300 million internet users in India, people may not necessarily use apps or devices the same way they do now, particularly because of the language barrier,” he explained. “Voice will be a cornerstone of how vernacular India will engage with many things, be it apps, websites, phones and other devices.”

Jio’s aggressive data plan strategy, which started with a free voice calls and free 4G data, disrupted India’s telecom market and forced the incumbents to move quicker and reduce prices — mobile data is reportedly now cheaper in India than anywhere else on the planet. It was, of course, a huge hit with consumers. The operator has consistently led on 4G subscriber numbers and it is ranked third overall with over 280 million customers, or around 23 percent market share. Clearly, keeping up with what’s next is a critical part of its plan to grow bigger still.

Vaish said Haptik wasn’t under pressure to sell but the team found an “ideal match in terms of philosophy” with Jio, which is also exploring alternative ways to enable consumers to interact with its devices and service. The company has a ‘Hello Jio’ assistant on its devices, and Haptik may help it further its strategy in the future although Vaish said that hasn’t been nailed down at this point.

Jio is allowing Haptik to continue to work with customers because, at this point, enterprise services are the “only proven business” for conversational platforms, Vaish said. Still, he’s adamant that the deal — which he describes more as a strategic partnership than acquisition — will give Haptik the resources it needs to grow whilst also providing a level of autonomy within Reliance Jio.

That’s singing from the same hymn sheet as Akash Ambani, direct at Reliance Jio, who said in a statement that the deal will “boost” Jio’s ecosystem and multi-lingual services.

“We believe voice interactivity will be the primary mode of interaction for Digital India,” he said. “We are delighted to announce this partnership, and look forward to working with the experienced team of Haptik in realizing this vision for offering greater connectivity and rich communication experiences to the billion-plus Indian consumers.”

Jio isn’t alone in going after more conversational interfaces. Flipkart, for one, acquired speech recognition startup Liv.ai last year to help reach new internet users and those more comfortable with vernacular languages. Beyond big companies, vernacular language apps like ShareChat — which drew investment from Xiaomi — and Velo from China’s ByteDance as seen as platforms that’ll be increasingly influential as internet access widens in India. In fact, there’s some concern that Chinese companies may already be too dominant in the country.

Unlike your traditional telco, Jio hasn’t been reluctant in cutting deals with tech companies and startups. To boost its ‘tech stack, it has acquired streaming service Saavn, which it merged with its own offering, bought AI platform Embibe, taken majority stakes in infrastructure companies DEN and Hathway, invested in Android alternative KaiOS and more.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced today it will suspend collaborations, including research projects and funding, with Huawei Technologies and ZTE, two Chinese tech companies fighting with the U.S. government over alleged sanction violations.

In a public letter titled “New review process for ‘elevated-risk’ international proposals,” MIT vice president for research Maria T. Zuber wrote that the school recently “determined that engagements with certain countries—currently China, Russia and Saudi Arabia—merit additional faculty and administrative review beyond the usual evaluations that all international projects receive.”

As a result of the enhanced review process, the university is “not accepting new engagements or renewing existing ones with Huawei and ZTE or their respective subsidiaries due to federal investigations regarding violations of sanction restrictions. The Institute will revisit collaborations with these entities as circumstances dictate.”

In January, Oxford University said it will stop taking funding from Huawei because of “public concerns raised in recent months surrounding UK partnerships with Huawei.”

Huawei and ZTE have been scrutinized by the U.S. over espionage risks since 2011, when the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee launched an investigation (later recommending that they be shut out of the U.S. market).

As the trade war with China intensified, however, the government began to hone in on both companies. Last December, Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (the daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei) was arrested in Canada at the request of the U.S. on charges of violating U.S. trade sanctions against Iran (Meng and Huawei have denied the charges). Earlier last year, ZTE agreed to pay a $1 billion fine to settle charges by the U.S. that it had violated sanctions by selling telecom technology to Iran and North Korea.

TechCrunch has contacted Huawei and ZTE for comment.

Tencent, Asia’s largest tech firm, is raising $6 billion after the Hong Kong-listed firm announced a new note sale today.

Tencent last tapped the markets when it raised $5 billion in January 2018. This time around, it is offering a five-tranche bond that is almost in line with reports earlier this week, which speculated that the Chinese giant would look to raise $5 billion. The notes will be issued on April 11, Tencent said.

It isn’t clear how the new capital will be spent — Tencent didn’t include details in its announcement and the company had not responded to a request for comment at the time of writing.

“We have a strong balance sheet with significant cash position and a rich pool of listed securities. Going forward, we will continue to exercise discipline in our financial management and focus on maintaining the right balance between capital expenditure, investments and returns,” CFO John Lo said in a statement.

Tencent is most famous for WeChat, China’s go-to messaging app that has become the mobile internet in the country, in addition to its lucrative gaming business, as well fintech, cloud, social media and other verticals. It is also increasingly striking investment deals with companies outside of China, having backed the likes of Reddit, Snap and Tesla and a clutch of public Chinese businesses.

The company’s star rose to a peak at the end of 2017 when it became Asia’s first $500 billion company, but it has been a mixed journey since then. Tencent largely struggled to maintain its high standards last year as a Chinese government freeze on issuing new licenses for games cut into its money-making ability and left investors skittish.

There are positive signs in 2019, however. China’s game licensing process has resumed and the company returned to profit growth thanks to its investment in Meituan, which went public in a massive $4 billion IPO. A major reorganization was undertaken to lessen Tencent’s financial reliance on gaming and, while the most recent quarter disappointed overall, ’emerging’ business units like social media, cloud computing and fintech saw positive growth. The company’s stock price is up some 20 percent from the end of 2019, giving the firm a market cap of around $456 billion.

Zaver, a Swedish fintech that has built a payments platform to facilitate peer-to-peer trades and more, has picked up just over $1.2 million in seed funding. Backing the burgeoning startup are VC firms Inventure and Inbox Capital, as well as a number of relatively well-established angel investors.

They include Joen Bonnier (partner at Atomico), Tom Dinkelspiel, Pontus Hagnö, Fabian Hielte (owner of Ernström & C:o and a previous investor in Spotify and iZettle), Bo Mattsson (founder of Cint), and Fredrik Österberg (founder of Evolution Gaming).

Aiming to disrupt the market for p2p payment solutions, Zaver is developing a SaaS and accompanying apps to bring together buyers, sellers and merchants with the promise of “secure payments on your terms”. The fintech startup aims to facilitate trades between peers by enabling the use of flexible payment methods such as direct payments, “buy now, pay later” and instalments.

To support this, Zaver’s platform claims to embed “intelligent fraud detection” algorithms in tandem with the automatic creation of “verified digital agreements” between transacting parties.

“The Zaver app is the first platform independent checkout solution for p2p transactions,” says Amir Marandi, who co-founded Zaver alongside Linus Malmén — both former engineering students at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

“With Zaver’s intelligent fraud prevention, automated and immediate credit decisions and cryptographically signed digital receipts, peers can do safe payments on their own terms with people they really don’t know that well,” he says. “We try to make p2p trades as safe as possible for all parties involved and offer flexible payment options, without compromising on the user experience”.

In addition, Zaver for Business enables merchants to utilise the platform to increase conversion and reduce transaction costs. “Our mission with this product is to reduce the need of a physical card reader,” adds Marandi.

Zaver’s typical user is described as a young student who wants to sell their iPhone on a classified site in a secure way, or a plumber who wants to buy a used VW Golf today, and pay later. Meanwhile, the typical customer of Zaver for Business is a company with omni-channel sales, selling products/services online and offline.

“Our main competitors are not the kind of business you might expect,” explains Marandi. “It’s not the banks, but rather upcoming startups wanting to innovate the payment industry. The most ‘direct competitor today I would say is the credit card industry”.

To that end, Zaver makes money from the transaction fees it charges merchants (which it says are up to 70 percent cheaper than traditional payment services), and on interest charged when someone chooses to pay via instalments.

Adds Marandi: “Using automated systems for the entire customer journey we are able to offer individualised interest rates at the point of sale. The system automatically chooses an interest rate for you, based on your creditworthiness”.

Less than a decade ago IPOs, acquisitions, and global expansion by African startups were more possibility than reality. March saw all three from the continent’s tech scene.

Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange, per SEC documents and confirmation from chief executive Sacha Poignonnec.

In an updated filing, (since the March 12 original) Jumia indicated it will offer 13,500,000 ADR shares, for an offering price of $13 to $16 per share to trade under the ticker symbol “JMIA”. The IPO could raise up to $216 million for Jumia.

Since our first story (and reflected in the latest SEC docs) Mastercard Europe agreed up front to buy $50 million in Jumia ordinary shares.

With a smooth filing process, Jumia will become the first African startup to list on a major global exchange. The company is incorporated in Germany, but maintains its headquarters in Nigeria, and operates exclusively in Africa with 4000 employees on the continent.

The pending IPO creates another milestone for Jumia. The venture became the first African startup unicorn in 2016, achieving a $1 billion valuation after a funding round that included Goldman Sachs, AXA and MTN.

Founded in Lagos in 2012 with Rocket Internet backing, Jumia now operates multiple online verticals in 14 African countries. Goods and services lines include Jumia Food (an online takeout service), Jumia Flights (for travel bookings) and Jumia Deals (for classifieds). Jumia processed more than 13 million packages in 2018, according to company data. The company has started to generate annual revenues over $100 million, but like many burn-rate startups, has done so while racking up big losses.

There’ll be a lot more to cover, analyze, and debate pre and post Jumia’s NYSE bell toll—which could happen in coming weeks or months. For example, can Jumia generate a profit, is it really an African startup, will Jumia become an acquisition target for a big outside name or an acquirer of smaller startups in African e-commerce? Stay tuned for continuing TechCrunch coverage.

On the acquisition front,  Lagos based online lending startup OneFi bought Nigerian payment solutions company Amplify for an undisclosed amount.

OneFi is taking over Amplify’s IP, team, and client network of over 1000 merchants to which Amplify provides payment processing services, OneFi CEO Chijioke Dozie told TechCrunch.

The purchase of Amplify caps off a busy period for OneFi. Over the last seven months the Nigerian venture secured a $5 million lending facility from Lendable, announced a payment partnership with Visa, and became one of first (known) African startups to receive a global credit rating. OneFi is also dropping the name of its signature product, Paylater, and will simply go by OneFi (for now).

Collectively, these moves represent a pivot for OneFi away from operating primarily as a digital lender, toward becoming an online consumer finance platform.

“We’re not a bank but we’re offering more banking services…Customers are now coming to us not just for loans but for cheaper funds transfer, more convenient bill payment, and to know their credit scores,” said Dozie.

OneFi will add payment options for clients on social media apps including WhatsApp this quarter—something in which Amplify already holds a specialization and client base. Through its Visa partnership, OneFi will also offer clients virtual Visa wallets on mobile phones and start providing QR code payment options at supermarkets, on public transit, and across other POS points in Nigeria.

On the back of the acquisiton, OneFi is in the process of raising a round and will look to expand internationally, considering Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC, Ghana and Egypt and Europe for Diaspora markets.

On African startups expanding globally, FlexClub—a South African venture that matches investors and drivers to cars for ride-hailing services—announced it will expand in Mexico in a partnership with Uber after closing a $1.2 million seed round led by CRE Venture Capital.

The move comes as Africa’s tech-transit space continues to produce unique mobility solutions shaped around local needs.

FlexClub touts itself as a “gig economy investment platform” that is creating new asset classes in emerging markets, according to chief executive and co-founder Tinashe Ruzane.

That asset class, for now, is ride-hail vehicles. FlexClub allows investors to go on the site and purchase a car (ultimately managed and serviced by FlexClub). The startup then connects that car to an Uber driver who uses earnings to pay a weekly rental charge.

Those fees generate monthly, fixed-rate interest income for the investor. The driver has the option of buying the car after the 12 months, with a descending purchase price over time.

FlexClub’s platform manages the investment, rental income, and disbursement of funds across all parties. The startup also handles insurance, maintenance, and upkeep of the cars.

Ruzane envisions this as a model to finance multiple asset classes in emerging markets—where lending options are fewer for individuals who may not have credit histories.

“Our goal is to make this completely passive… where investors can invest in different kinds of assets on our platform, login to a dash, and see this is how my five cars in South Africa are doing, my vans in Mexico, my motorbikes in Indonesia — with a diversified portfolio around the world,” he explained.

FlexClub will begin work matching investors to cars and Uber drivers in Mexico in April. The startup sees opportunities to move into other mobility classes, such as Africa’s ride-hail motorcycle taxi and three-wheel tuk-tuk market, CEO Tinashe Ruzane told TechCrunch in this feature.

And finally, francophone Africa will see a boost in funds and support for startups. The Dakar Network Angels group launched last month, making its first investment to cleantech venture Coliba—an Ivorian startup that uses a mobile app to coordinate waste recycling

The deal is part of Dakar Network Angels’ mission of convening experts and capital to bridge the resource gap for startups in French-speaking Africa — or 24 of the continent’s 54 countries.

The organization — which goes by DNA for short — will offer seed fund investments of between $25,000 to $100,000 to early-stage ventures with high growth potential. These rounds will come with the entrepreneurial guidance of DNA’s angel network.

Launched in Senegal, the organization’s founder is Marieme Diop — a VC investor at Orange Digital Ventures — named the goal of bridging VC disparities between francophone and non-francophone Africa as the primary driver for DNA. She pointed to funding data by Partech indicating that 76 percent of investment to African startups goes to three English-speaking countries — Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.

To gain consideration for DNA investment, startups must gain referral by a member. DNA will take a minority stake (less than 10 percent) in ventures that receive seed funds and provide program mentorship until exits, Diop told TechCrunch.

To become an angel, members must commit to investing a minimum of $10,000 a year (for those coming on as individuals), $20,000 (for corporates) and be on hand to support the portfolio startups, according to DNA’s Corporate Membership Charter.

More Africa Related Stories @TechCrunch

• Seven Africa-focused startups present at Y Combinator’s Demo Day
• Nigeria’s Gloo.ng drops consumer e-commerce, pivots to e-procurement
• Why Warriors’ Andre Iguodala joined African unicorn Jumia’s board
• Nala has built a hassle-free, offline mobile money payment platform for Africa

African Tech Around The Net

• African tech startups raised over $1.2bn in funding in 2018 – Partech report
• Microsoft’s Azure cloud data centers expand to South Africa
• Applications open for Jack Ma’s Africa Netpreneur Prize