Notarize, a startup that enables people to get documents notarized online, announced today that it has partnered with Guaranteed Rate, one of the largest retail mortgage lenders in the U.S. Guaranteed Rate’s new product, called FlashClose, integrates Notarize’s real estate API and allows customers to close real estate transactions and execute mortgages online.

The service is available in all 50 states. Notarize’s products, including its consumer app, connect users to a notary public by video call to witness e-signatures and notarize documents. Its enterprise solutions include business and real estate APIs. Guaranteed Rate, which has had almost $25 billion in total loan volume this year, is now the largest lender that uses Notarize.

Notarize, which has raised $47 million in funding so far from investors, including Polaris Partners, Lennar Corporation and Realogy Holdings, currently helps customers process online each month real estate deals worth a total of about $1.5 billion. Through partnerships like the one it has with Guaranteed Rate, it has added more than 50,000 realtors and title agents as users in the last three months.

Pat Kinsel, founder and CEO of Notarize, tells TechCrunch that 90% of people start searching for homes online and 60% apply for mortgages online, but many real estate and lending companies still require their customers to complete the closing process on paper. Allowing them to complete the entire process online can give companies like Guaranteed Rate a major advantage over competitors.

In a prepared statement, Guaranteed Rate COO Nikolaos Athanasiou said, “We are thrilled to announce this integration with Notarize for FlashClose, which puts even more power in the hands of homebuyers — wherever and however they want to close.”

Bird has closed a $275 million Series D round led by CDPQ and Sequoia Capital, Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden announced at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco today. The round values Bird at a $2.5 billion pre-money valuation, according to sources familiar with the round. This round comes a few months after TechCrunch reported Bird was looking to raise a Series D round at a $2.5 billion valuation led by Sequoia.

“Nearly a year ago, we recognized that the world was changing,” Bird CEO and founder Travis VanderZanden said in a statement ahead of Disrupt. “Gone are the days when top line growth was the leading KPI for emerging companies. Positive unit economics is the new goal line. As a result, we pivoted from growth to unit economics as the top priority for the company. Now with the best unit economics in the industry, new Bird investors such as CDPQ see that we are paving the road for a long term sustainable and healthy business.”

Sequoia Capital previously led Bird’s $300 million Series C round back in June, with Roelof Botha joining Bird’s board at the time. Bird plans to use the funding to continue research and development for its variety of vehicles.

“The team at Bird exemplifies grit and has embraced a laser focus on the key drivers of unit economics in a complex business,” Sequoia Capital partner and Bird board member Roelof Botha said in a statement. “The degree to which they were devoted to and accomplished strong contribution margins in a compressed timeline is rare for a company so early on in its development. We are thrilled to strengthen our commitment to Bird and look forward to seeing continued progress on their path to profitability.”

In July, Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden said Bird has positive unit economics on its new Bird Zero scooters, which accounts for more than 75% of its fleet. But based on one of the images VanderZanden tweeted, it seems that figure is based on a period of four weeks in the summer when scooter ridership is likely higher.

The month before, Bird acquired Scoot in a deal worth less than $25 million. That acquisition marked Bird’s first expansion into traditional bicycles and mopeds. Shortly before that, Bird unveiled a two-seater hybrid bike/moped vehicle called the Bird Cruiser. In addition to offering shared vehicles, Bird is also selling scooters directly to consumers. Prior to this round, Bird had raised more than $400 million in funding and reached a valuation of $2 billion last June.

I’m chatted with VanderZanden at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Check out the interview below.

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We know the world of startup funding is competitive. In fact, I’m speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt on this very topic alongside pre-seed investor Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures, early-stage investor Annie Kadavy of Redpoint Ventures. I’ve also written extensively for TechCrunch and ExtraCrunch about how founders can optimize their pitch decks to make the most of the 3 minutes and 44 seconds the average VC will spend looking at their deck. We’ve also analyzed the best time of year founders can fundraise to get the most attention from potential investors.

But what can VCs do to make sure they’re getting the biggest piece of the most promising looking companies? We dug into how founders choose their lead investor to gain some insight into how a VC can become more competitive in a rapidly growing market.

Before we dig into the numbers

The data included in this research came from companies that explicitly opted in to participate by responding to an automated email sent to them. We are incredibly appreciative to these founders for making this research possible. You can read more about our startup opt-in process and other aspects of our methodology here.

In this article, I’ll talk about how founders choose their VCs, both in oversubscribed rounds and non-oversubscribed rounds, and how investors can use that information to beat out their competitors.

For VCs, competition is getting harder

Getting a startup funded is a massive hurdle. The good news is there’s actually far more money available now than just a few years ago. In fact, in the first half of 2019 there was $20.6 billion in new capital introduced into the startup market.

Larger funds typically known for investing in later stages have introduced seed funds so they can invest with promising businesses earlier.  Kleiner Perkins announced a $600 million early-stage fund in January, GGV raised a second $460 million “Discovery Fund” last year, even Sequoia Capital operates a scout program with a $180 million fund.

This means smaller funds or those who only invest in earlier rounds might get overlooked when founders are looking for investors.

Investor meetings are a two-way street

In addition to having to compete for the best deals, VCs don’t get it right every time. For every Uber, there are hundreds of Juiceros. The reason they only spend a few minutes looking at a pitch deck is because they’re constantly looking at pitches in hopes they’ll come across another unicorn.

But while it seems like the investors are holding all the cards, if founders optimize their pitch deck and book their meetings in a short window, they can actually create a sense of urgency for the VCs. We’ve seen this recently with the amount of founders reporting oversubscribed rounds.

When looking at how founders chose their lead investors, we discovered that there was a massive difference between those that raised oversubscribed rounds and those that didn’t.

Being the first to move means a lot, until it doesn’t

What was the number one factor in founders deciding on who to choose as their lead investor? We found that nearly 48% of founders chose their lead investor because they were the first one to make the offer.

Anecdotally this makes sense. When DocSend was raising we received a lot of “maybes” during our first few meetings. However, once we had a term sheet most of those “maybes” flipped to a firm “yes.” In fact, many investors that had originally promised a $25k or $50k investment if we found other backers were suddenly asking for $300k or $500k.

We had so many investors interested that our round was oversubscribed and we had to make some choices about who we wanted as an investor. That could have been avoided if any of those VCs had simply acted first.

But when you look at the data a different way, we found that moving first was significantly more important in oversubscribed rounds than those that weren’t. And the more oversubscribed they were, the more valuable moving first becomes.

For founders whose rounds were more than 20 percent oversubscribed, 60 percent of them chose their VC because they came in first with a term sheet. But that dropped to 50 percent for founders that were only slightly oversubscribed and all the way to 38 percent for those founders that weren’t oversubscribed at all.

While we would have thought name-brand VCs might move first, and that top tier interest may cause an oversubscribed round, we found that not to be the case. In both oversubscribed and non-oversubscribed rounds 28 percent of founders reported that a name brand factored into their decision. And for those who chose a name brand investor, only 33 percent of those founders reported that their lead VC moved first. 

The more oversubscribed a round is, the more likely it is that some VCs aren’t going to make the cut. To avoid being the firm that didn’t get the deal it’s best to move quickly when you see a company you like.

A fast round isn’t always an oversubscribed one

Another surprising thing that came up in our research was the amount of time founders spent raising and how that affected their decision making. While we assumed oversubscribed rounds happened significantly faster than the average of 11-15 weeks, we found that oversubscribed rounds only came in slightly under, at 8.6 weeks. However, there was a lot of variability in that number.

We saw some oversubscribed rounds close in as little as 3 weeks and some take as long as 20. So there’s no way to tell whether a round will be oversubscribed based on the time spent fundraising. This means that even if you meet a founder who’s been raising for 10 weeks, it’s still smart to move quickly if you want to be the lead investor.

We would have also thought longer rounds would have benefited the first term sheet more, but there was virtually no difference in the impact of the first acting VC when looking at time. When looking at founders that spent less than 12 weeks raising and those that spent more than 12 weeks, there was virtually no difference in the percent that chose their lead investor based on the first term sheet (at 47 percent and 48 percent respectively).

Terms only matter in oversubscribed rounds

When choosing your lead investor, you would think the terms would be a significant reason to choose one VC over another. But we found that it was barely a factor for most people. In fact, only 4 percent of founders who weren’t oversubscribed cited terms as a major factor.

They instead focused on VCs that had experience in their industry (at 42 percent). But for oversubscribed rounds the percentage of founders who chose their lead investor based on terms shot up to 38. Meaning when the round gets competitive, so do the terms. But they still gave an edge to that first term sheet they received.

Interestingly, a potential deciding factor in oversubscribed rounds could be how well the VC and the founder get along. In those rounds that were significantly oversubscribed, over 46% of respondents said how well they got along with their VC was a factor in choosing them to be the lead. Compare that to only 19% of founders in non-oversubscribed rounds who cited rapport as a key factor in choosing a lead investor.

For many smaller firms getting edged out by bigger players boasting multi-stage funds, it may be as simple as being decisive and personable when it comes to landing the most competitive investments.

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Robinhood may be best known for its free stock trading, but today it’s rolling out a new version of the newsfeed, adding content from Reuters, Barron’s and market coverage from The Wall Street Journal, with no paywall or additional charge.

In addition, Robinhood is introducing video into the newsfeed, with ad-free videos from CNN Business, Cheddar and (again) Reuters.

The startup, which recently raised $323 million at a $7.6 billion valuation, has been showing more interest in content lately with the acquisition of the financial podcast and newsletter MarketSnacks — and as part of the redesign, the newsletter (now called Snacks) can be read directly in the app.

“A lot of this is not even about making investment decisions,” Robinhood’s vice president of Product Josh Elman told me. “[Some users] check Robinhood very, very often just to consume the news and understand the companies that they’re watching, the ones that they are invested in and continuing to hold.”

He added that just buying and selling stocks is “sort of a utility,” so Robinhood wants to help its users “to feel informed, to be empowered to make their own decisions.”

Before redesigning the newsfeed, Elman said the team did a seven-day study, where they asked subjects to create a diary of “all of their experiences reading and understanding market news.”

Among other things, Elman’s team learned that people “really want to read news from multiple, trusted sources,” which is why Robinhood is partnering with these publications. In addition, they saw that people like watching videos: “Even if it’s in the background, ultimately, people really told us they feel more confident and control in their decisions.”

Along with bringing in new content (which, again, is taken out from behind paywalls and is ad-free), Elman said the Robinhood newsfeed also features “all-new algorithms and a whole new display layer.” Robinhood users can see the new interface for themselves, but I was curious about those algorithms.

“We start with the companies you either own and hold in your portfolio or are watching, what types of sources do you frequently like to watch … and we make sure that we’re bringing you that news as much as possible,” Elman said. “And we have a lot of room to grow from here.”

According to Gartner, the global Robotic process automation (RPA) software market grew 63.1% in 2018 to $846 million. This was the fastest-growing segment of the global enterprise software market....

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Fyle, a Bangalore-headquartered startup that operates an expense management platform, has extended its previous financing round to add $4.5 million of new investment as it looks to court more clients in overseas markets.

The additional $4.5 million tranche of investment was led by U.S.-based hedge fund Steadview Capital, the startup said. Tiger Global, Freshworks and Pravega Ventures also participated in the round. The new tranche of investment, dubbed Series A1, means that the three-and-a-half-year-old startup has raised $8.7 million as part of its Series A financing round, and $10.5 million to date.

The SaaS startup offers an expense management platform that makes it easier for employees of a firm to report their business expenses. The eponymous service supports a range of popular email providers, including G Suite and Office 365, and uses a proprietary technology to scan and fetch details from emails, Yash Madhusudhan, co-founder and CEO of Fyle, demonstrated to TechCrunch last week.

A user, for instance, could open a flight ticket email and click on Fyle’s Chrome extension to fetch all details and report the expense in a single click in real-time. As part of today’s announcement, Madhusudhan unveiled an integration with WhatsApp . Users will now be able to take pictures of their tickets and other things and forward it to Fyle, which will quickly scan and report expense filings for them.

These integrations come in handy to users. “Eighty percent to ninety percent of a user’s spending patterns land on their email and messaging clients. And traditionally it has been a pain point for them to get done with their expense filings. So we built a platform that looks at the challenges faced by them. At the same time, our platform understands frauds and works with a company’s compliances and policies to ensure that the filings are legitimate,” he said.

“Every company today could make use of an intelligent expense platform like Fyle. Major giants already subscribe to ERP services that offer similar capabilities as part of their offerings. But as a company or startup grows beyond 50 to 100 people, it becomes tedious to manage expense filings,” he added.

Fyle maintains a web application and a mobile app, and users are free to use them. But the rationale behind introducing integrations with popular services is to make it easier than ever for them to report filings. The startup retains its algorithms each month to improve their scanning abilities. “The idea is to extend expense filing to a service that people already use,” he said.

International expansion

Until late last year, Fyle was serving customers in India. Earlier this year, it began searching for clients outside the nation. “Our philosophy was if we are able to sell in India remotely and get people to use the product without any training, we should be able to replicate this in any part of the world,” he said.

And that bet has worked. Fyle has amassed more than 300 clients, more than 250 of which are from outside of India. Today, the startup says it has customers in 17 nations, including the U.S. and the U.K. Furthermore, Fyle’s revenue has grown by five times in the last five months, said Madhusudhan, without disclosing the exact figures.

To accelerate its momentum, the startup is today also launching an enterprise version of Fyle that will serve the needs of major companies. The enterprise version supports a range of additional security features, such as IP restriction and a single sign-in option.

Fyle will use the new capital to develop more product solutions and integrations and expand its footprint in international markets, Madhusudhan said. The startup, which just recently set up its sales and marketing team, will also expand the headcount, he said.

Moving forward, Madhusudhan said the startup would also explore tie-ups with ERP providers and other ways to extend the reach of Fyle.

In a statement, Ravi Mehta, MD at Steadview Capital, said, “intelligent and automated systems will empower businesses to be more efficient in the coming decade. We are excited to partner with Fyle to transform one of the core business processes of expense management through intelligence and automation.”

Sramana Mitra: You started thinking about BeyondCore around 2004. What did that entail? Did you do this full-time? Arijit Sengupta: Clay doesn’t admit this story as being true so I’ll tell you the...

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Here’s a solid shout-out to early-stage startup founders who love the word “free.” You have just two weeks left to apply to be a TC Top Pick and exhibit in Startup Alley at Disrupt Berlin 2019 for — you guessed it — free.

Attending Disrupt Berlin as a TC Top Pick is a VIP experience and an incredible opportunity to showcase your business to the startup world’s influential movers and shakers. The Top Picks application window closes on 18 October at 12 p.m. (PT). Don’t wait — apply today.

Here’s how it all works. We accept applications from early-stage startups that fall into one of the following tech categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, CRM/Enterprise and Education.

Our discerning TechCrunch editors will review every qualified application searching for high-potential startups. They’ll choose up to five to represent each category. Each TC Top Pick receives a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package that includes, among other perks, one day exhibiting in Startup Alley, three Founder passes, access to programming on all stages, the complete attendee list (via TC Events Mobile App) and CrunchMatch — our business networking platform.

As VIPs, Top Picks receive plenty of attention from investors, global press and potential customers. If that’s not enough exposure for you, listen up. A TechCrunch editor will interview every Top Pick startup — live on the Showcase Stage — and we’ll record that interview and promote it across our social media platforms. Talk about a great sales and marketing tool.

Did you know that every startup that exhibits in Startup Alley has a shot at being chosen as a Wild Card? It’s true — even Top Picks. And the startup selected as a Wild Card gets to compete in the Startup Battlefield for the $50,000 prize. Case in point: Legacy, a startup focused on helping men freeze and store their sperm for future use (yes, you read that correctly) exhibited in Startup Alley at Disrupt Berlin 2018. Legacy earned the Wild Card slot, and then it won the Startup Battlefield competition. Crazy big dreams do come true.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December, but you have only two weeks left if you want a chance to exhibit in Startup Alley for free. Don’t wait — apply to be a TC Top Pick before the deadline strikes on 18 October at 12 p.m. (PT). Come and show the world what you’ve got!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Two of Africa’s powerhouse tech incubators joined forces in September. Nigerian innovation center and seed-fund CcHub acquired Nairobi based iHub.

The purchase amount was undisclosed, but CcHub will finance the deal out of its real estate project to build a new 10-story HQ in Lagos, CcHub CEO Bosun Tijani told TechCrunch.

Details are emerging on how the two entities will operate together, but Tijani noted some degree of autonomy. The names — CcHub and iHub — will remain the same. Tijani is now co-CEO of both organizations.

Nekesa Were continues as iHub managing director. And iHub’s existing programs will remain, with CcHub extending to Kenya some of its existing activities in education, healthcare and governance.

CcHub will also use the iHub addition to expand the investment scope of its Growth Capital Fund.

The acquisition brings together two of Africa’s most powerful tech hubs by membership networks, volume of programs, startups incubated and global visibility. CcHub and iHub visitors and partnerships span Zuckerberg, Mayer, Facebook, Google and several African governments.

There’ll be a lot to cover on how this merger shapes up. At a high level, for now, the CcHub-iHub union creates a direct innovation link between two of Africa’s most active markets for VC and startup formation — Nigeria and Kenya .

Africa-focused tech talent accelerator Andela announced cuts of 400 junior engineers across Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria just as the startup released first-time earnings figures indicating it will surpass $50 million in revenues for 2019.

On the disjointed news, Andela CEO told TechCrunch the layoffs were due to a shift in market demand for the startup’s more senior developers.

Andela’s client base is comprised of more than 200 companies around the world that pay for the African developers Andela selects and trains to work on projects.

The Series D tech-venture is one of Africa’s most visible (by press volume) and best funded ― backed by $181 million in VC from investors that include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Johnson said the layoffs were not due to a lack of demand or financial woes. That’s probably why Andela released first-time figures of a $50 million run rate for 2019, something of a rarity for a startup to reach in less than five years. That’s even more rare for ventures in Africa. Only one VC-backed digital company has revealed annual revenues between $50 and $100 million. That’s Jumia, the e-commerce startup, which listed in an NYSE IPO earlier this year.

The departing Andela software engineers gained severance packages and are receiving placement assistance from partners, including incubators CcHub and iHub.

Chinese mobile phone and device maker Transsion listed in an IPO on Shanghai’s new Nasdaq-like STAR Market, a Transsion spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch.

Headquartered in Shenzhen, Transsion is a top seller of smartphones in Africa under its Tecno brand. The company has also started to support venture funding of African startups.

Transsion issued 80 million A shares at an opening price of 35.15 yuan (≈ $5.00) to raise 2.8 billion yuan (or ≈ $394 million).

Transsion plans to spend 1.6 billion yuan (or $227 million) of its STAR Market raise on building more phone assembly hubs, and around 430 million yuan ($62 million) on research and development, including a mobile phone R&D center in Shanghai.

Transsion has a manufacturing facility in Ethiopia and announced plans to build an R&D facility in India.

There are a couple things to watch with Transsion’s IPO. First, the public listing and accompanying capital could mean more venture funding for African startups.

Transsion-funded Future Hub already teamed up with Kenya’s Wapi Capital in August to source and fund early-stage African fintech startups.

Transsion’s IPO and growing presence in Africa also accompanies TechCrunch coverage over the last year that signals China’s growing digital influence in Africa (see Extra Crunch analysis).

More Africa-related stories @TechCrunch

African tech around the ‘net

Halle Tecco is no stranger to conception struggles. The Rock Health founder and former CEO has been public about her journey on social media, including two rounds of IVF, eventually leading to a healthy baby boy. Now, she wants to help others make babies, too.

To get there, Tecco has joined a class of new fertility tech companies that have popped up in the last few years. Taking from her years of experience building Rock Health, she’s now launched a new company called Natalist, which offers conception products “inspired by beauty and backed by science” to help those hoping to get pregnant in the near future.

You can pick and choose various products in Natalist’s pretty packaging or opt for the basic “Get Pregnant” bundle, which includes seven ovulation and three pregnancy tests, a one-month supply of prenatal vitamins and Omega DHA, plus the company’s “Conception 101” book.

Of course, that package merely provides the basics for any healthy woman with a regular period and no other fertility issues — and, besides the book, it’s all something you could find in your local pharmacy. But, as Tecco was quick to point out, not every woman is keen on going into their local CVS, grabbing a pregnancy test and taking it up to the register. In fact, many women Tecco polled before starting her company mentioned the need in the market for discretion. Buying online from a trusted brand would provide them with both privacy and security in the product.

While Natalist’s first offerings are the minimum for anyone trying to make a baby, Tecco has already raised a cool $5 million to build out products addressing more serious fertility concerns, like PCOS and endometriosis, which, combined, affect one out of every five women in their child bearing years and can make it a lot harder to get pregnant or make a pregnancy stick.

“We plan to use the funding to bring new products to market but we wanted to start with products that are sort of tried and true,” Tecco told TechCrunch, further explaining she’d like to see Natalist be more than just physical products and become more of a platform to help women through their pregnancy journey.

“We really want to have a support platform for women who have questions or concerns, really creating a great customer experience and helping them troubleshoot if things aren’t going the way that they want them to and also arm them with information and knowledge around getting pregnant,” Tecco said.

While she doesn’t see herself creating something like the app Glow, which both offers information and data through various stages of pregnancy and a community of women working on becoming pregnant, she does see the value of collaboration with these types of communities on various fertility apps and would like to reach out to those founders to see if there might be something there they can work on in the future as well.

For those interested in checking out Natalist’s products, the “Get Pregnant” bundle starts at $90 for a one-time purchase or $75 per month for the subscription plan. You also can add products from the site à la carte, should you want more tests or vitamins than what’s in the one-month package.

And for those of you TechCrunch readers interested in the funding details, Natalist took in seed money from Collaborative Fund, Cowboy Ventures, Fuel Capital, Rock Health and xFund, as well as several well-known angel investors, including Katrina Lake, Julia Cheek, Christine Lemke, John Doerr, Malay Gandhi, David Vivero and R. Martin Chavez.

Sramana Mitra: How is this information consumed by your customers? Is there a human in between the bank’s automated system and where the consumer touches the bank? Richard Hamm: At the front-end, we...

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According to a recent report, the global sales performance management (SPM) market is estimated to grow 17% annually over the next few years to become a $9.34 billion industry by 2023. San Jose-based...

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As AI companies start to find adoption, we are now starting to see real successes emerge. Arijit Sengupta has built one company and sold it to Salesforce.com. He is doing a second one that is also...

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Meet Impala, a London-based startup that wants to make it easier to interact with hotel data. The startup is building a layer on top of legacy hotel systems to standardize everything with a modern REST API.

And Impala has just raised an $11 million Series A funding round from Stride.VC, Xavier Niel/Kima Ventures, Jerry Murdock, the partners of DST Global and existing investors. The company had previously raised a $1.75 million seed round.

Essentially, Impala wants to be as simple as Stripe, Twilio or Plaid. With a few lines of code, any developer should be able to get started with Impala before diving deeper.

If you’re not familiar with the tech stack of the hotel industry, hotels use Property Management Systems to manage rooms, room types, pricing, extras, taxes, etc.

“One of the reasons it's necessary is that hotels never replace that underlying system (ever) and so there's no incentive for those old systems to build open APIs (even if they could),” co-founder and CEO Ben Stephenson told me.

Developers working on products in the hotel industry currently have to build a ton of integrations to connect to all the different hotel systems. Impala wants to do the same work once and for all, and standardize the API for anyone building services on top of hotel systems.

In other words, if you want to know how many standard rooms are left in different hotels, you can query those hotels using the same API call. It becomes much easier to manage one or multiple hotels, and build apps, websites and internal services that interact with a hotel system.

With today’s funding round, the company wants to build more integrations with hotel systems. It currently supports 8 different systems, but universal support will be key when it comes to making Impala the universal language of the hotel industry.

Impala is also working on a direct booking API. Right now, many hotels manually upload booking data to Booking Holdings websites (Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak…) and Expedia Group websites (Expedia, Hotels.com, HomeAway, Trivago…), or use a channel manager.

Those channel managers act as middlepersons that send information to multiple websites at once. “The problem with this is that if you and I wanted to start a new online seller tomorrow, we would have to connect to all of the different channel managers,” Stephenson said.

A direct booking API would lower the barrier to entry for Expedia and Booking competitors. It would also open up possibilities for new types of players who don’t necessarily sell hotel rooms today. You could imagine being able to book a room directly from a city guide website, a conference website or a music festival app.

It wouldn’t be a Booking.com embed, it would leverage Impala’s direct booking API to book directly with the hotel, which would lead to reduced commissions.