Instead of switching between apps to secure a ride during rush hour, people in China can now hail from different companies using a single app. Some of the country’s largest internet companies — including ride-hailing giant Didi itself — are placing bets on this type of aggregation service.

The nascent model is reminiscent of a feature Google Maps added in early 2017 allowing users to hail Uber, Lyft, Gett and Hailo straight from its navigation app. A few months later, AutoNavi, a maps app owned by Alibaba, debuted a similar feature in China. Other big names like Baidu, Hellobike, Meituan and Didi subsequently joined forces with third-party ride-booking services rather than building their own.

The trend underscores changes in China’s massive ride-hailing industry of 330 million users (in Chinese). The government is tightening rules around vehicle and driver accreditation, leading to a widescale driver shortage. Meanwhile, established carmakers including BMW and state-owned Shouqi are entering the fray, offering premium rides with better-trained fleet drivers, but they face an uphill battle with Didi, which gobbled up Uber China in 2016.

By corraling various ride-booking services, an aggregator can shorten wait time for users. For new ride-hailing players, riding on a billion-user platform like Meituan opens up wider user acquisition channels.

These ride-hailing marketplaces let users request rides from any number of third-party services available. At the end of the trip, users pay directly through the aggregator, which normally takes a commission of about 10%, although none of the players have disclosed how revenue is exactly divided with their mobility partners.

In comparison, a ride-hailing operator such as Didi charges about 20% from each trip since they take care of driver management, customer support and other dirty work which, to a great extent, helps build the moat around their business.

Here’s a look at who the aggregators are.

In the years following the financial crisis, de novo bank activity in the US slowed to a trickle. But as memories fade, the economy expands and the potential of tech-powered financial services marches forward, entrepreneurs have once again been asking the question, “Should I start a bank?”

And by bank, I’m not referring to a neobank, which sits on top of a bank, or a fintech startup that offers an interesting banking-like service of one kind or another. I mean a bank bank.

One of those entrepreneurs is Judith Erwin, a well-known business banking executive who was part of the founding team at Square 1 Bank, which was bought in 2015. Fast forward a few years and Erwin is back, this time as CEO of the cleverly named Grasshopper Bank in New York.

With over $130 million in capital raised from investors including Patriot Financial and T. Rowe Price Associates, Grasshopper has a notable amount of heft for a banking newbie. But as Erwin and her team seek to build share in the innovation banking market, she knows that she’ll need the capital as she navigates a hotly contested niche that has benefited from a robust start-up and venture capital environment.

Gregg Schoenberg: Good to see you, Judith. To jump right in, in my opinion, you were a key part of one of the most successful de novo banks in quite some time. You were responsible for VC relationships there, right?

Judith Erwin: The VC relationships and the products and services managing the balance sheet around deposits. Those were my two primary roles, but my background is one where people give me broken things, I fix them and give them back.

Schoenberg: Square 1 was purchased for about 22 times earnings and 260% of tangible book, correct?

Erwin: Sounds accurate.

Schoenberg: Plus, the bank had a phenomenal earnings trajectory. Meanwhile, PacWest, which acquired you, was a “perfectly nice bank.” Would that be a fair characterization?

Erwin: Yes.

Schoenberg: Is part of the motivation to start Grasshopper to continue on a journey that maybe ended a little bit prematurely last time?

Erwin: That’s a great insight, and I did feel like we had sold too soon. It was a great deal for the investors — which included me — and so I understood it. But absolutely, a lot of what we’re working to do here are things I had hoped to do at Square 1.

Schoenberg: You’re obviously aware of the 800-pound gorilla in the room in the form of Silicon Valley Bank . You’ve also got the megabanks that play in the segment, as well as Signature Bank, First Republic, Bridge Bank and others.

Vikas Choudhury: Another investment is a cloud kitchen. It’s a company called Inner Chef run by someone I know. That company was riding on the wave of logistics and delivery, which was designed for...

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Nnamdi Okike is Co-founder and Managing Partner at 645 Ventures. We have an excellent conversation about trends and his firm’s investment thesis.

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Technology has been used to improve many of the processes that we use to get work done. But today, a startup has raised funding to build tech to improve us, the workers.

15Five, which builds software and services to help organisations and their employees evaluate their performance, as well as set and meet goals, has closed a Series B round of $30.7 million, money that it plans to use to continue building out the functionality of its core product — self-evaluations that take “15 minutes to write, 5 minutes to read” — as well as expand into new services that will sit alongside that.

David Hassell, 15Five’s CEO and co-founder, would not elaborate on what those new services might be, but he recently started a podcast with the startup’s “chief culture officer” Shane Metcalf around the subject of “best-self” management that taps into research on organizational development and positive psychology.

At the same time that 15Five works on productizing these principles into software form, it seems that the secondary idea will be to bring in more services and coaching into the mix alongside 15Five’s existing SaaS model.

This Series B is being led by Next47​, the strategic investment arm of manufacturing giant Siemens. Others in the round included Matrix Partners, PointNine Capital, ​Jason Calacanis’s LAUNCH Fund​, Newground Ventures, Bling Capital, Chaifetz ​Group, and ​Origin Ventures (which had led 15Five’s Series A). It brings the total raised to $42.6 million, but Hassell said that while the valuation is up, the exact number is not being disclosed.

(Previous investors in the company have included David Sacks, 500 Startups and Ben Ling.)

15Five’s growth comes at a time when we are seeing a significant evolution in how companies are run internally. The digital age has made workforces more decentralised — with people using smartphones, video communications and services like Slack to stay in constant contact while otherwise working potentially hundreds of miles from their closest colleagues, or at least not sitting in one office altogether, all the time.

All well and good, but this has also had an inevitable impact on how employees are evaluated by their managers, and also how they are able to gauge how well they are doing versus those with whom they work. So while communication of one kind — getting information across from one person to another across big distances — has seen a big boost through technology, you could argue that another kind of communication — of the human kind — has been lost.

15Five’s approach is to create a focus on building an easy way for employees to think about and set goals for themselves on a regular basis.

Indeed, “regular” is the operative word here, with key thing being frequency. A lot of companies — especially large ones — already use performance management software (other players in this space include BetterWorks, Lattice, and PeopleGoal among many others), but in many cases, it’s based around self-evaluations that you might make annually, or at six-month intervals.

15Five’s focus is on providing a service that people will use much more often than that. In fact, it encourages use all the time, by way of sending praise to each other when something positive happens (it calls these “High fives” appropriately enough), as well as regular evaluations and goals set by the employees themselves.

Hassell said in an interview that this is in tune with what modern workplaces, and younger employees, expect today, partly fuelled by the rise of social media.

“Most millennials will get feedback on what they eat for breakfast more than what they do at work,” he said. “The rest of our lives exist in a real-time feedback loop, filled with continuous, positive reinforcement, but then you go into work and have an annual or maybe biannual performance review? It’s simply not enough.”

He said that he knows some millennial employees who have said that they will not work at a company if it’s not already using or planning to adopt 15Five, and since talent is the cornerstone to a company’s success this could have a significant impact.

The startup was born in San Francisco in more than one sense. It’s based there, but also, its principles seem to be uniquely a product of the kind of self-reflection and self-care/quality of life emphasis that has been associated with California culture for a while now, even amidst the relentless march that comes with being at the epicenter of the tech world.

In that regard, its newest investor, Next47, will help put 15Five to the test, both in terms of how the product will be adopted and used at a company whose holdings are as much manufacturing as technology, and in terms of sheer size: Siemens globally has around 400,000 employees, a huge jump up compared to the smaller and medium-sized businesses that form the core of 15Five’s customer base today.

Matthew Cowan, a partner at the firm, noted that while Siemens is currently not a 15Five user, the thinking behind the investment was strategic and the idea will be to incorporate it into the company’s practices for helping employees’ progress.

“It’s very representative of how the workplace is transforming,” he said

Technology has been used to manage regulatory risk since the advent of the ledger book (or the Bloomberg terminal, depending on your reference point). However, the cost-consciousness internalized by banks during the 2008 financial crisis combined with more robust methods of analyzing large datasets has spurred innovation and increased efficiency by automating tasks that previously required manual reviews and other labor-intensive efforts.

So even if RegTech wasn’t born during the financial crisis, it was probably old enough to drive a car by 2008. The intervening 11 years have seen RegTech’s scope and influence grow.

RegTech startups targeting financial services, or FinServ for short, require very different growth strategies — even compared to other enterprise software companies. From a practical perspective, everything from the security requirements influencing software architecture and development to the sales process are substantially different for FinServ RegTechs.

The most successful RegTechs are those that draw on expertise from security-minded engineers, FinServ-savvy sales staff as well as legal and compliance professionals from the industry. FinServ RegTechs have emerged in a number of areas due to the increasing directives emanating from financial regulators.

This new crop of startups performs sophisticated background checks and transaction monitoring for anti-money laundering purposes pursuant to the Bank Secrecy Act, the Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) and FINRA rules; tracks supervision requirements and retention for electronic communications under FINRA, SEC, and CFTC regulations; as well as monitors information security and privacy laws from the EU, SEC, and several US state regulators such as the New York Department of Financial Services (“NYDFS”).

In this article, we’ll examine RegTech startups in these three fields to determine how solutions have been structured to meet regulatory demand as well as some of the operational and regulatory challenges they face.

Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering

Enterprise collaboration startup Slack went public last month on the NYSE under the ticker WORK. Rather than the usual IPO route, the company went public via a direct listing, similar to Spotify’s...

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Uber and Lyft going public may have put closer public scrutiny on the economics of ridesharing, but it hasn’t had a chilling effect on the level of competition in the space. In the latest development, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Bolt, the Estonian ridesharing, scooter and food delivery company that operates across Europe — most recently opening for business in London — and a number of emerging markets, has completed the first tranche of its latest round of funding. The equity injection bumps up the valuation of the company to over $1 billion, money that Bolt plans to use to fuel its international growth.

“We have closed a new funding round, aimed at supporting our recent launch in London and further expansion plans in 2019,” a spokesperson said in a short statement to TechCrunch.

The spokesperson would not elaborate on the size of the round, but technically, this would be a Series C. To date, Bolt has raised $185 million with its last big investment valuing it at $1 billion.

We understand that backers in this latest funding include Nordic Ninjas — a new fund out of Sweden backed by a number of Japanese LPs to invest in Northern European startups (Bolt is based out of Tallinn) — as well as Naya Capital (founded by hedge fund investor Masroor Siddiqui), Creandum and G Squared.

We are still trying to see if we can get further investor names and more details on the numbers. Previous investors in Bolt have included Didi (and by association SoftBank and Uber), Daimler, Korelya Capital and Spring Capital, although we understand Spring is not in this round.

Bolt has been talking about this funding for a little while now — CEO and founder Markus Villig admitted to me, when asked, four months ago that more funding was on the cards — but according to a short note in PitchBook and a memo sent out to TMT investors (TMT is a shareholder in Bolt), the investment actually only closed this month.

It appears that this is not the final close — there is more dealmaking going on — but so far, the investor list provides some interesting indicators about Bolt.

G Squared has been behind a number of growth rounds for a range of fast-growing and large tech startups, including Pinterest, SoFi, Airbnb, Coursera, Spotify, Postmates and Instacart. It’s also backed some of the biggest names specifically in the category of transportation, including Lyft, Uber, Fair, Getaround, Turo and Auto1. Its involvement speaks to big sums of money, and confidence in a strong growth story, hedging bets (or suggesting collaborations?) by potentially having stakes simultaneously in would-be competitors.

Nordic Ninjas, meanwhile, includes Honda as a shareholder. Added to Daimler, the owner of Mercedes who invested in Bolt last year when it was still called Taxify, this gives an interesting strategic twist to the investment.

And, it could also give Bolt a springboard to consider how to enter the Japanese market, to mark its first move into East Asia, to complement a footprint that includes a mix of developed and emerging markets in Western Europe, countries in the Arabic world, Africa, Eastern Europe, Western Asia and Australia.

Japan is notable for being one of the only developed countries to have, up to now, prohibited ridesharing businesses — that is, where private owners of vehicles work either individually or in networks to provide paid transportation services to other individuals.

That has led to a couple of different outcomes. First, the likes of Uber must partner with established taxi companies in the country to get entry into the market, rather than follow their usual course of business. And second, established taxi companies in Japan, which own and operate their own fleets, have become the most popular operators of ride-hailing apps in what is a fairly fragmented market.

It’s also a challenge to get operating licenses in the country. Didi, the Chinese ride-hailing giant that is also an investor in Bolt, last year launched its own app in the Japan. Didi works with some 10 fleets and provides the logistics and ordering layer on top of those third-party services. Bolt operates a partnership program modeled on the same idea, which helps it build up quickly in the emerging markets where it has gained a lot of ground quickly.

Notably, much of Bolt’s growth seems to have been carefully carved out without much overlap with the likes of Didi and Uber (London, the biggest ride-hailing market in Europe, being a key exception). But as it continues to capitalise and grow, it will be interesting to see how and if that pattern will change.

We’ll update this story as we learn more.

Richard Birnbaum: Even though distributors around the world were back-dooring the goods into the United States through e-commerce, I personally believe that the brands just closed one eye. It gave...

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DigitalBridge, the Manchester, U.K.-based startup using technology to help solve the “imagination gap” when planning home renovations, has picked up £3 million in new backing.

The round is led by Maven Capital Partners via two funds it manages: £1.5 million from Maven’s Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs) and £1.5 million from the NPIF Maven Equity Finance, a regional development fund managed by Maven as part of the U.K. government’s Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund.

Working with Kingfisher Plc (owners of B&Q and Castorama) for the last couple of years, DigitalBridge has pivoted from its original AR-based home decor planning app to a new product it’s calling a “guided design tool” for kitchens and bathrooms. That’s because, DigitalBridge founder David Levine tells me, home decor visualisation is only a “nice-to-have,” whereas it’s a “must-have” for bathrooms and kitchens.

“Bathrooms and kitchens are much more complex rooms governed by complex design rules,” he explains. “We felt there was a big gap for a guided design tool which actively guides consumers through the entire journey of designing, visualising and buying whilst simplifying the inherent complexity of these rooms.”

There was, perhaps, another factor at play, too: the creation of AR development kits by Apple and Google have made it “really simple” for retailers to build their own home decor and furniture AR solutions, as well as seeing new competitors enter the space.

“Unlike most tools on the market today, DigitalBridge is utterly focused on the consumer and obsessed with creating simple and compelling experiences that enable that consumer to build their dream bathroom or kitchen irrespective of their design experience,” adds Levine. “Crucially, our core skillsets of AI and computer vision are absolutely pivotal to reducing that complexity.”

The DigitalBridge solution resides on a retailer’s website or app — it is already live with B&Q in the U.K. — and guides you through the entire process of creating your new bathroom or kitchen. The draw for retailers is that by enabling customers to easily design and visualise their new bathroom or kitchen, DigitalBridge can reduce sales cycles, increase conversion rates and average basket sizes, and “drive more engaged customers into store.”

“By using our technology, consumers are now able to visit the B&Q website and design the dream bathroom that will work for them, their family and budget, all without the need for professional assistance,” explains Levine. “Within minutes, they are guided through the process of entering their floor plan, designing the perfect bathroom and bringing it to life in immersive 3D. Once they’re happy with the design, they can buy directly online or go into a store to complete the purchase.”

Meanwhile, with regards to today’s newly disclosed funding round, Jeremy Thompson, investment director at Maven, says that DigitalBridge has developed a market-leading AI product that solves a genuine problem for retailers by helping them engage with customers online. “We are genuinely excited to work with them and support their next stage of growth, as they look to accelerate deployment of the existing product, develop new products and enter new markets, including the U.S.,” he adds.

Wind Mobility, the Berlin and Barcelona-based micromobility startup that operates e-scooter rentals in Europe, Israel and Asia, is disclosing $50 million in Series A funding. The new round is backed by existing investors. The company last raised $22 million in funding eight months ago from Chinese Source Code Capital and Europe’s HV Holtzbrinck Ventures after it pivoted away from bike rentals to focus on e-scooters.

Coinciding with the new funding, Wind is unveiling its “third generation” e-scooters, which it says have been designed “from the ground up” for micromobility sharing. Eight months in development, the new hardware claims to be significantly more durable and best-in-class for battery life, with the ability to drive 65-80km between charges.

The battery is hot swappable, too, meaning that it should be more efficient to run the Wind e-scooter service. That’s because not only can more scooters remain in circulation at any given time, potentially increasing revenue per scooter, but there’s a reduction in the cost of collecting dead batteries for re-charging as they are de-coupled from the scooter itself.

Wind also claims its new scooter has the highest waterproofing, with IP67 standard, and that its increased durability should see it last over 12 months when used in the tough sharing environment. That, in turn, puts the startup on a better unit economic footing, as flimsy hardware that needs to be replaced frequently has been a fiscal drag for e-scooter companies using off-the-shelf e-scooters designed primarily for single ownership and not for commercial use.

In the last few months a number of other micromobility companies have announced upgrades to their hardware, including European competitors Voi and Tier, although Wind Mobility co-founder and CEO Eric Wang has long talked up the importance of hardware as a differentiator, something he echoed again in a call late last week.

Specifically, Wang argued that it is still “Day One” in the e-scooter rental race, and even though Wind hasn’t been as aggressive in its roll out and has deployed fewer scooters than Lime, Voi and Tier in Europe, he says there is still everything to play for. He said it was a conscious decision not to put too many scooters on the streets until the hardware was good enough to set the company on a path to profitability. Even with the third-generation scooter being deployed immediately, the company plans to stagger the launch so that it can gather sufficient data on how the new hardware is performing before hitting the accelerator, so to speak.

The early signs look promising, however (in a video Wang sent me via WhatsApp, the new Wind scooter survives being plunged into a pond and can be seen driving off after retrieval from the water), although the Wind CEO cautions other companies and industry commentators not to underestimate how difficult hardware is. He argues that the detailed design decisions that Wind has made and the resulting improvements aren’t easily replicated any time soon and that there are “no shortcuts” in hardware. This has seen Wind set up its own R&D center in China in order to work as closely with the supply chain as possible.

Meanwhile, I’m told Wind now offers its services in 20-plus cities, including operations in Germany, France, Spain, Israel, Austria, Portugal, Denmark, Korea and Japan. The company currently employs more than 120 people worldwide.

Soldo, the U.K. fintech that offers a multi-user spending account for businesses, has closed $61 million in Series B funding.

Leading the round is Battery Ventures and Dawn Capital, with participation from previous backers Accel and Connect Ventures. In addition, a small portion is debt financing from Silicon Valley Bank. It brings total raised by the London-based startup to $82 million.

Founded by Carlo Gualandri, who previously helped create Italy’s first online bank, Soldo offers a multi-user spending account for businesses of all sizes — from SMEs to much larger enterprises — that need to deploy and manage expenses across an entire organisation.

It enables departmental and employee spending to be managed in real time by combining a Soldo account, central dashboard, apps for iOS and Android and virtual wallets or physical “pre-paid” Mastercards that can be handed out to employees, departments and even external consultants or contractors.

In addition, Soldo offers granular spending controls that are at the heart of its tech stack. This allows for different expense criteria for each employee, contractor or spending department, with permissions set and all spending trackable centrally. It also lets users capture receipt data, while the whole system integrates with commonly used business accounting packages such as Xero, QuickBooks, Concur, Expensify, NetSuite, Zucchetti and SAP.

Asked what the biggest challenge for Soldo has been over the last 12 months, Gualandri says, “educating the market,” something that he doesn’t see changing any time soon.

“When you don’t know that a solution exists, you don’t even call it a ‘problem’ but you consider it just a ‘fact of life,’ ” he says. “Spend management is a new category that replaces many old and outdated processes. [It] allows companies to distribute access to money with control, enabling flatter and more agile organisations. It will take time for the market to fully realise its transformational power.”

To that end, Gualandri says the most gratifying thing over the last year has been the results achieved within the companies that have started adopting Soldo. “We have been recognised by thousands of companies from small to very large as an innovative and reliable provider of financial services,” he tells me. “No small achievement in the traditionally more conservative world of business.”

Soldo isn’t profitable yet, but Gualandri says it could be within one or two years if that was the goal. However, this would mean choosing “slower, more organic growth” and given there is a very large market in front of Soldo it “would not be the right choice.” The majority of companies in Europe are still using “reimbursable expenses, spreadsheets and manual processes to manage the expense management cycle,” and Soldo’s competition largely remains the status quo way of doing things (although Denmark’s Pleo, for example, operates in a similar space).

“We are a company with a fixed cost base and good unit economics so the break-even point is dependent on how much we invest and grow the fixed cost base (because most of our investment is people) and the volume of customers and spend managed by our system,” he says. “So by deciding to invest in product and sales we are in effect targeting a larger revenue and profit base, but later on.”

Meanwhile, Soldo’s Series B round will be used to further grow in the U.K., where it claims a “leadership position,” and in Italy and Ireland. The company also plans to enter new European markets and double its workforce over the next 12 months. Gualandri says Soldo will continue to invest in its product, too, in order to tackle additional spend management “pain points.”

“Travel expenses is the most common need but procurement, purchasing goods and services, subscriptions, mobility expenses, employees benefits are all areas that can be innovated and are an expression of the concept of company spend management,” he says.

Meanwhile, Soldo recently secured an e-money licence from Ireland’s central bank in addition to the license it holds in the U.K. so that it can continue trading within the European single market post-Brexit and in the event of “no-deal.” “It’s crazy to think we’ve been forced to work for a year and a half on a hugely complex project, mostly duplicating something that we had already, to prepare our business for something that may or may not happen,” Gualandri told TechCrunch at the time of announcing its newly acquired Irish license.

Vikas Choudhury: Entrepreneurs today are either second-generation or second lifecycle. They come to us after having tried something on their own, so we do believe that they will just look at the...

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