Shripati Acharya: I was talking to an entrepreneur yesterday. He was talking about why they turned down a chance to raise a lot of money. One is that the structure of the company changes if you raise...

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SoftBank Vision Fund has single-handedly changed the game when it comes to tech startup investment. And that’s why I’m excited to announce that SoftBank Vision Fund partner David Thevenon is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

Thevenon spent most of his career working for Google on international and strategic partnerships, especially in Latin America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. He ended up heading the business development teams working on Android partnerships globally.

While his career as an investor is still relatively recent, he’s currently a board member for DiDi, Grab and Kabbage. As a reminder, SoftBank’s Vision Fund invested $5 billion in DiDi — it’s not every day that you get to cut such a big check.

So Thevenon has become a sort of expert in ride-hailing and mobile transportation platforms. It’s going to be interesting to hear what he thinks about the concept of “super apps” that Grab pioneered, for instance. Can you transform ride-hailing apps into apps that you open every day to make payments, get insurance products and loans?

More generally, given the size of SoftBank’s Vision Fund ($100 billion), it has had a huge impact on the growth trajectory of some companies. I’m personally curious to know SoftBank’s approach as board members, whether they get involved in the strategy of those companies or let the executive teams make decisions on their own.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

Before joining SoftBank in 2014, David had a 10-year tenure at Google, where he last led global partnerships for the Android platform and was in charge of product-related partnerships and business development activities across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.

Prior to Google, David led strategic partnerships at T-Mobile International, and worked as a finance executive at Dell, ICL-Fujitsu and Elf-Atochem. David received a Master in Management from ESCEM.

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“No bad conversations between companies and their customers is what we’re shooting for,” Kair Käsper tells me. He’s the head of Growth of a relatively new startup called Klaus, which he founded together with old high school friend Martin Kõiva.

Most recently the pair were employees at Pipedrive, holding the roles of director of Product Marketing and global head of Customer Support, respectively. Many years prior to that they shared a flat together and worked on a number of projects. One of those was an applicant-tracking startup called Jobkitten “that didn’t really go anywhere.”

The latest Käsper and Kõiva venture, however, appears to already be on firmer footing. Described as a “conversation review and QA tool for support teams,” Klaus is designed to help companies improve the quality of customer service. Two years in the making but only launched formally six months ago, customers already include Automattic, Wistia and Soundcloud. And today the Estonian startup is disclosing $1.9 million in seed funding led by Creandum, the first Baltic investment by the Swedish VC firm and the first from its new fund.

“The problem is that maintaining an even, high level of customer service quality is hard,” explains Käsper. “It becomes even harder if you have over 20,000 monthly conversations with customers and your support team is 100 people in three offices.

“As the head of customer support, you want everyone on your team to provide answers that meet with internal standards, regardless of how long they’ve been with the company or how seriously they take their job. You get very anxious in this situation, because you have no idea about what’s going on in those thousands of conversations. For you, no visibility means no control.”

He says that his and Kõiva’s firsthand experience at Pipedrive taught them that the key to quality assurance is going through past interactions and giving systematic feedback to agents. “Kind of like code review in engineering or the editorial process in writing,” he says. “Teams all over the world are discovering this now, but they almost always start with a manual process, managed in spreadsheets. They get stuck fast.”

To make this type of feedback loop more scalable, Klaus has created a purpose-built UI for giving internal feedback. Smartly, it also integrates with modern SaaS help desk solutions, such as Zendesk and Intercom.

“[The software also has] countless specialized features that allow you to focus on the actual feedback instead of managing a spreadsheet,” adds the Klaus head of Growth. They include the ability to easily filter out conversations for review, rate them based on a customized score card and notify agents of received feedback through email or Slack.

Meanwhile, the young company makes money by charging a monthly or yearly subscription fee based on how many users are connected to its app. In other words, just like Pipedrive before it, another classic enterprise SaaS play out of Estonia.

Update: An earlier version of this article wrongly said that Kair Käsper is CEO of Klaus; his job title is actually head of Growth.

Cubyn, the Paris-based logistics startup that lets e-merchants outsource fulfillment and delivery logistics, has raised €12 million in new funding. The round is led by DN Capital, with participation from Partech Ventures, 360 Capital Partners, BNP Paribas Développement and the French investment bank BPI France.

The injection of capital is timed with the launch of “Cubyn Fulfillment,” as the company moves beyond pickup and delivery only. The new service is described as a fully integrated “first mile” solution that covers the entire fulfillment process, including keeping stock in Cubyn’s warehouses. It claims to be offered at a 30% lower price point than competitors.

“We want to make affordable world-class logistics accessible to every single e-merchant, whatever their size,” Cubyn co-founder and CEO Adrien Fernandez Baca tells TechCrunch. “Our typical customer is an e-merchant who sells across sales channels (marketplaces their own website). Size can go from 500 to 50,000 orders shipped per month.”

Launched in 2015, Cubyn says that in four years it has made more than 2 million shipments. It also reckons that because its tech is “built from the ground up,” the startup is well positioned to tackle fulfillment more efficiently than legacy players.

“Most direct competitors are the traditional third-party logistics players who missed the e-commerce revolution and lack technology intelligence,” says Baca. “We are 30% cheaper, with simpler multi-channel integrations and higher delivery quality. Less direct competitors are the fulfillment offer of marketplaces. They do offer a good logistics experience at a good price, but only for orders going through their marketplace.”

This, he argues, means there is a big gap in the market for a solution geared at multi-channel e-merchants. “We are marketplace agnostic and offer a seamless and high-quality multi-channel logistics,” adds the Cubyn CEO.

Specifically, the way the new Cubyn Fulfillment product works is as follows: An e-merchant signs up to Cubyn and plugs in their various sales channels, such as Amazon, Rakuten, eBay, Shopify etc. They then send Cubyn an appropriate amount of inventory to fulfill future orders, which is stored temporarily in a Cubyn warehouse. When an order is placed, Cubyn automatically packs the order and ships via the most suitable carrier to optimise for transit time and cost.

“Our customers pay based on the number of parcels they ship,” explains Baca. “Logistics is a game of volume and thanks to technology we can manage volumes that couldn’t be managed by historical players. This allow us to offer… cheaper prices and still have great margins.”

Hot startup Superhuman has been getting some backlash, as often happens when someone notices the precise methodology that a startup is using to enable a core feature. We’re well into stage 2 now when, inevitably, the backlash itself gets backlash.

The nut of it is that people have been exposed to the idea that Superhuman tracks email you send and receive and gives you tools to help you manage it. They do it on your behalf, but without the permission of the recipient.

You can read a review of the service by Lucas Matney, who spent six months with it, here on TC.

The best thing about all of this defense against the backlash chatter coming in is that the backlash itself is really not specious at all. People are literally just pointing out what they do, which is track email. And it provides real, genuine value.

This isn’t a new idea. It’s done by every marketing platform worth a darn that uses email. Every single email that comes in from a BRAND has some sort of this stuff happening. As do all websites (including this one). People are just not used to it being applied to a consumer product as intimate as personal email, and that sort of in-your-face use of commerce-grade tracking is perking up ears.

A few years back a startup founder with a suite of productivity apps (not Superhuman) asked me about this cool new feature they were planning on shipping: email tracking for senders, built right in. Read receipts and action items and all kinds of cool-sounding stuff to make your life easier. He was asking what I thought of it, and whether Apple would have an issue with it if they shipped it on the store.

I told him it sounded like a great idea, but that I would be very cautions of actually rolling it out because it was impossible to get verification from the other side before you began tracking them. There was no opt-in.

I advised him to look at the way Apple handles it, where email tracking happens outside the body of the email in a sort of passive radar fashion. Instead of active “pings” using tracking pixels or other image-hosting tricks, you’re getting a lighter client-side data set to work from. It’s opt in on your side, and doesn’t extend to them.

I warned on it for the same reason that I opt out of services that route my work email through their own servers, I choose not to employ any tracking apps and set up my emails not to auto-display images. It’s not because I don’t want actionable insights, it’s because I am unable to obtain the permission of the people I send it to to begin tracking them.

Yeah, for sure, they’re already tracked 10 ways to Sunday by every spam email from Groupon to The Gap, but this is coming from me, an individual. It’s different, in my opinion, which is why people are reacting the way they are.

Flash forward and now we’ve got a very well-capitalized startup with this at the core of their business. It seems like the founders have thought a lot about this and have decided that this tracking is good and defensible. So it shouldn’t be a shock when it comes time to defend those choices.

If you’re a founder, I think that’s a core lesson: always be willing to die on whatever hill you’re building.

I don’t think that the chatter about the tracking feature of Superhuman is a case of people turning on a startup that has become successful. Superhuman is very new, but very buzzy. And, as I said above, the backlash mostly consists of people highlighting their marquee features in detail. I’d bet a lot of people became even more interested in what it’s doing reading the various and sundry tweets and posts about it, including a Big Profile post in the NYT that kicked off this latest round of discussion.

We’ve been covering Superhuman for a few years now, including detailed explanations of what they want to accomplish and what the origins of the product and team are. That’s pretty much our job — to make sure we see this stuff years before anyone else. (We even covered the last startup to use the name Superhuman for a productivity app.)

The tracking has come up in our stories, but I think that people are just more willing to be skeptical of this stuff given the way that the last couple of years have gone. This is something that we have found happening with a lot of privacy issues recently.

In fact, the most astute criticism of the way Superhuman uses tracking came in a post by designer Mike Davidson, who has spent a lot of time working on large systems that have dangerous, as well as exciting, potential. And that post is anything but a “drive-by” on the model. It’s a thoughtful critique that actually offers some possible solutions.

I do think they are trying to solve a real problem. But there are clearly components of the way that they implemented their key feature that have potential for abuse.

It is, and I do find it a bit amusing that I have to say this in twenty-nineteen, OK for people to want to discuss this and to examine the trade offs in a product that makes other people’s privacy choices for them. This isn’t backlash, this is discussion, and it’s good.

One of the reasons that we’ve gotten to a place where large platforms have been able to be mis-used to manipulate audiences at scale is that not enough people were listening to the conversations that were had about these possibilities early enough.

In context, it is very hard to argue that a genuine moment of thoughtfulness about any startup that has traction, raises significant capital and is aiming to have the most users possible see the world from its point of view is a bad thing.

Podimo, a Copenhagen-based startup building what it hopes will become Europe’s “Netflix for podcasts,” has raised €6 million in seed funding prior to launch. The round is co-led by Germany’s E.ventures and Denmark’s Heartcore, reflecting the young company’s two planned country launches later this year.

Founded by Morten Strunge, who has a track record in subscription media products via audio books service Mofibo (which he sold to Storytel), Podimo is hoping to capitalise on the rise in consumption in podcasts. Ambitiously, this will include both a free and paid version of its product, with the aim of creating a reliable revenue stream for podcast producers. The startup’s other founders are Nikolaj Koppel, Andreas Sachse and Sverre Dueholm.

“Podcasts have finally come of age and we are seeing a lot of demand for audio content globally across many different demographics,” Strunge tells me. “Consumers are increasingly looking for premium, ad-free services and we see a huge potential in the podcasting space.”

The Podimo app has been designed to provide a “superior experience” in discovery and recommendation compared to existing podcast streaming and download services. The idea, says Strunge, is to make it as seamless and easy as possible to find your next podcast.

“We believe that with the fast increasing amount of podcasts available, curation and discovery becomes more and more important to both unfold content in a relevant context and to the right individual user, which will benefit both podcast creators and consumers,” he says.

By launching a freemium model, where a paid version provides unlimited listening and features, Strunge believes there is an opportunity to work closely with podcast creators to strengthen the podcast ecosystem and make it less reliant on advertising revenue. “We want to become the preferred partner for creators, by both working closely with their content, curate and match it with each individual user, but also by offering a superior monetisation model,” he explains.

The hope then is that a more robust revenue stream will enable new podcasters to enter the market and allow existing ones to earn more. In turn that could give podcasters the financial headroom to invest even more time and effort into “creating great content.”

“Our dream is that with around 20% of people in Europe listening to podcasts on a weekly basis, many creators should be able to make a living out of creating podcasts, it shouldn’t just be for the few,” says Strunge, perhaps ignoring the fact that media often scales to become a hits-driven business. “We will offer revenue share to all existing podcasters out there, but also co-produce and produce original content,” he adds.

More broadly, Strunge says he remains a strong believer in audio as a format. He says not only is it easier to listen than it is to read but that podcasts are built for subscriptions. “It’s a short format, actuality driven, series driven and niche and broad at the same time,” says the Podimo CEO.

In addition, production costs are low so it’s possible to keep to a price point below music and VOD services, and Strunge is convinced we will continue to see a significant increase in the number of podcasts produced. This will include the broader market, but also podcasts from more professional media players yet to invest strategically in the audio format.

TikTok is being investigated in the U.K. for how it handles the safety and personal data of underage users. According to The Guardian, information commissioner Elizabeth Denham told a parliamentary committee that the probe started in February after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission levied a $5.7 million fine against TikTok for breaking children’s privacy law.

Denham told The Guardian that the commission is examining how TikTok collects private data and has concerns about the open messaging system, which may allow adult users to contact children. “We are looking at the transparency tools for children. We’re looking at the messaging system, which is completely open, we’re looking at the kind of videos that are collected and shared by children online. We do have an active investigation into TikTok right now, so watch this space,” she said.

The investigation will also examine if the popular app, owned by ByteDance, violates the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which requires companies to put special protections in place for underage users and provide them with different services than adults.

The FTC’s investigation, which began when TikTok was still known as Musical.ly, ruled that the app broke the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by failing to seek parental consent before collecting names, email addresses and other personal information from users under 13. The ruling resulted in an age gate being added to an app that prevents users under 13 from filming and posting videos on it.

ByteDance, the Chinese media startup now valued at $75 billion, told The Guardian in a statement that “We cooperate with organizations such as the ICO to provide relevant information about our product to support their work. Ensuring data protection principles are upheld is a top priority for TikTok.”

The new era of tech-enabled banks is coming, even in regulation-heavy Japan. Kyash, a fintech company with visions on becoming Japan’s first challenger bank, said today it has raised $14 million to continue its expansion.

To be clear, Kyash isn’t a bank. Yet. But it is currently applying for a host of licenses in Japan that could allow it to offer banking-style features, including checking accounts, ATM withdrawals and money remittance. Right now, it is a payment app that offers a connected Visa card in the style of Monzo, N26, Revolut (which has a Japan license) and others of that ilk.

The startup was founded in 2015 by Shinichi Takatori, a former banker and management consultant who saw the potential to merge tech and finance.

“I really noticed that information and communication has become ubiquitous but money itself hasn’t changed for a long time,” Takatori told TechCrunch in an interview.

The company took some time — two years — before it released a consumer product, but it quickly tied up with Visa to offer a prepaid debit card that connects to the Kyash app. That provides benefits like instant payment notifications, clear balance and lower fees for overseas spending, while costs are borne by merchants rather than users. They might seem elementary today, but they are still not standard among Japan’s traditional banks, Takatori explained.

The company declined to share its user numbers, but Takatori said this new round of funding — Kyash’s Series B — is a validation of the progress it has made.

The $14 million investment is co-led by Goodwater Capital, a U.S. investor that has backed fintech startups like Monzo, Stash and Toss in Korea, and Mitsubishi UFJ Capital, the investment arm of Japan’s largest bank.

Mitsubishi’s involvement means that Kyash counts Japan’s three largest banks as investors, with SMBC and Mizuho having previously put money into the company. Others that took part in this Series B include Toppan Printing, JAFCO and Shinsei Corporate Investment Limited.

So many banks on the cap table might seem like a strange thing for a disruptor — let alone the banks, which tend to behave territorially — but Takatori believes that there’s the potential for cooperation, not to mention that it will help the startup with its licensing efforts. Already, he revealed, Mitsubishi plans to integrate its card with the Kyash app to provide its customers with the best of both worlds.

“We’re not here to win over existing banks, but instead inform [them of] how money should work in next decade,” explained Takatori. “So why not collaborate in some way.”

There’s also the fact that, even with a license, Kyash and others are unlikely to be able to offer full banking services. That means they will have to serve as complementary offerings to the industry, which would likely mean that cooperation is good — essential — for both sides.

But, beyond the consumer play, a notable piece of Kyash’s business that has investors excited is its B2B payment business.

The company developed its own payment processing system to reduce costs, which is one reason it took time to launch. Thanks to a tie-up with Visa, it offers both issuing and processing of prepaid Visa cards to fintech companies in Japan that want to go down the payment route.

That’s increasingly popular, given the government push to make the country a “cashless society” ahead of the 2020 Olympic Games next year. It also could appeal to crypto companies in Japan, which offers the world’s most robust licensing, that want to follow the example of the Coinbase card in Europe or startups like Crypto.com and TenX, which offer similar prepaid cards.

Takatori said Kyash is “in discussions” with crypto companies, but that it has not made a decision on how to proceed yet. The company is also eyeing potential overseas expansions, although that is some way down the line.

“We have open eyes for globalization, it’s just a matter of when,” he told TechCrunch. “We still have a far way to go [in Japan, but] maybe after the Olympics.”

More pressingly, he sees the company looking to raise a “pretty quick” Series C round to give it acceleration into next year. That’s likely to go to more expansion and user acquisition as the licenses the startup has applied for are unlikely to be granted this year.

Only six months after snapping up virtualization specialist Parallels, Canadian software company Corel is itself getting acquired. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed with multiple sources that private equity giant KKR has closed a deal to buy the company from Vector Capital, which has owned some or all of Corel since 2003.

KKR’s interest in Corel was first rumored in May, when PE Hub reported the two were in talks for a sale valued at over $1 billion. At the time, representatives of Corel declined to comment, although our sources inside the company indicated that the reports were not inaccurate.

Fast-forward to today, and both KKR and and a spokesperson for Parallels/Corel declined to comment. But, we now have a copy of the memo provided by an internal source that has been sent out to staff announcing that the deal has indeed closed, and that Corel is now officially part of the KKR family of companies.

According to the memo, KKR is very optimistic about Corel’s prospects. It plans to give Corel an “infusion of capital” to accelerate its growth, which will go into two areas. First will be expanding operations for the existing business: Corel is the company behind a number of longstanding software brands including WordPerfect, Corel Draw, WinZip, PaintShop Pro. Second will be making acquisitions (and the sheer proliferation of promising startups in the last decade dedicated to all variety of apps and other software that may have found it a challenge to scale means Corel could have rich pickings).

There are no layoffs planned as part of the deal, and the official announcement had been planned to go out next week, but now looks like it may be moved up to tomorrow (Wednesday).

Vector and Corel itself have never publicly disclosed much on user numbers or financials, but Vector has described the company as “highly profitable,” with dividends of more than $300 million to date. The memo we’ve seen notes that Corel (including Parallels) has millions of customers across its various software platforms and apps.

The acquisition of Corel by KKR marks another chapter in the company’s long corporate history.

Founded in the 1980s — when personal computers were just starting to enter the mainstream but well before we had anything like the internet (not to mention the world of cloud-based apps) that we know today — Corel once positioned itself as a potential competitor to Microsoft in the software wars.

When Corel purchased WordPerfect from Novel in 1996, Corel founder Michael Cowpland viewed the software package as an integral part of that rivalry, describing it as the Pepsi to Microsoft’s Coke — that is, Word.

Microsoft proved the mightier of the two, and it even eventually signed a partnership with Corel that saw it investing in the company: a sell out, as one disappointed Canadian journalist described it at the time. The two have also sparred over patents.

Corel, which went public early in its life, got battered in the first dot-com bust (which was not helped by an insider trading scandal that led to Cowpland’s departure). Vector stepped in and took it private in 2003.

After restructuring the company, Vector listed Corel again in 2006. But, amid another recession that again hit Corel hard, it once more took it private in 2010. In the intervening years, Corel has been focused on modernising its offerings, bringing in e-commerce, direct downloads, subscriptions and acquisitions to bring the company’s products and wider business closer to how consumers and workers use computers today.

Parallels was a part of that strategy: its products help people work seamlessly across multiple platforms, letting employees (and IT managers) run a unified workflow regardless of the device or operating system, with Parallels providing support for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Chromebook, Linux, Raspberry Pi and cloud — a timely offering in the current, fragmented IT market.

If the $1 billion+ figure is accurate, that strategy seems to have worked: across the two times that Vector took Corel private, it never paid more than $124 million for the company (the second time, as its stock was tanking, it paid just $30 million).