Target Circle and TapHeaven announced they’re merging into a single company under the Target Circle brand.

TapHeaven co-founder and CEO Chris Hoyt, who is becoming chief growth officer at the combined organization, said the two companies have been “trying to solve the same problem” — namely, eliminating many of the inefficiencies in the mobile advertising business.

Hoyt said that for Target Circle, that meant trying to “unify this fragmented ecosystem into a single dashboard for contracts, invoices and offers.” And for TapHeaven, that meant a focus on automation, resulting in the launch of what the company calls a “command center” for user acquisition, where advertisers can optimize their ad campaigns “at the source level, by country” while getting high-quality traffic without fraud.

The companies also complement each other geographically — Target Circle is headquartered in Oslo, Norway, while TapHeaven is headquartered in San Francisco.

According to Hoyt, they first came across each other because they were talking to the same mobile studio about supporting the launch of a new game, and it became clear they “both had the same vision for our businesses, the same future with a unified dashboard wrapped in automation and machine learning to simplify and help the ecosystem perform for these advertisers.”

Target Circle founder and CEO Heiko Hildebrandt will continue to serve as chief executive for the combined companies — in the announcement, he said TapHeaven allows the company to “strengthen and expand its technology in the automation of advertising and fraud prevention and resolution.” Meanwhile, TapHeaven executives Brian Krebs and Jeremy Jones will become CIO and chief of user experience, respectively.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Moving forward, Hoyt said Target Circle will continue to support its existing products while focusing on the new UA Command Center as “the future of our business.” He also suggested that the platform could help advertisers move away from Facebook and Google, allowing them to get the performance they need from other ad networks.

“What impact this is going to have on the market is really lifting up the rest of the ecosystem,” he said. “I feel like Facebook and Google have had their day, a little bit … With the serious things that are going on with these companies, advertisers are desperate for the answers to where [else] can they spend their money and diversify their portfolio.”

If you think about it, the basic concept of a toothbrush hasn’t evolved since… forever. Sure, many people have switched to an electric toothbrush, but it remains a stick with a brush at the end.

Willo thinks that’s not good enough. The company has developed an oral care device to improve brushing with a focus on plaque. The company says that basic brushing only cleans 42% of dental plaque, while electric brushes clean 46% of dental plaque.

The startup has worked with dentists to design its product. It still sounds a bit mysterious, as the company isn’t sharing much about the product. The photo above is the only image of the product right now.

But what we do know is that the startup has raised a $7.5 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins, with Bpifrance and Nest co-founder Matt Rogers also participating. The company was founded by Hugo de Gentile, Ilan Abehassera and Jean-Marie de Gentile, and it attended The Refiners accelerator program.

Now let’s see how it actually works, how much it costs and if people are willing to change everything about the way they brush their teeth.

According to a ResearchandMarkets report, the global digital signature market is estimated to grow at 37% CAGR to $5.5 billion by 2023 from $1.2 billion in 2018. Recently, DocuSign (Nasdaq: DOCU), a...

___

Video advertising company VidMob is announcing that it has raised $25 million in Series B funding.

When I wrote about VidMob’s seed funding back in 2015, it was focused on building a marketplace that connected marketers and professional video editors. That’s still a component of the VidMob business, said founder and CEO Alex Collmer, but the company has also built a broader platform for video advertising, which it calls the Agile Creative Studio.

So Collmer said that with VidMob, not only can marketers find professionals (editors, animators, graphic designers and more) to create their ads, they can also “with a single click, send hundreds and in some cases thousands of custom ads” to VidMob partners like Facebook, Google/YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.

The platform analyzes how the different creative elements are affecting the way audiences are responding to an ad and uses this data to make campaigns more effective. The result, Collmer said, is that “the decay curve actually inverts and the ad actually improves over time through this iterative process of creating and learning, creating and learning.”

Brands using VidMob include Bayer, Intercontinental Hotel Group, Ikea and Neutrogena, as well as startups like Acorns. In a statement, Joshua Palau, the vice president of media platforms and strategy for Bayer U.S., said the platform has “allowed us to meaningfully improve the ROI on our social video campaigns.”

VidMob has now raised more than $45 million in total funding. The round was led by Austin-based BuildGroup, with participation from Acadia Woods, Herington, Interlock Partners, Macanta Investments, the limited partners at Manifest and “brandtech” firm You & Mr Jones.

“VidMob solves a really important pain point for brands — how to deliver the volume of content that brands now need for all the different platforms, at the speed and price they need it at,” said You & Mr Jones founder David Jones in a statement. “In the near future all content will be intelligent and driven by data and VidMob has a product that delivers that now.”

BuildGroup co-founder and CEO Lanham Napier offered a statement praising VidMob for “not only offering up meaningful insights, but also providing the tools and talent to quickly and cost-effectively activate on that intelligence.”

“But it’s their vision for the future that gets us most excited,” Napier added. “As the world moves towards more complex forms of communication, the idea of an API for creativity is so powerful that you can see it becoming another foundational service layer of the web.”

Collmer expanded on this idea in our interview, suggesting that VidMob could eventually do much more than facilitate video ads on social media platforms.

“As the web is moving from text and images to more complex media types — today that’s video, tomorrow it’s augmented reality, who knows what it will be after that — I’m fairly certain the needle is always going to point towards greater complexity,” he said. “That creative friction becomes a tax on the entire internet. We’re trying to build what I think of as an API for creativity … Today, that friction point is frequently with our platform partners, with the Facebooks and Snaps, but we see it expanding to other areas where you see imagery as the central point of communication.”

As Facebook explores ways to generate revenue from WhatsApp, the company is now turning to a startup that already has a lead. The social juggernaut said today it has invested in social-commerce startup Meesho in what is the first time the firm takes equity in an Indian startup.

Neither Facebook nor Meesho, which prior to this announcement had raised about $65 million from a number of investors, including DST Partners, RPS Ventures and Shunwei Capital, shared financial terms of the deal. A source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that the capital was “very significant.”

Meesho, a Y Combinator alumnus, is an online marketplace that connects sellers with customers on social media platforms such as WhatsApp. The four-year-old startup claims to have a network of more than 2 million resellers who largely deal with apparel, home appliances and electronics items.

These resellers are mostly homemakers, most of whom have purchased a smartphone for the first time in recent years. Eighty percent of Meesho’s user base is female, the startup’s co-founder and CEO Vidit Aatrey told TechCrunch.

Meesho also has most of its customers in smaller cities and towns, popularly dubbed as India 2, where most users are still not online. These are two things that attracted Facebook to Meesho, Ajit Mohan, VP and managing director of Facebook India, told TechCrunch in an interview.

“A platform that is aimed at India 2 and has such a large user base of women — when most people online in India are predominantly men — is a remarkable achievement,” he said. According to several estimates, males account for more than 70% of India’s internet users.

Meesho claims that it is helping thousands of resellers earn more than Rs 25,000 ($360) each month. In an interview with TechCrunch last year, Aatrey said the startup, which operates in India currently, planned to enter international markets in the coming future.

Even as WhatsApp is a crucial play for Meesho, the startup will continue to engage with other social media platforms, Facebook’s Mohan said. Last year, Facebook launched its Marketplace in India, which operates in the same space as Meesho. Mohan said the company does not see Meesho as a vehicle to expand its own family of services.

On the contrary, Facebook is now open to exploring investment in other startups that are building unique solutions for the Indian market. “Wherever we believe there is opportunity beyond the work we do today, we are open to exploring further investment deals,” he said. There is no particular category that Facebook is necessarily looking at, however.

Even as Facebook has not made any push to make WhatsApp expand beyond a communications service, users in India, the service’s largest market with more than 250 million users, are increasingly finding ways to incorporate Facebook-owned apps into their businesses.

Google, Amazon and Twitter also have made investments in Indian startups. While Twitter has backed social platform ShareChat, Google has invested in hyperlocal concierge app Dunzo. And to be sure, Facebook also acquired an Indian startup five years ago.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do when that aha moment came? Ryan Chan: I hadn’t talked to this friend of mine in almost three years. He said, “Ryan, I will give you a little bit of money if...

___

Edition

Popular

Popular

Popular

Popular

Popular

French startup Lifen is raising a $22.7 million (€20 million) funding round. Partech is leading the round with Idinvest Partners and Majycc eSanté Invest also participating. Existing investors Serena and Daphni are also investing again.

Most of the healthcare industry in France still relies on good old physical letters with stamps and everything. Lifen wants to help practitioners and hospitals switch to digital letters instead to save time and money.

While it’s easy to send a digital receipt instead of printing one, it gets a bit more complicated with health information. Companies must comply with regulation and make sure that everything remains confidential. Lifen says that everything is encrypted in transit and at rest, and the company can’t access your data.

Lifen acts as an interface with multiple electronic messaging protocols — MS Santé, Apicrypt, Zepra and Medimail. You can send a letter using those protocols in a few clicks. And because paper isn’t going to die overnight, you can send letters through the French postal service using Lifen as well.

The startup manages a directory of healthcare professionals and also handles read receipts. When it comes to receiving messages, Lifen acts as a unified inbox that lets you receive messages, documents and reports from various channels — it essentially looks like an email interface with an inbox and an outbox. You can then export each document and sort them in a patient folder.

When it comes to user experience, the startup tries to automate as many things as possible. After setting up Lifen, you can select it as a printer in the printing popup — it’s compatible with any app that supports printing.

The service then tries to detect names and addresses to figure out who is supposed to receive the letter. Lifen searches its directory to find out how to contact this particular healthcare professional.

Individual healthcare professionals can access Lifen for €25 per month. And I’m sure hospitals pay a lot more to access the service.

Curve, the London fintech that now describes itself as an “over-the-top banking platform,” is unveiling a re-vamped cashback feature in a bid to draw in more customers for the premium versions of its Curve card. The company lets you consolidate all of your bank cards into a single Curve card and app to make it easier to manage your spending and access other benefits.

With the new Curve Cash programme, customers get 1% instant cashback on top of any existing rewards cards that they have plugged into the app, potentially earning customers double rewards on purchases. You simply pick from the list of retailers supported for cashback — you are allowed to choose between three and six retailers, depending on which Curve plan you are on — and then get 1% cashback for any purchases made at those stores.

The list of supported retailers spans more than 60 top brands, including most notably Amazon, Apple, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, TFL, Uber, Gett, Spotify and Netflix. There is no doubt that is a better choice of brands than many existing cashback schemes, and could go someway to softening the blow of losing Amex support for the second time earlier this year.

However, while the revamped cashback offering is available across all Curve products, the free version of Curve offers cashack for only the first 90 days. Otherwise, Curve Metal customers will earn 1% instant cashback on purchases at six retailers at a time, and can receive Curve Cash for an unlimited period; Curve Black customers will be able to choose three retailers at a time, and can also receive Curve Cash for an unlimited period; Curve Blue customers will be able to choose three retailers at a time for an introductory 90 days.

Noteworthy is that Curve’s cashback is being powered in three ways: like many other cards or fintechs offering cashback, the London startup is partnering with a number of rewards providers to support many of the retailers in its Curve Cash programme. Others are offered via direct partnerships it has negotiated. I also understand from my own sources that cashback at some retailers — such as Amazon where Curve doesn’t have any kind of formal partnership — are being cross subsidised from revenue Curve is generating elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the new Curve Cash follows the launch of Curve Customer Protection in February, which attempts to address one of the criticisms of using Curve in relation to losing additional consumer protections typically offered by credit cards you plug into the app. Curve says it now provides faster purchase protection on eligible purchases of up to £100,000 made with any Curve card.

Along with cashback, other Curve features include fee-free spending abroad, and “Go Back in Time,” which lets you retroactively switch the card you used to pay up to 14 days after a purchase.

Fintech startup Revolut is expanding beyond Europe for the first time. The service is going live for some users in Australia starting today.

Revolut isn’t opening its doors to all customers at once. The company calls this a beta release and plans to gradually on-board new users every day. There are currently 20,000 people on the waitlist in Australia.

You also don’t get the full Revolut experience for now. Cryptocurrency exchange, metal cards and business accounts aren’t available just yet. But you can open an account, get a card, send and receive money — all the basic stuff.

A new country also means a new group of users with a different currency. Families living on different continents could switch to Revolut to send money back and forth between Australia and the U.K., or Australia and Europe.

Sending money from one Revolut account to another is instant and free. Users can then choose to keep money in a foreign currency or convert it to their local currency from the app.

For instance, converting GBP to AUD is free during weekdays and below £5,000 per month (9,150 AUD, 5,600 EUR, 6,340 USD…). It costs 0.5% for bigger amounts (unless you’re a Premium or Metal customer), and you need to add 0.5% on top of that if you exchange money on the weekend.

If I try to convert 2,000 GBP in the Revolut app right now, I’d get 3,660.50 AUD. A similar transaction on TransferWise would give me 3,647.27 AUD. Of course, your mileage may vary depending on the day of the week, the amount you’re converting, etc.

Revolut currently has a team in Melbourne but doesn’t preclude putting together teams in Sydney and Perth as well. Eventually, the company plans to hire 30 people in Australia.

The startup has previously announced plans to expand to other countries, such as the U.S., Canada, Singapore, Japan and New Zealand.

Fintech startup N26 just issued an update on its main metrics. The bank now has 3.5 million customers across 24 European markets. The company is about to expand to new countries, such as the U.S. and Brazil, but it sounds like the company is not ready just yet.

In addition to the Eurozone, N26 is currently available in the U.K., Denmark, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Liechtenstein and Iceland.

If you look at past milestones, N26 announced reaching 2 million customers back in November 2018, 2.5 million customers in February 2019. So growth is still accelerating when it comes to user registrations.

Monzo currently has 1.7 million customers (Update: now 2 million) while Revolut has attracted 5 million customers.

But even more important than the number of users, N26 currently handles a volume of €2 billion per month — it represents 400 transactions per minute.

There are now 1,300 people working for the company in Berlin, Barcelona, Vienna, New York and São Paulo. Metrics are nice, but this is soft news. I hope the company will have more announcements soon about product and country launches.

Ask any venture capitalist about the most important ingredient to success in startups, and they’ll tell you it’s founders who can persuade not only investors to part with their capital but, more importantly, who can convince people to leave what are often more stable jobs in order to help build their companies.

Ryan Cohen certainly fits the description. It goes a long way in explaining why Chewy, the online retailer of pet supplies that he co-founded in 2011, sold to PetSmart for a reported $3.35 billion in 2017 — and why it’s also expected to stage a successful IPO this Friday, when PetSmart spins it off (though PetSmart will continue to hold a majority stake in the company). Just today, the expected IPO price range, originally planned at between $17 and $19 per share, was raised to $19 to $21 per share, with the IPO advisory firm IPO Boutique saying the guidance it has received is that the deal is “multiple times oversubscribed.”

Cohen stepped away from Chewy last year, nearly a year after its all-cash sale. Naturally, he’s still excited to stand on the balcony of the NYSE as the company’s shares begin trading publicly on Friday. We talked with him earlier today about his path, beginning as a baby-faced founder without a college degree or any kind of network — and what, at age 33, he’s planning to do next.

TC: Your company was acquired in one of the biggest e-commerce sales in history, yet most people still don’t know who you are. Who are you?

RC: [Laughs.] I’ve been an entrepreneur since as far back as I can remember. My father was a glassware importer — so a businessperson — and I saw what it was like to be accountable and responsible and to have your own employees, and from an early age, I just knew that I wasn’t cut out for a traditional job, that entrepreneurship was the right path for me.

TC: Were you coding away in your bedroom like 90% of the founders we talk with?

RC: I was building websites at [age] 13, 14, then I moved on to affiliate marketing . . . My co-founder, Michael Day [who became Chewy’s CTO] and I met each other in an internet chat room, back when they were pure and bad things weren’t happening [online]. It was [centered around] website design, computer programming, and we just hit it off.

TC: You get together, and then you settle on creating a retail pets business? Why? 

RC: We were doing affiliate marketing and we wanted to own the entire customer experience and were looking for big categories that were underpenetrated. In fact, we thought the jewelry space was ripe for disruption, so we started going to trade shows and building the site and the back end.

We even spent a few hundred thousand dollars on jewelry and we were a few weeks away from launching the company, but I have a poodle, Tylee, who’s now 12 years old, and I would go every couple of weeks to buy products from this store owner who knew me and who I really trusted and who was a pet lover like me. And I had this epiphany; I realized I’m so much more passionate about this category. So we sold the jewelry, luckily getting back most of our money, and started Chewy.

TC: Obviously, you’d heard of the terrible fate of dot.com high-flier Pets.com. Why didn’t that dissuade you?

RC: The world was full of business models back then that didn’t make sense. People weren’t online. They were using dial-up. They weren’t comfortable putting their credit cards online. But over time, so much changed, including that the pets market had moved up into high-margin, higher-retail price points. You could also suddenly ship 30-pound boxes from most of the country overnight, thanks to shipping density.

TC: You were living in Dania Beach, Florida — not exactly a tech hub at the time. Did you think about moving?

RC: I had family here, growing up. I also knew it would be really expensive to build out customer service in a big city. So it ended up working out really well. But you’re right, from a financing standpoint, south Florida is not a popular tech hub. We also had the fact that we were going head-to-head with Amazon, that I have no college education and the demise of Pets.com, and so when we talked with VCs, it was like, ‘We’ll pass.’

TC: Without outside help, how did you get started?

RC: We contacted a local distributor who worked with a [third-party logistics] company that was next to him, and we started buying product the same day. Then we started marketing to cities and states near fulfillment centers, using all direct-response marketing that we were able to optimize on the fly. We’d buy the inventory as we sold it and we were doing almost everything ourselves, so if an order came in and we didn’t have inventory, I’d go buy the product and ship it out from a local Kinkos.

For the first couple of years, it was three guys and a call center.

TC: When did that change?

RC: We hit an inflection point where three [third-party logistics companies] we were working with [were getting overwhelmed]. We’d give them weekly or monthly projections so they could plan ahead and have warehouse space, but they didn’t fully believe our growth and by the end of 2013, we had these 3PLs that couldn’t scale any more, so we had to bring fulfillment in-house.

We didn’t know anything about this, so we hired a bunch of people who were experts in fulfillment and we flew to Mechanicsburg, Pa. to lease a 400,000-square-foot space, and within nine months or so, we became expert at doing fulfillment. It was risky. It was totally outside of our areas of competence. But by August of 2014, after breaking everything first, that center was humming along, and then we launched another in Reno. At that point, we went national.

TC: How would you describe your hiring process?

RC: A lot of it was intuitive. I believe in the Warren Buffett model of treating people with respect and being honest and transparent with them. A lot of these people would come from Amazon and Wayfair. I went home at night and reached out to them after finding them on LinkedIn. We’d jump on a call and we’d talk about this vision to build the largest pet retailer in the world, while focusing on delighting customers and being category experts. And all of my management team, they came from amazing companies and stable jobs, and they pulled their kids out of school to come to south Florida because they believed in me.

I was grateful they took that leap of faith, but it was also a huge responsibility, so I was going to fight even harder; I wasn’t going to let them down.

TC: You say VCs weren’t interested. What happened exactly?

RC: Almost from the beginning we reached out to investors, but I knew nothing about raising capital. I have no network. I come from a middle-class family. I don’t have a rich uncle. We just started cold-calling VCs and I learned the hard way that’s not how it works. I got turned down basically every single time, until Larry [Cheng of Volition Capital] invested, and it was not a competitive process.

TC: What convinced Larry to write you that first check?

RC: We’d reached out to Volition six to nine months earlier and spoke to an associate who took down our information, and they followed up with us in late 2012. We’d given them our projections and we were crushing our numbers. Larry was going to Disneyland anyway with his family, so he decided to make a pit stop to meet with us. I remember he was like, ‘Who is going to take this company to $100 million in sales?’ and I was like, ‘Me! Who do you think?’

I looked very young at the time so I think I was easy to underestimate. I’ve been slightly aged now from Chewy. But he gave us that needed credibility. Then Greenspring Associates — they’re investors in Volition — came in to lead our Series B.

TC: Did you want to take the company public, or were you hugely relieved when PetSmart came knocking?

RC: We were building a big company that inevitably was going to go public. Especially in those later years, we’d become ‘public-company ready.’ We built up our finance and accounting team; we had audited financials. We’d raised a lot of capital — $350 million — but we had a lot of discipline. We also had a lot of revenue. We went from $200 million in sales in 2014 to $3.5 billion in sales by 2018. We burned through $130 million, but that cash burn was going to new customer acquisition and future fulfillment centers.

TC: So when you got that call from PetSmart . . .

RC: It was very fast. From the time I had a conversation with Raymond [Svider, the executive chairman of PetSmart] to the time he gave us a term sheet — and I was looking for an all-cash deal — the entire thing happened in 30 days, on our terms. We weren’t going to go and open up the kimono unless we got comfortable, and we were comfortable with the entire transaction.

TC: You stayed on for bit. Were you locked up?

RC: I wasn’t locked up at all. I could have left the day after the deal. I stayed but I felt like the teams were built and the systems and strategy were in place, and it felt like a fine-oiled machine. The business was at a significant scale. I just felt like my job was done. I’d been at it for more than seven years, going 24/7. I gave my life to this thing. But I have a two-year-old today, and just being with my family and being able to return to civilian life was [irresistible after a point].

TC: I’m a Chewy customer but I’m not even sure why, except that it’s easy for me to re-order. Why do you think I’m a Chewy customer?

RC: Because Chewy is the best in the business. It has the best selection, competitive pricing, fast shipping, excellent customer service and we know the product better than our competitors. If you need a weight loss product for your dog, we’ll tell you which to buy. All Chewy does is sell pet products, and that’s a big differentiator.

E-commerce can feel like a series of faceless transactions; we wanted to recreate that feeling I used to enjoy at the pet store, shopping with a pet parent I trusted. And we did that at scale, which is hard, but we stayed focused.

TC: How are you feeling about the IPO?

RC: It feels like my baby is graduating from the college that I never went to.

TC: There are concerns over the fact that Chewy remains unprofitable. Do you worry that, as a publicly traded company, Chewy might have to change — that it may need to charge for shipping, for example?

RC: It’s not profitable because it’s continuing to execute on scale and market leadership. If you reduce your marketing and decide you don’t want to grow as much, the company could have been profitable years ago. The underlying company is profitable.

TC: What about the fact that Amazon and Walmart are expanding their own pet product offerings?

RC: Amazon made us fight really hard. Obviously, they’re a fierce competitor. But I don’t think it was the category that made us successful. I think it was delighting our customers. You focus on that and you’re going to do just fine.

TC: You’re a young guy. Are you retiring?

RC: Retirement is overrated.

I’m lucky. I’m talking to a lot of different entrepreneurs and business and looking at corporate board opportunities. I’m going through that exploratory process.

TC: Would you partner again with Michael on a different e-commerce business or maybe a venture outfit?

RC: We’re really close. It needs to be the right opportunity obviously, and we need to be picky. But I have no plans to sit in retirement, that’s for sure. I’m 33 and I’m competitive and I like consumer businesses and I like to win.