We’ve captured much of Niantic’s ongoing story in the first three parts of our EC-1, from its beginnings as an “entrepreneurial lab” within Google, to its spin-out as an independent company and the launch of Pokémon GO, to its ongoing focus on becoming a platform for others to build augmented reality products upon.

It’s not an origin story that serves as an easily replicable blueprint — but if we zoom out a bit, what’s to be learned?

A few key themes stuck with me as I researched Niantic’s story so far. Some of them – like the challenges involved with moving millions of users around the real world – are unique to this new augmented reality that Niantic is helping to create. Others – like that scaling is damned hard – are well-understood startup norms, but interesting to see from the perspective of an experienced team dealing with a product launch that went from zero to 100 real quick.

The reading time for this article is 21 minutes (5,125 words).

Build on top of what works best

Everything Niantic has built so far is an evolution of what the team had built before it. Each major step on Niantic’s path has a clear footprint that precedes it; a chunk of DNA that proved advantageous, and is carried along into the next thing.

Looking back, it’s a cycle we can see play out on repeat: build a thing, identify what works about it, trim the extra bits, then build a new thing from that foundation.

Kyle Nakatsuji: The fortunate thing for us is that car insurance is a $230 billion per year market. The fact that one person who didn’t know us wanted to buy was an indication that lots of...

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Ticketing startup SeatGeek has a new CTO.

Brian Murphy previously held the same position at Tumblr (which, like TechCrunch, is owned by Verizon Media) and has also served as vice president of engineering at The New York Times and senior director of technology at Condé Nast.

“Brian is an incredible leader and team-builder who has overseen engineering teams for some remarkable companies,” said SeatGeek co-founder and CEO Jack Groetzinger in a statement. “He is a perfect fit for this role at SeatGeek and embodies the values we hold – he loves building great products, is humble yet aggressive in how he approaches opportunities, and is focused on creating experiences live event fans will love.”

Murphy told me his career started in consulting, but he’s been attracted to technology roles in media companies because he was “drawn to all the smart creative folks who want to use their technology in that medium.”

As for SeatGeek, Murphy described it as a “very consumer-oriented, very mobile-focused” company that’s now moving into the enterprise business by working with teams and venues to sell tickets. He also said he’ll be working on international expansion and helping SeatGeek build a broader live event experience.

“You’ve sort of started to see it with partnerships with Lyft and Snapchat and Spotify,” he said.”There’s definitely an opportunity how we bring our Starbucks-esque experience to the stadium.”

Murphy added that he’ll be “very, very busy with recruiting.”

Meanwhile, SeatGeek’s outgoing CTO Eric Waller isn’t leaving the company — instead, he’s becoming chief product officer.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about some examples of what you have invested in. In particular, talk about when you encountered the company. At what stage did you invest? What did they have that...

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Causes grew to a jaw-dropping 200 million users as one of the first 10 Facebook platform apps. Started by Facebook co-founder Sean Parker, it was meant to turn a generation into activists and philanthropists. Causes acquired Votizen to augment shallow clicktivism with a way to remind friends to vote. But after Facebook went mobile and the web platform waned, Parker arranged Causes’ sale to his newer civic tech effort Brigade, for which he’d led a $9.3 million Series A and later fed more money. Brigade’s ballot guide was used by 250,000 people in the 2016 election, leading to 5 million Get Out The Vote messages sent, but the startup’s apps for connecting with campaigns or debating political issues never went viral like Causes.

Now both Causes’ and Brigade’s stories are coming to an end. In February, we caught wind of Brigade selling off its high-grade engineering team to Pinterest in an acqui-hire while it sought a home for its IP. Today, Brigade announces its technology and data have been acquired by politician-tracking service Countable. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it’s unlikely that Brigade’s Series A investors earned a return.

“While we didn’t reach the ultimate mountaintop, I think we moved the entire civic tech space forward,” Brigade CEO Matt Mahan tells me. “Countable offers a unique opportunity to bring greater scale to some of our best ideas, and our previous work will in turn accelerate their already impressive progress.”

Countable lets people view summaries of upcoming legislation, contact their representatives about their opinion and track the officials’ votes. “Brigade was founded with the non-partisan mission to reinvent how Americans participate in politics. When they decided to bring their journey to a close, Matt and Brigade’s leadership team sought a mission-aligned company to acquire their technology, and a responsible place to point any members of their community who were eager to remain civically active and engaged,” says Countable CEO Bart Myers, whose tech has powered 35 million civic actions. “They approached Countable — an obvious fit for our commitment to lowering barriers to civic entry and empowering meaningful action, and we’re excited to provide a home for their technology moving forward.”

Mahan admits that a potentially fatal wrong turn for Brigade was pivoting its product to “debates” in 2016. “We quickly learned that this level of openness resulted in less substantive discussion, more personal attacks and fewer participants willing to add their voices: the opposite of our goals. By removing too many barriers, debates empowered the loudest and most aggressive voices in the room,” he tells me. The startup course-corrected to focus on making real political impact with petitions and tools for contacting representatives.

By 2018, Mahan realized that “after two election cycles Brigade had not achieved the user scale we know is required to fundamentally transform our politics . . . For a company set up to be a civic moonshot, this was simply not good enough.” Parker’s team did not provide TechCrunch a statement or commentary on Brigade’s decline. The startup’s San Francisco-based engineering team was too pricey for civic tech companies to afford, but those that could pay the steep price didn’t need Brigade’s IP. So after approaching a half-dozen potential acquirers, Mahan split the company, selling the team to Pinterest and the tech to Countable. The cash and stock deal will make Brigade investors shareholders in Countable, and Mahan is taking an advisory role.

To further their contribution to the democracy innovation community, Countable has agreed to open-source Brigade’s voter matching software. This allows apps to tie a user to their official voting record to offer personalized features, like reminders of upcoming elections, petitions for local issues and ways to contact their elected officials. Seth Flaxman, the CEO of civic tech software developer Democracy Works, which built TurboVote, says, “This is extremely difficult technology to build and can help TurboVote determine which of our 6 million users needs more help registering to vote. They are passing the baton, making it possible for nonprofits like ours to build off their progress.”

But there was one more loose end to tie up. Causes sucked in a ton of Facebook user data in the early days of the platform before restrictions were put in place (too late to stop Cambridge Analytica). So Mahan tells me, “Brigade proactively reached out to Facebook and worked with them and a third-party consultant to conduct a comprehensive review to identify and delete user data that was not essential for providing the existing app experience. In all, we deleted billions of rows of data that ethically we felt should not be transferred.”

As one of the most well-funded civic tech startups, Brigade’s breakup could cast a shadow on the space that includes MoveOn and Change.org. Consumer-focused apps for improving democracy are tough to monetize. It may fall to more sustainable democracy-focused startups like grassroots mass-texting app Hustle or nonprofits like Avaaz to arm the public with the equipment and knowledge necessary to participate in the political process. Given the deep polarization and animosity between nations’ political parties around the world, we need all the tools to amplify truth and civility we can get.

Good news for European startups with a health or wellness bent. Joyance Partners, a $20 million U.S. VC firm that invests in early-stage startups in the health and “better living” space, is launching into the European market with a dedicated European partner.

The move could be seen as taking advantage of leaps in the capability of European startups, especially in the health and AI space.

To lead its European efforts, the fund has appointed Paolo Pio as managing director of Joyance Partners Europe. Paolo was most recently head of product and business development at Cisco for Europe, and then Asia/Pacific. He has also been an active angel investor.

“The European startup scene is growing rapidly, and it needs funds like Joyance to provide the kind of support and capital necessary at the very early stages,” said Pio.

“We’re extremely pleased with the companies we’ve seen in the US and are excited to expand our search for companies that contribute to individual health and happiness to Europe,” said Mike Edelhart, managing partner of Joyance Partners, in a statement.

Joyance launched in 2017 and has since made more than 50 investments related to the emerging science of health and happiness. These include personal thermostat Embr Labs; on-body fluidics lab Epicore Biosystems; microbiome leader DermBiont; medical AI innovators Gyant and Lark Health; NeoSensory, which lets one human sense stand in for another; female pleasure products maker Unbound; and Wynd Technologies, which delivers pure air to individuals or groups.

Another investment, NeoSensory, raised $14.2 million, and focuses on sending a variety of data streams to the brain via the sense of touch.

Joyance is also adding two other new team members to bolster its activity. Holly Jacobus (Investment Partner, NY) and Jun Deng, PhD (Investment Partner, Silicon Valley).

The firm has a particular description for these types of investments. They call them “delightful moments — the small quanta of time that brings greater joy, confidence, calm, control, and absence of anxiety or pain.”

So far so hippie, but Joyance says that research increasingly notes a connection between happiness and health, such as the long-noted effects of job stress on health, and the coloration between positive emotions and longer and healthier life.

In a 2010 study released in the European Heart Journal, for each one-point increase in positive emotions a patient had expressed, their heart disease risk was 22 percent lower.

So get being happy, people.

(Photo by Form on Unsplash)

Last week, cloud-based enterprise services provider ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW), announced its first quarter results that outpaced market expectations and sent the stock soaring. ServiceNow’s stock has...

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India’s trucking system has a big inefficiency problem that continues to drag the economy. BlackBuck, one of the handful of logistics startups that is trying to overhaul this system, just raised $150 million in a Series D round to further pursue its mission.

The new round was led by Goldman Sachs Investment Partners and Accel at a valuation just shy of $1 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter. Wellington, Sequoia Capital, B Capital, Light Street and existing investors Sands Capital and World Bank’s investment arm International Finance Corporation also participated in the round.

The four-year-old B2B startup, which connects businesses with truck owners and freight operators, has raised about $230 million in equity financing and another $100 million in debt financing to date, CEO Rajesh Yabaji told TechCrunch in an interview.

Yabaji said the startup will use the fresh capital to expand and improve its technology stack that enables truck drivers to find more work, and grow its fleet of driver partners. As of today, BlackBuck has 300,000 trucks on its platform and about 10,000 clients, including big names such as soft drinks manufacturer Coca-Cola, consumer goods giant Unilever and automotive conglomerate Tata .

BlackBuck has developed a simplified app for truck drivers in India, who are typically not very literate, to help them accept work and easily navigate to their destination using Google Maps. On the client side, businesses can fire up a similar app to place orders. Recently it also tied up with insurance company Acko to cover all the trucks on its network.

As things work at the moment, truck drivers in India often struggle to find any work on their way back from a drop. Yabaji says BlackBuck enables them to find 25% to 30% more work opportunities. The startup takes between 15% to 20% of that, which is how it makes money.

India’s logistics market, valued at $160 billion, has attracted major VC funds in recent years. Delhivery, a supply chain startup, has raised north of $670 million from SoftBank and Tiger Global among others. Rivigo, a startup that rotates drivers to improve efficiency, has raised north of $215 million from SAIF Partners and Warburg Pincus.

It’s a capital-heavy business. BlackBuck, which employs about 2,000 people, generated $135.5 million in revenue at a loss of $17 million in fiscal year 2018, according to regulatory filings. Yabaji says the startup aims to aggressively grow its business, so profitability is not something it is hoping to go after in the immediate future.

“Given the market we are in today, in terms of private capital being available, we do not have to do IPO for a really long time. It is all about optimizing for the objective,” he said.

BlackBuck said it will also give about 200 of its employees an option to liquidate up to 25% of their vested shareholding in the company at the current price.

The changes continue to roll at Honestbee . Fresh from pausing operations in four countries and announcing plans to lay off 10% of its staff, the Singapore-based online grocery startup has let CEO Joel Sng go, two sources with knowledge of his exit told TechCrunch.

Sng, who co-founded Honestbee back in 2015 and previously served as an advisor with its investor Formation 8, cleared his desk and vacated his office yesterday, according to sources.

Honestbee declined to comment.

Update: In an announcement shared with media today — May 2, one day after this story was published — Honestbee confirmed Sng has left. It claimed that he has resigned. In a company-wide email that was sent last night (and shared with TechCrunch), Sng denied his impending departure.

“Guys, just want to let everyone know of the fake news article on tech crunch,” [sic] he wrote. “I am not an abandon ship person and I will never leave the company to be rudderless.”

Brian Koo, founder of Honestbee investor Formation Group, has stepped in as interim CEO following Sng’s exit, according to Honestbee’s statement.

Our original report continues below

Isaac Tay, another co-founder, left the company last year while the last remaining co-founder is Jonathan Low, who leads Honestbee’s engineering team.

Sng’s apparent exit comes after we reported that Honestbee had told staff that it is in the process of securing funding that it claims will provide an additional year of runway for the business. Sources who spoke to TechCrunch said it has not been announced how much that funding is, or which investor is providing it.

Honestbee had held acquisition talks with Grab, Go-Jek and others in recent weeks.

Filings show that Honestbee has raised at least $46 million since that Series A. Its high burn rate suggests it may have raised even more, but nothing has been announced or filed, while former staff have told TechCrunch that only Sng and Koh have access to financial details.

The company is going through some turbulent times. We reported last week that a cash crash — not helped by a burn rate of $6.5 million per month — had left suppliers unpaid, payroll for April uncertain and morale low among Honestbee’s estimated 1,000 staff.

The company announced a series of cost-cutting measures that will see it temporarily cease business in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines while it conducts a review. It has also stopped offering food delivery, an additional service it launched in recent years, in Thailand and Hong Kong.

Samsung Ventures, the VC arm of the Korean electronics giant, has made its first investment in Southeast Asia after it backed HR startup Swingvy.

Singapore-based Swingvy’s service provides HR services, payroll and insurance for SMEs on a freemium basis. The company announced this week that it raised $7 million that was led by the Samsung arm, with participation from Aviva Ventures — from insurance firm Aviva — and Bass Investment. Existing investors Walden International and Big Basin Capital, which financed a previous $1.6 million round, also took part.

Founded in 2016, Swingvy claims to work with more than 5,100 companies across Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan. Those customers, some of which do not pay, have a cumulative user base of more than 100,000 employees.

“Our target customer is SMEs not enterprise,” Jin Choeh, who is CEO and one of three Swingvy co-founders, told TechCrunch in an interview. “There are some local players, some legacy players and some startup competitors, but generally we saw that there’s no market leader for HR tech in Southeast Asia.”

The service itself covers areas such as an employee directory, processes for leave, performance management, company calendar, HR reporting, payroll and benefits. On the latter, Swingvy offers health insurance through partnerships with third-parties — Choeh said it is a licensed insurance agent. He said that new features coming soon include claims (for expenses and payments), while further down the line will be monthly insurance and corporate cards.

It is quite common for HR and other “base-level” SME services to develop marketplaces that match their customers with third-party providers — we’ve seen that in Japan among very mature players, for example — but Swingvy isn’t going down that route. Choeh explained that it will consider offering its own services in areas where it believes it can give value to customers and control the quality and experience directly.

More broadly, the startup is aiming to triple its customer base to 15,000 this year thanks to this new injection of capital.

The initial focus is on hiring — Swingvy plans to grow its headcount of 23 to more than 60 this year — and more “aggressive” sales growth. That’ll mean bringing in a dedicated sales team, increasing online advertising spend to reach new customers and being more visible around event marketing.

“Sales and marketing has been less than 10% of our spend,” said Choeh. “We’ve proved our model is quite cost efficient and we believe it is time to raise sales and marketing efforts.”

There’s no immediate plan to expand to new markets, but the Swingvy CEO said his company is eyeing potential expansions in 2020. Potential countries include Thailand, Vietnam and Japan, he said. Indonesia — Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the world’s fourth most populous country — is also under review, but Choeh said his team is aware that it is hyper-competitive while the market for paid SME products is particularly challenging.

What of the relationship with Samsung? For now, the relationship is financial rather than strategic, but Choeh admitted there could be opportunities to work closely together in the future.

Rappi represents a new era for Latin American technology startups.

Based in Bogotá, Colombia, the on-demand delivery startup has taken the region by storm, attracting a record amount of venture capital funding in mere months. Today marks the beginning of a new round of explosive growth as SoftBank, the Japanese telecom giant and prolific Silicon Valley tech investor, has confirmed a $1 billion investment in the business.

The king-sized financing comes two months after SoftBank announced its Innovation Fund, a new pool of capital committed to spending billions on the growing tech ecosystem in Central and South America.

VC funding in Latin America catapulted to new heights in 2018. Startups located across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and more have secured nearly $2.5 billion since the beginning of 2018, according to PitchBook, up from less than $1 billion invested in 2017.

SoftBank plans to transfer the Rappi investment to the Innovation Fund “upon the fund’s establishment,” according to a press release. For now, the SoftBank Group and affiliated Vision Fund will each invest $500 million in the company. Jeffrey Housenbold, a managing director at SoftBank responsible for investments in Brandless, Opendoor and DoorDash, will join Rappi’s board of directors.

“SoftBank’s vision of accelerating the technology revolution deeply resonated with our mission of improving how people live through digital payments and a super-app for everything consumers need,” Rappi co-founder Sebastian Mejia said in a statement. “We will continue to focus on building innovations for couriers, restaurants, retailers and start-ups that translate into new sources of growth.”

The latest round, the largest ever for a Latin American tech startup, brings Rappi’s total raised to date to a whopping $1.2 billion. The company was valued at more than $1 billion last year with a $200 million financing.

Rappi is among few venture-backed “unicorns” based in Latin America. São Paulo-based Nubank, a fast-growing fintech startup, garnered a $4 billion valuation last year with a $180 million investment.

Rappi didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Spot.IM announced today that it has raised $25 million in Series D funding.

We’ve written about the company’s commenting platform before, but CEO Nadav Shoval said it’s now building a broader “community platform.”

That means going beyond commenting and moderation to also include community pages and other ways to highlight and monetize user-generated content. The company’s customers include Hearst, Refinery29, Fox News and our corporate siblings at Engadget and AOL.com.

Shoval argued that these tools are particularly important as digital media business models are struggling — regardless of whether those publishers are focused on advertising, subscriptions or other models, the key is to focus on loyal readers and  viewers rather than “random users that come in and disappear.”

Spot.IM can make a big difference in this area by keeping users engaged, and by providing data to help publishers understand their behavior and value. In fact, Shoval said that for some publishers, a Spot.IM user will provide five times as much lifetime revenue as a non-Spot.IM user.

“We do believe it’s about better understanding: Who are our users, what do they want and how can we provide them with more value?” he added.

The company has now raised a total of $63 million, according to Crunchbase. The new funding was led by previous investor Insight Venture Partners with participation from Norma Investments (representing businessman Roman Abramovich), AltaIR Capital, Cerca and WGI Group (founded by Noah Goodhart, Jonah Goodhart and Mike Walrath).

Spot.IM is also announcing that it has appointed tech and media executive Itzik Ben-Bassat as president and as a member of its board of directors.

Jude Gomila, who previously sold his mobile advertising company Heyzap to RNTS Media, is taking on a new challenge — building a “knowledge base” that can fill in Wikipedia’s blind spots, particularly when it comes to emerging technologies and startups.

While Gomila is officially launching Golden today, it’s already full of content about things like the latest batch of Y Combinator startups and morphogenetic engineering. And it’s already raised $5 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Gigafund, Founders Fund, SV Angel, Liquid 2 Ventures/Joe Montana, plus a long list of individual angel investors including Gomila’s Heyzap co-founder, Immad Akhund.

To state the obvious: Wikipedia is an incredibly useful website, but Gomila pointed out that notable companies and technologies like SV Angel, Benchling, Lisk and Urbit don’t currently have entries. Part of the problem is what he called Wikipedia’s “arbitrary notability threshold,” where pages are deleted for not being notable enough. (This is also what happened years ago to the Wikipedia page about yours truly — which I swear I didn’t write myself.)

Perhaps that threshold made sense when Wikipedia was just getting started and the infrastructure costs were higher, but Gomila said it doesn’t make sense now. In determining what should be included in Golden, he said the “more fundamental” question is about existence: “Does this company exist? Does Anthony Ha exist?” If so, there’s a good chance that it should have a page on Golden, at least eventually.

In his blog post outlining his vision for the site, Gomila wrote:

We live in an age of extreme niches, an age when validation and completeness is more important than notability. Our encyclopedia on Golden doesn’t have limited shelf space — we eventually want to map everything that exists. Special relativity was not notable to the general public the moment Einstein released his seminal paper, but certainly was later on — could this have been the kind of topic to be removed from the world’s canon if it was discovered today?

Gomila said he’s also bringing some new technologies and fresh approaches to the problem. Some of this is pretty straightforward, like allowing users to embed videos, academic papers and other multimedia content onto Golden pages.

At the same time, he’s hoping to make it much easier to write and edit Golden pages. You do so in a WYSIWYG editor that doesn’t require you to know any HTML, and the site will help you with automated suggestions, for example pulling out author and title information when you’re adding a link to another site.

Gomila said that this will allow users to work much more quickly, so that “one hour spent on Golden is effectively 100 hours on other platforms.”

There’s also an emphasis on transparency, which includes features like “high resolution citations” (citations that make it extra clear which statement you’re trying to provide evidence for) and the fact that Golden account names are tied to your real identity — in other words, you’re supposed to edit pages under your own name. Gomila said the site backs this up with bot detection and “various protection mechanisms” designed to ensure that users aren’t pretending to be someone they’re not.

“I’m sure there will always be trolls up to their usual tricks, but they will be on the losing side,” he told me.

If you think someone has added incorrect or misleading information to a page, you can flag it as an issue. Gomila suggested AI could also play a more editorial role by pointing out when someone is using language that’s biased or seems too close to marketing-speak.

“AI can have bias and humans can have bias,” he acknowledged, but he’s hoping that both elements working together can help Golden get closer to the truth. He added that “rather than us editorially changing things, our team will act like normal users” who can edit and flag issues.

Golden is available to users for free, without advertising. Gomila said his initial plan for making money is charging investment funds and large companies for a more sophisticated query tool.

Facebook’s social graph is aging, full of long-lost acquaintances and hometown friends you don’t care much about seeing in the News Feed any more. But Facebook is now testing a pivot away from its core identity of connecting you with existing friends so it can revitalize the social graph and keep people coming back. Facebook’s “Meet New Friends” lets you browse people from shared communities such as your school, workplace or city who’ve also opted in to the feature. Announced today at Facebook’s F8 conference, Meet New Friends now in testing in a few markets before it’s rolled out more widely soon.

Meet New Friends could give people fresh pals to follow in their News Feed, or help recently registered users grow their network until they have access to enough content to keep them busy. And eventually, Facebook could layer on monetization features similar to dating apps where users pay to be shown more prominently to potential connections.

Fidji Simo, the head of Facebook’s main app, tells me Meet New Friends was based on emerging behaviors the company had spotted. “Developing relationships with people they didn’t already know is very different from the core use case of Facebook,” but she notes, “We’ve already seen that naturally happen in Groups, and Meet New Friends will make that a bit easier.”

When users open Meet New Friends, they pick the communities through which they’re open to meeting new friends. For now they choose between schools, employers and locations, but Facebook will eventually add Groups too. In that sense it works a bit like Facebook Dating, which rolls out to 14 new countries today and opens to dating friends with its new Secret Crush feature.

Algorithms will sort potential connections by who is most relevant, such as those with mutual friends or shared interests, but you won’t get “matched” where both users have to state their interest in the other. Instead, users can just browse profiles, and then either send people a friend request (which might feel a bit out of the blue), or send them a single text-only message to a recipient’s dedicated Meet New Friends chat inbox. They can’t message that same person again until they respond (to prevent spamming), and the text-only limitation ensures no unsavory photos get blasted around. If they do reply, the thread moves to Facebook Messenger.

Meet New Friends will pit Facebook against a range of other apps, from local-focused Meetup and Nextdoor to verticalized apps like Hey Vina for women only to dating-affiliated apps like Bumble BFF. But Facebook benefits from its ubiquity, so users can try Meet New Friends without feeling embarrassed by downloading an app just to make them less lonely.

For years, the mildly creepy People You May Know feature has been a cornerstone of Facebook’s growth strategy. But it’s still just about recreating your offline social graph online. As Facebook strives to become more meaningful to people’s lives, fostering new friendships could give people a fuzzy feeling about the giant corporation.

Click below to check out all of TechCrunch’s Facebook conference coverage from today: