Fundraising has always been something of a black box. High-flying companies make it seem like a breeze, but most entrepreneurs lose sleep over it. My first startup was called Pursuit.com and although we successfully raised a seed round, it was incredibly tough (we were eventually aqui-hired by Facebook). DocSend is my second startup, and it has taught me a lot about the process — not only because of our own fundraising, but because the product itself reveals big pitching trends in a unique way.

Since 2014, over 100,000 users have shared over 2.2 million links through our document tracking and sharing platform, and these documents have received over 220 million views. Thousands of founders share their funding decks with prospective investors every day, in addition to our product’s other uses for sales, business development and customer success. To get insights about all this activity, we have a long-running partnership with Harvard Business School, where we’ve been analyzing the anonymized fundraising data of startups attempting to raise a Seed or an A round.

We shared our early learnings in a TechCrunch article in 2015, Lessons from a study of perfect pitch decks. In this post, I’ll update our findings based on the last four years of data (and a lot of user growth on our side).

So what differentiates a winning seed round pitch deck from those that fail to raise capital? While both successful and failed pitch decks are about the same length, an average of 18 pages, how the content is structured is vastly different. And while investors spend the same amount of time on both, 3.7 minutes on average, where they spend time tells us a lot about what successful pitches and failed pitches have in common. Below, I detail three mistakes that you want to avoid.

If you want to check out more details on what you should do in your deck, read my follow-up article “Data tells us that investors love a good story“ over on Extra Crunch.

Mistake 1: Don’t start with your product

It’s very tempting, especially for technical founders, to start pitch decks with how incredible their product is, how much time they’ve spent building it, their unique tech stack, and how convinced they are that they have just the right MVP for launch. But guess what?

All failed pitch decks start with the product. Investors spend 4x more time on product slides in failed pitch decks than they do in successful pitch decks.

You might think that’s a good thing. More time on my product slides, right? No. Data tells us that they are probably digging into the details trying to map your product‘s value to the current market needs and they are not coming away with a clear connection between the two.

Your target investors are also not your target customer. Showing screenshots and product details are just confusing for them. What are they looking at? Why does this matter? Most products are capable of being built; the question they are trying to answer is why is this product going to create a big business?

Mistake 2: Not starting with the “Why?”

By now Simon Sinek has beaten this one into our collective brains with his start with the why Ted Talk and yet what we see in our data is that in failed decks, the “why now” and “why you” question has been left to the end. Successful pitches start with their company purpose, followed by why this team, and why the timing is right for this particular product.

All successful pitch decks start with the company’s purpose, their raison d’être.

In successful decks, investors spend 27 seconds on an average on “why now” and “why you” slides but in failed decks, they spend 62 seconds on these slides. We read this as investors are spending more time researching your team and your capabilities than they do with successful pitch decks. More time spent on these pages means that investors are not as convinced about this venture as the entrepreneur would like them to be. Entrepreneurs should focus on making their “why” slides part of a seamless narrative that leaves the investors wondering why this isn’t already a huge business.

Mistake 3: Not telling a story

Everyone loves a good story and investors are no exception to this rule. All successful pitch decks tell a compelling story and follow a similar narrative thread. They start with the company purpose, the big problem they are trying to solve, why now is the right time, and why they are the right team to solve it. Failed pitch decks start with the product, followed by business model, and competitive landscape. Successful decks cover these too but they invariably follow a narrative that makes intuitive sense while in failed decks there is no compelling narrative.

In failed decks, investors spend more time on product, team, and financials, 6 minutes on average, vs. 2 minutes in successful decks.

Successful decks also get more repeat visits, they are visited 2.3 times more than failed decks and are forwarded along more often than failed pitch decks.

Your purpose is more important than your product

In the early days, entrepreneurs spend most of their time conceiving and building their minimum viable product (MVP). Naturally, they feel compelled to pitch this to investors. Although unintuitive, data suggests that you should restrain yourself from talking about your product before you have painted a narrative about the business opportunity: why now and why you. Once investors are convinced of those key points, by all means, go through all the product details and roadmaps. Just don’t lead with your product.

This is the first of a series of articles about fundraising. My followup article now available on Extra Crunch reveals what our data shows you should do with your deck. In future installments, I’ll be sharing more about the difference between Seed, Series A, and Series B rounds as well as how fundraising challenges change as your company grows. For the next post, I’ll be writing about why some pitch decks raise way more money than others. In the meantime, have questions about the best way to raise money? Check out our blog or reach out to us on Twitter at: @rheddleston or @docsend.

What is Niantic? If they recognize the name, most people would rightly tell you it’s a company that makes mobile games, like Pokémon GO, or Ingress, or Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.

But no one at Niantic really seems to box it up as a mobile gaming company. Making these games is a big part of what the company does, yes, but the games are part of a bigger picture: they are a springboard, a place to figure out the constraints of what they can do with augmented reality today, and to figure out how to build the tech that moves it forward. Niantic wants to wrap their learnings back into a platform upon which others can build their own AR products, be it games or something else. And they want to be ready for whatever comes after smartphones.

Niantic is a bet on augmented reality becoming more and more a part of our lives; when that happens, they want to be the company that powers it.

This is Part 3 of our EC-1 series on Niantic, looking at its past, present, and potential future. You can find Part 1 here and Part 2 here. The reading time for this article is 24 minutes (6,050 words)

The platform play

After the absurd launch of Pokémon GO, everyone wanted a piece of the AR pie. Niantic got more pitches than they could take on, I’m told, as rights holders big and small reached out to see if the company might build something with their IP or franchise.

But Niantic couldn’t build it all. From art, to audio, to even just thinking up new gameplay mechanics, each game or project they took on would require a mountain of resources. What if they focused on letting these other companies build these sorts of things themselves?

That’s the idea behind Niantic’s Real World Platform. This platform is a key part of Niantic’s game plan moving forward, with the company having as many people working on the platform as it has on its marquee money maker, Pokémon GO.

There are tons of pieces that go into making things like GO or Ingress, and Niantic has spent the better part of the last decade figuring out how to make them all fit together. They’ve built the core engine that powers the games and, after a bumpy start with Pokémon GO’s launch, figured out how to scale it to hundreds of millions of users around the world. They’ve put considerable work into figuring out how to detect cheaters and spoofers and give them the boot. They’ve built a social layer, with systems like friendships and trade. They’ve already amassed that real-world location data that proved so challenging back when it was building Field Trip, with all of those real-world points of interest that now serve as portals and Pokéstops.

Niantic could help other companies with real-world events, too. That might seem funny after the mess that was the first Pokémon GO Fest (as detailed in Part II). But Niantic turned around, went back to the same city the next year, and pulled it off. That experience — that battle-testing — is valuable. Meanwhile, the company has pulled off countless huge Ingress events, and a number of Pokémon GO side events called “Safari Zones.” CTO Phil Keslin confirmed to me that event management is planned as part of the platform offering.

As Niantic builds new tech — like, say, more advanced AR or faster ways to sync AR experiences between devices — it’ll all get rolled into the platform. With each problem they solve, the platform offering would grow.

But first they need to prove that there’s a platform to stand on.

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite

Niantic’s platform, as it exists today, is the result of years of building their own games. It’s the collection of tools they’ve built and rebuilt along the way, and that already powers Ingress Prime and Pokémon GO. But to prove itself as a platform company, Niantic needs to show that they can do it again. That they can take these engines, these tools, and, working with another team, use them for something new.

Quiz Khalifa aka Host Malone aka Trap Trebek aka HQ Trivia’s Scott Rogowsky has been pushed out of the live mobile gaming startup. The two split due to disagreements about Rogowsky attempting to take a second full-time job hosting sports streaming service DAZN’s baseball show ChangeUp while moving to only hosting HQ on weekends, TMZ first reported. HQ wanted someone committed to their show.

Now HQ co-founder and CEO Rus Yusupov confirms to TechCrunch that Rogowsky will no longer host HQ Trivia. He tells me that the company ran a SurveyMonkey survey of its top players and they voted that former guest host Matt Richards rated higher than Rogowsky. Yusupov says HQ is excited to have Richards as its new prime time host. It’s also putting out offers to more celebrity guests to host for a few shows, a few weeks or even a whole season of one of its time slots.

The departure could still shake HQ’s brand since Rogowsky had become the de facto face of the company. But he was also prone to talking a lot on the air and promoting himself, sometimes in ways that felt distracting from the game. Rogowsky has also been using HQ’s brand to further his stand-up comedy career, splashing its logo on advertising for his shows like this one below at a casino where “The centerpiece is a live trivia competition,” he told WPTV5.

[Update: Rogowsky has since commented on his departure via tweetstorm. He thanked the team and viewers for their support but didn’t mention the startup’s founders, confirmed his ChangeUp gig led to leaving HQ, and threw a dig at the company noting “I wasn’t given the courtesy of a farewell show.”]

Rogowsky also issued TechCrunch this statement:

“Nothing in my decade-plus entertainment career has meant more to me personally and professionally than my involvement with HQ. I am tremendously grateful to the talented team of engineers, writers, animators and producers at Intermedia Labs who helped me grow the show into the international phenomenon it became, and above all, I will forever be thankful for the millions of HQties around the world who will always hold a special place in my heart. While the decision to leave HQ was a difficult one, I am delighted to begin this next chapter in my career with the amazing people at MLB and DAZN. If you miss me on HQ, you can now get three hours of me every weeknight watching ChangeUp on DAZN.”

TechCrunch had predicted that Rogowsky might depart if he wasn’t properly compensated with equity in HQ Trivia that would only vest and earn him money if he stuck around. The damage to HQ could worsen if he’s scooped up by Facebook, Snapchat or another tech company to build out their own live video gaming shows.

HQ Trivia provided this statement on Rogowsky’s exit:

We continue to build an incredible company at HQ Trivia, from drawing hundreds of thousands of players to the platform daily, to increasing the size of the prize, to attracting strong talent. We’ve come a long way since Scott Rogowsky’s first trivia game and we’re grateful for everything he’s done for the platform. This is a team that creates products for talent to really shine—we’re just getting started at HQ Trivia, and as he makes his next move, wanted to take a minute to thank him for being part of our journey.

Yusupov tells me he’s excited about exploring new hosts, noting that Richards is a person of color who brings more diversity to HQ’s lineup. Richards is a stand-up comic who has appeared on CBS’ 2 Broke Girls, Nickelodeon’s School of Rock and was a voice-over host for game show Trivial Takedown on FUSE. Yusupov says the team feels jazzed about the new creative opportunities beyond Rogowsky, though the CEO says he appreciates all that its former host contributed.

Richards will have the tall task of trying to revive HQ’s popularity. It climbed the app store charts to become the No. 3 top game and No. 6 overall app in January 2018, and peaked at 2.38 million concurrent players in March 2018. But it’s been on a steady decline since, falling to the No. 585 overall app in August, and it dropped out of the top 1,500 last month, according to App Annie. HQ Trivia was installed more than 160,000 times last month on iOS and Android, with approximately $200,000 in in-app purchase revenue, according to Sensor Tower. But that’s just 8 percent as many downloads as the 1.97 million new installs HQ got in March 2018.

Exhaustion with the game format, so many winners splitting jackpots to just a few dollars per victor and laggy streams have all driven away players. The introduction of a new Wheel of Fortune-style HQ Words game in August hasn’t stopped the decline. And the tragic death of HQ co-founder and former CEO Colin Kroll may have impeded efforts to turn things around. There’s a ton of pressure on the company after it raised $23 million, including a $15 million round at a $100 million valuation.

Even if HQ Trivia fades from the zeitgeist, it and Rogowsky will have inspired a new wave of innovation in what it means to play with our phones.

Juul Labs is today launching a pilot for its new Track & Trace program, which is meant to use data to identify exactly how Juul devices wind up in the hands of minors.

Juul vaporizers all have a serial number down at the bottom, by the Juul logo. However, it wasn’t until recently that Juul had the capability to track those serial numbers through every step of the process, from manufacture to distribution to retail to sale.

With Track & Trace, Juul is calling upon parents, teachers and law enforcement officials to come to the Juul Report web portal when they confiscate a device from a minor and input the serial number. Each time a device is input in the Track & Trace system, Juul will open an investigation to understand how that minor wound up with that device.

In some cases, it may be an issue with a certain retail store knowingly selling to minors. In others, it may be a case of social sourcing, where someone over 21 years of age buys several devices and pods to then sell to minors.

Juul will then take next steps in investigating, such as talking to a store manager about the issue. It may also enhance its secret shopper program around a certain store or distributor where it sees there may be a spike in sale/distribution, to youth to identify the source of the problem. To be clear, Track & Trace only tracks and traces the devices themselves, and does not use personal data about customers.

Juul isn’t yet widely publicizing Track & Trace (thus, the “Pilot” status), but it is focusing on Houston as a testing ground with banner ads targeted at older individuals (parents, teachers, etc.) pointing them to the portal. Of note: The ad campaign is geofenced to never be shown in or around a school, hopefully keeping the program a secret from young people illegally using Juul.

The company wants to learn more about how people use the portal and test the program in action before widening the campaign around Track & Trace. That said, the Report portal is not limited to Houston residents — anyone who confiscates a Juul can report it through the portal and trigger an investigation.

“It’s important to note that the pilot is an opportunity for us to learn how the technology is working and optimize the technology,” said Chief Administrative Officer Ashley Gould. “It’s not just at the retailer level. It’s a whole process through the supply chain to track that device and find out if everyone who is supposed to be scanning it is scanning it, and the software that we’ve created to track that serial number through the supply chain to the retail store is working. The only way we’re going to know that is when someone puts in the serial number and we see if we have all the data we need to track it.”

According to Juul, every device in production will be trackable in the next few weeks. In other words, Juul vapes that are years old are likely not fully traceable in the program, but those purchased more recently should work with the system.

Juul has been under scrutiny from the FDA and a collection of Democratic Senators due to the device’s rise in popularity among young people. Outgoing FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has called it “an epidemic” and enforced further restrictions on sales of e-cig products.

Juul has also made its own effort, removing non-tobacco and non-menthol flavored pods from all physical retail stores, enhancing their own purchasing system online to ensure online buyers are 21+ and not buying in bulk, going after counterfeits and copycats posing as Juul products and exiting its Facebook and Instagram accounts.

But Juul Labs also committed to build technology-based solutions to prevent youth use of the product. Co-founder and CPO James Monsees told TechCrunch at Disrupt SF that the company is working on Bluetooth products that would essentially make the Juul device as smart as an iPhone or Android device, which could certainly help lock out folks under 21.

However, the Track & Trace program is the first real technological step taken by the e-cig company. And it has been an expensive one. The company has spent more than $30 million to update its packaging, adjust printing standards, change manufacturing equipment and integrate the data and logistics software systems.

For now, Track & Trace is only applicable to Juul vaporizers, but it wouldn’t be shocking to learn that the company was working on a similar program for its Juul Pods.

Editor’s Note: This article mistakenly said that Republican senators were scrutinizing Juul. It has been edited for accuracy.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Kate and Alex were here yesterday to dig into the Uber IPO filing; for today’s episode, we put that aside and discussed everything else that happened this week. Lucky for us, for the second half of our Thursday podcast-a-thon, the excellent Phil Libin joined us. He was the perfect guest for an IPO-heavy week.

You may know Libin as a co-founder of Evernote, or part of General Catalyst, a venture shop. What’s he up to now? We took the time to let him explain it, so listen up and you’ll find out.

This week we talked about a few other IPO results, including what’s going on with Lyft’s stock price (it’s going down and Uber’s expected IPO price range isn’t helping) in the wake of the company’s own hugely successful IPO (in terms of capital raised). Lyft may be losing altitude due simply to hype wearing off, but at least now we understand how important its first earnings call will be.

We turned next to Pinterest, the buzzy visual search engine that’s now being called an “undercorn.” We didn’t spend too much time mocking the phrase, interestingly; instead, our guest explained his philosophical stance on IPOs, in general. He spoke for a while and Alex and Kate nodded their heads in agreement. They especially agreed with his claim that companies shouldn’t have to sacrifice culture for profits, amen!

Staying on the IPO theme, PagerDuty was next. Its IPO performance has been huge, and big, and impressive. And in a wave of appreciation toward everyone who has listened to the show for a long time, we did not spend 14 minutes arguing about IPO pricing. You’re welcome!

We ended with Kate doing a rapid-fire review of all the venture capital funds that announced closes this week, because there were a lot, including Slow Ventures, Defy.VC and Texas’s LiveOak Venture Partners .

If you’re already itching for more Equity, we have a feeling next week will be another heavy news week with Pinterest and Zoom’s IPO on the docket.

Dashlane, a popular password manager and all-round identity management solution, has raised another $30 million in funding, the company announced today. The funding — this time a round of debt financing from Hercules Capital — follows prior investment from FirstMark Capital, Rho Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, TransUnion and Silicon Valley Bank.

The company is also expanding its board with the addition of Seth Farbman, a former CMO for Spotify and Gap.

Farbman spent nearly four years at Spotify as its chief marketing officer, exiting that position in January 2019. During his time there, Spotify grew to more than 200 million monthly actives. He now joins Dashlane as the password management app has topped over 10 million users — a milestone it hit last June. The service is now available in 11 languages and used in 180 countries worldwide.

Dashlane has also been expanding its product to include new features like Dark Web monitoring, which alerts users if their information is being passed around by hackers on the far reaches of the internet; and has added a VPN and identify theft protection. The goal with these features is to make Dashlane more than just a password management app, and to better differentiate itself from rivals like 1Password or LogMeIn’s LastPass.

“I am excited to join the board of Dashlane, a company with the right vision for the internet at the right time,” said Seth Farbman, in a statement. “I see many of the same attributes in Dashlane, as I did in Spotify, when I first joined—a best-in-class product that its customers love, a diverse and capable team focused on growth and innovation and powerful macro trends that put the wind at the company’s back. Technology is meant to empower people and make their lives easier, and that is at the very core of what Dashlane does,” he said.

Password managers like Dashlane are today less of a “nice to have” option, and more of a “must” as data breaches and additional security measures — like complex passwords combined with 2FA — have become routine. It’s a lot for the average web user to keep up with, and native solutions like Apple’s Keychain aren’t often enough. That’s why it’s useful to have a program that helps to automate password changes, track compromised accounts, identify weak passwords and more.

People, broadly, are also more aware of their online privacy these days. That’s thanks, in part, to news coverage of Facebook’s privacy gaffes, security breaches and the changes to the way sites collect and use personal data, as required by Europe’s GDPR.

“When we look back 10 years from now, 2018 will be remembered as the year of GDPR, Facebook revelations, and the year that regulators, the press — and most importantly, public opinion — really started to look at the entire issue of digital privacy and identity differently,” said Emmanuel Schalit, CEO of Dashlane.

Dashlane doesn’t share all its metrics, but claims 90 percent revenue growth year-over-year.

To date, Dashlane has raised more than $100 million in venture funding. However, with 10 million+ users, it’s still behind some competitors. LastPass, for instance, announced 16.8 million users in 2018. 1Password’s website, meanwhile, claims “millions” of individual users and 40,000 businesses — a number that implies it reaches a large number of employees, thanks to its B2B deals. And of course it still has to convince people who use the built-in password features of today’s browsers that it’s worth having a more complete solution, rather than just a tool to remember passwords.

Sramana Mitra: Now let’s tie this into the investment strategies that you are following. What kind of cloud companies appeal to you? Of course, you want a venture scale category. That’s...

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Bird is gearing up to launch in more than 50 additional cities throughout Europe this spring.

Bird began its expansion into Europe less than one year ago. Today, Bird operates its scooters in Paris, Brussels, Vienna, Zurich and other European cities. This launch will increase its European fleet size more than ten-fold.

“World class brands and companies have the perfect formula of economics and the ability to grow and scale,” Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden said in a statement. “As we expand Bird’s global footprint, we will demonstrate unmatched innovation, commitment to riders, neighborhoods and cities and operational excellence while generating an explosive run rate. This formula will drive great impact and progress on our mission to make our cities and communities more livable.”

This comes about one month after Bird laid off between four to five percent of its workforce. The layoffs were part of Bird’s annual performance review process and only affected U.S.-based employees. Those laid off were eligible for severance, including health and medical benefits.

Bird has raised more than $400 million in funding to date and is reportedly in the midst of raising an additional $300 million.

As I started analyzing various paths to success via bootstrapping, one became absolutely obvious: holding onto a job and doing a startup part time. We gave this a name: Bootstrapping with a Paycheck,...

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Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia listed on the New York Stock Exchange today, with shares beginning trading at $14.50 under ticker symbol JMIA. This comes four weeks after CEO Sacha Poignonnec confirmed the IPO to TechCrunch and Jumia filed SEC documents.

With the public offering, Jumia becomes the first startup from Africa to list on a major global exchange.

In an updated SEC filing, Jumia indicated it is offering 13,500,000 ADR shares for an opening price spread of $13 to $16 per share, representing 17.6 percent of all company shares. The IPO could raise up to $216 million for the internet venture.

Since the original announcement (and reflected in the latest SEC docs), Mastercard Europe pre-purchased $50 million in Jumia ordinary shares.

The IPO creates another milestone for Jumia. The company in 2016 became the first African startup unicorn, achieving a $1 billion valuation after a funding round that included Goldman Sachs, AXA and MTN.

There’s a lot to break down on Jumia’s going public. The company is often dubbed the “Amazon of Africa,” and like Amazon, Jumia comes with its own mixed buzz. Jumia’s SEC F-1 prospectus offers us more insight into the venture, and perhaps any startup from Africa, thus far.

About Jumia

Founded in Lagos in 2012 with Rocket Internet backing, Jumia now operates multiple online verticals in 14 African countries. Goods and services lines include Jumia Food (an online takeout service), Jumia Flights (for travel bookings) and Jumia Deals (for classifieds). Jumia processed more than 13 million packages in 2018, according to company data.

Jumia’s original co-founders included Nigerian tech entrepreneurs Tunde Kehinde and Raphael Afaedor, but both departed in 2015 to form other startups in fintech and logistics.

Starting in Nigeria, the company created many of the components for its digital sales operations. This includes its JumiaPay payment platform and a delivery service of trucks and motorbikes that have become ubiquitous with the Lagos landscape. Jumia has extended this infrastructure as an e-commerce fulfillment product called Jumia Services.

Jumia has also opened itself up to Africa’s traders by allowing local merchants to harness Jumia to sell online. The company has more than 80,000 active sellers on the platform using the company’s payment, delivery and data-analytics services, Jumia Nigeria CEO Juliet Anammah told TechCrunch previously.

The most popular goods on Jumia’s shopping site include smartphones, washing machines, fashion items, women’s hair care products and 32-inch TVs, according to Anammah.

Jumia an African startup?

Like Amazon, Jumia brings its own mix of supporters and critics. On the critical side, there are questions of whether it’s actually an African startup. The parent for Jumia Group is incorporated in Germany and current CEOs Jeremy Hodara and Sacha Poignonnec are French.

On the flipside, original Jumia co-founders (Kehinde and Afaedor) are African. The company is headquartered (and also incorporated) in Africa (Lagos), operates exclusively in Africa, pays taxes on the continent, employs 5,128 people in Africa (page 125 of K-1) and the CEO of its largest country operation (Nigeria) Juliet Anammah is Nigerian.

The Africa authenticity debate often shifts into questions of a Jumia diversity deficit, which is of course important from Silicon Valley to Nairobi. The company’s senior management and board is a mix of Africans and expats. Golden State Warriors basketball player and tech investor Andre Iguodala joined Jumia’s board this spring with a priority on “diversity and making sure the African culture is in the company,” he told TechCrunch.

Can Jumia turn a profit?

The Jumia authenticity and diversity debates will no doubt roll on. But the biggest question — the driver behind the VC, the IPO, the founders and the people buying Jumia’s shares — is whether the startup can generate profits and ROI.

Obviously some of the world’s top venture investors, such as Jumia backers Goldman, AXA and Mastercard, think so. But for Jumia skeptics, there are the big losses. The company has generated years and years of losses, including negative EBITDA of €172 million in 2018 compared to revenues of €139 that same year.

To be fair to Jumia, most startups (e-commerce startups in particular) rack up losses for years before getting into the black. And operating in a greenfield sector in Africa — where it had to create much of the surrounding infrastructure to do B2C online sales — has presented higher costs for Jumia than e-commerce startups elsewhere.

On the prospects for Jumia’s profitability, two things to watch will be Jumia’s fulfillment expenses and a shift to more revenue from its non-goods-delivery services, which offer lower unit costs and higher-margins. Per Jumia’s SEC F-1 index (see above), freight and shipping make up more than half of its fulfillment expenses.

So Jumia has not turned a profit, but its revenues have increased steadily, up 11 percent to €93.8 million (roughly $106.2 million) in 2017 and up again to €130 million (or $147 million) in 2018. If the company boosts customer acquisition and lowers fulfillment costs — which could come from more internet services revenue and platform investment with IPO capital — it could close the gap between revenues and losses. This reflects the equation for most e-commerce startups. With the IPO, Jumia will have to publish its first full public financials in 2019, which will provide a better picture of profitability prospects.

Jumia’s IPO and African e-commerce?

There is, of course, a bigger play in Jumia’s IPO. One connected to global e-commerce and the future of online retail in Africa.

Jumia going public comes as Africa’s e-commerce landscape has seen its share of ups and downs, notably several failures in DealDey shutting down and the distressed acquisition of Nigerian e-commerce hopeful Konga.com.

As for the big global names, Alibaba has talked about Africa expansion, but for the moment has not entered in full.

Amazon offers limited e-commerce sales on the continent, but more notably, has started offering AWS services in Africa.

And this week, DHL came on the scene, launching its Africa eShop platform with 200 global retailers on board, in partnership with MallforAfrica’s Link Commerce fulfillment service.

Competition to capture Africa’s digitizing consumer markets — expected to spend $2 billion online by 2025, according to McKinsey — could get fierce, with more global entries, acquisitions and competition on fulfillment services all part of the mix.

And finally, the outcome of Jumia’s IPO carries weight even for its competitors. “Many things, like business decisions and VC investments across Africa’s e-commerce sector are on hold,” an African e-commerce exec told TechCrunch on background.

“Everyone’s waiting to see what happens with Jumia’s IPO and how they perform,” the exec said.

So the share price connected to NYSE ticker sign JMIA could reflect not just investor confidence in Jumia, but investor confidence in African e-commerce overall.

A recent Global Market Insights report estimates the global video conferencing market to grow more than 10% annually to $20 billion by 2024. But video conferences are just one of the reasons why...

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A games publisher in China is following the path of its larger peer Tencent to back a wide spectrum of startups for financial gains. Beijing Kunlun Wanwei, or Kunlun, announced in a filing this week that it plans to inject $50 million into autonomous driving startup Pony.ai in exchange for a 3 percent stake.

Pony.ai confirmed the investment with TechCrunch in an email response, adding that the money contributes to its pre-B round of financing. The startup last pocketed $102 million, which valued it at nearly $1 billion. It has raised $214 million in total fundings, excluding its angel round, according to data from Crunchbase.

Shanghai-listed Kunlun has its bets on one of China’s most aggressive smart driving companies. Pony.ai, co-founded by James Peng, formerly a leader in Baidu’s self-driving division, was only second to Baidu in total autonomous miles driven in Beijing last year (although by a large margin).

While neither Kunlun nor Pony.ai provided an inkling of possible strategic collaboration between them, next-gen vehicles have become a much sought-after space for hosting entertainment content, and without a doubt that includes video games.

Few outside China’s internet industry know of Kunlun, which has over the years been squeezed by industry leaders Tencent and NetEase . The 11-year-old company has, however, gradually earned its reputation as a savvy investor. Led by Zhou Yahui, a shrewd investor himself, Kunlun has backed companies that broadened distribution channels for its gaming titles. Other fundings appear more tangential. Here’s a taste of Kunlun’s lucrative portfolio:

Musical.ly: Kunlun laid out $20 million for Musical.ly and cashed out $41.08 million when ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in 2017, according to a filing. Musical.ly is now part of the popular short-video app TikTok.Inke: Back in 2016, Kunlun invested 68 million yuan ($10 million) in live-streaming company Inke . By 2017, it had sold all its stakes in the startup and was poised to cash out a total of 824 million yuan ($123 million) after the transaction completed, according to a filing. Inke is currently the third-largest live-streaming app by monthly active devices in China, says data from iResearch.Opera: Kunlun was part of a consortium that acquired the web browser in 2016 when it shelled out $600 million in investment. Through the consortium, Kunlun now owns a 48 percent stake in Opera, which floated on Nasdaq in 2018.Grindr: Kunlun paid $93 million for a 60 percent stake in Grindr, the popular dating app for gay, bisexual, transgender and queer users, back in 2016, and completed the buyout with $152 million in fundings in 2018. Kunlun is reportedly looking to sell Grindr after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States decided its ownership of the dating app may threaten national security.Qudian: Kunlun owned a 19.2 percent stake in Qudian when the micro-lender became one of the first Chinese fintech companies to list on Nasdaq. Kunlun has since been selling its stakes through a gradual exit and Zhou recently told analysts that his firm was expected to make around 2 billion yuan ($300 million) in profit from the Qudian investment.

The article has been updated to clarify Crunchbase’s data did not include Pony.ai’s angel round funding.

Sramana Mitra: If you were to assess, how many enterprise software companies that fit your thesis are operating in the market currently? What would be that number? Is it like thousands of companies?...

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LumApps, the “social intranet” for the enterprise, has closed $24 million in Series B funding. The round is led by previous backer IdInvest, and will be used to scale LumApps’ global sales and marketing and accelerate product development.

Founded in Paris in 2012 — and now also with offices in London, Tokyo, San Francisco and New York — LumApps has developed a social web-styled intranet for enterprises to let company employees better connect and collaborate.

The solution integrates with both G Suite, Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Sharepoint, and is accessible via mobile. Overall, it is designed to serve as a central hub for personalized content, social communications, work tools and enterprise applications.

“We launched LumApps Social Intranet solution in 2015, after our historical customer Veolia asked us to create a platform based on their needs,” “LumApps founder and CEO Sébastien Ricard tells me. “We quickly realized there was a massive demand for modern intranets from all companies, to transform internal communications and the employee experience”.

That’s because, he says, communication within an enterprise is challenging, spread across disparate tools such as email, live chat, and social networks – solutions that are typically disconnected and siloed. This is especially true in large enterprises, where finding information and reaching the right people can be very difficult.

“Our dream was to enable access to useful information in one click, from one place and for everyone. Just that simple. We wanted to build… a solution that bridged [an] intranet and social network, with the latest new technologies. A place that users will love”.

At its core, Ricard says LumApps goes further than just solving common business challenges, including fostering a collaborative workplace where employees are more engaged and more productive. “Every large company is building their digital workplace, and it’s critical that they have a central intranet that houses all employee communications, news, memos, applications, etc. from the corporate team but also from peers”.

That mission appears to be working, evidenced by today’s Series B funding and a customer base that spans enterprises small and large. Companies using LumApps include Veolia, Valeo, Air Liquide, Colgate-Palmolive, The Economist, Schibsted, EA, and Logitech. The intranet software has on-boarded more than 4 million users globally.

Adds Ricard: “As a French entrepreneur, it has always been a dream to build such a global success,” says Ricard. “We encountered highs and lows, especially in 2016 when we started in the U.S. and lived our first year of setbacks. Why? All we had was our product and we didn’t yet understand the culture and market specifics. It took time to hire American talent to structure everything and build a solid base… Now we have a team of 150-plus people worldwide with a special focus on the U.S.”

Uber’s exits from China, Russia and Southeast Asia were billed as failures, but the ridesharing giant has already made billions on paper from those moves, according to its IPO filing.

Uber released its much-anticipated S-1 on Thursday and reporters and analysts are frantically digging into a treasure trove of previously unreleased details. A number of sections on Uber’s global divestitures begin to paint a clear picture of the strategy that Uber employed when leaving China, Russia and Southeast Asia in recent years.

In each case, Uber decided to leave the market but, upon doing so, take a stake in its rival business in exchange for the assets it had remaining. That not only keeps them involved, but it removes the often substantial cost of competing with a single-market player and gives Uber options to re-enter the market or profit from its partner’s success there.

Already that strategy is bearing fruit. Today, those holdings are collectively worth a cool $12.5 billion on paper, with at least $3 billion in gains so far.

China: $7.95 billion

China was Uber’s first tactical exit and it saw the company sell to local giant Didi Chuxing in August 2016. 

The Uber filing shows the U.S. firm took an 18.8 percent stake in Didi. That, Uber estimates, has since been reduced to around 15.4 percent due to subsequent fundraising from Didi, which last publicly announced a $5.5 billion raise one year ago — previously, it raised $4 billion at the end of 2017.

The really interesting part of the filing is Uber’s estimate for the value of its Didi stake: that was $5.97 billion as of the end of 2017, and $7.95 billion at the end of last year. That’s a $2 billion paper increase in just one year, although the Uber filing doesn’t provide a value for the initial merger deal. Didi is also in the money, having invested $1 billion into Uber in exchange for shares.

One notable piece is that an investigation into whether the deal constitutes a monopoly is still ongoing, some two and a half years after the transaction was first announced.

“It is not clear how or when that proceeding will be resolved,” Uber notes in its document.

Finally, the original deal included a clause forbidding Didi from making “certain investments outside of Asia” for a six-year period. The company breached that — it acquired Uber rival 99 in Brazil and expanded its business into Mexico, among other moves — which saw Uber take back some shares, although its net gain was only $152 million.

Didi has struggled over the last 18 months, so safety concerns bubbled to the fore following the murder of two female passengers last year. Operationally, too, there have been challenges. Didi reportedly lost $1.6 billion last year — that’s more than Uber — and it reshuffled the organization by laying off 15 percent of its staff recently. Despite buying out Uber, it is up against increased competition after a consortium of automakers inked a $1.45 billion ride-hailing joint venture while new government rules have made the business of ride hailing, and in particular recruiting drivers, more challenging in China.

Still, as China’s dominant firm and with an increasingly global presence, you’d imagine that Uber’s stake is likely to become more lucrative in the future.

Southeast Asia: $3.22 billion

Uber’s exit from Southeast Asia in March 2018 never seemed a copy of its China play, where it was burning a reported $1 billion a year. Instead, I argued that the deal was actually a win for the U.S. firm because it took a decent slice of Grab as part of the agreement and Uber’s filings show that is already proving to be the case.

Uber noted that the exit deal saw it take an initial 30 percent stake for $2.28 billion, which has since diluted to around 23 percent following Grab fundraising, which remains ongoing with a goal of $6.5 billion for its Series H. (Uber’s Grab stake was announced as 27 percent at the time of the deal last year.)

Grab’s most recent valuation was $14 billion, according to sources, which means Uber’s stake is already worth $3.22 billion, a nearly $1 billion jump on paper in just a year. Uber said last year that it had spent $700 million in Southeast Asia, so that’s a significant return at this point.

With the company in a dogfight with Go-Jek, its Indonesia rival that’s backed by the likes of Google and Tencent, it seems unlikely that Grab and key shareholder SoftBank will do anything other than keep on raising. That’ll likely dilute Uber — which, as a shareholder rather than an investor, isn’t likely to invest again — but it’ll increase Grab’s valuation and thus the value of Uber’s stake.

That leads us to the next detail of Uber’s Grab investment: its stake is classified as “available-for-sale debt security.” That’s to say that Uber could potentially dispose of its stake in the future.

Indeed, the Uber filing notes a clause in the deal that would allow the U.S. firm to sell “all or a portion of its investment back to Grab for cash” if the company hasn’t gone public by March 25, 2023, five years after the deal.

That’s the first real line in the sand that we’ve seen for a Grab IPO and, with a buyback already expensive, as Uber’s stake is worth more than $3 billion, the clock is ticking.

Russia: $1.4 billion

Finally, Uber’s third tactical retreat is Russia, where it formed a joint venture with local rival Yandex.taxi in July 2017. The combined business covers ride-hailing and food delivery in more than 127 cities in Russia.

That gives it a different kind of relationship to its deals with Didi and Grab, where it is one of many minority shareholders, and Uber’s S-1 gives fewer details of the Russia JV.

What we do know is that Uber estimates its share of the business is 38 percent, a slice that it says is worth $1.4 billion. That’s a valuation of around $3.68 billion, which is on par with the $3.7 billion that the companies announced at the time of the deal. Like the other deals, the business is the dominant one in a huge market — Russia has a population of more than 140 million people — so it stands to reason that the business will grow and thus Uber’s value within it will increase.

Yandex, the parent of Yandex.taxi, also stands to gain, and not just from the joint venture. Uber allocated the company two million shares (then worth $54 million) which, at a proposed $55 per share, would more than double to $110 million at IPO, and that’s not counting its potential value in the future.

A change with Careem acquisition

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said that Southeast Asia would be the company’s last global retreat, and he seems to have been good to his word so far. Indeed, Uber announced its largest acquisition last month with a planned $3 billion purchase of Middle East-based rival Careem, which is present in 15 markets.

The Uber filing explains that the deal, which has not been completed, is $3.1 billion, with around $1.4 billion in cash.

“We have structured the acquisition and proposed integration of Careem with the goal of preserving the strengths of both companies, including opportunities to create operating efficiencies across both platforms. We expect to share consumer demand and driver supply across both platforms, thereby increasing network density and reducing wait times for consumers and drivers in the region, while simultaneously achieving synergies from combining back-end support functions and shared technology infrastructure,” Uber wrote in a statement.

That’s certainly a new approach for Uber worldwide and, post IPO, it’ll be interesting to watch it actively play a role in consolidating other businesses into its own rather than going the other way. Still, those three global retreats are likely to pay off handsomely despite being billed as the result of failure.

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Michael Smerklo, Co-founder and Managing Director at Next Coast Ventures. We discussed some of the ventures his firm has invested in and the...

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