Pan-African e-commerce company Jumia filed for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange today, per SEC documents and confirmation from CEO Sacha Poignonnec to TechCrunch.

The valuation, share price and timeline for public stock sales will be determined over the coming weeks for the Nigeria-headquartered company.

With a smooth filing process, Jumia will become the first African tech startup to list on a major global exchange.

Poignonnec would not pinpoint a date for the actual IPO, but noted the minimum SEC timeline for beginning sales activities (such as road shows) is 15 days after submitting first documents. Lead adviser on the listing is Morgan Stanley .

There have been numerous press reports on an anticipated Jumia IPO, but none of them confirmed by Jumia execs or an actual SEC, S-1 filing until today.

Jumia’s move to go public comes as several notable consumer digital sales startups have faltered in Nigeria — Africa’s most populous nation, largest economy and unofficial bellwether for e-commerce startup development on the continent. Konga.com, an early Jumia competitor in the race to wire African online retail, was sold in a distressed acquisition in 2018.

With the imminent IPO capital, Jumia will double down on its current strategy and regional focus.

“You’ll see in the prospectus that last year Jumia had 4 million consumers in countries that cover the vast majority of Africa. We’re really focused on growing our existing business, leadership position, number of sellers and consumer adoption in those markets,” Poignonnec said.

The pending IPO creates another milestone for Jumia. The venture became the first African startup unicorn in 2016, achieving a $1 billion valuation after a $326 funding round that included Goldman Sachs, AXA and MTN.

Founded in Lagos in 2012 with Rocket Internet backing, Jumia now operates multiple online verticals in 14 African countries, spanning Ghana, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Morocco and Egypt. 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.

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 also opened itself up to traders and SMEs by allowing local merchants to harness Jumia to sell online. “There are over 81,000 active sellers on our platform. There’s a dedicated sellers page where they can sign-up and have access to our payment and delivery network, data, and analytic services,” Jumia Nigeria CEO Juliet Anammah told TechCrunch.

The most popular goods on Jumia’s shopping mall site include smartphones (priced in the $80 to $100 range), washing machines, fashion items, women’s hair care products and 32-inch TVs, according to Anammah.

E-commerce ventures, particularly in Nigeria, have captured the attention of VC investors looking to tap into Africa’s growing consumer markets. McKinsey & Company projects consumer spending on the continent to reach $2.1 trillion by 2025, with African e-commerce accounting for up to 10 percent of retail sales.

Jumia has not yet turned a profit, but a snapshot of the company’s performance from shareholder Rocket Internet’s latest annual report shows an improving revenue profile. The company generated €93.8 million in revenues in 2017, up 11 percent from 2016, though its losses widened (with a negative EBITDA of €120 million). Rocket Internet is set to release full 2018 results (with updated Jumia figures) April 4, 2019.

Jumia’s move to list on the NYSE comes during an up and down period for B2C digital commerce in Nigeria. The distressed acquisition of Konga.com, backed by roughly $100 million in VC, created losses for investors, such as South African media, internet and investment company Naspers .

In late 2018, Nigerian online sales platform DealDey shut down. And TechCrunch reported this week that consumer-focused venture Gloo.ng has dropped B2C e-commerce altogether to pivot to e-procurement. The CEO cited better unit economics from B2B sales.

As demonstrated in other global startup markets, consumer-focused online retail can be a game of capital attrition to outpace competitors and reach critical mass before turning a profit. With its unicorn status and pending windfall from an NYSE listing, Jumia could be better positioned than any venture to win on e-commerce at scale in Africa.

Sramana Mitra: What’s been UiPath’s strategy? Have they set up in Silicon Valley very early on? What is their geographical location and headquarters? How was the company’s run from a scaling...

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When the bubble burst in the year 2000, Tanya Van Court lost over $1 million in stock and options over the course of a few minutes. Then and there she vowed to never let something like that happen to her children.

Five years later, her daughter Gabrielle was born. At the time, she was a VP of Digital Product Dev at ESPN. She then went on to work as SVP of Digital Products, Parenting & Preschool for Nickelodeon and, in 2013, moved to SVP of Marketing at Discovery Education, leading the charge to roll out digital textbooks nationwide.

Today, she runs Goalsetter, an app that allows parents and their kids to replace gift-giving with goal-giving.

It started when her daughter Gabrielle was eight years old. Van Court told her daughter that if she could save $100, Van Court would match that $100 and start her an investment account. After learning how exactly an investment account works, Gabrielle decided all she wanted for her ninth birthday was a bike and an investment account.

“I thought that these are amazing things for a nine-year-old to want, but she was going to get all kinds of stuff she didn’t want or need instead,” said Van Court. “I realized how early consumerism starts. We all have more and more and more and value things less and less and less.”

After conversations with fellow moms, Van Court got to work on Goalsetter. The app has two main branches: a savings account for kids and a financial literacy learning center with fun quizzes.

Kids and parents together sign up for the app, where kids input some of their goals, from college tuition to a new bike or gaming console. Kids can then earn their allowance through the app, and can also receive ‘GoalCards’ (replacing a gift card) from parents and relatives to save towards their goals.

Moreover, parents can round-up their debit card swipes to go towards their kids bigger goals, such as college tuition or a first car. Parents can also set up auto-save to set aside a few dollars each month.

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“Moms in particular all feel the pain of their kids having too much stuff,” said Van Court. “When they step on yet another lego in the house or go into the kids room to find 80 toys, only five of which they play with, these become daily pain points for moms. The idea of teaching kids how to save instead of teaching them how to acquire more stuff really resonates with moms.”

Goalsetter also offers a financial literacy quiz game called “It’s LIT” that is mapped to financial literacy standards for K – 12. The game uses pop culture memes, song lyrics, etc. to engage kids while teaching them the fundamentals of personal finance. Parents can choose to reward their kids with money toward their goals for each question they get right.

What’s more, Goalsetter has plans to launch “It’s LIT” as a curriculum to school districts, complete with lesson plan materials, quizzes and more.

Alongside the curriculum, Goalsetter makes money by charging a dollar for every GoalCard sent through the platform. Goalsetter donates 5 percent of its transaction fee to children’s related charities. The company also has a donation function that allows users to pay the company whatever amount they find appropriate for the features offered.

Gaolsetter skews a bit younger than some of its competitors, including Current, Greenlight, and Step.

Goalsetter currently has more than 20,000 users and was recently featured on Shark Tank — Van Court turned down Mr. Wonderful’s investment offer.

The company graduated from the Entrepreneurs’ Roundtable Accelerator in 2017 and has raised a total of $2.1 million, including investment from Morgan Stanley, CFSI sponsored by JP Morgan Chase, Pipeline Angels and Backstage Capital.

“When the bubble burst, I had to learn the hard way that what goes up can actually come down,” said Van Court. “Our mission is to teach children that money has real value that can go towards the things you want to accomplish in life, and to people who are in need of it.”

Venture capitalists’ latest on-demand delivery bet is in the pharmaceutical space.

Truepill, an online pharmacy powering delivery for the likes of Hims, Nurx, LemonAID and other direct-to-consumer healthcare brands, has nabbed a $10 million Series A from early-stage VC fund Initialized Capital. The investment brings the Y Combinator graduate’s total raised to $13.4 million. Y Combinator, Sound Ventures, Tuesday Capital and others participated in the round.

Founded in 2016, the San Mateo-based startup employs 150 workers and plans to expand its team and fulfillment facilities into the U.K. with the fresh funding. Truepill is currently active in all 50 states and has delivered 1 million subscriptions for birth control, erectile dysfunction medication, hair loss treatment and more.

It is, as co-founders Sid Viswanathan and Umar Afridi explained, Amazon Web Services for pharmacies.

“We are really only scratching the surface of where this telemedicine landscape is going to go,” Viswanathan, who became a product manager at LinkedIn after the social network acquired his transcription service CardMunch, told TechCrunch. “We are catering to this first wave of those companies and we want to be that pharmacy fulfillment service powering that entire shift … We want to build the next generation of pharmacy infrastructure.”

Afridi, for his part, previously spent more than a decade as a pharmacist at retail chains like CVS and Fred Meyer.

In addition to operating a prescription delivery service, Truepill provides a set of APIs that give its customers programmatic access to its pharmacy and allows brands to fully customize packaging.

Foundation Capital, Index Ventures, Social Capital, Box Group and Joe Montana are also Truepill stakeholders.

Stash, the fintech startup and app that aims to introduce new people to the world of investing, is unveiling some interesting new services while also announcing that it has raised more funding to expand its business. The company is introducing mobile-based banking accounts from Green Dot Bank, and, alongside it, a new rewards program called “Stock-Back.” When users spend money using their Stash accounts, they get “points” — which are either stocks in the companies where they are buying goods, or shares in ETFs approved by Stash. On top of that, Stash also said it raised a Series E of $65 million that it will be using to grow its business on the back of these two launches.

A spokesperson for the company said that Stash is not disclosing the full round of investors in this round. For context, Stash was valued at $350 million post-money in its Series D, according to figures from PitchBook, and a source says the valuation is now “much higher” than that of a straight upround.

But from the looks of it, the $65 million appears to include participation from Breyer Capital, a previous investor whose founder Jim Breyer has heartily endorsed the new Stock-Back service and accompanying loyalty program that’s tied in with it, which was tested early with companies like Netflix, T-Mobile and Chipotle all offering stock when people used their Stash accounts to pay for goods and services at the companies.

“I have invested in and served on the Board of many leading companies, and it’s clear how a program like Stock-Back can power immense brand loyalty,” he said in a statement today. “The early data shows unequivocally that share ownership drives increased sales and customer appreciation. This innovative new technology from STASH will have CEOs and CMOs knocking on their door.”

From what we understand, the round was led by a private institutional investor and includes 40 percent existing and 60 percent new investors. Previous backers in addition to Breyer include Union Square Ventures, Coatue Management, Entree, Goodwater and Valar. “We’re really excited and proud to be working with this incredible group of VCs,” the spokesperson noted.

The Green Dot-powered banking service comes with the core features that will sound familiar to those who have used or looked at next-generation banking services before. It will include a debit card-based account, no overdraft or monthly maintenance fees, access to a network of ATMs that can be used for free and direct deposit services, as well as “personal guidance” for their financial planning activities, from saving to investing.

Stash is part of a wave of fintech startups — others include the likes of Robinhood, Acorns, YieldStreet, Revolut and many others — that have tapped into the popularity of apps and the advent of new financial services technology to democratise how individuals can save, spend, invest, borrow and lend money, moving many of those operations and transactions out of the hands of the big incumbent players who used to control them.

The average age of a Stash user is 29 and average income is less than $50,000 per year, and tying in transactions made using Stash’s banking service — by way of reward points that are being picked up incidentally — will make it even more seamless for these users to take some of their money and invest with it, while at the same time demystifying some of the process and making it more likely that those users will choose to invest even more down the line.

The idea of tying investments to what you are actually purchasing is a clever one. For a startup whose user base includes no-nonsense professionals from fields like teaching, nursing and retail, this is the embodiment of putting your money where your mouth is — literally speaking, as the investments can include things like shares in Chipotle each time you buy food there, and T-Mobile every time you pay your phone bill for all the talking you do.

Stash is positioning Stock-Back as a rewards program, with the percentages varying by business or brand and going as high as five percent in Stock-Back in some cases — as is the case, at launch, when people use their Stash debit cards to pay their Spotify and Netflix dues.

Ultimately, the aim of this is to present a way for ordinary, modestly-salaried people not only to potentially make money, but to be better engaged in how financial systems work, and how their daily actions impact that — the idea being that this knowledge can only help them in the long run.

“80% of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck. Stock-Back is our way of utilizing STASH’s smart, patent-pending technology to help people build better financial habits and invest in their future,” said co-founder and president, Ed Robinson, in a statement. “Our ability to give customers the opportunity to save and build portfolios that mirror their spending behavior and preferences is incredibly powerful.”

Pitched as “travel insurance for people who don’t like insurance,” U.K.-based Pluto Insurance is officially launching today with an online travel insurance product targeting millennials.

Citing research that says 40 percent of millennials don’t actually buy travel insurance, mistakenly believing that it isn’t required, the mobile-first offering not only attempts to demystify travel insurance, but is also unbundling it in a way that ensures you only pay for the cover you need or desire.

“We’ve spoken to hundreds of millennials and three things keep coming up,” says Pluto co-founder and CEO Alex Rainey. “Travel insurance is too complicated and it’s hard to know what you’re actually buying. Secondly, a lot of younger people don’t think they need it. But most importantly, there is a distinct lack of trust towards insurers, and it’s easy to see why. With exclusions buried in the fine print and insurers expecting people to print out a claim form and post it in.”

To remedy this, Rainey says Pluto wants to make travel insurance more tailored, letting you build your own policy online. “We work hard to make sure everything is easy to understand, ensuring we always explain our cover in plain English,” he says. The startup also lets you submit a claim via the mobile web app “in under 10 minutes.”

Insurance options includes gadget cover, baggage cover, cancellation cover, level of excess, cover for certain activities and travel disruption. As you add more cover, the price of your insurance changes in real time with each decision. Once you’ve built your policy, a short summary of your cover is displayed before you go ahead and purchase.

Meanwhile, the insurance itself — which, at launch, doesn’t cover pre-existing conditions, although that will be offered in the future — is in partnership with Zurich, which Rainey says was chosen because they had a 99 percent claims payout rate in 2017. “This is so so important for us to solve the trust issues in insurance,” he adds.

To that end, Pluto integrates with Facebook Messenger, including letting you use the messaging app to start a claim. You can also search your policy, check a summary of your cover or chat to a Pluto team member.

“Our customers want to do everything from their phone, when and where they want. We’ve made sure that’s possible,” says Rainey.

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 435th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, March 14, 2019, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/4 p.m. CET/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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According to a Gartner report, VMWare (NYSE:VMW) accounts for 91% share of the virtualization infrastructure software market. Even after including vendors like Microsoft that provide virtual machine...

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Instacart has expanded its alcohol delivery to now be available in 14 states and Washington, DC from nearly 100 different retailers.

With the roll-out, Instacart alcohol delivery is currently available to 40 million homes in the U.S., and the number of alcohol deliveries on the platform has more than doubled since the same time last year.

Partners who participate in alcohol delivery on Instacart include Albertsons, Kroger, Publix, Schnucks and Stater Bros., alongside wine and liquor stores such as BevMo!, Binny’s Beverage Depot and Total Wine & More.

The list of states where Instacart offers alcohol delivery include California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and Washington, DC.

Instacart started rolling out alcohol delivery a year ago, and has quickly become a competitive player in the space. Postmates introduced alcohol delivery in 2017, whereas strictly alcohol delivery services like Drizly, Minibar and Saucey have been around for a while.

Here is what Instacart’s chief business officer, Nilam Ganenthiran, had to say:

Part of grocery shopping for many people goes beyond getting fresh produce, meats and pantry staples, and includes picking up the perfect bottle of wine for a dinner party or their favorite beer to sip while watching the big game. By working alongside our retail partners to add alcohol to the marketplace, we’re offering customers more choice and making it easier for Instacart to be their ‘one-stop-shop’ to get the groceries they need – including beer, wine and spirits – from the retailers they love.

When Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, some speculated that Instacart might be hit hard. But the deal also represented the digitization of a massive, traditional industry. Considering Instacart’s retail partner growth over the past year, it seems that the Whole Foods acquisition might have made Instacart an attractive platform for some retailers.

The company now serves more than 80 percent of U.S. households, which was Instacart’s stated goal for the end of 2018. Across its 300 retail partners, Instacart now delivers from 20,000 grocery stores across 5,500 cities in North America.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of positioning, there are obviously a lot of enterprise contact software players and there are some leaders. Right now, Suite within Oracle is a major player and has been...

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Vochlea Music, a U.K. startup and alumni of Abbey Road Red, the music tech incubator from Abbey Road Studios, is launching a crowdfunding campaign today for “Dubler Studio Kit,” a new device and app that turns your voice into a MIDI controller for synths, drum machines, DAWs and other music gear.

Described as a “vocal MIDI controller,” the Dubler Studio Kit consists of a bespoke USB microphone and a desktop application for Mac and Windows. It claims to be able to listen to you sing or beatbox and turn those sounds into MIDI notes and other MIDI control messages in real time.

Designed to be responsive enough to use live or for use in a recording studio, with a bit of practice, its makers say you’ll be able to hum a synth pattern (depending on your ability to sing in relative tune), beatbox to trigger a virtual drum kit or manipulate effects and filters vocally.

Vochlea Music demoed an early version of the technology at SXSW last year and won the festival’s pitch competition for its live vocal recognition for music making. While in pre-launch beta testing, Dubler Studio Kit has been used by Mercury Prize-nominated grime MC and producer Novelist, alongside other musicians and producers.

In a call with Vochlea Music founder and CEO George Wright, he explained that the Dubler Studio Kit was created in part to lower the barriers to generating and recording musical ideas, especially for those who are unable to play an instrument.

It’s common for artists, such as singers, to make a vocal note of their melody ideas using the iPhone’s voice memo app or similar mobile recording apps. However, being able to create MIDI notes and other MIDI data using your voice, instead of raw and often badly recorded audio, has the advantage of being able to edit and manipulate those ideas later within MIDI, including patching the resulting MIDI data to different sounds and effects.

Perhaps even more exciting is the way Dubler Studio Kit can be used in addition to playing an instrument, such as a synth or other keyboard, to control various parameters and effects. Traditionally, you have to lift one hand off the keyboard to make tweaks to the sound, or use a foot pedal. Dubler Studio Kit adds a fifth limb, so to speak.

Furthermore, Dubler Studio Kit doesn’t use the VST or Audio Unit plugin format for integration with a DAW. Rather cleverly, once the software is installed, the Dubler Studio Kit is recognised by your Mac or Windows machine as a standard MIDI controller so that it can be used by any software that accepts MIDI, including Logic or Ableton or the hundreds of virtual instruments on the market.

Related to this out of the box experience is the choice to couple the Dubler Studio Kit software with a Dubler-branded low-latency USB microphone. Wright says he wanted to avoid the user needing to have to conduct lengthy calibration with the Dubler machine-learning powered software, which would be the case if third-party microphones were supported.

In the future, that doesn’t prohibit Vochlea Music developing a version of Dubler Studio Kit for iPhone — where device specs are well-known — but will make supporting Android more tricky.

Live on Kickstarter, Vochlea Music wants to raise £40,000 for the Dubler Studio Kit over the next 35 days. During the campaign, backers have the opportunity to pledge to be amongst the first owners of Dubler Studio Kit at what promises to be an early-bird price starting from £175.

Time is Ltd., a Prague-based startup offering “productivity software analytics” to help companies gain insights from employees’ use of Slack, Office 365, G Suite and other enterprise software, has raised €3 million in funding.

Leading the round is Mike Chalfen — who previously co-founded London venture capital firm Mosaic Ventures but has since decided to operate as a solo investor — with participation from Accel. The investment will be used by Time is Ltd. to continue building the platform for large enterprises that want to better understand the patterns of behaviour hidden inside the various cloud software on which they run.

“Time is Ltd. was founded… to help large corporations and companies get a view into insights and productivity of teams,” co-founder and CEO Jan Rezab tells me. “Visualising insights around calendars, time and communication will help companies to understand real data behind their productivity.”

Powered by machine learning, the productivity software analytics platform plugs into the cloud software tools that enterprises typically use to collaborate across various departments. It then analyses various metadata pulled from these software tools, such as who is communicating with whom and time spent on Slack, or which teams are meeting, where and for how long as per various calendars. The idea is to enable managers to gain a better understanding of where productivity is lost or could be improved and to tie to business goals changes in these patterns.

Rezab cites the example of a large company undergoing “agile” transformation. “If you want to steer a massive company of 5,000 plus people, you really should understand the impact of your actions a bit more much earlier, not after the fact,” he says. “One of the hypothesis of an agile transformation is, for example, that managers really get involved a bit less and things work a bit more streamlined. You see from our data that this is or is not happening, and you can take corrective action.”

Or it could be something as simple as a large company with multiple offices that is conducting too many meetings. Time is Ltd. is able to show how the number of meetings held is increasing and which departments or teams are instigating them. “You can also show the inter-departmental video meeting efficiency, and if the people, for example, often need to travel to these meetings, how long does that takes versus digital meetings — so you can generally help and recommend the company take specific actions,” explains Rezab.

Sales is another area that could benefit from productivity analytics, with Time is Ltd. revealing that most sales teams actually spend the majority of their meeting time inside the company, not outside as you would think. “The structure of these internal meetings varies; planning for these events or just on-boarding and education,” says the Time is Ltd. CEO. “You can, so to speak, follow the time from revenue to different teams… and then see over time how it changes, and how it impacts sales productivity.”

Meanwhile, investor Mike Chalfen describes the young startup as a new breed of data-driven services that use “significant but under-utilised datasets.” “Productivity is one of the largest software markets globally, but lacks deep enterprise analytics to drive intelligent operational management for large businesses,” he says in a statement.

That’s not to say Time is Ltd. isn’t without competition, which includes Microsoft itself. “Our biggest competitor is Microsoft Workplace Analytics,” says Rezab. “However, Microsoft does not integrate other than MS products. Our advantage is that we are a productivity platform to integrate all of the cloud tools. Starting with Slack, SAP Success Factors, Zoom and countless others.”