Sometimes, it’s hard to imagine a product or industry that a new e-commerce startup hasn’t tried to remake already, from slippers to mattresses, from luggage to lipstick.

Yet two childhood friends in New York have seemingly struck on a fresh idea: taking on the stodgy and often expensive world of cookware, where one’s options out of college are usually limited to a few pieces of Calphalon or Farberware or, in the best-case scenario, some Le Creuset, the premium French cookware manufacturer founded back in 1925 and known for its vibrant colors, including Marseille, Cerise, and Soleil.

In fact, what the pair are building with their 10-month-old startup, Great Jones, appears to be a Le Creuset for the next generation: a handful of cookware items, including a cast-iron Dutch oven, that come in an array of colorful, if comparatively more muted, tones. Think Broccoli and Mustard.

The cookware is also more affordable than Le Creuset, which charges upward of $300 for a similar Dutch oven, compared with $145 for Great Jones’s new product. Notably, Great Jones’s full collection, which also includes a stainless steel stock pot, a stainless sauce pot, a stainless deep saute and a ceramic nonstick skillet, retails for $395.

Cookware is a smart sector to chase. According to the market consultancy IBIS World, the so-called “kitchen and cookware stores” industry has been growing steadily, reaching revenue of $17 billion last year.

One of the big questions for Great Jones will be whether its offerings hold up, and whether its customers find them compelling enough to recommend to others. After all, the old adage tends to hold up that you get what you pay for. And most new products take off because of favorable word of mouth, not merely because they’re Instagrammable.

Great Jones’s 28-year-old founders — Sierra Tishgart, previously a food editor at New York Magazine, and Maddy Moelis, who worked in customer insights and product management at a variety of e-commerce companies, including Warby Parker and Zola — seem to have thought these things through. Indeed, in a recent Forbes profile, they say they conducted extensive interviews with chefs and cookbook authors in their network in order to establish, for example, how to design a comfortable handle.

They also smartly made certain that their introductory offerings come in a range of metals. As even so-so cooks know, stainless steel is ideal for browning and braising; durable nonstick coatings make preparing delicate foods, including eggs and pancakes, less nightmarish.

In the meantime, Great Jones has easily captured the press’s imagination with what they are cooking up — a sign, perhaps, that the industry is ready for a refresh. In addition to Forbes, Great Jones also received recent coverage in The New York Times and Vogue — valuable real estate that most months-old startups can only dream of landing.

Great Jones has also raised outside funding already, including $2.75 million that it closed on last month led by venture capital firm General Catalyst, with participation from numerous individual investors.

Now the company just needs to convince its target demographic that it should ditch the older, established brands that may not feel particularly modern but are known to be durable, easy to clean, dishwasher safe and not insanely heavy (among the other things that keep people from throwing their pots in the garbage).

Great Jones also has plenty of newer competition to elbow out of the way if it’s going to succeed.

As the Times piece about the company notes, just a few of the other startups that are suddenly chasing the same opportunity include Potluck, a five-month-old, New York-based startup that sells a $270 “essentials bundle” that features 22 pieces, including utensils; Misen, a four-year-old, Brooklyn-based startup that sells cookware and chefs knives; and Milo, a year-old, L.A.-based startup that’s solely focused on Dutch ovens, to start.

According to Crunchbase, Misen has raised $2 million, including through a crowdfunding campaign; Milo has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding.

Crypto news got a little boost last week after a dark month of crashes, stablecoins and birthdays. The SEC ruled that two ICO issuers, CarrierEQ Inc. and Paragon Coin Inc., were in fact selling securities instead of so-called utility tokens.

“Both companies have agreed to return funds to harmed investors, register the tokens as securities, file periodic reports with the Commission, and pay penalties,” wrote Pamela Sawhney of the SEC. “These are the Commission’s first cases imposing civil penalties solely for ICO securities offering registration violations.”

From the release:

Airfox, a Boston-based startup, raised approximately $15 million worth of digital assets to finance its development of a token-denominated “ecosystem” starting with a mobile application that would allow users in emerging markets to earn tokens and exchange them for data by interacting with advertisements. Paragon, an online entity, raised approximately $12 million worth of digital assets to develop and implement its business plan to add blockchain technology to the cannabis industry and work toward legalization of cannabis. Neither Airfox nor Paragon registered their ICOs pursuant to the federal securities laws, nor did they qualify for an exemption to the registration requirements.

This behavior — a sort of “damn the torpedoes” for the fintech set — was all the rage at the beginning of the year as no clear guidance was available for filing security tokens — essentially pieces of company equity — versus utility tokens which were, in theory, used within the company ecosystem. In fact, ICOed companies contorted themselves into all sorts of knots to appear to fit their “utility token” within the torturous confines of securities law.

“We have made it clear that companies that issue securities through ICOs are required to comply with existing statutes and rules governing the registration of securities,” said Stephanie Avakian, co-director of the SEC’s Enforcement Division. “These cases tell those who are considering taking similar actions that we continue to be on the lookout for violations of the federal securities laws with respect to digital assets.”

The SEC fined both companies $250,000 each. Future ICOs, at least in the U.S., would do well to keep this in mind.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Alexander Ross was recorded in July 2018. Alexander...

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BuzzFeed News is giving readers a new way to support its journalism — by paying a monthly or yearly fee.

BuzzFeed might not seem like the most obvious publication to ask readers for financial support, as it doesn’t really have the high-minded appeal of (say) NPR or The New Yorker. However, the company has been working to establish a separate identity for its team focused on real journalism (as opposed to the quizzes and other entertainment for which BuzzFeed is known). In fact, it launched a separate website for BuzzFeed News a few months ago.

In August, BuzzFeed News started giving readers a way to make one-off donations of between $5 and $100. It says the average donation was more than $20, with some readers asking for a way to support the organization on an ongoing basis.

So today, it’s launching a recurring membership program. For $5 a month, readers will receive members-only emails highlighting the latest scoops and taking them behind the scenes of BuzzFeed reporting. For $100 a year, they’ll also receive a BuzzFeed News tote bag.

The memberships are available internationally, but you can only get a tote bag if you’re in the United States.

BuzzFeed reportedly missed its revenue target last year by as much as 20 percent, so it’s not surprising that the company is looking beyond advertising for ways to make money. However, in an email to the BuzzFeed team, Global News Director Lisa Tozzi said, “A membership program takes time to build, and we don’t expect it to be a huge portion of BuzzFeed’s revenue in 2019. That’s why we’re investing in it now and hope to see it contribute more to our work over time.”

And if you’re worried that this might be setting the stage for a paywall or meter on BuzzFeed News stories, Tozzi said flatly, “This is not a prelude to any sort of paywall.”

Knack, a peer tutoring platform aimed at college students, is taking a different approach than some online tutoring marketplaces have in the past. As a result, the Florida-based startup has raised a $1.5 million seed round co-led by Charles Hudson’s Precursor Ventures and Tampa Bay Lighting owner and Fenway Sports Group Partner, Jeff Vinik.

Other investors in the round include Bisk Ventures, the corporate venture-arm of Bisk Education; Arizona State University Enterprise Partners; Doug Feirstein, founder of Hired, uSell, and LiveOps; former State of Florida CFO Alex Sink; Tom DiBenedetto of Fenway Sports Group; PAR Inc.; and Elysium Venture Capital.

While many tutoring marketplaces have focused on only connecting students with others who could help them with their studies, Knack has instead also been focusing on adding institutional partners as its customers.

Today, it works with more than 50 colleges across the U.S., like seed investor ASU, which is licensing Knack to modernize their student support services and increase access to supplemental help for students.

“Although most universities already have on-campus tutoring centers,” explains company co-founder and CEO Samyr Qureshi, “Knack partners with institutions as a technology-enabled supplemental solution, filling in the gaps by increasing course and topical coverage for nuanced courses that campus learning centers may not be able to cover due to budgetary and resource constraints,” he says.

In addition, Knack is also now working with corporate employer sponsors like PwC and ConnectWise, which want to engage with high-potential students from Knack’s  campus networks.

“We’re focusing on the full life cycle of learning from ‘I need some help on Knack’ to ‘I can offer help through Knack’ to ‘my skills built and showcased through Knack helped me land a job,'” notes Qureshi.

The CEO says he was inspired to work in the edtech space because, as a first-generation immigrant, education has been at the forefront of his life. His mother brought Qureshi and his sister to the U.S. to allow them to pursue college degrees.

During his own time in school, Qureshi both sought tutoring and provided tutoring, which led him to believe that one of the best ways to learn was from a peer.

In 2016, the startup applied to the University of Florida’s Business Plan Competition and took home first place, winning a $25,000 cash prize. That opened the door to venture capital, and its first pre-seed round of funding.

While institutions and businesses are the focus in terms of monetization, Knack still caters directly to students today. Those who need help with their coursework can use Knack to book tutoring, and those who want to offer their skills can create a tutoring profile with basic info, like their bio, courses, rates and availability.

The platform then handles all the logistics, including searching, matching, scheduling, tracking, billing and rating and reviewing.

Knack takes a 20 percent service fee on this tier of its service. University partners are on a SaaS-based annual platform, and Employer partners are charged a sponsorship amount depending on their targeting criteria.

The team of eight is based in Tampa, Florida and plans to use the seed funding for sales and marketing, as well as making some key engineering hires, the CEO says.

Genies is emerging as the top competitor to Snapchat’s wildly popular Bitmoji as Facebook, Apple and Google have been slow to get serious about personalized avatars. More than one million people have customized dozens of traits to build a realistic digital lookalike of themselves from over a million possible permutations.

When Genies launched a year ago after raising $15 million in stealth, it misstepped by trying to show people’s Genies interpreting a few weekly news stories and seasonal moments. Now the startup has figured out users want more control, so it’s shifting its iOS and Android apps to let you chat through your avatar, which acts out keywords and sentiments in reaction to what you type, which you can then share elsewhere. And Genies is launching a software developer kit that charges other apps to let you create avatars and use them for chat, stickers, games, animations and augmented reality.

To power these new strategies and usher in what CEO Akash Nigam calls “the next wave of communication through avatars where people feel comfortable expressing themselves,” Genies has raised $10 million more. The party round comes from a wide range of investors, from institutional firms like NEA and Tull Co. to angels like Tinder’s Sean Rad, Raya’s Jared Morgenstern and speaker Tony Robbins; athletes like Carmelo Anthony, Kyrie Irving and Richard Sherman; and musicians, including A$AP Rocky, Offset from Migos, The Chainsmokers and 50 Cent. Some like Offset have even used their Genie to stand in for them for brand sponsorships, so their avatar poses for photos instead of them.

“We’ve transitioned from being an app to an avatar services company,” Nigam tells me. The son of WebMD’s co-founder, Nigam build a string of failed apps while at University of Michigan and worked with Genies co-founders Evan Rosenbaum and Matt Geiger on a startup called Blend that raised some money. Watching Snapchat-owned Bitmoji stay glued atop the app download charts inspired them to see more opportunity in the avatar space. Genies has had some talent issues, though. Nigam says it fired co-founder and president Matt Geiger, and a source tells me there were company culture issues that led to issues with the content writers it hired to create scenes for Genies to act out. Now it’s getting out of that scripted content creation business to focus on algorithmic suggestions of animations.

The revamped Genies app lets you chat with up to six friends through your avatar. As you type, Genies detects actions, places, things and emotions, and offers you corresponding animations your avatar acts out with a tap. Given people already have plenty of place to chat, it might be tough to get people to move real conversations inside Genies for more than a quick hit of novelty. But that functionality is also coming to Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and iMessage’s keyboards, where the expressive animations could naturally augment your threads.

With the Genies SDK, the startup is ready to challenge Snapchat’s new Snap Kit that lets apps build Bitmoji into their keyboards. But for $100,000 to $1 million in licensing fees, Genies allows apps to develop much deeper avatar features. Beyond creating keyboard stickers, games can plaster your Genies’ face over your character’s head, and utilities apps can have your Genie act out the weather or celebrate transactions. And since Genies is still taking off, partners can create experiences that feel fresh rather than just a repurposing of Bitmoji’s already-established cartoony avatars. Users spent an average of 19 minutes creating their Genie, so the SDK could add significant engagement to these apps. Genies has also launched its first official brand deal, where Gucci has created a wheel in the Genies creator so you can deck out your mini-you with luxury clothing.

Despite Bitmoji’s years of success, it’s yet to have a scaled competitor. TechCrunch broke the news that Facebook is working on a “Facebook Avatars” feature, but seven months later it’s still not publicly testing and the prototype looks childish. Google’s Gboard just added the ability to create avatars based on a selfie, but they’re bland, low on detail and far from fun looking. And Apple’s latest mobile operating system lets you create a Memoji, though they too look generic like actual emoji rather than something instantly identifiable as you. By designing avatars that not only look like you but like a cooler version of you, Genies could capture the hearts and faces of millions of teens and the influencers they follow.

A recent survey found that around 20 percent of all jobs in the U.S. are held by contractors — people who take on work based on a particular project or fixed-term period, not as full-time, permanent employees. We’ve definitely seen that trend play out in Silicon Valley, both among the knowledge workers building tech products and among the on-demand startups that rely on contractors to transport goods and people, clean homes and more. But it is also happening elsewhere.

Today, a startup called Wonolo, which has built a platform for workers to connect with businesses that need to staff up quickly specifically in labor-based roles in areas like retail, manufacturing and shipping — or, as it describes itself “other industries left behind by Silicon Valley’s future of work technologies” — has raised $32 million to meet the blue-collar demand.

The company says it now has 300,000 users registered on its platform, and it connects would-be workers with companies that include Coca-Cola, Papa John’s and Uniqlo. Employees can post jobs “in seconds” with jobs filled “in minutes,” with payment processed after a job is complete (pricing is not disclosed). Wonolo also vets workers before onboarding them to the platform.

The Series C round was led by Bain Capital, with participation from DAG Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Base10, AMN Healthcare and Cendana. Because VCs appear to be flush with money at the moment — Bain, for example, closed a $1 billion fund just last week — they are pumping a lot of it into the startups that look the most promising. Wonolo last raised money only seven months ago — a more modest $13 million led by Sequoia.

This latest round, the company said, will be used to expand its own staff (not clear if these will be contracted or salaried staff), as well as continue to expand its business.

The timing is important here. As of this week, we are now officially in the holiday period, which typically sees a seasonal bump in business that leads to the need for more temporary workers.

Companies hiring contractors might have in the past turned to staffing agencies to help fill that need — one kind of competitor for Wonolo.

These days, the rise of tech and an increasing prevalence of the contractor model has brought in a second track of competition — from Silicon Valley. Shiftgig is another startup that has created an efficient platform for would-be contractors to post their availability, and would-be employers to snap them up. (As a point of comparison, Shiftgig had some 15,000 workers and 1,500 companies/employers registered on its platform as of its last funding.) Uber has been trialing Uber Works for service contractors (wait staff, security and so on). There is Flexy in the U.K. And I wouldn’t be surprised at all if we see Amazon eventually turning its own temporary and contract staffing efforts into a wider business, given the pattern it has taken so many other products that it built first for its own internal use.

In that wider context, it’s not clear what Wonolo’s valuation is at the moment, but according to PitchBook the company had a modest post-money valuation of just under $48 million in April of this year. That would put Wonolo, at a conservative number, at just $80 million, but I’m guessing that the calibre of the backers, the rapidity of the funding rounds and the size of the business speaks to that figure being higher. (Wonolo has now raised $60 million in total.)

Contract employment becoming more common comes with a number of trade-offs. For the increased flexibility, and potentially strong income because you are filling an urgent need, you will often get fewer benefits with these roles, and far less job security. On the other hand, contract roles can become a very useful stopgap or top-up for people who either are between permanent roles or simply want to take on more hours to bump their income (hopefully not at the expense of their health or home life).

“When we founded Wonolo in 2014, we had a two-part goal of solving the underemployment epidemic for Americans while simultaneously eliminating the temporary staffing shortage large brands face,” said Yong Kim, CEO and co-founder at Wonolo, in a statement. “Over the past four years, we have scaled our business model and built a thriving marketplace that connects hundreds of thousands of underemployed workers with the jobs they need. Bain Capital Ventures is providing us with the opportunity to put Wonolo’s technology into the hands of major Fortune 500 companies to help upend traditional staffing models.”

Wonolo cites stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that found that “the number of open positions in the United States exceeded the number of job seekers for the first time on record.” Specifically, five million Americans were found to be “underemployed,” where they were working less than 30 hours per week. A marketplace like Wonolo’s potentially helps those people top up their hours elsewhere.

“Wonolo is reinventing the way people find hourly work. Their technology platform creates more flexibility for underemployed workers and fills hiring needs for understaffed companies insanely fast and at a disruptively lower cost,” said Jamison Hill, senior principal at Bain Capital Ventures, in a statement. “We are excited to support the Wonolo team in pursuing their grand mission of bringing flexible and fulfilling work to everyone.” Hill is joining Wonolo’s board with this round.

Interestingly, while it seems that contract employment is a model that is here to stay, Wonolo appears to be focused also on giving people the experience and connections to eventually try to catapult themselves into more full-time positions.

“We thought we could address [the idea of being able to deal with unpredictability] better than temp staffing, and we realized the antidote was flexibility on the worker side,” co-founder AJ Brustein told us in April of this year. “We could match them with these jobs that would unpredictably pop up. When we dug into it, we realized flexibility was something that was just completely lacking for workers. We took a very different approach to the way that people will often recruit talent for staffing agencies or their own employees. We are looking at character traits.”

Spencer Crawley is Co-founder of Firstminute Capital, based in London and focused on European startups.

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Lidar technology developer AEye will scale its operations globally through manufacturing partnerships after raising a $40 million Series B. The round was led by Taiwania Capital, the investment firm created and backed by Taiwan’s National Development Council, and includes returning investors Kleiner Perkins, Intel Capital, Airbus Ventures and Tychee Partners.

This brings the California-based startup’s total funding so far to about $61 million. In the announcement, founder and CEO Luis Dussan said Taiwania’s investment is a strategic one and will give AEye more access to manufacturing, logistics and tech resources in Asia. AEye also plans to launch a new product at CES in January.

In a press statement, Taiwania Capital’s managing partner Huang Lee said “We see AEye as the foremost innovator in this space, whose systems deliver highly precise, actionable information at speeds and distances never seen in commercially available lidar sensors. We look forward to working closely with AEye’s team to explore and pursue growth opportunities in this burgeoning space.”

Along with its funding, AEye also claimed it has set a new record for the distance from which a lidar system is able to detect and track a moving object. (Lidar stands for “light detection and ranging” and is used to create “point clouds,” or three-dimensional maps made of coordinates from laser pulses. Lidar has many applications, but a lot of attention is being paid to how it is used by autonomous vehicles and drones).

In tests monitored and validated by VSI Labs, a research company that focuses on autonomous-vehicle technology, AEye said that its iDAR sensor, which was launched earlier this year and combines a solid-state lidar and high-resolution camera in one device, was able to detect and track a moving truck from one kilometer away. AEye claims that this is four to five times the distance other current lidar systems can detect and is possible because iDAR is better able to mimic the way human brains process visual information. In a press statement, AEye chief of staff Blair LaCorte said the company believes iDAR can potentially track moving objects, including trucks and drones, from five kilometers to 10 kilometers away.

According to AC Nielsen and the Indian Federation of Sports Gaming, the number of online fantasy gaming operators doubled to 60 from 30 in 2017 and about 100 million Indians are estimated to play...

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“I wasn’t asking to pay in Bitcoin!” Plastiq CEO and co-founder Eliot Buchanan recalls with a laugh. “I went to pay part of my tuition at Harvard and I was told that they didn’t (and never would) accept credit cards. It was inconvenient and seemed odd. Credit cards had been around for 50 years.” That set off the a light bulb in his head. “Why couldn’t I use a credit card to pay for this important bill? So, I set out to solve my own problem.”

Whether you’re trying to pay your rent or tuition on credit, or you have a business and want to invest in a new opportunity or get a better rate by paying vendors up front, Plastiq can help. For a flat 2.5 percent fee, you pay Plastiq through your credit card, and it issues the proper wire transfer, check or deposit for up to $500,000, or even more, on your behalf to whomever you owe.

Now with more than 1 million clients, growth-stage VCs are taking notice. Kleiner Perkins has just led a $27 million Series C for Plastiq with partner Ilya Fushman joining the board. A source says the raise that also comes from DST Global between doubles and triples Plastiq’s valuation over its 2017 Series B-1 rounds of $11 million and $16 million. Now with $73 million in total funding, it plans to add 100 people to its current team of 60, while building out its small business product and bank partnerships.

“As tens of thousands of business owners started using Plastiq actively for billions of dollars in payments, we realized we had this incredible opportunity to serve as the hub/platform on which they (SMBs) could run all their payments. The very fabric of America’s economy — and certainly much of the world — is run by rising or aspiring small business owners,” Buchanan tells me. He says that’s “the main reason that seeded this Kleiner financing and our renewed vision to ‘accelerate how small businesses grow.’ [Helping people pay with credit cards] is merely the entry point to a much broader play where we are central to how a small business runs.”

For example, if a small business wants to ramp up production of something it’s selling, it’d typically have to pay up front for manufacturing, but wait months until the stuff is shipped and sold to recoup its investment. That can put a major squeeze on the company’s operating capital. With Plastiq, the business can pay with credit up front so they don’t have to worry about being in danger of running out of money in the meantime. Plastiq also lets businesses accept credit card payments, which can win them favor with partners.

Specialty medical clinic chain Metro Vein pays vendors who don’t take credit with Plastiq instead. “I was able to invest in a new line of business that has enabled me to more than double our revenues in the last 10 months,” said CEO Dmitri Ivanov. And thanks to tax write-offs, business users of Plastiq can push its realized fee down to 2 percent.

Buchanan claims Plastiq doesn’t have any direct competitors that allow SMBs to pay for all their bills via credit. It does carry platform risk, though. “Like any payments business, we rely heavily on Visa, MasterCard and American Express. A challenge or risk factor is that you’re relying on very large companies that are very successful. You have to learn to work hand in hand with those partners instead of ‘disrupt them.’” He says Plastiq’s relationships with them are positive right now since it’s driving new revenue for them and helping their customers spend in new areas.

There’s also the risk that people misuse Plastiq to procrastinate on actually paying their personal bills or get in over their head investing in their business. But Plastiq’s new board member Fushman calls the service “this elegant way for businesses to tap into credit they’ve been issued but they haven’t been able to utilize before.” For many who are happy to pay though just need some time and flexibility, Plastiq can pitch in.

VOI Technology, an e-scooter startup headquartered in Sweden but with pan-European ambitions, has raised $50 million in Series A funding, confirming our earlier scoop. As I previously reported, London-based venture capital firm Balderton Capital has led the round, alongside LocalGlobe, Raine Ventures and previous VOI backer Vostok New Ventures.

A number of angel investors also participated. They include Cristina Stenbeck, Jeff Wilkes (Amazon), Justin Mateen (co-founder of Tinder), Nicolas Brusson (CEO and co-founder of BlaBlaCar), Sebastian Knutsson (co-founder of King), Spencer Rascoff (CEO of Zillow) and Keith Richman.

A source with knowledge of VOI’s early fundraising tells me this is in actual fact two rounds effectively being announced at the same time, although both VOI and Balderton say this is not the case. The e-scooter startup had previously raised around $3 million earlier this year.

What I do know, however, is the size of this new round got increased significantly very late, as VOI continues to gain early traction and the round became more competitive with a lot of VC interest. According to my sources, the initial target was $15 million at a pre-money valuation of between $35-40 million. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to confirm the new valuation based on this much larger fundraise. Both VOI and Balderton declined to comment.

Launched in Sweden’s Stockholm in August 2018 by founders Fredrik Hjelm, Douglas Stark, Adam Jafer and Filip Lindvall, VOI has since expanded to Madrid, Zaragoza and Malaga in Spain. The plan is to use the new funding to continue to expand into new European markets. Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Italy, Norway and Portugal are said to be launching “in the coming months.” The VOI jobs page reveals that VOI is recruiting country managers for Denmark, Switzerland, Greece, Turkey and Finland, too.

Like other e-scooter startups, VOI pitches itself as a way to ease traffic-clogged city centers and reduce pollution, with VOI’s scooters offering a “clean, efficient, cost-effective and zero emission” first-and-last-mile alternative to cars and taxis. After downloading the VOI app, you simply locate a nearby scooter on the street or via the app’s map, press the “ride” button, scan the VOI QR code and ride anywhere in the city. The company charges a €1 unlocking fee and a ride costs €0.15 per minute.

In just 12 weeks, VOI claims to have garnered 120,000 users, who have taken 200,000 rides, travelling 350,000 kilometers. It says this makes VOI Europe’s leading e-scooter sharing company.

“We see that we’ve changed user behavior drastically in a very short time period,” VOI CEO Fredrik Hjelm tells me. “We changed how people commute, people move themselves. We changed how people transport within cities almost instantly after they try the scooters for the first time.”

He says this has resulted in “very strong retention rates, recurring use, and also friend referrals.”

“I’m from up in the North in Sweden, and for me it’s very difficult to understand, and it’s absurd, why we have so many cars and why our cities are built for cars, taxis and trucks, and not for people, animals, scooters, bikes, and light electric vehicles,” explains Hjelm. “That’s more from an ideological perspective. For me, scooters power freedom.”

VOI is also talking up its “distinctive” European approach in the way the company works collaboratively with city authorities. This is very different to the “ask for forgiveness not permission” mentality of Silicon Valley.

“When you are reading the news, you get the feeling that city politicians are against scooters. The reality is the other way around,” Hjelm says. “The only thing is that they want a say in this and how it should be operated, so we don’t end up in a scooter graveyard situation that we see in some U.S. cities… Pretty much every European city has some kind of ambition or vision to become less dependent on fossil fuel-driven cars and other vehicles.”

Balderton’s entrance into the e-scooter market comes after three of the other “big four” London VC firms have already made U.S. investments in the space. Index and Accel have backed Bird, and Atomico has backed Lime.

Last month also saw Berlin’s Tier raise €25 million in Series A funding led by Northzone, in another attempt to create the “Bird or Lime of Europe,” even if it is far from clear that Bird or Lime won’t take that title for themselves (which is obviously the bet being made by Index, Accel and Atomico). And two month’s ago Taxify also announced its intention to do e-scooter rentals under the brand Bolt, first launched in Paris but also planning to be pan-European.

This has led some VCs to describe the e-scooter space in Europe as a venture capital “blood bath” waiting to happen. The thinking is that the market has become so competitive so early, a lot of VC dollars are going to be spent (and potentially wasted) before it is far from clear who will be the eventual winner. That feels quite unusual for Europe, where it is more common for competing VCs to back off or co-invest once one or two of the big firms (or Rocket Internet) have made their move or when there is a better-funded U.S. competitor on the horizon — a point I put to Balderton partner Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen.

“Yeah, and I think if we kept doing that as a VC community, we would never see any billion-dollar companies coming out of Europe,” he replies. “This is why we’re backing VOI. [But] I get your point: it’s up against large amounts of capital.”

Describing e-scooters as a massive opportunity, Fjeldsoe-Nielsen says that in the last four weeks VOI has doubled its revenues and that Balderton is seeing the same kind of traction and market reaction as Bird and Lime in the U.S.

“We believe an equally big company can come out of Europe,” he adds.

This feature from Gartner ranks the top organizations across the healthcare value chain that demonstrate leadership in improving human life at sustainable costs. For this week’s posts, click on...

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Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Dafina Toncheva was recorded in August 2018. Dafina...

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Waikit Lau: My advice is whether you’re a tech guy or business guy, find your soulmate in some place in business. If you are a business guy, find your counterpart on the tech side. If you’re a tech...

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Sramana Mitra: Very good. Switching gears a bit, when you look around in your universe, what are the key trends and what are the open problems upon which a new entrepreneur could build a new...

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