It’s the best and worst of times for travel startups.

Massive growth over the past few decades has made tourism one of the big global industries, covering everything from recreation to business conferences to shopping sprees.

But doubts about the future of the industry are growing — and not just because of the novel coronavirus and COVID-19. The rise of remote work and the increasing stresses from tourism on urban and environmental systems portends tougher times ahead.

Given the spate of bad news the past few weeks swirling around global tourism startups, I wanted to go over where we are and what the future holds — and why that’s going to be so challenging for startups in this space.

With just over one month to go until its official launch date, the short-form, subscription streaming service Quibi has closed on $750 million in new financing, according to a report in the company’s private PR firm The Wall Street Journal.

The company declined to disclose exactly who invested in the new round (which is always a great sign) and didn’t comment on how the new investment would effect the company’s valuation.

Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman told the Journal that the new financing was made to ensure that the company would have the financial flexibility and runway to build a long-term business, but it’s likely that companies as diverse as Brandless and WeWork said the same thing about their goals when raising capital, as well.

Despite the doubt surrounding its success, Quibi managed to sell out of the initial $150 million in available advertising for the service’s first year.

Whether it’s as big of a hit with potential subscribers as with advertisers remains to be seen. The service could still become the Mike Bloomberg campaign of streaming media — a lot of money and no discernible result.

Lunchr has rebranded to Swile in order to expand its product offering beyond meal vouchers. The company wants to focus on everything that happens at work but that isn’t technically work — money pots for a birthday, paying back your co-workers, creating team-building events and more.

At heart, Swile provides a payment card for your lunch. French companies of a certain size have to support employees in one way or another when it comes to their lunch break. Big companies usually build out a cafeteria, while small companies hand out meal vouchers.

Companies can sign up to Swile so their employees all get a payment card for their meal vouchers. The company tops up everyone’s card every month. Just like challenger banks, Swile wants to provide a better user experience. For instance, you can associate a debit card with your account so that your debit card is used if you pay for an expensive lunch above your daily limit.

Currently 200,000 employees across 7,500 companies use a Swile card to pay for lunch.

But paying for lunch is just one of the financial transaction types that you do at work. And Swile wants to capture a bigger chunk of that market.

It starts with two simple features. First, you can pay back your co-workers when they lend you some money. It isn’t limited to lunch money; you can basically associate a debit card with your account, send money and hold money.

Old habits die hard, so it’s going to be hard to convince people to switch from Lydia to Swile. People already use Lydia to send money to their friends, and the company has managed to attract millions of users in France.

Second, many companies need to collect money from the team. It could be for a gift when somebody is leaving the company, it could be in order to buy beers or grab a drink after work on a Friday evening.

Employees can create money pots and invite the team. Given that everybody in your company has already created a Swile account, you don’t need to manually add your co-workers to the app — you just have to find their name in the directory. Swile doesn’t charge any fee on those money pots when you transfer the money to a Swile account or a bank account.

In addition to payment, Swile wants to help you connect more easily with your team. You can create and join events in the app. It could be useful for a birthday party at work, a soccer match, etc.

In the future, Swile also wants to add the ability to message your friends directly in the app — at some point, all apps become messaging apps. Also coming soon, Swile will help you bookmark places and share with your co-workers a map of your favorite places around the office.

Starting in June, even if your company doesn’t use Swile’s meal vouchers, you’ll be able to create an account for your team in order to use events, money pots, etc. Basic features will be free and Swile will introduce a premium tier later this year.

Enterprise software startups are changing how they infiltrate companies, and investors are taking note.

Last week, I chatted with Lerer Hippeau‘s Ben Lerer after his firm had just led a seed round in Air, a digital asset management platform. I used the opportunity to pick his brain about what he’s searching for in early-stage investments and which trends he believes are shaking up enterprise software.

Below is a chunk of our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

TechCrunch: What kinds of things are you looking at recently? Anything notable?

Ben Lerer: The market is always shifting, but 40,000 feet up, nothing has changed in that we’re always just focused on investing in people. But, beyond people, there’s certainly been various areas of opportunity that over the years we have had different kinds of focus on. One that I’ve been most focused on traditionally has been a category that would’ve been called direct-to-consumer brands. Now you would probably just call it “future of consumer” or “future of retail.” Now, I think direct-to-consumer is not the entire pie but just a piece of the pie. So generally my focus is doing consumer deals and then sometimes I focus on deals that are not necessarily consumer, but they’re SaaS businesses, often SaaS businesses that my consumer companies are current or potential customers of.

Neil Gurnhill: Our capacity is provided by a number of Lloyd’s of London syndicates. Lloyd’s of London is a very old and well-known institute for insurance. It’s conducted insurance for...

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We haven’t really covered Cyber Insurance thus far. Well, here we go… Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself and to the company. Neil Gurnhill: I’m the Founder and CEO of...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 475th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, March 5, 2020, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...

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According to a recent Research and Markets report, the global SaaS market is estimated at 13% CAGR to $220.21 billion by 2022 from $134.44 billion in 2018. SaaS-based financial and human resources...

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Lauri Kinkar: Back in 2001, we founded Mobi with a group of other people who were university students at that time. It was a telecommunication company. Over time, we started to go into new areas,...

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iPrice Group, which helps comparison shoppers in Southeast Asia by pulling together prices from different e-commerce platforms, has closed a $10 million Series B. Led by ACA Investments, the round also included participation from Daiwa PI Partners and returning investors Line Ventures, Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund.

The company’s last funding announcement, from Line’s venture capital arm, was in May 2018 and its new round brings iPrice’s total funding so far to about $19.8 million.

The company said it has more than 20 million monthly visitors and about 5 million transactions were made through its platforms in 2019. Its core iPrice unit accounted for about half of its revenue and operated at a 30% EBITDA margin, a level of profitability the company expects its other businesses to hit in the next two to three years.

iPrice will use its funding to develop product discovery features, including recommendations and professional product reviews. The platform currently partners with “super apps,” like Line and Home Credit, that offer a wide array of services, through one app.

iPrice began by collecting coupons and discount codes when it launched, before expanding into price aggregation to help consumers navigate the growing roster of e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia, such as Zalora, Shoppee and Lazada.

The platform is divided into verticals, including electronics and appliances, fashion and automotive, and now claims to aggregate more than 1.5 billion products from more than 1,500 e-commerce partners. It says it is the leading product aggregator in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

In a press statement, ACA Investments chief investment officer Tomohiro Fujita said, “The e-commerce industry in Southeast Asia is at its emerging stage and we see huge potential. iPrice Group will play an important role, especially with its comprehensive coverage of markets in Southeast Asia. It’s the prime gateway to online shopping.”

French startup Le Wagon has raised its first round of funding after many years of bootstrapping. The company closed a $19 million funding round (€17 million) a few months ago. Cathay Capital is leading the round with AfricInvest also participating.

“We’ve always bootstrapped since 2013 and we’ve always been profitable since day one,” Le Wagon co-founder and COO Romain Paillard told me. “Structurally, all of our metrics are doing well but we wanted to increase our resources.”

Le Wagon is an interesting story of a slow iteration of a successful product. The company has been laser-focused on a single course for most of its lifetime — a highly rated full-stack web development course. There are now 38 campuses around the world across two dozens of countries (but not the U.S.) offering this course.

But Le Wagon wants to go one step further. With today’s funding round, the startup hopes to widen its reach with both new courses and new countries. And it starts with a new data science course. It is only available in a handful of cities for now, but Le Wagon hopes to offer the new course across all its campuses.

The company has also been working on a new format. Instead of committing to a 9-week full-time bootcamp, you can apply to a part-time course on Tuesday night, Thursday night and Saturday. It takes longer to complete the course, but it could be particularly useful if you have a family and kids — maybe you can’t afford to leave your job or take a sabbatical.

Once again, part-time courses are live in a handful of cities for now. Le Wagon hopes to replicate the same offering across all its campuses.

Le Wagon Executive is another project that has been promising but is still underdeveloped. The company started offering courses to big corporate clients to train top talent. Clients include Axa, BNP Paribas, L’Oréal or LVMH. “For now, it’s only a small part of our business because it’s still the very beginning,” Paillard said.

As you can see, Le Wagon has a ton of ideas to grow its business, but it’s hard to iterate at a fast, global pace when you’re still bootstrapped. The company will now be able to reproduce things that are working well in Paris across all other countries much more easily.

And after that, you can expect more courses and more countries. But Le Wagon still wants to build a uniformized coding school and remain in control of its courses. That’s how Le Wagon managed to reach that scale in the first place.

Popular music app publisher MWM has raised a $55.9 million (€50 million) funding round. Blisce/ is leading the round with Idinvest Partners, Bpifrance (Large Venture fund), Aglaé Ventures and Xavier Niel also participating.

Some of MWM’s apps include edjing Mix, Beat Maker Pro, Drum Machine, Beat Snap 2, TaoMix 2, Guitar and Drums. The company has slowly expanded to cover more grounds in the music space, from production to learning, gaming and utilities.

Up next, MWM wants to expand beyond music and tackle new verticals in the creative space. And the company seems well-positioned to reproduce some of its successes as MWM has attracted over 400 million app downloads over the years.

Some of those verticals are already quite busy, such as video and photo editing. But MWM hopes that it’ll be able to become a sort of Adobe for mobile creativity apps.

The startup has also launched hardware products. Its latest product Phase lets you turn good old turntables into digital DJ controllers. After plugging a receiver to your mixer, you just have to put two tiny receivers at the center of your turntables, on top of records.

MWM was founded in 2012. It has attracted $67 million (€60 million) of funding in total. The company currently has 70 employees across two offices in Paris and Bordeaux.

Robinhood, the startup with a stock trading app valued upwards of at least $7.6 billion, suffered one of its worst outages on one of the busiest trading days of the year.

As the Dow Jones Industrial Average enjoyed the single biggest point-gain since 2009, Robinhood’s application fell prey to an error that locked users out of the service for the duration of Monday’s trading.

“We started experiencing downtime issues across our platform this morning at market open,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “We don’t have an estimate when the issue will be resolved but all of us at Robinhood are working as hard as we can to resume service.”

One potential cause of the outages could just be the high trading volumes that have accompanied highly volatile markets over the past month. While there were some early reports that the bug was caused by a Leap Day bug, the company has denied that a February 29th error was at fault.

The company’s mistake could cost its users lots of money as they sought to trade on stocks that were hit in last week’s string of losses due to investor worries over the impact the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, would have on the global economy.

This isn’t the first time that Robinhood’s code has got the company into trouble. Last year, faulty coding allowed users to borrow more money than the company intended, giving a potential windfall to would-be traders.

Back in 2013 when the founders of the company discussed their idea around TechCrunch reporter Josh Constine’s kitchen table, they envisioned the app as a way to share hot tips. That quickly morphed into a trading platform that the company says has more than 10 million users on its platform.

The secret to the company’s initial success was free stock trading — a pricing model which many of its competitors have since gone on to copy.

According to Apptopia, Robinhood is far and away the most popular of the free stock trading services, having far more volume and users than its legacy contenders. However, as today’s outage showed, that user base may be negatively impacted by not working with companies who have had their services stress tested over decades. Even so, the big trading houses have also experienced technical issues over the past week, as CNBC reported earlier today.

Lauri takes us into a country that has done amazingly well in developing a technology and startup culture. Fascinating! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you...

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Sonantic, a U.K. startup that has developed “human-quality” artificial voice technology for the games and entertainment industry, has raised €2.3 million in funding.

Leading the round is EQT Ventures, with participation from existing backers, including Entrepreneur First (EF), AME Cloud Ventures and Bart Swanson of Horizons Ventures. I also understand one of the company’s earlier investors is Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin.

Founded in 2018 by CEO Zeena Qureshi and CTO John Flynn as they went through EF’s company builder programme in London, Sonantic (previously Speak Ai) says it wants to disrupt the global gaming and entertainment voice industry. The startup has developed artificial voice tech that it claims is able to offer “expressive, realistic voice acting” on-demand for use by game studios. It already has R&D partnerships underway with more than 10 AAA game studios.

“Getting dialogue into game development is a slow, expensive and labour-intensive task,” says Qureshi, when asked to define the problem Sonantic wants to solve. “Dialogue pipelines consist of casting, booking studios, contracts, scheduling, editing, directing and a whole lot of coordination. Voiced narrative video games can take up to 10 years to make with game design changing frequently, defaulting game devs to carry out several iteration cycles — often leading to going over budgets and game releases being delayed.”

To help remedy this, Sonantic offers what Qureshi dubs “dynamic voice acting on-demand,” with the ability to craft the exact type of character in terms of gender, personality, accent, tone and emotional state. The startup’s human quality text-to-speech system is offered via an API and a graphical user interface tool that lets its synthetic voice actors be edited, sculpted and directed “just like a human actor,” she tells me.

This sees Sonantic work directly with actors to synthesise their voices whilst also harnessing their unique skills in performance. “We then augment how actors work by offering them a digital version of themselves that can create passive income for them,” explains the Sonantic CEO.

For the games studios, Sonantic offers faster iteration cycles at a cheaper price because it cuts down logistical costs and has voice models ready to perform. Its SaaS model and API also makes it easier to create audio performances to test out potential narratives or to finesse a story, helping with editing and directing.

Meanwhile, Sonantic says it is gearing up to publicly reveal how its technology can capture “deep emotions across the full spectrum,” from subtle all the way through to exaggerated, which it says is usually something only very skilled actors can achieve.

Last week, I sat down with Connie Chan, a general partner with Andreessen Horowitz who focuses on investing in consumer tech. She joined the firm in 2011 after working at HP in China.

From her temporary offices located in a modest skyscraper with unobscured views of San Francisco, we talked about where she sees the biggest opportunities right now, along with how big of an impact fears over coronavirus could have on the startup industry — and for how long.

Our conversation has been edited for length. You can also find a longer version of our chat in podcast form.

TechCrunch: There’s so much money flowing into the Bay Area and startups generally from all over the world. What happens if that slows down because of the coronavirus?

Connie Chan: It’s interesting, I was just talking to a friend of mine who is an investor in Asia, in China. And she said that some industries are going to suffer significantly. Restaurants, for example, are hurting [along with] any store that relies on foot traffic [like] bookstores and so forth. Yet you see a lot of companies also doing really well in this time. You’ll see grocery delivery as something that’s in high demand. Insurance is in very high demand. People are spending more time at home, so whether it’s games or streaming or whatever they’re doing at home is doing well. Lots of my counterparts in China are also taking all their pitches via video conference. They’re still doing work, but they’re all just working from home.

Where do you think we’ll see the biggest impact most immediately?

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: 473rd 1Mby1M Roundtable February 20, 2020: With Ashish Jain, 3Lines Ventures

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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: 472nd 1Mby1M Roundtable February 13, 2020: With Deepak Jeevankumar, Dell Technologies Capital

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