SumUp, the London-based fintech company that enables small businesses to take card payments via its device and online, is launching its own pre-paid card in partnership with Mastercard.

Dubbed “SumUp Card,” the new offering will enable merchants to gain quicker to access funds collected via SumUp as it will no longer require money to be transferred out to a third-party bank account first.

The idea — and especially useful for cash-flow constrained micro-businesses — is that the new card can be used for all business payments. In addition, SumUp merchants have access to other benefits, such as guaranteed next-day payouts (including on weekends) and low FX rates. It means SumUp now covers collecting and making payments, evolving into a banking app of sorts.

The SumUp Card, which supports online, contactless, and Chip-and-PIN payments, has no upfront cost or monthly fee. It is available immediately in the U.K., Italy and France, with plans to extend the service to further territories in the next 12 months.

“SumUp Card is a beneficial tool for merchants to get their payouts quicker, including on weekends, and control the cash flow,” a SumUp spokesperson tells TechCrunch. “It also allows merchants to have an overview of their finances in one place. Merchants can further keep money on the card and use it for paying business expenses, separating personal and business cash flows”.

More broadly, the pain point SumUp is trying to solve is that working capital is one of the biggest costs for small businesses, and by allowing them to shorten their cash cycles, it aims to help those businesses become more viable.

“Following feedback from SumUp merchants, it was clear that quicker payments and uninterrupted access to funds were particularly important to those running a micro-business, and who may not be able to open a traditional business account,” adds the spokesperson.

“The cost associated with opening a business account at a traditional bank is prohibitive for the small merchants as banks avoid serving this segment and are not able to do so profitably. In our merchant interviews, we heard feedback from a U.K. merchant that getting a business bank account is like getting married: as soon as you say it’s a wedding the cost doubles. SumUp Card allows these merchants to separate their personal accounts from their day-to-day business, removing friction in the process”.

Voodoo Games is one of the most interesting startups alive today. In mid-2018, it had 150 million MAUs and raised $200 million from Goldman Sachs, yet I’ve never heard anyone mention the company. That might be normal for an obscure enterprise SaaS play, but Voodoo is consumer-facing through and through.

Quantitative success aside, Voodoo upends much of the conventional thinking about product design and gaming. If it can do it, how can similar strategies apply to other products?

But first, some background: What is Voodoo Games?

Voodoo is best described as a product conglomerate. Take a look at its App Store page. It has dozens of generic-looking apps. The basic playbook is:

Despite the rapid growth of e-commerce in India, Southeast Asia and other emerging markets, the vast majority of retail transactions there still happen offline in small stores that also serve as neighborhood hubs.

The central role these stores play in their communities led GGV Capital to develop what the firm refers to as its mom-and-pop shop investment thesis. This means backing startups that help small retailers digitize operations, tap into better supply chains and serve as delivery points in markets where logistics and online payment infrastructures are still developing. In turn, GGV’s managing partners believe this will lay the groundwork for stronger e-commerce growth.

Companies that GGV has already invested in under this thesis include B2B e-commerce platform Udaan and Telio, bookkeeping app KhataBook and social commerce startup Shihuituan (also called Nice Tuan) in China.

A sociological approach to e-commerce investment

GGV managing partner Hans Tung says the mom-and-pop shop thesis means looking at consumers’ shopping habits across countries and understanding why they are different from a historical and social perspective. During his career, Tung has observed e-commerce develop in markets including the United States, China, Japan, Taiwan, India, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Offline shopping habits, population density, transportation infrastructure and credit card penetration all played a factor in how e-commerce evolved in each of those places.

“You realize e-commerce doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists as a substitute for what is happening in the offline world,” he says. “Mobile payment doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It just fulfills the same needs with a different method. It was a substitution for what was happening in the offline world with credit card and debit card penetration.”

After WeWork exploded there was — at least supposedly — a change in sentiment among investors and founders alike. Gone were the days of easy nine-figure rounds, expensive growth, negative unit economics and the rest of the excess that Startupland has enjoyed over the past half-decade.

Inside this purported sentiment shift, I presumed, was a decrease in optimism; surely venture capitalists and entrepreneurs would change their behavior inside this new paradigm?

But by some measures, they haven’t. I expected that startups would achieve more conservative proximate valuations in the post-WeWork world, as their leaders would aim to raise a bit less, and a bit more conservatively, and investors would be less starry-eyed in the prices they were willing to pay for startup equity.

That was all wrong, it turns out. A recent report from Fenwick and West, a legal firm that works with technology companies, paints a picture that is the complete opposite of what we might have anticipated.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised; our recent reporting hardly describes a market in slowdown. Boston is having a good start to the year, for example. SaaS is also looking healthy from a venture capital perspective. Cloud stocks are at all-time highs and One Medical is still defying gravity as a public stock. Whatever lesson WeWork was supposed to teach, it doesn’t appear to have made much impact.

Let’s explore the Fenwick data and then ask if we can spot anywhere where the markets are behaving like the chastened children that we were told had taken over.

Up and to the right

Remember when Zenefits imploded, and kicked out CEO Parker Conrad. Well, Conrad launched a new employee onboarding startup called Rippling, and now he’s going after another HR company called Gusto with a new billboard, “Outgrowing Gusto? Presto change-o.”

The problem is, Gusto got it taken down by issuing a cease & desist order to Rippling and the billboard operator Clear Channel Outdoor. That’s despite the law typically allowing comparative advertising as long as it’s accurate. Gusto sells HR, benefits and payroll software, while Rippling does the same but adds in IT management to tie together an employee identity platform.

Rippling tells me that outgrowing Gusto is the top reasons customers say they’re switching to Rippling. Gusto’s customer stories page lists no customers larger than 61 customers, and Enlyft research says the company is most often used by 10 to 50-person staffs. “We were one of Gusto’s largest customers when we left the platform last year. They were very open about the fact that the product didn’t work for businesses of our size. We moved to Rippling last fall and have been extremely happy with it,” says Compass Coffee co-founder Michael Haft.

That all suggests the Rippling ad’s claim is reasonable. But the C&D claims that “Gusto counts as customers multiple companies with 100 or more employees and does not state the businesses will ‘outgrow’ their platfrom at a certain size.”

In an email to staff provided to TechCrunch, Rippling CMO Matt Epstein wrote, “We take legal claims seriously, but this one doesn’t pass the laugh test. As Gusto says all over their website, they focus on small businesses.”

So rather than taking Gusto to court or trying to change Clear Channel’s mind, Conrad and Rippling did something cheeky. They responded to the cease & desist order in Shakespeare-style iambic pentameter.

Our billboard struck a nerve, it seems. And so you phoned your legal teams,
who started shouting, “Cease!” “Desist!” and other threats too long to list.

Your brand is known for being chill. So this just seems like overkill.
But since you think we’ve been unfair, we’d really like to clear the air.

Rippling’s general counsel Vanessa Wu wrote the letter, which goes on to claim that “When Gusto tried to scale itself, we saw what you took off the shelf. Your software fell a little short. You needed Workday for support,” asserting that Gusto’s own HR tool couldn’t handle its 1,000-plus employees and needed to turn to a bigger enterprise vendor. The letter concludes with the implication that Gusto should drop the cease-and-desist, and instead compete on merit:

So Gusto, do not fear our sign. Our mission and our goals align.
Let’s keep this conflict dignified—and let the customers decide.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. HQ Trivia shuts down after acquisition falls through

HQ Trivia is dead. On Valentine’s Day, the company laid off its full team of 25. The company had a deal in the works to be acquired, but the buyer pulled out and the investors aren’t willing to fund it any longer, according to a statement from CEO and co-founder Rus Yusupov.

At least the game went out with a bonkers finale, where the hosts cursed, sprayed champagne, threatened to defecate on the homes of trolls in the chat window and begged for new jobs.

2. Living with the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip

Brian Heater says he enjoyed his (admittedly brief) time with the Galaxy Z Flip. In fact, in many ways, it’s exactly the device that Samsung’s original foldable should have been.

3. Google ends its free Wi-Fi program Station

Google is winding down Google Station, a program where it worked with partners to bring free Wi-Fi to more than 400 railway stations in India and “thousands” of other public places in several additional pockets of the world.

4. Facebook pushes EU for dilute and fuzzy internet content rules

“I do think that there should be regulation on harmful content,” said CEO Mark Zuckerberg during a Q&A session at the Munich Security Conference. He then suggested that Facebook should fall “somewhere in between” media and telco regulation.

5. Is tech socialism really on the rise?

In the second part of our interview with writer/ethicist Ben Tarnoff, he goes in-depth on the relationship between socialism and technology. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Oyo’s revenue surged in FY19, but loss widened, too

Budget-lodging startup Oyo on Monday reported a loss of $335 million on $951 million revenue globally for the financial year ending March 31, 2019, and pledged to cut down on its spending as the India-headquartered firm grows cautious about its aggressive expansion. (Yes, it seems a bit late to be talking about earnings from 2018-19, but that’s how Indian finance law works.)

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The latest full episode of Equity discusses a big funding round for meditation app Headspace, while its Monday news roundup looks at global growth concerns due to coronavirus. And over at Original Content, we’ve got a review of “Mythic Quest,” the video game-focused comedy on Apple TV+.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Late last week two Boston-based companies raised big rounds. The size of the two investments — each over the $100 million mark — and their rapid succession made them stand out.

The pair of investments raised a question: Is Boston seeing an acceleration in the pace at which it attracts venture capital? Of course, Toast raising $400 million and Flywire raising $120 million within a day of each other does not, by itself, constitute a trend. So we’ve pulled some recent, and historical data from Boston to figure out what’s up.

Today let’s take a look at how many rounds of $50 million or more, and $100 million or more, have been raised in Boston so far in 2020 compared to the city’s full-year 2019 results from each category. We’ll be able to see if Boston is ahead of the pace it set last year. This will let us know if Boston’s venture scene is heating up, or cooling thus far in 2020. (Recall that we wrote about the Northeast in December, and found its venture activity to be intense.)

We’ll start with a quick peek at the Flywire and Toast rounds, and then dig into the data.

Winged Bread

Toast, Boston’s restaurant payment processing unicorn, put together $400 million in fresh funding last week, adding to its preceding haul of just over $500 million in known capital. The company, founded in 2011, has now raised $902 million, according to Crunchbase.

Americans are saddled with $1.2 trillion in auto loans, according to data collected by the Federal Reserve. And while that debt can be refinanced, even U.S. car owners who know it’s an option face a complicated task.

MotoRefi, a new fintech startup that was born out of QED Investors in 2017, says it has developed an auto refinancing platform that handles the entire process, from rooting out the best rates to paying off the old lender and re-titling the vehicle.

Now, the company is preparing to scale up and bring its platform to the masses, with $8.6 million in capital raised in a Series A funding round co-led by Accomplice and Link Ventures. Motley Fool Ventures, CMFG Ventures (part of CUNA Mutual Group) and Gaingels also participated in the round. The round follows $4.7 million in seed funding that MotoRefi announced in March 2019.

MotoRefi is also gaining two new board members, Rob Chaplinsky, managing director of Link Ventures, and Rachel Holt, former Uber executive and co-founder of a new VC firm, Construct Capital.

Auto loan debt is the same as student loan debt in the U.S., said MotoRefi CEO Kevin Bennett. And yet the majority of car owners don’t know that refinancing their auto loan is even an option, he added. A 2017 Harris Poll found that 47% of Americans were aware they could refinance their auto loan.

“People shop their home loans, while most just get their auto loans from the dealership where they bought their car, so their rates are artificially high,” Bennett said in a recent interview. “Meanwhile, credit unions can be great for auto loans but they might not have the tools to reach consumers.”

That’s where MotoRefi hopes to step in. Bennett said the MotoRefi platform can save customers an average of $100 per month on their car payments.

Holt, who was an early investor in MotoRefi, said during her time at Uber she saw firsthand the amount of auto loans drivers were carrying. Dealerships aren’t making money on selling cars, they’re making it on financing, Holt said. “I saw this problem and so I was looking out for startups trying to solve this problem,” she added.

The U.S. auto refinancing market is about $40 billion, according to TransUnion. But that market could be two to three times that size, according to data shared at TransUnion Financial Services Summit. It’s an opportunity that has prompted companies like Lending Tree to launch auto refinancing products.

MotoRefi is already scaling up by adding new lenders and partners, according to Bennett. The new funding will be used to hire more employees and invest in its technology platform.

The startup also launched in January separate pilot programs with Progressive and Chime. Under these pilots, Progressive and Chime will directly offer refinance options to their customers in addition to working with affiliate programs such as Credit Karma — a company backed by QED Investors.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you finding the most traction right now? Anthony Minessale: Something that’s really big right now is that the customer has learned how to use VoIP. The carrier industry is...

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Sramana Mitra: Where are you finding the most traction right now? Anthony Minessale: Something that’s really big right now is that the customer has learned how to use VoIP. The carrier industry is...

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Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years don’t worry — we’re not changing the main show.

Here’s last week’s episode with Danny Crichton and Bessemer’s Elliott Robinson which I really enjoyed. And, we just posted the video from that taping, in case you wanted to see what a podcast looks like IRL. Spoiler: It’s mostly a bunch of microphones and cables and nerds.

Turning to the news, global growth concerns stemming from the coronavirus outbreak are starting to come true, with Singapore changing its own forecasts. Singapore now expects either slower growth, or negative expansion in 2020. That’s bad news. And, Japan’s economy was on the ropes even before the virus really slowed things down. Expect more of this to keep happening.

Also this weekend there was yet another tech-media dustup. If you missed it, you didn’t miss much.

The week ahead looks pretty tame. No major earnings reports or IPOs are on our horizon, though Dropbox, Wix and Zscaler will report. If you are a SaaS person, that’s for you.

We then talked about Dovetail, Copper, Seez, and Bosta — bringing the morning venture update together with a theme, a first I think for Equity Monday.

All that and we wrapped with Oyo’s most recently disclosed financial performance. Surprise, it contained a lot of growth and quickly expanding losses.

PullRequest, a startup that provides code review as a service, announced today that it was buying Moonlight, an early-stage startup that has built an online platform for hiring remote developers. The companies did not share the terms.

Lyal Avery, founder and CEO at PullRequest, says he bought this company to expand his range of services. “Our platform is at a place where we’re very confident about our ability to identify issues. We’re moving to the next phase of fixing issues automatically. In order to do that, we have to have access to people producing code. So with the developers on our platform that are currently reviewers, as well as the Moonlight folks, we can start to fix the issues we identify, and also attach that to our learning processes,” Avery explained.

This fits with the company’s vision of eventually automating common fixes. It’s currently working on building machine learning models to facilitate that automation. Moonlight gives PullRequest access to the platform’s data, which can help train and perfect the beta models on which the company is working.

Avery says his vision isn’t to replace human developers so much as to make them faster and more efficient than they are today. He says that from the time a bug is found in website code to the time it gets fixed is on average about six hours. He wants to reduce that to 20 minutes, and he believes that buying Moonlight will give him more data to get to that goal faster, while also expanding the range of services from code review to issue remediation.

It’s fairly unusual for a startup that has raised just over $12 million (according to Crunchbase data) to be out shopping for another, but Avery sees buying small companies like Moonlight as an excellent way to fill in gaps in the platform, while offering an easier path to expansion.

Moonlight is a small shop with just two employees, both who will be joining PullRequest, but it has 3,000 developers on the platform, which PullRequest can now access. For now, Avery says the companies will remain separate, and Moonlight will continue to operate its own website under the PullRequest umbrella.

Moonlight is based in Brooklyn; it had raised an unidentified pre-seed round before being acquired today. PullRequest, which is based in Austin, was a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2017 cohort. It raised a $2.3 million seed round in December, 2017 and another $8 million in April, 2018.

According to IDC, small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are expected to spend approximately $65 billion in 2019 on software in the U.S. Bill.com, which recently went public, is a leading cloud-based...

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According to IDC, small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are expected to spend approximately $65 billion in 2019 on software in the U.S. Bill.com, which recently went public, is a leading cloud-based...

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Sramana Mitra: Gaming has been a very big advertiser base for mobile apps. I don’t see any reason why gaming would not be a good reason to go into. Zain Jaffer: Investors were not very keen on gaming...

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Sramana Mitra: Gaming has been a very big advertiser base for mobile apps. I don’t see any reason why gaming would not be a good reason to go into. Zain Jaffer: Investors were not very keen on gaming...

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Budget-lodging startup Oyo on Monday reported a loss of $335 million on $951 million revenue globally for the financial year ending March 31, 2019, and pledged to cut down on its spending as the India-headquartered firm grows cautious about its aggressive expansion.

The six-year-old startup’s growing revenue, up from $211 million in financial year ending March 31, 2018 (FY18), is in line with the company’s ambitions to be in a clear path to profitability this year, said Abhishek Gupta, Global CFO of OYO Hotels & Homes, in a statement.

But the startup’s loss has widened, too. Its consolidated loss at $335 million in FY19 rose over sixfold from $52 million in FY18. In India, where Oyo clocked $604 million in revenue in FY19 (up 2.9X since FY18), it was able to reduce its loss to 14% (from 24%) of revenue in FY19 to $83 million.

Indian laws require every local startup — and international businesses — to disclose their annual financials. Most of them filed their financials in early October.

The startup, which today operates more than 43,000 hotels with over a million rooms in 800 cities in 80 nations, said its expansion in China and other international markets contributed to the loss. Oyo entered China in 2018, and says the world’s most populated nation has already become its second largest market.

“These markets constituted 36.5% of the global revenues. While consistently improving operating economics in mature markets like India where it’s already seeing an improvement in gross margins, the company is determined to bring in the same fiscal discipline in emerging markets in the coming financial year,” the startup said in a statement.

Aditya Ghosh, who served as a chief executive of the startup and is now a board member, said in a call with reporters that since Oyo entered a number of markets last year it was in the growth phase and that needed some investments. Speaking especially of China, Ghosh said the company, like many others, is watching the outbreak of coronavirus that has resulted in shutting down some hotels.

He also said that the startup is not looking to enter more markets for now.

It is now working on improving its gross margin. In India, its gross margin increased to 14.7% from 10.6% as of FY18.

Oyo has come under scrutiny in recent months for its aggressive expansion in a manner that some analysts have said is not sustainable. The startup, which rebrands and renovates independent budget hotels, has also engaged in sketchy ways to sign up new hotels, as documented by the New York Times earlier this year. Several hoteliers have claimed that Oyo did not honor its agreements and owed them money.

In 2019, Oyo, which counts Airbnb among its investors, expanded in Europe and the U.S. among other markets. It bought Leisure Group from Axel Springer for $415 million to targer Europe’s vacation rental market — and announced plans to invest another $335 million for this effort. In the same month, it announced it had acquired the Hooters Casino Hotel Las Vegas for about $135 million in its first U.S. property purchase.

It also entered Japan in a partnership with SoftBank. Bloomberg reported on Sunday that Oyo currently has about 7,500 rooms in the country, less than 1% of its 1 million ambitious target.

In recent months, Oyo executives have acknowledged that the startup grew too fast and is confronting a number of “teething issues.” Oyo has laid off at least 3,000 employees, mostly in India, in last three months. Ghosh said the startup is still hiring for new roles, but only in key areas such as data science.

“The company’s increased focus on corporate governance and building a high-performing and employee-first work culture will also drive this next phase of sustainable growth for us,” said Gupta.

This feature from Financial Times covers the highlights of the 56th edition of the Munich Security Conference (MSC) held this week. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links. Tech...

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This feature from Financial Times covers the highlights of the 56th edition of the Munich Security Conference (MSC) held this week. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links. Tech...

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Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you switched from that open-source based services company to a product company. That product company is SignalWire? Anthony Minessale: Yes. Sramana Mitra: Did you build...

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