Sramana Mitra: Could you switch gears and tell me what you see out there as open problems around which people could be starting new companies? Patrick Mullane: That’s a broad question. I see a lot of...
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French crowd-lending platform October (formerly known as Lendix), wants to educate more people about new ways to borrow money. That’s why the company is launching a project called Grandir Ensemble (grow together).
11 big companies are borrowing €100,000 each on October at a 2.5 percent interest rate. October users will be able to lend as little as €20 to one of these companies.
If you look at the list of companies, all those names will sound familiar to French readers and beyond. Most of them are public companies, most of them are originally from France — AccorHotels, Adecco Group, Allianz France, Arkéa, Edenred, Engie, Iliad, JCDecaux, Suez, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield and Webhelp.
According to October, annual revenue of those companies ranges from €1.8 billion to €122 billion, with Allianz generating more revenue than anyone else.
At a press conference, October co-founder and CEO Olivier Goy explained the idea behind this project. Those credit lines won’t change anything for big public companies. But many of those companies work with small and medium companies.
Today’s partners will be able to refer small companies. October will wave the application fees for those companies up to €11 million in loans.
Thanks to this vote of confidence, you could imagine small companies applying to October because a big company they trust has done it before.
France’s Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire recorded a video message for the press conference, saying that he supports October and today’s campaign.
One of October’s key advantages compared to borrowing money from the bank is that it’s much faster. You can apply to a credit line and get an answer just a few days later. This is quite useful if you need to move quickly to launch a new product, open a new office and more.
October currently operates in France, Spain, Italy and soon the Netherlands. I already covered the company in depth back in June if you want to read more.
There’s hardly enough room to turn around in Livin Farms’ office. Pretty standard, really, in Central, Hong Kong, where space is at a perpetual premium. It’s a small operation for the HAX-backed startup — there’s space for a few desks and not much more. The startup’s last product, the Hive, stands next to the door. It’s a series of innocuous trays stacked atop one another.
But it’s the Hive Explorer I’m here to see. The small tray sits in the middle of the room. Its top is open, the brightly colored bits of plastic drawing the eye from the moment you step through the door. Its contents pulsate with strange, random rhythms. Upon closer inspection, the browns are whites and blacks are alive, a small bed of mealworms wriggle atop one other, chowing down of the remnants of oats left behind by the team.
Above them, a neon yellow tray houses a trio of fully grown beetles and a couple dozen pupae. The former are constant on the move, butting up against one another and sometimes doing more with aims of continuing the life cycle. The pupae lie around, seemingly lifeless, occasionally twitching out a reminder that there’s still life inside.
The Explorer finds Livin Farms broadening its horizons into the world of STEM education. Where past products were focused on scalable sustainability, the new Kickstarter project is firmly targeted at youngsters. And there’s a fair amount to be learned in the bucket full of beetles. Mortality, for one. Founder Katharina Unger grabs a nearby jar and twists off the cap.
It’s filled to the top with dried mealworms. She pulls one out and pops it in her mouth, handing it to me, hopefully. I follow suit. It’s crispy. Not flavorless, exactly, but not particularly distinct. Maybe a bit salty. Mostly it just feels overwhelmingly morbid, showing down on on a little larva as its brothers continue to feast a few inches away.
Protein source of the future, now, to quote The Mountain Goats. Livin Farms also produces a unflavored larva-based powder and a surprising tasty granola as a kind of proof concept for its sustainable high-protein foodstuffs. The mission hits home here in one of the world’s most densely packed places.
[She gave me some to take home, if anyone’s hungry.]
The Explorer also offers youngsters a peak at what many consider the future of sustainable farming — assuming food manufacturers are ever able to break through the stigma of eating insects. Kids are encourage to harvest the larva to avoid overpopulation with a bit of dry roasting. The box serves as a relatively odor-free form of composting. Feeding the bugs simply entails tossing excess foodstuffs into the bin. The little buggers will tear through it, leaving a thin powder of waste in a tray below.
The setup also features a heat plate to keep the worms warm and a fan to regulate humidity, assuring that settings are ideal for the beetles to do their thing. Livin Farms is also opening up the controls to the system via Swift, in an attempt to bring a coding component to the system.
The Explorer went live on Kickstarter this week. Early bird pledges can pick up a the box of worms for ~$113.
Sramana Mitra: These are banks in the UK? What kind of banks are we talking about? Alexander Ross: These are tier-one and tier-two European and US banks. What we find is that given that every company...
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Sramana Mitra: I don’t know if you have seen it on our blog. We have a Thought Leaders in Cyber Security series. Ray has actually been on it. He’s running a company these days. In that series, one of...
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Machine learning is everywhere now, including recruiting. Take CV Compiler, a new product by Andrew Stetsenko and Alexandra Dosii. This web app uses machine learning to analyze and repair your technical resume, allowing you to shine to recruiters at Google, Yahoo and Facebook.
The founders are marketing and HR experts who have a combined 15 years of experience in making recruiting smarter. Stetsenko founded Relocate.me and GlossaryTech while Dosii worked at a number of marketing firms before settling on CV Compiler.
The app essentially checks your resume and tells you what to fix and where to submit it. It’s been completely bootstrapped thus far and they’re working on new and improved machine learning algorithms while maintaining a library of common CV fixes.
“There are lots of online resume analysis tools, but these services are too generic, meaning they can be used by multiple professionals and the results are poor and very general. After the feedback is received, users are often forced to buy some extra services,” said Stetsenko. “In contrast, the CV Compiler is designed exclusively for tech professionals. The online review technology scans for keywords from the world of programming and how they are used in the resume, relative to the best practices in the industry.”
The product was born out of Stetsenko’s work at GlossaryTech, a Chrome extension that helps users understand tech terms. He used a great deal of natural language processing and keyword taxonomy in that product and, in turn, moved some of that to his CV service.
“We found that many job applications were being rejected without even an interview, because of the resumes. Apparently, 10 seconds is long enough for a recruiter to eliminate many candidates,” he said.
The service is live now and the team expects the corpus of information to grow and improve over time. Until then, why not let a machine learning robot tell you what you’re doing wrong in trying to get a job? That is, before it replaces you completely.
Quantum Machines, an Israeli startup launched by three Ph.D. physicists, wants to build the operational and control layer for quantum computing. Today, it announced a $5.5 million seed investment led by TLV Partners with participation from Battery Ventures.
The three principals have been studying quantum computing for a decade and they understand that to commercialize it, it’s going to require a complete solution. Right now the majority of the research is centered on increasing the number of qubits at the processor level. Co-founder and CEO Itamar Sivan says in order to advance the technology, it’s going to take an operational and control layer to make it all work, and that is where the founders decided to concentrate the company’s efforts, he said.
Sivan explained that there is a point where the classical computers we use today and the quantum computers of the future will have to work together to pass data and interpret commands. He described three layers in a quantum computing stack. The first is the quantum processor. Next is a classical computing control layer with classical electronics you would find on any computer today. Finally, there is the software layer where you program a classical algorithm that has to be passed to the quantum processor.
He says that some companies are trying to build full stacks, but the bulk of research as been concentrated on building quantum processors. Quantum Machines decided to focus on one part of the stack. “We have come to the conclusion that there must be a company laser-focused on a vertically integrated control solution that includes the classical hardware and software,” Sivan said.
“The power of quantum computers stems from their complexity and richness, though it is also this complexity which makes them incredibly difficult to control and operate — this is the problem our company is attempting to solve,” he added in a statement.
The company is currently working on prototype hardware to build this layer and is working with several beta customers at the moment. It’s early days for the company, but the seed money should help them accelerate that vision and get a product to market more quickly.
According to a Mordor Intelligence report published recently, the global telecom cloud market is estimated to grow 20% annually over the next five years to become a $34.6 billion industry by 2023....
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Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about some of the other trends that you see in this mode of delivering education. Are there international students who are just doing the certification and has nothing to do...
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Nihal Mehta, Founding General Partner at ENIAC Ventures, provides a great set of insights into his definition of a full stack founding team. Either a set of co-founders who cover all the requisite...
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TechCrunch will soon be returning to Africa to hold its Startup Battlefield competition dedicated to the African continent, in Lagos, Nigeria, on December 11th.
The event will showcase the launch of 15 of the hottest startups in Africa onstage for the first time. We’ll also be joined by some of the leading investment firms in the region. If you want to be in the same room, you’d better grab your tickets now.
Here are just some of the investors and founders who will be judging the startups competing for US$25,000.
Dr. Eleni Gabre-Madhin is founder and chief executive of blueMoon, Ethiopia’s first youth agribusiness/agritech incubator and seed investor. Prior to this, she founded eleni LLC, Africa’s leader in designing, building and supporting the operations of commodity exchange ecosystems in frontier markets. Dr. Gabre-Madhin is also founder and former CEO of Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX), having successfully traded $1.2 billion annually after three years of operation.
Erik Hersman is the CEO of BRCK a rugged wireless Wi-Fi device designed and engineered in Kenya for use throughout the emerging markets. In 2010 he founded iHub, Nairobi’s innovation hub for the technology community, bringing together entrepreneurs, hackers, designers and the investment community.
Minette Havemann is strategy director at Naspers Ventures, which finds and backs promising technology startups across the world. She plays a leading role in identifying consumer and market trends shaping the team’s overall investment agenda and represents the team in Africa. Before this, Minette worked as general manager of Strategy and Research at Media24, where she focused on business strategy development across a diverse portfolio spanning media, B2C e-commerce and classifieds assets.
Sangu is the co-founder and managing director of Africa Health Holdings, a company based in West Africa and focused on “building Africa’s healthcare future.” He also serves as chairman of Golden Palm Investments Corporation, a holding company that has backed startups, including Andela, mPharma and Flutterwave. GPI portfolio companies have raised more than $300 million in venture financing.
Wale Ayeni leads the IFC’s Venture Capital practice focused on Africa, South of the Sahara – the International Finance Organization is part of the World Bank Group. The IFC’s venture capital team invests in technology companies in frontier markets, and has deployed ~$800 million in early/growth-stage tech investments over the past decade. Prior to the IFC, Wale led venture capital early-stage investments in disruptive startups across various technology sectors for Orange in Silicon Valley with representative investments in the U.S.
Tickets to this event cost $10 (N3600 +VAT), and you can buy them right here.
Startup Battlefield consists of three preliminary rounds with 15 teams — five startups per round — who have only six minutes to pitch and present a live demo to a panel of expert technologists and VC investors. After each pitch, the judges have six minutes to grill the team with tough questions. This is all after the free pitch-coaching they receive from TechCrunch editors.
One startup will emerge the winner of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 — and receive a US$25,000 no-equity cash prize and win a trip for two to compete in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at the time).
Wind Mobility, a Berlin-based mobility startup that offers “dockless” e-scooter (and electric bicycle) rentals, has raised $22 million in seed funding, throwing its hat into the ring as European competitor to Bird and Lime.
It follows recent raises by Sweden’s VOI ($50 million Series A led by Balderton) and Germany’s Tier (€25 million Series A led by Northzone). All three companies are attempting to be pan-European from the get-go.
In other words, you wait all year for the “Bird or Lime of Europe” to appear and three contenders get funded at once. And that’s before we mention Taxify’s entrance into e-scooter rentals or Delivery Hero and Team Europe founder Lukasz Gadowski’s reported plans to enter the space, having picked up backing from the mobility arm of Target global.
Meanwhile, despite being U.S. companies, Bird and Lime have received substantial investment from three of Europe’s top venture capital firms. Index and Accel have backed Bird, and Atomico has backed Lime.
But I digress…
Investing in Wind Mobility’s rather large seed round is Chinese Source Code Capital, and Europe’s HV Holtzbrinck Ventures. The company says the investment will be used for global expansion and to further develop its e-scooter product. Wind currently operates its e-scooter rental service in various cities in Spain, France and the U.S., and its dockless bicycle rental service Byke in Germany.
Notably, Wind is currently developing its first proprietary model of electric scooters specifically designed for the sharing market, which co-founder and CEO Eric Wang tells me will become a significant differentiator going forward.
“Currently, almost all the scooters on the market are from Ninebot, which is designed for personal use rather than sharing,” he says. “Our own scooters are specifically designed for sharing: longer battery range, swappable battery, more capability to climb hills, sturdy and more fit for sharing. We can also tailor our scooters to the requirement of certain cities. This gives us an edge in continuing to adopt to customer needs and regulatory requirements.”
Alongside this, Wind Mobility has developed a proprietary “IoT technology and communication module” that it says gives it better location accuracy of its scooters. The system is also capable of delivering over-the-air updates to the Wind communication module to control certain functionality of its scooters remotely.
For example, it can tell a scooter light to flash via a tap on the Wind app so that users and operational personnel can spot the scooter more easily at night. “We can change the speed limit of the fleet in each city or certain scooters via our servers. We also limit the speed to zero via the communication module once a scooter is taken outside of the operating area,” adds Wang.
Like other European players in the space, Wind says it works in co-operation with local governments, with the goal of solving mobility problems and reducing congestion in urban areas.
“The scooter market in Europe is still relatively new,” says the Wind CEO. “The bigger competition is still to convert more users from using cars to using scooters along with public transportation. We are at the forefront of this transformation. We look forward to working with cities and authorities to serve this growing demand.”
The Morgan Stanley Multicultural Innovation Lab, Morgan Stanley’s in-house accelerator focused on companies founded by multicultural and female entrepreneurs, hosted its second Annual Showcase and Demo Day. The event also featured companies from accelerators HearstLab, Newark Venture Partner Labs and PS27 Ventures. (Note: I was formerly employed by Morgan Stanley and have no financial ties.)
The showcase represented the culmination of the program’s second year, which followed an initial five-company class that has already seen two acquisitions. Through the six-month program, Morgan Stanley provides early-stage companies with a wide range of benefits, including an equity investment from Morgan Stanley, office space at Morgan Stanley headquarters, access to Morgan Stanley’s extensive network and others. Applications are now open for its third cohort of companies, with the application window closing on January 4th, 2019.
The 16 presenting startups, all led by a female or multicultural founder, offered solutions to structural inefficiencies across a wide array of categories, including fintech, developer tools and health. Though all of the companies offered impressive presentations and strong value propositions, here are three of the companies that stood out to us.
In hopes of democratizing software and app development, Hatch Apps provides a platform that allows users and companies to build iOS, Android and web applications without any code through pre-built templates and custom plug-and-play functions. In essence, Hatch Apps provides a solution for application building similar to what Squarespace or Wix provide for websites.
In the modern economy, every company is in one way or another a tech or tech-enabled company. Now the demand for strong engineers has made the fight for talent increasingly competitive and has made engineering quite costly, even when only needed for simple tasks.
For an implementation and subscription fee, Hatch Apps allows companies with less sophisticated engineering DNA to reduce entering costs by launching native apps on their own, across platforms and often on faster timelines than those seen through third-party developers. Once an app is launched, Hatch Apps provides customers with detailed analytics and allows them to send targeted push notifications, export data and make in-app changes that can automatically go live in app stores.
The company initially took a bootstrapping approach to financing and raised funds by selling a 2016 election-themed “Cards Against Humanity”-style game created on the platform. Since then, Hatch Apps has already received funding from the Y Combinator Fellowship, Morgan Stanley and a number of other investors.
While estate planning is a topic many don’t like to think about, it’s a critical issue for managing cross-generational wealth. But will drafting can often be very complex, time-consuming and costly, requiring hours of legal consultation and coordination between various parties.
Founded by two former classmates at Stanford Business School, FreeWill looks to simplify the estate-planning process by providing a free online platform that automates will drafting, in a similar function to what TurboTax does for taxes. Using FreeWill, users can quickly set allocations for their estate and select personal recipients, charitable donations, executor specifications and other ancillary requests. The platform then creates a finalized legal document that is legally valid in all 50 states, to which users can also quickly make changes and replace without incurring expensive legal costs.
FreeWill is able to provide the platform to consumers for free due to the proceeds it receives from its nonprofit customers, who pay to be featured on the platform as a partner organization. FreeWill offers a compelling value proposition for partnering companies. By acting as a channel to funnel user donations to listed organizations, FreeWill has been able to drive a 600 percent increase in charitable giving to partner organizations on average. FreeWill also provides partner organizations with backing analytics that allow nonprofits to track bequests and donors through monthly reports.
FreeWill currently boasts an impressive roster of 75 paying nonprofit partners that include American Red Cross, Amnesty International and many others. In the long-run it hopes to be the go-to solution for financial and legal end-of-life planning for investment advisors, life insurance and employee benefits providers.
Shoobs is looking to be the go-to platform for local “urban” events, which the company defined as events centered on local nightlife, comedy and concerts in the hip-hop, R&B and reggae genres to name a few. But unlike the genre-agnostic, transaction-focused event management platforms that can make the space seem pretty crowded, Shoobs focused on providing genre-specific even discovery. Shoobs matches urban event goers with artists of their choice and related smaller-scale events that can be harder to discover, acting as a form of curation, quality control and discovery.
For event organizers, Shoobs helps provide digital ticketing and promotion services, with event recommendation capabilities that target the most promising potential customers. Through its offering to event organizers, Shoobs is able to monetize its services through ticket sale commission, advertising and brand partnerships.
Since its initial launch in London, Shoobs notes it has become one of the top urban events platforms in the city, with an extensive base of recurring registered users and event organizers. After previously working with AEG for its London launch, Shoobs is looking to expand stateside with the help of organizers like Live Nation. Shoobs joins a long list of promising Y Combinator alumni companies with YC also acting as one of Shoobs’ initial investors.
Morgan Stanley Multicultural Innovation Lab
BeautyLynk “is an on-demand hair and makeup service provider, specializing in customizable services for women.”Broadway Roulette “is an events marketplace that pairs consumers with surprise cultural events, beginning with Broadway theater.”CariClub “is an enterprise software platform to connect young professionals with nonprofit opportunities.”COI Energy Services “is an integrated platform for electric utilities and business users to optimize and manage energy usage.”CoSign “is an API and application that allows anyone to create, distribute and monetize visual content.”Goalsetter “is a goals-based gifting, savings and investing platform designed for children.”myLAB Box “offers customizable at-home health-test kits and relevant telemedicine consultations / prescription services.”HearstLab
Priori “is a global legal marketplace changing the way in-house teams find, hire and manage outside counsel.”TRENCH “is an online fashion marketplace that makes use of the unworn items in every woman’s closet.”Newark Venture Partners Labs
Floss Bar “is a new type of preventive brand for oral health care. The company offers high-quality, routine dental care across flexible locations at thoughtful prices.”Upsider “is a software solution allowing recruiters to leverage AI technology to identify a comprehensive set of candidates who align with their business and role requirements, resulting in a more strategic understanding of the best possible talent for the job.”PS27 Ventures
BlueWave Technologies “is a cleantech company and the creators of the BlueWave Cleaning System — a water-free, detergent-free and chemical-free plasma device that cleans items that are extremely hard or impossible to clean with a washer and dryer.”OnPay Solutions “focuses exclusively on business-to-business payments. They create payment software and offer payment web services to enhance efficiency and productivity for Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable.”
During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Sara Sutton, Founder and CEO at FlexJobs, who explained her platform and its ability to connect job seekers looking for flexible work schedules with...
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Nearly every online publisher has launched or announced a paywall — but of course, even the ones that are successful won’t convince every reader, or even the majority of readers, to sign up. Now Piano and True[x] say they’ve found a more effective way to monetize the rest of the audience, without threatening crucial subscription revenue.
Piano is a company that’s built a range of publisher tools, including paywall and subscription management. True[X], meanwhile, is an adtech company that was acquired by 21st Century Fox a few years ago.
Piano’s global head of business development Jonas Rideout said the collaboration will allow publishers to present different messages to different audience members. This is something that Piano has already been working on, but by partnering with True[x], it can present readers with the option to (temporarily) circumvent the paywall by watching a premium video ad.
According to Rideout, this takes advantage of Piano’s “out-of-the-box segmentation,” which assesses reader loyalty based on things like how often they visit a site, where they’re coming from and how many pages they visit. It probably makes more sense to ask the most loyal readers to subscribe, since they’re the most likely to convert.
Meanwhile, there’s another subset of readers who may be interested in the content, but aren’t actually going to pay — at least, not yet. Those are the ones who will have the option to see an ad, so the publisher is still making money, and they’re also keeping the reader engaged in case they want to subscribe down the road.
“Maybe 1 to 3 percent of that audience is going to subscribe, but you’re worried about cooking your golden goose [by giving them a way to get around the paywall],” said Chris Shively, True[x]’s director of global business development. “Now you can actually provide that other 97 percent of the audience with a different experience. They’re getting to enjoy the product while you’re getting a significantly higher CPM.”
Shively declined to specify how well these ads monetize, except to say that they’re priced “significantly higher” than a standard display or video ad. He also said, “It’s very important to us that the user has a choice” — so even if you’re given the ad option, you can still choose to subscribe instead.
And to be clear, these ads aren’t an indefinite free pass. It’s a metered system, where the publisher can let the reader through the paywall a set number of times before they really do have to pay.
Piano and True[x] have already been testing this out with Ad Age, where they found that the visitors who were asked to view a video ad were significantly more likely to register later on. Among readers who watched the ad, there was a 17x increase in the current conversion rate, but even if you look at readers who were given the option and didn’t watch it, they were 3x more likely to register than those who were only presented with the registration option.
Rideout also noted that not every Piano publisher makes money through subscriptions (in fact, TechCrunch is a publisher that uses Piano for non-paywall purposes). So he said the team has been talking about “how else this could be applicable,” like helping publishers drive readers to sign up for giveaways or to provide some of their data.
“It’s not just paid content sites — there are opportunities for other types of content,” he said.
Sramana Mitra: Can we do some examples? Alexander Ross: Cloud Margin is a cloud-based capital management solution that I mentioned. It focuses on compliance, clearly, because it enables the end users...
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Today’s 424th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Tuesday, November 20, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...
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Sramana Mitra: One small detail question. One of the issues of the current venture capital ecosystem is that Series A financing has become larger. A class of VCs has developed that does the smaller...
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Today’s 424th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Tuesday, November 20, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join....
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Agora, a developer of cloud communication APIs, will create products for new markets and verticals after raising a $70 million Series C led by Coatue Management. Existing investors SIG, Morningside Capital and Shunwei Capital also returned for the round, which brings Agora’s total funding so far to $125 million.
The startup’s APIs are used by customers, including The Meet Group, Xiaomi, Hike Messenger and Momo, to insert voice, video and group calling or broadcasting features into their apps. Agora claims it recently surpassed two billion installations of its SDKs and routes through its 200 distributed data centers around the world an average of 10 billion minutes of live communications each month.
The company is raising capital at a relatively fast pace to support its growth goals. Agora’s last funding announcement was made five months ago, when Agora said it had added a $30 million extension to its Series B, bringing that round to a total of $50 million.
Agora was started in 2014 by CEO Tony Zhao, who was a founding engineer at online communication platform WebEx, acquired by Cisco in 2007, and former CTO of Chinese live-streaming video platform YY. Headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., with offices in Shanghai, Agora is a relatively new entrant to a market that includes competitors like Twilio and Tokbox.
Agora’s core product is an SDK that enables developers to insert into their apps voice, video and group calling, as well as interactive broadcasting features, but it also recently added SDKs designed specifically for game developers and Facebook’s React Native framework.
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