Grover, the Berlin-based startup that offers “pay-as-you-go” subscriptions to the latest consumer tech as an alternative to owning products outright, has raised €37 million in funding.

The Series A round is led by Circularity Capital LLP — a VC that specialises in the so-called “circular economy” — with participation from fintech investor Coparion, Samsung NEXT, and Varengold Bank. Existing investors, including Commerzbank’s Main Incubator, also followed on.

Noteworthy, the funding consists of €12 million in equity and a new €25 million debt facility. Building an inventory of new tech products to rent is quite capital insensitive, after all.

Targeting Germany only, for now (after withdrawing from the U.K. and pausing a soft launch in the U.S.), Grover wants to be something akin to Netflix for gadgets. It offers individual tech products by monthly, three-monthly or yearly subscription, or via its newly launched “Grover Mix” subscription, which has a fixed monthly price and lets you switch item at any time.

In addition, you are afforded some upside protection, should you wish to purchase the item after renting it first. You’re given the option to buy products with 30 percent of your subscription payments to date being deducted from the recommended retail price. For longer rental periods, Grover will also warn you if you are close to reaching 130 percent of the full purchase price and prompt you to consider buying it for €1.

The startup has also been trialling a B2B product aimed at burgeoning companies, dubbed “Startups get Grover”. This I’m told came about after demand from startups who, for example, want to subscribe to a bunch of MacBooks to give to new employees, and as an alternative to deploying upfront capital.

In a call with Grover founder and CEO Michael Cassau, he told me the new capital will be used to expand the company’s market leadership in Germany and re-boot international expansion in a bid to continue a current revenue growth rate of 20 percent per month. He said the startup had taken the decision in early 2017 to focus on Germany, temporarily abandoning internationalization, after it had signed a major partnership with German e-retailer MediaMarkt. It has since also partnered with Saturn, Gravis, Conrad, and Tchibo.

This sees Grover become a checkout option, alongside other payment buttons or financing offers. That way a customer can choose to rent a tech product via their favourite online store powered by Grover. Behind the scenes, Grover actually buys the product from the retailer, having put agreements in place with regards to what products fit the Grover model and aren’t already overstocked by Grover.

Alternatively, in some instances, Grover has a “re-circulation” deal in place so that a retailer can continue offering Grover as an option even if Grover has enough inventory already, and instead take a share of future subscription income. This works particularly well for slightly older products or items that are diminishing in popularity.

In addition to growing in Germany and future international ambitions, Cassau says that the startup plans to invest in the user experience of Grover, suggesting that it has room for improvement. This will include developing “new and innovative usage models,” while he also conceded that with further scale the company can get more customer aligned in terms of the products on offer and its subscription pricing.

At some point, if Grover’s subscription model becomes compelling enough, it’s hoped that purchasing many tech products will become so unattractive as to create Netflix-level changes in consumption behaviour. Or, at least, that’s the aim. In my case, that would mean spending far less time recycling things like smartphones and music technology gear on eBay as I tread a well-trodden and perpetual upgrade path.

This feature from The Gaurdian examines the hype in the media about AI that is turning interesting research into sensational crap and leading to an AI misinformation epidemic. For this week’s...

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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 Rajul Garg of Leo Capital was recorded in February...

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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 Nitin Rai of Elevate Capital was recorded in...

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Sramana Mitra: If you can close deals of that size, yes. What is your value proposition in those scenarios? Let’s say your specialty is digital health. You have a company that comes to you with...

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For entrepreneurs interested to meet and chat with Sramana Mitra in person, please join us for our weekly and informal group meetups. If you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area or are just in...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 409th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, August 2, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register...

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More bad news for subscription movie ticket service MoviePass, which acknowledged yesterday that there was an unidentified issue preventing people from using their MoviePass credit cards to get tickets.

A regulatory filing from parent company Helios & Matheson offers more insight about what happened. The filing (first spotted by Business Insider) announces a “demand note” of $6.2 million, including $5 million in cash that the company borrowed. It goes on to explain:

The $5.0 million cash proceeds received from the Demand Note will be used by the Company to pay the Company’s merchant and fulfillment processors. If the Company is unable to make required payments to its merchant and fulfillment processors, the merchant and fulfillment processors may cease processing payments for MoviePass, Inc. (“MoviePass”), which would cause a MoviePass service interruption. Such a service interruption occurred on July 26, 2018.

In other words, it looks like MoviePass wasn’t able to pay one of its service providers, which led to the outage. In order to make those payments, it borrowed $5 million.

This doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in MoviePass’ finances. A Helios & Matheson filing from earlier this month suggested that the company was looking to raise up to $1.2 billion in equity and debt financing to fund MoviePass’ operations and growth.

Meanwhile, although the service is best-known for offering access to unlimited movie tickets for $9.95 per month, the specifics of the pricing model have been changing pretty frequently.

Maisie Williams, who’s best-known for playing Arya Stark on Game of Thrones, announced earlier this year that she’s founding a startup called Daisie. With the app set to launch on August 1, Williams and her co-founder Dom Santry came by the TechCrunch New York office to discuss her plans for the company.

Daisie will offer a way for filmmakers, musicians, visual artists, writers and other creators to showcase their work and find collaborators. The startup has already picked an initial 100 creators to kick things off.

Williams and Santry also gave us a quick runthrough of the app. At first glance, it might look like other social media services, but there are no follower counts, as Williams (who has no shortage of followers) explained: “If you have follower counts it then becomes about a competition, like a popularity contest between who can get the most.”

In addition, she noted that social media followings are generally one-sided, whereas Daisie is all about enabling “chains” of users who aren’t just viewing your profile, but can actually view your projects and contribute.

“A chain is where you reach out to someone who is in your area — or maybe even not,” she said. “So connecting with someone you’re inspired by, reaching out to them and saying, ‘Hey, I have this 30-second video of me singing the song, but I realized I’m actually a better lyricist than I am a songwriter, a musician. And I really love what you play, I wonder if you could make me a melody and we could sort of work together on this.'”

Ultimately, Williams is hoping that people’s Daisie profiles becomes an “online résumé or portfolio of work that they’re really proud of, that can be shown to the world.” And that, in turn, could help them find paying work, ideally on their own terms.

“We want to basically give the power back to the creator,” Williams said. “Instead of them having to market themselves to fit someone else’s idea of what their job would be, they can let their art speak for themselves.”

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

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Sramana Mitra: You emphasized geography greatly. Pacific Northwest is the sweet spot of the fund. You don’t invest outside? Corey Schmid: We do. We call it the Mountain West. One of our newest deals...

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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This was one hell of a week. Happily, we had our own Connie Loizos, Matthew Lynley, and Alex Wilhelm on hand, along with Initialized Capital’s Alexis Ohanian to pick over the mix.

First up we had zero choice but to talk about Facebook. The social company’s epic repricing in the middle of the week blotted out the news sun. It may keep us in the shade for another week, too. Facebook’s dive has implications for social startups and competing public companies alike. Like, say, Reddit.

Moving along, Crunchbase News recently dropped a report digging into the rise of $100 million and larger rounds. From a turning point in 2013 to today, megarounds have been on the rise. Why? When does it stop? Whose fault is it really? And is going public really that bad? We worked through each question, even tagging the structure of the stock market along the way. (Even more data here.)

From there we took a quick pivot to a company that is known for raising megarounds — Slack — and its new IRL BFF Atlassian. Yes, the Slack-Atlassian deal dropped right before we recorded. Our take is that the agreement makes sense, especially in light of a competitive landscape that keeps getting tougher for Slack.

That said, everyone agreed that Slack is one hell of a business.

And then we ran out of time. But, happily, we also worked in an advertisement for Melbourne and riffed one of Ohanian’s recent investments.

Thanks for comin’ round, and we’ll see you all in a week!

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Jeffrey Katzenberg’s new mobile video startup NewTV, which snagged Meg Whitman as CEO in January, has now closed on $1 billion in funding, according to a report out today in CNN. Investors in the round include Disney, 21st Century Fox, Warner Bros, Entertainment One and other media companies, with a combined $200 million investment, while institutional investors from the U.S. and China made up the rest.

The news follows a May report from Bloomberg, which said NewTV had then raised around $800 million. It had also said 21st Century Fox and Warner Bros. were investors.

Last fall, an SEC filing revealed WndrCo was looking to raise as much as $2 billion. That could indicate that the round CNN is reporting is still in the process of raising.

NewTV declined to comment, when TechCrunch reached them for confirmation.

Details are still fairly sparse on NewTV, which is being incubated by Katzenberg’s WndrCo, a holding company that’s also invested in startups including Mixcloud, Axios, Node, Flowspace, Whistle Sports, and TYT Network.

So far, we know NewTV aims to bring high-quality Hollywood production values and storytelling to mobile, but in a different format. Instead of producing regular-length TV shows, it aims to release content in “bite-sized formats of 10 minutes or less.” This will also involve custom-designed technology built specifically for mobile, it claims.

But it’s unclear why – beyond having Katzenberg and now Whitman’s names attached – this makes the company worth a billion dollar investment. The market for this type of content hasn’t really been proven out. After all, today’s youngest video consumers are happy with YouTube – their TV alternative of sorts – which is filled with short-form video.

And while YouTubers’ grasp of production values and storytelling chops may fall short of “Hollywood” standards, streaming services like Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and others are filling in the gaps in terms of quality, and are growing sizable subscriber bases.

If there is actually demand for “high-quality short-form” video, it seems content producers could just sell to existing distributors directly.

It’s also unclear for now if NewTV aims to own and distribute its content to others, act as its own standalone streaming service, or plans for a mixture of both.

In any event, as CNN points out, even a large round like this is a small bet for the bigger media companies involved. In addition, they don’t want to miss a shot at backing Katzenberg’s latest – especially given his prior successes at Paramount, Disney and DreamWorks.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this series. The following interview with Corey Schmid of Seven Peaks Ventures was recorded in...

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Facebook had a rough day yesterday when its stock plunged after a poor earnings report. What better way to pick yourself up and dust yourself off than to buy a little something for yourself. Today the company announced it has acquired Redkix, a startup that provides tools to communicate more effectively by combining email with a more formal collaboration tool. The companies did not reveal the acquisition price.

Redkix burst out of the gate two years ago with a $17 million seed round, a hefty seed amount by any measure. What prompted this kind of investment was a tool that combined a collaboration tool like Slack or Workplace by Facebook with email. People could collaborate in Redkix itself, or if you weren’t a registered user, you could still participate by email, providing a more seamless way to work together.

Alan Lepofsky, who covers enterprise collaboration at Constellation Research, sees this tool as providing a key missing link. “Redkix is a great solution for bridging the worlds between traditional email messaging and more modern conversational messaging. Not all enterprises are ready to simply switch from one to the other, and Redkix allows for users to work in whichever method they want, seamlessly communicating with the other,” Lepofsky told TechCrunch.

As is often the case with these kinds of acquisitions, the company bought the technology  itself along with the team that created it. This means that the Redkix team including the CEO and CTO will join Facebook and they will very likely be shutting down the application after the acquisition is finalized.

Lepofsky thinks that enterprises that are adopting Facebook’s enterprise tool will be able to more seamlessly transition between the two modes of communication, the Workplace by Facebook tool and email, as they prefer.

Although a deal like this has probably been in the works for some time, after yesterday’s earning’s debacle, Facebook could be looking for ways to enhance its revenue in areas beyond the core Facebook platform. The enterprise collaboration tool does offer a possible way to do that in the future, and if they can find a way to incorporate email into it, it could make it a more attractive and broader offering.

Facebook is competing with Slack, the darling of this space and others like Microsoft, Cisco and Google around communications and collaboration. When it launched in 2015, it was trying to take that core Facebook product and put it in a business context, something Slack had been doing since the beginning.

To succeed in business, Facebook had to think differently than as a consumer tool, driven by advertising revenue and had to convince large organizations that they understood their requirements. Today, Facebook claims 30,000 organizations are using the tool and over time they have built in integrations to other key enterprise products, and keep enhancing it.

Perhaps with today’s acquisition, they can offer a more flexible way to interact with the platform and could increase those numbers over time.