Hot on the heels of announcing that it has partnered with France’s BPCE Groupe, TransferWise could be about to unveil another partnership with a bank. According to sources, the international money transfer service and European unicorn is working with the fast-growing U.K. challenger bank Monzo.

The tie-in will likely see TransferWise functionality offered within Monzo’s mobile banking app, courtesy of the TransferWise API. It will give Monzo customers the ability to send money in various supported currencies at the ‘mid market’ rate in addition to TransferWise’s low and transparent fees.

Along with the newly-announced partnership with BPCE Groupe — which won’t ship until next year — TransferWise is also working with Estonia’s LHV, and German challenger bank N26 (which also has plans to launch in the U.K.).

A partnership with U.K. challenger bank Starling was also announced last year, but integration with the bank’s app never materialised and TechCrunch learned last week that the partnership has now dissolved entirely. That is particularly noteworthy given that Monzo and Starling are direct competitors with an interesting shared history, shall we say.

Meanwhile, if confirmed, we can probably chalk this up as a decent win for TransferWise, which is best known for its consumer-facing international money transfer app, but has always had ambitions of being a broader platform play.

In fact, the company is attempting to position itself as entirely agnostic on how customers access the service: the more money moving via its infrastructure, the better, whilst economies of scale also mean potentially lower fees on specific routes.

This can be done directly via the TransferWise app and service for both consumers and SMEs, via third-party integrations, such as with incumbent and challenger banks, or via the company’s own Borderless account. In all three cases, TransferWise generates revenue, regardless.

I’ve reached out to both TransferWise and Monzo for comment and will update this post if and when I hear back.

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 401st FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, June 7, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to...

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It’s scooters all the way down this morning, with Lime also reportedly raising $250 million in a funding after a new Delaware filing this morning indicated that competitor Bird authorized the sale of up to $200 million in shares.

GV (formerly Google Ventures) is leading this round, according to the report by Axios, as the massive land grab for a stake in the scooter wars continues to heat up — whether that’s funding or actual scooters piling up on the sidewalk. Both companies have faced pushback from some city regulators (probably on the basis of tripping over them and falling on your face), but it still means the venture community is still salivating over potentially the next major mode of metropolitan transportation. Most venture investors in the Valley argue scooters make sense for short trips throughout areas that are just too far to be considered a trek, but too close that it would be a waste of time and money to call a rideshare like Uber or Lyft.

Given that Uber exposed a massive hole for easier transportation in major metropolitan areas — and potentially replacing cars in those areas — getting into the next big transportation revolution is more than tempting enough for firms like GV (which is also an investor in Uber). Lime was previously reported to be seeking up to $500 million in funding and was taking meetings with some major firms in Silicon Valley over the past few weeks. It might not get that, but a $250 million influx might be plenty to try to continue to ramp up its business and get more rides on board. Axios is reporting that Lime has told investors users have taken 4.2 million rides and each scooter gets 8 to 12 rides per day.

Still, while it’s not $500 million, there’s plenty of interest in the on-demand scooter business — challenges of keeping them charged and intact included — that Bird has authorized the sale of up to $200 million in new shares at a $1 billion valuation just months after its previous round. So it might not be surprising if this, too, ends up as kind of a rolling process where Lime eventually gets all the capital it sought.

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Bird, the scooter startup whose scooters you might have seen fallen over on the sidewalk in a major metro area, has authorized a new $200 million round of funding that could value the startup at around $1 billion post-money, according to a certificate of incorporation filed in Delaware.

The latest Bird round has been pretty widely reported, suggesting that the company is raising $150 million at a $1 billion valuation. That, too, comes amid a big effort by competitor Lime to raise a big funding round. These documents indicate that the company has authorized the sale of those shares, though it may not fully fill out the round. The certificate of incorporation document was provided by Lagniappe Labs, creator of the Prime Unicorn Index.

The document indicates that Bird has authorized the sale of 31.5 million new shares in its financing round at a value of $6.15 per share, which if fully sold could net the startup as much as $200 million in this round. This round would value the company at just over $1 billion, a new financing round that follows up a $100 million round announced in March.

These kinds of rolling rounds are not completely uncommon. Instead of bundling everything together in a single round, startups may sometimes have a process that includes follow-on investment rounds, of which this may be a component. The last funding round in March valued the company at around $300 million.

Needless to say, scooters are a hot market right now even if they are facing a lot of friction when it comes to dealing with leaving their scooters everywhere around cities. But running startups that are hardware-focused — especially on-demand ones that have to manage a network of scooters that need to have enough of a charge to get someone from point A to point B, lest they have a bad experience and switch to an alternative — can be an expensive proposition. The hardware component itself, too, can be a tough business.

For the longest time, chips were a little bit boring. But the revolution in deep learning has now opened the market for startups that build specialty chips to accelerate deep learning and model evaluation. Among those is Israel-based Hailo, which is building deep learning chips for embedded devices. The company today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series A round.

Investors include Israeli crowdfunding platform OurCrowd, Maniv Mobility, Next Gear, and a number of angel investors, including Hailo’s own chairman Zohar Zisapel and Delek Motors’ Gil Agmon.

Hailo tells me that it will use the new round, which brings its total funding to $16 million, to further develop its deep learning processors. The company expects samples to reach the market in the first half of 2019. Those chips will be able to run embedded AI applications in a wide range of settings, including drones and cars, as well as smart home appliances and cameras.

The key market for Hailo is the car industry, though. In that respect, it’s following in the footsteps of other Israeli startups like Mobileye, which Intel eventually acquired.

“The 70-year old architecture of existing processors is inadequate to meet today’s deep learning and AI processing needs,” says Orr Danon, Hailo CEO. “Hailo is revolutionizing the underlying architecture of the processor to boost deep learning processing by several orders of magnitude. We have completely redesigned the pillars of computer architecture – memory, control and compute – and the relations between them.”

Casper is launching a new product today — the Casper Nap Pillow, a small pillow that you can carry in your bag.

While the startup remains best-known for its mattresses, it’s expanded to offer not just pillows and sheets but also dog beds. It also partnered with American Airlines to provide sleep products to higher-end flyers.

“The long-term vision of the brand [is] to help people sleep better, whether in your bedroom, in the air, wherever that may be,” said co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Neil Parikh.

But sometimes it can be hard to get the recommended eight hours of sleep at home. As Parikh put it, “I don’t even sleep eight hours and I run a sleep company.” So the Nap Pillow can help you get some extra sleep on “trains, buses, airplanes, the subway, the beach” — or even at your desk at work.

Parikh said the travel pillow was created by the company’s research division Casper Labs. It’s basically a shrunk-down version (10.25 inches by 15 inches) of the regular Casper pillow, deploying what the company calls its “pillow-in-a-pillow design” — namely, combining a supportive inner layer with a fluffier outer layer.

The Nap Pillow comes with a pillowcase and a travel bag. In fact, Veanne took the pillow with her to Tel Aviv, and she said it’s well-made and provides decent support, but feels more like a child-sized Casper pillow for the office or home, not the travel pillow that she’d hoped for.

But don’t worry, she has suggestions for improvement! Like: A suction cup to stop the pillow from slipping into the gap between the airplane wall and window seat, a detachable hoodie for privacy (seriously) and a pocket to hold iPhones and wallets.

The Casper Nap Pillow costs $35 and is currently available for purchase.

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Coya, a Berlin-based insurance startup, has raised $30 million in new cash as investors around the world continue to see opportunities in modernizing the insurance industry.

Founded by two early employees at the European credit and risk assessment unicorn startup Kreditech (which raised €110 million from the Naspers subsidiary PayU) and two seasoned executives from the European insurance industry, Coya is coming to market in Germany with a new renter’s insurance service.

For Coya’s co-founder Andrew Shaw, the new company was an opportunity to apply his experience creating credit and risk assessment products to an industry whose cumbersome inability to use technology had affected him personally.

The idea for Coya hit Shaw when he was traveling on the Gili Islands off the coast of Indonesia. It was there, while Shaw was trying to get information on his insurance as he recovered from an illness, that he decided to start his technologically enabled insurance business.

“I knew I had one or two [policies] somewhere, but couldn’t find them in email or log into the webpage, I felt left alone and realized how insurers are not concentrating on their product experience,” Shaw wrote to me in an email. “A bad insurance experience, plus the opportunity to create awesome technology in an outdated financial space was a challenge I couldn’t ignore.”

In 2016, Kreditech’s first employee launched the company with co-founders Sebastian Villaroel, a fellow former Kreditech employee; Peter Hagen, the former chief executive of Vienna Insurance Group; and Thomas Münkel, a longtime executive at Allianz and the former chief operating officer of Uniqa Insurance.

The company has raised a total of $40 million for its service from investors, including Valar Ventures (the Peter Thiel-backed investment firm), eVentures, La Famiglia and a slew of angel investors.

With the money, Coya hopes to establish its footprint in its first market — Germany — before expanding to the rest of Europe. Powering that expansion is a German insurance license, which the company is close to receiving, according to Shaw. Once that license is acquired, the company can access all 550 million European Union residents under the watchful eye of Germany’s regulators.

Although, Coya is starting with renter’s insurance, Shaw and his co-founders have big plans for the company’s platform, with insurance products across property, accident, personal liability and personal finance.

The company has 55 people on staff now, and expects to increase its headcount as a result of the new financing, according to Shaw.

Shaw says that Coya is different from many of the other startups pitching insurance products across Europe thanks to its push to receive regulatory approval and issue its own policies. That’s also created more capital requirements for the business starting out.

There’ve been a slew of insurance startups coming to market with novel twists on the service. Among them, Shaw pointed to Lemonade in the U.S., wefox in the Germany and the U.K.-based Sherpa as companies bringing innovation to the old industry.

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Apple's Lego augmented reality demo. Apple

Jim Chanos. Reuters

Tim Cook talks to Donald Trump at a tech roundtable last year. Getty

Apple CEO Tim Cook. Getty

Before we automate hotels with AI and robots (which will almost certainly happen) the first wave of this revolution will be brought by the software that runs hotels with humans.

Thus it is that
Mews, the hotel property management platform, has closed a €6m Series A funding round. The round was led by Notion.vc Capital, with participation from HenQ and Thayer Ventures.

The funding will be used to accelerate the business and open new offices around the world to support its global customer base.

Mews’ platform automates check-ins and payments as also covering booking management and staff training. It’s designed to be an open platform allowing other tools and apps to connect through its API. So, think ‘Slack for hotels’, perhaps.

Mews was founded in 2012 by entrepreneur and ex-hotelier Richard Valtr. Customers include Different Hotels, Machefert, Clink and Wombats, or 43,000 beds in 350 properties.

Valtr said: “Mews’ mission is to help hotels and hostels automate their operations so they can focus on their guests. We want to build the nervous system for hotels that all apps and tools for both guests and hosts can be plugged into. Until recently hoteliers were forced to rely upon a closed one-stop-shop PMS offered up by incumbent players who have held a luddite attitude towards the hospitality industry for years.”

Jos White, General Partner at Notion commented: “We think the hotel industry is at a tipping point in terms of the way it uses technology to better manage their operations and transform the guest experience.”

If you thought price comparison type online marketplaces were a done deal, you’re clearly mistaken. Motorway, a new startup from the team behind Top10 — the mobile and broadband comparison site that exited to uSwitch in 2011 — are back again, and this time they want to make it infinitely easier to sell your used car online.

To help with that mission, the young company, which formally launched in July 2017 after it had tested an MVP, has raised £2.75 million in seed funding led by LocalGlobe, and Marchmont Ventures (the VC fund of Hugo Burge, former CEO of Momondo, which sold to Priceline last year). Zoopla founder Alex Chesterman also participated.

Motorway had previously raised an angel round of £500,000 in the autumn of 2017 after the product had launched and was showing traction. Angel investors in that round included Duncan Jennings (founder of VoucherCodes.co.uk), Shakil Khan (early Spotify investor) and Christian Woolfenden (CEO of Photobox).

Tom Leathes, Motorway co-founder and CEO, says there are more than 8 million used cars sold annually in the U..K — which is more than 3x the number of new cars sold, apparently — but that the process of selling a car has gone largely unchanged for decades. This sees motorists having to visit multiple car dealers to negotiate a sale, or list privately on websites like AutoTrader or eBay. The other option is to use one of a number of online car buyers, such as WeBuyAnyCar, that provide a quick disposal option but in return prices paid are typically low. The London-based startup wants to provide a fourth option.

Namely — in classic price comparison fashion — Motorway makes it simple to compare the market and find the best deal for your car. In return, dealers get connected with motivated sellers instantly. Always be closing, as they say.

“Motorway makes selling a car faster by bringing the options online and enabling easy price comparison,” says Leathes. “Consumers enter their car’s registration number and mileage to instantly see multiple offers from car buying services, specialist dealerships and even vehicle recycling firms. They can then compare headline offers, read buyer reviews, collection criteria, fees and payment methods before choosing their best deal. By comparing offers, consumers can get up to £1,000 more than going directly to one buyer, and sell their car in 24 hours”.

In terms of typical customer, so far Motorway seems to have run the whole gamut of car owner. I’m told customers using the site have sold lots of Fords, Audis, VWs and Vauxhalls of all ages as well as Aston Martin DB9s, Porsche 911s and various Ferraris. “We’re building Motorway to help anyone looking to sell a car they own – no matter how old, its mileage, what brand or where it’s located,” adds the Motorway CEO.

Leathes cites competitors as established brands such as Auto Trader, We Buy Any Car, eBay and Gumtree, which are popular websites in the U.K. to sell your car. He says there are also a couple of early-stage startups in the space, but that none of these services offers a transparent price comparison experience with instant offers to buy your vehicle.

The revenue model is simple, too. The startup is paid a commission by the buyer when a car is purchased from a seller that found their offer through Motorway. “This means we’re aligned squarely with both consumers and car buyers, as we only make money when we successfully connect sellers with buyers and a deal is completed,” Leathes says. “Motorway’s goal is to help everyone find great offers for their car instantly. There’s a real perception that you need to be a car expert to get a good deal, and we think that needs to change”.

With over 25,000 customer sales enquiries per month, Motorway says the new funding will enable the startup to further develop its software platform, expand the network of buyers, and to market the service more widely.

Adds ​Suzanne Ashman, Partner at LocalGlobe: “Creating a compelling experience for people selling their cars is hard. The potential buyers are fragmented with many different online and offline options. Information about the sale process is difficult to find and pricing is often unclear. Motorway’s technology is exceptional and will bring much-needed transparency for car owners”.

Despite having three successful (or at least, moderately successful) exits behind them, the Motorway founders are used to doing hard things. A fourth venture — a hotel comparison site launched after they successfully bought back the Top10 domain name and subsequently backed by Accel and Balderton — shut down in 2015.

“Having had three successful startups before Top10, it was obviously a tough outcome for all of us. We built an amazing product and had decent growth, but it wasn’t 10x better than the competition, which it had to be to win in such an established market,” Leathes tells me. “After that we took almost a year working on ideas before deciding on Motorway. And we were pretty ruthless about launching something ourselves, proving it works and scaling it before raising any funding”.