Snapchat’s developer platform is blowing up as a gateway to teen social app users. Hoop is the latest Snap Kit blockbuster, rocketing to No. 2 on the overall App Store charts this month with its Tinder -esque swiping interface for discovering people and asking to message with them over Snapchat. Within a week of going viral, unfunded French startup Dazz saw Hoop score 2.5 million downloads.

The fact that such a dumbfoundingly simple and already ubiquitous style of app was able to climb the charts so fast demonstrates the potential of Snap Kit to drive user lock-in for Snapchat. Because the developer platform lets other apps piggyback on its login system and Bitmoji avatars, it creates new reasons for users to set up a Snapchat account and keep using it. It’s the same strategy that made Facebook an entrenched part of the internet, but this time it’s for a younger crowd.

In the first-ever interview about Hoop, Dazz’s 26-year-old co-founders Lucas Gervais and Alexi Pourret reveal that the idea came from watching user patterns in their previous experiment on the Snap Kit platform. They built an app called Dazz in 2018 that let users create polls and get anonymous answers from friends, but they noticed their 250,000 users “always ended up adding each other on Snap. So we decided to create Hoop, the app to make new Snap friends,” Gervais tells me.

Gervais and Pourret have been friends since age two, growing up in small town in France. They met their two developers in high school, and are now marketing students at university. With Hoop, they say the goal was to “meet everyone’s needs, from connecting people from different cultures to helping lonely people to feel better to simply growing your Snapchat community.”

At first, Hoop for iOS or Android looks just like Tinder. You create an account with some photos and bio information, and start swiping through profiles. If you like someone, you tap a Snapchat button to request their Snap username so you can message them.

But then Hoop reveals its savvy virality and monetization strategy. Rather than being able to endlessly “swipe right” and approach people, Hoop limits your asks by making you spend its in-app “diamonds” currency to reach out. After about 10 requests to chat, you’ll have to earn more diamonds. You do that by sharing and getting friends to open your invite link to the app, adding people on Snapchat that you meet on Hoop, logging in each day, taking a survey, watching a video ad and completing offers by signing up for streaming services or car insurance providers. It also trades diamonds for rating Hoop in the App Store, though that might run afoul of Apple’s rules.

Those tactics helped Hoop climb as high as No. 2 on the overall iOS chart and No. #1 on the Social Apps chart on January 24th. It’s now at No. 83 overall and No. 7 in social, putting it above apps like Discord, LinkedIn, Skype and new Vine successor Byte. Hoop had more than 3 million installs as of a week ago.

There are certainly some concerns, though. Gervais claims that “We are not a meeting or dating app. We simply offer an easy way to make new Snap friends.” But because Tinder isn’t available for people under 18, they might be looking to Hoop instead. Thankfully, adults can’t see profiles of users under 18, and vice versa, and users only see potential matches in their age group. However, users can edit their age at any time.

Snap Kit keeps startups lean

Tools like Amazon’s AWS have made building a startup with a lean team and little money increasingly easy. Snap Kit’s ability to let developers skip the account creation and management process is another step in that direction. But the power to imbue overnight virality is something even Facebook never accomplished, though it helped build empires for developers like Zynga.

Another Snap Kit app called Yolo for receiving anonymous responses to questions shot up to No. 1 in May. Seven months later, it’s still at No. 51. That shows Snap Kit can offer longevity, not just flash-in-the-pan download spikes. Gervais calls the platform “a very powerful tool for developers.”

Three years ago I wrote that Snapchat’s anti-developer attitude was a liability. It needed to become a platform with a cadre of allies that could strengthen its role as an identity platform for teens, and insulate it against copycats like Facebook. That’s exactly what it did. By letting other apps launch themselves using its accounts, Stories and Bitmoji, they wouldn’t need to copy its social graph, sharing format or avatars, and instead would drive attention to the originals.

If Snap can keep building useful developer tools, perhaps by adding to its platform real-world object scanning, augmented reality filters and video calling, a Snapchat account could become a must-have for anyone who wants to use the next generation of apps. Then could come the crown jewel of a platform: discovery and virality. By building a section for promoting Snap Kit apps into Snapchat Discover, developers looking for shortcuts in both engineering and growth might join Evan Spiegel’s army.

Drone startup Wingcopter, working with partners Merck and the Frankfurt University of Applied Science, has completed a first flight of a new drone delivery trial designed to show the benefits of using drones instead of trucks or other road-faring vehicles for moving small cargo between two physically separate office facilities. This first flight covered around 25 km (roughly 15.5 miles), taking a sample of pigments from one Merck lab in Gernsheim to its headquarters in Darmstadt in Germany.

This trial is significant in more ways than one: The area it covered spanned a fairly dense metropolitan area, flying over power lines, trains, roadways and more. It also did all of this without continuous line-of-sight, something that’s been required of most drone delivery trials in a commercial setting to date. The partners involved are hoping this means it can stand as a blueprint to other similar pilot projects and trials being run all over the world.

Next up, the project will continue to fly additional deliveries and then summarize their findings in a report to be delivered in March. Already, using drones instead of trucks seems to provide advantages in terms of time (saving between an hour and even a full day in some cases) and emissions, and it can cut down on the amount of empty return trips made by large, heavy gas-guzzling vehicles, as well.

Wingcopter CEO Tom Plümmer points out in a press release detailing the news that his company has “repeatedly demonstrated” the advantages of drone delivery across a number of use cases, including for use in getting life-saving medical supplies to remote areas. Trials in the U.S. include Alphabet’s Wing, which partnered with FedEx, and UPS, which is working with Matternet, but this commercial trial shows a potentially more fruitful avenue for deploying services in the near-term that don’t require buy-in from the average consumer.

With just about one month until go-time, TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 (March 3 in Berkeley, Calif.) is going to be a true powerhouse event. Prepare to spend the day engaging with the leading innovators, makers and investors bent on shaping the future of these two game-changing technologies.

Don’t have a ticket yet? Beat the price hike at the door and book your ticket now.

Last year 1,500 attendees packed the house, and we’re on track to surpass that number come March. Talk about an opportunity for focused networking. Here’s more great news. CrunchMatch, TechCrunch’s free business match-making tool, will be available to all attendees.

What can CrunchMatch do for you? Excellent question. It’s a curated, automated networking platform that helps you connect with people based on your criteria, goals and interests. No more time spent chatting up the wrong people. No matter who you’re hoping to meet with — founders, investors, technologists, researchers or engineering students — CrunchMatch makes networking a crowd as efficient and painless as possible.

Here’s how it works. When CrunchMatch opens, you’ll get an email to sign-up. Fill out your profile listing your role (technologist, founder, investor, etc.) and the type of connections you want to make at the event. The CrunchMatch algorithm will get to work and suggest people to meet and even set appointments, which you can approve or decline.

You never know who you’ll meet at a TechCrunch event or where that connection might lead. Wet your networking whistle with a look at some of the companies attending TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020:

While you’re at it, check out our program agenda for more than 17 presentations, including live robot demos, panel discussions, interviews and Q&As — where the audience gets to ask speakers their most burning questions.

Oh, and one more game-changer. We’ve added Pitch Night — a mini pitch-off competition that takes place the night before the conference starts.

TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 takes place on March 3, and with CrunchMatch at your side, you’ll network better than ever before. Don’t miss this opportunity to spend a full day connecting and engaging with your community of movers, makers and influencers. Buy your ticket today!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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

Casper, the well-known D2C mattress company, has lowered its IPO price range in a new S-1/A filing made public this morning. The repricing leads to a lower expected valuation for the former startup and a lower IPO raise.

The decision by Casper to shoot lower in its IPO comes after One Medical priced its own public offering conservatively last week, but it was rewarded by the public markets with a dramatic gain in value. That positive reception does not appear to have been enough to help Casper’s IPO pricing cycle.

Let’s calculate Casper’s new valuation range and expected fundraise, figure out its implied revenue multiples, and see if the resulting figures make sense when compared to Purple, its public competitor. For tech-enabled companies heartened by One Medical’s public offering, this is the other side of the coin.

New math

With a fresh commitment of $5 million for its on-demand staffing and care management service for at-home healthcare and nursing facilities, Los Angeles-based Gento is looking to grow.

The new financing came from Palisades Growth Capital, and the company said it would use the money to expand nationally and invest more capital in research and development.

“Gento has been consistently growing,” says Palisades Growth Capital’s Jeff Anderson. “I attribute this success to their user-friendly technology platform, meticulous attention to operations, and passion for their customers’ success. In a vastly changing regulatory landscape, Gento is providing highly cost-effective solutions to the growing in-home healthcare market.”

Founded as Nursing Without Walls, Gento is the brainchild of Victor Gajendran, who worked as a senior director of technology at Zynx Health, a Los Angeles-based technology company working on data analysis of clinical research to improve outcomes in healthcare.

“Recent payment reforms require that home health agencies and skilled nursing facilities operate with the highest level of efficiency,” said Gajendran in a statement. “Gento’s tech-empowered staffing and care delivery management solution is a win-win for the home health agencies, skilled nursing facilities, clinicians and especially the patients.”

Sramana Mitra: You said you have 3,600 customers. If you think about the industry trend, you have modernized the use of data in enterprises quite significantly. What is the adoption level in your...

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The growing ubiquity of open-source software has been a big theme in the evolution of enterprise IT. But behind that facade of popularity lies another kind of truth: Companies may be interested in using more open-source technology, but because there is a learning curve with taking on an open-source project, not all of them have the time, money and expertise to adopt it. Today, a startup out of Finland that has built a platform specifically to target that group of users is announcing a big round of funding, underscoring not just demand for its products, but its growth to date.

Aiven — which provides managed, cloud-based services designed to make it easier for businesses to build services on top of open-source projects — is today announcing that it has raised $40 million in funding, a Series B being led by IVP (itself a major player in enterprise software, backing an illustrious list that includes Slack, Dropbox, Datadog, GitHub and HashiCorp).

Previous investors Earlybird VC, Lifeline Ventures and the family offices of Risto Siilasmaa (chairman of Nokia), and Olivier Pomel (founder of Datadog), also participated. The deal brings the total raised by Aiven to $50 million.

Oskari Saarenmaa, the CEO of Aiven who co-founded the company with Hannu Valtonen, Heikki Nousiainen and Mika Eloranta, said in an interview that the company is not disclosing its valuation at this time, but it comes in the wake of some big growth for the company.

It now has 500 companies as customers, including Atlassian, Comcast, OVO Energy and Toyota, and over the previous two years it doubled headcount and tripled its revenues.

“We are on track to do better than that this year,” Saarenmaa added.

It’s a surprising customer list, given the size (and tech DNA) of some of those companies. Indeed, Saarenmaa even said that originally he and the co-founders — who got the idea for the startup by first building such implementations for previous employers, which included Nokia and F-Secure — envisioned much smaller, and less tech-centric organisations using Aiven.

But in truth, the actual uptake speaks not just to that learning curve you get with open-source projects, but to the fact that even if you do have the talent to work with these, it makes more sense to apply that talent elsewhere and use implementations that have been tried and tested.

The company today provides services on top of eight different open-source projects — Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, Redis, InfluxDB and Grafana — which cover a variety of basic functions, from data streams to search and the handling of a variety of functions that involve ordering and managing vast quantities of data. It works across big public clouds, including Google, Azure, AWS, Digital Ocean and more.

Aiven is running two other open-source technologies in beta — M3 and Flink — which will also soon be added on general release, and the plan will be to add a few more over time, but only a few.

“We may want to have something to help with analytics and data visualisation,” Saarenmaa said, “but we’re not looking to become a collection of different open-source databases. We want to provide the most interesting and best to our customers. The idea is that we are future-proofing. If there is an interesting technology that comes up and starts to be adopted, our users can trust it will be available on Aiven.”

He says that today the company does not — and has no plans to — position itself as a system integrator or consultancy around open-source technologies. The work that it does do with customers, he said, is free and tends to be part of its pre- and after-sales care.

One primary use of the funding will be to expand its on-the-ground offices in different geographies — Aiven has offices in Helsinki, Berlin and Sydney today — with a specific focus on the U.S., in order to be closer to customers to continue to do precisely that.

But sometimes the mountain comes to Mohamed, so to speak. Saarenmaa said that he was first introduced to IVP at Slush, an annual tech conference in Helsinki held in November, and the deal came about quickly after that introduction.

“The increasing adoption of open-source infrastructure software and public cloud usage are among the incredibly powerful trends in enterprise technology and Aiven is making it possible for customers of all sizes to benefit from the advantages of open source infrastructure,” Eric Liaw, a general partner at IVP, said in a statement.

“In addition to their market potential and explosive yet capital-efficient growth, we were most impressed to hear from customer after customer that ‘Aiven just works.’ The overwhelmingly positive feedback from customers is a testament to their hiring practices and the strong engineering team they have built. We’re thrilled to partner with Aiven’s team and help them build their vision of a single open-source data cloud that serves the needs of customers of all sizes.”

Liaw is joining the board with this round.

Clear is an early-stage startup with a big ambition. It wants to build a blockchain for high-volume transaction systems like payments between telcos. Today it announced a $13 million Series A investment.

The round was led by Eight Roads with participation from Telefónica Innovation Ventures, Telekom Innovation Pool of Deutsche Telekom, HKT and Singtel Innov8.

That the strategic investors were telcos is not a coincidence. The early use case for Clear’s blockchain transaction network involves moving payments between worldwide telcos, a system that today is highly manual and prone to errors.

Clear co-founder Gal Hochberg says what his company does is to take commercial contracts and turn them into digital representations, often known in digital ledger terms as a smart contract.

“What that lets us do is create a trusted view of the true status of the relationship within the company’s business partners because they’re now looking at the same pricing and usage. They can find any issues in real time, either in commercial information or in service delivery, and they can even actually resolve those inside our platform,” Hochberg explained.

By putting these high-volume, cross-border transactions onto the blockchain with these smart contracts to act as automated enforcer of the terms, it means that instead of waiting until the end of the month to find errors and begin a resolution process, this can be done in real time, reducing time to payment and speeding up conflict resolution.

“We use blockchain technology to create those interactions in ways that it is auditable, cryptographically secure and ensures that both sides are synced and seeing the same information,” Hochberg said.

For starters, the company is working with worldwide telco companies because the number of transactions, and the way they cross borders make this a good test case, but Hochberg says this is only the starting point. They are not in full-blown production yet, but he says they have proven they can process hundreds of millions of billable events.

The money should help the company get into full carrier-grade production some time in the first half of this year, and then begin to expand into other verticals beyond telcos with the help of today’s investment.

Amidst the staggering rise of on-demand delivery services, the convenience store has been left relatively untouched. Until very recently.

Foxtrot, founded in 2013, is looking to reimagine the corner convenience store, offering customers the option to buy in-store or order online for delivery.

The company today announced the close of a $17 million growth round, co-led by Imaginary and Wittington Ventures, with investment from previous backers Fifth Wall, Lerer Hippeau, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, M3 Ventures, The University of Chicago, Collaborative VC and Wasson Enterprise, as well as new investors Bluestein Associates and Barshop Ventures.

Foxtrot offers a wide variety of products to customers, including craft beer and natural wines, familiar brands like Oreo and everyday goods like Bounty paper towels, as well as products under the Foxtrot label like sandwiches, prepped meals and coffee. It’s an impressive mix of local, emerging and heritage brands all under one roof. In total, Foxtrot works with more than 100 vendors to supply customers with upwards of 800 different products.

Founder and CEO Mike LaVitola says that there is an even breakdown between Foxtrot’s own products (coffee, sandwiches, gummy candies), emerging brands (Hims, MatchaBar, etc.) and staple products and brands (Bud Light and Oreo).

But the roof isn’t necessarily all that important. Foxtrot offers on-demand delivery of its full product suite via an app. And moreover, Foxtrot’s loyalty program offers free delivery for a month for folks who spent more than $100 (either in-store or online) last month at Foxtrot.

[gallery ids="1942166,1942160,1942165,1942164,1942163"]

Foxtrot has stores in Dallas and Chicago, with plans to expand its footprint in those markets, as well as launch in D.C.

The company says it’s experiencing 2x year-over-year revenue growth, with 150% YOY growth of its e-commerce customer base. Its revenue is split 50/50 between offline and online sales.

In terms of employment, the workers inside the store who pick and pack and serve offline customers are W2 employees. Couriers are contractors but are employed directly by Foxtrot based on the company’s own best practices around on-demand delivery.

LaVitola identifies maintaining a cohesive experience across retail and online as one of the greatest challenges.

“They’re fundamentally different,” said LaVitola. “The things that make one successful are very different from the things that make the other side successful. Going forward, to be as successful as we’ve been in these first markets, we need to make sure that the customer is coming to us online and in the store, and that they feel that they’re seeing the same brands and the same ecosystem.”

Spanish startup Bnext is expanding beyond its home country. The company is currently rolling out its product in Mexico, and 170,000 people signed up to a waiting list. Bnext is going to invite those 170,000 potential users first before opening signups to everyone.

Bnext is building an alternative to traditional bank accounts. Customers can open a Bnext account in minutes using a mobile app. A few days later, users receive a payment card. You can then upload money to your Bnext account, and send and spend money all around the world.

You can receive notifications for each transaction with your card, temporarily lock and unlock your card and more. In other words, Bnext does many of the things that you expect from a neobank.

Unlike many traditional retail banks, Bnext plans to attract customers with cheaper international transactions. For instance, Spanish customers traveling abroad can withdraw money up to three times per month and spend as much as €2,000 per month without any foreign exchange fee. When you reach those limits, you pay 1.15% to 1.5% in foreign exchange fees. Mexican customers get two free withdrawals per month.

The startup has put together a local team in order to expand to Mexico. There are currently 12 employees working for Bnext in Mexico City.

But Bnext doesn’t want to stop at providing a current account with a card. In Spain, the company is building a financial hub to help you manage your money across multiple financial services. You can lend money to small and medium businesses and earn interest through October, you can save money using Raisin, you can get a loan, a mortgage, an insurance product, etc.

Bnext expects to launch its marketplace in Mexico at some point during the second half of 2020. The company also expects to expand to other countries in Latin America in the future.

When it comes to numbers, Bnext has attracted 300,000 active users in Spain. In the last 12 months, the startup has processed €430 million across 11.6 million transactions.

Deliverr doesn’t own a warehouse or a delivery truck, but the startup is helping e-commerce companies not named Amazon achieve Amazon-like two-day shipping. The startup does it with intelligent algorithms, and today it announced a $40 million Series C investment.

Activant Capital led the round. Other investors in the company include 8VC, GLP and Flexport founder and CEO Ryan Peterson. The company reports it has raised a total of $70 million.

“What we enable a merchant to do is offer free two-day delivery anywhere they sell, whether it’s Walmart, eBay, even Amazon, because we integrate into Prime or their own website,” Deliverr CEO and co-founder Michael Krakaris told TechCrunch. They also added a recent program for merchants who want next-day delivery.

The question is, how do they do this without owning a single warehouse or a single delivery truck? Krakaris says he cut his teeth at Twilio, a company that delivered message services without being a carrier. As he learned there, if you have good data and a good algorithm, you can build a business.

They have also built relationships with a network of warehouses across the country, and as Krakaris pointed out, most warehouses have unused space. So based on their understanding of markets, they move goods to different parts of the country, store them in available warehouse space and use the warehouse’s own picking systems to grab the goods.

The big thing is that they integrate into the warehouse’s Warehouse Management System software, so that orders coming through their system will integrate with the warehouse’s, get picked, processed and put on a truck. The system also helps find the fastest, cheapest way to deliver the goods on time.

This involves two algorithms, an in-bound algorithm and an outbound one. “Inbound is when a merchant is getting started sending inventory into the Deliverr network. And so we’re doing a few things. If it’s a repeat item, we already have a demand graph for that item so we’re just optimizing that existing demand,” he explained. He says there is some common sense in that you’ll see certain items tend to be consistent throughout the year, but you don’t want to put warm jackets in Florida and California.

The other piece is outbound, figuring the fastest, cheapest way to deliver that item. They have relationships with a variety of national and regional carriers, and when an order comes in, they look at the inventory and location and figure out the optimal choice, based on price and ability to get there in the delivery window. Krakaris says they have a success rate of over 95%, which is near the top of the industry.

The company launched in 2017. They are serving thousands of merchants using data with just 60 employees. That’s a testament to the power of data and good algorithms.

Like other tech giants, Google’s parent, Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOG) too has crossed into the trillion-dollar market cap territory. This was even though the recently announced fourth quarter results did...

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This morning The Zebra, an Austin-based insurance marketplace startup, announced it has closed a $38.5 million Series C. Accel led the funding event, which was participated in by prior investors Silverton Partners, Ballast Point Ventures, and the company’s CEO Keith Melnick. Floodgate and Weatherford Capital also invested in the round.

According to Melnick, the company had targeted a final sum closer to $30 million, but interest in putting more capital into the business by the company’s extant investor set led to a larger Series C. The Zebra previously raised a number of Seed rounds, and a $17 million Series C led by Ballast and a $40 million Series B led by Accel.

The Zebra joins competing startups, including Insurify ($23 million), Gabi ($27 million) and Policygenius ($100 million) in raising new capital this year. Why are venture capitalists putting so much money into the space? When we recently posed the question, we posited revenue growth among its constituent players and a total addressable market that was attractive as likely reasons why.

Happily, The Zebra released some hard performance numbers in conjunction with its round, which not only show why the company was able to raise more capital but also why its space is hot.

Performance

When most startups raise capital they are rarely share performance results and business metrics. This leads to press releases so insipid and anodyne that many rounds are covered by precisely zero members of the media.

One way to avoid this bland fate is to share at least directional results. ARR growth, say, on a year-over-year basis. The next level of transparency — and therefore flavor — is providing real figures. Which is what The Zebra did as part of its Series C. Here they are:

It’s an impressive list of metrics. An interview with the company’s CEO helped fill in a few more details.

According to Melnick, The Zebra is improving customer acquisition costs over time, as it is also improving its revenue generation (both categories on a unit basis), implying that the company isn’t spending its capital on driving artificial growth.

Given the company’s expected growth when is the IPO? Melnick cited his time at Kayak (which went public), listening to investor Mike Moritz who was skeptical at times of going public. Melnick joked that, “Like [with] most things, Mike was right.” The Zebra isn’t focused on any particular exit, he said. Instead, it wants to execute well, which will provide the company with a number of options when the time is right.

In summation: the Zebra’s $38.5 million brings us to $185.5 million raised by four insurance marketplaces so far in 2020. It’s going to be fascinating to see where all the startups are at the end fo 2020 and if any have linked up by then.

Sramana Mitra: Did you make any moves on the monetization of this half a million users? Abhinav Asthana: Not really. We used to have an in-app purchase. It used to be for $10 at that time. We...

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Early-stage European VC firm Blossom Capital is fresh from closing a $185M fund— a big jump up on its prior close. The firm makes just a handful of investments per year, mostly at the Series A stage, working very closely with founders in its portfolio, a strategy it refers to as “high conviction” investing.

One of its chosen few is Inne, a Berlin-based femtech startup that’s building a novel, hormone-tracking subscription product for fertility-tracking and “natural” contraception. The aim is to offer a high-tech alternative to taking hormones to prevent pregnancy or using an established barrier method (such as a condom).

Inne came out of stealth last fall to announce $8.8M in funding, giving us the first glimpse of the medical device it’s been working on since 2017. This test-at-home hormone tracker is slated to launch in select markets in Scandinavia this year, but at a scale akin to a limited beta. The startup said it would be iterating the product based on feedback from the first users

We chatted with Blossom Capital partner Louise Samet, who led the fund’s investment in Inne, to get the inside track on that deal and further understand how the fund thinks about femtech and the key challenges and opportunities she sees for founders building products targeted to women.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TechCrunch: How does the fund approach femtech?

Samet: The way we define femtech is products that are built for women. But I think the definition of the term is not necessarily important. The more important thing is the problem the founders are focusing on solving.

Following Tier Mobility’s $60 million Series B late last year, the e-scooter rentals startup has been busy bolstering its C-suite.

The Berlin-based company is announcing that Moritz Werner has joined as chief commercial officer (CCO), and Roger Hassan has joined as chief operational officer (COO). Werner will be responsible for revenue related activities across all markets, while Hassan will be responsible for the cost side of the business including all operations.

Both recruits will report to Tier co-founder and CEO Lawrence Leuschner. The leadership team also comprises Matthias Laug, co-founder and CTO, and Alex Gayer, CFO. Tier says the group will continue building Tier’s new executive team; therefore, we can likely expect more senior hires to be announced in the coming months.

Hassan, 38, most recently served as CEO of London-based Echo, the U.K.-based medication management and repeat prescription app recently acquired by McKesson (owners of Lloyds Pharmacy). Previously, he was COO International of HelloFresh, the now publicly traded meal-kit company where he spent nearly 4 years establishing the operations and supply chain expertise across 10 markets.

Werner, 38, joins from the Boston Consulting Group, where he has worked for more than 10 years. Most recently, he held the role of Partner and Managing Director for its corporate venture builder BCG Digital Ventures. In 2011, he founded 21Diamonds, a mass-customisation jewelry company funded by Rocket Internet, which was acquired in 2019.

(Fun fact: Julian Blessin, another one of Tier’s co-founders, was instrumental in setting up now defunct electric roadside scooter rental service Coup, a subsidiary of Bosch and backed by BCG Digital Ventures.)

Instamojo, a Bangalore-based startup that helps merchants and small businesses accept digital payments and sell on the web, has acquired Gurgaon-based startup GetMeAShop.

The deal is worth $5 million and includes conglomerate Times Internet making an investment in Instamojo, Sampad Swain, co-founder and chief executive of the Bangalore-based startup, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Hundreds of millions of people have come online in India in the last decade thanks to proliferation of low-cost Android smartphones and availability to some of the world’s cheapest mobile data plans. But most small businesses, especially neighborhood stores and merchants, remain offline.

A wave of startups in the country today are trying to make it easier for these merchants and businesses to come online. GetMeAShop is one such startup. It runs a platform that allows businesses to set up their website, build an online store, and make it easier for merchants or individuals to engage with — and sell to — their customers through social apps such as WhatsApp and Facebook.

For Instamojo, this acquisition is not surprising. The seven-year-old startup began its journey as a payments provider for small businesses. Over the years, it has launched an online store, and a lending service to serve more needs of a business.

Two years ago, the startup added logistics service to the platform through partnership with a handful of firms in the nation, allowing its merchants to have their packages picked up from their doorstep.

“This acquisition will allow us to become a full-fledged operating system for businesses,” said Swain.

Instamojo has amassed 1.2 million merchants on its platform. “It took us seven years to get a million merchants on the platform. Now we are adding more than 2,000 a day. We are on track to hit 2 million merchants by the end of this year,” he said.

The startup also operates an app store that allows developers to use Instamojo’s system to build their own apps and make money. Instamojo currently does not charge any commission to its developers, but in the future it plans to explores monetization opportunities.

Pushkal Srivastava, founder and chief executive of GetMeAShop, said the acquisition will give the startup access to “distribution specific to the target segment we’ve been going after for all these years.” He added, “with our full-stack SaaS offering for MSMEs with web and commerce builder [and] CRM and analytics built-in, we augment the existing offerings of Instamojo perfectly.”

Fearing weak fundraising options in the wake of the WeWork implosion, late-stage startups are tightening their belts. The latest is another Softbank-funded company, joining Zume Pizza (80 percent of staff laid off), Wag (80 percent),  Fair (40%), Getaround (25 percent), Rappi (6 percent), and Oyo (5 percent) that have all cut staff to slow their burn rate and reduce their funding needs. Now freight forwarding startup Flexport is laying off 3 percent of its global staff.

“We’re restructuring some parts of our organization to move faster and with greater clarity and purpose. With that came the difficult decision to part ways with around 50 employees” a Flexport spokesperson tells TechCrunch after we asked today if it had seen layoffs like its peers.

Flexport had raised a $1 billion Series D led by SoftBank at a $3.2 billion valuation a year ago, bringing it to $1.3 billion in funding. The company helps move shipping containers full of goods between manufacturers and retailers using digital tools unlike its old-school competitors.

“We underinvested in areas that help us serve clients efficiently, and we over-invested in scaling our existing process when we actually needed to be agile and adaptable to best serve our clients, especially in a year of unprecedented volatility in global trade,” the spokesperson explained.

Flexport still had a record year, working with 10,000 clients to finance and transport goods. The shipping industry is so huge that it’s still only the seventh largest freight forwarder on its top Trans-Pacific Eastbound leg. The massive headroom for growth plus its use of software to coordinate supply chains and optimize routing is what attracted SoftBank.

But many late-stage startups are worried about where they’ll get their next round after taking huge sums of cash from SoftBank at tall valuations. As of November, SoftBank had only managed to raise about $2 billion for its Vision Fund 2 despite plans for a total of $108 billion, Bloomberg reported. LPs were partially spooked by SoftBank’s reckless investment in WeWork. Further layoffs at its portfolio companies could further stoke concerns about entrusting it with more cash.

Unless growth-stage startups can cobble together enough institutional investors to build big rounds, or other huge capital sources like sovereign wealth funds materialize for them, these startups might not be able to raise enough to keep rapidly burning. Those that can’t reach profitability or find an exit may face down-rounds that can come with onerous terms, trigger talent exodus death spirals, or just not provide enough money.

Flexport has managed to escape with just 3 percent layoffs for now. Being proactive about cuts to reach sustainability may be smarter than gambling that one’s business or the funding climate with suddenly improve. But while other SoftBank startups had to spend tons to edge out direct competitors or make up for weak on-demand service margins, Flexport at least has a tried and true business where incumbents have been asleep at the wheel.