TechCrunch |
- Airtel Africa gets an extra $200M for its mobile money business from QIA
- Introducing the Open Cap Table Coalition
- Daily Crunch: Scarlett Johansson sues Disney, says streaming release of ‘Black Widow’ breaches contract
- Another banner quarter as Chromebook shipments grow 75% YOY
- Varda Space Industries closes $42M Series A for off-planet manufacturing
- 4 key areas SaaS startups must address to scale infrastructure for the enterprise
- Pinterest shares drop as company misses on user growth … again
- Robinhood’s stock drops 8% in its first day’s trading
- Horizon Blockchain Games raises $4.5M for its NFT trading card game and wallet
- Biofourmis receives FDA breakthrough device designation for heart failure “digital therapy”
- Zūm wins $150M from San Francisco schools to modernize and electrify student transport
- Microsoft in talks to back India’s Oyo
- Livestream e-commerce: Why companies and brands need to tune in
- Scarlett Johansson files suit over Disney+ ‘Black Widow’ release
- Panic sells 20,000+ Playdate handhelds in under 20 minutes
- Fortnite’s mystery ‘superstar’ virtual music tour kicks off next week
- Why Latin American venture capital is breaking records this year
- Tenderly raises $15.3M to help Ethereum developers ship decentralized apps faster
- Colombia’s Merqueo bags $50M to expand its online grocery delivery service across Latin America
- Uber will offer free Rosetta Stone language courses to drivers
| Airtel Africa gets an extra $200M for its mobile money business from QIA Posted: 30 Jul 2021 02:26 AM PDT Three months ago, Mastercard invested $100 million in Airtel Mobile Commerce BV (AMC BV) — the mobile money business of telecom Airtel Africa. This was two weeks after it also received $200 million from TPG’s Rise Fund. Today, the African telecoms operator has announced that it has secured another investment for its mobile money arm. The investor? Qatar Holding LLC, an affiliate of the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar with over $300 billion in assets. The Middle Eastern corporation is set to invest $200 million into AMC BV through a secondary purchase of shares from Airtel Africa. AMC BV is an Airtel Africa subsidiary and the holding company for several of Airtel Africa's mobile money operations across 14 African countries, including Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria. The mobile money arm operates one of the largest financial services on the continent. It provides users access to mobile wallets, support for international money transfers, loans and virtual credit cards. According to a statement released by the telecoms operator, the proceeds of the investment will be used to reduce debt and invest in network and sales infrastructure in the respective operating countries. The deal will close in two tranches — $150 million invested at the first close, most likely in August. The remaining $50 million will be invested at second close. Airtel Africa claims QIA will hold a minority stake while it continues to hold the majority stake. This transaction still values Airtel Africa at $2.65 billion on a cash and debt-free basis like other deals. However, what’s different this time is that QIA is entitled to appoint a director to AMC BV’s board and “to certain customary information and minority protection rights.” Airtel Africa’s most recent report for Q1 2021 shows signs of growth. The telecoms operator saw a year on year revenue growth of 53.7%, pushed by a 24.6% growth in customer base to 23.1 million. Transaction value went up 64.4% to $14.7 billion ($59 billion annualised); and EBITDA stood at $60 million ($240 million annualised) at a margin of 48.8%. The company also generated $124 million in revenue ($496 million annualised), while its profits before tax year-on-year for Q1 2021 stood at $185 million. Mansoor bin Ebrahim Al-Mahmoud, CEO of QIA, said the sovereign’s wealth fund investment in Airtel Africa would help promote financial inclusion in Sub-Saharan Africa. "Airtel Money plays a critical role in facilitating economic activity, including for customers without access to traditional financial services. We firmly believe in its mission to expand these efforts over the coming years," he added. In February, Airtel Africa first made it known that it wanted to sell a minority stake in AMC BV to raise cash and sell off some assets. The subsequent month, it sold off telecommunication towers in Madagascar and Malawi to Helios Towers for $119 million and raised $500 million from outside investors.  |
| Introducing the Open Cap Table Coalition Posted: 29 Jul 2021 03:32 PM PDT On Tuesday, the Open Cap Table Coalition announced its launch through an inaugural Medium post. The goal of this project is to standardize startup capitalization table data as well as make it far more accessible, transparent and portable. For those unfamiliar with a cap table, it's a list of who owns your company's securities, which includes your company shares, options and more. A clear and simple cap table should quickly indicate who owns what and how much of it they own. For a variety of reasons (sometimes inexperience or bad advice) too many equity holders often find companies’ capitalization information to be opaque and not easily accessible. This is particularly important for the small percentage of startups that survive in the long term, as growth makes for far more complicated cap tables. A critical part of good startup hygiene is to always have a clean and updated cap table. Since there is no set format and cap tables are generally not out in the open, they are often siloed rather than collaborative. Cap tables are near and dear to me as someone who has advised hundreds of startups over the past two decades as the founder of an accelerator, a venture partner and a senior adviser at a government-funded startup launchpad. I have been on the shareholder side of the equation as well and can assure you that pretty much nothing destroys trust between shareholders and startups quicker than poor communication, especially around issues such as the current status of the cap table.
A critical part of good startup hygiene is to always have a clean and updated cap table. I really like the idea of a cap table being an open corporate record, because the value proposition to the companies is clear. From the time a startup creates a cap table, it's prone to inaccuracy, friction and mistakes. What this means in practice is that startups may spend money on cap-table-related issues that they should be spending on other things. From a legal process perspective, the law firm that is brought in to help with these issues has to deal with tedious back-end work, so the legal time isn’t high value for either the startup or the law firm. The value proposition for equity holders is equally clear. All equity holders have a general and legal interest in a company's capitalization information. They have the right to this information, which they may need for a variety of reasons (including, if things ever get really bad, an aggrieved shareholder action). So making this information clear and easily accessible is a service to equity holders and can also encourage more investment, especially from less experienced investors. When I imagine what this project could become in the next couple of years, I think back to late 2013, when Y Combinator announced the SAFE (simple agreement for future equity). I think the SAFE is a good analogy here, as no one knew what it was and people wondered if this was a nice-to-have rather than a must-have for startups. But the end result was a dramatic improvement in the early-stage capital-raising process. While the coalition's founders include Morgan Stanley's Shareworks, LTSE Software and Carta, it's also heavy on Big Law, with Cooley, Goodwin Procter, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Orrick, Gunderson Dettmer, Latham & Watkins, and Fenwick & West rounding out the group of 10 founding members. So what's the real motivation of seven law firms, which together saw revenue of over $10 billion in 2020 to collaborate on an open cap table product for startups? Deal flow. Big Law has been trying for a couple of decades to build relationships with startups at the stage where it makes no sense for a startup to be dealing with a massive and expensive law firm. Their efforts to build startup programs have often fallen short and received mixed reviews. They have also been far too heavy on the self-serve and too light on the “we're going to give you our regular Big Law level of services at a small fraction of the costs just in case you make it big and can one day pay our regular fees.” So these firms are trying to separate themselves from the rest of the Big Law pack by building this entrepreneur-friendly tech. The coalition has already produced its initial version of the open cap table. The real question is whether this is going to be a big deal, as the SAFE was, or whether it's going to be a vanity solution in search of a real problem. My best guess is that if this coalition gets all the relationships right, doesn't get greedy and understands that there is a social good component at play here, this could be, reasonably quickly, as impactful as the SAFE was.  |
| Posted: 29 Jul 2021 03:10 PM PDT To get a roundup of TechCrunch's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 29, 2021. Between the IPO cycle and earnings it has been quite the day. And Nikola's founder was indicted on three counts of fraud. It's busy! Let's get into it! — Alex The TechCrunch Top 3 (OK, four, but it's about Scarlett Johansson)
Startups/VC
Livestream e-commerce: Why companies and brands need to tune inThis year, livestream viewers in China are projected to spend more than $60 billion on digital shopping experiences where they can interact with influencers in real time. Promoting everything from cosmetics to food, social media stars use Taobao, TikTok and other platforms to tout products and answer live questions. On Taobao’s Single's Day Global Shopping Festival in 2020, livestreams racked up $6 billion in sales, twice as much revenue as the year prior. Sensing a trend, Western startups are getting in on the action, with companies like Whatnot and PopShop.Live raising rounds to build out their infrastructure. Looking forward, Alanna Gregory, senior global director at Afterpay, says she foresees four major trends:
“For brands, SaaS streaming tools will be the most impactful way to take advantage of livestream commerce trends,” Gregory writes in an Extra Crunch guest post. “All of this will be incredibly transformative.” (Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Big Tech Inc.We went a bit long on the startup side of things, so let's be brief when it comes to Big Tech.
TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images We're reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices. Fill out the survey here. Read one of the testimonials we've received below! Marketer: Scott Graham Recommended by: Heather Larrabee, CMO, FORM Testimonial: "He was referred to us and blew our socks off from his initial analysis. He's the rare growth adviser expert at strategy and execution. He's a servant leader, a systems thinker, integrates with the team with empathy and curiosity like he's an internal teammate, brings a wealth of cutting-edge knowledge, and a stable of incredible partners and resources. He runs with the best and the brightest, but he's the first one on and the last one off for the day, putting in the time to make things great. He has an uncanny ability to communicate complex concepts and make them accessible for all audiences, and he's been a foundational game changer for our business and many others."  |
| Another banner quarter as Chromebook shipments grow 75% YOY Posted: 29 Jul 2021 03:08 PM PDT Last quarter, Chromebooks saw 275% year-over-year growth up to 12 million units. The figure isn't quite as unwieldy for Q2, but a 75% year-over-year growth is still extremely respectable, with the category hitting 11.9 million shipments, per the latest figures from research firm, Canalys. Chromebooks joined the rest of the PC market in getting an overall bump from the pandemic. Standard tablets and PCs saw healthy increases as consumers scrambled to create work from home setups, while Google's OS got an even larger rise as schools implemented remote learning. As schools in a number of locations have reopened more than a year into the pandemic, however, Chromebook sales are still hot. Google is certainly looking to capitalize on that success by once again attempting to extend the operating system's reach beyond its educational foothold. The company is clearly eyeing the enterprise segment, which may be welcoming of systems that are both easy to deploy and lock down.  Image Credits: Canalys "With Chrome's hold over the education space relatively secure, Google is set to bet big on the commercial segment this year," Canalys' Brian Lynch said in a statement. We expect to see a strong focus on attracting small businesses with updated services, such as the new 'Individual' subscription tier for Google Workspace and promotions on CloudReady licenses to repurpose old PCs for deployment alongside existing Chromebook fleets." After the launch of multiple M1-based systems, Apple, too, is making a big play for business. The company recently launched a new Apple at Work site. "Whether your organization has 10 devices or 10,000, Apple fits easily into your existing infrastructure," the company writes of its new IT efforts. "Zero-touch deployment allows IT to configure and manage remotely, and IT can tailor the setup process to any team. So every Mac, iPad, iPhone and Apple TV is ready to go from the start." With Windows 11 arriving later this year, Microsoft will no doubt be making its own case to maintain dominance over the office — remote and otherwise.  |
| Varda Space Industries closes $42M Series A for off-planet manufacturing Posted: 29 Jul 2021 02:40 PM PDT Varda Space Industries has raised a $42 million Series A to bring to manufacturing a key capability that can only be found off-world: microgravity. The eight-month-old startup is looking to establish its first manufacturing facility in space as early as 2023, and by doing so, bring back to Earth advanced products that can only be made under sustained periods of zero gravity. The round was led by Khosla Ventures and Caffeinated Capital, with participation from existing investors Lux Capital, General Catalyst and Founders Fund. It pushes the company's total raise thus far to over $50 million, including a $9 million seed round last December. Varda's idea is different than that of Jeff Bezos, who said after his own trip to space earlier this month that he wants to "move all heavy industry and all polluting industry off Earth." The company's co-founders, SpaceX veteran Will Bruey and Founders Fund principal Delian Asparouhov, aren't imagining cement mixers and steel plants in orbit. Instead, they want to open up manufacturing processes that aren't possible on Earth, in order to make bioprinted organs, fiber-optic cables or pharmaceuticals — products that require fundamentally different conditions than what's available on-planet. Building the space factory of the futureThe value of microgravity manufacturing, Bruey and Asparouhov say, can be found with the International Space Station, essentially a scientific outpost. A steady stream of research has emerged from the ISS over the last few decades showing that novel materials and products are possible in space. But until now, getting, staying in and returning from orbit has been too costly to consider scaling these findings. "In a way, a lot of our R&D has already been done for us in the public sector, and we’re essentially a ramp toward commercialization for that research that's already been proven out," Bruey told TechCrunch. Right now, the company is building a three-module spacecraft comprised of an off-the-shelf satellite platform, a center platform where the microgravity manufacturing will take place, and a reentry vehicle to bring the materials back to Earth. For the first 10 or so launches, Bruey said Varda would build the products itself. Once the company has established that its process is reliable and cheap, he added that in the long term the goal is to become a contract manufacturing platform for other companies wanting to build products in space. Asparouhov likened it to the iPhone and the App Store: "The iPhone didn't come out with the App Store. Apple developed the first 10 or 11 apps to share the value of that. So we’re developing those first few apps ourselves to show the value in this commercial capability that we’re bringing to market, but over time, we will start to release an app store." One key part of Varda's plan is to make all of the manufacturing automated. By keeping humans out of the picture (at least for now), the company is able to reduce critical overhead by skipping human-rated spacecraft development (and the associated safety concerns with crewed launches).  Varda invited regulators and the DoD to a preliminary design review. Image Credits: Varda Space Industries (opens in a new window) "I think that what investors, NASA and the [Department of Defense], really see as exciting about our approach is that in comparison to everyone else that’s ever discussed 'space manufacturing,' we’re by far the most near-term, pragmatic, commercially viable approach, launching and producing materials less than 18 months from now, as opposed to plans that are typically five years, 10 years, decades away from being viable," Asparouhov said. He added that one way to think about space manufacturing is that there is a certain dollar per unit-mass that Varda will need to spend to get things up to microgravity, and a dollar per unit-mass of value from manufacturing in microgravity. The key to profitability is finding the products that maximizes the difference between these two equations. Novel pharmaceuticals, for example, could yield massive profits if the innovation gains from zero gravity are correspondingly high. The company is imagining "multiple missions" in 2023, Bruey said, and then moving to once per quarter and even imagining multiple reentry capsules returning with products per day. The Varda co-founders are convinced that the scale of demand for novel space-made products is potentially high enough to meet this kind of launch and reentry schedule. Compared to a burgeoning industry like space tourism, Bruey said the space manufacturing has the potential to positively affect a much higher portion of humanity. "It will touch many different parts of humanity’s experience out here on Earth, with significant improvements in quality of life," he said.  |
| 4 key areas SaaS startups must address to scale infrastructure for the enterprise Posted: 29 Jul 2021 02:20 PM PDT Startups and SMBs are usually the first to adopt many SaaS products. But as these customers grow in size and complexity — and as you rope in larger organizations — scaling your infrastructure for the enterprise becomes critical for success. Below are four tips on how to advance your company's infrastructure to support and grow with your largest customers. Address your customers' security and reliability needsIf you're building SaaS, odds are you're holding very important customer data. Regardless of what you build, that makes you a threat vector for attacks on your customers. While security is important for all customers, the stakes certainly get higher the larger they grow. Given the stakes, it's paramount to build infrastructure, products and processes that address your customers' growing security and reliability needs. That includes the ethical and moral obligation you have to make sure your systems and practices meet and exceed any claim you make about security and reliability to your customers. Here are security and reliability requirements large customers typically ask for: Formal SLAs around uptime: If you're building SaaS, customers expect it to be available all the time. Large customers using your software for mission-critical applications will expect to see formal SLAs in contracts committing to 99.9% uptime or higher. As you build infrastructure and product layers, you need to be confident in your uptime and be able to measure uptime on a per customer basis so you know if you're meeting your contractual obligations.
While it's hard to prioritize asks from your largest customers, you'll find that their collective feedback will pull your product roadmap in a specific direction. Real-time status of your platform: Most larger customers will expect to see your platform's historical uptime and have real-time visibility into events and incidents as they happen. As you mature and specialize, creating this visibility for customers also drives more collaboration between your customer operations and infrastructure teams. This collaboration is valuable to invest in, as it provides insights into how customers are experiencing a particular degradation in your service and allows for you to communicate back what you found so far and what your ETA is. Backups: As your customers grow, be prepared for expectations around backups — not just in terms of how long it takes to recover the whole application, but also around backup periodicity, location of your backups and data retention (e.g., are you holding on to the data too long?). If you're building your backup strategy, thinking about future flexibility around backup management will help you stay ahead of these asks.  |
| Pinterest shares drop as company misses on user growth … again Posted: 29 Jul 2021 02:01 PM PDT Pinterest’s shares had popped last week when Snap posted its best quarter in four years, as investors were betting Pinterest’s image-based social app would also see a return in advertiser spending. Those expectations now appear to be correct, as Pinterest beat on earnings with second-quarter revenue of $613.2 million and earnings per share of 25 cents, above analysts’ estimates. However, Pinterest’s stock still tanked as the company reported monthly active user growth of just 9% to reach 454 million, when analysts were expecting 482 million. Ahead of Pinterest’s announcement, Wall St. had forecast revenue of $562.3 million and earnings of $0.133 per share, up from a loss of $0.70 per share from the same quarter last year. But while Pinterest delivered on financials, the company’s struggles with user growth sent the stock tumbling. The image pinboard and shopping inspiration site had initially benefitted from increased engagement and user growth during the early days of the pandemic, but both slowed in the first quarter of 2021 due the easing of COVID-19 restrictions, which had then sent the stock down by more than 10% after its first quarter earnings were posted. Today, the stock was down more than 12% in after-hours trading, shortly after earnings were announced. Pinterest addressed the issues around user growth upfront on the earnings call, again blaming the COVID pandemic for declines in usage. “The pandemic was an unprecedented and unique global event,” explained Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann. “In past earnings calls, we talked about how stay-at-home orders significantly increased usage of Pinterest. And for the past year, we’ve highlighted how people came to Pinterest for inspiration to reinvent their lives during such a difficult time,” he continued. “Now, as the world opens up, we’re seeing the similar effect in the opposite direction that impacted our growth — particularly because some of the core use cases we see on our platform are less common in 2021 than they were a year ago. That shifting behavior in Q2 impacts engagement,” Silbermann said. The company also noted that, as of July 27, 2021, its monthly active users in the U.S. had declined by approximately 7%, while global monthly active users gained approximately 5% year over year. Pinterest said its web users tend to be less engaged and generate less revenue than those who come from mobile apps. In the second quarter, its monthly active users on mobile apps grew in U.S. and internationally, year over year, by more than 20%. The company’s issues with user growth and engagement indicate just how critical Pinterest’s plan to cater to the creator industry is the company’s future. Recently, the company launched video-first Idea pins that allow creators to showcase their crafts, recipes, fashion, beauty tutorials, projects or anything else. This week, Pinterest introduced new features that will now allow creators to make money from those pins. Despite user growth issues, the return of ad spending led to year-over-year revenue growth of 78% in the first quarter, and the company predicted it would see even higher 105% year-over-year revenue growth in Q2. Today, it reported 125% revenue growth — above with the 116% Snap reported in its record second quarter — a figure Pinterest attributed to advertisers’ return.  |
| Robinhood’s stock drops 8% in its first day’s trading Posted: 29 Jul 2021 01:36 PM PDT Robinhood priced its public offering at $38 per share last night, the low end of its IPO range. The company was worth around $32 billion at that price. But once the U.S. consumer investing and trading app began to allow investors to trade its shares, they went down sharply, off more than 10% in the first hours of its life as a floating stock. Robinhood recovered some in later trading, but closed the day worth $34.82 per share, off 8.37%, per Yahoo Finance. The company sold 55,000,000 shares in its IPO, generating gross proceeds of $2.1 billion, though that figure may rise if its underwriting banks purchase their available options. Regardless, the company is now well-capitalized to chart its future according to its own wishes. So, why did the stock go down? Given the hungry furor we’ve seen around many big-brand, consumer-facing tech companies in the last year, you might be surprised that Robinhood didn’t close the day up 80%, or something similar. After all, DoorDash and Airbnb had huge debuts. Thinking out loud, a few things could be at play:
Regardless, in the stonk and meme-stock era, Robinhood’s somewhat downward debut is a bit of a puzzler. More as the company’s stock finds its footing and we dig more deeply into investor sentiment regarding its future performance. We have more coming on the company’s debut, including notes from an interview with the company’s CFO about its IPO coming tomorrow morning on Extra Crunch.  |
| Horizon Blockchain Games raises $4.5M for its NFT trading card game and wallet Posted: 29 Jul 2021 01:10 PM PDT Horizon Blockchain Games is — as the name implies — a company building games on the blockchain, along with tools to help others do the same. The company announced today that it has raised another $4.5 million, bringing its total raised to a little over $13 million. Horizon’s first game is Skyweaver, a competitive digital trading card game that taps the blockchain to give players more realistic ownership of their virtual cards. Once earned through competition with other players, cards can be sold, traded or taken out of the system and put in storage. As I previously wrote about Horizon here:
“Arcadeum” mentioned above has now been rebranded as “Sequence,” an easy-to-integrate wallet system that aims to hand-wave away the complexities of the blockchain. They want to let users buy and store their digital goods on the blockchain without either the user or an app’s developer really having to think about the blockchain. Horizon co-founder Michael Sanders tells me the rebranding comes with an overall broadening of its focus; the “Arcade” in “Arcadeum” suggested it was all about gaming, whereas the aim is to help manage all kinds of digital items, from virtual gaming goods to NFT art and beyond. The Horizon team often mentions being built to support “Web3,” a term I’ve been hearing more and more lately. In short (or, at least, as best I understand it), Web3 is a category of online-but-decentralized apps, services and games built around the blockchain (Ethereum, in this case) to give individual users more control of their data. The Ethereum foundation has a breakdown of the concept here.  A match in Skyweaver. Image Credits: Horizon Blockchain Games Horizon originally intended to open Skyweaver up more broadly in 2020; as of this morning it’s still in private beta, with plans to open widely later this year. Sanders tells me they’ve let in over 66,000 players so far. The company says that investors in this round (a “pre-Series A round SAFE”) include CMT Digital, The Xchange Company, BITKRAFT Ventures, Khaled Verjee and Zyshan Kaba.  |
| Biofourmis receives FDA breakthrough device designation for heart failure “digital therapy” Posted: 29 Jul 2021 01:04 PM PDT Kuldeep Singh Rajput, the founder of Boston-based Biofourmis, is imagining a future where heart failure patients go home with a prescription, a wearable sensor and an app. Today, a new FDA designation gets the company one step closer to that goal. Founded in 2015, Biofourmis is a digital therapeutics company that develops software to "augment" patient care. So far, the company has raised about $145 million in funding, and has around 350 employees, Rajput estimates. On Thursday, Biofourmis BiovitalsHF, a platform designed for heart failure medication monitoring received an FDA breakthrough device designation. Breakthrough device designation doesn't signal FDA clearance, but it does allow for an expedited review process, and gives the company access to expertise from the federal agency during development. Biofourmis has two major focus areas, says Rajput. The first is on developing digital therapies in conjunction with drug companies (apps for dosage delivery, for instance, or sensors that can monitor health). The second is on providing followup care for patients with acute conditions at home. BiovialsHF is an example of the company's forays into that first area of focus. So far, the company has developed digital therapies for a "pipeline" of conditions, like coronary artery disease or atrial fibrillation, and has digital therapies in the works for patients managing chemotherapy, or people dealing with chronic pain. The BiovitalsHF system, though, is the first to receive FDA breakthrough designation, and Rajput calls it the company's "lead digital therapy." The BiovitalsHF product is a software platform designed manage medication for patients with heart failure. The idea is patients may initially get a certain prescription, but once they go home, they might need to adjust the levels of certain medication they're taking. Doctors do often treat heart failure with multiple medications, and doses may need to be changed over time. Particularly in the case of two types of medication, ACE inhibitors or beta-blockers, medication may need to be titrated – a process where a patient begins treatment on a low dose, and slowly up the dosage over time to achieve the optimal "target" dose. However, titration is hard to achieve in real life – one 2020 study suggests that less than 25 percent of heart failure patients are on their optimal dosages (other studies suggest it's less than one percent). Another 2017 commentary in Cardiac Failure Review estimates that just 29 percent of patients were on target doses of ACEs and 18 percent on their target beta blocker dose. By contrast, in clinical trials, many to 50-60 percent of patients manage to obtain their optimal dosages, suggesting that there is a gap between how people take medicine in studies and how they do so in the real world. BiovitalsHF is supposed to streamline the titration process once patients leave hospitals by collecting and analyzing data from a wearable device. That data, in theory, could be used to titrate the medication depending on a patient's health status. The software tweaks medication dosage using information from the patient, a wearable, and outside lab results. The wearable device would collect data like heart rate, respiration rate, stroke volume or cardiac output. Meanwhile, a patient might report their own symptoms into an app, and a physician might input lab results. "Based on the data collected from the patients using sensors, and the mobile platform, we are able to automatically up titrate or down titrate and switch medication, so that patients are on the right, optimal dose," says Rajput. Patients would then receive a notification to let them know medications were going to be tweaked. The BiovitalsHF program has only been tested in one proof-of-concept study (more on that later), but the Biovitals patient monitoring platform has been tested on other diseases as well. For example, the Biovitals system was adapted to monitor 34 mild COVID-19 patients from the Queen Mary Hospital in Hong Kong who wore a biosensor 23 hours per day. A paper published in Scientific Reports suggested that the platform was able to predict whether a patient would deteriorate with 93 percent accuracy, and predict length of hospital stay with 78 percent accuracy. The BiovitalsHF system is slightly different. While the system does aim to monitor patients, Rajput aspires to have the technology itself be administered as a treatment program. In essence, a doctor might "prescribe" you three months of BiovitalsHF program in which the software itself might monitor patient outcomes and help determine dosage on its own. The aim is to be able to market Biovials HF not just as a decision support software, but as a treatment regimen. The distinction is subtle, but it means that the company is trying to be more than a delivery device, and more like a drug in itself. "The label of the product for digital therapy will have actual treatment claims as compared to just a monitoring tool for clinical decision support," says Rajput. Naturally, you need robust results to make these claims. The company has already done some early testing of the concept in a proof-of-concept clinical trial that concluded in March 2021, but will need to perform more rounds of testing in the future to prove efficacy. The study monitored 282 patients for 90 days, and compared people using BiovitalsHF to those using regular standard of care. The goal of the trial was to determine whether the platform could optimize medication dosage – which, in this case, means getting them within 50 percent of optimal dose. Results have yet to be posted publicly from that study. However, Rajput notes that the study did meet that endpoint, and seemed to be linked with other improvements in patients’ life quality and heart health. "Patients had, within three months, significant increases in quality of life, cardiac function, as well as reduction in a blood biomarker NT-proBNP [a marker of heart failure]. Based on this, we submitted the data to the FDA and received the breakthrough designation," he says. The company has submitted the data for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. With the breakthrough designation in hand, we might expect progress on BiovitalsHF to proceed quickly – though it's still a long way from true FDA approval, or even a premarket approval at the moment. "We will be kicking off our pivotal trial, you know, anytime now. And we expect to make a formal submission to the FDA sometime in June [or] July next year," Rajput says.  |
| Zūm wins $150M from San Francisco schools to modernize and electrify student transport Posted: 29 Jul 2021 12:33 PM PDT The San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) has awarded Zūm, a startup that wants to upgrade student transportation, a five-year $150 million contract to modernize its transport service throughout the district. Zūm, which already operates its rideshare-meets-bus service in Oakland, much of Southern California, Seattle, Chicago and Dallas, will be responsible for handling day-to-day operations, transporting 3,500 students across 150 school campuses starting this fall semester. The startup's fleet of 206 buses, vans and cars is distributed based on specific use cases, placing students who live on busier routes on school buses and sending out cars and vans for others to increase efficiency. Zūm will also facilitate over 2,000 field trips per year for the school district. Aside from Zūm's five-year $53 million contract with Oakland Unified School District, which began in 2020, the SFUSD contract is the largest the startup has ever won. The company intends to use the funds to lease vehicles, hire drivers — salaried employees — improve customer and operational support, and research and develop product enhancements to support the contract, a spokesperson for Zūm told TechCrunch. Zūm's transportation solution for SFUSD is expected to save the district $3 million per year on average, based on the cost of the incumbent's solution. "These savings are driven by our tech-driven route optimization and operations," a spokesperson told TechCrunch. "Zūm has absorbed all the drivers who were previously serving SFUSD. The buses previously used were old and owned by the incumbent and have been moved out of the city. Zūm has deployed a new fleet of connected school buses and other vehicles, which will be converted to electric by 2025." Along with its fleet, Zūm offers school districts a cloud-based dashboard that allows them to manage operations, track movements, plan budget use and analyze performance and service data — the kind of tech that makes sense for schools to have but still seems radical given how slowly the public sector moves. "A major challenge we experienced in the past was gaining visibility into the location of students and buses across the district," said Orla O’Keefe, chief of policy and operations at SFUSD, in a statement. “We hope and expect that our families will benefit from Zūm’s student-centered technology. Families will be able to track their child’s bus in real time and … easily communicate with the driver regarding their child or any unique circumstances that may arise." Included in the contract is Zūm’s goal to help SFUSD electrify its entire fleet by 2025. Last year, the SF District Board of Education adopted a resolution to modernize its transportation in a way that would create more efficiencies, help the district meet sustainability goals and increase transparency across the system. Zūm says this contract will mark the first time SFUSD has updated its transportation solution in 40 years. Earlier this month, Zūm announced a partnership with AutoGrid, an energy management and distribution software company, to transform the company's fleet of electric buses in San Francisco and Oakland into one of the world's largest virtual power plants. "These contracts are building blocks to Zūm and AutoGrid's vision of creating a 1 gigawatt virtual power plant in the next four years," said a Zūm spokesperson. "Oakland Unified and San Francisco Unified are the first two districts in the U.S. to commit to 100% conversion to an emission-free EV fleet. Between these two contracts, Zūm will be carrying around 60,000 kWh charge on its EV fleet battery. To put this in perspective, during a power outage this much storage energy can power around 47,000 households per hour." An earlier version of this article stated that Zūm would hire a mix of salaried employees and gig workers for the SFUSD contract. The company will only be hiring salaried employees, although it usually hires a mix of both.  |
| Microsoft in talks to back India’s Oyo Posted: 29 Jul 2021 12:01 PM PDT Indian budget hotel chain Oyo may have lost a significant portion of its business to the pandemic, but it is inching closer to finding a new investor: Microsoft. Microsoft is in advanced stages of talks to invest in Oyo, valuing the Indian startup at about $9 billion, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The proposed size of the investment is unclear. A deal may close as soon as Friday, one source said. Oyo was valued at about $10 billion in 2019, though SoftBank, a major investor in Oyo, had slashed the Indian startup’s valuation to $3 billion in recent quarters. The proposed deal may also involve Oyo shifting to use Microsoft’s cloud services, one of the people said. Both the sources requested anonymity as the matter is private. Microsoft and Oyo founder and chief executive Ritesh Agarwal declined to comment Thursday evening. Oyo, which is one of India’s most valuable startups, has aggressively expanded to many markets including Southeast Asia, Europe and the U.S. in recent years. But some of its missteps — “toxic culture,” lapse in governance, and relationship with many hotel owners — have scarred its growth. Just as the startup was pledging to improve its relationship with hotel owners, the pandemic arrived. In response, Oyo slowed its growth and laid off thousands of employees globally earlier this year as nations across the world enforced lockdowns. The pandemic hit the seven-year-old startup like a “cyclone,” Agarwal told Bloomberg TV earlier this month. “We built something for so many years and it took just 30 days for it drop by over 60%,” he said, adding that the firm had not made any decision on exploring the public markets. Airbnb-backed Oyo had between $780 million to $800 million in its bank, Agarwal said at a virtual conference recently and had pared its “monthly burn” across all businesses to $4 million to $5 million. (The startup had about $1 billion in the bank in December 2020.) Earlier this month — after Agarwal’s remarks at the aforementioned conference — Oyo said it had raised $660 million in debt. That debt was used to pay off the previous debt, a third person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. In a filing on Wednesday, Oyo disclosed that the term of the debt includes the option to exchange equity at a later date. If the deal between the two firms materializes, it will be Microsoft’s latest investment in an Indian startup. The firm has backed a handful of startups in the South Asian market, including news aggregator and short-video platform DailyHunt, e-commerce giant Flipkart, and logistics SaaS firm FarEye.  |
| Livestream e-commerce: Why companies and brands need to tune in Posted: 29 Jul 2021 11:59 AM PDT What comes to mind when you think of livestreaming? In the U.S., most people would name their favorite celebrity leading a Q&A on Instagram or a gamer doing a speedrun on Twitch. In China, it's shopping, streamed live. Livestream e-commerce has taken off in China in the last few years and is expected to yield more than $60 billion this year. In 2019, 37% of online shoppers in China (a cool 265 million people) made purchases on livestreams — and that was well before quarantine. In 2020, it's estimated to have reached around 560 million people. During Taobao's annual Single’s Day Global Shopping Festival in 2020 (China's Black Friday), livestreams accounted for $6 billion in sales — nearly doubled from a year earlier. Starting to see a trend? The big U.S. companies have noticed, and they're jumping on the bandwagon faster than you can say, “Swipe up to buy now!” Last December, Walmart livestreamed shopping events on TikTok. Amazon released a live platform where influencers promote items and chat with customers. Instagram launched a Shop feature that encourages users to browse and buy within the app. Facebook also kicked off Live Shopping Fridays for the beauty and fashion categories.
“It's an entertaining way for shops to tell the story behind their products. It brings buyers closer than ever to their favorite creators and allows them to have a voice in the conversation.” Startups are growing fast to keep up with the heavy hitters — PopShop.Live raised $20 million to let people buy everything from books and toys to jewelry from sellers who livestream their offerings, and Whatnot raised a $50 million Series B, largely to expand its livestream commerce infrastructure. There's also a burgeoning category of SaaS tools such as Bambuser, which is working with brands like Klarna to test native livestream shopping directly within branded apps. At this pace, retailers will all welcome livestream commerce teams like they have influencer partnerships in recent years. It'll just be part of the digital equation to stay competitive and relevant in the future of marketplaces and e-commerce. From B.C. to 5G: The evolution of shoppingWhat is old is new again. Your grandparents spent years watching QVC because it balanced the experience of speaking with an associate with the convenience of their retirement community's TV room. Livestream is today’s version of “shoptainment,” where hosts showcase products dynamically, interact with their audiences and build urgency with short-term offers, giveaways and limited-edition items. Now, with livestream commerce, hosts can form deeper customer connections and answer questions in real time. It's a new standard of communication that holds a longstanding truth from Istanbul's Grand Bazaar to smartphones: People shop to kill time and are more likely to buy when they feel connected with a salesperson.  |
| Scarlett Johansson files suit over Disney+ ‘Black Widow’ release Posted: 29 Jul 2021 11:58 AM PDT Update: Disney issued the following response to the suit,
With Scarlett Johansson's time as an Avenger seemingly in the rearview, the “Black Widow” star has filed a breach of contract suit against Marvel-owner Disney. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court this week, alleges that the studio breached its agreement with the star when it released the film on Disney+ alongside its theatrical debut. "As Ms. Johansson, Disney, Marvel, and most everyone else in Hollywood knows, a 'theatrical release' is a release that is exclusive to movie theatres," the filing writes, matter of factly. "Disney was well aware of this promise, but nonetheless directed Marvel to violate its pledge and instead release the Picture on the Disney+ streaming service the very same day it was released in movie theatres." The pandemic has fundamentally transformed the way first-run movies are delivered and consumed — at least in the short term. In 2020, Disney and other studios opted to release films straight to streaming, rather than suffer perpetual delays and poor box office numbers as restrictions closed the non-essential business of movie theaters. More recently they've split the difference as movie theaters have reopened, offering same day streaming. According to a copy of the suit obtained by TechCrunch, Johansson's concerns about streaming services pre-date the pandemic. When Disney launched the streaming service Disney+, the suit claims, Johansson's representatives sought assurances from Disney/Marvel that the Black Widow solo film would still get a theatrical release, in spite of the company's bids to boost subscription numbers. It cites an email with Marvel's chief counsel from May of that year:
"It's no secret that Disney is releasing films like “Black Widow” directly onto Disney+ to increase subscribers and thereby boost the company's stock price — and that it's hiding behind COVID-19 as a pretext to do so," the actress's attorney John Berlinski said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. "But ignoring the contracts of the artists responsible for the success of its films in furtherance of this short-sighted strategy violates their rights and we look forward to proving as much in court. This will surely not be the last case where Hollywood talent stands up to Disney and makes it clear that, whatever the company may pretend, it has a legal obligation to honor its contracts." The statement accuses Disney of "hiding behind COVID-19," though certainly the studio wasn't alone in rethinking its release strategy over the past year. The question remains whether the pandemic will serve as sufficient extenuating circumstances for its release decisions. The outcome of the trial, meanwhile, could well have a profound effect on how studios release blockbusters post-pandemic. We've reached out to Disney for comment and will update accordingly.  |
| Panic sells 20,000+ Playdate handhelds in under 20 minutes Posted: 29 Jul 2021 11:46 AM PDT As we’ve known for about a week, today was the day Panic’s charming/whacky/curious/all-of-the-above Playdate gaming device (and its crank!) went up for pre-order. The buzz around the little retro-inspired handheld seemed strong — but would that translate into actual sales? The answer, it seems, is a hard yes. Panic committed to making 20,000 units for 2021, selling them on a first come, first serve basis. Any orders after that would still be accepted, but those orders wouldn’t ship until sometime in 2022 at the earliest. According to Panic’s shipping estimator, those first 20,000 units were gone in under 20 minutes. That first 2021 batch went real quick. (We confirmed with a rep for Panic that the shipping estimator is accurate, and those first 20,000 units are spoken for.)  Image Credits: Panic Like just about any much anticipated launch, the process wasn’t without its technical troubles. After a brief blink of server instability and 502 errors, Panic’s checkout system came online … only for the plug-in system they tapped to handle international shipping to come crashing down. This booted some international users out of the checkout flow and — quite unfortunately — out of their place in line and into the 2022 batch.
There’s already talk, meanwhile, of a “2023 bucket” for orders, though the company notes that “it'll take a while” before they get there. For those who’ve missed the story so far: The Playdate is a kinda-sorta-experimental gaming device built by Panic (the team behind Mac apps like Transmit and Prompt, and which helped ship games like Firewatch and Untitled Goose Game) in collaboration with Teenage Engineering. Games are released to the $179 device in “seasons,” with two games (of varying length/complexity/etc.) scheduled to ship each week of its first three months. With a black-and-white screen, minimal buttons, and, yes, a crank (for controlling games, not charging the device), this one is less “WILL IT RUN CRYSIS?!” and more … blank canvas. While we’re not talking next-gen-console-level sales here, selling tens of thousands of units in no time flat is a resounding accomplishment for a software team’s first dive into gaming hardware. Now they’ve just gotta get them out the door.  |
| Fortnite’s mystery ‘superstar’ virtual music tour kicks off next week Posted: 29 Jul 2021 11:38 AM PDT Epic Games is teasing the biggest in-game event since Travis Scott psychedelically stomped through Fortnite’s virtual meadows. The mysterious new event, which Fortnite-maker Epic is calling the “Rift Tour,” will kick off on Friday, August 6 and run through Sunday, August 8. In the teaser announcement, Epic invites players to “take a musical journey into magical new realities where Fortnite and a record-breaking superstar collide.” In-game events building up to the mystery show series will run from July 29 through August 8, so players can hop into Fortnite to check out new Rift Tour-themed quests and rewards now. The cotton-candy-colored event will offer a custom loading screen and a fluffy cloud kitty emoticon, among other digital prizes. The Rift Tour isn’t a one-and-done event. Like the Travis Scott event, Fortnite will host five different show times across three days to make it easier for players to catch. Epic says they’ll have more details to share on Monday, August 2, so Fortnite players will have to wait for more hints or an official announcement about who’s performing. So … who’s performing? So far, all signs point to Ariana Grande. Leakers have been saying as much for more than a week, and the documents revealed through Epic’s court battle with Apple also detailed plans for in-game events with both Grande and Lady Gaga.  Image Credits: Epic Games At Forbes, Paul Tassi also connected the dots on how recent leaks point to Grande, including some visual themes from her music videos and a reference to her pet pig Piggy Smalls. Since Epic is calling its latest virtual event a tour, that suggests Grande won’t be alone, if she is indeed the mystery superstar. A Lady Gaga appearance could also be in the cards, since Epic apparently had plans for Gaga to appear in a December 2020 concert that never materialized. Kanye West is also releasing his newest album on August 6, but it seems less likely that Epic would be willing to partner with West given his myriad recent controversies. And “Donda,” West’s latest album, was originally scheduled for a different date before being delayed. Whoever it winds up being, we’ll likely know more on Monday. Even if you’re not a Grande fan or a regular gamer, Fortnite’s in-game concerts are some of the most creative and visually exciting virtual events to date. Everyone should fall through the metaverse with their friends while a skyscraper-sized virtual rapper shoots neon lightning bolts at least once.  |
| Why Latin American venture capital is breaking records this year Posted: 29 Jul 2021 11:36 AM PDT Today we're wrapping our multi-week exploration of the global venture capital market's second-quarter performance. We've gone around the world, working to better understand the geyser of cash flowing into today's startups. But we've saved the best for last: Latin America. At a glance, the Latin American venture capital and startup market appears similar to what we've seen from other growing ecosystems. Like the U.S., Canadian, European, Indian and African startup hubs, Latin America is seeing venture capital activity set records. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. But inside the big numbers is a surprising picture of a startup market in the process of maturing while outside money hunts for breakout opportunities. To help us in our exploration of Latin America's epic second quarter, we collected notes and observations from NXTP's Gonzalo Costa, Magma Partners' Nathan Lustig and ALLVP's Federico Antoni. We also have data from Dealroom, CB Insights, the Global Private Capital Association (GPCA) and ALLVP. Today we're digging into the data, yes, but also the human potential behind the startup rush. According to Antoni, the Latin American startup market of today "is a story about talent, not about capital." Echoing the point in a recent piece about “the Latin American startup opportunity,” U.S. venture capital firm Sequoia wrote that it has "been blown away by the quality of founders in the current wave." So we'll have to do more than just read charts. The union of talent and money is what startup markets need to thrive. But there are other reasons why Latin American startups are so frequently in the news today, including structural factors, such as strong digital penetration and quick e-commerce growth.
Let's talk about Latin American venture capital data, dig into which countries are rising stars in the region, learn how quickly Latin American startups have to go cross-border, and explore how quickly capital is recycling in the ecosystem – always a key test for startup-market longevity. A venture capital waveLatin America is on pace for all-time records in venture capital dollars raised and venture capital rounds in 2021. According to CB Insights data, startups in the region have already raised $9.3 billion in 2021's first six months from 414 deals. The same data set indicates that in all of 2020, startups in the region raised $5.3 billion across 526 deals. And in case you're worried that we're comparing to an unfairly COVID-impacted year, in 2019 the numbers were $5.3 billion (again) from 614 individual deals. This year is different, and the second quarter of 2021 was simply an outlier event. With some $7.2 billion invested in Latin American startups, Q2 2021's closest rival in terms of quarterly venture totals was the second quarter of 2017, when $2.6 billion was invested.  |
| Tenderly raises $15.3M to help Ethereum developers ship decentralized apps faster Posted: 29 Jul 2021 11:27 AM PDT Blockchain infrastructure startups are heating up as industry fervor brings more developers and users to a space that still feels extremely young despite a heavy institutional embrace of the crypto space in 2021. The latest crypto startup to court the attention of venture capitalists is Tenderly, which builds a developer platform for Ethereum devs to monitor and test the smart contracts that power their decentralized apps. Tenderly CEO Andrej Bencic tells TechCrunch his startup has closed a $15.3 million Series A funding round led by Accel with additional participation from existing investors. The Belgrade startup already raised a $3.3 million seed round earlier this year led by Point Nine Capital. The startup’s aim to date has been ensuring fledgling blockchain developers aren’t left finding out about contract errors when users discover issues and complain, instead allowing users to discover these bugs proactively. While the company’s Visual Debugger is already used by “tens of thousands” of Ethereum developers, Tenderly hopes to continue building out its toolset to help more developers build on Ethereum networks without dealing with the headaches and irregularities that they’ve had to. “Tenderly, from its inception, has been a solution to one of our own problems,” Bencic tells TechCrunch. “We wanted to make it as easy as possible to observe and extract information from Ethereum and the adjacent networks.” Bencic hopes the company’s product can help developers get their products out more quickly without compromising on usability. To date, the majority of Tenderly’s customers have been relatively small startup efforts aiming to tap into the exciting world of blockchain-based computing with a particular focus on decentralized finance. Tenderly itself is a small company with its team of 14 based in Serbia. Bencic says this funding will help the company expand its global footprint and build out engineering and business hires in other geographies. Climbing cryptocurrency prices have historically aligned pretty closely with developer uptake in the blockchain world so there is some concern that bitcoin and Ethereum’s downward-trending price corrections will lead to less stability in the pipeline of new developers embracing blockchain. That said, volatility is far from unusual to the crypto world and many developers have learned that riding its ebbs and flows is just part of the experience. “We built most of Tenderly in the bear market, and one thing we saw is that even though you get these concerning prices, people that are excited about the tech are excited about the tech whether the coins are up or down,” Bencic says.  |
| Colombia’s Merqueo bags $50M to expand its online grocery delivery service across Latin America Posted: 29 Jul 2021 10:36 AM PDT Merqueo, which operates a full-stack, on-demand delivery service in Latin America, has landed $50 million in a Series C round of funding. IDC Ventures, Digital Bridge and IDB Invest co-led the round, which also included participation from MGM Innova Group, Celtic House Venture Partners, Palm Drive Capital and previous shareholders. The financing brings the Bogota, Colombia-based startup's total raised to $85 million since its 2017 inception. Merqueo CEO and co-founder Miguel McAllister knows a thing or two about the delivery space in Latin America, having also co-founded Domicilios.com, a Latin American food delivery company that was bought by Berlin-based Delivery Hero and later merged with Brazil’s iFood. McAllister describes Merqueo as a "pure-play online supermarket with a fully integrated grocery delivery service" that sources directly from large brands and local suppliers, bypassing intermediaries and "delivering directly from its dark store network." (Dark stores are traditional retail stores that have been converted to local fulfillment centers.” Merqueo offers more than 8,000 products, including fresh foods, packaged goods, home essentials, beverages and frozen products. It currently operates in more than 25 cities in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil and has over 600,000 users.  Image Credits: Merqueo It must be doing something right. The startup is close to $100 million in "run-rate revenue," according to McAllister, having grown more than 2.5x in 2020. Merqueo also reached positive cash flow in Colombia, its most mature market. Over the last year, large Latin American retail chains and retailers have approached the company about potentially acquiring it, McAllister said. Part of the company's success might be attributed to the speed and flexibility it offers. Users can choose how and when to receive their groceries according to their needs, with the startup offering delivery in as little as 10 minutes or three to four hours. Users can also schedule delivery of their groceries in two-hour intervals for the same day or the next day. Also, owning and controlling the “entire” vertical supply chain gives it the ability to obtain better margins, offer competitive pricing and achieve healthy unit economics, according to McAllister. Merqueo plans to use its new capital in part to expand geographically. The company is currently in phase one of its expansion to Brazil, entering initially in Sao Paulo later this month. Next year, it expects to launch in other Brazilian cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Fortaleza and Salvador de Bahia. The market opportunity in Latin America is massive considering that online grocery sales only represent just 1% of the market –– far lower than in the U.S., EU or China, for example. Other players in the increasingly crowded space include GoPuff in the U.S., Getir out of Turkey and Mexico-based Jüsto, which raised $65 million in a Series A led by General Atlantic earlier this year. "The pandemic accelerated the adoption of online grocery shopping in LatAm," McAllister told TechCrunch. "The region went from 0.3% share of online groceries to 1%. And after the pandemic, we are seeing a 50% increase in the pace of user adoption." Overall, the $85 billion e-commerce market in Latin America is growing rapidly, with projections of it reaching $116.2 billion in 2023. Currently, Merqueo has over 1,300 employees in LatAm, up 60% from last year. It plans to continue hiring with the proceeds from the Series C round as well work "to become the largest and most ambitious dark stores network of Latin America." Alejandro Rodríguez, managing partner at IDC Ventures, is naturally bullish on Merqueo's potential. "From all the opportunities we looked into, Merqueo is undoubtedly the most advanced in the region. … The Merqueo team has proved they know how to scale the business and how to get to profitability,” Rodríguez told TechCrunch. Online grocery delivery is a business with many technical and operational complexities, he said. In his view, Merqueo's technology and operational expertise allow it to tackle those issues in a way that has led to "the best customer experience that we have seen in a scalable way." "They have the best combination of both great service metrics and healthy unit economics," Rodríguez added.  |
| Uber will offer free Rosetta Stone language courses to drivers Posted: 29 Jul 2021 10:08 AM PDT Uber wants to overcome the language barriers you’ll sometimes encounter when hailing a ride. The Verge says Uber has partnered with Rosetta Stone to offer free language lessons through its Driver app. Both Uber and Uber Eats drivers can use the feature to learn any of Rosetta Stone’s 24 languages. They’ll even get material tailored to common ridesharing scenarios. Drivers will need to have reached Gold, Platinum or Diamond status through the Uber Pro program in a qualifying country (including large parts of the Americas, the UK, India and Spain). The courses arrive alongside another career initiative. Drivers in some countries (including many of those from the Rosetta program) can request an achievements letter that will help them with job applications. Uber wasn’t shy about the official rationale for both moves. Many of its drivers are either immigrants (and less likely to be familiar with local languages) or see languages and rideshare work as key to expanding their opportunities. Uber is aware that driving for the company might just be a “temporary stop” on a career path — this gives workers a better chance to move upward. There are practical incentives for Uber. The more languages its drivers speak, the more likely those drivers are to get favorable ratings and encourage repeat business. The career incentives could also encourage more drivers to sign up for Uber in the first place, even if they ultimately spend less time in the role. Editor's note: This post originally appeared on Engadget.  |
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