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Roblox partners with Sony Music to connect artists with money-making activities in the metaverse

Published July 6, 2021

Video game platform Roblox announced this morning it has partnered with Sony Music Entertainment on a deal that will allow the two companies to work together to create music experiences for the Roblox community, including opportunities that would give Sony Music artists a way to reach new audiences and generate revenue.

The announcement follows last month’s news of a $200 million lawsuit filed by a group of music publishers who alleged Roblox was allowing creators to build virtual boomboxes inside their games that streamed copyrighted music without artists’ permission or any payment.

The publishers in the lawsuit included Universal Music Publishing, Big Machine Records, Concord Music Group, Downtown Music Publishing, Kobalt Music Group and Hipgnosis Songs Fund. Roblox responded to the litigation by saying it was “surprised and disappointed” by the action, which represented a “fundamental misunderstanding of how the Roblox platform operates.”

It claimed it doesn’t tolerate copyright infringement and uses filtering technology to prohibit unauthorized recordings. It also said it responds to valid Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests by removing any infringing content.

However, the company’s deal with Sony Music indicates Roblox is aware of the value in partnering in a more official capacity with a music company.

Roblox didn’t fully detail what sort of “commercial activities” it has in mind for Sony Music artists and their fans, but it had worked with the music company on past events, including its first-ever virtual concert with Lil Nas X in November 2020, and this May, a virtual Zara Larsson Launch Party. The concert was attended by over 36 million players, while the launch party attracted over 4 million visits — the highest for any launch party on Roblox to date.

The Roblox platform, generally speaking, allows artists to reach fans through a variety of activities, including virtual concerts, merchandise sales, and other integrated in-game activities. We understand the agreement will not include access by Roblox developers to Sony Music Entertainment artists’ recordings, however.

5 mistakes creators make building new games on Roblox

“Sony Music artists have been at the forefront of engaging the millions of music fans in Roblox’s massive user community with forward-looking initiatives like Lil Nas X’s industry-first virtual performance on the platform, and Zara Larsson’s recent listening party event,” said Sony Music Entertainment President of Global Digital Business and U.S. Sales, Dennis Kooker, in a statement. “With this new agreement, we look forward to expanding our successful partnership with the Roblox team to further unlock commercial opportunities at the intersection of music and gaming. Immersive online environments represent a meaningful opportunity for reaching a growing number of fans who want to use virtual communities to enjoy shared music experiences,” he added.

The deal comes at a time when Roblox’s audience is aging up. the company in its Q1 2021 earnings reported a 128% increase in engagement from users over the age of 13 — a time when music is becoming a more important part of young people’s lives and they’re interested in connecting more directly with favorite artists. The gaming company’s daily active users also grew 79% to reach 42.1 million during the quarter while revenue climbed 140% to $387 million.

“Sony Music has been a fantastic partner and I am pleased to deepen and lengthen our relationship. They truly understand the massive opportunity that the metaverse presents for their artists, and we are committed to helping them unlock new creative and commercial opportunities on Roblox,” said Jon Vlassopulos, Vice President and Global Head of Music at Roblox.

This is not Roblox’s first music label partnership. Last month, the company announced a similar deal with BMG, also focused on future collaborations and revenue-generating opportunities for artists and songwriters.

How Roblox completely transformed its tech stack

Wagmo raises $12.5M to offer pet insurance (and a lot more)

Published July 6, 2021

The pet care industry has boomed over the past several years. From Chewy’s IPO to the various veterinarian startups that have sprung up, VC money (and consumer cash) is flowing into the space.

Wagmo is no different. The pet insurance and perks startup has closed on a $12.5 million Series A financing, led by Revolution Ventures with participation from Female Founders Fund, Clocktower Technology Ventures, and Vestigo Ventures. Angels, including Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jim Grube, Marilyn Hirsch, David Ronick, and Michael Akkerman, also participated in the round.

The company was founded by Christie Horvath and Ali Foxworth, who both came from the world of finance and insurance and realized the gap in the market when it comes to pet insurance. Most pet insurance providers cover the big emergencies, such as surgeries, broken bones, etc. But anyone with a pet, and especially a new puppy (like myself), knows that the costs of basic care can add up very quickly.

Insurtech is hot on both sides of the Atlantic

Wagmo offers the same basic coverage as your usual pet insurance, but also offers a wellness service. The Wellness Program reimburses pet parents for the more basic stuff, like vaccinations, grooming, regular vet visits, fecal tests, and bloodwork.

Users simply pay anywhere between $20/month and $59/month and submit photos of their receipts in the app. Wagmo then reimburses what’s covered via Venmo, PayPal, or direct deposit within 24 hours.

The premise here is two-fold. A healthy dog, who has access to all the basics listed above, is less likely to have major issues later on. The second piece is that the earliest costs associated with owning a dog are these basic ones, like vaccinations, vet visits, fecal tests and grooming.

Wagmo offers the wellness plan without an insurance plan. That means that users can onboard to the platform with what they need first, and upgrade to an insurance plan later on.

Wagmo generates revenue through both the wellness and insurance plan, but is actively looking into an enterprise model, as well, signing on larger organizations as part of their benefits package to employees.

The now-14-person team has onboarded thousands of users, with 20 percent user growth month over month since the beginning of the pandemic, and has processed 30,000 wellness claims.

The team is 58 percent female identifying, with Black, Asian and Latinx each making up 17 percent of the workforce.

“The greatest challenge is figuring out how to break down the opportunity ahead of us, particularly in the employer benefit space,” said Horvath. “What keeps us up at night is thinking about where to start, what to prioritize, how to allocate limited resources and limited time.”

Insurtech startups are leveraging rapid growth to raise big money

Nintendo’s OLED Switch arrives October 8, priced at $350

Published July 6, 2021

So much for the big E3 reveal. Weeks after the big gaming show, Nintendo has finally taken the wraps off the latest iteration of its wildly popular hybrid gaming console. The Nintendo Switch (OLED model) [parentheses theirs] will arrive on October 8, priced at $350. That is, the company’s quick to note, the same day it launches Metroid Dread, the long-awaited latest side scrolling entry in the long-standing franchise.

The system sports a 7-inch OLED, improved audio and 64 GB of internal storage. The hybrid dock sports a wired LAN port, and the system ships with an adjustable port for playing in tabletop mode. There’s a sharp black and white color scheme, though the remainder of the materials looks to be similar to the earlier model, with most of that price bump going to the display. The company will also be offering a separate carrying case, because you don’t want to get the fancy screen on your new $350 system scratched.

From the sound of it, the two existing Switch models are sticking around as lower-cost alternatives. Those models run $299 and $199, respectively, though it seems reasonable to expect there may be some price drops as the new model arrives ahead of the holidays.

“The new Nintendo Switch (OLED model) is a great option for players who want to experience the new vibrant screen when playing in handheld and tabletop mode,” Nintendo of America President Doug Bowser said in a press release. “With the addition of this new model to the Nintendo Switch family of systems, people have an additional choice of a system that best fits the gaming experience they desire – whether it’s Nintendo Switch (OLED model), Nintendo Switch or Nintendo Switch Lite.”

The system will arrive in two color configurations. Per Nintendo:

Nintendo Switch (OLED model) white set, which features white Joy-Con controllers, a black main unit and a white dock.
Nintendo Switch (OLED model) neon red/neon blue set, which features neon red and neon blue Joy-Con controllers, a black main unit and a black dock.

An upgraded version of the four-year-old system has been rumored for some time, carrying the decidedly less clunky name, Switch Pro. With both Sony and Microsoft releasing next-gen versions of their consoles last year, the time certainly seemed right for a big refresh from Nintendo. A refreshed version of the standard Switch arrived in July 2019, addressing the original’s poor battery life — far and away the largest complaint of an otherwise well-received system.

Image Credits: Nintendo

Of course, in spite of growing a bit long in the tooth, the Switch continued to dominate the sales charts ahead of the arrival of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox One X. Nintendo utterly dominated sales during the pandemic, after some initial supply chain shortages. That success was due in no small part to the arrival of a new Animal Crossing title that provided some much-needed social gaming during the pandemic. Such success — coupled with potential supply chain shortage — led to suggestions that the company had opted to delay the system’s release.

Nintendo teases 2022 release for Breath of the Wild sequel and releases Zelda Game & Watch to tide us over

In spite of the lack of new hardware, last month’s E3 did see some big game news from Nintendo, before just a new Metroid. Far and away, the most eagerly anticipated is 2022’s sequel to Breath of the Wild, one of the most beloved entries in the Zelda series and easily one of the Switch’s best titles.

MAGIC Fund raises $30M to scale its global founders-backing-founders fund

Published July 6, 2021

Influential entrepreneurs like Paul Graham and Naval Ravikant always preach the need for startups to have founders-turned-investors on their cap table. As Ravikant puts it, “founders want to know that the people they are taking money from have first-hand experience.”

His platform AngelList has helped individual founders-cum-investors source and participate in deals via collectives. However, some venture firms have taken this up a notch by bringing founders to create a fund and invest together.

Today, one of such, MAGIC Fund, a global collective of founders, is announcing that it has raised a second fund of $30 million to continue backing early-stage startups across Africa, Europe, Latin America, North America, and Southeast Asia.

Since the firm’s first fund launched in 2017, MAGIC has invested in 70 companies at pre-seed and seed stages across these emerging markets. Some of these companies include Retool, Novo, Payfazz, and Mono.

MAGIC Fund has 12 founders who act as general partners. TechCrunch caught up with managing partner Adegoke Olubusi and operating partner Matt Greenleaf to learn more about the fund’s thesis and activities.

Olubusi, who had built and exited a couple of startups over the years, also dabbled with angel investing for some time. In 2017, Olubusi’s current startup Helium Health got accepted into Y Combinator. It was there he met more founders like him who were angel investors with impressive portfolios. The interesting bit? Each founder wanted to invest in other companies during YC’s Demo Day.

“So about three years ago, I was at YC, and I was going to invest in my own batch. I was pitching on the day, but I was also listening to other pitches. However, it wasn’t just me; there were many other founders as well,” Olubusi said.

After building and exiting multiple startups, some founders turn into angel investing to support startups and their ecosystems. However, most of them tend to go alone and are stuck with cutting checks in their local markets, which limits opportunities.

Some MAGIC portfolio companies

Here’s a scenario. In 2016, when unicorns Flutterwave and Kavak raised their seed rounds in Nigeria and Mexico respectively, an African biotech founder who knew about Kavak and a Latin American edtech founder interested in African fintech would not have had the capacity to evaluate those deals even if they wanted; the reason being a lack of reach and experience in both the industry or geography.

Olubusi and the other founders knew this would be a limitation in the long run if they went solo. Thus, they decided to create MAGIC. The idea was to bring global founders together with diverse skillsets in diverse industries and geographies to evaluate deals better and drive value for each other. Hence, they can participate in two unicorns instead of one.

“Instead of us investing individually because obviously, we have somewhat limited capacity in terms of how much time we have as founders because of our respective companies, why don’t we collaborate on a strategy together and co-invest together?”

“The way we thought of MAGIC was a fund of micro funds built by founders for founders,” Greenleaf continued.

Fund of micro funds but more than money

In some of the personal conversations I’ve had with founders about their investors, a recurring theme has been that the most useful investors didn’t necessarily sign the biggest checks. It’s a theme Olubusi also relates to all too well.

“It was like every time we think about it, everyone who gave the most money rarely had time for us. It was so frequent that we all identified this as an actual thing. What actually drove value for us were other investors who were founders and operators, and other experienced people who were able to help us find product-market fit and fight regulators. These were actually the people in the trenches with us.”

Olubusi believes the early-stage part of investing, particularly in pre-seed and seed, is where VCs who are founder-operators find their sweet spot. They are precious when startups are trying to figure out product-market fit. And unlike traditional investors who are looking to get multiples on investments, Olubusi argues that for founders-investors, what matters is how much value they can drive for startups.

Image Credits: MAGIC Fund

MAGIC’s play is even more essential considering that it also plays in emerging markets where on-the-ground operational help is needed in industries with numerous unknowns and uncertainties.

“There is so much money in the market now and early-stage decision making at pre-seed and seed should be left in the hands of founders. Because think about it really, to make an evaluation of whether I should invest in a healthcare or fintech company in Africa, it makes sense to have those who’ve spent years battling through it in the trenches make those decisions. And what we’re trying to do with the fund is publish as much information as possible and keep performing at the 100 percentile and say this is still the best strategy and is very scalable.”

MAGIC Fund 1 was $1.5 million and Olubusi says the investments performed 5x over the period of three years. As some of these companies exited, their founders invested in MAGIC and came on board as Fund 2 partners.

MAGIC has also enlisted additional investors who, according to Olubusi, are respected for their investing abilities and ecosystem support. For instance, Olugbenga Agboola, Flutterwave CEO, is known across the African tech ecosystem as a founder who goes out of his way to help established and up-and-coming fintech companies. Hendra Kwik of Payfazz has such a reputation in Southeast Asia as well. They, alongside other founders, join MAGIC as limited partners.

Per the firm’s statement, one-third of the entire fund was contributed by the founder GPs. For its LPs, diversity play is considered as 50% of them are black while 33% are women. Some of them include Michael Seibel, Tim Draper, Rappi’s Andres Bilbao, Paystack’s Shola Akinlade, Katie Lewis, and Octopus Ventures’ Kirsten Connell. For its partners, MAGIC has brought on the likes of Stitchroom’s Tom Chen, Medumo’s Adeel Yang, Juice’s Michael Lisovetsky, and Troy Osinoff, and Evercare’s Temi Awogboro.

Magic Fund 2 will be writing $100,000 to 300,000 checks at pre-seed and seed stages focusing on fintech, healthcare, SaaS and enterprise, women’s health, developer tools.

What does the fund look for in founders? Olubusi gives two answers. One, MAGIC wants to back founders with incentives to stick through the hard times of a company.

“At pre-seed and seed, you don’t have enough data about a company to make an investment decision. Your bet is entirely on the founder and the founding team. What we know, having done this several times, is that things get harder. So when we’re looking at the founder, we’re evaluating whether or not the founder has the grit to stick through the toughest times which are going to come up.”

The second indicator factors if the founder has the willingness, openness, the flexibility to learn and use that knowledge to succeed. Greenleaf believes these strategies have incredibly helped the firm fund exceptional companies and maintain good relationships with founders.

“Most of these founders don’t view us as their investors. They view us as fellow founders who are helping them along their journey. I think that also ties into them keeping it real with us and allows us to see them as people, and not just founders. That’s one of the things that have worked in our favor,” he said.

Free Extra Crunch membership included with TC Early Stage tickets

Published July 6, 2021

TechCrunch Early Stage is coming up soon, and all attendees can get 3 months of free access to Extra Crunch as a part of a ticket purchase. Extra Crunch is our members-only community focused on founders and startup teams.

Head here to buy your ticket to TC Early Stage.

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Learn more about Extra Crunch benefits here, and buy your TC Early Stage tickets here.

What is TC Early Stage?

TC Early Stage is a two-day virtual event where early-stage founders can take part in highly interactive group sessions with top investors and ecosystem experts. This particular Early Stage event has a focus on marketing and fundraising.

The event will take place July 8-9, and we’d love to have you join.

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TravelPerk buys UK-based Click Travel in latest pandemic purchase

Published July 6, 2021

Business trip booking platform TravelPerk has bagged another rival — picking up UK-based Click Travel. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed but we’re told it’s the third — and largest — acquisition for TravelPerk to date.

The Barcelona-based startup has been on a bit of a shopping spree since the pandemic crisis hit Europe last year, picking up risk management startup Albatross in summer 2020 to bolster resilience to COVID-19’s impacts, before going on to acquire US-based NexTravel in January to expand its presence in the US market.

Business trip platform TravelPerk buys YC-backed rival NexTravel

The latest acquisition deepens TravelPerk’s UK and European business, adding Click Travel’s 2,000+ SME clients (which includes the likes of Five Guys, Red Bull and Talk Talk) to its customer base — which will total just over 5,000 post-acquisition.

The UK company handles some £300M in business travel for its client base, which will bolster TravelPerk’s revenues going forward. The latter now bills itself as the “leading” travel management platform for the SME market globally and the UK as a whole.

“We are a global travel management platform but our core markets are the US and Europe and we expect both markets to be our primary growth areas this year,” said CEO and co-founder Avi Meir. “At the current moment, the US is our largest market due to the covid restrictions in the EU & UK.”

“Assuming travel restrictions won’t be imposed again, we expect to grow by 200% in 2022 with strong growth in our core markets in the US & EU,” he added.

Click Travel, which is based in Birmingham, was founded all the way back in 1999 — and appears to have raised relatively little venture capital over the years, per Crunchbase. However, in 2018, the veteran player participated in the government-backed Future Fifty scale-up program — and also took in a “multi-million pound” investment from the UK-based Business Growth Fund.

Whether there will be any domestic hang-wringing over a high growth UK business being sold to a European rival remains to be seen.

In a statement on its sale to TravelPerk, CEO James McLean omitted to mention the pandemic’s impact on the travel sector — choosing instead to highlight what he couched as the pair’s shared “mission” to reduce the cost and complexity of business travel.

“Those shared objectives, combined with the natural cultural fit between our two companies, means we are incredibly excited to bring our teams together. Combining TravelPerk’s industry-leading knowledge, technology, experience and first class customer support with our own is a powerful proposition and we can’t wait to get started,” McLean added.

While Click Travel has focused on serving the UK market, TravelPerk has had a global focus from the start.

It has also attracted a large amount of external investment (totalling just under $300M) over its shorter run (founded in 2015).

Back in April, for example, it raised a $160M Series D round. It had also topped up its Series C round in July 2019 before the pandemic hit. So TravelPerk hasn’t been short of funds to ride out the COVID-19 revenue crunch — and as well as shopping for competitors it has also been able to avoid making any layoffs over the travel crisis.

Per a press release, capital to fund the Click Travel acquisition was provided by Boston-based investment manager, The Baupost Group.

TravelPerk’s Meir remains bullish about the near-term prospects for growth in the business travel sector, despite ongoing concerns in Europe and the US about the more infectious ‘Delta’ variant of the virus which is contributing to surging rates of COVID-19 in some markets (including the UK) — claiming it’s already seeing green shoots of recovery in “key markets”.

“TravelPerk is outgrowing the market pace and is already at above 2019 revenue figures,” Meir told TechCrunch. “When it comes to the rest of the industry, the recovery of travel is well underway but moving at different speeds in different markets. For instance in the US, according to TSA Checkpoint figures, at the current rate of recovery the US travel market is expected to reach pre-pandemic volume at the end of August 2021.

“We anticipate the global market may take a little longer but are optimistic we will see close to pre-pandemic levels in 2022.”

“We’re one of the few players in the travel industry that continued scaling and growing since the beginning of the pandemic with a strategy that didn’t involve any layoffs,” he also told us. “Since March last year, our strategy has been not to sit back but to be aggressive and invest massively in our product offering and in our global reach, so that we are in the best position possible to capitalise when travel makes its full recovery. Today’s news is a major part of that plan.

“We will aim to continue being aggressive in our growth strategy and we are open to more acquisitions if they make strategic sense and are aligned with our vision and culture.”

Per Meir, Click Travel and TravelPerk will initially continue to run as two independent platforms but he confirmed that an “eventual full integration” is planned — with both set to operate under the TravelPerk brand in time.

The startup also says it will retain all Click Travel’s staff — denying it has plans to axe any jobs. It also intends to hold onto the company’s Birmingham base — having the city as another UK hub for its business (in addition to its existing London office).

“The 150 amazing people working for Click Travel were a big reason why we wanted to acquire the company, and were priced into the deal,” said Meir. “We have no plans of redundancies. We rather aim to integrate the entire team into the TravelPerk Group.”

Asked if TravelPerk might consider expanding its focus to also target the enterprise segment, he noted that it’s seen interest from larger businesses — and said he’s “open” to the idea — but for now Meir said TravelPerk remains fully focused on the SME market: “where we think there is the biggest need, and the biggest growth potential”.

“That’s why this acquisition is so exciting for us; it makes us undoubtedly the leading travel management platform for SMEs globally,” he added.

Flexibility and sustainability

Discussing how the pandemic has changed business travel, Meir highlighted two “important trends” he said TravelPerk will continue to invest it: Namely flexibility for bookings; and sustainability so environmental impact can be reduced.

TravelPerk plans to invest more than $100M in two key products in these areas (aka: FlexiPerk and GreenPerk), per Meir.

“We’ve noticed on our platform that travellers are booking closer to their departure date: Before the pandemic, trip searches were usually conducted between 7 and 30 days prior to the selected departure date,” he said, elaborating on the importance of flexibility for the sector. “Now we are seeing most trip searches are for trips less than 6 days away. Flexibility is therefore one of the most in-demand perks in business travel. Travellers will rely on flexible fares to give them the peace of mind that they won’t lose money if they need to change or cancel a trip on short notice.”

On sustainability, Meir said businesses are already looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint and general environmental impact, while consumers are also wanting to make conscientious decisions to reduce carbon emission — suggesting that train-based travel is set to gain ground (vs flights) as a result. (That might, ultimately, require some creative retooling of TravelPerk’s logo — which prominently features an airplane icon… )

“We expect to see significant interest in our carbon offsetting product, GreenPerk, as a result but we also expect to see changes in how people are choosing to travel,” he said.

“For instance, rail is undoubtedly the more environmentally-friendly travel option. In fact, taking a train over a domestic flight can reduce an individual’s carbon emissions by about 84%. We have been building out our rail inventory for a number of years now and we expect train travel to be an increasingly popular business travel option for customers this year and next.”

As for the changing mix of business-related travel in a pandemic-reconfigured world of remote work, Meir continues to argue that more businesses providing employees with remote working options will sum to more business travel overall.

“This might be bad news for the daily commute but it will result in more business travel,” he suggested. “Whether they are going fully remote and ‘working from anywhere’, or operating on a hybrid model, distributed teams will need (and want) to come together. We believe there will be a new type of business trip — one where team members will travel from different working hubs to get together for teambuilding and brainstorming sessions, for meetings with clients and colleagues, and even for ‘bleisure’ (business and leisure) trips.”

TravelPerk raises $160M in equity and debt after a year of derailed business trips

TravelPerk launches an open API platform to extend its work trip SaaS

TravelPerk launches flexible refunds to help businesses save on cancelled trips

Pleo raises $150M at a $1.7B valuation for its new approach to managing expenses for SMBs

Published July 6, 2021

Whether you are part of the accounting department, or just any employee at an organization, managing expenses can be a time-consuming and error-filled, yet also quite mundane, part of your job. Today, a startup called Pleo — which has built a platform that can help some of that work more smoothly, by way of a vertically integrated system that includes payment cards, expense management software, and integrated reimbursement and pay-out services — is announcing a big round of growth funding to expand its business after seeing strong traction.

The Copenhagen-based startup has raised $150 million — money that it will be using to continue building out more features for its users, and for business development. The round, which sets a record for being the largest Series C for a Danish startup, values Pleo at $1.7 billion, the startup has confirmed.

There are around 17,000 small and medium businesses now using Pleo, with companies at the medium end of that numbering around 1,000 employees. Now with Pleo moving into slightly larger customers (up to 5,000 employees, CEO Jeppe Rindom, said), the startup has set an ambitious target of reaching 1 million users by 2025, a very lucrative goal, considering that expenses management is estimated to be a $80 billion market in Europe (with the global opportunity, of course, even bigger).

It will also be using the funds simply to expand its business. Pleo has around 330 employees today spread across London, Stockholm, Berlin and Madrid, as well as in Copenhagen, and it will be using some of the investment to grow that team and its reach.

Bain Capital Ventures and Thrive Capital co-led this round, a Series C. Previous backers, including Creandum, Kinnevik, Founders, Stripes and Seedcamp, also participated. Stripes led the startup’s Series B in 2019. It looks like this round was oversubscribed: the original intention had been to raise just $100 million.

Like other business processes, managing expenses and handling company spending has come a long way in the last many years.

Gone are the days where expenses inevitably involved collecting paper receipts and inputting them manually into a system in order to be reimbursed; now, expense management software links up with company-issued cards and taps into a range of automation tools to cut out some of the steps in the process, integrating with a company’s internal accounting policies to shuffle the process along a little less painfully. And there are a number of companies in this space, from older players like SAP’s Concur through to startups on the cusp of going public like Expensify as well as younger entrants bringing new technology into the process.

But, there is still lots more room for improvement. Rindom, Pleo’s CEO who co-founded the company with CTO Niccolo Perra, said the pair came up with the idea for Pleo on the back of years of working in fintech — both were early employees at the B2B supply chain startup Tradeshift — and seeing first-hand how short-changed, so to speak, small and medium businesses in particular were when it came to tools to handle their expenses.

Pleo’s approach has been to build, from the ground up, a system for those smaller businesses that integrate all the different stages of how an employee might spend money on behalf of the company.

Pleo starts with physical and virtual payment cards (which can be used in, for example, Apple Wallet) that are issued by Pleo (in partnership with MasterCard) to buy goods and services, which in turn are automatically itemized according to a company’s internal accounting systems, with the ability to work with e-receipts, but also let people use their phones to snap pictures of receipts when they are only on paper, if required. This is pretty much table stakes for expense software these days, but Pleo’s platform is going a couple of steps beyond that.

Users (or employers) can integrate a users’ own banking details to make it easier to get reimbursed when they have had to pay for something out of their own pocket; or conversely to pay for something that shouldn’t have been charged on the card. And if there are invoices to be paid at a later date from the time of purchase, these too can be actioned and set up within Pleo rather than having to liaise separately with an accounts payable department to get those settled. Higher priced tiers (beyond the basic service for up to five users) also lets a company set spending limits for individual users. Pricing is based on number of users, per month.

Pleo also has built fraud protection services into the platform to detect, for example, cases when a card number might have been compromised and is being used for non-work purposes.

What’s notable is that the startup has built all of the tech that it uses, including the payments feature, from the ground up, to have full control over the features and specifically to be able to add more of them more flexibly over time.

“In the beginning we ran with a partner in services like payments, but it didn’t allow us to move fast enough,” Rindom said in an interview. “So we decided to take all of that in-house.”

It seems like this opens the door to a lot of possibilities for how Pleo might evolve in the years ahead now that it’s focused on hyper-growth. However, Rindom added that whatever the next steps might be, they will remain focused on continuing to solve the expenses problem.

“When it comes to our infrastructure we use it only for ourselves,” he said. “We have no plans of selling [for example, payments] as a service, even if we do have a lot of other ideas for broadening our offerings.” Indeed, the ability to pay invoices was launched only in April of this year. “We come up with things all the time, but will launch only those relevant to customers.” For now, at least.

That focus and perhaps even more than that the execution and customer traction are what have brought investors around to backing a fintech out of Copenhagen.

“The future of work empowers employees with the tools they need to be effective, productive, and successful,” said Keri Gohman, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, in a statement. “Pleo understands this critical shift for modern companies toward employee centricity—providing workers with a fun-to-use spend management app that automatically tracks their corporate spending and generates expense reports, paired with the powerful tools businesses need to create full visibility and management of every penny spent.”

Bain has been a pretty active investor in European fintech, also backing GoCardless in its recent round. “BCV invests in founders who aren’t afraid to tackle big problems, and Jeppe and Nicco saw a big challenge that employers faced—tracking all corporate spending and reconciling expenses back to the general ledger—and solved it with elegant technology that both employers and employees love,” added Merritt Hummer, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures.

Thrive is also a notable backer here, and it will be interesting to see how and if Pleo links up with others in the VC’s portfolio, which include companies like Plaid, Gong and Trade Republic.

“Pleo has already transformed the way that over 17,000 companies think about managing their expenses, saving them time and lowering costs while increasing transparency,” noted Kareem Zaki, a general partner at Thrive Capital, in a statement. “We are excited to partner closely with the Pleo team to help drive their next phase of growth.”

ManoMano raises $355 million for its home improvement e-commerce platform

Published July 5, 2021

French startup ManoMano has raised a Series F funding round of $355 million led by Dragoneer Investment Group. The company operates an e-commerce platform focused on DIY, home improvement and gardening products. It is currently available in six European countries. Following today’s funding round, the company has reached a valuation of $2.6 billion.

In addition to Dragoneer Investment Group, Temasek, General Atlantic, Eurazeo, Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund, Aglaé Ventures, Kismet Holdings and Armat Group are also participating.

“We operate in Europe and we are the industry leader in online sales,” co-founder and co-CEO Philippe de Chanville told me. In France in particular, the company has been profitable for a couple of years already. In 2020 alone, the company’s gross merchandise volume doubled to €1.2 billion ($1.42 billion at today’s rate).

So why did the company raise given that it’s already in a strong position to replicate the same model in other European markets? Because they could and because they didn’t need to. With a high valuation, ManoMano could raise quite a bit of money without having to sell a significant chunk of its equity.

In addition to France, the startup operates in Spain, Italy, Belgium, Germany and the U.K. With today’s funding round, the company wants to develop its activities in the U.K. and Germany in particular — they are Europe’s two biggest markets for home improvement and gardening.

ManoMano sells products to hobbyists and also targets the B2B market with ManoManoPro. It’s already working well in France with very small teams (1 to 5 employees) and the company is expanding this offering to Spain and Italy.

The startup will also invest more heavily in its product and build a better logistics infrastructure. “For the logistics part, we work with third-party logistics companies — we are a tech company,” co-founder and co-CEO Christian Raisson told me.

ManoMano doesn’t have its own warehouses and doesn’t own any inventory. That’s why ManoMano plans to recruit 1,000 people over the next 18 months and most of them will be tech profiles.

While ManoMano has 7 million clients, sales of home improvement and gardening items still mostly happen in brick-and-mortar stores. The startup is well aware that it’s not just a matter of having the best products at good price points.

ManoMano works with advisors (or Manodvisors) so that experts can give advice whenever customers need some tips. Overall, customers have initiated 2.3 million conversations with advisors in 2020. Recommendations and advice will be key to gain market shares. And the company is now well capitalized to innovate on this front and differentiate itself from other e-commerce platforms.

E-commerce logistics startup Locad gets $4.9M seed round led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge

Published July 5, 2021

E-commerce is booming in Southeast Asia, but in many markets, the fragmented logistics industry is struggling to catch up. This means sellers run into roadblocks when shipping to buyers, especially outside of major metropolitan areas, and managing their supply chains. Locad, a startup that wants to help with what it describes as an “end-to-end solution” for cross-border e-commerce companies, announced today it has raised a $4.9 million seed round.

The funding was led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge (Locad is currently a part of the program’s fifth cohort), with participation from firms like Antler, Febe Ventures, Foxmont, GFC and Hustle Fund. It also included angel investors Alessandro Duri, Alexander Friedhoff, Christian Weiss, Henry Ko, Huey Lin, Markus Bruderer, Dr. Markus Erken, Max Moldenhauer, Oliver Mickler, Paulo Campos, Stefan Mader, Thibaud Lecuyer, Tim Marbach and Tim Seithe.

Locad was founded in Singapore and Manila by Constantin Robertz, former Zalora director of operations Jannis Dargel and Shrey Jain, previously Grab’s lead product manager of maps. It now also has offices in Australia, Hong Kong and India. The startup’s goal is to close the gap between first-mile and last-mile delivery services, enabling e-commerce companies to offer lower shipping rates and faster deliveries while freeing up more time for other parts of their operations, such as marketing and sales conversions.

Since its founding in October 2020, Locad has been used by more than 30 brands and processed almost 600,000 items. Its clients range from startups to international brands, and include Mango, Vans, Payless Shoes, Toshiba and Landmark, a department store chain in the Philippines.

Locad is among a growing roster of other Southeast Asia-based logistics startups that have recently raised funding, including Kargo, SiCepat, Advotics and Logisly. Locad wants to differentiate by providing a flexible solution that can work with any sales channel and is integrated with a wide range of shipping providers.

Indonesian logistics startup SiCepat raises $170 million Series B

Robertz told TechCrunch that Locad is able to keep an asset-light business model by partnering with warehouse operators and facility managers. What the startup brings to the mix is a cloud software platform that serves as a “control tower,” letting users get real-time information about inventory and orders across Locad’s network. The company currently has seven fulfillment centers, with four of its warehouses in the Philippines and the other three in Singapore, New South Wales, Australia and Hong Kong. Part of its funding will be used to expand into more Asia-Pacific markets, focusing on Southeast Asia and Australia.

Locad’s seed round will also used to add integrations to more couriers and sales channels (it can already be used with platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Amazon, Shopee, Lazada and Zalora), and develop new features for its cloud platform, including more data analytics.

Golden Gate Ventures forecasts a record number of exits in Southeast Asia

Tinybird turns raw data into realtime API at scale

Published July 5, 2021

Meet Tinybird, a new startup that helps developers build data products at scale without having to worry about infrastructure, query time and all those annoying issues that come up once you deal with huge data sets. The company ingests data at scale, lets you transform it using SQL and then exposes that data through API endpoints.

Over the past few years, analytics and business intelligence products have really changed the way we interact with data. Now, many big companies store data in a data warehouse or a data lake. They try to get insights from those data sets.

And yet, extracting and manipulating data can be costly and slow. It works great if you want to make a PowerPoint presentation for your quarterly results. But it doesn’t let you build modern web products and data products in general.

“What we do at Tinybird is we help developers build data products at any scale. And we’re really focused on the realtime aspect,” co-founder and CEO Jorge Gómez Sancha told me.

The team of co-founders originally met at Carto. They were already working on complex data issues. “Every year people would come with an order of magnitude more data,” Gómez Sancha said. That’s how they came up with the idea behind Tinybird.

Image Credits: Tinybird

The product can be divided into three parts. First, you connect your Tinybird account with your data sources. The company will then ingest data constantly from those data sources.

Second, you can transform that data through SQL queries. In addition to the command-line interface, you can also enter your SQL queries in a web interface, divide then into multiple steps and document everything. Every time you write a query, you can see your data filtered and sorted according to your query.

Third, you can create API endpoints based on those queries. After that, it works like a standard JSON-based API. You can use it to fetch data in your own application.

What makes Tinybird special is that it’s so fast that it feels like you’re querying your data in realtime. “Several of our customers are reading over 1.5 trillion rows on average per day via Tinybird and ingesting around 5 billion rows per day, others are making an average of 250 requests per second to our APIs querying several billion row datasets,” Gómez Sancha wrote in an email.

Behind the scene, the startup uses ClickHouse. But you don’t have to worry about that as Tinybird manages all the infrastructure for you.

Right now, Tinybird has identified three promising use cases. Customers can use it to provide in-product analytics. For instance, if you operate a web hosting service and wants to give some analytics to your customers or if you manage online stores and want to surface purchasing data to your customers, Tinybird works well for that.

Some customers also use the product for operational intelligence, such as realtime dashboards that you can share internally within a company. Your teams can react more quickly and always know if everything is running fine.

You can also use Tinybird as the basis for some automation or complex event processing. For instance, you can leverage Tinybird to build a web application firewall that scans your traffic and reacts in realtime.

Tinybird has raised a $3 million seed round led by Crane.vc with several business angels also participating, such as Nat Friedman (GitHub CEO), Nicholas Dessaigne (Algolia co-founder), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel CEO), Jason Warner (GitHub CTO), Adam Gross (former Heroku CEO), Stijn Christiaens (co-founder and CTO of Collibra), Matias Woloski (co-founder and CTO of Auth0) and Carsten Thoma (Hybris co-founder).