These startups are locating in SF and Africa to win in global fintech
To become a global fintech player, locate your company in San Francisco and Africa.
That’s the approach of payments company Flutterwave, digital lending startup Mines, and mobile-money venture Chipper Cash—Africa-founded ventures that maintain headquarters in San Francisco and operations in Africa to tap the best of both worlds in VC, developers, clients, and the frontier of digital finance.
This arrangement wasn’t exactly coordinated across the ventures, but TechCrunch coverage picked up the trend and some common motives among these rising fintech firms.
Founded in 2016 by Nigerians Iyinoluwa Aboyeji and Olugbenga Agboola, Flutterwave has positioned itself as a global B2B payments solutions platform for companies in Africa to pay other companies on the continent and abroad.
Clients can tap its APIs and work with Flutterwave developers to customize payments applications. Existing customers include Uber, Booking.com and African e-commerce unicorn Jumia.com.
The Y-Combinator backed company is headquartered in San Francisco, runs its operations center in Nigeria, and plans to add offices in South Africa and Cameroon.
Flutterwave opened an office in Uganda in June and raised a $10 million Series A round in October. The company also plugged into ledger activity in 2018, becoming a payment processing partner to the Ripple and Stellar blockchain networks.
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DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg is coming to Disrupt
2019 is the year Facebook announced a “pivot to privacy.” At the same time, Google is trying to claim that privacy means letting it exclusively store and data-mine everything you do online. So what better time to sit down with DuckDuckGo founder and CEO Gabriel Weinberg for a chat about what privacy really means.
We’re delighted to announce that Weinberg is joining us at Disrupt SF (October 2-4).
The pro-privacy search engine he founded has been on a mission to shrink the shoulder-surfing creepiness of internet searching for more than a decade, serving contextual keyword-based ads, rather than pervasively tracking users to maintain privacy-hostile profiles. (If you can’t quite believe the decade bit; here’s DDG’s startup elevator pitch — which we featured on TC all the way back in 2008.)
It’s a position that looks increasingly smart as big tech comes under sharper political and regulatory scrutiny on account of the volume of information it’s amassing. (Not to mention what it’s doing with people’s data.)
Despite competing as a self-funded underdog against the biggest tech giants around, DuckDuckGo has been profitable and gaining users at a steady clip for years. It also recently took in a chunk of VC to capitalize on what its investors see as a growing international opportunity to help internet users go about their business without being intrusively snooped on. Which makes a compelling counter narrative to the tech giants.
In more recent developments it has added a tracker blocker to its product mix — and been dabbling in policy advocacy — calling for a revival of a Do Not Track browser standard, after earlier attempts floundered with the industry, failing to reach accord.
The political climate around privacy and data protection does look to be pivoting in such a way that Do Not Track could possibly swing back into play. But if — and, yes it’s a big one — privacy ends up being a baked-in internet norm, how might a pioneer like DuckDuckGo maintain its differentiating edge?
While, on the flip side, what if tech giants end up moving in on its territory by redefining privacy in their own self-serving image? We have questions and will be searching Weinberg for answers.
There’s also the fact that many a founder would have cut and run just half a decade into pushing against the prevailing industry grain. So we’re also keen to mine his views on entrepreneurial patience, and get a better handle on what makes him tick as a person — to learn how he’s turned a passion for building people-centric, principled products into a profitable business.
Disrupt SF runs October 2 – October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available here.
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N26 faces banking regulator order about fraudulent transactions
Fintech startup N26 received an order from BaFin, the German banking regulator. According to the regulator, N26 hasn’t been doing enough when it comes to money laundering and terrorist financing. The company has a specific period of time to implement changes and rectify its internal processes.
“Today, BaFin published an order for N26 Bank GmbH. An order is an instruction from them to improve processes within a certain time frame. The order requires us to optimize existing processes to prevent money laundering and increase N26 staffing levels,” the company says in a blog post.
A few articles have highlighted a handful of cases of fraud in recent weeks. Customers tried to use N26 for money-laundering purposes. It took some time before N26 reacted and closed those accounts.
It’s not that surprising given that literally every bank suffers from this issue. For instance, all the big French banks (BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole and Crédit Mutuel) have been fined in the past for the same reason.
Banking regulators don’t review suspicious transactions directly. They make sure that banks have the right processes and teams to catch the vast majority of suspicious transactions.
As N26 has more than 2.5 million users, it’s been hard to scale its workforce appropriately. In other words, it has been short-staffed. In recent months, the company has been hiring customer support and anti-money laundering teams like crazy, by hiring more people directly and signing deals with subcontractors.
BaFin asks N26 to catch up with its backlog of flagged transactions. The company plans to be done by the end of next week. BaFin also wants to see written descriptions of processes and workflows. Finally, the regulator says that N26 should recheck the identity of some customers and redo the KYC process (“know your customer”). N26 says that it plans to implement BaFin’s requirements before the deadline.
Creating a startup is hard, but creating a bank with startup-like growth is even harder. Banking regulation is tough, and it’s a good thing for N26 customers that BaFin is keeping an eye out. Let’s hope that today’s order is just a bump in the road.
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Now at Google, Facebook’s former teen-in-residence launches new social game Emojishot
Facebook’s former teen-in-residence Michael Sayman, now at Google, is back today with the launch of a new game: Emojishot, an emoji-based guessing game for iOS, built over the past 10 weeks within Google’s in-house incubator, Area 120.
The game, which is basically a version of charades using emoji characters, is notable because of its creator.
By age 17, Sayman had launched five apps and had become Facebook’s youngest-ever employee. Best known for his hit game 4 Snaps, the developer caught Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, earning him a demo spot onstage at Facebook’s F8 conference. While at Facebook, Sayman built Facebook’s teen app Lifestage — a Snapchat-like standalone project which allowed the company to explore new concepts around social networking aimed at a younger demographic.
Lifestage was shut down two years ago, and Sayman defected to Google shortly afterward. At Google, he was rumored to be heading up an internal social gaming effort called Arcade where gamers played using accounts tied to their phone numbers — not a social network account.
At the time, HQ Trivia was still a hot title, not a novelty from a struggling startup — and the new gaming effort looked liked Google’s response. However, Arcade has always been only an Area 120 project, we understand.
To be clear, that means it’s not an official Google effort — as an Area 120 project, it’s not associated with any of Google’s broader efforts in gaming, social or anything else. Area 120 apps and services are instead built by small teams that are personally interested in pursuing an idea. In the case of Emojishot, it was Sayman’s own passion project.
Emojishot itself is meant to be played with friends, who take turns using emoji to create a picture so friends can guess the word. For example, the game’s screenshots show the word “kraken,” which may be drawn using an octopus, boat and arrow emojis. The emojis are selected from a keyboard below and can be resized to create the picture. This resulting picture is called the “emojishot,” and also can be saved to your Camera Roll.
Players can pick from a variety of words that unlock and get increasingly difficult as you successfully progress through the game. The puzzles can also be shared with friends to get help with solving, and there’s a “nudge” feature to encourage a friend to return to the game and play.
According to the game’s website, the idea was to make a fun game that explored emojis as art and a form of communication.
Unfortunately, we were unable to test it just yet, as the service wasn’t up-and-running at the time of publication. (The game is just now rolling out, so it may not be fully functional until later today.)
While there are other “Emoji Charades” games on the App Store, the current leading title is aimed at playing with friends at a party on the living room TV, not on phones with friends.
Sayman officially announced Emojishot today, noting his efforts at Area 120 and how the game came about.
“For the last year, I’ve been working in Area 120, Google’s workshop for experimental products. I’ve been exploring and rapidly prototyping a bunch of ideas, testing both internally and externally,” he says. “Ten weeks ago, we came up with the idea for an emoji-based guessing game. After a lot of testing and riffing on the idea, we’re excited that the first iteration — Emojishot — is now live on the iOS App Store…We’ve had a lot of fun with it and are excited to open it up to a wider audience,” Sayman added.
He notes that more improvements to the game will come over time, and offered to play with newcomers via his username “michael.”
The app is available to download from the U.S. iOS App Store here. An Android waitlist is here.
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ARM halts Huawei relationship following US ban
The dominoes continue to fall for Huawei in the wake of a Trump-led U.S. trade ban. An internal memo from ARM lays out the chip giant’s decision to hit pause on “all active contracts, support entitlements, and any pending engagements,” per the BBC.
While based in Cambridge, England, the company believes itself to be impacted by the trade issue due to its use of technology originating in the States. The move is just another indication of how complex the issue of extracting U.S.-based technology from these devices will ultimately be. If upheld, many believe it could ultimately doom Huawei.
Huawei offered TechCrunch a fairly standard response to the news, once again chalking things up to politics. “We value our close relationships with our partners, but recognize the pressure some of them are under, as a result of politically motivated decisions,” it wrote. “We are confident this regrettable situation can be resolved and our priority remains to continue to deliver world-class technology and products to our customers around the world.”
Google was among the first to respond to Huawei’s inclusion on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s “Entity” trade blacklist, pulling support for Android. Other partners, including Microsoft, have remained largely silent on the matter.
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Meet Projector, collaborative design software for the Instagram age
Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures bonded with Trevor O’Brien in prison. The pair, Suster was quick to clarify, were on site at a correctional facility in 2017 to teach inmates about entrepreneurship as part of a workshop hosted by Defy Ventures, a nonprofit organization focused on addressing the issue of mass incarceration.
They hit it off, sharing perspectives on life and work, Suster recounted to TechCrunch. So when O’Brien, a former director of product management at Twitter, mentioned he was in the early days of building a startup, Suster listened.
Less than two years later, O’Brien is ready to talk about the idea that captured the attention of the Bird, FabFitFun and Ring investor. It’s called Projector.
It’s the brainchild of a product veteran (O’Brien) and a gaming industry engineer turned Twitter’s vice president of engineering (Projector co-founder Jeremy Gordon), a combination that has given way to an experiential and well-designed platform. Projector is browser-based, real-time collaborative design software tailored for creative teams that feels and looks like a mix of PowerPoint, Google Docs and Instagram . Though it’s still months away from a full-scale public launch, the team recently began inviting potential users to test the product for bugs.
“We want to reimagine visual communication in the workplace by building these easier to use tools and giving creative powers to the non-designers who have great stories to tell and who want to make a difference,” O’Brien told TechCrunch. “They want change to happen and they need to be empowered with the right kinds of tools.”
Today, Projector is a lean team of 13 employees based in downtown San Francisco. They’ve kept quiet since late 2016 despite closing two rounds of venture capital funding. The first, a $4 million seed round, was led by Upfront’s Suster, as you may have guessed. The second, a $9 million Series A, was led by Mayfield in 2018. Hunter Walk of Homebrew, Jess Verrilli of #Angels and Nancy Duarte of Duarte, Inc. are also investors in the business, among others.
O’Brien leads Projector as chief executive officer alongside co-founder and chief technology officer Gordon. Years ago, O’Brien was pursuing a PhD in computer graphics and information visualization at Brown University when he was recruited to Google’s competitive associate product manager program. He dropped out of Brown and began a career in tech that would include stints at YouTube, Twitter, Coda and, finally, his very own business.
O’Brien and Gordon crossed paths at Twitter in 2013 and quickly realized a shared history in the gaming industry. O’Brien had spent one year as an engineer at a games startup called Mad Doc Software, while Gordon had served as the chief technology officer at Sega Studios. Gordon left Twitter in 2014 and joined Redpoint Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence before O’Brien pitched him on an idea that would become Projector.
Projector co-founders Jeremy Gordon (left), Twitter’s former vice president of engineering, and Trevor O’Brien, Twitter’s former director of product management
“We knew we wanted to create a creative platform but we didn’t want to create another creative platform for purely self-expression, we wanted to do something that was a bit more purposeful,” O’Brien said. “At the end of the day, we just wanted to see good ideas succeed. And with all of those good ideas, succeeding typically starts with them being presented well to their audience.”
Initially, Projector is targeting employees within creative organizations and marketing firms, who are frequently tasked with creating visually compelling presentations. The tool suite is free for now and will be until it’s been sufficiently tested for bugs and has fully found its footing. O’Brien says he’s not sure just yet how the team will monetize Projector, but predicts they’ll adopt Slack’s per user monthly subscription pricing model.
As original and user-friendly as it may be, Projector is up against great competition right out of the gate. In the startup landscape, it’s got Canva, a graphic design platform valued at $2.5 billion earlier this week with a $70 million financing. On the old-guard, it’s got Adobe, which sells a widely used suite of visual communication and graphic design tools. Not to mention Prezi, Figma and, of course, Microsoft’s PowerPoint, which is total crap but still used by millions of people.
“There are many tools scratching at the surface, but there’s not one visual communications tool that wins them all,” Suster said of his investment in Projector.
Projector is still in its very early days. The company currently has just two integrations: Unsplash for free stock images and Giphy for GIFs. O’Brien would eventually like to incorporate iconography, typography and sound to liven up Projector’s visual presentation capabilities.
The ultimate goal, aside from generally improving workplace storytelling, is to make crafting presentations fun, because shouldn’t a corporate slideshow or even a startup’s pitch be as entertaining as scrolling through your Instagram feed?
“We wanted to try to create something that doesn’t feel like work,” O’Brien said.
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KaiOS raises $50M, hits 100M handsets powered by its feature phone OS
While Android and iOS have locked up the market for smartphone operating systems, a feature phone platform that has the distinction of being the world’s third biggest mobile OS is announcing a hefty round of funding to continue its expansion. KaiOS, which makes the OS that powers devices like Nokia’s feature phones and Jio’s devices out of India, has raised $50 million from Cathay Innovation (which led the round) and previous investors Google and TCL Holdings.
The funding takes the total raised by KaiOS — which has now shipped 100 million devices across 100 countries — to $72 million. It comes less than a year after Google invested $22 million in the business — a strategic round that also marked KaiOS beginning the process of creating native integrations of different Google services like Maps and (more recently) Assistant into the platform.
KaiOS is not disclosing its valuation, but Sebastien Codeville, its CEO, confirmed it is “definitely up.” (PitchBook put it at a very modest $43.75 million last year on the back of Google’s earlier round.)
We actually knew a little about this round back in February, at MWC in Barcelona, when KaiOS announced new handset partners and a raft of new features. A spokesperson for KaiOS told TechCrunch the delay in closing the deal and making it public was due to a need to coordinate with different stakeholders.
As it turned out, KaiOS’s timing for this announcement turned out to be pretty interesting. The big news this week in mobile is what kind of an impact Huawei will face in the wake of a U.S. regulation barring it from doing business in the U.S. One development in that story has been just how serious Huawei is about building its own operating system to replace Google’s Android and its related services.
This is big news because while Huawei is currently the world’s second-biggest mobile phone maker, we haven’t seen any platform gain reasonable mobile phone traction against the hegemony of iOS and Android outside of China — including the failure of Firefox OS, which retreated from the market only to reemerge, phoenix-like, as KaiOS two years ago — in part because of the extensive ecosystems that have coalesced around these two.
But while all eyes are on smartphones, KaiOS’s funding and general growth represents an interesting alternative for markets, carriers and consumers that might be in the market for what KaiOS refers to as “smart feature phones.”
Today, the company counts companies like Reliance Jio, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Orange, MTN and Qualcomm among its partners, and it’s been building an interesting, two-pronged strategy for targeting people both in developed and developing markets.
As Codeville describes it, in emerging markets (which are KaiOS’s primary target), its devices are being purchased by first-time phone users, or those that have had very basic, non-data mobile phones and are upgrading without the big step and expense of smartphones. “We are bringing people to internet usage with a device they are familiar with,” he said of the form factor. “Other key characteristics are a long battery life, a keyboard and a more resistant touch panel.”
The developed market, he added, was an interesting opportunity because of the amount of professionals and others who want pared-down devices for weekend use to unplug from their daily grind.
Many had left feature phones for dead with the growth in popularity of devices like the iPhone, app stores and, of course, apps themselves. But research from Counterpoint found that feature phones still accounted for almost 25% of all handset shipments in Q3 of last year, working out to a $28 billion market opportunity in the years ahead. Today there are some 1.5 billion feature phone users, an interesting number to consider as smartphone sales continue to feel the crunch.
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Throw out your diary, Jour is a new app for guided journaling
Since Jour, a new app for private and portable journaling, dropped on the App Store two months ago, it’s racked up 80,000 users. No paid marketing or public announcements. Just organic interest in discovering a better way of journaling than pen to paper.
“We can reinvent and redesign what we call journaling and the journal,” Jour co-founder and chief executive officer Maxime Germain told TechCrunch. “If we do it right, it will go mainstream.”
New York-based Jour has raised a $1.8 million seed round from True Ventures’ Kevin Rose. Similar to the meditation apps that have skyrocketed in popularity recently, Jour’s guided sequences are meant to facilitate the journaling process and encourage writers to mindfully reflect and record their lives. With its seed funding, Jour will create a library of audio sessions and written questions meant to spark inspiration.
“Meditation apps have shown there are some self-care habits we can use in our life to feel better, to feel less anxious,” Germain, a French native who relocated to New York seven years ago, said. “But the journal is a way to capture moments and people’s authentic selves. It’s all the stuff you might not be sharing on social media.”
Jour, at its core, is an app battling mental illness. The business joins a number of other well-being apps and venture-backed startups targeting the mental health crisis. From brick-and-mortar therapy clinics to chat apps to emotional wellness assistants, venture capitalists are waking up to the emotional struggles rampant across the globe.
“Ten years ago when I first started using meditation apps I think there was a certain type of stigma; like you need help so you’re meditating,” True Venture’s Rose, a founder of Digg, Oak, a guided meditation app, and Zero, an app for tracking intermittent fasting, told TechCrunch. “Now, it’s just crossed over to the mainstream.”
“I’m hopeful we are finally getting to a point where we can have open conversations about mental health,” Rose added.
Jour co-founders (from left to right) Maxime Germain, Justin Bureau and Bobby Giangeruso
As Jour deals with an influx of new users, it’s keeping the entire app and all of its features free, though eventually, the team plans to add a paywall to some of the guided content. As for anyone concerned about the safety of your anxieties, hopes and dreams, Jour’s founding team, which includes Germain, Bobby Giangeruso and Justin Bureau, built the app with zero-knowledge encryption.
“I would feel very uncomfortable if the rest of the people on my team could read my most intimate thoughts,” Germain explained. “We built [Jour] with an encryption key that stays on the phone, all the data is encrypted with that key and if you lose that key we can’t recover the entries that we save on the servers. Only you have access to that key, it’s stored on the phone, it encrypts the data and even if the data is compromised we can’t get it.”
Phew. The last thing we need today is our diaries getting hacked.
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Zendesk acquires Smooch, doubles down on support via messaging apps like WhatsApp
One of the bigger developments in customer services has been the impact of social media — both as a place to vent frustration or praise (mostly frustration) and — especially over messaging apps — as a place for businesses to connect with their users.
Now, customer support specialist Zendesk has made an acquisition so that it can make a bigger move into how it works within social media platforms, and specifically messaging apps: it has acquired Smooch, a startup that describes itself as an “omnichannel messaging platform,” which companies’ customer care teams can use to interact with people over messaging platforms like WhatsApp, WeChat, Line and Messenger, as well as SMS and email.
Smooch was in fact one of the first partners for the WhatsApp Business API, alongside VoiceSage, Nexmo, Infobip, Twilio, MessageBird and others already advertising their services in this area.
It had also been a longtime partner of Zendesk’s, powering the company’s own WhatsApp Business integration and other features. The two already have some customers in common, including Uber. Other Smooch customers include Four Seasons, SXSW, Betterment, Clarabridge, Harry’s, LVMH, Delivery Hero and BarkBox.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but Zendesk SVP class=”il”>Shawna Wolverton said in an interview that the startup’s entire team of 48, led by co-founder and CEO Warren Levitan, are being offered positions with Zendesk. Smooch is based out of Montreal, Canada — so this represents an expansion for Zendesk into building an office in Canada.
Its backers included iNovia, TA Associates and Real Ventures, who collectively had backed it with less than $10 million (when you leave the inflated hills surrounding Silicon Valley, numbers magically decline). As Zendesk is publicly traded, we may get more of a picture of the price in future quarterly reports. This is the company’s fifth acquisition to date.
The deal underscores the big impact that messaging apps are making in customer service. While phone and internet are massive points of contact, messaging apps is one of the most-requested features Zendesk’s customers are requesting, “because they want to be where their customers are,” with WhatsApp — now at 1.5 billion users — currently at the top of the pile, Wolverton said. (More than half of Zendesk’s revenues are from outside the U.S., which speaks to why WhatsApp — which is bigger outside the U..S than it is in it — is a popular request.)
That’s partly a by-product of how popular messaging apps are full-stop, with more than 75% of all smartphone users having at least one messaging app in use on their devices.
“We live in a messaging-centric world, and customers expect the convenience and interactivity of messaging to be part of their experiences,” said Mikkel Svane, Zendesk founder, CEO and chairman, in a statement. “As long-time partners with Smooch, we know first hand how much they have advanced the conversational experience to bring together all forms of messaging and create a continuous conversation between customers and businesses.”
While the two companies were already working together, the acquisition will mean a closer integration.
That will be in multiple areas. Last year, Zendesk launched a new CRM play called Sunshine, going head to head with the likes of Salesforce in helping businesses better organise and make use of customer data. Smooch will build on that strategy to bring in data to Sunshine from messaging apps and the interactions that take place on them. Also last year, Zendesk launched an omnichannel play, a platform called The Suite, which it says “has become one of our most successful products ever,” with a 400% rise in its customers taking an omnichannel approach. Smooch already forms a key part of that, and it will be even more tightly so.
On the outbound side, for now, there will be two areas where Smooch will be used, Wolverton said. First will be on the basic level of giving Zendesk users the ability to see and create messaging app discussions within a dashboard where they are able to monitor and handle all customer relationship contacts: a conversation that was initiated now on, say, Twitter, can be easily moved into WhatsApp or whatever more direct channel someone wants to use.
Second, Wolverton said that customer care workers can use Smooch to send on “micro apps” to users to handle routine service enquiries, for example sending them links to make or change seat assignments on a flight.
Over time, the plan will be to bring more automated options into the experience, which opens the door for using more AI and potentially bots down the line.
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Leak reveals Uber’s $9.99 unlimited delivery Eats Pass
What’s the cord-cutting equivalent to ditching your kitchen? Uber’s upcoming subscription to unlimited free food delivery. Uber is preparing to launch the $9.99 per month Uber Eats Pass, according to code hidden in Uber’s Android app.
The subscription would waive Uber’s service fee that’s typically 15% of your order cost. Given that’s often $5 or more, users stand to save a lot if they order in frequently. But Uber could still earn money on menu item markups, cover costs with a flat order fee that protects against someone ordering a single taco, and, most importantly, build loyalty and scale at a time of intense food delivery competition.
The Uber Eats Pass was first spotted by Jane Manchun Wong, the notorious reverse-engineering specialist who’s become a frequent TechCrunch tipster. She managed to generate screenshots from Uber’s Android app code that reveals a prototype of the feature. “Get free delivery, any restaurant, any time,” it says, showing the amount of money you could save or already saved.
An Uber spokesperson did not dispute the legitimacy of the findings and told TechCrunch, “We’re always thinking about new ways to enhance the Eats experience.” They declined to provide further details, which could hint that a launch is imminent but some details are still subject to change. For now we don’t know exactly which perks come with an Eats Pass or where it will be launching first.
At $9.99 per month, the Uber Eats Pass would cost the same and work similarly to Postmates Unlimited and DoorDash DashPass. If they all seem like good deals, you see why they’re less about immediate revenue and more about customer lock-in. You’re a lot less likely to order GrubHub or Caviar if you’ve already pre-paid to cover your Uber Eats delivery costs. And whichever apps emerge from this battle will have instituted the scale and steady behavior to raise prices or just enjoy large lifetime value from each subscriber.
Exploring new business opportunities could help perk up Uber’s share price, which closed at $41.50 today, two weeks after IPOing at an opening price of $42. There are fears that intense competition across both ridesharing and food delivery could make for an expensive road ahead for the newly public company. Any way it can gain an edge on its rivals’ users from straying to them is important. The logistics giant is already experimenting with allowing restaurants to offer discounts in exchange for promoted placement in the app, which is the first step to Uber becoming an ads company, where businesses pay for extra exposure.
If Uber combined Eats Pass with its car service subscription Ride Passes, you have the foundation for a sort of Uber Prime experience — one where you pay an upfront subscription fee that scores you perks and discounts but also makes you likely to spend a lot more on Uber. That bundle could be even more central to Uber than Amazon, which has few direct rivals in the west. People will need to eat and get around for the foreseeable future. Subsidizing loyalty now could be costly in the short-term, but poise Uber for years of lucrative business down the line.
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