Monthly Archives: November 2020

News: Seedcamp raises £78M for its fifth fund

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European pre-seed and seed-stage VC Seedcamp has reached £78M in the first and final close of its fifth fund, ‘Seedcamp V’, its largest to date. The round was backed by investors including British Patient Capital, Legal & General, TIFF, LGT, Vintage IP, Isomer Capital, OMERS. VC backers include Index, Sequoia, Underscore VC, Northzone, Atomico and

European pre-seed and seed-stage VC Seedcamp has reached £78M in the first and final close of its fifth fund, ‘Seedcamp V’, its largest to date.

The round was backed by investors including British Patient Capital, Legal & General, TIFF, LGT, Vintage IP, Isomer Capital, OMERS. VC backers include Index, Sequoia, Underscore VC, Northzone, Atomico and Draper Esprit. Angel backers include Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise), Daniel Dines (UiPath), David Helgason (Nordic Makers/Unity) and Shakil Khan (Spotify).

The new fund comes three years on from the close of Fund IV, at £60M, and this new fund increases the amount of capital it will invest in pre-seed and seed-stage companies, as well as reserving capital for follow-on rounds up to Series B.

Seedcamp backed Hopin, the virtual conferences platform which made hay during the pandemic and recently raised $125m giving it a $2bn valuation.

News: Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, angel investor and COO of GoCardless, is joining Index as partner

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Index Ventures, the London and San Francisco-headquartered venture capital firm that primarily invests in Europe and the U.S., has recruited its latest investment partner. Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, who is currently the COO of London-based fintech GoCardless and was previously the chief product officer of Skyscanner, is joining Index in January, TechCrunch can reveal. For those not

Index Ventures, the London and San Francisco-headquartered venture capital firm that primarily invests in Europe and the U.S., has recruited its latest investment partner.

Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, who is currently the COO of London-based fintech GoCardless and was previously the chief product officer of Skyscanner, is joining Index in January, TechCrunch can reveal.

For those not in the know, Gonzalez-Cadenas is a seasoned entrepreneur and operator, but has also become a prolific angel investor over the last three years — making more than 50 angel investments in Europe in total, I’m told. And while I can’t say I’m aware of every single one of those investments, it hasn’t gone unnoticed how often Gonzalez-Cadenas’ name seems to crop up on a European funding announcement or when I ask founders to list their earliest backers. The transition to a full-time role in venture capital, therefore, feels like it makes quite a lot of sense.

“I’ve been an angel investor for the last three years and this is something that has basically grown for me quite organically,” he tells TechCrunch. “I started doing just a handful and seeing if this is something I like and over time it has grown quite a lot and so has the number of entrepreneurs I’m partnered with. And this is something I’ve been increasingly more excited to do. So it has grown organically and something that emotionally has been getting closer and closer as time has passed”.

Related to this, Gonzalez-Cadenas describes himself as “quite a curious person” and says that investing gives him the opportunity to learn about lots of different sectors and different ways of building businesses. “That is something that I enjoy a lot,” he says.

At Index, partners work across both of its funds — venture and growth — and collaborate as one team straddling Europe and the U.S., which is something Gonzalez-Cadenas says attracted him to the firm. Partners also don’t strictly specialise, even if each one may have their own passion areas.

“At Index, all partners have a bit of a centre of gravity from their perspective, but I think we are still relatively broad,” he explains. “In terms of me, it’s something we’re still figuring out from our perspective, but I’m likely going to be more gravitating towards the software space, say SaaS plus enterprise plus a bit of deep tech, machine learning and artificial intelligence. That’s probably going to be my focus, and I’m primarily focused on Europe”.

In 2008, Gonzalez-Cadenas founded Fogg, a travel business which he sold to Skyscanner five years later. He then became Skyscanner’s chief product officer and helped drive its “five-fold growth,” international expansion and the development of its product offering.

Before stepping into the role of COO at GoCardless, he was the fintech’s CPO and CTO, working alongside founder Hiroki Takeuchi. During this time, GoCardless has grown into a 400-person scale-up, with significant international and product expansion.

Gonzalez-Cadenas says another thing that made him choose to join Index is that the firm isn’t afraid to invest early, including an increasing number of seed deals, even if those deals aren’t always disclosed at the time.

“I think Index is quite an entrepreneurial approach in terms of taking risk,” he says. “If you think about the percentage of companies that today are massive successes in Index’s portfolio — so, for example, Revolut, Robinhood, Deliveroo, Adyen, Figma. All these companies, Index invested really, really early in the seed round, or, you know, the A, but the vast majority of those were in the seed round. And this is something that I think is super exciting, because it aligns a lot with what I do. I’m more of a entrepreneurially minded person that wants to invest heavily in the journey of entrepreneurs and take fundamental bets, as opposed to just waiting until the numbers are perfect and invest then. That’s not the type of investing that I like”.

News: India’s broadcasting ministry secures power to regulate streaming services, online content

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India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which oversees programs beamed on television and theatres in the country, will now also regulate policies for streaming platforms and digital news outlets in a move that is widely believed to kickstart an era of more frequent and stricter censorship on what online services air. The new rules (PDF),

India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which oversees programs beamed on television and theatres in the country, will now also regulate policies for streaming platforms and digital news outlets in a move that is widely believed to kickstart an era of more frequent and stricter censorship on what online services air.

The new rules (PDF), signed by India’s President Ram Nath Kovind this week, might end the years-long efforts by digital firms to self-regulate their own content to avoid the broader oversight that impacts television channels and theatres and whose programs appeared on those platforms. (Streaming platforms may be permitted to continue to self-regulate and report to I&B, similar to how TV channels follow a programming code and their self-regulatory body works with I&B. But there is no clarity on this currently.)

For instance, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting currently certifies what movies hit the theatres in the country and the scenes they need to clip or alter to receive those certifications. But movies and shows appearing on services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video did not require a certification and had wider tolerance for sensitive subjects.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has previously also ordered local television channels to not air sensitive documentaries.

India’s Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology previously oversaw online streaming services, but it did not enforce any major changes. The ministry also oversees platforms where videos are populated by users.

Officials of India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting have previously argued that with proliferation of online platforms in India — there are about 600 million internet users in the country — there needs to be parity between regulations on them and traditional media sources.

“There is definitely a need for a level playing field for all media. But that doesn’t mean we will bring everybody under a heavy regulatory structure. Our government has been focused on ease of doing business and less regulation, but more effective regulation,” said Amit Khare, Secretary of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, earlier this year.

The move by the world’s second largest internet market is bound to make players like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney’s Hotstar, Times Internet’s MX Player, and dozens of other streaming services and web-based news outlets more cautious about what all they choose to stream and publish on their platforms, an executive with one of the top streaming services told TechCrunch, requesting anonymity.

Netflix, which has poured over half a billion dollars in its India business, declined to comment.

Digital news outlets and platforms that cover “current affairs” will now also be overseen by India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Over the years, the Indian government has pressured advertisers and indulged in other practices to shape what several news channels show to their audiences.

Information and Broadcasting minister Prakash Javdekar is expected to address this week’s announcement in an hour. We will update the story with additional details.

News: E-commerce startup Heroes raises $65M in equity and debt to become the Thrasio of Europe

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Heroes, a European e-commerce business operating a similar model to unicorn Thrasio in the U.S. — with a strategy of acquiring and scaling high performing Amazon businesses — has raised $65 million in funding round. The round — a mixture of equity financing and debt — is co-led by 360 Capital and Fuel Ventures, with

Heroes, a European e-commerce business operating a similar model to unicorn Thrasio in the U.S. — with a strategy of acquiring and scaling high performing Amazon businesses — has raised $65 million in funding round.

The round — a mixture of equity financing and debt — is co-led by 360 Capital and Fuel Ventures, with participation from Upper90, an alternative capital provider for e-commerce assets. Angel investors in the company include Matt Robinson, co-founder of GoCardless and Nested, and Carlos Gonzales, COO of GoCardless.

“Debt will play an important role in the growth of our business going forward,” explains ex-EQT VC Riccardo Bruni, who co-founded Heroes with his brother Alessio. “Ultimately, it is a significantly cheaper form of capital which is non-dilutive, allowing our team and our investors to retain ownership in Heroes in the long term”.

With the goal of becoming Europe’s largest acquirer and operator of ‘Fulfillment by Amazon’ (FBA) brands, Heroes plans to roll up high performing FBA businesses from a range of different sectors, spanning baby, pets, homeware, kitchenware, garden, DIY, sports and outdoors categories. The idea is to provide these types of founders with an exit opportunity, while leveraging Heroes’ infrastructure to hopefully scale these FBA companies internationally via its in-house team of experts.

“The problem with ‘traditional’ D2C is that product-market fit is a huge unknown,” says Alessio Bruni. “Over the past decade, venture capital funds have invested billions of dollars into D2C businesses and only a very few of those have actually managed to hit product-market fit. In most cases, the startups end up spending too much money to convince customers to buy their product. As a result, you have customer acquisition costs (CAC) far exceeding customer lifetime values (LTV)”.

Conversely, outside of the world of venture capitalism lies a $300 billion industry, he says, “built on the back of hard-working people who have built profitable businesses on Amazon without ever having given away a share of their business to investors”. What often started as a side-hustle to make some extra money towards rent can sometimes turn into a profitable multi-million dollar business.

“What becomes evident to many founders at this point is that running a >$1 million business on Amazon is no longer a side-hustle. It requires significant resources to be dedicated to administrative tasks, tax filings, accounting, staff management, supply chain, logistics, cash-management, marketing etc. And some of these founders find themselves out of depth to manage such a big undertaking”.

This, of course, is where Heroes and its competitors come in, promising to give founders the ability to exit and cash in on the benefits of their hard work.

“What we love about these brands is that they have already hit product-market fit and we just need to focus on growth,” adds Bruno. “So in some ways, we are turning around the traditional D2C equation. We start with product-market fit and don’t have to worry about spending millions just to hit it”.

To that end, Heroes says the new funding will be used to continue hiring the early team and to support the first few acquisitions.

Meanwhile, on U.S. competitors, Ricardo Bruni had this to say: “Both Thrasio and Perch are based out of the U.S. and focus predominantly on the U.S. market. We are London-based and focus on the European market. The European market is significantly more fragmented than the U.S. one, with each country having its own dedicated Amazon marketplace.

“We believe that this fragmentation in itself creates a huge opportunity; one where localised knowledge, expertise and language is required”.

News: ByteDance asks federal appeals court to vacate U.S. order forcing it to sell TikTok

• November 11, 2020
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In a new filing, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance asked the federal appeals court to vacate the United States government order forcing it to sell the app’s American operations. President Donald Trump issued an order in August requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok’s U.S. business by November 12, unless it was granted a 30-day extension by the

In a new filing, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance asked the federal appeals court to vacate the United States government order forcing it to sell the app’s American operations.

President Donald Trump issued an order in August requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok’s U.S. business by November 12, unless it was granted a 30-day extension by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). In today’s filing (embedded below) with the federal appeals court in Washington D.C., ByteDance said it asked the CFIUS for an extension on November 6, but the order hasn’t been granted yet.

It added it remains committed to “reaching a negotiated mitigation solution with CFIUS satisfying its national security concerns” and will only file a motion to stay enforcement of the divestment order “if discussions reach an impasse.”

Security concerns about TikTok’s ownership by a Chinese company were at the center of the executive order Trump signed in August, banning transactions with Beijing-headquartered ByteDance.

The executive order claimed that TikTok posed a threat to national security, though ByteDance maintains that it does not. But in order to prevent the app, which has about 100 million users in the U.S., from being banned, ByteDance reached a deal in September to sell 20% of its stake in TikTok to Oracle and Walmart. With the Biden administration set to take office in January and ByteDance’s ongoing legal challenge against the divestment order, however, the future of the deal is now uncertain.

The new filing is part of a lawsuit TikTok filed against the Trump administration on September 18. It won an early victory when the court stopped the U.S. government’s ban from going into effect on its original deadline that month.

In a statement to Bloomberg, TikTok said it has been working with the CFIUS to address its national security concerns.

“In the nearly two months since the President gave his preliminary approval to our proposal to satisfy those concerns, we have offered detailed solutions to finalize that agreement—but have received no substantive feedback on our extensive data privacy and security framework,” it said.

With the divestment order set to go into effect on Thursday unless the CFIUS grants an extension, TikTok said it made the filing “to defend our rights and those of our more than 1,500 employees in the U.S.”

TechCrunch has contacted ByteDance for comment.

TikTok asks U.S. federal appeals court to vacate U.S. divestment order by TechCrunch on Scribd

News: Chan Zuckerberg Initiative faces racial discrimination allegations from former employee

• November 11, 2020
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Ray Holgado, a former employee of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, recently filed a racial discrimination complaint with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Holgado, who is Black, worked at CZI from September 2018 through August 2020. “Despite its social justice rhetoric, CZI is not a welcoming environment for Black employees,” Holgado’s complaint states.

Ray Holgado, a former employee of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, recently filed a racial discrimination complaint with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Holgado, who is Black, worked at CZI from September 2018 through August 2020.

“Despite its social justice rhetoric, CZI is not a welcoming environment for Black employees,” Holgado’s complaint states. “Black employees are underpaid, undervalued, denied growth opportunities, and marginalized. Black employees who want to advance within the organization are shut down and labeled as too assertive or aggressive, while non-Black employees are favored and encouraged. When Black employees have communicated these concerns to CZI leadership, CZI has responded defensively and failed to address the underlying issues. CZI has utterly failed to ‘build a more inclusive, just, and healthy future’ for its Black employees.”

In his complaint, Holgado alleges he was paid less than some of his colleagues doing similar work to him. According to the complaint, a recruiter denied Holgado’s request to negotiate his salary but later found out other, non-Black employees had been able to negotiate a higher salary. Holgado went on to describe other instances in which he was allegedly denied opportunities for promotions and growth, and was treated differently because of his race.

In addition to his own experiences, Holgado says the alleged issues of discrimination at CZI are systemic. According to the complaint, Holgado told CZI co-founder Priscilla Chan that the organization’s approach to diversity was successful in retaining Black people but didn’t do enough to empower Black employees “or integrate their perspectives into the work,” the complaint states. In response, according to the complaint, Chan acknowledged it was concerning but said “DEI may look different for each of us.”

In a statement to TechCrunch, CZI denied the claims.

“While we take any allegation of discrimination seriously and will do so here, this former employee’s specific allegations were previously raised internally, independently investigated, and found to be unsubstantiated,” the spokesperson said. “The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is committed to fair treatment, access, and advancement for all members of the CZI team. We do not tolerate discrimination of any kind, full stop.”

This complaint comes after a group of more than 70 employees in June asked CZI to commit to 12 changes that would make the philanthropy more inclusive. Then, in August, The Washington Post reported that some Black employees were pushing CZI to approach more work through a racial equity lens. They wrote a letter to Chan, describing how CZI has issues with systemic racism, discrimination and anti-Blackness. Holgado was part of that group.

“Unfortunately, Chan once again failed to grasp the seriousness of the issues the letter raised, refusing to meet several of the group’s requests, most notably declining to provide transparency into CZI’s pay equity data as it related to Black employees,” Holgado wrote today on the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.”Instead of working through the plan of action that was put forth by Black employees, she tasked a recently hired chief operating officer with devising and implementing an alternative course of action. Having witnessed the dynamics of passing the buck and placating employees with half measures play out multiple times at the foundation, I recognized that further efforts would be in vain.”

TechCrunch has reached out to CZI and will update this story if we hear back.

 

News: Josh.ai launches a ‘nearly invisible’ Amazon Echo competitor that’s the size of a coin

• November 10, 2020
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In the past several weeks we’ve seen refreshes and product expansions from about every facet of the smart home virtual assistant world. Apple launched the HomePod Mini, Google offered a long-overdue refresh of the Google Home, and Amazon found even more speaker shapes to shove Alexa into. Today, we’re getting an addition from a startup

In the past several weeks we’ve seen refreshes and product expansions from about every facet of the smart home virtual assistant world. Apple launched the HomePod Mini, Google offered a long-overdue refresh of the Google Home, and Amazon found even more speaker shapes to shove Alexa into.

Today, we’re getting an addition from a startup competitor. Josh.ai has aimed to build out a niche in the space by building a smart assistant product that’s designed to be professionally installed alongside other smart home wares and they announced a new product this afternoon.

The device, Josh Nano, fully buys into a more luxury home-focused niche with a low-profile device that appears to be a little bit bigger than a half-dollar, though the bulk of the device is embedded into the wall itself and wired back to a central unit via power-over-ethernet. The device bundles a set of four microphones eschewing any onboard speaker, instead opting to integrate directly with a user’s at-home sound system. Josh boasts compatibility with most major AV receiver manufacturers in addition to partnerships with companies like Sonos . There isn’t much else to the device, a light for visual feedback, a multi-purpose touch sensor, and a physical switch to cut power to the onboard microphones in case users want extra peace of mind.

The aim of the new hardware is to hide the smart features of a home and move away from industry standard touch screen hubs with dated interfaces. By stripping down a smart home product to its essential feature, Josh.ai hopes it can push more users to buy in more fully with confidence that subsequent hardware releases won’t render their devices outdated and ugly. The startup is taking pre-orders for the device (available in black and white color options) now and hopes to start shipping early next year.

Powering these devices is a product the company calls Josh Core, a small server which basically acts as a hub for everything Josh talks to in a user’s home, ensuring that interactions between smart home devices can occur locally, minimizing external requests. The startup will also continue selling its previously released Josh Micro which integrates a dedicated speaker into the wall-mounted hardware.

Though Josh.ai partners directly with professional installers on the hardware, the startup has been scaling as a software business, offering consumers a license to their technology on an annual, 5-year or lifetime basis. The price of that license also differs depending on what size home they are working with, with “small” rollouts being classified as homes with fewer than 15 rooms. In terms of hardware costs, Josh.ai says that pricing varies but for most jobs, the average cost for users works out to be something like $500 per room.

Massive tech companies naturally design their products for massive audiences. For startups like Josh.ai this fact provides an in-road to design products that aren’t built for the common needs of a billion users. In fact, the selling point for plenty of their customers comes largely from the fact that they aren’t buying devices from Google, Amazon or Apple and hard-wiring microphones that feed back to them inside their home.

Though 95% of the startup’s business today focuses on residential, going forward, the company is also interested in scaling how their tech can be used in commercial scenarios like conference rooms or even elevators, the startup tells me.

News: Daily Crunch: Apple unveils new Macs

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Apple announces “One More Thing” before the holiday season, Uber lets you reserve rides 30 days in advance and Spotify makes another podcast acquisition. This is your Daily Crunch for November 10, 2020. The big story: Apple unveils new Macs During an unusually brief and focused “One More Thing” event, Apple announced three new Macs

Apple announces “One More Thing” before the holiday season, Uber lets you reserve rides 30 days in advance and Spotify makes another podcast acquisition. This is your Daily Crunch for November 10, 2020.

The big story: Apple unveils new Macs

During an unusually brief and focused “One More Thing” event, Apple announced three new Macs that will all use the M1 chip, its first chip for Macs. This is the beginning of a previously announced shift of the Mac lineup to Apple silicon.

What about the actual Macs? Well, there’s a new MacBook Air, which still costs $999 but is supposed to be 3.5x faster than the previous generation — and it doesn’t include a fan! There’s also a new Mac Mini with a base price of $699, and a 13-inch MacBook Pro that starts at $1,299.

Oh, and Big Sur, the latest version of the Mac operating system, will be released this Thursday, November 12.

The tech giants

Uber will now let users book rides 30 days in advance and pick a favorite driver — The new option, called Uber Reserve, will begin to show up on the app in the next week.

Google adds COVID-related health and safety info to Google Travel — When users search for hotels and vacation rental properties through Google Travel, they may see new information about COVID-19 safety precautions at the property.

Spotify buying podcast hosting and ad company Megaphone for $235M — Spotify already had an existing partnership with the company, including use of its hosting services.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Hopin raises $125M for its online events platform on the back of surging growth — TechCrunch is one of the customers for Hopin’s online events platform.

Spearhead launches $100M fourth fund to transform founders into top-notch VC investors — The premise remains simple: offer founders with great networks and hustle $1 million in capital to go out and start writing angel checks and build their own portfolio.

Carbon Health raises $100M with plans to expand pop-up clinics ahead of COVID-19 vaccination programs — The company plans to open 100 pop-up clinics in 20 markets across the U.S.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Five VCs discuss the future of SaaS and software after Pfizer’s vaccine breakthrough — SaaS stocks sold sharply on good vaccine tidings, but do VCs care?

Accelerators embrace change forced by pandemic — We spoke with the heads of three accelerators about the challenges and opportunities presented by the new virtual environment.

What I wish I’d known about venture capital when I was a founder — TheVentureCity’s Andy Arieto shares some knowledge.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

All Slingbox devices will stop working in two years — All Slingbox products will become less and less functional, leading up to a full shutdown two years from today.

House Reps ask FCC to ‘stop work on all partisan, controversial items’ during transition — This likely includes the FCC’s effort to reinterpret Section 230, an important protection for internet platforms, at the Trump administration’s request.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

News: Lyft sees ride revenues recover by nearly 50% in just three months

• November 10, 2020
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Shares of Lyft are riding high, popping more than 7% in after-hours trading today after the American ride-hailing giant reported its Q3 earnings. Lyft, which competes with Uber for rideshare, reported revenues of $499.7 million in third-quarter, a 48% drop from the $955.6 million in same year-ago period. That lackluster result is still a 47%

Shares of Lyft are riding high, popping more than 7% in after-hours trading today after the American ride-hailing giant reported its Q3 earnings.

Lyft, which competes with Uber for rideshare, reported revenues of $499.7 million in third-quarter, a 48% drop from the $955.6 million in same year-ago period. That lackluster result is still a 47% improvement over last quarter when Lyft reported $339.3 million in revenue. That’s good?

Investors were heartened by the improvement and Lyft’s ability to beat analysts revenue expectations of $486.45 million. The company’s net loss of $1.46 per share was worse than expected, but investors appeared more bullish than bearish, buying up Lyft equity and boosting its value after the company’s earnings report.

Lyft’s quarter is a story of year-over-year declines and sequential-quarter gains. On that theme, the company’s active riders fell 44% compared to the year-ago quarter, and rose 44% compared to Q2 2020. Its revenue per active rider fell 7% compared to Q3 2019, but rose 2% from the sequentially-preceding period.

Like Uber, Lyft is enjoying patience from investors as it digs its way out from a ride-hailing market pummeled by COVID-19; Uber has enjoyed a delivery business and international operations to buffer its ride revenue declines. Lyft, which is focused on the U.S. market and lacks a delivery program like Uber, has been more impacted by the domestic market.

Rising COVID-19 cases and ratcheting lockdowns could threaten Lyft’s recovery. Still, its core economics are not falling to pieces despite the pandemic. In Q3 2020, Lyft’s contribution margin — a metric that is akin to an adjusted gross margin result — was 49.8%. In the year-ago quarter it was 50.1%.

Lyft will return as long ride volume recovers. Lyft’s next big hurdle is profitability. The company is still on track to achieve adjusted EBITDA profitability by the fourth quarter of 2021 ever with a slower recovery, Logan Green said during the company’s earnings call Tuesday, adding that Lyft is taking an extremely disciplined approach to increase its operating leverage.” Lyft is positioned to achieve that profitability goal with about 30% fewer rides than what was required when the originally issued its Q4 2021 profitability target last fall, Green said.

Lyft wrapped Q3 with $2.5 billion in cash and equivalents. Its operations have consumed $1.1 billion in cash so far this year, up around $156 million in the third quarter. At $50 million a month, Lyft has lots of room to get back to more pedestrian losses, and year-over-year growth.

News: The Boox Poke 3 is my new favorite e-reader

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There are plenty of e-readers to choose from out there, but never enough for me. I’m always questing for the one that will make me forget that there are others available, and in the Onyx Boox Poke 3, I think I have found it — at least for now. The Chinese e-paper device maker has

There are plenty of e-readers to choose from out there, but never enough for me. I’m always questing for the one that will make me forget that there are others available, and in the Onyx Boox Poke 3, I think I have found it — at least for now. The Chinese e-paper device maker has nailed the size, the screen, and added a sprinkle of versatility that I didn’t know I was lacking.

The Poke 3 fits in the same “original flavor e-reader” category as the Kindle Paperwhite and Kobo Clara HD: 6 inches, 300 PPI or so (which makes for very clear text), and somewhere between $100 and $200.

These readers fit easily in a pocket, unlike the larger Oasis and even larger Forma; they tend to lack anything but a power button and are very focused on books and saved articles.

But the Kindle and Clara both have major flaws. The Kindle is tied to Amazon in all the ways I can’t stand, including on-device ads by default, and the Clara… well, beside the screen, the hardware is honestly just bad. Kobo made my previous favorite e-reading device, the compact and flush-front Aura, and I’ve finally found a worthy successor to that beloved gadget.

The Poke 3 is the latest device to come from Boox, the e-reader line from parent company Onyx. The company has mostly been a presence in Southeast Asia, particularly its home country of China, so don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of it. Boox makes a wide variety of e-paper devices (which I will evaluate in a separate article), and the Poke 3 is the simplest and smallest of them.

I’ll highlight the device’s strengths first. Most importantly, it is a lovely piece of hardware. The flush front is a pleasure to read on, as there is no raised bezel to shade the text or collect grime. The power button is well located and clicky. There’s just enough border to hold onto without worrying about smudging or activating the screen, and a bit of extra space at the bottom enables plenty of comfortable grips.

It’s thinner than the competition and the build quality is excellent. The front is hardened glass from partner Asahi, which will hopefully prevent it from needing a cover.

The finish is, to be honest, something of a fingerprint and oil magnet, and could be grippier. The Paperwhite has it beat on texture but I prefer the smooth back to the weird perforated one of the Clara.

At 150 grams it’s 16 lighter than the Clara and 32 lighter than the Paperwhite. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re holding a device for hours straight every little bit counts, and at this size it also helps with balance.

Its 6-inch screen is not meaningfully different from the Kindle or Kobo devices out there in terms of resolution or font rendering. I scrutinized the Poke 3 next to the Clara HD and Forma and found no differences that anyone would notice reading from 10-20 inches away.

It does differ in its approach to illumination, though whether meaningfully so is a matter of opinion. Instead of having a brightness slider and a temperature slider, it has a warm and cool slider, and increasing or decreasing either one changes both the brightness and temperature. You can also turn either one off entirely or link them together so they are adjusted as one.

If it sounds more complicated… it is. I don’t see that it adds any real new capabilities, but once you get the feel for it, it isn’t that much harder to use, either. I do wish that when you linked the two sliders, they kept their positions relative to one another. The whole system seems a little baroque and I hope Boox streamlines it. That said, the quality of the light is equally good and once you dial it in, it looks great.

Type formatting is good, and has plenty of options for tweaking how any of the many (too many…) included fonts look, even weight and contrast adjustments to really fine tune them. Adding custom fonts is as easy as dragging and dropping them, just like documents.

The operating system of the Boox provides far more options than either Kobo or Kindle. Amazon keeps tight control over its ecosystem and outside of a handful of associated services the devices can’t do much. Kobo at least allows for more file formats to be loaded directly on, and now has excellent Pocket integration for saving articles from the web. Boox takes things two steps further with a custom Android launcher that you can download full apps onto.

Now, there are really only so many apps that you actually might want on an e-reader like this one. And not everything works as well as I’d like. But for the first time I can actually get Simplenote on my e-reader.

It’s not as simple as it would be on an ordinary Android device, though. Because the Poke 3 comes from China, it doesn’t have access to Google services right off the bat. You can add it through settings, which isn’t hard, but there’s also a sideloading store built in with recent (if not quite brand new) install packages of popular, vetted apps for the device.

Let’s just admit right now that compared to the simplicity of Kindle and Kobo, this is already a bit out there. And whether you feel comfortable logging into a version of Evernote that you can’t (without a bit of work) verify the contents of… well, it’s not for everyone. But to be clear on this, Boox isn’t some fly-by-night operation — they may not be well known over here, but it’s hard to argue with the quality of the devices. The problem is simply that localizing an OS built for users in China has some fundamental challenges.

Fortunately for everyone, the basic capability to load books on there and read them is solid and it’s what you’d be doing most of the time. There may be a busy interface when you’re doing other stuff, but you can easily hide all indicators like progress and title while you’re reading, dedicating every square inch of the screen to actual reading.

It has 32 gigs of internal memory, making storage of audiobooks (it has Bluetooth for sound) and bulky documents easy, and connects quickly as a drive when you plug in its USB-C cord.

The Poke 3 will cost $189 when it ships next week, which is on the high end for this type of device. That’s $30 more than a Kindle Paperwhite and $70 more than a Clara HD. But I honestly think it is worth the premium. This is a better e-reader, period; despite the sometimes fussy interface, I enjoy using it, and appreciate that it provides capabilities that its competition doesn’t. If you need simple and don’t mind a cheap build, the Clara is a great cheaper option, but for a step up consider the Poke 3.