2020 – Page 32 – Digital Pulse

News: OpenSensors secures $4M for air-monitoring platform which allows offices to be more Covid-safe

December 16, 2020
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Today, the acute asthma attack of primary school-aged girl in February 2013 was ruled by a UK court to be due to air pollution. It is thought to be the first ruling of its kind in the world. Only a year after Ella Kissi-Debrah died, another mother also became concerned about the effects of air

Today, Yodit Stanton has secured $4m in seed funding for her air monitoring startup OpenSensors, in a Seed round led by Crane Venture Partners and other unnamed investors. The startup previously bootstrapped the company prior to the round, supported by customer revenues.

OpenSensors, uses sensors to monitor air quality and light intensity, but it’s the data platform that is the real ‘special source’. The startup’s technology works to reveal workplace and workforce conditions and patterns. It competes with companies like Condecco and Workplace Fabric, but takes a more ‘360 degree’ approach.

It now has more than 30 customers with complex real estate operations across North America, Ireland, UK and Europe, in industries such as Insurance, Finance, Tech and more.

OpenSensors

Building costs are the 2nd highest expense for organizations, with office costs over £20bn per year in the UK, but even in normal, pre-pandemic times, half of that office space is unused at any point during the day and only reaches 55% peak utilization. Buildings also represent 36% of global energy usage & 39% of CO2 emissions. OpenSensors tracks humidity, CO2 levels, and more to guide on the optimal capacity to reduce viral transmission, thus enabling companies to return their workforces to offices safely.

Stanton commented: “How we work and live are changing faster than we could have ever anticipated. There is a real opportunity for humanity to rethink how we use the physical world with sustainability in mind as well as making the design of workplaces better for people using them.”

Scott Sage, Partner at Crane Venture Partners said: “With data insights, real-world usage and known customer references, OpenSensors has all the ingredients to become a trusted advisor and solutions provider throughout COVID-19 and the immediate recovery, as well as supporting the shift towards more flexible working that COVID-19 has accelerated.”

Speaking exclusively to TechCrunch, Stanton, who also founded and runs the UK’s Women In Data event, said: “Initially it just started as a fun hobby project. I was playing around with IoT as in my daughter has asthma, so I was monitoring air quality up in our neighborhood to try to see if I can correlate the particulates spikes and so forth with her asthma attacks. I released it as a project for my community to monitor air quality. But it became, I guess a real thing when people asked if I could manage their buildings.”

She said that low humidity encourages virus transmission: “So you really have to aim for around 40% humidity within an indoor environment and dry air also affects your immune system as an individual.”

This means that monitoring air quality has become a huge issue for companies. So it unsurprising that VCs are now backing air-quality startups like OpenSensors.

News: New Wave is a new European seed fund headed up by ex-Accel VC Pia d’Iribarne

December 16, 2020
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Pia d’Iribarne, formerly of Accel and Stride, is heading up a new European early stage venture capital firm co-founded with French entrepreneur and investor Xavier Niel, TechCrunch has learned. Dubbed New Wave, its debut fund of $56 million was raised in just 3 months and has already begun making investments. It is said to be

Pia d’Iribarne, formerly of Accel and Stride, is heading up a new European early stage venture capital firm co-founded with French entrepreneur and investor Xavier Niel, TechCrunch has learned.

Dubbed New Wave, its debut fund of $56 million was raised in just 3 months and has already begun making investments. It is said to be targeting seed and pre-seed startups across Europe but also European founders further afield.

Cheque sizes will be between €500,000 and €2 million, with New Wave both leading and co-investing in rounds in what I’ve been told will be a “collaborative” approach, investing alongside and playing nicely with Europe’s business angels and other seed firms.

I reached out to d’Iribarne and she confirmed the fund size and that New Wave is open for business but declined to comment further.

D’Iribarne is taking the role of managing partner of New Wave and is also a co-founder of the new firm. Working with her on investments is New Wave partner and co-founder Jean de La Rochebrochard, who will also continue running Kima Ventures, the angel investment vehicle of Xavier Niel.

D’Iribarne, who is half French and half Dutch and splits her time between London and Paris, was most recently a partner at Stride where she is said to have led the investments in Strapi, Impala, and Jow. Before that she was at Accel where she invested in Doctolib, Framer, Payfit, Selency and Shift Technology. She started her career at McKinsey & Company.

French-born De La Rochebrochard has been running Niel’s venture arm for five years and has invested in close to 500 companies at seed stage. He has also been involved through larger commitments in Zenly, Payfit, Dice, Ibanfirst, Nabla, Alan, Impala and Openclassrooms. He is a former partner at The Family.

In addition to Niel, d’Iribarne, and de La Rochebrochard, New Wave’s other co-founders are Antoine Martin (co-founder and CEO of Zenly, and a prolific angel investor), and Alex Yazdi (founder of Voodoo, and experienced angel investor).

Meanwhile, as well as Niel, the billionaire founder of French telecoms giant Iliad (Free) and most recently the founder of Station F, sources tell me that New Wave has attracted a number of other high profile LPs, including Yuri Milner of DST, Peter Fenton from Benchmark, Philippe Laffont from Coatue, and Tony Fadell of Nest and Apple fame.

Stride.VC loses partner Pia d’Iribarne

News: StockX raises $275m Series E, valuing the retailer at $2.8b

December 16, 2020
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StockX today announced its Series E funding led by Tiger Global. The $275 million funding round values the company at $2.8 billion at a post-money valuation. The company intends to use the cash to accelerate global expansion, product development, and to expand StockX’s categories. Rumors are swirling that this financing will allow the company to

Tiger Global Management led the round with participation from Altimeter Capital, Sands Capital, and Whale Rock Capital Management.

“The quality of investors joining us is a clear signal that the market recognizes that there is incredible opportunity in e-commerce for current culture products and StockX is best positioned to meet consumer demand for those products,” said StockX CEO Scott Cutler in a released statement. “I’m thrilled to welcome our new partners to the team — their collective expertise will be invaluable as we continue to build on the momentum from the last year, and drive the growth to cement StockX’s position as the global marketplace leader.”

Headquartered in downtown Detroit, Michigan, the raise marks the largest VC funding round in Michigan history. This round brings StockX’s total amount raised to $490 million.

StockX is seeing blockbuster growth. Since launching in 2016, the company recorded sales in 200 countries through 13 million transactions — 50% of those coming within the last 12 months. In June the company surpassed $2.5 billion in lifetime gross merchandise value. International growth is quickly growing, too, with Q3 2020 non-US trades increasing 260% over 2019 levels.

During the most recent quarter, the company averaged 25 million visitors per month.

Just prior to the Covid-19 shutdown, CEO Cutler said the impending virus was looking to be great for his company. At the time he spoke about how having facilities in different regions would allow the company to better navigate shutdowns. In April, few weeks later, StockX laid off 100 people at the height of the shutdown. Shortly after the company’s outlook changed as the results speak for themselves.

The company opened new authentication facilities in 2020 resulting in a 50% increase of the company’s global footprint. Earlier in the year, the company opened an authentication facility in Portland, Oregon. Like other authentication centers, this location is a go-between buyers and sellers where StockX employees authenticate the products purchased and sold on the marketplace. Last month, the company opened similar facilities in Toronto and Hong Kong as it expands into key international markets.

StockX is targeting the Asian-Pacific market. The company opened an office in Tokyo in 2019 and a localized experience in 2020. Last month, StockX stated sell-side transactions across the region increased 500% over 2019 levels and up 1000% in Hong Kong.

StockX originally launched as a marketplace for sneakers where the value of the products are determined by supply and demand. Now, in 2020, the company offers the same pricing system but in more categories including streetwear, luxury good, collectables, and even hot electronics like the new PS5 and Xbox Series X. The company expects to keep expanding, too.

Inside StockX’s authentication center

EBay takes a bite at StockX and GOAT with sneaker authentication for sales $100+ in the US

As the US shuts down, StockX’s business is booming, says its CEO

Sneaker culture staple GOAT hits $1.75 billion valuation on new $100 million round

News: Facebook to move UK users out of EU’s privacy jurisdiction next year, post-brexit

December 16, 2020
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Facebook is to follow Google’s lead and move millions of UK users out of the jurisdiction of EU privacy laws to the US (which has no such comprehensive data protection framework) next year under a looming Brexit-related change to its T&Cs, Reuters reported yesterday. Confirming the switch, Facebook told the news agency: “Like other companies,

Confirming the switch, Facebook told the news agency: “Like other companies, Facebook has had to make changes to respond to Brexit and will be transferring legal responsibilities and obligations for UK users from Facebook Ireland to Facebook Inc.”

“There will be no change to the privacy controls or the services Facebook offers to people in the UK,” Facebook added, using phrasing that elides the fact that the switch from the EU to the US inevitably involves a radical downgrading in legal protection for data and privacy.

Per Reuters, Facebook will inform users of the switch within the next six months — giving them the ‘option’ to stop using Facebook’s services (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) if they’re unhappy with the legal switch.

As we reported in February when Google announced a similar legal migration for UK users, shifting them from its EU subsidiary to the US, the move is a consequence of the UK’s vote to leave the European Union — which moves it away from EU standards, including its long-standing data protection framework.

Google’s new T&Cs include a Brexit ‘Easter egg’ for UK users

Now, with just days before the end of the brexit transition period, it’s still not clear whether the UK will get a trade deal with the EU or leave with no deal — the latter ramping up the possibility the UK will also not get a data adequacy agreement from the EU, arguably making future divergence on data protection standards more likely (since there will be no ‘carrot’ of continued friction-free EU-UK data flows to encourage continued alignment).

The UK has also signalled it wants a data-fuelled levelling up of the economic, publishing a National Data Strategy in September that talks about making pandemic levels of data-sharing the new normal.

The document threw shade at the entire concept of data protection — saying the government plans to “promote domestic best practice and work with international partners to ensure data is not inappropriately constrained by national borders and fragmented regulatory regimes so that it can be used to its full potential”.

Since then privacy experts have expressed concern that clauses in a UK-Japan (post-brexit) trade deal are weakening the UK’s existing data protection regime (which is, for now, based on transposed EU standards) — and could allow for flows of citizens’ data to nations with “weak or voluntary data protection arrangements”, as the Open Rights Group warned last month.

The US is one such nation that lacks a comprehensive framework for data protection. Though California has passed its own consumer privacy law and residents voted in November to strengthen the regime. But at the federal level there’s no GDPR equivalent — yet.

With so much uncertainty on where exactly the UK is headed on standards post-brexit, it’s little wonder tech giants like Google and Facebook are taking the opportunity to shrink their liability under EU privacy rules — by removing the 45M+ UK users from its Dublin subsidiary’s jurisdiction, in Facebook’s case.

The recent Schrems II judgement by Europe’s top court has also ramped up legal risk and uncertainty over EU to US transfers of personal data, giving Facebook another potential reason to rework its UK T&Cs.

Europe puts out advice on fixing international data transfers that’s cold comfort for Facebook

Of course it’s not so great for UK users, given the privacy protections they’re losing.

But this time that’s more on brexit than big tech. And in this case brexit means that from next year UK users are going to have to hope their own government doesn’t decide to junk national privacy standards in its bid to ink trade deals with countries like the US, while trusting that Facebook (er!) will look out for their privacy interests.

Yes UK data protection law will continue to apply. (Though good luck getting the ICO to stand up for your rights.)

But the overarching guarantee of standards provided for by EU law is going in 2021.

The US Cloud Act, which was passed in 2018, already makes it easier for data on Internet services users to be passed between UK and US agencies for investigative purposes, for example.

While the UK government has a worrying record on mass surveillance and attacks on encryption.

Its new ‘child-safety-focused‘ plan to regulate Internet services also looks set to apply pressure on digital services not to use strong encryption to allow for mandatory content monitoring and other types of identity checks.

So, tl;dr, brexit is shaping up to mean the opposite of taking back control in the data sphere — with less privacy and reduce online freedom speeding down the pipe for Brits.

UK Online Safety Bill, coming next year, will propose fines of up to 10% of annual turnover for breaching duty of care rules

News: Why Alibaba rival Pinduoduo is investing in agritech

December 16, 2020
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Back in 2018, Pinduoduo sent shock waves through the investor community when it raised $1.6 billion from a Nasdaq listing as a three-year-old company. Online shoppers in China were excited to see its rise as an alternative to long-time market dominators Alibaba and JD.com. But the startup founded by former Google engineer Colin Huang has

But the startup founded by former Google engineer Colin Huang has ambitions well beyond e-commerce. It’s answering the Chinese government’s call to modernize the country’s agriculture and bolster the rural economy.

Life in China has become highly digital in many facets, from retail and entertainment to education and healthcare. But agriculture remains an exception. A McKinsey report from late 2017 showed that agriculture was among the least digitized industries in China. Pinduoduo saw an opportunity in the gap and started life by selling fruits online. Over time it has grown into a comprehensive e-commerce platform rivaling Alibaba, but agriculture “has always been close to the heart of Pinduoduo since its inception,” said Pinduoduo’s senior vice president Andre Zhu.

“Investing in smart agriculture is an extension of what we do and guided by our goal of promoting digital inclusion.”

Instead of a standalone department, the firm’s agricultural endeavor is a company- and even society-wide effort. Its strategy and investment team takes the lead to identify solutions targeting all stages of agriculture that the company can help scale up. At the implementation stage, the team might then tap its operational colleagues for contacts at various local governments and traditional farms that want to try the technologies.

“At least on the downstream distribution side, on e-commerce marketplaces for agricultural products, I would say we are relatively ahead compared to the rest of the world,” Xin Yi Lim, executive director of sustainability and agriculture impact at Pinduoduo, told TechCrunch in an interview.

In 2019, nearly 600,000 merchants sold farm produce through Pinduoduo. That translated to some 12 million farmers who supplied their fruits and vegetables to the merchants. In August, Pinduoduo pledged to sell $145 billion worth of farm produce annually by 2025. The number was $21 billion in 2019.

“But it’s really the upstream portion that we’re hoping to encourage and drive further investment in,” Lim added.

As such, the e-commerce giant has been traveling up the agricultural lifecycle, from building logistics infrastructure for distribution to equipping farmers with marketing know-how. In 2019, it trained close to 500,000 farm operators through its online e-commerce business institute.

Farmers in Yunnan Province learn how to open and operate a store on Pinduoduo at the Duo Duo University. / Photo: Pinduoduo

When it comes to production, Pinduoduo is able to track purchase behavior from its hundreds of millions of buyers and tell farmers what they should plant and how much they should price their products, an approach in line with the firm’s larger direct-to-consumer strategy to cut traditional middlemen costs.

The e-commerce firm is also hoping to gather agronomic expertise for its farm suppliers. It kickstarted a smart farming competition this year, calling teams from around the world to grow strawberries using artificial intelligence and connected devices. They were graded on criteria such as the fruit’s sweetness, energy and fertilizer use, and their AI strategy. The winner’s design would then be rolled out at one of the AI-powered Duo Duo Farms, a project jointly launched by Pinduoduo and the provincial government of Yunnan to let farmers sell directly on the e-commerce platform.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg of Pinduoduo’s agricultural long game. The firm doesn’t disclose exactly how much it plans to invest in the field, though Lim said “compared to some of the other players in the industry, our involvement in agriculture is definitely more comprehensive.”

The company looks for investment opportunities outside China as well. While domestic players come with more affordable hardware applications, especially drones and sensors, more mature solutions around crop modeling and prediction are found in Western countries where large commercial farms prevail, Lim noted.

Agritech adoption among Pinduoduo farmers is still “relatively small” because the firm’s smart farming initiative is in the early stage. But the e-commerce upstart might be well-positioned to drive the development of agritech in China.

Different from the U.S. and Australia, China is dominated by small-scale farms that often can’t afford to buy advanced farming equipment. Lacking demand, agritech startups have had difficulty fundraising to subsequently invest in customer acquisition and lowering their price point, Lim explained.

“Pinduoduo can already connect [agritech startups] with a wide pool of potential customers. I think that helps to ease a little bit of the initial pain point,” said Lim.

Finally, injecting technologies into farming could help retain talent in China’s vast rural hinterland, which is losing young labor to bigger, more affluent cities.

“In the long term, we [could] make farming more efficient and easier. There could potentially be a transformation in the whole structure of the farming industry. We could see young people feel that ‘I can actually be an entrepreneur. There are these tools that can give me more control over the output,’” Lim suggested.

“There are potentially people who today are not farmers who could then start to see farming as a viable alternative.”

News: Australia sues Facebook over its use of Onavo to snoop

December 16, 2020
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Yet more trouble brewing for Facebook: Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is suing the tech giant over its use, in 2016 and 2017, of the Onavo VPN app to spy on users for commercial purposes. The ACCC’s case accuses Facebook of false, misleading or deceptive conduct toward thousands of Australian consumers, after it had

The ACCC’s case accuses Facebook of false, misleading or deceptive conduct toward thousands of Australian consumers, after it had promoted the Onavo Protect app — saying it would keep users personal activity data private, protected and secret and not use it for any other purpose, when it was being used to gather data to help Facebook’s business.

“Through Onavo Protect, Facebook was collecting and using the very detailed and valuable personal activity data of thousands of Australian consumers for its own commercial purposes, which we believe is completely contrary to the promise of protection, secrecy and privacy that was central to Facebook’s promotion of this app,” said ACCC chair Rod Sims in a statement.

“Consumers often use VPN services because they care about their online privacy, and that is what this Facebook product claimed to offer. In fact, Onavo Protect channelled significant volumes of their personal activity data straight back to Facebook.”

“We believe that the conduct deprived Australian consumers of the opportunity to make an informed choice about the collection and use of their personal activity data by Facebook and Onavo,” Sims added.

The ACCC alleges that between February 1, 2016 to October 2017, Facebook and its subsidiaries Facebook Israel Ltd and Onavo, Inc. misled Australian consumers by misrepresenting the function of the free-to-download Onavo Protect app.

The regulator says it’s seeking declarations and pecuniary penalties.

Reached for comment on the suit, a Facebook spokeswoman said: “When people downloaded Onavo Protect, we were always clear about the information we collect and how it is used.”

“We’ve cooperated with the ACCC’s investigation into this matter to date. We will review the recent filing by the ACCC and will continue to defend our position in response to this recent filing,” she added.

Facebook announced last year that it would shut the Onavo Protect app — after a backlash over how it had used the VPN app which it acquired back in 2013 to snoop on users.

Facebook will shut down its spyware VPN app Onavo

Internal Facebook documents from a legal discovery process — made public in 2018 by the UK parliament after it seized them as part of an enquiry into online disinformation — show the tech giant using Onavo charts as a source of commercial intelligence to understand which third party apps its users were downloading and engaging with.

Data gleaned via Onavo revealed WhatsApp to be a competitive threat to Facebook’s Messenger app. Shortly after gaining this market insight Facebook shelled out $19BN to acquire the rival messaging app.

The tech giant is now facing a massive antitrust case on home soil, where earlier this month 46 states accused it of suppressing competition through monopolistic business practices — with the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp cited as prominent examples.

The FTC and US lawmakers are calling for the unwinding of those mergers and the breaking up of Facebook’s social empire as a necessity.

This is a necessity. The @instagram and WhatsApp mergers with @Facebook were anti-competitive, they were meant to be anti-competitive, and they should be broken up https://t.co/bt9ByuSvMt

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) December 9, 2020

Elsewhere, Facebook is being sued in Germany — where the Federal Cartel Office (FCO) is pressing a case that could put limits on how it can combine data between difference services it owns.

This month the FCO also announced it’s investigating Facebook tying usage of its latest Oculus VR kit to having a Facebook account — after it said new Oculus users must have a Facebook account to use the kit. This summer Facebook also said it would end support for existing Oculus accounts by 2023.

Antitrust case against Facebook’s ‘super profiling’ back on track after German federal court ruling

News: Facebook launches revamped Instagram Lite app in India

December 16, 2020
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Facebook is working to bring back the Instagram Lite app, months after it shut down the light version offering worldwide. The social conglomerate said on Wednesday that it is testing the revamped Instagram Lite app in India, where it hopes to “gain valuable insights” about the new offering before “a global rollout” of the app

Facebook is working to bring back the Instagram Lite app, months after it shut down the light version offering worldwide.

The social conglomerate said on Wednesday that it is testing the revamped Instagram Lite app in India, where it hopes to “gain valuable insights” about the new offering before “a global rollout” of the app later.

The revamped Instagram Lite app weighs less than 2MB and delivers a “fast, reliable, and responsive” experience of the social service. The Android app supports Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu, but currently lacks a several core features of Instagram including Reels, Shopping and IGTV.

Facebook quietly discontinued the previous iteration of Instagram Lite earlier this year. In July, Vishal Shah, VP of Product at Instagram, told TechCrunch that the company had identified some issues in the app and was working to resolve those. In September, a new Lite app was spotted in the wild, though Facebook did not acknowledge it.

Lite apps are especially popular in emerging markets where most users don’t have access to high-end smartphones or fast and cheap mobile internet data. Facebook Lite app, for instance, had about 40 million monthly active users in India last month, while Messenger Lite app had about 13 million, according to mobile insight firm App Annie, data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch. (Instagram app had about 164 million users.)

Shah made the announcement about the revamped Instagram Lite app at Facebook Fuel for India event on Wednesday, where scores of Facebook executives including Mark Zuckerberg and Ajit Mohan outlined a number of other programs they were working on for the world’s second largest internet market.

Instagram also announced the second version of ‘Born on Instagram,’ a one-year-old program it has built for content creators to better understand and leverage ways to collaborate with one another and explore monetization opportunities.

“With the test of Instagram Lite, and the next edition of Born on Instagram, we’re aiming to democratize expression and creativity for a greater number of people in India,” said Shah.

At the event, WhatsApp India head Abhijit Bose said that the company was working to launch sachet-sized health insurance offering to users in India this month. In July, WhatsApp had unveiled that it was working to pilot credit, insurance, and pension services in India, the instant messaging app’s biggest market by users, over the next year and a half.

“WhatsApp has proactively been working on several pilots to help ensure that every adult has access to the most basic critical financial and livelihood services through their mobile device. By the end of this year, we expect that people will be able to buy affordable sachet sized health insurance through WhatsApp,” Bose said today. For insurance protection, WhatsApp has partnered with SBI General, and for pension, with HDFC Pension.

Facebook, which identifies India as its biggest market by users, is also working with telecom giant Jio Platforms to help tens of millions of small businesses establish online presence and sell digitally. The American giant, which invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms this year, are collaborating to make Jio Platforms’ JioMart e-commerce service available through WhatsApp. Some new features are coming to JioMart’s WhatsApp channel in the “coming days,” Facebook and Reliance executives teased today.

News: Extra Crunch membership now available in Switzerland

December 16, 2020
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TechCrunch readers in Switzerland can now purchase Extra Crunch membership. Join our growing community of founders, startup teams, and investors here. Use the code SWISSCRUNCH during checkout for an additional 25% off an annual or 2-year plan. The discount code expires on January 15, 2021. Thanks to everyone who voted on where to expand. If

TechCrunch readers in Switzerland can now purchase Extra Crunch membership. Join our growing community of founders, startup teams, and investors here.

Use the code SWISSCRUNCH during checkout for an additional 25% off an annual or 2-year plan. The discount code expires on January 15, 2021.

Thanks to everyone who voted on where to expand. If you’d like to see Extra Crunch memberships available in your country, let us know here.

Join Extra Crunch by heading here.

What is Extra Crunch?

Extra Crunch is a membership program from TechCrunch that helps you spot technology trends and opportunities, build better startups, and stay connected. It features thousands of articles, including weekly investor surveys, daily private market analysis, and expert interviews on fundraising, growth, monetization, and other work topics.

We’d love to have you join our growing community of founders, investors, and startup teams.

Committing to an annual and two-year plan will save you a few bucks on the membership price and unlock access to TechCrunch event discounts and Partner Perks. Extra Crunch annual membership gets you 20% off tickets to all TechCrunch 2021 virtual events. The Partner Perks program features discounts and savings on services from DocSend, Crunchbase, AWS and more.

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News: Hong Kong-based Pickupp makes logistics more affordable for e-commerce sellers

December 16, 2020
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Logistics is one of the biggest challenges in e-commerce, especially for smaller merchants. Pickupp helps them compete in the on-demand economy with flexible, customizable delivery services. Based in Hong Kong, Pickupp also operates in Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan, and claims it can save clients an average of about 28% in logistic costs. Pickupp is able

Logistics startup co-founder and chief executive officer Crystal Pang

Pickupp is able to do this with an asset-light business model. Instead of operating warehouses or its own fleets, it partners with logistics companies and uses proprietary software to make delivering batches of orders more efficient.

The company, which currently serves about 10,000 e-commerce merchants, announced last month it closed an undisclosed amount in Series A funding from Vision Plus Capital, Alibaba Enterpreneurs Fund, Cyperport Macro Fund, Swire Properties New Ventures and SparkLabs Taipei.

Pickupp currently offers three kinds of door-to-door delivery services: on-demand couriers who deliver within a four hour window, same day deliveries, and one to three day deliveries. It can also customize logistics and last-minute delivery solutions for businesses.

In Singapore, Pickupp runs its own e-commerce platform. Called Shop On Pickupp, the platform enables merchants to move more of their retail operations online and has been used to digitize marketplaces like the Shilin Singapore Night Market during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Before starting Pickupp, co-founder and chief executive officer Crystal Pang, a software engineer by training, was part of the team that launched Uber in Hong Kong in 2014.

“Around that time, I started looking into logistics, because I found out a lot of merchants were trying to use Uber cars to deliver other stuff, anything but people,” she said.

But unlike delivery services, merchants couldn’t bargain with Uber drivers—for example, negotiating discounted fees if they were able to wait longer for a vehicle. “That’s the gist of logistics, because everyone wants to get part of those cost savings,” Pang said. Sensing a market opportunity, Pang began using her software engineering background to think of a solution.

Pickupp was founded in December 2016 and began operating the next year. When it launched, Pickupp already had formidable rivals like Gogovan and Lalamove. But since those companies focused mainly on on-demand, point-to-point delivery, Pang saw an opportunity to tackle other parts of the supply chain.

“How we see ourselves compared to other logistics companies is that we fulfill all these e-commerce needs. We behave like a logistics company, but we don’t need to own anything. So we perform the function of a traditional logistics company, which in this area is SF Express or Ninja Van, that lease warehouses and operate their own fleets, but Pickupp choses a lightweight asset approach to getting it done,” she said.

Pickupp positions itself more as a data and tech company, Pang added.

“You can almost imagine us as a monitoring system,” she said. Pickupp partners with sorting facilities, cross-border freight forwarders and delivery vehicles, and gives merchants visibility into where orders are along the supply chain.

Its system keeps costs down by predicting when and where available delivery people will be available, so it can match them with batches of orders. This also prevents bottlenecks during demand spikes and makes sure couriers are used at the most capacity possible, which is especially important for holidays and major shopping events like Double Eleven and Black Friday.

One of Pickupp’s advantages is that its system is designed to be flexible so it can scale into new Asian markets quickly. Pang told TechCrunch that the round will be used to add more services, and invest in machine learning, predictive analytics and understanding customer purchasing behavior. The company also plans to expand into up to five new Asian markets over the next three years.

News: MessageBird acquires real-time notifications and in-app messaging platform Pusher for $35M

December 16, 2020
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MessageBird, the omnichannel cloud communications platform recently valued at $3 billion following a Series C round in October, has acquired London-based real-time web technologies company Pusher. The acquisition price is $35 million, and sees Pusher co-founder and CEO Max Williams and the 25-person Pusher team join Amsterdam-headquartered MessageBird . (In 2018, Pusher told TechCrunch it

MessageBird, the omnichannel cloud communications platform recently valued at $3 billion following a Series C round in October, has acquired London-based real-time web technologies company Pusher.

The acquisition price is $35 million, and sees Pusher co-founder and CEO Max Williams and the 25-person Pusher team join Amsterdam-headquartered MessageBird . (In 2018, Pusher told TechCrunch it had a team of 60, so there has obviously been some cost-cutting in recent years.)

The Pusher product will be kept independent for existing customers, while Pusher’s tech, with its focus on in-app notifications and a developer-friendly API and SDKs built around “push,” will help plug a gap in MessageBird’s own communication platform, which is stronger in SMS and messaging-first channels such as Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Line and WeChat, etc. Specifically, Pusher is said to bring features like in-app messaging, push notifications and location tracking.

“The deal opens up a host of new tools and features that will help MessageBird’s customers talk to their customers in even more ways than before,” says MessageBird.

Founded in 2011, Pusher aimed to lower the barriers for developers who want to build real-time features into their websites and apps. This was originally delivered via a general purpose real-time API and supporting cloud infrastructure, enabling app developers to more easily build things like rich push notifications, live content updates and various real-time collaboration and communication features.

However, more recently the company had begun rolling out additional offerings dedicated to specific real-time functionality. The first of those was Chatkit, an API and SDK intended to do a lot of the heavy lifting required to add chat functionality to an app or service. This has since been extended to also include charts and location tracking/maps. Pusher customers include GitHub, Mailchimp, CodeShip and The Financial Times.

Meanwhile, MessageBird was originally seen as a European or “rest of the world” competitor to U.S.-based Twilio — offering a cloud communications platform that supports voice, video and text capabilities all wrapped up in an API — but has since repositioned itself as an “Omnichannel Platform-as-a-Service” (OPaaS). The idea is to easily enable enterprises and medium and smaller-sized companies to communicate with customers on any channel of their choosing.

Out of the box, this includes support for WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, Twitter, Line, Telegram, SMS, email and voice. Customers can start online and then move their support request or query over to a more convenient channel, such as their favourite mobile messaging app, which, of course, can go with them. It’s all part of MessageBird founder and CEO Robert Vis’ big bet that the future of customer interactions is omnichannel.

Therefore the acquisition of Pusher looks like a good fit, overall. London and Amsterdam are close geographically and with similar time zones, while MessageBird is transforming into a remote-first company anyway. There is also arguably enough product overlap but also genuine gaps to make the pairing a no-brainer.

In a short call with MessageBird CEO and founder Robert Vis, he talked up Pusher’s tech and team and pressed home his belief that it is important that startups exiting find a “good home,” rather than simply being acquired and then disappearing without a trace. Likewise, if MessageBird wants to be truly omnichannel, a really good “push” API and product suite is needed. The next decision was then whether or not to acquire or build, and, in this instance, teaming up with Pusher was deemed the best way forward.

Meanwhile, Vis advised me to expect a lot more M&A in the omnichannel and messaging platform space. Not just from MessageBird as it heads toward a potential IPO, but also from competitors.

MessageBird, the ‘omnichannel platform-as-a-service,’ raises $200M Series C at $3B valuation

Yearly Archives: 2020