Monthly Archives: February 2021

News: PayPal is shutting down domestic payments business in India

• February 5, 2021
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PayPal is shutting down its domestic business in India, less than four years after the American giant kickstarted local operations in the world’s second largest internet market. “From 1 April 2021, we will focus all our attention on enabling more international sales for Indian businesses, and shift focus away from our domestic products in India.

PayPal is shutting down its domestic business in India, less than four years after the American giant kickstarted local operations in the world’s second largest internet market.

“From 1 April 2021, we will focus all our attention on enabling more international sales for Indian businesses, and shift focus away from our domestic products in India. This means we will no longer offer domestic payment services within India from 1 April,” said a company spokesperson.

In a long statement, PayPal did not say why it was winding down its India business, but a report recently said the company, which has amassed over 360,000 merchants in the country, had failed to make inroads in India.

Indian news outlet The Morning Context reported in December that PayPal was abandoning its local payments business in India, a claim the company had refuted at the time.

“With the shift in priorities, some PayPal employees have been reassigned to new teams. Our focus is to always minimize the impact on our people whenever possible. Overall, our workforce is growing in India, not reducing. We are currently recruiting across our sites in India in large numbers,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Nonetheless, the move comes as a surprise. The company said last year that it was building a payments service powered by India’s UPI railroad, suggesting the level of investments it was making in the country.

PayPal had also partnered with a range of popular Indian businesses such as ticketing services BookMyShow and MakeMyTrip and food delivery platform Swiggy to offer a faster check out experience. At the time of writing, PayPal website in India appears to have removed all such references.

India has emerged as one of the world’s largest battlegrounds for mobile payments firms in recent years. Scores of heavily-backed firms including Paytm, PhonePe, Google, Amazon, and Facebook are competing among one another to increase their share in India, where the market is estimated to be worth $1 trillion by 2023. Several of these firms also offer a range of payments services for merchants.

The company, which says it processed $1.4 billion worth of international sales for merchants in India last year, added that it will continue to invest in “product development that enables Indian businesses to reach nearly 350 million PayPal consumers worldwide, increase their sales internationally, and help the Indian economy return to growth.” PayPal has been offering cross-border payments support in India for more than a decade.

News: Kuaishou, TikTok’s Chinese nemesis, surges 194% on IPO debut

• February 5, 2021
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Kuaishou, a Chinese video app that’s largely underappreciated outside China, has just completed a massive initial public offering in Hong Kong. The app is by far the biggest rival for Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese version, and unlike many Western video platforms that make money from ads and subscriptions, Kuaishou’s cash cow is its tipping business. Kuaishou’s

Kuaishou, a Chinese video app that’s largely underappreciated outside China, has just completed a massive initial public offering in Hong Kong. The app is by far the biggest rival for Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese version, and unlike many Western video platforms that make money from ads and subscriptions, Kuaishou’s cash cow is its tipping business.

Kuaishou’s shares opened in Hong Kong on Friday at HK$338 ($43.6) apiece, a 194% jump from its IPO price of HK$115 ($14.8). That catapults its market cap to nearly HK$1.4 trillion ($180 billion). The company pocketed approximately $5.4 billion from the listing with a total of 365,218,600 shares, excluding the overallotment option.

Kuaishou, which is backed by Tencent, now has a replenished coffer to invest in growth and hopefully work towards profitability. In the first nine months of 2020, the app posted an adjusted net loss of 7.2 billion yuan ($1.1 billion), compared to an adjusted profit of 1.8 billion yuan in the same period a year earlier.

Kuaishou’s stock is a huge hit with both institutional financiers and retail investors from China, many of whom are familiar with the app that boasted 481 million monthly users in the 11 months ended November. The app set a record as the most oversubscribed deal in Hong Kong, attracting retail investor demand totaling $164.8 billion, the South China Morning Post reported. Its share reached HK$322.8 on the gray market platform operated by Phillip Securities Group and HK$421 on online broker Futu Securities.

Like Douyin, Kuaishou began as a platform for people to create and share 15-second short videos (following a brief period as a GIF app) and later expanded into live streaming. The transition is natural, as creators who have built a name may seek further interaction with followers, and followers may want to express their loyalty and affection to creators. Live streaming and virtual gifting fill that need.

Kuaishou has three main monetization methods, with live streaming making up the majority of its revenue. Fifty-eight million users on Kuaishou spent on live videos monthly in the 11 months ended November, and on average every paying user brought 47.6 yuan ($7.36) in revenue.

The app also sells ads, with each user driving 71.4 yuan ($11) in marketing revenue for the period. Lastly, Kuaishou allows creators to hawk products. The gross merchandise value — an industry metric used loosely to measure e-commerce transactions — generated directly on Kuaishou reached 332.7 billion yuan ($51.4 billion) in the period.

For comparison, the live streaming feature on Alibaba’s Taobao bazaar generated over 400 billion yuan in GMV for the twelve months ended December.

While Kuaishou enjoys growing revenue from live streaming, regulatory risks loom in the background. The Chinese government has banned users under the age of 18 from purchasing virtual gifts. It has also urged platforms to put a cap on users’ monthly spending on virtual gifts, though regulators haven’t specified or suggested a limit.

Kuaishou is aware of the risk, noting in its prospectus that “any limits on user spending on virtual gifting ultimately imposed may negatively impact our revenues derived from virtual gifting and our results of operations.”

Until regulators take further action to rein in virtual gifting, Kuaishou will likely continue to thrive while it works on diversifying its business.

News: House punishes Republican lawmaker who promoted violent conspiracy theories

• February 5, 2021
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Democrats in the House voted to strip freshman Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of some of her responsibilities Thursday, citing her penchant for violent, anti-democratic and at times anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Greene has expressed support for a range of alarming conspiracies, including the belief that the 2018 Parkland school shooting that killed 17 people was

Democrats in the House voted to strip freshman Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of some of her responsibilities Thursday, citing her penchant for violent, anti-democratic and at times anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Greene has expressed support for a range of alarming conspiracies, including the belief that the 2018 Parkland school shooting that killed 17 people was a “false flag.” That belief prompted two teachers unions to call for her removal from the House Education Committee — one of her new committee assignments.

The vote on a resolution to remove Greene from her committee assignments broke along party lines, with nearly all Republicans opposing the resolution. Some of her colleagues even voted in Greene’s defense in spite of condemning her behavior in the past.

As the House moved to vote on the highly unusual resolution, the new Georgia lawmaker claimed that her embrace of QAnon was in the past.

“I never once said during my entire campaign “QAnon,’” Greene said Thursday. “I never once said any of the things that I am being accused of today during my campaign. I never said any of these things since I have been elected for Congress. These were words of the past.”

But as the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer reported, a deleted tweet from December shows Greene explicitly defending QAnon and directing blame toward the media and “big tech.”

In another recently-uncovered post from January 2019, Greene showed support for online comments calling for “a bullet to the head” for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and executing FBI agents.

Greene has also shared openly racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic views in Facebook videos, a track record that prompted Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to condemn her statements as “appalling” last June. More recently, McCarthy defended Greene against efforts to remove her from committees.

Greene was elected in November to represent a conservative district in northwest Georgia after her opponent Kevin Van Ausdal dropped out, citing personal reasons. Greene beat her opponent in the Republican primary in August, winning 57% of the vote.

QAnon, a dangerous once-fringe collection of conspiracy theories, was well-represented in January’s deadly Capitol riot and many photos from the day show the prevalence of QAnon symbols and sayings. In 2019, an FBI bulletin warned of QAnon’s connection to “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists.” A year later, at least one person who had espoused the same views would win a seat in Congress.

The overlap between Greene’s beliefs and those of the violent pro-Trump mob at the Capitol escalated tensions among lawmakers, many of whom feared for their lives as the assault unfolded.

A freshman representative with little apparent appetite for policy or coalition-building, Greene wasn’t likely to wield much legislative power in the House. But as QAnon and adjacent conspiracies move from the fringe to the mainstream and possibly back again — a trajectory largely dictated by the at times arbitrary decisions of social media companies — Greene’s treatment in Congress may signal what’s to come for a dangerous online movement that’s more than demonstrated its ability to spill over into real-world violence.

News: Peloton will pump $100M into delivery logistics to ease supply concerns

• February 5, 2021
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This probably falls under “good problems,” in the grand scheme of things. After another record quarter, Peloton has announced that it will invest more than $100 million in air and ocean freight deliveries due to “longer-than-acceptable wait times for the delivery of our products.” The fitness company is among those tech firms that have seen

This probably falls under “good problems,” in the grand scheme of things. After another record quarter, Peloton has announced that it will invest more than $100 million in air and ocean freight deliveries due to “longer-than-acceptable wait times for the delivery of our products.”

The fitness company is among those tech firms that have seen a tremendous rise in interest amid the pandemic. In fact, it seems these days that VCs can’t pump money into at-home fitness solutions quickly enough to appease their interest. 2020 was a banner year for home workout solutions, from LuluLemon’s $500 million acquisition of Mirror to new platforms from Apple and Samsung.

In all, Peloton pulled in $1.06 billion in revenue last quarter, marking a more than 200% increase, year over year. The numbers beat Wall Street expectations and are showing no sign of slowing, with another massive quarter expected for the connected fitness brand.

The market did balk slightly at Peloton’s admission that, “While this investment will dampen our near-term profitability, improving our member experience is our first priority.” Clearly this big spend on reducing supply bottlenecks is a longer-term play.

Of course, it remains to be seen how the company’s earnings will stabilize after the pandemic. I’d anticipate there will be some slowing for Peloton and other brands when vaccines make returning to gyms a more widescale phenomenon. Still, home workouts — like remote work — may well be an aspect that is fundamentally transformed even with COVID-19 in the rearview.

News: Firefly will light up the Moon with $93M lunar lander contract from NASA

• February 4, 2021
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NASA has awarded Firefly Aerospace with a $93.3 million contract to take a lunar lander module loaded with experiments to the surface of the Moon. While the company will not be performing the launch itself, it will be providing the spacecraft and “Blue Ghost” lander for the 2023 mission. The space agency made the award

NASA has awarded Firefly Aerospace with a $93.3 million contract to take a lunar lander module loaded with experiments to the surface of the Moon. While the company will not be performing the launch itself, it will be providing the spacecraft and “Blue Ghost” lander for the 2023 mission.

The space agency made the award as part of its ongoing Commercial Lunar Payload Services, under which several other non-prime space companies have been selected for similar work: Blue Origin, Astrobotic, Masten, and so on.

This particular contract was first publicized to its CLPS partners back in September, which would have submitted bids for the project; Firefly clearly carried the day.

“We’re excited another CLPS provider has won its first task order award,” said NASA associate administrator for science Thomas Zurbuchen in a release announcing the contract. The last few years have seen many such firsts as NASA has increasingly embraced the commercial sector in providing everything from launch services to satellite and spacecraft manufacturing.

It’s not exactly Firefly’s first order from NASA, though: its national security subsidiary Firefly Black (ominous) will be launching two cubesats for the Venture Class Launch Service Demo-2 mission. But this is larger and more complex by a huge margin (not to mention more expensive).

This will be the maiden lunar voyage for Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, which it’s been working on for the last few years in anticipation of renewed interest in the Moon. It will hold the 10 scientific payloads, which NASA describes here, including a new laser reflector array and an experimental radiation-tolerant computer. There’s a lot to be loaded up, but Blue Ghost should have 50kg of space left over for anyone else who wants a ride to the Moon.

Everything is going to Mare Crisium, a basin on the “light” or near side of the moon, where hopefully they will contribute valuable observations and experiments to inform future visits to and habitation on the Moon.

Firefly will also be providing the spacecraft that will take the lander into lunar space, and will be responsible for getting it off the Earth in the first place — the company told me they’re evaluating options for that. By the time 2023 rolls around there should be plenty of rides to choose from, and indeed Firefly’s own Alpha launch vehicle may be flying by then, though it’s not ready to commit to a lunar insertion orbit mission today. The company plans to have its first Alpha flight in March.

News: TechCrunch’s favorite companies from 500 Startups’ latest demo day

• February 4, 2021
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TechCrunch tuned into 500 Startups’ 27th demo day today, keen to get our eyes on the accelerator’s latest companies.

TechCrunch tuned into 500 Startups‘ 27th demo day today, keen to get our eyes on the accelerator’s latest companies.

Demo days are regular affairs, but they always feature a crop of startups that could build the next tech giant, so we pay attention. Especially in the COVID-19 era, when demo days have gone virtual. Now it’s easier than ever for investors, and journalists, to tune in.

TechCrunch has covered Y Combinator’s virtual demo days, as well as regular batches from the various Techstars accelerators around the world.

But, today we’re talking favorites from 500 Startups’ latest cohort. Jonathan Shieber will take the baton first, followed by Alex Wilhelm.

Demo day standouts

Stack

• What: A new way to browse online.
• Why we like it: The browser and tab model hasn’t changed much since the days of Netscape and organizing online information is increasingly a complicated mess of a hundred tabs (at least on my browser). Stack is pitching a new way to organize information that’s more interactive, more organized and easier to visualize.

Adapty

• What: Low-code A/B testing of monetization mechanics and subscriber services for apps.
• Why we like it: Helping to give app developers tools to better understand where, how and why monetization breaks down and offer tools to fix it makes Adapty a standout among this YC cohort. The app economy is still a multibillion dollar business and getting customers to stick around remains a huge problem. Anything that can help is a boon for company builders.
  

  

News: Daily Crunch: Microsoft rethinks corporate intranet

• February 4, 2021
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Microsoft tries to improve corporate intranet, Google will offer new smartphone health measurements and 23andMe is going public via SPAC. This is your Daily Crunch for February 4, 2021. The big story: Microsoft rethinks corporate intranet Microsoft launched what it’s calling a new “employee experience platform,” designed to reinvent those corporate intranet sites that large

Microsoft tries to improve corporate intranet, Google will offer new smartphone health measurements and 23andMe is going public via SPAC. This is your Daily Crunch for February 4, 2021.

The big story: Microsoft rethinks corporate intranet

Microsoft launched what it’s calling a new “employee experience platform,” designed to reinvent those corporate intranet sites that large companies use to share content with their employees.

What makes this new platform, called Viva, any different? Well, it integrates with Microsoft’s other collaboration tools like SharePoint and Yammer, along with LinkedIn Learning and other training services, and it also includes team analytics.

In a pre-recorded video, CEO Satya Nadella said Microsoft is launching this because, “We have participated in the largest at-scale remote work experiment the world has seen and it has had a dramatic impact on the employee experience. As the world recovers, there is no going back. Flexibility in when, where and how we work will be key.”

The tech giants

Venmo to gain crypto, budgeting, savings and Honey integrations this year — The Venmo mobile payments app is going to look very different in 2021 as it inches closer to neobank territory.

Google to offer heart and respiratory rate measurements using just your smartphone’s camera — Google is introducing features that will allow users to take vital health measurements using just the camera they already have on their smartphone.

HubSpot acquires media startup The Hustle — HubSpot says content is an increasingly important part of its business, with customers finding its products through things like YouTube videos and HubSpot Academy.

Startups, funding and venture capital

23andMe set to go public via a Virgin Group SPAC merger — The transaction is expected to result in 23andMe having around $984 million in cash available at close.

Accel backs Mexican startup Flink’s effort to bring consumer investing to Latin America — Since launching its first brokerage product in July of 2020, Flink has surpassed 1 million users and 800,000 active brokerage accounts.

Tovala, the smart oven and meal kit service, heats up with $30M more in funding — This is the second round of funding for the startup in the space of six months.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Four strategies for deep tech founders who are fundraising — Step one: Use storytelling to highlight your big vision.

Why one Databricks investor thinks the company may be undervalued — The recent Databricks funding round, a $1 billion investment at a $28 billion valuation, was one of the year’s most notable private investments so far.

Extra Crunch is now hiring for reporter, editor and project manager positions — Extra Crunch is about to turn two years old and we now have a lot of demanding subscribers. (We love them, of course.)

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

A growing number of startups are creating APIs to assess and offset corporate carbon emissions — It was only a matter of time before application programming interfaces came for the carbon credit offsets.

The cloud infrastructure market hit $129B in 2020 — That’s up from around $97 billion in 2019, according to data from Synergy Research Group.

China’s national blockchain network embraces global developers — Last year, an ambitious, government-backed blockchain infrastructure network launched in China.

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: A lake house architect, a Miami VC, and homeowner walk into a wine bar

• February 4, 2021
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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. The good news is that we managed to fit it all into a single episode this week. The bad news is that that means the show is

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. The good news is that we managed to fit it all into a single episode this week. The bad news is that that means the show is pretty long. Sorry about that!

So, what took us so much time to get through? All of this:

• Robinhood raised $3.4 billion after its trading hiccups, and we also chatted over what we know about the company’s Q4 2020 numbers. In short, the company is growing nicely.
• RPA is big and UiPath is cashing in on the trend, raising $750 million at a $35 billion valuation. That’s a lot of cash for very little dilution.
• Databricks raised $1 billion at a $28 billion valuation, after reaching $425 million in ARR. The company’s growth is hot, but its valuation may be even hotter.
• Bumble is going public, so we chatted about its results, and how founder- and venture-friendly the dating market may be in the future.
• In a big exit for the Boston startup ecosystem, alcohol delivery platform Drizly has sold to Uber for $1.1 billion.
• Sticking to the alcohol beat, Danny talked us through the Vivino news, describing himself as a wine sophisticate with a distaste for sommeliers, which is just about the most Danny thing he has ever said. But the company really is neat.
• Divvy homes raised a $110 million Series C to make it easier to buy a home, after financing five times as many homes in 2020 as it did in pre-pandemic times.
• And then there were some neat early-stage rounds to chat about: Balance raising $5.5 million to bring B2B payments to the modern world, Alloy Automation raising $4 million for ecommerce automation, and Beam raising $9.5 million to build a new browser.
• Make sure to read Natasha’s profile of the new Expectul CEO here.
• And, we closed on some Miami news.

And somehow we still have another entire day before the weeks is up! So much for 2021 calming down after 2020’s storms.

News: Biden Commerce nominee Raimondo sees no reason to remove Huawei from entity list

• February 4, 2021
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Huawei’s status in the U.S. has been one of many question marks hovering over the newly minted Biden administration. The smartphone maker was one of a number of Chinese companies added to the Department of Commerce’s “entity list” during Trump’s four years in office. Gina Raimondo, Joe Biden’s nominee for Commerce secretary, has offered what

Huawei’s status in the U.S. has been one of many question marks hovering over the newly minted Biden administration. The smartphone maker was one of a number of Chinese companies added to the Department of Commerce’s “entity list” during Trump’s four years in office.

Gina Raimondo, Joe Biden’s nominee for Commerce secretary, has offered what is potentially one of the clearest looks so far at how Huawei’s status might (or might not) evolve under a new administration. Responding to questions from Senate Republicans, former Rhode Island Governor Raimondo indicated that the Biden administration likely would not be in any hurry to remove Huawei from the blacklist.

Republican House members had previously raised concerns over Raimondo’s position on companies like Huawei, a stance she had yet to clarify. “We urge those Senators who have a history of calling for Huawei to remain on the Entity List to stick to their principles and place a hold on Ms. Raimondo’s confirmation until the Biden Administration clarifies their intentions for Huawei and on export control policies for a country that is carrying out genocide and threatening our national security,” they wrote.

Raimondo has since responded.

“I understand that parties are placed on the Entity List and the Military End User List generally because they pose a risk to U.S. national security or foreign policy interests,” the politician said, in a note reported by Bloomberg. “I currently have no reason to believe that entities on those lists should not be there. If confirmed, I look forward to a briefing on these entities and others of concern.”

The statement isn’t definitive in either direction (as is perhaps to be expected for a Cabinet nominee), but it certainly doesn’t point to a radical change from Trump’s position on the issue. The smartphone marker was added to the list in 2019, following longtime accusations over security and spying concerns. The company has also variously been tied to the Chinese government.

The DoC noted at the time:

Huawei was added to the Entity List after the Department concluded that the company is engaged in activities that are contrary to U.S. national security or foreign policy interests, including alleged violations of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), conspiracy to violate IEEPA by providing prohibited financial services to Iran, and obstruction of justice in connection with the investigation of those alleged violations of U.S. sanctions, among other illicit activities.

The Trump administration proved especially aggressive in regards to blacklisting Chinese tech companies, a fact that has already had a profound impact on Huawei’s bottom line. Drone giant DJI and AI company SenseTime have been added to the DoC list, while Xiaomi made a separate military blacklist in the waning days of the administration.

News: New antitrust reform bill charts one possible path for regulating big tech

• February 4, 2021
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As Democrats settle into control of both chambers of Congress, signs of the party’s legislative priorities are starting to manifest. So far, lawmakers’ interest in reimagining tech’s regulatory landscape appears to be alive and well. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is out with a new proposal for antitrust reform that would create more barriers for big

As Democrats settle into control of both chambers of Congress, signs of the party’s legislative priorities are starting to manifest. So far, lawmakers’ interest in reimagining tech’s regulatory landscape appears to be alive and well.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) is out with a new proposal for antitrust reform that would create more barriers for big mergers and beef up federal resources for antitrust enforcement. Klobuchar’s bill, the Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, seeks to address consolidation across industries, calling out “dominant digital platforms” specifically.

“While the United States once had some of the most effective antitrust laws in the world, our economy today faces a massive competition problem,” Klobuchar said. “We can no longer sweep this issue under the rug and hope our existing laws are adequate.”

Klobuchar now leads the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, a corner of Congress already signaling its interest on reform that would impact big tech.

The new bill would bolster the Clayton Antitrust Act, a 1914 bill that created a framework for the rules around competition that are still applied today. Specifically, it would amend that bill to reinterpret its standard for evaluating anti-competitive mergers, changing the language to prevent any deal that “create[s] an appreciable risk of materially lessening competition” rather than the current wording.

The aim is to catch potentially anti-competitive behavior earlier in the game — an outcome that would address the government’s current conundrum, in which federal regulators are now awkwardly reevaluating mergers that evolved into monopolistic behavior years after the fact.

The bill would also put the onus on merging companies to prove that they don’t pose a risk of reducing competition, taking that burden off of the government in specific cases. Those rules would apply to “mega-mergers” worth $5 billion or more and in which a company with 50 percent market share seeks to buy a current or potential competitor.

Klobuchar’s proposal also seeks to add a provision to the Clayton Act against conduct that puts competitors at a disadvantage — a rule that would address some of the murkier areas of anti-competitive behavior that stretch beyond outright mergers and acquisitions.

Citing lacking enforcement budgets, the bill also sets out a $300 million infusion for the Justice Department’s antitrust division and the FTC. At the FTC, that money would help create a new division within the agency for research on markets and mergers.

The bill will be co-sponsored by Senators Cory Booker, Richard Blumenthal, Brian Schatz and Ed Markey, all Democrats on the antitrust subcommittee. And while it’s a single party endeavor for now, the antitrust reform could attract support from Republicans in Congress like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, who signaled his interest in antitrust changes that target large tech companies as recently as this week. Hawley also sits on the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee.

Klobuchar stops short of calling for large tech companies like Facebook and Google to be broken into their component parts, a move that has attracted some support from lawmakers like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders in recent years. In the midst of emerging multi-state lawsuits targeting big tech companies, the FTC announced its own antitrust case against Facebook late last year, pushing for the company to be broken up.