Daily Archives: March 2, 2021

News: EBay and Adevinta to sell UK sites Gumtree, Motors.co.uk and Shpock to get their $9.2B deal past regulators

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After inking a $9.2 billion deal to merge their classifieds businesses last year, eBay and Norway’s Adevinta have announced a deal to sell off three popular web properties in the UK to get the deal cleared by local regulators, the Competition Markets Authority. The companies plan to sell off Adevina-owned Shpock, and eBay-owned Gumtree and

After inking a $9.2 billion deal to merge their classifieds businesses last year, eBay and Norway’s Adevinta have announced a deal to sell off three popular web properties in the UK to get the deal cleared by local regulators, the Competition Markets Authority. The companies plan to sell off Adevina-owned Shpock, and eBay-owned Gumtree and Motors.co.uk — three UK sites that let individuals sell used goods and find/offer services — with the transactions expected to be completed in time for eBay and Adevinta to complete their bigger deal in Q2 2021, pending final regulatory approvals.

“EBay and Adevinta remain excited about the proposed combination of Adevinta and eBay Classifieds Group and now target closing the transaction in Q2 2021, subject to final ratification of the remedies execution plan by the CMA and receipt of outstanding regulatory approval in Austria,” the companies said in a joint statement.

The companies have not yet said whether they plan to sell them in a single package or to independent buyers, but a spokesperson for Adevinta said that it’s likely that the CMA will give another update in 2-4 weeks. She declined to give a price range for the properties.

But in the statement from the companies, eBay said that Gumtree and Motors, which form its UK classifieds business, account for less than 10% of its consolidated revenues ($10.3 billion last year); and Adevinta said that Shpock revenues make up less than 1% of its consolidated revenues (which were about $80 million in the last 12 months). Adevinta is the majority owner of Norwegian publisher Schibsted, among other businesses.

The CMA provisionally has said that it would support the deal if the sale of the three properties gets completed.

“The CMA considers that there are reasonable grounds for believing that the undertakings offered by Adevinta and eBay, or a modified version of them, might be accepted by the CMA under the Enterprise Act 2002,” it noted in a brief update (which was dated 2 March, 2020, although I think that was a typo).

The divestment decision comes as a result of the CMA last month announcing that the deal raised competition concerns as is.

“It is important that people have choice when it comes to selling items they no longer require or searching for a bargain online, and that they can enjoy competitive fees and services,” said CMA’s Joel Bamford, Senior Director of Mergers, in a statement. “There is a realistic chance that without this deal Gumtree and Shpock would have been direct competitors to eBay, which is by far the biggest player in this market. This is the latest in a series of merger probes by the CMA involving large digital companies, where we are thoroughly examining deals to ensure that competition is not restricted, and consumers’ interests are protected.”

Interestingly, one of those other deals also involves eBay, indirectly. Another asset that eBay sold off as part of its wider divestment efforts aiming to streamline its business was selling secondary ticket market company Stubhub to Viagogo in a $4 billion deal. That acquisition closed last year, but then the merger was investigated by the CMA, which last month ordered Viagogo to divest the company’s business outside of North America. It’s a crushing blow when you consider that events have fallen off a virtual cliff (literally and figuratively).

Turning back to Gumtree, Shpock and Motors.co.uk, even if those sites are a relatively small part of eBay and Adevinta’s wider business revenue-wise, collectively they form a very popular option for people looking to buy or sell used goods or hire people for service jobs in the UK. I’ve been a regular user of both in my time, to sell and buy items, and to advertise for/discover several excellent au pairs. Coincidentally, people also use them to resell tickets.

It’s notable that the CMA didn’t consider Facebook, or any others, big enough yet to be seen as viable competitors in that market. It will be worth watching to see how and if that changes though. With deals like last week’s $191 million fundraise for Wallapop, and Facebook’s persistent Marketplace efforts, it is clear that there is still business to be found in classified listings, both as a standalone enterprise, or as something that creates stickiness for users to hang around for other services and advertising alongside them.

News: Microsoft’s Power Automate Desktop is now free for all Windows 10 users

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Microsoft today announced that it is making Power Automate Desktop, its enterprise-level tool for creating automated desktop-centric workflows, available to all Windows 10 users for free. Power Automate Desktop is what Microsoft calls its “attended Robotic Process Automation” solution, but you can think of it as a macro recorder on steroids. It comes with 370

Microsoft today announced that it is making Power Automate Desktop, its enterprise-level tool for creating automated desktop-centric workflows, available to all Windows 10 users for free. Power Automate Desktop is what Microsoft calls its “attended Robotic Process Automation” solution, but you can think of it as a macro recorder on steroids. It comes with 370 prebuilt actions that help you build flows across different applications, but its real power is in letting you build your own scripts to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks.

Power Automate Desktop originally launched last September. It’s based on Microsoft’s acquisition of Softomotive in early 2020, but Microsoft has since extended Softomotive’s technology and integrated it deeper into its own stack.

Users who want to give Power Automate Desktop a try can now download it from Microsoft, but in the coming weeks, it’ll become part of Microsoft’s Insider Builds for Windows 10 and then eventually become a built-in part of Windows 10, all the way down to the standard Windows Home version. Until now, a per-user license for Power Automate Desktop would set you back at least $15 per month.

“We’ve had this mission of wanting to go democratize development for everybody with the Power Platform,” Charles Lamanna, the CVP of Power Platform engineering at Microsoft, told me. “And that means, of course, making products which are accessible to anybody — and that’s what no-code/low-code is all about, whether it’s building applications with Power Apps or automating with Power Automate. But another big part of that is just, how do you also expand the imagination of a typical PC user to make them believe they can be a developer?”

This move, Lamanna believes, reduces the licensing friction and sends a message to Windows users that they can build bots and automate tasks, too. “The way we’ve designed it — and the experience we have, particularly around the recording abilities like a macro recorder — makes it so you don’t have to think about for loops or what is this app I’m clicking on or this text box — you can just record it and run it,” he said.

News: Microsoft brings tighter integration to Dynamics 365 and Teams

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As the pandemic drags on and we learn about the requirements of working from home with distributed teams, users could be craving more integration across their tools to help reduce the clicks required to complete a set of tasks. Today at the Ignite Conference, Microsoft announced tighter integration between its business suite Dynamics 365 and

As the pandemic drags on and we learn about the requirements of working from home with distributed teams, users could be craving more integration across their tools to help reduce the clicks required to complete a set of tasks. Today at the Ignite Conference, Microsoft announced tighter integration between its business suite Dynamics 365 and its collaboration tool Teams to help with that issue.

Alysa Taylor, corporate VP for business applications and global industry at Microsoft, pointed out that one of the advantages of this native integration approach is that it helps reduce context switching across different applications. “We are committed to really bringing together the collaboration platform and the business process layer to enable salespeople, service representatives, operations managers [and other similar roles] to really have a unified platform in which they both collaborate and have their everyday business functions,” Taylor explained.

This could manifest itself in a number of different ways across marketing, sales and service. For instance, a marketer can create a webinar, which they set up and track in Dynamics 365 Marketing tools and run in Teams as a streaming event with the Teams streaming setup integrated directly into the Dynamics 365 console.

In a sales example Taylor says, “We’re enabling sellers to be able to track the career movements of their contacts using the LinkedIn Sales Navigator, as well as connect very specific sales records within Microsoft Teams without ever having to leave Dynamics 365 Sales. So you can be in the Sales application and you have the ability to deeply understand a contact and any contact changes that occur in Teams, and that’s automatically updated in Sales.”

If your company is not an all-Microsoft shop and wants to use different tools as part of these workflows, Taylor says that you can use Microsoft cross-cloud connectors to connect to another service, and this is true regardless of the tasks involved (so long as the connector to the desired application is available).

Salesforce, a primary rival of Microsoft in the business software space, spent over $27 billion to buy Slack at the end of last year to bring this kind of integration to its platform. Taylor sees the acquisition as a reaction to the integration Microsoft already has and continues to build.

“I think that Salesforce had to acquire Slack to be able to have that collaboration [we have], so we are years ahead of what they’re going to be able to provide because they will not have these native integrations. So I actually see the Salesforce acquisition as a response to what we’re doing with Dynamics 365 and Teams,” Taylor told me.

It’s worth pointing out that Salesforce is far ahead of Microsoft when it comes market share in the CRM space with over 19% versus under 3% for Microsoft, according to Gartner numbers from 2019. While it’s possible these numbers have shifted some since then, probably not significantly.

News: Piano acquires analytics company AT Internet

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Piano is expanding its platform for digital publishers with the acquisition of AT Internet, a 25-year-old analytics company based in France. Even if you don’t recognize Piano as a company, TechCrunch readers will probably be familiar with the product, since we use it to manage the reader experience of our Extra Crunch membership program. Other

Piano is expanding its platform for digital publishers with the acquisition of AT Internet, a 25-year-old analytics company based in France.

Even if you don’t recognize Piano as a company, TechCrunch readers will probably be familiar with the product, since we use it to manage the reader experience of our Extra Crunch membership program.

Other customers include CNBC, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, and Piano describes itself more broadly as a “digital business platform” with products around personalization, advertising and analytics, as well as subscriptions.

“Fundamentally, our job is to help big websites make more money,” said CEO Trevor Kaufman. “We view that not as a billing problem, but as a marketing problem.”

Kaufman described a “pretty siloed system” used by most publishers and other digital businesses, where data around ad revenue, subscriptions, content engagement and customer profiles is all stored separately. By integrating with AT Internet’s “user-centric, event-based data store,” he said Piano can provide a more comprehensive picture of “the full customer journey,” allowing businesses to personalize their marketing and messaging accordingly.

He also praised AT Internet for its focus on “data quality and privacy,” with the company helping clients comply with GDPR and CCPA regulations.

New York-based Piano says AT Internet’s chief executive Mathieu Llorens will continue in that role while becoming a “significant shareholder” in the combined organization. The acquisition price was not disclosed, but the transaction involves both cash and equity and was funded by Updata Partners, Rittenhouse Ventures and Sixth Street Partners.

“The merger of our two organizations is an exciting chapter in our company’s history and prominence in the web analytics industry,” Llorens said in a statement. “This next chapter with Piano will enable AT Internet to invest more resources in and drive expansion of our current products, as well as help more organizations leverage analytics values and segments to deliver personalized customer experiences.”

Kaufman added that Piano and AT Internet will both work to integrate their platforms while continuing offer standalone products, but “the line becomes blurrier and blurrier as we use the backend of AT Internet to power more and more stuff for Piano.”

News: DJI launches an all-in-one FPV drone system

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DJI has flirted with FPV goggles before, of course. The company got on the burgeoning FPV movement with the launch of its DJI Goggles back in 2016. It was a logical extension for the company that controls around 70% of the drone market, at last count, and a push toward a more mainstream experience for

DJI has flirted with FPV goggles before, of course. The company got on the burgeoning FPV movement with the launch of its DJI Goggles back in 2016. It was a logical extension for the company that controls around 70% of the drone market, at last count, and a push toward a more mainstream experience for what has largely been the realm of hobbyists.

Today, it takes another important step toward conquering that market with the launch of DJI FPV. The simply named new drone model is aimed at offering a similar off-the-shelf solution for those looking to add a head-mounted display to their flying experience.

The DJI FPV occupies a strange space, both in the DJI ecosystem and the overall drone market. While FPV drones have largely been the realm of more advanced hobbyists and racers, the new model is aimed at beginning and intermediate drone users. In that, it essentially works out of the box. Though unlike racing models, this device isn’t particularly modular or customizable, so you can’t really tweak it for speed.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

There are beginner modes and a new optional motion controller to help ease the learning curve. The drone builds on several generations of DJI consumer hardware and software, both in terms of imaging and controller. There’s even a flight simulator baked in to the app, to help get you acquainted with flying the device virtually before accidently slamming the pricey hardware into a tree.

That’s the other thing that warrants mention up top: This is a $1,299 system. That price gets you the drone, the second-gen FPV goggles, a controller and a battery. The motion controller runs another $199 and additional batteries can be purchased with the Fly More bundle. Of course, drone pricing is a pretty wide spectrum, and racing models tend to be be fairly expensive. The price puts it between the $799 Mavic Air 2 and the $1,599 Mavic 2 Pro, which sports a Hasselblad camera. Given that the FPV goggles retail for $570 on their own, the asking price certainly isn’t outlandish.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Here’s how DJI’s European Creative Director describes the new system in a release:

Right out of the box, DJI FPV combines the best available technology for a hybrid drone like no other. It can fly like a racer, hover like a traditional drone, accelerate like a homebuilt project and stop faster than any of them. DJI FPV lets the world experience the absolute thrill of immersive drone flight without being intimidated by the technology or spending hours building a system from scratch.

That’s a pretty good assessment of the category here. It’s a way to dip one’s toes into this growing category, but backed with the peace of mind that comes with purchasing a more off-the-shelf solution from a company that knows how to build a good and fairly reliable drone (you’re not going to buy a product in this category that doesn’t give you some problems from time to time).

Image Credits: Brian Heater

It’s not a racing drone, really, but it’s designed to offer a closer version of that experience than the company’s popular Mavic line. In fact, in one mode, it’s capable of speeds up to 87 MPH, with a 0-62 MPH acceleration in two seconds. Obviously, less experienced fliers are going to want to work up to that and familiarize themselves with the intricacies of the first-person view footage. When you flip over from Normal to Manual mode, you lose the hovering and obstacle sensors in the process, making it a lot easier to do some serious damage to the $1,300 drone.

The goggles themselves feature three different modes. Low-latency HD does 1440 x 810p at 60 fps or an increased field of view at 50 fps. Smooth mode increases the frame rate to up to 120 fps. Audience mode connects up to eight additional googles to the single view. The footage is shot with the on-board 4K/60fps 120 Mbps single-axis, image stabilized camera. Footage can be shot in up to 4x slow motion, as well.

The DJI FPV is available to purchase starting today.

News: Microsoft launches Azure Percept, its new hardware and software platform to bring AI to the edge

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Microsoft today announced Azure Percept, its new hardware and software platform for bringing more of its Azure AI services to the edge. Percept combines Microsoft’s Azure cloud tools for managing devices and creating AI models with hardware from Microsoft’s device partners. The general idea here is to make it far easier for all kinds of

Microsoft today announced Azure Percept, its new hardware and software platform for bringing more of its Azure AI services to the edge. Percept combines Microsoft’s Azure cloud tools for managing devices and creating AI models with hardware from Microsoft’s device partners. The general idea here is to make it far easier for all kinds of businesses to build and implement AI for things like object detection, anomaly detections, shelf analytics and keyword spotting at the edge by providing them with an end-to-end solution that takes them from building AI models to deploying them on compatible hardware.

To kickstart this, Microsoft also today launches a hardware development kit with an intelligent camera for vision use cases (dubbed Azure Percept Vision). The kit features hardware-enabled AI modules for running models at the edge, but it can also be connected to the cloud. Users will also be able to trial their proofs-of-concept in the real world because the development kit conforms to the widely used 80/20 T-slot framing architecture.

In addition to Percept Vision, Microsoft is also launching Azure Percept Audio for audio-centric use cases.

Azure Percept devices, including Trust Platform Module, Azure Percept Vision and Azure Percept Audio

“We’ve started with the two most common AI workloads, vision and voice, sight and sound, and we’ve given out that blueprint so that manufacturers can take the basics of what we’ve started,” said Roanne Sones, the corporate vice president of Microsoft’s edge and platform group, said. “But they can envision it in any kind of responsible form factor to cover a pattern of the world.”

Percept customers will have access to Azure’s cognitive service and machine learning models and Percept devices will automatically connect to Azure’s IoT hub.

Microsoft says it is working with silicon and equipment manufacturers to build an ecosystem of “intelligent edge devices that are certified to run on the Azure Percept platform.” Over the course of the next few months, Microsoft plans to certify third-party devices for inclusion in this program, which will ideally allow its customers to take their proofs-of-concept and easily deploy them to any certified devices.

“Anybody who builds a prototype using one of our development kits, if they buy a certified device, they don’t have to do any additional work,” said Christa St. Pierre, a product manager in Microsoft’s Azure edge and platform group.

St. Pierre also noted that all of the components of the platform will have to conform to Microsoft’s responsible AI principles — and go through extensive security testing.

News: Microsoft’s Azure Arc multi-cloud platform now supports machine learning workloads

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With Azure Arc, Microsoft offers a service that allows its customers to run Azure in any Kubernetes environment, no matter where that container cluster is hosted. From Day One, Arc supported a wide range of use cases, but one feature that was sorely missing when it first launched was support for machine learning (ML). But

With Azure Arc, Microsoft offers a service that allows its customers to run Azure in any Kubernetes environment, no matter where that container cluster is hosted. From Day One, Arc supported a wide range of use cases, but one feature that was sorely missing when it first launched was support for machine learning (ML). But one of the advantages of a tool like Arc is that it allows enterprises to run their workloads close to their data and today, that often means using that data to train ML models.

At its Ignite conference, Microsoft today announced that it bringing exactly this capability to Azure Arc with the addition of Azure Machine Learning to the set of Arc-enabled data services.

“By extending machine learning capabilities to hybrid and multicloud environments, customers can run training models where the data lives while leveraging existing infrastructure investments. This reduces data movement and network latency, while meeting security and compliance requirements,” Azure GM Arpan Shah writes in today’s announcement.

This new capability is now available to Arc customers.

In addition to bringing this new machine learning capability to Arc, Microsoft also today announced that Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes, which allows users to deploy standard Kubernetes configurations to their clusters anywhere, is now generally available.

Also new in this world of hybrid Azure services is support for Azure Kubernetes Service on Azure Stack HCI. That’s a mouthful, but Azure Stack HCI is Microsoft’s platform for running Azure on a set of standardized, hyperconverged hardware inside a customer’s datacenter. The idea pre-dates Azure Arc, but it remains a plausible alternative for enterprises who want to run Azure in their own data center and has continued support from vendors like Dell, Lenovo, HPE, Fujitsu and DataOn.

On the open-source side of Arc, Microsoft also today stressed that Arc is built to work with any Kubernetes distribution that is conformant to the standard of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and that it has worked with RedHat, Canonical, Rancher and now Nutanix to test and validate their Kubernetes implementations on Azure Arc.

News: Beam raises $80M as the dental insurer looks to keep up rapid historical growth

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This morning Beam, an insurtech startup that provides dental coverage to corporate employees, announced that it has closed an $80 million Series E. Mercato-affiliated Traverse led the investment, with Nationwide insurance joining the deal. Both are new investors in Beam. Prior investors Drive Capital and Georgian Partners also put capital into the funding event. The investment

This morning Beam, an insurtech startup that provides dental coverage to corporate employees, announced that it has closed an $80 million Series E. Mercato-affiliated Traverse led the investment, with Nationwide insurance joining the deal. Both are new investors in Beam. Prior investors Drive Capital and Georgian Partners also put capital into the funding event.

The investment comes after rapid growth at the company, a common theme amongst neo-insurance providers. The startup cohort often leans on digital information collection to better information on consumer behavior. The information allows companies like Beam, and auto-insurers incent behaviors that lower costs like brushing, or safe driving, while having more information to inform their risk underwriting activities.

Once the neo-insurers have enough data to prove their underwriting models, they can rapidly scale their businesses, something investors covet.

Beam CEO Alex Frommeyer said in an interview that the dental insurance business, which lacks the occasional catastrophic impact of a home insurer having to cover the cost of a house, for example, is an attractive slice of the coverage market. Per Frommeyer, his company has “sub-70s” loss ratios, meaning that it spends less than $0.70 per dollar of premium it receives on paying claims.

We lack specifics on its combined loss ratio and loss adjustment expenses, but the loss ratio itself points to enough margin in Beam’s core insurance product to possible create an attractive business; some neo-insurnace providers that have been well received by investors are struggling to get their numbers to even similar levels of performance. Add in Beam’s self declared revenue growth of 600% in the last three years, and “net revenue retention rate of 100%,” and it’s not hard to see why investors wanted to put more capital to work in the company.

Beam’s business is interesting for more reasons than merely its economics. It is also a consumer hardware player, manufacturing its own toothbrush to track, and encourage via promotions, its covered members to brush as frequently correctly. And the company’s software for enrollment, claims, and the like has become popular enough that Beam offers other insurance products via its platform to some customers, in addition to its own dental coverage.

Regarding its new investment, Frommeyer said that thanks to dental insurance’s lack of mega-claims, it doesn’t require as large a capital reserve as some insurance types. That means its new funding is largely earmarked for growth. The cash is likely welcome. After doubling its member base in both 2019 and 2020, the company has an upward climb ahead of if it wants to match the result again in 2021.

While the insurtech market has proven attractive for public investors in some cases — Lemonade’s post-IPO performance, and Root’s IPO pricing, say — there have been bumps. Root’s share price has taken a beating in recent months, and MetroMile, which went public via a SPAC, has lost ground in recent trading sessions.

Still, the market for insurance is huge, and with startups trying to apply tech solutions and modern digital software to the market, there’s plenty for investors to favor. Let’s see how far Beam can get with another huge check.

News: Is EV charging the next gig for the gig economy? SparkCharge thinks so

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Last week the mobile charging battery company SparkCharge announced a partnership agreement with AllState that expands the company’s reach into vehicle services, driving the company further down the road toward its goal of making electric vehicle charging the next gig economy job. The company, which has developed, designed and is commercializing a mobile vehicle charger

Last week the mobile charging battery company SparkCharge announced a partnership agreement with AllState that expands the company’s reach into vehicle services, driving the company further down the road toward its goal of making electric vehicle charging the next gig economy job.

The company, which has developed, designed and is commercializing a mobile vehicle charger is also in the process of closing a $5 million round led by Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban and others as it brings its new mobile charging device, called the Roadie, to market.

SparkCharge’s 120 kilowatt fast charger can be delivered on-demand through a network of partners that now includes AllState and the Durham, N.C. vehicle services startup, Spiffy. Customers can choose to top up with between 50 miles and 100 miles of charge using the Roadie, which is the lynchpin in a broader charging network that SparkCharge’s founder, Joshua Aviv, envisions.

“You can say I want a charge at this point in time at this location and this much range,” Aviv said. “You pay and have the charge delivered all on one app.”

So far, the agreement between AllState and SparkCharge covers four cities: Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego, Calif., and the insurance and roadside assistance provider has ordered roughly twenty portable chargers.

Working through companies like Spiffy and AllState is one way to get to market, but SparkCharge’s chief executive thinks that independent workers could start up their own businesses offering on-demand charging to customers.

On-demand charges cost roughly 50 cents per mile and a customer can get a significant enough charge for as little as $10, according to Aviv.

“We’re basically creating a whole new [charging] network,” said Aviv. “This isn’t a network meant to be a stopgap. It’s a network that’s always on, always available and better and faster than [traditional chargers]… we don’t need permits, we don’t need construction. With our unit, you take it out fo the box you plug it into the car you push a button and begin charging. With us, every parking spot, every location — that’s now a charging station. That’s a much better network than the legacy.”

Folks who wanted to offer the charging services would pay roughly $450 per month for the equipment and that would give them the battery and the equipment they would need to start their own on-demand EV charging business.

“It’s a business designed to allow people to service EV owners,” said Aviv. 

The Somerville, Mass.-based company was born from Aviv’s own fascination and frustration with the current state of electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, the lack of charging infrastructure is one of the major obstacles that electric vehicles have to overcome for them to achieve mass adoption.

In a survey of 3,500 electric vehicle drivers, cited by the Journal, which was conducted in September and October of last year by the advocacy group Plug In America, over half of respondents reported having problems with public charging. Those problems are worse for drivers who don’t own Teslas.

Whatever else may be true about the EV that Elon built (along with thousands of workers and a slew of additional innovators and company founders), Tesla’s emphasis on having mostly adequate charging infrastructure to support its customers has paid huge dividends. And other carmakers, retailers, and standalone charging service providers are only beginning to catch up.

Companies ranging from oil majors like Shell to automakers like Volkswagen, who spent $2 billion to build out an electric vehicle charging network as part of the settlement from its diesel emissions chicanery, have networks built out or in the pipeline.

For Aviv, who has owned an electric vehicle since 2013 when he bought a Chevrolet Volt, the problem was clear. He began working on the company in 2014 while still a student at Syracuse University. A professor and advisor at the university had previously served on the board of the Environmental Protection Agency and was a huge proponent of electric vehicles.

After college Aviv continued to work on the business developing a portable charging station and then creating a platform for distribution and sales and a network of service providers on top of it. That’s how SparkCharge was built.

In the early days, the company received assistance from groups like the Los Angeles Clean Technology Incubator and investors like Techstars Boston, Techstars, Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest fund and his Revolution investment firm, PEAK6 Investments, and the Buffalo, NY-based accelerator 46North, along with investors like Cuban.

“I saw that the current [charging] infrastructure that we have has a lot of flaws,” Aviv said. They include the downtime between charging infrastructure upkeep, the time it takes to grow the charging network and the lack of maintenance and support for chargers. 

“There’s a huge push to move these chargers,” he said.”You don’t want these EV drivers to drive around a city with no guarantee of infrastructure. It’s an interesting tug of war that’s going on that we’re going to see unfold and consumers might be more persuaded to drive an EV [with SparkCharge] because not only can you deliver range but you can request it on demand.”

News: Flink, the Berlin-based grocery delivery startup that operates its own ‘dark stores’, raises $52M

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The on-demand grocery delivery industry in Europe (and beyond) continues to heat up amidst the pandemic, including a plethora of startups taking a vertical approach by operating their own delivery only — or “dark” — stores. The latest to show its hand is Berlin-based Flink, which today is announcing that it has raised a hefty

The on-demand grocery delivery industry in Europe (and beyond) continues to heat up amidst the pandemic, including a plethora of startups taking a vertical approach by operating their own delivery only — or “dark” — stores. The latest to show its hand is Berlin-based Flink, which today is announcing that it has raised a hefty $52 million in seed financing.

The round is led by Target Global and existing investors Northzone, Cherry Ventures, and Silicon Valley-based debt provider TriplePoint Capital. Cristina Stenbeck from Kinnevik also joins the round in a personal capacity.

TriplePoint’s inclusion is notable, since debt financing makes sense for these types of capital intensive businesses, including those that need to build out actual stores, albeit dark ones, and other deep logistics infrastructure.

To that end, the injection of capital — which brings total funding to date to $64 million — coincides with Flink’s expansion into the Netherlands and France, and follows the opening of ten dark stores in a number of German cities. They include Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Nuremberg, Dusseldorf, and Cologne, with more planned.

Officially launched just six weeks ago, Flink, which means “quick” in German, claims to deliver groceries from its own network of fulfilment centres in under 10 minutes. That puts it up against dark store competitors including Berlin’s much-hyped Gorillas and London’s Dija and Weezy, and France’s Cajoo, all of which also claim to focus on fresh food and groceries.

There’s also the likes of Zapp, which is still in stealth and more focused on a potentially higher-margin convenience store offering similar to U.S. unicorn goPuff. (Related: goPuff itself is also looking to expand into Europe and is currently in talks to acquire or invest in the U.K.’s Fancy, which some have dubbed a mini goPuff).

However, based on today’s funding round and an extremely experienced founding team, Flink is certainly one to watch. The rather stealthy company was founded in late 2020 by Oliver Merkel (former Bain & Company partner who led the firm’s retail practice in Germany), Christoph Cordes (former co-CEO of home24 which IPO’d in 2018), and Julian Dames (former co-founder of Foodora, CMO at foodpanda and VP at Delivery Hero, and most recently at Softbank). Founder-market-fit? Check.

As noted, Flink is pitching itself very much as a grocery solution, similar to Dija and Gorillas, for example, meaning that the real competition — in the short to mid-term, at least — is traditional supermarkets that do scheduled delivery but aren’t typically on-demand. However, delivering just-in-time fresh food poses many logistical challenges, such as the supply chain and ensuring you actually stock the products customers want when they want them. That’s a slightly different challenge to focusing on convenience store items such as beer, chocolate and snacks, or cigarettes etc., which is closer to the original goPuff model.

In a brief call last night with Christian Meermann, founding partner at Cherry Ventures, he told me that he believes truly on-demand groceries can be made to work, including the unit economics, but concedes it is a huge challenge logistically. But he also pointed out that the prize is potentially much bigger for whichever team can figure it out, since grocery shopping can easily happen multiple times per week and basket sizes can soon add up. Meermann isn’t convinced the same can be said of a pure convenience store offering, but of course there is overlap between the two.

Jessica Schultz, general partner at Northzone and previously a co-founder of HelloFresh, agrees. She says that instant shopping delivery will become “the new standard” in shopping more generally, and that groceries is the perfect category to start in, due to the nature of the products and frequency of consumption (e.g. perishables, waste, snacking, three meals per day etc.).

“Getting all your groceries, and not only convenience items but also your fresh herbs, your fruits, your bread… in less than 10 minutes is truly a wow experience,” she tells me. “I’m incredibly impressed with what the Flink team has achieved to date in this very fast-moving industry. I’m not sure I’ve seen such a rapid growth, or clean and strategic approach before. Their deep understanding of the core market dynamics is what will make them succeed”.

Schultz also argues that existing supermarket infrastructure can’t deliver on express grocery shopping and that large incumbents don’t have the skillset or agility to build on-demand grocery. “Instant delivery requires the build out of new infrastructure (micro-warehouses, hub & spoke) as well as a fully vertically integrated approach,” she adds.

Meanwhile, the new financing will be used to expand further within Germany and into additional European markets this year. “In Q2 2021, Flink will roll out its first stores in the Netherlands and France, beginning in cities like Amsterdam and Paris,” says the 120-person company.

Comments Flink founder Oliver Merkel: “Consumers absolutely love to get their grocery shopping done in 10 minutes,” says founder Oliver Merkel. “We’ve received fantastic NPS feedback and see people using Flink multiple times a week. With the additional funding, we can roll out Flink even faster in Europe.”