Daily Archives: July 22, 2021

News: Obé Fitness raises $15M for its personality-driven exercise platform

• July 22, 2021
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Obé Fitness’ co-founders/co-CEOs Mark Mullett and Ashley Mills toss around the word “entertrainment” a lot. For the record, it’s not a reference to the Butler County, Ohio-based amusement park that serves as the home of the “world’s largest train display,” but rather one of those industry portmanteaus like infotainment or webinar. Here it’s meant to

Obé Fitness’ co-founders/co-CEOs Mark Mullett and Ashley Mills toss around the word “entertrainment” a lot. For the record, it’s not a reference to the Butler County, Ohio-based amusement park that serves as the home of the “world’s largest train display,” but rather one of those industry portmanteaus like infotainment or webinar.

Here it’s meant to be a reference to what the New York-based company sees as its principle differentiator from an increasingly crowded market. Mills describes it as “where entertainment and fitness meet. Talent is key to that. Not also being able to cast talent that can deliver a great workout, but they also have that X Factor. They have the ability to reach across the screen and make you feel something at home.”

The company has been building up an audience of influencers as well, including Kelly Ripa, Kate Hudson and Tiffany Haddish, the latter of whom participated in the $15 million Series A the company is announcing today.

“The capital is really about team growth and awareness in a couple of key business development initiatives,” says Mullett. “In the current climate, where everyone is talking about their various home workouts, you definitely need resources to grow. So this round is about getting Obé in front of as many people as possible.”

The round was led by CAVU Venture Partners and features Athleta, Samsung Next, Wheelhouse Entertainment and WW International, Inc., along with previous investors Cassius Ventures, Ludlow Ventures, Harris Blitzer Sports Entertainment and BDMI.

Image Credits: Obé

It’s a pretty diverse list of parties with a diverse list of interests in the platform — take Samsung, which currently offers the Obé platform on its smart TVs. Users can also access it on iOS and Android devices and cast it accordingly to their TV sets.

Obé (pronounced “Obey”) bills itself as a “premium” service. At $27, it’s certainly at the higher end, verses offerings like the $10/month Apple Fitness+ or Peleton’s $13 monthly fee. Unlike Peloton, which has proprietary equipment attached, Obé actually skipped the equipment altogether at launch, though it has slowly expanded its offerings to include things like free weights and trampolines for its bounce classes — equipment that’s a bit more forgiving in smaller spaces.

Founded in 2018, the company saw a large increase in users during the pandemic. While Obé doesn’t disclose subscriber counts, its founders told me the platform’s userbase increased 4x last year.

“We started this company three and a half years ago,” says Mullett. “When COVID hit in March of 2020, our team, our talent, our interface — everyone was ready to receive the rush of new users who needed to be sated by movement and by someone who could keep them inspired, sane and confident during a difficult time.”

News: Allocate banks $5M to open up venture capital fund access

• July 22, 2021
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The world of venture capital investing is a relatively small one, and family offices and accredited investors are eager to get involved, but find it difficult to access fund managers.

The world of venture capital investing is a relatively small one, and relationship-based to boot. Family offices and accredited investors are eager to get involved in high-quality funds, but face hurdles like access to fund managers.

Enter Allocate. The company, founded by Samir Kaji and Hana Yang in February 2021, is developing an approach to venture capital fund investing that provides a way for investors of any size to participate.

On Thursday, the San Francisco-based company announced it raised $5 million in seed funding from a group of backers including Urban Innovation Fund, Tusk Venture Partners, Basis Set Ventures, Liquid2 Ventures, Fika Ventures, Ulu Ventures and Anthemis Group.

The pair met as Kauffman Fellows, both with backgrounds in financial services. By the time they met, Yang was working in the nonprofit world, and said they began talking about the friction between the nonprofit and venture capital worlds. Then Yang joined Kaji at First Republic Bank to work together and continue the conversation.

Kaji, citing a Boston Consulting Group report, estimated there are between 8,000 and 11,000 global family offices and nearly 17 million accredited investors that currently control some $42 trillion in assets.

They saw the issue as it related to supply and demand: On the supply side, there are a finite number of institutional investors, “all with their dance cards full,” Kaji told TechCrunch. Fund managers want to get at that nontraditional endowment money and are looking at family offices, but finding those individuals is a challenge.

Meanwhile, on the demand side, family offices have trouble accessing venture capital firms — they don’t know where to look to find managers, don’t have time to cultivate those relationships or can’t make the traditional $1 million commitments.

As a result, Kaji and Yang decided to start Allocate as a way to usher in the next era of venture capital by creating a way for retail investors of any size or background to invest in funds and for managers to find family offices.

Allocate’s platform curates venture fund products for wealth advisors, family offices and qualified individual investors based on their investment objectives, and any pre- and post-investment transactions and reporting activities are completed on the platform.

The company sets up its own feeder vehicles that aggregate investor capital so that there are lower minimum investments and that capital can easily be managed by fund managers. It then charges a fee, on an annual basis, on investments made.

Currently, investors can choose the funds they want to invest in, but Kaji said Allocate will eventually also offer products that will be like funds of funds, where investments go into a pot that will be invested by a fund manager.

The company is pre-revenue and said it will use the new funding to build out its product and make some key hires over the next year as it gears up for a formal software product launch at the end of the year. It is already attracting a waitlist of several hundred fund managers and investors.

“With the market the way it is, the number of accredited investors is expected to grow by 50% by 2025,” Raji said. “There is a huge opportunity to unlock the market and have people participate.”

Jordan Nof, co-founder and managing partner at Tusk Ventures, agrees. He sees a lot of economic growth taking place outside the public market, and opportunities present themselves for someone to capitalize on.

Due to the access issue between fund managers and potential investors, there are trillions of dollars sitting on the sidelines, he told TechCrunch. With Allocate, Nof saw a way to bridge the two parties with tools for both sides to make sound decisions and further evolve venture capital.

“I have known Samir for quite some time, and he and his team understand this problem set and they have a vision of what the venture capital future looks like,” he added. “This is a cottage industry even though VC is responsible for impacting the largest of technology companies, which have taken VC, yet it is a still super fragmented industry that has no transparency. Allocate is the next transition of a true platform that enables family offices and high-net worth individuals access.”

News: Visa acquires Currencycloud, which makes APIs for remittances and currency transfers, in a $963M deal

• July 22, 2021
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A year and a half after Currencycloud raised $80 million in a round that included Visa, the London-based developer of APIs that powered remittance and currency exchange services is getting even closer to the financial services giant. Today, Visa announced that it would acquire CurrencyCloud in a deal valued at $963 million (£700 million). This

A year and a half after Currencycloud raised $80 million in a round that included Visa, the London-based developer of APIs that powered remittance and currency exchange services is getting even closer to the financial services giant. Today, Visa announced that it would acquire CurrencyCloud in a deal valued at $963 million (£700 million).

This price is a very decent leap from that last funding round, when sources told us the startup was valued at around $500 million.

(As Visa already has equity in the company, the amount it will actually pay will be reduced by that amount.)

CurrencyCloud has some 500 customers in 180 countries that use its APIs to power multi-currency wallets, currency exchange services, and account management, including some of the biggest startups around such as Monzo, Moneze, Starling, Revolut and Dwolla. These will continue, and on top of that Visa will use the startup’s technology to bolster its own currency exchange rails to provide a wider set of services to its own customers, which include financial institutions, fintechs and more, as well as to build new services for consumers as well.

“At Currencycloud, we’ve always strived to deliver a better tomorrow for all, from the smallest start-up to the global multi-nationals. Re-imagining how money flows around the global economy just got more exciting as we join Visa,” said Mike Laven, CEO, Currencycloud, in a statement. “The combination of Currencycloud’s fintech expertise and Visa’s network will enable us to deliver greater customer value to the businesses moving money across borders.”

Remittance and currency transfers to be big business in the world of financial services, and that opportunity is growing. Two of the factors driving this are that e-commerce has extended well outside of our national borders, especially in the past 18 months, and so have supply chains. (Visa notes that some 43% of all small businesses globally carried out some form of international trade in 2020.) And with the rise of cloud-based, mobile services to facilitate transactions, consumers are ever more globalised in their outlooks, too.

At the same time, remittances and currency transfers are two areas ripe for disruption, with incumbent services often costly and inefficient. All of this sets the stage for a company like CurrencyCloud, which has built a new implementation of currency transfer that can be embedded into other financial services to help them run more smoothly.

The exit is also a classic example of how larger, incumbent financial powerhouses typically find it harder to innovate and jump into new services, so instead they tap smaller and more agile startups that are taking big bets on technology, and pulling it off, to help propel themselves into the next generation of financial services. Whether Visa will be able to successfully integrate and use CurrencyCloud’s tech and work with its team are two things that were already tested out: the two were strategic partners prior to this deal.

“The acquisition of Currencycloud is another example of Visa executing on our network of networks strategy to facilitate global money movement,” said Colleen Ostrowski, Visa’s Global Treasurer, in a statement. “Consumers and businesses increasingly expect transparency, speed and simplicity when making or receiving international payments. With our acquisition of Currencycloud, we can support our clients and partners to further reduce the pain points of cross-border payments and develop great user experiences for their customers.” 

News: Tailor Brands raises $50M, aims to be one-stop shop for small businesses to launch

• July 22, 2021
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Tailor Brands, a startup that automates parts of the branding and marketing process for small businesses, announced Thursday it has raised $50 million in Series C funding.

Tailor Brands, a startup that automates parts of the branding and marketing process for small businesses, announced Thursday it has raised $50 million in Series C funding.

GoDaddy led the round as a strategic partner and was joined by OurCrowd and existing investors Pitango Growth, Mangrove Capital Partners, Armat Group, Disruptive VC and Whip Media founder Richard Rosenblatt. Tailor Brands has now raised a total of $70 million since its inception in 2015.

“GoDaddy is empowering everyday entrepreneurs around the world by providing all of the help and tools to succeed online,” said Andrew Morbitzer, vice president of corporate development at GoDaddy, in a written statement. “We are excited to invest in Tailor Brands — and its team — as we believe in their vision. Their platform truly helps entrepreneurs start their business quickly and easily with AI-powered logo design and branding services.”

When Tailor Brands, which launched at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield in 2014, raised its last round, a $15.5 million Series B, in 2018, the company was focused on AI-driven logo creation.

The company, headquartered in New York and Tel Aviv, is now compiling the components for a one-stop SaaS platform — providing the design, branding and marketing services a small business owner needs to launch and scale operations, and within minutes, Yali Saar, co-founder and CEO of Tailor Brands told TechCrunch.

Over the past year, more users are flocking to Tailor Brands; the company is onboarding some 700,000 new users per month for help in the earliest stages of setting up their business. In fact, the company saw a 27% increase in new business incorporations as the creator and gig economy gained traction in 2020, Saar said.

In addition to the scores of new users, the company crossed 30 million businesses using the platform. At the end of 2019, Tailor Brands started monetizing its offerings and “grew at a staggering rate,” Saar added. The company yielded triple-digit annual growth in revenue.

To support that growth, the new funding will be used on R&D, to double the team and create additional capabilities and functions. There may also be future acquisition opportunities on the table.

Saar said Tailor Brands is at a point where it can begin leveraging the massive amount of data on small businesses it gathers to help them be proactive rather than reactive, turning the platform into a “consultant of sorts” to guide customers through the next steps of their businesses.

“Users are looking for us to provide them with everything, so we are starting to incorporate more products with the goal of creating an ecosystem, like WeChat, where you don’t need to leave the platform at all to manage your business,” Saar said.

News: Untitled Ventures joins the scramble for Russian & Eastern European startups with a $118M warchest

• July 22, 2021
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Sorry Mr. Putin, but there’s a race on for Russian and Eastern European founders. And right now, those awful capitalists in the corrupt West are starting to out-gun the opposition! But seriously… only the other day a $100 million fund aimed at Russian speaking entrepreneurs appeared, and others are proliferating. Now, London-based Untitled Ventures plans

Sorry Mr. Putin, but there’s a race on for Russian and Eastern European founders. And right now, those awful capitalists in the corrupt West are starting to out-gun the opposition! But seriously… only the other day a $100 million fund aimed at Russian speaking entrepreneurs appeared, and others are proliferating.

Now, London-based Untitled Ventures plans to join their fray with a €100 million / $118M for its second fund to invest in “ambitious deep tech startups with eastern European founders.”

Untitled says it is aiming at entrepreneurs who are looking to relocate their business or have already HQ’ed in Western Europe and the USA. That’s alongside all the other existing Western VCs who are – in my experience – always ready and willing to listen to Russian and Eastern European founders, who are often known for their technical prowess.

Untitled is going to be aiming at B2B, AI, agritech, medtech, robotics, and data management startups with proven traction emerging from the Baltics, CEE, and CIS, or those already established in Western Europe

LPs in the fund include Vladimir Vedeenev, a founder of Global Network Management>. Untitled also claims to have Google, Telegram Messenger, Facebook, Twitch, DigitalOcean, IP-Only, CenturyLinks, Vodafone and TelecomItaly as partners.

Oskar Stachowiak, Untitled Ventures Managing Partner, said: “With over 10 unicorns, €1Bn venture funding in 2020 alone, and success stories like Veeam, Semrush, and Wrike, startups emerging from the fast-growing regions are the best choice to focus on early-stage investment for us. Thanks to the strong STEM focus in the education system and about one million high-skilled developers, we have an ample opportunity to find and support the rising stars in the region.”

Konstantin Siniushin, the Untitled Ventures MP said: “We believe in economic efficiency and at the same time we fulfill a social mission of bringing technological projects with a large scientific component from the economically unstable countries of the former USSR, such as, first of all, Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, but not only in terms of bringing sales to the world market and not only helping them to HQ in Europe so they can get next rounds of investments.”

He added: “We have a great experience accumulated earlier in the first portfolio of the first fund, not just structuring business in such European countries as, for example, Luxembourg, Germany, Great Britain, Portugal, Cyprus and Latvia, but also physically relocating startup teams so that they are perceived already as fully resident in Europe and globally.”

To be fair, it is still harder than it needs to be to create large startups from Eastern Europe, mainly because there is often very little local capital. However, that is changing, with the launch recently of CEE funds such as Vitosha Venture Partners and Launchub Ventures, and the breakout hit from Romania that was UIPath.

The Untitled Ventures team:
• Konstantin Siniushin, a serial tech entrepreneur
• Oskar Stachowiak, experienced fund manager
• Mary Glazkova, PR & Comms veteran
• Anton Antich, early stage investor and an ex VP of Veeam, a Swiss cloud data management company
acquired by Insight Venture Partners for $5bln
• Yulia Druzhnikova, experienced in taking tech companies international
• Mark Cowley, who has worked on private and listed investments within CEE/Russia for over 20 years

Untitled Ventures portfolio highlights – Fund I
• Sizolution: AI-driven size prediction engine, based in Germany
• Pure app – spontaneous and impersonal dating app, based in Portugal
• Fixar Global –  efficient drones for commercial use-cases, based in Latvia,
• E-contenta – based in Poland
• SuitApp – AI based mix-and-match suggestions for fashion retail, based in Singapore
• Sarafan.tech, AI-driven recognition, based in the USA
• Hello, baby – parental assistant, based in the USA
• Voximplant – voice, video and messaging cloud communication platform, based in the USA (exited)

News: Yoobic raises $50M for its chat and communications app app aimed at frontline and service workers

• July 22, 2021
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Slack set the standard in many ways for what knowledge workers want and expect out of a workplace collaboration app these days, but a lot has been left on the table when it comes to frontline workers. Today, one of the software companies that has built a popular app for that frontline crowd to become

Slack set the standard in many ways for what knowledge workers want and expect out of a workplace collaboration app these days, but a lot has been left on the table when it comes to frontline workers. Today, one of the software companies that has built a popular app for that frontline crowd to become a part of the conversation is announcing a funding round that speaks to the opportunity to do more.

Yoobic, which provides an app for frontline and service workers to manage tasks, communicate with each other and management, and also go through training, development and and other e-learning tasks, has picked up $50 million.

Highland Europe led the round, a Series C, with previous investors Felix Capital, Insight Partners, and a family office advised by BNF Capital Limited also participating. (Felix led Yoobic’s Series A, while Insight Partners led the Series B in 2019.) Yoobic is not discussing valuation but from what I understand from a reliable source, it is now between $300 million and $400 million.

The funding comes at a time of strong growth for the company.

Yoobic works with some 300 big brands in 80 countries altogether covering a mammoth 335,000 locations in sectors like retail, hospitality, distribution and manufacturing. Its customers include the likes of the Boots pharmacy chain, Carrefour supermarkets, Lancôme, Lacoste, Logitech, Lidl, Peloton, Puma, Vans, VF Corp, Sanofi, Untuckit, Roots, Canada Goose, Longchamp, Lidl, Zadig & Voltaire, and Athletico.

But that is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s estimated that there are 2.7 billion “deskless” (frontline and service) workers globally, accounting for no less than 80% of the world’s workforce. But here is the shocker: only 1% of IT budgets is currently spent on them. That speaks of huge opportunity for startups to build more here, but only if they (or the workers themselves( can manage to convince those holding the purse strings that it’s worth the investment.

So to that end, the funding will be used to hire more talent, to expand geographically — founded in London, the company is now headquartered in New York — and to expand its product. Specifically, Yoobic plans to build more predictive analytics to improve responsiveness and give more insight to companies about their usage, and to build out more tools to cater to specific verticals in the world of frontline work, such as manufacturing, logistics and transportation, Fabrice Haiat, CEO and co-founder of YOOBIC, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Yoobic started life several years ago with a focus specifically on retail — an area that it was concentrating on as recently as its last round in 2019, providing tools to help with merchandizing, communicating about stock between stores and more. While retail is still a sizeable part of its business, Yoobic saw an opening to expand into a wider pool of verticals with frontline and service employees that had many of the same demands as retail.

That turned out to be a fortunate pivot as the pandemic struck.

“Covid-19 had a big impact on us,” said Haiat, who co-founded the company with brothers Avi and Gilles. “The first two months we were in panic mode. But what happened was that businesses realized that frontline employees were critical to the success of their operations.”

Since Covid hit last year, he said that activity on the platform rose by 200%, and earlier this year it passed 1 million activities per month on its platform. “We are growing like crazy,” Haiat said.

There are a number of reasons why building for frontline workers is important. Roaming round without a fixed desk, spending more time with customers than looking at a screen or in meetings, and generally having different business priorities and practices are just a few of the reasons why software built for the former doesn’t necessarily work for the latter.

There have been a number of companies that have aimed to build services to address that gap — they stretch back years, in fact. And there have been some interesting moves to consolidate in the market among those building some of the more successful tools for people in the field: Crew recently got acquired by Square; ServiceMax acquired Zinc; and Facebook’s Workplace has been on a march to amass some of the world’s biggest companies as customers of its own communications platform with a strong play for frontline workers.

Haiat argues that while all of these are fine and well, none of them understand the full scope of the kinds of tools that those in the field really need. That ranges from practical features (such as a way to handle inventory management), through to features that companies would love to have for their employees as long as they can be delivered in an easy way (such as professional development and training). In that context, the basic communications that all of the current crop of apps for frontline workers offer feel like basic tablestakes.

That close understanding of the gap in the market and what is needed to fix it is one reason why the company has seen such strong growth, as well as interest from investors.

“We’re excited to partner with YOOBIC, which, thanks to the highly impressive team led by Fabrice, Avi and Gilles, has clearly established itself as a leader in the digital workplace space with demonstrable market traction and impressive growth.” said Jean Tardy-Joubert, partner at Highland Europe, in a statement. “While companies have historically focused on digital investments for deskbound employees, the world is becoming distributed and decentralized.  We anticipate a seismic shift that will see huge resources, technology, and capital shifted toward frontline teams.” Tardy-Joubert will be joining the YOOBIC Board with this round.

News: B2B social management platform Oktopost raises $20M growth round with Expedition

• July 22, 2021
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With the pandemic forcing people online, social media use exploded, for obvious reasons. And with that, the opportunity to reach audiences and push messaging. More brand-oriented platforms such as Sprinkler, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite have obviously risen in use, but so did traffic to Oktopost, a much more B2B-oriented proposition. Founded in 2013, Oktopost has only

With the pandemic forcing people online, social media use exploded, for obvious reasons. And with that, the opportunity to reach audiences and push messaging. More brand-oriented platforms such as Sprinkler, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite have obviously risen in use, but so did traffic to Oktopost, a much more B2B-oriented proposition.

Founded in 2013, Oktopost has only ever registered an $800,000 early stage funding, and has run on revenues and profit ever since. Today that changes with a growth funding round of a $20 million minority investment from London-based growth equity firm Expedition Growth Capital.

Oktopost’s schtick is that it is an enterprise-grade platform for B2B marketers to curate content, organize, and manage campaigns for corporate social media accounts, employee advocacy and social selling. It can also handle social listening and analytics. It also boasts native integrations with Adobe’s Marketo, Salesforce’s Pardot, Hubspot; and CRM systems such as Salesforce, and Microsoft Dynamics. Oktopost’s customer include Fujitsu, Mitsubishi Electric, Xerox, SWIFT, ACI Worldwide, ContentSquare, ChargeBee and SUSE.

The above functions have hoved into view with far greater importance as social media users upped their interactions online, and companies needed to, to put it mildly, get their act together asocial media ‘ate the world’ in the last 16 months.

Oktopost says it plans to use the funding to advance its product roadmap, boost customer success, accelerate marketing and sales, and explore strategic acquisitions; and grow its workforce by 50%.
 
Daniel Kushner, co-founder and CEO of Oktopost, said: “Our mission from day one was to establish the first ever B2B social media marketing platform with the ability to measure and quantify the value of social media in terms of lead generation, pipeline influence, customer acquisition, and ultimately ROI… As siloes breakdown between marketing and sales within B2B companies, and as social selling becomes more widespread, we believe Oktopost is uniquely suited to provide the functionality desired.”
 
Oliver Thomas, Managing Partner at Expedition Growth Capital said: “There are a number of social media tools out there catering for B2C companies but we haven’t seen a platform that is specifically tailored to the B2B journey until Oktopost. The ability to manage, track and analyse social activities is increasingly a must-have for B2B sales and marketing organisations. Daniel and Liad have built the best product in the market to serve this need. They have also built a terrific culture and we’re excited to be part of the journey from here.”

Speaking to Kushner I asked him what effect the pandemic had had on the business.

“It’s gone bananas,” he said “Our focus is 100% on B2B organisations. Our platform is divided into corporate social media, so Twitter, LinkedIn company pages, etc. The second is what we call employee advocacy social, where you want your employees to be a part of the corporate brand, with employees sharing on a personal LinkedIn, Twitter accounts, social messages.”

He said that this ecosystem – the platform to support both corporate social and employee advocacy – means they can prove return on investment for customers: “What are they getting from doing all this social? The platform is designed to provide those kind of metrics to show the real business impact of social, the real impact that it has on the business. And not just fluff metrics that you normally get on social.”

News: India’s BlackBuck valued at $1 billion in $67 million fundraise

• July 22, 2021
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India’s trucking system has a big inefficiency problem that continues to drag the economy. BlackBuck, one of the handful of logistics startups that is trying to overhaul this system, has just attained the unicorn status after securing new funds. Tribe Capital, IFC Emerging Asia Fund and VEF led the $67 million Series E financing round

India’s trucking system has a big inefficiency problem that continues to drag the economy. BlackBuck, one of the handful of logistics startups that is trying to overhaul this system, has just attained the unicorn status after securing new funds.

Tribe Capital, IFC Emerging Asia Fund and VEF led the $67 million Series E financing round in the six-year-old startup, valuing it at $1.02 billion (up from about $850 million in 2019 Series D round), BlackBuck chief executive Rajesh Yabaji told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this week. BlackBuck is the 16th Indian startup to become a unicorn.

BlackBuck connects businesses with truck owners and freight operators. It has developed a simplified app for truck drivers in India, who are typically not very literate, to help them accept work and easily navigate to their destination using Google Maps. On the client side, businesses can fire up a similar app to place orders.

About 700,000 truckers and 1.2 million trucks in India today are connected to the platform, which sees over 15 million transactions each month. “India’s truckers did not go truly digital till 2019. Since then, the supply activity has gone up by 20 times,” said Yabaji.

During this period, BlackBuck, too, has transformed considerably. The platform has moved away from relying on call centres for booking orders to an app-based system. Today, Yabaji said the startup has very little reliance left on brokers, who help connect them to truckers in smaller regions.

“India’s supply chain and logistics industry is moving from paper and pencil to digital. BlackBuck’s ability to measure output and productivity growth has streamlined logistical challenges for the industry over a short time frame. Its continued high velocity growth promises to bring even greater transformation to the Indian trucking ecosystem,” said Arjun Sethi, cofounder and partner at Tribe Capital, in a statement. (On a side note, Tribe Capital is in talks to back at least two more Indian startups, according to people with knowledge of the matter.)

This is a developing story. More to follow…

News: Indonesian B2B marketplace GudangAda raises more than $100M in new funding

• July 22, 2021
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GudangAda, a Jakarta-based marketplace that brings wholesalers closer to retail stores and other buyers, announced it has closed a Series B of more than $100 million. The company says the round was oversubscribed, passing its initial target of $75 million. The funding was led by Asia Partners and Falcon Edge, with participation from Sequoia Capital

GudangAda founder and chief executive officer Stevensang

GudangAda, a Jakarta-based marketplace that brings wholesalers closer to retail stores and other buyers, announced it has closed a Series B of more than $100 million. The company says the round was oversubscribed, passing its initial target of $75 million. The funding was led by Asia Partners and Falcon Edge, with participation from Sequoia Capital India, Alpha JWC and Wavemaker Partners.

This brings GudangAda’s total raised so far to about $135 million. Its last funding was a $25.4 million Series A last year, led by Sequoia Capital India and JWC Alpha Ventures.

Founded in January 2019, GudangAda is now used by half a million SMEs and covers 500 cities in Indonesia. Before raising its Series B, it had already grown to $6 billion in net merchandise value on $35 million of funding. Principal manufacturers and distributors on the platform range include food products company Sido Muncul, seasoning maker Sasa and British multinational consumer goods group Reckitt Benckiser.

Founder and chief executive officer Stevensang spent more than 25 years in Indonesia’s fast-moving consumer goods and retail industries before starting GudangAda. Over the past 10 years, Stevensang told TechCrunch that logistics costs in Indonesia have increased to among the highest in the world, impacting the whole supply chain, especially SME buyers.

GudangAda helps lower operational costs by connecting principal manufacturers, distributors and retailers, and handling almost all aspects of B2B buying, including deliveries. Its mobile app includes a point-of-sale system and it can also be used to manage orders, track logistics and make payments.

Stevensang said GudangAda focuses on several things to make buying inventory easier for SMEs. One is optimizing inventory turnover to increase working capital for businesses on the platform. The company also provides market research and data for products and gives retailers a large selection of goods. Being connected to multiple suppliers on the same platform also lets small retail stores that sell a large selection of items, but don’t have the buying volume to order directly from distributors, to purchase inventory at competitive costs.

To keep logistics costs down, GudangAda partners with third-party vehicle and warehouse providers to build its coverage throughout Indonesia. For its logistics partners, it provides transportation and warehouse management systems to help them digitize their operations.

GudangAda also partners with banks to provide working capital for SMEs, enabling them to apply for loans using their data on the platform.

The funding will be used to expand GudangAda’s product categories, which now include fast-moving consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, packaging, homeware and stationery. It also plans to develop AI-based tools that can provide personalized recommendations for merchant customers. For example, during COVID-19, the platform suggested how much disinfectants a store should stock.

In a statement, Falcon Edge co-founder Navroz D. Udwadia said, “GudangAda is definitively the largest SME e-commerce marketplace in Indonesia with best-in-class metrics. Our research and conversations with stakeholders (principals, wholesalers and retailers) has given us confidence on GudangAda’s distinctive ROI and value addition to the entire ecosystem.”

News: Indonesia “sea-to-table” platform Aruna hooks $35M led by Prosus and East Ventures Growth Fund

• July 22, 2021
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When Aruna’s founders first met at university, they wanted to find a way to use their studies in information technology to help family members who were running small fisheries. Indonesia is one of the world’s largest fisheries producers, but the industry is very fragmented. This means fisheries, especially small ones, deal with fluctuations in demand

When Aruna’s founders first met at university, they wanted to find a way to use their studies in information technology to help family members who were running small fisheries. Indonesia is one of the world’s largest fisheries producers, but the industry is very fragmented. This means fisheries, especially small ones, deal with fluctuations in demand and price instability. Aruna was created to bring them closer to customers like restaurants and exporters, the way farm-to-table startups are aggregating the agricultural supply chain.

Aruna announced today it has raised $35 million in Series A funding led by Prosus Ventures and East Ventures Growth Fund, with participation from SIG and returning investors including AC Ventures, MDI and Vertex Ventures. Aruna says this is the largest Series A investment to date in Indonesia’s agritech and maritime sector.

The company works primarily with small fisheries (or ones that have boats with about one to two metric tonnes of capacity) and focuses on sustainability, helping suppliers adhere to the United Nations Goal 14’s targets. These include preventing overfishing, protecting coastal ecosystems and giving small-scale fisheries access to more resources and markets.

Aruna was founded in 2016 by Farid Naufal Aslam, Indraka Fadhlillah and Utari Octavianty, who met while studying information technology administration and management at Telkom University. Fadhlillah and Octavianty came from families in the fishing industry, and the three wanted to create something that would solve some of the challenges they faced.

“This was the main idea, but the bigger thing we saw at the time was the advantage of Indonesia’s position as a large agricultural country with big potential in the seafood industry,” Aslam told TechCrunch.

According to the World Bank, Indonesia is the world’s second largest fisheries producer. The sector creates about $4.1 billion in annual export earnings and supports more than 7 million jobs.

But Aruna’s founding team saw two major problems while analyzing coastal communities. The first one was market access and getting fair prices for seafood. The second was access to working capital.

To solve the first issue, Aruna was built to shorten the supply chain, which Aslam said can have six or seven layers between fisheries and buyers like restaurants, markets or exporters.

Buyers make purchase orders through the platform, which are then distributed to fishery communities that Aruna organizes to focus on particular types of seafood. This helps them predict demand, guarantee return business and prevent overfishing.

Aruna also built a logistics network that includes more than 45 collection sites, or warehouses where seafood is delivered by fisheries for quality checks, processing and packaging. Aruna’s warehouses are a combination of facilities that it owns or runs with partners. Deliveries are performed by third-party logistics providers.

The platform currently has about 20 product categories and will use its funding to expand into more. Its commodities include high-value products like lobster, which are shipped by exporters to markets like Malaysia, Singapore, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Canada and the United States.

One of Aruna’s main requirements for fisheries on the platform is sticking to its sustainability process. According to the World Bank, one of the biggest issues facing Indonesia fisheries is overfishing, which hurts marine biodiversity. Aruna team members work with fisheries to standardize their equipment so they comply with government regulations and chose locations that are not overfished.

By focusing on a few types of seafood each, fisheries that work with Aruna are better able to ensure the quality and traceability of their products, and manage pricing fluctuations.

The second problem Aruna is working on is lack of access to working capital. To help fisheries get low interest, collateral-free loans for equipment and other things they need for their businesses, Aruna partners with financial institutions and fintech companies. When an Aruna fishery applies for a loan, the platform is able to provide transaction data collected on the platform for credit scoring.

The company also announced today that it has appointed Budiman Goh as its president, and Octavianty as its chief sustainability officer. Its funding will be used to expand to new areas in Indonesia, hiring data analytics and tech development, including IoT devices to help perform quality checks.

Aruna plans to focus on Indonesia for the near future because of the large number of fisheries in the country.

“Currently we have 21,000 fishermen on the platform, yet there are about 2.7 million fishermen in Indonesia, so there is a lot of room to grow,” Aslam said.

In a statement, Sachin Bhanot, Prosus Ventures’ head of Southeast Asia investment said, “Having built a robust supply chain and technology infrastructure steeped with deep industry knowledge and expertise, we believe Aruna is uniquely positioned to service the growing global demand for sustainable fishery product, while supporting the livelihood of local fishermen.”