Monthly Archives: July 2021

News: Blossom Capital lures Alex Lim from Silicon Valley to join the European tech boom

• July 28, 2021
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Alex Lim, a British-born VC based in the Bay Area who invested in Hopin, UiPath, Discord, and many other unicorns has decided to up sticks and leave Sand Hill Road behind for Blossom Capital in London. Blossom is fast making a name for itself both in Europe and internationally, having invested in breakout hits like

Alex Lim, a British-born VC based in the Bay Area who invested in Hopin, UiPath, Discord, and many other unicorns has decided to up sticks and leave Sand Hill Road behind for Blossom Capital in London. Blossom is fast making a name for itself both in Europe and internationally, having invested in breakout hits like Tines, Duffel, and Checkout.com.

Lim, the youngest-ever Partner promotion at IVP, leaves after six years to take on the role of Managing Partner at Blossom. Blossom founder Ophelia Brown will remain as Co-Managing Partner.

Despite being born in the UK, Lim has spent his entire adult life in the US, so brings an interesting mix of UK/European culture, combined with West Coast savvy.

“Alex is an exceptional investor and adored by anyone he works with,” said Blossom founder Ophelia Brown. “He builds strong personal connections and is relentlessly committed to founders, which makes him a perfect fit for our team at Blossom. He shares our ethos and approach, which is to put founders at the center of everything we do. Alex brings with him both an incredible level of knowledge and expertise in building technology businesses, as well as a strong network in the US, which our companies will benefit from immensely.”

Lim started his career in investment banking at Credit Suisse, and became IVP’s youngest Partner in its 41-year history.

He told me: “I was promoted last October, to partner. I was the youngest partner in the history of the firm. I’ve been making European investments for a couple of years now, and that’s how I met Ophelia.”

He told me that Blossom would be heading more towards Series A investing in the future: “I think it’s the right strategy for Europe. A European Series A fund is like a very attractive market in my perspective, and it’s a little bit underserved by the venture community. There are great companies out there. Opportunity is very fragmented across cities. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity for our style of investing, getting out on the road and meeting entrepreneurs in person.”

He admitted “it’s a big step to take on a new managing partner. So we’re entering a new chapter.”

He added that Europe is now ripe for bigger companies and investors: “There’s been a big change over the last 12 months. Some of the outcomes that you’ve seen over the last few months have been just on a different level to what the European is experience has been before, with huge companies emerging like UIPath and Wise.”

Blossom Capital has also appointed Tatiana Chopova, formerly of McKinsey and Company, Insead and ALPInvest, as Operating Partner, and Kim Goddard as Talent Partner, following his roles in talent acquisition at NuBank, Atlassian and Funding Circle. 

News: Indian automobile marketplace Droom valued at $1.2 billion in $200 million pre-IPO funding

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An online marketplace for automobiles has become the latest Indian startup to attain the coveted unicorn status. Gurgaon-headquartered Droom said on Wednesday it has raised $200 million in what it described as a pre-IPO growth funding round. The new investment valued the seven-year-old startup at $1.2 billion, up from about $500 million in October 2018.

An online marketplace for automobiles has become the latest Indian startup to attain the coveted unicorn status.

Gurgaon-headquartered Droom said on Wednesday it has raised $200 million in what it described as a pre-IPO growth funding round. The new investment valued the seven-year-old startup at $1.2 billion, up from about $500 million in October 2018.

57 Stars, Seven Train Ventures and several existing investors financed the new round, said the startup, which counts Toyota and Lightbox among its early backers and has raised about $342 million to date, according to records on insight platform Tracxn.

Droom operates a marketplace in India to help people buy and sell used multi-category vehicles such as cars and motorbikes. The startup provides verified listings for buyers along with tools to view, schedule, negotiate and communicate with the seller. Sellers are provided with tools to manage their listings and estimate prices and dispute issues.

“Droom’s current annual run-rate is $1.7 billion for GMV and $54 million for net revenue. The company remains on track to touch a GMV of $2 billion and a net Revenue of $65 million in CY2021,” it said in a brief statement.

“With the current scale, technology-oriented business, and operational efficiency Droom is nearing profitability.”

The startup, which competes with other Indian unicorns including Spinny and Cars24, said it is working to file for an IPO and list on either Nasdaq or in India next year.

“Over the past 7 years, we have invested millions of dollars and thousands of human hours to build a full technology-based end-to-end transactional marketplace for buying and selling of automobiles online,” said Sandeep Aggarwal, founder and chief executive of Droom, in a statement.

“We have developed the complete technology-based machinery starting from first-mile services such as OBV, ECO, and History to mid-mile services like loan & insurance and last-mile services like doorstep delivery. Droom has been on a steady growth trajectory after Covid. While automobile is the largest retail category, it is the least penetrated online. In a post-pandemic world, we expect automobile buying and selling to shift online rapidly.”

Droom is the 17th Indian startup to become a unicorn as high-profile investors double down on their bets in the world’s second largest internet market.

News: Ivorian fintech Julaya raises $2M to digitize business payments in Francophone Africa

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Julaya enables companies to streamline their accounting and improve their operational efficiency by digitizing payments to workers and suppliers instead of relying on cash.

There are over 1 billion mobile money accounts globally. Africa leads the way in transaction value and volume thanks to M-Pesa, largely used in East Africa. Other regions across the continent are also growing fast.

In 2019, West Africa reported the most live mobile money services in any region, with 56 million active accounts. In Ivory Coast, one of Francophone Africa’s largest mobile money markets, 75% of the population own a mobile money account, compared to 20% who own bank accounts. The difference is staggering and clearly shows the region’s huge appetite for the service.

While telecom operators have largely dominated mobile money services across most of sub-Saharan Africa, a few startups are trying to change the mobile money experience for customers. Ivory Coast-based fintech startup Julaya is one such company, and today, it announced a $2 million pre-Series A funding to expand its products across West Africa.

Julaya was founded in 2018 by Mathias Léopoldie and Charles Talbot. Before launching Julaya, they worked at French payment fintech LemonWay on their service in Mali and Burkina Faso.

Léopoldie told TechCrunch that the experience introduced them to how mobile money worked across Francophone Africa. LemonWay acts as a payment solution for marketplaces. So, while working on expanding the fintech’s service in both countries, the pair noticed the massive potential businesses had to reach the unbanked via the large consumer penetration of telecom operators.

Julaya was launched to digitize trade payments but started in the Ivory Coast instead of Mali and Burkina Faso. The platform enables companies to streamline their accounting and improve their operational efficiency by digitizing payments to workers and suppliers instead of relying on cash.

The company helps African businesses and institutions disburse payments to mobile money and mobile banking wallets. It achieves this by working with telecom operators and other fintech startups in the region.

“Mobile money is coming to a mature stage where business and public institution use-cases provide new growth opportunities for the sector. The pandemic has opened up minds about the urge to digitize payments. Fintech competition in West Africa is making digital finance more affordable for consumers, and technical integrations with telecom operators are becoming more reliable,” Talbot said in a statement. 

Yet, these partnerships haven’t come without their own share of challenges. For one, payments technology in Francophone Africa remains quite fragmented, and APIs from telecoms are still burgeoning and somewhat unreliable.

Léopoldie added that challenges come from distribution channels, making it difficult for the company to sell en masse at a cheap cost, as well as from the untrustworthiness of businesses toward digitized payments.  

“In Ivory Coast, a wire transfer takes between one to three days, and you always have to check with your bank branch as a customer. … Businesses do not trust digital experiences as they often have shortcomings, and educating the market bears a high cost on acquisition. Then, talents that have a startup mindset are still difficult to find,” Léopoldie said of some of the challenges facing the three-year-old startup.

Despite this, the startup, which has an R&D and technical team in France, has bagged customers from SMBs and large corporates to government institutions. The company says it’s currently processing over $1.5 million monthly for 50 of these customers, including Jumia, SODECI, Ministry of Education, Ivory Coast and the World Bank.

Julaya closed a pre-seed investment of $250,000 in 2018 and a seed investment of $550,000 a year later, all from angel investors. But the company has introduced VC firms in its pre-Series A round. They include corporate venture capital firms Orange Ventures and MFS Africa Frontiers; VC firms Saviu Ventures, Launch Africa and 50 Partners Capital; and some angel investors in Africa and Europe. Julaya will use the investment to broaden its market share in Ivory Coast and launch digital payment products and expand across West Africa.  

More than 20 million people use Orange as a mobile money service across 15 African countries. The telecom operator also recently launched a mobile banking platform in Ivory Coast and has surpassed 500,000 users. Thus, what’s the rationale behind this strategic investment, which marks its third check in an African fintech startup after South Africa’s Yoco and Senegal’s SudPay?

“Fintech’s environment in Africa is distinguished by its competitiveness and strong dynamism. Orange Group, through its technology investment fund, intends to participate in this boom by supporting fintechs such as Julaya. The goal is to target local technology champions at the service of the transition to a more digital and responsible world,” said Habib Bamba, the director of Transformation, digital and media at Orange Ivory Coast.

Orange, other telecom operators, fintechs and banks remain big competitors to Julaya. So how does it plan to stay on top of people’s minds across the region? Léopoldie thinks that focusing on the best user experience might do the trick.

“This sounds like an overheard statement, but we understand that what the customer values most is reliable customer support and a predictable and smooth online experience, for instance, a reliable platform with very little downtime,” he said. “Even if you only have a 90% success rate on your transactions, as long as you give this information in a transparent communication to the customer, they will trust you.”

News: Shikho, an edtech startup focused on Bangladesh’s students, gets $1.3M seed

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In Bangladesh, students often rely on after school learning centers for study help or test preparation, but many of the best ones are concentrated in major cities. Edtech startup Shikho was created to make supplementary education more accessible and affordable. The company announced today it has closed a $1.3 million seed round co-led by returning

In Bangladesh, students often rely on after school learning centers for study help or test preparation, but many of the best ones are concentrated in major cities. Edtech startup Shikho was created to make supplementary education more accessible and affordable. The company announced today it has closed a $1.3 million seed round co-led by returning investor LearnStart (the seed fund of edtech investment firm Learn Capital) and Anchorless Bangladesh. 

The round also included participation from Wavemaker Partners and Ankur Nagpal, founder and chief executive officer of online course platform Teachable. Shikho’s last round of funding was $275,000 in pre-seed financing last year from LearnStart and strategic angel investors. 

Founded in April 2019, Shikho is focused on grades 9, 10, 11 and 12, with plans to introduce content for grades 6 up to university level and continuous education. Its learning material, created by educators and subject experts, is based on the Bangladeshi National Curriculum. To keep students engaged, it uses gamification techniques, like points, leaderboards and virtual awards. 

Shikho was founded in April 2019 by CEO Shahir Chowdhury, who previously worked in finance and business, including as a director at HSBC UK’s Private Bank, and chief operating officer Zeeshan Zakaria, who also worked in finance before becoming a mathematics teacher. 

Both grew up in Dhaka before moving to the United Kingdom, where they went to university. Chowdhury told TechCrunch that even while working in finance, his goal was to launch a socially impactful business in Bangladesh. 

At first, Chowdhury looked at fintech because of his career experience, but realized there were already many players focused on financial inclusion in Bangladesh, like bKash. He started thinking about education–Chowdhury’s father is a retired professor and his mother still teaches high school. Then by coincidence, he worked on a client report about the emergence of Indian and Chinese edtech startups, like Byju’s and Toppr. 

“I tried to understand what edtech was and why it was working in those markets and why it didn’t exist in Bangladesh,” said Chowdhury. “When I looked at that closely, there was no reason for it not to exist in Bangladesh. From an macroeconomic perspective, you have all the elements you need. You have a very large population, about 165 million people, and half of that is under the age of 25.”

Chowdhury reached out to Zakaria to lead Shikho’s academic programming. Shikho’s goal is to find more engaging and effective ways to teach students material from the Bangladesh National Curriculum. 

“Not much has changed since my dad was in grade 10 in terms of the syllabus,” said Zakaria. “I’m not a politician, so I can’t bring about change there, but I can change how it’s delivered. We deliver the curriculum in a way that has never been seen before in terms of the pedagogical experience.” 

Shikho launched about a year before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but that didn’t change its approach to product development because it was always meant to be an online learning platform. 

The company works with educators to create content, including animated videos that break down topics into short segments of about six minutes each to help students learn at their own pace. Each video is supplemented with digital resources called smart notes to replace the guidebooks many students buy for studying, and practice questions with detailed solutions.

Shikho’s main video content is pre-recorded, but it will also launch live classes for its app and web portal in about six weeks. The company’s new funding will allow it to scale-up content production, including an app for parents. 

One of the biggest challenges for online learning platforms is keeping students motivated. Chowdhury said Shikho’s gamification system was inspired by the Nike Run Club app. Similar to how Nike Run Club users get points every time they go on a run, Shikho gives students points when they log in, do a test or watch a video. The points can be collected for milestones ranging from beginner to “legend,” and special badges are awarded for accomplishments like finishing a test quickly and accurately. 

The point system also feeds into a leaderboard, so students can see how many points they have compared to other Shikho users at their school, or on the entire app. 

The app is free to use for seven days. One of the company’s plans for its new funding is to launch more freemium content to increase user conversions into paying customers. Chowdhury says that paying users have high engagement rates, typically spending about 45 to 50 minutes daily in the app. Shikho plans to double-down on its user acquisition strategy, including offline sales teams in front of schools, at the end of the year after launching its app for parents. 

“Students are the users and the actual customers are their parents, so we’re conscious that we’re going to have to flip communication to the parents,” said Chowdhury. “That’s part of what this funding round is for.” 

In statement about investment, Anchorless Bangladesh founding partner and CEO Rahat Ahmed said, “Bangladesh has one of the largest allocations of private education expenditure as a percentage of disposable income in the world, but lags behind countries like India and Indonesia when it comes to edtech funding. The market is primed for growth and we believe the team at Shikho is well-fit to lead the charge and take education to the next level.” 

News: Greywing launches Crew Change to help shipping companies navigate COVID-19 regulations

• July 28, 2021
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For fleet managers, managing shipping crew changes across different countries is an elaborate process even in the best of times—and now is definitely not the best of times. Greywing, a Y Combinator-backed platform for automating maritime operations, launched a new solution today that it describes as an industry-first. Called Crew Change, it is used to

For fleet managers, managing shipping crew changes across different countries is an elaborate process even in the best of times—and now is definitely not the best of times. Greywing, a Y Combinator-backed platform for automating maritime operations, launched a new solution today that it describes as an industry-first. Called Crew Change, it is used to help shipping companies manage testing, quarantine and other COVID-19 regulations for their crew members.

Crew Change draws on data from S5 Agency World, a global port agency, to keep on top of quarantine, testing and vaccination requirements, which are constantly changing. Greywing co-founder and chief executive officer Nick Clarke says Crew Change can potentially save fleet managers millions of dollars by streamlining crew changes, finding the most cost-effective flights for transporting crew, planning routes (or rerouting if necessary) and reducing delays, which have a trickle-down effect on the rest of the supply chain.

Greywing’s other solutions help fleet operators manage important tasks, like assessing sea routes for piracy risks and transporting crew to ships. Clarke told TechCrunch in an email that the company was originally created to help the maritime industry to mitigate risks in the Gulf of Guinea and offshore Somalia, which have high rates of piracy, by delivering rapid intelligence about those shipping lanes.

“We discovered that by going beyond this, we could deliver intelligence on where their crew could disembark to solve what was top of mind for seafarers—getting home to their families,” he said.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, Greywing started getting requests from clients who urgently needed help to manage crew changes. “They had personnel trapped on vessels unable to get on and off all over the world. My co-founder Hrishi [Olickel] and I examined the problem and seeing the growing complexity of global lockdowns, realized it was a problem that was here to stay.”

Crew managers have to stay on top of changing immigration restrictions in hundreds of countries and thousands of ports around the world, Clarke added. To complicate things further, many crews include members of different nationalities, who are often subject to different restrictions.

Much of the crew change process is analog. For example, a manager of a vessel chartered to a third-party may only find out its next destination by emailing the ship’s captain. Crew changes are often planned through spreadsheets, and flight bookings are done through email or phone.

“Even before the pandemic, crew change management was a classic problem that has always been hard to navigate, but with a few more levels of consideration added to that data at random, it became totally impractical for even a team of humans to make sense of,” said Clarke.

Greywing was able to create Crew Change by making small changes to its piracy risk mitigation methodology, and it is now integrated into CRY4, Greywing’s risk reporting solution.

The company worked with S5 Agency World because it “is regarded as one of the leading global port agencies which services port offices worldwide,” Clarke said. “What that means is their data is able to give us a clear picture of what’s happening on the ground so shipping owners can better predict and manage what’s happening on the seas.” Crew Change also uses data from 30 other public and private data APIs and is planning to add another 20 data sources.

Thanks to its wide range of data sources, Clarke said that Crew Change is able to update information about visa, quarantine and testing requirements in as little as 15 minutes (or a day for more complex data).

News: Cassie the bipedal robot runs a 5K

• July 27, 2021
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You may well recognize Cassie as the basis of Agility Robotics’ delivery bot, Digit. If you’ve been following the tech’s progression at all, however, you no doubt know that it started life as the ostrich-inspired Cassie. The robot is all legs and not much else. In addition to fueling Agility’s commercial ambitions, the robot has

You may well recognize Cassie as the basis of Agility Robotics’ delivery bot, Digit. If you’ve been following the tech’s progression at all, however, you no doubt know that it started life as the ostrich-inspired Cassie. The robot is all legs and not much else.

In addition to fueling Agility’s commercial ambitions, the robot has proven a solid platform for exploring bipedal location. Announced by Oregon State University professor Jonathan Hunt in 2017, Cassie was created with the aim of a $1 million grant from the DoD — a pretty familiar story in the robotics world.

Today, a team from the Dynamics Robotics Laboratory in OSU’s College of Engineering highlighted the ways they’re continuing to push Cassie to its bipedal limits. The team says the robot was able to run a 5K untethered, on a single charge. Cassie’s not going to beat any human world records anytime soon, but the 53-minute (and three second) run was still an impressive exhibition for the tech.

The robot’s run time included around 6.5 minutes of troubleshooting, as the team dealt with an overheated computer and a botched turn that knocked it off its legs.

“Cassie is a very efficient robot because of how it has been designed and built, and we were really able to reach the limits of the hardware and show what it can do,” Ph.D. student Jeremy Dao said in a statement.

According to the team, Cassie essentially taught itself to run using a deep reinforcement learning algorithm, which allowed the system to figure out how to stay upright by shifting its balance while running.

“Deep reinforcement learning is a powerful method in AI that opens up skills like running, skipping and walking up and down stairs,” undergrad student Yesh Godse adds.

In May of this year, the OSU team also demonstrated how Cassie can walk up and down stairs without the aid of lidar or on-board cameras.

News: Daily Crunch: No-code startup Bubble pops with $100 million Series A round

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Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 27, 2021. Today is a good day not only because the U.S. women’s national soccer team is heading to the Olympics quarter finals (shoutout Gotham’s Carli Lloyd!), but also because Danny Crichton just published an incredibly interesting EC-1 digging into RapidSOS. Danny has previously written extensively about disaster tech, a growth industry of sorts given the changing climate. OK, now to tech news! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Edtech’s shifting center of gravity: The debris is still settling after China’s recent regulatory changes impacted edtech, on-demand and music-streaming businesses in the country. Natasha Mascarenhas dug into the edtech market, asking investors where they planned to invest in the future. The gist is that while China was once the center of the edtech universe, it may rapidly lose that crown to a more global set of edtech hotspots.
• Africa’s burgeoning startup ecosystem: TechCrunch’s long-running dive into the Q2 venture capital market is coming to a close this week, but not before we investigated the African startup market, a growing space that is attracting more and more investor and media attention. Some big exits certainly haven’t hurt. But while capital raised by African startups is growing rapidly, some blank spaces still exist. Let’s see if investors pounce.
• No-code is still super hot: If you want to have a weird day on Twitter, tweet that you don’t like no-code as a concept. You will get many notes from folks who disagree. That passion among the hoi polloi is also reflected in investor interest. This time ‘round the funding tree it’s Bubble, which just closed a $100 million round to help anyone “begin building modern web applications using a click-and-drag interface that can connect data sources and other software together in one fluid interface,” per our reporting.

Startups/VC

Kicking off today’s startup notes, let’s talk about stock. Startup shares, to be precise. Mostly investors get preferred shares, because they can demand better equity as they are bringing capital to the table. Founders and staff tend to get common stock. Which, as the name implies, is not as good as preferred. But there’s a venture capital firm in Boston called Pillar VC that buys common stock in its investments. One of its investors, Jamie Goldstein, wrote an essay for TechCrunch sharing what he’s learned from the process. It’s worth reading.

Before we get into funding rounds, NowRx CEO and co-founder Cary Breese wrote an op-ed for TechCrunch discussing the delivery market. Given how much money is flowing into so-called instant grocery startups, it’s also worth your time.

• $200M for sensors as a service: That’s the news from Wiliot, which has just put a bunch of SoftBank Vision Fund 2 money into its pockets to turn its “ultra thin and light” processor that “runs on ambient power” into a service that it can sell to others. Very cool.
• Meet the latest crypto unicorn: It’s Fireblocks — with its new $310 million round, the company is now worth $2.2 billion. What does it do? According to our own reporting, Fireblocks “aims to offer financial institutions an all-in-one platform to run a digital asset business, providing them with infrastructure to store, transfer and issue digital assets.” Between this and the recent FTX deal, it’s clear that there is still ample investor appetite for continued crypto wagers.
• 1Password raises $100M more: Accel is at it again, putting big checks into largely self-sustaining businesses This time it’s a double down on 1Password, a software service that helps individuals and businesses alike create and manage supersecure passwords. The company competes with LastPass, among other companies. The company is now worth $2 billion and recently crossed the $120 million ARR milestone. That’s pretty darn good, even if the company’s revenue multiple implies that it is no longer growing at startup speeds. (How about an S-1? Anyone?)
• Oova wants to help people conceive: The startup just landed a $1.2 million round to help folks figure out their optimum fertility window and provide information that their healthcare provider may be able to use to confirm ovulation. There are two groups of people in the world. Those who have not dealt with fertility-related issues, and those who have. For the latter set, Oona’s newly released kit and goals are good news.

The RapidSOS EC-1

According to one estimate, Americans place 240 million 911 calls each year.

Sending emergency services to the right location sounds straightforward, but each call is routed through one of thousands of call centers known as public safety answering points (PSAPs).

“Every 911 center is very different and they are as diverse and unique as the communities that they serve,” said Karin Marquez, senior director of public safety at RapidSOS.

One PSAP that serves New York City is a 450,000-square-foot, blast-resistant cube set on nine acres, but “you have agencies in rural America that have one person working 24/7 and they’re there to answer three calls a day,” Marquez noted.

Founded eight years ago, RapidSOS processes more than 150 million emergencies each year across approximately 5,000 PSAPs. The company’s technology helps call centers integrate requests from cell phones, landlines and IoT devices.

“Its technology is almost certainly integrated into the smartphone you’re carrying and many of the devices you have lying around,” Managing Editor Danny Crichton writes in a four-part series that studies the company’s origins:

• Part 1: The early years and why a consumer app company turned to govtech and integrated services for technology and device companies.
• Part 2: How RapidSOS made its pivot and why its current business model has performed so well.
• Part 3: To transform 911 services, RapidSOS established dozens of corporate and individual partnerships.
• Part 4: Examines the future of 911 and RapidSOS in light of limited infrastructure funding.

“I’ve honestly never met a company like RapidSOS with so many signed partnerships,” says Danny, who initially wrote about the firm six years ago.

“It’s closed dozens of partnerships and business development deals, and with some of the biggest names in tech. How does it do it? This story is about how it built a successful BD engine.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

TechCrunch is about to dive into a whole mess of Big Tech earnings in a moment, so we’ll be brief regarding Big Tech news today. Here’s a rapid-fire rundown:

• Shopify allows merchants to sell NFTs directly through their storefronts: The popular Canadian e-commerce platform supporting NFTs could be a boon to their broader adoption.
• Instagram now supports 60-second videos on Reels, its TikTok clone: Every major social network wants a piece of TikTok’s magic. Let’s see if Instagram can capture some of that sparkle.
• Google TV mobile app redesign adds new services and recommendations: Google TV is the updated Chromecast interface, if you were wondering. The redesign includes Rotten Tomatoes scores, just in case you want some extra input on what to watch.
• Pinterest rolls out new features that let creators make money from pins: More shoppable content at Pinterest? Not a surprise, but perhaps something that will allow the company to continue posting above-expectations revenue growth.

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News: iPhone sales fuel Apple’s Wall Street-beating Q3

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Another excellent quarter for Apple, as the company posted $81.4 billion in revenue. That’s a 36% year-over-year jump for the company, besting Wall Street estimates of $73.3 billion by a considerable margin. “Our record June quarter operating performance included new revenue records in each of our geographic segments, double-digit growth in each of our product

Another excellent quarter for Apple, as the company posted $81.4 billion in revenue. That’s a 36% year-over-year jump for the company, besting Wall Street estimates of $73.3 billion by a considerable margin.

“Our record June quarter operating performance included new revenue records in each of our geographic segments, double-digit growth in each of our product categories, and a new all-time high for our installed base of active devices,” CFO Luca Maestri said in a release. “We generated $21 billion of operating cash flow, returned nearly $29 billion to our shareholders during the quarter, and continued to make significant investments across our business to support our long-term growth plans.”

Some strong figures for the company all around here, but it was iPhone sales and subscription services that continued to lead the way — a familiar story for anyone who’s followed the company the last several quarters.

iPhone sales increased from $26 billion to $39.5 billion, on the continued strength of the company’s long-waited push into linewide 5G, while services rose from $13.1 billion to $17.5 billion for the quarter. Apple has continued to grow its services offerings, which now includes Music, TV+, iCloud, Arcade, News+ and Fitness+. The company clearly sees the subscription portfolio as the future of its revenue model.

Greater China proved a strong market for the company in the third fiscal quarter. The company posted $14.76 billion in sales for the region, a more than 50% increase over the same time last year. The Americas region, meanwhile, rose from $ 27 billion to $35.89.

In the earnings report, CEO Tim Cook made reference to pandemic-related issues, which highlighting broader societal focuses for the company.

“This quarter, our teams built on a period of unmatched innovation by sharing powerful new products with our users, at a time when using technology to connect people everywhere has never been more important,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “We’re continuing to press forward in our work to infuse everything we make with the values that define us — by inspiring a new generation of developers to learn to code, moving closer to our 2030 environment goal, and engaging in the urgent work of building a more equitable future.

The company once again declined to offer guidance, owing to uncertainties during the pandemic. On a followup call with investors, however, Maestri noted, “We expect revenue growth to be lower than our June Quarter.” The CFO cited various issues including foreign exchange rates with the U.S. dollar, a slow down in the growth rate of services and continued supply chain issues for its hardware offerings.

 

News: Alphabet crushes Q2 earnings estimates as Google Cloud cuts losses, grows 54%

• July 27, 2021
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Today after the bell amidst a deluge of major technology company earnings reports, Alphabet reported its own second-quarter performance.

Today after the bell amidst a deluge of major technology company earnings reports, Alphabet reported its own second-quarter performance. The search-and-services company posted revenues of $61.9 billion in the June 30, 2021 quarter, net income of $18.5 billion, and earnings per share of $27.26. Those figures work out to top-line growth of 62%, and net income expansion of 166%. Naturally Google is currently being compared to pandemic-impacted Q2 2020 results, but its gains are noteworthy regardless.

The Android-maker’s results trounced expectations, with the street only expecting Google’s parent company to post $56 billion in total top line and $19.14 in earnings per share. Notably Alphabet shares are up around a single percentage point after hours, mirroring a similarly muted market reaction to better than officially anticipated earnings results from Microsoft.

Alphabet is a company with a number of moving parts, so let’s unpack the numbers a little bit.

YouTube’s reported revenue of $7 billion is up 84% year over year. This feels like a strong result, frankly, given YouTube’s age. That said, your humble servant wonders how much heavier the ad load can get on YouTube before a rival service steals some of its oxygen. In a separate note, YouTube disclosed that its YouTube Shorts product has “surpassed 15 billion global daily views,” up 131% from the 6.5 billion global daily views that it detailed in March. (Everyone wants to eat TikTok, it seems.)

Google Cloud reported revenue of $4.6 billion, up 54% year over year. That growth rate is slightly above what Microsoft posted for its Azure cloud unit. However, as the Microsoft effort is considered to be larger than Google’s own in revenue terms, investors might have anticipated a larger growth ∆ than what Mountain View just detailed. Google Cloud cut its operating loss from $1.4 billion in the year-ago Q2 to a far more modest $591 million deficit in its most recent quarter. That’s honestly rather good.

On the Other Bets side of things, revenues rose! But so did losses. The skunkworks group at Alphabet posted $192 million in revenue, up from $148 million in the year-ago period. But the collection of trials and errors lost $1.4 billion in the quarter, up from $1.1 billion in the corresponding year-ago period.

Naturally with operating income of $19.4 billion inclusive of its Other Bets cost center, Alphabet can well afford to continue spending on what projects that may in time generate material future revenues.

Still, everything at Alphabet that is not Google’s core offerings (search, YouTube, etc.) lost money in the quarter:

The real story, however, is in the epic gains that Alphabet posted in operating income from Q2 2020 to Q2 2021. Just look at that acceleration in operating income! It’s a somewhat befuddling result in terms of its quality.

What else to take note of? Google’s share repurchase program has been modified some, but not in a manner that should impact regular investors. So we can leave Alphabet’s quarter content that the company did well enough to defend its market cap of just over $1.75 trillion, even if it did not manage to add too much to the figure in after-hours trading thus far.

It’s a great time to be a huge tech company.

News: Activision Blizzard workers will stage a walkout after ‘abhorrent’ response to harassment suit

• July 27, 2021
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One of the world’s biggest video game companies is reeling after a state discrimination and sexual harassment suit kicked off a firestorm of controversy within the company. California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued Activision Blizzard last week, alleging that the company fostered a “breeding ground for harassment and discrimination against women.” Following a

One of the world’s biggest video game companies is reeling after a state discrimination and sexual harassment suit kicked off a firestorm of controversy within the company. California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued Activision Blizzard last week, alleging that the company fostered a “breeding ground for harassment and discrimination against women.”

Following a combative response to the lawsuit from corporate leadership, a group of employees at Blizzard will stage a walkout, which is planned for Wednesday at 10AM PT. Most employees at Blizzard continue to work remotely, but walkout participants will gather tomorrow at the gates to the company’s Irvine campus.

“Given last week’s statements from Activision Blizzard, Inc. and their legal counsel regarding the DFEH lawsuit, as well as the subsequent internal statement from Frances Townsend, and the many stories shared by current and former employees of Activision Blizzard since, we believe that our values as employees are not being accurately reflected in the words and actions of our leadership,” the organizers wrote.

In the new statement, they called for supporters to donate to organizations including Black Girls Code, the anti-sexual violence organization RAINN and Girls Who Code.

Activision Blizzard publishes some of the biggest titles in gaming, including the Call of Duty franchise, World of Warcraft, Starcraft and Overwatch. Blizzard came under Activision’s wing through a 2008 merger and the subsidiary operates out of its own Irvine, California headquarters.

In the suit, the state agency describes a “frat house” atmosphere in which women are not only not afforded the same opportunities as their male counterparts, but routinely and openly harassed, sometimes by their superiors.

The company pushed last week back in a fiery statement, blaming “unaccountable State bureaucrats that are driving many of the State’s best businesses out of California” for pursuing the lawsuit. Activision Blizzard Executive Vice President Frances Townsend, former Homeland Security advisor to George W. Bush, echoed that aggressive messaging in an internal memo, slamming the lawsuit as a “distorted and untrue picture of our company.”

In an open letter published Monday, the walkout’s organizers condemned Blizzard’s response to the lawsuit’s allegations. “We believe these statements have damaged our ongoing quest for equality inside and outside of our industry,” they wrote. “… These statements make it clear that our leadership is not putting our values first.”

More than 2,600 employees signed the letter, which demands an end to mandatory arbitration clauses that “protect abusers and limit the ability of victims to seek restitution,” improved representation and opportunities for women and non-binary employees, salary transparency and a full audit of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the company.

On Twitter, streamers, gamers, game devs and former employees expressed support for Wednesday’s walkout under the hashtag #ActiBlizzWalkout, with some calling for a blackout on Activision Blizzard games as a show of solidarity. Others called for streamers to use the walkout time slot to raise awareness about rampant sexual harassment and discrimination in gaming culture at large.

One Blizzard employee shared a photo of the company’s iconic statue depicting an axe-wielding orc, a central feature of its Irvine headquarters. Three plaques displaying corporate values that surround the statue had been covered with paper: “Lead responsibly,” “play nice, play fair,” and “every voice matters.”