News: E-commerce logistics startup Locad gets $4.5M seed round led by Sequoia Capital India

• July 5, 2021
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E-commerce is booming in Southeast Asia, but in many markets, the fragmented logistics industry is struggling to catch up. This means sellers run into roadblocks when shipping to buyers, especially outside of major metropolitan areas, and managing their supply chains. Locad, a startup that wants to help with what it describes as an “end-to-end solution”

E-commerce is booming in Southeast Asia, but in many markets, the fragmented logistics industry is struggling to catch up. This means sellers run into roadblocks when shipping to buyers, especially outside of major metropolitan areas, and managing their supply chains. Locad, a startup that wants to help with what it describes as an “end-to-end solution” for cross-border e-commerce companies, announced today it has raised a $4.5 million seed round.

The funding was led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge (Locad is currently a part of the program’s fifth cohort), with participation from firms like Antler, Febe Ventures, Foxmont, GFC and Hustle Fund. It also included angel investors Alessandro Duri, Alexander Friedhoff, Christian Weiss, Henry Ko, Huey Lin, Markus Bruderer, Dr. Markus Erken, Max Moldenhauer, Oliver Mickler, Paulo Campos, Stefan Mader, Thibaud Lecuyer, Tim Marbach and Tim Seithe.

Locad was founded in Singapore and Manila by Constantin Robertz, former Zalora director of operations Jannis Dargel and Shrey Jain, previously Grab’s lead product manager of maps. It now also has offices in Australia, Hong Kong and India. The startup’s goal is to close the gap between first-mile and last-mile delivery services, enabling e-commerce companies to offer lower shipping rates and faster deliveries while freeing up more time for other parts of their operations, such as marketing and sales conversions.

Since its founding in October 2020, Locad has been used by more than 30 brands and processed almost 600,000 items. Its clients range from startups to international brands, and include Mango, Vans, Payless Shoes, Toshiba and Landmark, a department store chain in the Philippines.

Locad is among a growing roster of other Southeast Asia-based logistics startups that have recently raised funding, including Kargo, SiCepat, Advotics and Logisly. Locad wants to differentiate by providing a flexible solution that can work with any sales channel and is integrated with a wide range of shipping providers.

Robertz told TechCrunch that Locad is able to keep an asset-light business model by partnering with warehouse operators and facility managers. What the startup brings to the mix is a cloud software platform that serves as a “control tower,” letting users get real-time information about inventory and orders across Locad’s network. The company currently has seven fulfillment centers, with four of its warehouses in the Philippines and the other three in Singapore, New South Wales, Australia and Hong Kong. Part of its funding will be used to expand into more Asia-Pacific markets, focusing on Southeast Asia and Australia.

Locad’s seed round will also used to add integrations to more couriers and sales channels (it can already be used with platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, Amazon, Shopee, Lazada and Zalora), and develop new features for its cloud platform, including more data analytics.

 

News: Tinybird turns raw data into realtime API at scale

• July 5, 2021
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Meet Tinybird, a new startup that helps developers build data products at scale without having to worry about infrastructure, query time and all those annoying issues that come up once you deal with huge data sets. The company ingests data at scale, lets you transform it using SQL and then exposes that data through API

Meet Tinybird, a new startup that helps developers build data products at scale without having to worry about infrastructure, query time and all those annoying issues that come up once you deal with huge data sets. The company ingests data at scale, lets you transform it using SQL and then exposes that data through API endpoints.

Over the past few years, analytics and business intelligence products have really changed the way we interact with data. Now, many big companies store data in a data warehouse or a data lake. They try to get insights from those data sets.

And yet, extracting and manipulating data can be costly and slow. It works great if you want to make a PowerPoint presentation for your quarterly results. But it doesn’t let you build modern web products and data products in general.

“What we do at Tinybird is we help developers build data products at any scale. And we’re really focused on the realtime aspect,” co-founder and CEO Jorge Gómez Sancha told me.

The team of co-founders originally met at Carto. They were already working on complex data issues. “Every year people would come with an order of magnitude more data,” Gómez Sancha said. That’s how they came up with the idea behind Tinybird.

The product can be divided into three parts. First, you connect your Tinybird account with your data sources. The company will then ingest data constantly from those data sources.

Second, you can transform that data through SQL queries. In addition to the command-line interface, you can also enter your SQL queries in a web interface, divide then into multiple steps and document everything. Every time you write a query, you can see your data filtered and sorted according to your query.

Third, you can create API endpoints based on those queries. After that, it works like a standard JSON-based API. You can use it to fetch data in your own application.

What makes Tinybird special is that it’s so fast that it feels like you’re querying your data in realtime. “Several of our customers are reading over 1.5 trillion rows on average per day via Tinybird and ingesting around 5 billion rows per day, others are making an average of 250 requests per second to our APIs querying several billion row datasets,” Gómez Sancha wrote in an email.

Behind the scene, the startup uses ClickHouse. But you don’t have to worry about that as Tinybird manages all the infrastructure for you.

Right now, Tinybird has identified three promising use cases. Customers can use it to provide in-product analytics. For instance, if you operate a web hosting service and wants to give some analytics to your customers or if you manage online stores and want to surface purchasing data to your customers, Tinybird works well for that.

Some customers also use the product for operational intelligence, such as realtime dashboards that you can share internally within a company. Your teams can react more quickly and always know if everything is running fine.

You can also use Tinybird as the basis for some automation or complex event processing. For instance, you can leverage Tinybird to build a web application firewall that scans your traffic and reacts in realtime.

Tinybird has raised a $3 million seed round led by Crane.vc with several business angels also participating, such as Nat Friedman (GitHub CEO), Nicholas Dessaigne (Algolia co-founder), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel CEO), Jason Warner (GitHub CTO), Adam Gross (former Heroku CEO), Stijn Christiaens (co-founder and CTO of Collibra), Matias Woloski (co-founder and CTO of Auth0) and Carsten Thoma (Hybris co-founder).

News: MaxAB, the Egyptian B2B food and grocery delivery startup, raises $40M for expansion

• July 5, 2021
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Globally, food and grocery delivery startups have been raising mega-rounds of late, especially those in Europe as the pandemic has given rise to more people ordering online more than ever. This growth has translated to an increase in volume across e-commerce platforms all over the world. While there has relatively been no action in Africa

Globally, food and grocery delivery startups have been raising mega-rounds of late, especially those in Europe as the pandemic has given rise to more people ordering online more than ever. This growth has translated to an increase in volume across e-commerce platforms all over the world.

While there has relatively been no action in Africa in terms of raising investments, startups in MENA continue to garner interest, mainly in B2B e-commerce. Today, the latest of these is coming out of Egypt.

MaxAB, a startup based out of Cairo that serves a network of traditional food and grocery retailers across Egypt, has raised $40 million in Series A financing.

The company, which claims to have launched in a new city every month this year, will be expanding its physical footprint across the Middle East and North Africa. In addition, MaxAB plans on hiring more talent and scaling its recently launched business verticals, including new supply chains and embedded finance solutions.

Founded in November 2018 by Belal El-Megharbel and Mohamed Ben Halim, MaxAB’s platform manages procurement and grocery delivery to shops in Egypt. Store owners can use the platform to purchase goods, request delivery or logistics to move the goods, and access a customer support team.

“It’s not just the technology platform; we operate our own warehouses, we operate our own fleet. And the idea was quite simple.”  CEO El-Megharbel said to TechCrunch. According to him, small merchants in Egypt, representing a large chunk of the nation’s GDP, find it hard to procure their inventory. On the other hand, manufacturers also have to suffer immensely and incur so many costs to serve a market like Egypt, where over 400,000 small mom-and-pop shops sell 90% of groceries in the country.

“We saw that there is a massive role in optimizing this supply chain using technology so that we can have the right amount of products at the right place at the right time,” explained El-Megharbel, the chief executive who left Careem in 2018 to start MaxAB.

He calls MaxAB the Amazon for retail in the Middle East. There’s a slight comparison. In emerging markets, it can be challenging to find third-party e-commerce delivery companies to work with. Those available are either expensive or inefficient. This is why MaxAB has its own infrastructure. The company doesn’t build warehouses from scratch. Instead, it buys them outrightly and revamps them to fit its needs. After that, MaxAB uses internal technology tools to better manage inventory flow in, within, and out of the warehouse.

El-Megharbel noted that up until last year, MaxAB was focused on offering a single type of supply chain in one city. That was before and after completing its $6.2 million seed round with 9,000 merchants on its app. But with this new round, MaxAB solidifies both infrastructure and technology into a multi-supply chain and multi-city business.

The new development is accompanying a period of growth the company experienced in the last two years where it now services more than 55,000 merchants and delivers over 2,000 unique products. In terms of staff size, the company has grown more than 5x to 1,600 people and is looking to add to that number.

Talking about the embedded finance solutions, the plan for MaxAB is to offer financial services to its merchants. First of all, given the company’s database of merchants, MaxAB can predict their financial status. Then orking with banking and non-banking partners, MaxAB will offer credit facilities and capital financing to these merchants. 

MaxAB’s Series A investment is one of the largest in this financing round across the MENA region. Impact investor RMBV led the round with participation from the IFC, Flourish Ventures, Crystal Stream Capital, Rise Capital, and Endeavour Catalyst. Exiting investors, Beco Capital and 4DX Ventures also took part. This round brings the company’s total investment to date to $46.2 million.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the unique structure of Egypt’s economy, with hundreds of thousands of shopkeepers and small businesses becoming the lifeline of our country at the time of crisis,” said managing partner at RMBV Ahmed Badreldin in a statement. “We are delighted to be backing visionary entrepreneurs that have created a transformative business with impressive growth that is a catalyst for financial inclusion and job creation. We look forward to supporting MaxAB in its next phase of development as they continue delivering on growth and innovation.”

The pandemic has significantly increased technology adoption and enhanced the company’s unit economics. As a market leader, MaxAB has taken advantage to consolidate its position and scale sustainably amidst competition.

“There is competitiveness in the Middle East. Most of them are marketplace models but do not manage their supply chain per se. And this is what makes our model more unique is that we own the end-to-end cycle. It’s painful, but we believe that this is what this industry, the food and groceries B2B e-commerce space, needs,” the CEO said.

After expanding across MENA, does the company see any opportunity southward into sub-Saharan Africa where it might face competition from the likes of Sokowatch? “Not in the near future,” answered El-Megharbel. “I think this market [the Middle East and North Africa] is almost $200 billion per year. So we have a long way to go there before we go to sub-Saharan Africa.”

News: India’s Furlenco raises $140 million for its furniture and appliance renting service

• July 4, 2021
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Furlenco, a Bangalore-based startup that operates an eponymous furniture and appliance rental service, said today it has raised $140 million in a financing round as it looks to scale its operations in the South Asian market and explore international market expansion. The new $140 million financing round, a Series D, comprises $120 million debt raise

Furlenco, a Bangalore-based startup that operates an eponymous furniture and appliance rental service, said today it has raised $140 million in a financing round as it looks to scale its operations in the South Asian market and explore international market expansion.

The new $140 million financing round, a Series D, comprises $120 million debt raise and rest in equity, the seven-year-old Indian startup told TechCrunch. The new financing round was led by Zinnia Global Fund. CE-Ventures and Lightbox Ventures also participated in this round, which brings its to-date debt and equity raise to over $240 million, according to data insight platform Tracxn.

Furlenco, which operates in more than a dozen Indian cities, allows customers to rent a range of furniture items. In recent quarters, it has expanded to other categories including fitness equipments, appliances, electronic products, as well as two-wheeler vehicles.

A queen size bed on the platform, for instance, starts at as low as $9 a month, while a laptop can be rented for as low as a monthly plan of $40. The startup has attracted customers in part because of its three-day delivery commitment, and deep cleaning of items at no additional cost. It also maintains a partnership with NoBroker, a General Atlantic-backed Indian startup that helps customers avoid brokers when finding new apartments.

The expansion into newer categories helped the startup recover and preserve 95% of its revenue in the financial year that ended in March this year, it said. Lightbox Ventures said Furlenco may explore expansion into Middle East and other international markets.

The startup, which competes with Rentomojo, said it will deploy the fresh capital to fuel its growth and also invest in design and also work to generate an annual revenue of $300 million in the next five years.

“Lifestyles have evolved and so have the needs of the urban Indian when it comes to how they do up their home. However, the furniture industry has some catching up to do in providing the right kind of solutions. We know there is immense strength and scope of innovation in the B2C commerce space and the sectors we operate in. We are tapping into that potential and will definitely disrupt the market with what we are planning,” said Ajith Mohan Karimpana, founder and chief executive of Furlenco, in a statement.

Rent platforms, like many others, saw a major dip last year when the coronavirus hit the country. But the market it’s going after remains a big opportunity. According to industry estimates, the rental furniture and appliance industry is currently worth over $4.5 billion.

“We are excited to partner with Furlenco, which is rapidly transforming Furniture subscription services for India’s lifestyle aspirants. As an industry leader with a strong management team, Furlenco is poised for continued strong growth,” said Ritesh Abbi, Zinnia Global Fund.

News: Didi app pulled from app stores in China after suspension order

• July 4, 2021
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China has ordered app-store operators to remove the app of Didi from their stores, the latest as tension escalates between the nation’s largest ride-hailing giant and local regulators. The app has disappeared from several stores including Apple’s App Store in China, TechCrunch can confirm. The nation’s cyberspace administration, which unveiled the order on Sunday, said

China has ordered app-store operators to remove the app of Didi from their stores, the latest as tension escalates between the nation’s largest ride-hailing giant and local regulators. The app has disappeared from several stores including Apple’s App Store in China, TechCrunch can confirm.

The nation’s cyberspace administration, which unveiled the order on Sunday, said Didi was illegally collecting users’ personal data.

The ride-hailing giant, which counts Apple, SoftBank, and Tencent and Uber among its investors and filed for an IPO late last month, has been ordered to make changes to comply with Chinese data protection rules.

The move comes after the Chinese internet watchdog announced a probe into Didi over “national security” concerns earlier this week. Didi raised at least $4 billion this week after the New York Stock Exchange debut in one of the largest U.S. IPOs.

In a statement, Didi said it had removed its app from various app stores and begun the “corrections.” It also said it had halted new user registrations on Saturday. For existing users, the Didi app remains operational.

It’s very rare for an app of this scale to be pulled from the app stores. For the 12 months ended March, Didi served 493 million annual active users and saw 41 million transactions on a daily basis, it revealed recently.

The app had 156 million monthly users in Q1, well above Uber’s 98 million in the period.China’s official data showed the country had 365 million ride-hailing users as of December, which suggests Didi commands a substantial market share.

News: This Week in Apps: iOS 15 public beta arrives, Android App Bundles to replace APKs, app consumer spend hits new record

• July 3, 2021
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Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

The app industry continues to grow, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that’s up 27% year-over-year

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Top Stories

Android App Bundles are now going to be required

This week Google announced it will require new apps to be published using the Android App Bundle as of August 2021. The company first launched the Android App Bundle standard, which replaces the APK, in May 2018 as part of its modern development push. Since then, the majority of the top 1,000 apps and games have switched over to AABs including those from companies like Adobe, Duolingo. Gameloft, Netflix, reBus, Rainy, and Twitter. Today, there are over 1 million apps using AAB in production.

AABs solve some problems with the aging APK standard, particularly around larger apps and games. With AABs, developers don’t have to create an APK that contains everything for every type of Android device. They offer a way to quickly and more efficiently download the assets needed for a particular device, and they do so in a way that focuses on getting the user or player to the app or game’s content as fast as possible.

But not everyone agrees the change is for the better. Those who utilize APK Hosting sites like APKMirror or APKPure to download and share apps worry that the shift to AAB is a way to force users to use the Play Store instead of alternatives. Meanwhile, Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney — who is taking on tech giants over their alleged app store monopolies with both lawsuits and lobbying — pointed out that the move away from the more open APK standard is about locking users into Google Play.

Consumer Spending on apps hits record $64.9B in the first half of the year

Consumer spending in mobile apps hit a record $64.9 billion during the first half of 2021, according to preliminary data from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. This figure represents a 24.8% increase in spending seen across both the App Store and Google Play, compared with the year-ago period. But while industry experts believe the accelerated shift to mobile fueled by the pandemic is a trend that will continue, it’s worth noting that — despite the new record — the growth rate for consumer spending has slightly slowed, and the download growth slowed more dramatically.

From the first half of 2019 to the first half of 2020, consumer spending on mobile apps grew 28.4% from $40.5 billion to $52 billion, for comparison — slower than the 24.8% seen in the current period.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

Apple launched the public betas of iOS 15, iPadOS 15 and watchOS 8. Although developers already had access to early builds, this week was the first time the public could get their hands on Apple’s latest software before its official launch this fall. One of the biggest changes in iOS 15 is the addition of “Focus” modes that give users more control over when and who can bother them with calls, texts and notifications during different contexts — like work, driving, sleeping, and more. Users will also gain access to SharePlay interactivity on FaceTime, iMessage improvements, the ability to FaceTime with Android friends via web links, spatial audio, Live Text (which unlocks info from your photos), app privacy reports, and upgrades to most of Apple’s core apps, and more.

Platforms: Google

Google is implementing stronger security measures on Google Play developer accounts in an attempt to crack down on spam and other malicious apps. Previously, the company required only an email and phone number to create a Google Play developer account. Now it will require an account type (personal or organization), a contact name and physical address, and it will require developers to verify their email and phone number. Google says the changes will allow it to better communicate with developers and will help to “make sure that every account is created by a real person with real contact details.” It’s also now mandating that users of Google Play Console sign in using Google’s 2-Step Verification.

Samsung and Google previewed their wearable platform ahead of the next Galaxy Watch launch. The two companies agreed to partner on wearables in order to better compete against Apple Watch. At Mobile World Congress, Samsung showed off the first device to feature the One UI Watch user experience and the new unified platform built in partnership with Google.

E-commerce

Instagram adds a new feature that will allow businesses in the U.S. to designate themselves as being Black-owned businesses using badges that appear on their profiles and on their product shopping pages. It may also be highlighted in places like the Shop tab, to help more potential customers discover the business.

Walmart partnered with mobile couponing app Ibotta on a multi-year deal that will offer cash-back rewards to Walmart customers that will be applied directly to customers’ Walmart accounts, where they can be used for future purchases. The offers will be made available on Walmart.com and inside the Walmart mobile app.

Following Apple and Google’s lead, Shopify dropped App Store commissions. However, it’s dropping its cut to 0% for the first million, and then will only take a 15% commission on “marginal” revenue above that $1 million. The change could increase pressure on other app stores to make further adjustments to their models in the future.

Augmented Reality

Rakuten Viber has partnered with Snap to bring augmented reality Lenses from Snapchat to its own Viber calling and messaging app. The over 30 Lenses will be built using Snap’s creative tools, including Bitmoji, Camera Kit, and Creative Kit and will offer AR-enabled messaging and photos to Viber’s users. The deal is another example of how Snap is growing its licensing business for its AR and creative tools alongside the development of its own social app.

Google’s Arts & Culture app created a new feature called Art Filter that allows everyone to learn about significant pieces of art from around the world and put themselves inside famous paintings using AR. Google talked this week about its work with MediaPipe to utilize their face mesh and 3D face transform tech to create custom effects for each of the artifacts chosen.

Fintech

Venmo introduced a new feature that allows users to add a “good and services” tag to payments sent to personal accounts to differentiate them from personal transactions. The system is meant to protect buyers and sellers, Venmo says. Buyers on these transactions will be eligible for Venmo’s Purchase Protection Program, but sellers are unable with the new fees associated with the change as Venmo will now deduct 1.9% of the transaction plus 10 cents from the money sent to the seller.

Intuit-owned finance and budgeting app Mint added the ability to track cryptocurrency investments across a number of supported exchanges, including Binance, BlockFi, Coinbase/Coinbase Pro, Gemini, Kraken, PayPal, and Robinhood. As a result, the app shot to No. 12 overall on the U.S. App Store on Wednesday and became the No. 1 app in the Finance category, though it has since dropped in ranking.

Social

TikTok is expanding its max video length to 3 minutes, up from 60 seconds, after testing this feature publicly for many months with a select group of creators. The feature will allow for more long-form video content, potentially making TikTok even more of a threat to YouTube.

Pinterest bans weight loss ads on its platform, becoming the first major social platform to take this sort of action. The company says social media plays a role in promoting harmful beauty standards, and ads that glorify weight loss contribute to a rise in disordered eating behaviors rather than healthy habits.

Instagram is developing its own version of Twitter’s Super Follow with “Exclusive Stories.” Instagram confirmed that the screenshots of an “Exclusive Stories” feature recently circulated across social media are from an internal prototype that’s now in development, but not yet being publicly tested. The feature would allow creators to offer Stories that only members (likely paying subscribers) would be able to see. These would appear on their profile in different colors and would display a message that their Story was only for members when others tried to view them. They could also be saved as Highlights, and can’t be screenshot, according to the leaks.

TikTok’s latest transparency report revealed the company removed 11,149,514 accounts in Q1 2021 for violating community guidelines or terms of service, which is fewer than 1% of total accounts. Of those removals, 7,263,952 were accounts belonging to children under 13.

Trump and Parler reportedly discussed a deal that would move the bulk of Trump’s social media presence to the right-wing Twitter alternative, according to New York Magazine. The deal would have seen Trump taking 40% of Parler’s revenues had it gone through. Parler was okay with the rev share, but wouldn’t ban Trump’s critics from the app, which scuttled the deal, the report said.

Instagram is testing a feature that would allow anyone to be able to share a link directly in their Stories through a linking sticker, which would work the same way the swipe-up links currently do. The company said the test is looking to understand how many people would use links, if available.

Twitter offered users a chance to receive one of seven free NFTs this week, which were minted on Rarible in editions of 20, making for 140 NFTs (get it?) in total. The NFTs were offered to those who replied to a post from the company’s main Twitter account, and could signal Twitter’s plans to invest in making NFTs more a part of its platform in the future.

Messaging

AT&T joined T-Mobile in switching its customers to use the Android Messages app as their default mobile messages app for both SMS and RCS services, making Verizon the only U.S. carrier that has not made a partnership deal with Google. RCS has a lot of advantages over SMS, including no character limits, the ability to send larger files, typing indicators, better group chat, Wi-Fi support and end-to-end encryption for one-on-one group chats. This makes it a more compelling alternative to Apple’s iMessage, but it requires carrier adoption.

Audio chat comes to the workplace as Slack this week released a new audio tool called Slack Huddles that allows users to have real-time conversations with colleagues in Slack’s app instead of typing. The company also offered more details about an upcoming feature that allows users to leave video messages and it showed off an upgraded employee directory. The video messages tool is being piloted while the directory is currently available to a limited number of Business + and Enterprise Grid customers.

The U.K. issued guidance to messaging apps operating in the country to not use end-to-end encryption on children’s accounts, asking companies to consider the risks that e2e poses to younger users, as it makes it more difficult to identify illegal and harmful content that takes place on private channels. A government spokesperson stressed that there’s a way to implement strong encryption in a way that’s consistent with public safety. Privacy activists disagree with this stance.

Telegram rolled out group video calls to its mobile and desktop apps after initially promising the feature was coming back in April 2020. The company says group video calls are limited to up to 30 people but it plans to increase that limit in the future.

WhatsApp is testing a redesigned voice message feature that will show short waveforms when the user is recording the message. After recording, the user can stop and listen to their message before sending it, too.

Dating

Dating app Bumble is planning to open its first cafe in New York later this month. The launch was originally planned for 2019, but was delayed due to the pandemic. The new venue, Bumble Brew, is being enabled by a partnership between the dating app maker and Italian restaurant Pasquale Jones. Decked out in Bumble’s yellow, the new cafe will open next to the restaurant, to offer a place for daters to meet for either coffee, cocktails or a meal.

Streaming & Entertainment

Netflix users on Android devices will now be able to start streaming titles that have only partially downloaded, which could help in the scenario where you’ve forgotten to download your favorite shows before boarding a plane. Before, until the download completed, you couldn’t watch any portion of the video at all.

Chinese TikTok rival Kuaishou and Tencent acquired the short-form rights to the upcoming Tokyo and 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics from state broadcaster CCTV. This makes the app the first short-form and livestreaming platform globally to become an official broadcaster of the Olympics.

Amazon Music Unlimited is giving subscribers up to six months of Disney+ for free (or three for existing subscribers). Disney’s isn’t the first to bundle a streaming deal with music. Hulu and Spotify had once done the same.

Spotify launched its Spotify Audience Network ad marketplace to advertisers and Megaphone publishers in Australia, Canada and the U.K., following its U.S. launch in February. The marketplace lets advertisers buy audio ads on and off the Spotify platform.

Gaming

Microsoft’s Xbox division announced the expansion of its Designed for Xbox mobile gaming accessories to iOS alongside the launch of the Xbox Cloud Gaming beta becoming available to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members on Windows 10 PCs and Apple phones and tablets via the web browser at xbox.com/play.

As part of the accessories program expansion, the Backbone mobile controller joined the Designed for Xbox family with the Backbone One for Xbox, which supports all iPhones running iOS 13 or later. It also added OtterBox Power Swap Controller Batteries, a battery pack compatible with Xbox consoles, Android and iPhone devices.

Health & Fitness

Google announced this week an update to its Passes API which will allow developers to build functionality into their websites and apps to export COVID-19 test and vaccination records to a digital format that can be saved either in the Google Pay app or directly on the users homescreen as a shortcut. The API will only be open to developers at healthcare organizations, government agencies, and other organizations authorized by public health authorities, initially in the U.S.

Travel

App Annie spots signs of a pandemic recovery in its Q2 2021 report, noting in particular a rebound in travel apps. The firm found that monthly hours spent in Travel and Navigations apps are on an upward trend in markets like the U.S. and the U.K., where the rollout of vaccinations has been strong. South Korea is seeing an even better recovery, as time spent in travel apps has surpassed pre-pandemic levels. Travel apps in Brazil, France and India, however, have not yet reached pre-pandemic levels.

Drones

Alphabet’s Wing launched a free app in the U.S. called OpenSky aimed at both commercial and recreational drone pilots. The app shows pilots where it’s okay to fly using color-coded maps with greens, yellows and reds. It also allows pilots to submit requests to fly in controlled airspaces and receive near real-time authorizations. This feature works in hundreds of airspaces. The app had previously been available in Australia only.

Education

Facebook is launching an educational app called Sabee in Nigeria, which is the first of the company’s new efforts to more directly target the country, and eventually, the African continent, with new mobile products. The app is being published by the company’s NPE Team, an internal R&D incubator, which had focused on new social experiences until now.

Security & Privacy

Twitter users now have the option to use security keys as their only form of two-factor authentication (2FA), which the company notes is the most effective way to keep your Twitter account secure. Twitter has offered the option to use security keys as one of its 2FA options since 2018. However, this initial support only worked for Twitter.com, not the mobile app, and required users to have another form of 2FA enabled, too.

Funding and M&A (and IPOs!)

Tapcart, a “Shopify for mobile apps,” raises $50 million Series B led by Left Lane Capital. The company offers a drag-and-drop builder that allows anyone to create a mobile app for their existing Shopify store and communicate with customers via push. Shopify was among the participating investors.

BreezoMeter, an iPhone app that measures air quality, raises a $30 million Series C led by Fortissimo Capital, bringing its total raise to date to $45 million. The company uses AI and machine learning to gather and understand data from multiple sources, including more than 47,000 sensors worldwide.

Istanbul-based Dream Games raised $155 million Series at a $1 billion valuation in a round co-led by Index Ventures and Makers Fund. The mobile puzzle game developer is best known for Royal Match, which has 6M MAUs and $20M/month in revenue.

Apple and Snap partner Jigspace, “the Canva for 3D,” raised $4.7 million Series A in a round led by Rampersand. The free JigSpace app lets anyone combine presets and templates of 3D-modeled objects to create their own “Jigs” (models). The app has over 4 million users on the App Store.

South Korea edtech app maker Mathpresso raised $50 million in Series C funding from GGV Capital, Yellowdog, Goodwater Capital, and KDB. The service is used by over 9.8M users

Robinhood files for its IPO. Earlier in the week, Robinhood agreed to pay $70 million in fines and restitution as part of its settlement with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority over providing customers with “false or misleading information. The SEC, however, is still investigating the trading halt related to GameStop and other meme stocks. Robinhood has 18M accounts and $80B in assets. It will trade under “HOOD” on the Nasdaq.

Women’s social networking app Peanut launches a microfund called StartHER to begin investing in early, pre-seed stage startups led by women or other historically excluded groups.

Social media app LYKA, focused on Southeast Asia, inked a deal with music-streaming technology company Tuned Global to integrate an immersive music-streaming service directly inside its app. The partnership will allow LYKA to provide on-demand streaming of music, video, and podcasts to the app’s users.

Chinese m-commerce app Dingdong made a small gain during this week’s IPO, with shares that closed at $23.52, up 2 cents from its offer price, on its first day of trading. The app allows customers to buy fresh produce, meat, seafood and other daily necessities.

Vietnamese investment app Infina raised $2 million in seed funding for its Robinhood-like app launched in January 2021, which now has some 500,000 trading accounts.

Gaming chat app Discord acquired AR startup Ubiquity6, which had raised $37.5 million in funding from top investors including Benchmark, First Round, Kleiner Perkins and Google’s Gradient Ventures. The startup had recently abandoned some of its projects, indicating it may have been struggling to find traction. Deal terms weren’t disclosed.

Edtech unicorn Duolingo filed to go public following 129% revenue growth in 2020. The 400-person company had $161.7 million in revenue in 2020 and had recently turned profitable.

Family app Life360 announced a $2.1 million investment round from celebs and influencers who will now help to advise the company on new features and help with product marketing. The round was led by Bryant Stibel, the firm co-founded by the late Kobe Bryant and business partner Jeff Stibel. Other investors included Vanessa Bryant, Joanna and Chip Gaines, Tony Hawk, Chris and Jada Paul, TikTok influencer Billy Perry, and Nicole and Michael Phelps. Life360 currently trades on the ASX.

Age of Learning, the creator of childhood education app ABCmouse, raised $300 million in a new round of funding led by TPG. The new investment more than doubled the company’s valuation to $3 billion. The company says it will use the funds to accelerate international expansion and the development of its next generation of apps.

Exercise and corporate wellness app Gympass raised $220 million in Series E funding. The Brazil-based app saw a record 4 million monthly check-ins across its network of more than 50,000 global partners in May.

Digital greeting card app Givingli raised $3 million in seed funding in a round led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six. The app aims to modernize the digital greeting card business for Gen Z users and monetizes through a $3.99 per month premium subscription and gift card sales. Snap also invested in the round after earlier partnering with the startup on a Snap Mini app.

Buzzer, a live sports app, raised $20 million in Series A funding from a number of sports and entertainment backers, including Michael Jordan, Naomi Osaka, Patrick Mahomes and others.

Downloads

Brickit

The new Brickit mobile app is a Lego fan’s dream and an impressive use of computer vision technology. The app is able to quickly analyze a pile of Legos to identify which bricks you have in your collection. It then serves up some projects where you have all, or at least most of, the bricks you need to build. The process is very fast, too — the app makes sense of hundreds of bricks in your pile within just seconds. Brickit doesn’t come from Lego directly, however, which limits some of its capabilities in terms of integrating with Lego’s larger library of instructions. But, in time, it will likely generate some data on the Lego collections users have at home which could make it an interesting acquisition target for Lego, in addition to the tech itself.

Reading Rec’s

Three Weeks with iOS and iPadOS 15: Foundational Updates by Federico Viticci for iMore. A great in-depth review and analysis of what’s new with Apple’s latest software update.

Tweets

 

 

News: Welcome to hot due diligence summer 

• July 3, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
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Wow, that headline worked? A recent board fight at a digital health unicorn is a reminder to entrepreneurs that it’s important to set boundaries, even amid the dizzying volume and velocity of this summer’s deal frenzy. This week I published a scoop about how Bessemer Venture Partners replaced a board member at Hinge Health, after

Wow, that headline worked?

A recent board fight at a digital health unicorn is a reminder to entrepreneurs that it’s important to set boundaries, even amid the dizzying volume and velocity of this summer’s deal frenzy.

This week I published a scoop about how Bessemer Venture Partners replaced a board member at Hinge Health, after that board member invested in a competing startup. Hinge Health co-founder Daniel Perez alleges that the board member did not notify him before they led a round in an early-stage startup in the same sector.

The situation gives a rare and nuanced peek into the world of competitive tension between startups. While founders expect certain standards of conduct from investors, including that they notify them of investments in directly competitive startups, investors may be feeling more pressure to make faster decisions that clash with the founders they’ve already backed, while having different definitions of competition from their portfolios. In a post-NDA world, the rules need to be rewritten around how to have these conversations.

I’m not quite sure if more due diligence is the solution to everyone’s woes — but I do think transparency and explicitness between founders and investors can’t hurt. It’s not just for founders. Investors, who owe returns to their LPs, don’t want to be in situations where they can’t invest in a booming sector because they have one other investment in the sector.

The situations are endless:

• What happens when a startup pivots into a different market than the one that it sold its investors on and is suddenly competitive with a portfolio company?
• What if a portfolio company’s future roadmap includes a go-to-market strategy that clashes with a potential investment?
• Can a Sequoia India partner back a company that is directly competing with a Sequoia India company?
• Is it okay for there to be competing investments within the same firm as long as different partners are sitting on the board?

Based on my DMs, Hinge Health isn’t alone in dealing with current investors backing competitors. It adds an asterisk to the barrage of funding rounds. Welcome to hot due diligence summer, I guess?

In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll get into the Duolingo S-1, a creator economy rebrand and an exclusive interview with top startup marketers. As always, you can find me on Twitter @nmasc_ — send me tips or notes on any competitive tensions you’ve dealt with.

Wall Street, it’s time for your language lesson

Duolingo, a language-learning unicorn last valued at $2.4 billion, filed to go public this week. Beyond the flurry of puns — thanks to this reader for today’s subhed — the S-1 gave us a sneak peak into the financials of a rare edtech company ambitious enough to list on the stock market.

Here’s what to know: A deep dive into the financials and fine print unveiled how Duolingo’s monetization efforts have led to 129% revenue growth and solid conversion between free and paying users. The document also exposed a number of other fun factoids, such as the fact that only four people left the company in 2020 — and that Duolingo is indeed looking to scoop up some companies.

For some more language on the language learning company: 

• How a bot-fighting test turned into edtech’s most iconic brand, Duolingo 
• The product-led growth behind edtech’s most downloaded app 
• How Duolingo became fluent in monetization
• Duolingo can’t teach you how to speak a language, but now it wants to try

Rebranding the creator economy

On Equity this week, Alex and I brought on techie comedian Alexis Gay to talk about the creator economy. 

Here’s what to know: Gay went from helping creators via her role at Patreon to becoming a creative herself. We talked about pet peeves, why it’s important to be explicit when building tools for this economy, and if rolling funds are inevitable for anyone with a Twitter following. Check out the episode, which I’d say is one of our funniest to date.

And as your postgame:

• Pietra raises $15M from Founders Fund to help creators launch their own product lines
• Egypt’s Minly raises $3.6M to connect celebrities and fans through personalized experiences
• Creator tools startup Spore raises $1M to build closer bonds between influencers and their fans

Marketing some marketing

TechCrunch’s Miranda Halpern and Eric Eldon are hard at work on TechCrunch Experts, a directory that will host vetted professionals within the startup industry. Right now, they’re seeking the names of the top growth marketers powering your favorite tech startup — and they’re still taking submissions!

Here’s what to know: Halpern interviewed Kathleen Estreich and Emily Kramer, the co-founders of strategic marketing firm MKT1. The revealing conversation includes notes on marketer attrition, why their job is about a lot more than just advertisements, and how they’re working against the stigma of marketers often being “thought of as second-class citizens” within a company.

Deeper dives:

• 5 companies doing growth marketing right
• 5 tips for brands that want to succeed in the new era of influencer marketing

Around TC

TechCrunch Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising is next week! The entire event is built for founders seeking tactical tips on everything from how to survive high-speed startup growth during COVID-19 to how to unearth the ever-illusive product-market fit. Buy your tickets, because it will make me very happy.

Across the week

Seen on TechCrunch

• Slack’s new video and voice tools are nod to changing face of work
• Women’s social network Peanut launches microfund StartHER to invest in pre-seed stage startups
• Uber’s first head of data science just raised a new venture fund to back nascent AI startups
• Twitter is making NFTs now, apparently

Seen on Extra Crunch

• Musculoskeletal medical startups race to enter personalized health tech market
• A startup’s guide to software delivery 
• Like the US, a two-tier venture capital market is emerging in Latin America
• How VCs can get the most out of co-investing alongside LPs
• Dear Sophie: How can I bring my parents and sister to the US?

Thanks for giving me a few minutes of your time. It truly never gets old. Enjoy the long weekend, and let’s do it all over again next week.

Talk then,

N

News: A new ‘digital violence’ platform maps dozens of victims of NSO Group’s spyware

• July 3, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

For the first time, researchers have mapped all the known targets, including journalists, activists, and human rights defenders, whose phones were hacked by Pegasus, a spyware developed by NSO Group. Forensic Architecture, an academic unit at Goldsmiths, University of London that investigates human rights abuses, scoured dozens of reports from human rights groups, carried out

For the first time, researchers have mapped all the known targets, including journalists, activists, and human rights defenders, whose phones were hacked by Pegasus, a spyware developed by NSO Group.

Forensic Architecture, an academic unit at Goldsmiths, University of London that investigates human rights abuses, scoured dozens of reports from human rights groups, carried out open-source research and interviewed dozens of the victims themselves to reveal over a thousand data points, including device infections, which show relations and patterns between digital surveillance carried out by NSO’s government customers, and the real-world intimidation, harassment and violence that the victims are also subject to.

By mapping out these data points on a bespoke platform, the researchers can show how nation-states, which use Pegasus to spy on their victims, also often target other victims in their networks and are entangled with assaults, arrests, and disinformation campaigns against the targets but also their families, friends, and colleagues.

Although the thousand-plus data points only present a portion of the overall use of Pegasus by governments, the project aims to provide researchers and investigators the tools and data of NSO’s activities worldwide, which the spyware maker goes to great lengths to keep out of the public eye.

Israel-based NSO Group develops Pegasus, a spyware that allows its government customers near-unfettered access to a victim’s device, including their personal data and their location. NSO has repeatedly declined to name its customers but reportedly has government contracts in at least 45 countries, said to include Rwanda, Israel, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates — all of which have been accused of human rights abuses — as well as Western nations, like Spain.

Forensic Architecture’s researcher-in-charge Shourideh Molavi said the new findings reveal “the extent to which the digital domain we inhabit has become the new frontier of human rights violations, a site of state surveillance and intimidation that enables physical violations in real space.”

The platform presents visual timelines of how victims are targeted by both spyware and physical violence as part of government campaigns to target their most outspoken critics.

Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi video blogger and activist living in exile in Montreal, had his phone hacked in 2018 by the Pegasus malware. Shortly after Saudi emissaries tried to convince Abdulaziz to return  to the kingdom, his phone was hacked. Weeks later, two of his brothers in Saudi Arabia were arrested and his friends detained.

Abdulaziz, a confidant of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi whose murder was approved by Saudi’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also had information about his Twitter account obtained by a “state-sponsored” actor, which later transpired to be a Saudi spy employed by Twitter. It was this stolen data, which included Abdulaziz’s phone number, that helped the Saudis penetrate his phone and read his messages with Khashoggi in real-time, Yahoo News reported this week.

Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui is another known victim, whose phone was hacked several times over 2015 and 2016 by a government customer of Pegasus, likely Mexico. The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab found that her son, Emilio, a minor at the time, also had his phone targeted while he lived in the United States. The timeline of the digital intrusions against Aristegui, her son, and her colleagues show that the hacking efforts intensified following their exposure of corruption by Mexico’s then-president Enrique Peña Nieto.

“It’s a malware that activates your camera, your microphone, all that which forms an integral part of your life,” said Aristegui in an interview with journalist and filmmaker Laura Poitras, who contributed to the project. Speaking of her son whose phone was targeted, Aristegui said: “To know that a kid who is simply going about his life, and going to school tells us about the kinds of abuse that a state can exert without counterweight.” (NSO has repeatedly claimed it does not target phones in the United States, but offers a similar technology to Pegasus, dubbed Phantom, through U.S.-based subsidiary, Westbridge Technologies.)

“A phenomenal damage is caused to the journalistic responsibility when the state — or whoever — uses these systems of ‘digital violence’,” said Aristegui. “It ends up being a very damaging element for journalists, which affects the right of a society to keep itself informed.”

The platform also draws on recent findings from an Amnesty International investigation into NSO Group’s corporate structure, which shows how NSO’s spyware has proliferated to states and governments using a complex network of companies to hide its customers and activities. Forensic Architecture’s platform follows the trail of private investment since NSO’s founding in 2015, which “likely enabled” the sale of the spyware to governments that NSO would not ordinarily have access to because of Israeli export restrictions.

“NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware needs to be thought of and treated as a weapon developed, like other products of Israel’s military industrial complex, in the context of the ongoing Israeli occupation. It is disheartening to see it exported to enable human rights violations worldwide,” said Eyal Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture.

The platform launched shortly after NSO published its first so-called transparency report this week, which human rights defenders and security researchers panned as devoid of any meaningful detail. Amnesty International said the report reads “more like a sales brochure.”

In a statement, NSO Group said it cannot comment on research it has not seen, but claimed it “investigates all credible claims of misuse, and NSO takes appropriate action based on the results of its investigations.”

NSO Group maintained that its technology “cannot be used to conduct cybersurveillance within the United States, and no customer has ever been granted technology that would enable them to access phones with U.S. numbers,” and declined to name any of its government customers.

---

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News: Startups, culture and riding the meme wave

• July 3, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter for your weekend enjoyment.

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

Hey! It’s going to be a long weekend here in the United States, which means that this newsletter is in between myself and being done with work. So, we’re going to hit on even more topics than usual as I am a glutton for both punishment and writing. But I repeat myself.

Up first: Startups and culture.

Something that I very much enjoyed this week was the Robinhood IPO filing. You can read our first look here, and a deeper dig into the numbers here. But today we’re going to riff on culture. Observe the following excerpts, the first from the company’s notes on its goals via its S-1 filing:

Over time, we strive to make Robinhood the most trusted, lowest cost, and most culturally relevant money app worldwide.

Surprised that “culturally relevant“ made it into the mix? Then check this out, from the prospectus’s overview section (emphasis added):

Cultural Impact. We pioneered commission-free stock trading with no account minimums, which the rest of the industry emulated, and we have continued to build relationships with our customers by introducing new products that further expand access to the financial system. We believe we have made investing culturally relevant and understandable, and that our platform is enabling our customers to become long-term investors and take greater control of their finances. Over half of 18-44 year olds in the United States know who Robinhood is according to an internal brand study that we conducted in March 2021. As a further sign of our relevance today, Robinhood reached the number-one spot on the Apple App Store multiple times in the first quarter of 2021 and was frequently ranked number one in the Finance category on the Apple App store during 2020 and the first quarter of 2021.

The app store bragging is whatever. The focus on culture caught me up.

I’ve often enjoyed watching culture evolve more and more rapidly over time; TikTok further accelerated the trend. And amongst the youths of the world, I’d hazard, the line between brand and culture is blurring as brands work to move more and more into cultural territory. The Robinhood S-1 is forward-looking in a number of ways, but to see a company going public discuss culture in this manner feels like the future.

Up second: American manufacturing is not dead.

That’s what The Exchange learned this week from a conversation with the CEO of Xometry. The company recently went public. You can read more of our notes on its numbers here, but like Robinhood the former startup raised lots of venture capital and this fits into our broader remit.

What doesn’t, really, is what we learned about manufacturing thanks to the chat. Per CEO Randy Altschuler, his business of connecting companies in need of manufacturing with those able to build stuff is nearly an entirely U.S.-based business. That’s to say that, yes, there is still stuff made here in America.

What Xometry does is actually pretty cool — including offering financial services as part of its role as marketplace middleperson — but what got us the most hype was the idea that a digital service was going to help connect folks in need with folks with tools here in the United States. If Xometry’s vision of the future works out, it could help sustain, and dare we say grow, domestic manufacturing in this nation. Who would have thought that that was possible?

Xometry’s IPO was also a huge success, we should add. It priced above range, and then shot higher. That’s what you want as a company.

And third, some fun odds and ends:

• More tech money in F1: Every race weekend in the Formula 1 calendar helps me notice yet another tech company putting money into racing’s most bonkers series. Zoom has a lot of branding out there, for example. And this week we got news that Crypto.com has closed a five-year, $100-million deal with the racing league. That’s a lot of duckets. Notably Tezos already sponsors some teams, and you can spy both Amazon and Microsoft branding here and there in the series. Oh, and the Splunk-McLaren tie-up was just extended. New life goal: Make lots of money, sponsor F1 team, get paddock access. What could possibly go wrong?
• Unqork has hired a CRO. Not a CFO, so we can’t make too many IPO noises concerning the no-code service that helps big companies build apps. But the news still matters for you no-code fans.
• Finally, Apptopia has download numbers for neobanks. Can you guess which was number one?

— Alex

News: Meet Mighty, an online platform where kid CEOs run their own storefronts; a “digital lemonade stand”

• July 2, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

For kids of a certain age — think 9 to 15 — options for enrichment are somewhat limited to school, sports, and camps, while the ability to make money is largely non-existent. A new startup called Mighty wants to provide them with a new alternative through a platform it’s building that, like a kind of

For kids of a certain age — think 9 to 15 — options for enrichment are somewhat limited to school, sports, and camps, while the ability to make money is largely non-existent.

A new startup called Mighty wants to provide them with a new alternative through a platform it’s building that, like a kind of Shopify for kids, enables younger kids to open their own store online and hopefully learn a bit in the process. In fact, Mighty — led by founders Ben Goldhirsh, who previously founded GOOD magazine, and Dana Mauriello, who spent nearly five years with Etsy and was most recently an advisor to Sidewalk Labs — sees itself as smack dab in the center of fintech, ed tech, and entertainment.

As often happens, the concept derived from the founders’ own experience. In this case, Goldhirsh, who has been living in Costa Rica, began worrying about his two daughters, who attend a small school and he feared might fall behind their stateside peers so began tutoring them after school. He says he was using Khan Academy and every other software platform that he thought might be helpful to the cause, but their reaction wasn’t exactly positive.

“They were like, “F*ck you, dad. We just finished school and now you’re going to make us do more school?’”

Unsure of what to do, he encouraged them to sell the bracelets they’d been making online, figuring it would teach them needed math skills, as well as teach them about startup capital, business plans (he made them write one), and marketing. It worked, he says, and as he told friends about this successful “project-based learning effort,” they began to ask if he could help their kids get up and running.

Fast forward and Goldhirsh and Mauriello — who ran a crowdfunding platform that Goldhirsh invested in before she joined Etsy — say they’re now steering a still-in-beta startup that has become home to 3,000 “CEOs” as Mighty calls them.

The interest isn’t surprising. Kids are spending more of their time online than at any point in history. Many of the real-world type businesses that might have once employed young kids are shrinking in size. Aside from babysitting or selling cookies on the corner, it’s also challenging to find a job before high school, given the Department of Labor’s Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets 14 years old as the minimum age for employment. (Even then, many employers worry that their young employees might be more work than is worth it.)

Investor think it’s a pretty solid idea. Mighty recently closed on $6.5 million in seed funding led by Animo Ventures, with participation from Maveron, Humbition, Sesame Workshop, Collaborative Fund and NaHCO3, a family office.

Still, building out a platform for kids is tricky. For starters, not a lot of 11-year-olds have the tenacity required to sustain their own business over time. While Goldhirsh likens the business to a “21st century lemonade stand,” running a business that doesn’t go away is a very different proposition.

Goldhirsh acknowledges that no kid wants to hear they have to “grind” on their business or to follow a certain trajectory, and he says that Mighty is certainly seeing kids who show up for a weekend to make some money. Still, he insists, many others have an undeniably entrepreneurial spirit and tend to stick around.  In fact, says Goldhirsh, the company — aided by its new seed funding — has much to do in order to keep its hungriest young CEOs happy.

Many are frustrated, for example, that they currently can’t sell their own homemade items through Mighty. Instead, they are invited to sell items like hats, totes, and stickers that they customize and which are made by Mighty’s current manufacturing partner, Printful, which then ships out the item to the end customer. (The Mighty CEO gets a percentage of the sale, as does Mighty.)

They can also sell items made by global artisans through a partnership that Mighty has struck with Novica, an impact marketplace that also sells through National Geographic.

The idea was to introduce as little friction into the process as possible at the outset, but “our customers are pissed — they want more from us,” says Goldhirsh, explaining that Mighty intends to enable its smaller entrepreneurs to sell their own items over time, as well as services, which the platform also does not support currently.

As for how it makes money, Mighty plans to layer in subscription services eventually, as well as collect transaction-based revenue.

As intriguing as it is, the startup, which launched last year, could need to fend off established players like Shopify to get there. Should Mighty begin to gain traction, such stalwarts might pay closer attention.

It’s also conceivable that parents — if not children’s advocates —  could push back on what Mighty is trying to do. Entrepreneurship can be alternately exhilarating and demoralizing, after all.

Mauriello insists they haven’t had that kind of feedback to date. For one thing, she says, Mighty recently launched an online community where its young CEOs can encourage one another and trade sales tips, and she says they are actively engaging there.

She also argues that, like sports or learning a musical instrument, there are lessons to be learned by creating a store on Mighty. Storytelling and how to sell are among them, but as critically, she says, the company’s young customers are learning that “you can fail and pick yourself back up and try again.”

Adds Goldhirsch, “There are definitely kids who are like, ‘Oh, this is harder than I thought it was going to be. I can’t just launch the site and watch money roll in.’ But I think they like the fact that the success they are seeing they are earning, because we’re not doing it for them.”