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News: Savannah Fund launches $25M fund to invest in African startups at seed and Series A

• March 10, 2021
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Savannah Fund, a pan-African venture capital firm, today announced a $25 million fund as it looks to back more early-stage startups on the continent. Since launching in 2012, Savannah Fund —  led by Mbwana Alliy and Paul Bragiel — has backed more than 30 startups. Some of its well-known investments include South African car subscription

Savannah Fund, a pan-African venture capital firm, today announced a $25 million fund as it looks to back more early-stage startups on the continent.

Since launching in 2012, Savannah Fund —  led by Mbwana Alliy and Paul Bragiel — has backed more than 30 startups. Some of its well-known investments include South African car subscription company, FlexClub; Kenyan on-demand logistics company, Sendy; and Nigerian fintech company, Lidya.

Before becoming a VC firm, Savannah Fund started as an accelerator program in Kenya. Startups who got accepted participated in cohorts for three months and received up to $30,000 in funding. However, in 2016, Savannah transitioned into venture capital investing, focusing on seed and Series A stages within $25,000 to $500,000 checks.

This is the second fund for the nine-year-old Mauritius-headquartered investment firm. It has secured a first close led by International Finance Corporation (IFC) with participation from the Women’s Finance Initiative (WeFi). US investor Tim Draper via his VC fund, Draper Associates and Visa Forsten, co-founder of Tencent-owned Supercell, are other notable investors. 

Mbwana Ally (Managing Partner, Savannah Fund)

Speaking with TechCrunch, Alliy said the firm has invested in seven startups already with the first close, which indicates effort on their part that would help close the rest of the fund.

“We raised from some angel investors, high net worth individuals, so when we the official fund launched, we rolled these select companies into the fund,” Alliy said. “We think if you can show that you already have investments you’ve made with your own money, it’s easier to raise from institutional investors, and I think we’re on that path.”

These seven startups cut across the firm’s focus areas, including fintech, edtech, logistics and e-commerce, SaaS, healthtech, and agritech. The disclosed investments include South African agritech Aerobotics and car subscription FlexClub, Ethiopian healthtech Orbit Health and Kenyan-based Safigen, Moringa School and Ando Foods.

The firm has a presence in Kenya, South African and Tanzania, but its core markets remain Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. The managing partner says Savannah is big on startups that can scale across regions in Africa — Rwanda, Ethiopia, Uganda in East Africa; Ivory Coast and Ghana in West Africa; and globally. This is typical of some of the startups in its portfolio — Aerobotics recently expanded to the US, Sendy is an established East African player, and FlexClub operates in Mexico.

“I know it might sound cliche, but we really want founders in our portfolio to think big enough, and we will help them get there,” he said.

The firm has doubled the ticket size from its first fund to $50,000 to $1 million. The fund plans to invest as low as $50,000 at the pre-seed, but typical first check sizes will be between $150,000 to 250,000. Follow up rounds that will likely involve larger amounts will depend on the firm’s position as a lead investor or not. 

In 2020, Savannah Fund’s portfolio raised $118 million across Series A, B and C, with some operating in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. With this new fund, Alliy said the firm is looking to perform better this year and increase its portfolio from 30 to 50 in the foreseeable future.  

The firm also acknowledges the role its backer — WeFi — will be playing in increasing these numbers, especially those led by female founders.

“Entrepreneurs in Residence (EIRs), especially female founders, are a key part of our investment strategy as we have seen with the success of Moringa School, Safigen and Sendy – all 3 of which have women founders/CEOs who previously worked with Savannah as EIRs, Associates & Interns. We’re proud to partner with WeFi to further expand and encourage female founders on the continent. Even during a pandemic, we held 3 internships in 2020, some virtual and some in-person in Kenya and Tanzania,” the statement read.

Lead investor IFC confirmed the news with TechCrunch. According to its statement, the World Bank Group member invested $3 million while We-Fi cut a $500,000 check for the fund.

“Early-stage funding is vital to enable more of Africa’s emerging and growing tech founders to grow their business and fuel the transformation of Africa’s internet economy. By partnering with Savannah Fund, we can help more entrepreneurs to access funding,” said Kevin Njiraini, IFC regional director for Southern Africa and Nigeria.

Paul Bragiel (Generap Partner, Savannah Fund)

Savannah’s second fund is a continuation of the firm’s network with Stanford University. Steve Ciesinski, the president of Stanford Research Institute and co-lectures on an entrepreneurship course with Alliy, joins the firm’s Investment Committee.

Tommy Chia, a Hong-Kong based investor with an active portfolio in Africa like Paga and OneFi, joins the team as a venture partner. Erik Hersman, the co-founder of multiple companies in Kenya, including BRCK, Ushahidi, iHub Nairobi, and Savannah Fund, moves to a senior advisory role while running BRCK full-time. 

Bragiel, the firm’s general partner with investments in multi-billion dollar companies like Unity, Niantic (Pokemon Go) & Zappos, continues to run the fund with Alliy. That said, Savannah Fund joins the likes of Knife Capital and Uncovered Fund that have launched funds dedicated to startups across the continent since the turn of the year.

News: Cloud cybersecurity startup Lumu raises a $7.5 million Series A

• March 10, 2021
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Miami-based cybersecurity startup Lumu today announced the closing of its $7.5 million Series A. The round was co-led by SoftBank Group Corp.’s SB Opportunity Fund and Panoramic Ventures. Lumu, co-founded and headed by Colombian native Ricardo Villadiego, offers a cloud-based service that helps companies continually scan and react to data compromises in real time. The

Miami-based cybersecurity startup Lumu today announced the closing of its $7.5 million Series A. The round was co-led by SoftBank Group Corp.’s SB Opportunity Fund and Panoramic Ventures.

Lumu, co-founded and headed by Colombian native Ricardo Villadiego, offers a cloud-based service that helps companies continually scan and react to data compromises in real time. The company collects and standardizes metadata from across the network, including DNS queries, network traffic, access logs from perimeter proxies, firewalls and spam box filters, then applies AI to correlate threat intelligence from these disparate data sources to isolate confirmed points of compromise.

Lumu CEO Ricardo Villadiego. Image Credits: Lumu

Villadiego described it in lay terms: “If you’re speaking with a bad guy, there’s no good that’s going to come from that. So we apply the same idea with cybersecurity. If your phone or your laptop is talking to an adversary, you don’t really need to understand what the conversation is about,” he said. What you do need to do, he says, is shut it down and prevent it from happening again.

He explained that Lumu not only helps companies prevent breaches but also allows them to automate their responses.

Lumu launched in February 2020 at the RSA cybersecurity conference in San Francisco, and already has 1,300 enterprise customers and targets small to large corporations. In just over 12 months, the company said it has analyzed more than 55 billion metadata records and detected more than 11 million adversarial contacts.

Villadiego was born and raised in the colonial port town of Cartagena, Colombia. With a degree in electrical engineering, he found his passion for cybersecurity while working at Unisys, which, through its cybersecurity excellence program, is how he ended up in the United States.

During his time at Unisys — and later at IBM — he said he was exposed to merger and acquisition deals, motivating him to start his own business. He founded his first cybersecurity company, Easy Solutions, in Miami in 2009, focused on preventing fraud. Easy Solutions caught the eye of tech heavyweight — and Miami local — Manny Medina of the eponymous Medina Capital, who invested in the company’s first round.

“I told him we were looking to raise $5 million and he said, ‘I’m in, but it has to be $10 million,’” Villadiego told TechCrunch.

The two eventually agreed on $11 million, and about a decade later Medina’s own company — Cyxtera — bought Easy Solutions for an undisclosed sum. Cyxtera announced last month that it’s going public at a $3.4 billion valuation through a merger with a SPAC.

Villadiego said Lumu, which has 35 full-time employees, will use the funds to fuel growth in the United States.

“In the U.S., I understand all the issues that we have — especially with diversity — but if you work hard, you have the chance to change your story,” said Villadiego. “At the end of the day, you have to build a business. The hardest part for any entrepreneur is getting access to capital.”

With funding help from SoftBank’s Opportunity Fund, which helps Black, Latinx and Native American founders and entrepreneurs in the U.S., Villadiego said he can focus entirely on the work.

“Once you have access to SoftBank, you sort of forget about the money part, because you know you’ll have access to capital to build your company,” he said. “Now your focus can be on execution — to make sure you’re solving the problem.”

News: Aqua Security raises $135M at a $1B valuation for its cloud native security service

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Aqua Security, a Boston- and Tel Aviv-based security startup that focuses squarely on securing cloud-native services, today announced that it has raised a $135 million Series E funding round at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by ION Crossover Partners. Existing investors M12 Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Insight Partners, TLV Partners, Greenspring Associates

Aqua Security, a Boston- and Tel Aviv-based security startup that focuses squarely on securing cloud-native services, today announced that it has raised a $135 million Series E funding round at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by ION Crossover Partners. Existing investors M12 Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Insight Partners, TLV Partners, Greenspring Associates and Acrew Capital also participated. In total, Aqua Security has now raised $265 million since it was founded in 2015.

The company was one of the earliest to focus on securing container deployments. And while many of its competitors were acquired over the years, Aqua remains independent and is now likely on a path to an IPO. When it launched, the industry focus was still very much on Docker and Docker containers. To the detriment of Docker, that quickly shifted to Kubernetes, which is now the de facto standard. But enterprises are also now looking at serverless and other new technologies on top of this new stack.

“Enterprises that five years ago were experimenting with different types of technologies are now facing a completely different technology stack, a completely different ecosystem and a completely new set of security requirements,” Aqua CEO Dror Davidoff told me. And with these new security requirements came a plethora of startups, all focusing on specific parts of the stack.

Image Credits: Aqua Security

What set Aqua apart, Dror argues, is that it managed to 1) become the best solution for container security and 2) realized that to succeed in the long run, it had to become a platform that would secure the entire cloud-native environment. About two years ago, the company made this switch from a product to a platform, as Davidoff describes it.

“There was a spree of acquisitions by CheckPoint and Palo Alto [Networks] and Trend [Micro],” Davidoff said. “They all started to acquire pieces and tried to build a more complete offering. The big advantage for Aqua was that we had everything natively built on one platform. […] Five years later, everyone is talking about cloud-native security. No one says ‘container security’ or ‘serverless security’ anymore. And Aqua is practically the broadest cloud-native security [platform].”

One interesting aspect of Aqua’s strategy is that it continues to bet on open source, too. Trivy, its open-source vulnerability scanner, is the default scanner for GitLab’s Harbor Registry and the CNCF’s Artifact Hub, for example.

“We are probably the best security open-source player there is because not only do we secure from vulnerable open source, we are also very active in the open-source community,” Davidoff said (with maybe a bit of hyperbole). “We provide tools to the community that are open source. To keep evolving, we have a whole open-source team. It’s part of the philosophy here that we want to be part of the community and it really helps us to understand it better and provide the right tools.”

In 2020, Aqua, which mostly focuses on mid-size and larger companies, doubled the number of paying customers and it now has more than half a dozen customers with an ARR of over $1 million each.

Davidoff tells me the company wasn’t actively looking for new funding. Its last funding round came together only a year ago, after all. But the team decided that it wanted to be able to double down on its current strategy and raise sooner than originally planned. ION had been interested in working with Aqua for a while, Davidoff told me, and while the company received other offers, the team decided to go ahead with ION as the lead investor (with all of Aqua’s existing investors also participating in this round).

“We want to grow from a product perspective, we want to grow from a go-to-market [perspective] and expand our geographical coverage — and we also want to be a little more acquisitive. That’s another direction we’re looking at because now we have the platform that allows us to do that. […] I feel we can take the company to great heights. That’s the plan. The market opportunity allows us to dream big.”

News: Sources: Web Summit will spin out its virtual conference software as a full-blown startup

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Sources say Web Summit, the giant tech conference company which specialized in very large gatherings in cities like Lisbon, is poised to spin out its Hopin-like proprietary conference software as an independent startup. Although it’s put out a statement today that it will be licensing its software to the United Nations Development Programme, I’ve spoken

Sources say Web Summit, the giant tech conference company which specialized in very large gatherings in cities like Lisbon, is poised to spin out its Hopin-like proprietary conference software as an independent startup. Although it’s put out a statement today that it will be licensing its software to the United Nations Development Programme, I’ve spoken to well-placed sources who say the platform will be spun out as a separate company and will raise venture funding, the context being that similar virtual conference platforms have already achieved million and billion-dollar valuations. A spokesperson denied the claim.

The software – which was first showcased at Collision in June 2020 and played host to 104,000 attendees at Web Summit in December 2020 – was initially designed to complement networking at physical events, but was flipped to work online after international travel was restricted for business and companies worldwide as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The United Nations Development Programme will be the first customer to run Web Summit’s conference software for its event – Istanbul Innovation Days, March 23-25.

Paddy Cosgrave, co-founder and CEO of Web Summit said: “We’ve agreed to run an event in March for the UNDP on our platform. We couldn’t imagine having a better first customer. It’s been a long journey, and we’ve taken it slow, perfecting the software over years. We’re in no rush for new customers, and we will take our time. In 2022, we hope to partner with other great events.” Speaking to TechCrunch, he denied the platform was to be spun-out.

However, our sources say investors are circling around the software platform in the light of the recent valuations of the likes of Zoom and Hopin, with the latter recently achieving a valuation of between $5 billion and $6 billion after its recent $400 million Series C.

The potential move come by Web Summit comes at an interesting time for the virtual events space.

Although Hopin’s valuation has soared, Zoom’s valuation has been called “impossible to justify”. And the huge growth of Microsoft Teams could hurt Zoom’s business as well.

That said, specialized virtual conference software is doing well, as we’ve seen with the recent $14m funding of Spatial and others.

Web Summit says will return to an in-person conference in November 2021, in Lisbon, Portugal.

News: Via buys mapping startup Remix for $100 million

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Remix, the startup that developed mapping software used by cities for transportation planning and street design, was born out of a hackathon during a Code for America fellowship. Nearly seven years later, the San Francisco-based startup is being acquired by Via for $100 million in cash and equity. Remix will become a subsidiary of Via,

Remix, the startup that developed mapping software used by cities for transportation planning and street design, was born out of a hackathon during a Code for America fellowship. Nearly seven years later, the San Francisco-based startup is being acquired by Via for $100 million in cash and equity.

Remix will become a subsidiary of Via, an arrangement that will let the startup maintain its independent brand. Remix’s 65 employees and two of its co-founders — CEO Tiffany Chu and CTO Dan Getelman — will stay on.

The acquisition adds yet another service to Via’s ever-expanding business as well as customer base of more than 350 local governments in 22 countries.

Remix’s strength is in planning, while Via brings expertise in software and operations, Chu said in a recent interview.

“By having those two strengths come together, we can be much stronger as an end-to-end solution — from the initial genesis of this idea around transportation planning and carrying that through to operations — in a way that we, individually, would not have been able to achieve otherwise,” Chu said.

Image Credits: Remix 

Via started as a on-demand shuttle operator in 2012. The company, which last year hit a $2.25 billion valuation after raising $400 million in a Series E round, has evolved from its initial consumer-facing focus.

Today, Via’s core business is its software and operations platform, which is used by cities and transportation authorities to plan, schedule and deploy their own on-demand and fixed route transit, paratransit and school buses. Via has 200 partners in 24 countries.

Via is backed by Exor, the Agnelli family holding company that owns stakes in PartnerRe, Ferrari and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles as well as Macquarie Capital, Mori Building, Shell 83North, Broadscale Group, Ervington Investments, Hearst Ventures, Planven Ventures, Pitango and RiverPark Ventures.

Accidental founders

Remix’s Silicon Valley-esque origin story was driven by some unlikely entrepreneurs.

Chu had been a user experience designer at Zipcar when she moved to San Francisco to complete a one-year fellowship with Code for America. In the middle of the fellowship, Chu along her eventual co-founders Getelman, Sam Hashemi and Danny Whalen were working on a hackathon project that to help citizens of San Francisco suggest better transit routes to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.

The transportation planning tool was shared on Twitter and it went viral. Within two weeks, 30,000 maps had been created.

“It became this funny, unexpected armchair transportation planning tool that people explored online,” Chu recalled. But it wasn’t just the local citizenry who took notice. About 200 urban planners reached out, asking the team to build extra features that could be used by agencies for their own transportation planning projects.

“It was kind of a mind blowing moment for us when we realized the project that was supposed to be a grassroots kind of civic project actually had implications around solving real needs and problems in transportation,” Chu said.

Remix was founded shortly after and the company’s founders applied and were accepted into Y Combinator. The company went on to raise a total of $27 million in investments from Y Combinator, Sequoia and Energy Impact Partners.

News: Fleex lets you allocate a monthly budget for work from home equipment

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Meet Fleex, a French startup that was formally named Flexlab. The company wants to make it easier to give some cash to your employees so that they can spend it on a desk, an external monitor, some computer peripherals, a nice chair, etc. Essentially, Fleex wants to make it easier to turn remote work into

Meet Fleex, a French startup that was formally named Flexlab. The company wants to make it easier to give some cash to your employees so that they can spend it on a desk, an external monitor, some computer peripherals, a nice chair, etc. Essentially, Fleex wants to make it easier to turn remote work into work.

If you work for a big company and have the ability to work from home, chances are your employer has sent you an email saying that you can request an external monitor or an office chair to make work easier during the pandemic. And if you work for a small company, it probably depends on your employer.

Either way, some IT and facility departments now have to deal with a huge inventory of devices and furniture that is spread around everyone’s homes. Setting up policies, ordering portals and inventory can be quite difficult as well.

Fleex basically wants to help you with that situation. The company lets you allocate a monthly budget for your employees. People can then choose to spend that budget on several products and services.

The startup works directly with suppliers to put together a product catalog. For now, Fleex is starting with IT supplies and furniture.

Fleex then buys supplies for you and sends stuff to your home — it takes care of the full lifecycle of the products. When an employee leaves the company, they have to send equipment back to Fleex.

As you can see, Fleex has a different business model compared to your average software startup. The company has to allocate some capital to buy desks, chairs, screens, printers, etc. It has to figure out whether employees efficiently spend their budget or if they leave some money sitting on their Fleex account.

It has to find out whether products can last for a while before they have to be decommissioned. In other words, it’s going to take a bit of time to figure out the unit economics behind Fleex.

The company is just getting started and is working with a few companies to try out its offering. So far, Swile, Back Market and Shine have been using Fleex. They allocate a monthly budget of €55 per employee on average.

Fleex has raised a $2 million seed round (€1.7 million) and has joined eFounders, a European startup studio focused on software-as-a-service companies.

Image Credits: Fleex

News: Apple starts assembling iPhone 12 in India

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Apple is beginning to assemble the iPhone 12 in India as it ramps up its production capacity in the world’s second largest smartphone market. Foxconn, a contract manufacturing partner of Apple, is assembling the iPhone 12 model — though currently no other iPhone 12 model — Pro and Pro Max, and Mini — in the

Apple is beginning to assemble the iPhone 12 in India as it ramps up its production capacity in the world’s second largest smartphone market. Foxconn, a contract manufacturing partner of Apple, is assembling the iPhone 12 model — though currently no other iPhone 12 model — Pro and Pro Max, and Mini — in the country.

The move underscores how India is emerging as a big production hub for global smartphone makers. Samsung, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus have been assembling their smartphone models in India for more than half a decade and have increased their production capacities in recent years.

To attract global giants, New Delhi has been offering tax benefits to firms that locally produce in India and in recent quarters has significantly increased the perks.

“We are optimistic and looking forward to building a strong ecosystem across the value chain and integrating with the global value chains, thereby strengthening electronics manufacturing ecosystem in the country,” said India’s IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad last year.

Apple began locally assembling select iPhone models in India in 2017 — beginning with the iPhone SE — though for the initial years the company’s contract partners locally produced only older iPhone models in the country.

Analysts have estimated that Apple, which launched its online store in India last year and is working to set up its first physical retail store in the country this year, plans to move between seven to 10% of its iPhone production to India as it looks to cut reliance on China. TechCrunch understands the figure is “wild speculation.”

The iPhone maker suffered a setback in India late last year after a violent protest broke at a facility in Wistron, one of its key manufacturing partners of Apple, near Bangalore last year. But the Taiwanese firm appears to have resolved the issues. It said last month that it was rehiring workers and will soon be resuming production at its facility.

“Apple is dedicated to making the best products and services in the world to delight our customers. We are proud to be starting production of iPhone 12 in India for our local customers,” said an Apple spokesperson in India in a statement.

Apple assumes just 2% of the Indian smartphone market, but it has grown in recent quarters. Apple shipped more than 1.5 million iPhone units in India in the quarter that ended in December, up 100% year-on-year, making this its best quarter in the world’s largest smartphone market to date, according to research firms Counterpoint and CyberMedia Research.

Unlike several foreign firms that offer their products and services at low prices in India, Apple has focused entirely on a small fraction of the population that can afford to pay big bucks, said Jayanth Kolla, chief analyst at Convergence Catalyst. And while it took several years, Apple has carved out a slice of the market that is growing, he said.

News: Songclip raises $11M to bring more licensed music to social media

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The team behind Songclip thinks that social media could use more music. Yes, music is a big part of the experience on a handful of apps like TikTok and Triller, but Songclip co-founder and COO John vanSuchtelen told me, “That is not the end of how music is going to be a feature, that is

The team behind Songclip thinks that social media could use more music.

Yes, music is a big part of the experience on a handful of apps like TikTok and Triller, but Songclip co-founder and COO John vanSuchtelen told me, “That is not the end of how music is going to be a feature, that is a beginning.”

He added, “In the next nine to 12 months … just like you never have a phone without a camera, you’re not going to have an app without music clips as a feature when you make videos.”

That’s what vanSuchtelen and his co-founder and CEO Andy Blacker are hoping to enable with Songclip, which announced today that it has raised $11 million in new funding.

The startup has created an API that, when integrated with other apps (current integrations include photo- and video-editing app PicsArt), allows users to search for and share music. VanSuchtelen said that like Giphy, Songclip plans to popularize a new media format — the short audio clip — and make it accessible across a wide range of services.

“If I were to say, I’m going to send you a four-minute song,’ it’s just not going to work that way, that’s not how we communicate anymore,” vanSuchtelen said. “How do you take the music and turn it into the bite that you want to use in a social context?”

To do this, Blacker said Songclip doesn’t just license music, it also does its own tagging and clipping, while offering tools for music labels to protect their intellectual property and providing data on how people are interacting with the music. And unlike Giphy, Songclip isn’t looking to build a consumer brand.

All of this involves a combination of human editors and technology. Blacker said the human element is key to understand the nuances of songs and their association, like the fact that Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” isn’t really about bridges or water, or that Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine” is a happy song even though it doesn’t have the word “happy” in it.

Songclip has now raised a total of $23 million. The new round was led by Gregg Smith of Evolution VC Partners. The Kraft Group, Michael Rubin, Raised in Space, Gaingels and ​Forefront Venture Partners​ also participated, as did industry executives Jason Flom and Steve Greenberg and the band AJR.

News: Zego, the tech-enabled commercial motor insurer, raises $150M at $1.1B valuation

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Zego, the insurtech that got its start by offering flexible motorbike insurance for gig economy workers but has since expanded with a range of tech-enabled commercial motor insurance products, has raised $150 million. Leading the London-based company’s C round — giving it a $1.1 billion valuation and a unicorn status — is DST Global. Other

Zego, the insurtech that got its start by offering flexible motorbike insurance for gig economy workers but has since expanded with a range of tech-enabled commercial motor insurance products, has raised $150 million.

Leading the London-based company’s C round — giving it a $1.1 billion valuation and a unicorn status — is DST Global. Other new backers include General Catalyst, whose founder and MD, Joel Cutler, joins Zego’s board.

Notably, I’m told all existing investors followed on, including Wise’s Taavet Hinrikus, who is also on the Zego board, and Target Global, Balderton Capital and Latitude. Zego has now raised more than $200 million since launching in 2016.

The insurance company says it will use the funding to “rapidly expand across Europe and beyond”. It will also double its workforce, which currently stands at 265 employees, to over 500 employees by the end of 2021, and continue to invest in technology. Late last year, Zeho acquired telematics company Drivit.

Zego offers commercial motor insurance for businesses, from self-employed drivers and riders to fleets of vehicles, spanning pay-as-you-go insurance to annual policies. It combines tech with multiple data sources to offer insurance products that it claims save time and are more cost-effective. It earned its own insurance license in 2019, enabling it to build and sell its own policies, in addition to working alongside other insurers.

Technical/data integrations include those with companies in the ride-hailing space, such as Uber, Ola and Bolt, and in the delivery space, such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat. More recently, Zego has become a key partner in the U.K.’s burgeoning e-scooter rental market, partnering with companies like Tier, Voi and Dott.

Next up, the insurtech is betting big on offering insurance for fleets. “Over the past couple of years, Zego’s focus on powering opportunities for businesses has expanded to include not just self-employed drivers and riders, but also entire fleets of vehicles,” Sten Saar, CEO and co-founder of Zego, tells me, noting that 80% of new vehicles are now sold to commercial customers.

“This has been both a natural progression for the company, with the only real difference being distribution, as well as a focused effort, as Zego aims to capitalise on an ever-growing market currently underserved by the insurance sector”.

To date, Zego has provided more than 17 million insurance policies and covered more than 200,000 vehicles in five countries.

“While most traditional insurers price their insurance products based purely on factors such as age and vehicle type, and while others may use telematics-based driver behaviour data too, Zego is able to price policies based not only on traditional factors, but also driver behaviour data and working habits data,” adds Saar.

“In fact, overall, the information Zego can collect amounts to five times more data per vehicle than competitors, or 50 data points per second. This means that we have a much more comprehensive understanding of risk than competitors, enabling us to provide best-value insurance coverage, from policies ranging from one hour to one year”.

Cue statement from Tom Stafford, managing partner of DST Global: “The shift to digital is occurring across multiple industry categories and is increasingly occurring in the insurance industry. We are excited to partner with Sten and the team at Zego as they leverage internet, technology, telematics and data-driven decisions to provide the best insurance products at the best pricing for their customers.”

News: Jobandtalent takes $120M from Softbank to enter the US market

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Spain’s Jobandtalent, a digital temp staffing agency startup which operates a dual-sided platform that matches temps with employers needing casual labor in sectors like ecommerce, warehousing, logistics and manufacturing, has grabbed €100 million (~$120M) in Series D funding from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. Previous investors — including Atomico, Seek, DN Capital, InfraVia, Quadrille, Kibo and

Spain’s Jobandtalent, a digital temp staffing agency startup which operates a dual-sided platform that matches temps with employers needing casual labor in sectors like ecommerce, warehousing, logistics and manufacturing, has grabbed €100 million (~$120M) in Series D funding from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2.

Previous investors — including Atomico, Seek, DN Capital, InfraVia, Quadrille, Kibo and FJ Labs — also participated in the round.

The new raise fast-follows a $108M top up to Jobandtalent’s Series C round, which we reported on back in January. In total, the company has raised a total of €310M (just under $370M) since being founded back in 2009.

Today Jobandtalent is also announcing a ~$100M (€83M) in debt financing from BlackRock.

The startup tells us the mix of debt and equity will help it step on the gas and accelerate growth of its marketplace faster than if it took in less capital at this point, as well as enabling it to plough more resource into its product and tech development.

On the tech side its platform uses learning algorithms to match temps with jobs — speeding the hiring process up. It also offers a CRM for employers which bakes in analytics for tracking workforce performance in real time — which it says can help them monitor workplace satisfaction, reduce attrition and track metrics such as absences and late arrivals.

For temps there’s the promise of steadier and easy to obtain shift work — as Jobandtalent streamlines job application admin and payroll into a one-stop shop, and it suggests its marketplace/workforce-as-a-service model can provide temps with continuous employment (i.e. through consecutive temp roles).

Its marketing also talks in terms of offering these workers a level of job security and benefits typically associated with full time employment — such as pensions, sick and holiday pay, health insurance (in some markets) and training courses.

With the new Series D funds in the bank Jobandtalent is preparing to enter the U.S. market “in the next year”, per co-CEO and co-founder, Juan Urdiales — expanding out from the eight markets it’s currently operating in (namely: Spain, the UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Mexico, Colombia, and Portugal).

He confirms it’s also now eyeing entering two more markets in Europe: Italy and the Netherlands.

“We are not yet seeing any competitor operating in the US at large scale and in multiple states in the verticals where we operate (e-commerce, logistics, etc). This is one of the reasons why we believe that we have a great opportunity there,” Urdiales tells TechCrunch.

“The U.S. can be a very difficult market to break into. However, we are starting to see more and more European companies going to the U.S. and being successful (Spotify, Klarna, Adyen, etc),” he adds.

“We believe that in our case, after having operated our model in Europe with high standards on labour rights and complex regulatory environments, we are in a great position to launch our platform in the US and offer a great value proposition to workers and employers there.”

Jobandtalent’s platform will offer temps equivalent perks and benefits in the U.S. as it offers elsewhere, per Urdiales.

“The perks and benefits offered into our marketplace meet the same principles everywhere, all of them aim to bring to the workers a similar status as a permanent worker, with the same type of benefits and perks,” he says, adding: “There are some adaptations in every country to do this, and it would be the same with the US.”

In the past year Jobandtalent says that more than 80,000 workers have used its marketplace to find temporary roles (its website says it has 10M+ registered users) — while more than 850 companies, including the likes of XPO, Ceva Logistics, eBay, Ocado, Sainsbury’s, Bayer and Santander, have used its platform to locate temp workers.

The startup’s revenue run rate has grown from €5M in 2016 to €500M in 2020 — which it says has resulted in a positive EBITDA. It also touts a growth rate of over 100% year on year.

Commenting in a statement, Yanni Pipilis, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said: “Jobandtalent is addressing a crucial challenge facing the modern workforce — how to balance flexibility with high quality, reliable job opportunities. The company has developed a data-driven platform that has a track record of providing high fulfilment and low attrition staffing for businesses with temporary roles to fill, while securing income stability and benefits for workers. We are incredibly excited to partner with Juan, Felipe and the team on the next phase of the company’s growth.”

Asked about its decision to take funding from SoftBank for the Series D — and whether it was largely about the scale the investor could offer or whether Jobandtalent also sees potential synergies with other SoftBank portfolio companies (in sectors like logistics) — Urdiales also tells us: “We believe the Vision Fund team can add a lot of value to the company in this new stage of our growth as they have a lot of experience with companies of our size. We can learn a lot from the companies and management teams that they have invested in over the past few years. They have an entrepreneurial mindset and a clear vision on how technology and AI is going to disrupt many industries, and we share the same vision around our category.”