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News: Zonos banks $69M to develop APIs for democratizing cross-border commerce

• September 15, 2021
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Zonos automatically classifies goods and calculates an accurate total landed cost on international transactions.

Cross-border commerce company Zonos raised $69 million in a Series A, led by Silversmith Capital Partners, to continue building its APIs that auto classify goods and calculate an accurate total landed cost on international transactions.

St. George, Utah-based Zonos is classifying the round as a minority investment that also included individual investors Eric Rea, CEO of Podium, and Aaron Skonnard, co-founder and CEO of Pluralsight. The Series A is the first outside capital Zonos has raised since it was founded in 2009, Clint Reid, founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.

As Reid explained it, “total landed cost” refers to the duties, taxes, import and shipping fees someone from another country might pay when purchasing items from the U.S. However, it is often difficult for businesses to figure out the exact cost of those fees.

Global cross-border e-commerce was estimated to be over $400 billion in 2018, but is growing at twice the rate of domestic e-commerce. This is where Zonos comes in: The company’s APIs, apps and plugins simplify cross-border sales by providing an accurate final price a consumer pays for an item on an international purchase. Businesses can choose which one or multiple shipping carriers they want to work with and even enable customers to choose at the time of purchase.

“Businesses can’t know all of a country’s laws,” Reid added. “Our mission is to create trust in global trade. If you are transparent, you bring trust. This was traditionally thought to be a shipping problem, but it is really a technology problem.”

As part of the investment Todd MacLean, managing partner at Silversmith Capital Partners, joined the Zonos board of directors. One of the things that attracted MacLean to the company was that Reid was building a company outside of Silicon Valley and disrupting global trade far from any port.

He says while looking into international commerce, he found people wound up being charged additional fees after they have already purchased the item, leading to bad customer experiences, especially when a merchant is trying to build brand loyalty.

Even if someone chooses not to purchase the item due to the fees being too high, MacLean believes the purchasing experience will be different because the pricing and shipping information was provided up front.

“Our diligence said Zonos is the only player to take the data that exists out there and make sense of it,” MacLean said. “Customers love it — we got the most impressive customer references because this demand is already out there, and they are seeing more revenue and their customers have more loyalty because it just works.”

In fact, it is common for companies to see 25% to 30% year over year increase in sales, Reid added. He went on to say that due to fees associated with shipping, it doesn’t always mean an increase in revenue for companies. There may be a small decrease, but a longer lifetime value with customers.

Going after venture capital at this time was important to Reid, who saw global trade becoming more complex as countries added new tax laws and stopped using other trade regulations. However, it was not just about getting the funding, but finding the right partner that recognizes that this problem won’t be solved in the next five years, but will need to be in it for the long haul, which Reid said he saw in Silversmith.

The new investment provides fuel for Zonos to grow in product development and go-to-market while also expanding its worldwide team into Europe and Asia Pacific. Eighteen months ago, the company had 30 employees, and now there are over 100. It also has more than 1,500 customers around the world and provides them with millions of landed cost quotes every day.

“Right now, we are the leader for APIs in cross-border e-commerce, but we need to also be the technology leader regardless of the industry,” Reid added. “We can’t just accept that we are good enough, we need to be better at doing this. We are looking at expanding into additional markets because it is more than just servicing U.S. companies, but need to be where our customers are.”

 

News: Walmart to launch autonomous delivery service with Ford and Argo AI

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Walmart has tapped Argo AI and Ford to launch an autonomous vehicle delivery service in Austin, Miami and Washington D.C., the companies said Wednesday. The service will allow customers to place online orders for groceries and other items using Walmart’s ordering platform. Argo’s cloud-based infrastructure will be integrated with Walmart’s online platform, routing the orders

Walmart has tapped Argo AI and Ford to launch an autonomous vehicle delivery service in Austin, Miami and Washington D.C., the companies said Wednesday.

The service will allow customers to place online orders for groceries and other items using Walmart’s ordering platform. Argo’s cloud-based infrastructure will be integrated with Walmart’s online platform, routing the orders and scheduling package deliveries to customers homes. Initially, the commercial service will be limited to specific geogrpahic areas in each city and expand over time. The companies will begin testing later this year.

Walmart and Ford have partnered before in a limited test with Postmates in fall 2018. In that pilot program, which focused on Miami-Dade County, they used simulated self-driving vehicles to study the user experience of delivering groceries. Argo was not involved in that study.

This latest collaboration will use Ford vehicles integrated with Argo AI’s self-driving technology. The aim is to show the potential for for autonomous vehicle delivery services at scale, according to Argo AI CEO and co-founder Bryan Salesky.

The announcement illustrates Ford’s two-track system to launch a commercial service that uses autonomous vehicles to shuttle people and possibly packages. The automaker has been testing the business side of of how a dedicated fleet of autonomous vehicles might operate in the real world. It backed Argo AI in 2016 and tapped the company to develop and test the self-driving system.

It also shows how Austin and Miami have become central to their initials commercialization plans.

Earlier this summer, Argo AI and Ford announced plans to launch at least 1,000 self-driving vehicles on Lyft’s ride-hailing network in a number of cities over the next five years, starting with Miami and Austin. The first Ford self-driving vehicles equipped with Argo’s autonomous vehicle technology are expected to become available on Lyft’s app in Miami later this year.

News: Patient monitoring startup Doccla secures $3.3M Seed funding for ‘virtual wards’ platform

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Doccla, a healthtech startup with a platform that can monitor patients on hospital wards and in the home, has secured a $3.3 million Seed funding round, led by Giant Ventures and Speedinvest. The company allows hospitals to predict when beds will be freed up by monitoring patients remotely via wearable medical devices, thus helping to

Doccla, a healthtech startup with a platform that can monitor patients on hospital wards and in the home, has secured a $3.3 million Seed funding round, led by Giant Ventures and Speedinvest. The company allows hospitals to predict when beds will be freed up by monitoring patients remotely via wearable medical devices, thus helping to alleviate bottlenecks in the system.

Founded by health entrepreneur, Martin Ratz, and tech entrepreneur, Dag Larrson, Doccla says it has saved “thousands of bed days for the NHS,” achieving a 29% reduction in Emergency Admissions and a 20% reduction in A&E attendance, the company claimed.

Doccla is similar to competitors Current Health, Huma and Cadence. The latter recently raised $41 million in funding from Thrive and General Catalyst. The company offers a remote patient monitoring platform that enables clinicians to monitor patients at home and provide personalized feedback via texts and ‘video visits’. Doccla says it can also measure patients at home.

The cash raised will be used to invest in its technology, and integrate further with the medical wearables and journal record systems. It also plans to expand into European healthcare markets.
 
Once again, as we have seen with other technologies, Doccla’s development was propelled by the pandemic. It turned out that overwhelmed hospitals needed technologies like this to create ‘virtual wards’ in order to monitor patients’ journey both in the hospital and when they got home.

Dag Larsson, CEO and co-founder of Doccla said. “Our end-to-end virtual ward services are extremely easy for the care provider to take on and extremely hard for them to ignore. The NHS now faces a challenging winter season and we’re evolving our technology to support care providers.”

He added: “We differ a lot from the competition in that we support the entire patient journey (e.g all last-mile activities like logistics, customer service, and even pre-configured mobile phones). This has made us punch substantially over our weight and win contracts with extremely high patient and clinician approval.”

Cameron McLain, Managing Partner & Co-Founder from Giant Ventures added: “Doccla provides a vital solution for a strained healthcare system, delivering a product that improves the patient experience and tackles cost.”

Felix Faltin, Principal and Digital Health Lead at Speedinvest said “Doccla’s platform is more than a product, it’s a full-stack solution that makes care delivery more efficient for providers, cheaper for payors and safer for patients, long past COVID-19.”

News: Ireland probes TikTok’s handling of kids’ data and transfers to China

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Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has yet another ‘Big Tech’ GDPR probe to add to its pile: The regulator said yesterday it has opened two investigations into video sharing platform TikTok. The first covers how TikTok handles children’s data, and whether it complies with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation. The DPC also said it will examine

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has yet another ‘Big Tech’ GDPR probe to add to its pile: The regulator said yesterday it has opened two investigations into video sharing platform TikTok.

The first covers how TikTok handles children’s data, and whether it complies with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The DPC also said it will examine TikTok’s transfers of personal data to China, where its parent entity is based — looking to see if the company meets requirements set out in the regulation covering personal data transfers to third countries.

TikTok was contacted for comment on the DPC’s investigation.

A spokesperson told us:

“The privacy and safety of the TikTok community, particularly our youngest members, is a top priority. We’ve implemented extensive policies and controls to safeguard user data and rely on approved methods for data being transferred from Europe, such as standard contractual clauses. We intend to fully cooperate with the DPC.”

The Irish regulator’s announcement of two “own volition” enquiries follows pressure from other EU data protection authorities and consumers protection groups which have raised concerns about how TikTok handles’ user data generally and children’s information specifically.

In Italy this January, TikTok was ordered to recheck the age of every user in the country after the data protection watchdog instigated an emergency procedure, using GDPR powers, following child safety concerns.

TikTok went on to comply with the order — removing more than half a million accounts where it could not verify the users were not children.

This year European consumer protection groups have also raised a number of child safety and privacy concerns about the platform. And, in May, EU lawmakers said they would review the company’s terms of service.

On children’s data, the GDPR sets limits on how kids’ information can be processed, putting an age cap on the ability of children to consent to their data being used. The age limit varies per EU Member State but there’s a hard cap for kids’ ability to consent at 13 years old (some EU countries set the age limit at 16).

In response to the announcement of the DPC’s enquiry, TikTok pointed to its use of age gating technology and other strategies it said it uses to detect and remove underage users from its platform.

It also flagged a number of recent changes it’s made around children’s accounts and data — such as flipping the default settings to make their accounts privacy by default and limiting their exposure to certain features that intentionally encourage interaction with other TikTok users if those users are over 16.

While on international data transfers it claims to use “approved methods”. However the picture is rather more complicated than TikTok’s statement implies. Transfers of Europeans’ data to China are complicated by there being no EU data adequacy agreement in place with China.

In TikTok’s case, that means, for any personal data transfers to China to be lawful, it needs to have additional “appropriate safeguards” in place to protect the information to the required EU standard.

When there is no adequacy arrangement in place, data controllers can, potentially, rely on mechanisms like Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) or binding corporate rules (BCRs) — and TikTok’s statement notes it uses SCCs.

But — crucially — personal data transfers out of the EU to third countries have faced significant legal uncertainty and added scrutiny since a landmark ruling by the CJEU last year which invalidated a flagship data transfer arrangement between the US and the EU and made it clear that DPAs (such as Ireland’s DPC) have a duty to step in and suspend transfers if they suspect people’s data is flowing to a third country where it might be at risk.

So while the CJEU did not invalidate mechanisms like SCCs entirely they essentially said all international transfers to third countries must be assessed on a case-by-case basis and, where a DPA has concerns, it must step in and suspend those non-secure data flows.

The CJEU ruling means just the fact of using a mechanism like SCCs doesn’t mean anything on its own re: the legality of a particular data transfer. It also amps up the pressure on EU agencies like Ireland’s DPC to be pro-active about assessing risky data flows.

Final guidance put out by the European Data Protection Board, earlier this year, provides details on the so-called ‘special measures’ that a data controller may be able to apply in order to increase the level of protection around their specific transfer so the information can be legally taken to a third country.

But these steps can include technical measures like strong encryption — and it’s not clear how a social media company like TikTok would be able to apply such a fix, given how its platform and algorithms are continuously mining users’ data to customize the content they see and in order to keep them engaged with TikTok’s ad platform.

In another recent development, China has just passed its first data protection law.

But, again, this is unlikely to change much for EU transfers. The Communist Party regime’s ongoing appropriation of personal data, through the application of sweeping digital surveillance laws, means it would be all but impossible for China to meet the EU’s stringent requirements for data adequacy. (And if the US can’t get EU adequacy it would be ‘interesting’ geopolitical optics, to put it politely, were the coveted status to be granted to China…)

One factor TikTok can take heart from is that it does likely have time on its side when it comes to the’s EU enforcement of its data protection rules.

The Irish DPC has a huge backlog of cross-border GDPR investigations into a number of tech giants.

It was only earlier this month that Irish regulator finally issued its first decision against a Facebook-owned company — announcing a $267M fine against WhatsApp for breaching GDPR transparency rules (but only doing so years after the first complaints had been lodged).

The DPC’s first decision in a cross-border GDPR case pertaining to Big Tech came at the end of last year — when it fined Twitter $550k over a data breach dating back to 2018, the year GDPR technically begun applying.

The Irish regulator still has scores of undecided cases on its desk — against tech giants including Apple and Facebook. That means that the new TikTok probes join the back of a much criticized bottleneck. And a decision on these probes isn’t likely for years.

On children’s data, TikTok may face swifter scrutiny elsewhere in Europe: The UK added some ‘gold-plaiting’ to its version of the EU GDPR in the area of children’s data — and, from this month, has said it expects platforms meet its recommended standards.

It has warned that platforms that don’t fully engage with its Age Appropriate Design Code could face penalties under the UK’s GDPR. The UK’s code has been credited with encouraging a number of recent changes by social media platforms over how they handle kids’ data and accounts.

News: Onin is trying to fix event planning by combining calendar and chat

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What would happened if your go-to calendar and messaging apps were in fact one and the same thing? That’s the thinking behind Onin — a UK startup that wants to simplify event planning by, well, making a more organized app for organizing stuff. If that sounds a little niche, it pays to remember that calendars

What would happened if your go-to calendar and messaging apps were in fact one and the same thing? That’s the thinking behind Onin — a UK startup that wants to simplify event planning by, well, making a more organized app for organizing stuff.

If that sounds a little niche, it pays to remember that calendars have been having a bit of a moment (ha!) of late (ho!) — what with the pandemic parceling our work lives into endless virtual meeting slots. Aka: How many Zoom calls can one human survive in a single day?

Certainly the limitations of digital calendars, these rather unlovely (yet ever more essential) time-management tools, have had faced closer scrutiny since COVID-19 popped up on the scene. Flaws? Yes they have a few.

And so we’ve seen a burst of startup attention to the space in recent years. Think stuff like Calendly and Reclaim.ai for more efficiently managing meeting scheduling (aka ‘smart calendar assistants’) — or, more recently, Magical — which is trying to push the (invite) envelope a little further by trying to make calendars more collaborative.

Onin is taking a similarly collaborative tack — but with, initially, more of a consumer focus: It wants to be your new go-to app to arrange stuff like drinks or trips with your friends. (If it can take off with twentysomething socialites and worm its way from B2C into work settings via a consumerization backdoor then great, is the founder’s thinking there.)

But why do you need a whole new app for organizing birthday drinks, I hear you cry!?

Because the experience of using a digital tool to arrange multi-person events is frustratingly un-social and friction-filled is Onin’s argument.

With a typical calendar, an event creator owns the event (and therefore the planning process) so only they can make changes that sync to all participants. Hence those endless emails discussion threads that spring up around nascent group events as people try to hash out the details of a plan — who’s free when and which location works for everyone and so on — and then nag the self appointed organizer to update the invite so everyone stays on the same page.

Onin’s alternative approach avoids this planning asymmetry by collapsing and combining chat and calendar into a one-stop scheduling dream: “One place to find time and plan events without leaving the chat.” Or, well, that’s the promise.

(And — yes — it will still integrate with your existing calendar software so that events planned in Onin get synced back there.)

Here’s founder Ryan Brodie laying it out: “We want to be the aggregation layer for events, contextualising the process & third party integrations so there’s zero fragmentation between them and the discussion that forms them (right now the event in our diaries is always one step behind the convo and every step is duplicated)

“To do this we want to replace your calendar app/web app and act as a client for whatever calendar provider you use (‘bring your own calendar’).”

“We’re starting from the consumer and consumer meet-up side however we strongly believe (and have already proven) Onin’s usefulness across sectors,” he also argues. “The key thing is we’re chat first not event first; 95% of the planning is happening by chat and not by editing the event’s details, thus our hard work on bringing the event into the conversation itself (you can @mention the group in any of its sub-groups too making referring to an upcoming event delightful).”

Per Brodie, the problem Onin is focused on stems from fragmentation related to the long-standing iCalendar standard —  aka the Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification format (RFC 5545), which allows different scheduling services to understand and process calendaring items (and was first created in 1998) — which is really why, as he tells it, trying to do group scheduling with existing calendar apps is such a frustrating mess.

Onin’s answer to this legacy fragmentation takes the form of a patent-pending “architectural solution” — which means the software always ‘organizes’ the event “from a calendaring perspective, not a specific user”, as Brodie puts it. (Or, more simply: “The organiser is the group email address and we control its sync.”)

The effect of that is to circumvent the fragmentation between an event and its communication channels — thereby removing unnecessary friction from the event planning process by letting groups plan stuff together more spontaneously.

“No one has solved this problem before,” claims Brodie (who’s name may be familiar as he co-founded YC-backed Muslim dating app Muzmatch, before moving on to his next app challenge).

“It’s incredibly hard to as the calendaring standards are decentralised and non-canonical (our tech made our events centralised and canonical). Everything you can do in our native apps you can do with very low friction web experience first (every Onin group is a rapidly shareable link).”

Asked about other software solutions, he suggests Onin is shooting to be “Microsoft Teams, just done right”. So, er, touché. (“An easy to use product and one that’s simple to understand, isn’t locked into the Microsoft ecosystem, and yet is incredibly powerful and versatile, scaling from 1:1 conversations to groups of hundreds of people, all the time seamlessly syncing event information into participant’s diaries,” is the ambition.)

“We send the invites to all users vs using their own calendar like say Calendly does,” Brodie also tells us, going into more detail on how exactly Onin does things differently vs rivals. “Therefore events are fully collaborative and provide a history of changes inside Onin but in your external calendar all you can do is change your attending status as a regular participant. This makes Onin very sticky!”

For now, it’s still super early for the product — which bagged some attention after launching on Product Hunt in August — and is just now launching as an MVP. But Onin has already turned investor heads, raising a $1M pre-seed round (“with just the idea”) last summer — which looks like a notable vote of confidence at such an early stage.

Backers in the pre-seed include Entrepreneur First’s Matt Clifford and Hambro Perks (on angel terms), plus a number of others who aren’t up for going public just yet.

“We’ve had over 400 people join the early access program in 48 hours which involved an 8-step form detailing their calendar woes, I’m very confident there is serious demand simply in combining chat and calendar,” adds Brodie, before segueing into reeling off a list of integrations and features the team is working on adding.

“We already have an official Zoom integration and are working on Typeform & Calendly integrations (Notion, Google Workspace, etc. all targeted). We then want to take over the event based discussions you have in other apps as a result, with you thinking of the event as living in Onin (‘zero switching cost’). For example, when you join the Zoom call a contextual message is sent into the group — “[Ryan] joined Zoom” — no one has done this before!

“We own the event that is synced to everyone’s diaries, it all links back to Onin. We have a unique, patent pending Talk around time chat UI that makes all of this possible. We have a very Notion-y style group/sub-group system, it’s a) extremely easy to create follow up events and b) easy to create sub-plans too (e.g. a holiday with lots of activities or a product launch with TechCrunch interviews…).”

News: Nigerian agritech startup Releaf secures $4.2M to scale its food processing technology

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The distance between their farms and the nearest processor is key for smallholder farmers who need to process their crops. And though Nigeria’s food processing systems have a keen resemblance to the West with respect to big factories and huge economies of scale in high-demand cities, farmers still suffer from poor logistics networks. With distance

The distance between their farms and the nearest processor is key for smallholder farmers who need to process their crops. And though Nigeria’s food processing systems have a keen resemblance to the West with respect to big factories and huge economies of scale in high-demand cities, farmers still suffer from poor logistics networks.

With distance and logistics problems, farmers’ crops can go bad and when factories buy them, it affects their processing yields and price. Farmers, witnessing post-harvest loss, also get paid less and miss the opportunity to invest in their crops production.

Nigerian agritech startup Releaf is solving this by building proprietary hardware and software solutions to make these farmers and food factories more efficient and profitable. Today, the company is announcing that it has raised $2.7 million in seed towards this effort.

Pan-African focused venture capital firms Samurai Incubate Africa, Future Africa and Consonance Investment Managers led the round. Individual investors like Stephen Pagliuca, the chairman of Bain Capital and Justin Kan of Twitch also participated.

In addition to the seed round, the agritech startup secured  $1.5 million in grants from The Challenge Fund for Youth Employment (CFYE) and USAID.

Founded by Ikenna Nzewi and Uzoma Ayogu, Releaf focuses on value chains where smaller factories are set up near smallholder farmers. This allows them to get better processing yields and fewer logistics costs; in the end, the farmer has more money to work with.

When the pair started the company in 2017, the idea behind Releaf was not concrete yet as the team, based in the U.S., had not figured out product-market fit.

First, it planned to increase productivity in Nigeria’s agricultural sector using software. Even after graduating from Y Combinator’s summer batch that year, Releaf toyed around with ideas around trade finance and a marketplace for buyers and sellers of agricultural products.

The team would get a clearer picture of what it wanted to build when the founders moved back to Nigeria. The Americans of Nigerian descent toured across 20 states and studied different value chains for crops spotting inefficiencies that could be solved by technology.

“We took a much more broad approach to what the solution would be, but we really wanted to decide on a specific crop to work in. And we found that opportunity in the oil palm sector,” Nzewi said to TechCrunch in an interview.

The oil palm market in Nigeria is a $3 billion one with over 4 million smallholder farmers cultivating farms where those crops are planted.

These farmers drive 80% of the production of oil palm. But since the industry is quite fragmented, they have many challenges processing the oil palm because it’s a crop that requires serious processing power to extract vegetable oil from it.

Farmers typically go through this process by using rocks or inappropriate hardware — ineffective processes that lead to low-quality oil palm largely unfit as input for high-quality vegetable oil manufacturing.

Nzewi says the team saw an opportunity and set out to build a technology to help farmers crack oil palm nuts. The result was Kraken, a proprietary patent-pending machine.

So here’s how the company’s business model works. Releaf buys nuts from the farmers, then uses the Kraken to crack the nuts and crush the kernels into vegetable oil. Releaf then sells the vegetable oil to FMCG processors and local manufacturers, mainly in Nigeria’s south-southern region.

“Nigeria has about 60% more demand for vegetable oil than it does supply. And it can not be met due to supply shortfall with imports because the government banned the importation of vegetable oil. So there is a need to take these smallholders who are driving 80% of production and make them more efficient so that we can have a better balance of supply and demand for vegetable oil,” Nzewi said about the pain point Releaf is addressing.

But still, why does the company think it can break into a competitive Nigerian vegetable oil market with hardly differentiable products?

Nzewi explains that the answer lies in the quality of products. Typically vegetable oil is driven by a free fatty acid (FFA) metric that measures vegetable oil’s impurity. The CEO claims that while the industry standard is about 5% FFA, Releaf produces at 3.5%.

Despite having an edge in quality of production, Releaf products are sold on an industry standard. Nzewi says that might not be the case in the future as the company is looking to finally take advantage of its product quality and increase prices to improve its profit margins.

According to the company, Kraken already processes 500 tonnes of palm nuts. Its software connects to over 2,000 smallholder farmers who have supplied over 10 million kilograms of quality palm kernel nuts to food factories.

Regarding expansion, Nzewi noted that Releaf has more appetite for moving into new geographies instead of crop offerings. His argument is that processing oil palm and cultivation style is a straightforward method due to its similarities across West Africa.

But for crop expansion, the company may need to find crops that can be planted alongside oil palm and practice intercropping or work with crops like soybeans or groundnuts used in the vegetable oil industry.

Releaf will use the seed investment to develop technology and deploy it to smallholder farmers, Nzewi tells me. Then the $1.5 million in grants will focus on providing working capital financing to these farmers. He adds that Releaf has run financing trials already this year where it has increased smallholder incomes by three to five times.

“We think there’s a really great opportunity to bring both physical technology and financial services to these communities to make them more productive. And it’s kind of central to our thesis,” the CEO said. “We believe that our smart factories can serve as an economic pillar in these rural communities and make it easier for us to supply these communities with other services that they can find valuable like access to working capital, payment for education, and access to insurance services. So we see the food processing as like the first step it cements us in the value chain.”

Earlier this year, agritech startups like Gro Intelligence and Aerobotics raised huge sums of venture capital and showed the sector’s promise in Africa. However, venture capital has slowed down over the past few months and Releaf’s investment brings that spotlight back to the sector, albeit briefly.

Rena Yoneyama, the managing partner at Samurai Incubate Africa, said Releaf’s novel approach sets it aside from other agritech startups the venture capital firm has engaged with.

“We believe the firm’s thesis on decentralizing food processing would have a strong match with Africa’s economic development landscape for the next few decades. Ikenna and Uzo are the perfect founders to disrupt this market in Nigeria and beyond. We are thrilled to back them as they innovate in providing both agro-processing and financial services to rural communities and farmers,” she added. 

Speaking on the investment as well, Iyin Aboyeji, general partner at co-lead investor Future Africa said, “…The team at Releaf is building the agro-allied industry of the future from the ground up, starting with palm oil which they have developed a novel technology to aggregate, deshell and process into critical ingredients like vegetable oil and glycerine. Future Africa is delighted to back Releaf to build the future of modern agriculture.”

News: Folk helps you share contacts with your team

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Folk is a new productivity tool started by European startup studio eFounders. And the startup just raised a $3.3 million seed funding round led by Accel with a big group of business angels. When you think about managing contacts and relationships in a professional environment, you might think that companies have solved this already. An

Folk is a new productivity tool started by European startup studio eFounders. And the startup just raised a $3.3 million seed funding round led by Accel with a big group of business angels.

When you think about managing contacts and relationships in a professional environment, you might think that companies have solved this already. An entire category of products and companies have emerged around this idea with CRMs. Popular CRM platforms include Salesforce and HubSpot and I’m sure your sales team loves their CRM.

But what does CRM mean exactly? Customer relationship management. If you work for a team that doesn’t have customers, then CRMs aren’t the most appropriate tools. For instance, PR teams work with journalists, logistics teams work with suppliers, events teams work with multiple kinds of partners, etc.

Folk wants to be the relationship management tool for the rest of the company. Chances are those teams don’t use a CRM. Instead, they often rely on shared spreadsheets or information remains siloed.

The company is even trying to give this new category of contact tools a name and calls is the xRM for extended relationships manager. “In xRM, the ‘x’ stands for anyone: you can use it not only for managing clients but also for journalists, suppliers, partners, for example,” Folk CEO Thibaud Elziere said in a statement.

Visually, Folk looks like a spreadsheet. You can add columns with specific information. You can also track your progress around a project with tags. Like with Airtable, Folk lets you filter your view, rearrange data and sort the table in different ways.

When you click on a contact, you open a dedicated contact page. It lets you change data more comfortably and view more information. In particular, you can add comments, assign contacts to your coworkers and view interactions with these contacts.

You don’t have to enter meetings in Folk or copy and paste email conversations in the service. Folk automatically pulls up data from your Gmail and Google Calendar accounts. This way, the entire team can see if someone is staying in touch more closely with a partner. You can choose to share some contacts with the rest of the team but keep your personal contacts to yourself.

In addition to Accel, 35 investors who tend to be operators in their companies are also participating. It’s a big group of investors and you can view the table of these investors at the end of the post.

It’s also worth noting that Thibaud Elziere, the CEO of Folk, is also a co-founder at eFounders, the startup studio where some popular SaaS tools originally started, such as Front, Aircall and Spendesk. And I’m sure he has a wide network of contacts in Folk that he can leverage to turn Folk into a commercial success.

News: Swedish caller-identification service Truecaller seeks to raise over $100 million in IPO

• September 15, 2021
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Truecaller, which operates an eponymous caller-identification service, said on Wednesday it is looking to raise $116 million in an initial public offering on Nasdaq Stockholm. The 12-year-old Stockholm-headquartered firm, which counts India as its biggest market by users, is aiming for a valuation of about $3 billion in the IPO, according to earlier local media

Truecaller, which operates an eponymous caller-identification service, said on Wednesday it is looking to raise $116 million in an initial public offering on Nasdaq Stockholm.

The 12-year-old Stockholm-headquartered firm, which counts India as its biggest market by users, is aiming for a valuation of about $3 billion in the IPO, according to earlier local media reports. The company said it plans to do its listing by fourth quarter of this year.

The firm, which has amassed 278 million monthly active users, has been working on its initial public offering for at least two years, according to past interviews Truecaller co-founder and chief executive Alan Mamedi has given to TechCrunch.

The firm counts Sequoia Capital and Atomica among its earlier investors. It has raised over $95 million over the years, according to Crunchbase. Six years ago, the firm engaged with some investors to raise an additional $100 million at a valuation of $1 billion, TechCrunch reported, but the deal never materialized.

“One of our objectives this year has been to prepare Truecaller for an IPO. Thanks to the strong feedback that we’ve received from potential investors, it feels very exciting to take the next step in this process. A listing of Truecaller is not only a milestone for Nami [the other co-founder], myself and all of our employees who have contributed to building Truecaller to the fantastic platform that it is today, but also to the growing Swedish tech ecosystem,” he said in a statement Wednesday.

“Even though we are twelve years into our incredible journey, we believe that this is just the beginning and we have a clear strategy to continue to grow and develop our services and products. I look forward to welcoming existing and new shareholders on this journey.”

Truecaller’s service allows users to avoid spam calls by identifying the callers, and also filters similar texts. The service is popular in many parts of the world, but India, where everyone receives dozens of such calls each month, is Truecaller’s biggest market by users.

Even as Apple and Google have improved the caller ID feature in their mobile operating systems in recent years, and taken several other steps to curb spam calls, Truecaller’s offerings remain unmatched.

The firm — which reported an operating revenue of $57 million in 2020, up from $22 million in 2018 — has expanded to additional categories such as financial services in recent years in India.

“Truecaller has made communication smarter, safer and more efficient across the world. As smartphone usage increases globally, fraud and unwanted communication has followed, and Truecaller has turned into an indispensable platform for consumers and businesses. With a clear focus on innovation and growth, Truecaller is on an exciting journey to reach even more users with even better products,” said Shailesh Lakhani, Managing Director at Sequoia Capital India, in a statement.

News: Chaldal, Bangladesh’s largest grocery delivery platform, raises $10M Series C

• September 15, 2021
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Founded in 2013, Bangladesh’s Chaldal was one of the first grocery delivery startups in the world to use the “dark” store model, picking up orders from its own warehouses instead of retail stores. Now the company says it is the country’s second-largest grocery player and the largest grocery e-commerce platform, with 27 warehouses located in

Founded in 2013, Bangladesh’s Chaldal was one of the first grocery delivery startups in the world to use the “dark” store model, picking up orders from its own warehouses instead of retail stores. Now the company says it is the country’s second-largest grocery player and the largest grocery e-commerce platform, with 27 warehouses located in four cities. Chaldal plans to expand into 15 new cities with a recently-closed $10 million Series C. The round was led by Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of Wise; Topia chief product officer Sten Tamkivi; and Xploration Capital, with participation from Mir Group.

When Chaldal launched in Dhaka eight years ago, it first picked up orders from local grocery stores. But most retailers in the city are very small and Chaldal was unable to guarantee items would be available for its customers. As a result, it decided to start building its own network of warehouses.

“When we started, Instacart was still the dominant model, but we took a different stand and said we want to deliver from our own warehouses because that leads to better inventory management,” co-founder and chief executive officer Waseem Alim told TechCrunch.

Now the company, a Y Combinator alum, has 27 warehouses located in four cities (Dhaka, Naryanganj, Chattogram and Jashore). It will expand to 15 new cities and plans to open 50 warehouses by the end of this year. In addition to its flagship grocery deliveries, Chaldal will expand GoGo Bangla, its on-demand logistics service for small e-commerce businesses, and the Chaldal Vegetable Network, which connects farmers directly to retailers. It also has plans to launch a direct-to-consumer pharmacy.

Chaldal claims that has generated $40 million in revenue and performed 2.5 million orders over the past 12 months, growing about 120% year-over-year. It currently sells about 8,500 kinds of products and wants to expand that to 30,000 SKUs by December.

Alim says Chaldal’s core grocery operations have been profitable for a while now, and it only invests cash in building its technology or launching new verticals. One of the reasons it is able to make money is because Chaldal began batching deliveries early on, sending out riders from its full-time fleet with several orders at a time (it recently launched a part-time driver program). Batching also means Chaldal is able to offer deliveries in as little as 15 to 30 minutes.

Chaldal also worked closely with suppliers and manufacturers. “We are one of the most efficient online grocery retailers in the world in terms of amount of capital that has been invested in us versus our size, and that’s mainly because we have been really working with our supply chain and all those details,” Alim said.

For example, it sources produce directly from farms, and partners with large manufacturers like Unilever. “Walmart and stores like that don’t exist here, it’s mostly small retailers, so we’ve been able to have a huge impact on the supply chain side of things,” said Alim. “We are continuing to expand our micro-warehouse model and have started supporting, as part of the delivery mechanism we have built, a lot of small merchants,” including many sellers who signed up for GoGo Bangla during the pandemic.

News: India’s Groww in talks to raise funds at a $3 billion valuation

• September 15, 2021
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Groww, an Indian startup that is helping millennials invest in mutual funds and stocks, is in advanced stages of talks to raise a new financing round at a $3 billion valuation, according to six people familiar with the matter. The Bangalore-based startup is negotiating to close a $250 million round, the people said, requesting anonymity

Groww, an Indian startup that is helping millennials invest in mutual funds and stocks, is in advanced stages of talks to raise a new financing round at a $3 billion valuation, according to six people familiar with the matter.

The Bangalore-based startup is negotiating to close a $250 million round, the people said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private. The round could close within weeks, they said.

Usual caveats apply: The terms of the deal may change. The startup has received several termsheets — with similar terms — in recent days. Tiger Global, Coatue, and TCV have held conversations to lead or co-lead the round, people said. And many including Insight Partners have also explored investment, the people said.

A spokesperson for Coatue declined to comment. Groww chief executive did not respond to a request for comment. Indian news outlet CapTable first reported about Groww’s upcoming financing round.

Groww is tapping into a huge market. More than 200 million people in India transact money digitally, but fewer than 30 million invest in mutual funds and stocks. The startup allows users to invest in mutual funds, including systematic investment planning (SIP) and equity-linked savings, gold, as well as stocks, including those listed at U.S. exchanges. The app offers every fund that is currently available in India.

Investors’ growing push to back — or double down on — Groww follows several months of strong growth. The Indian startup is currently on track to clock about $35 million in ARR, two people briefed on the figure said. Groww, which counts Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital India among its existing investors, was valued at $1 billion in April this year and $250 million last September.

The startup is also internally exploring expansion into the crypto space, but hasn’t made a firm decision on when it plans to offer such trading, one person said.

The new investment talks — and the surge in proposed valuation — also illustrate the level of excitement Indian startups have attracted in recent quarters. India has produced over two dozen unicorns this year, up from 11 last year.

And that list continues to expand. Indian esports firm Mobile Premier League said on Wednesday it has raised new funds at $2.3 billion valuation. And two startups Apna — which helps low-skilled workers learn and find new opportunities — and crypto trading app CoinSwitch Kuber are also in talks to raise new rounds at unicorn valuations, TechCrunch has previously reported.