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Saturday, September 7, 2019

After Epstein, it’s time for the Valley to find a moral view on capital

Is capital moral or amoral?

In the predominant view held in Silicon Valley today, capital is amoral — cash is cash, and regardless of where it comes from, once it leaves the hand of its investor or donor, it no longer has that individual’s taint. That money might have previously been spent on acquiring access to underage girls, or murder, or espionage, but now it is being spent on something productive, something useful. Isn’t that ultimately a net win for society?

That culture of fundraising is under an exacting microscope this week after the MIT Technology Review reported that Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the famed MIT Media Lab, would have continued to take convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s donations to the research center.

[… He] said he had recommended that [Joichi Ito, the lab’s current director] take Epstein’s money. “If you wind back the clock,” he added, “I would still say, ‘Take it.’” And he repeated, more emphatically, “‘Take it.’”

The comments, made during a meeting of the lab’s staff, shocked many of the participants, with some angrily replying in the heat of the moment. As the Review noted, “Kate Darling, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, shouted, ‘Nicholas, shut up!’ Negroponte responded that he would not shut up and that he had founded the Lab, to which Darling said, ‘We’ve been cleaning up your messes for the past eight years.’”

Epstein funded projects widely in the tech world through the Edge Foundation and other initiatives, and his acquaintances read like a who’s-who of tech luminaries.

Yet, this week’s controversy over fundraising is hardly novel. Just last year, SoftBank’s Vision Fund was dealing with the fallout in its own fundraising after Saudi Arabia — the fund’s largest limited partner with a $45 billion commitment to the $93 billion fund — murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its consulate in Istanbul.

These two singular cases also connect to the larger story about the U.S. government’s active shutdown of Chinese venture capital dollars flowing into the Valley for fear of foreign intelligence espionage. Through the modernization of legal tools like CFIUS, to the Pentagon’s creation of a Trusted Capital Marketplace, to reversals of acquisitions like the unwinding of Chinese company Kunlun’s purchase of gay dating app Grindr, the government has repeatedly been telling entrepreneurs: it matters where your capital comes from.

Indeed, that’s the very quandary that Silicon Valley is facing these days. Its amoral view of capital is increasingly clashing with the reality that it matters a whole heck of a lot where that capital comes from. And it is about time that founders and investors take responsibility for cleaning up a capital base that has become more and more squalid over time.

Why can’t capital just be immoral? Well, Epstein’s web of donations provided him with a philanthropic sheen that eased access to the highest echelons of society while he committed his crimes. Saudi Arabia is the largest investor in Silicon Valley not only because it drives a return and diversifies its oil-dependent economy, but also because it can Valley-wash the horrific rights abuses and atrocities it commits against all of its citizens, including women, LGBT people, and immigrants.

(But hey, women can drive now, just in time for autonomous vehicles.)

This amoral versus moral view of capital is just the classic debate in philosophy between utilitarianism versus deontological duties, but Silicon Valley has almost exclusively chosen the former rather than the latter. My bank asks me more questions about my $50 deposits than many founders ask about where that $500 million check comes from.

That’s perhaps understandable in context. Founders — as with non-profit leaders — fundraise around-the-clock. When a check finally arrives, they don’t bother to ask a bunch of due diligence questions. They just want that money to hit the bank and get back to building what they were intending to the entire time.

It’s a mode of operating that continues to the present day. I was chatting with a founder this week, and during demo day last week, he got an emailed check for $50,000 from an investor in the audience. It was amazing, he said with exclamation points to me, and it sounded like he just added the check to the pile he had accumulated. Who is this person? Do we know where his capital comes from? Is there going to be some scandal that shocks the startup in a couple of years? Yet the excitement was palpable — the round was closed, and it was the easiest $50,000 ever fundraised.

Those diligence questions probably didn’t need to be asked a decade or two in the Valley, back when a few dozen firms mostly raised from blue-chip university and non-profit endowments as well as state pension funds.

Today though, there are all kinds of sources of capital, with little clarity about where the capital is coming from. Take, for instance, Carlos Ghosn, who once headed Nissan Motors and is currently on trial in Japan for a variety of financial crimes. He has been accused of embezzling millions of dollars for a VC fund run by his son by running a kickback scheme through a Nissan distributor in Lebanon. As the Wall Street Journal reported a little more than a week ago:

In March 2015, the Ghosns set up in Delaware an investment vehicle called Shogun Investments, which Mr. Ghosn described as a fund that would invest in Silicon Valley startups. Mr. Ghosn was majority owner while his son, Anthony, held a stake, according to people familiar with the matter. The younger Mr. Ghosn, who was about to graduate from Stanford University, was working at the time as chief of staff for Silicon Valley venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, providing the elder Mr. Ghosn a close-up view of the tech investment world. The lofty returns had stunned him, according to one of the people.

That fund would go on to fund some of the most well-known unicorns in the world:

“Following our phone conversation, I ordered a transfer of $3 million,” Carlos Ghosn wrote in a December 2017 email to his son, who was 22 years old at the time.

Of that amount, $2 million was for an investment in Grab, a Southeast Asian competitor to Uber Technologies Inc., Mr. Ghosn wrote, adding that he was sending “$1 million for the company of your friend that you think will do very well.” It wasn’t clear which company Mr. Ghosn was referring to.

I would love a world in which founders asked all the right due diligence questions. I would love for them to inquire about limited partners, about how wealth was created, and how it has been invested. But I am also aware that in what can be a desperate search for funds, those questions may well never get asked in the first place.

If you want to stop the capital laundering taking place every day in the Valley, you have to create active, real-time antidotes. That means stopping it at every point of contact, every single opportunity where it can infect the ecosystem.

And so, we need better systems as a community and as an ecosystem to cleanse ourselves of this dirty money. We need “know-your-capital” processes that are standardized, robust, and accurate so that every check can be verified before it hits the bank. We need tools to verify that a startup or non-profit has actually followed those KYC processes, so that employees don’t suddenly show up at work and realize they are making money for a bunch of murderers. It’s “trust but verify.”

Systematization and process are key to execution, but that doesn’t disclaim the responsibility for the Valley’s leaders to take a moral stance here. Utilitarianism only takes you so far — it does matter that you take capital from a bad actor. Negroponte is wrong to say that he would still take Epstein’s money, regardless of what that capital might have funded at the MIT Media Lab.

Taking responsibility for your capital is part of being a leader of an organization today. Hopefully, the next generation of founders will take a look at Epstein, and Khashoggi, and China, and Ghosn, and the Sacklers, and a whole host of other case studies and learn from them and change their fundraising practices. A moral view on capital isn’t a cost of doing business — it’s simply the right thing to do.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J After Epstein, it’s time for the Valley to find a moral view on capital https://ift.tt/2LA1nTL

Startups Weekly: Stripe’s grand plan

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I noted Peloton’s secret weapons. Before that, I wrote about a new e-commerce startup, Pietra.

Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here.

The big story

In one fell swoop, Stripe may disrupt the entire financial services ecosystem.

The $22 billion payments behemoth announced Stripe Capital this week, a provider of quick and easy to obtain loans for internet businesses. The company is expected to launch a card as well, according to TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden. What does that mean for recent upstarts like Clearbanc, a business that provides revenue-share agreements to help startups forgo selling equity to VCs, or Brex, which has created a credit card tailored for startups? Stiff competition ahead.

Led by brothers Patrick and John Collison, Stripe is known for developing payment processing software to facilitate online purchases. Doubling down on financial services, the company seeks to become the go-to capital provider to its millions of customers. In a vacuum, it’s no threat to Brex, which has quickly become a fintech darling (with a multibillion-dollar valuation to prove it) — but coupled with Stripe’s massive network, resources and the soon-to-be-announced card, it’s worth concern.

I reached out to both Brex and Clearbanc. Here’s what they had to say.

Clearbanc: “Stripe is one of our close partners because we’re both deeply committed to empowering founders. There’s a huge demand amongst founders for flexible funding that allow them to grow while retaining equity in their company, so it’s encouraging to see the growth of alternative funding options. We’re seeing this first hand — we’re investing an average of $100,000 of growth capital per brand, with other companies taking up to $10 million. New funding alternatives not only open more doors for more businesses, but data-driven platforms can also help to reduce bias and promote entrepreneurship outside of VC capitals like Silicon Valley and New York.”

Brex CEO Henrique Dubugras: “We have created a new financial stack for tech companies, and this has resulted in a very innovative product experience with lots of adoption, so it makes sense that Stripe would also pursue this fast-growing opportunity.”

We’ll share more details on the card as soon as possible.

WeWork slashes expectations

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the company formerly known as WeWork is considering slashing its valuation as it looks to woo public market investors. The co-working biz may hit the public markets at a valuation of somewhere in the $20 billion range for its initial public offering, a figure that’s far less than the $47 billion valuation it received when it raised its last round of private funding. Yikes…

TechCrunch Disrupt

We are just weeks away from our flagship conference, TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco. We have dozens of amazing speakers lined up. In addition to taking in the great line-up of speakers, ticket holders can roam around Startup Alley to catch the more than 1,000 companies showcasing their products and technologies. And, of course, you’ll get the opportunity to watch the Startup Battlefield competition live. Past competitors include Dropbox, Cloudflare and Mint… You never know which future unicorn will compete next.

You can take a look at the full agenda here. Here’s a look at the panels I personally will be onstage moderating.

Deals, deals, deals

Listen

This week, we recorded Equity on location at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco. Our special guest was Emergence Capital founder Jason Green, who joined us to talk about the firm’s specialty: enterprise investments! Danny Crichton, the esteemed leader of TechCrunch’s Extra Crunch, was on hand to co-lead the episode with me. Listen here. And remember, Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotify, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Startups Weekly: Stripe’s grand plan https://ift.tt/2LvWwTL

Friday, September 6, 2019

Pagerduty’s Jennifer Tejada and Box’s Aaron Levie will talk IPOs at TC Disrupt SF

Pagerduty‘s CEO Jennifer Tejada and Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie both guided their companies to successful IPOs, with Box going public in 2015 and Pagerduty listing its stocks only a few months ago. Both of them will join us on the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2 to talk about their experiences in getting their companies to this point and managing the changes that come with being a public company.

It took both companies about ten years to get to their IPOs. Levie co-founded the content management and file sharing service Box in 2005 and Pagerduty first launched as a basic notification tool for on-call developers in 2009, with Tejada joining as CEO in 2016. Box has already experienced its share of ups and down in the stock market and Pagerduty’s IPO in April launched its stock right into one of the more volatile markets in recent years.

At Disrupt, though, we’ll focus on what these two CEOs did to get their companies ready to go public and the process of listing a company — and what, in hindsight, they would’ve done differently.

Box’s road, especially, was rather long and winding. It took the company nine months from filing its S-1 to actually IPOing — in part because the reaction to the numbers it disclosed in its S-1 was pretty negative at the time.

Pagerduty, on the other hand, had a more straightforward path, in part thanks to its strong financial position before it filed.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 to October 4 at the Moscone Center in the heart of San Francisco. Tickets are available here.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Pagerduty’s Jennifer Tejada and Box’s Aaron Levie will talk IPOs at TC Disrupt SF https://ift.tt/2zWthUy

Agave wants to fill the need Google Hire’s impending shutdown will create

With the scheduled 2020 shutdown of Google Hire, the tech giant’s applicant tracking system, there’s more room for startups to emerge as the go-to tool for hiring managers. Agave, which has $1 million in funding from SV Angel, Box Group and others, is aiming to serve that need.

Agave is a free hiring platform that offers job postings, hosted career pages, customer relationship management tools and full API read and write access. Agave also offers two paid tiers, ranging from $2 per user a month to $6 per user a month, which offer features like automated e-mail follow-up services, interview scheduling or pre-formulated offer letters. It’s available today, but it’s still early days in invite-only mode.

Similar to Google Hire, Agave is focused on small- to medium-sized businesses — anywhere from 20 to 500 employees.

“That’s the sweet spot,” Agave founder Jared Tame told TechCrunch. “After 20 people, companies tap out their referral networks and need to get more active about sourcing talent. After a certain point, it makes sense to use an ATS because the processes start to break down.”

[gallery ids="1878446,1878467,1878468"]

Tame started the company because of his own experience working as a hiring manager and feeling frustrated with some of the products out there, he said.

Despite Google Hire’s impending shutdown, Agave still faces other competitors in the space, including Lever, which has $72.8 million in funding and Greenhouse, which has $110.1 million in funding. Right now, Agave has a handful of startups using its platform but is hoping to entice additional customers with its 48-hour guarantee for migrations from Google Hire to Agave.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Agave wants to fill the need Google Hire’s impending shutdown will create https://ift.tt/2ZIRNbq

APIs are the next big SaaS wave

Looking to become the video-based social network of the gaming world, Medal.tv raises $9 million

When Medal.tv first launched on the scene, the company was an upstart trying to be the social network for the gaming generation.

Since its debut in February, the clipping and messaging service for gamers has amassed 5 million total users with hundreds of thousands of daily active users. And now it has a $9 million new investment from firms led by Horizons Ventures, the venture capital fund established by Hong Kong multi-billionaire Li Kashing.

“We’re seeing sharing of short-form video emerge as a means of self-expression and entertainment for the current generation. We believe Medal’s platform will be a foundation for interactive social experiences beyond what you can find in a game,” says Jonathan Tam, an investor with Horizons Ventures.

Medal sees potential both in its social network and in the ability for game developers to use the platform as a marketing and discovery tool for the gaming audience.

“Friends are the main driver of game discovery, and game developers benefit from shareable games as a result. Medal.tv is trying to enable that without the complexity of streaming,” says Matteo Vallone, the former head of Google Play games in Europe and an angel investor in Medal.

Assets Web 1

It’s a platform that saw investors willing to fork over as much as $20 million for the company, according to chief executive Pim DeWitte. “There are still too many risks involved to take capital like that,” DeWitte says.

Instead the $9 million from Horizons, and previous investors like Makers Fund will be used to steadily grow the business.

“At Medal, we believe the next big social platform will emerge in gaming, perhaps built on top of short-form content, partially as a result of gaming publishers trying to build their own isolated gaming stores and systems,” said DeWitte, in a statement. “That drives social fragmentation in the market and brings out the need for platforms such as Medal and Discord, which unite gamers across games and platforms in a meaningful way.”

As digital gaming becomes the social medium of choice for a generation, new tools that allow consumers to share their virtual experiences will become increasingly common. This phenomenon will only accelerate as more events like the Marshmello concert in Fortnite become the norm.

“Medal has the exciting potential to enable a seamless social exchange of virtual experiences,” says Ryann Lai, an investor from Makers Fund.



https://ift.tt/2N01vzj Looking to become the video-based social network of the gaming world, Medal.tv raises $9 million https://ift.tt/2ZE8NPY

Looking to become the video-based social network of the gaming world, Medal.tv raises $9 million

When Medal.tv first launched on the scene, the company was an upstart trying to be the social network for the gaming generation.

Since its debut in February, the clipping and messaging service for gamers has amassed 5 million total users with hundreds of thousands of daily active users. And now it has a $9 million new investment from firms led by Horizons Ventures, the venture capital fund established by Hong Kong multi-billionaire Li Kashing.

“We’re seeing sharing of short-form video emerge as a means of self-expression and entertainment for the current generation. We believe Medal’s platform will be a foundation for interactive social experiences beyond what you can find in a game,” says Jonathan Tam, an investor with Horizons Ventures.

Medal sees potential both in its social network and in the ability for game developers to use the platform as a marketing and discovery tool for the gaming audience.

“Friends are the main driver of game discovery, and game developers benefit from shareable games as a result. Medal.tv is trying to enable that without the complexity of streaming,” says Matteo Vallone, the former head of Google Play games in Europe and an angel investor in Medal.

Assets Web 1

It’s a platform that saw investors willing to fork over as much as $20 million for the company, according to chief executive Pim DeWitte. “There are still too many risks involved to take capital like that,” DeWitte says.

Instead the $9 million from Horizons, and previous investors like Makers Fund will be used to steadily grow the business.

“At Medal, we believe the next big social platform will emerge in gaming, perhaps built on top of short-form content, partially as a result of gaming publishers trying to build their own isolated gaming stores and systems,” said DeWitte, in a statement. “That drives social fragmentation in the market and brings out the need for platforms such as Medal and Discord, which unite gamers across games and platforms in a meaningful way.”

As digital gaming becomes the social medium of choice for a generation, new tools that allow consumers to share their virtual experiences will become increasingly common. This phenomenon will only accelerate as more events like the Marshmello concert in Fortnite become the norm.

“Medal has the exciting potential to enable a seamless social exchange of virtual experiences,” says Ryann Lai, an investor from Makers Fund.



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2N01vzj Looking to become the video-based social network of the gaming world, Medal.tv raises $9 million Jonathan Shieber https://ift.tt/2ZE8NPY
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Top VCs on the changing landscape for enterprise startups

Yesterday at TechCrunch’s Enterprise event in San Francisco, we sat down with three venture capitalists who spend a lot of their time thinking about enterprise startups. We wanted to ask what trends they are seeing, what concerns they might have about the state of the market, and of course, how startups might persuade them to write out a check.

We covered a lot of ground with the investors — Jason Green of Emergence Capital, Rebecca Lynn of Canvas Ventures, and Maha Ibrahim of Canaan Partners — who told us, among other things, that startups shouldn’t expect a big M&A event right now, that there’s no first-mover advantage in the enterprise realm, and why grit may be the quality that ends up keeping a startup afloat.

On the growth of enterprise startups:

Jason Green: When we started Emergence 15 years ago, we saw maybe a few hundred startups a year, and we funded about five or six. Today, we see over 1,000 a year; we probably do deep diligence on 25.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Top VCs on the changing landscape for enterprise startups https://ift.tt/2Q73unV

Only a few hours left for early-bird passes to Disrupt SF 2019

We’re in a price-hike homestretch, startup fans. Early-bird savings head south, and ticket prices head north in just a few short hours. Want to save up to $1,300 on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Buy your passes by 11:59 p.m. (PST) tonight, September 6 — avoid the costly stroke of midnight.

Wring even more savings out of the waning early-bird hours. How? Buy in bulk and score a group discount. Bring your entire squad and/or impress valued clients.

Here’s the 411 on group discounts:

  • Group Innovator Pass: Buy five or more passes and get a 20% discount. Need 10 or more passes? Email us for a price quote at events@techcrunch.com.
  • Group Founder Pass: Buy two or more passes and you’ll get a 10% discount. Note: You must be a (co)founder of a company (of any size).
  • Group Investor Pass: Purchase two or more passes to get a 10% discount.
  • Group Expo Only Pass: If you want to buy Expo Only passes in bulk (10 or more), email events@techcrunch.com for a price quote.
  • Group Startup Alley Exhibitor Packages: If you’re interested in purchasing more than one Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, email startupalley@techcrunch.com for more information.

Whether you bring your team or arrive solo, you’ll find incomparable networking opportunities at Disrupt SF. Head for Startup Alley to meet and greet our TC Top Picks. TechCrunch editors selected 45 companies they felt represented the best early-stage startups in these categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, SaaS and Social Impact & Education.

You’ll find hundreds of other stellar startups exhibiting their tech and talent, and we’re here to help you make networking as painless as possible. First, get a jump on your research by reviewing our directory of exhibiting startups. Once you get a vetted handle on who you’d like to meet, take advantage of CrunchMatch, our free business match-making platform.

Available to attendees with Innovator, Founder or Investor passes, CrunchMatch automatically suggests suitable prospects based on profiles each user submits. Use it to send, accept or decline meeting requests. And you can use the service to reserve dedicated meeting spaces.

There’s so much more: Don’t miss Startup Battlefield as a group of standout startups compete for $100,000 on a world stage. And look at our conference agenda to see which of the many, many presentations, interviews, workshops and panel discussions we have on tap. So many choices and so little time.

So little time — just a few hours left to save up to $1,300 on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019. Avoid the price hike. Beat the deadline and buy your early-bird passes before 11:59 p.m. (PST) tonight, September 6.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Only a few hours left for early-bird passes to Disrupt SF 2019 https://ift.tt/2HRQ9cl

NY attorney general will lead antitrust investigation into Facebook

New York Attorney General Letitia James announced this morning that she’s leading an investigation into Facebook over antitrust issues — in other words, whether Facebook used its social media dominance to engage in anti-competitive behavior.

In a statement, James said:

Even the largest social media platform in the world must follow the law and respect consumers. I am proud to be leading a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general in investigating whether Facebook has stifled competition and put users at risk. We will use every investigative tool at our disposal to determine whether Facebook’s actions may have endangered consumer data, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices, or increased the price of advertising.

According to the announcement, that coalition includes the attorneys general of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and the District of Columbia.

Facebook already announced in June that it was facing an antitrust investigation from the Federal Trade Commission (separate from the privacy-related settlement with the FTC that it announced on the same day). It seems that most of the tech giants are facing antitrust scrutiny from the FTC and Department of Justice.

“People have multiple choices for every one of the services we provide,” Facebook’s vice president of state and local policy Will Castleberry said in a statement after the new investigation was announced. “We understand that if we stop innovating, people can easily leave our platform. This underscores the competition we face, not only in the US but around the globe. We will of course work constructively with state attorneys general and we welcome a conversation with policymakers about the competitive environment in which we operate.”



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J NY attorney general will lead antitrust investigation into Facebook Anthony Ha https://ift.tt/31az5WR
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Huboo raises £1M to take the pain out of e-commerce fulfilment

Huboo, a U.K. startup that operates a multi-channel fulfilment service for e-commerce businesses of varying sizes, has raised £1 million in seed funding. Backing the majority of the round is London venture capital firm Episode 1, alongside a number of unnamed private individual investors.

Launched in November 2017 by Martin Bysh and Paul Dodd after the pair had ran a number e-commerce experiments, Huboo aims to solve the fulfilment pain-point that most online stores face. The service promises to store your stock, and then “pick, pack and deliver it” automatically as customer orders are placed.

The idea is that by outsourcing fulfilment, online shops can focus on the parts of the business where most value is added, such as customer service and choosing what products to develop and/or sell, by outsourcing fulfilment with confidence.

However, according to Huboo’s founders, except for larger e-commerce stores, the market is woefully underserved, with most fulfilment providers too expensive and uninterested in servicing smaller businesses. The only other option, they claim, is Amazon’s “Fulfillment by Amazon” (FBA), which they say is viable only for goods sold on Amazon because of discounts the e-commerce giant offers.

“Packing boxes and queuing in the post office were a horrible side effect of our [e-commerce] experimentation, and we needed to offload this if we weren’t to waste hours each day or abandon the whole e-commerce research project,” says Bysh.

“Luckily this is a solved problem, or so we thought… but we called around some fulfilment companies and discovered that they had no interest in our business, our items were too cheap and our volumes too low. And they weren’t very tech savvy, often basing their business on 3rd party warehouse management software, and limited marketplace integrations”.

The pair decided to change tact. Instead of attempting to find the next pure e-commerce opportunity, as their e-commerce experiments had intended, they began trying to figure out a way to “shatter the traditional economics of fulfilment”. The potential prize is a “huge chunk” of what Bysh frames as a “multi-billion, largely uncontested” market.

“We did some research on the market opportunity and determined that in the U.K. alone the opportunity was around £1 billion of more or less uncontested fulfilment business,” he says.

The key was to build systems that are flexible enough for Huboo to work with sellers, regardless of what they sell, how many they sell, and whether or not the goods are sold new or “re-commerced”. “We have clients that ship a couple of items a day and other that ship thousands. Items range in price for a few pounds to hundreds,” explains Bysh.

Products fulfilled by Huboo already span items such as vitamins, CBD oils, headphones, bingo tickets, electronic bagpipes, antiques, coffee, electronics, clothes (new and used), and beauty products. Clients include startups, subscription businesses, and individuals selling niche or boutique products.

Bysh says that serving this part of the fulfilment market is made possible via a combination of bespoke technology and algorithms, leading to “massive process optimisation” and reducing client management costs through SaaS sign-ups, on-boarding, and support.

But it’s not just about tech-driven optimised processes. Part of Huboo’s proposition is achieved through something as simple as a modular approach the company has designed to organise its warehouses. This sees every client given a designated space within a hub a and hub manager who understands their business.

From a revenue model perspective, Huboo is attempting to align its own interests with that of sellers. The startup provides two months of free storage to all clients for every new inventory shipment, so if sellers manage and maintain turnover they won’t need to pay for storage again.

“When a seller sells, we fulfil, which means they pay us primarily when they are earning. That’s where 80% of the revenue comes from,” explains Bysh.

Meanwhile, Huboo generates additional revenues from a small administrative subscription and optional services, such as packaging. The latter will grow when “Hubstore” is launched later this year, offering upgrades and customisations in a single click. This will include related services, such as tech to help expand to additional sales channels and increase sales.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Huboo raises £1M to take the pain out of e-commerce fulfilment https://ift.tt/2HPM7ky

Why Box is one of the most underappreciated companies

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week, we recorded on location at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco, a show that saw talks from Box’s Aaron Levie, Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar and venture capitalists Maha Ibrahim, Rebecca Lynn and Jason Green. The latter, the founder of Emergence Capital, joined us before his panel for a special episode of Equity focused almost entirely on enterprise tech. Danny Crichton, the esteemed leader of TechCrunch’s Extra Crunch, was on hand to co-lead the episode with Kate.

Before we jumped too deep into the enterprise pool, we had to review some news from one of the most-talked about companies. The co-working giant, legally known as The We Company, is said to have halved its IPO exceptions to a minuscule $20 billion! Ok that’s not really that small but compared to its most recent valuation of $47 billion, we’re a bit shocked.

Next, we ran through the IPO pipeline. Cloudflare is expected to go public next Friday. Datadog will come after that. WeWork is reportedly kicking off its roadshow next week, but given this week’s reports, that could be delayed.

After that, Green gave us his take on Box, the file sharing business in which he was an early investor in. If you haven’t heard, activist investor Starboard Value took a 7.5% stake in the business this week. Green explains what that means and what he think is next for the company. Levie, of course, spoke on stage at the enterprise event. In short, the executive said his goal is to continue building a sustainable business.

Finally, we dove into the latest trends in startups. Enterprise still isn’t sexy but it’s much sexier than it’s been in the past. Why? Because all the enterprise startups want to build consumer friendly tools. Tune in to hear what Green thinks of the consumerization of the enterprise and all the startup madness.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotify, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.



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Super early bird pricing for Disrupt Berlin 2019 ends tonight

The last few hours of serious euro-savings are upon us, startuppers. In the States, we’d say it’s time to fish or cut bait. What we’re trying to tell you is that super early bird pricing for Disrupt Berlin 2019 ends tonight at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Buy your passes now and save up to €600 or pay more tomorrow. Note that staying home is not an option.

Come to Berlin and join more than 3,000 of your kindred startup spirits from more than 50 countries. You’ll benefit from the words and wisdom of tech’s most influential leaders, investors, makers and shakers. Folks like these…and lots more phenomenal speakers.

Enjoy a fireside chat with Oscar Pierre, the CEO and co-founder of Glovo. Pierre’s bonafides are fascinating — he got his start as an aerodynamics engineer for Airbus. We can’t wait to hear how he transitioned to lead a major on-demand delivery platform with more than 1,000 employees and service in 124 cities across 21 countries.

​Quick, what company single-handedly changed the tech startup investment game? If you said SoftBank Vision Fund, well good on ya, mate. Fund partner David Thevenon will join us on stage, and we can’t wait to hear his take on ride-hailing and mobile transportation platforms. We also want to know if SoftBank board members are hands-on or hands-off when it comes to letting executive teams make decisions.

There are plenty more reasons and ways to attend Disrupt Berlin. Why not take a shot at startup glory? One application form is all it takes to apply to both Startup Battlefield and the TC Top Picks program.

Think you have what it takes to compete in Startup Battlefield and launch your company on the world’s most famous startup stage? It won’t cost you anything to apply or to participate. If you’re chosen, you’ll receive rigorous pitch coaching, so you’ll be ready to go head-to-head against some of the best early-stage startups. Who will win the $50,000 prize?

Not ready for a pitch competition quite yet? No worries. Apply to be a TC Top Pick. If you make the cut, you’ll get a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, a VIP experience and loads of investor and media attention.

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December, but the super early-bird ticket pricing disappears in just a few hours. Buy your passes now before the deadline strikes tonight at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Remember, staying home  is not an option.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.



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Xiaomi has shipped 100 million smartphones in India

{rss:content:encoded} Xiaomi has shipped 100 million smartphones in India https://ift.tt/2zXxpnC https://ift.tt/2ZH7KOd September 06, 2019 at 10:32AM

Xiaomi said on Friday it has shipped over 100 million smartphones in India, its most important market, since beginning operations in the nation five years ago. The company cited figures from research firm IDC in its claim.

The Chinese giant, which has held the top smartphone vendor position in India for eight straight quarters, said its budget smartphone series Redmi and Redmi Note were its top selling lineups in India.

“It’s a testament to the love we have received from millions of Mi Fans since our inception. There have been brands who entered the market before us, yet are nowhere close to the astounding feat we have achieved,” said Manu Jain, VP of Xiaomi and MD of the company’s India business, in a statement.

As competition in its home nation intensified, India has emerged as the most important market for Xiaomi in recent years. When the Chinese firm entered the nation, for the first two years, it relied mostly on selling handsets online to cut overhead. But in the years since, it has established presence in brick-and-mortar market, which continues to drive much of the sales in the nation.

xiaomi india

Last month, Xiaomi said the company is on track to building presence in 10,000 physical stores in the country by the end of the year. It expects offline market to drive half of its sales by that time frame.

 

More to follow…

Thursday, September 5, 2019

Facebook’s lead EU regulator is asking questions about its latest security fail

Facebook’s lead data protection regulator in Europe has confirmed it’s put questions to the company about a major security breach that we reported on yesterday.

“The DPC became aware of this issue through the recent media coverage and we immediately made contact with Facebook and we have asked them a series of questions. We are awaiting Facebook’s responses to those questions,” a spokeswoman for the Irish Data Protection Commission told us.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for a response.

As we reported earlier, a security research discovered an unsecured database of hundreds of millions of phone numbers linked to Facebook accounts.

The exposed server contained more than 419 million records over several databases on Facebook users from multiple countries, including 18 million records of users in the U.K.

We were able to verify a number of records in the database — including UK Facebook users’ data.

The presence of Europeans’ data in the scraped stash makes the breach a clear matter of interest to the region’s data watchdogs.

Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes stiff penalties for compliance failures such as security breaches — with fines that can scale as high as 4% of a company’s annual turnover.

Ireland’s DPC is Facebook’s lead data protection regulator in Europe under GDPR’s one-stop shop mechanism — meaning it leads on cross-border actions, though other concerned DPAs can contribute to cases and may also chip in views on any formal outcomes that result.

The UK’s data protection watchdog, the ICO, told us it is aware of the Facebook security incident.

“We are in contact with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), as they are the lead supervisory authority for Facebook Ireland Limited. The ICO will continue to liaise with the IDPC to establish the details of the incident and to determine if UK residents have been affected,” a spokeswoman said.

It’s not yet clear whether the Irish DPC will open a formal investigation into the security incident.

It does already have a large number of open investigations on its desk into Facebook and Facebook-owned businesses since GDPR’s one-stop mechanism came into force — including one into a major token security breach last year, and many, many more.

For the latest breach, it’s also not clear exactly when Facebook users phone numbers were scraped from the platform. In a response yesterday the company said the data-set is “old”, adding that it “appears to have information obtained before we made changes last year to remove people’s ability to find others using their phone numbers”.

If that’s correct, the phone number breach is likely to pre-date April 2018 — which was when Facebook announced it was making changes to its account search and recovery feature, after finding it had been abused by what it dubbed “malicious actors”.

“Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way,” Facebook said at the time.

It would also therefore pre-date GDPR coming into force, in May 2018, so would likely fall under earlier EU data protection laws — which carry less stringent penalties.



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Facebook is making its own deepfakes and offering prizes for detecting them

Image and video manipulation powered by deep learning, or so-called “deepfakes,” represent a strange and horrifying facet of a promising new field. If we’re going to crack down on these creepy creations, we’ll need to fight fire with fire; Facebook, Microsoft, and many others are banding together to help make machine learning capable of detecting deepfakes — and they want you to help.

Though the phenomenon is still new, we are nevertheless in an arms race where the methods of detection vie with the methods of creation. Ever more convincing fakes appear regularly, and though while they are frequently benign, the possibility of having your face flawlessly grafted into a compromising position is very much there — and many a celebrity has already had it done to them.

Facebook, as part of a coalition with Microsoft, the Partnership for AI, and several universities including Oxford, Berkeley, and MIT, is working to empower the side of good with better detection techniques.

“The most interesting advances in AI have happened when there’s a clear benchmark on a dataset to write papers against,” said Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer in a media call yesterday. The dataset for object recognition might be millions of images of ordinary objects, while the dataset for voice transcription would be hours of different kinds of speech. But there’s no such set for deepfakes.

We talked about this challenge at our Robotics and AI event earlier this year in what I thought was a very interesting discussion:

Fortunately Facebook is planning on dedicating around $10 million in resources to make this Deepfake Detection Challenge happen.

“Creation of these datasets can be challenging, because you want to make sure that everyone participating in it is clear and gives consent so they aren’t surprised by the usage of it,” Schroepfer continued. And since most deepfakes are made without any consent whatsoever, they’re not really permissible for usage in an academic context.

So Facebook and its partners are making the deepfake content out of whole cloth, he said. “You want a dataset of source video, and then a dataset of personalities you can map onto that. Then we’re spending engineering time implementing the latest most advanced deepfake techniques to generate altered videos as part of the dataset.”

And while you’re entirely justified in wondering, no, they aren’t using Facebook data to do this. They’ve got paid actors.

dfdc

This dataset will be provided to interested parties, who will be able to build solutions and test them, putting the results on a leaderboard. At some point there will be cash prizes given out, though the details are a ways off. With luck this will spur serious competition among academics and researchers.

“We need the full involvement of the research community in an open environment to develop methods and systems that can detect and mitigate the ill-effects of manipulated multimedia,” said the University of Maryland’s Rama Chellappa in a news release. “By making available a large corpus of genuine and manipulated media, the proposed challenge will excite and enable the research community to collectively address this looming crisis.​”

Initial tests of the dataset are planned for the International Conference on Computer Vision in October, with the full launch happening at NeurIPS in December.



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After announcing Galaxy Fold release date, Samsung cancels older preorders

{rss:content:encoded} After announcing Galaxy Fold release date, Samsung cancels older preorders https://ift.tt/2NQHT07 https://ift.tt/2ZKp9Sg September 05, 2019 at 06:55PM

The good news: Samsung says it has addressed the early problems with the Galaxy Fold and finally has a release date (in Korea at least). The bad news: the company is canceling the first round of U.S. preorders. The gooder news: if you were among those early adopters, the it’s giving you a $250 in-house credit to keep you in its good graces.

Shortly after announcing that its first foldable handset is set to start shipping to customers in South Korea on September 6, Samsung sent out a note to customers stating that it would be “taking the time to rethink the customer experience.” That involves, among other things, canceling existing pre-orders. “While not an easy decision to make,” the company writes, “we believe that this is the right thing to do.”

TechCrunch has confirmed the news with Samsung, though the company is letting the email to customers speak for itself. The letter also notes that the company is launching a “new Galaxy Fold Premier Service” for those who opt to pick up the newly rejiggered version of the phone. After the first version of the handset ran into some…issues with reviews, Samsung no doubt wants to be the first line of defense should consumers run into any problems with the new $2,000 phone.

The company has yet to confirm a release date for the rest of the world, though it notes that the Fold will be coming to markets including the U.S. in “coming weeks,” which is on track with the earlier September timeframe.

Parallel Markets is trying to make it easy to buy and sell private stock

Parallel Markets is a new startup aiming to make it as easy to buy and sell private company shares as it is for public company stock.

COO Nicholas Goss said this is becoming issue for startups as they stay private for longer, which means early employees can find their equity locked up for longer periods of time — and that’s assuming they can even afford to exercise their stock options.

“This is the type of thing that’s really change the game when it comes to attracting talent,” Goss said.

CTO Brian Muller added, “There’s a pent up demand, both for the ability to sell and the ability to buy … We’re bringing our platform into the mix to work directly with issuers to support that liquidity in a structured way.”

That idea of working with issuers (in other words, the companies whose stock is being sold) is a big of what the Parallel Markets team said distinguishes them from secondary marketplaces like SharesPost. Co-founder and CEO Tony Peccatiello said that while these sales usually happen without input from the company, Parallel Markets is taking a different approach, one that “puts the control over these transactions in the hands of a CFO.”

In other words, Parallel Markets will work with company executives to create what Peccatiello described as “structured liquidity events,” where employees can sell their stock to designated buyers at a given time. The platform also gives the companies additional controls, like a setting floors and ceilings on the price per share.

Meanwhile, all the employees get notified when there’s an opportunity to sell their stock. And the sales are handled by Parallel Markets’ subsidiary broker dealer, in a way that’s compliant with the various regulations.

Peccatiello said the startup — which has raised $1.4 million itself from friends and family — is already working with some initial partners, although it hasn’t actually powered any stock purchases yet: “We expect to be doing those in Q4 of this year.”

Goss (who previously worked as an IPO lawyer at Latham & Watkins, as well as on the investment banking team at Credit Suisse) predicted that over time, startups will make this a bigger part of their compensation packages, where it “almost mimics in reverse the vesting cliff,” where there’s not just a schedule for receiving stock, but also “when you can start selling into these liquidity events.”

Parallel Markets Passport

Today, Parallel Markets is officially launching a new tool called Passport that Muller said was created for its own needs — namely, verifying accredited investors.

He explained that equity crowdfunding sites, plus other platforms that work with accredited investors, currently need to subject those investors to “a lengthy and arduous on-boarding process” that involves uploading a variety of documents to confirm their accredited status.

With Passport, on the other hand, investors can go through the verification process just one time. After that, when they’re looking to invest through a platform that uses Passport, they can simply click a button to give Passport permission to share their information.

“We looked for partners who could provide this, but we did not find anyone who could provide an ongoing identity verification tool that worked across multiple platforms,” Peccatiello told me in a follow-up email. “We want identity to be truly portable — not only on other third party websites but also places like the blockchain, which provides an interesting use case with smart contracts.”



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Only 48 hours left on early-bird pricing to Disrupt SF 2019

Holy price hike, startuppers — you have just 48 hours left to save up to $1,300 on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Don’t let time stand in your way of saving serious dough. Release your inner savvy shopper and beat the deadline. Early-bird savings disappear at 11:59 p.m. (PST) on September 6. Avoid the price hike — buy your early-bird passes today.

More than 10,000 attendees will be on hand to experience the very best of startup culture. Whether you come to be inspired by today’s leaders and tomorrow’s most promising startups or to gain business insight from industry analysts, you’ll find it all at Disrupt SF 2019.

Let’s look at just some of the leading experts who will grace our various stages and discuss new innovations and game-changing technologies (you can see the full agenda here):

  • The Ethics of Snipping DNA with CRISPR — Rachel Haurwitz is the founder of Caribou Biosciences, a startup on the cutting edge of gene editing technologies — including animal and human DNA. She will chat with us about the ethical and scientific questions surrounding CRISPRing human embryos and what that could mean for the future of humanity.
  • How to Take a Digital Brand Offline — E-commerce has fundamentally changed the way we browse and buy physical goods. But even though online sales have taken a huge bite out of brick-and-mortar, it doesn’t mean that digital brands aren’t interested in the prospect of offline channels. Hear from Rich Fulop (Brooklinen), James Reinhart (thredUP) and Susan Tynan (Framebridge) — three founders who have taken their own unique approach to launching a store.
  • The Fourth Big Wave: Talking Crypto — If you care about understanding crypto and the ways it may well impact you sooner than you might imagine, you won’t want to miss this fireside chat with Andreessen Horowitz general partner Chris Dixon.
  • How to Raise My First Dollars — Venture funding may have boomed over the last decade, but the decisions around your initial funding are as tricky as ever. Hear how to take advantage of the current landscape from top Silicon Valley early-stage thinkers, including pre-seed investor Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures, early-stage investor Annie Kadavy of Redpoint Ventures and Russ Heddleston, CEO of DocSend.

You’ll find plenty of networking opportunities in Startup Alley, where 1,200 early-stage startups and sponsors — including our TC Top Picks — showcase their latest innovations. Don’t miss out on the Startup Battlefield to watch an impressive group of startups launch on a world stage and compete for $100,000.

Be a savvy shopper and save big bucks. Buy your early-bird passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 by 11:59 p.m. (PST) on September 6.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.



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BigID announces $50M Series C investment as privacy takes center stage

It turns out GDPR was just the tip of the privacy iceberg. With California’s privacy law coming on line January 1st and dozens more in various stages of development, it’s clear that governments are taking privacy seriously, which means companies have to as well. New York-startup BigID, which has been developing a privacy platform for the last several years, finds itself in a good position to help. Today, the company announced a $50 million Series C.

The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with help from SAP.io Fund, Comcast Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and ClearSky. New investor Salesforce Ventures also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to over $96 million, according to Crunchbase.

In addition to the funding, the company is also announcing the formation of a platform of sorts, which will offer a set of privacy services for customers. It includes data discovery, classification and correlation. “We’ve separated the product into some constituent parts. While it’s still sold as a broad-based solution, it’s much more of a platform now in the sense that there’s a core set of capabilities that we heard over and over that customers want,” CEO and co-founder Dimitri Sirota told TechCrunch.

He says that these capabilities really enables customers to see connections in the data across a set of disparate data sources. “There are a lot of products that do the request part, but there’s nobody that’s able to look across your entire data landscape, the hundreds of petabytes, and pick out the data in Salesforce, Workday, AWS, mainframe, and all these places you could have data on [an individual], and show how it’s all tied together,” Sirota explained.

It’s interesting to see the mix of strategic investors and traditional venture capitalists who are investing in the company. The strategics in particular see the privacy landscape as well as anyone, and Sirota says it’s a case of privacy mattering more than ever and his company providing the means to navigate the changing landscape. “Consumers care about privacy, which means legislators care about it, which ultimately means companies have to care about it,” he said. He added, “Strategics, whether they are companies that collect personal data or those that sell to those companies, therefore have an interest in BigID.”

The company has been growing fast and raising money quickly to help it scale to meet demand. Starting in January 2018, it raised $14 million. Just six months later, it raised another $30 million and you can tack on today’s $50 million. Sirota says having money in the bank and seeing these investments helps give enterprise customers confidence that the company is in this for the long haul.

Sirota wouldn’t give an exact valuation, only saying that while the company is not a unicorn, the valuation was a “robust number.” He says the plan now it to keep expanding the platform, and there will be announcements coming soon around partnerships, customers and new capabilities.

Sirota will be appearing at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise on September 5th at 11 am on the panel, Cracking the Code: From Startup to Scaleup in Enterprise Software.



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SF-based African fintech startup Chipper Cash expands to Nigeria

The African no-fee, cross-border payment startup Chipper Cash has expanded to Nigeria.

The San Francisco-based startup, with offices in Ghana and Kenya, will offer its P2P payment service and app in Africa’s most populous nation in partnership with Paystack — the payment gateway company. Paystack CEO Shola Akinlade confirmed the collaboration.

Chipper Cash will establish a company presence in Lagos and has hired a country manager, Abiodun Animashaun, co-founder of Lagos-based ride-hail startup Gokada.

Animashaun is one of two senior figures departing African tech ventures to join Chipper Cash. Alicia Levine will leave Nairobi-based internet hardware and service startup BRCK to become Chipper Cash’s chief operating officer, according to Chipper Cash CEO Ham Serunjogi.

The startup went live in October 2018, joining a field of fintech startups aiming to scale digital finance applications across Africa’s billion-plus population.

Chipper Cash was co-founded by Serunjogi (from Uganda) and Ghanaian Maijid Moujaled, both of whom emigrated to the U.S. to study and work in Silicon Valley.

The fintech company now has more than 70,000 active users and has processed 250,000 active transitions on its no-fee, P2P, cross-border mobile-money payments product.

The startup also runs Chipper Checkout: a merchant-focused, fee-based C2B mobile payments product that supports its no-fee mobile-money business.

Chipper Checkout will make its debut in Nigeria several months after Chipper Cash’s mobile-payments launch, according to Serunjogi.

The imperative to move to Nigeria was pretty straightforward. “Nigeria is the largest economy and most populous country in Africa. Its fintech industry is one of the most advanced in Africa, up there with Kenya and South Africa,” he said.

“I think for any company doing fintech across borders, that is looking to be successful in Africa, it’s imperative that you have a presence in Nigeria.”

For some fintech startups, such as Chipper Cash, locating in Nigeria is not just strategic for expanding in Africa, but also to serve international ambitions.

Chipper Cash was recently profiled in an Extra Crunch feature as one of three African fintech startups — with goals to scale globally — that has co-located in San Francisco with operations in Africa. The play is to tap the best of both worlds in VC, developers and the frontier of digital finance.

Toward that end, Chipper Cash raised a $2.4 million seed round led by Deciens Capital this May.

The payments company also persuaded 500 Startups and Liquid 2 Ventures — co-founded by American football legend Joe Montana — to join the round.

Per stats offered by Briter Bridges and a 2018 WeeTracker survey, fintech now receives the bulk of VC capital and deal-flow to African startups.

A number of estimates show the continent’s 1.2 billion people represent the largest share of the world’s unbanked and underbanked population.

In addition to creating greater financial inclusion on the continent, African fintech products and solutions have also found traction internationally. Safaricom (M-Pesa), Flutterwave, Paystack, Paga, Mines and Chipper Cash are among companies that offer or plan to offer their products in regions such as Asia, Europe and Latin America.



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YouTube launches a dedicated Fashion vertical

YouTube today is launching a new vertical called YouTube Fashion that aims to capitalize on the popular style and beauty content that attracts millions of viewers to its platform. According to Statista, beauty videos last year alone generated more than 169 billion views on YouTube, and more recently, some of fashion’s biggest names have set their sights on YouTube. Today, YouTube says the number of Fashion & Beauty channels on the site have grown over 6 times from 2014 to 2018, and combined, generated billions of views in 2018.

The new vertical, YouTube.com/Fashion, will attempt to better organize some of this content, including style videos from top creators, industry collabs, live streams from the runway, inside looks into the fashion industry, behind-the-scenes video, vlogs from fashion icons, and more.

Among the names and brands YouTube mentioned as prominent examples of what you’ll find on the new, top-level destination, there’s:

fashion

The launch comes at a time when Instagram has so well established its platform as a destination for style and fashion that it’s now entered into the e-commerce market as well, enabling brands to sell directly to Instagram users who can shop and check out through the social app itself. And with its IGTV platform for long-form videos, it’s working to become more of a YouTube rival.

YouTube, meanwhile, is better known for establishing beauty stars like Yuya, Bethany Mota, Michelle Phan,  Zoe Sugg, James Charles, Tati Westbrook, Jaclyn Hill, and others, who have gained traction for their makeup reviews and tutorials — and sometimes, their feuds. It has even launched a new ad unit targeting the beauty category, that uses AR to let viewers try on makeup themselves.

The company knows the potential in fashion, however — even if it’s been accused in the past of not paying enough attention to the category, despite having fashion-focused creators with millions of subscribers and hundreds of millions of video views.

Things are now starting to change on this front. Last June, YouTube hired Derek Blasberg, previously the host of CNN Style and a Vanity Fair contributor, as its new head of fashion and beauty partnerships. At YouTube, Blasberg has fostered collaborations between top creators and brands in order to better elevate the profiles of the brands and the YouTube stars.

With the launch of /Fashion, YouTube now plans to bring more international voices to the new destination and localize the page for global markets, Blasberg says, writing on the YouTube blog.

Dedicating a vertical to a particular type of content is nothing new for YouTube. As YouTube moved away from running a standalone Twitch competitor, for example, it launched a /Gaming destination on YouTube.com. It’s now one of the fastest-growing verticals on the site.

YouTube Fashion can be found on the YouTube homepage and in the mobile app, where you can subscribe to the category itself, instead of just individual creators.

It’s now one of only a few categories to get top billing on YouTube — a list that also includes Movies & Shows, Gaming, and Live.

 

 



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