Moka raises $27M led by Hillhouse to make hiring more data-driven in China

Moka, a startup that wants to make talent acquisition a little more data-driven for China-based companies that range from smartphone giant Xiaomi to Burger King’s local business, announced Monday that it has raised a 180 million yuan ($27 million) Series B round of funding.

The deal was led by Hillhouse Capital, an investor in top Chinese technology companies such as Tencent, Baidu, JD.com, Pinduoduo — just to name a few. Other investors that took part include Xianghe Capital, an investment firm founded by two former Baidu executives, Chinese private equity firm GSR Ventures and GGV Capital.

Moka claims more than 500 enterprise customers were paying for its services by the end of 2018. Other notable clients are McDonald’s and one of China’s top live-streaming services, YY. It plans to use its new capital to hire staff, build new products and expand the scope of its business.

Founded in 2015, Moka compares itself to Workday and Salesforce in the U.S. It has created a suite of software aiming to make recruiting easier and cheaper for companies with upwards of 500 employees. Its solutions take care of the full cycle of hiring. To start with, Moka allows recruiters to post job listings across multiple platforms with one click, saving them the hassle of hopping between portals. Its AI-enabled screening program then automatically filters candidates and makes recommendations for companies. What comes next is the interview, which Moka helps streamline with automatic email and message reminders for job applicants and optimized plans for interviewers on when and where to meet their candidates.

That’s not the end, as Moka also wants to capture what happens after the talent is on board. The startup helps companies maintain a talent database consisting of existing employees and potential hires. The services allow companies to keep close tabs on their staff, whose resume update will trigger a warning to the employer, and alerts the recruiter once the system detects suitable candidates.

Moka is among a wave of startups founded by Chinese entrepreneurs with foreign education and work experiences. Zhao Oulun, whose English nickname is Orion, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley and worked at San Francisco-based peer-to-peer car-sharing company Turo before founding Moka with Li Guoxing. Li himself is also a “sea turtle,” a colloquial term in Chinese that describes overseas-educated graduates who return home to work. Li graduated from the University of Michigan and Stanford University, and worked at Facebook as an engineer.

When the founders re-entered China, they saw something was missing in the booming domestic business environment: effective talent management.

“Businesses are flourishing, but at the same time many of them fall short in internal organization and operation. To a large extent, the issue pertains to the lack of digital and meticulous operation for human resources, which slows down decision-making and leads to mistakes around talents and company organization,” says chief executive Zhao in a statement.

Moka’s mission has caught the attention of investors. Jixun Foo, a partner at Moka backer GGV Capital, also believes China’s businesses can benefit from a data-driven approach to people management: “We are positive about Moka becoming a comprehensive HR service provider in the future through its unique data-powered and intelligent solutions.”

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Failed meal-kit service Munchery owes $6M to gift card holders, vendors

Several weeks after a sudden shutdown left customers and vendors in the lurch, meal-kit service Munchery has filed for bankruptcy. In the Chapter 11 filing, Munchery chief executive officer James Beriker cites increased competition, over-funding, aggressive expansion efforts and Blue Apron’s failed IPO as reasons for its demise.

Munchery owes $3 million in unfulfilled customer gift cards and another $3 million to its vendors, suppliers and various counterparties, the filing reveals. The company’s remaining debt includes $5.3 million in senior secured debt and convertible debt of approximately $23 million. Munchery says its scrounged up $5 million from a buyer of its equipment, machinery and San Francisco headquarters.

The business had raised more than $100 million in venture capital funding, reaching a valuation of $300 million in 2015 before ceasing operations on January 22 and laying off 257 employees in the process. Munchery was backed by Menlo Ventures, Sherpa Capital, e.Ventures, Cota Capital and others.

The company, which failed to notify its vendors it was going out of business, has been scrutinized for failing to pay those vendors in the wake of its shutdown. To make matters worse, emails viewed by TechCrunch show Munchery continued aggressively marketing its gift cards in emails sent to customers in December, weeks before a final email to those very same customers announced it was ceasing operations, effectively immediately.

An email advertising Munchery gift cards sent to a customer weeks before the startup went out of business.

The latest court filings shed light on Beriker’s decision-making process in those final months, touching on Munchery’s frequent pivots, the company’s 2017 layoffs, its plans to scale sales of Munchery products in Amazon Go stores and failed attempts at a sale. Beriker is the sole remaining Munchery board member. He has not responded to several requests for comment from TechCrunch.

In the third quarter of 2018, Munchery, at the recommendation of its board, hired an investment bank to find a buyer for the startup, to no avail. Beriker suggests the lack of a buyer, coupled with industry trends like larger-than-necessary venture capital rounds and inflated valuations, were cause for the startup’s failure to deliver.

“The company expanded too aggressively in its early years,” the filing states. “The access to significant amounts of capital from leading Silicon Valley venture capital firms at high valuations and low-cost debt from banks and venture debt firms, combined with the perception that the on-demand food delivery market was expanding quickly and would be dominated by one or two brands– as Uber had dominated the ridesharing market– drove the company to aggressively invest in its business ahead of having a well-established and scalable business model.”

Increased competition from well-funded competitors drove the startup off course, too, and the epic failure that was Blue Apron’s IPO, which had a “material negative impact on access to financing for startups in the online food delivery business,” was just the cherry on top, according to Beriker’s statements.

Former Munchery vendors protested today at @sherpa, one of the startup’s investors that’ve stayed silent as former employees, vendors and drivers claim to be owed thousands: “Startup idea don’t steal pies!” Photo by @ThreeBabesBake pic.twitter.com/kfaOZ9CFkq

— Kate Clark (@KateClarkTweets) January 30, 2019

Munchery’s vendors, who were not notified or paid following Munchery’s announcement, have provided outspoken criticism to the company and venture capital’s lack of accountability in the weeks following Munchery’s shutdown. Lenore Estrada of Three Babes Bakeshop, among several vendors owed thousands of dollars in unpaid invoices, orchestrated a protest outside of Munchery investor Sherpa Capital’s offices in January. She said she has spoken with Beriker and founding Munchery CEO Conrad Chu in an attempt to pick up the pieces of the failed startup puzzle.

“None of us who are owed money are going to get anything,” Estrada told TechCrunch earlier today. “But the CEO, after fucking it all up, is still getting paid.”

Beriker, indeed, is still earning a salary of $18,750 per month, one-half of his pre-bankruptcy salary, as well as a “success fee based on the net proceeds recovered from the sale of the company’s assets up to a maximum of $250,000,” the filing states.

View the full bankruptcy filing here:

After an abrupt shutdown, Munchery’s small business vendors are the ones picking up the bill

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Glossier launches its first spin-off brand, a line of Instagram-friendly ‘dialed-up’ beauty extras

Glossier, known for its line of understated makeup products and a cult-following of millennial Instagrammers, is getting colorful with the launch of its first spin-off brand, Glossier Play.

The company — led by founder and chief executive officer Emily Weiss, who built the nearly $400 million business from a makeup blog called Into The Gloss — has raised a total of $92 million in venture capital funding from top-tier consumer investors Forerunner Ventures, Index Ventures and IVP. Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake and Forerunner founder and general partner Kirsten Green, are among the company’s board members.

Weiss introduced Glossier in 2014 as a clean-skincare and natural beauty advocate. Today, the direct-to-consumer business boasts a growing line of barely there makeup, designed to mimic Weiss’s own subtle, au naturale vibe. The launch of Glossier Play, inspired by 1970s’ nostalgia, is its first foray into bright colors, glitter and, in the brand’s own words, “dialed-up extras.”

“We wanted to explore color the Glossier way,” a spokesperson for the company said. “This meant developing high-quality products without the moody, expert-centric rhetoric of most luxury brands. Glossier Play is all about fun and creative expression. These products were two years in the making, and just like Glossier’s modern essentials, they are designed to stand the test of time (not trend-driven or fast fashion).”

Glossier Play’s initial line-up of “extras” includes colored eyeliners ($15), highlighters ($20), multi-purpose glitter gel ($14) and the “Vinylic Lip” ($16). Customers can purchase “The Playground,” a set that includes each of the new products, for $60.

Introducing Glossier Play! A brand of dialed-up beauty extras that make getting ready the best part about going out. Four new makeup products at https://t.co/4PxDM67E2R pic.twitter.com/ULRrc9Ycn3

— Glossier (@glossier) March 4, 2019

The advertising campaign for the Instagram-friendly line will be led by none other than Instagram star Donté Colley, as well as pop musician Troye Sivan. The new line and future spin-offs will help Glossier compete with beauty incumbents, Estée Lauder and L’Oréal, for example, in a market estimated to be worth $750 billion by 2024.

Glossier, headquartered in New York, counts 200 employees, meager in comparison to its nearly 2 million — and growing — social media following. The company surpassed $100 million in annual revenue in 2018, it tells TechCrunch, and acquired 1 million new customers. In total, Glossier retails 29 products across skincare, makeup, body, and fragrance.

The company won’t be introducing additional brands this year and clarified it is not a brand incubator.

Glossier CEO Emily Weiss on why the company won’t sell on Amazon

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Galaxy S10 takes the ‘best smartphone display’ crown

{rss:content:encoded} Galaxy S10 takes the ‘best smartphone display’ crown https://ift.tt/2tPYiqc https://ift.tt/2tPGsny March 04, 2019 at 08:05PM

As you may have gathered from our review of Samsung’s Galaxy S10, it’s a very solid phone with lots of advanced features. But one thing that’s especially difficult to test is the absolute quality of the displaymate — which is why we leave that part to the experts. And this expert says the S10’s screen is the best ever on a smartphone.

Ray Soneira has tested every major phone, tablet, and laptop series for many a year, using all the cool color calibration, reflectance and brightness measurement, and other gear that goes with the job. So when he says the S10’s display is “absolutely stunning and Beautiful,” with a capital B at that, it’s worth taking note.

OLED technology has advanced a great deal since the first one I encountered, on the Zune HD — which still works and looks great, by the way, thank you. But originally it had quite a few trade-offs compared with LCD panels, such as weird color casts or pixel layout issues. Samsung has progressed well beyond that and OLED has come into its own with a vengeance. As Ray puts it:

The Absolute Color Accuracy on the Galaxy S10 is the Most Color Accurate Display we have ever measured. It is Visually Indistinguishable From Perfect, and almost certainly considerably better than your existing Smartphone, living room HDTV, Tablet, Laptop, and computer monitor, as demonstrated in our extensive Absolute Color Accuracy Lab Measurements.

The very challenging set of DisplayMate Test and Calibration Photos that we use to evaluate picture quality looked absolutely stunning and Beautiful, even to my experienced hyper-critical eyes.

Make sure you switch the phone’s display to “natural mode,” which makes subtle changes to the color space depending on the content and ambient light.

And although he has enthused many times before about the quality of various displays and the advances they made over their predecessors, the above is certainly very different language from, for example, how he described the reigning champ until today — the iPhone X:

Apple has produced an impressive Smartphone display with excellent performance and accuracy, which we cover in extensive detail below. What makes the iPhone X the Best Smartphone Display is the impressive Precision Display Calibration Apple developed, which transforms the OLED hardware into a superbly accurate, high performance, and gorgeous display, with close to Text Book Perfect Calibration and Performance!!

High praise, but not quite falling all over himself, as he did with the S10. As you can see I rate smartphone displays chiefly by the emotional response they evoke from Ray Soneira.

At this point, naturally, the gains from improving displays are fairly few, since to be honest, not many people care or can even tell today’s flagship displays apart. But little touches like front and back sensors for ambient light detection, automatic calibration and brightness that take user preferences into account — these also improve the experience, and phone makers have been adding them on at a good clip as well.

No matter what flagship phone you buy today, it’s going to have a fantastic camera and screen — but if you like to see it all in black and white, read through the review and you’ll find your hopes justified.

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Jupiter raises $23 million to tell businesses and governments how climate change will destroy them

Whether it’s by flood, fire or the fury of a storm, climate-related catastrophes are now impacting most cities and towns across the country. As these natural disasters increase in frequency and severity, cities and the businesses that reside in them are mobilizing to understand how best to prepare for the climatological challenges they’re going to face — and increasingly they’re turning to companies like Jupiter Intelligence for information.

From offices in San Mateo, Calif., Boulder, Colo. and New York, Jupiter Intelligence has made a business selling data from satellite imagery and advanced computer models to cities like New York and Miami, along with the federal government and big insurance and real estate customers.

With its new financing, Jupiter plans to take its show on the global road, and is bringing its services to clients in Rotterdam, London and Singapore.

It’s a story that has its roots in more than two decades of work from founders Rich Sorkin, Eric Wun, Josh Hacker and Alan Blumberg.

Wun and Sorkin met in 1996 in the early days of the development of mapping and weather prediction technologies. They got their start in the business co-founding Zeus, a weather prediction technology developer that was pitching its services to commodities traders.

“Zeus was way too early from a technology platform perspective,” says Hacker. “We put Zeus on the shelf eight years ago. Then when we came up with the idea for Jupiter most of the early ideas were already there.”

In the interim, Hacker served as the president of Kaggle, a company Google acquired in 2017. By that point, Hacker had already left to launch Jupiter, which he started in 2016.

While Zeus predicted the 30-day weather for commodities traders, Jupiter is a more powerful toolkit that predicts the possibility of damage from severe weather and climate change for a much broader set of customers, Hacker says.

Wun and Sorkin were on board immediately, and the next person to join the fledgling team was Hacker — who had run satellite operations for Skybox — another Google acquisition. Following the merger of Skybox with Planet Labs, Hacker took a job at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration within the Department of Commerce (one of the pre-eminent organizations focused on climate change).

The final recruit was Blumberg, who was approached because of his role in developing the Princeton Ocean Model, which is used by more than 5,700 research and operational groups in 70 countries, and his leadership position in developing two-hour and four-day flood predictions for Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Storm surge from Hurricane Sandy in New York City

After its launch, the company was able to land three big insurance companies (QBE, Mistui and Nephila), which all agreed to throw cash into the company’s new $35 million round.

Jupiter’s predictive and analytics technologies have applications far beyond insurance. Airports, ports, power plants, water facilities, hospitals, municipalities and even the federal government are turning to the company for information, according to Sorkin.

Jupiter raised $1 million in its seed round from DCVC (Data Collective), then closed on $10 million more from Ignition Partners. The latest $23 million was led by Energize Ventures, a fund focused on infrastructure and climate-related investments.

SYSTEMIQ, which was co-founded by McKinsey veteran Jeremy Oppenheim, also invested in Jupiter’s Series B. The architect of McKinsey’s Sustainability and Resource Practice said in a statement, “For a decade the planet has needed the kind of repeatable, globally consistent, insurance grade analytics Jupiter now delivers.”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

The toolkit the company pitches purports to offer new levels of granularity and insight into the kinds of threats climate and weather-related disasters pose to government and private assets.

“We predict probabilistically at the asset level… at the loading dock of a warehouse or a transmission box or a hotel on the beach, we determine the actual expected risk in a form that the insurance industry or the risk manager at an organization can use and integrate into their plans,” says Sorkin. 

The company’s process begins with global climate models and then drills down into a specific region, which is used as the basis of predicting peril-like events, according to Sorkin.

That goes into a statistical model that translates the predictions into a form that quantifies the uncertainty and in a way that’s tailored to decision makers, he said.

Using APIs from Mapbox, the company can also provide a mapping interface that gives customers visualizations along with a product that lets users see what damage can look like inside of a building through virtual reality and a collaboration with Oculus.

“The strategy was to start with one peril in one place in one market, so we started with flooding in Carolinas for the real estate,” says Sorkin. “We have expanded into much broader perils and geographies and market segments.”

For all of the time that Sorkin spends modeling out how cities will meet their doom in one form of cataclysm or another, Jupiter’s chief executive is fairly positive about the prospects for society to withstand the climate threat it currently faces.

“Even with all the bad things that could happen, we don’t think the apocalypse is inevitable,” Sorkin says. “The extent of damage is a function of how much people invest in avoiding it over the next decade.”

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Shift Technology raises $60 million to detect insurance fraud

Paris-based Shift Technology has raised another $60 million funding round. Bessemer Venture Partners is leading the round and existing investors Accel, General Catalyst, Iris Capital and Elaia Partners are also participating.

Shift Technology is all about detecting fraudulent insurance claims. There are 70 insurance companies around the world relying on its product, such as MACIF in France, Axa in Spain, Assurant, Chubb, CNA and HyreCar in the U.S. And given the size of those companies, it means that Shift Technology is processing a ton of claims every day.

It’s easy to sell this kind of products as fraudulent claims cost a ton of money. If Shift Technology can help you catch a more fraudulent claims, you can spend a bit of money to save a lot of money.

The startup has already grown quite a lot since its previous funding round. They now have 200 employees and customers all around the globe. In addition to its headquarters in Paris, Shift Technology also has offices in Boston, London, Hong Kong, Madrid, Singapore and Zurich.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to hire more people in Boston including data scientists and developers. The company is also playing around with an automated claim processing solution.

Shift Technology is creating a strong barrier to entry. Thanks to its huge data set, it can create an AI-powered detection model that is getting more and more accurate. A new company would have a hard time catching up.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Shift Technology raises $60 million to detect insurance fraud https://ift.tt/2NHgprN

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Go-Jek pulls in $100M more for its massive Series F round

U.S. ride-hailing giants Lyft and Uber are going public in the U.S. imminently, but in Southeast Asia, the two largest on-demand companies are still madly fueling up on investment capital.

The latest update to that story today saw Go-Jek, the Indonesian ride-hailing firm aiming to go regional in Southeast Asia, announce that it has pulled in $100 million from conglomerate Astra, an existing investor, as part of the Series F round it is raising right now. We know Go-Jek is aiming to bring in at least $2 billion from that round — and that it has closed around half of that capital — so the addition from Astra is likely one of many that will take it toward that target.

There’s also a strategic component to this deal.

Astra, for those who are not aware of it, is a $20 billion conglomerate that specializes in manufacturing, automotive and infrastructure industries. It plans to start a joint venture with Go-Jek to equip its cars with Astra’s fleet management system to help improve the way Go-Jek manages its fleet and on-demand services. The rollout will start with “thousands” of Go-Car drivers.

The capital is being raised to expand Go-Jek’s services in Southeast Asia.

The company recently went official with the launch of its Thailand-based Get business. It has also expanded to Vietnam and Singapore over the last year and it is primed to offer its services in the Philippines soon.

Grab, meanwhile, Go-Jek’s key adversary, recently raised $2 billion for its recent Series H round. The company is working to extend that figure to $5 billion with a planned investment of up to $1.5 billion from SoftBank’s Vision Fund in the offing.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Go-Jek pulls in $100M more for its massive Series F round https://ift.tt/2TucVOq

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JetBlue contest asks users to delete their Instagram pics to fly free for a year

In a move that’s both bold and bizarre, JetBlue is introducing a new contest that will give three winners a year of free flights on the carrier. But entrance to the contest comes at a steep price. Users must delete all of their Instagram photos, post a new photo using a JetBlue template and hope to be one of the lucky three.

Entrants must keep their Instagram clear, and set to Public, through March 8.

On the one hand, the Instagram-decimating contest may tap into some of the anti-social sentiment that’s cropped up over the past couple of years. In the wake of data misuse and privacy mishandling by Facebook, which owns Instagram, conversations around deleting social media and one’s own digital imprint have grown more frequent.

Plus, Instagram has tools to let users download all of their photos. Starting fresh on social media may be an attractive prospect to some people.

On the other hand, Instagram has been a modern-day photo album for many people, representing a place where they record the various steps of their life. For many, the request to delete their IG history is a very tall order.

The situation is made more baffling by the fact that JetBlue doesn’t really explain why you must delete all your Instagram photos before posting their promotional garbage content.

Perhaps the carrier would like to replicate the same viral moment that #FyreFestival did with that burnt orange square. Or maybe I’m falling into their trap as we speak, as a seemingly crazy request to delete an entire Instagram history is inherently a bit of a publicity stunt.

Whatever the case, we all have a very first-world decision to make. What’s worth more: your Instagram or the slim chance of free flights for a year?

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2tPjmxm JetBlue contest asks users to delete their Instagram pics to fly free for a year Jordan Crook https://ift.tt/2Td6yQi
via IFTTT

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Scytale grabs $5M Series A for application-to-application identity management

Scytale, a startup that wants to bring identity and access management to application-to-application activities, announced a $5 million Series A round today.

The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, a return investor which led the company’s previous $3 million round in 2018. Bain Capital Ventures, TechOperators and Work-Bench are also participating in this round.

The company wants to bring the same kind of authentication that individuals are used to having with a tool like Okta to applications and services in a cloud native environment. “What we’re focusing on is trying to bring to market, a capability for large enterprises going through this transition to cloud native computing to evolve the existing methods of application to application authentication, so that it’s much more flexible and scalable,” Sunil James, company CEO told TechCrunch.

To help with this, the company has developed the open source, cloud native project, Spiffe, that is managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The project is designed to provide identity and access management for application-to-application communication in an open source framework.

The idea is that as companies transition to a containerized, cloud native approach to application delivery, there needs to a smooth automated way for applications and services to prove they are legitimate very quickly in much the same way individuals provide a username and password to access a website. This could be, for example, as applications pass through API gateways, or as automation drives the use of multiple applications in a workflow.

Webscale companies like Google and Netflix have developed mechanisms to make this work in-house, but it’s been out of reach of most large enterprise companies. Scytale wants to bring this capability to authenticate services and applications to any company.

In addition to the funding announcement, the company also announced Scytale Enterprise, a tool that provides a commercial layer on top of the open source tools that the company has developed. The enterprise version helps companies, who might not have the personnel to deal with the open source version on their own by providing training, consulting and support services.

Bain Capital Venture’s Enrique Salem sees a startup solving a big problem for companies who are moving to cloud native environments and need this kind of authentication.”In an increasingly complex and fragmented enterprise IT environment, Scytale has not only built Spiffe’s amazing open-source community but has also delivered a commercial offering to address hybrid cloud authentication challenges faced by Fortune 500 identity and access management engineering teams,” Salem said in a statement.

The company, which is based in the Bay area, launched in 2017 and currently has 24 employees.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Scytale grabs $5M Series A for application-to-application identity management https://ift.tt/2UlpybI

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Sam’s Club to test new Scan & Go system that uses computer vision instead of barcodes

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Tide Foundation gives consumers full control of personal data on blockchain

It seems that on a regular basis, we hear about massive data breaches or companies sharing highly personal information with third parties without a consumer’s permission or knowledge. The Tide Foundation wants to change that by giving consumers complete control over their personal data on the blockchain by allowing them to manage their own encryption keys.

The startup wants to take that notion a step further by giving users the ability to sell that personal information in an open marketplace that the company is announcing today.

“The overall concept is that when a consumer engages with a business and provides that business with personally identifiable information, the Tide Protocol encrypts that information and provides the consumer with the only key to decrypt it,” Issac Elnekave, Tide co-founder told TechCrunch.

With full control over their data, companies could not transfer any information to a third party without the consumer granting permission first. The marketplace provides a way for companies who need data, the vendors who manage that data and the consumers who ultimately own the data to negotiate a fair market value for access to it. What’s more, the companies buying the data know that they are getting much more valuable and accurate information, delivered with the full knowledge of the consumer.

In the event of a massive data breach like Equifax or Marriott, if customers had been using the Tide Protocol, the hackers couldn’t have actually used the PII in the breached databases because consumers would control the keys to decrypt it, rendering it useless to the data thieves.

Technically, the protocol works in a kind of standard business blockchain fashion. “Tide Protocol uses forked EOS nodes, smart contracts and additional proprietary decentralized layers to manage permissioned access to encrypted consumer data stored by businesses (vendors),” the company explained in a statement.

As for consumers controlling encryption keys, the company says it has created a patented technology to simplify the process of managing those keys in order to put that process within reach of anyone, one that passes what they call “the Grandpa Test.”

“We have developed a layer, a decentralized way to dumb down blockchain to a ubiquitous user experience on the web,” Yuval Hertzog, the other company co-founder explained. He said the idea is to simplify the highly complex and make key management a typical kind of web experience.

Elnekave says that the company has also found a way to comply with GDPR, the strict EU privacy regulations that went into effect last year that includes the right to be forgotten. Because the protocol gives consumers full control over the encryption keys, the user simply has to stop giving access to the business, essentially throwing away the encryption key and blocking access, he explained.

Tide launched three years ago in Sydney, Australia and developed the Tide Protocol, the basis of its blockchain data privacy solution, two years ago. Today it has 13 employees. The company raised a $2 million seed round in November.

The startup believes data ownership should be a basic human right in a similar fashion to Hu-manity.co, the startup that wants to provide a similar set of tools as Tide, but focussed on medical information.

Hu-manity wants to create a health data marketplace with help from blockchain

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Voi Technology, the European e-scooter rentals startup, raises an additional $30M

Well, that didn’t take long. Just three months after raising $50 million in Series A funding, e-scooter rentals startup Voi Technology has added another $30 million to its balance sheet. The new round sees existing investors Vostok New Ventures, Balderton Capital, LocalGlobe and Raine Ventures participate again, alongside new investors Project A and Creandum.

The inclusion of Project A won’t be entirely new news to close readers of TechCrunch. Based on my own sources, I reported that the Berlin-based early-stage VC was in the running in late October, and it was a surprise not to see the firm on the list of backers when VOI announced its Series A a month later. This new round sees those loose ends tidied up nicely.

A number of angel investors also participated. They include Cristina Stenbeck (Kinnevik), Justin Mateen (co-founder of Tinder), Keith Richman (board member, Grubhub), Jeff Wilke (Amazon), Sujay Jaswa (founder of WndrCo), Sujay Tyle (CEO Frontier Car Group), Diego Piacentini (Former Head of International Business, Amazon) Christian Leone (founder of Luxor Capital) and Spencer Rascoff (ex-CEO of Zillow).

Voi says the new capital will be used to ramp up expansion across Europe and invest in R&D. The company is also now claiming to be the leading “home-grown” e-scooter rentals company in Europe — as opposed to U.S.-founded Lime and Bird. In seven months, Voi says it has garnered a customer base of over 400,000 riders, who have taken a total of more than 750,000 rides.

Other competitors operating in various parts of Europe include Flash — the stealthy mobility startup from Delivery Hero and Team Europe founder Lukasz Gadowski that recently raised €55 million in Series A funding — as well as Berlin’s Wind Mobility ($22 million) and Tier (€25 million).

Taxify has also announced its entrance into e-scooter rentals, and Silicon Valley’s Bird and Lime not only operate in Europe but have received substantial investment from three of Europe’s top venture capital firms. Index and Accel have backed Bird, and Atomico has backed Lime.

Staying on message, Voi says that key to its success to date is working collaboratively with city authorities across the continent, including developing a Code of Conduct in Stockholm “to help the city’s multiple scooter-sharing operators work more safely and efficiently together”. However, that didn’t stop Voi having its license temporarily revoked in Madrid, alongside Lime and Wind after a change in the law required a change in the way e-scooter firms operate. It returned to the Spanish city in February.

Meanwhile, the company says its strongest markets so far are in the Nordics. Namely, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö, Lund, Uppsala and Copenhagen, most of which it says will reach profitability in Q1. The e-scooter rental service is also live in Paris, Lyon, Madrid, Malaga, Zaragoza, Murcia, Lisbon and Faro. Today also sees a launch in Oslo, with Helsinki and other cities launching later this month. Italy, Germany, Norway and France are named as near-future expansions.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Voi Technology, the European e-scooter rentals startup, raises an additional $30M https://ift.tt/2INIuPm

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