Before people ever use or buy your product, they’ll interact with your brand. What does your company stand for? How is your product different? Branding is an often overlooked, but essential component of communicating your company’s values, connecting with potential customers and, ultimately, driving conversions.  

But finding the right brand designer is hard. Depending on your budget, industry and scope, brand designer and brand agency services can vary widely. It’s a niche community, and brand designers who thrive in chaotic, fast-paced startup environments are rare.

We’re demystifying the world of brand design by covering how companies like Intercom approach their brand identity, and asking founders, like you, to nominate a talented brand designer or agency with whom they’ve collaborated. We’ll be publishing more branding articles, guest posts by industry experts and brand designer profiles in the weeks to come, but we need your help. We’re relying on your recommendations to identify which brand designers and agencies to feature.

We’re especially looking for people who have experience in these three categories:

• Visual brand identity: Conveying a startup’s core values through its logo, colors, typography, graphics and other visual elements
• UX/UI design: Designing how a company’s brand is expressed through user experience and user interface elements, such as colors, shapes, fonts, illustrations and icons
• Brand narrative and strategy: Developing a startup’s story and a plan for how it is internally and externally communicated

We’re also interested in understanding how much time you’ve worked with a designer or agency, whether you’d recommend them to a friend and examples of their work.

Brand design is just one of our latest initiatives to identify the best service providers for startups. As we develop a shortlist of the top brand designers and agencies in the world, we’ll be asking them about their design philosophy, brand development process, rates and fees, and more. We’ll publish their profiles (along with your recommendations) on Extra Crunch.  

We’ll continue updating our database of brand designers on a rolling basis, but in the meantime, help us share this article and nominate a brand designer or agency you know and love.

Any thoughts or questions? Email us at ec_editors@techcrunch.com.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Tell us who designed your startup’s brand

Social investing and trading platform eToro announced that it has acquired Danish smart contract infrastructure provider Firmo for an undisclosed purchase price.

Firmo’s platform enables exchanges to execute smart financial contracts across various assets, including crypto derivatives, and across all major blockchains. Firmo founder and CEO Dr. Omri Ross described the company’s mission as “…enabl[ing] our users to trade any asset globally with instant settlement by tokenizing assets and executing all essential trade processes on the blockchain.” Firmo’s only disclosed investment, according to data from Pitchbook, came in the form of a modest pre-seed round from the Copenhagen Fintech Lab accelerator.

Firmo’s mission aligns well with that of eToro — which is equal parts trading platform, social network and educational resource for beginner investors — with the company having long communicated hopes of making the capital markets more open, transparent and accessible to all users and across all assets. By gobbling up Firmo, eToro will be able to accelerate its development of offerings for tokenized assets.

The acquisition represents the latest step in eToro’s broader growth plan, which has ramped up as of late. Earlier in March, the company launched a crypto-only version of its platform in the US, as well as a multi-signature digital wallet where users can store, send and receive cryptocurrencies.

The Firmo deal and eToro’s other expansion activities fit squarely into the company’s belief in the tokenization of assets and the immense, sector-defining opportunity that it creates. Etoro believes that asset tokenization and the movement of financial services onto the blockchain are all but inevitable and the company has employed the long-tailed strategy of investing heavily in related blockchain and crypto technologies despite the ongoing crypto winter.

“Blockchain and the tokenization of assets will play a major role in the future of finance,” said eToro co-founder and CEO Yoni Assia. “We believe that in time all investible assets will be tokenized and that we will see the greatest transfer of wealth ever onto the blockchain.” Assia expressed a similar sentiment in a recent conversation with TechCrunch, stating “We think [the tokenization of assets] is a bigger opportunity than the internet…”

After the acquisition, Firmo will operate as an internal R&D arm within eToro focused on developing blockchain-oriented trade execution and the infrastructure behind the digital representation of tokenized assets.

“The Firmo team has done ground-breaking work in developing practical applications for blockchain technology which will facilitate friction-less global trading,” said Assia.

“The adoption of smart contracts on the blockchain increases trust and transparency in financial services. We are incredibly proud and excited that [Firmo] will be joining the eToro family. We believe that together we have a very bright future and look forward to pursuing our shared goal to become the first truly global service provider allowing people to trade, invest and save.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Social investment platform eToro acquires smart contract startup Firmo

Ouster has raised $60 million as the San Francisco-based lidar startup opens a new facility that will have the capacity to assemble and ship several thousand sensors a month by the end of 2019.

The new factory, which will have a grand opening ceremony March 28, currently produces hundreds of sensors per month. Ouster says at full capacity, the factory will produce $25 million to $50 million in inventory per month.

Lidar measures distance using laser light to generate highly accurate 3D maps of the world around the car. It’s considered by most in the self-driving car industry a key piece of technology required to safely deploy robotaxis and other autonomous vehicles (although not everyone agrees). However, the sensors are also useful in other industries — and this is where Ouster’s business model is targeted.

Ouster has cast a wider net for customers than some of its rivals. Unlike others vying solely for automotive customers working on the development of autonomous vehicles, Ouster is selling sensors to other industries. Ouster is selling its light detection and ranging radar sensors to robotics, drones, mapping, defense, building security, mining and agriculture companies.

The strategy has appeared to pay off. Ouster says it has 400 customers from 15 industries.

The $60 million in additional funding follows a Series A raise of $27 million announced back in 2017 as Ouster came out of stealth mode. In the years since, the company led by Angus Pacala has grown to more than 100 employees and announced four lidar sensors, with resolutions from 16 to 128 channels, and two product lines, the OS-1 and OS-2. The startup expects to nearly double its headcount in the coming year to support further product line development.

The $60 million in equity and debt funding includes investments from Runway Growth Capital and Silicon Valley Bank, as well as additional funding from Series A participants Cox Enterprises, Constellation Tech Ventures, Fontinalis Partners, Carthona and others.

Ouster said the additional investment has helped to develop Ouster’s product lines, including the launch of the OS-1 128 lidar sensor, and fund the expansion of its production facilities.

The company also announced the appointment of Susan Heystee, senior VP for OEM business at Verizon Connect, to its board of directors.

Waymo, the self-driving car company under Google’s Alphabet, could be a new competitor to the company. Waymo announced this month it will start selling its custom lidar sensors to companies outside of self-driving cars. Waymo will initially target robotics, security and agricultural technology. The sales will help the company scale its autonomous technology faster, making each sensor more affordable through economies of scale, Simon Verghese, head of Waymo’s lidar team, wrote in a Medium post at the time.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Lidar startup Ouster raises million in production run-up

China’s Pinduoduo was all the rage in 2018 as the e-commerce upstart quickly rose to challenge Alibaba and raised $1.63 billion through a Nasdaq listing. Much of its success was attributable to its link to WeChat, China’s messaging leader. Now, another emerging e-commerce player that has leveraged WeChat is gearing up for a listing in the United States.

Yunji, which was founded in 2015 (the same year Pinduoduo launched), is raising up to $200 million according to its prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week. Reuters reported citing sources in September that Yunji planned to raise around $1 billion in the IPO at a valuation of between $7 billion and $10 billion.

Like Pinduoduo, Yunji bills itself as a “social e-commerce” service, which means it takes advantage of social relationships on apps like WeChat to acquire, engage and sell to users. The pair differ, however, in how exactly they make money. Pinduoduo generates the bulk of its revenues — nearly 90 percent in the fourth quarter — from advertising fees collected from merchants. This is akin to Alibaba’s marketplace play of connecting buyers and third-party sellers. Yunji, which was started by e-commerce veteran Xiao Shanglue, focuses on direct sales like Alibaba’s arch-foe JD.com, derived 88 percent of its fourth-quarter revenues from selling to users.

In terms of size, Yunji was about $15 million behind Pinduoduo in revenue last year. It had 23.2 million buyers in 2018, compared to Pinduoduo’s 272.6 million monthly active users. Yunji was, however, much closer to achieving profitability than Pinduoduo, which spent most of its money on sales and marketing. Most of Yunji’s expenses went to fulfillment and logistics.

From inception, Yunji has boasted of its “innovative” membership-based e-commerce model. To join, people typically pay a fee, upon which they gain access to a variety of benefits and discounts as well as the permission to open their own micro-stores. Members then get compensated for successfully selling to others and recruiting new members.

The marketing practice helped Yunji quickly build up a large network of users. As of 2018, Yunji had 7.4 million members who contributed 11.9 percent of its annual revenues and 66.4 percent of annual transactions. But the firm went too far in exploiting the social links it controlled that it started to look like a pyramid scheme, which is banned in China. In 2017, the local government slapped Yunji with a $1.4 million fine for pyramid selling. The firm subsequently apologized and promised to revamp its marketing strategy. For instance, to avoid crossing the red line of awarding salespeople with “material” or “financial” benefits, Yunji resorted to virtual Yun-coins, which are not redeemable for cash and can only be used as coupons for future purchase.

But Yunji is still on the edge. The company warns in its prospectus that China could at any time redefine what constitutes pyramid selling.

“[T]here is no assurance that the competent governmental authorities in China that we communicate with will not change their views, or the other relevant government authorities will share the same view as our PRC legal counsel, or they will find our business model, not in violation of any applicable regulations, given the uncertainties in the interpretation and application of existing PRC laws, regulations and policies relating to our current business model, including, but not limited to, regulations regulating pyramid selling.”

Some of Yunji’s more notable investors include China’s CDH Investments and Huaxing Growth Capital, China Renaissance’s subsidiary focusing on high-growth startups.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Yunji, a startup that enables social commerce via WeChat, files for 0M US IPO