Fresh from closing a notable investment from Airbnb, India’s OYO has expanded its footprint into Japan. The move comes through a joint venture with investor SoftBank — which led OYO’s $1 billion round last year through its Vision Fund — which will cover hotel-based accommodation and home rentals.

Financial details around the joint venture were not disclosed. An OYO representative declined to go into details when asked.

OYO started in India, where it initially aggregated budget hotels; it has since expanded into China, Malaysia, Nepal, the U.K., the UAE, Indonesia, the Philippines and — now — Japan. China, in particular, has shown promise, with OYO’s room inventory there reportedly double what it is in India.

The evolution has not just been a geographical one. Its business has moved from a laser focus on the long-tail of budget hotels to a broader “hospitality” play. It now includes managed private homes and, in India, wedding venues, holiday packages and co-working — while its hotel supply is a mixture of franchised and leased. It has also advanced its focus from budget-minded consumers to cover business travelers, too.

The Japanese JV will be led by Prasun Choudhary, whom OYO describes as a founding member of its team. Like OYO business elsewhere in the world, the company is appealing to small and medium hotel franchises and owners. On the consumer side, its prime segment is domestic and international travelers who seek “budget to mid-segment hospitality,” to use part of a statement from OYO founder and CEO Ritesh Agarwal, who is pictured in the image at the top of this post.

Agarwal is a Thiel fellow who started the company in 2011 when aged just 18. His original business, called Oravel, was an Airbnb clone that pivoted to become OYO. Today, that company is valued at $5 billion after raising more than $1.5 billion from investors.

SoftBank has previously struck joint ventures to bring other Vision Fund companies to Japan. Those include WeWork, Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing and India’s Paytm, which launched a payment service in the country.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | India’s OYO enters Japan in partnership with SoftBank

French startup OpenClassrooms is announcing a new partnership for a masters-level online program. Students who enroll in this program will access a fully online program about artificial intelligence. Eventually, future graduates will join companies — Microsoft will likely hire some of them.

If you aren’t familiar with OpenClassrooms, the company started with basic massive open online course content for people willing to learn more about a particular topic. The startup then started offering full-fledged diplomas that require six months, a year or more.

OpenClassrooms is accredited to deliver official degrees in France — and the company plans to do the same in the U.S. and the U.K. It’s not 100 percent just you learning by yourself, as you get to talk to a mentor every week to discuss your progress. And it’s been working quite well for the company.

An online path generally costs less than a traditional degree, and you’re more flexible when it comes to hours, days and semesters. The startup is so confident that it guarantees you’ll find a job within six months of graduation.

More recently, OpenClassrooms has been partnering with companies to offer apprenticeship programs. The idea is that you work for a company several days a week and study when you’re not working. It’s a win-win, as some companies struggle to find the right candidates, and some students want to start working right away and don’t want to pay for their studies. And OpenClassrooms gets paid by companies directly. Uber, Deliveroo, Capgemini, BNP Paribas and dozens of others participate in the apprenticeship program.

Microsoft will help OpenClassrooms design a new degree around data science, machine learning and all things artificial intelligence. The company will provide content and projects. OpenClassrooms will recruit 1,000 candidates in France, the U.K. and the U.S. as part of this program.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | OpenClassrooms partners with Microsoft on a masters-level AI diploma

Zaver, a Swedish fintech that has built a payments platform to facilitate peer-to-peer trades and more, has picked up just over $1.2 million in seed funding. Backing the burgeoning startup are VC firms Inventure and Inbox Capital, as well as a number of relatively well-established angel investors.

They include Joen Bonnier (partner at Atomico), Tom Dinkelspiel, Pontus Hagnö, Fabian Hielte (owner of Ernström & C:o and a previous investor in Spotify and iZettle), Bo Mattsson (founder of Cint), and Fredrik Österberg (founder of Evolution Gaming).

Aiming to disrupt the market for p2p payment solutions, Zaver is developing a SaaS and accompanying apps to bring together buyers, sellers and merchants with the promise of “secure payments on your terms”. The fintech startup aims to facilitate trades between peers by enabling the use of flexible payment methods such as direct payments, “buy now, pay later” and instalments.

To support this, Zaver’s platform claims to embed “intelligent fraud detection” algorithms in tandem with the automatic creation of “verified digital agreements” between transacting parties.

“The Zaver app is the first platform independent checkout solution for p2p transactions,” says Amir Marandi, who co-founded Zaver alongside Linus Malmén — both former engineering students at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

“With Zaver’s intelligent fraud prevention, automated and immediate credit decisions and cryptographically signed digital receipts, peers can do safe payments on their own terms with people they really don’t know that well,” he says. “We try to make p2p trades as safe as possible for all parties involved and offer flexible payment options, without compromising on the user experience”.

In addition, Zaver for Business enables merchants to utilise the platform to increase conversion and reduce transaction costs. “Our mission with this product is to reduce the need of a physical card reader,” adds Marandi.

Zaver’s typical user is described as a young student who wants to sell their iPhone on a classified site in a secure way, or a plumber who wants to buy a used VW Golf today, and pay later. Meanwhile, the typical customer of Zaver for Business is a company with omni-channel sales, selling products/services online and offline.

“Our main competitors are not the kind of business you might expect,” explains Marandi. “It’s not the banks, but rather upcoming startups wanting to innovate the payment industry. The most ‘direct competitor today I would say is the credit card industry”.

To that end, Zaver makes money from the transaction fees it charges merchants (which it says are up to 70 percent cheaper than traditional payment services), and on interest charged when someone chooses to pay via instalments.

Adds Marandi: “Using automated systems for the entire customer journey we are able to offer individualised interest rates at the point of sale. The system automatically chooses an interest rate for you, based on your creditworthiness”.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Swedish fintech Zaver has raised .2M seed for its P2P payments platform