Cable television provider Altice USA has confirmed plans to pay $200 million for the millennial-focused, digitally native news network Cheddar in an all-cash, or all-cheddar, rather, deal. The price tag comes at a 25 percent premium to the media startup’s $160 million Series D valuation.

Jon Steinberg, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Cheddar and former president and chief operating officer of BuzzFeed, will become president of Altice News. Altice, an existing Cheddar investor, plans to leverage Cheddar’s broadcasts and CheddarU, a growing network of 1,600 screens on 600 college campuses, to expand its portfolio of news businesses.

“Our goal is to make Altice News a leader in local, business, national and international news everywhere,” Steinberg said in a statement. “The Altice team and Altice Way are as entrepreneurial as it gets with amazing markets, world-class local and international news, an amazing broadband network, and a soon to launch mobile offering.”

Cheddar declined to provide further comment.

Altice News will include Cheddar, along with News 12 Networks and international and current affairs news network i24NEWS.

Founded in 2016, the New York-headquartered Cheddar operates its flagship business newscast on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, as well as three other programs at its studio in New York’s Flatiron Building, WeWork Vine in Hollywood and the White House.

The company, dubbed the “CNBC of the internet,” focuses on business news and the top headlines with 19 hours of programming per day. In a short time, the “fast-paced, young, non-partisan general and headline news network” has inked key partnerships to become widely available across platforms. Currently, its programs are viewable in 40 million homes on Sling TV, DirecTV NOW, Hulu, YouTube TV, Sony PlayStation Vue, Snapchat, fuboTV, Philo, Amazon, Twitch, Twitter, Facebook and 60 percent of smart TVs in the U.S. Cheddar attracts 400 million video views per month.

Cheddar had raised a total of $54.5 million in equity funding across four financings. Its investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Raine Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global, Comcast Ventures, AT&T, Amazon, Antenna Group, Ribbit Capital, The New York Stock Exchange, Altice USA, 7 Global Capital and Dentsu Ventures. Here’s a closer look at Cheddar’s funding history, per PitchBook:

• February 2016 Series A: $3 million at a $15 million valuation
• September 2016 Series B: $10 million | $40 million
• May 2017 Series C: $19 million | $84 million
• March 2018 Series D: $22.5 million | $160 million

The transaction is expected to close in the next two months.

“Cheddar has demonstrated an innovative approach to live news while building an engaged audience, solid followership and a strong brand,” Altice CEO Dexter Goei said in a statement. “As one of Cheddar’s early investors, we have enjoyed our partnership with Jon and admire the entrepreneurial spirit, energy and smart disruptive mentality that he brings to the news business.”

The deal represents a rare outcome for a digital media startup, a sector plagued by sudden shutdowns and slipping revenue figures. Mic, a similarly millennial-focused news outlet, laid off most of its staff last year before being acquired by Bustle for peanuts. The business was well-funded by venture capitalists, raising a total of $60 million before falling victim to Facebook’s 2017 algorithm change.

There’s more where that came from. Vice earlier this year confirmed plans to cut 250 jobs, BuzzFeed is laying off 15 percent of its staff and Verizon Media Group (TechCrunch’s parent company) laid off 10 percent of its workforce in January. Just this week Brit&Co, a digital media brand catering to young women, began laying off a majority of its staff after an M&A deal failed to come together at the last moment, according to Recode.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Altice USA buys digital news network Cheddar for 0M

Glovo, the Spain-headquartered on-demand delivery app that has similarities to Postmates in the U.S., has raised $169 million (€150m) in Series D funding. Lakestar led the round alongside Drake, owner of global pizza franchise Papa John’s.

Idinvest Partners and Korelya Capital also participated, bringing total raised to approximately $322 million. The company last raised funding ten months ago: a $134 million Series C round from Seaya Ventures, Cathay Innovation and Rakuten Capital.

Founded in January 2015 by Oscar Pierre and Sacha Michaud, Glovo offers a ‘shop on your behalf’ app that promises to let you order anything locally on-demand and have it delivered “within minutes”. This includes food items — the company is known for its McDonald’s deliveries in Spain — and non-takeout food and other verticals, such as groceries and pharmaceuticals.

The fast-growing company claims more than 5.5 million unique users and 16,000 associated partners, and now operates in 124 cities across 21 countries, including EEMEA, LATAM, and most recently in Sub Saharian Africa.

The startup says it currently employs over 1,000 people globally, with over 400 people in its Barcelona HQ. A classic gig worker setup: Glovo has 35,000 active “Glovers” on its platform (that’s “self-employed” couriers, to you and me).

Glovo says it will use this injection of funding to bolster global growth, which has been dramatically picking up pace (although, with some reported bumps in the road). CEO Oscar Pierre tells me the company launched in 18 new countries in 2018. There are also plans to further innovate around on-demand groceries, including creating “dark supermarkets” that operate alongside the app’s marketplace of local supermarket chains.

Explains Pierre: “Our Darkstores are urban micro-fulfillment centers located in central areas of a city. They allow us to fully control the value chain and offer the best UX, with a delivery of around 20 minutes. They are run 24 hours a day by Glovo employees whose role is to pick and pack customer orders and have them ready for when the courier arrives. We have launched the offering in Barcelona and Madrid so far and we are still learning and analyzing the results”.

In addition, Glovo will continue to throw more engineers and technology at the problem of optimising on-demand delivery. The company recently hired VP of engineering Mustafa Sezgin, who was an engineering leader at Uber prior to joining.

Pierre says tech is being developed to continue improving the efficiency of Glovo’s “delivery and dispatching capabilities to building a world-class mobile product that exposes everything in a city at the push of a button”. To support this, he intends to grow the tech and data team to over 300 engineers in the next 18 months.

“Today, more than 70 percent of our business is food, followed by groceries, courier and pharmacy,” adds Pierre. “Our vision is to make everything in a city instantly available through the app, and we want to expand into other areas beyond delivery (services, reservations, etc) soon”.

Meanwhile, I’m told Glovo’s most successful markets in terms of orders are Spain (Madrid & Barcelona), Argentina (Buenos Aires), Peru (Lima) and Italy (Milan). Its most successful markets in terms of growth last month (ie new customer acquisition) outside of the above were Costa Rica (San José), Guayaquil (Ecuador), Ukraine (Kiev), Turkey (Istanbul) and Romania (Bucharest).

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Glovo, the on-demand ‘deliver anything’ local app, raises 9M Series D

The Working Assembly began as a side hustle. Jolene Delisle and Lawrence O’Toole juggled full-time jobs while collaborating on projects for startup clients, and they eventually realized there was an opportunity to help companies with branding, marketing, and advertising. In the past four years, TWA has grown from a team of two to a team of twenty in NYC’s Flatiron district. We spoke with Creative Director and Partner Jolene Delisle about their start, their new initiative 24-Hour Assembly—a branding program for minority and women founders, what makes an ideal TWA client, and why she’s excited about the new frontier of experiential and immersive branding.   

On common founder mistakes:

“Clients often come to us and say, “I love the branding of this.” And we’re like, “Well, that’s not really your target. It doesn’t really make sense for you as a brand.” And I think it can be hard for founders to separate their own personal aesthetic from what is actually going to be most effective for their business.”

On TWA’s core values:

“There’s an opportunity when you start your own business to be able to pick your clients, and we started working with a lot of female-founded startups right away. Zola and TheSkimm are both led by women founders. We developed a natural passion for working with these types of companies. It helps that our team is also comprised of mostly women, which I think is really outside the norm. For us, we really focus on diversity and inclusivity. It’s a core tenet of our company and an integral part of the conversation.”

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup brand designers and agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.

Interview with TWA’s Creative Director and Founder Jolene Delisle

Yvonne Leow: Tell me a little bit about your backstory. What led you down this path of design and branding?

Jolene Delisle: So, I have more of a background in advertising and communications, and my founding partner, Lawrence, has a background in branding. In the beginning, we were both working full time, but we would collaborate on projects for startup clients. We eventually realized that there was a need to create branding elements before we could ever develop a marketing strategy so that became the impetus for starting Working Assembly

We’re a relatively new studio. We have about 20 people full time. We’re based in the Flatiron district in NYC. And we work with emerging and evolving brands. The emerging brands are startups. About 40% of our clients are early-stage companies that have either received some kind of angel investment or are pre-series A. Sometimes, founders come to us when they don’t even have a name yet, but they have a great idea and a core MVP. Other times, startups are growing very quickly, and we’ll build out their brand and create additional assets.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Verified Expert Brand Designer: The Working Assembly

Out-of-network ATM fees. Monthly service fees. Card replacement fees. Foreign exchange fees. Wire transfer fees. Overdraft fees. Check fees. Fees, fees, fees, fees, fees.

Oh and interest, of course.

Banking used to be built on a simple economic premise: tuck money away from customers into deposit accounts that pay interest, and then lend that money back out as loans at a higher interest rate. Today though, the modern bank — much like the airline industry — thrives on fees tacked on to basic services. JP Morgan Chase made about $77.44 billion on interest income, but $50 billion on non-interest income (i.e. fees), according to MarketWatch.

As the pressure builds on banks to increase that income, consumers can be bamboozled into paying all kinds of fees they didn’t even know they were expected to pay.

That’s where Cushion comes in. The San Francisco-based fintech startup offers a consumer app that sucks in the transaction history from its users’ bank accounts, determines what fees have been assessed and then conducts negotiations on their behalf to get a refund. It’s designed to be incentive-aligned with consumers by only taking a commission on any returned cash.

The company has had early success so far, and (officially) announced today that it raised $2.8 million in seed capital from Afore Capital, which also invested in the company’s pre-seed round, as well as from 9Yards Capital, Flourish, Green Cow Venture Capital and Vestigo Ventures. Its original Form D filing indicated the firm was targeting $2.5 million, and its amended filing in February showed $2.8 million.

Why Cushion avoided Plaid in its early days

Founder Paul Kesserwani got the idea for Cushion after leaving his job at Twitter. While taking some time off to think about what he wanted to do next, he was helping his parents manage their bank accounts while they were traveling for work in Lebanon. Due to bank security policies, his parents weren’t able to login to their accounts from Lebanon, and eventually, they faced a mountain of banking fees as their accounts went unattended. As Kesserwani investigated, he turned to his own accounts, and realized he had also been paying fees to the tune of $400 that he had no memory of agreeing to.

That sparked the idea for Cushion, which he formed in late 2016, and he launched an alpha product built on Plaid, the well-known banking API platform. But he soon got kicked off the service for holding on to users’ credentials, which violated Plaid’s policies. Cushion uses the credentials to negotiate on your behalf by accessing the secure messaging systems available at many large banks, and so it is a critical feature to make the product work as intended.

Kesserwani decided to get around these restrictions by building out his own data plumbing to avoid using Plaid. “If we build our own infrastructure, then we can offer a whole suite of services that no one else can offer,” he explained to me. The new platform launched in early January 2018.

With the infrastructure, Cushion can now securely download a user’s transaction history, and also initiate and conduct requests for refunds and fee reductions directly with banks automatically.

Surprisingly, many banks are quite amenable to these negotiations. Kesserwani told me the story of a user who was driving around looking for a payday loan, ended up downloading Cushion, and “by dinner had $500 in her pocket.” The company said that more than $1 million of fees have been returned to customers since its founding.

Building personal financial (active) management

The personal financial management space has been a hot one, with market leaders like Mint and Credit Karma offering products that paint a picture of a user’s finances and directing users to sign up for credit card offers and other financial products as a business model.

Kesserwani sees a distinction between what those sorts of companies have done and what he wants to do with Cushion. “A lot of folks are focusing on very sexy problems like investing, but we feel that there are a lot of foundational problems” that no one is solving, he explained.

Rather than just offering a financial snapshot with some recommendations, he wants Cushion to be able to actively manage a user’s financial accounts to maximize their financial health. That might mean switching to a cheaper bank account offering with lower fees, or hypothetically, working with a utility company to change the deadline of a heating bill so that a user doesn’t need a payday loan to pay it in the first place.

“If we do our job properly, we are introducing this whole new concept of managing your finances for you,” Kesserwani explained. He believes that the enormous complexity of the U.S. consumer banking and financial world lends itself to more activist software intervention.

That mission is what attracted Emmalyn Shaw of Flourish Ventures, an economic resilience-focused firm spinout of the Omidyar Network that has raised $300 million in new capital and also merged in a $200 million existing portfolio. What attracted her to Cushion is the incentive alignment between the company and its users. It only makes money when its customers make money, unlike with advertising-driven products. Plus, it can democratize finance by making fee negotiations accessible to all.

Will banks continue to negotiate though?

Cushion says it already has “onboarded tens of thousands” of users on the platform. But what happens if millions of people use AI to reach out to their banks to get fee reductions? Eventually, won’t the banks stop negotiating and just give their AI interlocutors the middle finger?

Kesserwani appreciates that perspective, but repeatedly mentioned in our interview that banks face extremely high customer service costs in working with customers. He sees an opportunity for Cushion to potentially work directly with banks and offer them far more affordable mechanisms to interact with their customers.

Plus, the cost of acquiring a new banking customer is extreme, and Cushion could help direct customers to lower-fee banking accounts. Without the high marketing costs required to make such programs profitable, Cushion might be able to make lower fee accounts more viable for banks.

That trajectory is all in the future though. For now, the company is looking to hire more engineers and data scientists, and continue to build out its AI recommendations, hoping to one day turn its overly fee’d customers into freed customers.

Updated: This article was updated to reflect that Cushion didn’t literally rebuild Plaid, but simply built its infrastructure to avoid using the popular service.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Cushion wants to negotiate bank service fees on your behalf

Fabletics, the digital-first activewear brand founded by Kate Hudson, Adam Goldenberg and Don Ressler, has recently opened a physical store in SoHo as part of its 2019 expansion plans.

The company has plans to open 12 new permanent retail stores over the course of this year alongside the SoHo pop-up shop, all of which will include a heavy tech element.

For one, Fabletics has built its own POS system that connects offline and online sales. The system, called OmniShop, allows Fabletics to track the conversion of every item that goes into a dressing room, by size, color and style, all the way down to each individual customer.

Co-CEO and co-founder Adam Goldenberg said the company invested more than $150 million in OmniShop.

But the system doesn’t just make the product easier to buy; it actually informs the product itself. The system allows Fabletics to see when a certain size of a particular SKU isn’t converting well and investigate if there is a fit/sizing issue.

“From a creative perspective, it allows the design team to actually test out new things in a way that creates less waste,” said co-founder Kate Hudson . “We know that when we test something we know exactly what that buy is going to be. We’re able to get this information so quickly.”

Hudson explained that these insights allow Fabletics to both maintain quality and move quickly to address exactly what the customer wants.

Fabletics can also use OmniShop to understand what’s trending, which helps with how the store is merchandized and gives designers insights to create new products.

It also allows shopping carts to be connected in store and online, which means customers can try on clothes they’ve already put in their shopping cart at home and sales clerks can pass a customer between stores quickly and easily. It also means that the relationship that begins in a store can be tracked online, which gives the company a more holistic view of its own performance with customers.

The new SoHo pop-up, located at 577 Broadway, has iPads in each of the dressing rooms that are personalized to the customer and also offer a single-tap button that calls an associate for a new size or some other question. Fabletics is also testing heat maps in store to measure interest in certain products and combinations.

Beyond the use of tech in physical stores, Fabletics has also carved a path for itself through a unique membership-based business model. Fabletics VIP members receive hand-picked outfits each month that start at $49.95, and are expected to opt out of any month where they don’t want a new outfit. If they don’t actively opt out, that $49.95 is credited to the account to be used toward future outfits.

This model feeds heavily into the OmniShop data set. Because users must come back to the Fabletics site each month, either to approve their new outfit or opt out for the month, Fabletics has a steady stream of information about its 1.5 million VIP members.

When asked about Fabletics’ greatest challenge, Hudson identified two.

“When you’re a name coming into a business and you have success,” said Hudson. “You have one of those names that people would like putting in a headline, you have to be incredibly transparent about everything that you’re doing. Anything that might be considered negative feedback becomes a headline.”

She explained that, as an entertainer, it was a personal challenge and transition to realize that you can’t make everyone happy in business.

“Being an entertainer, you want everyone to like you,” said Hudson. “In big business, there are moments where you aren’t going to please everybody. But that’s made us a very vigilant company with everything we do.”

The other challenge for Fabletics is simply keeping up with demand, which Hudson sees as a good problem to have.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Fabletics, the activewear brand from Kate Hudson, launches NYC pop-up shop

Facebook’s yearly developer conference kicks off today. The keynote starts at 1PM / 10AM with opening remarks from Facebook’s chief Mark Zuckerberg. As in past years, the event will last several hours and feature updates from various Facebook departments.

This year’s event comes as Facebook is attempting an ambitious transition to a privacy-focused messaging platform. It’s a tough sell given the company’s recent history and a consumer base increasingly becoming jaded to Facebook’s data-harvesting ways. But the show must go on.

We’ll be onsite but you can follow along with Facebook’s official video feed here or through Oculus Venues, Facebook’s VR live platform.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Watch Facebook’s F8 2019 keynote right here