Cubyn, the Paris-based logistics startup that lets e-merchants outsource fulfilment and delivery logistics, has raised €12 million in new funding. The round is led by DN Capital, with participation from Partech Ventures, 360 Capital Partners, BNP Paribas Developpement, and the French investment bank BPI France.

The injection of capital is timed with the launch of “Cubyn Fulfillment,” as the company moves beyond pickup and delivery only. The new service is described as a fully-integrated “first mile” solution that covers the entire fulfilment process including keeping stock in Cubyn’s warehouses. It claims to be offered at a 30% lower price point than competitors.

“We want to make affordable world-class logistics accessible to every single e-merchant, whatever their size,” Cubyn co-founder and CEO Adrien Fernandez Baca tells TechCrunch. “Our typical customer is an e-merchant who sells across sales channels (marketplaces their own website). Size can go from 500 to 50,000 orders shipped per month”.

Launched in 2015, Cubyn says that in four years it has made over 2 million shipments. It also reckons that because its tech is “built from the ground up,” the startup is well positioned to tackle fulfilment more efficiently than legacy players.

“Most direct competitors are the traditional third party logistics players who missed the e-commerce revolution and lack technology intelligence,” says Baca. “We are 30% cheaper, with simpler multi-channel integrations and higher delivery quality. Less direct competitors are the fulfilment offer of marketplaces. They do offer a good logistics experience at a good price, but only for orders going through their marketplace”.

This, he argues, means there is a big gap in the market for a solution geared at multi-channel e-merchants. “We are marketplace agnostic and offer a seamless and high quality multi-channel logistics,” adds the Cubyn CEO.

Specifically, the way the new Cubyn Fulfilment product works is as follows: An e-merchant signs up to Cubyn and plugs in their various sales channels, such as Amazon, Rakuten, eBay, Shopify etc. They then send Cubyn an appropriate amount of inventory to fulfil future orders, which is stored temporarily in a Cubyn warehouse. When an order is placed, Cubyn automatically packs the order and ships via the most suitable carrier to optimise for transit time and cost.

“Our customers pay based on the number of parcels they ship,” explains Baca. “Logistics is a game of volume and thanks to technology we can manage volumes that couldn’t be managed by historical players. This allow us to offer… cheaper prices and still have great margins”.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Cubyn raises €12M Series B to let e-merchants outsource fulfilment

Hot startup Superhuman has been getting some backlash, as often happens when someone notices the precise methodology that a startup is using to enable a core feature. We’re well into stage 2 now when, inevitably, the backlash itself gets backlash.

The nut of it is that people have been exposed to the idea that Superhuman tracks email you send and receive and gives you tools to help you manage it. They do it on your behalf, but without the permission of the recipient.

You can read a review of the service by Lucas Matney, who spent six months with it, here on TC.

The best thing about all of this defense against the backlash chatter coming in is that the backlash itself is really not specious at all. People are literally just pointing out what they do, which is track email. And it provides real, genuine value.

This isn’t a new idea. It’s done by every marketing platform worth a darn that uses email. Every single email that comes in from a BRAND has some sort of this stuff happening. As do all websites (including this one). People are just not used to it being applied to a consumer product as intimate as personal email, and that sort of in-your-face use of commerce-grade tracking is perking up ears.

A few years back a startup founder with a suite of productivity apps (not Superhuman) asked me about this cool new feature they were planning on shipping: email tracking for senders, built right in. Read receipts and action items and all kinds of cool-sounding stuff to make your life easier. He was asking what I thought of it, and whether Apple would have an issue with it if they shipped it on the store.

I told him it sounded like a great idea, but that I would be very cautions of actually rolling it out because it was impossible to get verification from the other side before you began tracking them. There was no opt-in.

I advised him to look at the way Apple handles it, where email tracking happens outside the body of the email in a sort of passive radar fashion. Instead of active “pings” using tracking pixels or other image-hosting tricks, you’re getting a lighter client-side data set to work from. It’s opt in on your side, and doesn’t extend to them.

I warned on it for the same reason that I opt out of services that route my work email through their own servers, I choose not to employ any tracking apps and set up my emails not to auto-display images. It’s not because I don’t want actionable insights, it’s because I am unable to obtain the permission of the people I send it to to begin tracking them.

Yeah, for sure, they’re already tracked 10 ways to Sunday by every spam email from Groupon to The Gap, but this is coming from me, an individual. It’s different, in my opinion, which is why people are reacting the way they are.

Flash forward and now we’ve got a very well-capitalized startup with this at the core of their business. It seems like the founders have thought a lot about this and have decided that this tracking is good and defensible. So it shouldn’t be a shock when it comes time to defend those choices.

If you’re a founder, I think that’s a core lesson: always be willing to die on whatever hill you’re building.

I don’t think that the chatter about the tracking feature of Superhuman is a case of people turning on a startup that has become successful. Superhuman is very new, but very buzzy. And, as I said above, the backlash mostly consists of people highlighting their marquee features in detail. I’d bet a lot of people became even more interested in what it’s doing reading the various and sundry tweets and posts about it, including a Big Profile post in the NYT that kicked off this latest round of discussion.

We’ve been covering Superhuman for a few years now, including detailed explanations of what they want to accomplish and what the origins of the product and team are. That’s pretty much our job — to make sure we see this stuff years before anyone else. (We even covered the last startup to use the name Superhuman for a productivity app.)

The tracking has come up in our stories, but I think that people are just more willing to be skeptical of this stuff given the way that the last couple of years have gone. This is something that we have found happening with a lot of privacy issues recently.

In fact, the most astute criticism of the way Superhuman uses tracking came in a post by designer Mike Davidson, who has spent a lot of time working on large systems that have dangerous, as well as exciting, potential. And that post is anything but a “drive-by” on the model. It’s a thoughtful critique that actually offers some possible solutions.

I do think they are trying to solve a real problem. But there are clearly components of the way that they implemented their key feature that have potential for abuse.

It is, and I do find it a bit amusing that I have to say this in twenty-nineteen, OK for people to want to discuss this and to examine the trade offs in a product that makes other people’s privacy choices for them. This isn’t backlash, this is discussion, and it’s good.

One of the reasons that we’ve gotten to a place where large platforms have been able to be mis-used to manipulate audiences at scale is that not enough people were listening to the conversations that were had about these possibilities early enough.

In context, it is very hard to argue that a genuine moment of thoughtfulness about any startup that has traction, raises significant capital and is aiming to have the most users possible see the world from its point of view is a bad thing.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Superbacklash

Podimo, a Copenhagen-based startup building what it hopes will become Europe’s “Netflix for podcasts,” has raised €6 million in seed funding prior to launch. The round is co-led by Germany’s E.ventures and Denmark’s Heartcore, reflecting the young company’s two planned country launches later this year.

Founded by Morten Strunge, who has a track record in subscription media products via audio books service Mofibo (which he sold to Storytel), Podimo is hoping to capitalise on the rise in consumption in podcasts. Ambitiously, this will include both a free and paid version of its product, with the aim of creating a reliable revenue stream for podcast producers. The startup’s other founders are Nikolaj Koppel, Andreas Sachse and Sverre Dueholm .

“Podcasts have finally come of age and we are seeing a lot of demand for audio content globally across many different demographics,” Strunge tells me. “Consumers are increasingly looking for premium, ad-free services and we see a huge potential in the podcasting space”.

The Podimo app has been designed to provide a “superior experience” in discovery and recommendation compared to existing podcast streaming and download services. The idea, says Strunge, is to make it as seamless and easy as possible to find your next podcast.

“We believe that with the fast increasing amount of podcasts available, curation and discovery becomes more and more important to both unfold content in a relevant context and to the right individual user, which will benefit both podcast creators and consumers,” he says.

By launching a freemium model, where a paid version provides unlimited listening and features, Strunge believes there is an opportunity to work closely with podcast creators to strengthen the podcast ecosystem and make it less reliant on advertising revenue. “We want to become the preferred partner for creators, by both working closely with their content, curate and match it with each individual user, but also by offering a superior monetisation model,” he explains.

The hope then is that a more robust revenue stream will enable new podcasters to enter the market and existing ones to earn more. In turn that could give podcasters the financial headroom to invest even more time and effort into “creating great content”.

“Our dream is that with around 20% of people in Europe listening to podcasts on a weekly basis, many creators should be able to make a living out of creating podcasts, it shouldn’t just be for the few,” says Strunge, perhaps ignoring the fact that media often scales to become a hits-driven business. “We will offer revenue share to all existing podcasters out there, but also co-produce and produce original content,” he adds.

More broadly, Strunge says he remains a strong believer in audio as a format. He says not only is it easier to listen than it is to read but that podcasts are built for subscriptions. “It’s a short format, actuality driven, series driven and niche and broad at the same time,” says the Podimo CEO.

In addition, production cost are low so it is possible to keep to a price point below music and VOD services and Strunge is convinced we’ll continue to see a significant increase in the number of podcasts produced. This will include the broader market but also podcasts from more professional media players yet to invest strategically in the audio format.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Podimo raises €6M to become Europe’s ‘Netflix for podcasts’