More than a year after Amazon announced that it would be lead a $575 million investment into UK food delivery startup Deliveroo, the country’s competition regulator, the CMA, has finally announced that it has provisionally cleared the deal, without any additional remedies (that is, requests to alter the terms), saying that it does not pose any threats to potential competition. The investment, which gives Amazon a 16% stake in Deliveroo, is now being opened up to views and feedback from interested parties one more time, due by July 10, before announcing its final decision on August 6.

The decision only relates to this investment, not to further financial tie-ups between the two, it added: “This decision reflects the 16% shareholding that Amazon is acquiring at the present time,” the CMA notes. “Were Amazon to acquire a greater level of control over Deliveroo, in particular by making a full acquisition of the company, this could trigger a further investigation by the CMA.”

Amazon and Deliveroo have not disclosed the value of its 16% stake, nor Deliveroo’s most current valuation. It was last valued at $1.92 billion in November 2017, and our sources tell us that the deal valued the company at around $2 billion (in other words, largely flat compared to its valuation in 2017) but that it’s likely that if it raised now it would probably be up at around $3 billion or more given business growth in recent months.

The deal comes about two months after the CMA initially indicated that it would be giving a nod to the investment, although — in a weird shift — in the interim period the reasons for approving it have changed.

Back in April, the CMA said that the impact of COVID-19 would have meant that without Amazon’s cash, Deliveroo would have gone bust. Now, however, it has changed its tune, saying that the impact of the health pandemic was not as strong as initially thought on the startup’s business.

Regardless, Stuart McIntosh, who chaired the CMA’s inquiry into the deal, noted other developments in the wider competitive landscape — remember that JustEat and Takeaway.com have now merged and will represent strong competition for Deliveroo and Uber Eats, the other big player — have meant that this deal will not have a negative effect on competition in the food delivery market, specifically competition between Deliveroo and Amazon themselves.

“The impact of the coronavirus pandemic, while initially extremely challenging, has not been as severe for Deliveroo as was anticipated when we reached our initial provisional findings in April,” he noted. “The updated evidence no longer shows that Deliveroo would exit the market in the absence of this transaction. This has required us to re-evaluate our initial provisional findings.

“We’ve carefully considered how this investment could affect competition between the two businesses in future. Looking closely at the size of the shareholding and how it will affect Amazon’s incentives, as well as the competition that the businesses will continue to face in food delivery and convenience groceries, we’ve found that the investment should not have a negative impact on customers.”

In a separate, much longer document detailing the CMA’s findings, it goes into a lot of detail of what competition between the companies on deliveries of food might look like — whether Amazon might ever re-enter into restaurant delivery, or whether Deliveroo might consider grocery delivery, and how having a stake in Deliveroo might impact Amazon’s taste for investing in a new operation. I have to admit, knowing what we know about the barrier to entry into food delivery, and how much consolidation is happening now, it seems like a red herring in terms of a line of inquiry, rather than asking what the impact might be for other large and smaller competitors, but that is where the CMA went:

“There is no evidence to suggest that Amazon is no longer interested in restaurant delivery or that it no longer expects it to be an important area providing benefits such as differentiation in its offering, flywheel effects for Prime, and enhanced logistical capabilities,” it notes.

The development caps off nearly a year of investigations by the Competition and Markets Authority, spurred initially by Labour MP Tom Watson, who had asked the CMA to either impose restrictions on the deal, or to block it outright, not just because of the impact it would have on the competitive landscape, but because of the trove of data Amazon would amass as a result of the deal,.

“It’s called surveillance capitalism,” he said at the time of Amazon’s approach to how it uses data from customers to build and sell products. “It’s a digital dystopia, and I shall be writing to the Competition and Markets Authority demanding they launch an investigation into this ‘investment.’”

The CMA then spent months looking into the numbers on the deal — which would have been Amazon’s only foray itself into ready-made food delivery in the UK, after it shut down its own homegrown effort, Amazon Restaurants, back in 2018 (around the time that it first started eyeing up Deliveroo). But that investigation took on several more twists in the last few months.

The first twist came in the form of COVID-19, which brought much of the economy to a grinding halt. While many have seen e-commerce and the sub-section of food delivery as two areas that could flourish — since people were significantly homebound and restaurants were closed — it appeared that in fact business seemed to be dragging, as people opted to reduce exposure even to contactless deliveries, leading to a big decline in demand.

That led the CMA to determine that “Deliveroo would have exited the market without [the Amazon investment], because of the negative impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on its business. The CMA considered that the imminent exit of Deliveroo would have been worse for competition than allowing the Amazon investment to proceed.”

However, Deliveroo made cuts (including 15% of staff) and on a closer examination, “Deliveroo’s finances shows considerable improvement in its financial position, reflecting, in part, changes which were not foreseeable during the early stages of the pandemic,” the CMA noted. This means that no Amazon deal would not have killed the company, so then attention turned to competition between the two businesses as a result of the investment.

The CMA said it surveyed 3,000 consumers, read submissions from third parties and examined internal documents from the two companies, and without going into detail of what kind of competition might ever exist in future between the two — especially considering that Amazon has already pulled out of food delivery in the UK — it determined that a deal wouldn’t preclude competition per se, based on Deliveroo’s interest in restaurant food delivery and Amazon’s existing business in grocery delivery, which in the UK currently includes both Amazon Fresh and a small Whole Foods footprint, but could potentially expand into more.

“This minority investment is good news for UK customers and restaurants, and for the British economy,” a Deliveroo spokesperson said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “As we have argued for the past year, since the beginning of the CMA’s investigation, the minority investment will enable British born, British bred Deliveroo to compete against well-capitalised overseas rivals and continue to innovate for customers, riders and restaurants. As the British economy recovers from the damage caused by COVID-19, a stable regulatory environment is critical. We therefore urge the CMA to conclude their review as swiftly as possible.”

More to come.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | UK’s CMA clears Amazon’s 16% Deliveroo stake, says COVID-19 impact less severe than initially thought

CapitalG, the growth equity arm of Alphabet, is doubling down on its bet on Aye Finance, an Indian startup that operates a digital lending platform for small businesses.

On Wednesday, the Gurgaon-based startup said it had raised $27.5 million in its Series E financing round led by CapitalG, which has also led one of its previous rounds. Existing investors LGT Lightstone, Falcon Edge Capital, A91 Partners and MAJ Invest also participated in the round, which brings the six-year-old Indian startup’s to-date equity funding to $91 million. According to a regulatory filing, Aye Finance is now valued at over $250 million.

Aye Finance caters to small businesses that need working capital but find it challenging or impossible to secure that from traditional lenders, such as banks. The startup said it had disbursed nearly $400 million to these businesses over the years.

Cutting checks to small businesses that banks won’t issue funds to is risky. Aye Finance, like scores of startups in South Asia such as Lendingkart, Capital Float, Indifi Technologies and InCred, says it utilizes statistical models and predictive analytics to determine the credit worthiness of borrowers.

The startup said it has helped more than 200,000 unorganized businesses to move to the formal lending ecosystem.

Sumiran Das, a partner at CapitalG and who also sits on Aye Finance’s board, said the startup’s use of “data science with physical presence in the field” and its underwriting methodology has positioned it to lead the market and tap the unaddressed demographic.

Sanjay Sharma, managing director at Aye Finance, said that the fact they have been able to close a major financing round at the height of a global pandemic “reinforces the value that our investors see in Aye Finance.”

“Difficult times are a true test of a good lender and we have already started showing significant improvements in the customer repayments in the past months,” he said, adding that Aye Finance has been able to secure more money than it needed to so that it has some financial cushion to steer through the pandemic.

The startup, which suspended disbursing capital to businesses in March, said it plans to resume lending small amounts of money to businesses starting next month to help them restart their operations. New Delhi announced a nationwide lockdown in late March, which forced most businesses to half their operations.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Alphabet’s CapitalG leads .5 million round in India’s Aye Finance

Collaborative enterprise software is absolutely booming, and Airtable is riding that wave in a very real way.

The company, which offers a flexible, collaborative database product, has raised more than $170 million in funding from investors like CRV, Benchmark, Coatue Management and Thrive Capital. So it should come as no surprise that we’re simply thrilled to have Airtable co-founder and CEO Howie Liu join us at Disrupt 2020.

Liu went to Duke University before starting his first company, eTacts, which was an automated CRM system that received investment from the founders of YouTube, Powerset and Delicious, as well as investors like Ron Conway and Ashton Kutcher.

Liu then went on to lead the social CRM product for Salesforce before leaving to set his own course once again with Airtable .

Airtable was founded back in 2012 with a broad mission of democratizing software. At its essence, Airtable is a relational database. Laymen can think of it as a Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel on steroids, but it actually goes much deeper than that.

Software is built on data — organized data, to be exact — and while many of us can compile and organize data into a spreadsheet, few can make it sing its way to a software product. Airtable aims to make that possible for anyone, even a non-developer.

That said, the company faces several hurdles. Airtable is a product that can be used in many, many ways, from tracking sales goals to organizing product road maps to managing workflows. With this type of open-ended product, it can be difficult to educate the end-user on how to make the most of it, or how to use it to begin with.

We’ll talk with Liu about how to build a very complex product in the most user-friendly way possible. We’ll also ask him about the state of enterprise software sales at a time when most large companies are freezing or decreasing spending, the future of no- and low-code software and how he thinks about hyper-growth.

Disrupt is all virtual in 2020 and runs September 14 to September 18, and we have several Digital Pass options to be part of the action or to exhibit virtually, which you can check out here.

Liu joins a stellar roster of speakers, including Roelof Botha, Cyan Banister, Charles Hudson and Mike Cannon-Brookes, with more speakers to be announced soon!

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Airtable’s Howie Liu to join us at Disrupt 2020

AfterShip, the e-commerce shipment tracking platform, announced today that Postmen, its shipping API, is now available for free, with no limits on shipment volume.

Co-founder Andrew Chan told TechCrunch that the company decided to make the Postmen API, previously offered as a SaaS subscription for enterprises, free in response to the massive jump in online shopping caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. About 60% of Postmen’s users are in the United States.

Since February, AfterShip has seen an 85% increase in shipping volume, a sharp contrast to previous years, when volume declined after the holiday shopping season ended, Chan said. Many retailers have also had to move most or all of their operations online, with many brick-and-mortar stores adjusting to e-commerce very quickly as movement restrictions were put in place around the world.

Postmen is partnered with 60 couriers, including USPS, DHL, FedEx and UPS, and integrates with a retailer’s existing shipping system. It allows them to print shipping and return labels, and track courier costs, delivery time estimates and shipment performances. It also allows them to keep discounted rates they have already negotiated with couriers and makes it possible to add new couriers within two weeks, a process Chan said can typically take months.

He added that gives retailers more flexibility during the pandemic, which has disrupted many logistics and fulfillment networks.

“If you are shipping with postal services, we have data that shows most of China Post’s parcels, for example, were usually delivered within 26 days, but now it is 40 days. Some of them take longer and some of them are shipped within normal times, but the problem is we don’t know,” Chan said. “Postmen lets users switch to other carriers more easily and then for tracking, we give visibility into shipping performance, so you can analyze carriers and choose different ones.”

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Hong Kong, AfterShip’s products are used by clients ranging from small to medium-sized businesses to large enterprises. Postmen users include Etsy, Harry’s Razor Blades and Watson’s, one of the world’s largest health and beauty retail groups. Chan said Watson’s uses the software to manage shipments for its Asia-Pacific operations, including warehouse-to-store deliveries performed by multiple couriers.

Some of the smaller companies that use Postmen include e-commerce order fulfillment provider Floship. Its co-founder, Steven Suh, said in a statement that Floship’s postal shipping lead time used to be about one to two weeks, but after the pandemic, that increased to as much as 60 days or more. At the same time, Floship’s postal costs rose by almost 100%.

“For our business to survive the pandemic, we need to offer express shipping with major carriers, and Postmen allows us to do so. Rather than building our own carrier integrations, we can go through Postmen’s catalog of existing carrier integrations and get express shipping up and running within 2-3 days,” Suh said. “Without Postmen, we’d need to hire three additional full-time developers to manage and maintain our shipping process. Postmen has been a huge time-saver for us and has helped accelerate offering new and better solutions for our clients.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | AfterShip makes its automated shipping API, Postmen, available for free

A year after its initial release, Jumbo has two important pieces of news to announce. First, the company has released a major update of its app that protects your privacy on online services. Second, the company has raised an $8 million Series A funding round.

If you’re not familiar with Jumbo, the app wants to fix what’s broken with online privacy today. Complicated terms of services combined with customer-hostile default settings have made it really hard to understand what personal information is out there. Due to recent regulatory changes, it’s now possible to change privacy settings on many services.

While it is possible, it doesn’t mean it is easy. If you’ve tried to adjust your privacy settings on Facebook or LinkedIn, you know that it’s a convoluted process with a lot of sub-menus and non-descriptive text.

Similarly, social networks have been around for more than a decade. While you were comfortable sharing photos and public messages with a small group of friends 10 years ago, you don’t necessarily want to leave this content accessible to hundreds or even thousands of “friends” today.

The result is an iPhone and Android app that puts you in charge of your privacy. It’s essentially a dashboard that lets you control your privacy on the web. You first connect the app to various online services and you can then control those services from Jumbo. Jumbo doesn’t limit itself to what you can do with APIs, as it can mimic JavaScript calls on web pages that are unaccessible to the APIs.

For instance, if you connect your Facebook account, you can remove your profile from advertising lists, delete past searches, change the visibility of posts you’re tagged in and more. On Google, you can delete your history across multiple services — web searches, Chrome history, YouTube searches, Google Map activities, location history, etc.

More fundamentally, Jumbo challenges the fact that everything should remain online forever. Conversations you had six months ago might not be relevant today, so why can’t you delete those conversations?

Jumbo lets you delete and archive old tweets, Messenger conversations and old Facebook posts. The app can regularly scan your accounts and delete everything that is older than a certain threshold — it can be a month, a year or whatever you want.

While your friends will no longer be able to see that content, Jumbo archives everything in a tab called Vault.

With today’s update, everything has been refined. The main tab has been redesigned to inform you of what Jumbo has been doing over the past week. The company now uses background notifications to perform some tasks even if you’re not launching the app every day.

The data-breach monitoring has been improved. Jumbo now uses SpyCloud to tell you exactly what has been leaked in a data breach — your phone number, your email address, your password, your address, etc.

It’s also much easier to understand the settings you can change for each service thanks to simple toggles and recommendations that you can accept or ignore.

Image Credits: Jumbo

A clear business model

Jumbo’s basic features are free, but you’ll need to buy a subscription to access the most advanced features. Jumbo Plus lets you scan and archive your Instagram account, delete your Alexa voice recordings, manage your Reddit and Dropbox accounts and track more than one email address for data breaches.

Jumbo Pro lets you manage your LinkedIn account (and you know that LinkedIn’s privacy settings are a mess). You can also track more information as part of the data breach feature — your ID, your credit card number and your Social Security number. It also lets you activate a tracker blocker.

This new feature in the second version of Jumbo replaces default DNS settings on your phone. All DNS requests are routed through a Jumbo-managed networking profile on your phone. If you’re trying to access a tracker, the request is blocked; if you’re trying to access some legit content, the request goes through. It works in the browser and in native apps.

You can pay what you want for Jumbo Plus, from $3 per month to $8 per month. Similarly, you can pick what you want to pay for Jumbo Pro, between $9 per month and $15 per month.

You might think that you’re giving a ton of personal information to a small startup. Jumbo is well aware of that and tries to reassure its user base with radical design choices, transparency and a clear business model.

Jumbo doesn’t want to mine your data. Your archived data isn’t stored on Jumbo’s servers. It remains on your phone and optionally on your iCloud or Dropbox account as a backup.

Jumbo doesn’t even have user accounts. When you first open the app, the app assigns you a unique ID in order to send you push notifications, but that’s about it. The company has also hired companies for security audits.

“We don’t store email addresses so we don’t know why people subscribe,” Jumbo CEO Pierre Valade told me.

Profitable by 2022

Jumbo has raised an $8 million funding round. It had previously raised a $3.5 million seed round. This time, Balderton Capital is leading the round. The firm had already invested in Valade’s previous startup, Sunrise.

A lot of business angels participated in the round as well, and Jumbo is listing them all on its website. This is all about being transparent again.

Interestingly, Jumbo isn’t betting on explosive growth and eyeballs. The company says it has enough funding until February 2022. By then, the startup hopes it can attract 100,000 subscribers to reach profitability.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Privacy assistant Jumbo raises million and releases major update

Lightrun, a Tel Aviv-based startup that makes it easier for developers to debug their production code, today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed round led by Glilot Capital Partners, with participation from a number of engineering executives from several Fortune 500 firms.

The company was co-founded by Ilan Peleg (who, in a previous life, was a competitive 800m runner) and Leonid Blouvshtein, with Peleg taking the CEO role and Blouvshtein the CTO position.

The overall idea behind Lightrun is that it’s too hard for developers to debug their production code. “In today’s world, whenever a developer issues a new software version and deploys it into production, the only way to understand the application’s behavior is based on log lines or metrics which were defined during the development stage,” Peleg explained. “The thing is, that is simply not enough. We’ve all encountered cases of missing a very specific log line when trying to troubleshoot production issues, then having to release a new hotfix version in order to add this specific logline, or — alternatively — reproduce the bug locally to better understand the application’s behavior.”

Image Credits: Lightrun

With Lightrun, as the co-founders showed me in a demo, developers can easily add new logs and metrics to their code from their IDE and then receive real-time data from their real production or development environments. For that to work, they need to have the Lightrun agent installed, but the overhead here is generally low because the agent sits idle until it is needed. In the IDE, the experience isn’t all that different from setting a traditional breakpoint in a debugger — only that there is no break. Lightrun can also use existing logging tools like Datadog to pipe its logging data to them.

While the service’s agent is agnostic about the environment it runs in, the company currently only supports JVM languages. Blouvshtein noted that building JVM language support was likely harder than building support for other languages and the company plans to launch support for more languages in the future.

“We make a point of investing in technologies that transform big industries,” said Kobi Samboursky, founder and managing partner at Glilot Capital Partners . “Lightrun is spearheading Continuous Debugging and Continuous Observability, picking up where CI/CD ends, turning observability into a real-time process instead of the iterative process it is today. We’re confident that this will become DevOps and development best practices, enabling I&O leaders to react faster to production issues.”

For now, there is still a bit of an onboarding process to get started with Lightrun, though that’s generally a very short process, the team tells me. Over time, the company plans to make this a self-service process. At that point, Lightrun will likely also become more interesting to smaller teams and individual developers, though the company is mostly focused on enterprise users and, despite only really launching out of stealth today and offering limited language support, the company already has a number of paying customers, including major enterprises.

“Our strategy is based on two approaches: bottom-up and top-down. Bottom-up, we’re targeting developers, they are the end-users and we want to ensure they get a quality product they can trust to help them. We put a lot of effort into reaching out through the developer channels and communities, as well as enabling usage and getting feedback. […] Top-down approach, we are approaching R&D management like VP of R&D, R&D directors in bigger companies and then we show them how Lightrun saves company development resources and improves customer satisfaction.”

Unsurprisingly, the company, which currently has about a dozen employees, plans to use the new funding to add support for more languages and improve its service with new features, including support for tracing.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Lightrun raises M for its continuous debugging and observability platform

Cape Privacy emerged from stealth today after spending two years building a platform for data scientists to privately share encrypted data. The startup also announced $2.95 million in new funding and $2.11 million in funding it got when the business launched in 2018, for a total of $5.06 million raised.

Boldstart Ventures and Version One led the round, with participation from Haystack, Radical Ventures and Faktory Ventures.

Company CEO Ché Wijesinghe says that data science teams often have to deal with data sets that contain sensitive data and share data internally or externally for collaboration purposes. It creates a legal and regulatory data privacy conundrum that Cape Privacy is trying to solve.

“Cape Privacy is a collaboration platform designed to help focus on data privacy for data scientists. So the biggest challenge that people have today from a business perspective is managing privacy policies for machine learning and data science,” Wijesinghe told TechCrunch.

The product breaks down that problem into a couple of key areas. First of all it can take language from lawyers and compliance teams and convert that into code that automatically generates policies about who can see the different types of data in a given data set. What’s more, it has machine learning underpinnings so it also learns about company rules and preferences over time.

It also has a cryptographic privacy component. By wrapping the data with a cryptographic cypher, it lets teams share sensitive data in a safe way without exposing the data to people who shouldn’t be seeing it because of legal or regulatory compliance reasons.

“You can send something to a competitor as an example that’s encrypted, and they’re able to process that encrypted data without decrypting it, so they can train their model on encrypted data,” company co-founder and CTO Gavin Uhma explained.

The company closed the new round in April, which means they were raising in the middle of a pandemic, but it didn’t hurt that they had built the product already and were ready to go to market, and that Uhma and his co-founders had already built a successful startup, GoInstant, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2012. (It’s worth noting that GoInstant debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2011.)

Uhma and his team brought Wijesinghe on board to build the sales and marketing team because, as a technical team, they wanted someone with go-to-market experience running the company so they could concentrate on building product.

The company has 14 employees and is already an all-remote team, so the team didn’t have to adjust at all when the pandemic hit. While it plans to keep hiring fairly limited for the foreseeable future, the company has had a diversity and inclusion plan from the start.

“You have to be intentional about about seeking diversity, so it’s something that when we sit down and map out our hiring and work with recruiters in terms of our pipeline, we really make sure that diversity is one of our objectives. You just have it as a goal, as part of your culture, and it’s something that when we see the picture of the team, we want to see diversity,” he said.

Wijesinghe adds, “As a person of color myself, I’m very sensitive to making sure that we have a very diverse team, not just from a color perspective, but a gender perspective as well.”

The company is gearing up to sell the product  and has paid pilots starting in the coming weeks.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Cape Privacy launches data science collaboration platform with .06M seed investment