Browsing Tag: Startups

Cashify, a company that buys and sells used smartphones, is the latest India startup to raise capital from Chinese investors after it announced a $12 million Series C round.

Chinese funds CDH Investments and Morningside led the round, which included participation from Aihuishou, a China-based startup that sells used electronics in a similar way to Cashify and has raised more than $120 million. Existing investors, including Bessemer Ventures and Shunwei, also took part in the round.

This new capital takes Cashify to $19 million raised to date.

The business was started in 2013 by co-founders Mandeep Manocha (CEO), Nakul Kumar (COO) and Amit Sethi (CTO) initially as ReGlobe. The business gives consumers a fast way to sell their existing electronics; it deals mainly in smartphones but also takes laptops, consoles, TVs and tablets.

“When we began we saw a lot of transaction for phone sales moving from offline to online,” Manocha told TechCrunch in an interview. “But consumer-to-consumer [for used devices] is highly opaque on price discovery and you never know if you’re making the right decision on price and whether the transaction will take place in the timeframe.”

These days, the company estimates that the average upgrade cycle has shifted from 20 months to 12 months, and now it is doubling down.

With Cashify, sellers simply fill out some details online about their device, then Cashify dispatches a representative who comes to their house to perform diagnostic checks and gives them cash for the device that day. The startup also offers an app which automatically carries out the checks — for example ensuring the camera, Bluetooth module, etc. all work — and offers a higher cash payment for the user since Cashify uses fewer resources.

A sample of the Cashify Q&A for selling a device

Beyond its website and app, Cashify gets devices from trade-in programs for Samsung, Xiaomi and Apple in India, as well as e-commerce companies like Flipkart, Amazon and Paytm Mall.

Used device acquired, what happens next is interesting.

The startup has built out a network of offline merchants who specialize in selling used phones. Each phone it acquires is then sold (perhaps after minor refurbishments) to that network, so it might pop up for sale anywhere in India.

With this new money, Cashify CEO Manocha said the company will develop an online resale site that will allow anyone to buy a used phone from the company’s network. Devices sold by Cashify online will be refurbished with new parts where needed, and they’ll include a box and six-month warranty to give a better consumer experience, Manocha added.

Today, Cashify claims to handle 100,000 smartphones a month, but it is planning to grow that to 200,000 by the end of this year. Cashify said its devices are typically low-end, those that retail for sub-$300 when new. A large part of that push comes from the online site, but the startup is also enlarging its offline merchant network and working to reach more consumers who are actually selling their device. That’s where Manocha said he sees particular value in working with Aihuishou.

Cashify is also developing other services. It recently started offering at-home repairs for customers and Manocha said that adding Chinese investors — and Aihuishou in particular — will help it with its sourcing of components for the repairs service and general refurbishments.

Cashify estimates that the used smartphone market in India will see 90 million phones sold this year, with as many as 120 million trading by 2020. That’s close to the 124 million shipments that analysts estimate India saw in 2017, but with surprisingly higher margins.

A reseller can make 10 percent profit on a device, Manocha explained, and Cashify’s own price elasticity — the difference between what it buys from consumers at and what it sells to resellers for — is typically 30-35 percent, he added. That’s more than most OEMs, but that doesn’t take into account costs on the Cashify side, which bring that number down.

“When I sell to a reseller, the margins aren’t that exciting, which is why we want to sell direct to consumers,” the Cashify CEO said.

The startup has plenty going on at home in India, but already it is considering overseas possibilities.

“We will focus on India for at least the next 12 months, but we have had discussions on markets that would make sense to enter,” Manocha said, explaining that the Middle East and Southeast Asia are early frontrunners.

“We are working very closely with one of the Chinese players and figuring out if we can do some business in Hong Kong because that’s the hub for second-hand phones in this part of the world,” he added.

Note: The original version of this article was updated to correct that Amit Sethi is CTO not CFO.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | India’s Cashify raises M for its second-hand smartphone business

And there we have it: Bird, one of the emerging massively hyped Scooter startups, has roped in its next pile of funding by picking up another $300 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital.

The company announced the long-anticipated round this morning, with Sequoia’s Roelof Botha joining the company’s board of directors. This is the second round of funding that Bird has raised over the span of a few months, sending it from a reported $1 billion valuation in May to a $2 billion valuation by the end of June. In March, the company had a $300 million valuation, but the Scooter hype train has officially hit a pretty impressive inflection point as investors pile on to get money into what many consider to be the next iteration of resolving transportation at an even more granular level than cars or bikes. New investors in the round include Accel, B Capital, CRV, Sound Ventures, Greycroft and e.ventures; previous investors Craft Ventures, Index Ventures, Valor, Goldcrest, Tusk Ventures and Upfront Ventures are also in the round. (So, basically everyone else who isn’t in competitor Lime.)

Scooter mania has captured the hearts of Silicon Valley and investors in general — including Paige Craig, who actually jumped from VC to join Bird as its VP of business — with a large amount of capital flowing into the area about as quickly as it possibly can. These sort of revolving-door fundraising processes are not entirely uncommon, especially for very hot areas of investment, though the scooter scene has exploded considerably faster than most. Bird’s round comes amid reports of a mega-round for Lime, one of its competitors, with the company reportedly raising another $250 million led by GV, and Skip also raising $25 million.

“We have met with over 20 companies focused on the last-mile problem over the years and feel this is a multi-billion dollar opportunity that can have a big impact in the world,” CRV’s Saar Gur, who did the deal for the firm, said. “We have a ton of conviction that this team has original product thought (they created the space) and the execution chops to build something extremely valuable here. And we have been long-term focused, not short-term focused, in making the investment. The ‘hype’ in our decision (the non-zero answer) is that Bird has built the best product in the market and while we kept meeting with more startups wanting to invest in the space — we kept coming back to Bird as the best company. So in that sense, the hype from consumers is real and was a part of the decision. On unit economics: We view the first product as an MVP (as the company is less than a year old) — and while the unit economics are encouraging, they played a part of the investment decision but we know it is not even the first inning in this market.”

There’s certainly an argument to be made for Bird, whose scooters you’ll see pretty much all over the place in cities like Los Angeles. For trips that are just a few miles down wide roads or sidewalks, where you aren’t likely to run into anyone, a quick scan of a code and a hop on a Bird may be worth the few bucks in order to save a few minutes crossing those considerably long blocks. Users can grab a bird that they see and start going right away if they are running late, and it does potentially alleviate the pressure of calling a car for short distances in traffic, where a scooter may actually make more sense physically to get from point A to point B than a car.

There are some considerable hurdles going forward, both theoretical and in effect. In San Francisco, though just a small slice of the United States metropolitan area population, the company is facing significant pushback from the local government, and scooters for the time being have been kicked off the sidewalks. There’s also the looming shadow of what may happen regarding changes in tariffs, though Gur said that it likely wouldn’t be an issue and “the unit economics appear to be viable even if tariffs were to be added to the cost of the scooters.” (Xiaomi is one of the suppliers for Bird, for example.)

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Bird has officially raised a whopping 0M as the scooter wars heat up

M12, Microsoft’s venture fund which was previously known as Microsoft Ventures, has been making a series of investments in the last few weeks. Today, it’s leading a $5 million Series A round into Cerebri AI, a startup that uses machine learning to help companies track, analyze and predict their customers’ behavior.

The University of Texas Horizon Fund, WorldQuant Ventures and Leawood Venture Capital also participated in this round for the Austin-based startup, which brings Cerebri’s total funding to date to $10 million. The company plans to use the fresh cash to expand its operations.

Microsoft’s involvement here is maybe no major surprise, given the company’s interest in machine learning and that the Cerebri platform sits on top of Microsoft Azure.

“Cerebri has created a product that is fundamentally changing how customer-facing sales and success professionals can analyze the customer journey,”  said Elliott Robinson, a partner at M12. “By enabling companies to follow an individual customer across the various touchpoints within the enterprise, Cerebri has proven they’re able to improve customer experiences and generate revenue lift.”

In addition to today’s funding announcement, Cerebri also today officially launched its Cerebri Values product, which it describes as “this industry’s first universal measure of customer success.” The idea here is to quantify a customer’s commitment to a brand or product and then predict the “next best action” for each of these customers to seal the deal. Like similar products, Cerebri Values also allows marketers to create cohorts of similar customers for marketing campaigns. The focus here is on grouping customers by behavior, not demographics, which is a bit different from how similar tools often work.

To do all of this, Cerebri allows its users to combine data from a variety of sources and then uses its machine learning models to predict what will work best for this customer. In an age where customers are increasingly wary of companies that harvest their data, all of this may sound a bit dystopian. Cerebri says it has already ingested more than two billion customer touchpoints and events across 12 million consumers and that all of this data sits securely behind its corporate firewall, “ensuring the highest level of security and safeguarding personally identifiable information.”

We asked the company whether consumers can access this data or opt out of being tracked and have not received an answer yet, but it looks like the company’s privacy policy argues that it’s up to its corporate customers to comply with local laws, including the likes of the European Union’s GDPR. (Update: And here is the official answer: “Cerebri Values has these capabilities and can comply with any request direct from its business customers to provide both opt-out as well as deliver personal data. Cerebri AI does not directly hold customer data, as it provides a SaaS-based platform that sits behind its customers’ corporate firewalls.”)

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Cerebri AI raises M Series A round led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund

Sequoia Capital has been at the top of its game in the U.S. for decades, thanks to early investments in Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn and PayPal, as well as, more recently, its stakes in the messaging startup WhatsApp, the payments company Stripe and the video conferencing unicorn company Zoom.

Yet unlike a lot of top-tier firms in Silicon Valley, Sequoia is far from reliant on the Bay Area companies for huge returns. Instead, a dozen years ago, anticipating that the most impactful tech ideas could come from anywhere and be built around the world, the firm founded Sequoia China and Sequoia India, assembling local teams to invest in startups and help founders build their companies.

That strategy is now paying off, big time. As we reported earlier this week, Sequoia currently makes more than 50 cents from every dollar returned to its investors from its overseas bets.

Among the many companies Sequoia Capital China alone has funded: Meituan-Dianping, the group-discount service that sells locally found products and retail services and just filed to go public in Hong Kong; Ele.me, the food ordering company that sold a controlling stake in its business to Alibaba in April for $9.5 billion; DJI, the drone company, which was reported to be raising $1 billion in new funding this spring at a $15 billion valuation; VIP.com, the commerce platform that went public in 2012 and currently boasts a $7.2 billion market cap; and Didi, the mobile transportation giant that’s in a race against its U.S. rival Uber to conquer the global ride-hailing market.

To learn more about the new reality facing Silicon Valley startups — that competition is no longer next door, it’s global — we’re thrilled to announce that Sequoia Managing Partner Doug Leone is coming to Disrupt for a fireside chat. Leone oversees the firm’s global operations with Roelof Botha, who runs Sequoia’s U.S. business, and Neil Shen, the founder and managing partner of Sequoia Capital China, and he knows better than nearly anyone in Silicon Valley how the investing and technology landscapes are evolving — and what founders globally should be mindful of as they build the next legendary company.

Leone also knows the value of grit. Leone immigrated to the U.S. from Italy and was reportedly called “Pasta” in high school before rising to the top of one of the most admired venture firms in history. It’s no wonder Leone is particularly passionate about founders from humble backgrounds like his own.

If you care about the global shifts that are majorly reshaping the tech industry right now, and the stuff that great founders are made of, you’re going to want to catch this conversation.

You can buy tickets to the show, taking place in San Francisco September 5th through September 7th, right here.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Doug Leone, the global managing partner of powerhouse Sequoia Capital, is coming to Disrupt

For the past 12 years I’ve followed the rise of the startup — defined as a small business with global ambitions — from my perch at TechCrunch. During that period I watched business reporting change from a sleepy backwater on the back of the Sports section into a juggernaut, a force that controls the global conversation. Why? Because business reporting became war reporting, and the battles fought were between VCs, businesses and ideas that changed the world.

In that period, VCs rose from glorified bank tellers to rock stars. Incubators popped up to socialize nervous founders and turn them into capital F Founders and the path for startups became a codified journey from failure to success.

Now we’re seeing the same thing happen in ICOs. But something is wrong. The startups coming out of the ICO craze aren’t being judged on the character of their founders, on their technologies or their probability for success. They are being judged, quite simply, on quantitative metrics that interrogate a token with one question: “When Lambo?”

This is the wrong approach. Token-based startups must receive the same level of socialization and scrutiny as the old VC-based startup vetting process. But something is different, and it’s an important difference.

In the old VC model a group of men — and it was mostly men for a long time — would stand in judgement over an idea. If any number of arbitrary points of risk appeared they would smile and say “No” to the founder, sending them down the road for another “No.” Unless you were plugged in professionally, went to Stanford, or had your own cash, seed to even late-stage investment wasn’t available and the resulting “valley of death” of undercapitalization sunk countless startups.

Now, however, something new is afoot. While it’s always nice to look at tokens in comparison with other tokens, this sort of quantitative masturbation can easily hide a multitude of sins. Due diligence on token-based companies must be done, but it must be done through the wisdom of crowds. Instead of trying to impress one dude in a fleece vest and chinos on Sand Hill Road a founder must impress the world. They must tell a true, human story of actual value and explain their product without mumbling and hand waving. And they have to do it again and again.

Cryptocurrencies were supposed to bring us an egalitarian age of decentralized decision-making and a mathematical certainty. But the founders forgot one thing: humans offer no mathematical certainty. Instead of looking at numbers, these startups must be assessed on the basis of their value to humanity, on their technical ability to solve a real problem and on their understanding of human-to-human interaction. The future isn’t a number. Instead, the future is a many-to-one investigation of a startup and the decision — by the decentralized crowd — whether or not to continue funding.

Again, if your primary driver is greed, then by all means check out a chart that compares TRON to TRON. It’s your right. But if your goal is to make startups that will drive us deep into the future, then the old ways are best. A lot of things are about to change.

A few years ago I spoke to Deepak Chopra about his vision for a global voting system. In short, he was working on a way to take the global temperature. If a politician wanted to spend money on a road or, god forbid, go to war, they could put the question to the crowd via their cellphones. One vote per person, defined by biometric controls. This pie-in-the-sky idea is slowly coming to fruition and I think it’s going to be very exciting. And it will find its perfect home in the future of startup funding.

The age of centralized decision-making, in which analytics were used to help make seat-of-the-pants decisions, is over. Now we enter a new world and the folks used to the old ways should probably watch out. After all, when the crowd speaks, even VCs listen.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Lies, damn lies and crypto analytics

If there’s still any doubt that esports is coming into the mainstream, just look to the world’s biggest sporting event: The Olympics.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Global Association of International Sports Federations (GAISF) have announced they will host an esports forum, looking to gauge whether or not esports has a place in the Olympics.

According to the release, the IOC and GAISF will host esports players, game publishers, teams, media, sponsors and event organizers, as well as National Olympic Committees, International Sports Federations, athletes and the IOC. The group as a whole is looking to “explore synergies, build joint understanding, and set a platform for future engagement between esports and gaming industries and the Olympic Movement.”

In the release, GAISF President Patrick Baumann said:

Along with the IOC, the GAISF looks forward to welcoming the esports and gaming community to Lausanne. We understand that sport never stands still and the phenomenal growth of esports and gaming is part of its continuing evolution. The Esports Forum provides an important and extremely valuable opportunity for us to gain a deeper understanding of esports, their impact and likely future development, so that we can jointly consider the ways in which we may collaborate to the mutual benefit of all of sport in the years ahead.

Some of the panels at the forum include an interview on “The Key to Twitch’s Success,” “Future Opportunities for Collaboration,” an interview on “A Day in the Life of an Elite Player” and a panel on “Gender Equality in All Sports.”

Esports have continued to grow at an impressive clip. The Overwatch League has introduced city-based teams into the mix, while Fortnite had a huge Pro-Am tournament at e3, not to mention Epic’s introduction of a $100 million tournament prize pool for competitive play.

Considering how bizarre some of the Olympic sports are — I’m looking at you, Biathlon — the potential introduction of esports to the Olympic slate almost seems ordinary.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | The International Olympic Committee is curious about esports

For a long time, it has been hard to buy a cloud-first security platform that delivers full-stack security in a single data path. Current market solutions offer a “one-trick pony,” leaving companies with overly complex routing setups or abnormal latency of traffic to get a solution that fulfills their needs.

Swedish cybersecurity startup Baffin Bay Networks thinks it has the answer, with distributed “threat protection centers” which interfere with the traffic before it reaches its customers’ services and removes any potential threats.

It has today announced the closing of a $6.4 million Series A round. The investment was led by European VC EQT Ventures and the capital will be used for further international expansion.

“We’re passionate about building a world-class threat protection platform – one that is easy to use for any company or service provider to protect their key assets and services,” said Joakim Sundberg, CEO at Baffin Bay Networks .

Competitors include Incapsula, Cloudflare, Akamai, Arbor and the like.

Via the customer portal Riverview, users can configure their own security settings and level of protection. The user interface allows for real-time tracking of traffic and delivers real-time results from threat analysis, providing current and complete information on the activity in their online environment.

Should users wish not to configure settings on their own, they can rely on preset, sensible defaults, which are calculated using sophisticated algorithms.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Cyber startup Baffin Bay Networks takes in .4M funding led by EQT Ventures

Unblockable is tackling a new area for blockchain technology — sports fandom, specifically collectibles and fantasy sports.

CEO Jeb Terry (a former Fox Sports executive, and before that a former offensive lineman for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers) said the goal is to connect pro sports and pro athletes with the technology, and to “create new means of access and really empower the fans to celebrate their fandom, to show off who they’re fans of and create new relationships.”

Terry founded Unblockable with Eben Smith, a former derivatives trader, as well as Greg Dean and Kedric Van de Carr, entrepreneurs who have founded multiple crypto projects in the past.

The startup is announcing it has raised $5 million from Shasta Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Shasta’s Jacob Mullins joining the board of directors. (Mullins and I have been friends since we worked together at VentureBeat a decade ago.)

“Taking advantage of the unique characteristics of the emerging blockchain platform, UNBLOCKABLE is defining a new category of fun, engaging and approachable experiences and games for consumers as well as new ways for stars, athletes and leagues to build new relationships with fans,” Mullins said in the announcement.

Unblockable isn’t launching its consumer product yet — Terry told me that will probably happen later this year. But the basic idea is to release collectible crypto tokens tied to pro athletes. The goal is to have tokens representing every player (including their likeness), not just the big stars, and to create “true, authentic scarcity.”

Terry argued that the tokens will function as a kind of virtual collectible, with “a limited volume ever minted.” The value of each token should also fluctuate depending on the player’s performance on the field, especially since there will be a fantasy sports component of the platform — you’ll need to own a player’s token in order to include them on your team.

“There will be market dynamics in play,” Terry said. “With the value of the performance of the athletes in the field, it will be basic supply-demand behavior.”

When asked about reaching the (presumably) huge swath of sports fans that have no real familiarity with cryptocurrencies, Terry said, “It’s the core crypto enthusiasts that are going to get this right away.” At the same time, he’s hoping to “bridge that gap” to all those other fans, partly by making sure the buying and selling process is as “frictionless” as possible.

Unblockable hasn’t announced any partnerships with specific leagues or athletes, aside from naming NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott as the head of its advisory panel. But it sounds like Terry’s working on that.

“There are a lot of opportunities for players to get involved,” he said. “As a former player, as a guy that’s worked with players in the past, it’s something that we really know and live. We want to make sure [they] trust us to take care of their brands. That’s important here. You can’t just take that lightly in this space.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Unblockable raises M to create crypto collectibles around pro athletes