Browsing Tag: Startups

Adriel is a South Korean startup bringing automated ad tools to small businesses — and in recent months, it’s been expanding into the United States and the United Kingdom.

This might seem like exactly the wrong time to be growing an ad-buying platform, since we’re at the beginning of what’s likely to be a tremendous pullback in ad spend due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, co-founder and CEO Sophie Eom told me via email that ad spend on Adriel increased by 7% in February, then by 6% in March, and she estimated that spend will be up by 8% in April.

“We all know that businesses are struggling from the uncertainty of the economic situations with COVID-19,” Eom said. “And most are hesitant about hiring agencies for their marketing and advertising efforts due to the high costs — in addition to the fact that many corporates don’t have enough knowledge about the right marketing processes.”

So why is Adriel still seeing growth? She argued, “We see that even in the midst of tough times, many startups and entrepreneurs are not giving up their businesses. In fact, they are shifting their focus and investments into more digital to reach their customers.”

As part of its response to COVID-19, the company is also donating ads to support small business customers in the San Francisco area.

Adriel’s technology automatically generates creative materials and suggests keywords for ads, as well as managing the targeting. But there’s also a human team that reviews campaigns and suggests ways to improve. The company does not require retainers or contracts, but charges a 19% fee on ad spend.

I first spoke to Eom at the end of 2019, when she was first expanding Adriel into the U.S. In some ways, it felt like a familiar pitch — I’ve written about companies like AdEspresso (acquired by HootSuite) and Smartly.io (which sold a majority stake to Providence Equity Partners last year), which also said they were optimizing or automating small business advertising. Plus, Facebook itself has launched an automated ad builder.

Eom suggested that while there are tools that sound superficially similar, there’s nothing quite like Adriel (which was part of Facebook’s Namsam Lab Korea incubator), with its multi-platform support for managing Facebook, Google and Instagram ad campaigns in one place, and with its focus on the true “long tail” of advertisers — she said the average Adriel client spends a relatively modest $1,000 per month on digital advertising.

“We’re not merely a self-service tool either,” she said. “We support and assist our clients in getting their ad placed, making their campaign more successful. We use technology to make all these processes more affordable for more business owners.”

She added that Adriel has launched 7,200 campaigns for nearly 20,000 business accounts.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Adriel brings automation to small business advertising

The well-funded Japanese space startup Synspective has tapped launch provider Rocket Lab to take its first Earth observation satellite to orbit. Launch is planned for late 2020, and the company’s StriX–α craft will be the sole payload.

Synspective was founded in 2018 and by mid-2019 had raised about $100 million, making it one of the most successful recent funding stories in the country. It’s going to need all that and more, though, to realize its ambition of a 25-satellite constellation regularly imaging the whole planet.

The number may seem small when compared to Planet and SpaceX, which will require hundreds or thousands of satellites to cover the Earth. That’s because Synspective’s craft are not making visual observations or providing internet access, but imaging the planet’s surface using what’s called synthetic aperture radar.

This difficult technique uses the motion of the satellite to essentially imitate a much larger antenna, letting it produce highly detailed imagery through cloud cover and other interference. It also can cover a much wider area than an optical camera or a radio antenna beaming data to dishes on the surface.

The satellites themselves are about 100 kilograms each and are smaller than existing SAR systems — an advantage that lets Synspective use a smaller launch vehicle like Rocket Lab’s Electron to put its birds in the air.

The launch isn’t scheduled yet, but as the sole customer, Synspective will have lots of latitude in choosing the time of launch and target orbit. “We are very pleased to work with Rocket Lab, a pioneer in rocket ventures,” said Synspective founder and CEO Motoyuki Arai in a press release. “We are also grateful for their flexibility in accepting our requests on the satellite’s orbit and launch period.”

At present the plan is only for “late 2020” and to launch from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand, not its brand new one in the States. We’ll know more closer to launch time.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Rocket Lab inks deal to carry Japanese startup Synspective’s first satellite into orbit

Labster, a virtual science lab edtech company, today announced that it is partnering with California’s community college network to bring its software to 2.1 million students.

California Community Colleges claims to be the largest system of higher education in the country. The Labster partnership will provide 115 schools with 130 virtual laboratory simulations in biology, chemistry, physics and general sciences.

As COVID-19 has forced schools to shutter, edtech companies have largely responded by offering their software for free or through extended free trials. What’s new and notable about Labster’s partnership today is that it shows the first few signs of how that momentum can lead to a business deal.

Based in Copenhagen, Labster sells virtual STEM labs to institutions. The startup has raised $34.7 million in known venture capital to date, according to Crunchbase data. Labster customers include California State University, Harvard, Gwinnett Technical College, MIT, Trinity College and Stanford.

Lab equipment is expensive, and budget constraints mean that schools struggle to afford the latest technology. So Labster’s value proposition is that it is a cheaper alternative (plus, if students spill a testing vial in a virtual lab, there’s less clean up).

That pitch has slightly changed since COVID-19 forced schools across the world to shut down to limit the spread of the pandemic. Now, it’s pitching itself as the only currently viable alternative to science labs.

For many edtech companies, the surge of remote learning has been a large experiment. Often, edtech companies are giving away their product and technology for free to help as schools scramble to move operations completely digital.

For example, last week self-serve learning platforms Codecademy, Duolingo, Quizlet, Skillshare and Brainly launched a Learn From Home Club for students and teachers. Before that, Wize made its exam content and homework services available for free. And Zoom offered its video-conferencing software for free to K through 12 schools, which had mixed results.

Labster itself gave $5 million in free Labster credits to schools across the country. The list continues.  

Labster’s new deal shows edtech companies can secure new customers right now — without breaking the bank.

Labster CEO and co-founder Michael Bodekaer declined to give specifics on what the deal is worth. He did share that Labster works with schools one by one to understand how much they can, or want to, invest in teacher training and webinar support. He also confirmed that Labster does profit from the deal.

“We want to make sure that we set ourselves up for supporting our partners but still also make sure that Labster as a financial institution can pay our salaries,” Bodekaer said. “But again, heavy discounts that help us cover our costs.”

The long game for Labster, like many edtech companies, is that schools like the platform so much that these short-term stints have a better chance to lead to long-term relationships.

“We’ll be keeping these discounts as long as we possibly can sustain as a company,” he said. “It looks like initially the discount was until August and now we’re extending it until the end of the year. If that continues, we may extend it even further.”

Pricing aside, the real struggle toward implementation for Labster, and honestly any other edtech company focused on remote learning, is the digital divide. Some students do not have access to a computer for video conferencing or even internet connection for assignments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how many households across America lack access to the technology needed for remote learning. In California, Google donated free Chromebooks and 100,000 mobile hotspots to students in need.

Bodekaer said that Labster is currently working on providing its software on mobile, and has worked with Google to make sure its product works on low-end computers like Chromebooks.

“We really want to be hardware agnostic and support any system or any platform that the students already have,” he said. “So that hardware does not become a barrier.”

While today’s partnership brings 2.1 million students access to Labster’s technology, it does not directly account for the percentage of that same group that might not have access to a computer in the first place. The true test, and perhaps success, of edtech will rely on a true hybrid of hardware and software, not one or the other.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Labster’s latest partnership, and what it tells us about the future of remote learning

Bradley Tusk is relatively unique among investors. Where other VCs shy away from heavily regulated industries and businesses, Tusk leans in.

The Tusk Ventures founder and CEO has investments that include Uber, Bird, Coinbase, Lemonade, FanDuel and Alma Health.

At a time when good governance is front and center, and innovative thinking to evolve the status quo is necessary, we couldn’t be more thrilled to have Tusk join us for a live Q&A session.

In the last decade, public perception of the tech industry has changed dramatically. When Tusk first invested in Uber, the “ask for forgiveness, not permission” era was well underway. Since, tech has slowly been seen as an enemy after an erosion of public trust by big and small firms alike. Has the coronavirus pandemic shifted the tide of public sentiment in favor of tech? This is but one of many questions we’ll ask Tusk.

We’re also excited to hear from Tusk on adaptation strategies for tech startups during this time, how they can catch the ear of government officials and regulators during COVID-19 in a way they couldn’t just a few months ago and how founders can be better leaders to their companies during a time of crisis.

We’ll also chat specifically about the potential of digitized voting tools and the explosion of telehealth amidst the pandemic.

There will be plenty of time for audience questions, so come prepared!

Hit up this link to drop the Zoom details into your calendar! See you there!

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Join a Live Q&A with Bradley Tusk tomorrow at 1pm ET/10am PT

Could avatars that show what co-workers are up to save work-from-home teams from constant distraction and loneliness? That’s the idea behind Pragli, the Bitmoji for the enterprise. It’s a virtual office app that makes you actually feel like you’re in the same building.

Pragli uses avatars to signal whether co-workers are at their desk, away, in a meeting, in the zone while listening to Spotify, taking a break at a digital virtual water coooler or done for the day. From there, you’ll know whether to do a quick ad hoc audio call, cooperate via screenshare, schedule a deeper video meeting or a send a chat message they can respond to later. Essentially, it translates the real-word presence cues we use to coordinate collaboration into an online workplace for distributed teams.

“What Slack did for email, we want to do for video conferencing,” Pragli co-founder Doug Safreno tells me. “Traditional video conferencing is exclusive by design, whereas Pragli is inclusive. Just like in an office, you can see who is talking to who.” That means less time wasted planning meetings, interrupting colleagues who are in flow or waiting for critical responses. Pragli offers the focus that makes remote work productive with the togetherness that keeps everyone sane and in sync.

The idea is to solve the top three problems that Pragli’s extensive interviews and a Buffer/AngelList study discovered workers hate:

1. Communication friction
2. Loneliness
3. Lack of boundaries

You never have to worry about whether you’re intruding on someone’s meeting, or if it’d be quicker to hash something out on a call instead of vague text. Avatars give remote workers a sense of identity, while the Pragli water cooler provides a temporary place to socialize rather than an endless Slack flood of GIFs. And because you clock in and out of the Pragli office just like a real one, co-workers understand when you’ll reply quickly versus when you’ll respond tomorrow unless there’s an emergency.

“In Pragli, you log into the office in the morning and there’s a clear sense of when I’m working and when I’m not working. Slack doesn’t give you a strong sense if they’re online or offline,” Safreno explains. “Everyone stays online and feels pressured to respond at any time of day.”

Pragli co-founder Doug Safreno

Safreno and his co-founder Vivek Nair know the feeling first-hand. After both graduating in computer science from Stanford, they built StacksWare to help enterprise software customers avoid overpaying by accurately measuring their usage. But when they sold StacksWare to Avi Networks, they spent two years working remotely for the acquirer. The friction and loneliness quickly crept in.

They’d message someone, not hear back for a while, then go back and forth trying to discuss the problem before eventually scheduling a call. Jumping into synchronous communicating would have been much more efficient. “The loneliness was more subtle, but it built up after the first few weeks,” Safreno recalls. “We simply didn’t socially bond while working remotely as well as in the office. Being lonely was de-motivating, and it negatively affected our productivity.”

The founders interviewed 100 remote engineers, and discovered that outside of scheduled meetings, they only had one audio or video call with co-workers per week. That convinced them to start Pragli a year ago to give work-from-home teams a visual, virtual facsimile of a real office. With no other full-time employees, the founders built and released a beta of Pragli last year. Usage grew 6X in March and is up 20X since January 1.

Today Pragli officially launches, and it’s free until June 1. Then it plans to become freemium, with the full experience reserved for companies that pay per user per month. Pragli is also announcing a small pre-seed round today led by K9 Ventures, inspired by the firm’s delight using the product itself.

To get started with Pragi, teammates download the Pragli desktop app and sign in with Google, Microsoft or GitHub. Users then customize their avatar with a wide range of face, hair, skin and clothing options. It can use your mouse and keyboard interaction to show if you’re at your desk or not, or use your webcam to translate occasional snapshots of your facial expressions to your avatar. You can also connect your Spotify and calendar to show you’re listening to music (and might be concentrating), reveal or hide details of your meeting and decide whether people can ask to interrupt you or that you’re totally unavailable.

From there, you can by audio, video or text communicate with any of your available co-workers. Guests can join conversations via the web and mobile too, though the team is working on a full-fledged app for phones and tablets. Tap on someone and you can instantly talk to them, though their mic stays muted until they respond. Alternatively, you can jump into Slack-esque channels for discussing specific topics or holding recurring meetings. And if you need some down time, you can hang out in the water cooler or trivia game channel, or set a manual “away” message.

Pragli has put a remarkable amount of consideration into how the little office social cues about when to interrupt someone translate online, like if someone’s wearing headphones, in a deep convo already or if they’re chilling in the microkitchen. It’s leagues better than having no idea what someone’s doing on the other side of Slack or what’s going on in a Zoom call. It’s a true virtual office without the clunky VR headset.

“Nothing we’ve tried has delivered the natural, water-cooler-style conversations that we get from Pragli,” says Storj Labs VP of engineering JT Olio. “The ability to switch between ‘rooms’ with screen sharing, video and voice in one app is great. It has really helped us improve transparency across teams. Plus, the avatars are quite charming as well.”

With Microsoft’s lack of social experience, Zoom consumed with its scaling challenges and Slack doubling down on text as it prioritizes Zoom integration over its own visual communication features, there’s plenty of room for Pragli to flourish. Meanwhile, COVID-19 quarantines are turning the whole world toward remote work, and it’s likely to stick afterwards as companies de-emphasize office space and hire more abroad.

The biggest challenge will be making comprehensible enough to onboard whole teams such a broad product encompassing every communication medium and tons of new behaviors. “How do you build a product that doesn’t feel distracting like Slack but where people can still have the spontaneous conversations that are so important to companies innovating?,” Safreno asks. The Pragli founders are also debating how to encompass mobile without making people feel like the office stalks them after hours.

“Long-term, [Pragli] should be better than being in the office because you don’t actually have to walk around looking for [co-workers], and you get to decide how you’re presented,” Safreno concludes. “We won’t quit, because we want to work remotely for the rest of our lives.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Replace non-stop Zoom with remote office avatars app Pragli

With a lot of towns instituting shelter-in-place orders to restrict how people physically interact in order to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus, fitness has come into its own.

In places where people are still allowed outdoors to exercise, we’ve seen an explosion of independent exercising like walking, running and cycling — often in conflict with each other, if my Facebook community board is anything to go by — to get the most out of being allowed outdoors. And in cases where people are remaining indoors, figuring out exercise regimes within our four walls has become a way to stave off boredom, to offset the cessation of our normal gym or sports routines or just to stay in shape in our newly extra-sedentary lives.

In that context, a startup called Aaptiv — a Netflix-style app-based business that connects people to a range of trainer-led indoor and outdoor fitness and wellness sessions that they can do on their own, usually without any special equipment — is today announcing that it has raised some funding from one of its big investors, Insight Partners, on the back of a recent surge in business.

Founder and CEO Ethan Agarwal says the the number of people using the service during the novel coronavirus outbreak has spiked, with organic traffic in the last month up 100% and engagement with content up 200%. Aaptiv has now passed 30 million classes consumed on its platform (up from 22 million in May last year). The company, like many startups, is not yet profitable but is coming close to breaking even.

The new infusion of funding will be used to continue expanding a new Enterprise channel that Aaptiv recently launched to provide classes via API on other platforms. Aaptiv’s partners include FitReserve, Weight Watchers and Audible (Amazon, owner of Audible, is one of Aaptiv’s investors), and the list is growing.

We asked, but Agarwal said that Aaptiv is not disclosing the amount of the investment, nor its valuation.

“I don’t want my company’s performance or success measured by those numbers,” he noted earlier today in an interview. “It’s not how we are thinking about the company.”

That could mean the round or valuation are not huge; or it could mean that they are so large that they would distract from the company’s product news, so not much to read into that. Insight Partners’ Thilo Semmelbauer, who sits on the board of the company, was equally quiet on the numbers.

“Crossing 30 million classes is a big milestone, and we’ve been excited to see the interest from corporates increase substantially in recent months,” he told TechCrunch. “The round is specifically for launching Aaptiv’s corporate offering to capitalize on such strong global interest. As the company is nearing break-even we aren’t disclosing the figure at this time.”

Insight earlier this month disclosed that it had raised a whopping $9.5 billion for a new fund, with a mission to support existing portfolio companies through these complicated COVID-19 times.

For some more context, Aaptiv has raised more than $60 million to date, and in its last round — the $22 million Series C in 2018 that included Amazon — Aaptiv was valued at $200 million. Last year, we noted that the startup was talking to potential acquirers to be sold for what we understand from a close source to be a “nine-figure” (hundreds of millions of dollars) price.

It was, in fact, those M&A conversations that led the company to deciding to build the enterprise tier and walking away from a possible exit for now.

“What was the point of selling if we could build a bigger business by making Aaptiv available to multiple companies,” said Agarwal.

Agarwal said that now Aaptiv is getting inbound interest from “multiple verticals” for its B2B2C offering, including businesses that want to integrate Aaptiv into their employee wellness programs, companies whose core business model — for example, FitReserve providing carnets of passes for in-person fitness or related classes — has been completely stalled by the coronavirus, and others that might benefit from providing more fitness and wellness services to their users.

The company started out life by connecting a network of trainers to users through a series of on-demand classes. Last year, however, it made a small pivot of sorts when it launched an AI-based service called Coach that aimed to provide workouts and other suggestions more tailored to your specific abilities and interests and goals: not replacing the human trainers, but augmenting them.

Along with that shift, Aaptiv laid off an unspecified number of trainers. Today, it has 20 on staff, Agarwal said, and has no plans to change that model with a move into, for example, an all-AI platform, or building a fitness marketplace where any trainer could sign up to offer classes.

“Part of the reason we are so successful is because it’s not that easy to create these classes,” he said. “We, and the trainers, put a lot of time, effort and energy into building them.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Fitness app Aaptiv raises from Insight Partners, launches Enterprise channel

The student loan crisis has crescendoed to even worse heights. As universities shut down across the country due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and employment opportunities dim with the rapidly decelerating economy, today’s students and post-grads need better tools than ever to navigate their finances.

Unfortunately, student loans in the United States are extraordinarily complicated, with literally hundreds of variations on loan terms, repayment methods and public interest forgiveness options. For borrowers, what are the best ways to minimize their total burden while staying within the rules?

Washington, DC-based Savi wants to make student loan borrowers “savvy” to the best options available to them, and now it has even more capital to take on this pressing challenge. The company announced today that it has raised a $6 million Series A led by Nyca Partners, one of the most influential investing firms in the fintech space.

Finance startups often have misaligned incentives between users and their own revenue models — a financial health app may make quiet referral revenue by peddling new credit cards and loans, exactly what a user doesn’t need.

What makes Savi interesting is that the company was designed from the beginning to make sure that it always placed the interests of its users first. It’s organized as a public benefit corporation and founded by two idealistic founders who came together over improving the outcomes of the nation’s youth.

After graduating from Georgetown Law, Aaron Smith founded and spent four years running Young Invincibles, a youth-focused think tank and advocacy organization that was originally created to bring attention to youth issues during the healthcare reform discussions in the early years of the Obama administration. Meanwhile, Savi’s other co-founder, Tobin Van Ostern, worked on youth voter engagement for Obama’s first presidential campaign as the head of Students for Barack Obama before heading to the liberal Center for American Progress.

Savi co-founders Tobin Van Ostern and Aaron Smith. Photos courtesy of Savi.

Together, they decided to found Savi to bring their progressive mission orientation to helping young people around student debt. The student loan world is “fairly complicated, and while obviously I think there needs to be continued improvement on the policy side, we needed solutions for student loan borrowers right now,” Smith explained. “And so that was sort of the impetus behind Savi — to use technology to create those kind of solutions.”

Savi ingests student loan data from users and then begins crunching the numbers to calculate the best options for repayment or forgiveness while taking into account the goals of its users.

While student lending is a trillion-dollar-plus market, Savi — owing to its progressive roots — has been particularly focused on offering its platform to users like social workers, teachers and service workers. One of their largest partners is NEA, the largest teachers union in the United States with around 3 million members, and Savi is offered as a benefit to its members.

Organizations offer Savi’s student loan assessment tool to their employees and members to help them understand their financial picture. That tool is free for users, but from there, Savi charges a subscription to actively manage a user’s student loans, such as automating the process for filling out paperwork. Users can calculate their savings using Savi before committing to paying a subscription, ensuring that no user pays if Savi can’t help them save money. The company says that the average borrower sees $140 in savings per month and pays a $5-a-month subscription fee.

Given the typical employment of its users, Savi has a particular specialty on loan forgiveness, an option that many student loans offer for people in public-interest careers. Such options often have byzantine rules for eligibility though, and so Savi works to ensure that borrowers seeking forgiveness stay within the rules of their loan programs. Currently, the company handles more than 150 forgiveness and repayment options.

Similar to its assessment tools for organizations, Savi launched a new tool around COVID-19 to help people in health professions or who have been laid off as a result of the pandemic to figure out their student loan situations and find new programs for help. “We actually happen to have a pretty disproportionately high number of users that actually work on the COVID crisis,” Van Ostern explained.

Startups around managing student loans have been a popular area of investment for VCs. Yesterday, my colleague Alex Wilhelm noted that student loan platform Frank received a $5 million interim strategic round of funding, with edtech giant Chegg taking a board seat. I also covered Summer’s $10 million raise late last year, which, like Savi, is a public benefit corporation focused on minimizing the burden of student loan payments.

In addition to Nyca, Savi received funding from AlleyCorp, Temerity Capital and 9Yards Capital, along with Michelle Kang, Catherine Reynolds and Sheila Lirio Marcelo.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | College isn’t free yet, but Savi raises a M Series A to assist student loan borrowers find loan forgiveness

With corporations across the world taking a closer look at the effects their operations have on global climate change, investors are backing a crop of software and services that are cropping up to pull back the curtain on those climate impacts.

The latest of these to raise capital is The Climate Service, which just closed on $3.82 million in its most recent round of funding.

Interestingly, in addition to the traditional mix of venture investment firms and angel investors, the Durham, N.C.-based company also picked up a commitment from the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants.

Institutional capital, including Persei Venture and Synovia Capital also joined the round.

The company said it would use the cash to expand the scope of its climate scenarios, risks and asset classes monitored by its software service.

The Climate Service bases its models and pricing of climate risk on the framework developed by the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, which is used by more than 1,000 organizations around the world, according to the company.

“Investors, markets and regulators are increasingly requiring businesses to measure their exposure to climate change-related risk. As a result, we designed this fundraising round to enable TCS to respond to the demands of industries under pressure to understand, quantify and manage climate risk,” said David L. Jadow of Persei Venture. “We forecast significant continued growth for TCS, and we are proud to support the company’s vision and mission to embed climate risk into global decision-making.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | North Carolina-based The Climate Service raises .8 million for climate audits

As we find ourselves tumbling toward a global financial crisis, every business is taking a second and third look at expenses going out the door to make sure they really, truly need them. Based on more than a decade of experience processing billions of dollars in expense reports for the top startups in Silicon Valley, here are the high-level keys to keeping costs low and managing expenses: hire people you trust, keep policies light and flexible, and invest in experiences that bring your team together. On the tactical side, get your travel policies in order (you know, when travel is a thing again), give everyone a smart corporate card and be honest about what really matters. These should all start way before the point of scouring spreadsheets for savings — and as a startup, you have a chance to get it right out of the gates. Invest now so you don’t have to cut later. 

Quick background on me: I started programming when I was six and spent the early days of my tech career building 3D graphics engines for video games. Eventually, I ended up working at Red Swoosh, a startup that Akamai bought just in time for the world to descend into the 2008 recession. Since then, I’ve been focused on relieving the world’s frustrations one expense report at a time. I’ve come to see how more than a million companies handle billions of dollars in expenses, and I’m here to give you some of the best expense-management tips I’ve picked up along the way. 

Hire people you trust

Rule zero of expense management is to hire people you trust. If you trust your team, you don’t need to micromanage expenses. If you don’t trust your team, no amount of micromanaging expenses will matter. Expense tools aren’t lie detectors or mind readers; they exist primarily to catch mistakes, not criminals.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Expensify CEO shares high-level keys for keeping costs low and managing expenses

Truphone, a UK-based startup that provides voice and data services for phones, tablets and IoT hardware by way of eSIM software integrated directly into the devices, has raised another round of funding to continue expanding its business. The company, which told TechCrunch today that it counts Apple as a key partner, has raised another £30 million, valuing Truphone at £410 million (or $38 million at a $516 million valuation at current rates).

Truphone said it would use the money to continue investing in software development and network upgrades “to ensure the business is equipped to deliver on further acceleration; and to support an expanding worldwide presence, particularly in North America and Asia Pacific.”

The company said it has now provisioned some 4 million eSIM profiles globally and is seeing further eSIM downloads of 20,000 daily.

Although eSIM technology was conceived as a quick way to switch carriers without physically changing fiddly, tiny physical cards (and subsequent carrier contracts), it’s an interesting datapoint right now, given that we are seeing a big focus on technology and transactions that can be run in a contactless way (thus avoiding the spread of the novel coronavirus).

“We have long championed eSIM as the superior method of connectivity, and it’s immensely rewarding to reap the benefits of this decision,” said Ralph Steffens, CEO of Truphone, in a statement. “We are delighted that our investors continue to support us as we develop this technology which is maturing and accelerating all the time. Backed further by our investors, the future looks bright for Truphone, our partners, customers and a better-connected world.”

Truphone did not disclose the specific names of investors but we have confirmed that the majority of the funds are coming from Vollin Holdings and Minden Worldwide — two investment firms with ties to Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch who also owns the Chelsea football club, among other things.

Collectively, Abramovich-connected entities controlled more than 80 percent of the company when Truphone last raised funding in 2018: part of its large shareholding also stems from an earlier fundraise, when the company raised $339 million to retire existing debt in 2017.

For some additional context, the company was valued at £386 million in its last fundraise in 2018, making this latest raise effectively a slight down round.

Truphone is not a startup in the “young” sense. It has actually been around since 2006, starting out originally as a provider of SIM cards that travellers could use in their phones to get cheap calls and data while roaming outside their home countries. That legacy MVNO business reached breakeven in September 2019, it said today.

In more recent years, it has pivoted to focusing squarely on eSIM services, taking advantage of the advances in hardware design that make it easier to switch carriers (and use cheaper data plans) without physically replacing a SIM card.

It was an early partner of Apple’s — a supporter of eSIM developments, first for its iPad tablets — and said today that in the last year has secured deals with 25 “major operator customers across four continents”, covering some 200 million customers, to expand its network of coverage to allow users to more easily switch between carriers, and seek out cheaper data deals. Its growth, Truphone said, makes it one of the three biggest eSIM providers now globally.

The company today says it provides several flavors of eSIM services. The first of these, an eSIM operating system that it calls SIM OS, works with eUICC and iUICC hardware, and “is a component-oriented, high-performance embedded operating system, fully compatible with most international and industry standards such as ISO, GSMA, Oracle’s Java, Global Platform, 3GPP and ETSI.”

The second of these is a secure remote SIM provisioning service. “Truphone’s platform works with any mobile network operator, is interoperable with any eSIM and supports consumer and M2M eSIM deployments” through this service, it said.

It also launched an entitlements server, an operator-focused service that allows carriers to enable the use, for example, of Apple Watch devices and other connected devices and objects on their networks.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Truphone raises M at 6M valuation as its eSIM business crosses 4M profiles