Browsing Tag: Technology

Part of the complex process that turns raw materials into finished products like detergents, cosmetics and flavors relies on enzymes, which facilitate chemical transformations. But finding the right enzyme for a new or proposed drug or additive is a drawn out and almost random process — which Allozymes aims to change with a remarkable new system that could set a new standard in the industry, and has raised a $5M seed round to commercialize.

Enzymes are chains of amino acids, the “building blocks of life” among of the many things encoded in DNA. These large, complex molecules bind to other substances in a way that facilitates a chemical reaction, say turning sugars in a cell into a more usable form of energy.

One also finds enzymes in the world of manufacturing, where major companies have identified and isolated enzymes that perform valuable work like taking some cheap base ingredients and making them combine into a more useful form. Any company that sells or needs lots of any particular chemical that doesn’t appear abundantly in nature probably has enzymatic processes to aid in creating more of it.

But it’s not like there’s just an enzyme for everything. When you’re inventing new molecules from scratch, like a novel drug or flavoring, there’s no reason why there should be a naturally occurring enzyme that reacts with or creates it. No animal synthesizes allergy medicine in its cells. So companies must find or create new enzymes that do what’s needed. The problem is that enzymes are generally at least 100 units long, and there are 20 amino acids to choose from, meaning for even the simplest novel enzyme you’re looking at uncountably numerous variations.

By starting with known enzymes and systematically working through variations that seem intuitively like they might work, researchers have been able to find new and useful enzymes, but the process is complex and slow even when fully automated: at most a couple hundred a day, and that’s if you happen to have a top-of-the-line robotic lab.

So when Allozymes comes in with a claim that it can screen up to ten million per day, you can imagine the level of change that represents.

Allozymes was founded by Peyman Salehian (CEO) and Akbar Vahidi (CTO), two Iranian chemical engineers who met while pursuing their PhDs at the National University of Singapore. The three years of research leading up to the commercial product also occurred at NUS, which holds the patent and exclusively licenses it to the company.

“The state of the art hasn’t changed in 20 years,” said Salehian. “When we talk with GSK, Pfizer, Merck, they have whole departments for this, they have $2 million robots, and it still takes a year to get a new enzyme.”

The Allozymes platform will speed up the process by several orders of magnitude, while decreasing the cost by an order of magnitude, Salehian said. If these estimates bear out, it effectively trivializes the enzyme search and obsoletes billions in investments and infrastructure. Why pay more to get less?

Traditionally, enzymes are isolated and selected over a multi-step process that involves introducing DNA templates into cells, which are cultured to create the target enzymes, which once a certain growth state is achieved, are analyzed robotically. If there are promising results, you go down that road with more variations, otherwise start again from the beginning. There’s a lot of picking and placing little dishes, waiting for enough cells to produce enough of the stuff, and so on.

The process Salehian and Vahidi designed is fully contained with a little benchtop device the size of a microwave, and generates almost no waste. Instead of using culture dishes, the device puts the necessary cells, substrate, and other ingredients in a tiny droplet in a microfluidic system. The reactions occur inside this little drop, which is incubated, tracked, and eventually collected and tested in a fraction of the time a larger sample would take.

Allozymes isn’t selling the device, though. It’s enzyme engineering as a service, and for now their partners and customers seem content with that. Its primary service is cut-to-size, depending on the needs of the project. For instance, maybe a company has a working enzyme already and just wants a variant that’s easier to synthesize or less dependent on certain expensive additives. With a solid starting point and flexible goal that might be a project on the smaller side. Another company may be looking to completely replace hard chemistry processes in their manufacturing, know the start and the end of the process but need an enzyme to fill in the gaps; that might be a more wide ranging and expensive project.

Vahidi explained that the goal is not to “democratize” enzyme engineering. It’s still expensive and large-scale enough that it will primarily be done by large companies, but now they can get a hundred thousand times more out of their R&D dollar. The speed and value put them above the competition, said Sahelian, with companies like Codexis, Arzeda, and Ginkgo Bioworks also doing enzyme bioengineering but at lower rates and with different priorities.

Occasionally the company might strike a bargain to take part ownership of an IP or product, but that’s not really the business model, Sahelian said. Some early work consisted of actually making the final compound, but ultimately the core product is expected to be the service. (Still, a million-dollar order is nothing to sneeze at.)

It may have occurred to you that in the process of doing a job, Allozymes might sort through hundreds of millions of enzymes. Rest assured, they are well aware of the value these may represent. The service transitions seamlessly into the inevitable data play.

“If you have a big data set that shows ‘if you change this amino acid this will be the function,’ you don’t even need to engineer it, you can eliminate it [i.e. from consideration]. You can even design enzymes if you know enough,” Salehian said.

The company’s recent $5M seed round was led by SOSV and Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign fund. Salehian explained that they planned to incorporate in the U.S. following interest from American venture firms, but Temasek’s early stage investor convinced them to stay.

“Biotransformation is in huge demand on this side of the world,” Salehian said. “Chemical, agriculture, and food companies need to do it, but no platform company can deliver these services. So we tried to fill that gap.”

Super.mx, an insurtech startup based in Mexico City, has raised $7.2 million in a Series A round led by ALLVP.

Co-founded in 2019 by a trio of former insurance industry executives, Super.mx’s self-proclaimed mission is to design insurance for “the emerging Latin American middle class,” according to CEO Sebastian Villarreal.

“That means insurance that is easy to buy – it can be bought on a cell phone in minutes – and that pays quickly with no adjusters,” he said. The company has built its offering with proprietary models that are used both on the underwriting side to predict risk and on the claims side to make payments automatically. 

Goodwater Capital, Kairos Angels and Bridge Partners also participated in the Series A round in addition to angels such as Joe Schmidt IV, vice president of business development at insurtech Ethos and former investor at Accel and Kyle Nakatsuji, founder and CEO of auto insurance startup Clearcover (and also a former VC). Better Tomorrow Ventures led Super.mx’s $2.4 million seed round, which also saw capital from 500 Startups Mexico, Village Global, Anthemis and Broadhaven Ventures, among others.

Unlike most insurtech startups in Latin America, Villarreal emphasizes that Super.mx is neither an aggregator nor a carrier. Instead, it’s an MGA, or managing general agent.

“This lets us have a ‘best of both worlds’ approach,” Villarreal said. “We handle the entire user experience just like a direct to consumer carrier, but with the breadth of product choice offered by an aggregator.”

That product choice includes property, natural disasters and life insurance. The company soon plans to expand to also offer health insurance. 

The founding team brings a variety of insurance experience to the table. Villarreal previously co-founded Chicago-based Kin Insurance (which raised over $150 million in funding from the likes of Flourish Ventures, Commerce Ventures and QED Investors). He was also once head of auto product at Avant, a growth-stage company funded by General Atlantic and Tiger Global, among others.

With over two decades of insurance industry experience, Dario Luna once served as Mexico’s insurance regulator and helped develop Mexico’s disaster risk management strategy. Marco Ahedo has designed parametric insurance products for 19 Caribbean countries. He was also once a solvency expert for life and health insurance lines at MetLife, and has developed financial models for several P&C carriers.

Villarreal lived in the U.S. for a while before deciding to move back to Mexico, which he recognized was home to an “underinsurance problem.”

“That’s actually a very acute problem,” he said. “People in Latin America buy a lot less insurance than they do in the U.S., and people in Mexico, in particular, buy a lot less insurance than they do in other Latin countries.”

Some have blamed the lack of insurance coverage on the country’s culture but Super.mx operates under the belief that this notion is “total BS.”

“It’s not a cultural problem,” Villarreal said. “The problem is that the insurance products that exist in the market just suck. They’re super expensive. They’re really hard to buy, and they pay very little.”

So far, Super.mx has sold “thousands of policies” but is more focused now on increasing the number of products that it’s selling. The company started out by selling earthquake insurance before adding COVID insurance, and more recently, in April, it launched life insurance. Next, it’s going to offer property, renter’s and health insurance.

“It’s really a different strategy than what you would find in the U.S.,” Villarreal said. “In the U.S, when you look at insurtechs, it’s like everyone just does one thing, but here, it’s very different because when someone says ‘I want insurance,’ really what they’re saying is ‘Hey, something happened that makes me nervous that didn’t make me nervous before.’”

That something could be a new child, for example, that prompts a need for life insurance.

“What we’re trying to do is like Lemonade, Roots and Hippo or Kin all rolled into one,” he added. It’s a big, big play.”

Digital adoption in Mexico, and Latin America in general, has increased exponentially in recent years. The bigger hurdle for Super.mx, according to Villarreal, has less to do with technology and more to do with Mexicans getting over what he describes a “deep mistrust” based on bad experiences in the past.

“People are really distrustful and that’s a huge hurdle, but once you show them that you actually are different,” Villarreal told TechCrunch, “that you actually do things in a different way, you get this incredible emotional response.”

Eventually, Super.mx plans to outside of Mexico to other countries in Latin America.

ALLVP’s Federico Antoni said his Mexico City-based firm had been looking for a team building in this space “for years” before investing in Super.mx. The venture firm was impressed with the company’s technical knowledge and industry expertise. It was also drawn to their multi-product approach and “capacity to ship highly complex products to the market quickly” — both of which he believes are “unique” in the region.

Citing statistics from MAPFRE Economics, Antoni pointed out that globally, the insurance market has been growing over the last 10 years. During that time, Latin America expanded faster on average (4.4% vs. 2.4% worldwide), albeit with more volatility. Life insurance has been driving this growth, at 6.1%, over the period. 

“Insurtech may be even bigger than fintech. Also, harder,” he told TechCrunch via email. “We knew the team to unlock the market potential would need to be highly competent and highly disruptive.”

Antoni said he is also convinced that Insurtech is the “next frontier” in financial inclusion in Latin America especially as digitization continues to increase.

“Providing risk coverage to individuals and businesses in the region, brings financial stability to families and unlocks economic potential for SMEs,” he said. “Moreover, the insurance incumbents have been unable to address a growing and underserved market.”

Shares of Chinese ride-hailing business Didi are off 22% this morning after the company was hit by more regulatory activity over the holiday weekend. The recently public company traded as high as $18.01 per share since it held an IPO last week; today, shares of Didi are worth just $12.09, off around a third from their 52-week high.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

The decline in value follows a review by a Chinese cybersecurity agency that led to Didi being unable to onboard new users, a decision that arrived as last week rolled to a close.

Over the weekend, Didi was hit with more regulatory action. This time, the Cyberspace Administration of China said, via an internet translation, that “after testing and verification, the ‘Didi Travel’ App [was found to have] serious violations of laws and regulations in collecting and using personal information,” which led the agency to command app stores “to remove the ‘Didi Travel’ app, and required [the company] to strictly follow the legal requirements and refer to relevant national standards to seriously rectify existing problems.”

Being yanked from relevant app stores was enough for Didi to alert investors that its mobile app “had the problem of collecting personal information in violation of relevant PRC laws and regulations.” Didi said that the change in its app availability “may have an adverse impact on its revenue in China.”

Understatement of the year, I reckon.

But there’s more going on than what Didi is enduring. As CNBC reported:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday Tuesday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here.

What a busy weekend we missed while mostly hearing distant explosions and hugging our dogs close. Here’s a sampling of what we tried to recap on the show:

Didi vs. China: The Chinese government’s crackdown on Didi continued over the weekend, after announcing a cybersecurity review of the company on Friday. That decision blocked new user signups. Now Didi has had its app removed from pertinent app marketplaces. That’s going to hit revenue. Shares of the company are sharply lower in pre-marketing trading here in the United States. The company went public last week.
Twitter vs. India: India’s attempts to cow Twitter into not enacting its own content moderation policies continues. Now India has taken away legal protections from the well-known American company. It’s not great news for India’s growing technology sector, or the investors backing the upstarts.
Funding rounds: Lots of companies raised money, including Byrd, with $19 million in a Series B, Pleo with a huge $150 million unicorn round, and Obviously AI, which just extended its Seed round.

It’s going to be a busy week! Chat tomorrow.

The pet care industry has boomed over the past several years. From Chewy’s IPO to the various veterinarian startups that have sprung up, VC money (and consumer cash) is flowing into the space.

Wagmo is no different. The pet insurance and perks startup has closed on a $12.5 million Series A financing, led by Revolution Ventures with participation from Female Founders Fund, Clocktower Technology Ventures, and Vestigo Ventures. Angels, including Jeffrey Katzenberg, Jim Grube, Marilyn Hirsch, David Ronick, and Michael Akkerman, also participated in the round.

The company was founded by Christie Horvath and Ali Foxworth, who both came from the world of finance and insurance and realized the gap in the market when it comes to pet insurance. Most pet insurance providers cover the big emergencies, such as surgeries, broken bones, etc. But anyone with a pet, and especially a new puppy (like myself), knows that the costs of basic care can add up very quickly.

Wagmo offers the same basic coverage as your usual pet insurance, but also offers a wellness service. The Wellness Program reimburses pet parents for the more basic stuff, like vaccinations, grooming, regular vet visits, fecal tests, and bloodwork.

Users simply pay anywhere between $20/month and $59/month and submit photos of their receipts in the app. Wagmo then reimburses what’s covered via Venmo, PayPal, or direct deposit within 24 hours.

The premise here is two-fold. A healthy dog, who has access to all the basics listed above, is less likely to have major issues later on. The second piece is that the earliest costs associated with owning a dog are these basic ones, like vaccinations, vet visits, fecal tests and grooming.

Wagmo offers the wellness plan without an insurance plan. That means that users can onboard to the platform with what they need first, and upgrade to an insurance plan later on.

Wagmo generates revenue through both the wellness and insurance plan, but is actively looking into an enterprise model, as well, signing on larger organizations as part of their benefits package to employees.

The now-14-person team has onboarded thousands of users, with 20 percent user growth month over month since the beginning of the pandemic, and has processed 30,000 wellness claims.

The team is 58 percent female identifying, with Black, Asian and Latinx making up 17 percent of the workforce each.

“The greatest challenge is figuring out how to break down the opportunity ahead of us, particularly in the employer benefit space,” said Horvath. “What keeps us up at night is thinking about where to start, what to prioritize, how to allocate limited resources and limited time.”

Influential entrepreneurs like Paul Graham and Naval Ravikant always preach the need for startups to have founders-turned-investors on their cap table. As Ravikant puts it, “founders want to know that the people they are taking money from have first-hand experience.” 

His platform AngelList has helped individual founders-cum-investors source and participate in deals via collectives. However, some venture firms have taken this up a notch by bringing founders to create a fund and invest together.

Today, one of such, MAGIC Fund, a global collective of founders, is announcing that it has raised a second fund of $30 million to continue backing early-stage startups across Africa, Europe, Latin America, North America, and Southeast Asia.

Since the firm’s first fund launched in 2017, MAGIC has invested in 70 companies at pre-seed and seed stages across these emerging markets. Some of these companies include Retool, Novo, Payfazz, and Mono.

MAGIC Fund has 12 founders who act as general partners. TechCrunch caught up with managing partner Adegoke Olubusi and operating partner Matt Greenleaf to learn more about the fund’s thesis and activities.

Olubusi, who had built and exited a couple of startups over the years, also dabbled with angel investing for some time. In 2017, Olubusi’s current startup Helium Health got accepted into Y Combinator. It was there he met more founders like him who were angel investors with impressive portfolios. The interesting bit? Each founder wanted to invest in other companies during YC’s Demo Day.

“So about three years ago, I was at YC, and I was going to invest in my own batch. I was pitching on the day, but I was also listening to other pitches. However, it wasn’t just me; there were many other founders as well,” Olubusi said.

After building and exiting multiple startups, some founders turn into angel investing to support startups and their ecosystems. However, most of them tend to go alone and are stuck with cutting checks in their local markets, which limits opportunities.

Here’s a scenario. In 2016, when unicorns Flutterwave and Kavak raised their seed rounds in Nigeria and Mexico respectively, an African biotech founder who knew about Kavak and a Latin American edtech founder interested in African fintech would not have had the capacity to evaluate those deals even if they wanted; the reason being a lack of reach and experience in both the industry or geography. 

Olubusi and the other founders knew this would be a limitation in the long run if they went solo. Thus, they decided to create MAGIC. The idea was to bring global founders together with diverse skillsets in diverse industries and geographies to evaluate deals better and drive value for each other. Hence, they can participate in two unicorns instead of one.

“Instead of us investing individually because obviously, we have somewhat limited capacity in terms of how much time we have as founders because of our respective companies, why don’t we collaborate on a strategy together and co-invest together?”

“The way we thought of MAGIC was a fund of micro funds built by founders for founders,” Greenleaf continued.

Fund of micro funds but more than money

In some of the personal conversations I’ve had with founders about their investors, a recurring theme has been that the most useful investors didn’t necessarily sign the biggest checks. It’s a theme Olubusi also relates to all too well.

“It was like every time we think about it, everyone who gave the most money rarely had time for us. It was so frequent that we all identified this as an actual thing. What actually drove value for us were other investors who were founders and operators, and other experienced people who were able to help us find product-market fit and fight regulators. These were actually the people in the trenches with us.”

Olubusi believes the early-stage part of investing, particularly in pre-seed and seed, is where VCs who are founder-operators find their sweet spot. They are precious when startups are trying to figure out product-market fit. And unlike traditional investors who are looking to get multiples on investments, Olubusi argues that for founders-investors, what matters is how much value they can drive for startups.

MAGIC’s play is even more essential considering that it also plays in emerging markets where on-the-ground operational help is needed in industries with numerous unknowns and uncertainties.

“There is so much money in the market now and early-stage decision making at pre-seed and seed should be left in the hands of founders. Because think about it really, to make an evaluation of whether I should invest in a healthcare or fintech company in Africa, it makes sense to have those who’ve spent years battling through it in the trenches make those decisions. And what we’re trying to do with the fund is publish as much information as possible and keep performing at the 100 percentile and say this is still the best strategy and is very scalable.”

MAGIC Fund 1 was $1.5 million and Olubusi says the investments performed 5x over the period of three years. As some of these companies exited, their founders invested in MAGIC and came on board as Fund 2 partners. 

MAGIC has also enlisted additional investors who, according to Olubusi, are respected for their investing abilities and ecosystem support. For instance, Olugbenga Agboola, Flutterwave CEO, is known across the African tech ecosystem as a founder who goes out of his way to help established and up-and-coming fintech companies. Hendra Kwik of Payfazz has such a reputation in Southeast Asia as well. They, alongside other founders, join MAGIC as limited partners.

Per the firm’s statement, one-third of the entire fund was contributed by the founder GPs. For its LPs, diversity play is considered as 50% of them are black while 33% are women. Some of them include Michael Seibel, Tim Draper, Rappi’s Andres Bilbao, Paystack’s Shola Akinlade, Katie Lewis, and Octopus Ventures’ Kirsten Connell. For its partners, MAGIC has brought on the likes of Stitchroom’s Tom Chen, Medumo’s Adeel Yang, Juice’s Michael Lisovetsky, and Troy Osinoff, and Evercare’s Temi Awogboro.

Magic Fund 2 will be writing $100,000 to 300,000 checks at pre-seed and seed stages focusing on fintech, healthcare, SaaS and enterprise, women’s health, developer tools.

What does the fund look for in founders? Olubusi gives two answers. One, MAGIC wants to back founders with incentives to stick through the hard times of a company.

“At pre-seed and seed, you don’t have enough data about a company to make an investment decision. Your bet is entirely on the founder and the founding team. What we know, having done this several times, is that things get harder. So when we’re looking at the founder, we’re evaluating whether or not the founder has the grit to stick through the toughest times which are going to come up.”

The second indicator factors if the founder has the willingness, openness, the flexibility to learn and use that knowledge to succeed. Greenleaf believes these strategies have incredibly helped the firm fund exceptional companies and maintain good relationships with founders.

“Most of these founders don’t view us as their investors. They view us as fellow founders who are helping them along their journey. I think that also ties into them keeping it real with us and allows us to see them as people, and not just founders. That’s one of the things that have worked in our favor,” he said.

TechCrunch Early Stage is coming up soon, and all attendees can get 3 months of free access to Extra Crunch as a part of a ticket purchase. Extra Crunch is our members-only community focused on founders and startup teams. 

Head here to buy your ticket to TC Early Stage. 

Extra Crunch unlocks access to our investor surveys, private market analysis, and in-depth interviews with experts on fundraising, growth, monetization and other core startup topics. Get feedback on your pitch deck through Extra Crunch Live, and stay informed with our members-only Extra Crunch newsletter. Other benefits include an improved TechCrunch.com experience and savings on software services from AWS, Crunchbase, and more.

Learn more about Extra Crunch benefits here, and buy your TC Early Stage tickets here. 

What is TC Early Stage? 

TC Early Stage is a two-day virtual event where early-stage founders can take part in highly interactive group sessions with top investors and ecosystem experts. This particular Early Stage event has a focus on marketing and fundraising.

The event will take place July 8-9, and we’d love to have you join. 

View the event agenda here, and purchase tickets here. 

Once you buy your TC Early Stage pass, you will be emailed a link and unique code you can use to claim the free 3 months of Extra Crunch.

Already bought your TC Early Stage ticket?

Existing pass holders will be emailed with information on how to claim the free 3 months of Extra Crunch membership. All new ticket purchases will receive information over email immediately after the purchase is complete.

Already an Extra Crunch member?

We’re happy to extend a free 3 months of access to existing users. Please contact extracrunch@techcrunch.com, and mention that you are an existing Extra Crunch member who bought a ticket to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising.

Business trip booking platform TravelPerk has bagged another rival — picking up UK-based Click Travel. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed but we’re told it’s the third — and largest — acquisition for TravelPerk to date.

The Barcelona-based startup has been on a bit of a shopping spree since the pandemic crisis hit Europe last year, picking up risk management startup Albatross in summer 2020 to bolster resilience to COVID-19’s impacts, before going on to acquire US-based NexTravel in January to expand its presence in the US market.

The latest acquisition deepens TravelPerk’s UK and European business, adding Click Travel’s 2,000+ SME clients (which includes the likes of Five Guys, Red Bull and Talk Talk) to its customer base — which will total just over 5,000 post-acquisition.

The UK company handles some £300M in business travel for its client base, which will bolster TravelPerk’s revenues going forward. The latter now bills itself as the “leading” travel management platform for the SME market globally and the UK as a whole.

“We are a global travel management platform but our core markets are the US and Europe and we expect both markets to be our primary growth areas this year,” said CEO and co-founder Avi Meir. “At the current moment, the US is our largest market due to the covid restrictions in the EU & UK.”

“Assuming travel restrictions won’t be imposed again, we expect to grow by 200% in 2022 with strong growth in our core markets in the US & EU,” he added.

Click Travel, which is based in Birmingham, was founded all the way back in 1999 — and appears to have raised relatively little venture capital over the years, per Crunchbase. However, in 2018, the veteran player participated in the government-backed Future Fifty scale-up program — and also took in a “multi-million pound” investment from the UK-based Business Growth Fund.

Whether there will be any domestic hang-wringing over a high growth UK business being sold to a European rival remains to be seen.

In a statement on its sale to TravelPerk, CEO James McLean omitted to mention the pandemic’s impact on the travel sector — choosing instead to highlight what he couched as the pair’s shared “mission” to reduce the cost and complexity of business travel.

“Those shared objectives, combined with the natural cultural fit between our two companies, means we are incredibly excited to bring our teams together. Combining TravelPerk’s industry-leading knowledge, technology, experience and first class customer support with our own is a powerful proposition and we can’t wait to get started,” McLean added.

While Click Travel has focused on serving the UK market, TravelPerk has had a global focus from the start.

It has also attracted a large amount of external investment (totalling just under $300M) over its shorter run (founded in 2015).

Back in April, for example, it raised a $160M Series D round. It had also topped up its Series C round in July 2019 before the pandemic hit. So TravelPerk hasn’t been short of funds to ride out the COVID-19 revenue crunch — and as well as shopping for competitors it has also been able to avoid making any layoffs over the travel crisis. 

Per a press release, capital to fund the Click Travel acquisition was provided by Boston-based investment manager, The Baupost Group.

TravelPerk’s Meir remains bullish about the near-term prospects for growth in the business travel sector, despite ongoing concerns in Europe and the US about the more infectious ‘Delta’ variant of the virus which is contributing to surging rates of COVID-19 in some markets (including the UK) — claiming it’s already seeing green shoots of recovery in “key markets”.

“TravelPerk is outgrowing the market pace and is already at above 2019 revenue figures,” Meir told TechCrunch. “When it comes to the rest of the industry, the recovery of travel is well underway but moving at different speeds in different markets. For instance in the US, according to TSA Checkpoint figures, at the current rate of recovery the US travel market is expected to reach pre-pandemic volume at the end of August 2021.

“We anticipate the global market may take a little longer but are optimistic we will see close to pre-pandemic levels in 2022.”

“We’re one of the few players in the travel industry that continued scaling and growing since the beginning of the pandemic with a strategy that didn’t involve any layoffs,” he also told us. “Since March last year, our strategy has been not to sit back but to be aggressive and invest massively in our product offering and in our global reach, so that we are in the best position possible to capitalise when travel makes its full recovery. Today’s news is a major part of that plan.

“We will aim to continue being aggressive in our growth strategy and we are open to more acquisitions if they make strategic sense and are aligned with our vision and culture.”

Per Meir, Click Travel and TravelPerk will initially continue to run as two independent platforms but he confirmed that an “eventual full integration” is planned — with both set to operate under the TravelPerk brand in time.

The startup also says it will retain all Click Travel’s staff — denying it has plans to axe any jobs. It also intends to hold onto the company’s Birmingham base — having the city as another UK hub for its business (in addition to its existing London office).

“The 150 amazing people working for Click Travel were a big reason why we wanted to acquire the company, and were priced into the deal,” said Meir. “We have no plans of redundancies. We rather aim to integrate the entire team into the TravelPerk Group.”

Asked if TravelPerk might consider expanding its focus to also target the enterprise segment, he noted that it’s seen interest from larger businesses — and said he’s “open” to the idea — but for now Meir said TravelPerk remains fully focused on the SME market: “where we think there is the biggest need, and the biggest growth potential”.

“That’s why this acquisition is so exciting for us; it makes us undoubtedly the leading travel management platform for SMEs globally,” he added.

Flexibility and sustainability

Discussing how the pandemic has changed business travel, Meir highlighted two “important trends” he said TravelPerk will continue to invest it: Namely flexibility for bookings; and sustainability so environmental impact can be reduced.

TravelPerk plans to invest more than $100M in two key products in these areas (aka: FlexiPerk and GreenPerk), per Meir.

“We’ve noticed on our platform that travellers are booking closer to their departure date: Before the pandemic, trip searches were usually conducted between 7 and 30 days prior to the selected departure date,” he said, elaborating on the importance of flexibility for the sector. “Now we are seeing most trip searches are for trips less than 6 days away. Flexibility is therefore one of the most in-demand perks in business travel. Travellers will rely on flexible fares to give them the peace of mind that they won’t lose money if they need to change or cancel a trip on short notice.”

On sustainability, Meir said businesses are already looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint and general environmental impact, while consumers are also wanting to make conscientious decisions to reduce carbon emission — suggesting that train-based travel is set to gain ground (vs flights) as a result. (That might, ultimately, require some creative retooling of TravelPerk’s logo — which prominently features an airplane icon… )

“We expect to see significant interest in our carbon offsetting product, GreenPerk, as a result but we also expect to see changes in how people are choosing to travel,” he said.

“For instance, rail is undoubtedly the more environmentally-friendly travel option. In fact, taking a train over a domestic flight can reduce an individual’s carbon emissions by about 84%. We have been building out our rail inventory for a number of years now and we expect train travel to be an increasingly popular business travel option for customers this year and next.”

As for the changing mix of business-related travel in a pandemic-reconfigured world of remote work, Meir continues to argue that more businesses providing employees with remote working options will sum to more business travel overall.

“This might be bad news for the daily commute but it will result in more business travel,” he suggested. “Whether they are going fully remote and ‘working from anywhere’, or operating on a hybrid model, distributed teams will need (and want) to come together. We believe there will be a new type of business trip — one where team members will travel from different working hubs to get together for teambuilding and brainstorming sessions, for meetings with clients and colleagues, and even for ‘bleisure’ (business and leisure) trips.”

French startup ManoMano has raised a Series F funding round of $355 million led by Dragoneer Investment Group. The company operates an e-commerce platform focused on DIY, home improvement and gardening products. It is currently available in six European countries. Following today’s funding round, the company has reached a valuation of $2.6 billion.

In addition to Dragoneer Investment Group, Temasek, General Atlantic, Eurazeo, Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund, Aglaé Ventures, Kismet Holdings and Armat Group are also participating.

“We operate in Europe and we are the industry leader in online sales,” co-founder and co-CEO Philippe de Chanville told me. In France in particular, the company has been profitable for a couple of years already. In 2020 alone, the company’s gross merchandise volume doubled to €1.2 billion ($1.42 billion at today’s rate).

So why did the company raise given that it’s already in a strong position to replicate the same model in other European markets? Because they could and because they didn’t need to. With a high valuation, ManoMano could raise quite a bit of money without having to sell a significant chunk of its equity.

In addition to France, the startup operates in Spain, Italy, Belgium, Germany and the U.K. With today’s funding round, the company wants to develop its activities in the U.K. and Germany in particular — they are Europe’s two biggest markets for home improvement and gardening.

ManoMano sells products to hobbyists and also targets the B2B market with ManoManoPro. It’s already working well in France with very small teams (1 to 5 employees) and the company is expanding this offering to Spain and Italy.

The startup will also invest more heavily in its product and build a better logistics infrastructure. “For the logistics part, we work with third-party logistics companies — we are a tech company,” co-founder and co-CEO Christian Raisson told me.

ManoMano doesn’t have its own warehouses and doesn’t own any inventory. That’s why ManoMano plans to recruit 1,000 people over the next 18 months and most of them will be tech profiles.

While ManoMano has 7 million clients, sales of home improvement and gardening items still mostly happen in brick-and-mortar stores. The startup is well aware that it’s not just a matter of having the best products at good price points.

ManoMano works with advisors (or Manodvisors) so that experts can give advice whenever customers need some tips. Overall, customers have initiated 2.3 million conversations with advisors in 2020. Recommendations and advice will be key to gain market shares. And the company is now well capitalized to innovate on this front and differentiate itself from other e-commerce platforms.