Monthly Archives: May 2018

Adzuna, the meta-search engine for jobs, has raised £8 million in Series C funding from Smedvig Capital. The U.K. company’s previous backers include Index Ventures, Passion Capital, LocalGlobe and more than 400 Crowdcube investors. It takes total funding to £12 million.

Founded by the team behind Gumtree, Zoopla and Qype, Adzuna essentially aggregates job listings across the web to offer a single destination to search for a job. It launched first in the U.K. in 2011 but has since expanded to 16 countries, in which co-founder Doug Monro tells me the U.K., the U.S., Germany, Netherlands, France and Brazil are its strongest markets.

“We’re growing very quickly in several of the others. We are really excited about the growth we are seeing in the U.S. in particular,” he says.

Across the 16 sites Adzuna operates, the jobs search engine is seeing 10 million monthly visitors, and has 7 million registered users. “Millions” of CVs have been uploaded to the site — no doubt drawn in by Adzuna’s data-driven “ValueMyCV” tool — and it currently aggregates 5,000 sources of jobs. But, perhaps more importantly, given its Series C backing, the company is disclosing more than £1 million in monthly revenue.

Adzuna generates revenue by referring job seekers to jobs. Job ads are included for free in its search index to ensure it always lists every job available, but advertisers have the option to promote listings on a CPC basis similar to Google Adwords. “Some additional revenue is generated through labor market data sales and of course now from the Find a job contract which is publicly disclosed,” says Monro.

The “Find a job” contract is a major recent win for the company that saw it displace competitor Monster who ran the pre-existing Universal Jobmatch service for the U.K. government’s Department for Works and Pensions. The publicly procured contract is said to be worth £2.5 million per year.

“We’d been talking to the DWP for a number of years about our vision for how we could help use our tech to help make their service better,” Monro tells me. “Last year they decided to put the Universal Jobmatch out to tender. As a startup with little govtech experience, we thought we had very little chance, but with the help of the Public.io team, we gave it a shot. There was a lot of paperwork and processes to navigate, and we were lucky to have great mentors to help guide us through this, but we were also pleasantly surprised with how agile and open to change the DWP team were.”

Meanwhile, on who Adzuna’s most direct competitors are these days, Monro says there are a number of other job search engines that aggregate content in a similar way but that he believes the startup is taking the market to the next level by bringing innovative tools and smart data to bear, such as the ValueMyCV tool and machine-learning based matching. “It’s a huge market and we are focused on building the best solution for job seekers. We see ourselves as competing in that sense with the likes of Indeed, ZipRecruiter and LinkedIn,” he says.

Pluralsight is having a pretty good day in its debut as a public company, with its shares popping more than 30% after its first trade following its IPO.

There’ll be a little bit of debate as to whether Pluralsight might have left some money on the table in its IPO after raising its price last night above its original target range. After looking at a range between $12 and $14 per share, the company settled on $15 in an IPO that would raise as much as $357 including additional shares offered to underwriters. But the significant pop this morning suggests that there is both a lot of demand for the company, and also that it could have potentially captured more capital in its IPO.

Still, Pluralsight will be considered a pretty successful one this morning, much like zScalar and Dropbox before it. Pluralsight, like many other enterprise-focused companies, offers investors an opportunity to tap a business model that can grow more consistently and methodically than a consumer company subject to the whims of fickle consumers. While Dropbox has more of a hybrid model, it was considered a substantially successful enterprise IPO, as was zScalar and others earlier this year.

Pluralsight offers companies a way to run courses that help their employees pick up new software engineering skills. That’s important for larger companies that can have a sprawling employee base, offering them an opportunity to find talent in their own workforces that might be missing a few skills instead of having to look out in a very competitive landscape. That minted another successful unicorn startup in the Utah tech scene, and now the company is going to potentially offer a nice return for its investors and an opportunity for investors with some appetite for risky early IPOs .

The company launched in 2004 and was largely bootstrapped until its first financing round in 2013, and raised nearly $200 million total prior to going public. Having a successful IPO like this one is also going to have the ancillary effect of keeping up morale at the company, as well as attracting talent with generous compensation packages. Pluralsight can point to the pop in its IPO and ongoing performance as a public barometer of its success, and the interest Wall Street has in it going forward as a good investment.

Cryptocurrency startup Circle has raised a $110 million funding round, which values the company near $3 billion. Cryptocurrency mining company Bitmain is leading the round.

Existing investors IDG Capital, Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Digital Currency Group and Pantera are investing more money. Blockchain Capital and Tusk Ventures are investing in Circle for the first time. Goldman Sachs also invested in the company in a previous round.

It’s hard to describe Circle in a few words because the company has been active on all fronts. For a really long time, the company pitched itself as a social payment company, a Venmo and Square Cash competitor. But Circle is more focused than ever on cryptocurrencies.

The company has been operating one of the largest over-the-counter trading desks for big cryptocurrency investors and exchanges. Circle Trade manages more than $2 billion a month in transactions and is able to fulfill large orders and provide liquidity.

More recently, the company launched Circle Invest, a really simple mobile app for the U.S. market. It lets you buy and sell Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin, Zcash and Monero in just a few taps. It’s a good way to get started with cryptocurrencies without learning about exchanges and order types. It could become a good Coinbase competitor for small cryptocurrency investors.

And Circle also acquired Poloniex, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the U.S.

But the most interesting projects right now are probably CENTRE and a new tokenized USD coin. There are so many different cryptocurrencies, fiat currencies, exchanges and wallets that it has become hard to make everything work together. Cryptocurrencies still suffer from price volatility, so bitcoin can’t be the common denominator.

That’s why Circle is creating a token that is pegged to the U.S. dollar. The USD Coin is based on an open source framework developed by CENTRE and everything should be audited regularly.

CENTRE is a Circle initiative to create a common framework to connect all electronic wallets. This protocol could let you send money to an Alipay user with your Square Cash balance.

It’s clear that Circle wants to build the infrastructure of the cryptocurrency industry. The company will need to convince multiple industry players to work with Circle, but it could help the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a whole.

Carro, an automotive classifieds service and car financing startup based in Singapore, has closed a $60 million Series B round to scale its business in Southeast Asia.

The deal was co-led by SoftBank Ventures Korea, Insignia Ventures — the firm from ex-Sequoia Asia partner Yinglan Tan — and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital Group. Other participants include IDG Ventures India founder Manik Arora (via his family fund) and existing Carro backers Venturra, Singtel Innov8, Golden Gate Ventures and Alpha JWC.

Carro raised a $12 million Series A round in March 2017. This latest capital takes it to $78 million from investors to date, according to Crunchbase.

The 2.5-year-old company said in an announcement that $250 million of vehicles were sold last year across its three markets: Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore. That’s more than double the $120 million it claimed in 2016. Last March, Carro introduced its Genie Finance underwriting business, and over its first year, it claims to have originated over $100 million in loans while amassing a loan book of nearly $40 million.

Carro CEO Aaron Tan previously spent time at Singtel Innov8 and is one of a trio of co-founders. Tan told TechCrunch that the capital will initially be spent growing Carro’s business in Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore, but further down the line, there’s a plan for expansion.

“The exact markets are still to be determined but it may be a small setup in Japan and other sources of cars,” he added.

Carro has already expanded in terms of services. Initially a vehicle marketplace, it launched Genie Finance and has also forayed into insurance brokerage and road-side assistance. It recently introduced a service that completes vehicle sales in 60 minutes — Carro Express — which it said is now available in 30 locations across Southeast Asia.

“We will double down on our online marketplaces and financing in emerging markets this year. Ultimately, we want to improve the experience of selling and buying a car, as well as provide access to capital to the next billion people, which will improve the quality of lives,” Tan said in a statement.

Carro is rivaled by a number of startups, including BeliMobilGue in Indonesia, Carsome, iCar Asia and Rocket Internet’s Carmudi, although with its new raise in the bank Carro is the best-funded by some margin.

iCar Asia, which is managed by Malaysian venture builder Catcha, raised $19 million last November. This year has seen Carsome — which covers Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand — raise a $19 million Series B, BeliMobilGue — Indonesia-only — raise $3.7 million and Carmudi land $10 million.

In the case of Carmudi, the business has retrenched itself. At its peak it covered over 20 markets worldwide across Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, but today its focus is on Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

Carro’s monster raise follows another notable deal in Southeast Asia today which saw Carousell close a Series C round worth $85 million. The firm added backing from new investors DBS, Southeast Asia’s largest bank, and EDBI, the corporate investment arm of Singapore’s Economic Development Board.

Capital One has acquired the San Francisco-based digital identity and fraud alert startup Confyrm, the company announced through a blog post on Thursday. The deal will bring Confyrm’s technology to the bank in order to help speed its development and implementation of consumer identity services at scale.

CEO Andrew Nash founded Confyrm in 2013, along with Dale Olds and Emma Lindley, with a vision of restoring trust in digital identities, he says.

“We recognized that despite an increasing reliance on digital identities, consumer trust in those identities continued to erode,” explains Nash. “We wanted to make a real difference to reducing online fraud and to make the internet a safer place for everyone engaged in it, but critically to do this without abusing customer privacy and storing personal data.”

The company created a system to offer early notifications of suspicious account activity, in order to mitigate the impact of fraud or account theft for identity providers and consumers alike. The system also uses privacy-enhancing mechanisms to protect the identities of the individual consumers and the event publishers.

For example, if a financial service was processing a password reset request but detected that the consumer’s email account had been taken over by a fraudster, it could stop the attack on the consumer’s account immediately. Meanwhile, the consumer could be alerted at the same time to take additional steps to secure their account.

Before starting Confyrm, Nash had previously served as Director of Identity Services at Google, one of the largest providers of consumer identity services in the world, with over a billion consumer and enterprise accounts. He also served as Senior Director of Consumer Identity at PayPal, managing over 350 million identities validated for use in the financial services space, and was Director of Technologies at RSA Security.

So for Capital One, the acquisition of Confyrm isn’t just about the technology itself – it’s about bringing Nash on board.

Following the deal’s close, Nash will become Managing Vice President of Consumer Identity Services.

He says working at Capital One will help the team reach more consumers than a startup could on its own, allowing them to “massively increase the set of consumers that we can help to protect.”

It’s unclear how far along Confyrm was on actually bringing its product to consumers – its website touted a few pilot programs several years ago, but hadn’t been updated in some time. Some of the site’s text is still “Lorem Ipsum” filler text, in fact, and there’s been little coverage by press in the years since its founding. The company hadn’t talked much about its pilot partners, but the list was reported to include an internet email provider, mobile operator, financial services company, and multiple e-commerce sites. Likely, Capital One was the early partner, which is what later led to this acquisition.

On the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) website, one of Confyrm’s pilot programs was listed, noting pilot partners included InCommon, Google, AOL, LinkedIn, and Microsoft. (AOL merged with Yahoo to form Oath, which also now owns TechCrunch.)

Deal terms regarding the Capital One acquisition were not being shared, but Confyrm had raised $1.2 million, according to Crunchbase, which attributes the funding to a grant. (Another source states the grant was for $2.4 million, however).

Acquiring an early stage startup isn’t rare for Capital One, which regularly picks up young companies to fuel its company with fresh talent and unique IP. Over the past several years, it’s acquired mobile savings startup BankOns, local business directory Bundle, budgeting app Level Money, design and development firm Monsoon, design firm Adaptive Path, price tracker Paribus (which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt), and secure container orchestration platform Critical Stack. 

There’s a video of Nash explaining how Confyrm works, here.

Robinhood started off as a dead-simple stock trading application that had no transaction fees — but since it’s continued to grow, and especially as it starts to dive into cryptocurrency, investors are getting pretty excited about its prospects and are pouring a ton of new funding into it.

And it’s that tantalizing prospect of creating a next generation way of trading assets and cryptocurrency is now sending Robinhood to a $5.6 billion valuation in a new financing round that the company is announcing today. Robinhood says it’s closed a $363 million Series D financing round, with DST Global led this new round and Iconiq, Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia and Capital G participated. Robinhood had a $1.3 billion valuation last year when it had around 2 million users, and Robinhood says it now has 4 million users and has passed $150 billion in transaction volume.

“It’s the only place right now where you can trade crypto, stocks, and options all in one place,” CEO Vlad Tenev said. “For us to construct an experience that feels seamless and natural for customers, that for example want to sell an equity and use the proceeds to buy crypto, seamlessly, that’s been challenging not just from a product and design standpoint, but also infrastructure standpoint. There’s complexity under the hood, and our goal is to make it as seamless as possible in the process and make that complexity go away.”

Those 4 million users — and that valuation — indicates that Robinhood has clearly exposed a lot of demand for an easier way to users to dip their toes into financial services without having to work with firms that have trading fees like Scotttrade or E*Trade. And while there are a lot of services that offer robo-advisory services like Betterment and Wealthront, which make it easier to start investing small amounts of money, Robinhood offers users the opportunity to do these things at a more granular level.

And, of course, there’s the cryptocurrency aspect that is clearly spurring a lot of interest in the company. At the time, 1 million users waitlisted for access in just the five days after Robinhood Crypto was announced. Robinhood has premium services like Robinhood Gold, where the company can find additional ways to generate revenue that offset the requirements of running a system that allows users to trade stocks for free. Robinhood has raised $539 million to date, as diving into financial services can be an expensive prospect, as well as getting enough users on board to the point that it can scale to a level that the business starts to increasingly make sense.

Robinhood’s crypto trading service came out in February and by today, the company says it’s available in 10 states. The company also rolled out a web version and stock option trading, trying to become a more robust financial services company that’s still tuned to a younger generation that wants an easier way to get into investing without needing a big balance to invest. Most of Robinhood’s users, too, aren’t so-called “day traders” and are instead holding stocks for a while after they buy them.

“If you look at the data and the statistics, people that are active day traders are actually a very small percentage of our space,” Tenev said. “People that are actually transacting on that cadence are the minority of our customers. Most of our customers engage in more of these buy and hold accumulation strategies. We really see a lot of unique things because we don’t charge trading commissions. There are customers that deposit money regularly twice or once a month and then buy stocks as soon as those deposits come in. We don’t see a lot of customers that are doing rapid buying and selling.”

Still, as it tries to further expand — especially into products like crypto and new regions — it’s going to increasingly find itself trying to jump hurdles that financial services companies find when going abroad. And there’s always a chance that the trading platforms will try to become a little more competitive (and companies like Square are even getting into Bitcoin trading). That’s going to require a robust amount of funding to try to outmaneuver well-capitalized companies that might already have those relationships in place to more easily expand.

“The political climate is uncertain, it sort of affects everyone, it doesn’t affect us uniquely,” Tenev said. “We’re a crypto business now. Not a lot of people have a ton of clarity on what that’s gonna look like in the future, it’s a new space that’s evolving really rapidly. I think that we’re confident we can adapt and evolve, and we’re operating the business in a responsible way. There’s only so much you can do, but I feel like we’ve done a lot to address any concerns.”

Walmart has opened up on the thinking behind its $15 billion majority investment in Flipkart, and perhaps the most interesting facet is that the retailer plans to export ideas from the Indian e-commerce firm to the rest of its global business, including the U.S..

Walmart’s decision to follow Amazon into India is a testament to huge potential growth in the market. Internet penetration is tipped to cross 500 million this year and a rising middle-class emerging, all of which led Walmart CEO Doug McMillon to describe the deal as “a unique opportunity in a market with significant long-term growth prospects” — but the aspirations run further.

“At Walmart, we’re learning how to build — and how to partner to build — retail ecosystems around the world. India will now become a key center of learning for our entire company,” he said on a call with analysts following the announcement of the deal.

McMillon credited Flipkart for more than just an e-commerce business.

The company’s verticals span electronics, fashion and more, but Flipkart’s management team consistently returned to other services including its mobile payment arm, supply chain business than does 500,000 deliveries daily and more. They also dropped a hint at the potential to do groceries in the future, for one.

That “ecosystem” play is something that is quite unique to Asia, particularly in China, and it is an area where Walmart believes it can glean operational intelligence and potential strategy for other markets, including the U.S..

“Not only is [Flipkart] innovative [with the] problem-solving culture that they have, but they are doing some great work both in the AI space, how they are using data across their platforms but particularly in terms of the payment platform that they’ve created through PhonePe,” Judith McKenna, Walmart COO, said on the call.

“All of those things we can learn from for the future and see how we can leverage those around the international markets and potentially into the US as well,” McKenna added.

That admission is notable, and it stands to reason that Walmart — a traditional offline retailer — might seek to lean on Flipkart’s technical expertise to build out its online or tech-enabled businesses elsewhere in the world, particularly with Amazon entering offline via its Whole Foods deal. That helps bring more immediate returns since, as Walmart’s executives admitted, Flipkart isn’t likely to turn a profit any time soon since it is focused on chasing scale in India.

There’s also some synergy with Walmart’s other recent star acquisition.

McKenna added that Marc Lore, the founder of Jet.com which Walmart acquired last year for $3 billion, had been involved in scouting out Walmart during due diligence. She added that, for now, he wouldn’t be a part of the Flipkart business.

“Maybe someday we might involve him, but right now there’s plenty to do in the U.S. business and that’s what he’s focused on,” McKenna concluded.

Walmart already has an international business — which includes a physical retail footprint in India — but McKenna said the management team is “very interested” in the potential to expand Flipkart outside of India to growth that global presence, presumably using many of the aforementioned learnings taken from the Indian market.

“[International expansion] aligns with the [Flipkart] management team’s ambitions, it aligns with an operating model that we [at Walmart] are comfortable with working with. There’s no timeframe on that but it’s something that for the future we are considering,” she added.

The expansion makes sense since Walmart has spent the last couple of years regrouping its global efforts. It exited China in 2016 — instead opting for a partnership with e-commerce giant JD.com — and this month it retreated from the UK after selling its Asda business to rival high-street retailer Sainsbury’s. Perhaps its time to examine upcoming markets worldwide? In which case the $16 billion Flipkart deal begins to seem a lot more strategic.

Dreamlines, which claims to be Europe’s largest online travel agency specialising in cruise-related travel, is disclosing that it has raised €45 million in Series E funding. The round is led by Princeville Global, with participation from existing investors that include Holtzbrinck Ventures, Target Global, Dimaventures, Hasso Plattner Ventures, TruVenturo, and Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital.

Founded by Felix Schneider in 2012, Hamburg-based Dreamlines can be thought of as a Booking.com or Expedia but for cruise holidays and other cruise line type travel. The OTA connects customers to what it says is the largest portfolio of cruises around the world, including holiday packages exclusive to Dreamlines.

Meanwhile, unlike other forms of holiday and travel, the cruise industry is only more recently being digitised, a sentiment echoed by Emmanuel DeSousa, Managing Partner of Princeville Global, who joins the Dreamlines board.

“The cruise industry is the last sizable, global travel segment to be disrupted by a tech-focused online booking platform,” he says. “Under the leadership of its visionary founders, Dreamlines is uniquely positioned to continue transforming the cruise industry to an online model, leading in Europe and expanding around the world”.

To that end, Dreamlines says the investment will support its continued growth and international expansion. The company currently operates in 10 countries, partnering with over 100 cruise operators, and has raised around €110 million to date.

Adds Christian Saller, General Partner at HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and the Dreamlines chairman: “As an early investor, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures has seen Dreamlines grow by a factor ten since its initial investment into the European market leader. The new investment will allow Dreamlines to continue this success story”.

Treating issues with mental health can be a daunting and very sensitive task for anyone that is suffering from any kind of mental illness — but the problem for many is that a lot of patients just don’t know where to start, according to David Ebersman.

That’s where Lyra Health hopes to help. The service works with employers to offer a tool to their employees that helps them securely and confidentially begin to understand what kind of treatment they need to seek if they feel like they are suffering from any mental health problems. Employers naturally have a stake in this as they want their employees to stay health, but the goal is to offer a sort of safe space where users can benefit from years of growth in pattern matching and data to help them figure out where to start. The company said it has raised $45 million in a new financing round including Tenaya Capital, Glynn Capital Partners, Crown Ventures, and Casdin Capital. Existing investors that include Greylock Partners, Venrock, and Providence Ventures also participated in the funding round.

“We felt it was important to build an offering that would be helpful to all of the people who work at these companies and are suffering from a mental health condition like depression, or anxiety, or substance abuse,” Ebersman said. “A lot of the people we want to help don’t know where they’re starting. Trying to build and market something narrowly to a subset of the audience requires the audience to know they’re in that subset. Trying to build something more welcoming and engaging for a broader set of conditions felt to us to be a realistic response to the fact that not everyone can self identify. Fortunately technology really helps us with this — we can build a secure and confidential place where an employee can go and answer some questions that relate to their symptoms, severity, treatment preferences and use technology to match them for the right care.”

Lyra Health first starts off working with employers to figure out a plan to communicate to employees that the tool actually exists. But that’s one of the biggest challenges, as mental health issues — like anxiety or depression — can be very sensitive subjects for employees. Lyra Health has to work with employers to convince to give them confidence to explore it as a safe and confidential place, where they can put in information about some of their symptoms while feeling like that information is going to be locked down.

From there, Lyra takes a close look at that data and then build a set of recommendations for the patients based on what they think some of their symptoms correlate to. Lyra Health has a network of around 2,500 therapists, most of which don’t participate in traditional health plans, Ebersman said. Lyra Health then connects patients with those therapists, and they can schedule the appointment online and get started right away. Lyra Health then periodically checks in with the patients to see how they are doing and ensuring they feel like they are getting better — another data point that helps the company figure out if its recommendations are working.

“We really believed that the experience that we give to patients today could be dramatically improved,” Ebersman said. “This is part of the healthcare system that’s really hard to understand, it’s hard to navigate, and there are a bunch of different types of solutions for a variety of different conditions. We felt that trying to build a comprehensive solution that would make it easy for clients to find the care that was matched correctly to their needs and preferences was a tech problem we could start grappling right away.”

Ebersman previously oversaw the initial public offering of Facebook as its CFO, but the challenge Lyra Health entails is one that may be just as complex. Not only does the company have to establish and maintain that network of high-quality doctors and therapists, it also has to ensure that it builds and maintains a robust data set that ensures that its recommendations are actually on point — and get better over time. If it ends up as a bad product, employees won’t use it, and the recommendations can’t improve at any point. And amid all of this, the experience has to feel like a good and approachable one, even though it’s partially tackled through machine learning.

“I think we are able to successfully communicate to employees what Lyra does in a way that doesn’t seem intimidating or stigmatized,” Ebersman said. “I think the experience of exploring what your care options are using technology is a little easier for people. I think there are places where technology plays a critical role in this journey. One is creating a safe environment where you can dip your toe in the water. I also think a technology based experience can give you confidence that the best care for what you need is out there. I do believe that for most people in the care journey, interacting with a human who is warm and who you can relate to, and who has skills to help you, improve is an important piece. But if you think comprehensively from the beginning to the end of someone’s care journey, there’s a critical set of roles technology can play to ensure that more people engage and have a better experience.”

Ebersman hopes Lyra Health is riding a wave of increased awareness and attention for mental health. That could encompass anything from apps like Lyra Health to companies that are focusing on wellness like meditation apps like Calm (which is reportedly valued over $250 million). All of these companies have been able to raise pretty significant rounds of financing, but it also means that there will be a lot of activity — and a bit of a race to get adoption and build up the kind of robust data sets you need to have a formal defensibility in the marketplace. There are other approaches to mental health like Huddle, but the trick will be figuring out how to get people on board and spin up that flywheel that will make the experience better and better.

” Many people with mental health conditions don’t ever engage with the system, or if they do, are quickly intimidated with how confusing and frustrating it can be,” he said. “We believe if we build a simple and warm tech-based experience that’s confidential and secure, we can get more people engaged with the mental health system. Our engagements are about seven times higher than the companies were seeing with the solutions they had before they launched Lyra.”