China’s secret startup advantage: liquidity

This year’s rush of IPOs from Chinese tech companies has dominated headlines, but what’s more interesting is how quickly they got there.

Traditionally, “going public” represented the gratifying culmination of sleepless nights and missed birthdays that went into building a company. The peak of a lengthy climb, where founders and VCs would finally see the fruits of their labor. 

However, Chinese companies appear to be reaching that peak much quicker than their American peers, heading to the public markets only a few years after initial venture investments, and often with little operating history. 

Analyzing twenty of the most high profile Chinese tech IPOs this year, the average time from first venture investment to IPO was only around three to five years. Take e-commerce platform Pinduoduo, which pulled in $1.6 billion less than three years after its Series A.  Or the recent IPO of EV-manufacturer NIO, which raised a billion dollars just three-and-a-half years after its Series A and having just delivered its first car in June.

China IPO data for 2018 compiled from NASDAQ, Pitchbook, and Crunchbase

That’s less than half the average 10-year timeline for venture-backed US tech companies that went public in 2018, including Dropbox, Eventbrite, and DocuSign, which all IPO’d more than a decade after their initial investments.

Differences in market maturity, government involvement, and support from large tech incumbents all undoubtedly play a factor, but the speed to liquidity for the Chinese companies is still astounding.

Faster liquidity can push cycle of returns, fundraising, reinvestment

Speed to liquidity is a critical metric for the health of a startup ecosystem. It creates a positive cycle where faster liquidity can drive faster fundraising, faster reinvestment, faster startup building, and faster public liquidity again.  An accelerated cycle could be especially appealing for funds with LPs that require faster returns due to cash commitments or otherwise.

It’s important to note that venture returns are a function of capital and time, so quicker exits will also drive higher returns for the same amount invested.  For example, a $1 million investment with a $5 million exit after ten years would generate an Internal Rate of Return (a commonly used metric to evaluate VC performance) of 20%.  If the same exit occurred after five years, the IRR would be 50%. 

Liquidity is a key consideration as China’s influence on the flow of global venture capital intensifies. As China’s tech ecosystem sees more of its darlings mature and more consistently deliver smashing exits, investments in China will have to be a more serious consideration for VCs, even if only to minimize the sheer amount of time, resources, and painstaking energy needed to build a company in the U.S.

SenseHawk, drone analytics for the solar industry, takes flight with $2M investment

The consumer market is just the tip of the iceberg for drones, which have the potential to deploy across a range of different industry verticals such as construction or agriculture.

That’s the premise beyond SenseHawk, a U.S-India startup that specializes in using data captured by drones to develop insight for projects within the solar industry. The startup is currently active in three markets — its two home countries and Australia — and now it has raised $2 million from SAIF Partners to push its business on and expand into new regions. A number of undisclosed angel investors also took part in the round.

The company was founded in December 2015 by Swarup Mavanoor and Rahul Sankhe, who previously both spent time working for renewable energy company SunEdison. Mavanoor that the idea for the business came when using a drone to collect data for a construction project. While the information gathering gave considerably more insight that traditional methods of deploying people, the duo found that there was no service for extracting specific data required.

“We started looking around and though lots of people are doing basic drone data processing, no-one is really looking at this vertical,” Mavanoor told TechCrunch in an interview. Thus SenseHawk was born.

[Left to right] SenseHawk co-founders Swarup Mavanoor and Rahul Sankhe

The company isn’t really a drone business, it’s more of a data and analytics startup.

That’s because it doesn’t pilot drones itself. Rather, it helps companies that own and use them to get the insight that they need for each project. SenseHawk is developing an AI platform that’s split into different modules. Those include terrain-based analysis tools, a construction monitoring and analytics system, and thermal analysis.

Mavanoor said that clients adopt modules based on requirements, with some taking all three.

He said the startup plans to use the new funds raised to develop its core tech and AI platform, including new modules, and expand its business into new regions such as Europe and Africa. It is also hiring, with its headcount is set to expand to around 20 people in the coming weeks. Its engineering team is based in Bangalore, India.

African experiments with drone technologies could leapfrog decades of infrastructure neglect

Many verticals that involve outdoor work have the potential for drone-based analytics and services, but SenseHawk is sticking to the industry it knows best for the time being.

“Our core development is focused on solar because we are from the industry so have an advantage in terms of our network and understanding of what’s needed. We did look at [other industries like] agriculture, but the worry was where do you make money.

“What you can deliver with a drone is basic analytics, but agriculture requires precise data on what to do and how to progress,” Mavanoor added. “Ultimately, we decided that there’s no point in doing 10 things and doing a decent job, versus sticking to one thing and doing an amazing job.”

India’s budget hotel startup OYO raises $1B for international growth

OYO, the India-based startup that operates a network of budget hotels, has pulled in $1 billion in new funding to grow its business in China and expand into other international markets.

The majority of the funding — $800 million, to be exact — was led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund with participation from Lightspeed, Sequoia and Greenoaks Capital. OYO said there is also an additional $200 million that has been committed from as-yet-unnamed investors. The deal values the five-year-old company at $5 billion.

Before today, OYO had raised $450 million from investors. Its previous financing was a $250 million round last September which was led by the Vision Fund and included a $10 million follow-on investment from China Lodging.

OYO was started in May 2013 by Thiel Fellow Ritesh Agarwal, who was then aged 19. The company aggregates budget hotels and hostels in India, ensuring that they include minimum standards such as clean sheets, hot showers and free WiFi. It has since branched out into other kinds of lodgings, and verticals that include wedding planning.

Today, OYO claims to have over 10,000 franchised or leased hotels in its network, which it says spans 350 cities across five countries. The company announced an expansion beyond India into China this summer and it is also present Nepal and Malaysia. More recently, it recently entered the UK market this month.

Its plan for China — which OYO interestingly today said is a dual “home market” alongside India — is particularly ambitious, but already the company claims to have reached 87,000 rooms in 171 cities.

China will account for $800 million of this newly-raised capital, OYO said. The remainder will be deployed to bolster its presence in India and supporting growth in its other overseas markets as well moving into other new territories. OYO isn’t saying right now what other overseas expansion plans it has up its sleeve.

“We will continue to explore newer businesses while remaining focused on both organic and inorganic growth. In the last 12 months, we have increased our international footprint to five countries… With this additional funding, we plan to rapidly scale our business in these countries, while continuing to invest further in technology and talent. We will also deploy fresh capital to take our unique model that enables small hotel owners to create quality living spaces, global,” Agarwal, the OYO CEO, said in a statement.

Qonto raises $23 million to improve business banking

French startup Qonto has raised a $23 million funding round for its fintech product. The company is trying to make business banking cheaper, faster and more efficient.

Existing investors Valar Ventures and Alven are once again leading the round. The European Investment Bank Group is also participating.

If you are running a small company or work as a freelancer, Qonto wants to replace your professional bank account. When you sign up, you get a French IBAN, one or multiple debit cards and the ability to send and receive money.

And then, it works pretty much like any challenger bank. You can create virtual cards, order more cards for your team, get real time notifications and freeze cards. This is a breath of fresh air compared to traditional business banks and their time-consuming processes.

You can then sync your transactions with accounting and invoicing services, and grant access to your accountant. Premium plans let you select multiple administrators and create a validation workflow to approve expensive transfers for instance.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to double the size of the team and create its own payment infrastructure. Qonto currently relies heavily on Treezor for the back end. The startup also plans to expand to Germany, Italy and Spain in 2019.

Qonto now has 90 employees and 25,000 clients. The company has managed $2 billion in total transaction volume so far. The fact that the same VC funds keep investing more money into Qonto is a great vote of confidence.

Eight Roads Ventures targets Southeast Asia deals

Eight Roads Ventures, the investment arm of financial giant Fidelity International, is moving into Southeast Asia where it sees the potential to plug the later stage investment gap.

The firm has funds across the world including the U.S, China and Europe, and it has invested nearly $6 billion in deals over the past decade. The firm has been active lately — it launched a new $375 million fund for Europe and Israeli earlier this year — and now it has opened an office in Singapore, where its managing partner for Asia, Raj Dugar, has relocated to from India.

The firm said it plans to make early-growth and growth stage investments of up to $30 million, predominantly around Series B, Series C and Series D deals. The focus of those checks will be startups in the technology, healthcare, consumer and financial services spaces. Already, it has three investments across Southeast Asia — including virtual credit card startup Akulaku, Eywa Pharma and fintech company Silot.

There’s a huge amount of optimism around technology and startups in Southeast Asia, where there’s an emerging middle-class and access to the internet is growing. A report from Google and Singapore sovereign fund Temasek forecasted that the region’s ‘online economy’ will grow to reach more than $200 billion. It was estimated to have hit $49.5 billion in 2017, up from $30.8 million the previous year.

Despite a growing market, investment has focused on early stages. A number of VC firms have launched newer and larger funds that cover Series B deals — including Openspace Ventures and Golden Gate Ventures — but there remains a gap further down the funding line and Eight Roads could be a firm that can help fill it.

“Southeast Asia has several early-stage and late-stage funds that cater well to the start-ups and more mature companies. The growth-stage companies, looking at raising Series B/C/D rounds have had limited access to capital given the lack of global funds operating in the region. We see phenomenal opportunity in this segment, and look forward to helping entrepreneurs as they scale their business, providing access to our global network of expertise and contacts,” Eight Roads’ Dugar said in a statement.

Meituan-Dianping’s IPO off to a good start as shares climb 7% on debut

Meituan-Dianping (3690.HK) enjoyed a strong debut today in Hong Kong, a sign that investors are confident in the Tencent-backed company’s prospects despite its cash-burning growth strategy, heavy competition and a sluggish Hong Kong stock market.

During morning trading, Meituan’s shares reached a high of HKD$73.85 (about $9.41), a 7% increase over its initial public offering price of HKD$69. When Meituan reportedly set a target valuation of $55 billion for its debut, it triggered concerns that the company, which bills itself a “one-stop super app” for everything from food delivery to ticket bookings, as overconfident.

While Meituan, the owner of Mobile, is the leading online marketplace for services in China, it faces formidable competition from Alibaba’s Ele.me and operating on tight margins and heavy losses as it spends money on marketing and user acquisition costs. As it prepared for its IPO, Meituan was also under the shadow of underwhelming Hong Kong debuts by Xiaomi and China Tower. Like Xiaomi, Meituan is listed under a new dual-class share structure designed to attract tech companies by allowing them to give weighted voting rights to founders.

The sponsors of Meituan’s IPO are Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Vegan meal delivery startup Allplants is served £7.5M Series A funding

Allplants, a London-based startup that delivers ready-made “plant-based” meals (that’s vegan, to you and me), has raised £7.5 million in Series A funding. The round is led by VC firm Octopus Ventures, which was an early backer in healthy snack delivery company Graze.

Additional investors in the round include existing backer Felix Capital (which I’m told has doubled its seed investment), Swedish VC firm Otiva, unnamed partners at VerlInvest (who are participating in a personal capacity), David Milner (ex-CEO Tyrells), Simon Nixon (founder of MoneySupermarket), and video blogger Jack Harries. Allplants reckons it is the U.K.’s largest Series A round for a vegan company.

Based on the premise that switching to a plant-based diet is the most impactful way to reduce our environmental footprint (and improve health), Allplants has developed a delivery service that wants to make it “effortlessly easy to eat more plants”. Specifically, either as a one-off or on a subscription basis, it delivers healthy, chef-made, vegan meals, for you to reheat at home.

They are “quick frozen” to lock in freshness and the idea is that you receive six meals at a time, to serve one or two people each, making the model more scalable and delivery more cost-effective. When your food is delivered you store it in your own freezer and cook/eat as needed, before your next order.

Since being founded in 2017 by brothers Jonathan and Alex Petrides, Allplants says it has served over 250,000 meals nationwide to plant-inspired foodies and built a “movement” with over 70,000 online fans. Notably, the company is a B-Corp, promising to do good by people and the planet.

Meanwhile, Allplants says it will use the investment to develop a broader range of ready-to-eat food, accelerate the growth of its community, further grow its North London-based 40-plus team, and expand the capacity of its production kitchen, which will operate on renewable and waste-created energy.

Adds Allplants’ Jonathan Petrides: “Most allplants customers aren’t veggie or vegan, they’re curious and hunting for convenient, healthy ways to boost their busy lives. This investment well help us fuel the plant-based movement forward”.

Marketing data startup Singular raises $30M

Singular, a startup working to unify data for marketers, is announcing that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding.

The company was founded by former Onavo executives, including Gadi Eliashiv, Eran Friedman and Susan Kuo — who now serve, respectively, as Singular’s CEO, CTO and COO.

Eliashiv explained that Singular was created in response to “this trend of data explosion in the marketing stack,” which require marketers to pull data from hundreds or thousands of different systems.

“Essentially what we see is the creation of this new category of marketing intelligence, where the complexity of the marketing stack has created the need for this layer that sits on top,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you use a marketing cloud like Adobe that’s bundling five products together — at the end of the day, you need a layer on top on making sense of it, helping you make better decisions.”

Eliashiv said Singular is able to go from a high-level dashboard summary for CMOs to “the finest level of detail.” He also noted that while the company is designed to integrate with existing marketing tools, it will “oftentimes displace smaller point solutions.”

“Our principal is, it has to be relevant for data, meaning we’re never going to displace your ad-buying tool,” he added. “It’s not what we do. We’re an intelligence platform.”

The idea of unifying marketing data is one that I hear a lot, but Eliashiv’s claims seem weightier when you see that Singular is already working with a number of big names, including Lyft, Yelp, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Symantec, Zynga, Match and Twitter.

Singular previously raised $20 million in funding. Norwest Venture Partners led the new round, with partner Scott Beechuk joining the board of directors.

Beechuk told me that he’d been studying marketing analytics market for quite some time, and he argued, “There is something really unique and special about Singular. It’s the bridge between mobile, web and offline, all on a single platform.”

“What you’re going to find is, there are going to be a lot of technologies that Singular replaces,” Beechuk continued. “Let’s say a CMO or [chief growth officer] has 300 different outlets where they are advertising … Every one of those systems tends to have their own analytics built in. The first thing Singular does, it replaces all of those analytics systems with a single pane of glass.”

General Catalyst, Method Capital, Telstra Ventures, Translink Capital and Thomvest also participated in the new funding.

Ola raises $50M at a $4.3B valuation from two Chinese funds

Ola, the arch-rival of Uber in India, has raised $50 million at a valuation of about $4.3 billion from Sailing Capital, a Hong Kong-based private equity firm, and the China-Eurasian Economic Cooperation Fund (CEECF), a state-backed Chinese fund. The funding was disclosed in regulatory documents sourced by Paper.vc and reviewed by Indian financial publication Mint.

According to Mint, Sailing Capital and CEECF will hold a combined stake of more than 1% in Ola . An Ola spokesperson said the company has no comment.

Ola’s last funding announcement was in October, when it raised $1.1 billion (its largest funding round to date) from Tencent and returning investor SoftBank Group. Ola also said it planned to raise an additional $1 billion from other investors that would take the round’s final amount to about $2.1 billion.

At the time, a source with knowledge of the deal told TechCrunch that Ola was headed toward a post-money valuation of $7 billion once the $2.1 bllion raise was finalized. So while the funding from Sailing Capital and CEECF brings it closer to its funding goal, the latest valuation of $4.3 billion is still lower than the projected amount.

Ola needs plenty of cash to fuel its ambitious expansion both within and outside of India. In addition to ride hailing, Ola got back into the food delivery game at the end of last year by acquiring Foodpanda’s Indian operations to compete with UberEats, Swiggy, Zomato and Google’s Areo. It was a bold move to make as India’s food delivery industry consolidated, especially since Ola had previously launched a food delivery service that shut down after less than one year. To ensure the survival of Foodpanda, Ola poured $200 million into its new acquisition.

A few months later after buying Foodpanda, Ola announced the acquisition of public transportation ticketing startup Ridlr in an all-stock deal. Outside of India, Ola has been focused on a series of international launches. It announced today that it will begin operating in New Zealand, fast on the heels of launches in the United Kingdom and Australia (its first country outside of India) this year.