Precision medicine has finally broken into the mainstream.
Source: Wired
A study finds that hackathon sponsors take advantage of free labor to create “fictional expectations of innovation that benefits all.”
Source: Wired
French startup Lydia announces two new things today. First, the company is launching a financial hub with multiple new products. Second, Lydia is announcing a new premium subscription to access those new features.
“Today, we’re lucky enough to have you here to announce you the biggest thing we’ve done since Lydia’s launch,” co-founder and CEO Cyril Chiche said in a press conference. “We’ve been working on this for a while — and it’s not a challenger bank.”
Lydia is no longer just a peer-to-peer payment app with a few other features. The company says it is now building a meta-banking app, sitting above other financial products. So you’ll find and control a handful of financial products in the Lydia app.
“We didn’t want to stop at aggregating services,” Chiche said. “But we tried to think about people-centric, exclusive features that you can’t find anywhere else.”
Let’s go through the new features. There’s a new IBAN menu where you can add new recipients using a good old IBAN account. Lydia also asks you if you want to add specific IBANs to your own bank accounts. This way, instead of opening BNP Paribas’ app to copy and paste an IBAN into Société Générale’s app, you can add recipients from Lydia.
And of course, you can also send money to your recipient. You can use money from your Lydia e-wallet or from one of your own bank account. You don’t have to open your banking app anymore. Lydia leverages Budget Insight for this feature.
Lydia also supports recurring transactions. “It’s been the most requested features for multiple years,” co-founder and CTO Antoine Porte said. For instance, you can pay for your share of the internet bill every month using Lydia. The app sends you a notification every month to confirm the transaction.
Finally, there’s a brand new tab to get an overview of multiple accounts. You can see your bank account and Lydia sub-accounts. For instance, if you’re going on vacation with a few friends, you can create a Lydia sub-account and manage all your expenses from Lydia without any fee.
Interestingly, you can create a URL and send it to friends who are not using Lydia. Other users can then pay using your debit card. It feels like a streamlined version of Lydia’s existing money pot feature.
This is a big step for the company as Lydia is launching Lydia Premium for those new features. You can connect to your bank accounts, create recurring payments and sub-accounts for a monthly post. It’ll cost €2.99 per month ($3.69).
Existing features are still free. You can send and receive money in a just a few seconds with a Lydia transaction. You can pay in Franprix stores or on Cdiscount with your Lydia account.
You can try some of the new features with a free account. For instance, you can link one bank account, you can create one recurring payment, you can generate one virtual card, you can create money pots with some fees, etc.
Just like before, you can generate a virtual card for free so that you can pay on the internet or use Apple Pay with it. But if you’re a Lydia Premium subscriber, you’ll be able to generate multiple virtual cards to manage your online subscriptions. For instance, you can stop a subscription by deleting a virtual card or change the payment source for this card.
If you want to get a good old plastic card, you can pay an extra euro. For €3.99 per month ($4.92), you get everything I just described and a MasterCard. When you pay, the card uses your Lydia e-wallet and sends you a notification. You can open the app and choose one of your bank accounts to debit your bank account instantly.
Personal IBAN numbers and direct debits are no longer available for now — you could generate one for free. They’ll be back as part of Lydia Premium with new features as well as shared accounts. You’ll be able to pick a bank account for each transaction. For instance, you can say that you use LCL for your electricity bill and Fortuneo for your taxes. Lydia partners with Treezor for IBANs, virtual and physical cards.
Lydia currently has a little bit over a million registered users. And the startup is currently attracting around 2,000 new users every day. Over 80 percent of this user base has less than 30 years.
Lydia is currently available in France, Ireland, the U.K., Spain and Portugal. The startup also recently raised $16.1 million (€13 million) from CNP Assurances and others.
It’s interesting to see that Lydia isn’t competing head-to-head with challenger banks, such as N26 or Revolut (soon). The company thinks you can provide more value by partnering with multiple companies and building the interface that makes everything work together.
Source: TechCrunch
Yesterday we reported that Match, the parent company of Tinder, was suing Bumble for patent infringement and misuse of intellectual property.
Specifically, Match alleged that Bumble “copied Tinder’s world-changing, card-swipe-based, mutual opt-in premise” for which a patent was filed in 2013 (before Bumble was founded) but just granted a few months ago.
Today Bumble has responded to Match’s lawsuit with a letter published on their own blog and other news outlets. The full letter is linked here and we’ll also include it in full at the bottom of this post.
Interestingly, Bumble’s letter focuses less on the actual litigation and instead attempts to fill in readers about the context in which Match has decided to sue over this patent claim.
Specifically, the letter notes that this lawsuit comes after Match has made repeated attempts to buy Bumble as well as launch a copy cat “lady’s first” feature. While Bumble or Match have never publicly acknowledged negotiations between the two companies, sources close to the situation have confirmed in the past to TechCrunch that there were multiple back and forth offers from Match which fell short of Bumble’s desired valuation.
With sources close to the two companies telling TechCrunch that this is the first time Match has ever mentioned possible patent infringements by Bumble, it’s very possible that Match feels that discussions have stalled and this is their way of either forcing the deal forward or making Bumble an unattractive target for other bidders that may be scared off by this potential legal liability.
The letter shows that Bumble essentially agrees with this analysis, as they openly call out the lawsuit as an intimidation tactic by saying “we swipe left on your attempted scare tactics, and on these endless games. We swipe left on your assumption that a baseless lawsuit would intimidate us.”
While anything is possible (especially in the world of M&A), the letter also strongly suggests that as of now any chance of a deal between the two companies are seriously off the table, as Bumble says “we’ll never be yours, no matter the price tag”.
When asked if any company besides Match has made a competing offer, Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd told TechCrunch that “Bumble is very excited about other potential opportunities that are still very much in discussion, and none of the recent news has affected these conversations.”
In regards to the lawsuit itself, Bumble does say (in a footnote) that they “vigorously dispute this lawsuit’s baseless claims and look forward to telling their story in court”.
It’s going to be interesting to see what happens next. If Bumble has truly swiped left on Match for good, than the dating conglomerate may feel like they have nothing to lose by pursuing their lawsuit against Bumble for as long as possible. Or, maybe it is all one big negotiating technique and they’ll end up dropping it before coming back to Bumble with a larger offer.
Either way, we’ll keep you updated as soon as we find out more. Here’s the full letter from Bumble to Match below:
Dear Match Group,
We swipe left on you. We swipe left on your multiple attempts to buy us, copy us, and, now, to intimidate us.
We’ll never be yours. No matter the price tag, we’ll never compromise our values.
We swipe left on your attempted scare tactics, and on these endless games. We swipe left on your assumption that a baseless lawsuit would intimidate us. Given your enduring interest in our company, we expected you to know us a bit better by now.
We — a woman-founded, women-led company — aren’t scared of aggressive corporate culture. That’s what we call bullying, and we swipe left on bullies. Ask the thousands of users we’ve blocked from our platform for bad behavior.
In fact, that behavior? It only fuels us. It motivates us to push our mission further — to work harder each day to build a platform, community, and brand that promotes kindness, respect, and equality. That’s the thing about us. We’re more than a feature where women make the first move. Empowerment is in our DNA. You can’t copy that.
So when you announced recently, in another attempt to intimidate us, that you were going to try to replicate our core, women-first offering and plug it in to Tinder, we applauded you for the attempt to make that subsidiary safer.
We strive every day to protect our nearly 30 million users, and to engineer a more accountable environment. Instead of swinging back and forth between trying to buy us, copy us, and sue us, why don’t you spend that time taking care of bad behavior on your platforms?
We remain focused on improving our users’ experience, and taking our mission worldwide, until every woman knows she has the power to make the first move, to go after what she wants, and to say “no” without fear.
We as a company will always swipe right for empowered moves, and left on attempts to disempower us. We encourage every user to do the same. As one of our mottos goes, “bee kind or leave.”
We wish you the best, but consider yourselves blocked.
Bumble
Source: TechCrunch
Dahmakan, a vertically-integrated Malaysian meal delivery startup, announced today that it has acquired Polpa to enter Bangkok. Dahmakan was the first Malaysian startup to participate in Y Combinator and recently received a $2.6 million round of funding earmarked for its expansion into new markets.
The company, which was launched in 2015 by former Rocket Internet executives, says it now delivers tens of thousands of meals each month in Kuala Lumpur, where it is based, and Bangkok. Co-founder and chief executive officer Jonathan Weins told TechCrunch that Dahmakan plans to venture into other Southeast Asian markets first, including Jakarta, Singapore, Hong Kong and Manila, before tackling East Asian countries like Japan and Korea.
Polpa was founded in 2014 by Julian Timings and Prongfa Uennatornaranggoon, who will join Dahmakan’s team. Polpa will continue to operate under its own brand in Bangkok.
“Polpa has incredible founders and we have been in touch with them for over a year. We shared the same excitement and wanted to do something much bigger together, so when it came to an acquisition, it made sense because they are complementary to us,” says Weins.
Polpa shares a similar business model to Dahmakan that helps them differentiate from “traditional” food delivery startups like Foodpanda (which was formerly owned by Rocket Internet) and Uber Eats. Self-described “full-stack food delivery” companies, they handle almost all parts of their business operation, including food preparation and logistics, in-house.
In order to make that possible, Dahmakan pre-plans menus a week in advance, offering a choice of several meals each day that customers can order a la carte or with discounted package deals. To make large-scale meal production and delivery efficient and affordable, the startup relies on its proprietary machine-learning routing technology. The system allows it to produce and began delivery of more than 1,200 fresh meals in an hour, or a “four times higher efficiency than the industry benchmark set by Chipotle,” Dahmakan claims. The company also says its delivery cost is five times lower than traditional food delivery companies.
As it expands, Dahmakan will need to compete with other vertically-integrated food delivery services, the most notable of which is probably Grain in Singapore. Weins says Dahmakan’s AI-based technology will be its key differentiator, because it keeps costs down while ensuring quick deliveries. Dahmakan will also be up against Foodpanda, Uber Eats and other services that offer food from a wide range of restaurants, but Weins says the benefit of choosing from Dahmakan’s pre-planned menus is quality control. Many of its chefs formerly worked in luxury hotels, including Shangri-La Kuala Lumpur, and create meals that the company says would be 30% to 50% more expensive when ordered from restaurants that aren’t able to utilize its economies of scale.
Source: TechCrunch
Sacrê merde sur un bardeau! You have only 48 hours left to apply for TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Europe. The Battlefield takes place at VivaTech at the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles on May 24th -25. The deadline — March 22, at 9 a.m. PST — is fast upon us, but you still have time. So, hop to it and apply today.
We’re not sure if it’s possible to be part of the startup world and not be familiar with Startup Battlefield and all the benefits you reap by participating. But hey, there could be true newbies in the house, so we’ll sketch out the details. Here’s how it works.
Out of all the applications TechCrunch receives, the editors select between 15 and 20 early-stage startups to compete. Each team receives expert pitch coaching from TechCrunch editors, and you’ll be thoroughly prepped and ready by the time you take the Startup Battlefield stage.
You’ll have six minutes to pitch and demo your product in front of both a large, live audience and a panel of notable judges — and to answer their questions. Five teams move on as finalists for a second round of pitching to a fresh set of equally qualified and esteemed judges.
One team will emerge victorious, claim the title of Startup Battlefield Europe winner and take home €25,000 in no-equity cash — and bragging rights, ‘natch. The winning team also receives an all-expense paid trip for two to San Francisco where they will compete in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch’s flagship event, Disrupt SF 2018 (assuming they still qualify at that time).
In addition to those valuable in-the-moment rewards, the resulting (and extensive) media exposure can truly launch your startup to the world. And to investors seeking to fund the next best-and-brightest tech startup. The entire event will be streamed live on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and it will be available later on-demand.
Every competing team, regardless of the overall outcome, joins the ranks of the Startup Battlefield alumni community. This community number nearly 750 companies, that have collectively raised more than $8 billion and created more than 100 exits. Notable names include Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, TripIt, Getaround and Cloudflare. That’s a valuable networking community right there.
If you’re detail-minded, read our Startup Battlefield Europe FAQ it has everything you need to know about applying and competing in Startup Battlefield.
One last reminder: TechCrunch does not take any equity, nor does it charge any fees to apply or to participate in Startup Battlefield. It’s no risk with a big reward potential.
TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Europe takes place at the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles on May 24th and 25th. You have 48 hours let to take your shot. Apply right here.
Source: TechCrunch
DocuSign is gearing up to go public in the next six months, sources tell TechCrunch.
The company, which pioneered the e-signature, has now filed confidentially, we are hearing. Utilizing a commonly used provision of the JOBS Act, DocuSign submitted its IPO filing behind closed doors and will reveal it weeks before its public debut.
Like Dropbox, which is finally going public this week, San Francisco-based DocuSign has been an anticipated IPO for several years now. It’s raised over $500 million since it was founded in 2003 and has been valued at $3 billion. Kleiner Perkins, Bain Capital, Intel Capital, GV (Google Ventures) and Dell are amongst the many well-known names which have invested in DocuSign.
But like many “unicorns” these days, the company took its time, spending 15 years as a private company. The DocuSign team decided that 2018 is the year for its debut and is targeting an IPO in either the second or third quarter.
DocuSign, which competes with HelloSign and Adobe Sign, amongst others, has been on a mission to get the world’s businesses to sign documents online. The team has worked with large enterprises like T-Mobile, Salesforce, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America.
Real estate, financial services, insurance and healthcare are amongst its key industries. Legal, sales and human resource departments frequently use DocuSign to send and sign documents.
In addition to large enterprises, DocuSign also offers services for small and mid-sized businesses. Individual consumers are able to use DocuSign services, too.
The company has a tiered business model, with corporations paying more for added services. Public investors will be evaluating DocuSign both on its revenue growth and customer retention.
North America is its largest market, but it’s also been focused on expanding throughout the world, including the U.K., France, Australia, Brazil, Singapore and Japan.
Since its inception, DocuSign has undergone several management changes. Early last year, Dan Springer took the helm. He was formerly CEO of Responsys, which went public and then was bought by Oracle for $1.5 billion.
Keith Krach, who is now chairman, had been running the company since 2011. Krach was previously CEO of Ariba, which was acquired by SAP for $4.3 billion.
DocuSign declined to comment.
The past few years have been slow for tech IPOs, which is a disappointment for Silicon Valley venture capitalists who can make a lot of money this way. But for the most part, enterprise tech companies have fared better than consumer tech companies, because strong customer retention makes it easier to predict growth.
Dropbox will debut this week and Spotify is slated to go public in April through a different process known as a “direct listing.” Zuora also recently revealed its IPO filing, implying that the company is expecting to debut in the coming weeks.
Source: TechCrunch
German startup N26 just raised a $160 million Series C round led by Tencent and Allianz — some of N26’s existing investors are also participating. The company has attracted 850,000 customers and raised $215 million in total. N26 is building a retail bank from scratch.
The company plans to double down on everything it’s been doing so far. It means more expansions, more partnerships with other fintech products, more features and more engineers. Allianz is investing through its Allianz X investment arm.
“I think Tencent and Allianz are a great combination or investors,” N26 co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf told me. “In the last 10 years, Tencent became one of the five most valuable companies in the world — it’s a pioneer in mobile payment and also fintech in general.”
Tencent is the company behind WeChat, mobile payment service WeChat Pay, WeBank, TenPay and countless of products.
“On the other hand, when you look at Allianz, it’s one of the most traditional finance companies in the world and also from Germany,” he continued. “It is a traditional brand that also believes in the changes of the financial industry.”
The company goes one step further and is also setting some aggressive goals with this funding round. N26 plans to reach more than 5 million customers by 2020. This year alone, N26 plans to process $16 billion (€13 billion) in transaction volume. British competitor Revolut currently processes $1.5 billion per month. It seems like there’s enough room for both of them to grow for now.
This funding round really brings N26 to a pre-IPO stage Valentin Stalf
While many companies use funding rounds to share some information about their roadmap, N26 has already announced a few things. N26 plans to roll out its product in the U.K. and the U.S. later this year.
Some products, such as savings, invest, overdraft and insurance are limited to Germany and/or Austria. The company will roll out those features to more markets in the future.
It’s also worth noting that N26 is now talking about leveraging artificial intelligence to create a smart banking experience. So you can expect some level of automation in the future if you’re fine with a robot managing your money.
I also asked Stalf about plans to expand beyond Europe and the U.S. given Tencent’s investment, but it’s not on the roadmap for now. “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything about our plans to go to Asia,” he said.
There are now 380 people working for N26. The company plans to hire more people, which should speed up product updates. And here are two things you can expect this year. First, N26 is working on shared accounts so that you can use your N26 account with your significant other. Second, you can expect some multi-currency features after the U.K. launch.
“It’s a good round to be as independent as possible,” Stalf said. “This funding round really brings N26 to a pre-IPO stage. I think we see a clear path to a very sustainable company with this funding round. Maybe in the next five years there will be an IPO.”
That’s one way of saying that N26’s valuation is now too high for a quick acquisition. Nevertheless, it’s great to see a potential European tech giant growing so quickly and willing to remain an independent company.
Source: TechCrunch
Eight Roads Ventures, the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity International, is officially launching its new European fund today.
Targeting scale-ups in Europe and Israel, ‘Eight Roads Ventures Europe’ will have $375 million in capital to deploy, mostly at the Series B and Series C stages but also in scale-ups that although bootstrapped have found market fit and traction and are in need of growth capital.
It plans to back a total of 15 to 20 companies, with an average investment size of between $10 million and $30 million, and will invest right across the region. Eight Roads Ventures also plans to remain sector agnostic, although enterprise, consumer, fintech and healthcare IT are name checked as markets of particular interest.
“The strategy continues to be to find European scale-ups — and by Europe we mean Europe and Israel — and help them become global winners,” Davor Hebel, Managing Partner and Head of Eight Roads Ventures Europe, tells me during a call.
“We are very excited about the health of the European ecosystem. We see more and more best young talent deciding to choose their career in entrepreneurship, and we see more and more early-stage funds popping up in different regions. And our strong belief is that there is no one place where great European companies are going to come up”.
Describing Europe as “truly the most scattered and distributed geography,” Hebel cites recent Eight Roads Ventures investments in companies founded in Hamburg, Malmo, Tel Aviv, and Paris, not just the most popular hubs of London, Berlin and Stockholm. “The real focus is to find great companies no matter where they are and to help them scale up from, typically, thirty to fifty employees to five hundred or one thousand employees,” he says.
Scaling up is also where Eight Roads Ventures sees a “resource gap” in the European market. This includes a big difference in the amount of growth capital available to companies in the U.S. compared to those in Europe. However, it’s not just money, but also a gap in knowledge of how to scale.
“This is where we want to bring our growth tool kit, and help companies around things like scaling sales and marketing, and expanding internationally, building layers of management, all the things that European companies are looking to do as they become globally and regionally successful,” says Hebel.
Talking specifically about the VC firm’s interest in fintech and healthcare, the Eight Roads Ventures Europe boss notes that a generation of technologies are moving into “pretty regulated industries” and that while this has major challenges it also brings a lot of interesting opportunities.
“One of the big raw materials is great entrepreneurship,” he says, and that to transform a highly regulated market you need people who can really shake things up. This is already happening in fintech with challenger banks going after opportunities “where it’s still early days but the ultimate prize is pretty big,” and we’re now starting to see the same thing in healthcare.
“Ten percent of the world’s GDP goes on healthcare spend, yet we feel like we can still do much better in terms of both preventing and then curing different diseases,” adds Hebel.
Meanwhile, since launching its first standalone European fund in 2010, Eight Roads Ventures has backed over 20 companies in the region. They include AppsFlyer, Compte Nickel, InnoGames, Made.com, Neo4j, Treatwell and Wallapop.
Source: TechCrunch
Bezos tweeted the Boston Robotics dog from MARS, Amazon’s invite-only robotics conference in California.
Source: CNET