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Wednesday 30 November 2022

Plant-based food brand Huel valued at $560M following Idris Elba-backed round

Plant-based food brand Huel valued at $560M following Idris Elba-backed round

Huel, the European provider of nutritional products, has sold more than 270 million meals across the globe since Julian Hearn started the company in 2015. Now with $24 million in fresh capital, it plans to do even more.

It’s been a while since we covered Huel, which originally launched in the United Kingdom in 2017 with a low-sugar, plant-based and low-carbon-footprint protein powder product and has since expanded into ready-to-drink, snack bars and hot lunch options.

In 2019, we reported on them when they launched their nutritional bars in the U.S. At the time, the company was buoyed by a Highland Europe-led $20 million venture round, at a $260 million valuation, it raised in 2018. There was even talk of Huel going public in 2021.

Today, much of the company’s sales are outside the U.K., with U.S. “Hueligans,” the company’s loyal fans, representing Huel’s second-biggest market, followed by Germany and Japan, CEO James McMaster told TechCrunch.

The company has now grown to 250 people, including a small office in New York. Year over year revenue growth is 40%, up to $170 million, which McMaster attributes to that strong new customer growth, the ready-to-eat hot lunch product launch (among others) and the company’s transition from solely direct-to-consumer to also retail stores.

Huel plant-based food

Huel’s plant-based product line. Image Credits: Huel

“We’re at the stage where having this second round of funding allows us to keep focusing on that growth,” he said. “We are going to keep innovating with new products, and are really proud of where we’re heading. We’re now the business that we hope can be a truly global brand.”

Highland Europe is back to lead that new $24 million infusion, which now values Huel at $560 million. Joining the venture fund this time is a star-studded group of new investors, including actor and UN Goodwill Ambassador Idris Elba and his wife, Sabrina Dhowre Elba, also a UN Goodwill Ambassador, television presenter Jonathan Ross and sustainable activewear brand TALA’s CEO Grace Beverley.

“I’ve been a Hueligan for several years now, starting my journey while preparing for my role in ‘Thor,’ so to come on board with Huel was an easy decision,” Idris Elba said in a written statement. “I believe in their mission to deliver nutritionally complete food, sustainably. We have some exciting projects coming up and I look forward to spreading the message and raising awareness around healthy, low carbon food.”

Meanwhile, the new funding will also be deployed in continued international expansion, with a focus on the U.S. The investment will also support new product innovation, and continued expansion online and in retail stores.

As part of the Elbas’s investment, one of the new projects will include Huel working with them on their climate change initiative to help people eat at 1.5 degrees Celsius, the global warming limit the Paris Climate Accord is trying to reach.

Huel meals fit within a diet aligned with supporting that reduction, and the company “is excited to work with Idris and Sabrina as we’re equally trying to be a force for good in the world,” McMaster added.

Huel brings its nutrition bars to the US

5 tips for scaling your green startup during a funding drought

Plant-based food brand Huel valued at $560M following Idris Elba-backed round by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch



LastPass says it was breached — again

LastPass says it was breached — again

Password manager LassPass said its investigating a security incident after its systems were compromised for the second time this year.

LastPass chief executive Karim Toubba said in a blog post that an “unauthorized party” recently gained access to some customers’ information stored in a third-party cloud service shared by LastPass and its parent company, GoTo. Toubba said the unauthorized party used information stolen from LastPass’ systems in August, which the company disclosed at the time.

Toubba did not say what specific customer information was taken, but said it was working to “understand the scope of the incident and identify what specific information has been accessed.”

GoTo, formerly LogMeIn which acquired LastPass in 2015, said in a similarly vague statement that it was investigating the incident. It’s not yet clear if both LogMeIn and GoTo customers are affected by the breach.

LastPass said in August that an unauthorized party “gained access to portions of the LastPass development environment through a single compromised developer account and took portions of source code and some proprietary LastPass technical information.” LastPass said that its system design and controls “prevented the threat actor from accessing any customer data or encrypted password vaults.”

Toubba added in the blog post Wednesday that “customers’ passwords remain safely encrypted.”

GoTo spokesperson Elizabeth Bassler declined to comment beyond LastPass’ blog post.

LastPass says it was breached — again by Zack Whittaker originally published on TechCrunch



Pinterest shuts down its ‘Creator Rewards’ program

Pinterest shuts down its ‘Creator Rewards’ program

Pinterest has shut down its Creator Rewards program that allowed creators to earn money by creating content around monthly prompts and achieving certain engagement goals.

“The Creator Rewards program will end on November 30, 2022. To all the creators who participated, thank you for your partnership. We’re committed to exploring more ways to help you find success on Pinterest and we’re looking forward to finding more opportunities to work together in 2023,” Pinterest said in a note on its creator rewards help page.

The rewards program asked participants to create Idea Pins — a video format introduced by the company last year — based on a monthly theme to earn cash.

The announcement, first reported by The Information, also said that Pinterest will pay a one-time bonus to creators who participated in at least one reward goal for August, September, or October 2022. The company didn’t specify the bonus amount on the Creator Rewards page.

Pinterest said that it is closing this program “in order to focus on other creator programs and features.” Last year, when the company debuted Creator Rewards, it said it planned to invest $20 million in the program. Separately, the company launched a $500,000 Creator Fund last year and injected an additional $1.2 million this year into the project. The social network created this project to help creators from underrepresented communities through cash and ad rewards.

Pinterest is still continuing with programs like the Creator Fund, “shoppable” Idea Pins, and paid partnerships by converting Idea Pins into ads.

Social media companies have been constantly tweaking their creator payment programs in recent times. Last month, Snapchat reduced its payouts to creators from millions of dollars per week to millions of dollars per year. In September, Meta announced that it is closing its Live Shopping program to focus on reels. At the same time, the social media giant also closed its Instagram affiliate program, which allowed creators to get a commission if users purchased tagged products from their posts.

Pinterest shuts down its ‘Creator Rewards’ program by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch



India pips North America to become the biggest smartwatch market

India pips North America to become the biggest smartwatch market

India surpassed North America to take the top global spot in the smartwatch market in the quarter that ended in September, according to a report from market research player Counterpoint. The festival sales and proliferation of affordable smartwatches helped grew the local market by 171% year-on-year.

The affordable smartwatch models getting bigger displays and adding features such as Bluetooth calling were key selling factors in India during the festival sales, Hong Kong-headquartered Counterpoint said.

“Indian brands expanding their product portfolios at affordable price points and emphasis on local manufacturing also contributed to the growth,” Counterpoint analyst Anshika Jain said in a statement.

“Bluetooth-calling emerged as an important feature, contributing a 58% share in total shipments, the highest ever share to date. Consumers are also preferring bigger display sizes, which is evident from the fact that over half of the total shipments in Q3 came from the 1.5”-1.69” display size.”

North America, which was the top market from Q4 2020 to Q2 2022, grew 21% year-on-year while China and Europe had a negative growth.

India’s growth meant that the country’s top brand Noise captured third place on overall shipment charts — thanks to a 218% year-on-year growth— only lagging Apple and Samsung.

The smartwatchmaker told TechCrunch that it aims to scale its local production from 50% to 80% by the end of the year. Local rival Fire-Boltt, which was only a percentage behind Noise in the market share, grabbed the fourth place in global rankings.

Apple grew 48% due to stellar sales of the new Apple Watch 8 series, which accounted for 56% of overall sales. Samsung grew 6% year-on-year despite registering a 62% shipping increase from the previous quarter.

Counterpoint report segregates smartwatches into two categories: High-level operating system smartwatches (HLOS), which include devices from companies like Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Garmin, and Amazfit; and what it calls “basic” smartwatches that feature a lighter operating system and are more affordable. Noise, Fire-Bollt, and BoAT operate in the latter category.

The research shop said that the HLOS segment grew 23%, whereas basic smartwatches grew by more than a double — resulting in commanding a 35% of the market share. Apple currently dominates the HLOS market with about 50% market share whereas Samsung sits second in the chart.

Image Credits: Counterpoint

“This remarkable increase in basic smartwatch shipments shows us that the market base is rapidly expanding toward more accessible segments amid aggressive drives by the supply side. But still, in terms of revenue, the HLOS smartwatch overwhelms the basic smartwatch with a market size of almost 10 times due to its high average selling price (ASP),” Research Analyst Woojin Son said in a statement.

Earlier this month, analyst firm IDC published a report on India’s wearable market, noting that the smartwatch segment grew by 178% with more than 12 million units shipped in the quarter ending September. The report said that this growth could also be attributed to falling smartwatch prices in the region as the average selling price (ASP) dropped from $60 to $41.9 in a year. IDC says that the ASP of basic smartwatches is $27.5 as compared to the $330 ASP of advanced smartwatches. This is an indicator that Indian consumers are likely to go for cheaper alternatives than the Apple Watch or the Samsung Galaxy Watch.

All the India-based smartwatch manufacturers have committed to rapidly increasing their local manufacturing output in the coming months to increase the production rate. This could help them bring down the device prices further and increase shipments to catch up with Samsung and Apple in unit shipments.

India pips North America to become the biggest smartwatch market by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch



Tuesday 29 November 2022

Disney coughs up $900M to acquire MLB’s remaining stake in BAMTech streaming company

Disney coughs up $900M to acquire MLB’s remaining stake in BAMTech streaming company

Disney paid $900 million to Major League Baseball (MLB) earlier this month to buy out the league’s remaining 15% stake in the streaming firm BAMTech, according to an SEC filing made public Tuesday.

The transaction makes Disney a 100% owner of the streaming company that powers Disney+ and the firm’s other consumer services.

The SEC filing noted that MLB’s interest in BAMTech was recorded in the entertainment company’s financial statements at $828 million, and in November Disney bought out MLB’s stake for $900 million. Last week, Disney announced that Bob Iger is returning to the company as a CEO to replace Bob Chapek. Since this transaction was undertaken earlier this month, it was probably one of the last big moves by Chapek.

In the filing, Disney said that Iger will “initiate organizational and operating changes within the Company to address the Board’s goals” in the coming months.

MLB founded MLB Advanced Media in 2000 to power its website and online streaming. It spun off the streaming division as BAMTech in 2015. A year later, Disney invested $1 billion for a 33% stake in BAMTech. In 2017, the entertainment conglomerate invested an additional $1.58 billion to acquire 42% more stake. In 2021, the National Hockey League (NHL) sold its 10% stake to Disney for $350 million— propelling Disney’s stake in BAMTech to 85%.

The move comes days before Disney+ is set to launch its ad-supported tier. In Q3 2022, the streaming service registered an increase of 12 million subscribers with a total of 164.2 million subscribers globally.

Disney coughs up $900M to acquire MLB’s remaining stake in BAMTech streaming company by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch



eFounders morphs into Hexa, a portfolio company of startup studios

eFounders morphs into Hexa, a portfolio company of startup studios

Over the past 11 years, eFounders has refined the startup studio model in Europe. The company has contributed to the launch of more than 30 different startups, including three unicorns — Spendesk, Aircall and Front.

While things seem to be doing well for the startup studio, eFounders is pivoting — sort of. As of today, eFounders is becoming Hexa, a holding company for different startup studios.

You could have seen this change coming as eFounders hasn’t been just eFounders for a while. In addition to its initial studio focused on the future of work, eFounders has already launched two new studios — Logic Founders for fintech startups and 3founders for web3 startups.

Hexa is going to run three different studios — Logic Founders, 3founders and, yes, eFounders. So what is happening with eFounders then?

“I started writing a LinkedIn article saying that it is the last time I’m writing as the founder of eFounders,” eFounders co-founder Thibaud Elzière told me. But he is not going anywhere as the eFounders core team is simply going to work for Hexa now.

Just like with Hexa’s other studios, there is a dedicated eFounders team with a head of studio as well as a core team of product people. Matthieu Vaxelaire is now at the helm of eFounders.

Combined, Hexa companies have hired 3,000 people and have reached a total valuation of $5 billion. And Hexa isn’t going to change its formula going forward. Hexa’s startup studios match an idea with a founding team.

The studio team then provides resources and help to launch a product. After raising some funding, startups gain their independence and the startup studio can move on and focus on new projects.

“We reached a limit when it comes to scalability. It’s a virtuous model but it’s also very much handcrafted work,” Elzière told me. In addition to supporting Hexa’s existing studios, the company wants to launch studios around new verticals, such as climate, education and health.

But it will depend on heads of studio that they meet and end up hiring. Hexa aims to launch two new studios next year.

“It’s a crazy bet for us. We are creating a brand from scratch. And we are doing that because eFounders is a strong brand when it comes to SaaS startups, but also because eFounders was outshining other studios,” Elzière said.

A 30% stake

“What we are doing with Hexa is that we are democratizing team entrepreneurship. We offer an alternative to traditional entrepreneurship” Elzière said. “Like a lot of things in life, when you work as a team, it works better.”

But that doesn’t mean that Hexa and its startup studios are launching new startups for fun. They are taking a significant stake in each new startup.

“We want to launch more startups. But it costs us around €800,000 to launch a company. We can either invest some money ourselves, or we could create a small fund like Y Combinator. Investors could contribute and they would end up on the cap table.”

When Hexa’s startup studios launch a new startup, they try to keep a 30% stake in the company after raising a seed round. With third-party investors, Hexa could lower its stake to something like 25%, and investors would get 5%.

Hexa’s own stake would be split between Hexa and each startup studio. “You would have 5 to 10% that would be allocated to the head of studio and their team,” Elzière said. The bottom line is that Hexa and its partners would still take a 30% stake. Then it would be split between multiple partners.

“That deal might seem a bit unfair,” Elzière said. But he thinks eFounders’ track record speaks for itself. With roughly 3 unicorns out of 30 portfolio companies, entrepreneurs are more likely to create a unicorn with the help of eFounders than without. Essentially, founders can potentially get a smaller portion of a bigger cake.

The life and death of startup studios

But where does Hexa come from exactly? It comes from the hexadecimal numbering system. In particular, hexadecimals are used to represent binary digits (0 and 1) in computing programming. Each hexadecimal character represents a succession of four binary digits.

“For me, it’s the simplest expression of the human-machine interface,” Elzière said. As a bonus, hexadecimal characters are also used by designers for color codes.

He believes that startup studios will work just like startups. Some of them will thrive, others will fail. “Studios will have a certain lifespan. At some point, they’ll run out of steam because the head of studio won’t be there anymore or there won’t be any opportunity left,” Elzière said. As always, we will judge the quality of Hexa’s work by the new startups that emerge from those studios.

eFounders morphs into Hexa, a portfolio company of startup studios by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch



Gogoro to pilot battery swapping and Smartscooters in Philippines next year

Gogoro to pilot battery swapping and Smartscooters in Philippines next year

Gogoro, the Taiwanese company that’s commercializing battery swapping ecosystems for electric scooters, is targeting the Philippines as its next market. The startup said Tuesday it has partnered with Filipino conglomerate Ayala Corporation, telecomms provider Globe and corporate venture builder 917Ventures to launch a B2B battery swapping pilot in Manila in the first quarter of 2023.

917Ventures is a subsidiary of Globe, which is part of Ayala Corporation’s umbrella.

The partnership with heavy hitters in the Filipino ecosystem comes a few days after the Philippines approved the removal of import duties on electric vehicles and their parts for the next five years. The move is part of the Philippines’ Electric Vehicle Industry Development Act, signed into law this year, to promote clean energy innovation. Horace Luke, founder and CEO of Gogoro, told TechCrunch the tariff removal applies to battery charging and swapping equipment, as well, making it the perfect time for Gogoro to introduce its battery swapping stations and Smartscooters into the country.

“The Philippines is trying to electrify, so we’re progressively saying we’re gonna be the first one to really take a leadership position in that and lead the market,” Luke said. “We see a huge opportunity for us to grow the market because there just hasn’t been the mass adoption of two-wheelers yet. And as they adopt, it would be great if it goes towards electrification.”

Eventually, Gogoro wants to bring an open network battery swapping system to the Philippines, one that’s compatible with locally produced electric two-wheelers as well as Gogoro’s own Smartscooters — Gogoro has worked with electric two-wheeler manufacturers in India and China to integrate its own swappable batteries into their scooters for easier market entry, rather than having to also import its own Smartscooters.

The Philippines is a different type of market, though. Two-wheelers have not historically been as popular in the country, as compared to India or China, said Luke. Market adoption is starting to pick up now alongside the increase of delivery and logistics services, hence Gogoro’s strategy of entering the market with a B2B pilot focused on the logistics industry.

Gogoro wouldn’t announce which delivery provider it will initially partner with, but Ayala Corp does have its own dedicated unit, AC Logistics. Luke said by early next year, Gogoro will have sent through several hundreds of its Smartscooters and several hundreds batteries, as well as half a dozen swapping stations, which will be placed throughout Manila for delivery riders to use.

“We’re going to use B2B as the first step to really build what we call the base load,” said Luke. “Base load is basically the minimum amount of users using the network that allows you to actually create a business model that is proven to be workable. Now, given the gas prices in the Philippines, given the amount of logistics rider output everyday, this is an opportunity for us to demonstrate that the business model is viable.”

The pilot will last at least six months before expanding to new B2B partners or even private consumers, said Luke. During that time, Gogoro hopes to gain feedback from the market both on whether two-wheelers can be adopted in the Philippines and on whether battery swapping will take hold alongside two-wheeler adoption. Gogoro will also collect data from vehicles while they’re on the road in order to fine tune its system, said Luke.

“More than 25% of Taiwan’s quick commerce deliveries and almost all of their electric deliveries are powered by Gogoro’s battery-swapping technology, and we see this solution being most beneficial to a densely populated region like Metro Manila, which is also the hub of business districts,” said Patrick Aquino, director of the Department of Energy’s Energy Utilization Management Bureau in the Philippines, in a statement. “The success of this pilot will pave the way for a new sustainable business model in other cities in the country as well. Philippines can learn from Taiwan’s experience.”

Gogoro’s global network includes nearly 11,000 battery swapping stations at over 2,260 locations. The company, which has a market dominance in Taiwan, says it hosts more than 370,000 daily battery swaps with more than 360 million total swaps to date.

The company recently announced a similar B2B partnership with EV-as-a-Service platform Zypp Electric to electrify logistics fleets and last-mile deliveries in India. Gogoro expects to launch a pilot with Zypp in Delhi in December, which will compliment Gogoro’s existing consumer-focused partnership in India with local two-wheeler manufacturer Hero MotoCorp.

Gogoro also recently launched battery swapping stations and Smartscooters in Tel Aviv, and has a presence in China and Indonesia, as well.

Gogoro’s public debut could supercharge EV battery swapping across the globe

Gogoro to pilot battery swapping and Smartscooters in Philippines next year by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch



Sequoia India backs Prismforce that helps IT companies build better talent supply chain

Sequoia India backs Prismforce that helps IT companies build better talent supply chain

Prismforce, an India-U.S. startup that provides IT and tech services companies with tools to build better talent supply chain, has raised $13.6 million in a Series A round led by Sequoia Capital India.

IT providers spend a large part of their variable costs on hiring skilled employees. But finding those employees from the ever-growing talent market and deploying them effectively to get adequate results is one of the most significant pain points for the industry worldwide.

Prismforce is taking Amazon’s approach to matching the demand for talent with the supply for companies offering IT and tech services, said co-founder and CEO Somnath Chatterjee.

“We are treating this as a supply chain problem, where you have to standardize demand, standardize supply, make the match happen, almost as if you are an e-commerce engine and e-commerce marketplace trying to make a talent marketplace,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch.

After spending 14 years as a partner at McKinsey, Chatterjee founded Prismforce with Mohd Qasim in April 2021. Qasim also worked as a senior engagement manager at McKinsey.

While working at the management consulting firm, both co-founders served several IT providers, which helped them identify the problem that Prismforce aims to solve.

Prismforce’s product catalog includes SkillPrism, which uses AI over a skill inventory management application to automate talent profiling. The startup also offers IntelliPrism for an end-to-end resource management module with AI-driven search and match, OutlookPrism to enable workforce planning and resource forecasting and InsightPrism to offer CXO dashboards.

The Delaware-registered startup, which has a wholly-owned India subsidiary and offices in San Francisco, Mumbai and Bengaluru, is currently on track to amass 10 clients by the end of this year, with the smallest client generating $400 million of revenue while the biggest counterpart making more than $10 billion. Chatterjee did not disclose their names but said half of them have their presence in India, while half of them are U.S.-domiciled companies.

The executive said that he expects the geographical ratio of the startup’s clients shift over time, with 70–80% coming from English-speaking countries, such as the U.S., U.K. and Europe.

Although the primary focus of Prismforce is limited to companies offering IT and tech services, it also targets entities in the enterprise IT domain. The startup also plans to reach professional services firms in the future, including accounting, tax and consulting firms, Chatterjee said.

“It is a lot more pertinent for IT companies because the underlying skills are changing very fast, which is not the case for many of these consulting and professional services companies. But that could be the third horizon we can go to,” he noted.

With the fresh funding from Sequoia Capital India and global angel investors, Prismforce plans to scale up its go-to-market reach, enhance its product suite and grow its talent base from the existing team of over 60 members to a 120–140 group in the next nine to 12 months.

“The technology services industry, with a cumulative market cap of over $4 trillion and a global workforce of over 20 million, is a core pillar of the global digital economy. Despite that, there is no large vertical software vendor serving its varied needs,” said Abhishek Mohan, principal at Sequoia Capital India, in a prepared statement.

“Somnath and Qasim’s vision is to create the defining vertical software company for technology and professional services. Over the past year, this vision has been validated by multiple industry-leading IT providers, which have deployed Prismforce products to great impact.”

Prismforce has raised a total of $15.4 million to date, with $1.8 million infused in a seed funding round a year ago from an undisclosed group of angel investors that included serial entrepreneurs and SaaS founders.

Sequoia India backs Prismforce that helps IT companies build better talent supply chain by Jagmeet Singh originally published on TechCrunch



Monday 28 November 2022

Instafest app lets you create your own festival lineup from Spotify

Instafest app lets you create your own festival lineup from Spotify

If your favorite music festival’s lineup didn’t live up to your expectations this year, don’t worry; a new app called Instafest will create a music festival poster for you based on your Spotify listening habits.

The free web app, created by developer Anshay Saboo, is pretty straightforward to use: sign in with your Spotify account, and it will generate a poster based on the artists to whom you most listened. You can customize the poster based on time intervals — last four weeks, last six months, and all time.

You can also select different styles of posters such as Malibu Sunrise, LA Twilight, and Mojave Dusk. Instafest app also calculates what it calls “Basic Score,” that might give you bragging rights about the niche music choice. The lower the score, the more niche your music festival is.

Once you generate the poster, you can choose to rename your music festival, hide/show your username, and hide/show your Basic Score. If you want to remove support for this app, you can follow this guide to revoke access.

Saboo told TechCrunch that he got the idea of the app while thinking about what Coechella’s lineup would look like if he picked the artists.

“I had the idea when I was in bed scrolling through TikTok one day, I saw people were posting videos from Coachella and I started thinking about how I would set the Coachella lineup if I could pick the artists. The thought process led to me thinking about generating a music festival graphic using a Spotify integration, and I built off from there,” he said

The developer is already working on adding support for more platforms. The site already lets you generate a festival poster using your Last.fm listening history and support for Apple Music support is in the works. Saboo wants to add support for music streaming services such as YouTube Music, Deezer, and Amazon Music down the road, he said, but cautioned that it may take some time as not every platform’s APIs are as friendly as those of Spotify.

Saboo is currently focusing on maintaining the app and adding more integration that makes sharing users’ festival lineups more fun. He said while it’s too early to comment on long-term plans, he is exploring possibilities of making a music-based social network around festival graphics generation.

Within hours of launch, Instafest has become a popular talking point on social media. Folks are posting their lineup to show off their good (or trash) taste in music. Saboo told TechCrunch that more than 5 million people have generated their Instafest poster.

The Instafest app seems like a mirror version of the Lineupsupply app, which lets you create playlists through music festival posters. So, if you like someone’s Instafest poster, you can use the LineupSupply app to make a playlist.

The app’s launch comes days before Spotify releases its Wrapped for users — showing customized listening habits across music and podcasts for each user — drops. So in a way, this feels like a Spotify Wrapped before Spotify Wrapped.

Instafest app lets you create your own festival lineup from Spotify by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch



Seedstars Capital launches to support new fund managers around the world

Seedstars Capital launches to support new fund managers around the world

The venture market is in the middle of a downturn, but there are still plenty of emerging fund managers. Seedstars International Ventures, the investment firm that backs high-growth startups around the world, announced today it has launched a platform called Seedstars Capital with Swiss-based investment holding company xMultiplied to help new fund managers around the world launch funds and develop their investment firms.

Seedstars Group co-founder and Seedstars Capital managing partner Michael Weber and Seedstars Capital partner Benjamin Langer told TechCrunch in an email that “Seedstars’ mission is to impact people’s lives in emerging markets through technology and entrepreneurship.” Over the past decade, it has supported various stakeholders, mostly tech entrepreneurs, through entrepreneurial programs.

“We’ve seen so many talented entrepreneurs grow their companies very fast, to the standard of the U.S. or Europe, but unfortunately too many struggle to raise capital to grow even faster. To continue our mission to support them, Seedstars is now supporting the next generation of VC fund managers in emerging markets that will then back those promising entrepreneurs.”

Seedstars Capital will look for sector and industry-specific strategies in regions and countries like Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia and India. It is looking for funds that target pre-seed to Series A companies, since that is where they see the biggest funding gaps and potential.

“Ideally, we want to support gender-diverse teams as we know we need a more inclusive industry,” said Weber and Langer. “We are convinced this will have a tremendous impact at the portfolio level and we will be able to empower more women entrepreneurs.”

The platform will incubate, accelerate and invest in new venture capital funds in emerging markets like Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Central and Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Managers have usually raised a micro fund, already have experience as angel investors or worked at larger investment firms, and are in the process of launching their first institutional funds of between $15 million to $50 million.

Many fund managers are ones that Seedstars has known for a long time “and despite having relatively little track record on their own we knew they had the necessary skills to become top performing managers,” Weber and Langer said.

In fact, this is how Seedstars International Ventures began. Weber and Langer had worked with co-founder Charlie Graham-Brown since 2014, and in 2019, launched its first global fund for emerging markets, focusing on pre-seed stage. Last year, it launched Fund II with Patricia Sosrodjojo, which is now backed by the IFC, the Rockefeller Foundation, Visa Foundation and Symbiotics, among other investors.

Seedstars Africa Ventures, which invests across the continent, was also formed in a similar way. Seedstars had known Tamim El Zein and Maxime Bouan since they worked at Blue Orchard, focusing on Africa. They hired a third partner, Bruce Nsereko-Lule, and now the fund has LBO France as an anchor investor.

“Over the last year, we have meet with many exceptionally talented teams working very hard building their ecosystems and investing in outstanding entrepreneurs across emerging markets,” Weber and Langer said. “We want to partner with them and allow them to develop their strategies and have a powerful and positive impact.”

Seedstars group partners Michael Weber, Alisée de Tonnac, Pierre-Alain Masson, and Charlie Graham-Brown

Seedstars group partners Michael Weber, Alisée de Tonnac, Pierre-Alain Masson, and Charlie Graham-Brown

Seedstars Capital is committed to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and plans to use ESG and impact considerations as it selects a diverse group of fund managers. It also plans to serve as an investment catalyst with the goal of getting fund managers over $500 million of new funding in total. Seedstars Capital says this will create more than 10,000 new jobs and generate over $20 billion of additional GDP in emerging markets over the next 10 years.

Challenges Seedstars Capital will help emerging VC managers solve include ones like access to international funding. Since most of them typically have assets under management below $50 million and focus on a specific country or sector, they often rely on local individual investors, family offices and development finance institutions (DFIs), which can make fundraising periods stretch as long as 18 to 24 months.

Many emerging managers also lack access to infrastructure, even though they are good at investing in high-growth startups. That means they don’t have the resources to build the right support infrastructure for their portfolio companies and firms, including marketing budgets, tech stacks to manage deal flow and investors, tools and framework to measure the positive impact of portfolio companies or a network of mentors to support their founders.

They also lack access to a community of people, including mentors, investors and other managers, that can help them share best practices, deal flow, market trends or informal events, Weber and Lager said. “These are critical components of building a brand that will allow managers to select the best opportunities and attract the best talent.”

Weber and Langer said Seedstars can help solve these issues because it has over 10 years of experience in emerging markets, and has accelerated or incubated more than 2,000 ventures. It also has a network of more than 1,000 experts and mentors and is therefore “in a prime position to become that partner who can support emerging managers thrive in the industry and develop their investment firms in an institutional manner.”

In terms of investment, Weber and Langer said Seedstars Capital has tested several models, including investing in the management company, providing warehousing facilities or serving as an LP.

In the future, it will work with managers throughout the fundraising stage, providing access to Seedstars network and relationships to help funds hit their first or final close more quickly. It will also be an LP in all funds, and plans to invest between 3% to 5% of the fund size, with the goal of increasing that allocation to up to 10% in the future.

“Having said that, we do not intend to become an investor and our goal will always remain the same, working alongside the most talented emerging managers as partners in the development of their investment firms,” Weber and Langer said.

Seedstars launches second fund to invest in 100 startups in emerging markets

Seedstars Capital launches to support new fund managers around the world by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch



AWS makes Lambda cold start latency a thing of the past with SnapStart

AWS makes Lambda cold start latency a thing of the past with SnapStart

At its re:Invent kickoff keynote tonight, AWS announced a small but important update to Lambda, its serverless platform, that tackles one of the most common issues with the service. Typically, when a function isn’t used for quite a while, Lambda will shut the virtual machine down — and despite improvements like faster Firecracker microVMs, this still takes a while. Now, with SnapStart, AWS is addressing this by creating snapshots of a customer’s Lambda functions and then simply starting those up without having to go through the usual initialization process.

Cold start times have long been one of the biggest complaints about Lambda — yet as Peter DeSantis, AWS’s senior VP of Utility Computing noted in today’s keynote, spiky workloads are pretty much what Lambda (and all other serverless platforms) were built for. With its Firecracker microVMs, AWS already improved cold start times from multiple seconds to well under a second. Now, the company promises a 90% improvement in cold start times by using Firecracker’s Snapshotting feature.

This new feature is now available to all Lambda users, though it has to be enabled for existing Lambda functions and for now, it only works for Java functions that make use of the Corretto runtime.

Once enabled, when you first run that function, it will perform a standard initialization. After that, it will create an encrypted snapshot of the memory and disk state and cache that for reuse. Then, when the function is invoked again, Lambda will grab the cache and start up the function. Cached snapshots are removed after 14 days of inactivity.

As DeSantis also noted, improvements like this will enable more users to bring their workloads to a platform like Lambda. The company already saw this with the launch of Firecracker on Lambda, he explained.

Read more about AWS re:Invent 2022 on TechCrunch

AWS makes Lambda cold start latency a thing of the past with SnapStart by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch



Despite ban, Twitter downloads surge in China amid COVID protests

Despite ban, Twitter downloads surge in China amid COVID protests

Twitter saw a surge in downloads in China as protests against the country’s stringent COVID restrictions erupted nationwide over the last few days.

The social media app ranked 9th amongst all the free iOS apps in China on November 29, up from 150th a week ago, according to app analytics firm SensorTower. Discussion about the protests, a rare act of defiance that has swept across major Chinese cities and universities since the past weekend, is closely monitored by censors and has been largely silenced on local social media. As a result, people are pouring onto foreign alternatives like Twitter to disseminate information and Telegram to organize demonstrations.

The spike in Twitter downloads is intriguing since the app has long been blocked by China’s “Great Firewall”. Accessing the app in China requires the use of a censorship circumvention tool or a virtual private network. The app has, however, remained available for download in the Apple App Store, at least since February 2019, according to Apple Censorship, an independent project that tracks censorship in the App Store.

Image Credits: Twitter ranking in the China App Store / Screenshot from SensorTower

Gauging the size of Android downloads is trickier because Google Play is unavailable in China. Android-based app stores are operated by an array of local tech firms like Huawei and Xiaomi, which tend to strictly follow local censorship rules. Apple has also in recent years come under fire for bowing to censorship requests from some governments.

Even when China-based users manage to jump over the “Great Firewall” and get on Twitter, they will likely have a difficult time finding the information they need. Bot accounts are bombarding searches for Chinese cities with tweets of porn, escort ads, and gambling links, making it impossible to look up city-related protest news. It doesn’t help that Elon Musk recently axed the team at Twitter responsible for fighting propaganda and misinformation.

Given the increase in Chinese-language bot activity, which is thought to be state-directed, it’s hard to know how many of the new app installs belong to protestors.

Access to Twitter and other Western internet platforms is increasingly challenging in China as Beijing continues to clamp down on censorship circumvention tools. All VPN providers without government authorization are in effect illegal. In October, a protocol widely used in VPN services experienced an unprecedented blockade in the country. It won’t be a surprise if the authorities move to further tighten the grip on VPN tools following this wave of protests.

Great Wall of porn obscures China protest news on Twitter

Despite ban, Twitter downloads surge in China amid COVID protests by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch



AWS launches Graviton3E, its new Arm-based chip for HPC workloads

AWS launches Graviton3E, its new Arm-based chip for HPC workloads

At its traditional evening keynote at re:Invent, AWS tonight announced quite a bit of new hardware in its cloud, starting with a new version of its Nitro hypervisor, new instance types, and a new version of its custom Arm-based Graviton chips which was specifically designed for powering high-performance computing workloads. This new Graviton3E chip — a variant of the existing Graviton line — promises significant performance improvements, including 35% better performance for workloads that heavily depend on vector instructions.

These new chips will obviously power new AWS EC2 instance types, starting with the logically dubbed Hpc7G. This new instance type will come in a variety of sizes, with up to 64 vCPUs and 128 GiB of memory. It’ll take until early 2023 before these instances become available, though. For more network-intensive workloads, AWS is also launching a new Graviton 3E instance type (c7gn).

For Intel fans, there are also new Ice Lake-based Xeon-based machines, too.

Image Credits: TechCrunch

All of these new instances will make use of AWS’s new Nitro 5 hardware hypervisor, which the company also announced today. Nitro v5 promises significantly improved latency, up to 40% better performance per watt, and 60% higher PPS. The AWS team made this possible by roughly doubling the number of transistors in the custom Nitro chips.

Image Credits: TechCrunch

“Performance can be hard to achieve when you refuse to budge on things like security and cost,” Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of AWS Utility Computing, said in tonight’s keynote. And in many ways, that’s long been the story of AWS’s compute platform and its work on its custom processors.

Read more about AWS re:Invent 2022 on TechCrunch

AWS launches Graviton3E, its new Arm-based chip for HPC workloads by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch



As Pipe’s founding team departs, tensions rise over allegations

As Pipe’s founding team departs, tensions rise over allegations

On November 22, alternative financing startup Pipe announced that its three co-founders were stepping down from their executive roles and that a search for a new, “veteran” CEO had commenced.

In an exclusive interview, co-founder and former co-CEO Harry Hurst told TechCrunch that the trio were “0-1 builders, not at-scale operators.” He said the company’s revenue was growing year-over-year and that the company had five years of runway.

Finding the right successor could take a while, however. For starters, Pipe — which has raised more than $300 million from investors since it was founded in 2019 — has just one outside board member in Peter Ackerson, a general partner at Fin Capital who himself became a VC just three years ago. Hurst and fellow founders Josh Mangel and Zain Allarakhia are the only other directors on the board.

More, detractors seem bent on raising questions about the way the business has been run. Since that article was published, several sources who wished to remain anonymous — including one investor who says he passed on investing in the startup in its early days — have said that they have “heard” that Pipe made roughly $80 million in loans to one or several crypto mining companies. The outfit or outfits have since gone out of business and the $80 million is believed to have been completely written off, said these individuals.

Asked about the allegations, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch that Pipe did not issue $80 million worth of loans to crypto mining companies and that Pipe did not have to completely “write off” any related receivables. Instead, she confirmed that Pipe “has provided access to financing to crypto mining hosting companies” and said — when asked if Pipe has lost any amount of money on loans to crypto mining entities — that as a private company, Pipe does not share its company financials.

The startup declined to name its crypto mining-related customers, but notably, Pipe had a public partnership with Compass Mining, a now beleaguered crypto mining company that is reportedly facing its own fair share of struggles.

There are other grumblings. One source alleged that Hurst and the other two founders sold millions of dollars’ worth of their own shares in a secondary sale, a practice that became fairly common during the pandemic across numerous young companies. (The founder of Hopin, also founded in 2019, has reportedly cashed out shares worth at least $195 million.) When we asked Hurst last week just how much investors had let the co-founders take off the table already, he declined to answer.

One fintech investor also raised questions about the sophistication of Pipe’s technology. Asked whether there was any related issue with Pipe’s underlying loans, the company’s spokesperson said, “While we’ve seen some delinquencies on the platform like many fintechs in this current macro environment, we do not expect buy-side investors to experience losses that haven’t already been communicated to them or a part of the larger risk profile communicated by the company.”

Hurst has apparently been hearing about the conjecture around his company. In a Twitter thread last night, he ranted against “VCs and others hating on our company based on rumors. Pretty obvious there are bad actors with their own agendas spreading BS with no regard for the people it damages.” He also wrote: “As a leader, I won’t let this noise distract us or undermine the incredible hard work our team puts into achieving our mission to empower companies everywhere to grow on their terms.”

Meanwhile, the CEO search continues. Indeed, Pipe’s spokesperson reiterated today what the company said publicly last week, that “Josh [Mangel] is now interim CEO and Harry is still at the company in his new capacity as Vice Chairman. They both want to see Pipe reach its ultimate potential and are committed to finding a new CEO as reported and announced…” 

Once Pipe’s new CEO is named, she added, that individual will assume Hurst’s seat on the board.

As for who is helping with the search, she said the answer is that “many of Pipe’s stakeholders are part of the CEO search process, including senior management and investors.”

 

Image Credits: Twitter

Besides Fin Capital, other VCs to lead investments in Pipe on the part of their investment firms include Marlon Nichols, a managing director at MaC Venture Capital, and Ashton Newhall, a longtime investor with Greenspring Associates and now a partner with StepStone Group, which acquired Greenspring in September of last year.

None responded to requests for comment.

Another investor in Pipe, Matthew Cowan of Next47 Capital, told TechCrunch that he was “not allowed to comment.” 

Other backers in the company include Morgan Stanley’s Counterpoint Global, CreditEase FinTech Investment Fund, 3L, Japan’s SBI Investment, Marc Benioff, Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, Republic and Craft Ventures, which led the company’s $6 million seed funding in February 2020.

Meanwhile, a Form-D signed by Pipe Senior Counsel Peter Chiaro with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in late September reveals that the company recently secured $7.12 million in debt financing, which could be construed as a positive alternative to the kind of highly structured inside round that many startups are closing currently.

Pipe co-founder and chief business officer Michal Cieplinski, whose name was absent from the company’s announcement last week, was listed as Pipe’s “executive officer” in the filing, which declined to disclose its revenue range.

TechCrunch’s weekly fintech newsletter, The Interchange, launched on May 1! Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

Got a news tip or inside information about a topic we’ve covered? We’d love to hear from you. You can reach me at maryann@techcrunch.com. Or you can drop us a note at tips@techcrunch.com. If you prefer to remain anonymous, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and various encrypted messaging apps.

Pipe’s founding team stepping down as hunt for ‘veteran’ CEO begins

As Pipe’s founding team departs, tensions rise over allegations by Mary Ann Azevedo originally published on TechCrunch



Southeast Asia insurtech Igloo increases its Series B to $46M

Southeast Asia insurtech Igloo increases its Series B to $46M

Igloo, a Singapore-based insurtech focused on underserved communities in Southeast Asia, announced it has raised a Series B extension of $27 million, bringing the round’s total to $46 million. The first tranche of $19 million was announced in March, and led by Cathay innovation with participation from ACA and returning investors OpenSpace.

The newest round was led by the InsuResilience Investment Fund II, which was launched by the German development bank KfW for the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and is managed by impact investor BlueOrchard. Other lead investors were the Women’s World Banking Asset Management (WAM), FinnFund, La Maison and returning investors Cathay Innovation.

Igloo develops its insurance products and then partners with insurers who underwrite their policies. Igloo currently works with 20 global, regional and local insurers across Southeast Asia. It distributes its insurance products through partnerships, and is partnered with over 55 companies in 7 countries. It now offers 15 products, including policies for gig workers, gamers, cars and farmers in Vietnam, and says it has facilitated more than 300 million policies and increased gross written premiums by 30 times since 2019.

Co-founder and CEO Raunak Mehta told TechCrunch that Igloo decided to raise a Series B extension because of investor interest after the first tranche of funds. The extension will give the startup a multiyear runway and will be used for hiring, infrastructure and merger and acquisitions opportunities.

Mehta said that the penetration rate of insurance in much of Southeast Asia is low, less than $100 USD per capita across Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. Igloo was created to make insurance more affordable and relevant to the needs of communities in Southeast Asia. Igloo distributes insurance products that range from 2 cents USD for phone screen protection to $600 USD for comprehensive motor insurance.

Igloo provides the tech stack for its products across Southeast Asia, which Mehta says means the entire insurance value chain, from product discovery to claims, is available on one platform. This makes it faster for it to brings the policies it distributes to market more quickly, and significantly reduce the operational cost of claims.

Mehta said more than 80% of claims are currently managed in an automated or semi-automated way, and that big data management, along with machine learning and artificial intelligence, has enabled it to reduce anti-selection risks, false positives and fraudulent claims. By bringing down the cost of managing claims, Igloo is able to offer lower premium to customers.

An example of Igloo’s insurance policies include ones for gig economy riders that it sells through its partnership with Foodpanda in Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines, and Lozi and Ahamove Vietnam. Its policy for Foodpanda, called PandaCare, includes motor, personal accident and hospitalization income protection for workers.

Another, more recent one, is is Weather Index Insurance product in Vietnam. The policy uses blockchain-backed smart contracts and automates claims payouts by using pre-assigned values for crop losses caused by weather and other natural events. Igloo says the Weather Index Insurance is Vietnam’s first parametric insurance (or a policy that agrees to make pre-agreed payouts based on trigger events like a flood) and its first integration of smart contracts into insurance.

Igloo also provides products that Mehta says directly or indirectly benefits women, through a partnership with Philinsure in the Philippines. They have distributed more than 5 million policies that cover credit default, personal accident, family relief and natural calamity support to women micro-entrepreneurs and their families. In Vietnam, more than 65% of the agents who use Igloo’s Ignite digital platform to sell insurance policies are women, and they are also the main beneficiaries of the Weather Index Insurance product.

The insurtech’s distribution partners include telecoms like Telkomsel, AIS and Mobifone, and e-commerce platforms like Shopee, Lazada, Bukalapak and JD.ID. It also works with financial service providers, like AEON, Gcash and UnionBank, to sell policies for their customer base, and provides products for insuring goods in transit and protecting fleet drivers through logistics platforms like Ahamove, Shippit, Loship and Locad.

Other Southeast Asia-based insurtechs that want to increase insurance penetration in the region and have raised large Series B rounds include Indonesia’s Fuse and PasarPolis and Thailand’s Sunday.

Insurtech gets more specialized, with products just for e-bikes and factory-built homes

Southeast Asia insurtech Igloo increases its Series B to $46M by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch



Deepomatic wants to build the AI-based computer vision companion for field workers

Deepomatic wants to build the AI-based computer vision companion for field workers

French startup Deepomatic has raised a $10.5 million (€10 million) Series B funding round. While the founding round is relatively small, the startup has managed to convince some large-scale clients to use its visual automation platform. For instance, telecom companies use Deepomatic on the field to check that tasks have been completed successfully.

EnBW New Ventures and Orbia Ventures are leading the newly announced funding round, which Deepomatic closed in October. Existing investors Alven, Hi-Inov Dentressangl and, Swisscom Ventures are participating once again in a new round.

The startup has been around for a few years already as I first covered Deeepomatic back in 2015. The company has always been focused on deep learning for computer vision applications. The main issue is that it has been a long journey to find the right clients for this technology.

With the telecom industry, it seems like Deepomatic has finally unlocked its true potential. “We discovered an industry that very much needed what we were working on — and that was telecom companies,” co-founder and CEO Augustin Marty told me.

When a field worker is installing optical fiber cables or rolling out a new 5G tower, they have to fill out complicated forms to make sure that they followed some specific processes. It can be quite tedious as workers can be working for contractor companies. And those companies can be working with multiple telecom companies with different requirements.

It’s also easy to make a mistake when you are filling out a form. Sometimes, field workers can also say that something is working fine when it’s kind of working. It can create some QA issues, as we have seen in fiber concentration points.

That’s why many field service companies are also working with photos. When they are done installing something, they have to take a photo of their installation and their instruments proving that some new equipment is up and running with the right parameters. It means more work.

With Deepomatic, field service companies mostly use photos as their benchmark. Photos are automatically analyzed to extract some knowledge. Deepomatic can then send some alerts if something feels off and should be double-checked.

“We started with the most complicated part, which is identifying mistakes,” Marty said. On top of that, Deepomatic now sells an end-to-end platform so that field workers only have to use Deepomatic to get something done. It also integrates with specific enterprise tools like ERPs.

When the startup works with a new client, there is some integration work so that Deepomatic works exactly as expected. It involves adding control points, reusing some of the existing tasks in its computer vision library or training its algorithm on a new set of photos. Deepomatic algorithms are trained on the startup’s own infrastructure. But its product can run on the client’s own cloud infrastructure and in some cases on premise.

The company currently has around 20 large accounts, such as Bouygues Telecom, Swisscom and Movistar, as well as a bunch of smaller clients. As this is enterprise software, clients usually pay hundreds of thousands of euros per year to use Deepomatic.

Every month, Deepomatic monitors more than one million on-field operations. More than 20,000 field workers are taking photos with their phone and uploading them to a Deepomatic backend every day.

Up next, Deepomatic and its team of 70 employees want to enter new markets and new industries, such as renewable energy, electric mobility, construction, insurance, etc. Deepomatic wants to work with companies in Europe, the U.S. and South America.

Many governments and big companies are currently investing heavily to overhaul their infrastructure for the next few decades. At the same time, there is a talent shortage for field workers. It seems like Deepomatic is arriving at the right time on the market to become an essential tool for this infrastructure overhaul.

Deepomatic wants to build the AI-based computer vision companion for field workers by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch



Cameroonian crypto and savings platform Ejara raises $8M, led by Anthemis and Dragonfly

Cameroonian crypto and savings platform Ejara raises $8M, led by Anthemis and Dragonfly

Ejara, a Cameroonian fintech offering an investment app that allows users to buy crypto and save through decentralized wallets, has raised $8 million in Series A investment. 

London-based venture capital firm Anthemis co-led the growth round alongside crypto-focused fund Dragonfly Capital. Anthemis is a follow-on investor in Ejara, having also led the fintech’s $2 million seed round announced last October. 

Participating VC firms in this new financing include other follow-on investors Mercy Corps Ventures, Coinshares Ventures and Lateral Capital–and new investors such as Circle Ventures, Moonstake, Emurgo, Hashkey Group and BPI France. Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockwoks is one of the angels in the round. 

Ejara wants to “democratize access to investment and savings products across the region, using blockchain technology.” While its recently launched savings product where it tokenizes government bonds is one of the ways it uses blockchain, so is its crypto product which was pivotal to the two-year-old startup raising $10 million in less than 18 months. 

By providing users in Francophone Africa with an option to buy, sell, exchange and store their crypto investments, CEO Nelly Chatue-Diop and her co-founder Baptiste Andrieux saw an opportunity to increase crypto activity in the region. However, unlike most crypto platforms in Africa that provide custodial wallets to users, Ejara offered customers the option of non-custodial wallets so they could own and store their keys. That decision paid off, especially during this period when the collapse of FTX and other crypto organizations continue to underscore the need for customers to prioritize privacy and ownership when dealing with crypto and tokenized assets. 

“When everyone was taking the other route and building centralized exchanges, we always thought that, if you want to own crypto, you need to own your keys. And that’s pretty much what’s saved us in turbulent times,” Chateau-Diop said to TechCrunch over a call. 

FTX processed billions monthly in Africa before going bust

The FTX implosion is an opportunity to learn

Ejara’s crypto product has caught on fast with users in a region where access to financial products is limited to the most informed and wealthy. In addition to connecting their mobile money accounts and accessing crypto, users could also make cross-border transactions via stablecoins. As a result, users on the platform have grown in multiples over the last 14 months. Last October, it had 8,000 users from Cameroon, its first market and others including Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, and Senegal. Now, it counts over 70,000 users across nine Francophone African countries. 

Chateau-Diop – who noted that Ejara has seen revenue growth 10x and achieved a 15% month-on-month transaction volume growth since last October despite crypto’s meltdown – expects users on the platform to reach 100,000 by the end of the year. Its savings product, which Ejara described, in a statement, as the first of its kind in the crypto world, was launched to get it there. “In an ecosystem where many people around the world are trying to find use cases for blockchain technology, Ejara has demonstrated that startups in emerging markets are likely to pioneer many such innovations in web3,” the company added. 

With this product, the Cameroonian fintech asserts that users do not need to set up a bank account to access savings products but can instead start that journey with Ejara by downloading its app and depositing a minimum of 1,000 CFA franc (~$1.5). Users can earn up to 10% interest on their two-year deposits on the platform, said Chateau-Diop, while adding that Ejara is going up against traditional financial institutions with this product. 

“The competition for treasury bonds is with the traditional asset managers and banks. And given the way they are structured, they mainly target high-net-worth individuals and institutions like other banks or insurance companies,” she commented. “Nobody is targeting the woman selling the markets or the man driving a motorbike for a living. And because we structure the product the way we do, we have many people come to our platform because they can save up to 1000 CFA franc daily.”

Both lead investors in this round recognize Ejara’s ambition to be a financial super app of some sort for users in French-speaking Africa and even those in the diaspora who send and invest money back home. Mia Deng, a partner at Dragonfly said Ejara is well-positioned to imitate the growth of China’s Alipay and WeChat Pay, two prominent web2 super apps based, in the early 2010s and help the Francophone region achieve a web3 financial leap in the coming years.

“Conscious of the challenges across the zone, Ejara does not intend to limit itself to being a crypto app, but rather to become a one-stop-shop for products tailored to the needs of Africans:  a shop where a suite of financial products will be accessible at their fingertips, without the need for any crypto knowledge,” stated Ruth Foxe Blader, partner at Anthemis, on Ejara’s potential.

Cameroon’s Ejara raises $2M to offer crypto and investment services in Francophone Africa

Ejara’s journey to a million users is somewhat dependent on how fast its target audience catches on to the nuances associated with crypto, savings and investments. It’s one reason why the fintech is championing a couple of non-profit initiatives to teach the public, particularly women, girls and orphans about crypto, savings, investments (it is yet to launch its fractional investments product) and financial education while prepping the market for its growth. 

“The initiative we launched for women and orphans and girls is to improve their financial literacy and computer skills. When I think about Ejara, I think about an ecosystem and as a leveler to bring the community together, whether they are in Africa or the diaspora, whether they belong to the elites, or they are in the poorer layers of the community,” said the chief executive who also mentioned that Ejara recently obtained a license to extend its offerings to the French-speaking diaspora in Europe.

Last week, Djamo, an Ivorian fintech announced what seems to be the largest equity round in the country. At $10 million, Ejara is one of Cameroon’s most-funded companies (if not the most funded). That’s two similar events across different Francophone markets in quick succession. Though it’s too early to say, it appears the market is rapidly embracing innovation, and its ecosystem — which for the most part, embodies a strict regulatory landscape — is becoming more attractive to foreign venture capital despite the current global downturn.

Consumer finance app Djamo eyes Francophone Africa expansion, backed by new $14M round

Cameroonian crypto and savings platform Ejara raises $8M, led by Anthemis and Dragonfly by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch



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