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Uploadcare raises $1.7M for its CDN platform

Published November 12, 2019

Uploadcare, a startup that aims to make using CDN platforms cheaper and easier for businesses, today announced that it has raised a $1.7 million seed round led by Runa Capital and Vendep Capital, with existing investors Vaizra Capital and LVL1 Group participating, as well. Uploadcare promises to offer an end-to-end solution for businesses that automatically optimizes the files, images and videos of its clients and then delivers it over its CDN network or that of its partners.

Uploadcare founder and CEO Igor Debatur told me the idea for the service started quite a few years ago, while he was running a web development agency. Gathering files in different formats and sizes and then making those available in a way that was secure and easily scalable often turned out to be a challenge — and one that others in the industry faced as well. In the early days, Uploadcare was basically a file uploader for developers. Over time, Uploadcare added back-end features, including the smart CDN that can modify content on the fly based on the client where it’s displayed.

For a while, the team developed Uploadcare as a side project, but by 2016, the project started getting traction and they decided to shut down the development agency and focus solely on building out a proper product. “We started to build out a team and right now, we have more than 1,000 paying customers from very different sizes, starting from SMB to large enterprises using the product,” said Debatur.

Having worked for clients, the team obviously knew how to build products, but it had to figure out sales and marketing on the fly. Unsurprisingly, a lot of today’s new funding will go to exactly that: building out a sales and marketing team. Debatur also argues that unlike some of its competitors, Uploadcare invests a lot in its own technology, though the company does partner with other CDN vendors as well, based on its users’ needs.

“The amount of data that’s created per day is rising at a breakneck rate,” said Dmitry Chikhachev, general partner at Runa Capital . “With its robust infrastructure of delivery networks that span the globe, Uploadcare has quietly become a go-to solution for developers and engineers at some of the world’s largest companies. With differentiated technology and a strong leadership team, we believe that Uploadcare is well positioned to accelerate its growth and further solidify its leadership in the content delivery market.”

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Loop Returns picks up $10 million in Series A led by FirstMark Capital

Published November 12, 2019

Loop Returns, the startup that helps brands handle returns from online purchases, has today announced the close of a $10 million Series A funding round led by FirstMark Capital. Lerer Hippeau and Ridge Ventures also participated in the round.

Loop started when Jonathan Poma, a co-founder and COO and president, was working at an agency and consulting with a big Shopify brand on how to improve their system for returns and exchanges. After partnering with longtime friend Corbett Morgan, Loop Returns was born.

Loop sits on top of Shopify to handle all of a brand’s returns. It first asks the customer if they’d like a different size in the item they bought, quickly managing an exchange. It then asks if the customer would prefer to exchange for a new item altogether, depositing the credit in that person’s account in real time so they can shop for something new immediately.

If an exchange isn’t in the cards, Loop will ask the customer if they’d prefer credit with this brand over a straight-up refund.

The goal, according to Poma and Morgan, is to turn the point of return into a moment where brands can create a life-loyal customer when handled quickly and properly.

The more we shop online, the more brands extend themselves financially, and returns are a big part of that. Returns account for 20 to 30% of e-commerce sales, which can become a terrible financial burden on a growing direct-to-consumer brand. And what’s more, the cost of acquiring those users in the first place also goes down the drain.

Loop Returns hopes to keep that customer in the fold by giving them post-purchase options that are more sticky and more lucrative for the brand than a refund.

The company thinks of it as Connection Infrastructure. Most brands already have a customer acquisition architecture, and Shopify and Amazon are ahead when it comes to the infrastructure around customer convenience. But the ties that bind customers to brands haven’t been optimized for the many D2C brands out there looking to make an impact.

“The big problem we’re trying to solve long term is connection infrastructure,” said Morgan. “Why does this brand matter? Why does it mean something to me? Why does the product matter? We want to enforce more mindfulness and meaning into buying.”

Of course, a more mindful shopper doesn’t yield as many returns. Poma and Morgan admit that the goal of their software is to minimize returns, the very reason for the software’s existence. After all, return volume is one of a handful of variables that help Loop Returns determine what it will charge its brand clients.

But the team is thinking about other layers of the connection infrastructure, with plans to launch a product in 2020 that also focuses on the connection point after purchase. Poma and Morgan believe, with an almost religious reverence, that the brands themselves will help lead shoppers and infrastructure providers to a better, more connected shopping experience.

“Brands are the torch bearers,” said Poma. “They will lead us to a more enlightened era of how we think about buying. Empowerment of the brand will lead us to a better consumerism.”

The co-founders stayed mum on any specific plans for the 2020 product, but did say they will use the funding to expand operations and further build out its current and future products.

Of course, Loop is playing in a crowded space. Not only are there other players thinking about post-purchase connection, but Shopify has itself built out tools to help with exchanges and returns, and even acquired Return Magic, a similar service, in the summer of 2018.

That said, Loop Returns believes there is a long way to go as it builds the “connection infrastructure,” and that one clear path forward is actual personalization. With data from returns and exchanges, Loop Returns is relatively well-positioned to take on personalization in a meaningful way.

For now, Loop Returns has more than 200 customers and has handled more than 2 million returns, working with brands like Brooklinen, Allbirds, PuraVida and more.

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Lawyers hate timekeeping — Ping raises $13M to fix it with AI

Published November 12, 2019

Counting billable time in six-minute increments is the most annoying part of being a lawyer. It’s a distracting waste. It leads law firms to conservatively under-bill. And it leaves lawyers stuck manually filling out timesheets after a long day when they want to go home to their families.

Life is already short, as Ping CEO and co-founder Ryan Alshak knows too well. The former lawyer spent years caring for his mother as she battled a brain tumor before her passing. “One minute laughing with her was worth a million doing anything else,” he tells me. “I became obsessed with the idea that we spend too much of our lives on things we have no need to do — especially at work.”

That’s motivated him as he’s built his startup Ping, which uses artificial intelligence to automatically track lawyers’ work and fill out timesheets for them. There’s a massive opportunity to eliminate a core cause of burnout, lift law firm revenue by around 10% and give them fresh insights into labor allocation.

Ping co-founder and CEO Ryan Alshak (Image Credit: Margot Duane)

That’s why today Ping is announcing a $13.2 million Series A led by Upfront Ventures, along with BoxGroup, First Round, Initialized and Ulu Ventures. Adding to Ping’s quiet $3.7 million seed led by First Round last year, the startup will spend the cash to scale up enterprise distribution and become the new timekeeping standard.

“I was a corporate litigator at Manatt Phelps down in LA and joke that I was voted the world’s worst timekeeper,” Alshak tells me. “I could either get better at doing something I dreaded or I could try and build technology that did it for me.”

The promise of eliminating the hassle could make any lawyer who hears about Ping an advocate for the firm buying the startup’s software, like how Dropbox grew as workers demanded easier file sharing. “I’ve experienced first-hand the grind of filling out timesheets,” writes Initialized partner and former attorney Alda Leu Dennis. “Ping takes away the drudgery of manual timekeeping and gives lawyers back all those precious hours.”

Traditionally, lawyers have to keep track of their time by themselves down to the tenth of an hour — reviewing documents for the Johnson case, preparing a motion to dismiss for the Lee case, a client phone call for the Sriram case. There are timesheets built into legal software suites like MyCase, legal billing software like TimeSolv and one-off tools like Time Miner and iTimeKeep. They typically offer timers that lawyers can manually start and stop on different devices, with some providing tracking of scheduled appointments, call and text logging, and integration with billing systems.

Ping goes a big step further. It uses AI and machine learning to figure out whether an activity is billable, for which client, a description of the activity and its codification beyond just how long it lasted. Instead of merely filling in the minutes, it completes all the logs automatically, with entries like “Writing up a deposition – Jenkins Case – 18 minutes.” Then it presents the timesheet to the user for review before they send it to billing.

The big challenge now for Alshak and the team he’s assembled is to grow up. They need to go from cat-in-sunglasses logo Ping to mature wordmark Ping.  “We have to graduate from being a startup to being an enterprise software company,” the CEO tells me. That means learning to sell to C-suites and IT teams, rather than just build a solid product. In the relationship-driven world of law, that’s a very different skill set. Ping will have to convince clients it’s worth switching to not just for the time savings and revenue boost, but for deep data on how they could run a more efficient firm.

Along the way, Ping has to avoid any embarrassing data breaches or concerns about how its scanning technology could violate attorney-client privilege. If it can win this lucrative first business in legal, it could barge into the consulting and accounting verticals next to grow truly huge.

With eager customers, a massive market, a weak status quo and a driven founder, Ping just needs to avoid getting in over its heads with all its new cash. Spent well, the startup could leap ahead of the less tech-savvy competition.

Alshak seems determined to get it right. “We have an opportunity to build a company that gives people back their most valuable resource — time — to spend more time with their loved ones because they spent less time working,” he tells me. “My mom will live forever because she taught me the value of time. I am deeply motivated to build something that lasts . . . and do so in her name.”

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Instagram Stories launches TikTok clone Reels in Brazil

Published November 12, 2019

Instagram is launching a video-music remix feature to finally fight back against Chinese social rival TikTok. Instagram Reels lets you make 15-second video clips set to music and share them as Stories, with the potential to go viral on a new Top Reels section of Explore. Just like TikTok, users can soundtrack their Reels with a huge catalog of music, or borrow the audio from anyone else’s video to create a remix of their meme or joke.

Reels is launching today on iOS and Android but is limited to just Brazil, where it’s called Cenas. Reels leverages all of Instagram’s most popular features to Frankenstein-together a remarkably coherent competitor to TikTok’s rich features and community of 1.5 billion monthly users, including 122 million in the U.S., according to Sensor Tower. Instead of trying to start from scratch like Facebook’s Lasso, Instagram could cross-promote Reels heavily to its own billion users.

But Instagram’s challenge will be retraining its populace to make premeditated, storyboarded social entertainment instead of just spontaneous, autobiographical social media like with Stories and feed posts.

“I think Musically before TikTok, and TikTok deserve a ton of credit for popularizing this format,” admits Instagram director of product management Robby Stein . That’s nearly verbatim what Instagram founder Kevin Systrom told me about Snapchat when Instagram launched Stories. “They deserve all the credit,” he said before copying Snapchat so ruthlessly that it stopped growing for three years.

Chinese startups were always criticized for copying American companies, but Reels’ launch signals the grand shift to cloning in the opposite direction.

Yet Stein insists, “No two products are exactly the same, and at the end of the day, sharing video with music is a pretty universal idea we think everyone might be interested in using. The focus has been on how to make this a unique format for us.” The key to that divergence? “Your friends are already all on Instagram. I think that’s only true of Instagram.”

Throwing around Instagram’s weight

Starting in Brazil before potentially rolling out elsewhere could help Instagram nail down its customization and onboarding strategy. Luckily, Brazil has a big Instagram population, a deeply musical culture and a thriving creator community, says Stein.

It also isn’t completely obsessed with TikTok yet, like fellow developing market India. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said about trying to grow Lasso, “We’re trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big.” Instagram used this internationalization strategy to make Stories a hit where Snapchat hadn’t expanded yet, and it worked surprisingly well.

Instagram also has the U.S. government on its side for a change. While its parent company Facebook is being investigated for antitrust and privacy violations, TikTok is also under scrutiny.

Chinese tech giant ByteDance’s $1 billion 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly, another Chinese app similar to TikTok but with traction in the U.S., is under review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. ByteDance turned Musical.ly into TikTok, but it could have to unwind the acquisitions or make other concessions to U.S. regulators to protect the country’s national security. Several senators have also railed against TikTok injecting Chinese social values via censorship into the American discourse.

Perhaps Instagram’s best shot at differentiation is through its social graph. While TikTok is primarily a feed broadcasting app, Instagram can work Reels into its Close Friends and Direct messaging features, potentially opening a new class of creators — shy ones who only want to share with people they trust not to make fun of them. A lot of this lipsyncing / dancing / humor skit content can be kinda cringey when people don’t get it just right.

How Instagram Reels works

Users will find it in the Instagram Stories shutter modes tray next to Boomerang and Super-Zoom. They can either record with silence, borrow the audio of another video they find through hashtag search or Explore, or search a popular or trending song. Some audio snippets will even get their own pages showing off top videos made with them. Teaching users to poach audio for their remixes will be essential to getting Reels off the ground.

Facebook’s enormous music collection secured from all the major labels and many indie publishers powers Reels. Users pick the chunk of the song they want, and can then record or upload multiple video clips to fill out their Reel. Instagram has been building toward this moment since June 2018, when it first launched its Music stickers.

Instagram is adding some much-needed editing tools for Reels, like timed captions so words appear in certain scenes, and a ghost overlay option for lining up transitions so they look fluid. Still, Reels lacks some of the video filters and special effects that TikTok has purposefully built to power certain gags and cuts between scenes. Stein says those are coming.

Once users are satisfied with their editing job, they can post their Reel to Stories or Close Friends, or message it to people. If shared publicly, it also will be eligible to appear in the Top Reels section of the Explore tab. Most cleverly, Instagram works around its own ephemerality by letting users add their Reels to their profile’s non-disappearing Highlights for a shot to show up on Explore even after their 24-hour story expires.

Instead of having to monetize later somehow, Instagram can immediately start making money from Reels since it already shows ads in Stories and the Explore tab. The feature is sure to get plenty of exposure, as 500 million Instagram users already open Stories and Explore each month. Still, Reels’ composer and feed will be buried a few extra taps away from the homescreen compared to TikTok.

TikTok screenshots

Cloning TikTok isn’t just about the features, though Reels does a good job of copying the core ones. Creating scripted content is totally new for most Instagram users, and could feel too showy or goofy for an app known for its seriousness.

TikTok is 100% about acting ridiculous just to make people smile, your personal image be damned. That’s the opposite of the carefully manicured image of glamour and glory most Instagram users try to project. It could feel counter-intuitively more awkward to perform comedy in front of your real friends and fans than it does on a dedicated world stage.

Instagram, and Instagrammers, may have to lose their artful, cool aesthetic to embrace the silliness of tomorrow’s social entertainment. But if Reels can change Instagram’s culture to one where we’re comfortable looking stupid, it could beat TikTok’s talent competition by opening a million private karaoke rooms for goofing off just with friends.

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A16Z-backed Shift.org announces veterans hiring pipeline partnership with Better.com

Published November 11, 2019

While across much of Asia, November 11th is either “singles day” (a $38 billion Alibaba extravaganza this year) or Pepero Day (named because 11/11 looks like a bunch of chocolate dessert sticks), here in the United States and parts of Europe, November 11th also marks the end of World War I and the commemoration of Veterans Day.

Every year in the U.S., tens of thousands of soldiers leave active duty and transition into the civilian workforce, a route that can be startlingly difficult to navigate. How do you describe what an ordnance specialist does to civilians who have no idea what an MOS is? While the military teaches skills useful to a wide number of professions, holding the right conversations in a job search is key to making the leap.

That’s why a spate of new programs aims to help make it easier for veterans to head into the civilian workforce, and particularly into tech, which obviously has huge growth and great jobs waiting for those who can lock them up. I’ve previously covered one TechStars-connected non-profit, Patriot Boot Camp, which helps veterans looking to launch startups navigate the founder route.

One company that we haven’t covered on TechCrunch before though is Shift.org, an a16z-backed for-profit startup that aims to help veterans learn the key career skills needed to “shift” from the military into the civilian workforce.

Today for Veterans Day, the company announced a new employer partnership with mortgage fintech startup Better.com that will see Better.com hire 80 veterans in the next few months using Shift.org as a sourcing pool, with a projected hiring target of 5,000 veterans and their spouses by 2025 (assuming, as with all high-growth startups, that the high-growth continues firing on all cylinders).

In a press statement, Better.com CEO Vishal Garg said that “Veterans are an untapped source of talent that learned, operated and adapted to some of the world’s most innovative technologies from VR to robotics, nuclear technology and cyber.”

I chatted a bit with Shift.org CEO Mike Slagh about how he sees these partnerships and his own path into building a company. “I got started three years ago after serving in the Navy for just over five years as a bomb disposal officer,” he explained. In many ways, Shift.org was trying to fix his own challenge in moving back into the civilian workforce:

… My story was, I was going on base to the career fairs — there are these big aircraft hangers — and you’re sitting across the table from these employers, and they’re telling you what it’s like to work at their company, they’re telling you what [their] culture is like, and it’s just really hard to picture and it’s such an anxiety-ridden decision, and a big high-stakes moment in your life where you want to get it right for your family, you want to get it right for your future career trajectory.

Part of that anxiety is that saying the right things is often more crucial in recruitment settings than having the right skills. Slagh said that “I actually think that the gap is much narrower than many people naturally assume,” but, “you have to oftentimes have industry-specific context for somebody to take a bet on you when you have a non-traditional background.”

Since launching, Shift.org has partnered with employers like Better.com, Major League Baseball, and Symantec to help bridge the divide and open the pipeline to a wider and more diverse set of candidates.

The company was first funded by Garrett Camp of Expa Labs, and netted a reported $4 million round from Jeff Jordan at Andreessen Horowitz early last year. Slagh said his hope is to eventually work with hundreds of thousands of veterans not just secure great jobs, but also to train them in the skillsets they need to succeed in the future. The company is exclusively partnered today with Lambda School to help provide some of that technical background, for instance.

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‘Death Stranding’ brings back appointment gaming

Published November 11, 2019

Game launches these days are frequently the very worst time to play them. Plagued by bugs, server issues, balance problems and a lack of content, many “games as a service” titles are best consumed after a month or two. Not so with Hideo Kojima’s long-awaited Death Stranding, which, if you’re going to play at all… you should probably play now.

This type of game comes out once every year or two: A title where the gradual discovery of mechanics and ideas by the players is part of the adventure. Being part of that vanguard of players who go in unsure of what to expect, learning by doing and sharing that information with others has a special feeling, not of exclusivity exactly, but of a collective experience.

Sure, playing the new Call of Duty on day one can be thrilling, but it’s not exactly a journey of discovery. Furthermore, games like those tend to get better after the first few months as content is added, gameplay is tweaked and so on.

But just as some TV and movies are best seen with friends on the day they’re released, some games beg to be played before they become over-amply documented, their mysteries vivisected and wikified.

The most frequent entries on this list are From Software’s Dark Souls type games, the esoteric workings of which are sometimes never fully revealed even years later. Bloodborne is still yielding up its secrets even now, for instance.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was another one, in which it wasn’t exactly that people were finding hidden things or speculating on lore, but rather finding how open-ended the world really was and demonstrating that in ingenious ways. When someone figured out you can trick an enemy into being struck by lightning by slipping them a metal weapon in a thunderstorm, it was like a million gamers worldwide squinted, said “wait, what?” and ran to their Switch to try it.

Death Stranding is likewise “appointment gaming,” because… well, it’s so weird. But it definitely belongs in the company of those games that are best experienced while steaming hot, like the frequent showers you’ll see Norman Reedus take in it. I’m glad I let a friend of mine convince me to jump in right away.

Don’t worry, I won’t be spoiling anything you don’t learn in the first couple of hours. But there is a mechanic where items like ladders or climbing ropes you lay down to help navigate the terrain get shared with other people for their own use. Just as there is glory in being the first to call down lightning in Zelda, there’s a glory (slightly more obscure admittedly) in being the first to go a certain way and let others follow in your footsteps.

Lay down a bridge to reach a shelter more easily while carrying lots of cargo, and you may find that a day or two later, thousands of people have used it, given it “likes,” and maybe even upgraded or expanded it with their own resources.

The thing about this is that in a year or two, the locations of these bridges will have been optimized and documented for all to know, as if they were part of the game’s landscape to begin with. Where’s the fun in that? It’s a pleasure knowing that the environment around you is being improvised by players all over the world.

Similarly, there are “aha” moments already occurring. You’re told directly that your character’s bodily fluids seem anathema to the ghostly “BTs” that are your most serious enemies. You’re also given the option, once you’ve drunk sufficient quantities from your canteen, to have a wee. Someone made that connection and decided to wee on the horrible ghostly BTs — and it repels them!

And a million gamers squint, say “wait, what?” and run to their PS4 to try it.

That collective experience that we shared when we sat in the same room to watch the Game of Thrones finale or, before that, Lost’s ultimately regrettable but thrilling perambulations, is present here in Death Stranding, as it has been for other games before it.

Is Death Stranding a game for everyone? Hell no. But nor was Dark Souls. Death Stranding is a game that is frequently original and odd and surprising, while also occasionally being heavy-handed, tedious and obtuse. We need more of that in the increasingly cynical and predictable world of AAA gaming.

By its nature Death Stranding is something that, if you don’t give it a hard pass (and I definitely get that), you should be playing today — not next year or even next month. Get it, then be patient, be weird, have fun and send likes.

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Facebook finally lets you banish nav bar tabs & red dots

Published November 11, 2019

Are those red notification dots on your Facebook home screen driving you crazy? Sick of Facebook Marketplace wasting your screen space? Now you can control what appears in the Facebook app’s navigation bar thanks to a new option called Shortcut Bar Settings.

Over the weekend TechCrunch spotted the option to remove certain tabs like Marketplace, Watch, Groups, Events, Profile, Friend Requests, News, Today In, Gaming and Dating or just silence their notification dots. In response to our inquiry, Facebook confirms that Shortcut Bar Settings is now rolling out to everyone, with most iOS users already equipped and the rest of Android owners getting it in the next few weeks.

The move could save the sanity and improve the well-being of people who don’t want their Facebook cluttered with distractions. Users already get important alerts that they could actually control via their Notifications tab. Constant red notification counts on the homescreen are an insidious growth hack, trying to pull in people’s attention to random Group feeds, Event wall posts and Marketplace.

“We are rolling out navigation bar controls to make it easier for people to connect with the things they like and control the notifications they get within the Facebook app,” a Facebook spokesperson tells me.

Back in July 2018, Facebook said it would start personalizing the navigation bar based on which utilities you use most. But the navigation bar seemed more intent on promoting features Facebook wanted to be popular, like its Craigslist competitor Marketplace, which I rarely use, rather than its long-standing Events feature, which I access daily.

To use the Shortcut Bar Settings options, tap and hold on any of the shortcuts in your navigation bar that’s at the bottom of the Facebook homescreen on iOS and the top on Android. You’ll see a menu pop up letting you remove that tab entirely, or leave it but disable the red notification count overlays. That clears space in your nav bar for a more peaceful experience.

You’ll also now find in the three-line More tab -> Settings & Privacy -> Settings -> Shortcuts menu the ability to toggle any of the Marketplace, Groups, Events and Pages tabs on or off. Eagle-eyed reverse engineering specialist Jane Manchun Wong spotted that Facebook was prototyping this menu and the Notification Dots settings menu that’s now available too.

A Facebook spokesperson admits people should have the ability to take a break from notifications within the app. They tell me Facebook wanted to give users more control so they can have access to what’s relevant to them.

For all of Facebook’s talk about well-being, with it trying out hiding Like counts in its app and Instagram (this week starting in the U.S.), there’s still plenty of low-hanging fruit. Better batching of Facebook notifications would be a great step, allowing users to get a daily digest of Groups or Events posts rather than a constant flurry. Its Time Well Spent dashboard that counts your minutes on Facebook should also say how many notifications you get of each type, how many you actually open, and let you disable the most common but useless ones right from there.

If Facebook wants to survive long-term, it can’t piss off users by trapping them in an anxiety-inducing hellscape of growth hacks that benefit the company. The app has become bloated and cramped with extra features over the last 15 years. Facebook could get away with more aggressive cross-promotion of some of these forgotten features as long as it empowers us to hide what we hate.

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Salesforce Ventures invested $300M in Automattic while Salesforce was building a CMS

Published November 11, 2019

In September, Salesforce Ventures, the venture of arm of Salesforce, announced a hefty $300 million investment in Automattic, the company behind WordPress, the ubiquitous content management system (CMS). At the same time, the company was putting the finishing touches on Salesforce CMS, an in-house project it released last week.

The question is, why did it choose to do both?

One reason could be that WordPress isn’t just well-liked; it’s also the world’s most popular content management system, running 34 percent of the world’s 10 billion websites — including this one — according to the company. With Automattic valued at $3 billion, that gives Salesforce Ventures a 10 percent stake.

Given the substantial investment, you wouldn’t have been irrational to at least consider the idea that Salesforce may have had its eye on this company as an acquisition target. In fact, at the time of the funding, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg told TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet that there could be some partnerships and integrations with Salesforce in the future.

Now we have a Salesforce CMS, and a potential partnership with one of the world’s largest web content management (WCM) tools, and it’s possible that the two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

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OLX Group invests up to $400M in used car marketplace Frontier Car Group at $700M valuation

Published November 11, 2019

Frontier Car Group, the Berlin-based startup building used car marketplaces targeting high-growth, emerging markets, has picked up another significant round of funding from a strategic backer also focusing on the same geographical opportunity.

Today, OLX, the online classifieds division Prosus (the digital division of Naspers that listed earlier this year in Europe) announced that it would invest up to $400 million in Frontier, in a mix of equity, secondary share acquisitions and existing business shares. The deal will include a primary capital injection of an unspecified amount, which OLX has confirmed to me values Frontier Car Group at $700 million, post-money.

In terms of business shares: OLX also said that it will be contributing its shares in a JV it had in place with Frontier in India and Poland. Meanwhile, the secondary acquisitions — the shares are currently held by other investors, founders and management — are subject to a tender process. The markets that Frontier operates in now include Nigeria, Mexico, Chile, Pakistan, Indonesia and the USA (where it acquired WeBuyAnyCar last year), in addition to India and Poland.

Notably, even before the full $400 million amount is exercised (that is, after the tender process is completed), an OLX spokesperson confirmed that first capital injection will make it Frontier’s largest single shareholder (but not the majority shareholder), which essentially values the deal at less than $350 million (based on the $700 million valuation).

Today, Frontier Car Group offers buyers and sellers a range of services: in addition to basic inventory listings, there are inspection reports, financial, pricing guides, warranties and insurance. The plan will be to expand more services for one of the key players in the used-car space, dealers — via Frontier’s Dealer Management System — more resale services (via OLX) and more CarFax/Blue Book-style pricing guides and other products.

Frontier sold about $700 million worth of cars in the past year, triple its value of a year before.

As a point of reference, in May of last year, when the company raised $58 million, it had sold 50,000 cars to date and was on track for $200 million in annualised revenues. CEO and co-founder Sujay Tyle says the company has been on a growth tear.

“FCG has nearly tripled performance across every key metric since the first OLX Group investment less than 18 months ago and has expanded to four new countries in that time,” said Tyle in a statement. “This is a testament to FCG’s team, the ripe market opportunity, and the results of early integration with OLX in our key markets. Together with OLX and Prosus, we are aiming to revolutionize the used car market in several emerging and developed economies by adding trust, transparency and a comprehensive suite of services to all participants in the ecosystem.”

“Together with FCG, we are aiming to build the leading global used car marketplace, offering a premium and convenient service to millions of car buyers, sellers and dealers,” said Martin Scheepbouwer, CEO of OLX Group. “We’re in a unique position to accelerate the expansion of this platform worldwide. Our experience in India is a great proof of concept, where within the space of a year, our joint venture has already increased the number of stores threefold, with car purchase volumes continuing to grow by 10% month-on-month.”

This is the second time that OLX has invested in Frontier: In May 2018, Naspers invested $89 million in the business, an investment that came just weeks after Frontier had raised $58 million from Balderton, TPG and others.

The deal underscores the longtime trend of consolidation in e-commerce businesses — something Prosus is also seeing played out in a completely different arena, that of food delivery.

The basics of the economy-of-scale principle, as applied to used car sales, goes something like this: economies of scale makes a platform more useful (there will be more cars on it, and less on competitors’ sites); but it also potentially means that Frontier would be making more transactions, thereby more revenues overall; and building and running more sales on the same platform improves the margins on the investment that gets made in building and operating that platform.

Targeting P2P used car sales in emerging markets is a big potential business: In part because of the nature of those economies, car owners are more likely to sweat out assets rather than go for buying completely new vehicles. OLX notes that combining the operations in Frontier’s footprint with those of the JV businesses that it is now taking over, plus OLX’s own business in Latin America, Asia and Poland, results in a market where some 30 million used cars are sold annually, “more than double that of China.”

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Join Jeremy Johnson from Andela at Disrupt Berlin

Published November 11, 2019

Over the past few years, Andela has built a simple yet powerful answer to the talent shortage in Silicon Valley and other overheating tech ecosystems. The company helps you hire some of the most talented software developers in a handful of African cities. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Andela co-founder and CEO Jeremy Johnson is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

Andela’s basic premise is that expertise is evenly distributed across the globe. And yet, the biggest tech companies are concentrated in a few places. More and more companies are now open to hiring remote employees, and Andela is taking advantage of that.

The company makes it easy to find software engineers in no time. It screens applications and selects the best software engineers that can develop in JavaScript (React.js, Angular.js), Python, Ruby, PHP and for the Android platform.

So far, 130,000 people have applied and Andela only accepted the top 1,000 engineers. The startup then tries to match your company with the best candidates for the job in order to facilitate onboarding. After that, you have a new team member.

With offices in Lagos, Nairobi, Kampala, Kigali, New York, San Francisco and Austin, Andela is trying to create a bridge between some of the most active tech communities in Africa and U.S.-based startups.

This isn’t Jeremy Johnson’s first startup. The young entrepreneur previously co-founded 2U, a software solution that helps schools and universities provide online degree programs. The company went public in 2014.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion — and many others. The conference will take place December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

Jeremy Johnson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Andela, a company that builds high-performing, distributed engineering teams with Africa’s most talented software developers. Founded on the premise that brilliance is evenly distributed, Andela is solving the global technical talent shortage while catalyzing the growth of tech ecosystems on the African continent.

Prior to founding Andela, Jeremy co-founded 2U, one of the fastest growing education technology startups to date. 2U went public in 2014 (NASDAQ:TWOU) and continues to transform higher education by delivering the world’s best online degree programs with top tier universities.

Jeremy is recognized broadly for his work as an education innovator. He has spoken on education and entrepreneurship at meetings hosted by the White House and Congress. His speaking appearances include conferences and college campuses around the world as well as media outlets like NBC, ABC, FOX, and CNBC. Jeremy was named “30 Under 30” by Inc. Magazine in 2012 and Forbes in 2013 and 2014.

Outside of Andela, Jeremy serves on the board of the Young Entrepreneur Council and the education non-profit PENCIL and co-authored a book for the World Economic Forum: ‘Education & Skills 2.0: New Targets & Innovative Approaches.’

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