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ShareGrid acquires UK peer-to-peer film and camera rental community BorrowFox

Published October 30, 2019

ShareGrid, the U.S.-based marketplace for sharing, buying and selling film and photography equipment, has acquired the U.K’s BorrowFox as part of its international expansion plans.

BorrowFox operates a “peer-to-peer” film and camera rental community that lets people rent out their under-utilised gear. ShareGrid says it expects to launch in the U.K. in 2020 (where it will compete with the likes of Fat Lama).

Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I understand ShareGrid is acquiring all of BorrowFox’s assets outright. The two companies aren’t disclosing if it was a cash or stock deal or mixture of the two, or who BorrowFox’s investors were.

Meanwhile, I’m told that BorrowFox’s founders, Arthur Pierse and Alastair Woods, won’t be joining ShareGrid.

In the U.S., ShareGrid lets users rent film and camera equipment from each other, including cinema cameras, still cameras, lenses, audio equipment, drones, lighting equipment, gimbals and other accessories, as well as studio space, locations and production vehicles.

The idea behind the service is to help creatives access world-class equipment at lower rental fees, and earn an income from their unused gear. The company also offers a buy-and-sell service, custom production quotes and instant insurance, acting as a “one-stop shop” for filmmakers, photographers and production professionals.

Following the acquisition, ShareGrid says it will host more than 100,000 users, with more than $1 billion worth of film and camera equipment available on its combined platform. Once the acquisition is complete and ShareGrid has launched in the U.K., existing BorrowFox members will be asked to transfer their account to ShareGrid.

“At ShareGrid, our mission is to enable all filmmakers and photographers, regardless of background, budget or location, to have access to cutting-edge and affordable equipment,” says Marius Ciocirlan, co-founder and CEO of ShareGrid in a statement. “We see the acquisition of BorrowFox as an exciting opportunity to enter the U.K. market, and build on a company that has had a similar vision from the start.”

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As Juul announces mass layoffs, a new lawsuit alleges it shipped a million contaminated pods

Published October 30, 2019

A lawsuit filed a by former Juul executive alleges that the company knew a batch of contaminated e-liquid had been used in about one million pods shipped to retailers earlier this year, but did not inform customers. The lawsuit, first reported by BuzzFeed, was brought by Siddharth Breja, former senior vice president of global finance at Juul from May 2018 to March 2019, who alleges he was fired after complaining about the contaminated pods.

News of the lawsuit comes the same day as Juul’s announcement it will lay off about 500 people, or 10% to 15% of its workforce, and the departure of four executives, including chief financial officer Tim Danaher. Juul is currently under scrutiny by the Food and Drug Administration, which claims the startup made misleading statements about its product and targeting of teens.

In the lawsuit, Breja claims that during a meeting on March 12, he learned a contaminated batch of mint e-liquid was used to make 250,000 refill kits, or a total of one million pods, that had already been shipped to retailers.

Breja alleges that when he complained about Juul’s refusal to issue a product recall or health and safety notice, Danaher said doing so would cost the company billions of dollars in lost sales, hurting its then-$38 billion valuation. About a week later, Breja says the company fired him, telling him that it was because he had misrepresented himself as former chief financial officer at Uber. In the lawsuit, Breja says the claim was “preposterous,” and that he had accurately represented his former position as a chief financial officer of a division at Uber.

In the lawsuit, Breja also claims that Juul wanted to sell pods that were almost a year old and when he asked the company to include an expiration or best by date, or a date of manufacture on the packaging, he was told by former CEO Kevin Burns that “half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods?”

In an email, a Juul spokesperson said “Mr. Breja’s claims are baseless. He was terminated in March 2019 because he failed to demonstrate the leadership qualities needed in his role. The allegations concerning safety issues with Juul products are equally meritless, and we already investigated the underlying manufacturing issue and determined the product met all applicable specifications. The company will vigorously defend this lawsuit.”

TechCrunch has contacted for comment the law firm representing Breja. In a statement to BuzzFeed, Breja’s attorney Harmeet Dhillon said “Mr. Breja became aware of very concerning actions at the company, and he performed his duty to shareholders and to the board by reporting these issues internally. In exchange for doing that, he was inappropriately terminated. This is very concerning, particularly since some of the issues he raised concerned matters of public safety.”

Burns was replaced in September by K.C. Crosthwaite, a former executive at Juul’s largest shareholder Altria . A replacement for Danaher has not been announced yet.

Updated with statement from Juul.

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Slack investor Index Ventures backs Slack competitor Quill

Published October 30, 2019

Slack created a new solution for workplace communication, one copied by many, even Microsoft. But the product, which is meant to help individuals and businesses collaborate, has been critiqued for sending too many notifications, with some claiming it’s sabotaged workplace productivity.

Quill, a startup led by Ludwig Pettersson, Stripe’s former creative director and design aficionado, claims to offer “meaningful conversations, without disturbing your team.” The company has raised a $2 million seed round led by Sam Altman with participation from General Catalyst, followed by a $12.5 million Series A at a $62.5 million valuation led by Index Ventures partner and former Slack board observer Sarah Cannon, TechCrunch has learned.

Quill and Cannon declined to comment.

The company, based in San Francisco, has created a no-frills messaging product. Still in beta, Quill plans to encourage fewer, more focused conversations with a heavy emphasis on threads, sources tell TechCrunch . The product is less of a firehose than Slack, says former Y Combinator president Altman, where one can get stuck for extended periods of time filtering through direct messages, threads and channels.

“It’s relentlessly focused on increasing the bandwidth and efficiency of communication,” Altman tells TechCrunch. “The product technically works super well–it surfaces the right information in the feed and it’s pretty intelligent about how it brings the right people into conversations.”

Pettersson previously worked with Altman at his current venture, OpenAI, a research-driven business focused on development that steers artificial intelligence in a “friendlier” direction. Pettersson was a member of the company’s technical staff in 2016 and 2017, creating OpenAI’s initial design.

Index Ventures, for its part, appears to be doubling down on the growing workplace communications software category. The firm first invested in Slack, which completed its highly-anticipated direct listing earlier this year, in 2015. Slack went on to raise hundred millions more, reaching a valuation of over $7 billion in 2018.

Since going public, Slack has struggled to find its footing on the public markets, in large part due to the growing threat of Microsoft Teams, the software giant’s Slack-like product that debuted in 2016. Quickly, Microsoft has gobbled up market share, offering convenient product packages including beloved tools used by most businesses. As of July, Teams had 13 million daily active users and the title of Microsoft’s fastest-growing application in its history. Slack reported 12 million daily active users earlier this month.

Startups like Quill pose a threat to Slack, too. It created the playbook for workplace chat software and proved the massive appetite for such tools; companies are bound to iterate on the model for years to come.

Quill is also backed by OpenAI’s chairman and chief technology officer Greg Brockman and Elad Gil, a former Twitter executive and co-founder of Color Genomics.

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Tencent leads $111M investment in India’s video streaming service MX Player

Published October 29, 2019

MX Player, a popular video app that offers both local playback and streaming services, said on Wednesday that it has raised $110.8 million in a new financing round led by Chinese internet giant Tencent as the video app looks to expand its business in India and other international markets.

Times Internet, which acquired a majority stake in MX Player in late 2017 for $140 million, also participated in the Series A financing round. The post-money valuation of MX Player was $500 million, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The addition of Tencent — which has invested in a handful of Indian startups including Times Internet-owned Gaana, ride-hailing giant Ola, ed tech startup Byju’s, B2B e-commerce startup Udaan and a bookkeeping service for merchants, Khatabook — “is a great sign of confidence,” said Satyan Gajwani, vice chairman of Times Internet. “Tencent is a leading global force in music and video, and there’s a lot for us to learn and leverage from their capabilities,” he added.

Karan Bedi, CEO of MX Player, said in an interview that the video app will use the fresh capital to double down on producing original TV shows and broadening its catalog of licensed content. The firm, which has so far added 15 original shows to its platform, has already commissioned production of another 20 by year-end, he said.

The Singapore-headquartered firm’s push into original shows and licensed content underscores one of the strangest evolution for a video app. MX Player originated in Korea as an app that could run video files in a wide-range of formats locally stored on a phone.

The app did all of this while consuming little resources, an ability that helped it win tens of millions of users with low-cost Android smartphones in emerging markets such as India. In fact, India is MX Player’s largest market, with 175 million monthly active users, Bedi said. Globally, the app has amassed more than 280 million users.

MX Player is ad-supported and does not charge users any monthly subscription fee. The service, which introduced movies and shows streaming in mid-2018, today also offers access to about 200 TV channels, their current and back catalog of shows, and a music streaming feature through an integration with Gaana.

mxplayer tc

Bedi said the company has tied up with all-web show producers such as HoiChoi in India and three of the top five TV local cable networks, including Sony and Sun. Missing from the list is Star India, the largest TV network in the country.

Thanks to the acquisition of 21st Century Fox, Disney now owns Star India. Star India has emerged as one of the gems in Disney’s new portfolio. The firm, which runs dozens of TV channels in India, operates Hotstar, the market-leading video streaming service.

Hotstar reported 300 million monthly active users and 100 million daily active users during the ICC Cricket World Cup tournament. The service has cashed in on the popularity of cricket to boost its numbers.

Bedi said MX Player is working on building new entertainment experiences, but sports content is not something it is exploring. The reason is simple: Cricket drives most of the sports streaming in India and Star India has secured rights to most of such content. (Facebook recently grabbed a slice of it, too.)

But cricket alone can’t help a streaming service win and sustain customers. Even Hotstar’s monthly user base plummets below 60 million in the months following the cricketing season, people familiar with Hotstar’s internal figures have told TechCrunch.

Figuring out what exactly resonates with the users in India, the world’s second largest internet market, is the billion-dollar question. The video streaming market in India is on track to be worth $1.7 billion in the next four years, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Bedi, who spearheaded Eros Now’s India business before joining MX Player, said users are increasingly enjoying the original shows. Most of the shows that MX Player has produced so far, such as “Hey Prabhu,” “Thinkistan” and “Immature,” are largely targeted at college students and those who have just joined the work force. But the company is slowly populating the platform with shows such as “Queen” that appeal “universally,” he said.

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MX Player today competes with more than three dozen local and international players, nearly all of which offer their services at dirt-cheap prices in India. Even Netflix, which launched in India with a $8 plan in 2016, this year introduced a $2.8 monthly tier. In recent months, several more firms including e-commerce giant Flipkart and food delivery startup Zomato have launched their video streaming services in the country.

Tencent-rival Alibaba announced earlier this year that it would invest $100 million to expand social video app Vmate in India.

Once cautious about each megabyte they spent consuming internet services, Indians are now spending about 10GB of data on their smartphones each month as data prices crash in the country, according to an Ericsson report. Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani disrupted the local telecom market in 2016 when he launched Reliance Jio. The 4G-only carrier undercut the market by first offering bulk of mobile data at no cost, and then charging very little fee.

An analyst TechCrunch spoke with said it’s only a matter of time before India’s video market begins to see some consolidation and pull back. “You have to offer something appealing that none of your rivals have,” he said, requesting anonymity as he advises many of these businesses.

For MX Player, its odd evolution story may be its biggest advantage. The app’s local video playback feature continues to draw many to it, and keeps the app among the top rated in Google’s Play Store. Bedi said the startup, which today employs about 300 people, maintains a large team that continues to improve the tech stacks to improve video playback support.

Moving forward, MX Player will also look into expanding to some international markets. It recently started beta testing the video streaming service in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Eventually, the startup hopes to make original shows for these markets that are relevant to the local audience there.

MX Player maintains a premium app on Google Play Store that strips ads for $5. But the app continues to mostly rely on revenue it generates from ads. Times Internet’s Gajwani said that at some point in the future, the video service will expand monetization beyond pure advertising. “That said, MX is consumed daily as much as the leading TV channel in India, so there’s significant headroom to capture larger advertising spends as well,” he added.

Paytm, a leading financial services firm in India, was also in talks with MX Player to invest in this financial round. It may invest in the video streaming services app at a later stage, a person familiar with the talks said.

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This former Uber exec wants to design and furnish your next apartment

Published October 29, 2019

Chan Park feels like “an eternal nomad.” He has since age 12, when he moved from Korea to the U.S., where he attended middle school in Minnesota, followed by high school in New Jersey, followed by college in New Hampshire. Then he really began to bounce around. Park worked as a trader in New York out of college, embraced the ski-bum life in Utah, then headed to Asia for Uber, where he spent six years, running its expansion team, then managing its entire Southeast Asia business out of Singapore.

More specifically, he was responsible for eight countries across the region, and 350 people, which didn’t give him a lot of time to organize his home. But he wasn’t overwhelmed by the chaos. Instead, he says that in Singapore, something unusual happened. “There’s this huge culture of landlords furnishing space to attract expats,” explains Park. “The furnishings aren’t super high-end, but they’re well-designed and well put together, and it enabled me to be basically moved in as soon as I put my clothes in the closet.” Suddenly, coming home was a treat — a new sensation for him. “For the first time, I was proud to host friends for dinners and barbecues and to just open the door and relax.”

Park knew his U.S. friends could benefit from the same experience, and before long, he was talking with his Dartmouth classmate turned product and industrial designer Christian Talmage about forming their own company. Enter Oliver Space, which provides a lot of what that Singaporean landlord delivered to Park. It furnishes places for busy professionals, making moving into a new home as easy as hanging up their clothes.

The now year-old service is available in the Bay Area only. And Oliver Space employs just a dozen people so far. But the company has already gained enough traction to attract $6.8 million in seed funding from an interesting array of investors, including Mayfield, Abstract Ventures, investors Jana Messerschmidt and April Underwood, Opendoor founder Eric Wu, and Kevin and Julia Hartz of Eventbrite, among others.

Now, Oliver Space just has to grow as quickly, or more so, than other furniture-as-service startups to recently attract funding. Among these is Fernish, a two-year-old, LA-based startup that helps people rent from brands like Crate & Barrel, Floyd and Campaign. It attracted $30 million in funding earlier this year led by Real Estate Technology Ventures, with participation from Intuit’s founder Scott Cook and Amazon’s head of global consumer, Jeff Wilke. Another rival is Feather, a two-year-old, New York-based furniture rental startup that similarly works with known brands like West Elm and Pottery Barn and meanwhile closed a $12 million round a few months ago led by Spark Capital. (It has raised $16 million altogether.)

Park, who as an Uber alum is very attuned to the competition, knows his own startup isn’t the first out of the gate. He thinks it can win on a few fronts, however.

For one thing, while Oliver Space uses traditional retailers for some of the items it’s renting, it is also making Oliver Space-branded furnishings — from sectionals to dining tables to beds — with the help of “dozens” of manufacturers in China and elsewhere, says Park. Part of its focus is on being able to assemble, and later disassemble, its furnishings fast, so that when a customer walks into his or her home, everything is picture perfect.

Park also stresses design, saying that Oliver Space wants to replace that friend with great taste to whom a college graduate or busy young professional would otherwise turn for help. Indeed, the company puts together “mood boards” for customers, featuring everything from loveseats to plants to pillows to candles, all of which it will happily rent to its customers on a monthly or even yearly basis. In fact, the longer a customer commits to rent items, the less they pay. If they decide eventually to buy the items, Oliver Space will sell them at their retail price, deducting all of their previous rental payments and considering them instead down payments on the furnishings.

As for what happens when that furniture isn’t brand-new, Park says Oliver Space has plans to inspect, clean and repair pieces as needed. He likens the opportunity to that of the car market, where pre-owned, certified cars are another source of revenue.

“In furniture, used means Craigslist, and you have no idea where a sofa or a rug has been,” says Park. “As our business grows, we’ll be creating that pre-owned concept with our brand’s stamp of approval.”

Maybe so. It’s early to know if these differentiators are enough to make the company stand out. A lot depends on execution as Oliver Space grows out of the Bay Area and into other markets. (Park won’t yet say where these will be.)

In the meantime, it’s easy to understand the appeal of the company and its rivals. Beyond making consumers’ lives easier in numerous ways and more stylish, Oliver Space and its peers may prove better for the environment. At least, with a reported 9.8 million tons of furniture that is thrown into a landfill every year in the U.S. alone, more eco-conscious shoppers may well decide they’re at least worth trying out.

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Samsung teases a clamshell foldable form factor

Published October 29, 2019

Last year at its developer conference, Samsung showed off an early glimpse of its upcoming foldable. In hindsight, the Galaxy Fold’s rollout could have gone more smoothly, but sometimes first-gen products go that way, I suppose. At the very least, it’s clear that the company won’t let a rocky start stand between it and broader foldable phone ambitions.

Onstage at this year’s event, the company showed off another take on the foldable display. A video shows the Galaxy Fold form factor morphing into a clamshell more akin to traditional dumb phones.

Attendees of #SDC19 got a sneak peek at a brand new form factor Samsung is exploring for the foldable category of devices. #SamsungEvent pic.twitter.com/rGtpvNj0SJ

— Samsung US Newsroom (@SamsungNewsUS) October 29, 2019

Unlike last year’s event, this one shouldn’t be taken as a pre-product announcement. Rather, the company says it’s “explor[ing] a range of new form factors in the foldable category.” It’s something that’s been pretty clear from the outset: these earliest days of foldables are very much about seeing which form factors click. Samsung is currently working with developers to explore these concepts.

This latest is more in line with leaks we’ve seen of the rumored Motorola Razr reboot, with an elongated screen that can easily be folded up and stashed away in a pocket. Perhaps we’ll get more insight into the company’s plans as CES or MWC.

Perhaps.

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Walmart and Green Dot to jointly establish a new fintech accelerator, Tailfin Labs

Published October 29, 2019

Walmart announced today an expansion of its existing relationship with financial services provider Green Dot, which will continue to serve as the issuing bank and program manager for the Walmart MoneyCard program for another seven years. The two companies also agreed to partner on the creation of a new accelerator that focuses on the intersection of retail and consumer financial services.

The accelerator, called Tailfin Labs, will help startups develop solutions that integrate omni-channel shopping and financial tech, which can be aimed either at consumers or businesses. These may involve products built on top of Green Dot’s “Banking-as-a-Service” (BaaS) platform.

“Green Dot is extremely proud and honored to both extend our MoneyCard partnership for many years and to additionally enter into an entirely new equity partnership with Walmart in the creation of a fintech accelerator,” said Steve Streit, founder and CEO, Green Dot, in a statement. “We believe the combination of Walmart’s unmatched retail ecosystem with Green Dot’s innovative and highly flexible BaaS platform, which enables the world’s largest technology and consumer brands to address their consumers with bespoke financial products and services, has the opportunity to create and bring to market many new and exciting innovations over the years to come.”

walmart money cardWalmart partnered with Green Dot in 2006 to create the Walmart MoneyCard, which offers FDIC-insured accounts and cash-back rewards on Walmart purchases, alongside other features, like early direct deposit, online bill pay, prize savings entries and more — as well as the usual set of features you’d have in a personal checking account, but without the fees. It’s now the largest retailer exclusive prepaid account program in the U.S.

In many ways, it was also a precursor to the sort of mobile banking startups seen today, which directly target consumers with similar products.

This is a busy space these days, as more companies go after the growing market of millennials (and even their younger Gen Z counterparts) who don’t want a traditional bank. Instead, they want banking services in a modern, easy-to-use mobile interface, where innovative features help them to better save and manage their money.

Just last week, for example, mobile banking app Current snagged $20 million more in funding for its service, now used by half a million users. Others in the space include Step, Cleo, N26, Chime, Simple and Stash, to name a few.

The new accelerator is seemingly poised to capitalize on this trend, while also giving Walmart and Green Dot a new foothold in the market.

“Over the years, Walmart has brought to market many innovative industry-defining financial services offerings to serve our customers – including several introduced through the Walmart MoneyCard program managed by Green Dot,” noted Daniel Eckert, senior vice president, Walmart Services and Digital Acceleration, in an announcement. “With this expanded relationship, and by leveraging Walmart’s footprint and existing offerings with Green Dot’s cutting-edge capabilities, we’ll be uniquely positioned to offer an unmatched set of customer experiences that sit at the nexus of omni-channel retail and tech-enabled financial services,” he said.

The new agreement between Green Dot and Walmart begins January 1, 2020 and will replace the agreement that would have otherwise expired in May 2020.

 

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Registration is open for TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020

Published October 29, 2019

It’s time to get your robotics fix, startup fans. That’s right, TC Sessions: Robotics & AI returns to UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on March 3, 2020. Join us for a day-long deep dive focused on the intersection of robotics and AI — arguably two of the most exciting and world-changing technologies.

Registration is now open. Save the date and save $100 when you buy an early-bird ticket to TC Sessions: Robotics & AI 2020. Want to save even more? Buy in bulk. You’ll save an extra 18% when you purchase four or more tickets at once.

This is our fourth year hosting this event and last year, 1,500 founders, technologists, engineering students and investors heard TechCrunch editors interview top leaders in AI and robotics, participated in workshops, watched live demos, attended speaker Q&As and enjoyed world-class networking. With so many advances in a range of technologies like AI, GPUs, sensors (to name just a few), it’s an exciting time to be part of this rapidly evolving space.

We’re building out the speaker roster and agenda, so keep checking back. In the meantime, take a look at last year’s agenda to get a sense of the quality programming you can expect.

Boston Dynamics founder Marc Raibert, a perennial favorite at TC Sessions: Robotics & AI, offers this perspective on the conference. It “blends the best of thoughtful, research-focused robotics with a unique business in technology focus.”

TC Sessions: Robotics & AI takes place on March 3, 2020 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. It’s not too early to save the date, and it’s never too early to save $100 on the price of admission. Join the top people in robotics and AI for a full day devoted to world-changing technologies.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Robotics & AI 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Yext Answers helps businesses provide better site search

Published October 29, 2019

Yext helps businesses manage their presence on search and across the web; starting today, with the launch of Yext Answers, it’s also helping them provide a better experience on their own websites.

“It lets any company with a website answer a question about their own brand in a Google-like experience on their own site,” CEO Howard Lerman told me.

While Lerman is officially announcing Yext Answers onstage at the company’s Onward conference this afternoon, the issue is clearly one he’s been thinking about for a while — in an interview earlier this year, he described user-generated content as “tyranny,” and claimed the company’s “founding principle is that the ultimate authority on how many calories are in a Big Mac is McDonald’s.”

It’s a theme that Lerman returned to when he demonstrated the new product for me yesterday, running a number of Google searches — such as “student checking account” — where a brand might want to be relevant, but where the results mostly come from SEO-optimized advice and how-to articles from third-party sites.

“The world of search became pretty cluttered with all these self-declared experts,” he said.

Answers Comparison AnswersNotLinks 1

The goal with Yext Answers is to turn a brand’s website into the source that consumers turn to for information on these topics. Lerman said the big obstacle is the simple fact that most site search is pretty bad: “The algorithms that are there today are the algorithms of 1995. It’s keyword-based document search.”

So if you don’t enter exactly the right keywords in exactly the right order, you don’t get useful results. Yext, on the other hand, has supposedly spent two years building its own search engine, with natural language processing technology.

As Lerman showed me, that means it can handle more complex, conversational queries like “broccoli cheese soup recipes in 10 minutes or less.” He also pointed out how Yext has tried to follow Google’s lead in presenting the results in a variety of formats, whether that’s just a straightforward answer to a question, or maps if you’re searching for store locations.

In addition, Yext Answers customers will get analytics about what people are searching for on their site. If people are searching for a question that the site isn’t answering, businesses can then take advantage of their company’s knowledge base to publish something new — and that, in turn, could also help them show up in search results elsewhere.

BBVA LiveExample3 1

Yext Answers has been beta testing with companies like Three Mobile, BBVA USA, IHA and Healthcare Associates of Texas. You also can try it out for yourself on the Yext site.

“Yext Answers represents a level of sophistication that elevates our current search into a predictive, insightful tool that provides opportunities to better understand what our patient population is interested in finding on our site,” said Lori Gillen, marketing director at Healthcare Associates of Texas, in a statement. “It is intelligent enough to understand complex relationships between HCAT-specific facts, like doctors to procedures or specialties to locations, and give insights into what our patients want to know.”

Yext Answers is now available in English-speaking countries.

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Fountain, a platform for recruiting gig and hourly workers, raises $23M

Published October 29, 2019

Contract, self-employed and temporary jobs are on the rise in developed markets, with some 85% of the global workforce, 2.7 billion people, estimated to be on some form of hourly wage rather than flat salary.

Today, a startup that helps companies source these kinds of candidates is announcing a round of funding to help meet that demand. Fountain, which has built a platform to find and screen candidates for field roles — not knowledge-worker desk jobs, but hourly work that likely has you on your feet — has raised $23 million, money that it will be using to continue expanding its platform, the kinds of services it provides to its customers and its geographical footprint.

Fountain already has some scale: The company currently sources and processes more than 1 million inbound candidate applications each month, filling some 150,000 jobs in the process, CEO and founder Keith Ryu said in an interview.

In addition to building engines to source candidates through a number of channels, such as traditional job boards, social media channels, a company’s own site and more, Fountain then helps with screening, interview scheduling, background checks (using third-party providers for this part), communicating with the candidate, handling the paperwork and, finally, onboarding.

Led by DCM, this latest round also included a potentially strategic backer, the Chinese recruitment site 51job, as well as Origin Ventures, Uncork Capital and others that are not being named. This brings the total raised by Fountain, which previously was called OnboardIQ and had been incubated in Y Combinator, to $34 million.

Fountain’s business targets two main kinds of employers. First, ridesharing companies like Uber, delivery startups like Postmates and home services providers like Thumbtack all function by virtue of their pools of “gig” workers, self-employed people who choose their own working hours and dip into the platforms for assignments when they have time to fulfill them.

But the challenge of finding good people for field jobs is not venture-backed startups’ alone. The second big category that Fountain taps for business is the wider pool of retail and food industry businesses that have long relied on hourly workers but also find it hard to source qualified and reliable people.

Between those two, Ryu said that customers cover big “gig economy” businesses like Uber Eats, Caviar and Cabify; large fast food franchises, including Taco Bell, Burger King and KFC chains; and a number of other customers that use Fountain’s APIs for white-label services and prefer not to be named. (I think it’s interesting that Uber Eats is on Fountain’s customer list, but Uber is not.)

Fountain was founded in 2015, arguably at the peak of demand for recruiting gig economy workers. In the years since then, and especially in recent times, demands have moved away for these companies from aggressive expansion (bringing on, for example, lots of new drivers), and into more profitable operations. Ryu said that the knock-on effect for Fountain has not been a reduction, but a change, in terms of the services required, with some companies opting to outsource, whereas in the past they might have handled recruitment in-house.

“There has been some attention to reducing operating costs per driver, including driver acquisition,” he said. “That is where we have been getting involved, using our size [and reach] to reduce the cost to the employer.”

This also has had the effect of also seeing Fountain change up its own strategy to make more of an effort to target more traditional businesses that are based around hourly employees: no longer contractors, but still very much in the field.

“As the unrivaled leader in gig hiring and recruiting, Fountain is already reshaping the way billions of job seekers interact with employers,” says David Chao, co-founder and partner at DCM, in a statement. “Fountain has been exceptionally capital efficient and has best-in-class customer retention,” adds Kyle Lui, partner at DCM.

Fountain is not disclosing its valuation with this round. In its last round, back in 2017, it had a very modest $40 million price on it, although given its growth since then (it had sourced 5 million candidates in two years in 2017; now it sources 1 million each month) this is likely to be significantly higher.

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