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Selina raises $95M to create a boutique travel lodging experience built around communities
If you’re looking to travel abroad — and especially if you’re looking to work while doing so — it might be tough to convince yourself you can find a cool boutique hotel that caters to a lot of different price points, as well as surround yourself with people that will help you feel like you should still get your work done.
That’s the goal of Selina, an emerging co-working and traveling hospitality service that opens up campuses geared toward fitting those niches across Central America. What started as originally just a real estate company has now turned into a venture-funded startup called Selina, which goes around the world creating a different kind of hotel product out of renovated older properties. Instead of just renting out a room in an Airbnb or paying for a hotel room in a boutique hotel, or some co-working space, Selina aims to be a more streamlined way to get that mixture of a community experience, a boutique hotel feel, and the ease of getting a consistent experience across multiple different properties. The company said today it’s raised $95 million from Abraaj Group and WeWork founder Adam Neumann.
“There are lifestyle hotels, surf camps, co-working places, hostels, and all those kinds of properties, Yoav Gery, Selina’s president, said. “A lot of companies talk the same talk. What was different about us and what we were telling the world is we were doing something different in the hospitality world. We’re creating a much more holistic program for the traveler. It’s not just a hotel, or for co-working. It’s everything that the traveler would want. And we hope the speed at which we’re doing it is also unique. Most hotels couldn’t get a product and convert it in 3 or 4 months into a new brand.”
You can think of Selina almost as a kind of ramped-up hostel — where you’re getting people of all different backgrounds into one spot to meet each other and get a feel for the area. But Selina still does serve different price points, from the bunk room set-up at a common hostel for under $30 a night to a more traditional private room that you’d find in an Airbnb or hotel for a higher price. The whole point, Gery said, is that customers shouldn’t be spending most of their time in their rooms.
The company currently has 22 locations that range a variety of locales, whether that’s beach areas or metropolitan ones. It plans to open a new location in Miami this year as it starts to expand beyond Central America, looking to structure it around frequent travelers looking to meet other like-minded individuals that might be looking to either explore a new area or find a co-working spot while traveling.
Selina started in Central America and has since begun expanding throughout those countries, and the company hopes to begin expanding into the United States and Europe this year as it continues to make inroads into Latin America. Selina looks to hire people that have the specific experience working with those regions when it comes to taxes and regulations, and one of the benefits it has is that it is usually repurposing old real estate. That means, in theory, most things should already be up to code for a hospitality project, Gery said.
“We are the first company to capitalize on this lifestyle shift for travelers and the way people are working,” Selina VP of strategy Brynne McNulty Rojas said. “People are eager to see the way we’re offering all these different business lines to make people feel at home, whether or not they’re on vacation or working. We do the market research, and exactly the target beds we want, that’s what gave people comfort — that we were going to be able to achieve the scale we were projecting. We wanted to focus on having that Selina DNA and that simplicity of experience and transactions and making it a nice, tech-first way of traveling and living and working.”
Part of the process is finding those old areas to renovate, but Selina hopes to also build out a strategy where it knows the exact needs for each of those properties — and how to properly staff them. The company hopes to be able to operate efficiently with a hospitality staff of between 30 or 40, though that could vary from property to property depending on the location. After all, an experience in Brooklyn is probably going to look radically different from one on the coast of Belize.
Then there’s the data aspect of it, where Selina is able — like any emerging hospitality service such as Airbnb, for example — to collect the right information from potential customers. But while Airbnb might be centered around that individual experience, Rojas said it wants to use data from potential visitors to improve the more community-oriented experience at Selina. In the end, it’s about having that campus-oriented feel to it rather than just renting someone’s home on the beach, she said.
The challenge, of course, is going to be going up against emerging hospitality services — like Airbnb, of course, which could work with a host to create a similar experience through a platform-oriented approach. But the company hopes it’ll have that vibe of a unified hotel chain experience in addition to being able to scale it up at the rate of a startup and be able to show investors that its ability to rapidly create new properties is what will make it be successful.
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Zuckerberg will also testify before the Senate
Earlier this week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is slated to testify on the use and protection of user data in Washington D.C. on April 11. Turns out, Zuckerberg will have a busier week in D.C. than expected, with the Senate Judiciary and Senate Commerce Committees announcing a joint hearing with the Facebook boss.
The Senate hearing will go down on April 10, a day before Zuckerberg appears before the House Committee.
The hearing, convened by Senate Committee on the Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.), is titled “Facebook, Social Media Privacy, and the Use and Abuse of Data.”
The hearing will take place in the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center at 2:15pm ET.
Here’s what Senator Thune had to say in a prepared statement:
Facebook now plays a critical role in many social relationships, informing Americans about current events, and pitching everything from products to political candidates. Our joint hearing will be a public conversation with the CEO of this powerful and influential company about his vision for addressing problems that have generated significant concern about Facebook’s role in our democracy, bad actors using the platform, and user privacy.
Zuckerberg brought up the possibility of speaking to congress in late March, saying: “If it is ever the case that I am the most informed person at Facebook in the best position to testify, I will happily do that.”
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Tap Bio’s mini-sites solve Instagram’s profile link problem
You only get one link on Instagram, but Tap Bio lets you point that to a customized landing page full of all the sites you want to share. Rather than constantly changing your Instagram profile URL, you can easily add slides equipped with links to your Tap Bio corresponding to your latest Instagram posts. Tap Bio could be a powerful tool for social media stars, digital entrepreneurs or anyone trying to market themselves via Instagram.
Tap Bio is About.me for the next generation. You can see it in action here.
It’s a deceptively simple idea, yet one that the big website-creation platforms like Squarespace, Wix and Weebly have missed. It’s dumbfounding that there’s no popular mobile-first site builder, though an app called Universe was one of the hottest companies that graduated from Y Combinator’s accelerator this month. But by starting with an obvious problem, the bootstrapped Tap Bio could gain a foothold in a business dominated by heavily funded startups, and angle to become the center of your online identity. People interested can sign up for the private beta here.
The whole reason for Tap Bio’s existence is a brilliant decision of Instagram’s. You can’t post links, and you get just one link in your profile. URLs in post captions don’t hyperlink and can’t be copied. That means the focus is on sharing beauty, not driving clicks. But promoters gonna promote, so the “Link in bio” trend began. Instagrammers change their profile link to where they want to send people, then mention that much-derided phrase hoping their followers will open their profile and click-through. Unfortunately, though, anyone reading one of their older posts might be confused when the “link in bio” has changed to point somewhere unrelated.
“The fact that you can’t link from posts has contributed to the quality of the experience,” says Tap Bio CEO Jesse Engle. “But it’s created a major pain point for people who are promoting something, which is a lot of people.”
Engle is experienced with filling social platform gaps. He co-founded Twitter scheduling and multi-account management app CoTweet in 2008, which sold to ExactTarget in 2010 and eventually became part of Salesforce. Over the past few years, he and Tap Bio co-founder Ryan Walker, who just left Apple, have been running Link In Profile, a more basic but similar tool that just recreates your Instagram profile but with links attached to each post.
With Tap Bio, you set it as your Instagram profile link, and then create different cards to show on your mini-site. One can show two columns of your recent Instagram posts that instantly open whichever link you want to pair with each. Another offers a more visual full-screen profile with links to your other social media presences, like on Twitter and YouTube. There’s a focused, single-link call to action page if you’ve got one big thing to promote. And Tap Bio is adding more card styles.
Tap Bio is “forever free” if you only want one profile card and one of any other card; $5 per month gets you three extra plus analytics, while $12 per month grants unlimited cards across up to three Instagram accounts — though there are discounts for yearly billing. It will compete with traditional site builders and less-polished alternatives, like Linkin.bio and Linktree.
But the biggest risk for Tap Bio isn’t competition, it’s its host platform. Instagram could always shut down links out to Tap Bio. After all, it did just suddenly kill off a big part of its API three months ahead of schedule as part of Facebook’s big data privacy crackdown. Luckily, Engle says, “we’re mitigating this risk by building a close relationship with Instagram, openly sharing our plans and offering whatever value we can to them. They’ve been very helpful in sharing their plans, and we are confident that we’ll continue to play a role in this space well into the future.”
Tap Bio’s potential goes far beyond Instagram, though. It could become the hub for your web presence. About.me is outdated, Twitter’s too temporal, Facebook’s too personal, LinkedIn’s too formal and Instagram’s too informal. Unless you have your own full-fledged website, it’s unclear which one link your should give people you meet online or off. If Tap Bio plays it right, it could become your digital calling card.
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MoviePass’ parent company acquires Moviefone
Helios and Matheson Analytics, which already owns movie ticket subscription service MoviePass, has acquired Moviefone.
Despite the old-school name, Moviefone is now a digital media business with trailers, movie information and ticketing via Fandango — it says it reaches 6 million unique visitors each month.
Moviefone was previously owned by Oath, the Verizon subsidiary formed from the merger of AOL and Yahoo. (Oath also owns TechCrunch). AOL acquired Moviefone for $388 million back in 1999.
The deal includes a $1 million cash payment, as well as stock that could bring the total value up to $23 million, according to Variety. That means Oath now has a stake in MoviePass . It will also continue sell Moviefone’s digital ad inventory.
MoviePass, meanwhile, allows customers to pay $9.95 a month (or less) to get one free movie ticket per day, albeit with inconveniences like the need to physically buy your ticket at the theater. Acquiring Moviefone is supposed to help the company expand into content and advertising.
“This natural alignment between MoviePass and Moviefone will help us grow our subscriber base significantly and expand our marketing and advertising platform for our studio and brand partners,” said MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe in the acquisition release. “Moviefone has been a go-to resource for entertainment enthusiasts for years, and we’re excited to bolster its presence and bring this iconic platform into the entertainment ecosystem of the future.”
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Suplari raises $10.3M Series A round to bring AI to procurement
Procurement isn’t the most exciting topic in the world, but for large businesses, it’s an area where inefficiencies can quickly affect the bottom line. Simply getting a complete view of all of the products and services that a company buys is a challenge in itself, though, which in turn makes it hard to find savings, ensure compliance with company policy or government regulations or detect potential fraud. Suplari wants to change this by bringing its AI systems to bear on this problem.
The company today announced that it has raised a $10.3 million Series A round led by Shasta Ventures. Existing investors Madrona Ventures and Amplify Partners also joined this round, as well as new investors Two Sigma Ventures and Workday Ventures.
“Suplari uses advanced artificial intelligence on top of existing enterprise systems to proactively uncover the highest-value opportunities to pursue and empower the CFO or Chief Procurement Officer to unlock savings and profit that can be invested in growth, innovation, and their people,” said Suplari CEO and co-founder Nikesh Parekh in today’s announcement.
The company’s cloud-based service allows businesses to analyze all of their procurement data across platforms and formats. This data can include contracts, purchasing data, product usage information and data from corporate credit card accounts.
A number of Fortune 1000 customers have already signed up for the service and Supplari argues that it has helped its customers save software licensing fees by 33 percent and consolidate $200 million in professional service and temporary labor suppliers.
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Pinterest aims for products from the store down your street as its next big ad business
Pinterest is known for having, and promoting, a lot of business content. It’s actually a majority of the content, and it’s usually from some of the most well-known brands that feed into the kinds of sometimes dream-level wants and needs of its users.
And while a majority of Pinterest’s potential is locked up there, the company has increasingly turned its gaze toward smaller and smaller businesses to try to entice users with local content — including that clothing store right down your street. That’s part of the reasoning behind Pinterest’s Propel program, which it started a year ago to work with small businesses that really either didn’t know what they were doing, or had just never done it before. In another step toward that goal, Pinterest has hired Matt Hogle to be the global head of small business.
Hogle spent 9 years at Facebook, working with small businesses and will be part of the effort for the company to try to find the right set of tools and strategies in place to appeal to small businesses as it starts to ramp it into a significant portion of its revenue. The number of small businesses advertisers on Pinterest has increased by around 50% year-over-year, the company said, and it looks to continue to refine a kind of hybrid strategy that mixes platforms and interactions with real people in order to entice those businesses. That’s important for, say, a local clothing store that only has one store and a limited online shop, but has products that would perform well on their own as content on Pinterest — and could quickly add revenue if they started advertising on it.
“We, as an ads business, know what customers’ business objectives are, and we capture that at the early stages,” Pinterest head of global sales Jon Kaplan said. “We know what they’re targeting, how they’re targeting, who, and we know the creative best practices. We should be able in the very near future to take all these elements and say, oh this is your objective, we’ll obfuscate all this complexity and hit a target [return on ad spend] you have. We’re not far. We’ve obfuscated a lot of the levers one can pull in Propel.”
Propel, for now, is adopting an increasingly popular human/digital approach for smaller businesses that are looking to advertise for the first time on Pinterest. If they have no experience whatsoever, or don’t even know what to do, Pinterest’s goal is to serve as a resource for best practices when it comes to creative content down to where to target it. Pinterest is increasingly rolling out more self-serve tools with more robust targeting and tracking, but the kind of small businesses — the sum of which could eventually account for a big chunk of its revenue — that Facebook has snapped up with the prospect of getting in front of the exact right people at the right time. The company says it will be rolling out the “promote” button, which allows advertisers to click a button on a pin to quickly spin up a campaign, to Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK in the next coming weeks.
In the end, Pinterest still has 200 million monthly active users, which is absolutely dwarfed by Facebook’s billions of users. But at the same time, Pinterest may be able to capitalize on the good will that Facebook has torched in light of its massive privacy scandal in which information on as many as 87 million users ended up in the hands of a research firm without authorization or permission. Facebook can prove a return on spend, but it can’t at the moment prove that it’ll be able to keep doing the same things that get that return on spend now that the Internet is revolting against Facebook for its massive breach of trust. (Hogle, to be clear, joined before details on the Cambridge Analytica scandal began pouring in.)
Pinterest’s value to advertisers is that it’s able to capture a potential customer when they are just a user clicking (or tapping) around Pinterest looking for ideas. Whether planning life events or just looking for wardrobe suggestions, Pinterest is able to go to advertisers and say they can catch them in those discovery stages and then stick the right ad in front of them to get their attention. Then, the service can follow the user all the way from when they are actually interested in doing something, searching for what to do, and eventually saving that product — or buying it.
It’s that potential value for advertisers that’s taken it to a $12.5 billion valuation in its most recent financing round. But while Pinterest is probably still a sort of curiosity buy for larger advertisers and brands, the challenge has been to chase down the businesses that don’t have huge marketing budgets and might not even be considering Pinterest as a potential advertising platform. After all, the playbook for Facebook is robust and there are plenty of success stories, and the same is true for Google. But at the same time, that bespoke coffee shop down on Valencia Street in San Francisco may have products that line up perfectly for a Pinterest user that’s looking for a holiday gift down the line.
“Over the coming nine months, into 2019, I think we’re gonna continue to invest in ways that make it easy for our small businesses to grow with us,” Hogle said. “Small businesses are unique in the sense that they don’t have the time or energy or resources — the CEO might also be the HR person and the marketing person, and so on. We need to make it extremely lightweight and seamless. At the end of the day, if we can’t provide value and deliver on the money they spend with us and demonstrate the value that’s created there — sales being that number one performance indicator for these companies — then we’re failing. The things we’re gonna continue to build are ways to make that process as easy and seamless.”
“Small businesses add disproportionate value to Pinners and our ad ecosystem,” Hogle said. “I truly believe that small businesses are part of the fabric of every community, they’re the engine that drives every economy around the world. Their relevancy, category or vertical, or proximity to consumers creates disproportionate organic value to Pinners and also creates disproportionate commercial value. Our goal is to show the people the most relevant ad they possibly can based on what they’re trying to accomplish. We can’t do that if we do not meet the needs of the vast majority of businesses that exist. It is a strategic decision, but it’s not just one that goes into paid ads, it creates disproportionate value for the entire platform and ecosystem.”
Hogle’s conversations started mid last year with Tim Kendall, Pinterest’s former president who left in November last year. What started as an exchange of ideas turned, as these conversations often do, it discussions about a potential job at Pinterest, and finally months later he ended up joining to start helping with the company’s small business efforts. Pinterest is increasingly looking to staff up with a suite of executives that will help it get its business in order ahead of a potential IPO. That includes a new COO, Francoise Brougher, who joined in February from Square.
But if Pinterest is going to eventually go public, and get its employees and investors paid out for their efforts, it needs to show that it can be a business that’s beyond just a curiosity budget for a big brand. Getting small businesses on board, like the ones Hogle looks to capture that are right down the street, are a big part of what the company hopes will eventually show that it has a diversified revenue stream and not beholden to just the big and potentially fickle budgets of larger brands.
“Our ad platform is not very old by industry standards, but the rate of development on our self serve tools and the rate of development on interfaces for our small customers is moving at a pace where I’m really pleased,” Hogle said. “The ability to carve out opportunity for advertisers is something that’s moving really quickly. Is it where it needs to be long term, of course not, but we’re gonna continue to invest. One of the reasons I joined was it was very clear to me that small businesses were a priority. We are going to invest in products and we’re also going to invest in educational programs. We’re gonna invest and provide the necessary resources.”
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News startup Knowhere aims to break through partisan echo chambers
It’s become a common complaint that social media allows everyone to limit their news consumption to stories that reinforce what they already believe. But the team at Knowhere says it’s found a solution: News stories written by machines.
The idea is that Knowhere’s technology can eliminate some of the in-built human bias, and also pull from a wide variety of sources and write stories with enormous speed. For controversial and political news, it doesn’t limit itself to one story. Instead, it allows you to jump between versions of the story that are written from a left, right or “impartial” perspective.
“I want to establish a source of record that’s indisputably trustworthy for everyone from across all aisles,” said CEO and Editor-in-Chief Nathaniel Barling. “As a Knowhere reader what you are signing up for is the truth and the full context around it.”
At first, I wondered whether Knowhere might simply deepen the same divisions that it claims to fight. Might this approach just reinforce the idea that every piece of news should be interpreted according to our ideological leanings? Or that we can dismiss an accurate piece of reporting by, say, The New York Times because The Times has been painted as a liberal paper?
When I brought this up, Barling said Knowhere is focused on facts, even if those facts (say, the scientific consensus around climate change) are sometimes disputed for political reasons.
Barling’s father Kurt was a longtime reporter at the BBC, and Barling recalled a conversation between the two of them on this topic: “The truth doesn’t care for your politics. What we must do is evaluate all of the evidence that we possibly have available to us, then come to the most accurate conclusion regardless of political stripe.”
So the Knowhere stories that I’ve read tend to be very straightforward and focus on facts that have been corroborated by reputable publications. The left-leaning version of the article might be written so those facts add up to one narrative, while the right-leaning version might tell a different story, but they still agree on the core facts. (And some stories — including most of the ones I read in the Technology section — don’t include multiple spins, just the impartial version.)
And while Knowhere articles are created by machine learning technology (Barling’s co-founders Alexandre Elkrief and Dylan Rhodes are both data scientists), they’re all reviewed by human journalists. In fact, he said there are already eight journalists on his team, making up for half of Knowhere’s headcount — a ratio that he hopes to maintain as the company grows.
Facebook has also been making efforts to show different perspectives on a story, particularly if the story’s accuracy is disputed. When I pointed this out, Barling said, “They do recognize the scale of the issue, but they’re not well-placed to execute on it because of their philosophical stand. As you said, they don’t want to be the arbiters of truth.”
In addition to launching today, Knowhere announced that it has raised $1.8 million in seed funding from investors, including CrunchFund, Danhua Capital, Day One Ventures, Struck Capital and Abstract Ventures. (Like TechCrunch, CrunchFund was founded by Michael Arrington, and it’s backed by our parent company, Oath.)
And while it’s way too early to declare that Knowhere is succeeding at breaking down partisan bias, I’ll say that I’m pretty left-leaning myself and that I get a lot of my news and commentary from left-leaning sources — but the site’s approach and tone made me way more willing to click on the right-wing version of the story.
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Fullscreen acquires influencer marketing startup Reelio
Digital media company Fullscreen announced this morning that it has acquired Reelio .
The startup has described itself as “the Match.com of brands and creators on YouTube,” collecting data about video creators and connecting them with marketers who want to use their skills and reach their audience.
In the announcement, Fullscreen suggests that Reelio’s technology will allow the company to offer a more complete set of services around influencer marketing.
“The integration of Reelio’s platform into our network brings us one step closer to building a complete solution for the future of brand marketing, which we believe will be social-first and content-driven,” said Fullscreen general manager Pete Stein in a statement. “The strength of Reelio’s data, technology, and team will be a huge asset to our company, and we’re excited to work alongside them as we continue to enhance our influencer marketing offerings.”
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Variety reports that the entire 50-person Reelio team (including co-founder and CEO Pete Borum) will be joining Fullscreen.
Reelio had raised $8 million in funding from investors including e.ventures, Tremor Video co-founders Jason Glickman and Andrew Reis and former Bertelsmann president Thomas Hesse. Fullscreen, meanwhile, is owned by Otter Media, the joint venture between AT&T and the Chernin Group.
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April Underwood is now Slack’s chief product officer
Former Twitter product lead April Underwood is getting another promotion this morning, now rising to the role of chief product officer of what aims to be the dead-simple employee communications platform Slack, according to Fortune.
Underwood previously served as director of product at Twitter, where she worked for five years before joining Slack as its head of platform. Shortly after that Underwood was promoted to the company’s VP of product, and will now serve as the company’s first chief product officer. These kinds of promotions imply some additional responsibility — especially as Slack looks to diversify and pitch itself as a more robust product than just a messenger — but also another point of maturation for Slack. The company hired its first chief financial officer, Allen Shim, in February this year.
Slack is one of those companies that faces a tense push-and-pull as it looks to get into larger and larger enterprises, which all have niche needs. The company is a darling in Silicon Valley thanks to its very simple interface, but with companies with thousands (or, eventually, tens of thousands of employees) just a tool with groups and direct messages could easily become unwieldy. That’s why Slack has invested in a variety of tools, including rolling out threaded messaging a little more than a year ago. Slack is likely one of those companies that gets hundreds of feature requests a year for larger businesses that have niche use cases, but it still has to demonstrate that it’s a simple product without hitting feature creep status.
Underwood getting more authority over that evolution (of which she was already a huge part, including the development of threaded messages) is another signal that the company is looking to tap her consumer background at Twitter to create some kind of middle ground between feeling like a satisfying consumer product while still operating as an enterprise tool. Slack is increasingly looking to apply machine learning to help employees get to answers right away, and it still has to take the same kind of care in rolling out new features that satisfy the needs of larger organizations without sacrificing that simplicity that made it a darling in the first place.
Slack most recently hit a $5.1 billion valuation in a recent investment round, and said it had around 6 million daily active users in September last year. That might be small-ish compared to the size and scale of Twitter, but as something geared toward internal communications at companies, that level of engagement in the workplace is going to increasingly be a selling point for the company as it looks to grow into that valuation.
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JUMP Bikes weighing Uber acquisition, investment offers
JUMP Bikes, the on-demand biking service that integrates with Uber, has been weighing both acquisition and investment offers.
A decision has not yet been reached, but right now possible options include a sale to Uber at a price that exceeds $100 million, or a venture investment round, multiple sources tell TechCrunch. One of the possible investor names that has been floated is Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital, but we are told that JUMP has multiple options.
We are also told that various parties have been upping their offers over the past week, as they fiercely compete to get ownership of JUMP. “E-bikes” are expected to become more popular, where users are able to find and rent bikes quickly via apps.
JUMP launched as Social Bicycles in 2008, but the startup recently rebranded as JUMP when it announced its $10 million Series A investment round a few months back. Menlo Ventures and Sinewave Ventures invested.
Since then, JUMP has launched a partnership with Uber, available in select cities like San Francisco. Users are able to identify a nearby bike via the Uber app and are given a PIN to unlock it. It costs $2 for every 30 minutes.
We’ve reached out to JUMP, Uber and Sequoia for comment.
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