TikTok launches Donation Stickers that creators can embed in videos, livestreams to raise funds for charities, says it will match COVID-19 donations till May 27 — TikTok is making it easier for creators and their fans to donate to favorite charities amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Online lending firms might be beginning to feel the heat of the coronavirus pandemic in Southeast Asia, but investors’ faith in digital insurance startups remains unflinching in the region.
Jakarta-based Qoala has raised $13.5 million in its Series A financing round, the one-year-old startup said Tuesday. Centauri Fund, a joint venture between funds from South Korea’s Kookmin Bank and Telkom Indonesia, led the round.
Sequoia India, Flourish Ventures, Kookmin Bank Investments, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, Mirae Asset Sekuritas and existing investors MassMutual Ventures Southeast Asia, MDI Ventures, SeedPlus and Bank Central Asia’s Central Capital Ventura participated in the round, which pushes the startup’s to-date raise to $15 million.
Qoala works with leading insurers including AXA Mandiri, Tokio Marine, Great Eastern to offer customers cover against phone display damage, e-commerce logistics and hotel-quality checks. The startup says it offers personalized products to customers and eases the burden while making claims by allowing them to upload pictures.
The startup maintains partnership with several e-commerce firms including Grabkios, JD.ID, Shopee and Tokopedia and hotel and travel booking firms PegiPegi and RedBus.
It uses machine learning to detect fraud claims. It’s a win-win scenario for customers, who can make claims easily and have more affordable and sachet insurance products to buy, and for insurers, who can reach more customers.
Qoala processes more than 2 million policies each month, up from 7,000 in March last year. The startup said it is working on insurance products to cover health and peer-to-peer categories. The startup, which employs about 150 people currently, plans to double its headcount in a year.
“As a relatively new entrant in the space we are delighted to partner with leading global investors whose tremendous thought leadership as well as operational experience will allow us to maintain our innovative edge. This truly demonstrates the ecosystem’s belief in what Qoala is trying to achieve — humanizing insurance and making it accessible and affordable to all,” said Harshet Lunani, founder and chief executive of Qoala, in a statement.
Kenneth Li, managing partner at Centauri Fund, said Qoala’s multi-channel approach has the potential to unlock Indonesia’s untapped insurance industry.
“Our thesis identified that Indonesia has a considerably low gross written premium (GWP) to GDP ratio in comparison to other emerging countries, coupled with the large growing middle class in need of more security in their financial planning which allows immense potential for the insurance sector to take off in Indonesia through innovative propositions,” he added.
According to one estimate (PDF), Southeast Asia’s digital insurance market is currently valued at $2 billion and is expected to grow to $8 billion by 2025. Last week, Singapore-based Igloo extended its Series A financing round to add $8.2 million to it.
The New York attorney general’s office reportedly sent a sternly-worded letter to Amazon telling the company that the measures it has taken regarding the COVID-19 pandemic “are so inadequate that they may violate several provisions of the Occupational Safety and Health Act,” and firing outspoken workers sends “a threatening message to other employees.”
The letter, not yet published but obtained by NPR (I’ve asked the NY AG for confirmation of the contents), is only informational and does not amount to legal action. But the wording is strong enough to suggest that legal action may be the next step.
While we continue to investigate, the information so far available to us raises concerns that Amazon’s health and safety measures taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic are so inadequate that they may violate several provisions of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
These are precisely the concerns brought up by many warehouse workers over the last two months, including Chris Smalls, who was fired in March after protesting the conditions at the facility where he worked.
Amazon says Smalls was not fired for riling up the workers. Yet reportedly at a meeting attended by Jeff Bezos, the company’s General Counsel suggested making him “the face of the entire union/organizing movement” before following with “our usual talking points about worker safety.”
(Amazon would not confirm or deny those comments took place when TechCrunch asked about them at the time, but did provide a quoted apology by the person who may or may not have said them.)
Two more outspoken employees were fired two weeks later for “repeatedly violating internal policies.” Naturally the usual talking points followed.
The NY AG’s letter said the office is looking into “cases of potential illegal retaliation,” and addresses this pattern as follows:
This Office has learned that many workers are fearful about speaking out about their concerns following the termination of Mr. Smalls’ employment. This is a particularly dangerous message to send during a pandemic, when chilling worker speech about health and safety practices could literally be a matter of life and death.
Amazon routinely protests that it is a paragon when it comes to labor, but is just as routinely contradicted by workers, like Smalls, who have experienced the reality of working at its warehouses.
Amazon issued its “usual talking points” to NPR as a response to the story, saying: “We encourage anyone to compare the health and safety measures Amazon has taken, and the speed of their implementation, during this crisis with other retailers.” The attorney general seems prepared to take the company up on that invitation.
Lyft’s former COO Jon McNeill has had a fairly storied career as an operator. A Northwestern University economics major who worked at Bain & Co. out of college, he went on to start and sell five companies before being introduced in 2015 to Elon Musk by Sheryl Sandberg and spending 2.5 years as Tesla’s president of global sales and service.
He was apparently so good at his job that Lyft’s investors asked him to join the car-share company to help it go public. There, he helped build up the company’s management team, got it through its public offering, then decamped last year roughly four months later.
At the time, the move left some shareholders scratching their heads. It also drove down the price of Lyft’s shares. Now, McNeill says he had too many ideas percolating to stay. He has so many, in fact, that he just cofounded a business that will launch other businesses.
It’s called Called DeltaV — an engineering term for a change in velocity — and the idea is to formulate startup ideas, get them up and running, then when when they’re at the Series B phase of life, seek outside funding while hanging on to roughly 80 percent of each company.
It’s a tall order, but McNeill thinks he has the team to do it.
Along with McNeill, DeltaV was founded by Karim Bousta, who spent eight years with GE before joining Symantec as a vice president, where McNeill lured him away to Tesla, then brought him to Lyft as its VP and head of operations. (Bousta more recently logged a quick five months as an operating partner with SoftBank Investment Advisors.)
DeltaV also counts as a cofounder Sami Shalabi, who spent nearly a dozen years as a top engineer at Google after it acquired a company he cofounded called Zingku; Michael Rossiter, a business operations exec who, like Bousta, worked with McNeill at both Tesla and Lyft; and Henry Vogel, who has cofounded a number of companies and was among the first partners at BCG Digital Ventures, the corporate investment firm. (Vogel was also McNeill’s roommate when the two were college freshmen.)
As important, McNeill also thinks DeltaV has the structure needed to pursue the founders’ collective vision of investing in fewer companies that they themselves start and grow. Specifically, the five have rounded up $40 million from a dozen investors — mostly family offices — for an evergreen fund. What that means: investors are committing to allow them to recycle capital, rather than aim to return it after a certain window of time. (Most traditional venture funds, for example, have a 10-year-long investment period.)
Evergreen funds have never gained much traction in the venture world, even while — or because — they alleviate expensive management fees. Still, there are precedents for what DeltaV is trying to do and, in fact, McNeil volunteers that they largely inspired what the team has built. Indeed, after spending time with tens of accelerators, incubators, and startup studios, McNeil says he walked away the most impressed with what two firms have created: Sutter Hill Ventures in the Bay Area and Flagship Pioneering in Cambridge, Mass.
Both operate evergreen funds, and both of which have enviable track records. Since its 2000 founding, Flagship Pioneering has formed and spun out 75 companies and 22 of them have gone public since 2013 alone, McNeill notes. Meanwhile, Sutter Hilll, a much older outfit that also sources ideas internally, then tests them against the marketplace with the help of roughly 40 in-house engineers, has founded 50 companies, at least 18 of which have gone public. (Another, the cloud-based data warehouse company Snowflake, may be Sutter Hill’s next big win. It was valued at $12.4 billion when it most recently raised a round in February, and its CEO, Frank Slootman, suggested then that the company’s next financing event would likely be an IPO.)
We don’t know the ins and outs of how Flagship or Sutter Hill are structured, and it wasn’t McNeill’s place to tell us.
But for its part, DeltaV doesn’t collect fees. Instead, its investors own a stake of the company, alongside the founders.
Further, while evergreen funds often provide limited partners with the ability to exit or change their investment in the fund every four years or so, DeltaV doesn’t restrict them at all. Investors instead have board representation and will have a say in how much is recycled versus distributed, and can distribute or shares driven by their needs, without any set windows.
Whether the arrangement proves lucrative for everyone will take take years to know, of course. Our sense of things is that DeltaV itself aims to become a public company at some point.
In the meantime, it already has four startups in the works, including one that should be out of stealth mode by early summer and another that the firm hopes to introduce to the world this fall.
The first is a pricing and profit optimization service that aims to help e-commerce players better compete with Amazon. The other is an automotive service business. McNeill wouldn’t share more than that right now, though he adds that a separate idea — one that revolved around the gig economy and the “future of work” — has been shelved for now, given the impacts of the coronavirus
It begs the question of why McNeill thinks right now is a good time to start DeltaV. He laughed when we asked about this earlier today. He said it was certainly a surprise. In fact, he and his cofounders firmed up their plans just in January and hit the fundraising trail roughly five weeks ago, just as the United States began to come apart at the seams.
But while it forced the team to change some of their priorities in terms of the companies that Delta V eventually hopes to launch, McNeill believes in the old adage that there’s no time to start a company like during a major downturn. As he told us on a call, “We’re actually accelerating a bit in terms of making much more forward progress,” particularly where it concerns the firm’s profit-optimization startup.
As McNeill explained it, he and his cofounders “want to make this a very long-term, durable business. We want to create dozens of companies over time.” They’re all operators who know a thing or two about repeatable processes, he added. Now, he said, they’ve just codified what they’ve been doing all along.
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Motorola Edge+ will launch in India in the coming weeks and has its eyes set on two recently launched phones, the OnePlus 8 series and Apple iPhone SE 2020. The Indian launch of the flagship smartphone by Lenovo-backed Motorola could be held sometime after the nation-wide lockdown eases or when e-commerce companies are allowed to deliver smartphones and laptops to customers. Due to the outbreak of Coronavirus in India and various parts of the world, the smartphone industry has been affected by manufacturing shutdowns that’s led to delayed launches and availability of products.
Motorola Edge+ alongside the Edge was unveiled last week on April 22 after many leaks and rumours. The phones were previously set to be announced during the MWC 2020, but the event fell victim to the COVID-19 crisis.
Prashant Mani, Country Head of Motorola India tweeted out an official video of the Motorola Edge+, stating the phone will eventually be making it’s way to the country very soon. The video highlights the key specifications of the phone such as 5G support, Snapdragon 865 chip, 108MP camera and more. We can expect Motorola to launch the Edge+ in India after e-commerce companies are allowed to accept orders for mobile phones.
The all-new Motorola edge+ is reinvigorating the flagship space with a Bold endless edge screen innovation,Fastest 5G performances with Snapdragon 865 and a monster 108 mpx camera .Here is a sneak peek into what went behind creating the #AbsoluteEverything. Coming soon to India! pic.twitter.com/xhH8wjMREu
— Prashanth Mani (@PrashanthMani10) April 25, 2020 Motorola Edge+ specificationsMotorola Edge+ has a glass-metal design and features a 6.7-inch Full HD+ (2340 x 1080 pixels) resolution display on an OLED panel. The display has a punch-hole cutout on the front that gives it a 19.5:9 aspect ratio. The screen has a 90Hz refresh rate and is certified for HDR10+ playback.
It is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 chipset with 5G support and an octa-core CPU. This is paired with 12GB RAM and 256GB storage and there doesn’t seem to be another available variant.
The Edge+ has a triple camera setup on the back followed by TOF 3D depth sensor and dual-tone LED flash. The primary camera uses a 108MP sensor with an f/1.8 aperture and OIS support, an 8MP secondary telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom and OIS followed by a 16MP ultra-wide-angle camera. The rear camera setup can record in 6K UHD at 30fps and 4K UHD at upto 60fps.
On the front, housed within the notch cutout is a 25MP selfie camera with f/2.0 aperture.
The phone has stereo speakers, Wi-Fi 6 modem and Type-C port for charging. The battery is rated at 5,000mAh and supports 18W fast charging and 15W fast wireless charging. It comes in two colours-- Smokey Sangria and Thunder Grey and is priced at $999 (~Rs 76,000) in the US.
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French startup Shine is adding a new option today. If you think there’s a chance that a client is not going to pay your next invoice, you can insure that invoice to avoid any bad surprise.
Shine is building a challenger bank for freelancers and small companies. It lets you send and receive money in a separate business account, pay with a MasterCard, create invoices and stay on top of administrative tasks.
It also helps you get started as the startup can fill out all administrative paperwork to register yourself as a freelancer. You also get notifications to remind you that you should pay your taxes and more. Starting accepting freelancing jobs can be confusing and Shine can help you with that.
Shine has a built-in invoicing tool. It lets you add a client and generate an invoice directly in the mobile app. After that, you can send a link to your client. You get a notification when your client opens the invoice. They can download a PDF and get your bank details to pay you.
And yet, many clients often wait until the last minute to pay an invoice. It can be a month or two after finishing a job, which means that they also forget about outstanding invoices.
In a few weeks, Shine users will be able to create an invoice and insure it before sending it. It costs you 2% of your total amount on your invoice. There’s no subscription fee, it’s a one-off process.
If your client hasn’t paid you after the due date, Shine will reach out to your client again to try to get the payment. If that doesn’t work, you can file a claim with the partner insurance company.
In that case, if the company is still operating, you get paid 100% of your invoice. If the company has collapsed, you get 90% back. (Of course, that’s without taking into account the 2% fees you already paid.)
BuyMed, a Vietnamese startup that wants to fix Southeast Asia’s complex pharmaceutical distribution networks, announced today it has raised $2.5 million in pre-Series A funding. Investors include Sequoia Capital India’s Surge early-stage accelerator program, and Genesia Ventures. Returning investor Cocoon Capital also participated.
Founded in 2018, BuyMed operates Thuocsi.vn, a pharmaceutical distribution platform in Vietnam. Over the past 12 months, the company says it has tripled its annual revenue, and now plans to add new product lines, including cosmetics, medical devices, supplements and medical services, with the goal of becoming a “one-stop marketplace” for supplies needed by healthcare providers in Southeast Asia.
BuyMed verifies suppliers on its platform, improving safety and reducing the risk of medications making its way into the grey market (or unofficial distribution channels). The startup currently has 700 verified suppliers, distributors and manufacturers on its platform, who serve over 7,000 healthcare providers.
In a press statement, Genesia Ventures general partner Takahiro Suzuki, said, “There is still a tremendous opportunity for growth and improvement in Vietnam’s pharmaceutical supply chain and we believe that BuyMed’s founders have the experience, execution and operational management necessary to tackle this problem.”
BuyMed Co-founder and CEO Peter Nguyen formerly served as a consultant for companies like Eli Lilly, Roche and Siemens, helping them create more efficient operations and supply chains.
Nguyen told TechCrunch that there are no major multi-brand distributors in Vietnam, so most pharmaceutical manufacturers and brands need to set up their own networks. This means the process of getting medications and other pharmaceutical supplies to healthcare providers is highly-fragmented.
There are roughly 200 domestic manufacturers in Vietnam, in addition to imported brands, and their products are handled by over 3,000 distributors. While about 2% of pharmacies in Vietnam are part of a franchise or chain, the vast majority are independent. This means distributors need to serve over 40,000 independent pharmacies and about 5,000 independent clinics.
Nguyen added that fragmentation is similar in many other Southeast Asian markets, giving BuyMed an opportunity to expand across the region.
Thuocsi.vn’s usage has grown over the last 60 days, as more Vietnamese pharmacies source from online channels. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, BuyMed has expanded its platform so more of its partners can sell online, and added safety measures like frequent warehouse and office sanitization and a no-contact drop-off and cash collection system.
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