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Tesla in 2019 opened a factory in China that officials hoped would stir the country’s EV makers into action. Now, some of those local carmakers are emerging as strong rivals to the U.S. automaker. See them here.
Many small to mid-sized food distributors still run on pen and paper. This makes it difficult to pinpoint things like how certain products are performing and customer churn. It also makes it hard for businesses to comply with the FDA’s new food traceability regulations. Butter’s solution is an all-in-one management system that helps distributors run their businesses while serving as a system of record to help them comply with food safety rules.
Butter announced today that it has a $9 million Series A led by Google’s AI-focused Gradient Ventures. Other participants included Uncommon Capital, Notation Capital and angel investor Jack Altman. The new funding will go toward hiring for Butter’s sales and engineering teams.
Butter was founded by Winston Chi and Shangyan Li in 2020, during the height of the pandemic. COVID’s impact on the food industry highlighted how outdated the supply side is, Chi told TechCrunch. While companies like Toast, DoorDash and Square addressed different parts of sales and management, there was still little innovation on the supply side, and many businesses relied on paper systems and phone calls.
Chi is familiar with the challenges faced by food businesses because his parents ran a battery-cage chicken farm in China for more than twenty years.
“They’d wake up between 3-4AM every day waiting for deliveries and collecting payments. I witnessed firsthand the cumbersome process of logging orders and tracking receivables. My dad rarely would have a night that didn’t involve calling customers or tracking down misplaced orders or payments,” Chi told TechCrunch. “If my parents were still doing wholesale, we would’ve had to shut down our business due to COVID. With my tech background, I feel a need to help this industry.”
Butter was created to digitize the process for food distributors who sell to restaurants and supermarkets, while also giving food businesses analytics to help them run their businesses more efficiently. Butter manages many parts of operations, from sales and inventory to payment and e-commerce storefronts. This way, the platform can tell users when they need to restock products, in what quantity and on what date.
Analytics available through the platform for distributors include how much money they make per day. Chi said many only have a rough idea.
“For example, the second day after we onboarded a seafood distributors, the distributor asked ‘is it true that I only make 20% on salmon?’ We were able to quickly point to our data and show this to him,” Chi said. He told he spent over half of his time on salmon everyday and after this, he was able to make necessary adjustments to scale his business.”
Butter tells distributors which customers are active, who is ordering less and who is churning, so they know before customers stop making purchases. It also analyzes which products sell best in revenue and profit, including what products are being returned the most often, which causes distributors to lose money.
The platform also makes it easier for them to comply with the new FDA traceability rule, because it acts as a system of record for distributors’ inventory. Chi explained that before the new regulations, only a few products, like oysters, had strict traceability rules. But the new traceability regulations cover more than 30 categories.
“Recently, a Butter customer told me it used to take him 8-10 hours of there was a recall,” Chi said. “He’d have to sift through piles of paperwork to pinpoint certain orders, buyers and transaction dates,” Chi said. “Now with Butter, we can do that in a few clicks.”
Butter is currently used by 6,000 restaurants across California and in total manages $300 million in cash flow and sales operations. Chi says that customers who have worked with Butter over the last 12 months have seen an average of 47% growth in sales revenue.
Butter onboarded many customers by working with distributors, who send invitations to customers to use Butter for free. Once they log in, their previous transaction history, customized order guide and updated pricing is available in the Butter account.
In a statement about the investment, Gradient Ventures partner Wen-Wen Lam said, “Butter has a huge opportunity to revolutionize the entire food supply chain. We’re impressed with Winston and Shangyan’s attention to detail in building their product. They are deeply in tune with their customer’s pain points and dedicated to solving less obvious problems for distributors, which is why they’ve had great adoption by suppliers including major wholesalers. We’re excited to support their team as they build and scale.”
Gradient backs Butter’s operating system for food distribution businesses by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch
It’s no secret that VC spending in 2022 did not take a page from the wild funding spree that was 2021. This year’s more measured approach has had a cooling effect — particularly on space-related startups.
In Q3 alone, investments in 79 space companies hit $3.4 billion — down 44% from Q3 2021. Still, some prognosticators report that while space investments continue to decline, some sectors are more resilient than others.
This is why we’re thrilled that Jory Bell, general partner at Playground Global; Mark Boggett, CEO and managing partner at Seraphim Capital; and Emily Henriksson, principal at Root Venture, will join us onstage for a panel discussion at TC Sessions: Space on December 6 in Los Angeles.
In a session called “Backing Big Bets in Uncertain Times,” these panelists will discuss the current mindset and priorities of investors who have previously backed space startups. We’re curious to get their take on whether sectors — like remote sensing, which provides critical information to both governments and enterprises during increasingly uncertain times — might be better insulated from macroeconomic trends like high interest rates and inflation.
And, if we are in for an extended economic downturn, what should startups expect from private space capital in 2023? We have questions, and these folks should provide valuable insights during a compelling discussion.
Jory Bell sourced some of Playground Global’s earliest investments, including Nervana Systems (acquired by Intel). His first three investments at the firm are now unicorns and one, Velo3D, went public last year.
Bell leads the firm’s investment efforts in deep tech areas, including advanced manufacturing, aerospace, computational therapeutics, energy, genomics, materials, next-gen computing, quantum and synthetic biology. His investment portfolio includes Mangata Networks, Relativity Space and Strand Therapeutics to name a few.
Mark Boggett, a pioneer in space tech investment, co-founded the Seraphim Space Fund and invested in a portfolio that includes three companies that have achieved billion-dollar valuations. Previously, Boggett served as director at YFM Equity Partners, the firm behind the high-profile British Smaller Companies VCT 1 and 2.
Boggett also worked at Brewin Dolphin and Williams de Broë. He completed his undergraduate degree in accounting and finance, and he received a master’s in economics and finance from the University of Leeds.
Emily Henriksson is a principal at Root Ventures, a firm focused on investing in three areas: tools and infrastructure, low-cost robotics, and hardware and data science. Prior to joining Root, she worked as a propulsion engineer and designed flight hardware for the SpaceX Falcon and supervised vehicle build for schedule-critical missions.
Henriksson also worked on the Model 3 battery module team at Tesla. She holds MS and BS degrees in mechanical engineering from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
TC Sessions: Space takes place on December 6 in Los Angeles. Buy your pass today, join us to learn about the latest space investment trends, see cutting-edge technology, and network for opportunities to help you build a better, stronger startup.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Space? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
Playground, Seraphim and Root VCs talk funding trends at TC Sessions: Space by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch
Hulu is expanding its Live TV line-up with 14 new channels, such as Hallmark Channel, The Weather Channel, Comedy.TV, JusticeCentral.TV, TheGrio Television Network, and six channels from the music video network Vevo. The new channels bring the total to over 85 channels, which include entertainment, live sports, and national and local news.
Today, November 14, Hulu Live TV added Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies & Mysteries to the platform. Hallmark Drama is also available, however, it’s only part of the Entertainment Add-on, which is an additional $7.99/month.
The Weather Channel and Comedy.TV have been on the platform since November 1.
On December 1, subscribers can stream channels such as Vevo Pop, Vevo Hip-Hop, Vevo Country, Vevo ‘80s, Vevo ‘90s, Vevo Holiday, TheGrio Television Network, JusticeCentral.TV, and The Weather Channel en Español.
As announced in August, Hulu will increase the subscription prices of the Hulu Live TV bundle on December 8. For the base plan, subscribers get Disney+’s new ad-supported plan, Hulu Live TV (Ads) and ESPN+ (Ads), for $69.99 per month. The Legacy plan will increase to $74.99 per month, which includes Hulu Live TV (Ads), ESPN+ (Ads), and Disney+ (No Ads). The premium plan with Hulu Live TV (No Ads), ESPN+ (Ads), and Disney+ (No Ads) will jump to $82.99 per month.
While many subscribers will be unhappy with the price hike, the new programming might make it easier for some to stomach.
“We have been listening to our subscribers and are thrilled to bring some of their most requested channels to our service just in time for the holidays,” said Reagan Feeney, Senior Vice President, Live TV Content Programming and Partnerships for Hulu, in a statement.
Hulu Live TV adds 14 channels including Hallmark and The Weather Channel by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch
Although FTX collapsed last week, raises their ventures team contributed to are still being announced.
Joepegs, an NFT marketplace on the Avalanche blockchain, raised $5 million in a seed round led by now-defunct FTX Ventures and the Avalanche Foundation, its co-founders who go by the pseudonyms Cryptofish and 0xMurloc, exclusively told TechCrunch.
“The funding from FTX Ventures was completed in June, and have since been transferred out of FTX prior to recent bankruptcy events,” the team said in a statement.
The marketplace launched in May and has grown rapidly to the largest NFT marketplace on Avalanche with over $3.4 million in secondary NFT sales and 12,000 users. It also has an in-house production unit, Joe Studios, as well as an NFT Launchpad, which has on boarded over 50 projects to the Avalanche ecosystem, the company said.
The co-founders also founded and remain involved in the operations of Trader Joe, a decentralized exchange on Avalanche (not to be confused with the American supermarket chain), which launched in early July 2021 and has a total trading volume over $88 billion.
“As we started building this, we realized very quickly that in order to deliver a platform that really helps users discover great NFTs we have to invest in a lot more platform capabilities so that’s what the fundraise will go toward,” 0xMurloc said. “On top of that, we also create a lot of content on our end. We did this at the start to fill a need. Marketplaces are only as good as the content in the ecosystem.”
Joepegs also invests in the operational side, beyond Avalanche, to partner with different traders, projects and artists “across the ecosystem,” 0xMurloc said. “That is something we do ferociously.”
Earlier this year, Avalanche dove further into the NFT space after partnering with the largest NFT marketplace, OpenSea, which now operates on the blockchain alongside other platforms like Joepegs and Kalao. With about $408.2 million in total sales, Avalanche is the seventh-largest blockchain by NFT sales volume, CryptoSlam data shows.
“People are focused on what is happening to the greater market,” 0xMurloc said. “Yes, there are less people playing with crypto and the NFT market as a whole right now, but, we do see that the interest from creators, brands and projects to dive deeper into web3 and NFTs – that appetite is not softening.”
There are a lot of companies, creators and artists who are “eager to explore this form of commerce and community building,” 0xMurloc added.
“We’re very bullish on the future of NFTs and what it could bring,” Cryptofish said. “The idea that you can have clothing backed by NFTs is very bullish. You see that with Azuki with their skateboards and Nike sneakers and we want to be on the forefront of NFT innovation with digital stuff and clothing.”
As more alternative NFT products come out, NFT markets will have to adapt to accommodate, Cryptofish added. “Our vision on NFT marketplaces will have to be like Amazon over time. Initially it was a bookstore and now they’ve branched out to sell everything. That’s how I see things going.”
In the short term, the team plans to continue driving in-house content and has new collections coming up in the near future, 0xMurloc said.
“Longer term, we want to branch into different flavors of NFTs and explore what Fish mentioned, whether it’s fashion, physical merchandise or gaming. We’re excited about what’s to come.”
FTX and Avalanche co-led $5M round for Joepegs NFT marketplace by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/14/ftx-and-avalanche-co-led-5m-round-for-joepegs-nft-marketplace/
Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.
Here’s what we got into on our Monday episode, a weekly kick-off of sorts:
And that’s all the time we had this morning! More Wednesday!
Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday and Wednesday, and at 6 a.m. PT on Fridays, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together, and more!
Cleanup, aisle FTX by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the fintech phenomenon.
Companies such as E*TRADE, Rocket Mortgage, and TurboTax began to disrupt the established financial services sector well before 2012, but that year marked the turning point when fintech morphed into a sustained movement that would drastically change how most people manage their money.
If you’re a fintech startup, you will face four main types of competitors over the next decade:
Your firm will need a very strong value proposition to compete with all four types of competitors.
This leaves most firms with two options over the next decade. One avenue is to specialize in a handful of products or services that you believe will have value on their own that consumers will sign up for despite robust competitor ecosystems. Alternatively, you need to develop a comprehensive strategy to compete and build a compelling suite of products, services and perks.
How can fintech startups prepare to compete in the next decade? Here are four steps you can take to remain competitive.
Any corporate strategy document will remain a fantasy on paper if your tech infrastructure is outdated and incapable of meeting your future needs.
The foundational step of any long-term strategy for the 2020s is to revamp your firm’s tech stack to support future needs. You will need modern tech infrastructure that can support greater cross-product automation, a sophisticated AI assistant, more integrations with external parties such as the crypto ecosystem, and non-financial perks/benefits.
The process for improving your tech stack varies based on the type of firm. If you work for a large bank still running COBL, the first step is likely a massive investment in a multi-year process to migrate to a modern and streamlined tech infrastructure. If you are a relatively young fintech company, you generally have more “white space” to design your stack. The challenge for smaller companies isn’t dealing with decades of tech debt; rather, it’s optimizing limited engineering resources to build the best possible tech stack.
Modernizing tech infrastructure is a difficult and expensive proposition. Generally speaking, the best way to get company leadership on board with such investments is to highlight what competitors are doing to help them understand the competitive threat.
Preparing for fintech’s second decade: 4 moves your firm must make now by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch
Micromobility company Bird said Monday it had overstated its revenue for more than two years by recognizing unpaid customer rides.
Bird’s audit committee found on Friday that the company’s financial reports spanning the first quarter of 2020 through the second quarter of 2022 “should no longer be relied upon,” according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing.
The committee discovered the discrepancy while preparing Bird’s financial statements for the quarter ended September 30, 2022. The Santa Monica–based e-scooter and e-bike sharing company also said it will delay filing its third-quarter financial report, originally scheduled for Monday.
Bird said it had recorded revenue on certain trips even when customers lacked sufficient “preloaded ‘wallet’ balances.” The company said it should have reported the unpaid balances on its financial statements as deferred revenue.
An internal investigation found that the company’s “disclosure controls and procedures are not effective at a reasonable assurance level.”
Bird, which went public in a November 2021 SPAC deal that valued the company around $2.3 billion, said it plans to file its third quarter results as soon as possible and restate its previous financial results.
In August, Bird reported that it missed Q2 revenue estimates slightly, with a net loss of $310.4 million on revenue of $76.7 million. It said that its total number of rides doubled over the year-ago period but that its average fare and number of rides per vehicle dropped.
Overall, the company suffered a tumultuous second quarter, announcing plans to dismantle its retail business, shut down operations in unprofitable markets and laying off close to 140 workers. CEO Travis VanderZanden stepped down as president in June, shortly after the New York Stock Exchange warned that the company could be delisted for trading below $1.
Bird said during its second-quarter financial report that it would realize savings from the cost-cutting measures in the third quarter.
Bird tells SEC it overstated revenue for two years by Jaclyn Trop originally published on TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/14/bird-tells-sec-it-overstated-revenue-for-two-years/
Twitter Blue, Twitter’s paid tier, appears to be on ice at the moment as the company tries to navigate how to control it from being abused by impersonators while still promoting it as a mass market product to build out a new revenue stream among “official” users and the hundreds of millions of others who use Twitter. No biggie! In the absence of any official announcements, Twitter’s new owner and CEO Elon Musk is reverting to type and pushing out some social guerilla marketing around how brands, other organizations, and the rest of us use the platform.
Yesterday, Musk said in a Tweet that the company soon would be letting “organizations to identify which other Twitter accounts are actually associated with them.” In later notes, he clarified this meant organizations would be able to manage their own affiliations and affiliated accounts, but that Twitter would likely be the arbiter of what counted as a primary organization.
It’s not clear if managing affiliations will be a tool only for organizations that pay for the privilege to use it — a la a Twitter Blue-style tier for orgs, brands and influencers — or if it will be something that any verified account will be able to do. Where Verified blue-check accounts will sit in relation to paid Blue blue-check accounts is in itself still a big question mark, since Twitter has made so many changes around the product in the last week that most people have now lost track of what is going on.
In any case, if it all goes to plan — Twitter’s business plan as meted out in Tweets, that is — Twitter Blue, plus another related service that was paused due to impersonation abuse — a current lock on verified users changing Twitter screen names — should both be reinstated by end of week, Musk noted.
Without doubt, Twitter is trying to make some lemonade out of lemons here. Musk’s tweets are coming on the back of an unbelievably chaotic couple of weeks of the company operating under new ownership, spearheading a different business model (focusing on subscriptions and paywalls rather than just ads while also going from publicly-traded to privately-held), and in some ways maybe most critically, as of last week with half the staff it had compared to a week before.
That’s meant not only sharp turns in what the company is doing, and how it’s carrying things out (the latest as of this morning: a freeze on code changes) but very little communication about any of it.
Case in point: Twitter Blue has expanded, been pretty mercilessly trolled and abused, contracted, and ultimately paused in the space of little more than a week. Yet the service’s own “Official” Twitter account has not sent a single Tweet out, nor made any actual announcements, since October 18 — a full 10 days before Musk closed his deal to buy the company.
On the other hand, if Musk’s hint of the new feature does get rolled out and it has to do with managing affiliated accounts (rather than creepily keeping tabs, say, on how employees discuss the company in their individual accounts), it’s actually long overdue. One of the problems with Twitter had been that accounts that were getting impersonated typically had to proactively find and request take-downs of other accounts, and even then the process was not always instantaneous. (Ditto abusive and harassing accounts.)
Something like this could effectively turn that problem on its head by making it easier for organizations to track and report those unaffiliated accounts, which would be one step towards Twitter sweetening the deal for getting organizations to sign up to (and pay for?) “official” tiers, and for Twitter improving its credibility with brands and organizations, which appears fairly poor at the moment.
Indeed, just as it’s downright hard for us regular people to stake much faith on what might happen next, brands and organizations have somewhat been left out in the cold, too.
We’ve received some research passed to us from Battenhall, a London-based marketing agency that works with brands and companies on social media strategy. It lays bare the state of Twitter’s current interface with commercial organizations. The long and short of it: like the rest of Twitter right now, it’s all over the place.
One of Twitter’s attempts at clearing up the confusion (hah) between “Blue” paid accounts, the pre-existing blue-check verification status and impersonations that were running riot exploiting the Blue paid tier, was to create a “double verification” route, where “real” accounts were denoted with both “official” notes and blue checkmarks.
But taking just the FTSE 100 top companies in the U.K., Battenhall found that only 23% of them had been given that double verification status as of late Friday.
Further to that, 39% of FTSE 100 companies had just a single blue tick verification. But as Battenhall founder Drew Benvie pointed out to me, “That can signify either a verified account or an $8 per month Twitter Blue pay-for-verification account.” Sounds inconsistent? On top of this, a full 38% of FTSE 100 companies did not have any form of verification at all.
“Burberry, the brand with the largest Twitter following in the FTSE 100, has not been given ‘official’ white tick status, ranking it equally in prominence to $8 Twitter Blue subscribers,” Benvie added. Burberry’s Twitter account, which does have the blue check, has around 8.2 million followers. Phoenix Group, which 4,100, has the smallest following among FTSE 100 companies with 4,100 followers, yet it does have double verification. Other FTSE 100 organizations with the double include AstraZeneca, BP, Diageo, Sainsburys, Tesco and Vodafone.
“There is no clear pattern to which accounts are verified, official, or even really who they say they are as blue ticks can be purchased for £6.99 or $8,” Benvie noted. “I believe (although don’t categorically know) that the verification situation is currently more or less random, in that certain brands – large and small, big advertisers and small advertisers – are seeing different levels of verification. I would expect people are making decisions based on this, as opposed to an algorithm, but as far as I’m aware the rationale is not being communicated to the brands involved.”
They are not the only ones not getting any communication. We’ve contacted Twitter for comment on this story — as we have for all of our coverage — but have yet to receive a reply. We will update this post as and when we do hear from the company.
Musk says orgs will soon verify affiliated accounts; Blue sign-ups and name changes will be reinstated end of this week by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch
African web3 startup Nestcoin has laid off some employees as FTX’s demise impacted its business. This information was shared by the startup’s CEO, Yele Bademosi, who, in a tweet, said FTX’s fall from grace affected his one-year-old startup, which held assets (cash and stablecoins) in the now-defunct crypto exchange to manage operational expenses.
Since Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire — made up of FTX, Alameda Research, and FTX Ventures — collapsed last week, there have been various reports of companies whose money are stuck on FTX, its crypto exchange platform. Some of them include Galois Capital, a hedge fund with half of its capital stuck at the collapsed crypto exchange; Genesis Trading, which had about $175 million locked on the crypto exchange; and Multicoin Capital, the famed crypto and web3 venture capital firm that has nearly 10% of its assets under management trapped. Nestcoin joins that growing list (more names are becoming known by the day); it appears most, if not all, of its assets, are stuck in FTX.
According to several reports, companies with money stuck on FTX might get their money back depending on how much FTX’s assets are ultimately worth. From its 23-page bankruptcy filing, FTX has more than 100,000 creditors with assets in the range of $10 billion to $50 billion and liabilities within the same range.
Nestcoin, which Bademosi described in an interview with TechCrunch as a venture collective, is one of a handful of African startups that have received venture capital from FTX and Alameda Research, alongside 200+ foreign-based startups and investment firms, including Circle and Sequoia Capital. FTX, for instance, led a $150 million Series C extension round in Chipper Cash, an African cross-border payments company. Alameda Research, on the other hand, has backed Nigeria- and Kenya-based web3 company Mara; Congolese web3 startup Jambo; and Nigerian crypto exchange platform Bitnob. It’s still unclear if these other startups held their assets in FTX, but that’s likely the case given what’s come to light with Nestcoin, even though Alameda Research, its investor, has less than 1% equity.
“We used the closely-associated exchange, FTX, as a custodian to store a significant proportion of the stablecoin investment we raised, i.e., our day-to-day operational budget,” said Bademosi in his tweet. “We were not undertaking any trading, but simply custodied our assets on the FTX exchange. While there are uncertainties, including the outcome of our assets held at FTX, we as a company have to adjust our plans, rethink our strategy and take steps to better position ourselves for the future.”
To that end, Nestcoin, which Bademosi launched last February to build, invest and operate web3 and non-custodial products for customers in frontier markets across Decentralized Finance (DeFi), media, digital art, and gaming, has had to reduce its headcount. According to two people familiar with the matter, Nestcoin layoffs will affect at least 30 employees from sub-departments, including Breach, its media arm; Brunch, a group messaging app with a crypto wallet; and Metaverse Magma (MVM), a gaming DAO that raised $3.2 million at a $30 million valuation two months ago. The remaining employees will see their salaries slashed by as much as 40%, the people said. On the other hand, Nestcoin noted that its products are DeFi protocols & non-custodial; thus, it has never held customer funds, and “this incident has no impact on our customers financially.”
The rest of Bademosi’s tweet reads:
While this is a challenging time for us and the industry as a whole – we see this as a wake up call to focus on building a more decentralized crypto future where no one organization or person can amass enough power to influence a nascent industry that has the potential to do good.
In the past few days I’ve strengthened my resolve and remain committed to “doing crypto” in line with its true spirit and founding ethos.
At Nestcoin we have a renewed sense of purpose — we realize that for crypto to truly go mainstream, we must accelerate the transition to self custody by building compelling trustless crypt products. To succeed, we will remain relentless, resourceful and flexible as we navigate these hard times.
This is a developing story…
African web3 startup Nestcoin declares it held its assets in FTX, lays off employees by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch