Upway lands $25 million to sell more refurbished electric bikes

French startup Upway has raised a $25 million Series A round led by Exor Seeds and Sequoia Capital. The company sells second-hand electric bikes that have been refurbished and are ready to roll.

In many ways, Upway reminds me of online marketplaces for cars. The startup provides a seamless experience for buyers who want to buy an electric bike but don’t want to pay the full price of a new electric bike.

Behind the scenes, Upway buys electric bikes from both consumers and companies. The team brings those bikes to its warehouse, checks them, repairs them in some cases and lists them on their website. Of course, Upway tries to generate a small margin on every sale.

In addition to Exor Seeds and Sequoia Capital, Origins is also participating in today’s round. Origins is the VC firm backed by many professional soccer players, such as Blaise Matuidi, Olivier Giroud, N’golog Kanté, as well as Antoine Dupont (a rugbyman).

Existing investor Global Founders Capital is investing once again in the startup. Henri Moissinac, the co-founder and CEO of micromobility startup Dott, is joining the round as well.

Right now, the startup operates in its home country France and Belgium. Bikes are shipped directly to customers from the same warehouse in Gennevilliers near Paris. But the company is already thinking about its next moves.

Upway will soon launch its marketplace in Germany, the Netherlands and the U.S. By the end of 2022, the company will have three different warehouses.

Sales of electric bikes have been growing rapidly in Europe. Manufacturers are benefiting from this boom, including some startups that have raised massive rounds, such as Cowboy and VanMoof . But they remain expensive goods and they also suffer from supply chain constraints.

Bikes (electric or not) will play an important role in the future of urban mobility in major European cities. That’s why it’s important to provide new ways to access bikes. Electric bikes more specifically can even replace many car rides outside of major hubs.

Some cities have invested heavily in subsidized bike-sharing services, such as Vélib’ in Paris. Some companies, like Dott, are buying thousands of electric bikes for their free-floating bike rental services.

How four European cities are embracing micromobility to drive out cars

Companies like Swapfiets and Dance are also important when it comes to democratizing electric bikes. These startups let you rent a bike for a flat monthly subscription fee. When you cancel your subscription, you hand out the bike.

Coming back to Upway, people who want to use an electric bike to go to work or ride to school may consider getting their own bike. In addition to new bikes, it’s important to provide different offerings.

Upway makes electric bikes more affordable. All bikes come with a one-year warranty and there’s no stock issue as the company only lists electric bikes that it can sell right way. Some customers can also take advantage of Alma to buy now and pay later, in multiple installments without any interest.

The startup also provides accessories, such as helmets, lights, bike locks and child seats. Eventually, you could also imagine adding some insurance product to your basket before checking out.

Overall, Upway sells 400 different models from brands like Moustache, O2feel, Keola, Veloci, Arcade, Cowboy and VanMoof. There are currently 20 million electric bikes on the European and American roads. Those millions of bikes could all end up on a second-hand marketplace like Upway. And I’m not surprised that the startup managed to raise another $25 million.

Image Credits: Upway

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South Africa’s Talk360 raises $4M to build single payment platform for Africa

Many businesses looking to set up pan-African operations are often met with the challenge of establishing payment services that are appropriate for each country they go to. Most of the payment services merchants working in the continent have solutions that are limited to specific regions, meaning that businesses have to sign deals with multiple providers to cater for the unique preferences of their users in different countries. This is a gap that Talk360 is looking to bridge as it creates a new payment platform that will integrate all available payment options across Africa. This product, it says, will open up businesses to the largest pool of localized payment options in Africa.

Meanwhile, the startup is also looking to expand its international calling operations across Africa after closing a $4 million seed funding round, led by HAVAÍC. HAVAÍC was joined by a number of angel investors that include Gaston Aussems (ex-Mollie), Robert Kraal (ex-Adyen), Gabriel de Montessuss (President WorldPay International) and Marnix van der Ploeg (ex-Booking.com and EQT).

While saying that the calling business will continue to grow in Africa, Talk360 co-founder and managing director for Africa Dean Hiine told TechCrunch he anticipates great growth for its payment platform, which he says will also make it easy for international merchants to sell to users in Africa too. He added that the startup decided to build its own payment platform informed by the need to make payment and checkout easy for its users in Africa.

African fintech Flutterwave triples valuation to over $3B after $250M Series D

Currently, the startup works through integrations with older payment service providers, which are majorly limited by region-specificity. Hiine says his new platform will bring all the “scattered payment methods” across Africa on a common platform, which he believes will positively impact Talk360’S bottom line, and that of other merchants that will use its platform.

Talk360 enables people to make international calls through its app for a fee, and it is built in such a way that only the initiator needs the app and internet – a smartphone– to make calls.

“In our calling business we identified some unique problems around digital payment in Africa. The payment methods are scattered and payment processes are lengthy…And we could see that this problem had a serious impact on our bottom line in terms of conversion rate we were seeing in Africa…It is a problem we experienced and we are trying to solve for other merchants with a presence in the continent too by making the process fast and easy,” said Hiine.

“We are building the platform to actually increase our conversion rate by giving the user experience one single checkout, and to some level, offer predictive analysis– to tell the preferred methods of payment for that region and offer them as top options for the user,” said Hiine.

The Talk360 calling app has connected over 2 million users in 170 countries so far, and this number is set to grow as the startup begins ramping up its marketing efforts and expansion plans, which include setting up a hub in Kenya.

Talk360 was co-founded by Hiine, Hans Osnabrugge, and Jorne Schamp in 2016 as a traveling app (used to avoid roaming charges). However, the co-founders were forced to rethink their strategy after social media apps like WhatsApp introduced internet calls.

They rebuilt to accommodate the digitally-marginalized individuals by removing the requirement for the person at the end of the call to have an internet connection or the app.

Talk360’s partnerships with agents like PesaPoint in Kenya and Flash in South Africa, also enables users to purchase airtime vouchers from a network of over 750,000 physical points of sale.

South Africa, Zimbabwe and Bangladesh are some of the markets where the calling app is widely used.

MoneyHash gets $3M to build a super-API for payment operations in Africa, Mideast

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Victoria’s Secret launches VS&Co-Lab marketplace

Victoria’s Secret have launched VS&Co-Lab an inclusive shopping experience for all customers which will feature unique, women-led third-party brands. VS&Co-Lab has been launched as a new section on VictoriasSecret.com, where it will showcase brands that align with its values of innovation and inclusivity.

In addition to the growth we are driving through our core business, we see important growth potential through partnerships with innovative, relevant brands that can help us extend our reach into category and consumer segments where we have historically been underrepresented. We’re excited to launch this platform where we will showcase, market and create consumer engagement with such exciting, unique and relevant businesses.

– Martin Waters, CEO, Victoria’s Secret & Co.

VS&Co-Lab marks the evolution of Victoria’s Secret & Co.’s journey to build strategic business partnerships with a focus on inclusive intimates and lifestyle brands on its own platform. At launch, a collection of 19 brands will be featured, 75 percent are founded, owned or led by women, including minority stake owned For Love & Lemons and Frankies Bikinis. VS&Co-Lab is committed to investing further with minority ownership in diverse brands that offer a differentiated view of the marketplace, customer and category.

As one of the world’s most recognizable companies among women, and with nearly 90 percent of our store associates worldwide identifying as women, we have a responsibility to ensure women can advance and thrive in every aspect of their lives, VS&Co-Lab evens the playing field for unique brands that speak to the modern consumer. Through leveraging the strength of Victoria’s Secret & Co. and our passionate customer base, we are meeting consumers where they are while simultaneously partnering with small business to drive economic empowerment for women and people of color.

– Patti Cazzato, Head of Emerging Businesses, Victoria’s Secret &Co.

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Onramp Funds accelerates e-commerce financing platform with $42M in equity, credit

Onramp Funds, an Austin-based company providing financing to e-commerce sellers, secured $42 million in equity and credit to expand its working capital offering.

CEO Eric Youngstrom founded the company in 2020 after a career at multicarrier shipping software company ShippingEasy. One of the problems with shipping at that time, back in 2012, was that you would have to log into each individual marketplace. For example, Amazon, eBay or Shopify, to see orders and figure out how to process them. What ShippingEasy did was bring that all together under one data management platform.

When ShippingEasy was acquired by Stamps.com in 2016, Youngstrom shifted over to the new company and saw a new problem emerge — that smaller e-commerce merchants couldn’t afford to ship an order because their credit cards were maxed out.

“People just didn’t have the money necessary to complete the order,” he told TechCrunch. “The money’s there — in three days it’ll be deposited into your account, but if you don’t get it going today, you’re going to lose the order. Amazon set the standard there.”

Youngstrom and his team tried solving the problem inside of Stamps.com, but couldn’t find a good solution, so he decided to leave in 2020 and launch a product that could help merchants.

The solution Onramp Funds came up with was a data-driven technology. The company doesn’t just look at top-line sales, which Youngstrom believes differentiates his company from competitors but takes in historical sales data to build a sales forecast.

Onramp then provides working capital from that data to resolve the shipping, fulfillment, advertising and inventory cost of goods so that merchants can take their own capital and redeploy it into their growing business. The company makes its revenue by charging a percentage of the sales, typically around 1%.

Onramp Funds web platform. Image Credits: Onramp Funds

Providing working capital to small businesses is somewhat of a personal mission for Youngstrom, who grew up around business owners in a small town and related to the need to support local businesses. He also notes e-commerce sales in the U.S. are still under 20% of all retail sales, so there is over 80% of retail still ripe for e-commerce to grab more market share.

“If we can help the small business owner, we can make the world a better place,” he added. “If we get to help people succeed at their jobs, I think that’s wonderful.”

Meanwhile, Youngstrom declined to provide the breakdown on the $42 million equity versus credit line ratio. Luther King Capital Headwater Investments led the funding, which also included a group of high-net-worth individuals.

Since officially launching the working capital offering nine months ago, Onramp is now working with hundreds of customers, some of whom have used the service multiple times. Revenue is growing 30% month over month.

While the credit line will be used for financing small businesses, the equity portion will go to build out Onramp’s customer acquisition engine and bring in additional staff in the areas of engineering, product, sales, marketing and client success. The company currently has 27 employees.

The company is also providing more guidance to merchants when it comes to navigating the supply chain bottleneck that got worse during the global pandemic.

“We’re building a really cool business that’s finding great success and very early standards, and we plan to be here for the long haul to help these guys,” Youngstrom added.

Which form of venture debt should your startup go for?

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Missguided falls into administration

Reports are circulating that fashion brand Missguided has fallen into administration after clothing suppliers came knocking for the millions of pounds owed to them.

Advisory Firm Teneo has been called in to sell the business and assets after the brand failed to secure a bid from potential buyers, including Boohoo. According to Teneo Missguided will continue to trade in the background, whilst they search for a buyer.

It was not uncommon to hear about high street retailers falling into administration when the high streets were empty. However, during the pandemic, Missguided were reporting good figures, including that sales had increased by 200%. Though it seems not long ago, the fashion brand is now in financial trouble likely caused by inflation, supply chain expenses, and changes in consumer spending behaviours.

One of the most prominent changes in consumer behaviour is the desire for sustainable goods over fast fashion, and it is the younger shoppers – Missguided’s audience – who are heading that change. It seems that some remained optimistic about the rewards of increased ecommerce activity, without considering what could come next.

Who will buy Missguided?

There are a few fashion brands who have shown interest in buying Missguided including JD Sports and ASOS but Boohoo seems to be the most interested. Though Boohoo could certainly take on Missguided at this moment, without the right interventions, fast fashion brands could face problems in the changing landscape.

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What will Post Office Strikes mean for Small Businesses?

Postal strikes have become ‘a thing of the distant past’ in many minds. However, following on from Post Office workers staging a one-day strike at 114 Crown locations in a dispute over pay on the 3^rd of May, plus the imminent threat of CWU strikes over Sunday deliveries, there is now going to be a second round of Crown Post Office strikes planned for the Jubilee weekend. With a row over pay continuing, they have been offered a 2% pay rise over two years, and with the cost-of-living crisis gaining further momentum we can only assume that the June strikes won’t be the last that we see in the postal sector.

But what does this uncertainty mean for small businesses who rely on the Post Office to support their business; these latest strikes could be, for some, frustrating at best and catastrophic at worst, and what alternatives are available if these strikes develop into national strikes like the seven-week strike in 1971 that brought the postal industry to a halt?

The ecommerce industry’s main differentiator from the technology industry is in physical fulfilment. Once you have charged your customer for their purchased item, you have to then fulfil your shipping and delivery promises. To excel with marketplace sales, sellers need to ensure that their delivery performance matches consumers’ expectations, in a way that complies with each marketplace’s guidelines. With Post Office and Royal Mail going through much needed major transformation, it does suggest that they will also have to manage the impact of disengagement and potential impact to service performance at times.

There is no doubt that both of the historic brands command great loyalty, almost like the British backbone of our postcode distribution reach. Whether we love or loathe the services in lesser or equal amounts, whether we walk straight in and out or faced with a bus stop size queue, there are still many sellers who rely on that local lifeline to send their goods via the networks with size of their national footprint.   With Post Office or Royal Mail strikes potentially increasing, whether as an interim or longer-term fix, other solutions and networks may need to be sought.

Research your options

Thankfully today, consumers, retailers, small businesses, and marketplace sellers have a huge array of delivery options available. From UK only carrier partners to cross-border shipping specialists there are alternatives to the good old Post Office and Royal Mail that provide flexibility, competitive rates.

Depending on your marketplace and their delivery requirements, you may wish to adopt a hybrid fulfilment setup in which you fulfil some orders from your premises (e.g. FBM or traditional eBay selling), utilising a carrier management firm, negating the reliance on the Post office. Or, alternatively, when volumes are at a certain level, utilise a third-party fulfilment provider or marketplace fulfilment (e.g. FBA or eBay’s Global Shipping Programme).

Explore new technology

Utilising shipping software can make life infinitely easier as it does all the heavy lifting for you with carrier rates readily available on one platform. Shipping software probably isn’t something that is on top of your mind when you have just started your online store and you have only a few orders coming in. But when orders start to increase shipping software such as Shippo, as just one example, can save time and money.

Exploring new technology solutions can also help support small businesses in times of crisis or turmoil. Innovative companies such as Stamp Free are looking to revolutionise the carrier and postal sector by putting convenience and simplicity first. The Stamp Free Digital Postage Solution allows businesses and consumers to use the Stamp Free or white-labelled smartphone app to send parcels and letters, as well as return consumer goods, without the need for a postage stamp or carrier label. With this technology there is no need to take parcels to the Post Office to pay for postage, everything can be done via a smartphone at home, at work or out and about. There is also no need for a printer as the technology generates a unique 6-digit code that can be written on any parcel.

Don’t Panic – Alternatives are available!

Whilst the Post Office strikes are currently limited to hundreds (not thousands) of branches, small sellers need not worry too much at this time. However, to mitigate against future strikes and even just to future-proof your business if you currently rely on your local Post Office and Royal Mail to deliver your goods, you may need to start looking into alternative solutions.

For this round of Post Office strikes, if you want to use the Post Office look for one in an independent store as they will probably still be open or, consider printing your postage online and dropping at your local Royal Mail depot.

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Younger US Online Shoppers Opportunity for British Brands

Pitney Bowes have released new findings from its latest BOXpoll survey highlighting the opportunity for British retailers with young US online shoppers. The survey of 1,254 US cross-border online shoppers finds one in four (25%) Generation Z consumers and more than one in five (22%) Millennials buy from UK online retailers once a month or more.

The key highlights are that there is strong demand for British brands, US shoppers demand delivery on a par with that they would expect from a domestic US brand, and if you can’t keep them informed of when their purchase will arrive with notifications and crucially give them a landed cost with any taxes paid up front then they’re not going to be your customer.

With the UK market impacted by constrained consumer spending, cross border is more important than ever. Pitney Bowes forecasts reveal one in every five ecommerce transactions around the world is likely to be cross-border in the next four years, with global cross-border sales expected to reach $1.6 trillion by 2025.

New UK-origin cross-border logistics services

The findings are announced as Pitney Bowes expands its portfolio of leading cross-border services, launching new UK-origin cross-border logistics services purpose-built to help UK retailers grow sales and reach consumers throughout Europe, in the US, and around the world.

Taking many elements of their previous all-in-one storefront, delivery and duty and tax calculations service, Pitney Bowes have broken the segments down so that you can now access just the parts that you need.

For instance, if you have already got logistics for outbound and returns in place or use a fulfilment service you can may now want the storefront service which localises your site with tax compliance and enables you to offer country specific pricing. Then you can add on checkout functionality with local payments and fraud checking. If you currently use services such as eBay GSP (highly recommended and powered by Pitney Bowes), you can use their logistics solutions to offer a similar level of service to US customers shopping on your own website.

US Online Shoppers Expectations

The BOXpoll survey reveals insights into the barriers US online shoppers face at checkout when buying from UK brands. Buyers show higher expectations and lower tolerance around the cost of shipping and returns, compared with last summer’s poll:

• 59% abandon their shopping cart because they do not want to pay the costs associated with returning items, up from 50% in 2021
• 74% of buyers are held back by high shipping costs – up from 69% last year
• Almost one in every two (47%) abandons their cart if duties are either not calculated or seem inaccurate, up from 44% in 2021

The results highlight the delivery times that US cross-border consumers find acceptable when buying a product online from a UK ecommerce site. The majority find seven days acceptable, with 44% saying they would still be happy with ten-day delivery. They are less tolerant after the ten-day mark, with 63% classifying 11-14 days as slow. The key is to set expectation on delivery times upfront at the checkout and then to meet those expectations.

Younger US consumers and their love of British brands present a fantastic opportunity for UK-based retailers, but these buyers are cost-conscious and experienced, with high service expectations. To win their business, sellers must replicate a best-in-class domestic ecommerce experience across borders, including fully-landed costs, reliable delivery time estimates, and accurate tracking. New Designed Cross-Border services from Pitney Bowes will make ecommerce logistics easier for UK retailers, helping them reduce complexity and risk while delivering an outstanding customer experience.

– Georges Berzgal, Senior Vice President International, Pitney Bowes Global Ecommerce

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WooCommerce partners with TikTok

TikTok have entered a partnership with WooCommerce to give users the ability to create advertising campaigns and reach one billion global users with TikTok for WooCommerce.

The two companies have partnered to connect the 3.7 million Woo-powered stores and the TikTok community with a new, official extension TikTok for WooCommerce – available now in the WooCommerce Marketplace. The new extension allows merchants to sync their catalog to TikTok and promote their products via ads to its one billion active global users. 

The TikTok community loves to discover new businesses and products, and we’ve seen countless merchants grow their audiences by embracing the creativity and authenticity of the TikTok platform. We’re thrilled to partner with WooCommerce to help their merchants build meaningful presences and drive sales on TikTok.

– Melissa Yang, Head of Ecosystem Partnerships, TikTok

Merchants can now create native, shareable “in-feed” TikTok ads directly from their WooCommerce dashboard – including an embedded Smart Video Generator that simplifies the process by producing video ads using existing product images. The integration also allows for an advanced TikTok pixel to be used on a merchant’s website for ongoing campaign performance tracking.

The integration will offer priority access to all of the eCommerce features TikTok plans to release in the upcoming months.

TikTok is the fastest-growing advertising channel for merchants to take advantage of, it was the top app by worldwide downloads in Q1 2022, Through our partnership, we’re bringing merchants direct access to TikTok ad tools, including enablement and education to getting started.

– Aleksandra Bettin, Vice President of Business Development at WooCommerce

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Betastore gets $2.5M to solve stock-outs, financing challenges for informal retailers in West and Central Africa

About 80% of household retail in sub-Saharan Africa is delivered through informal channels, which perennially face several challenges like stockouts, leading to an instability in earnings, and a lack of attractiveness to financiers. These challenges befall millions of micro-retailers across the continent, and Betastore, a B2B retail marketplace for informal retailers, is working to resolve in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Senegal.

The Betastore marketplace enables informal traders to source fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs) directly from manufacturers or distributors – which keeps the prices of the products competitive by eliminating interactions with sales agents. It also works with logistics partners to ensure the delivery of goods within 24 hours.

The Nigeria-based startup plans to provide these services beyond its current three markets by expanding to Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon by the end of this year, after closing $2.5 million in pre-series A funding from 500 Global, VestedWorld, and Loyal VC. Betastore has to date raised $3 million in funding.

“What is really important for us is to be able to continue to scale by leveraging our asset-light model. We plan to enter new markets before the end of the year and to expand to 100 cities across Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Senegal. We are also planning to reinforce our technology and leadership teams, and to bring in new products and to improve existing ones,” said Betastore CEO, Steve Dakayi-Kamga, who co-founded the startup with Leo-Armel Tchoudjang mid 2020.

MarketForce raises $40 million Series A, introduces BNPL merchant stock financing

The asset-light model means Betastore does not have any capital and labor intensive assets like warehouses or its own fleet of vehicles for delivery. Dakayi-Kamga said that this has helped the startup to optimize its technology to ensure that retailers source goods from the closest distributors. On average, a retailer using Betastore makes 4.4 orders per month.

“Our technology enables retailers to order on demand, access a variety of products and solves logistics headaches for them too. With Betastore, they don’t have to close their shops to go get goods from distributors stores or the market, and do not have to lose close to half of the margins in in the logistics,” said Dakayi-Kamga, who previously worked for Jumia, where he led the e-commerce platform’s logistics, warehousing and marketplace fulfillment department.

The B2B ecommerce platform is set to introduce financing in July, a launch that follows a pilot program involving 200 retailers that the startup carried out last year.

The BNPL financing strategy, Tchoudjang says, will be based on retailers’ sales and will go a long way in helping them to grow the value of their shopping baskets, and ultimately their businesses. The startup plans to charge an interest based on product margins.

Betastore is currently integrating its technology into a network of financing partners including fintechs and banks.

“The mandate of some of the partners we have on board is to support the economy by financing small businesses, but are not able to lend to them because they do not have the data to inform decisions. We have the visibility of what is happening in this sector, and have data they can use to extend financing,” said Tchoudjang, who previously held executive and leadership roles within the IFC-backed AccessHolding AG network in Africa. He has also helped multinationals rollout fintech and microfinance products for emerging markets in the past.

Namibian B2B e-commerce retail platform JABU raises $15M led by Tiger Global

Retailers use the Betastore wallet to repay loans, deposit money for their operations, and to send, receive and save money.

“The wallet helps them separate their business money from their own money, and it is directly connected to the whole banking system, meaning that retailers can receive and send money to any bank, and load cash with any agency banking platform,” said Tchoudjang.

Since launch, the startup claims to have grown its customer base and revenues by 10 and 12 times, respectively. The startup anticipates greater growth especially after entering more countries and rolling out its buy now pay later (BNPL) product, as it taps the retail market in sub-Saharan, which was valued at $380 billion in 2021, contributing 20-50% of the region’s GDP on average.

“We want to simplify access to goods and services for the retailers and for the end consumer because we see the merchant as an agent able to make access to goods and services easier. We started out in Nigeria, and we are expanding within Francophone Africa on our way to being a pan African player,” said Dakayi-Kamga.

Amit Bhatti, the principal at 500 Global while commenting on the latest funding round said, “We believe Betastore’s talented team is creating market efficiencies that have the potential to boost the growth of Africa’s retailers. With Betastore, merchants can get greater transparency into wholesaler inventories and price points.”

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Indonesia’s Astro raises $60M to work on 15-minute grocery delivery

Indonesia’s sprawling archipelago has long been a headache for logistics companies, but there’s no lack of brave challengers. Jarkata-based Astro, which provides 15-minute grocery delivery, has recently closed a $60 million Series B financing round, lifting its total funding to $90 million since the business launched just nine months ago.

The Series B round was led by Accel, Citius and Tiger Global, with participation from existing investors AC Ventures, Global Founders Capital, Lightspeed and Sequoia Capital India. The company declined to disclose its post-money valuation.

The speed at which Astro is attracting investment goes to show the need for hefty upfront investment in the grocery delivery race, which is about establishing a logistics infrastructure quickly and locking in loyal customers ahead of rivals. Founded by Tokopedia veteran Vincent Tjendra, Astro plans to spend its funding proceeds on user acquisition, product development, and hiring more staff to add to its current team of 200.

As in many countries around the world, on-demand delivery got a boost during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia. But e-grocery penetration in the country remains low and is estimated to be just 0.5% by 2022, compared to China’s 6% and South Korea’s 34% in 2020.

That means there’s a huge opportunity for companies like Astro that are trying to prove the convenience of online grocery ordering over brick-and-mortar visits. The e-grocery delivery market in Indonesia is projected to reach $6 billion by 2025.

Astro offers 15-minute delivery within a range of 2-3km through its network of rented “dark stores,” which are distribution hubs set up for online shopping only. The company has opted for a cash-intensive model, as it owns the entire user journey going from inventory sourcing, supply chain, mid-mile, to last-mile delivery. The benefit of this heavyweight approach is that it gets to monitor the quality of customer experience.

Astro currently operates in around 50 locations across Greater Jakarta, an area with 30 million residents, through a fleet of about 1,000 delivery drivers. Revenues grew more than 10x over the past few months and downloads hit 1 million, the company said.

The startup is competing with incumbents like Sayurbox, HappyFresh, and TaniHub to win over users. Its customers range from working professionals to young parents at home “who seek convenience,” said Tjendra.

Grocery delivery is notoriously cash-burning, but Tjendra reckoned margins will improve as the business scales. The company’s main source of revenue is the gross margin it earned from the goods sold and delivery fees customers pay. A large chunk of the business’s costs comes from delivery, which the founder believed “will come down over time as we deploy for hubs and subsequently reduce the delivery distance areas.”

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The Growing Power of Influencer Marketing on Twitch

If you know anything about the Amazon owned Twitch platform, you’re probably aware of it being a place for streamers to broadcast gameplay, but would you be surprised to find out that your perception of the platform might not reflect the whole truth? Matt Woods CEO and founder of influencer marketing agency AFK Digital has shared his knowledge on the power, potential and reach of influencer marketing on Twitch.

Although it is true that gaming is a huge part of Twitch, there is so much more to it. Matt explains that it might be surprising to find out that American Eagle is Twitch’s newest official marketing partner. As part of this, American Eagle is creating a five-part docuseries in which the featured creators wear the clothing of Twitch’s official apparel partner.

Thanks to the change in consumer behaviour spurred on by the pandemioc, live-streaming platforms have experienced massive growth in the past two years. The live-streaming platform exploded, with an 82% increase in the amount of hours people spent watching in the first year of the pandemic.

With the already popular Twitch growing in viewership and millions of creators from all backgrounds streaming on the platform, it is no longer just about gaming. Twitch channels are now covering cooking, music, food, fitness and more! Following the takeover by Amazon in 2014, the lifestyle section has gradually developed further to include shopping channels. This marks a huge transformation from 2011 when Twitch was originally an offshoot of the Justin.tv streaming platform for e-sports broadcasts.

Many brands are yet to discover the potential of utilising Twitch. Compared to other social media platforms, the livestreams drive consumers to stay on the platform for significantly longer which gives creators more time to talk about products in-depth. Twitch also allows for fans to engage directly with the creators. Key, as always, is to find the right influencer to promote your brand, brand values and the product. From experience, this is more important for Twitch than any other social media platform.

The fact that content cannot be pre-recorded but is done in livestreams gives the creator more freedom and more responsibility to promote the brand and product adequately, it also increases authenticity and trust from the consumer. The spontaneity which can bring the product so much closer to the consumer is a double-edged sword so brands must be aware of this when planning.

You also need to be aware that Twitch allows sponsored links with UTM tracking in chat command and timer as well as in Twitch panels. Unlike other social media platforms, Twitch doesn’t use an algorithm to push specific creators’ content.

– Matt Woods, CEO and founder, AFK Digital

The post The Growing Power of Influencer Marketing on Twitch appeared first on ChannelX - formerly Tamebay.

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Amazon flexes its retail muscle with a brick-and-mortar clothing store

Signaling its ambitions to make a dent in the apparel market, Amazon today opened its first physical clothing store, Amazon Style, in the Greater Los Angeles Area. Offering a twist on the traditional experience, visitors to the Glendale, California shop at The Americana At Brand use an app to scan codes on displayed items from Steve Madden, Levi’s, Lacoste and other brands to send them directly to a fitting room or pickup counter.

As TechCrunch previously reported, Amazon Style features hundreds of brands chosen by “fashion creators” and “feedback provided by millions of customers shopping on Amazon.com.” Scanning the QR code next to an item pops up a selector for sizes and colors, as well as details such as customer ratings and adds the item to a list for later perusing.

Amazon Style doesn’t use the cashierless “Just Walk Out” tech found in Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods locations, instead opting for Amazon’s controversial Amazon One palm recognition service. But there is an AI element. As Amazon explains on the store’s webpage: “We’re bringing more looks and less clutter to in-store shopping. Our advanced machine learning algorithms continually refine to find looks just for you based on your preferences.”

Fitting rooms are unlocked using the app and sport touchscreens that let shoppers continue requesting items to try on. Items found in the store can be bought online or in-store and, either way, returned in-store.

Window shopping the Amazon way. Image Credits: Amazon

Amazon has spent years experimenting with technology in the fashion space, notably with Echo Look, a since-discontinued connected camera that combined human and machine intelligence to recommend styles, color-filter clothes and keep track of what’s in customers’ wardrobes. The Echo Look tied into Prime Wardrobe, a program akin to those offered by Stitch Fix and Trunk Club that let users try on clothes and send back what they don’t want to buy.

In March 2021, Amazon passed Walmart as the top apparel retailer in the U.S. partly due to the pandemic-linked boom in online ordering, Wells Fargo reported. Analysts at the bank estimated that domestic sales of apparel and footwear on Amazon last year exceeded $41 billion, including sales through third-party sellers.

Amazon has been less successful where it concerns brick-and-mortar, having recently announced that it would close dozens of physical bookstores and mall pop-up kiosks to focus on other areas of the retail business. Still, Amazon’s physical stores generated roughly $4.68 billion in Q4 2021 as bets like Just Walk Out — and perhaps even barbershops — begin to gain traction.

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Namibian B2B e-commerce retail platform JABU raises $15M led by Tiger Global

More venture capital keeps trooping into Africa’s B2B e-commerce retail, a space where startups are digitizing informal trade to get thousands of merchants to operate more efficiently.

This time, it’s a startup that was in the news this January: Namibia-based JABU, whose $3.2 million seed round we covered. Now, the last-mile distribution e-commerce company has received more investment: a $15 million Series A led by Tiger Global.

The round, which closed sometime in March, is Tiger Global’s second investment in the B2B e-commerce space after backing Wasoko in its mega Series B round. It’s also worth noting that this deal closed before Tiger Global’s reported $17 billion loss during this year’s tech sell-off.

Other investors in this growth round include Box Group, Knollwood and D Global Ventures. Some backers from its seed round: Afore Capital, Oldslip and FJ Labs also doubled down.

For many years, merchants who own small to medium-sized kiosks and shops across Africa have dealt with logistics issues when ordering their products from wholesalers and distributors. Startups like JABU and several others such as Wasoko, TradeDepot, Omnibiz, MarketForce, MaxAB and Chari have made this process easier via apps and more efficient distribution channels.

With JABU, merchants can order, stock and pay for their products via Jwallet and expect same-day delivery, the YC-backed company said. In January, the company had over 6,000 merchants using its platform across Namibia, South Africa and Zambia. CEO David Akinin said that number has increased by 50%.

The company also provides data-driven services such as sales metrics and agent performances to FMCGs brands and banks via dashboards.

In the end, Akinin said JABU wants to build around its Jwallet, the wallet system currently launched as a standalone product. Jwallet allows merchants in Southern Africa to use their physical flows to offer cash withdrawals and deposit services for their customers. This play is akin to agency banking, a branchless banking system in Nigeria and West Africa where human agents act as ATMs to offer financial services in remote areas. Chari offers an identical offering in Morocco.

B2B e-commerce platform Chari is acquiring the credit line of Axa Assurance in Morocco for $22M

“You can offer your end consumers the ability to withdraw and deposit money into their wallets and bank accounts through JABU,” said Akinin. “So we’re connecting an API to banks into the interchange, literally to allow someone who received money via the wallet to walk up to a JABU merchant who can use their physical float and withdraw money.”

There are other working parts of Jwallet. According to the company, drivers who handle distribution for its 232 logistics partners and use the wallet for payments can access asset finance and, for merchants: stock financing. More on the latter, Akinin said he’s betting that the wallet system can provide a more sustainable alternative to the popular BNPL model that other platforms are offering to merchants.

“I think buy now, pay later is an optical illusion. I think there is credit, and there are cash sales, and there’s nothing in between,” Akinin said. “So, I think it [BNPL] is going to worsen the situation for small businesses, it’s going to create more defaults, generate a culture of bad pay, and it’s going to create real debt at the SME level in Africa, that will be hard to justify.”

His bias comes from experiencing defaults when JABU tried the BNPL model in the past. Akinin narrated how merchants would use a platform’s BNPL offering, generate revenue, and proceed to pay for the next invoice with this profit or purchase stock from another supplier in an entirely different supply chain.

Jwallet circumvents this by partnering with banks to carry out digital payments and creating communities for merchants to save and provide credit lines for each other on the platform. This process also helps merchants build up their transaction histories while they make enough revenue — from providing financial services to end customers — to pay back.

“Much of what we’re doing with our Java wallet is creating an ecosystem around the community and the shop rather than around our balance sheet. We’re excited about that as a product because we’re trying to prove as we scale that there is a different way to engage with shops.”

The Series A round will see JABU deepen its presence in Southern Africa and expand to new markets like Botswana and Eswatini later this year. Akinin says what differentiates his startup from others is how it is creating a supper and much broadly an ecosystem for small businesses rather than just a marketplace.

“Many businesses like ours are taking money out of the market. We’re trying to build a business that brings products into the market and continues in a journey that has a multiplier effect of moving that money 20 times around that market. And I think that’s the point of building the Java wallet. There will be shared services; other products will stem from this and so will the ability to pay for services and products in those markets.”

Sokowatch rebrands to Wasoko as it raises $125M Series B from Tiger Global and Avenir

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Getir, the $12B instant delivery startup, plans to axe 14% of staff globally and cut aggressive expansion plans

It continues to be a very rough week for e-commerce companies in Europe. In the latest development, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Getir — the $12 billion quick commerce upstart that grocery essentials and sundries and promises delivery of them in minutes — is cutting 14% of its staff globally. It’s been estimated that the Turkish company employs some 32,000 people in the nine markets where it operates, which would work out to 4,480 people impacted by the downsizing.

In addition to the headcount, the company plans to curtail a lot of its capital-intensive expansion — which will include hiring, marketing investments, and promotions. (Promotions in this context are not HR promotions, but the many discounts and free vouchers that quick commerce startups have been using to lure users to their platforms, at huge cost to the startups themselves.)

According to a memo that we have seen — which we are publishing below — the cuts will vary by country. (One source in Berlin estimated that the cuts in that city alone will be around 400, although this is not a number Getir would confirm.) The company has confirmed that it will not be pulling out of any specific country as part of this. Getir currently operates in its home market of Turkey, as well as the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Portugal and the U.S.

This is a stark swing of the pendulum for a company that raised $768 million at an $11.8 billion valuation just two months ago.

But it’s not a surprise in the wider market context we are in at the moment, with tech companies big and small all seeing a downturn in their finances and valuations in the face of a wider cooling of the market.

Just yesterday, one of Getir’s big rivals in Europe, Gorillas, announced layoffs of 300 people and plans to explore strategic options, including sales or exits, in several European markets. Earlier in the week, Klarna — the Swedish buy now, pay later company — confirmed it would cut 10% of its workforce amid reports that it was seeking to raise money at a reduced valuation.

The world of instant grocery delivery specifically has been one that many would argue was ripe for right-sizing for a while now. Founded seven years ago, Getir was an early mover in the “instant grocery” market, but the last couple of years has seen an explosion of the category.

Covid-19 led to a change in consumer habits: in many cases stores were outright closed for periods of time, and people were less inclined to shop in person when they were open, and that led to a surge of people willing to try out shopping for groceries online for the first time. Many companies popped up, propped up by huge amounts of VC investment, to serve those consumers, and a sizable proportion of these startups were based on the premise of “instant” delivery, with items coming to your door within minutes of ordering, mimicking (or even reducing) the time it would take to quickly run to a physical store.

Even before the capital markets collapsed earlier this year, several smaller startups either shut down or got acquired — Getir being one of the consolidators, alongside other big players like Gopuff, Flink and Gorillas. That’s a trend that has continued into 2022, and there will likely be even more to come.

Companies like Klarna and Getir may be coming from different corners of the world of commerce, but they share something in common: both are backed by Sequoia. The storied VC (which led Getir’s Series C in 2021) just this week put together an alarm-bell presentation for portfolio companies, running through the state of the market today and some guidance on how to help weather the storm. The 50-slide presentation — which a source shared with us — covered topics like runway extension, fundraising in difficult markets, leadership in uncertain times, and forecasting.

Pointedly for a company like Getir — which, similar to its rivals, has been raising hundreds of millions of dollars to pump into aggressive expansion strategies involving splashy ad campaigns, extensive operations infrastructure in urban areas, and lots of promotions to bring on more consumers — one slide was titled “Growth at all costs is no longer being rewarded.”

The presentation’s message appears to have definitely hit home for Getir.

The memo follows below. We’ll update this post as we learn more, and we’re sending our best wishes to those impacted by this news.

Today is one of the most difficult days since we founded Getir, because we have to make tough decisions about our people organization that will adversely affect some of our team members.

Rising inflation and the deteriorating macroeconomic outlook around the world pushes all companies, especially in the tech industry and including Getir, to adjust to the new climate.

With a heavy heart, we today shared with our team the saddening and difficult decision to reduce the size of our global organization. At a global headquarter base, our reduction will be about 14%. Numbers will vary by country.

We do not take these decisions lightly. We will do right by every person throughout this process in line with Getir’s values of being a good and fair company. We will also decrease spending on marketing investments, promotions, and expansion.

There is no change in Getir’s plans to serve in the nine countries it operates. In these tough times, we are committed to leading the ultra-fast grocery delivery industry that we pioneered seven years ago.

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Online shopping platform buywith already bagged Walmart, now grabs seed round

Buywith completed a $9.5 million seed round, and while that may be the kind of funding a younger company takes, the livestream shopping platform is actually a “veteran” in this emerging way of shopping.

The company was founded in Israel in 2018 by Adi Ronen Almagor and Eyal Sinai as an e-commerce site that enables end users to consult with their friends and family within the site as they shop.

When Ronen Almagor came to the U.S. to take part in the New York Fashion Tech Lab, she saw the impact influencers were having on shopping and created a video-enabled tool they could use. She would ask potential customers if they preferred the standard business-to-business shopping tool or the video one with influencers, and many chose the video.

“That’s when I met my co-founder Eyal, and we saw that we had something interesting if we added the video layer on top,” she told TechCrunch. “The meaning of that for us would be you could do the session on any e-commerce site, which would be a huge advantage for us.”

Retailers and brands can host on-site livestream shopping events featuring influencers, experts and brand representatives as viewers shop live and interact with the hosts.

SoftBank leads $150M round for Firework’s shoppable video

The buywith team with co-founders Eyal Sinai and Adi Ronen Almagor sitting in center. Image Credits: buywith

Some unique features of buywith are the “Shop With Me” screen-sharing component and the fact that it does not require an app download or code integration, making it easier for brands to use it. In fact, that is how buywith started out with Walmart, enabling the retail giant to get up and running with the platform and go live immediately, Ronen Almagor said. The company also has integration capabilities now and is working with brands like MAC Cosmetics and is launching new partnerships with Steve Madden and Charlotte Tilbury.

When buywith initially started, the company was running pilots with four employees, Ronen Almagor recalls. Live commerce was already a huge hit in China — where sales are expected to hit $423 billion in 2022 — but her company was one of the few doing it elsewhere.

However, when the global pandemic hit, it created some organic momentum for buywith as companies and brands were out to find more ways to engage with their audience and retain relationships with new audiences.

The company, now with 20 employees, is delivering an eight-time increase in e-commerce conversions, an increase of around 40% session engagement rate, and an average of 10 times return on investment, Ronen Almagor said.

Meanwhile, buywith is working with clients in all size ranges and experienced major growth in the last year, which resulted in bringing in a “few millions of dollars in ARR,” she added. The company also launched in the U.S. in 2021 and is in the process of opening offices in the U.K. to expand its European market presence.

The seed round was led by igniteXL Ventures, which was joined by Fab Co-Creation Studio Ventures, Alibaba.com’s former Europe and North American president John Caplan, and Alibaba.com’s North America general manager Kevin Ambrosini, Regah Ventures, Irani CVC and True Global Ventures. Among that list and more, the company touts having 18 female investors involved from Israel, the U.S. and Europe.

“Live commerce is a key to increasing e-commerce conversion rates,” Caplan said in a statement. “Approximately 30% of shoppers walk out of a physical retailer having bought something, while today’s e-commerce results in about 4% conversion rates globally. Buywith aims to close this gap.”

Though live commerce is already huge in China, the U.S. has a lot of bandwidth to catch up. Live commerce in the country is poised to reach only $35 billion in sales by 2024. Firework is making strides in this area, picking up $150 million this week, as is Drip.

Buywith intends to use its new cash infusion to grow its sales, marketing and R&D teams across the globe. It is also working on a self-serve marketplace where brands can select the host for their livestream shopping sessions among a growing community of vetted content creators and influencers.

“We are adding a roadmap for the product, and with our audience being young, we want to eventually enable them to buy with coins and even offer purchase chances to go live with the host,” Ronen Almagor said. “We have a new head of product that came from the gaming industry, so more features will come from that, too.”

4 trends that will define e-commerce in 2022

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Instacart updates its customer ratings system, rolls out new features for shoppers

Instacart announced today that it’s introducing a revamped customer ratings system that is designed to be more informative and fair for shoppers on its platform. The company will now remove a rating if it’s from a customer who consistently rates their shoppers below 5 stars. Instacart is also going to forgive more ratings for reasons that may be outside of a shopper’s control.

Shoppers will now also just need to maintain a 4.7 or above rating to get prioritization for “batches,” which is a term Instacart uses to describe delivery jobs that include more than one order at a specific store. Prior to this change, the prioritization of batches was based on having the highest rating possible. Instacart notes that a few low ratings shouldn’t have a significant impact on a shopper’s access to batches.

In addition to the revamped customer rating system, Instacart is rolling out new features for shoppers. The company is introducing a new “Your stats” screen that shows shoppers information about their account, including their average customer rating, customer feedback, and statistics like how many orders they’ve completed. There’s also a new section within the Shopper app that will provide shoppers with information about batch accuracy, including details about items found, replacements and more. Instacart says a shopper’s accuracy information does not have an impact on their rating or access to batches, but can provide additional insights.

Shoppers will also now be notified when they are close enough to a store location to see available batches. When a shopper enters a store’s designated vicinity, they’ll be notified that they are ideally situated and if they can expect to see batches from this retail location in the near future. Shoppers may also see other recommended store locations nearby that have higher batch availability.

Lastly, Instacart will now solicit batch-level feedback after each batch shoppers complete. Shoppers can share if they had an issue with a customer and would no longer like to be paired with them in the future. If a shopper had a rude customer, they can choose to block them.

These new features come a month after Instacart rolled out a tip protection service to give its shoppers more reliable access to their tips. The protection sees Instacart protect shoppers from customers who remove a tip without reporting an issue with an order. Instacart says it will cover the amount of the zeroed-out tip up to $10.

In March, the company introduced in-store navigation, live phone support and a safety toolkit for shoppers on its platform. The new in-app navigation feature gives shoppers an interactive map of the grocery store that they’re shopping in, and the new safety toolkit gives shoppers access to tools such as in-app emergency calling, incident reporting and safety alerts within the Shopper app.

Instacart is coming after users who tricked shoppers out of tips

Instacart introduces in-store navigation and live phone support for shoppers on its platform

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SoftBank leads $150M round for Firework’s shoppable video

Firework, a San Mateo livestreaming commerce company, secured $150 million in Series B funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

The company says it is now valued at $750 million. In 2021, Firework raised $55 million to value it at $230 million. Firework has now taken in over $235 million in funding since it was founded in 2017 by co-founders Vincent Yang and Jerry Luk.

“We chose Softbank Investment Advisers because of their shared vision,” said Luk in a statement. “We have big ambitions at Firework — to become the infrastructure on which the next-generation of the internet is built and run — and Softbank Investment Advisers supports that vision.”

Firework provides shoppable video and live streaming commerce capabilities for retailers, consumer brands and publishers that want to tap into their own customer data to build engaging video experiences across their own digital properties and social channels.

Last year, Firework was working with some 600 companies, including Albertsons Companies, The Fresh Market and Omnicom Media Group. Last October, Albertsons was the first U.S. grocer to utilize Firework’s platform to create, host and curate their own short-form and livestream video for the Albertsons brands websites and app to improve customer engagement.

The new funding comes as live commerce continues to grow in adoption. Live commerce is still most popular in China where sales are expected to hit $423 billion in 2022. That compares to the U.S. live commerce market, which is poised to reach $35 billion in sales by 2024.

Firework’s co-founders say there is much opportunity to be had in a North American market where live commerce represents just 0.1% of overall online sales, or less than $6 billion. Other companies think so, too. Startups like Upmesh and Drip are also attracting some of those venture capital dollars, most recently Drip raised $28.5 million for its livestream shopping approach. The industry is also dominated by Whatnot and Popshop.

Firework’s new round is a chance to grab more of that market share and invest in its technology and product development, especially with a shift toward Web 3.0. As a result, the company will be adding to its employee headcount in engineering, product and marketing.

As part of the investment, Linda Yu, partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, has joined Firework’s board of directors.

“Short videos and livestreaming are now the default language for the digital era, which is reshaping how consumers engage with brands and products online,” Yu said in a statement. “We believe Firework empowers businesses to use video to transform their websites into social and storytelling hubs so they can build deeper, long-term relationships with customers. Vincent and Jerry have assembled an impressive team in the digital commerce space and we’re thrilled to partner with them to build a next generation customer experience.”

Livestream e-commerce: Why companies and brands need to tune in

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Nomagic picks up $22M for its e-commerce warehouse picking robots

Robotics are playing a growing role in the world of e-commerce logistics and fulfillment — where they are seen not just as a way to speed up operations but to drastically reduce the costs of running them — and today a startup developing software and hardware specifically in the area of robot picking is announcing some funding.

Nomagic, a Polish startup that has built a robotic arm that can identify and pick out an item from an unordered selection (say, from objects in a box) and then move or pack it into another place, has raised $22 million, funding that it will be using towards both growing and expanding its business.

Nomagic’s robotic arms were first deployed to work picking up and moving small consumer electronics and related items — phones, cables, small toys — before extending to items like bagged apparel. Kacper Nowicki, the CEO who co-founded the company with Marek Cygan (CTO) and Tristan d’Orgeval (CSO), said that the plan is to add in more categories like groceries over time, reflecting changing consumer habits and what people are buying online these days. “That is the long-term goal,” he said.

The company already has a number of customers in sectors ranging from fashion, e-commerce and third-party logistics providers — one of the more prominent is Brack.ch, a Swiss-based “everything” store similar to Amazon in terms of its physical product range. And while it currently bases its tech around computer vision to identify objects and read codes, over time it is likely also to incorporate other kinds of tech such as radio-wave scanning to identify items. 

Khosla Ventures and Berlin’s Almaz Capital co-led the round with the European Investment Bank, with past backers Hoxton Ventures, Capnamic Ventures, DN Capital and Manta Ray also participating.

Nomagic last raised funding — a seed round of $8.6 million — in February 2020; and in the interim, it’s been a wild ride in the world of e-commerce.

Covid-19 led to a huge surge in online shopping, but also a reassessment of how people could work in warehouses under pandemic concerns and restrictions, and in some cases some serious reassessments of how operations were run, and a curtailing of investments to adjust to changing (and sometimes hard-hit) business conditions. Nomagic’s technology plays into all of those developments in a variety of ways.

The most obvious of these is around digital transformation, where companies are adopting robotic hardware as part of a wider update of their systems and bringing on more automation. Nomagic cites data from Research and Markets and Mordor that estimates that the the global warehouse automation market will be worth $31 billion by 2025, and that the market for piece-picking robots specifically is growing at a rate of 62.5% and will be worth $2.9 billion by 2026.

Alongside that, there is an obvious opportunity for robots to work in environments where humans might not, either because the environment is unsuitable for them and to modern labor laws (eg, no lighting, small spaces, no heating or cooling, and long hours); or because companies cannot afford that labor. Although Nomagic is also building out some hardware components, today the company focuses the bulk of its R&D on software development, which Nowicki says means that ultimately the tech will be able to work across a wide range of hardware.

Given that much larger e-commerce giants like Amazon and Ocado are investing in their own robotics technology, building third-party services that can be adopted by smaller players will be essential to letting them continue to compete. Nowicki argues that this is not about putting humans out of work but letting them focus on less repetitive tasks robots cannot handle — a factor potentially even more important for smaller organizations, with smaller staff bases and resources, to consider. This is the opportunity that investors see, too.

“An increasing number of mundane tasks will be increasingly automated by robots over the coming years,” said Kanu Gulati, partner at Khosla Ventures in a statement. “We come in early to support companies building promising technologies that are bold and impactful like Nomagic and are excited by the momentum they have demonstrated with customers.” 

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