Point Pickup acquires e-commerce platform GrocerKey for $42M to allow for same-day delivery

Point Pickup Technologies, a last-mile delivery service, has acquired white label e-commerce platform GrocerKey for $42 million, according to the company. With the acquisition, Point Pickup now allows retailers to offer same-day delivery, from purchase to fulfillment to delivery, under their own brand name, rather than under third parties like Instacart.

Instacart made a killing delivering groceries and goods for retailers during the coronavirus pandemic, with a generated revenue of $1.5 billion in 2020 and $35 billion worth of sales. The company has an estimated 9.6 million active users and over 500,000 “shoppers” who pick up and deliver goods. 

New entrants to the same-day delivery space are cropping up, which aligns with the expected growth of the industry to $20.36 billion by 2027, according to Allied Market Research. But companies like Amazon and Instacart that perform this service and host a delivery marketplace get far more than sales revenues – they also get all the customer data. 

Tom Fiorita, founder and CEO of Point Pickup, says retailers should have a right to own that data themselves. The acquisition of GrocerKey, which brings on board the company’s front-end consumer-facing sales engine and predictive analytics, puts the data and brand recognition back in the retailer’s hands. 

“If you are a customer of Instacart, you pay them a subscription, they own your buying habits, your credit cards, your data,” Fiorita told TechCrunch. “Instacart was a big thing during COVID because no one had delivery. So now retailers woke up and said, ‘Oh my god, I can’t just have an Instacart-like marketplace be selling my goods. I don’t know who my customers are, I don’t have their credit cards or data.’ And you know data runs the world now.”

Another recent, if not smaller, entrant to the space is Canadian startup Tyltgo, which operates under a similar model to what Point Pickup is now offering via GrocerKey’s technology. In both cases, the buyer goes directly onto the merchant’s platform and places the order through them, so it feels like they’re interacting with the brand they purchased from. And on Tuesday, Walmart also announced a new white-label delivery service that would allow other merchants to tap into its own delivery platform to get orders to their customers.

Tyltgo’s same-day delivery platform lets small businesses compete with Amazon

Fiorita founded Point Pickup in 2015 as a reaction to Amazon’s increased omnipotence with the noble, if not naive, mission to “save local America.” Walmart and Kroger, two of the largest grocery retailers in the U.S., are Point Pickup’s top customers, alongside other nationwide retailers like Albertsons, Giant Eagle and more. But Fiorita believes the service his company is offering will be even more impactful when it starts to work its way down to the mid-sized and small- to medium-sized businesses. 

“We built this not only to survive against Amazon or Instacart, but because these small businesses need this for their survival,” Fiorita said. “These companies will no longer survive if they continue to allow other companies to sell their merchandise and to own their customer, including the data, the advertising, the CPG dollars and everything.”

Point Pickup offers deliveries of everything from grocery to general merchandise, pharmacy and oversized delivery. It has a network of 350,000 gig economy drivers across 25,000 ZIP codes in all 50 states. 

Since the company’s network of drivers, who often pick and pack the products for the customer as well as deliver the goods, comprises all gig workers with their own vehicles, Point Pickup doesn’t have a clear picture of the percentage of its fleet that’s electric or hybrid. Fiorita speculates it’s probably on par with nationwide rates, if not higher. A recent Pew Research report found that 7% of Americans say they own an EV or hybrid. 

Fiorita said that the type of car drivers own is taken into account during recruitment and that the company is looking for ways to incentivize drivers to buy less polluting vehicles. He also said Point Pickup is a vehicle-agnostic platform, meaning it’s piloting other delivery vessels like drones and autonomous robots.

To compete with the big dogs in the space like Amazon and Walmart, both of which are either testing or already have in place electric delivery vans, Point Pickup will have to also make efforts to beef up its strategy in the carbon emissions space.

How Nuro became the robotic face of Domino’s

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International Transaction fees coming to PayPal

PayPal have announced some changes to their User Agreement, and the bit you’ll be most interested in is changes to their International Transaction fees. There will be a new International Transaction fees coming for ‘some’ commercial transactions between the EEA and the UK. At the same time you will notice the additional percentage-based International Transaction fees are also changing.

Currently, PayPal have given notice that the changes are coming but the new fee schedule won’t be published until the 7th of September, so mark the date in your diary to find out what International Transaction fees you’ll be charged. These changes will be effective from the 10th of November 2021.

Amendments to the PayPal User Agreement

• We are revising PayPal’s Seller Protection program to clarify eligibility for certain claims involving travel tickets sold by the travel carrier.
• We are requiring sellers who are Corporate Customers to notify us of any pricing errors or discrepancies within sixty (60) days from having access to their account statement(s) or other account activity information.
• We are removing the PayPal Payouts section and replacing it with a standalone agreement called the PayPal Payouts Agreement on the legal hub.
• We are clarifying the types of costs used to calculate the reasonable minimum estimate that we may recover if you engage in any restricted activities.
• We are introducing an additional service fee of 1.29% for some international commercial transactions between the EEA and the UK.
• We are changing the additional percentage-based fees for international commercial transactions as well as simplifying our market/region country classifications for these fees. The fees are changing from the rates shown in the current User Agreement to the new rates that will be shown on the updated Merchant Fee page that will publish on or after September 7, 2021

– PayPal

At the same time, to anticipate changes partly arising from the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, PayPal will be amending the Direct Debit Instruction from JPMC Re PayPal Pte Ltd to JPMC Re PayPal as the Originator of the transaction. This change will also take place on the 10th of November but no action is needed from you.

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Using AI to reboot brand-client relationships

Michael Gorman Contributor

Michael Gorman is SVP of Product, Business Development and Marketing at ShareThis, a data company focused on mapping comprehensive global consumer interest insights.

Marketing automation has usually focused on driving sales, mainly using past purchase or late funnel behavior (e.g., paid search) as a predictor of an imminent purchase. While effective at boosting sales numbers, this widely implemented strategy can result in a disservice to brands and industries that adopt it, as it promotes the perpetual devaluation of goods or services. Narrowing a brand’s focus only to aspects linked to conversions risks stripping the customer experience of key components that lay the groundwork for long-term success.

We live in a world rich with data, and insights are growing more vibrant every day. With this in mind, companies and advertisers can strategically weave together all the data they collect during the customer experience. This enables them to understand every inference available during customer interactions and learn what benefits the customer most at a given time.

But focusing exclusively on data collected from customers, brands risk falling subject to the law of diminishing returns. Even companies with meaningful consumer interactions or rich service offerings struggle to gain impactful contextual insights. Only by harnessing a broader dataset can we understand how people become customers in the first place, what makes them more or less likely to purchase again and how developments in society impact the growth or struggle a brand will experience.

Here’s a look at how we can achieve a more complete picture of current and future customers.

A critical component in re-imagining customer experience as a relationship is recognizing that brands often don’t focus enough on consumers’ wider needs and concerns.

Leverage AI to unlock new perspectives

Over the past several years, almost every industry has capitalized on the opportunity data-driven marketing presents, inching closer to the “holy grail” of real-time, direct and personalized engagements. Yet, the evolving toolset encouraged brands to focus on end-of-the-funnel initiatives, jeopardizing what really impacts a business’ longevity: relationships.

While past purchase or late-funnel behavior data does provide value and is useful in identifying habit changes or actual needs, it is relatively surface level and doesn’t offer insight into consumers’ future behavior or what led them to a specific purchase in the first place.

By incorporating AI, brands can successfully engage with their audiences in a more holistic, helpful and genuine way. Technologies to discern not just the content of language (e.g., the keywords) but its meaning as well, open up possibilities to better infer consumer interest and intentions. In turn, brands can tune consumer interactions to generate satisfaction and delight, and ultimately accrue stronger insights for future use.

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Europe’s quick-commerce startups are overhyped: Lessons from China

Alexander Kremer Contributor

Alexander Kremer is partner and head of China at venture capital firm Picus Capital.

More than 10 companies currently compete across Europe with an instant grocery delivery business model. Half of them were established in 2020, the year of the pandemic. These companies have raised more than $2 billion to date.

Existing and well-funded online food-delivery service players like Delivery Hero are also joining the race by launching dedicated grocery offerings. However, if lessons from the world’s largest online grocery market, China ($400 billion), matter, then it’s clear that instant delivery is not the magic bullet to crack the dominance of Europe’s incumbent supermarket chains in the overall $2 trillion-plus flat market.

Instead, China’s quick-commerce equivalents (like Dingdong Maicai, Miss Fresh and Meituan Maicai) compete alongside a wealth of other online grocery models (such as Pinduoduo, JD’s Super and Alibaba’s Taoxianda), which have helped bring total market penetration to 20% and beyond.

Quick commerce suffers from narrower profit margins compared to competing models and is addressing lower consumer demand in China than anyone in the West is expecting it to achieve in Europe and the U.S. If the performance of online grocery platforms in China (a market five to seven years ahead of Europe in terms of online retail) is anything to go by, a range of B2C business models would be more likely to displace the traditional grocery retailers.

Third-time luck for quick commerce?

The idea of ordering groceries online and having them delivered to consumers in less than an hour is nothing new. Back in the heyday of the dot-com bubble, a company attempted to do just that: Kozmo.com. Founded in 1998, it raised more than $250 million (around $400 million in today’s dollars) from investors, promising to deliver food, among other items, to consumers within an hour, while charging no delivery fees.

In 1999, it had revenues of $3.5 million and a loss of $1.8 million. However, in 2001, the business was shut down by its board after the company could not make the business model work at scale.

Some 15 years later, another company had a go. Gopuff was established in Philadelphia in 2013 and originally targeted students. What started out as a hookah delivery service soon expanded into a much broader convenience store offering and delivered to customers in approximately 30 minutes.

Gopuff was most recently valued at $15 billion after raising a total of $3.4 billion — 75% of which occurred in the past 12 months. Last year, Gopuff grew revenues from around $100 million to $340 million.

Kozmo.com went out of business after just three years. Meanwhile, Gopuff was turned down by several VCs in its early days, and it wasn’t until the pandemic that it saw a rapid acceleration in fundraising. Little did teams at either company know that they would later become the inspiration for a whole generation of founders in Europe.

Europe’s $2B instant-grocery gamble

Has anything fundamentally changed in the 20 years since Kozmo.com? Indeed, we’ve seen little technological progress that would hugely affect the operations of an instant commerce business. However, there have been much larger shifts in consumer habits.

Firstly, the number of global internet users has skyrocketed (from below 500 million to beyond 4 billion), and mobile internet has taken over. Secondly, demand for online grocery delivery has grown significantly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as consumers have preferred to make retail purchases from home for safety reasons. Thirdly, consumers are now accustomed to paying fees for delivery services, typically around $2 per order, which Kozmo notoriously did not do.

While many online grocery business models exist, the instant grocery, quick-commerce approach has been the favorite of European entrepreneurs and VCs over the past 18 months. The model itself, also referred to as q-commerce, is not that hard to understand.

Companies maintain a small product offering of around 1,000–2,000 SKUs that consumers would otherwise find in convenience or drug stores. These products are purchased directly from brands or through distributors and are stored in self-operated microwarehouses close to customers’ locations.

Marketing tactics are aggressive, often employing vouchers for first-time users of up to $12 (50% of an average shopping basket), and many startups offer their products at supermarket price or even at a discount of 10%–15%. Delivery usually happens by bicycle, e-bike or scooter, within 10-30 minutes of an order being placed, for a fee of around $2 with no minimum order value.

Companies like Getir from Istanbul (total funding: $1 billion, last valuation: $7.5 billion) and Gorillas from Berlin (total funding: $335 million, last valuation: $1 billion) are leading the way. When Gorillas announced its $290 million Series B in March 2021, it became the fastest European startup to achieve unicorn status (nine months after launch). The company is already rumored to be seeking Series C financing at a $2.5 billion valuation.

There are more than 10 companies across Europe with more or less the same business model. Those include the 2020-established Flink (Germany-based, $300 million raised), Zapp (U.K.-based, $100 million raised), Dija (U.K.-based, $20 million raised and just acquired by Gopuff), Jiffy (U.K.-based, $7 million raised) and Cajoo (France-based, $6 million raised).

There is also JOKR, which was started by the founder of Foodpanda. JOKR was only established in Q1 2021, but right after incorporation raised one of the largest ever initial seed rounds (rumored to be $100 million) and subsequently a $170 million Series A in July to bring the model to Europe, Latin America and the U.S.

Likewise, companies coming from food delivery have pushed further into this space and received additional funding in recent months, notably Delivery Hero through Dmart and Glovo through SuperGlovo, following role models in the U.S., such as DoorDash.

Does instant grocery stand a chance of becoming profitable?

As these companies approach later-stage financing sometime in the future, questions will be asked about the path to profitability in an industry of notoriously thin margins. Indeed, this is an uncomfortable truth that hasn’t changed since the early days of Kozmo.com.

The available figures show that old patterns are repeating. Gopuff recently reported an EBITDA of negative $150 million on $340 million in revenue (EBITDA margin: -45%). Furthermore, an analysis by the German business monthly Manager Magazine concluded that Gorillas was operating at negative unit economics of -6%. Additional costs, such as overhead and technology, might push this number up significantly further.

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Urban Outfitters launching resale marketplace in U.S.

Popular clothing retailer Urban Outfitters is launching Nuuly Thrift, A resale marketplace to buy and sell women’s, men’s and kids’ apparel and accessories.

Nuuly Thrift which is likely launching in fall this year will be a sister platform to Nuuly Rent, the subscription rental service for women’s apparel, and both platforms will support the Nuuly brand’s mission to be a curated destination for anyone who loves fashion and is exploring how to wear, buy and sell it in ways that are gentler on the planet – and on their wallets.

Customers will have the opportunity to resell products from any brand, and these products will be merchandised on the platform using the best-in-class creative edit that sets URBN apart. When customers sell an item on Nuuly Thrift, they will have two options: transfer their earnings directly into their bank account, or redeem them for Nuuly Cash, which is worth 10% more at Nuuly Thrift and the URBN family of brands. For example: if a customer is paid $100 for a dress on Nuuly Thrift, that customer will have the option to convert it to $110 in Nuuly Cash, which can be spent back on Nuuly Thrift, or at Anthropologie, Free People, Urban Outfitters, BHLDN or Terrain – online and in stores.

“With URBN’s millions of existing customers, our merchandising and creative expertise, our deep technical capability, and the potential for Nuuly Cash to drive incremental purchases at our family of brands, we believe the stage is set to capitalize on a very large resale market opportunity,”

“Our goal at Nuuly is to build a creative marketplace community – built around a best-in-class technology platform – where customers can be fashion-conscious, eco-conscious and financially-conscious, all in one place.”
– David Hayne, Chief Technology Officer, URBN, and Nuuly President

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Cannabis e-commerce startup Jane Technologies raises $100M after stellar growth

Don’t call Jane Technologies the Amazon of weed. Instead, think of Jane Technologies as the Shopify of weed, and it’s an important distinction. While other startups attempt to build a destination marketplace like Amazon, Jane Technologies is trying something more powerful. The company is building the backends for dispensaries that are quickly taking their cannabis offerings online, and the company accounts for 20% of all legal cannabis sales in the United States. To Jane Technologies, the future of cannabis isn’t a single destination like Amazon; the future of cannabis is the neighborhood dispensary that sells weed online, and Jane wants to power their online store.

Today, the company is announcing a $100 million Series C financing round, bringing the total amount raised since its founding in 2015 to $130 million. Honor Ventures lead the round, and founding Managing Partner Jeffrey Housenbold joined Jane Technologies’ board of directors.

Jane Technologies expects to use the additional capital to grow its digital footprint and its teams across multiple areas of operations. The company intends to build new features and expand its product offering for large and small cannabis operations.

These 5 VCs have high hopes for cannabis in 2021

Online cannabis retail sales are quickly becoming the norm as consumers’ expectations change, and Jane offers a turn-key solution to build a robust online presence quickly.

Socrates Rosenfeld, Jane Technologies co-founder and CEO, is quick to point out Jane’s current positioning is a long time in the making. In an interview with TechCrunch, he says that this was a bet the company made in 2015 that the future of e-commerce is not a marketplace, but the complete digitization of all commerces.

“I think we are really seeing the next chapter of what the future of e-commerce will look like,” Rosenfeld said, “not just in the cannabis industry, perhaps across the world with various retail verticals like alcohol, convenience goods, restaurants and groceries. Local establishments [now have] some digital connective tissue to their local community, and I don’t think there’s a more challenging environment than the cannabis industry. I’m very proud of the team that we’ve come this far and still have a long way to go, but I think that’s the direct result of us being able to raise this [$100 million].

It’s often cited that cannabis was one of the winners of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sales lit up as the world shut down. Jane Technologies’ internal numbers lend more supporting evidence. According to their data, only 17% of legal cannabis sales were done online before the pandemic. However, during the height of the pandemic, online sales reached a high of 52%, and now, halfway through 2021, Jane Technologies says online sales account for 38% of all legal cannabis sales.

According to Rosenfeld, in 2019, Jane saw $100 million in total transactional volume, with one million people on the platform, and worked with 1,000 dispensaries. In 2021, the company forecasts it will reach $3.5 billion in total transactional volume and is now working with 2,100 dispensaries, including in Canada. Even more impressive, the company has nearly doubled the number of products listed on its product database, with 700,000 items, up from 350,000, showing a dramatic increase in cannabis products available to the consumer.

“We feel extremely fortunate to be born from the cannabis industry where there was no direct consumer ecosystem,” Rosenfeld said. “And we had to go and figure out a way to connect and tie the consumer to the brand and the retailer. We couldn’t do that by shipping products directly to the consumer, and we couldn’t do that by competing against the retailer; we had to work in partnership with our retail partners to provide them with powerful e-commerce enablement tools.”

Last month Jane Technologies partnered with its first Canadian retailer, High Tide. Then, two months ago, the company launched Jane Roots, a powerful all-in-one e-commerce platform that allows dispensaries to focus mainly on the front-end design while Jane takes care of the retail integrations.

“Over the last 25 years I’ve spent working with e-commerce companies, few have become enduring global platforms,” said Housenbold, in a released statement. “Jane has all the right ingredients to become the next eBay or Shopify. They are creating a win-win for all constituents in the ecosystem – brands, retailers and consumers all benefit from their platform and trust Jane to be the go-to service provider to build the future of cannabis commerce on a global basis. I’m excited to watch Socrates and his team build an amazing company, a great place to work and a trusted brand.”

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Balance raises $25M in a Ribbit Capital-led Series A to grow its ‘consumer-like B2B checkout platform’

Balance, a payments platform aimed at B2B merchants and marketplaces, has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by Ribbit Capital.

Avid Ventures participated in the financing, in addition to existing backers Lightspeed Ventures, Stripe, Y Combinator Continuity Fund, SciFi VC and UpWest. Other individual investors that put money in the round include early employees and executives from Plaid, Coinbase, Square, Stripe and PayPal, such as Jaqueline Reses, formerly head of Square Capital. The financing comes just over six months after Balance announced a $5.5 million seed round.

The motivation for starting the company was simple, said CEO and co-founder Bar Geron: “We wanted to create an online B2B experience that doesn’t suck.” He and Yoni Shuster, both former PayPal employees, started the company in early 2020.

B2B payments, he said, have historically differed from B2C primarily in that they have not taken place at the moment of purchase (or at the point of sale) but rather within 30 days and with an invoice. This is not an efficient process for merchants or vendors alike, the company maintains.

Meanwhile, most businesses have avoided paying for their supply with credit cards, because cards can quickly max out, Geron said.

“The only element that keeps many merchants offline is payments,” he told TechCrunch. “It’s a process that is stuck in the flow of those marketplaces and keeping them from scaling. We got fascinated with the problem.”

Lightspeed and Levchin bet on Balance to bring B2B payments into the digital world

After starting out at Y Combinator, Balance has developed what it describes as a “consumer-like B2B checkout platform for merchants and marketplaces,” or a “self-serve digital checkout experience company for B2B businesses.”

What that means is that Balance has built a B2B payments platform that allows merchants to offer a variety of payment methods, including ACH, cards, checks and bank wires, as well as a variety of terms, including payment on delivery, net payment terms and payment by milestone. Behind the scenes, Balance underwrites the terms of those transactions requiring financing by evaluating the risk of the customer, the merchant and the specific payment terms selected. Balance is built on top of Stripe and offers all of Stripe’s credit card payment options, but then extends far beyond them.

Balance, according to Geron, invested “a lot” in APIs for marketplaces.

“We have a very robust API platform so that these businesses can manage the entire payment flow without being exposed to the risk and regulation of payments,” he told TechCrunch. “And this is all happening without them even touching the funds.”

The plus for merchants is the ability to get immediate payout that is always reconciled like credits. Marketplaces are equipped with automated vendor disbursement, a full compliance umbrella and reconciliation management, Balance says.

“We want to make the online payments experience for businesses as seamless as it is for consumer payments, and we want to do it globally,” Geron told TechCrunch.

The startup has already partnered with e-commerce giants such as BigCommerce and Magento and will soon also work with Salesforce, according to Geron. Its customers range from startups to publicly traded marketplaces to e-commerce enterprises across a variety of industries such as steel, freight, hardware, food ordering, medical supply and apparel. They include Bryzos, Choco, Zilingo and Bay Supply, among others.

It’s early days yet, but Balance has seen growth of about 500% to 600% since the time of its last raise in February, Geron said. The company, which has offices in Tel Aviv and New York, has about 30 employees.

Jordan Angelos, a general partner at Ribbit and former head of M&A and investment at Stripe, believes the fact that Balance has built its platform specifically for “rapidly scaling” B2B marketplaces and merchants is reflective of a “well-placed” focus.

“B2B marketplaces, for example, have a very particular set of payments and capital markets-related needs that can be much more holistically and elegantly solved with Balance’s flexible toolkit than alternatives,” he wrote via email. “Payments and checkout are two sides of the same coin, and Balance’s products allow users to address them together to better serve their customers as well as their own margins.”

All B2B startups are in the payments business

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