Author : zebethcontrol

Coinbase and Polygon back new crypto advocacy group in India • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in coinbase, CoinDCX, CoinSwitch, Crypto, india, Polygon, WazirXNo Comments

Top crypto firms including Coinbase and Polygon are among the firms that have formed an industry body in India to promote dialogue between key stakeholders and drive awareness about web3, months after the largest local crypto advocacy group was disbanded. Members of the new industry body, named Bharat Web3 Association (BWA), include top local crypto exchanges including CoinDCX, CoinSwitch Kuber and WazirX. It also includes Hike, Biconomy, ZebPay and Tax Nodes, BWA said in a statement. “India’s Web 3.0 potential – in terms of talent, investment, and innovation – is revolutionary, and will surely place the nation as a global leader in this fast-emerging field,” said Nana Murugesan, Vice President of International and Business Development at Coinbase, in a statement. “We support the BWA’s mission of boosting the Web 3.0 ecosystem through stakeholder collaboration, thought leadership, and education. Building robust infrastructure and designing the favourable environment can allow players like Coinbase to build a more free, open and safer Internet.” Murugesan and several other Coinbase executives are in India currently, where they have spent the last few days holding dialogue with key ministers, a person familiar with the matter told ZebethMedia. Coinbase had an unsuccessful launch in India earlier this year after it rolled back the service in the launch week itself after a regulatory body expressed concerns. Dialogues between Coinbase and government officials have yet to move the needle about the restoration of the service in the country, the person said, requesting anonymity speaking private matters. Bharat Web3 Association will also seek to chalk up standardised principles for the web3 industry and help nurture India’s talent pool. The Indian central bank continues to force the hand of banks from engaging with crypto platforms in India, a move that has made on-ramp a nightmare for the firms involved, people familiar with the matter said. Many investors and entrepreneurs in the country have been scrambling for months to find newer, more effective ways including engaging with Niti Aayog, a powerful think tank, to liaison with policymakers, sources with direct knowledge of the matter said. Niti Aayog resisted getting involved with the crypto industry, sources added. Indian lawmakers, on their part, have met several industry faces in the past one year, but so far they are of the view that the fast adoption of crypto trading has hurt most consumers and more safeguards should be put in place, the sources said. In the wake of the uncertainty, the local ecosystem has seen some talent move outside of the country and a growing number of local entrepreneurs build for the foreign markets and avoid serving customers in India, the world’s second-largest internet market. The local industry was previously represented by the Blockchain and Crypto Assets Council, part of the influential technology lobby group Internet and Mobile Association of India in the country. The advocacy group said in July that it was dissolving the crypto unit because “a resolution of the regulatory environment for the industry is still very uncertain.” The move was the culmination of years of frustration for the Indian crypto industry, which felt that the lobby group’s influence and reach had been unable to deliver landmark results, ZebethMedia previously reported, citing sources. “Owing to its thriving developer community, entrepreneurial spirit, fast-growing economy, sound digital infrastructure, and deep digital adoption, India is poised to become a leader in the Web3 space,” said Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, in a statement. “Indian entrepreneurs have already made a mark in the ecosystem and are innovating for the world, developing valuable public use cases. BWA will play a pivotal role in helping India achieve its potential as a global Web3 leader.”

Pacdora wants to be a ‘Canva + Figma’ for the $1 trillion packaging industry • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in canva, collaboration, design, design collaboration, Enterprise, Figma, GGV, hearst ventures, pacdora, packaging, printingNo Comments

I love meeting startups that are making a tangible impact on the factory floor. While Shein applies a data-driven approach to improve efficiency for clothing manufacturing, Pacdora is doing something similar for packaging, from design all the way to production. Packaging sounds archaic and pretty removed from tech — and it is, which is why there aren’t many competitors for Pacdora, yet. But the opportunity is enormous. In 2019, McKinsey estimated the global packaging industry had exceeded $1 trillion, thanks to a combination of factors like the e-commerce boom and changing consumer expectations. Most important, it’s an industry primed for technological disruption. The traditional lifecycle of packaging is highly inefficient. The illustrator might take a few days to draw up the design and spend another few days to discuss with their client before they can finalize the dieline — the 2D diagram marking the folds and cuts for a 3D box — only to be told later by the factory that the measurement doesn’t add up and the colors and materials requested aren’t available. This back-and-forth can take weeks before the prototype goes into production. “That’s because most designers don’t have real-life manufacturing experience and they are drawing things that aren’t useable by the factory,” Xianfeng Wang, founder and CEO of Pacdora tells ZebethMedia. To bridge the gap between designers and manufacturers, Wang’s team developed Pacdora, which is like Canva plus Figma for packaging. The platform offers thousands of packaging templates for all kinds of products, from shipping boxes and coffee bags to lotion bottles and yogurt pouches. With a click, designers can switch between the 2D dieline and 3D-rendered mockup. Any tweaks to the look apply to both modes automatically, freeing designers from spatial visualization challenges. Powering the automatic 2D-3D conversion is Pacdora’s proprietary algorithm, which took the team six months to develop, according to Wang. The Figma aspect of the platform allows a client to view and comment on the design in real time, further speeding up the project cycle. The collaboration feature is available on Pacdora’s Chinese version and will later debut on its international platform powered by AWS. Packaging is also notoriously polluting. Look around and you’d be uneasy with how much packaging there is, from bubble wrappers for your Amazon order to the plastic container holding cupcakes. That is just the visible portion of the waste generated by the industry. Traditionally, factories are only willing to take large orders — that is, at least tens of thousands of units — due to the overhead of starting up a printing machine. If the production volume is too low, the machine ends up idle for most of the time and the factory operates at a loss. “Therefore many clients are forced to order tens of thousands of packaging units even though they know they can’t sell that many products,” observes Wang. The inflexibility in traditional manufacturing fails to meet the growing need for product customization. Instead of sticking to the same classic bottle look, beverage makers, for example, are increasingly introducing brand collaboration or seasonal packaging. Brands now want to order 500 customized wrappers instead of 10,000 standardized ones. Pacdora’s other main service is to solve this mismatch. “The beauty of an internet platform is that we can group the same kinds of low-volume orders and place one batch order with a factory,” says Wang. Factories get to keep production costs low while brands pay the price for mass production and avoid inventory waste. Pacdora has launched the printing service in China by connecting designers to third-party manufacturers, and it’s getting its hands dirty by setting up its own production line to make prototypes. “We want to ensure quality control. Only after our client approves a sample will we place the order with factories,” says Wang. The firm’s freemium, Canva-like design platform enjoys an 80% profit margin; its supply chain side of the business, which works to consolidate orders, also has a comfortable 40% margin compared to 10% for traditional manufacturers. Pacdora has accumulated some 1.5 million registered users with revenues expected to exceed 10 million yuan ($1.37 million) this year. In August, the company raised $8 million from investors including Hearst Ventures, GGV Capital, and Sequoia Capital China at a valuation of $110 million. It has around 110 employees, mostly based in China. Like many other SaaS startups that originate from China, Pacdora is excited about expanding to more mature markets like the U.S. Businesses in China are increasingly willing to pay for software that can help cut costs and boost income, but the SaaS market is still years behind that of the U.S. SaaS penetration in China was just 28%, compared to 58% in the U.S., according to a November 2021 report by Deloitte. The startup’s growth outside China is telling. Several months after launching the international version of its design platform, Pacdora is generating $200,000 to $300,000 in revenues a month, with the U.S., the U.K. and Australia being its largest markets. It took the firm three years to reach that revenue level in China. While it doesn’t currently provide a manufacturing service for overseas customers, Wang is bullish about a future of connecting Chinese factories to global designers because of the country’s obvious price advantage: the same box that costs one yuan to make in China can easily cost seven times more, or one dollar, to make in America.

Bruvi’s new coffee pods bio-degrade faster with the power of enzymes • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Climate, Coffee, coffee makerNo Comments

Bruvi‘s B-pods take a novel approach that (probably correctly) assumes consumers are too lazy to return their aluminium pods to the manufacturer (looking at you, Nespresso), and too clumsy to do the pre-processing needed to properly dispose of other pods. So the company instead assumes that the pods go to a landfill, and designed them to disintegrate when they do. The company caught my attention just days after Intropic received the runner-up prize at ZebethMedia Disrupt Battlefield for its plastic-degrading bio-enzyme tech — seeing another implementation of the same idea turn up in the wild in a commercial application is exciting. Personally, I’d still prefer we’d just use bean-to-cup solutions instead; the coffee itself is perfectly biodegradable, after all, but consumers are gonna consume, I guess. “The reality today is that the world uses a lot of plastic. But if we’re being really honest, there are still no scalable and truly commercially viable alternatives to this material — especially in the U.S. where access to industrial composting facilities is very limited,” says Bruvi co-founder Mel Elias, in an interview with ZebethMedia ahead of the company’s launch of its new coffee machine. “Plastic, especially for packaging, is cost-effective, preserves food freshness and safety and uses comparatively fewer natural resources or carbon footprint to produce. We think the biggest problem with plastic — especially single use plastic, is its end of life — i.e. plastic waste.” Plastic has gotten a bad rap, of course, and there’s a lot of confusion among consumers in terms of what is actually recyclable. “We are convinced here at Bruvi that we have found a very viable alternative, other than recycling, to address the problem of plastic waste by using bio enzyme technology,” Elias says. “Some innovative companies continue to pursue the quest for alternative packaging materials — and that’s great and very much required. But our approach at Bruvi, as a local startup without billions of dollars of capital, has been to ask — what do people do now? What infrastructure exists? How can we make it better than before in practical steps that the masses can adopt without expecting a migration of human behavior?” The company decided to play some more environmental notes at the start of its life, setting out to create a platform that could be more eco-efficient, without encumbering the consumers. “For consumers who are under the perception that single-serve pod coffee systems are bad for the environment, our aspiration at Bruvi is to ultimately turn this perception on its head and demonstrate that if you really care about the environment but still want to drink specialty coffee, Bruvi is your choice,” Elias argues. “The enzyme-infused pod allows us to achieve this lofty objective. First it provides for a better alternative for responsible plastic waste disposal, but also preserves the merits of plastic as a meaningful improvement to the social impact of consuming specialty coffee. While the real problem of plastic or aluminum capsules buried beneath the landfill for 1,000 years must be addressed, the solution must never be worse than the cure.” The cynic in me was curious if this planet-friendly plastics thing could just be a launch stunt; nothing stops the company from switching back to traditional (and, presumably, cheaper) plastics as soon as they are in consumers’ hands — the cost, both in time and in money, to use an alternative plastic was not insignificant. “This is the first time enzyme-infused plastic has been applied to a polypropylene coffee capsule, so this has already been an expensive endeavor for us as a startup,” Elias admits. “Adding the bio-enzyme admittedly does add a significant enough increase to the actual cost of our pods that would be a disincentive to most. Our social impact mission demands this course of action and so do the consumers we are trying to reach. Simply put, we couldn’t afford not to implement this solution.” The company claims it spent almost five years to find a plastic that could have the moisture and oxygen barriers needed for a coffee capsule, while keeping food safety and the need for a high-pressure coffee brewing system in place. “Our immediate hope is that the large waste management companies that own or manage the majority of the active landfills in the U.S. today will be more incentivized, and supported by policy and regulation to increase the number of landfill gas to energy projects that are already in place today,” Elias says. “We also hope that the use of infused plastics becomes more commonplace across other industries as an alternative solution to plastic waste — it’s a bio enzyme leading to organic fermentation in an anaerobic environment so no microplastics are created as a by-product and that’s another great benefit.” The company shared that the actual bio enzyme it used is a commercially available product and that there are “multiple supplier options with varying degrees of efficacy,” but declined to name the manufacturer or the specifics of the enzymes used here. When pushed on whether bean-to-cup would have been a more eco-friendly solution, the company invites some reflection on the convenience factor. “There are two primary reasons we focused on a pod-based system from the sustainability perspective. First, they are incredibly popular with consumers for the convenience they offer. It’s a $7 billion market in the U.S. with about 29% household penetration. Further, it’s growing about 10% annually in both brewer installs and pod sales. So our choice in developing a pod system was based around giving consumers a better, tastier version of something consumers already want and use. Convenience, freshness and the need for variety options by the cup is something consumers want and something bean-to-cup machines (which are notoriously difficult to clean and maintain) don’t provide,” Elias says. “Secondly, Bruvi’s goal, as I previously mentioned, is to ultimately create the most eco-efficient way of consuming specialty coffee. Single-serve, and Bruvi in particular, is some way down the road in achieving this. A pod system like ours reduces coffees, water

Craft Ventures leads $11.5M into meez’s culinary recipe tool • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Craft Ventures, Enterprise, Meez, recipe management, VentureNo Comments

Restaurant kitchens across the country are trying to manage customers while also managing labor shortages. This means it’s important to get new employees up and running faster. Josh Sharkey, chef, founder and CEO of meez, a recipe management app for chefs, started the company in 2020 so that food and beverage professionals could digitally manage and execute recipe workflow, from creation and cost to organization and training. That training pain point is one that Sharkey has continued to hear from kitchens. “Right away we can see the impact of how they can train much faster than before to make sure that when someone new comes on board, it doesn’t take them a month, but for some, only a couple of days,” Sharkey told ZebethMedia. “Anecdotally, we have several case studies where there’s almost like an 80% decrease in the time it takes to train a new employee because they embedded meez in their organization and can now just hand off things that they need to execute on.” Sharkey is not alone: other startups, like Galley, a food data company, are lending their approach to helping this industry. For Galley, it raised $14.2 million in Series A funding earlier this year to help kitchens with predictive purchasing, smart inventory and accurate food production planning. We previously profiled meez last January when the company announced a $6.5 million seed round. At the time, the company was working with around 750 customers and has increased that to 1,200 kitchens worldwide, including fine dining and fast casual restaurants, culinary schools, ghost kitchens and catering companies. It also now has tens of thousands of active users. Now meez is back with new funding, $11.5 million in Series A capital, led by Craft Ventures. Joining Craft is Struck Capital, FJ Labs, AME Cloud Ventures, Moving Capital, Max Mullen, Lenny Rachitsky, Mike Montero, Bobby Lo, Austin Rief, Louis Beryl, James Beshara, Allison Pickens and the Todd & Rahul Fund. The new investment gives meez $18 million in total funding. The company wasn’t planning to raise as soon as it did, but while working on a partnership that accelerated growth, meez began hitting milestones befitting a Series A company, and Craft Ventures preempted the round, Sharkey notes. “It was really just a smart move,” he added. “We were growing fast, had a lot more customers and felt a responsibility to make sure we could serve them.” Along with an increased customer base, meez nearly tripled its revenue since the beginning of the year and has 41 employees. It is also now offering a free version of its platform for individuals who get unlimited recipes and recipe books, recipe sharing and publishing to the web. It also has two other paid tiers for kitchen teams that start at $49 per month. Sharkey intends to deploy the new funds into product and engineering teams, marketing and new premium features. For example, chefs will be able to assess how their recipes contribute to the profitability and success of the business and then be able to adjust their menu items based on sales, demand and margin data. In addition, meez is working on a new component targeting bakers (and chefs who do a lot of R&D) that will help with percentages of ingredients. “The short term is still creating a universal recipe language that everybody in the world can use in the medium to store, create, organize and share your recipes,” he added. “The long-term vision is growth and adding more value to holistically what happens in the business to help them generate more revenue through the lens of their recipes.”

Former ButcherBox execs leverage meat shipment expertise into new D2C startup • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Commerce, e-commerce, Shipping, VentureNo Comments

As ButcherBox’s former head of logistics, Juan Meisel knows how to get perishable items from A to Z, and now he wants to do the same for Grip, a perishable shipping company he is bringing out of stealth mode with $2 million pre-seed funding. Dubbed a “smart logistics engine,” Grip’s technology sits on top of customers’ existing order management systems and manages the shipment process using real-time network conditions, like weather events and temperature, carrier on-time delivery and box performance. Founder Juan Meisel told ZebethMedia that other shipping software uses “flat shipping logic and business rules for shipments, aka, the same amount of packaging, refrigerant, carrier, etc., each time for the same routes.” Instead, Grip adjusts its shipping recommendations dynamically based on what’s going on in the shipping network. This way, businesses can use that data to proactively hold orders, let customers know of potential delays and identify areas for improvement. Meisel got the idea for Grip while he was head of logistics at ButcherBox, where he had also been trying to solve the challenge of shipping perishable items, while also reducing the damage rate and improving margins, all while operating in conditions that seemed to change minute by minute. “I was always looking for that piece of software that could help us do this internally,” Meisel said. “I failed to find something, but at the same time, I also started advising some companies on the side that would find me on LinkedIn. They got their ButcherBox in the mail and were trying to ship anything from frozen milk to chocolate, flowers and pharmaceuticals.” While advising those other companies, he realized that there needed to be software to help e-commerce companies improve the way they ship and increase the customer experience. So he came upon the idea of Grip and launched a company a few months ago, joining with Jimmy Cooper, ButcherBox’s former head of data. Customers are onboarded and can begin shipping in a matter of hours, and Grip makes money via monthly SaaS fees based on the size of the company and the complexity of integration, Meisel said. In this short period of time, the company has processed hundreds of thousands of orders and customers have seen a 25% reduction in failure rates and 30% reduction in shipping costs, Meisel said. Grip is coming into a market that is not only growing fast, but has also attracted interest by other startups and investors. It’s a big market — U.S. food and beverage e-commerce sales are expected to be around $80 billion by the end of 2022, up 20.7% from just under $65 billion last year, according to Insider Intelligence. Those sales are forecasted to nearly double by 2026. Over the past year, we’ve seen several startups also raise venture-backed capital to solve similar logistics issues, particularly around food waste as direct-to-consumer subscription meal kits gained popularity. For example, Alima is building out produce logistics in Mexico, while Full Harvest is tackling the B2B produce supply chain. Grip’s $2 million pre-seed round was backed by Soma Capital, Western Technology Investment and a group of individual investors. Though ButcherBox itself was bootstrapped, Meisel said he decided to go after venture capital for Grip largely in part because “developing technologies is expensive.” To develop the right technology and the right data processing system to add value to customers quickly required some institutional funding and industry investors. “We’re running what we call ‘fast innovation cycles,’ which means that we go from idea to product to feedback very fast,” he added. “We basically have an idea, launch a product, work very, very closely with the customer to get feedback on that product and then we go back to the idea of how we can keep improving that product. Therefore, we’re using the money to develop technology to grow fast innovation cycles and to keep adding value to investors.” The company currently has six employees, and Grip will also add to that team to develop new features and user experience as it relates to reducing waste and improving customer experience.

Patreon adds a long-awaited native video feature • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Apps, creator economy, PatreonNo Comments

Patreon creators can now upload videos directly to the platform. After hyping it up for a full year, Patreon Video will roll out to eligible creators on Patreon’s Pro and Premium plans. “We’re just so excited to see what creators do with this,” Patreon CPO Julian Gutman told ZebethMedia. “I think it’s going to free them up to kind of go back to producing the type of content that they want to produce, not what the algorithm wants.” This offering helps creators ofter more incentives for their fans to turn into paying subscribers. Image Credits: Patreon Previously, creators would share exclusive video content with their paid subscribers through unlisted Vimeo or YouTube links, which can easily be leaked and reach an unintended audience. But Patreon Video will give creators more control over their content while also creating a more seamless user experience for fans. The product has a built-in promotional tool, allowing creators to choose a portion of the video to make public as a preview — if viewers want to see the rest, they’ll have to subscribe. “We know that the way creators prefer to share their Patreon is to share some value to their fans, not just say, ‘Hey, I’m on Patreon,’” Gutman said. “So we’re really excited about this preview feature. During the beta, we’ve seen creators use it quite successfully to grow their memberships, and we’re really excited to scale it out.” Creators’ uploads can be any length, and unlike many other platforms, there won’t be ads (Patreon in general doesn’t have ads, since it’s supported by subscribers). They will also have access to data like total views and average view duration, as well as insights into how many people are viewing the non-paywalled previews. Image Credits: Patreon For now, Patreon creators on the Pro and Premium plans will be able to upload 500 hours of content for free. But Gutman told ZebethMedia that by 2024, Patreon plans to transition this offering into a paid feature. As of now, the company has not yet worked out the pricing model. “Once we launch pricing, we will let creators know and they’ll have six months to still use the 500 free hours,” Gutman said. “It’s really important to us to be transparent in terms of what the long term plan is on video.” If successful, this product could offer an additional, strong revenue stream for creators. In beta, podcasts like “Dungeons and Daddies” and “Ladies & Tangents” used Patreon Video to supplement their public audio content with behind-the-scenes video clips. This added revenue could be crucial for Patreon, which laid off 17% of its staff, or 80 employees, in September. CEO Jack Conte explained the layoffs by saying that Patreon was reducing its investment in the areas it cut — operations, recruiting and internal support functions — in order to increase investment in engineering, product and design. Gutman told ZebethMedia at the end of last year that the company’s goal for 2022 was to double its staff size. Despite the layoffs, Gutman said this plan has gone well, echoing Conte’s sentiment about expanding those key departments. Patreon Video will be available on desktop and the iOS and Android apps; at launch, it will support Airplay on Apple devices, with Android Chromecast coming soon. The Patreon mobile app will also support picture-in-picture viewing.

Smartex sews up $24.7M to put smarter eyes on textile manufacturing • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Climate, Hardware, lightspeed venture partners, manufacturing, Smartex, textile manufacturingNo Comments

A lot of things might spring to mind when you hear “fashion,” but taking care of the planet generally isn’t on that list. Smartex just raised a couple of bolts’ worth of cash, sowing up a round of funding to bring smart tech to fabric manufacturing. The hope is to be able to detect textile defects in real time. The company is pushing hard on the green angle for its products. Smartex has developed machine-vision-driven software that makes fabric production more efficient by identifying defects, which primarily can be used to stop manufacturing if something is going wrong, preventing waste. In particular, the company argues that imperfect fabric can travel down the supply chain, with product issues only getting discovered much later in the manufacturing process. “I was born and raised by textile factory workers, I worked in factories when I was a teenager, I have a master’s in physics and the textile industry has been chasing me since ever,” said Gilberto Loureiro, co-founder and CEO of Smartex, in an interview with ZebethMedia. “We co-founded Smartex because we’re obsessed with solving problems — and the textile industry has big ones. It’s probably the industry with the worst ratio size / automation. Textile factories don’t have the tools to produce in a clean, transparent, efficient way… generating massive amounts of waste and other problems.” The company declined to share the valuation of its $24.7 million round, but told ZebethMedia it was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Tony Fadell’s Build Collective. Additional funds were raised from clothing giant H&M Group, DCVC, SOSV’s HAX, Spider Capital, Momenta Ventures, Bombyx Capital Partners and Fashion for Good. The company previously raised a $2.9 million seed round in 2019 co-led by DCVC and Spider Capital. Smartex’ founders, Antonio Rocha, CTO & Co-Founder, Gilberto Loureiro, CEO & Co-Founder, and Paulo Ribeiro, VP of Engineering & Co-Founder. Image Credits: Smartex. “It’s fantastic to work with such mentors that have invaluable experience. Lightspeed Ventures is a truly global firm and supports us in many geographies we operate, Paul [Murphy from Lightspeed VP] is also an operator with tremendous insights in scaling businesses,” said Loureiro, “Tony Fadell and his team are world-class mentors and operators with a unique product and marketing approach. Tony’s recent book “BUILD” is one of our bibles.” These Series A funds will enable Smartex to expand the business to new geographies and to continue to grow the team. “I’m so excited about textile production in Asia and all the mega-factories in Bangladesh, Vietnam, China, etc. No one will ever solve textile problems without having a deep understanding and presence in these markets. So, going into all the cultural aspects and making businesses here is really awesome,” said Loureiro. “Our ultimate vision and long-term goal is to expand into other industries to enable factories around the world to produce with significantly less waste. We won’t stop until we have made a massive difference.” It takes a rather sturdy stomach to take on an entrenched industry where a lot of the manufacturing facilities don’t have the necessary infrastructure to run AI-powered QA, but it’s a changing industry. “This industry is very challenging! That’s one of the reasons why few tech companies operate in here. We feel blessed to be already creating a massive impact — but when compared with the overall size of the industry, it feels like nothing,” Loureiro explains. “If there was ever a time to solve massive problems — it’s now!”

Dropit picks up $25M to digitize brick-and-mortar stores and unify inventories • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Commerce, dropit, eCommerce, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Dropit, a retail technology platform that bridges the digital divide by unifying merchants’ online and in-store inventories, has raised $25 million in a Series C round of funding. Founded in 2014, London-based Dropit counts retail brands including L’Occitane, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Estee Lauder as customers, in addition to shopping malls. At its core, Dropit is all about enabling brands to sell their in-store inventory online, essentially converting brick-and-mortar outlets into something akin to a local distribution hub — customers buy their goods digitally, with Dropit’s “smart sourcing” technology finding the nearest physical location to the customer that the goods are located, and dispatching accordingly. So even if a brand or outlet already has online inventory for specific goods, Dropit brings their offline inventory into the mix and joins all the dots to expedite delivery and minimize the impact of shipping goods from further afield. On top of that, a major selling point for retailers in shopping malls is that Dropit can also aggregate a mall’s entire brand network into a single online marketplace. This is particularly important at a time when shopping mall foot traffic has yet to fully rebound post-pandemic, as it means the mall stores can generate sales round-the-clock regardless of in-person visits, while also allowing customers to purchase from multiple outlets simultaneously. Dropit: Aggregating shopping mall stores into a single marketplace Integrated At the heart of Dropit’s platform are integrations — it can connect to any point in the sales or fulfilment chain, which is one of the reasons Dropit founder and CEO Karin Cabili says that it’s not in direct competition with any other in-house or external retail system, whether it’s Shopify or some other ecommerce platform. “Dropit has set out to solve a macro problem created by the retail industry’s duplication of inventory and lack of ability to combine local store presence with last-mile delivery,” Cabili told ZebethMedia. “One of our key strengths is unifying data and systems. In this effort, we have built integrations with many systems, including Shopify, which has done a fantastic job in the realm of ecommerce, creating a user-friendly platform that is recommended for SMBs.” Through integrations with multiple third-party couriers, Dropit allows brands and malls to offer same-day or next-day shipping spanning in-store and online transactions, though curbside pickup is offered too. It also allows merchants to consolidate their deliveries and pickups to minimize split shipments. “Dropit’s mission is to solve a core problem of efficient optimization for the retail industry, while taking care not to harm the level of service provided to the customer,” Cabili added. The Dropit platform showing courier options By way of example, a retailer wanting to use Dropit as part of its existing tech stack could deploy Dropit in between the order, warehouse, point-of-sale (POS), and ecommerce (e.g. Shopify) systems on one side, and the checkouts, payments, and couriers on the other. The retailer can decide for themselves what value they want to extract from Dropit, for example they may simply want fulfilment and capacity for pick-and-pack at a store, and curbside pickup or courier delivery. “Dropit connects to existing systems to fill gaps without the need to invest any additional capital or technological resources,” Cabilit explained. It’s worth noting that in addition to powering the backend for retailers and malls, Dropit also offers a consumer-facing mobile app for shoppers that like to shop in person, but don’t want to carry bags around with them. So they basically search for participating stores through the app, shop as normal, but when they get to the (physical) checkout, they scan a little Dropit QR code at the outlet and select where they want their bags delivered to. Dropit’s consumer app Expansion Since its launch six years ago, Dropit has been gaining steady traction across Europe and North America. And last year it was enlisted by Primaris in Canada to power Primarché, touted as the “world’s first first multi-mall, multi-brand marketplace” — essentially, it brings Primaris’ national mall network into a single online entity. This separates Dropit from something like Mall of America (MOA) in Bloomington, Minnesota, which has created a similar online marketplace but for stores in a single mall. Dropit had previously raised $25 million across two hitherto undisclosed rounds of funding in 2016 and 2018, and with a fresh $25 million in the bank, the company is well-financed to expand in its existing markets with plans to grow specifically in the U.S. where it already has an office in Austin, Texas. Dropit’s Series C round was led by Vault Investments, with participation from Tiga Investments, Axentia, Sugarbee, and others including former Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren, who sits on Dropit’s board of directors.

500 Global, GIZ establish bootcamp for accelerators in Africa to help them define sustainable business models • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in 500 Global, StartupsNo Comments

Silicon-Valley based VC firm 500 Global and German’s economic development agency Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) will train managers of leading accelerators in Africa over the next two years, to help them establish sustainable business models that commandeer greater influence in their ecosystems. The program, dubbed Bootcamp for Accelerator Managers (BAM), will use project-based teaching and real-world scenarios informed by 500 Global’s work running over 80 accelerator programs across the globe, and GIZ’s Make-IT in Africa experience in igniting innovation on the continent. Fifteen accelerators from key tech hubs, including Uganda, Egypt, Ghana, South Africa, Senegal, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Rwanda, and Tanzania will participate in the program. Accelerators provide all-round support to early-stage startups, including helping them find product-market fit, funding and access to investors. However, being startups too, accelerators also face failure due to a couple of challenges including liquidity issues. “500 Global is thrilled to be working alongside GIZ to ensure that African accelerators have the tools they need to support startups,” said 500 Global’s Africa Lead Mareme Dieng. The VC firm, previously an accelerator dubbed 500 startups, rebranded to 500 Global a year ago. “500 has been investing in companies in Africa for a decade and continues to be excited about the growth of the African tech ecosystem. We believe that the next phase of this evolution will be led by home-grown accelerators, like the ones joining BAM,” said Dieng. 500 Global said the participating accelerators were picked based on experience, length of existence, leadership positions in their markets and track record — some of their graduates must have raised follow-on capital. The first cohort will begin the program on November 14, with a five-day in-person training to be held in Kenya, followed by a year-long virtual program. “This program represents another cornerstone in Make-IT in Africa’s efforts to support African innovation on a local, pan-African and global scale,” said head of Make-IT in Africa, Matthias Rehfeld. “Together with our partner 500 Global, we use a hands-on approach to bring together African accelerators with seasoned coaches, while simultaneously building bridges between African and international networks. Beyond the scope of the program, African entrepreneurs and startups can benefit from the best practices applied by accelerators across the continent,” said Rehfeld.

Musk to slash Twitter’s headcount by half — report • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Elon Musk, Social, TwitterNo Comments

More on rumors of looming job cuts at Twitter: Bloomberg is reporting that new owner Elon Musk will slash headcount by 50% to cut costs, citing people familiar with the matter. Its report suggests staff will begin being told Friday. Additionally, Bloomberg says Musk will reverse Twitter’s current ‘work from anywhere’ policy — and intends to require staff to work from offices, with the possibility that some exceptions could be made. The social media firm has around 7,500 employees in total globally — so halving headcount would mean cutting around 3,750 jobs. While issuing a blanket mandate to return to office working could be a strategy for Musk to accelerate the staff purge by encouraging employees to leave voluntarily if they don’t like the change of terms. We reached out to Twitter for comment on Bloomberg’s report but at the time of writing it had not responded. A number of staff already left Twitter prior to the Musk takeover, electing to leave pre-emptively rather than stay for the inevitable drama/workplace hell. Musk also fired a clutch of top execs immediately on taking over the company, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, General Counsel Sean Edgett and Head of Legal Policy, Trust and Safety Vijaya Gadde — reportedly bringing in a coterie of advisors and Tesla staff to help him decide on how to restructure Twitter. The billionaire has not yet made it clear how he will reshape the company — but he is under pressure to shrink costs given the amount of debt he’s had to take on by taking over Twitter. In recent days, he has also been lashing out at Twitter’s core customers (advertisers), following reports that some are going cold on the platform over brand safety concerns attached to his particular brand of ‘free speech’ — a self-defeating dynamic that looks set to increase Musk’s financial bind. Bloomberg’s report of looming job cuts of 50% follows a Washington Post article at the end of last month that suggested Musk planned to cut 25% of the workforce. Earlier last month the Post had also reported that Musk planned to axe 75% of Twitter staff — a report Musk denied, according to a Bloomberg report citing ‘people familiar with the matter’. While Musk does not appear to have made public remarks on any of these headcount downsizing rumors he did tweet late last month to deny a New York Times report that had suggested layoffs at Twitter would take place before November 1 in order to avoid schedule stock grant payouts — dubbing that report “false”. In the small hours this morning, Musk was instead tweeting cryptically about Twitter’s potential for “improvement”. … with a lot of room for improvement — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 3, 2022