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BigCommerce has partnered with Walmart to allow its customers to sell on the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer’s ecommerce marketplace, it announced this morning. Shares of Austin-based BigCommerce rose sharply in pre-market trading after the news, gaining around 10% before the bell.
Walmart, best-known for in-person shopping, has proven an ecommerce success story in recent years. For example, in its most recent quarter while Walmart as a whole grew 7.3%, its ecommerce sales advanced 69%.
BigCommerce has also reported strong growth in recent quarters, supported in part by partnerships similar to the one that it announced today. The ecommerce SaaS provider rolled out an integration with Wish last year, for example.
In a call concerning its earnings, which were announced before the Walmart news was announced, BigCommerce CEO Brent Bellm told TechCrunch that his company had been impressed with customer uptake of the Wish integration. Regarding the Walmart partnership, in a second interview Bellm told TechCrunch that it was overdue on the BigCommerce side; given the historical success of the Wish deal, it will be curious to dig into how many of the ecommerce platform’s customers opt to sell on Walmart, and how quickly they do so.
TechCrunch also spoke with Walmart exec Jeff Clementz about the arrangement. He stressed Walmart’s online customer monthly-actives — 120 million, per his company — and the breadth of their demand; BigCommerce customers selling on Walmart could expand its product diversity, helping the traditionally physical retailer possible continue its rapid growth.
The two companies are incentivizing adoption of the deal amongst BigCommerce customers by waiving certain fees for a month for retailers that sign up to sell on Walmart; Clementz described it as the first time that his company had offered a “new-seller discount.”
TechCrunch has had its eye on BigCommerce for some quarters now, thanks in part to its 2020 IPO. But the company is also interesting as its regular earnings results provide a lens into the world of ecommerce growth amongst independent digital retailers. Shopify, a chief BigCommerce rival, provides a similar view into the ecommerce world.
Shopify previously integrated with Walmart in the middle of 2020.
Looking ahead, it will be interesting to see if the Walmart partnership helps BigCommerce continue its improving revenue growth. The company is in a marketshare race with Shopify. But while BigCommerce’s rival has posted impressive growth from its integrated solutions, like its payments service, the Austin-based company stresses what it calls a more open model. Shopify charges many customers a percentage of their transaction volume for using a third-party payment solution over its own, for example, which Bellm described as a “tax” during an interview.
“Merchant Solutions” revenue at Shopify, which it generates “principally” from “payment processing fees from Shopify Payments,” grew 116% in 2020 to a little over $2 billion.
So with BigCommerce collecting a partnership with Walmart to match Shopify’s own, we’re seeing not merely two ecommerce platforms go toe-to-toe on providing their customers with as much market access as they can, but two different business philosophies compete. Akin to Microsoft Teams and Slack, it’s a competition to spectate.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/24/bigcommerce-customers-can-now-sell-on-walmarts-online-marketplace/
Over the past year, the coronavirus crisis has spurred app usage in the United States as people stay indoors to limit contact with others. Mobile games particularly have enjoyed a boom, and among them, games from Chinese studios are gaining popularity.
Games released on the U.S. App Store and Google Play Store raked in a total of $5.8 billion in revenue during the fourth quarter, jumping 34.3% from a year before and accounting for over a quarter of the world’s mobile gaming revenues, according to a new report from market research firm Sensor Tower.
In the quarter, Chinese titles contributed as much as 20% of the mobile gaming revenues in the U.S. That effectively made China the largest importer of mobile games in the U.S., thanks to a few blockbuster titles. Chinese publishers claimed 21 spots among the 100 top-grossing games in the period and collectively generated $780 million in revenues in the U.S., the world’s largest mobile gaming market, more than triple the amount from two years before.
Occupying the top rank are familiar Chinese titles such as the first-person shooter game Call of Duty, a collaboration between Tencent and Activision, as well Tencent’s PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. But smaller Chinese studios are also quickly infiltrating the U.S. market.
Mihoyo, a little-known studio outside China, has been turning heads in the domestic gaming industry with its hit game Genshin Impact, a role-playing action game featuring anime-style characters. It was the sixth-most highest-grossing mobile game in the U.S. during Q4, racking up over $100 million in revenues in the period.
Most notable is that Mihoyo has been an independent studio since its inception in 2011. Unlike many gaming startups that covet fundings from industry titans like Tencent, Mihoyo has so far raised only a modest amount from its early days. It also stirred up controversy for skipping major distributors like Tencent and phone vendors Huawei and Xiaomi, releasing Genshin Impact on Bilibili, a popular video site amongst Chinese youngsters, and games downloading platform Taptap.
Magic Tavern, the developer behind the puzzle game Project Makeover, one of the most installed mobile games in the U.S. since late last year, is another lesser-known studio. Founded by a team of Tsinghua graduates with offices around the world, Magic Tavern is celebrated as one of the first studios with roots in China to have gained ground in the American casual gaming market. KKR-backed gaming company AppLovin is a strategic investor in Magic Tavern.
Other popular games in the U.S. also have links to China, if not directly owned by a Chinese company. Shortcut Run and Roof Nails are works from the French casual game maker Voodoo, which received a minority investment from Tencent last year. Tencent is also a strategic investor in Roblox, the gaming platform oriented to young gamers and slated for an IPO in the coming weeks.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/24/chinese-games-us-boom/
Knowledge workers — those whose professions tend to be anchored to desks or computers — have long been the most obvious and primary focus for a lot of B2B apps and services. But as the wider world migrates to doing more and more on smartphones and other connected devices, the opportunity to build for the rest of the global workforce continues to grow. Today, one of the startups targeting smaller businesses in the area of field service is announcing a round of funding that underscores that trend.
Workiz, which has developed a platform to help small business in the home services space — locksmiths, removals companies, large appliance repairs, and others — book jobs, manage teams, keep in communication with customers, bill them, and also — taking a page from the world of knowledge workers — run data analytics connected to their jobs to optimize business more in the future, has closed a funding round of $13 million.
The funding round was oversubscribed — it actually grew to $13 million in the week between getting pitched this story and writing it — and it comes on the back of a year that has seen double-digit growth exceeding what the startup had expected to achieve in 2020, said CEO Adi (Didi) Azaria in an interview.
Part of the reason has been an uplift from people spending more time working at home, putting their dwellings and the things contained in them through more wear and tear, and/or realizing that they could do some home improvement and vastly upgrade their daily environments.
“If you open the fridge too many times, things get broken and you need these guys to come in,” he said, adding that the demand from customers these days are for people to be using the same tools they are to get work done. “Many field services need software because our expectations as consumers are changing. They see it as a need.”
Workiz’s CEO himself was once a locksmith, similar to co-founders Idan Kadosh and Erez Marom (who co-founded the startup with Saar Kohanovitch), but he might be better known for co-founding his previous startup, Sisense, the business analytics company now valued at over $1 billion.
Workiz is based out of San Diego and Israel, with the latter home to its R&D efforts and a number of its investors. This Series B is being led by Tel Aviv’s New Era Capital Partners, with past backers Aleph, Magenta Venture Partners (which led its Series A), Maor Investments, and TMT Investments also participating in the round.
Valuation is not being disclosed but there are some signs that it’s on the up for the startup. Workiz’s services — the startup’s name incidentally is pronounced not like a cute version of work, “workies”, but like “work is” as the company’s official name is actually Workiz Easy — are live in the U.S. and Canada, and it currently has some 100,000 service professionals using the platform.
Since the startup was founded in 2015 (originally as Send a Job), more than 12 million jobs, 100 million text messages, and $5 billion in job revenue have been initiated through it.
For a point of comparison, a direct competitor, Jobber, earlier this year closed a $60 million round also after hitting 100,000 service professionals on its platform.
Despite that competition — and it’s a crowded field, with others like ServiceTitan, GE’s ServiceMax, BigChange in the U.K., new approaches like Super, and many others in the market — field service remains a big market, with some 20 million businesses globally focused on home services, with 5 million in the U.S. alone.
The opportunity for a startup like Workiz within that is to figure out what needs are currently not being addressed as well by existing offerings, and building them into its own solution.
One example of that, Azaria points out, has been the company’s voice service. He notes that most field service professionals before the rise of mobile apps had organized and updated customers and head offices of their whereabouts and progress through phone calls.
In some cases that is not hugely efficient, since it only alerts the person you are calling, not a whole team, and sometimes the person you are speaking with is not the person who needs the update most. But, it also remains a key way to connect with customers especially when there are delays. The phone service that the company offers integrates with other details about a job, letting the call become part of the bigger work log for everyone else to see.
Another is scheduling, which has been a complicated issue to manage especially in cases when you have small teams of users who need to work in close conjunction with each other. Workiz’s scheduling tools essentially work like a shared Google Calendar to help match people with skills, locations and jobs to get work booked and done faster.
The company’s toolkit, interestingly, has features that highlight business analytics too: you can currently manage call tracking, lead tracking and a live dashboard to measure how long jobs are taking and whether scheduling is mapping accurately or not. These are next-level tools that do remind me a little of Sisense and point precisely to how software and goals envisioned for the average data/knowledge worker are now being recast for those on their feet and in the field.
This also leaves the door open for the option to build in more lead generation into the platform, essentially creating a marketplace for field service professionals to connect with customers seeking people to do specific jobs, although it’s not an area the company is exploring for now at least.
“At this point we focus on SaaS and making a best-of-breed solution. We’re not in the lead generation market. We try to focus because we understand how challenging it is to be a field service engineer, with phone calls, stress and disorganization,” he said. “Most of them still use pen and paper and need tools to organizse the day. Many of them can advertise or use third party companies for lead generation, although maybe in the future we might do more on that.” For now, he said, the focus will remain on tools to address their more immediate needs just to get through their workdays and helping them be more professional, to “make the service person look larger than what they are.”
“Field service management is a market ripe for disruption, with a technological approach that is both agile and competitive,” said Gideon Argov, managing at New Era Capital Partners, in a statement. “In Workiz, we found all the elements for success, coupled with passionate leadership that started from the field. We are delighted to join the Workiz team.” Argov is joining the board with this round.
Joby Aviation, a startup that has spent a more than a decade developing an all-electric, vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft, will become a public company through a merger with Reinvent Technology Partners, a special purpose acquisition company from well-known investor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
The combined company, which will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, will have a pro forma implied valuation of $6.6 billion. Through the deal, Joby is capturing $1.6 billion in cash proceeds — $690 million of which will come from Reinvent’s cash in trust and an $835 million from private investors The Baupost Group, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Fidelity Management & Research LLC and Baillie Gifford. A $75 million convertible note, from Uber, will also be converted into common stock at a $10 per share value.
While SPAC deals typically put in place terms to prevent major shareholders from pulling out their money, this merger puts a long-term lock-up on founder JoeBen Bevirt’s shares for up to five years. The deal also includes an earnout structure with full vesting that cannot be realized until the share price reaches $50 per share, which implies more than a $30 billion market capitalization.
Joby plans to use the capital to fund the launch of passenger service, which is expected to begin in 2024. The company still must complete certification of its aircraft and develop manufacturing facilities, but it is already on its way to achieving both.
Joby has agreed to a “G-1” certification basis for its aircraft with the Federal Aviation Administration, which specifies the requirements that need to be met by the company’s aircraft for it to be certified for commercial operations.
Joby is also planning to begin construction on a 450,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, designed in conjunction with Toyota, later this year.
Prior to its SPAC deal, Joby had gained attention and investors over the years as it developed its eVTOL. Toyota became an important backer and partner, leading a $620 million Series C round of funding in January 2020. Nearly a year later, Joby acquired Uber’s air taxi moonshot Elevate as part of a complex deal. Under the terms, Uber offloaded Elevate to Joby Aviation and invested $75 million into the startup. The two companies also expanded an existing partnership.
The $75 million investment was in addition to a previously undisclosed $50 million investment made by Uber as part of Joby’s Series C financing round. Uber has invested a total of $125 million into the startup. Joby Aviation had raised $820 million before its bid to become a publicly traded company.
