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Until now General Catalyst has been better known as a US VC which makes occasional forays into European territory. But that changes with the news today that Chris Bischoff, an experienced London-based investor, joins as Managing Director of its new London office.
Bischoff brings with him an extensive track record of investment across the US and Europe, participating in the fund-raising for Avito, Babylon, Betterment, Cedar, VillageMD, Livongo and Cityblock Health, among others. He joins from the role of senior investment director at venture and growth fund Kinnevik AB where he led several investments most notably in the healthcare realm but also participated in deals alongside General Catalyst in companies such as Livongo (now Teladoc, NYSE: TDOC) and Cityblock.
In a statement, Bischoff said: “I’ve known and greatly admired GC for many years and have successfully partnered with the team on multiple occasions. I am strongly aligned with their purpose, approach, and culture, so this is a natural step.”
General Catalyst is no stranger to Europe, having invested most recently in British used-car startup Cazoo, FinTech as a Service company Rapyd, and Collective, an online back office platform. It’s also an investor in Bloom & Wild, and most recently it led a $44M Series B funding into Multiverse, founded by Euan Blair (former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s eldest son). It’s also a long-time investor in food delivery startup Deliveroo.
Last year it secured $2.3 billion in capital commitments across three funds: a $600 million early-stage fund, a $1 billion growth fund for companies with $10 million-plus in annual revenue and a $700 million “endurance fund” to back large companies doing more than $100 million in sales.
In a statement Hemant Taneja, managing partner, General Catalyst said: “Having invested alongside and worked with Chris as a fellow director, I know firsthand that he shares our commitment to backing and building enduring companies with the potential to materially improve the lives of many.”
Bischoff will be adding to the firm’s bench of healthcare investors given its involvement in Livongo, Cityblock, Oscar, Color and Ro Health, among others.
General Catalyst accelerated its interest in European and Israeli tech companies when managing director Adam Valkin joined from Accel Partners in London, bringing with him plenty of European savvy.
Valkin and Bischoff will run the deals in Europe and Israel, and no doubt more efficiently, now that GC has Bischoff with his feet under a desk in London, even if for the time being that will be a home office desk.
Valkin said: “Europe and Israel have unequivocally become major centers for global-scale innovation, and having Chris on the ground here is a huge asset for our firm. I have known Chris for many years and have observed his talent as an investor, his outstanding portfolio, and importantly, his reputation as a trusted partner for ambitious founders.”
At Accel, Valkin led investments in Gocardless, Flywire, and Spotify, and then joined General Catalyst in 2013 to build out the New York office.
In an interview, he told me: “In 2015 GC started looking into Europe in a more serious way… perhaps a little bit more opportunistically at that point. We invested in a number of European companies like Brainly in Poland and Fiverr in Israel. And then 2016 was sort of a big year for us because we led both a series A of Lemonade out in Israel, and a growth round and Deliveroo in the UK.”
He said GC decided to get a little bit more organised about Europe, and spent a lot more time with founders there, gradually ramping up its activity. “So, our European journey essentially began, five, six years ago. And we’ve become very active there, both in the UK in Europe as well as Israel. The big question for us was when would it make sense to have a team on the ground. And we actually got to know Chris about five years ago, in the context of what we were doing in Europe, and also just as a really important growth stage investor in Europe.”
Bischoff added: “ If you look at what GC has done in Europe, it really is across both consumer and enterprise, and across the sector. I’ve done quite a bit in healthcare, obviously, a bit in FinTech and consumer which are pretty large sectors in Europe… it’s not narrowly focused in Europe. The intention is to bring the full set of GC’s capabilities to Europe, and across sectors.”
Meet Cajoo, a new French startup that has raised a $7.3 million (€6 million) funding round. The company wants to make it easier to order groceries from your phone and receive them 15 minutes later. It is launching in Paris today.
“I left Bolt around mid-August and I’m launching a company with two co-founders focused on 15-minute deliveries,” co-founder and CEO Henri Capoul told me. Thanks to his experience at Bolt, he probably knows a thing or two about logistics and operating a marketplace at scale. Guillaume Luscan and Jeremy Gotteland are the two other co-founders.
What makes Cajoo different from what’s out there? In France, there’s no Instacart or pure player in the grocery delivering space. Instead, many supermarket chains already offer deliveries. You can order from their website or app and get your groceries the next day or two days later.
Some retailers are trying to speed things up a bit, such as Carrefour with its Livraison Express service and Monoprix with Monoprix Plus. Amazon can also deliver some groceries through its Amazon Prime Now sub-service. It can take 30 minutes, an hour or even two hours before receiving your order though.
But people want things now, as the success of Deliveroo, Uber Eats and others has shown. I think impatience is unsustainable because of unit economics, labor laws, the impact on small shops and cities. And yet, it seems likely that there’s enough demand for Cajoo.
The startup wants to differentiate itself with a full-stack approach. Cajoo operates its own micro-fulfillment centers. It has its own inventory of products. It manages the fleet of delivery people as much as possible. And, of course, it sells directly to customers.
Glovo offered grocery deliveries from your local grocery store. But the company pulled back from the French market a few weeks ago. It seems like it couldn’t generate big enough margins by buying from stores directly.
On Cajoo, you’ll find anything you could find in a local grocery store — pasta, shampoo, candies, you name it. You’ll be able to order wine, beer and snack — Uber proved that it can be a lucrative segment with its acquisition of Drizly for $1.1 billion.
And it is launching today in Paris in the 9th arrondissement and around. Overall, Cajoo thinks it’ll require ten micro-fulfillment centers to cover Paris and it’s going to take a few months.
Cajoo is also benefiting from the current economic crisis as there are a ton of empty stores, empty garages, small warehouses that are currently waiting for a new owner.
“The differentiating factor of our model is that we offer products at market price. It’s the same price as a Monoprix or Carrefour Express store with delivery fees under €2,” Capoul said.
The company doesn’t plan to generate most of its revenue from delivery fees. Those are minimum fees so that you don’t order one item at a time. Instead, the company will get margins from products themselves, like any retailer.
Frst and XAnge are leading the seed round with the two co-founders of Chauffeur-Privé (later rebranded as Kapten) also participating.
I asked about the company’s plans when it comes to delivery staff. As Gurvan Kristanadjaja reported for Libération last year, there are some serious issues with contractors working for food delivery companies in France. For instance, a significant portion of Frichti’s delivery people were illegal immigrants. Some riders on Deliveroo or Uber Eats also rent their accounts to illegal immigrants.
Capoul told me that it is going to hire some employees to handle deliveries and give them electric bikes. But the company will also work with partners — both contracting companies and freelancers.
“We don’t want to have the same standards as Deliveroo or Uber Eats. Recruiting the right delivery people, making sure that they have work permits are important topics,” Capoul said. Each micro-fulfillment centers will also have a restroom and a place to wait for the next order.
It’s going to be important to see whether Cajoo manages to keep high standards over the long run as the service gets more popular. At least, the service is starting with the right mindset.
Image Credits: Cajoo
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/cajoo-promises-grocery-deliveries-in-15-minutes/
While China bans cryptocurrency exchanges and initial coin offerings, the government is set to leverage the underpinning technology — often without the decentralized part. Blockchain, for instance, could help track the shipment of luxury goods and authenticate court evidence. In the process of adopting blockchain applications in its own interest, China also wants to become a world leader of the new technology.
Last year, an ambitious, government-backed blockchain infrastructure network launched in China. The Blockchain-based Service Network, or BSN, acts as an operating system for blockchain programs so developers won’t have to design a framework from the ground up. Importantly, it’s part of the country’s goal to set industry standards and build the underlying infrastructure for blockchain applications worldwide.
The brains behind BNS are the State Information Center, an affiliate to China’s top economic and reform planner, the country’s credit card processing giant UnionPay, telecoms carrier China Mobile, and a little-known Beijing-based startup called Red Date which cut its teeth building smart city technology in China.
There are two main types of blockchains: permissionless, which is public, decentralized and transparent; and permissioned, which is operated by one or multiple stakeholders of a given industry, respectively called private and consortium blockchains.
BSN is designed as a global infrastructure to support both consortium and public blockchains, it says in a white paper published last March. “Just as with the internet, the BSN is also a cross-cloud, cross-portal, cross-framework global infrastructure network.”
An English version of the website is available for dApp developers, and major public chains like Ethereum, EOS, Tezos, NEO already have nodes on the network.
Now BNS is working on the more private part of its infrastructure. This week, it announced it will roll out a permissioned version of Cosmos. Introduced in 2019, Cosmos is a network comprised of many independent blockchains and calls itself the “internet of blockchains.”
The development work for the Cosmos-based chain is done by Bianjie, a Chinese blockchain startup, and the permissioned chain is named after the city Wenchang in China’s southernmost Hainan Province, home to China’s first blockchain pilot zone.
The intentions of the Wenchang Chain are to provide a “public infrastructure network that allows the low-cost development, deployment, operation, maintenance and regulation of consortium blockchain applications,” Bianjie said in an announcement.
Global developers can now deploy their dApps on the Wenchang Chain via BSN, which makes their dApps concurrently compliant with Chinese regulations, a Bianjie spokesperson explained via email.
“In this way, it’s possible for their dApps to gain a large number of Chinese users and enter the Chinese market.”
The Wenchang Chain is intended not just for enterprise services but also business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer programs. For example, Uptick, a consumer-facing e-ticketing dApp, will soon become the first dApp to launch on the permissioned chain, according to the Bianjie spokesperson.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/bsn-china-national-blockchain/
Storyblok, a ‘headless’ CMS for developers and marketers to deliver content, has raised an $8.5 million Series A funding round led by Mubadala Capital, alongside existing Storyblok investors firstminute capital and 3VC.
The Austria-founded company’s platform counts Pizza Hut, Adidas, UPC, Greggs, Decathlon and others among its roster of clients, alongside many thousands of solo developers that use its CMS. That means it’s currently powering more than 60,000 projects, it says.
Storyblok says its CMS provides ‘highly customizable content blocks and visual editing tools’ in n contrast to other headless CMS solutions which are flexible for developers but might be less so for actual editors to edit.
Dominik Angerer, Co-Founder and CEO of Storyblok, said in a statement: “The marketing world is in a state of transition. Fragmented channels and rapidly changing consumer behavior as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic have made it much more challenging to efficiently and quickly keep brand messaging consistent across multiple platforms. On paper, headless CMS technology solves a lot of these problems, but in practice, most platforms are only geared towards developers, which makes them incredibly difficult for non-technical people to use. Storyblok’s solution marries the needs of both editors and developers, which has given us a unique position in the market and resulted in rapid growth.”
Fatou Bintou Sagnang, director at Mubadala Capital said: “In a vast but relatively homogenous market, Storyblok has impressed us with a truly differentiated product that resonates with small and large enterprises. The organic traction is proof of the customer love from both developers and marketers.”
Competitors to Storyblok include ContentStack, Contentful, Sitecore, Adobe Experience Manager and Prismic.
Speaking to TechCrunch Angerer said: “A lot of headless CMS platforms are easily integrated into legacy systems but when it comes to actually using them on a daily basis marketers or other editors find them incredibly difficult to use. In practice, they end up having to go back to their IT or developer teams to sort out problems or make major changes which ends up wasting the time and money that headless CMS’s perport to save.”
Mobile Premier League (MPL) has raised $95 million in a new financing round, just five months after it secured $90 million as the two-and-a-half-year-old Bangalore-based esports and gaming platform looks to grow in international markets.
The new $95 million round, a Series D, was led by Composite Capital and Moore Strategic Ventures and gave the Indian startup a post-money valuation of $945 million, it said. (MPL was valued at about $465 million in its previous financing round in September, TechCrunch had reported.) Base Partners, RTP Global, SIG, Go-Ventures, Telstra Ventures, Founders Circle and Play Ventures also participated in the round, which brings its total to-date raise to $225.5 million.
MPL, which counts Times Internet among its backers, operates a pure-play gaming platform that hosts a range of tournaments. The app, which has amassed more than 60 million users in India and 3.5 million users in Indonesia, also serves as a publishing platform for other gaming firms. MPL, which does not develop games of its own, hosts about 70 games across multiple sports on the app today.
“As we grow our presence and expand, this fresh round of funds will help us focus on our core value propositions — a robust platform with the best features for gamers and onboarding the best eSports titles. The esports community in India is thriving, and we believe this is the perfect time to take Indian-made games to the world as well as help Indian gamers get recognized for their talent,” said Sai Srinivas, co-founder and chief executive of MPL, in a statement.
The Bangalore-based startup also offers fantasy sports, a segment that has taken off in many parts of India in recent years. Because fantasy sports is only one part of the business, the coronavirus outbreak that shut most real-world matches has not impeded the startup’s growth in recent quarters.
“We’re competing with battle-hardened, decade old companies with much, much deeper pockets but it’s incredible what the young team has achieved over the past couple of years. When we were on the Play Store, a couple of years back, MPL was the fastest app to reach a 1M DAU ever in India!” tweeted Abhishek Madhavan, SVP of Marketing at MPL, last year.
“We signed Virat Kohli (pictured above), when we were a 3-month old company! When we got out of the Play Store, we were told growth will be very very hard to come by, every single marketing metric would fall.”
The startup, which bought stakes worth $500,000 from employees last week, said it will deploy the fresh capital to organize more esports tournaments in the country and accelerate its international expansion this year. The startup recently organized College Premier League, which saw participation of more than 13,000 gamers from over 100 colleges.
“We are excited to partner with the MPL team and support their continued growth. As an industry leader in the gaming market, we believe the company will continue to innovate and drive the evolution of eSports, both in India and internationally,” said Kanush Chaudhary, Managing Director, Composite Capital, in a statement.
