It was only earlier this week that we learned StudyFree — which connects students with international educational opportunities — had raised a $3 million seed round. But there’s more to this than being accepted on a traditional course. The pandemic has turned education into a remote industry, and tech startups have responded.

Educate Online is a platform allowing international students to study at UK, US, and Canadian schools, but there’s a twist. All the study is done online, remotely, full-time or part-time, without having to move to another country and bear the related costs.

It’s now raised $4 million in Seed funding from Xploration Capital, TMT Investments, Flyer One Ventures, Softline, and Angelsdeck.

In the past 12 months, the startup says it’s garnered 2,500 students from 18 countries, covering K-12 study, ESOL, career exploration, university preparation, and internship & mentorship programs.

The platform also offers options for students to participate in on-campus summer or semester programs. It now plans to scale in LATAM, Asia, and the Middle East.

Competitors include agencies that are still focused on offline education such as Transitions Abroad, Smapse and Academic Families.

Alexander Zheltov, co-founder and CEO of Educate Online, said: “Educate Online was founded in 2018 and since then has placed more than 4,000+ children between the ages of 4-19 in top schools. After COVID-19 hit, we made a hard pivot to online education as we were seeing a surge of interest towards online education – in 2020 we grew 5.5 times and we expect to continue growing 3-5x year-over-year”.

Eugene Timko, Managing Partner at Xploration Capital said: “Schools have historically been very local operations. Few have branched out to other countries, primarily through building foreign campuses and local partnerships. This has significantly limited the potential reach for international school education. Educate Online may become the dominant online layer on top of the existing schools’ infrastructure, vastly expanding the current market for cross-border education”.

StudyFree — which connects students with international educational opportunities via a community-driven B2B SaaS model — has raised a $3 million seed investment round led by I2BF Global Ventures, TMT Investments, and TechStars. Also participating was PandaDoc CEO Mikita Mikado and Google’s ex-director of product Andrey Doronichev. StudyFree has now received a total of $3.6 million in funding. The new funds will be used to attract new members to the community, expand into new markets, marketing, and platform development.

Founded in November 2018, StudyFree helps students and alumni to enroll in universities and graduate schools internationally, by listing scholarships and grants. It claims that international students using its platform have now received scholarships and grants worth $10.3M to study in universities across the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia. It offers more than 300,000 programs for various degrees with scholarships, with a user base of 90,000 students.

Dasha Kroshkina, CEO and founder of StudyFree said: “As someone who was born in a small town, but managed to study internationally, I know more than most how important it is for everyone in the world to have this opportunity. We estimate the international overseas education market is 15 million students per year.”

StudyFree’s main competitors is ApplyBoard (a unicorn) and traditional consulting agencies, but unlike the latter, StudyFree leverages its independent community of students with study abroad experience who act as mentors and assist new users with enrollment. These alumni, who have a strong desire to ‘give back’, can host community events and network with these new students. The service then generates revenue through a subscription model.

Mikita Mikado, CEO of PandaDoc said: “StudyFree has become a leading expert in international university admissions with a proven 98% success rate for its students over the last 3 years. It’s changed the adviser market, not only by digitizing the advising process throughout the application process, but also by making human capital and community the foundation of its product.”

Kroshkina is the first female founder to win the Seedstars global competition in its 7-year history. StudyFree was also selected by TechStars New York City Accelerator and Berkeley SKYDECK, in addition to attracting investment from TechStars twice.

Meta’s (formerly, Facebook’s) experimental app division, the NPE team, is shifting gears. The group, which first launched in mid-2019, has been focused on building consumer-facing apps that would allow the company to test out new social features and gauge people’s reactions.

Over the years, the largely Menlo Park-based team launched and retired a number of experiments, ranging from dating and calling apps to meme-makers to TikTok, Twitter and Clubhouse rivals to apps for couples and more. Now, NPE will begin testing out a new thesis: that the next big idea may come from a market outside the U.S.

To capitalize on that potential, the organization recently set up an office in Lagos, Nigeria, and it will soon open another in Asia. It’s also adjusting its strategy to include making seed-stage investments in small, entrepreneurial teams.

One such check has already been written. Meta’s recent investment in an A.I.-powered developer platform for building virtual characters, Inworld AI, was directed by NPE. But future checks may go to non-metaverse companies to include those with more near-term potential — like startups taking advantage of the mobile internet in new ways.

Meta, of course, understands that many of today’s universal experiences first emerged from niche communities. WhatsApp, for example, grew in popularity in regions where SMS text messaging wasn’t free before it was adopted globally. Some mobile money innovations, meanwhile, grew out of the lack of legacy payment systems in East Africa.

To ensure it’s not missing out on future opportunities like this, Meta’s NPE team is looking outside Silicon Valley.

Image Credits: Meta’s Ime Archibong

This new direction is being led by Ime Archibong, head of Meta’s New Product Experimentation (NPE), an 11-year Meta employee, whose experience prior to NPE included working on Facebook’s developer platform. That role saw him bouncing around the world to connect with entrepreneurs from both smaller startups and larger companies. After joining NPE two years ago, Archibong is taking the group in a similar direction.

“It’s a bit like what I was doing for the prior 10 years, which is going and attracting a bunch of entrepreneurial talent and small teams, and getting them access to the resources — which is talent, time and technology to build out their ideas,” he explained. “And of course, the objective is that some of the seeds of the ideas that we’re able to build, at some point, could be very big.”

The team will focus on markets in Asia, Africa and Latin America as it pursues this new direction, though it isn’t entirely giving up on U.S.-based projects. However, some of those may look different than they have in the past. Instead of launching and quickly shuttering new social apps that don’t gain traction, NPE’s current set of experiments include a project that’s helping citizens in the U.S. re-enter society after being incarcerated and another aimed at helping LGBTQ families on the journey to becoming parents. These are obviously a bit meatier than just another TikTok clone.

But the expanded focus to include the global stage will see NPE often looking for ideas that may start off small — perhaps even addressing underserved markets — but have the potential to scale.

“I think that the future is going to be built in some of these regions around the world that have been historically overlooked and undervalued,” Archibong noted. “I have a firm belief that the problems, solutions, the opportunities and the new experiences that are going to be built by people who are most proximate to the communities that they’re trying to serve.” And these solutions will be “more durable, more sustainable, and more viable” in the long run, he said.

This thesis itself sounds solid enough — after all, history has already proved it right. However, the question remains as to whether the global entrepreneurship community will welcome checks written by Meta, given its history of “borrowing” ideas from smaller companies.

Meta is widely known to have copied Snapchat’s Stories and grown it into a much larger product. It launched its own version of Snap’s Bitmoji. It’s currently expanding its Clubhouse, TikTok, Nextdoor and Substack clones. A startup called Phhhoto is even suing Meta for first promising it a partnership opportunity, then ultimately deciding to just build its own version of Phhhoto’s technology (which became Boomerang from Instagram). What Meta didn’t copy, it acquired — whether that was a future rival like Instagram, WhatsApp or Giphy, or an up-and-comer like tbh or Moves.

While Inworld AI may have felt comfortable working with Meta, given how tightly aligned their missions were in VR, other seed-stage startups may not feel the same. But Archibong believes there will be enough out there who will take the chance.

“I think that there are going to be more opportunities like that [with Inworld AI]. People who see working with us, a mission-aligned organization with what they’re trying to do — an organization that’s probably pretty excited about similar technology trends, or emergent platforms or user behavior,” he said.

The company hasn’t said how much capital it plans to deploy over what period of time, but the checks — like the teams themselves — will be “really, really small,” Archibong said.

Didi’s U.S. IPO is one of several key moments of the recent regulatory shift inside China regarding its leading technology companies. The other is Ant’s IPO that never happened, pulled in the wake of criticisms of the Chinese government’s handling of newer technologies by the previously prominent Alibaba founder Jack Ma.

It’s been a busy year for changes to how the autocratic Chinese government handles its economy. From a larger crackdown on technology firms to new rules regarding youth video game playing, a shellacking of the for-profit edtech sector, and changes to how fintech can operate, watching China from a tech perspective this year has proved hectic.

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Even though it’s the first of December, we may not be done yet with this year’s changes.

Bloomberg reports that China is considering removing the VIE loophole that allowed Chinese companies to list in the United States, closing a method by which local companies could access foreign capital.

VIEs, or variable-interest entities, are complex. But legal group Winston & Strawn has a good summary of why they matter, which will do for our purposes. Per the law firm, VIEs are “commonly used in China to allow foreign investors to participate in industries that are explicitly or practically restricted from foreign investment.”

VIEs don’t grant ownership of the underlying asset as we might normally understand it. Instead, they can help get around Chinese laws concerning foreign ownership of companies in select industries. How do they do that? By using an offshore company setup to collect “a claim on the profits and control of the assets that belong” to the actual company in China, GCI Investors explains. That’s where the interest part of VIE comes into play.

VIEs are how Tencent, Didi and others went public in the United States. Not by listing their main corporate bulk, but instead by dodging domestic rules, creating a puppet entity, and selling Americans stock in that corporate bridge. Not what you expected? Did you think that your Alibaba holding was in the actual company? Well, bad news.

The model was always risky as heck, but tolerated because folks wanted to buy shares of Alibaba, as well as the general risk-on climate of the last few years. But now the Chinese Communist Party is considering doing away with the side-step of its own rules.

More investor money is flowing into Indonesia’s startup ecosystem. Today, AC Ventures, which focuses early-stage startups in the country, announced it has raise $205 million in committed capital for its oversubscribed Fund II, more than double its original target of $80 million. Investors include World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) and Disrupt AD, the venture development platform of Abu Dhabi Developmental Holdings. This brings the firm’s total assets under management to about $380 million.

AC Venture’s Fund III has been actively investing since its first close in March 2020, and has now completed 30 out of its 35 targeted investments, and says it is on track to deploy over $100 million by the end of 2021. All of its investments were in pre-Series A stage startups. The firm says many portfolio companies gained traction during the COVID-19 pandemic, with some, like Shipper, Stockbit, Ula, Aruna, Bukuwarung and Colearn, reaching “centaur” status, or a valuation of at least $100 million. AC Ventures also says Fund III is delivering strong early returns, with a MOIC (multiple on invested capital) of 1.94X less than two years after its first close.

Back in October 2020, when TechCrunch covered Fund III’s first close, its target was $80 million. That number increased, until finally reaching more than $200 million. Fund III’s typical check size varies widely. Founder and managing partner Adrian Li told TechCrunch that having a larger fund size gives AC Ventures the flexibility to deploy the right amount of capital based on the stage of a startup, so it doesn’t have to worry about finding co-investors or other srouces of capital. This means that depending traction and sector, Fund III’s first check sizes can range from a few hundred thousand dollars to several million.

AC Ventures’ founding team Adrian Li, Pandu Sjahrir and Michael Soerijadji

“I think with the increased traction of the portfolio during COVID and a step up in global interest in Asian companies, startups have raised faster than,” said Li. “The larger fund allows us to make sure we can keep our pro ratas and maintain ownership percentages in the best companies.”

He adds that at the beginning of 2021, it “became clear that technology companies were being relied on more than ever to help people continue their daily lives, whether shopping, paying or even entertainment, and that was quickly reflected in the public markets.” He added, “I think the turning point was probably August or September last year. From then, institutional investors and LPs began to realize that COVID was not going away in the short term. They therefore started looking for companies that were “having huge moments of adoption, new users and new user frequency by existing users, and Indonesia was a stand out.”

AC Ventures two earlier funds returned 2.99X and 2.41X gross MOICs, and they include unicorns Xendit and Carsome. The firm’s portfolio companies have also raised a total of more than $500 million in follow-on funding from investors like Sequoia, Tiger Global and Prosus.

The firm started investing in 2014 as Convergence Ventures and in 2019, became AC Ventures through a merger with Agaeti Venture Capital. It now has a total of more than 100 portfolio companies, which AC Ventures says makes it one of the largest Indonesian-focused early-stage venture capital firms.

Many of AC Ventures’ partners, including Li, are former entrepreneurs who have worked in markets like the United States, China and Indonesia. As a result, he says they are uniquely positioned to work closely with startups from early stage to exits. For example, AC Ventures helps its portfolio companies hire key talent, introduces them to the right business partnerships to scale and helps with downstream financing. Having a larger fund gives AC Ventures more ability to invest in wha tthey call their value creation team, or a group of experts in areas like data operations and growth and scaling.

“Building a specific team whose sole objective is to increase the value of our portfolio companies through their advice and interactions is someting that’s really excites us. With a small fund, it’s hard to build an operational team to help portfolio companies, but now with the larger fund size, we’re able to invest into that,” said Li.

Since it works with very early-stage startups, AC Ventures has developed specific strategies for deciding on investments. For example, it makes decisions using a comparable market and business model analysis to understand new sectors.

Li says AC Ventures invests in companies with great teams and strong ideas, or companies that have bootstrapped their way to having customers and revenue. “There isn’t a hard and fast rule, but what we want to do is come into companies as early as possible, where we have built a conviction around the team and market so we can be a longstanding partner in them as they grow.”

At early stages, “there’s not much data you can underwrite on,” he added. “Fortunately, investing in Indonesia, we have the benefit of hindsight for models that have worked around the world and the ability to analyze where certain markets are in Indonesia, relative to the total country and the economic development of the national. We can do a lot of market and business model research and so on, all up front. We can see if this model looks right, if it’s got big potential, if it’s a business model that’s worked well in markets like China or India.”

AC Ventures has also done quantitative and qualitative analysis of its most successful portfolio companies, and honed in on a set of signals that identify the founding teams with the most potential. Li said this gives the firm a more objective way of ranking early-stage startups.

For example, it’s important for at least one of the founders, usually the CEO, to have the strong capability to convey their vision to relevant stakeholders, constituents or first users and business partnerships. When AC Ventures asks founders about their business, they also need to be able to go into detail, including all their numbers, what works and what doesn’t. “Running a business, there are all these devils in the details that are very necessary, so you know what experiments to run, how to ititerate your product. There’s a lot to take in at the early stage of a business, but we find it critical that the founding team is really on top of that.”

In statement about IFC’s investment in AC Ventures’ Fund III, Azam Khan, IFC country manager for Indonesia, Malaysia and Timor-Leste said, “IFC’s partnership with AC Ventures underscores our long-term commitment to Indonesia’s economic development and digital transformation.”

Singapore-based YouTrip, an online bank that focuses on making multi-currency transactions less costly and more efficient, announced today that it has raised a $30 million Series A. YouTrip founder and CEO Caecilia Chu said the round was led by prominent family offices in Asia who prefer to remain unnamed, but are returning from earlier rounds. 

The Series A brings YouTrip’s total funding to more than $60 million. The company says it has now processed over $800 million in card spend globally, with almost 20 million transactions and over 1.5 million app downloads.

Chu told TechCrunch that YouTrip decided to raise funding because it’s reaching an “inflection point.” 

“As Southeast Asia is coming out of the pandemic, and with Singapore really leading the way with the vaccination rate, what we saw on the consumer front is a huge pent-up demand in travel and also the recovery of consumer confidence,” she said. “We definitely see more spending on e-commerce and in terms of travel, we’ve seen daily transaction volumes grow at least two to three times since the beginning of Singapore’s vaccinated travel lanes.” 

Even though YouTrip is optimistic about those tailwinds, its taking a realistic approach toward the recovery of travel. In the medium-term, Chu said the company is most excited about consumer spending and its new B2B business, which includes a multi-currency corporate card called YouBiz. 

Caecilia Chu, Co-founder and CEO, YouTrip

Over the next year, YouTrip also plans to focus on geographical expansion. Currently operational in Singapore and Thailand, it has partnered with Visa to expand into the Philippines and Malaysia. Chu added that the company is also in late-stage discussions with partners to launch in Indonesia and Vietnam. 

When TechCrunch last covered YouTrip in 2019, one of core customer bases were international travelers. When COVID hit, the company had to adapt very quickly. 

It added new features like YouTrip Perks, setting up partnership teams to work with merchants like Lazada and Shopee on cashback deals of up to 15%. “During the pandemic, people were not only buying much more things online, but also they were more health conscious, so we saw more purchases of sporting equipment and health supplements,” said Chu. “We’ve been targeting the most relevant merchants for our users, to get those merchants partnerships going.” 

The company says its transaction volume has now returned to pre-pandemic levels. Since it anticipates more traction as consumer spending and travel increases, YouTrip plans to introduce a brand makeover for its consumer app in early 2022, along with new payment features. 

YouBiz, its corporate card, is also slated for launch in early 2022. Chu says one of the reasons the company entered the B2B space was because more SMBs are adopting fintech services. 

“We know how important it is to be a truly pandemic-resilient company,” she added. “We promised ourselves that we would no longer read the news every day to see when the borders would reopen. We would make it work and continue to make it work regardless of new travel measures.” 

The company has also witnessed a paradigm shift among SMBS.

“They’re really more open-minded to fintech products, to new banking products,” Chu said. “More relevant to us, because of the whole working from home and hybrid models, companies are increasingly distributed. Their payroll, vendor payments, even how they receive revenue or how they invoice their consumers is worldwide, and their foreign currency needs are certain to go up, so we feel that it is really the right time to segment into this market.” 

Once YouBiz is launched, YouTrip will be among several Southeast Asia VC-backed fintech companies that offer corporate cards or focus on the SMB space, including Aspire, Spenmo and Volopay. But Chu says the SMB space is not only huge compared to the consumer space, but “there is a massive opportunity because it is a heavily underserved one.” 

In particular, YouTrip plans to focus on companies that have between one to 1,000 employees. It picked this segment because YouBiz is not meant to be a replacement for traditional bank accounts. Instead, its main value-add is enabling SMBs to spend less on foreign currency transactions. YouTrip also plans to introduce an expense management tool, with an eye toward business travel picking up again. 

“I feel like on the SMB front, it’s not going to be one winner takes all. But getting back to the competition, we are also going into the space with our eyes wide open,” Chu said. “We have two key advantages that really stand out. One is that we are the only neobank that owns our entire tech infrastructure and licensing infrastructure end to end.” 

YouTrip invested a lot in its own technology stack “because the margin is razor-thin in consumer payment services, so in order to deliver the best cost and value, we need to optimize our value chain to a level where we have full control,” including over its product roadmap. 

YouTrip’s second advantage is that already has strong brand recognition. “When we talk to business owners, many are already users of YouTrip for their own purchases,” Chu said. That track record is helping YouTrip as it pitches itself to SMBs and Chu says the company already has 1,000 sign-ups for the launch of its B2B service. 

E-commerce and other online businesses are becoming increasingly global in their operations and customer bases, and a startup called Airwallex — which has built a banking solution that addresses the opportunity to provide cross-border financial services — has been seeing a massive surge of activity. To capitalize further on that opportunity, today the company is announcing growth funding.

Hong Kong and Melbourne-based Airwallex has raised $100 million, capital that it will be using to continue building out its banking and payments businesses into more markets, and to invest expanding its products.

The funding — which is being led by Lone Pine Capital, and joined by 1835i Ventures (the venture arm of ANZ, the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group) and Sequoia Capital China, all previous investors — is an extension to the company’s Series E that it announced only in September; and it brings the total of the round to $300 million.

The valuation is also being extended with this latest injection: Airwallex is now worth $5.5 billion (compared to $4 billion in September). From what we understand, the company was getting term sheets as high as $7 billion from outside investors (that outside interest was what prompted the round in the first place).

Airwallex today has around 20,000 customers spanning areas like e-commerce, tech/SaaS companies and professional services. It also has 500 large platform customers (Papaya Global and GOAT are two examples) that have embedded Airwallex’s services within their own services to power transactions for their own customers.

That business has seen a big boost of activity as a result of a few key developments in the world.

For starters, the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a big shift towards more e-commerce among both consumers and businesses. In turn, businesses have needed to extend their financial infrastructure to accommodate more customers. And because e-commerce has broken down the barriers of where you can do business, they’ve also had to extend their financial reach to touch customers in ever-wider geographies. Covid-19 has also massively disrupted supply chains, so businesses have also had to become more enterprising in how they manage these: they may now have to work with more partners, and potentially be agile enough to pay different people month-to-month.

All of these present the kinds of use cases that speak to the kinds of services that Airwallex offers. Jack Zhang, Airwallex’s co-founder and CEO, said that revenues at the company grew 100% in Q3 over Q2. Its annualized revenues in that most recent quarter were $100 million. “We had a target to achieve that at the end of the year, but we delivered it a quarter earlier,” he said.

It also means a number of other companies are also looking to serve this need: competitors to Airwallex across its different services include Stripe, PayPal, Revolut (via Revolut Business), and more.

Airwallex built its company originally around business banking — its thesis was that companies had a lot of banking options when it came to doing business in their own markets, but for those who worked across borders, it offered domestic and international accounts that worked as easily as domestic ones, along with card issuing, transfers and foreign exchange, payouts and so on. More recently, the company has moved into payments to complement that. The plan will be to add more services natively to that stack, as well as integrate with third-party providers by way of an app store that it is now developing. That will launch potentially next year.

Zhang also said some of the funds will be used for M&A, as part of the inevitable consolidation that we’re going to continue seeing in fintech.

“We’ve now raised $800 million in the last 6 years, with $600 million in the last two years, and we still have $600 million in the bank right now,” he told TechCrunch. “A very large part of that is going to be used for M&A purposes.” Features that Airwallex wants to have as a native part of its stack it might buy instead of building itself include subscription payments; software to automatically calculate stamp duty depending on the market where items are being sold; and more data analytics to help customers analyze their revenues better. “I think there will be consolidation in the next period. But it won’t be just two players. The [fintech] space is big enough for a dozen winners.”

And it looks like Airwallex is setting itself up to be one of those winners. Zhang confirmed to me that Stripe — which today is a key competitor of Airwallex’s — approached the company to acquire it around 2018/2019, when Airwallex was significantly smaller but already developing a strong presence in Asia Pacific, which is still its biggest market, even as Airwallex moves deeper EMEA and North America. (It would have been a big step for Stripe into the region, which is has instead taken on its own steam.)

Zhang said that another big fintech, currently valued at around $20 billion, also approached Airwallex more recently. Nothing has come of that, either — partly because Airwallex is now too expensive, he said.

“I think we are probably to big for others to buy us,” Zhang added.

As for what is coming next on the liquidity front, an IPO “is not on the agenda,” but is something that the company will think about potentially for 2023 or 2024.

“Airwallex’s achievements in the last quarter alone showcase the strength of the company’s business model and its unique ability to meet their customers’ evolving needs in a competitive digital payments market,” said David Craver, co-chief investment office at Lone Pine Capital. “The future is bright for Airwallex, and we look forward to helping its team unlock greater growth opportunities.”

Following a Covid-driven boost, the popular AllTrails resource for hikers, bikers, climbers, and anyone else who enjoys the outdoors, announced today it’s raised $150 million from the growth fund of global private equity firm Permira to further accelerate its business. Prior investor Spectrum Equity will continue to be the company’s largest shareholder, following this transaction.

Like many companies, AllTrails benefitted from how the pandemic impacted consumer behavior. Amid lockdowns and social distancing measures, many people rekindled their interest in exploring the outdoors and connecting with nature — and they turned to AllTrails’ extensive collection of over 300,000 hiking, running, and mountain biking trails to find where to go.

“Covid was an accelerant of a trend that we’ve been seeing for years,” explains AllTrails CEO Ron Schneidermann. “Even pre-pandemic, nearly a third of the global population regularly participated in some sort of outdoor recreation. And in almost every country in the world walking for recreation or exercise is by far the most popular activity. When you add in trail running, mountain biking, camping, and backpacking, those numbers only go up,” he said.

The past 18 months drew more users to the AllTrails mobie app, which now has over 40 million downloads and 30 million registered users across 190 countries. During the past 12 months, over 100 million users also visited AllTrails.com to find a trail. While the company doesn’t typically disclose its revenue or paid subscribers on an ongoing basis, it did celebrate crossing the 1 million paid subscriber milestone back in January.

Although Covid lockdowns (for now) have largely ended, demand for AllTrails hasn’t subsided, the company says.

“As the world opens back up, we’re seeing the staying power of this connection to the outdoors,” says Schneidermann. “This stickiness is manifesting itself in terms of app usage and frequency, and across the board improvements in sign up rates, user-generated content contribution rates, freemium conversion rates, and subscriber retention rates,” he adds.

AllTrails didn’t need to raise capital, however — it’s been profitable since 2017. Rather, the company chose to bring in new funding to help it accelerate its existing momentum. The funds will be used for product development, to build out the AllTrails team, and expand its community internationally.

Today, about two-thirds of AllTrails’ users are in North America, but it’s seeing some of its highest rates of growth across Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

Schneidermann says this is also the third year in a row where the comapny will be doubling headcount, primarily driven by investments in R&D and product development. Currently, it’s hiring in roles across engineering, design, finance, operations, product, and more.

Image Credits: All Trails

The AllTrails app — which today offers search, discovery, reviews, and a wide range of maps that work offline — will get an upgrade in 2022.

At present, the app is more utilitarian than it is social, despite the user-generated content in the form of trail reviews and photos. People contribute to this resource so others like them can benefit from their tips — like if a trail gets muddy after a rain, if it’s too steep for families hiking with little kids, if it’s crowded on weekends, and so on. Meanwhile, the trail photos help people get a sense of what a trail is like and what sort of scenic views they may have in store. But many AllTrails users still turn to other networks — like Facebook Groups — for inspiration about where to go hike or bike.

With the new investment, AllTrails plans to invest in its product, and has a range of new features coming in the year ahead for both free and paid users alike — including those that aim to help the community better connect.

“We think that there’s a big opportunity in improving the search and discovery experience via personalization, elevating the on-trail navigation experience, expanding access to more users around the world by supporting additional languages, and creating more ways for our community to interact, share their experiences, and inspire each other,” Schneidermann says.

The company believes Permira — which has backed Klarna, Minted, Zwift, and others, and recently helped to acquire McAfee — will be particularly helpful in expanding AllTrails’ global footprint.

“Continued international expansion is a huge priority for us, so we’re especially excited to tap into the global resources that Permira brings to the table,” notes.

With the transaction, Bruce Chizen, Senior Advisor to Permira and former CEO of Adobe, and Gretchen Howard, COO of Robinhood, will join the company’s board of directors.

The company had previously raised $75 million from Spectrum Equity in October 2018.

Singapore-based Deskimo, the on-demand app that lets people find co-working spaces and pay by the minute, announced today it has raised a $3 million seed round. It is also soft launching in Jakarta, bringing its total markets to three, along with Singapore and Hong Kong. Participants in the round included Y Combinator (Deskimo was part of its summer 2021 cohort), Global Founders Capital, Pioneer Fund, Seed X, Starling Ventures and TSVC.

The startup was founded earlier this year by Raphael Cohen, Rocket Internet’s former head of Asia, and Christian Mischler, who co-founded Foodpanda, HotelQuickly and GuestReady. Instead of offering its app directly to consumers, Deskimo works with companies that have a hybrid workplace model. The app is offered as a benefit to employees, who usually work from home but might want to get away to concentrate or take calls (Mischler said Deskimo’s average users spend 3 hours at a desk, but some stay the whole day). It partners with coworking spaces, including WeWork, The Hive, Executive Centre and Garage Society, giving them additional streams of revenue.

Mischler told TechCrunch in an email that the startup expanded into Jakarta because it is targeting cities with heavy traffic congestion and where real-estate infrastructure is usually less developed than in cities like Hong Kong or Singapore. “Indonesia is the largest market in Southeast Asia and Jakarta is one of the first markets where Singaporean companies expand into, hence many of our existing corporate clients were requesting the ability to use Deskimo there, which is why we’ve prioritized Deskimo in Jakarta ahead of other metropolitan areas in Southeast Asia.”

In Jakarta, Deskimo has contracted with more than 40 workspaces so far for its soft launch, with plans to add about 10 to 20 more locations by the end of this year. In all its cities, it looks for spaces outside of central business districts so users can find desks close to their homes. For example, in Hong Kong and Singapore, about one-third of Deskimo’s spaces are located in residential areas. In Jakarta, spaces are spread more evenly across the city, Mischler said, with about 60% of its partner workspaces located outside of CBDs.

“As COVID-related restrictions continue to ease, we expect spaces to become more busy, which is why we’ll continue to add options to the app to ensure availability in proximity to all Deskimo users,” he added.

Over the past three months since its launch, Deskimo has also added several new services in response to user demand, including the ability to book centrally-located meeting rooms. It is also trialling fixed-fee subscriptions in addition to its current pay-as-you-go model. Other features Deskimo is working on include the ability for main account holders to bring a guest, prepaid credits for companies in addition to end-of-month bills and a rate cap for users who want to spend the entire day at a space.

Consolidation to have better economies of scale is one of the biggest themes in the world of e-commerce, and today a player in the world of online retail is announcing a large round of funding to double down on its approach to the concept. San Francisco-based Heyday — which buys up and then grows direct-to-consumer merchants and brands that have found initial traction, leveraging the Amazon marketplace — has raised $555 million, a Series C that it will be using to continue expanding its technology, investing in business development, and to buy up more assets. Specifically, it will also be opening deepening its engagement in Asia (with a seventh office in China); hiring more brand management experts and other talent; investing in more product development; and building out its marketing, supply chain, data science and M&A tech stacks.

The Raine Group and Premji Invest co-led this round, with previous backers General Catalyst, Victory Park Capital, and Khosla Ventures also participating.

Heyday competes against a large field of startups also raising huge amounts of money to follow their own Amazon marketplace roll-up strategies. Other big names out of the U.S. include Thrasio (which picked up a cool $1 billion in October) and Perch ($775 million in May). Heyday has been moving at a fast clip to keep up since being founded in 2020. This latest round comes on the heels of a $70 million Series B that was raised only in May of this year, with the total capital raised by Heyday to $800 million, a mix of equity and debt (Heyday did not specify the proportions of equity and debt in this latest Series C).

“Our pace is insane,” said Sebastian Rymarz, Heyday’s co-founder and CEO, in an interview. “We were born 16 months ago and are already crossing $200 million in revenues.” (That’s an annual run rate figure.) The company said its brands are currently growing at a rate of 64% year-on-year compared to the broader e-commerce market.

Heyday has never disclosed its valuation, and Rymarz would only say that this latest round was made at “a very good valuation.”

That lack of detail is intentional. “I don’t want the team thinking or me getting into my head that ‘we’ve won,'” he continued. “We’re only 16 months in to what we think will be a multi-decade journey. I don’t want to celebrate valuations at this stage.”

However, as a point of reference, Thrasio is now valued at about $5 billion; Razor Group out of Berlin was valued at over $1 billion last week; and Perch also is now in the 9-figure range. As with all of these, Heyday is also profitable on an Ebitda basis, Rymarz confirmed to me.

There are millions of third-party sellers using Amazon as their primary route to market, and Heyday and others like it have seized on a prime opportunity to target them: often, these merchants lack the capital or appetite to take their businesses to the next level of growth. At the same time, as Amazon and other marketplaces mature, there are more sophisticated ways and more technology that could be used in aid of improving how to leverage them to find more buyers for products, amid a pool of me-too brands that are also finding ways to game Amazon’s algorithms.

The pitch that Heyday makes is that it has built technology that evaluates this sea of merchants to identify the most interesting of them all. Rymarz said that for every 100 merchants it looks at, it might consider buying just one.

When Heyday buys these companies, and their intellectual property, the idea is that it reaps the rewards of doing that scaling itself. It does so by integrating the business into a larger platform to manage marketing and sales analytics, production and distribution, and retail channels; and by following the company’s initial trajectory to continue developing more products to take along on that journey.

Given the number of third-party merchants and the gating factors for them scaling, this has become an area ripe for consolidation, and so, unsurprisingly, it has also become an area ripe for competition among consolidators.

In addition to Thrasio, Razor Group and Perch, others that have recently raised both equity and debt for the same ends include Heroes, which raised $200 million in August; Olsam with $165 million; Suma Brands ($150 million); Elevate Brands ($250 million); factory14 ($200 million); as well as Branded, SellerX, Berlin Brands Group (X2), Benitago, Latin America’s Valoreo and Rainforest and Una Brands out of Asia. There are dozens more.

How Heyday differs from these others is that, at least up to now, it has focused not on quantity of merchants, but quality.

Rymarz said that Heyday currently has only 15 brands in its stable, compared to, say, 200+ for Thrasio and 150+ for Razor Group. Again, this is also intentional: “We have much larger brands, with five of them making up over 70% of our revenues.”

He positively bristles when Heyday is described a rollup play. “Amazon is a launchpad, and we are not an aggregator,” he said.

For competitive reasons, Heyday has never publicly disclosed any of the names of the brands that it owns, but they are products in categories like home and lifestyle. And the bigger strategy is not just to build up their profiles on Amazon but to extend to a variety of other channels, including placement in household-name brick and mortar chains. (Rymarz showed me several brands under the condition that I would not publish their names, but just so that I could get a better idea of what it owned. At least two of them gearing up to sell in stores like Target.)

Heyday’s pitch these days typically does not bring on any of the teams involved with the brands that it buys up (there are sometimes exceptions to that, Rymarz said), but it has been bringing on more people with extensive e-commerce experience into the team to build out its wider operation. In addition to hiring more branding and retailing teams, it has included adding a number of new executives, including a CFO (Navid Veiseh, previously at Amazon and Coupang); a CMO (Reema Batta, formerly of Opendoor and Expedia), and a chief administrative officer (Todd Heeter, formerly of Doma and Anixter).

It’s been interesting to see how so many investors have piled into the opportunity in the last couple of years. (Other big names that have been backing Amazon marketplace consolidators include SoftBank, BlackRock, Silver Lake, Target Global, Tiger Global and more.) Part of the appeal is that it gives investors a look into some of the massive e-commerce growth that we’ve seen over the last decade, in a landscape that has otherwise been dominated not by startups, but by big players like Amazon. That, of course, has become an even more acute opportunity in the last two years with the rise of Covid-19 and the accelerate shift we’ve seen to more people shopping online than ever before.

“We have been exceptionally impressed with Sebastian and his team, their vision, and commitment to operational excellence for the next generation of consumer brands,” said Jake Vachal, MD at The Raine Group, in a statement. “Heyday’s innovative approach to growing and incubating brands provides entrepreneurs access to leading technology, as well as deep-rooted expertise spanning operations and marketing. We are excited to be partnering with this team as they continue building a differentiated platform for quality, digital-first brands.”

Investors in this round said that Heyday’s particular approach was also a factor.

“Heyday’s differentiated strategy and world-class team stand-out in what is playing out to be one of the most explosive new industries,” said Sandesh Patnam, Managing Partner Premji Invest, in a statement. “We are excited to partner with the leadership team to help Heyday leave a mark on the e-commerce space.”

Homebase, a Ho Chi Minh City-based proptech startup that helps people buy homes, announced today it has raised $30 million in equity and debt (the ratio was undisclosed). The company’s business model is similar to Divvy Homes and ZeroDown in the United States and, in fact, Divvy Homes co-founder and former CEO Brian Ma and Zerodown chief operating officer Troy Steckenrider III are investors in Homebase.

Participants in this round were Y Combinator (Homebase took part in the accelerator program earlier this year), Partech Partners, Goodwater Capital, Ace and Company, Emies Advisors and Foundamental. It also included Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel, and operators and executives from companies like SoFi, Opendoor, Republic, Microsoft, Instacart, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Binance and others.

The round’s returning investors were Ma, Steckenrider, VinaCapital Ventures, and Darius Cheung, the founder and CEO of 99.co, one of the largest property portals in Singapore and Indonesia.

Homebase works by acting as a co-investor, buying property with clients who put in a 20% deposit. Then clients pay back a fixed amount to Homebase each month, or can decide to buy out the company’s entire share. They can also chose to walk away from the deal and cash out their savings.

Clients have full usage rights to the home, so they can live in it or rent it. Contracts range from one to 10 years and An says people who buy homes to live in often chose 10 year contracts, while investors usually go for about three years, so they can see how the market appreciates before selling the property.

Homebase will use its new funding to continue developing its proprietary technology, form more partnerships with real estate developers and hiring. The company says it has doubled its headcount over the past year.

In terms of its technology, co-founder and COO Phillip An told TechCrunch, “a lot of it is how do we improve the customer experience and make it more customer-centric? Right now in Vietnam, buying property is really painful. It’s like 100 steps, you have to sign in blue ink on paper, at the bottom of every page. We’re thinking of how do you make the experience of buying a home or investing a one-stop shop where you can do everything digitally.”

He added Homebase is also thinking about developing asset valuation tools to help homeowners and passive investors gauge the value of their properties.

An said Homebase’s client base is split 50/50 between people who want a home and investors, including foreign buyers who can’t travel to Vietnam because of the pandemic and rely on Homebase to perform transactions for them.

“The concept of owning your own home is quite important culturally and if you look at the economy, real estate is one of the most popular types of investment,” said An. “People are investing more and more in crypto and stocks, especially during COVID, but I would say real estate still makes a really big portion of what people put their money in. And if you look at the historical track record of real estate in Vietnam, it’s really good.”

Homebase cites research from real estate consultancy CBRE that showed that increases in average landed property prices grew from 3% to 17% year-over-year, even during Vietnam’s COVID-19 lockdowns during the third quarter. This is good news for people who already own property, but means it is increasingly difficult for first-time buyers to secure mortgages.

Homebase works with agents and developers as a value-add service that helps them close more deals. “For a lot of agents, among the biggest hurdle for them is that clients cannot qualify for a mortgage right away because of the barriers. After COVID, I would say banks became even more strict in terms of criteria. Sometimes they require a 40% to 50% down payment.”

Having Homebase to buy property on behalf of a client makes the process more efficient and as a result, agents sometimes offer buyers a discount if use the startup’s services, An said.

The company will continue focusing on Vietnam over the next few months by expanding into more cities (it currently operates in Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon, Hanoi and Danang). It is also exploring other Southeast Asian countries like Thailand and the Philippines.

“Investors, even customers have reached out to us on social media and asked if we’re available in their country, so I think there is a lot of customer demand for these types of services that help make affording a home more accessible,” An said.

In a statement about his investment in Homebase, Siebel said, “We’ve seen many innovative proptech companies at YC from around the world, and Homebase is among those leading towards a significantly better and more customer-centric solution versus current options, and radically transforms accessibility for aspiring homeowners.”

Philippines-based Plentina, a buy now, pay later startup focused on emerging markets, announced today it has raised $2.2 million. This brings the fintech’s total funding since it was founded in 2019, including a seed round announced in April, to $5.7 million. The latest funding was led by TMV, with participation from Global Founders Capital and returning investors AV Ventures, Techstars and Unpopular Ventures.

The new capital will be used to speed-track Plentina’s growth in the Philippines, expand its product and start exploring launches in other countries, including Vietnam. The company is targeting a Series A raise next year and will hire senior talent before then.

In addition to its BNPL platform, Plentina also plans to focus on other data-driven financial services (its co-founders, Kevin Gabayan and Earl Valencia, are data scientists whose combined work experience include positions at Google and Charles Schwab). The two note that the Philippines has a population of more than 100 million people, but less than 5% of access to credit cards.

The company says that in 2021, Plentina’s Android app downloads have increased by 500%, growing from 30,000 users to over 150,000. It plans to launch an iOS app early next year.

When Plentina launched in the Philippines last October, it initially focused on daily needs, signing partnerships with vendors like 7-Eleven and telecom Smart Communications. Since then, it has added more than 20 brands to its platform and more categories. These include necessities like food, groceries and education supplies, but also things like airline tickets, gaming and e-commerce.

Its merchants include e-commerce platforms and offline retailers, like Isetann Supermarket, Lazada, Zalora, Shopee, Agoda, McDonald’s, Philippine Airlines, Razer E-Pins and National Bookstores. The company says it has a waitlist of more than 20 brands waiting to onboard to its platform.

Plentina also added new loan terms. When TechCrunch last covered the company in April, its required repayment within 14 days. Now Plentina has extended its BNPL offers to three months, since it has options for larger-value items, like airline tickets and e-commerce purchases.

The company will start its international expansion next year. “We are guided by our mission to democratize financial services to emerging markets, so we are planning to expand to Vietnam in 2022,” Valencia told TechCrunch. “We will apply lessons in launching and scaling in our first market of the Philippines.” He added that Plentina has already recruited a leadership team in Vietnam to launch operations.

In a statement, TMV founder and general partner Soraya Darabi said, “Kevin and Earl are precisely the entrepreneurs we look to back as investors. They have the domain discipline to be focused on this audacious opportunity, the tenacity to see it through to success. We are enthusiastically partnering with them to bring robust financial services to the Philippines and beyond.”