XanPool, a payment infrastructure provider that facilitates faster crypto and fiat settlements, announced today it has raised a $27 million Series A led by Valar Ventures. The round included participation from CMT Digital, Wise founder and chairman Taavet Hinrikus and existing investors Gumi Gryptos and Antler.

The funding brings XanPool’s total raised since it was founded in 2019 to over $32 million. Founder and chief executive officer Jeffrey Liu told TechCrunch that Series A will be used to consolidate XanPool’s presence across APAC, where it is used in 12 countries, with the goal of growing its user base from 500,000 now to 10 million by the end of 2022. Its users include consumers and businesses that want an alternative to traditional payment processors.

XanPool’s software enables a non-custodial crypto-to-crypto (C2C) network that is made up of liquidity providers, including crypto funds, money service operators and traditional-export businesses, who have idle capital sitting in their crypto wallets, e-wallets or bank accounts.

“XanPool never touches this money, we simply make the software which allows the individual or business to automate their buying and selling, and in return earn a fee,” Liu said.

The liquidity providers’ capital is used to settle cross-currency and cryptocurrency transactions and, in return, they earn fees of up to 2% a month. XanPool says its C2C network now has over $200 million of liquidity.

Liu added that the peer-to-peer architecture reduces counterparty risks because its C2C transactions don’t involve an intermediary and transactions are completed without credit or late settlements.

Based in Hong Kong, XanPool has more than 400 business partners. These include South Korean financial ‘super app’ Toss; Vietnamese fintech ViettelPay; Singapore’s electronic fund transfer service PayNow; Indonesian e-wallet GoPay; PayID, the fast payments infrastructure developed by Australian banks; and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s Faster Payment Service. They give their customers access to XanPool through their apps, and XanPool performs its own KYC on users.

XanPool founders Jeffrey Liu and Artem Ibragimov

Liu said XanPool’s user experience is different from traditional custody platforms because they just need to provide their crypto wallet address, send fiat to local liquidity peers on its C2C network and then receive cryptocurrency directly into their wallets.

Most traditional custody platforms, on the other hand, require users to send them fiat currency before conducting fiat-crypto exchanges and then wait for exchanges to approval withdrawals.

XanPool plans to continue offering its infrastructure to third-party exchanges, wallets and decentralized applications instead of launching its own app. Liu said XanPool’s goal is to become similar to the SWIFT Network, also enabling settlements without holding its own liquidity, but compatible with cryptocurrency, fast payment services and e-wallets.

The edtech boom has focused primarily on students, but teachers are learners, too. Doyobi, a Singapore-based professional development platform, wants to give educators new, more engaging ways of teaching STEM subjects. The startup announced today it has raised $2.8 million in pre-Series A funding led by Monk’s Hill Ventures.

The round included Tresmonos Capital, Novus Paradigm Capital and XA Network, along with angel investors like Carousell chief executive officer Quek Siu Rui, Glints co-founders Oswald Yeo and Seah Ying Cong and Grab Financial Group head Reuben Lai.

The platform, which includes teacher training and interactive content for their students, is now used by about 2,000 teachers in more than 10 countries in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Two of its largest markets are Indonesia and the Philippines. Doyobi has partnerships with educational platforms Leap Surabaya, Coderacademy and private schools like HighScope Indonesia, Mutiara Harapan Islamic School and Stella Gracia School.

Doyobi was founded in 2020 as a spin-off from Saturday Kids, a STEM-focused educational program. Co-founder and CEO John Tan told TechCrunch that after operating for eight years, Saturday Kids was only reaching thousands of students a year, even though there are millions of kids around the world who need to learn STEM skills.

“There is a massive gap between what is being taught in schools and what children need to learn in order to be prepared for jobs of the future. Curiosity, imagination and empathy are just as important as literacy and numeracy skills,” he said. “Teachers play an outsize role in shaping learning outcomes, yet most edtech innovations take the teacher in the classroom completely out of the picture.”

Though many governments understand the importance of STEM skills for economic growth, many are struggling to incorporate them into their curriculums, he added. Doyobi wants to solve that problem by reaching students through their teachers.

In addition to developmental training for teachers that include live video lessons, the startup built its own virtual learning environment for educators to use with kids. It includes courses that link new skills to real-world uses, interactive media and Scratch coding projects to reinforce what students learn in class. Doyobi also runs an online community called Teachers As Humans where educators can find peer support.

The startup will use its new funding to create more courses for educators, along with teaching resources, like videos, quizzes and projects, for their students.

Stripe, the outsized fintech out of San Francisco that is valued at $95 billion, is making another acquisition to expand the services it offers alongside its core payments product. The company is acquiring Recko, which has built a platform that lets businesses track and automate payments reconciliation, covering both outgoing and incoming payments and the full ecosystem of inbound and outbound payment sources and receivers. Like Stripe itself, Recko leans heavily on APIs to integrate and work with different data sources.

Recko is based out of Bangalore, India, and significantly this will be Stripe’s first acquisition in the country when the acquisition officially closes (based on customary closing conditions),

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, Stripe tells us. For some background, though, Recko had raised about $7 million prior to this, with investors including Vertex Ventures, Prime Venture Partners, and a number of individuals, including Taavet Hinirikus, the co-founder and former CEO of Wise (nee TransferWise). Founded in 2017 and based out of India, Recko had been seeing a lot of traction internationally, with Deliveroo, Meesho and PharmEasy among its wider list of customers. (That base and the crossover it has with Stripe’s customer base may well have been the trigger for getting on Stripe’s radar.)

Stripe will begin integrating Recko into its wider payments stack, but also notes that existing Recko users will be able to continue using it as before. From the looks of it, the plan is not to limit any of the functionality of the product, which today is partly so effective because of how it precisely works across so much of the fragmentation you already have in the world of accounting and finance.

The acquisition is the latest move from Stripe to build out more services beyond basic payments, a way of capturing more revenue from existing customers, and more customers overall, in particular those seeing platforms that let them handle accounting and other work that goes hand-in-hand with taking or making payments. Earlier this year, Stripe acquired Bouncer to integrate card authentication; and TaxJar to bring in automatic sales tax tools. International acquisitions — others have included Paystack in Nigeria and Touchtech in Ireland — have also been made strategically both to serve a wider network of territories and to tap into local expertise in those markets. Recko ticks both of those boxes.

Stripe’s moves come as part of a bigger consolidation we’ve been seeing in the world of fintech: a number of strong players have emerged covering very specific “point solutions” in the wider payments ecosystem, and so the stronger platform providers (and Stripe is among them) are now making moves to bring all of these together in the name of more convenience and efficiency for users, and better margins for Stripe itself.

“Payments reconciliation shouldn’t be a mild headache that balloons into a migraine as a company grows—it should be an easy, highly automated process,” said Will Gaybrick, Stripe’s Chief Product Officer, in a statement. “Stripe helps millions of businesses around the world streamline their revenue management—from subscriptions and invoicing to revenue recognition and bookkeeping. With Recko, we’ll automate their payments reconciliation, a critical input into their overall financial health.”

Of course, the other side of that argument is that it leads to less competition, since Stripe offering an all-in-one solution becomes too compelling to pass up. Others like Primer, which announced a fundraise this week, present another approach, building a platform that makes it easy for businesses to keep using a wide variety of services together, with less pain in the process.

For the startup, it’s a window to scaling in a way that would have been more challenging on its own, aligned with one of the bigger and interesting privately-held companies (I guess we can’t call Stripe a startup anymore?) out there challenging the established players in financial services.

“Joining Stripe is a perfect next chapter for Recko, and we can’t wait to help grow the GDP of the internet by removing the burden of reconciliation complexity,” commented Saurya Prakash Sinha, CEO and co-founder of Recko, in a statement. “Internet businesses need tools that can scale with their growth and automate the tasks required to produce an accurate picture of their financial health.”

It’s impossible to talk about Automattic without talking about remote work. The company is a role model and innovator in this area: It has been entirely remote since 2005, and at 1,700 employees, it has helped prove that a remote workplace culture can succeed at scale.

But “remote” has taken on a different meaning than it denoted two years ago. Since COVID-19 began, companies that never planned on working remotely have moved millions of employees online. Zoom’s video meeting minutes grew 30x as employers made a mad dash to replicate physical offices within virtual meeting rooms. Initial studies have shown that productivity declined as a result.

Perhaps that’s why Automattic rejects the word “remote” entirely. Instead, its leaders use words like “distributed” and “asynchronous.” There is no online analogue to an office; indeed, Automattic doesn’t even require that employees know what each other’s faces look like.

At its most basic level, Automattic’s model isn’t about remote work at all. Instead, it’s about how the company is structured, from its management, to its communication style, right down to its hiring process.

No more meetings

I got a peek into just how different Automattic is from ordinary companies while scheduling one of the interviews for this article. Usually, finding a good time with interviewees involves hunting through a packed schedule for the few morsels of time available. A busy executive might have two or three openings during a week with every other slot filled.

Instead, when Monica Ohara, chief marketing officer of WordPress.com, sent me her Calendly link, I saw a wide open schedule. Ohara, by all appearances, wasn’t doing much work. When I asked about it, she laughed.

“It’s the thing I think is really broken with normal office work,” she said. “Your meeting calendar was a badge of honor and having so many meetings meant you were so important. That’s not a paradigm here.”

Instead, most communication is written and asynchronous — meaning that it can be addressed anytime during the work day.

A CMS for a CMS company

Automattic’s replacement for meetings and most office collaboration is P2, a modification of WordPress that it announced in August 2020 at the height of the pandemic and offers as a paid service.

A P2 post looks more or less like a blog post, with threaded discussions, the ability to follow replies and a Like button. Whenever employees want to discuss anything with distant colleagues — for instance, a coder in the United States who wants to share something with a designer in South Africa who’s asleep at the time — they can write about it on the company’s P2 instance. Anyone else who is potentially interested can find the same post with a search or through various discovery features built into the platform.

Automattic CFO Mark Davies. Image Credits: Automattic

Documentation is the order of the day, up to and including information that would be hidden at other companies.

“You need to be extremely transparent. Matt [Mullenweg, Automattic’s founder and CEO] posts what he’s working on. I post what I’m working on,” said Mark Davies, Automattic’s CFO, who previously worked at smart home platform Vivint, which operated as a much more traditional company. “When I came here for the first time, I had a board meeting, and I said, ‘Let’s get to work.’ They said, ‘No way, you need to post the board deck and what the decisions were.’ I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!.’”

P2 isn’t the only communication method at Automattic — the company also uses software like Slack and Jira. Nonetheless, all the company’s tools share a common thread of asynchronicity: You have colleagues across the world, so don’t expect an immediate reply.

“You’d think that things could move slower here, but they really don’t. I think in offices, there’s also this perception that you have to be in-person. People are saving things up for their one-on-one or meeting when they could have sent an email,” said Ohara. “Here, I’ll often wake up and find out there’s lots happening in Europe that I need to catch up on versus us having to wait a week or two to get a conference room.”

Documenting everything and allowing employees to consume only what they need saves time. “I spend a lot more time communicating and a lot less time listening and sitting in reviews,” said Davies.

Founded in 2017, Geniebook is a Singapore-based learning platform that uses a combination of machine learning and human teacheres to personalize each student’s education. The company announced today it has raised $16.6 million in Series A funding led by East Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation by angel investors including John Danner, founder of Dunce Capital; Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini, founders of Indian edtech unicorn Unacademy; Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal; and senior executives from Grab, Shopee and Gojek.

Geniebook’s founders say it is profitable, and its revenue has grown over 2,000% since the beginning of 2019. It now has a user base of 150,000 students, and 350 employees across offices in Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Most of Geniebook’s students are based in Singapore and Vietnam, and it plans to use part of its funding to continue growing in those markets before focusing on other Southeast Asian countries. The startup’s Series A brings its total raised to about $18 million. Geniebook’s last round of funding was a $1.1 million pre-Series A round in 2019 from Apricot Capital.

Geniebook’s offers English, mathematics and science courses based on Singapore’s national curriculum for primary and secondary school students. The platform’s three core features are GenieSmart, or practice sheets customized for students with AI-based tech; live online classes that can host up to 900 students at a time; and GenieAsk, where a teacher and teaching assistant are assigned to groups of 50 students for class discussions and help.

Geniebook co-founders Neo Zhizhong and Alicia Cheong

The startup was founded by Neo Zhizhong and Alicia Cheong, who met while they were in university. Cheong tutored math, Neo tutored science and the two often referred students to one another. Eventually, they decided to set up a brick-and-mortar tutoring center, which quickly became profitable. While figuring out how to scale the center, the two started incorporating tech elements into classes, before deciding to make the business fully online in 2017. “We realized technology can change the way teachers teach and students learn,” Neo said.

Though Geniebook became an online platform well before the start of the pandemic, Neo said COVID-19 created a lot more awareness among parents and students. “Southeast Asia is a $60 billion market for private education and the market suddenly became a $60 billion market for online education.” As students got used to live-streaming classes, they started to expect more personalized and interactive content, he added.

Instead of generic worksheets, each student’s homework is customized by GenieSmart, which uses a neural network to pick questions based on their strengths and weaknesses, so they don’t have to answer questions about concepts they are already comfortable with. The communities led by teacher/teaching assistant pairs are another way to keep students motivated. Neo said Geniebooks’ personalization features is one of the ways it differentiates from other learning platforms like Koobits and Superstar Teacher.

“One of the questions any educator needs to answer is ‘how do we create an environment that engages a community of learners by themselves,’ so educators don’t have to keep nagging learners, because then kids will just be like ‘please don’t talk to me anymore,’” said Neo.

In Geniebook’s communities, students are encouraged to work together, with teachers and teaching assistants providing learning content, guidance and corrections. Students are also rewarded with points for completing worksheets or answering questions correctly that can be redeemed for things like Roblox’s virtual currency and Apple App Store credits (though some save them up to get holiday presents for their parents).

Each teacher works with several communities of students. To help them as the platform scales up, Geniebook will implement an AI chat function to answer basic and frequently-asked questions.

Geniebook’s new funding will be used to hire for leadership roles, build its product development team and market expansion.

In a statement about the funding, Lightspeed partner Dev Share said, “The Southeast Asia region has several countries with exam-driven cultures where Geniebook’s worksheets and cohort-based live learning approach delivers a premium experience with measurable improvement in student outcomes.”

American technology giant Microsoft announced today that it will pull its professional social network LinkedIn from the Chinese market later this year.

Microsoft purchased LinkedIn for more than $26 billion back in 2016.

The news comes amidst a flurry of regulatory changes in the Asian nation, as well as rising tensions between the company and the country. Two weeks past, Microsoft came under heavy scrutiny for its decision to block the profiles of certain U.S. journalists in China.

The company is hardly the only American enterprise to find it hard to balance the authoritarian demands of the Chinese government and its own business goals. Here, Microsoft has taken a sharp approach to a problem that likely would have only become exacerbated over time; the software giant could choose to either bow to the demands of the Chinese government to limit access of individual profiles it found unacceptable — that journalists were suffering from blocks is not a surprise, given the media environment inside China — or walk.

It chose the latter.

In a blog post discussing the news, LinkedIn wrote that the company described its 2014 decision to enter the Chinese market, which meant “adherence to requirements of the Chinese government on Internet platforms” despite it also “strongly support[ing] freedom of expression.”

But LinkedIn wrote that it is now “facing a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China.” That changed market landscape led to the company making the “decision to sunset the current localized version of LinkedIn, which is how people in China access LinkedIn’s global social media platform, later this year.”

Shares of Microsoft are up around 1.6% in morning trading, up roughly as much as the technology-focused Nasdaq Composite index. Investors are shrugging off the news, in other words.

What the decision will mean for Microsoft’s relationship with the Chinese market and state is not clear as this juncture. The Chinese Communist Party has been making changes in its domestic cloud market, for example, that could limit its commercial future for foreign companies. Microsoft’s Chinese LinkedIn decision could be viewed through the lens of a possible longer-term decoupling of the tech shop and the nation.

Depression and anxiety were taking a serious toll on peoples’ well-being even before COVID-19, and the pandemic prompted more interest (and venture capital) in mental health startups. While many of the highest profile mental health startups, like Calm or Headspace Health, are based in the United States, more attention is also being paid to emotional wellness around the world. In Southeast Asia, for example, a growing list of startups is increasing access to mental healthcare and support. One of them, ThoughtFull, announced today it has raised $1.1 million USD in seed funding, which it says one of the largest seed rounds raised by a digital mental health startup in Southeast Asia so far.

Founded in 2019, ThoughtFull’s ThoughtFullChat app connects users to mental health professionals for coaching sessions or therapy, and also has self-guided tools. The startup’s app for mental health professionals, called ThoughtFullCare Pro, enables them to manage and scale their online practices. ThoughtFullChat is available for download through the App Store and Google Play, or through insurers and employee benefit programs.

Investors in its seed round include The Hive SEA, Boston-based Flybridge and Vulpes Investment Management, along with family offices and angel investors in the Asia Pacific region.

Before launching ThoughtFull, founder and chief executive officer Joan Low was an investment banker, including six years at J.P. Morgan in Hong Kong. Low told TechCrunch in an email that she felt compelled to leave finance after observing how difficult it was to access mental healthcare in Southeast Asia, compared to “the breakneck speed of digital mental health innovations happening places such as the U.S. and Europe where I have spent time living, working and studying.”

ThoughtFull’s main operating markets are Singapore and Malaysia, but it now has users in 43 countries. Its app, which launched in 2020, is available in five languages: English, Bahasa Malaysia, Bahasa Indonesia, Mandarin and Cantonese, along with coaches who are also fluent in Tamil, Thai, Vietnamese and Tagalog.

Low said ThoughtFull works closely with local healthcare systems to ensure that its services are tailored to each market. For example, it will partner with The Hive Southeast Asia and Penjana Capital, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Malaysia’s Ministry of Finance, to digitize the country’s mental health ecosystem after the pandemic made access to care, including in-person consultations, more difficult.

“Healthcare systems are inherently complex given the various stakeholders, structures and outcomes that are involved. That said, healthcare in Asia is particularly intricate because of the diversity in not just culture, but also systems—from care delivery to payor and research models,” said Low. “This is why you see less of the foreign players coming into Asian healthcare in a big way as barriers to entry are high.”

Other apps in Southeast Asia that provide digital access to mental health professionals include Intellect, which also recently raise venture funding. Low said ThoughtFull differentiates from other mental health startups by focusing on end-to-end services, giving its users personalized preventative and curative options and creating “an entirely closed feedback loop for better quality mental healthcare delivery.”

ThoughtFull’s seed round will be used for product development, including deep tech developments and clinical research.

Five months after announcing a deal with two of China’s biggest two-wheel vehicle makers, Gogoro officially launched there today, opening 45 battery swapping stations in Hangzhou. The company’s co-founder and chief executive officer Horace Luke told TechCrunch that it targets 80 stations by the end of the year, before expanding into other major cities with its partners, Yadea and Dachangjiang Group (DCJ).

In China, Gogoro’s battery swapping technology will operate under the Huan Huan brand, a partnership between Gogoro, Yadea and DCJ.

Yadea and DCJ are both developing vehicles that run on Gogoro’s battery swapping technology, with Yadea launching two models for sale today, starting in Hangzhou.

The companies expect consumer demand to be driven by government regulations for electric two-wheel vehicles that (among other things) require the use of lithium batteries instead of lead-acid. An estimated 270 million vehicles that don’t meet the new regulations will need to be retired by 2025.

Gogoro announced last month that it will go public on Nasdaq after a $2.35 billion SPAC deal with Poema Global that is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022. In addition to its battery swapping network, Gogoro is also known for its own range of high-end two-wheel scooters, but has made deals with other manufacturers to produce vehicles that use its batteries and charging stations, including Yamaha, Suzuki and AeonMotor.

Its partnerships have been an important factor in increasing the accessibility of Gogoro’s technology, and the company also announced a deal this year with Hero MotoCorp, the market leader for two-wheeled vehicles in India.

“We’ve always been looked at as ‘Gogoro is too premium, we are out of reach to the people that really matter in major cities,’ and with Yadea and DCJ, everyone is going to be able to ride and buy the vehicles, which won’t be any more expensive than previously-sold mass vehicles,” said Luke.

In a late-August ruling, China’s supreme court declared one of the country’s most infamous work practices illegal.

Known as “996,” the term is shorthand for a work schedule spanning from 9AM to 9PM, six days per week. Though popularized by the country’s soaring tech firms, often evoking images of hip urban startup employees with stock option plans hustling before being made millionaires by an IPO or funding round, “996” has evolved in how it is understood and applied by employers and employees, as well as how it is viewed by regulators.

Indeed, while the August 26 Supreme Court decision and issuance of guidelines from the Ministry of Human Resources will impact tech firms and their well-educated, well-compensated employees, the case itself dealt with a worker much further down the digital economy hierarchy: a logistics worker making a salary of 8,000RMB (roughly $1,240) per month, which is just slightly below the average of the country’s 37 largest cities.

China’s regulators appear to be sending a message to employers and employees alike that the rules which define their relationship must change. As is the case with many things in China these days, what the country’s leaders are asking for will require a change not just in action, but also in the philosophies, psychologies, and incentive structures at the core of Chinese society. What this change will look like is only starting to come into form.

Hungry like the wolf (culture)

Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images

Whether as a result of the intense work culture that has defined many Chinese companies, or as the pacesetting example that many have emulated, there is perhaps no better case study of the spirit, the benefits, and the potential toxicity of a 996 work culture than that of Huawei.

Known for its “wolf culture,” the Shenzhen-based telecoms behemoth became defined by its intensity. Depending on who you ask, the description can be interpreted in multiple ways. In a more generous interpretation, it is seen as a sort of kinship, of team members moving in coordinated packs in pursuit of a shared goal. For others, it can mean something far more brutal. “In Huawei, ‘wolf culture’ means you kill or be killed,” explained a former Huawei employee who I interviewed for an article on the company in 2017. “I think the idea is that if you have everyone in the company competing fiercely with one another, the company will be better at fighting and competing with external threats.”

Regardless of how its employees came to characterize it, the intensity central to Huawei’s culture also helped shape its success. In contrast to its European competitors Ericsson and Nokia who have been criticized for their cumbersome bureaucracy and perceived complacency, Huawei’s willingness to win and deliver projects regardless of seemingly any obstacle made them favorites of telecommunications network providers across the world.

Though juiced by cheap financing from the Chinese state and lucrative contracts in its domestic market that allowed it to subsidize its overseas business, there is also a competitive logic to the extreme zeal that has characterized the firm’s culture, and which also helps to explain why other Chinese firms adopted such spirit in the form of “996.”

While now considered cutting-edge innovators in some areas, Huawei and other Chinese firms experienced a constant struggle to overcome deficits in technological sophistication in comparison to their foreign peers in their early days. Without holding an advantage through unique or advanced tech, they achieved an edge through cost, speed, and a flexibility in circumventing the obstacles to doing business that can be particularly tricky in the developing world.

“What Chinese tech companies seem to really understand is the value that execution can have over product,” explains Skander Garroum, a German entrepreneur who has founded startups both in China and Silicon Valley. “The U.S.-centric tech narrative is so often one of a genius who creates a great product, and due to an open internet and open economy, it scales simply due to its obvious superiority. But in China and other developing markets, [there] are more obstacles, less openness, and scaling is a question not simply of how good a product is, but how well a team executes, and how hard they work.”

While such narratives are often hyperbolic renditions of the truth, the willingness to out-work rivals is a badge of honor many Chinese companies carry. For ride-hailing company Didi Chuxing, its famed victory over Uber in their mid-2010s battle for the Chinese market was a result of a myriad of factors. Yet to ask many who were involved, the answer is often that they simply executed better on a local level and were willing to fight harder until Uber deemed it to be simply not worth continuing the fight.

Self-defined by their work ethic and hunger, many firms have actively sought out individuals without a privileged background, but who aspire to move above their station in life. Huawei, for example, is known to target its recruiting efforts on young, skilled people from fourth- or fifth-tier cities looking for their ‘first pot of gold’ (第一桶金 dìyī tǒng jīn), using a phrase meaning the first opportunity that a person receives to make a lot of money, or to move into the middle class.

As China grew and its firms rose to global prominence, the dream of the first pot of gold was indeed achievable for many, and generous compensation often accompanied the demanding work hours. For longtime Huawei employees enrolled in the company’s share scheme, annual dividends have been known to surpass hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars for individual employees, in many cases eclipsing employees’ salaries. It was hard work, but hard work that paid off.

A system set up for employer exploitation

Known for its infamously hard-driving work culture, it can be counterintuitive to learn that the laws on the books in China are quite protective of the rights of workers. In practice, however, these rules have rarely been enforced.

Though technically mandating overtime pay for anything surpassing a standard 5-day/40-hour work week, employers are known to avail themselves of a plethora of formal and informal methods for evading their legal obligations.

In the case of Huawei, this is known to come in the form of a “striver pledge,” a supposedly “voluntary” agreement signed by new employees in which they forego their rights to overtime pay and paid time off. Though Huawei has gained attention for such an approach, similar methods seem to be commonplace, and often for companies who do not offer Huawei’s perks and paths for advancement.

“For our [blue-collar staff], our contracts stipulate that all overtime pay is already included in their monthly salaries,” explained one career-long HR manager who has worked for both domestic and foreign firms in China. “It’s not a good thing, but it is pretty standard throughout China as far as I know.”

For those who have chosen to take on the system, they have often found themselves not only to be at odds with their employer, but with the state as well. Independent labor unions are functionally illegal in China, and the state-run All-China Federation of Trade Unions has historically been inconsistent in aiding workers in labor disputes.

In 2019, former 13-year Huawei employee Li Hongyuan was jailed for 241 days over charges that he had blackmailed the company while negotiating an exit package. Though eventually freed, as prosecutors failed to find sufficient evidence of wrongdoing on his part, news of his lengthy detention was a source of considerable online outrage.

Popular frustration over labor issues in nominally socialist China seems to have been on the rise in recent years. In 2018, security at the elite Peking University cracked down on protests by the school’s Marxist Society, which itself had been protesting the crackdown on labor activists in southern China. The GitHub repository “996.ICU” became a popular online forum for tech workers frustrated with their companies’ brutal workplace practices to vent and bring attention to the worst-behaving companies. For burnt-out young people across China, the trend of “lying flat” (tǎngpíng 躺平), which rejects the pressure and ambition that so defined earlier generations, has gained sufficient popularity that the government has lambasted the movement in major newspapers.

Schrödinger’s working hours: Written laws and unwritten norms

Compounded by a need to reduce pressure on families and boost a dwindling birth rate, authorities are now looking to change the unwritten rules of the game that have long dictated labor relations in China.

In response to the August 26 ruling, many companies acted quickly to change official policies. Yet for many firms and industries, the question that looms larger is one of culture and expectations.

TikTok parent company ByteDance, which previously was known to officially conduct a six-day work week, brought an end to the policy. However, this was not entirely welcomed by employees, who in exchange for reduced work days saw commensurate reductions in their pay.

“For many of us, we know what we’re agreeing to when we work for internet companies,” explained a woman surnamed Zhou who has worked for several such firms in China. “We know we might have to work hard, but we also get a chance to make more money,” she said. “If we wanted something different, we would have decided to work for other companies,” adding that she can understand why some ByteDance employees would be upset at the reduced hours and pay.

In the eyes of some China tech workers, increased pressure on companies to comply with government’s stricter expectations around working hours may just mean more informal working hours, for which they are not directly compensated. “Nothing has changed for me or my team as far as I know,” shared one employee of a popular U.S.-listed Chinese internet company. “I work on the weekends, and will work over my holiday [the National Day holiday of October 1]. Just because it’s officially a day off doesn’t mean that business stops,” adding that they “of course” do not receive overtime pay for their extra working hours.

The idea that “business doesn’t stop” is what leaves some in doubt about whether any government regulation will have any positive impact on the condition of tech workers. “ByteDance is cutting back official hours and pay, but if nothing else changes, it doesn’t really matter,” shared Zhou bluntly. “People still want to keep their jobs and get promoted, so of course they will work as much as they can … or move to a company that will pay them more to do it.”

Yet for those who are higher up the management ladder, there is a much stronger inclination to take recent government mandates seriously, both in the letter and spirit of the law. “Companies have to show that they are taking action on this, and if they don’t, they risk being made an example of by authorities,” said the Sino-European corporate HR executive. “HR departments should be conducting company-wide audits and getting a clear picture of what kind of hours people are working,” adding that, “the most likely outcome will probably be to hire more people, who will each work shorter hours, at least in the short term.”

What most do seem to agree on is the broader trend: as Xi Jinping speaks of “common prosperity” and puts the country’s corporate titans on notice, it appears as though the go-go years of China’s gilded age are coming to a close. How far the government will go in enforcing its desired changes is yet to be determined, however. For the first time in a long time, Beijing is signaling to the country’s corporate community that it will no longer tip the scales overwhelmingly in favor of business over labor. The question now is to what degree the balance of those scales will be adjusted.

The founders of Upmesh were building a game on top of Twitch’s API when they realized something about another group of livestreamers. Even though selling through Facebook Live has been gaining popularity in Southeast Asia for years, many vendors are still going through their comments afterward and using pen-and-paper to collect orders. Upmesh was created to automate the checkout process and ultimately wants to create a platform similar to Whatnot where people can discover new live commerce sellers across different social media platforms.

Upmesh announced today it has closed a seed round of $3 million, led by Leo Capital, with participation from Beenext, iSeed, Goto Financial head of merchant financial services Jonathan Barki, BukuWarung founders Abhinay Peddisetty and Chinmay Chauhan, and Zopim founders Royston Tay and Kwok Yangbin.

Upmesh was launched nine months ago by Wong Zi Yang, Soh Jan, Nhat Vu and Shawn Teow, and is now used by almost 300 live commerce merchants in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. The startup says it processes annualized gross merchandise value of $40 million.

The platform’s tools provide e-commerce functions that automatically capture orders made in livestream comments (for example “white top +1”), matches it to the right item in a seller’s inventory and sends a checkout link to the customer. Upmesh currently works with Facebook Live, but will add other platforms, too, with the goal of becoming platform-agnostic.

Other companies that provide order-capturing tools for live commerce include CommentSold, Dibsly, Soldie and Buy It Live, but Upmesh’s founders say one of its most important differentiators is tailoring its platform to meet the expectations of sellers and customers in different Southeast Asian countries.

“If you look at the live selling climate in Southeast Asia, the way people are collecting orders between each country is very different,” said chief executive officer Wong. “Between Singapore and the Philippines, whether you key-in your inventory before or after your live really different, even whether people maintain stock counts is really different.”

Upmesh’s tool for collecting orders through Facebook Live comments

For example, he said in Singapore, inventory turnaround is usually very fast, which means even sellers who offer 1,000s of items only keep stock on the shelf for short periods of time. In the Philippines, however, many vendors do live commerce to supplement their brick-and-mortar shops. Inventory is often taken from their stores and they sell what they have on hand. “The way the software is structured has to be very customized to the individual markets,” Wong said.

Upmesh will use part of its new funding to double down on the Philippines and Malaysia for at least another six months, but it also wants to enter Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. The company plans to increase its headcount, launch marketing campaigns and create educational content for sellers.

Wong notes that even though COVID-19 drove adoption of e-commerce, it isn’t what created interest in live commerce. Many of its clients have been livestreaming for about three years. “The way that people interact with e-commerce is changing. It’s becoming more relationship driven. In fact, our sellers actually know their buyers on a first name basis, so they can call them out by name when they join their livestream,” said Wong. “It’s actually replacing advertising for small business.”

Most of Upmesh’s user acquisition so far has been through word-of-mouth, and it serves a lot of fashion live sellers, since they are a closely-knit community, said Wong.

Upmesh’s future plans revolve around turning those communities into new ways of making money, creating a platform that will let sellers and buyers interact with each other and discover live commerce videos on different social media platforms.

“If we look at an interesting comparison to the U.S., the U.S. has live commerce platforms like Whatnot, but Whatnot is focused on collectibles and vintage items, things that have a very strong secondary reseller market,” said Wong. “In the U.S., those verticals have the most amount of community, people who are talking to each other on eBay, on YouTube or offline, and they look those communities and gave them a home to be in.”

Upmesh’s dashboard for live commerce sellers

Southeast Asia, on the other hand, does not have a similar collectibles market, but communities spring up around different types of goods, like fashion or fresh foods. Those are the kinds of verticals that Upmesh wants to add to its platform.

“That’s the end game for live commerce, that you can discover and interact with different sellers and then once you find a seller you like, you can go deeper,” said Wong. “We direct users’ attention to where they goods are, and since we have the inventory of all our sellers, if you want a red dress, we can tell you which sellers have a red dress.”

The founders of Tazah Technologies, a B2B agriculture marketplace in Pakistan, met while serving leadership roles at Uber subsidiary Careem. Abrar Bajwa and Mohsin Zaka bonded during long working hours as the platform dealt with COVID-19’s impact. Eventually, the two started talking about creating their own startup. When asked how they got from ride-hailing to agri-tech, Bajwa told TechCrunch that the two grew up in farming communities. “We are from central Punjab and every family there has something to do with agriculture,” he said. “We had seen firsthand how farmers, or people who are involved in small holder farming, do not encounter social mobility based on how the deck is stacked against them.”

Agriculture is Pakistan’s biggest sector, contributing about 24% of its gross domestic product and employing half of its labor force, according to government statistics. But fragmented and complicated supply chains lead to inflated prices, food waste and low profits for farmers, all problems that Tazah wants to solve. The startup, which launched two months ago in Lahore, announced today it has raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by Global Founders Capital and Zayn Capital. Other participants included Ratio Ventures, Walled City Co, i2i Ventures, Suya Ventures, Globivest, Afropreneur Syndicate, +92 Ventures, Sunu Capital, Musha Investments and angel investors like senior executives from ride-hailing platforms Careem and Swvl, where Bajwa worked before launching Tazah.

There are currently about 300 small- to medium-sized sellers buying inventory through the platform and it moves more than 10 million tons of produce per day. Right now it offers five main kinds of products: ginger, garlic, tomatoes, potatoes and onions. Tazah plans to expand into other vegetables and fruits, but wants to ensure that it can guarantee consistent supply and quality. For example, instead of just serving as a marketplace to connect farmer and buyers, Tazah also screens produce for quality, removing rotten produce. Then it sorts them into categories for specific types of buyers.

Tazah Technologies founders Abrar Bajwa and Mohsin Zaka

For example, potatoes are separated into ones for households, restaurants, small retailers, or to be made into French fries, based on what Bajwa and Zaka learned during market research. “We have spent months in wholesale markets, we’ve interviewed hundreds of retailers and we got to know that standardization of product is needed in Pakistan,” said Bajwa. “We get into the bottom of operations, because retailers will know what exactly is in the sack.” This has resulted in a monthly retention rate of more than 80%, and most customers buy from the platform about four times a week.

“We’re not just a box-moving operation because in one sack of potatoes, there can be multiple rotten potatoes, so you don’t want to just buy from farmers and then give to retailers. That doesn’t add a lot of value,” said Zaka. Tazah is currently focused on small to medium-sized sellers who are overlooked by fast-moving consumer goods and grocery product inventory providers because they aren’t able to buy at sufficient bulk. It’s also started talking to other customer segments, including B2C marketplaces, grocery apps and stores.

Increasing farmers’ profits and reducing food waste

Tazah’s founders say fragmented supply chains mean that about 30% to 40% of produce is wasted because they perish or are damaged each time they are unloaded, warehoused and reloaded onto a truck. The company wants to fix that by creating a shorter, more streamlined logistics infrastructure. It plans to keep costs down by working with third-party warehouse and trucking providers instead of owning its own facilities.

“There is the traditional supply chain and we’re building a parallel customized supply chain that is a more efficient supply chain,” said Bajwa. “It’s almost like reinventing the wheel to build a supply chain that ensures products move as fast as possible from point of harvest to point of retail.” This means Tazah will make early investments as it works with its warehousing and trucking marketplaces for middle- and last-mile deliveries, establishing best practices for how to handle produce.

Since Tazah needs to make deliveries early in the morning, it operates small fulfillment centers in addition to warehouses to stay close to customers. Part of its new funding will be used to expand its fulfillment center network in Lahore, with the goal of being operational in the entire city by the middle of October, before expanding into new regions.

Over-harvesting also contributes to food waste, and one of Tazah’s goals is to build a data and analytics platform that will help farmers plan crops to make sure there is no oversupply in the markets they serve. Farmers typically sell their produce at markets, occasionally forming groups with other farmers. But they don’t have a lot of information about market places and supply/demand beyond their communities. They also often end up in debt to middlemen because they lack access to working capital.

While Tazah is currently focused on its supply chain work, it plans to eventually add financing options for farmers after doing research, like going through several more procurement cycles to understand what how much capital farmers need and how they are able to repay it. Some of the barriers they face include lack of formal credit histories or access to financial institutions that usually don’t open branches in rural areas. Sometimes they borrow working capital from intermediaries in the supply chain, or loan sharks who charge interest rates of more than 60%, creating cycles of indebtedness.

“Financing is something we are aggressively looking after because it’s a future play for us and we are working with farmers to know what they are doing, and how they are actually getting financing,” said Zaka.

Tazah’s founders hope to see more startups emerge to solve problems for Pakistan’s farmers. “Agriculture has been a mostly ignored sector in Pakistan from a technology perspective, and I think that as more people come into this, they’re going to help each other, as opposed to competing with each other,” said Bajwa. “We feel that as more people come in, it will be better because it will accelerate the problem solving in this very difficult space.

He added, “this is such a large space in Pakistan and it’s so inefficient that if we are even able to make a small dent, it’s going to lead to social uplift for hundreds or possibly thousands of farmers, improve the availability of fresh produce, result in less food tasted and reduce food price inflation.”

European VC Eight Roads is launching its fourth fund of $450 million for European and Israeli tech companies , aiming for another 15-20 across a broad range of consumer, software-as-a-service, fintech and healthtech areas. Cheque sizes wil range from around $5 million to $50 million per company, and as such, it tends to play more in growth funding rounds. 10-year old Eight Roads is backed by Fidelity, and was formerly known as Fidelity Growth Partners and before that Fidelity Ventures.

Eight Roads has previously invested in companies such as AppsFlyer, Cazoo, Fireblocks, Hibob, Made.com, Spendesk, Red Points, and Neo4j, and now manages over $8 billion of capital across Europe, Asia and the US. 

To give you an idea of how the fund has grown, the first Eight Roads fund was 1st was £100m, the second £150m, the first $375m, and the latest is $450m.

Davor Hebel, Managing Partner and Head of Eight Roads Ventures Europe said: “It’s great to be launching our latest fund at a time when there is so much entrepreneurial energy and ambition in both Europe and Israel and we’re now firmly on a path to building global technology champions out of the region. This additional capital enables us to continue helping ambitious founders scale, win and have a lasting impact on the way we live.”  

I asked the firm whether it will also have a climate focus, given the scale of the problems facing the planet. A spokeperson said the focus on climate cuts across all of its sectors but as an investment theme Eight Roads looks at three main focus areas: 

• Clean energy – so it has an investment in a Nordic company Tibber which helps people run their homes more sustainably.
  
• Sustainable products – Eight Roads has invested in Otrium (fashion marketplace aiming to get every item to be worn), Smol (environmentally friendly house products), La Fourche (organic and sustainable produce), VIU (eyewear brand), and Made.com (online furniture brand)
  
• Climate change tools and enablers – e.g. carbon footprint measurement and reduction
  

During an interview, Hebel told me a major investment theme last year and this had been the shift to remote working, HR systems to support that, and: “Every company needs FinTech now.”

The fourth biggest category for Eight Roads is digital health, also supercharged by the pandemic. 

Enabling technologies, like AI, are also being applied: “I wouldn’t call it a sector, but the machine learning aspect. Like Glovo, which is a company that does internal talent marketplaces for large companies, where you can match people’s talents with opportunities in other parts of the organization.”

I asked Hebel if his company was returning to the office. He said: “I think we’re still feeling our way, you know. I think we said we’ll be two days a week, and then see how it goes. It’s good to see people again.”