Target is preparing a series of changes to make its curbside pickup service called Drive Up more appealing to consumers. The retailer announced on Wednesday it will begin testing an option that will allow customers to add Starbucks orders to their pickup as well as the ability to bring back items they want to return, among other changes.

The new additions are not yet available but instead are a part of a planned expansion of the Drive Up service in fall 2022 (Q3), Target said.

Initially, the enhancements will be piloted by store employees before rolling out to Target customers in select test markets, the company told TechCrunch. Likely, Target’s hometown market of Minneapolis will be among the first testers. However, Target declined to say which cities or how many stores would gain the features or when it expected the changes to roll out more broadly.

When available, customers will see the new options appear with the Target mobile app, which today powers Target’s Drive Up service. Here, customers today can place orders for curbside pickup, then alert the store when they’re on their way. That real-time notification about the customer’s location could tie into the Starbucks ordering option, as the company will know when to begin preparing the drink orders.

Target first partnered with Starbucks in 1999, and has at least 1,300+ Starbucks cafés inside its U.S. stores, to give a sense of the potential scale of this feature long-term. (In total, Target has over 1,900 U.S. stores, and a spokesperson noted “the vast majority” now include a Starbucks café.)

While grabbing a coffee during curbside pickup is a nice perk, the ability to manage returns without having to get out of the car is a highly competitive addition. Currently, most retailers require shoppers to come inside the store and visit the customer service counter to make a return, or ship their items back directly. Amazon offers a variety of destinations that shoppers can bring their returns to in person, like Whole Foods stores and Kohl’s. Walmart, meanwhile, rolled out support for online returns in-store in 2017. It then added support for marketplace items in fall 2018.

In addition to these changes, Target said it will expand its “backup item” functionality in more categories, including beauty and household items. This allows customers to pick a suitable replacement in the case their first choice is not available.

“Our guests continue to tell us they love the ease and convenience of Drive Up, and have been asking us to add even more of the Target experience to the service. Adding Starbucks ordering and easy returns, while expanding our backup item options, will give guests even more of what they love about shopping at Target, quickly and easily,” said Mark Schindele, Target’s chief stores officer, in a statement. “Ongoing investments in our same-day services have built trust and relevance with our guests, while meeting their needs — no matter how they choose to shop,” he added.

Drive Up is one of several same-day services Target offers, alongside its traditional online Order Pickup and its grocery-focused online shopping service Shipt, which is available both inside Target’s app, on Target.com and on its own branded website and app where users can shop non-Target stores, as well.

During Target’s third-quarter 2021 earnings, the company announced that its same-day services combined grew nearly 60% this year, on top of the 200% growth they saw during the year prior. The latter, of course, was amid the height of the coronavirus pandemic, which gave retailers’ curbside pickup options a massive boost. But while many consumers tried out curbside pickup for the first time to avoid shopping in-store during the outbreak, industry experts predict consumer adoption will remain high even as customers return to stores for in-person shopping.

Target has been adding new capabilities to Drive Up since its launch, including support for features like its Adult Beverage pickup, support for “Shopping Partners” (for customers who want to send someone else to pick up their order); “Forgot Something” for add-ons after orders were placed; and others. It’s also invested in capital projects to add more permanent storage capacity in more than 200 high-volume stores, plus flexible fixtures to provide temporary storage areas to support seasonal peak, the company noted in November.

More money for casual job-matching in Europe: Zenjob, a marketplace platform that targets students looking for side jobs in sectors like retail, logistics and hospitality and promises to connect them with employers in need of temporary labor, has closed a $50 million Series D round of funding.

It’s just under two years since the Berlin-based startup raised a $30M Series C.

As with a number of other such ‘modern staffing agencies’, Zenjob directly employs temps — taking care of associated admin (like pay and back-office functions) to further simplify their experience. Another carrot it offers temp workers is a pledge that it’ll pay out half their salary within 72 hours after a fulfilled shift — potentially speeding up remittance vs a traditional agency.

On the flip side, employers sign a contract with Zenjob and can then book temporary staff as needed, including for both short and longer term jobs.

Zenjob says it works with “some of the biggest” companies in the delivery, retail, logistics, e-commerce, hospitality and service industries — but isn’t disclosing any customer names.

Currently, it says more than 2,500 companies, across 10,000+ locations in its two active European markets, are signed up to its platform to get temps on demand — with 40,000+ workers using the platform each month to book side jobs.

According to the 2015-founded startup it’s matched over 1M jobs across Germany and the Netherlands to date.

The Series D raise is led by Aragon with participation from all Zenjob’s existing investors including Acton Capital, Atlantic Labs, Forestay, and Axa Venture Partners.

The new funding is being pegged for expansion within Europe — including the UK market, where it plans to launch this summer — and for product dev, including new data-based automation features which it says are in the works to serve the needs of its expanding customer base, such as by supporting new ‘white collar’ style job categories.

“We are launching Zenjob in the UK this year and continue our investment in new European markets. We are also growing our operations in Germany and the Netherlands as well,” it tells us, adding: “We are growing our tech team and will heavily invest in the scaling and new automation features on our platform.

“Due to the heavy demand we will expand our offers in knowledge work and office jobs.”

Zenjob competes with a growing number of platforms targeting tech at job matching for temp roles — including the likes of Spain’s Jobandtalent, CornerJob and Luxembourg-based Job Today, to name a few.

Gig platform, Uber, has also been eyeing the space — launching a Work Hub for UK drivers back in 2020, as ride hailing took a demand hit during pandemic lockdowns; and a shift finder app, called Uber Works, in the US in 2019.

In the European Union, incoming regulations aimed at tackling bogus self employment on gig platforms — via a pan-EU legal framework that will set out a minimum standards for platform workers — could accelerate demand for agency-style temp staffing platforms by channeling demand for on-demand labor through staffing intermediaries that do directly employ them, thereby enabling the gig platforms themselves to avoid having to hire thousands of delivery and other casual workers.

Discussing the competitive landscape, Zenjob argues that technology will be the biggest differentiator when it comes to the staffing market, job matching and platforms.

“When you look at the market, we just scratched the surface when it comes to using technology to handle the tasks that make staffing and job search tedious and slow,” it suggests. “That’s why we focus a lot on the internal technological development of our platform and all required processes. We have currently roughly 75% fully automated processes and our aim is to get north of 95% in the near future.

“Our model works because our tech focus allows us to offer a very fast service with high quality personnel (thanks to the high degree of automation) to the companies that we work with. And we can offer high fulfilment rates and reliable personnel, because the other half of our business is focused exclusively on providing the best experience and benefits to our talents. We pay above market rates for the jobs that we offer and we care a lot about the experience and satisfaction among the more than 40,000 people who are currently using our app to book jobs at any time of the day.”

Zenjob also argues there is massive growth yet to be tapped — pointing to Germany as an example, where it says 95%+ of staffing is still done mostly offline.

“So we are competing with large companies that are approaching job matching and staffing in a very traditional way,” it adds. “Our approach is 100% digital and we are always working on improving the benefits that we can offer to the people who book jobs through us: Fast payments, 24/7 opportunity to book jobs.”

Companies that help businesses integrate voice and video communication into their apps and services have proliferated in recent years, with services such as Twilio and Diagflow, an NLP platform developed by Google, proliferating.

Voximplant has raised $10.1M so far to do similar things, and is now launching the beta version of its Avatar product. Investors in Voximplant include Baring Vostok Capital Partners, RTP Ventures and Google Launchpad Accelerator.

The San Francisco-based startup offers an out-of-the-box Natural Language Processing (NLP) service that allows developers to embed NLP functionality into their apps, enabling them to build smart IVRs, voicebots, and chatbots for things like inbound call automation, FAQ, interactive surveys, NPS, contact center automation, and other examples.

Voximplant says it’s main offering is that developers can build AI-powered bots and connect them easily to chat and telephony, without building complex backend logic, through a combination of a no-code editor and conversational AI.

It also says developers only need to know Javascript at a basic level as all the machine learning aspects are handled by the platform.

“We at Voximplant believe that the next generation of CPaaS is about intelligent services mixed together with easily programmable omnichannel communication capabilities and that this brings maximum value to our existing and future customers,” said Alexey Aylarov, CEO and Co-founder of Voximplant, in a statement.

Earnings season is usually a snoozer if you aren’t obsessed with the stock market. So I understand if the last thing you want to read about this morning is a meta-analysis of cross-sector earnings. But hear me out.

TechCrunch has tracked a select handful of earnings reports from major technology companies in the current Q4 2021 reporting cycle. The picture that emerges is one of companies boosted by the pandemic coming back to Earth, while companies that faced a drop in demand due to COVID-19 are on the bounce.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

The latest corporate results are telling us that the pandemic is over, from a business perspective. This is critical for startups to understand.

Roblox shares are down today, as are Shopify’s. But Airbnb and Uber and Lyft are doing better than you might have expected.

What’s losing favor? Software, video and audio streaming, trading services, e-commerce, consumer fintech, gaming and, in some cases, social networking. And on the previously losing but now winning side, we have lodging and travel to start. The market has inverted, and startups need to prep for a re-inverted world.

So let’s talk accelerated and decelerated startup sectors in light of what we’ve learned from Big Tech’s flashing warning and jackpot lights.

Down is up, up is down

It was December when TechCrunch began to ring the alarm that software stocks, among the largest beneficiaries of pandemic tailwinds in terms of market demand and investor favor, were in decline. The selloff persisted into the new year. We should have read more into the early signal that public-market investors were sending.

Voila, a startup building infrastructure for social commerce, is bringing concepts from China’s e-commerce market to the U.S. The company offers an alternative to the “link in bio” solutions used today by creators, like Linktree and Beacons, which direct followers to creators’ social profiles, personal websites, and other recommendations. Instead of a link list or landing page, Voila creates A.I.-powered customizable, shoppable storefronts by automatically detecting items in the creators’ online content then generating shoppable links.

With now over 10,000 creators signed up for the service, Voila is today announcing the close of its $6 million Series A led by Sinnovation Ventures and joined by Fosun Rz Capital. To date, Voila has raised $7.5 million, including from investors SOSV and Artesian.

Voila founder Ke Shang first moved from China to the U.S. to attend college. He later joined a machine learning team at Google, thanks to his mathematics background. But Shang was always interested in how U.S. e-commerce could be improved with technology.

For instance, Shang shares how he was once inspired by a joke on the TV show “The Big Bang Theory” to build a tech-enabled shopping tool. On the show, the character Penny asked the oddball genius, Sheldon, to create something that would allow her to take a photo of a shoe she liked in order to instantly find out where to buy it.

“Sheldon thought it was stupid,” says Shang. “But I thought this is a great idea — I could just scan through any content and find out all the shopping options right away. And if you could tell me the best deal it would be even better.”

He ended up experimenting with the idea by building out a big database of shoes by crawling online shoestores like Zappos, DSW, and others, then used deep learning to train a model that would allow users to find similar pairs of shoes to those in their photo. The project wasn’t really commercially viable, but led Shang towards the creation of Voila.

Today, the founder explains, online creators act as the connector between the product and the consumers. But often, their followers who want to buy the item in question have to leave the social media app and go to Google to search for the product. And if the product has gone viral, you may find it’s already out of stock by the time you come across the photo or video that prompted you to buy in the first place.

Image Credits: Voila

Voila offers an improved solution. While it will allow creators to enter the exact URLs for the products featured on their social media accounts, its secret sauce is how it can build out an extended list of recommendations automatically. To work, creators connect their Instagram or TikTok accounts to Voila, which then scans through their content to detect items and generate affiliate links. As part of this process, it uses machine learning to try to also analyze the scene in order to suggest other relevant items that can be added.

That is, in addition to the specific product the influencer suggested, Voila can generate a list of similar products at different price points and generate affiliate links to those items as well.

Image Credits: Voila

“We like certain influencers’ or celebrities’ lifestyles, but we can’t afford those styles,” Shang explains. “That shouldn’t stop our pursuit,” he notes. “You have options. It’s just a way to make sure that everyone finds the right thing and increases the creators’ content-inspired sales.”

Plus, if an item is sold out at one retailer, Voila can find it at another.

It can also suggest items to accompany the purchase that aren’t in the photo or video. For example, if the influencer was wearing a nice pair of sunglasses on a hot, sunny day, Voila might suggest a hydrating face mask alongside the sunglasses.

Image Credits: Voila

To train its model, Voila crawled around 50 million fashion and style photos and learned north of 300 different attributes that relate to apparel items.

The products are showcased on online storefronts that creators can customize with their own text, colors and links. On the backend, it offers creators analytics detailing their shop’s engagement, audience demographics, and more.

Image Credits: Voila

Since launching in late 2019, Voila has signed up over 10,000 creators to its service. More than 70% are based in North America, with around 20% in Europe and the rest hailing from parts of Asia. Unlike some “link in bio” solutions, Voila’s service is free to the creators — there’s no freemium tier with a push to upgrade to a premium subscription.

Instead, Voila works with affiliate marketing programs Rakuten and CJ to create the creators’ links that can be matched to a database of roughly 3 million products. Its revenue comes from taking a percentage of sales its platform generates. Voila won’t disclose how much it’s making, citing the early-stage nature of its business and the competitive landscape.

Image Credits: Voila

Shang ended up fundraising for Voila after getting stuck in China after flying home to visit family just before Covid hit.

“I was stuck there for two years,” he says. “But while I was in China, I didn’t waste any time. I got the team built. I was also able to raise two rounds — one pre-Series A round from a small investor and a Series A round from the current investors.”

Today, Voila has a 40-person team, which includes former Alibaba, Bytedcance, and Rent the Runway employees across both the U.S. and China. The company is now in search of a CMO.

Shang, who’s currently on the East Coast, is preparing to move out to California to be in a better time zone for communicating with staff in China.

“I haven’t been able to sleep before 3 AM every day. I can’t do that anymore,” he notes.

With the additional funds, Voila plans to grow its user base and spend more of its resources on its database.

“That’s really the most difficult task, and I think that’s the key to our success,” Shang says.

Based in Singapore with offices throughout Asia and Australia, Reebelo wants to make buying pre-owned tech as desirable as a brand new device. “What we have seen is that many younger generations are very much open to the idea of sustainable consumption,” co-founder Philip Franta told TechCrunch. “We see a lot of growth and momentum in the space globally, but also here in this region, because I think we are finally at the stage as a society where we’ve realized that the way we’ve consumed in the past is not sustainable.”

Investors agree, with Reebelo announcing a $20 million Series A today, led by Cathay Innovation and June Fund. Other participants include FJ Labs, Naver affiliate KREAM, Moore Strategic Ventures, French Partners and Gandel Invest. Returning backers also contributed, like Antler, Maximilian Bittner (co-founder of Lazada and current CEO of Vestiaire Collective, an e-commerce site for curated pre-owned fashion) and Michael Cassau, the founder and CEO of Grover, a tech rental platform.

Reebelo’s last funding was a $1 million seed round announced in June 2020. The company was founded in 2019 by Franta and Fabien Rastouil. It says that in less than two years, its revenue has grown 600% year-over-year and it now has 10,000 monthly customers and is nearing $100 million in annualized gross merchandise value. It has offices in Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Taiwan.

In an interview, Franta and Rastouil said they wanted to create a startup that combined social and entrepreneurial impact. Both had related work experience in Europe—Franta was involved in subscription device programs for telecoms, while Rastouil worked at Recommerce Solutions, a French platform for pre-owned devices.

But the two said something like Recommerce didn’t exist yet in Singapore, where Rastouil grew up.

Unlike many e-commerce marketplaces, Reebelo selects its vendors, with an emphasize on standardizing the condition of devices and a specific grading systems for shoppers, using criteria like aesthetics (for example, if the device has a couple of scratches) and battery life. Partner vendors range from small shops to B2B players with much larger volumes of devices. Reebelo’s goal is to build the biggest inventory of pre-owned, refurbished devices, and says it is already the market leader in Singapore and Australia.

Before adding vendors to its platform, Reebelo screens them, checking that they are legal businesses, assessing their ratings on different distribution channels and making sure they are willing to abide by Reebelo’s quality checkpoints and returns and conditions. The latter includes free returns for 14 days and a one-year free warranty.

“This helps to filter quite well the vendors initially because some don’t want to agree to a one-year guarantee,” Franta said.

But Reebelo also sees its vendors as customers.

“We want to be a platform for all players in this circular economy,” said Rastouil, which includes vendors that are just getting started selling certified pre-owned devices. “Vendors are also our customers, because we really want to create this whole circular economy together with them in the region because it’s new for everyone.”

In terms of competition, Reebelo’s founders say it is a first-move in the APAC region, unlike Europe, where there are already several pre-owned device marketplaces. Instead of other e-commerce platforms, the main challenge is convincing customers that pre-owned devices can be just as good as brand new ones.

“There is quite some stigma in some countries here in the region, so the first challenge we had to overcome in the beginning was creating trust with our users,” says Franta. “That meant really changing minds from buying new to also buying refurbished devices, but I think we have achieved a lot.”

The new funding will be used to hire about 50 new employees in Reebelo’s existing markets across departments, and expand into new markets in 2022, including South Korea. It plans to offer new financial services, like device subscription, extended warranties in some areas, damage coverage or stolen phone protection. It is also expanding its verticals. Right now, Reebelo’s main category is smartphones, but it wants to sell more tablets, laptops and drones.

In a statement, Cathay Innovation investment director Rajive Keshup said, “Reebelo is providing a platform and marketplace for consumers that makes it easier for anyone to obtain electronic goods, all while helping to solve the problem of e-waste. The company is providing a pivotal platform for the circular economy in Southeast Asia and Australia, and we look forward to helping foster their expansion and growth.”

Banked is a FinTech startup that offers an alternative to card schemes. Consumers are able to pay without entering financial data, no need to create an account, no financial details are shared, authorization is biometric, and the merchant receives the funds in real-time. Businesses use it to drive customer engagement and loyalty with incentives and rewards embedded inside the payment process. It also claims its fees are up to 90% lower than the traditional payment methods. Back in 2020, the London-based fintech raised £2.35 million in seed funding.

It’s now raised a $20 million Series A funding round led by Bank of America and Edenred Capital Partners. These US investors will be part of the company’s planed US expansion.

Existing investors Acrew, Force Over Mass, Firestartr, OM2, Love Ventures, Kuvi Capital and Paul Forster (founder of Indeed.com) also participated again. New investors include Sidekick, 9Yards and Huey Lin (ex-PayPal). This means Banked has raised a total investment to date to over $30 million

The market for account-to-account payments is growing and is predicted to reach $43 billion by 2026 in Europe, according to research by Allied Market Research.

Faiz Ahmad, head of global transaction services with Bank of America, said: “We are pleased to be a lead investor for Banked and they have already demonstrated a proven ability to develop unique e-Commerce solutions.”

Banked competes to some extent with Truelayer, Trustly and Volt but, it doesn’t just provide rails and infrastructure, as it has more of an end-to-end experience.

Brad Goodall, Banked CEO, said told me: “We are building a branded network for the benefit of all merchants and consumers – merchants who work with us benefit from being part of the ecosystem for example a more seamless checkout, customer awareness and comfort with the payment method – alongside all the obvious benefits fo much cheaper payments, lower fraud, instant refunds etc.”

Meal deliveries in Vietnamese cities typically take less than half an hour, but grocery deliveries are lagging behind, sometimes taking up to two to three hours, says Rino founder Trung Thanh Nguyen. By creating a vertically-integrated logistics infrastructure centered around “dark stores,” or stores set up for order fulfillment only, Nguyen says Rino can cut grocery delivery times down to just 10 minutes. The startup, which will launch this month in Ho Chi Minh City, announced today it has raised a $3 million pre-seed round from Global Founders Capital (GFC), Sequoia Capital India, Venturra Discovery and Saison Capital.

After a wider public launch in March 2022, Rino (which stands for “right now”) plans to expand quickly, first in Ho Chi Minh City’s most densely-populated areas, then in Hanoi. 

Before starting Rino, Nguyen was co-founder and chief operating officer of Baemin Vietnam, one of the country’s largest food delivery apps. Before that, he served as Grab Vietnam’s head of GrabBike and GrabExpress.

Rino’s grocery delivery app

When asked why he wanted to focus on grocery deliveries after Baemin, Nguyen told TechCrunch that the rapid adoption of food deliveries in Vietnam “created a clear roadmap for the groceries segment.”

“Four years ago, food delivery in Vietnam was slow. Meals took up to an hour to reach customers, which meant that individuals had to get used to planning meals in advance,” he said. “Once the platforms reduced it to under 30 minutes, consumer behavior changed quickly and the sector as a whole had an opportunity to grow more than 10-fold within a very short time.” 

Nguyen believes grocery deliveries will follow the same pace. Adoption of grocery deliveries increased during COVID-19 lockdowns in Vietnam last year, and have become a regular part of consumer purchasing habits, he said. “Customers are ready, but existing delivery options including retail chains or third-party platforms who deliver on behalf of retailers are either too slow or unreliable.” 

Rino plans to cut that time down by owning its inventory, purchased directly from suppliers, and integrating its own dark stores into its logistics infrastructure. In order to make deliveries in such a short time, Nguyen said Rino will divide each of its cities into service zones with a radius of one to three kilometers. Each zone will have  a dedicated dark store owned and operated by Rino, with last-mile deliveries performed in batches by its own fleet of riders.

In a prepared statement about the investment, Saison Capital partner Chris Sirise said, “The quick commerce landscape has benefitted from permanent gains as consumers of all demographics continue to rely on e-commerce options even after COVID-19 lockdowns taper off. What we’ve seen from the founding team leading up to the launch reaffirms what we’ve seen from Trung throughout his time spearheading growth at Baemin Vietnam and Grab—high caliber industry leaders who not only have the insights required to lead the market but also the local know-how needed to truly cater to local needs.”

Livestream shopping platform Whatnot has come a long from being run out of a garage in Phoenix to now a 120-person company, valued at $1.5 billion, that’s expected to grow to over 300 people by year-end as its business explodes. To aid on that front, Whatnot is making two key hires, one of which involves the acquisition of Pastel Labs, a company founded in 2020 by Jeff Chang, previously the technical lead for Pinterest’s growth team and a well-known growth advisor. Chang has now become Whatnot’s Head of Growth, as a result of the all-stock deal that’s considered more of an “acqui-hire” as it doesn’t involve IP. In addition, Whatnot is announcing the hire of the former Head of Growth and Product Engineering for Lyft, Ludo Antonov as VP and Head of Engineering.

Whatnot co-founder and CEO Grant Lafontaine characterized the Pastel Labs deal — which was finalized in December, but not yet announced — as being in the five to ten million-dollar range. Pastel Labs had been a small, five-person team that was building experimental products, including a software-as-a-service product designed to capture user video testimonials and an edtech marketplace for online tutoring.

Image Credits: Whatnot

Lafontaine had originally gotten to know Chang through Y Combinator, the accelerator program Whatnot participated in just before Covid hit in winter 2020. In the early days, the startup — which largely focused on reselling collectibles like Funko Pops — couldn’t raise money as people were instead focused on the pandemic, not frivolity. Whatnot even had to relocate from L.A. to Phoenix for a time. But the team kept building, understanding that live and social commerce in the U.S. market was in the early stages, and still had a lot of potential.

“[Chang is] actually one of the people at Y Combinator who teaches growth,” notes Lafontaine, describing Chang as one of the top people in the world in terms of knowing “how to scale a company, grow it and the mechanisms for doing that.” Chang had already advised Whatnot on some of its growth problems in the past, he notes. And as they talked more, Lafontaine saw how some of the things being developed at Pastel Labs could be better applied at Whatnot, which had just seen 60x growth over the past year.

At Whatnot, Chang will focus on scaling the seller side of its marketplace, which is today focused on collectibles like sports and game cards, toys, comics, vintage games, and, more recently, other enthusiast categories like sneakers, vintage fashion, and vinyl records. He’ll also work on building up the buy-side of Whatnot’s business, and figuring out the mechanics need there to continue to scale — whether that’s advertising or sharing tools, or anything else. Chang will lead the growth team, which is now a half-dozen employees and planning to expand.

Antonov, meanwhile, has previous experience at a number of top tech companies like Lyft, Pinterest, and Hulu, and will now run Whatnot’s engineering team.

Image Credits: Whatnot

“Ludo has, one, helped build world-class engineering teams —  from the growth team at Pinterest, which was one of the best growth teams in the world — to running a couple hundred-person product and growth engineering team at Lyft,” praises Lafontaine. “His background is just about as perfect as it gets for Whatnot. He’s worked in video. He’s worked at content and Pinterest, and he’s worked in a marketplace at Lyft.”

Whatnot, he adds, encompasses all three — it’s a content platform, marketplace, and video platform.

Together, the new hires will help to guide the still expanding startup in the months to come as it navigates into new areas, which now includes NFTs, and as it tackles other challenges, like scaling, low-latency environments, or building out discovery systems that rely on real-time data. In the year ahead, Lafontaine says Whatnot will continue to expand outside of collectibles and other enthusiast categories. The team also plans to add new consumer-facing features and more seller tools.

“Jeff and Ludo both bring a wealth of experience as leading growth and marketplace engineering teams, where they not only married both content and commerce but displayed the chops for scaling a company to hundreds of millions of users,” said Lafontaine. “We couldn’t be more excited to have both Ludo and Jeff join Whatnot.”

A new Pinterest feature will allow consumers to see what furniture or other home décor items will look like in their own home, using augmented reality (AR). Similar technology has already been put into place by major retailers, like Amazon, IKEA or Wayfair, as well as others in the home design space, like Houzz. In Pinterest’s case, it’s working with a select group of U.S. retailers including Crate & Barrel, Walmart, West Elm and Wayfair, to allow online shoppers to virtually place items in their home using the Pinterest app’s “Lens camera.” If the user then likes what they see, they can proceed to purchase the item directly from the retailer.

This virtual shopping experience for home décor is launching in the U.S. across more than 80,000 shoppable Pins, which makes it Pinterest’s largest AR shopping investment to date.

It’s also the third “Try On” product Pinterest has launched over the past two years. Its first efforts were in the beauty market, with Try On features that allowed consumers to virtually experiment with different lipstick shades and eyeshadows, totaling 14,000 shoppable Pins. Pinterest had not yet worked with placing items directly in a room, in other words — only on users’ faces. While not quite the same technology as before, all of Pinterest’s Try On experiences have the same goal of turning product inspiration into purchases.

To use the feature on iOS or Android, users in the U.S. can click supported home décor Pins then click “Try in your Space” to see the virtual product through the camera lens. Users can adjust the product in their own space and browse the product information, including pricing. To purchase, they just click the Pin again to be directed to the checkout page on the retailer’s website.

Image Credits: Pinterest

This attempt to funnel consumers’ more casual browsing into retail transactions has been Pinterest’s larger focus over the years. But the company has been slow to adapt to various market shifts, including the move away from static images to video as shopping inspiration, for example — at least until more recently. Last year, the company belatedly entered this space with the launch of its debut video-first product, Idea Pins, and has since invested in creator tools that would allow online influencers to make money from their content.

Pinterest is also clearly not the first to market with its new AR feature for shopping furniture and décor. But the AR shopping market is still early. Here, initial adoption has been limited by the tools available to AR developers, like Apple’s ARKit, which has steadily improved over time to make the end-user experience less cumbersome and clunky. And app makers are still figuring out how to make AR shopping appealing to consumers. Just last week, for instance, Snapchat upgraded its own AR features which now include a shopping Lens that lets consumers browse multiple products in one place with real-time pricing.

While some of the early experiments in AR shopping have felt more gimmicky, there are some indications that using AR can help retailers increase conversions when done well. And there may be some consumer demand for this type of experience. For example, a Google survey from 2019 indicated consumer interest in AR, with 66% of people saying they wanted to use AR for help when shopping. But real-world research and data on conversions have been more limited. However, e-commerce platform Shopify shared that merchants who were adding 3D content to their stores were seeing a 94% conversion lift, on average, citing its own internal data. And some merchants who used 3D models in AR had increased conversion rates by up to 250%, Shopify said. It also cited 2020 research by Vertebrae which found that conversion rates increase by 90% for customers who engage with AR, versus those who don’t.

Pinterest, meanwhile, noted that its own users are 5 times more likely to purchase from a “Try On”-enabled Pin than a standard Pin. It also said that home décor is the top category on its site, with 3.37 billion search clicks in 2021. That makes this latest AR initiative one with a potentially larger audience than its AR beauty shopping features. The company touted its visual search feature, where usage increased by 126% year-over-year, but didn’t offer hard numbers in terms of total searches.

“Since the pandemic began, we’re seeing more digitally savvy shoppers than ever before, as millions of people now expect virtual and mobile options to try before they buy, see personalized recommendations, and gather information as part of their decision-making process,” said Jeremy King, SVP of Engineering at Pinterest, in an announcement. “These behaviors are happening across Pinterest every day, which is why we’re continuing to advance technologies like AR Try On and make Pinterest a full-funnel shopping destination that takes people from inspiration to purchase anywhere in the app.”

The company told TechCrunch it’s not currently monetizing its AR shopping feature. But its retail partners on the efforts are brands who have already seen both organic and paid advertising success on Pinterest, and are now taking advantage of another way to allow consumers to discover products organically.

The AR shopping feature is U.S.-only on iOS and Android at launch, but will later roll out to global markets, Pinterest said.

By now, many of us are familiar with the warehouse robots which populate those vast spaces occupied by the likes of Amazon and others. In particular, Amazon was very much a pioneer of the technology. But it’s 2021 now, and allying warehouse robots with a software logistics platform is no longer the monopoly of one company.

One late-stage startup which has been ‘making hay’ with the whole idea is Paack, an e-commerce delivery platform which a sophisticated software platform that integrates with the robotics which are essential to modern-day logistics operations.

It’s now raised €200m ($225m) in a Series D funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The capital will be used for product development and European expansion.

New participants for this round also include Infravia Capital Partners, First Bridge Ventures, and Endeavor Catalyst. Returning investors include Unbound, Kibo Ventures, Big Sur Ventures, RPS Ventures, Fuse Partners, Rider Global, Castel Capital, and Iñaki Berenguer.

This funding round comes after the creation of a profitable position in its home market of Spain, but Paack claims it’s on track to achieve similar across its European operations, Such as in the UK, France, and Portugal.

Founded by Fernando Benito, Xavier Rosales and Suraj Shirvankar, Paack now says it’s delivering several million orders per month from 150 international clients, processing 10,000 parcels per hour, per site. Some 17 of them are amongst the largest e-commerce retailers in Spain.

The startup’s systems integrate with e-commerce sites. This means consumers are able to customize their delivery schedule at checkout, says the company.

Benito, CEO and Co-founder, said: “Demand for convenient, timely, and more sustainable methods of delivery is going to explode over the next few years and Paack is providing the solution. We use technology to provide consumers with control and choice over their deliveries, and reduce the carbon footprint of our distribution.” 

Max Ohrstrand, Investment Director at SoftBank Investment Advisers said: “As the e-commerce sector continues to flourish and same-day delivery is increasingly the norm for consumers, we believe Paack is well-positioned to become the category leader both in terms of its technology and commitment to sustainability.”

According to research from the World Economic Forum (WEF), the last-mile delivery business is expected to grow 78% by 2030, causing a rise in CO2 emissions of nearly one-third.

As a result, Paack claim it aims to deliver all parcels at carbon net-zero by measuring its environmental impact, using electric last-mile delivery vehicles. It is now seeking certification with The Carbon Trust and United Nations.

In an interview Benito told me: “We have a very clear short term vision which is to lead sustainable e-commerce delivers in Europe… through technology via what we think is perhaps the most advanced tech delivery platform for last-mile delivery. Our CTO was the CTO and co-founder of Google Cloud, for instance.”

“We are developing everything from warehouse automation, time windows, routing integrations etc. in order to achieve the best delivery experience.”

Paack says it is able to work with more than one robotics partner, but presently it is using robots from Chinese firm GEEK.

The company hopes it can compete with the likes of DHL, Instabox, and La Poste in Europe, which are large incumbents.