Alongside the dramatic growth in e-commerce, in part fueled by the pandemic, there’s also increased demand for services that can help merchants more easily participate online. A startup called Soona, now backed by an additional $35 million in Series B funding, has been tapping into this market with its platform that allows brands to create content for their e-commerce websites and marketing through “virtual” photo and video shoots. That is, instead of having merchants ship off their items for a remote photo shoot, then wait for the results, Soona’s technology allows the brands to participate in the photo shoot process, both remotely and in real-time.

“We invite you to join your photoshoot in the browser. It’s not all that different than you and I joining a Zoom meeting,” explains Soona co-founder and CEO Liz Giorgi. “You click on the calendar invitation and your photoshoot appears in the browser where you can see every single photo and video clip as it’s captured in real-time. Those assets are there for you to interact with, so the customers or the teams can give feedback on those assets to the photographer,” she says.

Image Credits: Soona

Soona’s customers can communicate to the photographer if they want to do things like change the composition, add or remove props from the scene, or anything else they want to tweak about the photoshoot. What’s more, the merchants appreciate how they don’t have to pay upfront for the service. Instead, they’ll pay $39 per photo or $93 per video clip, and only have to purchase the assets they actually want. Once their selection is made, the photos and videos are delivered within 24 hours, ready to be uploaded to the merchants’ website or marketing channels. Merchants can also visit their past shoots at any time and order more content.

The business’s success has now led to a new infusion of capital, as Soona is announcing today it’s received $35 million in new funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. Prior investors Union Square Ventures, Matchstick Ventures, Starting Line Ventures, 2048 Ventures, and Range Ventures also participated in the round, bringing the company’s total raise to date to $51 million.

Giorgi’s background is in professional media production. Before starting Soona, she ran her own internet video production company, Mighteor, after working in media and television production previously. She says the experience has given her a good eye for determining how to make content, and specifically, how to make content beautiful. Her co-founder, Hayley Anderson, meanwhile, has a background in animation and was a creative director at Mighteor, which was later acquired by creator network Standard.

Image Credits: Soona; Hayley Anderson and Liz Giorgi

The duo founded Soona in 2019, launching their initial product the same year. In its earlier days, Soona worked by having customers come into actual studios for their photo and video shoots, while using software that offered quick uploads of the footage for the customers to shop from immediately. But the pandemic forced Soona to readjust and switch to a virtual model. As it turned out, embracing this model has helped the business grow not only during the height of the pandemic, when in-person activities shut down, but also in the months since as remote work became more of a business norm. Soona grew its revenue 400% from 2020 to 2021, then another 300% from 2021 to 2022. The company won’t share its annual revenue figures, however, citing its competitive advantage in keeping its business metrics private.

Today, Soona has served around 10,000 merchants, including customers like Wild Earth, Lola Tampons, The Sill, SNOW, Birchbox and others, but not via a subscription model. Instead, it’s a transactional business — but one Giorgi believes has found the right product-market fit as 63% of its revenue, month-over-month last year, came from repeat customers. Around 60% of its customers are $1 million to $5 million e-commerce stores, many of which are building on Shopify. The company is strong in cosmetics, beauty, wellness, fashion, and footwear, and is now growing more in consumer packaged goods and nutrition products.

“While we may not have a recurring business model, there is a high level of reoccurrence to how often brands need these assets. And so by making it possible for them to choose when and how they’re going to spend money and make investments in these visual assets, we’ve made it really easy for them to continue to work with Soona,” notes Giorgi. “But we’re not taking subscriptions off the table,” she adds.

Today, there are other businesses that allow merchants to ship in products for remote photo shoots, like Pow Photography, but they don’t offer Soona’s real-time experience. And some rivals primarily focus on “product-on-white” photography — product images on white backgrounds for traditional e-commerce sites — as opposed to the richer content created by pairing products with models in photos shot in living rooms or kitchen sets, for example. Meanwhile, other competitors work to connect merchants with photographers directly in more of a marketplace-style offering.

Image Credits: Soona

Soona’s proprietary technology, however, offers the customers everything they need to plan their photoshoot online, including access to models — both human and pet! — and stylists. Models work on a contract basis, similar to other gig economy jobs. But Soona’s photographers can either take on the jobs as gigs or transition to full-time employees. Today, there are around 35 full-time photographers on staff, and roughly 100 on contract.

With the additional funding, Soona is looking to grow its marketplace of model services, which is now one of the quickest-growing segments of its business — 20% of the total business in 2021, in fact. Soona plans to triple the size of this platform in 2022 to bring on more types of diverse talent and new ways of showing off products for its merchant customers. It will also invest in technology that will help make more recommendations to brands about what type of photoshoots to create by asking for select business data and the merchant’s goals. Already, Soona has launched Amazon and Instagram recommended shoots and is planning to launch something similar for TikTok.

The company also plans to expand its API platform, to grow its set of integrations beyond Shopify, which today accounts for 55% of its customer base. Going forward, Soona aims to integrate with other pieces of the e-commerce technology stack, like Klayvio or BigCommerce, for example.

The company, which has hubs in Denver, Austin, and the Twin Cities, will also triple its engineering team by adding engineers outside the current team in Minneapolis. It will grow its product team as well.

Giorgi declined to speak to Soona’s current valuation, but noted Soona is “on the path” towards becoming the next female-founded unicorn. “We’re going to get there very soon,” she said.

Mio, the Vietnamese social commerce platform, has raised an $8 million Series A, less than a year after announcing its seed round. The funding was led by Jungle Ventures, Patamar Capital and Oliver Jung, with participation from returning investors GGV, Venturra, Hustle Fund, iSEED SEA and Gokul Rajaram.

TechCrunch first covered Mio at the time of its $1 million seed funding in May 2021. Founded in 2020, Mio is a group buying platform that focuses on selling fresh produce and groceries in Tier 2 and 3 cities in Vietnam. The company is able to offer next day delivery because it built a logistics infrastructure that enables it to send produce directly from farms to customers.

The Series A brings Mio’s total raised to $9.1 million, and will be used to expand its logistics and fulfillment system, enter new areas in Vietnam and add new product categories like fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and household appliances.

Mio co-founder and chief executive officer Trung Huynh said that since TechCrunch first covered Mio seven months ago, it has achieved 10x gross merchandise value growth, a 10x increase in agents, or resellers, and grew its team from 60 people to 240. It now fulfills more than 10,000 pieces of fresh produce per day, operating in Ho Chi Minh, Thu Duc, Binh Duong, Dong Nai and Long An, with plans to expand into northern Vietnam.

The numbers “strengthened our conviction in this model and its potential,” he said. “We need fresh capital to accelerate hiring, product development and supply chain to keep up with the pace of growth as we deepen our presence in existing geographies and expand to new provinces.”

Mio is able to offer next day deliveries because its vertically integrated mayor layers of the value chain, including procurement, warehousing, order sorting and bulk delivery. The startup owns the majority of its logistics infrastructure and uses its own fleet of couriers. Its ability to delivery fresh produce directly from farms to customers in less than 16 hours contributed to higher customer retention and growth, Huynh said, and it will continue to shorten delivery times. .

Mio resellers are called Mio Partners. Huynh said one of the driving factors behind Mio is targeting the right people for the program, or “housewives and stay-home-moms in lower income regions who love sharing value-for-money products to their social circle of friends.”

They aggregate orders, usually from friends and family, and orders are delivered to them in batches for distribution. The startup claims Mio Partners can make up to $400 a month, including a 10% commission on each order and additional commissions based on the monthly performance of other resellers they referred to the program.

“There is a strong possibility” that Mio will expand beyond Vietnam, Huynh said, “but will only be considered at a more appropriate time after we successfully built our playbook for Vietnam.”

Halsey Minor has lived many lives.

One of the founders of CNET, Minor entered tech media at a time when the closest thing most of us had to the web was a spider spinning cobwebs on an old NES. Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, Minor worked for Merrill Lynch during the rise of the internet in the early 1990s and, in the words of Wayne Gretzky, has been skating to where the puck is going ever since.

Since his initial foray into media, Minor has taken to cryptocurrency and blockchain in a big way. In 2014, he started an exchange, Bitreserve, which morphed into Uphold, a money transfer product that supported over 30 currencies, including crypto.

Over the last few years, he built Live Planet, a video service, and VideoCoin, a token that rewards idle data centers for serving up video content. Now he’s expanded into NFTs and sees the space as wide open yet in need of serious change. We spoke to Minor about his view of the current NFT market and what needs to be done to turn today’s technology into tomorrow’s CNET.

These days, Minor is building startups – and running Zoom calls.

“I’ve spent the pandemic educating five children — with two dogs and a cat,” Minor said. “It’s been incredibly hard if you have a lot of children because of all the added work that comes from Zoom-based homeschooling. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to be able to work from home.”

“With five children in school it leaves very little time for anything other than around-the-clock work,” he said. “People honestly don’t talk about this enough probably because it’s not a sexy story.”

TechCrunch: You’ve gone all-in on crypto and NFTs after a career in content. Why?

Halsey Minor: Much like I recognized the massive explosion of the internet many years ago, I see crypto and NFTs as the technology of the future. As NFTs become more accessible and mainstream, the creator economy will continue to migrate to the blockchain and, I believe, will eventually overtake traditional platforms. I am all-in on video NFTs with Vivid Labs because we believe video is the next great bulwark for NFTs and has the potential to spread into various verticals, from gaming to art to traditional entertainment. Video has always been one of the most compelling, engaging and empathetic mediums across all swaths of entertainment, and we don’t expect NFTs to be immune to that.

What advice do you have for new founders right now? What’s the best route to raising capital?

When I started my first company CNET, 26 years ago, I had no track record. Everything I did was to build credibility. I hired a former head of programming and marketing at Fox and the head of multimedia from Bell Labs with extensive internet experience (rare skill in 1995). You need to sell great people on your vision to build great things. These people helped turn CNET into a NASDAQ 100 company in four years.

Instant purchase and delivery of food and other essentials was one of the big bubbles of opportunity in the world of e-commerce in the last year, with dozens of startups big and small emerging and scooping up funding to build out businesses to bring items like groceries, toilet paper and Tylenol to people’s doors in 30 minutes or less. Now a startup called Arive that’s applying this concept to the wider world of consumer goods in a Prime Now-style service — partnering with premium stores and brands to sell and deliver items like Apple electronics and Bose headphones, Lululemon active wear, furniture and beauty and bath products and Van Moof electric bikes, and then delivering items via its own courier service —  is announcing a Series A of $20 million to see if the idea finds traction beyond essentials.

The funding is being led by Balderton Capital, with Global Founders Capital (the firm connected to Rocket Internet’s Samwer family), Burda Principal Investments, La Famiglia and 468 Capital also participating. (La Famiglia and 468 Capital are repeat backers of Munich-based Arive, both having invested in the seed round for the company, which is not to be confused with the mortgage startup of the same name in the U.S.)

Arive’s funding, and list of backers, is notable in that it’s based on a pretty limited run so far. The startup launched only four months ago and is currently active in just four cities in Germany — Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and Frankfurt — although now the idea will be to use the investment to expand further across the country and to start considering which other markets to tackle next.

The reason for the vote of confidence is that so far, the numbers look promising. Arive is not disclosing how many customers it has or what its revenues are looking like, but it notes that the average order size is between €50 and €100 ($56 and $113) across some 1,000 SKUs, with the average basket containing between one and four items. That presents what Arive is doing as a very different proposition to what, say, a GoPuff or Getir is hoping to achieve with its instant delivery model, essentially replacing the weekly grocery shop with multiple baskets delivered to one’s door.

“It’s not just about being the next quick commerce vertical but building the next generation of e-commerce,” said Maximilian Reeker, who co-founded Arive with Linus Fries (the two co-lead the company). He described that next generation like this: “Very convenient delivery of between 30 and 60 minutes, connecting people to local stores with a bike-based service, in an app optimized for the phone.” All of its couriers are employed by the company, either full-time or part-time.

Arive has up to now split the model into three parts, providing consignment, wholesale and, in the next 2-3 months, marketplace options for sourcing supply. Fries said that currently the wholesale part accounts for the largest part of its business and sales.

Beyond that, white label services — where Arive might sell its backend technology and delivery infrastructure to third-party retailers to build their own instant delivery services — is another area that the company is considering, Fries said. This could be a very interesting opportunity in areas such as fashion: typically online sales of clothes have been challenged by issues of sizing and dealing with returns, which make for a high barrier of entry for a company like Arive without making extensive and focused investments to address them. What it could do, however, is provide its technology to fashion brands and retailers that have, who are considering ways of getting apparel faster to would-be online buyers.

Meanwhile, although it’s taking a different approach in instant delivery by eschewing groceries and FMCG essentials and focusing on higher-ticket slower-moving consumer goods, Arive is still operating very much with those grocery delivery startups in mind for another reason.

Reeker told me that Arive actually relishes the oversupply of these startups in certain markets — indeed, the bubble has definitely started to burst for some of these startups, as they get snapped up by much larger and highly capitalized rivals looking to expand to new geographies — because they become a signal for where Arive should be considering to expand to next.

“We want to go to more places in Germany and expand internationally, and while we haven’t decided which cities, we looking at those where existing grocery plays are live,” said Reeker. “The UK, France, they are all interesting. Having those grocery companies there is an advantage for us because it’s evidence of the consumer shift that has taken place. They are already used to getting their food quickly, which is the first step.”

Arive is not the first company to have thought of building a service around instant delivery of virtually any kind of item a person might like to have without leaving their homes to buy it. This was basically the premise behind Amazon Prime Now, which the e-commerce giant launched the service in 2014. Pointedly, although Amazon expanded it to several markets, eventually it discontinued the standalone app and branding it had built for Prime Now, which now exists as a faster-delivery option for some of the items that it sells via Prime.

The message there could be interpreted in two ways. It could point to challenges for scaling something like a fast-delivery service without also providing a wider range of options that offer cheaper options and longer delivery times to customers put off by the premium that comes with instant.

Or, it could point to how there remains an opportunity for a smaller and more focused company to get the model right, understanding that the market has matured in the last eight years and consumers are not only more willing to shop online than ever before due to Covid-19, but have focused their expectations of how that experience should more closely mirror the instant-gratification of shopping in person.

Investors are willing to bet that the two co-founders — which hatched the idea of Arive while at business school — have a shot in building something fit the latter of those.

“Linus, Max, and the entire team at arive are challenging e-commerce conventions with energetic execution and an acute sensitivity to the priorities of modern brands,” said Colin Hanna, partner at Balderton Capital, in a statement. “Using light electric vehicles to rapidly fulfill orders leaves a lighter footprint on our planet and ensures that customers are home to receive goods they’ve purchased online, avoiding costly failed deliveries. The team is also committed to building their UX in a way that protects, rather than erodes, the value of the brands they are lucky to work with. Finally, high basket sizes and no wastage means the company has a much stronger path to a sustainable business model over the long run.  Balderton is fortunate to be backing arive as it scales rapidly across Europe.”

As someone who covers Southeast Asia startups and funding stories, the best word I can think of to describe 2021 is “whoa!” This was the year that global investors not only started to pay close attention to the region’s tech ecosystems, but also began putting real money into them.

Backed by international LPs, Southeast Asia-focused venture firms like Alpha JWC, AC Ventures and Jungle Ventures raised their largest funds yet.

The Ken reported that American firms like A16z, Valar Ventures, Hedosophia and Goodwater Capital, were also setting up (or planning) regional offices as exits like Grab and Sea’s initial public offerings fueled interest in Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystems. A comprehensive report from Golden Gate Ventures also forecasted a record number of exits, due in part to an increase in B and C rounds.

I always feel a bit silly using the term “Southeast Asia” because the region is so large and complex. It’s the easiest option when I’m trying to be succinct, but Southeast Asia consists of 11 countries, and obviously there are huge differences between, say, Singapore, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia.

As a global financial center, one could argue that Singapore’s startup ecosystem is in a category of its own when compared to its neighbors. And Indonesia in particular warrants special attention, as the fourth-largest economy in the world and the most populated Southeast Asian country with 273.5 million people. Both countries produced a fair amount of unicorns in 2021. In Singapore, for instance, Ninja Van, Carousell, Carro and Nium were among startups that hit unicorn status.

While Singaporean startups tend to focus on other Southeast Asian countries (or, in Nium’s case, the United States and Latin America), Indonesia-based founders, on the other hand, might have mid- or long-term plans for international expansion, but most of the ones I talked to plan to focus on expanding in the country for at least the next year or so. Not only is Indonesia very large, but it is also geographically complex, with more than 17,000 islands, of which about 6,000 are inhabited. Startups tend to launch in the Greater Jakarta area before expanding into other Tier 1 cities like Bandung and Surabaya but many are eyeing smaller cities, especially fintech and e-commerce startups.

Here are a few sectors that took off in 2021, and are worth keeping an eye on in 2022:

Investment apps

A crop of investment apps, many aimed at millennial and first-time retail investors, raised small early-stage rounds at the beginning of 2021, only to quickly pick up much larger follow-on funding a few months later. Some examples include Indonesia-based crypto-focused Pintu, robo-advisor Bibit, Ajaib and Pluang, and Singapore-based Syfe.

While rates of retail investment are still relatively low in Indonesia, that number is growing because of increased interest in financial planning during the pandemic and the popularity of stock influencers, despite concerns about the legitimacy of some.

Indonesian SME-focused startups dig deeper into fintech

According to government figures, there are 62 million SMEs (small to medium-sized enterprises) in Indonesia, but several founders told me this is likely an underestimate, especially since family-owned businesses or solo entrepreneurs tend to be undercounted. Regardless of their exact number, SMEs, many of which use Excel spreadsheets or paper ledgers to handle their accounting, present a lucrative opportunity for tech startups.

Most notably, BukuWarung and BukuKas, two competing bookkeeping apps, both raised significant amounts of funding this year. The two startups are similar in that they are initially focused on helping SMEs digitize, but eventually plan to expand their product roster into financial services like working capital loans, using data users have already entered into their software to judge creditworthiness.

Some other startups that target SMEs include earned wage access and payroll management platform GajiGesa and Wagely.

Social commerce

People who live in Indonesia’s largest cities have a large choice of e-commerce platforms to chose from, but the selection is much less in more remote regions. This is partly due to a fragmented logistics infrastructure (but startups are also working on that, including SiCepat, Advoctics, Kargo and Waresix), which means it is costly and time-consuming to receive goods.

That is where social commerce startups like Super, Evermos and KitaBeli come in, hoping to replicated the success of Pinduoduo in China and Meesho in India. All focus on daily necessities like fast-moving consumer goods and food, and utilize the social commerce model to make the supply chain more efficient and affordable, since orders are made in batches by people who live in the same communities. In that sense, they can also be described as being at least partially logistics startups.

E-commerce aggregators

Startups that acquire small e-commerce brands, like Thrasio, have been attracting lots of funding in the United States and Europe for several years. But e-commerce aggregators took a little while longer to reach Southeast Asia.

This year, two e-commerce aggregators officially launched there with venture capital funding, and both raised follow-on rounds a few months later. While many e-commerce aggregators focus on Amazon sellers, Una Brands refers to itself as “sector-agnostic.” There is no dominant marketplace across APAC, so its developed a system to find brands across platforms like Tokopedia, Lazada, Shopee, Rakuten and eBay. On the other hand, Rainforest focuses on Asia-based Amazon sellers, but differentiates from other aggregators with its goal of becoming the online version of consumer goods conglomerate Newell Brands. With so many e-commerce sellers based in Asia, expect both Una Brands and Rainforest to grow, and other aggregators to launch.

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

The app industry continues to grow, with a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and Google Play stores combined in 2021, according to the latest year-end reports. App Annie says global spending across iOS and Google Play is up to $135 billion in 2021, and that figure will likely be higher when its annual report, including third-party app stores in China, is released next year. Consumers also downloaded 10 billion more apps this year than in 2020, reaching nearly 140 billion in new installs, it found.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that was up 27% year-over-year.

This Week in Apps offers a way to keep up with this fast-moving industry in one place with the latest from the world of apps, including news, updates, startup fundings, mergers and acquisitions, and suggestions about new apps and games to try, too.

Do you want This Week in Apps in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters

This Week in Apps is taking a vacation over the holidays, so this week’s update is briefer than usual!

Top Story

900+ app publishers will see their first $1 million in 2021

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Sensor Tower is forecasting that the number of publishers set to see their first $1 million (or more) in annual net income in 2021 has nearly doubled since 2016. This year, more than 900 publishers will reach this milestone, up nearly 91% from the 475 who hit the milestone in 2016. This 900+ breaks down to 581 on iOS and 325 on Google Play, it notes.

Image Credits: Sensor TowerBroken down by category, mobile game publishers continued to account for the largest percentage of iOS apps that hit the $1 million milestone in 2021, with a 32% share of the overall total. Social networking apps followed with an 11% share, then Entertainment, Health & Fitness and Productivity apps, at 7%, 7% and 6%, respectively. On Google Play, games also led but accounted for even more of the milestone-achieving apps, with a 43% share.

However, the figure represents a decline from last year, when 1,003 publishers hit their first net $1 million in global revenue — a change that Sensor Tower chalks up to a normalization of consumer behavior after the pandemic drove installs up during 2020 to outsized levels. Consumers in 2021 experimented with fewer new apps than during the height of the pandemic, the report noted.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

China’s laws impact the number of available apps

The South China Morning Post this week reported on how China’s big tech crackdown is playing out across the Chinese app stores. According to its findings, the number of available mobile apps has fallen 40% over the past three years as new data laws and other clean-up campaigns went into effect. By the numbers, Chinese app stores had 4.52 million apps in December 2018, but as of October 2021, that had dropped to just 2.78 million. It also noted the biggest declines took place over the course of this year, as Beijing further cracked down on big tech with its new data privacy laws.

The Netherlands orders Apple to allow dating apps to offer alternative payments

The Netherlands is the latest country looking to regulate the app stores with a new ruling, as reported by Reuters, that says Apple has violated the country’s competition laws via its in-app purchase policies. However, the case in this market is unique because it’s only applying to a segment of the app store — specifically, dating apps. (Match, of course, has been a significant Apple critic and has been pushing for new payment policies both in the U.S. and abroad.) The Netherlands’ Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) says that Apple has until January 15 to implement App Store changes. If the company fails to comply, it could be fined up to €50 million ($56.6 million), the report notes. Apple has appealed the ruling.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

• An unconfirmed leak by a French site claims iOS 16 will not support the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus and the iPhone SE 2016.
• Apple stopped signing iOS 15.1.1, meaning there will be no more downgrading options available now.

Platforms: Google

• Google announced the number of users engaging with Android apps on Chrome OS devices was up 50% year-over-year in 2021, while Chrome OS grew over 92% YoY.
• Amazon finally fixed its broken Amazon Appstore on Android 12 devices, which had been preventing users from using its app — or apps installed via its app — for over a month.
• The Google Play Store added filters that let you narrow down searches by devices, like Android TV or Wear OS.

Social

Image Credits: Insider Intelligence

• A 2022 forecast notes TikTok is the world’s third-largest social network, on track for 755 million monthly users next year. This estimate comes from Insider Intelligence (formerly eMarketer), which uses its own system for counting MAUs to be more consistent across companies, while also weeding out fake accounts.
• TikTok will launch a delivery-only restaurant business across the U.S. in March to promote some of the most viral food dishes on its app, posted by TikTok influencers and creators. The company said it’s not going into the food business itself, but is partnering with Virtual Dining Concepts and Grubhub on the TikTok Kitchen promotion.

Messaging

Image Credits: Meta

• Facebook Messenger rolled out holiday features, including new AR effects from beauty influencers like Bretman Rock and Ashley Strong; plus holiday-themed word effects; a New Year’s Eve chat theme; various seasonal soundmojis, backgrounds and “gift wrap” on Messenger using Facebook Pay on Android. Messenger Kids is launching a Santa chat experience and other games and AR effects.
• WhatsApp is testing a new interface for voice calls and other features on iOS and Android. The site WABetaInfo spotted the new interface under development, which offers some UI tweaks and new indicators for end-to-end encryption.

Streaming & Entertainment

• TikTok is being accused of violating open source licenses in its new Live Studio Windows app. The app is allegedly using code from the Open Broadcaster Software project’s OBS Studio app and other open-source projects without following the licensing terms.
• The Verge wants to know what happened to Spotify HiFi? The high-end version of the streaming service was supposed to roll out this year, but never did. What gives?

Government & Policy

• Apple is seeking a dismissal of an India apps market antitrust case, citing its small market share in the country where the Android mobile OS is dominant.

Funding and M&A (and IPOs)

Zepto, a 10-minute grocery delivery app operating in India, raised $100 million in Series C funding, led by Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund. With the round, the app has now more than doubled its valuation to $570 million, up from $225 million in less than two months ago.

Rocket Companies, maker of Rocket Mortgage, acquired Truebill, a personal finance app that helps consumers manage their bills, subscriptions and budgets. The deal was for $1.275 billion, up from Truebill’s final private valuation of $530 million following its last round.

 Amsterdam-based tennis and padel court booking app Playtomic raised €56 million in Series C funding led by GP Bullhound after its monthly bookings surpassed 1 million in November 2021, up nearly 3x from a year ago. The app reaches 1+ million users across 34 countries.

Taptap Send raised $65 million in Series B funding led by Spark Capital to further grow its cross-border remittances app, which now covers 20 countries, including those in less developed markets.

Lapse, a Dispo-like app that lets users take photos that “develop” 24 hours later, raised $11 million in seed funding led by Octopus Ventures and GV.

Gaming company Rec Room raised $145 million in funding led by Coatue Management, for its cross-platform game that runs on mobile, PC, game consoles and VR headsets. The company has grown its user base from 2 million in March to now 37 million, and is valued at $3.5 billion.

Spotify acquired podcast tech company Whooshkaa, which turns radio programming into on-demand podcasts. The tech will be integrated with Spotify’s Megaphone.

Vietnam-based MoMo, a super app offering money transfers, insurance, investments, donations and more, raised $200 million in Series E funding led by Mizhuo Bank. The round values the business at $2+ billion.

Stockholm-based Voi, an app offering e-scooter and e-bike rentals, raised $115 million in Series D funding led by Raine Group and VNV Global. The company, which has scooters in 80 European cities, will next begin preparing for an IPO.

Triller, a one-time TikTok rival turned live events app, announced plans to merge with adtech company SeaChange to take the two companies public at a ~$5 billion valuation.

Indian e-commerce startup Snapdeal filed for an IPO, which seeks to raise $165 million. The 11-year-old company, which offers its services online and via app, competes with Amazon and Flipkart in India, and has shifted its focus in recent years to serve consumers in smaller towns and cities.

Downloads

Wombo Dream

Image Credits: Wombo

Known for an AI-powered lip-syncing app, Wombo’s latest app, Dream, is tapping into AI to create art. (Read TechCrunch’s review by Natasha Lomas here). To use the app, you type in what you want to create a picture of, then choose a style — like vibrant, pastel, dark fantasy, steampunk, etc. Dream will then spend a few seconds making the finished composition — some of which look better than others. You can repeat the process until it delivers a result you like. The app has already seen over 10 million images created by users and has been downloaded over 1 million times across iOS and Android.

Because of the unpredictable nature of the fashion industry, fashion brands often have to ‘guestimate’ demand for their products, and if they get that demand wrong, they have to deal with the wasted inventory. All too often clothes end up being incinerated unnecessarily, adding to their environmental impact. UK startup Purple Dot has an ecommerce ‘waitlist and pre-order’ platform, allowing fashion brands to only produce the exact volume of goods ordered, thereby cutting down waste.

Purple Dot has now raised a $4 million early stage funding round led by US-based Unusual Ventures. Previous investors Connect Ventures, Moxxie Ventures, and the family office of Indeed co-founder Paul Forster also participated.

Founded in 2019 by entrepreneurs Madeline Parra and John Talbott, Purple Dot says it allows ecommerce businesses the ability to “sell inventory earlier as a way to maximize sales, build brand loyalty, and access demand data earlier.” Purple Dot’s waitlist solution allows inventory to be sold before it arrives in the warehouse. The startup claims it’s the only solution of its type available in the market.

Madeline Parra, CEO and co-founder of Purple Dot, said: “By selling earlier, brands open up a whole new window to capture sales.  The legacy mindset and technology assumes you need inventory in the warehouse to sell it. But with Purple Dot, you can always be selling because selling and shipping can be asynchronous. This is the “A-ha” moment for our brand partners. To get a sell-earlier strategy right, you need a dedicated approach that gets the customer experience, and internal tooling, right.”

Rachel Star, Investor at Unusual Ventures, said: “Purple Dot is more than an ecommerce enabler; they are revolutionizing how supply chains are managed and how brands sell, and we believe that pre-orders and waitlists will shape the future of online shopping.”

Some 55 billion parcels are shipped in bubble wrap every year. Plastic bubble wrap is reliant on fossil fuels and 98% of plastic packaging is single-use. You can imagine the adverse environmental impact of all this plastic.

The founders of Woola were running an online e-commerce store and saw the packaging problem first-hand. The lack of options in sustainable and scalable protective packaging led to them re-discovering wool — an unused resource that is elastic and regulates temperatures and humidity.

The result was their startup, which uses leftover sheep wool to replace bubble wrap. These wool-based packages can be reused, repurposed, or returned by the end-user, with the ultimate goal of making the solution ‘closed-loop’ so nothing goes to waste.

Woola opened a production facility in Estonia and launched its first product in December 2020. Wool envelopes were the first products to hit the market. It’s now expanding to the UK, France and Germany. The next product rolling out in January 2022 is targeted at beverage companies.

They’ve now a raised €2.5M Seed round led by Future Ventures. Future is joined by co-investors Kaarel Kotkas (CEO at Veriff), Janer Gorohhov (Co-founder at Veriff), Kristina Lilleõis (VP of People at Veriff), Zem Joaquin (founder of Near Future Summit), Bryan Meehan (executive chair of Blue Bottle Coffee). Woola’s previous investors include the co-founders of Pipedrive, Bolt and the angel fund Lemonade Stand.

“Bubble wrap has been dominating the packaging industry for ages – but its decline is inevitable,” said Woola’s CEO and co-founder Anna-Liisa Palatu. “The industry is broken for two reasons: fossil fuel reliance and single-use mindset. We need to get rid of both to make packaging more sustainable.” She is joined by co-founders Jevgeni Sirai and Katrin Kabun.

Steve Jurvetson from Future Ventures commented: “While e-commerce is booming, single-use plastic packaging is out of control. Woola can replace it all with beautiful envelopes made from scrap wool that would otherwise be burned or buried. The world needs sustainable alternatives to the petrochemical economy for a healthier future.”

Sheep wool is an unused resource – more than 200,000 tonnes of wool is thrown away in Europe yearly. Woola says this is enough to fulfill 120% of the global bubble wrap demand.

The startup will compete with whitelabel plastic bubble wrap and alternatives like Ranpak and S-Packaging.

With e-commerce becoming increasingly globalized, a company called Taxdoo, which builds API-based tools to help e-commerce companies with tax compliance and other accounting needs, is announcing a round of funding: $64 million, a Series B that the Hamburg-based startup will be using to expand further across Europe and to build what it describes as the financial operating system for e-commerce businesses.

“We’re already helping customers shave off hours of manual [sales tax] work, and with newer features like pro forma invoices for tax compliance, we’ve built a lot of adjacent features,” said CEO Christian Königsheim in an interivew. “The long-term vision is that we want to enable our customers to have their financial data accelerate their growth rather than holding them back. We want to give them competitive edge by automating tedious tasks, so that they don’t have to pay that much attention to compliance and regulation. We see this as a financial operating system for commerce.”

The funding is being led by Tiger Global — part of the VC’s very aggressive foray into backing European startups — with previous backers Accel, Visionaries Club, and 20VC also participating. Taxdoo last announced funding less than a year ago — a $21 million Series A — so this brings the total raised by it now to $84 million. I understand from sources close to the company that the valuation is now just north of $350 million.

Co-founded by three economics PhDs — Matthias Allmendinger, Roger Gothmann and Christian Königsheim — the three were doing research into VAT. They saw how complex sales tax regimes were for average merchants to follow, but they also identified that there was probably a way to solve that with automation technology.

The three have been very hands-on with how the company has developed and grown that vision: I mentioned to Königsheim that when he was talking to me it sounded like he was reading out his company’s press release — not what you want to happen when you’re interviewing someone! But it turned out that he actually wrote that press release himself, hence the identical cadence and diction. (I joked that he might have others on the team dedicated to doing that kind of work these days, he replied that he saw it as his “victory lap” after working so hard on closing the round.)

Taxdoo very much made its name around providing a set of APIs that European e-commerce companies, or really any organization doing business online, could use to calculate VAT (sales tax) and to track it to meet accounting compliance requirements. It currently works with over 1,700 marketplaces, online merchants, and enterprises, integrating with the platforms that they use in turn to sell online. (These include ERP providers like Xentral, as well as e-commerce site builders like Shopify, payment platforms like Afterbuy and marketplaces like eBay and Amazon.)

As e-commerce has continued to grow, so too have both the complexity of accounting around it, and the scrutiny of the space by financial regulators.

On the accounting side, one of Taxdoo’s tools, for example, allows companies to automatically query and pull out transaction data needed to calculate VAT (some transactions are exempt, so that makes it more complicated). Another can pull records and send them for individual filing across different countries or tax juridictions.

On the regulatory front, new rules coming into force have presented more opportunities for Taxdoo to expand its own scope of services. Its APIs now include, in addition to a wider set of VAT calculators, tools to manage accounting and invoicing. It also has opened its platform so that third-party developers can build their own tools on top of Taxdoo for customers to use to fit their specific needs (Xentral is an example of one of the developers building apps on top of Taxdoo to make it easier to use the two platforms together).

This is dry work, and for many definitely not the most visible part of building an e-commerce business, but it’s essential, and hard, to get right. This also makes the company an attractive partner — or even target — for ambitious fintech companies that are building one-stop shops to service online businesses with all of their payment and financial needs. (Case in point, Stripe has made acquisitions and launched a new suite of services aimed to help calculate sales tax for its customers. It seems that a logical next step would be to dive deeper into accounting around those tax calculations.)

“Taxdoo is tackling the largest pain points faced today by e-commerce merchants and marketplaces,” said John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global, in a statement. “Taxdoo’s team uniquely combines deep expertise in e-commerce, automation, tax, accounting, and finance — along with a pervasive customer centricity. We’re excited to support Taxdoo in building the Financial Operating System for e-commerce.”

As advertising and marketing become increasingly automated and thus commoditized, design has emerged as a savior to help brands stand out. And today, a startup that’s helping companies connect with a wider range of designers and other creatives to meet that demand is announcing a round of funding to fuel its business growth. Superside, which operates a network of freelance creatives that are tapped by companies to work on logos, display ads, packaging, bigger marketing campaigns and other design-based efforts, has picked up $30 million, money that it will be investing in further international expansion and growing its team of people, both in-house staff and the creatives network.

Prosus Ventures and Lugard Road Capital are co-leading the round, with previous investors Slack Fund and Acequia Capital also participating. Investors and company would not confirm but I understand from sources to be just over $400 million.

The round is the first sizable funding that Oslo-based, but very distributed, Superside has raised — it was founded as Konsus back in 2015 and had picked up only $5.5 million up to now — and it comes on the heels of some impressive growth in its nearly-bootstrapped state.

Its customers include the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Salesforce, Cisco, Shopify and Coinbase, “Really any hot company in the Valley,” Fredrik Thomassen, Superside’s co-founder and CEO, told me in his understated, Norwegian-accented clip the other day. (This helps downplay the words, which come off as matter-of-fact rather than boastful as a result.) You’d think that a company like Amazon or Facebook would have no end of people on in-house teams to handle whatever design need might arise, but in fact, no matter how big or small an organization is, there is always something that will need an extra pair of creative hands, especially these days. Superside provides them.

Those hands, meanwhile, are set to multiply. Thomassen tells me that the company currently has 500 on its “team” — his word to include both those working on staff (150 people) and the wider creatives network (350).

“It’s important for us to think of us all in the same boat and creating equal opportunities globally,” he said. Creatives are freelancers technically, though, and thus free to do whatever they want, although the idea, he said, is that Superside provides them with enough engagement, interesting work, and non-frustrating tools to manage it all to make it less likely that they would turn to 99designs, Fiverr, Upwork, or any of the other platforms that might provide them with gigs elsewhere.

The plan will be to expand that network in earnest in the coming months. “We want to go from 350 to 1,000 creatives,” he said, “and then maybe 10,000, or 100,000.” (Again, you have to read this thinking of Thomassen’s understated clip, which makes all this sound perfectly reasonable.)

Design — and in this case branding, advertising and other fields that have been described traditionally in the industry as “creative” work done by creatives — has faced a massive evolution in the digital age: most if not all work is carried out on software; more often than not, it is intended to be consumed on digital screens; and the nature of global, localized campaigns created by virtue of digital mediums mean that there is simply a lot more creative work needing to be done.

Added to this, even before the Covid-19 pandemic, designers long ago cut their tether to the office, working remotely, putting in extra hours at home even when they do not, picking up side-hustles where they never meet clients in person, and so on.

All of this has played neatly into the creation of really excellent design software, designed to be used, edited, shared and consumed in the cloud, and it’s played neatly too into the hand of companies like Superside to build platforms to help connect creatives to opportunities.

Superside itself has focused its technology development on making that engagement and following through on work as seamless as possible, with very specific project management software that it has designed itself to manage the processes, including remuneration and related accounting alongside the steps around seeking people, engaging them and working through projects. It has not built design tools up to now, and it has no plans to.

“We are using exclusively established tools,” said Thomassen. “It’s much more difficult to built competitors to companies like Figma and Adobe. We are incredibly bullish on Figma especially, since it’s a less closed system than Adobe’s.”

It will be interesting to see whether Superside sticks to that, or whether it becomes an attractive company to tap for those big firms that are taking on Adobe and building more bridges to creatives alongside the creative tools themselves. (Adobe’s ownership of Behance, which gives it a kind of link into those networks of creatives already, implies it might not be in the running if that were the case.)

In the meantime, what sets the company apart is how well it has identified the shortcomings of working with alternatives — Thomassen himself comes from a marketing background and said he built Superside specifically out of his own frustrations in trying to find, engage and work with creatives — and built a platform to solve that.

“What sets Superside apart from all the other players in the creative economy is their long-term approach to solving the underlying problems of marketing and creative teams,” said Mats Diedrichsen, the former CMO of Delivery Hero, who is joining the board with this round. “I believe Superside has the potential to become the ‘agency-killer’ while truly levelling the playing field for creatives all over the world.”

Superside has seen significant growth in the last few years, working with reputable brands, including Amazon, Salesforce and Cisco, who have consistently praised Superside’s fast turnaround times, creative diversity, high-quality content, and impressive access to global top talent.

Long-time customer Amir Jaffari, Growth lead at Shopify summarized: “Superside makes it easy for Shopify’s Growth team to get design done quickly without impacting the quality. Their platform is intuitive and enables speed, and the dedicated team model ensures everyone thoroughly understands our brand and day-to-day needs, allowing for scale.”

“As the need for high-quality, fast-turnaround digital content continues to rise, and companies look for increasing brand distinction, Superside is fulfilling the demand by offering a unique subscription that provides fast, flexible and diverse design from some of the world’s top creative talent,” added Sandeep Bakshi, head of European investments at Prosus Ventures, in a statement. “In addition, as the the pandemic has accelerated the momentum of flexible and independent work, Superside is highly attractive for creative team members, offering remote, flexible, and high paying jobs, allowing them to work with top brands globally. We believe Superside can usher in a new era of creative solutions for top companies globally, and are excited to partner with them on this vision.”

Instant grocery delivery continues to be a very frothy market, but today comes news of a major funding round for one player in it that investors believe will still be standing after the hype has died down.

Flink, the Berlin-based startup that sells food and other essentials at supermarket prices and aims to deliver them in under 10 minutes, has confirmed that it has raised $750 million, a Series B round of funding led by a strategic backer, DoorDash, made at a pre-money valuation of $2.1 billion ($2.85 billion post-money). Flink is already present in some 60 cities across four countries, where it covers 10 million customers; the plan will be to use the funding to continue growing that footprint, both organically and potentially by snapping up rivals (we have confirmed that most of the round is in equity with a small portion in debt for acquisitions).

The involvement of DoorDash — which went public in December 2020, has a market cap currently of just under $57 billion, and is making its first foray into Europe with this investment — was a badly-kept secret in this fundraise, with reports of the investment emerging several months ago. We can confirm that DoorDash’s investment officially closed in September, with the rest of the round completed in the months following.

Others in the round included previous backer Mubadala Capital (which backed Flink in a $240 million round made as recently as June) and other unnamed new and past investors. (Previous backers also include German supermarket giant REWE, Prosus, Bond, Target Global, Northzone, Cherry Ventures and TriplePoint Capital.)

What’s remarkable when you consider the size of the funding is that Flink has only been around for a year, and commercially active for just seven months. In a rare interview — the company has been media-shy up to now — CEO and co-founder Oliver Merkel said that part of the reason Flink has attracted attention is because of the founders’ track records. Merkel spent years as a management consultant at Bain working in grocery and retail; co-founders Julian Dames and Christoph Cordes are Rocket Internet alums who respectively founded the Foodora food delivery startup and furniture e-commerce business Fashion for Home (acquired by Home24, where Cordes became CEO).

“I think what we bring and why could we win market leadership in such a short amount of time is because we are obsessed about how we do things… and we bring some experience to the table. We made so many mistakes elsewhere, and we hope we’ve learned from those,” Merkel said. (Another reason for wooing investors could be that he’s quite personable for a media-shy person; that last comment was delivered tongue-in-cheek, as were many of the other quips he made off the record.)

This round has been in the works for some months now and the story behind that speaks to volatility and hype in the market at the moment, and where Flink believes it stands out.

DoorDash had originally come to Berlin looking at investing in Gorillas, one of Flink’s big rivals, but that deal fell through over differences between the two management styles and longer-term growth plans. So, the US company began talking with Flink, where it turned out executives were more aligned in their company cultures and approaches to growth. (Gorillas instead raised money from another strategic, Delivery Hero, as part of a whopping $1 billion round.)

Flink, meanwhile, had been approached by both e-commerce and delivery behemoth Amazon, as well as by another U.S. instant grocery delivery player GoPuff, as an acquisition target.

Both approaches didn’t go anywhere — depending on who you ask, because Flink’s valuation was too high; or because Flink wasn’t interested in selling. Flink at the time was also looking at a potential merger with Gorillas, a massive consolidation play that also didn’t happen at the time.

Whether Gorillas and Flink do ultimately join up, consolidation will likely come one way or the other as the many companies in instant delivery that have popped up in the last couple of years — spurred by the pandemic and changes in how people shopped and moved around — struggle to get profitable, reach positive unit economics, find new customers, and raise more money. GoPuff has been snapping up smaller instant delivery startups in Europe to expand and scale, as has Getir.

And we found out too that Flink itself came very close to buying Cajoo in France, for the grand sum of €1, before Cajoo instead opted to raise $40 million.

(TechCrunch has confirmed the above details with executives across the companies.)

Putting all that M&A intrigue to one side, though, Flink has been quietly building out a strategy for how it plans to tackle the market, and it starts with how it sources groceries.

E-commerce is a business of economies of scale — it’s one reason why it’s so hard ultimately to compete against the behemoth that is Amazon — and the same goes for groceries, which need to be procured by the retailers that sell them. Rather than try to get to a big enough scale to have the best negotiating power for buying in goods, Flink’s approach has been instead to partner with huge retailers and lean on them for those deals. In Germany, that has been its strategic backer REWE, and it has followed the same route with its launches in France and the Netherlands, although Flink has declined to disclose so far who those partners are.

“Flink is on a dynamic growth track, which REWE Group is supporting with its long-term commitment,” said Lionel Souque, CEO of REWE Group, in a statement on the relationship. “This also includes the operational cooperation between Flink and Rewe in the area of purchasing, which continues to develop very positively. Our decision to partner with Flink in April of this year has proven to be successful; Flink is now the number one in Quick Commerce in Germany and is ideally placed to further expand their market leadership.”

In the process, the aim has been to keep the concept of instant grocery delivery as normal as possible and delivered to as wide a range of consumers as possible, not just young urbanites with disposable cash.

“People in big cities are spoiled,” Merkel said. “They get all the new innovations and services, but when we opened in Regensburg” — a significantly smaller town in the south of the country where Flink is now also operating — “it was crazy, the amount of business we got from day one. It’s an indication that our model works everywhere. We want to be the supermarket for everyone. Our pricing is supermarket pricing, and our products appeal not just to hipsters but the fireman, the teacher. Normal people.” It currently offers some 2,500 items in its biggest markets, and following its wide-appeal approach, that selection likely will grow over time.

What will be worth watching also is how Flink grows its talent. At a moment when there are remains a lot of scrutiny — and potentially some big changes ahead — over the rights that gig workers have at the companies where they operate, Flink says that its focus is “fully employed riders with unlimited contracts at a massive scale to cope with customer demand.” 

The company says that on average, its customers are taking multiple orders each week, an engagement metric that caught the eye of DoorDash and will be something to watch as part of how the two companies potentially collaborate together in the future.

“We’ve been impressed by Flink’s growth and customer retention,” said Prabir Adarkar, CFO of DoorDash, in a statement. “Oliver, Julian, Christoph, and their team share our operator mindset and bring a wealth of industry experience. It’s not surprising that in less than a year of operating they have established themselves as the leader in key European markets.”

“This funding round is a watershed moment for Flink as it continues on its hyper growth trajectory,” added Amer Alaily of Mubadala. “We are excited to watch them disrupt the instant grocery delivery space amidst an enormous market opportunity in Germany, France, the Netherlands and beyond – and we look forward to remaining a trusted partner to Oliver, Julian, Christoph and their team.” 

Felix Capital, the London VC firm that has built a portfolio emphasizing investments in startups in the ecosystem that supports the creative class, is bringing on two more partners, Julien Codorniou and Susan Lin, as it continues to expand into a wider range of categories.

Codorniou had been a longtime executive at Meta (formerly Facebook), where he worked across different products for businesses, most significantly as VP of Workplace, the company’s effort to build a version of Facebook tailored to the working world. Lin is an internal promotion, and in what is perhaps a mark of just how slow change is to come to the halls of power and money in the world of tech, she is actually the first female partner at Felix since the firm was first founded in 2015.

Felix — co-founded by longtime European investors Frederic Court and Antoine Nussenbaum — today says it has some $600 million under management with 47 active investments. That portfolio includes a range of companies that are, in a straightforward way, bets on some of the bigger tech trends in Europe and further afield: they include businesses crossing the nexus of food and e-commerce such as Deliveroo, HungryPanda, Oatly, AllPlants and Frichti; transport startups Dott and Heetch; travel startup Perfect Stay and recruitment platform Job Today.

But there is also a big emphasis on startups putting out creator or creative products and content; or used by creators to help them work, with the list including companies like Farfetch, Business of Fashion, Moonbug, Mejuri and Goop; as well as Mirakl, SellerX, Sorare, Rally, Creative Fabrica, fraud prevention platform Forter, Juni and more.

Adding in two new partners will be a way of expanding Felix’s scope further, specifically into more categories to fill out those existing fields.

Codorniou, with his experience in building and evaluating workplace productivity tools — before Meta, he was at Microsoft as a director in business development — plans to look at and fund SaaS businesses with a focus around areas like the future of work (a pretty nebulous category these days, given how quickly working practices and work infrastructure have been forced to evolve in the wake of the pandemic). This is an area that Felix has been doubling down on of late, with investments in Mirakl, Job Today and Yoobic all part of a bigger and more generalized thesis around how working and building the infrastructure to work are changing fast.

“I spent so much time in last five years talking to CIOs and CFOs, learning what they like or don’t like,” he said. “Budgets are moving from IT to HR, and we want to make the best of that convergence. It’s about building community at work, but I also think front line is the next frontier for automation and more.”

Tapping another area that loomed large both at Meta and in Europe these days, Cordorniou told TechCrunch he will be looking to back more gaming startups as well, particularly those emerging out of further-flung corners of the European region, and those that are pushing the boundaries of gameplay and monetization models. On the latter point, games have long been early movers and some of the biggest users of virtual currencies; now, with the rise of new kinds of gamification around cryptocurrency, it will be interesting to see how (and if) we see a wave of startups building gameplay that taps into that.

There is a talent connection between the two areas, too, he pointed out. “Obviously NFT is all the rage in gaming right now,” Codorniou said. “What is interesting is that the same people I worked with 10 years ago that used to be in social mobile gaming are now building new companies in the world of play to earn and crypto.” Sorare and Ledger are two existing investments in the portfolio that point to where and how Codorniou and Felix might back startups in the future.

Codorniou is joining as a partner at Felix, but he’s had a connection to the firm since day one, as one of its founding advisors — a formidable group of people, former founders or top executives, who have been leaning into Felix’s investment strategy as LPs without being full members of the team. (Others include David Marcus, Stephanie Phair, and Henri Moissinac.)

Lin, meanwhile, has been with Felix for three years — previous investment roles included time at Hg Capital and Bain — and as a partner she will be focusing on expanding the portfolio in another equally significant direction: by focusing on startups building tools for financial, physical and mental health and productivity. Felix already has a very decent foothold in this department, with investments in Peloton, Unmind, Peanut and Peppy among the startups that are already developing the wider health theme.

“Since first joining Felix almost three years ago, it was clear I was joining a unique team that is both highly collaborative and ambitious, with a distinctive and inspiring vision and mission,” she said in a statement. “I have loved every minute of working with our own team, our founders and helping deepen our conviction and investments into newer areas such as consumer fintech and digital health. I am grateful for the development and trust in me, and am excited to continue helping to build Felix into a distinctive partner of choice for the best founders.”