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. Global spending across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China grew 19% in 2021 to reach $170 billion. Downloads of apps also grew by 5%, reaching 230 billion in 2021, and mobile ad spend grew 23% year over year to reach $295 billion.

Today’s consumers now spend more time in apps than ever before — even topping the time they spend watching TV, in some cases. The average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but in 2021, they spent 4.1 hours on their mobile device. And they’re not even the world’s heaviest mobile users. In markets like Brazil, Indonesia and South Korea, users surpassed five hours per day in mobile apps in 2021.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours, either. They can grow to become huge businesses. In 2021, 233 apps and games generated over $100 million in consumer spend and 13 topped $1 billion in revenue. This was up 20% from 2020, when 193 apps and games topped $100 million in annual consumer spend and just eight apps topped $1 billion.

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 to try, too.

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Top Stories

Instagram to verify users’ ages in new test

Image Credits: Instagram

Instagram announced this week it’s testing a new set of features for verifying users’ ages in the app, including things like video selfies, vouching from adult friends and providing an ID. The tests, which will begin in the U.S., will apply to users who try to change their age to 18 or over after being previously set to under 18. These users may be trying to correct an earlier mistake or they could be teens trying to circumvent the app’s newer age-appropriate restrictions.

If users are prompted to provide an ID card, like a passport or driver’s license, Meta will store it on its servers for 30 days before deletion. If users choose the social vouching option, they’ll need at least three other adult friends to vouch for their age — and Instagram will choose a list of six people randomly who meet the criteria. Those users can’t have a new account or be vouching for others at the same time.

The company also said it’s using AI that can estimate users’ ages in video selfies. The company is working with the London-based digital identify firm Yoti which will examine the file, make an estimate, then delete the file.

Age verification is an increasingly common feature in social apps used by younger users as a result of tighter regulations. Another company catering to Gen Z users, Yubo, recently rolled out its own age estimating tech as well.

Twitter goes long form

TechCrunch broke the news that Twitter was testing a long-form writing feature called Twitter Notes. The next day after our report went live, Twitter announced it officially.

The news is one of Twitter’s more significant changes since doubling the character count from 140 to 280 characters, as it will allow users to write on Twitter directly, as if it’s a blogging platform. With Twitter Notes, users are able to create articles using rich formatting and uploaded media, which can then be tweeted and shared with followers upon publishing. The company also said it would merge its newsletter service, Revue, into Twitter Notes.

Users with access can create Twitter Notes from the “Write” link in Twitter’s navigation. For the time being, Twitter is testing Notes with a small group of writers in the United States, Canada, Ghana and the United Kingdom. The Notes can be up to 2,500 words in length.

The feature could encourage users to rely on Twitter Thread (tweetstorms) less in order to share their longer thoughts, ideas or stories with their Twitter followers, Community or Circle. It could also put an end to using a screenshot from the Notes app to tweet something longer than 280 characters. Meanwhile, Twitter Notes can tap into the potential for viral distribution that comes with posting to the platform. Like tweets, the Notes would have their own link and could be tweeted, retweeted, sent in DMs, liked and bookmarked. They can also be reported and must comply with Twitter’s rules.

It’s worth noting (ha!) that Twitter Notes also gives the company a new business and potential revenue stream as it further develops the product. The feature may allow the social platform to compete with established services, like Medium for blogging, or Substack’s newsletters.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

• Apple released the second developer beta for iOS 16 and iPadOS 16, along with other betas for Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Among the changes is support for cellular iCloud backups over LTE; a new feature that shows a brand or company’s logo beside their email in the Mail app to cut down on phishing; tech that lets you skip CAPTCHAs; plus new SMS filters and the ability to tap to report a junk SMS sender in the U.S. But another thing to note if you’re testing iOS 16 — the current beta’s editable iMessage feature doesn’t work with older iPhones, meaning your edits are texted to the person after the original message.
• Apple also rolled out Xcode 14 beta 2 which now includes a Stage Manager simulator.
• The iPad will no longer work as a home hub in iOS 16 according to information discovered in the Home app.

E-commerce

Image Credits: Twitter/Shopify

• As part of its ongoing efforts to expand into e-commerce, Twitter announced a new partnership with Shopify. The deal will see Twitter launching a sales channel app that will be made available to all of Shopify’s U.S. merchants through its app store. The app allows merchants to onboard themselves to Twitter’s Shopping Manager, the dashboard offered by the social media company where sellers can access product catalog tools and enable other shopping features for their profiles. Merchants will be able to use the new sales channel app to connect their Twitter account to their Shopify admin then get set up with Twitter’s Shopping Manager and other free tools Twitter built for “Professionals.” This includes Twitter’s launch of a new feature called Location Spotlight, which allows local businesses in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Australia to display information like their street address, contact info and operating hours directly on their profile.

Augmented Reality

• Walmart gave its app an AR upgrade with the launch of View in Your Space, which allows customers to see home décor and furniture in their own homes. The feature will be rolled out to over 300 items on Walmart’s iOS app by early July.
• Tim Cook may have hinted at Apple’s AR headset plans when he told a Chinese state-run news outlet to “stay tuned” to see what Apple had in store next for AR in an interview. A later investor note by Ming-Chi Kuo also suggested the new hardware could arrive as soon as early 2023.
• IKEA launched a new in-app design experience, called IKEA Kreativ, that lets U.S. shoppers visualize furniture in their own spaces using AR and AI. The feature can also remove the existing furniture from your room so you can better imagine the changes.
• Snap shared some data about AR shopping trends, noting that there was a 32% increased use of shoppable AR during the pandemic and that 69% of consumers believed AR was a part of shopping’s future.

Fintech

• Coinbase is shutting down its standalone Pro service by year’s end and replacing it with Advanced Trade across its website and app. The latter offers comparable features to the Pro service, which had lowered fees to traders who interacted directly with the Coinbase Exchange order book.
• Facebook Pay formally rebranded to Meta Pay. The change had already been announced but is now rolling out in the U.S. before expanding globally.

Social

Image Credits: Twitter

• Snapchat announced its first accelerator program for emerging Black creators, which will see 25 selected participants receive $10,000 per month to launch their careers across a total $3 million investment.
• Instagram has been experimenting with a new feature that would allow users to leave notes for their friends at the top of the DM inbox. The feature could help users share urgent or more important messages that could be overlooked in Stories or in messages.
• Meta announced more ways for creators to make money on Facebook and Instagram and the expansion of other monetization tools to more creators. The company will keep paid online events, fan subscriptions, badges and its upcoming independent news products free for creators until 2024, instead of 2023, as it had said before. Meta is also testing a designated place on Instagram where creators can get discovered by brands for partnerships; will launch a way for users to subscribe to Facebook Groups even for those who have paid for access on another platform; and is expanding the Reels Play Bonus program to more creators and making Facebook Stars available to all.
• Twitter announced the return of its developer conference, Chirp. The event was first held in 2010 but was then canceled the next year. At the time, the event had been a reflection of Twitter’s attitude toward its developer community in general — disorganized and constantly in flux as the company’s business initiatives changed. Times have since changed and Twitter has been trying to woo back developers with its new API, even by promoting some apps on Twitter itself.

Messaging

• Telegram said it now has over 700 monthly active users and announced Telegram Premium, a subscription that gives users access to exclusive features like doubled limits, 4 GB file uploads, faster downloads, exclusive stickers and reactions, improved chat management and more.

Photos

• Camera+, an alternative to Apple’s built-in app, added a new “UltraRes upscaling” feature. With machine learning technology, the app can upscale images to up to four times what the native sensor can capture.

Dating

• Match-owned Hinge added a new feature that allows users to share their “Dating Intentions” — meaning whether they’re looking for long-term, short-term, open relationships and more. The update changes Hinge’s focus as the company has historically been the app designed to connect people looking for more serious relationships, while Match-owned Tinder was aimed at those seeking casual encounters.

Streaming & Entertainment

Image Credits: Spotify

• Spotify revamped its concert discovery feature with the launch of a new Live Events Feed. The personalized feature will allow users to find favorite artists’ events in your area and will now include artist imagery and more tour details. Local events will also be highlighted while streaming and soon, in other places in the Spotify app.
• Clubhouse is testing a new feature called Houses, per Bloomberg, which are private rooms aimed at encouraging social interactions where anyone can unmute themselves and speak.
• Reddit Talk, the company’s live audio Clubhouse-like feature, announced its Host program would launch on July 11th. The program will promote hosts’ audio across the site. Reddit Talk also gained new features like a soundboard and topic selector for discovery purposes.
• Apple Music raised the price of its student plan in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. In the United States and Canada, the price for the plan has increased from $4.99 to $5.99. In the United Kingdom, the price has increased from £4.99 to £5.99.

Gaming

• Epic Games has come up with a new system for game ratings. While these changes apply to its own online games store, it’s an example of why alternative app stores could be useful to provide competition with Apple’s own — they can be a ground to test out new ideas. In Epic’s case, random players who have played a game for over two hours will be asked to rate the game on a five-point scale. Over time, these will create the game’s Overall Rating. The system, which relies on random sampling, could cut down on review bombing and reviews left by those who aren’t actual players, the company notes.
• China’s regulation of the mobile gaming market may be leading to declining use of the App Store in the country, according to Morgan Stanley. The firm’s latest analysis estimated that the App Store only saw 1% growth in June so far, compared with 6% growth in May.

Health & Fitness

• Fitbit added a new premium feature, “Sleep Profile,” which will allow users to track their sleep patterns across 10 key metrics, including new data points like bedtime consistency, the time before sound sleep and disrupted sleep. The feature is rolling out to the Fitbit app’s Premium users and supports devices including Sense, Versa 3, Versa 2, Charge 5, Luxe or Inspire 2.

Travel & Transportation

• Apple is planning to expand its CarPlay experience to China, according to a job posting.
• Polestar has now added Apple CarPlay to its all-electric Polestar 2 sedan via an over-the-air software update, after previously only supporting Android Auto.
• Car rental apps saw their MAUs grow 19% year-over-year in the U.S. in May, reported Apptopia, despite rising gas prices.

Image Credits: Apptopia

Government & Policy

• TikTok offered a series of commitments in the EU to improve user reporting and disclosure requirements around ads/sponsored content as well as an agreement to boost transparency around its digital coins and virtual gifts. The agreement follows a series of complaints over child safety and consumer protection complaints filed back in February 2021.
• The U.S. Department of Justice today entered into an agreement with Meta to resolve a lawsuit that alleged Meta engaged in discriminatory advertising in violation of the Fair Housing Act (FHA). As a result, Meta has agreed to develop a new system for housing ads and will pay a roughly $115,000 penalty, the maximum under the FHA.

Reading & News

• India-based VerSe Innovation rolled out its news aggregator Dailyhunt in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait, with over 5,000 content partners in the region.

Security & Privacy

• Google Chrome for iOS gained a number of new features in a recent update, including access to Enhanced Safe Browsing to protect users from dangerous websites and malware, as well as the ability to make Google Password Manager your Autofill provider. Other additions include Chrome Actions (typed commands in the URL bar) and access to Google’s Discover feed on the main page.
• Daycare apps including those from Brightwheel, HiMama and others were found to lack 2FA and other privacy protections, in an analysis.
• Google threat researchers detailed a commercial spyware system called Hermit, used in Kazakhstan and Italy, which targeted both Android and iOS. The iOS version had six exploits, including two zero-days. Targeted victims are tricked into installing a malicious app — which masquerades as a legitimate branded telco or messaging app — from outside the app store.

Funding and M&A

Courier raised $35 million in a Series B funding round led by GV. The company provides an API for sending notifications across multiple channels, including email, text, web and mobile.

Ghana-based fintech Fido raised $30 million in equity investment and some undisclosed debt funding in a Series A round led by Israel-based private equity fund Fortissimo Capital. The round brings the total equity investment raised to date to $38 million. The startup says it’s adding savings and payment products to its portfolio later this year and will enter Uganda.

Twitter asked its shareholders to approve the $44 billion Elon Musk acquisition. At the time of its SEC filing, Twitter’s share price was around $38.12 — lower than Musk’s offer price of $54.20 a share. The company’s market cap had also dropped below $30 billion, making a $44 billion deal look very good.

Downloads

WatchTube

Image Credits: WatchTube

Well, here’s something kind of crazy: 9to5Mac this week highlighted the new app WatchTube, which lets you watch YouTube videos directly on your Apple Watch. Yes, really!

The app is not the best experience for watching videos, as you may have guessed, but it is pretty wild that it actually works. The app by default shows you top trending videos, but you can customize this so the videos that appear are selected from a particular genre, like Music, News, Gaming, Movies and more. While it would be enough to just accomplish bringing YouTube to the Watch, the developer also added other features like the ability to search for videos, save videos to the app’s local Library and subscribe to Channels. When you get back to your other devices, you can also scan a QR code to share the video back to your iPhone or iPad.

Shopify made a name for itself in its early days with a platform for letting retailers keen to establish their own online shops an easy and quick way build and run those services on their own websites and apps — a quick route to “D2C” at a time when it was starting to feel as if marketplaces like Amazon’s had a stranglehold on reaching consumers. Fast forward to today, after two years of an Covid-19 e-commerce boom, digital shopping is happening on an ever-expanding range of platforms. So to address that shift, today Shopify is launching a raft of tools for customers interested in spinning up social commerce, local shopping offers with Google, cryptocurrency, B2B selling, and more — some 100 new features in all.

Being everywhere shoppers might be is a movable feast these days, and Shopify’s approach seems to be to offer a Vegas-style buffet to address that: a little bit of everything for everyone. Or as CEO and founder Tobi Lütke described it, “the infinite game” of commerce.

The fuller list is being unveiled as part of a new semi-annual product sprint that the company is launching today called Shopify Editions. To be clear, Shopify has been building products in social commerce, partnering with Google, building links with cryptocurrencies, and other developments prior to today, and some of the features that it’s bundled into today’s announcement are not even being made public for the first time. What’s notable with Editions is how Shopify is rolling up so many developments into one big push, a sign of how the platform itself is expanding. Aggregating a long tail of news gives the bigger picture more heft.

Sarah has covered one in particular being announced today, a new shopping experience on Twitter, here; we’re highlighting some of the other more notable developments below:

B2B: Shopify’s primary use case has been firmly in the space of direct-to-consumer sales, retailers who are selling to mass-market audiences. Today that is shifting with a formal opening up of a framework for retailers that sell to businesses. B2B on Shopify, as it’s calling the product, isn’t only for companies that work in wholesale, but also acknowledges a couple of significant facts in the commerce world: first, retailers with a primarily consumer audience also often sell to businesses; second, those that don’t sell B2B could expand their sales by doing so. Business customers typically buy in a different pattern to consumers, and typically require different kinds of payment methods and will also have different kinds of tax needs (in the U.K., for example, a business buyer does not pay the same sales tax as a consumer does on goods and services). The new framework will make it easier for those retailers to automate some of that, and potentially grow B2B revenue in the process.

Tokengated commerce: NFT activity and valuations have nosedived in recent months, and the big question at the moment is whether that is a consequence of people waking up and smelling the tulips, or if it’s a temporal blip resulting from from the bigger dip that cryptocurrencies are making right now — and if it’s the latter, whether one might ever effectively be disaggregated from the other. Regardless! Shopify will be there for any and all customers who might decide that they would like to dip their toes into the open seas of NFTs.

No, it’s not a partnership with OpenSea, one of the bigger NFT marketplaces, but Shopify’s own take on building their own NFT experiences. Shopify’s Tokengated commerce, it says, will s to use NFTs, although it’s not clear if Shopify will be powering the creation and management of them. It notes that it will be a way to “reward true fans and VIPs, by giving NFT holders exclusive access to products, perks, and experiences” by linking crypto wallets to Shopify online stores. Merchants will be able to activate Shopify tokengated commerce experiences online, on mobile and in physical retail, Shopify said. It will also build ways for NFTs from one shop or retailer or brand to be used in a Shopify-powered store.

Shopify on iPhone. Shopify is getting more active in physical sales — not a surprise since the crossover would represent a much larger potential market for the company than solely serving online merchants; and many merchants operate across both. In the latest move to increase transactions, Shopify is providing the ability for people to tap to pay on Shopify-powered transactions on iPhone.

This was actually rolled out, it seems, in May, although without much fanfare. The basic idea is that while a lot of other point-of-sale services have relied on extra pieces of POS hardware, Shopify’s is using Apple’s tap to pay features to make it easy for a merchant to enable in-person payments with just an iPhone, no dongle or terminal required. If something like Square opened the door to a new wave of small sellers taking card payments for the first time, this is an even lower barrier to entry, which is what makes it so interesting.

Local Shopify inventory now appearing on Google. Shopify and Google were already partnering to make products sold on Shopify-powered sites discoverable on Google searches; now this is taking on a location-specific angle. When customers who are looking for a specific product, if that product is attached to a Shopify-powered retailer or brand, shoppers will be able to see if it’s available to pick up locally in a physical store. It’s not quite clear if that store needs to be one specifically run by that retailer, or if it will work with stock availability at other stores.

Functions. Shopify has been building out a lot of tech to address the growing interest among some retailers for “headless” commerce — systems where they can customize more of the features for how a site operates and looks. Functions is Shopify’s answer for that: a way for slightly bigger retailers to build more dynamic options, such as discounts for those adding above a certain threshold to their shopping carts. The idea with Functions is that it complements Hydrogen and Oxygen, the company’s framework for headless commerce, with more technical features to populate those customized sites. The aim here is to create more options to keep larger customers from migrating to platforms that cater to companies that feel that they have otherwise owngrown Shopify. (And there are dozens of them: just google “outgrown Shopify” to see what I mean.)

The bigger picture here is that while Shopify was an early mover and was prescient in seeing the potential of providing tools to build shopping sites to more merchants, it’s now trying to take more steps to anticipate but also reflect where commerce is going, and whatever those steps might be, to win by making that experience as accessible as easy to use as possible by those who are sellers, not technologists, at hear.

“We will go wherever the world of commerce goes,” Glen Coates, VP Product, Core, told us. “We want Shopify to be a big easy button.”

As part of its ongoing efforts to expand into e-commerce, Twitter today announced a new partnership with Shopify. The deal will see Twitter launching a sales channel app that will be made available to all of Shopify’s U.S. merchants through its app store. The app allows merchants to onboard themselves to Twitter’s Shopping Manager, the dashboard offered by the social media company where sellers can access product catalog tools and enable other shopping features for their profiles.

The news follows Twitter’s recent launches of shopping-related features, including this month’s introduction of a “Product Drops” feature, and Twitter’s earlier launches of mobile storefronts and livestream shopping. Meanwhile, Shopify says orders placed through partner integrations, like Twitter, quadrupled in the first quarter of 2022.

Merchants will be able to use the new sales channel app to connect their Twitter account to their Shopify admin then get set up with Twitter’s Shopping Manager and other free tools Twitter built for “Professionals.” This includes Twitter’s launch of a new feature called Location Spotlight, announced earlier this month, which allows local businesses in the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Australia to display information like their street address, contact info, and operating hours directly on their profile.

Image Credits: Twitter/Shopify

Currently, merchants can enable either Twitter Shops, a Shop Spotlight, or a Location Spotlight. But the company told us it’s working on giving merchants the option to enable more than one of these features at the same time.

After linking their Shopify and Twitter accounts, merchants can use the new app to sync their product catalogs to Twitter. This saves considerable time and energy, as previously, that inventory would have to be entered manually on Twitter’s platform. As their Shopify catalog changes, those will also be synced to Twitter’s Shopping Manager, as well.

One earlier adopter of this feature, @TrixieCosmetics, agreed this was an improvement.

“The Twitter sales channel makes it quicker and easier to meet our customers wherever they are. The automatic syncing is going to help us save so much time, and the sales channel allows me to easily connect the two platforms that we already tap into to sell products and engage with customers,” Trixie Cosmetics Senior Social Media Manager, Jessica Stevens, said in the announcement.

Image Credits: Twitter/Shopify

When inventory is synced, merchants can use Twitter Shops and Shop Spotlight features to help customers discover their products on the social media platform and make purchases. Those transactions will take place on the merchant’s own website. Related to this, Twitter Shops and Shop Spotlight are also now exiting beta testing and will be made available to all merchants in the U.S., Twitter says.

“Reaching potential customers where they are is critical to the success of Shopify merchants,” said Amir Kabbara, Director of Product at Shopify, in a statement. “Twitter is where conversations happen, and the connection between conversations and commerce is vital. Our partnership with Twitter, and the launch of the Twitter sales channel, will let merchants seamlessly bring commerce to the conversations they’re already having on the platform,” Kabbara added.

Twitter sees the potential in bringing more e-commerce brands to Twitter, as these same companies also make up a sizable portion of Twitter’s advertiser base. As the company explained last year, it aims to help people buy things on Twitter as this also helps advertisers find their customers and continue to own those relationships.

Unlike Meta’s e-commerce efforts, where many shopping transactions take place in-app using Meta’s own payments system Meta Pay (previously Facebook Pay), Twitter directs users’ clicks to brands’ own websites. However, Meta has a more developed e-commerce strategy, where it’s given “Shops” its own tab in the Instagram app. Twitter Shops, by comparison, aren’t centralized in such a way — they’re found on individual business’s Twitter profiles.

Twitter also today highlighted the potential for e-commerce when noting there were 6.5 billion tweets mentioning businesses on its platform in 2021. As it pointed out when announcing Product Drops recently, Twitter users are already having conversations about brands and products on its app, so allowing those customers then complete the transaction via Twitter makes sense as the next step.

The company declined to share how many brands were testing the Shopify app before launch, nor could it disclose how many businesses have now adopted Twitter Shops.

The Twitter partnership was one of several product announcements from Shopify today, as part of its new twice-annual showcase, Editions, where it will continue to share its latest commerce innovations. The company also announced ties up with other big tech companies Apple and Google with regard to Tap to Pay on iPhone and local inventory on Google, respectively, among other things.

Rider is on a mission to provide online shoppers in Pakistan with “Amazon-like” next-day deliveries. The Karachi-based company announced it has raised $3.1 million in new funding from Y Combinatior, along with new investors i2i, Flexport, Soma Capital and Rebel Fund. Returning investors included GFC, Fatima Gobi and TPL E-ventures, along with Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi. This brings RIder’s total raised to $5.4 million since September 2021.

Founded in 2019 by former UPS Pakistan executive Salman Allana, Rider is building a network of sorting hubs, delivery centers and a digitized fleet. The platform enables sellers to offer next-day delivery with route optimization, live tracking and scheduling for buyers. The company claims that since their pre-seed investment round in September 2021, monthly revenues have grown 110% and they have doubled their customer base to 650 online sellers. So far, Rider has delivered 3 million parcels across 60 cities in Pakistan. It currently runs a network of 16 hubs that cover 60 cities across Pakistan, which Allana said accounts for about 60% of e-commerce demand in the country.

Allana told TechCrunch that growing up in Karachi and spending his early career in sub-Saharan Africa meant he was used to poor supply chains and logistics services. “If you ordered something online, you accepted the huge risk it might never show up,” he said. When he moved to London to study for his MBA, he became “obsessed” with Amazon delivery. “How could an order I placed at midnight be at my doorstep the next morning? I believed there was a clear and large opportunity to bring this service quality to online sellers in Pakistan and eradicate ‘parcel anxiety’ for all online buyers in Pakistan—including myself.”

After earning his MBA, Allana started working for UPS Pakistan as head of strategy and business development. He saw for himself the challenges logistics incumbents face, including lost orders, buyers who are reluctant to order online again and, for online sellers, headaches like manual cash-on-delivery, reconciliation and slow payback, which created working capital challenges, especially for Pakistan’s one million SMEs that rely on Instagram and Facebook to reach buyers.

“I learnt that the traditional delivery payers were not set up or equipped to service the online retail trend, and that change from the inside would be slow and costly,” Allana said. “The COVID pandemic saw a huge and irreversible shift to online shopping across Pakistan. Only a built-for-purpose, dynamic, growth-focused startup could capture this opportunity on time.”

Logistics is a notoriously cash-burning sector. Allana said that the network of delivery centers Rider is building isn’t what you would usually imagine. Instead they include mobile warehouses (or pre-sorted vans), empty spaces in the parking lot of malls and petrol stations. Moving forward, Rider would also like to have delivery centers in kiranas, or convenience stores. This means delivery centers are flexible enough to move as high volume e-commerce zones change.

“We’re fundamentally building for ‘urban logistics,’ so we don’t have requirements for large sorting centers and spaces,” he said. “Our network consists of numerous small delivery centers which are purposely placed to cover high-volume e-commerce zones, and which ultimately are flexible to move as these zones change.”

Rider’s new funding will be used on its in-house tech, including e-commerce enablement tools like plug-ins and built-in wallets to help SMEs, which Allana said are mostly owned by women, grow their businesses.

“Our ambition from day one—we want to be the country’s number end-to-end e-commerce logistics solution provider,” Allana said. “But we see logistics as a series of building blocks, each of which we need to get right, operationally and financially, before we can build the next. Today, Rider is doing last-mile delivery to the customers’ doorstep. We’ve proven our last mile solutions work, we’ve proven they work at scale and we now need to prove they work sustainably before we enter other verticals.” He added Rider already has an eye on its next phase, and piloted its B2B movement, or overland trucking, in January.

In a prepared statement, i2i general partner Kalsoom Lakhani said, “As the e-commerce industry in Pakistan grows, so will the need for a next generation 3PL player that understands the Pakistani market realities and knows how to build both aggressively but also efficiently. We believe that this player is Rider and have so much conviction in Salman and his vision.

BeReal, LiveIn, Locket… what do these new consumer social apps have in common besides a highly-ranked position on the App Store’s Top Charts? They engage their users through a combination of push notifications and homescreen widgets, instead of forcing people to spend a long time browsing their app, scrolling feeds, or watching creator content.

The popularity of this homescreen-based form of social networking is, in part, tied to Apple’s move to launch a widgets platform for the iPhone with the release of iOS 14 in 2020. In doing so, it invited a new ecosystem of apps to emerge.

Initially, this began with apps that allowed users to better personalize their homescreens with widgets and custom app icons that matched their backgrounds, sending apps like Widgetsmith, Brass, Color Widgets, and others to the top of the App Store. But over time, developers realized that widgets didn’t just have to be homescreen decorations – they could, in effect, be an active extension of their own platforms. Their widgets could serve as a tool to engage users in the most personal space on a mobile device: the prime real estate that is the phone’s homescreen.

When Locket first launched in December 2021, this idea was more of a novelty.

Developer and former Apple WWDC student scholarship winner Matt Moss thought it would be clever to use a widget to send photos to his girlfriend as they embarked on a long-distance relationship. But soon, his friends were clamoring for access to the app he had built as a simple side project.

Since then, Locket has expanded from iOS to Android and how now seen a total of 20 million installs to date, according to estimates from app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower. But its popularity has declined a bit as newer competitors emerged. While Locket was No. 9 in the Social Networking category, as of the time of writing, it was only No. 42 Overall on the U.S. App Store. That rank is largely due to the fact that there are so many other apps now playing in this space and gaining momentum.

For instance, another app called BeReal had originally arrived in December 2019 – before iPhone’s widgets became broadly available. This social app encourages users to capture a photo within 2 minutes of receiving a push notification using BeReal’s camera — which takes both a front-facing photo and selfie at the same time. The idea is to give users a way to see what their friends are up to in real-time. Before this year, BeReal had seen steady, but not groundbreaking, growth, achieving 1.9 million worldwide installs, per Sensor Tower data. The app is backed by $30 million in funding, led by a16z, Accel, and New Wave.

Then, in February 2022, BeReal tapped into the idea to leverage the homescreen to capture friends’ reactions to users’ posts, with the launch of a feature called “WidgetMojis.” This addition allowed BeReal to display friends’ photos in a live-updating widget on the homescreen as they reacted to users’ BeReal posts, or what BeReal calls RealMojis. By April, the app intelligence firm Apptopia had reported that BeReal had grown its monthly active users 315% year-to-date and that 65% of its lifetime downloads had occurred this year. That figure has since grown to around 86%, Sensor Tower says, as the app now has a total of 13.9 million lifetime installs.

Over the course of 2022, BeReal’s popularity has skyrocketed. This year alone BeReal has gained some 12 million installs, the data further indicates. And, as of the time of writing, BeReal was the No. 10 Overall app on the U.S. App Store, beating out traditional social networking and communication apps like Messenger, Snapchat, Telegram, Discord, Twitter, and Pinterest. It was also the No. 3 app in the Social Networking category.

For younger users, BeReal also becoming a part of their cultural lexicon and everyday app rotation. On TikTok, the hashtag #bereal has over 390 million views, while variations on the name bring in thousands or millions more.

But BeReal is now only one of many competing in this space. Another vying for a part of this emerging market is the newer addition, LiveIn, which launched in January 2022 after pivoting from a Clubhouse-like app, Livehouse. This homescreen social networking app comes with its own twist. Instead of just sending selfie photos to friends’ phones, users can send videos and drawings, as well. Another new feature lets users “duet” photos and videos — taking a cue from the similarly-named mashup feature found on TikTok.

The company said in a press release it reached 4 million monthly active users in the first two months after launch. At the time, the hashtags #liveinapp and #livepic had generated more than 40 million TikTok views. Today, #liveinapp has 279.5 million TikTok views and #livepic has 37.6 million.

@tuckerthorn Guys use the link in my bio so I can send photos to your Home Screen #liveinapp @liveinapp #fyp #app #foryou ♬ As It Was – Harry Styles

In addition to the casual photo-sharing and updated widgets, these new social apps include a photo archive so users can look back at their memories. This serves not only as a way to incentivize users to launch the apps outside of designated photo-taking times, but also as a way to lock in users and keep them from abandoning the platform.

This sort of photo archive isn’t a new concept – it’s inspired by Facebook and Snapchat’s Memories features, but is designed to achieve the same results with a younger crowd.

In fact, these new social apps have taken many of the core concepts more recently popularized by Snapchat – access to real-life friends, private photo sharing, spontaneous and casual photo-taking, and memories – and have built their own differentiated platforms that tap into the smartphone’s notification system and direct homescreen access via widgets.

These three apps are only a handful of a growing number of apps building for social via the phone’s homescreen widgets.

Other top downloaded apps include Noteit Widget, which has gained 18.8 million lifetime installs per Sensor Tower data; Loveit: Live Pic & Note Widget (1.4 million installs); Widgetshare (3.1 million installs); Peek (704K installs); Widgetpal (374K installs), Snapwidget (185K installs); Rocket Widget (127K installs); Comet: Live Friends Widget (112K installs); and others.

There are even clones capitalizing on the names of popular brands like the not-so-subtly named app called “LivePic, Locket Photo Widgets” which has managed to pull in 79K installs — some of which likely came by way of misdirected App Store searches.

Gen Z’s shift to authenticity

Another one of the many things these apps have in common is that they promote sharing real-life photos that don’t involve heavy editing, filters, or AR effects – features Snapchat and Instagram had become known for. This speaks to a broader shift that’s helping fuel this trend: the end of the Instagram aesthetic and the increased desire for authenticity on social media.

We already saw hints of this emerging with the launches of other newcomer social photo apps like Dispo or Poparazzi, both of which focused on uncurated photostreams – the latter, where photos were snapped and posted by the user’s friends, not users themselves. There were also the apps that aimed at photographers abandoned by Instagram — like Glass, or Herd Social, which had positioned themselves as being “anti-Instagram” apps.

This broader group of photo apps promoted their defiance of Big Tech with its manufactured algorithms, the overabundance of features, and the hyper-competitiveness that now sees mainstream social networks chasing TikTok with short videos, not to mention their collective drive to incorporate all sorts of other activity — like e-commerce, creator subscriptions, virtual tipping, NFTs, and more. When it’s not trying to be an online mall, Instagram is trying to clone TikTok, for example. Snapchat is hosting creator content and now wants users to shop using AR.

Meanwhile, younger users – the key demographic that uses social apps – seemed to have actually just wanted simpler apps that focused on what they wanted social networking to be about: their friends.

It’s funny that it’s come to this. The “social graph” was once the holy grail of consumer social platforms – to know who someone was connected to in real life was perceived as valuable data. For one thing, it meant you could lock users into a walled garden they wouldn’t want to leave because their friends were all there, too. And making this social graph inaccessible to competitors meant every new network had to start from scratch. But these days, mainstream social networks are more heavily focused on connecting users with creators – after all, that’s where the money is. Users can subscribe to, shop from, and virtually tip content creators. Monetizing true friendships is much more difficult.

But Big Tech’s greed left a gap in the market where they began to underserve those in search of real-world connections. This impact isn’t just visible within the homescreen social app trend.

It’s also helped drive users to the almost too numerous to count “friend-finding” and friend discovery apps, like Yubo, LMK, Wink, Hoop, Wizz, Vibe, Fam, Itsme, Lobby, Hippo, LiveMe, Swiping, and others – many of which had built on top of Snapchat’s APIs until the company tightened its developer policy over child safety concerns.

The trend is similarly impacting dating, leading to Match’s biggest-ever acquisition of Hyperconnect for $1.73 billion, which had been building “social discovery” apps that weren’t designed specifically for romantic connections. Bumble today is beefing up its “BFF” feature as younger people are shifting their interest to friend-finding apps.

But this broader shift in social isn’t without concerns. Though mainstream social apps are now being held accountable regarding their user protections, newer social apps are flying under the radar. Parents haven’t heard of these new apps and don’t know to monitor or restrict them as a result. The same goes for lawmakers and regulators, too, who have their eyes affixed solely on tech giants. And as reports have shown, the apps’ privacy protections and policies, in some cases, are fairly weak. This is particularly concerning given that many are marketed towards and used by tweens and younger teens, who may inadvertently post to global, public feeds instead of to friends, post inappropriate content, or become the victims of cyberbullying.

But the apps’ freewheeling nature isn’t the only reason why homescreen social networking is having a moment. Beyond those mentioned above, there are many other factors at play here — including the apps’ clever use of TikTok to drive downloads, influencer marketing, and college ambassador programs to spread the word about new apps more “organically.” There’s also the continuous background noise related to social networking’s ill effects that Gen Z is aware of, even if only mariginally. Data scandals, high-profile leaks and whistleblowing, Congressional hearings, regulatory inquiries, and the resulting media coverage have helped fuel consumer demand for apps that weren’t created by today’s dominant players.

The market’s readiness for this type of networking is demonstrated by how well these “homescreen social” apps are currently doing. They’re dominating the Social Networking charts and are staking their position in the Overall Top Charts. While, longer-term, they could end up being another flash in the pan the way location-based social networking apps were in the 2010’s, there’s a sense that some Gen Z users no longer consider these apps experimental.

@carolinelusk it’s time sensitive man #fyp #foryou #foryoupage ♬ original sound – AnxietyGangOfficial

And while TikTok is certainly a viable threat in terms of capturing the valuable – and profitable – connection between users and creators, users’ social graphs are still up for grabs. In fact, many among Gen Z don’t want to share their real-world relationships with TikTok, they’ve said in videos posted to the platform. They appreciate that’s TikTok a network that’s about creativity and individualized interests, not their real-world connections.

@420koreaboono every time damn stop asking♬ ITSJULYSKI – JULYSKI

TikTok has realized this too and understands the risk it poses for its own business. It even got so pushy about acquiring users’ address books that it destroyed its own Discover page in favor of a Friends page in hopes of capturing that data.

If the trend continues, it could impact other mainstream social networks, which have largely ignored this new avenue to gain users and haven’t adopted the “live pics from friends” widget format, either.

With the social graph filtering to smaller, simpler homescreen social networking apps, there also now comes the potential to build a different kind of social network that could be monetized in new ways beyond ads. These apps could roll out premium features, a subscription service, direct payment, and more. But that future is still in question, as it remains to be seen whether homescreen social networking apps have long-term staying power among the historically fickle younger crowd who have adopted them.

Large banks are stepping up their game when it comes to new services and the technology that underpins them, and in many cases they are borrowing straight from the tech world’s playbook: Instead of building in-house, to speed things up, they are tapping third parties that have already found a fix for a tricky problem, integrating their breakthroughs by way of APIs.

In the latest development, a startup called Able has built an engine to speed up the processing of  documents and other data required for commercial loans (typically $100,000 but sometimes up to $100 million in value), which it sells as a service to banks and other lenders. Today, it’s coming out of stealth mode with $20 million in funding and a launch into the wider market.

The Series A is being led by Canapi Ventures — a specialist fintech investor — with participation also from Human Capital, which also led the startup’s seed round. Diego Represas, the CEO of Able who co-founded it with Andrew Hurst, noted that there are also a couple of strategic investors — financial services companies that are already using Able’s tech — but they are not disclosing those names currently.

I write that it is launching into the wider market because although it’s coming out of stealth, Able’s actually been around since 2020, and the customers it’s picked up are already using Able’s technology — which involves RPA, computer vision and other forms of AI to ingest and process data related to loans as part of their evaluation process.

The section of the loan market that it is focusing on is larger commercial endeavors and so are being done at much higher values than the typical small business loan. That also means more parsing of paperwork related to a loan application, a cumbersome process that Able is aiming to reduce by up to 30% on a typical application.

Represas said he came to the idea of fixing this after a meeting up with cousin of his who worked in business finance and told him about the painful process that went on behind the scenes.

Represas and Hurst at the time were engineers at another fintech, Digit, and so Represas’s natural inclination was to think that there was likely already a solution in the market to cut this down.

It turned out that there wasn’t. He couldn’t believe it, he said: business loans are a $6 trillion annual market, but globally banks were spending about $60 billion annually to process those loan applications.

Perhaps the bigger market size has kept a lot of incumbents from wanting to fix what didn’t really seem broken. But we know how this song goes: there are a number of companies now also building to address this, and so perhaps it was just a matter of time before they would get their inefficient stranglehold on business loans disrupted.

“So we dove into solving this problem,” he said.

The company is picking an interesting moment to announce funding and open for business. Inflation is on the rise, and interest rates are getting hiked up in a bid to contain it.

That means it’s a complicated, but potentially interesting, time to be a fintech startup building technology to power commercial loan services for major banks and other large lenders.

On one hand, higher interest rates and the presence of inflation might make getting loans and taking any business leap or risk less attractive; on the other hand, it may be precisely the right time to have a product out there that takes friction out of the process and therefore speeds up the transaction and lowers the costs around it.

Companies, meanwhile, will still be in need of funding to grow, and in some cases you’ll have companies investing in that because their products are breaking through, maybe because of the current state of the market. (As people in tech love to point out, Google and Airbnb after all were both launched during recessions.)

You could say the same for Able. Its own product crosses into a couple of different competitive spaces. There are a number of startups out there already either working directly with businesses, or providing their tech to embed elsewhere to power business loans with new approaches that leverage AI and big data analytics. (Some like Kabbage eventually do get snapped up by incumbents: Amex acquired the SoftBank-backed startup back in 2020 after it struggled hard through the first year of the pandemic.)

Alongside that, there is a wave of companies out there targeting fast-scaling companies and making it easier to secure revolving credit and debt facilities as an alternative to the equity-based funding that they might typically consider. They include the likes of Hum (formerly called Capital) providing services directly to businesses; and Sivo, which provides debt-as-a-service; Clearco and Wayflyer both targeting e-commerce and online businesses; and more.

I should also point out that there is another fintech startup called Able, although it focuses on personal money management and is not connected to this Able at all.

Represas notes that Able’s focus on the tech that is used for processing, but not decision-making or risk-profiling (which Represas told me is just a small aspect of loan approval and not where the pain point is); the fact that it focuses on commercial loans and not SMB loans (too small an opportunity, he said); and that it does not directly interface with borrowers itself but works through banks, all make it distinct from the rest of the pack (why create new channels when those banks already have those deep relationships, was Represas’ rhetorical question to me when I asked why not). All in all, Able is disruptive, but it’s not a threat, to its customers.

And that makes it one to watch.

“Able is a game-changer. Their team is already working with several banks in the Canapi network on use cases that span the entire loan lifecycle,” said Neil Underwood, general partner at Canapi Ventures and president of Live Oak Bank, in a statement. “Able cuts the time and resources needed to process any business loan. Lenders get better economics and a scalable platform for growth. Everyone gets a modern digital experience. It’s a win-win situation for all parties involved.”

Shipping and cargo services is one of the more fragmented and analogue verticals in the world of industry, with hundreds of thousands of businesses involved in a myriad of aspects of a process that is fundamentally physical (not digital) by its nature. Today, a company called PayCargo, which built a platform to bring one key aspect of it — how companies in the business of shipping products and specifically consumer goods pay each other — into the modern and digital age, is announcing $130 million in funding to expand its platform.

The funding, a Series C, is coming from a single investor, Blackstone Growth, and PayCargo — based out of Coral Gables, FL — said that it will be used to expand into more geographies, to build out more products around financial and business data, and potentially also for M&A, since the area of providing services to the shipping industry is as fragmented as the shipping industry itself.

PayCargo is not disclosing its valuation, but notably, the company is an example of one of the kinds of startups that is not finding it challenging to raise money at the moment: it is profitable, and it has been since it was founded in 2009; it is working in an enterprise vertical that still has a long way to go before it’s saturated with competing services filling the same need PayCargo is;  and that enterprise vertical itself represents a massive opportunity with the continued growth and globalization of e-commerce overall.

“Last year we moved over $10 billion in payments, and we are now on pace for $20 billion in 2022,” said Eduardo Del Riego, PayCargo CEO, in an interview.

The company today integrates with around 50 of the larger freight management systems, transportation management systems, ERP and terminal operating systems used by shipping and cargo companies — and again, that there are 50 “larger” platforms in that wider operational software category shows just how fragmented all of this is — and the 40,000+ customers using PayCargo (the list includes Kuehne + Nagel, DHL, DB Schenker, BDP, Seko Logistics, UPS, YUSEN Logistics and vendors like Hapag-Lloyd, MSC, Ocean Network Express, Alliance Ground, Swissport and Air France) can currently source and pay more than 5,000 global logistics providers, with that number continuing to grow.

For some perspective on that number, when we covered a more modest $35 million Series A investment into the company from Insight partners in 2020, it had integrations with 4,000 providers and worked with 12,000 customers. In between then and now it also raised a $125 million Series B in which it noted that potentially there are up to 40,000 providers to tap for integrations in the years ahead. Indeed, Del Riego noted to me that PayCargo’s current size still just represents a tiny fraction — less than 2% — of the overall market.

The core of the PayCargo platform is a set of cloud-based tools for those ordering shipping services by land, sea or air to send payments, and for vendors to receive them, a set of APIs to integrate the tools into a company’s existing FMS and other IT, as well as financing services for those who do not want to pay for the shipments up front.

E-commerce saw a huge windfall of activity during Covid-19 — when consumers who didn’t have a lot of places to go and spend money bought significantly more goods online.

The growth of the freight market may have slowed down since that peak — not just because we as a whole are moving back into the physical world; but arguably other factors around the globe like wars and embargoes are changing how things are moving around — but Del Riego pointed out to me that this hasn’t represented a decline to the company in terms of its own revenues, since its cut is made as a flat fee on each transaction, not the size of the transactions themselves.

As with others building IT services for the freight and shipping industries — they include Zencargo, FreightHub, Sennder, Flexport, and Cargo.com — the opportunity is about building more cloud-based services that work smoothly and securely and with other pieces of the operations puzzle; but in many cases, it’s still just about providing tools to replace paper and fax machines.

And so while that means that a good percentage of PayCargo’s customers have not really internalized or indeed yet doubled down on “digital transformation”, there is an opportunity for the company to become a partner and provider of more data-driven services for its users to fill that gap, too: the company, by the nature of powering transactions between different companies in the ecosystem, becomes a holder of a huge amount of data on how the industry is working: how different products are being shipped, timings and pricing, most active geographies and more. Companies will want to have that information to help shape their own strategies and know how others are performing in the market, but in many cases the kinds of customers PayCargo works with lack the tools to extract, analyse and glean insights from that information themselves.

That too is another reason why Blackstone was interested, and why PayCargo has the opportunity for a bigger fintech play here.

“I think today the opportunity is to provide the data in a digestible and synthesized manner, to take that and productize it for those customers,” said Vini Letteri, senior MD and head of financial services for Blackstone Growth. “Yes in the future, that can also be a handoff of data. But as supply chains get disrupted, there will be more demand for that data, so products to access that will be valuable.”

The e-commerce market is on track to pass $5.5 trillion in revenues this year, which speaks not only to how much consumers are shopping online these days, but also to how many businesses there are out there now selling to them. Today, a startup from Gothenburg, Sweden called Juni is announcing $206 million in funding — a $100 million Series B and a further $106 million in debt — to build out e-commerce-focused neobank, designed specifically to cater to that growing group of retailers with tools to help them run their business.

Mubadala Capital led the $100 million equity round, with previous backers EQT Ventures, Felix Capital, Cherry Ventures and Partners of DST Global also participating. Meanwhile, the $106 million in debt funding — which Juni will use to fuel its credit products — is coming from TriplePoint Capital.

Founded in 2020 and launched in 2021, Juni closed off its Series A only in October of last year (it raised $21.5 million in July and a further $52 million in October), but it’s been on a very strong pace of growth — “multiple hundred percent”, CEO Samir El-Sabini said in an interview. (It didn’t give actual customer numbers.) It’s not disclosing its valuation but sources close to the company tell me it is now in the region of $800 million. 

Most incumbent banks, and now a fair number of neobanks, target small and medium businesses as customers. But the gap in the market that Juni identified and built to fill is that the needs of e-commerce SMBs, and those doing business online in general, are unique among them.

E-commerce businesses have potentially huge incoming and outgoing sums in their accounts, and that money does not necessarily come in a consistent stream. They likely do business in multiple geographies and multiple suppliers. And in addition to potentially selling across a number of platforms and marketplaces (all of which also add complexity to the finances and managing them), they use a number of other digital tools both to sell, and to run and to help grow their operations.

El-Sabini, who co-founded the company with CTO Anders Orsedal and Jonathan Sanders (who is no longer with the company but remains a ‘silent partner’ El-Sabini said), all had track records of working in digital businesses where they saw, not just for themselves but their customers, an opportunity to build a bank that took all of that into account (so to speak) and built a financial management service that fit those dynamics. 

So around basic banking, Juni’s credit cards and capital advance/cashback services (which is where the debt funding will be put to use), accounting, and analytics are all optimized for the kind of incomings and outgoings e-commerce companies have. The platform includes some 2,400 integrations with tools (and the data that those tools generate) that companies might potentially use for their accounting, their digital advertising, their payments on websites, and more.

And while that sounds like a very large product with a lot of tentacles, Juni has actually narrowed its scope in the last year. The company initially launched catering to both e-commerce retailers and digital marketers, since the latter group also has a lot of similar dynamics, spending money in multiple jurisdictions and leveraging a variety of marketing and advertising tech. Now, it has shifted its target customer, and the tools it’s building, more specifically to the e-commerce vertical and the marketing that they undertake.

“We are focusing on e-commerce companies,” El-Sabini said. “However marketing is an important function in all e-commerce companies.”

The company launched during the pandemic, which was a windfall of sorts: there were suddenly a lot more consumers buying a lot more online, and e-commerce companies were scrambling both to connect with and sell to those audiences without going bust, so having a banking partner that could assist in that was partly what drove such strong growth for Juni.

Interestingly, and as you might expect, that need doesn’t go away as the pandemic subsides. Growth is definitely now slowing down in that sector (dropping by at least four percent globally and continuing that way for the next few years, says eMarketer) and so e-commerce companies have to manage that, too.

“The cost base is generally under pressure, and we can offer credit with great insights into our customers’ forecasting, so they understand the cash flow,” and cash flow is king for these customers, he continued. “Something that we also see is fear in the markets. So if you can have a partner that is long term and can help you and understand your position that is obviously very important. We want long relationships with our customers.”

Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company, the parent of Mubadala Capital, is a prolific fintech investor (it has backed Brex, SpotOn, GoCardless, and many others), and Fatou Bintou Sagnang, the partner who led the investment, said that she and the firm evaluated a number of other players in the banking space focusing on SMBs before coming to invest in Juni.

“It started with looking at SMBs and fintech enablement and we were looking for companies that fit that thesis,” she said in an interview. “We like companies that use tech in smart ways to decrease costs.” She said they spent more than nine months getting to know the young Juni and liked its focus on e-commerce. “We actually see a lot of parallels with Brex in the US. We came in with some experience doing this for sectors, and our thesis is that the next iteration in fintechs challenging incumbents will be more verticalization.” 

YouTube is improving its app’s experience for those who watch videos via their TVs, the company announced today. After observing that many YouTube users were already using the mobile app and engaging with videos as they watched on the big screen, the company is now introducing a new feature that allows users to connect their TV to their iOS or Android device in order to sync videos between devices. This makes it easier for users to engage with other YouTube features, like comments, the like button, or creator support, among other things, YouTube says.

The company pointed to research that found that over 80% of people claimed to use another digital device while watching TV as driving this product decision. It then looked at how people were using its own YouTube mobile app, and saw that many would open the video while watching YouTube on their TV and would engage with the content on their device by liking, subscribing, and more.

YouTube said it saw the opportunity to tap into this user behavior to address the challenges it has faced in designing a big-screen experience. Over the years, its designers have struggled with making the TV app easier to use, given that remote controls are difficult to navigate with, most TVs don’t have built-in web browsers, and there’s often less space to work with — especially when users are watching full-screen videos.

The new mobile feature helps to solve some of these challenges as it allows users to turn to their mobile app instead to synchronize their phone to the TV. After opening the YouTube app on the TV, they can then open the mobile app on their phone and click “Connect” on the prompt that appears to sync up their viewing.

This is sort of the reverse of the typical “casting” experience, where users would tap the Cast icon in the YouTube mobile app to connect their phone to the TV. YouTube confirmed the new feature doesn’t rely on casting protocols, like Google Cast or DIAL, in order to work. Instead, users just stay signed into their YouTube account on both devices — there’s no technical complexity to the experience for the end user, a spokesperson said.

Once synchronized via the new feature, users can then directly interact with the video from their phone while they watch, which YouTube says makes it easier to read video descriptions, leave comments, share a video with a friend, or use other features to support creators, like Super Chat or channel memberships, among other things.

But this feature also lays the groundwork for other experiences YouTube is building, including e-commerce. The company says it’s already testing new designs for its video watch page that would make it easier for users to browse and shop for products seen in videos directly from the big screen. These designs will help to guide users to their mobile device when they’re ready to buy.

In this case, a message may appear on the big screen that suggests users open the mobile app for a “second screen experience.” When they do so, they’ll see a list of products featured in the video which they can then view with a tap.

Image Credits: YouTube shopping experience

YouTube has signaled its interest in online shopping for some time, having launched livestream shopping last year, following other enhancements like merch shelves and shoppable ads, for example. At this year’s Brandcast event in May, YouTube also said it would soon roll out more livestream shopping features, including co-streams where creators could go live together, and redirects that send a creator’s audience to a brand’s channel.

According to a statement earlier this year from YouTube Chief Product Officer, Neal Mohan, e-commerce is a major area of focus for YouTube.

Left unsaid is the credible threat that TikTok is having on this market. TikTok has been sending users directly to other shopping platforms like Shopify or Amazon, driving millions in sales — with no Google sites being used along the way.

“One of the most anticipated opportunities we’ll bring to our brands this year is Shopping,” Mohan had written. “This new experience taps into the deep trust creators have built with their communities to help our partners expand into the booming world of e-commerce. We’re thinking about shoppable videos, Live Shopping, and, more broadly, how shopping appears across the app,” the post read.

Another benefit to syncing the app to the TV platform directly is that it could give YouTube more control over critical aspects of the user experience which it can’t always dictate on third-party TV platforms. The company, for instance, got into a dispute with Roku over the distribution of its YouTube and YouTube TV apps on the streaming media device maker’s platform, because YouTube wanted to control things like how search results appeared or how voice search functioned. In prior years, it had issues with Amazon as well, before finally coming to an agreement.

YouTube says the new feature will work on all smart and connected TVs that have the latest YouTube app. It will also require that users are signed into YouTube on both the TV app and in the mobile version, and both are connected to the internet.

The feature will roll out across all platforms with the latest YouTube app over the next few weeks, YouTube says.

It continues to be a very rough week for e-commerce companies in Europe. In the latest development, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Getir — the $12 billion quick commerce upstart that grocery essentials and sundries and promises delivery of them in minutes — is cutting 14% of its staff globally. It’s been estimated that the Turkish company employs some 32,000 people in the nine markets where it operates, which would work out to 4,480 people impacted by the downsizing.

In addition to the headcount, the company plans to curtail a lot of its capital-intensive expansion — which will include hiring, marketing investments, and promotions. (Promotions in this context are not HR promotions, but the many discounts and free vouchers that quick commerce startups have been using to lure users to their platforms, at huge cost to the startups themselves.)

According to a memo that we have seen — which we are publishing below — the cuts will vary by country. (One source in Berlin estimated that the cuts in that city alone will be around 400, although this is not a number Getir would confirm.) The company has confirmed that it will not be pulling out of any specific country as part of this. Getir currently operates in its home market of Turkey, as well as the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Portugal and the U.S.

This is a stark swing of the pendulum for a company that raised $768 million at an $11.8 billion valuation just two months ago.

But it’s not a surprise in the wider market context we are in at the moment, with tech companies big and small all seeing a downturn in their finances and valuations in the face of a wider cooling of the market.

Just yesterday, one of Getir’s big rivals in Europe, Gorillas, announced layoffs of 300 people and plans to explore strategic options, including sales or exits, in several European markets. Earlier in the week, Klarna — the Swedish buy now, pay later company — confirmed it would cut 10% of its workforce amid reports that it was seeking to raise money at a reduced valuation.

The world of instant grocery delivery specifically has been one that many would argue was ripe for right-sizing for a while now. Founded seven years ago, Getir was an early mover in the “instant grocery” market, but the last couple of years has seen an explosion of the category.

Covid-19 led to a change in consumer habits: in many cases stores were outright closed for periods of time, and people were less inclined to shop in person when they were open, and that led to a surge of people willing to try out shopping for groceries online for the first time. Many companies popped up, propped up by huge amounts of VC investment, to serve those consumers, and a sizable proportion of these startups were based on the premise of “instant” delivery, with items coming to your door within minutes of ordering, mimicking (or even reducing) the time it would take to quickly run to a physical store.

Even before the capital markets collapsed earlier this year, several smaller startups either shut down or got acquired — Getir being one of the consolidators, alongside other big players like Gopuff, Flink and Gorillas. That’s a trend that has continued into 2022, and there will likely be even more to come.

Companies like Klarna and Getir may be coming from different corners of the world of commerce, but they share something in common: both are backed by Sequoia. The storied VC (which led Getir’s Series C in 2021) just this week put together an alarm-bell presentation for portfolio companies, running through the state of the market today and some guidance on how to help weather the storm. The 50-slide presentation — which a source shared with us — covered topics like runway extension, fundraising in difficult markets, leadership in uncertain times, and forecasting.

Pointedly for a company like Getir — which, similar to its rivals, has been raising hundreds of millions of dollars to pump into aggressive expansion strategies involving splashy ad campaigns, extensive operations infrastructure in urban areas, and lots of promotions to bring on more consumers — one slide was titled “Growth at all costs is no longer being rewarded.”

The presentation’s message appears to have definitely hit home for Getir.

The memo follows below. We’ll update this post as we learn more, and we’re sending our best wishes to those impacted by this news.

Today is one of the most difficult days since we founded Getir, because we have to make tough decisions about our people organization that will adversely affect some of our team members.

Rising inflation and the deteriorating macroeconomic outlook around the world pushes all companies, especially in the tech industry and including Getir, to adjust to the new climate.

With a heavy heart, we today shared with our team the saddening and difficult decision to reduce the size of our global organization. At a global headquarter base, our reduction will be about 14%. Numbers will vary by country.

We do not take these decisions lightly. We will do right by every person throughout this process in line with Getir’s values of being a good and fair company. We will also decrease spending on marketing investments, promotions, and expansion.

There is no change in Getir’s plans to serve in the nine countries it operates. In these tough times, we are committed to leading the ultra-fast grocery delivery industry that we pioneered seven years ago.

Robotics are playing a growing role in the world of e-commerce logistics and fulfillment — where they are seen not just as a way to speed up operations but to drastically reduce the costs of running them — and today a startup developing software and hardware specifically in the area of robot picking is announcing some funding.

Nomagic, a Polish startup that has built a robotic arm that can identify and pick out an item from an unordered selection (say, from objects in a box) and then move or pack it into another place, has raised $22 million, funding that it will be using towards both growing and expanding its business.

Nomagic’s robotic arms were first deployed to work picking up and moving small consumer electronics and related items — phones, cables, small toys — before extending to items like bagged apparel. Kacper Nowicki, the CEO who co-founded the company with Marek Cygan (CTO) and Tristan d’Orgeval (CSO), said that the plan is to add in more categories like groceries over time, reflecting changing consumer habits and what people are buying online these days. “That is the long-term goal,” he said.

The company already has a number of customers in sectors ranging from fashion, e-commerce and third-party logistics providers — one of the more prominent is Brack.ch, a Swiss-based “everything” store similar to Amazon in terms of its physical product range. And while it currently bases its tech around computer vision to identify objects and read codes, over time it is likely also to incorporate other kinds of tech such as radio-wave scanning to identify items. 

Khosla Ventures and Berlin’s Almaz Capital co-led the round with the European Investment Bank, with past backers Hoxton Ventures, Capnamic Ventures, DN Capital and Manta Ray also participating.

Nomagic last raised funding — a seed round of $8.6 million — in February 2020; and in the interim, it’s been a wild ride in the world of e-commerce.

Covid-19 led to a huge surge in online shopping, but also a reassessment of how people could work in warehouses under pandemic concerns and restrictions, and in some cases some serious reassessments of how operations were run, and a curtailing of investments to adjust to changing (and sometimes hard-hit) business conditions. Nomagic’s technology plays into all of those developments in a variety of ways.

The most obvious of these is around digital transformation, where companies are adopting robotic hardware as part of a wider update of their systems and bringing on more automation. Nomagic cites data from Research and Markets and Mordor that estimates that the the global warehouse automation market will be worth $31 billion by 2025, and that the market for piece-picking robots specifically is growing at a rate of 62.5% and will be worth $2.9 billion by 2026.

Alongside that, there is an obvious opportunity for robots to work in environments where humans might not, either because the environment is unsuitable for them and to modern labor laws (eg, no lighting, small spaces, no heating or cooling, and long hours); or because companies cannot afford that labor. Although Nomagic is also building out some hardware components, today the company focuses the bulk of its R&D on software development, which Nowicki says means that ultimately the tech will be able to work across a wide range of hardware.

Given that much larger e-commerce giants like Amazon and Ocado are investing in their own robotics technology, building third-party services that can be adopted by smaller players will be essential to letting them continue to compete. Nowicki argues that this is not about putting humans out of work but letting them focus on less repetitive tasks robots cannot handle — a factor potentially even more important for smaller organizations, with smaller staff bases and resources, to consider. This is the opportunity that investors see, too.

“An increasing number of mundane tasks will be increasingly automated by robots over the coming years,” said Kanu Gulati, partner at Khosla Ventures in a statement. “We come in early to support companies building promising technologies that are bold and impactful like Nomagic and are excited by the momentum they have demonstrated with customers.” 

CleverTap, a retention marketing platform which has raised $76.6M to date, is to fully acquire Bulgarian-originated but San Francisco-based Leanplum, a customer engagement platform which has raised $131.2M, for an undisclosed amount. The news was broken by South Eastern European startup news site The Recursive.

Sunil Thomas, CleverTap Cofounder and Executive Chairman said: “Like many private company transactions we are not disclosing the price and terms of the acquisition. This is a cash and stock transaction that is being funded by internal accrual and CleverTap stock.” The deal is expected to close in Q2 of 2022.

The most recent Series D investors in Leanplum included LAUNCHub Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Kleiner Perkins.

This acquisition will give more global reach to CleverTap, with development centers and customer-facing teams across North America, Europe, Latin America, India, South East Asia and the Middle East. The company says it now has a total customer base of 1200 customers.

Thomas added: “Users today demand to be treated as individuals, and this has forced brands to change how they engage with them. CleverTap and Leanplum have both purposely built for a mobile-centric omnichannel world.”

“When we started Leanplum, our vision was to meet customers’ real-time needs at the cutting edge of technology,” said Momchil Kyurkchiev, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Leanplum in a statement. “We have succeeded in that, but as the market has matured, to fully meet the increasing demands put on brands today, we needed to bring in the best analytics, segmentation, and engagement tools, to help our customers build valuable, long-term relationships with their customers. This is why joining forces with CleverTap makes the most sense.”

CleverTap and Leanplum are well known in the retention marketing space but also compete with marketing automation software and that is a crowded category.

The acquisition is a possible sign that this market is consolidating.