French startup Multis has raised a $7 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital. Originally designed as a neobank for companies working with cryptocurrencies, the company has slightly altered its product vision. It now intends to offer the software layer that helps web3 organizations manage their crypto finances.

Other investors in the round include Long Journey Ventures, Sound Ventures, MakerDAO and several business angels, such as Paul Veradittakit, Ryan Selkis and Diogo Monica. Some existing investors also participated once again, such as eFounders, Y Combinator and White Star Capital.

If you run an organization that mostly receives and sends crypto assets and if you want to pay people in cryptocurrencies, chances are you could use something like Multis. When you first sign up, you can connect your Multis account with your Gnosis Safe wallet.

Gnosis Safe is a popular multisig wallet designed specifically for organizations with several people. It’s a smart contract wallet running on Ethereum that you can configure to your needs. For instance, you could require that three different persons validate a transaction when it crosses a certain threshold. They can use a hardware wallet, such as a Ledger wallet, or a software wallet, such as Metamask, to execute transactions.

If you don’t have a Gnosis Safe, Multis can help you create one. The idea is that organizations should remain in control of the private keys of their Gnosis Safe.

“We help customers supercharge their existing Gnosis Safe wallet by adding an all-in-one software layer designed for business,” co-founder and CEO Thibaut Sahaghian told me.

If you hold bitcoins, or you have other Ethereum wallets, you can also add any public key to track external wallets from the Multis interface. While you only get a read-only experience on those wallets, the ability to centralize all your crypto assets means that you can see the full picture when it comes to crypto treasury and cashflow analytics.

One of the biggest pain points for web3 companies is accounting. The startup wants to help you with those pesky tasks as you can categorize transactions as well as add notes and attachments to transactions. When this is done, you can export past transactions in a CSV file. Multis is also working on Quickbooks integration, which should be coming soon.

As for payments, Multis lets you issue mass payments to up to 60 Ethereum addresses. For instance, it could be particularly useful for payroll. The payment feature supports alerts and setting up approval workflows.

“Sending funds to staff is super clunky, as every single transaction has to be processed individually and logged manually. We're streamlining this payroll process by enabling customers to send funds via a company address book to up to 60 people, on the fly,” Sahaghian said.

And Multis wants to go one step further by creating ramps between the crypto and fiat worlds. In the U.S., Multis users will get traditional USD checking accounts, which could be particularly useful to pay bills and suppliers.

Moreover, Multis customers will be able to order corporate debit cards. Those banking features should be available at some point during the second quarter of 2022.

Behind the scenes, Multis will provide a crypto-to-USD brokerage service. “We partner with a money services business, brokers and an actual bank that is FDIC insured for up to $250,000,” Sahaghian said. For users, everything happens in your Multis account.

Up next, Multis will look at all the financial workflows in a typical organization and try to integrate those workflows in its product. You can imagine more accounting and HR integrations, access to decentralized exchanges, invoicing features, popular DeFi protocols, etc.

Essentially, Multis wants to replace all the tools that aren’t designed for DeFi companies or DAOs, such as shared spreadsheets and consumer dashboards like Zerion. With this vision, Multis could be more than a nice-to-have tool. It could represent a security upgrade for web3 organizations.

Spotify this afternoon announced two more acquisitions in the podcasts market, this time on both the measurement and analytics side of the business. The company is acquiring the podcast measurement service Podsights and the analytics platform Chartable for undisclosed sums.

Measurement and attribution are still two of the biggest, unsolved challenges for podcast advertisers, Spotify explained, which is what it hopes to address with the Podsights acquisition. Initially, Podsights’ technology will be used to help Spotify’s advertisers more accurately measure the impact and actions driven by their podcast ads. Over time, however, Spotify aims to expand the measurement tools to be able to other ad formats, including audio ads within music, video ads, and display ads.

Podsights has 40 full-time employees and all will join Spotify as one integrated unit. Spotify says it has no plans to adjust that team at this time.

Chartable, meanwhile, will be another addition to Spotify’s Megaphone, which was recently beefed up with a deal for a comapny called Whooshkaa, which allows radio broadcasters to convert their programming into podcasts. Chartable will integrate its audience insights and its promotional tools, SmartLinks and SmartPromos, with Megaphone so podcasters can learn more about their listener base and grow their business.

After Chartable is fully integrated into Megaphone, Spotify will deprecate the standalone Chartable platform. Until then, however, it will remain available to both new and existing publisher and advertiser clients.

This team is smaller, having only 11 employees, but Spotify isn’t planning to make any immediate changes here, either, it says.

There may be some concern that these previously independent firms will now be in-house at Spotify. But Spotify notes the Podsights team will operate independently from other service functions within Spotify for the foreseeable future in order to maintain trust with its clients, which include podcast brands and agencies.

Spotify’s name has been in the headlines in recent weeks related to its exclusive hosting of Joe Rogan’s podcast, which critics said is helping to spread Covid-19 misinformation. This backlash led several artists, including Neil Young, to pull their music from Spotify’s catalog in protest. But so far, the criticism hasn’t impacted Spotify’s broader plan to invest in podcasts and podcast technology, as it believes the medium has the potential to drive revenue for its business in the longer term.

“We believe we’re still in the early chapters of digital audio and the opportunity for advertising in this space remains significant,” said Dawn Ostroff, Chief Content & Advertising Business Officer at Spotify, in a statement. “Our acquisitions of podcast technology players Podsights and Chartable are important steps in our pursuit of taking digital audio to the next level, underscoring the powerful impact it delivers for advertisers and publishers, respectively.”

Human resources platform Employment Hero announced today it has raised $181 million AUD (or about $129 million USD), putting it at unicorn valuation in Australian dollars of $1.25 billion (or about $890 million USD). The round was led by returning investors Seek Investments with participation from OneVentures, AirTree Ventures and other shareholders.

The Sydney, Australia-based company also said it has acquired KeyPay, a workforce management and payroll platform that will remain as an independent brand and get investment from Employment Hero to grow its team.

Employment Hero’s platform, which offers a full suite of human resources management tools, including payroll and benefits, is now used by more than 80,000 SMEs, representing a total of 750,000 employees. The company itself has a team of more than 500 full-time employees based around the world. Employment Hero’s last funding announcement was in July 2021, when it announced a $140 million AUD Series E led by Insight Partners at a valuation of $800 million AUD. It has now raised a total of $220 million AUD.

KeyPay was founded in 2010 by Phil Bernie, Richard McLean, Paul Duran and Kristian Reynolds, and is active in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia and the United Kingdom, which Employment Hero said will help it grow in those markets. Bernie will stay on as KeyPay’s managing director, while Duran will remain its chief technology officer. Employment Hero’s co-founder and CEO Ben Thompson was a seed investor in KeyPay in 2012.

KeyPay was founded in 2010 by Phil Bernie, Richard McLean, Paul Duran and Kristian Reynolds, and is active in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia and the United Kingdom—which Employment Hero said will help it grow in those markets. Bernie will stay on as KeyPay’s managing director, while Duran will remain its chief technology officer. Employment Hero’s co-founder and CEO Ben Thompson, was a seed investors in KeyPay in 2012.

Mini-apps are lightweight programs that run within a larger app and serve as additional sources of user engagement and revenue. They became popularized by “super apps” like WeChat, Alibaba and Grab. But not all developers have these tech giants’ resources. Based in Singapore, Appboxo wants to level the playing field. The startup’s platform lets developers turn their apps into super apps, either by building their own mini-apps or accessing them through Appboxo Showroom, a marketplace for third-party developers.

Appboxo, whose clients include GCash, Paytm and VodaPay, announced today that it has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by RTP Global. Other participants included its first investors, Antler and 500 Southeast Asia, plus new backers like SciFi VC, Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused venture fund) and angel investors Huey Lin and Kayvon Deldar. 

Appboxo was founded in 2019 by Kaniyet Rayev, its CEO and CTO Nursultan Keneshbekov. TechCrunch first covered it in December 2020, when it announced its seed funding. The company is now used by 10 super apps across Southeast Asia, India and South Africa, and powers more than 400 mini-app integrations, the majority of which are built by third-party developers. The company says it has a combined base of more than 500 million users. 

The company has two main products. The first is Miniapp, a SaaS platform with SDKs and APIs for building and launching mini-apps. For example, mobile wallets can integrate mini-apps for food delivery, shopping or restaurant reservations.

The second, launched about a year ago, is Shopboxo, which lets businesses set up customizable online stores through mobile devices in less than 30 seconds. 

Then mini-apps created with Shopboxo can be integrated into super apps through Appboxo, and Rayev expects that being able to reach a broader merchant base of SMEs will “scale the number of mini-apps into the thousands this year, especially since Appboxo’s clients already use its platform mainly for e-commerce. “Financial super apps want to diversify into new verticals, and in the current landscape, e-commerce looks like the most obvious opportunity and the easiest to execute.”  

Rayev tells TechCrunch that AppBoxo’s new funding will be used to further develop Shopboxo, while also expanding its merchant ecosystem and building out its international presence. At first, the startup will focus on the Asia-Pacific region, where super apps are the most dominant, he says, but it also wants to enter Europe and the United States. 

Small businesses are the backbone of Southeast Asia’s economy, but many struggle to secure working capital loans because they don’t have traditional credit records or collateral, say the founders of Funding Societies. The fintech, which claims to be the region’s largest SME digital financing platform, uses alternative forms of credit-scoring and has disbursed more than $2 billion in financing to MSMEs since it launched in 2015. Today, Funding Societies announced it has raised $144 million in an oversubscribed Series C+ equity round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, with participation from new investors like VNG Corporation, Rapyd Ventures, EDBI, Indies Capital, K3 Ventures and Ascend Vietnam. 

It also received $150 million in debt lines from institutional investors, some of which have been drawn down since last year. 

TechCrunch first covered Funding Societies when it raised its Series A in 2016. The company’s previous round was a $45 million Series C raised between 2020 and 2021. Part of its newest funding, or $16 million, will be distributed to former and existing employees through its stock option plan in the form of share buybacks. 

The company was founded in 2015 by Kelvin Teo and Reynold Wijaya after they met in Harvard Business School. It is now licensed and registered in Singapore, Indonesia (where it is known as Modalku), Malaysia and Thailand. It recently began operating in Vietnam and will use part of its Series C+ to enter the Philippines. 

The platform disburses online loans ranging in size from $500 to $1.5 million. Since its launch, it has disbursed more than $2 billion in business financing to MSMEs through more than 4.9 million loan transactions. Funding Societies’ customers range in size from neighborhood stores and e-commerce vendors, to medium-sized enterprises, like fast-growth startups and established corporations, that want access to faster revenue-based financing than bank loans, which usually take about two to three months to disburse, Teo tells TechCrunch. 

A recent impact study calculated using methodology by the Asian Development Bank showed that Funding Societies-backed MSMEs contributed $3.6 billion in GDP, and 350,000 jobs.

By covering a wide range of businesses, Teo says Funding Societies has better customer acquisition costs and loan-to-value ratios. It also accumulates data faster to train its data-scoring models, which draw from traditional and alternative sources of data. Traditional sources include bank statements and credit bureau information if available, while alternatives ones can include transaction information, online reviews and supply chain data flow. 

One of Funding Societies’ advantages is that some of its data sources are proprietary, while they have exclusive rights to others through partnerships. This gives the startup an edge over newer players, Teo says, as well as the amount of loan repayment data that Funding Societies has collected since its launch. He added Funding Societies’ loan default rate is between 1% to 2%, even through the COVID-19 pandemic, which is why it was able to receive debt lines from so many institutions.

Funding Societies’ interest rates are generally higher than banks, but lower or equal to credit cards—in fact, it offers a credit card with a debit line to serve as a substitute for corporate cards. It also partners with businesses, including e-commerce platforms like Shopee and Bukalapak, bookkeeping app BukuWarung, fintech Alterra and agritech platform Tanihub that offer access to working capital loans to their SME customers.

Teo and Wijaya say Funding Societies’ main competitors are not banks. Instead, Teo says many of its customers were relying on loans from friends or families, their savings and personal credit cards to finance their businesses. “The opportunity is huge because it’s a $300 billion U.S. dollar quality financing gap,” he says.  

In a prepared statement, SoftBank Investment Advisers managing partner Greg Moon said, “SMEs across Southeast Asia have historically struggled to access institutional finance and instead been forced to mainly rely on personal funding to support growth. Funding Societies is establishing a bridge for these companies to access more sustainable and cheaper financing by building unique data sets on their performance and using AI-led technology to assess their creditworthiness more effectively than traditional models.” 

Data indicate that the pace of startup value creation reached a fever pitch in 2021. According to venture capital data collected by PitchBook, prices spiked for startup equity across the maturity spectrum last year. The result of those rising prices was a huge gain in the pace at which paper wealth was generated.

The rising velocity of value creation may indicate that rich entry prices for early startup investments will math out as similar pricing dynamics play out in the later stage of company development.

PitchBook cites rising inflows of nontraditional capital to the startup market as part of the changing landscape for startup prices and the pace at which they create illiquid equity value. Larger venture capital funds are also a driving force behind the pricing dynamics uncovered by the data.

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The dynamic of rising prices accelerating value creation at once undercuts the viewpoint that startups are too expensive today — pricey early-stage companies do not appear to be struggling to raise later-stage capital, if markups are any indication of investor appetite for recently funded early-stage upstarts. More simply, it appears that the market has decided that startups are worth more than they once were, by a material multiple.

This prompts a simple question: Were startups dramatically undervalued in prior years and decades? The former, yes. The latter, maybe.

Caveats abound. Underneath the wave of capital flowing into startups in recent years — and especially the blowout 2021 calendar year for private-market investments — is an expectation that eventual exit prices will make preceding investments for startup equity math out to the positive. There’s some concern in the market today that it won’t.

We aren’t here to throw stones, but instead figure out why startup prices have risen so much and whether the huge gains are reasonable, insane or more a sign of a changing software market.

Up and to the right

A few venture maxims to get us started: Every deal that a venture capitalist invests in is fairly priced; every deal that a venture investor takes a stab at but loses is overpriced; any following investment into a portfolio company of a venture investor is a reasonable markup for value created.

When we apply those rules to the following charts, we can reach some very interesting conclusions:

When Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger announced the company’s foundry strategy last March, he dubbed it IDM (integrated device manufacturing ) 2.0. At the time, the company announced the first part of that approach with a $20 billion investment to build two new fabs in Arizona. The company also announced plans to become a provider of foundry services for other chip makers.

Today, the company is building on that idea with the announcement that its plans to acquire Tower Semiconductor, a provider of custom foundry services, for $5.4 billion.

Gelsinger sees the move as a perfect fit for the company’s vision. “Tower’s specialty technology portfolio, geographic reach, deep customer relationships and services-first operations will help scale Intel’s foundry services and advance our goal of becoming a major provider of foundry capacity globally,” he said in a statement.

IDM 2.0 involves a three-pronged approach to semiconductor manufacturing: Intel’s network of global factories, use of third-party capacity and building out Intel Foundry Services, moving the company beyond simply producing Intel-branded chips, but helping meet the growing needs for custom chips.

Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insight & Strategies, says those custom chips are the key to this deal. “Intel’s acquisition means that it can now manufacture the type of silicon it never could before. Specifically this means RF, sensors, silicon photonics, and power management chips,” he said.

Dylan Patel, chief analyst at SemiAnalysis, a firm that tracks the semiconductor industry, agrees saying that acquiring Tower is a smart move for the company. “The acquisition of Tower semiconductor plugs much needed gaps in Intel’s foundry offerings on the basis of types of process nodes. It gives them teams who have been profitably running specialty technologies that interface with multiple external clients in a successful manner,” Patel told me.

He added that Intel had been mostly using flows that were custom tailored to their internal needs. Tower gives them a way to offer more standardized flows. “As Intel tries to adopt more industry standard flows, [product design kit (PDK] capabilities are an area they need a lot of help with. Towers capabilities in specialty niche technologies really boost their ability to create and offer flexible and extensible PDKs,” he said.

As you would expect, Tower CEO Russell Ellwanger sees the two companies coming together as a force multiplier. “Together with Intel, we will drive new and meaningful growth opportunities and offer even greater value to our customers through a full suite of technology solutions and nodes and a greatly expanded global manufacturing footprint,” he said in a statement.

The deal has been approved by both company’s boards, but has to move through normal regulatory approval channels, as well as passing muster with Tower stockholders. That process is expected to take approximately 12 months to complete.

Alternative protein startups have attracted a lot of investor attention over the past couple of years and the trend looks set to continue. The latest startup with funding news is Next Gen Foods, the creator of plant-based chicken alternative TiNDLE. The company announced today it has raised a $100 million Series A that will be used to expand quickly in the United States and on its Singapore research and development center, which is currently under construction.

Next Gen Foods says this is the largest Series A ever raised by a plant-based meat company, based on data from Pitchbook. TechCrunch first covered Next Gen Foods when it raised a $10 million seed round in February 2021, and then a $20 million extension just five months later.

The company’s Series A, which brings its total funding so far to $130 million, includes new investors Alpha JWC, EDBI and MPL Ventures, as well as returning investors like Temasek (through its wholly-owned Asia Sustainable Food Platform), GGV Capital, K3 Ventures and Bits X Bites. The new capital will be used to fuel TiNDLE’s distribution in all 50 states.

Like other alternative protein brands, including Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, Next Gen Foods is building brand recognition through partnerships with chefs who create and serve dishes in their restaurants, before moving to other distribution channels like grocery stores. It is currently available at restaurants in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Napa, New York and Philadelphia, with more planned, including Miami and Austin.

Starting today, U.S. distributors can also order TiNDLE through DOT Foods, one of the U.S.’s largest food re-distributors. It is also available through FoodServiceDirect.com and Cheetah for restaurants located in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Co-founder and CEO Andre Menezes says TiNDLE, made with a proprietary blend of plant-based ingredients, like sunflower oil, has already proven its ability to work in diverse cuisines through launches in Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Abu Dhabi, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai and Amsterdam.

Next Gen Foods’ rapid international expansion was enabled by its asset-light model, Menezes said. Instead of building its own production facilities, Next Gen Foods will work with production partners in each of its markets, including the U.S., in a relationship Menezes compares to Apple and Foxconn.

“If we were building our own factory and doing everything ourselves, we would probably still be building it right now and hiring the talent to start our first expansion, and we would have probably invested all the capital that shareholders invested in us into building that facility,” he said. “For us, that’s not quick or scalable enough for our business model and we believe there are people around the world who can do that extremely well.”

Next Gen Foods develops components, ingredients and recipes and then enters into manufacturing contracts with partners, sharing quality assurance procedures to ensure that each one uses the same processes to maintain consistency.

TiNDLE is Next Gen Foods’ first brand and it plans to increase product roster, including different categories of TiNDLE (like pre-prepared nuggets or tenders). Menezes said it eventually plans to introduce alternatives to other animal proteins besides chicken, but that probably won’t happen within the next two years because its priority is to expand TiNDLE’s presence in the U.S. and other big markets, like Brazil or China, first.

Next Gen Foods’ R&D center is being developed in partnership with the Food Tech Innovation Center, which was established by Temasek’s Asia Sustainable Foods Platform. The company plans to hire protein scientists and food technologists in Singapore (which has become a major hub for alternative meat development and production), Europe and the United States.

In a prepared statement, GGV Capital managing partner Jenny Lee said, “Next Gen Foods’ growth in less than a year has been remarkable, as is their ongoing commitment to being part of the solution for how global food production will play a significant role in addressing the impact of climate change. We look forward to their next phase of expansion into the U.S. and beyond.”

Mental wellness startup MindFi operates throughout APAC, but wants to deliver “culturally competent” care in each of its markets. To do that, it develops programs for its app, available as an employee benefit, with local providers that take into account religion, gender stereotypes, racial representation, communication style and values, co-founder and CEO Bjorn Lee told TechCrunch.

Today the Singapore-based company announced it has closed an oversubscribed $2 million seed round, with participation from returning investors M Venture Partners and Global Founders Capital. Angel investors included Carousell co-founder Marcus Tan, Carro executive Kenji Narushima and Spin co-founder Derrick Ko.

MindFi (short for Mind Fitness) took part in Y Combinator’s summer 2021 cohort. It currently operates across the Asia-Pacific region, including Sinagpore, Hong Kong and Australia, and offers its services in 16 languages. Its corporate clients include Visa, Willis Towers Watson and Patsnap. In total, MindFi’s products serve 100,000 employees across 35 employers in 15 markets.

While mental health startups have gained a lot funding in the United States, especially during the pandemic, it is still a nascent space in much of Asia. MindFi is among a cluster of startups working to change that. Others that have recently raised funding include Intellect (another Y Combinator alum) and Thoughtfull.

The MindFi app contains self-directed mental wellness programs, community forums, group therapy and an AI-based matching system for coaches and therapists. Users’ profiles aggregate data from MindFi with information from their fitness wearables, including sleep, heart rate and daily activity.

Lee told TechCrunch that its seed funding will be used to accelerate the development of its AI engine, advance the integration of physiological data from wearables to MindFi’s mental health data, and work with local experts to create in-app programs in its key APAC markets. Though Lee said there is a relatively low availability of licensed mental health professionals in APAC compared to the USA or Europe, its important to make sure its programs fit into diverse cultural contexts so users feel comfortable about getting support.

In a statement, M Ventures partner Mayank Parekh said, “Mental health has been traditionally overlooked in most countries, more so in fast-growth Asia. We feel the market is currently poorly served, and as founder-first investors, we are thrilled to work with the MindFi team, who together bring complementary skills and insight to solve a significant problem.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Reebelo also sees its vendors as customers.

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

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

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

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

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

Upcycling polyethylene (the normal ubiquitous plastic we are all familiar with) into high-value plastics that can compete with “virgin” plastic (meaning plastics made directly from petro-chemicals) is a fiendish problem to solve. The fact that it’s been extremely hard to do so means billions of tonnes of plastic is never recycled, and it’s out there pouting the planet and our oceans. A new US-based startup, Novoloop, claims to have come up with an answer.

The two female founder scientists, Jeanny Yao and Miranda Wang have been working for over five years on this problem.

They have now raised $11 million in a Series A financing led by Envisioning Partners with participation from Valo Ventures and Bemis Associates; earlier investors who joined the round included SOSV, Mistletoe, and TIME Ventures. Novoloop is also partnering with Bemis Associates, which makes apparel bonding solutions such as seam tapes, which can be found in high-performance outerwear.

Novoloop is setting out to transform plastic waste into high-performance chemicals and materials. The company says it has developed a proprietary process technology it calls ATOD (Accelerated Thermal Oxidative Decomposition). It claims that this breaks down polyethylene (the most widely used plastic today) into chemical building blocks that can be synthesized into high-value products.

The first product will be Oistre, a thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) for use in footwear, apparel, sporting goods, automotive, and electronics. Novoloop claims this has a carbon footprint that is up to 46% smaller than conventional TPUs.

Novoloop Co-founder and CEO Miranda Wang said in a statement: “Plastics are not going away anytime soon, so we need to innovate to close the gap between what is produced and what is repurposed. After years of technology development, we’re thrilled to announce backing by high-caliber investors and partners to commercialize this much-needed technology.”

“What really compelled us to lead the investment round is that Novoloop has found product-market fit,” said June Cha, Partner of Envisioning Partners. “Novoloop has proven that Oistre has a wide range of applications in the market even at their early stage.”

Speaking to me over a call, Wang added: “Polyethylene plastic is the most common packaging used but is extremely hard to chemically change and break apart and turn into useful things. We cracked this by essentially adopting a new chemical approach to oxidise this polyethylene.”

“Everybody else is turning this plastic waste polyethylene into fossil fuel reserves. But for us, our approach is to directly take the polyethylene waste and convert it in one step… So this essentially bypasses many steps and chemistries that would otherwise happen if people were to take it back into oil or into gas,” she said.

Competitors to Novoloop would include BASF, Covestro, Lubrizol, Huntsman. These are companies that make virgin fossil fuel-based TPU. About 99% of TPUs are virgin today. In other words, this is a giant industry ready for disruption.

News that Just Eat intends to delist from the United States isn’t an indication that the European food delivery giant intends to immediately sell GrubHub, the U.S. company it bought back in 2020. Instead, Just Eat’s CEO said, the move is focused on cost-cutting. The value of Just Eat’s U.S. shares — listed on the Nasdaq — has fallen from over $22 per share in 2021 to around $8.50 this morning, a huge reduction in worth.

The Just Eat retreat was not the only hard event to hit the on-demand market, which has seen former startups struggle once they reach the public markets. Delivery Hero is another example of the trend; its value fell sharply last week after its 2022 guidance proved a flop. (The Exchange recently dug into Delivery Hero’s appetite for Spanish delivery company Glovo.)

From a share price of around €130 last year, Delivery Hero has seen its value fall to around €41 per share. The company’s CEO actually apologized for his company’s declining value on Twitter, which felt rather human of him — in a good way, mind.

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U.K.-based Deliveroo has suffered since its IPO last year, losing about 65% of its value, measured from its trailing 52-week high.

And there’s more bad news domestically thanks to DoorDash’s falling value.

Given all that, you might think that investors would be pulling back on investment into the delivery space. And yet, we’ve seen capital pile into the delivery market even faster in recent quarters, thanks to startup enthusiasm to bring consumers goods and groceries in even faster time frames.

There’s a yawning gap between what public-market investors are saying about delivery companies and what private-market investors are hoping for the next crop of public companies from the space. Let’s tease apart what each group is saying and what it means for a host of startup wagers.

Growth concerns, profit matters

In reverse order of occurrence, let’s start with Just Eat Takeaway.com, as it is formally known. Its CEO, Jitse Groen, told a Dutch television program that his company’s decision to give up its U.S. listing in favor of its European listing is a “cost reduction measure.” The company, Reuters reports, has “come under pressure from shareholders to sell the unit.”

The latest data we have from Just Eat is a January document detailing 33% order growth in 2021 and a 14% year-on-year expansion in orders in Q4 2021. Gross transaction volume (GTV) rose 31% in 2021 compared to 2020, but just 17% year on year in Q4.

Notably, Just Eat also said that its “adjusted EBITDA margin improved substantially in the fourth quarter of 2021,” allowing it to hit the “midpoint of [its] guided range of minus 1% and minus 1.5% of GTV,” per the document.

Growth, then, was low-30s for the company in 2021, with about half that growth rate in the final quarter, albeit with rising profitability that’s just a little negative on a heavily adjusted basis. By more traditional accounting methods, Just Eat is likely losing a packet, once costs like share-based compensation and other expenses are included in its bottom line.

Our read? Slowing growth and persistent losses are not a great mix.