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Global restaurant delivery service Deliveroo has announced the closing of a US$275 million ($361 million) Series E funding round led by Bridgepoint, DST Global, and General Catalyst, with participation from Greenoaks Capital.
The funding, which brings the total raised by the startup since its founding in 2013 to $623 million, will go towards expanding the service in new and existing markets globally, as well as facilitating the continued rollout of RooBox, delivery-only kitchens built out of shipping containers established in areas currently not reached by the core Deliveroo service.
Levi Aron, country manager for Deliveroo Australia, said he is particularly excited about the possibilities for RooBox locally, where Deliveroo services the Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney central business districts and inner suburbs.
“We predominantly work with restaurants that don’t offer delivery themselves, and by their very nature these are high end or gourmet restaurants that sit in very central locations in our cities. What RooBox enables us to do is bring the people to the food and bring the food to the people,” Aron explained.
“We’re now able to go to these developments being built up around our cities, where there’s huge populations who may be half an hour or 45 minutes away from the great restaurant supply that some of us are able to enjoy depending on where we live.”
Aron said Deliveroo is having conversations with its restaurant partners and councils to identify areas with potential, with restaurants particularly interested in the concept due to the fact it is a low risk way for them to test expansion.
“Expansion is one of the hardest problems restaurants face. If they’ve got a fantastic business in Surry Hills, where do they open up next? How do they know where to open? Having these conversations with us is enabling them to, in a low-risk environment, open up their restaurants to a great population who hasn’t experienced their food before but has heard a lot about it,” Aron explained.
With RooBox set to begin rolling out in Melbourne and Sydney over the coming months, Aron said Deliveroo is also focused on deepening its core roots in its three Australian markets before looking to expansion.
Launching in Brisbane in April with 50 partner restaurants on board, Deliveroo reported that it now has over 170 restaurants using its service in the city, while it is seeing growth of between 30 to 35 percent month on month across Brisbane, Melbourne, and Sydney. There are over 1,200 partner restaurants now on the service, with Deliveroo recently signing on Mexican chain Guzman y Gomez and Jamie’s Italian.
“We’re in 12 countries worldwide and 84 cities and Australia rates in the top three to four, it’s a very high performing country,” Aron said.
Aron could not reveal which city Deliveroo was heading to next around Australia, but said the service is keen to expand further around Queensland, outside of Brisbane.
From startup daily http://www.startupdaily.net/2016/08/deliveroo-raises-361-million-series-e-round-help-deepen-australian-roots-begin-roobox-rollout/
If you were lucky enough to be an early investor in a startup unicorn like Airbnb (valued at $30 billion) or Uber ($60 billion-plus): Congrats, drinks are on you. For life.
But like many of your fellow investors, you're probably ready to get at least some of your cash back, and that's a challenge these days. Thanks to the current IPO drought—there have been just three IPOs on U.S. soil so far this year—many investors (and founders) lack the means to sell their shares without calling a banker.
Nasdaq's trading platform for private companies aims to solve that problem. Called Nasdaq Private Market, the platform has seen a brisk increase in trading volumes in 2016, logging $544 million in trades during the first six months of the year. Nearly half of that volume involved preferred stock, an indicator of investor activity.
If IPO activity doesn't pick up soon, those numbers are likely to climb even higher. AOC
From TechCrunch via linkedin - Posted by Mike Butcher (@mikebutcher)
Pulsate, a startup with a platform to deliver content for brands based on a user’s location and preferences, has raised $1.2 million in funding from PayPal and Dunnhumby (the customer science company). The money will be used to expand the platform and service customers.
Menlo Park-based Pulsate is a so-called “end-to-end context marketing” platform. Brands use it to surface the right kind of content into their apps and also leverage location.
Founder and CEO, Patrick Leddy says Pulsate integrates with new or existing apps, then its SDK collects information on the way users behave inside the app. It also collects social data, geofences and data on Beacons the app sees to deliver this relevant content. “Location alone is a weak context, for interactions to make sense you need to segment against behavioural data, interests, past purchases and that’s just the beginning. Think of Beacons as the cherry on top of a layered contextual cake,” he told us.
Competitors to Pulsate include Gimbal, Urban Airship and Estimote, among others.
US vice president Joe Biden says Australia can become the innovation hub of the southern hemisphere with a “little bit of help and a little bit of luck”.
Speaking at the US-Australia Business Roundtable in Sydney, Biden discussed how America can help the Australian startup ecosystem grow, the need to embrace failure and the importance of immigration, as the ABC reports.
“We want to see Australia continue to grow and to be a regional hub and a regional leader,” Biden said.
“It is overwhelmingly in our interests for you to become the innovation hub of the southern hemisphere and it’s overwhelmingly in our interests for you to continue to grow in ways that are totally within your wheelhouse, with a little bit of help and a little bit of luck.”
BlueChilli co-founder Sebastian Eckersley-Maslin also spoke on the panel and says Biden showed a real interest in the local startup and innovation sectors.
“He seemed genuinely interested in how America could support Australia in growing our economic future,” Eckersley-Maslin tells StartupSmart.
“The current administration is pushing really hard to build strong ties with their allies, and having Australia as a successful country in this area helps America.
“He showed a genuine interest in supporting Australia.”
Biden said that an embrace of failure is crucial to building a successful ecosystem.
“You’ve got to be willing to risk failure – that’s part of the spirit of all of you guys,” he said.
He also discussed how important migrants were in the development of Silicon Valley.
“We got to cherry pick the best of every single culture in the world,” Biden said.
“Ride through Silicon Valley folks – not everybody looks like me and thank god for them. It’s a polygon of the best minds in the world.”
This is a crucial area that Australia needs to improve on through better visas and helping companies establish a presence in the US, Eckersley-Maslin says.
“They have a strong culture of immigration and that’s very similar to us,” he says.
“The best people come to America for the best opportunities, and Australia can do the same.”
For the BlueChilli founder, it was heartening to see a politician of Biden’s stature promoting his country’s startups and exploring at a local ecosystem.
“The key takeaway was that American politicians do an incredibly good job of selling opportunities,” Eckersley-Maslin says.
“We need to embrace how to sell ourselves – as a country, community and as individual startups.”
From Denham Sadler - Startup Smart A Melbourne-based fintech startup has secured a $4.5 million ($US3 million) funding round led by a large Chinese venture capital firm.
Cross-border transactions platform Airwallex was led by Gobi Partners and also had the backing of Gravity VC and some big name angel investors.
Airwallex is a platform allowing SMEs to access interbank mid-market exchange rates when making cross-border transactions, and uses algorithms, big data analytics and quantitative models to work around market volatility.
The platform allows SMEs and sole traders to issue and pay invoices in their chosen currency at the mid-market foreign exchange rate, with co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang saying Airwallex can secure up to a 50% better rate.
The startup, which is based in Melbourne and has offices in China, is currently in beta mode but is set to be officially launched in the coming weeks
Zhang, who formerly worked at NAB, says he originally planned to also visit Silicon Valley to seek funding, but quickly secured the cash in Asia.
Zhang says there’s currently a gap in the market, and SMEs are shut out from the foreign exchange rates enjoyed by bigger corporations.
“The major companies are the banks and a few big companies – PayPal is the big payments company but they’re not really focusing on cross-border transactions,” he says.
“We saw the market opportunity here. There’s nothing out there that helps SMEs when they’re trying to expand globally. They reach a bottleneck in Australia, want to sell in China and gets complicated with payments.
“We’re adding core value to solving that issue.”
The beta phase proved useful to validate the platform and gain useful insights into what the market is crying out for, Zhang says.
“We’ve been talking to a lot of users and gathering feedback, and we’ve done a lot of things to improve the product,” he says.
“The feedback has been good. There’s a genuine requirement from the consumer market – they need something like us to solve that issue.”
For Gobi Partners managing partner Michael Zhu, the decision to invest in the Melbourne fintech came down to the team behind it and the market it is targeting.
“The Airwallex team has more than a decade of experience in the banking and foreign exchange sector across Australia, China and Hong Kong,” Zhu says.
“They’ve built an impressive platform and I believe they have the potential to truly disrupt the current cross-border payment ecosystem.”
http://www.startupsmart.com.au/advice/funding/melbourne-startup-airwallex-secures-4-5-in-funding-from-large-vc-firm-in-china/
By John Kavanagh
Macquarie Securities has surveyed what it sees as the four most significant technology trends that will have an impact on business earnings over the next few years and made six “high conviction” picks to gain exposure to these “megatrends”.
In a report sent to clients last week, Macquarie says investors wanting exposure to tech should be taking a look at the medical device manufacturer Cochlear, the accounting software and services company Xero, online recruiter Seek, cloud services provider Aconex, cinema management company Vista Group International, and advertising company oOhMedia!
The four technology megatrends identified in the report are the internet of things (what it calls the internet of everything), wearables, big data and virtual reality.
Macquarie’s view is that corporate Australia is lagging in the deployment of new technology. It cites the World Economic Forum, which ranks Australia 16th on its Networked Readiness Index – a measure of the progress of information and communications technologies.
“This is disappointing for a country where the standard of living is high, education rates favorable and where there is no evidence to suggest it is less innovative than other developed countries,” Macquarie says.
Several factors have limited the uptake of technology by corporates to date. They include the high cost of digital technology in Australia, slow internet speeds, over-regulation and the slow rollout of digital infrastructure.
Some of the likely losers are familiar names: traditional print and television media companies; and in retail, entertainment goods stores such as JB HiFi and Harvey Norman.
“We are wary of professional services and insurance,” Macquarie says.
The insurance industry should be a winner but it is not seizing the opportunities presented by technologies such as telematics and biometrics.
“To date Australian insurers have been slow to embrace new technology. Established insurers face a challenging market due to increasing competition from challengers,” Macquarie says.
Winners in the big data market will those that provide data storage, such NextDC, and also providers of software as a service, such as MYOB, Xero, Reckon and Aconex.
“We anticipate that the rollout of the National Broadband Network will enhance the value attached to data storage, with the NBN expected to increase accessibility to cloud computing services, improve connection speed and drive additional industry participation,” Macquarie says.
“Our top big data pick is NextDC, a data-centre-as-a-service provider with a range of business and government clients. The company connects business and government clients with their preferred IT providers, offering data centre facilities.”
In the wearables market, healthcare companies are well placed to benefit from the increasing sale of wearables and a reduction in patient cost base are medical device manufacturers that are innovating and adapting technological advances. Macquarie likes Cochlear and ResMed in this sector.
Macquarie says that for non-tech focused corporates the issue will be how they use technology to bring their costs down. The internet of things will improve asset utilisation for utilities, labour productivity in mining and agriculture, supply chain improvements and inventory management in retail.
It won’t work for all companies. “Each of Fairfax, News Corp, APN and Seven West has embarked on extensive restructuring and cost-cutting programs to counter the structural deterioration of ad revenue. While these will temper earnings losses, they will not completely offset them.”
When Jason Lemkin sold his last company, EchoSign, to Adobe for $400 million in 2011, there was one thing he knew he was going to miss: not leading the next part of the company’s journey.
EchoSign is now part of Adobe’s Document Cloud business, which is on pace to hit nearly $400 million in revenue this year.
Although Lemkin won’t be able to see EchoSign turn into a billion dollar “unicorn” , he is now growing his own company called SaaStr and using it to help other cloud software startup founders build their own businesses.
He is now a VC and has recently raised a new $70 million fund in little over 3 months. He’ll be the sole manager, and the fund will be dedicated to investing in SaaStr community startups at the “late-seed” stage — that is, companies that have some traction and are ready to build their first sales team.
Most investments will be in the range of $1 million to $4 million, but Lemkin stresses he won’t be going out of his way to find startups to invest in.
“I only want to invest in this community — spend less time in trying to meet founders, and be more successful trying to invest in the community,” he says.
“I want to help other people. I want them to do better than me. And if you do it better than me, you have a shot at having a billion dollar exit,” Lemkin says.
The goal is to at least quadruple the money for investors he says!
SaaStr is already one of the biggest names in the cloud software industry, leading one publication to give Lemkin the nickname, the “Godfather of SaaS”.
His SaaStr blog posts are required reading for any cloud startup founder, and his annual SaaStr event has become a big deal after only two years.
But as much as he cares about his performance, Lemkin says he’s enjoying every moment of his life now because it keeps him relevant in the tech space — where hotshot founders often slide into obscurity after selling out for hundreds of millions of dollars.
“These companies are just so great, and to be a participant in this next journey of enterprise, it’s pretty special,” he says.
For anyone contemplating a move into the cloud space, he offered 3 gems on how to really grow a healthy cloud software company:
( Contact me if interested and I will refer you to the powers that be)
League, a health IT startup that developed an app to ease the job of employers to locate providers and services for employees, raised a Series A round to support its expansion as it seeks to change the consumer healthcare experience, joining the likes of Oscar, Bright Health and others.OMERS Ventures, Canada’s largest investment firm, led the $25 million financing round. Infinite Potential Technologies, Real Ventures, and BDC IT Venture Fund also took part. Strategic investments were provided by RBC, owner of Citi National, John Hancock’s parent company, Manulife Financial, and Power Financial Corp, according to a company statement.
The financing follows the launch of the business in cities such as Seattle, Toronto, and Vancouver last year. The company claims that its business fills a gap in insurance market products for employers by providing health spending accounts, wellness accounts, and group insurance plans from a mobile platform.
League CEO Michael Serbinis said it needed to raise a large round to compete with the likes of Oscar and CollectiveHealth, which are part of a broader trend of companies giving employers more flexible services that are easier to access on mobile devices or through computers, in an interview with Bloomberg.
Several health IT startups have also spotted an opportunity in helping established payers resposition themselves to be more consumer friendly and provide service to help them change how they work with providers and health systems to meet the requirements of healthcare reform. Others see supporting employers insurance decisionmaking as a pain point in need of fixing. Among them are Picwell, Wellthie, Maxwell Health, and Stride Health.
Serbinis has previously led companies in the technology space such as Kobo, a digital reading company that views itself as a competitor to Amazon’s Kindle and has 20 million customers in 190 countries. He sold Kobo to Japanese Internet business Rakuten for $315 million in 2012. He also sold another business he started, cloud storage company DocSpace to Critical Path for $568 million in 2000.
There’s a certain amount of skepticism of entrepreneurs moving into healthcare from other industries, particularly technology, but also from areas such as sports apparel and advertising. Many have been unprepared for the long sales cycle or have an appreciation for the complexities of making it easier to navigate fragmented systems without creating more work for healthcare professionals and patients. American Medical Association CEO Dr. James Madara recently referred to many of the digital health technologies currently available but not validated the “snake oil of the early 21st century.”
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