Author: Manish Singh

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Indonesia’s KoinWorks raises $12 million to grow its P2P SME lending platform

KoinWorks, an Indonesian startup that helps small and medium-sized businesses secure financial services through its online peer-to-peer platform, has raised $16.5 million SGD ($12 million USD) in a new funding round as money continues to flow in what has become a hot space for investors.

The Series B round for the three-year-old startup was led by EV Growth and Quona Capital . Existing investors — Mandiri Capital Indonesia, Convergence Ventures, Gunung Sewu, Beeblebrox and Quona Capital — also participated in the round, the startup said in a statement. The new round means KoinWorks has raised more than $28.5 million to date.

SMEs have historically struggled with securing loan and other financial services from banks — creating a big opportunity for middlemen lending platforms. KoinWorks operates an online platform that uses machine learning to provide low interest loans to these small and medium sized enterprises. It identifies the businesses that are eligible to make the return eventually and connects them with lenders.

The platform has amassed more than 300,000 users, it claimed. More than 60% of the lenders are millennials and for 70%, it is their first time investment. Willy Arifin, a founder and CEO of KoinWorks said the startup aims to “democratize finance in Indonesia while fostering financial inclusion.”

Surprisingly, KoinWorks raised a bigger amount — $16.5 million (USD) in its Series A round in the second half of last year. Arifin insisted that the round was intentionally oversubscribed, suggesting that the existing shareholders of the startup were unwilling to overly dilute their stake. The new round “does not reflect the true appetite of investors in KoinWorks,” he added.

KoinWorks competes with a number of local startups including Akseleran, Investree, Reksadana, Amartha, and Modalku. It also fights with Funding Societies, which received $25 million last year to expand its business in several Southeast Asian markets. Soon, it will have a new competitor in Validus Capital, which raised $15 million earlier this year and announced its plan to enter Indonesia this quarter.

The new round comes at a time when Indonesia is pushing strict regulatory changes for peer-to-peer lending businesses in an attempt to ensure that the chaos in China does not seep into Indonesia.

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Byju’s-owned Osmo education startup enters pre-schoolers market

Osmo, a Palo Alto-based education startup acquired by Indian unicorn Byju’s for $120 million this year, is expanding its product lineup to serve a new and largely untapped market: pre-schoolers.

Osmo today announced Osmo Little Genius Starter Kit, a set of tools that aims to help children that have yet to enter schools to understand letters, expand their vocabulary, and build motor and social skills. The kit is priced at $79 and is available through Amazon, Target, and Apple stores in the U.S.

The kit provides children with sticks and rings of varying shapes, tasking them to assemble them to mimic objects and words that they see through video instructions on an accompanying tablet. Osmo claims its kit for pre-schoolers is based on Friedrich Froebel’s and Maria Montessori’s manipulative with advanced computer vision for a personalized experience.

Pramod Sharma, CEO of Osmo, told TechCrunch in an interview that he believes that the market for pre-schoolers remains untapped with little innovation hitting the space over the last 100 years. This new product launch represents a large and new opportunity for Osmo, which has so far catered to kids aged between five and 12.

In the U.S. alone, there are about 10 million kids who are in the pre-school stage. Additionally, “half of all the toys sale are aimed at kids who have not entered schools,” Sharma said.

The announcement today comes weeks after Byju’s, which acquired Osmo for $120 million earlier this year, expanded its own product catalog. Earlier this month, it partnered with Disney to roll out a new app that aims to educate children aged between six and eight.

Until recently, Byju’s focused entirely on high school students and those preparing for university entrance exams. It has since broadened its courses to cover all school grades. Byju’s, which competes with Unacademy in India, is heavily-funded by investors and valued at nearly $4 billion — it is widely acknowledged to be the leader in India’s e-learning market.

To tackle the pre-schoolers’ market, Osmo is leveraging on the interactive content produced by Byju’s, Sharma said. The nature of the product and market it serves will allow Osmo and Byju’s to expand the kit to many global markets, he explained.

The distribution of the new kit could prove challenging, however, Sharma acknowledged. Osmo has tie-ups with more than 30,000 U.S. elementary classrooms that help it deploy its product to a large number of students. It lacks that for earlier-stage education, but Osmo does plan to replicate that model in some capacity by partnering with pre-schools.

Sharma said also that a number of parents have asked Osmo whether it will have any products for their younger children which gives him confidence that there is raw demand. That said, he acknowledged that Osmo will initially need to be more aggressive than usual with its marketing and other outreach programs to parents.

In terms of subject matter, Osmo has largely focused on science and math to date. Moving forward, though, it plans to broaden its existing product lineup with more content and explore subjects including English language, history and social studies to “cover every aspect of learning,” Sharma said.

Byju’s claims 35 million registered users and some 2.4 million paid customers. It generated around $205 million in revenue in the fiscal year that ended in March this year. The company said it aims to increase that figure to over $430 million this year.

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Cricket World Cup highlights just how big video streaming is in India

As hundreds of millions of people turn their attention to the ongoing ICC Cricket World Cup tournament, many of them are using an Indian streaming service to follow the ins and outs of the game.

More than 100 million users tuned in to Hotstar, an on-demand streaming service owned by Disney, on June 16, the day India and Pakistan played a league match against each other. That’s the highest engagement the four-year-old service has clocked on its platform to date, it said in a statement today.

Hotstar said about 66% of its viewers came from outside of big metro cities, an equally remarkable feat that illustrates the growing adoption of the streaming service in smaller cities and towns that remain sporadic consumers — if at all — of internet services.

To be sure, these 100 million users are not paying subscribers. Hotstar offers five-minutes streaming of live events to users at no cost. The platform, which competes with Netflix, Prime Video, AltBalaji, Zee5, and YouTube in India, declined to share its paying subscribers base. In April, the company said it had 300 million monthly active users.

Regardless, 100 million daily active users is an impressive feat for any service in India. Especially for streaming services that, thanks to dramatically dwindling data prices in the country in recent years, are increasingly changing users’ behavior toward intensive data usage online. (For some context, Facebook and WhatsApp have under 300 monthly active users in India; Google’s YouTube, which is its fastest growing service in the nation, also has fewer than 300 million monthly active users in the country.)

It also helps that the game between India and Pakistan, two neighboring nations with a long history, remains one of the most anticipated events for cricket following countries.

Cricket itself has emerged as the biggest driver of video streaming in India in the last three years. The game is followed by hundreds of millions of users across the globe — if not more. In 2010, Hilary Clinton urged nations to look at cricket as a model for improving relationships with other countries.

“I might suggest that if we are searching for a model of how to meet tough international challenges with skill, dedication and teamwork, we need only look to the Afghan national cricket team,” she said as U.S. Secretary of State in 2010.

Star India, which operates Hotstar, owns rights to most cricket tournaments, a bet that has immensely helped it scale its business. This then wouldn’t come as a surprise that both Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, that do not offer live streaming of sporting events in India, have produced shows themed around cricket.

Both Amazon and Netflix have fewer than 5 million subscribers in India, according to industry estimates. While Amazon Prime Video, which bundles a range of other services including faster delivery of goods, and Hotstar are priced at Rs 999 ($14.4) for a year-long service, Netflix’s monthly offering starts at Rs 500 ($7.2) — though it has been experimenting with more options.

Even Facebook made an unsuccessful bid to acquire streaming rights to a cricket tournament in India two years ago, months before it began to talk about its Watch ambitions. That cricket tournament was Indian Premier League (IPL), which concluded its 12th edition last month. Hotstar, which also owns the right to stream IPL matches, set a global record for most simultaneous views to a live event in the final game of the tournament last month.

Beating its own previous record, Hotstar claimed that more than 18.6 million viewers watched the game simultaneously. Interestingly enough, even as a record 100 million plus users simultaneously watched the game between India and Pakistan this month, Hotstar said the concurrent views count peaked at 15.6 million.

It remains unclear why Hotstar was not able to break its concurrent record that day. TechCrunch reported earlier this month that Hotstar had identified a security flaw in its service that allowed some Safari browser users to access and distribute Hotstar’s content without a paid subscription. To fix it, Hotstar had temporarily discontinued support for Safari browser.

Last year, Hotstar and Walmart-owned Flipkart began a collaboration on building an advertising business in India. According to media planners TechCrunch has spoken to, Hotstar-Flipkart’s digital ad business is already the third largest in India, only behind Google and Facebook.

For Hotstar, the biggest challenge is in retaining customers after the mega cricket season ends next month. Each year, the service struggles to appease customers and sees a massive drop in users count after the cricket season is over, a source familiar with the matter said. In the last one year, it has started to invest in producing its original shows. Many inside the company have high hopes that people will show up to watch the Indian versions of Jim and Pam in the remake of NBC’s “The Office.” It premieres on Hotstar later this week.

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Facebook adds new limits to address the spread of hate speech in Sri Lanka and Myanmar

As Facebook grapples with the spread of hate speech on its platform, it is introducing changes that limit the spread of messages in two countries where it has come under fire in recent years: Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

In a blog post on Thursday evening, Facebook said that it was “adding friction” to message forwarding for Messenger users in Sri Lanka so that people could only share a particular message a certain number of times. The limit is currently set to five people.

This is similar to a limit that Facebook introduced to WhatsApp last year. In India, a user can forward a message to only five other people on WhatsApp . In other markets, the limit kicks in at 20. Facebook said some users had also requested this feature because they are sick of receiving chain messages.

In early March, Sri Lanka grappled with mob violence directed at its Muslim minority. In the midst of it, hate speech and rumors started to spread like wildfire on social media services, including those operated by Facebook. The government in the country then briefly shut down citizen’s access to social media services.

In Myanmar, social media platforms have faced a similar, long-lasting challenge. Facebook, in particular, has been blamed for allowing hate speech to spread that stoked violence against the Rohingya ethnic group. Critics have claimed that the company’s efforts in the country, where did does not have a local office or employees, are simply not enough.

In its blog post, Facebook said it has started to reduce the distribution of content from people in Myanmar who have consistently violated its community standards with previous posts. Facebook said it will use learnings to explore expanding this approach to other markets in the future.

“By limiting visibility in this way, we hope to mitigate against the risk of offline harm and violence,” Facebook’s Samidh Chakrabarti, director of product management and civic integrity, and Rosa Birch, director of strategic response, wrote in the blog post.

In cases where it identifies individuals or organizations “more directly promote or engage violence”, the company said it would ban those accounts. Facebook is also extending the use of AI to recognize posts that may contain graphic violence and comments that are “potentially violent or dehumanizing.”

The social network has, in the past, banned armed groups and accounts run by the military in Myanmar, but it has been criticized for reacting slowly and, also, for promoting a false narrative that suggested its AI systems handle the work.

Last month, Facebook said it was able to detect 65% of the hate speech content that it proactively removed (relying on users’ reporting for the rest), up from 24% just over a year ago. In the quarter that ended in March this year, Facebook said it had taken down 4 million hate speech posts.

Facebook continues to face similar challenges in other markets, including India, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Following a riot last month, Indonesia restricted the usage of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in an attempt to contain the flow of false information.

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Calibra wallet won’t launch in Facebook’s biggest market

Facebook unveiled its audacious Libra cryptocurrency and Calibra digital wallet on Tuesday through which it plans to transform financial services across the globe. The social juggernaut made clear of its ambitions when it said that it wishes to empower more than 1.7 billion people around the world who currently do not have a bank account.

But potentially an equally large group of people would not be able to use Facebook’s new digital payments service when it begins rollout next year.

Responding to queries from TechCrunch, a Calibra spokesperson said that the digital wallet will not be rolling out to a number of markets that have taken a stand against cryptocurrency, or are sanctioned by the United States.

“The Libra Blockchain will be global, but it will be up to custodial wallet providers to determine where they will and will not operate. Calibra won’t be available in US-sanctioned countries or countries that ban cryptocurrencies,” the spokesperson told TechCrunch.

TechCrunch understands that India, Facebook’s biggest market, is among the list of countries where Calibra does not intend to launch. Additionally, Calibra isn’t going to be available in China, North Korea, and Iran, too, where Facebook does not currently have a presence.

India remains cautious about cryptocurrency. The country’s central bank Reserve Bank of India told the highest court in the nation that it did not want cryptocurrency to spread like “contagion,” citing potential harms. Last month, the nation proposed a bill that would penalize ten year jail sentence to those who “mine, hold, sell, transfer, dispose, issue, or deal in cryptocurrencies.”

Earlier this week, Facebook said that Calibra will be available on WhatsApp, Messenger, and through a standalone app. In India, this created some additional confusion as WhatsApp already offers a person-to-person payments service in the nation, called WhatsApp Pay. India is the only market where WhatsApp currently offers its payments service.

A WhatsApp spokesperson told TechCrunch that Facebook is committed to the efforts that it has made on WhatsApp Pay, which is built on top of Unified Payments Interface (UPI), a three-year-old government-backed payments infrastructure that is driving hundreds of millions of financial transactions in the nation each month.

WhatsApp’s payments service is currently available to one million users in India, and the Facebook -owned instant messaging giant is working with the government for a nation-wide rollout.

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Postman raises $50 million to grow its API development platform

Postman, a five-year-old startup that is attempting to simply development, tests, and management of APIs through its platform, has raised $50 million in a new round to scale its business.

The Series B for the startup, that began its journey in India, was led by CRV and included participation from existing investor Nexus Venture Partners . The startup, with offices in India and San Francisco, closed its Series A financing round four years ago and has raised $57 million to date.

Postman offers a development environment which a developer or a firm could use to build, publish, document, design, monitor, test, and debug their APIs. Postman, like some other startups such as RapidAPI, also maintains a marketplace to offer APIs for quick integration with other popular services.

The startup was co-founded by Abhinav Asthana, a former intern at Yahoo . Asthana was frustrated with how APIs were an afterthought for many developers as they usually got around to building them in the eleventh hour. Additionally, developers were relying on their own workflows and there was no organized platform that could be used by many, he explained in an interview with TechCrunch.

Even big software firms have not looked into this space yet, and many have instead become a customer of Postman. “We are solving a fundamental problem for the technology landscape. Big companies tend to be slower as they have many other things on their plate,” said Asthana.

Five years later, Postman has grown significantly. More than 7 million users and 300,000 companies including Microsoft, Twitter, BestBuy, AMC Theaters, Paypal, Shopify, BigCommerce, and DocuSign today use Postman’s platform.

The modern software development relies heavily on APIs as more businesses begin to talk with one another. According to research firm Gartner, more than 65% of global infrastructure service providers’ revenue will be generated through services enabled by APIs by 2023, up from 15% in 2018.

Asthana said Postman intends to use the fresh capital to scale its startup, products, and grow its team. “We are scaling rapidly across all dimensions. There are many use cases that we still want to address over the coming months. We will also experiment with sales and invest in improving user experience,” he added.

Postman offers some of its services in limited capacity for free to users. For rest, it charges between $8 to $18 per user to its customers. That’s how the company generates revenue. Asthana declined to share the financial performance of the startup, but said its customer based was “growing phenomenally.”

Postman said CRV General Partner Devdutt Yellurkar has joined its board of directors.

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Anti-spam service Truecaller adds free voice calling feature

Truecaller, an app best known for helping users screen calls from strangers and spammers, is adding yet another feature to its service as it bolsters its super app status. The Stockholm-based firm said today that its app can now be used to place free VoIP-powered voice calls.

The company told TechCrunch on Tuesday that it has started to roll out the free voice calling feature to its Android users. It expects the rollout to reach all Android users in the coming days. The feature, which currently only supports calls between two users, will arrive on its iOS app soon.

In emerging markets such as India, where 100 million of Truecaller’s 140 million users live, free voice calls has been a long-sought after feature. Until late 2016, voice calls were fairly expensive in India, with telecom operators counting revenue from traditional calls as their biggest profit generator.

But in last two and a half years, things have changed dramatically for hundreds of millions of people in India after Reliance Jio, a telecom operator owned by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, launched its network with free voice calls and low-priced data services. Reliance Jio has already amassed over 300 million users to become one of the top three telcos in the nation.

Yet, the quality of network still leaves much to be desired in India as traditional calls drop abruptly and run into quality issues more often than one would like. Truecaller said that its voice calls rely on data services — mobile data and Wi-Fi — and claimed that they can work swiftly even on patchy network.

The addition of voice calling functionality comes as Truecaller aggressively looks to expand its business. The service, which offers both ad-support free tier and subscription bundle, has added messaging, mobile payments, and call recording features in recent years. Earlier this year, it also added a crediting option, allowing users in India to borrow a few hundred dollars.

A representative with the company said Truecaller began exploring the free voice calling feature a few months ago. It began testing the new functionality with alpha and beta test group users four weeks ago. It now plans to introduce group voice calling support soon, the company said.

With the new feature, Truecaller now competes even more closely with WhatsApp . The Facebook-owned app has become ubiquitous in India with more than three-quarters of India’s smartphone base using the app. WhatsApp added voice calling feature to its app in 2015. Last year, Facebook said users around the world were spending 2 billion minutes per day on WhatsApp video and audio calls.

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India’s payments firm MobiKwik kick-starts its international ambitions with cross-border mobile top-ups

MobiKwik, a mobile wallet app in India that has expanded to add several financial services in recent years, said today it plans to enter international markets as it approaches profitability with the local operation. The company is kick-starting its overseas ambitions with cross-border mobile top-ups support.

The 10-year-old firm said it has partnered with DT One, a Singapore-headquartered payments network, to enable international mobile recharge (topping up credit to a mobile account), rewards, and airtime credit services in over 150 nations across some 550 mobile operators. The feature is now live on the app.

The feature is aimed at Indians living overseas and immigrants in India, Upasana Taku, co-founder of MobiKwik told TechCrunch in an interview. Millions of Indians go overseas to pursue education or look for a job. Currently, there is no convenient way for them to either help — or receive help from — their families and friends in India when they need to top up their phones.

Similarly, millions of people come to India in search for a job. The new functionality from MobiKwik will allow their families and friends to top up their mobile credit as well. Taku said there is no processing fee for customers as MobiKwik is absorbing all the overhead expenses.

For MobiKwik, mobile recharge is just the entry point to assess interest from users, Taku added. “This is the first service we are launching. We will eventually add other essential services as well. Mobile recharge will offer us good data points and will help us understand different markets,” she added.

MobiKwik is also studying different regulatory frameworks in overseas markets and holding conversations with stakeholders, she added.

The announcement comes at a time when MobiKwik is inching closer to profitability, a feat unheard of for a mobile wallet app provider in India. The firm, which claims to have grown its revenue by 100% in the last two years, expects to be profitable by this year and go public by 2022. (Interestingly, MobiKwik was looking to raise a big round at $1 billion valuation two years ago — which never happened.)

In the last one year, the firm has expanded to offer financial services such as loans, insurances, and investment advice. MobiKwik competes with a handful of payment services in India including Paytm, PhonePe, and Google Pay that either support, or fully work on top of a government-backed payment infrastructure called UPI. In April, UPI apps were used to carry out 782 million transactions, according to official figures.

The big numbers have attracted major investors, too. With $285.6 million in funding, India emerged as Asia’s top fintech market in the quarter that ended in March this year.

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India’s Bounce raises $72 million to grow its electric scooters business

Bounce, a Bangalore-based startup that offers more than 5,000 electric scooters for rent in India, has raised $72 million to accelerate its bid to impact how people navigate India’s traffic-clogged urban areas.

The Series C funding round for the five-year-old startup was led by B Capital — the VC firm founded by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin — and Falcon Edge Capital. Chiratae Ventures, Maverick Ventures, Omidyar Network India, Qualcomm Ventures, and existing investors Sequoia Capital India and Accel Partners India also participated in the round.

This new money means that the startup has raised $92 million to date. The current round valued it at more than $200 million, a person familiar with the matter said.

Bounce, formerly known as Metro Bikes, operates in Bangalore. Its app allows users to pick up a scooter and, when their ride is finished, drop it off at any parking spot. It charges customers based on the time and model of electric scooter they choose. An hour-long ride could cost as little as Rs 15 (21 cents). The startup claims it has already clocked two million rides. 

Vivekananda Hallekere, co-founder and CEO of Bounce, told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup plans to use the fresh capital to add over 50,000 electric scooters to its fleets by the end of the year. Additionally, Bounce, which employs about 200 people, plans to enter more cities in India and invest in growing its tech infrastructure and head count.

“We have about ten metro and non-metro cities in mind. Starting next quarter, we will start to expand in those cities,” he said. The startup also aims to service one million rides in the next one year.

Hallekere said Bounce, which currently offers IoT hardware and design for the scooters, is also working on building its own form factor for scooters.

The rise of Bounce comes as it bets that shared two-wheeler vehicles — already a common mode of transportation in the nation — will play an important role in the future of ride-sharing, with electric vehicles replacing petrol ones.

This bet has gained more momentum in recent years. Startups such as Yulu, which partnered with Uber earlier this year to conduct a trial in Bangalore, Vogo, which raised money from Uber rival Ola, and Ather Energy have expanded their businesses and gained the backing of major investors.

Their adoption, though still in their nascent stages, is increasingly proving that for millions of people rides from Uber and Ola are just too expensive for their wallets. Besides, in jam-packed traffic in Bangalore and Delhi and other cities in India, two wheels are more efficient than four.