Tag: Philippines

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Ant Group buys Singapore’s 2C2P to further global payments ambitions

Quietly, Alibaba’s fintech affiliate Ant Group has been building a global cross-border payments network by partnering with or investing in third-party e-wallets, banks, remittance services and other ecosystem players.

The latest added to Ant’s alliance is 2C2P, a Singapore-based company that helps enterprises in Southeast Asia move money across borders. According to an announcement released on Monday, Ant will form a strategic partnership with 2C2P and become its largest shareholder, though a figure for the acquisition wasn’t disclosed. With the deal, the Singaporean firm’s network of merchants will be plugged into Alipay+, Ant’s cross-border payments platform.

“Through this complementary partnership with Ant Group, 2C2P will be connected to a much larger merchant base and be well-positioned to advance our international expansion strategy,” Aung Kyaw Moe, founder and CEO of 2C2P, said in a statement, adding that the partnership will help extend the company’s “current 250 payment options” to include more e-wallets and payments methods.

Rather than building its own country-specific wallet from the ground up and acquiring the needed regulatory permits to operate such services, Ant has chosen the route of partnership. It launched Alipay+ in 2020 and has so far teamed up with a slew of third-party payment methods, including banks and also e-wallets like Touch ‘n Go in Malaysia, GCash in the Philippines, KakaoPay in South Korea, TrueMoney in Thailand, Dana in Indonesia, bKash in Bangladesh, and Klarna in Europe.

Alipay+ comes in handy when a user traveling, working, or studying abroad wants to pay a local merchant, whether it’s online or offline, in their home country’s currency. If the retailer supports an e-wallet that works with Alipay+, the user can pay using Alipay+’s partnering wallet for the transaction, skipping the hassle of exchanging currency at a bank.

Alipay+ also comes with a suite of marketing tools that allow merchants to offer deals and discounts for customer engagement, a business model that it has proven in China’s mobile-first payments market over the years.

The fintech giant has long had globalizing goals and set out years ago by targeting China’s outbound tourists. While Alipay focuses on China’s domestic consumers and merchants, its sister Alipay+ appears to be Ant’s ambition to go after users outside China who have similar cross-border payments needs.

Ant’s plans to pursue an initial public offering were shelved in November 2020 after the Chinese government ordered a regulatory overhaul into its financial practices, which subsequently made some of its China-based businesses less lucrative. Ramping up overseas expansion could be a way for the behemoth to sustain growth.

Ant says Alipay+ has served more than 1 billion users in Asia and 1 million offline merchants across Europe and Asia. Online, it has connected payments providers to customers on platforms like Apple, Foodpanda, Google and TikTok.

Sequoia-backed SwooshTransfer raises millions of dollars to automate cross-border payments

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Egypt’s Pylon gets $19M to scale software for water and electricity distribution companies

Pylon, an Egyptian infrastructure management platform for water and electricity companies in emerging markets, has raised a $19 million seed round.

The round, a combination of debt and equity, was led by U.S.-based Endure Capital, which is backed by British International Investment (formerly CDC Group), the development finance institution of the U.K. government. Participating investors include Cathexis Ventures, Loftyinc Ventures, Khawarizmi Ventures and several unnamed angel investors.

Pylon currently operates in Egypt and the Philippines. Part of the seed investment will allow Pylon to expand to other countries in emerging markets, including Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. This funding is the company’s first venture round. CEO Ahmed Ashour said he and his co-founder, CTO Omar Radi, had bootstrapped Pylon since 2017.

Ashour worked in the metering and utility business for more than a decade and led the implementation of smart metering technologies — particularly hardware– across Africa, Europe, Asia and the Middle East for various companies.

In 2016, he found a gap in the market for solutions tailored to the needs of water and electricity distributors in Egypt and other emerging markets. He said these entities used software designed for developed economies with different needs and challenges from the likes of Siemens, Oracle and SAP that couldn’t meet distributors’ demands in emerging markets.

“We have seen them [foreign software] used in other projects but eventually experienced great failures. We started [Pylon] to replace them because their solution failed on the ground,” Ashour told TechCrunch on a call.

The chief executive said Pylon solves several challenges for water and distribution companies. First, they incur a very high rate of uncollected bills and thus miss out on huge revenues. Second, they experience high electricity costs and water theft. Thirdly, technical losses happen on the grid and the network — whether for lack of maintenance or law enforcement. These three issues contribute to these entities losing 40% of their revenues and give rise to the last issue — these entities being unable to upgrade their solution or have a smart infrastructure in place due to high costs.

Pylon builds solutions for these water and electricity distribution companies to make them efficient and stanch the bleeding — the company calculates hundreds of billions of losses (in dollars) across emerging markets per year. It’s a massive opportunity to increase the aggregate revenues and top line of those utilities by 50%.

Here’s how it works. Pylon’s software gathers data from the grids, analyzes it, and detects where theft and losses occur along the supply process. It then automates billing processes for the companies, similar to how telecom providers in these markets have done over the years.

With no upfront investment, Pylon says it can help utility companies reduce their losses to 8%, in addition to improving their top line. The company said it doesn’t charge its customers an upfront cost for its hardware. However, its smart metering-as-a-service (SMaaS) model makes it easy for cash-conscious utility companies to deploy its solution at scale.

“We believe that the electricity sector is following the footsteps of the telecom industry and the curve is starting to show. So we just mirrored the billing solution, and with the data detection, we can detect who exactly is stealing electricity and where the losses are happening,” said the CEO.

“Also, since those utilities are cash-strapped and cannot upgrade, we offer them this solution as a subscription model. So it’s a low-capex model where they subscribe with us, pay around 10-12% of the initial cost of their previous solution, and can recuperate the revenues. So just by signing with us, they start making more money and increasing their top line and bottom line.”

Over 12 different utilities (seven in the private sector and five in public) use Pylon. They serve more than 1 million metering endpoints across 26 separate meter models in Egypt and the Philippines.

Pylon grew its revenues by 3.5x in 2021 and claims to be profitable. But aside from building a thriving business, the founders are particular about how Pylon’s smart electricity grids foster sustainability of the environment.

“We believe big time in our role in helping the environment and helping with the challenges that we are currently facing,” the CEO said. “Emissions coming from the electricity sector is one of the biggest sources of CO2 emissions on the planet. We are able to make electricity efficient and reduce [emissions] by 25% when utilities subscribe with us.” 

One of its goals is to achieve 1 gigaton of total CO2 emissions reduction by 2035. On the other hand, water losses in emerging markets also reach over 45 million cubic meters per day. “Pylon can reduce this by up to 22%, potentially providing enough water to serve over 40 million people,” the company said.

The Y Combinator-backed startup believes the market opportunity in the water and electricity distribution space is worth over $20 billion across 10 emerging markets. However, it is currently focusing on one-fourth of that figure which covers Egypt, the Phillippines, Brazil and Africa. Ultimately, the plan is for the Egyptian startup to capture more market share over time, Ashour said, and an expansion to Southeast Asia, another fragmented market, is in the cards.

But these are all long-term projections. In the near future, next year to be exact, Ashour said Pylon plans to reach 3 million meters across its markets, representing a 4x year-on-year growth. The startup is already working with multiple companies across two continents that have deployed more than 2 million endpoints of Pylon’s smart grid technology across 15 distribution companies.

Getting its technology right will be essential in this next phase of growth. Therefore, securing this seed financing — one of the largest in the MENA region — presents Pylon with the chance to advance its engineering and product development.

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PayMaya owner Voyager Innovations raises $210M at a valuation of $1.4B

Voyager Innovations, the owner of Philippines’ payment and financial services app PayMaya and neobank Maya Bank, announced today it has raised $210 million, bringing its valuation to $1.4 billion.

The round was led by SIG Venture Capital, and included participation from EDBI and First Pacific Company, as well as returning shareholders PLDT, KKR, Tencent, International Finance Corporation and IFC Emerging Asia Fund and IFC Financial Institutions Growth Fund. 

The funds will be used to launch Maya Bank services, including savings and credit products, through PayMaya, which has over 47 million registered users and is one of the most popular financial apps in the Philippines, along with GCash and Coins.

Voyager also plans to add cryptocurrency, micro-investments and insurance products to PayMaya, which already includes a digital wallet, online remittances, bill payments, bank transfers, prepaid cards and an e-commerce feature called PayMaya Mall.  

Voyager’s last round of funding was in July 2021, when it raised $167 million in preparation for launching its neobank.

PayMaya owner Voyager Innovation raises $167M from KKR, Tencent and IFC, to launch digital bank in the Philippines

At the time of that announcement, Voyager said it had applied for a digital bank license with Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), the Philippines’ central bank. According to the BSP, about half of the adult population in the country is unbanked, but it has set a goal of onboarding 70% of Filipino adults to payment or transaction accounts by 2023.

Maya Bank secured one of six digital banking licenses from the BSP in September 2021 and started pilot testing Maya Bank in March 2022. 

Investors are doubling down on Southeast Asia’s digital economy

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Philippines-based MSME platform GrowSari adds $77.5 million to its Series C

GrowSari, a Manila-based platform for digitizing small businesses in the Philippines, announced today it has added $77.5 million to its Series C round. Along with prior funding, including $45 million announced in January, this brings the round’s total to about $110 million. Investors included the International Finance Corporation, KKR, Wavemaker Partners and the Temasek Group’s Pavilion Capital.

The new capital will be used for expansion into new store formats, building a logistics and fulfillment network and hiring for GrowSari’s operations, technology and data science teams. 

Co-founder and CEO Reymund Rollan told TechCrunch that GrowSari raised again because it wants to expand its fintech offerings for store owners and build its supplier marketplace, including commodities. It also plans to serve more types of MSMEs, like carinderias (small eateries), small over-the-counter pharmacies and other roadside and market shops.

KKR invests $45M into GrowSari, a B2B platform for Filipino MSMEs

Founded in 2016, GrowSari’s tools for small businesses now include inventory management, pricing tools, a logistics network and working capital loans. It also enables retailers to offer telco top-ups and bill payments. Its customers now include 100,000 stores in over 220 municipalities in Luzon, and it is planning to expand into Mindanao soon.

A screenshot of GrowSari's app

GrowSari’s app

 

Other plans include adding more financial services and logistics solutions, with plans to have more than 50 fulfillment centers across the country. 

In a prepared statement, Stephanie von Friedeburg, IFC’s Senior Vice President of Operations said, “The pandemic has fundamentally changed how business works,” said . “Businesses that ignore digital technology put themselves at an immediate disadvantage. Our investment will enable Growsari to expand digital adoption and financial services for MSMEs, which is critical to keep them competitive, and for a resilient and inclusive recovery.”

Predicting the next wave of Southeast Asia tech giants

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Philippines payment gateway PayMongo gets $31M Series B, will explore regional expansion

PayMongo founders (from left to right): Jaime Hing III, Chief Technology Officer, Francis Plaza, Chief Executive Officer and Luis Sia, Chief Commercial Officer

PayMongo founders (from left to right): Jaime Hing III, Chief Technology Officer, Francis Plaza, Chief Executive Officer and Luis Sia, Chief Commercial Officer

Philippines-based fintech PayMongo, which enables merchants to accept digital payments, announced today it has raised $31 million in Series B funding with an eye on regional expansion. Investors include Justin Mateen’s JAM Fund, ICCP-SBI Venture Partners and Lisa Gokongwei’s Kaya Founders, along with returning investors Global Founders Capital and SOMA Capital. The startup says the round also included founders from European fintechs like Qonta, Viva Wallet, Billie and Scalable.

This brings PayMongo’s total funding to just under $46 million. Its last funding was a $12 million Series A announced in 2020 and led by Stripe.

The company works with businesses of all sizes, but targets micro-, small- and medium-sized businesses in particular, enabling them to accept different forms of payments, including credit cards, online wallets and over-the-counter. Its products include PayMongo API and e-commerce plugins. The new funding will be used to further develop PayMongo’s current payments infrastructure and add more financial services, including disbursements, capital lending, BNPL, and subscriptions and recurring payments.

Part of PayMongo’s product roadmap includes acquiring new licenses that will allow it to operate more financial services. At the same time, the company is also exploring regional expansion.

“There is so much more work to do in the Philippines. We also forecast more than doubling our team size to support this increasing demand and deliver on our aggressive product roadmap. In parallel, we have started some initial exploration and leg work to expand in the SE Asia region, a work we have kicked off last year,” co-founder and CEO Francis Plaza told TechCrunch in an email.

Other digital payment gateways in the Philippines include DragonPay, PesoPay, PayMaya and Paynamics. Plaza told TechCrunch in an email that the company differentiates itself by its focus on SMBs and high-growth startups and companies since it was founded in 2019.

PayMaya owner Voyager Innovation raises $167M from KKR, Tencent and IFC, to launch digital bank in the Philippines

“Beyond that, as we work with thousands of businesses on the platform, we are geared towards building more products and services that not only enables merchants to easily accept payments but also to grow through access to other financial services,” he said. “From the ability to move money, store balances, access to credit and other expanded payment options for customers.” Plaza added that it is already testing out several new products and services in beta with merchants.

In a statement, Justin Mateen, the founder of Tinder and JAM Fund, said “As one of PayMongo’s first investors, I’ve seen their path from simplifying payments for a handful of businesses to now being a company that thousands of merchants depend on for their day-to-day operations. I’m excited by their progress and thrilled to support the team once again as they generate greater economic opportunities through the digital economy.”

Predicting the next wave of Southeast Asia tech giants

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Philippines ‘buy now pay later’ startup BillEase scores $11M Series B

Buy now pay later (BNPL) startups are proliferating around the world and the Philippines is no exception. Today, one of the country’s biggest BNPL providers, BillEase, announced it has raised an $11 million Series B. The round was led by BurdaPrincipal Investments, growth capital arm of Hubert Burda Media. Other participants included Centauri, a joint investment vehicle between MDI Ventures and KB Investment, and Tamaz Georgadze, CEO and co-founder of Raisin DS.

Operated by fintech First Digital Finance Corporation BillEase launched in 2017, with shopping marketplace Lazada as its first merchant partner. It can now be used at more than 500 merchants, including consumer electronics seller Kimstore and Philippine Airlines. Its BNPL is also available through payment gateways Xendit, Paynamics, 2C2P, Dragonpay and BUX, and it offers an app with personal loans, top-ups for digital wallets like GCash, PayMaya, Coins.ph, GrabPay and Shopee Pay and mobile phone and gaming credits.

Since the Philippines’ payment sector is fragmented, customers can pay back their BNPL loans through a variety of ways, including digital wallets, bank transfers, direct debit, linking their bank account or over-the-counter payments in physical stores like 7-11.

The new funding brings BillEase’s total raised to about $15 million in equity, and will be used for customer acquisition, developing new products and hiring.

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One of the main ways BillEase differentiates from other BNPL services in the Philippines is that it allows customers to build formal credit records.

Georg Stegier, First Digital Financial Corporation’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch in an email that BillEase’s target segment is the Philippines’ emerging middle class, specifically Gen Z and millennials who are early in their careers. “About 80% of our customers are new to the formal credit system and do not have a credit record.

For those customers, BillEase also serves as an on-ramp to the financial system—we are the only credit app in the Philippines that is a member of TransUnion.” It is also part of the state-owned Credit Information Corporation.

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Another differentiator is that BillPay built and owns its credit, fraud and payment software stack, and can approve more than 90% of BNPL loans instantly with it model. This means shorter checkout times and also enables BillEase to offer lower interest rates, at about 3.49% compared to 7% to 12% for other BNPL loans, Stegier said. It gives merchants customizable installment plans. For example, they can offer BNPL repayment terms of 10 to 30 days for smaller purchases, payment in four installments or monthly payments for larger purchases, and decide if those loans will be interest-free or not.

Since most of BillEase’s customers don’t have a credit record, it uses “a wide variety of alternative data sources to triangulate and get a good picture of our customers,” including telecom usage, phone metadata, network data and behavioral data points,” Stegier said.

“Credit scoring is also something we constantly tinker with,” he added. “As new data comes in or new variables become available, we upgrade our models. At any given time we usually run a few A/B tests to test new models or process improvements.”

Philippines ‘buy now, pay later’ startup Plentina raises $2.2M seed round

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Twitter expands misinformation reporting feature to more international markets

Last August, Twitter introduced a new feature in select markets, including the U.S., that invited users to report misinformation they encountered on its platform — including things like election-related or Covid-19 misinformation, for example. Now the company is rolling out the feature to more markets as its test expands. In addition to the U.S., Australia, and South Korea, where the feature had already gone live, Twitter is rolling out the reporting option to users in Brazil, Spain, and the Philippines.

The company also offered an update on the feature’s traction, noting that the company has received more than 3.7 million user-submitted reports since its debut. For context, Twitter has around 211 million monetizable active daily users, as of its most recent earnings, 37 million of which are U.S.-based and 174 million based in international markets.

According to Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity, the “vast majority” of content the company takes action on for misinformation is identified proactively through automation (which accounts for 50%+ of enforcements) or proactive monitoring. User-submitted reports via the new feature, however, Twitter to identify patterns of misinformation — an area where Twitter has seen the most success so far from the feature, Roth says. This is particularly true in areas like non-text-baed misinformation like media and URLs that link to content hosted off Twitter’s platform.
But he also noted that when Twitter reviewed a subset of individual reported tweets, only around 10% were considered “actionable” compared with 20-30% in other policy areas, as many tweets analyzed didn’t contain misinformation at all.

In markets where the feature is available, users can report misinformation by clicking the three-dot menu in the upper-right of a tweet, then choosing the “report tweet” option. From there, they’ll be able to click the option “it’s misleading.”

While Twitter already offered a way to report violating content on its platform before the addition of the new flagging option, its existing reporting flow didn’t offer a clear way to report tweets containing misinformation. Instead, users would have to pick from options like “it’s suspicious or spam” or “it’s abusive or harmful,” among others, before further narrowing down how the specific tweet was in violation of Twitter’s rules.

The ability to flag tweets as misinformation allows users to more quickly and directly flag content that may not fit into existing rules, as well. But the reports themselves are tied into Twitter’s existing enforcement flow, where a combination of human review and moderation is used to determine if a punitive action should take place. Twitter had also said the reported tweets would be sorted for review based on priority — meaning tweets from accounts with a large following or those showing higher levels of engagement would be reviewed first.

The feature is rolling out at a time when social networks are being pressured to clean up the misinformation they’ve allowed to spread across their platforms, or risk regulation that will enforce such cleanups and perhaps even enact penalties for not doing so.

The flagging option is not the only way Twitter is working to fight misinformation. The company also runs an experiment called Birdwatch, which aims to crowdsource fact-checking by allowing Twitter users to annotate misleading tweets with factual information. This service is still in pilot testing and being updated based on user feedback.

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App Annie: Global app stores’ consumer spend up 19% to $170B in 2021, downloads grew 5% to 230B

Consumer spending on mobile apps reached $170 billion in 2021, according to App Annie’s newly released “State of Mobile 2022″ report, out today, which offers a comprehensive look at the app economy across iOS, Google Play and third-party Android app stores in China. That figure is up 19% year-over-year, which is down just one percentage point from the growth rate the firm reported in its prior annual report. Growth in app downloads, however, dipped a bit more. Though today’s consumers are installing more apps than ever — 230 billion were downloaded in 2021, setting another record — the growth rate itself is slowing.

In January 2021, App Annie reported year-over-year download growth of 7% during 2021, which has now dropped to just 5% in 2021.

Download growth today is being driven largely by emerging markets like India, as well as Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia and Egypt.

Image Credits: App Annie

What’s also clear is that consumers are spending more time in apps — even topping the time they spend watching TV in some cases.

The report noted the average American watches 3.1 hours of TV per day, for example, but over the course of the past year, 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 5 hours per day in mobile apps in 2021.

Across the top 10 markets analyzed in the study, the average time spent in apps topped 4 hours, 48 minutes in 2021 — up 30% from 2019. This included the averages from Brazil, Indonesia, South Korea, Mexico, India, Japan, Turkey, Singapore, Canada, the U.S., Russia, the U.K., Australia, Argentina, France, Germany and China combined.

Much of this time was spent in social, photo and video apps, which accounted for 7 out of every 10 minutes spent on mobile in the past year. These categories, plus entertainment apps, also appeal to Gen Z users, particularly in the U.S.

Here in the U.S., Gen Z’s most-used apps included Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and Netflix. Millennials meanwhile preferred Facebook, Messenger, Amazon and WhatsApp. Gen X, which has now been lumped into the Baby Boomer demographic (ack!), used The Weather Channel, Amazon Alexa, NewsBreak and Ring.

Image Credits: App Annie

This increased time spent in apps has had a direct impact on consumer spending. In the U.S., the COVID-19 pandemic’s lingering effects have forced users to shop, work, learn, game and entertain themselves from home over the past year. This led to “phenomenal” growth in consumer spending, App Annie said, as the market added $43 billion in 2021, or $10.4 billion more than 2020, equating to 30% year-over-year growth — higher than the global average.

At the high end of consumer spending, there were 233 apps and games that pulled in more than $100 million in 2021, and 13 titles that generated over $1 billion. This is up 20% from 2020, when there were then 193 apps and games topping the $100 million mark, and only 8 titles making over $1 billion annually.

Image Credits: App Annie

Outside the consumer spending that included paid apps, subscriptions and in-app purchases, the broader mobile app market topped $295 billion in 2021, up 23% year-over-year, despite fears from marketers over Apple’s privacy changes and IDFA crackdown. In 2022, the market is expected to grow to $350 billion, aided by big events including the Beijing Olympics and the U.S. mid-terms.

Image Credits: App Annie

New mobile app releases also grew in 2021, as publishers launched 2 million new apps and games, bringing the total number of apps and games ever released across the App Store and Google Play to 21+ million. Of course, older apps and games have since been removed over the years either by the publishers themselves or the app stores during cleanups. Currently, there are 5.4 million “live” apps and games available on the app stores, 1.8 million of which are on iOS and 3.6 million on Google Play.

Google Play also accounted for 77% of all the new releases last year, while games made up 15% of all releases across both stores, the report noted.

Image Credits: App Annie

App Annie’s full report took a deep dive into individual app categories, as well, including gaming, finance, retail, video streaming, food & drink, health & fitness, social, travel, dating and more.

Among the highlights from its findings:

  • Gaming: An additional $16 billion in gaming consumer spend was added in 2021, bringing the total spend to $116 billion.
  • Finance: Finance app downloads in India topped 1 billion in 2021, driving the category’s 28% year-over-year increase in downloads to 5.9 billion worldwide.
  • Shopping: Time in shopping apps reached over 100 billion hours spent globally in 2021, up 18% year-over-year. Countries with the fastest growth include Indonesia, Singapore and Brazil (52%, 46% and 45%, respectively).
  • Video Streaming: Total hours spent watching video streaming apps grew 16% worldwide since pre-pandemic levels. But China saw declines as users shifted to short-form apps TikTok and Kwai. Netflix is on track to top 1 million downloads in more than 60 countries in 2022.
  • Food & Drink: Sessions in food & drink apps reached 62 billion in 2021. Several regions drove growth in Q4, including the U.S. (42% year-over-year), Russia (154% YoY), Turkey (75% YoY) and Indonesia (over 9x growth).
  • Health & Fitness: Worldwide downloads of health & fitness apps surpassed pre-COVID levels in 2021, despite a slight softening from a pandemic-induced high in 2020 in most countries. The top five meditation apps worldwide saw 27% year-over-year growth in consumer spending.
  • Social: Time spent in the top 25 livestreaming apps outpaced the social market year-over-year by a factor of 9 — year-over-year growth of 40% compared to all social apps at 5%. Global spend in the top 25 livestreaming apps in 2021 grew 6.5x from 2018 and 55% year-over-year. TikTok saw year-over-year growth rates as high as 75%.
  • Travel: Downloads of travel apps rebounded by 20% in H2 driven by sharp increases from July-December 2021. H2 downloads hit 1.95 billion globally, nearing pre-pandemic levels of 2.08 billion H2 2019.
  • Dating: Worldwide consumer spending on dating apps topped $4 billion in 2021, a 95% increase since 2018. Growth was primarily driven by the U.S., Japan, China and the U.K. Tinder led the market with $1.35 billion in worldwide consumer spending in 2021.

The report also listed the top apps and games worldwide and by individual countries by both downloads and consumer spending. Globally, the top five most downloaded apps in 2021 were Google Meet, Instagram, TikTok, Microsoft Teams and InShot. By consumer spend, the list was YouTube, Tinder, Tencent Video, Disney+ and TikTok.

Image Credits: App Annie

Top games by download included Project Makeover, acquapark.io, WormsZone.io, DOP 2: Delete One Part and Bridge Race. By spending, the list was led by Honour of Kings, Fantasy Westward Journey, Candy Crush Saga, Homescapes and Empires & Puzzles.

Image Credits: App Annie

The full report is here.

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Goldfinch raises $25M from a16z to power its DeFi lending protocol for borrowers in developing countries

For all of the excitement pulsing through the so-called web3 space in the past year, most of the heartiest sums of investor dollars have seemed to find their way towards products touching users in the United States, but an increasing number of startups are looking to tap opportunities in developing nations where existing centralized financial systems have struggled to meet the needs of their users.

Goldfinch is a crypto startup building a decentralized lending protocol that allows organizations to receive crypto loans without owning massive amounts of crypto already. Today, most lending platforms rely on an end user’s existing crypto collateralization to deem whether they’re a safe bet for a loan. Being required to stake valuable crypto assets that exceed the value of the loan makes for safer lending, but also alienates plenty of potential loan recipients who don’t have sizable crypto holdings.

The Bay Area startup wants to take a more blended solution to crypto lending with its protocol, building up capital pools and allowing fintech organizations outside the US to make their case to lenders operating on the protocol and get access to funds while showing non-crypto collateral.

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The startup tells TechCrunch it has closed $25 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm. Other backers include Coinbase Ventures, SV Angel, Blocktower, Bill Ackman and Heli-cap. Founders Mike Sall and Blake West previously worked together at Coinbase before starting Goldfinch in July of 2020. The firm raised an $11 million funding round last June.

“We just see enormous potential to expand access to capital and build this bridge to borrowers in the real world,” Sall tells TechCrunch.

Pooled investing like this outside of securities guidelines isn’t kosher stateside, so Goldfinch is ignoring the US market for now and tapping networks of investors elsewhere who are largely focusing investment on developing nations where scoring a loan has historically been a challenging prospect. Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda and and the Philippines are the countries with the highest volume of loans through the protocol.

One firm that backers on the protocol have financed is Tugende, an East Africa-based startup that loans motorcycle taxis to borrowers who set up payment plans to buy the bikes over time. Backers have also financed India-based Greenway which builds and loans our clean cook stoves to low-income households.

The team has put plenty of effort into the right incentive balance into their platform, allowing backers to take varying levels of risk and direct participation in the platform. An overall pool of capital split into “junior” and “senior” divisions allow lenders to balance their risk. While junior investors can make direct bets on which organizations they choose to back, the senior pool automatically diversifies across the portfolio bets of junior pool investors. The senior pool is a less active, more conservative bet because they’re paid out first, but lenders in that pool forego a sizable percentage of interest for riskier junior pool backers who take more risk with more potential upside.

The company says they have $39 million in active loans that have been deployed to a handful of fintech firms which have reached more than 230,00 end borrowers.

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Facebook is making two-factor mandatory for high-risk accounts

Facebook, a recently added subsidiary of Meta, said it will make two-factor authentication (2FA) mandatory for high-risk accounts likely to be targeted by malicious hackers.

The move is part of a major expansion of Facebook Protect, the social networking giant’s enhanced security program that’s intended to protect the accounts of people who may be at particular risk, like human rights defenders, journalists, and government officials. The initiative helps these accounts adopt stronger security protections by simplifying security features — including 2FA — and providing additional security protections for accounts and Pages, including monitoring for potential hacking threats.

The program was piloted in 2018 and expanded ahead of the 2020 U.S. election in a bid to try and stop abuse and election interference from spreading on the platform. It’s now enabled on more than 1.5 million accounts, according to Facebook, and is expanding to more than 50 countries by the end of the year, including the U.S., India, and Portugal. The company is planning a further expansion in 2022.

Of the 1.5 million accounts already enrolled in Facebook Protect, almost 950,000 have 2FA enabled, a feature that Facebook said has been “historically underutilized across the internet.” Facebook says it wants this feature to be used by all high-risk accounts, and is making it compulsory.

This means if a user identified by Facebook as high-risk does not enable 2FA at once a set period has expired, they won’t be able to access their accounts. The company said users won’t permanently lose access to their accounts, but will need to enable 2FA in order to regain access.

“2FA is such a core component of any user’s online defense, so we want to make this as easy as possible,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, head of Security Policy at Facebook. “To help drive wider enrollment of 2FA, we need to go beyond raising awareness or encouraging enrollment. This is a community of people that sit at very critical points in public debate and are highly targeted, so for their own protection, they probably should be enabling 2FA.”

Gleicher added that, in early testing, mandating Facebook Protect saw more than 90% of high-risk users enroll in 2FA.

In order to balance the protection the tool provides against the potential consequences — such as critical voices being locked out of their accounts — 2FA will first be required in places Facebook “has the necessary resources in place to smoothly expand,” such as the Philippines and Turkey. The company will also focus on regions where an upcoming election could create an important civic moment.

Facebook says that, while its own figures show that less than 4% of its global monthly active user base has not enrolled in 2FA, it currently has “no plans” to mandate the feature for all accounts.

Meta explains its approach to user safety following delayed rollout of end-to-end encryption