Servify, a Mumbai-headquartered startup that operates a device lifecycle management platform and works deeply with brands including Apple and Samsung in a number of geographies, has raised $23 million in a new financing round.
The Series C financing round for the five-year-old startup was led by existing investor Iron Pillar, and other existing investors including Blume Ventures, Beenext, and Tetrao SPF participated in the round. The new round pushes Servify’s to-date raise to $48 million.
Servify works with enterprises such as Apple, Samsung, OnePlus, Xiaomi, Nokia, Motorola, and Airtel and handles after-sales services such as device protection, exchange, and trade-in programs for its partners, explained Sreevathsa Prabhakar, founder and chief executive of the startup, in an interview with TechCrunch.
The startup, which offers its services through a whitelabel arrangement with enterprises, works with over 50 brands and reaches over 50 markets. With Apple, it works in three geographies, and in over half a dozen with OnePlus .
The new round, which was oversubscribed, will help the startup expand its expertise in many new product categories and deepen its reach in international markets, said Prabhakar, who has more than a decade of experience in overseeing after-sales and other device management businesses.
“We are keenly interested in unique businesses addressing hard problems in very large and global markets and are excited to continue to back the company in its next phase of growth. Stellar execution by Servify’s team combined with its differentiated technology platform have led to the company’s impressive growth this year despite Covid-19 related challenges,” said Anand Prasanna, Managing Partner at Iron Pillar, in a statement.
Google today announced the launch of Android 11, the latest version of its mobile operating system. After a slightly longer public preview, users who own a select number of Pixel devices (starting with the Pixel 2), OnePlus, Xiaomi, OPPO or realme phones will now see the update roll out to their phones in the coming days, with others launching their updates over the next few months.
Android 11 isn’t a radical departure from what you’ve come to expect in recent years, but there are a number of interesting new user-facing updates here that mostly center around messaging, privacy and giving you better control over all of your smart devices.
At the core of the improved messaging and communication features are improved notifications for conversations from your messaging apps. These now live in a dedicated space at the top of the notification shade and feature a more “people-forward design,” as the company describes it. The new Bubbles API now also makes chat bubbles a core part of the Android messaging experience.
One addition feature Google lists under the communications section is screen recording, which is now finally a built-in tool that lets you record what’s happening on your screen, using either the sound from your mic, the device or both. Until now, you needed third-party apps like AZ Screen Recorder for this (and you will still need these for more advanced features like live streaming, for example).
Image Credits: Google
As for controlling your smart devices, Google notes how you now simply long-press your power button to get access to a new menu that gives you access to device controls (similar to what you’d find in the Google Home app, but with a different design), as well as payment methods and your boarding passes, for example. And yes, you can still restart and power off your device from there, too.
Media controls are getting a redesign, too, with the controls moving out of the notifications and to the quick settings bar instead. From there, it is now also easier to choose where you want to play your audio and video.
Over the last few years, the Android team added a number of privacy features to the operating system, but this clearly remains a moving target. With this update, the focus is on app permissions. It’s now easier to provide an app with one-time permissions to access your microphone, camera and location, helping you to ensure that an app won’t have perpetual access to your location, for example. After you haven’t used an app for a while, Android will also reset your permissions and you’ll have to re-grant access to the app the next time you launch it.
On the enterprise side, Google is also launching some new features to help employees who use some personal apps on their work phone keep their personal profile data and activity out of the hands of their company’s IT departments.
If you own a compatible phone, you should see an upgrade notification for Android 11 soon.
Once known for its affordable smartphones, Xiaomi has in recent years been transforming itself into an online mall for consumer electronics by cutting checks and building relationships with hundreds of hardware and lifestyle startups. And some of its allies are now going after the Western market with their high-end, China-made products.
Beijing-based Dreame, which produces premium hairdryers and vacuums in the style of Dyson but at lower prices, is one of Xiaomi’s latest bets. The startup announced this week the completion of a Series B+ round led by IDG Capital. The financing of nearly 100 million yuan ($14.6 million) also saw the participation of existing investors Xiaomi and Xiaomi founder Lei Jun’s Shunwei Capital, as well as Peak Valley Capital and Edge Ventures.
Dreame makes Xiaomi-branded vacuums and operates its own label, a common setup between Xiaomi and its suppliers, which get to enjoy the security of Xiaomi distribution and build their names at the same time.
The startup has emerged as a more affordable vacuum brand than the area’s pioneer Dyson, whose inventor James Dyson topped the U.K.’s rich list this year. Dreame’s latest handheld cordless broom V11, for example, costs €350 ($413) whereas Dyson’s new model asks for $600.
“If we compare Dyson to Apple, then there must be a Huawei in the [home cleaning] area, and we believe this company will come from China,” co-founder and vice president of marketing and sales Roc Woo told TechCrunch. Domestic businesses are poised to tap China’s rich manufacturing resources, cheaper labor and longer work hours compared to Western counterparts, he asserted.
“There are more and more success stories of Chinese brands going global, from small players like us through to behemoths like Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo.”
The fresh proceeds will fuel Dreame’s marketing and sales efforts in Europe and North America and allow it to spend more on research and development, which tackles the likes of high-speed motors, fluid mechanics, robot dynamics and visual simultaneous localization and mapping (VSLAM), all essential technologies for Dreame’s family of home cleaners and personal care electronics.
The five-year-old startup likes to talk up its robust engineering background. The founding team consists of friends from Tsinghua University, and chief executive Yu Hao made a dent on campus by launching Skyworks, now the prestigious university’s largest hackerspace with sponsorship from industry giants like Boeing and Megvii. A number of its key staff were involved in China’s national spaceship program Shenzhou.
In addition, the startup boasts spending 12% of its annual sales revenue on R&D and operating a 20,000-sqm factory in eastern China’s Suzhou city, where it works to improve its proprietary designs, a growing trend among Chinese startups as Beijing calls for more tech self-reliance.
Xiaomi codependence
Xiaomi doesn’t put all its eggs in one basket when it comes to picking suppliers. In the realm of home cleaning, it’s also backed robot cleaner Roborock, which raised about 4.4 billion yuan ($640 million) from an initial public listing on China’s new tech board in February. Xiaomi first bankrolled Roborock back in 2014, four years before its first investment in Dreame.
Woo believed Dreame and Roborock can co-exist, for his company targets a wider product spectrum while Roborock is more focused and akin to iRobot. The startup doesn’t consider Tyson, of which Woo spoke highly, a direct competitor either, for it’s venturing beyond cleaning into areas like smart mobility.
When asked whether Xiaomi picks winners, Woo said “Xiaomi is more of a platform and doesn’t allocate resources.” While it tended to work closely with startups in its early years, Xiaomi’s empire of consumer products runs on the basis of market competition these days.
“Our collaboration with Xiaomi is no different from the way we work with Amazon or eBay. The investment means not much more than having a capital tie-up and a foundation for trust,” he said. Being in the Xiaomi family does provide a practical perk: it’s a guarantee for sales and offers a bargaining chip for Dreame in its negotiation with production partners.
What Xiaomi gets in return is millions of global consumers signed onto its Mi Home app, a central platform for managing Xiaomi-branded Internet of Things. In Europe, its biggest market, Dreame said it strictly follows the GDPR’s rules on data protection.
Boosted with new capital, Dreame is ready to foray into the U.S. by the end of this year. It already derives 70-80% of its sales outside of China, with a concentration in Europe where it saw a spike in orders since the COVID-19 outbreak for its products were sold mainly online.
For the current year, it aims to generate 3 billion yuan ($440 million) in sales, which doesn’t seem far off given it had shopped over 1 million vacuums by May since the category’s debut two years ago.
The front-facing camera has been a pretty constant bugbear for phone makers for a number of years now. Xiaomi certainly isn’t the first to offer a clever technological solution to the problem — and it’s also certainly not the only company to have show off under-screen camera tech — but next year, it’s committed to bringing that technology to market.
The manufacturer noted its plans today as part of its earnings report, stating that it will begin manufacturing handsets using the latest version of the technology it’s been working on for a number of years now. This actually represents the third generation of the tech. The first didn’t exist outside of the lab and the second was shown off to the public but never made it into production.
There are no doubt all sorts of practical reasons for that. Among them seems to be the issue of pixel density. For reasons that ought to be pretty obvious, there’s a big question of how to maintain a consistent pixel density in the area of the screen that sits on top of the front-facing camera. Xiaomi claims to have solved the problem, however.
“The self-developed pixel arrangement used in Xiaomi’s 3rd Generation Under-Display Camera Technology allows the screen to pass light through the gap area of sub-pixels, allowing each single pixel to retain a complete RGB subpixel layout without sacrificing pixel density,” it writes in a blog post.
Xiaomi says it’s been able to effectively double the pixel density of competing technology, letting light through to the camera, without sacrificing the uniformity of the screen. It looks good in the side-by-side videos the company has released, but obviously it’s worth reserving judgement until mass production starts next year.
The front-facing camera has been a pretty constant bugbear for phone makers for a number of years now. Xiaomi certainly isn’t the first to offer a clever technological solution to the problem — and it’s also certainly not the only company to have show off under-screen camera tech — but next year, it’s committed to bringing that technology to market.
The manufacturer noted its plans today as part of its earnings report, stating that it will begin manufacturing handsets using the latest version of the technology it’s been working on for a number of years now. This actually represents the third generation of the tech. The first didn’t exist outside of the lab and the second was shown off to the public but never made it into production.
There are no doubt all sorts of practical reasons for that. Among them seems to be the issue of pixel density. For reasons that ought to be pretty obvious, there’s a big question of how to maintain a consistent pixel density in the area of the screen that sits on top of the front-facing camera. Xiaomi claims to have solved the problem, however.
“The self-developed pixel arrangement used in Xiaomi’s 3rd Generation Under-Display Camera Technology allows the screen to pass light through the gap area of sub-pixels, allowing each single pixel to retain a complete RGB subpixel layout without sacrificing pixel density,” it writes in a blog post.
Xiaomi says it’s been able to effectively double the pixel density of competing technology, letting light through to the camera, without sacrificing the uniformity of the screen. It looks good in the side-by-side videos the company has released, but obviously it’s worth reserving judgement until mass production starts next year.
Xiaomi reported a revenue of $7.77 billion for the quarter that ended in June this year, up 3.1% since the same period last year and up 7.7% over the previous quarter as the Chinese smartphone maker sees recovery in most of its overseas markets.
The company said its profit in the second quarter stood at $650 million, up 129.8% year-on-year and 108% compared to Q1 2020.
Its smartphone sales, which still account for the bulk of its revenue, has recovered in most of its international markets. Excluding India, the average daily number of overseas smartphone activations reached 120% of the pre-pandemic level recorded in January 2020, it said.
India, its biggest market outside of China, is a different story. New Delhi ordered a nationwide lockdown in late March that resulted in closing of most shops across the nation. Package delivery of “non-essential” items ordered online were also restricted for weeks.
Even as India, where Xiaomi has been the top smartphone vendor for the last 12 quarters, has eased lockdown restrictions in the months since, daily number of smartphone activations were still at 72% (compared to January 2020) as of last month, Xiaomi said in its quarterly earnings presentation today.
Xiaomi said local production yields are to be blamed. “As the production capacity had not yet returned to the normal level, our sales were still limited by the production constraints,” it said.
The company has found a silver lining in Europe. In the second quarter of 2020, according to research firm Canalys, Xiaomi’s smartphone shipments grew by 64.9% year-on-year in Europe, achieving a total market share of 16.8%.
In Western Europe, Xiaomi’s smartphone shipments grew 115.9% year-on-year, accounting for a 12.4% market share. Similarly, according to Canalys, Xiaomi commanded the top smartphone vendor position in Spain, second in France, and 4th in Germany and Italy.
The company said shipment of its premium smartphones — those that sell at retail price of €300 ($350) or more — grew 99.2% year-on-year in international markets. “Driven by the higher proportion of sales from mid- to high-end smartphones, the average selling price of the company’s smartphones increased by 11.8% YoY and 7.5% QoQ,” it added.
The smartphone giant, which has been attempting to grow its advertisement business, said there were 343.5 million MIUI users as of June 30 this year, up 23.3% year-over-year. MIUI is Xiaomi’s custom Android operating system that runs on the vast majority of its smartphones. (Xiaomi has also launched a handful of smartphones with pure Android version.)
As the company’s smartphone install base grows, its advertising revenue is also surging. In the second quarter of 2020, its advertising revenue increased by 23.2% year-on-year to $450 million, it said.
Amazon has amassed at least 1 million subscribers for its Prime loyalty service in India, the e-commerce giant revealed today in a long rundown of how its platform fared during last week’s Prime Day in the world’s second largest internet market.
More than a million Prime subscribers in India shopped from small businesses in the two weeks leading up to 48-hour Prime Day event last week, the company said in a blog post. Factoring in the ongoing global pandemic, Amazon last month chose India as the first market for Prime Day this year.
This is the first time Amazon has even vaguely disclosed how many of its users in India have signed up for the Prime subscription that costs $13.3 a year in the country and bundles Prime Video and Prime Music services. Globally, Amazon has over 150 million Prime subscribers.
More than 91,000 small businesses (sellers) in India — a record for the company — participated in the local Prime Day, and sold to customers living in 5,900 zip codes (covering more than 97% of the country). Over 4,000 of these businesses clocked sales of more than $13,350 (slightly below 4,500 businesses during last year’s Prime Day), and overall 31,000 sellers reported the two-day period last week as their best selling on the platform.
Chinese firms Xiaomi and OnePlus continued to command dominance in the smartphone category, one of the top three selling categories on Amazon, during Prime Day and also attracted customers to their accessories, laptops, and television sets, Amazon disclosed. The reception stands in contrast with the all-time high anti-China sentiments swirling across India in recent months.
Amit Agarwal, SVP and Country Manager of Amazon India, said in a televised interview that last week’s Prime Day also illustrated an “increasing trend of local Indian sellers use Amazon as a starting point to launch products and reach customers globally” but he declined to share any figures.
“This Prime Day was dedicated to our small business (SMB) partners, who have been increasingly looking to Amazon to keep their businesses running. We are humbled that we were able to help as this was our biggest Prime Day ever for small businesses,” he said in a statement.
Prime Day is one of the biggest sales events for Amazon globally. In India, the e-commerce giant has historically sold more goods during sales events scheduled around the festival of Diwali, which is when local residents peak their spendings.
But the participation of 91,000 sellers in last week’s Prime Day is the highest Amazon has ever witnessed during any sales period in India. During the sale around Diwali last year, for instance, the company had reported the participation of 65,000 sellers.
Amazon, which competes with Walmart’s Flipkart in India, has visibly rushed to expand its base of sellers in the country in recent quarters. Earlier this year, Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos said the company would invest $1 billion in India to help digitize local small businesses and increase their cumulative exports on Amazon to $10 billion by 2025.
The company revealed today that it has amassed 650,000 sellers in India, up from 500,000 it disclosed in January this year.
Amazon has also been focusing on tie-ups with neighborhood stores across the country, leveraging their vast reach to drive more people to shop online. The company said over a thousand such shops from more than 100 cities made their debut on Prime Day last week.
Amazon also claimed that during Prime Day, the number of requests people made to Alexa exceeded one million. The company also shared a wide-range of other stats such as a claim that twice as many customers signed up for a Prime membership during last week’s Prime Day compared to last year’s. But without any concrete figures, these numbers are bereft of meaning.
Over a third of the world’s smartphone sales come from Chinese vendors Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo. These manufacturers have thrived not only because they offer value-for-money handsets thanks to China’s supply chains, but they also enjoy a relatively open mobile ecosystem, in which consumers in most countries can freely access the likes of Google, Instagram and WhatsApp.
That openness is under attack as the great U.S.-China tech divide inches closer to reality, which can cause harm on both sides.
The Trump Administration’s five-pronged Clean Network initiative aims to strip away Chinese phone makers’ ability to pre-install and download U.S. apps. Under U.S. sanctions, Huawei already lost access to key Google services, which has dealt a blow to its overseas phone sales. Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, and other Chinese phone makers could suffer the same setback as Huawei, should the Clean Network applies to them.
For years, China has maintained a closed-up internet with the Great Firewall restricting a bevy of Western services, often without explicitly presenting the reasons for censorship. Now the U.S. has a plan that could potentially keep Chinese apps off the American internet.
The Clean Network program was first announced in April as part of the Trump Administration’s efforts in “guarding our citizens’ privacy and our companies’ most sensitive information from aggressive intrusions by malign actors, such as the Chinese Communist Party.”
Many on Chinese social media compare Trump’s Clean Network proposal to routine cyberspace crackdowns in China, which regulators say are to purge pornography, violence, gambling, and other ‘illegal’ activities. Others that espouse a free internet lament its looming demise.
(1/2) A long, long time ago I can still remember how that internet used to make me smile
But August makes me shiver With every app I’d have delivered Bad news on state dot government I couldn’t reach Pompeo’s statement
It’s unclear when the rules would be implemented and how they would be enforced. The program also aims to remove ‘untrusted’ Chinese apps from US app stores. A TikTok ban is looking less likely as Microsoft nears a buyout, but other Chinese apps also have a big presence in the U.S. Many, like WeChat and Weibo, target the diaspora community, while players like Likee and Zynn, owned by Chinese firms, are making waves among local users.
Chinese firms are already hedging. Some like TikTok have set up overseas data centers. Others register their entities abroad and maintain U.S. offices, while still resorting to China for cheaper engineering talents. It’s simply impractical to investigate — and hard to determine — every app’s Chinese origin.
Under the program, carriers like China Mobile are not allowed to connect with U.S. telecoms networks, which could prevent these services from offering U.S. roaming to Chinese travelers.
The initiative also tells U.S. companies not to store information on Chinese cloud services like Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu. Chinese cloud providers don’t find many clients in the U.S., perhaps except when they are hosting data for their own services, such as Tencent games serving American users.
Lastly, the framework wants to ensure U.S. undersea cables connecting to the world “are not subverted for intelligence gathering by the PRC at hyper-scale.”
Such sweeping restrictions, if carried out, will almost certainly trigger retaliation from China. But what bargaining chips are left for Beijing? Apple and Tesla are the few American tech behemoths with significant business interest in China.
South Korean giant Samsung, Apple’s contract manufacturing partners Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron, and Indian smartphone vendors Micromax and Lava among others have applied for India’s $6.6 billion incentive program aimed at boosting the local smartphone manufacturing, New Delhi said on Saturday.
The scheme, called Production-Linked Incentive Scheme, will offer a range of incentives to companies including a 6% financial incentive on additional sales of goods produced locally over five years, with 2019-2020 set as the base year, India’s IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said in a press conference.
22 companies have applied for the incentive program — that also includes manufacturing of electronics components — and have agreed to export 60% of their locally produced units outside of India, said Prasad. He said the companies estimate they will produce smartphones and components worth $153 billion during the five-year duration.
The Production-Linked Incentive Scheme is aimed at turning India into a global hub of high-quality manufacturing of smartphones and support Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s push to make the country self-reliant, said Prasad.
A total of 22 companies have filed their application under the PLI Scheme. These companies will produce mobile phones and components worth Rs 11.5 lakh crore in the coming 5 years out of which products worth Rs 7 lakh crore will be exported. pic.twitter.com/3yUky3HkOC
As part of their applications, the companies have also agreed to offer direct and indirect employment to roughly 1.2 million Indians, the Indian minister said.
The interest of Samsung and Apple, two companies that account for more than 50% of the global smartphone sales revenue, in India is a testament of the opportunities they see in the world’s second largest internet market, said Prasad. “Apple and Samsung, India welcomes you with attractive policies. Now expand your presence in the country,” he said.
Missing from the list of companies that the Indian minister revealed today are Chinese smartphone makers Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus, and Realme that have not applied for the incentive program.
The Indian government did not prevent companies from any country from participating to the program, Prasad insisted in a call with reporters Saturday noon. Chinese smartphone vendors command roughly 80% of the Indian handset market, according to research firm Canalys.
“We are optimistic and looking forward to building a strong ecosystem across the value chain and integrating with the global value chains, thereby strengthening electronics manufacturing ecosystem in the country,” he said. The deadline for applying to participate in India’s program, which began in April, ended on Friday this week.
The participation of Wistron, Foxconn, and Pegatron is also indicative of Apple’s future plans to produce locally in India. Apple’s contract manufacturing partner, Taiwan-based Wistron, first began assembling older iPhone models in 2017. Last month, Foxconn kickstarted assembly of a small batch of iPhone 11 units. This was the first time any Apple supplier assembled a current-generation iPhone model in the country.
Apple’s contract manufacturing partner Foxconn has started to assemble the current generation of iPhone units — the iPhone 11 lineup — in its plant near southern city of Chennai, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
A small batch of locally manufactured iPhone 11 units has already shipped to retail stores, but the production yield is currently limited, the person said, requesting anonymity as matters are private. Apple, in general, has ambitions to scale up its local production efforts in India, the person said.
The local production of current iPhone 11 models illustrates Apple’s further commitment to India, the world’s second largest smartphone market, as it explores ways to cut its reliance on China, which produces the vast majority of iPhone models today.
Apple’s contract manufacturing partner Taiwan-based Wistron first began assembling older iPhone models in 2017. But until now, Apple has not been able to have an assembly partner produce the current generation iPhone model in India.
Wistron, which has locally assembled older iPhone SE, iPhone 6s, and iPhone 7 models in the past in its Bangalore plant, currently assembles iPhone XR units in India. Apple discontinued the local production of iPhone SE and iPhone 6s last year, the person said.
Piyush Goyal, India’s Minister of Commerce and Industry, tweeted on Friday that Apple had begun assembling iPhone 11 models in India. Apple did not comment on this story.
Assembling handsets in India enables smartphone vendors — including Apple — to avoid roughly 20% import duty that the Indian government levies on imported electronics products.
Xiaomi, Vivo, Samsung, Oppo, OnePlus, and a range of other smartphone companies, have inked deals with contract manufacturers across India in recent years to produce much of their locally sold smartphones units in the country itself.
Apple has been exploring ways to ramp up its production in India for years, but the company has struggled to find contract manufacturers that adhered to its safety and quality standards, people familiar with the matter have told TechCrunch.
News outlet The Information reported in March that some of Apple’s other contract manufacturers have attempted to enter — or expand in — India, but have run into regulatory and local laws issues. Pegatron, another assembly partner of Apple, plans to set up a local subsidiary in India and begin operations in the country, according to Bloomberg.
Foxconn, which counts India as one of its biggest markets, plans to invest $1 billion in its operations in the country, Reuters reported earlier this month. New Delhi announced a $6.6 billion plan to attract top smartphone manufacturers in June this year.
Apple plans to launch its online store in India in a few months and open its first brick-and-mortar retail store next year, chief executive Tim Cook announced earlier this year. The online store’s launch in India remains on track despite the pandemic, a person familiar with the matter said.
