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Best Buy investing millions in Brown Venture Group, a firm exclusively backing BIPOC founders
Last summer, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Best Buy committed to “do better” when it came to supporting communities of color. As part of the retail giant’s self-proclaimed mission to better address underrepresentation and technology inequities, the company announced today that it is investing up to $10 million in Brown Venture Group.
Minnesota-based Brown Venture Group is a three-year-old venture capital firm that has pledged to exclusively back Black, Latino and Indigenous technology startups in “emerging technologies.” Black and Latin communities were the recipients of just 2.6% of total funding in 2020, according to Crunchbase data.
Brown Venture Group is in the process of fundraising for its targeted inaugural $50 million fund, 75% of which has been committed, according to its principals. This means that Minneapolis-based Best Buy’s pledge to invest “up to $10 million” could represent as much as 20% of the total capital raised, making it a lead LP in the fund.
Brown Venture Group co-founder and managing partner Dr. Paul Campbell said that in the early days of forming the firm, he and co-founder Dr. Chris Brooks were told by “multiple people locally” that they should leave the Twin Cities metro area because “all the capital was on the coasts.”
“We just made a firm decision in the very early stages to stay put in the Twin Cities and that we wanted this to be a Twin City story,” Campbell told TechCrunch. “So when we thought about our Twin Cities ecosystem and who we wanted to be leading partners with, Best Buy was at the top of the list. So we are just more than excited to have Best Buy as a lead LP in our fund.”
For its part, Best Buy — which notched $47 billion in revenue last year — said the move is aimed at helping “break down the systemic barriers often faced by Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) entrepreneurs — including lack of access to funding — and empowering the next generation within the tech industry.”
The company added: “The partnership with Brown Venture Group will work toward making the technology startup landscape more inclusive and creating a stronger community of diverse suppliers.”
In conjunction with announcing Best Buy’s commitment to the fund, the company and venture firm said they would jointly launch an entrepreneurship program at Best Buy Teen Tech Centers to help develop young entrepreneurs through education, mentorship, networking and funding access.
Brown Venture Group — whose name was chosen to represent an “inclusive” skin color of the groups it represents — has so far invested in five companies, including clean energy startup Ecolution kwh.
Ten million dollars seems like a drop in the bucket for a company that generated sales of $47 billion last year. Best Buy said this initiative is just one of several that it has underway to support BIPOC businesses, including plans to provide $44 million to expand college prep and career opportunities for BIPOC students and a pledge to spend at least $1.2 billion with BIPOC and diverse businesses by 2025. The company has also said that by 2025 it will fill one out of three new non-hourly corporate positions with BIPOC employees and hire 1,000 new employees to its technology team, with 30% of them being diverse, specifically Black, Latinx, Indigenous and women.
“We’re committed to taking meaningful action to address the challenges faced by BIPOC entrepreneurs,” Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said in a written statement. “Through partnerships like this, we believe we can begin to do this by helping to build a stronger, more vibrant community of diverse innovators in the tech industry, some of whom we hope will become partners of Best Buy in the future.”
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US shopping app downloads on Black Friday reached a record 2.8M installs
Many U.S. consumers spent this year’s Black Friday sales event shopping from home on mobile devices. That led to first-time installs of mobile shopping apps in the U.S. to break a new record for single-day installs on Black Friday 2020, according to a report from Sensor Tower. The firm estimates that U.S. consumers downloaded approximately 2.8 million shopping apps on November 27th — a figure that’s up by nearly 8% over last year.
However, this number doesn’t necessarily represent faster growth than in 2019, which also saw about an 8% year-over-year increase in Black Friday shopping app installs, the report noted. This could be because mobile shopping and the related app installs are now taking place throughout the month of November, though, as retailers adjusted to the pandemic and other online shopping trends by hosting earlier sales or even month-long sales events.
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
The data seems to indicate this is true. Between November 1 and November 29, U.S. consumers downloaded approximately 59.2 million shopping apps from across the App Store and Google Play — an increase of roughly 15% from the 51.7 million they downloaded in Novenber 2019. That’s a much higher figure than the 2% year-over-year growth seen during this same period in 2019.
Another shift taking place in mobile shopping is the growing adoption of apps from brick-and-mortar retailers. During the first three quarters of 2020, apps from brick-and-mortar retailers grew installs 27%. This trend continued on Black Friday, when five out of the top 10 mobile shopping apps were those from brick-and-mortar retailers, led by Walmart.
Image Credits: Sensor Tower
Walmart saw the highest adoption this year, with around 131,000 Black Friday installs, followed by Amazon at 106,000, then Shopify’s Shop at 81,000. Combined, the top 10 apps saw 763,000 total new installs, or 27% of the first-time downloads in the Shopping category.
Because the firms are only looking at new app installs, they aren’t giving a full picture of the U.S. mobile shopping market, as many consumers already have these apps installed on their devices. And many more simply shop online via a desktop or laptop computer.
To give these figures some context, Shopify reported on Saturday it had seen record Black Friday sales of $2.4 billion, with 68% on mobile. And today, Amazon announced its small business sales alone topped $4.8 billion from Black Friday to Cyber Monday, a 60% year-over-year increase, but it didn’t break out the percentage that came from mobile.
Sensor Tower and rival app store analytics firm App Annie largely agreed on the top five shopping apps downloaded this Black Friday. They both saw Walmart again beating Amazon to become the most-downloaded U.S. shopping app on Black Friday — as it did in 2019. The two firms reported that Amazon remained No. 2 by downloads, followed by Shopify’s Shop app, then Target. However, Sensor Tower put Best Buy in fifth place, followed by Nike, while App Annie saw those positions swapped.
Image Credits: App Annie
The rest of Sensor Tower’s top 10 included SHEIN, Sam’s Club, Klarna, then Offer Up, while App Annie’s list was rounded out by SHEIN, Sam’s Club, Wish, then Offer Up.
The pandemic’s impact may not have been obvious given the growth in online shopping this year, but the recession it triggered has played a role in how U.S. consumers are paying for their purchases. “Buy Now, Pay Later” apps like Klarna were up this year, even breaking into the top 10 per Sensor Tower’s data. The firm also noted that many new shopping apps launched this year focused on discounts and deals, and retailers ran longer sales this year, as well.
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Tyto Care raises $50 million as it looks to buy and build new services during COVID-19 demand surge
Tyto Care, the provider of a home health diagnostic device and telemedicine consultation app, said it has raised $50 million in a new round of funding.
The round was led by Insight Partners, Olive Tree Ventures, and Qualcomm Ventures, according to a statement, and brings the startup’s total capital raised to more than $105 million.
The funding comes just as Tyto has seen a dramatic surge in demand brought on by the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Tyto Care’s toolkit is being used as a telehealth diagnostic solution that was already seeing three times sales growth in 2019 alone.
Last year, the company inked a deal with Best Buy and works with most of the major telemedicine providers, including American Well, Teladoc and others.
Previous investors Orbimed, Echo Health, Qure, Teuza and others also participated in the new financing, the company said in a statement.
With the financing, Tyto Care is well-positioned to both buy and build new tools based on its existing diagnostics platform, as well as expand its home health testing kit into new areas.
Companies like Scanwell Health are providing at-home diagnostic tests for things like urinary tract infections, and Tyto Care chief executive Dedi Gilad definitely sees options for new products around different kinds of at-home tests, the Tyto Care founder said in an interview.
All of this new capital comes with surging demand where Tyto Care’s telehealth technology is being used by every hospital in Israel to provide remote examinations of quarantined and isolated patients infected with COVID-19. Other hospital networks are also turning to the company’s diagnostics tools for similar applications, the company said.
The remote medical exams can protect health providers from exposure to SARS-Cov-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and enables uninfected patients to get an examination of their basic health remotely, without needing to go to a medical facility.
“Over the past two years, Tyto Care has increased momentum faster than ever before and is playing a leading role in changing how people receive healthcare. Telehealth is heeding the call of the COVID-19 pandemic and we are proud that our unique solution is aiding health systems and consumers around the world in the fight against the virus,” said Gilad, in a statement. “This new funding comes at a pivotal moment in the evolution of telehealth and will enable us to continue to transform the global healthcare industry with the best virtual care solutions.”
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Best Buy cancels Samsung Galaxy Fold pre-orders
Samsung is taking its time bringing the Galaxy Fold back to market. And frankly, that’s probably for the best. The Note debacle from a few years back was an important lesson about what happens when you rush a product back to market. That one resulted in a second recall — PR nightmare upon PR nightmare.
With a release date still very much in limbo, Best Buy has sent notes to those who pre-ordered the Fold. Spotted by The Verge, the letter has since been posted to Best Buy’s support forum. It cites “a plethora of unforeseen hiccups,” (fair enough) adding, “Because we put our customers first and want to ensure they are taken care of in the best possible manner, Best Buy has decided to cancel all current pre-orders for the Samsung Galaxy Fold.
The letter goes on to assure customers that the big-box retailer is “working closely with Samsung” to help deliver the product to customers. At the moment, however, their guess on the time frame is as good as ours.
Recent reports have suggested that an announcement was imminent, with the company having solved design flaws that had reviewers peeling off screens and getting debris jammed in the holes of the folding mechanism. More recent reports gave the product a June 13 release date, but that, too, appears to have been scrubbed for the time being.
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How startups can use Amazon’s SEO best practices to dominate new shopping verticals
Eli Schwartz is currently a growth advisor and the former Director of Growth at SurveyMonkey where he led the SEO strategy. Eli has been a columnist on the Huffington Post, the Y Combinator blog, Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal and numerous other publications.
Amazon dominates the top ranking positions of Google for tens of thousands of ecommerce queries, but there are plenty of products in newer shopping categories where Amazon has not yet achieved SEO supremacy. Retailers in nascent verticals have an opportunity to follow Amazon’s SEO playbook and become the default ranking ecommerce website.
Achieving this success can be done purely by focusing on on-page SEO without the need to build a brand and a backlink portfolio that rivals Amazon.
For those unfamiliar with mechanisms of SEO, there are essentially two streams of SEO tactics
- On-page SEO – This is anything to do with optimizing an actual page or website for maximum SEO visibility. Within this bucket will fall efforts such as the content of a page, metadata, internal links, URL/folder names, and even things like images.
- Off-page SEO – A key component of Google’s algorithm is the quality and sometimes quantity of the links from external sites that point to a page or website. At a high level the better backlinks a page or website has the more authority the page has to rank in search.
On-page SEO teardown
Delving into just their on-page SEO, their tactics can be divided into four distinct areas which we will go through in detail.
If you are following along with this process, make sure to log out of your Amazon account or open up an incognito window. Google only views the logged out version of the site, so all of Amazon’s SEO efforts are focused there.
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Highfive’s video conferencing platform is now available through Ingram Micro and at Best Buy
Highfive, a Redwood City-based startup, offers businesses an integrated video conferencing service through its own custom meeting room hardware. While Highfive has been quite successful in selling its service and hardware online, the company today announced that it is adding Best Buy and Ingram Micro as distribution partners in an effort to expand its reach to a wider audience.
Today’s announcement follows the company’s $32 million Series C round in February. That round was led by Dimension Data, a global technology integrator owned by Japan’s NTT Group. As part of this deal, Highfive signed a distribution deal with Dimension Data and it’s clear that company’s focus right now is on getting more of these deals on the books.
In the enterprise world that Highfive is targeting, getting distribution from Ingram Micro is obviously a big deal. The company has 155 distribution centers and works with over 200,000 resellers. And it’s through Ingram Micro that Best Buy for Business will also now offer Highfive’s products.
Since Highfive typically makes access to its services and hardware available through a subscription, this will be a slightly different sales process than usual, but to support its resellers, Highfive is launching an official channel program to help dealers sell its products effectively.
Pricing remains the same, though, no matter whether you go through Highfive’s online store or a reseller. Software-only plans start at $9.99 per month and user (which is paid annually) and then you can add the hardware on top of that for $99 per month (also paid annually) without any upfront cost.
“As the business demand for a conferencing platform that can manage every use case grows, our channel partner initiatives are paramount to equipping enterprises with the solution they need to improve team communication and workflow,” said Bobby Marhamat, CRO of Highfive. “Our certified partners are more than just a resource to deliver Highfive, we want to empower them with everything they need to provide customers full service—from purchase to deployment to maintenance.”
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Huawei’s U.S. plans hit major setback as Best Buy said to stop sales
Huawei can’t catch a break in the States. Just at the company was set to announce a big carrier deal at CES, AT&T reportedly switch gears last minute. Now, a week before the company is set reveal its next big flagship at an event in Paris, Best Buy is reportedly planning to stop sales of the company’s products “over the next few weeks.”
That news comes courtesy of a report from Reuters, based on a “person with knowledge of the matter.” The Chinese smartphone maker was clearly banking on 2018 to be the year it finally expanded sales to the world’s third largest smartphone market. The AT&T deal was reportedly all but finalized ahead of the company’s big CES push.
The last minute nature of the news clearly left the company in a lurch, with consumer CEO Richard Yu going off-script to excoriate carriers and U.S. officials that have repeatedly raised concerns over the company’s perceived ties to the Chinese government.
Huawei offered a non-comment to TechCrunch in the wake of the report. “Huawei values the relationship it has with Best Buy and all our other retail partners,” the company writes in the statement. “As a policy, we do not discuss the details of our partner relationships.”
The statement goes on to offer the standard sort of defense of the company’s position.
Huawei currently sells its products through a range of leading consumer electronics retailers in the U.S. We have a proven history of delivering products that meet the highest security, privacy and engineering standards in the industry and are certified by the Federal Communications Commission for sale in the U.S. Our smartphones are widely acclaimed – both among critics and consumers – for their innovation in areas like battery life, processing power, build quality, and camera capabilities. Our products are sold by 46 of the top 50 global operators, and we have won the trust and confidence of individuals and organizations in 170 countries around the world. We are committed to earning that same trust with U.S. consumers and making our products accessible in as many ways as possible.
A Best Buy spokesperson told TechCrunch, “We don’t comment on specific contracts with vendors, and we make decisions to change what we sell for a variety of reasons.” Noncommittal, sure, but it does appear to acknowledge a shift in the company’s relationship with the smartphone maker.
Until now, Best Buy has been a saving grace in the company’s U.S. plans. While it’s true that most smartphone purchases occur through carriers in the States, the chain is still the largest consumer electronics retailer in the U.S., marking another major setback for the company’s plans.
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Hello will begin selling its Sense sleep tracker at Best Buy and Target
While Kickstarter is a great place to start selling products online, and Amazon is a good next step, you’ll often see hardware companies begin shipping their products to local retailers like Best Buy. There’s a good reason for that — online commerce may be increasingly eating away at shopping offline, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t spending a ton of money at… Read More
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Blispay, the financing program for SMBs, raises $12.75M in seed funding
Big box retailers like Best Buy and Target have all kinds of financing card programs for their customers. But smaller and medium-sized merchants have no way to give their customers the same kind of financing plans. Until now. Blispay is a new startup founded by Greg Lisiewski, formerly of BillMeLater, which was acquired by PayPal for nearly $1 billion in 2008. From that point, he served as… Read More
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Pebble Time Pre-Orders Kick Off At Best Buy And Pebble.com
The Pebble Time has already been percolating out to backers of the record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, but now anyone can pre-order the wearable. In the U.S., pre-orders are routing through Best Buy, ahead of ship dates staring in early July, and in-store retail availability at the electronics giant starting in mid-July. For the rest of the world, Pebble.com is your pre-order destination,… Read More
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