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Egyptian ride-sharing company Swvl plans to go public in a $1.5B SPAC merger
Cairo and Dubai-based ride-sharing company Swvl plans to go public in a merger with special purpose acquisition company Queen’s Gambit Growth Capital, Swvl said Tuesday. The deal will see Swvl valued at roughly $1.5 billion.
Swvl was founded by Mostafa Kandil, Mahmoud Nouh and Ahmed Sabbah in 2017. The trio started the company as a bus-hailing service in Egypt and other ride-sharing services in emerging markets with fragmented public transportation.
Its services, mainly bus-hailing, enables users to make intra-state journeys by booking seats on buses running a fixed route. This is pocket-friendly for residents in these markets compared to single-rider options and helps reduce emissions (Swvl claims it has prevented over 240 million pounds of carbon emission since inception).
After its Egypt launch, Swvl expanded to Kenya, Pakistan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. The company also moved its headquarters to Dubai as part of its strategy to become a global company.
Swvl offerings have expanded beyond bus-hailing services. Now, the company offers inter-city rides, car ride-sharing, and corporate services across the 10 cities it operates in across Africa and the Middle East.
Queen’s Gambit, the women-led SPAC in charge of the deal, raised $300 million in January and added $45 million via an underwriters’ overallotment option focusing on startups in clean energy, healthcare and mobility sectors.
The statement also mentions a group of investors — Agility, Luxor Capital and Zain Group — which will contribute $100 million through a private investment in public equity, or PIPE.
Per Crunchbase, Swvl has raised over $170 million. From an African perspective, Swvl features as one of the most venture-backed startups on the continent. The company has been touted to reach unicorn status in the past and will when this SPAC merger is completed.
The company will aptly trade under the ticker SWVL. The listing will make it the first Egyptian startup to go public outside Egypt and the second to go public after Fawry. It will also make the mobility company the largest African unicorn debut on any U.S.-listed exchange, beating Jumia’s debut of $1.1 billion on the NYSE. In the Middle East, Swvl joins music-streaming platform Anghami as the second startup to go public via a SPAC merger.
Swvl had annual gross revenue of $26 million in 2020, according to the statement, and the company expects its annual gross revenue to increase to $79 million this year and $1 billion by 2025 after expanding to 20 countries across five continents.
On why Queen’s Gambit picked Swvl for this deal, Victoria Grace, founder and CEO, said in a statement that the company fit the profile of what she was looking for: “a disruptive platform that solves complex challenges and empowers underserved populations.”
“Having established a leadership position in key emerging markets, we believe Swvl is ready to capitalize on a truly global market opportunity,” she added.
In May, TechCrunch wrote that SPACs didn’t target African startups for several reasons, including a lack of global appeal and private capital and market satisfaction. Judging by Grace’s comments, Swvl has that global appeal and is ready to venture into the public market despite being in operation for just four years.
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European VC soars in Q1
A stunning first quarter in venture capital funding was not restricted to the United States; Europe also had one hell of a start to the year.
According to data from Dealroom and Crunchbase News, an investor, and an analyst from PitchBook, European startups put together an impressive fundraising haul. The venture capital world kicked off its 2021 European investing cycle with enough activity to set the continent on the path that would crush yearly records.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
Inside the data, there’s lots to unpack, including which sectors of European startups stood out in terms of capital raised, rising seed and late-stage deals, and dollar volume. We’ll also need to discuss exits — the Deliveroo IPO and its various woes was not the only transaction from the period worth understanding.
As with our prior looks at AI startup fundraising and the United States’ own blistering start to the year, we’ll lean on multiple sources to ensure that we have a wide lens. And we’ll keep in mind that all venture capital data lags reality somewhat, as many deals from a particular period are not disclosed or discovered until long after they actually occurred.
In this case, it makes the numbers all the more impressive. Let’s get into the data.
The big numbers
Dealroom was first out of the gate, reporting that European startups had a record quarter in Q1 2021 back when April just got started. Its preliminary results for the first quarter indicated that startups on the continent raised €16.6 billion, or $19.9 billion at today’s exchange rates.
That total was not only a record, but what Dealroom described as double the results of Q1 2020. While we’ve become slightly inured in recent months to the venture capital market’s rapid pace and capital-rich environment, it’s worth considering for a moment, as the first quarter of last year ended, how few of us would have guessed that just a year later — as COVID-19 still harms public health and disrupts life and business — we’d see numbers like this.
The Dealroom data, however, was not all records. Round volume by the group’s estimates was down from the year-ago period, if slightly better than the last few quarters. The general move toward the later-stage and larger-round venture capital market is alive and well in Europe.
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1Password acquires SecretHub and launches new enterprise secrets management tool
1Password, the password management service that competes with the likes of LastPass and BitWarden, today announced a major push beyond the basics of password management and into the infrastructure secrets management space. To do so, the company has acquired secrets management service SecretHub and is now launching its new 1Password Secrets Automation service.
1Password did not disclose the price of the acquisition. According to CrunchBase, Netherlands-based SecretHub never raised any institutional funding ahead of today’s announcement.
For companies like 1Password, moving into the enterprise space — and managing corporate credentials, API tokens, keys and certificates for individual users and their increasingly complex infrastructure services — seems like a natural move. And with the combination of 1Password and its new Secrets Automation service, businesses can use a single tool that covers them, from managing their employee’s passwords to handling infrastructure secrets. 1Password is currently in use by more then 80,000 businesses worldwide, and a lot of these are surely potential users of its Secrets Automation service, too.
“Companies need to protect their infrastructure secrets as much if not more than their employees’ passwords,” said Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password. “With 1Password and Secrets Automation, there is a single source of truth to secure, manage and orchestrate all of your business secrets. We are the first company to bring both human and machine secrets together in a significant and easy-to-use way.”
In addition to the acquisition and new service, 1Password also today announced a new partnership with GitHub. “We’re partnering with 1Password because their cross-platform solution will make life easier for developers and security teams alike,” said Dana Lawson, VP of partner engineering and development at GitHub, the largest and most advanced development platform in the world. “With the upcoming GitHub and 1Password Secrets Automation integration, teams will be able to fully automate all of their infrastructure secrets, with full peace of mind that they are safe and secure.”
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Roblox raises at $29.5 billion valuation, readies for direct listing
Roblox is now one of the world’s most valuable private companies in the world after a monster Series H raise brings the social gaming platform a stratospheric $29.5 billion valuation. The company won’t be private for long, though.
The $520 million raise led by Altimeter Capital and Dragoneer Investment Group is a significant cash influx for Roblox, which had previously raised just over $335 million from investors according to Crunchbase. The Investment Group of Santa Barbara, Warner Music Group, and a number of current investors, also participated in this round.
In February of 2020, the company closed a $150 million Series G led by Andreessen Horowitz which valued the company at $4 billion.
The gaming startup had initially planned an IPO in 2020, but after the major first-day pops of DoorDash and Airbnb, the company leadership reconsidered their timeline, according to a report in Axios. Those major day-one share price pops left significant money on the table for the companies selling those shares, an outcome Roblox is likely looking to avoid. Today, the company also announced that it plans to enter the public markets via a direct listing.
Roblox’s 7x valuation multiple signals just how feverish public and private markets are for tech stocks. The valuation also highlights how investors foresee the company benefiting from pandemic trends which pushed more users online and toward social gaming platforms. In a 2019 prospectus, the company shared that it had 17.6 million users, now Roblox claims to have 31 million daily active users on its platform.
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Niantic buys competitive gaming platform Mayhem
Pokémon GO creator Niantic has acquired a small SF gaming startup building a league and tournament organization platform to help gamers create their own communities around popular titles.
Mayhem was in Y Combinator’s winter 2018 batch and went on to raise $5.7 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. Other backers include Accel, which led the startup’s Series A in 2018, Afore Capital and NextGen Venture Partners.
The startup’s focus has shifted quite a bit since its initial YC debut, when it announced a service called Visor that would analyze video of esports gameplay and coach users on how they could improve their performance. The company has seemed to shift its focus wholly to community tools to help gamers find matches and organize tournaments for games like Overwatch on its platform.
Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed by Niantic .
The “majority” of Mayhem’s team will be joining Niantic with the startup’s CEO Ivan Zhou landing in the company’s Social Platform Product team while the rest of the team joins Platform Engineering.
In a statement, Niantic asserts that the acquisition “reinforces our commitment to real-world social as the centerpiece of our mission.”
Most of Niantic’s acquisitions of late have focused on augmented reality backend technologies, so it’s interesting to see them buying tech that focuses on community organization.
Pokémon GO continues to be Niantic’s cash cow, though the company hasn’t seen the same levels of viral success with subsequent releases where organic growth hasn’t been quite as easy to come by. Buying a startup building community tools suggests the company is ready to bring in some outside tech to push their own efforts forward as they strive to create a broader platform for their AR ambitions and more standalone hits of their own.
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Thumbtack acquires home management startup Setter
Thumbtack, a marketplace where you can hire local professionals for home improvement and other services, is announcing that it has acquired Setter.
Founded in 2016, Setter provides its customers with video home checkups conducted by experts, then offers personalized plans for how to address any issues. In a blog post, Thumbtack CEO Marco Zappacosta said that by acquiring the startup, his company will be able to offer those same consultations, which in turn could lead to recommendations for different Thumbtack services.
“This is an enormous step for Thumbtack,” Zappacosta wrote. “We won’t just be the platform homeowners turn to when a pipe breaks. We’ll be the only app any homeowner needs for the care and maintenance of their home. For our pros, this means there will be more projects than ever on our platform.”
In response to emailed questions, Zappacosta told me that Thumbtack will “likely” offer both free and paid home consultations: “Our goal is to get this in the hands of as many people as possible and to give homeowners peace of mind when it comes to home maintenance.”
He also said the entire Setter team will be joining Thumbtack, giving the company a presence in Toronto.
“Homeownership is hard,” said Setter co-founder and President David Steckel in a statement. “Together with Thumbtack, we can now give our homeowners both a game plan and a way to tackle their to dos all on one platform.”
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. According to Crunchbase, Setter raised a total of $12 million from investors including Sequoia Capital and NFX.
Thumbtack laid off 250 employees at the end of March, after the company saw big declines in its major markets. Since then, however, Zappacosta said there’s been “a renewed focus on the home and an acceleration of digital adoption.”
“In this new era of hyperfocus on the home, we are seeing permanent changes in consumer behavior,” he added. “People are investing in their most important asset, their home.”
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Is 2020 bringing more edtech rounds than ever, or does it simply feel that way?
Venture capital activity is high at the moment, making it difficult to keep up with the influx of new rounds that are being announced.
Our cup runneth over, and I would much rather be busy than bored, but not all sectors are as busy as others. We’re not drowning in consumer social rounds, for example. We are, however, seemingly suffering from a deluge of edtech investments.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
Happily for the TechCrunch crew, Natasha Mascarenhas has become our resident expert on the sector, covering it week in and week out. But even though it’s her beat, I couldn’t help but wonder this morning upon yet another large edtech round coming across the wires, just what is going on in the sector in aggregate?
I had to know. So, I’ve done a little digging into Crunchbase data, parsed through some other information and have something approaching an idea. My goal is to help us both understand if there are more edtech rounds than ever being announced, or if it simply seems that way.
Into the breach!
Edtech VC activity
The best way to start examining at a sector is to take its aggregate performance data and cut it into smaller bits. Companies do this with quarterly results, for example, an utterly arbitrary period of time to report on that is also very useful.
To get a handle on edtech in 2020, I went a bit more caveman and decided to look at the sector’s funding totals in 2020 by merely comparing the first and second half of the year.
Per Crunchbase’s “edtech” category, here’s what that data looks like:
- H1 2020: 211 rounds, $2.68 billion.
- H2 (YTD) 2020: 135 rounds, $5.25 billion.
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Jio Platforms backs SF-based AR gaming startup Krikey
Jio Platforms, the biggest telecom operator in India and which has raised over $20 billion from Facebook, Google and other high-profile investors this year, is leading a financing round of a San Francisco-based startup that develops augmented reality mobile games.
Jio has led the Series A fundraise of Krikey, founded by sisters Jhanvi and Ketaki Shriram, the Indian firm said on Wednesday. They did not disclose the size of Krikey’s Series A round, but Jio said Krikey has raised $22 million to date.
Krikey has previously not disclosed any financing rounds, according to their listings on Crunchbase, CBInsights and Tracxn. Jio also did not share who else participated in Krikey’s new round.
As part of the announcement, Krikey has launched Yaatra, a new AR game that invites users to step in an action-adventure story to defeat a monster army. “Using weapons such as the bow and arrow, chakra, lightning and fire bolts, players can battle through different levels of combat and puzzle games,” Krikey said.
Jio subscribers in India will get exclusive access to a range of features in Krikey, available on Android and iOS, including a 3D avatar, and entry to some game levels and weapons. Jio said Yaatra game would also be made available to JioPhone feature-phone users.
Krikey has developed two additional games, including Gorillas, a game the startup developed in partnership with Ellen DeGeneres’s wildlife foundation.
“We believe AR has a huge potential in not just gaming but in many other industries to disrupt the way people interact with the world around them. We are very excited to use the phone as the window back into the natural world and hope that people’s experiences in empathising with birds and guerrillas and different ecosystems will encourage them to start to take real-world conservation behaviour changes,” said Jhanvi in an interview with Cheddar last year.
“Our vision with Krikey is to bring together inspiration and reality in an immersive way. With augmented reality, we are able to bring fantasy worlds into your home, straight through the window of your mobile phone,” said Jhanvi and Ketaki Shriram in a joint statement today. They have previously participated in Apple’s female entrepreneur camp.
In a statement, Akash Ambani, director of Jio, said, “Krikey will inspire a generation of Indians to embrace Augmented Reality. Our vision is to bring the best experiences from across the world to India and the introduction of Yaatra is a step in that direction. Augmented Reality gaming takes the user into a world of its own, and we invite every Jio and non-Jio user to experience AR through Yaatra.”
Jio has previously acquired music streaming service Saavn (which has since been rebranded to JioSaavn), and Haptik, a startup that develops conversational platforms and virtual assistants.
We have reached out to Jio and Krikey for more details.
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Funding for female founders falls to 2017 levels as pandemic shakes up the VC market
So much for progress.
New data out this week from PitchBook indicates that the number of rounds raised by female-founded and co-founded companies fell year-over-year, with dollars invested in those rounds collapsing to 2017-era levels.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
It’s a disappointing quarter that comes after a few years in which female founders saw an increase in the amount of capital they were able to raise. In 2016, PitchBook data shows quarterly results for female founders totaling around 100 to 125 rounds, and between $300 and $400 million in value. By 2019, those figures rose to 150 to 200 rounds per quarter, worth between $700 million and $950 million.
To see Q3 2020 manage just 136 rounds worth just $434 million is a sharp disappointment.
The depressing results come not during a time of sharply lower aggregate venture capital results, notably. Recent data concerning Q3 2020 compiled by PwC indicates that the quarter was relatively rich. Certainly, overall deal volume in the United States is down slightly compared to year-ago periods, but female founders fared worse.
In short, a fear that well-known seed investor Charles Hudson discussed with TechCrunch during an Extra Crunch Live session back in April has come true. Let’s talk about it.
A diversity downturn?
Cards on the table, I think it’s better when venture capital is more diversely distributed. Why? Because when there’s more general access to funds, we’ll see a more varied set of products built to attack a more diverse set of issues and problems. Even more, venture capital can be a pathway to financial success for founders and employees, so investing it in all sorts of folks instead of one particular demographic set can spread the wealth around more equitably.
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Startups joining SK Telecom’s accelerator include AI-driven mapping and vision for delivery robots
We don’t often cover telecom technology startups, but it’s periodically worth checking in to see what’s happening in that space. We can get a good indication from the latest cohort to emerge from an accelerator associated with South Korea’s largest wireless carrier, SK Telecom.
This group of startups will join the Telecom Infra Project accelerator in South Korea, which is part of a global program of telecoms specialist centers, and run in partnership with SK Telecom.
The cohort includes a ship-berthing monitoring system; an app that turns a group of mobile phones into a TV studio; an AI-powered indoor positioning system, which creates interactive maps; a vision system for delivery robots; and one which allows remote audiences to experience live events “together” via a digital stadium.
The selected startups include:
Dabeeo: Dabeeo’s AI-powered indoor positioning system uses vision data produced through smartphone cameras to create interactive maps, used for gaming, marketing and logistics. Crunchbase
Neubility: Neubility develops vision-based localization and path planning technologies for last-mile delivery robots. Crunchbase
Seadronix: Seadronix is a computer vision-based ship-parking-monitoring solution that provides an AI-based berthing-monitoring system. Crunchbase
39 degrees C: This is a mobile multi-camera live-streaming app. It directly connects multiple smartphone feeds to each other using a technology called WiFi-Direct — turning them into a TV studio. Crunchbase
Kiswe: Kiswe is a supplier of entertainment broadcast technology. Its product, CloudCast, is a “Broadcast Studio in the Cloud,” which enables partners to send a digital feed into the cloud to produce live and non-live content. Its other product, Hangtime, allows remote audiences to experience live events “together” through creating a digital stadium with chat rooms, and provides control over viewing angles from within the platform. Crunchbase
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