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Fintech startup ClearGlass Analytics closes $3.6M for pension funds transparency platform
Fintech startup ClearGlass Analytics has closed a £2.6 million ($3.6 million) funding round for its platform, which aims to create greater transparency on fees in the long-term savings market, such as pensions and the wider asset management market.
The £2.6 million seed round includes European VC Lakestar and Outward VC, the venture arm of Investec, as well as several angels from both the asset management and pension fund worlds. These include Ruston Smith, a pension trustee; Richard Butcher, chair of the PLSA (U.K. pension trade body); Chris Wilcox, former Global Head of JP Morgan Asset Management; and Rob O’Rahilly, Sikander Ilyas and Alex Large, also former JP Morgan employees.
ClearGlass is targeting the £1.5 trillion mature “Defined Benefit” pension schemes market and claims to now work with more than 500 DB pension funds. It will use the funding to expand into the U.K. Defined Contribution pension market, and consolidate its early footprint in Europe and Africa.
How ClearGlass works is that it acts as a data interface between asset managers and their clients. Pension funds then use the platform to see all of their investment costs in one place, thus getting more data than usual from more asset managers and other suppliers. This helps the funds see the “true cost” of what they are paying for the management of their investments. ClearGlass claims to be able to uncover the kinds of costs of asset management that, in some instances, can be more than double those expected.
The startup recently did an analysis of the cost and performance of more than 400 asset managers. It found that while most U.K. asset managers were meeting minimum standards for data delivery, quality and accuracy, 30 (including some powerful players) did not pass their tests.
The company was founded by Dr. Christopher Sier, a World Bank and FCA expert who previously developed the cost transparency standard at the request of the FCA, and co-founders Ritesh Singhania and Kunal Varma.
Sier, founder and CEO, said: “Finding your costs are so much larger is shocking, but also something to be celebrated. These incremental costs were always there, they just weren’t exposed, and now you can identify those and bring about change. You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
In an interview with TechCrunch, Ritesh Singhania, COO, said getting the data about pension funds is normally “super challenging and complicated. And second of all, even when you got the data, you couldn’t make head nor tail of it because you can’t compare it across funds. What we have done is that we have been the line of communication between the manager and the pension fund. So we have built a piece of technology that helps with the communication between the asset managers, and the pension funds to be able to collect that data, check that data. And finally, give them something that doesn’t require them to spend 20 hours to understand it.”
ClearGlass was incubated by the Founders Factory accelerator.
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Rows, formerly dashdash, raises $16M to build and populate web apps using only spreadsheet skills
Spreadsheet software — led by products like Microsoft’s Excel, Google’s Sheets and Apple’s Numbers — continues to be one of the most-used categories of business apps, with Excel alone clocking up more than a billion users just on its Android version. Now, a startup called Rows that’s built on that ubiquity, with a low-code platform that lets people populate and analyze web apps using just spreadsheet interfaces, is announcing funding and launching a freemium open beta of its expanded service.
The Berlin-based startup — which rebranded from dashdash at the end of last year — closed a Series B round of $16 million, money that it is using to continue investing in its platform as well as in sales and marketing. The platform’s move into an open beta comes with some 50 new integrations with other platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram and more, as well as 200 new features (using known spreadsheet shortcuts) to use in them.
The round was led by Lakestar, with past investors Accel (which led its $8 million Series A in 2018) and Cherry Ventures also participating. Christian Reber has also invested in this round. Reber knows a thing or two about software disrupting legacy productivity software — he is the co-founder and CEO of presentation software startup Pitch and the former CEO and founder of Microsoft-acquired Wunderlist — and notably he is joining Rows’ Advisory Board along with the investment.
A little detail about this Series B: CEO Humberto Ayres Pereira, who is based out of Porto, Portugal, where some of the staff is also based, tells us that this round actually was quietly closed over a year ago, in January 2020 — just ahead of the world shutting down amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
The startup chose to announce that round today to coincide with adding more features to its product and moving it into an open beta, he said.
That open beta is free in its most basic form — the free tier is limited to 10 users or less and a minimal amount of integration usage. Paid tiers, which cover more team members and up to 100,000 integration tasks (which are measured by how many times a spreadsheet queries another service), start at $59 per month.
One strong sign of interest in this latest iteration of the software is the lasting popularity of spreadsheets. Another is Rows’ traction to date: in invite-only mode, it picked up 10,000 users off its waitlist, and hundreds of companies, as customers. Currently most of those are free, Ayres Pereira said.
“Our goal is to have 1,000 paying companies as customers in the 12 months,” he said. That process has only just started, he added, with paying numbers in the modest “dozens” for now. He emphasized though that the company is very cash efficient and has, even without raising more funding, two years of runway on the money it has in the bank now.
The growing appeal of low-code
No-code and low-code software, which let people create and work with apps and other digital content without delving deep into the lines of code that underpin them, have continued to pick up traction in the market in the last several years.
The reason for this is straightforward: non-technical employees may not code, but they are getting increasingly adept at understanding how services function and what can be achieved within an app.
No-code and low-code platforms let them get more hands-on when it comes to customizing and creating the services that they need to use everyday to get their work done, without the time and effort it might take to get an engineer involved.
“People want to create their own tools,” said Ayres Pereira. “They want to understand and test and iterate.” He said that the majority of Rows’ users so far are based out of North America, and typical use cases include marketing and sales teams, as well as companies using Rows spreadsheets as a dynamic interface to manage logistics and other operations.
Stephen Nundy, the partner at Lakestar who led its investment, describes the army of users taking up no-code tools as “citizen developers.”
Rows is precisely the kind of platform that plays into the low-code trend. For people who are already au fait with the kinds of tools that you find in spreadsheets — and something like Excel has hundreds of functions in it — it presents a way of leaning on those familiar functions to trigger integrations with other apps, and to subsequently use a spreadsheet created in Rows to both analyse data from other apps, as well as update them.
Image: Rows
You might ask, why is it more useful, for example, to look at content from Twitter in Rows rather than Twitter itself? A Rows document might let a person search for a set of Tweets using a certain chain of keywords, and then organise those results based on parameters such as how many “likes” those Tweets received.
Or users responding to a call to action for a promotion on Instagram might then be cross-referenced with a company’s existing database of customers, to analyze how those respondents overlap or present new leads.
You might also wonder why existing spreadsheet products may not have already build functionality like this.
Interestingly, Microsoft did dabble in building a way of linking up Excel with some rudimentary computing functions, in the form of Visual Basic for Applications. This however reached the dubious distinction of topping developers’ “most dreaded” languages list for two years running, and so as you might imagine it has somewhat died a death.
However, it does point to an opportunity for incumbents to disrupt their disruptors.
Apart from those most obvious, entrenched competitors, there have been a number of other startups building tools that are providing similar no- and low-code approaches.
Gyana is focusing more on data science, Tray.io provides a graphical interface to integrate how apps work together, Zapier and Notion also provide simple interfaces to integrate apps and APIs together and Airtable has its own take on reinventing the spreadsheet interface. For now, Ayres Pereira sees these more as compatriots than competitors.
“Yes, we overlap with services like Zapier and Notion,” he said. “But I’d say we are friends. We’re all raising awareness about people being able to do more and not having to be stuck using old tools. It’s not a zero sum game for us.”
When we covered Rows’s Series A two years ago, the startup had built a platform to let people who are comfortable working with data in spreadsheets use that interface to create and populate content in web apps. It had a lot of extensibility, but mainly geared at people still willing to do the work to create those links.
Two years on, while the spreadsheet has remained the anchor, the platform has grown. Ayres Pereira, who co-founded the company with Torben Schulz (both pictured above), said that there are some 50 new integrations now, including ways to analyse and update content on social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, CrunchBase, Salesforce, Slack, LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as some 200 new features in the platform itself.
While people can import into Rows data from Google Sheets, he noted that the big daddy of them all, Excel, is not supported right now. The reason, he said, is because the vast majority of users of the product use the desktop version, which does not have APIs.
Meanwhile, Rows also has a number of templates available for people to guide them through simple tasks, such as looking up LinkedIn profiles or emails for a list of people, tracking social media counts and so on.
One of the most common aspects of spreadsheets, however, has yet to be built. The interface is still banked around rows and columns, but with no graphical tools to visualize data in different ways such as pie charts or graphs as you might have in a typical spreadsheet program.
It’s for this reason that Rows has yet to exit beta. The feature is one that is requested a lot, Pereira admitted, describing it as “the final frontier.” When Rows is ready to ship with that functionality, likely by Q3 of this year, it will tick over to general “1.0” release, he added.
“Humberto and Torben have really impressed us with their ambition to disrupt the market with a new spreadsheet paradigm that tackles the significant shortcomings of today’s solutions,” said Nundy at Lakestar. “Data integrations are native, the collaboration experience is first class and the ability to share and publish your work as an application is unique and will create more ‘Citizen developers’ to emerge. This is essential to the growing needs of today’s technology literate workforce. The level of interest they’ve received in their private beta is proof of the desirability of platforms like Rows, and we’re excited to be supporting them through their public beta launch and beyond with this investment.” Nundy is also joining Rows’ board with this round.
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Impala raises $20 million to build the API of the hotel industry
Impala has raised another round of funding just a few months after raising an $11 million Series A round. This time, the startup is raising a $20 million Series B round led by Lakestar. Latitude Ventures is also participating in the round.
The company is building a service that works pretty much like Plaid, but for hotel rooms. The hotel industry relies on old-school “property management systems” to manage rooms, room types, pricing, extras, taxes, etc.
Instead of asking hotels to switch to an entirely different property management system, the company is upgrading those systems with a modern API. This way, you can build applications that query hotel data directly with a few lines of code. You get a standardized JSON response from the API.
Impala is currently compatible with a handful of property management systems. The company is still adding more systems in order to cover a wider range of hotels.
Three hundred hotels are currently working with Impala, such as Accor hotels (Mercure) and Hyatt-branded hotels. The company currently has a backlog of 3,500 hotels. It really shows that the industry has been waiting for a product like this.
While Impala is still focused on surfacing data in an easy-to-code manner, the company is already thinking beyond read-only data. The startup wants to let developers book rooms directly using the Impala API.
It could open up hotel bookings to many other services. For instance, you could imagine being able to book rooms on Lonely Planet’s website. Services selling train tickets and flights could upsell you with hotel rooms.
In order to offer rooms on the usual hotel booking services from Booking Holdings websites (Booking.com, Priceline, Agoda, Kayak…) and Expedia Group websites (Expedia, Hotels.com, HomeAway, Trivago…), many hotels currently work with channel managers to send out information to multiple services at once. In the future, Impala could replace those channel managers with its API.
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Eigen nabs $37M to help banks and others parse huge documents using natural language and ‘small data’
One of the bigger trends in enterprise software has been the emergence of startups building tools to make the benefits of artificial intelligence technology more accessible to non-tech companies. Today, one that has built a platform to apply the power of machine learning and natural language processing to massive documents of unstructured data has closed a round of funding as it finds strong demand for its approach.
Eigen Technologies, a London-based startup whose machine learning engine helps banks and other businesses that need to extract information and insights from large and complex documents like contracts, is today announcing that it has raised $37 million in funding, a Series B that values the company at around $150 million – $180 million.
The round was led by Lakestar and Dawn Capital, with Temasek and Goldman Sachs Growth Equity (which co-led its Series A) also participating. Eigen has now raised $55 million in total.
Eigen today is working primarily in the financial sector — its offices are smack in the middle of The City, London’s financial center — but the plan is to use the funding to continue expanding the scope of the platform to cover other verticals such as insurance and healthcare, two other big areas that deal in large, wordy documentation that is often inconsistent in how its presented, full of essential fine print, and typically a strain on an organisation’s resources to be handled correctly — and is often a disaster if it is not.
The focus up to now on banks and other financial businesses has had a lot of traction. It says its customer base now includes 25% of the world’s G-SIB institutions (that is, the world’s biggest banks), along with others that work closely with them, like Allen & Overy and Deloitte. Since June 2018 (when it closed its Series A round), Eigen has seen recurring revenues grow sixfold with headcount — mostly data scientists and engineers — double. While Eigen doesn’t disclose specific financials, you can see the growth direction that contributed to the company’s valuation.
The basic idea behind Eigen is that it focuses what co-founder and CEO Lewis Liu describes as “small data.” The company has devised a way to “teach” an AI to read a specific kind of document — say, a loan contract — by looking at a couple of examples and training on these. The whole process is relatively easy to do for a non-technical person: you figure out what you want to look for and analyse, find the examples using basic search in two or three documents and create the template, which can then be used across hundreds or thousands of the same kind of documents (in this case, a loan contract).
Eigen’s work is notable for two reasons. First, typically machine learning and training and AI requires hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of examples to “teach” a system before it can make decisions that you hope will mimic those of a human. Eigen requires a couple of examples (hence the “small data” approach).
Second, an industry like finance has many pieces of sensitive data (either because it’s personal data, or because it’s proprietary to a company and its business), and so there is an ongoing issue of working with AI companies that want to “anonymise” and ingest that data. Companies simply don’t want to do that. Eigen’s system essentially only works on what a company provides, and that stays with the company.
Eigen was founded in 2014 by Dr. Lewis Z. Liu (CEO) and Jonathan Feuer (a managing partner at CVC Capital Partners, who is the company’s chairman), but its earliest origins go back 15 years earlier, when Liu — a first-generation immigrant who grew up in the U.S. — was working as a “data-entry monkey” (his words) at a tire manufacturing plant in New Jersey, where he lived, ahead of starting university at Harvard.
A natural computing whiz who found himself building his own games when his parents refused to buy him a games console, he figured out that the many pages of printouts he was reading and re-entering into a different computing system could be sped up with a computer program linking up the two. “I put myself out of a job,” he joked.
His educational life epitomises the kind of lateral thinking that often produces the most interesting ideas. Liu went on to Harvard to study not computer science, but physics and art. Doing a double major required working on a thesis that merged the two disciplines together, and Liu built “electrodynamic equations that composed graphical structures on the fly” — basically generating art using algorithms — which he then turned into a “Turing test” to see if people could detect pixelated actual work with that of his program. Distill this, and Liu was still thinking about patterns in analog material that could be re-created using math.
Then came years at McKinsey in London (how he arrived on these shores) during the financial crisis where the results of people either intentionally or mistakenly overlooking crucial text-based data produced stark and catastrophic results. “I would say the problem that we eventually started to solve for at Eigen became tangible,” Liu said.
Then came a physics PhD at Oxford where Liu worked on X-ray lasers that could be used to decrease the complexity and cost of making microchips, cancer treatments and other applications.
While Eigen doesn’t actually use lasers, some of the mathematical equations that Liu came up with for these have also become a part of Eigen’s approach.
“The whole idea [for my PhD] was, ‘how do we make this cheaper and more scalable?,’ ” he said. “We built a new class of X-ray laser apparatus, and we realised the same equations could be used in pattern matching algorithms, specifically around sequential patterns. And out of that, and my existing corporate relationships, that’s how Eigen started.”
Five years on, Eigen has added a lot more into the platform beyond what came from Liu’s original ideas. There are more data scientists and engineers building the engine around the basic idea, and customising it to work with more sectors beyond finance.
There are a number of AI companies building tools for non-technical business end-users, and one of the areas that comes close to what Eigen is doing is robotic process automation, or RPA. Liu notes that while this is an important area, it’s more about reading forms more readily and providing insights to those. The focus of Eigen is more on unstructured data, and the ability to parse it quickly and securely using just a few samples.
Liu points to companies like IBM (with Watson) as general competitors, while startups like Luminance is another taking a similar approach to Eigen by addressing the issue of parsing unstructured data in a specific sector (in its case, currently, the legal profession).
Stephen Nundy, a partner and the CTO of Lakestar, said that he first came into contact with Eigen when he was at Goldman Sachs, where he was a managing director overseeing technology, and the bank engaged it for work.
“To see what these guys can deliver, it’s to be applauded,” he said. “They’re not just picking out names and addresses. We’re talking deep, semantic understanding. Other vendors are trying to be everything to everybody, but Eigen has found market fit in financial services use cases, and it stands up against the competition. You can see when a winner is breaking away from the pack and it’s a great signal for the future.”
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Glovo faces safety protests after delivery rider killed on the job
Spanish on-demand delivery startup Glovo is facing angry protests from couriers on its platform following the death of a 22-year-old rider on Saturday in Barcelona where the business is headquartered.
Local press reports that the man, a Nepalese national called Pujan Koirala, had been substituting for a registered Glovo courier at the time he was struck and killed by a garbage truck. It does not appear that Koirala had a visa to work legally in Spain.
After Koirala’s death, a number of Glovo couriers held protests in front of the company’s office, burning the signature yellow delivery backpacks and criticising it for ignoring long-standing safety concerns — using hashtags #glovonosmata #glovomata on social media — aka, “Glovo kills us,” “Glovo kills.”
In Barcelona, Glovo couriers are a more common sight than on-demand rivals such as Uber Eats and Deliveroo — typically to be found thronging eateries waiting to collect take-away orders and/or biking at speed to a drop-off. The city is one of Glovo’s best markets, though it also operates in other countries in Europe, as well as in LatAm and Africa.
“Trabajar dentro de la legalidad en estas plataformas es complicado. Eres falso autónomo” o “para llegar a los objetivos tienes que hacer malabares, trabajar muchas horas e ir rápido”; los ‘riders’ de Glovo denuncian la precariedad laboral que sufren https://t.co/Vwg9dmAkcf
— EL PAÍS (@el_pais) May 27, 2019
Esta noche en Barcelona un compañero de @Glovo_ES ha muerto mientras trabajaba. Llevamos avisando mucho tiempo de que esto acabaria pasando. La precariedad nos mata, @Glovo_ES nos mata. No vamos a permitir ni una muerte más. BASTA YA. Nuestras condolencias a la familia.
— #GlovoMata (@ridersxderechos) May 25, 2019
Avui els carrers de Gràcia s’han llevat amb un missatge clar#GLOVOMATA!
Contra la precarietat laboral
Organitza’t i Lluita!— CSOA Ka la Kastanya (@kalakastanya) May 28, 2019
The tragedy highlights persistent safety concerns attached to conditions for service providers on so-called gig economy platforms that rely on scores of individuals to deliver the core platform proposition who are classified as “self-employed,” rather than employed as workers with all the rights and protections that would entail — while also often having their work rate tightly controlled and managed remotely via location-tracking algorithms.
In the case of Glovo, the platform appears to weight delivery speed and availability between specific hours as key factors in distributing jobs. So, in other words, if a rider doesn’t make themselves available when the app demands, and get each delivery done quickly enough, they risk future work on the platform drying up.
A critical report last year by a U.K. politician, which examined conditions for couriers using the rival Deliveroo on-demand delivery platform, found a dual market in operation that encourages a surplus of labour that results in a winner takes all outcome where the best riders get rewarded with more stable work, while another group is left at a disadvantage to compete for whatever is left. (Deliveroo disputed the report’s findings.)
Hence, both the safety concerns attached to gig economy platforms’ algorithmic management, and the practice of registered riders substituting themselves — i.e. in order to try to keep up with the work rate being demanded by sharing their account with a non-registered rider, as appears to be the case in Koirala’s case.
In a statement yesterday, Glovo confirmed that Koirala had not been officially registered, writing that “the fact that he carried a Glovo backpack suggests that he could be using a third party’s account.”
It does not officially authorize this type of unregistered account sharing. But whether the pressures of working on its platform encourage unofficial substituting is quite another matter. (In its statement, Glovo also writes that it tries to prevent unregistered substituting by offering riders and users mechanisms where they can report suspected cases, after which it says it may immediately and permanently cancel the account in question.)
Undocumented, unregistered platform service providers plying a black economy, cash-in-hand trade entirely off the platform’s books, are clearly another, even more precarious tier of “gig” workers — given they are working illegally, meaning they risk exploitation by those they are substituting for, as well as falling entirely outside any insurance benefits that a platform may offer to officially registered workers. (Glovo does offer riders a level of insurance.)
El Espanol reports that on the fateful day, Koirala had agreed to do a delivery for his roommate. In such cases, the paper suggests, a substitute rider expects to be paid as little as €5 (~$5.60) for fulfilling the job on the registered user’s behalf.
Glovo, meanwhile, has raised more than $346 million in VC funding since being founded just over four years ago, per Crunchbase — including a $169 million Series D just last month. Investors include Seaya Ventures, Rakuten, Lakestar, Cathay Innovation, Antai Venture Builder and others.
We reached out to Glovo with questions about the safety and legal risks of using algorithms to manage a distributed “self-employed” workforce at scale. At the time of writing, we’re waiting for a response and will update this report when we have it.
Glovo investor Seaya Ventures did not respond to a request for comment about how it priced such a level of risk into its valuation of the startup.
In its statement yesterday, Glovo said it would pay to cover the expenses of the private insurance that Koirala would have been entitled to had he been working legally and able to officially register on the platform.
It’s not clear how many similarly undocumented workers are gigging on Glovo’s platform.
Update: Glovo has now responded to our questions. Here are the responses in Q&A form:
TC: I understand this person was not registered on the Glovo platform but was substituting for someone who was registered and apparently killed while making deliveries. Can you clarify how your substitution policy works?
Glovo: “Glovers passing on requests to people who aren’t registered on the platform is illegal and this is communicated to our couriers. The safety of our couriers is of paramount importance to us and it’s vital that they go through road safety practices we provide during the informative sessions before they sign-up. We have solutions in place for partners and users to report cases such as this, where people are not officially registered on the platform, to prevent potential harm. We’ll continue to look at alternative ways of how we better vet this to prevent these sad incidents occurring in the future.”
TC: What checks (if any) do you require on the individuals who riders substitute to make deliveries on their behalf?
Glovo: “Glovo requires couriers’ compliance when they activate their account. For example, couriers should upload a picture of themselves so that partners and users can verify they are the Glover they were assigned by the platform. It is illegal for couriers to pass on work to people who are not registered on the platform and while we audit this, we’re always reviewing ways to better guarantee this and educate Glovers on the correct and safe ways to use the platform.”
TC: Protesting Glovo riders have said they warned your company for months about safety risks for couriers. What is Glovo doing to address these safety concerns?
Glovo: “We take all recommendations regarding courier and user safety extremely seriously. It is our top priority to collaborate with Glovers to constantly improve the platform’s experience. Glovo offers guidance as well as private global insurance to couriers — we will continue to invest in new ways to help address safety concerns.”
TC: In this case the individual who was killed did not appear to have a legal right to work in Spain. How is Glovo preventing illegal working on its platform?
Glovo: “We have a signup process in place whereby Glovers provide ID, residence permit, driving license and vehicle insurance if applicable. No courier can sign up on Glovo without this evidence. We regularly audit the platform and ask partners and users to report any cases where someone is impersonating a Glover. As this investigation goes on we aim to find new ways to help prevent these sad instances happening in the future.”
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GetYourGuide picks up $484M, passes 25M tickets sold through its tourism activity app
As we swing into the summer tourist season, a company poised to capitalise on that has raised a huge round of funding. GetYourGuide — a Berlin startup that has built a popular marketplace for people to discover and book sightseeing tours, tickets for attractions and other experiences around the world — is today announcing that it has picked up $484 million, a Series E round of funding that will catapult its valuation above the $1 billion mark.
The funding is a milestone for a couple of reasons. GetYourGuide says it is the highest-ever round of funding for a company in the area of “travel experiences” (tours and other activities) — a market estimated to be worth $150 billion this year and rising to $183 billion in 2020. And this Series E is also one of the biggest-ever growth rounds for any European startup, period.
The company has now sold 25 million tickets for tours, attractions and other experiences, with a current catalog of some 50,000 experiences on offer. That’s a sign of strong growth: in 2017 it sold 10 million tickets, and its last reported catalog number was 35,000. It will be using the funding to build more of its own “Originals” tour experiences — which have now passed the 40,000 tickets sold mark — as well as to build up more activities in Asia and the U.S., two fast-growing markets for the startup.
The funding is being led by SoftBank, via its Vision Fund, with Temasek, Lakestar, Heartcore Capital (formerly Sunstone Capital) and Swisscanto Invest among others also participating. (Swisscanto is part of Zürcher Kantonalbank: GetYourGuide was originally founded in Zurich, where the founders had studied, and it still runs some R&D operations there.) The company has now raised well over $600 million.
It’s notable how SoftBank — which is on the hunt for interesting opportunities to invest its $100 billion superfund — has been stepping up a gear in Germany to tap into some of the bigger tech players that have emerged out of that market, which today is the biggest in Europe. Other big plays have included €460 million into Auto1 and €900 million into payments provider Wirecard. Other companies it has backed, such as hotel company Oyo out of India, are using its funding to break into Europe (and buy German companies in the process).
There had been reports over the last several months that GetYouGuide was in the process of raising anywhere between $300 million and more than $500 million. In late April, we were told by sources that the round hadn’t yet closed, and that numbers published in the media up to then had been inaccurate, even as we nailed down that SoftBank was indeed involved in the round.
The valuation in this round is not being disclosed, but CEO Johannes Reck (who co-founded the app with Martin Sieber, Pascal Mathis, Tobias Rein and Tao Tao) said in an interview with TechCrunch that it was definitely “now a unicorn” — meaning that its valuation had passed the $1 billion mark. For additional context, the rumor last month was that GetYourGuide’s valuation was up to €1.6 billion ($1.78 billion), but I have not been able to get firm confirmation of that number.
From hip replacements to hipsters
GetYourGuide’s growth — and investor interest in it — has closely followed the rise of new platforms like Airbnb that have changed the face of how we travel, and what we do when we get somewhere. We have moved far beyond the days of visiting a travel agent that books everything, from flight to hotel to all your activities, as you sit on the other side of a desk from her or him. Now with the tap of a finger or the click of a mouse, we have thousands of choices.
Within that, GetYourGuide thinks that it has jumped on an interesting opportunity to rethink the activity aspect of tourism. Tour packages and other highly organized travel experiences are often associated with older people, or those with families — essentially people who need more predictability when they are not at home.
Reck noted that the earliest users of GetYourGuide in 2010 were precisely those people — or at least those who were more inclined to use digital platforms to begin with: the demographic, he said, was 40-50 year olds, most likely travelling with family.
That is one thing that has really started to change, in no small part because of GetYourGuide itself. Making the experience of booking experiences mobile-friendly, GetYourGuide has played into the culture of doing and showing, which has propelled the rise of social media.
“They want to do things, to have something to post on Instagram,” he said. The average age of a GetYourGuide user now, he said, is 25-40.
This has even evolved into what GetYourGuide provides to users. “At some point, staff in Asia had the idea of crafting a ‘GetYourGuide Instagram Tour of Bali.’ That really took off, and now this is the number-one tour booked in the region.” It has since expanded the concept to 50 destinations.
Not by coincidence, today the company is also announcing that Ameet Ranadive is joining as the company’s first chief product officer. Ranadive comes from Instagram, where he led the Well-being product team (the company’s health and safety team). He’d also been VP and GM of Revenue Product at Twitter. Nils Chrestin is also coming on as CFO, having recently been at Rocket Internet-incubated Global Fashion Group.
That has also led GetYourGuide to conclude it has a ways to go to continue developing its model and scope further, expanding into longer sightseeing excursions, beyond one or two-hour tours into day trips and even overnight experiences.
As it continues to play around with some of these offerings, it’s also increasingly taking a more direct role in the branding and the provision of the content. Initially, all tickets and tours were posted on GetYourGuide by third parties. Now, GetYourGuide is building more of what Reck calls “Originals” — which it might develop in partnership with others but ultimately handles as its own first-party content. (That Instagram tour was one of those Originals.)
It’s worth noting that others are closing in on the same “experiences” model that forms the core of GetYourGuide’s business: Airbnb, to diversify how it makes revenues and to extend its touchpoints with guests beyond basic accommodation bookings, has also started to sell experiences. Meanwhile, daily deals pioneer Groupon has also positioned itself as a destination for purchasing “experiences” as a way to offset declines in other areas of its business. Similarly, travel portals that sell plane tickets regularly default to pushing more activities on you.
Reck pointed out that the area of business where GetYourGuide is active is becoming increasingly attractive to these players as other aspects of the travel industry become increasingly commoditised. Indeed, you can visit dozens of sites to compare pricing on plane tickets, and if you are flexible, pick up even more of a bargain at the last minute. And the rise of multiple Airbnb-style platforms offering private accommodation has made competition among those supplying those platforms — as well as hotels — increasingly fierce.
All of that leaves experiences — for now at least — as the place where these companies can differentiate themselves from the pack. Reck believes that focusing on this, however, means you just do it much better than companies that have added experiences on to a platform that is not a native destination for discovering or buying that kind of content or product. (That doesn’t mean there aren’t others natively tackling “experiences” from the world of startups. Klook is one also funded by SoftBank.)
“Consumers, especially millennials, are spending an increasing portion of their disposable income on travel experiences. We believe GetYourGuide is leading this seismic shift by consolidating the fragmented global supply base of tour operators and modernizing access for travelers globally,” said Ted Fike, partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a statement. “This combination creates powerful network effects for their business that is fueling their strong growth. We are excited to partner with their passionate and talented leadership team.” Fike is joining the board with this round.
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