Walmart
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Grocery startup BigBasket becomes India’s newest unicorn with new $150M investment
India has a new unicorn after BigBasket, a startup that delivers groceries and perishables across the country, raised $150 million for its fight against rivals Walmart’s Flipkart, Amazon and hyperlocal startups Swiggy and Dunzo.
The new financing round — a Series F — was led by Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund, the U.K.’s CDC Group and Alibaba, BigBasket said on Monday. The closing of the round has officially helped the seven-year-old startup surpass $1 billion valuation, co-founder Vipul Parekh, who heads marketing and finances for the company, told TechCrunch in an interview. Chinese giant Alibaba, which also led the Series E round in BigBasket last year, is the largest investor in the company, with about 30% stake, a person familiar with the matter said.
The company, which offers more than 20,000 products from 1,000 brands in more than two dozen cities, will deploy the fresh capital into expanding its supply-chain network, adding more cold storage centers and distribution centers to serve customers faster, Parekh said. The company also plans to add about 3,000 vending machines that offer daily eatable items, such as vegetables, snacks and cold drinks in residential apartments and offices by next month, he added.
Infusion of $150 million for BigBasket, which raised $300 million last year, comes at a time when both Walmart’s Flipkart and Amazon are increasingly expanding their grocery businesses in India.
Amazon Retail India, which operates Amazon Pantry and Prime Now services and has a presence in mire than 100 cities, is reportedly planning to expand its business in India. Flipkart Group CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy said in an interview with the Economic Times last month that the e-commerce giant may pilot a fresh foods business soon. Last week, Flipkart was said to be in talks to acquire grocery chain Namdhari’s Fresh.
Parekh largely brushed off the challenge his company faces from Flipkart and Amazon at this stage, saying that “it is a very large market, and it is unlikely to be dominated by one single company for the simple reason of its complex nature.” Flipkart and Amazon may eventually get serious about this space, but so far their play with groceries is mostly an additional differentiation checkpoint, he said.
“The success in this business requires having the ability to build and manage a very complex supply chain across multiple categories such as vegetables, meat and beauty products among others. Our focus has been on building the supply chain, and also ensuring that we are able to deliver a very large assortment of products to consumers,” he added. He said BigBasket today offers the largest catalog and fastest delivery among any of its rivals.
Besides, BigBasket, which is increasingly growing its subscription business to supply milk and other daily eatables, is also inching closer to becoming financially stronger. Parekh said BigBasket expects to become operationally profitable in six to eight months. “The idea is that business by itself does not consume cash. If we use cash, it will be for investment in new businesses or scaling of existing businesses,” he said.
India’s retail market, valued at mire than $900 billion, is increasingly attracting the attention of VC funds. Since 2014, online retailers alone have participated in more than 163 financing rounds, clocking over $1.38 billion, analytics firm Tracxn told TechCrunch. More than 882 players are operational in the market, the firm said.
The challenge for BigBasket remains fighting a growing army of rivals, including hyperlocal delivery startups including Grofers, which raised $60 million earlier this year, unicorn Swiggy and Google-backed Dunzo, which is increasingly becoming a verb in urban Indian cities.
Powered by WPeMatico
On balance, the cloud has been a huge boon to startups
Today’s startups have a distinct advantage when it comes to launching a company because of the public cloud. You don’t have to build infrastructure or worry about what happens when you scale too quickly. The cloud vendors take care of all that for you.
But last month when Pinterest announced its IPO, the company’s cloud spend raised eyebrows. You see, the company is spending $750 million a year on cloud services, more specifically for AWS. When your business is primarily focused on photos and video, and needs to scale at a regular basis, that bill is going to be high.
That price tag prompted Erica Joy, a Microsoft engineer, to publish this tweet and start a little internal debate here at TechCrunch. Startups, after all, have a dog in this fight, and it’s worth exploring if the cloud is helping feed the startup ecosystem, or sending your bills soaring, as they have with Pinterest.
after discussion with some folks about this article and the generally ridiculous amount of money startups pay for aws, i am wondering if there is an effective, easy to use, open source tool that helps startups reduce aws spend. https://t.co/GBh40b4UOH
— EricaJoy (@EricaJoy) March 25, 2019
For starters, it’s worth pointing out that Ms. Joy works for Microsoft, which just happens to be a primary competitor of Amazon’s in the cloud business. Regardless of her personal feelings on the matter, I’m sure Microsoft would be more than happy to take over that $750 million bill from Amazon. It’s a nice chunk of business; but all that aside, do startups benefit from having access to cloud vendors?
Powered by WPeMatico
Could Walmart be the next big company to launch a game streaming service?
Google stole the spotlight at this year’s GDC with the launch of Stadia. What the game streaming service lacked in specifics, it more than made up for in buzz. The software giant certainly isn’t the only one eyeing the space, however. A new report from US Gamer puts Walmart in the running, as well.
The retailer has spent the last several years making a push into the high-tech sphere. It has made some high-profile acquisitions, including Jet.com, in a bid to compete with the likes of Amazon. The company has even been testing out inventory-checking robots in around 50 or so of its stores. And with the recent exit of CTO Jeremy King, it could well be looking for the next big thing.
According to the reports, Walmart has been meeting with developers and publishers at GDC. It’s tough to say how advanced these talks are, and those involved with the leaks have understandably wished to remain anonymous. The company certainly has the back-end infrastructure to attempt a service. It also has a loyal base of customers in the U.S. to whom it sells a lot of video games.
But given how it abandoned plans for a video streaming service as of January, the talks could be little more than just talk.
Powered by WPeMatico
Sam’s Club to test new Scan & Go system that uses computer vision instead of barcodes
In October, Walmart-owned Sam’s Club opened a test store in Dallas where it planned to trial new technology, including mobile checkout, an Amazon Go-like camera system, in-store navigation, electronic shelf labels and more. This morning, the retailer announced it will now begin testing a revamped Scan & Go service as well, which leverages computer vision and machine learning to make mobile scanning easier and faster.
The current Scan & Go system, launched two years ago, requires Sam’s Club shoppers to locate the barcode on the item they’re buying and scan it using the Sam’s Club mobile app. The app allows shoppers to account for items they’re buying as they place them in their shopping cart, then pay in the app instead of standing in line at checkout.
However convenient, the system itself can still be frustrating at times because you’ll need to actually find the barcode on the item — often turning the item over from one side to the other to find the sticker or tag. This process can be difficult for heavier items, and frustrating when the barcoded label or tag has fallen off.
It also can end up taking several seconds to complete — which adds up when you’re filling a cart with groceries during a big stocking-up trip.
The new scanning technology will instead use computer vision and ML (machine learning) to recognize products without scanning the barcode, cutting the time it takes for the app to identify the product in question, the retailer explains.
In a video demo, Sam’s Club showed how it might take a typical shopper 9.3 seconds to scan a pack of water using the old system, versus 3.4 seconds using the newer technology.
Of course, the times will vary based on the shopper’s skill, the item being scanned and how well the technology performs, among other factors. A large package of water is a more extreme example, but one that demonstrates well the potential of the system… if it works.
The idea with the newly opened Dallas test store is to put new technology into practice quickly in a real-world environment, to see what performs well and what doesn’t, while also gathering customer feedback. Dallas was chosen as the location for the store because of the tech talent and recruiting potential in the area, and because it’s a short trip from Walmart’s Bentonville, Arkansas headquarters, the company said earlier.
Sam’s Club says it has filed a patent related to the new scanning technology, and will begin testing it this spring at the Dallas area “Sam’s Club Now” store. It will later expand the technology to the tools used by employees, too.
Powered by WPeMatico
Starting with data centers, Carbon Relay is slashing energy costs and emissions using AI
Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn International is backing Carbon Relay, a Boston-based startup emerging from stealth today that’s harnessing the algorithms used by companies like Facebook and Google for artificial intelligence to curb greenhouse gas emissions in the technology industry’s own backyard — the data center.
Already, the computing demands of the technology industry are responsible for 3 percent of total energy consumption — and the addition of new technologies like Bitcoin to the mix could add another half a percent to that figure within the next few years, according to Carbon Relay’s chief executive, Matt Provo.
That’s $25 billion in spending on energy per year across the industry, Provo says.
A former Apple employee, Provo went to Harvard Business School because he knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur and start his own business — and he wanted that business to solve a meaningful problem, he said.
Variability and dynamic nature of the data center relating to thermodynamics and the makeup of a facility or building is interesting for AI because humans can’t keep up.
“We knew what we wanted to focus on,” said Provo of himself and his two co-founders. “All three of us have an environmental sciences background as well… We were fired up about building something that was true AI that has positive value… the risk associated [with climate change] is going to hit in our lifetime, we were very inspired to build a company whose technology would have an impact on that.”
Carbon Relay’s mission and founding team, including Thibaut Perol and John Platt (two Harvard graduates with doctorates in applied mathematics) was able to attract some big backers.
The company has raised $6 million from industry giants like Foxconn and Boston-based angel investors, including Dr. James Cash — a director on the boards of Walmart, Microsoft, GE and State Street; Black Duck Software founder, Douglas Levin; Karim Lakhani, a director on the Mozilla Corporation board; and Paul Deninger, a director on the board of the building operations management company, Resideo (formerly Honeywell).
Provo and his team didn’t just raise the money to tackle data centers — and Foxconn’s involvement hints at the company’s broader goals. “My vision is that commercial HVAC systems or any machinery that operates in a business would not ship without our intelligence inside of it,” says Provo.
What’s more compelling is that the company’s technology works without exposing the underlying business to significant security risks, Provo says.
“In the end all we’re doing are sending these floats… these values. These values are mathematical directions for the actions that need to be taken,” he says.
Carbon Relay is already profitable, generating $4 million in revenue last year and on track for another year of steady growth, according to Provo.
Carbon Relay offers two products: Optimize and Predict, that gather information from existing HVAC devices and then control those systems continuously and automatically with continuous decision making.
“Each data center is unique and enormously complex, requiring its own approach to managing energy use over time,” said Cash, who’s serving as the company’s chairman. “The Carbon Relay team is comprised of people who are passionate about creating a solution that will adapt to the needs of every large data center, creating a tangible and rapid impact on the way these organizations do business.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Distinguished VCs back wholesale marketplace Faire with $100M at a $535M valuation
A slew of venture capitalists known for high-profile exits — Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures, Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital and Alex Taussig of Lightspeed Venture Partners — have invested in Faire (formerly known as Indigo Fair), a 2-year-old wholesale marketplace for artisanal products.
A quick glance at Faire suggests it’s a combination of Pinterest and Etsy, complete with trendy, pastel stationery, soap, baby products and more, all made by independent artisans and sold to retailers. Faire has today announced a $100 million fundraise across two financing rounds: a $40 million Series B led by Taussig at Lightspeed and a $60 million Series C led by Y Combinator’s Continuity fund. New investors Founders Fund, the venture firm founded by Peter Thiel, and DST Global also participated. The business has previously brought in a total of $16 million.
The latest financing values Faire at $535 million, according to a source familiar with the deal.
If you’re feeling a little bit of déjà vu, that’s because a similar startup also raised a sizeable round of venture capital funding, announced today. That’s Minted . The 10-year-old company, best known for its wide assortment of wedding invitations and stationery, raised $208 million led by Permira, with participation from T. Rowe Price. Though Minted is first and foremost a consumer-facing marketplace, it plans to double down on its wholesale business with its latest infusion of capital, setting it up to be among Faire’s biggest competitors.
Like Minted, Faire leverages artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to forecast which products will fly off its virtual shelves in order to to source and manage inventory as efficiently as possible. The approach appears to be working; Faire says it has 15,000 retailers actively purchasing from its platform, including Walgreens, Walmart, Sephora and Nordstrom — a 3,140 percent year-over-year increase. It’s completed 2,000 orders to date, garnering $100 million in run rate sales, and has expanded its community of artists 445 percent YoY, to 2,000.
The company, headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Ontario and Waterloo, was founded by three former Square employees: chief executive officer Max Rhodes, who was product manager on a variety of strategic initiatives, including Square Capital and Square Cash; chief information officer Daniele Perito, who led risk and security for Square Cash; and chief technology officer Marcelo Cortes, a former engineering lead for Square Cash.
“Our mission at Faire is to empower entrepreneurs to chase their dreams,” Rhodes wrote in a blog post this morning. “We believe entrepreneurship is a calling. Starting a business provides a level of autonomy and fulfillment that’s become difficult to find for many elsewhere in the economy. With this in mind, we built Faire to help entrepreneurs on both sides of our marketplace succeed.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Walmart adds an AR scanner to its iOS app for product comparisons
Walmart is giving augmented reality a shot. The retailer today announced the launch of a new AR scanning tool in its iPhone application which will help customers with product comparisons. However, unlike a typical barcode scanner meant only to compare prices on one item at a time, Walmart’s AR scanner can be panned about across store shelves, offering details on pricing and customer ratings beneath the products it sees.
The technology was first developed by a team at an internal Walmart hackathon using Apple’s ARKit technology. At the time, their idea was to create a scanning experience that worked faster and felt faster when used by customers. They also wanted to build a scanner that offered more than just price comparisons.
“Walmart store shoppers love using our mobile app barcode scanner as a price checker. Our team sees the potential of this product as so much more, though,” explains Tim Sears, senior engineering manager at Walmart Labs, in a post announcing the feature’s launch. “When a customer launches the scanner, they get a direct connection between the digital and the physical world that their screen and camera lens creates for them,” he says.
The team won the hackathon, then went on to further redesign the experience to become the one that’s live today in Walmart’s application.
To use the scanner, you launch the feature in the Walmart app, then point it at the products on the shelf you want to compare. As you move the phone between one item and the other, the product tile at the bottom of the screen will update with information, including the product name, price and star rating across however many reviews it has received on Walmart.com. A link to related products is also available.
The AR scanner was designed to anchor dots to what you’ve scanned, but uses smaller dots instead of anchoring the entire content to the product itself to overcome the problems that could occur when multiple items are scanned together in a close space.
Despite the supposed advantages of AR scanning over a simpler barcode scan, it still remains to be seen to what extent consumers will adopt the feature now that it’s live.
Walmart isn’t the only retailer to give AR a go. Others have used it in various ways, including Amazon, Target, Wayfair and many more. But in several cases, AR’s adoption by retailers have been focused on visualizing products in your home, or — in the case of Target’s AR “studio” — makeup on your face.
Walmart’s AR scanner goes after a more practical use.
The AR Scanner is in the latest version of the Walmart iOS app (18.20 and higher), and works on iPhones that run at least iOS 11.3. This latter requirement is due to its use of ARKit 1.5, but will limit the audience largely to those with newer iPhones.
Powered by WPeMatico
Instacart raises another $600M at a $7.6B valuation
Instacart chief executive officer Apoorva Mehta wants every household in the U.S. to use Instacart, a grocery delivery service that allows shoppers to order from more than 300 retailers, including Kroger, Costco, Walmart and Sam’s Club, using its mobile app.
Today, the company is taking a big leap toward that goal.
San Francisco-based Instacart has raised $600 million at a $7.6 billion valuation, just six months after it brought in a $150 million round and roughly eight months after a $200 million financing that valued the business at $4.2 billion.
D1 Capital Partners, a relatively new fund led by Daniel Sundheim, the former chief investment officer of Viking Global Investors, led the round.
Instacart is raking in cash aggressively but spending it cautiously. The company still has all of its Series E, which ultimately totaled $350 million, and the majority of its $413 million Series D in the bank, a source close to the company told TechCrunch. That means, in total, Instacart has $1.2 billion at its fingertips. Currently, according to the same source, the company is only profitable on a contribution margin basis, meaning it’s earning a profit on each individual Instacart order.
In a conversation with TechCrunch, Mehta said the company didn’t need the capital and that it was an “opportunistic” round, i.e. the capital was readily available and Instacart has ambitious plans to scale, so why not fundraise. Instacart plans to use the enormous pool of capital to double its engineering team by 2019, which will include filling 300 open engineering roles in its recently announced Toronto office, he said.
As far as an initial public offering, it will happen — eventually.
“It will be on the horizon,” Mehta told TechCrunch.
“2018 has been a really big year for us,” he added. “The reason why we are so excited is because the opportunity ahead of us is enormous. The U.S. is a $1 trillion grocery market and less than 5 percent of that is bought online. It’s an enormous category that’s highly under-penetrated.”
In the last six months, Instacart has announced a few notable accomplishments.
As of August, the service has been available to 70 percent of U.S. households. That’s due to the expansion of existing partnerships and new deals entirely, like a recently announced pilot program between Instacart and Walmart Canada that gives Canadian Instacart users access to 17 different Walmart locations across Winnipeg and Toronto, Ontario.
The company has also completed several executive hires. Most recently, it tapped former Thumbtack chief technology officer Mark Schaaf as CTO. Before that, Instacart brought on David Hahn as chief product officer and Dani Dudeck as its first chief communications officer.
In early September, the company confirmed its chief growth officer Elliot Shmukler would be leaving the company.
The six-year-old Y Combinator graduate has raised more than $1.6 billion in venture capital funding from Coatue Management, Thrive Capital, Canaan Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and several others.
Powered by WPeMatico
Walmart is working with Eko to create interactive content
Walmart and Eko announced a partnership this morning to create a joint venture for interactive content called W*E Interactive Ventures.
The best example of the interactivity that Eko enables is probably “That Moment When,” a comedy web series that the startup created last year in partnership with Sony. In a series of short videos, you take on the role of Jill, a young-ish woman struggling to get her life together — the viewer decides what Jill says and also plays mini-games to help her achieve her goals.
According to the announcement, W*E content will include a variety of formats like cooking shows and interactive toy catalogues.
Eko CEO Yoni Bloch said they aren’t announcing any specific shows yet, but they will be “free and distributed everywhere,” and will be united by an aim to make the viewer “be the hero, be a part of the decision-making in the story.” The plan is to start releasing this content sometime next year.
Walmart might not seem like the most obvious partner on something like this, but the company has been expanding into digital media with efforts like Vudu (it just announced a partnership with MGM) and, more recently, Walmart eBooks.
Bloch said the deal also includes a Walmart investment of undisclosed size into Eko. Apparently the joint venture will work primarily as “the funding vehicle” for this new content, with Walmart staying out of the creative decisions.
“Walmart has been an incredible partner, allowing us to have creative control, which we are passing on to the creators,” Bloch said.
Tribeca Productions co-founder Jane Rosenthal will serve as strategic advisor to W&E Interactive Ventures, and Eko Chief Media Officer Nancy Tellem will be on the board.
“Our partnership with Eko will help us accelerate efforts to deepen relationships with customers and connect with new audiences in innovative ways and is one part of an overall entertainment ecosystem we’re building,” said Scott McCall, senior vice president for entertainment, toys and seasonal at Walmart U.S, in the announcement.
Powered by WPeMatico
Deliverr raises $7M to help e-commerce businesses compete with Amazon Prime
When Amazon rolled out its membership-based two-day shipping service in 2005, e-commerce and customer expectations around fulfillment speed changed forever.
Today, more than 100 million people use Amazon Prime. That means, 100 million people are fully accustomed to two-day shipping and if they can’t have it, they shop elsewhere. As The Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims recently put it: “Alongside life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, you can now add another inalienable right: two-day shipping on practically everything.”
Only recently have Amazon’s competitors begun to offer similar fast delivery options. About two years ago, Walmart launched its own free two-day delivery service for its owned-inventory; eBay followed suit, establishing a three-day or less delivery guaranteed option for shoppers in March 2017.
To power these Prime-like delivery options, Walmart, eBay and the Canadian e-commerce business Shopify are relying on a little upstart.
One-year-old Deliverr helps businesses offer rapid delivery experiences to their customers. Today, the company is announcing a $7.1 million Series A led by Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC, with participation from Zola founder Shan-Lyn Ma, Flexport chief executive officer Ryan Peterson and others.
The San Francisco-based startup uses machine learning and predictive intelligence to determine which of its warehouses to store its client’s goods.
Currently, Deliverr operates out of more than 10 warehouses in Texas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey, among other states, though co-founder Michael Krakaris says that number is growing every week. Its customers typically store inventory in three to five different locations based on Deliverr’s predictive algorithms.
Unlike Amazon, which owns more than 75 fulfillment centers, Deliverr doesn’t own its warehouses. Krakaris describes the company’s strategy as a sort of Uber for fulfillment.
“Uber didn’t change the physical infrastructure of cars. They didn’t build their own taxis. What they did was create software that could connect excess capacity drivers,” Krakaris told TechCrunch. “Most warehouses aren’t going to be full. We are going in and filling that extra space they wouldn’t otherwise fill.”
One of the startup’s tricks is to use brand-neutral packaging so any and all marketplaces could theoretically power fulfillment through Deliverr. Amazon, of course, sticks a Prime sticker on all its outgoing packages. And because Amazon’s fulfillment service is used by some eBay sellers, eBay items are known to show up at customers’ homes in Amazon-branded packaging. Not a great look for eBay.
“You need an independent fulfillment service that can handle all these different fulfillment channels and be neutral,” Krakaris said.
Deliverr plans to use the investment to scale its team and ink partnerships with additional online retailers.
Powered by WPeMatico