Spain’s Glovo picks up $528M as the food deliver market continues to heat up

On the heels of Deliveroo raising more than $2 billion ahead of its debut on the London Stock Exchange this week, another hopeful in the food delivery sector has closed a super-sized round. Glovo, a startup out of Spain with 10 million users that delivers restaurant take-out, groceries and other items in partnership with brick-and-mortar businesses, has picked up a Series F of $528 million (€450 million).

Glovo aims to become the market leader in the 20 markets in Europe where it is live today, in part by expanding its “q-commerce” service — the delivery of items to urban consumers in 30 minutes or less — and it will be using the money to double down on that strategy.

This is a milestone funding round not just for the company, but its home country: it marks the largest-ever round raised by a Spanish startup.

“We started in Spain, where you have access to far less capital than other countries in Europe. We do more with less and that’s made us leaner,” said Sacha Michaud, the co-founder of the company, in an interview this week. “We’ve got our own strategy and it seems to be working.”

The funding is being led by Lugard Road Capital and Luxor Capital Group (the former is an affiliate of the latter), with Delivery Hero, Drake Enterprises and GP Bullhound also participating. All are previous backers of Glovo.

“We’re thrilled to have the continued backing of Luxor Capital Group and all of our existing investors. Over the last few months, we’ve moved very, very quickly but our vision remains unchanged,” said Oscar Pierre, Glovo’s other co-founder and CEO, in a statement. “This investment will allow us to double-down in our core markets, accelerate our leadership position in places where we are already very strong and continue to expand our excellent Q-Commerce division, as well as bring new innovations to our unique multi-category offering to extend more choice to our customers.”

Valuation is not being disclosed with this round, but when it raised its $166 million Series E in December 2019 — just ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic that truly changed the face of delivery services in many parts of the world — the company had a valuation of $1.18 billion, according to PitchBook data. Michaud would only confirm to me that it was “definitely an up-round,” which would put it at at least $1.7 billion, based on that estimate.

The funding comes on the heels of a very busy period of fundraising in the sector as investors the race to get in on the delivery of hot food, groceries and other necessities in Europe — a fast-growing business model in the most normal of times that blasted off in the last year as an essential service for consumers confined to their homes, often by government mandate, to stave off the spread of the coronavirus.

Just in the last few days, Gorillas in Berlin raised $290 million on a $1 billion+ valuation for its on-demand grocery business; Everli out of Italy (formerly called Supermercato24) raised $100 million (Luxor is one of its investors too); and reportedly Zapp in London has also closed $100 million in funding. Earlier in March, Rohlik out of the Czech Republic bagged $230 million.

Amid all those private raises, we also had Deliveroo’s IPO yesterday, which — as IPOs so often do — exposed some of the trickier aspects of the business. The company — which is backed by Amazon, a formidable player in food and essentials delivery — easily raised the most of money of the month — $2.1 billion in the private placement ahead of the listing — but then proceeded to slog out its debut on the LSE with shares progressively slumping throughout the day and ending up significantly lower than its offer price.

Areas of concern around Deliveroo serve as cautionary tales for all of them: not just how you price an IPO and what allocation you give to future shareholders, but also the unit economics of your business model, the price of competition, and where labor costs will fit into the bigger picture (and the bottom line).

“We’ve got our own road and we’re doing a pretty good job,” Michaud said in an interview when the subject of Deliveroo IPO came up. “We’re still David versus the Goliath out there.” Part of that for Glovo has also included some decisions made on rationalizing its own business: the company sold off its Latin American operations in a $272 million deal to its backer Delivery Hero last year to focus solely on Europe and adjacent geographies.

But even before the Series F being announced today, Glovo itself was one of the companies raising money for specific purposes, and those efforts point to how it plans to proceed in the weeks and months ahead on its own growth plan.

In January Glovo announced a strategic deal with Swiss real-estate firm Stoneweg, which pitched in €100 million ($117 million), to co-develop a number of “dark stores” in areas where Glovo already operates to improve its distribution networks and help speed up its delivery times. It’s part of a fulfillment operation that complements the hot food that Glovo sells on behalf of its restaurant partners: the dark stores are stocked with items Glovo sells on behalf of other companies such as Carrefour, Continente, and Kaufland, as well as a lot of independent retailers, companies that have not built their own (costly) B2C delivery networks but have wanted to provide that service to consumers nonetheless.

Although the company today promises deliveries in 29 minutes, in many markets, Michaud said, it’s already averaging 10-15 minutes and the aim is to make that the norm everywhere.

Restaurant delivery of hot food remains the biggest category of business for Glovo, but the company has seen a surge of demand for the other kinds of items and is expanding that accordingly.

“With Covid, we’ve been delivering pretty much anything you want in your city,” Michaud said. “Covid has been an accelerator and has educated the market. Instead of crossing city and spending time waiting and buying items, anything I want and Glovo will bring it to me. Why wouldn’t I do this?” He believes the more traditional rush of people doing in-person shopping is “definitely not gong to come back,” with groceries to be in the same position as restaurants in a couple of years. That’s leading the company to expand into more areas: “clothing, fashion and pharmacy, flowers. Hopefully we’re now in a good position to do that.”

Jonathan Green, Founder and Portfolio Manager at Lugard Road Capital, said in a statement: “Our investment in Glovo reflects our commitment to a company and leadership team that continues to innovate and disrupt in the on-demand delivery space.  As a long-term investor in Glovo, we are excited to watch the company continue to delight its customers through its unique multi-category offering, amidst an enormous market opportunity in both existing and new geographies.”

 

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Celonis announces significant partnership with IBM to sell its process mining software

Before you can improve a workflow, you have to understand how work advances through a business, which is more complex than you might imagine inside a large enterprise. That’s where Celonis comes in. It uses software to identify how work moves through an organization and suggests more efficient ways of getting the same work done, also known as process mining

Today, the company announced a significant partnership with IBM where IBM Global Services will train 10,000 consultants worldwide on Celonis. The deal gives Celonis, a company with around 1200 employees access to the massive selling and consulting unit, while IBM gets a deep understanding of a piece of technology that is at the front end of the workflow automation trend.

Miguel Milano, chief revenue officer at Celonis says that digitizing processes has been a trend for several years. It has sped up due to COVID, and it’s partly why the two companies have decided to work together. “Intelligent workflows, or more broadly spoken workflows built to help companies execute better, are at the heart of this partnership and it’s at the heart of this trend now in the market,” Milano said.

The other part of this is that IBM now owns Red Hat, which it acquired in 2018 for $34 billion. The two companies believe that by combining the Celonis technology, which is cloud based, with Red Hat, which can span the hybrid world of on premises and cloud, the two together can provide a much more powerful solution to follow work wherever it happens.

“I do think that moving the [Celonis] software into the Red Hat OpenShift environment is hugely powerful because it does allow in what’s already a very powerful open solution to now operate across this hybrid cloud world, leveraging the power of OpenShift which can straddle the worlds of mainframe, private cloud and public cloud. And data straddle those worlds, and will continue to straddle those worlds,” Mark Foster, senior vice president at IBM Services explained.

Celonis pushes beyond process mining into automated workflow tooling

You might think that IBM, which acquired robotic process automation vendor, WDG Automation last summer, would simply attempt to buy Celonis, but Foster says the partnership is consistent with the company’s attempt to partner with a broader ecosystem.

“I think that this is very much part of an overarching focus of IBM with key ecosystem partners. Some of them are going to be bigger, some of them are going to be smaller, and […] I think this is one where we see the opportunity to connect with an organization that’s taking a leading position in its category, and the opportunity for that to take advantage of the IBM Red Hat technologies…” he said.

The companies had already been working together for some time prior to this formal announcement, and this partnership is the culmination of that. As this firmer commitment to one another goes into effect, the two companies will be working more closely to train thousands of IBM consultants on the technology, while moving the Celonis solution into Red Hat OpenShift in the coming months.

It’s clearly a big deal with the feel of an acquisition, but Milano says that this is about executing his company’s strategy to work with more systems integrators (SIs), and while IBM is a significant partner it’s not the only one.

“We are becoming an SI consulting-driven organization. So we put consulting companies like IBM at the forefront of our strategy, and this [deal] is a big cornerstone of our strategy,” he said.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna wants to completely transform his organization

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Facebook denies its algorithms are a problem, but launches a tool to more easily view a non-algorithmic News Feed

Following years of backlash over its algorithms and their ability to push people to more extreme content, which Facebook continues to deny, the company today announced it would give its users new tools to more easily switch over to non-algorithmic views of their News Feed. This includes the recently launched “Favorites,” which shows you posts from up to 30 of your favorite friends and Pages, as well as the “Most Recent” view, which shows posts in chronological order. It also introduced new controls for adjusting who can comment on your posts, and other changes.

The features themselves aren’t entirely new, in some cases, but they’ve been made easier to get to with the addition of a Feed Filter Bar on mobile for changing the view of the News Feed, and an option menu on your posts to control who can comment.

The “Most Recent” view of the News Feed has long existed but has been buried in the extended “more” menu (the three-bar hamburger icon) on the Facebook mobile app. It’s not as useful as it sounds because it shows you all the posts from both friends and Pages in a single chronological view. If you’ve been on Facebook for many years, then you’ve probably “Liked” a number of Facebook Pages for brands, businesses and public figures. These Pages tend to post with more frequency than your friends, so the feed has become largely a long scroll through Page updates.

However, if you still prefer the “Most Recent” view, the Feed Filter Bar will give you a tool to easier switch back and forth between this and other views. The feature will launch on Android first, then roll out to iOS.

Meanwhile, Facebook has offered a way to prioritize who you see in your News Feed through a “See First” setting, but the newer “Favorites” feature rebrands this effort and gives you a single destination under Settings to select and deselect your Favorites, including favorite Pages.

The updated commenting controls are a new take on a habit many Facebook users have already adopted — when they share a post only to a given audience, like family or friends, while excluding other groups like work colleagues or even specific people. Now, users will have the option to instead share their posts but control who can engage in conversations. Public figures, for example, may choose to adopt the feature to restrict their audience to only those brands and profiles they’ve tagged.

Facebook says it will also show more context around suggestions it displays in the News Feed with its “Why am I seeing this?” feature that will explain how its algorithmic suggestions work. It says several factors may be at work here, in terms of what’s shown and why — including your location, whether you or people like you have engaged with related topics, groups or Pages, and more.

The changes arrive at a time when Facebook, along with other tech giants, has come under fire for its role in spreading misinformation leading to deadly events, like the storming of the U.S. Capitol, and serious public health crises, like vaccine hesitancy during a pandemic. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week testified before the House’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology about its failures to remove dangerous misinformation and its allowing of extremists to become more radicalized and to organize online.

Facebook’s official position, however, is that it doesn’t play a role in directing people towards problematic content — they seek it out. And people’s News Feeds are only a reflection of their own choices, in that way.

These thoughts and more were detailed today by Nick Clegg, VP of Global Affairs for Facebook, where he insists personalization algorithms are common across tech companies — Amazon and Netflix use them, too, for instance. And ranking simply makes what’s most relevant to the user appear first — effectively blaming users for the problems here. He also throws back the decisions to be made around Facebook’s role in misinformation peddling to the lawmakers, adding: “It would clearly be better if these [content] decisions were made according to frameworks agreed by democratically accountable lawmakers.”

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Ensemble raises $3M to help divorced parents avoid arguing about money

At the age of 14, Jacklyn Rome saw firsthand how divorce can impact families, and how arguing about finances both during and after the process can impact children.

The experience stuck with her. As an adult, after leading new product launches at Uber and Blue Apron,  Rome came up with the concept behind her startup, Ensemble. The expense tracking app quietly launched in the App Store in 2020 with the mission of reducing tension among co-parents and making sure kids’ needs aren’t negatively impacted by a divorce.

Today, Ensemble is coming out of stealth with $3 million in seed funding from TTV Capital, Lerer Hippeau and Citi Ventures.

Put simply, Ensemble’s mission is to improve the lives of co-parents and their children by giving parents a streamlined way to track shared expenses.

“Most co-parents either figure out finances on their own ad hoc or rely on child support payments — however, child support only covers food, shelter and clothing, which is only half of the cost of raising a child,” Rome points out. The other half of expenses, including medical bills, extracurricular activities, transportation, etc., often end up being discussed by co-parents via text messages and spreadsheets.

Ensemble founder and CEO Jacklyn Rome. Image courtesy of Ensemble

Ensemble kicked off a six-month pilot in January 2020, when the credit-first version of the app went live. In April 2020, the dual functionality version — where two parents could connect their accounts — went live.

Since its App store launch last spring, Ensemble has seen “strong organic growth and referrals” from its users, according to Rome. Ensemble’s users, on average, are tracking over $1,000 per month in shared expenses for their children.

Roughly 30% of Ensemble’s downloads were organic in people discovering the app in the App Store, she said.

“Even in the most amicable divorces, money is the number one thing that divorced parents end up arguing about. In more contentious divorces, it often gets used as a power lever among two emotionally charged individuals with no other tools at their disposal,” Rome said. “We set out to build a product that eases tense communication about shared finances and serves the nuanced needs of separated parents.”

For now, the app is free. Ensemble plans to begin monetizing with the use of funds from its seed round.

Eventually, the company is planning to build out a paid subscription model. Over the long term, it’s also planning to expand beyond being an expense tracking app to offering a suite of financial products and primarily banking products, for things like shared credit cards with tight spending controls, Rome told TechCrunch.

“Ultimately, we want to help make sure that the children of divorced parents are not at a financial disadvantage when it comes to building for their financial future,” she said.

Are subscription services the future of fintech?

Rome founded Ensemble while she was an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Co-Created, a venture studio based in New York, with support and funding from Citi Ventures’ D10X program.

“A key insight that Citi had given us was that for them as a bank, it’s incredibly hard to acquire new customers because people don’t often change banks,” Rome said. “One of the few times in life that people regularly change banks is when they get divorced. And that sparked the thought process around the pain points that people feel through their divorce, specifically as it relates to finances.”

Luis Valdich, managing director of venture investing at Citi Ventures, says the bank has been “tracking for some time” how the financial needs of individuals have been evolving given societal trends, while at the same time identifying potential investment opportunities in startups that address underserved needs.

“One growing gap is for divorced or separate parents to track and manage shared expenses,” Valdich said. “Ensemble solves this problem by striking the optimal balance of delivering ease of use, visibility and empathy for modern co-parents, minimizing the need for back-and-forth communications. While it is early, we found its user experience to be substantially superior to the alternatives in the market, and Jacklyn brings a unique perspective on the challenge Ensemble is trying to solve.”

And while he could not speak to specific plans between Citi and Ensemble, Valdich said that Citi Ventures’ approach has always been to invest in companies with an eye toward future collaborations.

“We are proud that the majority of our portfolio has been commercialized within Citi and/or with Citi clients and we will certainly explore opportunities for collaboration when mutually convenient for both parties, as we always do,” Valdich added.

Meanwhile, TTV Capital Partner Mark Johnson said his firm has been investing in fintech for over 20 years and that it’s clear “people are craving digital tools to simplify communication and finances.”

He called Ensemble’s app “a sleek and simple platform” that addresses those needs for co-parents.

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Diversity-focused Harlem Capital raises $134M

Harlem Capital is announcing that it has raised $134 million for its second fund — well above its target of $100 million and its initial cap of $125 million.

The firm was founded in 2015 by managing partners Henri Pierre-Jacques and Jarrid Tingle. It started out as an angel syndicate with the goal of investing in founders from diverse backgrounds, then announced its first VC fund of $40 million at the end of 2019. The firm’s investments include e-commerce companies Pangaea, CashDrop, Malomo and Repeat, as well as wellness startups, Wellory, Expectful, Wagmo and Shine. 

It hasn’t invested all of that initial $40 million yet — the firm says it’s aiming to make five more investments from Fund I. Apparently 61% of Harlem Capital’s Fund I portfolio companies are led by Black or Latinx executives, while 43% are led exclusively by women. While the firm was founded in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood — where I live and am typing these words — it invests in startups across the United States.

Meanwhile, with Fund II, it’s shifting its focus to seed stage investments in companies that are post-product, aiming to invest between $750,000 and $1.5 million and take a 10% stake or more. The firm says it’s industry agnostic, but will be focusing on both consumer and enterprise tech with the new fund. It will also introduce the idea of “culture carry,” where the founders backed by the fund will split 1% of the carry — basically, they’re getting a stake in the fund’s profits and in each other’s success.

The focus on diversity extends to the limited partners who invested in Fund II, with 42% of LPs being women or people of color.

“We are focused on building an institution and platform to support diverse founders for many generations,” said Managing Partner Henri Pierre-Jacques in a statement. “Fund II is one step closer to our mission, but we know the work and journey continues. We are excited to provide more capital and resources to even more diverse founders tackling unique problems.”

Last week, Harlem Capital also announced that it had promoted Brandon Bryant to partner and Gabby Cazeau and Kelly Goldstein to principal.

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Moveworks expands IT chatbot platform to encompass entire organization

When investors gave Moveworks a hefty $75 million Series B at the end of 2019, they were investing in a chatbot startup that to that point had been tuned to answer IT help question in an automated way. Today, the company announced it had used that money to expand the platform to encompass employee questions across all lines of business.

At the time of that funding, nobody could have anticipated a pandemic either, but throughout last year as companies moved to work from home, having an automated systems in place like Moveworks became even more crucial, says CEO and company co-founder Bhavin Shah.

“It was a tragic year on a variety of fronts, but what it did was it coalesced a lot of energy around people’s need for support, people’s need for speed and help,” Shah said. It helps that employees typically access the Moveworks chatbot inside collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams, and people have been spending more time in these tools while working at home.

“We definitely saw a lot more interest in the market, and part of that was fueled by the large scale adoption of collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams by enterprises around the world,” he said.

The company is working with 100 large enterprise customers today, and those customers were looking for a more automated way for employees to ask questions about a variety of tooling from HR to finance and facilities management. While Shah says expanding the platform to move beyond IT into other parts of an organization had been on the roadmap, the pandemic definitely underscored the need to expand even more.

Chatbots spotlight machine learning’s trillion-dollar potential

While the company spent its first several years tuning the underlying artificial intelligence technology for IT language, they had built it with expansion in mind. “We learned how to build a conversational system so that it can be dynamic and not be predicated on some person’s forethought around [what the question and answer will be] — that approach doesn’t scale. So there were a lot of things around dealing with all these enterprise resources and so forth that really prepared us to be an enterprise-wide partner,” Shah said.

The company also announced a new communications tool that enables companies to use the Moveworks bot to communicate directly with employees to get them to take some action. Shah says companies usually send out an email that for example, employees have to update their password. The bot tells you it’s time to do that and provides a link to walk you through the process. He says that beta testers have seen a 70% increase in responses using the bot to communicate about an action instead of email.

Shah recognizes that a technology that understands language is going to have a lot of cultural variances and nuances and that requires a diverse team to build a tool like this. He says that his HR team has a set of mandates to make sure they are interviewing people in under-represented roles to build a team that reflects the needs of the customer base and the world at large.

The company has been working with about a dozen customers over the last 9 months on the platform expansion, iterating with these customers to improve the quality of the responses, regardless of the type of question or which department it involves. Today, these tools are generally available.

Moveworks snags $75M Series B to resolve help desk tickets with AI

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Zapp, the on-demand delivery and ‘dark’ store operator, picks up backing from Lightspeed and Atomico

Zapp, one of a number of startups currently battling it out in London and beyond by promising to let you order everyday items on-demand from its own delivery-only stores, has quietly raised a new round of funding from leading VCs, TechCrunch has learned.

According to multiple sources, Silicon Valley’s Lightspeed and Europe’s Atomico (the VC firm started by Skype founder Niklas Zennström) have invested in Zapp’s unannounced Series A. Those same sources have also confirmed that Zapp has raised around $100 million in total, including via an earlier seed round.

In addition to Lightspeed and Atomico, other investors in Zapp include 468 Capital, and Burda, alongside notable angels such as Mato Peric, Christopher North (former Amazon UK CEO), and Stefan Smalla (Westwing CEO). One source tells me that the startup’s Series A is the first deal that consumer-focused partner, Sasha Astafyeva, has led on Atomico’s behalf since joining the London-headquartered VC firm.

“We’re relentlessly focused on delighting our customers and generally do not comment on our capital structure. We are excited to bring Zapp to millions of customers in London and beyond this year,” said Zapp, in a statement issued to TechCrunch when asked about the Series A and list of investors.

In conversation with Sasha Astafyeva, Atomico’s new consumer-focused investment partner

Started last summer, Zapp’s founders are Joe Falter, who was part of the founding team at Jumia where he led the on-demand services business through to the group’s IPO, and Navid Hadzaad, who most recently was a product leader at Amazon’s Seattle HQ after founding GoButler and scaling several ventures at Rocket Internet. The leadership team also spans ex-employees of Deliveroo, Just Eat, Dominoes and Tesco, to name just a few.

Zapp operates a vertical or “dark store” model, seeing it set up its own micro fulfillment centers. They include several locations in London already: Kensington, Chelsea, Fulham, Notting Hill, Hammersmith, Shepherd’s Bush, Shoreditch, Islington and Angel.

Shunning the gig economy model used by companyies like Deliveroo, Zapp employs its riders directly. It also emphasises sustainability and utilises an all-electric fleet.

From what we can glean online and through conversations with sources, Zapp also looks to be focusing less on fresh food/groceries and more on convenience a la goPuff in the U.S., thus targeting impulse purchases rather than trying to usurp the traditional grocery shop. This is in contrast to many of the other dark store competitors, although there is clearly cross-over in all of the offerings from a multitude of players.

Alongside Zapp, dark store operators in London alone include Getir, Gorillas, Jiffy, Dija and Weezy — with some also raising and deploying significant amounts of capital, including, in some instances, employing heavy discounting as the land grab accelerates.

Gorillas, the on-demand grocery delivery startup, raises $290M and ‘surpasses’ $1B valuation

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