Venture Day Minsk (organised by tech startup hub Imaguru) is run annually, but because of the pandemic and the political situation in Belarus it has gone virtual. Even Imaguru itself has had to switch to online-only operations after Lukashenko’s thugs shut down its physical space. If you want to support them, check out their startups, and maybe grab a T-shirt.
There are are always interesting startups to watch out of Belarus, a country which has produced startups like Splitmetrics, MSQRD, PingFin, DEIP and TrackDuck well as PandaDoc.
A run-down of who is pitching in below.
You can tune in to the live stream here. Investors can network with the startups here. And you can join the startup pitches on Clubhouse here. On twitter the hashtag is here.
Startups pitching:
1 – TeenUP: learning video platform teens-2-teens to unlock the teenagers’ potential and personality @TeenUP12
2 – Dignity: app for Business & Personal needs to talk, organize, sell, pay & manage without middlemen, make your Digital life private and secure your Assets #dignity
3 – Voxmate: an intuitive, gesture-based, Android app for people who are blind or visually impaired. It makes news, books, games and instant messaging accessible in a completely new way @voxmateapp
4 – LabMap App: app to explain laboratory tests in 24 hours in a clear language and monitor the state of health and the dynamics of biological indicators.
5 – Pigpughttps://pigpug.co/: AI neurofeedback brain training system for kids with ADHD and ASD @PigPugHealth
6 – SOVA App: mobile app for overwhelmed, exhausted or anxious people to get stress relief fast and sleep well by night rituals #sovaapp
7 – Itgen: an online edu platform for 1-1 live tutoring for kids from 8 to 16 years old @itgenik
8 – Filmustage: app which highlights breakdown elements in movie/game screenplays in seconds, changing the process from breakdown creation to breakdown discussion @filmustage
9 – DjinnSensor: IoT & cloud solution to manage indoor environment #djinnsensor
10 – Skinive: a Skincare AI-Assistant, based on the DL & CV technologies & medical experience which enables you to check your skin spots within 30 seconds. @skinive1
11 – FARBA: a professional apps design and prototyping tool #farbaapp
The pandemic has hammered the travel sector over the past 12 months so you’d be forgiven for feeling a bit of pre-COVID-19 déjà vu at this news: Business trip booking platform TravelPerk is announcing a $160M Series D.
The round, which is a mix of equity and debt funding, is led by London-based growth equity firm Greyhound Capital. Existing investors also participated (specifically: DST, Kinnevik, Target Global, Felix Capital, Spark Capital, Heartcore, LocalGlobe and Amplo).
No valuation is being disclosed, nor is the split between equity and debt. So it’s a bit more of a convoluted ‘vote of confidence’ vs TravelPerk’s pre-pandemic raises — as you’d expect given the locked down year we’ve all had.
The Series D means the 2015-founded Barcelona-based startup has pulled in a total of $294M to-date for its user-friendly retooling of business trip booking geared toward ‘global SMEs’, following a top-up of $60M (in 2019) to its 2018 $44M Series C — which itself fast-followed a $21M Series B that same year.
TravelPerk’s approach is akin to a consumerization play for the (non-enterprise end of) business trip booking, combining what it bills as “the world’s largest bookable travel inventory” — letting users compare, book and invoice trains, cars, flights, hotels and apartments from a range of providers including Kayak, Skyscanner, Expedia, Booking.com, and Airbnb — with tools for businesses to manage and report trips.
There’s the obligatory freemium tier for the smallest teams. It also offers 24/7 traveler support, a flexible booking option and an open API for custom integrations.
There was no funding announcement for TravelPerk in 2020, as investors took a break from the pandemic-struck sector. But earlier this year it told TechCrunch it had been starting to see interest picking up again, as of fall 2020. The closing of a Series D now — albeit debt and equity — suggests VCs are getting over the worst of their travel wobbles.
(Another sign on that front is the $155M Series E raise for U.S.-based TripActions, which closed in January on a $5BN valuation, as U.S. corporate travel lifted off from 2020’s lows.)
TravelPerk’s PR talks bullishly about momentum and using the funds to accelerate ‘global growth’, even as the coronavirus continues to hit parts of Europe and the U.S. — its two main markets — despite what are relatively advanced vaccination rollouts (especially the US) vs other parts of the world.
At the time of writing, COVID-19 is taking a particularly heavy toll on India, where the health system looks to be careening out of control in the face of a massive wave of infections. Parts of Latin America are also struggling. A third of the way through 2021 the pandemic looks far from done. And that makes for a still uncertain outlook for business travel over the coming months.
The typical pre-pandemic business trip is now a Zoom call, while former conference calls may have morphed into emails or group chatter in Slack. And there’s no immediate reason for that to change, given remote-working professionals have had a year to adjust to a richer mix of digital comms tools.
In 2021 it’s hard to imagine an overwhelming return for business travel — not least as plenty of offices remain shuttered. The contagion risk vs hard-to-quantify in-person networking rewards associated with non-essential business trips will surely see work trips remaining a hard sell for a lot of companies.
Still, TravelPerk and its investors are willing to bet that work trips will rebound — in time.
The plan is to be ready to meet what it expects will be a far more ‘moveable feast’ of business travel demand in the future.
“Travel is definitely coming back,” says CEO and co-founder, Avi Meir. “We can see that already with the numbers. In the US for instance, we can see a 70-75% recovery in domestic flights compared to the baseline before COVID-19.
“In Europe it’s a little less certain right now, as vaccine rollout isn’t as fast, but you can look to other parts of the world and with some degree of certainty predict what the European recovery will eventually look like by looking at those examples.”
“We expect the overall global recovery in travel to be uneven over the next year, with different countries reopening at different times, meaning constantly changing guidelines and restrictions,” he goes on. “We’ll continue living in a stage of uncertainty probably for the next 12 months or longer.
“We’ve realised from speaking to our customers that the demand for travel is there, people are eager to do these trips, but this period of uncertainty makes it difficult for them so we’re focused on finding solutions that can address that.”
TravelPerk didn’t sit on its hands last year as global business travel cratered. Instead, it focused on investing in product development, making bets on how it needs to tool up for the new climate of increased uncertainty — including by taking a number of steps toward making its business more resilient to the ravages of COVID-19.
Last October it launched an API — saying it wanted to help the wider travel industry access up to date info on coronavirus restrictions. It also picked up a risk management startup, called Albatross, back in July, to feed its own resilience efforts.
Another more recent acquisition was geared toward scaling its business in the U.S. — where domestic travel looks to be recovering faster than Europe. In January it announced it was buying YC-backed rival NexTravel — gaining a base in Chicago.
At the same time, it inked a partnership with Southwest Airlines to plug a key gap in its U.S. offering.
Meir avoids breaking out any revenue growth projections for the U.S. or Europe for this year or next, when we ask, which suggests he’s preparing for lean growth in the short term.
What he does say is that investors were impressed TravelPerk managed to grow its customer base 2x in 2020 (it now has 3,000+ businesses using its platform, including a bunch of familiar startup names) — and that it avoided making layoffs (when other travel businesses swung the axe).
“Last year we doubled the size of our customer-base and we now have over 3,000 businesses using the platform, including the likes of Wise, Farfetch, GetYourGuide and Monzo. The travel budget under management also increased by almost 100% over the last 12 months,” he tells TechCrunch.
“The reason we had such interest from investors with this round is because we had, given the context, a really good 2020. We doubled our customer base, avoided making layoffs, and most importantly we were there for our customers when they needed us, constantly investing in the product to enable safe travel during Covid.”
The thesis TravelPerk is now working to is that “flexibility, safety and sustainability” will be more important than ever for business travellers, per Meir.
“Flexibility, because travel still has a lot of friction due to the different restrictions and travel lockdowns mean that a trip could be cancelled at really short notice,” says Meir. “Safety, so that every traveler knows not only what specific health requirements are in place at their destination, but also that they will get updates in real time if anything changes. Sustainability, because in this period businesses have been taking stock and realising that we all have to do more in terms of our environmental impact — and of course travel is a big part of this.”
“We have worked hard to respond quickly to these requirements,” he continues. “We updated our product and product roadmap to better match these new needs. Our flexible booking tool FlexiPerk [which TravelPerk happened to launch pre-pandemic, in summer 2019] guarantees refunds on cancelled trips at short notice; our risk-management API TravelSafe keeps travellers updated in real time on local health guidelines and restrictions; and GreenPerk, our sustainability tool, directly reduces carbon emissions through initiatives run by our partner Atmosfair.”
Sustainability and business travel aren’t a natural pairing, however. Certainly not for air travel — where environmental groups accuse carbon offsetting schemes of boiling down to ‘greenwashing’ when what’s really needed to achieve a reduction in CO2e emissions is for people to take fewer flights.
TravelPerk launched its GreenPerk offsetting scheme in February 2020, letting customers pay a fee per carbon tonne to cover its guesstimate of the total emissions toll their trip will generate. But it’s only been applied to 10% of its business volume so far.
With 90% not even being offset, you hardly need to be Greta Thunberg to call that the opposite of ‘sustainable’.
Still, Meir says he expects the offset percentage to “grow rapidly”. “We intend to use this funding to develop GreenPerk even further,” he says, adding: “We want to be the standard bearer for the industry in terms of sustainable business travel.”
However when asked whether TravelPerk might seek to advance sustainability by supporting digital replacement itself (such as by being able to offer its users videoconferencing as an alternative to flying) he declines to comment, saying: “We don’t have anything to share yet on how we’ll advance that goal [sustainability] right now, but we’re working on some exciting ideas!”
Coming up with creative ways to reduce the need for business travel certainly doesn’t feature in TravelPerk’s near term vision.
Meir predicts a “full comeback” for business travel — arguing that “the meetings that matter happen in person” — while conceding that the travel industry will nonetheless be very different. (Hence its goal of “building the products for that [more flexible] future”.)
“We expect to double down on growth in the U.S. and Europe and that includes making key hires across all roles, especially in our hubs in Chicago, London, and Barcelona,” he says, adding that it expects the team to grow “rapidly” in the next 12-24 months (without putting any numbers on the planned hires).
TravelPerk will also continue to eye acquisition targets, per Meir. “Following our first two acquisitions, of Albatross and NexTravel, this funding round will also help us to continue being aggressive in our growth strategy. We aim to complete more acquisitions this year,” he says on that.
“Whilst many other providers have been in hibernation over the past year, we’ve been aggressive, continuing to update our product and growing our customer base, and we think that gives us a great foundation for growth in 2021 and beyond,” he adds.
Commenting on the Series D in a statement, Pogos Saiadian, investor at Greyhound Capital, said: “There is no doubt that from 2021 onwards the average business trip will look very different to how it did in 2019. We are confident that business travel will recover and thrive in the years ahead. We also believe that people will, more than ever before, need a platform like TravelPerk that has deep inventory, excellent ‘seven-star’ customer service, provides a great traveler experience and integrates with the broader tech-stack.
“We believe that this is a huge long-term opportunity, and as customers ourselves, we see first-hand the tremendous value that TravelPerk provides across organizations, from finance to admin and the travellers themselves. The fact the company is beating growth expectations already for this year further supports our belief that TravelPerk is a true market leader, and we are delighted to be supporting the next stage of the company’s growth with this investment.”
The European Parliament approved a new law on terrorist content takedowns yesterday, paving the way for one-hour removals to become the legal standard across the EU.
The regulation “addressing the dissemination of terrorist content online” will come into force shortly after publication in the EU’s Official Journal — and start applying 12 months after that.
The incoming regime means providers serving users in the region must act on terrorist content removal notices from Member State authorities within one hour of receipt, or else provide an explanation why they have been unable to do so.
There are exceptions for educational, research, artistic and journalistic work — with lawmakers aiming to target terrorism propaganda being spread on online platforms like social media sites.
The types of content they want speedily removed under this regime includes material that incites, solicits or contributes to terrorist offences; provides instructions for such offences; or solicits people to participate in a terrorist group.
Material posted online that provides guidance on how to make and use explosives, firearms or other weapons for terrorist purposes is also in scope.
However concerns have been raised over the impact on online freedom of expression — including if platforms use content filters to shrink their risk, given the tight turnaround times required for removals.
The law does not put a general obligation on platforms to monitor or filter content but it does push service providers to prevent the spread of proscribed content — saying they must take steps to prevent propagation.
It is left up to service providers how exactly they do that, and while there’s no legal obligation to use automated tools it seems likely filters will be what larger providers reach for, with the risk of unjustified, speech chilling takedowns fast-following.
Another concern is how exactly terrorist content is being defined under the law — with civil rights groups warning that authoritarian governments within Europe might seek to use it to go after critics based elsewhere in the region.
The law does include transparency obligations — meaning providers must publicly report information about content identification and takedown actions annually.
On the sanctions side, Member States are responsible for adopting rules on penalties but the regulation sets a top level of fines for repeatedly failing to comply with provisions at up to 4% of global annual turnover.
EU lawmakers proposed the new rules back in 2018 when concern was riding high over the spread of ISIS content online.
Platforms were pressed to abide by an informal one-hour takedown rule in March of the same year. But within months the Commission came with a more expansive proposal for a regulation aimed at “preventing the dissemination of terrorist content online”.
Negotiations over the proposal have seen MEPs and Member States (via the Council) tweaking provisions — with the former, for example, pushing for a provision that requires competent authority to contact companies that have never received a removal order a little in advance of issuing the first order to remove content — to provide them with information on procedures and deadlines — so they’re not caught entirely on the hop.
The impact on smaller content providers has continued to be a concern for critics, though.
The Council adopted its final position in March. The approval by the Parliament yesterday concludes the co-legislative process.
Commenting in a statement, MEP Patryk JAKI, the rapporteur for the legislation, said: “Terrorists recruit, share propaganda and coordinate attacks on the internet. Today we have established effective mechanisms allowing member states to remove terrorist content within a maximum of one hour all around the European Union. I strongly believe that what we achieved is a good outcome, which balances security and freedom of speech and expression on the internet, protects legal content and access to information for every citizen in the EU, while fighting terrorism through cooperation and trust between states.”