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Oyo is ready to explore the public markets. The eight-year-old Indian budget hotel giant has filed the paperworks with the local market regulator for an initial public offering, in which it is seeking to raise about $1.16 billion.

The Gurgaon-headquartered startup is seeking to raise about $940 million through sale of new shares, while the rest is set aside for pre-IPO and secondary transactions (sale of existing investors’ shares).

While the company — which counts SoftBank, Airbnb, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital India, and Microsoft among its investors and was most recently valyed at $9.6 billion — has not offered a ton of details about what it is looking for from the retail investors, here’s what we know: as we reported earlier this week, Oyo is seeking a valuation of over $12 billion in the IPO. And the startup’s young founder — Ritesh Agarwal — doesn’t plan to sell his shares in the public offering.

The filing today marks a major turnaround for Oyo, which grew too ambitiously in international markets in recent years but corrected course by hitting brakes on some of those efforts.

Much like every other hospitality and travel firm, Oyo was also severely disrupted by the pandemic. At one point, the startup reported that its business was down by up to 60% as several nations enforced lockdowns as they scrambled to contain the spread of the virus.

But it has been showing signs of fast recovery in recent weeks as some of its key markets opened up in recent quarters. The startup said in the filing today that four markets — India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Europe — account for about 90% of its overall revenue.

Oyo has also improved its finances and streamlined its relationship with hotels. The startup today doesn’t own any hotel of its own and instead works with over 150,000 partners and helps them operate hotels, resorts, and homes. It doesn’t promise any minimum guarantees to those partners.

The story of Oyo — in which currently SoftBank has over 45% ownership — starts with Agarwal, who left his rural town in search of a better education in Rajasthan. He often visited his friends in Delhi and stayed at their houses or rented cheap hotels. That’s when Agarwal, then in his late teens and a recent college dropout, spotted a budget hotel that was struggling to fill its rooms each night.

Agarwal then, he has said in the past conversations, convinced the hotelier to broker a deal to let him renovate the hotel and started marketing it to businesses in exchange for a cut of future commissions.

That deal immediately proved to be a success, which then propelled Agarwal to explore broadening his offering — now using technology — to focus on what were the neglected segments of the market.

That’s the beginning of Oyo, which immediately found success and soon enough attracted the attention of a fellowship run by the foundation of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

Oyo first assumed the market leading position and then started to expand — beginning with Southeast Asia, Europe, China, and the U.S., to name a few markets. Its aggressive expansion bet has had a mixed success rate. It’s doing well in Europe and Southeast Asia, but making inroads in China and North America have proven to be more difficult than the startup likely assumed.

At the height of that expansion, Agarwal, 27, invested $700 million into the startup. That year, he announced that he was planning to spend $2 billion through an entity called RA Hospitality Holdings to raise his stake in Oyo to 30%, from 10% prior to the $700 million investment.

Oyo said in the filing that its app has been downloaded more than 100 million times.

Catherine Shu contributed to this story.

TL;DR: A lifetime subscription to the ElevenSight Remote Engagement Platform is on sale for £26.05 as of Oct. 1, saving you 96% on list price.

If you’ve had it up to here (raises arm upward) with Zoom, but need a simple way to connect with clients, customers, and coworkers, look no further than the ElevenSight Remote Engagement Platform.

While created out of pandemic frustration, ElevenSight is more than just a way to host meetings and conferences virtually. It’s an award-winning browser-based and mobile one-click video, audio, chat, web conferencing solution. So, yes, it can be used for video-chatting your coworkers and collaborating on ideas virtually. But it can also be used to deliver omnichannel customer experiences, host one-on-one virtual interactions, or even let customers step into the showroom from afar with a one-click video call. Ultimately, it serves as a way for entrepreneurs and small businesses of all kinds to engage, transact, and increase sales, as well as improve customer satisfaction.

Users simply must create their own personal e-line, which is basically like a personal email address, and it becomes an encrypted link that they can share with anyone. When a customer or client clicks on the link, it’ll take them directly into a video or audio call with you. They won’t need to download an app to use it or jump through hoops for connections. It’s instantaneous and easy to use, even for the least tech-savvy folks among us.

Another cool feature of ElevenSight is the ability to add a super-button to any website. This super-button integrates with your favourite CRMs, helps you increase lead conversions, track lead sources, track the number of calls received, and ultimately get a better look at overall engagement for you and your brand.

These are only a few of the perks that have earned ElevenSight a TiEcon 2021 award, as well as 5 out of 5 stars on G2. You’ll have to sign up for yourself to reap the rest of the benefits.

For a limited time, you can sign up for a lifetime subscription to ElevenSight’s Starter Plan, which includes one-user access to an e-line address, a personal meeting room address, three-way calling, screen sharing, unlimited call time, and more, for just £26.05.

Credit: ElevenSight

Save 96% on the ElevenSight Remote Engagement Platform

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£26.05 from the Mashable Shop

TL;DR: A lifetime subscription to the Writesonic Starter Plan is on sale for £51.77 as of Oct. 1, saving you 98% on list price.

Let’s face it. Not everyone was born to be a writer. And if you’re one of the many who can’t arrange words into eloquent segments, you’ve likely already made your peace with it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean you’re free of all writing forever. In fact, if you run a business of any shape or size, you’re going to need a wordsmith to give your brand a fighting chance.

Along with visual content and SEO, written content is essential to most business marketing strategies. But when funds are tight, the luxury of an on-staff content writer is sometimes not something you can afford. That’s where artificial intelligence saves the day (as usual). With Writesonic, the AI-powered tool that helps you write copy effortlessly, you can create high-performing ads, landing pages, descriptions, blog posts, and more in just seconds without breaking the bank.

Rated 4.9 out of 5 stars on AppSumo, Writesonic has the power to boost your business without you lifting a finger. Well, you’ll actually have to click a few buttons, but it’s still a major energy and time-saver. You’ll select from a collection of copy templates depending on what you need, including landing pages, ads, and more. Then, simply enter a short description (just one or two lines) of your product or service as input, hit generate, and watch as a dozen high-converting copy variants are formed in front of your eyes. If you want to add a few things in after the fact, feel free to edit the results. Then just copy, share, and launch your AI-written copy. 

Writesonic is powered by OpenAi, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research lab, and their revolutionary Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 technology. Consider it the brains of the operation. It uses deep learning to scour the web and figure out what type of content performs well and how to sound like a human, thus delivering only the best for you and your brand.

For a limited time, you can grab a lifetime subscription to this game-changing tool for only £51.77.

Talk about a roller coaster ride.

Zoom, the video conferencing company that became everyone’s primary means of communication around work during the pandemic, will no longer be acquiring Five9, a maker of cloud-based customer-service software. Though the all-stock deal, announced in July, was expected to enable Zoom to tap into the lucrative contact center market, a few major hiccups along the way seemingly led to today’s decision.

First, Zoom’s shares, which moved in nearly a straight line toward the sky over the last couple of years, have more recently come under pressure, so the deal for Five9, which was valued at $14.7 billion in July, would have been considerably less today. (On the day that the deal was announced, Zoom’s shares were trading at around $360 each; they’re now trading at closer to $260 per share.)

It certainly didn’t help matters that, last week, Zoom disclosed that a U.S. Justice Department-led panel has been investigating the tie-up over concerns that it might create national security risks given Zoom’s ties to China.

Founder Eric Yuan is a naturalized American citizen who was born in China and moved to the U.S. as a 27-year-old in 1997. (Several years ago, we talked with Yuan about overcoming numerous hurdles to do this.) Zoom also said last year that it had mistakenly routed some meetings through servers in China and that it shut down the account of an activist who was using the platform to commemorate China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown. Afterward, the company, which has said previously that a sizable part of its development team is in China (as is the case with many multinational companies), announced it would not permit requests from the Chinese government to impact anyone outside of mainland China.

Still, the figurative nail the coffin might have been a recommendation two weeks ago by the proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Service that Five9 shareholders vote against the acquisition, owing to its concerns about Zoom’s slowing growth.

That advice appears to have been heeded, with Five9 today issuing a news release that the merger plan had been “terminated by mutual agreement” between the two companies. It was also expected, evidently. As news broke that the deal was off, shares of both Zoom and Five9 barely budged.

When someone in the U.S. is killed by a police officer, there's no guarantee that their death will be recorded as such.

This reality is no surprise to the activists, many of them Black, Latino, and Indigenous, who've said for years that their loved ones, friends, and neighbors are killed by police officers yet officials don't accurately report their cause of death. Instead, the fatality might be attributed to causes like heart disease or sickle cell trait. Sometimes coroners or medical examiners are embedded in police departments and may be under pressure to list a cause other than police violence. In other cases, they fail to properly cite the cause of death because of poor standards or training.

A new study published in the Lancet illustrates the vast disparity between the federal government tally of police killings and what people see happening in their own communities. The researchers estimate that between 1980 and 2018, more than 55 percent of these incidents, or 17,100 deaths, were misclassified or unreported in official statistics. They also found that Black Americans disproportionately experienced fatal police violence. They were 3.5 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than white Americans.

The study was led by researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). The research team took figures from the National Vital Statistics System, which tracks every death certificate in the U.S., and compared them to estimates of police violence generated by the non-governmental open-source databases Fatal Encounters, Mapping Police Violence, and The Counted. Those projects have endeavored to track police killings in all 50 states through public records requests and media reports, and past research has demonstrated that such open-source databases can be highly accurate.

The study's authors concluded that the U.S. must replace "militarised policing with evidenced-based support for communities," prioritize the public's safety, and "value Black lives."

"We think the U.S. should really be investing in solutions to police violence that are led by Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities," Eve Wool, a co-lead author of the study and a research manager at IHME, said in an interview.

The study is one of a few recent efforts to quantify the undercounting of police killings. In 2017, Harvard researchers compared data from Fatal Encounters to National Vital Statistics System figures and similarly found that the government failed to record more than half of police killings in 2015. Misclassification rates were particularly high for Black people, those living in poor counties, victims killed by means other than a firearm, and youth ages 18 and younger.

Social epidemiologist Justin M. Feldman, lead author of the 2017 study and a Health and Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, peer reviewed the Lancet study prior to its publication and told Mashable that it provides a persuasive estimate of undercounted deaths.

The research adds to his findings by projecting the disparity over the course of decades, as opposed to a single year, and by estimating deaths by race and ethnicity at the state level. During the time period studied, the five states with the highest underreporting rates were Oklahoma, Wyoming, Alabama, Louisiana, and Nebraska. States with the lowest rates were Maryland, Utah, New Mexico, Massachusetts, and Oregon.

Feldman described the decades-long estimate of uncounted deaths as a "best guess." Since the open-source databases collectively reflect deaths that happened between 2000 and 2019, the researchers produced a historical estimate for fatalities going back as far as 1980 by using a statistical regression to compare those figures with government data.

Their finding — that 17,100 out of 30,800 deaths were unreported or misclassified — rests on the assumption that the rate of underreporting remained stable over time.

Feldman noted that it's likely the study understated the extent of the problem given that coroners and medical examiners may have omitted or misclassified far more deaths decades ago compared to recent years, when there's been increasingly more pressure from the public as well as health departments to accurately account for deaths caused by police violence.

The findings point to the need for policy solutions that improve accurate reporting of police killings and prevent those deaths in the first place, Feldman said.

"We still, in 2021, don't have good government-run systems tracking police killings," he said.

Feldman suggested that death certificates in the U.S. could include a checkbox where a coroner or medical examiner would indicate whether the person died during an encounter with the police or while in their custody. Checking the box wouldn't mean police caused the death, but could trigger further review by government officials.

Feldman said that during the Obama administration, a Justice Department initiative used artificial intelligence to trawl the web for media reports related to deaths that happened in police custody and then surveyed local officials to learn more about what happened. The program appears to have languished during the Trump administration, but Feldman said it should be revived. He also noted that the federal agency can withhold a portion of government grants from police departments if they don't report deaths in custody.

Karin D. Martin, an assistant professor at University of Washington's Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy & Governance who has studied policy solutions for police violence, said the latest research confirms what's generally known about undercounted deaths and how Black Americans are disproportionately killed by officers. (Martin wasn't involved in the research and has no affiliation with the IHME.)

Martin says that preventing police killings requires a deep understanding of how widespread firearm availability and possession in the U.S. creates a culture in which law enforcement may perceive any interaction with the public as potentially life-threatening, and may react violently as a result. It also means looking at issues like why communities are over- or under-policed, why the baseline suspicion of people in some communities is so high, and how rules set by police departments, like whether officers can shoot a suspect fleeing a non-violent crime or whether they can engage in high-speed chases, can contribute to police killings.

"I think it's a very complex problem, and that it needs to account for both the environment that law enforcement officers are encountering, and for the history of policing in this country, and the racial issues that have plagued this country forever," said Martin.

Foxconn will build electric vehicles for Lordstown Motors as well as its other partner Fisker Inc. at a former GM factory in Ohio, under an agreement announced Thursday.

Lordstown Motors, the beleaguered electric vehicle company that became publicly traded via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, said Thursday it reached a nonbinding agreement with Foxconn to sell its 6.2-million-square-foot factory. Lordstown purchased the factory in 2019 from General Motors.

Under the agreement, which has yet to close, Foxconn will pay $230 million for the facility. The deal excludes certain assets such as Lordstown’s hub motor assembly line, battery module and packing line assets and certain intellectual property rights. Foxconn will also buy $50 million of Lordstown common stock.

The companies said they will negotiate a contract manufacturing agreement for Foxconn to assemble Lordstown’s Endurance full-size pickup truck at the facility. Reaching a contract manufacturing agreement is a condition to closing the facility purchase. The parties have agreed to explore licensing arrangements for additional pickup truck programs.

The deal comes at a critical moment for Lordstown Motors, a cash-strapped startup turned SPAC that had a string of missteps earlier this year. In August, the company hired Daniel A. Ninivaggi, a longtime automotive executive and former head of Carl C. Icahn’s holding company, as CEO and a board member. The appointment came after months of tumult at the company, including the resignation of its founder and CEO Steve Burns. CFO Julio Rodriguez resigned following a disappointing first-quarter earnings report that revealed the company was consuming more capital than expected and unable to reach previously forecasted production numbers for its electric Endurance pickup truck.

The goal of the partnership, the companies said in its announcement, is to present both Lordstown Motors and Foxconn with increased market opportunities in scalable electric vehicle production in North America. That includes Foxconn’s existing partnership with EV company Fisker Inc. (Lordstown and Fisker are separate companies and have no connection.)

In May, Fisker signed an agreement with Foxconn to co-develop and manufacture a new electric vehicle under a program called Project PEAR. Production on the Project PEAR car, which stands for Personal Electric Automotive Revolution, will be sold under the Fisker brand name in North America, Europe, China and India. Pre-production is expected tp begin in the U.S. by the end of 2023 and will then ramp up into the following year, Fisker told TechCrunch in an an August interview.

Fisker didn’t reveal the U.S. manufacturing location. The final decision would be Foxconn’s, Fisker noted at the time.

Fisker issued a statement Thursday welcoming the news from Foxconn.

“Achieving key program objectives such as time to market, access to a well-developed supplier ecosystem and overall cost targets were all important factors in the decision to locate manufacturing in Ohio,” Henrik Fisker said in an emailed statement. “Since signing the agreement with Foxconn earlier this year, we have been working together intensively on all aspects of Project PEAR including design, engineering, supply chain and manufacturing. Fisker’s commitment to volume manufacturing in the United States takes another important step forward today with the signing of this agreement.”

Fisker also has another vehicle program in the works with a different contract manufacturer. The Fisker Ocean SUV will be assembled by automotive contract manufacturer Magna Steyr in Europe. The start of production is still on track to begin in November 2022, the company reiterated in its second-quarter earnings call. Deliveries will begin in Europe and the United States in late 2022, with a plan to reach production capacity of more than 5,000 vehicles per month during 2023. Deliveries to customers in China are also expected to begin in 2023.

Apple, Sony, Google, Zoom, PayPal and several other tech companies as well as scores of banks have cautioned customers and partners in India to expect a surge in declined transactions as the world’s second-largest internet market’s central bank enforces a new directive for the way recurring payments are processed in the country.

The Reserve Bank of India’s directive, which goes into effect on Friday, requires banks, financial institutions and payment gateways to obtain additional approval for auto-renewables transactions worth over 5,000 Indian rupees ($67) from users by conducting notifications, e-mandates and Additional Factors of Authentication (AFA). The directive impacts all such transactions for debit cards as well as credit cards.

The directive, which was first unveiled in 2019, was scheduled to go into effect in April this year but was extended to September 30 after banks and other players said they were not fully prepared to comply.

India’s central bank was not amused by the way the industry handled its directive, saying in March that “any further delay in ensuring complete adherence to the framework beyond the extended timeline will attract stringent supervisory action.”

The Reserve Bank of India said in the original circular in 2019, that the framework was designed to serve as “a risk mitigant and customer facilitation measure,” adding that the issuer processing such transactions “shall send a pre-transaction notification to the customer, at least 24 hours prior to the actual charge by SMS or email, as per the customer’s preferences.”

Several companies have reminded their customers and in some cases, other business partners, about the new directive.

On Wednesday, Apple reminded developers that due to the new directive, “some transactions that don’t meet these requirements will be declined by banks or card issuers.”

HDFC, the largest private bank in India, has posted the following message on its website: “Please note: Effective 1st Oct 2021, the Bank will NOT approve any Standing Instruction (e-Mandate for processing of recurring payments) given at Merchant Website / App, on HDFC Bank Credit card/Debit Card, unless it is as per RBI compliant process.” Several banks, including HDFC, Axis and Kotak have said this week that they will be complying with the new rule.

In May this year, Google stopped on-boarding new recurring payment customers on its Play Store. The company told developers that free trials and introductory pricing should be removed from the apps until “the ecosystem challenges are addressed.” YouTube has moved to support only a prepaid — pay as you go — payments acceptance model for its Premium service.

In the same month, Amazon said it was “temporarily” discontinuing new member sign-ups for Amazon Prime free trial until further notice. There hasn’t been any change to that notice since.

The directive doesn’t impact recurring payments made through UPI, a payments infrastructure built by a coalition of retail banks. Which explains why some firms — including Netflix — have added support for auto-pay on UPI in the country.

But its impact is likely to be far-reaching. A fintech founder told TechCrunch that the payments provider they use to advertise on Facebook and Google had informed them that their automatic-payments won’t be processed starting later this week, citing the central bank’s rule. The founder requested anonymity to discuss what he deemed to be sensitive.

The new rule is the latest in a series of guidelines the Indian central bank has proposed or enforced in recent years. As Pratik Bhakta outlines in a post on The CapTable, the moves illustrate that though the regulator has encouraged the proliferation of fintech startups that are innovating for users, the RBI is closely watching whether any trend is attempting to hurt those consumers.

“Until legislation catches up, regulation has to adapt to ensure that the financial system absorbs digital innovation in a non-disruptive manner,” said RBI Deputy Governor T Rabi Sankar at a conference earlier this week. “We would only be able to reach a thriving and mature payments system if, over time, all stakeholders attach due importance to long-term improvements over short-term gains and internalise mature practices like informed consent and transparency of data usage.”

In emails to PlayStation Plus subscribers on Thursday, Sony said, “From 30 September 2021, you may see your credit and/or debit card payments for PlayStation Plus fail when trying to pay for a subscription on PlayStation Store.”

“This applies to both new subscription purchases and payment of recurring subscription fees. This means that any future PlayStation Plus subscription fees set up to be charged automatically may fail. If that happens, your PlayStation Plus subscription will come to an end.”

With global corporate-venture-capital-backed (CVC) funding reaching $79 billion across 2,099 deals in the first half of 2021, according to CB Insights, the chances are high that startups will find great opportunities with this growing investor set.

Entrepreneurs, however, are likely to discover that the investment process can be different for CVCs compared to private venture capital firms. While both types of investment firms tend to make decisions via an investment committee (IC), private VCs (inclusive of VCs with corporate backers that have an independent LPA structure) make up their ICs with firm partners and/or other venture-minded people.

But for CVCs investing off a corporate balance sheet, the IC can include corporate-minded people, such as the CEO or business unit leaders, who generally tend to be detached from the venture mindset and the requirements for operating in the VC world. As such, entrepreneurs will realize that a successful CVC investment decision tends to have different requirements compared to a private VC firm’s decision.

So what do entrepreneurs seeking investment need to know about this relatively new but powerful participant in the funding process? I’ll do my best to demystify the role of the CVC IC and shine a light on how entrepreneurs can navigate some of the hidden pitfalls while taking advantage of the opportunities.

The arbiters of investment

While private VCs immerse themselves into the venture ecosystem, CVCs live in the middle of two very different worlds and mindsets: corporate and venture. The CVC must engage the venture ecosystem to attract deal flow while also driving opportunities that can be of strategic interest to the corporation.

To do this well, a CVC ideally should have a well-defined mandate and IC purpose statement — to deem investment opportunities as strategic, for example. A business unit leader or CEO who spends about an hour on a monthly IC session is nearly completely immersed within the corporate mindset while making a decision related to the venture world.

The pandemic brought a new class of gamers online for the very first time, and the gaming space has never been larger or more diverse. At the same time, while esports saw some viewership gains in the past year, it still had to deal with plenty of hurdles tied to pandemic restrictions on physical events.

At TechCrunch Disrupt, we recently sat down with Evil Geniuses CEO Nicole LaPointe Jameson who helms one of the oldest esports leagues around as one of the youngest CEOs in her class. We chatted about the challenges facing the esports industry to keep pace with a rapidly diversifying audience and the opportunities for building a league that can adjust to those shifts faster than others.

Evil Geniuses (EG) was founded in 1999 and has had a winding journey since. LaPointe Jameson got involved when the Chicago-based firm she worked for, Peak6 Investments, took over EG as part of an Amazon divestment following its acquisition of Twitch, which had previously owned Evil Geniuses. The capital injection came at a time when esports leagues were finally catching the attention of institutional investors who saw big opportunity in the space.

Years later, that potential is still there, but the path toward mainstream embrace has been more circuitous than many had hoped. Hard viewership numbers are hard to come by but signal a subindustry that’s growing more slowly than the overall industry it sits inside. Still, LaPointe Jameson believes the industry has plenty of room left for rising players to innovate and create new opportunities for the whole industry.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for September 30, 2021. It’s the last day of the third quarter! Yes, that means earnings season is coming, along with a whole bunch of venture capital data — more on that in a moment — but more importantly, how the heck is it Q4? Already?

From the TechCrunch side of things, cheap tickets to our Sessions: SaaS event are going away in short order. So, snap ‘em up if you are coming. I’m hosting and even doing a panel or two. See you there! – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Facebook spins own research: The only way to get Facebook to release data and research concerning its own platform that hasn’t been filtered through its PR leviathan is to have it leak. Then Facebook may release it, but with a huge dose of its own spin. This, of course, is precisely the sort of transparency that the social giant is famous for and discussed before the Senate today.
• India’s startup market on pace for staggering Q3: An early look into India’s rapidly expanding venture capital market indicates that the country could set fresh records in Q3. The India-China rivalry that we see in so many spheres now has a startup angle as well. We have even more on India in our startup notes!
• Alloy raises $100M for anti-fraud work: While we often write about fintech startups that feature consumers as their customer base, not every financial technology upstart wants to sell to you or me. Alloy is an example of a B2B fintech startup, focused on automating “onboarding identity decisions” and “transaction monitoring,” TechCrunch reports. The company is now worth $1.35 billion.

Startups/VC

Before we start, TechCrunch’s Brian Heater gets 47 points for this headline.

As promised above, let’s start our startup work with two stories from India:

• Ola Electric raises $200M: The Bangalore-based startup, which builds electric scooters, is part of the larger Ola empire, a huge startup in the Indian market that provides ride-hailing services in the country. Ola’s Electric business is now worth $3 billion, up from $1 billion two years ago.
• And speaking of Indian startups now worth $3B, Tiger invests in OfBusiness: The $207 million Series F round doubles the value of OfBusiness in just two months, to a now tidy sum of $3 billion. What does the startup do? Per TechCrunch, it’s a “commerce startup that sells industrial goods and provides small businesses with credit.” Given how many SMBs there are in India, the startup shouldn’t run out of room to grow for some time.

Next up, venture capital news:

• BGV closes fourth fund worth $110M: Benhamou Global Ventures, better known as BGV, has a fourth fund to invest from now, and it’s 60% bigger than its preceding investment vehicle. So far BGV has invested in 28 companies and expects that number to rise by more than a dozen with its new fund.
• Counterpart Ventures also raises $110M, but for its first fund: What do you get when you take two former corporate venture capital investors and spin them out into their own fund? The backers of Counterpart are about to find out. The pair invested in Noom and DataRobot in their prior roles.

And, finally, a venture round rundown:

• Specialty chips are big business: That’s the wager behind Speedata, which just came out of stealth and announced $70 million in financial backing. The fabless company is building what it describes as “the world’s first dedicated processor for optimizing cloud-based database and analytic workloads.” Given how big the data center market is, and how much demand there is for data science work, the company could be taking on a simply enormous market.
• Voodoo buys Beach Bum: No, that’s not code or slang. That’s an accurate summation of my favorite bit of M&A in some time. Per our own Romain Dillet, French mobile gaming company Voodoo is buying Israel-based Beach Bum, which “specialize[s] in tabletop and card games.” You can see how the latter could feed the former with ideas and IP. As a data point about how big the casual gaming market is, Voodoo claims 300 million MAUs, per its website. Casual gaming is big.
• Forta raises $23M for smart contract security: As the blockchain economy (market?) grows, its security needs are expanding right along with it. And as smart contracts become an ever-more important function inside of the crypto world, their security needs are also rising. Forta, backed by a host of crypto-focused investors you have heard of, thinks that it has the solution to the matter.
• More capital for B2B gifting: On the back of corporate gifting startup Sendoso raising $100 million the other week, Reachdesk has raised $43 million for its own efforts in the space. Corp gifting brings together e-commerce, sales tooling and IRL objects into a neat package.
• And to close us off, Accel and Tiger team up to put $23M into Mexican B2B payments platform Higo. The company raised a far-smaller $3.3 million seed round just a half-year ago, making the Higo round another note on Mexico’s expanding startup market, a notably smaller deal from Tiger, and also, given how close it is landing to the company’s preceding investment, something of a very 2021 moment.

Scaling across Series A to C

It’s hard to find actionable, proven advice for scaling startups.

That’s because only 7% of the startups that raise seed rounds are able to grow their companies enough to land a Series C investment, according to a Dealroom study.

To create a framework for founders who are charting a path from $1 million to $25 million in annual revenue, Arthur Nobel, a principal at Knight Capital, conducted 47 interviews with founders and investors who’ve taken startups from Series A to C.

More than an overview, the article offers approaches for navigating the challenges of T2D3 (triple, triple, double, double, double) growth, specific hiring recommendations and other strategic insights.

As a bonus, the post also includes steps and visualizations you can use to create your own scaling roadmap.

“The takeaway is to initially figure out in which stage your company and departments are in and only do what is required for that stage,” writes Nobel.

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• New ad products from TikTok: Expect brands to have new ways to try to snag your attention on TikTok in the future, with the company working to bring “several new and interactive ad formats, ranging from clickable stickers to ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’-type ads to ‘super likes’ and more” to its social service. Whee.
• Lordstown may sell factory to Foxconn: Lordstown may sell a former GM plant it bought in 2019 to Foxconn. Lordstown is famous for not building EV trucks, while Foxconn is well known for not building factories in the United States. So, call it a perfect pairing.
• Facebook brings Messenger closer to Instagram: Cross-app messaging between Facebook and Instagram is getting easier with group conversations now possible. The decision from Facebook to make Instagram worse to prop up its core app is a business decision that I suspect we’ll be chattin’ about for decades to come.
• Spotify bolsters podcasting toolkit: Music streaming service Spotify would like its users to consume more podcasts, both to improve its gross-margin profile and to give it pricing power in the future thanks to exclusive content. To that end, the company is rolling out podcasting tools including polls and Q&A functionality to its global audience. The features were previously in beta.
  

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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TechCrunch wants to help startups find the right expert for their needs. To do this, we’re building a shortlist of the top growth marketers. We’ve received great recommendations for growth marketers in the startup industry since we launched our survey.

We’re excited to read more responses as they come in! Fill out the survey here.

Sinch, the Swedish company that competes with Twilio and others in the world of messaging and other communication APIs is making another big M&A play to build out its platform. It has acquired Pathwire, the cloud-based email provider behind Mailgun, Mailjet and Email on Acid. Sinch said it would pay $925 million in cash, with an additional 51 million new shares in Sinch. Based on yesterday’s closing price for Sinch (it’s traded on the Swedish stock exchange Nasdaq Stockhom and has a market cap of $13.7 billion), this works out to an enterprise value of $1.9 billion (SEK 16.6 billion).

The deal is very large in its own right, but also continues to set up Sinch as a (maybe “the”) key competitor to Twilio. The U.S.-based communications API giant acquired Sendgrid — another major email API provider that, like Pathwire’s products, is popular with developers — for $2 billion in 2018. That was an all-stock deal.

It also points to just how significant email is as a key part of the communications landscape, with services you may never even think twice about but use all the time — booking confirmations, receipts and password resets — falling under this umbrella. Quoting figures from Technavio, Sinch estimates the worldwide delivery market for email is worth $16 billion annually. This figure includes payments for email services, related investments and so on, and specifically “transactional email” (the area Pathwire covers) accounts for 60%+ of this amount.

It also underscores the massive consolidation at work at the moment in this sector. And even Pathwire itself is an example of that. Prior to this exit, it was owned by Thoma Bravo and was itself an acquirer of substantial businesses operating in the same general category of email-as-a-service, with its latest acquisition, of Email on Acid, announced as recently as June of this year. (Was that the spur that got Sinch to bite and buy Pathwire, I wonder?)

Collectively, Pathwire has shaped up to be a massive platform for those building email experiences within apps, marketing campaigns and other communications services. Today it counts more than 100,000 businesses as customers, which works out to millions of people using Mailjet, Mailgun and other Pathwire products (as well as the analytics and everything else that comes with this). That customer list includes Lyft, Kajabi, Microsoft, Iterable, and DHL.

Incident.io has raised a $4.7 million funding round led by Index Ventures and Point Nine. When your company is facing an outage or a data breach, Incident.io provides the right framework to communicate about the issue — both internally and externally — and make sure it is resolved as quickly as possible.

In addition to Index Ventures and Point Nine, several business angels are also investing in the company, such as Monzo founders Tom Blomfield and Jonas Templestein, Eileen Burbidge of Passion Capital, Renaud Visage, the co-founder of Eventbrite, as well as some clients, such as Hiroki Takeuchi of GoCardless and Vinay Hiremath of Loom.

Incident.io starts with a deep integration with Slack. Many teams have to deal with multiple tools. They track an outage on one service and then talk about it with the rest of the team in Slack. That seems inefficient and leads to information disparity.

With Incident.io, everything happens in Slack. Incidents are announced in a Slack channel so that people can get notified when something happens. People can create incidents with a /incident shortcut.

After that, Incident.io automatically creates a separate channel about the specific issue with the current date. Once again, you can interact with the service from the chat box in Slack or click on buttons. For instance, you can assign an issue to someone, add a summary, escalate the issue and more.

And because it’s a Slack channel, people can discuss the issue in that channel as well. This way, all information remains available in the same place. When you add people to an ongoing incident, they receive a summary from Incident.io so that they don’t have to ask unnecessary questions.

That information isn’t just restricted to Slack. Customers get their own Incident.io dashboard with a list of incidents. Each incident gets its own page with participants, a timeline of events. For instance, GitHub pull requests are automatically added to these timelines.

You can leverage this information to create a post-mortem post, share it with the team or your customers. Essentially, companies using Incident.io likely handle issues more gracefully and are more transparent about those issues. It should lead to a better experience for both team members and customers.

TL;DR: A lifetime subscription to the SelectTV Streaming App is on sale for £73.18 as of Sept. 30, saving you 79% on list price.

Prioritising streaming is basically the norm these days. Most streaming platforms come with a monthly fee, but the SelectTV Streaming App by FreeCast offers a huge library with a one-time payment.

SelectTV combines content from broadcast, cable, internet, on-demand, and streaming platforms on one unified interface. You’ll get access to more than 150 live channels, plus an extensive library of more than 500,000 movies and TV shows — and you can manage all of your other streaming subscriptions on the app. So, rather than having to open up streaming apps one by one, you’ll get everything in one place, bringing you that old-fashioned channel surfing feeling once more.

SelectTV works with iOS, Android, Mac, PC, Chromecast, FireTV, and all sorts of other smart devices. Plus, you can stream on multiple devices at the same time. Whether you’re looking for the latest episode of Grey’s Anatomy, a funny movie for the whole family to enjoy, or a live stream of the NHL playoffs, it’s all a click away with the SelectTV app.

Perhaps the best part, however, is that there are no monthly payments to worry about. Rather than paying a hefty fee each and every month, you can get plenty of TV shows and movies at your fingertips for a single fee of £73.18 with SelectTV by FreeCast. That's nearly 80% off the usual price and less than a single year's access to Netflix (though if you want access to all of Netflix's content, you will still need a Netflix subscription).

Credit: SelectTV

Save 79% on the SelectTV Streaming App

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Everyone likes getting something for free, right? Well, what if we told you we'd found five free music download sites that are completely above board and legit? The sites we're featuring all offer some kind of free audio downloads, giving you a risk-free way to discover new bands and artists.

If you like what you hear and can afford to do so, you can choose to pay to download more of their content in order to support them.

Here, in alphabetical order, are five free music download sites we love to browse.

1. Free Music Archive

Credit: screenshot: free music archive

Now owned by music platform and music licensing company Tribe of Noise, the Free Music Archive, or FMA, was founded in 2009 by radio station WFMU. The site offers free access to open licensed, original music.

The FMA states that tens of millions of visitors every month download music for personal use, and many share and remix music from FMA in videos, podcasts, films, games, apps, and even school projects.

You can browse the wealth of free-for-personal-use music by genre. These include blues, electronic, hip-hop, jazz, pop, rock, country, folk, classical, soul and R'n'B, as well as more niche categories such as spoken content, experimental audio, and old time/historic.

What we particularly like is that those genres are broken down into sub-genres. So, for example, electronic has jungle, techno, chill-out, trip-hop, and dubstep as sub-categories, among others.

You can also do keyword searches to find content. You can stream music on the site, and when you find a track you like, simply click on the download arrow. You can also add tracks to your own "mixes."

Credit: screenshot: free music archive

FMA users can "tip" an artist if they like what they hear, sending a donation directly to the artists' PayPal account.

2. Jamendo

Credit: screenshot: jamendo

Jamendo was founded in Luxembourg in 2004 and was the first platform to legally share music for free from any creator under Creative Commons licenses. Jamendo states it's "all about connecting musicians and music lovers from all over the world."

On Jamendo Music, you can enjoy a catalog of more than 500,000 tracks shared by 40,000 artists from more than 150 countries all over the world. You can stream all the music for free without signing in.

If you hear something you like and want to download it (for personal use only) you do need to sign in, but it's a quick and simple process. Once signed in, simply hit the "Free Download" button you'll see next to the "Play" button on the track's page. Liking, sharing, and adding the track to a playlist are all similarly simple things to click.

Credit: screenshot: jamendo

If you want to use Jamendo Music for new music discovery, we recommend browsing the site's "Hot Selections," playlists handpicked by Jamendo's music experts. You can also use Jamendo's "Explore" tab to browse by communities, playlists, and if you're keen to find The Next Big Thing, latest releases.

3. ReverbNation

Credit: screenshot: reverbnation

Since 2006, ReverbNation has offered an online streaming service for artists to promote their work and for fans to enjoy it. ReverbNation is primarily a music streaming service that gives users the ability to purchase music. The platform also allows artists to set different permissions for their content, and some do choose to offer free downloads.

If a track on ReverbNation is available to download, you'll see a small download icon next to the song's time duration. Simply click it to save it to your computer.

Credit: screenshot: reverbnation

Some artists and bands may require you to "Like" their page, share their page, or sign up for their mailing list, but if you're a fan of that track, it's not too much of an issue.

We like ReverbNation's very clean design and simple user interface. You can simply click "Play" on any of the featured collections to discover new music, hand-picked by ReverbNation's Curation Team.

You can use the sidebar to browse or see what’s new in your favorite genres. Any time you find something you like, you can add it to your library or share music with friends and to social networks.

4. SoundClick

Credit: screenshot: soundclick

The longest established service we're featuring, SoundClick is a true pioneer in online music. Founded in 1997 by twin brothers Tanju and Tolgar Canli, SoundClick's mission is "to work on the artists' behalf, to make their music easily available online."

SoundClick is a social music community with particularly robust social features. If you sign up, you get your own profile page with photo albums and video uploads. You can also create your own SoundClick stations.

You can stream and download music on the site. There are many, many tracks available to download for personal use in the MP3 format for free, but do be aware that some are only available for purchase.

Tracks that can be downloaded are easily identified by the download icon to the right of the screen.

Credit: screenshot: soundclick

Downloading is super quick and easy. You simply need to click the download button, and the download begins instantaneously.

5. SoundCloud

Credit: screenshot: soundcloud

Launched in 2008, SoundCloud claims to be the "world’s largest music and audio platform." SoundCloud lets people discover a wide selection of music from a very diverse creator community; music and audio creators use SoundCloud to share their content with a global audience so we get to enjoy great music, for free, online.

SoundCloud features music from all the genres you'd expect. It's super-simple to keyword search and find a track or SoundCloud playlist you like the look of. If you hear a song you particularly like, you can click through to see if it's available as a free download.

On the web, you can download tracks once you have signed in to your SoundCloud account by clicking on the download file button beneath the waveform.

Credit: screenshot: soundcloud

If you don't see a download file button, it means the user who uploaded it did not intend for it to be downloadable.

You can follow artists to see when they have new content. SoundCloud makes it easy to share music with friends and to social networks. Hitting the "Share" option gives you the ability to share the track to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, or send via email.

TL;DR: A three-year stackable subscription to PlayStation Plus is on sale for £87.82 as of Sept. 30, and includes a £15 store credit.

After unwrapping your shiny new PlayStation 5 and admiring its beauty, then gawking at the jaw-dropping visuals, you’ll quickly realise it’s missing something. In order to access online gameplay and everything else your new console has to offer, you’re going to need a subscription to PlayStation Plus. Consider it the golden ticket. 

For a limited time, you can score three years of PlayStation Plus for a total steal at just £87.82. With your subscription, you’ll get to enjoy online gameplay with friends and foes, exclusive discounts on new and classic games, plus two free games to keep each month. In September, subscribers got Predator: Hunting Grounds and HITMAN™ 2 as their free games, plus Overcooked! All You Can Eat as a bonus. The collection of free monthly games is epic and the library is always expanding. The membership essentially pays for itself in a single month.

As if all of those perks aren’t reason enough to subscribe, here’s another: Each member also gets 100GB of cloud storage to save game progress and pick up adventures on any other console with that game installed. Plus, you’ll get access to exclusive skins, cosmetics, and weapons for free-to-play games like Fortnite and Apex Legends. Members playing on a PS5 will even have access to expert help in a range of supported games.

The three years included in this subscription bundle are all individual stackable codes. So, if you’re feeling generous, you could keep one for yourself and give a year or two to friends so you can all play together. Or, you could keep all three for yourself because you deserve it after waiting this long to get a PS5. The choice is yours. 

Use the code PLAYSTATION2021 to knock the typical price tag down to just £87.82 for a limited time. Plus, enjoy a £15 credit that will be added back to your account within 10 days to use on other gaming essentials (or whatever else you want).

Credit: PlayStation

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Heyflow, a Hamburg, Germany-based startup touting ‘no code’ tools for easily building interactive “clickflows” to boost customer conversions, has bagged a $6 million seed. The round was led by Project A Ventures, with participation from Atlantic Labs and several unnamed angel investors.

Heyflow competes with a growing number of no code/low code tools which aim to simplify customer interactions using customizable templates and/or drag and drop interfaces that let non-techie easily users build conversational and/or graphical flows to gather info from visitors to a website or app.

Its pitch (and, indeed, that of many others’) is that interactive flows are a better conversion tool than more static calls to action.

Combine that with a drag and drop customer interaction flow builder and Heyflow’s nudge to its customers is there’s no excuses for not sporting a more engaging digital experience around user acquisition and onboarding.

There is no shortage of competition in this space, though. Competing approaches include the likes of Airkit (low code, template-based digital customer experience builder); Landbot and Intercom (customer service chatbots); and Typeform (less tedious forms), to name a few.

Heyflow says its special sauce is that it’s a true ‘no code’ play — which it argues makes it best suited to the target user-base of marketers, product managers and business owners while also allowing for engineers to built custom code atop its so-called ‘clickflows’. (“Unlike Airkit, we see this rather as an expansion into organizations and not as an entry,” it suggests.)

It also reckons chatbot interfaces — while having their place — are better suited to customer support rather than its target zone of customer conversion, not being “optimized for converting traffic into signups, leads and sales”, as it puts it.

While, on Heyflow vs Typeform, it suggests its product is more customizable — and also flags that it bakes in analytics and tracking, touting that as another detail which helps its customers build “truly differentiated experiences”.

The 2020-founded startup sells its SaaS as a subscription — not freemium but there is a free trial period of the basic version, which normally costs €33 per month (rising to €151 per month for a Pro Plus version).

The promise of being able to integrate these ‘engaging clickflows’ without needing to type a single line of code means Heyflow can and is (mostly) being used as a standalone solution, per the startup — which says that gives customers access to “more complex layout-ing functionality” (such as nested containers).

But the team confirmed it can also be integrated into a website by copying and pasting a few lines of code.

The founders are Dustin Jaacks (ex-Google) and Amir Bohnenkamp (previously Medwing, BCG Digital Ventures).

Since Heyflow soft-launched its product in January this year they say they’ve seen “rapid growth”, acquiring “hundreds” of paying customers — from small organizations to insurance companies in more than 15 countries.

The seed raise will go on supporting go-to-market and product development efforts, it adds.

“We were able to convert our first customers pre-product. So from day one, we are developing the product with our customers which means building and selling for us go hand in hand. The new funding will therefore be equally invested into product and growth following a vertical approach, starting with the industries that are currently driving most growth for us,” Heyflow tells TechCrunch, adding that the markets and sectors currently driving their growth are: Insurance, Financial Services, Recruiting, Marketing & Advertising (with use-cases including: Onboarding and Signup Flows; Lead Generation Flows; Customer Retention Flows).

Commenting on the seed round in a supporting statement, Dr. Anton Waitz, general partner at Project A, added: “No-code platforms are seeing very strong momentum, as they offer great opportunities for smaller companies without significant engineering capacity. Amir and Dustin are driven by their mission to build a highly intuitive drag and drop product that helps their users to better acquire, convert and onboard customers. Heyflow has seen enthusiastic first demand in the market – and we strongly believe it can become a clear leader in the space.”

A coalition of app-based delivery and ride-hail companies like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash recently filed a ballot proposition in Massachusetts to continue classifying gig economy workers as independent contractors, rather than employees. If the measure makes it to the November 2022 ballot and passes, drivers could end up earning as little as a quarter of the minimum wage, according to a University of California-Berkeley study published on Wednesday.

The UC Berkeley Labor Center researchers, Ken Jacobs and Michael Reich, identified multiple loopholes that would change the guaranteed pay from $18 per hour to $4.82 for a typical 15-hour week driver and $6.74 per hour for a typical 40-hour week driver receiving a health stipend. The MA Coalition for Independent Work, the group responsible for the initiative, claimed UC Berkeley was pushing “false and misleading information about the ballot question that are not only at odds with the facts, but don’t stand up to scrutiny when compared with the success of Prop 22 in California,” according to a statement released by the coalition.

The MA initiative, which was recently given the green light to start collecting signatures needed to get it on the ballot, is modeled after Proposition 22 in California. Prop 22 passed in November 2020, but in August a superior court judge ruled the law unconstitutional, a decision that will very likely be appealed.

As with Prop 22, the disagreement between advocates and opponents of the MA proposal comes down to the definition of “engaged time” and whether drivers have the right to earn pay outside of those hours. Engaged time is defined as the time when drivers are actively engaged in a gig, like when a delivery driver is driving to pick up food and drop it off. The proposed initiative would guarantee drivers an earnings floor equal to 120% of the MA minimum wage, which would be about $18 per hour in 2023 before customer tips, but only while drivers are actively engaged in a gig. It is this type of calculation that DoorDash drivers who recently protested outside the home of CEO Tony Xu said leads to inadequate pay.

“Much of the drivers’ time between paying rides is spent driving and cruising,” wrote Jacobs and Reich. “Drivers may be returning from a low demand drop off site to an area where they are more likely to pick up a ride, or they may be circling in downtown areas where there is no place to park.”

“Uber’s own data indicate that engaged time amounts to only 67% of the drivers’ actual working time,” the researchers continued. “The companies would not pay for the approximately 33 percent of the time that drivers are waiting between passengers or returning from trips to outlying areas. But such time is a necessary part of drivers’ work… Not paying for that time would be the equivalent of a fast-food restaurant or retail store paying the cashier only when a customer is at the counter. We have labor and employment laws precisely to protect workers from this kind of exploitation.”

Meanwhile, the coalition says drivers could have the app on while rejecting or ignoring dispatches, completing trips for other apps or just running errands, and essentially shouldn’t be paid for that time.

The proposed ballot question would also guarantee drivers at least $0.26 per mile to cover the cost of vehicle upkeep and gas, according to the coalition. Jacobs and Reich found that not only is this $0.30 less than the IRS reimbursement rate, but it also, again, only accounts for the time a driver is “active,” which means drivers wouldn’t be reimbursed for vehicle costs accrued in between rides. Using Uber’s studies, the researchers found 6.6 of the miles driven each hour incur costs that would not be reimbursed under the ballot proposal.

Also included in the coalition’s proposal are a series of new benefits including paid sick time, paid family and medical leave, occupational accident insurance and healthcare stipends for those who work at least 15 hours per week. In some cases, a company may require a driver to also submit proof of current enrollment in a qualifying health plan in order to be eligible for the stipend. Most drivers do spend an average of 15 hours per week on the app, say the researchers, but since a third of that time is spent unengaged, a driver would actually have to work 22. hours to be eligible for the stipend. Finding drivers who work those hours and already have insurance coverage would rule out the majority of drivers from qualifying for health stipends, according to Jacobs and Reich.

Finally, because independent contractors are required to pay both employer and employee shares of payroll taxes, drivers would end up having to pay up to 11.8% of their total income, another cost which app-based companies are not offsetting with the current language of their proposal.

“These numbers are completely ridiculous – I wouldn’t be doing this job if I wasn’t making well above minimum wage,” said Luis Ramos, a Lyft driver from Worcester, in a statement from the MA Coalition for Independent Work. “Every driver I know prefers this work because they make good money and they do it whenever they want for however long they want. That’s what we’re trying to protect with this ballot question.”

Massachusetts and California aren’t the only ones debating worker’s rights with app-based companies. In March, Uber lost a legal battle in the United Kingdom over similar driver classifications and had to reclassify drivers as employees, and earlier this month, Dutch courts ruled that Uber drivers are employees not freelancers.