For over six decades, the nonprofit has been active in the financial services sector.
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Airtel, India’s second-largest telco, is partnering with Google Cloud to develop and deliver cloud and GenAI solutions to Indian businesses.
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The logistics industry in Nigeria, like any informal sector, struggles with poor infrastructure and other inefficiencies, making it difficult for businesses — both large and small — to move and store goods.
Many startups have tackled middle-mile and last-mile delivery challenges, but one untapped area is providing an end-to-end fulfillment solution. Renda, a three-year-old startup, fills this gap by simplifying order fulfillment and retail distribution for businesses in Africa. It has secured a $1.9 million pre-seed round, money it will use to improve its offerings; to expand into more cities in Nigeria and Kenya, the two markets where it’s currently present; and grow its partnership network across these markets.
Ingressive Capital, a pan-African early-stage VC, led the round’s $1.3 million equity portion. Other participants included Techstars Toronto, Founders Factory Africa, Magic Fund, Golden Palm Investments, Reflect Ventures and Vastly Valuable Ventures. Additionally, Founders Factory Africa and SeedFi contributed $600,000 in debt funding.
The startup aggregates and provides access to end-to-end infrastructure that optimizes order fulfillment for businesses. Its solution allows them to access flexible storage, monitor and manage inventory, process and fulfill orders, manage deliveries and returns, and receive and reconcile cash on delivery in real time.
CEO Ope Onaboye, in a conversation with TechCrunch, explained that Renda uses an asset-light approach. Similar to companies like Flexport and ShipBob, Renda does not own its own assets. Instead, Renda partners with various providers in the chain — from warehousing and other storage companies through to those making deliveries on trucks and bikes and the companies needed to take payments since so many transactions are done in cash — allowing solutions tailored to each client’s needs without owning a fleet of assets.
According to Onaboye, this approach has helped Renda build an extensive partnership network enabling its clients to expand quickly across the country. The platform has over 300 warehousing and storage partners, more than 3,000 delivery assets, including trucks, vans and bikes, and 2,000+ cash collection partners.
“The beauty of Renda is that we do not own any assets. We don’t own any delivery or warehousing assets ourselves. Instead, we leverage existing resources across the country. We aggregate storage spaces and warehouses that may be underutilized and connect them with businesses needing storage solutions,” said the CEO, who founded the company with Bimbo Onaboye. “Similarly, we onboard delivery assets, including vans, trucks and bikes, that may be sitting idle and make them available to businesses for managing deliveries. Whether businesses want to handle their deliveries or entrust them to us, Renda provides the platform to streamline operations efficiently.”
Renda’s customer base has evolved since its launch in 2021. Initially serving small businesses, the logistics startup now serves e-commerce businesses, FMCG manufacturers, agriculture companies and manufacturers nationwide. Its current clientele includes OmniRetail, Jumia, M-KOPA and Dangote, highlighting the diverse range of businesses that use its solution for their logistics needs.
Prioritizing enterprise-level entities, typically higher-value clients that commit to contracts lasting 12 to 24 months over small businesses, has benefited Renda’s business. For instance, the startup, in addition to achieving profitability, saw its revenues grow 450% year-on-year, the CEO claims. “This is not something we did overnight because we had to build those relationships and infrastructure around it. But the good thing is that we’ve built a solid management and leadership team with experience from well-capitalized logistics and e-commerce startups,” he added.
Renda’s revenue model revolves around five key drivers: storage, fulfillment, vehicle booking, deliveries and cash collection. For storage, clients pay based on square meters or per year. Fulfillment services are charged per item processed; vehicle booking incurs a daily fee; deliveries are charged per item delivered, and cash collection fees are based on a percentage of the collected cash.
Logistics is inherently challenging, especially in Africa, due to its fragmented and informal nature. Businesses with logistical needs previously had to rely on informal warehousing or delivery agents before logistics platforms, most of which offered solutions in the middle or last mile, came along.
According to Onaboye, such businesses initially used these services separately but have realized they’re better off with a solution that offers fulfillment beyond the middle or last mile and integrates all aspects of their logistics operations over time. Haul247, Amitruck, and Leta are similar providers across Africa.
“Our goal is to simplify the process for businesses by providing a comprehensive platform to access all the services they need to expand across Nigeria and Africa without engaging multiple providers. It’s a challenging task, but once we establish a solid platform and master the aggregation model, scaling becomes much easier,” said the CEO, who noted that the complexity of building such a platform is also a moat for Renda.
The logistics platform has third-party teams that manage storage and fleet operations. They are responsible for the onboarding, verification, quality assurance, monitoring and evaluation processes of Renda’s storage and delivery partners. In addition, Onaboye draws from his background of owning a verification company that provides background check services to help with this process.
Once these checks are complete, Renda partners and drivers can manage their operations on dedicated apps and dashboards. The startup also provides apps for consumers and in-house admin purposes.
As the startup moves into the next phase of growth, it plans to introduce an embedded finance product for its partners, particularly drivers. This product will allow drivers to access loans weekly, which will be deducted from their payouts. Onaboye says this service provided on the app will address the immediate financial needs of drivers, such as vehicle repairs. According to the CEO, health insurance and fuel assistance are other services Renda has in the pipeline for its drivers. He also said the startup plans to use AI to automate its processes like helping partners save logistics costs and optimize routes.
The idea for Renda came about when Onaboye noticed the inventory and delivery challenges a friend faced when starting a business selling items from her house. Since its launch, the startup has helped over 500 businesses and reached more than 100,000 customers across 15 states in Nigeria. Renda, which claims to have processed more than 250,000 orders, expects its expansion into Kenya in late 2023 to serve as an entry into other markets across East Africa.
“Joining forces with Renda as an investor is a strategic move for us. Renda’s technology solution addresses a critical need in the African manufacturing and e-commerce ecosystems, offering seamless access to fulfillment infrastructure,” said Maya Horgan Famodu, founder and partner at Ingressive Capital. “We are particularly impressed by their track record of empowering businesses to thrive in this market and financials from the start of their business. With the current high inflation and skyrocketing prices for shipping and storage, there has never been a better time for Renda. We are doubling down our focus on marketplaces and solutions that promote commerce and strengthen African currencies by facilitating exports.”
Anthropic, one of the world’s best-funded generative AI startups with $7.6 billion in the bank, is launching a new paid plan aimed at enterprises, including those in highly regulated industries like healthcare, finance and legal, as well as a new iOS app.
Team, the enterprise plan, gives customers higher-priority access to Anthropic’s Claude 3 family of generative AI models plus additional admin and user management controls.
“Anthropic introduced the Team plan now in response to growing demand from enterprise customers who want to deploy Claude’s advanced AI capabilities across their organizations,” Scott White, product lead at Anthropic, told TechCrunch. “The Team plan is designed for businesses of all sizes and industries that want to give their employees access to Claude’s language understanding and generation capabilities in a controlled and trusted environment.”
The Team plan — which joins Anthropic’s individual premium plan, Pro — delivers “greater usage per user” compared to Pro, enabling users to “significantly increase” the number of chats that they can have with Claude. (We’ve asked Anthropic for figures.) Team customers get a 200,000-token (~150,000-word) context window as well as all the advantages of Pro, like early access to new features.
Image Credits: Anthropic
Context window, or context, refers to input data (e.g. text) that a model considers before generating output (e.g. more text). Models with small context windows tend to forget the content of even very recent conversations, while models with larger contexts avoid this pitfall — and, as an added benefit, better grasp the flow of data they take in.
Team also brings with it new toggles to control billing and user management. And in the coming weeks, it’ll gain collaboration features including citations to verify AI-generated claims (models including Anthropic’s tend to hallucinate), integrations with data repos like codebases and customer relationship management platforms (e.g. Salesforce) and — perhaps most intriguing to this writer — a canvas to work with team members on AI-generated docs and projects, Anthropic says.
In the nearer term, Team customers will be able to leverage tool use capabilities for Claude 3, which recently entered open beta. This allows users to equip Claude 3 with custom tools to perform a wider range of tasks, like getting a firm’s current stock price or the local weather report, similar to OpenAI’s GPTs.
“By enabling businesses to deeply integrate Claude into their collaborative workflows, the Team plan positions Anthropic to capture significant enterprise market share as more companies move from AI experimentation to full-scale deployment in pursuit of transformative business outcomes,” White said. “In 2023, customers rapidly experimented with AI, and now in 2024, the focus has shifted to identifying and scaling applications that deliver concrete business value.”
Anthropic talks a big game, but it still might take a substantial effort on its part to get businesses on board.
According to a recent Gartner survey, 49% of companies said that it’s difficult to estimate and demonstrate the value of AI projects, making them a tough sell internally. A separate poll from McKinsey found that 66% of executives believe that generative AI is years away from generating substantive business results.
Image Credits: Anthropic
Yet corporate spending on generative AI is forecasted to be enormous. IDC expects that it’ll reach $15.1 billion in 2027, growing nearly eightfold from its total in 2023.
That’s probably generative AI vendors, most notably OpenAI, are ramping up their enterprise-focused efforts.
OpenAI recently said that it had more than 600,000 users signed up for the enterprise tier of its generative AI platform ChatGPT, ChatGPT Enterprise. And it’s introduced a slew of tools aimed at satisfying corporate compliance and governance requirements, like a new user interface to compare model performance and quality.
Anthropic is competitively pricing its Team plan: $30 per user per month billed monthly, with a minimum of five seats. OpenAI doesn’t publish the price of ChatGPT Enterprise, but users on Reddit report being quoted anywhere from $30 per user per month for 120 users to $60 per user per month for 250 users.
“Anthropic’s Team plan is competitive and affordable considering the value it offers organizations,” White said. “The per-user model is straightforward, allowing businesses to start small and expand gradually. This structure supports Anthropic’s growth and stability while enabling enterprises to strategically leverage AI.”
It undoubtedly helps that Anthropic’s launching Team from a position of strength.
Amazon in March completed its $4 billion investment in Anthropic (following a $2 billion Google investment), and the company is reportedly on track to generate more than $850 million in annualized revenue by the end of 2024 — a 70% increase from an earlier projection. Anthropic may see Team as its logical next path to expansion. But at least right now it seems Anthropic can afford to let Team grow organically as it attempts to convince holdout businesses its generative AI is better than the rest.
Anthropic’s other piece of news Wednesday is that it’s launching an iOS app. Given that the company’s conspicuously been hiring iOS engineers over the past few months, this comes as no great surprise.
The iOS app provides access to Claude 3, including free access as well as upgraded Pro and Team access. It syncs with Anthropic’s client on the web, and it taps Claude 3’s vision capabilities to offer real-time analysis for uploaded and saved images. For example, users can upload a screenshot of charts from a presentation and ask Claude to summarize them.
Image Credits: Anthropic
“By offering the same functionality as the web version, including chat history syncing and photo upload capabilities, the iOS app aims to make Claude a convenient and integrated part of users’ daily lives, both for personal and professional use,” White said. “It complements the web interface and API offerings, providing another avenue for users to engage with the AI assistant. As we continue to develop and refine our technologies, we’ll continue to explore new ways to deliver value to users across various platforms and use cases, including mobile app development and functionality.”
Yelp announced a new AI-powered chatbot today for consumers that helps them connect with relevant businesses for their tasks. The company joins a long list of organizations leaning into AI chatbots as an assistive medium.
The company is rolling out the AI assistant on its iOS app under the “Projects” tab with plans to expand to Android later this year. Yelp said that the chatbot uses OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs) along with its own data to ask users queries about their problems and connect them with relevant professionals for the job.
Rather than using a traditional search box to look for different kinds of professionals for the problem, you can describe the issue directly into the chat interface.
The bot asks follow-up questions to gather more information along with your zip code to create a project. You will be able to see messages from professionals for their projects once the bot sends them information. You can respond to those conversations with a custom reply or use the app’s quick reply feature.
Image Credits: Yelp
The company is also introducing a new “Project Ideas” section to nudge you to start a new project that might involve you searching for services on Yelp. Some of the current suggestions include maintaining your home, installing new lighting in your home, and upgrading your outdoor space. Later in the summer, the company will make this feature more personalized with recommendations and checklists.
“AI enables us to transform the way people discover and connect with local businesses,” Craig Saldanha, Yelp’s chief product officer, said in a statement.
“Yelp Assistant is a game-changer for hiring service providers, alleviating friction for consumers in finding the right pro for their needs while providing pros with the information they need to evaluate and win jobs,” he added.
The company is not immediately thinking about leveraging AI chatbot experience for restaurant discovery.
“We’re working to understand how this type of natural language search could be used more frequently on our platform in the future to evaluate how best to meet this consumer need, including searching for restaurants & services,” Akhil Kuduvalli Ramesh, SVP of product at the company, told TechCrunch over email.
Along with making the bot available for consumers, the company is also launching an API so other sites can include an AI-powered bot for business discovery. Users visiting this third-party website can ask the chatbot for suggestions like “A vegan brunch place that is open this Saturday at 9 am” or “Suggest a good workout studio in Miami with a swimming pool.”
Yelp said that the bot will return relevant suggestions with information including Yelp ratings, price details, review highlights, photos, and AI-powered business summaries.
Image Credits: Yelp
Businesses can test out the new Fusion API with 30-day access. Currently, the API supports single-turn queries and responses, with support for multi-turn chat coming later this year.
Yelp already had a Fusion API for businesses like Amazon, Apple, Ford, and Mailchimp to integrate Yelp content into their products. The new release brings a conversational chatbot experience into the picture.
Yelp is also revamping its guest manager experience for more than 11,000 restaurants on its network. The new Guest Manager design allows restaurant operators to see cover flow for better staff utilization, look at real-time table status, and add notes for shift managers.
For customers, Yelp is rolling out waitlist updates with more accurate waiting times and text message updates for place-in-line status. Soon, the company will send texts to users with recommendations for dishes before they take their seats.
Image Credits: Yelp
The company is also revamping the Yelp Kiosk design so users can easily join the waitlist and check themselves into the restaurant.
In 2023, Yelp clocked a net revenue of $1.34 billion with a 12% growth year-on-year. After a $3 million decline in 2022, the company posted a 173% jump in net income by registering $99 million in profits. While Yelp stock has gained over 35% year-on-year, it is down roughly 12% year-to-date.
It’s not everyday that you get to sharpen your skills with Elon Musk as your boss. It was while sourcing manufacturing equipment for Tesla factories that Will Drewery drew inspiration for Diagon, a startup that helps manufacturers procure equipment.
“Big projects companies are building now, like battery manufacturing, need very specific types of process equipment and automation equipment to build a factory and automate,” co-founder and CEO Drewery told TechCrunch. “I’d been hearing and seeing the trends toward nearshoring and reshoring of American manufacturing. As a supply chain manager, I’ve been taking a critical eye at how that’s actually going to happen. People intuitively understand that they want to source batteries for the cars they’re making in the U.S. or near the U.S., but they have no idea if that capacity doesn’t exist anywhere, then there’s no way you’re going to find a qualified supplier or have the right infrastructure to make those products.”
In January 2023, he started Diagon with former Snackpass vice president of engineering Shri Muthu so that companies of all sizes could tap into his expertise of having sourced equipment for Tesla’s electric vehicle and battery facilities. Companies in fields like automotive and aerospace can identify qualified suppliers from Diagon’s network of equipment suppliers, system integrators and service providers, then leverage a toolkit to manage those complex projects.
Diagon also uses artificial intelligence to get answers to questions like, what type of infrastructure will companies need in order to become a qualified iron-based battery provider in the U.S.?, or what types of things will the company need in order to make those products?
The journey to Diagon for Drewery, who spent most of his career as an equipment buyer, started in Pittsburgh. When Drewery was growing up, his father and uncles worked in the steel industry. It was a “great way to make a living for a long time” until globalization shifted manufacturing centers elsewhere, he said.
“It impacted me to see not only the industry, but the businesses that supported it, being affected,” Drewery said. “I had this intuition that there was a much bigger significance to being able to manufacture to support a local economy.”
A few years later, Drewery joined PwC as a consultant before joining the U.S. Department of Defense as a contractor. This position took him to Baghdad, where one of his projects was to help companies procure machinery and equipment to rebuild facilities damaged during the war.
After graduating from business school in 2012, Drewery moved to the Bay Area, where a friend told him about Tesla. The company had just bought an old factory in Fremont and was stripping out the old equipment and needed someone to help source new equipment to make the Tesla S, X and 3 models.
His friend brought a Tesla to a party Drewery was at, and after taking joy rides up and down the freeway, Drewery recalls thinking, “I don’t know what this company is doing, but I’ll do anything to work there.”
Tesla, Drewery learned, was similar to most organizations when it came to the supply chain.
“They’re not really focused on buying the infrastructure for the factory — that tends to be left to engineers and other people within the organization,” Drewery said. “When I came in, I was the first person, really the first formal buyer, the company ever hired to source this type of machinery and equipment. Up until then, the engineers and shop managers were sourcing their own stuff.”
It was Drewery’s job to source all the industrial robots, the metal presses and plastic molding machines. That grew into sourcing for the entire scope of Tesla’s manufacturing footprint, both in Fremont and Buffalo, New York, and also in the gigafactory in Reno, Nevada.
It was quite an education, Drewery recalls. It was difficult to identify suppliers and where they were located. How to pay for those materials, and how to actually source everything. This is because a lot of the equipment didn’t fall into the norms of things that most supply chain managers buy, he said.
Diagon dashboard shows supplier discovery feature for battery equipment. Image Credits: Diagon
Drewery ended up getting a crash-course education in supply chain. He learned which suppliers made which type of equipment, all the pricing, lead times and other negotiations.
Also during this time, Drewery gained experience building out a pretty substantial team to tackle all of that. He grew his team to 30 people that was managing about $700 million a year in capital expenditure, Drewery said. During his time at Tesla, that was about $3.5 billion.
“One of the coolest jobs — hands down — that I’ve ever had, and I was awestruck at how few tools there were to help me do that job,” he said.
And what was it like working with Elon Musk? “I’ve never learned more than I learned in that role, but it was the hardest thing that I’ve ever done. Up until starting this company, I’d say that,” Drewery said.
Here’s a little sample of what that involved. Trade shows are the top place to find companies that make these types of equipment. However, how do you take off a day of work to attend conferences when your boss is Elon Musk?
“A lot of times I would have to do it under the radar,” Drewery said.
Drewery worked at Tesla between 2013 and 2018. During that time, he also had to manage delivery of all of that equipment and the testing and installation of it. This could take anywhere from a few months to a few years, he said. Drewery had a substantial team working with him but thought much about companies that don’t have the team or tools to do the same.
“This is why I felt the market needs a Diagon,” Drewery said.
Diagon launched its equipment sourcing and procurement platform in November 2023 after being a part of startup accelerator Techstars. It grew to six employees and a half-dozen customers, including Mitra Chem, Zeno Power and Mighty Buildings.
The company will deploy its software platform as a pilot program with its professional services customers first and do a broader release this summer, Drewery said.
The company also recently raised $5.1 million that includes a previous $800,000 SAFE (simple agreement for future equity) round. The Westly Group led the round and was joined by Valia Ventures, Techstars, Foster Ventures, Foxe Capital, Anthemis and ReFashiond Ventures.
The funding gives Diagon a good runway for the next two years and will enable the company to actively hire, including for a head of product and go-to-market.
“Now we are developing tools that help customers find suppliers better or help them interpret and summarize quotes better,” Drewery said. “We will roll those out as we develop them. We’ve also got some runway to acquire new customers and build more of the product until we raise our Series A, which we haven’t started fundraising for yet.”
It’s easy to assume the e-commerce ship has sailed when you consider we have giant outfits like Shopify, WooCommerce and Wix dominating the sector. But the opportunity for e-commerce platforms that cater to brands remain vast and fertile, since so many smaller businesses continue foraying into the internet in the wake of the pandemic.
Further evidence of this has surfaced in the form of one of the largest fundraises by a startup in Turkey, given that the average Series A usually comes in at below $15 million. E-commerce platform ikas has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round as it seeks to expand its operations into new markets in Europe. The company currently operates in Turkey and Germany, and says its platform simplifies store management for companies that want to have a digital presence.
The investment was led by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) fund, a venture arm of the World Bank Group.
ikas’ co-founder and CEO Mustafa Namoğlu told TechCrunch that the company would be using the new funding for international expansion in Eastern Europe and the DaCH region.
“Most of Europe is predominantly neglected or underserved by those U.S.-based giants,” he said. “The global platforms lack customer service in local languages. It looks easy to start with, for example, a Shopify. But once you start, you need to add other plugins, and you may even need an agency to run it.”
Namoğlu said ikas can win customers against other platforms because it’s more of a “fire and forget” platform. “The first reason our merchants pick us over others is storefront speed, which gives them higher conversion rates. You get this out of the box, even if you pay us €30 per month. The second reason is customer service. Thirdly, we bundle the payments and the shipping labels into our core product, which means you don’t need to go and negotiate with payment providers or shipping labels. You’re immediately ready to go,” he said.
Namoğlu previously founded MUGO, a fashion distribution and retail company, and launched ikas in 2017 with co-founders Tugay Karaçay, Ömercan Çelikler and Umut Ozan Yildirim.
The IFC invests directly in companies as well as through PE and VC funds.
Also investing in ikas is Re-Pie Asset Management, which has grocery delivery startup Getir in its portfolio. The round saw participation from ikas’ existing investor Revo Capital, best known as the first institutional investor in Getir, Param, Midas and Roamless.
Tim Goltser and Curtis Mason have been building things together since high school, when the two were the co-captains of their school’s robotics team. In college, Goltser and Mason teamed up to create an app — Hang, for scheduling hangouts with friends — with Sean Doherty, who Mason had met while an undergrad at Boston University.
Fast forward to 2022, and Goltser and Mason — along with Doherty — felt the entrepreneurial itch strike again. After considering a few ideas, they decided to go after what they saw as a largely unaddressed market: Tools to help small businesses secure U.S. government contracts.
“The federal contracting community has seen a shrinking of the small business industrial base for much of the past decade,” Doherty told TechCrunch. “It’s hard for these companies to compete against giants like Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman. It’s also expensive for them to bid on contracts — if they don’t win, they may run out of cash.”
As a result of labyrinthine systems and mountains of paperwork, finding and bidding for U.S. federal contracts is a laborious process. It takes weeks at a minimum to complete, according to Doherty — and often the best-resourced companies are the most successful.
In a 2023 survey from Setscale, a purchase order financing startup, small business owners cited insufficient cash flow and working capital — and a lack of time and resources — as their top roadblocks to securing government contracts.
To attempt to give these small businesses a boost, Goltser, Mason and Doherty founded GovDash, a platform that provides workflows to support government contract capture, proposal, development and management processes. GovDash was accepted to Y Combinator in 2022; Goltser dropped out of college to help spearhead it.
GovDash is essentially a contract proposal generator. The platform automatically finds contracts possibly relevant to a business, reads through the requests for proposals and — leveraging generative AI — writes proposals
GovDash can trawl through solicitation documents to identify requirements, requested formats, evaluation factors and submission schedules for contracts, Doherty says. It can also identify contracts a business might be qualified for based on their past performance, sending alerts to the inbox of a customer’s choosing, according to Doherty.
“When a contractor wants to respond to a government solicitation, they can run that through GovDash to produce a proposal in a fraction of the time,” Doherty said.
Now, generative AI makes mistakes. It’s a well-established fact. So why should businesses expect GovDash to be any different?
Two reasons, argues Doherty.
One, GovDash built a system that cross-checks a businesses’ info to see just how relevant the business is to a given federal contract. If the relevancy — as judged by the system — isn’t obvious, GovDash prompts the business to template out sections of the contract proposal with more information.
GovDash’s platform tries to automate many of the more tedious aspects of going after — and securing — U.S. federal contracts.
Two, GovDash involves heavy human review. At each stage of the proposal-generating process, the platform checks in with a human reviewer to get their seal of approval.
These steps — cross-checking and human review — aren’t infallible, Doherty admits. But he claims they’re better than what a lot of the competition’s doing.
“Companies now have one place where their business development data flows seamlessly, with an AI agent at its core to automate tedious workflows,” Doherty said. “This is a huge win for the C-suite as they can get out more proposals, at a higher quality level, in a fraction of the time, and put all the associated workflows on autopilot.”
GovDash’s competition is growing — and quickly.
GovDash competes with Govly, whose platform lets companies assess, search and analyze government contracting requirements across disparate sources. A more recent rival, Hazel, aims to use AI to automate government contracting discovery, drafting and compliance. Both — like GovDash — are Y Combinator-backed, interestingly.
But Doherty claims that GovDash is positioned well for expansion.
Having raised $12 million from investors including Northzone and Y Combinator, inclusive of a $10 million Series A funding tranche this month, GovDash plans to grow its engineering team, hire additional federal proposal managers to guide its product efforts and add new capabilities to its existing platform.
New York-based, six-employee GovDash currently works with around 30 federal contractors across the U.S., Doherty said, and is “nearly” cash-flow positive.
“We’re building for the long term for our customer base,” Doherty said. “[We’re] well-capitalized for eventual market tailwinds.”
As U.S. lawmakers weigh a possible TikTok ban, the ByteDance-owned short-form video app released an economic impact report on Thursday. In it, the company touts the platform generated $14.7 billion for small- to mid-size businesses (SMBs) last year, and a further $24.2 billion in total economic activity, supported through small business’s use of TikTok.
In addition, it says that over 7 million U.S. businesses rely on TikTok and that 224,000 jobs were supported by small business activity on the platform in 2023. Of those, 98,000 jobs were supported directly within SMBs on TikTok. The states with the largest impacts included California, Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois.
The study was performed by the economics forecasting group, Oxford Economics. It measured SMB activity on TikTok, along with ad spend and ROI, and leveraged census data and other measurements to come to its conclusions.
While a report of this size and scope couldn’t be thrown together overnight, the timing of its release is likely not coincidental.
In March, a bill that could ban TikTok passed in the House of Representatives. President Biden said he would sign it into law if it also passes in the Senate. Of concern to TikTok, is that the bill gained bipartisan support, passing the House with a 362-65 vote, despite former President Trump’s change of position on the matter. The Trump administration had previously sought to ban TikTok, calling it a national security risk, but Trump now opposes a ban, saying that Meta would benefit.
Meta is clearly preparing for a possible future where TikTok could be banned, if not spun out from ByteDance. On Wednesday, Facebook was updated to support a new video player across its social network; it will recommend Reels, long-form and Live videos, but default to showing them in vertical format, as on TikTok.
YouTube and other short-form video platforms could also gain increased exposure if TikTok were to be banned, and could pave the way for startups competing in the space, as well.
TikTok’s economic report is a clear attempt to make a case for why the app should be allowed to continue to operate, noting that $5.3 billion in tax revenue last year was supported by small business activity on TikTok, including as a marketing and advertising platform.
The company also presented a variety of case studies where business owners claim that TikTok helped to drive sales, website traffic, and other forms of additional revenue.
Tying the ban to the app’s economic impact is a solid PR strategy — especially since a group of TikTok creators got a judge to successfully block Trump’s TikTok ban in 2020 by saying it would affect their professional opportunities, like brand sponsorships, and ability to make an income.
Though TikTok has been urging users via in-app messages to call Congress to protest a ban, the bill still faces a more difficult path to pass in the Senate — and more so now that the Republican party’s leader has reversed his position on the ban.
Have you noticed the massive gap between consumer and business apps on your phone? While consumer apps are both beautifully designed and easy to use, business apps are simply painful to use.
A European startup is developing a suite of B2B apps that are designed for mobile first because phones have become the main computers for most people. And they’re calling their company … the Mobile-First Company.
When you download an app from this company, you can create an account from your phone (that’s not always the case for B2B apps) and perform everything from the device in your pocket. Too many companies that offer B2B tools treat mobile apps as companion apps and second-class citizens.
But the European startup doesn’t want to re-create Salesforce, Asana or Workday on mobile. Instead, the company plans to focus on small and medium businesses and address their needs one app at a time. Small companies don’t need a complicated enterprise software solution. They need one app to perform a set of tasks extremely well.
And the Mobile-First Company has plenty of ideas, such as building an app to create a quote, or another one to track expenses, or an app dedicated to managing the inventory in your workshop or small warehouse.
“The idea is really to build a suite of applications. It will not be an all-in-one app and that will be the main difference with other players. We don’t believe in the all-in-one model because people are scared of technology,” co-founder and CEO Jérémy Goillot told me.
Ignacio Siel Brunet, the co-founder and CTO of this new project, previously worked as VP of Engineering for Pomelo, a fintech infrastructure company in Latin America with 200 engineers working for the company.
While Siel Brunet is more experienced with the needs of large companies, he has also seen how B2B apps don’t work well with small businesses. “I know how to help big companies solve big problems. But on the other side I had this problem with my family. They own a furniture company but they have issues with invoicing, inventory, etc.,” he told me.
Many small companies simply rely on consumer apps to fill their needs. “They use Instagram as the showcase, WhatsApp as the CRM, a personal bank to run their financial aspects,” Goillot said. “Our DNA is to keep this B2C style of applications with this friendliness and mass-market appeal while also solving problems.”
The Mobile-First Company’s first app is Amoa, a mobile app to track your inventory. For instance, many garages rely on spreadsheets to track the number of spare parts they currently have in stock. But workers don’t usually spend their workday in front of a computer.
With Amoa, they can open an app, add parts by scanning a barcode, add other information such as pricing details, and start using the app as the source of truth. When they pick something up from the shelf, they can remove the item from Amoa and move on.
Even if you don’t sell goods, managing an inventory can be useful. For instance, if you’re a wedding photographer, you might want to create an inventory of all your camera lenses and gear to make sure that you don’t leave anything behind. Similarly, nurses want to make sure they have everything they need before driving to the first patient.
Amoa may or may not work. The idea is that the Mobile-First Company will develop, ship, iterate and kill ideas that don’t work so they can focus on the most promising ones. In my discussion with the founders, it felt more like talking with a casual mobile gaming company than a B2B software company. Eventually, the company plans to monetize the most promising apps with premium features that you can unlock with a paid subscription.
That’s because Goillot already knows a few things about product-market fit, as he previously worked for spend management startup Spendesk as head of growth. He was the fourth employee at the French fintech company that quickly became a unicorn.
When he left Spendesk, he spent some time traveling and looking at tech products and how they’re used outside of Europe and the U.S. “I traveled to Africa a lot, from Nigeria to Ghana and Kenya because I wanted to see other types of products. I traveled a lot in Latin America too,” Goillot said.
“And I was impressed by other types of companies. We are a huge fan of Indian companies — Zoho is one of them. We are a huge fan of Treinta as well — it’s a Colombian company.”
Since being incorporated in December, the Mobile-First Company has raised €3.5 million ($3.8 million at today’s exchange rate) in a pre-seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Emblem — the company is announcing the round today. Many angel investors also participated in the round, including Xavier Niel (Kima Ventures), Thibaud Elzière (Hexa), Jean-Baptiste Hironde (MWM) and Rodolphe Ardant (Spendesk).
Now the company wants to move quickly. “For the end of the year, our goal is to release six applications to have this high velocity of trying, killing, trying, killing to really upgrade the knowledge of the company,” Goillot said.
“We are able to build an application in two weeks. We are able to bring thousands of downloads a day,” he added. So let’s see how long it takes before The Mobile-First Company ships an app that you can spot in the wild when talking with a small business owner.
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