Technology

French startup Shine is raising a $9.3 million (€8 million) Series A round. The company is building an alternative to traditional bank accounts for freelancers working in France.

XAnge is leading todayround with existing investor Daphni also participating, as well as business angels Gilles Samoun and Ed Zimmerman. The company previously raised $3.3 million (€2.8 million) from Daphni, Kima Ventures and various business angels.

While itpretty easy to get started as a freelancer in many countries, France is not one of them. You need to register a µ-company&, report your earnings for corporate taxes, report sales tax collection in some cases and more.

Arguably, it has gotten much easier recently with a ton of resources to get started. But Shine wants to go one step further and package everything you need in an app.

Shine starts by helping you register your company. After downloading the app, the company will guide you through the process — you need to take a photo of your ID and fill out a form. It feels like signing up to a social network. Compared to the official process, Shineprocess is less intimidating and easier to understand.

You can send and receive money from your Shine account just like in any banking app. Shine gives you your own banking information (IBAN) to receive payments and pay using direct debit. A few days later, you receive a debit card. You can temporarily lock the card or disable some features in the app, such as ATM withdrawals and online payments.

Shine doesn&t handle IBAN and cards directly. The company partners with Treezor for those banking features.

If you&re a rider on Deliveroo and UberEats, or if you work with a freelancer marketplace, such as Malt, Side, Upwork and Brigad, all you need to do is enter your Shine IBAN on those platforms. If you work with clients directly, Shine has an integrated invoicing system. It generates a web page and a PDF that you can send to your clients. When a client opens the page, you get a notification. They can pay with a card.

Finally, Shine reminds you when you have to pay your taxes and has a customer support team that can help you figure out what you need to do. They&re slowly building a comprehensive knowledge base on being a freelancer in France.

Shine is free for everything I just described except if you choose to accept card payments on your invoices. But even for that feature, it remains quite cheap.

The company plans to launch a premium plan in the coming months with advanced accounting features. So far, 25,000 freelancers are using Shine in France. And 10 percent of new freelancers (µ-entrepreneurs&) register their company through Shine.

While challenger banks, such as N26 and Revolut are widely successful, itgreat to see some companies focus on niche markets with the same approach. Shine is a breath of fresh air for freelancers in France. The company is making the process so much easier for newcomers.

Meituan-Dianping is reportedly aiming for a $55 billion valuation in its upcoming initial public offering in Hong Kong, but the companynet losses and increasing competition from Alibaba are already raising questions about whether that is too ambitious, despite the companymarket leadership in China. Meituan-Dianping, which bills itself as a &one-stop super app& that offers everything from food delivery to travel bookings, has set an IPO price range of HK$60 to HK$72 (about $7.64 to $9.17), with a valuation of $46 billion to $55 billion, according to Reuters.

That is still less, however, than the valuation of about $60 million it targeted earlier, according to a June 25 report from the Wall Street Journal. Meituan-Dianping runs the leading online marketplace for services in China by gross transaction volume and also acquired bike-sharing startup Mobike earlier this year.

Meituan-Dianping was said to be valued at as much as $30 billion when it raised a $4 billion Series C round led by Tencent in October 2017.

But the companytight margins and losses, much of which were incurred on marketing and user acquisition, are raising concerns about Meituan-Dianpingvaluation, especially after Xiaomiunderwhelming debut on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in July. Despite reports that it sought a valuation of $100 billion, Xiaomi ended up with a $54 billion valuation after raising $4.7 billion.

A document filed today with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange didn&t provide more information about IPO pricing or valuation, but it did give some insights into the companyfinancials. It said that Meituan-Dianpingtotal revenues increased by 161.2% to RMB 33.9 billion in 2017, and by an additional 94.9% from RMB 8.1 billion in the four months ending in April 30, 2017 to RMB 15.8 billion in the same period of 2018.

In 2017, the platform generated over 5.8 billion transactions, totalling RMB 357 billion in gross transaction volume. It served 310 million transacting users and 4.4 million active merchants, with each transacting user making an average of 20.3 transactions in the 12 months ending April 30, 2018.

Meituan-Dianping recorded a gross margin of 9.3% for food delivery in the four months ending on April 30, 2018, while its second-largest business segment, in-store, hotel and travel services, recorded gross margin of 88% in the same period. Overall, the company had gross margin of 25.5% in that time frame.

In the same periods, however, it also recorded high net losses. In 2017, the company said it recorded net losses of RMB 19 billion, as well as net losses of RMB 8.2 billion and RMB 22.8 billion for the four months ending on April 30 2017 and 2018, respectively. Meituan-Dianping said the losses were due in changes to the fair value of its preferred shares, user acquisition expenses, including incentives to attract users and delivery riders, and new product launches.

The pressure of acquiring new users and marketing expenses probably won&t ease up anytime soon, as Meituan-Dianping faces down rivalry from Alibaba. The e-commerce giant used to be an investor in Meituan-Dianping, but offloaded its shares to focus on building its own online-to-offline services, including a combination of Ele.me and Koubei which recently raised $3 billion from investors including SoftBank.

TechCrunch has contacted Meituan-Dianping for comment.

Some topics are so politically charged that even to attempt a discussion online is to invite toxicity and rigid disagreement among participants. But a new study finds that exposure to the views of others, minus their political affiliation, could help us overcome our own biases.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, led by sociologist Damon Centola, examined how peopleinterpretations of some commonly misunderstood climate change data changed after seeing those of people in opposing political parties.

The theory is that by exposing people to information sans partisan affiliation, we might be able to break the &motivated reasoning& that leads us to interpret data in a preconceived way.

The data in this case was a NASA study indicating that sea ice levels will decrease but frequently misinterpreted as suggesting the opposite. The misunderstanding isn&t entirely partisan in nature: 40 percent of self-identified Republicans and 26 percent of Democrats polled in the study adopted the mistaken latter view.

The NASA graph used in the study. As you can see itnot crazy to think that the sea ice levels would increase, though it is incorrect.

Thousands from both parties, recruited via Mechanical Turk, were asked to indicate whether sea ice levels were rising or falling, and how much. After their initial guess, they were shown how others had answered and allowed to adjust their answer afterwards. Some were shown their peers answers with those peers& political affiliation, and some were shown it without.

When political party was not attached to the answers, there was a considerable effect on peopleanswers. Republicans jumped from about 65 percent getting it right to around 90, and Democrats went from 75 to 85 percent. When party was shown, improvements were much smaller; and when people were only exposed to those from their own party, there was practically no improvement at all.

Obviously this isn&t going to fix the problem of viral misinformation or the near-constant flame wars raging across every major online service. But itamazing that doing something as simple as stripping the political context from communications may lead to those communications being taken more seriously.

Perhaps something along these lines could help put the brakes on runaway articles: showing highly-cited views from people with no indication of their political beliefs. Will you be so quick to dismiss or accept someoneargument if you can&t be sure of their agenda At worst it may force people to take a second and evaluate those ideas on their merits, and thathardly a bad thing.

The study was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.