Technology

All of the good press the June Intelligent Oven got when it launched in late 2016 was overshadowed by one key thing: that ridiculously high price tag. The startup drew comparisons to the now defunct train wreck that was Juicero, with one review going so far as calling it &everything thatwrong with Silicon Valley.&

That was way harsh — overly so, in fact. Therea lot to like in the promise of Juneoven, but yeah, that price…

Itno surprise, then, that the company is leading with its price tag, this time out. The second-gen June Oven isn&t cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but with a starting price of $599, ita fraction of the cost of its predecessor$1,500. Therealso a limited-time $100 discount for the smart appliancepricier SKU ($799), so nowas good a time as any to make the leap, if you&ve been considering it.

This certainly looks like a bit of course correction for the company, but June co-founder and CEO Matt Van Horn told TechCrunch that lowering the cost of the device was the plan from the outset.

&None of it is responding to feedback,& he said. &This has always been part of the plan. We&ve always described this as our first product would be the Tesla Roadster. The new June oven is the Model S.&

The much higher-cost version of the oven helped the company ramp up and learn how to scale first-generation hardware. The Tesla comparison isn&t entirely apt, however, as June will effectively be sunsetting the previous version to make way for the new, lower-cost model. The basics of the oven are the same as the last generation.

Asked what separates the $599+ June from a toaster oven, Van Horn told TechCrunch, &The June oven inspires people to cook things they might not normally cook and to trust the oven.Who cooks a steak in the oven People don&t normally cook a steak in the oven.&

I should probably point out that at this point in the conversation Van Horn was cooking a piece of steak in a June on the other side of our Google Hangout.

The model has 100 cook programs built-in, allowing it to wear a bunch of hats. It can operate as a convection oven, slow cooker, broiler, toaster, warming drawer, dehydrator and air fryer, making it a compelling choice for small kitchens or college dorms. As someone who eats takeout on the regular, I&d certainly be willing to give it a go, if I had $600 burning a figurative hole in my pocket.

The oven also uses on-board cameras with food recognition AI to determine what you&re cooking and pre-heat its carbon-fiber heating coils accordingly. The company promises precision and speed, cooking food up to three times faster than standard ovens. I&ll say that I&m not fully convinced that the aforementioned food recognition system isn&t a bit of overkill, but at the very least, I suppose it will save you time from having to scroll through all of those touchscreen menus to find the right setting. On-board cameras also mean you can watch your foodprogress remotely — though the top-down view isn&t the most appetizing.

Oh, and it supports Alexa, obviously.

One of the more compelling features contained here-in is Junesoftware update pushes, which are delivered over Wi-Fi. That means those who spent an arm and a leg on the last generation will continue to get updates.

The $599 will get you the oven, a cooking pan, roasting rack, wire shelf and crumb tray. An additional $200 gets you an extended warranty, three-year subscription to the companyrecipes and three baskets for air frying.

Japan-based accounting software company Freee, one of the countrymost-prominent startups,has raised a $60 million Series E funding round as it bids to expand its services into other areas of management for its customers.

Freee was founded six years ago — we wrote about the startup when it raised a Series A in 2013 — which makes it one of the ‘oldest& startups in Japan, while this round is also a large one for the country, too. Japanstartup ecosystem has a culture that encourages founders to take their companies& public earlier than in most parts of the world, to mitigate some risk, but there are signs of alternative approaches that include this round and of course the recent IPO of Mercari, which went public this summer and raised over $1 billion.

&Japan is a country that respects precedent a lot,& Freee founder and CEODaisuke Sasaki told TechCrunch in an interview. &Having present cases will change [the culture] a lot, we are staying private and investing in growth. Theecosystem isn&t changing [yet] but [startups, founders and VCs] now have more options.&

Free was one of the first Japanese startups to raise from overseas investors, a move that helped get Japanese VCs interested in enterprise and Saas, and this time around it has pulled in capital from a bunch of big names: Chat app company Line,Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) — Japanlargest bank — consumer credit firm Life Card and &several [unnamed] internationalinstitutional investors.&

DCM and Infinity Investments are among the startupearliest backers.

Today, Freee offers cloud-based accounting and HR software and itclaims to have over one million business accounts. It has over 5,000 certified accountant advisors — who help it reach new customers and also use it for their own work — and the company said that over 3,500 apps and services, including mainly financial products, are integration with its software.

Going forward,Sasaki — who is a former Googler —said Freee will use this new capital to build out an API ecosystem to enable more integrations — some of its practical ones right now include Slack and Salesforce — while it is planning a major collaboration with Line to allow Line business customers to integrate their use of the app with Free, while it is exploring how it can collaborate around Line Pay.

Freee founder and CEODaisuke Sasaki

Freee is also focused on expanding the scope of its services to branch out into products that help with more general management and operational tasks.

&We want to focusnot only on back office but also to add value to customers to make their businesses better throughdashboards, reporting and insight. Customers who use the [existing business] reports grow faster. Our vision is to give much better insight and business advice through AI [and] to do that we need more data, not just back office but front line too,&Sasaki said.

Finally, the startup is exploring ways it can enable banks and financial organizations to work more closely with its customer base. Already customers can share data within Freee to banks for assessment for loans and other credit products, and the company is exploring the potential to introduce a marketplace that would give its customers a place to scout out financial products at more preferential rates.

&Initially we focused on small business but now our biggest customers have a couple of hundred employees so we are going upmarket,&Sasaki told TechCrunch.

One area Freee won&t be moving into is overseas markets. Yet at least.Sasaki explained that the company wants to build out that vision of an expanded ecosystem of connected services and more in-depth business tools before branching out into new countries.

SmartHR, a younger rival to free which specializes in HR as the name suggests, raised $13.3 million earlier this year to push on into areas such aspayroll and more. That could begin to pose a threat to Freee, particularly sinceSmartHR a developer platform to hose third-party applications and services.

Flux, the London fintech that has built a software platform to offer merchants digital receipts, loyalty, card-linked offers and analytics, continues to sign new partnerships in a bid to solve its ‘chicken and egg& problem. That is, it needs bank integrations to sign up merchants and it needs merchant integrations to sign up banks.

The latest to partner with Flux is the U.K. food chain itsu, which sells Asian-inspired fast food. Under the deal — positioned as a trial for now — the food merchant will use Flux to power paperless receipts across all 72 of its U.K. stores. Customers paying with cards issued by Flux partner banks who have opted-in will receive digital itemised receipts directly into their banking apps when they shop at itsu.

Founded by former early employees at Revolut, the Flux platform bridges the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchantpoint-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up on your bank statement or mobile banking app. Off the back of this, it can also power loyalty schemes and card-linked offers, as well as give merchants much deeper POS analytics via aggregated and anonymised data on consumer behaviour, such as which products are selling best in unique baskets.

On the banking side, it currently partners with challenger bank Starling, and has a closed trial with Monzo. After graduating from Barclayfintech accelerator, Flux also recently got added to Barclays via its Launchpad app, which is used by a subset of customers who want to get in on the banklatest innovations early.

On the merchant side, in addition to todayannounced itsu partnership, Flux works with EAT and pod in the U.K., and has an upcoming trial with Costa Coffee.

Asked how Flux is overcoming its chicken and egg problem, and how conversations with banks and merchants have changed over the last few months, Flux co-founder Veronique Barbosa says the startup faces the same challenge as any marketplace. However, she believes the company has built a solid foundation for what she dubs the &Flux Flywheel&, borrowing from AmazonAmazon Flywheel concept.

&For every bank we add on, we unlock the opportunity to provide Flux to those cardholders. With increasing access to cardholders, we can attract more retailers. With more retailers we can engage the banks, as their cardholders now have more places to use Flux. And so the cycle begins again,& explains Barbosa.

&We are now at the stage where in addition to our partnership with Starling Bank, for example, we&re integrated and live with one of the largest consumer banks in the U.K., Barclays, via their Launchpad app. On top of that we recently announced the largest coffee chain in the U.K. will trial Flux… We are having very different conversations now than we were even three months ago. The conversation has changed from why should I be interested in this to how could I tailor this for my business given the validation that inevitably comes with partnering with such familiar brands&.

However, despite the undoubted progress Flux has made, it is notable that a number of partnerships have launched as a trial only, suggesting both banks and merchants are being a little tentative in how they deploy the startuptechnology. Barbosa says that isn&t unusual, especially when deciding to invest in nascent technology from a relatively small startup.

&What we&re building is completely new as we&re liberating receipt level data at scale, and so itnot unusual for our partners to want to test out the waters and describe our work together as a trial before entering a longer term commitment,& she says. &The main reason being, how do they know if their customers will love it Whatexciting is we&ve now entered a phase where we&ve generated more than enough proof points to dispel that concern from the get go&.