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Technology
Airbnb is testing a new payments feature for hosts, letting them get partially paid out at the time of booking.
This feature isn&t rolling out to everyone just yet, as Airbnb says that this is just a preliminary test to gauge interest. Invited hosts simply opt-in to payout splitting to check out the feature.
Herehow it works:
Normally, Airbnb hosts are paid 24 hours after their guestscheduled check-in time. With the new payouts test, hosts who have been invited and opt in will receive 50 percent of their cash three days after the guest has booked their stay, and the other half will be received 24 hours after check-in time.
For their trouble, Airbnb is taking a 1 percent fee of the booking subtotal for early payouts.
As per usual, hosts can opt out of early payouts at any time by making the change in their Payout Preferences.
If a booking is cancelled after an early payout has been received, the amount will be deducted from the hostnext booking.
This comes on the heels of Airbnbannouncement in February to add new tiers and types of lodging to the platform, including boutique hotels and B-Bs. Airbnb classifies hosts with more than six listings on the platform as Professional Hosts, and early payouts are one way that Airbnb can help these hosts grow their business.
However, in certain housing-constrained markets like NYC, professional hosts aren&t necessarily welcome. In May, NYC Comptroller Scott Stringer released a report saying that Airbnbpresence in NYC is driving up the cost of rent for full-time residents. The company and the Comptrolleroffice went back and forth over the veracity of the report, but NYC isn&t the only market worried about the folks who make Airbnb their full-time job.
In 2017, the WSJ reported on a study surveying 100 of the largest metro areas in the U.S. which found that a 10 percent increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.39 percent increase in rent and a 0.64 percent increase in house prices. That may sound small, but rental prices typically climbed by 2.2% per year without Airbnb, according to one of the surveyauthors. So Airbnb is accelerating the rate at which rental prices rise.
This very argument and the ensuing spats have led Airbnb to cut SF listings (almost in half) following the citykick-off of new short term rental laws. And new, stricter laws may be coming to NYC.
Airbnb says that it works with its communities to stay on the right side of the law, but that professionally managed properties are integral in markets where tourism is a huge part of the economy.
&For decades, vacation rentals and professionally managed properties have been the backbone of the economy in vacation destinations like beach and ski towns and we welcome these types of listings in these types of communities,& said an Airbnb spokesperson. &Trials like these are one way we work to support our community. In some places, usually urban destinations, there can be rules around hosting multiple listings. We always want Airbnb to be a positive force in local communities and we make it clear to hosts that they need to follow these rules.&
The payouts test is geared towards professional hosts, but is being spread via an invite basis to both pro hosts and regular hosts.
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If you&re looking for a way to launch your pre-Series A startup to the world, thereno better platform for that than TechCrunchpremier startup-pitch competition, Startup Battlefield. And now, for the first time ever, founders of early-stage startups across the Middle East and North Africa can take advantage of that awesome launch pad.
You read that right. Thanks to our sponsor, Facebook, we&ll be in Beirut on October 3 forTechCrunch Startup Battlefield MENA 2018. Think your startup has what it takes to win it all Applications are now open, soapply today for your chance to join us in Lebanon at the Beirut Digital District.
Herewhat you need to know about competing in Startup Battlefield MENA. Before we can consider your startup, it must meet certain eligibility requirements. Letget these pesky details out of the way and then move on to what Battlefield competitors will experience.
To be considered for Startup Battlefield MENA 2018, you must:
- Have an early-stage company in &launch& stage
- Be headquartered in one of these eligible countries: Algeria, Armenia, Bahrain, Egypt, Georgia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, UAE, Yemen
- Have a fully working product/beta reasonably close to, or in, production
- Have received limited press or publicity to date
- Have no known intellectual property conflicts
- Apply by July 17, 2018, at 5 p.m. PST
Now then, letget on with the exciting stuff.
TechCrunch editors, highly experienced in all things related to Startup Battlefield, will vet the applications and choose 15 pre-Series A startups to compete. Each competing team receives top-notch pitch coaching from our editors — at no charge — so they&ll be primed and ready come the big day.
Teams have six minutes to pitch their company and present a product demo to the Startup Battlefield judges, who then follow up with hard-hitting questions. All of this nerve-wrackingaction takes place in front of a live, enthusiastic audience filled with startup fans, investors, tech founders and media outlets. Out of these teams, they&ll select five to go onto present in a finals round.
A new panel of fresh judges will confer on these final five startups and then select one to become &The Middle East and North AfricaMost Promising Startup,& whose founders will take home a US$25,000 no-equity cash prize. They also win an expense-paid trip for two to compete in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at the time).
Even teams that don&t win the big prize will still benefit from participating. You can&t find better media and investor exposure, and each team automatically becomes part of the Startup Battlefield alumni network — nearly 750 companies that have collectively raised more than $8 billion in funding and produced more than 100 exits. Talk about a networking opportunity.
TechCrunch Startup Battlefield MENA 2018 takes place on October 3, at the Beirut Digital District Nassif Yazigi, Lebanon. The July 17 deadlineapproaching, and it&ll be here before you know it, so apply today. We can&t wait to see you there!
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Trov, the on-demand personal property insurance service, is launching in the U.S., the company announced today.
Trovfirst port of call in the U.S. will be Arizona. The service is already available to customers in the UK and Australia who have signed up to insure items 1 million times since the company first launched its business.
A spokesperson for the company declined to comment on how many individuals have signed up for the service or how much they&ve spent on the policies.
Munich Re is serving as Trovunderwriting partner in the U.S. (and the rest of the world), and the company said it would look to roll out across the rest of the country over the course of the year.
As part of the rollout, Trov is introducing a new service that will cut a customerpremium payment, as the object they&re insuring depreciates in value. The insurer makes these adjustments by comparing the item insured with the retail replacement value of a similar, newer item.
In addition to its geographic expansion, the company is also expanding the types of items it&ll insure, from consumer electronics and photography gear to sports and musical equipment.
Trovinsurance policy is already approved in 44 states, and the personal property product is actually the companysecond service for the U.S. market.
Earlier this year the company launchedTrov Mobilityinpartnershipwith Waymo, the autonomous vehicle subsidiary of Alphabet (which owns Google). That product protects passengers in Waymoself-driving car service — which is preparing for launch later this year.
Insurance has been a hot business for startup investors with companies like Cover launching with a similar, on-demand offering already operating in the U.S. Other competitors include companies like Lemonadeand Hippo,which both offer homeowners or renters insurance for a modern home — including insurance for electronics, photography equipment and other possessions.
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Write comment (90 Comments)Airwallex, a three-year-old fintech startup focused on international payments for SMEs and businesses, is putting itself on the map after it raised an $80 million Series B round.
Based of out of Melbourne, but with six offices in Asia and other parts of the world, Airwallex new funding round is the second largest financing deal for an Australian startup in history. The round was led by existing investors Tencent, the $500 billion Chinese internet giant, and Sequoia China. Other participants included ChinaHillhouse, Horizons Ventures — the fund from Hong Kongrichest man Li Ka-Shing — Indonesia-basedCentral Capital Ventura (BCA) and AustraliaSquare Peg, a firm from Paul Bassat who took recruitment firm Seek to IPO and is one of Australiahighest-profile founders.
The financing takes Airwallex to $102 million raised. Tencent led a $13 million Series A in May 2017, while Square Peg added $6 million more via a Series A+in December. Mastercard is also a backer; the finance giant uses Airwallex to handle its &Send& productwhile Tencent uses the service to power an overseas remittance service for its WeChat app.
Airwallex handles cross-border transactions for companies that do business in multiple countries using international currencies. So itnot unlike a Transferwise-style service for SMEs that lack the capital to develop a sophisticated (and expensive) international banking system of their own.
The service uses wholesale FX rates to route overseas payments back to a clientdomestic bank and is capable of processing &thousands of transactions persecond,& according to the company. A use case example might include helping a China-based seller return money earned in the U.S. or Europe via Amazon or other e-commerce services, or route sales revenue back directly from their own website.
Airwallex CEO Jack Zhang (far right) on stage at TechCrunch Shenzhen in 2017
China is a key market for Airwallex — which was started by four Australian-Chinese founders — as well as the wider Asian region, and in particular Australia, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. With this new capital, Airwallex co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang said the company will increase its focus on Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, whilst also extending its business in Europe (where it has a London-based office) and pushing into North America.
Product R-D is shared across Melbourne and Shanghai, while Hong Kong accounts for business development, compliance and more, Zhang explained. However, Airwallexlocations in London and San Francisco are likely to account for most of the upcoming headcount growth planned following this funding.Right now, Airwallex has around 100 staff, according to Zhang.
The company is also aiming to expand its product range, too.
The firm is in the process of applying for a virtual banking license in Hong Kong, a third-party payment license in mainland China, and a cross-border Chinese yuan license. One goal, Zhang revealed, is to offer working capital loans to SMEs to help them to scale their businesses to the next level. Airwallex is working with an undisclosed partner to underwrite deals in the future. Zhang explained that the company sees a gap in the market since banks don&t have access to critical data on clients for loan assessments.
More generally, hebullish for the future despite Brexit and the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.
&Thetrade war gives the Chinese yuan a lot of vitality, and we&ve seen more demand in the market. Chinabelt road initiative has really taken off, too, and we&re seeing the impact in many many of our payment corridors,& he explained. &Business has been booming, especially as traditional offline SMEs start to move online and go from domestic to global.&
&We want to be the backbone to support these newopportunitiesfor businesses,& Zhang added.
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Our TC Sessions: Blockchain event takes place in Zug, Switzerland, this coming Friday (July 6), but we are also excited to host the TechCrunch Ethereum Meetup the very next day.
We are putting on the Meetupwith support from the Ethereum Foundation and other members of the Ethereum community, and now we can reveal the agenda for the follow-on event — which will run from 1-6 PM.
All tickets for the TC Sessions: Blockchain event are sold out, but we do have an allocation remaining forthe TechCrunch Ethereum Meetup. However, attendees of the TC Sessions: Blockchain event who wish to attend the Ethereum Meetup will need to purchase a separate pass.
Tickets for the meetup can be purchasedhere— they are priced at 50 CHF plus VAT, thataround $50 at current rates.
TechCrunch Ethereum Meetup, July 7
Agenda
1:00 PM — 1:05 PMOpening Remarks Ned Desmond (TechCrunch) and Aya Miyaguchi (Ethereum Foundation)
1:05 PM — 1:30 PMKeynote Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum Foundation)
1:30 PM — 1:55 PMA Governance Discussion Vlad Zamfir (Ethereum Foundation)
1:55 PM — 2:15 PMIntro to Cryptoeconomics Karl Floersch (Ethereum Foundation)
2:15 PM — 2:45 PMCrypto-finance: Exchanges - DExs Vansa Chatikavanij (OmiseGo),Aya Miyaguchi (Ethereum Foundation),Balaji Srinivasan (Coinbase) andChangpeng Zhao (Binance)
2:45 PM — 3:15 PMCommunity and Funding Joe Lubin (ConsenSys),Aya Miyaguchi (Ethereum Foundation),Cassandra Shi (Ethereum Community Fund),Vivek Singh (Gitcoin) andJutta Steiner (Parity Technologies)
3:15 PM — 3:35 PM BREAK
3:35 PM — 4:05 PM DApp Panel: What does success look like Rune Christensen (MakerDAO),Mona El Isa (MelonPort),Roham Gharegozlou (Axiom Zen), Jarrad Hope (Status),Aleksandra Skrzypczak (Golem) andJinglan Wang (Blockchain Education Network)
4:05 PM — 4:30 PMResearch and Sharding Justin Drake (Ethereum Foundation)
4:30 PM — 4:55 PMWhatat Stake Decentralizing Consensus David Knott (OmiseGo)
4:55 PM — 5:25 PMTackling Scalability Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum Foundation), Karl Floersch (Ethereum Foundation),Heiko Hees (Raiden), Liam Horne (L4) andHsiao-Wei Wang (Ethereum Foundation)
5:25 PM — 6:00 PMProof of Stake Adrian Brink (Tendermint),Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum Foundation),Peter Czaban (Web3 Foundation),David Knott (OmiseGo) and Vlad Zamfir (Ethereum Foundation)
6:00 PM FINISH
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Write comment (92 Comments)MeetFrank, aka a ‘secret& recruitment app that uses machine learning plus a chatbot wrapper to take the strain out of passive job hunting and talent-to-vacancy matching, has closed a€1 million (~$1.1M)seed funding round to fuel market expansion in Europe.
Hummingbird VC, Karma VC, and Change Ventures are the investors.
The Estonian startup was only founded last September but says it has ~125,000 active users in its first markets: Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, plus its most recent market addition, Germany, an expansion this seed has financed.
Around 2,000 companies are using the app to try to attract talent. In Germany employers on board with MeetFrank include Daimler, Eon, Delivery Hero, SumUp, Blinkist, High Mobility and MyTaxi.
&The average company profile we have at the moment is a start-up/scale-up company that develops their product in-house,& says co-founder Kaarel Holm.
&At the moment we are mainly focused on technology related companies — so positions you can find from average start-up or a scale-up,& he tells TechCrunch. &Around 50% of the position are engineering and other 50% is marketing, sales, customer support, legal, data science, product/project management etc.&
He names TransferWise, Taxify, Testlio, Smartly and High-Mobility as other early customers.
Herehow MeetFrank works on the talent side: The person downloads the app and goes through a relatively quick onboarding chat with ‘Frank& (the emoji-loving chatbot) where they are asked to specify their skills and experience — choosing from pre-set lists, rather than needing to type — plus to state their current job title and salary.
So while MeetFranktarget is passive job seekers, these people do still need to actively download the app and input some data.
Hence the chatbot having a strong emoji + GIF game to convince talent that a little upfront effort will go a long way…
The bot also asks what would convince them to switch jobs — offering options to choose from such as a higher salary, more flexible or remote working, relocation, a startup culture and so on.
The anonymous aspect comes in because thereno requirement for users to provide their real name or any other identifying personal information in order to get matches with potential positions.
Talent is therefore assessed on its merits, at least at this stage of the job hunt.
And while people are asked up front to specify their current salary, which you might think puts them at a potential disadvantage during any pay negotiations, Holm says the aim of MeetFrankplatform is also to encourage greater openness from employers and steer away from traditional pay negotiation situations.
&We use salary as one datapoint for matching and we try to make sure that offers we make to the user are match their preferences. In lot of cases the salary is the main deal breaker and we would like to present the information as early as possible,& he explains. &Companies on the other side of the marketplace disclose their salary for the users as well — in that case we can avoid the negotiating disadvantage.&
&The policy of MeetFrank platform is that companies have to be extremely open about the position they are trying to fill — this also includes the salary information,& he adds.
Employers are not at all anonymous on the platform. On the contrary, they have to write detailed job advertisements — including levels of pay for advertised roles.
And a pay range will be disclosed to applicants that the app deems potentially suitable — i.e. after its matching process — by displaying a percentage of how much more they could earn above their current salary.
So employers need to be comfortable showing their hand to people who may just be curious whatout there.
For employers, MeetFrank takes over the ad placement process — using its machine learning to algorithmically match potential candidates to positions. So its proposition is automatic pre-selection across &thousands& of potential job applicants.
And also the possibility of reaching talent which might otherwise not realize that company is hiring. Or think about working for a certain brand.
The app is mainly focused on a &passive talent pool& — aka¤tly or recently employed talent that is open for offers&, as Holm puts it. So itcertainly cherrypicking easier types of jobs to match and fill.
&Entry level jobs is bit out of reach for us at the moment but we will launch a beta project with couple of universities in the autumn this year,& he adds when we ask if the app is open to matching people who don&t currently have a job or are looking for a first job.
Holm says MeetFrank is currently showing 50% MRR growth. Italready out of thepre-revenue phase — so is charging employers to advertise (the service remains free for the talent side).
The main monetization model is a daily subscription, with employers beingcharged on a pay-as-you-go basis. Holm says the price per day for employers is €9, and MeetFrank lets them cancel at any time — with no minimum time commitment required to sign up.
&We believe that the new-aged classifieds will only monetize on that kind of on-demand model and should only pay when they find us useful. This also lowers the barrier of entry to most of the start-ups and allows them to vet the market and get visibility with low budgets,& he adds.
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