Архив рубрики: Startups

DoubleDown is going public: Why isn’t its IPO worth more?

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Agora isn’t the only company headquartered outside the United States aiming to go public domestically this quarter. After catching up on Agora’s F-1 filing, the China-and-U.S.-based, API-powered tech company that went public last week, today we’re parsing DoubleDown Interactive’s IPO document.
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The mobile gaming company is targeting the NASDAQ and wants to trade under the ticker symbol “DDI.”
As with Agora, DoubleDown filed an F-1, instead of an S-1. That’s because it’s based in South Korea, but it’s slightly more complicated than that. DoubleDown was founded in Seattle, according to Crunchbase, before selling itself to DoubleU Games, which is based in South Korea. So, yes, the company is filing an F-1 and will remain majority-held by its South Korean parent company post-IPO, but this offering is more a local affair than it might at first seem.
Even more, with a $17 to $19 per-share IPO price range, the company could be worth up to nearly $1 billion when it debuts. Does that pricing make sense? We want to find out.
So let’s quickly explore the company this morning. We’ll see what this mobile, social gaming company looks like under the hood in an effort to understand why it is being sent to the public markets right now. Let’s go!
Fundamentals
Any gaming company has to have its fun-damentals in place so that it can have solid financial results, right? Right?
Anyway, DoubleDown is a nicely profitable company. In 2019 its revenue only grew a hair to $273.6 million from $266.9 million the year before (a mere 2.5% gain), but the company’s net income rose from $25.1 million to $36.3 million, and its adjusted EBITDA rose from $85.1 million to $101.7 million over the same period.

DoubleDown is going public: Why isn’t its IPO worth more?

Revolut expands bank account aggregation to Ireland

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Fintech startup Revolut has expanded its open banking feature to Ireland. The feature first launched in the U.K. back in February. Once again, the startup is partnering with TrueLayer to let you add third-party bank accounts to your Revolut account.
The feature launch also marks the launch of TrueLayer in Ireland. For now, Revolut users can only link their Revolut account with AIB, Permanent TSB, Ulster Bank and Bank of Ireland. Revolut and TrueLayer will add support to other banks in the future. Revolut currently has 1 million customers in the Republic of Ireland.
The idea behind open banking is quite simple. Many online services rely on application programming interfaces (APIs) to talk to each other. You can connect with your Facebook account on many online services, you can interact with other services from Slack, etc.
Financial institutions have been lagging behind on this front, but it is changing thanks to new regulation and technical updates. With open banking, your bank account should work more like a traditional internet service.
When you connect your bank account with Revolut, you can view your balance and past transactions from a separate tab that lists all your linked accounts. Users can also take advantage of Revolut’s budgeting features with their bank accounts.
As TechCrunch’s Steve O’Hear noted when he first covered Revolut’s open banking feature, Revolut was originally authorized for Account Information Services (AIS) by the U.K. regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority. It lets you access and display information from other financial institutions.
But the startup now has permission to carry out Payment Initiation Services (PIS). It means that you’ll soon be able to initiate transfers from your bank account directly from Revolut. It should make it much easier to top up your Revolut balance, for instance.
While this feature might seem anecdotal, Revolut wants to build a comprehensive financial hub for all your financial needs — a sort of super app for everything related to money. With open banking, you theoretically no longer have to open your traditional banking app.
Image Credits: Revolut

Revolut expands bank account aggregation to Ireland

Imaging startup Light is exiting the smartphone business

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Light’s push into smartphones was an inevitability. Sure, the startup turned heads with its pricey L16 camera, but these days mobile photography is almost exclusively the domain of the handset. Early last year, the answer arrived in the form of the trypophobia-inducing Nokia 9 PureView.
In a category where manufacturers raced to add more cameras, the PureView had the most, with a five-hexagonal array. It was new, innovative and for most, it was overkill. At the very least, however, it gave Nokia/HMD some bragging rights and managed to set the handset apart in one of the most hotly contested corners of the smartphone hardware race.
But Light is getting out of the smartphone game. Ultimately, the competition may have just been too stiff for a small startup, especially with many manufacturers working on their own native hardware and software solutions.
Light confirmed the move this week in an email to Android Authority, writing simply that it was “no longer operating in the smartphone industry.” It’s a surprising bit of news, given that mobile partnerships seemed like the most logical way forward for the company, which drummed up a $121 million in a SoftBank-led round back in 2018. That Series D brought the Palo Alto-based company’s total funding up to more than $181 million.
More recently, it also signed deals with Sony and Xiaomi. No word on what such a move means for those partnerships going forward. Nor is it clear what life after smartphones looks like for Light. We’ve reached out to the company for more insight into its plans.

Imaging startup Light is exiting the smartphone business

Challenger bank Bnext revamps rewards for purchases in partner stores

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Spanish startup Bnext is revamping its cashback program so that you can buy from partner stores directly from the Bnext app and get some money back. The company has partnered with Button and the feature is available as an open beta.
Traditional cashback portals are a bit clunky. When you find an offer that gives you 2% of your money back, you click on the offer, get redirected to the partner site and hope that your purchase will be registered. A bit later, you get some money back on the cashback website, which you need to cash out to your bank account.
If you’re using Bnext as your bank account, you’ll be able to access rewards directly from your banking app. In addition to that, you don’t get redirected to another site as you purchase goods directly from the Bnext app.
There are multiple levels. If you’re making your first purchase through the feature, you get 1% in savings on average. If you’ve made more than three purchases over the past 30 days, you get 3% in savings on average. In order to reach level 3, you need a premium Bnext subscription. With that level, you get 5% in savings on average.
Partners include AliExpress, Booking.com, eDreams, Europcar, Nike, Just Eat and more. Eventually, the startup wants to let you earn rewards from in-store purchases as well. Bnext is creating a new revenue stream with this feature as the startup will keep a share of the revenue from each transaction.

Bnext provides current accounts and payment cards. You can receive notifications for each transaction with your card, and temporarily lock and unlock your card. You don’t pay any foreign transaction fee as long as you spend less than €2,000 per month with a standard account.
The company has also put together a marketplace of fintech products. You can earn interest by lending money to small companies on October, get a loan, an insurance product and more.
Earlier this year, the startup expanded to Mexico. The company plans to roll out rewards in Mexico soon. Bnext has managed to attract a bit less than 400,000 users.

Challenger bank Bnext revamps rewards for purchases in partner stores

PhotoRoom automagically removes background from your photo

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Meet PhotoRoom, a French startup that has been working on a utility photography mobile app. The concept is extremely simple, which is probably the reason why it has attracted a ton of downloads over the past few months.
After selecting a photo, PhotoRoom removes the background from that photo and lets you select another background. When you’re done tweaking your photo, you can save the photo and open it in another app.

“My original vision comes from my time when I was working at GoPro,” co-founder and CEO Matthieu Rouif told me. “I often had to remove the background from images and when the designer was out of office, I would spend a ton of time doing it manually.”
And it turns out many people have been looking for a simple app that lets them go in and out as quickly as possible with an edited photo in their camera roll.

For instance, people selling clothes and other items on peer-to-peer e-commerce platforms have been using PhotoRoom to improve their photos. PhotoRoom is often recommended in online discussions or YouTube tutorials about optimizing your Poshmark or Depop listings.
Downloads really started to take off around February. PhotoRoom now has 300,000 monthly active users. The app is only available on iOS for now. And if you’re a professional using it regularly, you can pay for a subscription ($9.49 per month or $46.99 per year) to remove the watermark and unlock more features.
“Subscriptions are what works best on mobile for photo and video apps,” Rouif said.
Behind the scene, PhotoRoom uses machine learning models to identify objects on a photo. And the vision goes beyond removing backgrounds.
Photoshop, the clear leader in photo editing, was designed decades ago. There’s a steep learning curve if you want to use it professionally. It’s hard to understand layers, layer masks, channels, etc.
PhotoRoom wants to build a mobile-first photo-editing app that doesn’t lazily borrow Photoshop’s metaphors and interface elements. “What would be Photoshop if you could understand what’s on the photo,” Rouif said.
While the app relies heavily on templates, you can tweak your images by adding objects, moving them around, adding some shadow and editing elements individually. Image composition is 100% up to the user.

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New summer templates are coming this week Wash your hands #photoroom
A post shared by PhotoRoom (@photoroom_app) on May 27, 2020 at 9:55am PDT

Like VSCO, Darkroom, PicsArt, Filmic Pro and Halide, PhotoRoom belongs to a group of prosumer apps that are tackling photo and video editing from different ways. A generation of users who grew up using visual social networks are now pushing the limits of those apps — they look simple when you first use them, but they offer a ton of depth when you learn what you can do with them. And they prove that smartphones can be great computers, beyond content consumption.
Rouif was the head of product at Stupeflix, a powerful video editing app that was acquired by GoPro back in 2016. PhotoRoom is just getting started as there are only four people working on the app, including two interns.

PhotoRoom automagically removes background from your photo