Technology

Target Global, the pan-European venture capital firm headquartered in Berlin, has raised a new €120 million early-stage fund, following what it claims was only 3 months of fundraising.

Dubbed &Early Stage Fund II&, the new vehicle will see the firm continue to back early-stage tech companies across Europe and Israel, leading and co-leading seed and Series A rounds. It also has a later-stage growth fund and a dedicated mobility fund, and in combination Target Global currently has over €800 million in assets under management.

&Our ‘Early Stage Fund II& will pretty much follow the same strategy as our ‘Early Stage Fund I&; same team, same size, same investment strategy,& Shmuel Chafets, General Partner and Vice-Chairman at Target Global, tells TechCrunch.

&We had long debates around fund size, and despite it being oversubscribed, we opted to keep it at the original €120 million, which we believe is optimal for European early-stage at the moment and will also us to both deliver venture returns to LPs and give our founders the time and attention that early stage companies need&.

To that end, Target Global — which has a 50-person team across offices in Berlin, London, Tel Aviv, Moscow and Barcelona — says it will continue to focus on startups that are disrupting &truly European, trillion-Euro industries,& citing retail, financial services, food, mobility, healthcare, and manufacturing organizations, and the application of technologies such as SaaS, online marketplaces and e-commerce, and AI.

&Category leaders& that the VC has already backed include Auto1, Delivery Hero, Wefox, TravelPerk, and Rapyd.

&We like to invest in companies that target huge markets and with great teams that have relevant experience for the problem they are solving and that show durability,& adds Chafets. &It is very rare to have a team in the pre-A stage that really has all the answers around product-market-fit and technology. Most companies go through good and bad times, we try to find the founders that would go the distance&.

Meanwhile, Target Global is also announcing that Dr Ricardo Schäfer has been appointed as a new partner for Early-Stage Fund II. He&ll be leading the firmearly-stage investments in its London office. Described as a serial angel investor and an early backer of Revolut, Schäfer was most recently part of Seedcampinvestment team, as well as a Venture Partner with Cherry Ventures.

&We are happy to strengthen our London team with such an experienced and successful early-stage investor,& says Alex Frolov, General Partner and CEO at Target Global, in a statement. &With his focus on fintech and proptech, and a hands-on, entrepreneurial approach, we feel that itan excellent match both for our Target Global investment strategy and our culture&.

Kenya based B2B e-commerce startup Sokowatch has raised $14 million in Series A funding toward its mission of revamping supply-chain markets for Africainformal retailers.

From Nairobi, the company has created a platform that connects merchants directly to local and multinational suppliers — such as Unilever and Proctor and Gamble — and digitizes orders, payments and delivery-logistics.

Since launching in 2016, and raising a $2 million seed round in 2018, Sokowatch has expanded within Kenya and into Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.

With its Series A, the startup plans to broaden its client services — from working-capital to data-analytics — and target new African markets, according to CEO Daniel Yu.

Sokowatch also doesn&t rule out using its infrastructure to someday enter business-to-consumer online retail.

For the moment, the startupprimary business focus is to reduce costs and increase profit margins for small merchants.

&We&re looking to build out the largest B2B e-commerce network across Africa,& Yu told TechCrunch on a call.

Informal retail is still king in Africa — even with the emergence of shopping malls and well-funded e-commerce ventures, such as Jumia.

The size and potential of the continentinformal sector has captured the attentionofeconomists and startups.GDP revisions in several African countries have revealed outdated statistical methods were missing billions of dollars in economic activity. And one estimate by The International Labor Organization places more than two-thirds of Sub-Saharan Africanon-agricultural employment in the informal economy.

On the number of shops in that space, a 2016 study by global consultancy PwC estimated 90% of sales in Africamajor economies come through informal channels, such as markets and kiosks.

By Yuaccount, too many of Africalocal merchants are sacrificing capital and incurring opportunity cost due to inefficient supply-chain.

Sokowatch is shifting that scenario, according to its CEO, and now serves over 15,000 small retailers across its operating areas.

&We…estimate that we save merchants at least 20% on supply-chain costs for the goods we supply,& said Yu.

Sokowatch offers retailers an app to order products from its partner suppliers and maintains a fleet of vehicles, primarily three-wheel tuk tuks, for delivery.

&We handle all of our last-mile logistics exclusively ourselves,& said Yu.

The startup is also generating additional enterprise services. &As part of the product we are developing other tools for merchants to directly manage other aspects of their business, especially when it comes inventory and overall sales,& said Yu.

The data analytics Sokowatch creates for clients is also opening up working-capital solutions.

&We&ve been able to use that data to offer in-kind credit lines to many shops that can&t gain it from banks,& said Yu.

Quona Capital led Sokowatch$14 million Series A round, joined by Amplo, Breyer Capital, Vertex Ventures, Timon Capital and repeat investor 4DX Ventures.

The startup joins other B2B oriented ventures that have drawn significant capital over the last 12 months.

Kenyan startup, and B2B food distributor, Twiga Foods raised $30 million in 2019 and announced it would expand to West Africa.

In August, Nigerian trucking logistics startup Kobo360 raised a $20 million Series A backed by Goldman Sachs. In November, East African on-demand delivery venture Lori Systems hauled in $30 million supported by Chinese investors and another Kenyan logistics company, Sendy, raised $20 million this January backed by Toyota.

Sokowatch wouldn&t name which countries in Sub-Saharan Africa iteyeing for expansion. The companyCEO did confirm the startup could someday use the advantages of its platform to offer 3PL services or sell online directly to consumers in Africa.

&Itwithin the power of our networks to do so& said Yu. &At the end of the day, we want to be the channel — both digital as well as physical — for transforming access to goods and services for these communities.&

HealthJoy, a platform designed to make it easier for employees to use their healthcare benefits, has raised $30 million in Series C funding led by Health Velocity Capital. Returning investors also participated, including U.S. Venture Partners, Chicago Ventures, Epic Ventures, Brandon Cruz and Clint Jones. This brings HealthJoy total funding so far to $53 million.

By integrating with healthcare service providers and partnering with benefit consultant agencies, HealthJoy simplifies the process of finding and using benefits. Its features include an AI-based virtual assistant and healthcare concierges. The startup says it has a monthly login rate of 33% and that its clients, which now includes 500 employers, see a tenfold increase in the employee use of benefits, including telemedicine.

Since TechCrunch covered HealthJoySeries B round last year, the company has launched two new services. One is a price transparency tool called HealthJoy Rewards that allows companies to provide incentives for employees to use more cost-efficient services.

&For example, an MRI in Chicago can vary in price from around $500 for an independent clinic to around $3,500 in a hospital system,& HealthJoy founder and CEO Justin Holland told TechCrunch. &Our rewards platform allows companies to customize the incentive, but we provide nearly 100 recommendations. We&re showing an amazing ROI for companies that have adopted the program since we&re targeting high-cost procedures.&

The second new service is called HealthJoy EAP, an employee assistance program that Holland says is a priority for further development. It gives 24/7 access to short-term counseling, with several sessions available for free.

&Addressing mental heath is of extreme importance for companies in todayworld. Access to traditional counseling is on decline in many rural areas due to lack of access. In cities, costs have risen so many users are priced out of the market,& he says.

The funding will also be used to improve HealthJoyvirtual assistant, develop new services, integrate with more partners and aggregate data. HealthJoy plans to add 200 employees in its Chicago office during 2021, with the goal of doubling its engineering team. Future plans include working with more small- to medium-sized businesses and a potential partnership to serve Medicare recipients.

Other startups focused on employee benefits include League, Catch and Collective Health. Holland says HealthJoy integrates with, instead of competing with, benefits administration platforms and differentiates by being able to work with any benefits package.

Health Velocity Capital partner Saurabh Bhansali will join HealthJoyboard of directors. In a press statement, Bhansali said &HealthJoy offers proven technology solutions to help navigate employees through our nationcomplex and costly healthcare system, one that costs US employees over $1.2 trillion each year. Healthjoy has shown that it can deliver substantial cost savings to employers while simplifying the employee healthcare experience.&

Laiye, a Chinese startup that offers robotic process automation services to several major tech firms in the nation and government agencies, has raised $42 million in a new funding round as it looks to scale its business.

The new financing round, Series C, was co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lightspeed China Partners. Cathay Innovation, which led the startupSeries B+ round and Wu Capital, which led the Series B round, also participated in the new round.

China has been the hub for some of the cheapest labor in the world. But in recent years, a number of companies and government agencies have started to improve their efficiency with the help of technology.

Thatwhere Laiye comes into play. Robotic process automation (RPA) allows software to mimic several human behaviors such as keyboard strokes and mouse clicks.

&For instance, a number of banks did not previously offer APIs, so humans had to sign in and fetch the data and then feed it into some other software. Processes like these could be automated by our platform,& said Arvid Wang, co-founder and co-chief executive of Laiye, in an interview with TechCrunch.

The four-and-a-half-year-old startup, which has raised more than $100 million to date, will use the fresh capital to hire talent from across the globe and expand its services. &We believe robotic process automation will achieve its full potential when it combines AI and the best human talent,& he said.

Laiyeannouncement today comes as the market for robotic automation process is still in nascent stage in China. There are a handful of startups looking into this space, but Laiye, which counts Microsoft as an investor, and Sequoia-backed UiPath are the two clear leaders in the market currently.

As my colleague Rita Liao wrote last year, it was only recently that some entrepreneurs and investors in China started to shift their attention from consumer-facing products to business applications.

Globally, RPA has emerged as the fastest growing market in enterprise space. A Gartner report found last year that RPA market grew over 63% in 2018. Recent surveys have shown that most enterprises in China today are also showing interest in enhancing their RPA projects and AI capabilities.

Laiye today has more than 200 partners and more than 200,000 developers have registered to use its multilingual UiBot RPA platform. UiBot enables integration with Laiyenative and third-party AI capabilities such as natural language processing, optical character recognition, computer vision, chatbot and machine learning.

&We are very bullish on China, and the opportunities there are massive,& said Lightspeed partner Amy Wu in an interview. &Laiye is doing phenomenally there, and with this new fundraise, they can look to expand globally,& she said.

As Indian startups begin to make inroads in the world of SaaS, Microsoft has taken notice. The American tech giant today launched 100X100X100, a program aimed at business-to-business SaaS startups.

Microsoft said Monday that 100X100X100 will bring together 100 companies and 100 early and growth startups. Each committed company will spend $100,000 over a course of 18 months.

&This initiative will help build scale and create amazing opportunities for startups. Businesses can now fast-track their digital journeys through easy adoption of enterprise-grade solutions,& said Anant Maheshwari, President of Microsoft India, in a statement.

Each startup participating in the program will also have access to prospective customers at Microsoft industry and customer events. Participants also get access to Microsofttechnology platform, and guidance in fine tuning their business and expansion models.

Microsoft is not a new face in Indiastartup ecosystem. The company runs Microsoft for Startups that allows early stage B2B startups to use the companyAzure marketplace and enterprise sales team. Early last year, the company also expanded M12, its corporate venture fund, to India.

The companyglobal rivals Google and Amazon are also actively helping startups in India, sponsoring countless events and bandying out a range of goodies including thousands of dollars of credit to use their cloud platforms.

The idea is simple: If the bets work, these startups are already a customer and their solutions could be beneficial to several tens of thousands of other customers. And ita safe time to make these bets.

In recent years, scores of startups have emerged in India to build SaaS software following the success of firms such as Freshworks, valued at $3.5 billion, and CleverTap. Since SaaS startups are not building hardware, or disbursing loans, they often have the best profit margin.

Shekhar Kirani, a partner at Accel, told TechCrunch in a recent interview that his biggest frustration was not seeing many more entrepreneurs build SaaS services. &Anyone with some coding skills and a cheap laptop can build a service and sell to the world,& he said.

At a recent SaaS focused event, Godard Abel, chief executive of business marketplace G2, said that India was already among the top five nations for active participations for development of new business services.

As for Microsoft, expect several more announcements this week as its chief executive, Satya Nadella, appears at companyflagship conference in the country today and tomorrow.

A Samsung factory in South Korea was shut down after a confirmed case of coronavirus.

The facility in Gumi, near the Southeastern city of Daegu, was closed until early Monday morning and the floor on which the affected employee was working on will remain shut until early tomorrow.

“The company has placed colleagues who came in contact with the i