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Chaque jour nous vous présenterons une nouvelle Startup française ! Notre pays regorge de talents et d'entrepreneurs brillants ! Alors partons à la découverte des meilleures startup françaises ! Certaines d'entre elles sont dans une étape essentielle dans la vie d'une startup : la recherche de financement, notamment par le financement participatif (ou crowdfunding en anglais). Alors participez à cette grande aventure en leur faisant une petite donation ! Les startups françaises ont besoin de vous !

#USA Adtech veteran Marcus Startzel becomes CEO at Whitebox

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Marcus Startzel is moving from the adtech to ecommerce: He’s becoming the new CEO at Whitebox.

One of his first tasks, apparently, will be raising a Series A.

Startzel was previously an executive at AppNexus, which he joined after the acquisition of MediaGlu, where he was CEO. (He departed AppNexus after it was bought by AT&T.) He’s also had senior roles at Millennial Media and Advertising.com.

Whitebox, meanwhile, was founded in 2013 by previous CEO Rob Wray. The company helps businesses manage some of the most challenging parts of ecommerce — for example, it handles warehousing and fulfillment, while also creating and optimizing listings on Amazon, eBay and the seller’s own website.

Startzel said he was attracted to the company because it taps into broader trends around the growth of ecommerce, and because of the opportunity provided by all of Whitebox’s data around “finding the best way to get the product to the consumer.” He also said he was impressed by the recent hiring of Chief Operating Officer Rob Hahn and Chief Data Officer Andrew Bignell, both from Amazon.

And while this may seem like a big change from his previous roles, Startzel said he’s still drawing on his leadership experience, and on his approach of “just understanding the market from a customer lens, just being customer focused when you’re a brand.”

“I’m excited to sell products, not just advertise them,” he added.

Wray, meanwhile, will remain at Whitebox as its chief product officer.

“We started Whitebox because brands were getting crushed by the enormous complexity
of selling online,” he said in a statement. “Brands need a unified approach to ecommerce to scale while lowering costs. We are thrilled to have Marcus join and apply his knowledge and experience.”

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2S5o8nS

#USA Wynd raises $82 million for its store management service

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French startup Wynd raised another $82 million (€72 million) from Natixis, Sofina and BNF capital. The company started with a point-of-sale solution for restaurants and other brick-and-mortar stores. It now provides a one-stop-shop for all your digital needs when it comes to managing your offline and online sales.

The startup has raised $127 million in total (€112 million) from today’s new investors as well as Sodexo, Orange and Alven.

Wynd provides a software-as-a-service platform for everything that can be powered by computers. The service manages your inventory, handles orders, payments and tells your staff what they’re supposed to do to prepare orders for your customers.

Everything is omnichannel, which means that an online sale and an offline sale are handled the same way in the system — there’s just a different parameter when it comes to delivery. Your inventory is unified across your e-commerce websites and stores. And Wynd can also replace your product information management service.

If you’re already using other services for some parts of your business, Wynd has an API and integrates with third-party services. For instance, you can connect Wynd with your ERP.

Wynd also lets you get detailed reports on your products and your staff. On this front, Wynd competes with Excel and good old static exports. Having dynamic dashboards can help you be more reactive and understand why a specific product is taking off for example.

And now, big brands are using Wynd to manage their sales, such as Carrefour, Total, MK2 and Monceau Fleurs. 30 percent of the company’s revenue comes from other countries.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2DsT7SR

#Blockchain Swedish Trader Expects to Pay 300% of Crypto Profits to Tax Agency

According to local media, a Swedish cryptocurrency trader is anticipating receiving a tax bill of approximately $1 million after conducting approximately $2.9 million worth of trades across tens of thousands of transactions made since 2014. The trader claims that the tax bill will equate to 300 percent of the profits he has earned rather than 30 percent due to failing to report the price that he paid for his cryptocurrency.

Also Read: Airdrop Causes Exchange to Accidentally Send BTC to Customers

Swedish Trader Faces $1 Million Tax Bill After Failing to Report Cost-Basis

Swedish media has reported on Linus Dunker, a cryptocurrency trader who is expecting to receive a bill of roughly 8 million Swedish Kroner ($1 million) for tens of thousands of transactions made during the last five years.

Swedish Trader Expects to Pay 300% of Crypto Profits to Tax Agency

Dunker has described the anticipated tax demand as “absurd,” claiming that he will pay three times that which he profited from the trades. “I will pay 300 percent of the profit instead of 30 percent. It should not be legal,” he said.

The expected hike in Dunker’s tax obligations results from the trader failing to report the price paid for the cryptocurrency he purchased, which he claimed was exchanged for cash. As such, Dunker is predicting that the tax agency will charge him at a zero-cost basis, in addition to being charged as a business activity rather than a personal activity, causing transactions incurring double the tax obligations.

Trader Claims Tax Bill Will Equate to 300 Percent of Profits

Recounting the day when several representatives of the Swedish Tax Agency came to his house, Dunker stated: “There were many in the stairs. I think it was four or five people.” According to media outlet Svt Nyheter, the representatives took notes on everything that he owned, including Dunker’s “car model, the summer cottage, the name of the dog Charlie, two TV sets and so on.”

Dunker added that he had previously contacted the tax agency regarding his declaration but did not expect the agency to take such severe action against him.

Swedish Trader Expects to Pay 300% of Crypto Profits to Tax Agency

Control coordinator with the Swedish Tax Agency, Henrik Kisterud, noted that while the agency is not currently 100 percent certain as to Dunker’s obligations, it is very confident in the accuracy of its judgments pertaining to Dunker’s cryptocurrency activities.

“We should not go here and say that we are 100 percent safe. But we think we have a good basis in these investigations where we have made judgments about business activities,” Kisterud said.

What is your response to Dunker’s tax situation? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!


Images courtesy of Shutterstock


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The post Swedish Trader Expects to Pay 300% of Crypto Profits to Tax Agency appeared first on Bitcoin News.

from Bitcoin News http://bit.ly/2R8Irwi Swedish Trader Expects to Pay 300% of Crypto Profits to Tax Agency

#USA Citizens Reserve is building a supply chain platform on the blockchain

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Citizens Reserve, a Bay Area startup, has a broad goal of digitizing the supply chain. Last fall, the company launched the Alpha version of Suku, a Supply Chain as a Service platform built on the blockchain. Today, it announced a partnership with Smartrac, an RFID tag manufacturer, based in Amsterdam, as a key identity piece for the platform.

Companies use RFID to track products from field or factory to market. Eric Piscini, CEO at Citizens says this partnership helps solve a crucial piece of digitizing the supply chain. It provides a way to trace products on their journey to market, and ensure their provenance, whether that is to be sure no labor was exploited in production, environmental standards were maintained or that the products were stored under the proper conditions to ensure freshness.

One of the big issues in track and trace on the supply chain is simply identifying the universe of items in motion across the world at any given moment. RFID tagging provides a way to give each of these items a digital identity, which can be placed on the blockchain to help prevent fraud. Once you have an irrefutable digital identity, it solves a big problem around digitizing the supply chain.

He said this is all part of a broader effort to move the supply chain to the digital realm by building a platform on the blockchain. This not only provides an irrefutable, traceable digital record, it can have all kinds of additional benefits like reducing theft and fraud and ensuring provenance.

There are so many parties involved in this process from farmers and manufacturers to customs authorities to shipping and container companies to logistics companies moving the products to market to the stores that sell the goods. Getting all of the various parties involved in the supply chain to move to a blockchain solution remains a huge challenge.

Today’s partnership offers one way to help build an identity mechanism for the Citizens Reserve solution. The company is also working on other partnerships to help solve other problems like warehouse management and logistics.

The company currently has 11 employees based in Los Gatos, California. It has raised $11 million, according to Piscini.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2B0pB5f

#USA Adjust expands its anti-ad fraud tech by acquiring Unbotify

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Adjust, a Berlin-headquartered company focused on mobile ad measurement and fraud prevention, is acquiring bot detection startup Unbotify.

Founded in 2012, Adjust has become increasingly focused on ad fraud, and in fact created an industry group called the Coalition Against Ad Fraud a little over a year ago. Co-founder and CTO Paul Müller argued that although the industry has become increasingly concerned about fraud, Adjust has led the way in taking a more proactive approach: “Instead of just telling our clients, ‘Hey, you just spent money on fraud,’ we actively intervened and rejected attribution to a fraudulent source.”

In Müller’s view, Unbotify fits in with the company’s broader philosophy because the Israeli startup isn’t just trying to detect bots — it also “produces explainable results,” providing a clear explanation of why an impression couldn’t have come from a real human being.

“We strongly believe fraud isn’t a problem that can be solved with a magical black box or eight ball,” he said. “Fraud should not be an opinion. We believe in clear, transparent measurement of why something is fraud.”

Adjust co-founder and CEO Christian Henschel said the entire 25-person Unbotify team will be joining the company, and will continue working as an independent office in Tel Aviv. In fact, Adjust plans to double the size of the team by the end of the year.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Unbotify was founded in 2015 by Yaron Oliker and Alon Dayan. According to Crunchbase, it raised $2 million in funding from Maverick Ventures Israel.

Ultimately, Henschel said, “What we’d like to achieve is to end fraud for digital media.”

Not that they think that Adjust alone can put a stop to all fraud. Instead, they hope to simply make it too costly and difficult for fraudsters to target Adjust customers.

“If you have a lot of houses on the street, and some of the doors are heavily fortified, most of the time [the thieves] will go with the door leaning open,” Müller said. “For us, the goal is not to eliminate fraud on idealistic level, but actually to make it financially unviable.”

The announcement comes just a month after Adjust announced it was buying data aggregation company Acquired.io.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Wi51GG

#Blockchain The Daily: 100 Exchanges’ Security Rated, Enjinx Block Explorer Launches

The Daily: 100 Exchanges’ Security Rated, Enjinx Block Explorer Launches

Tuesday’s installment of The Daily details new tools that are helping users safely navigate the cryptocurrency ecosystem. From making an informed decision about which exchanges to trust to tracking blockchain transactions with Enjinx, we cover a selection of developments from across the cryptosphere, before finishing with a trip to the darknet where KYC documents are allegedly up for sale.

Also read: How to Buy Bitcoin Anonymously

100 Crypto Exchanges’ Security Assessed

Over the last few months, Crypto Exchange Ranks (CER) has been shining a light on the practices of the exchanges tasked with protecting customer funds and fairly reporting trading volume and other metrics. While a good number of exchanges act ethically, there is a lot of unscrupulous operators out there. In its latest report, CER has applied a security score to the top 100 exchanges, ranking them for server security, user security, and an ongoing crowdsourced security assessment.

The Daily: 100 Exchanges’ Security Rated, Enjinx Block Explorer Launches
The top 20 exchanges for security according to CER

Just nine exchanges scored more than 8/10 in the report, with the top four comprising Kraken followed by Coinbase Pro, Binance, and Bitmex. Not surprisingly, the exchanges that received the lowest score were troubled by hacks during 2018. Bithumb, Coincheck, and Zaif all scored less than 5/10.

Enjinx Launches New Block Explorer

Enjinx has launched its new blockchain explorer. The tool, for interacting with the Ethereum network, is characterized by a clean and minimal design that sets it apart from traditional blockchain explorers. The Enjinx team is aiming to position its new resource in direct competition to Etherscan, the most popular explorer within the Ethereum ecosystem. Transactions, blocks, and ERC20 tokens can all be browsed, with the most popular Ethereum tokens ranked by 24-hour volume, price change, and market cap.

The Daily: 100 Exchanges’ Security Rated, Enjinx Block Explorer Launches

Enjinx is now working on integrating Bitcoin Core, Litecoin, and Dogecoin explorers in a bid to become the go-to tool for cryptocurrency users seeking to query public blockchains. The project’s Ethereum explorer is also scheduled to be upgraded further to incorporate data on ERC1155 and ERC721 non-fungible tokens.

Bitfinex Denies Security Breach After KYC Details Surface on Darknet

The Daily: 100 Exchanges’ Security Rated, Enjinx Block Explorer LaunchesCustomers of several leading crypto exchanges have had their personal details leaked according to a darknet hacker. “ExploitDOT” claims to have the details of 100,000 crypto customers, including selfies, passport scans, and other identification documents. The allegedly stolen data is believed to originate from early 2018 and pertains to Binance, Bitfinex, Poloniex and Bittrex. Bitfinex has issued a denial that it has suffered a security breach, though given that the hack is thought to have come from a third party KYC processor, this doesn’t mean that Bitfinex users are unaffected.

On darknet forum Dread, ExploitDOT insisted that his trove of documents was legitimate, writing “if you ever sent a KYC, chances are … your documents [are] in my dump,” adding that “the exchanges are completely denying the documents were took from them, whereas there is clearly docs with ‘Binance’, ‘Poloniex’ and such written on the paper.” While the veracity of the haul is debated, the story has reaffirmed to many in the crypto community something they have always known: enforced KYC makes everyone less secure.

What are your thoughts on the stories in today’s news roundup? Let us know in the comments section below.


Images courtesy of Shutterstock.


Need to calculate your bitcoin holdings? Check our tools section.

The post The Daily: 100 Exchanges’ Security Rated, Enjinx Block Explorer Launches appeared first on Bitcoin News.

from Bitcoin News http://bit.ly/2HpLPTP The Daily: 100 Exchanges’ Security Rated, Enjinx Block Explorer Launches

#USA The Pill Club raises $51M as VCs find new opportunities in women’s health

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Through telemedicine and direct-to-consumer sales platforms, startups are streamlining the historically arduous process of accessing contraception.

The latest effort to secure a significant financing round is The Pill Club, an online birth control prescription and delivery service. Consumer-focused investor VMG Partners has led its $51 million Series B, with participation from new investors GV and ACME Capital (formerly known as Sherpa Capital), and existing investors Base10 Partners and Shasta Ventures. The Pill Club declined to disclose its valuation.

Launched in 2016 in San Carlos, California, The Pill Club couples healthcare services with at-home delivery, reaching customers in all 50 states. With a team of doctors, nurses and patient care coordinators, the startup operates its own pharmacy and is licensed to prescribe medication in 35 states. With the new funding, which brings its total raised to $67 million, founder and chief executive officer Nick Chang said he plans to scale the business 50 percent and expand its prescription service across the entire U.S.

“At the end of the day, our company is about empowering women,” Chang told TechCrunch. “What does that mean? It means empowering our patients to make their own healthcare decisions and making reproductive healthcare more common — something to not be shy about or worried about.”

Chang, who has spent his career in medicine and holds an M.D. from Duke University, previously founded Ganogen. The business, which sought to facilitate patient’s access to organ donors, ultimately shut down but was a catalyst to The Pill Club’s formation, as were experiences from Chang’s youth.

“I [grew] up with an older sister who was on birth control since she was 14 for menstrual regulation,” Chang said. “She really felt embarrassed to pick up the medication and to talk to anyone about it and that was really insightful for me. There are so many hurdles in accessing birth control besides clinics being around.”

Some 67 million women between the ages of 13 to 44 live in the U.S.; 19 million of them live in contraceptive deserts, or areas that lack reasonable access to public clinics. The Pill Club wants to eliminate those deserts, as do other companies in the digital health arena.

Digital health has remained one of the hottest destinations for VC investment. In 2018, investors put about $4.5 billion into U.S. companies in the sector, a 17 percent increase year-over-year, according to PitchBook data. Telemedicine startups garnered a record $1.25 billion in funding in that timeframe thanks to large financings for industry leader Oscar, a health insurance startup that raised $540 million in 2018 alone; as well as an $88 million Series A for newcomer Roman, which offers a cloud pharmacy for erectile dysfunction.

Startups focused on women’s health, meanwhile, have continued to garner more attention from VCs. These companies, including The Pill Club and comepetitor Nurx, have not only benefited from the rapid rise of telehealth, but also from a societal shift sparked in part by President Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers’ attempts to limit women’s access to birth control.

“People want to talk about this,” Chang said. “With so much happening from Hollywood to politics … it’s really got some people to say ‘ok, we really need to talk about what we are prioritizing as a society.’”

In addition to accelerating the expansion of its 260-person team, The Pill Club plans to use the investment to explore launching more services within women’s healthcare and to broaden the educational content it offers its customers.

“This is just the beginning of a much broader and bigger movement,” Chang said.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2R6DeVF

#USA UK startup veteran and investor Wendy Tan White joins Google X as Vice President

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Wendy Tan White, a veteran of the U.K. startup scene — including founding SaaS website builder Moonfruit, which exited to Yell Group for $37 million — is joining Google X, TechCrunch has learned.

According to sources, Tan White was approached by Google late last year, as she weighed up a number of other options, including raising a VC fund of her own dedicated to “deep tech”. Ultimately, she’s decided to join Google X, where she’ll hold the position of Vice President and will be part of the leadership team.

I understand she’ll be reporting directly Astro Teller, the head of X. “She will be managing, mentoring and supporting a range of teams across X,” a source tells me.

As well as founding and exiting Moonfruit with her husband Joe, Tan White has recently been a very active investor in the U.K., both in a personal capacity and has an advisor and former Partner at BGF Ventures, the early-stage U.K. venture capital fund. She led led the Open Cosmos Series A for BGF, and is an investor in banking app Cleo, amongst others.

Prior to BGF, she was a General Partner at Entrepreneur First, the London-headquartered deep tech company builder, which is backed by Greylock, and remains a popular figure amongst EF alumni.

(Her husband, Joe Tan White, will remain in his current post as COO of Entrepreneur First, I’m told.)

Wendy Tan White is also a Board Trustee of the Alan Turing Institute (the U.K.’s National AI Institute), a Member of the UK Digital Economy Council, on the Board of TechNation and Imperial College, DoC. She was awarded an MBE for services to business and technology in 2016 and Women in IT, Business Role Model of the Year 2017.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2U6CDFn

#USA Just Eat acquires restaurant software platform Flyt for £22M

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Just Eat, the takeout marketplace and food delivery service, has acquired Flyt, a startup that offers software for restaurants and restaurant suppliers. The acquisition price is £22 million, which Just Eat says it has financed from cash reserves.

“A further cash consideration may also be payable subject to certain operational and financial criteria being met over the next three years,” discloses the company.

Notably, Just Eat was already one of Flyt’s investors, but this deal sees the takeout behemoth become a majority owner. Existing investors, including Time Out and Entree Capital, have exited. The company is thought to have raised close to £12 million since being founded in 2013.

Described as a leading software platform that helps restaurant groups and restaurant suppliers integrate their point of sale (POS) systems with third-party services, Flyt has obvious synergies with Just Eat, providing technology that helps improve the experience of ordering online.

Better POS integration with various third-party services can help improve a restaurant’s customer experience and its operational efficiency. Specifically, Flyt says its technology platform removes the need for manual restaurant processes, reduces driver wait times in restaurants, and eliminates human error in order processing.

To that end, Flyt currently works with over 3,000 quick service and branded restaurants, including some of the U.K. and world’s largest brands such as KFC, Tim Hortons, Mitchells and Butlers, Pizza Express and Nando’s.

Despite now being owned by Just Eat, the company says it will continue to operate as a standalone platform and brand. Founders Tom Weaver and Chris Evans will continue to lead the business.

As a footnote, prior to the acquisition, Just Eat owned an 8 percent stake. The takeout marketplace says the acquisition will enable it to accelerate the development of Flyt’s technology and offer Flyt’s services to more of its restaurant partners globally.

Peter Duffy, Interim CEO of Just Eat comments: “Bringing Flyt into our Group will accelerate the take-up of these services around the world and allow the Flyt team to innovate with new and exciting technology solutions for the industry. We’ve admired Flyt for some time and are hugely impressed by their technology – integration between Just Eat and our restaurant partners is a critical component to providing world-class food delivery services”.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Mpn7SD

#USA TaxScouts, the UK startup that helps prepare your taxes, picks up £1.2M led by SpeedInvest

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TaxScouts, the U.K. “tax preparation” startup founded by TransferWise and Marketinvoice alumni, has created some new paperwork of its own. The London-based company has raised £1.2 million in seed funding.

Leading the new round is SpeedInvest, with participation from Finch Capital and SeedCamp. It adds to £300,000 in pre-seed investment that TaxScouts announced six months ago.

Combining “automation” with a network of human accountants, TaxScouts’ service is designed to support you through your annual tax filing preparation and submission. However, the headline draw is that the company charges a flat fee of £99 if you pay in advance, and promises a turn-around of just 24 hours.

To achieve this, the web app walks you through your tax status, income and expenses without assuming too much prior knowledge. This includes asking you to upload or take a photo of any required documents, such as invoices or dividend certificates. The idea is that all of the admin is captured digitally and packaged up ready for an assigned accountant to check.

Last year, I took the service for a spin, the first time in years that I haven’t left my tax return to the last minute. The accountant assigned to me was helpful and his advice seemed quite good. Most importantly, the communication was speedy, both over text and in a call we needed to have to talk through the pros and cons of two alternative ways to expense a car for work.

Meanwhile, I’m told accountants like the service, too, as it potentially enables small practices to scale and therefore take on more clients. Powering this is TaxScouts’ client management system for accountants, which the startup claims is saving 3-5 days of work per month for its accounting partners.

To that end, TaxScouts says it hopes to quadruple its network of accountant partners by the end of 2019. Its longer term aim is reduce the workload of accountants by 80 percent through further “process automation and digital data processing”.

“With an ever increasing amount of people in the UK experiencing non-standard income and with late fines amounting to billions last tax season alone, the time is better than ever to fundamentally redefine the experience,” says Anthony Danon, Principal at SpeedInvest.

“TaxScouts has built automation that brings simplicity, speed and convenience through a unique approach that creates shared value across taxpayers and accountants. We are excited to be backing such a product-minded team that has led product and engineering in some of U.K.’s best fintech startup stories”.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2T7zgOi