Amazon’s cloud computing unit is making further inroads into Asia after it opened a data center in Hong Kong this week, adding to the seven existing locations where it currently operates across the Asia Pacific and China.

The new entry will likely give the American giant some leg up in its regional battle with Alibaba’s cloud service, which, according to a new Gartner report, was the biggest cloud infrastructure provider in the Asia Pacific last year. But that won’t be the case with all countries, notably China where the cards are often stacked against foreign players.

Amazon Web Services has been operating in China for quite some time, albeit through rough and roundabout routes. A set of cyber laws enacted by Beijing in mid-2017 required foreign companies to store data locally and outsource their hardware parts to Chinese partners. In response, AWS teamed up with two separate local providers based out of Beijing and the hinterland province of Ningxia to run its cloud service while it provides the necessary “technology, guidance and expertise” to the allies. In practice, AWS’s China users are subject to terms and conditions set by its domestic partners.

With two data hubs, AWS managed to carve out a 6 percent share in China’s market for public cloud as an infrastructure service in the first half of 2018, according to research company IDC. Alibaba enjoyed a significant lead with a whopping 43 percent share, exceeding the sum of second to ninth-ranked players.

One main appeal of Alibaba Cloud, as well as many other Chinese offerings, is affordability. “Whether it’s price or service, AWS is at a real disadvantage in China,” Lin Rong, who runs a website called 91Yun that reviews cloud services and runs a forum for cloud computing, told TechCrunch.

In the meantime, an increasing number of Chinese companies are looking to host their servers in neighboring countries for global deployment as they take their apps, mobile games and other internet services overseas. Hong Kong is one popular hosting destination for export businesses, but even on the opposite end of the border, Alibaba has been a prime choice for many Chinese enterprises.

Just like on the mainland, Alibaba Cloud’s Hong Kong service is cheaper than its international rivals; it also delivers lower latency to mainland users than AWS, Lin observes, thanks to its tie-ups with China’s top three network providers.

At the very least, AWS’s foray into Hong Kong will heighten competition among cloud services targeting locally based companies. There are few places in the world where competition in cloud is as fierce, suggested Keith Yau, founder of Bootdev, a cloud-based platform for running websites.

“Hong Kong now has all the big cloud companies — Azure, AWS and Alibaba Cloud — as well as Google Cloud Platform, which is very unusual for any city in the world,” he told TechCrunch.

Hong Kong as a hub for international trade and financial services, alongside the government’s recent push to attract more tech-focused companies, means a substantial demand for data storing and processing power. Amazon, being “best in tech among all cloud services,” suggested Cyrus Wong, a data scientist at Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education, will likely win some share away from existing players.

“Hong Kong is globally recognized as a leading financial tech hub and one of the top places where startups build their businesses, so we’ve had many customers asking us for an AWS Region in Hong Kong so they can build their businesses on the world’s leading cloud with the broadest and deepest feature set,” read a statement from Peter DeSantis, vice president of global infrastructure and customer support for AWS.

According to the Gartner report, AWS currently ranks second to Alibaba Cloud across the Asia Pacific. Its share declined 0.2 percent to 11 percent in 2018, while Alibaba Cloud added 4.7 percent to bring its slice to nearly 19.6 percent.

Slack has filed to go public via a direct listing. Similar to what Spotify did last year, this means that the company won’t have a traditional IPO, and will instead allow existing shareholders to sell their stock to investors.

The company’s S-1 filing says it plans to make $100 million worth of shares available, but that’s probably a placeholder figure.

The S-1 offers data about the company’s financial performance, reporting a net loss of $138.9 million and revenue of $400.6 million in the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019. That’s compared to a loss of $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million for the year before.

The company attributes these losses to its decision “to invest in growing our business to capitalize on our market opportunity,” and notes that they’re shrinking as a percentage of revenue.

Slack also says that in the three months ending on January 31, it had more than 10 million daily active users across more than 600,000 organizations — 88,000 on the paid plan and 550,000 on the free plan.

In the filing, the company says the Slack team created the product to meet its own collaboration needs.

“Since our public launch in 2014, it has become apparent that organizations worldwide have similar needs, and are now finding the solution with Slack,” it says. “Our growth is largely due to word-of-mouth recommendations. Slack usage inside organizations of all kinds is typically initially driven bottoms-up, by end users. Despite this, we (and the rest of the world) still have a hard time explaining Slack. It’s been called an operating system for teams, a hub for collaboration, a connective tissue across the organization, and much else. Fundamentally, it is a new layer of the business technology stack in a category that is still being defined.”

The company suggests that the total market opportunity for Slack and other makers of workplace collaboration software is $28 billion, and it plans to grow through strategies like expanding its footprint within organizations already using Slack, investing in more enterprise features, expanding internationally and growing the developer ecosystem.

The risk factors mentioned in the filing sound pretty boilerplate and/or similar to other Internet companies going public, like the aforementioned net losses and the fact that its current growth rate might not be sustainable, as well as new compliance risks under Europe’s GDPR.

Slack has previously raised a total of $1.2 billion in funding, according to Crunchbase, from investors including Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Social Capital, SoftBank, Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins.

Amazon is prepping a high-fidelity music streaming service for a launch by year-end, according to a report from Music Business Worldwide — a site which also accurately reported Amazon’s recent launch of the free, ad-supported Amazon Music service for Echo device owners. As for the high-fidelity service, the plan is to charge around $15 per month for this “better than CD quality” offering — which could present a direct challenge to TIDAL.

It seems Amazon wants to cover the market both at the low-end and the high, by offering direct competitors to services like Pandora, Spotify, Apple Music, and now, TIDAL.

The company’s investment in music not only allows for new revenue streams through advertising and subscriptions, it also provides a direct connection to Amazon’s smart speakers: its Echo line of devices. For consumers pinching pennies, the ad-supported service streaming over an Echo Dot may be good enough. But those who bought, say, a stereo pair of Echo Plus devices and an Echo Sub, may want a better-quality music subscription, too.

Currently, those audiophiles may have sought out something like TIDAL. The service’s Hi-Fi tier is $19.99 per month for CD-quality streams at 44.1 kHz / 16 bit. TIDAL also offers a Masters quality tier at 96 kHz / 24 bit. Deezer, meanwhile, streams 16-bit FLAC files.

It’s unclear where Amazon’s high-fidelity service will fit in, as the bit rate isn’t known.

However, discussions are still in the early stages, the report notes — only one major record company is on board so far.

If Amazon proceeds to launch this high-fidelity service, it will have price points and feature sets that span the music streaming market from free to paid to premium. That will help the company retain customers who may have otherwise jumped to a competitor for a differentiated offering. As a further incentive, Amazon could also choose to offer deals and discounts to its premium offering to those buying its smart speakers or subscribing to Prime — much as it does today with its $3.99 / month Amazon Music Unlimited plan tied to a single Echo device.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm dug into the latest, namely big news on the fund front from folks you know, two China-based companies going public on domestic exchanges, and what’s next in the long-running sagas of getting Uber and Slack public.

First up Kate talked us through the latest at Kleiner Perkins and Mary Meeker’s new growth fund, called Bond Capital. Alex has some more great context on that here, for interested parties, Kate has more here.

Next, we turned to the F-1 filings of Luckin Coffee and DouYu, two China-based companies joining the list of firms from the country that have chosen to go public here in the United States. With Luckin’s filing, we have a fascinating look into the costs of building a hyper-growth company; as you can imagine, Luckin running pretty steep deficits, but adding revenue incredibly quickly on a year-over-year basis. DouYo is fascinating for a different reason, namely that it only recently began generating gross profit. And in 2018, when it did begin to create some margin to cover its operating costs, it didn’t make much.

DouYu works in the live streaming and esports worlds, places where Twitch and Huya (another China-based company that went public in the States) have found success.

Finally, we had two domestic public offerings to dig into. Slack, an exit we’ve long anticipated, is supposed to drop its S-1 today. If that’s the case Alex and Kate will be back at their mics to bring you the highlights from that filing. And then there’s Uber .

To cap off a fun show, we chatted through the impending Uber debut. We expect the company to set a price range tomorrow, but if early reports are correct, the firm could be sandbagging a bit in hopes of raising its price next week. Lyft reports earnings on May 7, giving Uber a somewhat tight window to jump through if it wants to control its own narrative. (If Lyft’s earnings fall short, for example, and Uber hasn’t gone public by that point, it could be forced to lower its own pricing.)

That’s all we got for now. We’ll probably be back later today with an Equity shot. Stay cool!

In what seems like a historic moment in crypto, New York State Attorney General (NYSAG) office has announced that it is investigating iFinex, the company behind exchange Bitfinex and stablecoin Tether, over an alleged $850 million fraud.

Attorney General Letitia James’ office said on Thursday that it is looking how the company (apparently) lost $850 million which is said to have gone missing through a deal with Panama-based Crypto Capital. iFinex reportedly selected Crypto Capital as a payment processor to handle customer payouts after a series of banks refused to do business, including Wells Fargo which had previously taken transfers from its Taiwan-based accounts.

When it became evident that the money wouldn’t be returned, iFinex is said to have taken “at least” $700 million from the reserves that (apparently) back Tether, which is pegged against the U.S. dollar. The deal was not declared to investors.

“Those transactions treat Tether’s cash reserves as Bitfinex’s corporate slush fund, and are being used to hide Bitfinex’s massive, undisclosed losses and inability to handle customer withdrawals,” Attorney General James’ office argued in a release.

iFinex also stands accused of allowing New York-based investors to use Bitfinex to trade Tether without holding a license to operate in the state of New York.

In response, iFinex has claimed that “the New York Attorney General’s court filings were written in bad faith and are riddled with false assertions.”

“We have been informed that these Crypto Capital amounts are not lost but have been, in fact, seized and safeguarded. We are and have been actively working to exercise our rights and remedies and get those funds released. Sadly, the New York Attorney General’s office seems to be intent on undermining those efforts to the detriment of our customers,” the company said in a statement.

Tether and Bitfinex have long attracted suspicion within the crypto space and beyond. Tether has been accused of moving the market by printing new tokens. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that news of the investigation sent crypto prices down.

At the time of writing, the price of Bitcoin is down four percent over 24 hours while Ethereum is down six percent. In fairness, given the scale of the alleged fraud, and involvement of a branch of the U.S. government, those losses seem quite minimal.

The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

Uber filed an updated S-1 today where it announced that it would be pricing its initial public offering at $44-50 per share. Selling 180,000,000 common shares, it plans to raise between $7.9 billion and $9 billion ahead of its public debut on the NYSE, valuing it at $84 billion — squarely in the middle of the $80-90 billion that was projected as late as yesterday.

Separately, there was a surprise announcement in the S-1: PayPal said it would make a $500 million investment in the company in a private placement, as part of an extension of the partnership between the two, whether they will develop new digital wallet services.

PayPal has been working with Uber providing payment services since 2013 and is its lead processing partner in the US and Australia (but not the only one globally).

The $500 million placement is being made at the same valuation as the IPO price range, Uber said.

“In April 2019, we entered into a stock purchase agreement with PayPal, Inc. (“PayPal”), pursuant to which PayPal will purchase $500 million of our common stock from us in a private placement at a price per share equal to the initial public offering price,” Uber notes. “The sale of the shares in the private placement is subject to certain closing conditions, including the closing of this offering and certain regulatory approvals. Concurrently, and subject to the closing of the private placement, we and PayPal extended our global partnership through the execution of an addendum to our existing commercial agreement. We and PayPal intend to explore future commercial payment collaborations, including the development of our digital wallet.”

“This is another significant milestone on our journey to be a platform partner of choice, helping to enable global commerce by connecting the world’s leading marketplaces and payment networks,” said PayPal president and CEO Dan Schulman in a statement.

Uber’s pricing is more than three times the amount of Lyft’s $2.34 billion IPO, making it one of the largest IPOs in the U.S. since Alibaba’s debut on the public markets in 2014.

In 2018, Uber reported 2018 revenues of $11.27 billion, net income of $997 million and adjusted EBITDA losses of $1.85 billion. Uber, which filed for its IPO two weeks ago, will list on the New York Stock Exchange in May.

More to come.

China’s Ctrip, the world’s second largest online travel company, is doubling down on India after it announced a deal to increase its ownership of travel company MakeMyTrip to nearly half.

Ctrip will boost its ownership of MakeMyTrip, which is listed on the Nasdaq like Ctrip, to 49 percent through an exchange deal that sees Naspers, the South African internet giant and early backer of Tencent, swap its shares for 5.6 percent of Ctrip. Ctrip said the investment leaves it with four percent of MakeMyTrip’s voting power.

On paper, each stake is worth around $1.3 billion. MakeMyTrip has a current market cap of $2.69 billion while Ctrip’s current share price gives it an overall valuation of $23.5 billion. In the industry, only Booking Holdings is valued higher with a current market cap of $84 billion.

There’s a long history between the three companies. Ctrip and Naspers invested $330 million into MakeMyTrip two years ago, a move that saw Naspers deepen its involvement after its portfolio company Ibibo merged with MakeMyTrip in January 2017. Prior to that, Ctrip invested $180 million into the India company in January 2016.

“Over the past years we have witnessed the great achievements of MakeMyTrip, and we are confident that MakeMyTrip will extend its success in the future,” read a statement from James Liang, co-founder and executive chairman of Ctrip.

“We are also delighted to welcome Naspers to become our shareholder. Ctrip will continue to work hard to create greater value to our customers, our partners and all shareholders,” added Ctrip CEO Jane Sun.

MakeMyTrip co-founder and co-CEO Rajesh Magow said the deal would take his company’s partnership with Ctrip “to the next level.”

The deal comes as Naspers prepares to list its international business, which includes advertising giant OLX and stakes in numerous internet companies, in the Netherlands.

Ctrip’s past deals have included the $1.74 billion acquisition of Scotland-based Skyscanner and the undisclosed purchase of U.S-based travel discovery app Trip.com. It has also invested $463 million in China Eastern Airlines and swapped shares with Chinese rival Qunar.

Today’s share swap deal is forecast to close in this current Q2, according to an announcement from Ctrip.

London-based startup Wheely has raised a $15 million Series B round led by Concentric with Oleg Tscheltzoff, Misha Sokolov and other investors also participating. The company wants to build an Uber competitor focused on the luxury market.

It’s a bit ironic when you think about it as Uber started as a luxury company. But everybody knows someone with horrific Uber stories. That’s why Wheely is building a reliable and predictable ride-hailing experience.

The company is currently live in London, Moscow and St. Petersburg — Paris is coming this summer. It works with 3,500 drivers and it currently has a run rate of $80 million in gross bookings.

Wheely doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel as the company works with third-party partners and doesn’t employ its drivers. Similarly, the company takes a 20 percent cut on each ride.

But the startup insists on its strict recruitment process. For instance, you can’t become a Wheely driver from day one. The company requires at least three years of previous chauffeur driving experience. You also need to pass multiple tests including driving tests and etiquette tests. Only one in four UberBlack drivers pass the exam.

There are currently three different classes — a normal one with Mercedes-Benz E-Class cars, a fancy one with Mercedes-Benz S-Class cars and a van category with Mercedes-Benz V-Class vehicles.

Minimum rides cost £12 with the entry-level class, £16 in an S-Class and at least £40 for a van. You then pay more depending on distance traveled and time spent in the car.

And it’s been working well as Wheely now represents around 11 percent of gross bookings in London. Given that each ride is more expensive than a traditional ride-hailing ride, it makes sense that Wheely already captured a good chunk of the money pie. Now let’s see if the company can find enough cities with affluent people to scale its business.

RosieReality, a startup out of Zürich developing consumer augmented reality experiences, has raised $2.2 million in seed funding led by RedAlpine. Other backers include Shasta Ventures, Atomico Partners Mattias Ljungman and Siraj Khaliq (both of whom invested in a personal capacity), and Akatsuki Entertainment Fund.

Founded in early 2018, RosieReality’s first AR experience is designed to ignite kids interested in robotics and programming. The smart phone camera-based app is centred around “Rosie,” a cute AR robot that inhabits a “Lego-like” modular AR world within which you and your friends are tasked with building and solving world-size 3D puzzles.

The kicker: to solve these 3D-puzzle games requires “programming” Rosie to move around the augmented reality world.

“By developing Rosie the Robot, we created the first interactive and modular world that exclusively lives in your camera feed,” RosieReality co-founder and CEO Selim Benayat tells TechCrunch. “We use this new computational platform to enable kids to creatively build, solve and share world-sized puzzle games with friends and families – much like modern-day Lego”.

Describing Rosie the Robot’s typical users as teens that “like the challenge of intricately crafted puzzles,” Benayat says part of the inspiration behind the AR game was remembering how as a kid he used to love spending time building stuff and then inviting friends over to show them what he’d built.

“Kids today are not that different,” he argues, before adding that AR makes it possible for them to have the same tangible and contextual sensation while giving them a bigger outlet for their creativity.

“We see the camera as a tool to teach and enable [the] next generation of creators. For us gaming is the ultimate creative, social and educational outlet,” says the RosieReality CEO.

It’s official: Nikkei, the Japanese media firm that owns the FT, has confirmed that it has acquired Singapore-based new media startup Deal Street Asia. (The Nikkei announcement is buried behind a paywall — make of that what you will!)

The deal is undisclosed, but the announcement does confirm a TechCrunch report from last month which broke news of the impending acquisition.

Deal Street Asia covers a mix of news from Asia’s financial markets, business verticals and startups… which I guess makes it a competitor to us here at TechCrunch. Like TechCrunch, it also runs an events business — its main show in Singapore in September costs upwards of $1,000 and features senior executives from the likes of DBS, Grab, Sea, GGV, Allianz and IFC.

Initially, we reported that the deal valued Deal Street Asia at around the $5 million mark, but we now understand that the valuation is between $5 million and $10 million. The arrangement will see Nikkei take a majority stake in the business, which includes buying out existing investors and making a separate capital investment into Deal Street Asia worth around $3 million, according to what we’ve heard.

Launched in 2014, Deal Street Asia never disclosed its funding total, but its backers include Singapore Press Holdings, North Base Media, Alpha JWC, K2 VC, SGAN and Hindustan Times, the Indian media firm that operates Mint which is a Deal Street Asia content partner. Its Angel investors include Vijay Shekhar Sharma — the founder of Alibaba-backed Paytm — the Singapore Angel Network and Rogers Holdings chairman Jim Rogers.

Deal Street Asia confirmed that all of those agreed to sell with the exception of Mint which “continues to be a minority shareholder.” We understand that all investors enjoyed a positive outcome from the deal, so Mint’s continued involvement is down to strategy not any kind of issue on Deal Street Asia’s side, a source disclosed.

Nikkei said its capture of Deal Street Asia will “deepen its coverage of the Asian startup ecosystem and tech industries, the fastest-growing sectors in the region” and boost its ScoutAsia news and data offering.

Indeed, it looks like you can expect to see links form between Deal Street Asia and Nikkei media properties.

“Joining forces with Nikkei will help us accelerate our mission of helping the PE-VC industry and dealmakers understand the changing megatrends in this space. As we expand our reportage across Asia, we look forward to greater collaboration across Nikkeiʼs publications and group of companies such as the FT, Nikkei Asia Review and scoutAsia,” read a statement from Deal Street Asia founder and editor-in-chief Joji Thomas Philip.

The deal follows Nikkei’s majority share acquisition of The Next Web [disclaimer: my former employer] in March. As we previously reported, both of those acquisitions are part of a new subscription media strategy that Nikkei is hatching:

This is far from it for the FT in terms of deals. TechCrunch understands that the company is actively seeking acquisition and investment opportunities in media startups across the world. Beyond augmenting its existing events business, one source told TechCrunch that the FT is considering a new media subscription business, which could bundle together some of its acquisitions. That’s very much an ongoing work in progress as it seeks additional deals to plump up that potential subscription offering.

Keep an eye out for more deals, we certainly will!