With remote working becoming more of a norm than ever before, remote interviews have, in turn, become a necessity. But how can you truly assess someone from these? In addition, it’s easy to miss great candidates just because you don’t have time to interview all the candidates.

A number of startups have appeared to try and address the problem. HireVue,
which has raised $93M, has tried to address with an AI-driven ‘Hiring Intelligence’ platform. AllyO, which has raised $19M, is trying to make hiring more efficient by addressing the traditional inefficiencies of lost applicants and conversions due to poor candidate experience. And Arya is a seed stage start-up which uses machine learning to identify successful sourcing patterns and draws potential candidates out of online profiles.

Another player is applying algorithms to the hiring process.

VCV.AI, has now raised $1.7 million to automatically screens job candidates using facial and voice recognition. Yes, it looks like another episode of Black Mirror is on its way…

The investment comes from Japanese VC Will Group, Talent Equity Ventures, 500 Startups and angel investors, including Masahiro Takeshima of Indeed. The funding will help VCV continue to develop its technology and strengthen its position, and will also see it opening an office in Tokyo, Japan.

VCV claims it can help eliminate human bias from the hiring process with preliminarily screening of candidates, automated screening calls, and by conducting these robo-video interviews with voice recognition and video recording.

Through VCV, potential candidates can record a video using a computer or smartphone on iOS or Android. This functions like a real interview, as candidates don’t have the ability to prepare for the questions in advance. Additionally, facial and voice recognition identifies a candidates’ nervousness, mood, and behavior patterns to help recruiters assess whether a person is a good cultural fit for the company.

VCV says this doesn’t replace the job of a recruiter but enhances their toolset so they can find and screen a greater number of candidates more efficiently. The startup says this AI-led approach helps companies save over 20 hours of work with recruiting bots working 24/7 to find, chat, and interview potential candidates.

Clients already include PWC, L’Oreal, Danone, Mars, Schlumberger, and Citibank .

Arik Akverdian, founder and CEO of VCV.AI, said: “AI can improve and streamline the hiring process, while also helping to remove corrosive biases that all humans have. There’s no reason technological innovation shouldn’t transform this area of business—especially considering human talent is an organization’s most important asset.”

We will see how those biases play out once all our hiring is via AI…

Series B rounds used to be about establishing a product-market fit, but for some startups the whole process seems to be accelerating. Harness, the startup founded by AppDynamics co-founder and CEO Jyoti Bansal is one of those companies that is putting the pedal the metal with his second startup, taking his learnings and a $60 million round to build the company much more quickly.

Harness already has an eye-popping half billion dollar valuation. It’s not terribly often I hear valuations in a Series B discussion. More typically CEOs want to talk growth rates, but Bansal volunteered the information, excited by the startup’s rapid development.

The round was led by IVP, GV (formerly Google Ventures) and ServiceNow Ventures. Existing investors Big Labs, Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $80 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Bansal obviously made a fair bit of money when he sold AppDynamics to Cisco in 2017 for $3.7 billion and he could have rested after his great success. Instead he turned his attention almost immediately to a new challenge, helping companies move to a new continuous delivery model more rapidly by offering Continuous Delivery as a Service.

As companies move to containers and the cloud, they face challenges implementing new software delivery models. As is often the case, large web scale companies like Facebook, Google and Netflix have the resources to deliver these kinds of solutions quickly, but it’s much more difficult for most other companies.

Bansal saw an opportunity here to package continuous delivery approaches as a service. “Our approach in the market is Continuous Delivery as a Service, and instead of you trying to engineer this, you get this platform that can solve this problem and bring you the best tooling that a Google or Facebook or Netflix would have,” Basal explained.

The approach has gained traction quickly. The company has grown from 25 employees at launch in 2017 to 100 today. It boasts 50 enterprise customers including Home Depot, Santander Bank and McAfee.

He says that the continuous delivery piece could just be a starting point, and the money from the round will be plowed back into engineering efforts to expand the platform and solve other problems DevOps teams face with a modern software delivery approach.

Bansal admits that it’s unusual to have this kind of traction this early, and he says that his growth is much faster than it was at AppDynamics at the same stage, but he believes the opportunity here is huge as companies look for more efficient ways to deliver software. “I’m a little bit surprised. I thought this was a big problem when I started, but it’s an even bigger problem than I thought and how much pain was out there and how ready the market was to look at a very different way of solving this problem,” he said.

Social networking and media platform Twitter today reported its results for the first quarter of the year, and it’s a strong one. The company said that revenues came in at $787 million, up 18 percent on a year ago; with net income of $191 million and earnings per share of $0.25. However, monthly active users continue to paint a challenging picture (no surprise that they are a dying metric for the company). Twitter says MAUs were 330 million in Q1, a drop of 6 million users on a year ago, although up 9 million on last quarter.

Monetizable daily active users — Twitter’s new and preferred metric for user numbers — were 28 million in the quarter, up 8 percent on the 26 million a year ago, and up 6 percent on last quarter’s 27 million.

Still, on the financial side, this is a strong set of results for the company. Going into today, average analyst expectations were for Twitter to post about $775 million in sales ($742-$815 million range) on an EPS of $0.15 per share ($0.10-$0.20 range). Twitter itself last quarter said it expected Q1 revenues to be between just $715 million and $775 million, with operating income between $5 million and $35 million.

With those numbers relatively stabilised, Twitter is putting more focus on trying to improve its actual product in the two areas where it has been considered weak: the ability for people to use Twitter when it gets noisy and active; and the general “health” of content management, around harassment and fake news. For the former, it’s been tinkering with a prototype app called twttr, and for the latter, it’s been adding more rules that it is proactively enforcing, which it says has led to “helping [Twitter] remove 2.5 times more of this content since launch.”

The “initial focus” of the twttr app up to now has been to focus on conversations and how to make them easier to follow. This implies that the app could stay around for some time to come and become the testing ground for much more, including Twitter’s increasing forays into video and other content and how it manages bad actors on the platform: in other words, aspects of the service potentially represent opportunities for growth and monetization — or otherwise urgently need attention because if they don’t get resolved they will ultimately hinder both.

This is the last quarter that Twitter is reporting monthly active users, as it makes a switch instead to reporting “mDAUs”, or monetizeable daily active users, which it claims is a more accurate representation of how the business is growing. MAUs have not been a great metric for the company over the years, with one of Twitter’s strongest criticisms being that its user growth is stagnating. Given that the platform has a strong surge of usage around specific events, the average usage on days will work out stronger than that of usage on a monthly period.

Last quarter, while reporting a relatively strong set of Q4 earnings, we noted that Twitter’s stock dropped on that weak guidance, which represented a big drop from Q4 at a time (Q1) when many expect Twitter to report its strongest numbers.

As a point of comparison, a year ago in Q1 2018, Twitter posted revenues of $665 million, on an EPS of $0.16 per share, both blowing past Wall Street estimates with sales up 21 percent year-on-year.

More to come.

Binance, the company widely seen as the world’s largest crypto exchange, has officially set up shop in Singapore after it launched a service in the country.

The new Singapore service, however, bears more of a resemblance to U.S. rival Coinbase than a classic Binance exchange. Binance’s rapid ascent is thanks to a service that lets users trade a range of crypto tokens with very little verification or individual data required. It’s Singapore venture is quite the opposite: it allows customers to purchase Bitcoin only and at fixed prices. Initially, it appeared that purchased Bitcoin could not be moved out of the exchange at this point but that issue seems to be fixed now.

We checked in with Binance for more details, but the company is yet to respond.

Binance’s Singapore launch follows an investment from Vertex, a VC firm backed by Singapore’s sovereign fund Temasek, in October. Binance has been testing a ‘beta’ version of its service in the country since late 2018 in communication with Singaporean regulator MAS.

The company has prioritized creating fiat ramps — exchanges that allow customers to buy into crypto using currency — over the past six months as it seeks to gain increased legitimacy and play within regulated jurisdictions. CEO Changpeng Zhao has also stressed the importance of going beyond retail customers to reach institutional money and enable it to enter crypto. As a global financial hub, Singapore is its biggest effort on fiat to date.

The Singapore venture is Binance’s third fiat effort following exchanges in Uganda and Jersey — a joint-venture in Lichenstein is yet to launch — although it remains to be seen just how useful the Singapore offering will be in its current form.

Binance users have long been accustomed to a choice of a vast array of crypto assets on sale, but the Binance Singapore exchange falls short on that count, despite considerable expectation for its launch.

Interestingly, information on the website indicates that the new Binance venture appears to be a partnership with Xfers, a crypto startup in Southeast Asia that helped Coinbase set up its service in Singapore. Coinbase ended the partnership and quit the country last year claiming that Xfers was “not suitable in its current form to handle the growth” it had seen. Let’s see how Binance gets on.

Meanwhile, the company made another significant announcement after it officially launched its decentralized exchange, also known as Dex — its other major priority besides fiat.

There are no initial fireworks here — the Dex doesn’t yet include trading pairs or native tokens — but the launch means that blockchain companies are now able to migrate from Ethereum, EOS or other blockchains and begin to issue tokens on Binance Chain. A Binance spokesperson confirmed that the first of those migrations are expected to happen this week. The first is Binance’s own BNB token, which is moving from ERC20 to BEP2.

The Dex has been in testing since February, during which the company said that some 8.5 million transactions have been made. The real test will be when projects begin moving over and (if) traders begin to utilize the platform in large volumes going forward. Binance has always claimed that its Dex will operate as an alternative to its existing centralized exchanges, rather than as a replacement.

Binance draws revenue from over-the-counter (OTC) trading, trading fees on its platform and via BNB. Eventually, the Dex could augment that monetization as Binance will gain a share of network fees when its nodes are used in transactions on the Dex. Likewise, increased usage of the Dex and Binance Chain could raise the value of BNB — which has been on an incredible run this year, outpacing Bitcoin itself.

Valued at $6.02 on January 1, BNB broke $25 last week. Today, the price is $24.20, according to data from Coinmarketcap.com, and it remains to be seen how these two developments will impact it.

KeepTruckin, a developer of hardware and software that helps truck drivers manage their vehicles and cargo, has raised $149 million in Series D funding. Greenoaks Capital has led the round, with participation from existing backers GV, IVP, Index Ventures and Scale Venture Partners .

The round values the business at $1.25 billion, according to KeepTruckin co-founder and chief executive officer Shoaib Makani.

Since it was founded in 2013, KeepTruckin has accumulated 55,000 unique customers, deploying its software in hundreds of thousands of vehicles. The San Francisco-headquartered company will use the latest investment to double its employee headcount to 2,000 in the next 12 to 18 months.

“Our technology really improves the life of the driver,” Makani told TechCrunch. “These are real people doing work that keeps our economy moving. Trucking is really the foundation of the American economy. More than 70 percent of all freight is moved over the road in a truck. This is how we eat, consume and produce; without it, our economy wouldn’t thrive.”

The Series D financing brings KeepTruckin’s total raised to $228 million, including a $50 million Series C that closed in March 2018.

KeepTruckin’s software is intended to bring the antiquated trucking industry into the digital age. Its platform provides electronic logs and fleet management tools, including GPS tracking and driver performance monitoring for fleet managers and dispatchers to track and communicate with their drivers.

“We are competing against paper and pencil,” Makani explained.

Makani left Khosla Ventures, where he had been an investor in early-stage consumer and enterprise companies since 2011, in 2013 to build KeepTruckin. At the time, the beginnings of a new sector focused on tech-enabled logistics was beginning to emerge. Since then, several companies have launched and scaled with similar focuses.

There’s Convoy in Seattle, for example, which also operates a network of connected-trucks. Uber Freight, the logistics and supply chain management business inside Uber. And Huochebang, a Chinese mobile app dubbed the “Uber-for-Trucks.”

“Trucking is forecasted to be a $1 trillion industry by 2024 and is the backbone of the global economy, yet has been underserved by technology but change is coming and KeepTruckin is at the leading edge,” Greenoaks managing partner Neil Mehta said in a statement. “KeepTruckin is building the technology that trucking companies need to compete in the modern economy. The network that KeepTruckin has built will enable it to change the way freight is moved on our roads.”

There’s no question that springtime in Paris is the stuff of legend. TechCrunch is returning to the City of Lights to continue building another legendary experience. The TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech 2019 takes place at the Expo Porte de Versailles on 17-18 May. If you’re a developer, a UX/UI designer or an all-around tech creator, don’t miss this chance to collaborate, compete and create something great.

Thanks to stellar sponsored hack contests, you can win serious cash and other awesome prizes in the process. There’s no fee to enter, but get your free hackathon ticket now, because they won’t last long.

Thousands of startup founders, business leaders, investors, academics, students and media across Europe and beyond will descend on VivaTech, which makes it the perfect place to host a hackathon of epic proportion.

Here’s how it all works:

Form or join a team and take on a specific hack challenge put forth by the hack sponsors. Fuel up on whatever gets you through the night, because you have just 24 hours to work your tech magic, wield your mighty coding skills and produce a working solution.

It’s pencils down after 24 hours, and then your sleep-deprived team will have just 60 seconds to deliver a rapid-fire presentation to our hackathon judges. Each team receives a score between one and five, and the team with the highest score wins the prize associated with the sponsored hack. In addition, TechCrunch will award a €5,000 grand prize for the best overall hack.

All teams that receive a combined score of three or higher also win tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2019 and VivaTech 2020.

We’re stoked to announce the details of the latest hack contest from our sponsor, Eramet:

In the 21st century, metal alloys are everywhere, e.g. computers, electric cars, satellites. You can find up to 20 different alloys in a single computer. The quality requirements of customers are extremely tight nowadays. Eramet, a global mining and metallurgical group, challenges you to find a solution that can provide our customers with 100 percent transparency on our supply chains, from the extraction of ore from the mine to the final product, with a heavy focus on the quality, environmental, social and ethical aspects. The winner of this challenge will receive a €5,000 prize.

In case you missed it, we already announced a contest from EDHEC. The company’s offering a €5,000 prize to the team that creates the best product to help students make sure they choose the course of studies and career that’s right for them.

Be sure to keep checking back, because we’ll announce plenty more sponsored contests — with awesome prizes — in the coming weeks.

The TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech 2019 takes place on May 17-18. Are you ready to put your skills to the ultimate test and become a legend in your own right? Get your free ticket and join us in Paris. We can’t wait to see what you create!

Le Wagon has been steadily growing for the past few years. The bootstrapped French company now has 34 campuses across 22 countries. And now, Le Wagon is about to welcome a whole lot more students thanks to a new part-time program.

The startup has been testing a new part-time format in London and now wants to expand this program across all campuses. This way, students can keep working in their existing company and attend Le Wagon on Tuesday night, Thursday night and Saturday.

Le Wagon still focuses on its highly rated full-stack program. So far, nearly 5,000 students have attended this 9-week full-time bootcamp. You get to learn about front-end and back-end development, and you end up building your own project from start to finish.

After a couple of months, you should be ready to start a startup or join a startup as a software engineer. And Le Wagon is still scaling that program as the company expects to accept between 2,000 and 3,000 students in 2019 alone.

The part-time program has the exact same content and costs the same price — the full-time program in Paris currently costs €6,900. The part-time program is going live in Paris in August, and it should be live on most campuses by January 2020. And the company thinks a part-time program opens up many different possibilities.

If you have a family and kids, maybe you can’t afford to leave your job or take a sabbatical. Some high-ranked executives also want to be 100 percent sure they want to start a new career before leaving everything behind. According to Le Wagon co-founder and COO Romain Paillard, the new program should attract different profiles, which should improve the quality of the alumni community.

Many former students create their own startups. French startups founded by Le Wagon alumni have raised $48 million (€43 million) in total.

Of course, it’ll take a lot of motivation to go through the program. It’s like signing up for a part-time job in addition to your full-time job. Le Wagon will screen candidates as much as possible to see if they’re motivated enough to finish the program.

Many companies don’t want to let their employees attend Le Wagon right now because it means they’ll be gone for a couple of months. Le Wagon thinks companies will be more open-minded about a part-time program and support their employees.

This will be a nice addition to Le Wagon’s executive program. The company is just starting on this front and has attracted hundreds of employees working for big companies and looking for a short program to learn new skills.

Douyu, a Chinese live streaming service focused on video games, has filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as it prepares to raise up to $500 million on the NYSE less than a year after its archrival floated on the same stock market.

Wuhan-based Douyu, whose name translates as “fighting fish”, is the second Twitch -like service backed by Tencent to go public in the United States. Its direct competitor Huya, who has a similarly fierce name “tiger’s teeth” and also counts Tencent as a major investor, raised $180 million from its NYSE listing last May.

It’s not surprising for Tencent to hedge its bets in esports streaming, given the giant relies heavily on video games to make money. For example, Tencent can use some of its portfolio companies’ ad slots to get the word out about its new releases. Indeed, Douyu’s filing shows it received a hefty 27.48 million yuan ($4.09 million) in advertising fees from Tencent last year.

As Douyu warns in its prospectus, its alliance with Tencent can be tenuous.

“Tencent may devote resources or attention to the other companies it has an interest in, including our direct or indirect competitors. As a result, we may not fully realize the benefits we expect from the strategic cooperation with Tencent. Failure to realize the intended benefits from the strategic cooperation with Tencent, or potential restrictions on our collaboration with other parties, could materially and adversely affect our business and results of operations.”

But there are nuances in the giant’s ties to China’s top two live streaming services that could mean more affinity between Tencent and Douyu. The social media and gaming behemoth is currently Douyu’s largest shareholder with a 40.1 percent stake owned through its wholly-owned subsidiary Nectarine. Over at Huya, Tencent is the second-largest stakeholder behind YY, the pioneer in China’s live streaming sector that had spun off Huya.

When it comes to the financial terms, the rivaling pair is in a head-on race. In 2018, Douyu doubled its net revenues to $531.5 million. Huya held an edge as it earned $678.3 million in the same period, also doubling the amount from a year ago.

Huya may have learned a few things about monetizing live streaming from 14-year-old YY as it managed to pull in more revenues despite owning a smaller user base. While Douyu claimed 153.5 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter, Huya had 116.6 million.

How the two make money also diverge slightly. In the fourth quarter, 86 percent of Douyu’s revenues originated from virtual items that users tipped to their favorite streaming hosts, with the remaining earnings derived from advertising and more. By contrast, Huya relied almost exclusively on live streaming gifts, which made up 95.3 percent of total revenues.

As Douyu grows its coffers to spend on content as well as technologies following the impending IPO, competition in China’s live streaming landscape is set to heat up. Just earlier this month, Huya raised $327 million in a secondary offering to invest in content and R&D. Like many other businesses anchored in content, Huya and Douyu depend tremendously on quality creators to keep users loyal. Both have offered sizable checks to live streaming hosts, promising to grow the internet celebrities into bigger stars.

And they’ve extended the battlefield outside China as emerging media forms, most exemplified by short video services Douyin (TikTok’s China version) and Kuaishou, threaten to steal people’s eyeball time away. Both bite-size video apps now enjoy a much bigger user base than their live streaming counterparts.

“We intend to further explore overseas markets to expand our user base through both organic expansion and selective investments,” noted Douyu in its IPO filing.

In a similar move, Huya’s overseas expansion is also well underway. “In addition to our vigorous domestic growth, we have successfully leveraged our unique business model to enter new overseas markets. We believe we are delivering long-term value through strategic investments in overseas markets in 2019 and beyond,” said Huya chief executive Rongjie Dong in the company’s Q4 earnings report.

Ruthless copying is common in tech. Just ask Snapchat. However, it’s typically more conceptual than literal. But car API startup Smartcar claims that its competitor Otonomo copy-and-pasted Smartcar’s API documentation, allegedly plagiarizing it extensively to the point of including the original’s typos and randomly generated strings of code. It’s published a series of side-by-side screenshots detailing the supposed theft of its intellectual property.

Smartcar CEO Sahas Katta says “We do have evidence of several of their employees systemically using our product with behavior indicating they wanted to copy our product in both form and function.” Now a spokesperson for the startup tells me “We’ve filed a cease-and-desist letter, delivered to Otonomo this morning, that contains documented aspects of different breaches and violations.”

The accusations are troubling given Otonomo is not some inconsequential upstart. The Israel-based company has raised over $50 million since its founding in 2015, and its investors include auto parts giant Aptiv (formerly Delphi) and prestigious VC firm Bessemer Ventures Partners. Otonomo CMO Lisa Joy provided this statement in response to the allegations, noting it will investigate but is confident it acted with integrity:

Otonomo prides itself on providing a completely unique offering backed by our own intellectual property and patents. We take Smartcar’s questions seriously and are conducting an investigation, but we remain confident that our rigorous standards of integrity remain uncompromised. If our investigation reveals any issues, we will immediately take the necessary steps to address them.

Both startups are trying to build an API layer that connects data from cars with app developers so they can build products that can locate, unlock, or harness data from vehicles. The 20-person Mountain View-based Smartcar has raised $12 million from Andreessen Horowitz and NEA. A major deciding factor in who’ll win this market is which platform offers the best documentation that makes it easiest for developers to integrate the APIs. 

“A few days ago, we came across Otonomo’s publicly available API documentation. As we read through it, we quickly realized that something was off. It looked familiar. Oddly familiar. That’s because we wrote it” Smartcar explains in its blog post. “We didn’t just find a few vague similarities to Smartcar’s documentation. Otonomo’s docs are a systematically written rip-off of ours – from the overall structure, right down to code samples and even typos.”

The screenshot above comparing API documentation from Smartcar on the left and Otonomo on the right appears to show Otonomo used nearly identical formatting and the exact same randomly generated sample identifier (highlighted) as Smartcar. Further examples flag seemingly identical code strings and snippets.

Otonomo has pulled down their docs.otonomo.io documentation website, but TechCrunch has reviewed an Archive.org Wayback Machine showing this Otonomo site as of April 5, 2019 featured sections that are identical to the documentation Smartcar published in August 2018. That includes Smartcar’s typo “it will returned here”, and its randomly generated sample code placeholder “”4a1b01e5-0497-417c-a30e-6df6ba33ba46” which both appear in the Wayback Machine copy of Otonomo’s docs. The typo was fixed in this version of Otonomo’s docs that’s still publicly available, but that code string remains.

“It would be a one in a quintillion chance of them happening to land on the same randomly generated string” Smartcar’s Katta tells TechCrunch.

Yet curiously, Otonomo’s CMO told TechCrunch that “The materials that [Smartcar] put on their post are all publicly accessible documentation, It’s all public domain content.” But that’s not true, Katta argues, given the definition of ‘public domain’ is content belonging to the public that’s uncopyrightable. “I would sure hope not, considering . . . we have proper copyright notices at the bottom. Our product is our intellectual property. Just like Twilio’s API documentation or Stripe’s, it is published and publicly available — and it is proprietary.”

Otonomo’s Lisa Joy noted that her startup is currently fundraising for its Series C, which reportedly already includes $10 million from South Korean energy and telecom holdings giant SK. “We’re in the middle of raising a round right now. That round is not done” she told me. But if Otonomo gets a reputation for allegedly copying its API docs, that could hurt its standing with developers and potentially endanger that funding round.

Fintech is very much still hot in Asia. ZestMoney, a startup that helps consumers with no credit history get loans to buy online, announced today it has raised a $20 million Series B.

The round is led by Quona Capital, a stealthy Washington-based fund that invests in emerging market fintech and has an office in India. Others participating included new backer Reinventure, an Australian fund which includes Coinbase among its fintech portfolio, as well as returning investors Ribbit Capital, Omidyar Network and Naspers -owned PayU. The round takes ZestMoney to $42 million to date, it previously raised a $13.4 million ‘Series A2’ led by Chinese phone giant Xiaomi last August.

ZestMoney was founded in 2015 by Lizzie Chapman (its CEO), Priya Sharma (CFO/COO) and Ashish Anantharaman (CTO). The trio — pictured at the top — met working at Wong after Chapman moved to India from the UK to head up the controversial pay-day loan company’s local business. That venture ended up falling through and the rest is history, as they say.

Unlike Wonga and its ilk, ZestMoney is very much a consumer-centric loans company. That’s to say that it works with consumers who have no credit card, limited credit history and often very little assessable data, to help them build a profile and become ‘credit-worthy.’ That typically begins with small loans, which grow as a customer repays successfully.

The startup has partnered with over 800 merchants, including Flipkart and Amazon, to offer financing options at point-of-sale. That helps retailers close out transactions whilst enabling consumers to buy medium-to-large ticket items, which typically include electronics, education and learning costs or vacations. Most of its transactions happen online, but Xiaomi is a major partner helping ZestMoney’s offline push.

Small loans don’t generate a return that makes the hassle worthwhile for banks, but that’s where startups like ZestMoney come in. It aggregates the smaller customers and manages the details, making it an attractive partner at scale for banks — and that’s another stakeholder that the startup works with.

All in all, the approach runs in stark contrast to the ratchety terms that Wonga and others force on consumers who use their credit services.

As Chapman told us last year: “New age fintech is much more optimistic… the thesis is ‘Behave well and do good things and you’ll get cheaper pricing.’”

Speaking to TechCrunch this week, the ZestMoney CEO said the new capital will towards further increasing the focus on technology. That includes AI for credit assessment and other analytics, as well as developing voice-based communication and facial recognition technologies that will help engage consumers who are less comfortable with English as a language and lack experience using the internet and digital services.

The company is also beginning to cast its eye overseas, and it has opened an office in Singapore as it begins to assess expansion opportunities in the Southeast Asian region. Singapore is the regional hub, especially for fintech, but Chapman said the country itself isn’t likely to be a market for ZestMoney. She also cautioned that expansion isn’t likely to come in the immediate future.

“We’re looking at doing things around the Southeast Asia region,” she explained in an interview. “We won’t dive in and start operating in 10 other markets overnight, but a lot of countries [there] have synergies with India. There could be opportunities to work with local e-commerce companies or perhaps license our technology.”

The main focus for ZestMoney will remain its home market in India, however.

“There is still a huge, huge ocean of demand in India,” added Chapman — who spoke at our Disrupt Berlin event last year. “We still see sub-five percent financing online and it is just 30 percent offline.”

With that in mind, Chapman said ZestMoney is making a more concerted push around its in-store financing option that works directly with physical retail partners.

Quona Capital co-founder and managing partner Ganesh Rengaswamy echoed Chapman’s belief that there is still plenty of growth opportunity in India.

“ZestMoney and Quona’s partnership is very symbiotic given the shared values of addressing big challenges in emerging markets fintech, market leadership through responsible high growth, and delivering financial accessibility to vastly underserved consumers,” he said in a statement