TechCrunch
With 100k Meals Delivered, Plated Will Expand Nationwide By The Fall
Having already raised a $1.4 million seed round in May, the meal ingredient delivery service Plated announced on the Techstars Demo Day stage that they will begin raising their Series A in the near future.
Plated caters to gourmets who are too busy to deal with the hassle of shopping for ingredients on a weeknight. Pick a recipe, and Plated delivers a box of all the necessary components to your door for as little as $10 per plate. Non-members pay a few dollars more.
CEO Nick Taranto said that since the company launched in November it has been growing 50% month over month. In the last six months, they have delivered more than 100k meals.
The company will also begin expanding its delivery service in the next few months. Plated currently delivers in the Northeast and Midwest, with plans to reach the west coast, the Southeast, and the Southwest. In early May, Plated launched a social feature called “Social Recipe Pages” so users could share photos and cooking tips.
Taranto sees food service as the final frontier of ecommerce, as it represents only 1% of online sales today. Plated has been able to boost its margins by cutting out two major costs in the traditional food industry, spoilage and overhead.
Plated is currently backed by ff Venture Capital and angels including Manischewitz Company CEO Alain Bankier, Andrew McCollom of Facebook, and LA-based investor Paige Craig.
BlackBerry Misses In Q1 2014: EPS Of -$0.13 On Revenue Of $3.1B, 6.8 Million Phones Shipped
BlackBerry has just released its fiscal Q1 2014 earnings today (yes, their fiscal calendar is a little kooky), and the company still can’t seem to find its footing. The company reported generating $3.1 billion in revenue this past quarter, up 9% year-over-year, but definitely missed most analyst estimates with an adjusted net loss of $67 million (which works out to -$0.13 per share).
Meanwhile, the consensus estimates according to Bloomberg Businessweek were for the company to report earnings of $0.07 per share on revenue of $3.4 billion. As you might expect, BlackBerry’s poor quarterly performance has left the company’s stock price tumbling in pre-market trading: at time of writing, the price is down over 18%.
Now these are undeniably bad numbers, but beyond that, today’s earnings release is a little… odd.
Take hardware for instance. More than a few pundits and analysts ruminated on the importance of the BlackBerry Q10 to the company over the past few weeks — it’s the first BlackBerry 10 device to sport the now traditional physical QWERTY keyboard, but today’s release doesn’t take into account U.S. shipments. Curiously enough though, BlackBerry didn’t break down its hardware shipments by OS like it usually does — according to the release the company shipped 6.8 million smartphones, but there’s no word on how many of them run BB10. Last quarter the company reported moving 1 million BB10 devices, so there’s something very strange (and frankly not very confidence-inspiring) about the fact that BB10 hardware doesn’t seem to get a nod this time around.
Furthermore, there’s no word on the company’s subscriber base. Last quarter the company reported that it some 76 million subscribers were still loyal to the BlackBerry platform (down from 79 million the quarter before that). Has the number finally dipped to the point where the company would rather not flaunt it despite launching a new operating system and hardware to go with it? It sure seems like it.
If anything though, these next few months will shine even more light on whether or not BlackBerry still has the chops to compete in the crowded smartphone space. We’ll have a clearer understanding of the Q10′s sales impact in the United States, and BlackBerry pulled back the curtain on the entry-level Q5 last month, a device that seems tailor-made to help the company maintain its relatively strong position in emerging markets. It’ll be some time before we get a feel for the impact the Q5 will have on BlackBerry’s bottom line though — CEO Thorsten Heins noted during the Q5′s unveiling that the device won’t be available until sometime this summer, and declined to delve into which markets would get the thing first.
Speaking of the summer, Heins also noted that the BlackBerry Messenger service would go live for Android and iOS sometime over the next few months. BBM has endeared itself to a considerable chunk of fans (the service boasts “over 60 million” users across the globe), but we’ll soon see if it’s enough to keep BlackBerry competitive amidst a sea of messaging apps.
As always, the company will be holding an earnings call in just a little bit. Stay tuned — hopefully Heins explains where all those juicy numbers went.
After 17 Years In Business, Expense Management SaaS Replicon Raises $20M In Series A Funding From Social + Capital And Emergence
Replicon, the developer of a cloud time tracking and expense management application, has raised $20 million Series A funding led by The Social + Capital Partnership and Emergence Capital Partners. This is actually the first time in the company’s 17-year history of raising money from institutional investors.
Co-founders Raj Narayanaswamy and Lakshmi Raj have largely bootstrapped the SaaS company on their own since its inception in 1996. Replicon’s products allow you to track project time and expenses, client billing, employee work schedules, and employee time and attendance. The company was originally founded in Canada but moved to Silicon Valley three years ago.
TimeSheet Project & Billing allows users to track project time and costs and create reports based off of this data. Managers can monitor project/task progress, actual vs. estimated hours/cost, and billing amounts. Users can track hours worked for both salaried and hourly employees, manage time off, set accrual policies, manage overtime rules, run attendance and payroll reports, and integrate with other payroll software.
Additionally managers can track employee expenses in multiple currencies, attach expense receipts, automatically calculate taxes such as VAT or GST, and monitor expense reimbursements. In terms of scheduling, the software allows you to track employee work schedules, make on-the-fly adjustments, and track actual work against the set schedule.
Quietly, Replicon, which is profitable, has accumulated more than 1.2 million users in 60 countries worldwide, with clients including Ernst & Young, Cornell University, Health Canada, Shell, Verizon, Ferrari and Amazon. The company says that it is projecting 60 to 80 percent growth by 2015.
It’s not that often you come across companies raising the first round of outside funding after 17 years of business. But Raj said the new capital is really focused on accelerating growth, and not being constrained with the expense on the balance sheet. The money will be primarily used towards sales and marketing, international expansion and hiring.
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