Logicbroker taps into $135M to advance cloud-based drop ship software

Logicbroker, a Connecticut-based e-commerce company focused on cloud fulfillment, secured a $135 million growth round from K1 Investment Management.

Its software provides drop ship and marketplace automation capabilities to brands, retailers, suppliers and third-party logistics providers. As CEO Peyman Zamani explained it, “drop ship” is a way that packages get from the seller to the buyer.

For example, Walgreens is one of the Logicbroker’s customers, and if you purchased a bottle of Walgreens brand vitamins from the website, it might get to you from a company warehouse, shipped directly from the provider or from a third-party, but the item you receive will be branded Walgreens. Drop ship can also happen in-store: say you see a dress you like, but the retailer only has the blue one available and you want it in red. The store can order it and send it to you or you can pick it up in the store.

Zamani, who was previously an executive at Office Depot, says this kind of technology started about 30 years ago when the concept of electronic data interchange — businesses communicating information, like purchase orders and invoices, electronically versus on paper — began to become mainstream.

“Electronic data interchange is now at the heart of e-commerce,” he added. “The concept today is the same, but what I envisioned was this taking place in the cloud, but no one was focusing on the connectivity and automation in a scalable way.”

Logicbroker portal

He founded Logicbroker in 2010, his third startup, and hadn’t raised much in the way of venture capital since 2013, just under $2 million, to get to profitability, Zamani said. Logicbroker hit that milestone about six years ago, and is growing about 80% year over year in revenue. It expanded into five global regions and works with over 4,000 companies, including Mars Wrigley and Samsung, to manage more than $5 billion in gross merchandise value annually.

Over the years, investors were knocking on the door, and Zamani was always “respectfully declining,” that is, until this year. The company closed out last year with approximately $2 billion in GMV and is on target to do close to $6 billion this year. In order to be a powerhouse and global leader in drop ship, Logicbroker wanted to accelerate product features, which meant going after some capital.

“We had eight offers, but picked K1 because they only invest in SaaS companies and look for category leader,” Zamani said. “We were already there in the U.S and want to repeat that globally. We could have gotten there ourselves, but it would have taken five to 10 years. Now we can get there in a couple of years.”

6 tips for establishing your startup’s global supply chain

The new funding will go toward adding to its 65-person employee base, the global expansion and continued product development. Logicbroker launched its curated marketplace this year with half a dozen customers and intends to make it one of the company’s leading offerings over the next four quarters.

Simon Yu, senior vice president at K1, said via email he reached out to Zamani a few years ago when the firm saw that Logicbroker “was building something unique in the e-commerce space.” In speaking with the company’s customers, Yu said they told K1 how much “they loved the products and thought the team was building an innovative platform that had a direct positive impact on revenue.”

He believes digitalization of global e-commerce is still in the early stages, and behavior, like drop shipping, will become more prevalent over time.

“COVID-19 definitely accelerated some of that,” he added. “Logicbroker is fueling this transformation and we’re excited to work with Peyman and the Logicbroker team on building a category leader.”

5 ways AI can help mitigate the global shipping crisis

 

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Deci snaps up $21M for tech to build better AI models based on available data and compute power

Building usable models to run AI algorithms requires not just adequate data to train systems, but also the right hardware subsequently to run them. But because the theoretical and practical are often not the same thing, there is often a gap between what data scientists may hope to do and what they practically do. Today, a startup called Deci that has built a deep learning platform to help bridge that gap — by building models that can work with the data and hardware that are available to use — is announcing some funding after finding strong traction for its products with Fortune 500 tech companies running mass-market, AI-based products based on video and other computer vision-based services.

The Tel Aviv-based startup has picked up a Series A of $21 million, money that it will be using to continue expanding its product and customer base. Insight Partners is leading the round, with previous backers Square Peg, Emerge and Jibe Ventures, alongside some new backers: Samsung Next, Vintage Investment Partners, and Fort Ross Ventures. Square Peg and Emerge led Deci’s seed round of $9.1 million a year ago. It also works very closely with others who are not strategic or financial investors (but may well be down the line?). Intel collaborated with it on MLPerf, where Deci’s technology accelerates the inference speed of the ResNet-50 neural network when run on Intel CPUs.

Up to now, Deci has been focusing its attention on models for computer vision-based products, where its platform — built on its own proprietary AutoNAC (Automated Neural Architecture Construction) technology — is able to build, and continuously update, models quickly for services that might have otherwise taken longer, and a lot of trail and error, to devise.

One key client, for example, is one of the world’s biggest and well-known videoconferencing platforms (unfortunately, name undisclosed) that is using Deci to build AI modeling so that users can blur their backgrounds in video calls. Here, all of the computing needed to execute that blurring is happening at “the edge”, on users’ own CPU-based devices (that is, not typically optimized for AI workloads).

Yonatan Geifman, the CEO who co-founded Deci with Ran El-Yaniv and Jonathan Elial (a trio of AI specialists), said that the plan is now to start expanding from computer vision applications to another challenge, building better NLP (natural language) models, which you might need to run any kind of service with a voice interface, from personal assistants on phones or smart speakers through to audio-based search or any kind of customer service interface, for example.

Although Deci has picked up a lot of business by helping companies address the challenge of running AI services in a landscape of devices that are not necessarily optimized for AI, it has also found a lot of interest from organizations to use Deci to build better models for their own internal computing, even when they theoretically have the GPUs and compute power on hand to run anything. This taps into an interesting power balance that has long existed in enterprise IT and is very much getting played out in AI today, where enterprises will try to do more with the assets they have to hand, while at the same time they are regularly getting pushed to invest more in newer and more expensive and powerful equipment.

“There is a race to larger models all the time,” Geifman said in an interview, citing the new language model announced earlier this month by Nvidia and Microsoft as one example of that evolution. “So the hardware is just not enough. In one sense, maybe that race and drive to invest in new hardware is being pushed by the hardware makers themselves, but the models are getting larger. There is a gap, between the algorithm and the supply of the hardware. So, we need to have some convergence based on what hardware we have. Deci is bridging or even closing that gap.”

With adequate training data being another perennial problem in AI, Deci is also working to give a boost on the data side of the equation. Geifman said that Deci essentially builds synthetic data sets to supplement data when more is needed to build the models. In all cases, the product works within organizations’ developer environments, data stays where it is and does not go to Deci or anywhere else in the process of building the models.

Alongside that Deci is also using AutoNAC to build more products. The most recent of these is DeciNets, which Deci describes as “a family of computer vision models” that essentially skip some of the work of building models from the ground up and therefore using less compute power to run.

“Deci is at the forefront of AI and deep learning acceleration, with highly differentiated technology that lets customers optimize blazingly fast deep learning models for inference tuned to any hardware platform,” said Lonne Jaffe, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. “We are delighted to be part of Deci’s ScaleUp journey and look forward to supporting the company’s rapid growth.” Jaffe is joining the board with this round.

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YouTube plans week-long live shopping event, following tests of livestream shopping with creators

YouTube announced earlier this year it would begin pilot testing livestream shopping with a handful of select creators. Now, the company is ready for a larger test of its live shopping platform with plans to host a week-long live shopping event, “YouTube Holiday Stream and Shop,” starting on November 15. The event will allow viewers to shop new products, unlock limited-time offers, and engage with creators and other viewers via Q&As and polls, the company says.

The company first unveiled its plans to invest in live shopping at the beginning of 2021, as part of a larger initiative around integrated shopping on YouTube. The initial tests had been focused on videos on demand before the livestream pilot kicked off this summer.

Since then, a number of YouTube creators have tried out livestream shopping with their fans, including Simply Nailogical, who launched her nail polish collection to 2.8 million fans on her Simply Not Logical channel; Hyram, who launched his ‘Selfless’ skincare line to his 4.5 million fans; and Raven Elyse who ran a livestream shopping session where she sold products in partnership with Walmart. (Walmart had earlier experimented with live shopping on TikTok across multiple events.)

Other retailers also participated more directly, YouTube notes. Sephora hosted a live Q&A and Target ran a live style haul using the new features, for example. 

The upcoming Stream and Shop event, which kicks off with the Merrell Twins, will also feature products from top retailers including Walmart, Samsung, and Verizon.

As part of its panel at Advertising Week, the company shared a few details from the research it has invested in to better understand the live shopping journey and how YouTube plays a role. In partnership with Publicis and TalkShoppe, YouTube study’s found that 75% of viewers used YouTube for shopping inspiration — for instance, by watching creators’ #ShopWithMe videos. It also found that 85% of viewers trust creators’ recommendations and that viewers valued information quality and quantity over the production value of the videos.

Despite the steps it’s been making towards live stream shopping, YouTube hasn’t yet made the feature broadly available. Instead, it’s continuing to test live shopping with individual creators.

In the meantime, however, rival TikTok has moved forward with live shopping features of its own.

Earlier this year, TikTok began piloting TikTok Shopping in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, in partnership with Shopify. At an event last month, the company said it was expanding shopping with new partners Square, Ecwid, PrestaShop, Wix, SHOPLINE, OpenCart and BASE. It also introduced a suite of solutions and features under the brand TikTok Shopping, which includes ways to integrate products into videos, ads, and LIVE shopping support.

Facebook also ran its own series of live shopping events this spring and summer, and now offers dedicated live shopping sections inside both its Facebook and Instagram apps’ Shop sections.

YouTube plans to share more about its upcoming live shopping event as the date grows closer.

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Equity Monday: Welcome to bigtech hardware week

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

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here. I also tweet.

• This week, the week of October 18, 2021, kicked off with a mixed markets picture. Asian stocks were mixed, down in Europe, and set to fall in the United States. China remains a concern.
• There are hardware events this week from Apple, Samsung and Google. Along with earnings from Netflix, IBM, and Qualtrics.
• Amazon is in hot water with American regulators, China may force its tech giants to allow for cross-platform search, and Facebook wants to hire lots of Europeans.
• From startup-land, Enpal landed a huge dollop of cash for its solar work, while OfficeRnD made bets on a hybrid working future. Notes to come shortly on the Expensify IPO filing.

The show is back on Wednesday! Chat then!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!

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What to expect from Apple, Google and Samsung’s big events

Hardware season is heading for a dramatic finale next week, with three events from three major companies, three days in a row. Apple, Google and Samsung (in that order) are all hosting big events next week, getting their last big announcements (hopefully) out of the way ahead of the upcoming holiday season.

That means your friendly neighborhood hardware editor — and much of the TechCrunch staff — is set to be busy for the next few weeks, writing about and reviewing all manner of gadgets. Meantime, we’ve got some information to go off, in terms of what we can expect next week, through a combination of rumors, leaks and process of elimination.

That last bit holds especially true in the case of Apple and Samsung. Both companies are following recent big product unveils, and barring brand new product lines, we can triangulate what’s likely next on the docket for each. Google, meanwhile, has essentially announced what it’s got brewing for Tuesday.

Let’s work chronologically here.

Apple MacBook Pro silver keyboard. close up Mac on the blue background

Apple’s kicking things off Monday at 10AM PT/1PM ET. It’s been just over a month since the company’s latest event, which brought new iPhones, Apple Watches and iPads. One big missing product line was absent, however. We didn’t see any new Macs. With macOS Monterey dropping any day now, and the company’s already announced plans to upgrade its entire line to first-party silicon, the absence was felt at the event.

It seemed reasonable to expect the company might go the press release route, but instead, it looks like Apple’s opted to give Mac its moment in the spotlight. As I’ve noted before, companies are generally less obligated to cram everything into a single event now that they’re not asking attendees to fly from around the world to be there. Some have taken liberties with this notion — though I don’t anticipate that to be the case here. At the very least, we expect some big Mac news, including:

• A new MacBook Pro in 13 and 16-inch versions
• A new Mac Mini
• A 27-inch iMac

Image Credits: Brian Heater

The first two essentially replace last year’s M1 models, which effectively had the same guts. A new, even faster M1X chip is said to be arriving, along with potential hardware redesigns. The 27-inch iMac, meanwhile, would augment the 24-inch model, serving as a more pro-focused system.

An overdue update to the entry-level AirPods are said to be in the works, as well, featuring improved sound quality and design more inline with the Pros — but without active noise canceling.

Image Credits: Google

Speaking of new chips, Google already announced its plan to unveil its in-house Tensor chip, becoming the latest company to buck Qualcomm for first-party silicon. That will be used to power the new Pixel 6 and a Pro model. The handsets feature a radical redesign for a line that’s been stumbling to stay afloat in the smartphone wars.

Google has gone as far as putting up a product page for the pair ahead of the event. Cribbing from Greg’s writeup of the initial announcement here:

• The base 6 will have a matte aluminum finish with a 6.4″ display, while the Pro has a shinier polished aluminum finish with a 6.7″ display.
• Pixel 6 has two cameras (wide and ultrawide), while the 6 Pro adds a telephoto zoom lens.
• If you were hoping the increasingly common “camera bump” trend was on the way out… not quite. The bump has now evolved into the “camera bar,” with Google’s Rick Osterloh noting that better sensors and lenses just won’t fit in a smaller package.

A recent leak has offered up a bit more info on their camera system — two rear-facing on the 6 and three on the Pro. They’ll both feature a 50-megapixel wide-angle and a 12-megapixel ultra-wide, while the Pro adds a 48-megapixel telephoto. That event is going down Tuesday at 10AM PT/1PM ET.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Samsung’s Wednesday event is the biggest question mark of the three — which, given how Samsung products tend to leak, is not something we get to say much. The new foldables were recently announced and we don’t expect another Galaxy S device until around MWC in February/March of next year. A PC or tablet seems to be a reasonable guess. Though the bright colors in the invite could offer another clue. That event kicks off at 7AM PT/10AM ET on Wednesday.

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Smartphone sales down 6% as chip shortages begin to impact market

Canalys reported this morning that global smartphone sales are off 6% this quarter, and it’s not because of lack of demand. It’s due to the worldwide chip shortage.

The pandemic has had a negative impact across supply chains, and chips have been particularly hard hit. Canalys principal analyst Ben Stanton says that manufacturers are trying to keep up as best they can, but the chip shortage is a legitimate roadblock right now. “On the supply side, chipset manufacturers are increasing prices to disincentivize over-ordering in an attempt to close the gap between demand and supply. But despite this, shortages will not ease until well into 2022,” he said in a statement.

What did the market look like this past quarter as a result of these supply chain issues? Well, the usual suspects maintained their market share positions with Samsung holding steady year over year at 23%. Meanwhile Apple saw YoY sales increase 3% to 15% this quarter. Xiaomi held steady in third place at 10% with no change YoY.

Image Credits: Canalys

Manufacturers have to be concerned at this turn of events, especially as we head into the crucial holiday shopping season. Apple released the new iPhone 13 at the end of September, too late for this quarterly report, but no doubt timed for the shopping season. The chip shortage issues could put a damper on its plans. Even though both Samsung and Apple make their own chipsets for their mobile devices, each company is still feeling the impact of the chip component shortage.

As a result, Stanton says it will be unlikely consumers will see any cost cutting this year, as manufacturing costs continue to spiral upward. Instead, he anticipates that we may see more bundling of phones with other devices as a buying incentive. “Customers should expect smartphone discounting this year to be less aggressive. But to avoid customer disappointment, smartphone brands which are constrained on margin should look to bundle other devices, such as wearables and IoT to create good incentives for customers.”

CNBC reported just yesterday that the consumer chip shortage could persist even longer than Stanton is predicting, perhaps as long as two to three years, according to president of Hisense, Jia Shaoqian, whose company makes devices like home appliances and consumer goods.

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Funnel, a no-code tool for marketers to organize disparate data sources, raises $66M in ‘pre-IPO’ round

The world of marketing has become a world of marketing tech. But marketers are not necessarily engineers, so working with the terabytes of data their campaigns produce can be a challenge. Today, a Stockholm startup called Funnel, which has built a no-code platform to help manage that process, is announcing $66 million in funding, a growth round that underscores the demand in the market for such tools. Funnel is describing this as a “pre-IPO” round: it will be its last before it files to go public, likely in his home market, and likely in the next six to 18 months.

Fourth Swedish National Pension Fund (AP4) and Stena Sessan are co-leading the round, with previous backers Balderton Capital, Eight Roads, F-Prime, Oxx, and Industrifonden also participating, among others. Fredrik Skantze, the co-founder and CEO, said the company is not disclosing its valuation but he said it was considerably higher than its pre-money valuation in its last round, a pre-pandemic $47 million Series B in January 2020.

As a measure of Funnel’s size, the company has about 1,200 large customers, with about half of them in the U.S. They include brands like Home Depot, trivago, Skechers, Samsung, Vodafone, Logitech, Skyscanner, and SAS – Scandinavian Airlines, as well as Havas Media, a division of the French advertising and PR giant, Ogilvy and DAC Group.

The challenge that Funnel is tackling is that marketing has become a massively digitized business: although outdoor, print, television and other analogue campaigns still account for 40% of marketing spend, that leaves 60% to digital.

That is a proportion that is still very much on the rise, not least because digital marketing provides a more measurable picture of how well a campaign is doing: people engage and respond on social media; they click on links; they share information to other platforms. The growing ubiquity of digital marketing also means that the data sources that a marketer typically uses are also growing.

“Four or five years ago, a marketer typically used seven data sources,” said Skantze. “Then that grew to 10. Now, our customers might be using 20 to 30 or even 70 or 80 data sources. If you are active in 50 markets that becomes a complex problem.”

But that also poses a data problem. When there are fewer platforms and marketing campaigns running, a marketer has typically relied on using spreadsheets to analyse data, or tools specific to a single campaign. However, that becomes untenable as the data sources grow and as the expectations of what marketers want to get out of that information grow along with it. Working with the data that is produced thus usually requires the help of a data scientist to organise it to be reported in a more usable way.

“It’s not enough to simply use the raw data,” Skantze said. “Facebook alone has 700 metrics, and the data you will get from a campaign just goes to a data warehouse. So you have to make it business-ready, you have to normalize it. That means using something like SQL. And that means marketers themselves cannot work directly with that funnel of data.”

Funnel’s platform is able to “read”, organize and create reports for the various datasets coming out of these campaigns, by way of sets of rules that are pre-designed, or a company can customize for itself. It currently handles some 550 different data sources (from social media platforms to search engines and much more: basically any digital platforms that might be used by a marketer to run a campaign). And it is adding more in as and when customers use them, Skantze said. Through drop-down menus, non-technical marketers can do, he said, “all the things they would have previously asked an IT person to do, to stage the data.”

The key also is that it’s focused on marketing, which also sets it apart from other competitors providing low-code tools to help organize data for further business intelligence or reporting applications.

“Five years ago I would have thought that BI tools would solve this, but the problem is is that they are too horizontal, and cover any type of data, whether it is marketing, geographical, financial or so on. So within marketing it might cover only five data sources, while we have 550,” he said. “You can’t solve the problem of pulling in the data unless you are vertical in some sort of segment. It’s the same with snowflake: it has 200 connectors but they are in too many areas.”

Funnel’s future growth may seem all but assured: more online activity breeds more marketing activity, and marketers are being expected to report and provide more, not less, insights about what they do and discover about their customers. On the other hand, the market is evolving. People do not want to be tracked; regulations are coming into force that are making it harder to gather marketing data; there is a growing body of technology that is looking for ways of creating “synthetic” datasets that could mean less reliance on pulling data out of marketing campaigns, which could mean less business for the Funnels of the world; and platforms are also changing their tune.

“The restrictions that Apple has placed on tracking on iOS has had a big impact especially for B2C companies,” Skantze said. “They are not seeing the same level of performance as before. It’s something our customers are concerned with but so far that hasn’t affected us. Our role is to pull down data, so that others can understand it. We are a bit like Switzerland here. We are a step away from the mechanics of adtech.”

Regardless of how that develops, this is a good argument for diversifying to cover more than marketing in its platform.

There are a number of tools in the market today that are also creating ways to better order data troves so that they can be used for better business intelligence. They include Collibra and Acryl and many others. The key with Funnel is that it is presented firmly as a tool for non-technical people, and it has been built with marketing in mind, Skantze noted. That being said, the company has plans to extend beyond marketing over time. “We are already pulling data for sales teams and e-commerce teams,” he said, and it is also eyeing up a move into providing data reporting tools for the finance sector.

“Pre-IPO” rounds in the context of this latest fundraise is about bringing in institutional investors who will also be a part of the IPO process.

“We are long term investors who look for companies we like and hold them for a long time. We were impressed with the size of the global opportunity and the team’s ambition to build a large software company,” said Jannis Kitsakis, senior portfolio manager at AP4, in a statement.

“Funnel has shown strong, predictable growth with impressive go to market metrics and a global footprint,” added Fredrik Konopik, Investment Director at Stena Sessan. “We feel that the company is well positioned for the public market in Sweden.”

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Plume raises $300M as it passes 1.2B devices in 35M homes using its smart WiFi service

Plume — a communications startup that partners with carriers to provide smart mesh WiFi to improve broadband connectivity in homes, and then offers other smart home services on top of that network — has been in the middle of a massive boom in its business fueled by the rapid uptake, use, and complete reliance on broadband in the home working as best as it can.

Now it has closed a huge funding round to ride the wave. The Palo Alto-based startup has raised another $300 million led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 at a valuation of $2.6 billion. Plume’s CEO and founder Fahri Diner said the startup will be using the money to continue building out its software platform, inking and servicing more deals with carriers, and generally expanding its horizons.

“Two years ago, the killer app was WiFi, managing the pods,” he said, referring to the system of mesh routers that are used to improve the speed and quality of a WiFi network in homes. “That is no longer it, although it’s still a big piece of it. Access control and device security are growing fast, and people are also engaging with our motion sensors since indoor cameras are going away because of privacy reasons. IOT, health, energy management, and home security are all areas we have been testing for two years and they work, so we will be leaning into a lot of stuff.”

Other investors in this latest round were not disclosed but previous backers include a strong mix of strategic and financial investors: Charter Communications, Comcast Cable, Foxconn, Insight Partners, Jackson Square Ventures, Liberty Global Ventures, Presidio Ventures, Qualcomm, Samsung, Service Electric Cablevision, Shaw Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, and UpBeat Venture Partners among them. Insight was the sole backer in its last round, investing $270 million at a $1.35 billion valuation in the startup. The fact that this latest SoftBank-led round is coming just eight months later is a mark of how rapidly Plume’s business has been growing.

Indeed, Covid-19 and the impact it had on how we use our broadband at home has probably been the biggest driver of Plume’s business in the last year.

As more people have been compelled to stay home to work, study, and pass the time, the more strain we’ve been putting on those home networks. In some cases, like mine, that strain also quickly led to major cracks: I am myself a Plume user; after trying a number of other things it was the only solution that could get the broadband to work well and reliably in our London Victorian house.

I guess we weren’t the only ones. Plume said that business ballooned in the last two quarters, adding 13 million new households to total 35 million (“more than our biggest customer, Comcast,” Diner pointed out to me); and it added 350 million more devices to its platform bringing the total to 1.2 billion devices; plus 60 more broadband carrier customers to now total 240 million globally (these include cable companies, telcos, and wireless carriers that also offer broadband).

It’s also now partnering with those carriers to branch out beyond their own broadband. In an OTT-style play, in the UK, Plume and Virgin Media are selling HomePass, which includes the Plume pod and software to manage it and run other services, across all of the UK (25 million households), regardless of whether Virgin is providing the broadband underpinning the service or not.

All of this is banked around services for consumers and the connected home. These are two areas where the startup will definitely continue to expand its reach, as outlined by the range of managed services Diner said the company has been working on for some time, along with others tapping into the connected home and specifically electronic objects that already have some degree of interfacing with the internet (think here: Plume letting you know when your connected Nespresso machines is about to need cleaning). These are due to start to get rolled out later this year when Plume releases an update of its app.

But further along, the company’s next steps will likely be outside the home, Diner said. One big area where you could see it doing more, for example, is in the area of industrial environments, where there are vast networks of often remote devices that are costly to connect to networks in a reliable way, which also need monitoring — two areas where Plume could figure in the future.

“We might segment the market into residential, business, and industrial IoT,” he said. “We have a phenomenal foothold in residential, which we are now moving into small business. Industrial is also in our scope. We have ambitious plans and this financing gives us more capability.” What is not in scope, he added, is enterprise campuses, where often there is already extensive internet wiring and bespoke WiFi solutions that fit into a company’s particular networking and security configurations.

“The pandemic has dramatically accelerated the adoption of digital services, increasing our dependence on smart devices,” said Nagraj Kashyap, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, who joined the Plume Board of Directors, in a statement. “Through its innovative cloud data platform, we believe Plume’s consumer-first approach provides customers with reliable connectivity in their homes and beyond. We are pleased to partner with Fahri and the team to support their ambition of reinventing services for smart spaces globally.”

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Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney calls out Apple for promoting its services in the iPhone Settings screen

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, whose high-profile antitrust lawsuit against Apple is now under appeal, is today calling out the iPhone maker for giving itself access to an advertising slot its competitors don’t have: the iPhone’s Settings screen. Some iOS 15 users noticed Apple is now advertising its own services at the top of their Settings, just below their Apple ID. The services being suggested are personalized to the device owner, based on which ones they already subscribe to, it appears.

For example, those without an Apple Music subscription may see an ad offering a free six-month trial. However, current Apple Music subscribers may instead see a prompt to add on a service they don’t yet have, like AppleCare coverage for their devices.

Sweeney suggests this sort of first-party advertising is an anticompetitive risk for Apple, as some of the services it’s pushing here are those that directly compete with third-party apps published on its App Store. But those third-party apps can’t gain access to the iPhone’s Settings screen, of course — they can only bid for ad slots within the App Store itself.

Writes Sweeney: “New from the guys who banned Fortnite: settings-screen ads for their own music service, which come before the actual settings, and which aren’t available to other advertisers like Spotify or Sound Cloud.”

New from the guys who banned Fortnite: settings-screen ads for their own music service, which come before the actual settings, and which aren’t available to other advertisers like Spotify or Sound Cloud. “It’s all about the customers!” https://t.co/p9FNpXT1Rx

— Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) October 6, 2021

Sweeney had been retweeting another post by Mobile Dev Memo analyst Eric Seufert, who himself was sharing an image credited to Glassfy co-founder Francesco Zucchetta.

Zucchetta tells TechCrunch he spotted the ad on an iPhone 8 he owned which was running iOS 15. But others have seen the ads on newer devices, as well. And some respondents noted they were receiving Apple’s promotions as push notifications, too.

The issue here is tricky because the promotion isn’t always a situation where Apple is disadvantaging a rival to its own benefit.

For example, on an iPhone 13 Pro Max we have which is running iOS 15.1, the prompt was used to inform us we still had a certain number of days left to add AppleCare+ coverage. (We already have most of Apple’s other subscriptions.). But in this case, there aren’t third-party apps offering a direct competitor to AppleCare, in the same way that Spotify directly competes with Apple Music. Instead, warranty companies like Asurion partner with mobile carriers like AT&T and Verizon to sell their iPhone insurance plans, instead of selling direct to consumers through the App Store.

Some might even argue that a reminder to add warranty coverage is a useful feature, not an unwanted intrusion.

While Sweeney’s tweet has raised awareness of the first-party promotions in Settings, they are not new.

Apple has often used the iPhone’s Settings screen to market its services to its customers in much of the same way as it’s doing now.

Last year, for example, it was spotted running promotions for Apple Arcade, AppleCare and Apple TV+ in Settings. Outside of this screen, Apple has also promoted its own services in other unusual ways, including through the use of push notifications. And it has cross-promoted its services inside its own apps for years — like prompts to subscribe to Apple Music while using iTunes.

But regulators today are taking a closer look at platforms and how they’re using or abusing their market power. Google is currently appealing a record penalty in the EU for its requirement that device manufacturers preinstall Google’s suite of apps with the phones they sell. Samsung, meanwhile, said it would stop running ads in its first-party apps on Galaxy devices. (It had displayed ads for other companies and those that promoted its own products, at times.)

Epic Games didn’t have any further comments on Sweeney’s tweet, including whether or not the company would be using this latest bit of information in its upcoming appeal. Apple has been asked for comment but has not responded.

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