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Microsoft is to acquire a 4% stake in the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG), the company that owns the London Stock Exchange as well as a several other businesses including financial market data company Refinitiv which LSEG acquired from a Blackstone/Thomson Reuters consortium last year for $27 billion.

Microsoft’s stake, which it bought from the same Blackstone/Thomson Reuters consortium,constitutes part of a bigger 10-year partnership, which includes a contractual commitment for LSEG to spend a minimum of $2.8 billion on cloud computing services. This will involve LSEG migrating its data platform and “other key technology infrastructure” over to Azure, while the Workspace data and analytics product it procured as part of its Refinitiv acquisition last year will be integrated with core Microsoft applications including Teams and the broader Microsoft 365 software suite.

This initial partnership will create a single product spanning data, analytics, and collaboration, and could go some way toward helping LSEG challenge the likes of Bloomberg as the go-to platform for finance and investment workers.

The integration will allow all LSEG customers to collaborate with each other through Teams, and generate models and graphs through connecting LSEG content and Excel, for example. But the scope of the partnership seems fairly far-reaching, with plans to mesh Microsoft’s cloud-based machine learning smarts with LSEG’s analytics and modelling to “co-develop a new suite of solutions” for financial institutions, the companies said.

So this is a win-win for both firms: a huge cloud contract for Microsoft that opens it to Refinitiv’s 40,000 customers, as well as an equity investment in a major Bloomberg challenger. And for LSEG, it now has the technological and financial backing of one of world’s biggest public cloud companies.

“Bringing together our leading data sets, analytics, and global customer base with Microsoft’s comprehensive and trusted cloud services and global reach creates attractive revenue growth opportunities for both companies,” LSEG CEO David Schwimmer said in a press release.

Microsoft to acquire 4% stake in London Stock Exchange Group as part of 10-year cloud partnership by Paul Sawers originally published on TechCrunch

Playtika, the Israeli tech company that made its name with through a series of wildly successful online gambling and gaming titles with hundreds of millions of players, is leveling the latest swing of the layoffs pendulum. The company today has confirmed that it is laying of 15% of its staff. Playtika currently employs 4,100, so the redundancies will impact 615 people across the company’s global footprint in Europe, Israel and the U.S.

A memo sent to employees that TechCrunch has seen notes that three titles will also be sunset as it seeks to rationalize costs across the board. We understand that these will be ‘MergeStories,’ ‘DiceLife’ and ‘Ghost Detective’. We also understand that the company is also going to offer alternative roles to a proportion of employees impacted by the cuts. Playtika’s most popular titles, such as ‘Best Fiends’, have racked up at least 100 million users.

”Playtika’s success is rooted in our agility, efficiency, creativity and obsession with delivering the most fun forms of mobile entertainment to our players,” CEO Robert Antokol told TechCrunch in an email in response to questions about the cuts. “We consistently evaluate our strategic plans with attention to many factors, including the economic environment. We believe the structure announced today further leverages our core strengths of delivering superior in-game experiences and scaling mobile games to global franchises in continuation of growth. Saying goodbye to talented colleagues and friends is difficult. They will always be part of Playtika’s rich history and a foundation to our bright future as we build on our reputation as a technology and entertainment powerhouse.”

The layoffs have been the subject of rumors since last week in the Israeli press — although the actual figures are higher than the 500 number getting reported.

Playtika — publicly traded on Nasdaq — has been facing an especially tough year in what has been a hard time for the tech sector overall.

The company was one of the wave of businesses that went public last year, riding on the back of a huge surge in usage among pandemic consumers cooped up at home and staying out of in-person social situations.

In its IPO in June 2021, it debuted with a per-share price of $27 and a valuation of over $11 billion to raise nearly $1.9 billion, before climbing to a market cap of over $14 billion in its first day of trading.

But those figures have seen massive drops. Currently, its market cap (pre-market open on December 12) stands at $3.1 billion, with stock priced at $8.61/share as of market close on Friday.

The company also missed on earnings estimates in the last quarter. Although third-quarter revenues climbed slightly to $647.8 million versus $635.9 million in the same quarter a year ago, net income dropped to $68.2 million versus $80.5 million in Q3 2021.

And last week, one of its shareholders, Joffre Capital, pulled out of a deal to take a majority stake in the company after disputes over governance. Although this wasn’t cited in the memo sent to employees, that inevitably will have an impact on the company’s financial planning going forward.

It’s not game-over just yet, but online gaming is going to lose a lot of lives in the coming months.

Playtika itself had already cut 250 workers in May; Electronic Arts is reportedly looking for a buyer; Unity laid off around 200 people earlier this year, and some believe this is just the start.

More to come.

Playtika lays off 610 workers, shuts down three online gaming titles amid broader restructure by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch

Individuals or businesses buying furniture in Africa can purchase from local furniture stores or global furniture retailers like IKEA. But both options have pros and cons; for the latter, local furniture stores may lack the quality that clients need, while global retailers, in addition to taking several months to ship their products to Africa, can be too pricey.

Taeillo, a Lagos-based startup innovating around these issues relating to time, quality and cost via its online furniture e-commerce store, has raised $2.5 million in “expansion” funding from Aruwa Capital, a Nigeria-based early-stage growth equity and gender-lens fund.

In a statement, Taeillo said it is an alternative for customers who incur high costs when they import furniture (combined with an unstable exchange rate) and have to endure long wait periods of 3-6 months before the furniture is delivered. “… we provide customers with aesthetically pleasing furniture pieces at a fraction of the importation price and with a 50% reduction in delivery time to about 4-8 weeks,” it continued.

Founded in 2018 by Jumoke Dada, the online furniture seller sources raw materials from local suppliers and manufactures furniture pieces from sofas and beds to chairs and tables, which it sells to individual customers and businesses. The company, which doubles as a manufacturer and retailer, can be likened to Wayfair and now-defunct Made.com. However, because it serves an entirely different market, Taeillo has had to be authentic with its product offerings by infusing cultural elements (it refers to them as Afrocentric furniture).

When Dada launched the platform, its target audience was solely businesses. The initial product brought in $165,000 in seed funding from investors such as CcHUB Growth Capital, Montane Capital and B-Knight. However, in mid-2020, during the pandemic, Taiello, leaning on investors’ guidance and citing a chance in the market after several walk-in stores halted operations, pivoted to a direct-to-consumer approach.

“It was more or less like opportunity met preparation because, at that time, many people were at home, and the leading furniture brands were not online to serve them,” CEO Dada told TechCrunch. “Traditional showrooms were locked up too, so that was an opportunity for brands like us to position ourselves and prove that they could buy furniture online without necessarily going into showrooms.”

The decision proved a masterstroke; up until its pivot, Taeillo had sold under 200 pieces of furniture in Nigeria. Its pivot came with the launch of the “Amakisi” table (₦29,999/~$85) — a work table and one of its best-selling products — which quickly gained popularity and sold over 1,000 pieces in six months. Since then, the online furniture manufacturer and retailer has expanded into 10 additional product categories, moved into Kenya and shipped more than 10,000 pieces of furniture to over 5,000 customers in both countries.

In 2021, Taeillo raised a $150,000 bridge round from CcHUB Syndicate as it tripled its revenue from the previous year. But that growth and progress didn’t come without headaches. Due to the popularity of some of its furniture within the Nigerian millennial and working-class demographic, Taeillo has struggled to meet demand; on various occasions, taking months to deliver products. Though it manages its supply chain to an extent and manufactures about 70% of its products, the startup also relies on third-party manufacturers who make components before they are sent to Taeillo’s warehouse, assembled and shipped to customers. According to Dada, the reasons behind extended wait times – with the company producing as many as 800 pieces of furniture monthly – are due to working with these third-party providers, including suppliers and logistics services.

“Sometimes, as a modern business, you must deal with crude suppliers. But recently, we’ve had to change our suppliers to shorten the time we get the materials. Right now, we’re also working around strategic partnerships with third-party logistics companies and might set up a logistics arm to help us improve our deliveries.” said the CEO on how Taeillo plans to deal with the long delivery times while also admitting that the online furniture manufacturer and retailer could also improve how it handles production.

With the funding, Taeillo intends to reduce delivery times to about 3-5 days by pre-manufacturing some of its best-selling furniture (for instance, the “Amakisi” table) instead of waiting till customers make orders before starting production. The investment will also help scale its “Pay with Flexi” product, where shoppers can buy furniture and pay in installments; over 200 people have used it. Then there’s its augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) tech (powering virtual showrooms), which the startup intends to double down on marketing-wise.

“We’ve done a lot of work with less. So now, we want to get outstanding talent that will take us to the next growth stage. Also, we want to increase our market share, optimize operations, hack our supply chain and ensure that customers have a great experience,” expressed the chief executive of the online furniture retailer, who made over $1 million in annual revenue in 2021.

Adesuwa Okunbo Rhodes, founder and managing partner at sole investor Aruwa Capital, said investing in Taeillo aligns with one of her firm’s investment objectives: backing women founded- and led startups. Last week, the three-year-old growth equity firm, which is one of the few founded and run by an African woman, closed a $20 million+ fund from Visa Foundation and other LPs to invest in 10 startups across fintech, healthcare, renewable energy and essential consumer goods serving the female population.

“In line with Aruwa’s gender lens investing strategy, Taeillo is founded and led by a woman and has a 50% female representation in its management team,” she said in a statement. “… The company [Taeillo] has maintained its innovative model in a traditional brick-and-mortar industry, creating a unique value proposition for its customers in a fast-growing, underserved market. By leveraging technology in its value chain, Taeillo has been able to achieve exponential growth in less than 2 years, achieving results that take traditional furniture companies decades to achieve.”

Nigerian startup Taeillo raises funding to scale its online furniture e-commerce platform by Tage Kene-Okafor originally published on TechCrunch