Accord opened up its previously announced $6 million seed round to accept over $1 million from a group of CEOs and sales leads at companies they are working with to officially launch its business-to-business sales platform.

Brothers Ross and Ryan Rich co-founded the San Francisco-based company in 2019 with Wayne Pan to create a customer collaboration platform that, in the words of CEO Ross Rich, “makes the process of buying and selling suck less.”

The average sales deal can involve 14 people, just on the buyer side, which means teams do a lot of “herding cats” in order to drive consensus on sales, he said.

Instead, Accord’s application provides shared next steps and milestones for buying and selling teams to align on so that the right people are looped in at the right time.

“Our unique approach is helping management and sales, but also helping the buyer, which is how you build a relationship,” Ross Rich explained. “Before COVID, you could go onsite, but now you can’t do that. You also have to adjust to the buyer’s expectations, and with business-to-consumer, everything is ‘now and immediate.’ ”

The company’s target market is technology startups, but Ross Rich said Accord is now attracting interest from medical device companies and others where there is no software that bridges the gap between external parties.

Over the past six months, Accord doubled its team and was approached by multiple companies with acquisition offers. However, just a year-and-a-half into the company Rich said he is not entertaining those kinds of offers just yet.

“We have barely scratched the surface and would be selling ourselves short not having had a swing at it,” he added.

The company decided to focus on non-institutional investors when it raised this uncapped round, opting not to grow the board, Rich said.

Instead, it gathered a group of CEOs and sales leads from companies it works with — people who were getting it and seeing the value, including Mike Murchison, co-founder and CEO of Ada Support, who said via email that Ada’s B2B growth “exploded in part because of our focus on being a true partner — not simply a vendor — to our clients.” He added that Accord made it easy for Ada’s sales teams to offer a collaborative buying process.

Another investor, Stephanie Schatz, one of Accord’s advisors, said via email she got in on the round due to Ross Rich having “all the right ingredients for a successful founder,” and the product, which she said was taking into account how people want to buy.

“Ross has intelligence, drive, passion, vision and charisma, but on top of that, I have found that he has excellent instincts for leading a team and building a generational company,” she added. “Accord offers CEOs and sales leaders the opportunity to build a high-performing sales team from the very beginning that truly puts customers at the center.”

The new funding will go toward the general launch of the platform and adding to its team of 13. Rich expects a Series A round to quickly follow.

Since launch, “learning pods” have been controversial in the world of edtech. The term, somewhat synonymous with micro-schools, pandemic pods and small-group learning, describes small clusters of children within the same age range who are paired with a private instructor with the goal of replacing, or supplementing, school learning.

The concept took off last year as working parents looked for a way to supplement their children’s video-based school days with more engaging, personalized material. Some edtech entrepreneurs predicted that the trend would usher in a new wave of homeschooled children, which would disproportionately favor affluent families that could afford pod-learning to begin with. Tyton Partners estimates that 7 million students were enrolled in supplemental learning pods last year, which drove $12 billion in new spend.

Now, nearly a year after the first pods popped up, one startup coming out of Y Combinator has a fresh take on the role that the emerging learning model plays in schooling. KaiPod Learning, founded by the former chief product officer of Pearson Online Learning, Amar Kumar, recently launched its learning pod service that aims to connect homeschooled children with in-person, supplemental learning pods.

The Boston-based startup wants to be the go-to platform for online learners and learning pod families to get in-person interactions into their curriculum. The startup is starting by targeting homeschooling families in need of a boost to refresh existing curriculum.

KaiPod begins by helping parents pick the best online school for their child, whether it’s through a virtual micro-school like Sora Schools or a homeschooling program set up by locals. This process makes sure that students get access to a replacement from a traditional school that still meets core standards. Then, KaiPod tries to serve as a co-working space of sorts for any child that is going through the online school.

“We know we can’t do socialization as well in the cloud, we can’t do childcare as well in the cloud, and those are some of the things that parents look to schools for,” Kumar said. “And the fact that we got rid of them by moving everything online shows you that our priorities weren’t in the right place.”

Students are invited to come to a KaiPod center near them where they will interact with learning coaches, a role that Kumar defines as part-time teacher, part-time camp counselor.

The coaches are there to help through online coursework, while also leading enrichment activities meant to give the social edge back to the school day. Learning coaches are juggling a variety of curriculums within their centers, which could be a quality assurance challenge as KaiPod scales.

In the broadest sense, KaiPod is helping students in virtual school go to physical school, but this time with more flexibility and diversity when it comes to what the day looks like. For example, one kid may be following an entirely different curriculum than another; which means the physical space won’t be used for, say, a lecture, but may be used for a Socratic-style seminar that motivates children to share their separate learnings.

A WeWork for education?

Kumar thinks it’s a more inclusive approach to pods because it takes care of childcare along with education. The centers are open five days a week from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Kumar pointed to Kumon as an example of how out of school, supplemental models can lead to academic enrichment. Kumon began as one-off centers, and eventually took over the franchise model until it became one of the largest after- school tutoring companies in the global market.

A non-insignificant part of KaiPod’s success depends on if homeschooling is here to stay, beyond the pandemic bump of interest. The National Center for Education Statistics shows that the percent of homeschool households in the United States tripled between 2020 to 2021, but the numbers don’t entirely reflect how the return to school will change those metrics.

In the meantime, KaiPod Learning ran an eight-student pilot program in Boston this year. Kumar said that one learning coach identified the early signs of a potential learning disability in a middle-schooler during a game, a sign he thinks illustrates how a small-group format helps instructors “engage with students in more ways than just didactic teaching.” KaiPod plans to open up five to seven more centers in the next few months.

“As we generate more awareness, we think entrepreneurs in other states will want to open centers using our playbook (à la franchise model) and we can power them through our technology layer [which is] affectionately code-named ‘KaiPod OS’, ” Kumar said. The locations of centers could show who KaiPod is selling to, as well as if families come from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

“At this point I have no interest in becoming WeWork for education, or anything like that,” he said. “Think of the centers as convenient areas where families can drop off their kids, stop in and see how the pod is doing.”

Webiny, an early-stage startup that launched in 2019 with an open-source, serverless CMS, had also developed a framework to help build the CMS, and found that customers were also interested in that to help build their own serverless apps. Today, Webiny announced a $3.5 million seed round to continue developing both pieces.

Microsoft’s venture fund M12 led the round, with participation from Samsung Next, Episode 1, Cota Capital and other unnamed investors. The company previously raised $348,000 in 2019.

Webiny founder Sven Al Hamad says that when the company launched, he had an inkling that serverless would be the future and started by building an open-source serverless CMS, but then something interesting happened.

“We spoke to more than 300 companies, who had actually approached us and they also believed that the future is going to be built on top of serverless infrastructure. While they were intrigued by the CMS we built, they were more intrigued in terms of how we built it because they had tried serverless and they had a poor experience,” Al Hamad explained.

It turned out that the Webiny team was spending the vast majority of its time building an underlying serverless framework in order to build the CMS on top of that, and he began to realize that maybe they should be marketing and selling both the framework and the CMS.

“There was still a lot of interest for the CMS, but a lot of companies wanted both, being able to use the CMS for some of the content platforms, but also being able to build custom APIs on top, custom business logic, all on top of serverless,” he said.

At that point, Al Hamad realized that his startup had two products and that’s where they stand today as they take on this new capital to help build out the company. While he is still working on building a community and reports that he hosts a Slack community with close to a 1,000 developers, the goal is to use this money to begin building commercial products on top of their open-source offerings.

That will involve some sort of enterprise offering with management features for complex environments, single sign-on, better security and so forth.

Serverless is a way of delivering infrastructure in an automated way, so that the developer can concentrate on building the application without worrying about delivering the correct amount of resources. But it requires a very specific way of programming that involves writing functions and triggers. Webiny’s serverless framework is designed to help developers build these specialized apps and the related bits to make it all work.

The company currently has nine employees, with plans to add about six more over the remainder of 2021. He says that diversity is top of mind, but there are challenges in a tight market for technical talent. “We are thinking openly about diversity, but the overall market in terms of the talent available is making it very hard for us to find that balance,” he said. He says that there needs to be an effort across the entire system to train more diverse talent in STEM roles, but he will continue to try look for a diverse staff in spite of the challenges.

He says that his employees are spread out, but when it’s possible to be back in the office, he intends to make offices available where there are pools of people, while giving them the flexibility to decide when and if to come in.

One, a startup that aims to bring “all-in-one banking” to the middle class, announced today that it has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding.

Progressive Investment Company (the insurance giant’s investment arm) led the round, which included participation from Obvious Ventures, Foundation Capital, Core Innovation Capital and others. The financing brings One’s total raised since its 2019 inception to $66 million.

Since making its product generally available in September of 2020, Northern California-based One has grown to have “hundreds of thousands” of customers, according to CEO and co-founder Brian Hamilton, who previously co-founded PushPoint (which was acquired by Capital One).

“Stretched middle-income households and working families deal with financial stress on a daily basis and are largely unsupported by current offerings,” Hamilton said. “This can be viewed as a kind of a noisy market, and so this funding has been a good validation of the vision and kind of the products, in that we have been able to stand out in that market.”

Over the past 11 months, the startup has worked to enhance its core product offering, launching overdraft protection, an auto-save feature that rewards automatic savings contributions at 3.00% APY, cash flow-based credit lines and a credit builder product to help its customers build financial health. One claims that it has helped its users automatically save nearly $20 million collectively since its launch, a number that grows daily, according to Hamilton.

The company is also trying to change up how people share financial goals and responsibilities with individually configurable “Pockets” that it says can be “easily” shared with others and accessed via virtual and physical cards. 

“What we’re doing really is to re-integrate and unify what is otherwise a pretty splintered financial life for middle income households and families that are attempting to manage finances on a daily, weekly and monthly basis,” Hamilton told TechCrunch.

Over the past few years, he said, there have been a number of different fintech and bank products that people use to run their life “and they’re all starting to converge.”

The company was founded on the premise that traditional banking exists “on a system of fractured accounts and billions of dollars in hidden fees that leave customers living paycheck to paycheck despite steady incomes.” One says it is built on a “proprietary” technology core that aims to deliver saving, spending, sharing, budgeting and borrowing in a single account.

“Everybody’s trying to do a piece of everything, but they all started doing one thing,” Hamilton said. “But it’s really hard to back into the others or to bolt them on afterwards if you didn’t begin with the end in mind, kind of on an integrated basis. So that is essentially what we set out to build with One, with the idea to reunify credit and debit and savings and reintegrate the sharing of money with other people so it didn’t have to be done on a one-off transactional basis through Venmo or PayPal or Zelle.”

One’s banking services are provided by Coastal Community Bank, Member FDIC. The startup emphasizes that it’s a financial technology company, and “not a bank.”

It plans to use the new funding toward “fueling” customer growth, hiring and expanding its product offerings.

Charles Moldow, Foundation Capital general partner and One investor, said that challenger banks such as Chime and Aspiration focus on a debit card offering to subprime customers who are looking for lower bank fees and access to paychecks sooner.  

“These customers are generally treated poorly by banks and charged a lot of fees because they don’t generate much revenue for banks outside of interchange fees on debit purchases with little disposable income,” he said.

The real money made by banks, according to Moldow, is against mid-prime customers for both debit and lending.  

“These customers are harder to acquire because banks hate to lose them due to their large lifetime values,” he said. “One differs from the challenger banks in the market in that they have created a superior mobile banking experience for the 80% of the market that is not super prime or subprime. They have both a debit and credit offering and a vastly better user experience.”

The fintech is able to offer a user experience that is “materially” different from standard large bank offerings in that their back end infrastructure is a “modern” core and One is able to handle core checking, lending, money transfer and savings all on the same back end.

This means One can fully integrate those experiences (the aforementioned integrated offering “Pockets”).

“This differs from traditional banks which have each of these systems on top of different tech stacks which prevents them from providing integrated offerings,” he said. 

Also, by not having brick and mortar branches, the company is able to offer lower fees, more points and rewards and higher savings rates, Moldow added.

Welcome back to The Exchange. Today we’re doing something fun with crypto.

Sure, we could write more about how insurtech valuations are under fresh pressure after Hippo’s Q2 earnings report — we spoke to the company’s president yesterday; more to come — or the latest stock market movements in China. There are big rounds worth considering as well. Roblox reported earnings this week. And Monday.com’s earnings pushed its shares sharply higher yesterday. There’s lots of interesting news to chew on.

But instead of all that, we’re digging back into crypto. Why? Because there are some rather bullish trends that indicate the world of blockchain is maturing and creating a raft of winning players

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Writing about crypto is always a little risky. Cybersecurity folks will complain that we’re abusing the phrase crypto, despite the fact that language always evolves. And Bitcoin maximalists aren’t going to find much below that underscores their core thesis that every coin not mentioned in Satoshi’s whitepaper is, in fact, a scam. Save your tweets, please.

But if you care more generally about the larger global cryptoeconomy, it’s time to imbibe some good news. Our goal is to highlight a few recent trends and then talk a little about what we might see coming from startups.

Sound good? Let’s get busy.

Encouraging news from your local distributed ledger

The Exchange finds rising NFT volumes bullish, and we have a new thesis for what the value proposition is for such digital assets. The rising tide of mega-rounds for crypto exchanges belies not only the worldwide demand for access to crypto, but also sets the stage for a global cohort of stable, well-funded and trustworthy on-ramps to the crypto world — and, of course, more exchanges imply lower fees over time.

Non-exchange crypto fees are also bullish. And then there’s a wrinkle to the stablecoin game and what sort of economics things like USDC may command in time. We have notes from an interview with Circle to help us there.

NFTs and the concept of joy

I don’t think anyone actually understands what the metaverse is. But the possibility that, in time, unique assets on particular chains — NFTs — will have a part to play in larger digital worlds seems like a reasonable conjecture. One can easily imagine life, as we all become Increasingly Online, leaning on human desires for scarcity as a method of showing status. NFTs will help meet that demand in certain digital ecosystems. Games, probably, though what we consider a game will also evolve as VR becomes more mainstream.

But that future is not here yet. So, what value are NFTs providing today that makes them potentially worthwhile? Joy.

Floods are devastating. They rip asunder communities, wipe out neighborhoods, force the evacuation of thousands of people every year and recovering from them can take years — assuming recovery is possible at all. The U.S. government estimates that floods in recent decades (exclusive of hurricanes and tropical storms) have caused an estimated $160 billion in damage and killed hundreds of people.

One would think that we should have a real-time model for where water is and where it is going around the world, what with all of those sensors on the ground and satellites in orbit. But we mostly don’t, instead relying on antiquated models that fail to take into account the possibilities of big data and big compute.

FloodMapp, a Brisbane, Australia-based startup, is aiming to wash out the old approaches to hydrology and predictive analytics and put in place a much more modern approach to help emergency managers and citizens know when the floods are coming — and what to do.

CEO and co-founder Juliette Murphy has spent a lifetime in the water resources engineering field, and saw firsthand the heavy destruction that water can cause. In 2011, she watched as her friend’s home was submerged in the midst of terrible flooding. The “water went right over the peak of her house,” she said. Two years later in Calgary, she saw the same situation again: floods and fear as friends tried to determine whether and how to evacuate.

Those memories and her own professional career led her to think more about how to build better tools for disaster managers. She ultimately synced up with CTO and co-founder Ryan Prosser to build FloodMapp in 2018, raising $1.3 million AUD along with a matching grant.

The company’s premise is simple: We have the tools to build real-time flooding models today, but we just have chosen not to take advantage of them. Water follows gravity, which means that if you know the topology of a place, you can predict where the water will flow to. The challenge has been that calculating second-order differential equations at high resolution remains computationally expensive.

Murphy and Prosser decided to eschew the traditional physics-based approach that has been popular in hydrology for decades for a completely data-based approach that takes advantage of widely available techniques in machine learning to make those calculations much more palatable. “We do top down what used to be bottoms up,” Murphy said. “We have really sort of broken the speed barrier.” That work led to the creation of DASH, the startup’s real-time flood model.

Unlike typical tech startups though, FloodMapp isn’t looking to be its own independent platform. Instead, it interoperates with existing geographic information systems (GIS) like ESRI’s ArcGIS by offering a data layer that can be combined with other data streams to provide situational awareness to emergency response and recovery personnel. Customers pay a subscription fee for access to FloodMapp’s data layer, and so far, the company is working with the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services in Australia as well as the cities of Norfolk and Virginia Beach in Virginia.

But it’s not just emergency services the startup is ultimately hoping to attract. Any company with physical assets, from telcos and power companies to banks and retail chains with physical stores could potentially be a customer of the product. In fact, FloodMapp is betting that the SEC will mandate further climate change financial disclosures, which could lead to a … flood of new business (I get one flood pun, okay, I get one).

Murphy notes that “we are still in our early stages” and that the company is likely to raise further financing early next year as it gets through this year’s flood season and onboards several new customers. She hopes that ultimately, FloodMapp will “not only help people, but help our country change and adapt in the face of a changing climate.”

Blumira today announced it raised a $10.3 million Series A financing round. The Ann Arbor-based cybersecurity company says the capital will be used to expand its product offering, double its headcount to 80 employees and grow its partnership program with managed service providers.

The company, founded in 2018, seeks to provide enterprise-level security to medium-sized businesses through turn-key, cloud-based solutions. Blumira’s solution upends the traditional security information and event management (SIEM) market with a powerful suite of tools designed specifically for mid-market companies that’s relatively more affordable. According to Blumira, its product deploys quickly and gives these companies the security and threat monitoring ability of tools used by giant corporations.

With the new funding, the firm has raised $12.9 million since its founding in 2018. New investor Mercury led Blumira’s Series A, with managing director Aziz Gilani joining Blumira’s board as a director. The Series A also included participation from Ten Eleven Ventures, enterprise angles and existing investors M25, Array Ventures and Duo
Security co-founder and angel investor Jon Oberheide.

“Having additional capital behind us accelerates our velocity and ability to execute our vision of democratizing the detection and response market,” said Steve Fuller, co-founder and CEO at Blumira. “We’ve built incredible momentum in just a few short years, and we’re thrilled to have the support of world-class investors as we work to make security operations simple, automated, affordable and accessible to organizations of all sizes.”

A new GamesBeat event is around the corner! Learn more about what comes next.  On this episode of Last of the Nintendogs, we prepare for tomorrow’s Pokémon Presents and speculate about what we’re going to see. We talk about our favorite Wii U games (even if most of them are also available on other consoles). Also, Jeff learns that Punch-Out’s Don F…Read More

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News is vital to society, but it’s also incredibly expensive to produce. As ad rates have suffered across the industry (minus a positive blip this summer), publishers have increasingly turned to paywalls to make ends meet. There’s just one problem: the open internet which allowed readers to range over the entire thought of humanity has transformed into row after row of walled gardens locked down by angry sentries. The subscription hell I talked about three years ago has indeed only accelerated.

Fixing hell is going to take some doing, but three veterans of news and media in Europe are ready to take a crack at it.

Benjamin Mateev, Martin Kaelble, and Axel Bard Bringéus have come together to launch informed. (official branding: no caps, mandatory period). The Berlin-based startup wants to be a layer on top of prominent paywalled news services, connecting readers with curated “playlists” of news and opinion stories called Read Lists and augmented with an original summary. The company was founded in January, is currently in beta, and has raised a “significant pre-seed by modern standards” from local shop 468 Capital.

What’s interesting here is the team. Bringéus previously spent six years at Spotify where he ultimately worked as global head of markets during the company’s rapid overseas expansion. He has most recently been a deal partner at prominent European firm EQT Ventures. Meanwhile, Mateev was a lead engineer on to-do list platform Wunderlist through its Microsoft acquisition and head of product at opinion news site The European, and Kaelble has been a long-time business journalist at places like Capital.

The trio, who have seen success in their varied careers, took a step back to explore how they could fix the varied challenges of the news industry circle 2021. They did “diary studies” where they asked people to track what they read in the news, ran surveys across thousands of people, and also talked to media executives and investors.

They found that paywalls have been mostly successful the past few years for media companies, but that growth is flagging as core readers have purchased subscriptions. “Almost all publishers post-COVID and post-Trump have hit a wall with their paywall strategies,” Bringéus said. “Many were able to monetize their content directly in their core geo, so they are very open to working with non-cannibalizing third parties like us.”

Simultaneously, young readers in the Gen Z crowd increasingly want to peruse quality news, but lack the means to pay the exorbitant subscription fees at some of the most prestigious sites. “They want to read but financially they can’t afford [it],” Mateev put it. I asked somewhat skeptically whether our illustrious progeny actually want to read quality news over viral TikToks, but Mateev said the evidence pointed strongly to yes. “That’s where the interesting thing lies … the old publishers do have a lot of good standing with the younger audience,” he said.

Informed, which is working with the Washington Post, The Economist, Financial Times, and Bloomberg, will group articles from those sources among others onto Read Lists, while adding its own news summary to the event. For example, you could imagine today that the platform would have a Read List on Afghanistan that would include breaking news stories from the Kabul airport as well as a curated selection of deeper-dives and opinion pieces that talk about the history and perspective of the crisis in the Central Asian nation. “You can snack or you can eat if you want to,” Bringéus said of the design.

He noted that while there are similarities with Spotify playlists, a subject with which he is very familiar, news doesn’t have the same properties as music. “In news, you don’t need all the news and it is perishable, [so] you want to cluster it,” he said.

The company will launch its mobile-first product later this year, although you can sign up for the beta test today. Ultimately, the company is looking to pursue a freemium model with all the licensed content behind the paywall, while its own news summaries will be free. The team is testing pricing and hasn’t determined a launch price at this time.

It’s a bold initiative in a space riven with the tombstones of past startups and even larger corporate initiatives such as Apple News+, which has mostly failed to gain traction despite owning a foothold on every iOS device. That harrowing history aside, the hope here is that the timing is propitious: a new generation of news readers are clamoring for quality, and publishers are ready to let go of some control over their audience in exchange for growth in the post-Trump news landscape. If it succeeds, it’d definitely be front-page news.

Are you curious about stock investing but think it might be too much like gambling? Find out if the two are really so different.

Many Southeast Asian digital businesses run into obstacles when seeking early-stage growth financing. They might not want to sell equity in their company, but often struggle to secure working capital loans from traditional financial institutions. That’s where Singapore-based Jenfi comes in, providing revenue-based financing of up to $500,000 with flexible repayment plans that co-founder and chief executive officer Jeffrey Liu refers to as “growth capital as a product.” 

While revenue-based financing is gaining traction in many other markets, Liu told TechCrunch that Singapore-based Jenfi is the first company of its kind focused on Southeast Asia. The startup announced today that it has raised a $6.3 million Series A led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. Participants included Korea Investment Partners and Golden Equator Capital, 8VC, ICU Ventures and Taurus Ventures. The company previously raised $25 million in debt financing from San Francisco-based Arc Labs. 

Jenfi works primarily with “digital-native” companies, including SaaS providers and e-commerce sellers. Some of its clients include Tier One Entertainment, Pay With Split and Homebase. Jenfi hasn’t disclosed how much non-dilutive financing it’s provided so far, but its goal is to deploy $15 million by July 2022. It claims that the average Jenfi customer experienced compounded sales growth of about 26.5% over three months, 60% over six months and 156% over twelve months.

The aggregate sales of companies in its portfolio is currently more than $30 million, and Jenfi expects that the capital it has already deployed will help them generate $47 million in sales, or a 156% increase by July 2021. 

Liu launched Jenfi with Justin Louie in 2019, after seeing how traditional financial institutions were lagging behind Southeast Asia’s digital boom. The two previously founded GuavaPass, the fitness studio membership platform that was acquired by ClassPass in 2019. Jenfi’s creation was motivated by some of the challenges Liu and Louie faced while financing a high-growth startup focused on Asian markets. 

Jenfi’s application process is completely online and in some cases, companies have received financing in less than 24 hours, though it typically takes a few days. This is another benefit over traditional working capital loans or private equity financing, which can take months to complete, making it difficult for companies to respond quickly to revenue growth opportunities. For example, an e-commerce company may need quick working capital to purchase more inventory if it suddenly gets a lot of demand for a certain product. 

Some of Jenfi’s Series A will also be used to develop more integrations for its proprietary risk assessment engine, which analyzes how efficiently companies use their growth spending. Currently, it can tap into information from bank accounts; software like Xero or Quickbooks; payment gateways including Stripe and Braintree; e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Shopee and Lazada; and Facebook Ads and Google Ads. 

Instead of fixed installment repayment plans, Jenfi gives companies more flexible target repayment plans and charges them a flat fee based on the amount of financing they received, their monthly sales and how many months it will take to pay back the loan. Jenfi continues analyzing the data sources provided by companies, so it can tell if a client potentially needs more capital or an adjustment to their repayment terms. 

Ultimately, Jenfi’s plan to move beyond financing and also provide tools to help businesses. “We see ourselves as partners in our portfolio companies’ growth,” said Liu. 

Since Jenfi taps into a mix of data sources—including bank accounts, accounting software and digital advertising platforms, it can use that same information to identify opportunities. Part of Jenfi’s Series A funding will be used to develop automated analytics. For example, the platform would be able to identify an advertising opportunity with high ROI on Google Ads and notify the company, asking if they want to apply for more capital to finance the campaign.