Mintos, the Latvian fintech that operates a global loans marketplace to let you invest in loans from various loan originators, has raised €5 million in Series A funding. Backing the startup once again is the Riga-based venture capital firm Grumpy Investments (previously known as Skillion Ventures). More noteworthy, the new capital will be used to launch a Mintos banking account and debit card, significantly expanding the company’s offering.

“Both banking account and the card in our opinion is a natural step in our journey of revolutionising financial services through technology and serving our investors and will nicely complement our current offering of investments in loans, and low-fee mid-market rate currency exchange,” Mintos co-founder and CEO Martins Sulte tells me. “This development also means that, theoretically, our investors won’t need their banks anymore”.

The Mintos banking account will act like any other IBAN account. You’ll be able to receive a salary into your Mintos account, use it to get paid by companies, or receive money from friends. And of course you’ll be able to transfer money out of your Mintos account, just like a regular bank account.

Sulte says the idea behind plans to launch a Mintos banking account, and the reason why the company is applying for a European e-money license, is to improve the overall Mintos experience. This includes making it quicker to access money generated by the loans you have invested in (which is held by Mintos on your behalf) and easier to invest on a regular basis.

“The card will allow investors to access the money they hold on the Mintos account instantly by paying at their local grocery shop or online or withdrawing money at ATMs; basically use the card like any other bank card,” he says. “They will no longer need to request a withdrawal from the platform to their bank account and wait up to two days for their money to arrive”.

The fintech startup claims a customer base of 87,000 investors from 71 different countries. In addition to launching the Mintos banking account, it will use the additional funding for further geographical expansion, including Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. The company will also invest in acquiring more customers, and plans to significantly expand the size of its 60 person team. Notably, Mintos has been profitable since January 2017.

To that end, the fintech says it has already facilitated more than €1 billion in investments in loans through its marketplace since launching in 2015. It says investors in total have earned €26.7 million in interest through loans to individuals and businesses and have attained an average net return of nearly 12 percent.

Heyday, a startup aiming to make facials more affordable and personalized, announced today that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding.

I first wrote about the company a year ago, when it raised its $3 million seed round. At the time, co-founder and CEO Adam Ross said his goal was to offer something that sits between expensive, high-end facials and “random little places that are generally cheap in a bad way.” (Heyday pricing starts at $65 for a 30-minute session.)

The company currently operates six brick-and-mortar locations — it started in New York City but recently opened its first Los Angeles store. At the same time, Ross said the website was recently redesigned to offer a more “frictionless” booking experience, and the company also says it can use its “Facial Record” of customers to personalize the treatment and products.

Moving forward, the goal is to both open new physical locations (particularly in LA), but also to continue investing in the technology.

“It’s not an either/or — we see mutual growth and expansion across both channels,” Ross said. “The physical footprint is always going to be a key pillar of our brand strategy, but to win and service customers’ needs in this space, you need to be online.”

Ross also suggested that Heyday is changing the way customers look at facials. For one thing, 30 percent of its customers say they’ve never had a facial before. In addition, Ross said they’re starting to see facials not as an occasional luxury, but as a regular part of their wellness routine: “Most of our clients think about us like an Equinox membership.” And they should, he argued, especially since “your skin is your largest organ.”

The new funding was led by Fifth Wall Ventures, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, Brainchild Funding, M3 Ventures and CircleUp. Fifth Wall partner Kevin Campos is joining Heyday’s board of directors.

“We are in the midst of a significant shift in the retail industry, where marquee brands are moving from digitally native to an omnichannel model,” Campos said in the funding announcement. “We believe the team at Heyday is offering the best experience across both digital and physical touchpoints, and we are thrilled to partner with them to help navigate this complex process and position them for success.”

Lime, the well-funded startup known for its fleet of brightly colored dockless bicycles and electric scooters, has a new way for its customers to get around: cars.

Beginning this week, Lime users in Seattle will be able to reserve a “LimePod,” a Lime-branded 2018 Fiat 500, within the Lime mobile app. There will be 50 cars available to start as part of the company’s initial rollout. Lime plans to increase that number at the end of the month.

“LimePods, Lime’s car-sharing product line, a convenient, affordable, weather-resistant mobility solution for communities,” a spokesperson for Lime said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “The ease of use of finding, unlocking, and paying for cars will be consistent with how riders use Lime scooters and e-bikes today.”

Rides in the LimePod will cost $1 to unlock the car and 40 cents per minute of use. The company plans to unleash additional shareable cars in California early next year. Its scooters and e-bikes, for reference, are $1 to unlock and 15 cents per minute and regular pedal bikes are $1 to unlock and 5 cents per minute.

Founded in 2017 by Berkeley graduates Toby Sun and Brad Bao, the startup has raised a total of $467 million to date from GV, Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Section 32, GGV Capital and more. Reports indicate that Lime is on the fundraising circuit now, targeting a $3 billion valuation, or nearly 3x its latest valuation.

The company is expanding rapidly, most recently releasing a fleet of e-scooters and bikes in Australia, as well as making notable hires on what seems like a weekly basis. In the last month, Lime has tapped Joe Kraus, a general partner at Alphabet’s venture arm GV and an existing member of the startup’s board of directors, as its first chief operating officer. Before that, it brought on Uber’s former chief business officer David Richter as its first-ever chief business officer and interim chief financial officer.

In July, the company hired Peter Dempster from ReachNow to lead the LimePod initiative out of Seattle.

Sramana Mitra: Given that is your high level hypothesis, where are the investment opportunities for venture investment that you are particularly excited about? Brock Pierce: We’re about 10 years in...

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RideCell, a transportation software startup, has doubled its previously announced Series B funding round to $60 million, a sign that investors believe demand for cloud-based mobility platforms will grow as more companies try to scale up car-sharing, ride-hailing and even robotaxi businesses.

The company, which has developed a platform designed to help car-sharing, ride-sharing and autonomous technology companies manage their vehicles, announced it raised $28 million in May.

Activate Capital led this round; its co-founder and managing director Raj Atluru has joined RideCell’s board. Reinsurance group Munich Re’s ERGO fund, LG Technology Ventures, BNP Paribas, Sony Innovation Fund, Ally Ventures and Khosla Ventures joined this extended round. Denso also upped its investment in the Series B round.

Nearly half a dozen other companies had already invested in the Series B round, including Cox Automotive, Initialized Capital, Denso, Penske, Deutsche Bahn and Mitsui.

“Investor interest in cloud-based mobility platforms and autonomous vehicles increases almost daily as the disruptive potential of these new technologies are realized,” RideCell CEO Aarjav Trivedi said in a statement.

The company recently received a permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test its Auro autonomous vehicles on public roads. RideCell acquired self-driving car company Auro in October 2017. Auro initially developed and operated driverless shuttles for private geo-fenced locations such as corporate and university campuses. The company has since expanded its focus to include passenger vehicle models and minivans, although it still plans to target low-speed urban use cases focused on solving last-mile transportation.

The company’s real-world trials will start on Ford Fusion vehicle platforms equipped with Auro’s autonomous driving system.

Sramana Mitra: What is the metric that you look for? Kelly Perdew: We publish that we like to see companies that have $50,000 to $100,000 of monthly recurring revenue which translates into $600,000...

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According to a ResearchAndMarkets report published recently, the global security and vulnerability management market is expected to grow 10% annually over the next five years. The BFSI segment is...

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Sramana Mitra: Do you feel comfortable talking a bit about what it cost to get this kind of endorsement? How do you evaluate which influencer relationships should you take on versus not? Nick Shaw:...

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Kara Weber, Founder General Partner at Brilliant Ventures, speaks extensively about her commitment to female founders.

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By Guest Author Dan Schawbel Publisher Credit: Excerpted from Back to Human: How Great Leaders Create Connection in the Age of Isolation by Dan Schawbel. Copyright © 2018. Available from Da Capo...

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Anorak Technologies, the U.K. startup building a life insurance advice platform, has raised £5 million in Series A funding. Notably, the round is led by previous backer Kamet Ventures, the tech incubator funded by insurance giant AXA. It brings the total raised by Anorak to £9 million.

In a call, co-founder and CEO David Vanek told me the startup’s mission is to build the world’s “smartest” automated life insurance advice platform. It wants to offer insurance advice at the most appropriate time and place in a person’s life, such as when buying a house or starting a family, and in turn open up life insurance cover to many more people.

As it stands, life insurance, such as accidental death cover, tends to be sold through financial advisors or brokers targeting high net worth individuals. That leaves swathes of people and their dependents without any cover at all.

Vanek says the additional capital will be used to “grow our tech, data, product and business development teams,” and to continue to invest in Anorak’s unique recommendation engine, which covers the profiling of users, analysing their risk, and connecting them to a suitable product.

The “insurtech” startup also plans to integrate with more partners in order to build out its distribution infrastructure for life insurance. This will span investment platforms, online mortgage brokers, money management apps, challenger banks, media groups, and gig economy platforms. To test these non-traditional B2B2C routes to market for life insurance advice, Anorak already has API integrations with Starling Bank, and the money management app Yolt.

So, for example, Starling customers can connect Anorak to their Starling account via the bank’s own API to provide Anorak with access to personal details and transaction data. This enables the life insurance advisor to begin building up a profile based on things like rent, mortgage, salary, outgoings etc., to provide accurate advice.

Anorak will also ask any remaining questions needed to fill out missing profiling data. It then outlines what is at risk in case of death or disability, the type of protection that might be needed (life, income protection, etc), how much, and for how long.

Finally, Anorak presents the three best-suited products (from all of the major life insurers) and provides quotes for each of them, as well as the option to apply and buy the product online through Anorak.

Moving forward, Vanek tells me that Anorak wants to expands its tech platform to advisors, such as mortgage brokers and wealths managers, who haven’t previously had tools to help them provide life insurance or accidental injury cover.

The resulting hybrid approach will enable customer journeys to start online and be finalised offline by an agent/adviser using the Anorak platform to access customer data and use the Anorak recommendation engine, or to start offline with advisers using the Anorak platform and continuing online with a dedicated customer portal so clients can visualise or adjust their insurance needs.

“Buying life insurance is not an impulse buy, it is complex, [and] some people will always want to be able to speak to an adviser,” he tells me. “We want to leverage Anorak technology to build a truly ‘channel agnostic’ protection advice.

Fluidly, the London-based fintech that offers an “intelligent” cashflow management SaaS for SMEs, has raised £5 million in Series A funding. The round is led by New-York based Nyca Partners, with participation from other investors including Octopus Ventures, Anthemis, and angel investors Simon Murdoch, and Charlie Songhurst.

Claiming to define a new software category, namely “Intelligent Cash,” Fluidly want to significantly improve small and medium-sized businesses’ cashflow management. To do this it has built machine learning-based technology to predict and optimise the future cash flows for SMEs, thus helping business owners conduct better financial decision-making. As part of this, you connect Fluidly to your business bank account via Open Banking, and to your cloud accounting software.

“Fluidly is then able to access the transaction-level bank and accounting data and it uses this data to automatically forecast future cash flows by predicting when invoices will arrive, get paid or other payments will be made,” explains co-founder and CEO Caroline Plumb. “This gives a business an instant, continuously updated view of their financial future rather than having to model it in a spreadsheet”.

Since launching a year ago, Fluidly says it is now working with nine of the top twenty U.K. accounting firms as a route to market, including BDO, Baldwins, and Haysmacintyre. The fintech has also formed partnerships with various cloud accounting software providers, and says it is one of the fastest-growing apps on Xero’s marketplace and a “Champion-level” Sage partner.

To that end, businesses sign up for Fluidly on a monthly subscription basis, and Fluidly also sells volume licences to accounting firms and lenders who then in turn offer the SaaS to their own small business clients. Futrli, and Float could be considered competitors, but arguably the humble Excel spreadsheet is Fluidly’s main competitor and a far from optimum solution.

Meanwhile, Plumb tells me the new funding will be invested in product development and engineering to increase the number of platforms that Fluidly can integrate with, and to add new features such as scenario-building and insights to the software’s forecasting ability.

“We’ll be adding smart alerts, scenarios and suggested actions if you might be running into cashflow difficulty,” she says. “We’ll also start to scale our sales and marketing team”.

Adds Hans Morris, Managing Partner at Nyca: “We are thrilled to have joined Fluidly on their journey as they grow into a major AI/ ML player in the financial technology industry. Cashflow management for SME’s is an area that is long overdue for the kind of innovation that Fluidly is providing”.

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 421st FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Wednesday, November 14, 2018, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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For entrepreneurs interested to meet and chat with Sramana Mitra in person, please join us for our bi-monthly and informal group meetups. If you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area or are just...

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Some more comments from readers on the changing culture around startups filing their Form Ds with the SEC, and then a short update on SoftBank and a bunch more article reviews.

We are experimenting with new content forms at TechCrunch. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the authors: Danny at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or Arman at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you like or hate something here.

Lawyers are pretty uniform that disclosure is no longer ideal

If you haven’t been following our obsession with Form Ds, be sure to read our original piece and follow up. The gist is that startups are increasingly foregoing filing a Form D with the SEC that provides details of their venture rounds like investment size and main investors in order to stay stealth longer. That has implications for journalists and the public, since we rely on these filings in many cases to know who is funding what in the Valley.

Morrison Foerster put together a good presentation two years ago that provides an overview of the different routes that startups can take in disclosing their rounds properly.

Traditionally, the vast majority of startups used Rule 506 for their securities, which mandates that a Form D be filed within 15 days of the first money of the round closing. These days though, more and more startups are opting to use Section 4(a)(2), which doesn’t require a Form D, but also doesn’t provide a “blue sky” exception to start securities laws, which means that startups have to file in relevant state jurisdictions and no longer have preemption from the SEC.

David Willbrand, who chairs the Early Stage & Emerging Company Practice at Thompson Hine LLP, read our original articles on Form Ds and explained by email that the practices around securities disclosures have indeed been changing at his firm and others:

We started pushing 4(a)(2) very hard when our clients kept getting “outed” thru the Form D and upset about it. In my experience, for 99% is the desire to remain in stealth mode, period.

[…]

When I started in 1996, Form Ds were paper, there was no internet, and no one looked. Now they are electronic and the media and blogs scrape daily and publish the information. It actually really is true disclosure! And it’s kind of ironic, right, which goes to your point – now that it’s working, these issuers don’t want it.

[…]

What I find is that the proverbial Series A is the brass ring, and issuers wants to call everything seed rounds (saving the title) until something chunky shows up, and stay below the radar too. So they pop out of the cake publicly for the first time with a big “Series A” that they build press around – and their first Form D.

Another piece of feedback we received was from Augie Rakow, the co-founder and managing partner of Atrium, which bills itself as a “better law firm for startups” that TechCrunch has covered a few times before. He wrote to us that in addition to the media concerns, startups also have to be aware of the broad cross-section of interested parties to Form Ds that hasn’t existed in the past:

Today, there is a bigger audience in terms of who cares about venture backed companies. Whether this spun off from the launch of the Facebook movie or the fact that over two billion people across the global have the internet at their fingertips via smartphones, people are connected and curious. The audience is not only larger but also encompasses more national and international interests. This means there are simply more eyes on trends, announcements, and intel on privately held companies whether they are media, investors, or your competitors. Companies that have a good reason to stay stealth may want to avoid attracting this attention by not making a public Form D filing.

For startups, the obvious advice is to just consult your attorney and consider the tradeoffs of having a very clean safe harbor versus more work around regulatory filings to stay stealthy.

But the real message here is for journalists. Form Ds are no longer common among seed-stage startups, and indeed, startup founders and venture investors have a lot of latitude in choosing how and when they file. You can no longer just watch the SEC’s EDGAR search platform and break stories anymore. Building up a human sourcing capability is the only way to get into those early investment rounds today.

Finally — and this is something that is hard to prove one way or the other — the lack of disclosure may also mean that the fears around seed financing dropping off a cliff may be at least a little bit unfounded. Eliot Brown at the Wall Street Journal reported just yesterday that the number of seed financings is down 40 percent, according to PitchBook data. How much of that drop is because of changing macroeconomic conditions, versus changes in filing disclosures?

Quick follow up on SoftBank

Last week, I also got obsessed with SoftBank. The company confirmed today that it intends to move forward with the IPO of its Japanese mobile telecom unit, according to WSJ and many other sources. The company is targeting more than $20 billion in proceeds, and its overallotment could drive that above $25 billion, or roughly the level of Alibaba’s record IPO haul.

One interesting note from Taiga Uranaka at Reuters on the public issue is that everyday investors will likely play an outsized role in the IPO process:

Yet SoftBank’s brand name is still likely to draw retail investors long accustomed to using SoftBank’s phone and internet services. Many still see CEO Son as a tech visionary who challenged entrenched rivals NTT DoCoMo Inc ( 9437.T ) and KDDI, and brought Apple Inc’s ( AAPL.O ) iPhone to Japan.

Japanese households are commonly seen as an attractive target in IPOs with their 1,829 trillion yen in financial assets, even if they are traditionally risk-averse with over 50 percent of assets in cash and deposits.

More than 80 percent of the shares will be offered to domestic retail investors, a person with knowledge of the matter told Reuters.

Pavel Alpeyev at Bloomberg noted that “SoftBank is looking to tempt investors with a dividend payout ratio of about 85 percent of net income, according to the filing. Based on net income in the last fiscal year, that would work out to an almost 5 percent yield at the indicated IPO price.” A higher dividend ratio is particularly attractive to retired individual investors.

Despite SoftBank’s horrifying levels of debt, Japanese consumers may well save the company from itself and allow it to effectively jump start its balance sheet yet again. Complemented with a potential Vision Fund II, Masayoshi Son’s vision for a completely transformed SoftBank seems waiting for him in the cards.

Notes on Articles

Tech C.E.O.s Are in Love With Their Principal Doomsayer – Nellie Bowles writes a feature on Yuval Noah Harari, the noted philosopher and popular author of Sapiens. Bowles investigates the paradoxical popularity of Harari, who sees technology as creating a permanent “useless class” and criticizes Silicon Valley with his now enduring popularity in the region. Interesting personal details on the somewhat reclusive Israeli, but ultimately the question of the paradox remains sadly mostly unanswered. (2,800 words)

Why Doctors Hate Their Computers – Atul Gawande discusses learning and using Epic, the dominant electronic medical records software platform, and discovers the challenges of building static software for the complex adaptive system that is health care. His observations of the challenges of software engineering will be well-known to anyone who has read Fred Brooks, but the piece does an excellent job of exploring the balancing act between the needs of technocratic systems and the human design needed to make messy and complicated professions work. Worth a read. (8,900 words)

Picking flowers, making honey: The Chinese military’s collaboration with foreign universities – An excellent study by Alex Joske at the Australia Strategic Policy Institute on the hundreds of military scientists from China who use foreign academic exchanges as a means of information acquisition for critical scientific and engineering knowledge, including in the United States. China’s government under Xi Jinping has made indigenous technology development a chief domestic priority, and the U.S. innovation economy is encouraged to increasingly guard its intellectual property. (6,500 words)

The Digital Deciders – New America report by Robert Morgus who investigates the fracturing of the internet, which I have written about at some length. Morgus finds that a small group of countries (the “digital deciders”) will determine whether the internet continues to be open or whether nationalist interests will close it off. Let’s all hope that Iraq believes in freedom of expression and not Chinese-style surveillance. Worth a skim. (45 page report, but with prodigious tables)

Reading Docket

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Brock Pierce was recorded in September 2018. Brock...

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French startup BlaBlaCar is announcing plans to acquire Ouibus, the bus division of France’s national railway company SNCF. For the first time, BlaBlaCar is moving beyond carpooling and plans to offer both long-distance carpooling rides and bus rides.

BlaBlaCar already ran a test with Ouibus for the past six months on popular corridors. It looks like both companies are happy with this test, as SNCF is willing to let BlaBlaCar run Ouibus from now on.

As part of this deal, BlaBlaCar is announcing a new $114 million investment (€101 million) from SNCF and existing BlaBlaCar investors. I’d guess that this isn’t just cash but probably cash and shares as part of the move with SNCF. Yes, you read that correctly, SNCF is now an investor in BlaBlaCar.

Ouibus has transported more than 12 million passengers over the past few years in France and Europe. Many thought that buses would hurt BlaBlaCar over the long run. By offering buses on BlaBlaCar directly, the company can capitalize on its brand and huge community to counter that trend. BlaBlaCar is now a marketplace for road travel.

BlaBlaCar is taking a risk, as Ouibus has been relentlessly losing money. Just like other bus companies, Ouibus relies heavily on contractors, which means that BlaBlaCar could quickly adjust the offering. It’ll also depend on product integrations on BlaBlaCar, OUI.sncf and other platforms.

BlaBlaCar currently has 65 million users in 22 countries and is about to reach profitability. And you can expect to find ridesharing offers on OUI.sncf in the coming months.

Tel Aviv-based Audioburst has been developing a search engine for audio news, which allows users to locate audio content within podcasts and other talk radio programs. Today, the company is capitalizing on its technology to launch personalized playlists that deliver custom news briefs that get better over time the more you use the product.

The feature has been built using deep AI learning, the company says.

The content itself is drawn from top podcasts and the radio stations in Audioburst’s index, and will alert you to new information based on your chosen keywords and topics.

To use the feature, you first sign up on the Audioburst website, then select from a set of interests or add your own. When you’re finished with the selection process, you just hit the “I’m done” button to be taken to your personalized playlist of audio clips.

The end result is being able to listen to the parts of the podcasts or other audio programs you would actually care about, rather than slogging through half an hour or more of chatter for the one tidbit of news you were interested in.

For example, when testing the feature this morning, I chose a variety of topics like “tech news,” “movies,” “entertainment,” “science,” “parenting” and more, and was delivered a set of audio clips that included a discussion of Disney’s “Star Wars” spin-off series starring Diego Luna; a chat about the 2018 MacBook Air overhaul; an assessment of the smog in L.A.; and a lot of other clips I chose to skip (but will hopefully train the AI further).

You can try the feature yourself at search.audioburst.com by clicking on “Personalized Playlist” in the top left.

The results were hit or miss, which is expected — to some extent — fresh out of the gate. But there were also times when the clips didn’t actually serve up too much information. That is, you’d still need to turn to the podcast itself for the full story.

However, the feature itself isn’t necessarily going to be used by consumers directly on Audioburst’s website. Instead, its development came about thanks to requests from partners using its API.

The company says you can expect to see the personalized playlists integrated into its partners’ products in the smart speaker, mobile, in-car infotainment, and wearable tech spaces in 2019.

Audioburst currently has partnerships with ByteDance, Nippon, Bose, Harman, Samsung and more.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a couple of things next. I’d like to understand what are you really proud of in your portfolio. What’s really scaling? What’s looking really interesting? As you explain to us...

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According to India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), the Indian e-commerce market is projected to grow 51% annually from $39 billion in 2017 to $120 billion by 2020 driven by a young demographic...

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