Meet Point, a new challenger bank in the U.S. that has been available as a private beta for the past year. Today, the company is announcing new fundraising — later this month, the company is launching a major new version of its service and opening its doors to everyone. There’s a waitlist for now.

Point is a consumer banking app combined with a debit card. The company wants to reproduce the experience of credit cards but with debit cards, thanks to rewards and a point-based system. There’s no credit check when you sign up.

The startup raised a $10.5 million Series A funding round led by Valar Ventures with Y Combinator, Kindred Ventures, Finventure Studio and business angels also participating. Valar Ventures has backed several high-profile fintech startups, such as N26, TransferWise and Stash.

As a user, you get many features you’d expect from a challenger bank. The debit card is tightly integrated with the app, which means that you can receive notifications every time you make a transaction and manage your card from the app. You don’t pay any foreign transaction fees for international transactions — the company uses Mastercard’s exchange rate for those transactions.

In addition to your physical Point card, you can access a virtual card from the app. Point has partnered with Radius Bank for the banking infrastructure, an FDIC-insured bank.

When it comes to points, every transaction lets you earn points. You get 2x points on groceries and dining and 5x points on subscriptions, such as Spotify and Netflix. It then works like a cash-back system; you can redeem points for dollars and they’ll appear on your checking account — each point is worth $0.01.

The company uses Plaid to link your Point account with a third-party bank account. You can then move money from your existing account to your Point account and top up your account with payment apps, such as Venmo, Cash App and PayPal.

Points’ biggest competitor is probably Chime, the challenger bank that has attracted 8 million customers. Chime doesn’t currently offer rewards. Let’s see if Point can convince customers who have yet to try out a challenger bank that Point is a better option.

Update: An earlier version of this story mistakenly said that the new version was launching today. It will be live later this month.

European startup studio eFounders has looked back at the first half of 2020 to share some metrics about its portfolio companies. The startup studio that is focused on building Software as a Service enterprise startups has now launched 25 companies in total. Those startups have raised $148 million in 2020 alone.

You may remember that the portfolio of eFounders reached a total valuation of $1 billion late last year. After those new funding rounds, the consolidated valuation of eFounders companies is now at $1.5 billion.

And because we’re talking about SaaS, the monthly recurring revenue has also doubled year-over-year compared to the first half of 2019. Overall, those companies now generate around $10 million in monthly recurring revenue.

Of course, some companies are doing better than others. In particular, Front and Aircall have raised $59 million and $65 million respectively. Back when I wrote about those stories, Front said its valuation had quadrupled compared to its previous funding round, while Aircall said it had done more than 3x on the valuation.

Slite, Bonjour, Folk, Cycle and Equify have also raised smaller funding rounds. Yousign, an e-signature startup, has also experienced an important growth bump with demand exploding.

eFounders seems particularly well-positioned for the current situation. Due to lockdowns around the world, many companies have been looking at tools that help them work remotely and work more efficiently. “We build the future of work,” eFounders writes on its website.

“The changes that were naturally, but slowly, occurring in companies for a decade have accelerated in a matter of months. We’ve certainly gained a few years of digitalisation in the space of a quarter,” eFounders co-founder Thibaud Elziere said in a statement.

If you’re not familiar with eFounders, the company first comes up with an idea for a new company and hires a founding team. The core team works alongside the founders for a year or two to define product-market fit, and eFounders keeps a stake in those startups.

After that initial launch, portfolio companies usually raise a seed round, which helps them build a solid team. Then eFounders can switch their focus and start working on new startups.

While many investors say sheltering in place has broadened their appetite for funding companies located outside major hubs, one firm is doubling down on backing startups in America’s heartland.

Launched in 2016 by Brett Brohl, The Syndicate Fund rebranded to Bread & Butter Ventures earlier this month (a reference to one of Minnesota’s many nicknames). Along with the rebrand, longtime Google executive and Revolution partner Mary Grove joined the team as a general partner and Stephanie Rich came aboard as head of platform.

The growth of the Twin Cities’ startup ecosystem is precisely why The Syndicate Fund rebranded. The firm, which has $10 million in assets under management, will invest in three of Minneapolis’ biggest strengths: agriculture and food, health care and enterprise software.

Agtech interest spans the entire spectrum from farming to restaurants and grocery stores. The firm is also interested in the “messy middle” of supply chain and logistics around food, said Brohl and is interested in a mix of software, hardware and biosciences. Within health care, the firm evaluates solutions focused on prevention versus treatment, female health startups working on maternal health and fertility and software focused on the aging population and millennials.

It’s also looking at enterprise software that can serve large businesses and scale efficiently.

Contrary Capital, which has raised money from Tesla, Reddit, SoFi and Twitch, knows a thing or two about how to work with tech’s brightest mafias. Now it wants to invest in them, before anyone else.

The San Francisco fund and accelerator, which traditionally invests in student entrepreneurs, is betting on the idea that the best founders are early-career employees first. Today Contrary Capital is publicly launching its next big bet: Contrary Talent, a new arm within the fund that will invest and support early-career folks and students to grow their tech ambitions.

While Contrary Capital founder Eric Tarczynski said the new focus is not a pivot for the firm, he added that he wouldn’t be surprised if early-career professionals become the bulk of the portfolio in years to come.

Contrary Talent will source the top engineers, designers and managers at top tech companies and pair them with top operators in tech for mentorship and job consultancy. It’s giving startup employees access to great minds before they have a pitch deck, or even know how to make one.

Talent members will only be admitted to the group through a referral from one of Contrary Capital’s hundred-plus venture partners, or scouts. The firm’s venture partner network has operated for the past four years to help the firm find talent on college campuses, so now it will shift to also focus on early-career talent.

The goal is to have a diverse end result, so it doesn’t hurt that Contrary Capital’s venture partner network is currently 40% female and 60% non-white.

Contrary Talent is also launching a venture partner team at an undisclosed HBCU this fall to increase representation.

Along with the announcement, Contrary Capital shared it has hired Triplebyte’s former head of talent, Ellis Briery, to lead this new arm of the fund.

Once a candidate is referred, they will have to go through multiple rounds of interviews before being selected to join the Talent community. Members receive access to job opportunities, mentorship, invites to annual retreats and funding when (and if) they do decide to start a company.

The program has been in stealth for six months so far and has 150 members. Contrary Talent will admit roughly 100 new members annually, and there will be continuous light learning on job resources, 1:1 training for career paths and AMAs with top people within tech. Think of the curriculum as a steady, but small, drip of asynchronous and live learning.

Contrary founder Eric Tarczynski said there is reserved capital for Talent members, but did not disclose how much. Contrary has low tens of millions in assets under management.

“Because of the long-term nature of the program and that we want to support Talent members regardless of whether or not they’re starting companies right now, we’ll be investing in Talent member-started companies across many funds,” Tarczynski said. He estimated that about 33% of investments from the current fund will come from the Talent community.

“Candidly, we’re not expecting Facebooks to be kind of falling off of trees,” Tarczynski said.

Talent is Contrary Capital’s first move beyond investing in students since its inception in 2016.

“As time went on and we spent more time on the ground at tech campuses, we realized not only were the number of young founders going up, but so were the number of top engineers, designers and product heads who were interested in working in tech,” he said.

Finding out how many Black founders have successfully raised venture capital, and which venture capital firms invested in their startups hasn’t been an easy task, historically. Venture capital data is often diceable by stage, say, or by startup type. But if you wanted to know how many Black founders a particular firm had invested into, that information has been hard to come by.

Until now, that is.

Earlier this year, Yonas Beshawred, Sefanit Tades, and James Norman, in association with the Transparent Collective, compiled what was heralded as “the most comprehensive list of U.S.-based venture-backed Black founders ever.” You can check out the data here.

It’s an extraordinary document, both for its usefulness and its brevity. This morning the list is just 283 names long, though it appears to be expanding over time.

The same group recently put together more data. Now, the public database includes details on which venture capital firms have invested in Black-founded startups. (The founder list came during Black History month, while the VC list was put together around Juneteenth; for more on how tech recently discovered Juneteenth, head here).

There are more VC firms that have invested in Black founders than there are Black founders who have raised money from VCs. This makes sense, as there is often more than one VC firm in any given round. But while the number of VCs detailed is encouraging at first glance, there’s nuance to the data.

TechCrunch spoke with Norman, the CEO of Pilot.ly, and a partner at the Transparent Collective, who told TechCrunch that he was initially “overwhelmed by the sheer number of investments made from 570 different firms,” but that “after one look, roughly 75% of the names had one Black founder investment.”

Even more, Norman told TechCrunch that after reviewing the data he “realized most of the firms on this list are likely follow-ons piling into single rounds of funding.” That most VC firms on the list of groups that put capital into a single Black-founded startup “highlights the lack of capital deployed to Black-founded startups in general” he continued.

Still, having the founder and VC data compiled is useful on its own. In Norman’s view, the dataset will allow other orgs to ingest and parse the information, hopefully yielding useful knowledge that was previously occluded.

Tades, another contributor to the Black founder and VC lists, told TechCrunch that response to the databases has been “overwhelmingly positive, with a number of people reaching out to provide support to expand the list and provide additional data points.” She also said that user “feedback is also driving our iterations on The Black Founder List database,” so there should be more to come from the effort. That’s exciting and welcome.

Silicon Valley loves to say things like “measure what matters.” Well, here’s a list of Black founders and the VCs who have cut one, two or more checks into their startups. It matters that both lists get longer, and we can now measure progress.

Author’s note: I tangled up some of the list’s original provenance, which has been corrected. My mistake!

When the inventor of AWS Lambda, Tim Wagner, and the former head of blockchain at AWS, Shruthi Rao, co-found a startup, it’s probably worth paying attention. Vendia, as the new venture is called, combines the best of serverless and blockchain to help build a truly multicloud serverless platform for better data and code sharing.

Today, the Vendia team announced that it has raised a $5.1 million seed funding round, led by Neotribe’s Swaroop ‘Kittu’ Kolluri. Correlation Ventures, WestWave Capital, HWVP, Firebolt Ventures, Floodgate and Future\Perfect Ventures also participated in this oversubscribed round.

Seeing Wagner at the helm of a blockchain-centric startup isn’t exactly a surprise. After building Lambda at AWS, he spent some time as VP of engineering at Coinbase, where he left about a year ago to build Vendia.

“One day, Coinbase approached me and said, ‘Hey, maybe we could do for the financial system what you’ve been doing over there for the cloud system,'” he told me. “And so I got interested in that. We had some conversations. I ended up going to Coinbase and spent a little over a year there as the VP of Engineering, helping them to set the stage for some of that platform work and tripling the size of the team.” He noted that Coinbase may be one of the few companies where distributed ledgers are actually mission-critical to their business, yet even Coinbase had a hard time scaling its Ethereum fleet, for example, and there was no cloud-based service available to help it do so.

“The thing that came to me as I was working there was why don’t we bring these two things together? Nobody’s thinking about how would you build a distributed ledger or blockchain as if it were a cloud service, with all the things that we’ve learned over the course of the last 10 years building out the public cloud and learning how to do it at scale,” he said.

Wagner then joined forces with Rao, who spent a lot of time in her role at AWS talking to blockchain customers. One thing she noticed was that while it makes a lot of sense to use blockchain to establish trust in a public setting, that’s really not an issue for enterprise.

“After the 500th customer, it started to make sense,” she said. “These customers had made quite a bit of investment in IoT and edge devices. They were gathering massive amounts of data. They also made investments on the other side, with AI and ML and analytics. And they said, ‘Well, there’s a lot of data and I want to push all of this data through these intelligent systems. I need a mechanism to get this data.'” But the majority of that data often comes from third-party services. At the same time, most blockchain proof of concepts weren’t moving into any real production usage because the process was often far too complex, especially enterprises that maybe wanted to connect their systems to those of their partners.

“We are asking these partners to spin up Kubernetes clusters and install blockchain nodes. Why is that? That’s because for blockchain to bring trust into a system to ensure trust, you have to own your own data. And to own your own data, you need your own node. So we’re solving fundamentally the wrong problem,” she explained.

The first product Vendia is bringing to market is Vendia Share, a way for businesses to share data with partners (and across clouds) in real-time, all without giving up control over that data. As Wagner noted, businesses often want to share large data sets but they also want to ensure they can control who has access to that data. For those users, Vendia is essentially a virtual data lake with provenance tracking and tamper-proofing built in.

The company, which mostly raised this round after the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the U.S., is already working with a couple of design partners in multiple industries to test out its ideas, and plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering team to build out its tools.

“At Neotribe Ventures, we invest in breakthrough technologies that stretch the imagination and partner with companies that have category creation potential built upon a deep-tech platform,” said Neotribe founder and managing director Kolluri. “When we heard the Vendia story, it was a no-brainer for us. The size of the market for multiparty, multicloud data and code aggregation is enormous and only grows larger as companies capture every last bit of data. Vendia’s serverless-based technology offers benefits such as ease of experimentation, no operational heavy lifting and a pay-as-you-go pricing model, making it both very consumable and highly disruptive. Given both Tim and Shruthi’s backgrounds, we know we’ve found an ideal ‘Founder fit’ to solve this problem! We are very excited to be the lead investors and be a part of their journey.”

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DeepSpin, a Berlin-based startup that is developing what it describes as a “next-generation, AI-powered MRI imaging machine”, has raised €600,000 in seed funding.

Backing the round is APEX Digital Health, with participation from existing investors Entrepreneur First (EF) and SOSV, along with a number of unnamed angel investors. Including grants and earlier investment, it brings the total raised to €1 million pre-launch.

DeepSpin is a graduate of EF’s company builder programme, where its two founders — Clemens Tepel, a former McKinsey consultant, and Pedro Freire Silva, a PhD researcher from KIT — decided to partner in September 2019. Freire Silva drew on his research into small-scale, mass-manufacturable MRI systems and pitched the idea to his future co-founder.

“From the beginning I found the idea very intriguing and so we directly jumped into attempting to prove its feasibility,” says Tepel. “Within 4 weeks we were able to prove it in simulation, get industry-leading advisors on board and get first LOIs [letter of intent] from interested clinicians”.

Yet-to-launch and still in the development phase, DeepSpin aims to build a new type of MRI system at a “fraction of the cost, weight and size” of existing systems. To make this possible, the startup is has developed a new antenna technology combined with AI-controlled operation, which the startup is currently patenting.

“The problem we are solving is that MRI, the most advanced medical imaging method, is currently not easily accessible because it is incredibly expensive, requires specialised operators and needs specifically shielded rooms,” explains Tepel. “We are removing all of these constraints based on our proprietary technology, making MRI universally accessible for any patient, anywhere in the world”.

Adds Freire Silva: “Instead of combining highly expensive hardware with standard software, as it is done on conventional MRI scanners, we will be able to obtain the same clinical information by applying very sophisticated algorithms on simplified hardware, thereby reducing our system’s cost by orders of magnitude”.

Tepel tells me this approach has not been taken before because both key enablers — highly capable AI-algorithms and the specific antenna design – were only available very recently.

Having proven DeepSpin’s methods in simulation, the next step and the team’s current focus is to develop a first fully AI-driven prototype. “Based on that, we will develop an initial product version, aimed at pre-clinical applications, before going into medical certification, which then will allow us to sell our product for clinical use across a range of medical domains and to new geographies that can’t afford conventional systems,” says Tepel.

Uber has reportedly made an offer to buy food delivery service Postmates, according to The New York Times.

According to the Times, the talks are still ongoing and the deal could fall through.

For those that have been paying attention to Uber, this appetite is not new, albeit consistent. A little over a month ago, the ride-hailing company was reportedly pursuing an acquisition of Grubhub,  another food delivery company. Grubhub was ultimately acquired by Just Eat Takeaway in a $7.3 billion deal, but only after the deal with Uber fell through over a variety of concerns.

Food delivery market has set to benefit largely from the COVID-19 pandemic, as stores remain shuttered or switch operations to takeout only. Latest earnings from the public ride-hailing company show that its ride-hailing business is slowing while its food delivery service is growing like hell. Gross bookings for Uber Eats last quarter were $4.68 billion.

So even though Uber still loses a ton of money ($2.94 billion including all costs), its Uber Eats growth is staggering. And the green shoots might be fueling some of this interest in other competitors.

If regulatory concerns were an issue, Postmates may make a better fit.

With a valuation of $2.4 billion, Postmates is significantly smaller than Grubhub. And while the company filed to go public nearly 16 months ago, it held off eventually citing “choppy market” conditions.

So if Uber Eats and Postmates combined, the result would still be smaller than Doordash’s market hold, but would be competitive nonetheless. DoorDash, last valued at $13 billion, confidentially filed for an IPO nearly four months ago. 

Also, Postmates delivers more than just food.

If the merger goes through, the food delivery race would get refueled in an interesting way: Uber Eats and Postmates versus Grubhub and Takeaway versus DoorDash .

Postmates declined to comment on rumors or speculation. Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Despite the Wirecard fallout, German fintech startup solarisBank has raised a Series C funding round of $67.5 million (€60 million). Following today’s funding round, solarisBank is now valued at $360 million (€320 million). solarisBank doesn't have any consumer product directly. Instead, it offers financial services to other fintech companies through a set of APIs.

With solarisBank, you can build a fintech startup and leverage solarisBank’s line of products to do the heavy lifting. It’s an infrastructure company in the banking space.

While solarisBank might not be a familiar name, some of its clients have become quite popular. They include challenger banks, such as Tomorrow, Insha and a newcomer called Vivid, business banking startups, such as Penta and Kontist, trading app Trade Republic, cryptocurrency startups Bison and Bitwala, etc.

Overall, solarisBank works with 70 companies that have attracted 400,000 clients in total.

HV Holtzbrinck Ventures is leading the round with existing investor yabeo committing a substantial follow-on investment. Other new investors include Vulcan Capital, Samsung Catalyst Fund and Storm Ventures. Existing investors BBVA, SBI Group, ABN AMRO Ventures, Global Brain, Hegus and Lakestar are investing again.

The company started the fundraising process back in December. Due to the economic prospects, it has been a mixed process. “A lot of investors looked at their portfolio companies and the appetite to look at something new was not there,” solarisBank CEO Roland Folz told me. But everything worked out eventually as around half of the funding comes from existing investors.

“We originally were looking for €40 million but we were overwhelmed by the interest of investors in spite of Covid,” solarisBank Head of Strategy and Shareholder Relations Layla Qassim told me.

solarisBank’s vision could be summed up in two words — regulation and modularity. The company is a fully licensed bank, which means that its clients don’t have to apply to a banking license themselves.

And the startup lets you pick the modules that you want to use for your product. Maybe you’re building a mobile cryptocurrency wallet and you just want to be able to give an IBAN and a debit card to your users. Maybe you’re building a used car marketplace like CarNext and you want to offer credit. Maybe you want to build a challenger bank but address a specific vertical.

With solarisBank, you can open bank accounts and issue payment cards attached to those accounts. You can also issue cards and attach them to a different account in case you’re integrating with existing bank accounts. The startup also offers various services around payments, vouchers, cross-border transactions and more.

More recently, the company launched a new feature called Splitpay with American Express. When customers check out on an e-commerce platform in Germany, American Express customers will be able to choose a repayment plan to pay over multiple months.

solarisBank generates revenue from its clients as they pay to use the company’s APIs and enable accounts and cards. solarisBank also collects the interchange fees on card transactions and share revenue with its clients. Similarly, solarisBank can offer to share revenue on credit interests with its clients.

In the future, solarisBank plans to make its portfolio of financial services even more compelling by introducing local IBANs in the most important European markets. It should make it easier to convince potential clients outside of Germany to use solarisBank as their banking infrastructure.

When the going gets tough, it’s common for some corporate VCs to head for the hills.

Today, it’s a narrative that’s emerging again amid the COVID-19 crisis. Global corporate venture deals fell from a total of 580 in April/May of 2019 to 486 in the same period this year, according to Global Corporate Venturing.

However, institutional VC deals are also headed for a decline, with PitchBook anticipating a drop in transaction volume over the next several quarters, as well as a downturn in valuations.

It remains to be seen how it will play out this time, but I believe corporate venture capital (CVC) will not only stick around, but also be a vital part of the innovation ecosystem going forward.

I know that Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (MGHIF) remains fully committed to “doing” venture. Now, more than ever, health innovation is vital. Second, we understand that many of today’s most successful companies were funded in times of uncertainty. In fact, to put our money where our mouth is, we’ve recently completed two spinouts, three follow-on investments, and two new deals in 2020 — all since COVID hit. We intend to increase that pace going forward in 2020 and beyond.

It hasn’t been easy. It’s hard to do venture when you can’t venture out into the world, meet founders and do diligence the way we did in the past. But it is possible, if you do some innovating of your own and set up a smoothly functioning system to do CVC virtually.

Here’s how we’ve done it.

Finding real benefits in virtual CVC

As e-commerce companies aim to capitalize on the online spending boom connected to shelter-in-place and keep the party going as physical retailers open back up, more are turning their attention to how they can juice the functionality of their online storefronts and improve experiences for shoppers. Enter Nacelle, an LA-based startup in the burgeoning “headless” e-commerce space.

The startup bills itself as a JAMstack for e-commerce, offering a developer platform that delivers greater performance and scalability to online storefronts. Nacelle has raised about $4.8 million to date in fundings led by Index Ventures and Accomplice. Some of the company’s other angel investors include Shopify’s Jamie Sutton, Klaviyo CEO Andrew Bialecki and Attentive CEO Brian Long.

Nacelle builds an easier path for e-commerce brands to embrace a headless structure. Headless web apps essentially mean a site’s front end is decoupled from the backend infrastructure, so it’s leaning fully on dedicated frameworks for each to deliver content to users. There are some notable benefits for sites going headless, including greater performance, better scalability, fewer hosting costs and a more streamlined developer experience. For e-commerce sites, there are also some notable complexities due to how storefronts operate and how headless CMSs need to accommodate dynamic inventories and user shopping carts.

“We asked how do you pair a very dynamic requirement with the generally static system that JAMstack offers, and that’s where Nacelle comes in,” CEO Brian Anderson tells TechCrunch.

Anderson previously operated a technical agency for Shopify Plus customers building custom storefronts, a venture that has led to much of the company’s early customers. Nacelle also recently hired Kelsey Burnes as the startup’s first VP of marketing; she joins from e-commerce plug-in platform Nosto.

Though Anderson described a flurry of benefits regarding Nacelle’s platform, many are the result of reduced latency that he says converts more users and pushes them to spend more. The startup has a particular focus on mobile storefronts, with Anderson noting that most desktop storefronts dramatically outperform mobile counterparts and that the speedier load times Nacelle enables on mobile can do a lot to overcome this.

As more brands embrace headless structures, Nacelle is aiming to manage the experience. Nacelle is optimized for Shopify users to get up and running the most quickly. Users can also easily integrate the system with popular CMSs like Contentful and Sanity. All in all, Nacelle sports integrations for more than 30 services, including payments platforms, SMS marketing platforms, analytics platforms and more. The goal is to minimize the need for users to migrate data or learn new workflows.

The company is unsurprisingly going after direct-to-consumer brands pretty heavily. Some of Nacelle’s early customers include D2C bedding startup Boll & Branch, cozy things marketplace Barefoot Dreams and fashion brand Something Navy. Most of Nacelle’s rollouts launch later this summer. Last month, Nacelle went live with men’s toiletries startup Ballsy and says that the storefront has already seen conversions increase 28%.

Nacelle is far from the only young entrant in this space. Just last month, Commerce Layer announced that it had raised $6 million in funding from Benchmark.

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In the two years since Jeff Semenchuk took the reins in the newly created position of chief innovation officer for Blue Shield of California, the nonprofit health insurer with $20 billion in revenues has stepped up its investments in startup companies.

As one of California’s largest insurance providers with more than four million members, Blue Shield plays an outsized role in technology adoption among physicians, hospital networks and patients. With that in mind, and with the acceleration of entrepreneurial activity around the multitrillion health care market, Semenchuk was brought on board after serving as chief executive of Yaro (now Virgin Plus) and CIO of Hyatt Hotels and co-founder of Citi Ventures.

Semenchuk said he sees Blue Shield as working to create a new health care system: “It’s not to perpetuate the health care system we have today.” Increasingly, startups have a role to play in that revisioning of health care services in America, according to Semenchuk.

“What I would say has happened over the last two years is that we have really focused on transformational innovation,” he added.

Investing in those transformational technologies involves taking cash directly from Blue Shield’s balance sheet for investments. The company doesn’t operate a corporate venture capital fund in the traditional sense, instead making strategic investments under the auspices of Semenchuk or Chief Financial Officer Sandra Clarke.*