Less than six months after raising $55 million in a Series C round of funding, SMB 401(k) provider Human Interest today announced it has raised $200 million in a round that propels it to unicorn status.

The Rise Fund, TPG’s global impact investing platform, led the round and was joined by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The financing included participation from new investor Crosslink Capital and existing backers NewView Capital, Glynn Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, Wing Venture Capital, Uncork Capital, Slow Capital, Susa Ventures and others. 

Over the past year, the San Francisco-based company has raised $305 million. With the latest financing, it has now raised a total of $336.7 million since its 2015 inception.

The company admittedly has an IPO in its sights, as evidenced by the appointment of former Yodlee CFO Mike Armsby to the role of CFO at Human Interest. It’s targeting a traditional IPO sometime in 2023, with execs saying the target is to have “$200 million+ in run-rate revenue before going public.” Currently, it’s at “tens of millions of run-rate revenue” now, and adding millions of new revenue each month.

Human Interest’s digital retirement benefits platform allows users “to launch a retirement plan in minutes and put it on autopilot,” according to the company.  It also touts that it has eliminated all 401(k) transaction fees.

Demand for 401(k)s by SMBs appears to be at an all-time high, with Human Interest reporting that its sales tripled over the last year. The company has also more than doubled its headcount over the last 12 months to 350 employees.

The startup said it is seeing strong adoption in verticals that have not previously had retirement benefits, including construction, retail, manufacturing, restaurants, nonprofits and hospitality. For example, over the past three quarters, Human Interest has seen 4.5x customer growth in the restaurant sector. Since the start of the pandemic, Human Interest has experienced 2x higher enrollment growth among hourly workers than salaried workers, and hourly worker assets have tripled.

“Promoting financial health is a core investment pillar for The Rise Fund. Human Interest delivers one of the most compelling solutions to the persistent problem that roughly half of Americans will not have enough savings when they reach retirement age,” said Maya Chorengel, co-managing partner at The Rise Fund, in a written statement. “Despite recent legislation, primarily at the state level, legacy programs have not, to date, produced the same participant outcomes as Human Interest.”

The company said it will be using its new capital to expand its network of integrations and partnerships with financial advisers, benefits brokers and payroll companies. It also expects to, naturally, do some hiring –– another 200 employees by year’s end, primarily in its product, engineering and revenue teams.

The 401(k) for SMB space is heating up as of late. In June, competitor Guideline also raised $200 million in a round led by General Atlantic. 

Additional details around the IPO and revenue were added post-publication.

The global venture capital bet on neobanks is massive. London-based Starling Bank has raised more than $900 million, per Crunchbase. The same data source indicates that Chime has raised $1.5 billion. Monzo has raised nearly $650 million. And the list goes on: E-commerce-focused neobank Juni raised $21.5 million last month. Novo, an SMB-focused neobank, raised $41 million in June. Nubank has raised $2.3 billion. And FairMoney has locked down more than $50 million.

On and on and on.

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But despite our general inclination to lump banking-focused fintech providers that serve consumers, business customers or both into a single bucket, there’s wide divergence in how the various neobank players are performing in the market.

Back in August 2020, The Exchange noted that many neobanks were racking up steep losses. Our read at the time was that the capital being poured into the fintech category was being invested aggressively in the name of growth. Based on recent results, that view is holding up.

But not all neobanks are the unprofitable enterprises that they once were. Chime indicated in September 2020 that it generates positive, unadjusted EBITDA. That’s a stricter profit metric than the one that Lyft used recently to claim its ascendance into the realm of profitable companies; Lyft posted positive adjusted EBITDA in its most recent quarter, but burned cash to fund its operations and posted a wide net loss in the period.

And Starling Bank reached what it describes as profitable territory in October 2020. Things have changed since our first look into neobank results.

The trend of positive neobank news continued this June, when Revolut reported its recent financial performance. The company did post rather negative aggregate results for the 2020 period. But when we drilled down into its quarterly results, we saw the picture of a fintech company scaling its gross margins and revenues while nearly reaching adjusted net income neutrality by Q4 2020. We were impressed.

This morning, let’s add to our running dig into neobank results by parsing recently released data from Starling Bank and Monzo. As we’ll see, although some neobanks are managing to clean up their ledgers and work toward profits — or reach profitability — not all are in the black.

Reserve Trust, a Denver-based financial services provider, has raised $30.5 million in a Series A round led by QED Investors.

FinTech Collective, Ardent Venture Partners, Flywire CEO Mike Massaro and Quovo founder and CEO Lowell Putnam also participated in the financing, which included $17.9 million in secondary shares. It brings the startup’s total raised since its 2016 inception to $35.5 million.

Reserve Trust describes itself as “the first fintech trust company with a Federal Reserve master account.” What does that mean exactly? Basically, a federal reserve master account allows Reserve Trust to move dollars on behalf of its customers directly, via wire and ACH payment rails, without an intermediate or partner bank. 

Historically, only banks were able to access these payment rails directly, which left both domestic and international fintechs “with limited partner options, poor technology and slow implementations when it came to embedding high-value B2B payments,” says COO Dave Cahill. Reserve Trust touts that its technology and services give companies all over the world the ability to “seamlessly move money via the first cloud-based payment system connected directly to the Federal Reserve” since it is not limited by legacy banking systems.

In conjunction with the fundraise, Reserve Trust is also announcing that Dave Wright has been named CEO and Cahill joined as COO. The pair worked together previously at SolidFire, a flash storage startup that Wright founded and sold to NetApp for $870 million in 2016.

Reserve Trust works with businesses that seek to embed domestic and cross-border B2B payment by offering them the ability to store funds in custody accounts that are backed by its Federal Reserve master account.

The history of the company relates back to the global financial crisis. After the crisis, banks in the U.S. went through a process called derisking, which meant they shed businesses that on a risk return basis weren’t as strong as other businesses. One of those included the handling of U.S. dollar payments, particularly in emerging countries. 

“One of the consequences of this is that it became significantly more difficult and expensive for businesses and smaller economies to trade and move U.S. dollars around the world,” Wright told TechCrunch. “And the founders of Reserve Trust saw this opportunity to build a new type of financial institution that was focused on helping to provide U.S. dollar payment services, especially to emerging fintechs in markets around the world, and helping to reconnect those economies to global trade.”

But rather than start a bank, the founders (Dennis Gingold, Justin Guilder) navigated a previously unexplored part of regulatory waters to create a state-chartered trust company with a Federal Reserve master account.

“That’s something that had never really been done before,” Wright added. “Pretty much every other trust company has to work through banks for all their payment services. Reserve Trust is the first that has actually managed to get a Federal Reserve master account and can process payments directly with the Federal Reserve.”

The complex process took about three years, and in 2018, the company got a Federal Reserve master account and started providing U.S. dollar custody and payment services for fintechs all over the world. Reserve Trust began to see strong demand from payment and fintech companies that were struggling to develop strong partner bank relationships, even though fundamentally there wasn’t any reason the banks couldn’t work with them. 

“They found working with banks to be a slow process, one that didn’t involve a lot of technology expertise on the side of the banks, and it was really inhibiting their ability to develop their technology,” Wright said. And that was even here in the U.S. Today, more than half of its business is from domestic fintechs, although Reserve Trust still has a strong international presence as well.

The new funds will mainly go toward helping the company scale to handle what Wright describes as “a fairly overwhelming amount of demand” and toward building out the team, the technology and the services it needs to address the payment needs of larger, faster growing fintechs around the world. 

“Most of our customers today are small and midsize fintechs, but now we’re seeing demand for much larger fintechs that have much higher payment volumes and are involved in embedded banking and B2B payments,” Wright said. “They are looking for a stronger banking partner than what they’ve been able to find among the role of traditional banks.” Customers include Unlimint and VertoFX, among others.

QED Investors partner Amias Gerety and FinTech Collective principal Matt Levinson are bullish both on Reserve Trust’s history and its potential.

The pair point to payments giant Stripe as an example of how far Reserve Trust can go.

“Stripe has significant market share doing merchant acquiring and processing e-commerce payments for the consumer,” Levinson said. “B2B payments is significantly bigger in terms of volume, so we’re talking about well over $20 trillion of addressable payment flow. But there’s no real technology company that’s brought the modern payments platform to market without being beholden to legacy banks. And that’s why we’re so excited about this business.”

Reserve Trust, he added, is giving businesses a way to facilitate B2B payments that “are smarter, faster and cheaper.”

Gerety agrees.

“Despite all the excitement around digital payments and infrastructure, there is still no fintech that can offer direct integration with the U.S. payment system,” he said. “With Reserve Trust, we are creating foundational infrastructure to hold and move payments globally and at scale.”

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One of the big reasons you’re giving 110% of your talent and effort to your private company is because you’re hoping to eventually cash in on all those vested incentive stock options (ISOs) that have been sitting in some account, waiting for the day your company goes public.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Who doesn’t dream of reaping an options windfall and using it to retire early, buy a house, pay off their college loans, travel around the world or become a full-time philanthropist?

Unfortunately, when it comes to figuring out how to cash in their stock awards, most employees are on their own.

Their employers can’t always provide the answers they need — especially when the questions relate to personal finances. Most companies admit they need to be better at explaining how ISOs work in general, but they can’t legally work one-on-one with employees to help them exercise and sell shares the right way.

That’s why, when the time is right, many employees actively look for help from a qualified fiduciary financial adviser who can walk these could-be “options millionaires” through various cash-in scenarios.

Here’s a real-life example (using a pseudonym).

Kurt is a 50-year-old VP of product management at a healthcare startup that just went public. Over his three years with the company, Kurt had amassed 350,000 ISOs worth approximately $6 million. Unlike many options millionaires, he didn’t intend to cash in everything and retire early. He planned to stay with the firm but wanted to liquidate enough ISOs to pay for a vacation home and add greater diversification to his investment portfolio. This presented significant tax risks that Kurt wasn’t aware of.

If Kurt exercised his ISOs and sold the shares before a year had passed, his profits would be characterized as short-term capital gains, which are taxed as ordinary income.

To illustrate the potential tax implications of this action, we created a hypothetical scenario that showed if Kurt exercised all of his ISOs and sold the shares immediately, he would incur approximately $6 million in ordinary income, which would push him into the top tax bracket and put him on the hook for almost $3 million in combined federal and state taxes.

If you’re trying to develop fluency in a non-native tongue, language immersion is a crucial part of the learning process. Surrounding yourself with native speakers helps with pronunciation, context building, and most of all, confidence.

But what if you’re an eight-year-old kid in Spain learning English and can’t swing a solo trip to the United States for the summer?

Novakid, founded by Maxim Azarov, wants to be your next best option. The San Francisco-based edtech startup offers virtual-only, English language immersion for kids between the ages of four through 12, by combining a mix of different services from live tutors to gamification.

After closing its $4.25 million Series A round last December, Novakid announced today that it is back with a $35 million Series B financing, led by Owl Ventures and Goodwater Capital. Existing investors also participated in the round, including PortfoLion, LearnStart, TMT Investments, Xploration Capital, LETA Capital and BonAngels.

The startup is raising capital in response to an active start to its year. The company’s active client base grew 350% year over year, currently at over 50,000 paying students. The money will be used to get more students into its universe of tools, as well as help Novakid expand into international markets with high populations of speakers who want to learn English.

The company’s suite of services are built around two principles: First, that it can immerse early-age learners into the world of English at scale, and second, that it can actually be fun to use.

When a user signs up, they are first connected to one of Novakid’s 2,000 live tutors for their first class. Tutors must be native English speakers with a B.A. degree or higher, as well as an international teaching certificate such as DELTA, CELTA, TESOL or TEFL.

“One of the things that is really important, even psychologically, is to start listening to the language, start interacting with a live person, and remove being afraid of not understanding something,” Azarov said. The company wants to recreate the conditions of how a kid likely learned their first language.

In the class, the tutors only speak English, and users are encouraged to do the same to slowly build and mistake their way into confidence. While the live, video-based classes are a key part of Novakid’s product, Azarov said it was important that his company “was not just giving you access to a teacher” as its main value proposition.

“Most of the competitors are taking teachers and making them available remotely so you don’t have to travel and you have a bigger selection,” he said. But if you look at the industry in the bigger picture, guys like Oxford, Cambridge, Pearson who provide content for the language learning industry, their product basically sucks. It’s really bad.” So, Novakid puts most of its energy into rebuilding a curriculum that works with better design, and includes games.

Gamified content lives both in and out of classes. Within the classroom, a teacher may take a student on a VR-enhanced tour through famous landmarks and museums to practice vocabulary. Self-paced content could look like a multiplayer “battle” between two students answering questions within a certain time period to get a better score. Novakid has an entire team dedicated to game design and development.

Students are clicking in. Novakid users spend two-thirds of their time on the website with tutors, and one-third with self-paced content that the company built in-house. The company wants to switch those concentrations because more students are spending time with the asynchronous content around grammar and vocabulary, and teachers are reserved for more complex information like speaking and conversation.

Part of the difficulty of scaling up a language learning business is that users need to stay motivated. Gamification helps with engagement, but Novakid’s clientele of children could also be fast to churn compared to adult learners, simply due to priorities. Azarov said that he sees how some would view selling exclusively to children as a disadvantage, but he views their focus as differentiation.

“You get better brand equity when you’re more focused,” he said. “The way kids learn language is vastly different from the way adults learn language, and I don’t think the general players who do ‘everything from everybody’ will be able to do [the former] as well as we are.” Duolingo recently launched Duolingo ABC, a free English literacy app with hundreds of short-form exercises. While the now-public company has strong branding, Novakid’s strategy differs by adding in more services around live learning and speaking.

So far, the company has proven that its strategy is sticking. Its revenue in 2020 was $9 million, and in 2021 it is expected to hit between $36 million to $45 million in revenue. It declined to disclose the specifics around diversity of the team, but plans to kick off a quite intensive recruiting spree going forward. Azarov plans to add 200 people to his 300-person company in the next six months.

Around 15% of website traffic comes through paid search ads. But to turn passive searchers into active shoppers, your ads should answer their question and entice them to click.

We’ve tested thousands of paid search ads at Demand Curve and through our agency Bell Curve. This post breaks down 14 questions your paid search ads should answer to ensure you’re only paying for the highest-intent shoppers.

Question 1: “What’s in it for me?”

An important distinction between paid search and organic search is that paid ads are an interruption. Users of search engines are simply looking for an answer to their question. The people who see your ads don’t owe you anything. Just because you’re paying to have your ad show up first doesn’t mean they’re going to pay attention to it.

To generate genuine interest in your paid ads, reframe your offer as a favor.

You can do this in two ways:

For example, reframing free delivery as an extra convenience makes the offer that much more attractive.

Use ad extensions by listing additional benefits in the description of the page. For example, including “customized plans” in the pricing extension page signals to your customer that they’ll have control over the cost. This will help to attract the curiosity of even the most cost-conscious buyers.

Question 2: “Why should I buy now?”

Approximately 80% of e-commerce shopping carts are abandoned, mostly because shoppers don’t feel any urgency to complete the transaction. Online shoppers aren’t in any rush, as the internet is open 24/7 and inventory feels unlimited.

To answer the question, “Why should I buy now?”, you’re going to have to create an incentive to get them to take action now.

Swiss alternative protein company Planted has raised its second round of the year, a CHF 19 million (about $21 million at present) “pre-B” fundraise that will help it continue its growth and debut new products. A U.S. launch is in the cards eventually, but for now Planted’s exclusively European customers will be able to give its new veggie schnitzel a shot.

Planted appeared in 2019 as a spinoff from Swiss research university ETH Zurich, where the founders developed the original technique of extruding plant proteins and water into fibrous structures similar to real meat’s. Since then the company has diversified its protein sources, adding oat and sunflower to the mix, and developed pulled pork and kebab alternative products as well.

Over time the process has improved as well. “We added fermentation/biotech technologies to enhance taste and texture,” wrote CEO and co-founder Christoph Jenny in an email to TechCrunch. “Meaning 1) we can create structures without form limitation and 2) can add a broader taste profile.”

The latest advance is schnitzel, which is of course a breaded and fried piece of pounded-thin meat style popular around the world, but especially in the company’s core markets of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Jenny noted that Planted’s schnitzel is produced as one piece, not pressed together from smaller bits. “The taste and texture benefit from fermentation approach, that makes the flavor profile mouth watering and the texture super juicy,” he said, though of course we will have to test it to be sure. Expect schnitzel to debut in Q3.

It’s the first of several planned “whole” or “prime” cuts, larger pieces that can be prepared like any other piece of meat — the team says their products require no special preparation or additives and can be dropped in as 1:1 replacements in most recipes. Right now the big cuts are leaving the lab and entering consumer testing for taste tuning and eventually scaling.

The funding round came from “Vorwerk Ventures, Gullspång Re:food, Movendo Capital, Good Seed Ventures, Joyance, ACE & Company (SFG strategy) and Be8 Ventures,” and was described as a follow-on to March’s CHF 17M series A. No doubt the exploding demand for alternative proteins and growing competition in the space has spurred Planted’s investors to opt for more aggressive growth and development strategies.

The company plans to enter several new markets over Q3 and Q4, but the U.S. is still a question mark due to COVID-19 restrictions on travel. Jenny said they are preparing so that they can make that move whenever it becomes possible, but for now Planted is focused on the European market.

(Update: This article originally misstated the new round as also being CHF 17M — entirely my mistake. This has been corrected.)

MGA Thermal wants to help utility companies transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources with shoebox-sized thermal energy storage blocks. The company says a stack of 1,000 blocks is about the size of a small car and can store enough energy to power 27 homes for 24 hours. This gives utility providers the ability to store large amounts of energy and have it ready to dispatch even when weather conditions aren’t ideal for generating solar or wind power. The modular blocks also make it easier to convert infrastructure, like coal-fired power plants, into grid-scale energy storage.

MGA Thermal announced today it has raised $8 million AUD (about $5.9 million USD), bring its total funding so far to $9 million AUD. The round was led by Main Sequence, a venture firm founded by Australia’s national science agency that recently launched a new $250 million AUD fund. Alberts Impact Capital, New Zealand’s Climate Venture Capital Fund, The Melt and returning investor CP Ventures participated, along with angel investors like Chris Sang, Emlyn Scott and Glenn Butcher.

Based in Newcastle, Australia, MGA Thermal was founded in April 2019 by Erich Kisi and Alexander Post after nearly a decade spent researching and developing miscibility gap alloys technology at the University of Newcastle. When asked to explain MGA tech in layperson’s terms, Kisi used a delicious analogy.

MGA Thermal’s blocks “essentially comprise metal particles that melt when heated embedded in an inert matrix material. Think of a block as being like a choc-chip muffin heated in a microwave. The muffin consists of a cake component, which holds everything in shape when heated, and the choc chips, which melt,” he told TechCrunch.

“The energy that goes into melting the choc chips is stored and can burn your mouth when you bite into the muffin,” he added. “Melting energy is more intense than merely heating something up and that melting energy is concentrated near the melting temperature so energy can be released in a consistent way.”

Energy stored in MGA Thermal’s blocks can be used to heat water to power steam turbines and generators. In this scenario, blocks are designed with internal tubing for pumping and boiling water, or interact with a heat exchanger. Kisi said MGA Thermal’s blocks enable aging thermal power plans to continue running on renewable energy that would usually be switched off in situations like overheating caused by too much sun or high winds.

Other thermal energy solutions include heating low-cost solid materials in blocks or granules to high temperatures in an insulated container. But many of these materials aren’t good at moving thermal energy around and have temperature limitations, Kisi said. This means thermal energy decreases in temperature as it is discharged, making it less effective.

Another method for storing thermal energy involves molten salts that are heated by a renewable energy source and stored in a hot tank. The hot salt is then pumped through a heat exchanger to make steam, while colder (but still molten) salt is returned to a “cold” tank.

“These systems are widely used in concentrating solar thermal energy but have found little use elsewhere,” Kisi said. “That’s mostly because there is a large infrastructure cost for piping pumps and heaters, and a large amount of power is wasted keeping the salt from freezing.”

MGA Thermal is establishing a manufacturing plant in New South Wales to scale to commercial levels production of its blocks, and plans to double its team over the next 12 months so it can make hundreds of thousands of blocks each month. It is also currently working with partners like Swiss company E2S Power ASG and U.S.-based Peregrine Turbine Technologies to deploy its tech in Australia, Europe and North America. For example, E2S Power AG will use MGA Thermal’s tech to repurpose retired and active coal-fired thermal plants in Europe.

While MGA Thermal’s tech has many industrial use cases, like converting power stations, building off-grid storage and supplying power to remote communities and commercial spaces, it can also help consumers consume less fossil fuel. For example, MGA blocks can be used by households to store excess energy generated from rooftop solar panels or small wind turbines. Then that energy can be used to heat homes.

“Around the world an estimated three billion people heat their homes by burning fuel,” said Kisi. “That’s a lot of CO2, especially in very cold climates.”

In a statement, Main Sequence partner Martin Duursma said, “A core focus of our new fund is uncovering the scientific discoveries, and helping to turn them into real, tangible technologies so we can reverse our climate impact. Erich Kisi and Alexander Post’s impressive deep research backgrounds, their expert team and innovative technology are paving the way for grid-scale energy storage and boosting the capability of a renewable energy future globally.”

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology predicts that U.S. companies will spend upward of $100 billion on AI R&D per year by 2025. Much of this spending today is done by six tech companies — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, IBM, Facebook and Apple, according to a recent study from CSET at Georgetown University. But what if you’re a startup whose product relies on AI at its core?

Can early-stage companies support a research-based workflow? At a startup or scaleup, the focus is often more on concrete product development than research. For obvious reasons, companies want to make things that matter to their customers, investors and stakeholders. Ideally, there’s a way to do both.

Before investing in staffing an AI research lab, consider this advice to determine whether you’re ready to get started.

Compile the right research team

Assuming it’s your organization’s priority to do innovative AI research, the first step is to hire one or two researchers. At Unbabel, we did this early by hiring Ph.D.s and getting started quickly with research for a product that hadn’t been developed yet. Some researchers will build from scratch and others will take your data and try to find a pre-existing model that fits your needs.

From there, you’ll need to hire research engineers or machine learning operations professionals. Research is only a small part of using AI in production. Research engineers will then release your research into production, monitor your model’s results and refine the model if it stops predicting well (or otherwise is not operating as planned). Often they’ll use automation to simplify monitoring and deployment procedures as opposed to doing everything manually.

None of this falls within the scope of a research scientist — they’re most used to working with the data sets and models in training. That said, researchers and engineers will need to work together in a continuous feedback loop to refine and retrain models based on actual performance in inference.

Choose the problems you want to solve

The CSET research cited above shows that 85% of AI labs in North America and Europe do some form of basic AI research, and less than 15% focus on development. The rest of the world is different: A majority of labs in other countries, such as India and Israel, focus on development.

Sunday was a big day in fintech: Afterpay has agreed to merge with Square. This agreement sets two of the most admired financial technology companies in recent history on a path to becoming one.

Afterpay and Square have the potential to build one of the world’s most important payments networks. Square has built a very significant merchant payment network, and, via Cash App, a thriving high-growth consumer payment service. However, these two lines of business have historically not been integrated. Together, Square and Afterpay will be able to weave all of these services together into a single integrated experience.

Afterpay and Cash App each have double-digit millions of consumers, and Square’s seller ecosystem and Afterpay’s merchant network both record double-digit billions of payment volume per year. From the offline register and the online checkout flow to sending money in just a few taps, Square and Afterpay will tell a complete story of next-generation economic empowerment.

As Afterpay’s only institutional venture investor, I wanted to share some perspective on how we got here and what this merger means for the future of consumer finance and the payments industry.

Critical innovations in fintech

Every five to 10 years, the global payments industry undergoes a critical innovation cycle that determines the winners and losers for the next several decades. The last major transition was the shift to NFC-based mobile payments, which I wrote about in 2015. The major mobile OS vendors (Apple and Google) cemented their position in the global payments stack by deftly bridging the needs of the networks (Visa, Mastercard, etc.) and consumers by way of the mobile devices in their pockets.

Afterpay sparked the latest critical innovation cycle. Conceived in a living room in Sydney by a millennial, Nick Molnar, for millennials, Afterpay had a key insight: Millennials don’t like credit.

Millennials came of age during the global mortgage crisis of 2008. As young adults, they watched their friends and family lose their homes by overextending on mortgage debt, bolstering their already lower trust for banks. They also have record levels of student debt. Therefore, it’s no surprise that millennials (and Gen Z right behind them) strongly prefer debit cards over credit cards.

But it’s one thing to recognize the paradigm shift and quite another to do something about it. Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen did something, ultimately building one of the fastest-growing payments startups in history on their core product: Buy now, pay later … and never any interest.

Afterpay’s product is simple. If you have $100 in your cart and choose to pay with Afterpay, it will charge your bank card (typically a debit card) $25 every two weeks in four installments. No interest, no revolving debt and no fees with on-time payments. For the millennial consumer, this meant they could get the primary benefit of a credit card (the ability to pay later) with their debit card, without the need to worry about all the bad things that come with credit cards — high interest rates and revolving debt.

All upside, no downside. Who could resist? For the early merchants, virtually all of whom relied on millennials as their key growth segment, they got a fair trade: Pay a small fee above payment processing to Afterpay, get significantly higher average order values and conversions to purchase. It was a win-win proposition and, with lots of execution, a new payment network was born.

Imitation is the greatest form of flattery

Afterpay went somewhat unnoticed outside Australia in 2016 and 2017, but once it came to the U.S. in 2018 and built a business there that broke $100 million net revenues in only its second year, it got attention.

Klarna, which had struggled with product-market fit in the U.S., pivoted their business to emulate Afterpay. And Affirm, which had always been about traditional credit — generating a significant portion of their revenue from consumer interest — also noticed and introduced their own BNPL offering. Then came PayPal with “Pay in 4,” and just a few weeks ago, there has been news that Apple is expected to enter the space.

Afterpay created a global phenomenon that has now become a category embraced by mainstream players across the industry — a category that is on track to take a meaningful share of global retail payments over the next 10 years.

Afterpay stands apart. It has always been the BNPL leader by virtually every measure, and it has done it by staying true to their customers’ needs. The company is great at understanding the millennial and Gen Z consumer. It’s evident in the voice, tone and lifestyle brand you experience as an Afterpay user, and in the merchant network it continues to build strategically. It’s also evident in the simple fact that it doesn’t try to cross-sell users revolving debt products.

Most importantly, it’s evident in the usage metrics relative to competition. This is a product that people love, use and have come to rely on, all with better, fairer terms than were ever available to them than with traditional consumer credit.

Square + Afterpay: The perfect fit

I’ve been building payment companies for over 15 years now, initially in the early days of PayPal and more recently as a venture investor at Matrix Partners. I’ve never seen a combination that has such potential to deliver extraordinary value to consumers and merchants. Even more so than eBay + PayPal.

Beyond the clear product and network complementarity, what’s most exciting to me and my partners is the alignment of values and culture. Square and Afterpay share a vision of a future with more opportunity and fewer economic hurdles for all. As they build toward that future together, I’m confident that this combination is a winner. Square and Afterpay together will become the world’s next generation payment provider.