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Aircall has raised a $120 million Series D round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Following today’s funding round, the company has reached unicorn status, which means it has a valuation above $1 billion — this is the 16th French unicorn.

The startup has been building a cloud-based phone system for call centers, support lines and sales teams. It integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Slack, Intercom and other popular CRM, support and communication systems.

Aircall customers can create local numbers and set up an interactive voice response directory. The service manages the call queue for you and your agents can start answering inbound calls. Agents can transfer calls and put customers on hold. Admins can see analytics, monitor calls and see how everyone is doing.

In addition to Goldman Sachs Asset Management, existing investors DTCP, eFounders, Draper Esprit, Adam Street Partners, NextWorldCap and Gaia are also participating once again in today’s funding round.

As a cloud-based software product, Aircall works well with remote or hybrid teams. For the past year, many companies have been looking for a new phone system with various lockdowns taking place around the world. And Aircall has capitalized on this influx of customers.

When it comes to metrics, it means that signups increased by 65% in 2020. New customers include Caudalie, OpenClassrooms and Too Good To Go. Overall, Aircall has 8,500 customers. 15% of them are based in France, 35% in the U.S. and 50% in other countries.

With the new funding round, the company plans to iterate on its product with new integrations with third-party tools, and in particular industry-specific integrations. There will be new offices in London and Berlin as well as new hires in the company’s existing offices based in New York, Paris, Sydney and Madrid.

The company also plans to control a bigger chunk of its tech stack. It means that it’ll collaborate with big telecommunications companies to leverage their networks. You can also expect more product features with better transcription and better sentiment analysis.

Sohail Prasad and Samvit Ramadurgam are cofounders who met during Y Combinator’s 2012 summer batch and went on to cofound Forge, which helps accredited investors and institutions buy and sell private company shares and which most recently raised $150 million in new funding in May.

Forge — originally known as Equidate —  has taken off as demand for private company shares has ballooned. The company, launched in 2014, has now raised $250 million altogether, including from, Deutsche Börse, Temasek, Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, and Munich Re. It acquired rival SharesPost last year for $160 million in cash and stock. According to the company, it now has more than $14 billion in assets under custody.

Prasad and Ramadurgam — who helped hire Forge CEO Kelly Rodriques back in 2018 — say they’re excited about that success. They still own a stake in the company; they remain non-voting board members.

But after spending 18 months as co-president of Forge at the outset of Rodrigues’s tenure, they left early last year to begin tinkering on a new idea, one that Prasad says is centered around giving a much wider pool of people access to private company shares. Called D/XYZ (pronounced “Destiny”), the idea is to enable any investor — not just the 1% —  to invest in startups whose services they use and love.

Unfortunately, the two aren’t offering much more of a curtain raiser than that right now, though Prasad suggests D/XYZ is neither a new fund nor a crowdfunding vehicle. It’s also not selling any tokens, we gather. Instead, Prasad hints at an entirely new product, saying the company is being cautious in how much it shares publicly because it first wants to “get the go-ahead from regulators, as well as to ensure we have a clear path to market,” he says.

In the meantime, the two have raised $5 million in seed funding from numerous founders who like the idea of making private company shares easier for their parents, friends, customers, partners, and everyone else who likes what they’re building. Among the round’s participants is Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam; Plaid cofounder and CEO Zach Perret; Quora and Expo cofounder Charlie Cheever; Superhuman founder and CEO Rahul Vohra; and serial entrepreneur Siqi Chen, who most recently founded a finance software company called Runway.

As for some of the nascent startup’s most obvious competition, Prasad doesn’t sound concerned. Asked, for example, about Carta, a well-funded company that helps private companies and their employees manage and sell their stock and options and that has long talked about democratizing access to private company shares, Prasad says it remains very much a direct competitor instead to Forge given that both cater first and foremost to companies, not individuals.

And what of SPACs, the special purpose acquisition companies that are moving private companies onto the public market faster, allowing (at least in theory) more people to access high-growth companies at earlier stages? It’s a partial solution, says Prasad. But the way he sees it, “SPACs are more a reflection that people want late-stage access to private tech and their best option right now is giving money to a SPAC manager who will hopefully find a promising company to merge with in two years or less.” He calls them a “layer of abstraction.”

Of course, there’s also the question of whether Forge will be a friend of foe if whatever Prasad and Ramadurgam are building succeeds. Could their tech be sold back to their first company? Could Forge come to see them as a rival to its business?

“What we’re doing now is not competitive,” insists Prasad. “It’s more picking up the mantle where we left off. Forge is focused on trading, custody, company solutions and data. It has built what some call boring plumbing.” Now that the plumbing has been erected, it has “enabled a lot of other interesting things to be built, too.”

So is D/XYZ working with Forge in some capacity? Prasad demurs. “Potentially,” he says.

In other words, stay tuned.

Pictured above, left to right: Sohail Prasad and Samvit Ramadurgam.

The founders of Holy Grail, a two-year-old startup based in Mountain View, California, are taking a micro approach to solving the outsized problem of capturing carbon.

The startup is prototyping a direct air carbon capture device that is modular and small — a departure from the dozens of projects in the U.S. and abroad that aim to capture CO2 from large, centralized emitters, like power plants or industrial facilities. Holy Grail co-founder Nuno Pereira told TechCrunch that this approach will reduce costs and eliminate the need for permits or project financing.

While Holy Grail has a long development and testing phase ahead, the idea has captured the attention and capital from well-known investors and Silicon Valley founders. Holy Grail recently raised $2.7 million in seed funding from LowerCarbon Capital, Goat Capital, Stripe founder Patrick Collison, Charlie Songhurst, Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt, Songkick co-founder Ian Hogarth, Starlight Ventures and 35 Ventures. Existing investors Deep Science Ventures, Y Combinator and Oliver Cameron, who co-founded Voyage, the autonomous vehicle acquired by Cruise, also participated.

The carbon capture device is still in the prototype stage, Pereira said, with many specifics — such as the anticipated size of the end product and how long it will likely function — still to be worked out. Cost-effectively separating CO2 from the air is an extremely difficult problem to solve. The company is in the process of filing patents for the technology, so he declined to be too specific about many characteristics of the device, including what it will be made out of. But he did stress that the company is taking a fundamentally different technical approach to carbon capture.

“The current technologies, they are very complex. They are basically either [using] temperature or pressure [to capture carbon],” he said. “There is a lot of things that go into it, compressors, calciners and all these things,” referring to additional parts like mechanical pumps, cryogenic air separators and large quantities of water and energy. Pereira said the company will instead use electricity to control a chemical reaction that binds to the CO2. He added that Holy Grail’s devices are not dependent on scale to achieve cost reductions, either. And they will be modular, so they can be stacked or configured depending on a customer’s requirements.

The scrubbers, as Pereira calls them, will focus on raw capture of CO2 rather than conversion (converting the CO2 into fuels, for example). Pereira instead explained — with a heavy caveat that much about the end product still needs to be figured out — that once a Holy Grail unit is full, it could be collected by the company, though where the carbon will end up is still an open question.

The company will start by selling carbon credits, using its devices as the carbon reducing project. The end goal is selling the scrubbers to commercial customers and eventually even individual consumers. That’s right: Holy Grail wants you to have your own carbon capture device, possibly even right in your backyard. But the company still likely has a long road ahead of it.

“We’re essentially shifting the scaling factor from building a very large mega-ton plant and having the project management and all that stuff to building scrubbers in an assembly line, like a consumer product to be manufactured.”

Pereira said many approaches will be needed to tackle the mammoth problem of reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. “The problem is just too big,” he said.

The story has been updated to reflect that Holy Grail is based in Mountain View, not Cupertino.

Usually, a teacher who grades students on a curve is boosting the efforts of those who didn’t perform well on the test. In the case of cloud companies, however, it’s the other way around.

As of Q1 2021, startups in this sector have median Series A rounds around $8 million, reports PitchBook. With $100+ million Series D rounds becoming more common, company valuations are regularly boosted into the billions.

Andy Stinnes, a general partner at Cloud Apps Capital Partners, says founders who are between angel and Series A should seek out investors who are satisfied with $200,000 to $500,000 in ARR.

Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.

Usually a specialist firm, these VCs are open to betting on startups that haven’t yet found product-market fit.

“At this phase of development, you need a committed partner who has both the time and the experience to guide you,” says Stinnes.

These observations aren’t just for active investors: This post is also a framework for new and seasoned founders who are getting ready to knock on doors and ask strangers for money.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Maybe neobanks will break even after all

Alex returned from a week of vacation with a dispatch about the profitability of neobanks Revolut, Chime and Monzo.

“In short, while American consumer fintech Chime has disclosed positive EBITDA — an adjusted profitability metric — many neobanks that we’ve seen numbers from have demonstrated a stark inability to paint a path to profitability,” he writes.

“That could be changing.”

How to land the top spot in Google Search with featured snippets in 2021

“Google search is not what it used to be,” Ryan Sammy, the director of strategy at growth-marketing agency Fractl, writes in a guest post. “We all want to be No. 1 on the search results page, but these days, getting to that position isn’t enough. It might be worth your while to instead go after the top featured snippet position.”

Sammy writes that earning the featured snippet spot is “one of the best things you can do for your SEO.” But how do you land your page in the coveted snippet perch?

What does Red Hat’s sale to IBM tell us about Couchbase’s valuation?

After noSQL provider Couchbase filed to go public, joining the ranks of the Great IPO Rush of 2021, Alex Wilhelm looked into its business model and financial performance, with a goal of better understanding the company — and market comps.

Alex used Red Hat, which recently sold to IBM for around $34 billion, as a comp, determining Couchbase “is worth around $900 million” if you use the Red Hat math.

“The Red Hat-Couchbase comparison is not perfect; 2019 is ages ago in technology time, the database company is smaller and other differences exist between the two companies,” Alex notes. “But Red Hat does allow us the confidence to state that Couchbase will be able to best its final private valuation in its public debut.”

How much to pay yourself as a SaaS founder

Anna Heim interviewed SaaS entrepreneurs and investors to find out how much early-stage founders should pay themselves.

Startups run by CEOs who take home a small salary tend to do better over the long run, but there are other points to consider, such as geography, marital status, and frankly, what quality of life you desire.

Waterly founder Chris Sosnowski raised his own pay to $14/hour last year; at his prior job, his salary topped $100,000.

“We had saved money up for over a year before we cut out my pay,” he told Anna. “I can live my life without entertainment … so that’s what we did for 2020.”

How much are you willing to sacrifice?

The early-stage venture capital market is weird and chaotic

Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim had been hearing that Series A raises were coming later, while Series Bs were coming in quick succession after startups landed an A.

That piqued their curiosity, so they put feelers out to a bunch of investors to understand what’s going on in early-stage venture capital markets.

In the first of a two-part series, Alex and Anna examine why seed stage is so chaotic, why As are slow, and why Bs are fast. In their first dispatch, they looked at the U.S. market.

Before our conversation on Extra Crunch Live, Marlon Nichols dropped a bomb on me. The MaC Venture Capital founding managing partner hadn’t actually seen Wonderschool’s original pitch deck before investing in the remote education startup. Our conversation with the company’s CEO, Chris Bennett was the first time he’d been through the seed-stage deck.

Their partnership was a bit of Silicon Valley luck, good timing and some old fashioned networking.

“He was a part of an organization that was helping to bring more diverse founders in touch with investors,” says Nichols. “That was happening when I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2011. We started to build a casual relationship then. Fast forward to 2016. At my first fund, Cross Culture [Ventures], we were interested in investing in early childhood care. We were actually looking at a number of different companies and one of my partners, Suzy [Ryoo] was like, ‘Have you heard of this company Wonderschool that Chris Bennett was starting, and I was like, ‘Holy shit, I know Chris.’ ”

According to Bennet, Nichols reached out about the opportunity on Facebook Messenger. After the initial conversation and assessing some direct competitors, Nichols says Wonderschool was ultimately the right fit for Cross Culture’s portfolio.

Fittingly, the startup’s origin also has its roots in SV networking.

“I used to go the TED conference every year,” says Bennett. “I met a woman who told me that early childhood education was really important [ … ] She said, ‘A lot of the skills I use today as a CEO, a lot of those seeds were planted before the age of five.’ I thought that was a really wild idea. I started doing research and realized there was a shortage of childcare in America.”

Bennett cringed slightly when we started the process of showing off the company’s early deck. The first thing that jumped out at all of us was just how bare bones the presentation is: white text on a blue background, largely made up of bullet points. There’s not flash — or even graphics — to be found in the entire thing. And the CEO adds that honestly, not much changed aesthetically between that first pitch and the Series A deck.

“It aligned with what we were valuing at the time,” says Bennett. “We were really focused on getting the product-market fit and really trying to understand what our customers needed. And we’re really focused on building the team.”

Perhaps there was something to it, however, as Wonderschool managed to raise $20 million for the latter.

Viva Republica, the Seoul-based fintech company behind Toss, a super app with more than 40 financial services, announced today it has raised $410 million at a post-money valuation of $7.4 billion. The new funding was led by Alkeon Capital, an American investment firm, and included participation from new investors like Korea Development Bank, and returning backers Altos Ventures and Greyhound Capital.

The company plans to launch Toss Bank, a neobank, in September 2021, which it describes as “the final key component” of its super app strategy. It will also use the funding to continue its expansion in overseas markets, including Vietnam, where Toss launched last year.

Viva Republica, which hit unicorn status in 2018, has now raised more than $940 million in equity funding.

Founder and chief executive officer SG Lee told TechCrunch that Toss Bank will focus on lending, and also offer savings accounts with competitive interest rates.

“A lot of challenger banks and neobanks are focusing on the banking experience, such as cards, so their main revenue source is interchange fees,” he said. “Toss is quite different because we already cover all that. We cover P2P payment, money transfer, cards and all sorts of services. So we are focusing on loans, unsecured loans, mortgages, all sorts of loans. We are going to use this vehicle to give the most competitive interest rates to users, and Toss Bank will not have a separate app, since we have super app strategy.”

One of the reasons Toss Bank is focusing on loans is because if someone has a middling credit score, many South Korean banks will only offer them loans at subprime interest rates, Lee said. Toss Bank will be able to offer better rates because its risk-scoring model leverages data from its millions of users.

Toss now claims a total of 20 million users (or more than a third of South Korea’s 51.7 population) and of that amount, 11 million are monthly active users.

The app launched as a Venmo-like peer-to-peer money transfer platform in 2015, before adding more services. Now its users can turn to the app for almost all of their financial needs.

For example, they can check their balances at different banks and credit cards on a dashboard. Merchants can use Toss Payments to send and receive online payments and manage their business finances. Other features include budgeting tools, bill payments, a credit score tracker and insurance plans. Lee said more than 20% of bank accounts and credit cards in South Korea are already registered on Toss.

As a financial super app, Toss Bank will be able to supplement information from South Korea’s main credit rating agencies with its own data about user transactions: for example, where do they spend money, how often do they spend, their cash flow and balances.

Lee added that one of South Korea’s leading credit bureaus, KCB (Korea Credit Bureau), backtested Toss’ engine with data from over two million users, and it turned out to be 150% better in terms of differential power analysis and 30% lower in delinquency rates. “This is the first engine that counts this asset-related data, and no machine-learning technologies have been used in credit evaluation” in South Korea, he said. “I think Toss Bank is really well-positioned to disrupt the whole loan market.”

In March, Toss also launched an investment service called Toss Securities, designed to make stock trading accessible to new investors who shy away from traditional brokerages. Over the past three months, it has signed up more than 3.5 million users.

Viva Republica launched Toss in Vietnam, its first international market, in 2020, and the app now has services like no-fee money transfers, debit cards and a financial dashboard through a partnership with CIMB bank. Toss currently claims more than three million monthly active users in Vietnam and says it adds more than 500,000 active users every month. Toss is planning to enter other Southeast Asian markets, too.

Toss hasn’t finalized a timeline, but it is targeting Malaysia for its next market by the end of this year. “The product that we built for Vietnam is actually quite scalable across all Southeast Asia markets, so it’s a matter of time,” Lee said. “But we want to focus on the Vietnam market because it’s scaling increasingly fast and we have to cover the growth.”

As for the possibility of holding an initial public offering or finding another exit opportunity, Lee said the company is still finalizing its plans. “As an Asian company, reaching a $7.4 billion valuation is pretty high, and I think at some point we will face not being able to do more fundraising in the private market. So we’re targeting to raise once more by the end of this year or early next year for over $300 million. That will be our last private fundraising, and then we’re thinking a timeline of three years, and we are reviewing not only for a Korean listing but also a U.S. listing.”

Here at TechCrunch, we’re big fans of startup competitions. From our Extra Crunch Live Pitch-offs all the way up to the world-famous Disrupt Startup Battlefield, we can’t get enough of ’em. So we’re hooking up with Extreme Tech Challenge (‘XTC’) to present the Extreme Tech Challenge Global Finals, a startup competition focused on powering a more sustainable, equitable, inclusive, and healthy world.

Extreme Tech Challenge is the world’s largest transformative tech startup competition and forum for the leaders of tomorrow to be able to unleash their full potential. Last year, the competition attracted startups from 87 countries, and one third of the  XTC 2020 finalists raised more than $167M combined in venture investment since being selected.

This year, over 3700 startups applied from 92 countries across XTC’s competition tracks: Agtech, Food & Water, Cleantech & Energy, Edtech, Enabling Tech, Fintech, Healthtech, and Mobility & Smart Cities. Check out the 80 Global Finalists that emerged from this competitive pool. The Category winners and the Special Awards winners will make it to the Global Finals stage. 

Join the Extreme Tech Challenge on 7/22 to meet the world’s best purpose-driven startups making the world better through transformative tech. Network with corporations, VCs, & founders. Get your free tickets here!

Today, we’re excited to share the agenda of the event with you.

Powering the Future Through Transformative Tech
with Young Sohn (Young Sohn (XTC Co-Founder, Chairman of the Board, HARMAN International, and former Samsung Corporate President and Chief Strategy Officer), Bill Tai (XTC Co-Founder, Partner Emeritus, Charles River Ventures), and Beth Bechdol (Deputy Director-General, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization) 

What are the breakthrough tech innovations transforming industries to build a radically better world? How can business, government, philanthropy, and the startup community come together to create a better tomorrow? Hear from these industry veterans and thought leaders about how technology can not only shape the future, but also where the biggest opportunities lie, including some exciting news about XTC and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Going Green
with Shilpi Kumar (Urban Us), Jenny Rooke (Genoa Ventures), and Albert Wenger (Union Square Ventures)

Sustainability is the key to our planet’s future and our survival, but it’s also going to be incredibly lucrative and a major piece of our world economy. Hear from these seasoned investors and founders how VCs and startups alike are thinking about greentech and how that will evolve in the coming years.

The Extreme Tech Challenge 2021 Global Finals: Startup Pitches Part 1

The reason we’re all here – the XTC Category and Special Awards Winners get their chance to pitch their transformative tech ideas to a panel of expert judges and hear their feedback. XTC is a global platform that connects exceptional purpose-driven startups with a network of investors, corporations, and mentors to help them raise capital, launch corporate collaborations, and scale their world-changing startups.

Waste Matters
with Leon Farrant (Green Li-ion), Matanya Horowitz (AMP Robotics), and Elizabeth Gilligan (Material Evolution) 

According to the EPA, the U.S. alone produces 292.4 million tons of waste a year. Can technology help this massive – and growing – issue? Leon Farrant (Green Li-Ion), Matanya Horowitz (AMP Robotics), and Elizabeth Gilligan (Material Evolution) will discuss their companies’ unique approaches to dealing with the problem.

The Extreme Tech Challenge 2021 Global Finals: Startup Pitches Part 2

The reason we’re all here – the XTC Category and Special Awards Winners get their chance to pitch their transformative tech ideas to a panel of expert judges and hear their feedback, in this second and final round. 

Cutting Out Carbon Emitters with Bioengineering
with Aaron Nesser (AlgiKnit), Jennifer Holmgren (LanzaTech) and Patricia Bubner (Orbillion Bio)

Bioengineering may soon provide compelling, low-carbon alternatives in industries where even the best methods produce significant emissions. By utilizing natural and engineered biological processes, we may soon have low-carbon textiles from Algiknit, lab-grown premium meats from Orbillion, and fuels captured from waste emissions via LanzaTech. Leaders from these companies will join our panel to talk about how bioengineering can do its part in the fight against climate change.

Announcement of the Extreme Tech Challenge 2021 Winners

The judging panel will crown the global winner of Extreme Tech Challenge 2021 and also announce the winner of the Female Founder Award.

Networking

Join thousands of investors, corporate executives, startups, and policymakers to network via video chat.

Join the Extreme Tech Challenge on July 22 to meet the world’s best purpose-driven startups making the world better through transformative tech. Network with corporations, VCs, & founders. Get your free tickets here!

Amazon commands a vast, dominating empire in the world of e-commerce. While its marketplace has proved a boon for businesses trying to get off the ground, many of the more successful companies are now looking beyond the e-commerce giant’s fences, spurred by a desire to compete on their own terms.

This trend has mushroomed as online shopping burgeoned over the past five years. Businesses such as mattress maker Casper, men’s personal care brands Harry’s and Dollar Shave Club, footwear and apparel makers Allbirds and Zaful, gadget store Banggood, and power-bank maker Anker are just a few of the multitude of brands that choose to leverage their own web stores, social media presence and supply chains to build their business and identity without having a marketplace like Amazon get in the way.

Shein, an online-only apparel store that sells the latest in fashion at very affordable prices, is a shining example of this trend. It’s a rage among budget-conscious young adults across Europe, Asia and the Americas: The app was downloaded 14 million times in the United States in March, according to Apptopia, and currently dominates the shopping category in app stores in over 50 countries.

Its success is proof of its belief in bringing the latest trends to the masses as quickly as it can. In the past couple of decades, brands like Zara, H&M and Forever 21 earned themselves the “fast fashion” moniker when they turned the tables on global behemoths such as Gap and Calvin Klein by drastically shortening lead times — the time it takes for clothing to reach the store floor from the designer’s desk.

Shein takes this fast fashion mindset one step further: While brands like Zara and H&M take about three to four weeks to bring clothing from the ramp to the store, Shein uses a combination of real-time customer and predictive analytics, hyperaware fashion designers and an extremely quick and agile supply chain based in China to bring the latest fashion trends from Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and TikTok to its online store in just a week or two.

Hey, you there — early-stage founders. Yes, you. TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising, our mini master class in entrepreneurship, is right around the proverbial corner. And by mini we mean it’s just two days — July 8-9. There’s nothing mini about the expert advice, information and actionable tips you’ll glean from attending this event.

Buy your pass today and get ready to learn how to build a better startup without reinventing the wheel (good thing we don’t charge by the cliché).

Day one is packed with presentations by a passel of outstanding subject-matter experts. Don’t miss these sponsored breakout sessions — they cover essential topics such as value-added investing, crafting customer experience, building high-performance teams and how to stand out while fundraising.

Check the agenda for exact times in your specific time zone.

More than capital — Value-add investing: There is a wide variety of capital outlets available for entrepreneurs to consider. Today more than ever, founders are seeking out investors that can deliver value-add services to support startups throughout their growth journey. Dell Technologies Capital’s Chris Hillock will discuss the firm’s Portfolio Development Practice, and how their team of company builders helps founding team’s establish and hone product market fit, develop scaling strategies and provide unique access to the Go to Market capabilities of the Dell Technologies Organization. Presented by Dell for Entrepreneurs.

Iterating more effectively with feedback: A great product alone is not enough. To be successful, early-stage companies need to optimize all phases of the customer journey. This session will include tactics, best practices and case studies on how to use customer feedback to understand customer needs, craft more compelling messaging and improve all phases of the customer experience. Presented by Nate Wright, VP of product marketing at UserTesting.

Inspiring high-performance teams — The Movile way: Big dreams — unbelievably big ones — can really help people see the future. And they will rally your team to move faster, together. Learn the proven methodology taught at universities like Harvard and Stanford to create a highly effective, “can do” culture to catapult your startup to the next level. And continue to attract and retain talent, because sizable ambitions inspire teams based on Movile’s wildly successful “Mobile Dream” internship and recruitment program. Presented by Patrick Hruby, CEO, and Luciana Carvalho, VP, at Movile.

Standing out during your fundraising process: Fundraising is never easy, but the right preparation can make all the difference. Three-time founder Waseem Daher joins Katie Myrick, Pilot’s GM, to share the KPIs investors look for, which questions they ask, and what you need to succeed at the various stages of investment. Currently CEO of Pilot, which specializes in bookkeeping, tax and CFO services for high-growth startups, Waseem is a three-time entrepreneur with two successful exits. Presented by Pilot.

How to survive high-speed startup growth during COVID-19 and retooling for growth opportunities in post-pandemic: On a journey to build a virtual real estate world? Meet oVice — an early-stage startup that witnessed massive growth and became the top virtual space in Japan in less than one year. In this session, you will hear from CFO, Daniel Buckley and Shinji Asada, CEO of One Capital and lead investor of oVice, on how to effectively scale as you grow without imploding. Presented by oVice.

TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising takes place on July 8-9. Grab a pass today and take maximum advantage of this mini masterclass.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Meet Airbank, a startup that is taking advantage of open banking regulation and related APIs to aggregate all your bank accounts. Focused on startups and small and medium companies, the company wants to build an all-in-one banking interface to access financial data, initiate payments, manage cash flow and more.

Airbank just raised a $3 million (€2.5 million) seed round led by Pia d’Iribarne and Jean de la Rochebrochard at New Wave, with Speedinvest and Tiny VC also participating. A handful of business angels are also joining the round, such as Cris Conde (executive in residence at Accel), Luca Ascani (Accel scout) and Marc McCabe (Sequoia scout).

The startup’s value proposition is quite simple and can be easily explained in one screenshot. With Airbank, you can enter your login information for all the bank accounts and related accounts that you use. After that, you can view everything from your Airbank account:

Many companies have to deal with multiple bank accounts for several reasons — you may have opened one bank account when you incorporated your company, another bank account to request a loan, a Wise Business account for low foreign transaction fees, a Revolut Business account to get debit cards for everyone, etc.

In addition to bank accounts, chances are you’re also generating revenue with Stripe, PayPal or Shopify. Many executives lose a ton of time connecting to web portals, exporting data as CSV files, importing those files in Microsoft Excel and consolidating all that information.

Airbank automatically refreshes your balances across several accounts. You can see your total balance in multiple currencies. It also can help you reconcile transactions with outstanding invoices, as you can search across multiple accounts at once.

This is just a starting point; Airbank wants to become the only interface for all your banking needs. You can categorize transactions, see how much you’re spending with each supplier, track recurring payments and export everything to Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. Soon, you’ll be able to use Airbank for cash flow forecasting and automatic reconciliation with your Xero or QuickBooks data.

Open banking isn’t limited to account aggregation. With proper APIs, you should be able to initiate payments from a third-party product. And Airbank plans to take advantage of that as the company is working on payments. As you can manage access rights, Airbank could act as the payment portal for the finance team.

“Open banking has enabled smooth integrations with banks, which we can utilize to offer richer banking and payments experiences for our users. Our vision is to build an all-in-one finance hub that connects all your financial accounts in one place. Our integrations will bring bill payments, expense management, and FX all in a single product that is easy to use,” co-founder and CEO Christopher Zemina said in a statement.

Other startups have been working on cash flow management, such as Agicap, and B2B payments, such as Libeo and Upflow. Airbank is starting with account aggregation and wants to tackle B2B finance in a holistic manner.

Vertical SaaS products have been booming lately. And there’s a reason why the space is quite competitive: There’s still a ton of stuff to do around B2B fintech and specialized software-as-a-service products.

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