French startup Matera has announced that is has raised a new $43 million (€35 million) Series B funding round led by Mubadala Capital. Bpifrance, Burda Principal Investments as well as existing investors Index Ventures and Samaipata are also participating.

The company is building a vertical SaaS for residential property management. In France, co-owners of the common space of a building can decide to ditch the company that handles residential building management for them and do it themselves.

And it could work particularly well for small buildings with 10 or 15 apartments. There are fewer relationships to manage, fewer bills to pay and less work in general.

When co-owners vote to switch to Matera, they get a web-based platform and a mobile app to view information and see all the contracts with various partners — think about elevator maintenance, heating maintenance, water, electricity, etc.

If something feels odd, you can contact a residential building expert on Matera. They can help you make sure you comply with the law and file paperwork for you.

The platform also guides you when it comes to leading an annual co-owner meeting. It can help you communicate with all co-owners with a forum, an on-demand letter service, etc. Essentially, all co-owners get their own login information.

In October 2020, the company launched a new service to tackle a bigger chunk of the building management stack. Matera clients can now decide to manage their building’s bank account through the platform. This way, co-owners pay directly on Matera and everybody can keep track of the budget over time.

With today’s funding round, Matera plans to expand to Germany. The startup has been growing rapidly as it now manages 3,000 buildings, representing a 300% year-over-year jump. Overall, 60,000 owners use Matera.

“This past year gave us the opportunity to prove the relevance of our model and our value proposition, showing why Matera is the perfect solution for our times. The crisis sped up the digital transformation of our market, while at the same time increasing the attachment to our homes and buildings,” co-founder and CEO Raphaël di Meglio said in a statement. “Our clients wanted more transparency, and to save money and that’s exactly what we can bring them.”

By the end of 2021, Matera wants to manage 6,000 buildings including 40 in Germany. The company currently has 200 employees and plans to hire another 50 employees.

Smart Eye, the publicly traded Swedish company that supplies driver monitoring systems for a dozen automakers, has acquired emotion-detection software startup Affectiva for $73.5 million in a cash-and-stock deal.

Affectiva, which spun out of the MIT Media Lab in 2009, has developed software that can detect and understand human emotion, which Smart Eye is keen to combine with its own AI-based eye-tracking technology. The companies’ founders see an opportunity to expand beyond driver monitoring systems — tech that is often used in conjunction with advanced driver assistance systems to track and measure awareness — and into the rest of the vehicle. Together, the technology could help them break into the emerging “interior sensing” market, which can be used to monitor the entire cabin of a vehicle and deliver services in response to the occupant’s emotional state.

Under the terms of the deal, $67.5 million will be paid with 2,354,668 new Smart Eye shares, of which 2,015,626 are to be issued upon closing of the transaction. The remaining 339,042 Smart Eye shares will be issued within two years of closing. About $6 million will be paid in cash once the deal closes in June 2021.

Affectiva and Smart Eye were competitors. A meeting at the technology trade show CES in 2020 put the two companies on a path to merge.

“Martin and I realized like, wow, we are on a path to compete with each other — and wouldn’t it be so much better if we joined forces?” Affective co-founder and CEO Dr. Rana el Kaliouby said in an interview Tuesday. “By joining forces, we kind of check all the boxes for what the OEMs are looking for with interior sensing, we leapfrog the competition and we have an opportunity to do this better and faster than we could have done it on our own.”

Boston-based Affectiva brings its emotion-detection software to the deal, which will allow Smart Eye to offer its existing automotive partners a variety of products. Smart Eye helps Affectiva move beyond the development and prototype work and into production contracts. Smart Eye has won 84 production contracts with 13 OEMs, including BMW and GM. Smart Eye, which has offices in Gothenburg, Detroit, Tokyo and Chongqing, China, also has a division that provides research organizations such as NASA with high-fidelity eye tracking systems for human factors research.

Smart Eye founder and CEO Martin Krantz said that European manufacturers building luxury and premium vehicles led the charge for driver monitoring systems.

“We see the same pattern repeating itself now for interior sensing,” Krantz said. “I think a large part of the early contracts will be European premium OEMs such as Mercedes, BMW, Audi, JLR, Porsche.” Krantz added that there are a number of other premium brands it will target in other regions, including Cadillac and Lexus.

The opportunity will initially be in passenger vehicles driven by humans and will eventually expand as greater levels of automated driving enter the market.

Affectiva, which employs 100 people at its offices in Boston and Cairo, also has another business unit that applies its emotio-detection software to media analytics. This division, which will be part of the deal and will operate separately, is profitable, Kaliouby said, noting the software is used by 70% of the world’s largest advertisers to measure and understand emotional responses to media content.

The social video tool Promo.com just raised $16 million in a Series B round led by Getty Images, the company synonymous with stock imagery.

Brands, creators or whoever else might need some quick and dirty video content can search Promo.com for what they need, just like they would use a stock photography service. Getty offers its own library of stock videos as well, but Promo.com provides both the video clips and the tools for non-editors to craft a basic edit with a little bit of customization.

Brands can select an existing professional video clip from a library, plug in their own message and add a logo or custom audio. All that’s left is downloading the customized video and whisking it off to their social channels.

Mizrahi-Tefahot Bank, one of the largest banks in Israel, also participated in the Series B round through debt financing. Promo.com’s existing “strategic partnership” with Getty Images will deepen as part of the deal, giving the former company access to the latter’s expansive existing pool of video clips.

Of course, Promo.com isn’t the only show in town. Video creation platform Biteable raised $7 million of its own in December, and similarly allows companies to make bright, bite-sized video content for social. The super streamlined graphic design platform Canva also supports video editing with its own library of stock images. Vimeo offers its own video template service too, known as Vimeo Create, which grew out of the company’s acquisition of the AI-powered video editor Magisto.

Lordstown Motors released its Q1 earnings yesterday, and the electric vehicle manufacturer is facing a few challenges.

Expenses were higher than expected, it plans to slash production by about 50%, and the company reported zero revenue and a net loss of $125 million. Oh, it also needs more capital.

“But there’s more to the Lordstown mess than merely a single bad quarter,” writes Alex Wilhelm. “Lordstown’s earnings mess and the resulting dissonance with its own predictions are notable on their own, but they also point to what could be shifting sentiment regarding SPAC combinations.”

In light of the company’s lackluster earnings report (and a pending SEC investigation), Alex unpacks the company’s Q1, “but don’t think that we’re only singling out one company; others fit the bill, and more will in time.”

May 27 Clubhouse chat: How to ensure data quality in the era of Big Data

Join TechCrunch reporter Ron Miller and Patrik Liu Tran, co-founder and CEO of automated real-time data validation and quality monitoring platform Validio, on Thursday, May 27 at 9 a.m. PDT/noon EDT for a Clubhouse chat about ensuring data quality in the era of Big Data.

The world produces 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily, but modern data infrastructure still lacks solutions for monitoring data quality and data validation.

Among other topics, they’ll discuss the build versus buy debate, how to better understand data failures, and why traditional methods for identifying data failures are no longer operational.

Click here to join the conversation.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch; have a great week!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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

How Expensify shed Silicon Valley arrogance to realize its global ambitions

Expensify may be the most ambitious software company ever to mostly abandon the Bay Area as the center of its operations.

The startup’s history is tied to places representative of San Francisco: The founding team worked out of Peet’s Coffee on Mission Street for a few months, then crashed at a penthouse lounge near the 4th and King Caltrain station, followed by a tiny office and then a slightly bigger one in the Flatiron building near Market Street.

Thirteen years later, Expensify still has an office a few blocks away on Kearny Street, but it’s no longer a San Francisco company or even a Silicon Valley firm. The company is truly global with employees across the world — and it did that before COVID-19 made remote working cool.

It makes sense that a company founded by internet pirates would let its workforce live anywhere they please and however they want to. Yet, how does it manage to make it all work well enough to reach $100 million in annual revenue with just a tad more than 100 employees?

As I described in Part 2 of this EC-1, that staffing efficiency is partly due to its culture and who it hires. It’s also because it has attracted top talent from across the world by giving them benefits like the option to work remotely all year as well as paying SF-level salaries even to those not based in the tech hub. It’s also got annual fully paid month-long “workcations” for every employee, their partner and kids.

Brian Chesky describes a faster, nimbler post-pandemic Airbnb

Managing Editor Jordan Crook interviewed Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky to discuss the future of travel and what it was like leading the world’s biggest hospitality startup during a global pandemic.

“Our business initially dropped 80% in eight weeks. I say it’s like driving a car. You can’t go 80 miles an hour, slam on the brakes, and expect nothing really bad to happen.

Now imagine you’re going 80 miles an hour, slam on the brakes, then rebuild the car kind of while still moving, and then try to accelerate into an IPO, all on Zoom.”

Embedded finance will help fill the life insurance coverage gap

There’s latent demand for life insurance currently unaddressed by much of the financial services industry, and embedded finance can be the solution.

It’s imperative for companies to consider product lines and partnerships to expand markets, create new revenue streams and provide added value to their customers.

Connecting consumers with products they need through channels they already know and trust is both a massive revenue opportunity and a social good, providing financial resilience to families at a time when they need it most.

Zeta Global’s IPO filing uncovers modest growth, strong adjusted profitability

Zeta Global raised north of $600 million in private capital in the form of both equity financing and debt, making it a unicorn worth understanding.

The gist is that Zeta ingests and crunches lots of data, helping its users market to their customers on a targeted basis throughout their individual buying lifecycles. In simpler terms, Zeta helps companies pitch customers in varied manners depending on their own characteristics.

You can imagine that, as the digital economy has grown, the sort of work Zeta Global supports has only expanded. So, has Zeta itself grown quickly? And does it have an attractive business profile? We want to know.

5 predictions for the future of e-commerce

In 2016, more than 20 years after Amazon’s founding and 10 years since Shopify launched, it would have been easy to assume e-commerce penetration (the percentage of total retail spend where the goods were bought and sold online) would be over 50%.

But what we found was shocking: The U.S. was only approximately 8% penetrated — only 8% for arguably the most advanced economy in the world!

Despite e-commerce growth skyrocketing over the past year, the reality is the U.S. has still only reached an e-commerce penetration rate of around 17%. During the last 18 months, we’ve closed the gap to South Korea and China’s e-commerce penetration of more than 25%, but there is still much progress to be made.

Here are five key predictions for what this road to further penetration will hold.

Develop a buyer’s guide to educate your startup’s sales team and customers

Every company wants to be innovative, but innovation comes with its share of difficulties. One key challenge for early-stage companies that are disrupting a particular space or creating a new category is figuring out how to sell a unique product to customers who have never bought such a solution.

This is especially the case when a solution doesn’t have many reference points and its significance may not be obvious.

Some buyers could use a walkthrough of the buying process. If you are building a singular product in a nascent market that necessitates forward-looking customers and want to drastically shorten sales cycles, create a buyer’s guide.

When to walk away from a VC who wants to invest in your startup

Pay attention to red flags when meeting with VCs: If they cancel late or leave you waiting, it’s a sign, just like being asked generic questions that demonstrate little or no understanding of the proposition. If they critique you or your business, that’s fine (obviously), but make sure you find out what’s behind their assertions to judge how well informed they are.

If you’re going to face these people each month and debate the direction of your business, the least you can expect is a robust argument outlining precisely why you may not have all the right answers.

If you fail to spot the warning signs, you’ll live to regret it. But do your due diligence and work constructively with them and, together, you might actually build a sustainable future.

Deep Science: Robots, meet world

This column aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence — and explain why they matter.

In this edition, we have a lot of items concerned with the interface between AI or robotics and the real world. Of course, most applications of this type of technology have real-world applications, but specifically, this research is about the inevitable difficulties that occur due to limitations on either side of the real-virtual divide.

2 CEOs are better than 1

Netflix has two CEOs: Co-founder Reed Hastings oversees the streaming side of the company, while Ted Sarandos guides Netflix’s content.

Warby Parker has co-CEOs as well — its co-founders went to college together. Other companies like the tech giant Oracle and luggage maker Away have shifted from having co-CEOs in recent years, sparking a wave of headlines suggesting that the model is broken.

While there isn’t a lot of research on companies with multiple CEOs, the data is more promising than the headlines would suggest. One study on public companies with co-CEOs revealed that the average tenure for co-CEOs, about 4.5 years, was comparable to solitary CEOs, “suggesting that this arrangement is more stable than previously believed.”

Furthermore, it’s impossible to be in two places at once or clone yourself. With co-CEOs, you can effectively do just that.

The spinout of video platform Vimeo from IAC completed today, with the smaller company now trading as an independent entity under the ticker symbol VMEO.

If you missed the news that the internet conglomerate was spinning out the video service, don’t feel bad; it slipped past many radars. But with the company now trading, with our access to its historical results, and with our minds still enthralled by YouTube’s recent financial performance for Alphabet, it’s worth taking a moment to digest the company’s health.

Let’s answer a few questions: How quickly is Vimeo growing, how profitable is its business, and what can its spinout tell us about the larger video market? Recall that Kaltura, another video-powering company, recently put its IPO back into the pipeline after a small delay during what felt like a snap-freeze of the public markets toward the start of the second quarter.

So the Vimeo debut could impact a possible forthcoming unicorn IPO. With that in mind, let’s dig into the numbers.

Growth

From Q1 2020 to Q1 2021, Vimeo’s revenues expanded from $57 million to $89.4 million, a gain of around 57%. That’s a solid pace of expansion, but not a surprising one considering how much digital video the world consumed during the COVID-19 pandemic, a fact that could have bolstered the company’s recent performance.

Over the same time frame, Vimeo’s gross profit grew from $38.6 million to $64.5 million, a gain of around 67%. As you can infer from faster-rising gross profit than revenue, Vimeo’s gross margins improved during Q1 2021 compared to the first quarter of 2020, from 68% to 72%.

Earlier this year, Turntable.fm’s founder Billy Chasen dusted off the old site and resurrected it for the pandemic age. I know I wasn’t the only one feeling a wistful pang of nostalgia for the service during the long, dull days of sheltering in place. And while March 2020 would have been the best time for a relaunch, March 2021 was pretty good, too.

Today Chasen announced that the service has received a nice little slice of VC backing to help the service (which has thus far been invite/password only) take the next step. Andreessen Horowitz led the $7.5 million round a decade after the site’s original launch. Funding had thus far been limited to fans through services like Patreon and Venmo. He notes that he will be turning off the service’s Patreon.

Chasen is staying mum as far as where the funding will go, stating, “And now with the new fundraising, we can continue to innovate and truly explore the cross section of social + music. I have a lot of ideas for the space and I’m excited to start building them.”

Though, a blog post does note that the company is hiring engineers and designers. Understandable, though as someone who’s been enjoying the site these last few months, I’m actually pretty surprised at how fresh the whole thing feels.

The team found a clever loophole around music rights in the form of YouTube videos, but perhaps a future version of the service will involve more direct music licensing or ties to popular apps like Spotify. A mobile app would be nice, if I’m just spitballing here.

Turntable.fm initially shut down back in 2013, stating at the time, “It was a tough decision to make because we love this community so much, but the cost of running a music service has been too expensive and we can’t outpace it with our efforts to monetize it and cut costs.” The service added that it was focusing on a live events platform instead.

Notably, Turntable.fm is not the only Turntable service looking to relaunch in 2021. There’s also Turntable.org (confusingly located at TT.fm), which is seeking fan funding, as well as looking toward a subscription fee. It announced that it had raised $500,000 in March and was aiming for an April launch for a mobile and desktop version. The site currently reads, “We’re building a new version just as much fun as the original.”

The two Turntables are not affiliated.

What’s it like raising a round in 2021? How has it changed over the last few months, as some glimmer of normalcy seems, at least, within reach? What do early-stage founders (and investors!) need to know about the current state of the industry?

Few are in a better place to outline this than Avlok Kohli, the CEO of AngelList Venture who will let you know at TC Early Stage on July 8-9. With more than $2.2 billion in assets under management and over 5,000 startups funded on the platform, AngelList has data-driven insights that just about no one else could offer. Kohli joined AngelList Venture as CEO in mid-2019, giving him a remarkably unique view of the industry through a particularly wild time.

Kohli also knows what it’s like to be a founder, having been in that seat multiple times. In 2014 he founded Fastbite, a low-cost meal delivery service; in 2015, he sold it to Square. He dove back in with a daily house cleaning service called Fairy in 2017, and sold it to Postmates at the beginning of 2019.

We’re super excited to announce that Avlok Kohli will join us at TC Early Stage on July 8-9 to get us all up to speed on the state of play in early-stage investing.

TC Early Stage is our event series all about startups that are… well, early stage. From raising money to marketing the right way to just getting people to care, we go deep on the topics that matter most to founders.

We’ll kick this session off with a presentation from Kohli on the state of early-stage investing, then we’ll get right into audience Q&A and try to get your most burning questions answered live.

TC Early Stage: Marketing & Fundraising goes down on July 8th and 9th — and because it’s virtual, you can attend right from the comfort of your couch. Or office chair. Or a hammock. We don’t care, just come watch. Get your tickets here!

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Whatnot exists with one primary goal in mind: to give people a place to buy and sell collectibles (like Pokémon cards, sports cards, pins, etc.) in a safe, authenticated way.

The company started out with intentions of being a GOAT/StockX-style resale marketplace, where the products up for sale lived on neat little pages with row after row of static images. As they started experimenting with other formats, they found one that really seemed to catch on: livestream sales. Think QVC or the Home Shopping Network… but instead of hosts in huge studios selling jewelry and patio furniture, it’s users with smartphones selling Charizard cards and Yoda figurines.

I first wrote about Whatnot last year. In the short time since, the company has raised three increasingly large rounds: $4 million in December, $20 million in March and, as of this morning, another $50 million.

While Whatnot still offers the more standard product pages to give sellers a 24/7 presence on the site, the livestreaming side of things has become the primary driver — by far. Co-founder Grant LaFontaine tells me that livestreaming is currently “95% of the focus”; it’s where most of their sales are happening, and what users seem to care most about.

Another thing users seem to care about? Sports cards. Whatnot opened up the site to sports card sellers in January, and it almost immediately took over as the site’s best-selling category. The one category now accounts for “millions of dollars” in sales each month, the company says.

The Whatnot team itself is growing quickly as well. When I first spoke to them, it was just a handful of employees; by January of this year, they were up to 10. Today it’s 45 full-timers. By the end of the year, says Grant, they expect to be nearing 100.

While anyone can sell on Whatnot’s marketplace, only users that have been vetted/invited can sell via livestream. This helps to keep fraud low; sellers know that if they try to sneak in fake cards or rip anyone off, their access to livestreaming — and thus their audience — could vanish.

The company tells me that this Series B round was led by Anu Hariharan of Y Combinator Continuity fund, and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Animal Capital and a number of angels.

Salesforce dominates the world of CRM today, but while it’s a popular and well-used tool for organizing contacts and information, it doesn’t have all the answers when it comes to helping salespeople and marketers sell better, especially when meetings are not in person. Today, one of the startups that has emerged to help fill the gap is announcing a round of growth funding on the back of a huge year for its business.

Qualified — which builds better interactions for B2B sales and marketing teams that already use Salesforce by tapping into extra data sources to develop a better profile of those visiting your website, in aid of improving and personalizing the outreach (hence the name: you’re building “qualified” leads) — has picked up $51 million in funding. The startup will be using the Series B to continue building out its business with more functionality in the platform, and hiring across the board to expand business development and more.

Led by Salesforce Ventures, the funding round also included Norwest Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures, both previous backers, among others. As with so many rounds at the moment — the venture world is flush with funding at the moment — this one is coming less than a year after Qualified’s last raise. It closed a $12 million Series A in August of last year.

Qualified was co-founded by two Salesforce veterans — ex-Salesforce CMO Kraig Swensrud and ex-SVP of Salesforce.com Sean Whiteley — serial entrepreneurs who you could say have long been hammering away at the challenges of building digital tools for sales and marketing people to do their jobs better online. The pair have founded and sold two other startups filling holes to that end: GetFeedback, acquired by SurveyMonkey, and Kieden, acquired by Salesforce.

The gap that they’re aiming to fill with this latest venture is the fact that when sales and marketing teams want to connect with prospects directly through, say, a phone call, they might have all of that contact’s information at their disposal. But if those teams want to make a more engaged contact when someone is visiting their site — a sign that a person is actually interested and thinking already about engaging with a company — usually the sales and marketing teams are in the dark about who those visitors are.

“We founded Qualified on the premise that a website should be more than a marketing brochure, but not just a sales site,” Swensrud, who is the CEO, said in an interview.

Qualified has built a tool that essentially takes several signals from Salesforce as well as other places to build up some information about the site visitor. It then uses it to give the sales and marketing teams more of a steer so that when they reach out via a screen chat to say “how can I help?” they actually have more information and can target their questions in a better way. A sales or marketing rep might know which pages a person is also visiting, and can then use the conversation that starts with an online chat to progress to a voice or video call, or a meeting.

If a person is already in your Salesforce Rolodex, you get more information; but even without that there is some detail provided to be slightly less impersonal. (Example: When I logged into Qualified to look around the site, a chat popped up with a person greeting me “across the pond”… I’m in London.)

Qualified also integrates with a number of other tools that are used to help source data and build its customer profiles, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, 6sense, Demandbase, Marketo, HubSpot, Oracle Eloqua, Clearbit, ZoomInfo and Outreach.

Additional data is part and parcel of the kinds of information that sales and marketing people always need when reaching out to prospective customers, whether it’s via a “virtual” digital channel or in person. However, in the last year — where in-person meetings, team meetings and working side-by-side with those who can give advice have all disappeared — having extra tools like these arguably have proven indispensable.

“Sales reps would heavily rely on their ‘road warrior’ image,” Swensrud said. “But all that stuff is gone, so as a result every seller is sitting at an office, at home, expecting digital interactions to happen that never existed before.”

And it seems some believe that even outside of COVID-19 enforcing a different way of doing things, the trend for “virtual selling”, as it’s often called, is here to stay: Gartner forecasts that by 2025, some 80% of B2B sales interactions will take place in digital channels. (So long to the expense account lunch, I guess.)

It’s because of the events of 2020, plus those bigger trends, that Qualified has seen revenues in the last year grow some 800% and its net customer revenue retention rate hover at 175%, with funding rounds come in relatively close succession in the wake of that.

There is something interesting to Qualified that reminds me a bit of more targeted ad retargeting, as it were, and in that, you can imagine a lot of other opportunities for how Qualified might expand in scenarios where it would be more useful to know why someone is visiting your site, without outright asking them and bothering them with the question. That could include customer service, or even a version that might sell better to consumers coming to, say, a clothes site after reading something about orange being the new black.

For now, though, it’s focused on the B2B opportunity.

There are a number of tools on the market that are competing with Salesforce as the go-to platform for people to organise and run CRM operations, but Swensrud is bullish for now on the idea of building specifically for the Salesforce ecosystem.

“Our product is being driven by and runs on Salesforce,” he noted, pointing out that it’s through Salesforce that you’re able to go from chatting to a phone call by routing the information to the data you have on file there. “Our roots go very deep.”

The funding round today is a sign that Salesforce is also happy with that close arrangement, which gives it a customization that its competitors lack.

“Qualified represents an entirely new way for B2B companies to engage buyers,” said Bill Patterson, EVP of CRM Applications at Salesforce, in a statement. “When marketing and inbound sales teams use this solution with Sales Cloud… they see a notable impact on pipeline. We are thrilled about our growing partnership with Qualified and their success within the Salesforce ecosystem.”

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In February, Nigerian fintech startup Mono announced its acceptance into Y Combinator and, at the time, it wanted to build the Plaid for Africa. Three months later, the startup has a different mission: to power the internet economy in Africa and has closed $2 million in seed investment towards that goal.

The investment comes nine months after the company raised $500,000 in pre-seed last September and two months after receiving $125,000 from YC. Mono’s total investment moves up to $2.625 million, and investors in this new round include Entrée Capital (one of the investors in Kuda’s seed round), Kuda co-founder and CEO Babs Ogundeyi; Gbenga Oyebode, partner at TCVP; and Eric Idiahi, co-founder and partner at Verod Capital. New York but Africa-based VC Lateral Capital also invested after taking part in Mono’s pre-seed.

In a region where more than half of the population is either unbanked or underbanked, open finance players like Mono are trying to improve financial inclusion and connectivity on the continent. Open finance thrives on the notion that access to a financial ecosystem via open APIs and new routes to move money, access financial information and make borrowing decisions reduces the barriers and costs of entry for the underbanked. 

Launched in August 2020, the company streamlines various financial data in a single API for companies and third-party developers. Mono allows them to retrieve information like account statements, real-time balance, historical transactions, income, expense and account owner identification with users’ consent.

When we covered the company early in the year, it had already secured partnerships with more than 16 financial institutions in Nigeria. In addition to having a little over a hundred businesses like Carbon, Aella Credit, Credpal, Renmoney, Autochek, and Inflow Finance access customers bank account for bank statements, identity data, and balances, Mono has also connected over 100,000 financial accounts for its partners and analysed over 66 million financial transactions so far.

Mono has done impressively well in a short period. While it appears to have figured out product-market fit, CEO Abdul Hassan is quick to remind everyone that the burgeoning API fintech space is just an entry point to its pursuit of being a data company — a case he also made in February.

“The way I see it, our market is not that big. Compare the payments market now with 2016, when Paystack and Flutterwave just started. The payments space in 2016 was very small and the number of people using cards online was very small,” said Hassan, who co-founded the company with Prakhar Singh. “It’s the same thing for us right now. That’s why our focus isn’t only on open banking but data. We’re thinking of how we can power the internet economy with data that isn’t necessarily financial data. For instance, think about open data for telcos. Imagine where you can move your data from one telco to another instead of getting a new SIM card and making a fresh registration. That’s where I see the market going, at least for us at Mono.” 

He adds that the company is taking an approach of building a product one step at a time until it can fully diversify from financial data offerings, including connecting with payment gateways (Paystack and Flutterwave) and other fintechs like wealth management startups Piggyvest and Cowrywise.

“When you’re able to connect to all the systems, a lot of use cases will come up. The first step is how can we connect to all available data and open it up for businesses and developers,” he continued.

Therefore, Mono will use the funding to reinforce its current financial and identity data offerings and launch new products for diverse business verticals. Also, a long-overdue pan-African expansion to Ghana and Kenya is top priority. The last time I spoke with Hassan, the end of Q1 looked feasible to get into at least one of the two markets but it didn’t turn out that way. But the wait seems to be over as the company said it’d be going live in Ghana next month with a handful of existing customers from Nigeria and new ones in Ghana. Some of these partners include five banks (GTBank, Fidelity Bank and three unannounced banks) and the mobile money service arm of MTN Ghana.

“Our expansion is mostly inspired by our customers looking to expand to other markets, same with some of our products. We work with our customers to give them the right tools to build new experiences for their customers,” Hassan stated. 

Mono is one of the three API fintech companies to have raised a seed investment this year. Last month, another Nigerian fintech Okra closed $3.5 million while Stitch, a South African API fintech, launched with $4 million in February. Back to back investments like this show that investors are incredibly optimistic about the market. Avil Eyal, managing partner and co-founder of Entrée Capital, one of such investors, had this to say.

“We are very excited to be working with Abdul, Prakhar and the entire Mono team as they continue to build out the rails for African banking to enable the delivery of financial services to hundreds of millions of people across the African continent.”