Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank with just shy of 5 million customers, has recruited a new U.S CEO to head up its efforts states-side, TechCrunch has learned.

Carol Nelson, who previously spent ten years as CEO of Cascade Bank and prior to that was a long time senior vice president of Bank of America, will start as early as next week, staff at Monzo were informed this morning. Notably, she has been a strategic advisor to Monzo U.S. for more than a year, so she’ll already be familiar with the bank’s U.S. ambitions and general culture.

Technically, Nelson takes over from TS Anil, who is now Monzo’s U.K. CEO and held both CEO titles temporarily after Monzo founder Blomfield relinquished CEO duties to become president in May. Then, last month, we broke news that Blomfield had decided to cease his involvement with Monzo entirely, the challenger bank and now fintech unicorn he founded six years ago.

Details of Monzo’s U.S. ambitions first broke cover in January 2019 (again, thanks to this publication), and were officially confirmed the following June. Since then, Monzo U.S. has only seen a tentative soft launch, reminiscent of its early U.K. beta all those years ago and an understanding that product-market-fit is key for different geographies.

The current U.S. team is still roughly ten people as the bank works through its U.S. banking charter application and supports a limited pool of U.S. customers. I understand there are currently over 20,000 signups to the U.S. waitlist, and that post pandemic Monzo will choose San Francisco for its U.S. HQ.

(In April last year, Monzo shuttered its Las Vegas customer support office, amid a round of cutbacks. However, that satellite office was to serve U.K. customers overnight and separate to its U.S. plans.)

Meanwhile, the recruiting of a new U.S. CEO comes hot on the heels of Monzo reportedly raising further top up funding. First reported by Sky’s Mark Kleinman via a tweet (yes, really) and with additional details sourced by Business Insider, the challenger bank is closing a further £50 million, thought to be on the same terms as its recent Series G funding. Backing comes from existing investors — Novator, and Kaiser — and new investor Octahedron Capital.

Since M-Pesa’s mobile money infrastructure came into play in 2007, there has been a proliferation of fintech services ranging from wallets to savings and loans. With this mobile money ecosystem growing in double-digits year-on-year, a lot of data is being created in the process. But this has left some fragmentation, where one person’s information is diverse and can be accessed via multiple channels. 

For banks and financial institutions, it becomes difficult to understand and provide insights from users’ data. Over the past three years, some platforms have looked to solve this problem. They aggregate users’ financial data and share it with these financial players through APIs driving more data-driven insights and value-added products. One such platform is Pngme.

Today, the Africa-focused but U.S.-based unified financial data platform announced its seed round of $3 million. The investment, led by Radical Ventures, Raptor Group, Lateral Capital and EchoVC was closed in Q3 2020 and came after the fintech startup raised $500,000 in pre-seed two years ago. It further reflects the continued customer growth from banks, fintechs, credit bureaus and microfinance banks in Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria.

Founded by Brendan Playford and Cate Rung, Pngme started primarily as a lending platform in 2018. Playford, who grew up in the U.K., came to East Africa in 2007 to work on philanthropic biofield projects. He ended up writing short-term loans to entrepreneurs, particularly in Kenya and Tanzania, and during this time formed the basis for which he as CEO and Rung as COO founded Pngme.

“That was sort of the impetus we needed and also the experience of being credit invisible in the U.K. led Cate and me to found the company specifically focusing on providing access to finance to Africans,” he said to TechCrunch.

According to Rung, the company’s initial thesis was that entrepreneurs didn’t get enough help, capital-wise. But going into 2019, when the company raised its pre-seed round, the founders realized another problem — the lack of data infrastructure to access risk when giving out loans or capital.

Their stint in an accelerator based in Toronto, Canada helped to better understand the more valuable version of the company — the B2C layer which connects entrepreneurs with finance or the data infrastructure layer to understand risk or a person’s financial identity.

“We were building two different companies at once, so we had to choose one path. We realised that the data infrastructure layer was critical and a massive pain point in most of sub-Saharan Africa,” the COO added.

Pngme had to make a swift pivot to the latter. Building this would have a much more significant impact. Being able to aggregate mobile money transactions, bank transactions, loan data, behavioural data, process all that data into a structured format and make it available as an open API to developers, fintechs or banks across the continent will provide data to power real-time credit and new financial products.

Additionally, the company found out in the course of building that consumers want to understand their finances more. This helps to navigate their way to financial wellness using credit and, later, more sophisticated products. On the other hand, financial institutions need the data to know what customer segments to expand to or increase their bottom line. Therefore, placing emphasis on the customers’ needs is one of the company’s core value propositions.  

“We’re hyper-focused on providing the highest real-time data coverage on credit-invisible customers, something that no other API is offering in our markets,” said Playford regarding the company’s consumer-centric play.

Some of Pngme’s customers include SimpleFi, Pavelon, ReadyCash, CashTopUp and Rigo Microfinance. In addition to this, the CEO says the company will integrate with large institutional banks next month.

Despite similarities to other API fintech startups in the region with Plaid-esque functionalities, Playford says Pngme intends to be different from the billion-dollar company.

For one, its focus on traditional channels like USSD data — which has the highest financial coverage on the continent — attests to that. “We’ve gone a step beyond just providing rails to actually building on top of the data. We also provide machine learning insights for our customers,” Rung said.

Also, the platform’s SDK collects user-permissioned data through a partner’s existing app using a one-click data-sharing feature. This data is served up through an easy to integrate API that delivers real-time financial data and alerts. With 300% month-on-month growth in the fourth quarter of 2020, Pngme forecasts the number of user-permissioned data profiles created on its platform to reach hundreds of thousands and millions by 2022.

Pngme’s revenue model is subscription and API-call driven. The platform has different tiers; developers can get a set number of free API calls with no subscription with the free tier. With the enterprise tier for banks and fintech, API calls are charged and can be discounted in some instances. Besides that, the company has a white-glove onboarding process where Playford says developers and startups can reach out to build specific use cases on the platform.

Since raising its pre-seed round, Pngme has been in stealth mode, working with a close group of customers. But with this seed round, the company is going full tilt. According to Pngme, the investment is being used to grow its Lagos and Nairobi teams, particularly the engineers and data scientists, and scaling its product for banks, mobile money operators and fintechs.

Lateral Capital, one of the investors in this round, also backs another API fintech startup in Mono. On the firm’s decision to invest in Pngme, managing partner, Rob Eloff said to TechCrunch that “over the past five years, we have seen a growing appreciation for the continent-wide challenge of providing accurate relational data for financial services customers across Africa. In Pngme, we are fortunate to have met a team with a unique solution to the root cause of financial exclusion in Africa, and a unique culture that spans the best of Africa and the U.S.”

For EchoVC Partners, a Lagos-based early-stage VC, it’s the remarkable job the Pngme team has done in building and delivering a unified financial data API platform for credit identity and access. This is according to Damilola Thompson, the VP and associate general counsel at the firm.

At the moment, Pngme is processing millions in data points per month. With that scale, Rung hopes it will lead to the creation of new technology and more sophisticated financial products.

“What I think is most exciting is the way mobile money leapfrogged any sort of traditional financial infrastructure. Similar to that is how we’re seeing open banking in the U.S. give way to so many new financial products for the end consumer. I hope that by providing forward-thinking open API layers, the same can happen in Africa.”

Northmill Bank, the Sweden-based challenger that has around 200,000 customers across three European countries, has raised around $30 million in new funding.

Leading the round is M2 Asset Management, the Swedish investment company controlled by Rutger Arnhult, and asset management firm Coeli. The injection of cash will be used for continued geographical expansion and to accelerate the development of new products. Notably, this will include plans to launch in 10 new markets as Northmill aims to step on the gas. Next stop, Norway.

As it stands, 2006-founded Northmill is available in Sweden, Norway and Finland, where it competes with incumbent banks with physical branches and the likes of Lunar, Revolut and Klarna (which operates as a bank in its home country of Sweden, and Germany).

More adjacent, another competitor is Anyfin, which is similar to Northmill’s “Reduce” product, which promises to help customers consolidate their existing loans/credit and lower their interest payments. “Our fastest-growing product and main driver today is Reduce, which lowers people’s interest on existing credits, part-payments and credit cards,” explains a Northmill spokesperson.

Founded nearly 15 years ago and originally operating as a credit provider, in 2019 Northmill secured a full banking license, regulated by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority. The bank employs 150 people and offers savings, credits, payments and insurances. More generally, it has taken a different and slower path than most of the newer crop of challengers in Europe, relying less on investment to fuel its growth and claims to have been profitable from nearly the get-go.

Cue statement from Rutger Arnhult, chairman of the board of M2 Assets Management: “Northmill Bank is already a profitable company with a proven and sustainable business model, which stands out among today’s tech investments. We have been following their journey for a while and have been impressed by the founders, as well as the company. The banking market is well on its way to change and the winners will be those who best can adapt to the new digital reality. For me, this is an investment in a tech company with long-term owners, who are just at the beginning of their journey. I see great growth potential in the bank.”

This afternoon Bumble priced its IPO at $43 per share, ahead of its raised IPO range of $37 to $39 per share.

Bumble filed to go public in mid-January, and offered up its first price range on February 2. That range, $28 to $30 per share, wound up coming up short. Bumble raised its price range to $37 to $39 per share earlier this week.

Before counting a possible underwriters’ option, Bumble raised $2.15 billion by selling 50,000,000 million shares in its public offering. The company will begin to trade tomorrow morning.

Bumble’s debut comes amidst a number of other 2021 offerings, including MetroMile’s SPAC-led public combination earlier this week. Other well-known companies are anticipated to list this year, including Coinbase and, perhaps, Robinhood.

The public offering of Bumble shares comes after a sustained period when one company, Match, was presumed to be the only possible public dating company. However, the smaller Bumble has proven that there is room for at least one more.

TechCrunch explored Bumble’s financial results here, if you’d like more.

Scalarr, a startup that says it uses machine learning to combat ad fraud, is announcing that it has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding.

The company was founded by CEO Inna Ushakova and CPO Yuriy Yashunin, who previously led the mobile marketing agency Zenna. Ushakova told me that while at Zenna, they realized that ad fraud had grown to the point that it posed a real threat to their business.

At the same time, the team wasn’t impressed by any of the existing anti-fraud solutions, so it built its own technology. Eventually, they shut down Zenna completely and moved the entire team over to Scalarr.

The startup’s products include AutoBlock, which is supposed to detect fraud before the advertiser bids on an ad, and DeepView, which is used by adtech platforms (including ad exchanges, demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms).

Scalarr says it can detect 60% more fraud than existing products on the market and that it saved its clients $22 million in ad fraud refunds in 2020. Ushakova attributed this in large part to the startup’s extensive use of machine learning technology.

She added that while large ad attribution companies are adding anti-fraud products, they aren’t the focus. And historically, companies have tried to detect fraud through a “rules-based approach,” where there’s a list of behaviors that suggest fraudulent activity — but no matter how quickly they create those rules, it’s hard to keep up with the fraudsters.

“Fraud is ever evolving,” Ushakova said. “It’s like a Tom and Jerry game, so they are ahead of you and we are trying to catch them.”

As for why machine learning works so much more effectively, she said, “Only ML could help you predict the next step, and with ML, you should be able to detect abnormalities that are not classified. Right after that, our analytics should be able to take a look at those abnormalities and decide whether something is statistically important.”

Scalarr’s Series A was led by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, with participation from TMT Investments, OTB Ventures and Speedinvest. Among other things, the company will use the money to expand its presence in Asia and continue developing the product.

Today, there are a number of website builders aimed at creators who want to point fans to a dedicated landing page from their social media profile. If you’ve spent any time on TikTok or Instagram, you’ve likely come across one of these simplified “link in bio”-style websites — like those hosted by Linktree, for example. A new startup called Beacons is now entering this market with the goal of making “link in bio” websites even more powerful. Its website builder offers creators an expanded set of tools to monetize their community, including through donations, sales, paid requests, affiliate shopping and more.

After signing up for the service, Beacons walks the user through a series of questions, many which can be answered with just a “yes” or “no.” For example, Beacons may ask the user if they want to accept donations or collect followers’ emails, if they make TikTok or YouTube videos, and which category they’re in, in terms of the content they create.

This information is used to set up their Beacons landing page with the right content sections, which Beacons calls “blocks.” At launch, Beacons offers around a dozen of these configurable blocks, like email and SMS collection modules, video embed blocks for TikTok or YouTube creators, music blocks for embedding a track or album, a Twitter block to embed a tweet or Twitter profile, and link blocks, similar to Linktree, among others.

There’s even a “friends” block, which is like a modern-day Myspace Top 8. This lets you link out to your friends on either Beacons, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok.

An area where Beacons differentiates itself from other “link in bio” website builders, however, is with its set of “monetization” blocks. Today, it has four tools for creators who want to generate revenue from their online presence. One of these is similar to Cameo, as it allows the creator to set up a menu of options to take fan requests for personalized content. For instance, fans could ask a fitness influencer to critique their routine, or they could pay to have their burning questions answered by someone they admire. The creator can then send out a personalized response either publicly or privately.

Other monetization blocks allow creators to accept donations or sell digital downloads — like e-books or paid video content, for instance.

The fourth, and perhaps most interesting, monetization block is a TikTok shopping feature. It allows creators to embed their TikTok videos where they recommend products directly on their Beacons website. From here, they can add affiliate links to the products in question, allowing them to directly generate revenue when fans purchase the items they’ve featured.

This particular feature comes at an opportune time. Today, TikTok is only beginning to formalize its plans around e-commerce. In a recent presentation to marketers, TikTok spoke of its plans to launch new online shopping tools that would allow brands to more directly reach TikTok’s younger audience. TikTok has also partnered with Shopify on social commerce, and has experimented with live video shopping, including with a holiday event hosted by Walmart.

But TikTok’s creators have already been driving shopping trends across categories like fashion, beauty, home décor, household items, toys and much more, to the point that “TikTok made me buy it,” has become a common excuse for the impulse purchases prompted by TikTok’s viral content. By allowing creators to now more directly and financially benefit from these trends is the next logical step.

The idea for Beacons comes from co-founders Neal Jean, Jesse Zhang, Greg Luppescu and David Zeng. Neal, Jesse and David met while in the PhD program at Stanford studying different areas of research, like machine learning and AI. Greg, meanwhile, did his Master’s at Stanford, then went on to work at Apple on the Apple Watch team.

Neal, Jesse and David had teamed up on Beacons and went through the Y Combinator Summer 2019 batch, iterating on ideas and pivoting the product several times. Some of those early concepts may eventually return — like a Shopify integration that would connect creators with brands selling on Shopify, for example.

The broader focus, however, had always been on helping creators make money, says Neal.

“Even before our current product, we were really focused on trying to help creators solve monetization,” he explains. “When we kind of made this mini-pivot into the more Linktree-like product, we thought about building features that can help creators actually generate revenue — which I don’t think Linktree or any of the existing incumbents in the space were doing. Even today, you can’t actually make any money through Linktree,” he notes.

Linktree, of course, is only one of many “link in bio” websites on the market today, which means Beacons still faces a lot of competition. Other rivals include Linkin.bio, Lnk.bio, Shorby, Tap.bio, Feedlink.io, Link in Profile, Milkshake, Campsite, bio.fm, url.bio and biolincs.me, for example.

Unlike some of its competitors, Beacons offers its tools for free and instead monetizes through a premium plan ($10/mo) that allows creators to use their own custom domain. It also makes money by taking a percentage of sales on the requests and sales blocks, which is either 9% on the free plan or 5% on the paid plan. This rev share doesn’t bring in much money today — only “hundreds” of dollars — but the team believes that will scale as the startup grows and gains a large user base.

“Our strategy is…to continue building out more of these different kinds of revenue streams for creators,” says Neal. “And as we do that, I think, the fraction of transactional revenue will become higher relative to the subscription revenue than it is today.”

Since launching in private beta last September, Beacons has seen 90,000 sign-ups and now has over 20,000 people who are considered active users of the product — most arrived in the last couple of months when the service began to roll out some of its newer features. So far, Beacons hasn’t done any paid marketing, with around 77% of new users coming to Beacons because they saw it on someone else’s profile.

The team raised a small, post-YC angel round of around $600,000 but is looking to fundraise in the future.

As a deep tech investor, I have often noticed that deep tech startups go through a different evolution cycle than a typical B2B or B2C company.

Accordingly, the challenges they face along the way are different — commercialization tends to be more complex and founders are often required to approach it differently.

Deep tech companies are usually built around a novel technology that offers significant advances over existing solutions in the market; often they create new markets that don’t yet exist. Taking these technologies from “lab to market” requires substantial capital carrying a much higher degree of risk than an average venture investment.

Typically, the underlying intellectual property (IP) of a deep tech company is unique and hard to recreate, resulting in a significant competitive advantage.

High risk, high reward

Since most deep tech companies are built around a fundamentally new and unproven technology, they carry higher risk. Typically, the tech has been tested in a lab or a research center and the early results are therefore often derived in a controlled environment. As a result, while building a product, founders are likely to encounter technical challenges along the way and won’t be able to eliminate the technology risk until later in the process.

By comparison, if a company is building a marketplace for used cars, for example, the technology risk is almost zero. Deep tech companies have the capability to create new markets with little competition and can replace existing technologies while fundamentally transforming an industry.

Microsoft, Nvidia, ARM, Intel and Google were all deep tech startups in the beginning. These companies will almost always require higher capital, carry higher risk and have longer time to return on investment.

However, if successful, they could deliver outsized returns over an average venture investment.

Technology-first approach

An obvious, but fundamental difference with deep tech companies is their technology-first approach. Typically, the founder has developed a novel technology or IP as part of their Ph.D. thesis or postdoc work and is in search for a real-world problem it can solve. Most startups, in general, pick an existing problem in a market they know well and develop a product that solves for that problem and they have a clear sense of the problem they need to solve.

Deep tech entrepreneurs take the opposite approach and as a result they often suffer from SISP (a solution in search of a problem), as Y Combinator calls it. Founders need to be aware of this and must be willing to pivot and repivot based on market and customer feedback. Investors should be prepared for this before backing the company and support the founders as they navigate through the challenges of building a successful deep tech company.

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

We’ve been having a tough time filling vacant engineering and other positions at our company and are planning to make a more concerted effort to recruit internationally.

Do you have suggestions for attracting workers from abroad?

— Proactive in Pacifica

Dear Proactive,

Yes, I have many suggestions on what you can do to support international talent interested in moving to the United States. Immigration is a great benefit for attracting the best and the brightest team members from around the globe. And providing immigration security through visa practices and green card programs supports retaining these valued individuals. Consider sponsoring international students and other qualified candidates in the upcoming H-1B lottery in March.

As it now stands, the H-1B lottery will be random this year, not pay-to-play. We anticipate the electronic lottery process will follow these dates:

March 9 at 9 a.m. PST: H-1B registration process opens.March 25 at 9 a.m. PDT: H-1B registration process closes.March 31: You’ll know if your H-1B beneficiaries were selected electronically in this initial round of the lottery.April 1: First date to file H-1Bs selected in the lottery to request a 10/1/2021 or later start date.June 30: Last anticipated day to complete filing of selected H-1B petitions in this initial round of the lottery.After June 30: Possibility of a second lottery for registrations submitted in March.

Through the H-1B and other proactive immigration-support measures you can take, your international team members will enjoy a greater sense of immigration security. This allows them to focus on their job rather than worrying about their immigration status. Here are my recommendations for drawing international talent from abroad and fostering productivity and loyalty.

Establish your company’s immigration policy

I recommend working with an experienced immigration attorney who can help your company develop an immigration policy based on your company’s core values, recruiting and immigration budget, and growth plan. Think of immigration as a benefit and a way to differentiate your company from others when recruiting top talent. Providing immigration benefits and immigration security goes a long way toward building team member loyalty and longevity.

For some companies, the best policy may be to have no policy, but it’s important to be deliberate about it and how that will affect your ability to make decisions and budget. For other companies, they implement a limited immigration policy to, for example, hire 40 engineers as soon as possible. Even with a decentralized workforce, a new recruit may be happy to move from Ukraine to Idaho even if your company is not based there.

Mobile analytics and market data company App Annie launched a new app today that CEO Ted Krantz said is built not for the analyst who’s “immersed in the data,” but rather the executive who needs “a much more elevated, top-down view.”

The biggest new piece of the company’s Pulse app is something called the App Annie Performance Score, which Krantz compares to a FICO score for mobile apps. The idea is to take an app’s user acquisition, engagement, monetization and sentiment and boil them down into a single score that benchmarks how the app is performing relative to the competition.

Krantz said that eventually, the performance store could become more customizable for each customer, so that  “you can tailor it to the metrics that matter to you.” The app also highlights any shifts in key app metrics and identifies potential causes, and it includes a newsfeed showing what’s happening to the apps and markets that a user follows.

The goal, Krantz added, is to provide executives with a quick overview of the data they need without requiring them to dig through it or wait for a report — especially as “mobile is becoming such an imperative.” It’s the team’s “aspiration” to create an app that executives check every day, though he’s not necessarily expecting that to happen initially.

The Pulse app is based on App Annie’s market-level data, so Krantz said it shouldn’t be affected by Apple’s upcoming privacy changes. At the same time, he acknowledged that the company’s broader goals of bringing together first-party and third-party data are starting too look “a little tricky.”

App Annie Pulse is currently available on iOS, with the company planning to launch an Android version in the second quarter of this year. And while the full features of Pulse are only available to paying App Annie customers, Krantz said there are also plans for “revamping the free side of the equation and make that a little more meaty.”

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Finch Capital, the early-stage fintech VC with a presence in London and Amsterdam, has raised a third fund. Targeting a final close of €150 million, the fund has already secured €85 million from LPs ready to deploy.

Out of Finch Capital “Europe III,” the VC will invest in fintech startups at the Series A and B stages, deemphasising its previous inclusion of seed. Specifically, it says it is on the lookout for “European category leaders,” and in particular those leveraging AI with €2-5 million in revenues — a company profile, the firm argues, that is currently seeing a funding gap. Noteworthy, in early 2020, Finch Capital added Google and DeepMind alum Steve Crossan as a venture partner.

As with its previous funds, Finch plans to back 15-20 European startups over the next three years, and candidly reveals it’s targeting liquidity (i.e. exits) “3-5 years post investment”.

“Although we have a relatively good hit rate on seed deals, the overall impact on the fund is small, as we have made the best returns on deals with €2-5 million in revenues,” Radboud Vlaar, MD Finch Capital, tells me. “This plays to our sweet spot as a team, to leverage our network to help companies to scale, which is harder in the earlier stages when the companies look for product market fit”.

On a potential funding gap, Vlaar says there is a lot of early-stage capital going to companies with €0.5-2 million in revenue, with the aim to get to €5 million and beyond in revenue quickly. And there is also a lot of capital chasing companies with €5-10 million in revenue. “In reality, B2B takes time and many companies are not growing linearly,” he observes. “They might have to adapt the team, strategy etc., on the way to cracking the market.

In addition, most of the U.S. or European growth firms prefer to see signs of a “winner takes all” market, which in Europe, due to its fragmented landscape, is more the exception than the rule, with a greater proportion of €100-500 million exits.

This means that Finch is seeing promising companies with “great products” that are facing a funding gap at €2-5 million in revenue, which the VC aims to plug. “Our strategy is fairly dynamic in terms of ownership but specific in terms of theme: we can aspire for 30-40% in certain companies as well as the more traditional stake of 15-25%,” adds Vlaar.

Meanwhile, Finch’s current portfolio spans pure-play fintech, regtech and insurtech, and includes Trussle, Fourthline, Goodlord, Grab, Hiber, BUX, Twisto and Zopa. Exits include Salviol and Cermati, plus two exits currently unannounced or in progress.

In 2020 the firm launched “Flowrence,” its machine learning tool to help source and manage deal flow. Finch says that over the last SIX months, 20% of its shortlisted deals were sourced by Flowrence, especially useful during the current pandemic.