May
07

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dave Hornik of August Capital (Part 4) - Sramana Mitra

Twinco Capital, a Madrid and Amsterdam-based startup making it easier to access supply chain finance, has raised €3 million in funding.

Leading the round is Spanish VC fund Mundi Ventures, with participation from previous backer Finch Capital and several unnamed angels. Twinco Capital also has a debt facility with the Spanish investment bank EBN Banco de Negocios, which is common for any type of lending company.

Founded in 2016 by Sandra Nolasco and Carmen Marin Romano, Twinco Capital offers a supply chain finance solution that includes purchase order funding. To do this, it integrates with large corporates on the purchase side and then funds suppliers by paying up to 60% of the purchase order value upfront and the remainder immediately upon delivery.

The entire process is digital, promising a quick decision and fast deployment of funds, and is powered by Twinco’s supply chain analytics and the data it is able to access by partnering with both sides of the supply chain.

“The financing of global supply chains is expensive and inefficient, the burden of the cost is mostly borne by the suppliers and in particular by those that are SMEs in emerging markets,” explains Twinco Capital co-founder and CEO Sandra Nolasco.

“Take any global supply chain, such as apparel, automotive, electronics etc. Exporters in countries like Bangladesh, China or Vietnam that have been supplying European companies for years, with stable commercial relationships. However, their creditworthiness is still measured only on the basis of annual financials, making access to competitive liquidity a major obstacle for growth”.

By having visibility on both sides, including upcoming orders, Twinco provides liquidity to the suppliers “from purchase order to final invoice payment”.

“We do that by analyzing supply chain data – the performance of the suppliers, the network effects between common suppliers and buyers (and many more data points I am not allowed to mention!),” says the Twinco CEO. “In short, using advanced data analytics we can better assess, price and significantly mitigate risk. The good news is that the more transactions we fund, the more suppliers and buyers we add, the more robust is our risk assessment. We believe there is a strong network effect”.

To that end, Twinco makes money by charging a “discount fee” for each purchase order it funds. “Since default rates are a fraction of that fee, we can unlock significant value,” says Nolasco.

Meanwhile, the fintech is also unlocking an asset class for investors and competes with local banks that are much more manual and don’t benefit from increased visibility via network effects. Nolasco says that to ensure interests are aligned, the company uses a portion of equity to also invest in the purchase orders it funds.

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May
07

Printify, a new marketplace for custom printing, raises $1 million seed

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. The good news is that we managed to fit it all into a single episode this week. The bad news is that that means the show is pretty long. Sorry about that!

So, what took us so much time to get through? All of this:

Robinhood raised $3.4 billion after its trading hiccups, and we also chatted over what we know about the company’s Q4 2020 numbers. In short, the company is growing nicely.RPA is big and UiPath is cashing in on the trend, raising $750 million at a $35 billion valuation. That’s a lot of cash for very little dilution.Databricks raised $1 billion at a $28 billion valuation, after reaching $425 million in ARR. The company’s growth is hot, but its valuation may be even hotter.Bumble is going public, so we chatted about its results, and how founder- and venture-friendly the dating market may be in the future.In a big exit for the Boston startup ecosystem, alcohol delivery platform Drizly has sold to Uber for $1.1 billion.Sticking to the alcohol beat, Danny talked us through the Vivino news, describing himself as a wine sophisticate with a distaste for sommeliers, which is just about the most Danny thing he has ever said. But the company really is neat.Divvy homes raised a $110 million Series C to make it easier to buy a home, after financing five times as many homes in 2020 as it did in pre-pandemic times.And then there were some neat early-stage rounds to chat about: Balance raising $5.5 million to bring B2B payments to the modern world, Alloy Automation raising $4 million for e-commerce automation and Beam raising $9.5 million to build a new browser.Make sure to read Natasha’s profile of the new Expectul CEO here.And, we closed on some Miami news.

And somehow we still have another entire day before the week is up! So much for 2021 calming down after 2020’s storms.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple PodcastsOvercastSpotify and all the casts.

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Apr
29

Bootstrapping Course: Welcome - Sramana Mitra

Robotic process automation (RPA) has found a strong foothold in the world of enterprise IT through its effective use of AI and other technology to help automate repetitive tasks to free up people to focus on more complicated work. Today, a startup called Infinitus is coming out of stealth to apply this concept to the world of healthcare — specifically, to speed up the process of voice communication between entities in the fragmented U.S. healthcare industry.

Infinitus uses “voice RPA” to become the machine-generated voice that makes calls from, say, healthcare providers or pharmacies to insurance companies to go through a series of questions (directed at humans at the other end) that typically need to be answered before payments are authorized and other procedures can take place. Those conversations are then ingested into Infinitus’s platform to parse them for relevant information that is input into the right fields to trigger whatever actions need to happen as a result of the calls.

The startup is coming out of “stealth mode” today but it has been around for a couple of years already and has signed on a number of large healthcare companies as customers — for example, the wholesale drug giant AmerisourceBergen. And it is contributing pro bono its technology to public health efforts around the current coronavirus pandemic, with one organization currently using it to automate a mass calling system across several states to get a better idea of vaccine availability to help connect the earliest doses with the most vulnerable groups that need them the fastest.

It made 75,000 calls on behalf of 12,000 providers in January alone.

Infinitus’ public launch is also coming with a funding kicker: it has picked up $21.4 million in Series A funding from a group of big-name investors to build the business.

The round is being co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue, with Gradient Ventures (Google’s early-stage AI fund), Quiet Capital, Firebolt Ventures and Tau Ventures also participating, along with individual investments from a selection of executives across the worlds of AI and big tech: Ian Goodfellow, Gokul Rajaram, Aparna Chennapragada and Qasar Younis.

Coatue is shaping up to be a huge investor in the opportunity in RPA. Earlier this week, it emerged that it co-led the latest investment in UiPath, one of the leaders in the space, having been a part of previous rounds as well.

“Coatue is proud to have led the Series A in Infinitus,” says Yanda Erlich, a general partner at Coatue. “We are big believers in the transformative power of RPA and Enterprise Automation. We believe Infinitus’ VoiceRPA solution enables healthcare organizations to automate previously costly and manual calls and faxes and empowers these organizations to see benefits from end-to-end process automation.”

The problem that Infinitus is addressing is the fact that healthcare, in particular in the privatized U.S. market, has a lot of time-consuming and often confusing red tape when it comes to getting things done. And a lot of the most immediate pain points of that process can be found in voice calls, which are the primary basis of critical communications between different entities in the ecosystem.

Voice calls are used to initiate most processes, whether it’s to obtain critical information, follow up on a form or previous communication, or pass on some data, or of course provide clearance for a payment.

There are 900 million calls of these kinds made in the U.S., with the average length of each call 35 minutes, and with the average healthcare professional who works in an administrative role to make those calls dedicating some 4.5 hours each day to being on the phone.

All of this ultimately adds to the exorbitant costs of healthcare services in the U.S. (and likely some of those inscrutable lines of fees that you might see on bills), not to mention delays in giving care. (And those volumes underscore just what a small piece Infinitus touches today.)

Co-founder and CEO Ankit Jain — a repeat entrepreneur and ex-Googler who held senior roles in engineering and was a founding partner at Gradient at the search giant — told TechCrunch in an interview that the idea for Infinitus first occurred to him a couple of years ago, when he was still at Gradient.

“We were starting to see a lot of improvements in voice communications technology, turning text into speech and speech into text. I realised that it would soon be possible to automate phone calls where a machine could carry out a full conversation with someone.”

Indeed, around that time, Google itself had launched Duplex, a service built around the same principle, but aimed at consumers, for people to book appointments, restaurant tables and other services.

He determined that just being able to talk like a human and understand natural language wasn’t the only issue, and not even the main one, in enterprises applications like healthcare environments, which rely on specific jargon and particular scenarios that are probably less rather than more like actual human interactions.

“I thought, if someone wanted to build this for healthcare it would change it,” he said. And so he decided to do just that.

Jain — who co-founded the company with Shyam Rajagopalan, the CTO, who was previously at Snap, and also worked with Jain at his previous startup Quettra, as well as at Google — said that Infinitus is using public cloud speech-to-text systems, but the natural language processing and flows to triage and use the information gained from the conversations are built in-house.

The specialization of the content and interactions potentially is also one reason why Infinitus might not worry so soon about cannibalization from bigger RPA players, at least for now.

However, Jain notes that much of the tech is vertical-agnostic: that is both an argument for Infinitus to expand into other areas beyond healthcare, but also a sign that others could potentially build something to compete with it.

The fact that services like these — the new generation of robocalls, as it were — can sound “lifelike”, like actual humans, has been something that consumer versions have aspired to, although that hasn’t always worked out for the best. Duplex, for example, in its early days came under criticism for how its excellent quality might actually be deceptive, because it wasn’t clear to users they were speaking to a machine logging their responses in a data harnessing exercise. Jain notes that Infinitus is actually intentionally choosing voices that sound like bots to help make that clear to those taking the calls.

He said that this also “helps reduce the level of chatter” on the conversation and keeps the person speaking focused on business.

On that front, it seems that while Infinitus works like other voice RPA services, connected up with live, human agents who can take over calls if they get tricky, that hasn’t really needed to be used.

“Today we don’t need to triage with humans because we see high enough success rates with our system,” he said.

You might wonder, why hasn’t the healthcare industry just moved past voice altogether? Surely there are ways of exchanging data between entities so that calls could become obsolete? Turns out that at least for now that isn’t something that will change quickly, Jain said.

Part of it is because the fragmentation in the market means it’s hard to implement new standards across the board, covering hundreds of insurance payers, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical groups, billing and collections organisations and more.

And when it comes down to it, a phone call ends up being the easiest route for many admins who might have to typically deal with 100 different payment companies and other entities, each with a different logging mechanism.

“It’s a lot of cognitive load, so it’s often easier to just pick up the phone,” Jain said.

Bringing in voiceRPA like Infinitus’s is part of that long haul to update the bigger system.

“By automating one side we are showing the other side that it can be done,” Jain said. “Right now, there are just too many players and getting them to agree on one standard is a gargantuan task, so trying to win one small piece after another is how it’s done. It should not be voice, but by the time standards bodies agree on something else, the world has moved on.”

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Apr
29

Wise locks down $5.7 million to scale its challenger bank designed for small businesses

As startups have stayed private longer and liquidity has become harder to secure for early employees and investors, more and more shareholders have looked for ways to unload their shares to others. All the way back in 2011, companies like SecondMarket were seeing nine-figures’ worth of shares being traded on their secondary share platforms.

That wave of liquidity startups ran into two problems: One was regulatory, and the other was a lack of company information about cap tables and that company’s current financial picture. Stock buyers were essentially flying blind while buying into companies, which some investors were more than willing to do, but that blindness limited the market demand for secondary shares significantly.

Carta is hoping that its base as the cap table management solution of choice for many startups will allow it to parlay that position into a new service it has called CartaX. We’ve heard rumblings about the service for more than a year now, but according to a new blog post by founder Henry Ward, it looks like the product is exiting beta and starting to operate in the real world with real money.

Yesterday, Carta sold just shy of $100 million of its shares across 1,484 market orders to 414 participants through its own CartaX product at a price of $6.9 billion. Ward says that is up from the $3.1 billion valuation of the company’s Series F round from last year.

As a comparison, secondary transactions typically involve secondary buyers who negotiate these deals manually one-on-one with individual sellers. What makes CartaX interesting is that it could allow for much faster and more frequent secondary sales at companies based on the same sort of computerized trading models that currently power the stock market.

Liquidity is a huge issue for startups, and while CartaX is just getting going, it fulfills a key need for many participants in the startup ecosystem, and it’s a key financial product to watch as it expands in 2021.

Meanwhile, revenues are looking good at Carta these days. According to an article earlier today by Zoë Bernard and Cory Weinberg at The Information, Carta has an ARR of $150 million. That’s a 46x revenue multiple if all the numbers are correct, which these days is good if not great for SaaS companies approaching the public markets.

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Apr
25

Colors: Basque Hermitage, Cliff - Sramana Mitra

Virtual health and wellness platforms have grown increasingly popular throughout the pandemic, but a new startup wants to focus that effort exclusively on senior citizens. Bold, a digital health and wellness service, plans to prevent chronic health problems in older adults through free and personalized exercise programs. Co-founded by Amanda Rees and her partner Hari Arul, Bold picked up $7 million this week in seed funding led by Julie Yoo of Silicon Valley-based Andreessen Horowitz.

Rees said in an interview that the idea for Bold came from time she spent caring for her grandmother, helping her through health challenges like falls. “I kept thinking about solutions we could build to keep someone healthier longer, rather than waiting for until they have a fall or something else goes off the rails to intervene,” she said. Rees started Bold to use what she’d learned from her own experience in dance and yoga to help her grandmother practice maintaining balance to prevent future falls. “My passion really was around ways to sort of widen the aperture and make these solutions more accessible and built for older people.”

The member experience is pretty straightforward. Users fill out some brief fitness information on the web-based platform, outlining their goals and current baseline. From that information, Bold creates a personalized program that ranges from a short, seated Tai Chi class once a week, to cardio and strength classes meeting multiple times each week. “The idea is to really meet a member where they are, and then through our programming, help them along their journey of doing the types of exercises that are going to have the most immediate benefit for them,” said Rees.

Bold’s funding round comes at a time of concern around ballooning healthcare expenses for older populations, and a focus on how to reduce these costs for both current and future generations. While falls alone aren’t necessarily complex medical incidents, they have the potential to lead to fractures and other serious injuries. Bold’s preventative approach to falls is a more active solution than necklace or bracelet monitors that send a signal to emergency services when they detect a fall. And by offering virtual programs, they can help at-risk older populations engage in exercise while avoiding potential COVID-19 exposure at gyms.

Research shows that this works. Even simple, low-intensity exercise can improve balance and strength enough to reduce the incidence of falls, which is currently the leading cause of injury and injury death among older adults.

Fewer injuries would mean less need for medical care, which would lead to money saved for hospitals and health insurers alike. That’s why in addition to their seed funding, Bold has plans to start rolling out partnerships with Medicare Advantage organizations and risk-bearing providers, which will help make their exercise programs available to users for free.

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Apr
25

Bootstrapping to Exit: Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia (Part 6) - Sramana Mitra

The recent Databricks funding round, a $1 billion investment at a $28 billion valuation, was one of the year’s most notable private investments so far.

For Databricks signaled its IPO readiness by disclosing to TechCrunch last year that it had scaled its revenue run rate from $200 million to $350 million in a year, so the new capital looked like the capstone on its private fundraising before an eventual public debut.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

But I did have a few questions, starting with the price of the round.

At a $28 billion valuation and ARR of $425 million, Databricks is valued at around 66x top line. That’s steep, if not the highest number we can dredge up on the public markets. Of course, for Databricks shareholders, seeing the value of their stock rise so quickly is hardly a bad thing. They are hardly going to complain about having more paper wealth.

But what about the investor perspective? Does the price really make sense? The Exchange caught up with Battery Ventures’ Dharmesh Thakker earlier this week to discuss a number of things, one of which was Databricks’ round and pricing. Thakker is named in the Databricks Series D funding announcement, which brought Battery into the company.

What was surprising about our conversation was not that Thakker was bullish on Databricks — a company that he and his firm have backed since its $140 million, 2017 round when the company was worth just under $1 billion. What surprised me was that he thinks its new $28 billion valuation might be a little low.

Intriguing, yeah? So this morning for both of us, I’ve pulled out quotes from our chat to help explain how Thakker views the market for Databricks, unicorns at scale more broadly through the lens of risk-adjusted investing, and the scale of the market some unicorns are playing in.

At the close, we’ll remind ourselves what Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi told TechCrunch when we asked him the same question. Let’s go!

Databricks at $28 billion

Here’s how the valuation part of my chat with the Battery Ventures’ investor went down:

The Exchange: I want to talk about Databricks, because I spoke to [CEO] Ali [Ghodsi] yesterday about this round, and hot damn, it’s a lot of money at a valuation that is roughly 64x ARR, give or take. I don’t understand the price, and I know it’s a boring thing to talk about. [It’s a] great company, I get their market, I’ve talked to them a bunch, I know their revenue numbers. [But] I don’t understand the price, and I was hoping you could tell me why I’m being too conservative.

Dharmesh Thakker:  I, for what it’s worth, think [the price] fair. If anything, I think it is on the lower end — he could have done better, frankly. But I think it comes down to three major things, right?

One is the addressable market. Just think about the addressable market of data. If there’s a trillion dollars spent in software or technology, I think you and I would be both hard pressed to say, almost all of that [isn’t] influenced by some data-oriented decisioning. Whether it’s digital transformation, whether it’s analytics, data is everywhere. So the TAM is massive … I think you and I both agree on that, whether it is $20 billion or $80 billion — it’s massive.

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Apr
25

Rendezvous Online Recording from March 17, 2020 - Sramana Mitra

Jessica Li Contributor
Jessica is on the growth marketing team at Zageno, a multi-vendor, online marketplace for life science products, and is head of content at Elpha, a Y Combinator-backed community of 40K+ women in tech.

Fundraising is challenging, especially for deep tech founders who need to get investors excited about a complex technology, a complex sales cycle and a complex risk profile.

As a former investor and current angel investor, I have met thousands of founders, many in the deep tech space.

Based on my experience, here’s how to avoid making the most common mistakes deep tech founders make when pitching investors:

Work on your storytelling

Highlight your big vision

Early-stage investors are in the business of funding dreams. They chose to be early-stage investors because they love hearing about new ideas and enthralling futures. They deliberately are not investment bankers or accountants because they do not want to constantly pour over endless spreadsheets or dive deep into financial models. Similarly, they are not operators because they do not want to spend time figuring out the intricacies of a supply chain or a marketing campaign or the configuration of a product component.

Make your pitch tailored to what excites venture capital investors and avoid what does not.

So make your pitch tailored to what excites venture capital investors and avoid what does not. Keep the financial model details and the warehouse system logistics information to your Appendix. You have it in case anyone wants to dive in deeper, but your core presentation should be focused on your biggest, most bullish hopes for the company seven to 10 years from now. Dedicate multiple slides to painting the picture of what society would look like should you meet all your intended milestones as a company.

Underscore the impact

As a deep tech company, your differentiation is in your intellectual property. However, investors care less about the “what” and much more about the “so what.” Investors are less interested in the intricacies of your technology and more interested in what impact it can create.

Formulate your slides to focus on answering questions like, “What can people or companies do as a result of your technology?” and “How will people save time, money and lives with your product?”

Put your presentation to the “grandma” test. Would your grandmother be able to understand and be excited about everything you share? Investor pitch meetings are not dissertation defenses. You are being evaluated on your potential for impact rather than the intricate details of your research. The best way to succeed in this evaluation framework is to ensure that everything you share is relevant and exciting to a diverse audience of even nontechnical folks.

Try to reach hearts and minds

Five million people are a statistic, but one person is a story. When people read data on massive populations of people, they conceptually understand the implications but only on a logical level, not an emotional one. When pitching, you want to reach the hearts of investors.

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Sep
27

2 of Amazon's businesses are going to boost its stock by another 25%, analyst says (AMZN)

Meet moka.care, a French startup that has built several services that should help you improve your psychological well-being. The company sells its solution to employers directly. They can then offer access to moka.care to their employees.

The startup raised a $3 million (€2.5 million) funding round from Singular, the VC firm founded by former Alven partners Jeremy Uzan and Raffi Kamber. A long list of business angels are also participating in today’s round, such as Nicolas Dessaigne (Algolia), Ning Li (Made.com, Typology), Florian Douetteau (Dataiku), Céline Lazorthes (Leetchi, MangoPay), Pierre Dubuc (OpenClassrooms), Marc-Antoine de Longevialle (LeCab), Adrien Ledoux (JobTeaser), Roxanne Varza (Station F), Thibault Lamarque (CASTALIE) and Côme Fouques (Indy).

Moka.care believes that companies aren’t doing enough when it comes to mental health. Many companies give you a phone number and tell you that you can call that number to get mental support. But few employees actually call those helplines.

That’s why the startup is taking a completely different approach. The most important principle is that people are looking for different things. And you don’t necessarily know what you’re looking for when you’re feeling down. When you first contact moka.care, the company spends roughly half an hour talking with you to understand what you’re looking for.

There are three main options after that. Moka.care could send you some recommendations for a practitioner — it can be a psychologist, a certified coach or a licensed therapist. Moka.care also organizes group sessions around a specific topic. It could be focused on remote work, work-life balance, self-confidence, etc. Finally, moka.care also provides content on some of those topics. You can access that content and learn more about yourself.

With this granular approach, the company hopes it can tackle mental health conditions before it’s too late — you don’t want to recommend a therapist when an employee is already suffering from excessive stress, fatigue or burnout.

Employees don’t pay for the first sessions as it’s part of moka.care’s plans. This way, the barrier to entry should be much lower for employees. Of course, if you want to book further appointments, you’ll have to pay at some point.

For employers, moka.care tries to lower the barrier to entry as well. Clients agree on a per-employee-per-month subscription plan based on some usage rate. If your employees end up using moka.care more than that, you don’t pay more. If your employees don’t use the service at all and you’re overpaying, the startup pays you back.

There are 30 companies currently using moka.care — it represents thousands of employees that could potentially create an account and access the service. The startup currently works with around 50 practitioners.

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Sep
27

The SEC alleges that Elon Musk's $420 price point was a weed reference to amuse his girlfriend (TSLA)

Flux, the London fintech that has built a technology platform for banks and merchants to power itemised digital receipts and more, has seen its lengthy pilot with Barclays bear fruit.

Announced formally today — but actually quietly rolled out a few months ago — Flux-powered digital receipts are now available as an opt-in for all U.K. Barclays debit card holders within the bank’s main mobile banking app. Previously, the functionality was only available within the Barclays Launchpad app, which is available for customers that want to try out experimental or upcoming features.

Early last year, Barclays announced that it has invested in Flux, taking a minority stake, so the strengthening of its partnership isn’t too much of a surprise. Flux also went through the Techstars-powered Barclays accelerator in its very early days. However, not all corporate accelerators lead to great outcomes as corporates are notoriously risk-adverse. This one certainly wasn’t rushed but it’s meaningful regardless, giving Flux a major shot in the arm in reaching mainstream banking customers beyond the existing challenger bank partnerships it has forged.

“Customers who pay using their Barclays debit card for future in store purchases at H&M, shoe retailer schuh and food outlets, which include Just Eat and Papa Johns, will see their receipts sent automatically to their app after making a purchase. They can then easily and securely view their receipts whenever they need by tapping on the transaction,” says Barclays. Crucially, although opt-in, Barclays customers will receive a prompt to set up digital receipts when they purchase items from retailers currently on-boarded to Flux.

Founded in 2016 by former early employees at Revolut, Flux bridges the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up on your bank statement or mobile banking app. Off the back of this, it can also power loyalty schemes and card-linked offers, as well as give merchants much deeper POS analytics via aggregated and anonymised data on consumer behaviour, such as which products are selling best in unique baskets.

On the banking side, along with Barclays, Flux has partnered with challenger banks Starling and Monzo. Once banking customers link their account to the service, Flux delivers digital receipts (and where available rewards and loyalty) for transactions at Flux retailer partners.

Longer term, Flux wants to become a standard for the interchange of item level digital receipt data — and the proprietary platform that powers that standard — but has always faced a chicken-and-egg problem: It needs bank integrations to sign up merchants and it needs merchant integrations to sign up banks. Barclays going live properly is another significant turn in the upstart’s flywheel.

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  37 Hits
Sep
25

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff seems to have had a big change of heart on Apple CEO Tim Cook, and thanked him publicly for his activism (CRM, AAPL)

Werewolf: The Apocalypse -- Earthblood does a good job of making your feel like a powerful werewolf, even if the stealth isn't that good.Read More

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  49 Hits
Apr
28

Run A Virtual 5k With Me On Sunday May 3rd

IBM predicts commercial applications for quantum computing within the next 5 years as hardware continues to advance.Read More

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  46 Hits
Apr
28

10 things in tech you need to know today

Sony's expecting its most profitable year ever for PlayStation, and that is despite traditionally losing money during console launches.Read More

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  91 Hits
Apr
27

$4 million richer, Walrus.ai has a pitch for companies looking for QA-testing tools

Kite, the ML-based code completion assistant, launched an enterprise-grade Team Server today to accelerate developer teams' workflows.Read More

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  51 Hits
Apr
27

Rendezvous Online Recording from April 21, 2020 - Sramana Mitra

Gearbox Entertainment CEO Randy Pitchford said that selling his company will be good for both gamers and employees.Read More

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  60 Hits
Apr
27

Smart ring maker Motiv acquired by ‘digital identity’ company

Hitman 3's Dartmoor stage is filled with mystery, but while you might have solved it one way, multiple other possibilities exist as well.Read More

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  26 Hits
Apr
28

Rendezvous Online Recording from April 14, 2020 - Sramana Mitra

Researchers at Tilburg University and the University of Maryland claim that AI-translated text is less 'rich' than human translations.Read More

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  31 Hits
Apr
28

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ritesh Agarwal of CerraCap Ventures (Part 2) - Sramana Mitra

Linux Foundation takes control of open source Magma project from Facebook to advance adoption of 5G wireless networks.Read More

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  33 Hits
Apr
29

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Elly Truesdell of Almanac Insights (Part 3) - Sramana Mitra

Microsoft today launched Custom Neural Voice in limited preview, a service that allows customers to create custom voices using AI.Read More

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  25 Hits
Sep
20

Here's everything Amazon announced at its huge September event (AMZN)

Sony is selling PS5 hardware at a loss and component costs could rise as memory and processor demand remains high.Read More

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  22 Hits
May
04

Chinese robotics company UBTECH gets $820 million in funding

Embedded finance — the idea of offering financial products where customers are already congregating via white label solutions and APIs – isn’t an entirely new concept. In fact, in one form or another, such as point of sale credit, the concept has existed for years and long before Silicon Valley venture capital firm and media company (ha!) Andreessen Horowitz made it a thing. However, fuelled by cloud technology and a plethora of new fintech and Banking-as-a-Service startups, there is no doubt the embedded finance trend is accelerating.

The latest company to declare its hand is Berlin-based Banxware, which offers embedded finance in the form of loans for SMEs, in partnership with marketplaces, payments providers, and others. It launched in December and today is disclosing that it has raised €4 million in seed funding.

Leading the round is Force over Mass, and VR Ventures. They are joined by HTGF, and private investors in banking, payment and e-commerce.

Banxware says it will use the investment to develop and grow its embedded white label financial services offering, and expand its team. In addition to lending, the startup will also soon offer card-based products and other financial services.

Banxware’s tech and infrastructure enables any company to offer loans and other banking services to SME customers. The idea is to act as the link between banks (lenders), digital platforms, and merchants. Banks get access to hard to reach SME customers. Platforms, such as online marketplaces, can up-sell financial products beyond their core offering. And merchants benefit from speedy access to working capital.

“SMEs have a hard time to access capital when needed, especially when they are less than three years old or do not have the most pristine credit history,” explains co-founder and CEO Jens Röhrborn. “On top of this, loan applications, i.e. loan decisions and loan payout, still take several weeks in most cases.

“More and more sellers and merchants are using digital platforms through which they sell their products or process their digital payments. By using the recent historic data on these merchants provided by the platforms, we can lend against their future revenues”.

This has seen Banxware build an instant lending tool that includes AML and KYC compliance, and a scoring engine that analyzes historic platform data and data from third party providers, such as account information providers and external scoring services. The promise is an instant loan decision and loan payout, “all in less than 15 minutes”.

“On the lending side, we work with both balance sheet lenders and lending vehicles with whom we pre-agree on lending terms and loan decision criteria and on whose behalf we execute the loan decision,” says Röhrborn. “Merchants repay their loan in such a way that platforms subtract a certain percentage of the future merchant payouts”.

Röhrborn says the company’s instant lending tool is “only the beginning” and that Banxware will develop additional embedded financial services and expand internationally.

Meanwhile, the German fintech currently generates revenue by charging a one time fee for each loan that is processed through its platform and via a one off customization fee.

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