The media licensing business is a massive market, but much of the work involved is still handled manually through emails and spreadsheets. A startup called Flowhaven is working to change that. The company, which has now closed on $16 million in Series A funding, helps brands to manage their licensing partnerships, including the account management aspects, the individual product information, the financial information, and more.

The new round was led by Sapphire Sport, the part of Sapphire Ventures that specializes in sports, media and lifestyle brands. Existing investors Global Founders Capital and Icebreaker.vc also returned, bringing Flowhaven’s total raise to date to $21.5 million.

The idea to modernize the media licensing business comes from a founder who had direct experience in the industry.

Flowhaven CEO Kalle Törmä previously worked on licensing for the Angry Birds mobile game franchise while at Rovio, starting back in 2012. While there, he created the global blueprint for managing the merchandising side of the business, which later expanded to include partnerships for the Angry Birds Star Wars and Angry Birds Transformers games.

“It was evident that the workflows were very broken — from managing the commerce, or the agreements, the product approvals, and financials. The information was very siloed. Also, there were a lot of things that fell through the cracks,” explains Törmä.

In addition, it was time consuming and difficult to pull together data that would allow management to understand how the business was doing.

The challenges Törmä faced at Rovio led him to understand what would be needed to create a solution like Flowhaven — particularly, the difficulty of managing tricky licensing workflows and timetables through manual methods.

He left Rovio in 2016 and founded Flowhaven, where he’s joined by university pal and CCO Timo Olkkola, whose background is in sales.

Today, the Flowhaven licensing management platform automates the brand licensing workflow process, including the planning and strategy, account and agreement management, content distribution, design approvals, royalty reporting, and more.

It also helps to keep teams on schedules that can often be tight in the media and entertainment businesses.

“There’s always a timeframe that they follow — whether it’s a film release or game release,” Törmä says. “There are lot of moving pieces in closing all the agreements and then moving the products through the approvals [so when], let’s say, a film comes out, a couple of months prior, the merchandise hits the retail shelves,” he says.

“If you don’t have the products approved and ready, then you didn’t really seize the momentum,” Törmä adds.

Flowhaven pitches that its software isn’t just saving time, it also saves money. The company estimates that licensing professionals waste 50 hours per month at $70 per hour on work that could be automated. This equals approximately $42,000 per year wasted for a single professional.

As of its new funding, Flowhaven’s software-as-a-service platform has been adopted by close to 100 companies, ranging from smaller business to Fortune 100 companies in markets like media, entertainment, sports, fashion, and by corporate and consumer brands Though some customer names can’t be shared, Flowhaven says it’s working with Nintendo, LAIKA, Games Workshop, Acamar Films, and Crunchyroll.

Its pricing is based on how many users will be on the platform. This doesn’t include those with guest access outside the organization, who are always free of charge.

The company also reports 400% year-over-year growth and says it’s expecting that trend to continue, but declines to share its current revenue figures.

The additional funding will help Flowhaven fuel its growth, expand its product and platform, and aid in hiring, Törmä says. Today, the company’s staff is split between offices in Helsinki, London and L.A. but says it’s seeing the most growth in the latter two.

In terms of the product itself, the plan is to further develop Flowhaven’s analytics and speed up the process of exchanging information between the brand owners and their licensees.

Already in 2021, Flowhaven is growing. It began the year with a team of 30 and is now 43 people. Throughout the year, Törmä says the team will grow to nearly 100.

Cowrywise, a Nigerian fintech startup that offers digital wealth management and financial planning solutions, has raised $3 million in pre-Series A funding. Quona Capital led the round as Tsadik Foundation, Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia, and a syndicate of Nigerian angel investors locally and in the diaspora participated. The company previously raised more than $500,000 through a combination of equity financing and grants.

The idea for Cowrywise came when CEO Razaq Ahmed was an investment analyst with Meristem covering equities and making recommendations to retail and wealth management clients. He noticed that existing investment management firms in the country focused on the top 1 percent. They couldn’t scale investment products to millions of Nigerians primarily due to their restricting size.

Banks, though, have been able to make progress on this front when compared to investment firms. They expanded heavily in the mid and late 2000s to accumulate the branch networks they have today where there are about 45 million unique accounts in Nigeria.

But over the years, the quality of bank services in terms of savings and investments has drastically reduced. With interest rates hovering around 3-5% per annum, what Nigerians are now familiar with is to send and receive money via their bank accounts, and use debit cards for withdrawals leaving the market still underserved when it comes to investment products.

For this reason, Ahmed, alongside Edward Popoola as CTO, founded Cowrywise in 2017 to solve this problem. With Cowrywise, they hoped to democratise access to savings and investment products to the growing demography of underserved Nigerian millennials and the middle class. 

“Wealth management had been strange to many Nigerians because the existing players were not built for the mass market. That has always been a problem we felt required a solution,” Ahmed told TechCrunch.

When they launched, the founders wanted to leverage the telecom industry’s reach to drive its investment products to millions of subscribers. But it didn’t turn out as planned, as the project became expensive to undertake and also, the telcos requested cutthroat prices and commissions. 

The company switched focus, deciding to build upon existing payment infrastructure companies like Flutterwave and Paystack. The first facet of products launched to the market were savings-related products backed by fixed income instruments like treasury bills. Ahmed claims that these products yield better interests at 10%-15%, more substantial than what banks offered.

Following that was the introduction of its mutual funds’ products. Currently, the company has 19 different mutual funds and at least 20% of the total mutual funds in the country are listed on its platform. Ahmed claims this is the largest portfolio of mutual funds a single entity has in the country.

These assets cut across five investment partners, and they allow users to save and invest with as little as ₦100 ($0.25). The partners include United Capital Asset Management, Meristem Wealth Management, Afrinvest Wealth Management, ARM Investment Managers and Lotus Capital. Cowrywise indirectly charges customers for this service and splits the fee with the mutual fund partners but the CEO doesn’t disclose how much. 

Also, the four-year-old company takes into account the needs of different demographics and religious background, which Ahmed asserts is as a result of an understanding with the mutual fund partners. 

“Our mutual fund partners clearly recognize the value of being part of an inclusive digital platform that allows retail investors to invest regardless of faith or financial status,” he said. 

The YC alum and Catalyst Fund company also offers advisory services and recommends different funds to customers based on their risk appetite and spending power.

But building trust with users has not always been smooth for the company. It’s an issue Ahmed explains Cowrywise has had to deal with via transparency and outstanding service delivery.

For instance, one of Cowrywise’s darkest days came last September when a customer took to Twitter to complain about its lack of communication in reported stolen funds from her account. In response, Cowrywise apologised for the lapse in communication, acted on the request, and promised to do better.

“Service delivery has helped us bridge that trust gap to a huge extent, and I feel it’s reflected in the user growth and adoption we’ve experienced. Trust was a major issue we faced but right now, we’re crossing that bridge pretty well,” the CEO said.

About that, Cowrywise has more than 220,000 users. In its first year, it had just 2,000 users. Similarly, to highlight the journey ahead for the company, there are only half a million Nigerians actively investing in mutual funds. When compared to the total number of active bank accounts in the country of more than 40 million, it is obvious Cowrywise still has room to grow in the $3 billion market.

Cowrywise’s unique approach to wealth management is one reason why Quona Capital led the round according to partner Johan Bosini. The VC firm, known to back fintech and retail enablers like SA-based Lulalend and Yoco, and Kenya’s Sokowatch, is making its first foray into the Nigerian market with Cowrywise.

“Razaq, Edward, and the Cowrywise team are providing everyday Nigerians with easy access to powerful and flexible wealth-generating tools that have typically been reserved for people who are already wealthy,” said Bosini to TechCrunch. “In a market of 200 million people, we think this will be very impactful for individuals to have more control over their financial future.”

The company hopes to increase its customer base, and the new infusion will be critical to that. According to the company, the investment will also expand Cowrywise’s product offerings, support more fund managers in Nigeria and build out its investment management infrastructure.

Cowrywise is one of the many wealth tech startups on the continent. There are startups with comparable business models like Nigeria’s Piggyvest and others are Robinhood-esque platforms like Egypt’s Thndr and Nigeria’s Bamboo, Trove, Risevest and Chaka. Cowrywise’s investment which is the largest publicized round at this stage brings in much-needed validation for this segment of fintech startups that are starting to take off.

In the same vein, despite a slow start to a year which has seen Africa’s agritech and cleantech sectors take the lion’s share of investments, we might see fintech startups picking up the kind of pace we’ve been accustomed to that has made them dominate VC funding for the past couple of years.

Levity, which has been operating in stealth (until now), is the latest no-code company to throw its wares into the ring, having picked up $1.7M in pre-seed funding led by Gil Dibner’s Angular Ventures. The Berlin-based startup wants to bring AI-powered workflow automation to anyone, letting knowldge workers automate tedious, repetitive and manual parts of their job without the need to learn how to code.

Suitable for customer service, marketing, operations, HR, and more, Levity has elected to be a horizontal offering from the get-go. Typical repetitive tasks that can be automated includes reviewing and categorizing documents, images, or text. The premise is that conventional, rule-based automation software isn’t able to automate tasks like these as it requires cognitive abilities, meaning that they usually done manually. This, of course, is where machine learning come into play.

“We want to solve the problem that people spend so much time at their jobs doing boring, repetitive stuff that can be automated to free up space and time for fun and interesting work,” says Gero Keil, co-founder and CEO. “Even though this is what AI has been promising us for decades, there are very few solutions out there, and even less for non-technical people who can’t code”.

To that end, Keil says Levity’s entire mission is to help non-technical knowledge workers automate what they couldn’t automate before. Specifically, the startup targets work processes that involve making decisions on unstructured data, such as images, text, PDFs and other documents.

“For example, if a company receives hundreds or thousands of emails from partners and customers with attachments every day, someone typically has to download the attachment, look at it and then decide what to do with it,” explains Keil. “With Levity, they can train their own custom AI on all of the historic data that they have accumulated, and once it has learned from that it seamlessly integrates with their existing tools and workflows e.g. Dropbox, Gmail, Slack etc.”

More broadly, he says there are many companies struggling to “productionize AI” that would really benefit from having an end-to-end platform “that enables them to build their own AI solutions and make them part of their processes”.

Keil argues that Levity’s main competitor is people doing work manually, but concedes that there is crossover with automation machine learning tools, workflow automation offerings, and labeling tools,

“Instead of going deep into every domain of the ML value chain and making the lives of developers and data scientists at large corporations easier, we focus only the most essential bits and pieces, wrap them in simple and enjoyable UX and abstract the rest away,” he says. “That makes us the best for non-developers in small and medium-sized businesses that want to automate previously non automatable processes in the most straightforward way. The people that have the automation problem become the same people that solve the automation problem; it’s a paradigm shift just like what Wix and Squarespace did to websites”.

Adds Gil Dibner, general partner and founder at Angular Ventures, in a statement: “Levity is driving a massive shift that will affect all knowledge workers. By allowing knowledge workers to easily train AI engines, build AI-powered automations, and integrate them into their everyday workflows, Levity is radically democratizing the benefits of AI.”

Alongside Angular, Levity’s other backers include: System.One, Discovery Ventures (founders of SumUp), Martin Henk (founder of Pipedrive) and various additional unnamed angel investors.

IAC has acquired Confide, the encrypted mobile messaging that once made headlines for its use by White House staffers during the Trump administration. The deal, which closed on Dec. 1, 2020 but was not publicly announced, sees Confide joining Teltech, the makers of spam call-busting app Robokiller, which itself had joined IAC’s Mosaic Group by way of a 2018 acquisition.

Teltech confirmed the Confide acquisition, but declined to share the deal terms. The confidential mobile messaging app had raised just $3.5 million in funding, according to Crunchbase data, and had been valued between $10 to $50 million, as a result. (Pitchbook put the valuation at ~$14 million around the same time.)

According to Teltech, the deal was for the Confide IP and technology, but not the team.

The company believes Confide makes for a good fit among its growing group of mobile communication apps, including Robokiller and its latest app, SwitchUp, which offers users a second phone number for additional privacy and spam blocking purposes. Other Teletech apps include phone call recorder TapeACall and blocked call unmasker TrapCall.

Confide, however, may end up being one of the better-known additions among that group, thanks to being remembered as a favored tool of choice among frustrated Washington Republicans during the Trump years.

But despite the user growth that news had driven, things slowed in the months that followed, when researchers published a report that claimed Confide wasn’t as secure as it had promised. Confide quickly fixed its vulnerabilities but then a month later was facing a class action lawsuit (later dismissed by the plaintiff) over the security issues.

Teltech says it was aware of the security concerns, but it had conversations with the prior Confide team and understands that the earlier issues had been “quickly and effectively remediated.”

While IAC won’t speak to its specific plans for Confide’s future, the app will continue to offer users a safe and secure way to communicate. What it won’t do, though, is try to directly compete with Telegram or other private apps that offer large channels or group chats that support tens of thousands of people at once.

“I think one kind of key differentiators is that Confide is definitely more for one-on-one and smaller group communication, rather than with Signal and Telegram where there’s some larger chat dynamics,” notes Giulia Porter, Teltech’s VP of Marketing. “One thing that makes us a little bit different is just that we’re more personal,” she says.

Despite having hit some bumps in the road over the years, Confide as of the time of the acquisition, still had around 100,000 monthly active users. There’s now a team of around 10 assigned to work on the app, adding needed resources to its further development, and soon, an updated logo and branding.

Confide’s existing desktop and mobile apps will also continue to be available, but later updated with new features as part of Teltech’s efforts.

Investors and IAC alike have declined to talk about deal price, but that may speak for itself.

“With the absolute explosion in privacy over the past several years, Confide, which started as a side project, has become a mission-critical platform for sensitive communication throughout the world,” said Confide co-founder and President Jon Brod, in a statement shared with TechCrunch about Confide’s exit.

“We’re thrilled that IAC shares our passion for secure communication and recognizes the unique business we have built. IAC has a proven track record of providing fast-growing companies with the support to reach their full potential and we are excited to see IAC take Confide to the next level,” he said.

Squarespace announced this afternoon that it is going public. The online website creation and hosting service is a venture-backed entity, having raised Series A and B rounds in 2010 and 2014, respectively. Those deals were worth a combined $78.5 million, according to Crunchbase data.

But Squarespace is perhaps best known for its epic 2017-era $200 million secondary round that General Atlantic financed. A secondary round is a transaction in which an external party buys share from existing shareholders, instead of the company issuing new equity. Some private companies execute secondary transactions when they do not need additional capital, but are also not near a liquidity event.

The 2017 transaction fits well with the company’s now-impending 2021 IPO.

At the time TechCrunch reported that the company had revenues of around $300 million and that it was profitable.

By filing, Squarespace joins a growing list of companies pursuing the public markets in recent months. At the end of 2020 C3.ai, DoorDash and Airbnb listed. To kick off 2021, Affirm and Poshmark listed to great effect. Coinbase has filed, Robinhood is a hot IPO prospect, and now Squarespace is throwing its hat into the ring.

The Squarespace filing is private, which means that we are waiting for a future public S-1 from the company. Here’s its own words on the current state of affairs:

Squarespace, Inc. today announced that it has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”). The registration statement is expected to become effective after the SEC completes its review process, subject to market and other conditions.

As Squarespace is a software company, a cloud company and a company with a hand in the e-commerce space, we can only presume that it will suffer from a stultifying lack of investor interest when it does file, price and list.1 After all, we’ve not seen a hot software IPO for weeks.

Hat’s off to Squarespace for freeing us from the news doldrums. We’re going back to our nap now.

1This is sarcasm.

The furor surrounding GameStop and its stock price has consumed social media, business television, and the hopes and dreams of many retail investors. It has even convinced some folks that causing short-term economic damage to a few hedge funds is similar to shaking up the global financial market.

It isn’t, but a lot of folks are doing some downright risky things with their personal capital all the same. And some of them are making those investments — bets, let’s be honest — on platforms that have lowered barriers to buying and selling stocks by cutting trading fees to zero. Apps and services like Robinhood, Public, M1 Finance and Freetrade.

After noting reports that some traditional brokers were limiting access to GameStop and other so-called meme stocks, TechCrunch was curious what the newer, app-based investing services were doing for their own users.

A spokesperson for M1 Finance, a Midwest-based consumer fintech player that offers a basket of banking and investing services — more on its growth here and here — told TechCrunch via email that it wasn’t taking “specific” steps regarding individual stocks.

But the company also provided a statement from its CEO, Brian Barnes. In his comment, Barnes drew a delineation between investing, and trading, which he likened to a casino, adding that his firm “question[s] whether short-term trading is predictable, sustainable or repeatable.”

It isn’t for nearly anyone, of course. Barnes went on to say that his company thinks that “ownership of great companies and assets at reasonable prices that compound for long periods of time is the most straightforward and repeatable way to build wealth,” and that they have focused their company more around that ethos, “forego[ing] the mania of the moment.”

Turning to the well-known Robinhood, an impressive 2020 growth story, TechCrunch asked the same question regarding warnings or other guardrails for users concerning certain equities.

In an email a Robinhood spokesperson directed TechCrunch to a comment that its CEO, Vlad Tenev, made on CNBC earlier today:

Like other brokerages do, we monitor volatility and we take steps as appropriate like raising the margin requirements. I do think it’s wrong to assume though that most of our activity is characterized by trading of volatile stocks. As I’ve said before, most of our customers are what’s called buy and hold. They deposit and buy over the long term.

Robinhood changed margin requirements for GameStop and AMC Entertainment to 100%, TechCrunch understands. And like M1, Robinhood doesn’t allow users to short equities. So, there’s that.

Something notable about the companies we are discussing is that not one of them wants to be labeled as the place where folks like to trade a lot. Which amuses me as cutting fees to zero, which they have largely done, is at once a great way to democratize investing, and, also, a great way to encourage folks to trade more frequently. And as the apps and services that offer free trading often make money when users trade (read this), their chatter about their users being focused on buying and holding always rings slightly thin.

Anyhoo, some apps are going as far as adding warnings. Public, a company that TechCrunch recently covered, said that the company has added “‘High Risk’ safety labels” to the meme stocks that are causing so much ruckus.

Public has long had a stated focus on building community over trading, which led to us having a question or two about when it is going to kickstart its monetization plans. The company did just hire a CFO, which makes this move appear in concert with its general ethos, so more to come there we presume.

And, finally, U.K.-based Freetrade. TechCrunch has covered the service before, making it a good company to rope into this group. Per the company, Freetrade restricts small-cap stocks to the subscription tier of its service, which should limit access amongst its user base to GameStop and other memetic equities.

The company also stressed that it does not offer options or “any other form of leveraged derivatives” and has made “huge investment in investor education and financial literacy.”

So there’s a general bent toward either building products that are not tuned for day trading in silly stocks or providing some protection against users’ worst instincts amongst the cohort of companies that have also made it inexpensive to trade. There’s tension there, akin to this.

But they can only do so much. People are dumb, and it’s not looking like that’s going to get much better anytime soon.

Rumors have been flying this week that SAP was going to buy Berlin business process automation startup Signavio, and sure enough the company made it official today. The companies did not reveal the purchase price, but Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the deal could be worth $1.2 billion.

With Signavio SAP gets a cloud-native business process management tool. SAP CFO Luka Mucic sees a world where understanding and automating businesses processes has become a key part of a company’s digital transformation efforts.

“I cannot overstress the importance for companies to be able to design, benchmark, improve and transform business processes across the enterprise to support new capabilities and business models,” he said in a statement.

While traditional enterprise BPA tools have existed for years, having a cloud-native tool gives SAP a much more modern approach to attacking this problem, and being able to automate business processes via the cloud has become more important during the pandemic when many employees are working entirely from home.

SAP also sees Signavio as a key missing piece in the company’s business process intelligence unit. “The combination of business process intelligence from SAP and Signavio creates a leading end-to-end business process transformation suite to help our customers achieve the requirements needed to gain a competitive edge,” he said.

SAP has been making moves into process automation of late. In fact at SAP TechEd in December, the company announced SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, its foray into the RPA space. This should fit in nicely alongside it.

Dr. Gero Decker, Savigno co-founder and CEO, sees SAP resources helping push the company beyond what it could have done on its own. “Considering the positioning of SAP, its geographical coverage and financial muscle, SAP is the biggest and best platform to bring process intelligence to every organization,” he said in a statement.

The increased resources and reach argument is one that just about every acquired company CEO makes, but being pulled into a company the size of SAP can be a double-edged sword. Yes, it has vast resources, but it also can be hard for an acquired company to find its place in such a large pond. How well they fit in and make that transition from startup to big company cog, will go a long way in determining the success of this transaction in the long run.

Signavio launched in 2009 in Berlin and has raised almost $230 million, according to Crunchbase data. Investors include Apax Digital and Summit Partners. The most recent investment was a July 2019 Series C for $177 million, which came in at a $400 million valuation.

Customers include Comcast, Bosch, Liberty Mutual and yes SAP. Perhaps it will be getting a discount now.

Stilt, a provider of financial services for immigrants in the United States, announced today it has raised a $100 million warehouse facility from Silicon Valley Bank for lending to its customers. This brings Stilt’s total debt facilities so far to $225 million, and will enable it to reach more than $350 million in annualized loan volume. The company also announced the public launch of its no-fee checking accounts, which have been in private beta since September.

A Y Combinator alum, Stilt was founded five years ago by Rohit Mittal and Priyank Singh. Both dealt with the challenges of accessing financial services as immigrants and wanted to created a company to serve other people without Social Security numbers or credit histories.

For applicants without traditional credit reports, Stilt’s loan application process considers their personal information, including bank transactions, education, employment and visa status, and also uses proprietary machine-learning algorithms that draws on demographic data from a wide range of financial and non-financial sources.

TechCrunch last covered Stilt when it announced a $7.5 million seed round in May 2020.  During the pandemic, demand for loans increased for a wide range of reasons. Some customers sought new loans because their working hours got cut. Other borrowers’ own jobs weren’t impacted, but they needed to transfer money to family members in other countries who had lost income. Several used loans to pay for additional visa processing and many customers turned to Stilt because other financial providers shut down or reduced their loan programs over concerns about repayment.

Despite the economic challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Stilt’s loan performance has remained steady. Many of Stilt’s customers are using their loans to build a credit history in the United States and even borrowers who lost income because of the pandemic continued making payments on time (Stilt also created temporary programs, including waiving interest for a few months, to help those who were struggling financially).

Mittal said immigrants are also in general more creditworthy, because many moved to the United States to pursue educational or career opportunities. The difficulty of securing visas means “all immigrants move to the U.S. after jumping through a lot of hoops,” said Mittal. He added that “it isn’t just people coming from other countries. We also see it in DACA applicants. They tend to be the best risk-adjusted return customers. These are people who are going to school, they are working, they have seen their families work, they are helping their parents, they are doing all these things, and they understand the value of money, so they end up being a lot more financially responsible.”

Stilt’s new checking accounts, powered by Evolve Bank and Trust, are also designed for immigrants, with features like spot-rate remittance to about 50 countries. Users can also apply for credit lines and pre-approved loans through their accounts. Since opening to existing customers in September, the number of active checking accounts is growing 50% month over month, with many using it for direct deposits of their salaries.

The new debt facility from Silicon Valley Bank means Stilt will be able to provide larger loan volumes and better interest rates, said Mittal. Stilt’s average interest rate is about 12% to 14%, compared to the 30% to 100% charged by other programs, like payday loans, that people without Social Security numbers or credit reports often use.

Last year, we hit you with 44(!) episodes of Extra Crunch Live, a series that gives startups and founders direct insights from the experts who know best. We’re making Extra Crunch Live even better in 2021: we’ll take a look at funding deals through the eyes of the founders and investors who made them happen, and those same tech leaders will go through your pitch decks and give feedback and advice. Every single Wednesday at 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST!

Today, I’m thrilled to announce the February slate for Extra Crunch Live.

Gaurav Gupta (Lightspeed Venture Partners) + Raj Dutt (Grafana Labs)

February 3, 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST

Grafana Labs, the open-source platform for monitoring, visualization and metric analytics, has raised more than $75 million since its 2014 inception. Lightspeed’s Raj Dutt has partnered with the company throughout its journey, leading Grafana’s Series A and B. Hear from Gupta and Grafana co-founder Raj Dutt about how that Series A deal came together and take a look at the startup’s original Series A pitch deck on the next episode of Extra Crunch Live. And don’t forget! Gupta and Dutt will be giving live feedback to Extra Crunch members who have submitted their own pitch decks.

Aydin Senkut (Felicis Ventures) + Kevin Busque (Guideline)

February 10, 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST

In 2014, Guideline stepped into the ring with giants, launching an all-inclusive 401k platform for fast-growing businesses. Since, it’s raised nearly $140 million in funding, including a $15 million Series B round led by Felicis Ventures. Hear the behind-the-scenes story of how Guideline CEO Kevin Busque and Felicis partner Aydin Senkut came together for that deal, with a walk through the pitch deck that started it all, and get the founder/investor duo’s live feedback on your own pitch deck.

Steve Loughlin (Accel) + Jason Boehmig (Ironclad)

February 17, 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST

Steve Loughlin views the tech world through a prismatic lens. He’s been a founder, he’s been through an acquisition, and now he invests as a partner at Accel. One such investment includes Ironclad, a contract management platform that recently raised a $100 million Series D and is valued at nearly $1 billion. Hear CEO Jason Boehmig and Loughlin talk through their original Series A deal and get live feedback on your own pitch deck from the founder/investor duo.

Matt Harris (Bain Capital) + Isaac Oates (Justworks)

February 24, 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST

Justworks’ back-office software has garnered the attention of many investors. The company has raised $143 million from firms including FirstMark Capital, Union Square Ventures, Thrive, Redpoint and Bain Capital. Hear from Justworks founder and CEO Isaac Oates and Bain Capital Partner Matt Harris as they describe how their partnership began and get their live feedback on your own pitch deck.

Extra Crunch Live is for EC members only. If you’re not already signed up, get on it right here. Registration info for each of these episodes is below. See you soon!

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This week, Latch becomes the latest company to join the SPAC parade. Founded in 2014, the New York-based company came out of stealth two years later, launching a smart lock system. Though, like many companies primarily known for hardware solutions, Latch says it’s more, offering a connected security software platform for owners of apartment buildings.

The company is set to go public courtesy of a merger with blank check company TS Innovation Acquisitions Corp. As far as partners go, Tishman Speyer Properties makes strategic sense here. The New York-based commercial real estate firm is a logical partner for a company whose technology is currently deployed exclusively in residential apartment buildings.

“With a standard IPO, you have all of the banks take you out to all of the big investors,” Latch founder and CEO Luke Schoenfelder tells TechCrunch. “We felt like there was an opportunity here to have an extra level of strategic partnership and an extra level of product expansion that came as part of the process. Our ability to go into Europe and commercial offices is now accelerated meaningfully because of this partnership.

The number of SPAC deals has increased substantially over the past several months, including recent examples like Taboola. According to Crunchbase, Latch has raised $152 million, to date. And the company has seen solid growth over the past year — not something every hardware or hardware adjacent company can say about the pandemic.

As my colleague Alex noted on Extra Crunch today, “Doing some quick match, Latch grew booked revenues 50.5% from 2019 to 2020. Its booked software revenues grew 37.1%, while its booked hardware top line expanded over 70% during the same period.”

“We’ve been a customer and investor in Latch for years,” Tishman Speyer President and CEO Rob Speyer tells TechCrunch. “Our customers — the people who live in our buildings — love the Latch product. So we’ve rolled it out across our residential portfolio […] I hope we can act as both a thought partner and product incubator for them.”

While the company plans to expand to commercial offices, apartment buildings have been a nice vertical thus far — meaning the company doesn’t have to compete as directly in the crowded smart home lock category. Among other things, it’s probably a net positive if you’re going head to head against, say Amazon. That the company has built in partners in real estate firms like Tishman Speyer is also a net positive.

Schoenfelder says the company is looking toward such partnerships as test beds for its technology. “Our products have been in the field for many years in multifamily. The usage patterns are going to be slightly different in commercial offices. We think we know how they’re going to be different, but being able to get them up and running and observe the interaction with products in the wild is going to be really important.”

The deal values Latch at $1.56 billion and is expected to close in Q2.