When Laura Wittig and Liza Moiseeva met as guests on a podcast about sustainable fashion, they jibed so well together that they began one of their own: Good Together. Their show’s goal was to provide listeners with a place to learn how to be eco-conscious consumers, but with baby steps.

Wittig thinks the non-judgmental environment (one that doesn’t knock on a consumer for not being zero-waste overnight) is the show’s biggest differentiator. “Then, people were emailing us and asking how they can be on our journey beyond being a listener,” Wittig said. Now, over a year after launching the show, the co-hosts are turning validation from listeners into the blueprint for a standalone business: Brightly.

Brightly is a curated platform that sells vetted eco-friendly goods and shares tips about conscious consumerism. While the startup is launching with more than 200 products from eco-friendly brands, such as Sheets & Giggles and Juice Beauty, the long-term vision is to start their own commerce brand of Brightly-branded products. The starting lineup will include two to four products in the home space.

To get those products out by the holiday season, Brightly tells TechCrunch that it has raised $1 million in venture funding from investors, including Tacoma Venture Fund, Keeler Investments, Odile Roujol (a FAB Ventures backer and former L’Oréal CEO) and Female Founder’s Alliance.

The funding caps off a busy 12 months for Brightly. The startup has gone through Snap’s Yellow accelerator, an in-house effort from the social media company that began in 2018. As part of the program Snap invests $150,000 in each Yellow startup for an equity stake. The company also did Ready Set Raise, an equity-free accelerator put on by Female Founders Alliance, in the fall.

With new funding, Brightly is seeking to take a Glossier-style approach to become the next big brand in commerce: gather a community by recommending great products, then turn the strategy on its head and make your superfans buy in-house products under the same brand.

“We have access to a community of women who are beating our door down to shop directly with us and have exclusive products made for them,” Wittig said.

Brightly wants to be more than a “boring storefront” one could quickly whip up on Shopify or Amazon, Wittig says.

The company’s curation process, which every product goes through before being listed on the platform, is extensive. The startup makes sure that every product is created with sustainable and ethical supply chain processes and sustainable material. The team also interviews every brand’s founders to understand the genesis of any product that lives on the Brightly platform. The co-founders also weigh the durability and longevity of products, adopting what Wittig sees as a “Wirecutter approach.”

“It’s more like, ‘why would we pick an ethically produced leather handbag over something that might be made not from leather but wouldn’t last too long necessarily,’ ” she said. “These are the conversations we have with our audience, because the term eco-friendly is very much our grayscale.”

More than 250,000 people come to Brightly, either through their app or website, every day, according to Wittig. The startup monetizes largely through brand partnerships and getting those users in front of paid products.

The monetization strategy is similar to what you might find a podcast use: affiliate links or product placement mid-episode. But while the co-founders are relying on this strategy right now, they see the opportunity to create their own e-commerce company as larger and more lucrative.

“The billion-dollar opportunity is not with that,” Wittig said. “The value will be going direct commerce and selling our picks of ethical sustainable goods.”

Marking the transition from podcasting about eco-friendly goods to creating them in-house is a strong pivot. The co-founders consider creating a distribution commerce channel to be a larger opportunity and likely more lucrative than the podcasting business.

Beyond creating a line of their own products, Brightly is thinking about how to partner with white-label sustainable products. Another option, Wittig said, is to partner with big corporations to get products on their shelves with colors and customization for Brightly. An example of an ideal partnership would be Reformation’s recent partnership with Blueland.

Wittig declined to share more details on how they plan to win, but likened the strategy to that of Goop or Glossier, two companies that started with content arms and drew their community into a commerce platform.

“It’s not going to be a Thrive Market where there are hundreds and thousands of sustainable goods on there. It’s going to be much more curated,” she said.

COVID-19 has helped the startup further validate the need for a platform that unites a conscious consumer community.

“We are all so aware of the purchasing power we have,” she said. “As consumers we go out and support small businesses by getting coffee on the go. But before, we did not think twice about getting everything from Amazon.”

The conversation with investors hasn’t been as simple, the co-founder said. Investors continue to be “hands off” about community-based platforms because they are unsure it will work. Wittig says that many bearish investors have placed bets on singular direct-to-consumer brands, such as Away or Blueland.

“Those investors know the rising costs of customer acquisition, and see what happens when you don’t have a community that surrounds our business,” she said.

Brightly is betting that the future of commerce brands has to start with a go-to-market, and then bring in the end-product, instead of the other way. The end goal here for Brightly is attracting, and generating excitement from, Gen Z and millennial shoppers. To do so, Wittig says that Brightly is experimenting with ways to implement socialization aspects into the shopping experience.

Leslie Feinzaig, the founder of Female Founders Alliance, said that what’s special about Brightly is that it “demonstrated demand before building for it.”

“I think a lot of people today could build software to connect people and sell things, but very few people could get thousands of fanatical followers to actually engage with each other and make that software useful,” Feinzaig said. “Brightly built that community with matchsticks and tape.”

BeGreatTV, an online education platform featuring Black and brown instructors, recently closed a $450K pre-seed round from Stand Together Ventures Lab, Arlan Hamilton, Tiffany Haddish and others.

The goal with BeGreatTV is to enable anyone to learn from talented Black and brown innovators and leaders, founder and CEO Cortney Woodruff told TechCrunch.

“When you think of being a Black or brown person or individual who wants to learn from a Black or brown person, there’s nothing that really exists that gives you a glossary of every business vertical and where you see representation at every level in a well put together way,” Woodruff said. “That alone makes our market a lot larger because there are just so many verticals where no one has really invested in or shown before.”

The courses are designed to teach folks how to execute and succeed in a particular industry, and enable people to better understand the business aspect of industries while also teaching “you how to deal with the socioeconomic and racial injustices that come with being the only one in the room. Whether you are a Black man or woman who wants to get into the makeup industry, there will always be a lot of biases in the world.”

When BeGreatTV launches in a couple of months (the plan is to launch in April), the platform will feature at least 10 courses — each with around 15 episodes — focused on arts, entertainment, beauty and more. At launch, courses will be available from Sir John, a celebrity makeup artist for L’Oréal and Beyoncé’s personal makeup artist, BeGreatTV co-founder Cortez Bryant, who was also Lil Wayne and Drake’s manager, as well as Law Roach, Zendaya’s stylist.

Hamilton and Haddish will also teach their own respective courses on business and entertainment, Woodruff said. So far, BeGreatTV has produced more than 40 episodes that range anywhere from three to 15 minutes each.

Each course will cost $64.99, and the plan is to eventually offer an all-access subscription model once BeGreatTV beefs up its offerings a bit more. For instructors, BeGreatTV shares royalties with them.

“Ultimately, the platform can include a more diverse casting of instructors that aren’t just Black and brown,” Woodruff said. But for now, he said, the idea is to “reverse the course of ‘Now this is our first Black instructor’ but ‘now this is the first white instructor’ ” on the platform.

BeGreatTV’s team consists of just 15 people, but includes heavy hitters like Cortez Bryant and actor Jesse Williams. Currently, BeGreatTV is working on closing its seed round and anticipates a six-figure user base by the end the year.

MasterClass is perhaps BeGreatTV’s biggest competitor. With classes taught by the likes of Gordon Ramsay, Shonda Rhimes and David Sedaris, it’s no wonder why MasterClass has become worth more than $800 million. The company’s $180 annual subscription fee accounts for all of its revenue.

“If you benchmark [BeGreatTV] to MasterClass, we are finding individuals that are not only the best at what they do in the world, but often times these individuals have broken barriers because often times they were the first to do it,” Woodruff said. “And do it without having people who look like them.”

 

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Before he was a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, Gaurav Gupta had his eye on Grafana Labs, the company that supports open-source analytics platform Grafana. But Raj Dutt, Grafana’s co-founder and CEO, played hard to get.

This week on Extra Crunch Live, the duo explained how they came together for Grafana’s Series A — and eventually, its Series B. They also walked us through Grafana’s original Series A pitch deck before Gupta shared the aspects that stood out to him and how he communicated those points to the broader partnership at Lightspeed.

Gupta and Dutt also offered feedback on pitch decks submitted by audience members and shared their thoughts about what makes a great founder presentation, pulling back the curtain on how VCs actually consume pitch decks.

We’ve included highlights below as well as the full video of our conversation.

We record new episodes of Extra Crunch Live each Wednesday at 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST/8 p.m. GMT. Check out the February schedule here.

Episode breakdown:

How they met — 2:20Grafana’s early pitch deck — 12:25The enterprise ecosystem — 26:00The pitch deck teardown — 33:00

How they met

As soon as Gupta joined Lightspeed in June 2019, he began pursuing Dutt and Grafana Labs. He texted, called and emailed, but he got little to no response. Eventually, he made plans to go meet the team in Stockholm but, even then, Dutt wasn’t super responsive.

The pair told the story with smiles on their faces. Dutt said that not only was he disorganized and not entirely sure of his own travel plans to see his co-founder in Stockholm, Grafana wasn’t even raising. Still, Gupta persisted and eventually sent a stern email.

“At one point, I was like ‘Raj, forget it. This isn’t working’,” recalled Gupta. “And suddenly he woke up.” Gupta added that he got mad, which “usually does not work for VCs, by the way, but in this case, it kind of worked.”

When they finally met, they got along. Dutt said they were able to talk shop due to Gupta’s experience inside organizations like Splunk and Elastic. Gupta described the trip as a whirlwind, where time just flew by.

“One of the reasons that I liked Gaurav is that he was a new VC,” explained Dutt. “So to me, he seemed like one of the most non-VC VCs I’d ever met. And that was actually quite attractive.”

To this day, Gupta and Dutt don’t have weekly standing meetings. Instead, they speak several times a week, conversing organically about industry news, Grafana’s products and the company’s overall trajectory.

Grafana’s early pitch deck

Dutt shared Grafana’s pre-Series A pitch deck — which he actually sent to Gupta and Lightspeed before they met — with the Extra Crunch Live audience. But as we know now, it was the conversations that Dutt and Gupta had (eventually) that provided the spark for that deal.

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Robinhood has shown an impressive ability to raise enormous amounts of capital in the past few weeks to ensure it has the funds needed to allow users to trade and, presumably, provide it with enough cash until it goes public. Raising $3.4 billion so quickly is an extraordinary feat.

But how the company managed to get investors to wire money with such alacrity has been a curiosity; what about Robinhood was so compelling that giving it a multibillion dollar injection was such an obvious decision?

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

We got a whiff of it when we parsed Robinhood’s Q4 2020 payment for order flow (PFOF) data, which showed the discount trading service growing nicely from its Q3 results. Robinhood’s PFOF revenue growth had slowed in sequential terms in the third quarter of 2020, but the final quarter iced near-term concerns that the unicorn’s growth days were behind it.

But then the company gave us a little more, a few charts that I think better explain why Robinhood was able to raise so much money so quickly.

Equities and options volumes go up

The reason why Robinhood was able to raise lots more cash very quickly was because the company’s PFOF revenue driver likely went into overdrive during the mess that was the GameStop period, This is somewhat obvious, as many people were trading.

But thanks to a new chart from the company posted on its own blog, we now know that Robinhood’s PFOF incomes were likely spiking to all-time highs.

Here’s the chart the company published, which I have loosely marked with quarterly intervals. Per Robinhood, the green line is “Robinhood equities and options trading volumes over a longer time horizon, through last week:”

Tickr, an app that allows U.K. consumers to make financial investments based on their impact on society and the environment, has secured £2.5 million ($3.4 million) in funding lead by Ada Ventures, a VC which focuses on “impact” startups. The cash will be used for product development, expanding the user base, and eventually taking Tickr into other European countries from its current U.K. base.

As well as investing, the platform allows customers to spend their cash via partnerships with impact-oriented compares, and offset their carbon footprint through a subscription. The core business model is £1 p/m per customer, plus 0.30% on assets above £3,000. Additional products, like carbon offsets, for example, are charged as a separate additional subscription depending on the tier selected.

The startup says it is approaching 100,000 users in the U.K. and is reaching a millennial audience, 90% of which have “never invested before” (they say) and these users are investing £250 per month on average.

The app is not billed as a trading app, with quick “in and outs”, but is about building wealth whilst investing in a diversified portfolio of high-impact companies. Its competitors include MoneyBox, but Tickr says it is “100% pure impact focus” by contrast. The vast majority of Europeans don’t invest in markets, so this could be a good opportunity for the product.

Founders Tom McGillycuddy and Matt Latham spent eight years working in investment management, but say they became disillusioned by the jargon, high fees and indifference to causes such as the environment.

Over text interview, McGillycuddy told me: “We also realized there was zero consideration for the underlying impact of the investments people were making; it was purely about the return. Coming from Wigan and Liverpool, we were the first people in our families to be exposed to this world, and it didn’t seem right.” The pair moved into impact investing and subsequently went on to launch Tickr in 2018.

Djamo, a financial super app for consumers in Francophone Africa, is the first startup from Ivory Coast to get backing from Y Combinator.

While there has been a huge profusion of financial services that have emerged in recent years in Africa, Djamo’s mission is to try to plug one specific and a very underserved gap in Francophone Africa.

In the region, less than 25% of adults have bank accounts as the focus for banks remains the top 10-20% wealthiest customers. The rest, which is a huge segment of the market of about 120 million people, is not perceived as profitable. But as banks slacked, mobile money from the region’s telcos filled in the gap. In the last 10 years, their wallets have reached more than 60% of the population — proof of how many millions of French-speaking natives were hungry for financial services. Today, this mobile money infrastructure and reach allows startups to build upon their existing payment infrastructure to democratize access through different applications.

Djamo is one of such companies taking advantage of this opportunity to bring affordable and seamless banking to the region.

In 2019, Hassan Bourgi, a second-time founder, returned to Ivory Coast after exiting his Latin American-based startup, Busportal, to Naspers-company redBus. There he met Régis Bamba who was still working at MTN, one of Africa’s largest telcos, leading several mobile money projects.

Frustrated by the unpleasant banking experiences they and many millennials faced in the country, Bourgi and Bamba launched Djamo last year to challenge the banking industry status quo. 

“Banking services are really difficult to access here, and we saw that as a huge opportunity,”  Djamo CEO Bourgi said to TechCrunch. “Since day one, we wanted to design a mobile-first platform that could break into the masses and our combined experience building mass-market consumer products was very critical to launching Djamo.”

According to Bourgi, the country’s millennials are trying to create relations with technology companies and be served differently from the norm. So, Djamo is providing this audience with a better front end experience and faster customer service.

Rather than offering a one-size-fits-all approach, they focused on accommodating multiple layers tailored to different user needs. Whether it’s affording Ivorians the luxury to pay for online services like Amazon, Alibaba, or Netflix, or providing VISA debit cards in a timely fashion, these tailored approaches have made Djamo grow organically via word of mouth.

And why not? Before Djamo came along, the CEO says people would need to go to their bank branches and stay in long queues to get their cards or even load them with credit. Djamo relieves that stress and even allows customers to use their cards with zero fees in a wide range of services.

“For us, it was important to offer a zero-fee card with no recurring fee to a certain limit. After that, you pay as you go in transaction fees. There is a premium plan around $4 a month where users can transact to higher limits,” said Bourgi.

Today, Djamo claims to have around 90,000 registered users and processes over 50,000 transactions monthly. However, to get to this point, the company has ridden on sheer resourcefulness around its operations.  

Unlike Nigeria, where there are established payment infrastructure players like Flutterwave and Paystack, Ivory Coast doesn’t have such household names.

 “We have a couple of providers, but most are unreliable. But this doesn’t matter to the end-user, you have to make it work somehow,” said Bambi, the company’s CPO and CTO.

Lacking better options, Djamo switches from one provider to another to keep operations running. The year-old startup has also faced scepticism issues, common with most African fintech startups when they first launch. In Djamo’s case though, the founders had to go at lengths to prove to banks and customers that the platform was safe to use for onboarding, KYC and transactions.

Onboarding customers also came with its own set of problems: the delivery of Djamo VISA cards. Bourgi says unlike more developed countries on the continent, it is a Herculean task to access efficient delivery and logistics services in Ivory Coast. So, the startup built a delivery app with in-house delivery agents for this particular purpose. “The objective for our customers is that after registering with us, they get their cards the next day in a timely fashion,” Bourgi added.

But even before pushing out its MVP, Djamo had already received monetary validation for its product. In June 2019, it raised a pre-seed investment of $350,000 from private investors — arguably the largest round at this stage in the Francophone region. The ingenuity of the solution, at least to French-speaking Africa, and the founders’ track record was crucial to Djamo closing the round, Hassan explained.

For a long time, Francophone Africa has been underrated by international investors despite signs pointing to the emergence of a budding startup scene. Part of this has to do with language barriers and the region’s GDP and income per capita where English-speaking countries, excluding South Africa, contribute to 47% of sub-Saharan Africa’s average GDP, while French-speaking countries boast of only 19%.

However, with the World Bank stating that the region will have 62.5% of Africa’s fastest-growing economies by 2021, there’s bullishness around its growth in the coming years. 

With so many untapped opportunities, underrepresented regions like Francophone Africa are ripe for disruption. Investors know this and though their checks are still skewed towards Anglophone Africa, million-dollar raises from Senegalese energy startup, Oolu and Cameroonian healthtech startup, Healthlane in 2020 show their keenness on the market.

Like Djamo, both startups are YC-backed and are the other Francophone startups to have made it into the accelerator. But with this Winter 2021 batch, Djamo becomes the first fintech startup from the region. Following Healthlane’s acceptance in 2020, it is also the first time French-speaking Africa has had representatives for consecutive years.

To the founders, YC’s backing validates Djamo’s premise that financial service distribution across the Francophone Africa region is fundamentally changing towards applications.

“In Ivory Coast, people always say that the banking industry is too complex and we can’t do anything about it. But we saw it as a huge opportunity and a great industry to take on. Everywhere you see frustration, customers in pain, there is an opportunity for a business to come and do it better,” said Régis.

After participating in the three-month-long program which culminates in a Demo Day on March 23rd, Djamo will also take part in Visa’s Fintech Fast Track Program, an avenue for the company to leverage the fintech giant’s network to introduce new payment experiences.

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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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.

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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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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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