Tag: 500 startups

Posted on

As Southeast Asia start to boom, an accelerator backed by Silicon Valley execs jumps in

By today’s standards, $10 million isn’t a lot of capital to invest.  But Iterative, which describes itself as a YC-style accelerator focused exclusively on Southeast Asia, says the $10 million it has raised from a cadre of Silicon Valley bigs — including investor Andrew Chen of Andreessen Horowitz, Chi-Hua Chien of Goodwater Capital, and Qasar Younis, the cofounder of Applied Intuition and former COO of Y Combinator — is enough to make its mark on the region, where it’s been writing checks to nascent startups over the last 18 months.

It’s easy to appreciate Iterative’s interest in the region. As Iterative cofounder Brian Ma is quick to note, the vast majority of the 676 million people who live in Southeast Asia are now internet users — and spending their money online. Indeed, according to report by Google, Temasek Holdings and Bain & Company that was published early last month, the region has added 60 million new internet users since the start of the pandemic, bringing the total to 440 million. Meanwhile, driven primarily by growth in e-commerce and food delivery, the online industry for Southeast Asia is expected to grow from an estimated $174 billion in gross merchandise volume by the end of this year, to $360 billion by 2025, and $1 trillion by 2030.

With a growing number of startups in the region becoming so-called unicorn companies — including Grab, the ride-hailing app that just went public by merging with a blank-check company, and GoTo, which was formed this year by merging the ride-hailing company Go-Jek with the popular online shopping portal, Tokopedia (GoTo expects to go public early in 2022) —  it’s also probably safe to imagine that competition is heating up and that Iterative won’t receive the same favorable terms it has garnered thus far for much longer. (Currently, it invests $150,000 per startup in exchange for 10% of the business.)

Ma — who also cofounded Divvy Homes, a rent-to-own platform now value by investors at $2 billion — readily acknowledges that the investing scene in Southeast Asia is poised to get crowded fast, which could impact terms and valuations. He says that’s okay with him, though.

For one thing, Iterative has already invested $3.6 million across 26 companies, more than a handful of which have already announced meaningful follow-on funding, including Spenmo (it just raised a $34 million round led by Insight Partners), Coder School, which raised $2.6 million in pre-Series A funding led by Monk’s Hill Ventures, and Go Zayaan, which has raised $2.6 million in seed funding led by Wavemaker Partners. In short, Iterative has already planted many seeds for the amount that just one nascent U.S. company might raised in its first round of funding.

Ma — who founded Iterative with friend Hsu Ken, the former chief product officer of Workmate, an on-demand blue collar staffing platform in Southeast Asia — seems also to want to help founders in the region who have relatively little (for now) experience with investors and with seasoned operators.

In fact, he says that when he first began meeting with founders in the region, some told him they were being offered $150,000 checks for upwards of 30% of their company, which is . . . a lot. (Part of Iterative’s promise is access to both Ma and Ken but also access to a broader network of founders and investors, along with a kind of fundraising bootcamp, so founders know how to pitch, and what agreements not to strike.)

Iterative’s timing looks prescient in the meantime. While regional funds are doubling down on their commitments with bigger funds, like Jungle Ventures and 500 Startups, and while global investors like Tiger Global and Accel pick up the pace in a variety of Southeast Asian countries, the seed-stage scene is just forming, by Ma’s telling. “It’s happening literally this year and maybe last year that you’re starting to see execs from Grab and Facebook and [Southeast Asia shopping giant] Lazada start to write $5,000 and $10,000 checks,” he says. “That’s the thing that makes it really exciting for me. The ecosystem is just now starting to recycle, and when that starts to happen, you see tech ecosystems develop.”

As for Iterative’s own development, somewhat naturally, the outfit already has a bigger fund in its sights. Asked how much Iterative might raise in 2022, Ma says he expects to close a fund that’s closer to $50 million, given what the market — and he and cofounder — can absorb.

“I’m still talking to advisors about it,” Ma says. “But we’re definitely going to raise the fund because the pilot fund has gone really well. Obviously, too,” he adds, “the opportunity is only accelerating.”

Posted on

Productfy raises $16M to build the ‘Shopify of embedded finance’

Productfy Inc., a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform that aims to build “DeFi for traditional finance,” has raised $16 million in a Series A round of funding led by CM Ventures.

Existing backers Point72 Ventures, 500 Startups and Envestnet | Yodlee also participated in the financing, which brings its total raised since its 2018 inception to nearly $19 million.

There are a growing number of BaaS companies, which all essentially have the same end goal — to make it faster and easier for fintechs and other companies to launch financial services and products. 

Productfy aims to stand out with its mission to build DeFi for traditional finance, according to founder and CEO Duy Vo. From a product architecture standpoint, Productfy has been built “from the ground up,” he said, to operate with multiple banking partners.

“This is not something our competitors are built for,” Vo said. “Traditional banks will not last if they can’t decentralize.” (More on this topic later.)

Who needs a BaaS partner, anyway?

Put more simply, Productfy wants to be the “Shopify of embedded finance.” The company claims that with its platform, developers can “configure in hours, integrate in days, and go from idea to full stack deployment in as little as three weeks.”  

But Productfy, unlike many other BaaS companies, is not just focused on developers. Its team is building beyond the API layer to produce more white label user interfaces. So while the company, of course, wants to be robust for developers, Vo says it is even more focused on brands that lack technical resources or domain expertise. Since July, the startup has seen 119% month over month revenue growth. It currently has eight clients, including HatchCard.

CM Ventures evaluated a number of BaaS and embedded finance companies and had discussions with around “30 different players” before deciding to place its bet on Productfy, according to Vagan Khranyan, managing partner of lead investor CM Ventures.

“We concluded that Productfy has the only market-ready solution to be sold to customers,” Khranyan told TechCrunch. “We see massive parallels in what Productfy is building and larger movements in distributed and decentralized finance across the industry.” 

The company, he said, is working to simplify an otherwise complicated process with multiple bank partners, data and card vendors.

Productfy

Image Credits: Founder and CEO Duy Vo / Productfy

For example, Productify’s partners include Equifax, card issuing platform Marqeta, card fulfillment partner Arroweye and financial data provider Envestnet | Yodlee. The startup has also teamed up with Stearns Bank National Association as it works on developing “expanded access” to money movement, digital banking and card issuance products “via easily embeddable APIs, widgets and pre-approved customer interfaces.”

“The Productfy platform is unlike any we’ve seen in the market,” said Josh Hofer, chief risk and information security officer of Stearns Bank. “Aligning our technology roadmap with the Productfy platform enables both companies to succeed by making banking products more accessible and scalable for the entire ecosystem.”

Specifically, the startup says that its partnership with Stearns Bank gives fintech entrepreneurs and non-fintech businesses a way to launch money movement and card programs with stacked workflows and unified due diligence, “eliminating months of development, compliance hurdles, and third-party integrations.”

“We’ve been building our basic infrastructure and compliance and technology,” Vo told TechCrunch. “When we launched these programs, we learned a ton. Now, we’re taking those learnings to build the next iteration of our product, which will essentially be a white label ‘fintech in a box’ solution, which will allow any organization to launch a financial product or retail banking experience within days.”

Vo says he was motivated to start Productfy because he believed that the financial services industry has “largely failed the most vulnerable people in our society.”

“We’re always asking ourselves how can we create a financial ecosystem that is kinder, more compassionate and more socially just,” Vo said. “The way that we believe that we can solve this problem is to create a decentralized financial infrastructure.”

He emphasizes that while DeFi has traditionally been associated with cryptocurrency, his startup has “nothing to do with cryptocurrency.”

“What we’re doing is we’re creating a DeFi for traditional banking,” Vo told TechCrunch.” Because banks are the origin servers, and if AWS can dynamically route traffic based on usage, that takes power away from users and spreads it around to small banks and the organizations that work with end users.”

Vo’s goal is that if this can be nailed down in the U.S., Productfy could add a node in countries such as Uganda and Libya and create the “first true distributed financial infrastructure” that would allow for near-instant funds transfers, for example, “easily, securely and at less than a penny globally.”

Looking ahead, the startup will use its new influx of capital to further scale its offerings and compliance-as-a-service capabilities and continue improving its core data and card issuance offering, with a focus on building new integrations and partnerships and launching its first cohort of customers. 

In the fourth quarter, Productfy plans to launch a new Card-Issuance-as-a-Service solution, dubbed “Latinum,” aimed at helping brands improve their customer experience and build greater loyalty. The idea around the branded debit card is to give say, members of a church congregation, the ability to use a card where the interchange fees would be used to lend money to fellow congregation members.

Currently, Productfy’s target is to allow brands to go live in as little as three weeks. Today, they still have to have an engineering team to do that. But by the fourth quarter, Vo says, they won’t need engineering or compliance teams because its white-label solution will be available. And the process will only take days, the company claims.

“We’re moving the ability to offer retail banking services to the edge,” Vo said. So that religious organizations, schools, gaming companies, e-commerce brands or any organization with “a strong following” can launch a debit card program with deposits, money movement, KYC (Know Your Customer), compliance and servicing built in.

Other BaaS companies that have raised capital this year include Unit, which in June raked in $51 million in a Series B round to further its goal of making it possible for companies and fintechs alike to build banking products “in minutes.” In July, Solarisbank, a Berlin startup that provides a range of financial services by way of some 180 APIs that others use to build end-user-facing products, raised $224 million at a $1.65 billion valuation.

Solarisbank raises $224M at a $1.65B valuation to acquire Contis, expand API-based embedded banking tech in Europe

Posted on

Flat.mx raises $20M from VCs, proptech unicorn founders to fix Mexico’s ‘broken’ real estate market

Flat.mx, which wants to build a real estate “super app” for Latin America, has closed on a $20 million Series A round of funding.

Anthemis and 500 Startups co-led the investment, which included participation from ALLVP and Expa. Previously, Flat.mx had raised a total $10 million in equity and $25 million in debt. Other backers include Opendoor CEO and CEO and co-founder Eric Wu, Flyhomes’ co-founder and CEO Tushar Garg and Divvy Homes’ co-founder Brian Ma.

Founded in July 2019, Mexico City-based Flat.mx started out with a model similar to that of Opendoor, buying properties, renovating them and then reselling them. That September, the proptech startup had raised one of Mexico’s largest pre-seed rounds to take the Opendoor real estate marketplace model across the Rio Grande.

Flat, a Mexican property tech startup, raises $4.6M pre-seed led by ALLVP

“The real estate market in Mexico is broken,” said co-founder Bernardo Cordero. “One of the biggest problems is that it takes sellers anywhere from 6 months to 2 years to sell. So we launched the most radical solution we could find to this problem: an instant offer. This product allows homeowners to sell in days instead of months, a fast and convenient experience they can’t find anywhere else.”

Building an instant buyer (ibuyer) in Mexico — and Latin America in general — is a complex endeavor. Unlike in the U.S., Mexico doesn’t have a Multiple Listing Service (MLS). As such, pricing data is not readily available. On top of that, agents are not required to be certified so the whole process of buying and selling a home can be informal.

And since mortgage penetration in Mexico is also low, it can be difficult for buyers to have access to reasonable financing options.

“To build an iBuyer, we had to solve the transaction end-to-end,” said co-founder Victor Noguera. “We had to build the MLS, a third-party marketplace, a contractor marketplace, financial products, broker technology, and a home maintenance provider, along with other services. In other words, we have been building the real estate Superapp for Latam.”

Flat.mx says its certified remodeled properties have gone through a 200+ point inspection and “a full legal review.” 

Flat.mx is growing sales by 70% quarter-over-quarter, and has increased its inventory by 10x over the last year, according to its founders. It has also nearly tripled its headcount from 30 at the middle of last year to over 85 today. So far, Flat.mx has conducted thousands of home valuations and over 100 transactions.

Image Credits: Flat.mx

The pandemic only helped boost interest.

“Our low touch digital solution was key for having a strong business during the pandemic. We were able to create quick liquidity for sellers at a time in Mexico where it was complicated to sell,” said Cordero. “Our model allows sellers to sell with one visit instead of having to receive over 40 potential buyers at a time where they wanted to sell but also wanted to avoid contact with many buyers.”

The company plans to use its new capital to continue to develop what it describes as a “one-stop shop where homeowners and buyers will be able to get all the services they need in one place.”

The founders believe that rather than just try to tackle one aspect of the homebuying process, it makes more sense in emerging markets to address them all.

“We believe that each one of our products makes the others stronger and creating this ecosystem of products will continue to give us an important advantage in the market,” said Noguera. The startup plans to also use the capital from the round to expand its presence in Mexico for iBuying, and to invest in data and financial products.

Image Credits: Flat.mx

Naturally, Flat.mx’s investors are bullish.

Archie Cochrane, principal investor at Anthemis Group, said his firm views Flat.mx as an integral part of its embedded finance thesis in the context of the Mexican property sector. 

“The iBuyer model itself is well understood and developed in many parts of the world, but it is also a complex model with many variables that requires a seasoned and astute team to execute the strategy,” Cochrane wrote via email. “When we met Victor and Bernardo, it was clear that their clarity of vision and deep understanding of the broader opportunity set would allow them to succeed over the long term.

Tim Chae, managing partner at 500 Startups, said he envisions that Flat.mx will become “the go-to route” for buyers, sellers, agents and lenders in Mexican real estate. 

“There are nuances and specific problems that are unique to Mexico that Flat.mx has done a great job identifying and solving,” he said. 

ALLVP Partner Fernando Lelo de Larrea said that essentially after years of “unkept promises,” software is finally transforming the real estate industry in Mexico. 

“Most models replicate successful models from the more mature U.S. proptech space,” he said. “Since we started investing in proptech, we’ve never seen such an innovative approach to seizing a trillion dollar opportunity.”

Why global investors are flocking to back Latin American startups

Posted on

Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Plug and Play invest in Odiggo’s $2.2M seed round

Servicing one’s car personally is a time-consuming, expensive and painstaking process. It’s a cycle that can lead to more expensive repairs and safety issues down the line, and no car owner likes that.

Egypt and Dubai-based auto tech startup Odiggo is a platform addressing this problem. It allows car owners to get the help they need by finding car services and parts suppliers from providers around them. Then for the suppliers, it increases their sales and reaches more customers without necessarily spending on marketing.

Odiggo is part of the current YC Summer batch and has secured a $2.2 million seed round before Demo Day. The rosters of existing investors participating in the round are Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and Plug and Play Ventures. Regional VCs like Seedra Ventures, LoftyInc Capital, and Essa Al-Saleh (CEO of Volta-Tucks) also took part.

Ahmed Omar and Ahmed Nasser launched Odiggo in December 2019. The company operates a marketplace that connects car owners with service providers who can solve their problems, from servicing and repair to washing and maintenance. A commission-based model is used and Odiggo charges the car suppliers 20% commission on every transaction.

Over 50,000 car owners across three markets — Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia — use Odiggo. The company also works directly with over 300 merchants. It claims merchant numbers have grown 40% month-on-month while its user base has increased 200% since the start of the pandemic.

“We believe we are at a watershed moment. It is incredible that since COVID hit, Odiggo has experienced over 10 times growth in the last year,” said co-founder Omar. 

CEO Omar said with this new round, Odiggo’s priority will be to attain consistent growth while expanding its team across the UEA, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Odiggo

L-R: Ahmed Nassir (co-founder) & Ahmed Omar (co-founder and CEO)

He adds that since Odiggo taps into a mix of data sources — including car metrics and internal software, it will use that same information to provide more product offerings.

Odiggo will use part of the funding to continue developing its tech and dashboard software, he said.

“For example, the platform would be hooked up to the car owner’s vehicle and link the vehicle to the marketplace and provide frequent updates of your vehicle condition so you’ll be informed if the tires are low, the oil needs changing, or if a service is required.”

The pandemic has upended the mobility and logistics sectors, especially in MENA, making players like Odiggo gain much visibility from investors. In an industry today worth over $61 billion in the Middle East and Africa alone, Odiggo is looking to become a market leader. It has even more lofty plans to go public in the next three years.

“We are also aiming to be fully focused on spending more on our product and technology, as building an ecosystem to monetize requires more capital. Our target is to go for IPO by 2024 and achieve one billion services booked, and this requires a lot of network effects, infrastructure and technology,” the CEO said.

“We aim to be the first $100 billion company coming out of the region,” added Nasser.

Some of its investors, Idris Ayodeji Bello, managing partner at LoftyInc, and Essa Al-Saleh, are onboard with the startup’s plan despite early days.

“We are excited to back Odiggo through our Afropreneurs Funds in its quest to transform the automotive parts market and provide superior service to clients, starting from MENA. The leadership team of Omar and Nasser, supported by the rest of the employees, have been a joy to work with and we are on a countdown to the IPO,” said Bello in a statement. 

Posted on

Canopy raises $15M Series A after posting 4.5x customer growth in H1 2021

Canopy Servicing announced this morning it recently closed a $15 million Series A. The startup sells software to fintechs and others, allowing customers to create loan programs and service the resulting products.

The company raised a $3.5 million seed round in 2020. Canaan led its Series A, with participation from Homebrew, Foundation and BoxGroup, among others. Per Canopy, its valuation grew by 5x from its seed round to its Series A.

The company has raised $18.5 million to date.

So far this reads much like any other post announcing a new startup funding round, kicking off with an array of information concerning the round and who chipped into the transaction. Next, we’d probably note the competitors, growth and what investors in the company in question have to say about their recent purchase. This morning, however, I want to riff a bit on the future of fintech and how the financial tech stack of the future may be built.

TechCrunch chatted with Canopy CEO Matt Bivons last week. He has an interesting take on where fintech is headed. Let’s discuss it and work through what Canopy does.

Canopy

As with many startups, Canopy was built to scratch an itch. Bivons had run into issues regarding loan servicing in prior jobs. He went on to found a startup that aimed to build a student credit card. But after working on that project, Bivons and co-founder Will Hanson pivoted the company to a B2B-focused concern building loan servicing technology.

Behind the decision was market research undertaken by the Canopy crew that uncovered that a great number of fintech startups wanted to get into the credit market. That makes sense; credit products can provide far more attractive economics to fintech startups than, say, checking and savings accounts. Knowing that loan servicing was a bear and a half to manage, Canopy decided to focus on it.

Bivons framed Canopy as a modern API for loan servicing that can be used to create and manage loans at any point in their lifecycle. He noted that what the startup is doing is akin to what several successful fintech companies have done, namely taking a piece of the fintech world and making it better for developers.

This is where Bivons’ view of the future of fintech products comes into play. According to the CEO, in the future, companies will not buy a monolithic financial technology stack. Instead, he thinks, they will buy the best API for each slice of the fintech world that they need to implement. This matters because we could argue that Canopy is targeting too small a product space. Not that its market isn’t large — debt and its servicing are massive problem spaces — but seeing a company find a niche to focus on makes more sense when its leaders expect focused fintech products to win out over large bundles of services.

Bivons added that much of the fintech focus of the last five years has been on debit, citing Chime, Step and Greenlight as examples. The next decade, he said, is going to focus on credit products. That would be good news for Canopy.

Canopy co-founders via the company. CTO Will Hanson (left) and CEO Matt Bivons (right).

Critically, and for the finance nerds out there, Bivons told TechCrunch that its loan servicing technology does not require the company to take on any credit risk, and that it has gross margins of around 90%. I never trust a too-round number, but the figure indicates that what Canopy has built could grow into an attractive business.

Today, Canopy is a traditional SaaS, though Bivons said that it wants to move toward usage-based pricing in time. Its service costs around 50 cents per account per month, or around $6 per year in its current form. Today, around 40% of Canopy’s customers are seed and Series A-scale startups, though Bivons noted that it is moving up the customer size chart over time.

The resulting growth is impressive. Canopy’s customer count grew 4.5x from February to May of 2021. Of course, Canopy is a young company, so its overall customer base could not have been massive at the start of the year. Still, that’s the sort of growth that makes investors sit up and pay attention, making the Canopy Series A somewhat unsurprising.

Fintech growth doesn’t seem to be slackening much, meaning that the market for what Canopy is selling should expand. Provided that its view that best-of-breed, more particular fintech products will beat larger stacks in the market, it could have an interesting trajectory ahead of it. And now that it has raised its Series A, we can start to annoy it with more concrete questions about its growth from here on out.

Posted on

Raise, a startup building Africa’s Carta, gets backing from 500 Startups

As startups in Africa continue to grow and raise money at a ridiculous pace, so too will their cap tables expand. Most African startups’ bulk of VC money is from foreign investors, making it imperative for African startups to incorporate abroad, especially in the U.S.

The processes for incorporation are quite complicated, and even though most founders still get the hang of it, they risk the chance of messing up their cap tables. For instance, some Nigerian startups are guilty of issuing preferred shares in naira and then canceling to issue dollar-denominated SAFEs when they get incorporated in the U.S.

Raise, a startup building Africa’s Carta is tackling these challenges and has received backing from 500 Startups to scale its technology.

In 2019, Marvin Coleby, Tina Nyamache and Eugene Mutai set out to create a blockchain solution that would make it easier for people to buy and sell shares in pre-IPO companies in Africa. After running several iterations, they found out that most companies still struggled with the concept of equity and liquidity. They spent money managing corporate structures for holding companies in Delaware, Canada, and Europe but maintained paper-based subsidiaries across Africa.

According to Coleby, most of the equity across Africa is still stored, tracked and updated using paper certificates, manual processes and fragmented government databases. This raises transaction costs to manage subsidiaries and issue employee stock options. It also inflates costs to enter and exit positions in private and public companies.

Raise

Image Credits: Raise

So they started Raise to help startups, investors, employees, and law firms manage deals, cap tables and corporate compliance. 

On the platform, Raise customers can also automate due diligence, set valuations, track employee stock vesting and make routine documentation for licenses and government documents in Nigeria and Kenya. 

When Raise launched in 2019, it was in private beta and was backed by Binance Labs, the sole investor in its pre-seed round. Since proceeding to a public beta in 2020, Raise has onboarded customers like Anjarwalla & Khanna, Africa’s largest law firm; startups Bamboo, Workpay and Mono; and VC firms like Microtraction and Chrysalis Capital.

But the long-term problem Raise is trying to solve is liquidity, Coleby tells TechCrunch on a call.

“Everything we do is to find a way to make it easier for founders, customers, employees, investors to get liquidity from investing in companies,” he said. “Companies are raising money, people are investing, and employees are getting stock options. However, there are only one or two exits now and then. That’s because we build with the Silicon Valley model where we have to grow, scale until we get some big exit. From our perspective, liquidity doesn’t have to be that way. It can be small little pieces of liquidity that employees and investors get over time.”

By that measure, Africa’s capital markets for private and public companies are painfully illiquid. It takes several months or years to buy or sell equity, and, according to Raise, over $1 trillion of stock in Africa is “illiquid, paper-based and priced in inflationary currencies.”

Nigerian stock trading platforms like Chaka, Bamboo and Trove help Nigerians create liquidity for assets locally and internationally. However, Raise aims to build the platform behind them to streamline more asset classes and investment opportunities.

Nigerian investment platform Chaka secures $1.5M pre-seed after bagging country’s first SEC license

While that’s still in the works, Raise organizes ownership data for African companies and makes them accessible. It’s a similar play to what Carta, a $3 billion company offering cap table software, does for U.S. companies.

Over time, onboarding cap tables and equity data will also open up use cases for Carta to become a blockchain-based digital asset platform. The plan is to become more like Africa’s Nasdaq for private companies as it hopes to sell indexes, ETFs, futures, and assets for them. Coleby says in that way, Raise will become an equity engine for processing Africa’s hundreds of billion dollars of trade and securities volume.

Coleby says the number of companies going live is increasing 60% month-on-month. The platform manages about 200 cap tables with assets worth more than $400 million. The next phase of growth, according to Coleby, will be onboarding Series A and growth-stage companies onto the platform.

The company is active in Nigeria and Kenya. Coleby says a seed round is in the works to continue growing deeper into those markets and experiment with funding and liquidity operations across the African VC space.

Next, Raise is building a marketplace that continues connecting and educating investors, employees, and founders in one platform with their law firms to use trusted and verified data to do deals and issue stock options to employees.

African startups join global funding boom as fintech shines

Posted on

Butlr Technologies, developing anonymous people sensors, inks $7.9M seed round

A new $7.9 million seed round boosts Butlr Technologies’ ability to apply its real-time people-sensing technology beyond commercial real estate and retail uses to monitor falls and other movements for active seniors who are aging in place.

Hyperplane led the round, with Founder Collective, Union Labs, 500 Startups, SOSV, E14 Fund, Tectonic Ventures, Scott Belsky, Chad Laurans and Sunny Vu participating.

The new funding comes one year after the Burlingame, California-based proptech company raised $1.2 million in convertible notes, which is included in the $7.9 million. It is developing a platform and Heatic sensors that detect someone’s body heat anonymously to determine occupancy, headcount and activity.

Co-founders Honghao Deng and Jiani Zeng, who spun Butlr out of the MIT Media Lab in 2019, refer to their technology as “Alexa for spatial.” Their wireless sensors capture five frames per second of thermal body heat data — posture, quality of sleep and temperature — and then turn that into insights that customers can use to make decisions on anything from constructing a building to planning how people will coexist in physician spaces.

Deng told TechCrunch the company is “the only one combining accuracy with wireless.” The wireless aspect of the sensors, which can fit in the palm of your hand, means that they can be placed anywhere, require a one-time setup and the batteries last for two years. Butlr is also all about protecting privacy, so the replay doesn’t show faces, but instead the person’s “heat” moving around.

“The sensors can be used in any environment,” Deng said. “It should be invisible and not something people have to worry about. We can bring dignity back to the technology world, while also understanding users’ needs. This is about new things people couldn’t do before, how to use the space in real-time and in a way that is easy to deploy.”

Basic kits, which start at $880, can be purchased from the company’s website, and include space-designing software that someone can use to easily determine where to place the sensors for maximum coverage.

Butlr Technologies' simulation of movement and detection.

Butlr Technologies’ simulation of movement and detection. Image Credits: Butlr Technologies

The funding is earmarked for continued market expansion and technology development, including a more advanced API, to meet explosive demand for spatial intelligence — the company is shipping out hundreds of thousands of sensors and grew almost 10 times in revenue last year. Deng expects that to continue as companies figure out their return-to-work policies following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Though Butlr initially started with real estate and retailers, Deng sees potential in other use cases, like car traffic flow and assisted living facilities, where early diagnostics and cognitive function can be monitored before an accident happens.

“The assisted living market is huge,” Deng added. “One of the most important things coming from monitoring is understanding where a person is. We can get early predictions about their frailty.”

For example, by being able to transmit images in real time, Butlr is better able to detect rigid movements or behavior that looks like falling. This is unlike incumbent technology, which Deng said “misses minutes” during the transmission of the images.

Incumbents are also relying on wearables or health bands, which have to be charged and can be cumbersome to use in a senior care or home health environment. In addition, by having a sensor versus a camera, it also preserves dignity, Zeng said.

Founder Collective partner Eric Paley told TechCrunch that he loved what Butlr is doing because of its “incredible simplicity,” what he called “the holy grail of indoor sensing.”

He’s seen other startups go after this same market and fail due to making it difficult for an average user to set it up or require an electrician. For the sensors to be fixed in one place and be there for years “is huge,” Paley said.

“What they have been able to do at an early stage is impressive,” he added. “There are so many uses for what Butlr’s technology is doing, and many industries are coming after them to use it. We are constantly having conversations on what are the best opportunities, and by having an API approach we can serve lots of customers.”

As tech offices begin to reopen, the workplace could look very different

 

Posted on

Butlr Technologies, developing anonymous people sensors, inks $7.9M seed round

A new $7.9 million seed round boosts Butlr Technologies’ ability to apply its real-time people-sensing technology beyond commercial real estate and retail uses to monitor falls and other movements for active seniors who are aging in place.

Hyperplane led the round, with Founder Collective, Union Labs, 500 Startups, SOSV, E14 Fund, Tectonic Ventures, Scott Belsky, Chad Laurans and Sunny Vu participating.

The new funding comes one year after the Burlingame, California-based proptech company raised $1.2 million in convertible notes, which is included in the $7.9 million. It is developing a platform and Heatic sensors that detect someone’s body heat anonymously to determine occupancy, headcount and activity.

Co-founders Honghao Deng and Jiani Zeng, who spun Butlr out of the MIT Media Lab in 2019, refer to their technology as “Alexa for spatial.” Their wireless sensors capture five frames per second of thermal body heat data — posture, quality of sleep and temperature — and then turn that into insights that customers can use to make decisions on anything from constructing a building to planning how people will coexist in physician spaces.

Deng told TechCrunch the company is “the only one combining accuracy with wireless.” The wireless aspect of the sensors, which can fit in the palm of your hand, means that they can be placed anywhere, require a one-time setup and the batteries last for two years. Butlr is also all about protecting privacy, so the replay doesn’t show faces, but instead the person’s “heat” moving around.

“The sensors can be used in any environment,” Deng said. “It should be invisible and not something people have to worry about. We can bring dignity back to the technology world, while also understanding users’ needs. This is about new things people couldn’t do before, how to use the space in real-time and in a way that is easy to deploy.”

Basic kits, which start at $880, can be purchased from the company’s website, and include space-designing software that someone can use to easily determine where to place the sensors for maximum coverage.

Butlr Technologies' simulation of movement and detection.

Butlr Technologies’ simulation of movement and detection. Image Credits: Butlr Technologies

The funding is earmarked for continued market expansion and technology development, including a more advanced API, to meet explosive demand for spatial intelligence — the company is shipping out hundreds of thousands of sensors and grew almost 10 times in revenue last year. Deng expects that to continue as companies figure out their return-to-work policies following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Though Butlr initially started with real estate and retailers, Deng sees potential in other use cases, like car traffic flow and assisted living facilities, where early diagnostics and cognitive function can be monitored before an accident happens.

“The assisted living market is huge,” Deng added. “One of the most important things coming from monitoring is understanding where a person is. We can get early predictions about their frailty.”

For example, by being able to transmit images in real time, Butlr is better able to detect rigid movements or behavior that looks like falling. This is unlike incumbent technology, which Deng said “misses minutes” during the transmission of the images.

Incumbents are also relying on wearables or health bands, which have to be charged and can be cumbersome to use in a senior care or home health environment. In addition, by having a sensor versus a camera, it also preserves dignity, Zeng said.

Founder Collective partner Eric Paley told TechCrunch that he loved what Butlr is doing because of its “incredible simplicity,” what he called “the holy grail of indoor sensing.”

He’s seen other startups go after this same market and fail due to making it difficult for an average user to set it up or require an electrician. For the sensors to be fixed in one place and be there for years “is huge,” Paley said.

“What they have been able to do at an early stage is impressive,” he added. “There are so many uses for what Butlr’s technology is doing, and many industries are coming after them to use it. We are constantly having conversations on what are the best opportunities, and by having an API approach we can serve lots of customers.”

As tech offices begin to reopen, the workplace could look very different

 

Posted on

Una Brands launches with $40M to roll up brands on multiple Asia-Pacific e-commerce platforms

Una Brands' co-founders (from left to right): Tobias Heusch, Kiran Tanna and Kushal Patel

Una Brands’ co-founders (from left to right): Tobias Heusch, Kiren Tanna and Kushal Patel. Una Brands Una Brands

One of the biggest funding trends of the past year is companies that consolidate small e-commerce brands. Many of the most notable startups in the space, like Thrasio, Berlin Brands Group and Branded Group, focus on consolidating Amazon Marketplace sellers. But the e-commerce landscape is more fragmented in the Asia-Pacific region, where sellers use platforms like Tokopedia, Lazada, Shopee, Rakuten or eBay, depending on where they are. That is where Una Brands comes in. Co-founder Kiren Tanna, former chief executive officer of Rocket Internet Asia, said the startup is “platform agnostic,” searching across marketplaces (and platforms like Shopify, Magento or WooCommerce) for potential acquisitions.

Una announced today that it has raised a $40 million equity and debt round. Investors include 500 Startups, Kingsway Capital, 468 Capital, Presight Capital, Global Founders Capital and Maximilian Bitner, the former CEO of Lazada who currently holds the same role at secondhand fashion platform Vestiaire Collective.

E-commerce roll-ups are the next wave of disruption in consumer packaged goods

Una did not disclose the ratio of equity and debt in the round. Like many other e-commerce aggregators, including Thrasio, Una raised debt financing to buy brands because it is non-dilutive. The round will also be used to hire aggressively in order to evaluate brands in its pipeline. Una currently has teams in Singapore, Malaysia and Australia and plans to expand in Southeast Asia before entering Taiwan, Japan and South Korea.

Tanna, who also founded Foodpanda and ZEN Rooms, launched Una along with Adrian Johnston, Kushal Patel, Tobias Heusch and Srinivasan Shridharan. He estimates that there are more than 10 million third-party sellers spread across different platforms in the Asia-Pacific.

“Every single seller in Asia is looking at multiple platforms and not just Amazon,” Tanna told TechCrunch. “We saw a big gap in the market where e-commerce is growing very quickly, but players in the West are not able to look at every platform, so that is why we decided to focus on APAC, launch the business there and acquire sellers who are selling on multiple platforms.”

Singapore is poised to become Asia’s Silicon Valley

Una looks for brands with annual revenue between $300,000 to $20 million and is open to many categories, as long as they have strong SKUs and low seasonality (for example, it avoids fast fashion). Its offering prices range from about $600,000 to $3 million.

Tanna said Una will maintain acquisitions as individual brands “because what’s working, we don’t change it.” How it adds value is by doing things that are difficult for small brands to execute, especially those run by just one or two people, like expanding into more distribution channels and countries.

“For example, in Indonesia there are at least five or six important platforms that you should be on, and many times the sellers aren’t doing that, so that’s something we do,” Tanna explained. “The second is cross-border in Southeast Asia, which sellers often can’t do themselves because of regulations around customs, import restrictions and duties. That’s something our team has experience in and want to bring to all brands.”

Thrasio raises $750M more in equity for its Amazon roll-up play

Amazon FBA roll-up players have the advantage of Amazon Marketplace analytics that allow them to quickly measure the performance of brands in their pipeline of potential acquisitions. Since it deals with different marketplaces and platforms, Una works with much more fragmented sources of data for revenue, costs, rankings and customer reviews. To scale up, the company is currently building technology to automate its valuation process and will also have local teams in each of its markets. Despite working with multiple e-commerce platforms, Tanna said Una is able to complete a deal within five weeks, with an offer usually happening within two or three days.

In countries where Amazon is the dominant e-commerce player, like the United States, many entrepreneurs launch FBA brands with the goal of flipping them for a profit within a few years, a trend that Thrasio and other Amazon roll-up startups are tapping into. But that concept is less common in Una’s markets, so it offers different team deals to appeal to potential sellers. Though Una acquires 100% of brands, it also does profit-sharing models with sellers, so they get a lump sum payment for the majority of their business first, then collect more money as Una scales up the brand. Tanna said Una usually continues working with sellers on a consulting basis for about three to six months after a sale.

“Something that Amazon players know very well is that they can find a product, sell it for four to five years, and then ideally make a multi-million deal exit and build another product or go on holiday,” said Tanna. “That’s something Asian sellers are not as familiar with, so we see this as an education phase to explain how the process works, and why it makes sense to sell to us.”

Target Global leads $150M round for Amazon Marketplace consolidator Branded

Posted on

Offering a service that prioritizes the highest-paying gigs in the gig economy, Stoovo raises funding

Semih Korkmaz and Hantz Févry launched Stoovo in 2019 as a way to help gig workers make the best use of their time.

Févry, who immigrated to the U.S. from Haiti, knew first hand the struggles that come with part time work from his days as a student at Stonybrook University. While there bouncing from job to job, Févry would feel the sting associated with hidden fees, unkept promises, and variability of part-time labor.

The time at Stonybrook was also when Févry got his first taste of entrepreneurship. In 2010 and 2011 Févry said the Dean of the University’s business school let the budding business owner cut back on his hours so he could start iTrade International, an import-export business selling earthquake detection equipment in Haiti.

That first taste of tech and business development eventually landed Févry a job at Google in Hong Kong and offered him the chance to travel around the world. After a stint in Europe, Févry moved back to the U.S. where he set to work building Stoovo.

The question on his mind was this: How can we leverage technology to help gig workers or people taking short term assignments?

Févry and his co-founder Korkmaz envisioned Stoovo as a way to level they playing field by providing gig workers with information about the highest paying jobs available on the gig platforms at any one time. “What the platforms are doing is they are  optimizing to make sure that they’re responding to demand,” Févry said. “What we do is use the same approach to predict what will be the demand, where will be the demand, what will be the competition, and what’s the payout.”

The company’s software advises gig workers on the optimum time for using each service based on their earning criteria and hours, Févry said.

“We tell you when to start working, where you need to start working, and when you need to go when you need to take your break,” he said. 

But the company’s service isn’t only about optimization. There’s also a banking component and a suite of products to ensure that gig workers are also getting the most out of their gigs financially. The company offers a checking account, a tax management service, and lending services as well through services like BellBizzer, a Seattle-based company which offers a short-term rental service for consumer goods.

Both Korkmaz and Févry spent time working as delivery drivers or freelancing to get a feel for the challenges gig workers faced, Févry said. During lunch breaks at Google, Févry would do food deliveries to seewhat he could do so that he could understand how to make the gig economy work better.

Ultimately, the best solution would be to pay gig workers a fair wage for the time they spend doing their work, but barring that, technologically developed band-aids to help heal technologically enabled wounds seem like the only option.

Gig companies like Uber have a history of using their algorithms to wring more money from drivers — sometimes unbeknownst to the workers.

Back in August, a developer named Armin Samii created an app called UberCheats that monitored the UberEats application for a software bug to inform drivers if they were underpaid by the company for the distance they’d traveled to make a delivery. Last week, the app was taken down, but only because of a copyright infringement claim from Uber.

 

Stoovo and UberCheats seem to come from the same place. The idea is to equip workers with tools that can work for workers instead of for big platforms.

It’s this vision that attracted investors like Derek Norton from Watertower Ventures to invest in the company. To date, Stoovo has raised $2.4 million from investors including Watertower, 500 Startups, Plug and Play Ventures, and TSEF, Févry said.

With the money the company hopes to build out more products that can enable things like low-cost money transfers. Ultimately, the company just wants to give these gig workers a chance, Févry said.

“The gig economy is rife with frustrations,” Févry said, and Stoovo is making a pitch to smooth over the obstacles. “We really understand your life. We are also immigrants,” he said. “We know that of that $200… we know you have to send $40 overseas… We are building a product with [gig workers], we are not building for them.”

As it adds Jeremy Milken to the partnership, Watertower Ventures nears $50 million close for its new fund