Tag: accomplice

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MotoRefi raises $8.6 million to bring its auto refinancing platform to the masses

Americans are saddled with $1.2 trillion in auto loans, according to data collected by the Federal Reserve. And while that debt can be refinanced, even U.S. car owners who know it’s an option face a complicated task.

MotoRefi, a new fintech startup that was born out of QED Investors in 2017, says it has developed an auto refinancing platform that handles the entire process, from rooting out the best rates to paying off the old lender and re-titling the vehicle.

Now, the company is preparing to scale up and bring its platform to the masses, with $8.6 million in capital raised in a Series A funding round co-led by Accomplice and Link Ventures. Motley Fool Ventures, CMFG Ventures (part of CUNA Mutual Group) and Gaingels also participated in the round. The round follows $4.7 million in seed funding that MotoRefi announced in March 2019.

MotoRefi is also gaining two new board members, Rob Chaplinsky, managing director of Link Ventures, and Rachel Holt, former Uber executive and co-founder of a new VC firm, Construct Capital.

Auto loan debt is the same as student loan debt in the U.S., said MotoRefi CEO Kevin Bennett. And yet the majority of car owners don’t know that refinancing their auto loan is even an option, he added. A 2017 Harris Poll found that 47% of Americans were aware they could refinance their auto loan.

“People shop their home loans, while most just get their auto loans from the dealership where they bought their car, so their rates are artificially high,” Bennett said in a recent interview. “Meanwhile, credit unions can be great for auto loans but they might not have the tools to reach consumers.”

That’s where MotoRefi hopes to step in. Bennett said the MotoRefi platform can save customers an average of $100 per month on their car payments.

MotoRefi auto loan refinancing product

Holt, who was an early investor in MotoRefi, said during her time at Uber she saw firsthand the amount of auto loans drivers were carrying. Dealerships aren’t making money on selling cars, they’re making it on financing, Holt said. “I saw this problem and so I was looking out for startups trying to solve this problem,” she added.

The U.S. auto refinancing market is about $40 billion, according to TransUnion. But that market could be two to three times that size, according to data shared at TransUnion Financial Services Summit. It’s an opportunity that has prompted companies like Lending Tree to launch auto refinancing products.

MotoRefi is already scaling up by adding new lenders and partners, according to Bennett. The new funding will be used to hire more employees and invest in its technology platform.

The startup also launched in January separate pilot programs with Progressive and Chime. Under these pilots, Progressive and Chime will directly offer refinance options to their customers instead of going through an affiliate program such as Credit Karma — a company backed by QED Investors — or LendingTree.

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Postscript raises $4.5M to help Shopify shops stay connected with customers over SMS

Back in February, we wrote that Postscript “wants to be the Mailchimp for SMS.” Now they’ve raised $4.5 million to help get it done.

This round was lead by Accomplice, and backed by Kayak co-founder Paul English, Wufoo co-founder Kevin Hale, Klaviyo co-founder Andrew Bialecki, Drift co-founder Elias Torres, Front co-founder Mathilde Colin, and Podium co-founders Eric Rea and Dennis Steele. The Postscript team is currently made up of 14 people.

Postscript is meant to help e-commerce companies — specifically Shopify shops, currently — connect with their existing customers over SMS. Their Shopify plugin lets store owners run SMS marketing campaigns with customers who’ve opted in, have two-way conversations with users who respond, and analyze the data to figure out what’s working.

Got a new product hitting the shelves, and want to let your most frequent customers know first? Plug the message into Postscript’s dashboard, tell it what segment of your customer base you want to receive it, and send away. Their analytics backend will tell you how many people received it, how many actually clicked through, and how much revenue you pulled in from those clicks.

If a customer types out a text and responds, it’ll pop up in the backend like a support ticket. Shop owners and employees can respond and have direct conversations, answer questions, and close out the ticket through the dashboard — or they can automatically pipe them into services like Zendesk or Zapier.

But what about spam? Our text message inboxes tend to feel like the last refuge from the overwhelming onslaught of marketing messages that have ruined e-mail; do we really want shops pinging our phones directly every time they’ve got a new pair of pants?

It seems like Postscript is pretty mindful of this, and is building things in a way that limits just how ‘spammy’ anyone on the platform can be — partly because (as we’ve seen with e-mail) flooding users with unwanted messages ensures that messages just don’t get opened, and partly because SMS is much more tightly regulated than many other messaging protocols. Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in the US, for example, SMSing marketing messages to someone without an explicit opt-in can get the company nailed with fines of thousands of dollars per text.

As Lucas Matney wrote in February:

The opt-in process for phone communications is already a bit more codified in the U.S., and as companies attempt to stay in the good graces of GDPR for fear of the EU god, it might be more likely they tread carefully.

As such, everything is opt-in, and easily opted out of if a user changes their mind. It also helps, of course, that sending SMS isn’t free for the companies. Each SMS you send to a customer who doesn’t care is money wasted — so there’s interest on all sides on limiting messages to just the folks who actually want them.

Postscript pricing varies depending on how many messages a shop is looking to send each month. Paid plans start at $50 a month for 1,500 SMS, climbing up to $2,000 per month for 83,000 messages — after that, they ask shops to reach out for a custom plan. Postscript co-founder Alex Beller tells me the company currently has around 530 paying customers, each spending anything from $50 per month to “the mid 5 figures.”

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Flume Health is an insurance administrator cutting costs by pre-approving prices and paying on-demand

Cedric Kovacs-Johnson launched Flume Health after watching his own family struggle with payments for his sister’s surgery.

“When we looked at who was calling the shots [on prices] it was this litany of service providers that was unknown to us and the cost was unknown to us until we got the bill weeks later,” says Kovacs-Johnson. 

The family had thought that their medical bills would be covered by one insurance provider, but as bills kept rolling in, they realized that what had been promised as one insurance company was actually an insurance plan managed by a benefits manager whose plan was not as extensive — and that the insurer was only managing the relationship with the benefits manager.

So the former Makerbot employee launched Flume in February 2017 to make the payment process more transparent for the hundreds of companies that are self-insuring their employees to cope with rising healthcare premiums.

Roughly 80% of companies with over 500 employees are providing their own insurance plans, or outsourcing the administration of insurance coverage to plan administrators and startups, seeing the woefully poor service these companies provide, are jumping into the fray.

Collective Health is one of the best funded, with $300 million in capital committed to the company, including a $110 million round last year. Another startup, Limelight Health has raised $40 million in financing as it tries to grab market share by providing tools to make the self-insured health management process easier for companies.

Those companies and upstarts like Flume, Apostrophe and Eden Health are all tackling services and support for companies providing self-insurance.

Collective Health nabs $110 million in funding

“We become the independent administrator [and] instead of buying a whole bundle of services from a carrier we let them buy it from independent providers.”

Flume is able to offer lower prices for procedures than competitors by offering payment on the day of an operation or within three days of a visit.

“Our difference is that you have an ability to change the fundamental relationship between payer and provider,” said Kovacs-Johnson. “We pay for a bundle. We know ahead of time that a procedure is pre-authorized… when we give them the approval on this estimated date of service… now that we know we’ve authorized the service we are going to pay that before or at the time of service. So we get discounts because providers hate the billing process.”

Traditional insurance administrators usually offer a bundled package of services that companies just pay for. Instead, Flume offers companies transparent pricing for independent services that allows patients and providers to pick and choose — cutting out much of the claims processing that creates additional administrative overhead for care providers, according to the company.

To navigate the world of third party administrators, Flume hired one. The company’s chief operating officer was the chairman of the board of third party administrators, Kevin Schlotman.

“As SPBA chairman, I am constantly looking at the future of our industry and have been frustrated by the lack of transparency in the cost and quality of healthcare, and the structural barriers in place that restrict flexibility in plan design and reimbursement methods that our clients are demanding,” Schlotman said in a statement when he joined the company in September.

So far, Flume has eight customers who’ve signed on to its digital health plan administration service pulling its first clients from unions and school districts across five states.

The New York-based company has also managed to attract a few investors, raising $4 million from New York investors including Primary Venture Partners, Accomplice, Founder Collective, and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator.

By working directly with providers to get cash prices for services, patients avoid surprise bills and know what they’re paying before an appointment, according to the company.

“Cedric and team have created a solution to one of the most crippling problems facing America right now, and their early success is strong evidence that employers are desperate for change. What they’re doing has huge implications for the future of healthcare in our country,” said TJ Mahoney, partner at Accomplice .

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Home buying and selling platform Perch raises $220M in debt and equity

Perch, a home-buying and selling platform, has raised $220 million in a combination of equity ($20M) to fund operations and debt ($200M) to finance home purchasing. The equity investment was led by existing investors FirstMark Capital, with participation from Accomplice and Juxtapose. Perch declined to disclose the debt lender in the deal.

Perch was founded in September of 2017 by Court Cunningham and Phil DeGisi.

The premise of Perch is to focus on the largest segment of home buyers on the market, which Perch calls “dual trackers.” These buyers are also in the process of selling their current home at the same time.

This is a generally difficult and taxing process that forces people to choose between the uncertainty of a huge investment without having sold their current home or moving into a short-term rental indefinitely until they find the right new home. The alternative is to make an offer to purchase the new home contingent upon the sale of their current home, which tends to be an unattractive proposition for sellers, according to Perch.

Perch solves this for clients by making an offer on their homes that is valid for six months, and then helping them to find a new home. Perch also conducts the closing on both homes in the same day.

There is a certain amount of risk associated with this business model considering the fluctuation of the housing market, but that doesn’t seem to be an issue for investors of Perch or their competition. Looking at the way it works now, however, it’s hard to imagine that tech won’t have gotten a strong foothold within the real estate industry over the next few decades.

Which explains the huge influx of cash going to companies the industry calls “iBuyers,” such as RedFin, Zillow, Opendoor, and OfferPad. Opendoor recently filed to raise $200 million at a $3.7 billion valuation in February, while OfferPad closed a Series C that brings total equity and debt raised to $975 million.

Perch, however, doesn’t consider itself an iBuyer.

“An iBuyer will buy your house for you at a certain price in an easy and convenient transaction,” said cofounder and CEO Court Cunningham, referencing the offerings of Perch’s competition. “It adds a lot of value, but that’s a feature of a complete offering, not the offering in and of itself.”

In short, Perch wants to tie together the three branches of home buying and selling — closing, title, and mortgage — for the 60 percent of the market comprised by “dual trackers.”

For now, Perch is squared away on the closing and title portion of the process, offering e-closing and e-notary to let users complete the transaction from the comfort of their own home. The company plans to offer its own mortgage brokerage service to customers at some point this year, and though it’s not on the roadmap anytime soon, Cunningham said he isn’t closed off to the idea of Perch becoming an underwriter somewhere down the line.

Not only will mortgages add a new revenue stream for Perch, but Cunningham sees the convenience of having everything in one place as a huge opportunity for customer acquisition.

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User Interviews, a platform for product feedback, raises $5 million

It’s not uncommon to hear CEOs and business leaders talk about focusing on the consumer. But the only way to build for the consumer is to hear what they want, which can be a resource-intensive thing to retrieve.

User Interviews, an ERA-backed company out of New York, is looking to lighten that load with a fresh $5 million in seed funding from Accomplice, Las Olas, FJ Labs, and ERA.

User Interviews actually started out as Mobile Suites, an amenities logistics platform for hotels. It was a dud, and the team — Basel Fakhoury, Dennis Meng and Bob Saris — decided to do far more user research before determining the next product.

In the process of talking to customers to understand their pain points, they realized just how difficult collecting user feedback could be.

That’s how User Interviews was born. The platform’s first product, called Recruit, offers a network of non-users that can be matched with companies to provide feedback. In fact, User Interviews’ first sales were made by simply responding to Craigslist ads posted by companies looking for non-users from which they could collect feedback.

But because the majority of user research is based on existing users, the company also built Research Hub, which is essentially a CRM system for user feedback and research. To be clear, User Interviews doesn’t facilitate the actual emails sent to users, but does track the feedback and make sure that no one from the research team is reaching out to a single user too often.

With Recruit, User Interviews charges $30/person that it matches with a company for feedback. Research Hub costs starts at $150/month.

“Right now, our greatest challenge is that our clients are the best product people in the world, and we have a huge pipeline of amazing ideas that are very valuable and no one is doing yet that our clients would love,” said CEO and founder Basel Fakhoury. “But we have to build it fast enough.”

No mention of what those forthcoming products might be, but the current iteration sure seems attractive enough. User Interviews clients include Eventbrite, Glassdoor, AT&T, DirecTV, Lola, LogMeIn, Thumbtack, Casper, ClassPass, Fandango, NNG, Pinterest, Pandora, Colgate, Uber and REI, to name a few.