Affirm files confidentially to go public

This afternoon Affirm, a startup focused on providing point-of-sale credit to consumers making online purchases, announced that it has filed to go public.

The filing is confidential, so there’s little to be gleaned about the company’s performance from the news. That Affirm was exploring a public offering was reported by the Wall Street Journal back in July. In the aftermath of that news, TechCrunch tried to understand the valuation that Affirm was said to be targeting in its debut, which we placed at as much as $10 billion.

Affirm has been richly funded throughout its private life. The fintech unicorn has raised private funds in excess of $1 billion, including a $500 million Series G in September of 2020, a $300 million Series F in April of 2019, and a $200 million Series E in December of 2017. Affirm also raised more than $400 million in earlier equity rounds, and a $100 million debt line in late 2016.

Many venture bets are therefore riding on the success of Affirm and its future liquidity.

The company was valued at $2.9 billion at the time of its $300 million Series F last year according to PitchBook data. The company’s most recent valuation is not known. How much of a step-up a $10 billion public valuation would be, therefore, from its final private valuation is not clear.

Affirm will enter warm public markets if it chooses to list in short-order. The third quarter of 2020 was a bonanza of public-market liquidity, as the United States saw its most active quarter of public offerings since at least 2016, partially driven by the craze around SPACs. With retail investors and larger checkbooks alike active in their interest for growth-focused shares, unprofitable tech startups have done well in their recent debuts.

Those that make money have done even better, certain outliers like Snowflake aside.

After a confidential filing, Affirm will wait to hear back from the SEC on its application, and then will have the choice to file a nonconfidential S-1 when it is ready. There is no set timeline here, but once the company’s numbers are public, we’ll be diving into them. Affirm joins other recent companies like Palantir who filed their public offerings confidentially first, before later making them public.

Killer Mike, former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, and Bounce TV founder Ryan Glover launch a digital bank

A group of Black Atlanta businessmen, politicians and entertainers — including former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, the entertainer Michael Render (better known as Killer Mike) and Bounce TV founder Ryan Glover — have launched a new digital bank focused on developing and promoting local communities and cultivating Black and Latinx entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Named Greenwood in an homage to the thriving Tulsa, Okla., business community known as “Black Wall Street” that was destroyed by white rioters in 1921, the digital bank has several features designed to promote social causes and organizations for the Black and Latinx community.

For every sign-up to the bank, Greenwood will donate the equivalent of five free meals to an organization addressing food insecurity. And every time a customer uses a Greenwood debit card, the bank will make a donation to either the United Negro College Fund, Goodr (an organization that addresses food insecurity) or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In addition, each month the bank will provide a $10,000 grant to a Black or Latinx small business owner that uses the company’s financial services.

For Render, the decision to launch a new digital bank alongside Young and Glover was a way to link Atlanta’s well-established, centuries-old Black business community with the technologies that are redefining wealth and creating new opportunities in the twenty first century. It was also a way to equip a new generation with financial tools that could empower them instead of undermine them.

“What I have learned about capitalism is that you’re either going to be a participant in it or a victim of it,” said Render. “The ultimate protest is focusing your dollar like a weapon.”

Young, who is also the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had seen the ways digital banking technologies were transforming the social order in countries like India — reducing the power of payday lenders and providing greater economic access — and wanted to bring those opportunities to communities in the U.S.

Atlanta is a perfect home for a new Black-owned digital bank. After riots in 1906 destroyed Atlanta’s own bustling Black business district in a prelude to the Greenwood Massacre 15 years later, the community rebuilt with banks like Citizen’s Trust (founded in 1921) and Carver (founded in 1946) serving the city’s Black community.

Rendon, a serial entrepreneur who owns a chain of barber shops called the SWAG Shop, some real estate, and a restaurant along with the rapper TI, said that he’s not just a founder of Greenwood, he’ll soon become a customer.

“Today, a dollar circulates for 20 days in the white community but only six hours in the Black community,” said Render in a statement.”Moreover, a Black person is twice as likely as a white person to be denied a mortgage. This lack of fairness in the financial system is why we created Greenwood.”

Greenwood will offer a physical debit card and savings and checking accounts to its customers — along with all of the digital features one would expect, including integrations with Apple, Samsung and Google Pay, the ability to make peer-to-peer payments, mobile checking deposits and free ATM usage at over 30,000 locations.

“It’s no secret that traditional banks have failed the Black and Latinx community,” said Glover, in a statement. “We needed to create a new financial platform that understands our history and our needs going forward, a banking platform built by us and for us, a platform that helps us build a stronger future for our communities. This is our time to take back control of our lives and our financial future. That is why we launched Greenwood, modern banking for the culture.”

To run the bank, the founding team hired Aparicio Giddins, who’s serving as the company’s president and chief technology officer. David Tapscott, a former executive with Combs Enterprises and Green Dot, is serving as the company’s chief marketing officer. Andrew “Bo” Young III, the managing partner of Andrew Young Investment Group and Paul Judge, the co-founder of Pindrop and TechSquare Labs, both have seats on the company’s board of directors.

The timing for Greenwood’s launch is somewhat auspicious, coming as it does nearly a century after the launch of Citizen’s Trust and days after the chief executive of Wells Fargo, Charles Scharf, said really, really dumb things about diversity in the financial services industry.

Backing the company is a $3 million commitment from undisclosed angel investors. The bank is currently taking deposits and the hope, according to Rendon, is for it to start a new wave of entrepreneurial activity among young Black and Latinx community members and their allies.

“The work that we did in the civil rights movement wasn’t just about being able to sit at the counter. It was also about being able to own the restaurant,” said Ambassador Young. “We have the skills, talent and energy to compete anywhere in the world, but to grow the economy, it has to be based on the spirit of the universe and not the greed of the universe. Killer Mike, Ryan and I are launching Greenwood to continue this work of empowering Black and brown people to have economic opportunity.”

Revolut lets you track your subscriptions, adds savings bonus in the US

Fintech startup Revolut has rolled out a handful of additional features over the past few days. The financial app lets you track all your subscriptions that you pay with your Revolut account or your card. In the U.S., Revolut is adding a savings bonus based on your purchasing habits. Finally, business customers can now order metal cards.

Let’s start with subscription tracking. For customers in Europe, Revolut is trying to make it easier to stay on top of your various subscriptions. Direct debit or card transactions are automatically marked as recurring. You can also manually mark transactions as subscriptions in case they aren’t automatically marked.

After that, you can see all your recurring payments from the app and check how much you’re spending with each merchant. If you spot a subscription that you completely forgot, you can block it — future payments will be declined.

And if you don’t have a lot of money on your account, you receive a notification warning you that a subscription payment is coming up. Subscriptions can be accessed from the Payments tab under Scheduled.

If you have multiple bank accounts, some users might switch their payment information to their Revolut card just to keep all their subscriptions in Revolut. It could boost usage.

4.5% bonus on savings accounts in the U.S.

In some markets, Revolut offers savings vaults. As the name suggests, those sub-accounts let you put some money aside and earn interest. You can round up card transactions and save spare change in a vault, you can set up weekly or monthly transactions or you can transfer money manually whenever you want.

In the U.S., customers earn 0.25% annualized percentage yield (APY) with their savings vaults. If you pay for a premium subscription, you get 0.5% APY with a Revolut Premium or Revolut Metal plan.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, you get a generous bonus on top of your normal interest rate. Revolut calculates how much you spent with your Revolut debit card the previous month. That amount is eligible for a 4.5% APY bonus.

For instance, if you spent $400 with your card last month and you have $500 in your savings vault, you’ll receive the 4.5% bonus on $400. You’ll also earn 0.25% to 0.5% on the entire savings vault.

If your savings vault balance is lower than how much you spent with your card last month, your entire vault is eligible for the bonus. Interests are calculated daily using an annualized rate and paid out the first business day of the following month.

Once again, the new feature should boost engagement in the U.S. for both card transactions and savings vaults. Revolut has 13 million customers in total, including 150,000 in the U.S.

Metal cards for business customers

People care about metal cards. That’s why many fintech startups now offer expensive monthly plans with metal cards — N26, Bunq, Curve and Revolut.

But Revolut Business customers have been limited to plastic cards (or virtual cards). If you use Revolut Business for your company, you can now order metal cards depending on your plan.

Revolut Business customers with a free account or a freelancer account can’t order metal cards. Customers on the Grow, Scale or Enterprise plans receive one, two or five metal cards respectively.

And if you want to order more metal cards, it costs £49 per card. You can choose a card among five different colors — black, gold, rose gold, space grey and silver.

Other than a new look, metal cards don’t differ from standard cards. It’s a small perk that you get with a paid plan. Revolut has managed to attract 500,000 customers for its Revolut Business product.

Lydia partners with Tink to improve open banking features

French fintech startup Lydia is going to work with financial API startup Tink for its open banking features in its app. Lydia started as a peer-to-peer payment app and now has 4 million users in Europe.

Lydia’s vision has evolved to become a financial super app that lets you control your bank accounts and access various financial services. In France, you can connect your Lydia account with your bank account using Budget Insight’s Budgea API.

Over the coming weeks, Lydia is going to switch over and use Tink for most clients going forward. If you have a bank account in a small French bank, Lydia might still use Budget Insight for those accounts.

“It’s going to be a progressive rollout and we’ll use the best service depending on our users,” Lydia co-founder and CEO Cyril Chiche told me.

Open banking is a broad concept and covers many different things. In Lydia’s case, we’re talking about two features in particular — account aggregation and payment initiation.

In the app, you can connect your bank accounts and view the most recent transactions. This feature is important if you want to become the go-to financial app on your users’ home screen.

As for payment initiation, as the name suggests, it lets you start a SEPA bank transfer from a third-party service. For instance, you can transfer money from your bank account to your Lydia wallet directly in the Lydia app. You can also move money between multiple bank accounts from Lydia.

Tink provides a single API that manages all the complexities of the information systems of European banks. An API is a programming interface that lets two different services talk and interact with each other. Tink does the heavy lifting and translates each banking API into a predictable API that you can use for all banks.

Since 2018, banks have to provide some kind of API due to Europe’s DSP2 regulation. It’s been a slow start as many French banks still don’t provide a usable API. But it’s slowly evolving.

Tink’s API supports 15 financial institutions in France, including major banks, N26, Revolut and American Express. And it covers a dozen European markets, which is going to be important if Lydia wants to grab more users outside of its home country.

“At first, it’s not going to add new things to the app. But it will allow us to provide features in a very stable environment and at a European scale,” Chiche said.

“We want to have the most uniform product across different markets,” he added later in the conversation.

Pay with your card or with your bank account

When you first install Lydia and want to pay back a friend, you associate your debit card with your Lydia account. The startup charges your card before sending money to your friend.

If open banking APIs become the norm, you could imagine grabbing money from someone’s bank account directly instead of paying card processing fees. But this sort of features is nowhere near ready for prime time.

“What made us choose card payments is that it’s a stable system with widespread usage — and it works every time. When you’re dealing with payments, it has to work every single time,” Chiche said.

Lydia isn’t changing anything on this front for now. But you could imagine some changes in a few years. “We are the beginning of a new system that is not going to be ready within the next 18 months,” Chiche said.

Cards also provide many advantages, such as the ability to chargeback a card. And card schemes have been trying new things, such as the ability to transfer money directly from a card to another card. So you’re not going to ditch your Mastercard or Visa card anytime soon. But Chiche thinks there will be some competition in Europe between DSP2-ready banks and card schemes. European consumers should see the benefits of increased competition.

In other news, Lydia usage dropped quite drastically during the full lockdown earlier this year. But transaction volume has bounced back since then and reached all-time highs. The company processes €250 million in transactions every month and it is currently adding 5,000 new users every day.

Nivelo nabs $2.5M seed to reduce risk in digital ACH payments

As we plunge deeper into the pandemic, online transactions have become increasingly important, and ACH transactions, the ones that help us get direct deposit of our paychecks or pay our bills are growing ever more essential. Nivelo, an early stage startup from a former JP Morgan executive wants to take the risk out of ACH transactions and today the company announced a $2.5 million seed investment, which closed in mid-August.

FirstMark, Barclays and Anthemis led the round with help from Dash Fund and several individual investors. While the company was announcing its first funding, it also launched a private beta of a Risk Scoring API for payments.

Company co-founder Eli Polanco says that ACH payments are a huge business, but mostly haven’t been updated for quick and safe digital transactions “We protect digital payments in real time, but taking a step back our focus is ACH payments, which are the most ubiquitous payment channel in the U.S.,” Polanco told TechCrunch.

To give you a sense of how big this business is, more than $55 trillion worth of transactions moves through the ACH channel annually, yet Polanco says for the most part, it remains mired in legacy technology. Her company wants to update the risk component by building a set of APIs that companies can tap into and understand the risk associated with a particular transaction.

“We’re unbundling this risk assessment service and packaging it in the easiest way possible in the form of APIs and embedding it into the most critical payment use cases in the U.S.,” she said.

Polanco, who is a Black woman who grew up in the Dominican Republic, started the company in January and went to raise money. She had a lot going for her including a strong background in payments products, a working product and paying customers. While she faced a lot of due diligence, she expected that, especially as a newly minted founder at a time when she couldn’t meet with investors in person.

Still, she knows the odds for Black founders are abysmal, but she says she could only come armed with data and tell her story. “I know that discrimination and racism exist in the world, but I can just live and play offense as much as possible and come prepared,” she said. Ultimately she prevailed and got her funding.

She said that the pandemic has reinforced how important having a safe digital payment system is. “COVID really shone a light into how unprepared we are for where the world is moving to. When COVID happened and a lot of folks were no longer able to rely on checks and cash […] it elevated the prominent rise of moving to digital payments,” she said. And investors saw this too.

Polanco says that she is also building her financial services tooling with the idea of leveling the playing field for everyone. “My hyper focus on risk infrastructure is directly tied to my outsider experience as an immigrant. When you’re trying to get access to any financial service, you’re always the edge case in the risk models that they have, and you’re always going to have additional friction. So when you grow up as a product manager who has always experienced this, you always have a keen sight on building accurate, but accessible FinTech tools,” she said.

Nivelo is taking its first steps as a company with this funding, but it’s on its way with an alpha product and a future road map of products and services. The company is live with a couple of thousand customers today.

Nivelo nabs $2.5M seed to reduce risk in digital ACH payments

As we plunge deeper into the pandemic, online transactions have become increasingly important, and ACH transactions, the ones that help us get direct deposit of our paychecks or pay our bills are growing ever more essential. Nivelo, an early stage startup from a former JP Morgan executive wants to take the risk out of ACH transactions and today the company announced a $2.5 million seed investment, which closed in mid-August.

FirstMark, Barclays and Anthemis led the round with help from Dash Fund and several individual investors. While the company was announcing its first funding, it also launched a private beta of a Risk Scoring API for payments.

Company co-founder Eli Polanco says that ACH payments are a huge business, but mostly haven’t been updated for quick and safe digital transactions “We protect digital payments in real time, but taking a step back our focus is ACH payments, which are the most ubiquitous payment channel in the U.S.,” Polanco told TechCrunch.

To give you a sense of how big this business is, more than $55 trillion worth of transactions moves through the ACH channel annually, yet Polanco says for the most part, it remains mired in legacy technology. Her company wants to update the risk component by building a set of APIs that companies can tap into and understand the risk associated with a particular transaction.

“We’re unbundling this risk assessment service and packaging it in the easiest way possible in the form of APIs and embedding it into the most critical payment use cases in the U.S.,” she said.

Polanco, who is a Black woman who grew up in the Dominican Republic, started the company in January and went to raise money. She had a lot going for her including a strong background in payments products, a working product and paying customers. While she faced a lot of due diligence, she expected that, especially as a newly minted founder at a time when she couldn’t meet with investors in person.

Still, she knows the odds for Black founders are abysmal, but she says she could only come armed with data and tell her story. “I know that discrimination and racism exist in the world, but I can just live and play offense as much as possible and come prepared,” she said. Ultimately she prevailed and got her funding.

She said that the pandemic has reinforced how important having a safe digital payment system is. “COVID really shone a light into how unprepared we are for where the world is moving to. When COVID happened and a lot of folks were no longer able to rely on checks and cash […] it elevated the prominent rise of moving to digital payments,” she said. And investors saw this too.

Polanco says that she is also building her financial services tooling with the idea of leveling the playing field for everyone. “My hyper focus on risk infrastructure is directly tied to my outsider experience as an immigrant. When you’re trying to get access to any financial service, you’re always the edge case in the risk models that they have, and you’re always going to have additional friction. So when you grow up as a product manager who has always experienced this, you always have a keen sight on building accurate, but accessible FinTech tools,” she said.

Nivelo is taking its first steps as a company with this funding, but it’s on its way with an alpha product and a future road map of products and services. The company is live with a couple of thousand customers today.

Inside Root’s IPO filing

Last night, Root filed to go public, adding a second name to the insurtech IPO rolls in 2020.

Lemonade was first out the gate this summer, taking its rental and home insurance business public at an attractive valuation, compared to its revenues and margins as we traditionally understand them. Wall Street was enticed by its growth and burgeoning consumer brand, according to one insurtech executive TechCrunch spoke to earlier this week.


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Root, in contrast, is focused on the automotive market, a lucrative space with a host of incumbent players and startup rivals like MetroMile and Clearcover. Reuters was first to report that Root was looking to file, after which we dug into the company’s reportedly-targeted $6 billion IPO valuation.

We found that a $6 billion price tag, knowing what we did then, seemed reasonable. This morning we’ll fact-check our work.

Let’s get into the IPO filing and find out what we can. We want to know how quickly Root is growing, how much its economics have improved over time and how healthy the company is going into its public offering.

Inside Root’s IPO filing

Root has two lines of business in 2020: auto insurance and rental insurance. Akin to how fintech startups will offer you a debit card, and later offer, say, equities trading, insurance startups also want to cross-sell their existing customer base.

Historically, however, Root has been automotive-insurance focused, and its recent addition of rental insurance has yet to constitute a material portion of its in-market premiums. Still, here are the insurance-specific numbers that you should know, before we get into the regular financial results:

  • Root’s active automotive policies grew from 111,736 in 2018 to 281,310 in 2019. That’s just under 152% growth on a year-over-year basis.
  • And, Root’s active automotive policies grew from 220,536 on June 30, 2019, to 334,327 on June 30, 2020. That’s just under 52% growth on a year-over-year basis.

As Root has scaled, its economics have improved as well. Here’s a raft of key numbers of how Root’s overall business has gotten better over time:

Tipalti receives $150M at a $2B+ valuation after its accounts payable platform sees a surge in use

Digital transformation has been one of the big enterprise themes of 2020: organizations are doubling down on cloud services both to link up suddenly remote teams and centralize apps, documents and data in a more efficient way. Today, one of the startups that has filled out that story with a cloud-based suite of accounting services is announcing a major round of funding on the back of massive growth.

Tipalti, an Israeli company that helps businesses manage suppliers, invoices, purchase orders, tax compliance, payments and billing and other accounting services from a single cloud platform, has raised $150 million at a valuation that the company says is now over $2 billion.

The plan is to use the funding to continue enhancing Tipalti’s accounts payable suite with more tools; hire across all departments; and for business development. Tipalti’s aim, according to founder and CEO Chen Amit, is to provide easy to integrate accounts payable services to a base of fast-scaling businesses, which need AP services to function well, but would never consider them core functions of their businesses in themselves.

“Accounts payable is the last area that companies in the mid market would want to invest in,” said founder and CEO Chen Amit. “They will invest in literally anything else other than building software to pay or manage suppliers.”

The round, a Series E, is being led by Durable Capital Partners (the firm founded last year by Henry Ellenbogen, previously a star at T. Rowe Price), with participation also from Greenoaks Capital and existing investor 01 Advisors, the firm co-founded by Twitter alums Dick Costolo and Adam Bain.

Tipalti’s growth comes as the result of a perfect storm of sorts for the startup.

The Covid-19 health pandemic has led to a global economic crunch, and businesses are especially focused now on watching where money is coming in and where it is going.

But at the same time, even before the coronavirus pandemic, Tipalti had been seeing a lot of inbound business from organizations that were scaling fast and looking for solutions that could integrate easily into their current systems.

The backstory and necessity around accounts payable can be told in a few words: it’s a boring but necessary area, and if it goes wrong, it can potentially bring a whole company down because of the tax, fraud and auditing implications.

Tipalti describes accounts payable as “the most time-consuming function in finance”, noting that 47% of finance organizations in a recent survey said they still spend around 520 hours per year on manual accounts payable tasks, with 27% of respondents indicating that their teams dedicate up to 80 people-hours per month on AP tasks, or 1,040 hours annually.

Tipalti, which fittingly means “I’ll handle it” in Hebrew, is positioned as a helper in this context. By way of an API, it integrates with a number of other accounting and tracking platforms that its customers use including NetSuite, Sage, QuickBooks, Affise, Cake, Everflow, HitPath, LinkTrust, Paladin, Tune (HasOffers) and Vidooly and lets companies run and track how payments are being made relative to actives within the organization, all with relatively little input from the companies themselves, essentially giving them time and other resources to focus on other areas.

The pandemic has hit some of Tipalti’s customers hard. But overall, Chen said that it’s seen more business as a result, not just from companies suddenly growing much faster (as in the case, for example, for e-commerce businesses, or those catering to people spending much more time at home and on screens), but from businesses that simply need to pay much more attention to how money is moving around.

In 2020 so far, Tipalti has seen transaction volume on its platform balloon to $12 billion, up 80% on a year ago. It now has some 1,000 customers on its books, with a specifically strong emphasis on fast-growing tech companies. The list includes Amazon Twitch, Amplitude, Roku, Duolingo, Gitlab, Medium, ClassPass, Toast, Automattic, Twitter, Business Insider, GoDaddy, Zola, Boston Globe Media, Noom, Roblox, Headspace, Fiverr, Vimeo, Stack Overflow, ZipRecruiter, AppLovin, Canva, Indeed, and Foursquare.

Indeed, as we have described before, it was Tipalti’s initial work with Twitter on its own accounts payable services (central to how it can make money on its ad business) that served as its first introduction to Costolo and Bain, who went on to invest in it after they left the social network and started 01 Advisors.

“We are pleased to have the opportunity to increase our investment in Tipalti during a time in which organizations have been focused on rapidly transforming and modernizing the way they operate,” said Dick Costolo, Founding Partner of 01 Advisors and former Chief Executive Officer of Twitter, in a statement. “When I ran Twitter, I saw first-hand the importance and value of Tipalti in automating financial operations. Tipalti transformed our processes and opened up our expansion, growth, and scalability strategies.”

It’s worth pointing out that the rise in valuation is a huge spike for Tipalti, a sign not just of its growth but investors’ bet that there will be more of that to come.

Chen Amit, the company’s founder and CEO, said it is four times the size of its valuation in its previous round (it raised $76 million in a Series D round led by 01 Advisors a little over a year ago, which would have been at around a $500 million valuation), and a whopping 14 times what Tipalti was valued in 2017). Indeed, even with other competitors like Bill.com and Coupa also targeting the same users as Tipalti, Amit estimates that between them all, they have just 3-4% of the addressable market.

“The accounts payable automation space has an extremely large total addressable market with significant growth potential,” explained Henry Ellenbogen, Founder, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Durable Capital Partners LP, in a statement. “We believe that Tipalti has the potential to become a much larger company within the Midmarket space due to its differentiated holistic platform, superior global capabilities and management team. This has resulted in leading retention and customer satisfaction.”

Calling Amsterdam VCs: Be featured in The Great TechCrunch Survey of European VC

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe, and their cities.

Our <a href=”https://forms.gle/k4Ji2Ch7zdrn7o2p6”>survey of VCs in Amsterdam will capture how the city is faring, and what changes are being wrought amongst investors by the coronavirus pandemic. (Please note, if you have filled the survey out already, there is no need to do it again).

We’d like to know how Amsterdam’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19, and, generally, how your thinking will evolve from here.

Our survey will only be about investors, and only the contributions of VC investors will be included. More than one partner is welcome to fill out the survey.

The shortlist of questions will require only brief responses, but the more you can add, the better.

You can fill out the survey here.

Obviously, investors who contribute will be featured in the final surveys, with links to their companies and profiles.

What kinds of things do we want to know? Questions include: Which trends are you most excited by? What startup do you wish someone would create? Where are the overlooked opportunities? What are you looking for in your next investment, in general? How is your local ecosystem going? And how has COVID-19 impacted your investment strategy?

This survey is part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing to help founders find the right investors.

https://techcrunch.com/extra-crunch/investor-surveys/

For example, here is the recent survey of London.

You are not in Amsterdam, but would like to take part? Or you are in another part of the country? That’s fine! Any European VC investor can STILL fill out the survey, as we probably will be putting a call out to your city next anyway! And we will use the data for future surveys on vertical topics.

The survey is covering almost every European country on the continent of Europe (not just EU members, btw), so just look for your country and city on the survey and please participate (if you’re a venture capital investor).

Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email mike@techcrunch.com

Cryptocurrency wallet BRD reaches 6 million users, driven by growth in Latin America and India

Mobile cryptocurrency wallet BRD announced today that it now has more than six million users worldwide, thanks to strong growth in India and Latin America. With this momentum, the company expects to reach 10 million users by early 2021.

Founded in 2015, Zurich-based BRD also said it now adds about one million new users every two months, after initially taking more than four years to hit the one million user mark. It reached 550,000 monthly active users at the beginning of July. Co-founder and chief executive officer Adam Traidman attributes the increased interest in cryptocurrency, especially among first-time users, to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s causing a lot of people who are staying at home and sheltering in place to reconsider a lot of fundamental questions about their life and family right now,” he told TechCrunch. “It’s causing a lot of thinking about money and finances. People have had a lot more time over the last six months to look at their investments and as a result of that, we found that for cryptocurrency in general, but especially for BRD’s business, we’ve been growing dramatically.”

An image of mobile cryptocurrency wallet BRD's user interface

An image of mobile cryptocurrency wallet BRD’s user interface

He added that BRD, which has raised $55 million in funding from investors like SBI Crypto Investment and East Ventures, has two main groups of users. The first are millennials who have discretionary income that they invest using apps like Robinhood instead of traditional brokerages. The second group are people who have been more financially impacted by the pandemic and are turning to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to cope with currency fluctuations in their countries or as a more cost-effective alternative to international wire transfers to send money to family members. Falling bank interest rates have also prompted many people to consider alternative places to put their money.

While Bitcoin and Ethereum are still the most popular purchases through BRD, in countries with volatile currency fluctuations, like Venezuela, Argentina and India, interest in stablecoins, which are pegged to the U.S. dollar, is growing. The company is also seeing more adoption in Eastern European countries.

BRD is a non-custodial wallet and cryptocurrencies are stored on users’ devices, which makes it more accessible to users in countries who need to undergo lengthy registration processes to use custodial wallets. The app also allows people to use Apple Pay or their bank cards to buy cryptocurrency. This ease of use is one of the reasons for its growth, Traidman said.

The company’s most recent funding announcement was a $15 million Series B announced in January 2019 for expansion in Asian markets. BRD also offers enterprise blockchain tools called Blockset and says it is currently used to store the equivalent of about $6 billion in cryptocurrencies.