401(k) provider Human Interest doubles valuation with $55M fundraise

Human Interest, a 401(k) provider for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), announced Thursday that it has tacked on another $55 million to its Series C.

The news is notable for a couple of reasons. For one, the San Francisco-based company had already raised $50 million across two tranches in 2020. Secondly, the majority of its existing backers (about 40 of 55) joined one new investor — NEA spinout NewView Capital (NVC) — in pumping more capital into Human Interest.

And last but definitely not least, the latest extension — which closed in December but is only now being publicly announced — effectively doubles Human Interest’s valuation from its financing a few months prior. 

CEO Jeff Schneble would not disclose the company’s current valuation, but he did say Human Interest “is now in the position of becoming a unicorn” the next time it raises, if that round “follows the same step-ups as the last couple” of financings.

With this latest extension, Human Interest has now raised a total of $136.7 million since its 2015 inception.

Human Interest’s growth has been impressive. It’s gone from adding about $100,000 a month in net new revenue in early 2019 to now adding more than $1 million a month in net new revenue, according to Schneble. The startup’s goal is to get to over $2 million a month by year’s end.

“We’ve grown about 10 times in the past 18 months or so, and we’re not going to stop here,” he told TechCrunch. “Our goal is to get to $100 million-plus ARR [annual recurring revenue] in the next three years so that we can go public in the next three to four years.”

Since its launch, Human Interest says it has helped nearly 3,000 businesses across America to offer retirement accounts to their more than 80,000 employees.

The COVID-19 pandemic was challenging, but led to an interesting shift in the company’s business. Pre-2020, about 85% of its customers were first-time 401(k) users. Last year, that number dropped to about 50%. This means that more companies moved from existing plans to Human Interest.

“Given there was a recession and a lot of uncertainty, it was a much easier pitch, considering we could offer a more affordable product,” Schneble said.

Human Interest says it works with “every kind of SMB” — from tech startups to law offices, from dentists to dog walkers, manufacturing firms and social justice nonprofits. Customers include a San Francisco Bay Area electrician company, a Denver-based  pizza chain and a Seattle-based chain of gas stations and convenience stores.

Despite being just a few years old, Schneble said the company doesn’t view itself as a startup.

“We want to build a really big company that will be around for decades, and can go public,” he said. “If we were trying to sell the company, we might be doing this differently.”

Currently, Human Interest has about 300 employees, up from a little over 100 a year ago. It plans to double the size of its engineering team this year.

Looking ahead, Schneble said the company is simply out “to do more of the same.”

“We don’t need new products,” he told TechCrunch. “There’s so much runway just doing what we’re doing, and that’s taking market share from others.”

It also plans to focus on improving the technology on its platform, which it moved from a third-party provider to in-house in 2020. The move led the company to double its margins over the past six months while eliminating transaction fees for plan administrators and participants, according to Schneble. 

“Often financial services products get worse as you go,” he said. “We want to be the opposite, and this year are focused on making our platform as awesome as it can be.”

Human Interest says it also launched new offerings, Complete and Concierge, last year in an effort to simplify retirement plan administration andmake retirement savings accessible to people in all lines of work.

“The big incumbents haven’t figured out how to make plans affordable and accessible for smaller companies,” Schneble said. “We knew that to make a permanent dent in this country’s retirement crisis, we had to do something different.” 

The 401(k) space is indeed a growing one. Last July San Mateo-based Guideline — which is also focused on SMBs — announced an $85 million Series D round co-led by Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management and Greyhound Capital. It was later revealed that American Express Ventures had joined the financing as an investor.

With more than $2 billion in assets under management, new investor NewView Capital (NVC) — which also backed Plaid — aims to match late-stage funding with “significant operational support.” 

NewView founder and Managing Partner Ravi Viswanathan said he was impressed by how the company simplifies the process and administration for SMBs to offer 401(k)s and “is able to do so at lower fees through software and automation.”   

The NewView team was also drawn to the company’s desire to make offering a 401(k) accessible for more employers. In a blog post, Ankit Sud and Christina Fa wrote:

“Traditional 401(k) providers like Vanguard and Fidelity designed and priced their plans for large businesses. The administrative burden and high fees make it unaffordable for small business owners. In fact, only 10% of small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) offer 401(k) plans to their workforce, despite employing one-third of the working population…Human Interest brings simple, affordable 401(k) plans to the 90% of small businesses that do not offer retirement plans today. “

Capitalize, a startup that wants to make it easy to roll over your 401(k), closes on $12.5M Series A

If you’ve ever left a job, chances are you left your 401(k) plan along with it.

And, if you’re like many Americans and change jobs every few years or so, you could have multiple 401(k) plans spread out at various companies, doing their own thing.

Many of us don’t deal with the hassle of trying to consolidate accounts, which can lead to lost money over many years.

Enter Capitalize. The New York-based startup aims to address this very problem with a platform that it claims makes it virtually painless to locate misplaced 401(k) accounts, select and open individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and consolidate retirement plans — for free. 

And it’s just raised $12.5 million in a Series A round to help grow that platform. Canapi Ventures led the round, with participation from existing backers including Bling Capital, Greycroft, RRE  Ventures and Walkabout Ventures. 

Australian-born Gaurav Sharma co-founded the company after years of working in traditional finance.

“While I enjoyed investing, I started peeling back the layers and saw a host of systemwide problems with the 401(k) market,” he recalls. “One of those being that our accounts are tied to our employers.”

Sharma said that about one-third of the people who change jobs end up cashing out their 401(k) plans, and paying the related penalties.

“Another several million leave it behind for an extended period of time, ultimately because it’s complicated to move the money,” he said.

Sharma teamed up with CTO Chris Phillips in late 2019 to form Capitalize, which went on to raise a $2 million seed round last March led by Bling Capital. Since its formal launch last September, the rollover platform has processed almost $10 million in volume.  

“There were a lot of layoffs during the summer last year as a result of the pandemic,” Sharma said. “So a lot of our early users while we were in beta were people who had been impacted by those layoffs.”

I was curious about how Capitalize’s offering differs from the services that financial advisors provide. According to Sharma, the difference lies in the process and eligibility requirements.

“If you have an advisor, they will help you do some of this but in a really manual way, whereas we have built an online platform to help consumers find and consolidate retirement accounts,” Sharma told TechCrunch. “And usually, you have to have a few hundred thousand in assets to even get an advisor.”

That was one of the things that motivated Sharma.

“Whether you have $500 or $500,000 in assets, we’ll help you,” he said.

As mentioned above, Capitalize’s service is free to consumers, who can go to the site and let the company manage the consolidation process for them. If they need to open an IRA, the platform can help them do that, too.

“We help them compare IRAs from leading fintech providers and established institutions,” Sharma explained. If Capitalize has forged a commercial relationship with one of those providers, it is compensated by them for the referral in a model that is similar to NerdWallet, PolicyGenius and Credit Karma.

And if they already have an IRA, Capitalize will still help with consolidation.

Capitalize also offers employers a free onboarding service to help departing employees “roll over quickly at the point of job change,” Sharma said. 

“This is also great for the employer, who can save money on administrative fees and reduce fiduciary risk,” he added.  

Canapi Venture partner Jeffrey Reitman said his fintech venture fund, which has about 43 banks as LPs, was attracted to a number of things about Capitalize’s team and platform. 

First off, he described Sharma as “one of the best early-stage CEOs” he’s seen when it comes to recruiting, company building and decision making.

Canapi also had one of its VPs and family members try out the product in its early beta format.

They said, according to Reitman, that the platform “worked like magic and removed so much friction in the process.”

“So when you have a team member that has such a strong reaction to it, that’s such a validator of what it can be at scale,” he told TechCrunch. “That made it a bit of a no-brainer for us.”

Besides also being drawn to the company’s “mission-driven” approach, Reitman noted that about 80% of its existing bank LP base has existing IRA and individual retirement account products.

“Many of them are digital in nature, we believe there should be a lot of synergies between what banks are trying to accomplish as they further digitize their product suite and what Capitalize is looking to accomplish in reducing friction for as many people as possible in that process.”

Looking ahead, Capitalize plans to use its new capital to refine and streamline its product, and continue to invest in technology.

How African startups raised investments in 2020

The venture capital scene in Africa has consistently grown, with an influx of capital from local and international investors reaching unprecedented heights in recent years. To understand how much growth has occurred, African startups raised a meagre $400 million in 2015 compared to the $2 billion that came into the continent in 2019, according to Africa-focused fund Partech Africa.

However, that figure isn’t the only yardstick. With other outlets like media publications WeeTracker and Disrupt Africa disclosing different results for the African venture capital market, we compared and contrasted their results last year. The result of that investigation detailed differences in methodology, as well as similarities.

In comparison to Partech’s $2 billion figure for 2019, WeeTracker estimated that African startups raised $1.3 billion while Disrupt Africa, $496 million for the same year.

It was expected that these figures would increase in 2020. But with the pandemic bringing in utter confusion and panic, companies downsized as investors re-strategized, and due diligence slowed during the first few months of the year. Also, new predictions came into light in May with some pegging expected deals to close between $1.2 billion and $1.8 billion by the end of the year.

Investments did pick up, and from July, VC funding on the continent had a bullish run until December. Although 2020 didn’t witness the series of mammoth deals in 2019 and didn’t reach the $2 billion mark, it proved to be a good year for acquisitions. Sendwave’s $500 million purchase by WorldRemit; Network International buying DPO Group for $288 million; and Stripe’s larger than $200 million acquisition of Paystack were high-profile examples.

To better understand how VCs invested in Africa during 2020, we’ll look into data from Partech Africa, Briter Bridges and Disrupt Africa.

Behind the numbers

In 2019, Partech Africa reported that a total of $2 billion went into African startups. For 2020, the number dropped to $1.43 billion. Briter Bridges pegged total 2020 VC for African startups at $1.31 billion (for disclosed and undisclosed amounts), up from $1.27 billion in 2019.  Disrupt Africa noted an increase in its figures moving from $496 million in 2019 to $700 million in 2020. 

Just as last year, contrasting methodologies from the type of deals reviewed, to the definition of an African startup contributed to the numbers’ disparity. 

Cyril Collon, general partner at Partech says the firm’s numbers are based on equity deals greater than $200,000. Also, it defines African startups “as companies with their primary market, in terms of operations or revenues, in Africa not based on HQ or incorporation,” he said. “When these companies evolve to go global, we still count them as African companies.”

Briter Bridges has a similar methodology. According to Dario Giuliani, the firm’s director, the research organisation avoided using geography to define an African startup due to factors contributing to business identities like taxation, customers, IP, and management team.

For Disrupt Africa, the startups featured in its report are seven years or less in operation, still scaling, and a potential to achieve profitability. It excluded “companies that are spin-offs of corporates or any other large entity, or that have developed past the point of being a startup, by our definition of one.”

The continued dominance of fintech and the Big Four

Despite the drop in total funding, Partech says African startups closed more total deals in 2020 than previous years. According to the firm, 347 startups completed 359 deals compared in 2020 compared to 250 deals in 2019. This can be attributed to an increase in seed rounds (up 88% from 2019) and bridge rounds due to shortage of cash amidst a pandemic-induced lockdown.

A common theme in the three reports shows fintech, healthtech, and cleantech in the top five sectors. But, as expected, fintech retained the lion’s share of African VC funding.  

According to Partech, fintech represented 25% of total African funding raised last year, with agritech, logistics & mobility, off-grid tech, and healthtech sectors following behind.

Briter Bridges reported that fintech companies accounted for 31% of the total VC funding over the same time period. Cleantech came second; healthtech, third; agritech and data analytics, in fourth and fifth.

Fintech startups raised 24.9% of the total African VC funding counted by Disrupt Africa. E-commerce, healthtech, logistics, and energy startups followed respectively.

2020 also showed the Big Four countries’ preponderance in terms of investment destination, at least in two out of the three reports.

The countries remained unchanged on Partech’s top five as Nigeria remained the VC’s top destination with $307 million. At a close second was Kenya accounting for $304 million of the total investments in the continent. Egypt came third with its startups raising $269 million, while $259 million flowed into South African startups. Rounding up the top five was Ghana with $111 million, displacing Rwanda which was fifth in Partech’s 2019 list.

The sequence remained unchanged from Disrupt Africa’s 2019 list as well. Funding raised by Kenyan startups reached $191.4 million; Nigeria followed with $150.4 million; South Africa, third at $142.5 million; Egypt came a close fourth with $141.4 million; while Ghanaian startups raised $19.9 million.

Briter Bridges took a different approach. Whereas Partech and Disrupt Africa highlighted funding activities per country of origin and operations, Briter Bridges chose to attribute funding to the startups’ place of incorporation or headquarters. This premise slightly altered the Big Four’s positions. Startups headquartered in the US received $471.8 million of the total funding, according to Briter Bridges. Those in South Africa claimed $119.7 million. Mauritius-headquartered companies received $110 million while African startups headquartered in the U.K. and Kenya raised $107.6 million and $77.1 million respectively.

On why Briter Bridges went with this narrative, Giuliani said the company wants its data to be an impartial conversation starter which can be used to investigate more complex dynamics such as the need for better policies, regulation, or financial availability.

This speaks particularly to the absence of Nigeria as a primary location for incorporation. Due to unfriendly regulations, business and tax conditions, Nigerian startups are increasingly incorporating their startups abroad and other African countries like Seychelles and Mauritius. It’s a trend that may well continue as most foreign VCs prefer African startups to be incorporated in countries with business-friendly investment laws.

Regional and gender diversity check

With an increase in startup activity in Francophone Africa, one would’ve expected an uptick in VC funding in the region. Well, that’s not exactly the case. Senegal, the region’s top destination for VC funding dropped from $16 million in 2019 to $8.8 million in 2020 according to Partech. The country was 9th on the list while Ivory Coast, placed 10th, raised a meagre sum of $6.5 million.

However, the good news is that 22 other countries received investments outside this Big Four this year, according to Partech data. Will we see this continue? And if yes, which countries will likely join the nine-figure club?

Tidjane Deme, a general partner of Partech Africa, believes Ghana might be next. He references how it previously used to be a Big 3 of Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa before Egypt became a dominant force, and says a similar event might happen with the West African country.

“We see a clear diversification happening as investors are going into more markets. Ghana, for instance, is already attracting above $100 million. Of course, we all wish it would happen faster, but we also recognize that this is a learning process for both investors entering new markets and for founders learning about this game.”

Ghana also emerged in Giuliani’s forecast. He adds the likes of Tunisia, Morocco, Rwanda as second-tier countries quickly entering global investors’ radar and building more sophisticated ecosystems.

Tom Jackson, co-founder of Disrupt Africa, doesn’t mention any names. But he thinks that while there are some positives from other markets, the Big Four dominance will continue.

“Funding will filter down to other markets more and more, and there are already positive signs in that regard. But the space is still relatively early-stage and those four big markets have a big head start and will remain far ahead for years to come,” he said.

Another diversity check that cannot be overlooked is that of gender. Despite all the talk of inclusion, Briter Bridges reported that 15% of the funded startups in 2020 had women as founders, co-founders, or C-level executives. Partech, on the other hand, places this number at 14%. There’s still a lot of work to be done to increase this figure, and we might see more early-stage firms looking to plug that gap.

India’s BharatPe valued at $900 million in new $108 million fundraise

India may soon have another fintech unicorn. BharatPe said on Thursday it has raised $108 million in a financing round that valued the New Delhi-based financial services startup at $900 million, up from $425 million last year.

Coatue Management led the three-year-old startup’s Series D round. Other six existing institutional investors — Ribbit Capital, Insight Partners, Steadview Capital, Beenext, Amplo and Sequoia Capital — also participated in the round, which brings BharatPe’s total to-date raise to $233 million in equity and $35 million in debt.

The startup said as part of the new financing round it returned $17.17 million to its angel investors and employees with stock option.

“With the balance sheet well capitalized (more than US$ 200M in bank), we are now going to keep our heads down and deliver US$30B TPV and build a loan book of US$ 700mn with small merchants by March 2023,” said Ashneer Grover, co-founder and chief executive of BharatPe.

BharatPe operates an eponymous service to help offline merchants accept digital payments and secure working capital. Even as India has already emerged as the second largest internet market, with more than 600 million users, much of the country remains offline.

Among those outside of the reach of the internet are merchants running small businesses, such as roadside tea stalls and neighborhood stores. To make these merchants comfortable with accepting digital payments, BharatPe relies on QR codes and point of sale machines that support government-backed UPI payments infrastructure.

Scores of giants and startups are attempting to serve neighborhood stores in India.

The startup said it had deployed over 50,000 PoS machines by November of last year, and enables monthly transactions worth more than $123 million. It does not charge merchants for universal QR code access, but is looking to make money by lending. Grover said the startup’s lending business grew by 10x in 2020.

“This growth reiterates the trust that the small merchants and kirana store owners have showed in us. This is just the beginning of our journey and we are committed to build India’s largest B2B financial services company that can serve as one-stop destination for small merchants. For BharatPe, merchants will always be at the core of everything we build,” he said.

BharatPe’s growth is impressive especially because it was not the first startup to help merchants. In a recent report to clients, analysts at Bank of America said BharatPe has proven that fintech is not the winner takes all market.

“BharatPe perhaps has the late mover advantages in the space. It was one of the first companies to act as a universal consolidator of QR codes on UPI, giving the merchant the advantage to have one QR code (eventually others like Paytm followed). Unlike its Fintech peers, BharatPe is not educating the merchants but instead following its larger peers who have already educated the merchants,” they wrote in the report, reviewed by TechCrunch.

The startup, which has presence in 75 cities today, plans to further expand its network in the nation with the new fund.

India’s BharatPe valued at $900 million in new $108 million fundraise

India may soon have another fintech unicorn. BharatPe said on Thursday it has raised $108 million in a financing round that valued the New Delhi-based financial services startup at $900 million, up from $425 million last year.

Coatue Management led the three-year-old startup’s Series D round. Other six existing institutional investors — Ribbit Capital, Insight Partners, Steadview Capital, Beenext, Amplo and Sequoia Capital — also participated in the round, which brings BharatPe’s total to-date raise to $233 million in equity and $35 million in debt.

The startup said as part of the new financing round it returned $17.17 million to its angel investors and employees with stock option.

“With the balance sheet well capitalized (more than US$ 200M in bank), we are now going to keep our heads down and deliver US$30B TPV and build a loan book of US$ 700mn with small merchants by March 2023,” said Ashneer Grover, co-founder and chief executive of BharatPe.

BharatPe operates an eponymous service to help offline merchants accept digital payments and secure working capital. Even as India has already emerged as the second largest internet market, with more than 600 million users, much of the country remains offline.

Among those outside of the reach of the internet are merchants running small businesses, such as roadside tea stalls and neighborhood stores. To make these merchants comfortable with accepting digital payments, BharatPe relies on QR codes and point of sale machines that support government-backed UPI payments infrastructure.

Scores of giants and startups are attempting to serve neighborhood stores in India.

The startup said it had deployed over 50,000 PoS machines by November of last year, and enables monthly transactions worth more than $123 million. It does not charge merchants for universal QR code access, but is looking to make money by lending. Grover said the startup’s lending business grew by 10x in 2020.

“This growth reiterates the trust that the small merchants and kirana store owners have showed in us. This is just the beginning of our journey and we are committed to build India’s largest B2B financial services company that can serve as one-stop destination for small merchants. For BharatPe, merchants will always be at the core of everything we build,” he said.

BharatPe’s growth is impressive especially because it was not the first startup to help merchants. In a recent report to clients, analysts at Bank of America said BharatPe has proven that fintech is not the winner takes all market.

“BharatPe perhaps has the late mover advantages in the space. It was one of the first companies to act as a universal consolidator of QR codes on UPI, giving the merchant the advantage to have one QR code (eventually others like Paytm followed). Unlike its Fintech peers, BharatPe is not educating the merchants but instead following its larger peers who have already educated the merchants,” they wrote in the report, reviewed by TechCrunch.

The startup, which has presence in 75 cities today, plans to further expand its network in the nation with the new fund.

Scalarr raises $7.5M to fight mobile ad fraud

Scalarr, a startup that says it uses machine learning to combat ad fraud, is announcing that it has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding.

The company was founded by CEO Inna Ushakova and CPO Yuriy Yashunin, who previously led the mobile marketing agency Zenna. Ushakova told me that while at Zenna, they realized that ad fraud had grown to the point that it posed a real threat to their business.

At the same time, the team wasn’t impressed by any of the existing anti-fraud solutions, so it built its own technology. Eventually, they shut down Zenna completely and moved the entire team over to Scalarr.

The startup’s products include AutoBlock, which is supposed to detect fraud before the advertiser bids on an ad, and DeepView, which is used by adtech platforms (including ad exchanges, demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms).

Scalarr says it can detect 60% more fraud than existing products on the market and that it saved its clients $22 million in ad fraud refunds in 2020. Ushakova attributed this in large part to the startup’s extensive use of machine learning technology.

She added that while large ad attribution companies are adding anti-fraud products, they aren’t the focus. And historically, companies have tried to detect fraud through a “rules-based approach,” where there’s a list of behaviors that suggest fraudulent activity — but no matter how quickly they create those rules, it’s hard to keep up with the fraudsters.

“Fraud is ever evolving,” Ushakova said. “It’s like a Tom and Jerry game, so they are ahead of you and we are trying to catch them.”

As for why machine learning works so much more effectively, she said, “Only ML could help you predict the next step, and with ML, you should be able to detect abnormalities that are not classified. Right after that, our analytics should be able to take a look at those abnormalities and decide whether something is statistically important.”

Scalarr’s Series A was led by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, with participation from TMT Investments, OTB Ventures and Speedinvest. Among other things, the company will use the money to expand its presence in Asia and continue developing the product.

Accord launches B2B sales platform with $6M seed

The founders of Accord, an early stage startup focused on bringing order to B2B sales, are not your typical engineer founders. Instead, the two brothers, Ross and Ryan Rich, worked as sales reps seeing the problems unique to this kind of sale first-hand.

In November 2019, they decided to leave the comfort of their high-paying jobs at Google and Stripe to launch Accord and build what they believe is a missing platform for B2B sales, one that takes into account the needs of both the sales person and the buyer.

Today the company is launching with a $6 million seed round from former employer Stripe and Y Combinator. It should be noted that the founders applied to YC after leaving their jobs, and impressed the incubator with their insight and industry experience, even though they didn’t really have a product yet. In fact, they literally drew their original idea on a piece of paper.

Original prototype of Accord sketched on a piece of paper.

The original prototype was just a drawing of their idea. Image Credits: Accord

Recognizing they had the sales skills, but lacked programming chops, they quickly brought in a third partner, Wayne Pan to bring their idea to life. Today, they have an actual working program with paying customers. They’ve created a kind of online hub for B2B sales people and buyers to interact.

As co-founder Ross Rich points out these kinds of sales are very different from the consumer variety, often involving as many as 14 people on average on the buyer side. With so many people involved in the decision-making process, it can become unwieldy pretty quickly.

“We provide within the application shared next steps and milestones to align on and that the buyer can track asynchronously, a resource hub to avoid sorting through those hundreds of emails and threads for a single document or presentation and stakeholder management to make sure the right people are looped in at the right time,” Rich explained.

Accord also integrates with the company CRM like Salesforce to make sure all of that juicy data is being tracked properly in the sales database. At the same time, Rich says the startup wants to this platform to be a place for human interaction. Instead of an automated email or text, this provides a place where humans can actually interact with one another, and he believes that human element is important to help reduce the complexity inherent in these kinds of deals.

With $6 million in runway and a stint at Y Combinator under their belts, the founders are ready to make more concerted go-to-market push. They are currently at 9 people, mostly engineers aside from the two sales-focused founders. He figures to be bringing in some new employees this year, but doesn’t really have a sense of how many they will bring on just yet, saying that is something that they will figure out in the coming months.

As they do that, they are already thinking about being inclusive with several women on the engineering team, recognizing if they don’t start diversity early, it will be more difficult later on. “[Hiring a diverse group early] only compounds when you get to nine or 10 people and then when you’re talking to someone and they are wondering ‘do I trust this team and is that a culture where I want to work?’ He says if you want to build a diverse and inclusive workplace, you have to start making that investment early.

It’s early days for this team, but they are building a product to help B2B sales teams work more closely and effectively with customers, and with their background and understanding of the space, they seem well positioned to succeed.

Lang.ai snags $2M to remove technical burden of implementing AI for businesses

Lang.ai, which has developed a no-code platform for businesses, closed on a $2 million seed funding round.

The company’s SaaS platform aims to allow business users to structure any free-text data with custom categories built through a drag & drop interface, based on AI-extracted concepts.

Village Global led the financing, which included participation from new and existing backers including Acceleprise, Oceans Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, 2.12 Angels, GTMFund, and Lorimer Ventures.

Spain-born Jorge Penalva founded Lang.ai in 2018 with the goal of giving any business user the ability “to build enterprise-ready natural language processing models in just minutes.” It was built to give non-engineers a way to automate repetitive tasks in use cases such as customer service and claims processing.

“It can be installed in our cloud or theirs,” Penalva said. 

Lang.ai saw its revenue double from the last quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2021 and the seed funding was motivated mainly to continue that momentum.

“We’re getting demand in the form of projects with our larger customers, so we needed the funding to be able to support that demand,” Penalva told TechCrunch.

In his previous role of CEO of Séntisis, Penalva realized that processes driven by free-text data remained a blind spot for many companies. 

“Today, millions of dollars and hours are invested by companies to manually read and process textual information captured from disparate areas of their business,” he said.

His mission with Lang.ai is to “empower businesses to put AI to work for them, without the technical complexities of building and training custom algorithms.” 

Specifically, Penalva said that Lang.ai’s product analyzes a customer’s historical data “in minutes” and suggests AI-extracted concepts to build custom categories through a drag & drop interface. The custom categories are applied in real-time to automate “tedious” tasks such as the manual tagging and routing of support tickets, the processing of insurance claims and the dispatching of field engineers to incoming work order requests.

Put simply, Lang.ai’s goal is to remove the technical burden of implementing AI for a business.

Lang.ai’s community of users (called “Citizen NLP Builders”) consists of mostly non-technical business roles, ranging from customer service operations to marketers, business analysts and UX designers.

Customers include Freshly, Userzoom, Playvox, Spain’s CaixaBank, Yalo Chat and Bancolombia, among others. 

Ben Segal, director of infrastructural efficiency at Freshly, described the platform as “so nimble.”

“Out of the box, it took us two days to make automated tagging 15% more reliable than a previous platform that we had had in production for 2 years, with the added benefit that now all of our teams can tap into and exploit our support data,” Segal said. “The marketing team has built workflows to understand key customer moments. Our data and analytics team is super excited about having all these new tags in Snowflake, and it’s crazy how easy it is to use.”

Penalva is proud of the fact that Lang.ai’s engineering team is primarily based in Spain and that he has been able to grow the 10-person company outside of his native country.

“With very few resources, it took us a little over two years to build an enterprise-grade product and find the right set of early customers and investors who are aligned with our vision,” he said. “I moved to the US from Spain to build a global company and this is just the beginning…Lang has always been powered by immigrant hustle, and it has been core to our values since day 1.”

Accessibility overlay startup AccessiBe closes $28M series A

If you want to make your website accessible right now but lack the resources for the kind of serious revamp it would take, an “accessibility overlay” may take the pressure off while the work gets done. Though critics argue that these tools aren’t a permanent solution, AccessiBe has raised $28 million to show that its approach is an important part of making the entire web available to everyone.

It’s a problem often faced by small businesses: their website may not have been built to modern accessibility standards, and not only needs a deep dive by professionals to fix, but ongoing work to keep up to date and fix errors. This sort of work can be very expensive, and SMBs may not have the cash to lay out. This is not only a bummer for anyone with a disability who visits the site, but it exposes the business to legal action.

At the enterprise level accessibility is increasingly becoming part of the development process, and startups like Fable and Evinced are looking to push things forward there. For those whose development budgets compete with rent and food money, however, other approaches may be desired.

AccessiBe is one of a few new services called accessibility overlays that claim to provide total ADA compliance and other features just by installing a line of javascript. If it sounds too good to be true… well, it is and it isn’t.

What the overlay code does is scrub the whole website’s user-facing code for issues like unlabeled buttons, fields that aren’t addressable by keyboard navigation, images without alt text, and other common accessibility issues. AccessiBe’s system does so with the addition of machine learning to match features of the target site to those in its training database, so even if something is really poorly coded, it can still be recognized by its context or clear intention.

You can try it out yourself at a handful of websites by appending #showacsb: it’s live on Everlast, Tupperware, and Playmobil (among many others).

Screenshot of the Everlast website with accessiBe's overlay on the right with options to adjust text and visuals.

The result is a website that works in many ways as if it was designed with accessibility in mind, fixing a lot of the basic problems that prevent visitors with disabilities from using a site, and providing plenty of additional quality-of-life features like improving contrast, stopping animations, changing the font, etc. The overlay can be automatically activated or manually by users prompted by screen reader text that tells them how to do so.

AccessiBe’s agent scans the site regularly and updates what users will see, and the website owner pays monthly (from $40 to a couple hundred a month depending on the size of the site) to have the tool available. This demo video does a pretty good job of showing the problems the tool fixes.

You may wonder how this could be considered anything but good for accessibility, but there’s serious debate over the role of overlays in considerations for how the web should be made more accessible. The implication of such a tool is that all that’s needed to make any website accessible is a single line of code. This leads to a couple problems.

First, it’s questionable whether automated processes like accessiBe’s (and others aimed at developers, like Evinced and AudioEye) can actually catch and fix every accessibility problem. There are many that slip past even the best analysis and others that resist automated fixes. (The company offers a free assessment tool in case you’re curious what it would and wouldn’t catch at your website.)

AccessiBe CEO Shir Ekerling said that this concern has been ameliorated by recent improvements to the technology.

“AccessiBe scans and analyzes every website every day. We know, automatically, exactly what are the interactive elements of the site, where people click, put their mouse, or stay the longest,” he explained. “Combining this with probability algorithms we run (matching every site element to every site element of over 100,000 websites including an insane amount of artificial data), we are able to know exactly what each and every element of the site is and adjust it so it is accessible adhering to WCAG 2.1 level AA.” (The WCAG guidelines can be perused here.)

Likewise considerations that overlays can interfere with existing accessibility tools, for example if a user has a browser or add-on that automatically captions images or reads out text a certain way; Ekerling said accessiBe defers to user-side tools on these things. And it also works on mobile browsers, which many previous overlays didn’t.

There’s also the more philosophical question of whether, by having accessibility essentially something you can turn on and off, a site owner is maintaining a sort of “separate but equal access” to their content. That’s a big no-no in this field, like a restaurant having a separate dining room for people with wheelchairs rather than adding a ramp to the front door. Of course since accessiBe doesn’t make a separate site or permanently modify the source code, it clearly isn’t that. But it’s equally clear that the base site isn’t built to be accessible — it just has a layer of accessibility spread over the top.

The company’s position is that their overlay provides everything needed for ADA compliance and WCAG best practices, and as such constitutes a complete solution for making a website accessible. Others contend that this is not the case and at any rate that developers should not be incentivized to ignore accessibility while building because they think a third party service can provide it with one line of code.

accessiBe is also working on a user-side version that isn’t reliant on a website including the widget, something that could potentially be very helpful to a lot of people but do little to make the web more accessible in its fundamentals. That takes dedication by many independent actors and businesses. The recently hired Michael Hingson, “chief visionary officer,” acknowledges this while also asserting the usefulness of well-done overlays.

The company has raised $28M in the last year, all from K1 Investment Management. K1 initially invested $12M last may, but more than doubled that commitment after 2020 saw accessiBe tripled their ARR. Much of the cash will be used for further R&D and to consult and hire more people with disabilities for testing, feedback, and development.

Every website should be accessible, that much everyone can agree on. But it’s a long, complicated, and expensive road to get there. Tools like accessiBe may not be a permanent solution, but they can make a website more accessible tomorrow — and potentially less vulnerable to lawsuits alleging noncompliance with ADA rules — where deeper changes may take months or years to achieve.

Nobl9 raises $21M Series B for its SLO management platform

SLAs, SLOs, SLIs. If there’s one thing everybody in the business of managing software development loves, it’s acronyms. And while everyone probably knows what a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is, Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) may not be quite as well known. The idea, though, is straightforward, with SLOs being the overall goals a team must hit to meet the promises of its SLA agreements, and SLIs being the actual measurements that back up those other two numbers. With the advent of DevOps, these ideas, which are typically part of a company’s overall Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) efforts, are becoming more mainstream, but putting them into practice isn’t always straightforward.

Noble9 aims to provide enterprises with the tools they need to build SLO-centric operations and the right feedback loops inside an organization to help it hit its SLOs without making too many trade-offs between the cost of engineering, feature development and reliability.

The company today announced that it has raised a $21 million Series B round led by its Series A investors Battery Ventures and CRV. In addition, Series A investors Bonfire Ventures and Resolute Ventures also participated, together with new investors Harmony Partners and Sorenson Ventures.

Before starting Nobl9, co-founders Marcin Kurc (CEO) and Brian Singer (CPO) spent time together at Orbitera, where Singer was the co-founder and COO and Kurc the CEO, and then at Google Cloud, after it acquired Orbitera in 2016. In the process, the team got to work with and appreciate Google’s site reliability engineering frameworks.

As they started looking into what to do next, that experience led them to look into productizing these ideas. “We came to this conclusion that if you’re going into Kubernetes, into service-based applications and modern architectures, there’s really no better way to run that than SRE,” Kurc told me. “And when we started looking at this, naturally SRE is a complete framework, there are processes. We started looking at elements of SRE and we agreed that SLO — service level objectives — is really the foundational part. You can’t do SRE without SLOs.”

As Singer noted, in order to adopt SLOs, businesses have to know how to turn the data they have about the reliability of their services, which could be measured in uptime or latency, for example, into the right objectives. That’s complicated by the fact that this data could live in a variety of databases and logs, but the real question is how to define the right SLOs for any given organization based on this data.

“When you go into the conversation with an organization about what their goals are with respect to reliability and how they start to think about understanding if there’s risks to that, they very quickly get bogged down in how are we going to get this data or that data and instrument this or instrument that,” Singer said. “What we’ve done is we’ve built a platform that essentially takes that as the problem that we’re solving. So no matter where the data lives and in what format it lives, we want to be able to reduce it to very simply an error budget and an objective that can be tracked and measured and reported on.”

The company’s platform launched into general availability last week, after a beta that started last year. Early customers include Brex and Adobe.

As Kurc told me, the team actually thinks of this new funding round as a Series A round, but because its $7.5 million Series A was pretty sizable, they decided to call it a Series A instead of a seed round. “It’s hard to define it. If you define it based on a revenue milestone, we’re pre-revenue, we just launched the GA product,” Singer told me. “But I think just in terms of the maturity of the product and the company, I would put us at the [Series] B.”

The team told me that it closed the round at the end of last November, and while it considered pitching new VCs, its existing investors were already interested in putting more money into the company and since its previous round had been oversubscribed, they decided to add to this new round some of the investors that didn’t make the cut for the Series A.

The company plans to use the new funding to advance its roadmap and expand its team, especially across sales, marketing and customer success.