Tag: Recent Funding

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Supplier, grocer connector Clubbi secures $4.5M to expand in Brazil

Clubbi, a Brazilian business-to-business resource for small food retailers, brought in $4.5 million in seed funding to expand across the country.

The remote first company started in 2020 as an online commerce resource for neighborhood markets and grocery stores — most that have never shopped online before — to stock up on products they need, offering competitive pricing and better customer service.

Co-founder João Macedo initially had the vision for Clubbi while working as head of distribution for Red Bull. He saw how fragmented and analog the commerce business was, resulting in difficulty reaching a large retail base. In fact, suppliers still rely on door-to-door sales, he told TechCrunch.

“They depend on intermediaries, and that makes go-to-market more complex and expensive,” he added. “I lived in India, and it was fragmented there also, but B2B marketplaces were doing well there.”

Last year, he joined with Marcos Adler and Alexandre Farber to create a marketplace connecting suppliers, like Kraft Heinz, Adria and Piraquê, with markets.

Clubbi launched in October 2020 with 24-hour delivery, no minimum order quantity and flexible payment terms. It is currently working with 1,000 grocery stores in Rio de Janeiro, up from three at launch, with plans to grow to over 3,000 by mid 2022, Adler said. The company is also growing 40% month over month, gross merchandise value-wise.

“We reach a long tail of customers that are hard to service, are working with less working capital and offer them a single place to buy everything they need and have good delivery lead time to keep inventory fulfilled,” Adler added. “All they have to do is go on the website, place a one-click order and get it the next day on their doorstep.”

Valor Capital Group co-led the round with ONEVC and was joined by Better Tomorrow Ventures, Latitud and Canary, which led Clubbi’s $550,000 pre-seed round.

The funding will be used to accelerate growth, technology development, expansion into other Brazilian cities and develop additional supplier partnerships. Clubbi offers about 7,000 to 8,000 SKUs on its marketplace, while the average store will carry 1,000 to 2,000 SKUs, Adler said. The company started with five employees and also plans to hire additional staff to bring its now 40-person employee base to 70 people by the middle of 2022.

Meanwhile, the company still has a long way to go to get in front of over 200,000 mom-and-pop grocery stores in Brazil, which generate more than $35 billion in combined revenue, Valor Capital Group’s Antoine Colaço said in a written statement.

“These stores still face many challenges when trying to procure goods in an efficient and low-cost manner, and they also lack access to fair financing solutions,” Colaço said. “Clubbi is delivering an integrated and simple way for these stores to receive the best products — at the right prices and payment terms — at their doors. The social and economic development Clubbi generates is huge and the Company’s early results are very promising and impressive.”

Will Brazil’s Roaring 20s see the rise of early-stage startups?

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Max Q: Rocket Lab unveils Neutron, plus more private space station news

Hello and welcome back to Max Q! There was a TON of space news this week so I won’t ramble too much, other than to remind you that many of the people mentioned below will be at TC Sessions: Space on the 14th and 15th! That includes Peter Beck, CEO of Rocket Lab, Nanoracks’ Jeffrey Manber, and many, many others. It’s going to be a really great event and we’d like for you to be there — more details are at the bottom of this post.

Questions, comments, feedback, compliments: aria.techcrunch@gmail.com.

Don’t forget to sign up to get the free newsletter version of Max Q delivered to your inbox.

Rocket Lab is reimagining rocket design with Neutron launch system

On Thursday, Rocket Lab finally gave a much-anticipated update on Neutron, its medium-lift launch system, and the company did not disappoint. Neutron features a number of surprising innovations in both operation and development that depart from other rockets of its class — I’ll go over a few here.

The first is the material used: Rocket Lab has chosen to go with carbon composites for the body of the rocket, eschewing metal alternatives. This is interesting because SpaceX famously ditched carbon composites for stainless steel for the Starship system, but CEO Peter Beck told me that the lighter structure offers huge advantages in weight and performance.

The other notable alteration I’ll mention here is the payload fairing. Traditionally, a rocket is stacked vertically, with the second stage sandwiched between the first stage on the bottom and the fairing on the top, like a nose cone. This is not the case with Neutron.

Instead, the company has decided to attach the fairing to the first stage and put the second stage inside it. When the rocket is ready to deploy payload, the fairings will mechanically open, like a weird alien flower or a big claw!

These are just a few details on the design — read the full story for more.

Neutron’s second stage and payload saying sayonara. Image Credits: Rocket Lab (opens in a new window)

NASA awards over $400M to Blue Origin, Nanoracks and Northrop Grumman for private space stations

Big news this week in the world of commercial space stations: NASA has awarded more than $400 million in agreements to three companies to further develop designs for private destinations in low Earth orbit.

The three companies, which received the awards under the agency’s Commercial low Earth orbit (LEO) Destinations program, are Nanoracks, which received $160 million for “Starlab”; Blue Origin, which received $130 million for “Orbital Reef”; and Northrop Grumman for $125.6 million, for a station that does not yet have a flashy name.

This first set of awards will help the companies develop their designs, work that is expected to continue through 2025. There will be a second phase of the program, where NASA intends to certify for human use one or more stations (from this group of companies or other entrants) and ultimately become one of many customers purchasing in-orbit services and use of the stations.

More news from TC and beyond

Astroscale raised a $109 million Series F to scale its on-orbit servicing technology, designed to extend the lifespan of satellites and reduce orbital debris. (The startup’s CEO and founder, Nobu Okada, will be joining us onstage at TC Sessions: Space 2021 this year.)

Isar Aerospace won an €11 million ($12.4 million) award from the German government and the German Aerospace Center to further the development of the startup’s Spectrum launch vehicle, in return for transportation services of up to 150 kilograms of payload on two separate flights.

Northrop Grumman won a massive $3.19 billion contract from NASA to build boosters for the agency’s heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket. The company is tasked with building boosters for nine SLS flights.

Phase Four, a propulsion startup, has released the specs of its next-gen radio-frequency plasma thruster, which the company says offers key performance improvements to allow spacecraft using it a wider range of maneuverability in orbit.

Q-CTRL, a startup that provides quantum control engineering solutions, closed a $25 million Series B financing round led by Airbus Ventures. The company is developing space-qualified quantum sensors and exploration technologies for Earth and beyond.

SpaceX sent a batch of 48 Starlink satellites, plus two satellites for geospatial intelligence company BlackSky, to orbit Thursday evening. It marked the ninth mission for that specific Falcon 9 booster. Rewatch it here.

Varda Space Industries, SCOUT and Neutron Star Systems came in first, second and third place (respectively) in Hyperspace Challenge, an accelerator run by the Air Force Research Laboratory and CNM Ingenuity as part of the U.S. Space Force’s SpaceWERX program.

Join us for TC Sessions: Space

Last year we held our first dedicated space event, and it went so well that we decided to host it again in 2021. This year, it’s happening December 14 and 15, and it’s once again going to be an entirely virtual conference, so people from all over the world will be able to join — and you can, too.

Check out a sneak peek of the early agenda by clicking here. Suffice to say, you won’t want to miss it.

Read more stories on TechCrunch.com

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Hometap closes on $60M to let people tap into their home equity without taking out a loan

Hometap, a startup that offers people a way to borrow against the equity in their homes without taking out loans, has raised $60 million in new funding.

American Family Ventures led the investment, which brings Hometap’s total operating capital raised since its 2017 inception to $95 million. New and existing backers, including Bain Capital, Iconiq Capital, LLC, G20 Ventures, Pillar and General Catalyst, also put money in the latest round.

As its name implies, Hometap offers homeowners a way to “tap” into their home equity by taking on an investor in their property. That investor is essentially providing cash in exchange for a share of their home’s future value. When the home sells or the homeowner “settles” the investment, Boston-based Hometap is paid an agreed-upon percentage of the sale price or current appraised value.

“We started this company not only because we thought it was a good business, but because we wanted to be part of something with a social mission,” CEO Jeffrey Glass said. “There are so many people that are house rich and cash poor — and might have a capital need such as renovating a house or paying for college where, historically their only alternative is to further borrow on, or sell their house.”

While he declined to reveal revenue specifics, Glass said that in the first 10 months of this year, Hometap made four times as many home equity investments as it had during the same time period in 2020. He said the company “more than tripled” its revenue growth this calendar year and more than doubled its employee headcount to 140 in the same time frame.

“We expect to more than double, or perhaps triple again, next year as well,” he told TechCrunch. “We’ve grown 14 consecutive quarters quarter-over-quarter, even right through the pandemic.”

Hometap claims that its model differs from others that charge people a share of appreciation. Such a model is more stressful for homeowners, according to Glass, because they don’t know how much they owe until they’ve sold or settled. Also, the biggest difference between a Hometap investment and a traditional loan is that the startup doesn’t require any monthly payments or charge interest. In fact, some people take the money from Hometap to pay down other debt and improve their FICO scores.

The company offers a 10-year term, meaning that homeowners will need to settle the investment within 10 years, and they can do that at any point in time within that 10-year period. Homeowners can settle their investment by buying out Hometap, selling their home or refinancing their first mortgage.

Image Credits: Hometap

The startup says its software uses automated technology to make the process as simple as possible for a homeowner. It also uses proprietary financial models and forecasting tools as part of its investment process. Glass emphasizes that the company is an investor, not a lender — and one that is offering a “smart loan alternative.”

Hometap currently invests in 15 states (including Massachusetts, New York, California, Virginia, Florida and North Carolina). The company plans to use its new capital toward hiring, scaling its channel program/partnerships, expanding operations nationwide and introducing additional alternative financing products and services.

As for its revenue model, Hometap charges homeowners a one-time fee that gets deducted out of their proceeds, but most of its revenue comes from the investors putting up their capital to invest in the properties.

“We get a fee from the capital we invest in these homes, including a fee to acquire a new investment, and then we’re paid a backend fee to manage that investment on an ongoing basis,” Glass told TechCrunch.

This reminds me a bit of Pipe, a buzzy fintech that connects investors with startups with predictable revenue streams to offer them cash upfront. It too does not classify itself as a lender.

Alan Valkin, managing director at General Catalyst, notes that his firm has been investors in Hometap “since the beginning.”

“We saw that Jeff and his team had identified a simple, homeowner-centric way for people to leverage the equity they’ve built in their homes and reach their financial goals without the added stress of debt…[in a way] that sets it apart from traditional financing providers and other fintech companies in this space,” he wrote via email.

Dan Reed, managing director at American Family Ventures, in a written statement, said that since his firm made its first investment in Hometap in 2018, it has “strongly believed in its mission to give homeowners a more accessible way to create liquidity and financial flexibility from what is oftentimes their largest asset.”

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Dispatch Goods takes in $3.7M for restaurant, food delivery container reuse

Plastic containers are ending up in landfills and oceans all over the world as more countries stop accepting our recycled goods. This is adding up: The average American uses and throws away 110 pounds of single-use plastic every year, yet only 8% of plastic is recycled in the United States.

You might think that all of those clamshell plastic containers we get from restaurants, food delivery services and grocers are recyclable, but the reality is that not all recycling centers accept them.

Dispatch Goods

Dispatch Goods’ collection of reusable containers. Image Credits: Maude Ballinger

Dispatch Goods co-founder and CEO Lindsey Hoell started the company in 2019 to build out an infrastructure that takes on the heavy lifting of recapturing plastic containers, freezer packs and packaging. All of those are taken back to the company’s facilities where they are washed, sanitized and sold back for reuse. Even restaurant or food delivery customers can text a number on the containers to schedule at-home collection from Dispatch Goods or deposit their containers in a return bin.

Prior to starting the company, Hoell had a career in medicine, but dreamed of moving to California and being a surfer. She ended up moving to California, which is where she became aware of the plastic crisis. Hoell met her co-founder, Maia Tekle, through the Sustainable Ocean Alliance while she was launching Dispatch Goods. At the time, Tekle was West Coast partnerships lead at Caviar.

“Recycling makes people think they are doing something good, but when we dug deeper, we found that we aren’t always doing good if there is no secondary market demand,” Hoell told TechCrunch. “Containers can only be downcycled, but there is not a good infrastructure in place to collect the containers and process them.”

Dispatch Goods set out to build that infrastructure and now collects and processes between 10,000 and 15,000 food packages a week. It is already working with over 50 customers, like DoorDash, Imperfect Foods and 50 restaurants in the Bay Area, including Bombera, which has replaced 4,000 containers since it began using Dispatch Goods over the summer, Hoell said.

After replacing some 250,000 single-use plastics, overall, across its customers in 2021, the company today announces $3.7 million in seed funding. The round was led by Congruent Ventures and included Bread and Butter Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Incite Ventures, MCJ and Berkeley SkyDeck. The latest investment gives Dispatch Goods just under $4.7 million in total funding, Hoell told TechCrunch.

Hoell and Tekle are hands-on founders, even learning to drive trucks and forklifts, but their small team needed a boost, especially after seeing their monthly revenue grow from $700 last September to $20,000 in May.

They sought out capital with the intention to grow the team and outfit their current facilities, including a microhub in San Francisco, to be able to handle the growth that was happening outside of that area and its new facility in Baltimore.

“This use case didn’t exist before, so we are making the best of it until we can strategize on what a facility for reuse would be like,” Hoell said. “We are in the middle of building that right now.”

They plan to invest the new funding into additional geographical expansion, adding more restaurant partnerships and exploring new packaging opportunities. The company is also bringing on three new people by the end of the year to join its current staff of nine.

Female founders are making a buzzing, venture-backed comeback

Though Dispatch Goods is mainly working with restaurant partners, it did kick off a pilot program last month targeted at consumers. Hoell said there was interest from that side, but the company will stick to selling into businesses so that the ultimate barrier to entry will be low.

Hoell didn’t go into specifics with growth metrics, but did say the company tracks how many items it is collecting and how many stops it is making. At launch, the company was collecting around four items per stop, and that has grown to an average of 12 items, while the number of stops grew to around nine (from three).

Meanwhile, Hoell and Tekle are excited to bring in Christina O’Conor, vice president at Congruent Ventures, as one of their new advisors.

“The zero-waste movement is rapidly growing and we see circular packaging as an inevitable part of a sustainable future,” O’Conor said in a written statement. “Lindsey and Maia have demonstrated that they have the hustle, strategic insights, and passion to create new systems to support an infrastructure designed for reuse.”

They also have some star power on their advisory team in actor Adrian Grenier, who is co-founder of DuContra Ventures. Grenier said what Dispatch Goods is doing “has been on my mind for a long time.” In fact, he is so anti plastic containers that he avoids takeout as much as he can and even brings in his own reusable containers.

“We know how challenging it can be to reinvent the world,” he added. “Everyone is excited about the on-demand lifestyle that technology has given us, but to what expense? Dispatch Goods can save businesses the convenience and give them the opportunity to be able to afford this kind of shift in business model.”

The whole package: How plastics and sustainability startups achieve success

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TradeDepot raises $110M from IFC, Novastar to extend BNPL service to merchants across Africa

Startups digitizing B2B e-commerce and retail in Africa continue to grab the headlines after the pandemic paved the way for widespread offline retail and commerce disruption.

TradeDepot, a Nigeria- and U.S.-based company that connects consumer goods brands to thousands of retailers and help out with distribution, has raised $110 million in new equity and debt funding round as it looks to bring in more retail stores and expand its buy now, pay later service across the continent.

Though TradeDepot did not comment on the share of equity to debt, data from the company’s SEC filing pegs the equity share at almost $42 million.

The Series B funding is coming almost eighteen months after raising $10 million co-led by Partech Africa and the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

IFC led the round this time while Novastar, Sahel Capital, CDC Group, Endeavor Catalyst and existing investors, Partech and MSA Capital participated. The debt funding was led by Arcadia Funds, a lender that specializes in p2p and marketplace lending and insurance-linked securities.

As part of the round, Wale Ayeni, the head of Africa Venture Capital Investment for the IFC and Brian Odhiambo, the West Africa director of Novastar Ventures, will join TradeDepot’s board. 

TradeDepot operates a B2B marketplace that connects small shops, kiosks, retailers with wholesalers of global consumer brands who have access to food, beverages and personal care products. The company owns its warehouses and fleets of drivers to carry out distribution.

Last year, the company had over 40,000 merchants on its platform; now, it is servicing more than 100,000 merchants, according to CEO Onyekachi Izukanne. On the call with the CEO, he also mentioned that TradeDepot grew its GMV by 5x within this period.

In the past five years, TradeDepot’s main work centred around building out the supply chain with technology and onboarding retailers one at a time. The company now provides a full range of products to those onboarded, rolling out digital wallets and financial services, particularly credit or BNPL offerings.

The BNPL offering is embedded within the company’s ShopTopUp platform, where retailers can access a credit line for all consumer goods on the application.

TradeDepot

A TradeDepot warehouse

However, just as any B2B e-commerce platform offering BNPL services, TradeDepot does not provide these merchants with cash advances. Instead, it sends the products directly to them while they pay in instalments. The repayment value stands at almost 5% per month. 

“Merchants are able to double or triple what they normally buy just because of this access. We think that these embedded financial services will be a key part of this narrative: Supply chain on the one hand, and everything related to financial services to make these businesses work on the other,” said the CEO. “We think they go together. And the last year and a half have been defined by us focusing on bringing more of these embedded finance products to market.”

In 2020 when the five-year-old company announced plans to offer credit, it built scoring models by using equity to finance credit to the retailers off its balance sheets. The company claims its BNPL model has led to a 200% increase in transaction volumes for retail store owners.

It’s on the back of track of lending to these retailers (looking into their purchase history, previous repayment performance and other related data points to predict their creditworthiness) for 18 months that TradeDepot is setting up a debt structure to execute at scale. 

A large majority of small and medium-sized businesses in Nigeria and across Africa are offline. These businesses generate $1 trillion in sales annually and contribute $2.6 trillion to the continent’s nominal GDP.

These numbers are catching the eyes of a growing cohort of startups who see opportunity in providing digital infrastructure and financing to a fragmented distribution network across the value chain. And while the jury is still out on whether retailers can effectively use and scale with online methods, prominent players such as Capiter, Sokowatch, Alerzo, MarketForce, Sabi and Omnibiz, keep expanding across major African markets.

“The informal sector is a large and critical part of Africa’s economy, accounting for around 80% of jobs in the region,” said Makhtar Diop, IFC’s Managing Director, in a statement. “We are excited to work with TradeDepot to leverage technology to help small businesses across the continent, particularly the many retailers led by women, access the resources they need to grow and scale.”

TradeDepot’s Series B round is the largest for any B2B e-commerce platform in Africa at the moment, both in equity and debt. The company was one of the earliest players in the space and started out distributing milk to small retailers in Lagos, Nigeria.

Izukanne believes the emergence of new startups targeting the market at various touchpoints, inserting convenience and innovative pricing has made it easier for investors to see the opportunity in offline retail digitization.

“Four or five years ago, if you were having a conversation with an investor, there was a lot of education required to convince them why this was an opportunity and why they should come on board,” said the CEO who founded the company with Michael Ukpong and Ruke Awaritefe.

“I think what we’re seeing is that the market is now awake to that opportunity. You have more parties, especially several serious ones coming in and trying to help build this. There’s a lot of iteration required to figure out the models that work. And more parties that you find hacking at this kind of speeds up innovation within the space, so that’s super useful.

TradeDepot is active across 12 cities in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa (Accra, Johannesburg and ten cities in Nigeria). Izukanne said with the new funding, TradeDepot will double down activities in these three countries and increase its footprint across Nigeria, trying to capture more of the 5 million SMEs it sees as its target market. The debt financing will support the delivery of the BNPL service to these retailers.

TradeDepot adds $10 million to add financial services to its supply chain services for African SMBs

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Kenya’s Pariti raises $2.85M led by Harlem Capital to develop startup ecosystems in emerging markets

Pariti, the Kenya-based community-led marketplace building the digital infrastructure for startup ecosystems in emerging markets, has raised $2.85 million seed, the company confirmed to TechCrunch today.

The round was led by U.S.-based Harlem Capital. In Africa, it’s the first deal of the diversity-focused fund that secured $134 million for its second fund earlier this year. Other investors — Better Ventures, Accelerated Ventures, Diverse Angels, AVG Basecamp and New General Market Partners participated.

“We’re thrilled to be working with Harlem Capital,” co-founder and CEO Yacob Berhane said of Harlem’s participation. “Their focus on data, process and supporting underserved ecosystems aligns perfectly with our mission and makes them an amazing partner for us to build with.”

When TechCrunch covered Pariti in March, the company which connects founders in emerging markets to resources, talent and capital, was fresh out of finding product-market-fit.

Pariti was founded by Yacob Berhane and Wossen Ayele in 2019. This past year, CEO Berhane said the company has grown 795% and attributed this growth to the pandemic and how the African tech ecosystem has hit an inflection point, minting half a dozen unicorns within this period.

“The pandemic was a Black Swan event because we saw a major jump in activity on our platform. Remote staffing and remote investing accelerated tremendously. This was a bet we made a while back but obviously could not anticipate what was coming,” Berhane said to TechCrunch.

“And after taking nearly ten years to get Africa’s first unicorn, we had six announced in roughly six months. This led to a significant increase of interest from local and international investors for African startups.

Pariti has over 880 companies across 42 countries on its platform, up from 500 early this year. But Berhane does not share any other numbers to reflect the progress from the 100 freelance experts and 60 investors TechCrunch reported in March.

How Pariti is connecting founders with capital, resources and talent in emerging markets

Data from BCG says that Africa appears to be at the dawn of a startup revolution, with the ecosystem “growing at a 46% annual rate, which is six times faster than the global average.”

But with some founders needing support more than ever after in an inefficient ecosystem with trust issues, platforms like Pariti will become critical for founders and investors to negotiate on neutral terrain.

Pariti’s principal product is the Recommendation Engine, where founders submit their companies for review and feedback from experts on the platform. Then the engine suggests personalized next steps for the founders to take in areas where the company needs help.

The Kenya-based marketplace also helps talent monetize their skills and VCs and angels to find, vet and execute deals.

Berhane mentions that Pariti’s pitch assessment and recommendation engine also has some predictability features where the platform can tell how companies will perform with fundraising.

“So we’ve looked at the companies that have been able to go on and raise money after submitting the Pariti pitch review, and companies that score over 70 on a Pariti score have a 50% likelihood of connecting successfully with investors,” the CEO said. “But companies that score above 78 have shown correlation to having 8x likelihood of raising capital, which is pretty dramatic.”

According to a few founders who have used the platform and spoke anonymously to TechCrunch, Pariti also helped them get into global accelerators such as Y Combinator and Techstars.

Berhane confirmed that five companies have gotten into Y Combinator after using Pariti. One of the startups is Kenyan neobank Fingo, a startup highlighted in the previous article that had secured a $250,000 pre-seed round in March.

“If Pariti builds this community of founders, investors and freelancers that have the right mindset to elevate this ecosystem, nobody has to be a gatekeeper. You’re fostering a certain mentality of ‘we will get further together.’ It’s bigger than any one of us,” Berhane stated, emphasizing the need for Pariti to democratize access to global investors and accelerators.

Coaching and mentorship services have picked up significantly on the platform, too, appearing in different forms: VC fellows to founder, founder to founder, expert to founder, and investor to founder, the company said. With access to this support and investors, companies have raised over $20 million in debt and equity this past year. 

Pariti seed funding will allow it to build SaaS workflows to aggregate multiple forms of raising capital, from traditional equity and debt to DeFi solutions.

The company also plans to enhance its talent marketplace, create a bespoke solution for investors looking to invest and support founders, hire talent, build bigger communities and expand into new markets.

Diversity-focused Harlem Capital raises $134M

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MarketForce partners with Cellulant to expand in five new markets across Africa as it races to cover continent

MarketForce, a Kenyan B2B retail and financial services distribution startup, has expanded into five additional markets across Africa to grow RejaReja — its retailer ‘super app’ that makes it possible for informal merchants to order and pay for inventory digitally, accept payments for utility bills, and access financing for their businesses.

The startup has today announced entry of RejaReja, the B2B retail marketplace, into Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, Rwanda and Uganda, after successful pilot programs, coming about two months after it grew beyond Kenya by launching in Nigeria.

MarketForce has partnered with Cellulant, a pan-African payments company that makes it possible for local and international merchants to accept “locally relevant and alternative” payment methods from their customers, to expand into these new markets.

“We are working with Cellulant to open the new markets, and the reason is they already have a presence in these markets and have partnerships with both banks and billers. This will ensure that we focus on acquiring new merchants,” MarketForce’s co-founder and CEO, Tesh Mbaabu told Techrunch.

Cellulant has partnerships with 46 mobile-money operators in Africa, 120 banks and serves 35 African countries with a physical presence in 18, according to the payments firm. RejaReja is set to tap Cellulant’s coverage to grow across the continent.

“We have been piloting this partnership for six months and are happy to announce the plan to extend the fruitful relationship we have built with MarketForce in Kenya…This collaboration will make our digital financial services available to millions of Africans, with the goal of significantly boosting financial inclusion and incomes for merchants across Sub-Saharan Africa,” said Cellulant chief business officer, David Waithaka.

Cellulant chief business officer, David Waithaka and MarketForce co-founder and CEO Tesh Mbaabu. Image credits: MarketForce.

Mbaabu said that they aim to grow their RejaReja merchants tenfold to 1 million by the end of next year. RejaReja has experienced a rapid growth since its launch in December 2020 with over 87,000 orders made through the platform to date at an average basket value of $151. It is expected to record $60 million in annualized transaction volume by the end of this month.

“In November we hit 100,000 merchants in Kenya and Nigeria and this number is growing quite rapidly. Currently, we are growing 40% month on month. This shows how strong our service is,” said Mbaabu.

“The growth is because the merchants are seeing the value, it is a vote of confidence in our platform by the merchants. And a lot of them are using technology for their businesses for the first time,” said Mbaabu, who co-founded MarketForce with Mesongo Sibut in 2018 as an SaaS product for the formal markets. The service’s active users include Unilever, Pepsi, Safaricom and CocaCola. MarketForce recently raised $2 million in seed funding.

The startup’s plan for RejaReja is to have a presence in every market across sub-Saharan Africa in the near future by building an all inclusive platform for the informal merchants, who sell a huge chunk of the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCGs) in Africa. In sub-Saharan Africa about 80% of household retail is delivered through informal retailers but these shops are faced with a number of challenges like stockouts, earnings instability and financing that make it hard for their businesses to grow.

MarketForce, through RejaReja, is providing solutions to these challenges by ensuring next-day delivery of goods, and using their data to develop the credit profiles needed to secure loans. The startup has partnered with Pezesha — a digital financial marketplace platform — to extend loans to its merchants.

Mbaabu said, “we see RejaReja being the largest retail distribution network in sub-Saharan Africa.”
“The goal is to empower all these merchants to grow their incomes and profits in a digital age, to access inventory, to act as special agents for various financial services, and to make extra income as a result. We are able to extend working capital loans too.”

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Stacked raises $35M to bring passive investing tools to retail crypto traders

Stacked, a web-based platform that provides passive investment tools for retail investors interested in crypto, just announced it raised a $35 million Series A co-led by Alameda Research, a crypto trading firm owned by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

Bybit and BitDAO partner Mirana Ventures co-led the round alongside Alameda. Fidelity International Strategic Ventures, DRW Venture Capital, Alumni Ventures, and Jump Capital also participated. 

The Chicago-based company, which launched in April 2020, raised a $1 million seed round in September 2020. The latest round brings its total funding to “just shy of $40 million,” co-founder and CEO Joel Birch told TechCrunch in an interview. 

It plans to use the funds to double its 40-person employee base in the next six to eight months and invest in user acquisition, growth and marketing. Until this fundraise, Stacked had grown its business with no formal marketing spend, he added. 

Stacked has automated over $10 billion worth of transactions for tens of thousands of new investors in 2021, per the company. It also secured status as a registered investment advisor (RIA) with the US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) this summer in preparation to widen its product offerings, the company told TechCrunch.

“In the very near future, we’re going to continue to evolve our platform away from automating strategies and giving people this easy investment platform into actually offering structured products like risk-adjusted portfolios and giving curated investment advice to individuals based on their risk tolerance,” Birch said.

While the SEC has not yet approved a crypto ETF for trading in the U.S., products like Grayscale’s trusts have become popular with investors seeking price exposure to the asset class. Birch said Stacked’s product differs from those sorts of products in that it is available to all retail investors, regardless of whether they are accredited, and allows users to hold custody of their digital assets. 

Stacked, which acts as a layer on top of a user’s existing crypto brokerage account, offers a range of pre-built portfolios it calls “stacks” based on a risk score it assigns to each user after they take a suitability assessment. It partners with “a handful of the most reputable exchanges in the world,” including Coinbase, FTX, and Binance, per Birch.

Its core product is currently free to use and allows users to manage portfolios across multiple crypto exchanges, auto-rebalance and compound their portfolios, and lend cryptocurrency through FTX’s exchange, he added.

Stacked makes money by charging a percentage fee on transactions in its two-sided open marketplace, which sells automated trading strategies, according to Birch. Investors use the exchange to buy strategies designed by well-known traders and influencers in the crypto space.

Stacked cofounders Joel Birch and Stephen Beavis

Stacked cofounders Joel Birch and Stephen Beavis. Image Credits: Stacked

In the “next few weeks,” the company plans to launch a feature that will allow users to copy any “stack” as a template and customize it by making direct edits, Birch said. 

Exchanges are interested in backing Stacked because its users tend to stay active on those exchanges for longer than average, he added.

“I just think that you will see more of that in the crypto ecosystem — exchanges acting as the infrastructure rails,” Birch said. “They have great custody solutions, liquidity, security, all these very complicated things. But the user experience is usually pretty simple, and it’s a fairly technical product, so I think you’ll see tons of products continue to get built on top of the infrastructures that exchanges build.”

Birch first heard about bitcoin in 2015 while he was working at Grubhub, where he spent nearly five years leading restaurant growth. Once a homeless immigrant, Birch got his start as an entrepreneur launching a dropshipping business at age 17. A self-described “tech nerd,” he dropped out of college three times before completing his bachelor’s degree to explore his interest in building an internet business.

“In 2012 to 2013, we saw major funding [for startups] and saw [Silicon] Valley, really starting to come to fruition,” Birch said. “So I started looking at a place I could move to work for a startup. I wanted to integrate myself into the tech ecosystem, so that way, I could one day be a tech founder myself.”

He applied to jobs at startups in Chicago and landed at Grubhub when it had just 13 employees. At Grubhub, he was surrounded by engineers, data scientists, and business operations professionals who supported and mentored him.

Once he learned about bitcoin, he started working on business ideas in the space and got connected with Stacked cofounder Stephen Beavis. According to Birch, “the rest is history,”

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Vinehealth, offering digital support for cancer patients and SaaS for R&D, gets $5.5M to launch in the US

Vinehealth, a 2018-founded, London-based digital health startup that’s built an app which offers personalized support for cancer patients while also making it easier to gather patient-reported outcome (PRO) data, including for drug development and clinical trials, has closed a $5.5 million seed round as it prepares to expand into the U.S.

The round, which co-founder and CTO Georgina Kirby describes as a “late seed” — ahead of a planned Series A “in the next 12-18 months” — is led by Talis Capital with participation from previous investors Playfair Capital and Ascension.

A number of angel investors have also joined the round, including Keith Gibbs, former CEO of AXA PPP Healthcare; Pam Garside, partner at Newhealth; Voyagers Health-Tech Fund, led by David Rowan, founding editor of Wired; David Giampaolo, healthcare entrepreneur and founder of PI Capital; Deepali Nangia, venture partner at Speedinvest and Atomico Angel; Faisal Mehmud, VP and former medical director of Bristol Myers Squibb; and KHP, a collaboration between King’s College London, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Trust.

The startup — which we billed as one “to watch” back in 2019 when we saw the founders pitching at Entrepreneur First’s demo day — combines behavioral science and AI to deliver timely patient support and nudges (for things like medication reminders) so they can more easily self-manage their treatment.

Vinehealth’s platform also acts as a channel through which patients can be remotely monitored by their clinicians as they provide feedback on symptoms and report any treatment side-effects.

So far its app has been downloaded around 15,000 times since being made available in January 2020 — which Kirby confirms covers all usage to date, so both for pure patient-support and for trials/research.

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The patient-support app is offered free for cancer patients to download themselves — currently available in the UK and Ireland.

For pharma, Vinehealth provides its platform as a software-as-a-service — supporting drug companies in recruiting patients for trials and gathering PRO to help with R&D and drug development.

“We’ve been focused on pharma since the very beginning and we’re getting a lot of traction there and seeing a lot of opportunity,” says Kirby. “The patient support program and the clinical trial are extremely similar [products]… For pharma they’re different parts of the drug development process but in terms of the delivery of software, the things that patients need throughout that process — it’s extremely similar. So we’ve really narrowed down to that life science offering.”

She confirms Vinehealth is not going down the procurement route of trying to sell to healthcare services directly. So essentially the idea is for life sciences research to fund free provision of the support software to patients. (Although it can’t disclose any pharma customer names as yet.)

While, for monetization, it’s focused on serving the needs of drug companies, Vinehealth is equally keen to be seen as patient-centric — and wants its app to play a key clinician support role that promotes better patient outcomes.

“We have a web dashboard that is accessible through any browser for clinicians and doctors who want to be able to track their patients remotely and do this through running research studies or even within clinical trials,” says Kirby. “Those doctors and nurses can see that data in real-time but they can feed that into either appropriate points of the care pathway — obviously they’re not sitting there on the dashboard all day but there may times at which it’s very useful for them to see specific red flags and be able to know which patient to see see first and also to know how to make better clinical decisions using that kind of more real-time data — rather than the typical [fortnightly or monthly catch up with a patient].”

“So it’s kind of giving them that context and that rich longitudinal data that they’ve never had,” she adds.

Vinehealth has digitized the traditional paper-based questionnaires that cancer patients would typically be asked to fill in during a visit with their clinical team to report their symptoms and provide any wider feedback.

Its premise is that moving that legacy process to a dedicated, user-friendly digital interface supports better patient self management, treatment outcomes and improved quality of life for people living with cancer — given the relative ease of reporting data via an app, combined with the wider support package it offers (it’s worked with charities Macmillan and Bowel Cancer UK to supply support content to the app). 

For example, Kirby says they use A/B testing and AI to configure personalized and timely recommendations to surface appropriate resources, as well as to determine how best to nudge and motivate patients to take medications and manage what can be complex medication regimes for cancer treatment.

Vinehealth’s app wrapper can also dole out positive feedback to encourage patients to provide PRO.

Kirby points to (general) evidence that when patients track their PRO data effectively survival rates can increase — by up to 20%. “Better self management can have such a huge impact on survival,” she says, adding: “We want to show not only improvements in survival but in quality of life too.”

The blend of behavioral science and data-driven support Vinehealth’s approach involves stems from the combined expertise of the co-founders.

“Rayna’s [Patel; co-founder and CEO] background is really in behavioral science; mine is in data science,” says Kirby. “And so when we came together we thought we can really leverage both sides here — and use the data to understand what people are going through and where those nudges can be most effective. And use behavioral science to deliver some really key nudges at the right time with the right wording that can really nudge people to build their habits and be able to feel more in control and be able to actually understand what’s going on and make some better decisions for their own care.

“There are a number of nudges in the app — some small ones, some bigger ones. We build medication nudges and reminders to be delivered in a certain way that is really effective and isn’t just dismissed by patients. We have nudges for logging certain symptoms and what that leads on to — so certain supportive content. So you’re logging anxiety at certain levels, here’s some supportive content that could really help you with dealing with this particular symptom or side effect of your drug.”

“At different times it’s about the timing, the wording and the delivery of that nudge,” she adds. “If you try to change too many things at once research shows that you don’t change anything at all — so we’ve really carefully thought about how we nudge and how we try to help patients build better habits and how often we do that as well.”

Kirby says the goal — in time — is also to use AI to incorporate more advances suggestions into the platform in the future, such as predictive symptom logging (i.e. “what is likely to occur for this particular drug for this particular patient”).

For now, Vinehealth has built a content recommender system which is specialized in oncology and personalized to the patient; tuned to their diagnosis, adapting to their ongoing input, and factoring in content that other similar patients are reading and finding supportive.

On the research side, Kirby says the largest study the platform has been used for to date is an ongoing study involving nine NHS Trusts and 300 patients — which is a piece of research that Vinehealth is undertaking itself.

“We’re planning out a number of clinical trials that are slightly largely than that but still tbc in terms of exact numbers. The US studies are likely to be the larger ones,” she adds.

Health data is of course highly sensitive and Kirby confirms that consent for any third party research purposes is sought separately to the consent which a user of the patient-support product is asked for in order that Vinehealth can process their medical information to provide the service and give them personalized treatment support.

“That data is not shared with anybody — unless they have [given] explicit consent to do that. By just signing up to the platform they’re not consenting to sharing their data as part of a clinical trial. That is a completely separate piece of consent,” she says.

“We make it extremely clear and don’t want to hide any sharing in any way — it has to be really obvious and really clear to a patient. Ultimately everyone wants to support patients. They want to give more opportunities for patients to be in those clinical trials, to be able to capture that data and feed that back in a way where — normally they’re suffering at home with these kind of side effects and that’s never getting back to the pharma company, for example — so we’re making it really clear what we’re doing and why we’re doing that and we give patients a choice.”

Kirby does suggest that, in the future, the startup may also look to be able to provide “properly anonymized” data-sets based on purely aggregated insights provided by patients — so it might, for example, be able to highlight demographic groups that experience particular side effects of certain drugs. However she adds that that is not something it’s doing at the moment — “given our focus on trials and patient support programs”.

In the near term Vinehealth is gearing up for growth via a US launch — which it hopes will happen “early next year” — with the 18-strong team likely to double over the next six months or so and its first US hire already locked in.

“The main thing that we’ve been focused on since we fund raised is hiring a great team and growing that team and investing time in really building that out and making sure that everyone’s aligned on the mission and that we’re really building out a product that’s scalable to be able to take into these new markets,” says Kirby, adding: “Building a startup is all about having great people. You can have great technology but if you don’t have great people then you don’t really have anything.”

Commenting on the seed funding in a statement, Beatrice Aliprandi, principal at Talis Capital, said: “We’re hugely excited to be partnering with Rayna and Georgina: we’d been keeping a close eye on Vinehealth’s growth for several months before we invested in the company, given its unique value proposition where healthcare outcomes work in direct correlation with financial outcomes. It’s a win-win-win for patients, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, which is rarely the case in the healthcare space where parties are often at odds with one another.

“From our first meeting, the resilience and mission-driven attitude of the founders was immediately clear and is really what made this opportunity so compelling. Both Rayna and Georgina are clearly incredibly driven to improve the lives and survival of cancer patients, and as a team they possess a unique combination of expertise, skills, and drive to make Vinehealth a success.”

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Umamicart bags $6M to deliver traditional Asian ingredients right to your home

People come together around the dinner table and the food they love, but for Umamicart founder and CEO Andrea Xu, it wasn’t always easy to find the ingredients to make the foods she grew up eating with her family.

Xu’s parents are Chinese, but moved to Spain, opening up their own Chinese restaurant. She recalls the grocery stores not having the kinds of sauces, thinly-sliced meat cuts and vegetables common in Asian cuisine. Even when she moved to the U.S. for college, she and her friends would talk about what wasn’t available in the one aisle of the grocery store dedicated to Asian cooking.

Andrea Xu, Umamicart

Andrea Xu, founder and CEO of Umamicart. Image Credits: Umamicart

“Food has been a way to connect back to identity, but there was difficulty in accessing foods that were prevalent in my household,” she told TechCrunch. “In the U.S., there are 29 million Chinese Americans, yet there is still a hurdle to access products.”

With most anything available for delivery these days, Xu decided to put that to the test with Asian ingredients. In March, she and Will Nichols, formerly with FJ Labs, launched Umamicart, an online Asian grocer and delivery service offering both a curated and comprehensive selection of traditional and creative Asian products.

Umamicart aims to be a one-stop shop for home cooks, offering staple products and pantry essentials, recipe inspirations and occasion-specific kits for cooking activities like holiday roast duck, DIY sushi night, hotpot and dumpling making.

Orders can be placed via the company’s website — and soon a mobile app — with same-day delivery for New York City customers, or next-day delivery to ZIP codes in greater New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. areas.

Today, the company announced $6 million in seed capital in a round co-led by M13 and FJ Labs, with participation from Picus Capital, Starting Line, Golden Ventures, First Minute Capital and Goldhouse Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding raised to $7 million, including a $1 million seed round.

Brent Murri, investor at M13, was introduced to Xu by FJ Labs, and said Umamicart was in line with the kinds of consumer technology his firm typically invests in, looking at the digitization of food. M13 has invested in similar companies, like Thrive Market and Shef.

“The combination of Andrea and Will as co-founders is one of the best market fits I saw this year,” Murri said. “Andrea has learned from her parents and retained a lot of relationships with food distributors, while Will led Instacart’s New York City market, so he knows how to scale the grocery business. All of that set them apart.”

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He noted that grocery experts expect half of the U.S. population to make at least one digital grocery purchase next year. However, the digitization of grocery stores is not equal to everyone, citing the Asian market as one that is largely offline, providing space for companies like Umamicart to offer a curated selection of food with good customer experience.

The new capital will enable the company to expand its delivery range, grow its team and add product catalogue and geographic service areas as Umamicart sees increased demand from customers. Xu would like to provide more diverse offerings for Southeast Asian cuisine and increase the number of recipes available to users.

“We are also seeing huge interest from people who didn’t exactly grow up eating Asian food, but have come to enjoy it and cooking it,” she added.

The global food delivery market was estimated at around $111 billion last year, with forecasts showing that to be $154 billion in 2023, according to a report from ResearchAndMarkets.com. Overall interest in cooking and eating ethnic food continues to increase. U.S. retail sales of ethnic foods was $12.5 billion in 2018, up from $11 billion in 2013, while annual spend at Chinese restaurants in the U.S. was estimated to be just over $15 billion in 2020.

Umamicart itself saw 313% in quarter-to-quarter web traffic growth since its launch in March, is growing 20% to 30% month over month and now has more than 3,000 products.

The pandemic showed some key insights that when cooking with Asian cuisine, people prefer fresh products, but if those aren’t accessible, it impedes cooking and people try to find swaps, Xu said.

“Consumers are also rejecting what is in the international or ethnic aisle and want to source products and brands that are better,” she added. “We value that, so when they come to Umamicart, they know that what we put on our shelves is a vetted product, tried and true staples or the best new brands we were able to scout.”

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