Kidtech startup SuperAwesome raises $17M, with strategic investment from Microsoft’s M12 venture fund

Kidtech startup SuperAwesome has raised an additional $17 million in funding, which includes a new strategic investment from Microsoft’s venture fund, M12. Others participating in the round include existing investors, Mayfair Equity, Hoxton Ventures, and Ibis, along with other angels.

To date, SuperAwesome has raised $37 million in outside investment.

SuperAwesome has been tapping into the need for more kid-friendly technology on the web that’s now used just as much by younger children as it is by adults.

“Historically the internet was designed to be used by adults but now over 40% of new users are kids,” said SuperAwesome CEO Dylan Collins. “We’re in the middle of a structural shift in the composition of the internet that requires investment in privacy and kidtech to support children. This is as big a transition as mobile was for the desktop internet,” he noted.

The company’s platform includes products for kid-safe advertising, social engagement tools, authentication, and parental controls. The breadth of this lineup has attracted big-name kids’ brands as customers, including Activision, Hasbro, Mattel, LEGO, Cartoon Network, Spin Master, Nintendo, Bandai, WB, Shopkins maker Moose Toys, WPP, Omnicom, Dentsu, Niantic, Wildworks, among others.

Today, the company has over 300 customers in total.

SuperAwesome’s technology has arrived at a critical time for many working in the kids’ app space, as governments are newly enacting and enforcing a range of kids’ privacy laws like COPPA (the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule) and GDPR-K in the E.U., as well as other laws in major markets like China, Brazil, and India. In the U.S., for example, the FTC has slapped apps like Musical.ly (now TikTok) and YouTube with record fines for violations of children’s privacy regulations.

These changes have been a boon to SuperAwesome, which is now fully profitable and powering over 12 billion kids digital transactions per month. Last year, the company pulled in $55 million in revenue and is on track for $80 to $90 million in revenue in 2020, Collins told TechCrunch.

SuperAwesome and Microsoft aren’t yet talking in detail about how the two companies will be teaming up, following the strategic investment. One thing being discussed by the two, however, are the opportunities around family identity, we’re told. In addition, Microsoft today is focused on both privacy and kids across its products — for example, with its web browser as well as with its educational efforts involving Minecraft, among other things.

“After we spent time with the M12 team and folks in Microsoft, it was clear we shared the same vision of where the internet is going: more kids and more privacy,” Collins said.

“We are proud to welcome the SuperAwesome team to the M12 portfolio. Dylan has cultivated a mission-driven team dedicated to keeping the internet safer for kids—a critical priority for digital-first generations,” said Nagraj Kashyap, Microsoft Corporate Vice President and Global Head of M12, in a statement about the funding. “Given Microsoft’s footprint in the identity management space, we’re excited to explore opportunities for partnership with SuperAwesome as well,” Kashyap added.

https://ift.tt/2U2ElLs Kidtech startup SuperAwesome raises $17M, with strategic investment from Microsoft’s M12 venture fund https://ift.tt/2vk6OSm

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AI-powered voice transcription app Otter raises $10M, including from new strategic investor NTT DOCOMO

Otter.ai, an AI-powered transcription app and note-takers’ best friend, has received a strategic investment from Japan’s leading mobile operator and new Otter partner, NTT DOCOMO Inc. The two companies are teaming up to support Otter’s expansion into the Japanese market, where DOCOMO will be integrating Otter with its own AI-based translation service subsidiary, Mirai Translation, in order to provide accurate English transcripts, which are then translated into Japanese.

The investment was made by DOCOMO’s wholly owned subsidiary, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Inc., but the size was undisclosed. However, the new round was $10 million in total, we’re told. To date, Otter has raised $23 million in funding from NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Fusion Fund, GGV Capital, Draper Dragon Fund, Duke University Innovation Fund, Harris Barton Asset Management, Slow Ventures, Horizons Ventures and others.

Otter launched its service in 2018, offering a way for users to search voice conversations as easily as they can today search their email or their text. Otter CEO and founder Sam Liang, along with a team hailing from Google, Facebook, Nuance and Yahoo as well as Stanford, Duke, MIT and Cambridge, developed a technology specifically designed to capture conversations — like meetings, interviews, presentations, lectures and more. This is a different sort of technology than what’s used in today’s voice assistants, like Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa, as it’s focused on transcribing longer, human-to-human conversations, which are spoken naturally.

The product itself creates automated transcriptions in real time, as speakers are talking. The resulting transcript is searchable, and identifies the different speakers and key phrases. You also can upload photos alongside the recording.

Since launch, Otter has expanded its product to millions of users and now offers both an Otter for Teams and enterprise tier. 

With the new NTT DOCOMO partnership, the goal is to bring the Otter enterprise collaboration services to the Japanese market, explains Liang, the former Google architect who later sold his location startup Alohar Mobile to Alibaba.

“DOCOMO and other large companies have a large international workforce who communicate in English for their international conference calls,” says Liang. “They will use Otter to take automatic meeting notes, and improve meeting and communication effectiveness… The goal is to further enhance communication and collaboration on top of Otter‘s automatic English meeting note services,” he adds.

Otter.ai has similar partnerships with U.S. businesses, including Zoom Video Communications and Dropbox.

As a result of the new partnership, Otter’s Voice Meeting Notes application is being used on a trial basis in Berlitz Corporation’s English language classes in Japan. Students are using Otter to transcribe and review their lessons, click on sections of text and initiate voice playback. DOCOMO, Otter.ai and Berlitz are also expanding their collaboration in language education to verify Otter’s effectiveness in the study of English, the company says.

“The Japanese market values high-quality detailed meeting notes, and Otter’s highly accurate A.I.-powered note-taker overcomes language barriers and improves the operating efficiency of Japanese companies with global operations,” said Tomoyoshi Oono, senior vice president and general manager of the Innovation Management Department in the R&D Innovation Division at DOCOMO, in a statement about the deal. “There is a large business market opportunity for Otter.ai and DOCOMO’s translation service.”

DOCOMO is also featuring Otter during demonstrations at DOCOMO Open House 2020 taking place in the Tokyo Big Sight exhibition complex January 23 and 24, 2020. Here, Otter will transcribe the English-language presentations in real time, which will then be translated into Japanese using DOCOMO’s machine translation technology. Both the English transcription and Japanese translation will be projected on a large screen for attendees to read.

While Otter’s transcriptions aren’t perfect in real-world scenarios, like where there’s background noise or muffled speaking, it does better when it can be connected directly to the audio source, like at big events. (TechCrunch, for example, has used Otter’s service to transcribe audio at TechCrunch Disrupt.)

Otter’s new funding will also used to hire more engineers and further enhance its AI technologies in speech recognition, diarization, speaker identification and automatic summarization, Liang tells TechCrunch. And the team will work to accelerate Otter’s adoption by enterprise customers in professional services, media and education.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J AI-powered voice transcription app Otter raises $10M, including from new strategic investor NTT DOCOMO https://ift.tt/2Rydk0K

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Bird confirms acquisition of Berlin scooter rival Circ

If you didn’t see this coming, then clearly you didn’t have your eyes on the road. Bird, the LA-founded e-scooter giant, has confirmed that it is acquiring European competitor Circ, the micromobilty company founded by Lukasz Gadowski of Delivery Hero fame.

The deal, for which terms remain undisclosed, was first reported by the FT late last week. Meanwhile, TechCrunch revealed late November that Circ was facing difficulties and had issued a round of layoffs following so-called “operational learnings”.

Circ, the Berlin-based e-scooter company, makes layoffs following ‘operational learnings’

At the time, Gadowski put on a brave face, telling TechCrunch that Circ needed to learn how to operate a micromobility service across many European markets simultaneously. “Basically figure out how to be more efficient, how to run a micromobility operation; it’s not optimized yet and we learned over the summer,” he said.

He also conceded that, within the micromobility space more generally, there had been something of a land grab strategy that is now perhaps inevitably shifting toward greater emphasis on capital efficiency. “When we started this there was a focus on time to market but now it is not about time to market but efficiency,” he told TechCrunch.

We also understand Circ was also in the midst of trying to raises a Series B, which is what prompted talks with Bird. Early last year, the startup closed a Series A north of $60 million, funding it used to push into 12 countries and 43 cities, a spokesperson tells us.

On the funding front, Bird is also taking this announcement as an opportunity to share that they’ve added to their own funding, tacking on another $75 million onto their Series D, which now sits at $350 million.

Micromobility companies have been hard-pressed to cut spending and push towards profitability. One of Bird’s chief competitors, Lime, announced earlier this month they were laying off 100 employees and leaving 12 markets with the goal of becoming profitable in 2020.

300 employees will be added to Bird’s European operations as a result of the deal, the company says.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Bird confirms acquisition of Berlin scooter rival Circ https://ift.tt/36xv5S3

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Casper’s valuation could fall 40% in IPO as it reports 2019 results

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today we’re taking stock of the latest from Casper, the D2C mattress company that is going public. The unicorn announced its initial IPO price range this morning, targeting a $17 to $19 per-share IPO price range — an interval that dramatically reprices the firm. When Casper first filed to go public, questions regarding its unprofitability, growth rate and economics quickly arose. Whether the firm would be able to go public at a flat price to its final private round was not obvious, and today’s news makes it clear that that is not likely.

Let’s explore the pricing and the company’s new valuation range, then figure out what the hell went wrong. To understand the new pricing, we’ll dig into the company’s preliminary full-year 2019 results. Let’s go!

Prices, ranges

Casper is hoping to sell 8.35 million shares at $17 to $19 apiece, with another 1.25 million shares reserved for its underwriting banks. Without the option, Casper could raise from $142 million to about $159 million. Including the underwriters’ shares boosts those results to $163 million to $182 million.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Casper’s valuation could fall 40% in IPO as it reports 2019 results https://ift.tt/36t9nOP

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Currencycloud nabs $80M from Visa, World Bank Group and more for cross-border payment APIs

Sending money from one country to another — either because you are a business paying someone for a service, or a family member working abroad and sending money back home, or something in between — is a huge business, worth some $700 million annually. Today, a London startup called Currencycloud, which has built a set of remittance APIs that let any financial business integrate money transfer services into its platform, is announcing that it has raised $80 million to tap into that opportunity, and to help take on the Western Unions of the world.

To date, over $50 billion has been transferred between some 180 countries using Currencycloud’s 85 APIs, which cover areas like inbound money collection (helping clients get paid), foreign exchange, outgoing payments, and digital wallet services managing multiple currencies and more.

Mike Laven, Currencycloud’s American CEO and founder, tells TechCrunch that the company has some 350 companies using its APIs as of the end of 2019, and it employs 230 people, but you are almost certainly never going to see it, even if you’ve used it.

“No one is doing what we’re doing in terms of the model we have,” Laven said, referring to what he describes as an “embedded model” where transfer is seamlessly embedded into its customers’ platform and workflow. “I’m not competing with our customers. My brand is invisible. We think we’re still the only one that has that kind of solution.”

This round, a Series E, has a number of heavy hitters among the startup’s new strategic investors. They include Visa, the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, French bank BNP Paribas, the SBI Group (the Japanese giant that was once a part, but now independent, of SoftBank) and Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank. With that, Laven said that Asia will be a big focus for Currencycloud in the year ahead, with a new office in Singapore to tap into providing money-transfer APIs to businesses in the region.

At least one of its newest investors, Visa, is also integrating Currencycloud’s services into its own. Existing investors Sapphire Ventures, Notion Capital, GV (formerly known as Google Ventures, which led its Series D), Accomplice, and Anthemis are also participating.

As for the valuation, Laven said it was not being disclosed — not the focus for the company at the moment, building is — but he confirmed that the pre-money amount was higher than when it previously raised. Reliable sources have confirmed to us that it’s actually around the half-billion dollar mark.

This is a huge leap for the company. For some context, we first reported the news that Currencycloud was raising last summer, and at the time, when it had closed about $40 million of the funding, PitchBook estimated the pre-money valuation at $114 million and post-money at $184 million. That would imply that this Series E puts the London-based startup’s valuation at around $220 million (and took somewhat longer to close than originally planned), although it’s had a much bigger leap, it seems, in part because of its growth. To date, Currencycloud has raised $140 million.

The startup has been around since 2012 and was early to identify the opportunity in the money-transfer market.

The trend of globalisation in the world economy has led to a sharp rise in the pace of remittances, helped by the expansion of the internet and smartphone usage — which has spelled opportunity for companies leveraging the latter to enter the market. And in terms of the companies providing money-transfer services, while there are some notable legacy names like Western Union and Moneygram, by and large it’s a fragmented market — leaving an opportunity for many more hopefuls to get involved.

But on top of all that, the system is largely expensive and inefficient — meaning there was a lucrative opportunity for a company to come along and provide an easy way to plug into the rails — say, by way of APIs — to build these services (not unlike what companies like Adyen or Stripe have done for e-commerce payments).

All roads, effectively, led to Currencycloud, and it’s seen business expand. To date, Currencycloud says that it has processed more than $50 billion in cross-border payments, with the proliferation of so-called neobanks (or challenger banks, going head-to-head with traditional institutions in the business of deposits and lending using all-digital, mobile-first platforms) helping it along. Customers include Monzo, Moneze, Starling, Revolut and Dwolla — alongside the likes of bigger players like Visa now also getting involved.

“I’m delighted to be joining the board of such an exciting technology company,” added Colleen Ostrowski, SVP and Treasurer at Visa, in a statement. “Currencycloud is re-shaping the way that the platforms of the future are moving money around the world, and there is huge potential for the company to drive further innovation in the cross-border payments industry.” 

Updated with more detail on valuation.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Currencycloud nabs $80M from Visa, World Bank Group and more for cross-border payment APIs https://ift.tt/36wVQpA

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Get ready to see Spotify’s looping videos on Instagram

Following Spotify’s confirmation of a new Stories feature, initially being tested by social media influencers, the company this morning announced it will now allow artists to reach their Instagram fan bases in a new way, too. However, in this case, they aren’t creating Spotify Stories they can market elsewhere on their social media, but instead are able to share their unique video art from Spotify’s Canvas feature directly to their Instagram.

Canvas launched into beta last fall, allowing artists to replace the album art that appears when a song is playing with a moving, visual experience that plays in a short loop. Canvas videos have had mixed reviews as some users find the imagery distracting while others seem to prefer it.

Starting today, the thousands of artists in the Canvas beta will be able to share their looping videos to Instagram with just a tap.

From the app’s Artists profile, each track that included a Canvas will have a “Share” icon next to it. By tapping that icon, artists can share the song and its Canvas to Instagram Stories. The post will look like a regular Spotify share with cover art and a link to play the track on Spotify. However, now their looping video will be the backdrop.

Currently, the Canvas beta is only available to those using the Spotify for Artists app on iOS. Spotify says it’s working to bring the sharing feature to Android users soon.

In addition, fans seeing the Canvas on Instagram aren’t counted in the Canvas metrics, unless they click through to Spotify, the company says.

The feature itself is intended to aid artists who are marketing their new songs to fans on Instagram as well as for highlighting updates to Canvas — like those that are updated to include clips from a new music video, new art, or live performances, for example.

One high-profile artist who’s taking advantage of Canvas is Billie Eilish — the artist who just swept last night’s Grammy Awards by winning the four biggest prizes — best new artist, record of the year, album of the year, and song of the year. Eilish has used Canvas to share animated versions of fan art, which helps her to better engage with her fan base.

Spotify claims that adding a high-quality Canvas has increased track shares by up to 200%, in addition to lifting streams, saves, and artist profile visits. By expanding Canvas to Instagram, those shares should bump up even higher, the company believes.

Despite its social media media-inspired features, like the new Stories addition or the looping videos of Canvas, Spotify doesn’t intend for its streaming app to become a new social platform. Instead, its focus is on building features that artists and listeners can leverage to better connect with social media fan bases elsewhere — either to help market themselves and their music or to improve discoverability of new music among their followers.

Artists interested in Canvas can sign up for the waiting list here.

 

 

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Get ready to see Spotify’s looping videos on Instagram Sarah Perez https://ift.tt/37rMvkd
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4 days left to save $150 on tickets to TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020

The countdown to savings continues, and you have just four days left to score the best price on tickets to TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020. Join 1,500 of the brightest minds and innovators in robotics and machine learning — technologists, founders, investors, engineers and researchers. Buy an early-bird ticket now before prices go up on January 31, and you’ll keep $150 in your pocket. Why spend more when you don’t have to?

Get ready for a full day focused on the future of two technologies with the potential to change everything about the way we live. We have an outstanding line up of speakers, interviews and panel discussions covering a range of topics. And of course, plenty of demos, too.

We won’t just parrot the hype, either. Our editors will ask the hard questions, and the conference agenda includes discussions about the ethics and ramifications inherent with these potent technologies.

Here’s a just sample of what’s on tap.

• Saving Humanity from AI: Stuart Russell, a UC Berkeley professor and AI authority argues in his acclaimed new book, “Human Compatible,” that AI will doom humanity unless technologists fundamentally reform how they build AI algorithms.
• Bringing Robots to Life: This summer’s Tokyo Olympics will be a huge proving ground for TRI-AD (Toyota Research Institute – Advanced Development). TRI-AD’s CEO James Kuffner and its VP of Robotics, Max Bajracharya will join us to discuss the department’s plans for assistive robots and self-driving cars.

There’s plenty more waiting for you, including the finalists of our first Pitch Night. This group of intrepid robotics and AI startup founders made the cut (10 teams will pitch the night before the conference at a private event). The finalists will pitch again at the conference from the Main Stage. Think your startup has what it takes to throw down in a pitch-off? We’re accepting applications until February 1. Talk about a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for focused exposure — apply right here today!

TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 draws the top people in the industry, which makes it prime networking territory. Whether you’re looking for funding, hunting for the perfect startup to add to your portfolio or searching for the next generation of engineers, this is where you need to be. Come work it to your advantage.

TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 takes place in Berkeley on March 3, and we’ve packed a lot of value and opportunity into one day. Make the most of it and remember, you’ll save $150 if you buy an early bird ticket before prices go up on January 31.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Robotics & AI 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

 

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J 4 days left to save $150 on tickets to TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 https://ift.tt/2Gu4FG0

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WholyMe, which makes natural products for chronic pain, closes Seed round

WholyMe, a London startup that makes and markets ‘natural relief’ products to manage chronic pain, has closed a £500,000 Seed round from investors Financière Saint James, V1 Capital, Guibor and business angels. The round also includes Joyance Partners, a New York-based VC concentrating on the new science emerging around ‘health and happiness’ which recently expanded to the UK and Europe.

The funding will be used to manufacture WholyMe’s first range of 100% organic supplements and topicals for muscle and joint health, starting with a cannabis-based ointment slated to launch Spring 2020. Formulated in-house and manufactured in Europe, WholyMe products will be sold online and the start-up also has plans to partner with gym clubs to support athletic millennials by preventing injuries.

Its direct competitors include natural health brands like Tiger Balm, BetterYou, Weleda but also adjacent competitors such as Voltarol and Deep Heat.

They say their differentiating factors are that, at the product level, their products “have no adverse effects as opposed to conventional pain killers”, while they say the ingredients are organic and contain no synthetics, petroleum, GMOs etc.

The market they are aiming at is certainly large. The natural medicine products market is now worth €16bn in Europe and has grown +7% CAGR from 2017-2023, according to the latest figures.

Co-Founders Celine Ivari and Quitterie de Rivoyre researched and developed of WholyMe’s first products while trying to solve chronic inflammation problems plaguing family members.

Ivari says: “When my mother suffered from severe inflammation, she was overloaded with painkillers and prescription drugs, which had terrible side effects. Having studied the genetics of human disease, I knew there were alternative solutions to manage her pain. I helped her improve her wellbeing through natural remedies.”

Paolo Pio, European managing director for Joyance Partners, said in a statement: “We’re thrilled to support WholyMe as they push the boundaries of health & pain management to bring greater happiness to the world.”

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J WholyMe, which makes natural products for chronic pain, closes Seed round https://ift.tt/312haSH

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Equity Monday: A global selloff, MURAL snags $23M, and two unicorns that can’t raise

Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years don’t worry — we’re not changing it in the slightest. (Here’s last week’s episode which took a look at The Athletic’s latest round, in case you missed it.)

This Monday was a bit of a bad news run. The weekend was stuffed with news, not much of it good.

Continued concerns relating to the spread of the coronavirus led to equity selloffs in Asia and Europe. In the United States, markets look set to follow suit. The concerns come as startups had already come under pressure from investors to show a quick path to profitability. Now, their public comps are taking fire as well.

Topping it off, today kicks off a huge, two-week earnings run from tech companies worth trillions of dollars. It’s not a great moment for it. (As we note on the show, the economic side of the outbreak is a small portion of the story; it feels a bit crass to cover the moment from a dollars-perspective, but that’s our particular lens.)

We also ran through three funding rounds, including MURAL’s $23 million Series A, Otter.ai’s $10 million Series B, and Sawee’s $2.3 million round focused on last-mile logistics. (As a product, I can’t recommend Otter highly enough.)

Wrapping, a Wall Street Journal story was stuck in my head all weekend. According to the Journal’s Eliot Brown, Lime and DoorDash have each been out in the markets trying to raise money lately. Neither has managed to pull it off. If stocks keep selling, what happens next for the infamous unicorns?

That’s what we have for you today. More on Friday morning.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Equity Monday: A global selloff, MURAL snags $23M, and two unicorns that can’t raise https://ift.tt/2GusFch

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Teller raises $4M to take on Plaid in the U.S. by providing API access to bank accounts

“They’re idiots, they’re really naive,” is how Stevie Graham, the co-founder of fintech Teller, once described Open Banking Limited, the body charged with delivering open banking in the U.K.

His view back in 2017 — which now looks somewhat prophetic — was that open banking wouldn’t be the competition driver it was hyped up to be. Instead, incumbent banks were incapable of change and would act in a malevolent way to stop fintechs from walking through the front door and stealing their lunch.

He, along with co-founder Dan Palmer, had spent several years building an early version of Teller that reverse engineered the APIs used by U.K. banks for their own mobile apps, and offered access to developers that wanted to create apps using banking data. It was billed as a more robust and realtime alternative to either screenscraping or waiting haplessly for PSD2 — the European directive mandating open banking — to eventually come into existence.

But this inevitably meant playing a game of Whac-A-Mole as incumbent U.K. banks tried unsuccessfully to thwart the efforts of Graham and Palmer. It was also never entirely clear who was doing the whacking.

Fast-forward to today, and Graham, who was Twillio’s first European employee, has a different incumbent in his sights. In late 2018, Teller re-incorporated in the U.S. to take on Plaid, the financial services API provider recently acquired by Visa for a chunky $5.3 billion.

The fintech startup also quietly raised $4 million in seed capital from a slew of U.S. investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Founders Fund, and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin’s SciFi. Teller’s U.K. product has since been shut down, and the company launched a U.S. beta of Teller in September.

“The U.S. is a better opportunity for Teller because the market is far larger with more mature, large-scale customers to serve as well as startups being created every day, [and] an incumbent with an unreliable, unpopular product and not much competition,” Graham tells me.

“PSD2 was also a factor in our decision to withdraw from the U.K. Primarily because it made practically every use-case of banking APIs a regulated activity, meaning that it’s no longer possible to quickly build and test a product without first spending thousands of pounds and 3-6 months getting FCA approval. When we checked at the end of 2018 less than 100 entities had been granted approval. We can not build the business we want with a total addressable market of 100 customers”.

On Plaid, Graham is almost as scathing as he was about the major U.K. banks three years ago, even if he chooses his words a little more carefully. Unlike Plaid, Teller’s technology is not built using screenscraping, dubbed a “creaky technique” by the Teller co-founder,  and therefore is “more reliable and performant”.

“We are also better because we have the incentive to really care about our users and mean it. Plaid has rolled up the market by buying Quovo and is now effectively a monopoly. Speaking to users we found a lot of frustrated Plaid customers that didn’t feel as if Plaid was sympathetic when things went wrong. For example their Capital One integration has been down for months. Maybe the Plaid folks genuinely can’t fix it, maybe they don’t have truly enough competition to care. Either way, our Capital One integration works great”.

Suspicious of Visa’s ability to innovate and serve developers as customers, Graham says that if he was a Plaid customer he would be concerned about the future quality of the product now they are owned by legacy business “not exactly renowned for serving developers or shipping successful developer products”.

The deal is also substantially all-cash, he notes, suggesting that employees may have little incentive to stay.

“The top talent at Plaid has to now be sitting there in the morning thinking ‘do I really want to work at a stodgy public company that has barely 3x’d its stock price in 5 years? This is not what I signed up for’. This is why I fear for the future of Plaid’s product. A lot of their best people will be heading for the door, and we’d love to talk to them,” Graham says unabashedly.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Teller raises $4M to take on Plaid in the U.S. by providing API access to bank accounts https://ift.tt/2uExm0A

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N26 reaches 5 million customers including 250,000 in the US

Challenger bank N26 has reached 5 million customers. In 2019 alone, N26 managed to add over 2.5 million customers. And the company’s growth rate seems to be accelerating as N26 reached 3.5 million customers in June 2019.

That represents an addition of 1 million customers during the first half of 2019 and an addition of 1.5 million customers during the second half of 2019.

One reason why N26 is growing at a faster pace is that the company is still expanding to new market. N26 has been available all around the Eurozone for a while. People living in the U.K., Denmark, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Liechtenstein, Iceland and Switzerland can also open an N26 account.

But N26 also expanded to the U.S. during the summer of 2019. It represents a huge market opportunity, even though N26 faces competition from local players, such as Chime.

Over the past five months, N26 has managed to attract 250,000 customers in the U.S. The company operates under a sligthly different model in the U.S. N26 has partnered with Axos Bank, a white-label partner that manages your money, while N26 takes care of all the interactions between customers and their money.

Banking regulation is complicated in the U.S., which makes it difficult to launch a challenger bank across all 50 states without a banking partner.

There are now 1,500 people working for N26 across five offices — Berlin, New York, Barcelona, Vienna and São Paulo. Up next, as you might have guessed with the mention of São Paulo, N26 plans to expand to Brazil.

US regulators need to catch up with Europe on fintech innovation 

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J N26 reaches 5 million customers including 250,000 in the US https://ift.tt/36AI8lP

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Indian B2B packaging marketplace Bizongo raises $30M

Bizongo, one of the largest business-to-business online marketplaces for packaging needs in India, has raised $30 million in fresh funding round as it looks to widen its footprint in the nation and expand to more categories.

The new financing round, Series C, was led by Switzerland-based hedge fund Schroder Adveq, which manages assets worth $10 billion. Existing investors B Capital, Accel, Chiratae Ventures, and IFC also participated in the round, the startup said.

Mumbai-based Bizongo has raised about $56 million to date. It was valued at about $96 million in its Series B financing round in 2018, according to an analysis of its regulatory filings.

The five-year-old startup serves as a marketplace for businesses to identify, buy, and sell material packing solutions across industries. It also offers in-house packing design, development, and procurement solutions.

Sachin Agarwal, chief operating officer and co-founder of Bizongo, said the startup offers a unique value proposition of promising a “100% availability of packaging material and no-stock-outs at very low inventory.”

“This helps clients to reduce their packaging material procurement cost by 2-5% and at the same time ensures better production planning for our supply partners. This creates a strong value proposition for all stakeholders across the value chain,” he said in a statement.

Bizongo did not reveal how many customers it has, but said they span across some of the nation’s leading e-commerce, retail, FMCG, FMCD industries. On its website, it mentions that it works with over 750 manufacturers in India, and has delivered 290 million packaging units to date. It also claims to have served over 350 brands.

In a statement, Aniket Deb, chief executive and co-founder of Bizongo, said the startup has witnessed a “significant improvement in operating metrics since the last round of financing and the current round will further help us grow the business in a sustainable way.”

The fresh fund will be deployed to ramp up technology infrastructure and to expand to newer sectors such as pharma packaging. Deb said the startup also plans to work on expanding its presence in the country.

“We believe in the vision of the founders who are transforming and digitising the highly fragmented B2B packaging marketplace by leveraging technology and a unique supply chain efficiency solution. Bizongo has demonstrated strong momentum by continuing to add marquee clients and we have been impressed with the company’s rapid growth trajectory over the past year,” said Kabir Narang, General Partner at B Capital Group, in a statement.

https://ift.tt/30UeW82 Indian B2B packaging marketplace Bizongo raises $30M https://ift.tt/2vpZiWg

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