Sundae closes on $80M for residential real estate marketplace

Sundae, a residential real estate marketplace that pairs sellers of dated or damaged property with potential buyers, has raised $80 million in a Series C funding round co-led by Fifth Wall and General Global Capital.

QED Investors, Wellington Management, Susa Ventures, Founders Fund, First American Financial, Prudence Holdings, Crossover VC, Intersect Capital, Gaingels and Oberndorf Ventures also participated in the financing. The round marks San Francisco-based Sundae’s third financing in a 13-month time frame, bringing its total raised since its August 2018 inception to $135 million. 

The San Francisco-based company declined to reveal at what valuation its Series C was raised. It also declined to provide hard revenue figures, saying only that it saw a 600% year-over-year increase in revenue from June 2020 to June 2021.

The startup aims to help people who need to sell dated or “damaged” properties for a variety of reasons — such as job loss, illness or divorce. In some cases, according to CEO and co-founder Josh Stech, such vulnerable sellers get taken advantage of by “predatory fix and flippers” seeking to capitalize on their misfortune. 

Since sellers in these situations don’t typically have the funds to fix up their properties before selling, Sundae lists the property for them on its platform – serving as an intermediary between sellers and investors. There, it is visible to about 2,600 qualified off-market buyers.

The company essentially aims to aggregate demand from “fix and flippers,” who use the marketplace to bid against each other for distressed properties. If the seller accepts and an inspection is completed, the company offers a $10,000 cash advance before closing to help homeowners with moving costs or other expenses.

“Our goal is to displace wholesalers who exploit desperate or uninformed sellers and lock them into a contract which they turn around and assign to a property investor at a steep profit,” Stech said. “The tens of thousands of dollars in lost equity that goes to a wholesaler could mean the difference between paying off debts, or having enough money to retire.”

Sundae claims that on average, sellers receive 10 offers within three days on its marketplace.

Since its launch in January 2019, the startup has slowly been expanding its marketplace geographically. It went from operating in four markets in California at the end of last year to now operating in 14 markets across Florida, Colorado, Georgia, Texas and Utah.

Sundae makes money by charging buyers in its investor marketplace a fee when it “assigns” them a property. 

In the first quarter of this year, the startup launched a dedicated online marketplace for investors, where they can view properties and submit offers. Once an investor signs up to join the marketplace, they can access the full inventory of properties, including information such as photos, floor plan, 3D walkthrough and a third-party inspection report. 

Looking ahead, the company plans to use its new capital to expand to new markets, invest in its platform and “build brand awareness.” It also, of course, plans to boost its current headcount of 180 mostly remote employees.

Vik Chawla, a partner at Fifth Wall, believes Sundae is serving a segment of the residential real estate market that has historically been overlooked. 

“Their marketplace model simultaneously solves a crucial pain point for sellers by disrupting the wholesale industry, while delivering a platform that property investors can count on for reliable investment opportunities,” he said.

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The company last raised $36 million in a Series B funding round in December 2020.

Interestingly, a slew of angel investors — including a number of athletes and celebrities — also put money in the company’s latest round, including: actor Will Smith, DJ Kygo, three-time NFL Super Bowl champion Richard Seymour of 93 Ventures, NFL All-Pro DK Metcalf of the Seattle Seahawks, Matt Chapman of the Oakland A’s, Alex Caruso of the Los Angeles Lakers, Aaron Gordon of the Denver Nuggets, Solomon Hill of the Atlanta Hawks, Kelly Olynyk of the Houston Rockets, NBA All-Star Isaiah Thomas, three-time NBA Champion & Gold Medalist Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors, Hassan Whiteside of the Sacramento Kings, Andrew Wiggins of the Golden State Warriors and 2020 U.S. Soccer Player of the Year and Juventus midfielder, Weston McKennie.

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Employment Hero gets $140M AUD Series E led by Insight Partners, grows valuation to $800M AUD

Employment Hero co-founders Ben Thompson and Dave Tong

Four months after announcing its last round, Employment Hero has closed another $140 million AUD (about $103 million USD) in funding. The Series E was led by Insight Partners, the venture capital firm known for its ScaleUp program to help tech companies accelerate their growth.

Employment Hero is an automated human resources, payroll and benefits platform for SMEs. Founded in Sydney in 2014, the company is now expanding into Southeast Asian and Western European markets. Its previous funding announcement was a $45 million AUD Series D announced in March, led by online job platform SEEK, at the company’s previous valuation of about $250 million AUD.

Now Employment Hero has bumped up its valuation $800 million in less than six months by reaching 133% year-on- recurring revenue growth. Co-founded by Ben Thompson, its chief executive officer, and chief technology officer Dave Tong, Employment Hero is used by 6,000 businesses, with a total of 250,000 employees. Over the past 12 months, the company says $14 billion in gross wages was processed through the platform.

Australia-based Employment Hero raises $45M AUD for its global expansion

“We always thought Insight Partners would be a great partner,” Thompson told TechCrunch. “We had been speaking with them for years, so when they asked if we would consider raising, we agreed it was definitely worth exploring. As it turned out all the stars were aligned, and we reached a deal that made sense and allowed us to keep scaling without having to switch back into capital raising mode.”

Over the past year, Employment Hero grew its headcount by 65% to 325 full-time employees and now has a permanent remote-first work model. The new capital will be used to hire for its engineering teams and for the company’s continuing international expansion.

Employment Hero began entering new markets in October 2020, launching localized versions of the platform in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Malaysia and Singapore.

Thompson said Employment Hero will continue focusing on Malaysia and Singapore until the end of this year, while looking at ways to cross-promote SEEK’s products and services in Asia. After that, it plans to localize Employment Hero for Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Vietnam.

To localize the platform, Employment Hero starts with employment contracts, policies, leave rules and pay rules. Then it integrates with tax authorities and pension funds, before focusing on local benefits providers to get discounts on non-discretionary expenses for users, like health insurance and mortgages.

During the pandemic, Thompson said Employment Hero’s teams shifted their focus to help companies adapt to a distributed workforce. Some of the services it launched include Global Teams, a professional employer organization (PEO) solution that pushes job openings to more than 1,700 career boards and helps companies onboard and manage remote workers. Employment Hero is also working with recruitment agencies that will help employers find remote workers.

Remote raises $150M on a $1B+ valuation to manage payroll and more for organizations’ global workforces

Thompson said, “while it’s still early days for Global Teams, it’s definitely popular,” with dozens of companies in Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand using it to employ people in 21 countries.

Employment Hero’s Remote Work Report, released in June, found that 94% of respondents want to continue working remotely at least one day a week, up from 2% a year ago. Meanwhile, 74% of employers surveyed told Employment Hero that they plan to keep flexible working arrangements after COVID restrictions are lifted, up from 64% in 2020.

“We are seeing employers embrace remote work as a competitive advantage because it broadens their available talent pool and helps retain and engage their employees,” Thompson said. “Employers are now asking, how should we do things differently if we want to continue working remotely forever? This requires real intention and education, but it’s a whole lot better than losing great employees by forcing them back to office five days a week.”

In a statement about the investment, Insight Partners managing director Rachel Geller said, “We have been following Employment Hero’s journey for four years and have seen the impressive and consistent growth experience by the company. Its customer-centric solutions have been embraced globally by the small and medium business community and we are looking forward to supporting them through this next phase of their expansion journey.”

How to do remote work right, from the teams that know it best

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Mural raises $50M Series C after tripling its ARR in the last year

This morning Mural, a startup that builds digital collaboration software with a focus on visual presentation, announced that it has closed a $50 million Series C. The new capital, co-led by prior investors Insight Partners and Tiger Global, values the startup at more than $2 billion.

Previously, Mural was valued at around $500 million when it closed a $118 million round last August. Mural also raised a $23 million Series A at the start of 2020.

Mural’s product focuses around a visual collaboration space, akin to a digital whiteboard. Given its product focus, it’s not hard to see why the startup had a good COVID cycle; the world’s companies moved to remote work en masse, leaving offices empty and physical whiteboards un-scribbled. Services like Mural helped fill that, and similar voids. TechCrunch caught up with Mural CEO Mariano Suarez-Battan and Insight managing director Nikhil Sachdev to learn more about deal mechanics.

The new unicorn also disclosed that customers generating $100,000 in ARRR tripled to more than 100 organizations in the last year, and that it now has seven customers bringing in at least $1,000,000 in ARR apiece. That second figure is up from a “couple” seven-figure deals at the start of 2020, a figure that the company disclosed at the time of its Series A.

Visual collaboration startup MURAL raises huge $118M Series B

Per Suarez-Battan, Mural has continued the torrid pace of growth that made it a breakout company in 2020. In the last year the company has tripled its annual recurring revenue (ARR), he said. That’s the same pace of growth that the company disclosed when it raised its Series B in Q3 2020. As the company has now disclosed that it has tripled in each of the last two years, we can infer that the company has reached material top line scale.

Mural — known as Mural.ly through 2019 — however, was growing before the pandemic, and doesn’t appear to think that the eventual conclusion of the pandemic will be too deleterious to its growth rates. In a discussion concerning the company’s path after COVID-19, Suarez-Battan noted that many of his company’s customers have multiple offices in disparate locations. Those concerns, even if they returned to a fully in-office setup in time, would still have need for Mural and its software, goes the argument.

With more companies flipping to hybrid-friendly work environments, part-time office cultures, or fully remote organization structures, Mural’s market is moving toward its vision of collaboration at scale sans the need to be sitting next to the people with whom you are trying to be creative. Underscoring the point, Sachdev told TechCrunch that COVID was a “huge pull forward” in a trend that was long underway: remote work. He believes that companies executing collaborative, or creative work at a distance was a reality merely accelerated by COVID, not created by it.

The dollar amount of the Series C may seem a bit odd. Why did Mural raise less in its Series C than it did in its preceding Series B? Mural still had most of its previous round on its books, Sachdev said. Our read from that fact is that Mural simply didn’t need to raise another huge round. So, it didn’t.

Insider demand led to the funding event, which for Mural represents incredibly modest dilution (it sold around 4% of its shares at its new valuation) and a massive upsizing in its valuation (a little under 4x). Effectively, Mural was just handed the ability to go out into the market and buy whatever smaller companies and talent it wants, without worrying about dilution or cash concerns, respectively.

Quick growth wasn’t the only reason that Tiger and Insight wanted to buy more of Mural. According to the Insight MD, the startup has retained strong levels of efficiency as it has scaled, venture-speak for an ability to rapidly expand revenues while not similarly boosting the pace at which cash is consumed. It’s the venture equivalent of crowing about operating leverage, essentially.

Suarez-Battan also emphasized during his interview with TechCrunch that his company’s net dollar retention, or NDR, is strong. NDR is a key metric for modern software companies, as marginal revenue gains from existing customers are cheaper to secure than net-new accounts. Again, the theme that the metric details is efficient growth.

There’s lots to Mural worth our chewing on in time. The loop of consultants using its service, leading to new customers. How the firm works with consultants, period. The list goes on. Let’s see how quickly Mural can keep growing in the second half of 2021. The next time we chat with the firm it will be time to harangue it for hard revenue figures. Let’s see how that goes!

Wall Street needs to relax, as startups show remote work is here to stay

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Choco bites into $100M Series B, at a $600M valuation, to build a more transparent, sustainable food supply chain

The United States estimates of the food produced here approximately 40% is wasted. Globally, $2.6 trillion annually is lost.

Berlin-based Choco, which has built ordering software for restaurants and their suppliers, is working to digitize the food supply chain and announced $100 million in Series B funding, led by Left Lane Capital, to give it a $600 million post-market valuation. Joining in is new investor Insight Partners and existing investors Coatue Management and Bessemer Venture Partners.

The new round comes just over a year after Choco’s $63.7 million Series A, raised at two different periods, a $33.5 million round in 2019 and a $30.2 million round in 2020 — at a $230 million valuation — to bring total funding to $171.5 million since the company was founded in 2018.

The company’s core food procurement technology digitizes ordering workflow and communications for restaurants and suppliers. During the global pandemic, Khachab said Choco became the go-to tool for operators to be more efficient around procurement processes and reducing expenses as they adapted to the changing market conditions.

With the food industry a $6 trillion market, Choco CEO Daniel Khachab told TechCrunch he aims to make the food supply chain more transparent and sustainable in order to help increase margins in the food service sector and combat climate change.

The company did 14 months of food waste research and found that it was central to a lot of other global problems: Food waste is the third-largest driver of climate change and is causing deforestation — as evident by news from the Amazon last year  — and the extinction of animals.

“It makes sense to try and solve it,” he added. “The food system is highly fragile, and what was shown in the first and second waves of the pandemic is how fragile and inflexible it was. It made the industry realize that it has to step up and that it can’t continue to work on pen and paper.”

Between the farmer and the end point, there are some nine parties involved, Khachab said. None are connected to another, which often means nine data silos and data not collected along the chain. It is important to connect them on one single platform so decision-making can be data-driven, he added.

As uncertainty swept across the food industry at the beginning of the pandemic, Khachab said Choco could either lay low and wait or invest in the company. He chose the latter, pumping up the team, regions and technology. As a result, Choco’s technology is stronger than it was 15 months ago and proved to be flexible amid the inflexible environment.

Choco saw orders quadruple on the platform in the past year, and gross merchandise value grew to $900 million annualized, up from $230 million, Khachab said.

As the company continues to learn how it can provide value to the food supply chain, half of the Series B funding will go into technology development. It will also go toward doubling its headcount, especially on the engineering side. Choco recently brought on ex-Uber and Facebook executive Vikas Gupta as chief technology officer, and Khachab said Gupta’s expertise will enable the company “to build the best technology team in Europe” and scale faster.

Choco is already operating in six markets, including the United States, Germany, France, Spain, Austria and Belgium. Khachab expects to expand in those markets and gain a footprint in new markets like Latin America, the Middle East and Asia.

What SOSV’s Climate Tech 100 tells founders about investors in the space

 

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Choco bites into $100M Series B, at a $600M valuation, to build a more transparent, sustainable food supply chain https://ift.tt/3Blr7wo

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Bielefeld survey highlights an emerging B2B, crypto, deep tech ecosystem

Welcome to the city survey of Bielefeld, Germany, part of our ongoing survey into European cities. If you’d like your city featured, just fill in this form and add your city name. Once we have enough entries from a city, we will put your city on TechCrunch!

According to local media reports, Bielefeld’s has experienced a tech boom in recent years, with accelerators like the local Founders Foundation (backed by the Bertelsmann Foundation) and Garage 33 (at the University of Paderborn) attracting a new wave of young company founders to the East Westphalia-Lippe region.

Notable startups to emerge include Semalytix, Valuedesk, Zahnarzt-Helden, StudyHelp, PartWorks and AMendate.

Unfortunately, Bielefeld suffers from the same ailment the rest of Germany is subject to: Most startups gravitate to Berlin, followed by Munich, then Hamburg (according to an initiative from UnternehmerTUM in Munich).

However, as Business Punk magazine found earlier this year, the Ostwestfalen-Lippe region in northern North Rhine-Westphalia is home to some of Germany’s biggest companies. That means startups aiding large organizations to digitize post-pandemic have ready access to some of Germany’s largest companies and institutions.

Our survey respondents pointed out that the region is strong in sectors such as B2B because of the many old-school B2B companies in the manufacturing area. There is fairly ready access to many large family offices such as Dr. Oetker, Miele, CLAAS, Schüco and Bertelsmann, so there is a lot of capital available.

Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups.

Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody.

“The region has a good momentum for startups in general, [largely] because of Founders Foundation. At the same time, them being the only institutional driver leads to a certain monoculture,” said one.

Deep tech technologies are a feature of the ecosystem, but there are “almost no B2C or direct-to-consumer” startups, said another respondent.

Commenting on the investment scene in the city, survey respondents said investors have “strong bonds to the industry and Mittelstand.” However, another commented that there are “only very few local investors with NRW or OWL focus like EnjoyVenture (Technologiefonds OWL), but not much more.”

That said, companies get decent attention from “national” investors, and Founders Foundation has really boosted the scene in the region. Angels are also becoming more active, and “there is a strong business angel community in Bielefeld who have been really supportive of the new startup scene.”

We surveyed:

Jonathan Maycock, co-founder and CEO, margin

Louis Schulze, ecosystem development manager, Founders Foundation

Stefan Trockel, founder and CEO, Mercury.ai

Jasper Steinlechner, CTO, Pektogram

Victoria Erdbrügger, co-founder and managing director, circuly

Manuel Rüsing, CTO, Synctive

Conner Kuhlmeyer, founder, reportio

Miriam Kleiner, talent acquisition manager, Founders Foundation

 

---

Jonathan Maycock, co-founder and CEO, margin

Which sectors is Bielefeld’s tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What does it lack?
We are strong in the cryptotrading ecosystem. We are most excited by the adoption of Bitcoin as a financial asset by corporates and institutions as well as the ongoing network effect and adoption by the masses. We need to add support for DeFi trading venues alongside the centralized exchanges we already support.

Which are the most interesting startups in your city?
Semalytix, Zahnarzt-Helden, Coindex and Valuedesk.

What is the tech investment scene like in Bielefeld? What’s their focus?
Since Founders Foundation started in Bielefeld in 2016 the startup scene has exploded. We joined the first accelerator and since then 24 startups have been founded and come through its programs. There is a strong business angel community in Bielefeld that has been really supportive of the new startup scene.

With the shift to remote working, do you think will people stay in Bielefeld, move out, or will people move in?
We switched completely to home office once the pandemic got underway. For us, it has worked really well and we now have three employees who work outside of Bielefeld. Everything is more flexible now.

Who are the key startup people in your city (e.g., investors, founders, lawyers, designers, etc.)?
Sebastian Borek (CEO of the Founders Foundation), Eduard R. Doerrenberg (managing director, Dr. Wolff Group).

Where do you think Bielefeld’s tech scene will be in five years?
As Bielefeld is in the heart of the German “Mittelstand”, there are huge opportunities for tech startups to help these large industries take a leap forward with technical solutions using AI, blockchain and other technologies. The city is well served by Bielefeld University, which turns out highly qualified CS graduates every year. Especially with the superb backing of the Founders Foundation, the startup ecosystem in Bielefeld has a bright future.

Louis Schulze, ecosystem development manager, Founders Foundation

Which sectors is Bielefeld’s tech ecosystem strong in? What are you most excited by? What does it lack?
B2B, deep tech technologies.

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YouTube acquires Indian social commerce startup Simsim

YouTube has acquired social commerce startup Simsim, the Google-owned firm said on Tuesday. Neither of the firms disclosed the terms of the deal, but two people with knowledge of the matter told TechCrunch the Indian startup was valued at over $70 million. Simsim chief executive didn’t respond to a query about the acquisition Monday evening (IST).

Two-year-old Simsim had raised about $17 million and was last valued at $50.1 million.

Gurgaon-headquartered Simsim helps small businesses in India transition to e-commerce by using the power of video and creators. The simsim app serves as a platform to connect local businesses, influencers and customers.

The thesis, according to Rohan Malhotra of Good Capital, an early backer of Simsim is: “micro-influencers are more effective at building a targeted audience (growth), creating entertaining experiences (retention), building trust (higher value) and personalising messaging (conversion). Consumer social platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc.) cannot meaningfully monetise via advertising-financed models in India; this unlocks the opportunity for more deeply integrated transactional platforms. New internet users in India need an interactive seller-led experience to replicate the offline e-commerce experience this market is used to.”

He, like everyone else, declined to comment on the size of the deal.

“We started simsim with the mission of helping users across India shop online with ease, enabled through small sellers and brands showcasing and selling their products using the power of content by trusted influencers. Being a part of the YouTube and Google ecosystem furthers simsim in its mission. We cannot think of a better ecosystem in which to build simsim, in terms of technology, reach, creator networks and culture. We can’t wait to be part of YouTube and are excited to build simsim within the most admired tech company in the world,” Simsim cofounders Amit Bagaria, Kunal Suri and Saurabh Vashishtha said in a joint statement.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

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Meet the startups competing in the Extreme Tech Challenge Global Finals on July 22

There’s not much that thrills us more than a startup competition — and we mean deep down in our bones thrilled. That’s why we’re beyond excited to host the Extreme Tech Challenge (XTC) Global Finals on July 22 starting at 9:00 a.m. (PT). This event is virtual and free to attend — but you need to register for your free ticket.

We’re serious when we describe this particular startup competition as extraordinary. Why? This pitch throw-down is all about startups determined to power a more equitable, inclusive and healthy world, and we need more of that visionary thinking put into action.

The competition just to reach the finals was fierce. More than 3,700 startups — from 92 countries — applied across XTC’s competition tracks: Agtech, Food & Water, Cleantech & Energy, Edtech, Enabling Tech, Fintech, Healthtech and Mobility & Smart Cities. Learn more about XTC here.

You know they’ll bring the heat and present a finely tuned pitch. And they’ll need it to impress this panel of judges — all of whom focus on sustainable impact.

So, without further ado, meet seven of the world’s best purpose-driven startups as they vie to be crowned the Extreme Tech Challenge 2021 global winner.

AgTech & FoodTech: Wasteless, a patented fully automated AI solution that applies optimal markdowns in real time — based on products’ expiration dates and other factors — to reduce food waste and increase profitability.

CleanTech & Energy: Mining and Process Solutions, a nontoxic, natural alternative to cyanide and acid for the extraction of metals in mining operations.

EdTech: Testmaster, a mobile app that helps secondary students in West African countries successfully pass their matriculation exams. “The best private tutor in one’s pocket” delivers short, intuitive and accessible exercises and tutorial videos.

Enabling Tech: Dot Inc., the maker of the first tactile monitor that enables STEM education, visual works and games for the 285 million visually impaired people worldwide. Dot Inc. is expanding its technologies to help all disabled people to access public information in smart cities through barrier-free kiosks and IoT infrastructures.

FinTech: Hillridge Technology has developed weather-based parametric insurance for farmers to help protect crop yields and livestock.

HealthTech: Genetika+ combines genetics, patient history and unique brain biomarkers to help people suffering from depression, thereby helping to save patients’ lives, physicians’ time and healthcare payers’ costs.

Mobility & Smart Cities: Fotokite helps public safety teams save lives with elevated and actionable intelligence at the push of a button. Fully autonomous and field proven, Fotokite solutions are used daily by firefighters and first responders to assess, visualize and document their incidents within seconds of arriving on scene.

The Extreme Tech Challenge Global Finals take place on July 22. Join us and thousands of people around the world for this free, virtual pitch competition. Register here for your free ticket.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Meet the startups competing in the Extreme Tech Challenge Global Finals on July 22 https://ift.tt/3kzFdo0

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Founders: How well do you really understand seed-stage financing?

Yin Wu Contributor

Yin Wu, a three-time YC alum, is founder of Pulley, which offers cap table management tools that help companies better understand and optimize their equity.

More posts by this contributor

• How to start a company in 4 days

I’ve fundraised a lot. Tactically, fundraising is a skill like any other. You get better the more you do it. But practicing gets you nowhere if you don’t have a strong foundation in understanding a fundraising round’s core components.

As a founder, you will understand less than investors when it comes to fundraising. For investors, negotiating with founders is their full-time job. For founders, fundraising is just a small part of building a business. Understanding the basics of venture financing can help founders raise on better terms.

We’ll cover:

• How financing works: SAFEs versus equity rounds.
• How much to raise.
• How to arrive at your valuation.

How financing works: SAFEs versus equity rounds

As a founder, you will understand less than investors when it comes to fundraising.

Venture financing takes place in rounds. The first stage is the pre-seed or seed round, then a Series A, then a Series B, then a Series C and so on. You can continue to raise funding until the company is profitable, gets acquired or goes public.

We will focus here on seed-stage funding — your very first funding round.

SAFEs

Post-money SAFEs are the most common way to raise funding. These documents are used by Y Combinator, angel investors and most early-stage funds. You should raise on post-money SAFEs using standard documents created by YC. Standard documents have consistent terms that have been drafted to be fair to both investors and founders.

By using the standard post-money SAFE, your negotiation can focus on the two terms that matter:

1. Principal: The amount you want to raise per investor.
2. Valuation cap: The value of your business.

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Go1 raises $200M at a $1B+ valuation to boost its curated enterprise learning platform

Online learning continues to see a huge boost of attention and use in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and today a startup building tools specifically for enterprises to deliver on their internal education remits is announcing a big round of funding that points to the startup’s own growth and ambitions.

Go1, which provides curated online learning materials and tools to businesses using “playlists” that tap content from multiple publishers and silos, has closed a round of $200 million, a Series D that the Australian company’s CEO and co-founder Andrew Barnes confirmed values the startup at over $1 billion.

Barnes added that the funding will be used to expand further in existing markets. Based out of Brisbane, Australia, Go1 has offices in London, the U.S., Singapore and Malaysia, so it wants to go deeper into Europe more broadly and into more of Asia Pacific, he said. Go1 will also continue expanding its suite of services in the wider areas of learning and development training, he added.

Today, it already offers a host of analytics and AI tech to chart how well that content is used and further personalize materials, so the idea will be to expand on that.

SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, AirTree Ventures and Salesforce Ventures co-led this Series D, with Blue Cloud Ventures, Larsen Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Microsoft’s M12, SEEK, TEN13 and Tiger Global also participating. (To be clear, it appears there were reports about this Series D closing, but no details on the value, the investors, nor confirmation from the company.)

The funding represents a major capital infusion for the startup: Prior to this it had only raised about $80 million over the last six years, with the last round, a more modest Series C of $40 million, closed 14 months ago.

GO1, an enterprise learning platform, picks up $40M from Microsoft, Salesforce and more

But it also comes on the heels of impressive growth. Incubated at Y Combinator and based out of Brisbane, Australia, the company currently works with some 3.5 million users and more than 1,600 enterprises globally, with companies like Microsoft, TikTok, the University of Oxford, Suzuki, Asahi and Thrifty, as well as many smaller businesses, among its customers. On average, an individual, when actively engaging on Go1, spends between two and six hours per month using the platform, and Barnes told me that its user base has grown by more than 300% in the last year.

But in a tech world now full of options for online learning content — both for K-12 as well as business users — what is perhaps more interesting is the startup’s approach.

Currently, Go1 has some 150,000 pieces of content available in its library, but it has not created any of that itself. The material comes from some 1,000 publishers and creators, a figure that is growing weekly, said Barnes, and includes not just your standard names in online education like Pearson, EdX, Coursera and Skillsoft, but also Blinkist and the Harvard Business Review.

The point of Go1 is to make it easier for businesses to access and use all these materials without having to negotiate separate deals with the various rights holders, or for users to have to negotiate multiple apps or sites to use it.

Somewhat akin to a streaming service like Spotify, Go1 acts not just as a distributor/aggregator to access that content, but as a channel for those providers, which receive royalties based on how much their content is consumed. (And individual rights holders can also negotiate how some or all of their content is accessed, in the event that they have paywalls that they do not want to break down in specific areas.)

The Spotify analogy goes beyond the company’s business model: Barnes pointed out that it too calls its curated bundles — which it creates itself, or lets customers create themselves — “playlists.”

“We started the business six years ago because no one else was doing this, yet there was such a desire to bring together that diversity of content and make it easily available,” he said.

The challenge for employers is not just navigating the user experience of juggling multiple sites (which Go1 solves with these curated playlists), but also building learning that is still cohesive and easy to manage, regardless of which department or employee is doing the training.

“How do I create something for the broad diversity of skills for our workforce?” is how Barnes described it to me. This is what the company addresses with the platform, he added, not only making it easier to create training for different people, but to help them find, and to suggest, relevant content that will interest those users by offering as big a selection as possible. “We help people find the needle in the haystack,” he said.

Where the analogy stops, it seems, is in how Go1 interfaces with the rest of the corporate learning market.

I asked Barnes if he saw companies like Success Factors as competitors, but in reality, Go1’s ethos is to integrate into whatever education or training platform a company might already use, be it SAP, Workday, Salesforce or Microsoft-based platforms, or something else altogether.

Borrowing another media comparison, Barnes notes that he sees Go1 as occupying the “Netflix” button on a remote: regardless of the manufacturer or pay-TV provider, you still have a way to get your Netflix fix; and so, too, is the hope for Go1 in corporate learning and development training.

This also means that while platforms are not rivals, others also aggregating content might well be: That likely makes for an interesting relationship with Microsoft, given that it owns LinkedIn, which has LinkedIn Learning, which also aggregates content from across a wide range of publishers.

It seems that while Microsoft has slowly created more integrations with LinkedIn over the years since it’s acquired it, this is one area where it’s also been okay with working with one of its competitors.

“Our team worked closely with Go1 on a Microsoft Teams integration to enable more enterprises to maintain corporate training remotely,” Jeff Teper, Microsoft corporate vice president, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, said in a statement. “As many companies navigate in-person work scenarios, a plan for hybrid engagement is critical. Employees and students can access one of the world’s largest libraries of online learning resources with Go1 in Microsoft Teams. Companies can also onboard new talent and ensure essential trainings are provided regardless of employee location.”

One way that Go1 is looking to grow is in how it is used by the individuals that learn or train on its platform.

Another reason Barnes and his co-founders — Vu Tran (head of growth), Chris Eigeland (CRO) and Chris Hood (CTO) — started Go1, he said, was because of a pain point one of them directly encountered. Tran was doing his training to become a doctor at the time, and he found it very frustrating that he had re-do hand-washing training each time he started a new rotation.

13 investors say lifelong learning is taking edtech mainstream

“There was no way to re-share that he’d already done that,” Barnes said. Go1 is trying to double down on that, increasing the ability for its users to “own” those credentials and certifications and re-use them in subsequent places, even when they change jobs. (Again… not unlike exporting a Spotify playlist, which you can also do.)

It seems that I am not the only one who sees a lot of Spotify resonance in Go1.

“When people think about music, they often think of Spotify and access to unlimited music for one subscription. We believe Go1 is the emerging category leader in providing a similar experience for corporate learning. Powered by AI and machine learning, Go1’s platform provides an intuitive experience, and creates an opportunity for individuals to expand their professional development goals and explore the resources to help achieve them,” said Nagraj Kashyap, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a statement.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Go1 raises $200M at a $1B+ valuation to boost its curated enterprise learning platform https://ift.tt/2Up0Xbr

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How one founder pivoted a startup designed for in-person interaction in light of the pandemic

When Ashley Sumner designed and launched Quilt, it was meant to be a response to digital social networking, preferring creating authentic in-person interactions between people who didn’t necessarily know each other. The app would match members for in-person conversations and informal meetups in their own homes — but when COVID-19 arrived, the fundamentals of the model obviously changed.

After first trying out Zoom-powered virtual video meetups as one alternative, Quilt instead settled on creating an audio platform that provided real-time conversation centered around wellness. It might sound like it has a lot in common with the rash of other audio networking startups out there, but unlike the buzzier Clubhouse or its many competitors, Quilt has carefully crafted a very different kind of community thanks to patience and building with intention.

Ashley talks to us this week on Found about making that big change, while also keeping intact the core mission that Quilt has been focused on from the beginning. She also tells us all about her own approach to being a founder and a leader, which is both unique and refreshing.

Quilt, an audio social network focused on self care, raises $3.5 million in seed

We loved our time chatting with Ashley, and we hope you love yours listening to the episode. And of course, we’d love if you can subscribe to Found in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts or in your podcast app of choice. Please leave us a review and let us know what you think, or send us direct feedback either on Twitter or via email at found@techcrunch.com. And please join us again next week for our next featured founder.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J How one founder pivoted a startup designed for in-person interaction in light of the pandemic https://ift.tt/36KxFqj

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India’s GlobalBees raises $150 million to build Thrasio-like house of brands

The universe of Indian firms attempting to replicate Thrasio’s success in the world’s second-largest internet market just got bigger. Three-month-old GlobalBees said on Monday it has raised $150 million in a Series A financing round led by FirstCry.

Lightspeed Venture Partners also invested in the new financing round, which is $75 million in equity and $75 million in debt. Even with a $75 million equity raise, Monday’s announcement makes GlobalBees’ round the largest Series A funding in India.

Founded by Nitin Agarwal, formerly of Edelweiss Financial, and Supam Maheshwari, a founder of FirstCry, GlobalBees acquires and partners with digitally native brands across categories such as beauty, personal care, home and kitchen, food and nutrition, and sports and lifestyle with a revenue rate of $1 million to $20 million.

The New Delhi-based startup then helps these firms scale and sell to marketplaces (such as Amazon and Flipkart) and through other channels in India and outside the South Asian market, Agarwal told TechCrunch in an interview. He said GlobalBees has already acquired or partnered with more than a dozen brands and they are selling both in India and outside of the country.

“We have created and engaged with brands in the past and realized that most of these brands reach a scale after which it becomes too difficult to scale them,” he said. “Supam and I have been talking about this for several years, trying to find ways to disrupt this market. We think there’s an opportunity to create a new house of brands that is digital-native.”

Agarwal said GlobalBees will attempt to build a distribution and enterprise ecosystem in the online space similar to how traditional firms have established those connections in the offline world. (Not all brands GlobalBees engages with will get acquired on day one, Agarwal said. Typically, some brands get acquired in a span of three years or so, he said.)

“The time it takes for D2C brands to go from 0 – 100Cr (about $13 million) in revenue has more than halved over the past few years,” said Harsha Kumar, partner at Lightspeed Venture, in a statement.

“We believe that this creates a unique opportunity to create a brand house much faster as well. With their past entrepreneurial stints together and their experience in building one of the largest ecommerce platforms in India, the duo of Supam and Nitin is the perfect team to go after this idea. Lightspeed is thrilled to be part of this journey!” said Kumar, who is joining the board of GlobalBees.

India poised for record VC year as unicorns head for decisive IPOs

Scores of startups in India today are trying to replicate what is popularly known as the Thrasio-model. Mensa Brands, a similar venture by former fashion e-commerce Myntra’s chief executive, recently raised $50 million in equity and debt. 10club, another similar startup, recently raised $40 million — though much of it is in debt. TechCrunch reported last month that UpScale, another prominent player in this space, is in advanced talks with Germany’s Razor Group to raise capital.

Like Thrasio, several of these firms are trying to acquire brands that sell midrange to high-end products in categories where competition is limited. In fact, some of the categories that are common among these brands are so underappreciated that even Amazon and other e-commerce firms have not explored them through their private label ecosystems.

GlobalBees’ Agarwal agreed with this assessment, though he added that not all brands are operating in niche categories.

New York-headquartered Thrasio, which has raised over $1.3 billion in equity and debt since December last year, had acquired or otherwise consolidated about 6,000 third-party sellers on Amazon as of earlier this year.

Thrasio raises $100M for its Amazon roll-up play, appoints retail CFO for its next steps

“India is at the cusp of a D2C revolution with an estimated market size of $200 billion in the next 5 years. Indian brands have shown great promise in the recent years, and we believe that GlobalBees is building great assets to accelerate the growth of digitally native brands in the country,” said Vikas Agnihotri, operating partner, SoftBank Investment Advisers, in a statement.

Agnihotri, alongside Atul Gupta of Premji Invest, Sudhir Sethi of Chiratae Ventures and Kshitij Sheth of Chrys Capital are also joining GlobalBees’ board.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J India’s GlobalBees raises $150 million to build Thrasio-like house of brands https://ift.tt/2UpdJ9U

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Nigerian investment platform Chaka secures $1.5M pre-seed after bagging country’s first SEC license

When Robinhood raised its $3 million seed round in 2013, it was a couple of months old with huge ambitions of democratizing securities access to the underserved and unserved. Robinhood has since taken the world by storm and grown to serve more than 30 million users with its zero-commission trading. 

In the past, we’ve seen such growth trickle down to other regions across the world, inspiring similar businesses. Robinhood is no exception. Several platforms have sprung forth to bring stock trading opportunities in their respective markets. In Nigeria, at least four platforms offer both local and foreign stocks to individuals. Chaka is one such platform. Today, it is announcing the close of its $1.5 million pre-seed round to power digital investments for individuals and businesses.

The pre-seed round was led by Breyer Capital, while 4DX Ventures, Golden Palm Investments, Future Africa, Seedstars, and Musha Ventures participated. It’s the second joint deal for 4DX Ventures and Breyer Capital in the space of two weeks, the first in Egyptian social e-commerce platform Taager.

It is a well-known fact that even before Robinhood, the average American actively participated in stock trading. According to a survey by Gallup, about 60% of Americans owned some form of stock in 2000; that number was down to 55% in 2020. This was partly due to the global financial crisis that occurred in 2008.

The crash also affected the Nigerian capital market and because Nigerians lost a lot of money during that period, stock trading is mostly frowned upon by most of the public. Yet for the average Nigerian interested, participating in trading local stocks is hard; and practically impossible for foreign ones.

Tosin Osibodu, while in the U.S., recognised this problem and came back to Nigeria to start Chaka officially launching the company in 2019. According to Osibodu, Chaka wanted to create opportunities for Nigerians to invest in dollar assets and at the same time allow foreigners to invest in Nigerian assets.

“If there’s more demand in the market, over time, we expect there’ll be more supply. If you fast forward over a long period of time, we expect that our local capital markets will continue to grow,” he said to TechCrunch in an interview. “We will provide borderless digital access to multiple solutions, and so it’s not just about Nigerians investing in the market, it’s about making the markets accessible for people locally and globally.”

For the most part, Chaka has executed on one front. The platform Nigerians access to more than 10,000 stocks and ETFs trading on local and foreign capital markets. The CEO maintains that the platform has levelled entry barriers for borderless investments in Nigeria by providing customers with compliant access to the capital market.

“The thing about markets is that they have demand and supply with barriers to entry. We’re committed to lowering those barriers in local markets and by lowering barriers to investing for retail, more people will come to the market. In fact, more people came into the Nigerian stock market through us last year than any other broker. It’s like a demand-supply flywheel,” the CEO added.

Chaka’s local assets are registered with the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) Central Securities Clearing System (CSCS) and regulated by the Securities Exchange Commission of Nigeria (SEC). Dollar assets, on the other hand, are regulated by the US FINRA and the US SEC.

Nigeria’s SEC warns investment platforms to stop trading ‘unregistered’ foreign securities

In April this year, digital investment platforms were caught in crosshairs with Nigeria’s SEC. The regulator declared their activities illegal and warned capital market operators working with them to renege on providing brokerage services for foreign securities. Unlike Robinhood which offers online brokerages, Nigerian investment platforms do not. Chaka, for instance, partners with Citi Investment Capital in Nigeria and DriveWealth LLC in the U.S. to issue stocks and securities.

According to Nigeria’s SEC, the bottom line was to bring the activities of these platforms under its purview as part of its efforts to safeguard the investing public. Although Osibodu claims Chaka had always engaged the SEC since the company was formed in 2019, it did not seem that way last December when the regulator singled out the two-year-old company for “selling and advertising stocks.”

The event set the precedence for the regulator’s all-out attack on other digital investment platforms, giving Chaka enough time to engage and conclude talks in about half a year. And last month, Chaka acquired the first fintech license issued by the SEC, making it the only investment platform operating as a digital sub-broker.

“When we launched, we kept SEC in the loop. But now, over the last six months, we’ve engaged with them, showed them our business models, the benefits, the markets. Now we’re proud to have SEC’s first fintech license. We believe that the most important thing is that the market has clarity and understands the regulations required to be registered. And we’re thrilled to have broken new ground and cleared up what it takes to be able to offer services in the market,” he said.

With the new license, the company can swiftly focus on what lies ahead. Osibodu says the license expands the scope of what Chaka can achieve. He asserts that Chaka can power multiple brokers and provide access to different digital investment offerings in addition to being a digital sub-broker.

Image Credits: Chaka

Asides from Chaka’s traditional stock trading app for retail investors, it also offers Chaka SDK which allows asset managers and financial institutions to offer digital investments and Chaka for Business for direct business onboarding and trading tools for institutional investors.

Jim Breyer of Breyer Capital, commenting on the investment said, “We are proud to combine efforts with a company that is levelling the investment playing field for Nigerians [and Africans at large]. We’re confident in the value Chaka provides through its digital tools, and we look forward to playing our part in supporting Chaka’s team on their mission to drive borderless investments in Africa.” 

Osibodu says the company will use its pre-seed investment to expand footprints to Ghana and other West African markets. Improving its technology and services and securing partnerships with major financial institutions, including apex ones, is also a priority.

“As we advance, I think something that we’re just very focused on is how do we continually reduce access barriers, and we are proud of the initiatives that we’ve brought and are to come. Watch this space for more partnerships, even with apex institutions in our markets as well.”

Rising African venture investment powers fintech, clean tech bets in 2020

https://ift.tt/3iv7QjE Nigerian investment platform Chaka secures $1.5M pre-seed after bagging country’s first SEC license https://ift.tt/3ksG1ei

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