Lux Capital’s Deena Shakir is helping judge Startup Battlefield at this year’s Disrupt

Deena Shakir is a partner at Lux Capital, where she looks to invest in technologies that are streamlining analog industries while also improving lives and livelihoods. Among the companies she has backed, for example, are Shiru, which is leveraging computational design to create enhanced proteins to help feed the world; and AllStripes, which aggregates and analyzes medical records, then sells the de-identified data to pharma companies to help them develop medicines.

It’s not a surprise that Shakir is focused on empowering people. Shakir’s father is a psychiatrist and as she once told us, “for a hot minute, I thought I was going to be a doctor myself.” Instead, after attending Harvard, then Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, she wound up working for the State Department during the Obama administration, then headed to Google. She would stay for the next seven years, spending the last of them with GV, Google’s venture unit. There, her work revolved in part around some of the alternative protein companies in GV’s portfolio. Then, in 2019, she was poached by Lux.

Indeed, while Shakir might have once imagined working with people on an individual basis, she has become an increasingly sought-after investor in startup teams, which is why we couldn’t be more excited that she’s able to join us this year for TechCrunch Disrupt. Specifically, we’re thrilled that Shakir will be judging our Startup Battlefield competition, the centerpiece of Disrupt every year and oftentimes a life-changing event for the winning team — and often runners-up, too. Consider that past winners include Vurb, Dropbox, Mint and Yammer, while runner-up Cloudflare currently boasts a market cap of $26 billion.

Lux Capital’s Deena Shakir sees space and frontier tech going mainstream right now

It’s because we take the competition — and our record to date — so seriously that we’re exceedingly thankful to savvy investors like Shakir, who ask the right questions, and make the tough decisions when it comes time to decide which teams to move along.

Want to watch and judge from home? With our entirely virtual event this year, you’re more than welcome to join us from the comfort of your home or office (and let us know what you think of the startups within the many networking forums you’ll find).

To watch this year’s 20+ startups compete for $100,000 — and to interact with more than 100 hours of content and thousands of enthusiastic startup fans — make sure to book your pass to TC Disrupt, happening September 21-23 — all for less than $100.

Secure your seat today.

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Equity Monday: Stocks up, cryptos up, regulation up

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here. I also tweet.

Today’s show was good fun to put together. Here’s what we got to:

• Global stocks are up to kick off the week. It’s a great way to start Monday, frankly.
• Thinking broadly, the latest regulatory news from China regarding ByteDance is not super bullish for the nation’s tech industry. And what the Indian government is doing to its own technology industry is not encouraging. But all of that and tension between the two countries, is not stopping deals. You can’t stop deals!
• Facebook bowed to pressure, and released a content report that it had previously shelved.
• Zetwerk raised a $150 million Series E. The Indian startup scene is trucking right along, perhaps acting a bit as-if its government wasn’t increasingly authoritarian.
• Shelf.io raised a $52.5 million Series B in what we’re somewhat considering a classic Tiger-led deal.
• And the SPAC boom is not over yet, with yet another Virgin space company headed for the public markets.

Woo! And that’s the start to the week. Hugs from here, and we’ll chat you on Wednesday!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!

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Shelf.io closes huge $52.5M Series B after posting 4x ARR growth in the last year

Covering public companies can be a bit of a drag. They grow some modest amount each year, and their constituent analysts pester them with questions about gross margin expansion and sales rep efficiency. It can be a little dull. Then there are startups, which grow much more quickly — and are more fun to talk about.

That’s the case with Shelf.io. The company announced an impressive set of metrics this morning, including that from July 2020 to July 2021, it grew its annual recurring revenue (ARR) 4x. Shelf also disclosed that it secured a $52.5 million Series B led by Tiger Global and Insight Partners.

That’s quick growth for a post-Series A startup. Crunchbase reckons that the company raised $8.2 million before its Series B, while PitchBook pegs the number at $6.5 million. Regardless, the company was efficiently expanding from a limited capital base before its latest fundraising event.

What does the company’s software do? Shelf plugs into a company’s information systems, learns from the data, and then helps employees respond to queries without forcing them to execute searches or otherwise hunt for information.

The company is starting with customer service as its target vertical. According to Shelf CEO Sedarius Perrotta, Shelf can absorb information from, say, Salesforce, SharePoint, legacy knowledge management platforms, and Zendesk. Then, after training models and staff, the company’s software can begin to provide support staff with answers to customer questions as they talk to customers in real time.

The company’s tech can also power responses to customer queries not aimed at a human agent and provide a searchable database of company knowledge to help workers more quickly solve customer issues.

Per Perrotta, Shelf is targeting the sales market next, with others to follow. How might Shelf fit into sales? According to the company, its software may be able to offer staff already-written proposals for similar-seeming deals and other related content. The gist is that at companies that have lots of workers doing similar tasks — clicking around in Salesforce, or answering support queries, say — Shelf can learn from the activity and get smarter in helping employees with their tasks. I presume that the software’s learning ability will improve over time, as well.

Shelf, around 100 people today, hopes to double in size by the end of the year, and then double again next year.

That’s where the new capital comes in. Hiring folks in the worlds of machine learning and data science is very expensive. And because the company wants to scale those hires quickly, it will need a large bank balance to lean on.

Quick ARR growth was not the only reason why Shelf was able to secure such an outsized Series B, at least when compared to how much capital it had raised before. Per Perrotta, Shelf has 130% net dollar retention and no churn to report, meaning its customers are both sticky and expand organically.

While Shelf is interesting today and has certainly found niches it can sell into in its current form, I am more curious about how far the company can take its machine learning system, called MerlinAI. If its tech can get sufficiently smart, its ability to prompt and help employees could reduce onboarding time and the overall cost of employee training. That would be a huge market.

This is the sort of deal that we expect to see Tiger in — an outsized investment compared to prior rounds into a high-growth company that has lots of market room. Whatever price Tiger just paid for the company’s stock, a few years of continued growth should de-risk the investment. By our read, Tiger is really just the market-leading bull on software market growth in the long term. Shelf fits into that thesis neatly.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Shelf.io closes huge $52.5M Series B after posting 4x ARR growth in the last year https://ift.tt/2WhRmDK

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African fintech OPay valued at $2B in SoftBank Vision Fund 2-led $400M funding

Chinese-backed and Africa-focused fintech company OPay raised $400 million in new financing led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Bloomberg reported Monday, valuing the company at $2 billion.

The round, which marks the Fund’s first investment in an African startup, drew participation from existing investors like Sequoia Capital China, Redpoint China, Source Code Capital, and Softbank Ventures Asia. Other investors, including DragonBall Capital and 3W Capital, also took part in the new financing round.

This news comes three months after The Information reported that the company was in talks to raise “up to $400 million at a $1.5 billion valuation” from a group of Chinese investors. The new financing also comes two years after OPay announced two funding rounds in 2019 — $50 million in June and a $120 million Series B in November.

In an emailed statement, OPay CEO Yahui Zhou said OPay “wants to be the power that helps emerging markets reach a faster economic development.” The company, founded in 2018, had an exclusive presence in Nigeria. It provided various digital services ranging from mobility and logistics to e-commerce and fintech at cheap rates for consumers.

Right now, the company’s mobile money arm thrives the most. This year, its parent company Opera reported that OPay’s monthly transactions grew 4.5x to over $2 billion in December last year. OPay also claims to process about 80% of bank transfers among mobile money operators in Nigeria and 20% of the country’s non-merchant point of sales transactions. Last year, the company also said it acquired an international money transfer license with a WorldRemit partnership also in the works.

Per Bloomberg, the company’s monthly transaction volumes exceed $3 billion at the moment.

African fintech OPay is reportedly raising $400M at over $1.5B valuation

OPay plays in an extremely competitive fintech market. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation, and with a large share of its people underbanked and unbanked, fintech is arguably the most promising digital sector in the country. The same can be said for the continent as a whole. Mobile money services have long catered to the needs of the underbanked. Per GSMA, Africa had more than 160 million active mobile money users generating over $495 billion in transaction value last year.

Last year, OPay expanded to Egypt and according to the company, that’s an entry point to the Middle East market.

Kentaro Matsui, a managing director at SoftBank Group Corp, said, “We believe our investment will help the company extend its offering to adjacent markets and replicate its successful business model in Egypt and other countries in the region.”

SoftBank joins a growing list of high-flying investors (Dragoneer, Sequoia, SVB Capital, among others) that have cut their first checks in African ventures this year. As the continent continues to show promise, fintech remains its poster child. This year up to half of the total investments raised have emerged from the sector; it contributed to more than 25% last year.

In addition, fintech has produced the most mega-rounds so far. TymeBank raised $100 million in February, Flutterwave bagged a $170 million round in March, while Chipper Cash secured $100 million in May. OPay’s raise is the largest of the lot and makes it the other African fintech unicorn asides from Flutterwave and the third unicorn after e-commerce giant Jumia. The three make up the five billion-dollar tech companies on the continent, in addition to Interswitch and Fawry.

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African fintech OPay valued at $2B in SoftBank Vision Fund 2-led $400M funding

{rss:content:encoded} African fintech OPay valued at $2B in SoftBank Vision Fund 2-led $400M funding https://ift.tt/3DcjGZt https://ift.tt/3j9mOgq August 23, 2021 at 02:58PM

Chinese-backed and Africa-focused fintech company OPay raised $400 million in new financing led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Bloomberg reported Monday, valuing the company at $2 billion.

The round, which marks the Fund’s first investment in an African startup, drew participation from existing investors like Sequoia Capital China, Redpoint China, Source Code Capital, and Softbank Ventures Asia. Other investors, including DragonBall Capital and 3W Capital, also took part in the new financing round.

This news comes three months after The Information reported that the company was in talks to raise “up to $400 million at a $1.5 billion valuation” from a group of Chinese investors. The new financing also comes two years after OPay announced two funding rounds in 2019 — $50 million in June and a $120 million Series B in November.

In an emailed statement, OPay CEO Yahui Zhou said OPay “wants to be the power that helps emerging markets reach a faster economic development.” The company, founded in 2018, had an exclusive presence in Nigeria. It provided various digital services ranging from mobility and logistics to e-commerce and fintech at cheap rates for consumers.

Right now, the company’s mobile money arm thrives the most. This year, its parent company Opera reported that OPay’s monthly transactions grew 4.5x to over $2 billion in December last year. OPay also claims to process about 80% of bank transfers among mobile money operators in Nigeria and 20% of the country’s non-merchant point of sales transactions. Last year, the company also said it acquired an international money transfer license with a WorldRemit partnership also in the works.

Per Bloomberg, the company’s monthly transaction volumes exceed $3 billion at the moment.

African fintech OPay is reportedly raising $400M at over $1.5B valuation

OPay plays in an extremely competitive fintech market. Nigeria is Africa’s most populous nation, and with a large share of its people underbanked and unbanked, fintech is arguably the most promising digital sector in the country. The same can be said for the continent as a whole. Mobile money services have long catered to the needs of the underbanked. Per GSMA, Africa had more than 160 million active mobile money users generating over $495 billion in transaction value last year.

Last year, OPay expanded to Egypt and according to the company, that’s an entry point to the Middle East market.

Kentaro Matsui, a managing director at SoftBank Group Corp, said, “We believe our investment will help the company extend its offering to adjacent markets and replicate its successful business model in Egypt and other countries in the region.”

SoftBank joins a growing list of high-flying investors (Dragoneer, Sequoia, SVB Capital, among others) that have cut their first checks in African ventures this year. As the continent continues to show promise, fintech remains its poster child. This year up to half of the total investments raised have emerged from the sector; it contributed to more than 25% last year.

In addition, fintech has produced the most mega-rounds so far. TymeBank raised $100 million in February, Flutterwave bagged a $170 million round in March, while Chipper Cash secured $100 million in May. OPay’s raise is the largest of the lot and makes it the other African fintech unicorn asides from Flutterwave and the third unicorn after e-commerce giant Jumia. The three make up the five billion-dollar tech companies on the continent, in addition to Interswitch and Fawry.

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Moesif secures $12M to provide user behavior insights on API usage

As more companies provide more API-first services, Moesif has developed a way for those companies to learn how their customers are utilizing them.

The San Francisco-based startup is adding to its capital raise Monday with the announcement of a $12 million Series A round led by David Sacks and Arra Malekzadeh of Craft Ventures. Existing investor Merus Capital, which led Moesif’s $3.5 million seed round in 2019, also participated in the round, bringing the company’s total raise to $15.5 million, Moesif co-founder and CEO Derric Gilling told TechCrunch.

Gilling and Xing Wang founded Moesif in 2017 and went through the Alchemist Accelerator in 2018.

Moesif raises $3.5M seed round to provide insight into API usage

Companies seeking data around API usage and workflow traditionally had to build that capability in-house on top of a tech like Snowflake, Gilling said. One of the problems with that was if someone wanted a report, the process was ad hoc, meaning they would file a ticket and wait until a team had time to run the report. In addition, companies find it difficult to accurately bill customers on usage or manage when someone exceeds the rate limits.

“We started to see people build on top of our platform and pull data on APIs, and they started asking us how to directly serve customers, like making them aware if they are hitting a rate limit,” Gilling added. “We started to build new functionality and a way to customize the look and feel of the platform.”

Moesif provides self-service analytics that can be accessed daily and features to scale analytics in a more cost-effective manner. Customers use it to monitor features to better understand when there are issues with the API, and there are additional capabilities to understand who is using the API, how often and who may be likely to stop using a product based on how they are using it.

The company is also now seeing its revenue grow over 20% month over month this year and adoption by more diverse use cases and larger companies. At the time of the seed round, the company was just getting started with analytics and user trials, Gilling said. Today, it boasts a customer list that includes UPS, Tomorrow.io, Symbl.ai and Deloitte.

The company has also gone from a team of two to nine employees, and Gilling expects to use the new funding to bolster that roster across engineering, sales, developer relations and customer success.

He is also focusing on being a thought leader in the space and is pushing go-to-market and building out a new set of features to monetize APIs and improve its dashboard to better differentiate Moesif from competitors, which he said focus more on server health versus customer usage.

As part of the investment, Craft Ventures’ Malekzadeh is joining Moesif’s board. She was introduced to Gilling by another portfolio company and felt Moesif fit into Crafts’ thesis on SaaS companies.

Malekzadeh’s particular interest is in developer tools, and while in her previous position working at a startup developing APIs, she felt firsthand the pain point of not being able to know how those APIs were being used, how much customers should be billed and “was always bugging the product and engineering teams for reports.”

Moesif didn’t exist at the time she worked at the startup, and instead, her company had to build it own tools that turned out to be clunky, while at the same time recruiting top engineers that didn’t want to take up their time with building something that wasn’t the company’s core product.

“The two founders are highly technical, but they provided great content on their website that helped me learn about them,” Malekzadeh added. “One of the interesting things about them is that even though they are technical, they speak the same language as a business user, which makes them special as a developer-first company. Just the growth in their revenue was super impressive, and their customer references were glowing.”

The most important API metric is time to first call

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Virtual dressing room startup Revery.ai applying computer vision to the fashion industry

Figuring out size and cut of clothes through a website can suck the fun out of shopping online, but Revery.ai is developing a tool that leverages computer vision and artificial intelligence to create a better online dressing room experience.

Under the tutelage of University of Illinois Center for Computer Science advisrr David Forsyth, a team consisting of Ph.D. students Kedan Li, Jeffrey Zhang and Min Jin Chong, is creating what they consider to be the first tool using existing catalog images to process at a scale of over a million garments weekly, something previous versions of virtual dressing rooms had difficulty doing, Li told TechCrunch.

Revery.ai co-founders Jeffrey Zhang, Min Jin Chong and Kedan Li. Image Credits: Revery.ai

California-based Revery is part of Y Combinator’s summer 2021 cohort gearing up to complete the program later this month. YC has backed the company with $125,000. Li said the company already has a two-year runway, but wants to raise a $1.5 million seed round to help it grow faster and appear more mature to large retailers.

Before Revery, Li was working on another startup in the personalized email space, but was challenged in making it work due to free versions of already large legacy players. While looking around for areas where there would be less monopoly and more ability to monetize technology, he became interested in fashion. He worked with a different adviser to get a wardrobe collection going, but that idea fizzled out.

The team found its stride working with Forsyth and making several iterations on the technology in order to target business-to-business customers, who already had the images on their websites and the users, but wanted the computer vision aspect.

Unlike its competitors that use 3D modeling or take an image and manually clean it up to superimpose on a model, Revery is using deep learning and computer vision so that the clothing drapes better and users can also customize their clothing model to look more like them using skin tone, hair styles and poses. It is also fully automated, can work with millions of SKUs and be up and running with a customer in a matter of weeks.

Its virtual dressing room product is now live on many fashion e-commerce platforms, including Zalora-Global Fashion Group, one of the largest fashion companies in Southeast Asia, Li said.

Revery.ai landing page. Image Credits: Revery.ai

“It’s amazing how good of results we are getting,” he added. “Customers are reporting strong conversion rates, something like three to five times, which they had never seen before. We released an A/B test for Zalora and saw a 380% increase. We are super excited to move forward and deploy our technology on all of their platforms.”

This technology comes at a time when online shopping jumped last year as a result of the pandemic. Just in the U.S., the e-commerce fashion industry made up 29.5% of fashion retail sales in 2020, and the market’s value is expected to reach $100 billion this year.

Revery is already in talks with over 40 retailers that are “putting this on their roadmap to win in the online race,” Li said.

Over the next year, the company is focusing on getting more adoption and going live with more clients. To differentiate itself from competitors continuing to come online, Li wants to invest body type capabilities, something retailers are asking for. This type of technology is challenging, he said, due to there not being much in the way of diversified body shape models available.

He expects the company will have to collect proprietary data itself so that Revery can offer the ability for users to create their own avatar so that they can see how the clothes look.

“We might actually be seeing the beginning of the tide and have the right product to serve the need,” he added.

Livestream e-commerce: Why companies and brands need to tune in

https://ift.tt/2WfCc26 Virtual dressing room startup Revery.ai applying computer vision to the fashion industry https://ift.tt/2UGkCUt

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Y Combinator-backed Adra wants to turn all dentists into cavity-finding ‘super dentists’

Like other areas of healthcare, the dental industry is steadily embracing technology. But while much of it is in the orthodontic realm, other startups, like Adra, are bringing artificial intelligence into a dentist’s day-to-day workflow, particularly in finding cavities, of what will be a $435.08 billion global dental services market this year.

The Singapore-based company was founded in 2021, but was an idea that started last year. Co-founder Hamed Fesharaki has been a dentist for over a decade and owns two clinics in Singapore.

He said dentists learn to read X-rays in dental school, but it can take a few years to get good at it. Dentists also often have just minutes to read them as they hop between patients.

As a result, dentists end up misdiagnosing cavities up to 40% of the time, co-founder Yasaman Nemat said. Her background is in imaging, where she developed an artificial intelligence machine identifying hard-to-see cancers, something Fesharaki thought could also be applied to dental medicine.

Providing the perspective of a more experienced dentist, Adra’s intent is to make every dentist “a super dentist,” Fesharaki told TechCrunch. Its software detects cavities and other dental problems on dental X-rays faster and 25% more accurately, so that clinics can use that time to better serve patients and increase revenue.

Example of Adra’s software. Image Credits: Adra

“We are coming from the eye of an experienced dentist to help illustrate the problems by turning the X-rays into images to better understand what to look for,” he added. “Ultimately, the dentist has the final say, but we bring the experience element to help them compare and give them suggestions.”

By quickly pointing out the problem and the extent of it, dentists can decide in what way they want to treat it — for example, do a filling, a fluoride treatment or wait.

Along with third co-founder Shifeng Chen, the company is finishing up its time in Y Combinator’s summer cohort and has raised $250,000 so far. Fesharaki intends to do more formalized seed fundraising and wants to bring on more engineers to tackle user experience and add more features.

The company has a few clinics doing pilots and wants to attract more as it moves toward a U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance. Fesharaki expects it to take six to nine months to receive the clearance, and then Adra will be able to hit the market in late 2022 or early 2023.

R&D Roundup: Ultrasound/AI medical imaging, assistive exoskeletons and neural weather modeling

https://ift.tt/2WgRBiU Y Combinator-backed Adra wants to turn all dentists into cavity-finding ‘super dentists’ https://ift.tt/3Da6KTW

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Tencent in talks to lead funding in India’s Pocket FM

Tencent is in advanced stages of talks to lead an investment round in Gurgaon-headquartered Pocket FM, the latest in the Chinese giant’s push to broaden its consumer internet portfolio in the Indian market.

The Chinese firm, which is already an investor in Pocket FM, is in talks to lead a ~20-25 million round in Pocket FM, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. The proposed term values the three-year-old startup between $75 million to $100 million, two people said. Existing investors Times Internet’s Brand Capital and Lightspeed are also participating in the round.

The round hasn’t closed, so the terms may change. Tencent and Pocket FM declined to comment.

Pocket FM operates an eponymous app that offers users podcasts and audiobooks in English and several Indian languages. On its website, the service says its catalog is over 10,000 hours. The startup works with several creators to produce audiobooks.

The app is available in a freemium model. It has a paid subscription as well as an ad-supported free version.

The investment talks come at a time when a range of Indian startups are beginning to launch in — or expand to — audio category. Indian social network ShareChat, for instance, launched a Clubhouse-like feature earlier this year.

Pocket FM will be Tencent’s latest bet in India’s consumer internet space. The Chinese giant is also a major investor in music streaming service Gaana and on-demand video streaming player MX Player.

Tencent slowed its the pace of investments in India last year after New Delhi amended a rule to require Chinese companies to take its approval before backing Indian firms. It has become more active in recent quarters, investing through debt instead of equity with a convertible note.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Tencent in talks to lead funding in India’s Pocket FM Manish Singh https://ift.tt/3sEuqux
via IFTTT

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Blockchain startup XREX gets $17M to make cross-border trade faster

XREX co-founders Winston Hsiao and Wayne Huang

A substantial portion of the world’s trade is done in United States dollars, creating problems for businesses in countries with a dollar shortage. Blockchain startup XREX was launched to help cross-border businesses in emerging markets perform faster transactions with products like a payment escrow service and crypto-fiat exchange platform.

The Taipei-headquartered company announced today it has raised $17 million in pre-Series A funding led by CDIB Capital Group. The oversubscribed round also included participation from SBI Investment (a subsidiary of SBI Holdings), Global Founders Capital, ThreeD Capital, E.Sun Venture Capital, Systex Corporation, MetaPlanet Holdings, AppWorks, BlackMarble, New Economy Ventures and Seraph Group. XREX’s last funding was a $7 million seed round in 2019.

Part of the new round will be use to apply for financial licenses in Singapore, Hong Kong and South Africa, and partner with banks and financial institutions, like payment gateways.

“We specifically wanted to build a regulatory-friendly cap table,” XREX co-founder and chief executive officer Wayne Huang told TechCrunch. “It’s really hard for a startup like us to raise from banks and public companies, but as you can see, this round we deliberately to do that and we were successful.”

Huang sold his previous startup, anti-malware SaaS developer Armorize Technologies, to Proofpoint in 2013. Armorize analyzed source code to find vulnerabilities, and many of its clients were developers in Bangalore and Chennai, so Huang spent a lot of time traveling there.

“We ran into all sorts of cross-border money transfer issues. It seemed almost unstoppable,” Huang said. “Growing up in the U.S. and then in Taiwan, we were not exposed to those issues. So that planted a seed, and then when Satoshi [Nakamoto] published the bitcoin white paper, of course that was a big thing for all cybersecurity experts.”

He began thinking of how blockchain can support financial inclusion in emerging markets like India. The idea came to fruition Huang teamed up with XREX co-founder Winston Hsiao, the founder of BTCEx-TW, one of Taiwan’s first bitcoin exchanges. Hsiao grew up in India and founded Verico International, exporting Taiwan-manufactured semiconductors and electronics to other countries, so he was also familiar with cross-border trade issues.

Crypto’s coming of age moment

XREX Crypto Services give merchants, especially those in countries with low U.S. dollar liquidity, tools to conduct trade in digital fiat currencies. “They have to get quick access to the U.S. dollar and be able to pay it out quick enough for them to secure important commodities that they want to import, and that’s the problem we want to solve,” said Huang.

To use the platform, merchants and their customers sign up for XREX’s wallet, which includes a commercial escrow service called Bitcheck. Huang said it is similar to having a standby letter of credit from a commercial bank, because buyers can use it to guarantee they will be able to make payments. Bitcheck uses digital currencies like USDT and USDC, stablecoins that are pegged to the U.S. dollar.

Merchants pay stablecoin to suppliers and XREX escrows the funds until the supplier provides proof of shipment, at which point it moves the payment to them. XREX’s crypto-fiat exchange allows users to convert USDT and USDC to U.S. dollars, which they can also withdraw and deposit through the platform.

Part of XREX’s funding will be used to expand its fiat currency platform, though Huang said it doesn’t plan to add too many cryptocurrencies “because we’re not built for crypto traders, we’re built for businesses and brand really matters to them. Brand and compliance, so whatever the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency says is a good stablecoin is what they’re going to use.”

Some of XREX’s partners include compliance and anti-money laundering providers like CipherTrace, Sum&Substance and TRISA. Part of XREX’s funding will be used to expand its security and compliance features, including Public Profiles, which are mandatory for customers, and user Reputation Index to increase transparency.

In a statement about the funding, CDIB Capital Innovation Fund head Ryan Kuo said, “CDIB was an early investor in XREX. After witnessing the company’s fast revenue growth and their commitment to compliance, we were determined to double our investment and lead this strategic round.”

Regulating crypto is essential to ensuring its global legitimacy

Crypto world shows signs of being rather bullish

https://ift.tt/3B42cww Blockchain startup XREX gets $17M to make cross-border trade faster https://ift.tt/3jaoBSK

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Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Plug and Play invest in Odiggo’s $2.2M seed round

Servicing one’s car personally is a time-consuming, expensive and painstaking process. It’s a cycle that can lead to more expensive repairs and safety issues down the line, and no car owner likes that.

Egypt and Dubai-based auto tech startup Odiggo is a platform addressing this problem. It allows car owners to get the help they need by finding car services and parts suppliers from providers around them. Then for the suppliers, it increases their sales and reaches more customers without necessarily spending on marketing.

Odiggo is part of the current YC Summer batch and has secured a $2.2 million seed round before Demo Day. The rosters of existing investors participating in the round are Y Combinator, 500 Startups, and Plug and Play Ventures. Regional VCs like Seedra Ventures, LoftyInc Capital, and Essa Al-Saleh (CEO of Volta-Tucks) also took part.

Ahmed Omar and Ahmed Nasser launched Odiggo in December 2019. The company operates a marketplace that connects car owners with service providers who can solve their problems, from servicing and repair to washing and maintenance. A commission-based model is used and Odiggo charges the car suppliers 20% commission on every transaction.

Over 50,000 car owners across three markets — Egypt, the UAE and Saudi Arabia — use Odiggo. The company also works directly with over 300 merchants. It claims merchant numbers have grown 40% month-on-month while its user base has increased 200% since the start of the pandemic.

“We believe we are at a watershed moment. It is incredible that since COVID hit, Odiggo has experienced over 10 times growth in the last year,” said co-founder Omar. 

CEO Omar said with this new round, Odiggo’s priority will be to attain consistent growth while expanding its team across the UEA, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

L-R: Ahmed Nassir (co-founder) & Ahmed Omar (co-founder and CEO)

He adds that since Odiggo taps into a mix of data sources — including car metrics and internal software, it will use that same information to provide more product offerings.

Odiggo will use part of the funding to continue developing its tech and dashboard software, he said.

“For example, the platform would be hooked up to the car owner’s vehicle and link the vehicle to the marketplace and provide frequent updates of your vehicle condition so you’ll be informed if the tires are low, the oil needs changing, or if a service is required.”

The pandemic has upended the mobility and logistics sectors, especially in MENA, making players like Odiggo gain much visibility from investors. In an industry today worth over $61 billion in the Middle East and Africa alone, Odiggo is looking to become a market leader. It has even more lofty plans to go public in the next three years.

“We are also aiming to be fully focused on spending more on our product and technology, as building an ecosystem to monetize requires more capital. Our target is to go for IPO by 2024 and achieve one billion services booked, and this requires a lot of network effects, infrastructure and technology,” the CEO said.

“We aim to be the first $100 billion company coming out of the region,” added Nasser.

Some of its investors, Idris Ayodeji Bello, managing partner at LoftyInc, and Essa Al-Saleh, are onboard with the startup’s plan despite early days.

“We are excited to back Odiggo through our Afropreneurs Funds in its quest to transform the automotive parts market and provide superior service to clients, starting from MENA. The leadership team of Omar and Nasser, supported by the rest of the employees, have been a joy to work with and we are on a countdown to the IPO,” said Bello in a statement. 

https://ift.tt/3AZatBK Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Plug and Play invest in Odiggo’s $2.2M seed round https://ift.tt/2XO2f11

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India’s path to SaaS leadership is clear, but challenges remain

Manav Garg Contributor

Manav Garg is CEO and founder of Eka Software Solutions and is founding partner of SaaSboomi and Together Fund.

Software as a service is one of the most important sectors in tech today. While its transformative potential was quite clear before the pandemic, the sudden pivot to distributed workforces caused interest in SaaS products to skyrocket as medium and large enterprises embraced digital and remote sales processes, significantly expanding their utility.

This phenomenon is global, but India in particular has the opportunity to take its SaaS momentum to the next level. The Indian SaaS industry is projected to generate revenue of $50 billion to $70 billion and win 4%-6% of the global SaaS market by 2030, creating as much as $1 trillion in value, according to a report by SaaSBOOMi and McKinsey.

The Indian SaaS industry is projected to generate revenue of $50 billion to $70 billion and win 4%-6% of the global SaaS market by 2030.

There are certain important long-term trends that are fueling this expansion.

The rise of Indian SaaS unicorns

The Indian SaaS community has seen a flurry of innovation and success. Entrepreneurs in India have founded about a thousand funded SaaS companies in the last few years, doubling the rate from five years ago and creating several unicorns in the process. Together, these companies generate $2 billion to $3 billion in total revenues and represent approximately 1% of the global SaaS market, according to SaaSBOOMi and McKinsey.

These firms are diverse in terms of the clients they serve and the problems they solve, but several garnered global attention during the pandemic by enabling flexibility for newly remote workers. Zoho helped streamline this pivot by providing sales teams with apps for collateral, videos and demos; Freshworks offered businesses a seamless customer experience platform, and Eka extended its cloud platform to unify workflows from procurement to payments for the CFO office.

Other SaaS firms stayed busy in other ways. Over the course of the pandemic, 10 new unicorns emerged: Postman, Zenoti, Innovacer, Highradius, Chargebee and Browserstack, Mindtickle, Byju, UpGrad and Unacademy. There were also several instances of substantial venture funding, including a $150 million deal for Postman, bringing the total amount raised by the Indian SaaS community in 2020 to around $1.5 billion, four times the investment in 2018.

India’s path to leadership

While the Indian SaaS community has made admirable progress in recent years, there are several key growth drivers that could lead to as much as $1 trillion in revenue by 2030. They include:

The global pivot to digital go-to-market

The number of enterprises that are comfortable with assessing products and making business decisions via Zoom is increasing rapidly. This embrace of digital go-to-market fundamentally levels the playing field for Indian companies in terms of access to customers and end markets.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J India’s path to SaaS leadership is clear, but challenges remain https://ift.tt/3AU8WNc

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