Curabitur et lectus vitae purus tincidunt laoreet sit amet ac ipsum. Proin tincidunt mattis nisi a scelerisque. Aliquam placerat dapibus eros non ullamcorper. Integer interdum ullamcorper venenatis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.
Curabitur et lectus vitae purus tincidunt laoreet sit amet ac ipsum. Proin tincidunt mattis nisi a scelerisque. Aliquam placerat dapibus eros non ullamcorper. Integer interdum ullamcorper venenatis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.
Curabitur et lectus vitae purus tincidunt laoreet sit amet ac ipsum. Proin tincidunt mattis nisi a scelerisque. Aliquam placerat dapibus eros non ullamcorper. Integer interdum ullamcorper venenatis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.
Curabitur et lectus vitae purus tincidunt laoreet sit amet ac ipsum. Proin tincidunt mattis nisi a scelerisque. Aliquam placerat dapibus eros non ullamcorper. Integer interdum ullamcorper venenatis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.
Curabitur et lectus vitae purus tincidunt laoreet sit amet ac ipsum. Proin tincidunt mattis nisi a scelerisque. Aliquam placerat dapibus eros non ullamcorper. Integer interdum ullamcorper venenatis. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas.
Instagram and WhatsApp experienced an apparent outage on Friday. It began around 1:40 p.m. ET and lasted for more than half an hour.
WhatsApp was unable to connect to the server, and messages were not being delivered. It’s not clear if the issue also affected Facebook Messenger, which last year rolled out new functionality to allow cross-platform messaging between Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.
Instagram was showing a 500 message, suggesting a back-end server error.
Instagram’s error page. (Image: TechCrunch)
WhatsApp unable to connect to the server. (Image: TechCrunch)
WhatsApp has more than two billion users, and Instagram has about one billion users. Facebook’s developer status page did not show any immediate outages.
We’ve reached out to Facebook, which owns the two units, but did not immediately hear back. We’ll update when we know more.
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. This time around we had whatever passes for a quiet week as far as news volume. But that still meant we had to cut stuff and move the rest around. But, once we got done editing the notes doc down, here’s what was left over:
Snap acquires Fit Analytics, a fitting technology startup: A far-past TechCrunch Disrupt alum has found a new home inside of LA’s social leader. No price on this one, but a fun thing to talk about all the same.
The future of cannabis is in the hands of retail shops, or at least that’s what Dutchie, a Bend, Oregon-based startup, believes. The cannabis management startup raised $200 million at a $1.7 billion valuation this past week.
Airtable raised another round. A huge one. Again. This time it was $270 million at a $5.77 billion valuation. How much more money could it need? Who knows!
And we closed on how unequal the venture capital world really is. It’s super embarrassing to report on, but knowing the numbers is better than not. So we wrote about it.
The show wraps with a teaser for next week that we won’t spoil here.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!
John S. Kim is CEO of Sendbird, makers of a customizable chat and messaging API service for mobile and web applications.
Social+ companies are upping the stakes for everyone by giving consumers multiple benefits at once: products that serve a purpose but also meet our need for belonging to a community.
But what exactly is a social+ company? One for which social engagement is an inextricable component of the product. That is to say: If you removed the social element, the product would cease to make sense. You can find plenty of examples in gaming (Fortnite), fitness (Strava, Peloton), commerce (Pinduoduo), audio (Clubhouse) and more. As noted in Andreessen Horowitz’s recent series Social Strikes Back, “The best version of every consumer product is the one that’s intrinsically social.”
Social+ products are seeing mass adoption because they marry community with functionality.
The benefits of a social+ company
Social+ products are seeing mass adoption because they marry community with functionality. Users form meaningful connections — and engage in value-adding conversations — within the context of the goal they’re trying to achieve. Whether it’s shopping for a deal or growing their assets, social+ products help users gain new knowledge, find motivation, garner status, form friendships and generally feel like they’re part of something.
Companies that base their business model on social+ products enjoy a variety of benefits:
Growth
When the social aspect of a product is integral to its function, users will often drive growth on their own steam, inviting their friends and family to join the community.
Members of highly engaged communities are inspired and fired up by their interactions with other members, and when they’re fired up about something, they talk about it. Participating in these communities makes users feel like they’re part of something, which can have a powerful effect on your growth.
Retention
Relationships matter. The relationship your users have with your brand is ultimately what will determine whether they stick with you or leave you for a competitor offering the same service — particularly at a more attractive price. If you provide your customers with access to a community they relate to and resources that make their lives easier, they’re more likely to be loyal.
The beauty of social+ is that embedding social interaction within your product or app allows you to own that conversation and build a community around your brand. In the absence of built-in communities, these users are forced to turn to places like Reddit or WhatsApp to discuss, among other things, the relative advantages of competitors’ apps.
Harnessing the creativity of your users
User-generated content (UGC) is the lifeblood of any social+ product, driving user engagement and fostering connections among users. UGC means the company can harness the creativity and popularity of its users and doesn’t have to expend as many resources creating content users find valuable. Plus there’s the added bonus that authentic UGC — whether it’s a screenshot or a meme — lends the product far greater credibility than any marketing initiatives you could launch.
from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Social+ payments: Why fintechs need social features Annie Siebert https://ift.tt/3vGQwh3
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Fetcher, a startup that promises to make the recruiting process easier while also diversifying the candidate pool, is announcing that it has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding.
Originally known as Scout, the New York startup was founded by CEO Andres Blank, CPO Chris Calmeyn and engineering directors Javier Castiarena and Santi Aimetta.
Blank told me that Fetcher automates parts of recruiters’ jobs, namely finding job candidates and sending the initial outreach emails. When I wondered whether that just leads to more spammy recruiting messages, he said that Fetcher emails actually result in “a very good response rate” because they’re targeted at the right candidates.
“The reality is that if you’re looking for a job, you don’t need an email to be so amazing, and if you’re a recruiter, you don’t want to spend 10 minutes thinking about what to write to each candidate,” he said.
He also described Fetcher’s approach as a “human in the loop” approach. Yes, the initial outreach is automated, but then the recruiter handles the conversations with candidates who respond.
Image Credits: Fetcher
“By automating both the sourcing [and] outreach sides of recruiting, Fetcher reduces the amount of time a recruiter spends in front of a computer searching for candidates, making a recruiter’s job more balanced, strategic and impactful, all while continuing to build a robust, diverse pipeline for the company,” Blank wrote in a follow-up email.
He also suggested that automated sourcing allows recruiters to reach a much more diverse candidate pool than they would through traditional methods. For example, he sent me a case study in which Fetcher helped video collaboration startup Frame.io hire 11 new employees in less than 12 months, nine of whom were women and/or underrepresented minorities.
“Fetcher has freed up time and given us the capacity to diversify our pipeline more organically,” said Anna Chalon, Frame.io’s senior director of talent and diversity, equity and inclusion, in a statement. “This has allowed us to make some incredible hires, mostly from underrepresented groups, over the last year.”
Blank added that after Fetcher has seen its revenue increase every month since July of last year, owing to shrinking recruiting teams needing to be able to do more with fewer resources, as well as a greater corporate focus on the aforementioned diversity, equity and inclusion.
Fetcher has now raised a total of $12 million. The Series A was led by G20 Ventures, with participation from KFund, Slow Ventures and Accomplice. Blank said he’s planning to double the employee count (currently 80) by the end of the year and to build out additional analytics (including diversity analytics) and CRM tools.
Igor Marinelli and Gabriel Lameirinhas were raised around manufacturing plants. Marinelli’s father worked for International Paper in a plant outside of São Paulo, while Lameirinhas’ father worked in a cement plant.
Throughout their lives, the two friends had heard their parents complain about the sorry state of maintenance and monitoring of the heavy equipment that their factories depended on to stay up and running.
So the two men decided to do something about it, and set about to develop the technology that would become Tractian.
Friends from their days at University of São Paulo, Lameirinhas and Marinelli kept in touch as Marinelli pursued a career in the U.S. as an entrepreneur. They reconnected in Brazil after the collapse of Marinelli’s attempt to launch a predictive chronic health condition service called BlueAI.
Marinelli spent some time working in a paper plant himself and became a software engineer for the facility. It was there that he saw the shoddy state of affairs of industrial monitoring tools.
Together with Lameirinhas he determined that there could be a better way. Factories in Brazil aren’t equipped with Wi-Fi or gateways or other networking technologies that the newest solutions from companies like Siemens or Schneider Electric require. Integrations with existing enterprise resource planning software from companies like SAP present another headache, said Marinelli.
“Only industries with huge capital can go through that mess,” Marinelli said.
Tractian’s sensors measure four things: vibration, temperature, energy consumption and a horometer to measure how long a machine has been up and running. The company has also developed software that can analyze the data coming off of the sensors to predict when a machine might need maintenance.
Y Combinator found the software and hardware package compelling and so did investors like Soma Capital, Norte Ventures, and angel investors including Alan Rutledge and Immad Akhund.
Tractian’s tech costs $90 for the sensors and the analysis and software is another $60 per month, per sensor. Marinelli claims that the service can pay for itself in less than two months. Already, the company has signed up AB InBev as an initial customer and has roughly 30 buyers in total using its sensors.
As indoor farming expands, a number of new companies are cropping up to provide better data and monitoring tools for the businesses aimed at improving efficiencies and quality of indoor crops.
One of these companies, the Copenhagen-based Nordetect, is entering the U.S. market with around $1.5 million in funding from government investment firms and traditional accelerators like SOSV, with a tech that the company claims can give vertical farms a better way to monitor and manage nutrients and water quality.
Controlled agriculture, whether in greenhouses or warehouses, benefits from its ability to administer every aspect of the inputs to ensure that plants have the optimal growing conditions. It is, however, far more expensive than just seeding the ground.
Proponents say that these farms can overcome the additional expense by improving efficiency around water use, reducing the application of pesticides and fertilizer, and cultivating for better, tastier produce.
That’s where Keenan Pinto and Palak Sehgal’s Nordetect comes in. The two co-founders have known each other since they were undergraduates in India eight years ago. They went on to do their masters’ work together and after working in bioengineering plants — Sehgal focused on flowering systems in plants and Pinto focused on roots — they both went into more digital fields — but maintained their fascination with plants and kept in touch with each other.
Professional work in medical diagnostics for Sehgal and lab instrumentation for Pinto kept both busy, but they continued their discussions around plant science and soil health.
Roughly three years ago, the two hit on the idea for a combined toolkit for water quality monitoring and soil health. Sehgal left the India Institutes of Technology, where she had been working, and joined Pinto in Copenhagen to begin developing the tech that would form the core of Nordetect’s business proposition.
The company’s technology consists of an analyzer and a cartridge, a microfluidic chip that users can insert into their water tank to take a sample. From the data that the device collects, farmers can control the nutrients they put into the water to optimize for traits like color and flavor, Pinto said.
Image Credits: Shutterstock/Francesco83
The company was accepted into SOSV’s Hax accelerator in 2017 and the two first-time founders moved from Denmark to Shenzhen to begin developing the business. In late 2018 the company moved back to Denmark and raised a small amount of additional capital from SOSV and Rockstart.
By 2020, watching the expansion of vertical farming, the company took what had initially been a soil-monitoring tool and added water-quality monitoring features to support indoor farming. That’s when the business started taking off, according to Pinto.
“One of the interesting things is when I consider the outdoor versus the indoor markets. The outdoor felt a bit conservative… the indoor seems much more forthcoming… and that traction allowed us to pull together this funding round $1.5 million,” Pinto said.
The new round came from Rockstart, Preseed Ventures, SOSV, the government of Denmark’s growth fund, and Luminate, a Rochester, New York-based accelerator that focuses on optical electronics technology.
Luminate’s participation is one reason why Nordetect is coming to the U.S., but it’s hardly the only reason. There’s also the capital that has come in to finance indoor ag companies. The two largest vertical farming companies in the U.S., Plenty and Bowery Farming, have raised $541 million and $167 million, respectively.
“The vertical movement has put people into the position where they are what I call data farmers,” said Pinto. “Each batch of produce is being used to learn and the data is more important than the output. We used this market as a beachhead.”
Once the path less traveled, bootstrapping today has become a much more viable and common approach to building a startup. By not taking venture capital dollars early, bootstrapping can force founders to remain disciplined in serving their paying customers well. It’s also a pretty compelling way to minimize dilution for founders and early employees. No wonder then that a crop of unicorn enterprise startups has taken this road these past years.
Few companies in that emerging crop though have reached quite the stature of Atlanta-based Calendly. The company is not just on everyone’s calendars (literally), but has also become a $3 billion unicorn behemoth with $70 million in subscription revenue in 2020.
Bootstrapping is a continuous commitment to not take venture capital for an extended period of time. Why make that commitment? How does a founder build the fortitude to resist the lucre of VC when it can make so many things easier? What are the advantages to bootstrapping, and when does the calculus switch from avoiding VC to embracing it?
I’m excited to talk about those questions and more with Awotona and Bartlett at our upcoming Early Stage — Operations & Fundraising event, where we explore how to answer the strategic and tactical questions that founders must make in the course of leading their startups.
Not only will we be getting Awotona’s deep perspective as a founder, but we’re also going to dig into Bartlett’s long-time relationship with Calendly and how he assiduously built a partnership there over many years to “win” what was one of the marquee deals of the year.Bartlett has backed a variety of major enterprise startups, such as Expensify (which has also demurred from the high stakes world of big-dollar VC), Highspot, Postscript and others, and I’m curious to see how he thinks about companies that go big with venture versus those who want to go big without it.
While many decisions when building a startup can be delayed, how you fund your startup (and therefore, how you fund your employees and growth) is one that must be made early and consistently. Join us and learn more about the different paths to financing startups, and how one calendar company timed its approach to greatness.
The TC Early Stage curriculum is being spread across two events, with fundraising and operations represented on April 1 & 2 and fundraising and marketing deep dives on July 8 & 9. Folks who buy a ticket to just one event will get three months of Extra Crunch for free, and folks who buy a dual-event ticket will get six months of Extra Crunch membership for free.
https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Timing your bootstrap with Calendly’s Tope Awotona and OpenView’s Blake Bartlett at TC Early Stage https://ift.tt/2OSyQyq
Recently public unicorn Upstart announced earnings that blew the socks off of Wall Street this week. After closing on Wednesday at around $61 per share, Upstart wrapped Thursday worth $115 per share. It turns out that all the blather we’ve had to endure about artificial intelligence (AI) in the past decade is coming true, at least in certain applications for select companies.
But Upstart’s blockbuster guidance for 2021 is just a sliver of the story. The AI-powered fintech is projecting a year so good that its valuation nearly doubled yesterday, but there are other shoots of life in the AI world worth discussing, and investors are taking note.
Per a new data set I spent this morning chewing on, VCs are firing cannons of capital into the AI startup world while exits reach new records.
Real-world financial output coupled to historically strong venture capital activity — and new technologies dripping into the tech upstart world at a record clip — are creating whole-cloth new use cases for AI tied to lots of capital access. It’s all very exciting.
This morning, I want to discuss Upstart and its quarterly results. I spoke with CEO Dave Girouard yesterday, which yielded some notes on AI-powered tech adoption rates among more conservative companies. Then, we’ll peek into PitchBook data on global AI-focused startup fundraising and their exit market.
In its first earnings report as a public company — you can read The Exchange’s coverage of its IPO here and here — Upstart reported Q4 2020 revenues $86.7 million (up 39% on a year-over-year basis), while its 2020 revenues totaled $233.4 million (up 42% on a year-over-year basis).
The quarter was a strong revenue beat, and a beat on adjusted profits. But it’s what the company has coming next that really stuck out. Here’s its CFO:
https://ift.tt/2YAJc8v AI fintech products are operating at scale and investor interest is maturing https://ift.tt/3eZWvrs
Across the street from Suzhou North, a high-speed railway station in a historic city near Shanghai, a futuristic M-shaped building easily catches the eye of anyone passing by. It houses the headquarters of the five-year-old Chinese autonomous driving startup, Momenta.
Like other major Chinese cities, Suzhou, which is famous for its serene canals and classical gardens, offers subsidized offices and policy support to attract high-tech firms. It seems to have chosen well. Momenta exceeded $1 billion in valuation in two years and became one of the most-funded driving companies in China. The startup has a dazzling list of investors, from Kai-Fu Lee’s Sinovation Ventures and the government of Suzhou, to Mercedes-Benz maker Daimler.
Momenta recently closed another massive round, which nears $500 million and lifts its total funding to more than $700 million. The investment marks an important step toward the firm’s international expansion, its chief of business development Sun Huan told TechCrunch. In a few months’ time, Sun will head to Stuttgart, the German hometown of Mercedes-Benz, and open Momenta’s first European office.
The new funding, a Series C round, was led by Chinese state-backed automaker SAIC Motor, Toyota and Bosch, an indication of the traditional auto monoliths’ conviction to smart driving.
“The auto industry needs to develop more advantages when confronting Tesla’s marketing today, so they are paying more attention to autonomous driving,” Momenta’s founder and CEO Cao Xudong told TechCrunch.
Financial investors leading the round were the Singaporean sovereign fund Temasek and Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s Yunfeng Capital. Other participants included Mercedes-Benz AG, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun’s Shunwei Capital, Tencent, Cathay Capital and a few undisclosed institutions. It’s rare to see Tencent and Alibaba (or their affiliates) co-invest.
Despite the sizable financial injection, Cao said that “autonomous driving companies can no longer rely solely on fundraising to burn cash.”
Mega-fundraising has become common in the capital-intensive autonomous vehicle world. Momenta’s Chinese rivals Pony.ai has amassed over $1 billion within five years and four-year-old WeRide.ai has raised over $500 million. Like Momenta, the two firms have nabbed investments from big automakers. Pony.ai also counts Toyota as an investor, and WeRide is backed by Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi.
Momenta declined to disclose its latest valuation. For reference, Pony.ai hit $5.3 billion in its November fundraising round.
TechCrunch went on a test ride with Momenta / TechCrunch
Momenta prides itself on what it calls a “two-legged” business model. Unlike some peers that concentrate resources on “Level 4,” or real driverless passenger cars, Momenta is selling semi-automated driving software to carmakers while investing in more advanced tech that is years from mass adoption.
It also tries to cap expenses by crowdsourcing data from auto partners instead of building its own car fleets, which helps save billions of dollars, the company has reiterated. By accumulating driving data at scale, Momenta gets to finetune its algorithms through a self-correcting system. The more data it has, the better its machine becomes at driving.
“It works like a flywheel,” Cao said, using a tech industry jargon first popularized by Jeff Bezos to explain Amazon’s growth.
Driver’s habit
During a test ride TechCrunch went on, where a safety driver was present but did not intervene, a Momenta-powered Lincoln maneuvered through a neighborhood of Suzhou dotted by jaywalkers, unleashed dogs, speeding scooters and reckless truck drivers. When the sedan slowed down at a highway entrance ramp, other cars zipped past us. It felt as if we were going too slowly, but in fact all the human-steered cars were going well above the 40km/h speed limit.
“Some drivers may want the autonomous driving car to be more aggressive, so we are also exploring a system that learns from individual style,” said Jiang Yunfei, an R&D engineer at Momenta who went on the ride. “Of course, on the condition that the car is obeying traffic rules.”
A tablet next to the dashboard showed what our car was capable of seeing and predicting on the road with a set of mass-produced sensors. “Prediction relies on data,” noted Sun. “If we build our own car fleets, it will be very costly to keep the data-driven approach.”
Momenta has joined the ranks of companies piloting robotaxis on China’s urban roads. It aims to remove some safety drivers from its robotaxis, which it jointly operates with auto partners, in 2022, and expects all of its vehicles to go driverless in 2024. By then, the company will have significantly reduced labor costs and reached a positive operating margin per vehicle.
Momenta has kept a quiet public profile since its inception and rarely talked about its customers except for its partnership with Toyota on high-definition maps, which predated the investment. What Cao could say was the company has fostered “deep collaborations” with carmakers and Tier-1 suppliers across China, Germany and Japan.
By the end of 2021, multiple customers will start mass-producing mid-to-high-end cars equipped with Momenta’s software. And by 2024 or 2025, Momenta’s solutions could be powering millions of vehicles, which should provide a steady stream of driving data to the startup.
“Electrification is no longer enough to differentiate one high-end car brand from another because the motors and batteries they used are quite similar. The key differentiator now is intelligence,” said the founder.
When asked whether Momenta worries about challenges faced by Chinese firms amid geopolitical tensions and continuing U.S.-China technological decoupling, Jijay Shen, who recently joined Momenta as vice president of sales and marketing, said such situations are “uncontrollable” and “regulatory compliance” is the priority for entering any new market.
“The human race was able to achieve significant technological progress in the last 10 years exactly because tech companies from different countries are building on top of each other,” said Shen, who spent over a decade at Huawei and was formerly CEO of the telecoms giant’s Ireland business.
“But because of geopolitical factors, many markets will begin to consider self-subsistence in the short term… I can’t conclude what is better, but I think the whole ecosystem and supply chain need to think what’s better — self-subsistence or interdependence.”
Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE” at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.
https://ift.tt/3r1Itbp Betting on China’s driverless future, Toyota, Bosch, Daimler jump on board Momenta’s $500M round https://ift.tt/30WIdQd
As WhatsApp spends months to address users’ concerns and confusion about its planned policy update, there is evidently one entity it hasn’t had much luck making inroads with: The Government of India.
The Indian government alleged on Friday that WhatsApp’s planned privacy update, which goes into effect in two months, violates local laws on several counts.
In a filing to the Delhi High Court, the federal government also asked the court to prevent Facebook-owned messaging app from rolling out the update in India, WhatsApp’s biggest market by users.
“Social media in recent years has been used by billions of people around the world and millions of Indians today are dependent on WhatsApp. Therefore, information that is generally personal is shared at an enormous level. This information is susceptible to being misused if the social media giant decides to either sell or exploit the information, sensitive to the users, to any third party,” the government wrote in the filing.
The filing suggests that WhatsApp hasn’t been able to assuage concerns of New Delhi, which first raised issue about the planned policy update in January.
Earlier this year, India’s IT ministry had written to Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, to express its “grave concerns” about the update and its implications and had “called upon to withdraw the proposed changes.”
A WhatsApp spokesperson declined to comment.
The Indian government’s unchanging stand — and ongoing legal case — on WhatsApp’s forthcoming terms and conditions change is the latest headache for the popular instant messaging firm, which is also grappling with a forthcoming guideline from New Delhi that could require WhatsApp to compromise end-to-end encryption it offers on its service.
Used by over 2 billion users, WhatsApp has been sharing some information with parent firm Facebook since 2016. The company, which hasn’t substantially updated its terms of service since, said last year that it will be making some changes to share a set of personal data about users such as their phone number and location with Facebook.
Through an in-app alert earlier this year, WhatsApp asked users to share their consent for the new terms in January, which prompted an immediate backlash from some users. Following the backlash — which saw tens of millions of users explore competing services such as Signal and Telegram — WhatsApp said it will give users three additional months to review its new policy. (On a side note, Signal mobile apps had crossed 100 million monthly active users in February, according to a popular mobile insight firm.)
from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J India asks court to block WhatsApp’s policy update, says new change violates laws Manish Singh https://ift.tt/38Xk1l9
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Ideally, it is expected of every business to reach its customers effectively.However, that’s not the case as limiting factors that hinder proper digital communication come into play at different growth stages.Termii, a Nigerian communications platform-as-a-service startup that solves this problem for African businesses, announced today that it has closed a $1.4 million seed round.
The round was co-led by African early-stage VC firm Future Africa and Japanese but Africa-focused VC Kepple Africa Ventures.Other investors include Acuity Ventures, Aidi Ventures, Assembly Capital, Kairos Angels, Nama Ventures, RallyCap Ventures, and Remapped Ventures.
Angel investors like Ham Serunjogi, co-founder and CEO of Chipper Cash; Josh Jones, former co-founder and CTO, Dreamhost; and Tayo Oviosu, co-founder and CEO of Paga also participated.
Gbolade Emmanuel and Ayomide Awe launched Termii after Emmanuel’s experience as a digital marketer helped him recognize the need for businesses to have exceptional communication channels.The CEO consulted for these companies and leveraged emails toretaincustomers, but as he found out that this process was lethargic, he sought other channels as a replacement.
“That got me to start thinking about multichannel messaging.What it meant was that we needed to find how to allow companies to use WhatsApp, voice, SMSeffectively,” he said to TechCrunch.“And we had to make the process simple because in the African market, you can’t do complex stuff. You have to be as simple as possible.”
In 2017, the companyofficiallylaunched and subsequently secured investment from Lagos-based VC Microtraction. Emmanuel says the company found product-market fit two years later aftercollating enough data from companies in different industries to understand what theyreallywanted.
Termii found out thatin additionto assisting businesses toretaincustomers, there was a clear need to verify, authenticate and engage them.
“Many of these businesses we started engaging said they required tools toeffectivelycommunicate and verify customers because they were losing money at those points. For us, we saw it was a bigger problem,” Emmanuel added.
After making some tweaks, the team began to see an increase in customers numbers, especially amongst fintech startups.Positioning itself in the fast-moving space, Termii created an API-based communication infrastructure that caters to over 500 fintech startups across the continent.That’s not all. More than 1,000 businesses and developers are also using Termii’s API.
Some of these businesses include uLesson, Yassir, Helium Health, Piggyvest,Bankly, Paga, and TeamApt.
Playing in a $3.6 billion B2C communications marketestimatedto grow 6%annually, Termii runs a B2B2C model. But how does it make money?While a subscription-based model would’ve made sense, the two years spent by the company trying to find PMF made them think otherwise.
So the company leverages a virtual wallet systemtiedto a bank account andcustomers can make payments to the platform using mobile money, bank transfer, and credit cards.The startup charges these wallets on a per-message basis.It also does the same on every successful customer verification made towards customers’ contacts.
The Termii team
In early 2020, Termii started seeing immense progress and this coincided with their acceptance into Y Combinator.The growth continued throughout the year, growing its messaging transactions by 1000% and experiencing a 400% increase in its ARR.
Spilling into this year, Emmanuel says the company’s revenue is growing 60% month-on-month as a result of the surge in online financial transactions which to date makes up for 68% of the company’s total messaging transactions.
The seed investment that is coming a year after Termii graduated from the YC willbe usedfor expansion and launch more messaging offerings across Africa.
Emmanuel says the company has its sights on North Africa with a physical presence in Algeria for the expansion.The reason lies behind the fact that in this quarter, Nigeria has accounted for 76% of the company’s messaging transactions, while Algeria currently accounts for 15%.
With this new fundraising, the company plans to tap into the wealth of experience from some of its new investors like Oviosu and Serunjogi who have also taken local companies into expansion phases.
Termii’s round is also noteworthy because it strays away from the usual fintech, mobility, agritech and cleantech sectors that investors typically notice.In fact, there are only a handful of venture-backed communications platform-as-a-service companies on the continent. A notable example is Kenya’s Africa Talking.It might be a stretch to saywe mightsee more funding activity from this segment but one thing is apparent — investors are willing to place bets on less popular sectors.
Another highlight of Termii’s investment is that while foreign investors continue to dominate rounds in African tech startups, local and Africa-focused firms are beginning to step up by leading some which is a good sign for the bubbling ecosystem.
This round is also a big step for Future Africa. According to publicly available information, the firm is leading a million-dollar round for the first time since officially launching last year. This achievement is a continuation of its work over the past three quarters havinginvested in more than 10 African startups in the last three quarters and 30 startups in general.
Kepple Africa Ventures, the co-lead, is also an active investor and can be argued to be the most early-stage VC firm on the continent — in terms of the number of deals made. So far, the firm has invested in 79 companies across 11 countries.
Speaking on the investment for Kepple Africa, Satoshi Shinada, a partner at the firm, said, “Fragmented and unstable communication channels are one of the biggest challenges for the digitization of businesses in Africa.Emmanuel has proven that with his visionary goals and solid implementation of iterations on the ground, his teamis unparalleledto build an innovative solution in this space.”
https://ift.tt/3tA5J1J Nigeria’s Termii raises $1.4M seed led by Future Africa and Kepple Africa Ventures https://ift.tt/3lCONF1
For small and mid-sized restaurants in Nigeria and most of Africa, food procurement can be a complex process to manage. The system is such that a business caneasilyrun out of money or have considerable savings.Most restaurants don’t have access to dealdirectlywith farms to get better deals because they lack the staffing to chase them.Besides, they also don’t have the aggregation pull as single entities to directly get good value from the farms.
Nigerian startup Vendease solves this problem by building a marketplace that allows restaurants to buydirectlyfrom farms and food manufacturers.
The companywas founded by Tunde Kara, Olumide Fayankin, Gatumi Aliyu, and Wale Oyepeju.The idea for Vendease came when founders who have been friends for more than five years noticed their favorite restaurants in cities like Lagos and Accra shutting down.Inquisitive, they asked the owners who were acquaintances why, and the problems boiled down to the unreliable and expensive nature of food procurement in the cities.
Some months later they saw a hotel manageropenlycomplain to a vendor about the unsteady supply of produce the hotel was getting. It sparked an idea in the founders’ minds.
The established processes involved staff or a contract employee going to the market or using third-party vendors.The founders saw that these processes were often unreliable from the two unrelated events, and restaurants lost a lot of money from price inflation and bad produce.
“We thought to ourselves that if restaurant owners and hotel managers have these problems, let us actually do some research and find out if it is a problem we can solve, scale and make money while doing it,” Kara said to TechCrunch.
At the time, Kara, the CEO, and Fayankin, the COO, held the respective positions at a Pan-African media consulting company called RED Media.Aliyu, the chief product officer (CPO), also held a similar role at another Lagos and San Francisco-based, YC-backed startup, 54gene. Oyepeju, the CTO, was working on a couple of technology projects for corporates.
BeforeVendease, they had founded an adtech startup for ride-hailing companies, which didn’t survive for long.So this was another shot at another entrepreneurial journey, and after two and half months of iteration, the founders decided to launch the company in January 2020. They also closed an undisclosed pre-seed round to kickstart operations.
On its website, itis describedas “a procurement platform that provides a transparent process for hotels and restaurants to get the best quality products at the best possible price.” But Kara has a more fanciful description: The Amazon Prime for restaurants in Africa.
Customers can order anything ranging from bread to grains and meat to vegetables on the website. The order notification goes to the farms or food manufacturers, gets processed, and delivery is done within 24 hours.
“Why we call ourselves that is because we are deliberate about fulfilling our orders to restaurants and hotels in less than 24 hours. As most of us know, this issimilar tohow Amazon Prime prioritizes delivery,” he commented.
The speed and timely manner in which Vendease carries out its operations are such that it currently completes 80% of on-time and one-time deliveries across all orders.
Image Credits: Vendease
To further highlight how effective the company has been thus far, Kara claims that a good number of the 100 businesses using Vendease went from procuring only one type of produce to 80% of their catalog in two months.
As much as Vendease helps restaurants a lot, it also looks out for the vendors and farmers involved in the supply chain. Typically it takes two to three months for these set of customers to get the paymentsand this happens becauserestaurants and hotels take too long to balance their books before making payments.In effect, farmers and vendors mark up their prices to mitigate losses, making products more expensive for restaurants and hotels.
While growing up, Kara and Fayankin were on both sides of the vicious cycle.Growing up on a farm and helping his parents with livestock and crop care, Kara knows what it means tobe owedfor a long time.
“Those experiences help fuel what I do right now.Then, we had a problem selling our products and most times we ended up consuming them because we didn’t have enough off-takers. Even when you did, they’ll owe for six months. And this problem still exists to date.”
On the other side of the marketplace is Olumide, who grew up in a hotel and restaurant business.He runs and handles procurement activities and his experience is vital to how Vendease handles issues around unreliable and expensive supply of food produce. But now they are helping these customers reduce the waiting time to days.
Although they would’ve wanted to solve these problems earlier, their careers strayed toward media and energy.However, it has brought them back, and they’re solvingadditionalproblems they didn’t recognise in the past.They soon figured that customers couldn’t track most of their orders and be certain of what they got alongside the supply and cost issues.
Vendease has built all that to help these businesses digitize, track and automate their procurement and inventory management processes.It also helps with logistics, warehousing, quality control and financing where restaurants can buy goods and pay later.
In the next five years, the one-year-old company wants to be the operating system for food supplies in Africa. Kara talks of plans to expand to other African cities in the coming months but is tight-lipped on the names. As Demo Day approaches, the team will be looking to raise some moneyand follows Egypt’s Breadfast as the only restaurant-focused companies from Africa (although they have very different business models) that the accelerator has funded.
https://ift.tt/3lGR5mN Backed by YC, Vendease is building Amazon Prime for restaurants in Africa https://ift.tt/3bYJcWs
After that, we’ll start to come up with a 
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