Monthly Archives: May 2021

News: Holoride deploys Elrond blockchain and NFTs in prep for 2022 market launch

• May 20, 2021
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Holoride, the Audi spinoff that’s creating an in-vehicle XR passenger entertainment experience, is deploying blockchain technology and NFTs as the next stage in its preparation for a 2022 market launch.  The company, which closed a $12 million Series A in April, announced it would be integrating Elrond blockchain into its tech stack to bring transparency

Holoride, the Audi spinoff that’s creating an in-vehicle XR passenger entertainment experience, is deploying blockchain technology and NFTs as the next stage in its preparation for a 2022 market launch. 

The company, which closed a $12 million Series A in April, announced it would be integrating Elrond blockchain into its tech stack to bring transparency to its ecosystem of car manufacturers and content creators. Holoride hopes to use NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, to incentivize developers into creating more content on holoride’s platform for the promise of more money earned off token purchases, and to attract passengers who want to personalize their in-car experience. 

Blockchain… NFTs… is holoride just trying to be internet trendy? Maybe, but the blockchain integration at least has been in the works for the past year, says holoride CEO and founder Nils Wollny.

Holoride’s immersive in-vehicle media platform doesn’t need blockchain to function. Its passenger experiences sync to the real-time motion and location-based data of the vehicle, so content adjusts to vehicle motion (meaning no motion sickness!). Where blockchain plays a role is to help holoride fairly and transparently distribute content and compensate developers based on user engagement time and value distribution. 

“We said we want to connect all our ecosystem partners in a very fair and transparent manner from the beginning, and blockchain technology delivers exactly on that,” Wollny told TechCrunch. “Every transaction and engagement can be stored in the blockchain. For car manufacturers, they can see how much time was spent with holoride experiences in their cars, and for content creators it’s transparent on how much time was spent with their title they have created for our platform.”

NFTs are unique digital tokens that have a marked place on the blockchain and cannot be replaced with anything else. Most NFTs are part of Ethereum’s blockchain, but holoride’s will be supported by Elrond’s blockchain. 

Wollny hopes the enticement of buying or collecting NFTs while immersed in holoride’s experiences will lead to more engagement. He also anticipates the acceleration of what futurists and other tech nerds are calling the ‘metaverse’ or the concept of the digital and virtual world increasingly intertwining with physical and augmented reality.

Need help visualizing how this works while you’re strapped into a headset being driven to your next destination? For holoride, an NFT might start by connecting elements in the virtual world to locations or events in the real world. 

“Imagine people are traveling in their virtual vehicle, maybe it’s a spaceship or a submarine, as their physical body is in a car driving through the real world,” said Wollny. “They might pass by a certain location where a content creator decided to put something passengers can collect on their way.”

So it’s kind of like Pokémon GO, but you’re sitting in a car with a VR headset on rather than walking around outside holding your phone in front of you and following augmented reality anime pets like a lunatic. And when you catch the Pokémon, it’s unique and yours and no one else can have it unless you decide to trade it.

“Or maybe the user is really good at a game they’re playing and they earn rewards while playing,” Wollny continued. “You can maybe display them to other users or trade them in the future, bringing the real world and the virtual world closer together.”

The future of holoride’s NFTs really depends upon the extent to which passengers find themselves so immersed in their in-car experiences that they seek attachment and personalization in the form of digital tokens. Maybe Wollny has been spending too much time in virtual reality, or maybe he knows something we don’t about our inevitable reliance on extended reality. But as he told TechCrunch, this is only the genesis of the startup’s ecosystem, a step towards making holoride the “transportation company for the metaverse.”

News: Chile-based Kredito raises $4M to help businesses get loans

• May 20, 2021
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In the last few months, we’ve seen an explosion in funding for consumer banking startups in Latin America, all eager to reinvent traditional banking in the region. However, the business banking space seems like it’s also undergoing some changes. Today, Chile-based Kredito announced a $4 million pre-seed round. The company focuses on generating loans for

In the last few months, we’ve seen an explosion in funding for consumer banking startups in Latin America, all eager to reinvent traditional banking in the region. However, the business banking space seems like it’s also undergoing some changes.

Today, Chile-based Kredito announced a $4 million pre-seed round. The company focuses on generating loans for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). 

“What we see is that in our sector people have a bank account but don’t have access to credit,” said Sebastian Robles, co-founder and CEO of Kredito.

Robles explained that in Chile, when you open a business bank account, you don’t get a credit or debit card attached to it, so entrepreneurs usually have to use their personal cards.

“Ninety percent of our customers don’t have access to credit with their bank (but they have a bank account) and thanks to the power of AI they can have access to working capital for the first time,” added Robles.

By using an AI algorithm to underwrite the loans in real time, Kredito does all the heavy lifting and then connects the SMBs with a traditional bank that loans out the money.

“We use proprietary algorithms and alternative data to evaluate credit risk more inclusively than traditional banks,” the company said in a statement. This approach speeds up the process of getting a loan, which traditionally has taken weeks or months to complete.

While in beta, the company used data from more than 10,000 SMBs to train their AI models.

Kredito makes money by serving as lead generation for the traditional banks and charging them a small percentage for each loan they bring in.

In addition to its loan service, Kredito is also developing a debit card product that will be available in the next couple of months. Like other fintechs in the region, the company’s strategy is to launch individual financial products one at a time without having to apply to be a full bank.

“Being a bank is too expensive, so we use pieces of the ecosystem instead,” Robles told TechCrunch.

Kredito launched in March of this year and today the company has more than 2,000 active SMBs on the platform. 

In addition to offering new products, the company is very focused on offering optimal customer service, which is an area that traditional banks are lacking.  

“To open a bank account for our startup was more painful than raising our angel funds, and despite having $4 million in the bank, I still don’t have a line of credit for Kredito,” Robles said.

Investors in the round include a private VC fund from Maurice Khamis and Family, Link Capital Partners, partners from Patio Group, Karim Fajardin and other family offices focused on VC and fintech.

News: Dooly raises $80M more for its AI tools to help salespeople manage their busywork

• May 20, 2021
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Salespeople have more tools than ever these days to help them with their work, whether they are tools to source new leads, keep those leads interested or informed about what’s being sold, to track how the sales process is going, to manage those relationships once they are secured, or accounting tools to manage how and

Salespeople have more tools than ever these days to help them with their work, whether they are tools to source new leads, keep those leads interested or informed about what’s being sold, to track how the sales process is going, to manage those relationships once they are secured, or accounting tools to manage how and where sales are actually coming in. Today, a startup that’s built a platform to help manage the data entry that powers all of that is announcing a swift round of funding to build on momentum and interest in its technology.

Dooly — which has built a set of AI-based tools to automate the busywork that goes into updating data in sales software, specifically apps like Salesforce, in order to get the most out of that software — has closed $80 million in funding. Sources tell us that the money values the Vancouver-based startup at over $300 million.

This is a “swift” round in that efforts to raise and close the funding happened quickly, and come not two months after the company had announced a Series A and seed round totaling $20 million. (In fact, we got wind of this round a couple of weeks ago, so arguably it was less than two months since the previous announcement.)

This latest Series B is being led by Spark Capital, with Greenspring, Tiger Global, Lachy Groom, boldstart ventures, BoxGroup and Addition also participating. Several of these are repeat investors.

Investor interest in the company is coming in part because of what Dooly is adding to the bigger mix of sales tools; and in part because of the traction it has already picked up for that.

While there are indeed a number of apps that salespeople can use these days, that has presented something of a predicament for many salespeople: tending to the data in each of these, updating records and helping them tick along, can be a very time-consuming task that takes people away from doing what they do best.

That predicament has perhaps been heightened in the last year, as organizations push for “digital transformation” — investing in newer IT — to better adapt to workforces that are not in the office all the time, and in many cases haven’t been in an office together for a year and with some perhaps never to return again. That’s in many cases translated to using a ton more software to manage those people, what they do, and how they engage with each other when in-person is not an option.

Dooly’s proposition is that it uses AI tools like natural language processing to let people take notes on meetings and other work which it then intelligently can feed into other applications to let them work as they should.

Kris Hartvigsen, Dooly’s CEO himself experienced these pain points firsthand as a top salesperson for a number of other companies and this served as his motivation for building Dooly.

“This was born out of pain,” he said. “When I was in a previous role as a top sales performer, I was constantly in this mode that eroded my time. The headwinds now are for remote working, but not everyone is benefitting from this remote world as much as Zoom is. Some are finding it harder to hit their numbers so you want to spend more time, not less, speaking to customers.”

He describes his business as “the table cloth that goes over the table that no one wants to sit at” and more seriously, “a clean overlay to systems” that is very aware of the challenges salespeople face on a practical, operational level. “We are always mindful of thinking of workflows that hinder users from peak value mode.”

The the app, in his words, “plays nice” with a number of services both to ingest information — these, for example, include tools like Gong that among other things monitor voice-based sales calls to provide real-time feedback and transcripts), as well as those that are used to record what is going on, like Salesforce. It also integrates with Slack and G-Suite and other popular apps.

Then, in addition to being able to use and populate relevant data easily across multiple apps, Dooly also provides some guidance, based on the data it is seeing, to give suggestions on closing deals.

This is music to many salespeople’s ears, it seems. It now has some 500 businesses as customers, and says the list includes revenue teams at Asana, BigCommerce, Contentful, Figma, Intercom, Lessonly, and Procore, and more.

Up to now, the company has been growing organically, through word-of-mouth — which is perhaps the best kind of sales pitch and success that any company can hope for. Ironically, now that it’s model has been well proven out, it will quite possibly be using its own tools to expand its reach even more.

“Dooly is building one of the most consequential enterprise companies of the next decade,” said Will Reed, a general partner at Spark Capital. “We are thrilled to support Dooly as it continues to power the most forward-thinking revenue teams, and believe it will ultimately define the connected workspace category via its relentless focus on customers and product-led growth.” Reed is joining the board with this round.

News: Berlin’s Trade Republic nabs $900M led by Sequoia at a $5B valuation to take its neo-broker app across Europe

• May 20, 2021
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Consumers are moving into investing to complement — or in some cases, offset — less good returns from things like traditional savings accounts with low interest rates or pensions, and today one of the bigger “neo-brokers” in Europe helping to open up that opportunity is announcing a monster round of funding to fuel its growth.

Consumers are moving into investing to complement — or in some cases, offset — less good returns from things like traditional savings accounts with low interest rates or pensions, and today one of the bigger “neo-brokers” in Europe helping to open up that opportunity is announcing a monster round of funding to fuel its growth.

Trade Republic, which lets people buy and sell shares, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), derivatives and most recently cryptocurrency by way of a mobile app that does not charge commissions (but does have a fee structure for various services), has raised $900 million in a Series C round of funding that values the Berlin startup at $5 billion.

The funding has a very strong bench of investors behind it. It is being led by Sequoia, with new backers TCV and Thrive Capital, as well as previous backers Accel, Founders Fund, Creandum and Project A, also participating. Accel and Founders Fund co-led Trade Republic’s Series B a year ago.

The investment catapults the Berlin-based startup into being of the biggest privately-held fintech businesses in the region, and while Trade Republic is currently only active in Germany, Austria and France, Christian Hecker (who co-founded the company with Marco Cancellieri and Thomas Pischke) said the startup will be using the funds to expand to many more countries (which will include not just sorting out licenses to do so, but implementing larger regional operations, hence the large round of funding).

“It’s our ambition to be present across the entire Eurozone in the next four months,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. That will start with Spain and Italy, followed by Benelux, Ireland, and Finland, he added. His view is that what Trade Republic provides is a resource that everyone should be able to access. “It really hurts me to see that the those demographic or macroeconomic factors [that are impacting users in Germany, France and Austria] are basically burning all continental European countries. So I think that’s really, really important we launch in all of those nations.” The UK is also on the target list, he noted, but Brexit has definitely thrown a proverbial spanner into the works on sorting that one out.

The turning tides of consumer habits, and economic trends, are indeed playing in favor of apps like Trade Republic that are giving people a crack at investing, an area of financial services that has traditionally been reserved for wealthier individuals with large sums of money and access to brokers to help them manage that.

For more ordinary people in Europe, interest rates have been at an all-time low, making traditional savings a less-compelling way of growing money; and given the rate of inflation, there are concerns that state pensions — Social Security, as it’s known in the U.S. — will not be enough for average consumers to live on in their later years without a supplement, while private pension plans are not widely used to supplement that already.

Enter “neo-brokers” who are leveraging the ubiquity of smartphones and mobile apps, and a growing acceptance of carrying out financial services like payments or banking using them, to build a new approach to investing, one that is far more accessible to a wider pool of consumers by splitting the stock investing into increments or making way to invest in funds that are composites of many stocks; or indeed giving users a way of investing into alternative areas like cryptocurrency.

Or, as Hecker sums it up: “We have negative interest rates, and we have inflation, and we have a huge pension gap. All three factors demand that you need to do something for yourself.”

This has meant a massive shift in stock trading that has led to the rise of a number of new players, including Robinhood in the U.S. (which has tried but has yet to make a move into Europe); eToro, which in March announced it was going public by way of a SPAC valuing it at $10 billion; Bux, which raised $80 million just last month; and neo-bank Revolut, which also provides stock trading services. It is also leading to the growth of completely new approaches to the concept, such as Rally creating a new market for investing in collectibles, and most recently NFTs to turn “everything” into an investible asset. Rally too raised $30 million led by Accel this week.

All those trends, and the wider rise of services to let you trade by phone, has led to a huge boost for Trade Republic. Last year when announcing its Series B, Trade Republic said it had more than €1 billion under management. Now, that figure has ballooned to €6 billion, coming from just 1 million customers in the three markets where the startup is active: Germany, Austria and France.

Doing the math on that, customers on average are putting some €6,000 per account into Trade Republic, although in practice — and as a mark of the “democratization” that the company touts as part of its mass-market appeal — some are putting significantly less, and some significantly more, than that amount.

Hecker said that some users are earmarking as much as 20-30% of their salaries or savings on a monthly basis, and the idea is not so much about quick returns from quick trades, as it is about people looking longer-term gains.

“We’ve never been a trading platform,” Hecker said, referring to the fact that many people tread their Trade Republic accounts as a savings plan. And for that reason, he wouldn’t really be drawn out on what kind of returns people could expect from the investments except to say that they are in line with how the general market provides gains, and would depend on what you invest in.

“I think what’s very exciting about being a savings plan is that it’s not only bound to short term returns,” he said, noting that a recent customer survey found that 70% of Trade Republic’s customers “are not looking for short-term gains, or investing with the sole purpose to benefit from the average buying effect.” Users, he said, “believe in trends, like sustainability, or the ability of the U.S. technology industry to really grow for the next 10 to 30 years.”

The funding and valuation, and the story that the company likes to tell about its potential to help the average consumer have a better financial outcome with what money they have to hand, certainly seem to set up the startup to begin positioning itself as a more permanent part of the financial fabric, although as we have unfortunately seen, that can be a slippery idea not just in the world of financial services, but in the world of startups, too.

This is one reason why the fact that the company has a banking license comes in handy: it means that customers get deposit insurance of up to €100,000 per account (similar to how the FDIC backs banks in the U.S.).

Sequoia has been a strong investor in fintechs, backing the likes of Klarna and Nubank, and this comes as the firm is expanding its reach in the region after opening its first European office, in London.

“The democratization of financial markets will be one of the most important consumer trends of the next decade,” says Doug Leone, partner at Sequoia, in a statement. “Trade Republic is on the leading edge of this trend and has attracted an untapped generation of European savers who demand increased financial accessibility. We’re thrilled to partner with Christian, Thomas, Marco and their team as they deliver a product and experience that customers love.”

News: WalletsClub wants to be the ‘Visa for e-wallets’ across the world

• May 20, 2021
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Digital payments are going mainstream around the world. By the end of 2020, there were more than 300 mobile money providers with over 100,000 active users, according to a report published by GSMA, an industry association for mobile network operators. Altogether, over 300 million mobile money accounts were active every month around the world. Mobile

Digital payments are going mainstream around the world. By the end of 2020, there were more than 300 mobile money providers with over 100,000 active users, according to a report published by GSMA, an industry association for mobile network operators. Altogether, over 300 million mobile money accounts were active every month around the world.

Mobile money providers — more commonly known as e-wallets — are used to transfer money, pay and receive payments through mobile phones without the need for a traditional bank. They are useful so long as they enjoy wide adoption and a strong network effect. But even a popular service like Ant Groups’s Alipay, which has over one billion annual users, is practically unusable outside China due to its low penetration in most countries.

The problem is there is no interoperability between most wallets as there is between traditional banks, suggested Xue Zhixiang, who worked on the basic infrastructure for Alibaba’s cloud unit and Alipay before starting WalletsClub.

Registered in Hong Kong in 2019 with a small operational team in mainland China, WalletsClub sets its sights on becoming the Visa for digital wallets, making money transfers possible between the world’s hundreds of electronic money services.

“We are like a clearinghouse for digital wallets,” said Xue, the company’s CEO.

A clearing system is an intermediary for two parties engaged in a financial transaction. It’s designed to ensure the efficiency and security of a transfer by validating the availability of the funds and logging the transfer between two transacting parties. Payments can be sent and received in real-time using WalletsClub, Xue claimed, and its technology is based on the “ISO 20022” standard, a common language for financial institutions to exchange data across the globe.

In other words, WalletsClub is going after the hundreds of e-wallets around the world rather than individual end-users. Its vision is to let people pay with any mobile wallet anywhere as long as the sender’s service provider or financial institution and the receiver’s equivalent services are members of WalletsClub, similar to how Visa and Mastercard process credit cards issued by different banks that are in their networks. The company plans to monetize by charging a flat fee per transaction.

By adding interoperability to electronic wallets, even small, regional players can thrive because they gain compatibility wherever a clearing system is in place.

Instead of challenging the traditional financial system, WalletsClub wants to provide a way for unbanked individuals to easily move money around through digital wallets, which are easier to obtain than a bank account. A big demand will come from overseas migrant workers who need to send money back to their home countries, such as the millions of Southeast Asian workers abroad.

WalletsClub is potentially encroaching on the territory of a few players. Expatriate workers sending money home currently revert to longstanding remittance services like Western Union or MoneyGram, which have large networks of “agent” locations where users go send or collect money. In 2018, Alipay began allowing users in Hong Kong to send money to GCash accounts in the Philippines, but “the focus of Ant Group is payments rather than remittance,” Xue observed.

In 2019, money sent home from diaspora workers became the largest source of external financing in low- and middle-income countries excluding China, according to World Bank data. The money flows amounted to over $500 billion and surpassed the levels of foreign direct investment in these regions.

The other type of business that a clearinghouse for mobile wallets could threaten is cross-border payment aggregators, which save merchants from having to integrate with various digital payment methods.

The biggest challenge for the nascent startup is to establish trust with clients. At this stage, WalletsClub in talks with electronic money services founded by Chinese entrepreneurs in Hong Kong, Singapore and Canada. Chinese-made wallets are especially plentiful in emerging markets, thanks to these founders’ learning from China’s fintech boom over the decade. Many of them found it hard to compete with behemoths like Tencent and Ant, let alone China’s tightening regulations around fintech.

“If we reach 20 members and have several hundreds of transactions between every pair of members on a daily basis, we are basically profitable,” said Xue, adding that the goal is to onboard a dozen customers by this year.

News: &Open raises $7.2M from First Round Capital and LocalGlobe to send gifts at scale

• May 20, 2021
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We live in a world where companies have to send out ‘gifts’ to individuals. Chocolate bars. Bottles of wine. You name it. Companies are gifting it. But right now, that operation is buried in a marketing department on a spreadsheet, as is mostly pretty disorganized. A handful of startups realized it could be done better

We live in a world where companies have to send out ‘gifts’ to individuals. Chocolate bars. Bottles of wine. You name it. Companies are gifting it. But right now, that operation is buried in a marketing department on a spreadsheet, as is mostly pretty disorganized.

A handful of startups realized it could be done better and at scale, among them Sendoso (which has raised $52.7M) and ReachDesk ($6M).

Joining this clan is a startup with the tortuous name of “&Open” (yes, ‘ampersand open’, pronounced ‘And Open’ for those of you at the back).

Suffice it to say, that despite its name it’s raised $7.2 million to makes it easier for brands to send carefully gifts to customers to boost loyalty and engagement. First Round Capital and LocalGlobe led the Seed round along with participation from angel investors including Andrew Robb (Farfetch), Des Traynor (Intercom) and Liam Casey (PCH). The funds will be used to scale to Europe and the US. Currently &Open claims to deliver more than 3,500 gifts every week.

Dublin-based &Open launched in 2017 and was founded by Ciara Flood, formerly buyer at Net-a-Porter and part of the founding team at Mr Porter, together with her husband Jonathan Legge, and her and brother-in-law, Mark Legge. The brothers previously founded the high-end gift and homeware venture Makers & Brothers.

&Open (please God, take me now…) counts Airbnb, Spotify, and Peloton among their customers.

Gifting can be powerful. According to one study which the company cites, customers who feel emotionally connected to a brand have been shown to create a 306% higher lifetime value. This is in stark contrast to existing, traditional Meanwhile, Schemes like corporate gifts, branded merchandise, loyalty programmes, and vouchers don’t work, claims &Open.

Jonathan Legge said: “Customers will choose brands who prioritize care and connection over transactional relationships. A thoughtful gift can make all the difference — both for a customer’s experience and their advocacy and loyalty to a brand.”

Hayley Barna, Partner at First Round Capital, said: “Gone are the days of relying on a points-based loyalty scheme to keep your customers engaged and happy. Brands increasingly need to work harder to retain customers and &Open provides an elegant solution to this conundrum.”

News: Climate risk platform Cervest raises $30M Series A led by Draper Esprit

• May 20, 2021
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Cervest – a startup with a platform that claims to quantify climate risk across multiple decades and threats down to the asset level – has raised a $30 million Series A round led by Draper Esprit. Previous investors Astanor Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital (Chris Sacca), and Future Positive Capital also participated in the round, and were

Cervest – a startup with a platform that claims to quantify climate risk across multiple decades and threats down to the asset level – has raised a $30 million Series A round led by Draper Esprit. Previous investors Astanor Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital (Chris Sacca), and Future Positive Capital also participated in the round, and were joined by new investors UNTITLED, the venture fund of Magnus Rausing, and TIME Ventures, the venture fund of Marc Benioff. Cervest’s total funding now stands at $36.2 million. It previously raised $5.2M in 2019.

Cervest’s competitors include Jupiter Intelligence, which has raised $35M to Series B level, but Cervest claims it has a more data + AI approach.

The company will use the new funding to expand in the U.S. and European markets through its freemium model
It’s widely accepted now, with unpredictable weather patterns and clear climate “weirding” that these weather events are of huge risk to trillions of dollars of physical assets.

Cervest says its “Climate Intelligence” platform has been built through peer-reviewed research over the five years and combines public and private data sources (i.e. NOAA, ECMWF, CMIP6), machine learning, and statistical science to come up with a view of climate risks to assets.

‘EarthScan’ will be its first product, giving enterprises and governments a view on how flooding, droughts, and extreme temperatures can impact the assets they own or manage,going back 50 years and looking forward 80 years.

Iggy Bassi, Founder and CEO of Cervest said: “Climate Intelligence is Business Intelligence for managing climate risk. Climate volatility has thrown us into a new era where Climate Intelligence needs to be integrated into all decisions. Organizations that fail to do so risk being blindsided by climate events such as the recent floods and fires in Australia, the droughts in Europe, and the winter freeze in Texas. Much of the spotlight is on decarbonization today. While this is absolutely necessary, it is not sufficient to build asset-level resilience.”

Vinoth Jayakumar, Partner and Fintech Practice Lead at Draper Esprit added: “Climate Tech has grabbed a lot of attention recently, with good reason… Cervest’s pioneering approach to quantifying risk, in a way that was never before possible, means we can better understand the economics of the problem and bring real-world market solutions to bear.”

News: Uncapped, which provides upfront revenue to digital companies, raises $80M in funding

• May 20, 2021
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Buzzy US startup Pipe — which claims to be the “Nasdaq for revenue” — has just raised $250 million at a $2 billion valuation? The secret for the hype? It gives SaaS companies a way to get their revenue upfront, by “pairing them with investors on a marketplace that pays a discounted rate for the

Buzzy US startup Pipe — which claims to be the “Nasdaq for revenue” — has just raised $250 million at a $2 billion valuation? The secret for the hype? It gives SaaS companies a way to get their revenue upfront, by “pairing them with investors on a marketplace that pays a discounted rate for the annual value of those contracts”, as my colleague Mary Ann Azevedo so eloquently put it.

Virtually the same model is about to hit Europe in various guises, and the newest of the crop will be Uncapped, a London-based startup that plans to extend the model not just to SaaS companies but also to the booming sector of E-commerce.

It’s now raised an $80 million combined funding round of debt and equity to launch a suite of banking services tailored to the needs of this new wave of tech-driven companies. The round was led by Lakestar. Uncapped’s previous investors include All Iron Ventures, White Star Capital, Global Founders Capital, and Mouro Capital.

The company plans to use the cash to move into the banking space, with new products and services. Last year, the company began issuing Visa cards.

Founded in 2019, Uncapped is positioned as an alternative to traditional debt financing and venture capital, providing companies with growth finance for a flat fee which goes down to 6%, and fast-released capital. Businesses repay the capital as they make revenue. There is no set repayment and no compounding interest, equity, or personal guarantees. There are even no credit checks or business plans required.

Uncapped arrives at an opportune moment. The pandemic has led to an e-commerce boom, but the sector requires much more capital than existing VCs can provide. Legacy banks don’t ‘get’ new entrepreneurs. Neo Banks are trying to provide it, but can still be slow.

Piotr Pisarz, Co-Founder of Uncapped, said: “Digital companies are innovating and evolving faster than ever before, but their legacy banking providers are not keeping up with the pace. We want to help digital entrepreneurs with quick access to funding, insights that help their business grow, rewards they actually care about, and modern integrations that will save them time and money.”

“The reality is that legacy banks don’t really understand the needs of digital entrepreneurs, and their dated infrastructure is not up to the standards required to help their business grow. So it’s no surprise that 82% of business owners say they are unhappy with their bank,” Asher Ismail, Co-Founder of Uncapped, added.

Nicolas Brand, Partner at Lakestar, said: “The composition of our economies is changing, with digital native businesses contributing an ever-increasing share to overall GDP. Uncapped uses real-time data provided by its clients across APIs to offer bespoke credit and other novel banking services.”

News: White Star Capital launches new $50M crypto/blockchain fund backed by Bpifrance, Ubisoft

• May 20, 2021
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White Star Capital, better known as a VC which, in its time, has backed the likes of Digg, launchrock, Meero, Summly, and Tier, among others, is moving into the hot world of crypto and blockchain with a new $50M Digital Asset Fund. The special-vehicle fund will specialize in investing in crypto-networks and blockchain-enabled businesses and

White Star Capital, better known as a VC which, in its time, has backed the likes of Digg, launchrock, Meero, Summly, and Tier, among others, is moving into the hot world of crypto and blockchain with a new $50M Digital Asset Fund.

The special-vehicle fund will specialize in investing in crypto-networks and blockchain-enabled businesses and was previously going to be $30 million before raising more backing. Both Bpifrance and Ubisoft are among those institutions backing the new fund.

The fund will be run by New York-based General Partner Sep Alavi and supported by Principals Thomas Klocanas in New York and Sanjay Zimmerman in Toronto. The will deploy between $500,000 and $3.0 million in initial investments into 15-20 companies with a focus on North America and Europe.

Alavi said: “We are hyper-focused on this space and we expect to see further innovative use cases such as crypto credit, DeFi, NFTs, metaverses and more manifesting at an accelerated pace… With this fund, We are actively investing in crypto protocols, infrastructure, privacy, financial, gaming, and social use cases.”

The fund has already made six investments including; dfuse, Multis, Paraswap, Rally, Safello, a European crypto brokerage that went public on the Nasdaq First North stock exchange on May 12, and Ledn, a global digital asset savings, and credit platform.

Yoann Caujolle, managing director of Bpifrance said: “It’s critical that emerging crypto and blockchain-enabled startups receive investment from firms and professionals who have the experience and knowledge to help drive their businesses forward,” said “We’re pleased to partner with the Digital Asset Fund team for bringing their support and vision into the French and European blockchain and digital asset ecosystem.”

Over a call, Alavi told me: “White Star is investing across three funds, obviously our fund one, fund two, and in this new specialized Digital Asset Fund. Historically we’ve invested in enterprise and consumer businesses, we’ve not done any, any blockchain, but for two years ago we’ve been looking at this sector. And we believe that this merits its own dedicated vehicle. I’ve been personally been investing in blockchain the blockchain ecosystem since 2015 and bring your five-plus years of domain expertise and then I was able to build a team around this new fund.”

“We are, we’re looking at the three main verticals in this sector. The protocol layer, the infrastructure layer, and the application layer. That’s the kind of high-level thesis. The protocol layer is where we invest in tokens, because it’s important to mention that the fund will also hold tokens as investments as well as equity. On top of that, we’re pretty much agnostic and opportunistic. We see great use cases in decentralized finance. We see some great use cases in the NFT space and have made investments there as well. As long as we’re true to those three verticals that I mentioned, we will capture great value there.”

News: Virtuo raises $96M for its streamlined take on car rentals

• May 20, 2021
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Car ownership has become pricey and untenable in many towns and cities in Europe: between congestion charges to reduce emissions, parking fees, and traffic, many consumers opt instead to use public transportation, two wheels, cabs or their own legs to get around. To add to that mix for longer journeys, today a startup that’s building

Car ownership has become pricey and untenable in many towns and cities in Europe: between congestion charges to reduce emissions, parking fees, and traffic, many consumers opt instead to use public transportation, two wheels, cabs or their own legs to get around. To add to that mix for longer journeys, today a startup that’s building a new take on car rental is announcing some funding to scale out its service.

Virtuo, a Paris-based startup that has built a very streamlined, all-digital approach for those who want to rent a car for a few days, or up to a few months, has picked up $96 million, money that it will be using to invest in its tech; to expand to more markets beyond France (12 cities including Paris), UK (London, Manchester and Edinburgh) and Spain (Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia); to add in a tier for business users; and to add more vehicles into the mix. The company currently has 150,000 active users, and grew 100% (2x) this last year, said co-founder Karim Kaddoura.

“The rise of the ‘staycation’ boosted our business,” he said. “And we saw a surge in the average duration of a rental.”

All-digital and streamlined in the case of Virtuo means exactly that: currently there are only two models to choose from outside of France — either a Mercedes Benz A-Class or a Mercedes GLA SUV — but there is no paperwork, with everything handled through an app, and you have the option of getting a car delivered to and picked up from you, meaning no lines in airports or hotel garages, and you get a virtual key to operate it.

The funding is coming in the form of a $60 million Series C and $36 million in asset financing. AXA Venture Partners, the strategic investment arm of the insurance giant, led the equity round, with new investors Bpifrance, Alpha Intelligence Capital and H14; and previous backers Balderton Capital, Iris Capital and Raise Ventures, also participating. Natixis, members of Banque Populaire and Caisse d’Epargne Group handled the asset financing.

While companies like Zipcar, Getaround or Turo (which has, interestingly acquired Virtuo as a Google search, and even writes “Virtuo” on its search resultshave made it easy to rent cars for a day or as little as a few hours in cities, Virtuo provides a modern take on the more traditional use case for renting cars: when you need a vehicle for longer journeys that can take up to several days, and specifically in the case of Virtuo between one and 90 days.

As Kaddoura — who co-founded Virtuo with Thibault Chassagne — notes, traditional car rental companies serving that market are typically still pretty rigid with how they do things.

Even if you initiate a process online, there is usually still paperwork that needs to be filled out in person; and you need to go to a rental hub — in an airport or a hotel, but not necessarily in your neighborhood — to pick up the car. The process for checking them out and in can also be tedious and the costs for all of this quite high, with many moments where the rental company might upsell you to make a basic price suddenly quite premium.

“The car rental industry itself is huge but consumers in it are completely underserved,” Kaddoura said.

And on the other side of the equation, there is a growing case for not owning a car if you live in a city or large town.

“Our aha-moment was when we looked into the numbers,” he said. “In Paris, there are 700,000 cars parked in the streets, with twice that in London. The average European spends €7,500 per car per year when you calculate parking, insurance, damage, taxes, and the price of the car averaged out. That’s €5 billion spent by Parisians, yet those cars are idle 95% of the time. Forget the financial part and look at the impact cars have on our lives and livelihoods, occupying 50% of our urban space.” It’s all the more ironic, Kaddoura noted, given that his father is a car dealer who completely expected his son to go into business with him one day.

It’s partly because of this environmental angle that Virtuo is also going to be expanding its fleet to include more electric vehicles: it already inludes Hyundai’s Kona Electric vehicles in its fleets in France, and the plan is to expand to have 50% of its fleet electrified by 2025, with 100% of it covered by electric vehicles by 2030. It also has been offsetting 100% of its carbon footprint since January of this year.

The funding round being announced today comes after what has been a challenging period for any company with a business model predicated on people leaving their homes to do things, not least to do things in spaces others have recently occupied. That is to say, Covid-19 has encourage people to stay home and socially distance, so a car rental — which encourages travel and specifically travel in a vehicle someone else has been in — may be a challenging sell.

Although revenues grew in 2020, it’s perhaps partly because of the bigger market conditions that Virtuo somewhat slowed down its roll. When we covered its last round of funding, in 2019, the company said the money would be used to expand to Spain and Germany, and more markets in the UK, that year, and it was also live in Belgium. Now, Kaddoura confirms that now Germany will only be coming online in 2022. Milan will be as soon as later this month, he said, with the bigger plan being to be live in 10 countries by 2025. (And Belgium is no longer online, it seems.)

Added to its own scaling ambitions, however, the opportunity that Virtuo is targeting is not one that others have ignored. In addition to others like Getaround (which recently got a big round), Drover out of the UK, Zipcar and Turo providing more streamlined rental and car-sharing experiences, recently Uber also expanded a car rental offering in partnership with a third party called CarTrawler. This is not a fully integrated service like Virtuo’s, nor a peer-to-peer offering like Getaround, but something that appears to aggregate and search across the same traditional car rental companies that Virtuo is competing against. That makes it, potentially, a direct competitor.

“We are very proud and excited to be part of the Virtuo adventure alongside the Virtuo team, led by Karim and Thibault,” said Benoit Fosseprez, general partner at AXA Venture Partners, in a statement. “Virtuo has quickly become a tech leader disrupting the car rental space, with a clear long-term vision and strong ambitions for growth into new markets. We have been impressed by the Virtuo team and look forward to working closely together on the next stages of their development. With this investment in Virtuo, the first for our Growth II fund, we are confirming our ambition in the tech-led high growth companies segment.”

“We are delighted to support Virtuo in its development,” said Caroline Lebel of Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund, in a separate statement. “The company offers a true alternative to owning private cars for city dwellers who wish to use more sustainable shared mobility solutions. Born in the digital era, Virtuo’s 100% digital experience is backed by powerful technology and artificial intelligence to optimize its operations. We are convinced that the mobility of tomorrow must be built with strong technology at its core, addressing new behaviors and with the freedom of choice of a multimodal offer.”