Monthly Archives: July 2021

News: Epic Games acquires Sketchfab, a 3D model sharing platform

• July 21, 2021
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New York-based startup Sketchfab has been acquired by Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite and Unreal Engine. Sketchfab has been building a platform to upload, download, view, share, sell and buy 3D assets. Essentially, it is the leading repository for 3D files on the web. Epic Games isn’t disclosing the terms of the deal. Sketchfab

New York-based startup Sketchfab has been acquired by Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite and Unreal Engine. Sketchfab has been building a platform to upload, download, view, share, sell and buy 3D assets. Essentially, it is the leading repository for 3D files on the web.

Epic Games isn’t disclosing the terms of the deal. Sketchfab will still operate as a separate brand and offering. Epic Games also says that all integrations with third-party tools will remain available, including with Unity.

The deal makes a ton of sense as Epic Games has been developing — and acquiring — some of the most popular creation tools. Unreal Engine has been one of the most popular video game engines of the past couple of decades.

More recently, Unreal Engine has been used for different use cases beyond video games, such as special effects, 3D explorations of virtual worlds, mixed reality projects and more.

But an engine without assets is pretty useless. That’s why creators either design their own 2D and 3D assets, outsource this process or buy assets directly. It led to the creation of an entire ecosystem of assets and creators.

Epic Games has its own Unreal Engine marketplace, but Sketchfab has been working on building the definitive 3D marketplace for many years with three important pillars — technology, reach and collaboration.

On the technology front, Sketchfab lets you view 3D models on any platform. The Sketchfab viewer works with all major browsers on both desktop and mobile — you can see an example on Sketchfab. It also works with VR headsets. You can upload 3D models from your favorite 3D modeling app, such as Blender, 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D and Substance Painter.

Sketchfab can also convert any format into glTF and USDZ file formats. Those formats work particularly well on Android and iOS.

When it comes to reach, Sketchfab has grown tremendously over the years. In 2018, the company shared some metrics — 1 billion views, 2 million members and 3 million 3D models. Around the same time, the company launched a store so that creators can buy and sell assets directly on the platform.

Finally, Sketchfab launched an interesting feature for companies that work with 3D models all the time — Sketchfab for Teams. It’s a software-as-a-service play that lets you share a Sketchfab account with the rest of the team. Essentially, it works a bit like a shared Google Drive folder — but for 3D models.

With today’s acquisition, Epic Games is making some immediate changes. Starting today, store fees have been reduced from 30% to 12% — just like on the Epic Games Store. The company lowered commissions on ArtStation immediately after acquiring ArtStation as well.

As for Sketchfab users paying a monthly subscription fee, everything is a bit cheaper now. All features in the Plus plan are now available for free, all features in the Pro plan are available to Plus subscribers, etc.

“We built Sketchfab with a mission to empower a new era of creativity and provide a service for creators to showcase their work online and make 3D content accessible,” Sketchfab co-founder and CEO Alban Denoyel said in the announcement. “Joining Epic will enable us to accelerate the development of Sketchfab and our powerful online toolset, all while providing an even greater experience for creators. We are proud to work alongside Epic to build the Metaverse and enable creators to take their work even further.”

With the acquisitions of ArtStation and Capturing Reality, Epic Games has been on an acquisition spree. It’s clear that the company wants to build an end-to-end developer suite for the gaming industry.

News: Accion Systems raises $42 million in Series C to accelerate development of 4th-gen propulsion system

• July 21, 2021
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Space propulsion developer Accion Systems has closed its most significant funding round yet. The company raised $42 million in a Series C led by Tracker Capital, bringing its valuation to $83.5 million. Along with the investment, Tracker Capital also acquired a majority stake in the company. This latest injection of capital will facilitate the development

Space propulsion developer Accion Systems has closed its most significant funding round yet. The company raised $42 million in a Series C led by Tracker Capital, bringing its valuation to $83.5 million.

Along with the investment, Tracker Capital also acquired a majority stake in the company. This latest injection of capital will facilitate the development and manufacturing of the company’s fourth generation propulsion system, dubbed the tiled ionic liquid electrospray (TILE) system.

The TILE system uses electrical energy to push charge particles (ions) out its back to generate propulsion. While ion engines have been around for decades, Accion uses a liquid propellant, an ionic liquid salt, instead of gas. The liquid is inert and non-pressurized, meaning there’s no risk of explosion. It also results in a product that doesn’t need bulky components like ionization chambers, and an overall smaller and lighter weight system relative to the spacecraft – key considerations in space, where every gram of payload has a high price tag.

“It lets us build really, really small systems,” Accion co-founder Natalya Bailey explained to TechCrunch. “Instead of trying to take an existing ion engine the size of a Prius and shrink it down, we can start with very small systems because of this propellant.” And she does mean small – each thruster tile is about the size of a postage stamp.

The TILE system is also scalable and modular, meaning it could feasibly be used on anything from cubesats to propelling an interplanetary spacecraft, Accion CEO Peter Kant added in a recent interview with TechCrunch. “It’s one of the few occasions where the total addressable market and the actual addressable market that we can serve are pretty closely aligned and almost overlap,” he said.

The newest generation of the TILE system is the same size as its predecessors, but Accion is increasing the number of emitters on a given chip – emitters being the technology that actually shoots out the ions, generating the momentum – by almost tenfold. “We get more ions per area and that gives us a whole lot more thrust with the same amount of space,” Kant said.

Accion is looking to ship the first fourth-gen thruster systems in the middle to late summer of 2022.

The TILE system was developed by Accion co-founders Natalya Bailey and Louis Perna while the two were at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The tech generated a ton of interest from big aerospace companies, but they decided to found Accion in 2014 rather than sell. The company manufactures and assembles its product at its facility in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

The TILE system was onboard commercial spacecraft, one with Astra Digital and one with NanoAvionics, that went up on SpaceX’s Transporter-2 launch at the end of June. Accion started by focusing on serving smaller spacecraft first, like cubesats, but Bailey said that was just the beginning.

“We’re going after that segment initially, and then intending to reinvest our learnings in building larger and larger systems that eventually can do big geostationary satellites and interplanetary missions and so on. The systems that went up on the most recent launcher [is] probably good for a satellite up to about 50 kilograms [. . .] For us, it’s on the smaller end of where we intend to go.”

News: How WeWork’s Adam Neumann made a pigeon look like a swan

• July 21, 2021
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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha took a trip down memory lane to the great WeWork saga. We had WSJ reporter and author Eliot Brown on the show to chat about his new book, The Cult of We, written

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

For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha took a trip down memory lane to the great WeWork saga. We had WSJ reporter and author Eliot Brown on the show to chat about his new book, The Cult of We, written with his colleague Maureen Farrell. You can snag it here if you haven’t already.

Brown and Farrell were key reporting voices during WeWork’s rise, and fall, covering the company’s growth, hijinks, and demise.

Recently, WeWork has filed to go public via a SPAC, bringing the co-working startup to the public markets years after it initially tried for an IPO. It will debut at a fraction of the value that it once commanded on the private markets.

• For fun, you can read the original WeWork S-1 filing here.
• The WeWork-SPAC deck is here.

While we had Brown on the show, we took the time to dive into how he handled reporting the WeWork story, what his take is on today’s startup market, and how the tech media in general can do a better job. It felt like a masterclass for journalists and founders alike, which we’d argue is Equity’s sweet spot.

What lessons can we take away from WeWork’s rise and fall? At a very basic level, that companies with slim gross margins are not software companies and should not be valued as such. And that allowing founders to have monarchical control of their company goes against historical norms of good corporate governance, which isn’t so smart.

News: Loop Returns locks in $65 million Series B led by CRV

• July 21, 2021
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Loop Returns, a software company looking to handle the costly and inefficient process of retail/ecommerce returns, has announced the close of a $65 million Series B financing round. The round was led by CRV, with participation from Shopify, Renegade Partners, as well as existing investors FirstMark Capital, Ridge Ventures, Peterson Ventures, and Lerer Hippeau. The

Loop Returns, a software company looking to handle the costly and inefficient process of retail/ecommerce returns, has announced the close of a $65 million Series B financing round. The round was led by CRV, with participation from Shopify, Renegade Partners, as well as existing investors FirstMark Capital, Ridge Ventures, Peterson Ventures, and Lerer Hippeau.

It paid off. The company has grown its team from 20 employees in 2019 to 100, with 41 percent of the team identifying as female and 16 percent identifying as BIPOC.

In terms of traction, the company has gone from 200 to 700 customers, and from $26 million in returns processed to just over $100 million in the same time frame.

Poma told TechCrunch that the greatest challenge for the startup is scaling the team.

“It’s about bringing great people and keeping them aligned toward a common goal, especially in this remote first world,” said Poma.

News: Sololearn raises $24M for its bite-sized, Duolingo-like mobile-first coding education app

• July 21, 2021
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Coding is not just for engineers and computer programmers anymore: the pace of technology and its growing ubiquity mean that even non-tech roles will require workers to have some degree of knowledge to do their jobs in the future. Today a company called Sololearn — which has built a popular mobile-first education platform to meet

Coding is not just for engineers and computer programmers anymore: the pace of technology and its growing ubiquity mean that even non-tech roles will require workers to have some degree of knowledge to do their jobs in the future. Today a company called Sololearn — which has built a popular mobile-first education platform to meet that demand, now with over 21 million users across some 25 curriculum categories like Python, JavaScript, Java, C++, HTML, and SQL — is announcing $24 million in funding to expand its business.

Drive Capital led the round, with participation from past backers from Sololearn’s previous $1.2 million Series A round in 2016. They include Learn Capital and Prosus Ventures.

Of note, Drive Capital was co-founded by two alums from Sequoia out of Columbus, Ohio, with a mission to focus on founders outside of the “usual” hubs. That’s precisely what they have done here: Sololearn comes from Yerevan, Armenia, which has produced a lot of engineering talent, but interestingly not as many startups. (PicsArt, which is actually also HQ’d in San Francisco, may the biggest name to come out of there.)

Sololearn was founded and is currently led by Yeva Hyusyan, who tells me that the impetus for the company came out of a previous project she worked on while working for Microsoft in the country, a startup accelerator.

One side effort to that was a coding bootcamp they put together to help upskill would-be entrepreneurs. The bootcamp took on a life of its own eventually, with tech companies in the country, and specifically the capital city, approaching Hyusyan to source interesting candidates for jobs, and soon after to take and train people in specific areas on behalf of the tech companies themselves. In the process, the accelerator started building tools that could be used outside of the classroom. Through all of that, Hyusyan said she realised that there was an opportunity in itself to focus just on this. And thus Sololearn was born.

Now I know what you must be thinking at this point: aren’t there already dozens, maybe hundreds, of decent online coding courses and tools out in the market already? Why fund Yet One More?

Key to what Sololearn is doing is that it has taken a realistic approach: on mobile people want short bursts of content, so coding education on that platform should follow from that. The “lessons” such as they are come in bite-size engagements, which can be run through in minutes if needed. Its target users are equally distributed among those who are focused on learning deeply about coding, and non-tech people who are trying to learn some specific skills for their jobs, and she said that both have taken to the format.

“Everyone was critical about the idea of learning coding on a mobile screen, so we built a compiler a few years ago,” she said. “But believe me, the younger generation prefers to code on mobile. It’s as normal as a desktop. You’d be amazed at the thousands of lines of code they put together, all on a phone.”

The Duolingo-like approach to the curriculum further followed by the fact that there are no formal “teachers” but if people need help they can turn to others in the Sololearn community. Helpers are incentivized, Hyusyan said, “because they learn and they get recognition from the community.”

“The best helpers are community influencers, experts that work with us for free and basically help everyone out. They are our best and most influential members,” she added.

The formula seems to have worked. Sololearn is adding between 200,000 and 300,000 new users every month, she said, with active users up 300% over last year. The 21 million people who are already using the platform essentially gravitated to it by word of mouth. (That will surely change now that Sololearn has raised this big round…)

The potential audience is a massive one. “Billions will need to re-skill in the next 10 years,” Hyusyan said, with the implication being that Sololearn (and others like it) will take on that re-skilling role. “We think the era of institutional learning is over. No one institution, not even a consortium, could cope with that demand.”

With the company also seeing a lot of traction for learning in platform-specific languages, such as C# and Swift for Apple iOS, Kotlin for Android, and Go for Google cloud computing, it will be using the funding both to continue expanding into more languages, but also more learning tailored to specific job categories.

With Dulingo and other bite-sized content players seeing huge growth, that speaks to a lot of potential in the educational realm, and with Sololearn specifically.

“Sololearn provides bite-sized habit-forming instruction at scale, a warm and supportive community, and amazing user-generated content,” said Masha Khusid, Partner at Drive Capital, in a statement. “And with Sololearn bringing that same proven approach to a subject matter with such a profound impact on millions of peoples’ financial futures, it’s particularly exciting and rewarding to be their Series B lead.”

News: Startups and investors are turning to micromobility subscriptions

• July 21, 2021
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Micromobility vendors are keen to follow other industries into the subscription model for a few reasons: ease of scaling, return on investment and cost-per-mile to operate. 

Amid the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic and the murky path to profitability for shared electric micromobility, an increasing number of companies have turned to subscriptions. It’s a business model that some founders and investors argue hits the profit center sweet spot — an approach that appeals to customers who are wary of sharing as well as paying upfront to own a scooter or e-bike, all while minimizing overhead costs and depreciation of assets.

Across the United States, Europe, some of Canada and at least one Middle Eastern city, existing mobility companies are adding a subscription business line to their repertoire, and entirely new companies are being formed on the basis of the hardware-as-a-service model. But will this new playbook push the unit economics of micromobility in a positive direction? And what will determine which companies win at the subscription game?

In general, subscriptions for everything from groceries and streaming video to exercise equipment and clothing are on an upward slope. Subscription businesses are expected to grow at a rate of 30% this year, according to a 2021 study by digital services monetization company Telecoming.

Micromobility vendors keen to follow other industries into this model are focused on several factors, according to experts following the industry: the ease of scaling, return on investment and cost-per-mile to operate.

“Subscription services for a single vehicle are far more interesting and scalable than the subscription model that was trialed by the shared mobility services,” Oliver Bruce, angel investor and co-host of the Micromobility Podcast with Horace Dediu, told TechCrunch. “The cost per kilometer is just an order of magnitude smaller, and it’s not constrained by citywide caps.”

Shawn Carolan, managing director at Menlo Ventures, is also bullish on the micromobility subscription model because it makes more sense for the consumer, as most people will prefer to pay a low monthly fee rather than a higher upfront fee.

“The best customers are repeat customers, commuters or local neighborhood trips,” Carolan said. “Repeatedly paying per ride is both expensive and cognitively taxing. People want low friction in transportation. Getting from here to there shouldn’t require a lot of thought.”

The key players: E-bikes

Bird and Lime might dominate the shared micromobility space, but they’re not leading the subscription market, largely because their bikes and scooters are built to be heavier and more robust in order to handle city usage. Their operating systems are also designed to manage fleets and keep the vehicles in specific territories within a city. Bird and Spin have announced intentions to offer subscriptions, but so far there’s only been a chance to sign up for a waitlist.

Meanwhile, subscription services tend to offer lighter-weight vehicles that can be carried up flights of stairs or even folded down.

Swapfiets, the bike-sharing company with the distinctive blue front wheel, is one of the pioneers in the world of bike-sharing. In 2015, Richard Burger, Martijn Obers and Dirk de Bruijn started the Dutch company as university students in Delft when they realized that owning a bike could be somewhat of a hassle. The Netherlands is renowned for having more bicycles than people, but that doesn’t make it any easier to buy, sell and maintain them, especially with such high fees at bike shops.

“We asked how we could shift this and get only benefits from using a bike to go from A to B and not have all this hassle,” Burger told TechCrunch. “And for us, the subscription model was really the realization that would fix that.”

News: Spreadsheet.com wants to put apps in your spreadsheets

• July 21, 2021
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An old rule of thumb for building a startup is to find a group of professionals who use spreadsheets to do their work and then build an app to replace their spreadsheet usage. Presto, you have a startup, and perhaps even a new software category. Spreadsheet.com, however, is doing the opposite. Instead of turning spreadsheets

An old rule of thumb for building a startup is to find a group of professionals who use spreadsheets to do their work and then build an app to replace their spreadsheet usage. Presto, you have a startup, and perhaps even a new software category.

Spreadsheet.com, however, is doing the opposite. Instead of turning spreadsheets into apps, the startup wants to put apps in your spreadsheets.

TechCrunch caught up with the company when it reached out, disclosing that it raised $5.5 million last June. That round, wrought from the coffers of Spark Capital, First Round Capital and Firebolt Ventures, is now a pretty dated event. (PitchBook details a valuation of around $22 million, post-money, for that funding event.) But what Spreadsheet.com is up to is neat. Let’s talk about it.

People love spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are a blend of database (structured data storage), calculator (averages, sums and all sorts of other goodies), and programming interface (functions and more). That hybrid feature set has kept traditional spreadsheet tools like Microsoft’s venerable Excel relevant amid a growing sea of applications.

Jokes abound concerning just how much spreadsheets hold up the world. This meme remains stuck in my mind, for example:

The movement to replace spreadsheets has yet to strike a lethal blow against their general usage. That reality forms part of Spreadsheet.com’s thesis. CEO Matt Robinson told TechCrunch that companies that break out parts of their workflow from spreadsheets into tailored apps wind up merely running both sets of software at the same time. So, Robinson and co-founder Murali Mohan want to build a spreadsheet that helps companies avoid running more apps at one time than they must.

What does the company’s product do? Robinson answered that question with a question of his own: What do we currently do with spreadsheets? He offered up managing data, assigning tasks and linking to docs as examples. Using his startup’s service, he said, those are things that you can do in a spreadsheet, without having to use a separate app.

“We designed Spreadsheet.com to be the best of both worlds,” he explained in a follow-up Q&A. “It works just like the traditional spreadsheet you already know, but with a whole new set of capabilities.”

The company’s software can display spreadsheets in various formats like a timeline-style perspective, something that should be familiar to Airtable fans. Robinson also emphasized that Spreadsheet.com can handle formulas that folks already know, adding that it will be able to handle if-then functions to send data to other apps or trigger emails. The CEO argued that his company is building first-party features instead of third-party plugins.

Notably, Spreadsheet.com is not generally available today, so if you haven’t heard of it, don’t consider yourself behind. The company told TechCrunch that it currently has a 16,000-person waiting list, which it plans to open to others on October 17, which, it turns out, is Spreadsheet Day.

Asked how the company managed to build such a large waitlist while being in something akin to stealth mode, Robinson noted that Fast Company did cover the company back in 2019. Not a bad result.

What’s ahead?

When a startup flies out of the ether to announce a historical funding round, our first question is whether it’s about to fundraise again. TechCrunch doesn’t want to play patsy to a company’s next funding cycle. In this case, Robinson said that his startup has received inbound Series A interest and may raise in the next 12 months. Because that’s not tomorrow, I’m content to yammer about them in the interim.

Robinson indicated that Spreadsheet.com has around 2.5 years of capital in the bank and is not cash-constrained. If it does raise in 2021, then, it should be able to extract a pound of flesh in the form of a strong valuation; raise when you don’t need to, another startup rule of thumb states.

Why raise more capital inside the next year if the company doesn’t need cash? Robinson said that if his startup wants to scale its non-engineering roles — it is currently around 92% engineers by headcount — and wants to hire the best, and those folks won’t come cheap. And the CEO noted that some competing players have raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Competing won’t be cheap, either.

In the larger universe that Spreadsheet.com plays in, there are many competing companies. Airtable is the obvious mention; the unicorn has raised more than $600 million, per Crunchbase data. Layer wants to make spreadsheets more collaboration-friendly. Stacker wants to help no-code developers build apps from spreadsheets, something akin to the antithesis of Spreadsheets.com. So does Rows, which was known as dashdash earlier in life. Flowhaven wants to do brand work outside of spreadsheets, an example of the market trend that Spreadsheet.com wants to combat. And Fivetran wants to “bring spreadsheets into the modern age and make it easier for users to work with messy data and analyze large amounts of information,” per our own reporting.

So, we now wait for Spreadsheet.com to open its doors and let the world get a better look at its tech. Are spreadsheets going apps, or are apps going spreadsheets? We’ll find out.

News: Alternative investing hub Vincent closes $6 million raise

• July 21, 2021
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While markets grapple with the concept that the pandemic might not be entirely in the rear view mirror, investors are continuing to seek out investment opportunities outside public markets as they seek to diversify. Vincent, an alternative asset aggregation hub, is hoping to capture some of that investor attention, allowing users to scour multiple types

While markets grapple with the concept that the pandemic might not be entirely in the rear view mirror, investors are continuing to seek out investment opportunities outside public markets as they seek to diversify.

Vincent, an alternative asset aggregation hub, is hoping to capture some of that investor attention, allowing users to scour multiple types of assets across vertical-specific platforms and build up a diverse portfolio. Vincent CEO Slava Rubin says that more than 100 thousand people have used the platform since its launch in November, and that they now have 75 partner platforms integrated with the site.

Rubin, who previously co-founded the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, tells TechCrunch that Vincent has just closed a $6 million Series A led by LAUNCH with additional investment from 8VC and Digital Currency Group, among others.

Vincent is looking to approach both accredited and unaccredited investors and the platform is currently a pretty even split between the two, Rubin tells us. The platform’s partner offerings span several alternative asset classes including venture capital, real estate, debt, crypto, art and collectibles. Vincent makes money by facilitating discovery on its partner platforms and earning fees.

We covered the company’s launch back in December when the alternative asset market was taking off but would proceed to get hotter by the week. At the moment, venture capital and real estate deals make up more than half of the capital flowing through the platform while crypto investments have seemed to slide in popularity amid the broader market sell-off there. Unaccredited investors gaining access to VC deals via equity crowdfunding has been a big onramp for the platform, especially amid loosening restrictions which have made that fundraising method more popular among some founders.

Today, there are more $3.5 billion worth of searchable deals on the Vincent platform spread across supported platforms like WeFunder, Groundfloor, Republic, SharesPost, Rally Rd. and Otis.

“The ecosystem of potential investors is bigger than it’s ever been,” Rubin tells us.

News: Dwolla raises $21M to bring more customizable payment and money transfer options to fintechs and brands

• July 21, 2021
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Stripe, with its $95 billion valuation, has been taking on the payment landscape with a whole platform approach, bringing in dozens of adjacent services to snag a wider and deeper set of customers that use these services by way of APIs. But in the world of so-called “embedded finance” there still remains a lot of

Stripe, with its $95 billion valuation, has been taking on the payment landscape with a whole platform approach, bringing in dozens of adjacent services to snag a wider and deeper set of customers that use these services by way of APIs. But in the world of so-called “embedded finance” there still remains a lot of room for smaller players to bring a more sophisticated approach to the business of building complicated financial processes that can be integrated by third parties to carry out their own businesses, and today one of them is announcing some funding to support its own mission.

Dwolla, which provides an API that allows companies to build and facilitate fast payments, specifically with a focus on ACH (automated clearing house, or payments or transfers between banks or other financial institutions), has closed $21 million in funding, money that it will be using to continue building out the functionality of its service and specifically how it integrates and provides more of the responsiveness of card payments; hiring more talent; and starting the process of taking its rails to more markets outside of the U.S., most likely looking at Canada, the U.K. and Australia first.

Foundry Group is leading this round, with Park West Asset Management LLC, Union Square Ventures, Detroit Venture Partners, Firebrand Ventures and Next Level Ventures also participating. Jeremy Andrus, the CEO of Traeger, is also in the round as an individual investor. Other investors in the company include Andreesen Horowitz, High Alpha, Thrive Capital and Ludlow Ventures, and CEO Brady Harris in an interview said Dwolla would not be disclosing its valuation at the moment, but described it as “competitive in what’s happening with transactions and payments overall.”

Dwolla is based out of Des Moines, Iowa, and has been somewhat under the radar over the years. Since 2009 it had only raised just over $50 million before this round, a relatively modest amount for a fintech these days. This $21 million is its biggest-single round to date.

But it’s also been quietly seeing a lot of growth. In 2019, Dwolla processed $11 billion in gross payment volume over its platform. In 2020, that grew to $20 billion. This year it’s projected to be $30 billion, said Harris. Customers include both larger institutions and fintechs that want to incorporate faster and more efficient ACH-based payments into their own services without going through the grunt work of building them from the ground up, as well as businesses that want these also in their stack, with particular requirements around how they would like the white labelled and customised.

In total the company has some 3 million end users on its platform, which are channelled through some 500 customers using its services.  Those customers include real estate companies, educational institutions, and retailers and brands like GOAT, Ibotta, and Rally. Some of those customers are bigger than you might think. Harris noted to me that one of its customers using the Dwolla API in a white-label service is a fintech that sees some $9 trillion in gross transactions. (Dwolla is under NDA so cannot disclose the name.) That 3 million number, Harris said, is currently growing by 1.5 million each quarter, so it’s really seeing a lot of transaction traffic right now.

And $30 billion is, of course, just a small part of the payments pie, with transactions estimated to be valued at $5.4 trillion in 2020 and projected to grow to $11.29 trillion by 2026.

As Harris describes it, while there are a lot of options out there in the market today for companies that want to incorporate payments and specifically bank transfer-based payments into their stack, Dwolla’s unique approach is that it’s made this particular service more efficient, and easily customizable for those that want to add more features into the process. (That could include more timing, incorporating a blended approach including card payments or other payment methods, or something else altogether.)

“ACH products are something that a consumer can pull off the shelf at a payments company like Stripe, but this is about creating more customization,” said Harris. “We get a lot of people who are mid integration with another provider but it can’t do it what they would like it to, and so they come to us. We like to think of ourselves as programmatic and flexible.”

This focus and mastery of its space has helped Dwolla’s star rise not just with customers but also investors.

News: Pink Floyd drummer invests in Disciple Media, a platform aimed at the creator economy

• July 21, 2021
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Much has been made of the rise of the “creator economy” in the last year. With the Pandemic biting, millions flooded online, looking for a way to make money or promote themselves. The podcasting world has exploded, and with it platforms like Patreon, Clubhouse, and many others. But the thorny problem remains: Do you really

Much has been made of the rise of the “creator economy” in the last year. With the Pandemic biting, millions flooded online, looking for a way to make money or promote themselves. The podcasting world has exploded, and with it platforms like Patreon, Clubhouse, and many others. But the thorny problem remains: Do you really own your audience as a creator, or does the platform own you? Companies like Mighty Networks, Circle and Tribe have tried to address this, giving creators greater control than social networks do over their audiences. Now another joins the fray.

Disciple Media bills itself as a SaaS platform to enable online creators to build community-led businesses. It’s now raised $6 million in funding in what it calls a ‘large Angel round’. It already claims to have garnered 2 million members and 500 communities since launching in 2018. Investors include Nick Mason (drummer in Pink Floyd), Sir Peter Michael (CEO of Cray Computers, founder of classic FM, Quantel and Cosworth Engineering), Rob Pierre (founder and CEO of Jellyfish), and Keith Morris (ex. chairman Sabre Insurance). It’s also announced a new Chairman, Eirik Svendsen, a expert in online marketplaces, SaaS and the publishing and media industry.

On its communities so far it has American country star and American Idol judge Luke Bryan, Gor Tex, and Body by Ciara. The platform is also available on iOS and Android and comes with community management tools, a CRM, and monetization options. The company claims its creators are now “earning millions in revenue each year.”

Benji Vaughan, Founder and CEO said: “The scale and rapid growth of the creator economy is extraordinary, and today that growth is being driven by entrepreneurial creators looking to build independent businesses outside of Youtube and the social networks.”

Vaughan, a Techno DJ and artist-turned-entrepreneur, says he came up with the idea after building similar communities for clients. He says the data created on Disciple communities is owned entirely by the host who built the network, “removing third-party risk and allowing insights to be actioned immediately”.

He told me: “We are moving from a position of effectively having ‘gig economy workers for social networks’ to owners of businesses who use social networks for their needs, not the other way around. Therefore, these people are starting to leave social networks to build their businesses and using social networks as marketing channels, as the rest of the world does. Once that migration happens where they move away from social networks as their prime platform, they need a hub where their data is going to get pulled together, they have an audience, which we see as a community that connects with itself as much as they do with the host.”

He thinks the equivalent of Salesforce or HubSpot in the creative economy is going to be a community platform: “That’s where they’re going to aggregate all the information about their valuable audience or community engagement. So, we are looking to, over time, to build out something very akin to what HubSpot sites they have for tech companies or SaaS businesses: a complete package, a complete platform to manage your engagement with your users, grow your user base and then convert that into revenue.”

Rob Pierre, founder and CEO Jellyfish said: “Creating and engaging with your community digitally has never been more important. Disciple allows you to do both of those things with a fully functional, feature-rich platform which requires very little upfront capital expenditure. It also provides numerous options to monetize your community.”