Daily Archives: September 14, 2021

News: Sonos’ second-gen Beam soundbar supports Dolby Atmos

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Today, the Sonos Beam is getting a major upgrade. The new, second-generation Beam goes on sale today for $449 and will be available on October 5th, and includes Dolby Atmos support.

Sonos has sold home theater products for a long time, but the company has made the living room even more of a priority in recent years. It started with the Sonos Beam, a smaller and more affordable version of the flagship Playbar soundbar. And 2020’s new flagship, the Sonos Arc, was the company’s first soundbar capable of Dolby Atmos playback.

Today, the Beam is getting a major upgrade. The new, second-generation Beam goes on sale today for $449 and will be available on October 5th. That’s $50 more than before, in line with the other price increases Sonos announced last week. The good news is that the new Beam is more capable than its predecessor in a number of ways. We’ll have to review it before we can really say if it’s worth the extra $50, but there are a number of notable new features here.

The new Beam looks nearly identical to its predecessor, aside from a new perforated polycarbonate grille instead of the cloth front found on the original. It also has the same speaker components inside: a center tweeter, four woofers, and three passive bass radiators. What’s different is that the new processor inside the Beam is 40 percent faster, which opens up a lot of new audio formats.

Sonos

Most notably, the gen-two Beam supports Dolby Atmos, for movies, TV and music (the latter in a limited fashion, for now). Scott Fink, a product manager at Sonos who worked on the new Beam, says that the horsepower from the new CPU let the company increase the speaker arrays — not the specific speaker components, but, as Fink explains, “the set of software that coordinates the playback and interaction of all the speakers together in the soundbar.” The new Beam has five arrays, up from the three in the older model, and Fink said that the extras are dedicated to surround sound and height info.

All told, the Beam supports the same home theater audio formats as the Arc(including Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital Plus, Multichannel PCM and more), which costs twice as much as the Beam. In addition to the increased processing power, the new Beam has HDMI eARC to facilitate these new formats. Sonos says the speaker should have improved dialog clarity thanks to the additional audio processing power, something that should make the currently-available speech enhancement feature work better than before.

The hardware also supports additional music formats, as well. The Beam (as well as the Arc) will soon support the Ultra HD and Dolby Atmos formats from Amazon Music. Some Sonos speakers have worked with a handful of HD music services for a while now, but this is the first time that a 3D music format will work with the company’s products. I asked if there were any plans to support Dolby Atmos on Apple Music, and unsurprisingly the company wasn’t willing to say yet. But, there shouldn’t be any technical reason, it’s just a matter of Sonos and Apple working together to get more Apple Music formats supported.

Sonos

As with other Sonos products, the new Beam connects to the company’s other speakers for multi-room playback; you can also use other Sonos speakers as surrounds. You can tune the speaker to your room to improve the sound using Trueplay, assuming you have an iOS device. The Beam also has far-field microphones so it can receive voice commands through either Alexa or the Google Assistant, but that’s not required (there’s a mic mute button right on top of the Beam, too). Like some other recent Sonos speakers, the new Beam has NFC to make setup even easier — playing your phone running the Sonos app near it will automatically connect it to your WiFi network.

Based on what Sonos has said so far, the new Beam is probably not a crucial upgrade for most, unless you’ve been itching to get Dolby Atmos into your setup without spending a ton of money. But given that the Beam is already the best-selling compact soundbar (according to NPD data), these upgrades should help it keep its lead over the competition — even with that $50 price hike.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.

News: Xiaomi launches its own smart glasses, of course

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Xiaomi is challenging Facebook in the wearables arena by launching its own smart glasses. The device won’t only be capable of taking photos, but also of displaying messages, notifications and more.

Xiaomi is challenging Facebook in the wearables arena by launching its own smart glasses. The device won’t only be capable of taking photos, but also of displaying messages and notifications, making calls, providing navigation and translating text right in real time in front of your eyes. Like Facebook, Xiaomi is also putting emphasis on the device’s lightness despite its features. At 51 grams, though, it’s a bit heavier than the social network’s Ray-Ban Stories. In addition, the glasses also has an indicator light that shows when the 5-megapixel camera is in use.

Xiaomi’s Smart Glasses are powered by a quad-core ARM processor and run on Android. They also use MicroLED imaging technology, which is known for having a higher brightness and longer lifespan than OLED. The company says the technology has a simpler structure that enabled it to create a compact display with individual pixels sized at 4μm. You won’t be able to view the images you take in color, though — Xiaomi says it opted to use a monochrome display solution “to allow sufficient light to pass through complicated optical structures.”

The company explains:

“The grating structure etched onto the inner surface of the lens allows light to be refracted in a unique way, directing it safely into the human eye. The refraction process involves bouncing light beams countless times, allowing the human eye to see a complete image, and greatly increasing usability while wearing. All this is done inside a single lens, instead of using complicated multiples lens systems, mirrors, or half mirrors as some other products do.”

Its smart glasses won’t be just a second screen for your phone, according to Xiaomi. It’s independently capable of many things, such as selecting the most important notifications to show you, including smart home alarms and messages from important contacts. The device’s navigation capability can display maps and directions in front of your eyes. It can also show you the number of whoever’s currently calling your phone, and you can take the call using the smart glasses’ built in mic and speakers.

That mic will be able to pick up speech, as well, which Xiaomi’s proprietary translating algorithm can translate in real time. The glasses’ translation feature also works’ on written text and text on photos captures through its camera. Unfortunately, the company has yet to announce a price or a launch date for the glasses, but we’ll keep you updated when it does.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.

News: Here’s what your BNPL startup could be worth

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What would you pay for $1 of BNPL GMV?

It’s a two-Exchange Tuesday, everyone. First up, we’re talking fintech valuations. Next up, we’re digging into Atlanta.

Last week’s news that PayPal intends to buy Japanese startup Paidy marked the second major acquisition of a buy now, pay later (BNPL) company this year. PayPal’s news followed an even larger deal by Square for the Australian BNPL company Afterpay.

The multibillion-dollar exits provided hard market proof that what BNPL startups are building has value beyond simple operating results; major fintech platforms are willing to shell out large sums for their revenues and possible strategic value.

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Because both deals happened in 2021, they provide two data points for the value of BNPL companies operating at scale. And because both Square and PayPal provided some information to their investors concerning their transactions, we have a little bit of comparative work to do.

Let’s do a little math and figure out how much PayPal and Square investors are paying for transaction volume across both platforms. Then, we’ll peek at what Affirm is worth along similar lines. We’ll wrap with a look at Klarna’s numbers to see if there’s anything we can dig up there.

Our goal is to find out what sort of price floor or ceiling the Paidy and Afterpay deals imply, if other players in their space are matching that figure, and why. This will be fun!

What would you pay for $1 of BNPL GMV?

Square’s Afterpay deal is worth some $29 billion, a huge sum. It isn’t hard to see why the U.S. consumer- and business-focused fintech is willing to write so large a check — Afterpay does volume.

News: EverAfter closes $13M to help companies ride off into the sunset with their customers

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EverAfter’s customer-facing tool streamlines onboarding and retention and enables B2B clients to embed personalized customer portals within any product.

EverAfter secured $13 million in seed funding to continue developing its no-code customer-facing tool that streamlines onboarding and retention and enables business-to-business clients to embed personalized customer portals within any product.

The Tel Aviv-based company was founded in 2020 by Noa Danon and Tal Shemesh. CEO Danon, who comes from a project management background, said they saw a disconnect between the user and product experience.

The company’s name, EverAfter, comes from the concept that in SaaS companies, someone has to be in charge of the “EverAfter,” with customers, even as the relationship changes, Danon told TechCrunch.

Via its no-code platform, customer success teams are able to build a website in weeks using drop-and-drag widgets like training materials, timelines, task management and meeting summaries, and then configure what each user sees. Then there is a snippet of code that is embedded into the product.

EverAfter also integrates with existing customer relationship management, project management and service ticket tools, while also updating Salesforce and HubSpot directly through an interface.

“It’s like the customer owns a piece of real estate inside the product,” Danon said.

TLV Partners and Vertex Ventures co-led the round and were joined by angel investors Benny Shneider, Zohar Gilon and Amit Gilon.

Yanai Oron, general partner at Vertex Ventures, said he is seeing best-in-breed companies try to solve customer churn or improve the relationship process on their own and failing, which speaks to the complexity of the problem.

Startups in this space are coming online and raising money, but with EverAfter, they are differentiating themselves by not only putting a dashboard on their product, but launching with the capabilities to manage thousands of customers using the product, he added.

“I’ve been tracking the customer success space over the past few years, and it is a growing field with the least sophisticated tools,” Oron said. “During COVID, companies realized it was easier to retain customers rather than get new ones. We are all used to more self-service and wanting to get the answer ourselves, and customers are the same. Companies also started to be more at ease in letting customers develop things on their own and leave R&D departments to do other things.”

Clients include Taboola, AppsFlyer and Verbit, with Verbit reporting its company’s customer success managers save 10 hours a week managing ongoing customer communication by using EverAfter, Danon added. This comes as CallMiner reports that unplanned customer churn costs companies $35.3 billion in the U.S. alone.

EverAfter offers both customer success and partner management software and clients can choose a high-touch service or kits and templates for self-service.

The new funding will enable the company to focus on integration and expansion into additional use cases. Since being founded, EverAfter has grown to 20 employees and 30 customers. The founders also want to utilize the data they are collecting on what works and doesn’t work for each customer.

“There are so many interesting things that happen between companies and customers, from onboarding to business reviews, and we are going to expand on those,” Danon said. “We want to be the first thing companies put inside their product to figure out the relationship between customers and customer success teams and managers.”

News: Locus Robotics just raised another $50M

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Seems Locus Robotics is striking while the iron is hot. Seven months after raising a sizable $150 million Series E, Tiger Global is investing another $50 million in the Massachusetts firm. The last round made Locus a unicorn, and this one brings the company’s total funding to around $300 million. Locus specializes in warehouse and

Seems Locus Robotics is striking while the iron is hot. Seven months after raising a sizable $150 million Series E, Tiger Global is investing another $50 million in the Massachusetts firm. The last round made Locus a unicorn, and this one brings the company’s total funding to around $300 million.

Locus specializes in warehouse and fulfillment robotics, making a more modular solution that doesn’t require the sort of “ground-up build” of a Berkshire Grey. The company’s approach is closer to that of Fetch, which was acquired by Zebra Technologies back in July. Locus seems prime for an acquisition from a logistics firm or retailer grappling to compete with the monolith of Amazon.

The continued funding rounds, on the other hand, seem to point to a company looking to continue to go it alone.

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CEO Rick Faulk confirmed as much with me back in February, stating, “We have no interest in being acquired. We think we can build the most and greatest value by operating independently. There are investors that want to invest in helping everyone that’s not named ‘Amazon’ compete.”

Faulk adds this morning that the new funds are a kind of validation for Locus. Certainly they’re yet another sign in accelerated interest in automation amid the pandemic. “At a time of increasing volumes and ongoing labor shortages, this new round of funding underscores how critical flexible, scalable, intelligent robotics automation has become to the warehouse and the supply chain,” the executive says. “Locus is uniquely positioned to drive digital transformation in this enormous global market.”

Funding will be used to further expand Locus’ global operations.

News: Indonesian fintech Xendit is now a unicorn, with $150M in fresh funding led by Tiger Global

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There’s a new entrant in Southeast Asia’s growing list of unicorns. Jakarta-based Xendit, best known for its digital payment infrastructure but also focused on other financial products, announced today it has raised $150 million in Series C funding, bumping its valuation to $1 billion. The round was led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from

There’s a new entrant in Southeast Asia’s growing list of unicorns. Jakarta-based Xendit, best known for its digital payment infrastructure but also focused on other financial products, announced today it has raised $150 million in Series C funding, bumping its valuation to $1 billion. The round was led by Tiger Global Management, with participation from returning investors Accel, Amasia and Goat Capital, the venture firm co-founded by former Y Combinator partner Justin Kan (in 2015, Xendit became the first Indonesian startup to participate in the accelerator program).

Accel led Xendit’s $64.6 million Series B, announced just six months ago. This new round brings its total funding so far to $238 million. The company was founded in 2015 by chief executive officer Moses Lu and chief operating officer Tessa Wijaya.

At the end of last year, Xendit expanded into the Philippines, and says it is now one of the biggest payment players in the country. In July, it announced a strategic investment in legacy online payments platform Dragonpay.

Xendit decided to raise again because to fuel expansion into other countries, Wijaya told TechCrunch. “Our core focus at the moment for this new fundraise is to further regionalize and to expand our product suite in regions where we are at or will expand into.” The company also plans to launch value-added services.

Wijaya said that Xendit has experienced more than 200% year-over-year increase in total payments volume, and now has a total payment volume (TPV) of $9 billion processed per annum.

Before COVID-19, many of Xendit’s customers were in the travel industry, and it was hit hard by the pandemic. But since then, it’s expanded its scope.

“One big segment are SMEs. By August, there were 10,000 SME sign-ups on our platform alone. The other one is expanding out to fintech companies—for example, there’s been a big uptick in Indonesia, especially accounting platforms. We’ve also expanded to traditional enterprises, like telecom companies, who focused on having retail outlets in shopping malls. Suddenly the malls are closed, so we’ve been able to sign some of the bigger retail outlet groups in the market as well.”

The company’s clients range in size from SMEs to some of the region’s largest tech players, including Traveloka, Wise, Wish and Grab. Digital payments in most Southeast Asian markets are extremely fragmented, with consumers using everything from digital wallets, buy-now-pay-later services and virtual accounts to traditional debit and credit cards.

Xendit’s solutions let businesses accept payments from many of these methods through three integration options. These include live URLs that sellers can message to a customer for payment; web and mobile checkouts that work with e-commerce platform plug-ins; and APIs.

Though it is best known as a payment infrastructure provider, referring to itself as “a Stripe alternative build for Indonesia and Southeast Asia” on its website, Xendit is also working on other services. “In Southeast Asia, you can’t just focus on one thing, you can’t just focus on payments,” said Wijaya. “You want to focus on being this platform for every merchant to get onboard, and to never leave whenever they transact digitally.”

For example, Xendit is experimenting with working capital loans for merchants, and also exploring credit card issuing with partners, since credit card penetration is still very low in Indonesia and the Philippines. “For merchants to come online, they don’t just need payments, they need to be able to do things like subscribe to Shopify or subscribe to Google Suite, to be able to support being digital-first.”

Xendit’s expansion strategy into new markets, like Malaysia and Vietnam, will rely on solving problems that are unique to each market. For example, Wijaya said disbursements, including marketplace refunds, were difficult in Indonesia, so Xendit focused on fixing that. In the Philippines, on the other hand, “the real problem was accepting money,” so Xendit developed direct debit with Grab.

“I think the formula we had in the Philippines, which is hiring a lot of local people who understand the market rather than telling them what to do, has really worked for us, and that is how we’re going to continue our expansion plan,” she said.

Some of Xendit’s competitors in its current markets include Midtrans in Indonesia, which was acquired by Gojek in 2017, and PayMongo in the Philippines, which is backed by Stripe.

Xendit’s edge is combining a global approach with its intense focus on localization, Wijaya said. “One of our investors sent a survey to some potential customers, big merchants, and they said what they like about Xendit is because we have a full commitment to being on the ground. We’re not like players where expanding into one market means a sales team, and that’s it. When we expand somewhere, we really mean we’re going to expand. We’re going to hire partnership people, a customer success team there. We’re going to hire a whole team on the ground.”

In a press statement, Tiger Global Management partner Alex Cook said, “Xendit’s digital payments infrastructure, built specifically for Southeast Asia, is quickly becoming the standard for financial operations in the region. By providing a reliable and secure payment gateway, Xendit has created an on-ramp to the digital economy for businesses across the region.”

News: QED Investors closes on $1.05B across two funds to invest in fintech companies globally

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QED Investors announced the closing of two new funds totaling $1.05 billion, capital that it will be using to back early-stage startups, as well as growth rounds for later-stage companies. Specifically, today QED is announcing a $550 million early-stage fund and a $500 million growth-stage fund, both of which are aimed at backing fintech companies

QED Investors announced the closing of two new funds totaling $1.05 billion, capital that it will be using to back early-stage startups, as well as growth rounds for later-stage companies.

Specifically, today QED is announcing a $550 million early-stage fund and a $500 million growth-stage fund, both of which are aimed at backing fintech companies primarily in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Latin America and Southeast Asia. The fund was oversubscribed, according to QED co-founder and managing partner Nigel Morris.

Since its 2007 founding by Morris — who also co-founded Capital One Financial Services in 1994 — and Frank Rotman, QED has backed more than 150 companies, including 20 unicorns. It currently has over $3 billion under management.

While fintech has been an area of investor interest for some time, it’s safe to say the sector has exploded in recent years — largely fueled by consumer demand as more people transact online. That’s especially true as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to (sadly) rage on.

Clearly, Alexandria, Virginia-based QED was investing in fintech before fintech was “cool.” As evidence of that, the firm led Credit Karma’s Series A in 2009; led Remitly’s Series A in 2014 and participated in Nubank’s Series A in 2014.

The firm has come a long way from when it closed its first fund — $30 million of internal capital — in 2008. Its last fund — totaling $400 million — closed in 2020. Over the years, QED has backed unicorns that went on to exit either via the public markets or by acquisition, including SoFi, Credit Karma, Red Ventures and, more recently, Flywire.

As someone who also years prior had launched Capital One Financial Services, it’s no surprise that when Morris started a venture fund, it was one that focused on funding fintech companies.

“After 14 years… it remains our cornerstone, even though fintech has evolved from the lending and credit businesses of the early years that was a core part of our Capital One DNA,” said Morris, who serves as QED’s managing partner.

Frank Rotman, the firm’s founding partner, describes fintech as QED’s “North Star.”

“There are so many exciting financial technology verticals today that can have a meaningful and lasting impact on consumers across the world, from proptech, sustainability and earned wage access to student loan solutions and financial products that cater to those that have been long ignored by banks and financial institutions,” he said.

In particular, Rotman said the firm is bullish on the future of embedded finance and on backing companies that distribute financial products in a variety of industries such as cross-border trucking logistics (such as Nuvocargo), car sales (Kavak) and shrimp farming (XpertSea).

QED plans to invest in between 40 to 50 companies out of its early-stage fund, with an initial average check size of $5 million to $15 million with similar reserves, according to Morris. The firm expects to make 20-25 investments out of its growth fund, with average check sizes between $10 million and $40 million. It has so far made one investment out of that growth fund, which has not yet been publicly announced.

“Almost every single” LP from QED Fund VI increased their allocation in the firm’s new funds, according to Morris. But the firm also welcomed several new LPs. While Morris declined to be more specific, he said the new LPs included “some really well-known names.”

“There’s no better confirmation than when an LP doubles down in their support of what we’re doing,” Rotman said. 

In terms of strategy, Rotman notes that QED has continued to lead deals that it feels “passionate about being involved in.”

“It’s not a secret that the market’s hot, and opportunities move quickly in this type of environment,” he told TechCrunch. “We see firms meeting with a founder in the morning, and a term sheet issued as soon as the following day. Many VCs can offer capital. Very, very few can augment that with proven, actionable advice and insight that can help them tomorrow.”

Both Morris and Rotman believe the fact that QED’s 17-person investment team being made up of former operators gives it a competitive edge.

“We’re a unique company offering unique insights in an industry in which it’s easy to perform poorly and hard to do well,” Morris said.

“Most fintech companies will fail. That’s just the statistical, pragmatic distribution that occurs,” he added.

Within the fintech industry, there are myriad complicated issues — compliance, operations, tech, talent, credit risk and treasury, Morris continued.

“And they take a long time for people to have enough tree rings to be able to understand them,” he told TechCrunch. “Much of what we do…is help ameliorate and mitigate against those different issues by bringing to bear specific functional talent and the scars on our back of mistakes that we’ve made as operators to make sure that the young entrepreneur doesn’t make those same errors. It’s not enough to simply solve one problem. Founders need to successfully solve five, six, seven problems concurrently because if any one is not solved, the entire business will come crashing to the ground.”

News: SoftBank’s latest proptech bet is leading Pacaso’s $125M Series C

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Less than six months after raising $75 million, Pacaso — a real estate platform which aims to help people buy and co-own a second home — announced today that it has raised $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the Series C funding round for Pacaso, which essentially went from

Less than six months after raising $75 million, Pacaso — a real estate platform which aims to help people buy and co-own a second home — announced today that it has raised $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation.

SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the Series C funding round for Pacaso, which essentially went from “launch to unicorn” in five months earlier this year and is pronounced like Picasso. New backers Fifth Wall and Gaingels also participated in the financing, along with existing backers Greycroft, Global Founders Capital, Crosscut and 75 & Sunny Ventures. (Sunny Ventures is Pacaso co-founder Spencer Rascoff’s venture firm). With the latest round, Picasso has now raised a total of $215 million in equity funding since its 2020 inception. It also secured $1 billion in debt financing earlier this year.

The fully distributed startup launched its platform in October of last year and already has an annualized revenue run rate of $330 million, according to CEO and co-founder Austin Allison — a feat which quite frankly seems remarkable. The company currently manages nearly $200 million in real estate on its platform, and in the second quarter, its website and mobile app saw a combined 1.8 million visits, up 196% from the first quarter. It’s currently serving owners “in the hundreds.”

Former Zillow executives Allison and Rascoff came up with the concept of Pacaso after leaving Zillow together about two years ago. (Publicly traded Zillow today has a market cap of $24 billion.) 

With a unique co-ownership model made possible via the creation of a property-specific LLC, the company aims to reduce the cost and hassle of second home ownership. It also gives vacation homeowners an alternative option to renting out their property.

Pacaso distinguishes its model from the age-old concept of timeshares, which sell the right to use a fixed amount of time in a condo or hotel. Pacaso aims to bring together a small group of co-owners to purchase a share of a single-family home and “enjoy ongoing access throughout the year.”

The way it works is that Pacaso purchases a home either outright or shares in a home. The company then partners with local real estate agents to market the properties. It then sells shares in the home — from one-eighth of the home to a greater percentage.

Pacaso holds a brokerage license in about 25 top second home markets such as Napa, Lake Tahoe, Palm Springs, Malibu and Park City. It recently expanded to its first market outside of the U.S. — Spain. Buyers can view curated listings on the startup’s website, which includes active listings, as well as previews of homes under consideration for purchase based on buyer demand.

In addition to curating the listings, Pacaso also offers integrated financing, “upscale” interior design, professional property management and proprietary scheduling technology.

In January of this year, Pacaso had 30 employees. Today, it has over 120, according to Allison.

It’s important to note that while Pacaso one day aspires to offer homes that are affordable to a broader segment of the population, Allison acknowledges that currently, the homes available on its platform are “very much” luxury, or higher price, homes.

As for what markets it plans to enter next, he said that will be based on customer feedback. For now, Allison said, 65% of Pacaso’s customers are first-time second homeowners and 25% of are non-white or identify as LGBTQ.

SoftBank Investing Partner Lydia Jett says she was drawn to Pacaso for both professional and personal reasons.

For one thing, she says that when she was growing up, her family owned one-tenth of a “modest” beach house on the coast of Oregon.

“This asset that should be an investment, and source of joy actually had an incredible amount of friction, pain and unexpected cost,” Jett told TechCrunch. “It was a difficult asset to make liquid.”

The friction and pain she referred to included debates around scheduling, capital investments and tension when one of the co-owners needed liquidity but none of the others wanted to buy them out.

Part of the pain involved many of the the things that Pacaso is trying to solve for, Jett believes. By managing the whole co-ownership process, owners don’t have to deal with the “headaches” of maintenance, furnishings and scheduling respective vacations, among other things.

“We’ve designed  a very innovative scheduling solution we call SmartStay, which empowers a calendar to be shared equitably among the ownership group so that each co-owner has fair and equitable access to the property all times of the year,” Allison told TechCrunch

In other words, Picasso is effectively an intermediary between the co-owners, something Jett makes it a very attractive model.

Also, she said, SoftBank was drawn to the opportunity to “create a whole new category of home ownership.”

“This is something that fundamentally can enrich millions of people’s lives,” she told TechCrunch, “and help them realize that dream of co-ownership.”

News: Fintech startup SellersFunding raises $166.5M in equity, credit round to support e-commerce sellers

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SellersFunding created a lending and financial services platform to streamline global commerce for thousands of marketplaces, including working capital, cross-border cash management and taxes.

SellersFunding secured $166.5 million in a combination of Series A equity funding and a credit facility to continue developing its technology and payments platforms for e-commerce businesses.

Northzone led the round and was joined by Endeavor Catalyst and Fasanara. SellersFunding CEO Ricardo Pero did not disclose the funding breakdown, but did say the company previously raised two seed rounds for a total of $40 million in equity and more than $100 million in credit facilities, including one that the company was expanding to $200 million.

SellersFunding, with offices in Florida, New York and London, created a digital platform that delivers financial tools and resources to streamline global commerce for thousands of marketplaces, including working capital, cross-border cash management, tax solutions and business valuation.

Pero got the idea for the company after spending 20 years in the financial industry. He left JP Morgan in 2016 with a drive to start his own company. He was consulting for a friend selling on Amazon who asked him to help make sense of Amazon’s fees and to review the next year’s budget because the friend was struggling to keep up with growth.

“I helped him address the fees issue, but when I went to talk to traditional lenders, I found that they have no clue about e-commerce and the needs of SMEs,” he said.

In addition to being a lending source for businesses selling on these marketplaces, SellersFunding leverages sales data provided by the marketplaces and e-commerce platforms to create sales and cash flow estimates based on the credit limits given to clients so that owners can better understand the fees they are paying and make more informed decisions.

He founded the company in 2017, and today has over 30,000 registered users and is approaching $10 billion in sales volume that is feeding data into SellersFunding’s daily models. The company makes money as both a lender and on fees it charges for payments collected by its customers. Merchants can collect money from marketplaces and pay their suppliers in local or foreign currency.

SellersFunding has consistently grown 300% year over year, Pero said. As such, he intends to use the new funding to scale globally, expand the team, create a marketing budget and look for two small acquisitions in the U.S. and Europe.

The company will continue to invest on the payments side and to promote cross-border payments.

“When I look at the payments landscape, companies are competing on pricing and I don’t think we will ever have a focus there, but instead will compete on customer experience,” Pero added. “Our core business will always be lending and our core investments will be payments and technology, but then we will extend to other services that our clients want.”

With an eye on expanding internationally, it fit to bring on Northzone as a partner, he added. The venture firm is based in Europe and was of a similar vision for thinking globally.

Jeppe Zink, general partner at Northzone, said via email that Pero and his team “are the most experienced in this category” and are building a category leader that is “more experienced and understanding of the lending side than its competitors.”

“We have seen this massive rise in e-shopping, most of the new ones coming from marketplaces like Amazon and Shopify, and if you look at the sellers, thousands are small businesses sourcing their goods which means that they are very important customers,” Zink added. “Normal banks like Barclay can’t check credit. SellersFinding is helping small businesses get this credit, and rightly so. In the same way we thought neobanks won with accounts created when it comes to delivering credit and banking products, they are nowhere to be found yet.”

News: Sendoso nabs $100M as its corporate gifting platform passes 20,000 customers

• September 14, 2021
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Corporate gift services have come into their own during the Covid-19 pandemic by standing in as a proxy for other kinds of relationship building activities — office meetings, lunches, and hosting at events — that have traditionally been part and parcel of how people do business, but were no longer feasible during lockdowns, social distancing

Corporate gift services have come into their own during the Covid-19 pandemic by standing in as a proxy for other kinds of relationship building activities — office meetings, lunches, and hosting at events — that have traditionally been part and parcel of how people do business, but were no longer feasible during lockdowns, social distancing and offices closing their doors.

Now, Sendoso — a popular “end-to-end” gifting platform offering access to 30,000 products including corporate swag, regular physical gifts, gift cards and more; and then providing services like logistics, packing and sending to get those gifts to the recipients — is announcing $100 million of funding to capitalize on this shift, led by a big new investor.

New backer SoftBank, via its Vision Fund 2, is leading this latest Series C round of funding. Oak HC/FT, Struck Capital, Stage 2 Capital, Craft Ventures, Signia Venture Partners and Felicis Ventures — all previous investors — are also participating.

The company has been on a strong growth trajectory for years now, but it specifically saw a surge of activity as the pandemic kicked off. It now has more than 20,000 businesses signed up and using its services, particularly for sales and marketing outreach, but also to help shore up morale among employees.

“Everyone was stuck at home by themselves, saturated with emails,” said Kris Rudeegraap, the CEO of Sendoso, in an interview. “Having a personal connection to sales prospects, employees and others just meant more.” It has now racked up some 3 million gifts sent since launching in 2016.

Sendoso is not disclosing its valuation, but Rudeegraap hinted that it was four times higher than the startup’s Series B valuation from 2020. PitchBook estimates that to be $160 million, which would make the current valuation $640 million. The company has now raised over $150 million.

Rudeegraap said Sendoso will be using the funds in part to invest in a couple of areas. First, to hire more talent: it has 500 employees now and plans to grow that by 30% by the end of this year. And second, international expansion: it is setting up a European HQ in Dublin, Ireland to complement its main office in San Francisco.

Comcast, Kimpton Hotels, Thomson Reuters, Nasdaq and eBay are among its current customers — so this is in part to serve those customers’ global user bases, as well as to sign up new gifters. He estimated that the bigger market for corporate gifting is about $100 billion annually, so there is a lot to play for here.

The company was co-founded by Rudeegraap and Braydan Young (who is its chief alliances officer) on the back of a specific need Rudeegraap identified while working as a sales executive. Gifting is a very standard practice in the world of sales and marketing, but he was finding a lot of traction with potential and current customers by taking a personalized approach to this act.

“I was manually packing boxes, grabbing swag, coming up with handwritten notes,” he recalled. “It was inefficient, but it worked so well. So I dreamed up an idea: why not be able to click a button in Salesforce to do this automatically? Sometimes the best company is one that solves a pain point of your own.”

And this is essentially what Sendoso does. The startup’s platform integrates with a company’s existing marketing, sales and management software — Salesforce, HubSpot, SalesLoft among them — and then lets users use this to organize and order gifts through these channels, for example as part of larger sales, marketing or HR strategies. The gifts are wide-ranging, covering corporate swag, other physical presents, gift cards and more, and there are also integrations you can include to share gifting across teams of salespeople, to analyze the campaigns and more.

The Sendoso platform itself, meanwhile, positions itself as having the “marketplace selection and logistics precision of Amazon.com.” But Sendoso also believes it’s better than someone simply using Amazon.com itself since it ultimately takes a more personalized approach in how it presents the gift.

“There are a lot of things we do uniquely in terms of what we have built throughout our software, gifting options and logistics centre. We really personalize our gifts at scale with handwritten notes, special boxing, and more,” something that Amazon cannot do, he added. “We have built a lot of unique technology and logistics software that would make it hard for Amazon to compete.” He said that one of Sendoso’s integrations is actually with Amazon, so Sendoso users can order through there, but then the gift is first routed to Sendoso to be repackaged in a nicer way before being sent out.

At its heart, the startup has built a way of knitting together disparate work practices — some codified in software, and some based on human interactions and significantly more infused with randomness, emotion and ad hoc approaches — and built it all into a technology platform. The ability to scale what feels like an otherwise bespoke level of service is what has helped Sendoso gain traction not just with users, but investors, too:

“We believe Sendoso offers the most comprehensive end-to-end gifting platform in the market,” said Priya Saiprasad, a partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. “Their platform includes a global marketplace of curated vendors, seamless integration with existing tools, global logistics, and deep analytics. As a result, Sendoso serves as the backbone to enterprises’ engagement programs with prospective customers, existing customers, employees and other key stakeholders. We’re excited to lead this Series C round to help Sendoso accelerate its vision.”