Yearly Archives: 2021

News: Brex buys Weav, a universal API for commerce platforms, for $50M

• August 17, 2021
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Fintech Brex first partnered with Weav, a developer of a universal API for commerce platforms, last summer. In March, Brex launched Instant Payouts for Shopify sellers using the startup’s technology. The results were impressive enough that by April, Brex co-founders Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi participated in Weav’s $4.3 million seed round as strategic angel

Fintech Brex first partnered with Weav, a developer of a universal API for commerce platforms, last summer.

In March, Brex launched Instant Payouts for Shopify sellers using the startup’s technology.

The results were impressive enough that by April, Brex co-founders Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi participated in Weav’s $4.3 million seed round as strategic angel investors.

Over the past few months, the pair determined that Weav’s technology — and team — was too good to share. So today, the fintech is announcing that it is acquiring one-year-old Weav for $50 million in its first significant acquisition, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.

Interestingly, the deal was forged without the founders of either company having met — which may have been more unusual before the COVID-19 pandemic but is likely more commonplace these days. (Although they have since met.) Brex has previously made ‘acquihires’ but has not previously acquired both a company’s team and technology.

Brex started working with Weav “pretty early on” in the company’s life as a partner, Dubugras said. 

“We were so impressed with [CEO] Nadav [Lidor] and his team, how fast they were building and how good the technology is, that we wanted to expand to a more strategic partnership,” he told TechCrunch. “Then, we started talking about an acquisition.”

TechCrunch talked with Dubugras and Weav CEO and co-founder Lidor to find out the details of the deal, and why it’s significant for both companies.

For one, as part of the acquisition, Brex will be expanding its global presence by building an “innovation hub” and hiring employees in Israel beyond Weav’s nine-person team, which is located in Israel and New York. CEO Lidor will head up Brex’s new Israeli office.

Besides expanding its global reach, the technology that Brex is acquiring will help accelerate the fintech’s connectivity of its platform, Dubugras said. Currently, Brex offers credit cards, business cash accounts, spend management and bill pay software together in a single dashboard for its customers. Its goal is to continue expanding its product and services portfolio to become “a fully-integrated and holistic financial platform for businesses.” 

“Weav’s technology helps make Brex even better for our customers,” he said.

Founded last year by engineers Ambika Acharya, Avikam Agur and Lidor after participating in the W20 YC batch, Weav was among the wave of fintech infrastructure companies that aimed to give fintechs and financial institutions a boost. Specifically, Weav’s embedded technology was designed to give organizations access to “real time, user-permissioned” commerce data that they could use to create new financial products for small businesses.  

Its products will allow customers to connect to multiple platforms with a single API that was developed specifically for the commerce platforms that businesses use to sell products and accept payments. Weav has operated under the premise that allowing companies to build and embed new financial products creates new opportunities for e-commerce merchants, creators and other entrepreneurs. 

Since its inception last year, Weav’s API call volume has grown by 300% each month.

The increased adoption of cloud and SaaS technologies has led to data being stored in a variety of disparate systems. Weav’s API aims to build digital connections that enable automatic sharing and analysis, thus (as mentioned above) allowing commerce platforms to access their customers’ standardized transaction data in real time. This is important to Brex because the premise is that by using Weav, businesses can get financial services and new products “more quickly and precisely.” 

“We want to build this all-in-one finance platform,” Dubugras told TechCrunch. “That was already the direction we were headed with the partnership but this acquisition helps us so that we can build a better integration across all our financial products, and we can do more, and a lot faster than what we were originally planning.”

For example, he added, Brex integrates with platforms such as Shopify. With the acquisition of Weav, it intends to build more lending, visualization and insights products for its customers.

“The Weav team will basically manage any third-party integration,” Dubugras said, “so that Brex can be your financial operating system no matter where your data is. You can have everything in one place.” 

Lidor admits that Weav did not expect to be exiting so soon after founding. But the companies found themselves on the same page, he said.

 “Our goal has always been to connect businesses, creators, and other entrepreneurs with fintech to expand financial access, and this aligns with Brex’s mission,” Lidor added. “After working with Henrique and Pedro, we realized they couldn’t be a better partner. We too were so impressed with the Brex team, and had a great time learning from them, and building with them.”

The company did not disclose its valuation at the time of its $4.3 million seed round earlier this year. The $50 million price tag represents a “healthy multiple for all involved,” Dubugras said.

The expansion into Israel is also exciting to the Brex team, which went remote last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic with operations in the United States, Canada and Brazil.

Founded in 2017, San Francisco-based Brex earlier this year was valued at $7.4 billion after raising a $425 million Series D led by Tiger Global. The company has raised $1.2 billion in debt and equity financing, according to Crunchbase data.

Earlier this year, the company announced it had put together a new service called Brex Premium that costs $49 per month. 

“The number of premium subscribers that we now have definitely blew away our expectations,” Dubugras said.

In February, Brex was the latest fintech to apply for a bank charter.

The company, which sells a credit card tailored for startups, with Emigrant Bank currently acting as the issuer, had submitted an application with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Utah Department of Financial Institutions (UDFI) to establish Brex Bank.

Earlier this month, the company said it would voluntarily withdraw its bank charter and federal deposit insurance applications. 

“This will permit us to modify and strengthen our application and resubmit at a later date,” the company said. “We appreciate the support and thoughtful guidance from the Utah DFI and FDIC.”

News: xentral, an ERP platform for SMBs, raises $75M Series B from Tiger Global and Meritech

• August 17, 2021
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Enterprise Resource Planning systems have traditionally been the preserve of larger companies, but in recent years the amount of data small medium sized businesses can generate has increased to the point where even SMEs/SMBs can get into the world of ERP. And that’s especially true for online-only businesses. At the beginning of the year we

Enterprise Resource Planning systems have traditionally been the preserve of larger companies, but in recent years the amount of data small medium sized businesses can generate has increased to the point where even SMEs/SMBs can get into the world of ERP. And that’s especially true for online-only businesses.

At the beginning of the year we covered the $20 million Series A funding of Xentral, a German startup that develops ERP for online small businesses, but it clearly didn’t plan to stop there.

It’s now raised a $75 million Series B funding from Tiger Global and Meritech, following up from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Visionaries Club (a B2B-focused VC out of Berlin), and Freigeist.

The cash will be used to enhance product, hire staff and expand the UK operation towards a more global ERP market, which is expected to reach $32 billion by 2023.

Speaking to me over a call, Benedikt Sauter, founder and CEO of central, said: “We hook into Shopify, eBay, Amazon, Magento, WooCommerce, and also CRM systems like Pipedrive to collect the software together in one place, and try to do it all automatically in the background so that companies can really focus. Our goal is that a business owner who decides on Friday that they need a flexible ERP can implement and configure xentral over the weekend and hand it over to their team on Monday.”

The German startup covers services like order and warehouse management, packaging, fulfillment, accounting, and sales management, and, right now, the majority of its 1,000 customers are in Germany. Customers include the likes of direct-to-consumer brands like YFood, KoRo, the Nu Company and Flyeralarm.

John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global, said: “Our diligence has uncovered a delighted customer base at xentral and a product offering that has evolved into a true mission-critical platform for ecommerce merchants globally. We are excited to partner with such product visionaries as Benedikt and Claudia as the business scales to serve customers not only in Europe but around the globe in the future.”

Xentral was Sequoia’s first investment in Europe since officially opening for business in the region this year. Sequoia backed other European startups before, including Graphcore, Klarna, Tessian, Unity, UiPath, n8n, and Evervault — but all of those deals were done from the US. Sequoia and its new partner in Europe, Luciana Lixandru, is understood to be joining Xentral’s board along with Visionaries’ Robert Lacher.

Alex Clayton, General Partner at Meritech said: “Meritech invested in NetSuite in 2008 with the vision of bringing ERP to the cloud… We believe that xentral will bring automation to hundreds of thousands SME businesses, dramatically improving multi-channel processes and data management in an ever-growing e-commerce market.”

Sauter and his co-founder Claudia Sauter (who is also his wife) built the early prototype of central originally for their first business in computer hardware sales.

News: A leaked bill for Nigerian startups reveals a theme of licenses, fees, fines, and sentences

• August 17, 2021
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For a while, there have been talks about revamping the outdated 2007 Act of Nigeria’s information and technology body, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA). Earlier this year, in March, the director-general Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi proposed the realignment of the Act with “tenets and ideals of the fourth Industrial Revolution” and Nigeria’s Digital Economy

For a while, there have been talks about revamping the outdated 2007 Act of Nigeria’s information and technology body, the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA).

Earlier this year, in March, the director-general Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi proposed the realignment of the Act with “tenets and ideals of the fourth Industrial Revolution” and Nigeria’s Digital Economy Policy.

Yesterday, we might have caught a glimpse of what that amended bill looks like, and its details are rather concerning.

In summary, the bill states that NITDA wants tech companies operating in Nigeria to get a license, pay pre-tax profit levies, and sanction whoever (person or company) that operates contrary to the new Act’s provisions.

In 2019, the World Bank ranked Nigeria 131 out of 190 countries on its Doing Business Index, which measures the ease of doing business through a comparative assessment of regulatory environments.

Per the report, Nigeria was one of the top 10 countries with the most notable improvements during the review period of May 2018 to April 2019. Granted, the country made some improvements during this period but since last year, any talk of progression from the country has been on paper. In reality, businesses especially those with focus on technology, have faced harsh regulations and policies that are detrimental to their growth.

We witnessed how the operations of motorcycle-haling companies in Lagos were halted indefinitely in early 2020, forcing them to switch business models to survive. In March this year, the country’s apex bank barred people from trading cryptocurrency through banks; crypto startups haven’t looked the same despite using peer-to-peer methods. And more recently, the Twitter ban has affected small businesses in general and how tech startups communicate with customers.

What’s in the bill?

Section 6 of the amended bill details the powers accrued to NITDA. Some of them include the powers to fix licensing and authorization charges, collect fees and penalties and issue contravention notices and non-compliance with the Act.

The agency says it also reserves the right to “enter premises, inspect, seize, seal, detain and impose administrative sanctions on erring persons and companies who contravene any provision of the Act” subject to a court order.

In section 13, NITDA proposes establishing a fund (The National Information Technology Development Fund) to carry out the country’s digital economy objectives. How will this Fund be financed? Grants-in-aid, fees, accrued money under administrative payments, and levies charged from tech companies.

The bill declares that tech companies making an annual turnover of N100 million (~$200,000) will have to pay a levy of 1% of their profit before tax.

In section 20 of the leaked bill, NITDA says it will issue licenses and authorizations for tech companies regardless of their size. The licenses are classified into three — product, service provider, and platform provider. The bill provided no additional information about what these licenses entail and how startups qualify to get them.

However, the agency is more concerned about stating what will happen to individuals or companies that do not get these licenses or pay the 1% levy fee.

“Any person or body corporate who operates an information technology or digital economy service, product, or platform contrary to the provisions of this Act, commits an offense,” the agency said in the statement.

Individuals found guilty by the agency will be fined not less than N3 million (~$6,000) or placed into custody for a year or more. The bill states NITDA can also decide to charge such a person both the fine and imprisonment.

On the other hand, a fine of not less than N30 million (~$60,000) will be charged against corporate bodies. The ‘principal officers’ of the companies may also serve a prison sentence for two years or more.

And individuals or corporates that deny personnel from the agency to carry out duties under the Act will be fined not less than N3 million (~$6,000) and N30 million (~$60,000), respectively. Prison terms range from a year to two in this section for individuals and members within a corporate body.

Further offenses and penalties are mentioned later in the bill. For instance, any company which falls into the category of paying levies and does not pay after two months will be liable to a fine of 0.5% of the total amount to be paid every day after the default.

TechCrunch reached out to the agency for comment regarding the validity of the leaked bill but did not receive any response as of press time.

Startup bill v. NITDA Act

NITDA’s leaked amended bill is coming when the Nigerian tech ecosystem has rallied around to engage policymakers in the country to enact a Startup Bill.

The Startup Bill is geared toward creating an enabling environment for tech startups through co-created regulations with the Nigerian government. The first draft will be made public this month towards a first reading in the country’s National Assembly in October.

Momentarily, uncertainty hovers around the stakeholders’ next steps following the content revealed in NITDA’s revised bill because the agency is supposed to play a major role in bringing the Startup Bill to fruition.

The leaked NITDA Amendment Bill also presents a whole new level of threat. It is heads and shoulders above what tech companies might have faced in recent memory. If passed, it will alter how they operate and drastically affect the ease of doing business.

Many have called for startup leaders and tech companies to lobby the legislators behind such bills. However, the general sentiment is that lobbying is a dead-end for now.

Before the Lagos state government banned ride-hailing companies from operating on its roads, sources say they tried to lobby with necessary stakeholders. Popular players like Gokada and OPay took to the media to take pictures with the governor. However, it still ended in a ban.

Despite being one of the pioneers of the Startup Bill, Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, co-founder of Andela and Flutterwave, also thinks lobbying might make for a futile effort.

In a tweet, he says Nigerian legislators are not “lobbyable,” and startups should prepare for the worst while hoping for the best. He also offered advice to Nigerian startups to start building for a global audience and incorporate their companies outside the country if necessary.

News: informed., you want to be? Trio of European media veterans take on the problem of news economics

• August 17, 2021
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News is vital to society, but it’s also incredibly expensive to produce. As ad rates have suffered across the industry (minus a positive blip this summer), publishers have increasingly turned to paywalls to make ends meet. There’s just one problem: the open internet which allowed readers to range over the entire thought of humanity has

News is vital to society, but it’s also incredibly expensive to produce. As ad rates have suffered across the industry (minus a positive blip this summer), publishers have increasingly turned to paywalls to make ends meet. There’s just one problem: the open internet which allowed readers to range over the entire thought of humanity has transformed into row after row of walled gardens locked down by angry sentries. The subscription hell I talked about three years ago has indeed only accelerated.

Fixing hell is going to take some doing, but three veterans of news and media in Europe are ready to take a crack at it.

Benjamin Mateev, Martin Kaelble, and Axel Bard Bringéus have come together to launch informed. (official branding: no caps, mandatory period). The Berlin-based startup wants to be a layer on top of prominent paywalled news services, connecting readers with curated “playlists” of news and opinion stories called Read Lists and augmented with an original summary. The company was founded in January, is currently in beta, and has raised a “significant pre-seed by modern standards” from local shop 468 Capital.

What’s interesting here is the team. Bringéus previously spent six years at Spotify where he ultimately worked as global head of markets during the company’s rapid overseas expansion. He has most recently been a deal partner at prominent European firm EQT Ventures. Meanwhile, Mateev was a lead engineer on to-do list platform Wunderlist through its Microsoft acquisition and head of product at opinion news site The European, and Kaelble has been a long-time business journalist at places like Capital.

The trio, who have seen success in their varied careers, took a step back to explore how they could fix the varied challenges of the news industry circle 2021. They did “diary studies” where they asked people to track what they read in the news, ran surveys across thousands of people, and also talked to media executives and investors.

They found that paywalls have been mostly successful the past few years for media companies, but that growth is flagging as core readers have purchased subscriptions. “Almost all publishers post-COVID and post-Trump have hit a wall with their paywall strategies,” Bringéus said. “Many were able to monetize their content directly in their core geo, so they are very open to working with non-cannibalizing third parties like us.”

Simultaneously, young readers in the Gen Z crowd increasingly want to peruse quality news, but lack the means to pay the exorbitant subscription fees at some of the most prestigious sites. “They want to read but financially they can’t afford [it],” Mateev put it. I asked somewhat skeptically whether our illustrious progeny actually want to read quality news over viral TikToks, but Mateev said the evidence pointed strongly to yes. “That’s where the interesting thing lies … the old publishers do have a lot of good standing with the younger audience,” he said.

Informed, which is working with the Washington Post, The Economist, Financial Times, and Bloomberg, will group articles from those sources among others onto Read Lists, while adding its own news summary to the event. For example, you could imagine today that the platform would have a Read List on Afghanistan that would include breaking news stories from the Kabul airport as well as a curated selection of deeper-dives and opinion pieces that talk about the history and perspective of the crisis in the Central Asian nation. “You can snack or you can eat if you want to,” Bringéus said of the design.

He noted that while there are similarities with Spotify playlists, a subject with which he is very familiar, news doesn’t have the same properties as music. “In news, you don’t need all the news and it is perishable, [so] you want to cluster it,” he said.

The company will launch its mobile-first product later this year, although you can sign up for the beta test today. Ultimately, the company is looking to pursue a freemium model with all the licensed content behind the paywall, while its own news summaries will be free. The team is testing pricing and hasn’t determined a launch price at this time.

It’s a bold initiative in a space riven with the tombstones of past startups and even larger corporate initiatives such as Apple News+, which has mostly failed to gain traction despite owning a foothold on every iOS device. That harrowing history aside, the hope here is that the timing is propitious: a new generation of news readers are clamoring for quality, and publishers are ready to let go of some control over their audience in exchange for growth in the post-Trump news landscape. If it succeeds, it’d definitely be front-page news.

News: Trading platform Bitpanda raises $263M at a $4.1BN valuation

• August 17, 2021
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It’s not even half a year since crypto exchange Bitpanda announced a $170M Series B — when, back in March, Austria’s first unicorn was being valued at $1.2 billion. Today it’s topping that: Announcing a $263M Series C, led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, with the fintech startup now valued at a whopping $4.1BN —

It’s not even half a year since crypto exchange Bitpanda announced a $170M Series B — when, back in March, Austria’s first unicorn was being valued at $1.2 billion. Today it’s topping that: Announcing a $263M Series C, led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, with the fintech startup now valued at a whopping $4.1BN — more than 3x its earlier valuation as crypto trading continues cooking on gas.

The round was signed earlier this month, just four months after the business gained unicorn status. Other participating investors include Alan Howard and REDO Ventures, with existing investors LeadBlock Partners and Jump Capital also joining the Series C.

There are a number of exchanges and trading platforms targeted at retail investors, of course, including some big US-based players. But Bitpanda has been making its mark by being Europe-focused, with offices and physical tech hubs located in eight cities across the region, including Vienna, Barcelona, Berlin, Krakow, London, Madrid, Milan, and Paris.

The platform has a further twist in that it lets its ~3 million users easily invest (commission-free) in precious metals (like gold) or in any established stock they fancy — in addition to encouraging individuals to hop aboard the crypto rollercoaster, which was its first focus. (The minimum investment amount set by the platform is €1.)

Despite diversification beyond crypto, a spokeswoman confirmed to us that crypto trading remains “the preferred choice” for Bitpanda’s current users, noting the Stocks trading product is still in beta. “With Bitpanda Stocks, we introduced a new way of investing in stocks and ETFs; it enables investing 24/7, any time, day or night. This is still in a beta phase, we’re adding constantly new assets. That said, stock trading is slowly picking up and increasing its share in overall trading,” she added.

More recently (in June) Bitpanda expanded into the b2b market — with a white label platform offering that lets other fintechs and banks offer trading to their own clients.

This combination of products and regional focus has helped the platform pile on new users in short order: Bitpanda says it’s “on track” to achieve 6x customer growth year over year, with revenues projected to increase sevenfold in 2021 vs the previous year.

The Series C funding will be used for international expansion and growth, per a press release, as well as going on further beefing up headcount (500+ strong at this stage), as well as on gearing up for further scaling of the business.

Tech and product are also set to get juiced with Series C funds.

Commenting in a statement, Eric Demuth, co-founder and CEO, said: “We started Bitpanda in 2014 with a clear vision: To bring investing closer to everyone, everywhere. We wouldn’t be here today without the efforts of our talented team members who are constantly ‘rolling up their sleeves’ to make things happen. We’re grateful to share our journey with these incredible people — and that’s why a key area of focus for us is to keep strengthening our team by bringing onboard world-class talent.We’re also grateful for the vote of confidence received from our investors, old and new, in this investment round. We look forward to working together as we shape the future of finance and grow Bitpanda into the #1 investment platform in Europe
and beyond”.

Bitpanda’s spokeswoman also told us that international expansion and growth are “key priorities”, adding: “We’ll keep building the team, opening new offices, and launching new products as we design for scale and optimise for growth. This also means strengthening Bitpanda’s position in existing markets — such as in the DACH region, Spain, France, Italy, and Poland, and also enter new markets, such as the UK or the markets in Central and Eastern Europe.”

In another supporting statement, Andrew McCormack, founding partner of Valar Ventures, said: “We believed in Bitpanda’s potential from the beginning and we are impressed by the results that Eric, Paul, Christian and the Bitpanda team have achieved. With more than 1.2 million users acquired in the first half of 2021, impressive net revenue growth and world-class executive hires, Bitpanda stands as the living proof that hypergrowth can be achieved in a sustainable way. We’re excited to further work together to bring the world of investing at the fingertips of everyone, anywhere.”

News: Ultrahuman raises $17.5M, touting a wearable blood glucose tracker

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Fitness platform Ultrahuman has officially announced a $17.5 million Series B fund raise, with investment coming from early stage fund Alpha Wave Incubation, Steadview Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures and Utsav Somani’s iSeed fund. A number of founders and angel investors also participated in the Bangalore-headquartered startup’s Series B, including Tiger Global’s Scott Schleifer,

Fitness platform Ultrahuman has officially announced a $17.5 million Series B fund raise, with investment coming from early stage fund Alpha Wave Incubation, Steadview Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Blume Ventures and Utsav Somani’s iSeed fund.

A number of founders and angel investors also participated in the Bangalore-headquartered startup’s Series B, including Tiger Global’s Scott Schleifer, Deepinder Goyal (CEO of Zomato), Kunal Shah (CEO of Cred), and Gaurav Munjal and Romain Saini (the CEO and co-founders of unacademy), among others. The latest tranche of funding brings its total raised to date to $25M.

While the subscription platform has been around since 2019, offering a fairly familiar blend of home workout videos, mindfulness content, sleep sessions and heart rate tracking (integrating with third party wearables like the Apple Watch), its latest fitness tool looks rather more novel — as it’s designed for monitoring metabolic activity by tracking the user’s glucose levels (aka, blood sugar).

Keeping tabs on blood sugar is essential for people living with diabetes. But in the US alone millions of people are prediabetic — meaning they have a higher than normal level of blood glucose and are at risk of developing diabetes, though they may not know it yet.

More broadly, Ultrahuman claims over a billion people in the world suffer from a metabolic health disorder — underlining the scale of the potential addressable market it’s eyeing. 

Having sustained high blood glucose is associated with multiple health issues so managing the condition with lifestyle changes like diet and exercise is advisable. Lifestyle changes can reduce elevated blood glucose and shrink or even avoid negative health impacts — such as by averting the risk of a prediabetic person going on to develop full blown diabetes.

But knowing what type of diet and exercise regime will work best for a particular person can be tricky — and involve a lot of frustrating trial and error — since people’s glucose responses to different food items can differ wildly.

These responses depend on a person’s metabolic health — which in turn depends on individual factors like microbiome diversity, stress levels, time of day, food ingredient and quality. (See also: Personalized nutrition startups like Zoe — which is similarly paying mind to blood glucose levels but as one component of a wider play to try to use big data and AI to decode the microbiome.) 

With metabolic health being so specific to each of us there’s a strong case for continuous glucose monitoring having widespread utility — certainly if the process and price-point can be made widely accessible.

Here, Ultrahuman is having a go at productizing the practice for a fitness enthusiast market — launching its first device in beta back in June — although the price-point it’s targeting is starting out fairly premium. 

The product (a wearable and a subscription service) — which it’s branded ‘Cyborg’ — consists of a skin patch that extracts glucose from the interstitial fluid under the skin, per founder and CEO, Mohit Kumar, with the data fed into a companion app for analysis and visualization.

The patch tracks the wearer’s blood glucose levels as they go about their day — eating, exercising, sleeping etc — with the biomarker used to trigger the app to nudge the user to “optimize your lifestyle”, as Ultrahuman’s website puts it — such as by alerting the user to a high blood glucose event and suggesting they take exercise to bring their level down.

If the product lives up to its promise of continuous glucose monitoring made easy, lovers of junk food could be in for a rude awakening as they’re served fast feedback on how their body copes (or, well, doesn’t) with their favorite snacks…

“We use medical grade sensors that have been used in the sports technology domain for the last 6-7 yrs with decent accuracy levels,” says Kumar when we ask about the specifics of the wearable technology it’s using. (The sensing hardware is being ‘worn’ here in the sense that it’s directly attached to (i.e. stuck into/on) bare skin.)

While Ultrahuman’s platform has plenty more vanilla fitness content, the company is now billing itself as a “metabolic fitness platform” — putting the nascent product front and center, even though the glucose tracking subscription service remains in closed beta for now.

The startup is operating a waitlist for sign-ups as it continues to hone the technology.   

Ultrahuman touts “thousands” of people signed up and waiting to get their hands on the glucose tracker service — and says it’s seeing 60% week over week growth in sign ups, with wider availability of the product slated for “early 2022”.

Some of the Series B cash will be used to make improvements to the quality of the glucose biomarkers ahead of a full product launch.

On the enhancements side, Kumar tells TechCrunch the team is exploring “other form factors and other types of sensors that could help us capture glucose in a more accurate way and for a longer duration than 14 days”, as they work to hone the wearable. (The current version of the skin-worn sensor only lasts two weeks before it must be replaced with another patch.)

“We want to add more biomarkers like HRV [heart-rate variability], sleep zones and respiratory rate to help people understand the impact of metabolic health on their recovery/sleep and vice-versa,” he adds.

Ultrahuman says it decided to focus on tracking glucose as its “main biomarker” as it can be used as a proxy for quantifying a number of fitness and wellness issues — making it a (potentially) very useful measure of individual health signals.

Or provided the startup’s technology is able to detect changes to glucose levels with enough sensitivity to be able to make meaningful recommendations per user.

“Glucose is interesting because it is a real-time biomarker that’s affected by exercise, sleep, stress and food,” says Kumar, adding: “We are able to help people make lifestyle changes across many vectors like nutrition, sleep, stress and exercise vs being unidimensional. It is also highly personalized as it guides you as per your body’s own response.”

He gives some examples of how the product could help users by identifying beneficial tweaks they could make to their diet and exercise regimes — such as figuring out which foods in their current diet yield “a healthy metabolic response” vs those that “need more optimization” (aka, avoiding the dreaded sugar crash). Or by helping users identify “a great meal window” for their lifestyle — based in their body’s glucose consumption rate.

Other helpful nudges he suggests the service can provide to sensor-wearing users — with an eye on athletes and fitness fanatics — is how best to fuel up before exercise to perform optimally.

Optimizing the last meal of the day to improve sleep efficiency is another suggestion.

If Ultrahuman’s Cyborg can do all that with a (bearably) wearable skin patch and a bit of clever algorithmic analysis it could take the quantified self trend to the next level.

A simple stick-on sensor-plus-app that passively amplifies internal biological signals and translates individual biomarkers into highly actionable real-time personalized health insights could be the start of something huge in preventative healthcare.

Again, though, Ultrahuman’s early pricing suggests there will be some fairly hard limits on who is able to tap in here.

Early adopters in the closed beta are shelling out $80 per month for the subscription service, per Kumar. And — at least for now — the startup is eyeing adding more bells and whistles, rather than fewer. “[Product pricing] will mostly be in the same range but may introduce more services/premium features on top of this,” he confirms.

The (typically higher) cost of eating healthily and having enough leisure time to be able to look after your body by taking exercise are other hard socioeconomic limits that won’t be fixed by a wearable, no matter how smart.

 

News: Revenue-based financing startup Jenfi raises $6.3M to focus on high-growth Southeast Asian companies

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Many Southeast Asian digital businesses run into obstacles when seeking early-stage growth financing. They might not want to sell equity in their company, but often struggle to secure working capital loans from traditional financial institutions. That’s where Singapore-based Jenfi comes in, providing revenue-based financing of up to $500,000 with flexible repayment plans that co-founder and

Many Southeast Asian digital businesses run into obstacles when seeking early-stage growth financing. They might not want to sell equity in their company, but often struggle to secure working capital loans from traditional financial institutions. That’s where Singapore-based Jenfi comes in, providing revenue-based financing of up to $500,000 with flexible repayment plans that co-founder and chief executive officer Jeffrey Liu refers to as “growth capital as a product.” 

While revenue-based financing is gaining traction in many other markets, Liu told TechCrunch that Singapore-based Jenfi is the first company of its kind focused on Southeast Asia. The startup announced today that it has raised a $6.3 million Series A led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. Participants included Korea Investment Partners and Golden Equator Capital, 8VC, ICU Ventures and Taurus Ventures. The company previously raised $25 million in debt financing from San Francisco-based Arc Labs. 

Jenfi works primarily with “digital-native” companies, including SaaS providers and e-commerce sellers. Some of its clients include Tier One Entertainment, Pay With Split and Homebase. Jenfi hasn’t disclosed how much non-dilutive financing it’s provided so far, but its goal is to deploy $15 million by July 2022. It claims that the average Jenfi customer experienced compounded sales growth of about 26.5% over three months, 60% over six months and 156% over twelve months.

The aggregate sales of companies in its portfolio is currently more than $30 million, and Jenfi expects that the capital it has already deployed will help them generate $47 million in sales, or a 156% increase by July 2021. 

Liu launched Jenfi with Justin Louie in 2019, after seeing how traditional financial institutions were lagging behind Southeast Asia’s digital boom. The two previously founded GuavaPass, the fitness studio membership platform that was acquired by ClassPass in 2019. Jenfi’s creation was motivated by some of the challenges Liu and Louie faced while financing a high-growth startup focused on Asian markets. 

Jenfi’s application process is completely online and in some cases, companies have received financing in less than 24 hours, though it typically takes a few days. This is another benefit over traditional working capital loans or private equity financing, which can take months to complete, making it difficult for companies to respond quickly to revenue growth opportunities. For example, an e-commerce company may need quick working capital to purchase more inventory if it suddenly gets a lot of demand for a certain product. 

Some of Jenfi’s Series A will also be used to develop more integrations for its proprietary risk assessment engine, which analyzes how efficiently companies use their growth spending. Currently, it can tap into information from bank accounts; software like Xero or Quickbooks; payment gateways including Stripe and Braintree; e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Shopee and Lazada; and Facebook Ads and Google Ads. 

Instead of fixed installment repayment plans, Jenfi gives companies more flexible target repayment plans and charges them a flat fee based on the amount of financing they received, their monthly sales and how many months it will take to pay back the loan. Jenfi continues analyzing the data sources provided by companies, so it can tell if a client potentially needs more capital or an adjustment to their repayment terms. 

Ultimately, Jenfi’s plan to move beyond financing and also provide tools to help businesses. “We see ourselves as partners in our portfolio companies’ growth,” said Liu. 

Since Jenfi taps into a mix of data sources—including bank accounts, accounting software and digital advertising platforms, it can use that same information to identify opportunities. Part of Jenfi’s Series A funding will be used to develop automated analytics. For example, the platform would be able to identify an advertising opportunity with high ROI on Google Ads and notify the company, asking if they want to apply for more capital to finance the campaign. 

News: EV startup Canoo is gearing up for production in Oklahoma factory

• August 16, 2021
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EV startup Canoo has hired hundreds of employees and is homing in on a production date, but critical milestones including landing a battery supplier remain, according to the company’s second quarter earnings report. Canoo’s earnings report comes just a few weeks after the company’s first investor relations day when it named Dutch company VDL Nedcar

EV startup Canoo has hired hundreds of employees and is homing in on a production date, but critical milestones including landing a battery supplier remain, according to the company’s second quarter earnings report.

Canoo’s earnings report comes just a few weeks after the company’s first investor relations day when it named Dutch company VDL Nedcar as its contract manufacturing partner for its lifestyle vehicle. At the time, Canoo estimated the Nedcar facility would build up to 1,000 units in 2022 for U.S. and European markets, with a target of 15,000 units in 2023. During Monday’s earnings call, CEO Tony Aquila said the company is now expecting 25,000 units in 2023.

Canoo also provided updates on its plans to build a U.S.-based factory, which it describes as a “mega microfactory” for its pickup truck and multipurpose delivery vehicle. In June, the EV startup announced plans to build its first factory in Oklahoma. The state has committed $300 million in non-dilutive financial incentives to support the facility and Phase 2 of manufacturing.

“This two-pronged strategy is important for a few reasons,” Aquila said during Monday’s earnings call. “As a new OEM, working with Nedcar will allow us to refine our manufacturing process. While augmenting our production expertise, which will be deployed in our Oklahoma manufacturing plant, it will allow us to geographically diversify our manufacturing operations and position us to increase our commitments, products and volumes to adapt to changing market demands and build flexibility in distribution.”

Aquila said about a third of Oklahoma’s investment will be available within the first 36 months. These funds will help the company progress as it moves into its Gamma phase, which means Canoo is getting ready to launch. Year over year, Canoo upped its workforce from 230 to 656 total employees, 70% of which are hardware and software engineers. The startup’s operating expenses have increased from $19.8 million to $104.3 million YOY, with the majority of that increase coming from R&D.

The ramping up of expenses pre-revenue is a signal that Canoo is pushing forward on its production goals, but there’s still work to be done before construction begins on the Oklahoma factory. Aquila said Canoo is in the final process of selecting a construction manager, an architect and an engineering firm and will likely have more updates on the construction progress by next quarter.

The company is still working on making a final decision for a battery partner in the third quarter, a move that is becoming increasingly important as more legacy OEMs work to control their supply chain with battery joint ventures. Canoo is also struggling with semiconductor supply chain issues, as is the rest of the industry, but says its streamlined manufacturing process means its vehicles will require less chips to function.

On IR day, Canoo announced that it had completed 500,000 miles of beta testing. As of June 30, Aquila said the company has locked in engineering and design to commence “gamma” builds.

“We have also sourced 87% of components, compared to 74% in the first quarter of the year, and excluding bulk material, we are 95% sourcing complete,” said Aquila. “Our CTO and his team have completed engineering design for 67% of the lifestyle vehicle components and have moved those into tooling.”

Aquila said Canoo would begin its countdown to standard operating procedure for its lifestyle vehicle during the fourth quarter. The lifestyle vehicle is probably closer to production, but Aquila said out of the 9,500 non-binding refundable preorders, preorders for Canoo’s other two vehicles, the pickup truck and the multipurpose delivery vehicle, are the most popular.

News: Daily Crunch: Israel-based stroke therapy tech startup BrainQ raises $40M

• August 16, 2021
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Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 16, 2021. While the world deals with myriad issues, we’re sticking to our usual remit. Hugs and love to everyone, and here’s hoping for a better tomorrow. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• How Nuro is taking on Google, the world: The race to build commercial-ready self-driving cars is big, well funded and competitive. And companies are taking diverging paths in their approach to the autonomous driving question. Nuro is one such company, and TechCrunch has the inside scoop in our latest EC-1. Enjoy!
• Tesla under investigation for Autopilot crashes: Speaking of self-driving cars, Tesla’s efforts on the project are in the spotlight after a number of collisions between the company’s cars and parked first-responder vehicles. Tesla’s diver assistance program appears to be the culprit. How you feel about the inquiry will depend on whether you hold Tesla stock, but the situation underscores just how hard it is to get self-driving, full or not, to work in the wild.
• Chime, Carta and Discord: As U.S. unicorns raise new mega-rounds, or work to close their next epic funding round, TechCrunch wondered what the rash of startups worth $10 billion or more could mean for startups earlier in their lifecycle. The news is good for startups and their founders alike.

Startups/VC

• Guilded sells to Roblox: Microsoft failed to acquire Discord, but Roblox didn’t miss when it came to Guilded. Admittedly, Guilded is a far smaller company than Discord, but the two startups play in the same space, so the Roblox deal really does matter. The market for gamer chat apps is probably big enough to support a few players, but Roblox, flush with cash, was more than happy to pony up for Guilded, which raised just over $10 million while private.
• Tropic raises $25M for better software procurement: The pandemic taught the world that software gets paid for. Why? Because without it business literally stops. Software companies did well during the pandemic thanks to the centrality to regular operations that their business enjoyed. But no one wants to overpay. That’s where Tropic comes in — and now the startup that wants to help others spend less on software has $25 million to play with.
• Shopistry raises $2M for better headless commerce: We are presuming that this startup’s name is pronounced SHOP-istry, else it would make little sense. Regardless, Shopistry is building a modular e-commerce service that it thinks is better than other headless e-commerce services. It has pretty big competition in BigCommerce and Shopify, but those companies were also once wee startups.
• BrainQ wants to transform stroke rehab: At-home stroke therapy startup BrainQ has racked up a $40 million round, TechCrunch wrote today. What does its hardware do? It “stimulates the damaged part of the brain and promotes self-repair,” and does so with enough impact that it secured “a Breakthrough Device certification from the FDA.” I mean, that’s super cool.
• How Amanda DoAmaral built Fiveable: Today on the Found podcast, TechCrunch has a real treat: “Hear how DoAmaral took her dissatisfaction with an inadequate system and turned that into the motivation to build a venture-scale business outside of it.”

The Nuro EC-1

In 2010, Google’s autonomous vehicle project placed self-driving cars on Bay Area streets and freeways, but practical applications were thought to be at least a decade away.

The futurists were right on schedule: In 2020, Mountain View-based Nuro was testing its second-generation R2 robotic vehicle, the first to earn a federal exemption to operate an autonomous vehicle.

By the time Nuro raised $940 million for its Series B, it had already partnered with companies like CVS, Walmart and Domino’s to use the R2 for last-mile deliveries.

But before Nuro could even consider reaching product-market fit, its founders had to overcome technological challenges, win over regulators and strike partnerships with a range of consumer-facing companies.

“Neither JZ nor I think of ourselves as classic entrepreneurs or that starting a company is something we had to do in our lives,” says co-founder Dave Ferguson. “It was much more the result of soul searching and trying to figure out what is the biggest possible impact that we could have.”

Part 1: How Google’s self-driving car project accidentally spawned its robotic delivery rival

Part 2: Why regulators love Nuro’s self-driving delivery vehicles

Part 3: How Nuro became the robotic face of Domino’s

Part 4: Here’s what the inevitable friendly neighborhood robot invasion looks like

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Soon everyone will be able to verify their Tinder date: After initially rolling out in Japan back in 2019, Tinder intends to roll out ID verification for all of its users around the world in coming quarters. Frankly, this sounds like a good idea, and one that could improve the app’s overall safety. Our only question is how it took this long for Tinder to get to.
• Cisco buys Epsagon: U.S. tech company Cisco has plonked down around $500 million for Israeli app monitoring company Epsagon. Sure, Israel is best known for its cybersecurity work, but that doesn’t mean that the country is one-note. The deal didn’t appear to move Cisco’s stock, which eased modestly during a generally lackluster day for technology shares. Still, we don’t see this size of deal as often as we once did, it feels, so we wanted to highlight it.
• Do you want more privacy breaches? This is how you get more privacy breaches. That’s my takeaway from news that Pearson is paying a $1 million fine for a 2018 breach that leaked millions of student records, one that it failed to mention to investors. The SEC agreed to the settlement. Next they’ll fine Exxon $47.29 for lying about climate change.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Are you all caught up on last week’s coverage of growth marketing? If not, read it here.

TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you’re a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we’d like to hear about why they loved working with you.

Community

Join Danny Crichton on Thursday, August 19, at 2 p.m. PDT/5 p.m. EDT for a Twitter Spaces interview with Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, author of “Choose Possibility: Take Risks and Thrive (Even When You Fail).”

News: Yik Yak returns from the dead

• August 16, 2021
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After meeting an ignominious end in 2017, the anonymous gossip app once popular with college students lives again. Yik Yak returned to the iOS App Store on Monday (sorry, Android users) under new ownership, inspiring a fresh round of interest in the long-dead social network. 📣 ICYMI: After a 4 year hiatus, Yik Yak is

After meeting an ignominious end in 2017, the anonymous gossip app once popular with college students lives again. Yik Yak returned to the iOS App Store on Monday (sorry, Android users) under new ownership, inspiring a fresh round of interest in the long-dead social network.

With a reputation for rampant cyber-bullying and harassment, moderation woes were central to the app’s failure. Once ubiquitous on many college campuses, Yik Yak limped into 2016, laying off most employees and struggling to keep users engaged. The app tried to pivot away from campus gossip and toward location-based social networking that same year, but it wasn’t enough and the once high-flying social network was sold for scrap.

As co-founders Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington wound down the app in 2017, Square paid $1 million for several Yik Yak engineers and rights to some of the company’s intellectual property. The company had raised $73 million and was valued around $400 million in 2014, during its peak. TechCrunch contacted the company for information about its new ownership, which is apparently based in Nashville, but has yet to receive a response.

Though we’re still not sure who re-launched it, the new version of Yik Yak is well aware of the original app’s pitfalls. After providing a phone number to sign up, a short onboarding sequence warns users of a zero tolerance “one strike and you’re out” policy for bullying and threats.

“We’re committed to combating bullying and hate speech on the Yik Yak platform by any means necessary,” the new Yik Yak team, which acquired the rights to develop the app in February, wrote on a relaunched website.

Being aware of what issues will inevitably arise on a social network and being prepared to moderate those issues at scale are two very different propositions. Yik Yak is anonymous, but it’s also an app focused on what’s happening IRL nearby within a tight radius, two factors that could combine to pose even more of a moderation challenge.

Within the new app, a sidebar points users toward “stay safe” resources address an array of issues that could arise on the app, like ride-sharing, bullying, sexual consent and COVID-19, though the app doesn’t yet include explicit misinformation policies.

Another section in the sidebar offers a list of mental health resources and encourages users to downvote and report any bullying on the app so it can be reviewed by the Yik Yak team. The company says that yaks with a negative ranking from five or more downvotes will be automatically removed from the app’s feed, though we’ve asked the company for more details about its content moderation plans, including if a team at Yik Yak is dedicated to the task.

The new Yik Yak is built around location-based sharing and users can share messages, called “yaks,” to anyone within a five mile radius. If you’re in a rural area of otherwise quiet zone devoid of yaks, you can amuse yourself with the confessions that show up on a chart of popular national posts.

For now, many high-ranking posts are excited chatter about the app’s return from former Yik Yak devotees — mostly younger millennials who’ve since graduated from college. A smattering of popular posts warns that Gen Z-ers too young to have used Yik Yak during its heyday won’t know what hit them.

“Is this app now 100% 25-30 year olds?” one post reads. “The Zoomers aren’t ready for the return of the Yak,” another user wrote.