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News: Salesforce announces first integrations with Slack after closing $28B sale

• August 17, 2021
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When Salesforce acquired Slack at the end of last year for almost $28 billion, you had to figure that they had some big plans for the company, and today the CRM giant announced some initial integrations that should prove useful for Salesforce customers. Rob Seaman, SVP for Slack at Salesforce sees Slack as the communications

When Salesforce acquired Slack at the end of last year for almost $28 billion, you had to figure that they had some big plans for the company, and today the CRM giant announced some initial integrations that should prove useful for Salesforce customers.

Rob Seaman, SVP for Slack at Salesforce sees Slack as the communications platform for Salesforce moving forward. “We really want Slack to be the primary engagement surface for our users, their communications, their work, their workflows and the processes and the apps they support,” he said.

“What we’re announcing are these new capabilities to support that Slack vision for sales, service, marketing and analytics. And for each of those areas what we’re doing is a combination of articulating, both in best practices and codifying, how you can and should model your sales, service and marketing organizations in this new world,” he said.

The hope is that by taking advantage of Slack’s ability to integrate external enterprise apps inside the application, working together they can find ways to speed up and automate various Salesforce tasks, making it faster and easier to use without switching context to make it happen.

For starters, the Sales Cloud gets dedicated deal rooms, where all of the parties involved in a complex sale, whether internal departments like finance and product people or external partners, can come together in Slack throughout the sales cycle and stay on top of the ebb and flow of all the sales activity.

“I think the deal room is an expression of an opportunity from Salesforce into Slack in a way that makes it very simple to connect with everybody to effectively get a deal done, including customers and partners,” Seaman explained. “That’s where Slack Connect is extremely powerful [to connect with external partners]. We think we should be able to dramatically reduce sales cycle lengths as a result of this…” he said. Slack Connect is the service introduced last year that enables Slack users to connect with people outside of a company.

In addition, through integrations members of the sales team involved in a more complex deal can get daily updates, which are automatically pulled together in Slack and include personalized daily task lists, meetings and priority deals.

Service teams can meet together in a room Salesforce is calling a swarm, a place for the team to help one another with specific questions or problems they may be having. In a company with a large product catalogue this could be particularly helpful to get an answer quickly. While Einstein recommendations helps with related content, a swarm can come in handy when there is a more specific question involved and a human with that knowledge may be just the ticket. Service team members will also be able to search for experts to invite to the swarm, who may be able to help answer the question or solve the problem more quickly.

Not to be left out, marketing gets intelligent insights delivered with the help of Datorama, the company Salesforce bought in 2018. Marketers also get regular updates inside of Slack when a change is made to a marketing campaign.

Finally there are integrations with Tableau, the company that Salesforce bought in 2018 for $6.5 billion — Salesforce is a highly acquisitive company. In a similar way that marketers get updates to campaigns, other users can get Slack updates whenever data they consider important gets updated in Tableau, and they can also get daily digests of key metrics that matter to them right in Slack.

Seaman promised that these announcements were just the start, and we will be hearing about more integrations with Slack at the Dreamforce customer conference next month — and in the coming months. “This is just the beginning, and so you’ll continue to see expansion of the integrations between Salesforce and Slack for the four areas that we’re announcing today around sales, service, marketing and analytics, but also every single cloud and industry solution in [the] Salesforce [family of products] is working on this,” he said.

News: Stop using Zoom, Hamburg’s DPA warns state government

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Hamburg’s state government has been formally warned against using Zoom over data protection concerns. The German state’s data protection agency (DPA) took the step of issuing a public warning yesterday, writing in a press release that the Senate Chancellory’s use of the popular videoconferencing tool violates the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) since

Hamburg’s state government has been formally warned against using Zoom over data protection concerns.

The German state’s data protection agency (DPA) took the step of issuing a public warning yesterday, writing in a press release that the Senate Chancellory’s use of the popular videoconferencing tool violates the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) since user data is transferred to the US for processing.

The DPA’s concern follows a landmark ruling (Schrems II) by Europe’s top court last summer which invalidated a flagship data transfer arrangement between the EU and the US (Privacy Shield), finding US surveillance law to be incompatible with EU privacy rights.

The fallout from Schrems II has been slow to manifest — beyond an instant blanket of legal uncertainty. However a number of European DPAs are now investigating the use of US-based digital services because of the data transfer issue, and in some instances publicly warning against the use of mainstream US tools like Facebook and Zoom because user data cannot be adequately safeguarded when it’s taken over the pond.

German agencies are among the most proactive in this respect. But the EU’s data protection supervisor is also investigating the bloc’s use of cloud services from US giants Amazon and Microsoft over the same data transfer concern.

At the same time, negotiations between the European Commission and the Biden administration to seek a replacement data transfer deal remain ongoing. However EU lawmakers have repeatedly warned against any quick fix — saying reform of US surveillance law is likely required before there can be a revived Privacy Shield. And as the legal limbo continues a growing number of public bodies in Europe are facing pressure to ditch US-based services in favor of compliant local alternatives.

In the Hamburg case, the DPA says it took the step of issuing the Senate Chancellory with a public warning after the body did not provide an adequate response to concerns raised earlier.

The agency asserts that use of Zoom by the public body does not comply with the GDPR’s requirement for a valid legal basis for processing personal data, writing: “The documents submitted by the Senate Chancellery on the use of Zoom show that [GDPR] standards are not being adhered to.”

The DPA initiated a formal procedure earlier, via a hearing, on June 17, 2021 but says the Senate Chancellory failed to stop using the videoconferencing tool. Nor did it provide any additional documents or arguments to demonstrate compliance usage. Hence the DPA taking the step of a formal warning, under Article 58 (2) (a) of the GDPR.

In a statement, Ulrich Kühn, the acting Hamburg commissioner for data protection and freedom of information, dubbed it “incomprehensible” that the regional body was continuing to flout EU law in order to use Zoom — pointing out that a local alternative, provided by the German company Dataport (which supplies software to a number of state, regional and local government bodies) is readily available.

In the statement [translated with Google Translate], Kühn said: “Public bodies are particularly bound to comply with the law. It is therefore more than regrettable that such a formal step had to be taken. At the [Senate Chancellery of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg], all employees have access to a tried and tested video conference tool that is unproblematic with regard to third-country transmission. As the central service provider, Dataport also provides additional video conference systems in its own data centers. These are used successfully in other regions such as Schleswig-Holstein. It is therefore incomprehensible why the Senate Chancellery insists on an additional and legally highly problematic system.”

We’ve reached out to the Hamburg DPA and Senate Chancellory with questions.

Zoom has also been contacted for comment.

News: Hopper raises $170M at $3.5B+ valuation as travel surges and its fintech tools help offset variant concerns

• August 17, 2021
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Travel tech company Hopper has raised a $170 million Series G, the company said today. Astute observers may recognize the number — that’s the same amount it raised in a Series F round that closed earlier this year. These are indeed new funds, however, bringing its total raised to date to nearly $600 million, with the

Travel tech company Hopper has raised a $170 million Series G, the company said today. Astute observers may recognize the number — that’s the same amount it raised in a Series F round that closed earlier this year. These are indeed new funds, however, bringing its total raised to date to nearly $600 million, with the company now valued at over $3.5 billion. This latest round arrives as Hopper is seeing impressive growth as travel starts to surge on the recent downswings in cases in North America following large-scale Covid-19 vaccination campaigns.

Hopper says that its revenue is on track to surge 330% vs. last year, which is hardly surprising given that 2020 saw the depths of the pandemic and a widespread screeching halt to the bustling global travel industry. The more impressive stat is that Hopper’s revenue is already up 100% vs. its last pre-pandemic quarter, indicating the tough choices and aggressive re-prioritization of its products and business it underwent as a result of the pandemic are working well.

Of course, there’s a looming spectre threatening the overall narrative of a travel industry bounce-back: Delta and other Covid-19 variants, which are currently driving another wave of resurgence of the disease in North America. I asked Hopper CEO and co-founder Fred Lalonde about Delta’s impact on Hopper’s business so far.

“Currently, we have not seen an incremental impact of the Delta variant on Hopper’s domestic bookings,” he said. “In recent weeks, we have seen higher domestic bookings and lower international bookings on Hopper, as travelers look to stay closer to home. Since Hopper’s customer base is predominantly younger, leisure travelers and the majority of our bookings have been domestic throughout the pandemic, our domestic bookings still remain stable. ”

Regardless of the impact on the nature of bookings, though, Lalonde notes that Hopper’s line of fintech products (something the company increasingly sees as its key differentiation) are in increasing demand as elements of uncertainty like the impact of the Delta variant enter into customer travel planning considerations.

We are, however, seeing increased demand for our flexible booking products in recent weeks,” Lalonde said. “In fact, purchases of Hopper’s Cancel for Any Reason are up 33% from early July, Change for Any Reason is up 9.3% from early July, and Rebooking Guarantee is up 12% in the past month, as travelers look for more flexibility and protection over their trips.”

These AI-powered tools offer protections against pricing fluctuations and volatility, no hassle rebooking even up to the day prior to your trip, cross-airline rebooking for missed connections and more.

Hopper is also looking to use these newly-raised funds to further reinforce its business through increased customer support hiring (it’s already scaled the team by 200% and rolled out a suit of new automated tools that Lalonde says resolves 60% of its inbound requests “instantly”). The company intends to bring on 500 new employees in the near future, with 300 of those dedicated to customer service roles.

Another area of interest for Hopper with this funding is acqui-hiring: Lalonde says specific targets include teams focused on “travel, data science or engineering-heavy startups to help introduce new product offerings and fuel its international expansion.” The company’s product expansion goals include opening up home rentals on the platform, and its global ambitions include expanding to Europe and Asia.

When it raised its Series F in March, Hopper also announced that it would be white labeling its booking products through Hopper Cloud, and partnering first with Capital One to launch a travel booking portal for its cardholders, which is on track to debut later this year. Since then, Hopper has also revealed that it will be working with Amadeus to roll out its fintech products to any travel provider that wants to use them, including airlines, online travel agencies and more.

Covid-19 was obviously a shock to the system across all industries and almost every aspect of daily life, but the travel industry likely experienced some of the most dramatic upheaval. Hopper’s ability to attract significant pools of new funding in the wake of the pandemic, including this new round led by GPI Capital, reflect the impressive flexibility and speed with which it’s been able to shape an entirely new kind of digital travel company that anticipates and even thrives on volatility.

News: African fintech Pngme raises $15M for its financial data infrastructure platform

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Unbundling financial data through APIs and driving data-driven insights with value-add products in Africa keeps getting more exciting as major players continue to raise more money for scale. Less than a year after its $3 million seed round, San Francisco- and Africa-based fintech Pngme has snapped up another $15 million for its financial data infrastructure

Unbundling financial data through APIs and driving data-driven insights with value-add products in Africa keeps getting more exciting as major players continue to raise more money for scale.

Less than a year after its $3 million seed round, San Francisco- and Africa-based fintech Pngme has snapped up another $15 million for its financial data infrastructure play. The company is also describing itself as a machine learning-as-a-service platform.

Octopus Ventures led the Series A round, with follow-on investment from Lateral Capital, EchoVC and Raptor Group.  Other investors like Unshackled Ventures, Future Africa and Two Small Fish Ventures participated too. Pngme also received checks from angel investors; some include Hayden Simmons of RallyCap, Plaid’s Dan Kahn, Richard Talbot of RBC Capital and Kyle Ellicott of Intersect VC.

Pngme’s platform caters to fintechs and other financial institutions across sub-Saharan Africa. When the founders, Brendan Playford and Cate Rung, last spoke with TechCrunch, Pngme was heading out of stealth mode in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa.

Right now, Pngme has three core products for clients in these three markets. In addition to its already known API and mobile SDK, Pngme has added a customer management platform. The company says combining the three products will drive its customers’ adoption and use of personalized user experiences and financial products.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, Playford references building personalized user fintech experiences to what Alipay and WeChat have done in the past couple of years.

When users sign up, both platforms provide the right recommendations on every financial service before offering the right product when they make up their minds.

“It’s a highly data-driven user experience. And every fintech or bank wants to provide that same data-driven user experience. From instant loans or savings, or overdrafts, or whatever it might be, it’s all just like a user experience around a product,” Playford said, referring to both Chinese super-app juggernauts. “If you get to the core of all of the business problems for financial institutions, they’re looking at doing two things. One is they’re looking at lowering their customer acquisition costs. And then they’re looking at increasing the lifetime value of their customers.”

Playford says Pngme wants to mirror this playbook. But why has it become important for the company all of a sudden?

Most African financial institutions and fintechs are racing to offer fully customized user experiences and financial products tailored to their customers’ needs. To fuel these products and user experiences, data infrastructure is needed. Machine learning models are supposed to be trained to acquire, retain and maximize the lifetime value of a customer. 

These processes can be expensive and time-consuming, leaving them with the difficult task of choosing between building the infrastructure or serving their customer.

Pngme allows financial institutions and fintechs to collect and aggregate financial data at scale. The company says its mobile SDK and data processing pipelines collect alternative financial data and unify it with other data sources to create a holistic picture of an individual’s financial behavior.   

“The pain point we solve is the cost of building the infrastructure is very high. And the data science, the data engineering talent, just globally is really hard to find. So building a data infrastructure as a service works really well because it’s a subscription to get those services which you’d normally need a five- or six-person team to build this structure.”

The close of Pngme’s Series A brings its total investment to $18.5 million, making it the most funded in this fintech category across the continent. Other prominent startups include South African-based Stitch, and Nigeria’s Okra, Mono and OnePipe.

Although each platform has morphed into providing more complex data offerings, Playford says one of the important things Pngme has considered since February is clearly distinguishing itself from these other platforms. 

“What we do is that we’ve kind of really differentiated ourselves to be not just collecting the data that we can see but also, we can connect to Mono data, Okra data, and we can connect with banks’ data. We essentially merge all that data and then put machine learning models on top for the clients. That can be predictive credit models, segmentation models and really positioning ourselves as a data processing infrastructure for banks and fintechs.”

Playford’s explanation of how he thinks Pngme is different resonates with the way other founders think of their own platforms. But time will tell how long these products can keep being dissimilar.

Pngme’s proposition has found traction with some tier-one banks in Nigeria and South Africa like ABSA, UBA, First Bank, fintechs Kuda, Umba, Renmoney, CredPal and credit bureaus like TransUnion Africa.

Pngme will use the investment to acquire more customers, it says. One way the company plans to make this happen is by expanding its executive team. Pngme is hiring Lorraine Kageni Maina as the CSO and Nick Masson as the CTO.

Alongside key executive hires, Pngme is expanding its data science, engineering and sales teams globally. COO Rung says Pngme’s infrastructure has processed billions of data points from hundreds of financial institutions across sub-Saharan Africa. The next plan is to double down on its Insights Library product and expand its third-party data connections to other markets over the next year.

For Octopus Ventures, the lead investor in this round, Pngme shows the need for actionable data to drive the explosion of digital fintech services for Africans.

On why the VC firm invested, Tosin Agbabiaka said, “The elegance of the technology solution, combined with an exceptional team and strong market traction with large institutions underlines our belief that Pngme will power the next generation of financial services in Africa, helping to give millions of more people access to banking and lending.”

News: MOLOCO raises $150M Series C led by Tiger Global at a $1.5B valuation

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MOLOCO, an adtech startup that uses machine learning to build mobile campaigns, announced today it has raised $150 million in new Series C funding led by Tiger Global Management, taking its valuation to $1.5 billion. This is separate from the $20 million Series C round MOLOCO announced three months ago, which brought it to unicorn

MOLOCO, an adtech startup that uses machine learning to build mobile campaigns, announced today it has raised $150 million in new Series C funding led by Tiger Global Management, taking its valuation to $1.5 billion. This is separate from the $20 million Series C round MOLOCO announced three months ago, which brought it to unicorn status. Co-founder and chief executive officer Ikkjin Ahn told TechCrunch that MOLOCO raised again so soon because “as we gear up for a potential IPO, we wanted more funding to help us grow faster.”

Founded in 2013 and based in Redwood City, California, MOLOCO has now raised $200 million in total. The company claims it has “consistently grown in excess of 100% annually,” and has an annual net revenue run rate of more than $100 million.

Its clients range in size from mobile developers who have less than 100,000 users to more than a billion, Ahn said in an email, with some spending more than $1 million a month through MOLOCO Cloud, its demand side platform (DSP). MOLOCO’s customers include King Digital, Playrix and Netmarble.

MOLOCO already serves mobile app developers in a wide range of industries, like gaming, social networking, e-commerce, ride-sharing, food delivery and fintech, helping them turn their first-party user data into marketing, monetization and user acquisition campaigns. The new funding will be used to expand MOLOCO’s machine learning engine to more use cases by focusing on research and development, product and engineering. Part of the raise is earmarked for hiring, adding to MOLOCO’s 200 employees, who are spread across the world in eight offices: San Francisco, Seattle, London, Beijing, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo.

MOLOCO is getting ready to launch its Retail Media Platform, currently in beta, which helps e-commerce companies create revenue streams like sponsored ads.

Before launching MOLOCO, Ahn was a machine learning engineer at YouTube from 2008 to 2010, then Android from 2010 to 2013. Back then, MOLOCO’s founding team “noticed that a lot of mobile businesses struggled to generate sustainable growth and monetization,” Ahn said. “A big reason for that was that they offered very unique services and therefore generated very unique data—data that traditional tools were incapable of helping make use of.” MOLOCO’s machine learning engine was created to help companies turn their first-party data into growth campaigns and monetization strategies.

Eight years later, mobile developers now view machine learning “as an essential part of their tech stack in order to advertise and monetize their apps effectively,” Ahn said.

Some try to build their own machine learning algorithms, but this can be a drain on their resources. Others outsource the work, but that means losing transparency and control of their data. Ahn said MOLOCO’s goal is to help app developers maintain control of data while giving them access to the same quality of algorithms as tech giants like Facebook and Google, which he describes as the startup’s main competitors.

Beyond walled gardens

“Let’s face it, most ad spend today is going to Facebook and Google, because they have excellent machine learning and they make it easy for advertisers to scale their campaigns,” Ahn said.

But a major drawback for businesses is that first-party data generated on Facebook or Google Ads for targeting and optimization can’t be used on other platforms, creating walled gardens. On the other hand, MOLOCO allows businesses to retain full access to their data. “We believe they should own it and do with it what they want,” Ahn said.

This also helps businesses adapt to new consumer privacy laws. Stricter regulations make it important for companies to gather as much of their own data as possible, since they will get less of it from other sources, and make sure that they keep that data secure. Ahn said MOLOCO’s platform and cloud service “are built with security and privacy in mind, so our partners can simply plug in their data and trust that we handle all compliance matters.”

Part of MOLOCO’s new funding will be used to expand MOLOCO Cloud, which programmatically bids on ad exchanges like Google AdX and Twitter Mopub, into new verticals and geographic markets.

To make the most efficient use of ad budgets, MOLOCO Cloud analyzes signals like in-app purchases or in-app activities that allow businesses to gauge the effectiveness of a campaign.

“For mobile games, those activities often include level completions or friend invites; for ride sharing apps, it’s likely to be a ride order; for e-commerce apps, it’s likely to be a purchase,” Ahn said, adding “the strength of our machine learning is that it is flexible enough to automatically adjust to an advertiser’s unique KPIs and embrace different, diverse data sets.”

MOLOCO’s Retail Media Platform was created to help e-commerce companies make more money off their sites through features like Recommended Products and Sponsored Ads. “For example, our machine learning can tell them, in real time, which products a visitor is most likely to purchase next, so that they can make intelligent recommendations that drive incremental revenue,” Ahn said. The massive growth of Amazon’s ad platform also demonstrates how sponsored ads can be a significant source of revenue for e-commerce businesses, he added.

In a statement about Tiger Global’s investment in MOLOCO, partner John Curtius said, “The volume of digital data produced is growing exponentially yet the tools available for taking action on that data remain relatively limited. We invested in MOLOCO because its machine learning algorithms have proven to be among the best available and the level of transparency and sophistication the company brings to data-driven businesses is paramount in today’s world.”

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

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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.”