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News: Equity Monday: Crypto’s awful weekend, Apple v. Epic, and funding rounds galore

• May 24, 2021
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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You

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

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here.

After a somewhat quiet weekend, things are kicking off in rapid-fire fashion this week. Here’s what you need to know:

• The cryptocurrency selloff that was in full-swing on Friday continued over the weekend. Though bitcoin and ether managed to recoup some of their losses since they set new local minima, the value of popular cryptos is vastly depressed compared to recent highs.
• Looking ahead, it’s the final day of arguments at the Epic Games vs. Apple trial. And we’re seeing a smaller company try to crack some of the hold that a major tech incumbent enjoys over a huge piece of the digital economy. So, if you like startups, you might want to put aside your Apple fandom for a minute.
• More than a few funding rounds are cracking off this morning, including neat rounds from African fintech Mono, India-and-UAE-based Zeta, Emitwise raising $3.2 million, and Aurora Solar raising $250 million.

With a busy funding market and a yet-busy IPO cycle, it should be yet another busy week. Strap in!

News: Korea’s Riiid raises $175M from SoftBank to expand its AI-based learning platform to global markets

• May 24, 2021
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“AI is eating the world of education,” Riiid co-founder and CEO YJ Jang notes in his biographical description on his LinkedIn profile, and today his startup — which builds AI-based personalized learning, including test prep, for students — is announcing a major funding round to help it position itself as a player in that process.

“AI is eating the world of education,” Riiid co-founder and CEO YJ Jang notes in his biographical description on his LinkedIn profile, and today his startup — which builds AI-based personalized learning, including test prep, for students — is announcing a major funding round to help it position itself as a player in that process.

Seoul-based Riiid has closed a funding round of $175 million, an equity round coming from a single backer, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2.

The funding is coming at a high-watermark moment for edtech — with the shift to remote learning in the last year of pandemic living highlighting the opportunity to build better tools to serve that market, and a number of startups in the category subsequently raising hundreds of millions of dollars to tackle the opportunity. Riiid plans to use the investment both to expand its footprint internationally, a well as to expand its products.

Riiid is not disclosing its valuation, but this round is its biggest yet and brings the total raised by the startup to $250 million, a significant sum in the world of edtech.

Riiid has primarily made a name for itself through Santa, a test prep app geared towards people in non-English-language countries to practice and prepare to take the TOEIC English language proficiency exam (often a requirement to apply to English-language universities if you’re not a native English speaker), which has been used by more than 2.5 million students in Korea and Japan.

It has also been partnering with third parties to expand into test prep for other exams. These have included the GMAT (in partnership with Kaplan) for Korean students; an app, in partnership with ConnecME Education (a company that tailors educational services specifically to cater to international audiences) to help people in Egypt, UAE, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan prepare for the ACT; and a deal to build AI-based tools for students in Latin America to prepare for their college entrance exams. The ACT development comes after Riiid said that the former CEO of ACT, Marten Roorda, was joining its international arm Riiid Labs as its “executive in residence,” so that could point to more ACT prep applications for other markets, too.

Beyond university entrance tests, Riiid has also been building apps for vocational education, with Santa Realtor for preparing for real estate agency exams, and a test preparation tool for insurance agent exams, both in Korea.

The company has been growing at a time when edtechs are seeing more business and a rise in overall credibility and urgency to fill the gap left by the temporary cessation of in-person learning. The extra element of bringing artificial intelligence into the equation is not unique: a number of companies are bringing in advances in computer vision, natural language processing and machine learning to bring more personalized experiences into what might otherwise appear like a one-size-fits-all model. What is notable here is that Riiid has also been anchoring a lot of its R&D in IP. The company says it has applied for 103 domestic and international patents, and has so far had 27 of them issued.

“Riiid wants to transform education with AI, and achieve a true democratization of educational opportunities,” said Riiid CEO YJ Jang in a statement. “This investment is only the beginning of our journey in creating a new industry ecosystem and we will carry out this mission with global partnerships.”

For SoftBank, this is one of the firm’s bigger edtech investments — others have included Kahoot ($215 million), Unacademy in India, and Descomplica in Brazil. Riiid said that this round is SoftBank’s first specifically in the area of AI built for educational applications.

“Riiiid is driving a paradigm shift in education, from a ‘one size fits all’ approach to personalized instruction. Powered by AI and machine learning, Riiid’s platform provides education companies, schools and students with personalized plans and tools to optimize learning potential,” said Greg Moon, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers. “We are delighted to partner with YJ and the Riiid team to support their ambition of democratizing quality education around the world.”

News: E-commerce startup Little Birdie lands $30M AUD pre-launch funding from Australia’s largest bank

• May 24, 2021
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Melbourne-based Little Birdie, an e-commerce startup that wants to become the “new homepage of online shopping,” won’t launch until next month, but it’s already scored a major investor. Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), the largest of Australia’s “Big Four” banks, has poured $30 million AUD (about $23.2 million USD) in pre-launch funding into Little Birdie,

Commonwealth Bank group executive Angus Sullivan and Jon Beros, co-founder and CEO of Little Birdie

Melbourne-based Little Birdie, an e-commerce startup that wants to become the “new homepage of online shopping,” won’t launch until next month, but it’s already scored a major investor. Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), the largest of Australia’s “Big Four” banks, has poured $30 million AUD (about $23.2 million USD) in pre-launch funding into Little Birdie, and will also integrate its shopping content, including exclusive offers, into its consumer banking app, which reaches 11 million retail customers in Australia.

Little Birdie says this brings its valuation to $130 million AUD (about $100 million USD). Compared to the United States, where Amazon is the largest e-commerce retailer by far, Australian shoppers spend more time choosing between several platforms, including large marketplaces like eBay, Gumtree, Amazon, Woolworths and a host of smaller players.

Set to launch in mid-June, Little Birdie will aggregate over 70 million products from different online brands and stores, with the goal of being the first place shoppers look when they want to buy something. Users can use Little Birdie to track and compare products, and look for price drops, sales and offers. The SKUs come from a combination of brand partnerships and scraping e-commerce sites, with the majority from retailers’ product feeds.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Jon Beros told TechCrunch that “Australia’s e-commerce market is very competitive and quite fragmented with a lot of retailers fighting for market share. The pandemic accelerated online adoption and saw many retailers switch on an online presence, or shift their focus online. With so many players fighting for the attention of shoppers and driving up the cost of acquisition, Little Birdie can genuinely help retailers by providing a new marketing channel that delivers qualified customers leads.”

Commonwealth Bank will be able to access Little Birdie’s catalog of shopping content to create targeted offers for customers, including features that link savings goals to specific items through its money management tools. Beros said that Little Birdie will also seek two different types of brand partnerships: “Firstly with retailers who come on board to promote their exclusive offers and products on Little Birdie and secondly with major brands and media companies that look to integrate our shopping content into their apps or websites. These integration partners ultimately deepen the value Little Birdie offers its retail partners by helping to amplify the reach of their offers to a wider audience.”

The company is looking at expansion into Southeast Asia and the United States, but Beros said there is not a firm timeline for its international growth yet, since it depends on the COVID-19 pandemic situation and when borders start to reopen.

In a press statement, Commonwealth Bank group executive Angus Sullivan said, “We believe customers should have access to the world’s best digital experience and our partnership with Little Birdie will give customers access to exclusive industry leading deals via the CommBank app.”

News: Invoca acquires DialogTech for $100M to expand its conversational intelligence tools

• May 24, 2021
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On the heels of expanding its marketing call analytics platform last year to provide more insights to help those in sales, e-commerce and customer experience, Invoca is making its first acquisition to widen the net of companies that it targets. The company has acquired DialogTech, a startup that builds tools for marketers to analyze inbound

On the heels of expanding its marketing call analytics platform last year to provide more insights to help those in sales, e-commerce and customer experience, Invoca is making its first acquisition to widen the net of companies that it targets. The company has acquired DialogTech, a startup that builds tools for marketers to analyze inbound phone calls and other contacts, in what TechCrunch understands to be a $100 million deal.

As part of the transaction, Santa Barbara-based Invoca will be divesting Swydo, a company that Chicago-based Dialog acquired in 2018. Swydo — originally from The Netherlands — will remain a partner of Invoca’s, the company said.

Invoca has up to now focused on larger consumer-facing enterprises — its customers include the likes of ADT, AutoNation, DISH, TELUS, and The Home Depot — providing them with an AI-based platform that lets their marketing, sales and other teams analyze calls from consumer customers and provide call tracking, coaching, and other insights in real time and in the form of post-call reports to help those teams do their jobs more easily.

Gregg Johnson, Invoca’s CEO and one of growing pool of Salesforce veterans that are reinventing the marketing and sales technology landscape, described Dialog as “complementary” to what Invoca does, but will specifically help Invoca better target mid-market companies.

The opportunity that both Invoca and Dialog have identified is that, despite the growth of digital media advertising, social media and other channels for brands to connect to would-be customers, inbound calls remain a very key part of how companies sell goods and services, especially when the sale is of a complex item.

“About 40% to 80% of revenues come through contact centers,” Johnson said. “Brands can do all the retargeting they want but the same strategies in digital don’t work there.”

For those working at the other end of the line, the need for tools to do their jobs better became even more pressing in the last year, a time when customers stayed home and away from physical stores, shifting all of their interactions to virtual and remote channels. Subsequently, they demanded and expected better levels of service there.

“This move enables us to be an even better partner to enterprises and agencies looking to optimize their marketing and drive sales,” said DialogTech CEO, Doug Kofoid, in a statement. “Together as Invoca, our combined company will deliver an unrivaled solution for conversation intelligence, with the most innovative technology, expertise, experience, and resources in our industry.”

The combined business will become one of the bigger “martech” startups focusing on conversational insights, with 2,000 customers, over 300 employees and on track to make more than $100 million this year in revenue. This is, however, just the tip of the iceberg: the conversational intelligence market was estimated to be worth some $4.8 billion in 2020 and is expected to balloon to nearly $14 billion by 2025.

Given how many startups we’ve seen launch in the name of better sales intelligence, it’s likely that this will not be the last piece of consolidation in the area. Combining to expand the functionality of a platform, or to expand the scale and reach of a business, or simply to bring on interesting tech that is easier to acquire than build from scratch, are three areas that will likely drive more M&A.

Invoca last raised funding in October 2019, a $56 million round just ahead of the world shifting into Covid-19 pandemic mode. Johnson confirmed that Invoca — which has to date raised $116 million from Accel, Upfront Ventures, H.I.G. Growth Partners, Morgan Stanley, Salesforce Ventures and others — is in a strong enough position as a business not to need to raise more for this acquisition.

However, I suspect that scaling up like this will help it bid for bigger money and a bigger valuation when it does, as will the fact that peers in the market like Gong (which Johnson described as the “B2B version of Invoca” to me) have seen their valuations catapult in the last year, spurred by the changes in how customers interact with businesses, and sales and marketing can work to better serve them.

News: ByteDance’s video editor CapCut is the latest to top the U.S. App Store

• May 24, 2021
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From time to time, we see a Chinese app climbing to the top of Google Play and App Store in a host of Western countries. It might be a utility tool like a selfie beautifier or some casual video game, which has universal appeal and require little localization effort. But most of them tend to

From time to time, we see a Chinese app climbing to the top of Google Play and App Store in a host of Western countries. It might be a utility tool like a selfie beautifier or some casual video game, which has universal appeal and require little localization effort. But most of them tend to be a blip on the radar.

The latest Chinese app to top the overseas charts is from TikTok owner ByteDance. Called CapCut, the video editing app allows users to not only add a trove of stickers, filters and effects, it also has a simple-to-use green screen function, a zooming feature that works like a Ken Burns effect, and many more — which make the app like an accessible Final Cut on the go.

Users won’t have to worry about paying for music, as CapCut has a library of licensed sound clips that they can use to spice up their content. Over the past year, TikTok has been beefing up its music arsenal through efforts like scouting for musicians and signing deals with major labels.

Chinese tech giants are adept at attracting a large user base first by offering their services for free, and then exploring monetization models after users become sticky to the products. CapCut appears to have the same playbook.

CapCut’s Chinese sibling Jianying has already had success among Douyin (TikTok for China) users. Now that pattern is repeating outside China, with TikTok users taking advantage of CapCut to make their videos look sleek and professional with a few taps on their phones. 

Since May 21, CapCut has been the No. 1 free app on the U.S. App Store, according to analytics company SensorTower, and it ranks 9th on Google Play in the U.S. as of writing. Across the globe, it comes in first among free iOS apps in 33 countries, according to App Annie.

All told, the app has exceeded 250 million installs globally to date from across the App Store and Google Play, and nearly 9.5 million from U.S. app stores, SensorTower says.

CapCut’s rise is reminiscent of the Chinese photo editor Meitu. The app was so popular that it became synonymous with a selfie beautifier in China, but it also had a solid base of loyal users abroad. The difference is CapCut’s rise is built on its sibling TikTok’s global dominance, whereas Meitu’s early attempt to foster a social network around its photo tool to increase user stickiness never really took off.

CapCut probably won’t be ByteDance’s last viral app. TikTok’s sprawling content empire will spawn more offshoots, whether it’s a video editor or an e-commerce service for creators to make money and for users to buy the products endorsed by their favorite influencers.

News: Seed-stage accelerator Flat6Labs closes $13.2M fund for startups in Egypt

• May 24, 2021
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Investment activities in Egypt continue to gain steam, not for startups only but also the funds backing them. Today, seed accelerator Flat6Labs announced the second close of its Egypt fund to support early-stage startups and provide follow-up investment. The fund had a target for EGP50 million (~$3.2 million) but eventually closed at EGP207 million ($13.2

Investment activities in Egypt continue to gain steam, not for startups only but also the funds backing them. Today, seed accelerator Flat6Labs announced the second close of its Egypt fund to support early-stage startups and provide follow-up investment. The fund had a target for EGP50 million (~$3.2 million) but eventually closed at EGP207 million ($13.2 million).

Launched in 2011, Flat6Labs is a regional seed accelerator with offices in Egypt and Tunisia. The accelerator launched its Cairo programme in 2017 to invest in more than 100 startups across Egypt over the course of five years. Startups that get into the accelerator are provided with office space, legal and marketing help, and access to mentorship and networking, among other perks. They also receive between EGP500,000 and EGP750,000. However, with the close of this round, Flat6Labs has increased the check sizes to EGP1.5 million (~$95,000) and up to EGP3 million (~$191,000) in post-programme follow-on funding for selected startups.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC), the MSME Development Agency, Egypt Ventures, and the Egyptian American Enterprise Fund are the anchor investors in Flat6Labs’ seed fund. Sawari Ventures, which recently closed its $71 million fund, also participated in this second close, and it comes as no surprise because the firm, which is highly affiliated with the accelerator, said it would set aside 10% of its fund for Flat6Labs seed-stage companies when we covered them in April.

“At Sawari Ventures, our fund strategy has always been to allocate a percentage of our fund to the seed stage, which is a completely different proposition in terms of process, culture, and support needed,” Wael Amin, managing Partner at Sawari Ventures, said in a statement. “As investors in Flat6Labs Accelerator Company, we get the opportunity to profitably participate in Egyptian companies at a very early stage, get early indicators on ecosystem trends, and visibility into the ecosystem.”

The second close of Flat6Labs’ fund is the latest of four venture capital funds targeted at Egyptian startups. Shortly after Sawari Ventures’ close, Algebra Ventures announced launching a $90 million second fund. Subsequently, GIZ Egypt launched a €100 million funding programme to provide up to four MENA-based fund managers between €25-30 million and is exclusively targeted at Egypt-based startups.

Flat6Labs is one of the continent’s active and well-known seed-stage accelerators. Just in Egypt alone, it has run seven cycles and invested in 62 startups. The venture capital firm and seed-stage accelerator provides a filter for some early-stage investors to source what companies to back or not. A good portion of startups in Flat6Labs’ portfolio has piqued investors’ interests, and half of them who have gone on to raise more money also received follow-up investment from Flat6Labs totalling EGP145,000,000 (~$9.25 million). Some of the startups in Flat6Labs’ portfolio include Welnes, Glued, CreditGo, and Docspert Health.

News: Zeta becomes a unicorn with $250 million SoftBank-led funding

• May 24, 2021
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Zeta, a startup that helps banks and fintech firms launch products, is the newest to attain the coveted unicorn status after closing a financing round. The banking tech firm, co-founded by veteran Indian entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia, said on Monday it has raised $250 million in a round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, confirming a

Zeta, a startup that helps banks and fintech firms launch products, is the newest to attain the coveted unicorn status after closing a financing round.

The banking tech firm, co-founded by veteran Indian entrepreneur Bhavin Turakhia, said on Monday it has raised $250 million in a round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, confirming a TechCrunch report from mid-April. Existing investor Sodexo also participated in the round.

The new round valued the startup, which has offices in Bangalore and Dubai, at $1.45 billion. That’s up from the $300 million valuation that Zeta reported in the second half of 2019.

Zeta has developed a technology stack that helps it engage with both banks, fintech startups, as well as other online consumer platforms. The thesis is that banks — largely operating on antiquated technologies — today don’t have the time and expertise to offer the best experience to hundreds of millions of customers and fintech firms they serve.

“Banks are still stuck in the ’80s. Many of them still use COBOL programming language. They offer poor user experience,” said Turakhia in a press briefing Monday, adding that to make up for it, banks end up working with dozens of vendor and technology partners. “Nobody thought of building the bank stack from the ground up. Until now.”

Banks, which have licenses to offer financial services to customers, use Zeta’s cloud-native API and SDKs to launch credit cards, debit cards, loans and offer improved experience to customers, and also work with fintechs.

“Any financial service you can think of, Zeta provides it today,” he said.

The startup today serves 10 banks and 25 fintech firms, and plans to deploy the fresh capital to reach more clients and increase its headcount.

The journey of Zeta. (Image: Zeta)

Zeta is SoftBank Vision Fund 2’s latest investment in India. The Japanese conglomerate, which minted another unicorn in social commerce Meesho last month, is in advanced stages of talks to invest up to $500 million in food delivery giant Swiggy and is also engaging with SaaS startup WhatFix.

“Banking software is a $300 billion industry globally. Most banks still employ technology which is significantly older than their customers, impacting user experience and engagement,” Munish Varma, a managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said in a statement.

Zeta is the 14th Indian startup to become a unicorn this year as Tiger Global, Falcon Edge, and SoftBank accelerate their pace of funding in India, the world’s second largest internet market.

Turakhia, with his brother Divyank, started his first venture in 1998. Along the way, they sold four web companies to Endurance for $160 million. Zeta is the third startup Bhavin has co-founded since then — the other being business messaging platform Flock and Radix.

More to follow later today…

News: Aurora Solar aims to power the growing solar industry with a $250M round C

• May 24, 2021
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Aurora Solar had one of those pitches that seemed obvious in retrospect. Instead of going to a house and measuring its roof manually for a solar panel installation, why not use aerial scans and imagery of the whole region? That smart play earned them a $20M A round, a $50M B round, and now only

Aurora Solar had one of those pitches that seemed obvious in retrospect. Instead of going to a house and measuring its roof manually for a solar panel installation, why not use aerial scans and imagery of the whole region? That smart play earned them a $20M A round, a $50M B round, and now only six months later a massive $250M C as they aim to become the software platform on which the coming solar power expansion will be run.

The idea is simple enough to explain, but difficult to pull off. There’s lots of data out there about the topography, physical and infrastructural, of most cities. Satellite imagery, aerial lidar scans, light and power lines and usage data, and of course where and how the sun hits a given location — this information is readily available. Aurora’s innovation wasn’t just using it, but assembling it into a cohesive system that’s simple and effective enough to be used widely by solar installers.

“Aurora’s core value proposition is the fact that you can do things remotely much faster and more accurately than could if you traveled to the site,” explained co-founder and CRO Sam Adeyemo.

Having developed algorithms that ingest the aforementioned data, the service they offer is a very quick turnaround on the tricky question of whether a solar installation makes sense for a potential customer, and if so what it might cost and look like, down to the size and angle of the panels.

Image Credits: Aurora Solar

“It’s not uncommon for the acquisition cost for a customer to be thousands of dollars,” said Adeyemo’s co-founder, CEO Chris Hopper. That’s partly because every installation is custom. He estimated that half the price tag of any setup is “soft cost” — that is, over and above the actual price of the hardware.

“If the quote is for $30K, what actually goes on your roof might be $15K, the rest is overhead, design, acquisition cost, yada yada yada,” he explained. “That’s the next frontier to make solar cost-competitive, and that’s where Aurora comes in. Every time we shave a few dollars off the price of an installation, it opens it up for new consumers.”

The company doesn’t do its own lidar flights or solar installations, so the $250M in funding may strike some as rather high for a company making software. Though I did my best to tease out any secret skunkworks projects under way at Aurora, Adeyemo and Hopper patiently explained that enterprise-scale software isn’t cheap, and the funding is proportional to their ambitions.

“The amount we raised speaks to the opportunity ahead of us,” said Hopper. “There’s a lot more solar to put on roofs.”

Aurora has been used for evaluating about 5 million solar projects so far, about a fifth of which end up being built, Adeyemo estimated. And that’s just a fraction of a fraction. Solar makes up about two percent of the U.S.’s power infrastructure, right now, but that’s on track to increase by an order of magnitude in the next 20 years.

The new administration has thrown fuel on the fire of the industry’s optimism, and whether or not something like the Green New Deal comes to fruition, the fundamentally different approach to environmental and energy policy mean there are more eyeballs directed at clean energy and consequently a lot of checks being written.

Image Credits: Aurora Solar

“It counts for a lot. With heightened awareness about climate change there will be more interest in ways to mitigate it,” said Adeyemo. He gave the example of Texas, which after the recent storms and blackouts had more inquiries per capita than anywhere else in the country. Renewables may be a charged issue in some ways, but solar power is bipartisan and broadly popular across the political spectrum.

The $250M round, led by Coatue and with participation from previous investors ICONIQ, Energize Ventures, and Fifth Wall, allows the company to go both broad and deep with their product.

“Historically we’ve been more of a design solution; the next phase is to broaden that into a platform that covers more of the process of going solar,” said Hopper. “We don’t believe this is going to be a niche market — going from 2 to 20 percent and beyond, that’s a huge endeavor.”

The co-founders would not be more specific than that scaling a SaaS company requires significant cash up front, and during the push to come they can’t be worried about whether or when they’ll need to get more capital.

“The first five years of the company were quasi-bootstrapped… we’d raised like a million bucks. So we know what it’s like to grow a company from that perspective, and now we know what it’s like to really need the capital to scale the business,” said Adeyemo. “If you want to be the platform for a significant percentage of the energy capacity of the country… you gotta tool up.”

What exactly tooling up comprises we will soon find out — the company is planning to announce more news at its upcoming summit in June.

News: Emitwise raises an extra $3.2M from ArcTern Ventures for its greenhouse gas emissions platform

• May 24, 2021
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Emitwise, a startup that claims its AI platform can measure greenhouse gas emissions from companies and their supply chains, has added to its seed funding round by $3.2 million, bringing its total seed funding raised to $6.6 million. ArcTern Ventures led the $3.2m raise. Also participating were Angel investors including Peter Harrison, the CEO of

Emitwise, a startup that claims its AI platform can measure greenhouse gas emissions from companies and their supply chains, has added to its seed funding round by $3.2 million, bringing its total seed funding raised to $6.6 million. ArcTern Ventures led the $3.2m raise. Also participating were Angel investors including Peter Harrison, the CEO of Schroders; Magnus Rausing; and Saltwater (Uber Co-Founder Ryan Graves’ investment firm). Other investors include True Ventures, Social Impact Capital, Lightbird Ventures, and others.

The company claims its platform will automate carbon accounting across a supply chain; identify emissions hotspots; integrate with ERP systems; and complies with auditing and disclosure systems like CDP, GHG and TCFD.

Mauro Cozzi, Emitwise Co-Founder and CEO, said in a statement: “With leaders set to ratchet up global climate ambition at the upcoming COP26 climate summit, there’s never been more certainty amongst corporates and investors: carbon equals cost and risk. A net zero-aligned model is a proxy for profit, efficiency and resilience and we’re committed to helping firms realize the major economic upsides of the transformation.”

Marc Faucher, ArcTern Ventures, said: “Enterprises face mounting pressure from customers, investors, and regulators to disclose accurate environmental data. Emitwise gives a clear line of sight to supply chain carbon which is critical for instilling effective mitigation strategies and incentives. Here at ArcTern Ventures, we believe Emitwise’s software platform is a game-changer that sets new standards in universal carbon footprint reporting.”

Emitwise competes to some extent with other startups in this space including Watersheds and Plan A, which also recently raised a round of funding.

News: Nigeria’s Mono raises millions to power the internet economy in Africa

• May 24, 2021
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In February, Nigerian fintech startup Mono announced its acceptance into Y Combinator and, at the time, it wanted to build the Plaid for Africa. Three months later, the startup has a different mission: to power the internet economy in Africa and has closed $2 million in seed investment towards that goal. The investment comes nine

In February, Nigerian fintech startup Mono announced its acceptance into Y Combinator and, at the time, it wanted to build the Plaid for Africa. Three months later, the startup has a different mission: to power the internet economy in Africa and has closed $2 million in seed investment towards that goal.

The investment comes nine months after the company raised $500,000 in pre-seed last September and two months after receiving $125,000 from YC. Mono’s total investment moves up to $2.625 million, and investors in this new round include Entrée Capital (one of the investors in Kuda’s seed round), Kuda co-founder and CEO Babs Ogundeyi; Gbenga Oyebode, partner at TCVP; and Eric Idiahi, co-founder and partner at Verod Capital. New York but Africa-based VC Lateral Capital also invested after taking part in Mono’s pre-seed.

In a region where more than half of the population is either unbanked or underbanked, open finance players like Mono are trying to improve financial inclusion and connectivity on the continent. Open finance thrives on the notion that access to a financial ecosystem via open APIs and new routes to move money, access financial information and make borrowing decisions reduces the barriers and costs of entry for the underbanked. 

Launched in August 2020, the company streamlines various financial data in a single API for companies and third-party developers. Mono allows them to retrieve information like account statements, real-time balance, historical transactions, income, expense and account owner identification with users’ consent.

When we covered the company early in the year, it had already secured partnerships with more than 16 financial institutions in Nigeria. In addition to having a little over a hundred businesses like Carbon, Aella Credit, Credpal, Renmoney, Autochek, and Inflow Finance access customers bank account for bank statements, identity data, and balances, Mono has also connected over 100,000 financial accounts for its partners and analysed over 66 million financial transactions so far.

Mono has done impressively well in a short period. While it appears to have figured out product-market fit, CEO Abdul Hassan is quick to remind everyone that the burgeoning API fintech space is just an entry point to its pursuit of being a data company — a case he also made in February.

“The way I see it, our market is not that big. Compare the payments market now with 2016, when Paystack and Flutterwave just started. The payments space in 2016 was very small and the number of people using cards online was very small,” said Hassan, who co-founded the company with Prakhar Singh. “It’s the same thing for us right now. That’s why our focus isn’t only on open banking but data. We’re thinking of how we can power the internet economy with data that isn’t necessarily financial data. For instance, think about open data for telcos. Imagine where you can move your data from one telco to another instead of getting a new SIM card and making a fresh registration. That’s where I see the market going, at least for us at Mono.” 

Abdul Hassan (CEO) and Prakhar Singh (CTO)

He adds that the company is taking an approach of building a product one step at a time until it can fully diversify from financial data offerings, including connecting with payment gateways (Paystack and Flutterwave) and other fintechs like wealth management startups Piggyvest and Cowrywise.

“When you’re able to connect to all the systems, a lot of use cases will come up. The first step is how can we connect to all available data and open it up for businesses and developers,” he continued.

Therefore, Mono will use the funding to reinforce its current financial and identity data offerings and launch new products for diverse business verticals. Also, a long-overdue pan-African expansion to Ghana and Kenya is top priority. The last time I spoke with Hassan, the end of Q1 looked feasible to get into at least one of the two markets but it didn’t turn out that way. But the wait seems to be over as the company said it’d be going live in Ghana next month with a handful of existing customers from Nigeria and new ones in Ghana. Some of these partners include five banks (GTBank, Fidelity Bank and three unannounced banks) and the mobile money service arm of MTN Ghana.

“Our expansion is mostly inspired by our customers looking to expand to other markets, same with some of our products. We work with our customers to give them the right tools to build new experiences for their customers,” Hassan stated. 

Image Credits: Mono

Mono is one of the three API fintech companies to have raised a seed investment this year. Last month, another Nigerian fintech Okra closed $3.5 million while Stitch, a South African API fintech, launched with $4 million in February. Back to back investments like this show that investors are incredibly optimistic about the market. Avil Eyal, managing partner and co-founder of Entrée Capital, one of such investors, had this to say.

“We are very excited to be working with Abdul, Prakhar and the entire Mono team as they continue to build out the rails for African banking to enable the delivery of financial services to hundreds of millions of people across the African continent.”