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News: Rokk3r acquires AdMobilize and Matrix Labs for $19.5M

• February 23, 2021
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Miami-based AdMobilize and its spin-off, Matrix Labs, announced this morning that they are being acquired for $19.5 million. The buyer is Rokk3r, a Miami-based holding company that invests in creating, acquiring and integrating companies. AdMobilize quantifies digital advertising in the physical world, so marketers can better reach their target audiences. “If you’re walking on 5th

Miami-based AdMobilize and its spin-off, Matrix Labs, announced this morning that they are being acquired for $19.5 million. The buyer is Rokk3r, a Miami-based holding company that invests in creating, acquiring and integrating companies.

AdMobilize quantifies digital advertising in the physical world, so marketers can better reach their target audiences.

“If you’re walking on 5th Avenue and you pass by a bus shelter that has a digital screen, AdMobilize analyzes [peoples’] age, gender, emotion and even how long the person was looking at the ad. We created a platform that mimics the click-through rate. So we kind of created Google Analytics for the outside world,” said Rodolfo Saccoman, CEO and founder of AdMobilize.

The company, which has raised $13 million since its launch in 2012, also has offices in Saccoman’s native Brazil, as well as Colombia and London. 

AdMobilize operates as a SaaS with an average monthly subscription fee of $50 per screen or billboard. 

“Our tech is 95% accurate, and it’s based on undeniable computer vision data,” Saccoman said. If a digital ad screen doesn’t have a camera built-in, AdMobilize can provide one. But Saccoman made it very clear that the company doesn’t do any facial recognition and really is only interested in the data in a broader sense.

Matrix Labs, on the other hand, is a hardware company with products that look similar to Raspberry Pi, but with a lot more oomph.

“Our Matrix Labs development boards give the Raspberry Pi superpowers. It transforms the Pi to be AI-ready for computer vision, sensor fusion, voice recognition and more. It democratizes AI at the edge by removing barriers to entry, shortening the learning curve, and increases adaptability,” Saccoman said.

Rodolfo Saccoman Image Credits: Saccoman

The company offers two boards. One is called the Matrix Creator and sells for $99, while the other is the Matrix Voice which goes for $75.

“It [Matrix boards] enables people to not spend millions of dollars making a piece of hardware,” Saccoman said. In fact, it levels the playing field for developers, he added. “It allows them to create solutions in the physical world with inexpensive edge AI hardware.”

Rokk3r was an early investor in AdMobilize, along with Azoic Ventures, Fuel Venture Capital, VAS Ventures and Axel Springer.

“Rokk3r has always believed in the potential of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and computer vision, hence it seeded and helped build AdMobilize. Where we stand today with what AdMobilize/Matrix Labs has achieved, it is clear that the technology created is critical to the future of AI/IOT/CV, and with Rokk3r’s focus on AI/IOT and IP creation, the fit was clear,” said Nabyl Charania, chairman and CEO of Rokk3r.

Saccoman is a Brazilian-born serial entrepreneur who moved to the U.S. to attend college at Cornell in 1995 and never left. He made his way down to South Florida with his first job out of college, where he was head of Digital Innovation at the ultra-lux Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. While the AdMobilize/Matrix Labs deal is his first exit, his first “venture” was when he was just 13 years old. It was called the PiPi bag. São Paulo, the financial capital of Brazil, is notorious for awful traffic. It can often take people three hours to get to the airport, and when you’re trying to catch a flight, stopping to use the restroom isn’t usually an option. As the name suggests, the Pipi bag was a handheld portable toilet of sorts for those moments when nature calls.

Years later, in 2007, Saccoman also founded a company with his brother who has a PhD in psychology. It was called MyTherapyJournal.com and was the first online journaling platform with cognitive behavior therapy. 

“It would measure your varying emotions when you answered key questions. For example, people could start to understand what would trigger their anxiety. It had early traces of AI,” Saccoman said. MyTherapyJournal closed in 2012.

Of his various ventures, he said, “My mind was always running to find problems.”

Saccoman will stay on board and lead Rokk3r’s AI and IoT division.

News: Codecademy eyes the enterprise with $40 million in new capital

• February 23, 2021
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After going over four years without raising any capital, coding class platform Codecademy has raised a new tranche of money: a $40 million Series D round led by Owl Ventures, with participation from Prosus and Union Square Ventures. The startup is the latest edtech business to bring on capital after years without it, a list

After going over four years without raising any capital, coding class platform Codecademy has raised a new tranche of money: a $40 million Series D round led by Owl Ventures, with participation from Prosus and Union Square Ventures.

The startup is the latest edtech business to bring on capital after years without it, a list that includes ClassDojo, CourseHero, Quizlet and Udacity. But founder Zach Sims, who began the company in 2011 as a Columbia student, says that Codecademy’s growth, and hunger for new capital, isn’t due to a pandemic bump.

“A lot of that edtech bump came in K-12 and college solutions, or in leisure educational things like MasterClass,” Sims said. “Ours was less pandemic-induced.”

The business, which helps students and employees learn how to code in an interactive environment, is currently bringing in $50 million in annual recurring revenue. That figure is on track with Codecademy’s normal growth trajectory, which has been doubling since 2018. The startup has still seen some areas of growth. It took Codecademy four years to reach their first 100,000 users; however, they added 50,000 more paying users in their fifth year alone.

Codecademy’s funding signals that investors aren’t just looking for exponential growth, they are looking for sustainable, historical growth. The startup has been cash-flow positive for years, and has $20 million of its $30 million Series C, closed in 2016, still in the bank. Two-thirds of today’s capital is going straight to the bank, Sims says.

Still, raising itself costs money in the form of equity for founders and a startup. So why raise if you still have cash and aren’t struggling to keep up demand?

Sims says that the new cash will be used to acquire businesses, grow internationally in India and other countries, and hire. He also wants to “invest deeply” in a paid product it launched in the wake of the pandemic, Codecademy For Business. The product is Codecademy’s foray into selling coding classes for the enterprise, a shift from its direct-to-consumer route.

Codecademy For Business launched in beta last year and grew to 600 paying clients. Half of those customers are non-technology companies like banks, consulting firms and small businesses that want to train employees in data literacy and tech-specific programing. Sims says that the product was launched due to customer demand, and piggybacks on what investors see as an awakening among companies that it is necessary to train and reskill employees.

The growth mirrors the gains recently enjoyed by Udemy. The re-skilling company similarly has an enterprise and consumer product, but is seeing more monetary gains in the former. We scooped last month that Udemy for Business has secured 7,000 customers, and is bringing in roughly $200 million in ARR.

Sims says that its enterprise operation, which competes with products like Udemy or Coursera, requires upfront research and development “before it starts to pay itself back.” He thinks that building a bottoms-up enterprise product, fueled by tens of millions of Codecademy users, will be both the big opportunity and a big challenge for the company. The end goal here for Codecademy is to have a 50% split between its consumer and enterprise business.

“The number one biggest differentiator has been interactivity,” Sims said. “Everyone is tired of Zoom, and our thesis since the beginning is that video is not the best way to learn, and that learning by doing is.”

While the startup wouldn’t disclose valuation, Codecademy’s growth feels mature and unicorn-like. The startup is diversifying revenue, adding offensive cash to its bank, and even not-so-subtly added a CFO from Chegg to its ranks. IPOs are in the air.

News: Y Combinator company Axle Health is bringing on-demand home testing services to telehealth providers

• February 23, 2021
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While usage of telehealth services have surged during the COVID-19 epidemic, there are some times when health professionals need to be around in person to conduct diagnostics tests. To help those telehealth companies bridge that gap is Axle Health, a company currently enrolled in the latest cohort from the Y Combinator accelerator. “In terms of

While usage of telehealth services have surged during the COVID-19 epidemic, there are some times when health professionals need to be around in person to conduct diagnostics tests. To help those telehealth companies bridge that gap is Axle Health, a company currently enrolled in the latest cohort from the Y Combinator accelerator.

“In terms of the professionals that we send in home, they’re phlebotomists, NAs, RVNs, and RNs as well,” said Axle co-founder Connor Hailey.

In a sad reflection of the times, most of the calls the company’s getting are COVID-19 related, Hailey said.

And while the company currently doesn’t accept insurance, many of the companies on the platform choose a price they want to charge their patients and then seek reimbursement from insurers from those costs, according to Hailey.

“There are very few patients that are paying cash. Our services in the home are what would come out of pocket,” Hailey said. Those fees vary by the licensure level of the visiting health care worker. An in-home COVID-19 test could be $40 and a phlebotomist providing a blood draw would cost about the same amount, said Hailey.  

The company launched its service at the end of January and is seeking to expand its treatment options to more than just COVID-19 testing, but for now, it’s simply responding to market demand.

Hailey launched the business after spending a few years working at ZocDoc and then spending some time at Uber. What motivates Hailey and company co-founder Adam Stansell is providing similar concierge services at lower costs for a broader base of patients, Hailey said.

“The rich have access to in-home care can we make it economical enough so that we can bring it to everyone,” he said. 

News: Plume picks up $270M at a $1.35B valuation to power smart home WiFi for broadband providers

• February 23, 2021
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The last year of life under a global health pandemic has seen a massive surge of people working from home — a shift that has thrown a stark light on the iffy quality of our broadband networks. Today a startup called Plume — which has built a mesh-WiFi platform that helps optimize broadband connectivity and

The last year of life under a global health pandemic has seen a massive surge of people working from home — a shift that has thrown a stark light on the iffy quality of our broadband networks. Today a startup called Plume — which has built a mesh-WiFi platform that helps optimize broadband connectivity and then uses it to deliver a range of smarter home services to some 22 million homes globally — is announcing a major funding round of $270 million that underscores the opportunity to fix that, and more.

“We’re the best at optimizing WiFi connectivity in the home, but that is not what we’re about,” said Fahri Diner, Plume’s co-founder and CEO, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We see it as the foundation. We cut our teeth on it but have gone way beyond that to services like advanced parental controls, secure access controls, which devices can access networks and what passwords they use. We focus on sophisticated security, which we believe will be the next big area that consumers will start paying attention to.

“The ultimate product for Plume is a comprehensive, cloud-driven platform that enables consumers to curate, manage and deliver these services. That’s what the company is about.”

The investment, a Series E, is coming from a single investor, Insight Partners, and values the company at $1.35 billion. This is a significant step up for the company, which almost exactly a year ago raised $85 million in a combination of equity and debt at a valuation of $510 million.

Unless you have been following the business of home broadband networking, you may not be familiar with the name Plume. But if you are not already be using it, chances are that you may be getting pitched a service using its technology, or will be soon.

The company, based out of Palo Alto, has deals in place with some 170 carriers around the globe that provide residential broadband services, reselling Plume’s mesh technology as a way to improve home WiFi connectivity — especially critical in older or bigger homes, and dwellings where you have many people connecting to and straining your broadband network — providing Plume-powered services like network security, parental access controls and motion awareness on top of that.

Plume brands those added services as HomePass, and on top of this it also provides a cloud-based operations tools to carriers, Haystack and Harvest, which help them with customer support, to manage their networks, glean better performance analytics and provide insights on customer usage and churn.

Plume also works with a number of big and less well-known hardware makers who design the routing devices and the processors and related software that power them.

Some of its customers, like Comcast, Charter, Qualcomm, Belkin, Cablevision, Liberty Global and Shaw Communications have become strategic investors in the company over the years, which speaks to its traction with the big players in the market. (It has raised $397 million to date.)

There have been a number of efforts over the years to improve WiFi in the home, from faster networks through to better routers and WiFi extenders.

Plume’s technology is based on one of those alternatives, mesh architecture — also used by others like Google in its Nest WiFi system — which uses a single router and then a series of nodes that operate as if they are a single device on the network (extenders by contrast use different SSIDs and passwords).

On top of the mesh architecture, Plume then runs a software-defined network to identify and better measure the traffic, using automation to, for example, then detect and fix when a device is on the network, may need more power to work properly, and so on.

In all, it appears that Plume has some 170 patents and patent applications in play to underpin what it has built.

It’s interesting to note that at one time Plume was compared to Eero, the mesh-based wifi router startup that was eventually acquired by Amazon, which now resells its routers as part of its own mesh WiFi solution.

But the two have some critical differences, based mainly on the business premise behind the two. As Diner points out, Plume’s service stack is based not around a router (as Eero’s primarily was) but on mesh technology that plus an open source silicon-to-cloud framework platform for building services to run on the mesh network that it calls OpenSync. This essentially allows service providers to build their own services on top of Plume’s mesh architecture.

(Diner, I should point out, has a pretty long-standing and deep understanding of what carriers need, what they actually use and also how they think. He himself trained as an engineer and worked in increasingly senior roles at a number of vendors at the cusp of when carriers were making their switch from legacy copper to fiber and optic networks. In the heyday of telecoms capital expenditures, he sold a previous company that he founded, Qtera, a pioneer in long-haul photonic networking solutions, to now-defunct Nortel for $3.2 billion. He’s also a long-standing investor and board member at a range of major next-generation communications vendors.)

In a telecoms world that has long fretted over the idea of being cannibalized and relegated to the role of a “dumb pipe”, it provides a way for those carriers to build services — apps, as it were — on top of that WiFi connectivity.

That existential crisis has been even more compounded as the promise of “triple play” — carriers selling voice, broadband and video services to their customers — has failed to deliver not least because no one is particularly interested in using or keeping their fixed landlines, and carriers have been completely outplayed on content by the giant rush of tech and media companies building their own, more attractive alternatives for consumers.

That has left carriers with a focus on broadband, which itself then gets commoditized on price, with everyone more or less offering the same speeds and reliability.

“How to differentiate?” is the question they all ask now, said Diner. Plume’s answer: “We differentiate inside the home, with a new bundle of services.”

Realistically, however, Diner points out that only the very biggest carriers (and not even all of them) might have the resources and appetite to do so. Of the 170 customers it has today, only five are building their own customized services on top of the platform, he said.

This is why Plume builds services that it white-labels and resells to carriers to sell on to consumers, and why those services have seen a lot of traction among those service providers. OpenSync, Plume says, now covers some 26 million access points and is seeing a sharp rise as more people fill out their homes with more equipment that they use throughout the day.

You might argue that those home services will also start to look too similar to each other as well, and so frankly the hope is that the open platform will eventually lead to more companies and services innovating around it.

In the meantime, it’s a win-win for Plume.

“Growth in the smart home category is exploding, but the quality of consumer experience has fallen short,” said Insight Partners Managing Director Ryan Hinkle, in a statement. “We are convinced that Plume, with its scalable cloud data platform approach, highly efficient go-to-market strategy, strong momentum, top-quartile financial performance across all SaaS KPIs – including revenue, growth rates, gross margin, efficiency and retention metrics – and world class team is transforming this category. We’re delighted to join and support this exciting journey.” Hinkle is joining Plume’s board with this round.

News: Anuvia raises $103 million to commercialize its novel fertilizer

• February 23, 2021
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Anuvia Plant Nutrients has raised $103 million to commercialize its novel fertilizer technology. The company, backed by investors like TPG ART, Pontifax Global Food and Agriculture Technology Fund, Generate Capital andPiva Capital, is now ready to roll out its tech, which is already used on roughly 1200 farms and is projected to be on 20 million

Anuvia Plant Nutrients has raised $103 million to commercialize its novel fertilizer technology.

The company, backed by investors like TPG ART, Pontifax Global Food and Agriculture Technology Fund, Generate Capital andPiva Capital, is now ready to roll out its tech, which is already used on roughly 1200 farms and is projected to be on 20 million acres of farmland by 2025. 

Now led by longtime agriculture executive Amy Yoder, who represents the sixth generation of a Michigan farm family, Anuvia pitches its tech as a supplement for crops that can boost productivity by taking excrement, food waste and agricultural processing waste and converting that into useful fertilizer using a proprietary catalytic process. 

By treating the waste with a specific blend of chemicals Yoder said Anuvia’s technology can control the release of nutrients as plants grow to make more productive crops and reduce leaching into soil, protecting groundwater and restoring carbon to the soil.

Anuvia is one of a growing number of agriculture technology companies trying to juice crop productivity and capture carbon to provide additional revenues from more abundant crops and carbon capture and storage. Other startups, including Pivot Bio, Indigo Agriculture, AgBiome, and Agrinos, are all developing other crop treatments that can purportedly boost agricultural production.

“Most of what I see would be very complimentary to us,” said Yoder. “Because we put the carbon back into the soil, because the nutrients are held in different way. You could utilize the pivot technology and the Anuvia technology. Those things when they could piggyback together could make really nice solutions in the longterm.”

The Winter Garden, Fla.-based company has a 1.2 million ton facility for production, but the company wants to build out additional capacity and continue developing new fertilizers to take to market, Yoder said.

Farmers using the product see increased yields of around five times their previous production levels and the product can be used on all the main row crops, according to Yoder.

That claim has been verified by Environmental Resources Management (ERM), a leading global environmental consulting firm, versus traditional fertilizer on corn, rice, and cotton.

Anuvia’s treatment can also reduce greenhouse gases on production by up to 32% compared to commercial fertilizers. Anuvia estimates that its products could provide emissions reductions equivalent to removing 30,000 cars from roads. If the company can get farmers to apply its treatment to the 90 million acres of corn in the U.s. that would reduce the equivalent emissions of 1.8 million cars, according to a statement.

“With the world’s population expected to hit 10 billion by 2050, we need technology-enabled, large-scale agriculture to meet this growing demand,” says Dr. Geoff Duyk, Founder and Managing Partner of Circularis and Anuvia Board Member. “Anuvia’s technology will help farms continue to feed the world, while also advancing the circular economy, increasing sustainability, and enhancing resource efficiency.” 

News: IronSource acquires video and playable ad platform Luna Labs

• February 23, 2021
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Mobile advertising company ironSource is announcing its second acquisition of the year — Luna Labs, a startup that that’s built a platform allowing app developers to create and manage video and playable ads. When I first wrote about the startup in 2019, its main selling point was the ability to create those ads directly from

Mobile advertising company ironSource is announcing its second acquisition of the year — Luna Labs, a startup that that’s built a platform allowing app developers to create and manage video and playable ads.

When I first wrote about the startup in 2019, its main selling point was the ability to create those ads directly from from the Unity game engine used by many developers. Since then, it has expanded its platform to support the creation of both playable and video ads (including unlimited variations of a gameplay video), manage their entire ad library, analyze their performance and even automatically optimize them based on install data. Its customers include Crazy Labs, Supersonic Studios, Lion Studios, Kwalee and Voodoo.

IronSource, meanwhile, has built a platform for mobile user growth and monetization. It was valued at more than $1 billion in its most recent funding round of more than $400 million, and in January it announced the acquisition of ad measurement company Soomla.

In a statement, ironSource’s co-founder and chief revenue officer Omer Kaplan said:

Our vision at ironSource is to build the most comprehensive growth platform for app developers, allowing them to focus on content creation and on building a great user experience, while we provide the infrastructure for their business expansion. Creatives are a key part of that and have only become more important as competition for user attention grows. But ad creative development and testing at scale is incredibly difficult and costly. Luna Labs solves that by bringing high quality end-to-end ad creation management to app developers, and we’re excited to be able to add that capability into the ironSource platform.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. IronSource says that the Luna Labs team (currently based in the United Kingdom) will remain in its current offices, where it will continue developing its technology “under the ironSource umbrella.”

News: SpaceTech startup ConstellR, that can monitor land surface temperatures, raises €1M pre-seed round

• February 23, 2021
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ConstellR, a SpaceTech startup with a technology that can monitors land surface temperatures from space, has raised a €1m pre-seed round led by FTTF, with the participation of strategic investor OHB Venture Capital, Baden-Württemberg’s state bank L-Bank and an undisclosed investor. The first system is due to go into orbit in December 2021. The company

ConstellR, a SpaceTech startup with a technology that can monitors land surface temperatures from space, has raised a €1m pre-seed round led by FTTF, with the participation of strategic investor OHB Venture Capital, Baden-Württemberg’s state bank L-Bank and an undisclosed investor. The first system is due to go into orbit in December 2021. The company was a finalist for Hottest Ag/FoodTech Startup at the prestigious Europas Awards 2020.

The Freiburg, Germany-based startup monitors the land via a constellation of 30 CubeSats with thermal infrared payloads. The data generated is used by farmers to reduce water and fertilizer usage, and could help them reduce existing monitoring costs by 97%, says the company. ConstellR has a patent-pending miniaturization architecture with ‘free-form optics’ and claims to be able to make it much cheaper to monitor the infrared part of the spectrum than traditional satellite systems.

Dr. Max Gulde, CEO, ConstellR, said: “Our mission is to monitor every single field on the planet every single day of the year and provide precision farming companies with highly accurate temperature data to safeguard the world’s food supply. With our strong financial and technology partners on board, I am looking forward to a time of quantum leaps in our constellation development to change agriculture on the global planetary scale.”

Tobias Schwind, Managing Partner at FTTF, Fraunhofer’s Technology Transfer Fund, said: “ConstellR’s unique technology and business case as well as its passionate team convinced us to make this exciting pre-seed investment.”

News: Better Origin, which turns flies into food for chickens, raises $3M from Fly Ventures

• February 23, 2021
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Better Origin is a startup that converts waste food into essential nutrients using insects fed to chickens inside a standard shipping container. It’s now raised a Seed Series $3 million funding round led by Fly Ventures and solar entrepreneur Nick Boyle, while previous investor Metavallon VC is also participating. Its competitors include Protix, Agriprotein, InnovaFeed,

Better Origin is a startup that converts waste food into essential nutrients using insects fed to chickens inside a standard shipping container. It’s now raised a Seed Series $3 million funding round led by Fly Ventures and solar entrepreneur Nick Boyle, while previous investor Metavallon VC is also participating. Its competitors include Protix, Agriprotein, InnovaFeed, Enterra, Entocycle.

Better Origin’s product is an “autonomous insect mini-farm.” Its X1insect mini-farm is dropped on site. A farmer adds food waste – gathered from nearby factories or from the farm – into a hopper to feed the larvae of black soldier flies.

Two weeks later, the insects are fed directly to the chickens as an alternative to the soy feed they normally get. To add to the ease of use, everything inside the container is automated and remotely controlled by Better Origin’s engineers in Cambridge.

This process has a double effect. Not only does it take care of the food waste product as a by-product of farming practices, but it also drives down the use of soy, the growth of which is contributing to deforestation and habitat loss in countries like Brazil.

Plus, given the pandemic has exposed the fragility of the global food supply chain, the company says its solution is way of decentralizing food and feed production, thus safeguarding the food supply chain and food security.

Better Origin says it is tackling a real problem, and it’s a fair assessment. Western economies waste around a third of all food produced annually, but, on average, the demands of a growing population means food production will need to increase by 70%. Food waste is also the third-largest emitter of Green House Gas (GHG) after the US and China.

Founder Fotis Fotiadis was working in the Oil & Gas industry when he decided he’d rather work in a sustainable, non-polluting. After studying Sustainable Engineering at Cambridge University, and meeting cofounder Miha Pipan, the two set out to work on a sustainable startup.

The company was launched in May 2020, now has five commercial contracts, and plans to expand across the UK.

Better Origin says its differentiation with competitors is the nature of its ‘decentralized’ approach to insect farming, as a result of the way its units are, effectively, ‘Drag-and-drop’ into a farm. In some sense, it’s not dissimilar to adding a server to a server farm.

The business model will be to either lease or sell systems to farms, likely with a subscription model.

News: Future Acres launches with the arrival of crop-transporting robot, Carry

• February 23, 2021
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When people ask me which robotics categories are poised for the biggest growth, I often point to agriculture. The technology already has a strong foothold in places like warehouse and logistics, but it’s impossible to look at the American – and global – farming community and not see a lot of potential for human-assisted automation.

When people ask me which robotics categories are poised for the biggest growth, I often point to agriculture. The technology already has a strong foothold in places like warehouse and logistics, but it’s impossible to look at the American – and global – farming community and not see a lot of potential for human-assisted automation.

The category still seems fairly wide open — but not for lack of interest. There are a number of companies both large and small carving out niches in the category. For now, at least, it seems there’s room for a number of different players. After all, needs vary greatly from farm to farm and crop to crop.

Santa Monica-based Future Acres is launching today, with plans to tackle grape picking. An outgrowth of Wavemaker Partners — the same firm that gave the world burger-flipping Miso Robotics — the startup is also announce its first robot, Carry.

Image Credits: Future Acres

“We see Carry as a kind of harvesting sidekick for workers. It’s an autonomous harvesting companion,” CEO Suma Reddy tells TechCrunch. “What it can do in the real world is transport up to 500 lbs. of crops in all terrain and all weather. It can increase production efficiency by up to 80%, which means it pays for itself in only 80 days.”

Carry relies on AI to transport hand-picked crops, working alongside humans rather than attempting to replace the delicate picking process outright. The company is expecting that farms will purchase multiple machines that can work in tandem to speed up their process and help reduce the human strain of moving the crops around manually.

Image Credits: Future Acres

The company is still in early stages, having developed a prototype of Carry. It’s also exploring some partnerships for development. The systems would run $10,000-$15,000 up front, though the company says it’s looking at a RaaS (robotics as a service) model, as a way to defer that cost.

Interest in agricultural robotics has only increased during the pandemic, amid health concerns and labor issues. The company is building on that interest by launching a campaign on SeedInvest, in hopes of raising $3 million, in addition to funding already provided by Wavemaker.

News: South African digital bank TymeBank lands $109M from UK and Phillippines investors

• February 23, 2021
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The onset of the pandemic has led to increased demand across customer income groups around the world for digital banking options. We’ve seen how digital banks like Zolve and Nubank have raised money in recent months to fill this need. This time, a startup from Africa has joined the party. TymeBank, a South African digital

The onset of the pandemic has led to increased demand across customer income groups around the world for digital banking options. We’ve seen how digital banks like Zolve and Nubank have raised money in recent months to fill this need. This time, a startup from Africa has joined the party.

TymeBank, a South African digital bank, announced today that it has secured an R1.6 billion (~$109 million) investment from new investors in the UK and Phillippines. The company made this known via a statement. This investment will be used to bolster TymeBank’s growth and drive its commercial expansion across the country.

However, this investment will come in two instalments. According to the company, R500 million ($34 million) has already been invested in the business, while the rest — R1.1 billion ($75 million) — will be invested over the next 12 to 15 months.

TymeBank offers a transactional bank account with zero or low monthly fees and a savings product. Most of its customers are onboarded via physical kiosks, usually in Pick n Pay and Boxer stores around the country. Since launching in February 2019, TymeBank has grown rapidly and now has about 2.8 million customers. The company says that it’s on track to reach 3 million by the end of next month.

The investors for this unnamed round include Apis Growth Fund II, a private equity fund managed by Apis Partners, and Gokongwei-owned JG Summit Holdings, one of the largest conglomerates in the Philippines. Both these investors are experienced in financial services in emerging markets; Apis, for instance, is a private equity asset manager that supports growth-stage financial services and financial infrastructure businesses.

It is noteworthy that this is one of the largest raises, if not the largest, for a digital bank on the continent. Tauriq Keraan, the CEO of TymeBank, considers this to be largely due to more investors buying into the importance of digital banking and also the company’s value propositions — the first which is improving access to underbanked and underserviced customers in South Africa, and the other, satisfying customer demand for low and transparent bank fees which is generally viewed as both costly and difficult to understand across the country.

“The establishments of digital banks in South Africa is in its infancy. Growth in this particular segment of financial services is only possible with investments from partners who understand and support the growth trajectory of digital banks,” he said.

With already existing shareholders like African Rainbow Capital (founded by South African billionaire Patrice Motsepe), TymeBank says these new investors will grow the company into a top tier retail bank in South Africa. The investment will also help the company expand its range of banking products and grow its lending portfolio. Diversification of offerings is key as well as TymeBank seeks to enhance its propositions in insurance and credit cards to its customers.

“As the controlling shareholder in TymeBank, African Rainbow Capital is delighted to have our new co-investors onboard. Equally important, Apis and the Gokongwei family invest in TymeBank at a time when significant uncertainty reigns globally and in South Africa as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Dr Patrice Motsepe, the majority owner of TymeBank and chairman of African Rainbow Capital. “The invested amount of R1.6 billion is no small feat – both in terms of drawing investment into South Africa’s financial services sector as well as investing into a fledgeling part of the sector in our country.”

TymeBank claims to onboard an average of 110,000 new customers per month. This makes it globally recognized for digital banking in emerging markets, and the plan is to reach 4 million customers next year. To reach this target, the digital bank has entered into an agreement to launch a digital bank in the Philippines in the coming months. 

In terms of growth, TymeBank currently outpaces its competitors in Africa and can be argued to be one of the fastest-growing digital banks in the world at the moment. The company is the first bank in South Africa to be fully operated off a cloud-based infrastructure network and the first to be granted a commercial banking license in the country since 1999.

TymeBank isn’t indigenously South African though. It is a member of the Tyme group of companies headquartered in Singapore. The holding company, Tyme, focuses on designing, building, and operating digital banks for emerging markets. With its success in South Africa, Tyme is planning to launch operations in Asia.