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Singapore-based open finance startup Finantier gets backing from Y Combinator

Published December 22, 2020

Being “underbanked” doesn’t mean that someone lacks access to financial services. Instead, it often means they don’t have traditional bank accounts or credit cards. But in markets like Indonesia, many still use digital wallets or e-commerce platforms, creating alternative sources of user data that can help them secure working capital and other financial tools. Finantier, a Singapore-based open finance startup, wants to streamline that data with a single API that gives financial services access to user data, with their consent. It also includes machine-learning-based analytics to enable credit scoring and KYC verifications.

Currently in beta mode with more than 20 clients, Finantier is busy getting ready to officially launch. It announced today that it has been accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 startup batch. The startup also recently raised an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding led by East Ventures, with participation from AC Ventures, Genesia Ventures, Two Culture Capital and other investors.

Finantier was founded earlier this year by Diego Rojas, Keng Low and Edwin Kusuma, all of whom have experience building products for fintech companies, with the mission of enabling open finance in emerging markets.

Open finance grew out of open banking, the same framework that Plaid and Tink are built on. Meant to give people more control over their financial data instead of keeping it siloed within banks and other institutions, users can decide to grant apps or websites secure access to information from their online accounts, including bank accounts, credit cards and digital wallets. Open banking refers mainly to payment accounts, while open finance, Finantier’s specialty, covers a larger gamut of services, including business lending, mortgages and insurance underwriting.

While Finantier is focusing first on Singapore and Indonesia, it plans to expand into other countries and become a global fintech company like Plaid. It’s already eyeing Vietnam and the Philippines.

Before launching Finantier, Rojas worked on products for peer-to-peer lending platforms Lending Club and Dianrong, and served as chief technology officer for several fintech startups in Southeast Asia. He realized that many companies struggled to integrate with other platforms and fetch data from banks, or purchase data from different providers.

“People are discussing open banking, embedded finance and so on,” Rojas, Finantier’s chief executive officer, told TechCrunch. “But those are the building blocks of something bigger, which is open finance. Particularly in a region like Southeast Asia, where about 60% to 70% of adults are unbanked or underbanked, we believe in helping consumers and businesses leverage the data that they have in multiple platforms. It definitely doesn’t need to be a bank account, it could be in a digital wallet, e-commerce platform or other service providers.”

What this means for consumers is that even if someone doesn’t have a credit card, they can still establish creditworthiness: For example, by sharing data from completed transactions on e-commerce platforms. Gig economy workers can access more financial services and deals by giving data about their daily rides or other types of work they do through different apps.

Building Southeast Asia’s financial infrastructure

Other open-banking startups focused on Southeast Asia include Brankas and Brick. Rojas said Finantier differentiates by specializing on open finance and creating infrastructure for financial institutions to build more services for end users.

Brankas wants to bring Southeast Asia’s banks and e-commerce into the digital era

The benefit of open finance for financial institutions is that they can create products for more consumers and find more opportunities for revenue sharing models. In Southeast Asia, this also means reaching more people who are underbanked or otherwise lack access to financial services.

While taking part in Y Combinator’s accelerator program, Finantier will also be participating in the Indonesia Financial Service Authority’s regulatory sandbox. Once it completes the program, it will be able to partner with more fintech companies in Indonesia, including bigger institutions.

There are 139 million adults in Indonesia who are underbanked or unbanked, said East Ventures co-founder and managing partner Willson Cuaca.

The investment firm, which focuses on Indonesia, conducts an annual survey called the East Ventures Digital Competitiveness Index and found that financial exclusion was where one of the largest divides existed. There are significant gaps in between the number of financial services available in heavily populated islands like Java, where Jakarta is located, and other islands in the archipelago.

To promote financial inclusion and alleviate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the government has set a goal for 10 million micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) to go digital by the end of the year. There are currently about eight million Indonesian MSMEs that sell online, representing just 13% of MSMEs in the country.

“Providing equal access to financial services will create multiplier effects to the Indonesian economy,” Cuaca told TechCrunch about East Ventures’ decision to back Finantier. “Currently, hundreds of companies work with their own unique solutions to bring financial services to more people. We believe Finantier will help them offer more products and services to this underserved section of the population.”

4 takeaways from fintech VC in Q3 2020

Boardable’s board management software for nonprofits raises $8 million

Published December 22, 2020

Indianapolis-based Boardable, a provider of board management software tools for nonprofits, has raised $8 million in a new round of financing, the company said.

The investment came from Base10 Partners with participation from the company’s seed-stage backer, the Indianapolis-based enterprise investment firm High Alpha.

Boardable provides organizational tools to help nonprofits better manage their board meetings and offers management solutions for nonprofit operations.

Software and services developers catering to the nonprofit sector are seeing more interest from investors as they look for new verticals that have been underserved by technology companies in the past. Earlier this year, Resilia, a New Orleans-based startup, raised $8 million for its own spin on services for nonprofits and charity organizations.

New Orleans-based Resilia raises $8 million from Mucker Capital to make nonprofits more efficient

In a statement, Boardable said that it would use the financing to grow its team and develop new tools to become more of a one-stop shop for nonprofit operations.

“Most nonprofits manage their board members with ‘digital duct tape’—endless email threads and file sharing services. It’s a terrible experience that drains the board members and staff. Boardable is purpose-built by nonprofit founders to solve this problem, increasing efficiency and engagement,” said Jeb Banner, Boardable’s chief executive, in a statement.

Organizations including the YMCA, The Salvation Army, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the Girl Scouts of Indiana and more have turned to the company to use its paperless approach for board management.

IAC plans to spin off Vimeo as an independent company

Published December 22, 2020

IAC announced today that it plans to turn Vimeo into an independent, publicly traded company.

Last month, IAC CEO Joey Levin wrote a letter to shareholders in which he said the holding company had “begun contemplating spinning Vimeo off to our shareholders.” It sounds like the company has moved beyond the contemplation phase, with plans that will be submitted for stockholder approval in the first quarter of 2021, and the actual spin off happening in Q2.

“The combination of Vimeo’s remarkable growth, solid leadership position and enormous market opportunity have made clear its future,” Levin said in a statement today. “It’s time for Vimeo to spread its wings and become a great independent public company.”

While Vimeo once competed with YouTube as a consumer video destination, its strategy has shifted in recent years to providing video tools for businesses. In November, the company said it had 1.5 million paying subscribers and 3,500 enterprise clients — and that its most recent quarter was with positive EBITDA, plus year-over-year revenue growth of 44%.

The announcement notes that this is the eleventh company that IAC has spun off, a process in which it distributes its ownership stake to IAC shareholders. (Match Group completed its separation from IAC over the summer.)

“Today we have a rare opportunity to help every team and organization in the world integrate video throughout their operations, across all the ways they communicate and collaborate,” said Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud in a statement. “Our all-in-one solution radically lowers the barriers of time, cost and complexity that previously made professional-quality video unattainable. We’re ready for this next chapter and focused on making video far easier and more effective than ever before.”

Vimeo promotes Anjali Sud to CEO after canceling SVOD plans

Austin-based ReturnSafe raises $3.25 million for its employee health management tools

Published December 22, 2020

ReturnSafe, a symptom checking and contact tracing employee health management toolkit for businesses, has raised $3.25 million in financing from investors including Fifty Years and Active Capital.

With companies looking to reopen operations and have their employees return to work safely, management toolkits that track employee health are piling into the market offering all sorts of strategies to maintain a safe work environment.

These include offerings from companies like WorkSafe; or the ProtectWell tool from Microsoft and UnitedHealth; or NSpace, which has similar features and a scheduling tool for booking office space safely.

For its part, ReturnSafe is boasting six-figure monthly recurring revenue and is working with 50 organizations since its launch six months ago.

The pitch to investors and customers is that the need to manage employees and ensure that workspaces are free from health risks is only going to grow in a post-COVID-19 world.

Of course, the best way for employers to ensure the safety and security of their employees is to provide adequate leave and time off if employees are sick, and to ensure that everyone has access to adequate testing at regular intervals should they not be able to work remotely.

Like other companies in the market, ReturnSafe offers a symptoms screener, a testing dashboard, a case management dashboard and a new vaccine management service. In addition to those software tools, ReturnSafe pitches a set of wearable devices with built-in social distancing alarms to ensure that employees maintain safe distances.

Tech’s role in the COVID-19 response: Assist, don’t reinvent

Group Nine Media forms a SPAC to fund acquisitions

Published December 22, 2020

Group Nine Media — which owns Thrillist, NowThis, The Dodo, Seeker and PopSugar — is the latest company to form a SPAC, according to a filing with the SEC.

These blank-check corporations, as they’re also known, have become a popular way to raise money from the public markets. The filing says that Group Nine is creating a SPAC “for the purpose of effecting a merger, capital stock exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization or similar business combination.”

The company goes on to claim that it doesn’t have any specific acquisition targets in mind, and that there have not been “any substantive discussions.” But it says it’s interested in digital media companies, as well as those in “adjacent industries” such as social media, e-commerce, events, digital publishing and marketing.

The idea of consolidating digital media properties has been a recurring theme from executives over the past few years. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti, for example, has said that a consolidated digital media entity could have more clout in negotiations with Facebook and Google, and he recently struck a deal to acquire HuffPost from Verizon Media (which also owns TechCrunch).

Group Nine is itself a roll-up of previously independent digital media companies, led by CEO Ben Lerer (pictured above) and growing last year with the acquisition of PopSugar. The Wall Street Journal reported recently that the company was exploring a SPAC.

“We believe the digital media sector is primed for consolidation, as digital media companies need a scaled platform with efficient portfolio infrastructure to compete in the ecosystem and return value to shareholders in the long-term,” Group Nine says in the filing.

PopSugar co-founder says pandemic will create ‘a huge windfall’ for digital media

One final $100M ARR company and the startups we want to meet in 2021

Published December 22, 2020

As we head toward the exits of 2020, we have one more name to add to our roll call of private companies that have reached the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) milestone. Well, one and a half.

But before we get into Nexthink and give Coalition a honorable mention, let’s talk about the startups we’re looking for in 2021.

The $100 million ARR list came together by accident, a quirk of a news cycle that happened to have a few companies reach the threshold when I was in transition back to working at TechCrunch. So, when I got back into our WordPress install, the group of companies that had each recently reached nine-figure revenues was top of mind.

But looking at $100 million ARR companies proved less useful than we might have hoped. Mostly what we managed was to collect a bucket of companies that were about to go public.

That was always a risk. As we wrote at the time:

Perhaps the startup market would do well to celebrate the $50 million ARR mark even more loudly. At $50 million ARR, a startup is scaling to IPO size. That’s the goal, after all.

This is our aim for 2021.

If your startup is approaching the $50 million ARR mark, or the $50 million annual run rate threshold, I want to hear from you. Drop a line if your startup has an annualized run rate between $35 million and $60 million, is privately held, and you are willing to chat about how quickly it is growing. (The Exchange first raised this idea in November.)

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

But that’s next year. Today, let’s chat about Nexthink, what the hell “digital employee experience” is and what’s good with cyber insurance and why it’s helping Coalition grow rapidly.

Nexthink gets IPO ready

Nexthink is a venture-backed software company with headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland and Boston. According to PitchBook, Nexthink raised external capital in modest amounts from 2006 until 2014, when the startup picked up a $14.5 million Series D. That round was its first worth more than $10 million.

From there, Nexthink was a venture capital success story, presumably scaling quickly as it raised two larger rounds in 2016 and 2018 worth an estimated $40 million and $85 million, respectively. Nexthink was valued at a little over $558 million (post-money) following its 2018 round.

How did it attract so much external funding? By building digital experience monitoring software. Which, after doing a bit of research this morning, appears to be software aimed at tracking what corporate end users are doing with devices and how well software running on those devices perform.

StepZen snares $8M seed to build data integration API

Published December 22, 2020

StepZen, a new startup from the crew who gave you Apigee (which was sold to Google in 2016 for $625 million) had a different vision for their latest company. They are building a single API that pulls data from disparate sources to help developers deliver more complex customer experiences online.

Today, the startup emerged from stealth and announced an $8 million seed investment from Neotribe Ventures and Wing Venture Capital .

With years of experience working with APIs, the founders wanted to take that a step further, says CEO and co-founder Anant Jhingran. “StepZen is a product that lets front end developers easily create and consume one API for all the data they need from the back end,” he explained.

This is all in the service of providing a smoother, more consistent customer experience. That means whether you are on an e-commerce site accessing your order history or a banking app grabbing your current balance, these scenarios require pulling data from various back-end data resources. Connecting to those resources is a time-consuming task, and StepZen wants to simplify that for developers.

“Developers spend an enormous amount of time deploying and managing code that accesses the back end, and what StepZen wants to do is to give them that time back,” he said.

Jitsu nabs $2M seed to build open-source data integration platform

Instead of manually writing code to pull this data, StepZen enables developers to simply provide configuration information and credentials to connect to these back-end data sources, and then it builds a single API that handles all of the heavy lifting of pulling that data and presenting it when needed.

Jhingran uses the example of presenting a list of open orders for a customer. It sounds simple enough, but once you consider that the data could live in several places, including the CRM system, the order system or with your courier, that means accessing at least three separate and highly disparate systems. StepZen will help pull this all together via its API and present it smoothly to the user.

Today the company has 11 employees, including the three founders, with plans to add another eight or so in 2021. As they do that, CBO and co-founder Helen Whelan says they are working to build a diverse and inclusive company. While the founding team is itself diverse, they want to hire employees with diverse backgrounds and ways of thinking to build the most complete product and company.

“For the first 10 or so employees, we tapped into the networks of the people who we’ve worked with, people who you know can do a great job. Then I think it’s about deliberately expanding from there and deliberately taking the time that you need to explore and expand your pipeline of candidates,” she said.

The company is just nine months old and has been spending most of this year building the solution and working with pre-alpha users. Today the product is in alpha, with plans to release it as a software service early next year.

As the company emerges from stealth, it’s looking to continue building the product and looking for ways to remove as much complexity as possible. “We know how to do the hard things on the back end. We’ve got the database technologies and the API technologies down, and it’s now about finding how to make all of that simple on the outside and easy for developers to use, ” Whelan said.

Google will acquire Apigee for $625 million

Activism platform actionable helps users be proactive about the causes they love

Published December 22, 2020

In 2016, when the world felt like an entirely different place, Jordan Hewson launched a platform called Speakable. It was meant to let news readers take action on a cause or issue in the very moment they cared most: while reading a news article about it. The company partnered with publishers and NGOs to deliver an action button, right on the publisher’s website.

Skip forward to today, and people have become far more proactive about the causes they care about. That’s why Hewson is launching a new product called actionable, a library of actions mapped across dozens of causes, giving the user a clear view into how they can do something about the things they care about most.

Though donations are an option across the platform, there are other methods by which users can take action, including volunteering, contacting your representatives and signing petitions.

“We were founded before the 2016 election,” said Hewson. “And Speakable was based on the hypothesis that if we didn’t make action easy, people wouldn’t do it. But so much has changed, politically and socially, that people are really breaking down the doors to find out ways that they can help in this moment that we’re in. So we really wanted to be able to provide our users with a platform where they can proactively seek out things that they want to do and deepen their community experience.”

Issues on the platform include Education, Equal Rights, Environment, Health, Migration, Politics, Poverty, Racial Justice and more. When a user clicks on an issue, actionable breaks the results down into the type of action the user might take, from donating to volunteering to signing petitions. The platform also drills down into the specific mission of the organization to give users a clear look at how they’re spending their resources.

When Speakable launched, it offered its services for free in the hopes of scaling up rapidly. Today, the platform charges a 3% service fee for donations made through the platform, but Hewson doesn’t see that as the company’s primary revenue generator.

Rather, Speakable is partnering with brands to sponsor action buttons for their own purpose-based initiatives. Hewson explains that might take the form of a matching campaign or sponsoring the ability for you to reach out to your legislator on a certain issue, giving the publishers another way to generate revenue, as well as Speakable, while scaling campaigns and initiatives on behalf of the brand partners.

The company is currently partnered with about 90 publishers and, via an API, aims to list all the nonprofits that exist in the States.

Interestingly, actionable doesn’t necessarily rank or curate the NGOs on its platform in an effort to maintain neutrality among nonprofits, according to Hewson.

Speakable has raised $2.5 million since inception. It has also powered 10 million actions, with the majority of those actions coming in 2020, with 5.2 million actions taken this year. Just this past week, in fact, Speakable facilitated more than $1.3 million in donations in a single day to Feeding America in partnership with the TODAY show.

The team is about 15 people. Sixty percent identify as women at the female-founded company, with 20% identifying as BIPOC and 10% identifying as LGBTQI+.

VergeSense raises $12M Series B for its workplace analytics service

Published December 22, 2020

VergeSense, a startup that uses machine vision to help businesses better understand how their office spaces are being utilized, today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series B funding round led by Tola Capital.

Including the company’s $9 million Series A round, which it raised earlier this year, VergeSense has now raised a total of $22.6 million. Previous investors include JLL Spark, Allegion Ventures, MetaProp, Y Combinator, Pathbreaker Ventures and West Ventures.

Given the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s maybe no surprise that VergeSense would be seeing quite a bit of demand for its service and sensors. While the company was seeing strong growth since its launch in 2017, the pandemic is accelerating the move to smarter office spaces. As VergeSense CEO and co-founder Dan Ryan told me, over the course of the last few months, the company added new features to help businesses manage social distancing, for example, and to better understand where in a given office they should intensify their cleaning protocols.

VergeSense sensor

It’s also becoming increasingly clear that even after we get the pandemic under control, office spaces — and office work — will look radically different. “It’s going to be a sort of a hybrid model of working, which, pre-pandemic, was already something that was happening — companies were experimenting with this — but now it’s been turbocharged,” Ryan said. “We never anticipated any of this, but I think it’s a great example of the possibilities that you can help support when you have this intelligent infrastructure all around you that allows you to almost program the physical world.”

Another new feature the company launched this year allows its tools to register when a seat is likely occupied, even though nobody is in it right now, by looking for backpacks and other signs that would signal that a desk is in use.

VergeSense currently has customers in 29 countries. These include the likes of Shell, Quicken Loans, Roche, Cisco and Telus. In total, the company’s tools watch more than 40 million square feet of space now.

Image Credits: VergeSense

As Ryan told me, the company saw quite a bit of inbound interest from investors this year and the team wanted to capitalize on the current trends. “As we look forward to ’21, especially now that this transition to an agile hybrid seating model is going to be turbocharged, we were preparing for and planning for additional growth there as well. So this was sort of opportunistic opportunity to team up with Tola to help go to the next level,” Ryan explained.

The company plans to use the new funding to continue to work on its core computer vision capabilities and hardware, but as Ryan noted, one of the focus areas for VergeSense in 2021 will also include new partnerships and integrations with tools for booking desks and rooms, as well as building automation systems. To do so, it plans to double its headcount and hire across all departments.

VergeSense is obviously not the only company playing in this space. Swiss startup Locatee, for example, raised a Series A round for its service earlier this year, though it uses network data to measure occupancy and not the kind of dedicated sensors that VergeSense is developing. Other players include the likes of Density, Basking and SteerPath.

Locatee raises $4M Series A for its workplace analytics platform

VergeSense grabs $9M for its people-counting sensor tech as offices eye COVID changes

Astroscale ships its space junk removal demonstration satellite for March 2021 mission

Published December 22, 2020

Japanese startup Astroscale has shipped its ELSA-d spacecraft to the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazahkstan, where it will be integrated with a Soyuz rocket for a launch scheduled for March of next year. This is a crucial mission for Astroscale, since it’ll be the first in-space demonstration of the company’s technology for de-orbiting space debris, a cornerstone of its proposed space sustainability service business.

The ELSA-d mission by Astroscale is a small satellite mission that will demonstrate two key technologies that enable the company’s vision for orbital debris removal. First will be a targeting component, demonstrating an ability to locate and dock with a piece of space debris, using positioning sensors including GPS and laser locating technologies. That will be used by a so-called “servicer” satellite to find and attach to a “target” satellite launched at the same time, which will stand in for a potential piece of debris.

Astroscale intends to dock and release with the “target” using its “servicer” multiple times over the course of the mission, showing that it can identify and capture uncontrolled objects in space, and that it can maneuver them for controlled de-orbit. This will basically prove out the feasibility of the technology underlying its business model, and set it up for future commercial operations.

In October, Astroscale announced that it had raised $51 million, making its total raised to date $191 million. The company also acquired the staff and IP of a company called Effective Space Solutions in June, which it will use to build out the geostationary servicing arm of its business, in addition to the LEO operations that ELSA-d will demonstrate.

Astroscale expands into geostationary satellite life extension with new acquisition