1010Computers | Computer Repair & IT Support

1 … 73 74 75 76 77 … 2,385

WhenThen’s no-code payments platform attracts $6M from European VCs Stride and Cavalry

Published July 21, 2021

The payments space — amazingly — remains up for grabs for startups. Yes, dear reader, despite the success of Stripe, there seems to be a new payments startup virtually every other day. It’s a mess out there! The accelerated growth of e-commerce due to the pandemic means payments are now a booming space. And here comes another one, with a twist.

WhenThen has built a no-code payment operations platform that, they claim, streamlines the payment processes “of merchants of any kind”.  It says its platform can autonomously orchestrate, monitor, improve and manage all customer payments and payments ops.

The startup’s opportunity has arisen because service providers across different verticals increasingly want to get into open banking and provide their own payment solutions and financial services.

Founded six months ago, WhenThen has now raised $6 million, backed by European VCs Stride and Cavalry.

The founders, Kirk Donohoe, Eamon Doyle and Dave Brown, are three former Mastercard Payment veterans.

Based out of Dublin, CEO Donohoe told me: “We see traditional businesses embracing e-comm, and e-comm merchants now operating multiple business models such as trade supply, marketplace, subscription, and more. There is no platform that makes it easy for such businesses to create and operate multiple payment flows to support multiple business models in one place — that’s where we step in.”

He added: “WhenThen is helping e-commerce digital platforms build advanced payment flows and payment automation, in minutes as opposed to months. When you start to integrate different payment methods, different payment gateways, how you want the payment to move from collection through to payout gets very, very complex. I’ve been doing this for over a decade now, as an entrepreneur building different businesses that had to accept, collect and pay payments.”

He said his founding team “had to build very complex payment flows for large merchants, airlines, hotels, issuers, and we just found it was ridiculous that you have to continue to do the same thing over and over again. So we decided to come up with WhenThen as a better way to be able to help you build those flows in minutes.”

Claude Ritter, managing partner at Cavalry, said: “Basic payment orchestration platforms have been around for some time, focusing mostly on maximizing payment acceptance by optimizing routing. WhenThen provides the first end-to-end payment flow platform to equip businesses with the opportunity to control every stage of the payment flow from payment intent to payout.”

WhenThen supports a wide range of popular payment providers such as Stripe, Braintree, Adyen, Authorize.net, Checkout.com, etc., and a variety of alternative and locally preferred payment methods such as Klarna Affirm, PayPal and BitPay.

“For brave merchants considering global reach and operating multiple business models concurrently, I believe choosing the right payment ops platform will become as important as choosing the right e-commerce platform. Building your entire e-comm experience tightly coupled to a single payment processor is a hard correction to make down the line — you need a payment flow platform like WhenThen”, added Fred Destin, founder of Stride.VC.

All B2B startups are in the payments business

Powered by WPeMatico

Outplay gets $7.3M from Sequoia Capital India to help outbound sales team scale their campaigns

Published July 21, 2021

Outbound sales managers typically rely on high volumes of inquiries to find customers, but this means that their revenue is often in proportion to the size of their team. Outplay helps them scale more easily with tools that automate campaigns, identifies the likeliest prospects and uses data to decide the right time to send pitches. The company announced today it has raised $7.3 million in seed funding from Sequoia Capital India.

The new capital will be used for tech development and hiring, and brings Outplay’s total raised so far to $9.3 million. Its previous funding was a $2 million raise from Sequoia Capital India’s Surge announced in March after Outplay took part in the program’s fourth cohort.

Since its seed round, Outplay says it has grown its revenue four times and now has customers in more than 50 countries, serving primarily B2B software companies.

Outplay was founded in 2019 by brothers Ram and Lax Papineni. The two previously launched AppVirality, a referral marketing tool for app developers.

Sequoia Capital India’s Surge invests $2M in sales engagement platform Outplay

Outplay was designed for sales team who contact prospects through multiple channels, like phone calls, emails, SMS, LinkedIn and Twitter. It integrates the channels into one interface, so salespeople don’t have to switch between apps. Outplay also automates sequences, or marketing campaigns that include an initial pitch sent through various channels and automatic follow-up messages if a reply isn’t received within a preset time.

The platform is meant to replace the process of cold-calling potential customers, which is time-consuming and difficult to scale, and enable salespeople to focus on the best prospects, helping them decide which channel to use and when to contact them.

Since its seed funding, Outplay has launched several new tools and features, including a Chrome extension that lets salespeople add prospects from LinkedIn and Gmail, send emails, make calls and perform other tasks without having to visit Outplay’s dashboard. It also added integrations with sales tools like Gong, Dynamics CRM and Zapier (Outplay was already integrated with customer relationship management platforms Pipedrive, Salesforce and HubSpot).

One major new feature is Magic Outbound Chat, a web chat box that is launched when a prospective customer clicks on an email link. Salespeople are notified and provided with context about the prospect. Laxman told TechCrunch that most chat boxes are designed for inbound sales teams, and Magic Outbound Chat has helped some of its teams grow their sales pipeline by 300%.

Laxman said that the onboarding process for Outplay takes just a few days and sales managers are provided with a playbook of successful sequences to help them get started.

Outplay’s competitors include unicorns Outbound and SalesLoft. Laxman said that in the mid-2000s, inbound sales processes and tech began rapidly evolving as SaaS adoption increased, but outbound sales teams still relied on the same high-volume tactics they had been using for years.

Outreach nabs $50M at a $1.33B valuation for software that helps with sales engagement

“The previous outbound sales tech disruption happened in 2011 when Outreach and Salesloft were founded. We really respect what they have done to the industry, but the approach is not scalable and the revenue eventually becomes a function of the size of the outbound sales team,” he said, adding that Outplay is changing the process by using data-driven signals to help sales representatives engage with the likeliest prospects at the right time in the right channel.

For example, Outplay’s Dynamic Sequencing automatically moves prospects from one sequence to another that has a higher chance of success. In one scenario, Outplay can be configured to move a prospective who opens a sales representative’s email more than four times to another sequence that focuses on people who appear interested in a product. Laxman said some of its customers have seen open rates as high as 80% in the second sequence with Dynamic Sequencing.

In a statement, Sequoia India principal Harshjit Sethi said, “Outbound sales needs are evolving rapidly and reps now need personalized, automated and contextual tools to drive sales which Outplay is successfully enabling. Sales reps spend an average of four hours per day on Outplay, demonstrating the effectiveness of the product which has category-leading customer reviews.”

Atlanta’s SalesLoft raises $100M for its digital sales platform, now valued at $1.1B

Develop a buyer’s guide to educate your startup’s sales team and customers

Powered by WPeMatico

LiveControl raises $30M to help venues livestream events

Published July 21, 2021

One thing seems certain: The past year-and-a-half has fundamentally transformed the world of live events. The pandemic left plenty of venues scrambling for alternative revenue streams and, in many cases, shutting down for good.

On the flip side, it’s been a massive driver for those companies working to expand the reach of in-person events. Take LiveControl, which just raised a $30 million Series A led by Coatue and featuring existing investors First Round Capital, Box Group, Susa Ventures and TriplePoint. The round brings the So Cal company’s total funding to $33 million, on the heels of a $3.2 million seed led by FRC last August.

The company offers a production suite that’s a sort of plug and play solution for venues. “What if you could snap your fingers and an entire video product crew would appear, for just $150?” CEO Patrick Coyne asked, extremely rhetorically in a comment offered to TechCrunch.

Image Credits: LiveControl

LiveControl says its technology has been deployed in “hundreds” of spots in the U.S., everywhere from music venues and comedy clubs to Broadway theaters and religious institutions. With its device agnostic software and support, the company also provides third-party camera hardware as part of a package, for a more out-of-the-box solution.

The latest funding round will go toward accelerating its technology and expanding employee headcount from 40 people to 120 over the next year and a half. LiveControl and its investors are clearly bullish on the possibilities here. But there remain broader questions around how much audience members’ interest in remote viewing regresses to the mean once venues reopen across the country and world.

“Video is now table stakes for most organizations, venues and creators,” says Coyne. “We’re only seeing it accelerate, and everyone is forward leaning to make bigger investments to improve their video quality.”

Flymachine raises $21 million to build a virtual concerts platform for a post-pandemic world

These best practices maximize the value of your online events

 

Powered by WPeMatico

The Extreme Tech Challenge Global Finals 2021 starts tomorrow

Published July 21, 2021

Get ready for a startup throwdown of global proportions (literally). We’re the proud hosts of the Extreme Tech Challenge (XTC) Global Finals, and the pitch competition action starts tomorrow, July 22 at 9:00 am (PT).

Pro housekeeping tip: Attending this virtual pitch fest is 100% free, but you need to register here first.

Not familiar with XTC? It’s the world’s largest pitch competition focused on solving humanity’s most vexing challenges. You gotta love a competition that serves the greater good — and a startup ecosystem for purpose-driven companies determined to build a more sustainable, equitable, healthy, inclusive and prosperous world.

The road to the XTC finals was crowded, to say the least. More than 3,700 startups from 92 countries applied to compete in one of these categories: Agtech, Food & Water, Cleantech & Energy, Edtech, Enabling Tech, Fintech, Healthtech and Mobility & Smart Cities.

Talk about a daunting endeavor. Team XTC, which consisted of deeply experienced investors, entrepreneurs and executives, winnowed down that field to these seven competing finalists: Wasteless, Mining and Process Solutions, Testmaster, Dot Inc., Hillridge Technology, Genetika+ and Fotokite.

Tomorrow’s competition takes place in two rounds, and each startup team will have to bring its best if they hope to impress this panel of judges — all leaders in sustainability and social impact.

Young Sohn, co-founder, XTC and chairman at Harmann International; Bill Tai, co-founder, XTC and partner emeritus, Charles River Ventures; Regina Dugan, president and CEO of Wellcome Leap; Jerry Yang, founder/partner of AME Cloud Ventures and co-founder of Yahoo!; Lars Reger, CTO and EVP at NXP Semiconductors; and Michael Zeisser, managing partner at FMZ Ventures.

In a classic, “but wait, there’s more” moment, the day also features several presentations from some of the leading voices in sustainability. Take a look at the two examples below, and check out the complete XTC finals agenda and the roster of speakers:

  • The Keynote Address: Tune in as Beth Bechdol, the deputy director-general at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, provides an update on the latest from her agency.
  • Waste Matters: According to the EPA, the U.S. alone produces 292.4 million tons of waste a year. Can technology help this massive — and growing — issue? Leon Farrant (Green Li-Ion), Matanya Horowitz (AMP Robotics) and Elizabeth Gilligan (Material Evolution) will discuss their companies’ unique approaches to dealing with the problem.

The Extreme Tech Challenge Global Finals starts tomorrow, July 22. Join us and thousands of people around the world for this free, virtual pitch competition. Register here for your free ticket.

Powered by WPeMatico

Cyber risk startup Safe Security lands $33M from UK telco BT

Published July 21, 2021

Safe Security, a Silicon Valley cyber risk management startup, has secured a $33 million investment from U.K. telco BT. 

Founded in 2012, Safe Security — formerly known as Lucideus — helps organizations measure and mitigate enterprise-wide cyber risk using its security assessment framework for enterprises (SAFE) platform. The service, which is used by a number of companies, including Facebook, Softbank and Xiaomi, helps businesses understand their likelihood of suffering a major cyberattack, calculates a financial cost to customers’ risks and provides actionable insight on the steps that can be taken to address them.

This funding round saw participation from Safe Security’s existing investors, including former Cisco chairman and chief executive John Chambers, and brings the total amount raised by Safe Security to $49.2 million.

BT said the investment, which is its first major third-party investment in cybersecurity since 2006, reflected its plans to grow rapidly in the sector. Philip Jansen, BT CEO said: “Cybersecurity is now at the top of the agenda for businesses and governments, who need to be able to trust that they’re protected against increasing levels of attack. 

“Already one of the world’s leading providers in a highly fragmented security market, this investment is a clear sign of BT’s ambition to grow further.”

To guard against data loss and misuse, the cybersecurity conversation must evolve

The startup’s co-founder and chief executive Saket Modi said he was “delighted” to be working with BT.

“By aligning BT’s global reach and capabilities with SAFE’s ability to provide real-time visibility on cyber risk posture, we are going to fundamentally change how security is measured and managed across the globe,” he said.

As part of the investment, which will see Safe Security double its engineering team by the end of the year, BT will combine the SAFE platform with its managed security services, and gain exclusive rights to use and sell SAFE to businesses and public sector bodies in the U.K. BT will also work collaboratively with Safe Security to develop future products, according to an announcement from the company.

Safe Security’s competitors include UpGuard, Exabeam and VisibleRisk.

It’s time to better identify the cost of cybersecurity risks in M&A deals

Powered by WPeMatico

Pangaea Holdings, developing men’s personal care brands, raises $68M, including minority stake from Eurazeo

Published July 21, 2021

Global investment group Eurazeo invested $53 million in Pangaea Holdings for a minority investment in the Los Angeles e-commerce company rooted in creating premium men’s personal care brands.

The investment is part of a larger $68 million round that includes $15 million in Series B funding from a group of backers including Unilever Ventures and GPO Fund and existing investors Base10 Partners and Gradient Ventures. This brings the company’s total funds raised to $87 million since the company was founded by Richard Hong and Darwish Gani in 2018.

Harlem Capital’s Henri Pierre-Jacques invested in both Pangaea’s seed round in 2019 and Series A in 2020. He’s known Gani since college and worked with Hong over the past two years, calling the pair “one of the most data-driven and founder market fits I have seen.”

“At the seed stage, the business was already a seven-figure business and has continued to see astonishing growth,” he added. “Pangaea, to date, has been a brand incubator, but post the Series B will expand to be a vertically integrated e-commerce platform for other brands. We are even more excited for this next phase of their growth.”

Hong started Pangaea with the launch of men’s skincare brand Lumin that contains natural Korean-based formulations. In fact, he was among a group of people living together in an apartment using Korean beauty products and hiding it from their roommates, Gani told TechCrunch.

Gani later joined Hong as a co-founder to scale the business, as they realized there was a bigger opportunity for global e-commerce.

“Men are actually into skincare, but not as comfortable talking about it,” Gani said. “For Richard, he came from a place where skincare was more culturally accepted. His idea was to provide high-quality products, but presented in a way that people can understand their use and help them to form a habit.”

Pangaea ended up developing proprietary infrastructure, including warehousing, payments and shipping, as a holding company to grow and scale direct-to-consumer brands. It’s latest brand, Meridian, offering grooming products, launched in 2020. Products are now selling in more than 70 countries.

Though headquartered in Los Angeles, the company is basically remote, with more than 300 employees across its major hubs in LA, Lagos, Nigeria, Singapore and Europe.

The company is already cash flow positive, and the new funding will enable Pangaea to round out leadership roles in its brands and reach the next stage of growth with the goal of being “omnichannel male megabrands,” Gani said. The company is also investing in additional product categories, new brands and potentially licensing its proprietary software.

Gani said he is excited to work with Eurazeo, which he referred to as “experts in building and scaling consumer brands.” The firm will work with Pangaea to continue developing the Lumin and Meridian brands and accelerate its international expansion.

Jill Granoff, Eurazeo’s managing partner and brands CEO, said in a written statement that the company “is well-positioned for future growth.”

“Richard and Darwish have launched a platform and products that address a significant need in an attractive, growing market,” Granoff added. “The team has achieved impressive results in a short period of time across geographies and categories, demonstrating strong product appeal to global consumers. They have also built a highly scalable technology that can support future brand development.”

It may not be as glamorous as D2C, but beauty tech is big money

 

Powered by WPeMatico

Spendesk raises $118 million for its corporate spend management service

Published July 21, 2021

French startup Spendesk has announced earlier today that it has raised a $118 million funding round (€100 million) led by General Atlantic. Overall, the company has raised $189 million (€160 million) since its inception.

Existing investors Index Ventures and Eight Road Ventures participated once again in today’s funding round.

Spendesk, as the name suggests, focuses on all things related to spend management. Originally founded in startup studio eFounders, the startup first offered virtual and physical company cards for employees. While corporate cards are quite popular in the U.S., many small and medium companies in France can’t give a card to every single employee.

That’s why spending your company’s money can be a cumbersome process. You can borrow your boss’ card but they’ll have to trust you with it. You can pay with your own personal card but you want to be reimbursed as quickly as possible.

By combining a SaaS platform with corporate cards, it opens up a ton of possibilities. For instance, you can create an approval workflow for expensive purchases. You can set different budgets for different teams.

How a band of P2P hackers planted the seeds of a unique expense management giant

Over time, Spendesk has expanded beyond cards to manage expenses and invoice processing. It tries to automate some repetitive accounting tasks as well. Employees are automatically reminded that they have to attach a receipt for each transaction. You can export everything to Xero, Datev, Sage, Cegid or Netsuite.

If that pitch sounds familiar, it’s because there are a handful of European startups that are all doing well in this field. Soldo recently raised $180 million while Pleo snatched $150 million at a $1.7 billion valuation.

And yet, Spendesk doubled its revenue over the past year. Its team grew from 150 to 300 employees and it plans to double its headcount again over the next couple of years.

It means two things — the market opportunity is important and many customers are switching from old school workflows to modern SaaS products. That’s why three startups can grow at the same time.

“Traditionally, finance teams haven’t been equipped with the tools that can support this transformation,” Spendesk co-founder and CEO Rodolphe Ardant said in a statement. “In the past few years we have built the reference spend management solution for finance teams in Europe, which frees businesses and their people from administrative constraints of spending and managing money at work. While our solution is about empowering finance teams, we are actually delivering value to the entire business through the finance team.”

Spendesk currently has 3,000 clients, including Algolia, Soundcloud, Curve, Doctolib, Gousto, Raisin, Sezane and Wefox.

Image Credits: Spendesk

Powered by WPeMatico

Zebra raises $1.1M in a pre-seed round for messaging that pairs photos with voice chat

Published July 21, 2021

A new voice-based social app that cites Clubhouse as its biggest inspiration offers a playful new way to stay in touch with close friends and family. Zebra leaves video out of the equation altogether, inviting users to snap on-the-fly photos and send them off paired with casual voice updates.

Zebra focuses on asynchronous sharing, but it also lets users call one another if they’re both already hanging out on the app. The result is a fun and casual way to stay in touch for anyone who doesn’t feel like accidentally getting sucked into Instagram’s endless, ad-strewn feed every time they want to give a friend a quick update.

For now Zebra is a two-person team consisting of CEO Dennis Gecaj, a product designer based in Berlin, and Amer Shahnawaz, Zebra’s head of engineering, who previously worked on Snap Maps at Snapchat. The pre-seed funding was led by Alexis Ohanian’s fresh early-stage venture firm Seven Seven Six, which the Reddit co-founder announced in June. The app will launch formally in August but is now open for preorders through the App Store and as a beta in TestFlight.

Seven Seven Six, the new venture firm from Alexis Ohanian, closes $150 million Fund 1

“It’s no secret that we are in the midst of an audio revolution, one that has ushered in a series of new audio-first social platforms and content vehicles,” Ohanian said, noting that Zebra’s unique blend of photos and voice is what caught his eye.

Gecaj sees voice-based social networking as a much richer alternative to text-dominant platforms. While products like Instagram allow voice messages and technically let users make voice calls by disabling the camera, voice usually plays second fiddle to video. But video calls are more taxing and require more commitment — it’s no coincidence more and more Zoom cameras blinked offline as the pandemic dragged on.

Unlike Clubhouse, which Gecaj calls a “huge inspiration, Zebra is social audio designed for your inner circle. “With everything opening back up we saw an incredible opportunity for an asynchronous format for that,” he told TechCrunch.

Gecaj hopes that Zebra’s “talking photos” can capture the collective imagination in a way that makes early growth natural. Anyone who downloads Zebra can invite friends individually without needing to share their full contact list (and they’ll need to — you can’t do anything on the app without friends). Because Zebra’s interface is so clean and streamlined, this process is painless and doesn’t necessitate any extra digging through menus.

Clubhouse ventures beyond audio with Backchannel, a new messaging feature

The idea of a “zebra” — naturally, Zebra is trying to make “zebra” happen — is that people like to see what they are talking about. On a different messaging app, this would require sending a photo and then sending a voice message in quick succession. But on Zebra, sending a photo is the main thing you can do. The app opens right to the camera where you snap a picture. You then hold the photo to record a snippet of voice to go along with it and send it off to friends and family, who appear in a row beneath the camera.

Zebra isn’t worried about the prospect of talking people into downloading another app. Gecaj sees a natural split emerging as creators and audiences increasingly become the focus of social platforms that were initially designed to help friends stay in touch.

“I think the trend is a division between creator platforms where you go to be entertained and platforms you go to hang out with your friends,” Gecaj told TechCrunch.

On top of that, he hopes that Zebra’s dual focus on voice and photos, two aspects of social networking that platforms either don’t prioritize or are actively abandoning, can make it appealing for people who aren’t as interested in video.

“We really also think that text messaging doesn’t have the same emotion as voice… and voice has been really neglected,” Gecaj said. “There’s really a richness to voice, a power to voice that nothing else has.”

Swell launches its app for asynchronous voice conversations

10 VCs say interactivity, regulation and independent creators will reshape digital media in 2021

 

Powered by WPeMatico

i80 Group has quietly committed $1B in credit to the fintech and proptech worlds

Published July 21, 2021

Not every startup wants to raise venture capital. And then there are those that do want to raise VC money but don’t want to use it for specific things.

In recent years, a number of firms have emerged looking to meet the credit needs of such venture-backed and growth startups: i80 Group is one of those firms.

Former Goldman Sachs investment banker Marc Helwani founded i80 in 2016 after investing in early-stage New York-based fintechs in 2014-2015 via his VC fund, Avenue A Ventures.

“It became very clear to me that fintech was going to explode,” he recalls. “At that time, it was still relatively new. And every time I spoke to a company, they would tell me, ‘We know how to raise VC, but what about the credit?’ I just saw this white space.”

For example, proptechs that buy homes on behalf of buyers don’t want to use venture money. Fintechs that want to make loans to consumers don’t want to use equity to do it. Instead, in those cases, credit might be more desirable.

Enter i80. The firm offers credit exclusively, and over the years has quietly committed more than $1 billion to over 15 companies –including real estate marketplace Properly, finance app MoneyLion and SaaS financing company Capchase — that have all raised a significant amount of venture capital but are looking for credit “to help them scale very efficiently and in a non-dilutive manner so they can retain more ownership of their companies,” Helwani said. 

Its $1 billion milestone follows fund commitments nearing $500 million from an unnamed “leading global asset manager” as well as other institutional and retail investors.

Image Credits: Founder and Chief Investment Officer Marc Helwani / i80 Group

I80 — which derives its name from the highway that connects New York and San Francisco — is mainly focused on the fintech and proptech sectors. 

“They are the two centers for the venture ecosystem,” Helwani said. “And we’re trying to be a bridge between those two cities.” I80 has offices in both locations and will soon be opening one in Montreal.

The firm works in conjunction with VC firms such as a16z (more formally known as Andreessen Horowitz); Affirm and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin’s SciFi; Khosla Ventures; Union Square Ventures; and QED.

“In a perfect world, venture capital would be called venture equity,” Helwani said. “VCs’ capital is critical for companies to hire and get office space. But when it comes time to do what the actual business is, such as provide loans or buy homes, capital like ours is very accretive without VCs and management losing ownership in the business. In these cases, using both credit and equity makes a lot of sense.”

Helwani is reluctant to call what i80 offers venture “debt.” He says that has a very specific connotation and is what Silicon Valley Bank and others like it do in providing debt as a percentage of a previous equity round. Instead, according to Helwani, i80’s approach is to minimize fees. The vast majority of its deals are “interest-rate related.”

As venture capital rebounds, what’s going on with venture debt?

“With mortgages, for example, we never think about the fees upfront, and focus more on the interest rate,” Helwan said. “We believe the more transparent we are, the more companies will want to work with us.”

I80 conducts quarterly calls with VCs and for now, that’s how it typically sources most of its deal flow. It also gets referrals. Helwani believes that i80 stands out from other firms also offering credit in that it’s “not trying to be credit investors in VC clothing.”

He also thinks that the fact that the i80 team is made of operators, as well as investors, is a contributing factor.

The firm is set to close another half a dozen deals in the next 60 to 90 days, and then plans to set its sights on raising more capital.

“We want to fill this void, and help companies raise money in their subsequent rounds at higher valuations,” Helwani said.

Architect Capital brings alternative capital to the early stage with new $100M fund

Powered by WPeMatico

1 … 73 74 75 76 77 … 2,385