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São Paulo’s QuintoAndar real estate platform raises $120M, now valued at $5.1B
Less than three months after announcing a $300 million Series E, Brazilian proptech QuintoAndar has raised an additional $120 million.
New investors Greenoaks Capital and China’s Tencent co-led the round, which included participation from some existing backers as well. São Paulo-based QuintoAndar is now valued at $5.1 billion, up from $4 billion at the time of its last raise in late May. With the extension, the startup has now raised more than $700 million since its 2013 inception. Ribbit Capital led the first tranche of its Series E.
QuintoAndar describes itself as an “end-to-end solution for long-term rentals” that, among other things, connects potential tenants to landlords and vice versa. Last year, it also expanded into connecting home buyers to sellers. Its long-term plan is to evolve into a one-stop real estate shop that also offers mortgage, title insurance and escrow services.
To that end, earlier this month, the startup acquired Atta Franchising, a 7-year-old São Paulo-based independent real estate mortgage broker. Specifically, acquiring Atta is designed to speed up its ability to offer mortgage services to its users. QuintoAndar also plans to explore the possibility of offering a product to perform standalone transactions outside of its marketplace in partnership with other brokers, according to CEO and co-founder Gabriel Braga.
This year, QuintoAndar expanded operations into 14 new cities in Brazil. Eventually, QuintoAndar plans to enter the Mexican market as its first expansion outside of its home country, but it has not yet set a date for that step. Today, the company has more than 120,000 rentals under management and about 10,000 new rentals per month. Its rental platform is live in 40 cities across Brazil, while its home-buying marketplace is live in four (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre) and seeing more than 10,000 sales in annualized terms.
QuintoAndar, he said, is open to acquiring more companies that it believes can either help it accelerate in a particular way or add something it had not yet thought about.
“We’re receptive to the idea but our core strategy is to focus on organic growth and our own innovation and accelerate that,” Braga said.
Why raise more money so soon?
The Series E was oversubscribed with investors who got in and “some who could not join,” according to Braga.
Greenoaks and Tencent, he said, couldn’t participate because of “timing issues.”
“We kept talking and they came back to us after the round, and wanted to be involved so we found a way to have them on board,” Braga said. “We did not need the money. But we have been constantly overachieving on the forecast that we shared with our investors. And that’s part of the reason why we had this extension.”
Greenoaks’ long-term time horizon was appealing because the firm’s investment was designed to be “perpetual capital with no predefined time frame,” Braga said.
“We’re doing our best to build an enduring company that will be around for many, many years, so it’s good to have investors who share that vision and are technically aligned,” he added.
Greenoaks partner Neil Shah said his firm believes that what QuintoAndar is building will “fundamentally reshape real estate transactions, enhancing transparency, expanding options for Brazilians seeking housing, dramatically simplifying the experience for landlords and driving increased investment into real estate across the country.” He also believes there is big potential for the company to take its offering to other parts of Latin America.
“We look forward to being partners for decades to come,” he added.
Tencent’s experience in China is something QuintoAndar also finds valuable.
“We believe we can learn a lot from them and other Chinese companies doing interesting stuff there,” Braga said.
QuintoAndar isn’t the only Brazilian proptech firm raising big money: In March, São Paulo digital real estate platform Loft announced it had closed on $425 million in Series D funding led by New York-based D1 Capital Partners. Then, about one month later, it revealed a $100 million extension that valued the company at $2.9 billion.
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Cardiomatics bags $3.2M for its ECG-reading AI
Poland-based health tech AI startup Cardiomatics has announced a $3.2 million seed raise to expand use of its electrocardiogram (ECG) reading automation technology.
The round is led by Central and Eastern European VC Kaya, with Nina Capital, Nova Capital and Innovation Nest also participating.
The seed raise also includes a $1 million non-equity grant from the Polish National Centre of Research and Development.
The 2017-founded startup sells a cloud tool to speed up diagnosis and drive efficiency for cardiologists, clinicians and other healthcare professionals to interpret ECGs — automating the detection and analysis of some 20 heart abnormalities and disorders with the software generating reports on scans in minutes, faster than a trained human specialist would be able to work.
Cardiomatics touts its tech as helping to democratize access to healthcare — saying the tool enables cardiologists to optimise their workflow so they can see and treat more patients. It also says it allows GPs and smaller practices to offer ECG analysis to patients without needing to refer them to specialist hospitals.
The AI tool has analyzed more than 3 million hours of ECG signals commercially to date, per the startup, which says its software is being used by more than 700 customers in 10+ countries, including Switzerland, Denmark, Germany and Poland.
The software is able to integrate with more than 25 ECG monitoring devices at this stage, and it touts offering a modern cloud software interface as a differentiator versus legacy medical software.
Asked how the accuracy of its AI’s ECG readings has been validated, the startup told us: “The data set that we use to develop algorithms contains more than 10 billion heartbeats from approximately 100,000 patients and is systematically growing. The majority of the data-sets we have built ourselves, the rest are publicly available databases.
“Ninety percent of the data is used as a training set, and 10% for algorithm validation and testing. According to the data-centric AI we attach great importance to the test sets to be sure that they contain the best possible representation of signals from our clients. We check the accuracy of the algorithms in experimental work during the continuous development of both algorithms and data with a frequency of once a month. Our clients check it everyday in clinical practice.”
Cardiomatics said it will use the seed funding to invest in product development, expand its business activities in existing markets and gear up to launch into new markets.
“Proceeds from the round will be used to support fast-paced expansion plans across Europe, including scaling up our market-leading AI technology and ensuring physicians have the best experience. We prepare the product to launch into new markets too. Our future plans include obtaining FDA certification and entering the US market,” it added.
The AI tool received European medical device certification in 2018 — although it’s worth noting that the European Union’s regulatory regime for medical devices and AI is continuing to evolve, with an update to the bloc’s Medical Devices Directive (now known as the EU Medical Device Regulation) coming into application earlier this year (May).
A new risk-based framework for applications of AI — aka the Artificial Intelligence Act — is also incoming and will likely expand compliance demands on AI health tech tools like Cardiomatics, introducing requirements such as demonstrating safety, reliability and a lack of bias in automated results.
Asked about the regulatory landscape it said: “When we launched in 2018 we were one of the first AI-based solutions approved as medical device in Europe. To stay in front of the pace we carefully observe the situation in Europe and the process of legislating a risk-based framework for regulating applications of AI. We also monitor draft regulations and requirements that may be introduced soon. In case of introducing new standards and requirements for artificial intelligence, we will immediately undertake their implementation in the company’s and product operations, as well as extending the documentation and algorithms validation with the necessary evidence for the reliability and safety of our product.”
However it also conceded that objectively measuring efficacy of ECG reading algorithms is a challenge.
“An objective assessment of the effectiveness of algorithms can be very challenging,” it told TechCrunch. “Most often it is performed on a narrow set of data from a specific group of patients, registered with only one device. We receive signals from various groups of patients, coming from different recorders. We are working on this method of assessing effectiveness. Our algorithms, which would allow them to reliably evaluate their performance regardless of various factors accompanying the study, including the recording device or the social group on which it would be tested.”
“When analysis is performed by a physician, ECG interpretation is a function of experience, rules and art. When a human interprets an ECG, they see a curve. It works on a visual layer. An algorithm sees a stream of numbers instead of a picture, so the task becomes a mathematical problem. But, ultimately, you cannot build effective algorithms without knowledge of the domain,” it added. “This knowledge and the experience of our medical team are a piece of art in Cardiomatics. We shouldn’t forget that algorithms are also trained on the data generated by cardiologists. There is a strong correlation between the experience of medical professionals and machine learning.”
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Greycroft leads $3.5M into Breef, an online marketplace for ad agencies
Breef raised $3.5 million in funding to continue developing what it boasts as “the world’s first online marketplace” for transactions between brands and agencies.
Greycroft led the round and was joined by Rackhouse Ventures, The House Fund, John and Helen McBain, Lance Armstrong and 640 Oxford Ventures. Including the new round, the New York and Colorado-based company has brought in total funding of $4.5 million since its inception in 2019 by husband-and-wife co-founders George Raptis and Emily Bibb.
Bibb’s background is in digital marketing and brand building at companies like PopSugar, VSCO and S’well, while Raptis was on the founding team at fintech company Credible.com.
Both said they experienced challenges in finding agencies, which traditionally involved asking for referrals and then making a bunch of calls. There were also times when their companies would be in high demand for talent, but didn’t necessarily need a full-time employee to achieve the goal or project milestone.
While the concept of outsourcing is not new, Breef’s differentiator is its ability to manage complex projects: a traditional individual freelance project is less than $1,000 and takes a week or less. Instead, the company is working with team-based projects that average $25,000 with a length of engagement of about six months, Raptis said.
Breef’s platform is democratizing how brands and boutique agencies connect with each other in the process of planning, scoping, pitching and paying for projects, Raptis told TechCrunch.
“At the core, we are taking the agency online,” Bibb added. “We are building a platform to streamline a complicated process for outsourcing high-value work and allow users to find, pay for and work with agencies in days rather than months.”
Brands can draft their own brief to articulate what they need, and Breef will connect them to a short list of agencies that match those requirements. Rather than a one- or two-month search, the company is able to bring that down to five days.
Bibb and Raptis decided to seek venture capital after experiencing demand — millions of dollars in projects are being created on the platform each month — and some tailwinds from the shift to remote work. They saw many brands that may have originally utilized in-house teams or agencies of record turn to distributed or smaller teams.
Due to the nature of agency work being expensive, Breef is processing large amounts of money over the internet, and the founders want to continue developing the technology and hiring talent so that it is a secure and trustworthy system.
It also launched its buy now, pay later project funding service, Breef(pay), to streamline payments to agencies and reduce cash flow challenges. Users can construct their own payment terms, mix up the way they are paid and utilize a credit line or defer payments to control external spend.
To date, Breef has more than 5,000 vetted boutique agencies in 20 countries on its platform and is able to save its users an average of 32% in product costs compared with a traditional agency model. It boasts a customer list that includes Spotify, Brex, Shutterstock, Bluestone Lane and Kinrgy.
Kevin Novak, founder of Rackhouse Ventures, said he met Raptis through the Australian tech community. He recently launched his first fund targeting startups in novel applications of data.
“When they were talking to me about what they wanted to do, I got intrigued,” Novak said. “I like finding marketplaces where the idea is well understood by the people involved. Looking at the matching problem, Emily and George have found a unique way to find ad agencies that hasn’t existed before.”
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Rutter comes out of stealth with $1.5M in funding for its e-commerce API
Rutter, a remote-first company, is developing a unified e-commerce API that enables companies to connect with data across any platform.
On Friday the company announced it was emerging from stealth with $1.5 million in funding from a group of investors including Haystack, Liquid 2 and Basis Set Ventures.
Founders Eric Yu and Peter Zhou met in school and started working on Rutter, which Zhou called “Plaid for commerce,” in 2017 before going through the summer 2019 Y Combinator cohort.
They stumbled upon the e-commerce API idea while working in education technology last year. The pair were creating subscription kits and learning materials for parents concerned about how their children would be learning during the global pandemic. Then their vendor customers had problems listing their storefronts on Amazon, so they wrote scripts to help them, but found that they had to write separate scripts for each platform.
With Rutter, customers only need one script to connect anywhere. Its APIs connect to e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Walmart and Amazon so that tech customers can build functions like customer support and chatbots, Yu told TechCrunch.
Lan Xuezhao, founding and managing partner of Basis Set Ventures, said via email that she was “super excited” about Rutter first because of the founders’ passion, grit and speed of iteration to a product. She added it reminded her of another team that successfully built a business from zero to over $7 billion.
“After watching them (Rutter) for a few years, it’s clear what they built is powerful: it’s the central nervous system of online commerce,” Xuezhao added.
As the founders see it, there are two big explosions going on in e-commerce: the platform side with the adoption of headless commerce — the separating of front end and back end functions of an e-commerce site, and new companies coming in to support merchants.
The new funding will enable Yu and Zhou to build up their team, including hiring more engineers.
Due to the company officially launching at the beginning of the year, Yu did not disclose revenue metrics, but did say that Rutter’s API volume was doubling and tripling in the last few months. It is also supporting merchants that connect with over 5,000 stores.
Some of Rutter’s customers are building one aspect of commerce, like returns, warranties and checkouts, but Yu said that since Shopify represents just 10% of e-commerce, the company’s goal is to take merchants beyond the marketplace by being “that unified app store for merchants to find products.”
“We think that in the future, the e-commerce stack of a merchant will look like the SaaS stack of a software company,” Zhou added. “We want to be the glue that holds that stack together for merchants.”
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Communication software startup Channels takes on event management with text workflow
Three University of Michigan students are building Channels Inc., a communication software tailored for physical workers, and already racking up some big customers in the event management industry.
Siddharth Kaul, 18, Elan Rosen, 20, and Ibrahim Mohammed, 20, started the company after finding some common ground in retail and events. The company’s customer list boasts names like Marriott Hotels, and it announced a $520,000 seed round, led by Sahra Growth Capital, to give it nearly $570,000 in total funding.
Kaul grew up going to a lot of events in Kuwait and Dubai, but started noticing there was a delay in things that should happen and many processes were being done on pen and paper.
“The technology that was available was inharmonious and made it hard for physical workers to fulfill tasks,” Kaul told TechCrunch. “We saw it happening in the event management space, forcing workers to coordinate across technologies.”
Legacy communication platforms like Slack are aggregating communications, but are better for remote workers; for physical workers, they rely more on text communication, he said. However, the disadvantage with texting is that you have to keep scrolling to get to the new message, and old communication is lost amid all of the replies.
They began developing a platform for small hotels to help them transition to digital and provide communication in a non-chronological order that is easier to access, enables discussion and can be searched. Users of the SaaS platform can build live personnel maps to see where employees are and what the event floor looks like, prioritize alerts and automate tasks while monitoring progress.
Marriott became a customer after one of its employees saw the Channels platform was being tested at an event. He saw employees pulling out their phones and asked the manager why they were doing that, and was told they were testing out the product and referred him to Kaul.
“What they thought was helpful was that it was communication, and though the employees were checking their phones, it was quick and they remained attentive,” Kaul said.
Channels provides a solid platform in terms of analytics and graphical representation, which is a major selling point for customers, leading to initial traction and revenue for the company that Rosen said he expects can occur at the convention level the company is striving for.
The new funding will be used to grow in development and bring additional engineering talent to the team. In addition, it will allow Kaul and Rosen to continue with their studies, while Mohammed will be doing more full-time work. They want to increase their recurring revenue in the Middle East while building up operations in the United States.
Jamal Al-Barrak, managing partner of Sahra Growth Capital, said Channels was on his firm’s radar ever since they won the 2020 Dubai X-Series competition it sponsors. As a result of winning the competition, he was able to see the founders on multiple occasions and hear their growth.
Sahra doesn’t typically invest in companies like Channels, but the firm started a “seed sourcing effort” to make investments of between $200,000 and $800,000 into early-stage companies, Al-Barrak said. Channels is one of the first investments with that effort.
“Channels is one of our first investments in this initiative and they look very promising so far even compared to our investments before we started this initiative,” Al-Barrak said. He liked the founders’ work ethic and their focus on the event industry, which he called, “historically outdated and bereft of technological innovation.”
“Sid, Elan and Ibrahim are some of the youngest yet brightest entrepreneurs I have come across to this day and I have invested in over 25 technology startups,” he said. “Additionally, I enjoyed that they had proof of concept with a prior customer base and revenue. I was most impressed by their vision past their current industry and bounds as they want to encapsulate communication for all physical workers, whether it is events, retail or more.”
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Arianna Simpson of a16z on Yield Guild Games, the firm’s newest bet on crypto + gaming
As one of four general partners at Andreessen Horowitz who are investing the venture firm’s new $2.2 billion crypto fund, Arianna Simpson is very focused on how to return that capital and much more to the firm’s limited partners.
Toward that end, she has been more focused of late on startups that combine crypto with gaming. Last month, for example, her team co-led an investment in Virtually Human Studio, the startup behind a digital horse racing service Zed Run, wherein users buy, sell and breed virtual horses whose value rises depending on their performance against other virtual horses. (Each is essentially a non-fungible token, or NFT, meaning it is unique.)
Simpson is relatedly intrigued with NFT-based “play-to-earn” models, wherein gamers can earn cryptocurrency that they can then cash out for their local currency if they so choose. Indeed, a16z is announcing today that it just led a $4.6 million investment in the tokens of Yield Guild Games (YGG), a decentralized gaming outfit based in the Philippines that invites players to share in the company’s revenue by playing games like “Axie Infinity,” a blockchain-based game where players breed, battle and trade digital creatures named Axies in order to earn tokens called “Small Love Potion” that they can eventually cash out. YGG lends players the money to buy the Axies and other digital assets to start the game, so they can start earning money. (The obvious hope is that they earn more than they have to pay YGG for the use of its assets.)
We talked yesterday with Simpson — who joined a16z after first backing some of the same startups, including the blockchain infrastructure company Dapper Labs and the global payment platform Celo — to learn more about what’s happening at the intersection of crypto and gaming. She also shared which platforms a16z tracks most closely to identify up-and-coming crypto startups. Our chat, edited for length, follows.
TC: Zed Run is really interesting. How did you first come across this digital horse racing business?
AS: I think it was crypto Twitter, which honestly is where we’re finding a lot of our gaming investments. The community on there is really incredible and often one of the first places where really exciting new projects are surfaced.
Zed really marks the advent of kind of a new type of more involved gameplay in crypto. If you look at [the collectibles game] CryptoKitties, it was one of the first NFT-based games that really caught the attention of people outside of the crypto sphere. Zed is definitely a derivative extension in the sense that you have a digital animal that you’re playing with, but the gameplay is much more complex, and the thing that’s been incredible to watch is just how excited the community is. People are putting together all kinds of very sophisticated guides around how to play the game, to read [race] courses, how to do all kinds of different things in the game, and tens of thousands of people all over the world [are playing].
TC: Maybe these already exist, but are there endless opportunities across verticals here, like, say, a digital car racing equivalent or a UFC-style equivalent, where people are buying and betting on digital fighters and hoping they’ll rise in value?
AS: There’s an incredibly broad range of possibilities in terms of what’s happening and what will happen in the universe of crypto games. I think at the core of this movement is really the idea of giving more of the value and ownership in these game assets back to the players. That’s something that has historically been a problem. You might spend years and years building up your arsenal of skins or in-game assets, and then a game will change the rules, take [some of your winnings] away from you or do any number of things that can leave players feeling very disappointed and kind of ripped off. The idea [with blockchain-based games] is to make them more open and allow players to have actual ownership in the space themselves.
TC: Which leads us to your newest investment, Yield Guild Games, or YGG. Why did this company capture the firm’s attention?
AS: During the pandemic, a lot of people were put out of work and not able to provide for themselves and for their families. This time kind of coincided with the rise of a game called “Axie Infinity,” one of the first games to pioneer a play-to-earn model, which is becoming a very important theme in crypto games.
In order to play “Axie Infinity,” you need to have three Axies, and generally speaking, that means you need
to buy them upfront. Obviously if you’re out of work, you have no money [so buying these digital pets] can become a very challenging proposition. So [YGG founder] Gabby Dizon in the Philippines, who played “Axie Infinity” started lending out his Axies so other people could play the game and earn tokens that could then be converted to local currency. And so basically YGG emerged as sort of the productization of what they were doing here, so YGG either purchases or breeds in-game assets that are yield-earning, then loans them to out “scholars,” who are the recipients of these in-game assets, and YGG then takes a small cut of the in-game revenue that the players generate over time.
TC: Does a “scholar” have to be a sophisticated player?
AS: There are managers who basically manage teams of scholars; they’re the ones who effectively decide who to bring into the guild.
TC: So these Axies can be cashed out for currency, but where, and who is buying them?
AS: They can be bought or sold on exchanges and other players are buying them if they need to breed in “Axie” and needs some [Axies]; others are buying them for investment purposes. Also, they aren’t necessarily selling the NFTs but they may be selling the tokens that they earn as part of the gameplay.
TC: There are now 5,000 of these scholars playing the game. Are they mostly in Southeast Asia?
AS: A majority of the players and scholars are in Southeast Asia, but we’re seeing really strong international growth as well, both for “Axie Infinity” and YGG, in particular. At this point, scaling internationally is definitely a core focus for the YGG team.
TC: You mentioned crypto Twitter. What about Discord and Reddit? Where else are you looking around for new crypto projects that are bubbling up and capturing people’s imagination?
AS: All of the above. Discord in particular is very actively used by the crypto community, and the thing that’s interesting there is it really allows you to get a pulse for how active a community is, how engaged people are, how frequently they’re talking, and what they’re talking about. It gives you a look into the community at large and that’s a very important thing to consider when looking to make an investment or assess the health of a project.
TC: One of the cofounders of YGG is known only as the Owl of Moistness. Why do we see these pseudonyms so often in this world?
AS: One of the things I love the most about crypto is that it’s a little bit weird. The industry doesn’t take itself too seriously. I actually think that’s really important in terms of allowing people enough creativity to build new things rather than copies of existing things.
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Tiger Global backs Nacelle with $50M for its e-commerce infrastructure
Consumer shift to buying online during the global pandemic — and keeping that habit — continues to boost revenue for makers of developer tools that help e-commerce sites provide better shopping experiences.
LA-based Nacelle is one of the e-commerce infrastructure companies continuing to attract investor attention, and at a speedy clip, too. It closed on a $50 million Series B round from Tiger Global. This is just six months after its $18 million Series A round, led by Inovia, and follows a $4.8 million seed round in 2020.
The company is working in “headless” commerce, which means it is disconnecting the front end of a website, a.k.a. the storefront, from the back end, where all of the data lives, to create a better shopping experience, CEO Brian Anderson told TechCrunch. By doing this, the back end of the store, essentially where all the magic happens, can be updated and maintained without changing the front end.
“Online shopping is not new, but how the customer relates to it keeps changing,” he said. “The technology for online shopping is not up to snuff — when you click on something, everything has to reload compared to an app like Instagram.”
More people shopping on their mobile devices creates friction due to downloading an app for each brand. That is “sucking the fun out of shopping online,” because no one wants that many apps on their phone, Anderson added.
Steven Kramer, board member and former EVP of Hybris, said via email that over the past two decades, the e-commerce industry went through several waves of innovation. Now, maturing consumer behaviors and expectations are accelerating the current phase.
“Retailers and brands are struggling with adopting the latest technologies to meet today’s requirements of agility, speed and user experience,” Kramer added. “Nacelle gives organizations a future-proof way to accelerate their innovation, leverage existing investments and do so with material ROI.”
Data already shows that COVID-era trends accelerated e-commerce by roughly five years, and Gartner predicts that 50% of new commerce capabilities will be incorporated as API-centric SaaS services by 2023.
Those kinds of trends are bringing in competitors that are also attracting investor attention — for example, Shopistry, Swell, Fabric, Commerce Layer and Vue Storefront are just a few of the companies that raised funding this year alone.
Anderson notes that the market continues to be hot and one that can’t be ignored, especially as the share of online retail sales grows. He explained that some of his competitors force customers to migrate off of their current tech stack and onto their respective platforms so that their users can get a good customer experience. In contrast, Nacelle enables customers to keep their tech stack and put components together as they see fit.
“That is painful in any vertical, but especially for e-commerce,” he said. “That is your direct line to revenue.”
Meanwhile, Nacelle itself grew 690% in the past year in terms of revenue, and customers are signing multiyear contracts, Anderson said.
Anderson, who is an engineer by trade, wants to sink his teeth into new products as adoption of headless commerce grows. These include providing a dynamic layer of functionality on top of the tech stack for storefronts that are traditionally static, and even introducing some livestream capabilities later this year.
As such, Nacelle will invest the new round into its go-to-market strategy and expand its customer success, partner relations and product development. He said Nacelle is already “the de facto standard” for Shopify Plus merchants going headless.
“We want to put everything in a tailor-made API for e-commerce that lets front-end developers do their thing with ease,” Anderson added. “We also offer starter kits for merchants as a starting point to get up-and-running.”
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Insight Partners leads $30M round into Metabase, developing enterprise business intelligence tools
Open-source business intelligence company Metabase announced Thursday a $30 million Series B round led by Insight Partners.
Existing investors Expa and NEA joined in on the round, which gives the San Francisco-based company a total of $42.5 million in funding since it was founded in 2015. Metabase previously raised $8 million in Series A funding back in 2019, led by NEA.
Metabase was developed within venture studio Expa and spun out as an easy way for people to interact with data sets, co-founder and CEO Sameer Al-Sakran told TechCrunch.
“When someone wants access to data, they may not know what to measure or how to use it, all they know is they have the data,” Al-Sakran said. “We provide a self-service access layer where they can ask a question, Metabase scans the data and they can use the results to build models, create a dashboard and even slice the data in ways they choose without having an analyst build out the database.”
He notes that not much has changed in the business intelligence realm since Tableau came out more than 15 years ago, and that computers can do more for the end user, particularly to understand what the user is going to do. Increasingly, open source is the way software and information wants to be consumed, especially for the person that just wants to pull the data themselves, he added.
George Mathew, managing director of Insight Partners, believes we are seeing the third generation of business intelligence tools emerging following centralized enterprise architectures like SAP, then self-service tools like Tableau and Looker and now companies like Metabase that can get users to discovery and insights quickly.
“The third generation is here and they are leading the charge to insights and value,” Mathew added. “In addition, the world has moved to the cloud, and BI tools need to move there, too. This generation of open source is a better and greater example of all three of those.”
To date, Metabase has been downloaded 98 million times and used by more than 30,000 companies across 200 countries. The company pursued another round of funding after building out a commercial offering, Metabase Enterprise, that is doing well, Al-Sakran said.
The new funding round enables the company to build out a sales team and continue with product development on both Metabase Enterprise and Metabase Cloud. Due to Metabase often being someone’s first business intelligence tool, he is also doubling down on resources to help educate customers on how to ask questions and learn from their data.
“Open source has changed from floppy disks to projects on the cloud, and we think end users have the right to see what they are running,” Al-Sakran said. “We are continuing to create new features and improve performance and overall experience in efforts to create the BI system of the future.
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Medical supply marketplace startup bttn. sews up additional $5M seed
Coming off a $1.5 million seed round in June, bttn. announced Thursday that it secured another $5 million extension, led by FUSE, to the round to give it a $26.5 million post-money valuation.
The Seattle-based company was founded in March 2021 by JT Garwood and Jack Miller after seeing the challenges medical organizations had during the global pandemic to not only find supplies, but also get fair prices for them.
“We went into this building on the pain points customers had dealing with a system that is so archaic and outdated — most were still faxing in order forms and keeping closets full of supplies, but not knowing what was there,” Garwood, CEO, told TechCrunch.
Bttn. is going after the U.S. wholesale medical supply market, which is predicted to be valued at $243.3 billion by the end of 2021, according to IBISWorld. The company created a business-to-business e-commerce platform with a variety of high-quality medical supplies, saving customers an average of between 20% and 40%, while providing a better ordering and shipping experience, Garwood said.
It now boasts more than 300 customers, including individual practices and surgical centers, and multiple government contracts. It is also currently the preferred supplier for over 17 healthcare associations across the country, Garwood said. In addition to expanding into dental supplies, bttn. is also attracting customers like senior living facilities and home and hospice care.
Garwood intends to use the funds to expand bttn.’s technology, sales and operations teams, and increase its partnerships. The company is also adding new features like a portal to track shipments more easily, better order automation and improve the ability to control when supplies will get to them.
Bttn. is also analyzing more of the data coming in from its marketplace to recognize where the trends are coming from, including hospitalization rates, to share with customers. For example, if hospitals are overcrowded, supply shortages will follow, Garwood said.
“The medical supply industry was built on inequity, and we have a sense of duty to build a product that enables a better future for our customers,” he added. “We can proactively let customers know that spikes are expected, provide them with correct information and give that power back to the consumers and healthcare providers in ways they never had before.”
Whereas bttn.’s first seed round was “about pouring gas on the fire,” partnering with FUSE this time around was an easy decision for Garwood, who said the firm is bringing new assets to the table.
Brendan Wales, general partner at FUSE, said via email that his firm backs promising entrepreneurs building businesses in the Pacific Northwest and discovered bttn. before they announced any funding.
He said there is massive consumerization of healthcare, most evident on the patient side for years, but now becoming so on the provider side. Medical office employees are looking for the same type of customer experience they get from online businesses they frequently shop at, and bttn. “has a relentless drive to provide the same type of experiences and interactions to health providers.”
“We fell in love with the idea of providing a transparent and delightful customer experience to health providers, something that has been sorely lacking,” Wales added. “That, tied in with a young and ambitious team, made it so that our entire partnership worked tirelessly to partner with them.”
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Mealworm farming company Beta Hatch raises $10M
Last time I was in Hong Kong, a startup gave me a jar of mealworms as a snack. They were crunchy and a bit odd looking (as one might expect from a jar full of baked larvae). They really didn’t offer much in the way of flavor, though, so maybe supply your own seasoning.
For all sorts of sustainability reasons, there’s been a good deal of interest in these sorts of alternative protein sources — for humans and otherwise. Beta Hatch’s farming efforts are squarely focused on the latter, citing livestock and pets as primary targets for a farming process it says is “virtually zero-waste.”
Today the St. Louis-based firm announced $10 million in funding in a round led by Lewis & Clark AgriFood, with participation from Cavallo Ventures and Innova Memphis, which are both signed on as existing investors. The money comes as Beta Hatch is eyeing the expansion of its flagship farm in Cashmere, Washington.
“We are proud to be a part of building the future of farming as a member of the Washington agricultural community,” founder and CEO Virginia Emery said in a release. “We are excited for our presence in rural America to grow, as we employ and partner with the people in those communities to feed a growing global population.”
The company says the new facility will be the largest of its kind in North America, helping to push Beta Hatch to 10x its current output over the next year. The location is currently powered by renewably sourced energy.
Mealworms have proven intriguing as food sources for food sources, as evidenced by Ÿnsect’s $125 million raise way back in 2019.
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