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B2B sales platform Accord adds $1M to seed round
Accord opened up its previously announced $6 million seed round to accept over $1 million from a group of CEOs and sales leads at companies they are working with to officially launch its business-to-business sales platform.
Brothers Ross and Ryan Rich co-founded the San Francisco-based company in 2019 with Wayne Pan to create a customer collaboration platform that, in the words of CEO Ross Rich, “makes the process of buying and selling suck less.”
The average sales deal can involve 14 people, just on the buyer side, which means teams do a lot of “herding cats” in order to drive consensus on sales, he said.
Instead, Accord’s application provides shared next steps and milestones for buying and selling teams to align on so that the right people are looped in at the right time.
“Our unique approach is helping management and sales, but also helping the buyer, which is how you build a relationship,” Ross Rich explained. “Before COVID, you could go onsite, but now you can’t do that. You also have to adjust to the buyer’s expectations, and with business-to-consumer, everything is ‘now and immediate.’ ”
The company’s target market is technology startups, but Ross Rich said Accord is now attracting interest from medical device companies and others where there is no software that bridges the gap between external parties.
Over the past six months, Accord doubled its team and was approached by multiple companies with acquisition offers. However, just a year-and-a-half into the company Rich said he is not entertaining those kinds of offers just yet.
“We have barely scratched the surface and would be selling ourselves short not having had a swing at it,” he added.
The company decided to focus on non-institutional investors when it raised this uncapped round, opting not to grow the board, Rich said.
Instead, it gathered a group of CEOs and sales leads from companies it works with — people who were getting it and seeing the value, including Mike Murchison, co-founder and CEO of Ada Support, who said via email that Ada’s B2B growth “exploded in part because of our focus on being a true partner — not simply a vendor — to our clients.” He added that Accord made it easy for Ada’s sales teams to offer a collaborative buying process.
Another investor, Stephanie Schatz, one of Accord’s advisors, said via email she got in on the round due to Ross Rich having “all the right ingredients for a successful founder,” and the product, which she said was taking into account how people want to buy.
“Ross has intelligence, drive, passion, vision and charisma, but on top of that, I have found that he has excellent instincts for leading a team and building a generational company,” she added. “Accord offers CEOs and sales leaders the opportunity to build a high-performing sales team from the very beginning that truly puts customers at the center.”
The new funding will go toward the general launch of the platform and adding to its team of 13. Rich expects a Series A round to quickly follow.
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Enable bags $45M for B2B rebate management platform
Enable, a startup developing a cloud-based software tool for business-to-business rebate management, announced Wednesday a $45 million Series B funding round.
The round is led by Norwest Venture Partners with participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures and Sierra Ventures, and a group of angel investors. Including the new round, the company has raised a total of $62 million, which includes a $13 million Series A raised in 2020.
The company, which started in the U.K. and moved to San Francisco in 2020, was co-founded by Andrew Butt and Denys Shortt in 2015 but launched fully in 2016. Its technology automates how distributors and manufacturers create, execute and track rebates. These types of trading programs are a common industry practice and are relied on by distributors as a way to turn a profit.
Since raising its Series A last year, Butt, chief executive officer, moved to the Bay Area, grew its North American operations to 60 people, tripled revenue and more than tripled its customer base, he told TechCrunch. The new funding will be used for product innovation and building sales and go-to-market teams.
“The Series A was proving traction in the U.S. and Canada and gave us the ability to hire a U.S. leadership team,” he added. “When we saw that momentum, the market size was large and the opportunity was now getting bigger and bigger, we started scaling up the business.”
As customer needs changed and incentives were growing in terms of revenue and profitability, Enable saw that they were more critical to manage; the incentives needed to be more dynamic and easy to make targeted and personalized. In a sense, incentives have “gone from being blunt instruments to very sharp in size and volume,” Butt said.
Reaching the year over year revenue doubling was a milestone for the company, and his immediate next steps are to get a fully ramped team so Enable can continue on that growth trajectory. The market for incentives is big, but “there is no credible competition,” so the company is also working to build that distribution and sales team now, he added.
It was also over the past year that Butt met Sean Jacobsohn, partner at Norwest Venture Partners, who, as part of the investment, joined Enable’s board of directors.
Jacobsohn had noticed Enable and asked for an introduction to the company when it hired Jerry Brooner as its president of global field operations. Jacobsohn was tracking Brooner’s next moves after leaving Scout, a Workday company, and the hire got his attention.
Enable checks all of the boxes Jacobsohn said he looks for in a company: strong CEO, a good team and good customer feedback — many of them were dissatisfied with the legacy software, he said.
“I also love companies going after a big market where there is no credible competition,” Jacobsohn added. “There is a lot of greenfield space here. What’s great about a player like that is they can come in, create a category and be the new generation cloud player. This isn’t something someone can wake up and start. You need deep domain expertise.”
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Stacker raises $20M Series A to help business units build software without coding
No-code platforms have developed into a hot market, and Stacker, a London-based no-code platform, is attempting to bring the concept to a new level. Not only can you create a web application from a spreadsheet, you can pull data from a variety of sources to create a sophisticated business application automatically (although some tweaking may be required).
Today the company announced a $20 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from existing investors Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and Pentech. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $23 million, according to Crunchbase data.
Michael Skelly, CEO and co-founder at Stacker, says that the idea is to take key business data and turn it into a useful app to help someone do their job more efficiently. “[We enable] people in business to create apps to help them in their working life — so things like customer portals, internal tools and things that take the data they’re already using, often to run a process, and turn that into an app,” Skelly explained.
“We really think that in order to actually be useful for business, you need to be hooked into the data that a business cares about. And so we let people bring their spreadsheets, SQL databases, Salesforce data, bring all the data that they use to run their business, and automatically turn it into an app,” he said.
Once the company pulls that data in and creates an app, the user can begin to tweak how things look, but Stacker gives them a big head start toward creating something usable from the get-go, Skelly said.
Jennifer Li, a partner at lead investor Andreessen Horowitz, likes the startup’s approach to no-code. “We’ve been watching the no-code space for a while, and Stacker stands apart from the rest because of its thoughtful product approach, allowing business operators to instantly generate a functional app that perfectly fits existing business processes,” she said in a blog post announcing the funding round.
The company currently has 19 employees, with plans to put the new capital to work to reach 30-40 by the end of the year. Skelly sees building a diverse company as a key goal and is proactive and thoughtful about finding ways to achieve that. In fact, he has identified three ways to approach diversity.
“Firstly is just making sure that we get a diverse pipeline of people. I really think that the ratio of the people you talk to is probably going to be the biggest indicator of the people you hire. Secondly we try to find ways we can hire people who are maybe further down their career profile, but [looking] to grow,” he said.
Thirdly, and I think this is something that is not talked about enough, there are plenty of people who would like to get into programming roles, and who are underrepresented, and so we have members of our team who are converting from various non-technical roles to DevOps — and I think it’s just like a really great route to add to the overall pool [of diverse candidates],” he said.
The company is remote-first, with Skelly in London and his co-founder based in Geneva, and they intend to stay that way. They founded the company in 2017 and originally created a different product that was much more complex and required a lot of hand holding before eventually concluding that making it simple was the way to go. They released the first version of the current product at the end of 2019.
The company has a big vision to be the software development tool for business units. “We really think that in the future just like everyone’s got email, a chat tool, a spreadsheet and a video conferencing tool nowadays, they will also have a software tool where they write and run the custom software that they run their business on,” he said.
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Apeel bites into another $250M funding round, at a $2B valuation, to accelerate fresh food supply chains
Apeel Sciences, a food system innovation company, is out to prevent food produced globally from ending up in the landfill, especially as pressures from the global pandemic affect the food supply chain.
The company just added $250 million in Series E funding, giving it a valuation of $2 billion, to speed up the availability of its longer-lasting produce in the U.S. (where approximately 40% of food is wasted), the U.K. and Europe.
Existing investor Temasek led the round and was joined by a group of new and existing investors, including Mirae Asset Global Investments, GIC, Viking Global Investors, Disruptive, Andreessen Horowitz, Tenere Capital, Sweetwater Private Equity, Tao Capital Partners, K3 Ventures, David Barber of Almanac Insights, Michael Ovitz of Creative Artists Agency, Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe, Susan Wojcicki of YouTube and Katy Perry.
With the new funding, Apeel has now raised over $635 million since the company was founded in 2012. Prior to this round, the company brought in $250 million in Series D funding in May 2020.
Santa Barbara-based Apeel developed a plant-based layer for the surface of fruits and vegetables that is tasteless and odorless and that keeps moisture in while letting oxygen out. It is those two factors in particular that lead to grocery produce lasting twice as long, James Rogers, CEO of Apeel, told TechCrunch.
Apeel installs its application at the supplier facilities where the produce is packed into boxes. In addition to that technology, the company acquired ImpactVision earlier this year to add another layer of quality by integrating imaging systems on individual pieces as they move through the supply chain to optimize routing so more produce that is grown is eaten.
“One in nine people are going hungry, and if three in nine pieces of produce are being thrown away, we can be better stewards of the food we are throwing away,” Rogers said. “This is a solvable problem, we just have to get the pieces to the right place at the right time.”
The company is not alone in tackling food waste. For example, Shelf Engine, Imperfect Foods, Mori and Phood Solutions are all working to improve the food supply chain and have attracted venture dollars to go after that mission.
Prior to the pandemic, the amount of food people were eating was growing each year, but that trend is reversed, Rogers explained. Consumers are more aware of the food they eat, they are shopping less frequently, buying more per visit and more online. At the same time, grocery stores are trying to sort through all of that.
“We can’t create these supply networks alone, we do it in concert with supply and retail partners,” he said. “Grocery stores are looking at the way shoppers want to buy things, while we look at how to partner to empower the supply chain. What started with longer-lasting fruits and vegetables, is becoming how we provide information to empower them to do it without adding to food waste.”
Since 2019, Apeel has prevented 42 million pieces of fruit from going to waste at retail locations; that includes up to 50% reduction in avocado food waste with corresponding sales growth. Those 42 million pieces of saved fruit also helped conserve nearly 4.7 billion liters of water, Rogers said.
Meanwhile, over the past year, Apeel has amassed a presence in eight countries, operating 30 supply networks and distributing produce to 40 retail partners, which then goes out to tens of thousands of stores around the world.
The new funding will accelerate the rollout of those systems, as well as co-create another 10 supply networks with retail and supply partnerships by the end of the year. Rogers also expects to use the funding to advance Apeel’s data and insights offerings and future acquisitions.
Thomas Park, president and head of alternative investments at Mirae Asset Global Investments, said his firm has been investing in environmental, social and governance-related companies for awhile, targeting companies that “make a huge impact globally and in a way that is easy for us to understand.”
The firm, which is part of Mirae Asset Financial Group, often partners with other investors on venture rounds, and in Apeel’s case with Temasek. It also invested with Temasek in Impossible Foods, leading its Series F round last year.
“When we saw them double-down on their investment, it gave us confidence to invest in Apeel and an opportunity to do so,” Park said. “Food waste is a global problem, and after listening to James, we definitely feel like Apeel is the next wave of how to attack these huge problems in an impactful way.”
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South Korean online secondhand marketplace Danggeun Market raises $162M at a $2.7B valuation
Danggeun Market, the publisher of South Korea’s hyperlocal community app Karrot, announced it has raised $162 million in a Series D round of funding with a valuation of $2.7 billion. (By the way, Danggeun means carrot in Korean.)
This round of funding was led by DST Global, with additional participation from Aspex Management, Reverent Partners and existing investors such as Goodwater Capital, Altos Ventures, SoftBank Ventures Asia, Kakao Ventures, Strong Ventures and Capstone Partners.
The latest funding officially makes Danggeun Market a unicorn, with $205 million total raised.
The company plan to strengthen its capabilities in local commerce with Danggeun Pay, or Karrot Pay, which is set to launch this year, and Danggeun’s platform Karrot enables approximately 300,000 local SMB partners to go digitalized by offering offline to online (O2O) service. Danggeun Market’s consumers access everything from fresh local produce delivery to essential services, including cleaning, education, real estate brokerage and used cars in their local communities.
The funding proceeds from the new round will be used for further global expansion, business diversification, R&D, investment in advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technology and recruiting team talent.
“Danggeun Market plans to focus on accelerating further overseas market expansion for the next two years after closing Series D funding, and in South Korea, we will diversify our business, aiming to be a super app,” co-founder and co-CEO Gary Kim said in an exclusive conversation with TechCrunch.
Danggeun Market, which is short for “the market in your neighborhood,” was founded by Gary Kim and Paul Kim in 2015.
Danggeun Market also plans to launch its payment service Karrot Pay, expand offline to online (O2O) service for South Korean SMEs that use its platform Karrot and invest to develop advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning in its platform for suggesting personalized feeds for users to stay longer, Kim continued.
Danggeun Market is expected to get approval from South Korea’s financial supervisory service (FSS) as early as September for two licenses, such as payment gateway operator (PG) and prepaid payment means operator, to launch Danggeun Market’s payment service, Karrot Pay, this year, Kim said.
Danggeun Market, which already launched its global version of hyperlocal community app Karrot in the U.K. in November 2019, currently operates the Karrot app in 72 local communities in four countries: the U.K., the U.S., Canada and Japan.
“We see some active transactions in Manchester, Birmingham and Toronto,” Kim said. Danggeun Market launched Karrot in Canada and the U.S. in September and October 2020, respectively. In February 2021, it opened in Japan, Kim said.
When asked regarding the next foreign market location, “Danggeun Market will not designate a particular country this time. We will change our overseas penetration strategy slightly by opening the app Karrot globally and monitor the countries that show organic growth and then we will narrow down specific countries and cities to focus on more,” Kim said.
The company will still seek the high population density areas in foreign markets and keep the distance limit set, Danggeun’s unique feature that only shows people listings from sellers located within 6 km radius in South Korea and 10 miles (about 15 km) maximum for the U.K. for providing hyperlocalized community service.
For the next round, Gary Kim said it depends on its global expansion growth. If its global business works well and Karrot draws more global users and reaches active MAU and transactions the company has set, Danggeun Market will definitely raise another funding in two years, Kim said. “We are not in a hurry for an IPO at this stage since we can raise enough capital in the private market now. We want to consider going public after we make stable profits,” Kim said.
Danggeun Market now claims its total registered users exceed 21 million (South Korea has a total of 20.92 million households) and has consistently experienced over 300 % year-on-year growth since 2018.
The company reached 1.8 million monthly active users (MAUs) in 2019, 4.8 million MAUs in 2020 and finally increased to 14.2 million MAUs in 2021, growing 3x every year over the past three years. According to global app analytics platform App Annie, Danggeun Market users spend an average of two hours and two minutes per month on the app.
“Over the past few years, Danggeun Market has demonstrated overwhelming dominance in the Korean C2C market… with unique user behavior from location-based communities, Danggeun Market continues to showcase its potential as the hyperlocal super app,” managing partner at DST Investment Management John Lindfors said.
“COVID-19 highlighted the importance of people wanting to connect to their neighbors and community. When meeting a friend for a simple coffee can no longer be taken for granted, we realize all the more importance of our relationships and community. Danggeun Market’s service bridges the offline and online world, enhancing both in-person interactions as well as purely digital ones. The core of Danggeun Market’s growth is its digital end-to-end platform that allows consumers to feel both genuinely part of their communities as well as have the comfort and safety of being part of a larger network that can grow together,” co-founder and managing partner at Goodwater Capital Eric Kim said.
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Tropic picks up $25M to streamline software procurement experiences
The pandemic was a catalyst for showing companies looking to cut costs just how much they were spending on their software tools. New York-based Tropic’s platform not only uncovers those savings, but also brings a click-and-approve approach to buying software. Today, the company announced a $25 million Series A round of funding.
Canaan Partners led the round, with participation from Founder Collective and Mo Koyfman’s new fund, Shine. It gives Tropic $27.1 million in total funding since the company emerged from stealth in 2020, CEO David Campbell told TechCrunch.
Prior to founding the company with Justin Etkin, Campbell was in technology and sales roles, selling software contracts of every size, and realized how complex and rigid the contracts were getting as companies grew larger and the lack of price transparency increased. The complexity of some contracts can cause companies to overpay, even locking companies into payments they can’t afford, Campbell said.
On top of that, more buyers are younger now and their experience with purchasing software is pulling out their phone to download an app, while buying a customer relationship management tool will take six months to buy and cost thousands of dollars.
“Looking at the space, we are in a mirror maze of software, including companies using software to build products that they then sell back to the software companies,” Campbell said. “Companies are only buying software once a year, yet the process can be so complex.”
Tropic’s SaaS procurement model gathers the whole process under one platform. Unlike some competitors’ approaches, it takes on the heavy lifting so when companies have to buy or renew a contract, users can access Tropic’s one-click purchasing service to outsource the transaction. After the contracts are signed, its platform manages the technology and ensures financing is in order. This approach saves companies 23%, on average, on the software purchases, which Campbell said “moves the needle” for many companies where software is the No. 1 cost after salary.
In recent years, cloud software has become a fast-growing spend category across most businesses. Campbell said the average company can have more than 100 software contracts, while that jumps to over 500 for enterprise organizations. Meanwhile, global spend on enterprise software is forecasted to reach $599 billion by the end of 2021, a 13.2% increase over the previous year, according to Statista.
In the last 12 months, the company added over 60 customers, counting Qualtrics, Vimeo, Zapier and Intercom, surpassed $250 million in managed spend and processed transactions for over 1,200 vendors. The company is seeing 100% quarter over quarter growth, and in the last quarter, doubled its annual recurring revenue, Campbell said.
Tropic will use the funding for R & D and to deepen integrations with existing procurement tools in the cloud software ecosystem. Over the past year, the company’s headcount has grown to 50 and Campbell has “aggressive hiring plans between now and the rest of the year” focused on the tech side with engineering and product management.
Hootan Rashidifard, principal from Canaan Partners, said his firm was tracking the software procurement sector and learned about Tropic through Founder Collective, which led the company’s seed round.
“We’re seeing software and financial services converge and Tropic sits squarely at the intersection of both in a category with massive tailwinds,” Rashidifard said via email. “Software is accelerating the share of expenses while also penetrating every part of an organization, and software purchasing is becoming more decentralized. Tropic’s platform is in a fragmented market with high payment volume, which is ripe for layering on all kinds of adjacent services.”
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Shopistry bags $2M to provide ‘headless commerce without the headaches’
Canada-based Shopistry wants to turn the concept of headless commerce, well, on its head. On Monday, the e-commerce startup announced $2 million in seed funding to continue developing its toolkit of products, integrations, services and managed infrastructure for brands to scale online.
Jaafer Haidar and Tariq Zabian started Shopistry in 2019. Haidar’s background is as a serial technology founder with exits and ventures in e-commerce and cloud software. He was working as a venture capitalist when he got the idea for Shopistry. Zabian is a former general manager at OLX, an online classified marketplace.
Shopistry enables customers to create personalized commerce experiences accessible to all. Haidar expects headless will become the dominant architecture over the next five years, though he isn’t too keen on calling it “headless.” He much prefers the term “modular.”
“It’s a modular system, we call it ‘headless without the headaches,’ where you grab the framework to manage APIs,” Haidar told TechCrunch. “After a company goes live, they can spend 50% of their budget just to keep the lights on. They use marketplaces like Shopify to do the tech, and we are doing the same thing, but providing way more optionality. We are not a monolithic system.”
Currently, the company offers five products:
- Shopistry Console: Brands turn on their optimal stack and change anytime without re-platforming. There is support for multiple e-commerce administrative tools like Shopify or Square, payment providers, analytics and marketing capabilities.
- Shopistry Cloud is a managed infrastructure spearheading performance, data management and orchestration across services.
- Shopistry Storefront and Mobile to manage web storefronts and mobile apps.
- Shopistry CMS, a data-driven, headless customer management system to create once and publish across channels.
- Shopistry Services, an offering to brands that need design and engineering help.
Investors in the seed round include Shoptalk founder Jonathan Weiner, Hatch Labs’ Amar Varma, Garage Capital, Mantella Venture Partners and Raiven Capital.
“At MVP we love companies that can simplify complexity to bring the proven innovations of large, technically sophisticated retailers to the masses of small to midsize retailers trying to compete with them,” said Duncan Hill, co-founder and general partner at Mantella Venture Partners, in a written statement. “Shopistry has the team and tech to be a major player in this next phase of the e-commerce evolution. This was easy to get excited about.”
Shopistry is already working with retailers like Honed and Oura Ring to manage their e-commerce presences without the cost, complexity or need for a big technology team.
Prior to going after the seed funding, Haidar and Zabian spent two years working with high growth brands to build out its infrastructure. Haidar intends to use the new capital to future that development as well as bring on sales and marketing staff.
Haidar was not able to provide growth metrics just yet. He did say the company was growing its customer base and expects to be able to share that growth next year. He is planning to add more flexibility and integrations to the back end of Shopistry’s platform and add support for other platforms.
“We are focusing next on the go-to-market perspective while we gear up for our big launch coming in the fourth quarter,” he added. “There is also a big component to ‘after the sale,’ and we want to create some amazing experiences and focus on back office operations. We want to be the easiest way to control and manage data while maintaining a storefront.”
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Kiddom grabs early revenue amid $35M Series C funding
Kiddom, a platform that offers a digital curriculum that fits the core standards required by states, announced today that it has raised a $35 million Series C round led by Altos Ventures, with participation from Owl Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Outcomes Collective. The financing came nearly three years after Kiddom’s Series B, a $15 million round led by Owl.
The startup didn’t just raise money, it finally learned how to make some. Founded in 2012, Kiddom was able to raise millions without revenue or a clear business model. But Ahsan Rizvi, CEO and co-founder of Kiddom, and Abbas Manjee, chief academic officer and co-founder of Kiddom, think an early focus on adoption instead of monetization was necessary.
“At our Series B, we were definitely not making money,” Manjee said. “But we have a free product that teachers and students use, and the idea was to build an enterprise product on top of it.” It’s a common strategy with bottom up sales. For example, ClassDojo prioritized adoption for years before it finally introduced a paying version of its classroom socialization product.
Kiddom poured most of its capital into research and development into its enterprise product. It has two parts. First, it offers a platform that helps schools integrate all of their different platforms into an interface that tracks student utilization and achievement. Second, it offers that platform alongside the product it’s built up for years, a digital curriculum that fits in with Common Core, a set of math and English academic standards that students are required to learn on a grade by grade level. The latter is perhaps the hardest sell for Kiddom, but also the most lucrative.
Manjee explained vendor approval processes across the States can take a long time, and the stakes are high since decision-makers will only turn to a handful of vendors when it comes to meeting core standards.
A lot of Kiddom’s success depends on if traditional curriculum providers, like the Pearsons and McGraw-Hills of the world, don’t catch up to the digitization of education. Rizvi explained that older companies are “losing market share rapidly” right now. Last year, McGraw-Hill and Cengage terminated a proposed merger that would’ve added some fresh competition to the curriculum world.
The product has resonated with some users. While Kiddom declined to give specifics, it said that new ARR growth grew 2,525% its first year. In 2020 to 2021, ARR growth is on track to be 300%. It said that at least one teacher uses its product in 70% of schools in the United States, a metric that has remained consistent since 2018.
Kiddom’s fresh funding and revenue shows that its years of product development have kept it competitive in the eyes of investors, synergistic unicorns and the stingiest enterprise customer of them all, school districts.
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Employee talent predictor retrain.ai raised another $7M, adds Splunk as strategic investor
Automation will displace 85 million jobs while simultaneously creating 97 million new jobs by 2025, according to the World Economic Forum. Although that sounds like good news, the hard reality is that millions of people will have to retrain in the jobs of the future.
A number of startups are addressing these problems of employee skills, and are looking at talent development, neuroscience-based assessments and prediction technologies for staffing. These include Pymetrics (raised $56.6 million), Eightfold (raised $396.8 million) and EmPath (raised $1 million). But this sector is by no means done yet.
Retrain.ai bills itself as a “Talent Intelligence Platform”, and it’s now closed an additional $7 million from its current investors Square Peg, Hetz Ventures, TechAviv, .406 Ventures and Schusterman Family Investments. It’s also now added Splunk Ventures as a strategic investor. The new round of funding takes its total raised to $20 million.
Retrain.ai says it uses AI and machine learning to help governments and organizations retrain and upskill talent for jobs of the future, enable diversity initiatives, and help employees and jobseekers manage their careers.
Dr. Shay David, co-founder and CEO of retrain.ai said: “We are thrilled to have Splunk Ventures join us on this exciting journey as we use the power of data to solve the widening skills gap in the global labor markets.”
The company says it helps companies tackle future workforce strategies by “analyzing millions of data sources to understand the demand and supply of skill sets.”
The new funding will be used for U.S. expansion, hiring talent and product development.
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Argentine fintech Ualá lands $350M at a $2.45B valuation in SoftBank, Tencent-led round
The dollars keep flowing into Latin America.
Today, Argentine personal finance management app Ualá announced it has raised $350 million in a Series D round at a post-money valuation of $2.45 billion.
SoftBank Latin America Fund and affiliates of China-based Tencent co-led the round, which included participation from a slew of existing backers, including funds managed by Soros Fund Management LLC, funds managed by affiliates of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, Ribbit Capital, Greyhound Capital, Monashees and Endeavor Catalyst. New funds, such as D1 Capital Partners and 166 2nd, also put money in the round in addition to angel investors such as Jacqueline Reses and Isaac Lee.
The round is believed to be the largest private raise ever by an Argentinian company and brings Ualá’s total raised to $544 million since its 2017 inception.
Founder and CEO Pierpaolo Barbieri, a Buenos Aires native and Harvard University graduate, has said his ambition was to create a platform that would bring all financial services into one app linked to one card.
Today, Ualá says it has developed “a complete financial ecosystem,” including universal accounts, a global Mastercard card, bill payment options, investment products, personal loans, installments (BNPL) and insurance. It has also launched merchant acquiring, Ualá Bis, a solution for entrepreneurs and merchants that allows selling through a payment link or mobile point-of-sales (mPOS).
The startup has issued more than 3.5 million cards in its home country and in Mexico, where it launched operations last year. The company claims that more than 22% of 18 to 25-year-olds in Argentina have a Ualá card. At the time of its Series C raise in November 2019, it had issued 1.3 million cards.
Image Credits: Ualá
Over 1 million users invest in the mutual fund available on the Ualá app, which the company claims is the second largest mutual fund in Argentina in number of participants. The company, which has aimed to provide more financial transparency and inclusion in the region, says that 65% of its users had no credit history prior to downloading the app.
Ualá plans to use its new capital to continue expanding within Latin America, develop new business verticals and do some hiring, with the plan of having 1,500 employees by year’s end. It currently has more than 1,000 employees.
“We are most impressed by Ualá’s ambition and execution. Our investment will propel the next stage of their vision, furthering a regional ecosystem that can make financial services more accessible and transparent across LatAm,” said Marcelo Claure, CEO of SoftBank Group International and COO of SoftBank Group, in a written statement.
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