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Twitter leads $100M round in top Indian regional social media platform ShareChat
Is there room for another social media platform? ShareChat, a four-year-old social network in India that serves tens of million of people in regional languages, just answered that question with a $100 million financing round led by global giant Twitter .
Other than Twitter, TrustBridge Partners, and existing investors Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient and Morningside Venture Capital also participated in the Series D round of ShareChat.
The new round, which pushes ShareChat’s all-time raise to $224 million, valued the firm at about $650 million, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. ShareChat declined to comment on the valuation.
Screenshot of Sharechat home page on web
“Twitter and ShareChat are aligned on the broader purpose of serving the public conversation, helping the world learn faster and solve common challenges. This investment will help ShareChat grow and provide the company’s management team access to Twitter’s executives as thought partners,” said Manish Maheshwari, managing director of Twitter India, in a prepared statement.
Twitter, like many other Silicon Valley firms, counts India as one of its key markets. And like Twitter, other Silicon Valley firms are also increasingly investing in Indian startups.
ShareChat serves 60 million users each month in 15 regional languages, Ankush Sachdeva, co-founder and CEO of the firm, told TechCrunch in an interview. The platform currently does not support English, and has no plans to change that, Sachdeva said.
That choice is what has driven users to ShareChat, he explained. In the early days of the social media platform, the firm experimented with English language. It saw most of its users choose English as their preferred language, but this also led to another interesting development: Their engagement with the app significantly reduced.
The origin story
“For some reason, everyone wanted to converse in English. There was an inherent bias to pick English even when they did not know it.” (Only about 10% of India’s 1.3 billion people speak English. Hindi, a regional language, on the other hand, is spoken by about half a billion people, according to official government figures.)
So ShareChat pulled support for English. Today, an average user spends 22 minutes on the app each day, Sachdeva said. The learning in the early days to remove English is just one of the many things that has shaped ShareChat to what it is today and led to its growth.
In 2014, Sachdeva and two of his friends — Bhanu Singh and Farid Ahsan, all of whom met at the prestigious institute IIT Kanpur — got the idea of building a debate platform by looking at the kind of discussions people were having on Facebook groups.
They identified that cricket and movie stars were popular conversation topics, so they created WhatsApp groups and aggressively posted links to those groups on Facebook to attract users.
It was then when they built chatbots to allow users to discover different genres of jokes, recommendations for phones and food recipes, among other things. But they soon realized that users weren’t interested in most of such offerings.
“Nobody cared about our smartphone recommendations. All they wanted was to download wallpapers, ringtones, copy jokes and move on. They just wanted content.”
So in 2015, Sachdeva and company moved on from chatbots and created an app where users can easily produce, discover and share content in the languages they understand. (Today, user generated content is one of the key attractions of the platform, with about 15% of its user base actively producing content.)
A year later, ShareChat, like tens of thousands of other businesses, was in for a pleasant surprise. India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, launched his new telecom network Reliance Jio, which offered users access to the bulk of data at little to no charge for an extended period of time.
This immediately changed the way millions of people in the country, who once cared about each megabyte they consumed online, interacted with the internet. On ShareChat people quickly started to move from sharing jokes and other messages in text format to images and then videos.
Path ahead and monetization
That momentum continues to today. ShareChat now plans to give users more incentive — including money — and tools to produce content on the platform to drive engagement. “There remains a huge hunger for content in vernacular languages,” Sachdeva said.
Speaking of money, ShareChat has experimented with ads on the app and its site, but revenue generation isn’t currently its primary focus, Sachdeva said. “We’re in the Series D now so there is obviously an obligation we have to our investors to make money. But we all believe that we need to focus on growth at this stage,” he said.
ShareChat also has many users in Bangladesh, Nepal and the Middle East, where many users speak Indian regional languages. But the startup currently plans to focus largely on expanding its user base in India.
It will use the new capital to strengthen the technology infrastructure and hire more tech talent. Sachdeva said ShareChat is looking to open an office in San Francisco to hire local engineers there.
A handful of local and global giants have emerged in India in recent years to cater to people in small cities and villages, who are just getting online. Pratilipi, a storytelling platform has amassed more than 5 million users, for instance. It recently raised $15 million to expand its user base and help users strike deals with content studios.
Perhaps no other app poses a bigger challenge to ShareChat than TikTok, an app where users share short-form videos. TikTok, owned by one of the world’s most valued startups, has over 120 million users in India and sees content in many Indian languages.
But the app — with its ever growing ambitions — also tends to land itself in hot water in India every few weeks. In all sensitive corners of the country. On that front, ShareChat has an advantage. Over the years, it has emerged as an outlier in the country that has strongly supported proposed laws by the Indian government that seek to make social apps more accountable for content that circulates on their platforms.
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Traces AI is building a less invasive alternative to facial recognition tracking
With all of the progress we’ve seen in deep learning tech in the past few years, it seems pretty inevitable that security cameras become smarter and more capable in regards to tracking, but there are more options than we think in how we choose to pull this off.
Traces AI is a new computer vision startup, in Y Combinator’s latest batch of bets, that’s focused on helping cameras track people without relying on facial recognition data, something the founders believe is too invasive of the public’s privacy. The startup’s technology actually blurs out all human faces in frame, only relying on the other physical attributes of a person.
“It’s a combination of different parameters from the visuals. We can use your hair style, whether you have a backpack, your type of shoes and the combination of your clothing,” co-founder Veronika Yurchuk tells TechCrunch.
Tech like this obviously doesn’t scale too well for a multi-day city-wide manhunt, and leaves room for some Jason Bourne-esque criminals to turn their jackets inside out and toss on a baseball cap to evade detection. As a potential customer, why forego a sophisticated technology just to stave off dystopia? Well, Traces AI isn’t so convinced that facial recognition tech is always the best solution; they believe that facial tracking isn’t something every customer wants or needs and there should be more variety in terms of solutions.
“The biggest concern [detractors] have is, ‘Okay, you want to ban the technology that is actually protecting people today, and will be protecting this country tomorrow?’ And, that’s hard to argue with, but what we are actually trying to do is propose an alternative that will be very effective but less invasive of privacy,” co-founder Kostya Shysh tells me.
Earlier this year, San Francisco banned government agencies from the use of facial recognition software, and it’s unlikely that they will be the only city to make that choice. In our conversation, Shysh also highlighted some of the backlash to Detroit’s Project Green Light, which brought facial recognition surveillance tech city-wide.
Traces AI’s solution can also be a better option for closed venues that have limited data on the people on their premises in the first place. One use case Shysh highlighted was being able to find a lost child in an amusement park with just a little data.
“You can actually give them a verbal description, so if you say, ‘it’s a missing 10-year-old boy, and he had blue shorts and a white t shirt,’ that will be enough information for us to start a search,” Shysh says.
In addition to being a better way to promote privacy, Shysh also sees the technology as a more effective way to reduce the racial bias of these computer vision systems that have proven less adept at distinguishing non-white faces, and are thus often more prone to false positives.
“The way our technology works, we actually blur faces of the people before sending it to the cloud. We’re doing it intentionally as one of the safety mechanisms to protect from racial and gender biases as well,” Shysh says.
The co-founders say that the U.S. and Great Britain are likely going to be their biggest markets due to the high quantity of CCTV cameras, but they’re also pursuing customers in Asian countries like Japan and Singapore, where face-obscuring facial masks are often worn and can leave facial tracking software much less effective.
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Incorta raises $30M Series C for ETL-free data processing solution
Incorta, a startup founded by former Oracle executives who want to change the way we process large amounts of data, announced a $30 million Series C today led by Sorenson Capital.
Other investors participating in the round included GV (formerly Google Ventures), Kleiner Perkins, M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures), Telstra Ventures and Ron Wohl. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $75 million, according to the company.
Incorta CEO and co-founder Osama Elkady says he and his co-founders were compelled to start Incorta because they saw so many companies spending big bucks for data projects that were doomed to fail. “The reason that drove me and three other guys to leave Oracle and start Incorta is because we found out with all the investment that companies were making around data warehousing and implementing advanced projects, very few of these projects succeeded,” Elkady told TechCrunch.
A typical data project involves ETL (extract, transform, load). It’s a process that takes data out of one database, changes the data to make it compatible with the target database and adds it to the target database.
It takes time to do all of that, and Incorta is trying to make access to the data much faster by stripping out this step. Elkady says that this allows customers to make use of the data much more quickly, claiming they are reducing the process from one that took hours to one that takes just seconds. That kind of performance enhancement is garnering attention.
Rob Rueckert, managing director for lead investor Sorenson Capital, sees a company that’s innovating in a mature space. “Incorta is poised to upend the data warehousing market with innovative technology that will end 30 years of archaic and slow data warehouse infrastructure,” he said in a statement.
The company says revenue is growing by leaps and bounds, reporting 284% year over year growth (although they did not share specific numbers). Customers include Starbucks, Shutterfly and Broadcom.
The startup, which launched in 2013, currently has 250 employees, with developers in Egypt and main operations in San Mateo, Calif. They recently also added offices in Chicago, Dubai and Bangalore.
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Energy Vault raises $110 million from SoftBank Vision Fund as energy storage grabs headlines
Imagine a moving tower made of huge cement bricks weighing 35 metric tons. The movement of these massive blocks is powered by wind or solar power plants and is a way to store the energy those plants generate. Software controls the movement of the blocks automatically, responding to changes in power availability across an electric grid to charge and discharge the power that’s being generated.
The development of this technology is the culmination of years of work at Idealab, the Pasadena, Calif.-based startup incubator, and Energy Vault, the company it spun out to commercialize the technology, has just raised $110 million from SoftBank Vision Fund to take its next steps in the world.
Energy storage remains one of the largest obstacles to the large-scale rollout of renewable energy technologies on utility grids, but utilities, development agencies and private companies are investing billions to bring new energy storage capabilities to market as the technology to store energy improves.
The investment in Energy Vault is just one indicator of the massive market that investors see coming as power companies spend billions on renewables and storage. As The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend, ScottishPower, the U.K.-based utility, is committing to spending $7.2 billion on renewable energy, grid upgrades and storage technologies between 2018 and 2022.
Meanwhile, out in the wilds of Utah, the American subsidiary of Japan’s Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems is working on a joint venture that would create the world’s largest clean energy storage facility. That 1 gigawatt storage would go a long way toward providing renewable power to the Western U.S. power grid and is going to be based on compressed air energy storage, large flow batteries, solid oxide fuel cells and renewable hydrogen storage.
“For 20 years, we’ve been reducing carbon emissions of the U.S. power grid using natural gas in combination with renewable power to replace retiring coal-fired power generation. In California and other states in the western United States, which will soon have retired all of their coal-fired power generation, we need the next step in decarbonization. Mixing natural gas and storage, and eventually using 100% renewable storage, is that next step,” said Paul Browning, president and CEO of MHPS Americas.
Energy Vault’s technology could also be used in these kinds of remote locations, according to chief executive Robert Piconi.
Energy Vault’s storage technology certainly isn’t going to be ubiquitous in highly populated areas, but the company’s towers of blocks can work well in remote locations and have a lower cost than chemical storage options, Piconi said.
“What you’re seeing there on some of the battery side is the need in the market for a mobile solution that isn’t tied to topography,” Piconi said. “We obviously aren’t putting these systems in urban areas or the middle of cities.”
For areas that need larger-scale storage that’s a bit more flexible there are storage solutions like Tesla’s new Megapack.
The Megapack comes fully assembled — including battery modules, bi-directional inverters, a thermal management system, an AC breaker and controls — and can store up to 3 megawatt-hours of energy with a 1.5 megawatt inverter capacity.
The Energy Vault storage system is made for much, much larger storage capacity. Each tower can store between 20 and 80 megawatt hours at a cost of 6 cents per kilowatt hour (on a levelized cost basis), according to Piconi.
The first facility that Energy Vault is developing is a 35 megawatt-hour system in Northern Italy, and there are other undisclosed contracts with an undisclosed number of customers on four continents, according to the company.
One place where Piconi sees particular applicability for Energy Vault’s technology is around desalination plants in places like sub-Saharan Africa or desert areas.
Backing Energy Vault’s new storage technology are a clutch of investors, including Neotribe Ventures, Cemex Ventures, Idealab and SoftBank.
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Flatfair, the ‘deposit-free’ renting platform, raises $11M led by Index Ventures
Flatfair, a London-based fintech that lets landlords offer “deposit-free” renting to tenants, has raised $11 million in funding.
The Series A round is led by Index Ventures, with participation from Revolt Ventures, Adevinta, Greg Marsh (founder of Onefinestay), Jeremy Helbsy (former Savills CEO) and Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise co-founder).
With the new capital, Flatfair says it plans to hire a “significant” number of product engineers, data scientists and business development specialists.
The startup will also invest in building out new features as it looks to expand its platform with “a focus on making renting fairer and more transparent for landlords and tenants.”
“With the average deposit of £1,110 across England and Wales being just shy of the national living wage, tenants struggle to pay expensive deposits when moving into their new home, often paying double deposits in between tenancies,” Flatfair co-founder and CEO Franz Doerr tells me when asked to frame the problem the startup has set out to solve.
“This creates cash flow issues for tenants, in particular for those with families. Some tenants end up financing the deposit through friends and family or even accrue expensive credit card debt. The latter can have a negative impact on the tenant’s credit rating, further restricting important access to credit for things that really matter in a tenant’s life.”
To remedy this, Fatfair’s “insurance-backed” payment technology provides tenants with the option to pay a per-tenancy membership fee instead of a full deposit. They do this by authorising their bank account via debit card with Flatfair, and when it is time to move out, any end-of-tenancy charges are handled via the Flatfair portal, including dispute resolution.
So, for example, rather than having to find a rental deposit equivalent to a month’s rent, which in theory you would get back once you move out sans any end-of-tenancy charges, with Fatfair you pay about a quarter of that as a non-refundable fee.
Of course, there are pros and cons to both, but for tenants that are cashflow restricted, the startup’s model at least offers an alternative financing option.
In addition, tenants registered with Flatfair are given a “trust score” that can go up over time, helping them move tenancy more easily in the future. The company is also trialing the use of Open Banking to help with credit checks by analysing transaction history to verify that you have paid rent regularly and on time in the past.
Landlords are said to like the model. Current Flatfair clients include major property owners and agents, such as Greystar, Places for People and CBRE. “Before Flatfair, deposits were the only form of tenancy security that landlords trusted,” claims Doerr.
In the event of a dispute over end-of-tenancy charges, both landlords and tenants are asked to upload evidence to the Flatfair platform and to try to settle the disagreement amicably. If they can’t, the case is referred by Flatfair to an independent adjudicator via mydeposits, a U.K. government-backed deposit scheme with which the company is partnering.
“In such a case, all the evidence is submitted to mydeposits and they come back with a decision within 24 hours,” explains Doerr. “[If] the adjudicator says that the tenant owes money, we invoice the tenant who then has five days to pay. If the tenant doesn’t pay, we charge their bank account… What’s key here is having the evidence. People are generally happy to pay if the costs are fair and where clear evidence exists, there’s less to argue about.”
More broadly, Doerr says there’s significant scope for digitisation across the buy-to-let sector and that the big vision for Flatfair is to create an “operating system” for rentals.
“The fundamental idea is to streamline processes around the tenancy to create revenue and savings opportunities for landlords and agents, whilst promoting a better customer experience, affordability and fairness for tenants,” he says.
“We’re working on a host of exciting new features that we’ll be able to talk about in the coming months, but we see opportunities to automate more functions within the life cycle of a tenancy and think there are a number of big efficiency savings to be made by unifying old systems, dumping old paper systems and streamlining cumbersome admin. Offering a scoring system for tenants is a great way of encouraging better behaviour and, given housing represents most people’s biggest expense, it’s only right renters should be able to build up their credit score and benefit from paying on time.”
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Fantasy football startup Sleeper nabs VC funding to take on ESPN
Sleeper is looking to take on fantasy league apps from major players like ESPN and has amassed venture funding from Silicon Valley investors to take them down.
The Bay Area startup is aiming to treat a fantasy football league more like a social platform than a loose jumble of league mechanics, distinguishing itself as a simple and free, ad-free option.
Sleeper has done limited press as it has been ramping up its app over the past two seasons, but the team has been courting the interest of investors to scale the product, raising more than $7 million from VCs to date. The company closed a $5.3 million Series A late last year led by General Catalyst. In early 2017, the startup also closed a $2 million seed led by Birchmere Ventures with participation from Uber co-founder Garrett Camp’s startup studio, Expa.
There isn’t much in terms of monetization options at the moment. CEO Nan Wang tells TechCrunch that the focus right now is “amassing a large base of users and making it the stickiest and highest engagement product in the category.”
Wang says the app’s users spend 50 minutes per day on average during the season, numbers he calls “Instagram-like.” The main contributor to that number seems to be that chat is always a swipe away and that all of the actions that are happening during the season show up inside chats to encourage engagement.
This unifies the experience for users, many of whom have had to piecemeal their experience by using a WhatsApp or GroupMe group in addition to the other fantasy league apps that they’ve been using. Sleeper’s more differentiated UI seems to be largely popular among early vocal users as well as the up-to-the-minute notifications that deliver league updates.
Poaching users from other platforms is definitely a priority, but Wang says the team has really been looking at how to nab users who have stayed away from the convoluted confusion of fantasy leagues as well. Taking on the leading apps from ESPN, Yahoo and NFL can be daunting; another stress for the younger startup is just how tight the user acquisition window is, though things compound quickly if you can create one loyal user that brings their entire league to the platform.
“The user acquisition window for fantasy football leagues is strongest from the second week of August until the first week of September. Historically, we’ve seen that about 70% of users create their leagues in that three-week window,” Wang tells me.
The funding has been used to build out its team, which is still just 10 full-time employees, as well as expand their ambitions beyond fantasy football alone into other sports, including basketball and soccer.
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Darren Bechtel (yes, of those Bechtels) has raised $97.5 million for his firm, Brick & Mortar Ventures
Brick & Mortar Ventures, a young, San Francisco-based venture firm that’s focused on startups innovating in or around architecture, engineering, construction and facilities management, has closed with $97.2 million in capital commitments.
The fund is one in a sea of debut funds that have swung open their doors in recent years, though it’s also interesting for numerous reasons, beginning with its founder, Darren Bechtel, who knows a thing or two about the building industry. He’s a scion of the family that built the 120-year-old, privately held company Bechtel into one of the largest construction and engineering firms in the world. In fact, his brother, Brendan, who was named CEO in 2016, represents the fifth generation of Bechtels to lead the company. (Their sister, Katherine, is a project controls manager with the powerhouse outfit.)
Brick & Mortar’s investors are just as notable. They aren’t the typical pension funds and university endowments that many VCs try hard to lock down. Instead, they comprise a long list of companies that are part of the “construction value chain” and so have an interest in the latest and greatest developments in their respective industries. Among the firm’s backers, for example, is the special materials maker Ardex; the software giant Autodesk; the building materials company CEMEX; Ferguson Ventures, which is the venture arm of a huge U.S distributor of plumbing supplies; FMI, a management consulting company to the engineering and construction industry; Obayashi, a major Japanese construction company; Sidewalk Labs, which is Alphabet’s urban innovation organization; and United Rentals, one of the world’s largest equipment rental companies.
Brick & Mortar isn’t the first venture firm to focus on the so-called built world. Other firms that focus largely, if not exclusively, around the same themes include Fifth Wall Ventures, Navitas Capital, Corigin Ventures, Camber Creek, MetaProp, Starwood Capital and Tamarisc Ventures.
In fact, Darren Bechtel has ties to and is an individual investor in Fifth Wall, an LA-based firm that stormed onto the scene in 2017 with an equally impressive, and very different, roster of limited partners in the real estate industry, from which it has already amassed more than $700 million in capital commitments across two funds.
As Bechtel told us on a call late last week, he was going to go into business with Fifth Wall’s founders initially, but they wanted to raise a lot of money, and Bechtel was thinking more conservatively — for a reason. “I’d done five deals on AngelList with [Fifth Wall co-founder] Brendan [Wallace] and we’d started putting together a pitch deck, and as we were thinking through ideal fund structure and size, Brendan said $500 million and I said $50 million,” says Bechtel.
Wallace was thinking big, says Bechtel, because “hospitality already had some massive players — Airbnb, WeWork. It was a far more mature landscape, and Brendan thought that if we were going to own a category, we needed the capital to secure a leadership position in the right deals.”
Bechtel thinks Wallace was right, too. He says he just came to realize that construction tech — which is what really interested him — was in its own league, and it was in its infancy. Though the construction software company PlanGrid took off like gangbusters — Bechtel wrote the largest check during the company’s seed round — it wasn’t so long ago that “there were great, billion-dollar ideas being formed but the rounds were small and the valuations were small,” says Bechtel. Because the “investment community didn’t understand what it was looking at, I had concerns about our ability to generate returns if we had too large a fund.”
In the end, the friends and former Stanford MBA classmates decided to split their respective focus on real estate and hospitality (Fifth Wall) and the actual construction of buildings (Brick & Mortar), and things seem to have gone well since. As Fifth Wall has gained traction, so too has Brick & Mortar, which is now a couple of years in the making. Indeed, though Bechtel is announcing the close of Brick & Mortar’s first fund today, he already works with two principals and two associates, and they’ve collectively sourced and funded 16 startups to date with capital they’ve been raising from investors along the way.
One of those checks went to Fieldwire, a maker of field management software for construction teams. They’ve also backed Serious Labs, which trains workers how to use heavy equipment and tools via virtual reality software, and Curbio, a real estate technology startup that orchestrates turnkey renovations for home sellers, then gets paid back once the home is sold.
Brick & Mortar even has an exit already, having helped fund the construction software platform BuildingConnected, which sold last December to Autodesk. (Bechtel’s earlier investment in PlanGrid, which also sold to Autodesk last year, was a personal investment, one of roughly 40 he made before setting out to create a traditional venture firm.)
As for whether Brick & Mortar ever hunts for companies that Bechtel — the firm founded by Darren’s great-great-grandfather — might like to acquire or otherwise partner with, Darren is quick to note that the firm is not an investor in his venture fund or any or its portfolio companies, and he doesn’t have his finger on the pulse of what’s happening there.
“I don’t work at Bechtel or pretend to know what their intentions are, though my brother is CEO, so you could say I know a guy there.”
More, he notes, he doesn’t think it would make sense to fund a company that “a user would want to acquire. If one user buys [a startup’s tools] because they want exclusivity, they’re limiting the exit value of that company.” To underscore his point, he notes that “Bechtel does around $30 billion a year, but the construction market is an $11 trillion market.” In the end, he says, it’s “better to have a preferred relationship. Maybe you get the next year’s model released early; maybe you get custom colors.” But if you’ve developed a winning product, you want to make it accessible to everyone. “You benefit the most by having a technology adopted by the whole industry.”
Above, the Brick & Mortar Ventures team. From left to right: Austin Yount, senior associate; Alice Leung, associate; Curtis Rodgers, principal; Darren Bechtel, general partner; and Kaustubh Pandya, principal.
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Clumio raises $51M to bring enterprise backup into the 21st century
Creating backups for massive enterprise deployments may feel like a solved problem, but for the most part, we’re still talking about complex hardware and software setups. Clumio, which is coming out of stealth today, wants to modernize enterprise data protection by eliminating the on-premise hardware in favor of a flexible, SaaS-style cloud-based backup solution.
For the first time, Clumio also today announced that it has raised a total of $51 million in a Series A and B round since it was founded in 2017. The $11 million Series A round closed in October 2017 and the Series B round in November 2018, Clumio founder and CEO Poojan Kumar told me. Kumar’s previous company, storage startup PernixData, was acquired by Nutanix in 2016. It doesn’t look like the investors made their money back, though.
Clumio is backed by investors like Sutter Hill Ventures, which led the Series A, and Index Ventures, which drove the Series B together with Sutter Hill. Other individual investors include Mark Leslie, founder of Veritas Technologies, and John Thompson, chairman of the board at Microsoft .
“Enterprise workloads are being ‘SaaS-ified’ because IT can no longer afford the time, complexity and expense of building and managing heavy on-prem hardware and software solutions if they are to successfully deliver against their digital transformation initiatives,” said Kumar. “Unlike legacy backup vendors, Clumio SaaS is born in the cloud. We have leveraged the most secure and innovative cloud services available, now and in the future, within our service to ensure that we can meet customer requirements for backup, regardless of where the data is.”
In its current iteration, Clumio can be used to secure data from on-premise, VMware Cloud for AWS and native AWS service workloads. Given this list, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Clumio’s backend, too, makes extensive use of public cloud services.
The company says that it already has several customers, though it didn’t disclose any in today’s announcement.
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Rimeto lands $10M Series A to modernize the corporate directory
The notion of the corporate directory has been around for many years, but in a time of more frequent turnover and shifting responsibilities, the founders of Rimeto, a three-year-old San Francisco startup, wanted to update it to reflect those changes.
Today, the company announced a $10 million Series A investment from USVP, Bow Capital, Floodgate and Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates.
Co-founder Ted Zagat says that the founders observed shifting workplace demographics and changes in the way people work. They believed it required a better way to locate people inside large organizations, which typically used homegrown methods or relied on Outlook or other corporate email systems.
“On one hand, we have people being asked to work much more collaboratively and cross-functionally. On the other, is an increasingly fragmented workplace. Employees really need help to be able to understand each other and work together effectively. That’s a real challenge for them,” Zagat explained.
Rimeto has developed a richer directory by sitting between various corporate systems like HR, CRM and other tools that contain additional details about the employee. It of course includes a name, title, email and phone like the basic corporate system, but it goes beyond that to find areas of expertise, projects the person is working on and other details that can help you find the right person when you’re searching the directory.
Rimeto directory on mobile and web (Screenshot: Rimeto)
Zagat says that by connecting to these various corporate systems and layering on a quality search tool with a variety of filters to narrow the search, it can help employees connect to others inside an organization more easily, something that is often difficult to do in large companies.
The tool can be accessed via web or mobile app, or incorporated into a company intranet. It also could be accessed from a tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
The three founders — Zagat, Neville Bowers and Maxwell Hayman — all previously worked at Facebook. Unlike a lot of early-stage startups, the company has paying customers (although it won’t share exactly how many) and reports that it’s cash-flow positive. Up to this point, the three founders had bootstrapped the company, but they wanted to go out and raise some capital to begin to expand more rapidly.
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Blade raises $4.3M from Coinbase, SV Angel to reshape cryptocurrency derivatives trading
Exchanges like Coinbase have ballooned in size by taking the mechanics of equity markets and fitting them to cryptocurrency markets, but as the space expands in its scope and craftiness, new exchanges trading asset classes native to cryptocurrency are taking off and attracting the attention of top Silicon Valley VCs. Oh, and Coinbase, too.
Blade is a new cryptocurrency derivatives exchange launching in three weeks. Prior to starting the company, CEO Jeff Byun and his co-founder Henry Lee founded OrderAhead, a delivery startup platform that was eventually acquired in-part by Square in 2017. The pair’s newest company shares little in common with their previous venture, but they are bringing aboard some of the same investors to support them.
Blade is announcing that they’ve raised $4.3 million in seed funding from a host of investors, including Coinbase, SV Angel, A.Capital, Slow Ventures, Justin Kan and Adam D’Angelo.
The exchange is tackling perpetual swap contracts.
Perpetuals are a crypto-native trading instrument that Byun says are “arguably the fastest growing segment of cryptocurrency trading.” They allow traders to bet on the future values of cryptocurrencies in relation to another and the instruments have no expiration dates, unlike fixed maturity futures. Traders can bet on how the price of Bitcoin can increase relative to USD, but they can also make bets relative to other altcoins like Monero, DogeCoin, Zcash, Ripple and Binance Coin. Here’s what’s on the Blade menu at the moment.
Blade’s noteworthy spins on perpetuals trading — compared to other exchanges — are that most of the contracts will be set up on simplified vanilla contracts, the perpetuals will also be margined/settled in USD Tether and the company is offering higher leverages (up to 150x on BTC-USD and BTC-KRW) on trades.
Blade is raising funds from Silicon Valley’s VCs, but U.S. investors won’t be legally able to participate in the exchange. U.S. government agencies have been a bit more stringent in regulating cryptocurrencies, so there’s more trading activity taking place on exchanges outside the jurisdiction. Blade itself is an offshore entity with a U.S. subsidiary; its primary market is East Asia.
“It’s kind of a bifurcated market,” Byun tells TechCrunch. “Either you have exchanges like Coinbase or Gemini or Bitrex that cater to the U.S. market that are highly regulated or the exchanges that cater to the non-U.S. market that are much less regulated, but that’s where most of the volume is.”
While the company is still three weeks away from launch, the founders have bold ambitions.
“In the long term, we want to be the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) of crypto,” Byun tells me. “Coinbase and Binance are building this foundational structure for crypto, but I think we are too and in a sense that derivatives are at their core about risk transfer, we want to be building the foundational layer for risk transfer in the crypto markets.”
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