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Walnut wants to crack open flexibility for healthcare bills
Healthcare insurance, if you’re lucky to have it, only covers a subset of conditions in the United States. As a result, patients can often get burdened with horror story charges, like huge deductibles, out-of-network costs and expensive co-pays. So for the uninsured and insured alike, innovative ways of managing big bills are in high demand — especially as uncertainty remains around how COVID-19 and long-haul symptoms will be handled by patients and payers.
Walnut, founded by Roshan Patel, is a point-of-sale lending company with a healthcare twist. Walnut uses a “buy now, pay later” model, popularized by Affirm and Klarna, to help patients pay for healthcare over a period of time, instead of in one $3,000 chunk. Walnut works with healthcare providers so that a patient’s bill can be paid back through $100-a-month increments for 30 months, instead of one aggressive credit card swipe.
A patient using Walnut to pay healthcare bills. Image Credits: Walnut
It’s a sweet deal, but Patel added one more detail that he thinks makes Walnut stand out: The startup doesn’t charge any interest or fees to consumers.
“Almost every ‘buy now, pay later’ company in e-commerce charges interest or fees, and every personal loan provider charges interest or fees, but we do not,” he said. “And that’s really important to me, not making healthcare any more expensive than it already is. It’s a very patient-friendly product.”
Companies that use the buy now, pay later model with zero interest or fees need to make revenue somehow, and in Walnut’s case it is by charging healthcare providers a percentage of each sale or transaction.
If a provider’s collection rate for an out-of-pocket is 50%, Walnut would go to them and say “give us a 40% discount, and we’ll guarantee the cash for you upfront.” The startup will take the risk, and then the provider is able to make 60% of the collection rate.
Now, ideally, a provider would want to get 100% of payments they are owed, but that is wishful thinking. Patel explained that a large number of bills go unpaid due to bankruptcies or a default on payments (the average collections rate for hospitals out of pocket is less than 20%). Because of this, a company like Walnut has room to offer at least some stable upfront cash to hospitals, even if it ends up being 60% of overall bills versus 100%.
The company uses “extensive underwriting models” to figure out if a patient should qualify for a loan. Patel says that the startup goes beyond using credit score, which he describes as an “outdated metric”, and instead looks at thousands of data points from different providers, from side hustle income to spending habits on things like groceries and bills.
Image Credits: Lightspring (opens in a new window) / Shutterstock (opens in a new window)
Walnut’s biggest challenge, says Patel, is to underwrite the population and pay the healthcare provider upfront in cash. It then collects from the patient on the back end, which comes with its own amount of risk.
“To be able to take on that risk for patients that are less credit-worthy is a very challenging problem, and I don’t think it’s really solved yet in healthcare,” he said.
The startup is starting by working with small private practices of one to five physicians that focus on specialties like dentistry, dermatology and fertility.
A big part of Walnut’s success will be determined by if it can attract people that truly need flexible financing options. For example, the company doesn’t have any hospitals as a partner yet, which would tap a larger group of patients that likely need flexible financing options the most. Right now, “the people who get elective-care surgery are the ones that can afford it.”
But Patel doesn’t see this as a disconnect; instead, he sees it as an opportunity to widen access to elective medical care to more people.
“I talked to a person last week who has no teeth and wants dentures but it costs $6,000,” he said. “That person should be able to afford it, and we enabled them to pay $100 a month for it.”
Walnut’s two biggest customer groups are the uninsured (people who have lost their jobs from COVID-19), and consumers who have high deductible plans.
Walnut isn’t the first. PrimaHealth Credit, Walnut’s closest competitor, offers point-of-sale lending procedures for elective medical procedures. Think surgeries like cataract work or dental work. The company said the service is currently available in Arizona, California, Florida, Oklahoma and Texas, and will be expanded to all 50 states this year. Walnut, comparatively, is mostly focused on the East Coast and plans to expand nationwide by the end of this year.
PrimaHealth’s average loan size is $1,800, and Walnut’s average loan size is $5,000.
The company is currently piloting with a handful of healthcare providers in dermatology, dentistry and fertility. It has had more than 500 patient loan applications, totaling over $4.6 million in application volume year-to-date. Patel says that Walnut only accepted a fraction of these applications, but declined to share what percent of money it has lent so far. As Walnut refines its model, it might be able to cover other categories.
Up until this point, Walnut has been lending off of its own balance sheet. In order to truly scale, it will need to get a new source of capital — either a credit line, debt financing round or venture capital — to offer more loans. Patel says that the startup is in talks with banks, and turned down a debt offer due to size and rate.
Venture capital seems to be the solution for now: The startup announced that it has raised a $3.6 million seed round from investors including Gradient Ventures, Afore Capital, 2048 Ventures, Supernode Ventures, TA Ventures, Polymath Capital, Tack Ventures, Awesome People Ventures, Newark Ventures and NKM Capital. Angels include the CEOs of Giphy and PillPack, and the CTO of Rampm Financial as well as an NFL coach. The company is also a part of Plaid’s inaugural accelerator.
“I don’t want to be yet another startup trying to offer you an undifferentiated insurance plan,” Patel said.
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Mexican unicorn Kavak raises a $485M Series D at a $4B valuation
Kavak, the Mexican startup that’s disrupted the used car market in Mexico and Argentina, today announced its Series D of $485 million, which now values the company at $4 billion. This round more than triples their previous valuation of $1.15 billion, which established them as a unicorn just a couple of months ago in October of 2020. Kavak is now one of the top five highest-valued startups in Latin America.
The round was led by D1 Capital Partners, Founders Fund, Ribbit and BOND, and brings Kavak’s total capital raised to date to more than $900 million. Kavak recently soft-launched in Brazil, and this new round of funding will be used to build out the Brazilian market and beyond, said Carlos García Ottati, Kavak’s CEO and co-founder. The company plans to do a full launch in Brazil in the next 60 days, García said, and we can expect to see Kavak in markets outside Latin America in the next 24 months, he added.
“We were built to solve emerging market problems,” García said.
Kavak, which was founded in 2016, is an online marketplace that aims to bring transparency, security and access to financing to the used car market. The company also offers its own financing through its fintech arm, Kavak Capital, and counts more than 2,500 employees and 20 logistics and reconditioning hubs in Mexico and Argentina.
“In Latin America, 90% of the [used car] transactions are informal, which leads to a 40% fraud rate,” said García, who experienced these challenges firsthand when he moved to Mexico from Colombia a couple of years ago and bought a used car.
“My budget allowed me to buy a used car, but there was no infrastructure around it. It took me six months to buy the car, and then the car had legal and mechanical issues and I lost most of my money,” he said. Kavak buys cars from individuals, refurbishes them and offers warranties to buyers.
“Instead of buying a new car, they can buy a better car that still has all the warranties. It’s a really aspirational process,” said García. The company, which really amounts to four companies in one given its areas of focus, was built to be comprehensive by design in order to meet the various gaps in the market, García said.
“When you’re building a business here [Latin America], you need to build several businesses because so many things are broken,” he said. That’s why the financing option, for example, has been a key to their success, according to García.
Financing has traditionally been hard to come by in Brazil, and as García said, the used car market lacks infrastructure there, too. That being said, Brazil is Latin America’s fintech hub, and the space has made leaps and bounds over the last 7-10 years with companies such as Nubank, PagSeguro, Creditas, PicPay, and others leading the way. As a result, credit cards and loans are more widely available today in the region, offering competition for Kavak Capital. While Kavak has localized some of its product for the Brazilian market — namely building out a Portuguese language version of the app and website — García said the markets are very similar.
“In Brazil, you still have the same problems that you have in Mexico, but Brazil is a little more developed, especially in fintech, which is light years ahead of Mexico,” he said.
With the Brazilian product heading to the races, García said they already have plans for other regions, though he declined to name them.
“80% of people in emerging markets don’t have access to a car,” García said of the global market size. “We want to go into big markets where customers are facing similar problems and where Kavak can really change their lives,” he added.
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Nuvocargo raises $12M to digitize the freight logistics industry
Despite hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods flowing across the U.S.-Mexican border each year, the freight industry has remained analog — each side of the border offering up its own maze of bureaucracy.
Nuvocargo, a digital logistics platform for cross-border trade, is trying to modernize the process. The company offers an all-in-one service that rolls freight forwarding, customs brokerage, cargo insurance and even trade financing into one UI-friendly software and app. Housing all of these services under one app makes it easier for companies to track their supply chain and gives customs and logistics teams access to more centralized information, according to Nuvocargo CEO Deepak Chhugani.
“And you just have one single audit trail in case something goes wrong,” Chhugani told TechCrunch, adding that the process helps reduce or eliminate the extra costs that come with a high administrative overhead. It also lets customers take a high-level look at their operations from within a single interface, he said.
Chhugani likened the experience to something like Uber Eats, which offers customers the ability to easily track food orders from restaurant to home.
“Just imagine, because you are dealing with so many different parties, you lose visibility on what’s going on. If you want a snapshot of — what did I spend end-to-end? — you actually have to go through all these email chains or faxes or texts with different providers,” Chhugani explained. “Some of them might be in another country. So [Nuvocargo] just creates more visibility throughout the process, from where the goods literally are to visibility around your finances.”
But Nuvocargo is thinking beyond the actual movement of goods. The company is also starting to offer customs brokerage, comprehensive cross-border cargo insurance and factoring, or short-term account receivable finance. The last of these solves an especially difficult pain point for trucking companies, which sometimes must wait up to net-90 days to be paid.
The approach has caught investors’ eyes: Nearly one year after announcing it had raised a $5.3 million seed round, the company has closed on a $12 million Series A funding led by QED Investors and with injections from David Velez, Michael Ronen, Raymond Tonsing, FJ Labs and Clocktower. Investors NFX and ALLVP, which participated in the previous round, also participated.
The “holy grail” of their new offerings, as Chhugani called it, is trade financing. Because Nuvocargo will already have a relationship with companies, including an understanding of credit and fraud risk, its hope is that it can offer financial products at a competitive rate.
This is what attracted QED Investors, a firm that typically focuses on financial technology rather than logistics and trucking.
“After speaking with [Deepak] and seeing the connection points and parallels between what we were looking at in e-commerce and the challenges of actually getting goods across border, the fintech spark went off in my own head,” Lauren Connolley Morton, a partner at QED, said in an interview with TechCrunch. “The opportunities for factoring, for lending, for insuring goods are all very much right up our alley.”
Although Chhugani declined to disclose Nuvocargo’s valuation after this most recent round of funding, it’s clear there is plenty of room to grow into the logistics industry’s huge and seemingly disaggregated value chain.
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Streamlit nabs $35M Series B to expand machine learning platform
As a company founded by data scientists, Streamlit may be in a unique position to develop tooling to help companies build machine learning applications. For starters, it developed an open-source project, but today the startup announced an expanded beta of a new commercial offering and $35 million in Series B funding.
Sequoia led the investment with help from previous investors Gradient Ventures and GGV Capital. Today’s round brings the total raised to $62 million, according to the company.
Data scientists can download the open-source project and build a machine learning application, but it requires a certain level of technical aptitude to make all the parts work. Company co-founder and CEO Adrien Treuille says that so far the company has 20,000 monthly active developers using the open-source tooling to develop streaming apps, which have been viewed millions of times.
As they have gained that traction, they have customers who would prefer to use a commercial service. “It’s great to have something free and that you can use instantly, but not every company is capable of bridging that into a commercial offering,” Treuille explained.
Company COO and co-founder Amanda Kelly says that the commercial offering called Streamlit for Teams is designed to remove some of the complexity around using the open-source application. “The whole [process of] how do I actually deploy an app, put it in a container, make sure it scales, has the resources and is securely connected to data sources […] — that’s a whole different skill set. That’s a DevOps and IT skill set,” she said.
What Streamlit for Teams does is take care of all that in the background for end users, so they can concentrate on the app building part of the equation without help from the technical side of the company to deploy it.
Sonya Huang, a partner at Sequoia, who is leading the firm’s investment in Streamlit, says that she was impressed with the company’s developer focus and sees the new commercial offering as a way to expand usage of the applications that data scientists have been building in the open-source project.
“Streamlit has a chance to define a better interface between data teams and business users by ushering in a new paradigm for interactive, data-rich applications,” Huang said.
They have data scientists at big-name companies like Uber, Delta Dental and John Deere using the open-source product already. They have kept the company fairly lean with 27 employees up until now, but the plan is to double that number in the coming year with the new funding, Kelly says.
She says that the founding team recognizes that it’s important to build a diverse company. She admits that it’s not always easy to do in practice when as a young startup you are just fighting to stay alive, but she says that the funding gives them the luxury to step back and begin to hire more deliberately.
“Literally right before this call, I was on with a consultant who is going to come in and work with the executive team, so that we’re all super clear about what we mean [when it comes to] diversity for us and how is this actually a really core part of our company, so that we can flow that into recruiting and people and engineering practices and and make that a lived value within our company,” she said.
Streamlit for Teams is available in beta starting today. The company plans to make it generally available some time later this year.
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Snorkel AI scores $35M Series B to automate data labeling in machine learning
One of the more tedious aspects of machine learning is providing a set of labels to teach the machine learning model what it needs to know. Snorkel AI wants to make it easier for subject matter experts to apply those labels programmatically, and today the startup announced a $35 million Series B.
It also announced a new tool called Application Studio that provides a way to build common machine learning applications using templates and predefined components.
Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with participation from previous investors Greylock, GV, In-Q-Tel and Nepenthe Capital. New investors Walden and BlackRock also joined in. The startup reports that it has now raised $50 million.
Company co-founder and CEO Alex Ratner says that data labeling remains a huge challenge and roadblock to moving machine learning and artificial intelligence forward inside a lot of industries because it is costly, labor-intensive and hard for the subject experts to carve out the time to do it.
“The not so hidden secret about AI today is that in spite of all the technological and tooling advancements, roughly 80 to 90% of the cost and time for an average AI project goes into just manually labeling and collecting and relabeling this training data,” he said.
He says that his company has developed a solution to simplify this process to make it easier for subject experts to programmatically add the labels, a process he says decreases the time and effort required to apply labels in a pretty dramatic way from months to hours or days, depending on the complexity of the data.
As the company has developed this methodology, customers have been asking for help in the next step of the machine learning process, which is taking that training data and the model and building an application. That’s where the Application Studio comes in. It could be a contract classifier at a bank or a network anomaly detector at a telco and it helps companies take that next step after data labeling.
“It’s not just about how you programmatically label the data, it’s also about the models, the preprocessors, the post processors, and so we’ve made this now accessible in a kind of templated and visual no-code interface,” he said.
The company’s products are based on research that began at the Stanford AI Lab in 2015. The founders spent four years in the research phase before launching Snorkel in 2019. Today, the startup has 40 employees. Ratner recognizes the issues that the technology industry has had from a diversity perspective and says he has made a conscious effort to build a diverse and inclusive company.
“What I can say is that we tried to prioritize it at a company level, the full team level and at a board level from day one, and to also put action behind that. So we’ve been working with external firms for internal training and audits and strategy around DEI, and we’ve made pipeline diversity a non-negotiable requirement of any of our contracts with recruiting firms,” he said.
Ratner also recognizes that automation can hard code bias into machine learning models, and he’s hopeful that by simplifying the labeling process, it can make it much easier to detect bias when it happens.
“If you start with a dozen or two dozen of what we call labeling functions in Snorkel, you still need to be vigilant and proactive about trying to detect bias, but it’s easier to audit what taught your model to change it by just going back and looking at a couple of hundred lines of code.”
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Hiro Capital puts $2.3M into team sports tracking platform PlayerData — as does Sir Terry Leahy
Hiro Capital has gradually been making a name for itself as an investor in the area know as “Digital Sports” or DSports for short. It’s now led a $2.3 million funding round in PlayerData. While the round might sound small, the area it’s going into is large and growing. Also investing in the round is Sir Terry Leahy, previously the CEO of Tesco, the largest British retailer.
Edinburgh, U.K.-based PlayerData uses wearable technology and software tracking to give grass-roots and professional sports teams feedback on their training. It can, for instance, allow coaches to replay key moments from a game, even modeling different outcomes based on player positioning.
This is Hiro Capital’s fourth DSports and “connected fitness” investment, and it joins Zwift, FitXR and NURVV. Hiro has also invested in eight games startups in the U.K., U.S. and Europe, as befits the heritage of co-founder and partner Ian Livingstone, OBE, CBE, who is the former chairman of Tomb Raider publisher Eidos plc and all-round gaming pioneer.
PlayerData says it has captured more than 10,000 team sessions across U.K. soccer and rugby, and logged over 50 million meters of play. It also has strong network effects, it says. Every time a new team encounters one using Playerdata’s platform, it generates five more clubs as users.
Roy Hotrabhvanon is co-founder and CEO of PlayerData, and is a former international-level archer. He’s joined by Hayden Ball, co-founder and CTO, a firmware and cloud infrastructure expert.
PlayerData app. Image Credits: PlayerData
In a statement Hotrabhvanon said: “Our mission is to bring fine-grained data and insight to clubs across team sports, helping them supercharge their game-making, improve player performance, and avoid injury… Our ultimate goal is to implement cutting-edge insights from pioneering wearables that are applicable to any team in any discipline at any level.”
Cherry Freeman, co-founding partner at Hiro, says: “PlayerData ticks all of our key boxes: a huge TAM with over 3 million grass-roots clubs; a deep moat built on shared player data, machine learning and highly actionable predictive algorithms; compelling customer network effects; and a really impressive yet humble founding team.”
The PlayerData news forms part of a wider growth in digital sports, which includes such breakout names as Peloton, Tonal, Mirror and Hiro’s portfolio investment, Zwift. With the pandemic putting an emphasis on both home workouts and general health, the fascination with digital measurement of performance now has a growing grip on the sector.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Freeman added: “We think there are something like 3 million teams that are potential customers for PlayerData. Obviously the number of runners is enormous, and they only need to get a small slice of that market to have a very, very large business. At the end of the day everyone, everyone works out, even if you just go for a walk, so the target market’s huge and they started with running but their technology is applicable to a whole raft of other sports.”
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CaptivateIQ raises $46M for its no-code sales commissions platform
CaptivateIQ, which has developed a no-code platform to help companies design customized sales commission plans, has raised $46 million in a Series B round led by Accel.
Existing backers Amity, S28 Capital, Sequoia and Y Combinator also participated in the financing, which brings the San Francisco-based company’s total raised to $63 million since its 2017 inception.
CaptivateIQ must be doing something right. While it is not yet profitable, the startup’s revenue has grown 600% year-over-year. To date, it has processed more than $2 billion in commissions on its platform across hundreds of enterprise customers, including Affirm, TripActions, Udemy, Intercom, Newfront Insurance and JMAC Lending.
“A big part of our growth is that we can help any company that offers a performance-based compensation plan, so we don’t have any restrictions with the types of businesses we work with,” said co-CEO Mark Schopmeyer. “We typically see conversations start with teams that have a minimum of 25 sales people, though we easily serve enterprises and public companies as well.”
The number of payees — defined as someone receiving a payout in CapitvateIQ’s system — was up four times in December 2020 from the year prior. Plus, the company had “back-to-back record months” from September through the end of the year in 2020, according to Schopmeyer.
He, co-CEO Conway Teng and CTO Hubert Wong founded CaptivateIQ after coming out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2017 cohort.
Left to right: CaptivateIQ co-founders Hubert Wong, Mark Schopmeyer and Conway Teng. Image Credits: CaptivateIQ
The company touts its SaaS platform as a combination of the familiarity of spreadsheets with the scalability and performance of software, so that users can configure any commission plan “entirely on their own,” according to Teng.
“Calculating commissions is really complicated and mission-critical — think of it like a very complicated form of payroll — each company has a unique commission plan that involves a lot more calculations and data than your typical salary payroll math,” Teng said. “Also, in recent years, companies have access to more data than ever, giving them room to incentive employees on more performance metrics.”
Today, CaptivateIQ has 90 employees, more than triple what it did one year ago.
In 2020, the startup saw a bump in the number of non-high-technology companies buying its software, and as a result, CaptivateIQ is going to increase its efforts into those other verticals, according to Teng. So far, it has found success in particular in financial services, manufacturing and business services, among other sectors.
The pandemic served as a tailwind to its business. Sales teams generally rely on in-person interactions to stay productive, Schopmeyer points out. Without those activities over the past year, “having the right incentives in place became ever more critical as companies required new ways to motivate teams during the shift to remote work.”
“We saw our product usage skyrocket at the beginning of the pandemic as businesses quickly adjusted incentives, team quotas, SPIFs and other components of their comp plans to stay competitive,” he said.
The company plans to use its new capital to improve upon the user experience. Specifically, Teng said, it plans to introduce “more powerful data transformations, a richer set of formulas and off-the-shelf templates.”
Another goal is to automate and streamline the commissions process from beginning to end, he added. The startup is expanding its data integrations to support “all major data systems” and introducing new dashboarding capabilities. It’s also enhancing existing collaboration workflows around approvals, inquiries and contracts.
Looking ahead, CaptivateIQ is exploring the potential of applying its technology to solve for use cases outside the world of commissions — something that it says its customers are already doing.
“It’s exciting to see what people have been building, and we’re looking forward to enabling new solutions as we continue to release more of our core technology platform,” Teng said.
Accel Partner Ben Fletcher said the pain point of calculating and reporting sales commissions kept coming up among portfolio companies, with CaptivateIQ frequently referenced. Those companies, he said, tried more enterprise-grade solutions — “spending hundreds of thousands on implementation to ultimately find that their products did not work.” They also tried other newer tools that also just didn’t work well.
“As we dug in and talked with more and more customers, it was abundantly clear — CaptivateIQ was the best product in the space,” Fletcher said.
Besides ease of use, the fact that CaptivateIQ is a no-code tool, is a big deal to Accel.
“Similar to UIPath, Webflow, and Ada, CaptivateIQ is able to bring the power of customer development and automation to an easy to use, drag-and-drop product,” Fletcher said.
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Swyft raises $17.5 million to bring same-day delivery to all the retailers that aren’t Amazon
Thanks to major players like Amazon and Walmart, we’ve become accustomed to next- or same-day delivery. But the pandemic has also renewed our interest in buying from smaller businesses and retailers.
Swyft, a company that has just raised $17.5 million in a Series A, helps retailers of any size provide affordable same-day delivery. The round was co-led by Inovia Capital and Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Shopify and existing investors Golden Ventures and Trucks VC.
Swyft is a marketplace, connecting a network of shipping carriers with vendors. But the company also provides software to those carriers to make them more efficient, and turns them into a vast network that allows them to pick up more inventory without adding to their infrastructure.
In other words, several regional carriers may play a part in delivering a parcel shipped via Swyft without making any big changes to their original routes or adding new drivers, trucks, etc.
To date, major players in both shipping and retail have dominated this space, thanks in large part to their ability to deliver quickly. Swyft is looking to amass an army, for lack of a better term, comprised of all of the smaller players, including mom and pop retailers and vendors as well as smaller, regional carriers. Banded together through software, these carriers and retailers can match the scale and influence of the behemoths without spending a fortune.
Swyft was co-founded by Aadil Kazmi (CEO), Zeeshan Hamid (head of Engineering) and Maraz Rahman (head of Sales). Kazmi and Hamid both spent their careers at Amazon, working on data and last-mile operations for the behemoth. Rahman was an early employee at a YC-backed proptech startup.
The trio started asking themselves early last year why retailers weren’t able to offer same-day delivery and chose to tackle the gap they discovered.
The key ingredient to Swyft is not its aggregation of couriers, but the software it provides to them. Because Swyft is increasing demand for these carriers, it also needs to make them more efficient. The back-end software allows carriers to digitize or automate a good deal of what they’re traditionally doing by hand.
Kazmi says that Swyft is able to come in anywhere between 25-30% cheaper than the incumbent option.
“I don’t know what percent of your purchases are from Amazon, but for me it’s like 150%,” said Eurie Kim. “I’d prefer to buy elsewhere with the pandemic, and support local and independent brands, but Amazon’s trained us all to have fast and free shipping. It feels like an opportunity where the consumer experience is really lacking and the burden on merchants and retailers is extremely heavy.”
Swyft currently has 16 full-time employees; 12% percent are female and 75% are people of color, according to the company.
Since April 2020, Swyft has facilitated the delivery of more than 180,000 packages, and expanded gross margin from 78% to 82%, thanks in large part to revenue from the software side of the business and a zero-asset model.
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Pathlight, a performance management tool for customer-facing teams and the individuals in them, raises $25M
The longer we continue to work with either all or part of our teams in remote, out-of-physical-office environments, the more imperative it becomes for those teams to have some tools in place to keep the channels of communication and management open, and for the individuals in those teams to have a sense of how well they are performing. Today, one of the startups that provides a team productivity app with that in mind is announcing a round of funding to fuel its growth.
Pathlight, which has built a performance management platform for customer-facing teams — sales, field service and support — to help managers and employees themselves track and analyze how they are doing, to coach them when and where it’s needed and to communicate updates and more, has picked up $25 million — money that it will be using to continue growing its customer base and the functionality across its app.
The funding is being led by Insight Partners, with previous backers Kleiner Perkins and Quiet Capital also participating, alongside Uncorrelated Ventures; Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp; David Glazer, CFO of Palantir; and Michael Ovitz, co-founder of CAA and owner of Broad Beach Ventures. Pathlight has now raised $35 million.
Pathlight today provides users with a range of tools to visualize team and individual performance across various parameters set by managers, using data that teams integrate from other platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk and Outreach, among others.
Using that data and specific metrics for the job in question, managers can then initiate conversations with individuals to focus on specific areas where things need attention, and provide some coaching to help fix it. It can also be used to provide team-wide updates and encouragement, which sits alongside whatever other tools a person might use in their daily customer-facing work.
Since launching in March 2020, the startup has picked up good traction, with customers including Twilio, Earnin, Greenhouse and CLEAR. But perhaps even more importantly, the pandemic and resulting switch to remote work has underscored how necessary tools like Pathlight’s have become: The startup says that engagement on its platform has shot up 300% in the last 12 months.
Alexander Kvamme, the CEO of Pathlight, said that he first became aware of the challenges of communicating across customer-facing teams, and having transparency on how they are doing as individuals and as a group, when he was at Yelp. Yelp had acquired his startup, reservations service SeatMe, and used the acquisition to build and run Yelp Reservations.
He was quick to realize that there weren’t really effective tools for him to see how individuals in the sales team were doing, how they were doing compared to goals the company wanted to achieve and based on the sales data they already had in other systems, how to work more effectively with people to communicate when something needed changing, and how to tailor all that in line with new variations in the formula — in their case, how to sell new products like a reservations service alongside advertising and other Yelp services for businesses.
“Whether it’s five or 3,000 people, the problem doesn’t go away,” he said. “Everyone uses their own systems, and it hurts front-line employees when they don’t know how they are doing, or don’t get recognition when they are doing well, or don’t get coaching when they are not. Our thesis was that if software is eating the world, and you as a company are buying more software and analytics, over time managers will be more like data analysts. So we are providing a way for managers to be more data-driven.”
Five years down the line, Kvamme got the bug again to start a company and decided to return to that problem, teaming up with co-founder Trey Doig, the engineer who designed SeatMe and then turned it into Yelp Reservations and is now Pathlight’s CTO.
As they see it, the challenge has still not really been addressed. That’s not to say that there are not a number of companies — competitors to Pathlight — looking to fill that gap as well. Another people management platform called Lattice last year picked up $45 million (I’m guessing it will be raising money again around about now); HubSpot, Zoho, SalesLoft and a number of others also are taking different approaches to the same challenge: front-line customer-facing people spend the majority of their time and attention on interacting with people, and so there need to be better tools in place to help them figure out how to make that communication more effective, figure out what is working and what is not.
And all of this, of course, is not at all new: It’s not like we all woke up one day and suddenly wanted to know how we are doing at work, or managers suddenly felt they needed to communicate with staff.
What has changed, however, is how we work: Many of us have not seen the inside of our offices for more than a year at this point, and for a large proportion of us, we may never return again, or if we do it will be under different circumstances.
All of this means that some of the more traditional metrics and indicators of our performance, praising, management relationships and learning from teammates simply is not there anymore.
In customer-facing areas like sales, support and field service, that lack of contact may be even more acute, since many of the teams working in these environments have long relied on huddles and communication throughout the day, week and month to continuously tweak work and improve it. So while tools like Pathlight’s will be useful as data analytics provision for teams regardless of how we work, it can be argued that they are even more important right now.
“I think people have started to realize that if you can empower front line to be more independent, your numbers will go up and do better,” Kvamme said.
This is part of what went into the investment decision made here.
“With the acceleration of digital transformation across the enterprise, it’s not enough to rethink the way we work — we must also rethink the way we manage,” said Jeff Lieberman, MD at Insight Partners. “Pathlight is ushering in a new age of data-driven management, an ethos that we believe every enterprise will need to embrace — quickly. We are excited to partner with the Pathlight team as they bring their powerful platform to companies across the world.”
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Blue dot raises $32M for AI that helps businesses manage their tax accounting
Artificial intelligence has become a fundamental cornerstone of how a lot of business software works, providing a useful boost in reading, understanding and using the often-fragmented trove of data that organizations generate these days. In the latest development, an Israeli startup called Blue dot, which uses AI to help companies handle their tax accounting, is announcing $32 million in funding to continue its growth, specifically addressing the demand from companies for more user-friendly tools to help read and correctly itemize expenses for tax purposes.
“The tax sector is very complicated, and we are playing in a very large space, but it’s a huge revolution,” Blue dot’s CEO and co-founder Isaac Saft said in an interview. “Business and enterprise accounting is just not going to look the same in the future as it does today.”
The funding is being led by Ibex Investors in partnership with Lutetia Technology Partners, with past investors La Maison Partners, Viola and Target Global also contributing. Blue dot rebranded only last week from its original name, VATBox (part of the funding will be used to help Blue dot move deeper into the U.S. market, where the concept of VAT is not quite so ubiquitous: there is no national sales tax and states determine the rates themselves).
PitchBook notes that under its previous name, the startup last raised money in 2017, a $20 million Series B led by Viola at a $120 million post-money valuation.
While Blue dot is not disclosing valuation today, it’s likely to be significantly higher than this based on some of its engagements. In addition to customers like Amazon, tobacco giant BAT and Dell, it also has a partnership with one of the bigger names in expense accounting, SAP Concur, which uses Blue dot to power its expense data entry tool to automatically read charges and figure out how to itemize them so that employees or accountants don’t need to go through the pain of that themselves.
As Saft describes it, part of what is propelling his company’s business is the bigger trend of consumerization and the role that it has played in enterprise services: the working world has picked up a lot of technology tools, led by the smartphone, to help them organize their personal lives, and a lot of what they are being “served” through technology is increasingly personalized with lower barriers of entry, whether its on e-commerce sites, entertainment or social media. In the working world, people can often be frustrated as a result with how much work something like expenses can involve — a process that gets ever more complicated the more strict tax regimes become.
Blue dot’s approach is to essentially view the tax accounting process as something that can be improved with AI to make it easier for people to use — whether those people are workers itemizing their expenses, or accountants auditing them and running those through even bigger accounting processes. With a machine learning system that both takes into account a company’s own internal compliance and company policies, and the wider tax and regulatory framework, Blue dot helps “read” an expense and figure out how to notate it, how much tax should be accounted and where, and so on.
This is especially important as the process of entering and managing expenses gets pushed out to the people spending the money, rather than dedicated accountants handling that work on their behalf. An awareness of how modern offices are functioning today and evolving is one reason why investors were interested here.
“We believe Blue dot can change the way organizations worldwide manage accounting and its tax implications for their expenses,” Gal Gitter, a partner at Ibex, said in a statement. “There’s been a major market shift away from centralization of enterprise functions, including procurement. As that accelerates, more companies will be looking for ways to replace costly and complex manual processes with digital, automated solutions that use data and AI to essentially enable transactions to report themselves, which Blue dot delivers.”
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