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AI-driven energy startup Octopus hits $2B mark after $200M investment from Tokyo Gas
You’ve heard of challenger banks? Now meet the challenger energy suppliers. The U.K.’s Octopus Energy has attained a $2.06 billion valuation (£1.5 billion) after attracting a $200 million (£150 million) investment from Tokyo Gas, for a 9.7% stake, in order to launch a joint venture. Octopus will own 30% of the venture, with Tokyo Gas owning the majority. After five years of operation, Octopus is now close to the valuation of British Gas owner Centrica.
Octopus will now launch as a brand in Japan with its trademark 100% renewable electricity operation, which uses an innovative AI and data-based platform to balance loads around the grid. Its Kraken software is also licensed to Origin Energy, nPower and E.On, Good Energy and Hanwha Corporation, among others, reaching 17 million energy accounts worldwide.
“This joint venture will bring our exciting approach to renewable energy and technology to the world’s largest competitive energy market, and the investment will turbocharge our mission to revolutionize energy globally,” said chief executive Greg Jackson (pictured above) in a statement.
Australia’s Origin Energy is also set to take a stake in Octopus for $50 million (£37 million) following a larger investment in April when Origin bought a 20% stake.
Octopus says it is aiming for 100 million customers around the world by 2027, and recently launched in the U.S., Australia, Germany and New Zealand.
In the U.K., Octopus has a 5% share of the energy supply market and counts 1.8 million households in its retail portfolio, according to the company.
Tokyo Gas president Takashi Uchida said: “Through this partnership, we will contribute to the achievement of a better lifestyle for customers by realizing value creation and delivery tailored to every one of them.”
Japanese renewables lag the U.K. by 50% (renewables in Japan in 2019 accounted for 18.9% of electricity versus 37.9% in the U.K.), so the potential for growth is significant. Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has set a target of reaching net-zero by 2050.
In the U.K., Octopus has also launched Electric Juice, an electric vehicle roaming network, and partnered with Tesla to launch Tesla Power.
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Chinese autonomous driving startup WeRide bags $200M in funding
WeRide, one of China’s most-funded startups developing autonomous driving capabilities, said on Wednesday that it has raised a $200 million strategic round from Chinese bus maker Yutong.
Mega investments aren’t uncommon at companies like WeRide developing the next-generation level 4 driving standard, which denotes that the car can handle the majority of driving situations independently without human intervention.
WeRide did not disclose its valuation for this round, which is the first tranche of its Series B round, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch.
The new funding will see WeRide joining hands with Yutong, a 57-year-old company, to make autonomous-driving minibuses and city buses as well as work together on R&D, vehicle platforms and mobility services. The partners have already jointly developed a front-loaded driverless minibus for mass-production. The model, which comes without a steering wheel, accelerator or brakes, is designed for operating in urban open roads, said WeRide.
Alliance Ventures, the strategic venture capital arm of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, became WeRide’s strategic investor in 2018 following the completion of the startup’s Series A round, which was partially funded by the Chinese facial recognition giant SenseTime.
Autonomous driving startups in China are racing to showcase their progress, in part to attract funding for their cash-bleeding businesses. Alibaba-backed AutoX, for instance, began deploying driverless cars on the roads in Shenzhen in a bold move. WeRide and its rivals are testing various levels of autonomous driving vehicles in both the United States and major Chinese cities where local policies are supporting the futurist transportation tech.
“Capital’s attitude is shifting and increasingly bullish about autonomous driving and its commercial future following the COVID-19 pandemic [in China]. Many investments are happening in this space because investors don’t want to miss out on any potential leaders in autonomous driving,” the WeRide spokesperson said. “Our Series B round has attracted a lot of interest.”
WeRide’s competitors include Pony.ai in its backyard Guangzhou, AutoX and Deeproute.ai in Shenzhen, Momenta in Suzhou and Baidu in Beijing, to name a few.
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Boardable’s board management software for nonprofits raises $8 million
Indianapolis-based Boardable, a provider of board management software tools for nonprofits, has raised $8 million in a new round of financing, the company said.
The investment came from Base10 Partners with participation from the company’s seed-stage backer, the Indianapolis-based enterprise investment firm High Alpha.
Boardable provides organizational tools to help nonprofits better manage their board meetings and offers management solutions for nonprofit operations.
Software and services developers catering to the nonprofit sector are seeing more interest from investors as they look for new verticals that have been underserved by technology companies in the past. Earlier this year, Resilia, a New Orleans-based startup, raised $8 million for its own spin on services for nonprofits and charity organizations.
In a statement, Boardable said that it would use the financing to grow its team and develop new tools to become more of a one-stop shop for nonprofit operations.
“Most nonprofits manage their board members with ‘digital duct tape’—endless email threads and file sharing services. It’s a terrible experience that drains the board members and staff. Boardable is purpose-built by nonprofit founders to solve this problem, increasing efficiency and engagement,” said Jeb Banner, Boardable’s chief executive, in a statement.
Organizations including the YMCA, The Salvation Army, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the Girl Scouts of Indiana and more have turned to the company to use its paperless approach for board management.
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Austin-based ReturnSafe raises $3.25 million for its employee health management tools
ReturnSafe, a symptom checking and contact tracing employee health management toolkit for businesses, has raised $3.25 million in financing from investors including Fifty Years and Active Capital.
With companies looking to reopen operations and have their employees return to work safely, management toolkits that track employee health are piling into the market offering all sorts of strategies to maintain a safe work environment.
These include offerings from companies like WorkSafe; or the ProtectWell tool from Microsoft and UnitedHealth; or NSpace, which has similar features and a scheduling tool for booking office space safely.
For its part, ReturnSafe is boasting six-figure monthly recurring revenue and is working with 50 organizations since its launch six months ago.
The pitch to investors and customers is that the need to manage employees and ensure that workspaces are free from health risks is only going to grow in a post-COVID-19 world.
Of course, the best way for employers to ensure the safety and security of their employees is to provide adequate leave and time off if employees are sick, and to ensure that everyone has access to adequate testing at regular intervals should they not be able to work remotely.
Like other companies in the market, ReturnSafe offers a symptoms screener, a testing dashboard, a case management dashboard and a new vaccine management service. In addition to those software tools, ReturnSafe pitches a set of wearable devices with built-in social distancing alarms to ensure that employees maintain safe distances.
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StepZen snares $8M seed to build data integration API
StepZen, a new startup from the crew who gave you Apigee (which was sold to Google in 2016 for $625 million) had a different vision for their latest company. They are building a single API that pulls data from disparate sources to help developers deliver more complex customer experiences online.
Today, the startup emerged from stealth and announced an $8 million seed investment from Neotribe Ventures and Wing Venture Capital .
With years of experience working with APIs, the founders wanted to take that a step further, says CEO and co-founder Anant Jhingran. “StepZen is a product that lets front end developers easily create and consume one API for all the data they need from the back end,” he explained.
This is all in the service of providing a smoother, more consistent customer experience. That means whether you are on an e-commerce site accessing your order history or a banking app grabbing your current balance, these scenarios require pulling data from various back-end data resources. Connecting to those resources is a time-consuming task, and StepZen wants to simplify that for developers.
“Developers spend an enormous amount of time deploying and managing code that accesses the back end, and what StepZen wants to do is to give them that time back,” he said.
Instead of manually writing code to pull this data, StepZen enables developers to simply provide configuration information and credentials to connect to these back-end data sources, and then it builds a single API that handles all of the heavy lifting of pulling that data and presenting it when needed.
Jhingran uses the example of presenting a list of open orders for a customer. It sounds simple enough, but once you consider that the data could live in several places, including the CRM system, the order system or with your courier, that means accessing at least three separate and highly disparate systems. StepZen will help pull this all together via its API and present it smoothly to the user.
Today the company has 11 employees, including the three founders, with plans to add another eight or so in 2021. As they do that, CBO and co-founder Helen Whelan says they are working to build a diverse and inclusive company. While the founding team is itself diverse, they want to hire employees with diverse backgrounds and ways of thinking to build the most complete product and company.
“For the first 10 or so employees, we tapped into the networks of the people who we’ve worked with, people who you know can do a great job. Then I think it’s about deliberately expanding from there and deliberately taking the time that you need to explore and expand your pipeline of candidates,” she said.
The company is just nine months old and has been spending most of this year building the solution and working with pre-alpha users. Today the product is in alpha, with plans to release it as a software service early next year.
As the company emerges from stealth, it’s looking to continue building the product and looking for ways to remove as much complexity as possible. “We know how to do the hard things on the back end. We’ve got the database technologies and the API technologies down, and it’s now about finding how to make all of that simple on the outside and easy for developers to use, ” Whelan said.
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VergeSense raises $12M Series B for its workplace analytics service
VergeSense, a startup that uses machine vision to help businesses better understand how their office spaces are being utilized, today announced that it has raised a $12 million Series B funding round led by Tola Capital.
Including the company’s $9 million Series A round, which it raised earlier this year, VergeSense has now raised a total of $22.6 million. Previous investors include JLL Spark, Allegion Ventures, MetaProp, Y Combinator, Pathbreaker Ventures and West Ventures.
Given the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s maybe no surprise that VergeSense would be seeing quite a bit of demand for its service and sensors. While the company was seeing strong growth since its launch in 2017, the pandemic is accelerating the move to smarter office spaces. As VergeSense CEO and co-founder Dan Ryan told me, over the course of the last few months, the company added new features to help businesses manage social distancing, for example, and to better understand where in a given office they should intensify their cleaning protocols.
VergeSense sensor
It’s also becoming increasingly clear that even after we get the pandemic under control, office spaces — and office work — will look radically different. “It’s going to be a sort of a hybrid model of working, which, pre-pandemic, was already something that was happening — companies were experimenting with this — but now it’s been turbocharged,” Ryan said. “We never anticipated any of this, but I think it’s a great example of the possibilities that you can help support when you have this intelligent infrastructure all around you that allows you to almost program the physical world.”
Another new feature the company launched this year allows its tools to register when a seat is likely occupied, even though nobody is in it right now, by looking for backpacks and other signs that would signal that a desk is in use.
VergeSense currently has customers in 29 countries. These include the likes of Shell, Quicken Loans, Roche, Cisco and Telus. In total, the company’s tools watch more than 40 million square feet of space now.
Image Credits: VergeSense
As Ryan told me, the company saw quite a bit of inbound interest from investors this year and the team wanted to capitalize on the current trends. “As we look forward to ’21, especially now that this transition to an agile hybrid seating model is going to be turbocharged, we were preparing for and planning for additional growth there as well. So this was sort of opportunistic opportunity to team up with Tola to help go to the next level,” Ryan explained.
The company plans to use the new funding to continue to work on its core computer vision capabilities and hardware, but as Ryan noted, one of the focus areas for VergeSense in 2021 will also include new partnerships and integrations with tools for booking desks and rooms, as well as building automation systems. To do so, it plans to double its headcount and hire across all departments.
VergeSense is obviously not the only company playing in this space. Swiss startup Locatee, for example, raised a Series A round for its service earlier this year, though it uses network data to measure occupancy and not the kind of dedicated sensors that VergeSense is developing. Other players include the likes of Density, Basking and SteerPath.
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Liberis, the embedded finance provider for SMEs, raises additional £70M in debt
Liberis, the U.K.-based fintech that provides finance for small businesses as an alternative to a traditional bank loan or extended overdraft, has replenished its own coffers with £70 million in funding. The round is a mixture of debt and venture debt, although the company is declining to disclose the percentage split, so we can likely chalk this up as mostly debt to fund the loans Liberis issues.
Providing the financing are previous backers British Business Investments, Paragon Bank and BCI Europe, along with new partner Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). It brings the total funding raised by Liberis to £200 million, including more than £50 million in equity funding. “The new funds will be used to fuel company growth, launch new products and markets, and provide additional customer financing solutions,” says the fintech.
To date, 2007-founded Liberis has provided over £500 million in financing to 16,000 SMEs across Europe, the U.S. and the U.K. (the product is available in five new countries: U.S., Finland, Sweden, Czech Republic and Slovakia). However, lending has really picked up lately, with £250 million lent in the past two years alone.
Liberis provides SMEs with funding from £1,000 to £300,000 based on projected credit and debit card sales. However, the clever part is that the loan is paid back via a pre-agreed percentage of the business’ digital transactions. In other words, bar any minimum monthly payment agreed, the repayment schedule is directly tied to the size and pace of a business’ card transactions.
Noteworthy, the go-to-market strategy has shifted toward B2B2B — or “embedded finance” — with Liberis now predominantly partnering with marketplaces, software providers and acquirers, such as Worldpay from FIS and Global Payments. These partners integrate with Liberis to offer personalised pre-approved revenue-based financing to their end customers.
“Liberis’ core business is to enable partners to offer embedded business finance to their customers,” Rob Straathof, CEO of Liberis, tells TechCrunch. “Back in 2015, we launched one of the world’s first embedded business finance partnerships with Worldpay from FIS, and have significantly expanded our partnerships across the globe over the past years, including Global Payments, Opayo (Sagepay), EPOS Now and Worldpay U.S.”
Straathof says that by integrating Liberis’ business finance platform into a partner’s existing ecosystem and customer experience, the fintech is able to provide “instant value” for its partners and the SMEs they support.
“Through our single API integration, we receive privileged data from our partners which enables Liberis to offer hyper-personalised and pre-approved finance to SMEs,” he explains. “By making finance more personalised, intuitive and accessible for SMEs, we in turn empower our partners to unlock greater customer value by improving engagement, satisfaction and loyalty which lowers churn. Ultimately, everyone wins”.
Comments Folake Shasanya, SVB’s head of EMEA warehouse financing: “We are pleased to become a new funding partner to Liberis and have been impressed with their ability to embed financing solutions across technology platforms, payments providers and more. At SVB, supporting innovation is in our DNA and we are delighted to provide this global growth opportunity to Liberis through our warehouse and venture debt products”.
Article updated to clarify the round is a mixture of debt and venture debt, without any pure equity funding.
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Google invests in Indian startups Glance and DailyHunt
Google said on Tuesday it is investing in two Indian startups, Glance and DailyHunt, as the Android-maker makes a further push into the world’s second-largest internet market.
Two-year-old Indian startup Glance, which serves news, media content and games on the lock screen of more than 100 million smartphones, has raised $145 million in a new financing round from Google and existing investor Mithril Partners.
Glance, which is part of advertising giant InMobi Group, uses AI to offer personalized experience to its users. The service replaces the otherwise empty lock screen with locally relevant news, stories and casual games. Late last year, InMobi acquired Roposo, a Gurgaon-headquartered startup, that has enabled it to introduce short-form videos on the platform. Google is also investing in Roposo.
Roposo is a short-video platform with more than 33 million monthly active users. These users spend about 20 minutes consuming content across multiple genres in more than 10 languages on the app everyday.
Glance ships pre-installed on several smartphone models. The subsidiary maintains tie-ups with nearly every top Android smartphone vendor, including Xiaomi and Samsung, the two largest smartphone vendors in India. The service has amassed over 115 million daily active users.
“Glance is a great example of innovation solving for mobile-first and mobile-only consumption, serving content across many of India’s local languages,” said Caesar Sengupta, VP, Google, in a statement. “Still too many Indians have trouble finding content to read or services they can use confidently, in their own language. And this significantly limits the value of the internet for them, particularly at a time like this when the internet is the lifeline of so many people. This investment underlines our strong belief in working with India’s innovative startups and work towards the shared goal of building a truly inclusive digital economy that will benefit everyone.”
Naveen Tewari, founder and chief executive of Glance and InMobi Group, said the investment will pave the way for “deeper partnership between Google and Glance across product development, infrastructure, and global market expansion.” The startup plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand in the U.S.
Investment in DailyHunt
Google said on Tuesday that it is also investing in VerSe Innovation, the parent firm of Indian startup DailyHunt. Across its apps including eponymous service and short-video platform Josh, DailyHunt claims to serve over 300 million users news and entertainment content in 14 Indian languages. The startup said it has completed a round of over $100 million from Google, Microsoft and AlphaWave among other investors, and this new round values it at over $1 billion, making it a unicorn.
DailyHunt — which is co-run by Umang Bedi, former Facebook India head — plans to deploy the fresh capital to scale the Josh app, the augmentation of local language content offerings, the development of content creator ecosystem, innovation in AI and ML and the growth of its truly “made-in-Bharat-for-Bharat short-video platform,” it said.
Josh and Roposo are among over a dozen apps in India that are attempting to fill the void New Delhi created after banning TikTok in late June in the country. TikTok identified India as its biggest overseas market prior to the ban.
Google is writing both these checks from India Digitization Fund that it unveiled this year. Google has committed to invest $10 billion in India over the course of the next few years. Prior to today, the company invested $4.5 billion from this fund in Indian telecom giant Jio Platforms.
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After lockdowns boost gaming marketplace Eneba, it raises $8M from Practica and InReach
Eneba, a marketplace for gamers that sells games and other products, has raised an $8 million round of funding from Practica Capital and InReach Ventures. The funding is described as a “combination” of a seed and Series A round. Also participating in the funding for the Lithuanian startup was FJ Labs and a group of angel investors, including Mantas Mikuckas, COO of Vinted. The investment highlights once again the strength of the Baltics region as a tech ecosystem, after Lithuania produced its first Unicorn in the shape of Vinted, and Estonia added Pipedrive to its unicorns list.
With the increased shift to digital entertainment during the pandemic, the startup has managed to garner much more U.S. traffic. Launched in 2018 by two Lithuanian school friends, Vytis Uogintas and Žygimantas Mikšta, Eneba says it has attracted 26 million unique users because of its security features, “one-click to buy” gamer experience and fingerprinting technology. The site also optimizes its localized gaming experiences to show locally trending gaming products. Eneba’s platform is designed to reduce risky transactions, simplify the refunding process and deal with fraud threats.
Co-founder and CMO Žygimantas Mikšta said: “We had a lot of new users coming to Eneba during these uncertain times. While it was extremely satisfying to see our numbers increasing tenfold, there was a challenge to meet the demand. To better reflect our user numbers, we had to quickly expand our team to 130.”
Security has risen up the agenda in online gaming as virtual goods and services connected to games can be highly susceptible to fraud or theft. Although it competes with outlets like Amazon, eBay and retailers like GameStop and Game.co.uk, Eneba thinks it has found a better, tailored online pre/post-buying experience for gamers, while addressing the risk problems for sellers and buyers in the gaming world.
Donatas Keras, partner at Practica Capital said: “We are thrilled to be backing Vytis and Žygimantas. We’ve been impressed by their ability to execute at such speed as their company quickly scales, and to drive an incredible product with a unique value proposition for gamers.”
Co-founder of InReach Ventures, Roberto Bonanzinga, said: “In Europe we have a tradition of building successful companies in the gaming space. We are very excited to have discovered Eneba thanks to our AI platform when the company was unknown and under the radar. We have been extremely impressed by what the founders have been able to build in such a short amount of time.”
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OneTrust nabs $300M Series C on $5.1B valuation to expand privacy platform
OneTrust, the four-year-old privacy platform startup from the folks who brought you AirWatch (which was acquired by VMmare for $1.5 billion in 2014), announced a $300 million Series C on an impressive $5.1 billion valuation today.
The company has attracted considerable attention from investors in a remarkably short time. It came out of the box with a $200 million Series A on a $1.3 billion valuation in July 2019. Those are not typical A round numbers, but this has never been a typical startup. The Series B was more of the same — $210 million on a $2.7 billion valuation this past February.
That brings us to today’s Series C. Consider that the company has almost doubled its valuation again, and has raised $710 million in a mere 18 months, some of it during a pandemic. TCV led today’s round joining existing investors Insight Partners and Coatue.
So what are they doing to attract all this cash? In a world where privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA are already in play, with others in the works in the U.S. and around the world, companies need to be sure they are compliant with local laws wherever they operate. That’s where OneTrust comes in.
“We help companies ensure that they can be trusted, and that they make sure that they’re compliant to all laws around privacy, trust and risk,” OneTrust Chairman Alan Dabbiere told me.
That involves a suite of products that the company has already built or acquired, moving very quickly to offer a privacy platform to cover all aspects of a customer’s privacy requirements, including privacy management, discovery, third-party risk assessment, risk management, ethics and compliance and consent management.
The company has already attracted 7,500 customers to the platform — and is adding1,000 additional customers per quarter. Dabbiere says that the products are helping them be compliant without adding a lot of friction to the building or buying process. “The goal is that we don’t slow the process down, we speed it up. And there’s a new philosophy called privacy by design,” he said. That means building privacy transparency into products, while making sure they are compliant with all of the legal and regulatory requirements.
The startup hasn’t been shy about using its investments to buy pieces of the platform, having made four acquisitions already in just four years since it was founded. It already has 1,500 employees and plans to add around 900 more in 2021.
As they build this workforce, Dabbiere says being based in a highly diverse city like Atlanta has helped in terms of building a diverse group of employees. “By finding the best employees and doing it in an area like Atlanta, we are finding the diversity comes naturally,” he said, adding, “We are thoughtful about it.” CEO Kabir Barday also launched a diversity, equity and inclusion council internally this past summer in response to the Black Lives Matter movement happening in the Atlanta community and around the country.
OneTrust had relied heavily on trade shows before the pandemic hit. In fact, Dabbiere says that they attended as many as 700 a year. When that avenue closed as the pandemic hit, they initially lowered their revenue guidance, but as they moved to digital channels along with their customers, they found that revenue didn’t drop as they expected.
He says that OneTrust has money in the bank from its prior investments, but they had reasons for taking on more cash now anyway. “The number one reason for doing this was the currency of our stock. We needed to revalue it for employees, for acquisitions, and the next steps of our growth,” he said.
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