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Fin names former Twilio exec Evan Cummack as CEO, raises $20M
Work insights platform Fin raised $20 million in Series A funding and brought in Evan Cummack, a former Twilio executive, as its new chief executive officer.
The San Francisco-based company captures employee workflow data from across applications and turns it into productivity insights to improve the way enterprise teams work and remain engaged.
Fin was founded in 2015 by Andrew Kortina, co-founder of Venmo, and Facebook’s former VP of product and Slow Ventures partner Sam Lessin. Initially, the company was doing voice assistant technology — think Alexa but powered by humans and machine learning — and then workplace analytics software in 2020. You can read more about Fin’s origins at the link below.
The new round was led by Coatue, with participation from First Round Capital, Accel and Kleiner Perkins. The original team was talented, but small, so the new funding will build out sales, marketing and engineering teams, Cummack said.
“At that point, the right thing was to raise money, so at the end of last year, the company raised a $20 million Series A, and it was also decided to find a leadership team that knows how to build an enterprise,” Cummack told TechCrunch. “The company had completely pivoted and removed ‘Analytics’ from our name because it was not encompassing what we do.”
Fin’s software measures productivity and provides insights on ways managers can optimize processes, coach their employees and see how teams are actually using technology to get their work done. At the same time, employees are able to manage their workflow and highlight areas where there may be bottlenecks. All combined, it leads to better operations and customer experiences, Cummack said.
Graphic showing how work is really done. Image Credits: Fin
Fin’s view is that as more automation occurs, the company is looking at a “renaissance of human work.” There will be more jobs and more types of jobs, but people will be able to do them more effectively and the work will be more fulfilling, he added.
Particularly with the use of technology, he notes that in the era before cloud computing, there was a small number of software vendors. Now with the average tech company using over 130 SaaS apps, it allows for a lot of entrepreneurs and adoption of best-in-breed apps so that a viable company can start with a handful of people and leverage those apps to gain big customers.
“It’s different for enterprise customers, though, to understand that investment and what they are spending their money on as they use tools to get their jobs done,” Cummack added. “There is massive pressure to improve the customer experience and move quickly. Now with many people working from home, Fin enables you to look at all 130 apps as if they are one and how they are being used.”
As a result, Fin’s customers are seeing metrics like 16% increase in team utilization and engagement, a 25% decrease in support ticket handle time and a 71% increase in policy compliance. Meanwhile, the company itself is doubling and tripling its customers and revenue each year.
Now with leadership and people in place, Cummack said the company is positioned to scale, though it already had a huge head start in terms of a meaningful business.
Arielle Zuckerberg, partner at Coatue, said via email that she was part of a previous firm that invested in Fin’s seed round to build a virtual assistant. She was also a customer of Fin Assistant until it was discontinued.
When she heard the company was pivoting to enterprise, she “was excited because I thought it was a natural outgrowth of the previous business, had a lot of potential and I was already familiar with management and thought highly of them.”
She believed the “brains” of the company always revolved around understanding and measuring what assistants were doing to complete a task as a way to create opportunities for improvement or automation. The pivot to agent-facing tools made sense to Zuckerberg, but it wasn’t until the global pandemic that it clicked.
“Service teams were forced to go remote overnight, and companies had little to no visibility into what people were doing working from home,” she added. “In this remote environment, we thought that Fin’s product was incredibly well-suited to address the challenges of managing a growing remote support team, and that over time, their unique data set of how people use various apps and tools to complete tasks can help business leaders improve the future of work for their team members. We believe that contact center agents going remote was inevitable even before COVID, but COVID was a huge accelerant and created a compelling ‘why now’ moment for Fin’s solution.”
Going forward, Coatue sees Fin as “a process mining company that is focused on service teams.” By initially focusing on customer support and contact center use case — a business large enough to support a scaled, standalone business — rather than joining competitors in going after Fortune 500 companies where implementation cycles are long and there is slow time-to-value, Zuckerberg said Fin is better able to “address the unique challenges of managing a growing remote support team with a near-immediate time-to-value.”
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LiveControl raises $30M to help venues livestream events
One thing seems certain: The past year-and-a-half has fundamentally transformed the world of live events. The pandemic left plenty of venues scrambling for alternative revenue streams and, in many cases, shutting down for good.
On the flip side, it’s been a massive driver for those companies working to expand the reach of in-person events. Take LiveControl, which just raised a $30 million Series A led by Coatue and featuring existing investors First Round Capital, Box Group, Susa Ventures and TriplePoint. The round brings the So Cal company’s total funding to $33 million, on the heels of a $3.2 million seed led by FRC last August.
The company offers a production suite that’s a sort of plug and play solution for venues. “What if you could snap your fingers and an entire video product crew would appear, for just $150?” CEO Patrick Coyne asked, extremely rhetorically in a comment offered to TechCrunch.
Image Credits: LiveControl
LiveControl says its technology has been deployed in “hundreds” of spots in the U.S., everywhere from music venues and comedy clubs to Broadway theaters and religious institutions. With its device agnostic software and support, the company also provides third-party camera hardware as part of a package, for a more out-of-the-box solution.
The latest funding round will go toward accelerating its technology and expanding employee headcount from 40 people to 120 over the next year and a half. LiveControl and its investors are clearly bullish on the possibilities here. But there remain broader questions around how much audience members’ interest in remote viewing regresses to the mean once venues reopen across the country and world.
“Video is now table stakes for most organizations, venues and creators,” says Coyne. “We’re only seeing it accelerate, and everyone is forward leaning to make bigger investments to improve their video quality.”
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Digital lending platform Blend valued at over $4B in its public debut
Mortgages may not be considered sexy, but they are a big business.
If you’ve refinanced or purchased a home digitally lately, you may not have noticed the company powering the software behind it — but there’s a good chance that company is Blend.
Founded in 2012, the startup has steadily grown to be a leader in the mortgage tech industry. Blend’s white label technology powers mortgage applications on the site of banks including Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank, for example, with the goal of making the process faster, simpler and more transparent.
The San Francisco-based startup’s SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform currently processes over $5 billion in mortgages and consumer loans per day, up from nearly $3 billion last July.
Today, Blend made its debut as a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange, trading under the symbol “BLND.” As of early afternoon, Eastern Time, the stock was trading up over 13% at $20.36.
On Thursday night, the company had said it would offer 20 million shares at a price of $18 per share, indicating the company was targeting a valuation of $3.6 billion.
That compares to a $3.3 billion valuation at the time of its last raise in January — a $300 million Series G funding round that included participation from Coatue and Tiger Global Management. Also, let’s not forget that Blend only became a unicorn last August when it raised a $75 million Series F. Over its lifetime, Blend had raised $665 million before Friday’s public market debut.
In filing its S-1 on June 21, Blend revealed that its revenue had climbed to $96 million in 2020 from $50.7 million in 2019. Meanwhile, its net loss narrowed from $81.5 million in 2019 to $74.6 million in 2020.
In 2020, the San Francisco-based startup significantly expanded its digital consumer lending platform. With that expansion, Blend began offering its lender customers new configuration capabilities so that they could launch any consumer banking product “in days rather than months.”
Looking ahead, the company had said it expects its revenue growth rate “to decline in future periods.” It also doesn’t envision achieving profitability anytime soon as it continues to focus on growth. Blend also revealed that in 2020, its top five customers accounted for 34% of its revenue.
Today, TechCrunch spoke with co-founder and CEO Nima Ghamsari about the company’s decision to go with a traditional IPO versus the ubiquitous SPAC or even a direct listing.
For one, Blend said he wanted to show its customers that it is an “around for a long time company” by making sure there’s enough on its balance sheet to continue to grow.
“We had to talk and convince some of the biggest investors in the world to invest in us, and that speaks to how long we’ll be around to serve these customers,” he said. “So it was a combination of our capital need and wanting to cement ourselves as a really credible software provider to one of the most regulated industries.”
Ghamsari emphasized that Blend is a software company that powers the mortgage process and is not the one offering the mortgages. As such, it works with the flock of fintechs that are working to provide mortgages.
“A lot of them are using Blend under the hood, as the infrastructure layer,” he said.
Overall, Ghamsari believes this is just the beginning for Blend.
“One of the things about financial services is that it’s still mostly powered by paper. So a lot of Blend’s growth is just going deeper into this process that we got started in years ago,” he said. As mentioned above, the company started out with its mortgage product but just keeps adding to it. Today, it also powers other loans such as auto, personal and home equity.
“A lot of our growth is actually powered by our other lines of business,” Ghamsari told TechCrunch. “There’s a lot to build because the larger digitization trends are just getting started in financial services. It’s a relatively large industry that has lots of change.”
In May, digital mortgage lender Better.com announced it would combine with a SPAC, taking itself public in the second half of 2021.
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This QR code startup just raised $5 million co-led by Coatue and Seven Seven Six
Amazon revolutionized one-click shopping, and it has a nearly $2 trillion market cap to show for the effort.
Now, a 10-person startup founded by JD Maresco, who previously cofounded the public safety app Citizen, says it plans to make it a lot easier for retailers who sell directly to their customers to make re-ordering their products just as fast and simple through its QR codes. Indeed, Maresco’s new startup, Batch, is already working with numerous products and brands that use Shopify, promising their customers “one-tap checkout” when it’s time to reorder an item as long as the retailer has slapped one of Batch’s codes on their items or incorporated the codes directly into their packaging.
For the moment, New York-based Batch is wholly reliant on Apple’s App Clip technology, which produces a lightweight version of an app to save people from having to download and install it before using it. (Users can instead load just a small part of an app on demand, and when they’re done, the App Clip disappears.)
But Maresco — whose company just raised $5 million in seed funding co-led by Coatue and Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, with participation from Weekend Fund, Shrug Capital, and the Chainsmokers, among others — says Batch will eventually work on both iOS and Android phones. We talked with him yesterday to learn more about its ambitions to make the physical world “instantly shoppable.” Our chat has been edited lightly for length and clarity.
TC: Citizen and Batch are very different companies. Is there a unifying thread?
JM: I’ve spent a good portion of my career, trying to change the way people think about and interact with their physical environment. With Citizen, we were questioning why everyone doesn’t have immediate access to information about what the police are doing in our neighborhoods. With Batch, we’re asking a simpler question but something that matters to me as a consumer: Why isn’t it easier for me to get more of a product I love and use?
With subscriptions in general, I’ve found myself constantly frustrated because every few weeks I’m emailing to either pause a subscription, or restart it. I wanted an easier way to use my phone to reorder in 10 seconds on the spot. Our phones are capable of much more than we put them to use for and, so we set out to tackle that problem.
TC: Right now, Batch integrates with Shopify alone, correct?
JM: We have a Shopify plugin that brands can connect into the Batch platform, and then we integrate the experience, all the way from the physical world wherever this QR code lives, through the purchase experience on the mobile side of things into their fulfillment on the back end. But we’re also expanding to other e-commerce platforms.
TC: And Batch takes a per-transaction fee from every item that’s purchased using your codes?
JM: We’re developing our pricing model over time, but currently we’re taking a service percentage-based fee.
TC: How are you getting brands to partner with you?
JM: Brands are starting to wake up to this idea that they can actually create a new retail channel off their physical packaging, where a customer can effectively shop throughout their home or their place of work or anywhere where they interact with these products the moment they run out of an item. So we’ve been able to spend time with dozens of brands now, and work with them to actually reengineer their packaging and say, ‘Let’s put QR codes front and center and figure out how to make this a really important customer touchpoint.’
TC: How many brands are using the codes currently?
JM: We’re launching dozens of brands this summer. We’ve had overwhelming demand, to be honest, and we haven’t really even fully launched yet.
TC: These are physical codes that you’re sending off to your retail partners — stickers, magnets. Are you also creating digital QR codes?
JM: We have customers that are integrating QR codes into out-of-home advertisements, into direct mail, into T shirts, into promotional vans, so we’re not just limited to packaging. There’s a wide range of places that you can integrate QR codes for your customers.
TC: It’s interesting that Coatue led your round. We’ve seen the firm delve more into early-stage deals but a seed round seems anomalous. How did you connect with the firm?
JM: We met during the seed process. They reached out to me and I developed a relationship with Andy Chen and Matt Mazzeo and it was a great opportunity to to work with their platform — the way they support the go-to-market motion around B2B companies; they have a great data platform. Alexis [Ohanian’s] experience in the consumer space was really appealing, too.
TC: Your company makes sense, but I wonder what’s special about these codes. What’s to prevent countless other startups from doing what you’re doing?
JM: QR codes are all over the place. The product we’re building makes it really easy for brands to create high converting shopping experiences and a native mobile interface. It’s a combination of our Shopify integration and our native product design experience and the relationships we have with these brands and how we help them with their packaging that’s not something you can spin up overnight.
TC: I have to ask about Citizen, which was in the headlines recently for all the wrong reasons. Is there anything you want to say about the company or the app or some of that recent coverage?
JM: I’m not going to comment on the recent press, but I continue to be proud of what the company is continuing to do to help communities stay safe and understand what police and first responders are doing in their neighborhoods.
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Aurora Solar aims to power the growing solar industry with a $250M round C
Aurora Solar had one of those pitches that seemed obvious in retrospect. Instead of going to a house and measuring its roof manually for a solar panel installation, why not use aerial scans and imagery of the whole region? That smart play earned them a $20 million A round, a $50 million B round and now, only six months later, a massive $250 million C round as they aim to become the software platform on which the coming solar power expansion will be run.
The idea is simple enough to explain, but difficult to pull off. There’s lots of data out there about the topography, physical and infrastructural, of most cities. Satellite imagery, aerial lidar scans, light and power lines and usage data and, of course, where and how the sun hits a given location — this information is readily available. Aurora’s innovation wasn’t just using it, but assembling it into a cohesive system that’s simple and effective enough to be used widely by solar installers.
“Aurora’s core value proposition is the fact that you can do things remotely much faster and more accurately than if you traveled to the site,” explained co-founder and COO Sam Adeyemo.
Having developed algorithms that ingest the aforementioned data, the service they offer is a very quick turnaround on the tricky question of whether a solar installation makes sense for a potential customer, and if so what it might cost and look like, down to the size and angle of the panels.
Image Credits: Aurora Solar
“It’s not uncommon for the acquisition cost for a customer to be thousands of dollars,” said Adeyemo’s co-founder, CEO Chris Hopper. That’s partly because every installation is custom. He estimated that half the price tag of any setup is “soft cost” — that is, over and above the actual price of the hardware.
“If the quote is for $30K, what actually goes on your roof might be $15K, the rest is overhead, design, acquisition cost, yada yada yada,” he explained. “That’s the next frontier to make solar cost-competitive, and that’s where Aurora comes in. Every time we shave a few dollars off the price of an installation, it opens it up for new consumers.”
The company doesn’t do its own lidar flights or solar installations, so the $250 million in funding may strike some as rather high for a company making software. Though I did my best to tease out any secret skunkworks projects under way at Aurora, Adeyemo and Hopper patiently explained that enterprise-scale software isn’t cheap, and the funding is proportional to their ambitions.
“The amount we raised speaks to the opportunity ahead of us,” said Hopper. “There’s a lot more solar to put on roofs.”
Aurora has been used for evaluating about 5 million solar projects so far, about a fifth of which end up being built, Adeyemo estimated. And that’s just a fraction of a fraction. Solar makes up about 2% of the U.S.’s power infrastructure, right now, but that’s on track to increase by an order of magnitude in the next 20 years.
The new administration has thrown fuel on the fire of the industry’s optimism, and whether or not something like the Green New Deal comes to fruition, the fundamentally different approach to environmental and energy policy means there are more eyeballs directed at clean energy and consequently a lot of checks being written.
“It counts for a lot. With heightened awareness about climate change there will be more interest in ways to mitigate it,” said Adeyemo. He gave the example of Texas, which after the recent storms and blackouts had more inquiries per capita than anywhere else in the country. Renewables may be a charged issue in some ways, but solar power is bipartisan and broadly popular across the political spectrum.
Image Credits: Aurora Solar
The $250 million round, led by Coatue and with participation from previous investors ICONIQ, Energize Ventures and Fifth Wall, allows the company to go both broad and deep with their product.
“Historically we’ve been more of a design solution; the next phase is to broaden that into a platform that covers more of the process of going solar,” said Hopper. “We don’t believe this is going to be a niche market — going from 2 to 20% and beyond, that’s a huge endeavor.”
The co-founders would not be more specific than that scaling a SaaS company requires significant cash up front, and during the push to come they can’t be worried about whether or when they’ll need to get more capital.
“The first five years of the company were quasi-bootstrapped… we’d raised like a million bucks. So we know what it’s like to grow a company from that perspective, and now we know what it’s like to really need the capital to scale the business,” said Adeyemo. “If you want to be the platform for a significant percentage of the energy capacity of the country… you gotta tool up.”
What exactly tooling up comprises we will soon find out — the company is planning to announce more news at its upcoming summit in June.
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Persona lands $50M for identity verification after seeing 10x YoY revenue growth
The identity verification space has been heating up for a while and the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated demand with more people transacting online.
Persona, a startup focused on creating a personalized identity verification experience “for any use case,” aims to differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded space. And investors are banking on the San Francisco-based company’s ability to help businesses customize the identity verification process — and beyond — via its no-code platform in the form of a $50 million Series B funding round.
Index Ventures led the financing, which also included participation from existing backer Coatue Management. In late January 2020, Persona raised $17.5 million in a Series A round. The company declined to reveal at which valuation this latest round was raised.
Businesses and organizations can access Persona’s platform by way of an API, which lets them use a variety of documents, from government-issued IDs through to biometrics, to verify that customers are who they say they are. The company wants to make it easier for organizations to implement more watertight methods based on third-party documentation, real-time evaluation such as live selfie checks and AI to verify users.
Persona’s platform also collects passive signals such as a user’s device, location, and behavioral signals to provide a more holistic view of a user’s risk profile. It offers a low code and no code option depending on the needs of the customer.
The company’s momentum is reflected in its growth numbers. The startup’s revenue has surged by “more than 10 times” while its customer base has climbed by five times over the past year, according to co-founder and CEO Rick Song, who did not provide hard revenue numbers. Meanwhile, Persona’s headcount has more than tripled to just over 50 people.
“When we look back at the space five to 10 years ago, AI was the next differentiation and every identity verification company is doing AI and machine learning,” Song told TechCrunch. “We believe the next big differentiator is more about tailoring and personalizing the experience for individuals.”
As such, Song believes that growth can be directly tied to Persona’s ability to help companies with “unique” use cases with a SaaS platform that requires little to no code and not as much heavy lifting from their engineering teams. Its end goal, ultimately, is to help businesses deter fraud, stay compliant and build trust and safety while making it easier for them to customize the verification process to their needs. Customers span a variety of industries, and include Square, Robinhood, Sonder, Brex, Udemy, Gusto, BlockFi and AngelList, among others.
“The strategy your business needs for identity verification and management is going to be completely different if you’re a travel company verifying guests versus a delivery service onboarding new couriers versus a crypto company granting access to user funds,” Song added. “Even businesses within the same industry should tailor the identity verification experience to each customer if they want to stand out.”
Image Credits: Persona
For Song, another thing that helps Persona stand out is its ability to help customers beyond the sign-on and verification process.
“We’ve built an identity infrastructure because we don’t just help businesses at a single point in time, but rather throughout the entire lifecycle of a relationship,” he told TechCrunch.
In fact, much of the company’s growth last year came in the form of existing customers finding new use cases within the platform in addition to new customers signing on, Song said.
“We’ve been watching existing customers discover more ways to use Persona. For example, we were working with some of our customer base on a single use case and now we might be working with them on 10 different problems — anywhere from account opening to a bad actor investigation to account recovery and anything in between,” he added. “So that has probably been the biggest driver of our growth.”
Index Ventures Partner Mark Goldberg, who is taking a seat on Persona’s board as part of the financing, said he was impressed by the number of companies in Index’s own portfolio that raved about Persona.
“We’ve had our antennas up for a long time in this space,” he told TechCrunch. “We started to see really rapid adoption of Persona within the Index portfolio and there was the sense of a very powerful and very user friendly tool, which hadn’t really existed in the category before.”
Its personalization capabilities and building block-based approach too, Goldberg said, makes it appealing to a broader pool of users.
“The reality is there’s so many ways to verify a user is who they say they are or not on the internet, and if you give people the flexibility to design the right path to get to a yes or no, you can just get to a much better outcome,” he said. “That was one of the things we heard — that the use cases were not like off the rack, and I think that has really resonated in a time where people want and expect the ability to customize.”
Persona plans to use its new capital to grow its team another twofold by year’s end to support its growth and continue scaling the business.
In recent months, other companies in the space that have raised big rounds include Socure and Sift.
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Developer-focused video platform Mux achieves unicorn status with $105M funding
Barely more than eight months after announcing a $37 million funding round, Mux has another $105 million.
The Series D was led by Coatue and values the company at more than $1 billion (Mux isn’t disclosing the specific valuation). Existing investors Accel, Andreessen Horowitz and Cobalt also participated, as did new investor Dragoneer.
Co-founder and CEO Jon Dahl told me that Mux didn’t need to raise more funding. But after last year’s Series C, the company’s leadership kept in touch with Coatue and other investors who’d expressed interest, and they ultimately decided that more money could help fuel faster growth during “this inflection moment in video.”
Building on the thesis popularized by a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen, Dahl said, “I think video’s eating software, the same way software was eating the world 10 years ago.” In other words, where video was once something we watched at our desks and on our sofas, it’s now everywhere, whether we’re scrolling through our social media feeds or exercising on our Pelotons.
“We’re at the early days of a five- or 10-year major transition, where video is moving into being a first-class part of every software project,” he said.
Dahl argued that Mux is well-suited for this transition because it’s “a video platform for developers,” with an API-centric approach that results in faster publishing and reliable streaming for viewers. Its first product was a monitoring and analytics tool called Mux Data, followed by its streaming video product Mux Video.
“If you’re going to build a video platform and do it data-first, you need heavy data and monitoring and analytics,” Dahl explained. “We built the data layer [and then] we built the streaming platform.”
Customers include Robinhood, PBS, ViacomCBS, Equinox Media and VSCO — Dahl said that while Mux works with digital media companies, “our core market is software.” He suggested that back when the company was founded in 2015, video was largely seen as a “niche,” or “something you needed if you were ESPN or Netflix.” But the last few years have illustrated that “video is a fundamental part of how we communicate” and that “every software company should have video as a core part of its products.”
Mux founders Adam Brown, Steven Heffernan, Matt McClure and Jon Dahl. Image Credits: Mux
Not surprisingly, demand increased dramatically during the pandemic. During the past year, on-demand streaming via the Mux platform grew by 300%, while live video streaming grew 3,700% and revenue quadrupled.
“Which is a lot of work,” Dahl said with a laugh. “We definitely spent a lot of the last year ramping and scaling and investing in the platform.”
This new funding will allow Mux (which has now raised a total of $175 million) to continue that investment. Dahl said he plans to grow the team from 80 to 200 employees and to explore potential acquisitions.
“We were impressed by Mux’s laser focus on the developer community, and saw impressive customer retention and expansion indicative of the strong value their solutions provide,” said Coatue General Partner David Schneider in a statement. “This funding will enable Mux to continue to build on their customer-centric platform and we are proud to partner with Mux as it leads the way to this hybrid future.”
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NBA Top Shot maker Dapper Labs is now worth $2.6 billion thanks to half of Hollywood, the NBA and Michael Jordan
From the early success of Crypto Kitties to the explosive growth of NBA Top Shot, Dapper Labs has been at the forefront of the cryptocurrency collectible craze known as NFTs.
Now the company is reaping the benefits of its trailblazing status with a new $305 million financing led by some of the biggest names in Hollywood, sports and investing.
The new round values the company at a whopping $2.6 billion, according to multiple media reports, and comes at a time when NFTs have captured the popular imagination.
Leading the company’s financing was Coatue, the financial services firm that’s behind many of the biggest later-stage tech deals. But heavy hitters from the entertainment world also took their cut — these are folks like NBA legend Michael Jordan as well as current players and funds including Kevin Durant, Andre Iguodala, Kyle Lowry, Spencer Dinwiddie, Andre Drummond, Alex Caruso, Michael Carter-Williams, Josh Hart, Udonis Haslem, JaVale McGee, Khris Middleton, Domantas Sabonis, Klay Thompson, Nikola Vucevic and Thad Young and Richard Seymour’s 93 Ventures.
Entertainment and music heavyweights including Ashton Kutcher and Guy Oseary’s Sound Ventures, Will Smith and Keisuke Honda’s Dreamers VC, Shawn Mendes and Andrew Gertler’s AG Ventures, Shay Mitchell and 2 Chainz also bought in on the action.
And from the venture world comes other strategic investors like Andreessen Horowitz, The Chernin Group, USV, Version One and Venrock.
The company said it would use the funds to continue building out NBA Top Shot and expanding the updated digital trading card platform to other sports and a broader creator community.
Top Shot has already notched over $500 million in sales for its animated trading cards featuring things like LeBron James dunking, and the sky (at least for now) is seemingly the limit for the collectible applications of blockchain.
It’s like the one thing that cryptocurrency can do really well and it’s been embraced far beyond the world of sports collectibles. The recent $69 million sale of a digital piece of art at Christies also marks a watershed moment for the art world.
“NBA Top Shot is successful because it taps into basketball fandom — it’s a new and more exciting way for people to connect with their favorite teams and players,” said Roham Gharegozlou, CEO of Dapper Labs. “We want to bring the same magic to other sports leagues as well as help other entertainment studios and independent creators find their own approaches in exploring open platforms. NFTs unlock a new model for monetization that benefits the fans much more than advertising or sponsorships.”
Powering the Top Shot system and Dapper Labs’ other offerings is a new blockchain protocol called Flow, which purports to handle mainstream consumer applications at scale, and can support mass adoption.
Flow also allows for transactions using fiat currency and credit cards, and provides a much needed ease of cryptocurrency, and can keep customers safe from the fraud or theft common in cryptocurrency systems, according to a statement from Dapper Labs.
Flow enables NFT marketplaces and other decentralized applications that need to scale to handle mainstream demand without extremely high transaction costs (“gas fees”) or environmental concerns, the company said.
“NBA Top Shot is one of the best demonstrations we’ve seen of how quickly new technology can change the landscape for media and sports fans,” said Kevin Durant, co-founder of Thirty Five Ventures. “We’re excited to follow the progress with everything happening on Flow blockchain and use our platform with the Boardroom to connect with fans in a new way.”
Already companies like Warner Music Group, Ubisoft, Warner Media and the UFC, as well as thousands of third-party developers, artists and other creators, are using the Flow mainnet to sell collectible cards and develop custodial wallets.
Additional investors in the round include: MLB players like Tim Beckham and Nolan Arenado; NFL players Ken Crawley, Thomas Davis, Stefon Diggs, Dee Ford, Malcom Jenkins, Rodney McLeod, Jordan Matthew, Devin McCourty, Jason McCourty, DK Metcalf, Tyrod Taylor and Trent Williams; team ownership, including Vivek Ranadivé (Kings); and notable sports investors Bolt Ventures.
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Infinitus emerges from stealth with $21.4M for ‘voice RPA’ aimed at healthcare companies
Robotic process automation (RPA) has found a strong foothold in the world of enterprise IT through its effective use of AI and other technology to help automate repetitive tasks to free up people to focus on more complicated work. Today, a startup called Infinitus is coming out of stealth to apply this concept to the world of healthcare — specifically, to speed up the process of voice communication between entities in the fragmented U.S. healthcare industry.
Infinitus uses “voice RPA” to become the machine-generated voice that makes calls from, say, healthcare providers or pharmacies to insurance companies to go through a series of questions (directed at humans at the other end) that typically need to be answered before payments are authorized and other procedures can take place. Those conversations are then ingested into Infinitus’s platform to parse them for relevant information that is input into the right fields to trigger whatever actions need to happen as a result of the calls.
The startup is coming out of “stealth mode” today but it has been around for a couple of years already and has signed on a number of large healthcare companies as customers — for example, the wholesale drug giant AmerisourceBergen — and is in some cases contributing its technology to public health efforts around the current coronavirus pandemic, with one organization currently using it to automate a mass calling system across several states to get a better idea of vaccine availability to help connect the earliest doses with the most vulnerable groups that need them the fastest.
It made 75,000 calls on behalf of 12,000 providers in January alone.
Infinitus’ public launch is also coming with a funding kicker: it has picked up $21.4 million in Series A funding from a group of big-name investors to build the business.
The round is being co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Coatue, with Gradient Ventures (Google’s early-stage AI fund), Quiet Capital, Firebolt Ventures and Tau Ventures also participating, along with individual investments from a selection of executives across the worlds of AI and big tech: Ian Goodfellow, Gokul Rajaram, Aparna Chennapragada and Qasar Younis.
Coatue is shaping up to be a huge investor in the opportunity in RPA. Earlier this week, it emerged that it co-led the latest investment in UiPath, one of the leaders in the space, having been a part of previous rounds as well.
“Coatue is proud to have led the Series A in Infinitus,” says Yanda Erlich, a general partner at Coatue. “We are big believers in the transformative power of RPA and Enterprise Automation. We believe Infinitus’ VoiceRPA solution enables healthcare organizations to automate previously costly and manual calls and faxes and empowers these organizations to see benefits from end-to-end process automation.”
The problem that Infinitus is addressing is the fact that healthcare, in particular in the privatized U.S. market, has a lot of time-consuming and often confusing red tape when it comes to getting things done. And a lot of the most immediate pain points of that process can be found in voice calls, which are the primary basis of critical communications between different entities in the ecosystem.
Voice calls are used to initiate most processes, whether it’s to obtain critical information, follow up on a form or previous communication, or pass on some data, or of course provide clearance for a payment.
There are 900 million calls of these kinds made in the U.S., with the average length of each call 35 minutes, and with the average healthcare professional who works in an administrative role to make those calls dedicating some 4.5 hours each day to being on the phone.
All of this ultimately adds to the exorbitant costs of healthcare services in the U.S. (and likely some of those inscrutable lines of fees that you might see on bills), not to mention delays in giving care. (And those volumes underscore just what a small piece Infinitus touches today.)
Founder and CEO Ankit Jain — a repeat entrepreneur and ex-Googler who held senior roles in engineering and was a founding partner at Gradient at the search giant — told TechCrunch in an interview that the idea for Infinitus first occurred to him a couple of years ago, when he was still at Gradient.
“We were starting to see a lot of improvements in voice communications technology, turning text into speech and speech into text. I realised that it would soon be possible to automate phone calls where a machine could carry out a full conversation with someone.”
Indeed, around that time, Google itself had launched Duplex, a service built around the same principle, but aimed at consumers, for people to book appointments, restaurant tables and other services.
He determined that just being able to talk like a human and understand natural language wasn’t the only issue, and not even the main one, in enterprises applications like healthcare environments, which rely on specific jargon and particular scenarios that are probably less rather than more like actual human interactions.
“I thought, if someone wanted to build this for healthcare it would change it,” he said. And so he decided to do just that.
Jain said that Infinitus is using public cloud speech to text systems but the natural language processing and flows to triage and use of the information gained from the conversations are built in house. The specialization of the content and interactions potentially is also one reason why Infinitus might not worry so soon about cannibalization from bigger RPA players, at least for now.
The fact that services like these — the new generation of robocalls, as it were — can sound “lifelike”, like actual humans, has been something that consumer versions have aspired to, although that hasn’t always worked out for the best. Duplex, for example, in its early days came under criticism for how its excellent quality might actually be deceptive, because it wasn’t clear to users they were speaking to a machine logging their responses in a data harnessing exercise. Jain notes that Infinitus is actually intentionally choosing voices that sound like bots to help make that clear to those taking the calls.
He said that this also “helps reduce the level of chatter” on the conversation and keeps the person speaking focused on business.
On that front, it seems that while Infinitus works like other voice RPA services, connected up with live, human agents who can take over calls if they get tricky, that hasn’t really needed to be used.
“Today we don’t need to triage with humans because we see high enough success rates with our system,” he said.
You might wonder, why hasn’t the healthcare industry just moved past voice altogether? Surely there are ways of exchanging data between entities so that calls could become obsolete? Turns out that at least for now that isn’t something that will change quickly, Jain said.
Part of it is because the fragmentation in the market means it’s hard to implement new standards across the board, covering hundreds of insurance payers, healthcare providers, pharmaceutical groups, billing and collections organisations and more. And when it comes down to it, a phone call ends up being the easiest route for many admins who might have to typically deal with 100 different payment companies and other entities, each with a different logging mechanism. “It’s a lot of cognitive load, so it’s often easier to just pick up the phone,” Jain said.
Bringing in voiceRPA like Infinitus’s is part of that long haul to update the bigger system.
“By automating one side we are showing the other side that it can be done,” Jain said. “Right now, there are just too many players and getting them to agree on one standard is a gargantuan task, so trying to win one small piece after another is how it’s done. It should not be voice, but by the time standards bodies agree on something else, the world has moved on.”
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Melio raises $110M on a $1.3B valuation to bring B2B payments for SMBs into the 21st century
Payments for consumers have made a huge shift to the online world in the last year, a time when they have moved more of their purchasing to the internet to minimize in-person transactions in the midst of a virus-based health pandemic. Today, a startup that has built a similar kind of payments infrastructure — but specifically targeting small businesses and the payments they need to make — has raised a big round of funding to double down on its own slice of the market.
Melio, which provides a platform for SMBs to pay other companies electronically using bank transfers, debit cards or credit — along with the option of cutting paper checks for recipients if that is what the recipients request — has closed $110 million in funding at a valuation that the company said was now $1.3 billion.
The company’s focus to date has been building and growing a system to replace the paper invoices, snail mail and bank transfers that might take multiple days to clear and still dominate payments for small and medium enterprises. The company was founded in Israel but has to date focused a lot of its attention on the U.S. market, where it saw growth of 2,000% last year (it doesn’t disclose the actual number of customers that it has). CEO Matan Bar said that this is where the company will continue to focus for now.
This latest round was led by Coatue and also included participation from previous backers Accel, Aleph, Bessemer Venture Partners, Corner Ventures, General Catalyst and Latitude. It caps off a huge year for the company, which raised $130 million in 2020 (and $256 million overall), with other recent backers including others like American Express and Salesforce.
The latter two are strategic backers: AmEx is one of the options given to customers paying other businesses through Melio’s rails.
Salesforce, meanwhile, is not yet an integration partner, but Bar — who co-founded the company with Ilan Atias and Ziv Paz (respectively CTO and COO) — described its interest as similar to that of Intuit-owned accounting giant QuickBooks. QuickBooks connects with Melio so that users of one can seamlessly import activity from one platform into the other, and Bar hinted that there is an interest from the CRM giant, which provides a number of other business and productivity tools, to work together in a similar fashion.
Bar came to found Melio on the heels of years of experience in peer-to-peer payments focused on the consumer market. He previously ran PayPal’s business unit focused on peer-to-peer payments, which included Venmo in the U.S. and equivalent services (not branded Venmo) outside of it. He came to PayPal, which at the time was a part of eBay, through eBay’s acquisition of his previous startup, a social gifting platform called The Gifts Project.
As Bar describes it, PayPal “was the first time I experienced what the digitization of payments looked like as they were shifting from cash to mobile payments. Consumers were buying online instead of at brick-and-mortar stores, and even when they were getting physical items, they were paying online.” What he quickly realized, though, was that the same was not applying to the businesses themselves.
“There are still trillions being transferred via paper checks in the B2B space,” he said, with paper invoices and paper checks dominating the market. “The space is way behind other payment areas. I would be talking with SMB owners who would be using fancy Square or PayPal point of sale devices, but when they had to pay, say, a coffee bean supplier, they stuffed checks in envelopes. That’s very intriguing obviously, and it triggered our interest.”
Interestingly this isn’t a problem that hasn’t been identified before, but many of the solutions, such as Bill.com or Tipalti, are really designed for larger enterprises. “They are too overwhelming for SMBs,” he said. “Even their names say it all: Accounts Payable Automation Solutions. It’s about tens of thousands of payments, and accounting departments, not an order from a wine shop.”
That formed the basis of what the startup started to build, which has been, in essence, a very pared-down version of these other payments platforms with SMB needs in mind.
The first of these is a focus on cashflow, Bar said. Specifically, the Melio platform lets payments be made automatically but businesses themselves can delay the timing on when money actually leaves their accounts: “Buyers keep cash longer, vendors get paid faster,” is how Bar describes it.
This is in part enabled by the tech that Melio has built, which builds in risk assessment, as well as fraud management, and balances payments across the whole of its platform to send money in and out without the need for the company to raise debt to back up those payments.
“We leverage data to assess risk,” said Bar. “Every dollar in this round is going towards R&D and sales and marketing. We don’t need the capital in our model.” It also works with the likes of AmEx and its own credit system in cases where people are paying on credit, but Bar also noted that currently most of the transactions that happen on its platform are not credit based. Most are bank transfers.
While others like Stripe have also built B2B payment services to pay out suppliers, Bar points out that what it has created is unique in that it is a standalone service: no need to be a part of Stripe’s wider ecosystem of services to use this if you already use another payments provider you are happy with.
Given that focus on cashflow for SMBs, what’s also interesting is the low bar to entry that Melio has built into its platform. Specifically, the service is completely free for businesses to use — that is, no fee is charged — as long as companies are making bank transfers or using debit cards. It takes a 2.9% fee when a business elects to use a credit card for a transaction (and even then Melio says that the fee is tax deductible in the U.S.).
He noted that one of the reasons that Melio has to date targeted the U.S. market is because of how antiquated it still is. “The average bank transfer still takes three to four business days, if you don’t want to take any risk,” he said. “We have developed models to do it same day. We take the risk that the buyer might not have the funds in that account but think about how that impacts cash flows. With Melio you still pay in three days, but money will be delivered the same day. That is how you can keep cash longer, without a payments risk.”
Targeting a market that remains very underserved at a time when so much has gone virtual in payments is why investors are also interested.
“Melio has identified both the opportunity and duty to help small businesses manage their finance remotely and improve cash flow, in normal times as well as during this crisis, as physical payments supply chains are interrupted and overwhelmed,” said Michael Gilroy, a general partner at Coatue, in a statement. “Going digital is the only way small businesses can compete against larger rivals and stay ahead of the curve.”
In terms of more product development, Bar said that the company has received “a lot of incoming interest from partners to enable B2B payments within their products on their product,” similar to what QuickBooks is doing and Salesforce is likely to do. “Payments are contextual and they want to enable a quicker way to get there. The SMB is underserved. And yes, from a unit economics it’s much better to go after Nike. But this is also to really create some financial inclusion. We want to enable services for the small shop that the big guys already have.”
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