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Pangaea Holdings, developing men’s personal care brands, raises $68M, including minority stake from Eurazeo
Global investment group Eurazeo invested $53 million in Pangaea Holdings for a minority investment in the Los Angeles e-commerce company rooted in creating premium men’s personal care brands.
The investment is part of a larger $68 million round that includes $15 million in Series B funding from a group of backers including Unilever Ventures and GPO Fund and existing investors Base10 Partners and Gradient Ventures. This brings the company’s total funds raised to $87 million since the company was founded by Richard Hong and Darwish Gani in 2018.
Harlem Capital’s Henri Pierre-Jacques invested in both Pangaea’s seed round in 2019 and Series A in 2020. He’s known Gani since college and worked with Hong over the past two years, calling the pair “one of the most data-driven and founder market fits I have seen.”
“At the seed stage, the business was already a seven-figure business and has continued to see astonishing growth,” he added. “Pangaea, to date, has been a brand incubator, but post the Series B will expand to be a vertically integrated e-commerce platform for other brands. We are even more excited for this next phase of their growth.”
Hong started Pangaea with the launch of men’s skincare brand Lumin that contains natural Korean-based formulations. In fact, he was among a group of people living together in an apartment using Korean beauty products and hiding it from their roommates, Gani told TechCrunch.
Gani later joined Hong as a co-founder to scale the business, as they realized there was a bigger opportunity for global e-commerce.
“Men are actually into skincare, but not as comfortable talking about it,” Gani said. “For Richard, he came from a place where skincare was more culturally accepted. His idea was to provide high-quality products, but presented in a way that people can understand their use and help them to form a habit.”
Pangaea ended up developing proprietary infrastructure, including warehousing, payments and shipping, as a holding company to grow and scale direct-to-consumer brands. It’s latest brand, Meridian, offering grooming products, launched in 2020. Products are now selling in more than 70 countries.
Though headquartered in Los Angeles, the company is basically remote, with more than 300 employees across its major hubs in LA, Lagos, Nigeria, Singapore and Europe.
The company is already cash flow positive, and the new funding will enable Pangaea to round out leadership roles in its brands and reach the next stage of growth with the goal of being “omnichannel male megabrands,” Gani said. The company is also investing in additional product categories, new brands and potentially licensing its proprietary software.
Gani said he is excited to work with Eurazeo, which he referred to as “experts in building and scaling consumer brands.” The firm will work with Pangaea to continue developing the Lumin and Meridian brands and accelerate its international expansion.
Jill Granoff, Eurazeo’s managing partner and brands CEO, said in a written statement that the company “is well-positioned for future growth.”
“Richard and Darwish have launched a platform and products that address a significant need in an attractive, growing market,” Granoff added. “The team has achieved impressive results in a short period of time across geographies and categories, demonstrating strong product appeal to global consumers. They have also built a highly scalable technology that can support future brand development.”
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Neo4j raises Neo$325M as graph-based data analysis takes hold in enterprise
Databases run the world, but database products are often some of the most mature and venerable software in the modern tech stack. Designers will pixel push, frontend engineers will add clicks to make it more difficult to drop out of a soporific Zoom call, but few companies are ever willing to rip out their database storage engine. Too much risk, and almost no return.
So it’s exceptional when a new database offering breaks through the barriers and redefines the enterprise.
Neo4j, which offers a graph-centric database and related products, announced today that it raised $325 million at a more than $2 billion valuation in a Series F deal led by Eurazeo, with additional capital from Alphabet’s venture wing GV. Eurazeo managing director Nathalie Kornhoff-Brüls will join the company’s board of directors.
That funding makes Neo4j among the most well-funded database companies in history, with a collective fundraise haul of more than half a billion dollars. For comparison, MongoDB, which trades on Nasdaq, raised $311 million in total (according to Crunchbase) before its IPO. Meanwhile, Cockroach Labs of CockroachDB fame has now raised $355 million in funding, including a $160 million round earlier this year at a similar $2 billion valuation.
The past decade has seen a whole new crop of next-generation database models, from scale-out SQL to document to key-value stores to time series and on and on and on. What makes graph databases like Neo4j unique is their focus on the connections between individual data entities. Graph-based data models have become central to modern machine learning and artificial intelligence applications, and are now widely used by data analysts in applications as diverse as marketing to fraud detection.
CEO and co-founder Emil Eifrem said that Neo4j, which was founded back in 2007, has hit its growth stride in recent years given the rising popularity of graph-based analysis. “We have a deep developer community of hundreds of thousands of developers actively building applications with Neo4j in any given month, but we also have a really deep data science community,” he said.
In the past, most business analysis was built on relational databases. Yet, inter-connected complexity is creeping in everywhere, and that’s where Eifrem believes Neo4j has a durable edge. As an example, “any company that ships stuff is tapping into this global fine-grain mesh spanning continent to continent,” he suggested. “All of a sudden the ship captain in the Suez Canal … falls asleep, and then they block the Suez Canal for a week, and then you’ve got to figure out how will this affect my enterprise, how does that cascade across my entire supply chain.” With a graph model, that analysis is a cinch.
Neo4j says that 800 enterprises are customers and 75% of the Fortune 100 are users of the company’s products.
We last checked in with the company in 2020 when it launched 4.0, which offered unlimited scaling. Today, Neo4j comes in a couple of different flavors. It’s a database that can be either self-hosted or purchased as a cloud service offering which it dubs Aura. That’s for the data storage folks. For the data scientists, the company offers Neo4j Graph Data Science Library, a set of comprehensive tools for analyzing graph data. The company offers free (or “community” tiers), affordable starting tiers and full-scale enterprise pricing options depending on needs.
Development continues on the database. This morning at its developers conference, Neo4j demonstrated what it dubbed its “super-scaling technology” on a 200 billion node graph with more than a trillion relationships between them, showing how its tools could offer “real-time” queries on such a large scale.
Unsurprisingly, Eifrem said that the new venture funding will be used to continue doubling down on “product, product, product” but emphasized a few major strategic initiatives as critical for the company. First, he wants to continue to deepen the company’s partnerships with public cloud providers. It already has a deep relationship with Google Cloud (GV was an investor in this round after all), and hopes to continue building relationships with other providers.
It’s also seeing a major uptick in interest from the APAC region. Eifrem said that the company recently opened up an office in Singapore to accelerate its sales in the broader IT market there.
Overall, “We think that graphs can be a significant part of the modern data landscape. In fact, we believe it can be the biggest part of the modern data landscape. And this round, I think, sends a clear signal [that] we’re going for it,” he said.
Erik Nordlander and Tom Hulme of GV were the leads for that firm. In addition, DTCP and Lightrock newly invested and previous investors One Peak, Creandum and Greenbridge Partners joined the round.
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PayFit raises $79 million for its payroll service
French startup PayFit is raising a new $79 million funding round (€70 million) from Eurazeo and Bpifrance. The company first started with a payroll service for small and medium companies in France. It has evolved into a full-fledged HR solution for multiple European countries.
PayFit uses a software-as-a-service approach so that small companies can easily manage payroll and HR information from a web browser. Everything stays up-to-date and compliant with labor regulation.
After you enter information about your employees, PayFit automatically generates pay slips every month. Your employees receive an email when their pay slips are ready. If somebody is getting a raise, you can connect to your PayFit account and modify an amount for all pay slips going forward.
When it comes to payroll taxes, the service automatically reminds you when you have to pay them and how much you’re supposed to pay. You also can generate exports for your accountant, see reports about your staff, etc.
And PayFit doesn’t want to stop at payrolls. You also can manage absences and leaves, expense reports and shifts. It makes sense to build those tools in-house as they have a direct effect on your payroll.
In order to approve expense reports and vacation days, you also can build an organizational chart in PayFit and decide who’s managing who.
While it’s easy to build an HR giant in the U.S., it’s a bit more complicated in Europe, as labor laws vary so much from one country to another. But the startup has managed to launch its service in France, Spain, Germany and the U.K. — Italy is coming soon.
The company says that it has developed its own programming language called Jetlang in order to transform labor code into computer code.
There are 3,000 companies relying on PayFit and 300 people working for the company. With today’s funding round, PayFit plans to double its workforce by 2020.
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