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The enterprise software and services-focused accelerator Alchemist has raised $4 million in fresh financing from investors BASF and the Qatar Development Bank, just in time for its latest demo day unveiling 20 new companies.
Qatar and BASF join previous investors, including the venture firms Mayfield, Khosla Ventures, Foundation Capital, DFJ and USVP, and corporate investors like Cisco, Siemens and Juniper Networks.
While the roster of successes from Alchemist’s fund isn’t as lengthy as Y Combinator, the accelerator program has launched the likes of the quantum computing upstart Rigetti, the soft-launch developer tool LaunchDarkly and drone startup Matternet .
Some (personal) highlights of the latest cohort include:
Watch a live stream of Alchemist’s demo day pitches, starting at 3PM, here.
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The San Francisco-based startup Branch International, which makes small personal loans in emerging markets, has raised $170 million and announced a partnership with Visa to offer virtual, pre-paid debit cards to Branch client networks in Africa, South-Asia and Latin America.
Branch — which has 150 employees in San Francisco, Lagos, Nairobi, Mexico City and Mumbai — makes loans starting at $2 to individuals in emerging and frontier markets. The company also uses an algorithmic model to determine credit worthiness, build credit profiles and offer liquidity via mobile phones.
“We’ll use [the money] to deepen existing business in Africa. Later this year we’ll announce high-yield savings accounts…in Africa,” says Branch co-founder and chief executive Matt Flannery.
The $170 million round from Foundation Capital and its new debit card partner, Visa, will support Branch’s international expansion, which could include Brazil and Indonesia, according to Flannery. Branch launched in Mexico and India within the last year. In Africa, it offers its services in Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania.
A potential Branch customer
The Branch-Visa partnership will allow individuals to obtain virtual Visa accounts with which to create accounts on Branch’s app. This gives Branch larger reach in countries such as Nigeria — Africa’s most populous country with 190 million people — where cards have factored more prominently than mobile money in connecting unbanked and underbanked populations to finance.
Founded in 2015, Branch started operating in Kenya, where mobile money payment products such as Safaricom’s M-Pesa (which does not require a card or bank account to use) have scaled significantly. M-Pesa now has 25 million users, according to sector stats released by the Communications Authority of Kenya. Branch has more than 3 million customers and has processed 13 million loans and disbursed more than $350 million, according to company stats.
Branch has one of the most downloaded fintech apps in Africa, per Google Play app numbers combined for Nigeria and Kenya, according to Flannery.
Already profitable, Branch International expects to reach $100 million in revenues this year, with roughly 70 percent of that generated in Africa, according to Flannery.
In addition to Visa and Foundation Capital, the $170 Series C round included participation from Branch’s existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Trinity Ventures, Formation 8, the IFC, CreditEase and Victory Park, while adding new investors Greenspring, Foxhaven and B Capital.
Branch last raised $70 million in 2018. The company’s overall VC haul and $100 million revenue peg register as pretty big numbers for a startup focused primarily on Africa. Pan-African e-commerce startup Jumia, which also announced its NYSE IPO last month, generated $140 million in revenue (without profitability) in 2018.
Startups building financial technologies for Africa’s 1.2 billion population have gained the attention of investors. As a sector, fintech (or financial inclusion) attracted 50 percent of the estimated $1.1 billion funding to African startups in 2018, according to Partech.
Branch’s recent round and plans to add countries internationally also tracks a trend of fintech-related products growing in Africa, then expanding outward. This includes M-Pesa, which generated big numbers in Kenya before operating in 10 countries around the world. Nigerian payments startup Paga announced its pending expansion in Asia and Mexico late last year. And payment services such as Kenya’s SimbaPay have also connected to global networks like China’s WeChat.
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Two years ago, former Amazon product manager Xiao Wang stood on the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco and made the case for a platform meant to help couples apply for marriage green cards, a complex process made worse by bureaucracy and red tape.
Called Boundless, the startup had spun out of Seattle startup studio Pioneer Square Labs and raised a $3.5 million seed round. Now, Foundry Group’s Brad Feld has led a $7.8 million Series A in the startup, with participation from existing investors Trilogy Equity Partners, PSL, Two Sigma Ventures and Founders’ Co-Op.
“Families have really only had two choices, they could spend weeks or months trying to figure this out on their own, or they can spend thousands and thousands of dollars on an immigration attorney,” Wang, Boundless co-founder and chief executive officer, told TechCrunch. “What we are trying to do is basically give everyone access to the information, the tools and the support that was previously only available to those that could afford high-priced attorneys.”
Boundless charges $750 for its online green card application support services, which includes ensuring families correctly complete applications and have access to an immigration lawyer to review those applications. The fee comes at a major discount to the costs of an immigration lawyer and streamlines a process that can be delayed months when errors are made. The startup also offers a recently launched $395 naturalization product meant to assist eligible green card holders with their U.S. citizenship applications.

Wang founded Boundless in 2017 after helping build Amazon Go, the e-commerce giant’s line of cashierless convenience stores. Wang is an immigrant, having relocated to the U.S. from China when he was a child.
“We spent almost five months of rent money on an immigration attorney because the stakes were so high and we only had one shot,” Wang said. “We wanted to make sure we were doing it right. This is a story that is echoed by millions of families every year; this is such an important part of them starting a new life in a new country.”
Wang, after three years at Amazon, realized he could use his technology background and data prowess to build an information platform supportive of these millions of families.
“This is exactly what tech and data is meant to do,” he said. “I believe there is a moral obligation for tech to be used in meaningfully improving people’s lives.”
Boundless plans to use this investment to expand its team and product offerings, as well as build out its content library, which Wang said is rapidly becoming the go-to place for immigrants navigating the legal labyrinth that is the U.S. green card and citizenship process. Its resources page, which includes straightforward guides, a number of forms and more, counts 300,000 unique visitors per month.
“We hold their hand through the entire process,” Wang said. “We want to be the single source of information and tools for all family-based immigration.”
Wang and his team also hope to shine a brighter light on immigration policy. In late 2018, as part of its effort to be louder advocates for immigrants, Boundless, alongside Warby Parker, Foursquare, Foundation Capital and more, published an open letter to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security opposing its proposed “public charge” immigration regulation, which would allow for non-citizens who are in the country legally to be denied a visa or a green card if they have a medical condition, financial liabilities and other disqualifiers.
“The stakes for making sure your application is correct have never been higher; the government has far more leeway to be able to deny applications,” Wang said. “While we can’t speed up the government processing times, we can make meaningful improvements to helping families gather all the materials they need to send in the right information.”
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Teamable, a provider of hiring software that leverages employees’ social networks, has brought in $5 million from new investor Foundation Capital and existing backers True Ventures and SaaStr Fund.
The startup also announced its acquisition of Simppler‘s referral recommendation engine and matchmaking recruiting software. Teamable’s co-founder and chief executive officer Laura Bilazarian declined to disclose the terms of the deal but said none of the $5 million investment was used to finance the transaction.
According to Crunchbase, Simppler had raised $3.2 million in equity funding from Foundation Capital, Greylock, Vertex Ventures and others. The company, which is akin to Teamable, creates a referral platform using existing employee networks; it was founded by Vipul Sharma in 2013. Sharma previously ran machine learning at Eventbrite and, according to his LinkedIn profile, he’s been an engineering director at Indeed for the past year.
Sharma and the Simppler team will not be joining Teamable .
Using Gmail, Facebook, GitHub and other social media platforms, Teamable aggregates its employees’ contacts to connect recruiters with a more focused set of potential candidates. Companies using Teamable, including Spotify and Lyft, then facilitate a warm introduction between a candidate and the employee in their network. The startup says its social recruiting algorithms lead to more efficient and diverse hiring practices.
“I don’t think candidates love the way recruiting is done,” Bilazarian told TechCrunch. “They are throwing applications over a wall and not hearing back. And I don’t think companies love the way recruiting is done because people are just making guesses based off a job description and they aren’t getting the right applicants.”
“Instead of few people at a company spamming the entire world, you have people who really understand the company reaching out to you,” she added. “Teamable is very precise. It’s reach out to five people to get a hire versus reach out to 200 just to get one response.”
The Foundation-led investment brings Teamable’s total equity funding to date to $10 million, including last year’s $5 million Series A. Bilazarian says the 50-person company is cash flow positive with 200 customers. With offices in San Francisco and Yerevan, Armenia, Teamable will use the capital to expand its team and recruiting platform.
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You might get to actually save money while you’re traveling if you just leave some free space in your bag — or not pay for that travel at all — if Daria Rebenok’s plan plays out. As avid travelers, and ones longing for products from home they can’t get abroad, she and Artem Fedyaev decided to start Grabr to work on exactly this problem. While you might not be… Read More
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Our spidey senses are tingling over here. According to an SEC filing, TechCrunch has learned Bolt Threads, the biotech company spinning microbes into spider silk, is raising a whopping $106 million in Series D financing. Bolt Threads has been on a meteoric rise since it first told TC about its ambitious endeavor to make spider silk, a material stronger than teflon but softer than a cloud. Read More
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Simon Vallee is exactly the kind of person who venture capitalists like to keep on their radar. He’s Canadian, for one thing. (Everyone knows how nice Canadians are.) He has also co-founded a number of small companies over the last decade — and sold them. First, there was SiteMasher, a site-creation platform that was sold a couple of years later, in 2009, to Saleforce for… Read More
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A service that helps online shoppers save when prices drop, Paribus, has raised $2.1 million in seed funding to continue to grow its business following the startup’s participation in the Y Combinator summer program and the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2015, where it first debuted. The company’s idea is to take a process that consumers were used to managing… Read More
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