Matrix Partners
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Roblox acquires Discord competitor Guilded
Roblox is using M&A to bulk up its social infrastructure, announcing Monday morning that they had acquired the team at Guilded that has been building a chat platform for competitive gamers.
The service competes with gaming chat giant Discord, with the team’s founders telling TechCrunch in the past that as Discord’s ambitions had grown beyond the gaming world, its core product was meeting fewer competitive gaming needs. Like Discord, users can have text and voice conversations on the Guilded platform, but Guilded also allowed users to organize communities around events and calendars, with plenty of specific functionality designed around ensuring that tournaments happened seamlessly.
The startup’s product supported hundreds of games, with specific functionality for a handful of titles, including League of Legends, Fortnite, CS: GO and, yes, Roblox. Earlier this year, the company launched a bot API designed to help nontechnical users build bots that could enrich their gaming communities.
Guilded had raised $10.2 million in venture capital funding to date according to Crunchbase, including a $7 million Series A led by Matrix Partners early last year. The company launched out of Y Combinator in mid-2017.
Terms of the Roblox deal weren’t disclosed. In an announcement post, Roblox detailed that the Guilded team will operate as an independent product group going forward. In a separate blog post, Guilded CEO Eli Brown wrote that existing stakeholders will be able to continue using the product as they have previously.
“Everyone – including communities, partners, and bot developers – will be able to keep using Guilded the same way you are now,” Brown wrote. “Roblox believes in our team and in our mission, and we’re going to continue to operate as an independent product in order to achieve it.”
Roblox has seen profound success and heightened investor attention in recent years as the pandemic has pushed more gamers online and brought more users into the fold, but that success has drawn the attention of competitors. In June, Facebook acquired a small Roblox competitor called Crayta, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing just weeks ago that he planned to transform Facebook into a “metaverse” company, using a term many have come to associate closely with what Roblox has been building. Guilded represents an opportunity for Roblox to bring its user base deeper inside its own suite of products, creating a social infrastructure that keeps users engaged.
Powered by WPeMatico
The next generation of global payments: Afterpay + Square
Sunday was a big day in fintech: Afterpay has agreed to merge with Square. This agreement sets two of the most admired financial technology companies in recent history on a path to becoming one.
Afterpay and Square have the potential to build one of the world’s most important payments networks. Square has built a very significant merchant payment network, and, via Cash App, a thriving high-growth consumer payment service. However, these two lines of business have historically not been integrated. Together, Square and Afterpay will be able to weave all of these services together into a single integrated experience.
Afterpay and Cash App each have double-digit millions of consumers, and Square’s seller ecosystem and Afterpay’s merchant network both record double-digit billions of payment volume per year. From the offline register and the online checkout flow to sending money in just a few taps, Square and Afterpay will tell a complete story of next-generation economic empowerment.
As Afterpay’s only institutional venture investor, I wanted to share some perspective on how we got here and what this merger means for the future of consumer finance and the payments industry.
Afterpay and Square have the potential to build one of the world’s most important payments networks.
Critical innovations in fintech
Every five to 10 years, the global payments industry undergoes a critical innovation cycle that determines the winners and losers for the next several decades. The last major transition was the shift to NFC-based mobile payments, which I wrote about in 2015. The major mobile OS vendors (Apple and Google) cemented their position in the global payments stack by deftly bridging the needs of the networks (Visa, Mastercard, etc.) and consumers by way of the mobile devices in their pockets.
Afterpay sparked the latest critical innovation cycle. Conceived in a living room in Sydney by a millennial, Nick Molnar, for millennials, Afterpay had a key insight: Millennials don’t like credit.
Millennials came of age during the global mortgage crisis of 2008. As young adults, they watched their friends and family lose their homes by overextending on mortgage debt, bolstering their already lower trust for banks. They also have record levels of student debt. Therefore, it’s no surprise that millennials (and Gen Z right behind them) strongly prefer debit cards over credit cards.
But it’s one thing to recognize the paradigm shift and quite another to do something about it. Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen did something, ultimately building one of the fastest-growing payments startups in history on their core product: Buy now, pay later … and never any interest.
Afterpay’s product is simple. If you have $100 in your cart and choose to pay with Afterpay, it will charge your bank card (typically a debit card) $25 every two weeks in four installments. No interest, no revolving debt and no fees with on-time payments. For the millennial consumer, this meant they could get the primary benefit of a credit card (the ability to pay later) with their debit card, without the need to worry about all the bad things that come with credit cards — high interest rates and revolving debt.
All upside, no downside. Who could resist? For the early merchants, virtually all of whom relied on millennials as their key growth segment, they got a fair trade: Pay a small fee above payment processing to Afterpay, get significantly higher average order values and conversions to purchase. It was a win-win proposition and, with lots of execution, a new payment network was born.
Image Credits: Matrix Partners
Imitation is the greatest form of flattery
Afterpay went somewhat unnoticed outside Australia in 2016 and 2017, but once it came to the U.S. in 2018 and built a business there that broke $100 million net revenues in only its second year, it got attention.
Klarna, which had struggled with product-market fit in the U.S., pivoted their business to emulate Afterpay. And Affirm, which had always been about traditional credit — generating a significant portion of their revenue from consumer interest — also noticed and introduced their own BNPL offering. Then came PayPal with “Pay in 4,” and just a few weeks ago, there has been news that Apple is expected to enter the space.
Afterpay created a global phenomenon that has now become a category embraced by mainstream players across the industry — a category that is on track to take a meaningful share of global retail payments over the next 10 years.
Afterpay stands apart. It has always been the BNPL leader by virtually every measure, and it has done it by staying true to their customers’ needs. The company is great at understanding the millennial and Gen Z consumer. It’s evident in the voice, tone and lifestyle brand you experience as an Afterpay user, and in the merchant network it continues to build strategically. It’s also evident in the simple fact that it doesn’t try to cross-sell users revolving debt products.
Most importantly, it’s evident in the usage metrics relative to competition. This is a product that people love, use and have come to rely on, all with better, fairer terms than were ever available to them than with traditional consumer credit.
Image Credits: Afterpay H1 FY21 results presentation
Square + Afterpay: The perfect fit
I’ve been building payment companies for over 15 years now, initially in the early days of PayPal and more recently as a venture investor at Matrix Partners. I’ve never seen a combination that has such potential to deliver extraordinary value to consumers and merchants. Even more so than eBay + PayPal.
Beyond the clear product and network complementarity, what’s most exciting to me and my partners is the alignment of values and culture. Square and Afterpay share a vision of a future with more opportunity and fewer economic hurdles for all. As they build toward that future together, I’m confident that this combination is a winner. Square and Afterpay together will become the world’s next generation payment provider.
Powered by WPeMatico
CommonGround raises $19M to rethink online communication
CommonGround, a startup developing technology for what its founders describe as “4D collaboration,” is announcing that it has raised $19 million in funding.
This isn’t the first time Amir Bassan-Eskenazi and Ran Oz have launched a startup together — they also founded video networking company BigBand Networks, which won two technology-related Emmy Awards, went public in 2007 and was acquired by Arris Group in 2011. Before that, they worked together at digital compression company Optibase, which Oz co-founded and where Bassan-Eskenazi served as COO.
Although CommonGround is still in stealth mode and doesn’t plan to fully unveil its first product until next year, Bassan-Eskenazi and Oz outlined their vision for me. They acknowledged that video conferencing has improved significantly, but said it still can’t match face-to-face communication.
“Some things you just cannot achieve through a flat video-conferencing-type solution,” Bassan-Eskenazi said. “Those got better over the years, but they never managed to achieve that thing where you walk into a bar … and there’s a group of people talking and you know immediately who is a little taken aback, who is excited, who is kind of ‘eh.’”
CommonGround founders Amir Bassan-Eskenazi and Ran Oz. Image Credits: CommonGround
That, essentially, is what Bassan-Eskenazi, Oz and their team are trying to build — online collaboration software that more fully captures the nuances of in-person communication, and actually improves on face-to-face conversations in some ways (hence the 4D moniker). Asked whether this involves combining video conferencing with other collaboration tools, Oz replied, “Think of it as beyond video,” using technology like computer vision and graphics.
Bassan-Eskenazi added that they’ve been working on CommonGround for more than year, so this isn’t just a response to our current stay-at-home environment. And the opportunity should still be massive as offices reopen next year.
“When we started this, it was a problem we thought some of the workforce would understand,” he said. “Now my mother understands it, because it’s how she reads to the grandkids.”
As for the funding, the round was led by Matrix Partners, with participation from Grove Ventures and StageOne Ventures.
“Amir and Ran have a bold vision to reinvent communications,” said Matrix General Partner Patrick Malatack in a statement. “Their technical expertise, combined with a history of successful exits, made for an easy investment decision.”
Powered by WPeMatico
DealShare raises $21 million to expand its e-commerce platform to 100 Indian cities and towns
DealShare, a startup in India that has built an e-commerce platform for middle and lower-income groups of consumers, said on Tuesday it has raised $21 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand its footprint in the world’s second-largest internet market.
WestBridge Capital led the Series C round of the three-year-old startup, which is based in Bangalore. Alpha Wave Incubation, a venture fund managed by Falcon Edge Capital, Z3Partners and existing investors Matrix Partners India and Omidyar Network India also participated in the round, bringing DealShare’s to-date raise to $34 million.
DealShare kickstarted its journey the day Walmart acquired Flipkart, the startup’s founder and chief executive Vineet Rao said at a recent virtual conference. Rao said that even as Amazon and Flipkart had been able to create a market for themselves in the urban Indian cities, much of the nation was still underserved. There was an opportunity for someone to jump in, he said.
The startup began as an e-commerce platform on WhatsApp, where it offered hundreds of products to consumers. It didn’t take long before a major consumer spending pattern was visible, Rao said. People were only interested in buying items that were selling at discounted rates, said Rao.
Over time, that idea has become part of DealShare’s core offering. Today it incentivizes consumers — by offering them discounts and cashbacks — to share deals on products with their friends. The startup, which has since launched its own app and website, now operates in over two dozen cities in India.
Consumers wanted products that were relevant to them and they wanted to buy these items at a price that instilled the most value for their bucks, said Rao. “We focused on locally produced items instead of national brands. Even today, 80% to 90% of items we sell are locally produced,” he said.
“We started building a network of these suppliers. It was very tough because none of these guys fancied joining modern retail like e-commerce. Some of them had tried to work with e-commerce firms before but the experience left a lot to be desired,” he said.
Sandeep Singhal, co-founder and managing director of WestBridge, said in a statement, “Majority of Indian population is currently residing in the non-metros and there is a huge business opportunity in these regions. The buying pattern of low and middle-income group is different especially in smaller markets and DealShare seems to have understood the nuances very well. We are very impressed with how the team has scaled up in the last 2 years, while retaining a sharp focus on low cost, high impact model.”
The startup says it spent the last 18 months to improve its finances and is nearing profitability. Now it plans to invest in its technology stack and expand its platform to 100 cities and towns in five states of India in the next year. It did not disclose how many customers it serves today, but said it is working to reach 10 million customers and clock $339 million in annual GMV.
Powered by WPeMatico
Parabola no-code platform raises $8M Series A as it focuses on e-commerce
Many workers today are still stuck doing a bushel of manual tasks, copying and pasting data into spreadsheets, sending out the same emails every morning and generally lacking any kind of automation because they lack coding skills. Parabola wants to change that with a simple drag and drop workflow setup, and today the startup announced an $8 million Series A investment.
Matrix Partners led the round with participation from Thrive Capital and various individual investors. Ilya Sukhar from Matrix will be joining the Parabola board under the terms of the agreement. The company has now raised $10.2 million, including a $2.2 million seed round in 2018.
At the same time, the company also announced a new Shopify connector. As COVID has forced a dramatic increase in online shopping, Parabola has seen a corresponding increase in demand for its workflow automation services from e-commerce vendors, and they have added functionality to support that.
Company founder and CEO Alex Yaseen sees the tool as a way to bring programming-like automation to anyone who deals with data tasks on a regular basis, particularly in a spreadsheet. “We’re a drag and drop productivity tool, and we like to say we bring the power of programming to everybody,” Yaseen told TechCrunch.
They do this by providing a library of pre-built steps that you can drag and drop onto a workflow canvas. Each of those steps helps you automate what was previously a manual, repetitive data task in Excel or Google Sheets.
Image Credits: Parabola
Lead investor Sukhar says that while low code is becoming more popular right now, he and Yaseen have always seen it as a way to bring programming-level productivity enhancing skills to a much broader set of users, and to bring that focus to e-commerce in particular.
“The real trick is finding the right set of users, the right abstraction, the right niche to start with and that’s where I think this goes back to the e-commerce focus. I think that’s what’s super exciting about the approach Parabola has taken, and what got me excited,” he said.
As e-commerce in general surges during the pandemic, Yaseen says he has seen a corresponding increase in usage on the platform over the last couple of months as retail companies move online or increase their online presence and need to find ways to automate more of their internal processes to keep up.
While the company is still in its early stages of development with around 20 employees, it is actively hiring and looking to build a diverse workforce as it does. Yaseen sees this tied to the company’s overall mission of bringing programming level skills to a larger group of people who don’t know how to code, and they need a diverse set of workers that reflects society at large to build that effectively.
“We talk about this as a core authentic value, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job so far. I think we have a lot of room for improvement, as does the tech industry as a whole, but we are pushing very hard,” he said.
The company wants to use the money from this round to keep refining the design of the platform to make it even easier for non-technical users. “This round is very much for product and design work to make it increasingly comfortable for these users who are today really familiar with doing their tasks in spreadsheets […] and increasingly working towards a less and less technical user, as we make products easier and more approachable,” he said.
Powered by WPeMatico
FeaturePeek moves beyond Y Combinator with $1.8M seed
FeaturePeek’s founders graduated from Y Combinator in Summer 2019, which for an early-stage startup must seem like a million years ago right now. Despite the current conditions though, the company announced a $1.8 million seed investment today.
The round was led by Matrix Partners with some unnamed angel investors also participating.
The startup has built a solution to allow teams to review front-end designs throughout the development process instead of waiting until the end when the project has been moved to staging, co-founder Eric Silverman explained.
“FeaturePeek is designed to give front-end capabilities that enable developers to get feedback from all their different stakeholders at every stage in the development process and really fill in the missing gaps of the review cycle,” he said.
He added, “Right now, there’s no dedicated place to give feedback on that new work until it hits their staging environment, and so we’ll spin up ad hoc deployment previews, either on commit or on pull requests and those fully running environments can be shared with the team. On top of that, we have our overlay where you can file bugs, you can annotate screenshots, record video or leave comments.”
Since last summer, the company has remained lean with three full-time employees, but it has continued to build out the product. In addition to the funding, the company also announced a free command line version of the product for single developers in addition to the teams product it has been building since the Y Combinator days.
Ilya Sukhar, partner at Matrix Partners, says as a former engineer, he had experienced this kind of problem firsthand, and he knew that there was a lack of tooling to help. That’s what attracted him to FeaturePeek.
“I think FeaturePeek is kind of a company that’s trying to change that and try to bring all of these folks together in an environment where they can review running code in a way that really wasn’t possible before, and I certainly have been frustrated on both ends of this where as an engineer, you’re kind of like, ‘okay, I wrote it, are you ever going to look at it?’ ” he said.
Sukhar recognizes these are trying times to launch a startup, and nobody really knows how things are going to play out, but he encourages these companies not to get too caught up in the macro view at this stage.
Silverman knows that he needs to adapt his go to market strategy for the times, and he says the founders are making a concerted effort to listen to users and find ways to improve the product while finding ways to communicate with the target audience.
Powered by WPeMatico
As funding slows in Boston, its early-stage market could shine
Chris Lynch, a founder and former general partner at Boston-based seed-stage fund Accomplice, remembers “VC Mountain in Waltham.”
Back then, entrepreneurs on funding quests would visit a building overlooking the Waltham Reservoir near Boston where they pitched to a few investors: Matrix Partners, Charles River Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.
“And if they didn’t invest in you, you weren’t getting money to start your company,” Lynch said.
Since then, Lynch has watched the area’s startup ecosystem reach the point where seed-stage firms are ubiquitous, but in a city populated with firms waiting to make first bets, the scene is unsurprisingly undergoing a funding drought. Crunchbase data indicates that the city’s Q2 venture capital pace slowed dramatically, with April seeing far fewer rounds and dollars invested in 2020 than in 2019.
Boston saw just seven known equity funding rounds in April, investments worth a hair under $60 million. In the year-ago April, Boston recorded 24 equity funding rounds worth more than $500 million.
Yet, while the numbers are slow, some Boston tech leaders think seed startups will continue to thrive thanks to accelerators and a healthy base of local early-stage investors. And Lynch, who left Accomplice in 2017, says the venture slowdown might help firms recalibrate their appetite for new deals to a more healthy pace.
“The advantage of more access to capital without a proportional increase in great ideas really waters down the fort,” he said, referring to upmarkets. “A lot of money has been invested in companies before they even proved their ideas were right, and I think even I fell into a trap of competing so hard for deals that I lost sight of a good deal.” He estimates that in our COVID-19 world, investors will start to again take three months for due diligence on a deal, versus three weeks to a signed term sheet.
If Boston’s seed investors becomes more conservative, that means that accelerators — homes of the brightest founders, often before they even have their first customer — will be pressed to react.
Accelerators
Venture Lane, a co-working space and startup incubator for early-stage companies, was nearing its one-year anniversary in the heart of Boston when COVID-19 hit the city.
The incubator, which traditionally hosts 10 startups at a time, made its whole program virtual and reworked existing content to help navigate the climate. Plus, per founder Christian Magel, its tips and workshops were opened up to any early-stage founder, not just the ones enrolled with Venture Lane. Hundreds have signed up, he said.
Powered by WPeMatico
Guilded raises $7 million for its competitive gaming-focused chat app
Gaming platforms have earned serious clout with investors in recent years. Add in the VC excitement surrounding collaboration tools and it’s no surprised there’s interest in backing another gaming chat app.
Guilded is creating a chat platform designed for competitive gaming and esports that focuses heavily on keeping gamers organized and connected with their teams.
The startup’s sell is that Discord (currently valued at $2 billion) has moved too broadly in recent years and that their feature set isn’t actually focused on what competitive gamers are looking for, forcing them to turn to spreadsheets and form submissions when they’re looking to get serious about organization.
“Discord is really great for a lot of communities, but we’re building chat specifically for gamers,” Guilded CEO Eli Brown told TechCrunch.
Guilded just announced that they’ve raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Matrix Partners. Initialized Capital, Susa Ventures and Sterling.VC also participated in the deal. Guilded was in Y Combinator’s S17 class.
Guilded is a bit more tightly organized than Discord, with the focus more dialed in on teams and server-based structures. The deep integration of scheduling and calendars is perhaps the biggest differentiation of the platform.
In addition to text chat, users can create inline events, upload documents and post screen captures as well. You can fire up the app while you’re actually playing a game and use voice chat to communicate with your server. Guilded currently supports more than 400 titles.
As with any new communications tool, Guilded’s challenge will be chipping away at competing products, namely Discord, and achieving a critical mass of users and servers that can self-sustain moving forward.
Looking ahead, the platform is looking to get deeper into facilitating gameplay. Users can already browse through public servers to immediately join or apply to be accepted to a private server and these servers can be further broken down into individual groups or channels. Guilded is building out a tournaments feature to match servers with similar skill levels to each other, a feature that’s launching in the coming months.
Powered by WPeMatico
Sila Nano’s battery tech is now worth over $1 billion with Daimler partnership and $170 million investment
Sila Nanotechnologies and its battery materials manufacturing technology are now worth more than $1 billion.
The company, which announced a $170 million funding led by Daimler and a partnership with the famed German automaker, started building out its first production lines for its battery materials last year. That first line is capable of producing the material to supply the equivalent of 50 megawatts of lithium-ion batteries, according to Sila Nano’s chief executive officer Gene Berdichevsky.
That construction, made on the heels of a $70 million investment round, is now going to be expanded with the new cash from Daimler and 8VC along with previous investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Chengwei Capital, Matrix Partners, Siemens Next47 and Sutter Hill Ventures.
Berdichevsky would not comment on how much production capacity would increase, but did say that the company’s battery materials would find their way into consumer devices before the end of 2020. That means the potential for longer-lasting batteries in smart watches, earbuds and health trackers, initially.
From its headquarters in Alameda, Calif., Sila Nanotechnologies has developed a silicon-based anode to replace graphite in lithium-ion batteries. The company claims that its materials can improve the energy density of batteries by 20 percent.
“If you can increase energy density by 20 percent… you can use 20 percent fewer cells and each pack can cost 20 percent less,” says Berdichevsky. “The subtext of it is that it is the way to drive price of energy storage down. And that’s the way for the electric vehicle market to sand more and more on its own.”
That kind of cost reduction is what brought BMW and Daimler to partner with the company — and what led to the massive funding round and the company’s newfound unicorn status.
“Our valuation is over $1 billion dollars now,” Berdichevsky says.
Image courtesy of Sila Nanotechnologies
For Daimler, the materials that Sila Nanotechnologies are developing will give the company’s commitment to electrification a much needed boost.
Mercedes-Benz has plans to electrify its entire product suite by 2022, the company has said. That means Daimler has to accelerate its production of electrified alternatives to its fuel-powered fleet — everything from its 48-volt electrical system (the EQ Boost), to its plug-in hybrids (EQ-Power) and the more than 10 fully electric vehicles powered by batteries or fuel cells. The company is projecting that between 15 percent and 25 percent of its total sales will be electric by 2025 — depending on customer preferences, infrastructure development and the regulatory environment in each of the markets in which it sells vehicles, the company said.
In all, Mercedes-Benz cars has committed to investing €10 billion ($11.3 billion) in the production of vehicles and another $1.3 billion into a global battery production network. The global battery production network of Mercedes-Benz Cars will in the future consist of nine factories on three continents.
“We are on our way to a carbon free future mobility. While our all-new EQC model enters the markets this year we are already preparing the way for the next generation of powerful battery electric vehicles,” said Sajjad Khan, executive vice president for Connected, Autonomous, Shared & Electric Mobility, Daimler AG in a statement.
Still, consumers shouldn’t expect to see vehicles with Sila Nano’s technology until at least the mid 2020s, as automakers look to prove that the company’s battery technology meets their quality assurance standards. “The qualification time means there’s many years of work to make sure it is reliable for next 10 to 20 years,” says Berdichevsky. “Our partnership is geared towards mid-2020s production targets, but the qualification is something that takes quite a while.”
The company’s latest round brings its total financing to just under $300 million since its launch in 2011. And as a result of the latest funding, former General Electric chief executive Jeff Immelt will take a seat on the company’s board of directors.
“Advancements in lithium-ion batteries have become increasingly limited, and we are fighting for incremental improvements,” said Immelt. “I’ve seen first-hand that this is a huge opportunity that is also incredibly hard to solve. The team at Sila Nano has not only created a breakthrough chemistry, but solved it in a way that is commercially viable at scale.”
Powered by WPeMatico
YC alum Keeper raises $1.6M to help gig workers pay taxes
Every year around this time, Uber drivers, Wag dog walkers, Bird scooter chargers, social media influencers and other gig economy workers face the unsightly challenge of paying their taxes.
Companies like Uber and Lyft classify their drivers as independent contractors, which means you aren’t given any benefits and the company doesn’t withhold any of your taxes. This puts gig workers in a tough position come tax day, especially if they aren’t prepared to shell out big sums to the IRS.
Keeper, a startup that’s just graduated from the Y Combinator startup accelerator, is here to make taxes a lot easier for that demographic and to save them as much money as possible.
Founded by childhood buddies and former debate partners Paul Koullick and David Kang, the San Francisco-based company has raised $1.65 million on a $10 million valuation in a round led by Jake Jolis of Matrix Partners.
Keeper co-founders Paul Koullick (left) and David Kang
The pair entered YC this winter with a big idea and little to show for it. Come March, they had developed a full-fledged product and accumulated 200 paying customers. With their first round of funding, they plan to add to their small but growing team and acquire 10,000 customers in the next 18 months.
“There are some companies that are trying to go very broad and trying to cover the whole spectrum of benefits; we’re just trying to go really deep on taxes,” Kang told TechCrunch. “This is a pain point. This is where people are definitely leaving the most money on the table.”
Keeper guesses the average gig worker in the U.S. is overpaying their taxes by more than 20 percent, or about $1,550 for those making more than $25,000 per year. Why? Because these independent contractors aren’t claiming the tax write-offs available to them, like phone bills, car maintenance fees and even a Spotify subscription for drivers.
“If you’re a dog walker, there are so many things you need to be writing off, like your poop bags, your extra leashes, your parking,” Koullick told TechCrunch. “This population needs the guidance of an accountant, but they can’t afford one and we’re trying to create this third option.”
Like a personal accountant, Keeper monitors gig workers’ expenses all year in search of possible tax deductions, saving each user $173 per month on average, it estimates. The startup uses Plaid to follow its customers’ transaction history, and once per day sends a text message asking if there are any tax write-offs to note. Over time, it gets smarter and smarter, keeping the SMS questions to a minimum.
Keeper doesn’t fully file taxes for 1099 workers yet, but will begin offering a quarterly tax filing service in June. Next year, it plans to offer a full-year tax-filing service.
Koullick, Keeper’s chief executive officer, worked in product at Square before joining another startup, called Stride, where he built and scaled Stride Tax, a mileage and expense-tracking app. Kang, for his part, has spent most of his post-graduate career at a trading firm in Chicago, focused on quantitative modeling. The two toyed with a few startup ideas before landing on Keeper’s tax business.
“We wanted to build something that actually mattered to real people,” Koullick explained. “And we wanted to do it in the financial space where we were happy to wade through ugly details and systems on their behalf.”
Keeper isn’t the only recent YC alum focused on the growing gig economy. Another, Catch, sells health insurance, retirement savings plans and tax-withholding services directly to freelancers, contractors or anyone uncovered. Given the rapid rise of Uber and other gig platforms, it’s no wonder YC startups are tapping into the various business opportunities available there.
“We’re willing to tackle some of these topics that are kind of boring and mundane and really intensive,” Kang added. “Like the average person doesn’t want to think about taxes or filling out forms. We saw that as an opportunity for us to step in and be like, hey, we’ll take it.”
Powered by WPeMatico