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NerdWallet acquires small business loan marketplace Fundera
Financial guidance company NerdWallet announced at the end of last week that it has acquired Fundera. New York City-based Fundera was co-founded in 2013 by Jared Hecht, who previously co-founded GroupMe. It created a marketplace where small businesses could find loans, subsequently expanding into other areas like legal services, while also (like NerdWallet) offering free financial content.
“It can be the wild wild west out there for small business owners,” Hecht said in a statement. “Finding the financial products and the guidance needed to start, grow and fund their businesses can be very challenging, and most small business owners don’t have a resource or partner to support them along their journey. Bringing transparency to this process and educating, empowering and advocating for business owners is so similar to what we see NerdWallet doing in the consumer space.”
And of course, small businesses may be in particularly dire need of assistance now, given the impact of the pandemic.
According to the announcement, Fundera will operate as a subsidiary of NerdWallet, with the entire team making the transition. The goal is to help NerdWallet expand into the small- and medium-business market with both content and actual financing.
“Although we offer free tools and content, we’ve never been able to fully support small business owners — that changes today,” said NerdWallet co-founder and CEO Tim Chen. “Fundera has been one of our partners for several years and their deep understanding of the SMB market, the long-standing, trusted relationships they’ve built with both lenders and business owners, and their commitment to putting the needs of small business owners first is really unique and impressive.”
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Fundera had raised $18.9 million in funding from investors including QED Investors, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital and Susquehanna Growth Equity, according to Crunchbase.
This is NerdWallet’s second acquisition of 2020, having previously acquired U.K.-based Know Your Money. The company says it’s been growing and profitable for the past several years.
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An autonomous robot EV charger is coming to San Francisco
Electric-vehicle chargers today are designed for human drivers. Electrify America and San Francisco-based startup Stable are preparing for the day when humans are no longer behind the wheel.
Electrify America, the entity set up by Volkswagen as part of its settlement with U.S. regulators over the diesel emissions cheating scandal, is partnering with Stable to test a system that can charge electric vehicles without human intervention.
The autonomous electric-vehicle charging system will combine Electrify America’s 150 kilowatt DC fast charger with Stable’s software and robotics. A robotic arm, which is equipped with computer vision to see the electric vehicle’s charging port, is attached to the EV charger. The two companies plan to open the autonomous charging site in San Francisco by early 2020.
A rendering of an autonomous electric vehicle charging station.
There’s more to this system than a nifty robotic arm. Stable’s software and modeling algorithms are critical components that have applications today, not just the yet-to-be-determined era of ubiquitous robotaxis.
While streets today aren’t flooded with autonomous vehicles, they are filled with thousands of vehicles used by corporate and government fleets, as well as ride-hailing platforms like Uber and Lyft . Those commercial-focused vehicles are increasingly electric, a shift driven by economics and regulations.
“For the first time these fleets are having to think about, ‘how are we going to charge these massive fleets of electric vehicles, whether they are autonomous or not?’ ” Stable co-founder and CEO Rohan Puri told TechCrunch in a recent interview.
Stable, a 10-person company with employees from Tesla, EVgo, Faraday Future, Google, Stanford and MIT universities, has developed data science algorithms to determine the best location for chargers and scheduling software for once the EV stations are deployed.
Its data science algorithms take into account installation costs, available power, real estate costs as well as travel time for the given vehicle to go to the site and then get back on the road to service customers. Stable has figured out that when it comes to commercial fleets, chargers in a distributed network within cities are used more and have a lower cost of operation than one giant centralized charging hub.
Once a site is deployed, Stable’s software directs when, how long and at what speed the electric vehicle should charge.
Stable, which launched in 2017, is backed by Trucks VC, Upside Partnership, MIT’s E14 Fund and a number of angel investors, including NerdWallet co-founder Jake Gibson and Sidecar co-founder and CEO Sunil Paul .
The pilot project in San Francisco is the start of what Puri hopes will lead to more fleet-focused sites with Electrify America, which has largely focused on consumer charging stations. Electrify America has said it will invest $2 billion over 10 years in clean energy infrastructure and education. The VW unit has more than 486 electric vehicle charging stations installed or under development. Of those, 262 charging stations have been commissioned and are now open to the public.
Meanwhile, Stable is keen to demonstrate its autonomous electric-vehicle chargers and lock in additional fleet customers.
“What we set out to do was to reinvent the gas station for this new era of transportation, which will be fleet-dominant and electric,” Puri said. “What’s clear is there just isn’t nearly enough of the right infrastructure installed in the right place.”
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NerdWallet lays off 11 percent of staff due to missing profitability goals
Personal finance startup NerdWallet seems to be on the struggle bus, having just laid off 53 people today (about 11 percent of its workforce) due to the fact that the company is not hitting its profitability goals, TechCrunch has learned. As part of the restructuring, NerdWallet’s sales and partnerships teams will be folded into various product teams. Read More
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NerdWallet, a personal finance company, laid off six people from its marketing team this week, TechCrunch learned and has since confirmed with NerdWallet. This latest round of layoffs means NerdWallet has cut nine percent of its workforce this year.