NewView Capital
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Paystand banks $50M to make B2B payments cashless and with no fees
It’s pretty easy for individuals to send money back and forth, and there are lots of cash apps from which to choose. On the commercial side, however, one business trying to send $100,000 the same way is not as easy.
Paystand wants to change that. The Scotts Valley, California-based company is using cloud technology and the Ethereum blockchain as the engine for its Paystand Bank Network that enables business-to-business payments with zero fees.
The company raised $50 million Series C funding led by NewView Capital, with participation from SoftBank’s SB Opportunity Fund and King River Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $85 million, Paystand co-founder and CEO Jeremy Almond told TechCrunch.
During the 2008 economic downturn, Almond’s family lost their home. He decided to go back to graduate school and did his thesis on how commercial banking could be better and how digital transformation would be the answer. Gleaning his company vision from the enterprise side, Almond said what Venmo does for consumers, Paystand does for commercial transactions between mid-market and enterprise customers.
“Revenue is the lifeblood of a business, and money has become software, yet everything is in the cloud except for revenue,” he added.
He estimates that almost half of enterprise payments still involve a paper check, while fintech bets heavily on cards that come with 2% to 3% transaction fees, which Almond said is untenable when a business is routinely sending $100,000 invoices. Paystand is charging a flat monthly rate rather than a fee per transaction.
Paystand’s platform. Image Credits: Paystand
On the consumer side, companies like Square and Stripe were among the first wave of companies predominantly focused on accounts payable and then building business process software on top of an existing infrastructure.
Paystand’s view of the world is that the accounts receivables side is harder and why there aren’t many competitors. This is why Paystand is surfing the next wave of fintech, driven by blockchain and decentralized finance, to transform the $125 trillion B2B payment industry by offering an autonomous, cashless and feeless payment network that will be an alternative to cards, Almond said.
Customers using Paystand over a three-year period are able to yield average benefits like 50% savings on the cost of receivables and $850,000 savings on transaction fees. The company is seeing a 200% increase in monthly network payment value and customers grew two-fold in the past year.
The company said it will use the new funding to continue to grow the business by investing in open infrastructure. Specifically, Almond would like to reboot digital finance, starting with B2B payments, and reimagine the entire CFO stack.
“I’ve wanted something like this to exist for 20 years,” Almond said. “Sometimes it is the unsexy areas that can have the biggest impacts.”
As part of the investment, Jazmin Medina, principal at NewView Capital, will join Paystand’s board. She told TechCrunch that while the venture firm is a generalist, it is rooted in fintech and fintech infrastructure.
She also agrees with Almond that the B2B payments space is lagging in terms of innovation and has “strong conviction” in what Almond is doing to help mid-market companies proactively manage their cash needs.
“There is a wide blue ocean of the payment industry, and all of these companies have to be entirely digital to stay competitive,” Medina added. “There is a glaring hole if your revenue is holding you back because you are not digital. That is why the time is now.”
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NewView Capital leads $22.3M Series B in Australian telehealth platform Eucalyptus
Telehealth platform Eucalyptus raised a $22.3 million Series B round of funding to build a digital health portfolio for primary care in Australia.
NewView Capital led the round with participation from existing investors Blackbird Ventures and W23, and new investor AirTree Ventures. As part of the investment, Ravi Viswanathan, NewView founder and managing partner, will be joining the Eucalyptus board.
The new round gives the Sydney-based company a total of $32.8 million raised since it was founded in 2019 by Tim Doyle, Benny Kleist, Alexey Mitko and Charlie Gearside.
Australia’s healthcare system is a two-payer model, where most of the care is paid for by the government, and there is a smaller insurance coverage that is owned by individuals. Eucalyptus fits into these models as a private-pay option selling directly to consumers. In some cases, the company is able to charge lower copays for care than the average $25 per doctor visit, Doyle told TechCrunch.
He touts the company as the “largest vertically integrated telehealth platform in Australia,” serving more than 200,000 patients across four demographic-focused brands: contraception and fertility, skincare, men’s health and sexual wellness. Each brand has its own core platform of healthcare providers, patient data repository, remote monitoring tools and partnerships with pathology labs and pharmacies.
All of that results in a higher touch and higher quality relationship between doctor and patient, Doyle said.
“We are seeing an opportunity to shorten the amount of time between identification of a condition and diagnosis,” he added. “We also want to go more in-depth into diabetes, heart conditions and mental health. People are dropping out of diabetes and mental care because there are not enough touch points that are easy to use. If we can build a hub, it will make it easier to treat those conditions.”
In addition to product development, the new funding enables Eucalyptus to build toward being a major player in the telehealth industry. The company will introduce new brands in the next year around chronic care like behavioral health, weight management and diabetes.
Eucalyptus grew its revenue between 200% to 300% year over year since 2019, Doyle said. This is not unlike other startups in the digital health sector, where 2020 saw another record year for venture capital investment. He expects similar growth in 2021, including adding about 20 employees to be over 100 by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Doyle said he is excited to work with NewView, especially with Viswanathan and principal Christina Fa, who said Eucalyptus is proving that Australia can lead in digital healthcare.
“The team is impressive in terms of clarity of vision and execution, especially in the way they brought in people to manage the brands,” she told TechCrunch. “It is unique being based in Australia where they don’t have Teledoc and other digital health companies. Instead, Eucalyptus had to build all of that in-house and do the hard work upfront. In addition, they curated a network of health providers and four brands, each with their own personalities. This allows them to be fully vertically integrated and own the customer journey.”
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LA-based gaming studio Scopely raises $200M at a $1.7B valuation
The Los Angeles-based mobile game development studio Scopely has become America’s newest unicorn thanks to a $200 million financing, which values the company at a whopping $1.7 billion.
Scopely said it would use the capital to continue its strategy of developing and acquiring new games as it looks to continue its run of six consecutive mobile games that will gross $100 million or more in lifetime revenue.
The new investment follows Scopely’s milestone of achieving more than $1 billion in lifetime revenue. Games in the company’s portfolio include: Looney Tunes World of Mayhem and Star Trek Fleet Command, created with the recently acquired DIGIT Game Studios.
Indeed, part of the reason for the financing is to accelerate the pace of its acquisitions and investments into new game development studios, according to chief executive Walter Driver .
“The barrier to entry from independent studios is to find product-market fit,” says Driver. “Increasingly, it’s helpful for them to have publishing capabilities that are more global in nature and more scaled.”
The unicorn gaming company has amassed increasingly larger rounds over the past three years on a nearly annual basis. The company raised a $55 million round of financing in 2016, $60 million in 2017 and $100 million in 2018.
For investors, what makes the company compelling (beyond its string of successful games) is the technology platform that undergirds its popular mobile gaming titles. “What the company allows you to do is look at engagement and alter a game midstream to tailor the experience,” says Ravi Viswanathan, the founder and managing partner of NewView Capital .
NewView, a growth-stage venture capital firm spun out of the multibillion-dollar investment firm NEA, led the most recent $200 million round for Scopely.
Scopely is the firm’s first major investment in a gaming company and was part of a portfolio of investments that NewView took over when it spun off from NEA.
For Scopely, the latest capital infusion is just more money in the bank to invest in or acquire budding game studios and give them access to the technology stack that has made Scopely so compelling, according to Driver.
“Our technology platform is about optimizing free digital experiences for the largest amount of players possible,” Driver says. “We’re primarily focused on finding the most passionate and talented game developers that want to specialize in making the kind of game design and might have the kind of specialized expertise that we admire.”
In the eight years since Scopely first launched, the gaming industry has been transformed by the opportunities that exist in the mobile market — and both Scopely and companies like Jam City have capitalized on the new platform.
“We see the future of gaming as free live services that give users choice and agency of how they want to play,” says Driver. “Being able to refine those live services over time and react to the data that you’re seeing and optimize those products,” has been at the core of Scopely’s technology stack.
The company is already raking in more than $400 million in annualized revenue and it was that growth that convinced NewView and investors like the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board to commit capital as part of this latest round.
Scopely has already made a few select minority investments in gaming studios, and with the new cash, Driver hopes to roll up more independent game developers.
*This story has been updated to indicate that Scopely’s valuation is $1.7 billion. Not $1.4 billion as originally reported.
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Analytics startup Heap raises $55M
Since co-founding Heap, CEO Matin Movassate has been saying that he wants to take on the analytics incumbents. Today, he’s got more money to fund that challenge, with the announcement that Heap has raised $55 million in Series C funding.
Movassate (pictured above) previously worked as a product manager at Facebook, and when I interviewed him after the startup’s Series B, he recalled the circuitous process normally required to collect and analyze user data. In contrast, Heap automatically collects data on user activity — the goal is to capture literally everything — and makes it available in a self-serve way, with no additional code required to answer new queries.
The company says it now has more than 6,000 customers, including Twilio, AppNexus, Harry’s, WeWork and Microsoft.
With this new funding, Heap has raised a total of $95.2 million. The plan is to fund international growth, as well as expand the product, engineering and go-to-market teams.
The Series C was led by NewView Capital, with participation from new DTCP, Maverick Ventures, Triangle Peak Partners, Alliance Bernstein Private Credit Investors, Sharespost and existing investors (NEA, Menlo Ventures, Initialized Capital and Pear VC). NewView founder and managing partner Ravi Viswanathan is joining the startup’s board of directors.
“Heap offers an innovative approach to automating a company’s analytics, enabling a variety of teams within an organization to obtain the data they need to make educated and, ultimately, smarter decisions,” Viswanathan said in a statement. “We are excited to team up with Heap, as they continue to develop their cutting edge software, expand their analytics automation offerings and help serve their growing numbers of customers.”
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