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Reserve Trust raises $30.5M to become the ‘Stripe for B2B payments’
Reserve Trust, a Denver-based financial services provider, has raised $30.5 million in a Series A round led by QED Investors.
FinTech Collective, Ardent Venture Partners, Flywire CEO Mike Massaro and Quovo founder and CEO Lowell Putnam also participated in the financing, which included $17.9 million in secondary shares. It brings the startup’s total raised since its 2016 inception to $35.5 million.
Reserve Trust describes itself as “the first fintech trust company with a Federal Reserve master account.” What does that mean exactly? Basically, a federal reserve master account allows Reserve Trust to move dollars on behalf of its customers directly, via wire and ACH payment rails, without an intermediate or partner bank.
Historically, only banks were able to access these payment rails directly, which left both domestic and international fintechs “with limited partner options, poor technology and slow implementations when it came to embedding high-value B2B payments,” says COO Dave Cahill. Reserve Trust touts that its technology and services give companies all over the world the ability to “seamlessly move money via the first cloud-based payment system connected directly to the Federal Reserve” since it is not limited by legacy banking systems.
Image Credits: CEO Dave Wright and COO Dave Cahill / Reserve Trust
In conjunction with the fundraise, Reserve Trust is also announcing that Dave Wright has been named CEO and Cahill joined as COO. The pair worked together previously at SolidFire, a flash storage startup that Wright founded and sold to NetApp for $870 million in 2016.
Reserve Trust works with businesses that seek to embed domestic and cross-border B2B payment by offering them the ability to store funds in custody accounts that are backed by its Federal Reserve master account.
The history of the company relates back to the global financial crisis. After the crisis, banks in the U.S. went through a process called derisking, which meant they shed businesses that on a risk return basis weren’t as strong as other businesses. One of those included the handling of U.S. dollar payments, particularly in emerging countries.
“One of the consequences of this is that it became significantly more difficult and expensive for businesses and smaller economies to trade and move U.S. dollars around the world,” Wright told TechCrunch. “And the founders of Reserve Trust saw this opportunity to build a new type of financial institution that was focused on helping to provide U.S. dollar payment services, especially to emerging fintechs in markets around the world, and helping to reconnect those economies to global trade.”
But rather than start a bank, the founders (Dennis Gingold, Justin Guilder) navigated a previously unexplored part of regulatory waters to create a state-chartered trust company with a Federal Reserve master account.
“That’s something that had never really been done before,” Wright added. “Pretty much every other trust company has to work through banks for all their payment services. Reserve Trust is the first that has actually managed to get a Federal Reserve master account and can process payments directly with the Federal Reserve.”
The complex process took about three years, and in 2018, the company got a Federal Reserve master account and started providing U.S. dollar custody and payment services for fintechs all over the world. Reserve Trust began to see strong demand from payment and fintech companies that were struggling to develop strong partner bank relationships, even though fundamentally there wasn’t any reason the banks couldn’t work with them.
“They found working with banks to be a slow process, one that didn’t involve a lot of technology expertise on the side of the banks, and it was really inhibiting their ability to develop their technology,” Wright said. And that was even here in the U.S. Today, more than half of its business is from domestic fintechs, although Reserve Trust still has a strong international presence as well.
The new funds will mainly go toward helping the company scale to handle what Wright describes as “a fairly overwhelming amount of demand” and toward building out the team, the technology and the services it needs to address the payment needs of larger, faster growing fintechs around the world.
“Most of our customers today are small and midsize fintechs, but now we’re seeing demand for much larger fintechs that have much higher payment volumes and are involved in embedded banking and B2B payments,” Wright said. “They are looking for a stronger banking partner than what they’ve been able to find among the role of traditional banks.” Customers include Unlimint and VertoFX, among others.
QED Investors partner Amias Gerety and FinTech Collective principal Matt Levinson are bullish both on Reserve Trust’s history and its potential.
The pair point to payments giant Stripe as an example of how far Reserve Trust can go.
“Stripe has significant market share doing merchant acquiring and processing e-commerce payments for the consumer,” Levinson said. “B2B payments is significantly bigger in terms of volume, so we’re talking about well over $20 trillion of addressable payment flow. But there’s no real technology company that’s brought the modern payments platform to market without being beholden to legacy banks. And that’s why we’re so excited about this business.”
Reserve Trust, he added, is giving businesses a way to facilitate B2B payments that “are smarter, faster and cheaper.”
Gerety agrees.
“Despite all the excitement around digital payments and infrastructure, there is still no fintech that can offer direct integration with the U.S. payment system,” he said. “With Reserve Trust, we are creating foundational infrastructure to hold and move payments globally and at scale.”
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Payhawk raises $20M to unify corporate cards, payments and expenses
Fintech startup Payhawk has raised a $20 million funding round. QED Investors is leading the round with existing investor Earlybird Digital East also participating. Payhawk is building a unified system to manage all the money that is going in and out.
Essentially, companies switching to Payhawk can replace several services they already use and that didn’t interact well with each other. Payhawk lets you issue corporate cards for your employees, manage invoices and track payments from a single interface.
After signing up, customers get their own banking details with a dedicated IBAN. You can connect with your existing bank account, load funds to your Payhawk account and start using it in multiple ways.
Compared to other companies working on similar products, Payhawk gives each customer their own IBAN, which means they can receive third-party payments.
One of the key features of Payhawk is that customers can issue virtual and physical cards for employees with different rules. You can set up a team budget, configure an approval workflow for large transactions and let Payhawk handle receipt collection from those card transactions.
You can upload invoices to manage them through Payhawk. The startup tries to automatically extract data from those invoices for easier reconciliation. Payhawk also lets you reimburse employees. The service acts as a single source of truth for your company’s spending. Finally, you can connect Payhawk with your existing ERP system.
As a software-as-a-service solution, you pay a monthly subscription fee that will vary depending on optional features and the number of active cards. Clients include LuxAir, Lotto24, Viking Life, ATU, Gtmhub, MacPaw and By Miles. Overall, the startup has 200 clients.
The company has been growing nicely as revenue doubled in Q1 2021. It currently accepts clients in the European Union and the U.K. but it already plans to expand beyond those markets. Up next, Payhawk plans to launch credit cards, more currencies and tighter integration with corporate bank accounts.
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Nuvocargo raises $12M to digitize the freight logistics industry
Despite hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods flowing across the U.S.-Mexican border each year, the freight industry has remained analog — each side of the border offering up its own maze of bureaucracy.
Nuvocargo, a digital logistics platform for cross-border trade, is trying to modernize the process. The company offers an all-in-one service that rolls freight forwarding, customs brokerage, cargo insurance and even trade financing into one UI-friendly software and app. Housing all of these services under one app makes it easier for companies to track their supply chain and gives customs and logistics teams access to more centralized information, according to Nuvocargo CEO Deepak Chhugani.
“And you just have one single audit trail in case something goes wrong,” Chhugani told TechCrunch, adding that the process helps reduce or eliminate the extra costs that come with a high administrative overhead. It also lets customers take a high-level look at their operations from within a single interface, he said.
Chhugani likened the experience to something like Uber Eats, which offers customers the ability to easily track food orders from restaurant to home.
“Just imagine, because you are dealing with so many different parties, you lose visibility on what’s going on. If you want a snapshot of — what did I spend end-to-end? — you actually have to go through all these email chains or faxes or texts with different providers,” Chhugani explained. “Some of them might be in another country. So [Nuvocargo] just creates more visibility throughout the process, from where the goods literally are to visibility around your finances.”
But Nuvocargo is thinking beyond the actual movement of goods. The company is also starting to offer customs brokerage, comprehensive cross-border cargo insurance and factoring, or short-term account receivable finance. The last of these solves an especially difficult pain point for trucking companies, which sometimes must wait up to net-90 days to be paid.
The approach has caught investors’ eyes: Nearly one year after announcing it had raised a $5.3 million seed round, the company has closed on a $12 million Series A funding led by QED Investors and with injections from David Velez, Michael Ronen, Raymond Tonsing, FJ Labs and Clocktower. Investors NFX and ALLVP, which participated in the previous round, also participated.
The “holy grail” of their new offerings, as Chhugani called it, is trade financing. Because Nuvocargo will already have a relationship with companies, including an understanding of credit and fraud risk, its hope is that it can offer financial products at a competitive rate.
This is what attracted QED Investors, a firm that typically focuses on financial technology rather than logistics and trucking.
“After speaking with [Deepak] and seeing the connection points and parallels between what we were looking at in e-commerce and the challenges of actually getting goods across border, the fintech spark went off in my own head,” Lauren Connolley Morton, a partner at QED, said in an interview with TechCrunch. “The opportunities for factoring, for lending, for insuring goods are all very much right up our alley.”
Although Chhugani declined to disclose Nuvocargo’s valuation after this most recent round of funding, it’s clear there is plenty of room to grow into the logistics industry’s huge and seemingly disaggregated value chain.
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Ribbit Capital leads $26.7M round for Brazilian fintech Cora
Cora, a São Paulo-based technology-enabled lender to small and-medium-sized businesses, has raised $26.7 million in a Series A round led by Silicon Valley VC firm Ribbit Capital.
Kaszek Ventures, QED Investors and Greenoaks Capital also participated in the financing, which brings the startup’s total raised to $36.7 million since its 2019 inception. Kaszek led Cora’s $10 million seed round (believed at that time to be one of the largest seed investments in LatAm) in December 2019, with Ribbit then following.
Last year, Cora got its license approved from the Central Bank of Brazil, making it a 403 bank. The fintech then launched its product in October 2020 and has since grown to have about 60,000 customers and 110 employees.
Cora offers a variety of solutions, ranging from a digital checking account, Visa debit card and management tools such as an invoice manager and cashflow dashboard. With the checking account, customers have the ability to send and receive money, as well as pay bills, digitally.
This isn’t the first venture for Cora co-founders Igor Senra and Leo Mendes. The pair had worked together before — founding their first online payments company, MOIP, in 2005. That company sold to Germany’s WireCard in 2016 (with a 3 million-strong customer base), and after three years the founders were able to strike out again.
Cora co-founders Leo Mendes and Igor Senra; Image courtesy of Cora
With Cora, the pair’s long-term goal is to “provide everything that a SMB will need in a bank.”
Looking ahead, the pair has the ambitious goal of being “the fastest growing neobank focused on SMBs in the world.” It plans to use the new capital to add new features and improve existing ones; on operations; and launching a portfolio of credit products.
In particular, Cora wants to go even deeper in certain segments, such as B2B professional services such as law and accounting firms, real estate brokerages and education.
Ribbit Capital partner Nikolay Kostov believes that Cora has embarked on “an ambitious mission” to change how small businesses in Brazil are able to access and experience banking.
“While the consumer banking experience has undergone a massive transformation thanks to new digital experiences over the last decade, this is, sadly, still not the case on the small business side,” he said.
For example, Kostov points out, opening a traditional small business bank account in Brazil takes weeks, “reels of paper, and often comes with low limits, poor service and antiquated digital interfaces.”
Meanwhile, the number of new small businesses in the country continues to grow.
“The combination of these factors makes Brazil an especially attractive market for Cora to launch in and disrupt,” Kostov told TechCrunch. “The Cora founding team is uniquely qualified and deeply attuned to the challenges of small businesses in the country, having spent their entire careers building digital products to serve their needs.”
Since Ribbit’s start in 2012, he added, LatAm has been a core focus geography for the firm “given the magnitude of challenges, and opportunities in the region to reinvent financial services and serve customers better.”
Ribbit has invested in 15 companies in the region and continues to look for more to back.
“We fully expect that several fintech companies born in the region will become global champions that serve to inspire other entrepreneurs across the globe,” Kostov said.
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Collective, a back-office platform that caters to ‘businesses of one,’ just landed a hefty seed round
Americans and other global citizens are increasingly self-employed, thanks to great software, the need for flexibility and because skilled services especially can pay fairly well, among other reasons.
In fact, exactly one year ago, the Freelancers Union and Upwork, a digital platform for freelancers, released a report estimating that 35% of the U.S. workforce had begun freelancing. With COVID-19 still making its way around the country and globe, prompting massive and continued job dislocation for many tens of millions of people, that percentage is likely to rise quickly.
Unsurprisingly, savvy startups see the economic power of these individuals — many of whom aren’t interested in managing anyone or anything other than the steady growth of their own businesses. A case in point is Collective, a 2.5-year-old, 20-person San Francisco-based startup that’s been quietly building back-office services like tax preparation and bookkeeping for what it dubs “business of one” owners, and which just closed on $8.65 million in seed funding.
General Catalyst and QED Investors co-led the round, joined by a string of renowned angel investors, including Uber cofounder Garrett Camp, Figma founder Dylan Field and DoorDash executive Gokul Rajaram.
We talked yesterday with cofounder and CEO Hooman Radfar about Collective’s mission to “empower, support and connect the self-employed community” — and what, exactly, it’s proposing.
TC: You previously founded a company and, even before it sold to Oracle in 2016, you had jumped over to VC, working with Garrett Camp at his startup studio Expa. Why shift back into founder mode?
HR: What I saw across AddThis and Expa and my angel investing is that managing finances is hard. Accounting, taxes, compliance — all that set-up as a small business is annoying.
Two years ago, [Collective cofounder] Ugur [Kaner] came into Expa and he basically pitched me on a startup-in-a-box-type program that we were talking about building from an incubation perspective, but [with more of a pointed focus on back office issues]. He’s an immigrant like me, and because he didn’t quite understand the system, he wound up having tax penalties — penalties that are even worse when you’re a freelancer. Some startups have come up with a bespoke version of what we offer, but we were like, ‘Why do they have to do it?’ These are commodities, but if you put them together in a platform, they can can be powerful.
TC: So is what you’ve created proprietary or are you working with third parties?
HR: Both. We’re an online concierge that’s focused on the back office as the core, meaning accounting and tax services. We also form an S Corp for you because you can save a lot of money [compared with forming a business as an LLC, which features different tax requirements]. So there’s an integration layer plus a dashboard on top of that. If you’re an S Corp, you need to have payroll, so we have a partnership with Gusto that comes with your subscription. We have a partnership with QuickBooks. We work with a third party on compliance. Our vision is to make this easy for you and to set this on autopilot because we understand that time is literally money.
TC: How much are you charging?
HR: For taxes, accounting, business banking and payroll, for the core package, it’s $200 a month. We are piloting bookkeeping and a fuller service package that’s probably [representative of] the direction we’ll head over time, and that will be an additional fee.
TC: How can you persuade these businesses of one that it’s worth that cost?
HR: There are almost three million people in the U.S. who [employ only themselves and] are making more than $100,000 a year and if you think about how many of these [different products] they are already using, it’s a great deal. QuickBooks and Gusto is cheaper with us. You see savings through expensing. The magic is really running your S Corp the right way. Part of that is normal income tax, but you also have a distribution and it’s taxed differently than an income — it’s taxed less. So we pull in salary data and look at expenses and across states, and say, ‘This is what we’d recommend to you based on how your cash flow is coming in, so you recognize this distribution in a compliant way.’
TC: Interesting about this useful data that you’ll be amassing from your customers. How might you use it?
HR: Our first concern is making sure the right people are seeing it [meaning we’re focused on privacy]. But there’s a lot we can do with the aggregation of that data once we’ve earned the right to use it. Among the things we could do, theoretically, includes creating a new level of scoring. If you’re a business of one, for example, it’s very difficult to get mortgages and loans, because credit agencies don’t have the tools to assess you. But if we have your financial history for years, we can represent that you’re a great person, you have a great business.
Another interesting direction as we reach more members — we’ll get to 2,000 soon — would be to use our power as a collective to get our members less expensive insurance, [help facilitate] credit, [help them with a] 401(k).
TC: There are a lot of other things you can get into presumably, too, from project management to graphic design . . .
HR: Right now, we want to make sure our core service is nailed.
Think about the transparency and peace of mind that Uber brought to ridesharing, or that Uber Eats brings to food delivery. You know when something is cooking, when it’s on its way, when it’s arriving. We’ve gotten used to that level of transparency and accountability with so many things, but when it comes to accounting, it’s not there and that’s crazy. This is your money. We want to change that.
TC: Going after “businesses of one” means you’re addressing a highly fragmented market. What kinds of partnerships are you striking to reach potential customers?
HR: We’re having those conversations now, but you can imagine neo banks make sense, along with vertical marketplaces for nurses and doctors and realtors and writers. There are a lot of possibilities.
Pictured, left to right, Collective’s cofounders: CTO Bugra Akcay, CEO Hooman Radfar and CPO Ugur Kaner.
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Brazilian mobile phone insurance technology startup Pitzi is now worth over $100 million
With roughly one million customers across Brazil and a new round of financing, the mobile phone insurance provider Pitzi now finds itself with a $100 million valuation.
The size of its latest round, which was led by QED Investors and included commitments from existing investors like Thrive Capital and Valiant Partners, was undisclosed.
PItzi acts as a reseller for insurance companies to offer products around mobile phone insurance across Brazil. Founded in 2012, the company’s mobile handset insurance offerings were a service that was in the right place at the right time, as low-cost handsets caused the market in Latin America’s most populous country to explode.
Pitzi previously raised $20 million from investors, including Thrive, Kaszek Ventures, Flybridge and DCM. Even with the company’s success, cell phone insurance in Brazil stands at 4%, compared with global standards of more than 40%. This despite the fact that there are more than 200 million phones in Brazil alone.
“Today, only 4% of smartphones here are protected but we’re driving that towards 90% in the coming years and using those phones to unlock even more transformation in the space,” said Daniel Hatkoff, founder and CEO of Pitzi, in a statement.
The investment by QED Investors puts Pitzi in some pretty good company when it comes to Latin American financial technology startups. Other Latin American investments in the firm’s portfolio include the multibillion-dollar credit card startup, Nubank; the personal finance lender, Creditas; the business lender, Konfio; and the rental financing company Quinto Andar.
As a result of the investment, Bill Cilluffo, a former president of Capital One International and a general partner with QED, will take a seat on the company’s board of directors, according to a statement.
For Hatkoff, the cell phone is a window into other products and services in the insurance industry thanks to the ways the device has transformed so many experiences for the emerging Brazilian middle class.
“The smartphone will be profoundly transformational in Brazil, allowing the emerging middle class to finally emerge and do things it never imagined possible,” said Hatkoff. “As market leaders, we at Pitzi are obsessed with unlocking the Brazilian consumer’s ability to use their phones in ever more powerful ways. Cell phone protection is just the beginning.”
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Bringing affiliate marketing and outsourced customer acquisition to Brazil nets Escale $22.6 million
Despite not being Brazilian and having their first exposure to the country only a few years ago, the two co-founders of Escale have managed to raise $22.6 million for their company, which provides customer acquisition services to companies in telecommunications and healthcare across Brazil.
Their secret? A knowledge of search engine optimization technologies honed through side businesses the two ran back in the United States.
The state of online marketing and digital sales was so woefully bad in Brazil that co-founders Matthew Kligerman and Ken Diamond had a green field in front of them on which to build Brazil’s first true online customer acquisition service, according to Diamond.
“We fell in love with Brazil for its warm culture and natural beauty, but as consumers, we had terrible experiences acquiring the most fundamental products and services for our new lives: internet, cell phone plans, health insurance and basic banking needs,” Kligerman said in a statement.
The company’s largest customer, according to Diamond, is NET, the Brazilian cable and telecom operator. NET was the first company to sign on for Escale’s customer acquisition services, but the company’s roster of clients now includes some of Brazil’s largest companies, including Bradesco, Sul America, Claro, GNDI and Amil.
It’s that marquee client list that attracted QED Investors and Invus Opportunities to co-lead the $22.6 million round that Escale just closed. The company’s previous investors, Kaszek Ventures, Rocket Internet’s GFC and Redpoint e.Ventures, also participated in the funding.
Latin America is in the throes of a startup renaissance at the moment, with Brazilian companies like Nubank and iFood and the Colombian company Rappi reaching billion-dollar valuations. Meanwhile investors are committing more capital to the region. SoftBank, for instance, is committing $5 billion to a new Latin American-focused fund.
With the new funding, Escale intends to move deeper into the development of customer acquisition platforms across verticals like consumer finance, insurance and education with comparison shopping sites and informational services (à la Credit Karma in the U.S.).
“With millions of web and cloud voice interactions every month, Escale can transform each of those interactions into data points, and continually improve its proprietary acquisition platform, ‘EscaleOS,’ to create highly-intelligent, customized marketing and sales funnels, helping consumers at the right moment connect with the products and services they need,” says Nicolas Berman, a partner at Kaszek Ventures. “The more consumer interactions they have, the faster Escale’s data flywheel spins.”
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Fundera Picks Up $11.5 Million In Series B Funding
Fundera, the online credit marketplace that helps small business secure loans started by GroupMe cofounder Jared Hecht, has today announced the close of a $11.5 million Series B funding round led by Susquehanna Growth Equity with participation from existing investors including QED Investors, Khosla Ventures, and First Round Capital. Alongside the funding, SGE’s Scott Feldman and… Read More
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Brazil’s Nubank Raises $30M Led By Tiger To Build Out Its Mobile-Based Credit Card Business
Brazil is one of the world’s fastest growing mobile markets, with 90 million smartphones in circulation among a population of about 200 million, and today a fin-tech company that has focused on catering to that growing group of users has raised a significant round of funding. Nubank, which has developed a platinum Master Card credit service that you apply for and manage using only… Read More
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