Unilever Ventures
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Pangaea Holdings, developing men’s personal care brands, raises $68M, including minority stake from Eurazeo
Global investment group Eurazeo invested $53 million in Pangaea Holdings for a minority investment in the Los Angeles e-commerce company rooted in creating premium men’s personal care brands.
The investment is part of a larger $68 million round that includes $15 million in Series B funding from a group of backers including Unilever Ventures and GPO Fund and existing investors Base10 Partners and Gradient Ventures. This brings the company’s total funds raised to $87 million since the company was founded by Richard Hong and Darwish Gani in 2018.
Harlem Capital’s Henri Pierre-Jacques invested in both Pangaea’s seed round in 2019 and Series A in 2020. He’s known Gani since college and worked with Hong over the past two years, calling the pair “one of the most data-driven and founder market fits I have seen.”
“At the seed stage, the business was already a seven-figure business and has continued to see astonishing growth,” he added. “Pangaea, to date, has been a brand incubator, but post the Series B will expand to be a vertically integrated e-commerce platform for other brands. We are even more excited for this next phase of their growth.”
Hong started Pangaea with the launch of men’s skincare brand Lumin that contains natural Korean-based formulations. In fact, he was among a group of people living together in an apartment using Korean beauty products and hiding it from their roommates, Gani told TechCrunch.
Gani later joined Hong as a co-founder to scale the business, as they realized there was a bigger opportunity for global e-commerce.
“Men are actually into skincare, but not as comfortable talking about it,” Gani said. “For Richard, he came from a place where skincare was more culturally accepted. His idea was to provide high-quality products, but presented in a way that people can understand their use and help them to form a habit.”
Pangaea ended up developing proprietary infrastructure, including warehousing, payments and shipping, as a holding company to grow and scale direct-to-consumer brands. It’s latest brand, Meridian, offering grooming products, launched in 2020. Products are now selling in more than 70 countries.
Though headquartered in Los Angeles, the company is basically remote, with more than 300 employees across its major hubs in LA, Lagos, Nigeria, Singapore and Europe.
The company is already cash flow positive, and the new funding will enable Pangaea to round out leadership roles in its brands and reach the next stage of growth with the goal of being “omnichannel male megabrands,” Gani said. The company is also investing in additional product categories, new brands and potentially licensing its proprietary software.
Gani said he is excited to work with Eurazeo, which he referred to as “experts in building and scaling consumer brands.” The firm will work with Pangaea to continue developing the Lumin and Meridian brands and accelerate its international expansion.
Jill Granoff, Eurazeo’s managing partner and brands CEO, said in a written statement that the company “is well-positioned for future growth.”
“Richard and Darwish have launched a platform and products that address a significant need in an attractive, growing market,” Granoff added. “The team has achieved impressive results in a short period of time across geographies and categories, demonstrating strong product appeal to global consumers. They have also built a highly scalable technology that can support future brand development.”
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India’s Khatabook raises $60 million to help merchants digitize bookkeeping and accept payments online
Khatabook, a startup that is helping small businesses in India record financial transactions digitally and accept payments online with an app, has raised $60 million in a new financing round as it looks to gain more ground in the world’s second most populous nation.
The new financing round, Series B, was led by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin’s B Capital. A range of other new and existing investors, including Sequoia India, Partners of DST Global, Tencent, GGV Capital, RTP Global, Hummingbird Ventures, Falcon Edge Capital, Rocketship.vc and Unilever Ventures, also participated in the round, as did Facebook’s Kevin Weil, Calm’s Alexander Will, CRED’s Kunal Shah and Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.
The one-and-a-half-year-old startup, which closed its Series A financing round in October last year and has raised $87 million to date, is now valued between $275 million to $300 million, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
Hundreds of millions of Indians came online in the last decade, but most merchants — think of neighborhood stores — are still offline in the country. They continue to rely on long notebooks to keep a log of their financial transactions. The process is also time-consuming and prone to errors, which could result in substantial losses.
Khatabook, as well as a handful of young and established players in the country, is attempting to change that by using apps to allow merchants to digitize their bookkeeping and also accept payments.
Today more than 8 million merchants from over 700 districts actively use Khatabook, its co-founder and chief executive Ravish Naresh told TechCrunch in an interview.
“We spent most of last year growing our user base,” said Naresh. And that bet has worked for Khatabook, which today competes with Lightspeed -backed OkCredit, Ribbit Capital-backed BharatPe, Walmart’s PhonePe and Paytm, all of which have raised more money than Khatabook.
The Khatabook team poses for a picture (Khatabook)
According to mobile insight firm AppAnnie, Khatabook had more than 910,000 daily active users as of earlier this month, ahead of Paytm’s merchant app, which is used each day by about 520,000 users, OkCredit with 352,000 users, PhonePe with 231,000 users and BharatPe, with some 120,000 users.
All of these firms have seen a decline in their daily active users base in recent months as India enforced a stay-at-home order for all its citizens and shut most stores and public places. But most of the aforementioned firms have only seen about 10-20% decline in their usage, according to AppAnnie.
Because most of Khatabook’s merchants stay in smaller cities and towns that are away from large cities and operate in grocery stores or work in agritech — areas that are exempted from New Delhi’s stay-at-home orders, they have been less impacted by the coronavirus outbreak, said Naresh.
Naresh declined to comment on AppAnnie’s data, but said merchants on the platform were adding $200 million worth of transactions on the Khatabook app each day.
In a statement, Kabir Narang, a general partner at B Capital who also co-heads the firm’s Asia business, said, “we expect the number of digitally sophisticated MSMEs to double over the next three to five years. Small and medium-sized businesses will drive the Indian economy in the era of COVID-19 and they need digital tools to make their businesses efficient and to grow.”
Khatabook will deploy the new capital to expand the size of its technology team as it looks to build more products. One such product could be online lending for these merchants, Naresh said, with some others exploring to solve other challenges these small businesses face.
Amit Jain, former head of Uber in India and now a partner at Sequoia Capital, said more than 50% of these small businesses are yet to get online. According to government data, there are more than 60 million small and micro-sized businesses in India.
India’s payments market could reach $1 trillion by 2023, according to a report by Credit Suisse .
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As meal-kit melee stretches on, Sun Basket whips up $30M Series E
Sun Basket, a provider of a healthy meal kit delivery service, has raised another $30 million in venture capital funding. The round, led by PivotNorth Capital, brings the company’s total raised to $125 million.
The Series E funding delays Sun Basket’s expected initial public offering once again. There’s been unsubstantiated talk of a Sun Basket float for quite some time; in fact, before Blue Apron and Hello Fresh, a pair of fellow meal-kit delivery businesses, completed IPOs, Sun Basket was the subject of exit rumors. Alas, we will have to wait a while longer before the company makes the big leap.
After all, Blue Apron has performed very poorly since going public on the New York Stock Exchange two years ago. Sun Basket chief executive Adam Zbar has been honest about the difficulties of running a meal-kit startup in a post-Blue Apron IPO universe, telling PitchBook his company’s Series D round “was by far the most challenging fundraise” in its history.
Sun Basket, headquartered in San Francisco, was founded in 2014 by Webby Award winner Zbar and award-winning chef Justine Kelly . The company delivers fresh, organic and sustainable ingredients to customers, setting itself apart from the large number of meal-kit providers active in the U.S. Its latest infusion of capital will be used to expand their offerings to include breakfast, lunch and dinner “personalized for any lifestyle.”
“We’re thrilled to have the strong support of our investors who share our vision for building the leading personalized healthy eating platform,” Zbar said in a statement. “Food is a $1T market ripe for online disruption, and Sun Basket will continue to innovate, focusing on our customers’ top three needs: health, ease, and personalization.”
Sun Basket says it’s growing fast. In its funding announcement, the business cited a compound annual growth rate of 80% over the last three years with “the best unit economics in the space.” Sapphire Ventures, August Capital, Founders Circle, Unilever Ventures, Baseline Ventures, Relevance Capital, Accolade Partners and Correlation Ventures have also participated in the round.
Despite known issues in the space, a tough path to profitability and high-profile failures (see After raising $125M, Munchery fails to deliver), venture capital investors continue to make deals in the meal-kit/ food-delivery space. From large financings like DoorDash’s $400 million Series F to GrubMarket’s recent $25 million deal, food startups continue to attract investment.
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