Blog Archive

Sunday, November 17, 2019

VC Deals Only: VC Deals Only. Weekend Edition. DroneDeploy raises...

VC Deals Only: VC Deals Only. Weekend Edition. DroneDeploy raises...: VC Deals Only HealthCare.com , a NYC-based provider of technology-enabled health insurance solutions, secured $18m in Series B funding. Th...

VC Deals Only. Weekend Edition. DroneDeploy raises $35 million for drone management and logistics tools

VC Deals Only

HealthCare.com, a NYC-based provider of technology-enabled health insurance solutions, secured $18m in Series B funding. The round, which brought the total capital raised to over $27m, was led by Second Alpha Partners, with participation from Axis Capital and CNO Financial Group.The company intends to use the capital to fund technology, engineering and data-science investments, expand consumer experience solutions and accelerate the development and marketing of its proprietary insurance products. More

Chip, the London-based fintech that created an automatic savings account, has raised £7.3 million, with £3.8 million crowdfunded by customers and the remainder from unnamed angel investors. The campaign ran for three weeks in September and is currently Crowdcube’s most participated-in crowdfund, with 7,182 investors. More

LawnStarter, an Austin, TX-based on-demand platform for outdoor services, raised $10.5m in growth funding. The round was led by Edison Partners with participation from existing investor Lerer Hippeau.The company intends to use the funds to continue its growth in lawn care across the US and add new outdoor service lines including landscaping, fertilization, pest control, and tree care.More 

Convoy, the digital freight network that connects truckers with shippers, has raised $400 million in a Series D funding round as it aims to scale its business amid an increasingly competitive market.The funding round brings Convoy’s post-money valuation to $2.75 billion.More 

Mobile monetization gets harder and harder every year (heck, I’d bet this gets more difficult by the week in this ultra-competitive market). Companies have long been trying to solve this problem for studios and publishers, and the latest one to offer tools to help here is Wappier.Wappier is a platform that uses AI models to predict consumer and user behavior, and it just raised $4 million in a seed round More

DroneDeploy, a startup developing a holistic cloud-based drone mapping and analytics platform, today announced that it’s closed a $35 million series D round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Energize Ventures, AirTree, Emergence Capital, Scale Venture Partners, and Uncork Capital also participated in the tranche, which follows on the heels of a $20 million series C in June 2018 and brings DroneDeploy’s total raised to $90 million.More 

Sponsor

myCareBase™is a platform for seniors and their families to find, evaluate, hire and manage home support services, to improve the seniors’ ability to remain living safely in their current home for as long as possible. The caregiver marketplace currently offers candidates in Greater Toronto and Greater Vancouver.

To compliment this platform the company also offers an innovative care management app that centralizes communication and task management among family members and the caregiver, along with a Care Concierge service to help family members with administrative, navigational or organizational tasks.

New Funds

CVC Capital Partners, a private equity and investment advisory firm, closed CVC Growth Partners Fund II, at $1.6 billion.Fund II exceeded its $1 billion target and, including a sidecar co-investment vehicle, has secured commitments of $1.6 billion. Fund II enjoys a diverse global investor base, spread across North America, Europe, the Middle-East and Asia. More

Angular Ventures, the early-stage enterprise and “deep tech”-focused VC firm founded by former DFJ Esprit partner Gil Dibner, is announcing the closing of its debut fund at $41 million. Targeting startups in Europe and Israel, Angular Ventures has been operating in so-called “stealth mode” for almost two years, seeing its portfolio grow to 12 companies. The VC typically invests between $250,000 and $1.5 million, from writing a startup’s first cheque to Series A. It says it aims to do five-seven new investments per year.More



IPOs 

Alibaba Group Holding, the record holder of the largest global initial public offering, has unveiled a secondary listing plan in Hong Kong, in a vote of confidence for the local financial market as the worst political crisis in the city’s history threatens its status as a global financial centre.The e-commerce giant aims to sell 500 million new shares, with 487.5 million set aside for international offering and the rest for Hong Kong public, according to a filing in New York. More 

When Beyond Meat's post-initial public offering expired on October 29, the company's stock fell 24% as roughly 48 million shares suddenly became eligible to trade on the market.In the weeks since, the post-IPO lockup expiration has continued to add downward pressure on shares of the plant-based meat alternatives company. The stock has fallen an additional 6% percent from October 29 through Monday's close. More 

Sponsor 

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax. 

Exits 

Epic Games announced it has acquired Quixel, a startup that created a huge “photogrammetry” asset library of real world imagery that can be used in animated films or video games. More

 

Friday, November 15, 2019

VC Deals Only: AMP Robotics raises $16 million to sort recyclable...

VC Deals Only: AMP Robotics raises $16 million to sort recyclable...: AMP Robotics, a Denver, Colorado-based startup creating robotic systems that sort recyclable material, this morning announced that it has ...

AMP Robotics raises $16 million to sort recyclable materials autonomously

AMP Robotics, a Denver, Colorado-based startup creating robotic systems that sort recyclable material, this morning announced that it has closed a $16 million series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital. BV, Closed Loop Partners, Congruent Ventures, and Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (an infrastructure firm spun out of Sidewalk Labs and backed by Alphabet and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan) also participated in the round, which brings AMP Robotics’ total raised to nearly $20 million following a seed round totaling $3.5 million.

The news comes just over a month after AMP Robotics installed 14 of its AI-guided robots at Single Stream Recyclers in Florida — the single largest global deployment in the recycling industry, the company claims — following deployments at facilities in California, Colorado, Indiana, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and elsewhere in the U.S. CEO Matanya Horowitz said the newfound capital will bolster AMP Robotics’ operations in the nearly $12.26 billion waste sorting robotics market and drive product research and development.

"Our new partners at Sequoia have a history of building category-defining businesses, and we are deeply excited to be executing on this vision with their experience, along with our existing world-class consortium of investors,” said Horowitz, who founded AMP Robotics in 2015. “We are perfectly positioned to expand the scope of our technology and the geographies where we do business, furthering our mission to change the fundamental economics of recycling and help make the circular economy possible.”

AMP Robotics asserts its platform delivers higher and more consistent pick rates than typical manual processes and that it offers holistic monitoring of material streams without requiring retrofitting. It’s modular in design, enabling facilities mangers to adapt it to existing workflows, and it’s tailored to individual brands and SKUs of recyclable objects. To this end, AMP Robotics’ products can process not only metals, batteries, capacitors, plastics, PCBs, wires, cartons, cardboard, cups, aluminum, and thin film, but also materials made of metal, mixed wood, asphalt, bricks, concrete, and mixed plastics.

AMP Cortex, AMP Robotics’ robotics control system, leverages a combination of AI algorithms and physical robots to orchestrate sorting, picking, and placing tasks. A three-armed picker machine with an adaptable frame area and height sits over a conveyor belt, held in place by a moveable steel frame. It’s fed data from AMP Neuron, which uses computer vision to distinguish visual features and self-improves by processing “millions” of images in the cloud across AMP Robotics’ network, such that it’s able to more accurately sort objects and learn new classes of materials while adapting to packaging design and lighting changes.

All that data feeds into AMP Insights, an online visualization tool that monitors material stream activity and performance. Real-time notifications sent via text and email keep managers abreast of goings-on, including potential equipment issues and hazards. And AMP Insights tracks key commodities to determine things like material composition per bale, known value created or lost on residual lines, and per-hauling load.

“We are excited to partner with AMP because their technology is changing the economics of the recycling industry,” said Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, who plans to join the company’s board of directors. “Over the last few years, the industry has had their margins squeezed by labor shortages and low commodity prices. The end result is an industry proactively searching for cost-saving alternatives and added opportunities to increase revenue by capturing more high-value recyclables, and AMP is emerging as the leading solution.”

Source. Venture Beat, Kyle Wiggers, November 14, 2019

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 This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.


Thursday, November 14, 2019

VC Deals Only: Convoy raises $400 million to expand its on-demand...

VC Deals Only: Convoy raises $400 million to expand its on-demand...: Convoy, the digital freight network that connects truckers with shippers, has raised $400 million in a Series D funding round as it ai...

Convoy raises $400 million to expand its on-demand trucking platform


Convoy, the digital freight network that connects truckers with shippers, has raised $400 million in a Series D funding round as it aims to scale its business amid an increasingly competitive market.

The funding round brings Convoy’s post-money valuation to $2.75 billion.

The round was co-led by Generation Investment Management and previous Convoy investor T. Rowe Price Associates. Asset management firm Baillie Gifford, which has fondness for pre-IPO tech companies, Fidelity and Durable Capital Partners, as well as Series C investors CapitalG and Lone Pine Capital, also participated in the round.

Convoy has managed to attract a slew of high-profile investors — and their capital — such as Jeff Bezos, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and even U2’s Bono and the Edge. In the four years since its founding, Convoy has raised a total of more than $668 million. Early investors include Greylock Partners, Y Combinator, Cascade Investment (the private investment vehicle of Bill Gates) and Code.org founders Hadi and Ali Partovi.

And that money has been put to work. Convoy co-founders Dan Lewis and Grant Goodale set out in 2015 to modernize freight brokerage, a fragmented and oftentimes analog business that matches loads from shippers with truckers.

The company has gone from hundreds of loads per week in 2016 to tens of thousands per week across the U.S. Notably, Convoy’s platform handles 100% of the matching, as opposed to having humans complete the task.

Convoy also has about 100 routes, many of them concentrated around economic hubs such as Chicago, Michigan and California, Lewis told TechCrunch.

The 850-person company wants to accelerate those efforts with capital raised in this latest round. However, it’s bound to face more competition. Uber Freight, Loadsmart and Flexport are just a few online marketplaces that are targeting freight.

Convoy has added new features to its platform as part of its scaling strategy. The company launched in 2019 an automated reloads feature that allows truckers to book multiple loads at a time. It also added Convoy Go, which allows drivers to bring their truck cab and hook up to a trailer pre-filled with cargo.


Source. TechCrunch, Kirsten Korosec, November 13, 2019
 
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 This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.





Wednesday, November 13, 2019

VC Deals Only: LawnStarter Raises $10.5M in Growth Funding

VC Deals Only: LawnStarter Raises $10.5M in Growth Funding: LawnStarte r , an Austin, TX-based on-demand platform for outdoor services, raised $10.5m in growth funding.   The round was led by Ed...

LawnStarter Raises $10.5M in Growth Funding

LawnStarter, an Austin, TX-based on-demand platform for outdoor services, raised $10.5m in growth funding.
 
The round was led by Edison Partners with participation from existing investor Lerer Hippeau.
The company intends to use the funds to continue its growth in lawn care across the US and add new outdoor service lines including landscaping, fertilization, pest control, and tree care.

Led by CEO and co-founder Steve Corcoran, LawnStarter provides an online marketplace for consumers and lawn care professionals. Through its online presence and its app, the company provides instant quotes for consumers, who can schedule lawn mowing and related lawn-care services from insured professionals.

The company handles marketing, billing, scheduling and other back-office operations so that pros can focus on delivering the service. Additionally, LawnStarter’s algorithms use geolocation data to help pros build route density, increasing their profitability.

Source. FinSMEs, November 12, 2019
 
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 This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.





Tuesday, November 12, 2019

VC Deals Only: London-based fintech Chip raises £7.3 million thro...

VC Deals Only: London-based fintech Chip raises £7.3 million thro...: Chip , the London-based fintech that created an automatic savings account, has raised £7.3 million, with £3.8 million crowdfunded by cu...

London-based fintech Chip raises £7.3 million through angel and crowdfunding


Chip, the London-based fintech that created an automatic savings account, has raised £7.3 million, with £3.8 million crowdfunded by customers and the remainder from unnamed angel investors. The campaign ran for three weeks in September and is currently Crowdcube’s most participated-in crowdfund, with 7,182 investors.

The startup provides a free app “to make saving as easy as spending.” The AI-driven system calculates how much a user could save, gives the option to decline it, and then automatically transfers the amount to user’s Chip account. Chip has saved over £85 million for its users to date.

CEO Simon Rabin commented: “The most powerful way for Chip to grow is to have thousands of investors advocating for the product they believe in. It’s amazing to have this many Chip savers as investors in the company. We’ve proven there’s a big demand for Chip, and we’re ready to scale – we’re going to use our investment to grow and deliver a product that will fill a huge gap in the market. Many of the other big names in fintech are focussed on making spending easier. Monzo have the current account, Curve are disrupting credit cards, Revolut have the travel card, but Chip… Chip is for saving.”

The fintech will use the funds to increase the app’s capacity for large volumes of users, refining the infrastructure and expanding the team. THe plan is also to expand the product to offer access to FSCS protected accounts and deliver an in-app marketplace for returns products.

Already the company has made a number of senior hires, all fintech veterans: David Kavanagh (CTO), former CTO of Purplebricks; Sharon Miles (COO), former innovation director of B2B fintech unicorn Deposit Solutions, as well as Barclays and LeasePlan; Gerard Hurley (CCO), former compliance lead at Funding Circle and an ex-FCA regulator; Gary Dolman (Board Advisor), co-founder and recently retired CFO of Monzo.

New CTO David Kavanagh said: “The savings market is archaic, broken and ineffective. People want more from their savings accounts, so they are voting with their capital. Chip has raised VC-levels of funding from its users and supporters, demonstrating that what customers want is a market-changing product that is easy to use, helps them save, and offers the best possible rates in the market. It’s an incredibly exciting time for the company and I’m delighted to have joined it as such a pivotal stage. I look forward to working with the team at Chip to help set a new standard for savings apps.”

Source. Tech.Eu,. Annie Musgrove, November 6, 2019


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 This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.




Monday, November 11, 2019

VC Deals Only: HealthCare.com Secures $18M in Series B Funding

VC Deals Only: HealthCare.com Secures $18M in Series B Funding: HealthCare.com , a NYC-based provider of technology-enabled health insurance solutions, secured $18m in Series B funding. The round,...

HealthCare.com Secures $18M in Series B Funding

HealthCare.com, a NYC-based provider of technology-enabled health insurance solutions, secured $18m in Series B funding.

The round, which brought the total capital raised to over $27m, was led by Second Alpha Partners, with participation from Axis Capital and CNO Financial Group.

The company intends to use the capital to fund technology, engineering and data-science investments, expand consumer experience solutions and accelerate the development and marketing of its proprietary insurance products.

Founded in 2014 by Howard Yeh, Jeff Smedsrud and Jose Vargas, HealthCare.com is an online health insurance company providing a data-driven shopping platform for American consumers to enroll in individual health insurance and Medicare plans. The company also develops and markets a portfolio of proprietary, direct-to-consumer health insurance and supplemental insurance products under the name Pivot Health.

Source. FinSMEs. November 11, 2019

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 This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.




Sunday, November 10, 2019

VC Deals Only. Weekend Edition. Anti-Fraud Startup Riskified Raises $165 Million

VC Deals

Counterfeiting isn’t a new problem, but it’s a growing one. The global market for fake goods is estimated to exceed $1.2 trillion. Counterfeits take roughly $300 billion worth of revenue away from brands that have to compete with them. In worse news still, roughly two out of every five products purchased online was counterfeit, according to the U.S. Government of Accountability Office.Perhaps it’s unsurprising that fraud prevention and phishing detection startup RedMarlin recently secured capital from an investor cohort. The Los Altos-based company this morning announced that it has raised $10 million in series A funding. More 

As the UK continues on its slow march to leave the European Union, a London-based startup that enables companies to work internationally has raised a huge round of funding from a strategic backer to expand its business. Ebury, which provides foreign exchange, money transfer and other currency services to small and medium businesses and their banking partners, has picked up £350 million (about €400 million, or $452 million) led by Spanish banking giant Santander. With the deal, Madrid-based Santander will become a majority shareholder at 50.1% but notes that Ebury will continue to operate as an independent entity. More 

FreeTrade the U.K. challenger stockbroker that offers commission-free investing, has closed $15 million in Series A funding. The round includes a $7.5 million investment from Draper Esprit, the U.K. publicly listed venture capital firm, along with previously announced equity crowdfunding via Crowdcube.The funding will be used by Freetrade for further growth and product development, including “doubling down” on engineering hires. The firm, which claims more than 50,000 customers, is also planning to expand to Europe next year. More 

Faire, a curated wholesale marketplace that connects independent retailers and makers, raised $150m in Series D funding round at $1 billion valuation.The round was co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Founders Fund with participation from existing investors including Forerunner Ventures, YC Continuity, and Khosla Ventures.The company, which has raised $266m in total funding to date, intends to use the funds to expand into new markets, improve the marketplace, and continue building its tools. More 

Boston-based PathAI, maker of artificial intelligence tools for pathology, has capped off its Series B funding round with a $15 million strategic investment from the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and Bristol-Myers Squibb. This raise brings the startup’s full round to $75 million, and its total funding to just over $90 million. More 

Tel Aviv-based online payments fraud prevention startup Riskified Ltd. has completed a $165 million funding round, the company announced Tuesday. The round was led by New York-based General Atlantic according to a company valuation of more than $1 billion, the company said. Minneapolis-based Winslow Capital participated in the round, as did existing investors Qumra Capital, Entrée Capital, and Pitango Venture Capital. More 

Sponsor  

myCareBase™is a platform for seniors and their families to find, evaluate, hire and manage home support services, to improve the seniors’ ability to remain living safely in their current home for as long as possible. The caregiver marketplace currently offers candidates in Greater Toronto and Greater Vancouver.

To compliment this platform the company also offers an innovative care management app that centralizes communication and task management among family members and the caregiver, along with a Care Concierge service to help family members with administrative, navigational or organizational tasks. 

New Funds 

London-based VC firm Frog Capital has announced the first close of its second scale-up fund, which is expected to accumulate over €150 million. The fund is dedicated to European software companies that earn around €5 million in annual revenue. More 

Foresite Capital has launched a new incubator with one goal in mind: to help usher in a transformation in healthcare.Led by Foresite's managing director—Vik Bajaj, Ph.D., a former exec at Verily and Grail—the incubator, dubbed Foresite Labs, will sit at the intersection of data science and healthcare. More

Aspirant Group, a Japanese middle-market buyout firm, closed a ¥50 Billion fund. AG III’s commitments were secured from European and U.S. investors, and several global fund of funds, as well as major Japan institutional investors. Investors included major financial institutions, pension plans, asset managers, and family offices. More 

Sponsor 

This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax. 

IPOs 

China’s Megvii Technology Ltd. is considering whether to delay its initial public offering given uncertainty over whether it can secure its existing $4 billion valuation while on an American blacklist, according to people familiar with the matter. More 

Chinese autonomous air mobility company EHang has filed with the SEC the paperwork required to go public in the U.S. on the Nasdaq exchange, with a $100 million initial public offering. The company, which has been flying demonstration flights with passengers on board for a while now, is gearing up to launch its first commercial service in Guangzhou after getting approval from local and national regulators to deploy its drones in the area. More 

Exits  

Veeva Systems is buying Crossix Solutions with an eye to integrating the Veeva healthcare professional (HCP) cloud software services with the more patient-centric Crossix data and analytics.Under the $430 million cash deal, Crossix will remain an independent unit inside Veeva called Veeva Crossix and will continue to be run by Crossix CEO Asaf Evenhaim. More

VC Deals Only: VC Deals Only. Weekend Edition. Anti-Fraud Startup...

VC Deals Only: VC Deals Only. Weekend Edition. Anti-Fraud Startup...: VC Dea ls Counterfeiting isn’t a new problem, but it’s a growing one. The global market for fake goods is estimated to exceed $1.2 ...

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

VC Deals Only: RedMarlin raises $10 million to fight counterfeiti...

VC Deals Only: RedMarlin raises $10 million to fight counterfeiti...: Counterfeiting isn’t a new problem, but it’s a growing one. The global market for fake goods is estimated to exceed $1.2 trillion. Counte...

RedMarlin raises $10 million to fight counterfeiting with AI

Counterfeiting isn’t a new problem, but it’s a growing one. The global market for fake goods is estimated to exceed $1.2 trillion. Counterfeits take roughly $300 billion worth of revenue away from brands that have to compete with them. In worse news still, roughly two out of every five products purchased online was counterfeit, according to the U.S. Government of Accountability Office.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that fraud prevention and phishing detection startup RedMarlin recently secured capital from an investor cohort. The Los Altos-based company this morning announced that it has raised $10 million in series A funding co-led by Thomvest Ventures and Crosslink Capital, with participation from Cyber Mentor Fund, Nexxus Venture Partners, and Rain Capital. CEO Abhishek Dubey said the new funds will be used to grow RedMarlin’s engineering and sales teams while furthering its go-to-market strategy.

 The funding comes after a year in which RedMarlin’s revenue grew tenfold.

“In today’s digital marketplace, phishing and fraud are [paramount] security issues to brands. By providing an effective, accurate, and robust automated system, we are already helping companies in the finance, travel, transport, social media, and SaaS sectors grow more confidently and have a robust strategy in place to continue fueling growth into new sectors,” said Dubey, who cofounded RedMarlin in 2017 with Shashi Prakash.

The natural language understanding and computer vision algorithms underlying RedMarlin’s platform learn from corpora containing millions of samples, RedMarlin says. They’re able to detect an instance of brand hijacking on a webpage, email, or social network in as little as milliseconds and can understand intent from text snippets alone. More impressive still, they automatically collect evidence such as screenshots, web host details, and web history while scaling via APIs from thousands to millions of queries per day.

RedMarlin’s platform alerts customers when it detects incriminating info regarding kit authors, stolen credentials, and more. And it sends takedown notifications and reports websites to blacklists autonomously, in partnership with global counterfeit and phishing registries.

RedMarlin’s complementary anti-phishing solution, CheckPhish.AI, provides a URL scanning service that detects tech support and gift card scams, drug spam websites, rogue streaming sites, gambling websites, and more using machine learning. The company says over 101 Fortune 500 companies have used CheckFish to scan more than 600 million URLs to date.

The global anti-counterfeit technologies market is anticipated to be worth $104 billion by the end of 2024, and RedMarlin is far from the only startup gunning for a slice of it. One rival is Spain-based Red Points, which raised $38 million in April to further develop its tools to fight counterfeiting and piracy. Another is 3PM Marketplace Solutions, a Chicago-based company that’s worked with clients like HBO to spot counterfeit products.

But Crosslink Capital’s Matt Bigge has faith in RedMarlin’s ability to stand out.

“The deep experience of the RedMarlin team has helped them gain evangelical praise from early customers,” he said. “More so, the automation capabilities they’ve built, which solve critical customer challenges both in resources and productivity, have already proven to exceed anything available in this huge and underserved market.”

Source. Kyle Wiggers, VentureBeat, November 5, 2019

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 This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.

Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.




Tuesday, November 5, 2019

VC Deals Only: Ebury nabs £350M for foreign exchange and currency...

VC Deals Only: Ebury nabs £350M for foreign exchange and currency...: As the UK continues on its slow march to leave the European Union, a London-based startup that enables companies to work internationall...

Ebury nabs £350M for foreign exchange and currency services for SMEs, Santander takes 50.1% stake

As the UK continues on its slow march to leave the European Union, a London-based startup that enables companies to work internationally has raised a huge round of funding from a strategic backer to expand its business. Ebury, which provides foreign exchange, money transfer and other currency services to small and medium businesses and their banking partners, has picked up £350 million (about €400 million, or $452 million) led by Spanish banking giant Santander. With the deal, Madrid-based Santander will become a majority shareholder at 50.1% but notes that Ebury will continue to operate as an independent entity.

Ebury and Santander said that the funding will be used to support Ebury’s growth, and specifically to scale its customer base in Latin America and Asia, while at the same time bolting on more modern services to Santander’s offerings as it seeks both to expand its revenues from existing customers and take on new ones.

Santander said that it has 4 million SME customers globally, and currently more than 200,000 of them do international business, while Ebury is already operating 19 countries and covers 140 currencies, with annual revenue growth of 40% in each of the last three years.

But putting to one side 4 million businesses, even providing services to 200,000 customers would be a big step up for Ebury: the company said that last year it processed £16.7 billion in payments for just 43,000 clients.

Santander said that its investment gives it a 50.1% stake in the company, but it is not disclosing total valuation. On a straight percentage, it would work out to about £700 million, or $902 million, but it sounds like the deal includes both primary and secondary investment — “£70 million will be new primary equity (approximately €80 million) to support Ebury’s plans to enter new markets in Latin America and Asia,” the companies note — and that could change the numbers. Santander is optimistic and said it expects a return on its invested capital in Eubury of higher than 25% in 2024.

Ebury’s existing investors and co-founders and management will also invest in the transaction. Past backers include 83North (formerly Greylock Israel) and Vitruvian Partners, among others. 

Founded in 2009, it has to date raised $134 million.

Services that Ebury currently provides include currency transfer and exchange, but it looks like there will be  more down the line. Just last month, Ebury announced that it had acquired another fintech called Frontierpay, which specialises in international payroll solutions. The deal is still going through regulatory approavals.

Many have lamented the fact that startups out of Europe find it hard to scale and grow and need to look to markets like the US for that kind of funding and support — often relocating in the process. Fintech is one of the big areas that bucks this trend.

Adyen built and still operates its successful online payments business out of the Netherlands; Revolut, Monzo and a wave of other so-called ‘challenger banks’ are revisiting what it means to provide banking services to consumers and businesses; and TransferWise — itself a major player in currency transfer services focusing both on individuals as well as businesses — are among the many that have scaled internationally out of Europe and have valuations in the billions.

Indeed, it’s competition from the likes of TransferWise that may have spurred Santander to invest in Ebury.

If bringing Ebury’s technology to the Santander platform will give the legacy bank a better way of competing in a market that’s seeing a lot of challengers at the moment, it also gives Ebury a stronger underpinning for those skeptical of doing business with a newer startup.

“Combining a big bank with nimble fintech means we can offer our clients the best of both worlds: they can benefit from our technology and high- quality service safe in the knowledge that they are counterparty to one of the world most important financial institutions,” said Juan Lobato and Salvador García, co-founders of Ebury, in a joint statement. “It is an exciting time for Ebury, we have just completed our first acquisition, and the new capital from Santander and our existing shareholders will allow us to invest in new ways to serve SMEs trading internationally and continue the growth in our business while keeping our entrepreneurial culture.”

Santander is not a stranger to making strategic investments in financial technology startups to grow its business, specifically by integrating or co-marketing those services alongside its own. It made an early strategic investment in Sweden’s iZettle, a Square competitor, that brought the startup into Latin America, and specifically as a co-provider of services to Santander’s customers in the region. Although it looked like iZettle could eventually get gobbled up by Santander, in the end, it was acquired by PayPal for $2.2 billion.

As with the iZettle investment, the focus for Santander here is on providing more services for SMEs, a huge sector that is fragmented and often overlooked and underserved against the bookends of mass-market consumer services and high-touch, high-end large enterprise services. The gap in turn becomes an opportunity.

“Small and medium-sized businesses are a major engine of growth around the world, creating new jobs and contributing up to 60% of total employment and up to 40% of national GDP in emerging economies,” said Ana Botín, Group Executive Chairman of Banco Santander, in a statement. “SMEs are becoming increasingly global and Santander is the best positioned bank to play a leading role to help them access global trade finance. By partnering with Ebury, Santander will deliver faster and more efficient products and services for SMEs, previously only accessible to larger corporates.”

Source. TechCrunch, Ingrid Lunden, November 4, 2019 
 
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Monday, November 4, 2019

VC Deals Only: Freetrade, the UK challenger stockbroker, complete...

VC Deals Only: Freetrade, the UK challenger stockbroker, complete...: FreeTrade the U.K. challenger stockbroker that offers commission-free investing, has closed $15 million in Series A funding. The round in...

Freetrade, the UK challenger stockbroker, completes $15M Series A

FreeTrade the U.K. challenger stockbroker that offers commission-free investing, has closed $15 million in Series A funding. The round includes a $7.5 million investment from Draper Esprit, the U.K. publicly listed venture capital firm, along with previously announced equity crowdfunding via Crowdcube.

The funding will be used by Freetrade for further growth and product development, including “doubling down” on engineering hires. The firm, which claims more than 50,000 customers, is also planning to expand to Europe next year.

In addition, Adam Dodds, CEO and founder of Freetrade, tells me there will be a marketing and content push to help reach more of the challenger stockbroker’s target millennial customers and help educate the market as a whole that investing in the stock market doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive or complicated.

Amongst a number of new stock trading and investment apps in the U.K., London-based Freetrade was first out of the gate as a bona fide “challenger broker” after deciding early on to build its own brokerage. This included obtaining a full broker license from the FCA, rather than simply partnering with an established broker.


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The Freetrade app lets you invest in stocks and ETFs. Trades are “fee-free” if you are happy for your buy or sell trades to execute at the close of business each day. If you want to execute immediately, the startup charges a low £1 per trade. The idea is to put the heat on the larger incumbents that can charge up to £12 per trade, which is off-putting to people wanting to only invest a small amount or regularly refresh a modestly sized portfolio.

Meanwhile, Dodds says that next on the product roadmap will be a new investment platform that will give users the option to purchase U.K. and European “fractional” shares, not just U.S. ones, which he claims will be a first.

With that said, competition has been steadily increasing since Freetrade set up shop. Silicon Valley’s Robinhood is gearing up for a U.K. launch, having recently received regulatory approval. Bux has also recently launched commission-free trading and now bills itself as a challenger broker just like Freetrade.

Then, of course, there’s Revolut, the fast-growing challenger bank that tentatively launched fee-free stock investing in August.

Noteworthy, André Mohamed, previously CTO and a co-founder of Freetrade, joined Revolut as its new head of Wealth & Trading Product, adding a bit of extra spice to that rivalry. As I wrote at the time, the circumstances that saw Mohamed depart Freetrade remain unclear. According to my sources, his contract was terminated last year and the two parties settled, with Freetrade accepting no liability.

“Freetrade are on a mission to open up investment opportunities for everyone, as are we,” says Simon Cook, CEO of Draper Esprit, in a statement. “In this sense, their mission is totally aligned with our own, as a rare tech-focused VC listed on the stock exchange. The company have shown exceptional growth in the short time since they first launched the platform last year. We could not be more delighted to support Adam, Viktor, Ian and their wider team as they enable Europe’s 100 million millennials to benefit from the world’s economic growth.”

Source. TechCrunch, Steve O'Hear, October 31, 2019
 
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This post was brought to you by Woewoda Communications, your partner in the venture capital, private equity and startup markets; offering strategic communications, public relations & investor relation services to Canadian VCs, PEs, Angels, Endowments/Trusts, Family Offices, and Canadian startups involved in ICT, IoT, blockchain, life sciences, healthcare, agribusiness, clean energy, fintech, AI and robotics.

Are you a Canadian GP/LP/CI or a Canadian startup that needs to grow or scale? Give us a call! One of our representatives would love to explain how we vertically design, and then systematically layer each of our communication platforms to effectively reach niche target audiences for our clients. WC offers a unique synergistic approach to effectively communicate our client's message to their target audience.


Serving Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax.





Small Business Finance Presentation: Creating Your Money Map

  Small Business Finance Presentation Creating Your Money Map  Title  Small Business Finances - Creating your Money Map Descriptio...