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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Galileo Financial raises $77 million for its fintech services that were 19 years in the making

Clay Wilkes had already been retired for six years when he launched Galileo Financial Services in 2000.

The serial entrepreneur, who had been an early pioneer in telecommunications technologies (like voice over internet protocols), saw the need for better connectivity between secondary services and financial institutions 19 years ago, just as new digital services around payroll processing, transit vouchers, store cards and other services were launching.

Now the company runs the backend integrations with financial institutions for some of the biggest names in financial technology and has just raised $77 million in financing from Accel Partners.

Not that Galileo necessarily needed the money. The company has been profitable for years since its bootstrapped beginnings and counts fintech giants like Chime Banking, Robinhood, Monzo and TransferWise among its customers. In fact, the debit and credit card service provider will process nearly $26 billion in financing by the end of the year, according to the company.

For financial services companies that are launching these days there are a few ways to get to market quickly. One is to partner with a financial institution that will handle the money for them in accounts that are FDIC assured; the other is to become a financial provider that’s fully regulated themselves.

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Most companies have opted for the second route, and when they do, they need to find a way to hook into a bank’s financial system and the payment technologies that form the backbone of transaction processing through the debit and credit cards that a huge portion of the world relies on to buy things.

Accel partner John Locke, who is joining the Galileo board of directors, calls the company almost the flip side of the Braintree and Stripe investments that power transactions for most online merchants.

Rather than focus on the companies that are taking online orders and processing payments, Galileo deals with the consumers who are spending the money and powers the ways in which companies are trying to offer new services to get those consumers to switch from traditional banks to their upstart challengers (ironically still mostly powered by traditional banks).

“Through the API what they’re doing is creating and managing accounts, authorizing merchant transactions, monitoring fraud, initiating disputes and chargebacks, being able to configure products and a wide variety of product,” said Wilkes. “We support [direct deposit accounts] and we do credit products… all of these capabilities are capabilities that fit on our platform.”

Wilkes wouldn’t talk about the company’s valuation except to say that it’s worth “a substantial amount.”

What he will talk about is how Galileo will use the money it has raised. The Salt Lake City-based startup is planning to greatly expand its geographical reach beyond North America. It’s “actively pursuing opportunities in Brazil and Colombia and Argentina,” according to Wilkes. In fact, the company plans to open an office in Mexico City in the coming months to service new Latin American business.

Meanwhile, it already has something of a stranglehold on the market in the United Kingdom. “The top five largest fintechs in the U.K. are all clients today,” Wilkes said.

Unlike other companies in the market that take a fixed percentage of transactions, Galileo charges a variable amount of a few cents for every transaction that it processes to connect a startup with its banking back end. 

“We’re in a golden era of fintech innovation and Galileo has quietly built the API infrastructure layer powering the industry’s most innovative products,” said Locke in a statement. “Clay and his team have built a very impressive business with many parallels to companies like Qualtrics and Atlassian: bootstrapping first to build a quiet, profitable powerhouse and now, ready to go big globally. We’re excited to help Clay and team take Galileo to the next level.”

Source. TechCrunch, Johnathan Schreiber October 16, 2019

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Loadsmart Raises $19M in Funding

Loadsmart, a Chicago, IL- and NYC-based digital freight technology company, raised $19m in funding.

Backers included Ports America, Maersk Growth, Chromo Invest and Connor Capital SB.

This latest round follows Loadsmart’s series A round in late 2018, bringing total funding to date to $53.4m.

The company intends to use the funds for its new Smart Drayage initiative.

Co-founded by Ricardo Salgado, CEO, and Felipe Capella, chief product officer, Loadsmart is a digital freight platform that specializes in truckload and intermodal shipping. The company is leveraging data and machine learning to build artificial intelligence processes into the complex freight cycle, allowing shippers to book a truck in seconds and providing instant and targeted loads to carriers.

The announcement comes together with the release of Loadsmart Drayage Instant Booking. The new service is available via the company’s website and enables small and medium-sized shippers to book a drayage truck in seconds.

For enterprise accounts Loadsmart offers an API integrated solution.

Source. FinSMEs, September 6, 2019

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Digital Medical Tech Raises $1.5M in Seed Funding

Digital Medical Tech, an Annapolis, MD-based solution provider for hospital management and asset tracking, raised $1.5m in seed funding.

St. Louis, Mo.-based DMTI Capital Partners, LLC provided the funding.

The company intends to use the funds to launch a nationwide engagement program for targeting healthcare providers and potential partnerships.

Founded in 2016 by CEO Matthew Nicholson, Digital Medical Tech enables health systems to proactively track medical equipment and devices via a Bluetooth platform. The company’s real-time location system monitors and manages medical assets while requiring less infrastructure and shorter installation time compared to other tracking solutions.

Digital Medical Tech, which recently graduated from the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator business program powered by Techstars, currently has pilot programs at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Calif.; Keck Medicine of USC; and American Medical Concepts, an exclusive distributor for Stryker Corporation, in Portland, Ore.

The company also has offices in Los Angeles, Calif.

Source. FinSMEs, Staff, August 23, 2019

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Clumio raises $51M to bring enterprise backup into the 21st century

Creating backups for massive enterprise deployments may feel like a solved problem, but for the most part, we’re still talking about complex hardware and software setups. Clumio, which is coming out of stealth today, wants to modernize enterprise data protection by eliminating the on-premise hardware in favor of a flexible, SaaS-style cloud-based backup solution.

For the first time, Clumio also today announced that it has raised a total of $51 million in a Series A and B round since it was founded in 2017. The $11 million Series A round closed in October 2017 and the Series B round in November 2018, Clumio founder and CEO Poojan Kumar told me. Kumar’s previous company, storage startup PernixData, was acquired by Nutanix in 2016. It doesn’t look like the investors made their money back, though.

Clumio is backed by investors like Sutter Hill Ventures, which led the Series A, and Index Ventures, which drove the Series B together with Sutter Hill. Other individual investors include Mark Leslie, founder of Veritas Technologies, and John Thompson, chairman of the board at Microsoft .

“Enterprise workloads are being ‘SaaS-ified’ because IT can no longer afford the time, complexity and expense of building and managing heavy on-prem hardware and software solutions if they are to successfully deliver against their digital transformation initiatives,” said Kumar. “Unlike legacy backup vendors, Clumio SaaS is born in the cloud. We have leveraged the most secure and innovative cloud services available, now and in the future, within our service to ensure that we can meet customer requirements for backup, regardless of where the data is.”

In its current iteration, Clumio can be used to secure data from on-premise, VMware Cloud for AWS and native AWS service workloads. Given this list, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Clumio’s backend, too, makes extensive use of public cloud services.

The company says that it already has several customers, though it didn’t disclose any in today’s announcement.

Source. Techcrunch, Frederick Lardinois, August 14, 2019

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News App SmartNews Now Worth $1B+ After New Capital, Joining Chinese News-Focused Unicorns

SmartNews, a self-described “news app” that claims 500 percent userbase growth in the United States over the past year, has raised a fresh round of capital. The new $28 million Series E values the firm at $1.1 billion, it announced. SmartNews previously raised a $38 million Series D led by the Development Bank of Japan and a $10 million Series C led by GREE.

The Tokyo-based company has raised just over $116 million since it was born in 2012. SmartNews stated in a release that it has 20 million monthly active users, or MAUs, in the United States and Japan. In June it was reported that SmartNews had 15 million DAUs. 

The news that SmartNews had raised a nice chunk of new money received normal coverage from the technology and business press (here’s TechCrunch and Bloomberg). It also picked up a little doubt. Rafat Ali, the former founder of paidContent, a publication focused on the economics of media before selling in 2012, weighed in as well.

In a tweet Ali said the following:

Hasn’t everyone learned this lesson already, chasing unicorn status for media startups is likely the kiss of death? Of what use is putting that giant target on your back, when the buyers are scarce?

His argument is twofold. First, that this sort of fundraise tells other companies that the SmartNews market is lucrative, possibly leading to competition or a squeeze from platforms. And, second, that it’s hard to exit a media company at such a high price.

Both criticisms are valid. Media-focused startups haven’t had a great run in America in recent quarters. However, the landscape abroad looks a bit different.

Aggregation For Fun And Profit

Media-focused upstarts have a bad rap in America. With the implosion of Mic, the fire-sale of Mashable, the birth-death of News Gawker, and staffing cuts as far as you can can see, it’s difficult to be optimistic about the future of media and news-centered startups domestically.

But the local market is not the global market. Outside of this country’s borders, there’s reason for optimism regarding media apps and news aggregators in particular.

Two examples come to mind. First, China-based Qutoutiao, a Tencent-backed news aggregation app that TechCrunch called the “number two mobile content aggregator” in that country. It went public last year, and despite shedding most of its value while public, is still worth over $1 billion. (Crunchbase News coverage of the company’s financials here.)

And second, Jinri Toutiao. Part of the ByteDance empire in China, Jinri Toutiao is worth about $20 billion after a $2 billion 2017 round. ByteDance, Toutiao’s parent company, is best known in the United States for the success of its TikTok social application. General Atlantic led the $2 billion investment.

While China-based apps seem to have the highest valuations (read up on the Chinese podcast market as well for more on the country’s domestic media market), it’s not impossible to imagine the model (and, therefore, the success) working again. Perhaps SmartNews can pull it off.

Source. Crunchbase, Alex Wilhelm, August 5, 2019

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RIVAL TECHNOLOGIES RAISES FIRST FINANCING ROUND TOTALLING $8.5 MILLION CAD

Rival Technologies, a voice, video, and chat marketing solution based in Vancouver, has raised $8.5 million CAD, claiming to have doubled its venture capital funding target.

The investors are not being disclosed, but a Rival spokesperson told BetaKit the participants were from Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Vancouver. The startup said funds from the investment will be used to continue developing the company’s platform and expanding Reach3 Insights, Rival’s sister company, under the umbrella of the Reid Campbell Group.

“This product-development funding further validates the work we are doing to revolutionize market research,” said Rival’s co-founder and CEO Andrew Reid. “By opening our doors to external investors for the first time, we also gain new perspectives and opportunities for collaboration. I am extremely proud of the growing team at Rival for their ground-breaking contributions to expanding our business and positioning us as a world leader in the market research software industry.”

Reid is the former president of corporate innovation at Vision Critical. After raising $16 million in venture capital and another $76 million in a secondary offering, Vision Critical sold its business in 2016 to focus on marketing intelligence software. Reid and Rival’s co-founders provided an undisclosed amount of seed money for the company when it was founded in 2018 along with Reach3 Insights.

“I am incredibly proud of the platform and culture we’ve built so far at Rival,” said Jennifer Reid, Rival’s senior methodologist and an investor in the company. “By attracting passionate, courageous and talented people who are committed to providing the best technology for consumer engagement, everyone at Rival is helping organizations capture the authentic voice of their customers and improve business outcomes in the process.”

By integrating chat, voice, and video solutions into SMS, social media, and messaging apps, Rival’s insight platform, Chat Lab, aims to help companies reach consumers to better understand their attitudes, opinions, and preferences.

Rival’s client base includes the National Football League, A&W Canada, and the Vancouver Canucks. The startup said it is currently looking to expand its team, as its annual recurring revenue, which is generated by subscriptions, approaches $1 million.

Source. Betakit, Isabelle Kirkwood, July 17, 2019

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Amperity Secures $50M in Series C Funding

Amperity, a Seattle, WA-based AI-powered Customer Data Management platform, raised a $50M Series C financing.

Backers included Tiger Global Management, Goldman Sachs, Declaration Partners, Madera Technology Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and Lee Fixel.

The company, which has now raised total funding to-date to $87m, intends to use the funds to accelerate new capabilities, as well as expand into new verticals including financial services, automotive, insurance, and healthcare, while continuing to grow within the retail, travel, and hospitality industries.

Led by Kabir Shahani, CEO and co-founder, Amperity leverages artificial intelligence to provide a Customer Data Management platform for companies to connect, identify, and understand their customers, improve marketing performance, accelerate accurate customer insights, and enable customer experiences.

The company serves brands such as Alaska Airlines, Starbucks, The Gap Inc, Moët Hennessy USA, Wynn Resorts, Kendra Scott, Lucky Brand, Planet Fitness, Seattle Sounders, Stanley, and many more.

Source. FinSMEs, Staff, July 15, 2019

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Life House hotel chain and tech provider secures $100M investment

Life House, a startup hospitality company that both manages its own branded hotels and provides its technology platform as a white-label solution for independent hotel owners, has received $100 million in equity commitments from Blue Flag Partners.

Boston-based Blue Flag is an investment, real estate development and branding firm that has a collection of hotels in its portfolio.

Life House founder and CEO Rami Zeidan says the company will use this funding to buy properties that it will convert to the Life House brand.

It currently has two Life House brand hotels – both in Miami – and two hotels using its white-label technology platform – and expects to have 20 hotels open or under construction by 2020 in markets across the United States including Nantucket, Brooklyn, Denver and Lake Tahoe.

Since its launch in 2017, Life House has also raised $10.4 million in venture capital from investors including Global Founders Capital, Comcast Ventures and Trinity Investments.

Life House is using that money to pay for staff and technology development.

Zeidan says it is that technology that differentiates Life House. The company has developed seven proprietary software solutions including a guest-facing mobile app with a social network, an automated financial accounting and reporting system, a reservation and booking system and software to manage hotel staff.

“At the core, our brand is about delivering a high quality, locally-rooted, meaningful experience that’s designed-led at a more affordable price point,” Zeidan says.

“The social component allows us to drive the quality and the value of the experience and then a lot of the software is really focused around... cutting out a lot of the costs required to operate a hotel.”

Since early May, Life House has been operating one of Blue Flag’s newest acquisitions, The Roberts Collection boutique hotel in Nantucket, MA.

Life House says it expects to increase the property’s net operating income by more than 100% per year, translating to a $15 million increase in the value of the property.

This fall, work will begin to convert he property into a Life House brand hotel.

“We selected Life House after a competitive process, and we've quickly seen the massive value they're able to create,” says Terry Sanford, co-founder of Blue Flag.

“Since we closed on the acquisition [of The Roberts Collection] this past spring and in advance to repositioning the asset, they are already driving approximate 40% higher total revenue with nearly 80% direct web bookings.”

Life House says it will continue to focus on smaller hotels, which can be challenging to operate profitably.

“We’re quickly proving to be, along with our real estate partners, the best buyers of hotels with fewer than 150 keys,” says Bryan Dunn, Life House’s vice president of acquisitions and business development.

“Our technology-enabled approach to hotel operations allows us to extract maximum value for our investors from these traditionally overlooked assets.”

Source. PhocusWire, Mitra Sorrells, July 12, 2019

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OneTrust raises $200M at a $1.3B valuation to help organizations navigate online privacy rules

GDPR, and the newer California Consumer Privacy Act, have given a legal bite to ongoing developments in online privacy and data protection: it’s always good practice for companies with an online presence to take measures to safeguard people’s data, but now failing to do so can land them in some serious hot water.

Now — to underscore the urgency and demand in the market — one of the bigger companies helping organizations navigate those rules is announcing a huge round of funding. OneTrust, which builds tools to help companies navigate data protection and privacy policies both internally and with its customers, has raised $200 million in a Series A led by Insight that values the company at $1.3 billion.

It’s an outsized round for a Series A, being made at an equally outsized valuation — especially considering that the company is only three years old — but that’s because of the wide-ranging nature of the issue, according to CEO Kabir Barday, and OneTrust’s early moves and subsequent pole position in tackling it.

“We’re talking about an operational overhaul in a company’s practices,” Barday said in an interview. “That requires the right technology and reach to be able to deliver that at a low cost.” Notably, he said that OneTrust wasn’t actually in search of funding — it’s already generating revenue and could have grown off its own balance sheet — although he noted that having the capitalization and backing sends a signal to the market and in particular to larger organizations of its stability and staying power.

Currently, OneTrust has around 3,000 customers across 100 countries (and 1,000 employees), and the plan will be to continue to expand its reach geographically and to more businesses. Funding will also go toward the company’s technology: it already has 50 patents filed and another 50 applications in progress, securing its own IP in the area of privacy protection.

OneTrust offers technology and services covering three different aspects of data protection and privacy management.

Its Privacy Management Software helps an organization manage how it collects data, and it generates compliance reports in line with how a site is working relative to different jurisdictions. Then there is the famous (or infamous) service that lets internet users set their preferences for how they want their data to be handled on different sites. The third is a larger database and risk management platform that assesses how various third-party services (for example advertising providers) work on a site and where they might pose data protection risks.

These are all provided either as a cloud-based software as a service, or an on-premises solution, depending on the customer in question.

The startup also has an interesting backstory that sheds some light on how it was founded and how it identified the gap in the market relatively early.

Alan Dabbiere, who is the co-chairman of OneTrust, had been the chairman of Airwatch — the mobile device management company acquired by VMware in 2014 (Airwatch’s CEO and founder, John Marshall, is OneTrust’s other co-chairman). In an interview, he told me that it was when they were at Airwatch — where Barday had worked across consulting, integration, engineering and product management — that they began to see just how a smartphone “could be a quagmire of privacy issues.”

“We could capture apps that an employee was using so that we could show them to IT to mitigate security risks,” he said, “but that actually presented a big privacy issue. If [the employee] has dyslexia [and uses a special app for it] or if the employee used a dating app, you’ve now shown things to IT that you shouldn’t have.”

He admitted that in the first version of the software, “we weren’t even thinking about whether that was inappropriate, but then we quickly realised that we needed to be thinking about privacy.”

Dabbiere said that it was Barday who first brought that sensibility to light, and “that is something that we have evolved from.” After that, and after the VMware sale, it seemed a no-brainer that he and Marshall would come on to help the new startup grow.

Airwatch made a relatively quick exit, I pointed out. His response: the plan is to stay the course at OneTrust, with a lot more room for expansion in this market. He describes the issues of data protection and privacy as “death by 1,000 cuts.” I guess when you think about it from an enterprising point of view, that essentially presents 1,000 business opportunities.

Indeed, there is obvious growth potential to expand not just its funnel of customers, but to add more services, such as proactive detection of malware that might leak customers’ data (which calls to mind the recently fined breach at British Airways), as well as tools to help stop that once identified.

While there are a million other companies also looking to fix those problems today, what’s interesting is the point from which OneTrust is starting: by providing tools to organizations simply to help them operate in the current regulatory climate as good citizens of the online world.

This is what caught Insight’s eye with this investment.

“OneTrust has truly established themselves as leaders in this space in a very short time frame, and are quickly becoming for privacy professionals what Salesforce became for salespeople,” said Richard Wells of Insight. “They offer such a vast range of modules and tools to help customers keep their businesses compliant with varying regulatory laws, and the tailwinds around GDPR and the upcoming CCPA make this an opportune time for growth. Their leadership team is unparalleled in their ambition and has proven their ability to convert those ambitions into reality.”

Wells added that while this is a big round for a Series A it’s because it is something of an outlier — not a mark of how Series A rounds will go soon.

“Investors will always be interested in and keen to partner with companies that are providing real solutions, are already established and are led by a strong group of entrepreneurs,” he said in an interview. “This is a company that has the expertise to help solve for what could be one of the greatest challenges of the next decade. That’s the company investors want to partner with and grow, regardless of fund timing.”

Source. TechCrunch, Ingrid Lunden, July 11, 2019

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Waresix hauls in $14.5M to advance its push to digitize logistics in Indonesia

Waresix, one of a handful of startups aiming to modernize logistics in Indonesia — the world’s fourth most populous country — has pulled in $14.5 million to grow its 18-month-old business.

This new investment, Waresix’s Series A, is led by EV Growth — the growth-stage fund co-run by East Ventures — with participation from SMDV — the investment arm of Indonesia corporation Sinar Mas — and Singapore’s Jungle Ventures . The startup previously raised $1.6 million last year from East Ventures, SMDV and Monk’s Hill Ventures. It closed a seed round in early 2018.

Waresix is aiming to digitize logistics, the business of moving goods from A to B, which it believes is worth a total of $240 billion in Indonesia.

A large part of that is down to the country’s geography. The archipelago officially has more than 17,000 islands, but there are five main ones. That necessitates a lot of challenges for logistics, which are said to account for 25-30% of GDP — a figure that is typically below 5% in Western markets — while Indonesia barely scraped the top 50 rankings in World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index.

But, as Southeast Asia’s largest economy and the key market for digital growth in the region, that makes this an attractive problem to solve… or, rather, attractive industry to modernize.

Like others in its space worldwide — which include Chinese unicorn Manbang and BlackBuck in India — Waresix is focused on optimizing logistics by making the process more transparent for clients and more efficient for haulage companies and truckers. That includes removing the chain of “middle man” brokers, who add costs and reduce transparency, and provide a one-stop solution for transportation by land or sea, as well as cold storage and general cargo handling.

As of today, Waresix claims a fleet of more than 20,000 trucks and over 200 warehouse partners across Indonesia. The company said it plans to use this new capital to expand that coverage further. In particular, that’ll include additional land transport options and additional warehouse capacity in tier-two cities and more remote areas. That’s a push that founders Andree Susanto (CEO) and Edwin Wibowo (CFO) — who met at UC Berkeley in the U.S. — believe fits with Indonesia’s own $400 billion commitment to improve national infrastructure and transport.

It is also consistent with East Ventures, the long-standing early-stage VC, which has backed a pack of young companies aiming to inject internet smarts into traditional industries in Indonesia. Some of that portfolio includes Warung Pintar, which develops smart street vendor kiosks, Kedai Sayur, which is digitizing street vendors, and Fore Coffee, which draws inspiration from China’s digital-first brand Luckin Coffee, which recently listed in the U.S.

Now with EV Growth, which reached a final close of $200 million thanks to LPs that include SoftBank, East Ventures has the firepower to write larger checks that go beyond seed and pre-Series A deals, as it has done with Waresix.

But the company is far from alone in going after the logistics opportunity in Indonesia. Its rivals include Kargo, which was started by a former Uber Asia exec and is backed by Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick’s 10100 fund among others, and Ritase.

Ritase, which claims to be profitable, closed an $8.5 million Series A this week. It said it has 7,500 trucks and, on the client side, some 500 SMEs and a smattering of well-known global brands. Kargo has kept its metrics quiet, but it is a later arrival on the scene. The startup only came out of stealth in March of this year when it announced a $7.6 million funding round.

Source. TechCrunch, Jon Russell, July 5, 2019

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Kabbage Receives New $200M Revolving Credit Facility

Kabbage, Inc., an Atlanta, GA-based data and technology company offering automated cash flow solutions to small businesses, closed a $200m revolving credit facility.

The new four-year credit facility commitment is provided by a subsidiary of a life insurance company, managed and administered by 20 Gates Management, and Atalaya Capital Management.

The debt capital will support the company’s growth in the USA.

Kabbage provides small businesses access to lines of credit up to $250,000 by analyzing their real-time business data. With more than 2 million live data connections with its customers, the company provides small businesses access to capital in minutes.

To-date, it has provided more than 185,000 U.S. small businesses access to over $7 billion in capital.

All of the company’s U.S.-based loans are issued by Celtic Bank, a Utah-Chartered Industrial Bank, Member FDIC.

Kabbage is funded and backed by leading investors, including the SoftBank Vision Fund, BlueRun Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures and others.

Source. FinSMEs, Staff, July 2, 2019

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Join raises $4M seed round to build a better construction planning platform

By Darrell Etherington

Startup Join wants to modernize the back office for an industry that’s everywhere, but maybe not top of mind, especially when it comes to project management software: Commercial construction. The company has raised a $4 million seed round, co-led by Signalfire and Building Ventures and including participation by existing investor Bolt.

The startup’s core product is a collaborative decision-making platform designed to facilitate more effective working relationships between everyone involved in the preconstruction phase of a building project, including owners, contractors, designers, tradespeople and suppliers. The platform includes visualization tool, including timeline and budget planners, along with trend predictions so that you can see how changes to the plan will affect the project overall.

It also includes permission-based account access control, so that you can ensure everyone working on the project has the visibility they need to the pieces they touch. Join’s product also provides insights based on past project performance so that future ones can benefit from the successes of the past.

Join’s foundation is based on the observation that commercial construction industry is following a path blazed by the software industry before it, from a so-called ‘waterfall’ product development mode, whereby you more or less follow rigid steps in sequence, to a more agile mode in which each phase is more fluid and the project’s scope can change in the execution. Join believes construction is following a similar path, hence the need now for a tool like this.

The founding team behind Join includes co-founder and CEO Andrew Zukoski, Drew Wolpert, Ye Wang and Jim Forester. Both Zukoski and Wolpert have experience at Flux.io, a startup borne of Google X, that focused on supporting architecture, engineering and construction industry improvement via cloud-based solutions, and Wang has a background in manufacturing design technology from past work at both Onshape and Autodesk .

Join will make use of this round, which brings its total funding to $5.2 million including a pre-seed round led by Bolt, to bring on additional product development talent to help it set up for public launch of the platform to customers.

Source. TechCrunch, Darrell Etherington, June 24, 2019

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Nowports raises $5.3 million to become Latin America’s digital shipping answer to Flexport

Nowports, a developer of software and services to track freight shipments from ports to destinations across Latin America, has aims to become the regional answer to Flexport’s billion-dollar digital shipping business.

Almost 54 million containers are imported and exported from Latin America each year, and nearly half of them are either delayed or lost due to mismanagement.

Nowports is pitching shippers on its digital management software to keep track of each container, and has signed on a number of leading venture capital firms to fulfill its mission.

The Monterrey, Mexico-based company raised $5.3 million in its seed round of financing. The round was led by Base10 and Monashees, with participation from Y Combinator and additional investors like Broadhaven, Soma Capital, Partech, Tekton and Paul Buchheit.

“In Nowports we saw a very strong combination: well prepared and ambitious team using technology to help thousands of customers to improve their importing and exporting processes. By adding efficiency, reliability, and transparency to change a multi-billion dollar industry, Nowports has been able to attract many clients that saw significant improvements in their daily routines by using the solution” said Caio Bolognesi, general partner from Monashees, in a statement.

The company said it would use the money to expand into new markets, grow its team and integrate with more companies involved in the (very fragmented) Latin American logistics industry. It’s a market that needs a range of better logistics technologies.

“Even though over 90% of the world’s trade is carried by sea, the most cost-effective way to move goods en masse, there has yet to be a solution that’s able to connect suppliers, customs brokers, carriers and transportation companies to provide an efficient and reliable service,” said Maximiliano Casal, founder and chief executive of Nowports, in a statement. “This is why we launched Nowports, combining our 10 years of industry expertise to fill this void and are currently working with over 40 customers in the region and growing.”

The company now has offices in Chile and Uruguay, and is planning to expand to Brazil, Colombia and Peru.

“With platforms, algorithms with AI and integrations, our platform allows companies to take control of their shipments and plan and predict the best timing to move the freight based on the needs of their own company,” said Alfonso De Los Rios, founder and CTO of Nowports.

As the company looks to expand, it has a strategic road map it can follow in the growth of Flexport, the Silicon Valley startup that has become a billion-dollar business by applying technology to the outdated shipping industry.

The two co-founders of Nowports met at a program at Stanford University, with De Los Rios hailing from a family with deep ties to the shipping industry. He and Casal linked up and the two began plotting a way to make the deeply inefficient industry more modern and transparent. To familiarize himself with the market for which he’d be developing a technology, Casal worked in a freight forwarder in Kansas City that had been operating for more than 30 years.

In all, freight providers are getting paid nearly $40 billion per year to move freight into Latin America.

“Alfonso and Max are the ideal founders we look to invest in as they are industry experts and passionate about evolving the industry using technology and automation,” said Adeyemi Ajao, general partner from Base10. “We are proud to be investors in Nowports alongside our friends at Monashees and look forward to watching the company’s continued growth.”

Source. Techcrunch, Jonathan Schreiber,  June 20, 2019

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