Maad, a B2B e-commerce startup based in Senegal, has secured $3.2 million debt-equity funding to bolster its growth in the western Africa country and to explore fresh opportunities in the wider Francophone region. The seed round was led by Ventures Platform, with participation from Seedstars International Ventures, Reflect Ventures, Oui Capital, Launch Africa, Voltron Capital […]
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The fresh funds were raised from two investors who transferred the capital into a special purpose vehicle, a legal entity associated with the OpenAI Startup Fund.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
For cancer patients, medicines administered in clinical trials can help save or extend lives. But despite thousands of trials in the United States each year, only 3% to 5% of eligible patients enroll in investigations of new treatments. Triomics, a generative AI startup, claims it can significantly reduce the time it takes doctors to match […]
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High interest rates and financial pressures make it more important than ever for finance teams to have a better handle on their cash flow, and several startups are hoping to help. Two-year-old Israeli startup Panax is one, and it just raised a $10 million Series A round of funding led by Team8, with participation from […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
We’ve all seen them. The inspector with a clipboard, walking around a building, ticking off the last time the fire extinguishers were checked, or if all the lights are working. They work in the TICC (Testing, Inspection, Certification and Compliance) space, and they literally tick boxes. And while the job may seem simple enough to do physically, it’s a whole different ball game when it needs to be done remotely.
Founder Ben Lambert realized just that, when after moving to Portugal, his wife’s property inspection business needed to be run remotely. “It was no longer easy to check inspections on-site and get reliable information. A final report could take weeks to come through,” he told me. Plus, actually scheduling the inspections turned out to be at least as large a problem.
Seeing an opportunity, Lambert founded an AI-powered workflow tools startup, Checkfirst, that, in addition to allowing for remote inspections, enables businesses to schedule inspectors based on geographical location and qualifications. This results in less travel, a lower environmental footprint, and the workers end up happier as well. The company has now raised a pre-seed $1.5 million led by Lisbon-based, early-stage venture firm, Olisipo Way, and Hiero VC (a solo GP firm). Notion Capital, and angel investors from companies like Source Point, Busuu, Swogo and FaceIT also participated.
“As [the product] developed, we saw that the biggest problem wasn’t necessarily the data capture alone, but where companies earn or lose money was in the scheduling. It’s timely, as AI is perfect for scheduling tasks,” he said.
“The biggest problem in the industry is scheduling, and the cool thing is, with AI, you can schedule really easily,” he told me. “Say an inspector is in London but needs to be in Munich to audit a building. With AI, you can understand what they’re doing and put it all together. We’re creating a scheduling tool for all these big companies. It’s not just about meeting compliance; it’s also scheduling. Then the compliance tool allows them to collect data easily to meet the regulatory standards.”
It turns out that the TICC industry is moving people around the world all the time, explained Lambert.
“For example, an inspector could be in London today, but the company will send someone from Munich to London, because they don’t really understand they already have a guy in London. If an inspector then flies from Munich to London, they lose all of their margin immediately. With our tools, the guy the company was going to send in from Munich now doesn’t need to come to London. That saves the company thousands of euros, if not more.”
Lambert said they “initially used a mix of open source and commercial AI models”, and are now building their own “based on proprietary data for image recognition and scheduling”.
In terms of competitors, Checkfirst is going up against some large incumbents in the compliance space, such as Intact Systems, Lumiform, Safety Culture (a unicorn) and Happy Co (focuses on property management).
The difference with Checkfirst, says Lambert, is that it is an API-first solution and uses AI for image recognition and automation, churning out report summaries, and scheduling.
The startup is working with several clients on proof-of-concepts, one which has 30,000 customers, the company claims.
The co-founding team includes Lambert, CPO Oyvind Henriksen (who started Poq Studio) and CTO Rami Elsawy. Lambert was formerly with Nexmo and Agora.
Ansa, a startup that helps merchants develop and offer branded virtual wallets, has raised a $14 million Series A round of funding, the company has told TechCrunch exclusively.
Renegade Partners led Ansa’s latest financing, which included participation from existing backers Bain Capital Ventures, BoxGroup and Wischoff Ventures and new investor B37 Ventures. With this latest raise, Ansa has raised a total of nearly $20 million in venture capital, including a $5.4 million seed round. The company declined to reveal its current valuation, saying only the Series A was raised “with a significant valuation multiple.”
Notably, female investors — including Renegade Partners’ Renata Quintini, Wischoff Ventures’ Nichole Wischoff, Bain Capital’s Christina Melas-Kyriazi, BoxGroup’s Nimi Katragadda and former Affirm exec Silvija Martincevic — contributed 95.6% to the Series A round, the company said.
Founded in 2022 by former Adyen product manager Sophia Goldberg and ex-Affirm software engineer JT Cho, San Francisco-based Ansa is building what it describes as a white-labeled digital wallet infrastructure to help businesses process small payments and offset high credit card fees for smaller transactions.
Or as Goldberg describes it, Ansa is building a “wallet-as-a-service,” or embedded customer balances to let any merchant launch a branded flexible payment instrument.
That can look like the Starbucks in-app payment experience where a customer loads funds. It can also allow a merchant to fund with incentives or refunds. Ansa claims that by using its API-first platform, a merchant can create a wallet “within weeks rather than quarters.”
“Branded customer wallets enable merchants to offer a payment solution which fits their use cases better, while driving customer loyalty and frequency,” CEO Goldberg told TechCrunch. “Additionally, merchants can enhance revenue streams and foster customer loyalty. With Ansa, merchants can drive adoption of their wallets by integrating customer balances with rewards, incentives, and their other loyalty initiatives.”
Ansa is focused on the coffee, quick service restaurant (QSR) and marketplace verticals as its initial core markets. Retail and convenience stores are other target markets.
The use of a branded wallet also helps these types of merchants avoid paying credit card fees, which can be high, especially relative to the dollar amount of some of the purchases.
For example, Goldberg noted that a $4 latte paid for with a credit card can incur additional costs exceeding 12.5%. A typical e-commerce transaction could be 2.9% and $0.30. The fixed fee is extremely impactful on smaller transactions, Goldberg contends, as it represents a higher percentage when the transaction size is smaller.
“A 30 cents fee on a $5 transaction is a higher percentage of the total revenue and will impact margins more than it would on a $100 transaction,” Goldberg added. “For merchants with narrow margins, these fixed fees can significantly cut into revenue.”
Image Credits: Ansa
In the first quarter of 2024, Goldberg said that the startup doubled its customer base compared to the previous year, although she declined to reveal hard customer or revenue figures.
Ansa monetizes through a mix of platform fees and a markup on the transaction.
“We’re part-infrastructure, part-revenue generation, and so we bill on service and value-add,” Goldberg said.
The funding will largely go toward product development and engineering. Presently, the company has 12 employees and is hiring.
Renegade Partners’ Quintini told TechCrunch that her firm’s investment in Ansa marks its largest first check to date.
“Because Ansa integrates with most modern PSPs (payment service providers), including Square, Stripe and Braintree, new merchants can ramp up right away to begin driving both loyalty and operational efficiency,” she told TechCrunch, adding that the tech helps “any merchant to deliver a seamless, Starbucks app-like experience to their customers.”
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Wiz, the buzzy startup building an all-in-one cloud security platform, is on an acquisition march to expand its business quickly en route to an IPO.
Now, it has closed a major round of funding of $1 billion to help on that march.
The Series E — co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Thrive — values Wiz at $12 billion, making it one of the most highly valued startups in cybersecurity today.
It’s a notable step up from the last time Wiz raised, in February 2023, when it closed a $300 million round at $10.3 billion post-money. When rumors of this latest fundraise circulated in the market in March, the amount was pegged at $800 million. The fact that the Series E is now at $1 billion speaks to how heated activity is around Wiz right now. “Iconic” was the word one investor, speaking to TechCrunch, used to describe the company.
(The company confirmed that the Series E also has a small secondary component. Sources close to the deal say it is around $30 million to $40 million, “a few dozens millions of dollars”.)
Assaf Rappaport, Wiz’s co-founder and CEO, said in an interview that Wiz plans to continue growing its platform organically with more talent hires and R&D investment. But with countless cybersecurity startups now in existence, the New York startup sees a prime opportunity to acquire to grow inorganically through acquisitions, bringing customers, talent, and technology into the fold more quickly.
“We see two kinds of opportunities in the market right now,” he said. “There are ex-unicorns” — startups that have raised substantial money at valuations exceeding $1 billion, but may have failed to grow as expected and are now exploring other options beyond IPO — “and also exciting, younger startups, superstars with a great trajectory ahead of them. We have an opportunity now to combine forces with both of these.”
The large size of this round gives Wiz a lot of room to make acquisitions in cash, which means giving up less equity in Wiz itself — a nod to the company’s public listing intentions in the future.
The fundraise is coming at a time when Wiz is already rolling up smaller companies. It was only a month ago that it acquired Gem Security — which Rappaport described today as falling into the latter “exciting, younger” category — for $350 million. Just weeks later, Wiz signed a letter of intent to buy Lacework, the startup once valued at $8.3 billion, for just $168 million. (That would make it an “ex-unicorn” in Rappaport’s terminology.) The latter deal went cold, we now understand, during due diligence, a reminder that simply having an interest and the money to buy are not enough to get deals over the line.
The firm has a long list of companies from which to pick. By one estimate there are 62 cybersecurity startups with last-raised valuations of over $1 billion right now. The list includes Aqua and Orca — which are not related to each other but do partner together — as well as Netskope, Snyk, Arctic Wolf, Axonius, and many more. The smaller ones number in the hundreds. All these compete against much larger players in the market that include Palo Alto Networks, Crowd Strike and more.
Wiz was founded only four years ago by Rappaport and his co-founders Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica and Roy Reznik (all previously at Microsoft, with startup building experience and exit success in their past). The company claims to have signed contracts with some 40% of the Fortune 100, with some of its biggest customers including BMW, Colgate-Palmolive, strategic investor Salesforce, and Mars.
Together that business now amounts to $350 million ARR. That’s still a far cry from the $1 billion ARR it’s aiming to have by the end of 2025. However, that aim is one more reason the company is looking to grow by acquisition.
Wiz’s traction in the market is in part because of the area that it’s targeting, and in part because of its approach.
Enterprises have made significant investments into cloud services to speed up how they work and to make their IT more flexible, but that shift has come with a significantly changed security profile for those organizations: network and data architectures are more complicated, and attack surfaces are larger, creating opportunities for malicious hackers to find ways to breach those systems.
Wiz has stood out in a crowded market by taking an all-in-one platform approach. Ingesting data from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and other cloud environments, Wiz scans applications, data and network processes for security risk factors and provides a range of detailed views to its users to understand where those risks exist, and also how to fix them. Its platform currently covers some 13 different areas, from code security, container environment security and supply chain security, and around that it integrates and partners with a number of other startups to build out it ecosystem (and malleability for customers).
Philip Clark, who is leading the investment for Thrive Capital, described AI as part of “the next wave of security problems,” and Wiz has also been expanding its activity there, specifically with AI security posture management.
“It’s meeting customers where their needs are,” Sarah Wang, a general partner at a16z, told TechCrunch. “There is nothing that competes directly with Wiz in the area of cloud security.”
In the meantime, more opportunities abound. When I talked to Rappaport on Monday for this story, he’d just landed in San Francisco to attend the RSA security conference, where there will be nearly 600 companies exhibiting: a ripe opportunity to do some shopping.
The funding — which also saw participation from Greylock and Wellington Management, as well as previous backers Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, Howard Schultz, Index Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Sequoia Capital — brings the total raised by Wiz to $1.9 billion.
That long list of big-name backers, added to the list Rappaport said it rejected, both underscore the investor interest in the company at the moment.
“Wiz is nothing short of a rocket ship,” another investor, Arsham Memarzadeh of Lightspeed, said in a statement.
Wayve, a UK-born startup developing a self-learning rather than rule-based system for autonomous driving, has closed a $1.05 billion in Series C funding led by SoftBank Group. This is the UK’s largest AI fundraise ever and sits among the top 20 AI fundraises globally to date.
Also participating in the raise was NVIDIA and existing investor Microsoft. Waye’s early stage investors included Meta’s head of AI, Yann LeCun.
Wayve, which was founded in Cambridge in 2017, raised $200m in a series B round in January last year led by Eclipse Ventures.
The company plans to use the fresh capital injection to develop its product for “eyes on” assisted driving and “yes off” fully automated driving, other AI-assisted automotive applications, and expand operations globally.
San Francisco has become known as the epicenter for autonomous driving roll-outs, with Alphabet-owned Waymo and GM-owned Cruise both operating services in the city. By contrast, Wayve’s “end-to-end” self-driving system began its life around the tiny streets of Cambridge on an electric Renault Twizy.
Since then, it has been training its model on delivery vehicles for the likes of companies like UK grocery delivery company Ocado, which invested $13.6 million in the startup.
Wayve’s approach to autonomous driving is similar to Tesla’s, but Wayve plans to sell its autonomous driving model to a variety of auto OEMs. The implication, of course, is that Wayve will garner a great deal more training data on which to improve its model, as Tesla must rely on someone buying their car brand. The company has not announced any such automotive partners yet, however.
Wayve calls its hardware-agnostic mapless product an “Embodied AI”, and it plans to distribute its platform not just to car makers but also to robotics companies serving manufacturers of all descriptions, allowing the platform to learn from human behavior in a wide variety of real-world environments. The company’s research on multimodal and generative models, known as LINGO and GAIA, will offer “language-responsive interfaces, personalized driving styles, and co-piloting,” the firm promises.
Wayve co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall told Techcrunch: “Seven years ago, we started the company to go build an embodied AI. We have been heads down building technology … What happened last year was everything really started to work.”
He said the key moment has been the automotive industry’s “step change” into having cameras surrounding new cars, from which Wayve can draw data for its autonomous platform: “Now their production vehicles are coming out with GPUs, surrounding cameras, radar, and of course the appetite to now bring AI onto, and enable, an accelerated journey from assisted to automated driving. So this fundraise is a validation of our technological approach, and gives us the capital to go and turn this technology into product and bring this this this product to market.”
He added that Wayve has big plans for robotics as well.
“Very soon you’ll be able to buy a new car, and it’ll have Wayve’s AI on it… Then this goes into enabling all kinds of embodied AI, not just cars, but other forms of robotics. I think the ultimate thing that we want to achieve here is to go way beyond where AI is today with language models and chatbots. But to really enable a future where we can trust intelligent machines that we can delegate tasks to, and of course they can enhance our lives and self-driving will be the first example of that.”
In a move that signified the importance of this fundraise more broadly to the UK, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak issued a supporting statement saying: “From the first electric light bulb or the World Wide Web, to AI and self-driving cars – the UK has a proud record of being at the forefront of some of the biggest technological advancements in history.”
“I’m incredibly proud that the UK is the home for pioneers like Wayve who are breaking ground as they develop the next generation of AI models for self-driving cars. The fact that a homegrown, British business has secured the biggest investment yet in a UK AI company is a testament to our leadership in this industry, and that our plan for the economy is working,” he said.
“We are leaving no stone unturned to create the economic conditions for businesses to grow and thrive in the UK. We already have the third highest number of AI companies and private investment in AI in the world, and this announcement anchors the UK’s position as an AI superpower,” he added.
Also in a statement, Kentaro Matsui, Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers and a Wayve boardmember said: “AI is revolutionizing mobility… The potential of this type of technology is transformative; it could eliminate 99% of traffic accidents. SoftBank Group is delighted to be at the forefront of this effort with Wayve, as advanced intelligence redefines mobility and connectivity, contributing to a more convenient and safer society.”
Iconiq Capital has raised $5.15 billion across two funds associated with the seventh growth fund family, according to SEC filings.
The firm, which launched in 2011 as a private office managing capital of some of the most prominent and wealthiest people in tech, including Mark Zuckerburg and Jack Dorsey, originally targeted $5.75 billion, according to meeting information from New Mexico State Investment Council, the Wall Street Journal reported in March 2022. It is unclear if the firm is still raising capital toward its goal.
Iconiq didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The fund size is a substantial increase from Iconiq’s fund VI target of $3.75 billion.
Iconiq’s latest fund haul is impressive, given that many other large growth investors failed to reach their targets by a long shot. Most notably, Tiger Global closed its latest venture capital fund at $2.2 billion, the firm’s smallest fund since 2014, Bloomberg reported. Tiger initially planned to raise $6 billion, less than half its predecessor vehicle of $12.7 billion the firm closed in March 2022.
The two giant funds aren’t in exactly the same position. Tiger Global was widely criticized for investing capital too quickly at exuberant prices during the 2020 and 2021 tech boom (though it always pushed back on the idea that it was overpaying). And, unlike Tiger Global, which has been actively selling secondary stakes to realize liquidity, Iconiq has been shopping for secondary positions, according to two sources.
Iconiq’s substantive fundraise likely means that its backers are relatively pleased with the firm’s investment strategy.
Iconiq has realized several dozen exits from its portfolio in recent years, including the IPOs of Snowflake, Airbnb, GitLab and Hashicorp, according to PitchBook data. In 2023, Iconiq invested $1.1 billion into 22 companies, it says, and its portfolio includes startups like Drata, Canva, Ramp, ServiceTitan, Writer and Pigment.
The firm’s fund VII-B has raised $3.06 billion from 219 investors, while fund VII-B closed on $1.26 billion from 462 backers, according to regulatory filings.
Iconiq seventh vehicles will invest in 20 to 25 tech companies, according to the Buyouts Insider report based on the March 2022 meeting of New Mexico Investment Council.
Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje’s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday.
Musk’s 10-month-old baby, xAI, is closing in on a whoppin’ $6 billion funding round. The social network X, née Twitter — also part of Elon’s tech family — is already a shareholder. The deal was initially supposed to raise just $3 billion, but then everybody wanted in and the price tag bumped. Investors include Musk’s BFFs from Sequoia Capital, Future Ventures and some other chums who may also be joining this AI party — it’s all very Mean Girls “You can’t sit with us” at this point. The thing that really frustrates me, though, is how smug Musk probably is about all of this. It’s fine, I’m just bitter that none of my startups ever raised $6 million — never mind three orders of magnitude more.
Sure, it may be on the eve of getting banished from the U.S. altogether (although, I hasten to add, the previous administration tried that, too, and TikTok’s still here, going strong), but TikTok may be sneaky in more ways than one. Word on the street (or should we say web?) is that TikTok is playing a bit of hide-and-seek with Apple. Instead of giving Apple its 30% cut for in-app purchases, it appears they’re trying to guide users into buying their digital tipping coins directly from their website. But shh … it’s a secret! The feature is apparently only visible to certain users (lookin’ at you, high spenders). Will Apple give them the boot like they did Fortnite? Only time will tell.
Your founding team sucks: In a brutally honest chat with me at TechCrunch Early Stage, Tom Blomfield, ex-Monzo Bank founder and current Y Combinator partner, spilled the tea on venture capitalist decision-making. He says investors are looking for unicorns that can deliver 1,000x returns — anything less is an epic fail. They’re not just judging your business model or product. No, they’re eyeing YOU up to see if you have what it takes to make their cash multiply like rabbits.
Hello? Is that iPhone? Why are you so quiet today? Image Credits: Vectorian / Getty Images
Oh, EyeEm, you sly dog! The once “Insta-challenger” Berlin-based photo-sharing app that nearly went belly-up last year has found a new way to milk its users — by training future AI overlords! Yup, they’re selling your snaps to train machine-learning models. Users were graciously given 30 days to pack up their digital photo albums and scram or forever hold their peace (and surrender their photos). Are you opting out, though? Not as easy as swiping left on Tinder — you need to manually delete your pictures. But wait for it … the real kicker is if you decide in a fit of rage to delete your account altogether, no more payouts for you. Womp-womp, sad trombone.
It’s like “Game of Thrones” but in the tech world. Welcome to Techstars’ latest season, where CEO Maëlle Gavet is fighting battles on all fronts within her kingdom! She’s got a bank collapse, an international accelerator program shutdown, and dodgy LinkedIn posts. And that’s just for starters. Throw in the Swedish labor law conundrums and you’ve got more drama than an episode of The Real Housefounders. As if that wasn’t enough, she’s also dealing with a company-wide revolt against her reign, as well as her cost-cutting measures leading to a toxic work culture, and hiring folks with as much startup experience as my pet goldfish. (It died back in 2007. RIP, Knee-mo.) Stay tuned for this gripping saga of power struggles, corporate drama, questionable financials and strategizing — I can’t guarantee dragons or White Walkers but there will be plenty of fire-breathing and icy glares!
Mark Cuban wrote a check to Truffle Shuffle. Nobody will comment on whether it was a good exit for the company. Image Credits: Christopher Willard / ABC via Getty Images
Rubrik, the cybersecurity company, decided to take a leisurely stroll onto Wall Street this week and BAM! Shares shot up 16% on their public debut. They were initially priced at $32 per share (just a smidge above their target range) and settled down to a cushy $37 by end of trading. Now, that’s one way to make an entrance! This little outing bumped their valuation from $3.5 billion in 2019 to a dizzying $6.6 billion today. Not bad for a company that’s not even turning profits yet! Their secret sauce? Subscription revenue — it went from 73% to 91% in just a year. But, hey, who needs profitability when you’ve got stickiness, right? While this may seem like the start of an IPO party parade with Reddit and Ibotta leading the conga line, potential interest rate cuts could play party pooper soon enough. No doubt, Greylock is giggling maniacally all the way to the bank.
ButcherBox, the meat-obsessed startup that bootstrapped its way to a juicy $600 million revenue, just sunk its teeth into “Shark Tank” darling Truffle Shuffle. The acquisition is less about gobbling up competition and more about helping ButcherBox’s customers stop burning their steaks. Truffle Shuffle was born out of sheer desperation when founders Jason McKinney and Tyler Vorce found themselves with $20,000 worth of truffles but no restaurants to sell them to, thanks to our dear friend COVID-19.
RevenueCat founders Miguel Carranza (L) and Jacob Eiting (R). Image Credits: RevenueCat
Bad news for healthcare privacy this week. UnitedHealthcare CEO says “maybe a third” of U.S. citizens were affected by their recent hack, and Kaiser pissed away a bunch of customer data as well. Gee, thanks, you clowns.
Anyway. Here’s a few other stories that are fun. Maybe. Or at least interesting. Or maybe they just got a metric crapton of traffic this week. Who knows what my selection criteria is, but … just read the stories, okay?
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