Year: 2018

Workday, the cloud-based platform that offers HR and other back-office apps for businesses, is making an acquisition to expand its portfolio of services: it’s buying Adaptive Insights, a provider of cloud-based business planning and financial modelling tools, for $1.55 billion. The acquisition is notable because Adaptive Insights had filed for an IPO as recently as May 17.

Workday says that the $1.55 billion price tag includes “the assumption of approximately $150 million in unvested equity issued to Adaptive Insights employees” related to that IPO. This deal is expected to close in Q3 of this year.

IPO filings are known to sometimes trigger M&A. Most recently, PayPal announced it would acquire iZettle just after the latter filed to go public. Skype was acquired by Microsoft in 2011 while it was waiting to IPO after previous owner eBay said it would spin it off.

Workday itself went public in 2012 and currently has a market cap of nearly $27 billion.

The deal will give Workday another string to its bow, in its attempt to become the go-to place for all for back-office services for its business customers: the company plans to integrate Adaptive Insights’ tools into its existing platform.

“Adaptive Insights is an industry leader with its Business Planning Cloud platform, and together with Workday, we will help customers accelerate their finance transformation in the cloud,” said Aneel Bhusri, Co-Founder and CEO, Workday, in a statement. “I am excited to welcome the Adaptive Insights team to Workday and look forward to coming together to continue delivering industry-leading products that equip finance organizations to make even faster, better business decisions to adapt to change and to drive growth.”

The two have been working together as partners since 2015.

In the case Adaptive Insights, which says it has ‘thousands’ of customers, its growth mirrors that both of cloud services and specifically about how business intelligence has developed into a distinct software category of its own over the years, with not just the CFO but an army of in-house analysts relying on analytics of a business’ data to help make small and big decisions.

“The market opportunity here is huge as the CFO has become a power player in the C-Suite,” CEO Tom Bogan told TechCrunch when it raised $75 million in 2015, when it first passed the billion-dollar mark for its valuation. Bogan previously also held a role as chairman of Citrix. “As a former CFO myself, I have seen this first hand and it is accelerating.” Other examples of this force includes Twitter’s Anthony Noto catapulting from CFO to COO (and is now a CEO running SoFi). Around 25 percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are former CFOs.

Adaptive Insights had raised $175 million prior to this.

Bogan will stay on and lead the business and report directly to Bhusri.

“Joining forces with Workday accelerates our vision to drive holistic business planning and digital transformation for our customers,” said Bogan, in a separate statement. “Most importantly, both Adaptive Insights and Workday have an employee-first and customer-centric approach to developing enterprise software that will only increase the power of the combined companies.”

More generally, while we have certainly seen a much wider opening of the door for tech IPOs this year, there is also an argument to be made for continuing consolidation it enterprise IT, in particular with regards to cloud services that might have small or potentially negative margins.

Adaptive Insights was not immune to that: the company in its public listing filing said that its previous fiscal year brough tin $106.5 million in revenues, up 30 percent from the year before, but it also posted a loss of $42.7 million in the same period. That was narrower than the $59.1 million it posted in 2016. Combined with the bigger trend of all-in-one platforms packing a bigger punch with businesses, it might have meant that Workday’s offer was too compelling to refuse. 

This looks like Workday’s biggest acquisition yet, but the company has been on a spree of sorts: just last week it announced the acquisition of RallyTeam to beef up its machine learning.

New UK early stage VC firstminute Capital launched in June last year to the tune of $60m, with Atomico Ventures as it’s first cornerstone investor. They were joined by 30 unicorns founders form Europe. Last September they brought in the huge China-based company, Tencent, reaching a fund size of $85m.

Today firstminute capital, the London-based pan-European seed fund announced a final close of $100m, and detailed its first batch of early-stage investments made since September.

Two institutional investors have now joined. Henkel, the €60bn publicly-listed FMCG giant, is making its first investment into a European seed fund, and Lombard Odier, one of Europe’s largest private banks, also joins.

The fund has three partners: Brent Hoberman CBE, Spencer Crawley and Henry Lane-Fox. Hoberman is chairman and co-founder of Founders Factory, a corporate-backed incubator/accelerator based in London, and also of Founders Forum, a series of invitation-only, but influential annual global events for leading entrepreneurs. He co-founded lastminute.com in April 1998, and sold to Sabre for $1.1bn in 2005. Crawley is co-founder and General Partner was previously Business Development at AppDirect (a San Francisco-based cloud commerce platform provider, backed by Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital, latest valuation $1bn+), Investment Associate at DMC Partners (Goldman Sachs spin-out Special Opportunities fund), and Analyst in the Moscow office of Goldman Sachs. Lane-Fox is a partner at Founders Forum, Co-founder and CEO of Founders Factory, Co-founder of SmartUp.io, and previously part of the founding team of lastminute.com.

Hoberman said: “We’re excited to reach a significant milestone for firstminute, that helps us continue to support the most ambitious entrepreneurs globally. The latest investors to get behind the fund further increase our ability to have real impact, and we are buoyed by the rapid progress our portfolio founders are making. With our young and hard-working investment team, and our invaluable venture partners, we are hopeful that we can make our brand promise – of aspiring to be Europe’s most helpful seed fund – a reality. We were aiming to raise $60m for our first fund, and so to have closed our first fund at $100m is a strong signal for European technology.”

The link to Founders Forum is not insignificant. Hoberman curates an eclectic mix of founders investors and new entrepreneurs which has allowed him to tap a wide range of enthusiastic investors to his fund. These include the co-founders of lastminute.com, Supercell, Skyscanner, Trulia, Skype, Autonomy, Betfair, King.com, BlaBlaCar, Qunar, Carphone Warehouse, Datamonitor, PartyGaming, Tradex Technologies, Net-a-Porter, Capital One Bank, Fox Kids Europe, Webhelp, Airtel, PartyGaming and others, alongside other successes such as Marketshare, Ticketbis, Nordeus and LoveFilm. Tommy Stadlen, author, former Obama campaign speechwriter and co-founder of Swing, which exited to Microsoft, is both an investor in firstminute and a venture partner.

firstminute says it has a European focus – with the flexibility to follow local lead funding events in the US and Israel – and says its typically plans to invest $1m into seed-stage businesses.

There will be a sector agnostic remit for the fund, but wil take a particular interest in Robotics, vertical AI, Healthtech, Blockchain, SaaS, Cyber, Gaming and D2C.

The fund also released more details of its portfolio companies to date including:

• Cambridge self-driving start-up Wayve
/> • Fuel delivery business Zebra
• Wireless charging platform Chargifi
• ICO exchange Templum (which has raised an additional $10m).

Firstminute says three of its portfolio have raised subsequent rounds within 6 months of firstminute’s investment.

The geographic spread of their 17 investments to-date has been UK, Germany, Portugal and Israel, as well as four investments in the US.

Family offices also feature heavily in the fund.

These include the JCDecaux family (€6bn market cap business), Baron Davies of Abersoch (former Labour minister and Standard Chartered CEO & Chairman), Sir Paul Ruddock (former CEO of Lansdowne Partners and Chairman of Oxford University’s Endowment) and Alex de Carvalho (founder of Public.io and Heineken non-executive director).

Firstminute is also now introducing its full-time operating team consisting of six investors: Lina Wenner (Cambridge, BCG), Camilla Mazzolini (OLX, Berenberg), Elliot O’Connor (founder of Code at Uni), Sam Endacott (Goldman Sachs), Anais Benazet (Founders Forum) and Clara Lindh (former freelance journalist).

Finally, three venture partners complete the set-up. Steve Crossan, formerly of DeepMind and Google and co-founder & CTO of Brandwatch.com, currently also an XIR at Atomico; Arek Wylegalski, formerly of Index Ventures in London, and currently exploring opportunities in the blockchain space; and Tommy Stadlen.

A month after it filed for a much-anticipated Hong Kong IPO, Xiaomi has revealed a little more financial information after a monster 621-page document disclosed a $1.1 billion (seven billion RMB) loss for the first quarter of the year.

The IPO, which could raise up to $10 billion value Xiaomi at high as $100 billion, is set to be the largest IPO raise since Alibaba went public in the U.S. in 2014. That prospect got a boost with a dose of positive financial growth despite a loss incurred by one-off payments.

The document, which was filed was an application to issue a CDRs as part of a dual-listing that would include Mainland China, showed that Xiaomi’s revenue for the quarter jumped to 34 billion RMB, or $5.3 billion. That’s compared to 114.6 billion RMB ($17.9 billion) in total sales for all of last year, according to digging from TechCrunch partner site Technode.

While Xiaomi posted a loss for the quarter, the firm actually posted a 1.038 billion RMB ($162 million) profit for the period when one-time items are excluded. Xiaomi previously registered a 43.9 billion RMB ($6.9 billion) loss in 2017 on account of issuing preferred shares to investors (54 billion RMB) but it did post a slim profit in 2016.

The company is ranked fourth based on global smartphone shipments, according to analyst firm IDC, and it is one of the few OEMs to buck slowing sales in China.

China is, as you’d expect, the primary revenue market but Xiaomi is increasingly less dependent on its homeland. For 2017 sales, China represented 72 percent, but it had been 94 percent and 87 percent, respectively, in 2015 and 2016. India is Xiaomi’s most successful overseas venture, having built the business to the number one smartphone firm based on market share, and Xiaomi is pledging to double down on other global areas.

Interestingly there’s no mention of expanding phone sales to the U.S., but Xiaomi has pledged to put 30 percent of its IPO towards growing its presence in Southeast Asia, Europe, Russia “other regions.” Currently, it said it sells products in 74 countries, that does include the U.S. where Xiaomi sells accessories and non-phone items.

Despite its design progress, relative age as an eight-year-old company and the fact it is shooting for a $100 billion, Xiaomi left some spectators disappointed when it wheeled out a very iPhone X-looking new device earlier this month. While the company claims the Mi 8 is packed with new technology, it’s hard to look past the fact that a number of its visual designs are identical to Apple’s flagship smartphone. Xiaomi could have made a stronger statement of intent with the launch, but it will hope its financials can do the talking as it moves into the last moments of preparation before its public listing.

A few levels past the bestsellers and sci-fi/romance/adventure titles on Kindle Unlimited, in the darkest corners of the Kindle Direct Publishing market, there are books that are made entirely out of garbage designed to make scammers hundreds of dollars a day. One user, who called his or herself Chance Carter, was one of the biggest abusers of the KDP system and, more important, made over $15 per book they uploaded to the system, over and over, for books that contained no real content.

Carter, according to the Digital Reader, would create large novels out of other books. The books, which were simple hack jobs written by Fiverr writers, were hundreds of pages long and, on the first page, featured a recommendation to flip to the last page to get a free giveaway. KDP pays authors for both paid downloads as well as for pages read and it doesn’t sense reading speed, just the highest number of pages reached. Therefore Chance’s “readers” were instantly sending him or her about twenty dollars a read.

The way that the book-stuffing con works is that scammers stuff lots of extra content into an ebook before uploading it to Kindle Unlimited, and then trick readers into jumping to the end of the book.

Thanks to a flaw in the Kindle platform, namely that the platform knows your location in a book but not how many pages you have actually read, the scammers can get paid for a user having “read” a book in Kindle Unlimited by getting the user to jump to the last page.

This sort of KDP scam is actually quite unusual. Amazon has worked to prevent scams like these from taking cash out of the KDP “pool” – a multi-million dollar account that is passed out to the best KDP authors – but this one was so long-running and ingenious that it’s not surprising that it took so long to pull these books from the store. Interestingly, the flip-to-end scam doesn’t quite work on newer Kindles but still works on older, non-updated Kindles which makes it still a lucrative scam.

Chance, for his part, offered free Tiffany jewelry if you flipped to the end of his books. This was, obviously, against KDP rules.

Carter and his books are gone but books stuffers like him still exist. While it’s not a crime per se, it does muddy the Kindle ebook waters and brings garbage content into the market. While most of us wouldn’t fall for these cynical tricks, plenty will and that makes it a danger to readers and a boon to scammers.

Memrise, a UK startup whose eponymous language-learning app employs machine learning and localised content to adapt to users’ needs as they progress through their lessons, has raised another $15.5 million in funding to expand its product. The funding comes after a period of strong growth: Memrise has now passed 35 million users globally across its 20 language courses, and it tipped into profitability in Q1 of this year. Ed Cooke, who co-founded the app with Ben Whately and Greg Detre, told TechCrunch that this places it as the second-most popular language app globally in terms of both users and revenues.

(Duolingo has more signups, Babbel more revenue.)

This round, a Series B, was led by Octopus Ventures and Korelya Capital, along with participation from existing investors Avalon Ventures and Balderton Capital. (Previous investors have included the likes of Matt Mullenweg, Lerer Ventures and more.)

Memrise is not disclosing its valuation — it has raised a relatively modest $22 million to date — but Cooke (who is also the CEO) said the plan will be to use the funding to expand its AI platform and add in more features for users.

And also to move into bigger digs. He described the company’s current offices in the East End of London as in a “ne’er-do-well” kind of building. But the step up won’t be giant. “Funding makes me more frugal,” he told me.

The company originally started out as a general learning platform in 2010 before honing in on how to apply its principles of memorization and native content to get people to learn languages specifically. “We saw the importance of focus,” Cooke said.

The company uses several modern hooks in its approach to a very old problem: learning to speak different languages. They include building the service around both online and mobile versions, using “crowdsourced” native speakers to give people a sense of how people actually use the language (which can often be different from how it’s taught in classes), and by employing artificial intelligence to customise the product to each individual’s progress.

Memrise’s machine learning, in fact, has been a key factor in helping to raise a little more awareness of the app: during WWDC Apple showed off Memrise on stage in its presentation of Create ML, a new product that lets non-technical people train machine learning services using their own custom data on a Mac (which also cuts down the time needed to do so). It’s not an Apple-only shop: Google named Memrise an app of the year in 2017.

The crowdsourced content, meanwhile, had an interesting fillip, too, when Memrise ran a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 to fund a “Membus,” a double-decker bus that toured through Europe collecting clips of “tens of thousands” of native speakers. “Learning from native speakers is a popular feature of the app,” Cooke said, as it gives users more than “just a computerised version of how you say something.”

Cooke’s background is in psychology and philosophy, and he holds a distinction as a “Grand Master of Memory“. And memory indeed comes into the fabric of how the app works, as there is repetition and other devices used to help you not just ingest information but actually retain it. I actually have a personal connection to this: my daughter Eve’s school uses Memrise to supplement in-class learning, and well before this funding story came along, Eve had told me that her Memrise training has been a huge help in growing and remembering German vocabulary and how to use words correctly. (That’s at least her excuse for staring at a computer screen on a school night…)

The company’s services are based around a freemium model, where a free version lets you learn any language from any language (there are 200 combinations possible across the base), along with a review feature; and a paid tier starting at $4.90/month to add on other features like a “grammarbot”, pro chats, difficult words, speed review, listening skills, learning stats and more.

The company today is seeing the most growth in the 25-40 age group, but has a lot of younger (like my daughter) and older people using it as well. When raising the funding, Cooke said one regular question was about how likely it would be that a Google might wade in simply improve its Translate app to obviate the need to learn anything at all.

“We believe that this is a misunderstanding about language learning,” Cooke said. “People don’t want to learn languages for pragmatic reasons but to be socially credible. You have to engage as a human being and be interested.” And Memrise things that if they can create an engaging enough experience for that base, its growth can expand even more.

“We’re in love with Memrise’s vision for language learning, and have been deeply impressed with the high engagement levels and tangible learning among their millions of users. We look forward to supporting this exceptionally diverse and talented team in their mission to enrich human consciousness through learning,” said Eyal Rabinovich, of Octopus Ventures, in a statement.

Memrise, a UK startup whose eponymous language-learning app employs machine learning and localised content to adapt to users’ needs as they progress through their lessons, has raised another $15.5 million in funding to expand its product. The funding comes after a period of strong growth: Memrise has now passed 35 million users globally across its 20 language courses, and it tipped into profitability in Q1 of this year. Ed Cooke, who co-founded the app with Ben Whately and Greg Detre, told TechCrunch that this places it as the second-most popular language app globally in terms of both users and revenues.

(Duolingo has more signups, Babbel more revenue.)

This round, a Series B, was led by Octopus Ventures and Korelya Capital, along with participation from existing investors Avalon Ventures and Balderton Capital. (Previous investors have included the likes of Matt Mullenweg, Lerer Ventures and more.)

Memrise is not disclosing its valuation — it has raised a relatively modest $22 million to date — but Cooke (who is also the CEO) said the plan will be to use the funding to expand its AI platform and add in more features for users.

And also to move into bigger digs. He described the company’s current offices in the East End of London as in a “ne’er-do-well” kind of building. But the step up won’t be giant. “Funding makes me more frugal,” he told me.

The company originally started out as a general learning platform in 2010 before honing in on how to apply its principles of memorization and native content to get people to learn languages specifically. “We saw the importance of focus,” Cooke said.

The company uses several modern hooks in its approach to a very old problem: learning to speak different languages. They include building the service around both online and mobile versions, using “crowdsourced” native speakers to give people a sense of how people actually use the language (which can often be different from how it’s taught in classes), and by employing artificial intelligence to customise the product to each individual’s progress.

Memrise’s machine learning, in fact, has been a key factor in helping to raise a little more awareness of the app: during WWDC Apple showed off Memrise on stage in its presentation of Create ML, a new product that lets non-technical people train machine learning services using their own custom data on a Mac (which also cuts down the time needed to do so). It’s not an Apple-only shop: Google named Memrise an app of the year in 2017.

The crowdsourced content, meanwhile, had an interesting fillip, too, when Memrise ran a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 to fund a “Membus,” a double-decker bus that toured through Europe collecting clips of “tens of thousands” of native speakers. “Learning from native speakers is a popular feature of the app,” Cooke said, as it gives users more than “just a computerised version of how you say something.”

Cooke’s background is in psychology and philosophy, and he holds a distinction as a “Grand Master of Memory“. And memory indeed comes into the fabric of how the app works, as there is repetition and other devices used to help you not just ingest information but actually retain it. I actually have a personal connection to this: my daughter Eve’s school uses Memrise to supplement in-class learning, and well before this funding story came along, Eve had told me that her Memrise training has been a huge help in growing and remembering German vocabulary and how to use words correctly. (That’s at least her excuse for staring at a computer screen on a school night…)

The company’s services are based around a freemium model, where a free version lets you learn any language from any language (there are 200 combinations possible across the base), along with a review feature; and a paid tier starting at $4.90/month to add on other features like a “grammarbot”, pro chats, difficult words, speed review, listening skills, learning stats and more.

The company today is seeing the most growth in the 25-40 age group, but has a lot of younger (like my daughter) and older people using it as well. When raising the funding, Cooke said one regular question was about how likely it would be that a Google might wade in simply improve its Translate app to obviate the need to learn anything at all.

“We believe that this is a misunderstanding about language learning,” Cooke said. “People don’t want to learn languages for pragmatic reasons but to be socially credible. You have to engage as a human being and be interested.” And Memrise things that if they can create an engaging enough experience for that base, its growth can expand even more.

“We’re in love with Memrise’s vision for language learning, and have been deeply impressed with the high engagement levels and tangible learning among their millions of users. We look forward to supporting this exceptionally diverse and talented team in their mission to enrich human consciousness through learning,” said Eyal Rabinovich, of Octopus Ventures, in a statement.

Those not looking at the Bitcoin markets lately will either gasp or smile. Bitcoin, down from its all time high of around $19,000, is now floating at $6,785 as of this writing. To many this means that either the Bitcoin experiment is over or, to many more, that it has just begun.

There are plenty of folks who will have been hurt by this crash. I was speaking with a Romanian entrepreneur about his friend who bought BTC on a credit card only to find that he is wildly underwater. The volatility is also frightening to folks who might have gotten in on the last run up only to find themselves back at the start. I pity the poor waiter who a friend saw making Bitcoin trades at $18,000 during his shift. I hope he sold.

But there are no signs that the cryptocurrency train is stopping. Startups around the world are all examining – and doing – ICOs. Plenty of early crypto miners and buyers still have enough cash to play around in all sorts of ways. Bitcoin naysayers like R3 are figuring out that bankers didn’t want to hear “blockchain, not bitcoin” after all once they realized that bitcoin, like their beloved equities and commodities, was just another place for them to play.

And people are still active in the market. That’s important. As this Coindesk analysis notes, the markets will be deeply volatile during this stretch and could remain so as risk-taking buyers snap up coin on the downswing.

Don’t believe me? This is the seven day trading volume for almost all of the exchanges.

Ultimately these moves make up one of the most interesting forms of intergenerational and international wealth transfer we’ve ever seen. Whereas this wealth transfer once came in the form of inheritances and joint ventures, cryptocurrencies enable an almost instantaneous partners ship between the old and young and the near and far. It’s a fascinating economic time and I doubt it will let up any time soon.

Sometimes the price goes up, sometimes it goes down. That’s the best advice any smart person can give anyone in any market. However, the signs point less to a flatline and more to a gut-wrenching EKG full of ups and downs. The patient, however, is not dead yet.

Those not looking at the Bitcoin markets lately will either gasp or smile. Bitcoin, down from its all time high of around $19,000, is now floating at $6,785 as of this writing. To many this means that either the Bitcoin experiment is over or, to many more, that it has just begun.

There are plenty of folks who will have been hurt by this crash. I was speaking with a Romanian entrepreneur about his friend who bought BTC on a credit card only to find that he is wildly underwater. The volatility is also frightening to folks who might have gotten in on the last run up only to find themselves back at the start. I pity the poor waiter who a friend saw making Bitcoin trades at $18,000 during his shift. I hope he sold.

But there are no signs that the cryptocurrency train is stopping. Startups around the world are all examining – and doing – ICOs. Plenty of early crypto miners and buyers still have enough cash to play around in all sorts of ways. Bitcoin naysayers like R3 are figuring out that bankers didn’t want to hear “blockchain, not bitcoin” after all once they realized that bitcoin, like their beloved equities and commodities, was just another place for them to play.

And people are still active in the market. That’s important. As this Coindesk analysis notes, the markets will be deeply volatile during this stretch and could remain so as risk-taking buyers snap up coin on the downswing.

Don’t believe me? This is the seven day trading volume for almost all of the exchanges.

Ultimately these moves make up one of the most interesting forms of intergenerational and international wealth transfer we’ve ever seen. Whereas this wealth transfer once came in the form of inheritances and joint ventures, cryptocurrencies enable an almost instantaneous partners ship between the old and young and the near and far. It’s a fascinating economic time and I doubt it will let up any time soon.

Sometimes the price goes up, sometimes it goes down. That’s the best advice any smart person can give anyone in any market. However, the signs point less to a flatline and more to a gut-wrenching EKG full of ups and downs. The patient, however, is not dead yet.

India is a major part of Google’s global focus. The company launched a new product in India last week as its program to bring free WiFi to the public registered its 400th railway station. Now, the U.S. tech giant is continuing to deepen its focus after CapitalG — its venture arm formerly known as Google Capital — made its first investment in India by backing micro-loan startup Aye Finance.

CapitalG led the $21.5 million Series C round which also included participation from existing investors SAIF Partners and LGT, who were part of a $10.5 million investment in 2016. Since that round, Aye Finance has raised over $30 million via a series of debt investment-based deals, according to data from Crunchbase.

Aye Finance offers micro-loans to small businesses in India that are not on the radar of banks and traditional financing companies, and also don’t qualify for programs run by the likes of Flipkart and Amazon. The firm aims to digitize the market of informal money lending and loan sharking. Its disbursements are typically used as working capital for SMEs.

Over its four years of operations, the startup claims it has payed out more than 60,000 loans. Today, it claims to cover 10 states in India through a network of 72 branches. The firm touts its use of technology, and in particular data, which helps keep operating costs low and efficiency high.

In particular, it targets industry ‘clusters’ — aka industry verticals — which allows it not only to develop more accurate metrics for analyzing the potential of a business than the general criteria that traditional financiers follow, but it also helps generate new leads through word of mouth.

“We have used insightful data models and technology to provide affordable business loans to the financially excluded micro enterprises across India [and] CapitalG’s access to Google expertise in scaling businesses using analytics and technology will strongly supplement our approach. We are at an exciting juncture, where the business model has been proven and is also scaling well,” Sanjay Sharma, Aye Finance founder and managing director, said in a statement.

Google’s previously made its first direct investment in an Indian startup when it backed Dunzo, a startup that operates a concierge app, in December 2017. Now CapitalG is catching up with its first deal on Indian soil.

India is a major part of Google’s global focus. The company launched a new product in India last week as its program to bring free WiFi to the public registered its 400th railway station. Now, the U.S. tech giant is continuing to deepen its focus after CapitalG — its venture arm formerly known as Google Capital — made its first investment in India by backing micro-loan startup Aye Finance.

CapitalG led the $21.5 million Series C round which also included participation from existing investors SAIF Partners and LGT, who were part of a $10.5 million investment in 2016. Since that round, Aye Finance has raised over $30 million via a series of debt investment-based deals, according to data from Crunchbase.

Aye Finance offers micro-loans to small businesses in India that are not on the radar of banks and traditional financing companies, and also don’t qualify for programs run by the likes of Flipkart and Amazon. The firm aims to digitize the market of informal money lending and loan sharking. Its disbursements are typically used as working capital for SMEs.

Over its four years of operations, the startup claims it has payed out more than 60,000 loans. Today, it claims to cover 10 states in India through a network of 72 branches. The firm touts its use of technology, and in particular data, which helps keep operating costs low and efficiency high.

In particular, it targets industry ‘clusters’ — aka industry verticals — which allows it not only to develop more accurate metrics for analyzing the potential of a business than the general criteria that traditional financiers follow, but it also helps generate new leads through word of mouth.

“We have used insightful data models and technology to provide affordable business loans to the financially excluded micro enterprises across India [and] CapitalG’s access to Google expertise in scaling businesses using analytics and technology will strongly supplement our approach. We are at an exciting juncture, where the business model has been proven and is also scaling well,” Sanjay Sharma, Aye Finance founder and managing director, said in a statement.

Google’s previously made its first direct investment in an Indian startup when it backed Dunzo, a startup that operates a concierge app, in December 2017. Now CapitalG is catching up with its first deal on Indian soil.