Year: 2019

On December 11 and December 12, some of the brightest mind in fintech are coming to TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin. While we’ll sit down with some of the most famous tech CEOs and investors, the agenda is particularly packed when it comes to fintech.

On the main stage, I’ll interview GoCardless CEO Hiroki Takeuchi about the company’s impressive trajectory. GoCardless has a shot at becoming a global leader when it comes to payments via direct debit. The startup has been building an API that lets you collect payments at a global scale, even if your customers are on the other side of the planet.

Later that day, Sophia Bendz, Siraj Khaliq, Hiro Tamura and Niall Wass, all key partners at London-based VC firm Atomico are here to talk about their investment strategy. And Atomico has invested in many well-known fintech names over the years, such as LendInvest, Klarna and Habito.

Talking about Klarna, the company’s CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski is making his Disrupt debut to talk about how he turned a small Stockholm-based startup into a payment giant. The company is now looking to storm the U.S. and has managed to reach a higher valuation than almost any other privately held company in the world.

Sofie Quidenus-Wahlforss from omni:us is going to talk about how she’s using machine learning to turn complicated insurance contracts and legal documents into actionable insights. And if you think cryptocurrencies are part of the fintech industry, we’ll also sit down with Ethereum researcher Justin Drake to talk about scaling the Ethereum blockchain.

Charlie Delingpole, founder and CEO of ComplyAdvantage and Yoni Assia, founder and CEO of eToro will share a stage in a discussion that is pretty self-explanatory, “How to Radically Change Finance Through Fintech Startups”.

These are just some highlights from the Disrupt Berlin agenda. Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to these discussions and many others. The conference will take place on December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

One of the biggest trends in the world of financial technology has been an ongoing push towards consolidation, where larger fish are snapping up smaller fish (including a proliferation of interesting startups) to get improved economies of scale in a business model where every transaction brings incremental returns. But today, a startup that has built the concept of consolidation into its basic DNA has raised another round of funding to continue doubling down on its business.

Rapyd — a London-based startup that has built an API that lets customers tap into a range of financial services spanning payments, checkout, funds collection, fund disbursements, compliance as a service, foreign exchange, card issuing and soon logistics across a wide range of geographies — has picked up an additional $20 million. Rapyd’s valuation with the funding is now at $1.2 billion (up from just under $1 billion in October).

The $20 million comes from new investment firm Durable Capital Partners.

Notably, it was only in October that Rapyd announced a $100 million raise. CEO and co-founder and Arik Shtilman said that Rapyd has now raised $180 million in total, with previous investors in the startup including Oak HC/FT Tiger Global, Coatue, General Catalyst, Target Global, Stripe and Entrée Capital. (Stripe, itself a fast-growing fintech upstart, remains only a financial investor in the company, Shtilman confirmed.)

Durable is the firm founded by Henry Ellenbogen, formerly a star investor at T. Rowe Price, in what Rapyd said was the firm’s first investment. (Note: Durable was also announced earlier as an investor in Convoy’s $400 million round, some clear signs that it’s open for business now.)

With Rapyd only recently raising a round, Shtilman said that the reason for the — err — rapid follow up was because the company is gearing up to make some acquisitions, as it too moves in on the consolidation trend by adding in more tools into its “Swiss Army Knife” of services.

“We’ve started to look at two acquisitions that were bigger than what we originally planned, with prices more in the range of $100 million,” he said. Up to now, Rapyd has largely built its technology from the ground up, but this will be about “getting at new business very quickly,” he added. Both deals are in progress now and are likely to close in February / March. One is of a card issuing platform (a la Marqeta), and the other is of a company based in Asia Pacific that is a significant player in payments in the region. 

The focus on Asia Pacific both for testing out new services and acquisitions is in part because this, along with Latin America, have shaped up to be important geographies for the company. In the last three months, Rapyd has signed on 20 additional large-scale companies, Shtilman said, with several of them based out of, or serving, customers out of the two regions.

In fact, Rapyd doesn’t talk much about actual customers, but they include e-commerce merchants, gig-economy platforms — including Uber — financial institutions, and technology providers. The basic pitch is that financial services are complex, and providing one like payments often means having to offer others. Building these from scratch if this is not your core competency can be time-consuming and costly, and so that is where a company like Rapyd steps in with its API.

This is what attracted its newest investor, too. “Durable Capital Partners LP has a vision to identify and invest in promising early stage growth companies and invest in teams that have bold ideas but can also execute at a world-class level and build much larger companies,” said Ellenbogen in a statement. “I believe the Fintech-as-a-Service category has tremendous potential as companies seek to embed financial services as an integral part of the next generation technology stack. I believe Rapyd is very well positioned to drive this trend and I believe Arik’s track record in scaling cloud-based businesses will deliver success in this sector.”

When we last talked with Rapyd in October, we asked Shtilman about whether the company would ever move into logistics as part of its range of tools. After all, when you think about the complexities of procuring, storing and moving goods, it’s clear that logistics is one of the cornerstones you need to get right in an online business.

He said that this was on the company’s roadmap, and now Rapyd is in a pilot in Indonesia — an interesting test bed, considering that the country’s is spread across thousands of islands — where it has integrated a logistics service and given access to a single merchant as stage one of its closed beta. It’s also in discussions with other companies about how it can incorporate their services into the Rapyd platform to provide further “logistics as a service” to customers. He also confirmed the Durable has been a help here, by making an introduction to Convoy as part of that wider strategy.

If you can’t stop dreaming about NoSQL databases, AWS re:Invent is the closest thing to heaven that you’ll find today. At 8 AM PT/11 AM ET/4 PM GMT, some of the brightest minds in cloud computing are going to introduce the upcoming features of AWS.

Along with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, Amazon is building the infrastructure of the web. Countless startups use AWS as their only hosting provider. So it’s going to be interesting to see what Amazon has in store to beat their competitors on the cloud front.

Michigan-based in-space propulsion startup Orbion is working with a major new partner: The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Orbion has secured a research contract from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Propulsion Directorate, specifically aimed at helping the DOD “enhance resiliency of U.S. systems in space.”

Basically, it sounds like that will boil down to seeing how Orbion’s propulsion technology can be applied to DOD satellites when used in larger constellation form, to provide those satellites with the ability to move propulsively while in orbit, and to do so at a way that can scale cost-effectively. In a press release announcing the news, Orbion CEO Brad King says that volume is a strategy when it comes to fortifying U.S. systems in space agains potential foreign attack.

“One way to increase the resilience of space systems is to improve our nation’s ability to build and deploy small satellites in large numbers at low costs,” said King in a statement, “Orbion is developing mass-production techniques to build propulsion systems for commercial customers.  With this research contract we are investigating how or if our manufacturing processes must be modified to meet DOD requirements.”

It’s true that in the past, the U.S. and other international powers with access to space have mostly focused on large, expensive, singular pieces of orbital hardware as their strategic assets. Shifting to the small satellite constellation approach currently being pursued by a number of private companies definitely has advantages in terms of redundancy and replaceability.

Orbion’s entire business proposition as a startup is that its applying mass-production to in-space thrusters, which will bring down costs and make their technology accessible to a much wider range of potential clients than ever before, and practical for application in small satellite design. The DOD may not have the same budget-constraint issues as a cash-strapped satellite startup, but long-term cost savings that also comes with a tactical advantage is a hard bargain to pass up.

On Friday, the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York announced that Ethereum Foundation staff member Virgil Griffith was arrested. He faces charges of conspiracy following a trip to North Korea and a presentation at the Pyongyang Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Conference.

In particular, he allegedly provided services to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, also known as North Korea) without obtaining approval from the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control.

According to the complaint, Griffith reached out to the U.S. State Department but his permission was denied due to economic sanctions against North Korea. Griffith traveled to China and then North Korea anyway. The complaint also says that Griffith discussed “cryptocurrency technologies to evade sanctions and launder money.”

A special agent for the FBI interviewed Griffith back in May 2019. It was a consensual interview and he talked about his presentation titled “Blockchain and Peace” with the agent. He showed photos of his trip and said he would like to attend the same conference next year.

Griffith discussed his presentation with another individual via a messaging app. “Individual-1 asked, in sum and substance, what interest North Koreans had in cryptocurrency. Griffith replied, in sum and substance, ‘probably avoiding sanctions… who knows,’” the complaint says.

Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, wrote multiple tweets about Griffith’s arrest. “I don't think what Virgil did gave DRPK any kind of real help in doing anything bad. He *delivered a presentation based on publicly available info about open-source software*. There was no weird hackery ‘advanced tutoring,’” he wrote.

He also says that the Ethereum Foundation has nothing to do with Griffith’s trip to North Korea. “EF paid nothing and offered no assistance; it was Virgil's personal trip that many counseled against,” Buterin wrote.

Earlier today, a judge ruled that there is enough evidence to move forward with a trial. Griffith will be released from jail pending trial.

This is it, code jockeys — your last call to grab a seat and compete in the TC Hackathon at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. We limited participation to 500 people and, with just eight days to go, only a few spots remain. Do you have the skills, stamina and creativity it takes to build a working product in less than 24 hours? Well, do ya? Then apply to the Hackathon today and snag one of the few remaining seats.

Competing in the Hackathon is free, plus we give every participant an Innovator pass to take in the show on day two. Sweet! When you’re done hacking, explore the early-stage startups exhibiting in Startup Alley including the TC Top Picks. Be sure to catch some of our incredible speakers — you can use the Disrupt Berlin ’19 agenda to help you plan your time.

New to the TC Hackathon? Here’s how it works.

You join a team — either one you come with or one you find on site — and pick one of the sponsored challenges. Sponsors look for working solutions to real-world problems, and they pony up cash and prizes for the winning team(s). Plus, TechCrunch will award $5,000 to one team it deems to have created the best over-all hack.

Hackers have roughly 24 sleep-deprived hours to work their magic — and we’ll have plenty of food, drink and caffeine on hand to fuel your genius. When the clock runs out, the judges review every completed project and choose 10 teams to move on to the finals on day two.

Those 10 bleary-eyed teams will have two minutes to pitch their creation to the judges — in front of a live audience on the Extra Crunch Stage. Then it’s time for the big reveal. First, the various sponsors announce their winners and then TechCrunch names the team it deems the best overall hack-at-the-thon. See what we did there?

We’ll announce specifics about this year’s sponsors and challenges soon. In the meantime, check out the other sponsored contests, prizes and winners from DSF ’18 to get a sense of what awaits you in Berlin.

Strut your skills, compete for cash, prizes, adulation and the pure joy of coding something into existence. But don’t wait because we have only a few seats left. Apply to compete in the TC Hackathon, come to Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December and show us what you can do.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Under the terms of a a settlement with the ACLU and other civil rights groups earlier this year, Facebook has been taking steps to prevent discriminatory ad targeting.

Specifically, the company says ads in the United States that involve housing, employment or credit can no longer be targeted based on age, gender, ZIP code or multicultural affinity. Nor can the ads use more detailed targeting that connects to these categories.

Today, Facebook is announcing what VP of Ads Product Marketing Graham Mudd described as the next “milestone in our effort to reduce and eliminate discrimination.”

First, it’s expanding the enforcement of these rules beyond Facebook Ad Manager to encompass every other place where someone might buy ads on Facebook: the Ads Manager app, Instagram Promote, the ad creation tools on Facebook Pages and the Facebook Marketing API (which connects with third-party ad-buying tools).

Second, it’s expanding its searchable ad library — first created in response to concerns about political misinformation — to include housing ads targeted at an U.S. audience.

So moving forward, if a regulatory agency, civil rights group, journalist or anyone else wants to check on how businesses are actually using Facebook to advertise housing, they can check the archive. This portion of the library will start archiving ads from tomorrow (December 4) onward, and Facebook says it will eventually include employment and credit ads as well.

Mudd said that Facebook has also been helping advertisers understand how to work within the new rules. While he described this as “the right tradeoff” to combat discrimination, he also suggested that “there are and have always been very reasonable and legal non-discriminatory advertising practices” that use age- and gender-based targeting.

Now, he said, advertisers are having to “relearn how to use the platform given these restrictions.”

Podcorn, the service that connects brands with podcasters to acquire in-broadcast sponsored time (not pre- or post-roll advertising), is officially launching its services today.

The benefit of Podcorn is that we aim to service podcasters of all sizes, many of which don’t currently qualify for traditional advertising but can still bring a lot of value to brands if matched accordingly. We are giving brands the opportunity to be part of the conversation, where listeners can hear from the brands – so not just pre, mid, and post-roll host read ads but brand interviews, panel discussions with experts and professionals who are within the brand’s industry, etc. It’s not about the podcaster just pushing products. It’s More inquisitive. More journalistic.

“For brands, the benefit is that we are scaling the discovery of relevant podcasters of all sizes and making it possible to work with hundreds of really targeted podcasters within their niche at scale,” writes Podcorn co-founder Agnes Kozera. “Historically, if you look at programmatic pre-roll ads in video, programmatic wasn’t enough to sustain the creator ecosystem in terms of revenue and a lot of audiences skip those ads. And importantly, only a small portion of top creators end up making a sustainable income from programmatic because it is strictly based on impressions so smaller creators with niche but very engaged audiences don’t generate a sufficient amount of revenue.”

The company, which raised $2.2 million in a round of financing led by Global Founders Capital, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, 500 Startups, Alumni Ventures Group, Correlation Ventures and the investment firm Next 10 Ventures, was founded by Kozera and her high school friend, David Kierzkowski.

The two previously launched the influencer marketing company Famebit, which was acquired by Google three years after its launch — and after raising $1.5 million from 500 Startups and the Los Angeles based incubator and early stage investment firm, Science.

“[Podcasts] need alternative monetization such as native sponsorships (why influencer marketing blew up) because creators started making a lot more money from it than traditional ad formats because it takes into consideration other criteria that make their podcast valuable,” Kozera writes. “It also gives brands an opportunity to see the value of creators irrespective of size.”

Like the influencer marketing business which gave Kozera and Kierzowski their first exit, Podcorn connects brands with a range of different podcasting formats and manages the types of contracts these new media broadcasters can offer to increasingly targeted audiences that follow them.

It’s a strategy that’s been a boon for influencer marketing and now that increasing numbers of ad dollars are going to podcasts, it was only a matter of time before the practice made its way into the new format.

Companies like Acast, Midroll, Audiogo, and ThoughtLeaders are also all vying for a piece of the podcast advertising market.

“We are giving brands the opportunity to be part of the conversation, where listeners can hear from the brands – so not just pre, mid, and post-roll host read ads but brand interviews, panel discussions with experts and professionals who are within the brand’s industry,” Kozera wrote in an email.

The four ex-Google employees, also known as the “Thanksgiving Four,” who were fired right before the holiday, are planning to file a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.

“We look forward to hearing the NLRB’s findings, which we expect will confirm that Google acted unlawfully,” ex-Googlers Laurence Berland, Paul Duke, Rebecca Rivers and Sophie Waldman wrote on Medium today.

The plan is to argue that Google fired them for organizing, which is a protected activity. As the Thanksgiving Four outlined on Medium, they organized around a variety of topics, including Google’s treatment of its temporary, vendor and contractor workers, Google’s alleged retaliation against employees who organized, the company’s work with Customs and Border Protection and more.

“Google didn’t respond by honoring its values, or abiding by the law,” the four wrote on Medium. “It responded like a large corporation more interested in revenue growth than in ensuring worker rights and ethical conduct. Last week, Google fired us for engaging in protected labor organizing.”

Last month, Google put Rivers and Berland on leave for allegedly violating company policies. At the time, Google said one had searched for and shared confidential documents that were not pertinent to their job, and one had looked at the individual calendars of some staffers.

Following a protest in support of the two, Rivers, Berland, Duke and Waldman were fired.

Google declined to comment but confirmed an internal note published by Bloomberg, which said Google fired a total of four employees for repeatedly violating its data-security policies.

Since the massive employee-led walkout last November, organizers say Google has tried to undermine further attempts to organize. In July, walkout co-organizer Meredith Whittaker left the company following reports of retaliation in April. Organizers of the rally say both Rivers and Berland were put on leave for “simply looking at openly shared internal information.”

The Thanksgiving Four’s terminations came shortly after The New York Times reported Google hired an anti-union firm, IRI Consultants. Google employees, who the Times kept anonymous, discovered Google’s relationship with ISI via internal calendar entries.

“Google fails to understand that workers are the ones who built the company and its most successful products,” the four wrote. “And that we can stop building them. No company — tech giant or otherwise — should be able to interfere with workers’ rights to organize for better working conditions, including ethical business practices.”

TechCrunch has reached out to Google and will update this story if we hear back.

Uberflip is acquiring SnapApp, bringing together two startups that promise help marketers use their content more effectively.

President and Chief Marketing Officer Randy Frisch argued that Uberflip focuses on content experience, not content marketing. In other words, it’s not selling productivity and workflow tools for marketers to write blog posts and and create videos. Instead, it helps them present their existing content in a smarter and more personalized way.

For example, it worked with data warehousing company Snowflake to create content streams highlighting the topics most likely to grab the attention of different sales prospects, then embedded those content streams in Snowflake’s marketing emails.

“Content marketing gotten a bad rap in some ways,” Frisch said, noting that there’s been “a lot of consolidation in that space in last number of years,” so Uberflip has been working to distance itself from that term. (To that end, Frisch recently published a book with the colorful title “F#ck Content Marketing.”)

As for SnapApp, I wrote about the company’s interactive content tools back in 2015, but Uberflip CEO Yoav Schwartz told me that the product has changed dramatically in the last 18 months — it now offers “a better smarter, way to understand a visitor” by “peppering them with questions” as they’re browsing a marketer’s website.

So Schwartz sees this acquisition — Uberflip’s first — as a way to help the company improve its personalized content recommendations.

“We’re going let SnapApp to continue to run as is,” he added. “We’re not going to attempt to integrate on day one. We’re going to allow time to understand how those two technologies can work together.”

Frisch and Schwartz said that about 10 to 15 SnapApp team members will be joining Uberflip, bringing the total headcount to around 150. And SnapApp’s current headquarters will become the Boston office of Toronto-based Uberflip.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. SnapApp previously raised $22 million in funding, while Uberflip has raised $36 million.