Year: 2020

WhatsApp said on Tuesday it is adding a new shopping feature to its app as the Facebook -owned instant messaging service looks to court more merchants and invite a larger portion of its 2 billion users base to shop.

The instant messaging service, where business accounts process messages from more than 175 million people, said it is adding carts on WhatsApp around the world ahead of the holiday shopping season.

Carts are aimed at making it easier for consumers to buy multiple items from a business, and for merchants to keep track of order inquiries and manage requests. WhatsApp said it is adding the new feature after early positive response from some businesses who tested it recently.

On WhatsApp, users will now see the option to add items to the cart. When done, users will be able to send the order request as a message to the business. WhatsApp said carts are going live for users across the globe today. (You can read the complete how-to flow here.)

In recent months, WhatsApp has added a number of features to supercharge the commerce experience on its app. It has added QR codes and the ability to share catalog links in chats. The platform is also offering free storage to merchants to host their business’s messages.

For WhatsApp, success with commerce is crucial. Despite its gigantic reach, the messaging app is available to users at no charge and also remains free of ads. But it stands to become a viable challenger to giants like Amazon and Walmart in at least emerging markets like India where e-commerce is yet to make a significant dent to traditional retail.

In India, which happens to be WhatsApp’s biggest market by users, several businesses have originated on the Facebook-owned app. On Tuesday, DealShare, an Indian e-commerce startup, said it had raised $21 million in a new financing round. DealShare began its life on WhatsApp.

But one element that remains missing from WhatsApp’s shopping experience is support for payments. As of today, when a user has placed their order to a business on WhatsApp, they have to figure out payments themselves.

More to follow…

Opendoor has opened the door, so to speak, for startups to apply their technical expertise in search, marketplaces and audience segmentation to rethink the very antiquated and analogue world of property. Today, a startup that is doing this in the specific area of distressed property is announcing a round of growth funding to ramp up its team and expand its business.

Sundae — which has built a marketplace for homeowners to list and sell dated or damaged homes, or homes that they may need to shift faster for financial reasons; for property investors/developers seeking to buy, fix up and then sell or rent out those properties; and for itself potentially to buy in a property and do the same — is today announcing that it has raised a Series B of $36 million.

The funding is being led by QED Investors; Founders Fund, Susa Ventures, Navitas Capital, and Prudence Holdings also participated. All are previous investors from the startup’s last round, a $16.55 million Series A also led by QED.

In an interview, CEO and co-founder Josh Stech, who describes the business he is in as the “homes that need love segment”, declined to talk about the company’s valuation, and he also declined to give specifics on a number of other points: Sundae is not disclosing how many homeowners and developers have used its service (“thousands”); the average selling price for a property; the number of properties it’s shifted; and how many of those it’s bought it versus sold to a third party (the “vast majority”, more than 50% but less than 100%, are purchased by investors, not Sundae itself, he said).

He did note that in the four markets where the company has gone live since launching its business in January 2019 — San Diego, Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, and Sacramento — has yielded an annualized revenue run rate of over $400 million in gross merchandise value (the total value of home sales transacted on its platform). That also speaks to the vast and interesting quantity of data that the startup is amassing on home sales, and how it can use that to power its platform in the future.

And as another measure of its momentum, that this latest round comes less than six months after its Series A.

With those two funding rounds all equity-based, to buy up property itself and provide $10,000 cash advances to all sellers, Sundae previously also raised a debt fund from high net worth individuals, and it has a “very large” debt facility from Goldman Sachs that it also non-dilutive, Stech said.

The opportunity that Sundae is tackling is one that has been a persistent cornerstone of the housing market, but one that might have become an even more keen factor in the last year.

In the US, there has long been a relentless push, both in newer cities with more room for geographical expansion and older cities where you have legacy buildings that get demolished, a drive for new-build homes. Interestingly, that demand has grown a lot during the pandemic, with demand for new homes as much as four times higher than demand for buying “existing” homes.

But at the same time, there has been a quickly dwindling supply of any housing stock, going down to as low as one month in terms of sales pace. As Stech puts it, that means that “In 30 days, if no homes get listed, there are no homes for sale.” That subsequently has put more of an emphasis on the sale of older homes to meet demand.

The issue with distressed property is that typically these days, people are not as interested in buying fixer-uppers as they may have been in the past. Those selling property want to present ready-to-inhabit homes for a quicker turnaround and to lower the barrier to sales. This means that usually distressed homes, where the owner either doesn’t want to or can’t make improvements before listing, are rejected for sale.

That’s presented an opportunity for developers (or as they are more commonly called in the US, property investors) who buy up those properties and put in the work themselves to make them more sales-friendly. They operate on the principle of five F’s: “find, finance, fix, fill or flip” as Stech puts it.

Sundae basically removes the friction both for the homeowners and the developers: those who want to sell their homes only have to deal with one entity, Sundae itself, which comes in to photograph (using Matterport) the property, provide some guidance on how to sell it and at what price, offer an advance on the sale in case the owner needs the money even faster, and ultimately bring in a number of interested prospects, including itself.

Those who are looking for investment properties can use the service to widen the funnel of homes that they can discover, buy and work on.

Stech said he had a brainwave about the opportunity when he finished graduate school at Stanford and moved to Las Vegas, which at the time was at the epicenter of the housing market crash of 2009. He bought a one-bedroom condo that sold for $267,000 in 2007 for $19,000 in cash and realized that the market was ripe for the taking.

It was a brainwave that came in part because of his experience. Stech has spent his whole professional life in property. Before Sundae, he and co-founder Andrew Swain were executives at LendingHome, providing loans to property investors; and before that Stech built a property business in Vegas.

There is admittedly something a little unsettling about any kind of business that focuses on distress: the implication is that those building services for people who are in difficult circumstances can take advantage of them and essentially operate in a predatory way.

Stech said that his intention is in fact to prevent that very situation, by creating a more transparent process where sellers are given the option of considering offers from multiple developers rather than just one that is not going to be operating with the seller’s interests in mind, but his own.

“It’s shameful what property developers have become,” Stech said. “The idea has become glamorized, and they make a ridiculous amount of money. Everyone forgets who lost in the process: the homeowner who is probably being forced to sell.”

That’s not to say that selling on a marketplace will remove that self-interest but it creates the option for more balanced dynamics where a seller might at least have more competition to consider. If especially tight markets like London’s are any example, in the best case scenarios sellers sitting in a property might even make an excellent turnaround on their homes, compared to the sums they initially paid to buy them, even if the home might still need a lot of “love” to become habitable by gentrified comparisons.

All of this is especially interesting in light of the bigger forces at play, which have brought us all closer to staying put in one place more than being nomadic, heightening the bigger urge to buy property rather than rent if we can manage it financially.

“The concept of homeownership is fundamentally changing. This is particularly true given COVID-19 which has caused more uncertainty and forced people to rethink their real estate decisions. Homeowners are looking for solutions that make the selling process more efficient, transparent, and reliable, particularly for the distressed property segment,” said Frank Rotman, founding partner at QED Investors, in a statement. “Sundae’s rapid growth is a testament to their differentiated offering and the trusted brand they’ve created through a customer-centric approach to the market.”

Engineers at Cloudflare and Apple say they’ve developed a new internet protocol that will shore up one of the biggest holes in internet privacy that many don’t know even exists. Dubbed Oblivious DNS-over-HTTPS, or ODoH for short, the new protocol makes it far more difficult for internet providers to know which websites you visit.

But first, a little bit about how the internet works.

Every time you go to visit a website, your browser uses a DNS resolver to convert web addresses to machine-readable IP addresses to locate where a web page is located on the internet. But this process is not encrypted, meaning that every time you load a website the DNS query is sent in the clear. That means the DNS resolver — which might be your internet provider unless you’ve changed it — knows which websites you visit. That’s not great for your privacy, especially since your internet provider can also sell your browsing history to advertisers.

Recent developments like DNS-over-HTTPS (or DoH) have added encryption to DNS queries, making it harder for attackers to hijack DNS queries and point victims to malicious websites instead of the real website you wanted to visit. But that still doesn’t stop the DNS resolvers from seeing which website you’re trying to visit.

Enter ODoH, which decouples DNS queries from the internet user, preventing the DNS resolver from knowing which sites you visit.

Here’s how it works: ODoH wraps a layer of encryption around the DNS query and passes it through a proxy server, which acts as a go-between the internet user and the website they want to visit. Because the DNS query is encrypted, the proxy can’t see what’s inside, but acts as a shield to prevent the DNS resolver from seeing who sent the query to begin with.

“What ODoH is meant to do is separate the information about who is making the query and what the query is,” said Nick Sullivan, Cloudflare’s head of research.

In other words, ODoH ensures that only the proxy knows the identity of the internet user and that the DNS resolver only knows the website being requested. Sullivan said that page loading times on ODoH are “practically indistinguishable” from DoH and shouldn’t cause any significant changes to browsing speed.

A key component of ODoH working properly is ensuring that the proxy and the DNS resolver never “collude,” in that the two are never controlled by the same entity, otherwise the “separation of knowledge is broken,” Sullivan said. That means having to rely on companies offering to run proxies.

Sullivan said a few partner organizations are already running proxies, allowing for early adopters to begin using the technology through Cloudflare’s existing 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. But most will have to wait until ODoH is baked into browsers and operating systems before it can be used. That could take months or years, depending on how long it takes for ODoH to be certified as a standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force.

With nearly half a million customers across Mexico already and a network of 30,000 retail locations where representatives can take deposits, the challenger bank albo is already on its way to becoming a dominant player in Mexico’s emerging fintech industry.

And the company has recently raised another $45 million to consolidate its position.

“When your mission is to build the biggest bank in Mexico, you will need a ton of money,” said albo founder Angel Sahagún.

The company received its license to operate as a full depository bank in Mexico, and is slowly working toward being the premiere internet-based financial services provider for Mexico’s large and growing middle class, Sahagún said.

“We are targeting a similar target market to Chime,” the albo founder and chief executive said. “We are targeting people who are underbanked and don’t have access to all the financial products in the market.”

Sahagún said the money will be used to expand the range of services albo offers into lending and insurance products. That’s a path which has already produced one multi-billion dollar business in Nubank, Brazil’s wildly successful fintech company, which planted a flag for a new generation of Latin American startups.

While many challenger banks in the region pursued a strategy targeting upper class and upper middle class consumers, Sahagún said his service had chosen a different path.

The company is trying to bring the middle and low income Mexican consumers into the banking system by making it easy for them to move from a cash-based world to a digital one. “Where 90% of transactions are cash-based you need a value proposition that fits very well on that cash-based society,” Sahagún said.

It’s why the company set up a network of 30,000 locations including convenience stores and drug stores so that it can accept deposits at the places where its customers frequent.

That growth, and the company’s 40% share of the digital banking market in Mexico, according to data from Apptopia cited by the company, is why investors like Valar Ventures, Greyhound Capital, Mountain Nazca and Flourish Ventures were willing to invest as part of the $45 million round.

“albo has proven its ability to drive sustainable growth and is leading the market. This is the team that is going to transform banking in the region and we are proud to be supporting them in that”, said James Fitzgerald of Valar Ventures, in a statement. 

 

Reliance’s Jio Platforms, the largest telecom operator in India, plans to roll out a 5G network in the country in the second half of 2021, top executive Mukesh Ambani announced on Tuesday.

“India is today among the best digitally connected nations in the world. In order to maintain this lead, policy steps are needed to accelerate early rollout of 5G, and to make it affordable and available everywhere. I assure you that Jio will pioneer the 5G revolution in India in the second half of 2021,” said Ambani, who controls Jio Platforms’ parent firm Reliance Industries, at a trade conference.

The announcement comes as a surprise as India has yet to grant spectrum for 5G network to telecom networks in the country. At this moment, it is also unclear when India will begin auctioning the 5G spectrum.

Ambani, who is India’s richest man, said he was hopeful that the rollout of 5G network in India will enable the world’s second largest internet market to lead what he termed as the fourth industrial revolution. “Jio Platforms, with its family of over 20 start-up partners, has built world-class capabilities in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, big data, machine learning, internet of things, blockchain, etc,” he said.

The telecom operator, which has raised over $20 billion this year from a roster of high-profile investors including Facebook and Google, said the company is also hopeful that its bouquet of services in education, healthcare, financial services and new commerce categories “once proven in India, will be offered to the rest of the world to address global challenges.”

Gopal Vittal, the chief executive of Airtel (India’s second largest telecom operator), said the company was hopeful that India would have established a nation-wide 5G network in two to three years. He, however, did not share a timeline for when the rollout of 5G on his network would begin. (In a recent earnings call, Vittal had warned that the proposed price of the spectrum of 5G was “very, very expensive” — something that won’t support any kind of business model.)

During his speech, Ambani also urged industry players to rely on locally produced hardware and components. “As the digitalisation of the Indian economy and Indian society picks up speed, the demand for digital hardware will grow enormously. We cannot rely on large-scale imports in this area of critical national need.”

Airtel has previously said that it is open to the idea of collaborating with global firms for components. “Huawei, over the last 10 or 12 years, has become extremely good with their products to a point where I can safely today say their products at least in 3G, 4G that we have experienced is significantly superior to Ericsson and Nokia without a doubt. And I use all three of them,” said Sunil Mittal, the founder of Airtel, at a conference earlier this year. In the same panel, US commerce secretary Wilbur Ross had urged India and other allies of the US to avoid Huawei.

Vittal today also urged that India should adopt the global 5G standard. “There is sometimes talks that India must have its own 5G standard. This is an existential thread which could lock India out of the global ecosystem and slow down the pace of innovation. We could let down our citizens if you allow that to happen.”

On today’s panel, which was attended by Mittal as well as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Ambani said stakeholders also need to think about ways to serve nearly 300 million people who are still on 2G networks in India. “Urgent policy steps are needed to ensure that these underprivileged people have an affordable smartphone, So that they too can benefit from Direct Benefit Transfer into their bank accounts, and actively participate in the Digital Economy,” he added.

The Seattle-based startup Recurrent said today it has closed on $3.5 million in financing as it looks to become the Carfax for electric vehicle batteries. 

The battery system is arguably the most important part of any electric vehicle and as the market for used electric vehicles expands, independent verification on battery life and range can help car buyers with their purchasing decision, the company said.

Investors including Wireframe Ventures, PSL Ventures, Vulcan Capital, Prelude Ventures, Powerhouse Ventures, Ascend.VC and the American Automobile Association’s (AAA) Washington chapter.

“Used car sales are at least double new car sales every year. With the third anniversary of Tesla’s Model 3 and the rapid introduction of new electric models across all vehicle makers, used EV sales are about to grow substantially,” said Paul Straub, Managing Director of Wireframe Ventures, said in a statement. “The timing is right for a first mover with a strong data and technology advantage to bring confidence and transparency to these transactions.”

The company said it will use the money to invest in continued product development as it refines its third-party condition reports for used electric vehicle shoppers and battery analytics stats for current electric vehicle owners.

Recurrent collects its data from 2,500 volunteer electric vehicle drivers who currently use the Recurrent service for monthly battery reports on their own vehicles

“While there’s clearly a market-driven opportunity here, we’re particularly excited about the potential impact of Biden administration’s policies on EV adoption,” said Emily Kirsch, Founder and Managing Partner of Powerhouse Ventures, said in a statement. “We’ve seen the huge impact that favorable policies are having in the EU and think there’s a lot of upside potential in a similar acceleration in the U.S.”

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German e2e encrypted email provider Tutanota has been ordered by a regional court to develop a function that allows it to monitor an individual account.

The encrypted email service provider has been fighting a number of such orders in its home country.

The ruling, which was reported in the German press late last month, contradicts an earlier Hanover court finding that Tutanota, a provider of web-based email, is not a telecommunications service.

The order by the Cologne court comes under a German law (known as “TKG”) which requires telecommunications service providers to disclose data to law enforcement/intelligence agencies if they receive a lawful intercept request.

The Cologne court ruling also runs counter to a 2019 decision by Europe’s top court, the CJEU, which found that another web-based email service, Gmail, is not an ‘electronic communications service’ as defined in EU law — meaning it can’t be subject to common EU rules for telcos.

Tutanota co-founder Matthias Pfau described the Cologne ruling as “absurd” — and confirmed it’s appealing.

“The argumentation is as follows: Although we are no longer a provider of telecommunications services, we would be involved in providing telecommunications services and must therefore still enable telecommunications and traffic data collection,” he told TechCrunch.

“From our point of view — and law German law experts agree with us — this is absurd. Neither does the court state what telecommunications service we are involved in nor do they name the actual provider of the telecommunications service.

“The telecommunications service cannot be email, because we provide it completely ourselves. And if we were to participate, we would have to have a business relationship with the actual provider.”

Despite the absurdity of a regional court treating an email provider as an ISP — in apparent contradiction of earlier CJEU guidance — Tutanota is nonetheless required to comply with the order, and develop a surveillance function for the specific inbox, while its appeal continues.

A spokeswoman for Tutanota confirmed it has told the court it will develop the function by the end of this year — whereas she suggested its appeals process is likely to take “months” more to run its course.

“We are going to the higher court in parallel. We are already preparing an appeal to the Bundesgerichtshof [Germany’s Federal Court of Justice],” she added.

The Cologne court order is for a surveillance function to be implemented on a single Tutanota account that had been used for an extortion attempt. The Tutanota spokeswoman said the monitoring function will only apply to future emails this account receives — it will not affect emails previously received.

She added that the account in question appears to no longer be in use.

While after-the-fact monitoring seems unlikely to make any difference to the specific case the suspicion is that court wants to create a precedence — raising the hackles of security watchers who are worried about the risk of digital service providers being compelled to bake backdoors into their services in the region.

Last month a draft resolution of the Council of the European Union triggered substantial concern that EU lawmakers are considering a ban on e2e encryption as part of an anti-terrorism security push. However the draft document discussed only “lawful and targeted access” — while expressing support for “strong encryption”.

Returning to the Tutanote surveillance order, it can only be made to apply to unencrypted emails linked to the specific account.

This is because the email service provider applies e2e encryption to its own users’ content — meaning it does not hold decryption keys so is unable to decrypt the data — though it also allows users to receive emails from email services that do not apply e2e encryption (hence it can be compelled to provide that data in plain text).

However, if the EU were to legislate to compel e2e encryption service providers to provide decrypted data in response to lawful intercept requests, it would effectively outlaw the use of e2e encryption.

That’s the scenario of most concern — though no such law has yet been proposed by any EU institutions. (And would very likely face fierce opposition in the European parliament.)

“According to the ruling of the Cologne Regional Court, we were obliged to release unencrypted incoming and outgoing emails from one mailbox. Emails that are encrypted end-to-end in Tutanota cannot be decrypted by us, not even after the court order,” noted Pfau.

“Tutanota is one of the few mail providers that encrypts the entire mailbox, also calendar and contacts. The encrypted data cannot be decrypted by us, because only the user has the key to decrypt it.”

“This decision shows again why end-to-end encryption is so important,” he added. 

Nielsen is updating its TV ratings to reflect a world which audiences are watching TV both live and on-demand, across a variety of different streaming services and devices.

While the firm has long provided the standard measure for TV audiences, things are more fragmented when it comes to digital viewing. So the upcoming Nielsen One platform isn’t just another digital measurement product — it’s an update to Nielsen’s core metrics.

“Our main objective is, we want measurement to be no longer be a barrier to cross-media [ad] buying,” said Scott Brown, Nielsen’s general manager of audience measurement.

So when Nielsen One launches in fall 2022, the numbers that Nielsen reports about a TV program’s viewership should reflect the true size of the audience, not just the number of people watching on traditionally.

And given the online world’s programmatic ad-buying, as well as similar tools beginning to expand into linear traditional TV, Brown said it’s also time to abandon the idea that “everybody sees the same ads.”

That means the platform will be “moving away from” Nielsen’s C3 and C7 ratings, which are supposed to measure how many people saw a TV program’s ads within three and seven days of airing, respectively. Brown said Nielsen One will be much more granular, measuring how many people saw each ad across different platforms: “Each individual advertisement will get an audience estimate number,” with the goal of fully abandoning the older metrics by fall 2024.

The Nielsen One launch will also include what Brown called a “new data backbone,” allowing the firm’s clients to get more direct access to the data that Nielsen uses to report these numbers.

To offer this data, Nielsen will continue relying on the panels that it uses to create its existing TV ratings, except Brown said the data will now be “truly cross-platform.” The firm will be drawing additional data from its partners, who already include Amazon, Hulu, Roku, Vizio and Google/YouTube.

Brown suggested that with many networks and media companies launching or acquiring streaming services of their own, all of them should want to work with Nielsen to validate their viewership and ads — though some, like Netflix and Disney+, have less of an incentive since their business models rely on subscriptions, not ads.

“Everyone will be measured,” he said. “The ones that lean in and do an integration with us will get more granular measurement and more comprehensive coverage.”

I also brought up one of the big debates in the online world: With Facebook counting three seconds of viewing time as a video play, while Netflix focuses on viewers who “chose to watch” at least two minutes of a show, what actually constitutes an impression?

“We don’t have a final answer in terms of, this is what we’re rolling out,” Brown said. Instead, Nielsen plans to create a working group to hash this out next year. And in the meantime, it’s building technology that will “measure on a second-by-second level of granularity,” allowing the platform to support whatever the final rule might be.

“Today’s fragmented measurement landscape makes planning, implementing, and validating cross-platform campaigns overly complex and increasingly less predictable,” said Adam Gerber, chief media officer at the agency Essence, in a statement. “As we shift to addressable models, prioritize reach, and optimize to outcomes, it’s critical that we develop and adopt consistent, single-source measurement solutions. Nielsen’s new cross-media approach is an important step in delivering the confidence and transparency that advertisers require to support holistic campaigns.”

Nielsen is updating its TV ratings to reflect a world which audiences are watching TV both live and on-demand, across a variety of different streaming services and devices.

While the firm has long provided the standard measure for TV audiences, things are more fragmented when it comes to digital viewing. So the upcoming Nielsen One platform isn’t just another digital measurement product — it’s an update to Nielsen’s core metrics.

“Our main objective is, we want measurement to be no longer be a barrier to cross-media [ad] buying,” said Scott Brown, Nielsen’s general manager of audience measurement.

So when Nielsen One launches in fall 2022, the numbers that Nielsen reports about a TV program’s viewership should reflect the true size of the audience, not just the number of people watching on traditionally.

And given the online world’s programmatic ad-buying, as well as similar tools beginning to expand into linear traditional TV, Brown said it’s also time to abandon the idea that “everybody sees the same ads.”

That means the platform will be “moving away from” Nielsen’s C3 and C7 ratings, which are supposed to measure how many people saw a TV program’s ads within three and seven days of airing, respectively. Brown said Nielsen One will be much more granular, measuring how many people saw each ad across different platforms: “Each individual advertisement will get an audience estimate number,” with the goal of fully abandoning the older metrics by fall 2024.

The Nielsen One launch will also include what Brown called a “new data backbone,” allowing the firm’s clients to get more direct access to the data that Nielsen uses to report these numbers.

To offer this data, Nielsen will continue relying on the panels that it uses to create its existing TV ratings, except Brown said the data will now be “truly cross-platform.” The firm will be drawing additional data from its partners, who already include Amazon, Hulu, Roku, Vizio and Google/YouTube.

Brown suggested that with many networks and media companies launching or acquiring streaming services of their own, all of them should want to work with Nielsen to validate their viewership and ads — though some, like Netflix and Disney+, have less of an incentive since their business models rely on subscriptions, not ads.

“Everyone will be measured,” he said. “The ones that lean in and do an integration with us will get more granular measurement and more comprehensive coverage.”

I also brought up one of the big debates in the online world: With Facebook counting three seconds of viewing time as a video play, while Netflix focuses on viewers who “chose to watch” at least two minutes of a show, what actually constitutes an impression?

“We don’t have a final answer in terms of, this is what we’re rolling out,” Brown said. Instead, Nielsen plans to create a working group to hash this out next year. And in the meantime, it’s building technology that will “measure on a second-by-second level of granularity,” allowing the platform to support whatever the final rule might be.

“Today’s fragmented measurement landscape makes planning, implementing, and validating cross-platform campaigns overly complex and increasingly less predictable,” said Adam Gerber, chief media officer at the agency Essence, in a statement. “As we shift to addressable models, prioritize reach, and optimize to outcomes, it’s critical that we develop and adopt consistent, single-source measurement solutions. Nielsen’s new cross-media approach is an important step in delivering the confidence and transparency that advertisers require to support holistic campaigns.”

The old saw about finding a place where companies still use spreadsheets, and then building a startup to solve the problem, was a good way to dream up new software as a service (SaaS) companies. But the next generation of that idea may be to instead find a place where data is locked, fragmented or both, and build an API to unleash the information.

That’s the thesis behind companies that TechCrunch has covered like Noyo, which wants to free health insurance data and raised $12.5 million in September. And it’s the apparent concept behind Finch, a recent Y Combinator graduate that is looking to liberate HR and payroll data.

General Catalyst led the round, which saw participation from a number of industry executives, including the founders from Ramp and Brex, two competing startups, and Digits. The company’s round comes after the startup had targeted a smaller, $1.5 million sum but wound up taking more capital aboard.

Finch was founded by Jeremy Zhang and Ansel Parikh. Zhang moved from robot R&D for a big tech company to SmartCar, which is building an API for what it self-describes as “mobility applications.” Parikh, Zhang told TechCrunch, worked in venture on API-related deals. So, the pair had experience with startup products that were delivered through a developer endpoint, not by an application coupled to a contract.

Zhang and Parik initially worked on a product that would have allowed other companies to embed consumer lending into their own service. But, in Zhang’s telling, the pair ran into the pandemic, the early period of which was anathema to interest in extending more credit to regular folks. (Notably Upstart, a fintech focused on facilitating consumer lending, is in the process of going public; how rapidly 2020 has spun industries around.)

However, a design partner wanted to offer PPP loans to SMBs on its platform, so the pair wound up looking into what was required for the project on the data side of the ask; Finch was born out of those learnings.

Finch connects customers to payroll and HR data via an API, offering both a free version of its product to entice developers, and a paid version of the product that is priced either as a pay-as-you-go service, or with a SaaS-like pricing provision.

Something notable about Finch is its age. Even for a startup, it’s young. The founding group put up a landing page for the company in April, and wrote the first code for the project in July. That’s rapid scaling from zero to in-market traction. Today Finch is growing 50% month-over-month in terms of both revenue and “employers connected,” giving it the sort of growth that investors flock to.

What might one be able to build with Finch’s API? Past a few basic ideas, my brain was bereft, so I asked Zhang to dole out the future to me. In the co-founder’s estimation, there are three core buckets where Finch can have a role: financial software, inside the lending and insurances spaces, and supporting the burgeoning HR and benefits software market.

In each area, having access to what Zhang called a “source of truth,” namely HR and payroll data about employees and their employment, would allow other companies to better make decisions; tenure at a job could help one determine creditworthiness, HR services need to know who works where, and in the realm of finance apps that are working to help or supplant CFOs need to understand current headcount.

Still, Finch’s path won’t be an easy one. Part of the problem that its founders discovered is that there are myriad payroll and HR systems. Building out an API to support as many as its market requires will take time and investment. Raising more capital than it initially intended will help, we’re sure, but even with deeper coffers, the scale of the challenge in front of the young company will require yeoman’s work.

The company told TechCrunch that it can support the systems of 1.4 million employers today, though it intends to “10x” that number in the next year. Finch’s capital event is similar to the round raised recently by fellow YC graduate BuildBuddy, a SaaS play, in which both startups took aboard more than $3 million in funding after initially targeting a raise in the $1 million range.

The startup has six staff today, with Zhang expecting the the company to scale to 15 or 20 by the end of next year.