Month: March 2021

Hundreds of thousands of teenagers and young adults get on flights each year from India to a foreign land to pursue higher education. Upon landing, they face a myriad of challenges: They don’t have a local credit history, so they can’t avail a range of financial services including a loan or a credit card — at least not without paying a premium for it.

For banks and other financial institutions, there is an increased risk when they engage with foreigners, so they charge more. An Indian student studying in the U.S., for instance, borrows money at an interest rate over 13%, compared to their local peers who can secure the same amount of credit, if not more, at less than half of that interest rate.

Leap, a two-year-old startup with headquarters in San Francisco and Bangalore, is attempting to solve this problem and many others. The startup grants loans to students at fair interest rate by evaluating the data they generated — alternative and derived — in India itself.

Since the last time we wrote about Leap, the startup has evolved to address several other problems students face, explained Arnav Kumar, co-founder of Leap, in an interview with TechCrunch.

Kumar said Leap today is helping students with guidance on admission, visa, as well as test preparation. Leap has also developed a social network of sorts where over half a million students are talking to one another and use the platform’s other services to get admission in a college abroad.

About ten years ago, when I was looking to join an engineering college, I reached out to several individuals who were already studying in the colleges I had shortlisted. Turns out, over a million students in India do the exact same thing each year when they are about to begin their college life. (If I may complete the loop, I did graduate and have a bachelor’s degree in CSE somewhere in the house.)

Kumar said Leap’s community today is replicating the offline-behavior. Some students, to be sure, reach out to others on LinkedIn, or Facebook. But by just focusing on one problem, Leap is attempting to become the community for students who are looking to pursue higher education. (Its pages are indexed on Google search for better visibility.)

Leap Finance founders pose for a picture

There is a massive opportunity for startups to better solve these problems.

“India is the second-largest market globally for overseas enrolment, and in just a decade higher education enrolments are up by 8 million. This presents a huge opportunity in an otherwise fragmented landscape. Leap is addressing this huge opportunity through its end-to-end tech platform and a community-first approach,” said Amit Anand, Founding Partner of Jungle Ventures, in a statement.

Vaibhav Singh, the other co-founder of Leap, said in an interview that students from India take admission in over 5,000 schools and universities abroad each year to study tens of thousands of courses.

“So the choice spectrum is really, really wide and you need experts who can help you make the right choice. This is the most important decision you or your family will make,” he said.

Investors have spotted an opportunity in this space, too — and are backing Leap. The startup said on Tuesday that it has raised $17 million in its Series B round. The new financing round was led by Singapore-based Jungle Ventures, along with Sequoia Capital India and Owl Ventures. The startup has to-date raised $22.5 million.

The global pandemic prevented many Indian students from traveling abroad. This year, more than 700,000 students are estimated to leave India to pursue higher education. Leap co-founders said they are working to serve 150,000 of such students this year.

Leap said it plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand its tech team and reach more geographies. The startup currently helps students join colleges in several countries including the U.S., Canada, UK, and Australia. Singh said Leap is also looking to hire some tech and business talent.

“2020 was a tough year for international education with Covid related travel restrictions. We are impressed by the resilience of the Leap team during the last year, where not only have they served hundreds of students with their financing solutions but have also expanded with Leap Scholar providing counselling to thousands of Indian students looking to study abroad. This vertically integrated strategy has materially strengthened the moats for Leap,” said Ashish Agrawal, Principal at Sequoia India, which wrote its first check to Leap before the startup had a product.

Hundreds of thousands of teenagers and young adults get on flights each year from India to a foreign land to pursue higher education. Upon landing, they face a myriad of challenges: They don’t have a local credit history, so they can’t avail a range of financial services including a loan or a credit card — at least not without paying a premium for it.

For banks and other financial institutions, there is an increased risk when they engage with foreigners, so they charge more. An Indian student studying in the U.S., for instance, borrows money at an interest rate over 13%, compared to their local peers who can secure the same amount of credit, if not more, at less than half of that interest rate.

Leap, a two-year-old startup with headquarters in San Francisco and Bangalore, is attempting to solve this problem and many others. The startup grants loans to students at fair interest rate by evaluating the data they generated — alternative and derived — in India itself.

Since the last time we wrote about Leap, the startup has evolved to address several other problems students face, explained Arnav Kumar, co-founder of Leap, in an interview with TechCrunch.

Kumar said Leap today is helping students with guidance on admission, visa, as well as test preparation. Leap has also developed a social network of sorts where over half a million students are talking to one another and use the platform’s other services to get admission in a college abroad.

About ten years ago, when I was looking to join an engineering college, I reached out to several individuals who were already studying in the colleges I had shortlisted. Turns out, over a million students in India do the exact same thing each year when they are about to begin their college life. (If I may complete the loop, I did graduate and have a bachelor’s degree in CSE somewhere in the house.)

Kumar said Leap’s community today is replicating the offline-behavior. Some students, to be sure, reach out to others on LinkedIn, or Facebook. But by just focusing on one problem, Leap is attempting to become the community for students who are looking to pursue higher education. (Its pages are indexed on Google search for better visibility.)

Leap Finance founders pose for a picture

There is a massive opportunity for startups to better solve these problems.

“India is the second-largest market globally for overseas enrolment, and in just a decade higher education enrolments are up by 8 million. This presents a huge opportunity in an otherwise fragmented landscape. Leap is addressing this huge opportunity through its end-to-end tech platform and a community-first approach,” said Amit Anand, Founding Partner of Jungle Ventures, in a statement.

Vaibhav Singh, the other co-founder of Leap, said in an interview that students from India take admission in over 5,000 schools and universities abroad each year to study tens of thousands of courses.

“So the choice spectrum is really, really wide and you need experts who can help you make the right choice. This is the most important decision you or your family will make,” he said.

Investors have spotted an opportunity in this space, too — and are backing Leap. The startup said on Tuesday that it has raised $17 million in its Series B round. The new financing round was led by Singapore-based Jungle Ventures, along with Sequoia Capital India and Owl Ventures. The startup has to-date raised $22.5 million.

The global pandemic prevented many Indian students from traveling abroad. This year, more than 700,000 students are estimated to leave India to pursue higher education. Leap co-founders said they are working to serve 150,000 of such students this year.

Leap said it plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand its tech team and reach more geographies. The startup currently helps students join colleges in several countries including the U.S., Canada, UK, and Australia. Singh said Leap is also looking to hire some tech and business talent.

“2020 was a tough year for international education with Covid related travel restrictions. We are impressed by the resilience of the Leap team during the last year, where not only have they served hundreds of students with their financing solutions but have also expanded with Leap Scholar providing counselling to thousands of Indian students looking to study abroad. This vertically integrated strategy has materially strengthened the moats for Leap,” said Ashish Agrawal, Principal at Sequoia India, which wrote its first check to Leap before the startup had a product.

Cloud Paper, the startup whose bamboo toilet paper (and celebrity and billionaire backers including Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Marc Benioff, Dara Khosrowshahi, and Mark Cuban) made a splash last year, is getting into the paper towel racket.

Starting today, the company is taking pre-orders for its 12 pack boxes of sustainably sourced bamboo paper towels, which will retail for $34.99.

The Seattle-based company was founded by two ex-Uber employees, Ryan Fritsch and Austin Watkins, who went on to take roles at the logistics startup Convoy, before launching Cloud Paper. Their toilet paper (and now paper towel company) is one of several businesses trying to get consumers to make the switch to bamboo-based consumer products.

Cozy Earth and Ettitude sell bamboo sheets and bedding; The Bamboo Clothing Co., Thought, Tasc, Free Fly Apparel, all make bamboo clothing; and Bite has a bamboo toothbrush to go with its plastic-free toothpastes and flosses.

But (I’m quoting myself here) Cloud Paper may be the only one to get such super wealthy, high profile investors to flush it with wads of cash. Even so, companies like Grove, Tushy, Reel, and the aptly named Who gives a crap, Inc. are all angling to wipe up a piece of the $10.4 billion market for toilet paper.

The company’s founders are on a mission to make the paper industry more sustainable, according to co-founder Ryan Fritsch, and they’re looking to do it one roll at a time.

While other companies look at bamboo as a replacement for cotton or plastics, the Cloud Paper co-founder said this company is squarely focused on toilet paper and paper towels because those products make up most of the crap that’s most wasteful in the paper industry.

The company has already ordered 1 million rolls of toilet paper for production and shipped hundreds of thousands of toilet paper, but the rationale for adoption has shifted, the company said.

“It definitely had its moment when the COVID shutdowns happened,” said Fritsch. “But [consumption] shifted from a TP panic to ‘There’s an easy and convenient, sustainable, option out there.’ It’s less of an all-out craze,” Fritsch said.

No less august a body than the National Resources Defense Council has come out swinging against how much waste is sacrificed to the commode.

For instance, the logging industry in Canada degrades over a million acres of its climate-critical forest, in part to feed U.S. demand for toilet paper, according to the NRDC. Demand from the U.S. has grown so substantially that, in recent years, Canada has ranked third globally in its rate of intact forest loss—behind only Russia and Brazil—mostly due to logging, the NRDC said.

Ninety percent of that is clearcutting, which exacerbates climate change. By the most conservative estimates, “logging in the boreal releases 26 million metric tons of carbon through driving emissions from the forest’s carbon-rich soils and eroding the forest’s ability to absorb carbon,” the NRDC wrote in 2020 report. “Toilet paper’s impact is even more severe because, since it is so short-lived, it quickly releases its remaining carbon into the atmosphere. That is why, according to the Environmental Paper Network, toilet paper made from trees has three times the climate impact as toilet paper created using recycled materials.”

That’s why wiping out forested paper can be a real boon in the climate fight.

“The lion’s share of usage is number one is toilet paper and number two is paper towels, after that the size of the market really really shrinks. We’re going to be continuing on the paper space,” said Fritsch. 

The company’s next act will be working with businesses like restaurants, hotels, and even stadiums and arenas to make the swithc.

“We launched the company as a B2B company. We were working with WeWork and restaurants and the market — if you look at where our paper products were being used,” Fritsch said. “So another big focus will be building products for our commercial customers where there’s higher capacity.”

Cloud Paper box of paper towels. Image Credit: Cloud Paper

Cloud Paper, the startup whose bamboo toilet paper (and celebrity and billionaire backers including Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Marc Benioff, Dara Khosrowshahi, and Mark Cuban) made a splash last year, is getting into the paper towel racket.

Starting today, the company is taking pre-orders for its 12 pack boxes of sustainably sourced bamboo paper towels, which will retail for $34.99.

The Seattle-based company was founded by two ex-Uber employees, Ryan Fritsch and Austin Watkins, who went on to take roles at the logistics startup Convoy, before launching Cloud Paper. Their toilet paper (and now paper towel company) is one of several businesses trying to get consumers to make the switch to bamboo-based consumer products.

Cozy Earth and Ettitude sell bamboo sheets and bedding; The Bamboo Clothing Co., Thought, Tasc, Free Fly Apparel, all make bamboo clothing; and Bite has a bamboo toothbrush to go with its plastic-free toothpastes and flosses.

But (I’m quoting myself here) Cloud Paper may be the only one to get such super wealthy, high profile investors to flush it with wads of cash. Even so, companies like Grove, Tushy, Reel, and the aptly named Who gives a crap, Inc. are all angling to wipe up a piece of the $10.4 billion market for toilet paper.

The company’s founders are on a mission to make the paper industry more sustainable, according to co-founder Ryan Fritsch, and they’re looking to do it one roll at a time.

While other companies look at bamboo as a replacement for cotton or plastics, the Cloud Paper co-founder said this company is squarely focused on toilet paper and paper towels because those products make up most of the crap that’s most wasteful in the paper industry.

The company has already ordered 1 million rolls of toilet paper for production and shipped hundreds of thousands of toilet paper, but the rationale for adoption has shifted, the company said.

“It definitely had its moment when the COVID shutdowns happened,” said Fritsch. “But [consumption] shifted from a TP panic to ‘There’s an easy and convenient, sustainable, option out there.’ It’s less of an all-out craze,” Fritsch said.

No less august a body than the National Resources Defense Council has come out swinging against how much waste is sacrificed to the commode.

For instance, the logging industry in Canada degrades over a million acres of its climate-critical forest, in part to feed U.S. demand for toilet paper, according to the NRDC. Demand from the U.S. has grown so substantially that, in recent years, Canada has ranked third globally in its rate of intact forest loss—behind only Russia and Brazil—mostly due to logging, the NRDC said.

Ninety percent of that is clearcutting, which exacerbates climate change. By the most conservative estimates, “logging in the boreal releases 26 million metric tons of carbon through driving emissions from the forest’s carbon-rich soils and eroding the forest’s ability to absorb carbon,” the NRDC wrote in 2020 report. “Toilet paper’s impact is even more severe because, since it is so short-lived, it quickly releases its remaining carbon into the atmosphere. That is why, according to the Environmental Paper Network, toilet paper made from trees has three times the climate impact as toilet paper created using recycled materials.”

That’s why wiping out forested paper can be a real boon in the climate fight.

“The lion’s share of usage is number one is toilet paper and number two is paper towels, after that the size of the market really really shrinks. We’re going to be continuing on the paper space,” said Fritsch. 

The company’s next act will be working with businesses like restaurants, hotels, and even stadiums and arenas to make the swithc.

“We launched the company as a B2B company. We were working with WeWork and restaurants and the market — if you look at where our paper products were being used,” Fritsch said. “So another big focus will be building products for our commercial customers where there’s higher capacity.”

Cloud Paper box of paper towels. Image Credit: Cloud Paper

Malicious hacking has become a pernicious and dogged fact of life for more organizations, and it’s a threat that has seemingly grown more complicated and sophisticated over time. One one effective approach to tackling that has been collaboration: not just applying an array of services to address the issue, but creating environments to help those building cybersecurity to work better together. Today one of the startups building tools to do just that is announcing a round of funding, underscoring the opportunity and its own growth within that.

Cyware, a New York startup that has created a platform for organizations to build and operate virtual “cyber fusion centers” —
spaces for people to share threat intelligence, run end-to-end security automation, and orchestrate and execute 360-degree threat responses — has picked up $30 million in funding, a Series B that it will use to continue growing its business.

The funding is being co-led by Advent International and Ten Eleven Ventures. Advent made some waves in the cybersecurity industry last year when it partnered with Crosspoint to acquire Forescout for $1.9 billion. Ten Eleven, meanwhile, is a VC that specializes in cybersecurity startups. Prelude Fund (the venture practice at Mercato Partners), Emerald Development Managers, Great Road Holdings and cloud security firm Zscaler — a mix of financial and strategic investors — also participated. Before this, the startup had raised around $13 million, and it is not disclosing its valuation.

The story of the last year in the world of business has been about how everything has gone online: people and their companies have been working remotely; consumers are browsing, buying and entertaining themselves over the internet and with apps. Digital is where all the traffic is.

Unsurprisingly that has also played out in the world of cybersecurity: the threat landscape has grown, and so cybersecurity responses have grown with them. Cyware said that in the last year it saw 120% year-over-year growth in annual recurring revenue — although it doesn’t disclose actual revenue figures. Its customers are a mix of large enterprises, but also those who both collaborate with others to manage cyber security, such as information sharing communities (ISACs), as well as organizations that manage cybersecurity on behalf of a number of others, such as managed security service providers and computer emergency response teams.

Although many might have a stereotype of a malicious hacker in their heads who sits alone in a darkened room with a determined look in his/her eye, the reality is more likely to be a collaboration between a number of people, providing tips, technology, threads that are developed and so on. Cyware, in its focus on providing a platform for collaboration and creating operations centers, seems to take the same approach in what it has built, a platform to make collaborating easier and part of the solution.

It does so through security orchestration, automation and response (known as SOAR), used by teams to collaborate better and make more informed threat scoring, and to respond better to threat alerts. Indeed, a key part of the challenge for a lot of security services is that they cross multiple parts of organizations, including IT, compliance, trust and safety, and indeed security itself. One aim of Cyware is to create a platform for these all to meet and exchange information that could be helpful to others in one place.

“Over the past decade, security operations teams have had difficulty with trying to sift through copious amounts of threat data and lacked the humans’ role as part of their security orchestration strategies,” said Anuj Goel, Ph.D., cofounder and CEO of Cyware, in a statement. “Our goal with our Virtual Cyber Fusion platform is to help our customers unite their security teams to efficiently respond to high-priority threats by connecting the dots in their environments, and the momentum we’re experiencing is proof that we are executing on that mission. This Series B financing will help us continue to overdeliver for customers, expand our team, improve our platform and truly revolutionize how security operations and threat intelligence teams work together.”

Goel, who cofounded the company with CTO Akshat Jain, cut his teeth in a big security team, as head of global cyber strategy for Citi. He is also an advisor for the Centre for Strategic Cyberspace in London and has worked with other organizations on collaborative approaches to the problem and consequences of malicious hacking.

Investors will have not just been looking at the company’s growth, but also the list of customers — themselves also leaders in cyber — that are trusting Cyware.

“In our increasingly connected environment, companies of all sizes are demanding new and innovative cybersecurity solutions,” said Eric Noeth, Principal, Advent International, in a statement. “Cyware’s early traction among leading enterprises and major ISACs reflects its unique ability to bring together all key security functions to seamlessly anticipate, contextualize and remediate threats. We look forward to drawing on our experience in this sector to help the talented Cyware team make its Virtual Cyber Fusion platform the gold standard technology for enterprises around the world.”

Meet Resilience, a new startup that wants to help cancer treatment institutes as well as cancer patients at every step of the treatment journey. It’s an ambitious project founded by two well-known French entrepreneurs. They want to leverage their tech skills for this new healthcare startup.

Behind the scenes, there are two co-CEOs — Céline Lazorthes and Jonathan Benhamou. Nicolas Helleringer and Matthieu Pozza are the two remaining co-founders acting as CTO and CPO respectively. Lazorthes previously co-founded Leetchi, the leading money pot company in France. She also started MangoPay, a marketplace payment solution, as a spinout company. Crédit Mutuel Arkéa acquired both companies.

Benhamou co-founded PeopleDoc, a cloud-based HR service. In 2018, his company was acquired by Ultimate Software. Following the acquisition, he served as an executive in the publicly quoted company. Shortly after, private equity firm Hellman & Friedman Capital Partners acquired Ultimate Software.

Last year, they both spent a lot of time working together on a nonprofit called ProtegeTonSoignant. Along with 140 people, they raised €7.4 million ($8.8 million) in donations to buy personal protective equipment and deliver it to hospitals in need. It was a fundraising and logistics challenge.

After spending a lot of time talking with healthcare professionals, they decided to “dedicate at least the next ten years to those who save lives,” Lazorthes said.

It seems like an ambitious bet, and they’re aware of that. “We don’t know anything about healthcare just like we didn’t know anything about HR and finance. We’re entering a market that is highly regulated,” Benhamou told me.

That’s why they chose to focus on one area in particular — cancer care. While research institutes have made some tremendous progress over the past few years, it has become increasingly more complicated to treat cancer. For instance, Benhamou says he expects to see 300 new treatments over the next three years. Treatment is slowly evolving from broad spectrum treatments to targeted treatments.

Cancer treatment facilities face three issues. First, “a human brain can’t assimilate all this data,” Benhamou said. Second, as life expectancy increases, there are more cancer cases every year. A tumor board is going to spend a minute and a half or two minutes on a specific case to make a therapeutic decision.

Third, as a result of the first two problems, patients are left on their own. For instance, they suffer from side effects because there’s no dosage adjustment in their treatment.

Image Credits: Resilience

Starting from there, Resilience wants to become a full-stack software solution for cancer treatment for both the medical team and patients. When it comes to practitioners, Resilience will be a software-as-a-service solution that can augment therapeutic decisions. The company will categorize scientific literature, use machine learning to find some similarities with past cases and surface clinical trials based on various criteria.

When it comes to patients, there will be a web and mobile app to access content and information about their cancer. In particular, Resilience could help you understand side effects and treat them.

“Our goal is to prove that the app can improve the quality of life of the patients,” Lazorthes said. Resilience also wants to leverage its app to ask questions and collect data to improve treatments.

The startup is already putting together a data science team. It will use natural language processing to parse scientific literature. It will also work with a medical team to double-check everything.

When it comes to finding similarities between patients, the company is signing partnerships with various hospitals to get data from past cases.

Resilience has raised a $6 million funding round (€5 million) led by Singular, the VC firm founded by former Alven partners Raffi Kamber and Jérémy Uzan. Tech business angels Nathalie Balla (La Redoute), Xavier Niel (Free), Jean-Charles Samuelian (Alan), Roxanne Varza (Station F) and more are also participating.

There are also some healthcare investors in today’s funding round, such as Charles Ferté (AstraZeneca), Philippe Dabi (Bioclinic) and Thomas Clozel (Owkin).

Resilience is a mission-driven company — the company is partnering with a scientific board and a patient board. Gustave Roussy, one of the leading cancer research institutes in the world, is also acting as a co-founder in Resilience.

That’s a lot of stakeholders, but it’s the right thing to do when you’re building a healthcare company. Resilience now has the right system of checks and balance to iterate on its product and roll out a product that has a chance of actually improving cancer treatment.

Meet Resilience, a new startup that wants to help cancer treatment institutes as well as cancer patients at every step of the treatment journey. It’s an ambitious project founded by two well-known French entrepreneurs. They want to leverage their tech skills for this new healthcare startup.

Behind the scenes, there are two co-CEOs — Céline Lazorthes and Jonathan Benhamou. Nicolas Helleringer and Matthieu Pozza are the two remaining co-founders acting as CTO and CPO respectively. Lazorthes previously co-founded Leetchi, the leading money pot company in France. She also started MangoPay, a marketplace payment solution, as a spinout company. Crédit Mutuel Arkéa acquired both companies.

Benhamou co-founded PeopleDoc, a cloud-based HR service. In 2018, his company was acquired by Ultimate Software. Following the acquisition, he served as an executive in the publicly quoted company. Shortly after, private equity firm Hellman & Friedman Capital Partners acquired Ultimate Software.

Last year, they both spent a lot of time working together on a nonprofit called ProtegeTonSoignant. Along with 140 people, they raised €7.4 million ($8.8 million) in donations to buy personal protective equipment and deliver it to hospitals in need. It was a fundraising and logistics challenge.

After spending a lot of time talking with healthcare professionals, they decided to “dedicate at least the next ten years to those who save lives,” Lazorthes said.

It seems like an ambitious bet, and they’re aware of that. “We don’t know anything about healthcare just like we didn’t know anything about HR and finance. We’re entering a market that is highly regulated,” Benhamou told me.

That’s why they chose to focus on one area in particular — cancer care. While research institutes have made some tremendous progress over the past few years, it has become increasingly more complicated to treat cancer. For instance, Benhamou says he expects to see 300 new treatments over the next three years. Treatment is slowly evolving from broad spectrum treatments to targeted treatments.

Cancer treatment facilities face three issues. First, “a human brain can’t assimilate all this data,” Benhamou said. Second, as life expectancy increases, there are more cancer cases every year. A tumor board is going to spend a minute and a half or two minutes on a specific case to make a therapeutic decision.

Third, as a result of the first two problems, patients are left on their own. For instance, they suffer from side effects because there’s no dosage adjustment in their treatment.

Image Credits: Resilience

Starting from there, Resilience wants to become a full-stack software solution for cancer treatment for both the medical team and patients. When it comes to practitioners, Resilience will be a software-as-a-service solution that can augment therapeutic decisions. The company will categorize scientific literature, use machine learning to find some similarities with past cases and surface clinical trials based on various criteria.

When it comes to patients, there will be a web and mobile app to access content and information about their cancer. In particular, Resilience could help you understand side effects and treat them.

“Our goal is to prove that the app can improve the quality of life of the patients,” Lazorthes said. Resilience also wants to leverage its app to ask questions and collect data to improve treatments.

The startup is already putting together a data science team. It will use natural language processing to parse scientific literature. It will also work with a medical team to double-check everything.

When it comes to finding similarities between patients, the company is signing partnerships with various hospitals to get data from past cases.

Resilience has raised a $6 million funding round (€5 million) led by Singular, the VC firm founded by former Alven partners Raffi Kamber and Jérémy Uzan. Tech business angels Nathalie Balla (La Redoute), Xavier Niel (Free), Jean-Charles Samuelian (Alan), Roxanne Varza (Station F) and more are also participating.

There are also some healthcare investors in today’s funding round, such as Charles Ferté (AstraZeneca), Philippe Dabi (Bioclinic) and Thomas Clozel (Owkin).

Resilience is a mission-driven company — the company is partnering with a scientific board and a patient board. Gustave Roussy, one of the leading cancer research institutes in the world, is also acting as a co-founder in Resilience.

That’s a lot of stakeholders, but it’s the right thing to do when you’re building a healthcare company. Resilience now has the right system of checks and balance to iterate on its product and roll out a product that has a chance of actually improving cancer treatment.

Montreal-headquartered Inovia Capital has raised $450 million for Growth Fund II, the firm’s second growth-stage investment fund. The close of this funding comes just a little over two years after the announcement of its first in February 2019, a $400 million pool of investment capital that marked Inovia’s first foray beyond the early stage deals it originally focused on.

Inovia now has investments across every stage of a company’s development — including retaining stakes in some of its portfolio companies that have had successful exits to the public markets, like Lightspeed, the point-of-sale and commerce company that went public in a nearly $400 million public offering on both the NYSE and the TSX last year.

As with Growth Fund I, the goal of Growth Fund II is to invest in companies with a focus primarily on Canadian startups, but also looking to targets in the U.S. and EU, where Inovia also maintains offices. The firms’ partners, including Chris Arsenault, Dennis Kavelman, and former Google CFO Patrick Pichette, have focused on building out a team of experienced operators to help their portfolio companies, and invest specifically in areas of particular need for startups outside the Valley, like sourcing high-demand, senior talent with high-profile tech industry experience.

Inovia’s original Growth Fund was based on an assumption that the firm could leverage its relationships and its experience to deliver value to its portfolio companies not just when they’re starting out, but across their growth cycles. Arsenault explained in an interview that Fund I was kind of a proof point that that this assumption was correct, which then paid big dividends when the firm went out to raise Fund II last year.

“We basically built the team around Dennis, Patrick and myself,” he said. “We really followed through on our key assumptions over why it made sense for Inovia to use its platform to actually build a growth stage fund that would benefit not only from insights into the portfolio, but also all of the relationships and the platform that we built over the last decade.”

What needed proving, Arsenault said, was that Inovia could stand toe-to-toe with the growth-focused firms that had acted as follow-on investors for its early stage deals over the years. That was no easy task, when you consider that Inovia provided deal flow to some of the most respected venture firms in technology, including Bessemer, KKR, TA Ventures and Sequoia.

Inovia hired a lot of operators with experience at high-growth companies, and focused on being able to shepherd its investments through challenges like building a real board, and engineering a cap table to properly manage and prepare secondary sales. With a plan to invest in between 10 to 12 companies with the $400 million in Fund I, Inovia began making deals – the first was with Lightspeed, and then they got into Forward (tech-enabled primary health care), Hopper and Snaptravel (two travel industry startups) and more.

Inovia Capital growth partners Chris Arsenault, Dennis Kavelman and Patrick Pichette (left to right)

Most of the companies that Lightspeed picked with Fund I (it did 10 deals in total) ended up having a very strong 2020 – including, surprisingly, all the travel-focused startups. Based on the strength of their performance, Arsenault and his partners decided to accelerate their timetable for raising Fund II, and found LPs more than willing. They ended up capping the fund at $450 million (with a target of between 10 to 12 investments, as with Fund I) given what Arsenault says felt like the right size for managing across the investment and operating team, despite available demand to likely raise quite a bit more.

Arsenault noted that most of the LPs contributing to this fund also had capital in the first, though some new investors have also signed on. And while Inovia’s focus is not strictly Canadian, he added that the firm’s success, along with the makeup of its investment partners and portfolio (two-thirds of the companies it has backed are Canadian) tells a story of a changing investment landscape north of the border.

“The majority of our LPs are Canadian, and I take it to heart that it’s important to create patterns of success, so that people can look towards models and either replicate or adapt to their own situation,” Arsenault said. “I think that we need more success stories that people can look at and say, ‘I can do the same thing, or I can do better.’ And the fact that our LPs came back with us, and when you look at, you know, what Georgian [Partners] is doing, and what Novacap is doing, and what OMERS Growth – this is nothing like the VC ecosystem and industry that I was in 10 years ago, right? We’re definitely on another level now in Canada.”

He added that there are examples at every stage of company-building, citing the new Backbone Angels collective led by a number of post and current Shopify employees including Arati Sharma, Atless Clark, Lynsey Thornton and Alexandra Clark. Arsenault also pointed to Lightspeed’s decision to list first on the TSX before the NYSE as a sign of newfound tech industry maturity in the Canadian context.

Finally, Arsenault credits an unusual ‘X’ factor in how Inovia has been able to put together this second fund and manage deep involvement in its very active portfolio companies over the last year: the mostly remote conditions brought on by the necessities of the pandemic.

“It would have been impossible to do what we did within the portfolio, with the portfolio, fundraising a new fund, generating our best year, in terms of exits last year, we had the New York Stock Exchange IPO for Lightspeed, we had a dozen transactions of acquisitions where our portfolio companies are doing the acquiring,” he said. “I don’t know how we would have done what we’ve done, had we been traveling and had a normal life.”

Montreal-headquartered Inovia Capital has raised $450 million for Growth Fund II, the firm’s second growth-stage investment fund. The close of this funding comes just a little over two years after the announcement of its first in February 2019, a $400 million pool of investment capital that marked Inovia’s first foray beyond the early stage deals it originally focused on.

Inovia now has investments across every stage of a company’s development — including retaining stakes in some of its portfolio companies that have had successful exits to the public markets, like Lightspeed, the point-of-sale and commerce company that went public in a nearly $400 million public offering on both the NYSE and the TSX last year.

As with Growth Fund I, the goal of Growth Fund II is to invest in companies with a focus primarily on Canadian startups, but also looking to targets in the U.S. and EU, where Inovia also maintains offices. The firms’ partners, including Chris Arsenault, Dennis Kavelman, and former Google CFO Patrick Pichette, have focused on building out a team of experienced operators to help their portfolio companies, and invest specifically in areas of particular need for startups outside the Valley, like sourcing high-demand, senior talent with high-profile tech industry experience.

Inovia’s original Growth Fund was based on an assumption that the firm could leverage its relationships and its experience to deliver value to its portfolio companies not just when they’re starting out, but across their growth cycles. Arsenault explained in an interview that Fund I was kind of a proof point that that this assumption was correct, which then paid big dividends when the firm went out to raise Fund II last year.

“We basically built the team around Dennis, Patrick and myself,” he said. “We really followed through on our key assumptions over why it made sense for Inovia to use its platform to actually build a growth stage fund that would benefit not only from insights into the portfolio, but also all of the relationships and the platform that we built over the last decade.”

What needed proving, Arsenault said, was that Inovia could stand toe-to-toe with the growth-focused firms that had acted as follow-on investors for its early stage deals over the years. That was no easy task, when you consider that Inovia provided deal flow to some of the most respected venture firms in technology, including Bessemer, KKR, TA Ventures and Sequoia.

Inovia hired a lot of operators with experience at high-growth companies, and focused on being able to shepherd its investments through challenges like building a real board, and engineering a cap table to properly manage and prepare secondary sales. With a plan to invest in between 10 to 12 companies with the $400 million in Fund I, Inovia began making deals – the first was with Lightspeed, and then they got into Forward (tech-enabled primary health care), Hopper and Snaptravel (two travel industry startups) and more.

Inovia Capital growth partners Chris Arsenault, Dennis Kavelman and Patrick Pichette (left to right)

Most of the companies that Lightspeed picked with Fund I (it did 10 deals in total) ended up having a very strong 2020 – including, surprisingly, all the travel-focused startups. Based on the strength of their performance, Arsenault and his partners decided to accelerate their timetable for raising Fund II, and found LPs more than willing. They ended up capping the fund at $450 million (with a target of between 10 to 12 investments, as with Fund I) given what Arsenault says felt like the right size for managing across the investment and operating team, despite available demand to likely raise quite a bit more.

Arsenault noted that most of the LPs contributing to this fund also had capital in the first, though some new investors have also signed on. And while Inovia’s focus is not strictly Canadian, he added that the firm’s success, along with the makeup of its investment partners and portfolio (two-thirds of the companies it has backed are Canadian) tells a story of a changing investment landscape north of the border.

“The majority of our LPs are Canadian, and I take it to heart that it’s important to create patterns of success, so that people can look towards models and either replicate or adapt to their own situation,” Arsenault said. “I think that we need more success stories that people can look at and say, ‘I can do the same thing, or I can do better.’ And the fact that our LPs came back with us, and when you look at, you know, what Georgian [Partners] is doing, and what Novacap is doing, and what OMERS Growth – this is nothing like the VC ecosystem and industry that I was in 10 years ago, right? We’re definitely on another level now in Canada.”

He added that there are examples at every stage of company-building, citing the new Backbone Angels collective led by a number of post and current Shopify employees including Arati Sharma, Atless Clark, Lynsey Thornton and Alexandra Clark. Arsenault also pointed to Lightspeed’s decision to list first on the TSX before the NYSE as a sign of newfound tech industry maturity in the Canadian context.

Finally, Arsenault credits an unusual ‘X’ factor in how Inovia has been able to put together this second fund and manage deep involvement in its very active portfolio companies over the last year: the mostly remote conditions brought on by the necessities of the pandemic.

“It would have been impossible to do what we did within the portfolio, with the portfolio, fundraising a new fund, generating our best year, in terms of exits last year, we had the New York Stock Exchange IPO for Lightspeed, we had a dozen transactions of acquisitions where our portfolio companies are doing the acquiring,” he said. “I don’t know how we would have done what we’ve done, had we been traveling and had a normal life.”

Ikigai, a London fintech founded by former McKinsey partners, thinks there’s room in the crowded challenger market for a new premium offering that combines digital banking with wealth management.

Targeting future and present high-net-worth individuals, Ikigai is iOS-only for now and consists of a current account and savings account, with adjacent wealth management features, all combined in a single app and card. The thesis, says the founding team, is that currently there is very little on the market that provides a modern digital-first banking experience and the kind of premium banking services typically offered by legacy banks to their more affluent customers.

“Our typical client is young — usually in their late twenties or thirties,” explains Ikigai co-founder Edgar de Picciotto. “They’re entering their prime spending and earning years, and are looking to secure their financial future. Although they’re not high-net-worths yet, they have aspirations and goals — and they want to do more with their money”.

Rather than a freemium model, Ikigai charges a flat subscription fee from the get-go, and new users gain access to a relationship manager, which differentiates it from most digital-first banking. Features include an “everyday” spending account, and a saving section of the app, dubbed “nest”. The latter is separate from the spending account, including having its own account number, but can be easily topped up from the everyday account.

So far, quite me-too, you might conclude. However, where some more differentiation arguably comes into play is that Ikigai also offers “fully managed, globally diversified investment portfolios” under the wealth section of the app. Portfolios are built and managed by Ikigai in collaboration with asset manager BlackRock, and take into account both risk appetite and the nature of what users want to achieve.

“We say it a lot but Ikigai was very much born from personal frustration,” says de Picciotto. “Everything on the market seemed to be slow, impersonal, full of attempts to sell lending and debt products. It felt like either the tech was there or the humanity, never both. That was the first thing we knew we wanted to solve”.

“Banking can also be way too time-consuming, investing even more so,” adds Maurizio Kaiser, Ikigai’s other co-founder. “There is so much for people to do when they have to do it themselves. It can basically become a second job if you’re constantly looking at different stocks and shares working out if the value is under this or over that. No one really has time for that — I certainly didn’t”.

Once the pair dug deeper, as management consultants are wont to do, they say they also discovered “interesting behavioural trends,” particularly when it comes to young and affluent people.

“This group are entering their prime earning and spending years, and they expect so much more from their banks than previous generations,” says de Picciotto. “Not only do they expect faster, fairer and better experiences, they have specific expectations and demands that current financial providers just don’t meet. This includes things like approaching personal finance as an act of self-care, like lifestyle banking over lifestage banking, and aligning their money with their goals and sense of purpose”.

Notably, unlike many of the first wave of challenger banks that made a virtue out of claims to be building their own core banking technology, Ikigai is primarily partnering with technology providers, including Railsbank and WealthKernel.

“Going with banking-as-a-service providers actually makes it easier to execute on our vision,” claims de Picciotto. “It allows us to focus on what we are good at and really matters to our customers: the user experience”.

On banking competitors, Ikigai’s founders argue that existing incumbents and challengers both have “significant” failings.

Incumbents are too dependent on branches or telephone services, and are premised on cross-selling and up-selling services, particularly lending products, in order to make money on loss-making current accounts.

Challengers, on the other hand, are “faster and more accessible”. However, in a bid to keep their cost-base low, they are increasingly automating their chat support and, in some cases, hiding live chat features.

“Delivering a high-quality service is obviously at odds with their aim of offering banking for free,” concludes Kaiser.