Month: August 2021

Boeing’s Starliner capsule is leaving the launchpad after a series of delays that prevented takeoff over the last few days. NASA and the beleaguered aerospace giant will take “whatever time is necessary” to find and fix the issue, but it’s beginning to feel like this long-in-development spacecraft may never make it to the ISS.

This the second major launch attempt after the Starliner failed to enter the correct orbit in a 2019 launch. The rescheduled ISS rendezvous launch was originally scheduled for March of this year, but eventually delayed to this week. A valve issue prompted a countdown halt yesterday, but the ground teams have been unable to resolve the problem as the whole operation has had to stand down as a result.

“Engineering teams have ruled out a number of potential causes, including software, but additional time is needed to complete the assessment,” wrote NASA in a news release. “Mission teams have decided to roll the Atlas V and Starliner back to the Vertical Integration Facility (VIF) for further inspection and testing where access to the spacecraft is available. Boeing will power down the Starliner spacecraft this evening.”

It’s another major setback for Boeing’s shot at providing crew launch capability, something its rival SpaceX has achieved now multiple times despite originally working on a very similar timeline. Both experienced years of delays, but ultimately Crew Dragon was successfully piloted to the ISS while Starliner is yet to make a successful orbital trip at all, let alone one with astronauts on board.

Some may wonder whether this is throwing good money after bad, since the race is apparently lost. But Boeing knows better than many that this is a marathon, not a sprint, and that the demand for orbital launches is nearly insatiable. Even if SpaceX has a multi-year lead on Boeing, Boeing has a multi-year lead on some of its other competitors and if it can get Starliner working there will likely be enough customers to make even its tortuous development worthwhile.

Depending on how quickly this valve issue is resolved, it could be weeks or months before there’s another launch attempt.

Florida-based HackerU, which creates cybersecurity and other digital skills programs, is acquiring Cybint, a SaaS-based cyber education company. TechCrunch sources understand this to be a $50M acquisition, though both companies declined to comment on the price.

HackerU provided digital workforce training to students, post-graduate professionals, and the community in the U.S., Europe and Asia through partnerships with universities. The acquisition will mean the combined entity’s geographic footprint will now increase, and it will now rebrand as ThriveDX, standing for ‘digital transformation’.

Cybint had previously raised $7.5M thus far. HackerU has been around for 15 years and in the past 4 years raised around $100 million from Prytek, as well as Liquidity Capital and Shintilla Cap. The company had a number of global initiatives including a partnership with Southern New Hampshire University, where it created boot camps training cybersecurity skills and preparing black and refugee students based in southeast Africa through remote training for long-term job opportunities.

ThriveDX’s main competitor will be 2U, which acquired Trilogy in 2019 for $750 million.

In a statement, Dan Vigdor, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of HackerU said: “The combination of our two companies’ positions the new ThriveDX group as the category leader worldwide and solidifies our ability to reskill and upskill individuals at any stage of their professional life.”

Both rising incidences of cybersecurity breaches and the switch to remote working means the cyber world is booming right now – but there is a huge shortage of staff. According to ISC2, some 3.1 million cybersecurity vacancies were left unfilled in 2020, with 63% of corporations reporting their employees are underqualified in cybersecurity.

Vigdor added: “The pandemic accelerated a huge transformation across the global workforce, leaving companies in dire need of workers with specific skills — and job candidates in need of training.”

Roy Zur, Founder and CEO of Cybint said: “The Cybint team will support HackerU by signing additional partnerships and accelerating the development of software as a service (SaaS) training solutions with a strong emphasis on corporate training and cybersecurity education solutions globally.”

Less than six months after raising $55 million in a Series C round of funding, SMB 401(k) provider Human Interest today announced it has raised $200 million in a round that propels it to unicorn status.

The Rise Fund, TPG’s global impact investing platform, led the round and was joined by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. The financing included participation from new investor Crosslink Capital and existing backers NewView Capital, Glynn Capital, U.S. Venture Partners, Wing Venture Capital, Uncork Capital, Slow Capital, Susa Ventures and others. 

Over the past year, the San Francisco-based company has raised $305 million. With the latest financing, it has now raised a total of $336.7 million since its 2015 inception.

The company admittedly has an IPO in its sights, as evidenced by the appointment of former Yodlee CFO Mike Armsby to the role of CFO at Human Interest.

Demand for 401(k)s by SMBs appears to be at an all-time high, with Human Interest reporting that its sales tripled over the last year. The company has also more than doubled its headcount over the last 12 months to 350 employees.

The startup said it is seeing strong adoption in verticals that have not previously had retirement benefits, including construction, retail, manufacturing, restaurants, nonprofits, and hospitality. For example, over the past three quarters, Human Interest has seen 4.5x customer growth in the restaurant sector. Since the start of the pandemic, Human Interest has experienced 2x higher enrollment growth among hourly workers than salaried workers, and hourly worker assets have tripled.

“Promoting financial health is a core investment pillar for The Rise Fund. Human Interest delivers one of the most compelling solutions to the persistent problem that roughly half of Americans will not have enough savings when they reach retirement age,” said Maya Chorengel, co-managing partner at The Rise Fund, in a written statement. “Despite recent legislation, primarily at the state level, legacy programs have not, to date, produced the same participant outcomes as Human Interest.”

The company said it will be using its new capital to expand its network of integrations and partnerships with financial advisors, benefits brokers and payroll companies. It also expects to, naturally, do some hiring –– another 200 employees by year’s end, primarily in its product, engineering, and revenue teams.

The 401(k) for SMB space is heating up as of late. In June, competitor Guideline also raised $200 million in a round led by General Atlantic. 

Heatworks has at long last opened pre-orders for the Tetra, a countertop dishwasher the company unveiled to some fanfare at CES 2018. Since the Tetra doesn’t require any plumbing, the only thing you need to connect it to is an electrical outlet. The appliance has a three-liter tank you fill with water manually. Once the cycle (which takes less than an hour on the shortest setting) is complete, you disconnect the greywater tank and pour out the used water.

The dishwasher can wash and dry three place settings worth of dishes per load. On the surface, it might seem wasteful compared with cleaning those plates, cups and utensils manually, not to mention the counter space the machine will hog. However, Heatworks claims the machine requires less water than handwashing and rinsing the dishes.

There are several settings, including a “fruit” one for washing produce. In addition, the dishwasher uses recyclable cartridges with concentrated detergent in an attempt to reduce waste.

The Tetra also requires less power than a standard dishwasher, according to the company. To heat up water, Heatworks uses Ohmic Array Technology, as Gizmodo notes. The Tetra takes a microwave-style approach to heating water rather than harnessing traditional metal elements. It uses graphite electrodes and “advanced electronic controls” to excite natural minerals in water. That setup allows the Tetra to efficiently heat water and maintain precise temperature control, according to Heatworks.

While there are other countertop dishwashers that don’t need a plumbing connection, the Tetra has a smaller water tank than many of its rivals. Farberware’s FDW05ASBWHA model (which is currently $340) has a five-liter capacity. The Tetra may heat water more efficiently than other models as well.

The Tetra will typically cost $499, but Heatworks is offering a $100 discount to those who lock in a preorder now. The detergent cartridges will cost around $6 each and they should be good for 20 loads depending on the setting and load capacity. Heatworks expects to start shipping the Tetra by May 18th, 2022, which is No Dirty Dishes Day.

Editor’s note: This post first appeared on Engadget.

It’s a little known fact that the carbon footprint of the technology sector is great than the entire aviation industry (Aalto University and LUT University). At the same time, tech companies (like many others) are generally attracted to carbon offsetting schemes which don’t actually remove carbon from the environment and are often riddled with flaws.

Only carbon removal offsets contribute towards net-zero because they actively take carbon out of the sky. And yet, so far there are very few schemes making carbon removal a focus, largely because only the biggest companies are able to play in this space, partly due to cost and the nascent nature of the technology.

This is where new startup Supercritical comes in.

The startup says its platform can help businesses get to net-zero by measuring their climate impact and selling high-impact carbon removal offsets.

It’s now raised a £2m / $2.7m in a pre-seed funding led by London’s LocalGlobe venture firm. The raise is also significant because the team was that which took Songkick to exit.

Supercritical says its platform assesses a company’s carbon impact, creates an actionable plan for reducing their emissions, and recommends a portfolio of high-quality carbon removal offsets for companies to purchase. It will effectively be building a marketplace of carbon removal projects such as enhanced weathering, bio-oil sequestration, and direct air capture.

Right now these technologies tend to be costly as many are so early in development, but the opportunity is for Supercritical to become a market-maker for these emerging solutions, aggregating demand to help them scale and innovate faster.

The startup already has clients including accuRx, Tide and what3words are already customers. Supercritical is also a member of the TechZero task force, a group of UK tech companies claiming to work toward NetZero Carbon impact.

Supercritical CEO and co-founder, Michelle You, said: “Businesses are rightly suspicious of traditional carbon offsetting options, which do nothing at best and at worst are outright fraud, but most companies lack the time and the expertise to find an adequate alternative. Our mission is to make it possible for any business to start the journey to net zero. Climate action can’t just be the reserve of the world’s biggest companies, and this is a crisis that can’t wait.”

Remus Brett, who led the investment from LocalGlobe, said: “Supercritical is providing a service that is as timely as it is essential. With COP26 approaching, the question of how businesses can meaningfully address their climate impact is a critical CEO issue. We are excited to be backing the exceptional team at Supercritical as they scale the only platform that helps companies focus their efforts on carbon removal rather than offsets.”

The startup is pushing at an open door. To keep warming below 1.5°C – one of the key goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement – at least 8 billion tonnes – of carbon needs to be removed from the atmosphere every year, so the voluntary carbon offset market is set to be worth at least $100bn by 2030, and that’s inside nine years.

General Motors said Wednesday it is adding to two new zero-emissions vehicles to its commercial portfolio as it looks to expand its first-to-last-mile business arm, BrightDrop.

The first vehicle will be a battery electric cargo van under the Chevrolet brand that will likely be similar to the popular Chevy Express van. The second will be a medium-duty truck that CEO Mary Barra said “will put both the Ultium and Hydrotec hydrogen fuel cell technology to work.”

Much has been made of GM’s commitment to invest in electric passenger vehicles, but the company has also been busy targeting commercial customers with zero-emitting technologies. GM’s go-to technologies are battery electric and hydrogen fuel cells for heavy-duty and long-haul purposes.

GM in January said it would supply Hydrotec Hydrogen Fuel Cell Power Cubes to trucking manufacturer Navistar, with the first hydrogen trucks anticipated to go on sale in 2024. The automaker also penned a deal with Wabtec to develop hydrogen fuel cells and batteries for locomotives.

GM launched BrightDrop in January in a bid to to offer commercial customers, starting with a contract with FedEx, an ecosystem of electric and connected products.

BrightDrop started with two main products, an electric van called the EV600 with an estimate range of 250 miles and a pod-like electric pallet dubbed EP1. BrightDrop executives previously hinted that the business unit was working on other products, including a medium-distance vehicle that transports multiple electric pallets known as EP1 and rapid load delivery vehicle concept.

“Between these new trucks, BrightDrop, EV pickups coming from Chevrolet and GMC, and our work with Wabtec on locomotives, and Navistar on semi-trucks, we will have electric solutions for almost any towing or hauling job you can imagine,” Barra said.

In spite of the pandemic, New York City remains the center of commerce and business, and over the last decade a robust startup community has developed there. Work-Bench, the NYC VC firm that concentrates on early stage enterprise seed investments, announced its $100 million Fund 3 this morning.

The company started back in 2013 when most investment was still concentrated in Silicon Valley, but founders Jonathan Lehr and Jessica Linn believed there was room for a new firm in NYC that concentrated on writing first checks for enterprise startups. The founding team knew IT and believed that with the concentration of Fortune 500 companies in the city, they could build something that took advantage of that proximity.

The bet has paid off in a big way with investments in successful startups like Cockroach Labs, Catalyst, Dialpad and FireHydrant (all companies TechCrunch has covered). Big exits have included UIPath, which went public last year after raising $2 billion, and today has a market cap of $34 billion and CoreOs, which Red Hat acquired for a more modest $250 million in 2018.

Writing in a blog post announcing the new fund, Lehr and Linn said their initial idea has grown far beyond anything they could have hoped for in those early days. “By utilizing our deep corporate network of Fortune 500 customers here in NYC, we can get conviction in companies early on, and before they have the metrics other VC firms require. It’s also through this network of customers that we can land critical early customer logos and through our extensive community events and playbooks that we can enable pivotal knowledge sharing,” the two founders wrote.

Lehr says, even with the pandemic, which could allowed to expand its reach, the company is mostly sticking to its NYC focus with the majority of investments based there. “This may sound ironic, but while businesses went virtual, the pandemic reinforced our focus on New York City. Our city was hit first and hardest by COVID, but despite it all, VC funding activity for local enterprise startups actually increased substantially during the pandemic. Along with that, with so many Fortune 500s in NYC all going through accelerated digital transformation during the pandemic, there was a ton of work to be done and numerous customer opportunities right here in our own backyard,” Lehr said.

He says that the $47 million Fund 2 portfolio was deployed to 70% NYC-based startups, and he predicts that Fund 3 will have a similar composition, if not slightly more concentrated in New York.

The company didn’t just decide to write first checks though, it tried to build the community by offering workspace in their offices where early stage companies could feed off one another (at least until the pandemic came along). The founders have also offered events where various speakers came to their offices, hosting hundreds of events since inception, while going virtual when the pandemic closed down in-person gatherings.

Lehr says as the company deploys Fund 3 money, it is looking for ways to invest in a more diverse group of founders. “Right now, 20% of our portfolio is made up of women founders. While we are proud of that number within an enterprise context, we believe there is so much room for improvement. As we’ve learned, deal flow doesn’t become diverse on its own – you need to make it diverse, which is why we place a huge emphasis on identifying and amplifying the voices of women and diverse founders within our own Investment Committee meetings and across the rest of the VC and enterprise tech community.”

The company will continue to look at enterprise startups, particularly in New York City, as it looks distribute these new funds.

When Sankaet Pathak co-founded Synapse in 2014, he had a vision of doing more than just building a platform that enables banks and fintech companies to easily develop financial services. 

He wanted to build a company that helped provide greater access to financial services to a larger pool of people — regardless of their net worth or their country of origin. 

Over the years, San Francisco-based Synapse has steadily grown its Deposit Hub, its product that is aimed at making it “faster and easier” for fintech companies to launch and scale foundational financial products to their customers. Synapse’s banking-as-a-service platform provides payment, card issuance, deposit, lending, compliance, credit and investment products as APIs. Through those white-labeled developer- and bank-facing APIs, Synapse aims to make it easier for companies to connect with banks, and, in turn, for banks to automate and extend their back-end operations. And that line of its business has been doing well. Last year, for example, Synapse doubled its revenue, and this year, so far, it has increased it by 150%.

Today, the company is going a step further and announcing a new platform — its Credit Hub, a full-stack API platform designed to give fintech companies and neobanks a way to make credit products “easier and smarter” for everyday Americans. The platform is designed to allow any company to build white-labeled credit products — including card issuance, credit-building tools, lending accounts and cashback rewards — in as little as six weeks.

Or, as Pathak puts it, “We want to democratize credit, so that the credit invisible can build, and get access to, credit.”

In private beta until now, the company’s Credit Hub has so far helped facilitate the issuance of one million credit accounts, and the platform has extended more than $40 million in credit.

Synapse is launching its Credit Hub by leveraging the Mastercard network. With the Synapse Credit Hub platform, companies can offer a “comprehensive” suite of products, including card issuance, credit-building tools, accounts and cashback rewards, among other things, Pathak said.

“We realized that no good solution existed for the credit market. Companies would have to piecemeal it together,” Pathak said. “It takes a year or 18 months to take products to market, at a minimum. So we’re taking the same speed we brought to the deposits space to the credit space so developers can democratize credit for everyday Americans and hopefully in the future, globally.”

Synapse was founded in 2014 by Bryan Keltner and Pathak, who came to the U.S. from India to study but grew frustrated at the difficulty of opening a bank account without U.S. social security history. Specifically, as an astrophysics grad student at the University of Tennessee, Pathak was denied a bank account that he applied for alongside an American colleague. 

Even today, Pathak says he — as CEO and co-founder of a company that in 2019 raised over $33 million in a Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) –– considered himself one of the “credit invisible.”

“Pretty much the American dream is to essentially get a house. But If you’re a person who is credit invisible, you cannot get a house. I could not get a house in America — and I’ve done decently well for myself — because I’m an immigrant,” he said. 

But of course, the underbanked doesn’t just include immigrants. It also includes minorities and other populations who have been caught in a cycle of not having access to certain banking services, including credit. He said that the goal is that people with little to no financial expertise can take financial services to market. That’s not the case with other providers that require more expertise to get products and services to market, he said.

The Synapse Credit Hub, he said, specifically supports a new class of flexible, personalized accounts, cash advances and lines of credit for businesses, and increases access to credit-building and borrowing services for end-users. The platform also gives companies the ability to go to market in as little as six weeks with “out-of-the-box” access to multiple bank partnerships; a full suite of KYC and card issuance features; and a full stack of payment tools, including ACH, checks, wires, bill pay and card processing. 

“Until now, nobody could provide a comprehensive solution that enables the developer to go live with a feature-rich credit product in just weeks,” Pathak said. “We created Synapse to democratize and drive innovation in fintech, and our Credit Hub operates alongside our deposit products to provide a full-featured digital banking experience.”

The various types of credit accounts that can be built using Credit Hub offer different services, such as a credit card, a spend card, buy now, pay later and the ability to issue one-time or revolving loans to enable customers to build credit. 

“Synapse shares in Mastercard’s commitment to offering and delivering a frictionless payments experience that is easy to access and always on,” wrote Sherri Haymond, executive vice president of digital partnerships at Mastercard via e-mail. “With their Credit Hub platform, Synapse is enabling partners to accelerate the launch of credit products, allowing new solutions to go to market in a matter of weeks instead of months. We’re pleased that Synapse is leveraging the Mastercard network to make credit products more accessible.” 

The power of networking will be in full force at TC Sessions: SaaS 2021 on October 27. This day-long virtual gathering of the global SaaS community features the sector’s leading voices — established founders, top VCs and expert developers. That spells opportunity for early-stage founders who want to expand their network and drive their business forward.

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The global venture capital bet on neobanks is massive. London-based Starling Bank has raised more than $900 million, per Crunchbase. The same data source indicates that Chime has raised $1.5 billion. Monzo has raised nearly $650 million. And the list goes on: E-commerce-focused neobank Juni raised $21.5 million last month. Novo, an SMB-focused neobank, raised $41 million in June. Nubank has raised $2.3 billion. And FairMoney has locked down more than $50 million.

On and on and on.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

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But despite our general inclination to lump banking-focused fintech providers that serve consumers, business customers or both into a single bucket, there’s wide divergence in how the various neobank players are performing in the market.

Back in August 2020, The Exchange noted that many neobanks were racking up steep losses. Our read at the time was that the capital being poured into the fintech category was being invested aggressively in the name of growth. Based on recent results, that view is holding up.

But not all neobanks are the unprofitable enterprises that they once were. Chime indicated in September 2020 that it generates positive, unadjusted EBITDA. That’s a stricter profit metric than the one that Lyft used recently to claim its ascendance into the realm of profitable companies; Lyft posted positive adjusted EBITDA in its most recent quarter, but burned cash to fund its operations and posted a wide net loss in the period.

And Starling Bank reached what it describes as profitable territory in October 2020. Things have changed since our first look into neobank results.

The trend of positive neobank news continued this June, when Revolut reported its recent financial performance. The company did post rather negative aggregate results for the 2020 period. But when we drilled down into its quarterly results, we saw the picture of a fintech company scaling its gross margins and revenues while nearly reaching adjusted net income neutrality by Q4 2020. We were impressed.

This morning, let’s add to our running dig into neobank results by parsing recently released data from Starling Bank and Monzo. As we’ll see, although some neobanks are managing to clean up their ledgers and work toward profits — or reach profitability — not all are in the black.