Year: 2021

This morning, Ramp, which provides corporate cards and spend management software, announced that it has closed $115 million across two investments, the latter of which valued the company at $1.6 billion.

The Information first reported that Ramp was raising new capital. TechCrunch confirmed the news prior to the company’s announcement earlier today. Ramp raised the capital in two tranches, the first of which, a $65 million investment led by D1 Capital Partners, valued the startup at $1.1 billion. A $50 million investment led by Stripe, the online payments giant, pushed its valuation to $1.6 billion.

On a call with TechCrunch, Ramp CEO and co-founder Eric Glyman was demure about the valuation differential between the two investments, only noting that different investing groups can have different assessments of the value of a company. TechCrunch’s read of the two-part fundraising event is that Stripe likely saw Ramp’s growing scale and wanted to put capital into it but had to pay a higher price for coming in after D1 had already written a check.

Regardless, Ramp’s latest capital raises are a multiple of the amount it last raised when it pursued primary funds, namely its $30 million December, 2020 round. The company raised twice in 2020, and once in 2019. More recently, Ramp secured a $150 million credit facility to help it support growing spend volume from its corporate customers.

Ramp provides corporate cards to customers, wrapped in software that helps companies track and manage overall spend. As part of its news today, the startup shared that it is “nearing” a transaction run rate of $1 billion. Glyman confirmed to TechCrunch that the metric was calculated on a month’s volume multiplied by 12, a reasonable method of determining the figure.

The company’s spend run rate grew by around 400% in the last half year.

Ramp’s new capital, debt and valuation gains that it has managed thus far in 2021 may help it navigate competitive waters. Its rivals — Brex, TeamPay, Divvy, Airbase and others — are also well-capitalized and hungry to take an ever-larger chunk of the world of corporate expense under their belts.

Ramp, like many of its rivals, makes money by collecting a small slice of customer spend as revenue via interchange incomes. TechCrunch asked Glyman if he has plans to start charging for the software that Ramp currently provides its customers for free, as some of its rivals do. The CEO declined to guide us further than our own hunches.

TechCrunch reckons that while growth remains strong at Ramp and its fellow zero-cost corporate spend providers, they’ll stick with their current model. In time, however, we expect surviving players to ask their customers to pony up for at least part of the software stack that they currently receive for free.

The possibility is accentuated by the fact that Glyman told TechCrunch that his customers are removing existing software like Expensify in favor of Ramp’s own code in some instances. That means that those companies have spend budgeted that Ramp and others are not accreting to their own books.

And Ramp is not slowing down its product work. Almost all of its new capital, per Ramp’s CEO, will go into product work. The roughly 100-person company closed 2020 with around 65 people, and plans to continue doubling its headcount every six or eight months, according to Glyman.

Finally, what to make of Stripe on the Ramp cap table? Stripe itself has a corporate card and spend management product, and was picky when one of its backers put capital into a company that it construed as a rival. According to Glyman, the decision to take investment from Stripe came down to whether his team wanted to work with the larger company — they did — and whether they trusted the payments giant. He decided to. Stripe did not receive a board seat as part of its investment.

Perhaps we’ll see Ramp move its backend off of Marqueta and over to Stripe’s own? Or perhaps Stripe subsumes Ramp at some point in the future. We’ll see.

Canvas Medical, an electronic health records (EHR) startup, today announced their $17 million Series A and a new partnership with Anthem, one of the biggest health insurance companies in the country.

The round was co-led by Inspired Capital and IA Ventures, with participation from Upfront Ventures. This round brings the company’s total funding to date to $20 million. 

The San Francisco-based company, which launched in 2015, aims to help doctors experience a more efficient — and painless — approach to delivering value-based care by offering an EHR platform that promises “80% fewer clicks, 3x faster workflows, and the ability to truly work on one screen,” said Andrew Hines, the company’s CEO and founder.

Andrew Hines. Image Credits: Canvas Medical

Value-based care is a delivery model where providers are paid based on patient health outcomes as opposed to the traditional pay-per-service model where doctors are reimbursed per visit.

We’ve seen a transition in the U.S. toward value-based care over the last several years, and that shift is also being reflected in how doctors are getting reimbursed. As a result, existing EHR companies find themselves having to add bells and whistles to their platforms, which in turn has compromised the doctor’s workflow experience.

“What has happened over time is we have asked our clinicians to become sophisticated coders. They are clicking through screens that are cluttered, that are not designed with human factors in mind,” said Steve Strongwater in Catalyst, a journal on innovation in care delivery published by the New England Journal of Medicine. Strongwater is a physician and the CEO of Atrius Health in Boston.

“Current EHRs are a workplace hazard from an ergonomics perspective,” said Hines. “It’s like if you sit in the wrong chair day in and day out, your back is going to hurt.” 

While technology has made many people’s jobs easier, that’s not the case for doctors. Studies have shown that EHRs are actually a source of physician burnout in the U.S., which is in and of itself a problem of national concern. 

The EHR market is extremely fragmented (there are several hundred EHR companies in the U.S.) which makes sharing medical records between physicians a challenge. Because health insurance claims contain significant medical information, insurance companies are a reliable alternative source for a lot of the important data about their members. But if a doctor needs to access that information for treatment purposes – which they have to do regularly – they have to log into a different portal or access a different report depending on each patient’s insurance. That’s one of the problems Canvas aims to solve, and their partnership with Anthem is just the beginning.

While there’s often a major amount of inertia — and associated cost — with changing EHRs, Hines, a data scientist-turned-entrepreneur, says the company assuages these concerns by leading its sale efforts with its numbers.

“Doctors who use Canvas experience 30% more productivity in the first month and are able to save 1-2 hours a day charting — which allows them to see more patients or go home early,” he added.

While Nigeria and Kenya have been at the forefront of African fintech innovation, activities in Egypt are beginning to shape up nicely. Right now, Egypt is home to a burgeoning fintech startup ecosystem and today, fintech startup Paymob announced that it has completed an $18.5 million Series A round.

In July 2020, Paymob raised $3.5 million as its first tranche of Series A investment. An additional $15 million was raised from the same investors in the first tranche led by Dubai-based VC firm Global Ventures. Other investors include Egyptian investment fund A15 and Dutch development bank FMO.

The total raise of $18.5 million is the largest Series A round in Egypt yet and one of the largest equity rounds in North Africa.

“We are delighted to lead this momentous fintech fundraise in the region. Paymob has a perfect combination of high-quality technology, product customers increasingly cannot do without and an outstanding management team. Their market opportunity is also huge; Egypt’s transformation to a cashless society is being enabled by the unique products Paymob has built,” Basil Moftah, general partner at Global Ventures said of the investment.

Paymob was founded in 2015 by Alain El Hajj, Islam Shawky, and Mostafa El Menessy. The platform helps online and offline merchants to accept payments from their customers via several products and solutions. It offers a payment gateway that merchants can plugin into their sites or mobile application using its APIs. For offline merchants, Paymob has a POS solution where they can receive in-store card payments.

The company also has a payment links feature where merchants share links with their customers to receive payments that are received using mobile wallets. And according to the company, 85% of mobile wallets transactions carried out in Egypt is processed by its infrastructure. It also claims to be the largest payment facilitator in the country.

Asides from Egypt, Paymob is also present in Kenya, Pakistan, and Palestine. CEO Shawky says the company has plans to expand into more Sub-Saharan African countries, however, that will come after focusing on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) where it hopes to gain a large market share.

Regional expansion (with an imminent entrance into Saudi Arabia) is one of Paymob’s objectives following this raise for this year. Per a statement released by the company, it will also use the investments to expand its merchant network, meet increasing demand, and improve product offerings.

The pandemic presented one of the best opportunities for fintechs all over the world to achieve massive growth. Paymob claims to have grown its monthly revenue over 5x last year. The company also recorded a total payment volume of more than $5 billion from over 35,000 local and international merchants like Swvl, LG, Breadfast, Tradeline, among others. 

It was even this growth that allowed the fintech company to raise the second tranche of investment after closing just $3.5 million initially. According to CEO Shawky, the deal materialized after the company’s investors and management witnessed an “unprecedented growth” driven by the pandemic. 

As earlier iterated, fintech is on the rise in Egypt with startups like Moneyfellows, NowPay, Raseedi, Flick providing services in lending, payments, wealth and personal finance management, etc.

The Egyptian fintech ecosystem also got a major boost when incumbent fintech Fawry became a publicly-traded unicorn for the first time. Since launching in 2007, Fawry has been the largest online payment platform in the country and offers a variety of services ranging from mobile wallet to banking services. Does Fawry’s longstanding presence pose a challenge to Paymob’s quest to become a dominant fintech as well? Shawky doesn’t think so.

“Paymob’s major competitor is cash. With only a small percentage of the economy operating in digital forms, we believe the opportunity of truly transforming cash into digital is yet to be unlocked,” he said.

That said, the raise follows the launch of two funds — Algebra Ventures and Sawri Ventures in what can be described as an exciting week for startups and VCs in the country.

While Nigeria and Kenya have been at the forefront of African fintech innovation, activities in Egypt are beginning to shape up nicely. Right now, Egypt is home to a burgeoning fintech startup ecosystem and today, fintech startup Paymob announced that it has completed an $18.5 million Series A round.

In July 2020, Paymob raised $3.5 million as its first tranche of Series A investment. An additional $15 million was raised from the same investors in the first tranche led by Dubai-based VC firm Global Ventures. Other investors include Egyptian investment fund A15 and Dutch development bank FMO.

The total raise of $18.5 million is the largest Series A round in Egypt yet and one of the largest equity rounds in North Africa.

“We are delighted to lead this momentous fintech fundraise in the region. Paymob has a perfect combination of high-quality technology, product customers increasingly cannot do without and an outstanding management team. Their market opportunity is also huge; Egypt’s transformation to a cashless society is being enabled by the unique products Paymob has built,” Basil Moftah, general partner at Global Ventures said of the investment.

Paymob was founded in 2015 by Alain El Hajj, Islam Shawky, and Mostafa El Menessy. The platform helps online and offline merchants to accept payments from their customers via several products and solutions. It offers a payment gateway that merchants can plugin into their sites or mobile application using its APIs. For offline merchants, Paymob has a POS solution where they can receive in-store card payments.

The company also has a payment links feature where merchants share links with their customers to receive payments that are received using mobile wallets. And according to the company, 85% of mobile wallets transactions carried out in Egypt is processed by its infrastructure. It also claims to be the largest payment facilitator in the country.

Asides from Egypt, Paymob is also present in Kenya, Pakistan, and Palestine. CEO Shawky says the company has plans to expand into more Sub-Saharan African countries, however, that will come after focusing on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) where it hopes to gain a large market share.

Regional expansion (with an imminent entrance into Saudi Arabia) is one of Paymob’s objectives following this raise for this year. Per a statement released by the company, it will also use the investments to expand its merchant network, meet increasing demand, and improve product offerings.

The pandemic presented one of the best opportunities for fintechs all over the world to achieve massive growth. Paymob claims to have grown its monthly revenue over 5x last year. The company also recorded a total payment volume of more than $5 billion from over 35,000 local and international merchants like Swvl, LG, Breadfast, Tradeline, among others. 

It was even this growth that allowed the fintech company to raise the second tranche of investment after closing just $3.5 million initially. According to CEO Shawky, the deal materialized after the company’s investors and management witnessed an “unprecedented growth” driven by the pandemic. 

As earlier iterated, fintech is on the rise in Egypt with startups like Moneyfellows, NowPay, Raseedi, Flick providing services in lending, payments, wealth and personal finance management, etc.

The Egyptian fintech ecosystem also got a major boost when incumbent fintech Fawry became a publicly-traded unicorn for the first time. Since launching in 2007, Fawry has been the largest online payment platform in the country and offers a variety of services ranging from mobile wallet to banking services. Does Fawry’s longstanding presence pose a challenge to Paymob’s quest to become a dominant fintech as well? Shawky doesn’t think so.

“Paymob’s major competitor is cash. With only a small percentage of the economy operating in digital forms, we believe the opportunity of truly transforming cash into digital is yet to be unlocked,” he said.

That said, the raise follows the launch of two funds — Algebra Ventures and Sawri Ventures in what can be described as an exciting week for startups and VCs in the country.

A startup that began its journey in India 15 years ago, helping businesses reach and engage with users through texts said on Thursday it has attained the unicorn status and is also profitable.

San Francisco-headquartered Gupshup has raised $100 million in its Series F financing round from Tiger Global Management, which valued the 15-year-old startup at $1.4 billion.

The startup operates a conversational messaging platform, which is used by over 100,000 businesses and developers today to build their own messaging and conversational experiences to serve their users and customers.

Gupshup says each month its clients send over 6 billion messages.

“The growth in business use of messaging and conversational experiences, transforming virtually every customer touchpoint, is nothing short of extraordinary,” said John Curtius, a partner at Tiger Global Management, in a statement.

“Gupshup is uniquely positioned to win in this market with an advanced product, a differentiated strategy with substantial barriers, significant scale with growth, profitability with expanding margins and an experienced team with a proven track record.”

Tens of millions of users in India, including yours truly, remember Gupshup for a different reason, however. For the first six years of its existence, Gupshup was best known for enabling users in India to send group messages to friends.

That model eventually became unfeasible to continue, Beerud Sheth, co-founder and chief executive of Gupshup, told TechCrunch in an interview.

“For that service to work, Gupshup was subsidizing the messages. We were paying the cost to the mobile operators. The idea was that once we scale up, we will put advertisements in those messages. Long story short, we thought as the volume of messages increases, operators will lower their prices, but they didn’t. And also the regulator said we can’t put ads in the messages,” he recalled.

That’s when Gupshup decided to pivot. “We were neither able to subsidize the messages, nor monetize our user base. But we had all of this advanced technology for high-performance messaging. So we switched from consumer model to enterprise model. So we started to serve banks, e-commerce firms, and airlines that need to send high-level messages and can afford to pay for it,” he said.

Over the years, Gupshup has expanded to newer messaging channels, including conversational bots and it also helps businesses set up and run their WhatsApp channels to engage with customers.

Sheth said scores of major firms worldwide in banking, e-commerce, travel and hospitality and other sectors are among the clients of Gupshup. These firms are using Gupshup to send their customers with transaction information, and authentication codes among other use cases. “These are not advertising messages or promotional messages. These are core service information,” he said.

The startup, which had an annual run rate of $150 million, will use the fresh capital to broaden its product offering and court clients in more markets.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

SaaS to support mid-sized companies’ financial planning with real-time data and native collaboration isn’t the sexiest startup pitch under the sun but it’s one that’s swiftly netted Abacum a bunch of notable backers — including Creandum, which is leading a $7M seed round that’s being announced today.

The rosters of existing investors also participating in the round are Y Combinator (Abacum was part of its latest batch), PROFounders, and K-Fund, along with angel investors such as Justin Kan (Atrium and Twitch co-founder and CEO); Maximilian Tayenthal (N26 co-founder and co-CEO & CFO); Thomas Lehrman (GLG co-founder and ex-CEO), Avi Meir (TravelPerk co-founder and CEO); plus Jenny Bloom (Zapier CFO and Mailchimp ex-CFO) and Mike Asher (CFO at Neo4j).

Abacum was founded last year in the middle of the COVID-19 global lockdown, after what it says was around a year of “deep research” to feed its product development. They launched their SaaS in June 2020. And while they’re not disclosing customer numbers at this early stage their first clients include a range of scale-up companies in the US and in Europe, including the likes of Typeform, Cabify, Ebury, Garten, Jeff and Talkable.

The startup’s Spanish co-founders — Julio Martinez, a fintech entrepreneur with an investment banking background, and Jorge Lluch, a European Space Agency engineer turned CFO/COO — spotted an opportunity to build dedicated software for mid-market finance teams to provide real-time access to data via native collaborative that plugs into key software platforms used by other business units, having felt the pain of a lack of access to real-time data and barriers to collaboration in their own professional experience with the finance function.

The idea with Abacum is to replace the need for finance teams to manually update their models. The SaaS automatically does the updates, fed with real-time data through direct integrations with software used by teams dealing with functions like HR, CRM, ERP (and so on) — empowering the finance function to collaborate more easily across the business and bolster its strategic decision-making capabilities.

The startup’s sales pitch to the target mid-sized companies is multi-layered. Abacum says its SaaS both saves finance teams time and enables faster-decision making.

“Prior to using Abacum, finance analysts in our clients were easily spending 50% to 70% of their time in manual tasks like downloading files from different systems, copy&pasting them in massive spreadsheets (that crash frequently), formatting the data by manually adding and removing rows, columns and formats, connecting the data in a model prone to manual error (e.g. vlookups & sumifs),” Martinez tells TechCrunch. “With Abacum, this entire manual part is automatically done and the finance professionals can spend their time analyzing and adding real value to the business.”

“We enable faster decisions that were not possible prior to Abacum. For instance, some of our clients were updating their cohort analysis on a quarterly basis only because the associated manual tasks were too painful. With us, they’re able to update the analysis weekly and take better decisions as a result.”

The SaaS also supports decisions in another way — by applying machine learning to business data to generate estimates on future performance, providing an AI-based reference point based on historical data that finance teams can use to inform their assumptions.

And it aids cross-business collaboration — allowing users to share and gather information “easily through workflows and permissions”. “We see that this results in faster and richer decisions as more stakeholders are brought into the process,” he adds.

Martinez says Abacum chose to focus on mid-market finance teams because they face “more challenges and inefficiencies” vs the smaller (and larger) ends of the market. “In that segment, the finance function is underinvested — they face the acute complexities of scaling companies that become very pressing but at the same time they are still considered a support function, a back-office,” he argues.

“Abacum makes finance a strategic function — we deliver native collaboration to finance teams so that they become the trusted business partner they want to be. We also see that the pandemic has accelerated the need for finance teams to collaborate effectively and work remotely,” he adds.

He also describes the mid market segment as “fairly unpenetrated” — claiming many companies do not yet having a solution in place.

While competitors he points to when asked about other players in the space are long in the tooth in digital terms: Adaptive Insights (2003); Host Analytics (2001); and Anaplan (2008).

Commenting on the seed round in a statement, Peter Specht, principal at Creandum, added: “The financial planning processes in many companies are ripe for disruption and demand more automation. Abacum’s slick solution empowers finance teams to be more collaborative, efficient and better informed with access to real-time data. We were impressed by their user-friendly product, the initial hiring of top talent, and crucially the strong founders and their extensive operational experience — including as CFOs and entrepreneurs who have experienced the problem first-hand. We are delighted to be part of Abacum’s journey to empower global SMEs to bring their financial operations to new levels.”

Abacum’s seed financing will be ploughed into product development and growth, per Martinez, who says it’s focused on wooing finance teams in the US and Europe for now.

Butter, a startup registered in Denmark but operating fully remote, is building an “all-in-one” platform for planning and running virtual workshops.

Offering video software and other features dedicated to workshopping, the idea is to pull people away from using more generic tools, such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, which, arguably, aren’t well suited to workshops. It’s also an idea that will be welcomed by many remote workers trapped in a groundhog day full of back-to-back Zooms — and one that has already attracted venture capital.

Backing Butter’s seed round of $2.75 million, which is being disclosed today, is Project A. Others investing in the burgeoning startup are Des Traynor, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Intercom (amongst other angels). It adds to $440,000 previously raised through a mix of equity funding from Morph Capital, venture debt from The Danish Growth Fund and grants from Innovation Fund Denmark.

Butter co-founder and CEO Jakob Knutzen tells me that workshop facilitators, such as strategy consultants, HR trainers and design sprinters, typically have two problems: technical overload and a lack of energy in the workshops.

The former includes having to juggle too many tools needed to plan, run and disseminate a workshop, coupled with unintuitive interfaces and an inability to set up elements of a workshop in advance. The lack of “energy” when delivering workshops virtually is likely a harder nut to define and then crack, but anyone who has taken part in an online workshop has likely experienced it.

“We solve these in two ways,” says Knutzen, “[with an] all-in-one tool that helps facilitators prepare, run and debrief the workshop in one place, [and] a delightful design that supports facilitators in delivering a more human experience… 90% of our users comment on this; Zoom fatigue is real”.

Image Credits: Butter

You get started in Butter by creating and setting up a “room,” including optionally creating an agenda, polls and timers, as well as various customisation, such as a welcome page, image and (yes) music. Next, you invite workshop participants via an automatically generated link that can easily be shared.

On the day, participants join directly in their browser and the workshop leader runs the workshop using the agenda they created as the main guiding point. Butter also supports various third-party integrations, such as for white boarding, note taking, etc. After the session, facilitators can access a “recap” in the room overview with a chat transcript, recording and poll results, etc.

Adds the Butter CEO: “Down the line, we’ll make this even more ‘full workshop flow’ — [including] more of the planning part, having a full pre-workshop space for participants, building out the post-workshop experience, etc. But for now, we’ve doubled down on making the ‘during’ part flow smoothly”.

To that end, Butter is yet to monetise, but will adopt a SaaS model. Meanwhile, Knutzen cites competitors as established but generalist platforms, such as Zoom and Teams; legacy specialist platforms, such as Adobe Connect and Webex for Training; and other startups trying to solve the same problem (e.g. Toasty.ai, circl.es and VideoFacilitator).

“We differentiate ourselves by being laser focused on workshops,” he says.

Shilling, an early-stage VC in Portugal, has now launched a new €30M ($35.6M) early-stage fund called Shilling Founders Fund, which is backed just over 35 successful tech founders, as well as large European VC Atomico. The fund will run on a profit-sharing model, sharing fund returns with all of its portfolio founders. While the fund tends to back Portuguese startups it also hold back 40% of its capital for international deals.

The fund says it has already invested in seven companies: Rows (spreadsheet for app creators), Vawlt (secure and resilient multi-cloud platform), Promptly (SaaS platform for health outcomes analytics), Modatta (decentralized marketplace for consented personal data), Biocol Labs (DTC post-chemical pharmacy), Decipad (low-code notebook) and Detech.ai (AI-powered application and infrastructure monitoring platform).

The fund is also launching what it dubs the “Shilling Platform” – a pool of learnings and resources for startups.

In a statement, Pedro Santos Vieira, managing partner at Shilling said: “We call it experience-based acceleration. Additionally, we run on a profit-sharing model. Each portfolio founder will receive a share of our returns. This twofold approach fully aligns incentives between Shilling, LPs, and portfolio founders.”

Founded by Hugo Gonçalves Pereira, António Casanova, Diogo da Silveira, João Coelho Borges, Juan Alvarez and Pedro Rutkowski in 2011, Shilling was later joined by tech founders Ricardo Jacinto (Elecctro), Miguel Santo Amaro (Uniplaces), Pedro Ramalho Carlos (IP) and Pedro Santos Vieira (GoodGuide) in the last five years. Since 2011, it has invested in a number of breakout hits from the country, including Unbabel; Bizay; Uniplaces; and Best Tables, acquired by TripADvisor.

Hugo Gonçalves Pereira, founder of Shilling, added: “We are a Portugal-based, globally ambitious, VC fund, with a founder-friendly approach to early-stage investing… and when we say founder-friendly we truly mean it: in our pre-seed program, ventures go from first call, to money in the bank, in less than 30 days.”

As we noted earlier this year in our ExtraCrunch survey of Lisbon, Portugal, the city is gearing up to join other significant tech hubs.

Other leading VCs in the country include Indico Capital Partners,  Faber, Armilar Venture Partners, Tocha, and Portugal Ventures.

TrueLayer, the London startup that offers a developer-friendly platform for companies, including other fintechs, to utilise open banking, is disclosing $70 million in new funding.

The Series D round is led by new investor Addition. Existing investors, including Anthemis Group, Connect Ventures, Mouro Capital, Northzone and Temasek, also participated. New investors include Visionaries Club, Zack Kanter (CEO Stedi), Daniel Graf (ex-Uber, Google, Twitter) and David Avgi (ex-CEO SafeCharge, CEO UniPaaS).

TrueLayer says the Series D brings the total investment to date to $142 million. The injection of capital will be used to continue scaling its open banking network, which brings together payments, financial data and identity to enable companies to build new products that improve “how we spend, save, and transact online”.

This will include further development of premium open banking-based services that go beyond simply accessing open banking APIs and will enable more innovation across financial services, including embedded finance and payments more generally.

To do this, and to support what it says is growing demand, TrueLayer is expanding its engineering, product and commercial teams. In the past 12 months, the fintech has expanded its services across 12 European markets.

Over the years, TrueLayer CEO and co-founder Francesco Simoneschi and I have often pontificated on what open banking’s killer use case or use cases may turn out to be. We may finally have our answer: payments.

That’s because one aspect of open banking is payment initiation, which lets an authorised third party initiate the transfer of money out of your bank account on your behalf as an alternative to card payments, which were never built with online payments in mind.

“We believe open banking payments will become the default way to pay online, replacing other payment methods in the next five years,” says Simoneschi. “Open banking is digitally native and mobile-first, moving money at a fraction of the cost, securely and conveniently, while also delivering a vastly better consumer experience”.

The past year has also exposed some of the problems with existing payments methods, as people have turned to digital channels to manage every aspect of their lives. “The problem is cards,” says the TrueLayer CEO, “which weren’t designed for online and have been retrofitted into current online payment flows. Newer digital approaches such as Google Pay or Apple Pay paper over those cracks but don’t change the fundamentals”.

Simoneschi says the company has seen the use of its payments API grow rapidly as more consumers embrace instant bank payments. Volumes grew by 600x over the last year, driven by more and more companies adopting open banking payments, including the likes of Revolut, Trading 212, Freetrade and Nutmeg.

“We typically see that 1 in 3 customers choose the open banking payment option after trying it once,” he notes, revealing that for some clients, closer to 70% of their customers are using open banking as the primary payment method.

“There are a number of reasons why it makes sense for customers. For one, they don’t need to remember card details. Instead, they authenticate with their face or fingerprint on their mobile device, instantly and securely. Plus, they’ll never need to update stored details if their card is lost, stolen or expires”.

Open banking payments as a checkout option benefits merchants too, argues Simoneschi. “These payments typically convert 20% better than cards (and up to 40% with our flows) and have success rates higher than 95%, equating to millions or hundreds of millions in recovered revenue at the end of the year,” adds the TrueLayer co-founder.

Byju’s said on Thursday it will expand to international markets in the second half of next month as the Indian edtech giant, valued at over $13 billion, looks to accelerate its growth.

The Indian edtech giant, which acquired 33-year-old Indian tutor Aakash for nearly $1 billion earlier this week, plans to launch to the U.S., UK, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico next month and explore other geographies later this year.

The startup’s international business will be headed by Karan Bajaj, the founder of coding platform WhiteHat Jr, which Byju’s acquired for $300 million last year.

In international markets, the Indian online learning giant will be branded as Byju’s Future School. It will offer a range of subjects including coding, Math, Music, English, Fine Arts and Science in synchronous and asynchronous formats, the startup said.

“We believe that through technology, we can inspire kids all over the world to fall in love with learning. Our global expansion comes at a critical time as families are actively looking for supplemental learning that encourages their children to be creative and learn by doing,” said Byju Raveendran, founder and chief executive of Byju’s. “This launch furthers our vision of creating active learners across the world.”

This is a developing story. More to follow…