Year: 2021

Popular saving and investing app Acorns has acquired Pillar, an AI-powered startup built to help manage student loan debt, in its second acquisition of 2021.

New York-based Pillar helps consumers optimize their debt payments by focusing first on student loans. It launched in May 2019 with $5.5 million in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins. The companies declined to reveal the financial terms of the deal, only noting that within six months of launching, Pillar managed over $500 million worth of student loan debt of more than 15,000 borrowers. 

Michael Bloch dropped out of Stanford Business School and co-founded Pillar after he and his wife had amassed more than $500,000 of student loan debt after she graduated from law school. Prior to that, he had led the Strategy & Operations division for DoorDash, growing it to $100 million in revenue. The problem Pillar has aimed to tackle is massive. Student loan debt is the second-largest type of consumer debt in the U.S., with 45 million borrowers collectively owing nearly $1.7 trillion in student loans.

Notably, Acorns was apparently one of several companies that had courted Pillar.

“We were in a pretty lucky position to have a lot of interest from many of the top fintech companies that are out there,” Bloch told TechCrunch. “We had multiple offers on the table and Acorns was really our top choice just given how the business has been doing and the team, the culture and the mission.”

The deal marks the second acquisition this year and third overall for Acorns, which says it notched its strongest quarter in its history the first three months of this year. In March, Acorns also acquired Harvest, a fintech that helped customers reduce more than $4 million in debt in 2020.

The Pillar and Harvest teams will help Acorns accelerate its product roadmap of helping customers pay down debt, “an essential part of the financial wellness system,” said CEO and founder Noah Kerner.

Over time, Pillar will become part of one of Acorns’ monthly subscription tiers. 

“The IP and technology that the Pillar team created in debt management is really interesting to us when we think about how we scale our Smart Deposit feature,” Kerner said.

With Smart Deposit, when a customer’s paycheck hits the Acorns bank account, the app automatically allocates a percentage of that paycheck into an individual’s different investment accounts. 

“From a behavioral perspective, the best way to get somebody to save and invest is to enable them to set aside a piece of their paycheck as soon as it hits the account so that they don’t spend it. That feature has been really well adopted by our direct deposit customers,” Kerner said. “And so Michael and his team are coming in to manage that feature, and also our bank accounts product. I think their past experience is going to be really useful for us to take what we have and help the team catalyze it further.”

With its latest acquisition, Irvine, California-based Acorns now has more than 350 employees. In 2017, the company acquired Vault, now called “Acorns Later.” As a result of that acquisition, the company has seen its number of retirement accounts grow to 1.2 million from 500.

As mentioned above, Acorns has had a good year so far. In the first six weeks of 2021, the company added nearly 600,000 new accounts, reaching a total of more than 9 million users having saved and invested a total of $7.5 billion.

“The first quarter was our biggest growth quarter on record,” Kerner told TechCrunch. “In particular we crossed the $4.3 billion in dollars in assets under management, which is a really exciting milestone when you think about the fact that these are customers that are saving small amounts of money in the relative scheme of money invested typically.”

Trax’s co-founders, Joel Bar-El (left) and Dror Feldheim (right), and Trax’s CEO, Justin Behar (center)

COVID-19 forced many retailers and brands to adopt new technologies. Retail analytics unicorn Trax expects that this openness to tech innovation will continue even after the pandemic. The Singapore-based company announced today that it has raised $640 million in Series E funding to expand its products, which combine computer vision and cloud-based software to help brick-and-mortar stores manage their inventory, merchandising and operations. The round included primary and secondary capital, and was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and returning investor BlackRock. Other participants included new investors OMERS and Sony Innovation Fund by IGV.

Before this round, Trax had raised $360 million in primary funds. J.P. Morgan acted as a placement agent to Trax on its Series E, which brings its total funding so far to $1.02 billion. Trax did not disclose a new valuation, but reportedly hit unicorn status in 2019. Reports emerged last year that it is considering a public offering, but chief executive officer Justin Behar had no comment when asked by TechCrunch if Trax is planning for an IPO.

Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Singapore, Trax also has offices in Brazil, the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Israel, Mexico, Japan, Hungary, France, Russia and Australia. The company says it serves customers in more than 90 countries.

Behar told TechCrunch that the new funding will be used to “invest heavily in global [go-to-market] strategies and technology for our flagship Retail Watch solution, as we look for ways to make it easier for retailers and brands to continue their digitization journey. More specifically, we will use the capital to accelerate growth and triple-down on continued innovation across our core vision, machine learning, IoT and marketplace technologies.”

Launched last year, Retail Watch uses a combination of computer vision, machine learning and hardware like cameras and autonomous robots, to gather real-time data about the shelf availability of products. It sends alerts if stock is running low, corrects pricing errors and checks if planograms, or product display plans for visual merchandising, are being followed. Retail Watch currently focuses on center shelves, where packaged goods are usually stocked, but will expand into categories like fresh food and produce.

The funding will also be used to expand Trax’s Dynamic Merchandising, a partnership with on-demand work platform Flexforce, and Shopkick, the shopping rewards app Trax acquired in 2019, into new markets over the next one to two years.

“Finally, we see many opportunities to help retailers along their digitization journey and will be expanding into new use cases with products we develop internally and via potential acquisitions,” Behar said.

Early in the pandemic, retailers had to cope with surge buying, as customers emptied shelves of stock while preparing to stay at home. As the pandemic continued, buying patterns shifted dramatically and in April 2020, Forrester forecast COVID-19 would cause global retail sales to decline by an average of 9.6% globally, resulting in a loss of $2.1 trillion, and that it would take about four years for retailers to overtake pre-pandemic levels.

In a more recent report, Forrester found despite spending cuts, nearly 40% of retailers and wholesalers immediately increased their tech investment, in some cases implementing projects in weeks that would have otherwise taken years.

Behar said “the pandemic made it clear the retail industry was not prepared for a sudden change in demand, as consumers faced empty shelves and out-of-stocks for extended periods in key categories. These extreme shifts in consumer behavior, coupled with global supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, changing channel dynamics (such as e-commerce) and decrease in brand loyalty forced brands and retailers to develop new strategies to meet the evolving needs of their customers.”

He expects that willingness to adopt new technologies will continue after the pandemic. For example, to get shoppers back into brick-and-mortar stores, retailers might try things like in-store navigation, improved browsing, loyalty programs and new check out and payment systems.

Trax’s Retail Watch, Dynamic Merchandising and Dynamic Workforce Management solutions were in development before the pandemic, though “it has certainly expedited the need for innovative digital solutions to longstanding retail pain points,” Behar added.

For example, Retail Watch supports online ordering features, like showing what products are available to online shoppers and helping store associates fulfill orders, while Dynamic Merchandising lets brands find on-demand workers for in-store execution issues—for example, if new stock needs to be delivered to a location immediately.

Other tech companies focused on retail analytics include Quant Retail, Pensa Systems and Bossa Nova Robotics. Behar said Trax differentiates with a cloud-based platform that is “extensible, flexible and scalable and combines multiple integrated technologies and data-collection methods, optimized to fit each store, such as IoT-enabled shelf-edge cameras, dome cameras, autonomous robots and images taken from smartphones, to enable complete and accurate store coverage.”

Its proprietary computer vision technology was also designed specifically for use in retail stores, and identifies individual SKUs on shelves, regardless of category. For example, Behar said it can distinguish between near identical or multiple products, deal with visual obstructions like odd angles or products that are obscured by another item and recognize issues with price tags.

“Like many innovative solutions, our most meaningful competition comes from the legacy systems deeply entrenched in the world of retail and the fear of change,” he added. “While we do see an acceleration of interest and adoption of digital innovation as a result of the ‘COVID effect,’ this is by far our biggest challenge.”

In a press statement, SoftBank Investment Advisers director Chris Lee said, “Through its innovative AI platform and image recognition technologies, we believe Trax is optimizing retail stores by enabling [consumer packaged goods] brands and retailers to execute better inventory strategies using data and analytics. We are excited to partner with the Trax team to help expand their product offerings and enter new markets.”

A new UK public body that will be tasked with helping regulate the most powerful companies in the digital sector to ensure competition thrives online and consumers of digital services have more choice and control over their data has launched today.

The Digital Markets Unit (DMU), which was announced in November last year — following a number of market reviews and studies examining concerns about the concentration of digital market power — does not yet have statutory powers itself but the government has said it will consult on the design of the new “pro-competition regime” this year and legislate to put the DMU on a statutory footing as soon as parliamentary time allows.

Concerns about the market power of adtech giants Facebook and Google are key drivers for the regulatory development.

As a first job, the unit will look at how codes of conduct could work to govern the relationship between digital platforms and third parties such as small businesses which rely on them to advertise or use their services to reach customers — to feed into future digital legislation.

The role of powerful intermediary online gatekeepers is also being targeted by lawmakers in the European Union who proposed legislation at the end of last year which similarly aims to create a regulatory framework that can ensure fair dealing between platform giants and the smaller entities which do business under their terms.

The UK government said today that the DMU will take a sector neutral approach in examining the role of platforms across a range of digital markets, with a view to promoting competition.

The unit has been asked to work with the comms watchdog Ofcom, which the government named last year as its pick for regulating social media platforms under planned legislation due to be introduced this year (aka, the Online Safety Bill as it’s now called).

While that forthcoming legislation is intended to regulate a very wide range of online harms which may affect consumers — from bullying and hate speech to child sexual exploitation and other speech-related issues (raising plenty of controversy, and specific concerns about associated implications for privacy and security) — the focus for the DMU is on business impacts and consumer controls which may also have implications for competition in digital markets.

As part of its first work program, the government said the secretary of state for digital has asked the DMU to work with Ofcom to look specifically at how a code would govern the relationships between platforms and content providers such as news publishers — “including to ensure they are as fair and reasonable as possible”, as its press release puts it.

This suggests the DMU will be taking a considered look at recent legislation passed in Australia — which makes it mandatory for platforms to negotiate with news publishers to pay for reuse of their content.

Earlier this year, the head of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which the DMU will sit within, told the BBC that Australia’s approach of having a backstop of mandatory arbitration if commercial negotiations between tech giants and publishers fail is a “sensible” approach.

The DMU will also work closely with the CMA’s enforcement division — which currently has a number of open investigations into tech giants, including considering complaints against Apple and Google; and an in-depth probe of Facebook’s Giphy acquisition.

Other UK regulators the government says the DMU will work closely with include the data protection watchdog (the ICO) and the Financial Conduct Authority.

It also said the unit will also coordinate with international partners, given digital competition is an issue that’s naturally globally in nature — adding that it’s already discussing its approach through bilateral engagement and as part of its G7 presidency.

“The Digital Secretary will host a meeting of digital and tech ministers in April as he seeks to build consensus for coordination on better information sharing and joining up regulatory and policy approaches,” it added.

The DMU will be led by Will Hayter, who takes up an interim head post in early May following a stint at the Cabinet Office working on Brexit transition policy. Prior to that he worked for several years at the CMU and also Ofcom, among other roles in regulatory policy.

Avant, an online lender that has raised over $600 million in equity, announced today that it has acquired Zero Financial and its neobank brand, Level, to further its mission of becoming a digital bank for the masses.

Founded in 2012, Chicago-based Avant started out primarily as an online lender targeting “underserved consumers,” but is evolving into digital banking with this acquisition. The company notched gross revenue of $265 million in 2020 and has raised capital over the years from backers such as General Atlantic and Tiger Global Management.

“Our path has always been to become the premier digital bank for the everyday American,” Avant CEO James Paris told TechCrunch. “The massive transition to digital over the last 12 months made the timing right to expand our offerings.” 

The acquisition of Zero Financial and its neobank, Level (plus its banking app assets), will give Avant the ability to offer “a full ecosystem of banking and credit product offerings” through one fully digital platform, according to Paris. Those offerings include deposits, personal loans, credit cards and auto loans.

Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed other than the fact that the acquisition was completed with a combination of cash and stock.

Founded in 2016, San Francisco-based Zero Financial has raised $147 million in debt and equity, according to Crunchbase. New Enterprise Associates (NEA) led its $20 million Series A in May of 2019.

Level was unveiled to the public in February of 2020, created by the same California-based team that founded the “debit-style” credit card offering Zero, according to this FintechFutures piece. The challenger bank was created to target millennials dissatisfied with the incumbent banking options.

Zero Financial co-founder and CEO Bryce Galen said that Avant shared his company’s mission “to challenge the status quo by bringing innovative financial services products to consumers who might otherwise be unable to access them.”

Avant, notes Paris, uses thousands of AI-driven data points to determine credit risk. With this acquisition, that lens will be expanded with data, such as a deposit customer’s cash flow, how they manage their finances and whether they pay their bills on time. 

“This will allow us to make credit decisions faster and deliver personalized options to help underbanked consumers gain financial freedom, at any and every stage of their financial journey,” Paris told TechCrunch. “It will also build long-term engagement and loyalty and help grow our reach beyond the 1.5 million customers we’ve served to date.”  

Like a growing number of fintechs, Avant operates under the premise that a person’s ability to get credit shouldn’t be dictated by a credit score alone.

“A significant amount of Americans have poor, bad or no credit at all. For these people, accessing credit isn’t exactly easy and often comes with extra fees,” Paris said. That’s why, he added, Avant has focused on providing options for such consumers with “transparent, rewards-driven products.”

Level’s branchless, all-digital platform offers things such as cashback rewards on debit card purchases, a “competitive APY” on deposits, early access to paychecks and no hidden fees, all of which are especially beneficial for consumers on the path to financial freedom, according to Paris.

Since its inception in 2012, Avant has connected more than 1.5 million consumers to $7.5 billion in loans and 400,000 credit cards. The company launched its credit card in 2017 and over the past two years alone, it has grown its number of credit card users by 170%.

More than 200 million people in India transact money digitally, but fewer than 30 million invest in mutual funds and stocks.

An Indian startup that is attempting to change this figure by courting millennials announced a new financing round on Wednesday and turned into the newest unicorn in the world’s second largest internet market.

Bangalore-based Groww has raised $83 million in its Series D financing round, which valued the Indian startup at more than $1 billion, up from $250 million in $30 million Series C in September last year.

Tiger Global led the new round, and existing investors Sequoia Capital India, Ribbit Capital, YC Continuity and Propel Venture Partners participated in it, the five-year-old Indian startup said, which has raised $142 million to date.

On a side note, Groww is the eighth Indian startup to attain the unicorn status this year — and fourth this week. Social commerce Meesho turned a unicorn on Monday, fintech firm CRED on Tuesday, and earlier today epharmacy firm PharmEasy announced a new financing round that valued the firm at about $1.5 billion.

Groww allows users to invest in mutual funds, including systematic investment planning (SIP) and equity-linked savings, gold, as well as stocks, including those listed at U.S. exchanges. The app offers every fund that is currently available in India.

The startup has amassed over 8 million registered users, two-thirds of whom are first-time investors, Lalit Keshre, co-founder and chief executive of Groww, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Keshre said the startup will deploy the fresh funds to accelerate its growth, and hire more talent. “We now have fuel for longer-term thinking and faster growth,” he said.

More than 60% of Groww users come from smaller cities and towns of India and 60% of these have never made such investments before, said Keshre. The startup said it has conducted workshops in several small cities to educate people about the investment world. The coronavirus pandemic has also accelerated the startup’s growth as youngsters explore new hobbies.

Plaid, a unicorn that helps connect consumers’ bank accounts to financial applications, has raised a $425 million Series D, it announced this morning. TechCrunch understands that the new capital infusion, led by Altimeter Capital, values the company at around $13.4 billion.

It is not surprising that Plaid, a former takeover target for consumer credit giant Visa, is raising more capital. After its $5.3 billion sale to the larger company fell through this January, it became clear that Plaid would chart its own future, sans a corporate parent.

When the Visa-Plaid deal did finally grind to a halt in the face of regulatory scrutiny there was chatter amongst startup and venture folks that the sale dying out was a good thing. Why? Because Plaid had had a great 2020 and was generally agreed to be worth far more than what Visa had agreed to pay.

The startup’s Series D valuation confirms the sentiment. And it wasn’t merely Altimeter that was willing to put capital into the company at its new valuation. The group was joined by two more news investors, Silver Lake Partners and Ribbit Capital. Silver Lake is a private equity leviathan with dozens of billions of dollars under management, while Ribbit is known for its myriad fintech bets.

In short, Plaid has picked up a hybrid of investor scale, late-stage guidance, and fintech acumen in a single round. A number of prior investors also put capital into round.

TechCrunch spoke with Plaid CEO Zachary Perret about the deal, who told TechCrunch in a brief phone call that Altimeter was selected as its new lead investor over other options due to shared alignment regarding the future of financial services for consumers. He added that he’s excited to learn from his trio of new backers, which will help the company build for the long-term.

The CEO also made passing mention of a future IPO, though TechCrunch doesn’t expect to see paperwork regarding a potential flotation from Plaid for some time; it was, however, refreshing to hear an executive admit to having future financial goals.

Regarding the amount of capital that it raised, Perret said that it was the “right level” of capital to allow Plaid to invest in scale, both in terms of its team and its product lineup. The CEO also said that the funds will allow his company to be opportunistic.

The last 12 months for Plaid have been busy. Perret mentioned the time period several times during the interview, explaining how rapidly the world evolved regarding the digitization of consumer financial services over the last year.

Finally, what of growth? What was Plaid willing to share on the growth front was light, merely disclosing that it grew its customer count by 60% in 2020. Perret said that the figure represented an acceleration from previous years. With around 650 staffers today, Plaid grew its headcount by around 20% in the first quarter according to its CEO.

Plaid sits in the midst of the fintech boom that TechCrunch has covered extensively over the past several quarters. As far as external signals go, watching the companies that must partially comprise Plaid’s customer base expand is about as close as we can get to other growth metrics. That particular signal bodes well for Plaid.

Let’s see how well the company can fend off domestic and international competition. It certainly now has the funds to do so.

Artificial intelligence has become a fundamental cornerstone of how a lot of business software works, providing a useful boost in reading, understanding, and using the often-fragmented trove of data that organizations generate these days. In the latest development, an Israeli startup called Blue dot, which uses AI to help companies handle their tax accounting, is announcing $32 million in funding to continue its growth, specifically addressing the demand from companies for more user-friendly tools to help read and correctly itemize expenses for tax purposes.

“The tax sector is very complicated, and we are playing in a very large space, but it’s a huge revolution,” Blue dot’s CEO and co-founder Isaac Saft said in an interview. “Business and enterprise accounting is just not going to look the same in the future as it does today.”

The funding is being led by Ibex Investors in partnership with Lutetia Technology Partners, with past investors Lamaison Partners, Viola and Target Global also contributing. Blue dot rebranded only last week from its original name, VATBox (part of the funding will be used to help Blue dot move deeper into the U.S. market, where the concept of VAT is not quite so ubiquitous: there is no national sales tax and states determine the rates themselves).

Pitchbook notes that under its previous name, the startup last raised money in 2017, a $20 million Series B led by Viola at a $120 million post-money valuation.

While Blue dot is not disclosing valuation today, it’s likely to be significantly higher than this based on some of its engagements. In addition to customers like Amazon, tobacco giant BAT and Dell, it also has a partnership with one of the bigger names in expense accounting, SAP Concur, which uses Blue dot to power its expense data entry tool to automatically read charges and figure out how to itemize them so that employees or accountants don’t need to go through the pain of that themselves.

As Saft describes it, part of what is propelling his company’s business is the bigger trend of consumerization and the role that it has played in enterprise services: the working world has picked up a lot of technology tools, led by the smartphone, to help them organize their personal lives, and a lot of what they are being “served” through technology is increasingly personalized with lower barriers of entry, whether its on e-commerce sites, entertainment or social media. In the working world, they can often be frustrated as a result with how much work something like expenses can involve — a process that gets ever more complicated the more strict tax regimes become.

Blue dot’s approach is to essentially view the tax accounting process as something that can be improved with AI to make it easier for people to use — whether those people are workers itemizing their expenses, or accounts auditing them and running those through even bigger accounting processes. With a machine learning system that both takes into account a company’s own internal compliance and company policies, and the wider tax and regulatory framework, Blue dot helps “read” an expense and figure out how to notate it, how much tax should be accounted and where, and so on.

This is especially important as the process of entering and managing expenses gets pushed out to the people spending the money, rather than dedicated accountants handling that work on their behalf. An awareness of how modern offices are functioning today and evolving is one reason why investors were interested here.

“We believe Blue dot can change the way organizations worldwide manage accounting and its tax implications for their expenses,” Gal Gitter, a partner at Ibex, said in a statement. “There’s been a major market shift away from centralization of enterprise functions, including procurement. As that accelerates, more companies will be looking for ways to replace costly and complex manual processes with digital, automated solutions that use data and AI to essentially enable transactions to report themselves, which Blue dot delivers.”

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey European founders and investors in cities outside the larger European capitals.

Over the next few weeks, we will ask entrepreneurs in these cities to talk about their ecosystems, in their own words.

This is your chance to put Zagreb on the Techcrunch Map!

If you are a tech startup founder or investor in the city please fill out the survey form here.

This is the follow-up to the huge survey of investors (see also below) we’ve done over the last six or more months, largely in capital cities.

These formed part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing regularly for ExtraCrunch, our subscription service that unpacks key issues for startups and investors.

In the first wave of surveys, the cities we wrote about were largely capitals. You can see them listed here.

This time, we will be surveying founders and investors in Europe’s other cities to capture how European hubs are growing, from the perspective of the people on the ground.

We’d like to know how your city’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19, and generally how your city will evolve.

We leave submissions mostly unedited and are generally looking for at least one or two paragraphs in answers to the questions.

So if you are a tech startup founder or investor in one of these cities please fill out our survey form here.

Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email mike@techcrunch.com and/or reply on Twitter to @mikebutcher.

No-code startups continue to see a lot of traction among enterprises, where employees — strictly speaking, non-technical, but still using software every day — are getting hands-on and building apps to take on some of the more repetitive aspects of their jobs, the so-called “citizen coders” of the working world.

And in one of the latest developments, a Bryter — an AI-based no-code startup that has built a platforms used by some 100 global enterprises to date across some 2,000 business applications and workflows — is announcing a new round of funding to double down on that opportunity. The Berlin-based company has closed a Series B of $66 million, money that it will be investing into its platform and expanding in the U.S. out of a New York office it opened last year. The funding comes on the heels of seeing a lot of demand for its tools, CEO and co-founder Michael Grupp said in an interview.

“It was a great year for low-code and no-code platforms,” said Grupp, who co-founded the company with Micha-Manuel Bues and Michael Hübl. “What everyone has realized is that most people don’t actually care about the tech. They only care about the use cases. They want to get things done.” Customers using the service include the likes of McDonald’s, Telefónica, and PwC, KPMG and Deloitte in Europe, as well as banks, healthcare and industrial enterprises.

Tiger Global is leading this round, with previous backers Accel, Dawn Capital, Notion Capital and Cavalry Ventures all also participating, along with a number of individual backers (they include Amit Agharwal, CPO of DataDog; Lars Björk, former CEO of Qlik; Ulf Zetterberg, founder and CEO of Seal Software; and former ServiceNow global SVP James Fitzgerald).

Accel and Dawn co-led Bryter’s Series A of $16 million less than a year ago, in June, a rapid funding pace that underscores both interest in the no-code/low-code space — Bryter’s enterprise customer base has doubled from 50 since then — and the fact that startups in it are striking while the iron is hot.

And it’s not the only one: Airtable, Genesis, Rows, Creatio, and Ushur are among the many ‘hands-on tech creation for non-techie people’ startups that have raised money in the last several months.

Automation has been the bigger trend that has propelled a lot of this activity: knowledge workers today spend most of their time these days in apps — a state of affairs that pre-dates the pandemic, but has definitely been furthered throughout it. While some of that work still requires manual involvement and evaluation from those workers, software has automated large swathes of those jobs.

RPA — robotic process automation, where companies like UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism have taken a big lead — has accounted for a significant chunk of that activity, especially when it comes to reading forms and lots of data entry — but there remains a lot of other transactions and activities within specific apps where RPA is typically not used (not yet at least!). And this is where non-tech workers are finding that no-code tools like Bryter, which use artificial intelligence to deliver more personalised, yet scalable, automation, can play a very useful role.

“We sit on top of RPA in many cases,” said Grupp.

The company says that areas where its platform has been implemented include compliance, legal, tax, privacy and security, procurement, administration, and HR, and the kinds of features that are being built include tools like virtual assistants, chatbots, interactive self-service tools, and more. These don’t replace people as such but cut down the time they need to spend in specific tasks to process and handle information within them.

That scalability, and the rapid customer up-take from a pool of users that extends beyond tech early-adopters, are part of what attracted the funding. “Bryter has all the characteristics of a top-tier software company: high quality product that solves a real customer pain point, a large market opportunity and a world-class founding team,” said John Curtius, a partner at Tiger Global, in a statement. “The feedback from Bryter’s customers was resoundingly positive in our research, and we are excited to see the company reach new heights over the coming years.”

“Bryter has seen explosive growth over the last year, signing landmark customers across a large number of sectors and use cases. This does not come as a surprise. In the pandemic-affected world, digitalisation is no longer a nice to have, it is an imperative,” added Evgenia Plotnikova, a partner at Dawn Capital.

China is pushing forward an internet society where economic and public activities increasingly take place online. In the process, troves of citizen and government data get transferred to cloud servers, raising concerns over information security. One startup called ThreatBook sees an opportunity in this revolution and pledges to protect corporations and bureaucracies against malicious cyberattacks.

Antivirus and security software has been around in China for several decades, but until recently, enterprises were procuring them simply to meet compliance requests, Xue Feng, founder and CEO of six-year-old ThreatBook, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Starting around 2014, internet accessibility began to expand rapidly in China, ushering in an explosion of data. Information previously stored in physical servers was moving to the cloud. Companies realized that a cyber attack could result in a substantial financial loss and started to pay serious attention to security solutions.

In the meantime, cyberspace is emerging as a battlefield where competition between states plays out. Malicious actors may target a country’s critical digital infrastructure or steal key research from a university database.

“The amount of cyberattacks between countries is reflective of their geopolitical relationships,” observed Xue, who oversaw information security at Amazon China before founding ThreatBook. Previously, he was the director of internet security at Microsoft in China.

“If two countries are allies, they are less likely to attack one another. China has a very special position in geopolitics. Besides its tensions with the other superpowers, cyberattacks from smaller, nearby countries are also common.”

Like other emerging SaaS companies, ThreatBook sells software and charges a subscription fee for annual services. More than 80% of its current customers are big corporations in finance, energy, the internet industry, and manufacturing. Government contracts make up a smaller slice. With its Series E funding round that closed 500 million yuan ($76 million) in March, ThreatBook boosted its total capital raised to over 1 billion yuan from investors including Hillhouse Capital.

Xue declined to disclose the company’s revenues or valuation but said 95% of the firm’s customers have chosen to renew their annual subscriptions. He added that the company has met the “preliminary requirements” of the Shanghai Exchange’s STAR board, China’s equivalent to NASDAQ, and will go public when the conditions are ripe.

“It takes our peers 7-10 years to go public,” said Xue.

ThreatBook compares itself to CrowdStrike from Silicon Valley, which filed to go public in 2019 and detect threats by monitoring a company’s “endpoints”, which could be an employee’s laptops and mobile devices that connect to the internal network from outside the corporate firewall.

ThreatBook similarly has a suite of software that goes onto the devices of a company’s employees, automatically detects threats and comes up with a list of solutions.

“It’s like installing a lot of security cameras inside a company,” said Xue. “But the thing that matters is what we tell customers after we capture issues.”

SaaS providers in China are still in the phase of educating the market and lobbying enterprises to pay. Of the 3,000 companies that ThreatBook serves, only 300 are paying so there is plentiful room for monetization. Willingness to spend also differs across sectors, with financial institutions happy to shell out several million yuan ($1 = 6.54 yuan) a year while a tech startup may only want to pay a fraction of that.

Xue’s vision is to take ThreatBook global. The company had plans to expand overseas last year but was held back by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’ve had a handful of inquiries from companies in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. There may even be room for us in markets with mature [cybersecurity companies] like Europe and North America,” said Xue. “As long as we are able to offer differentiation, a customer may still consider us even if it has an existing security solution.”