Year: 2021

After revealing its first fund just last year, a $100 million pool of investment capital dedicated to early stage startups focusing on sustainable food development, clean energy, health innovation and new space technologies, Prime Movers Lab is back with a second fund. Prime Movers Lab Fund II is larger, with $245 million committed, but it will pursue the same investment strategy, albeit with a plan to place more bets on more companies, with an expanded investment team to help manage the funds and portfolio.

“There are a lot of VCs out there,” explained founder and general partner Dakin Sloss about the concept behind the fund. “But there aren’t many VCs that are focused exclusively on breakthrough science, or deep tech. Even though there are a couple, when you look at the proportion of capital, I think it’s something like less than 10% of capital is going to these types of companies. But if you look at what’s meaningful to the life of the average person over the next 30 years, these are all the companies that are important, whether it’s coronavirus vaccine,s or solar energy production, or feeding the planet through aquaponics. These are the things that are really meaningful to to making a better quality of life for most people.”

Sloss told me that he sees part of the issue around why the proportion of capital dedicated to solving these significant problems is that it requires a lot of deep category knowledge to invest in correctly.

“There’s not enough technical expertise in VC firms to choose winners intelligently, rather than ending up with the next Theranos or clean tech bubble,” he said. “So that’s the first thing I wanted to solve. I have a physics background, and I was able to bring together a team of partners that have really deeply technical backgrounds.”

As referenced, Sloss himself has a degree from Stanford in Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy. He was a serial entrepreneur before starting the fund, having founded Tachyus, OpenGov and nonprofit California Common Sense. Other Partners on the team include systems engineer Dan Slomski, who previously worked on machine vision, electro-mechanical systems and developing a new multi-phase flow fluid analyzer; Amy Kruse, who holds a PhD in neuroscience and has served as an executive in defence technology and applied neuroscience companies; and Carly Anderson, a chemical engineer who has worked in biomedicine and oil & gas, and who has a PhD in chemical and biomolecular engineering. In addition to core partners with that kind of expertise, Prime Movers Lab enlists the help of venture partners and specialist advisors like former astronaut Chris Hadfield.

Having individuals with deep field expertise on the core team, in addition to supplementing that with top-notch advisors, is definitely a competitive advantage, particularly when investing in the kinds of companies that Prime Movers Lab does early on in their development. There’s a perception that companies pursuing these kinds of hard tech problems aren’t necessarily as viable as a target for traditional venture funding, specifically because of the timelines for returns. Sloss says he believes that’s a misperception based on unfortunate past experience.

“I think there are three big myths about breakthrough science or hard tech or deep tech,” he said. “That it takes longer, that it’s more capital intensive, and that it’s higher risk. And I think the reason those myths are out there is people invested in things like Theranos, and the clean tech bubble. But I think that there were fundamental mistakes made in how they underwrote risk of doing that.”

Image Credits: Momentus

To avoid making those kinds of mistakes, Sloss says that Prime Movers Lab views prospective investments from the perspective of a “spectrum of risk,” which includes risk of the science itself (does the fundamental technology involve actually work), engineering risk (given the science works, can we make it something we can sell) and finally, commercialization or scaling risk (can we then make it and sell it at scale with economics that work). Sloss says that if you use this risk matrix to assess investments, and allocated funds to address primarily the engineering risk category, concerns around timeframes to return don’t really apply.

He cites Primer Movers Lab’s Fund I portfolio, which includes space propulsion company Momentus, heading for an exit to the public markets via SPAC (the company’s Russian CEO actually just resigned in order to smooth the path for that, in fact), and notes that of the 15 companies that Fund I invested in, four are totally on a path to going public. That would put them much faster to an exit than is typical for early stage investment targets, and Sloss credits the very different approach most hard science startups take to IP development and capital.

“The inflection points in these types of companies are actually I think faster to get to market, because they’ve spent years developing the IP, staying at relatively low or attractive valuations,” he said. “Then we can kind of come in, at that inflection point, and help them get ready to commercialize and scale up exponentially, to where other investors no longer have to underwrite the difference between science and engineering risk, they can just see it’s working and producing revenue.”

Companies that fit this mold often come directly from academia, and keep the team small and focused while they’re figuring out the core scientific discovery or innovation that enables the business. A prime example of this in recent memory is Wingcopter, a German drone startup that developed and patented a technology for a tilt-wing rotor that changes the economics of electric autonomous drone flight. The startup just took its first significant startup investment after bootstrapping for four years, and the funds will indeed be used to help it accelerate engineering on a path towards high-volume production.

While Wingcopter isn’t a Prime Movers Lab portfolio company, many of its investments fit the same mold. Boom Aerospace is currently working on building and flying its subscale demonstration aircraft to pave the way for a future supersonic airliner, while Axiom Space just announced the first crew of private tourists to the International Space Station who will fly on a SpaceX Falcon 9 for $50 million a piece. As long as you can prove the fundamentals are sound, allocating money turning it into something marketable seems like a logical strategy.

For Prime Movers Lab’s Fund II, the plan is to invest in around 30 or so companies, roughly doubling the number of investments from Fund I. In addition to its partners with scientific expertise, the firm also includes Partners with skill sets including creative direction, industrial design, executive coaching and business acumen, and provides those services to its portfolio companies as value-add to help them supplement their technical innovations. Its Fund I portfolio includes Momentus and Axiom, as mentioned, as well as vertical farming startup Upward Farms, coronavirus vaccine startup Covaxx, and more.

People and businesses are relying on the internet to get things done more than ever before, an opportunity but also an infrastructure headache for service providers that need to scale quickly and reliably to meet that demand.

Today, a startup that has built a clever, software-based way for them to expand their networks without buying costly equipment is announcing a major round of funding on the back of its business booming.

DriveNets — which provides software-based routing solutions to service providers that run them as virtualized services over “white box” generic architecture — has closed $208 million in funding, a Series B that values the company at over $1 billion post-money.

The plan will be to use the funding to continue building out the business internationally and to tailor it to more use cases beyond carriers, including the wave of bigger companies that stream large amounts of media and have some control over their networks as a result.

Future deals are still under NDA, CEO Ido Susan said but described the opportunity as a clear one: “If you want to serve bandwidth with low latency, if you want to offer strong 5g capability or cloud gaming, you need to be close to your end customer.”

The Series B is being D1 Capital Partners. Previous backers Bessemer Venture Partners and Pitango (which co-led DriveNets’ previous, $110 million round when it emerged from stealth) also made a significant investment, and Atreides Management also participated. This latest round was made at more than double DriveNets’ valuation in 2019.

D1 has been an especially prolific investor in the last year, going big on businesses that are seeing a lot of attention as a result of pandemic conditions. They include e-commerce giants Warby Parker and Instacart, fintech TransferWise, gaming engine Unity, online car sales platform Cazoo, and transportation startup Bolt.

DriveNets’ big round is based both on bigger trends in the market, as well as its own strong record.

Before this round, DriveNets had already counted AT&T among its customers, a major vote of confidence for the company and its virtual network approach, but it seems that recent circumstances and the spike in internet activity have brought more providers to consider its approach.

“The internet was growing 30%-40% annually even before Covid-19,” said Susan. “But even five years ago, incumbent carriers were coming to us saying, said no one can build virtual networks. Now, it’s not a question of whether it works or not, but when you will adopt it.”

Recent momentum for the company’s sales, he said, is very good. “Everyone is working and studying from home so you need more capacity and bandwidth in the network,” he added. 

DriveNets’ core product is a more flexible and cost-effective replacement for the traditional network router that relies on virtualized architecture. Traditionally, routers have been sold as vertically-integrated hardware solutions, bringing together both software and hardware into one branded big box, with companies like Cisco and Juniper Networks dominating the space.

In their place, as Susan and co-founder Hillel Kobrinsky envisioned it, DriveNets provides a solution that is based around generic white boxes. It currently works with three providers for these boxes, Susan said.

These work in conjunction with a system it has developed called Network Cloud, which in turn runs a networking stack called the DriveNets Operating System. Service providers control their systems of white boxes and other servers through a virtualized service run over Docker containers, using open APIs to automate and configure various network services. This allows for more flexibility in capacity among the white box servers, but they can also be easily added and removed as needed. Essentially, it’s a system that disaggregates the software from the hardware, to make expanding the hardware much easier, and controlling the software significantly more flexible to boot.

It’s a disruptive concept that potentially steps on a lot of toes, but Adam Fisher, a partner with Bessemer, said that he’s confident it’s one that will continue to gain traction.

“We are extremely enthusiastic about the company,” he said. “Aside from Ido and Hillel as entrepreneurs, we really connected with their vision. Network routing is moving to software and cloud architecture. We’re talking not just about the small parts here but the hearts and lungs of the system. DriveNets is starting with the hardest parts. Once one customer becomes multiple customers, you just realise it’s the future.”

Beauty and wellness appointment booking apps have proliferated of the last few years, but it appears the race is still on as today one of the leaders, Booksy, raises $70 million in a Series C round led by Cat Rock Capital, with participation from Sprints Capital. 

The round was also joined by OpenOcean, Piton Capital, VNV Global, Enern, Kai Hansen, Zach Coelius and Manta Ray Ventures, and takes the total raised by the firm to $119 million. The funding will be used for expansion plans across North America, expanding to new verticals, and acquiring complementary businesses.

The Booksy app is used by customers to book and pay for beauty appointments with local businesses. Salons, nail bars and barbershops can manage the bookings, payments, and customer base via the accompanying Booksy Biz app. The platform also allows salons to sell other products via Booksy E-Commerce, which acts as a marketplace allowing customers to discover and book other local stylists, nail technicians etc.

Booksy was founded by Polish entrepreneurs Stefan Batory (CEO) and Konrad Howard. Allowing customers to schedule their best appointment time means that 38% of customers end up booking after-hours and increasing their appointment frequency by 20%, says the company. The startup launched in 2014 but is now in the US (its largest market), UK, Poland, Spain, Brazil, and South Africa. It claims to be the number-one beauty booking app in each country, with “13 million” consumers on the app.

Batory said in a statement: “Like with many sectors negatively hit by the pandemic, it’s been a turbulent time for the beauty and wellness industry but we’re confident in its ability to come back from this, so it’s fantastic to see our latest group of investors share our optimism and vision. This latest round of funding enables us to reach even more salons and service providers across the US, and in all the regions we operate, which in turn helps them reach more customers.” 

Alex Captain, founder and managing partner at Cat Rock Capital, said: “We are incredibly excited to invest in Booksy as it builds the leading global software platform for digitizing the beauty and wellness industry around the world.”

Booksy certainly seems to have cracked the international expansion game ahead of most competitors, which tend to stay more local to their countries of origin such as Treatwell, Styleseat, Vagaro and Mindbody. The opportunity for Booksy is to now use its war cast to roll-up other local players.

It has already acquired rival Lavito in 2018 and, more recently, merged with Versum in December 2020 allowing it to enter Mexico.

Lime is adding electric mopeds — painted in the company’s signature green — to its micromobility platform as the startup aims to own the spectrum of inner city travel from jaunts to the corner store to longer distance trips up to five miles.

Lime said Wednesday it plans to launch as many as 600 electric mopeds on its platform this spring in Washington D.C. The company is also working with officials to pilot the mopeds in Paris. Eventually, the mopeds will be offered in a “handful of cities” over the next several months.

The mopeds, supplied by manufacturer Niu, are designed for two people and outfitted with tech like infrared-cameras in the helmet compartment that can detect if they’re in use during a trip, an effort aimed at rooting out misuse and increasing safety. Repeat offenders of Lime’s policies, which includes wearing a helmet at all times, will be kicked off the platform. Customers will also be required to take a selfie wearing the helmet at the start of a ride.

The helmets will be supplied by Moon for U.S. customers and Nikko for the European deployments.

The mopeds will have a top speed of 28 miles an hour and be able to travel up to 87 miles on a single charge. Unlike Lime scooters, in which gig economy workers can earn money by collecting, charging and bringing back to city streets, the mopeds will have swappable batteries and be maintained by full-time employees.

While it’s unclear if mopeds have always been part of Lime’s long-term plans, the company’s head of new mobility  told TechCrunch that they’ve been thinking about what the future of electrified urban transportation might include.

“As we’ve grown as a company, we understood that we just needed to follow what our riders were demanding which is further distances,” said Sean Arroyo, head of new mobility at Lime. “The ability to meet any trip, at anytime, anywhere, is something that’s at the foundation for us and so our riders really are the ones that pointed us in this direction.”

Lime CEO Wayne Ting first hinted late last year that a “third mode” of transport beyond scooters and bikes was in the works for the first quarter of 2021 as well as the addition of third-party companies to its platform. Last year, Lime also started to include on its app Wheels-branded electric bikes in certain cities. Ting said, at the time, that users should expect more partnerships like these.

The expansion into mopeds is the latest sign that Lime has managed to put some of its darker Covid-19-tainted times behind it. Lime underwent a round of layoffs in April, taking on capital from Uber the next month in a down-round that brought its valuation under the $1 billion mark. Lime paused most of its operations for a month during the early COVID-19 days.

But it has since rebounded. Ting said in November that the company is both operating cash flow positive and free cash flow positive in the third quarter and was on pace to be full-year profitable, excluding certain costs (EBIT), in 2021. It also had enough cash — or access to it — to expand into mopeds.

The question is, ‘whether more modes are on the way?’

Arroyo didn’t give specifics, but it does appear more is coming.

“I think throughout this year you’re gonna see us really expand, not just with modes, but optionality,” Arroyo said. ” For us it’s really about having a platform that’s available for all these trips, and then we want to be able to provide optionality that makes sense for the riders. Shared is a huge component, but there’s a lot of different levels of what shared looks like; and throughout 2021, I think you’re gonna see us offer quite a few different options as our modes expand.”

Gardin, a ‘deep tech’ hardware and software startup developing optical phenotyping technology and analytics to optimise food production, has raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding.

Leading the round is LDV Capital, with participation from Seedcamp, and MMC Ventures. A number of angel investors are also investing, including Pratima Aiyagari, Gilad Engel, and Abdulaziz Alrashed.

Founded in late 2019, Gardin’s mission, in the U.K. company’s own words, is to help everyone access high quality, nutritious food that is “good for you and for our planet”.

Specifically, the startup is developing tech for farms based on its own “optical phenotyping” hardware and accompanying analytics software. The idea is to enable food producers to measure and monitor the nutritional value of food, from “seed to plate in a real world environment,” rather than a lab.

“With deployment of Gardin’s OS, insight from our analytics will be delivered to help food producers optimise production, grow nutritious food, lower carbon footprint and reduce waste,” says founder and CEO Sumanta Talukdar. “At Gardin, we want to empower food producers to feed the world consciously, sustainably and nutritionally, as it should be”.

Talukdar says he started the company after learning that the traditional food industry currently “does not, or cannot, quantifiably measure food nutrition and quality”. This has seen Gardin partner with some of the leading crop and plant physiologists, phenotyping experts and plant scientists to identify the key biochemical mechanisms in various crops related to plant physiology.

“By designing hardware to specifically measure the signatures of these mechanisms, Gardin is able to quantify plant physiology and key compounds density with high fidelity (i.e. signal/noise ratio) at a cost similar to consumer electronics goods,” he explained. To achieve this, Gardin is employing a multispectral data fusion approach, using a suite of remote sensing and computer vision techniques to capture very specific data which is then “fused” to drive the analytics.

To that end, Gardin has been designed to assist both traditional and CEA (controlled environment agriculture), with the ambitious aim to become the new “food production gold standard”.

“Our full stack product is designed to run and optimise the entire growing environment running silently in the background like an OS i.e we are solving their problems, helping food producers grow higher quality food and reducing their operating costs and carbon footprint,” adds Talukdar.

“We have also designed our platform so we can integrate with their existing architectures. To us, asking a producer in what is already an asset heavy industry to change or add to their system to make us fit, was folly”.

In terms of traction, Talukdar says Gardin has already secured pilot trials that are ready to go live early this year with “key go-to-market clients. They include supermarket chains, food producers and vertical farms.

French startup Mooncard is partnering with Flying Blue to offer Air France miles to its customers. This is the first time you can earn miles with a payment card in France that isn’t an American Express card.

Mooncard provides corporate payment cards to streamline your expenses. Most companies in France don’t use corporate cards. But fintech startups have created corporate cards that can help you streamline expenses.

In addition to Visa cards, Mooncard lets you easily take a photo of your receipts, add details and submit expenses to your accounting team. You can set up different limits and validation processes.

Today’s news is interesting as American Express has been in a monopolistic position for decades with its partnership with Flying Blue. In France, companies had to choose American Express if they wanted miles as perks.

When it comes to pricing, it looks pretty similar to what American Express offers:

There’s one big difference — Mooncard relies on the Visa network. As many restaurants and shops don’t support American Express, it could be enough to lure customers away from American Express. Employees can use their miles for personal trips.

There are 3,000 companies using Mooncard as well as many public institutions.

Joanne Chen just became the second general partner in the history of the now 26-year-old, Silicon Valley venture firm, Foundation Capital.

Were she still alive, Foundation’s founder, Kathyrn Gould, would undoubtedly cheer the development.

Known for her big personality, Gould first met Chen when Chen was an an MBA student at the University of Chicago. Gould was recovering from a bout with cancer at the time, and after being introduced to Chen through one of Chen’s professors, she initially advised Chen not to go into venture. As Gould herself discovered early on, doors open more easily to men in the venture world, which is why she’d started her own firm in the first place.

Yet, like Gould, being dissuaded only motivated Chen more. Though she began her career as an engineer at Cisco, she’d always been interested in finance, jumping into a banking analyst role with Jeffries, then working as an associate with the capital advisory firm Probitas before cofounding a mobile gaming company she’d later wind down.

Grad school in Chicago — and meeting Gould — only reinforced for Chen how much she wanted to become a VC, and following stints at Formation 8 and Hyde Park Angels, she landed at Foundation in 2014. (Sadly, Gould passed away in 2015.)

Certainly, Chen has brought a fresh perspective to a firm that features 10 investors altogether, the rest men.

Aside from being the only woman in the group, Chen has a strong point of view, for example, on the entrepreneurial potential of students from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied as an undergraduate. While the university is not nearly so organized as Stanford when it comes to minting founders, in her view it has just as much talent and, as a result, it’s a network into which she invests a lot of time and energy as an investor.

Chen, who was born in China and great up in Montreal, also spends a lot of time thinking about AI, both as an investor and also simply a person in the world. Her father, who received his PhD from the University of Montreal, went on to work at Bell Labs as a researcher, and her mother is a computer programmer and “DevOps person” who Chen routinely talks with about software tools. But their background isn’t so simple.

Like many immigrants, her parents fled China during the Cultural Revolution. Because her grandfather helped architect a major telecom company in China, he was persecuted by the Communist Party, stripped of all his responsibilities and titles and, as an “intellectual,” says Chen, thrown in jail. Meanwhile, his son (her father) wasn’t allowed to start college until he was 21, and it was only because he was a good student that was he invited abroad to obtain his master’s degree.

Today, her family’s experience combined with China’s use of artificial intelligence — including to track its Muslim minority — is top of mind for Chen in ways it may not be for someone with a lesser grasp of the lengths to which authoritarian regimes will go, and how quickly they can act.

It’s why most of Chen’s work centers on understanding how AI, from how machines evolve from organizing activity to replacing humans (which will definitely happen, says Chen); to how to recognize and counter malicious applications of AI with AI (such as through recruiting software that screens out names and gender to eliminate human bias); and how to otherwise make sure that AI is used to improve human life, she suggests.

Of course, Chen isn’t exactly alone in her interest in AI. Nearly every startup today incorporates — or says it does — AI into its offerings, from lending companies to startups that help remote teams work more effectively. And investors, including at Foundation, have funded many of them.

Asked how she deals with competition for many of these deals, Chen says she moves as fast when there’s a decision to be made. She engages with VPs of engineering and technical founders who share ideas through Slack communities and elsewhere. She also notes that Foundation provides capital to roughly 30 operators who write angel checks and help steer the firm’s attention to interesting deals.

Mostly, suggests Chen, she focuses on whatever is not landing in her inbox — a lesson learned in part from Gould years ago.

It’s easy to believe. As Gould once told this editor of the advice she gives to other VCs: “It not the calls you take. It’s the calls you make. Everyone is calling you with dumb startup ideas, and you can stay hugely busy sorting through that crap. My advice instead is to figure out who are the 10 to 20 smartest people you know and call them. One of them is always starting a company.”

Joanne Chen just became the second general partner in the history of the now 26-year-old, Silicon Valley venture firm, Foundation Capital.

Were she still alive, Foundation’s founder, Kathyrn Gould, would undoubtedly cheer the development.

Known for her big personality, Gould first met Chen when Chen was an an MBA student at the University of Chicago. Gould was recovering from a bout with cancer at the time, and after being introduced to Chen through one of Chen’s professors, she initially advised Chen not to go into venture. As Gould herself discovered early on, doors open more easily to men in the venture world, which is why she’d started her own firm in the first place.

Yet, like Gould, being dissuaded only motivated Chen more. Though she began her career as an engineer at Cisco, she’d always been interested in finance, jumping into a banking analyst role with Jeffries, then working as an associate with the capital advisory firm Probitas before cofounding a mobile gaming company she’d later wind down.

Grad school in Chicago — and meeting Gould — only reinforced for Chen how much she wanted to become a VC, and following stints at Formation 8 and Hyde Park Angels, she landed at Foundation in 2014. (Sadly, Gould passed away in 2015.)

Certainly, Chen has brought a fresh perspective to a firm that features 10 investors altogether, the rest men.

Aside from being the only woman in the group, Chen has a strong point of view, for example, on the entrepreneurial potential of students from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied as an undergraduate. While the university is not nearly so organized as Stanford when it comes to minting founders, in her view it has just as much talent and, as a result, it’s a network into which she invests a lot of time and energy as an investor.

Chen, who was born in China and great up in Montreal, also spends a lot of time thinking about AI, both as an investor and also simply a person in the world. Her father, who received his PhD from the University of Montreal, went on to work at Bell Labs as a researcher, and her mother is a computer programmer and “DevOps person” who Chen routinely talks with about software tools. But their background isn’t so simple.

Like many immigrants, her parents fled China during the Cultural Revolution. Because her grandfather helped architect a major telecom company in China, he was persecuted by the Communist Party, stripped of all his responsibilities and titles and, as an “intellectual,” says Chen, thrown in jail. Meanwhile, his son (her father) wasn’t allowed to start college until he was 21, and it was only because he was a good student that was he invited abroad to obtain his master’s degree.

Today, her family’s experience combined with China’s use of artificial intelligence — including to track its Muslim minority — is top of mind for Chen in ways it may not be for someone with a lesser grasp of the lengths to which authoritarian regimes will go, and how quickly they can act.

It’s why most of Chen’s work centers on understanding how AI, from how machines evolve from organizing activity to replacing humans (which will definitely happen, says Chen); to how to recognize and counter malicious applications of AI with AI (such as through recruiting software that screens out names and gender to eliminate human bias); and how to otherwise make sure that AI is used to improve human life, she suggests.

Of course, Chen isn’t exactly alone in her interest in AI. Nearly every startup today incorporates — or says it does — AI into its offerings, from lending companies to startups that help remote teams work more effectively. And investors, including at Foundation, have funded many of them.

Asked how she deals with competition for many of these deals, Chen says she moves as fast when there’s a decision to be made. She engages with VPs of engineering and technical founders who share ideas through Slack communities and elsewhere. She also notes that Foundation provides capital to roughly 30 operators who write angel checks and help steer the firm’s attention to interesting deals.

Mostly, suggests Chen, she focuses on whatever is not landing in her inbox — a lesson learned in part from Gould years ago.

It’s easy to believe. As Gould once told this editor of the advice she gives to other VCs: “It not the calls you take. It’s the calls you make. Everyone is calling you with dumb startup ideas, and you can stay hugely busy sorting through that crap. My advice instead is to figure out who are the 10 to 20 smartest people you know and call them. One of them is always starting a company.”

eFounders is expanding its focus by creating a second startup studio called Logic Founders. This time, Logic Founders is going to focus on fintech startups exclusively. Camille Tyan (pictured above) is going to lead the new studio.

Over the past ten years, eFounders has launched dozens of software-as-a-service companies trying to improve the way we work. Portfolio companies include Front, Aircall and Spendesk.

Camille Tyan previously co-founded PayPlug, a payments company that was acquired by Natixis (Groupe BPCE). He plans to follow the eFounders model centered around a new vertical. Logic Founders will come up with ideas for new startups. It’ll recruit two co-founders and start working on the product for the first 12 to 18 months of the company.

Ideally, the startup finds product-market fit and raises a seed round after this initial phase. The startup studio keeps a stake in the startup but it moves on so that it can focus on new projects.

If you’ve been following eFounders closely, the startup studio has already worked on several fintech companies, such as Spendesk, Upflow, Multis and Swan. New fintech projects will likely fall under the Logic Founders umbrella.

The studio says it will launch API-first financial products. It is riding the embedded finance trend — many believe financial products will be distributed by platforms that aren’t primarily focused on finance but could benefit from fintech features. You can expect companies working on payments orchestration, asset securitization, lending APIs, crypto and B2B identity.

eFounders is expanding its focus by creating a second startup studio called Logic Founders. This time, Logic Founders is going to focus on fintech startups exclusively. Camille Tyan (pictured above) is going to lead the new studio.

Over the past ten years, eFounders has launched dozens of software-as-a-service companies trying to improve the way we work. Portfolio companies include Front, Aircall and Spendesk.

Camille Tyan previously co-founded PayPlug, a payments company that was acquired by Natixis (Groupe BPCE). He plans to follow the eFounders model centered around a new vertical. Logic Founders will come up with ideas for new startups. It’ll recruit two co-founders and start working on the product for the first 12 to 18 months of the company.

Ideally, the startup finds product-market fit and raises a seed round after this initial phase. The startup studio keeps a stake in the startup but it moves on so that it can focus on new projects.

If you’ve been following eFounders closely, the startup studio has already worked on several fintech companies, such as Spendesk, Upflow, Multis and Swan. New fintech projects will likely fall under the Logic Founders umbrella.

The studio says it will launch API-first financial products. It is riding the embedded finance trend — many believe financial products will be distributed by platforms that aren’t primarily focused on finance but could benefit from fintech features. You can expect companies working on payments orchestration, asset securitization, lending APIs, crypto and B2B identity.