Author: azeeadmin

According to the World Bank, it is more expensive to send money to sub-Saharan African than to any region in the world. It is also the most expensive region to send money from. In Q1 2020, people spent an average of 8.9% to send money to the region, much higher than the global average of 6.8%.

There’s much talk around sending money from Africa to the West, which has led to many startups using traditional fiat and crypto means to facilitate cross-border payments between the two corridors. However, there’s little noise about the corridors between Africa and other regions like Latin America or Asia.

South Asia, for instance, has the lowest average remittance costs across all regions at 4.95% (these percentages are reported on a standard $200 transfer); therefore, it makes sense to tap into the opportunities the market presents. Wapi Pay, a Kenyan startup with offices in China and Singapore, is carrying out this play and has carved a market for itself by facilitating payments between both extreme remittance worlds of Africa and Asia.

Founded in 2019 by brothers Paul and Eddie Ndichu, Wapi Pay provides a payments gateway for African businesses to receive and send money from Asia via mobile money platforms and bank accounts.

Most of the focus on remittance has been the flow of money into Africa for sustenance. Therefore, digitizing has been mostly around delivery rather than building new infrastructure and payment processing models for African individuals and businesses to make cross-border payments.

Financial institutions are left with traditional systems and correspondence models to offer service to their customers. These transactions are inherently complex in nature, given their compliance requirements. The lack of new infrastructure or processes make them further opaque, longer to process and far too expensive. Crypto remittance startups are claiming to solve this problem, but no one has successfully scaled to effective usage.

“We started Wapi Pay having seen how fragmented the payment infrastructure is and how horrifying the experience and expense of making or receiving a payment to and from Asia,” Peter Ndichu said to TechCrunch.

“We spent some time in Asia given the growing trade relationship between the two corridors [Africa and Asia] and saw the growing need to make this more efficient, faster and cheaper, evolving from remittances to global payments. These transactions are already complex in nature; how do we make them as simple and easy as mobile money?” he added.

In Q1 2021, Africa-China trade jumped 27% to $52.1 billion compared with 2020. Despite the economic recovery from the pandemic, African merchants still find it expensive to send and receive money. In some cases, these costs can be as high as 20%, especially in Southern African regions. The wait time can also be ridiculous, too, with some spending up to a week before payment is processed. Wapi Pay says it can process payments within a day and charges as low as 3%.

“Wapi Pay bypasses traditional payment networks, optimizing efficiency and cost for our customers. Users choose the delivery channels they want, such as bank to bank, wallet to wallet, bank to wallet and wallet to bank options to transfer funds as well as make merchant payments, with settlement done within 24 hours,” said CEO Eddie in a statement.

Presently, Wapi Pay works with local banks and platforms in China, Indonesia, India, Japan, Malaysia, Phillippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. The company claims to be growing at 396% year-on-year since 2019 and has hopes to continue in that fashion. By the end of next year, Wapi Pay wants to process $500 million in remittances and increase the number of African merchants and Asian suppliers to half a million and 100,000 respectively.

The $2.2 million pre-seed investment announced today will be vital to meeting those targets to scale up global payments and remittances between Africa and Asia.

The round is one of the largest of its kind in East Africa and the continent. The venture firms that took part include China-based fund MSA Capital, known to have invested in unicorns Meituan, Nubank and Klarna; Pan-African and Africa-focused firms EchoVC, Kepple Africa, Future Hub; and Pan-Asian firms Transsion Holdings and Gobi Ventures.

Wapi Pay will use the investments to engage regulators for licensing across Africa and for scale, product and geographical expansion.

“These funds will help Wapi Pay diversify our products range and drive growth so that we can evolve remittances into real-time global cross-border payments, starting with Africa and Asia. All while minimising the cost of transactions, it needs to be as easy as sending M-PESA,” Eddie added.  

“Africa to Asia is a large trading corridor overlooked and underserved by tech today. We believe Wapi Pay is the best team to build the necessary infrastructure to support its growing trade volumes. We are excited to support them with our extensive China fintech network and playbook,” Tim Chen, vice president at MSA Capital, said in a statement. 

Neobanks, other financial startups, and the basic concept of “finance anywhere” are seeing huge gains at the moment, and today one of the key companies building the infrastructure that powers services like these is announcing a major growth round of funding to double down on the opportunity.

Rapyd — which provides a range of financial services like payments, mobile wallets, money transfers, card issuing, fraud protection, and more, all by way of an API for third parties to integrate quickly into their own services — has raised $300 million, a Series E that TechCrunch understands from reliable sources values the company at $8.75 billion.

The company has been on a fast pace of growth in the last year, spurred in no small part by the global shift to carrying out life and business online in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Rapyd’s total payment volume is on target to pass $20 billion this year, a four-fold increase on 2020’s volume of $5 billion. The company has some 12,000 small and medium-sized businesses using its services, with another 650 large enterprise clients.

Target Global — the European VC that has been making some big bets on fintech and commerce lately — is leading this round, with new backers Fidelity Ventures, Altimeter Capital, Whale Rock Capital, BlackRock, and Dragoneer, and previous backers General Catalyst, Latitude, Durable Capital Partners, Tal Capital, Avid Ventures, and Spark Capital also participating. Past strategic investors in the startup have included the payments behemoth Stripe.

Rapyd’s CEO and co-founder Arik Shtilman said in an interview that the plan will be to use part of the investment for acquisitions, and part for R&D.

Rapyd has been starting the M&A march in earnest already this year, acquiring payments and card issuing company Valitor in July for $100 million to expand deeper into Europe, and starting an investment arm called Rapyd Ventures. Acquisitions will likely be to continue getting deeper into markets where it is

On the R&D front, the company already has some 900 different services that cover 100 countries within its API. I’ve likened Rapyd’s approach in the past to being akin to a “swiss army knife” of services, and Shtilman says that these roughly fall into several distinct categories. 

“At the end of the day there are five things on planet earth for financial services whether you are a bank or a mom-and-pop shop: payment collection, money dispersing, funds storage, card issuing, and foreign exchange. From these you can build endless capabilities,” he said. One priority now, he added, will be to focus on expanding its technology related to identity management and fraud to complement what it already does.

“Know your customer [KYC] and compliance tools will help us bring on more customers even faster,” Shtilman said.

The timing of this latest round is a big deal for Rapyd. For starters, it’s coming just seven months after Rapyd announced another $300 million round, its Series D (that round actually closed in November, I’ve found out). Notably, that last round was at a $2.5 billion valuation, and while the company is not disclosing its funding, Shtilman told me that revenues have grown 3.5 times since then. A source very close to the company told me that the valuation was, simply, the multiple of those two figures: $8.75 billion.

Secondly, it’s important in the context of the wider market and where Rapyd fits into it.

We’re currently seeing a huge profusion of companies tapping into the potential of so-called embedded finance — financial services that are built and operated by one party and integrated by APIs into another party’s service — to build new products, ranging from neobanks around the world, to e-commerce companies building checkout services, or companies only tangentially in the business of commerce who are now launching products to improve customer engagement or make their first moves into the space.

That’s meant a lot of competition for Rapyd, with some other big players including Fast, Checkout, Mambu, and Railsbank, all of which have also raised huge rounds.

In other words, not only is this round a sign of Rapyd’s own growth, but a signal to the market of how it is positioning itself and faring in what is shaping up to be an interesting and competitive field.

Rapyd — which is now based in Silicon Valley but has its R&D and CEO based in Tel Aviv — was one of the earlier players in this space, and Shtilman likes to recall how, when he first started the company, he was met with a lot of skepticism from others in the financial services community, not just because the idea sounded too hard to execute but because they saw financial infrastructure as essentially the crown jewels of most financial services companies.

“When we started in 2016 everyone thought we were crazy because the concept was too big and too wide,” he said. “Then, like mushrooms after the rain, everyone saw it. Everyone understands now that the future of fintech is fintech infrastructure. Like cloud computing.”

Indeed, it’s taken a little while, but these days most acknowledge that the basics of these services are, yes, super hard to build, but essentially work the same for everyone, so they can be built once, and then packaged and turned into something you can tap by way of cloud services, and thus turned into commodities that you can spend your resources, time, and strategy to personalize.

Meanwhile, the crown jewels are, in fact, your customers. And therefore, building transactional services that either complement what you already do as a business, or augment it in an interesting and useful enough way, is how you end up deepening your engagement with them, and commitment from them.

The fact that this is something that might apply to just about any business online today means that the opportunities are vast as well, one reason investors are so keen to be in this market. (And that goes for more than just Rapyd, as it’s big enough not to be a winner-takes-all market.)

“Rapyd has built a borderless embedded fintech infrastructure critical to all digital businesses that operate globally. Their platform incorporates payments, compliance, FX, fraud management, escrow, virtual account and card issuing, and more. But now, as the world sees growing traction across global eCommerce, Gig Economy, Fintech Solutions and Technology platforms, Rapyd must take the next step,” said Mike Lobanov, General Partner at Target Global, in a statement. “There is currently an unprecedented need for a single partner serving as a bridge between a vast array of local payment services and merchants, providing them access to the flexible, fast-to-integrate, and scalable solutions they need to thrive. Having led Rapyd’s Series A in 2018, we are confident that Rapyd can be such a partner, and are now renewing our bet in this round.”

In “Macbeth,” Shakespeare described sleep as the “chief nourisher in life’s feast.” But like his titular character, many adults aren’t sleeping well. Revery wants to help with an app that combines cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for insomnia with mobile gaming concepts.

Founded in March 2021, Revery is currently in beta stealth mode and plans to launch its app in the United States later this year. The company announced today it has raised $2 million led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge program. Participants included GGV Capital, Pascal Capital, zVentures (Razer’s corporate venture arm) and angel investors like MyFitnessPal co-founder Albert Lee; gaming entrepreneur Juha Paananen; CRED founder Kunal Shah; Mobile Premier League founder Sai Srinivas; Carolin Krenzer; and Josh Lee.

Lee, a mutual friend, first introduced Revery’s founders, Tammie Siew and Khoa Tran, to one another. Before launching the startup, Siew worked at Sequoia Capital India, Boston Consulting Group and CRED, while Tran was a former product manager at Google.

Revery plans to focus on other mental health issues in the future, but it’s starting with sleep because “it has such a strong correlation with mental health and we’re leveraging protocols, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, that’s robust and have been tried and tested for 30 years,” Siew told TechCrunch. “That is the first indication, but the goal is to build multiple games for other wellness indications as well.”

A study by research firm Infinium found that about 30% to 45% of adults in the world experience insomnia, a problem exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Chronic lack of sleep is linked to a host of health issues, including high blood pressure, strokes, depression and lowered immunity.

For Revery’s team, which also includes former Zynga and King lead game designer Kriti Sawa and software engineer Stephanie Wong, their focus on sleep is personal.

Revery’s team on a Zoom call

“Everyone on our team has a deeply personal connection to the mission, because everyone on our team has experienced, or had a family member or friends go through challenges in mental health,” said Siew. “They’ve seen how late intervention creates consequences that could have been avoided if they had gotten help earlier.”

When Tran was 15, he was diagnosed with hypertension and several other health conditions that needed medication. It wasn’t until he was 26 that Tran found out that sleep apnea was at the root of his medical issues. After getting surgery, Tran’s blood pressure became normal and many of his other conditions also improved.

“When I finally got treatment for my sleep disorder, only then did I realize the impact of sleep on mental health,” Tran said. “For me, I was really lucky that a doctor caught my sleep disorder and super lucky to have the time and resources to get treatment. For many people, it’s incredibly inaccessible.”

Revery’s medical advisory team includes the doctor who performed Tran’s surgery, Stanford Sleep Surgery Fellowship director Dr. Stanley Liu; Stanford professor and behavioral sleep medicine expert Dr. Fiona Barwick; and Dr. Ryan Kelly, a clinical psychologist who researches how video games can be used in therapy.

When people think of sleeping apps, ones that focus on meditation (Calm and Headspace, for example) or soothing noises usually come to mind. The Revery team isn’t sharing a lot of details about its app before launch, but says it draws from casual mobile games, which are designed to get people to return for short play sessions over a long period of time. The goal is to use gamification to make CBT practices interactive and fun, so it becomes part of users’ daily routines.

“That’s the same kind of gameplay that Zynga and King have used, which is why Kriti’s experience is super helpful,” said Siew. Casual games revolve around rewarding people for small actions, and for Revery app, that means positive reinforcement for habits that contribute to better sleep. For example, it will reward people for putting down their phones.

“I think a lot of people have the misconception that solving sleep is only at the time you fall asleep. They don’t realize that sleep is impacted by what you do throughout the day,” Siew said. “A big part is also what are your thoughts, behavior and the other things that you do, so in order to effectively and sustainably improve sleep, we also have to change your thoughts and behaviors outside of the time you’re trying to fall asleep.”

In a statement, GGV Capital managing director Jenny Lee said, “We are excited about the growing mental wellness market, and believe that Revery’s unique mobile game-based approach has the opportunity to create immense impact. We are happy to back such a mission-driven team in this space.”

Inequalities between women and men in the workplace have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic and are likely to persist in the near future, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). The World Economic Forum estimates globally it will take 267.6 years to close the gender gap in economic participation and opportunity.

So it’s even more crucial that the global gender and ethnicity pay gap be ‘squared away’ by entrepreneurs passionate about the issue.

Gapsquare, a UK startup addressing this issue since 2017, has been among a handful of startups pioneering these concerns via machine learning around the issue.

Its analytics software, which analyses and tracks pay disparity, pay equality and pay gap data, has now been acquired by XpertHR, a part of RELX, for an undisclosed sum. TechCrunch understands from sources that Gapsquare never raised institutional venture funding.

The Gapsquare platform, and co-founders Dr. Zara Nanu and Ion Suruceanu, will be joining the XpertHR team. Gapsquare has previously counted Vodafone, Condé Nast, and Serco as clients, amounting to data from tens of thousands of employees.

Gapsquare’s model is to provides HR and Reward professionals with actionable insights about their company’s existing pay gaps.

Through its ‘FairPay Pro’ platform, Gapsquare says it can identify variables for employee demographics such as gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability, identifying the causes of pay gaps, and proposing and tracking remedial actions.

In a statement Nanu said: “We know for many businesses transparency around compensation fairness and pay reporting is high on the agenda. Gartner research indicates that over 80% of businesses globally are driven to take action around pay equity and pay gaps as the workforce is changing and younger generations entering the workforce are increasingly interested in transparency, sustainability, and equality. By joining forces, XpertHR and Gapsquare are better equipped to support our customers’ evolving needs and those of the businesses around the globe.”

Scott Walker, Managing Director XpertHR, said: “I am excited to bring Gapsquare into the XpertHR family. Our mission is a simple one: to create purposeful workplaces for every person in every organization. Both businesses are dedicated to improving the experiences of millions of working professionals around the globe. By combining Gapsquare’s advanced technology with XpertHR’s expertise in reward data, we can better equip employers to build a world where work is inclusive, where pay meets value and diverse talent thrives.”

The child and grandchild of teachers, Nanu was inspired to look more deeply into the issue of the gender pay gap after working with a female trafficking prevention program in Moldova, a small country in Central Europe. She realized women were being thrown into sweatshops and paid a minimum wage, thus trapped in poverty.

After growing up in Chișinău, the capital of Moldova, she relocated to Bristol, UK, and started Gapsquare. Nanu has previously talked about how Soviet attitudes to gender equality – where the Communist system dictated that men and women should be equally treated – made her realize that Western practices had actually become retrograde by comparison.

Speaking to The Guardian in 2018 she said: “We had quotas around women in parliament, quotas around the representation of women in any sector. Childcare was free, so my mum could go back to work six months after giving birth. When I came to the UK [in 2007] it felt like, to some extent, I was going back in time in terms of gender equality.”

Ultimately, the background to the Gapsquare story is reflective of the environment Nanu operated in. Raising venture capital to highlight gender disparity in a male-dominated corporate and venture environment was a tough gig. Perhaps one of the toughest. It’s a testament to Nanu’s persistence that she bootstrapped, got this far, and exited with her team. But it’s also an indictment of the VC industry. We haven’t seen the last of this entrepreneur.

Infra.Market, an Indian startup that is helping construction and real estate companies in the world’s second-most populated nation procure materials and handle logistics for their projects, said on Tuesday it has raised its third financing round in the past nine months.

Tiger Global, which led the startup’s Series C round in February this year, has led the $125 million Series D financing round in the five-year-old startup. The new round valued Mumbai-headquartered Infra.Market at $2.5 billion (post-money), up from $1 billion in February and $200 million in December last year.

Infra.Market helps small businesses such as manufacturers of paints and cements improve the quality of their production and meet various compliances. The startup adds its load cells to the manufacturing facilities of these small businesses to ensure there is no lapse in quality, and also helps them work with other businesses that can provide them with better raw material and provide guidance on pricing. It also works closely with businesses to ensure that their deliveries are made on time.

These improvements, explained co-founder Souvik Sengupta, help small manufacturers land larger clients that have higher expectations from the businesses with which they engage. He said the startup has helped small manufacturers reach customers outside of India as well. Some of its clients are in Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore and Dubai.

“We continue to build on our vision of creating India’s largest multi-product construction materials brand and transform the construction materials supply chain, not only in India, but also globally,” he said.

“We are also embarking on new business verticals within the construction ecosystem beyond materials to enable us to provide end to end solutions to our customers across the lifecycle of a construction project. We are seeing huge growth in buyer wallet share as we are rapidly expanding our product portfolio and market presence and the launch of new verticals will help us fulfill our vision of creating a technology backed end to end construction solutions company.”

The startup, which said it expects to surpass $1 billion in sales by the end of this calendar year, plans to deploy the fresh fund to expand to new markets and also expand into new categories.

“We are delighted to double-down on our investment in Infra.Market. The team has demonstrated exceptional growth and continues to disrupt the construction materials industry. Over the past year, Infra.Market has become the go-to partner, especially during the pandemic when the traditional supply chains were disrupted,” said Scott Shleifer, Partner, Tiger Global Management, in a statement.

The myriad challenges faced by farmers in Africa — inadequate financing, education and input distribution — persist and greatly affect the agricultural output on the continent. But startups are providing innovative solutions to these problems, and South Africa’s Khula is an example. The startup, launched in 2018, is finding its niche in the ever-growing industry. 

Today, it announced a $1.3 million seed round to scale operations across the country.

On the surface, it would seem agritech in Africa hasn’t taken off as exponentially as other tech-operated industries. But it has: The agritech sector grew 44% year-on-year between 2016 and 2019, and the continent has the highest number of agritech services in the developing world, reaching more than 33 million smallholder farmers, according to a report from Farmers Review Africa. 

Karidas Tshintsholo, Matthew Piper and Jackson Dyora founded Khula three years ago. Khula provides small-scale and commercial size farmers with software and a marketplace to grow their business. But this description doesn’t do justice to the painstaking problem Khula is solving.

Before Khula, Tshintsholo and Piper were school and business partners. They worked on consulting gigs after dropping out of college a year before graduation. But while it allowed them to meet with clients in various disciplines, the consulting business wasn’t exhilarating enough.

“We always wanted something to do something more impactful, something more meaningful, something that could really change the way that the world works,”  Tshintsholo told TechCrunch. As time went on, agritech seemed like the path to take due to both founders’ experiences.

Africa is home to 60% of the world’s arable land. Research also shows agritech in Africa is projected to reach a value of $1 trillion by 2030. But a trip to Israel made Piper wonder why the country — although half of its land is considered a desert — had more agricultural produce than African countries.

“It didn’t make sense that we have more land than any other continent,” Tshintsholo said. “And pretty much everyone on the continent is a farmer and we’re buying food more than we were selling. We wondered how that was possible, considering how big of competitive advantage agriculture is?” 

Further research and spending time with farmers exposed another problem: how intermediaries ripped off farmers in the country.

L-R: Karidas Tshintsholo (CEO), Matthew Piper (CPO) and Jackson Dyora

The agricultural industry in South Africa is known to favor industrial agriculture. And like most parts of Africa, smallholder farmers have it rough as they face a plethora of challenges, from marketing and selling to transportation of their goods and produce.

Typically, farmers take their produce to a large warehouse where big aggregators pick up the produce and sell it. The problem here is that most products are sold on consignment, which means there are no guarantees farmers will make a sale. The goods, mostly perishable, are also bound to experience drops in price, and there’s a huge lack of transparency, allowing middlemen to rip off farmers. 

“I think the penny dropped for us was when we started playing detective. We followed these farmers and noticed what big companies listed on the stock exchange did: Go to these physical markets, pick up the produce and then sell to the formal market. They’d pick it up for R3.50 and sell it for R11.00. They literally added nothing to the value chain other than just picking it up and dropping it off.”

In some cases, farmers could sell their produce to a processor who subsequently sells it to a supermarket at a much higher price. The supermarket also makes a profit by selling to individual consumers. So what a farmer sold for R3.50 ($0.24) might end up at R30 ($2.07) in an individual consumer’s hands. That’s not all; farmers must also pay commissions to these middlemen and municipalities they operate in.

“This was when we knew that this was a struggle, and this was the problem we wanted to address,” Tshintsholo said. “But then, in addressing that problem, we didn’t go live initially. Agriculture can be very complex. What we have now is something that we call the Khula ecosystem, and this is because the industry is very interconnected.”

Khula wants to tackle all these issues at once and provide farmers with liquidity, access and a market. The platform is an ecosystem made with three products.

The Inputs App allows farmers to access approved agricultural inputs and services from local and international suppliers.

The second is the Fresh Produce Marketplace, targeted at farmers with challenges cited earlier. It allows farmers to sell produce directly to local and international formal bulk buyers. By allowing farmers to engage and negotiate prices with suppliers, the platform aims to reduce the access middlemen have that has led to the exploitation of farmers.  

Then, the Funder Dashboard connects institutional investors with farmers who meet their funding mandates.

“The reason we’ve gone with this ecosystem approach is that it’s more of a sticky business model,” Tshintsholo said. “So we want to allow farmers to use our ecosystem to buy the products they need and get the services they need.”

Khula has seen reasonable traction since launching. The company has signed up more than 3,000 farmers, and over 100 suppliers now work with the company. This year, the startup was accepted into the Google for Startups Accelerator Class 6 alongside 14 other African companies.

While the company is just announcing this investment, it closed the round last year. It was led by AECI, one of the continent’s biggest agrochemical companies. South African impact investor E Squared Investments also participated.

In addition to the financial firepower Khula receives from its lead investor, it will also get access to AECI’s wide distribution network to scale its inputs app. With 132 depots across the country, Khula says it can deliver products in every province, in every major agriculture region.

Tshintsholo says AECI is the kind of investor Khula hopes to have as it progresses: a long-term partner interested in execution and not quarterly updates.

“We did not want an investor at the table who was only going to ask us how we’d performed in a specific quarter. We wanted a long-term partner that would execute with us. A partner with a great reputation in the industry and an incredible distribution network, a partner whose long-term success was tied to a business model like ours. And AECI fits that description perfectly for us.”

“Khula has very attractive fundamentals, a sizable addressable market, app development capabilities, key agri-business networks and a management team that wishes to work with AECI as their preferred agri-input and technical advisory partner,” Quintin Cross, the managing director of AECI Plant Health, said in a statement. 

Creoate is a startup, which lets independent retailers buy sustainable products from brands and wholesalers, has raised a $5m Seed round led by Fuel Ventures with participation from Vinted founder, Justas Janauskas. 

Its competitors include traditional wholesalers who’ve supplied independent retailers for decades, and other startups such as Faire (US, raised $696M) and Ankorstore (FR, raised €115M).


Founders Ashley Horn and Fahad Khan say the company aims at helping independent businesses and “reclaims the supply chain from global giants”. Khan says ‘Mom and Pop’ are “faced with poor information, discriminatory pricing and unpredictable cash flows.”

Creoate, which doesn’t own inventory, says it helps retailers forecast which products will sell well so that they can buy and manage inventory levels more easily. It says its cataloging software allows retailers to deal with fewer middlemen.

Launched in January 2020 the platform now claims 25,000 retailers across the UK, France, and Netherlands.

Creoate co-founder Horn said: “Sourcing brands as an independent retailer is close to impossible… We could see that this system was not sustainable and there had to be a better way”. 

Mark Pearson, founder and managing partner at Fuel Ventures said: “Unless you’re in the world of retail, it can be difficult to truly grasp just how broken the system is for the 2.5 million retailers and 30 million emerging brands that Creoate serves. We are captivated by Creoate’s technology which is inspired by the founding team’s real-world experience and empathy.”

Health and wellness apps startup Palta, has raised $100 million in a Series B round led by Per Brillioth at VNV Global, with the participation of Target Global and other existing and new investors. The cash will be used to generate more products, such its existing products Flo.Health, Simple Fasting, Zing Fitness Coach, and others.

Palta claims to have 2.4M active paid subscribers in their apps.

Yuri Gurski, CEO and founder of Palta said: “Palta Brain platform, the foundational powerhouse that drives our consumer digital apps, allows for much faster scaling of both products that we envisage internally, as well as those that come to us from the market.”

“Mobile and preventative health services are the future of the health industry,” said Per Brillioth, CEO of VNV Global. “As a result, Palta has proven its capabilities to develop and scale its wide range of leading mobile subscription products.”

Headquartered in London with offices in Munich, Vilnius, Warsaw, and other locations, the company says most of its revenue comes from customers in the US (60%) and Western Europe (20%).

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, August 2, 2021. What a day. Square kicked off this week’s news cycle with a megadeal, Google popped up with new hardware, and there are new VC funds aplenty. It’s busy, but before we get started, there’s a special summer edition of Extra Crunch Live this week that’s 100% pitch-off. It’s on Wednesday, so be there or be square. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Google pursues custom silicon: Alphabet’s Google subsidiary is getting into the custom silicon game, TechCrunch reports. Akin to what Apple did with its A and M chips, Google hopes that its Tensor SoC (system on a chip) “will differentiate itself in a crowded smartphone field,” Brian Heater writes. For more on Google’s new hardware, head here.
• Square buys Afterpay: U.S. fintech giant Square is buying the Australian buy now, pay later company Afterpay for $29 billion in stock. TechCrunch dug into the deal’s numbers, but the gist is that Afterpay brings merchants, global users and a new fintech product to Square. The deal isn’t cheap, but it does make sense.
• Cloud infra spend accelerates: Want to know why investors are so hot and bothered by the tech industry these days? In part because demand just keeps accelerating. TechCrunch covered new data today indicating that the cloud infra market — which underpins so very many services that consumers and corporates depend on alike — saw spending grow 39% in Q2 2021 compared to the year-ago quarter. The total for the second quarter? $42 billion.

Startups/VC

• Reese Witherspoon’s media company sells for $900M: This is not our usual startup fare, but when a media company sells for nearly $1 billion, we have to pay attention. Per TechCrunch, the company, Hello Sunshine, made content for major streaming firms. What’s weird is who bought it. A “yet-unnamed new media firm run by former Disney execs,” TechCrunch writes. Mysterious.
• Afterpay investor bullish on Afterpay: TechCrunch published an op-ed by Dana Stalder, an investor at Matrix Partners and self-described “only institutional venture investor” in Afterpay. Their take? That Square + Afterpay will be greater as a sum than the mere addition of their parts. We’ll see.
• Nektar.ai wants to consolidate B2B sales data: Selling software is no easy game, and there are myriad tools that every SDR and AE is expected to use. Nektar wants to be the central collection point and brain for all that data, and it just raised $6 million to grow its operation. Frankly, the salesops market is big, and I am surprised we don’t hear about even more companies pursuing similar lines of work.
• Investors back startups making B2B payments simpler: Sticking to the B2B world, Yadoo has raised a $20 million round to power business-to-business payments. In short, while Venmoing your friend beer money is as easy as drinking said beer, it’s not the same with corporations. Yadoo is one of the startups looking to take the problem on, in this case from the startup’s Mexico City HQ.

And now, some venture capital news:

• Element Ventures raises $130M: It’s a sign of the times that I am not at all surprised that a B2B-focused fintech venture capital firm just raised nine figures. Of course that’s a big enough problem space to deploy that amount of capital. And of course there are enough startups that fit its parameters to fill its book with deals. Element will invest in 15 companies each year, focusing on deals in Europe, the U.S. and Asia.
• More money for LatAm: Newtopia is a new fund focused on Latin America that just put together a fresh $50 million fund. It will invest in pre-seed companies ($100,000 checks) and larger rounds ($250,000 to $1 million) in startups scaling toward their Series A. Early-stage investing is its own beast, so it’s nice that the burgeoning Latin American market is getting its own dedicated vehicles to tackle the task.
• From the podcast today, if you are into edtech, boy do we have the show for you.

Demand Curve: Questions you need to answer in your paid search ads

At some point, almost every early-stage startup will use paid search ads to connect with customers and throw down the gauntlet with their competitors.

Most of these initial attempts at paid search are unsuccessful. There’s a steep learning curve when it comes to transforming passive searchers into paying customers, and almost no one gets it right the first time.

In a comprehensive guest post, growth marketing expert Stewart Hillhouse identified “14 questions your paid search should answer to ensure you’re only paying for the highest-intent shoppers.”

Question 1? “What’s in it for me?”

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Zoombombing costs Zoom $85M: Today’s immaterial technology fine comes via Zoom, the video product that became ubiquitous during the pandemic. It was sued by users claiming that it was “violating users’ privacy by sharing their data with third parties without permission and enabling ‘Zoombombing’ incidents,” per TechCrunch. The settlement is worth a total of 0.07% of the company’s $112 billion market cap. Oh no.
• Amazon will pay you $10 for your palm print: Speaking of sums of money so small that they should not induce any sort of behavioral changes, Amazon wants to give people $10 in credit if they give the company their palm print so that they can better check out at the e-commerce giant’s physical stores. Hard pass on this one.
• Salesforce buys Mulesoft an RPA firm: CRM giant Salesforce is investing in Mulesoft, a company that it bought a ways back, in the form of German RPA company Servicetrace. Servicetrace will link up with Mulesoft, not Salesforce proper.
• I asked TechCrunch reporter and genial human Ron Miller why the deal matters. He said that the deal, “while not on par with the Slack megadeal, is probably the kind of smaller deals the company will make in the next year.” He explained that the Servicetrace acquisition gives SFDC an “entry into the growing RPA market without spending a ton of money.” Ron’s also bullish on the planned Mulesoft integration.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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One of the big reasons you’re giving 110% of your talent and effort to your private company is because you’re hoping to eventually cash in on all those vested incentive stock options (ISOs) that have been sitting in some account, waiting for the day your company goes public.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Who doesn’t dream of reaping an options windfall and using it to retire early, buy a house, pay off their college loans, travel around the world or become a full-time philanthropist?

Unfortunately, when it comes to figuring out how to cash in their stock awards, most employees are on their own.

Their employers can’t always provide the answers they need — especially when the questions relate to personal finances. Most companies admit they need to be better at explaining how ISOs work in general, but they can’t legally work one-on-one with employees to help them exercise and sell shares the right way.

That’s why, when the time is right, many employees actively look for help from a qualified fiduciary financial adviser who can walk these could-be “options millionaires” through various cash-in scenarios.

Here’s a real-life example (using a pseudonym).

Kurt is a 50-year-old VP of product management at a healthcare startup that just went public. Over his three years with the company, Kurt had amassed 350,000 ISOs worth approximately $6 million. Unlike many options millionaires, he didn’t intend to cash in everything and retire early. He planned to stay with the firm but wanted to liquidate enough ISOs to pay for a vacation home and add greater diversification to his investment portfolio. This presented significant tax risks that Kurt wasn’t aware of.

If Kurt exercised his ISOs and sold the shares before a year had passed, his profits would be characterized as short-term capital gains, which are taxed as ordinary income.

To illustrate the potential tax implications of this action, we created a hypothetical scenario that showed if Kurt exercised all of his ISOs and sold the shares immediately, he would incur approximately $6 million in ordinary income, which would push him into the top tax bracket and put him on the hook for almost $3 million in combined federal and state taxes.