Author: azeeadmin

Almost overnight, platforms that offer non-dilutive capital for recurring revenue businesses have become white-hot. It was only in March that Pipe — which aims to be the “Nasdaq for revenue” — raised $150 million, but two months later had raised $250 million at a $2 billion valuation.

This fever is now reaching Europe, where today Capchase raises an additional $280 million in new debt and equity funding, led by i80 Group, following a $125 million round in June. But unlike Pipe, Capchase is playing both in the US and in Europe, where it has made €100m available to more than 50 companies in its first month of operation on the continent.

Right now it’s live in the UK and Spain but expects to expand across Europe this year.

The Spanish-American company is also now launching ‘Capchase Expense Financing’ to enable companies to manage their largest expenses – such as legal bills, cloud hosting services, payroll and bonus payments, and recruitment fees –  without depleting their cash reserves, in either 3, 6, 9, or 12-month increments.

Miguel Fernandez, co-founder, and CEO of Capchase said: “Our new expense financing solution is a first in the industry, and we believe it will be a game-changer. Since we launched just over a year ago, we’ve seen first-hand the challenges that companies face when securing the financing they need to grow their business. Managing large expenses and having to make difficult decisions over how they spend their cash is one of the most consistent and trying issues that our clients face. There’s also a great opportunity to reduce costs by making use of the upfront discounts that vendors provide. Now Capchase users can pay upfront with Capchase, get a discount, and pay Capchase monthly over the following months.”

At interview Fernandez told me their main competitor is venture debt: “That is the one that we constantly keep winning against.”

He said: “We’re not limited to just monthly or quarterly subscriptions, we can work with any revenue. We apply intelligence to it and work with customers. It’s not just the ability to pull forward revenues to find the growth, but also what is the implied schedule in order to achieve a business goal.”

Sundae, a residential real estate marketplace that pairs sellers of dated or damaged property with potential buyers, has raised $80 million in a Series C funding round co-led by Fifth Wall and General Global Capital.

QED Investors, Wellington Management, Susa Ventures, Founders Fund, First American Financial, Prudence Holdings, Crossover VC, Intersect Capital, Gaingels and Oberndorf Ventures also participated in the financing. The round marks San Francisco-based Sundae’s third financing in a 13-month time frame, bringing its total raised since its August 2018 inception to $135 million. 

The San Francisco-based company declined to reveal at what valuation its Series C was raised. It also declined to provide hard revenue figures, saying only that it saw a 600% year-over-year increase in revenue from June 2020 to June 2021.

The startup aims to help people who need to sell dated or “damaged” properties for a variety of reasons — such as job loss, illness or divorce. In some cases, according to CEO and co-founder Josh Stech, such vulnerable sellers get taken advantage of by “predatory fix and flippers” seeking to capitalize on their misfortune. 

Since sellers in these situations don’t typically have the funds to fix up their properties before selling, Sundae lists the property for them on its platform – serving as an intermediary between sellers and investors. There, it is visible to about 2,600 qualified off-market buyers.

The company essentially aims to aggregate demand from “fix and flippers,” who use the marketplace to bid against each other for distressed properties. If the seller accepts and an inspection is completed, the company offers a $10,000 cash advance before closing to help homeowners with moving costs or other expenses.

“Our goal is to displace wholesalers who exploit desperate or uninformed sellers and lock them into a contract which they turn around and assign to a property investor at a steep profit,” Stech said. “The tens of thousands of dollars in lost equity that goes to a wholesaler could mean the difference between paying off debts, or having enough money to retire.”

Sundae claims that on average, sellers receive 10 offers within three days on its marketplace.

Since its launch in January 2019, the startup has slowly been expanding its marketplace geographically. It went from operating in four markets in California at the end of last year to now operating in 14 markets across Florida, Colorado, Georgia, Texas and Utah.

Sundae makes money by charging buyers in its investor marketplace a fee when it “assigns” them a property. 

In the first quarter of this year, the startup launched a dedicated online marketplace for investors, where they can view properties and submit offers. Once an investor signs up to join the marketplace, they can access the full inventory of properties, including information such as photos, floor plan, 3D walkthrough and a third-party inspection report. 

Looking ahead, the company plans to use its new capital to expand to new markets, invest in its platform and “build brand awareness.” It also, of course, plans to boost its current headcount of 180 mostly remote employees.

Vik Chawla, a partner at Fifth Wall, believes Sundae is serving a segment of the residential real estate market that has historically been overlooked. 

“Their marketplace model simultaneously solves a crucial pain point for sellers by disrupting the wholesale industry, while delivering a platform that property investors can count on for reliable investment opportunities,” he said.

The company last raised $36 million in a Series B funding round in December 2020.

Interestingly, a slew of angel investors — including a number of athletes and celebrities — also put money in the company’s latest round, including: actor Will Smith, DJ Kygo, three-time NFL Super Bowl champion Richard Seymour of 93 Ventures, NFL All-Pro DK Metcalf of the Seattle Seahawks, Matt Chapman of the Oakland A’s, Alex Caruso of the Los Angeles Lakers, Aaron Gordon of the Denver Nuggets, Solomon Hill of the Atlanta Hawks, Kelly Olynyk of the Houston Rockets, NBA All-Star Isaiah Thomas, three-time NBA Champion & Gold Medalist Klay Thompson of the Golden State Warriors, Hassan Whiteside of the Sacramento Kings, Andrew Wiggins of the Golden State Warriors and 2020 U.S. Soccer Player of the Year and Juventus midfielder, Weston McKennie.

Hyper is a $60M early-stage fund co-founded by Josh Buckley, Product Hunt’s CEO along with writer, founder and designer Dustin Curtis. Two ex-Sequoia operators are part of the team at launch as well. Malika Cantor as Partner and GM and Ashton Brown as Head of Program. The fund launches today and is self-described as ‘inspired by the Product Hunt community’. 

The team will be writing $300k checks for 5% of very early companies in any arena that seems promising to the partnership in a fixed deal structure that mirrors Y-Combinator. 

The fund will exist as a ‘sister company’ to Product Hunt (though it’s going to technically own it). Product Hunt, however, is the first of what the team says will be many companies it will own, create and operate in order to provide ‘direct value’ to its portfolio companies. 

I had a chat with Buckley, Curtis and Cantor about the new fund and company and the way that they hoped to differentiate Hyper in a world of aggressively service-oriented venture firms. 

The short version is: distribution. It’s hard to argue with the overall assumption that the Hyper team is working under — capital is majorly commoditized. Frankly, sometimes that’s all you want from an investor whose value add is more of a thorn in your side than anything. But, especially at the early stage there are a few funds and firms that offer a strong value outside of writing checks in the form of, say, hiring, sales introductions or board members that have relevant operational experience. 

Where Hyper differs, says Buckley, is that they see distribution as the biggest value add for a nascent startup at the stages where the firm hopes to invest. Product Hunt is one opportunity that he points to as an example. It’s an established launch pad to an audience of extreme early adopters that can provide a seed of a real user base — Hyper itself is launching via a post on the platform. 

I’ll let the Hyper team’s words spell out what they say is its thesis:

Hyper believes that every company (B2B or B2C) needs access to distribution channels to find customers, users, and talented employees to join their teams. Hyper works with early-stage companies at three key junctures in a startup’s journey:

• Initial customer acquisition and validation (often at the pre-Seed stage)
• First product/company launch and hiring (often at the Seed stage)
• Scaling customer acquisition and fundraising (before the Series A)

Founders who go through the program will remain a part of the tight-knit Hyper founder community long past their Series A.

Over the past few months, Buckley says that Product Hunt has grown headcount by around 50% in part to boost its ability to act as an enhanced distribution channel. 

A short list of some of the people involved as advisors, mentors or investors themselves includes Alexis & Serena Williams, Alfred Lin of Sequoia, Garry Tan of Initialized, Harry Stebbings, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Naval Ravikant, Owen van Natta, Ryan Hoover, Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic and Sriram Krishnan of a16z. 

It’s a pretty eclectic group, but if you squint you can see the shape of the ambitions that Hyper has reflected in the parties involved. A mix of media, venture and product figures is probably the right way to go if you want to back yourself into a media empire funded by venture capital returns. 

They’ll be building additional media products as well, especially ones that focus on areas of hyper growth and high interest in order to both generate deal flow and to feature companies in the portfolio. Interestingly, unlike many marketing-operations-disguised-as-journalistic-enterprises, Curtis says that they want these to be real, functioning media companies and that startups funded by Hyper will be presented on those sites and platforms in clearly defined sections that make it clear that they are part of the program. 

As an example, the team is careful to state that Product Hunt will remain a ‘neutral platform’ for launching products and that Hyper companies will get clearly marked slots on the site. 

Surrounding those placements will be content that is produced by editorial media arms independent of the fund (though, in the end, funded by the profits of the fund). They’re not quite up to giving specifics about how they’re going to power these media properties initially but the funds management fees as well as most of its profits from carry will go towards cultivating the distro side. The other part of the ‘most’ will, one assumes, go to the individual investors. Curtis says that there could be other ways to obtain capital to speed up this process that is allowed by the unique structure of Hyper like debt or equity financing. 

Hyper itself is trying to establish two lines of business. A portfolio of wholly owned companies like Product Hunt (which still counts AngelList as a majority investor and Ravikant on its board) and other new media brands. And the other component which includes the portfolio of Hyper funds (plural theirs) and a founder program that includes mentorship, twice-a-year-events, and other future efforts — eventually. 

The mentorship component that Hyper hopes to add for founders in the fund is an 8-week founder program that includes individuals from “partners” like Andreeessen Horowitz, AngelList, Sequoia Capital, the Twenty Minute VC Podcast and Product Hunt helping founders to solve ‘key challenges’. Some of the participants are investors in Hyper, though none of the funds participated themselves The group includes some close to home figures as well, in Product Hunt GM Ashley Higgins and founder Ryan Hoover.

The program will also offer office hours with experts, an exclusive Product Hunt launch event and a Public Hyper Demo Day and Investor Demo Day to participate in within a year of being in the program.

The Hyper concept sounds fresh in combination, if not in components. An enormous amount of ink has been spilled, for instance, on the spinning up of the VC media apparatus as a bullhorn for a tech-optimism POV. But most of that content is understood to be talking the firm’s book and not intended to be seen as journalism. Though the media publications that Hyper is planning on forming have yet to be realized, there is enough of a differentiating spark here that could make it a unique play that attempts to straddle the worlds of editorial and venture. 

I have thoughts about the way that venture and media interact, as you might imagine given what I do and waves hands at the masthead where we are having this little chat. Combining a media and investing apparatus is not a new concept — as TechCrunch readers will know. But it’s not without its complexities. Enthusiast media that works does so for a couple of major reasons, in my opinion:

• Genuine obsession with the subject matter. The writers, editors and even business people involved must have a crazy thirst to understand and contextualize the subjects that they write about. There can be no in-between here, as they are speaking every day to an audience that is just as obsessed with it as they are and can detect any level of commitment to it that is less than 100%. 
• A patina of either trust or candor built over time. You can go into it with some bona-fides that you buy with a big name hire or series of them, and the reputations that they’ve built elsewhere. But if you’re full of shit, you’re going to lose — no matter how well positioned and funded you are. You may ‘win’ long term by turning what you’re doing into something else, a broad interest publication in niche clothing, for instance. But you won’t win at the enthusiast level.
• An intense, punishing commitment to momentum. The further you delve into any niche, the more knowledgeable your audience will be. This means that you must produce uniquely insightful, crisp, well-researched content every day and you must do it with a level of granularity that surpasses anyone else in your niche. Your audience lives and breathes this stuff so if you’re telling them things they’ve already read on 3 message boards, in private texts or in their work slack then you’ve lost. You’ve got to get subcutaneous and not just superficially so. 

And when you add in a layer of complexity that is proudly announcing your vested interests in the success of particular companies, it just ups the level of difficulty massively. I don’t think that it’s at all impossible to run a fund that feeds a media arm, but it’s definitely a ‘doing a really hard thing while also on fire’ kind of operation.

Which doesn’t mean that Hyper can’t pull it off. Product Hunt is the model for what they’re trying to do, creating close-to-the-ground media that attracts as many operators and investors as it does early adopters. Duplicating that in a variety of publications and events, however, is not easy at all. 

I will say that a bet on distribution as value add is still one of the better stabs that I’ve seen lately. The capital is, as Buckley told me, readily and generically available. And having your calling card be “we can help the first 10, 20 or 30 thousand people know that you even exist” isn’t a bad situation at all. It works.

This is, after all, what we do at TechCrunch, we just don’t take a cut. 

The announcement today is the Hyper the fund, and the fact that they’re opening applications to a small cohort of 25 companies. The applications are planned to open for roughly 4 weeks every quarter and the deadline for this tranche is August 10th, 2021 at midnight PT. The second cohort will open in November 2021. 

The fund is taking applicants worldwide though notes that some countries present legal complexities for investment. 

Four months after announcing its last round, Employment Hero has closed another $140 million AUD (about $103 million USD) in funding. The Series E was led by Insight Partners, the venture capital firm known for its ScaleUp program to help tech companies accelerate their growth.

Employment Hero is an automated human resources, payroll and benefits platform for SMEs. Founded in Sydney in 2014, the company is now expanding into Southeast Asian and Western European markets. Its previous funding announcement was a $45 million AUD Series D announced in March, led by online job platform SEEK, at the company’s previous valuation of about $250 million AUD.

Now Employment Hero has bumped up its valuation $800 million in less than six months by reaching 133% year-on- recurring revenue growth. Co-founded by Ben Thompson, its chief executive officer, and chief technology officer Dave Tong, Employment Hero is used by 6,000 businesses, with a total of 250,000 employees. Over the past 12 months, the company says $14 billion in gross wages was processed through the platform.

“We always thought Insight Partners would be a great partner,” Thompson told TechCrunch. “We had been speaking with them for years, so when they asked if we would consider raising, we agreed it was definitely worth exploring. As it turned out all the stars were aligned, and we reached a deal that made sense and allowed us to keep scaling without having to switch back into capital raising mode.”

Over the past year, Employment Hero grew its headcount by 65% to 325 full-time employees and now has a permanent remote-first work model. The new capital will be used to hire for its engineering teams and for the company’s continuing international expansion.

Employment Hero began entering new markets in October 2020, launching localized versions of the platform in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Malaysia and Singapore.

Thompson said Employment Hero will continue focusing on Malaysia and Singapore until the end of this year, while looking at ways to cross-promote SEEK’s products and services in Asia. After that, it plans to localize Employment Hero for Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Vietnam.

To localize the platform, Employment Hero starts with employment contracts, policies, leave rules and pay rules. Then it integrates with tax authorities and pension funds, before focusing on local benefits providers to get discounts on non-discretionary expenses for users, like health insurance and mortgages.

During the pandemic, Thompson said Employment Hero’s teams shifted their focus to help companies adapt to a distributed workforce. Some of the services it launched include Global Teams, a professional employer organization (PEO) solution that pushes job openings to more than 1,700 career boards and helps companies onboard and manage remote workers. Employment Hero is also working with recruitment agencies that will help employers find remote workers.

Thompson said, “while it’s still early days for Global Teams, it’s definitely popular,” with dozens of companies in Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand using it to employ people in 21 countries.

Employment Hero’s Remote Work Report, released in June, found that 94% of respondents want to continue working remotely at least one day a week, up from 2% a year ago. Meanwhile, 74% of employers surveyed told Employment Hero that they plan to keep flexible working arrangements after COVID restrictions are lifted, up from 64% in 2020.

“We are seeing employers embrace remote work as a competitive advantage because it broadens their available talent pool and helps retain and engage their employees,” Thompson said. “Employers are now asking, how should we do things differently if we want to continue working remotely forever? This requires real intention and education, but it’s a whole lot better than losing great employees by forcing them back to office five days a week.”

In a statement about the investment, Insight Partners managing director Rachel Geller said, “We have been following Employment Hero’s journey for four years and have seen the impressive and consistent growth experience by the company. Its customer-centric solutions have been embraced globally by the small and medium business community and we are looking forward to supporting them through this next phase of their expansion journey.”

This morning Mural, a startup that builds digital collaboration software with a focus on visual presentation, announced that it has closed a $50 million Series C. The new capital, co-led by prior investors Insight Partners and Tiger Global, values the startup at more than $2 billion.

Previously, Mural was valued at around $500 million when it closed a $118 million round last August. Mural also raised a $23 million Series A at the start of 2020.

Mural’s product focuses around a visual collaboration space, akin to a digital whiteboard. Given its product focus, it’s not hard to see why the startup had a good COVID cycle; the world’s companies moved to remote work en masse, leaving offices empty and physical whiteboards un-scribbled. Services like Mural helped fill that, and similar voids. TechCrunch caught up with Mural CEO Mariano Suarez-Battan and Insight managing director Nikhil Sachdev to learn more about deal mechanics.

The new unicorn also disclosed that customers generating $100,000 in ARRR tripled to more than 100 organizations in the last year, and that it now has seven customers bringing in at least $1,000,000 in ARR apiece. That second figure is up from a “couple” seven-figure deals at the start of 2020, a figure that the company disclosed at the time of its Series A.

Per Suarez-Battan, Mural has continued the torrid pace of growth that made it a breakout company in 2020. In the last year the company has tripled its annual recurring revenue (ARR), he said. That’s the same pace of growth that the company disclosed when it raised its Series B in Q3 2020. As the company has now disclosed that it has tripled in each of the last two years, we can infer that the company has reached material top line scale.

Mural — known as Mural.ly through 2019 — however, was growing before the pandemic, and doesn’t appear to think that the eventual conclusion of the pandemic will be too deleterious to its growth rates. In a discussion concerning the company’s path after COVID-19, Suarez-Battan noted that many of his company’s customers have multiple offices in disparate locations. Those concerns, even if they returned to a fully in-office setup in time, would still have need for Mural and its software, goes the argument.

With more companies flipping to hybrid-friendly work environments, part-time office cultures, or fully remote organization structures, Mural’s market is moving toward its vision of collaboration at scale sans the need to be sitting next to the people with whom you are trying to be creative. Underscoring the point, Sachdev told TechCrunch that COVID was a “huge pull forward” in a trend that was long underway: remote work. He believes that companies executing collaborative, or creative work at a distance was a reality merely accelerated by COVID, not created by it.

The dollar amount of the Series C may seem a bit odd. Why did Mural raise less in its Series C than it did in its preceding Series B? Mural still had most of its previous round on its books, Sachdev said. Our read from that fact is that Mural simply didn’t need to raise another huge round. So, it didn’t.

Insider demand led to the funding event, which for Mural represents incredibly modest dilution (it sold around 4% of its shares at its new valuation) and a massive upsizing in its valuation (a little under 4x). Effectively, Mural was just handed the ability to go out into the market and buy whatever smaller companies and talent it wants, without worrying about dilution or cash concerns, respectively.

Quick growth wasn’t the only reason that Tiger and Insight wanted to buy more of Mural. According to the Insight MD, the startup has retained strong levels of efficiency as it has scaled, venture-speak for an ability to rapidly expand revenues while not similarly boosting the pace at which cash is consumed. It’s the venture equivalent of crowing about operating leverage, essentially.

Suarez-Battan also emphasized during his interview with TechCrunch that his company’s net dollar retention, or NDR, is strong. NDR is a key metric for modern software companies, as marginal revenue gains from existing customers are cheaper to secure than net-new accounts. Again, the theme that the metric details is efficient growth.

There’s lots to Mural worth our chewing on in time. The loop of consultants using its service, leading to new customers. How the firm works with consultants, period. The list goes on. Let’s see how quickly Mural can keep growing in the second half of 2021. The next time we chat with the firm it will be time to harangue it for hard revenue figures. Let’s see how that goes!

People shopping around for a fitness app already have a plethora to pick from: MyFitnessPal, Noom and Lifesum, to name a few. Founded in India, HealthifyMe is betting that users around the world will prefer its range of customizable health programs. The Bangalore-based company announced today it has closed a $75 million Series C from LeapFrog and Khosla Ventures, with plans to grow its user base in India, Southeast Asia and North America.

HealthifyMe is the first Indian health tech startup LeapFrog has invested in, and Khosla Ventures’ largest investment in India to date. The company did not disclose its post-money valuation, but co-founder and chief executive officer Tushar Vashisht told TechCrunch it is now at “soonicorn” status.

Unilever Ventures, Elm and Healthquad also participated in the round along with returning investors Chiratae Ventures, Inventus Capital and Sistema Asia Capital. HealthifyMe has now raised more than $100 million in total.

Vashisht said HealthifyMe is India’s top health and fitness app, but its long-term goal is to become the global leader. In North America, it is popular among Indian expat and Indian American communities, and now it will target other customer segments, too.

HealthifyMe’s products include HealthifySmart, which uses AI-based tech to customize diet plans for users, and HealtifyCoach, which also includes live conversations with coaches. During the pandemic, it launched two products: HealthifyPlus, for people who are managing chronic conditions like diabetes, polycystic ovary syndrome, high cholesterol or hypertension, and HealthifyStudio, with live workout classes.

The app also has a AI-based nutritionist called Ria that is trained for cuisines in different markets through a combination of user-tracked data, guidance from local nutritionists and databases from sources like the United States Department of Agriculture.

HealthifyMe will work with LeapFrog’s research and development hub, ImpactLabs, to develop more programs for people with chronic health conditions.

 

HealthifySmart and HealthifyStudio, its newest products, already contribute 25% to the company’s line. HealthifyMe also says it doubled its user base and revenue over the last year, recently surpassing 25 million downloads, and is currently on target to reach $50 million in annualized recurring revenue within the next six months. It has about 1,500 trainers and coaches on the platform, with plans to add 1,000 more to support its expansion.

Since HealthifyMe began operating first in cost-sensitive markets, it started using AI early on to scale efficiently, Vashisht said. As a result, it is able to offer products at lower prices than its competition.

“Today in the U.S., you have free DIY calorie counting solutions like MyFitnessPal and expensive human-assisted coaching and diet solutions like Noom and WeightWatchers,” said Vashisht. “But nothing in the middle exists that allows one to track nutrition and calories while getting advice at an affordable price point.”

About 25% of HealthifyMe’s revenue comes from outside of India, including Singapore and Malaysia. When it enters a new market, the company localizes its services using a playbook.

“We begin by building a food database with local foods. We also tailor our search algorithms and app language to ensure accurate food searches take place in the app,” Vashisht said. “Next, we hire 50 diet and fitness coaches locally to cater to the region’s population via the platform and launch HealthifyCoach locally. Once we have sufficient data, we were able to retrain and refactor our AI to suit local preferences.” That is how the company launched HealthifySmart in Singapore and Malaysia, and it plans to do the same thing in North America.

The company measures the efficacy of its program through user-reported statistics and working with researchers like Sridhar Narayan, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, to verify and analyze its data. Vashisht said average paying subscribers lose about 8 pounds in 180 days, while the top 10% lose more than 20 pounds.

For its HealthifyPlus customers, the company has seen a statistically significant impact on their Hemoglobin A1C (Hb1AC), LDL cholesterol and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) levels. Vashisht added that HealthifyMe plans to publish its results in the coming months, and also hopes to integrate with diagnostics providers in the future to track clinical indicators.

Part of the new funding will be used to double HealthifyMe’s current engineering and design teams, including through acqui-hires, with the company looking for digital health and wellness companies to buy. It will also fill senior leadership roles in operations, marketing, human relations and technology.

It’s been a wild 2021 for NFT auction marketplace OpenSea. The startup was exceedingly well-positioned in a niche space when NFTs exploded earlier this year seemingly out of nowhere. Since then, the startup has found its user base expanding, the total volume of sales skyrocketing and more investor dollars being thrown at them.

The startup announced in March, it had closed a $23 million Series A, and now some four months later, the company tells TechCrunch it has raised another $100 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $1.5 billion valuation. Other investors in the round include Coatue, CAA, Michael Ovitz, Kevin Hartz, Kevin Durant and Ashton Kutcher.

Despite a fall from stratospheric heights in the early summer, the broader NFT market has still been chugging along and OpenSea is continuing to see plenty of action. The startup saw $160 million in sales last month and is on track to blow past that figure this month, CEO Devin Finzer tells TechCrunch.

One of the company’s clearer growth roadblocks has been infrastructure issues native to the Ethereum blockchain that its marketplace has been built around. The Ethereum blockchain, which has a number of network upgrades outstanding, has struggled to keep up with the NFT boom at times, leaving users footing the bill with occasionally pricey “gas” fees needed to mint an item or make a transaction. Though these fees have largely cooled down in recent weeks, OpenSea is aiming to make a move towards long-term scalability by announcing that they plan to bring support for several more blockchains to its platform.

They’re starting with Polygon, a popular Layer 2 Ethereum blockchain which boasts a more energy-efficient structure that will allow OpenSea to entirely eliminate gas fees for creators, buyers and sellers on that blockchain. Losing these fees may give OpenSea a better shot at expanding its ambitions, which include finding a future for NFTs in the gaming world and in the events space, Finzer says.

Beyond Polygon, OpenSea has plans to integrate with Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain as well as Tezos down the road, the company says.

Operating across multiple blockchains could create some headaches for consumers operating across platforms with differing levels of support for each network. Some NFT investors are also more hesitant to buy items on blockchains they see as less time-tested than Ethereum, worrying that newer chains may lose support over time. But overall, the user-friendly changes will likely be well-received by the wider NFT community which has seen the explosion in new interest stress-test its systems and highlight need for user interface and user experience improvements.

Pan-European early-stage VC Speedinvest has reached the final close for its second fund aimed at specialist marketplaces and consumer startups. Aside from institutional LPs, the €60m / $70.8M fund was also backed by marketplace founders and executives including those from Ankorstore, Vinted, TradingView, Planetly, and others. Jörg Gerbig, COO of JustEatTakeAway and co-founder of Lieferando, also participated.
 
Four investments have been made from the fund so far including freight and logistics B2B marketplace Yolda, which announced a $1.9m seed round in June.

It’s also invested in Byrd’s €16m Series B, digital coaching platform CoachHub’s €30m Series B and TIER Mobility’s $60M.

Mathias Ockenfels, General Partner leading the Marketplaces and Consumer team, said: “Themes we are focusing on in this fund are plentiful, and include everything from B2B to B2C marketplaces as well as the sharing, subscription and circular economies.”

Speedinvest has raised over €100M dedicated towards marketplaces and platforms across two generations of the fund, since 2017.

The “subscribe to your car” movement has been taking off in recent years, with the appearance of Fleks in the UK (Europe), Cazoo (after its acquisition of Drover), Care by Volvo Hertz, to name just a few.

Into this space has appeared imove out of Norway, with what appears, at least, to be a new twist on the whole thing: a white-label platform offered to industry to enable it to offer these car subscription services under their own brands. imove’s platform allows users to subscribe to electric vehicles from eighteen different manufacturers and over 50 different models.

The startup has now closed a €19M / $22.3M Series A round led by pan-European online car market AutoScout24. It was joined by the VCs Norselab and Idekapital, as well as the Norwegian state climate investment company Nysnø. Existing owner Hedin Automotive also joined. The round consists of a new equity issue of €13M combined with a €6M secondary sale of shares.

Founded in 2018, imove allows a company in automotive, finance, insurance, or even electricity and telecoms, to offer car subscriptions as an alternative to car ownership or leasing.

The team is led by co-founders Hans Kristian Aas (CEO) and Gunnar Birkenfeldt (CPO), who are jumping on a trend whereby (according to some estimates) some 20-30% of new car sales globally are predicted to be switched to car subscriptions by 2025.

Hans Kristian Aas, co-founder, and CEO said: “Amazing customer feedback, strong unit economics, and an industry ripe for change told us that the timing was right for pushing the ‘Scale button’.”

AutoScout24 is a large, pan-European online car market, and will act as a distribution channel for imove’s electric vehicle subscription service.

“With this investment, AutoScout24 clearly positions itself at the forefront of supporting new ownership models for consumers and customers, and makes a decisive step in supporting the EV introduction,” said Chief Strategy Officer at AutoScout24, Borja Muller.

While imove is clearly moving fast in Europe, there are several players offering technology for car subscription and fleet management. These include Ridecell (US-based), Clutch (US-based, owned by Cox Automotive), Fleetonomy (Israel) and Vulog (France). So there’s plenty to play for in this race yet.

The global Covid-19 pandemic had a chilling effect on a number of industries and their workforces, resulting in mass furloughs and layoffs. But now, with countries now taking steps back to “normal”, that has been leading, in many cases, back to a hiring surge. Today, SmartRecruiters, one of the companies that has built software to handle that process more smoothly, is announcing $110 million in funding to seize the moment.

The funding, a Series E, is coming in at a $1.5 billion valuation, the company confirmed. Silver Lake Waterman is leading this round, with previous backers Insight Partners, and Mayfield Fund also participating.

The investment will be used in two areas. First, SmartRecruiters plans to continue expanding business — its primary customers are large enterprises with Visa, Square, McDonald’s, Ubisoft, FireEye, Biogen, Equinox and Public Storage among them, and the plan will be to bring on more of these globally. Jerome Ternynck, SmartRecruiters’ CEO and founder, pointed out that one of its clients made a move recently in which it had to swiftly ramp up by 10,000 people in 90 days.

“That is the scale of the great rehire that we are aiming to serve,” he said.

And second, it plans to hire and invest more in product. Specifically, Ternynck said the company is looking to build more intelligence into its platform, so that it can help customers find ideal matches for roles and provide them with tools to automate and reduce the busy work of managing a recruitment process.

This is a notable area for growth, and one that smaller startups have also identified and are building to fix: just yesterday, one of them, Dover, announced a Series A.

Ternynck likes to describe SmartRecruiters as “the Salesforce of recruiting”, by which he means that it provides a system of record for large enterprises who can manage 100% of the process of recruitment, from sourcing candidates to hire.

“In recruiting tech, we are the mothership,” he said, with some 600 vendors integrated into its platform — a mark of how fragmented the wider industry really is.

(Salesforce, incidentally, is an investor in SmartRecruiters, and while right now it’s not directly working with its portfolio company to build recruitment into what it operates as essentially a massive CRM behemoth, it’s an interesting prospect and seems like a no-brainer that it might try to some day. Ternynck would not comment…)

There are already a lot of application tracking systems in the market that can handle the basics of logging candidates and managing their progress through the screening, interview, references, and hiring/rejection cycle — Ternynck, in fact founded and sold one of the pioneers in that space, But the problem with these is that they are limited and often work within their own silos. He refers to these ATS systems as “the first generation” of recruitment software, a generation that is now getting replaced.

There are some big changes driving that evolution, and specifically SmartRecruiters’ growth. One key area is the bigger shift in “digital transformation”, precipitated by the pandemic but also a bigger shift to cloud-based computing and evolutions in big data management. Fragmentation is rife in recruiting, but we now are equipped in the world of IT with many, many ways of navigating that and using the wide amount of information out there to our advantage.

But there is another, more epistemological shift, too. Recruitment, and talent in general, has become a critical part of how a company conceives of its future success. Get the right people on board and you will grow. Fail to hire correctly and you will not, and you might even fail.

“This round and our progression signals the fact that CEOs have been forced to care more about recruiting,” he said. They want want to hire the best, he added, but that is fundamentally different from how recruiting has traditionally been approached, which is focused on cost per hire.

“This means recruiting is coming out of the administration function and into value add and sales and marketing,” he added. (That’s another interesting parallel with Dover which has gone so far as to conceive of its recruitment approach as “orchestration”, a word more commonly associated with sales software.)

The pandemic has had an impact here, too: employees and “hires” today are not what they used to be. It has become more acceptable to work remotely, and what people have come to expect out of jobs, and what roles they are coming from when applying, are all so different, and that also demands a different kind of platform to engage with them.

Indeed, that bigger area — sometimes referred to as “the future of work” — is part of what attracted this investment.

“Hiring talent and building human capital is more complex and important than ever, and SmartRecruiters is well positioned to help companies attract and land top talent,” said Shawn O’Neill, Managing Director and Group Head, Silver Lake Waterman, in a statement. “Their scale and customer growth are testament to their strong leadership and industry leading platform. We are excited to help fuel SmartRecruiters’ next growth chapter.”

Interestingly, Ternynck noted that even despite the mass layoffs and furloughs experienced in some industries in the last year and a half, SmartRecruiters has seen business grow, even through some of the worst moments of Covid-19. Over the last 12 months, bookings have grown by 70%, he said. That’s a mark of how recruiting priorities are indeed changing, regardless of whether it’s a SmartRecruiters, or another kind of company entirely — and there are many, from Taleo and Cornerstone, through to smaller hopefuls like Dover, and even Salesforce — who might reap the spoils longer term.