Author: azeeadmin

Kikoff, a personal finance platform aimed at helping consumers build credit, announced today that it has raised $30 million in a Series B round.

The capital is in addition to the $12.5 million the startup raised across previously unannounced seed and Series A rounds, which were both led by Lightspeed Venture partners.

Portage Ventures led Kickoff’s Series B, which included participation from Lightspeed, GGV, Coatue and Core Innovation Capital. Previous backers of the company include NBA star Steph Curry, Wex CEO Melissa Smith and Teresa Ressel, former CFO of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

CEO Cynthia Chen and CTO Christophe Chong co-founded the San Francisco-based company in late 2019 with the goal of helping consumers without a credit history establish one, and helping those with credit histories to continue building credit. The pair came from “low to moderate income” families, Chen said, and say they want to help others who also come from similar economic backgrounds. Chen grew up in Beijing before coming to the U.S. for college on a scholarship and says she was struck by the experience of her parents having to borrow money from family and friends in order to purchase a TV.

While the company declined to reveal hard revenue figures, Chen did say that Kikoff has “hundreds of thousands” of customers after being out of beta for half a year.

Kikoff’s product, the “Kikoff Credit Account,” is the first of a planned suite of offerings all aimed at improving consumers’ financial health.

“There are many Americans who don’t come from affluent families and have tons of student loan debt,” Chen said. “For them and so many others, we wanted to create a better way to build good credit than existing offers in the market.” While anyone can use its platform, Chen says the vast majority of its customers are millennials and GenZers as they are most in need of a way to build credit.

With Kikoff, the pair aim to give people not only a way to build a credit history, but also a way to increase consumer financial literacy. Rather than provide a debit or credit card that can be used anywhere, Kikoff restricts the use of its line of credit to an online store it’s created. Users can purchase things like e-books covering a variety of finance-related topics such as how to plan and budget, or profit from trading bitcoin. It also has a selection of courses that it has purchased resell rights for, covering topics such as personal finance education, or how to set up an e-commerce store or even how to learn Python programming skills.

“When a consumer purchases something from our store, [that] item is going to help that person improve his or her financial habits or help him or her make money by making smarter investments, or setting up their small business or learning skills,” Chen told TechCrunch.

The company also does not charge any interest on its credit line or fees for the financing.

“There’s no cost of borrowing money,” she said. Instead, Kikoff collects revenue by taking the margin between the wholesale price for the items it sells in its store and the retail price that customers pay.

To sign up, customers first apply for a $500 revolving line of credit that can be used for purchases at Kikoff’s online store. The company touts that within months, its customers “can become eligible for better interest rates, competitive credit cards and home mortgages,” among other things within a relatively short period of about 45 days. 

Kikoff has intentionally worked to help its customers build credit in what Chen describes as “a very financially responsible way.”

“That’s why they are able to only use the product within our proprietary online store, and we have a number of affordable items in the store for them to purchase,” she told TechCrunch. “So it is relatively easy for them to not overspend or make any kind of impulse purchase that they later cannot really afford to pay.”

Lightspeed Partner Ansaf Kareem said he could empathize with the experiences of Chen and Chong in having to create and build credit for the first time, “especially as immigrants and first-generation Americans.”

“A credit score holds the keys to your financial future, yet so many Americans struggle with creating and building credit,” he said. “Adjacent products may let you check your credit score, but do not provide tools or guidance to improve it without charging fees or asking for a large up-front cash commitment,” he added. “Kikoff built a product that provides real value through a simple, no fee structure to initiate and build credit. And they are just getting started.”

Kikoff’s executive team certainly has an impressive background in fintech. Chen previously served as Figure’s Chief Risk Officer and she held senior executive roles at Capital One and OnDeck. Chong was former head of growth at Lime and led growth teams at Facebook and Square. Andrew Brix, Kikoff’s head of product was employee No. 15 at Credit Karma and served as its director of product management. He also was a senior product manager at E-Trade. Patrick Glover, head of marketing, worked at both Plaid and Square and Vinni Bala, head of operations, is former CMO and Chief Credit Officer at Deserve.

Other companies with similar goals that have raised venture funding as of late include Tomo Credit and Welcome Tech, among others.

FightCamp, an interactive at-home training system for boxing/kickboxing, is announcing this morning that it has raised a $90M round from a long list of investors, including quite the roster of famous fighters.

FightCamp pairs smart sensors (“punch trackers” worn under your boxing gloves) with a subscription-based stream of training videos. As you punch your way through a session, it’ll track things like punch count and speed over time. To oversimplify it a bit, think Peloton for punching.

The company tells me that this round was led by NEA and Connect Ventures — the latter a two-headed beast made up of NEA and the Hollywood talent firm Creative Artists Agency. Also investing: Supercell CEO Iikka Paananen, ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman, Usher, and Katheryn Winnick (star of the TV series Vikings, not to mention a ridiculously accomplished martial artist.) Oh, and of course, a bunch of folks who are very well known for punching: Mike Tyson, Floyd Mayweather, Georges St-Pierre, and UFC heavyweight champ (and thrower of the world’s hardest punch, no joke) Francis Ngannou.

While FightCamp is currently iOS only, that’ll hopefully change before too long; in a press release about the round, the company says it plans to put the funds toward international expansion, growing its subscription content library, and building an Android offering.

 

The company’s kit costs anywhere from $439 – $1349, depending on what you need. $1219 gets you a free-standing punching bag, a mat to go beneath it, boxing gloves, and the punch trackers. Already have the rest of the gym gear, and just want the trackers? That drops the price down to $439. The monthly membership, meanwhile, costs $39.

FightCamp started its life in 2016 as “Hykso”, focusing initially on the sale of the punch tracking hardware. As the company shifted focus to include subscription content in 2018, the “FightCamp” name took over; now it seems to be used almost exclusively.

The company tells me that they’d raised $8M before this round, bringing its total funding to $98M.

Virgin Orbit is set to launch a payload that includes satellites it’s delivering for tis first commercial customers. The launch is set to happen sometime within a launch window that opens at 6 AM PT (9 AM ET) and continues through 8 AM PT (11 AM ET), taking off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.

This is the first mission following Virgin Orbit’s successful orbital demonstration launch in January, and also the first that the company will be live-streaming, providing never-before-seen views of its carrier aircraft and the mid-air launch of its LauncherOne two-stage rocket as they happen. Virgin Orbit’s launch system uses a modified 747 to carry its small rocket to a high altitude, where it releases the rocket from the aircraft’s wing, which then ignites its own engines and flies the rest of the way to its destination in low-Earth orbit (LEO).

Virgin’s approach is very different from the traditional vertical rocket launch employed by companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab, and after years of testing and development, the company opened the door for commercial operations with its demonstration launch earlier this year. As it ramps operations, it’s hoping that its launch model will demonstrate flexibility, since it can launch from almost any traditional runway, while meeting all the needs of small satellite companies looking to get their spacecraft to LEO.

The launch livestream above is set to begin at around 5:30 AM PT (8:30 AM ET).

Istanbul in Turkey continues to prove itself as very fertile ground for casual gaming startups, which appear to be growing from small seedlings into sizable trees. In the latest development, Dream Games — a developer of mobile puzzle games — has raised $155 million in funding, a Series B that values the startup at $1 billion.

This is a massive leap for the company, which raised $50 million (the largest Series A in Turkey’s startup history) only 3.5 months ago. This latest round is being co-led by Index Ventures and Makers Fund, with Balderton Capital, IVP and Kora also participating. It also comes in the wake of a bigger set of deals in the world of gaming and developers in Turkey, the most prominent of which saw Zynga acquire Peak Games for $1.8 billion, amid other acquisitions. Dream is one of several startups in the region founded by alums from Peak.

The focus of the funding, and currently of Dream Games itself, is Royal Match, a puzzle game (iOS, Android) that launched globally in March.

The game has been a huge hit for Dream, with 6 million monthly active users and $20 million/month in revenues from in-game purchases (not ads), according to figures from AppAnnie. (A source close to the company confirmed the figures are accurate, but Dream did not disclose its revenue numbers or revenues directly.) This has catapulted it into the top-20 grossing games categories in the U.S., U.K., and Germany, the same echelon as much older and bigger titles like Candy Crush and Homescapes.

“The funding will be used for heavy user acquisition in every channel and every geography,” Soner Aydemir, co-founder and CEO, Dream Games, told me in an interview. He said Asia would be a focus in that, specifically Japan, South Korea and China. “Our main target is to scale the game so that it becomes one of the biggest games in the global market.”

The world of mobile gaming has in many respects been a very cyclical and fickle one: today’s hot title becomes tomorrow’s has-been, while for developers, they can go through dozens of development processes and launches (and related costs) before they find a hit, if they find a hit. The role of app-install ads and other marketing tools to juice numbers has also been a problematic lever for growth: take away the costs of running those and often the house of cards falls apart.

Aydemir agrees, and while the company will be investing in those aforementioned in-game ads to encourage more downloads of Royal Flush, he also said that this strategy can work, but only if the fundamentals of the game are solid, as is the case here.

“If you don’t have good enough metrics, even with all the money in the world it’s impossible to scale,” he said. “But our LTV [lifetime value] is high, and so we think it can be scaled in a sustainable way because of the quality of the game. It always depends on the product.”

In addition to its huge growth, Dream has taken a very focused approach with Royal Flush, working on it for years before finally releasing it.

“We spent so much time on tiny details, so many tests over several years to create the dynamics of the game,” he said. “But we also have a feel for it,” he added, referring to the team’s previous lives at Peak Games. “Our users really appreciate this approach.”

For now, too, the focus will just one the one game, he said. Why not two, I asked?

“We believe in Pixar’s approach,” Aydemir said. “When Pixar started, it was very low frequency, a movie every 2-3 years but eventually the rate increased. And it will be similar for us. This year we need to focus on Royal Match but if we can find a way to create other games, we will.”

He added that the challenge — one that many startups know all too well — is that building a new product, in this case a new game, can take the focus away when you are a small team and also working on sustaining and maintaining a current game. “That is the most difficult and challenging part. If we can manage it we will be successful; otherwise we will fail because our business model is basically creating new IP.” He added that it’s likely that another game will be released out into the world at the beginning of next year.

The focus, in any case, was one of the selling points for its investors. “The Dream Games team’s deep genre insight, laser-focus on detail and team chemistry has helped create the early success of Royal Match,” said Michael Cheung, General Partner at Makers Fund, in a statement. “We’re excited to be on the journey with them as they grow Royal Match globally.”

In terms of monetization, Dream Games is pretty firmly in the camp of “no ads, just in-app purchases,” he said. “It’s really bad for user experience and we only care about user experience, so if you put ads in, it conflicts with that.”

Some of the struggles of building new while improving old product will of course get solved with this cash, and the subsequent hiring that Dream Games can do (and it’s doing a lot of that, judging by the careers section of its website). As more startups emerge out of the country — not just in gaming but also areas like e-commerce, where startups like Getir are for example making big waves in instant grocery delivery — it will be interesting to see how that bigger talent pool evolves.

“Since its launch in early March, Royal Match has become one of the top casual puzzle titles globally, driven by once in a decade retention metrics. It speaks to the sheer quality of the title that the Dream Games team has built and the flawless polish and execution across the board,” commented Stephane Kurgan, venture partner at Index Ventures and former COO of King. Index is also the backer of Roblox, Discord, King and Supercell, in a statement.

Enterprise API security startup Noname Security has raised a $60 million Series B funding round, just six months after closing $37 million at Series A. 

The round was led by Insight Partners with Next47, Forgepoint, and The Syndicate Group (TSG) also participating, and brings Noname’s total funding to $85 million since emerging from stealth in December 2020.

The startup, which currently has a 70-strong workforce and offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, says it raised rapidly due to the fact the pandemic has fueled a growing dependence on APIs. Naturally, this proliferation of APIs has led to an increase in the number of API security incidents. Earlier this year, for example, an Experian API exposed the credit scores of nearly every American with one, and just weeks later a leaky Peloton API allowed anyone to grab users’ private account data directly from the company’s servers. Facebook, LinkedIn, Echelon, and Clubhouse have also fallen victim to scraping attacks that abuse access to APIs to pull in data about users on their platforms. 

“The need for API security was so strong and got super emphasized during the pandemic,” Oz Golan, CEO of Noname, tells TechCrunch. “We want to help organizations to leverage APIs securely, and we want to eliminate all of the API vulnerabilities out there. We don’t want another Experian incident.”

The Silicon Valley startup provides a holistic security platform that uses AI and machine learning to enable enterprises to see and secure managed and unmanaged APIs exposed by the organization, consumed by the organization, or used internally, thereby eliminating the API security blind spots. The majority of these flaws often go unnoticed for years, according to Noname, giving anyone who can find them unfettered access to an organization’s most sensitive operations.

“Even seasoned security professionals often have no idea how exposed their systems are,” Golan says.

In its six months since launch, the startup has amassed 40 technology, reseller, and channel partners, as well as “hundreds” of enterprise customers either in production or trialing the platform.

“Because of the huge traction that we have seen, we want to accelerate – expanding our sales team, marketing team, customer success, R&D. Basically growth, growth, growth,” says Golan, who previously served as director of engineering at NSO Group. 

Commenting on the funding round, Thomas Krane, principal at Insight Partners — which recently led a $75m Series C funding round in cybersecurity skills platform Immersive Labs — said: “The surging volume of APIs and the growing complexity of modern applications has led to an increase in cybersecurity obstacles. Noname came to market at just the right time with a fully realized, next-gen technology that’s making a big impact with global customers.”

API security is a hot ticket for investors right now. Last month, London-based 42Crunch raised a $17 million Series A, and just weeks later California-based Salt Security closed a $70 million Series C — bringing the total amount of funding the company has raised in the last year to $120 million.

E-commerce marketplaces continue to play a major role in how consumers buy goods online and how retailers show off and sell goods to those consumers, accounting globally for 47% of all e-commerce sales. But today, one of the startups that has built technology to help retailers build and run more direct relationships — by way of zippy websites of their own — is announcing a big round of growth funding, a sign that the marketplace model is not for everyone, and that those catering to those retailers are finding traction.

Shogun — a platform to help e-commerce businesses of all sizes built on platforms like Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce easily design and run their own responsive storefronts — has raised $67.5 million. This Series C values Shogun at $575 million, a “nice markup” on its previous valuation, said Finbarr Taylor, the company’s co-founder and CEO, in an interview.

He added that the capital will be used both to continue building out its two main products — Page Builder, a drag-and-drop page builder for Shopify merchants; and Shogun Frontend, an end-to-end headless commerce solution — as well as business development, and to build out new tech, specifically in areas like first-party data and personalization.

“We want to help companies build a destination where they can control the experience,” he said, comparing it to the physical world and the difference between Nike shoes sold at the brand’s own store versus at a big retailer like Walmart. “In a Nike store you can design an experience. In Walmart you cannot.”

Led by Insight Partners — a new investor in the startup — it also included Initialized Capital, Accel and VMG Partners. Accel led Shogun’s previous round — a $35 million Series B — announced less than a year ago, in October 2020. The startup has now raised $114.5 million.

The hike in valuation, and the rapid succession of its fundraises, are two signs of how Shogun has been doing in the last eight months — a time when e-commerce has continued to perform strongly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Another is the company’s actual growth based on the idea of making front-end tools that used to be cost-prohibitive into something affordable for even the smallest merchant.

One of the selling points for Shogun up to now has been that pages and sites built on its platform run fast: a very key detail in the world of e-commerce where shopping cart abandonment is rife and often hinges on how long people have to wait for something to load.

Page Builder — the mass-market, drag-and-drop site builder for those creating sites on top of Shopify — is now used by around 20,000 business, Taylor said, ranging from small startups through to Fortune 500 companies, with customers including brands like K-Swiss, Leesa, Rumpl, BeardBrand, MVMT and Fila. He said that merchants collectively are seeing GMV (gross merchandise value, or total amount sold) in the “billions of dollars” through their sites.

(For a point of reference, Shogun told me it had 15,000 customers back in October; growing 5,000 in the last eight months is the same amount of growth as last year.)

Shogun’s newer product, Frontend, designed for mid-market to enterprise customers and positioned as a “headless” solution aimed more at web designers and others building more customized experiences, now has hundreds of customers and grew . “Apple’s site is beautiful, but it cost millions to make,” Taylor said. “We want anyone to be able to build those exceptional e-commerce experiences.” Frontend has grown 10x in the last year, Taylor said.

GMV across all of Shogun’s business grew by 255% in the last two years.

The rise of services like Shogun’s underscores a swing we have seen among e-commerce companies that are looking for a more autonomy and control in how they engage with customers. Sites like Amazon have long been seen as a way to tap into a large population of shoppers, as well as solid fulfillment and shipping infrastructure to store, package, distribute and deliver products.

There has even been a sharp rise in “roll-up” plays like Thrasio to help consolidate merchants on these platforms to leverage even better economies of scale on details like marketing, customer analytics and manufacturing, which marketplaces like Amazon do not (yet?) handle.

But none of that still replaces the ability to set your own destiny.

Now, the rise of services like Shopify, BigCommerce and Spryker (also backed by Insight Partners) to help manage the backend; Stripe, PayPal and others to manage payments; and others like ShipBob to manage the logistics, have made it increasingly less difficult to build and run your own online experience. That takes on a stronger priority as your business grows, but even for smaller merchants, the idea of controlling your own customer experience is a compelling one.

Services like Shogun (and others like fit into that latter trend, such as Squarespace or Wix but also others like Duda), which give merchants the tools to build their own e-commerce experiences as they would like them to look, are the front ends for that strategy. Opting to take the “headless” commerce approach, apparently, is an increasing trend.

And that individualism is also where Shogun plans to double down and build more tools for its users, Taylor said.

“It’s all about direct relationships with customers,” he said, pointing out that newer changes in privacy regulation and cookies going away mean retailers can no longer rely on third-party platforms as they used to. “It’s about first party relationships. The future is way more personalized shopping online.”

That vision is also what interested investors.

“Our investment in Shogun underscores the market’s desire to see headless commerce become merchant-focused,” said Matt Gatto, managing director at Insight Ventures, in a statement. “More brands want to be able to build headless progressive web apps in a low-code environment. Those on the forefront of e-commerce want to enable web teams to build truly unique, memorable shopping experiences. Shogun is well positioned to make flexible frontends accessible to brands in a whole new way, and we’re excited to be a partner in this journey.”

When former Art Director Zac Duff started teaching a game development course online in 2015, he faced the same challenges that teachers around the globe have become all too familiar with after a pandemic-induced lockdown. So, he used his experience in 3D design to build a virtual reality classroom to make remote learning more engaging for his students. Instead of entering yet another Zoom lecture, the school gave students VR headsets to transport themselves to the Ancient Greek-inspired classroom that Duff built.

Still, Duff knew that this learning model couldn’t be easily scaled — most schools don’t have VR headsets to send out, and most teachers don’t have over a decade of game design experience to whip up a classroom with green fields and butterflies (yes, Duff made that). But he saw that there was potential for a user-friendly program that lets anyone create 3D presentations and share information in AR.

“Right at the center of it is knowledge transfer. It’s about one person giving knowledge to another person in a really effective way,” Duff told TechCrunch. He referenced products like Microsoft Powerpoint and Canva, which make it easy for the average user to create presentations and graphics that communicate their ideas. “We have those systems in 2D, but in 3D, we just didn’t have it, and it was a really complex, expensive technical process that you had to go through to build anything, and that stuck with me.”

Soon after, Duff took a Friday off from work to outline the company that would become JigSpace, which is poised to set the standard for knowledge-sharing in 3D. After launching in 2017, the JigSpace platform now has over 4 million users with a 4.8 average rating on the App Store. When you download the JigSpace app, you can interact in AR with 3D models that show how to fix a leaky sink, repair a dry wall, or even build a Lego Star Wars spacecraft. There are also educational models, or Jigs, that show how a piano works, the anatomy of the human eye, and even how the coronavirus spreads. The potential use cases for JigSpace are expansive — Duff says he hopes to work with manufacturing companies to have them make Jigs of their products. That way, let’s say you want to replace your AC filter, you can look at a 3D model in AR, rather than a black and white 2D drawing in an instruction booklet.

Today, JigSpace announced that it raised $4.7 million in Series A funding led by Rampersand, with Investible and new investors including Vulpes, and Roger Allen AM, also participating. The JigSpace app is free to use, and anyone can combine presets and templates of 3D modeled objects to create their own Jigs — the more tech savvy among us can upload up to 30 MB of files to make more customized Jigs on the free version. But the money-maker for Jigspace is its Jig Pro platform, which is designed for commercial businesses and manufacturers. Jig Pro‘s subscription for individuals is $49 per month, while the price of the enterprise offering isn’t listed online.

“The best area for us has been in durable manufacturing, because almost all manufacturing products have CAD files, so the 3D already exists,” said Duff. “Then, we’re able to work with those companies to give them the tools to create knowledge material around their products.”

Right after JigSpace launched its Pro version, it was featured in Apple’s iPhone 12 Keynote, demonstrating how the iPhone 12’s LiDAR scanner and 5G capabilities could be used to save time and money in manufacturing. JigSpace also partnered with Snapchat to create a Lens that allows you to scan kitchen items to reveal 3D Jigs that show how stuff works, from your microwave to your coffee maker.

Jig Pro’s customer base has grown 40% month-on-month since it launched in mid-2020, with the average user logging into the app at least once per day. Companies like Verizon, Volkswagen, Medtronic, and Thermo Fisher Scientific use JigSpace to develop 3D models to present to stakeholders, customers, and remote colleagues. Especially as products like Apple’s Capture emerge, it will become even easier for people to import their own 3D models into JigSpace.

Despite its commercial potential, it’s important to Duff that JigSpace always retains a free version that makes learning through AR easy.

“We want to make sure that all of the people with information they want to share, those are the people we serve, not just the technical people at the top,” Duff says. “From the beginning, my co-founder Numa Bertron and I always wanted to have a free version. Knowledge should be accessible to people in the best way possible, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be.”

Turntide Technologies, a sustainable technology developer, has announced $225 million in convertible note financing that it says will help fund projects to reduce carbon emissions in the commercial buildings, agriculture and transportation industries.

Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board led the round, along with Monashee Capital Inc. and current investor JLL Spark. Other participating investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Millennium Management and Suvretta Capital Management, bringing Turntide’s total funding to $400 million. Convertible note financing is short-term debt that will convert to equity in the form of shares of preferred stock which Turntide says will happen at a future determined valuation.

“The addition of a major national pension fund fortifies Turntide with permanent capital as we expand into new markets like electrified transport,” said Ryan Morris, Turntide’s chairman and CEO, in a statement.

Earlier this month, Turntide announced the acquisition of Hyperdrive Innovation and BorgWarner Gateshead and the subsequent launch of Turntide Transport. Using the drivetrain tech from those two U.K.-based companies, this division of Turntide is focused on modernizing legacy motor systems in the commercial transportation industry such as those found in construction equipment, high-speed rail, autonomous robots, freight trucking and shipping and air cargo. The fresh funds will also go towards Turntide Transport’s goal of creating a “one-stop powertrain platform that includes battery pack, power electronics, motor, and connected intelligence,” according to the company. 

The company says its so-called “Smart Motor System” reduces energy consumption by nearly 64%, and will address the need for sustainably electrifying more challenging markets than passenger vehicles, where most of the progress has been made to date.   

Turntide says it is working with brands such as JCB, Hitachi Rail and Volkswagen’s MAN division to further develop a motor that doesn’t use environmentally damaging rare earth materials, and that can achieve net zero climate goals, which also makes it cheaper to produce. 

The $225 million will also finance the development of a cloud-based software platform that the company expects to be released this year. The platform will integrate the Smart Motor System into different built environments and electric vehicles in a way that’s user friendly. 

“Turntide’s technology combines a redesigned electric motor wrapped in intelligent automation with cloud connectivity to dramatically improve the efficiency of building controls, electric vehicles, and agriculture,” Morris told TechCrunch. “Today, half of the world’s energy is used by electric motors and nearly half of that energy consumption is being wasted due to inefficiency and lack of intelligent controls.” 

The UK’s more expansive, post-Brexit role in digital regulation continues to be felt today via a policy change by Google which has announced that it will, in the near future, only run ads for financial products and services when the advertiser in question has been verified by the financial watchdog, the FCA.

The Google Ads Financial Products and Services policy will be updated from August 30, per Google, which specifies that it will start enforcing the new policy from September 6 — meaning that purveyors of online financial scams who’ve been relying on its ad network to net their next victim still have more than two months to harvest unsuspecting clicks before the party is over (well, in the UK, anyway).

Google’s decision to allow only regulated financial entities to run ads for financial products & services follows warnings from the Financial Conduct Authority that it may take legal action if Google continued to accept unscreened financial ads, as the Guardian reported earlier.

The FCA told a parliamentary committee this month that it’s able to contemplate taking such action as a result of no longer being bound by European Union rules on financial adverts, which do not extend to online platforms, per the newspaper’s report.

Until gaining the power to go after Google itself, the FCA appears to have been trying to combat the scourge of online financial fraud by paying Google large amounts of UK taxpayer money to fight scams with anti-scam warnings.

According to the Register, the FCA paid Google more than £600,000 (~$830k) in 2020 and 2021 to run ‘anti-scam’ ads — with the regulator essentially engaged in a bidding war with scammers to pour enough money into Google’s coffers so that regulator warnings about financial scams might appear higher than the scams themselves.

The full-facepalm situation was presumably highly lucrative for Google. But the threat of legal action appears to have triggered a policy rethink.

Writing in its blog post, Ronan Harris, a VP and MD for Google UK & Ireland, said: “Financial services advertisers will be required to demonstrate that they are authorised by the UK Financial Conduct Authority or qualify for one of the limited exemptions described in the UK Financial Services verification page.”

“This new update builds on significant work in partnership with the FCA over the last 18 months to help tackle this issue,” he added. “Today’s announcement reflects significant progress in delivering a safer experience for users, publishers and advertisers. While we understand that this policy update will impact a range of advertisers in the financial services space, our utmost priority is to keep users safe on our platforms — particularly in an area so disproportionately targeted by fraudsters.”

The company’s blog also claims that it has pledged $5M in advertising credits to support financial fraud public awareness campaigns in the UK. So not $5M in actual money then.

Per the Register, Google did offer to refund the FCA’s anti-scam ad spend — but, again, with advertising credits.

The UK parliament’s Treasury Committee was keen to know whether the tech giant would be refunding the spend in cash. But the FCA’s director of enforcement and market insight, Mark Steward, was unable to confirm what it would do, according to the Register’s report of the committee hearing.

We’ve reached out to the FCA for comment on Google’s policy change and questions about the refund situation and will update this report with any response.

In recent years the financial watchdog has also been concerned about financial scam ads running on social media platforms.

Back in 2018, legal action by a well-known UK consumer advice personality, Martin Lewis — who filed a defamation suit against Facebook — led the social media giant to add a ‘report scam ad’ button in the market as of July 2019.

However research by consumer group, Which?, earlier this year, suggested that neither Facebook nor Google had entirely purged financial scam ads — even when they’d been reported.

Per the BBC, Which?’s survey found that Google had failed to remove around a third (34%) of the scam adverts reported to it vs Facebook failing to remove over a fifth (26%).

It’s almost like the incentives for online ad giants to act against lucrative online scam ads simply aren’t pressing enough…

More recently, Lewis has been pushing for scam ads to be included in the scope of the UK’s Online Safety Bill.

The sweeping piece of digital regulation aims to tackle a plethora of so-called ‘online harms’ by focusing on regulating user generated content. However Lewis makes the point that a scammer merely needs to pay an ad platform to promote their fraudulent content for it to escape the scope of the planned rules, telling the Good Morning Britain TV program today that the situation is “ludicrous” and “needs to change”.

It’s certainly a confusing carve-out, as we reported at the time the bill was presented. Nor is it the only confusing component of the planned legislation. However on the financial fraud point the government may believe the FCA has the necessary powers to tackle the problem.

We’ve contacted the Department for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport for comment.

It is no secret that healthcare in Nigeria and most parts of Africa is not easily available and a lot of work needs to be done in that regard. However, there are instances where accessibility is taken for granted. Take for instance Nigeria where a majority of the population with some form of healthcare access would rather treat diseases than prevent them in the first place.

As a result, people get to find out about life-threatening diseases, especially non-communicable ones (NCDs), much later in their lives. Access to diagnostics and preventive care is key to addressing this situation, and Nigerian-based diagnostic startup MDaaS Global is keen on making these services readily accessible. Today, the startup also announcing the launch of its product SentinelX, has closed a seed extension round of $2.3 million to scale across Nigeria.

MDaaS, an abbreviation for medical devices-as-a-service, started back in 2016. It operates a network of tech-enabled diagnostic centers across Nigeria. Two years ago, it raised a million-dollar seed round. And in addition to the other investments secured over the last five years, the healthtech startup has raised a total of $3.7 million.

The investors in the round include lead Newtown Partners, who invested via its Imperial Venture Fund, CRI Foundation, and return investors FINCA Ventures, Techstars, and Future Africa. 

The idea for MDaaS came when co-founder and CEO Oluwasoga Oni was tasked alongside his classmates at an MIT class to develop an idea that could impact a billion lives. Coming from a medical background, he chose the one he could relate to.

“I wanted to solve the problem close to me and my dad in my early years. He had a 30-bed hospital and struggled so hard to find medical equipment that was good for him and also at a good rate,” he said to TechCrunch.

Oni started MDaaS with Opeyemi Ologun, Genevieve Barnard Oni, and Joseph McCord. With their connections in the U.S., the founders began connecting secondary medical equipment marketplace in the U.S. to Nigeria. They would import equipment, provide service support, and deploy to hospitals via rent, lease, or outright sale.

The founders did this for a while until they realized that the core problem wasn’t providing equipment pieces; it was a matter of necessity. The money doctors spent on the pieces of equipment was more than the earnings from patients. Therefore it just didn’t make financial sense for doctors to own the equipment.

MDaaS decided to revert to an aggregation model where they would look at a clinically underserved area, build a centralized diagnostic center, and aggregate demand from small, medium-sized hospitals within that community. They launched the first center in the Nigerian southwestern city of Ibadan. The startup subsequently got into Techstars and has since added six other centers across other cities in Nigeria.

MDaaS diagnostic centers offer a wide range of services. First, there are imaging services such as digital x-ray and ultrasound, cardiac services such as ECG and echo. Then the lab services ranging from chemistry analysis and immunoassay to hematology.

So how did SentinelX come about? Oni tells me that it was during the pandemic last year. As MDaaS helped out with testing for COVID in patients, it was also taking time to screen for underlying health conditions.

“We didn’t really find a lot of people that had COVID, but what we found was that a lot of people had underlying conditions like high blood pressure and high cholesterol that they didn’t know about. So we were really shocked about that.”

In the past two decades, NCDs have risen dramatically in sub-Saharan Africa. They are driven by a growing incidence of cardiovascular risk factors like unhealthy diets, reduced physical activity, hypertension, and diabetes. Statistics point out that by 2030, NCDs are set to become the leading cause of mortality on the continent. 

So far, MDaaS has done a reasonably good job with its diagnostic centers. To date, the healthcare startup has provided diagnostic services to over 40,000 patients in underserved communities. It has also performed over 80,000 diagnostics tests across cardiology, radiology, neurology, laboratory, and general health checks. Over 750 clinicians use its referral network, and it has locked partnerships with more than 500 health facilities and 10 HMO networks.

Therefore, building SentinelX on the infrastructure already put in place serves as an opportunity to provide more customer-centric products for its users. The platform acts as a personalized care program where patients pay a one-time fee of N35k (~$70) and access a doctor all year round.

At the moment, users can run through a series of tests ranging from 60 or 70 biomarkers to assess individual risk for a wide range of diseases, including cancers, diabetes, kidney disease, and heart diseases. Clinical and family history and demographic data are also taken into consideration as part of the comprehensive analysis. Meanwhile, MDaaS creates a care plan unique to customers should they have health concerns after screening.

SentinelX is currently in private beta. However, the plan is to go live in September 2021. One would argue that $70 for a year might be cheap for this kind of service, Oni concurs but says it’s all about the long game for MDaaS.

“What we’re trying to solve is non-consumption. Most people in Nigeria don’t go for annual screening, which is something meant to be routinely done. Instead, what we tend to have in Nigeria is that people wait till they get sick before going for checkups. By that time, it costs so much money to solve the problem,” Oni echoes on the lackadaisical effort some Nigerians place on their health. 

Through SentinelX, MDaaS is trying to get as many people as possible to cheaply pre-screen themselves for one year then pay for full value the next year after seeing the benefits of regular checkups. The service is one of many MDaaS can deploy on top of its diagnostic infrastructure built over the years. But getting to this point meant the startup had to scale through the capital-intensive hurdle associated with infrastructural plays. Moreover, defining what price to charge patients has even become more challenging due to the economic recession that has frequently plagued Nigeria.

“We have had to get very creative in the way we build things because we target low to middle-income patients. As a result, we’ve needed to customize our diagnostic infrastructure, especially as it relates to costs for the people we serve,” Oni added.

The economic recession has also affected one of MDaaS’ most priced assets: doctors. Brain drain is a major challenge facing the Nigerian health system right now. It has led to a dramatic reduction in the number of Nigerian doctors who leave for a better quality of life and pay, with some reports estimating that over 2,000 doctors leave annually.

“When you hear about it in the news, it seems like a theoretical thing. But for us, it is real because we have staff leaving to go abroad,” the CEO remarked. MDaaS tries to approach the situation by training younger doctors and deploying them to its centers. Still, there’s some commitment play as both parties agree on a period of time the doctor would work with the company.  

Per application of funds, MDaaS wants to scale its physical footprint across Nigeria by adding six more diagnostic centers this year. According to Oni, the healthtech startup wants to become one of Nigeria’s three largest diagnostic centers. The CEO also said MDaaS would consider a pan-African expansion to similar countries like Nigeria, although he gave no timeline. But by 2025, the company aims to operate 100 centers across the continent and serve a million patients per year. 

Speaking on the news, the managing partner at Newtown Partners, Llew Claasen, said, “Most consumers in sub-Saharan Africa receive suboptimal medical care because of infrastructure gaps, low physician density, delays in diagnostics, and a lack of health data visibility. We think the physical diagnostic infrastructure that MDaaS is building out, coupled with the means to collect data and deliver value-added software services, has the potential to completely change the way that physicians, clinicians, and pharmacists do their jobs and lead to better health outcomes for a huge number of previously underserved consumers.”