Author: azeeadmin

One clear outcome of the pandemic was pushing more people to do their shopping online, and that was as true for B2B as it was for B2C. Knowing which of your B2B customers are most likely to convert puts any sales team ahead of the game. Slintel, a startup providing that kind of data, announced a $20 million Series A today.

The company has attracted some big-name investors with GGV leading the round and Accel, Sequoia and Stellaris also participating. The investment brings the total raised to over $24 million including a $4.2 million seed round from last November.

That’s a quick turnaround from seed to A, and company founder and CEO Deepak Anchala, says that while he had plenty of runway left from the seed round, the demand was such that it seemed prudent to take the A money sooner than he had planned. “So we had enough cash in the bank, but investors came to us and we got a pretty good valuation compared to the previous round, so we decided to take it and use that money to go faster,” Anchala said.

Certainly the market dynamics were working in Slintel’s favor. Without giving revenue details, Anchala said that revenue grew 5x last year in the middle of the worst of the pandemic. He says that meant buyers were spending less time with sales and marketing folks to understand products and more time online researching on their own.

“So what Slintel does as a product is we mine buyer insights. We understand where the buyers are in their journey, what their pain points are, what products they use, what they need and when they need it. So we understand all of this to create a 360 degree view of the buyer that you provide these insights to sales and marketing teams to help them sell better,” he said.

After growing at such a rapid clip last year, the company expected more modest growth this year at perhaps 3x, but with the added investment, he expects to grow faster again. “With the funding we’re actually looking at much bigger numbers. We’re looking at 5x in our revenue this year, and also trying for 4x revenue next year.”

He says that the money gives him the opportunity to improve the product and put more investment into marketing, which he believes will contribute to additional sales. Since the round closed 6 weeks ago, he says that he has increased his advertising budget and is also hopes to attract customers via SEO, free tools on the company website and events.

The company had 45 employees at the time of its seed round in November and has more than doubled that number in the interim to 100 spread out across 10 cities. He expects to double again by this time next year as the company is growing quickly. As a global company with some employees in India and some in the U.S., he intends to be remote first even after offices begin to reopen in different areas. He says that he plans to have company gatherings each quarter to let people gather in person on occasion.

In June of last year, Alexis Ohanian announced that he was leaving Initialized Capital, the venture firm he co-founded alongside Garry Tan in 2011. Nearly a year later, he’s announcing that his new venture firm, Seven Seven Six, has raised $150 million for its first fund.

Seven Seven Six is named for the year of the first Olympics, when a cook from nearby village ended up winning the Stadion race. Ohanian’s idea with the name stems from the fact that the cook was likely a fantastic athlete, but not necessarily the best athlete out there; many people were excluded from the first Olympic games, from athletes outside of Greece to those who didn’t have the means to show up to women, who weren’t even allowed to watch the games.

“When I thought about that track record, and all the things that I’ve been proud of as an entrepreneur and investor, I couldn’t help but feel like I was celebrating the cook,” said Ohanian. “I’m still very proud of that track record, but I know that I could have done better. I want the idea that we’re always on the first starting line trying to do better in pursuit of greater returns.”

He added that this pursuit, to leave no entrepreneurial rock unturned, is not necessarily something he wants to do because he enjoys it and it feels good, but because “it will make more money, it’s more successful and more effective.”

Equity and inclusion, then, is built into the DNA of Seven Seven Six. Half of the firm’s limited partners are women, and 15 percent are black or indigenous people.

Alongside Ohanian, Katelyn Holloway and Lissie Garvin are taking founding positions at Seven Seven Six. Both worked with Ohanian at Initialized and Reddit.

One other unique piece of Seven Seven Six is that it is introducing a 2% “Growth and Caregiving Commitment.” Ohanian explained that, when he was going through Y Combinator, he was going through a rough time in his personal life. His mother was suffering from an illness, and his girlfriend (at the time) had been in an accident abroad.

So, as he was establishing a business, he was also traveling to see the people he loved who needed him. The financial burden added even more complexity to his life, and an incalculable level of stress.

The 2% commitment sets aside an extra two percent of an investment Seven Seven Six makes into a particular company, to offer financial support to founders for whatever they might need, from childcare to travel to surfing lessons, if that’s what it takes to help a founder perform in a healthy, balanced way.

Transparency is also a key part of Seven Seven Six’s philosophy. The firm plans to report on the spending out of this 2% commitment, as well as the diversity and inclusion breakdown of its investments each year.

Thus far, the VC firm has made 17 investments. From the release:

• Lolli, a bitcoin-back rewards program leading the charge of mainstream adoption by giving shoppers free bitcoin

• Pipe, a global trading platform for recurring revenue streams which just announced a $2B valuation in under one year

• QuickNode, a leading Web3 developer platform for building and operating blockchain-powered applications

• Alt, a platform where users can buy and sell alternative assets such as trading cards, the same way you would with stocks

• Pearpop, a company revolutionizing the ever-expanding creator economy

• Itsme, an Avatar-based social platform

• Gloria, a company building the home of football online

• Riverside.fm, a next generation video recording platform

• Stoke, a company working to reimagine space exploration with reusable rockets

Seven Seven Six primarily wants to invest in seed rounds, and lead those rounds as much as possible. The fund joins a host of others that have raised this year as VCs continue to enjoy a low interest-rate environment that is helping bring cash to their investment firms.

Threat intelligence company Recorded Future is launching a $20 million fund for early-stage startups developing novel data intelligence tools.

The Intelligence Fund will provide seed and Series A funding to startups that already have venture capital funding, Recorded Future says, as well as equip them with resources to help with the development and integration of intelligence applications in order to accelerate their go-to-market strategy. 

Recorded Future, which provides customers with information to help them better understand the external cyber threats they are facing, will invest in startups that aim to tackle significant problems that require novel approaches using datasets and collection platforms, which the company says could be anything from technical internet sensors to satellites. It’s also keen to invest in startups building intelligence analysis toolsets that make use of technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as intelligence-driven applications that can be integrated into its own Intelligence Platform and ecosystem.

Recorded Future co-founder and chief executive Christopher Ahlberg said: “In a world of aggressive uncertainty, intelligence is the only equalizer. With the launch of the Intelligence Fund, we are investing in the next generation of entrepreneurs who share our vision for securing the world with intelligence.” 

So far, the Intelligence Fund has invested in two companies, the first being SecurityTrails, which provides customers with a comprehensive overview of current and historical domain and IP address data. The second investment went to Gemini Advisory, a fraud intelligence platform specializing in finding compromised data on the dark web, which Recorded Future went on to acquire earlier this year for $52 million in a bid to bolster its own threat intelligence capabilities. 

Recorded Future told TechCrunch that future investments could also be made with an eye to acquiring, but added that funding could also be given purely on the basis that the startup would make a good business or technology partner. Recorded Future was itself acquired by private equity firm Insight Partners back in 2019 for $780 million. The acquisition effectively bought out the company’s earlier investors, including Google’s venture arm GV, and In-Q-Tel, the non-profit venture arm of the U.S. intelligence community.

Commenting on the launch of the fund, Michael Triplett, managing partner at Insight Partners, said: “Cyberattacks continue to impact global enterprises across the globe, and we’re excited to see Recorded Future invest in intelligence startups tackling the business-critical issues that organizations face today. 

“The Intelligence Fund will provide the resources needed by entrepreneurs to build applications with data and mathematics at the core.” 

Just over three months after its last funding round, European fintech giant Klarna is announcing today that it has raised another $639 million at a staggering post-money valuation of $45.6 billion.

Rumors swirled in recent weeks that Klarna had raised more money at a valuation north of $40 billion. But the Swedish buy now, pay later behemoth and upstart bank declined to comment until now.

SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 led the latest round, which also included participation from existing investors Adit Ventures, Honeycomb Asset Management and WestCap Group. The new valuation represents a 47.3% increase over Klarna’s post-money valuation of $31 billion in early March, when it raised $1 billion, and a 330% increase over its $10.6 billion valuation at the time of its $650 million raise last September. Previous backers include Sequoia Capital, SilverLake, Dragoneer and Ant Group, among others.

The latest financing cements 16-year-old Klarna’s position as the highest-valued private fintech in Europe.

In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, Klarna CEO and founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski said the company has seen explosive growth in the U.S. and plans to use its new capital in part to continue to grow there and globally.

In particular, over the past year, the fintech has seen “massive momentum” in the country, with more than 18 million American consumers now using Klarna, he said. That’s up from 10 million at the end of last year’s third quarter, and up 118% year over year. Klara is now live with 24 of the top 100 U.S. retailers, which it says is “more than any of its competitors.”

Overall, Klarna is live in 20 markets, has more than 90 million global active users and more than 2 million transactions a day conducted on its platform. The company’s momentum can be seen in its impressive financial results. In the first quarter, Klarna notched $18.1 billion in volume compared to $9.9 billion in the prior year first quarter. In all of 2020, it processed $53 billion in volume. To put that into context; Affirm’s financial report in May projected it would process $8.04 billion in volume for the entire fiscal year of 2021 and Afterpay is projecting $16 billion in volume for its entire fiscal year. 

March 2021 also represented a record month for global shopping volume with $6.9 billion of purchases made through the Klarna platform.

Meanwhile, in 2020, Klara hit over a billion in revenue. While the company was profitable for its first 14 years of life, it has not been profitable the last two, according to Siemiatkowski, and that’s been by design.

“We’ve scaled up so massively in investments in our growth and technology, but running on a loss is very odd for us,” he told TechCrunch. “We will get back to profitability soon.”

Klarna has entered six new markets this year alone, including France and New Zealand, where it just launched this week. It is planning to expand into a number of new markets this year. The company has about 4,000 employees with several hundred in the U.S. in markets such as New York and Los Angeles. It also has offices in Stockholm, London, Manchester, Berlin, Madrid and Amsterdam. 

While Klarna is partnered with over 250,000 retailers around the world (including Macy’s, Ikea, Nike, Saks), its buy now, pay later feature is also available direct to consumers via its shopping app. This means that consumers can use Klarna’s app to pay immediately or later, as well as manage spending and view available balances. They can also do things like initiate refunds, track deliveries and get price-drop notifications.

“Our shopping browser allows users to use Klarna everywhere,” Siemiatkowski said. “No one else is offering that, and are rather limited to integrating with merchants.”

Other things the company plans to do with its new capital is focus on acquisitions, particularly acqui-hires, according to Siemiatkowski. According to Crunchbase, the company has made nine known acquisitions over time — most recently picking up Los Gatos-based content creation services provider Toplooks.ai.

“We’re the market leader in this space and we want to find new partners that want to support us in this,” Siemiatkowski told TechCrunch. “That gives us better prerequisites to be successful going forward. Now we have more cash and money available to invest further in the long term.”

Klarna has long been rumored to be going public via a direct listing. Siemiatkowski said that the company in many ways already acts like a public company in that it offers stock to all its employees, and reports financials — giving the impression that the company is not in a hurry to go the public route.

“We report quarterly to national authorities and are a fully regulated bank so do all the things you expect to see from public companies such as risk control and compliance,” he told TechCrunch. “We’re reaching a point for it to be a natural evolution for the company to IPO. But we’re not preparing to IPO anytime soon.”

At the time of its last funding round, Klarna announced its GiveOne initiative to support planet health. With this round, the company is again giving 1% of the equity raised back to the planet.

Naturally, its investors are bullish on what the company is doing and its market position. Yanni Pipilis, managing partner for SoftBank Investment Advisers, said the company’s growth is “founded on a deep understanding of how the purchasing behaviors of consumers are changing,” an evolution SoftBank believes is only accelerating. 

Eric Munson, founder and CIO of Adit Ventures, said his firm believes the “best is yet to come as Klarna multiplies their addressable market through global expansion.” 

For Siemiatkowski, what Klarna is trying to achieve is to compete with the $1 trillion-plus credit card industry.

“We really see right now all the signs are there. True competition is coming to this space, this decade,” he said. “This is an opportunity to genuinely disrupt the retail banking space.”

 

Microsoft will soon launch a dedicated device for game streaming, the company announced today. It’s also working with a number of TV manufacturers to build the Xbox experience right into their internet-connected screens and Microsoft plans to bring build cloud gaming to the PC Xbox app later this year, too, with a focus on play-before-you-buy scenarios.

It’s unclear what these new game streaming devices will look like. Microsoft didn’t provide any further details. But chances are, we’re talking about either a Chromecast-like streaming stick or a small Apple TV-like box. So far, we also don’t know which TV manufacturers it will partner with.

It’s no secret that Microsoft is bullish about cloud gaming. With Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, it’s already making it possible for its subscribers to play more than 100 console games on Android, streamed from the Azure cloud, for example. In a few weeks, it’ll open cloud gaming in the browser on Edge, Chrome and Safari, to all Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers (it’s currently in limited beta). And it is bringing Game Pass Ultimate to Australia, Brazil, Mexico and Japan later this year, too.

In many ways, Microsoft is unbundling gaming from the hardware — similar to what Google is trying with Stadia (an effort that, so far, has fallen flat for Google) and Amazon with Luna. The major advantage Microsoft has here is a large library of popular games, something that’s mostly missing on competing services, with the exception of Nvidia’s GeForce Now platform — though that one has a different business model since its focus is not on a subscription but on allowing you to play the games you buy in third-party stores like Steam or the Epic store.

What Microsoft clearly wants to do is expand the overall Xbox ecosystem, even if that means it sells fewer dedicated high-powered consoles. The company likens this to the music industry’s transition to cloud-powered services backed by all-you-can-eat subscription models.

“We believe that games, that interactive entertainment, aren’t really about hardware and software. It’s not about pixels. It’s about people. Games bring people together,”
said Microsoft’s Xbox head Phil Spencer. “Games build bridges and forge bonds, generating mutual empathy among people all over the world. Joy and community -that’s why we’re here.”

It’s worth noting that Microsoft says it’s not doing away with dedicated hardware, though, and is already working on the next generation of its console hardware — but don’t expect a new Xbox console anytime soon.

The world seems to move faster every year, and yet, nothing feels slower than the speed by which paychecks get distributed. In the United States, work conducted the day after a pay period will take two weeks just to process, with a check or direct deposit coming another week or two later. For the tens of millions of employees who live paycheck-to-paycheck, that multi-week delay can be the difference of making a rent check — or not.

A variety of startups have approached this problem with different solutions, and one of the newest and most compelling offerings is Clair.

Using its own base of capital, New York City-based Clair offers instant — and most importantly — free earned wage advances to workers by integrating into existing HR technology platforms. It works with both full-time employees and also gig workers, and it offers a suite of online and mobile apps for workers to make sense of their finances and ask for an earned wage advance.

The company was founded in late 2019 by CEO Nico Simko, COO Alex Kostecki and CPO Erich Nussbaumer, and today, the company announced that it raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Kareem Zaki of Thrive Capital, who will join the company’s board of directors. Just a few months ago, Clair had announced a $4.5 million seed round led by Upfront Ventures, bringing its total funding to $19.5 million.

“Pay advance” or “earned wage advance” (there is a slight distinction) have been the Silicon Valley euphemism for payday loan, an industry that has been plagued with allegations of fraud, deceit and rapacious greed that have bilked workers out of their hard-earned paychecks through usurious interest rates.

What sets Clair apart is that its offering is free to workers. Since it connects directly into HR systems, the startup takes on significantly less financial risk than traditional payday lenders, who don’t have access to the payroll data that Clair is able to analyze.

For Simko, one of his goals is simply to see the elimination of the traditional industry entirely. “I have a payday lender just in front of my apartment in Brooklyn and there is a long line on the 25th of every month, and I am not going to stop until that line disappears,” he said. “Success for us is just to become the winner in earned wage access.”

He is Argentine-Swiss, and came to the States to attend Harvard, where he met Nussbaumer. He ended up working at J.P. Morgan focused on the payments market. He stayed in touch with Kostecki, whose families are good friends, and the Swiss trio decided to go after this problem, partly inspired by Uber’s instant pay feature that it introduced in 2016 and which proved wildly successful.

Instead of making money on interest rates, fees, or tips, Clair instead wants to be the bank and financial service provider of choice for workers. As I noted last week about Pinwheel, an API platform for payroll, owning the direct deposit relationship with a worker all but guarantees they will conduct the vast majority of their financial transactions through that particular bank account.

Clair offers free instant pay advances as a gateway to its other offerings, which include spending and savings accounts, a debit card, a virtual in-app debit card, and financial planning tools. Simko said, “Our business model is to give earned wage access free for people and then sign them up automatically for a digital bank, and then we make money the same way Chime makes money, which is interchange fees.”

In fact, he and the company believe in that model so much, it will actually pay human capital technology platforms like workforce management and payroll systems to integrate with Clair as an inducement. It offers a recurring revenue fee stream for HR tools based on the number of users who join Clair, regardless of how much those workers use the software. We are “really going down the thesis of embedded fintech,” Simko said. “Employees start spending money on their Clair card, and we distribute that back to our [HR tech] partners.”

Clair joins a number of other companies in this space, which is becoming ever more heated as the perceived opportunity in financial services remains high among investors. Last year, payroll platform Gusto announced that it would expand from purely payroll to a financial wellness platform, which is partially based on its instant earned wage advances or what it dubs Cashout. We’ve covered Even, which is one of the originals in this space with a major partnership with Walmart, as well as neobank Dave, which offers pay advance features with a tipping revenue model. Dave just announced a $4 billion valued SPAC with VPC Impact Acquisition Holdings III.

Nonetheless, Clair’s angle is differentiated as the race to lock in every person globally with new financial services heats up. Simko says he sees a gargantuan opportunity to be the “Alipay” of the United States, noting that unlike China with Alipay, Nubank in Brazil and increasingly Latin America, and N26 and Revolut in Europe, there is still an opportunity for a comprehensive neobank to take over the U.S. market.

With the new funding, the company will continue to expand its product offerings, exploring areas like health care and debt repayment. “I can give APR not based on their credit score but on their employer’s credit score, which is the multi-billion dollar idea here,” Simko said. The team is nominally hubbed in New York with roughly half of the 25 or so person team.

On the heels of acquiring sales tax specialist TaxJar in April, today Stripe is making another big move in the area of tax. The $95 billion payments behemoth is launching a new product called Stripe Tax, which will provide automatic, updated sales tax calculations (covering sales tax, VAT, and GST) and related accounting services to Stripe payments customers initially in some 30 countries and across the U.S.

Stripe Tax is a separate service from TaxJar, but the two are not unconnected: as Stripe Tax was being built out of Stripe’s offices in Dublin over the last several months, Stripe’s business lead for EMEA Matt Henderson told me that the team had identified TaxJar as a strong company in the field, and that ultimately led to M&A between them.

Sales tax — and specifically a more seamless way to deal with charging and tracking sales tax — is a painful issue for people doing business online. Digital and physical goods are taxed in over 130 countries, Stripe said, and within that there can be a huge amount of variation and compliance complexity, since codes get updated all the time, too. Mishandled sales tax, meanwhile, can result in pretty hefty fines, sometimes up to 30% interest on past-due amounts.

Unsurprisingly, a sales tax tool has been the most requested feature from Stripe’s customers, Henderson said, a request that presumably only got louder in the last year, as e-commerce and digital transactions went through the roof with Covid-19.

Arguably, that makes Stripe Tax one of the company’s more significant product launches, not to mention the first since announcing its monster funding round earlier this year.

Previously, Stripe customers would have resorted to using a third-party service (like TaxJar) to work out sales tax, or more typically those Stripe customers would have opted to limit the number of places they sold goods and services, in order to minimize the pain of dealing with multiple, complex, and usually quite localized tax codes.

Stripe said that a survey of its customers found that two-thirds of respondents said that the challenge of implementing sales tax actually limited their growth.

TaxJar has built a strong system for handling that, but the company — based out of Massachusetts — is primarily focused on the U.S. market, which has sales tax that is complicated enough (there are 11,000 different tax jurisdictions in the country).

That leaves a lot on the table for building out sales tax tools for the rest of the world: the wider geographical focus of Stripe Tax thus fills a particular geographical gap for the company, regardless of how well TaxJar and Stripe integrate over time.

There are some other differences worth noting between the two.

TaxJar came to Stripe’s attention with an established business — 15,000 customers at the time of the announcement. Stripe (wisely) bolted that on as a standalone business, so new and existing customers that use TaxJar can continue to use it as is. That is to say, at least for now, they do not need to be Stripe payments customers in order to use TaxJar, even if the integration between the two platforms will only improve over time.

Stripe Tax, on the other hand, is being built from the ground up as a product aimed specifically at increasing touchpoints and stickiness with Stripe customers specifically.

Stripe Tax provides real-time tax calculation based on customer location and product sold; transparent itemizing for customers; tax ID management in areas (like Europe) where business customers can provide their code and get a reverse charge on tax if they are under a certain turnover threshold themselves; and reconciliation and reporting across all transactions to make filing and remittance easier.

But, there is for now no way to use Stripe Tax outside of Stripe itself.

This could pose some problems for some customers — these days many of the strongest retailers will take an ‘omnichannel’ approach that might cover selling through marketplaces, selling through websites, selling through social media and more — and not all of those storefronts might be powered by Stripe. It will be worth watching whether future iterations of Stripe Tax can account for that.

“No one leaps out of bed in the morning excited to deal with taxes,” said John Collison, co-founder and president of Stripe in a statement. “For most businesses, managing tax compliance is a painful distraction. We simplify everything about calculating and collecting sales taxes, VAT, and GST, so our users can focus on building their businesses.”

Stripe’ most significant product launch prior to Stripe Tax — Stripe Treasury — underscores how the company is currently very focused on diversifying outside of their basic payments business and opening the platform to much wider, more scaled transactions. Treasury, which is still in invite-only mode, saw Stripe partner with established banks to provide a business banking service, providing a way for its customers to handle money that they generate from their Stripe-powered businesses.

The full country list where Stripe Tax is launching is Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

For the early detection and treatment of health conditions, easy access to primary healthcare is crucial. Primary healthcare is best delivered by teams of primary care clinicians coordinating care between them. However, ubiquitous access to such care is scant across Sub-Saharan Africa.

There is a real opportunity for digital healthcare platforms to scale access to team-based care across the region. They can reduce the cost of quality care while improving health outcomes, reach patients in remote areas and reduce the pressure on the traditional medical support systems.

The pandemic has seen such platforms scale globally, and Africa is not exempt. A new platform (without a name yet) is launching out of South Africa and it wants to provide accessible quality care for Africans with its telehealth service. Today, it has closed a $3 million pre-Series A round to that end.

Yes, you’re wondering why the platform doesn’t have a name (I am too), but what’s interesting is the fact that a VC firm (Webrock Ventures) and two health tech companies (Healthforce.io and Doktor.se) joined forces to launch this new venture. 

Here’s summarized information on the trio.

Webrock Ventures is a Sweden-based investment company that employs a venture-building model. So essentially, the firm partners with tech companies in Sweden and combines its cash with the company’s business models to create portfolio businesses. It does this while maintaining a sizeable stake in the company.

Healthforce is a South Africa-based health tech company that tries to improve healthcare through multidisciplinary clinical teams. So far, it has set up nurses in over 450 clinics across the country while conducting more than 1 million nurse consultations. Healthforce also has a telemedicine play with over 110,000 consultations since launching the service last year.

As a Sweden-based telehealth company, Doktor.se allows patients to contact healthcare professionals through their smartphones across the whole spectrum of primary care. Most of its customers are in Europe, as well as in Latin America.

So why form a partnership to launch a telehealth product in South Africa with a plan for further roll-out in other African countries down the line?

Globally, telehealth investments have skyrocketed and increased by more than 50% since the start of the pandemic. With many of the fastest-growing economies globally, investors and companies (in this case, Webrock and Doktor.se) are now turning to Africa as a major growth region for such high-demand services.

Now, Doktor.se has two models for commercialising its telemedicine application. The first is to use its technology to personally deliver healthcare services. The second model licenses the core technology to third parties in markets in which Doktor.se has no intention of expanding. Doktor.se achieved this with Brazilian health tech startup ViBe Saúde (via Webrock), and last year, the platform had over 1.2 million patient consultations. It plans to do the same by licensing its technology to deliver care through Healthforce across Africa.

By forming a new partnership, a completely new opportunity is set up. Healthforce can leverage its current position to take core tech from Doktor.se to a new direct-to-patient market. In the background is Webrock, a willing investment machine set up to scale the platform.

The new venture will focus on the uninsured, B2C segment through a freemium-type offering. The platform offers on-demand and scheduled consultations with nurses, general practitioners and mental health professionals. It also provides chronic care management and will be integrated with Healthforce’s broader primary care offering.

Saul Kornik, co-founder and CEO at Healthforce, will resume a new role at the newly formed company. According to him, the partnership gives Healthforce an additional product to add to its healthcare product stack. In addition, it gives Doktor.se the ability to generate license fee revenue from a new market, while Webrock has an opportunity to invest in yet another large developing market.

“Webrock and Healthforce partnered to bring funding and strategic/operational capacity to this new pan-African direct-to-patient play, respectively,” he said to TechCrunch. “All existing independent operations will continue. However, under the NewCo, Healthforce as a major shareholder will expand its primary care product stack and Doktor.se will generate revenue off license fees earned.”

Sub-Saharan Africa has a healthcare market of about $90 billion. But health insurance coverage is in single-digit (percentage-wise) across countries in Sub-Saharan Africa except for South Africa with 16% coverage. Kornik says the three parties want to tackle a large portion of this challenge and are aligned about how the healthcare system in Africa could look if it were functioning optimally.

“This is a pure-play provider-of-healthcare venture. Through this pan-African venture, we will deliver high-quality healthcare at low cost to 75 million people through telemedicine, literally putting healthcare in the palm of their hands,” he said.

Partner at Webrock Ventures Joshin Raghubar and co-founder and CEO of Doktor, Martin Lindman, are enthusiastic about the opportunity Africa presents due to its large population and increasing smartphone penetration.

This new venture, which should hopefully have a name soon, is one of the few health tech platforms based in South Africa that have raised seven-figure sums in a fintech-dominated year. In February, hearX Group, a company that specializes in making hearing healthcare technologies, raised $8.3 million Series A to expand into the U.S. April saw Quro Medical close a $1.1 million seed round to scale its service that manages ill patients in the comfort of their homes. Judging by the spacing between each fundraise, we should see more from the country before the year runs out.

Eightfold AI, a startup which uses deep learning and artificial intelligence to help companies find, recruit and retain workers, said on Thursday it has raised $220 million in a new round as it looks to accelerate its growth.

SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the Series E round of the five-year-old startup, which is now valued at $2.1 billion, up from $1 billion in Series E last October, Eightfold AI founder and chief executive Ashutosh Garg told TechCrunch in an interview.

Existing investors General Catalyst, Capital One Ventures, Foundation Capital, IVP and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in the new round, which brings the startup’s all-time raise to over $410 million.

The Mountain View-based startup provides its clients with a talent acquisition platform that helps them identify suitable candidates and import and filter thousands of resumes. One of Eightfold AI’s mission is to help companies reduce biases in their hirings, so it masks candidates’ personal information during evaluation.

“Instead of searching for a job, a candidate can upload their resume and the system will tell what is the most relevant job for that candidate in real-time,” explained Garg. “What this does is it reduces the drop-off rate. And our clients see more applications — and field more diverse applications.”

The startup, which has amassed clients in 25 countries, also enables employers to deploy the Eightfold platform internally and help employees discover job opportunities within their organization. “This has helped businesses almost double their internal mobility,” said Garg, who previously worked at Google.

“Powered by AI and machine learning, Eightfold’s platform provides global enterprises with a single solution for managing the entire talent lifecycle, including hiring, retaining, and growing a diverse global workforce,” said Deep Nishar, Senior Managing Partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers and who previously worked for nearly six years at LinkedIn. “We are pleased to partner with Ashutosh and the Eightfold team to support their ambition of transforming how enterprises manage talent and how people build their careers.”

This is a developing story. More to follow…