Author: azeeadmin

According to research, 85% of African SMBs have zero access to financing, and each day, African SMBs have billions locked up in receivables due to long payment cycles. This leads to cash flow problems that cause businesses to be late on important expenses and fulfilment of new orders.

Jesse Ghansah and his co-founder Barima Effah want to answer these problems with their newly launched startup Float.

Ghansah is a serial entrepreneur. Since leaving the university in 2014, he has co-founded several tech startups but made his mark globally with OMG Digital, a startup with offices in Ghana and Nigeria that wanted to become the “BuzzFeed of Africa.” In 2016, OMG Digital was one of the first African companies accepted into Y Combinator.

Ghansah had a good run with the company and left two years ago. For his newest venture, he turned his focus outside media to fintech. Formerly Swipe, Float is an 18-month-old Lagos and San Francisco-based company aiming to close the $300 billion liquidity gap for Africa’s small and medium businesses. The company took part in YC’s Winter batch 2020, making Ghansah one of the few two-time YC founders in Africa.

Float has evolved from the last time we partly covered them during their Demo Day as “Brex for Africa.” According to CEO Ghansah, Float is “rethinking the way African businesses manage their financial operations, from managing cash and making payments to accessing credit.”

After 18 months in stealth, Float is finally going live, and we spoke with the CEO to get a glimpse into its progress and what makes it different from similar platforms on the continent.

TC: What problem would you say Float is solving?

JG: If you ask any small business, cash flow will most likely be the number one problem that they face. And this stems from the whole payment cycle, which is after you provide a service or deliver a product. Businesses that serve other businesses have to wait typically for 30-90 days for their payments to come in. This is like a traditional payment cycle where you have to offer credit sales to your customers to stay competitive; that’s why you send an invoice, and the customer will pay you back within that time frame. 

That creates a lot of problems in terms of constant cash crunches. Because you’re waiting for your revenue to come in, they sometimes fall behind in meeting certain expense payments like payroll, inventory, utilities. That’s what really causes a lot of these cash flow issues, and because of that, businesses can’t grow. For existing businesses, these are the issues they face and getting credit in terms of working capital is extremely difficult if you’re dealing with banks. 

TC: Did you have a personal experience with this problem seeing as your past venture was in media?

JG: As you know, I was a co-founder at OMG Digital, and as a media company, we had to wait for months to get paid by our partners. We needed credit this time and proceeded to get an overdraft from a long-term partner bank where we had transacted more than $100,000. But the bank wanted us to deposit 100% collateral in cash before they could give the overdraft. 

I also remember taking money from loan sharks with ridiculous interest rates, sometimes as high as 20% a month, just to meet payroll. That sort of threw me into solving those problems with Float.

TC: There are a plethora of lenders giving loans to businesses. How is Float solving the credit issue differently?

JG: So our credit product is quite different regarding how we present it to the customer. It is less complex than a loan; it is more flexible than a business overdraft. Also, there’s a difference in the tools that we provide. So we don’t just give money; what we’ve provided is a software solution with credit embedded. 

Right now, we’ve built what we call the cash management tool for businesses where they get credit at the critical set of moments in time. For instance, if you want to pay a lender and need credit, you can withdraw the credit and make payment immediately. We provide a credit line that businesses can tap into any time they want as soon as they onboard to our platform, and it increases and decreases based on the transactions performed on our platform. 

So that’s just on the credit side. We’ve also built tools to help businesses stay on top of their cash flow. We give them invoicing, budgeting tools and spend management tools and a way for them to manage all their bank accounts because we know that existing businesses usually have more than one bank account. On Float, they can see all their balances and transactions, and we’re building a way for these businesses to make payments from their accounts on Float. 

You can think of Float as a really well-built cash management platform. You get credit when you need it to make vendor payments or boost your working capital, which has been pivotal to our loss rate of 0%. Then two, tools that give total visibility about your businesses so you know where your money is coming in and going out.

TC: Float’s loss rate is 0%? Does that mean no business has defaulted on your platform?

JG: Yes, we’ve not had any default so far. We’ve advanced $2.8 million to our pilot customers in Nigeria, and we don’t have any losses in the last eight months; it’s because of the type of loans we’re giving. We give businesses money to boost their working capital. So we’re essentially giving you an advance for your future revenue. 

If you look like, in the U.S., Pipe has built this for SaaS companies and are building for other customer segments, which is essentially what we’re doing. So, for us, the way we’re solving the cash flow issue is that we’re sorting your future revenue and as your customers pay you through our platform, then we make deductions. 

You can think of us as a Stripe Capital, Square Capital, Pipe or the new multidimensional lending platforms we have now. When you consider lending, I’d say there are different phases. Lending 1.0 was when you’d fill an application online, and you’d get a loan decision. Lending 2.0 and 3.0 is where credit is embedded in online tools businesses already use. That’s why it has worked really well because the businesses on our platform aren’t exactly looking for a lifeline but are looking to boost their cash flow and basically step on the gas to grow.

TC: But this loss rate will likely change as soon as you onboard more businesses, right?

JG: Yes, definitely it’s going to change. The thing with lending is that with more customers, your credit model gets tested. The more customers you have, the more probability that you’re going to have default losses. But as long as you have, like a solid credit risk criteria and assessment, you must always try to keep it as small as possible. It’s almost impossible to have a 0% default rate when you begin to grow fast.

TC: What strategy does Float put in place to mitigate losses and reduce risk?

JG: The way our credit product works is that we’re constantly connected to your bank; we know who your vendors are, know who your suppliers are, and know who your customers are. We know how much money is flowing in and out of your business at any point in time. So as I mentioned, we can quickly adjust your credit limits as soon as we sense a difference in your activity. If we notice your invoice activity has dropped and we’re not receiving as much money as you were in the previous weeks, we reduce your limit. It’s a very dynamic sort of type of product, and it is really different from what you see out there today.

TC: Aside from lending, how have the other tools been helpful to businesses?

JG: With our pilot phase, we’ve been able to give credit and also processed invoicing and vendor payments for our customers worth about $5 million. 

When you think of business payments, sometimes people always think about Paystack and Flutterwave. They’re tackling a different segment which is basically consumers paying businesses. For us, we’re centred around businesses paying other businesses. Their method, as we know, is a very drawn-out process, and that market is 10 times bigger than the market Paystack and Flutterwave are serving. 

If you look at your big multinational corporations, they have thousands of vendors on their payroll every month. Globally trillions of dollars are flowing from business to business, and that is where we want to play in. We’re launching the new version of our invoicing product and vendor payments, and a product where we can pay for services upfront on behalf of our customers and they pay back in 30 days.

TC: I’m tempted to call Float a digital bank for small businesses. Would you say there are differences?

JG: Of course there are. Almost any business owner will tell you that business banking is mostly broken. Legacy banks typically provide an outdated, underwhelming user experience. Businesses quickly move beyond basic banking needs, and for them, the options are frustratingly limited.

African neo-banks are aiming to compete with traditional banks. Still, in reality, they are actually now competing with each other for a relatively tiny slice of the market due to not solving the core problems facing businesses. A marginally better UX and a quick account opening experience is the value proposition that probably resonates well with a new startup business or a budding freelancer. However, to an already operating retail business owner that struggles to make timely payments to suppliers due to poor cash flow, that’s grossly inadequate.

This, coupled with the trust matters, reconciliation, and auditing headaches involved in moving accounts, is why neobanks haven’t taken off in this market.

There are little to no switching costs using Float because we have designed our platform to run on top of existing business bank accounts and payment processors. The idea is to provide a single platform that provides businesses with the credit they need, a consolidated view of their existing business banking and cashflow activity, coupled with various payment tools to enable them to speed through their financial operations so they can spend more time actually growing their business.

French startup Pennylane has raised a new $18.3 million funding round (€15 million). Interestingly, this is Sequoia Capital’s first investment in France after they announced ambitious expansion plans in Europe.

If you’re not familiar with Pennylane, the startup has been developing an accounting platform that improves accounting for both clients and their accountants. Focused on small and medium companies, the company has already attracted hundreds of clients as it says 1,000 executives are currently using Pennylane.

If you’re running a small company, chances are you’re using Microsoft Excel or another financial tool for your financial projections. You’re also sending all your invoices, payroll info and more to your accountant. Essentially, you’re doing the same thing twice.

Pennylane lets you connect your account with third-party services that already hold valuable information, such as Stripe, Payfit, Qonto, Zoho, Sellsy, etc. Data is then synchronized regularly so that you can check outstanding invoices, pay your suppliers and see where you’re standing when it comes to inbound and outbound payments.

On the other side of the equation, Pennylane works with 100 accounting firms that could handle accounting tasks for you. You can ask Pennylane to connect you with an accountant and they’ll leverage your Pennylane data to complete their work.

If you already have an accountant or you have your own in-house accounting team, you can also tell them to create an account on Pennylane and retrieve accounting data from the platform. Pennylane acts as the central repository where your financial data is always up to date.

“Pennylane is becoming the key financial management platform for SME’s in Europe,” Sequoia partner Luciana Lixandru said in a statement. “We are thrilled to partner with their exceptional team to ensure businesses of any size can have a single, up-to-date source for their financial data and improve how they collaborate with their accountants.”

Up next, the startup wants to build a ‘financial operating system’ for European small and medium enterprises. You can imagine a marketplace of services that clients can choose to use in addition to Pennylane’s core product.

Pennylane has been on a roll as the company raised an $18.4 million Series A round just a few months ago. Global Founders Capital and Partech led the Series A back in January.

Vivaldi has always been one of the more interesting of the Chromium-based browsers, in no small part thanks to its emphasis on building tools for power users in a privacy-centric package, but also because of its pedigree, with Opera’s outspoken former CEO Jon von Tetzchner as its co-founder and CEO. Today, the Vivaldi team is launching version 4.0 of its browser and with that, it’s introducing a slew of new features that, among many other things, include the beta of new built-in mail, calendar and RSS clients, as well as the launch of Vivaldi Translate, a privacy-friendly translation service hosted on the company’s own servers and powered by Lingvanex.

Vivaldi isn’t new to email clients. The company has long offered a webmail service, for example. But building an offline email client into the browser — as well as a calendar client — almost feels like a return to the early days of browsers, like Netscape Navigator and Opera, when having these additional built-in features was almost standard. Von Tetzchner argues that for a lot of browser vendors, doing away with those features was about steering users into certain directions (including their own webmail clients).

“We’ve chosen to say, ‘okay, we don’t want to have the business model decide what we do. We rather focus on what the users want.’ And I think there’s a significant value [in a built-in email client]. Most all of us use email — at varying levels, some of use it a lot, some less, but everyone basically has at least one email account,” he said. “So having a good client for that, that’s kind of where we’re coming from. And, I mean, we obviously did a lot of those things at Opera — some of them we didn’t — and we are filling a gap with what Opera used to be doing. And now at Vivaldi, we are doing those things, but also a lot more. We never did a calendar at Opera.”

Clearly, a lot of the decisions around Vivaldi Mail and Calendar were driven by the team’s own preferences. That means, for example, that the Mail client does its best to do away with the usual folder structure of an Outlook, for example, so that its filtering system allows a message to appear in multiple views. Since Vivaldi has always been about customization, you can choose between the traditional horizontal and wide views you’re probably familiar with from other email clients. One nice feature here is that you can also control which messages you see through toggles that let you exclude emails from mailing lists and custom folders from the default view, for example. I do like the fact that Vivaldi Mail also distinguishes between unseen and unread email.

As expected, you can use virtually any email provider here that supports the IMAP and POP protocols, but there’s also built-in support for Gmail as well.

The new built-in calendar, too, supports most of the standard calendar providers, including Google Calendar and iCloud, for example. One interesting design twist here is that the team decided to show all the data available for an event right in the calendar instead of just one or two lines per event. Von Tetzchner tells me that this is very much his preference.

“I think we have done things differently. We’ll see what people think,” he said. “But one of the things I wanted with the calendar, I wanted to be able to see all the content. Typically, with the calendars that are used today, the size of the space available for the text is dependent on the timeslot size. It doesn’t need to be that way. It looks better when the time slots are even, but functionally, it’s better that you actually can read more of the text.”

Von Tetzchner noted that he obviously wants to steer users away from Google and Microsoft, but he believes that providing alternatives isn’t good enough — they have to be better alternatives.

As for the RSS reader, which is still pretty basic and doesn’t offer features like the ability to import and export lists of feeds yet, for example, the idea here is to help users leave their respective echo chambers but also avoid newsreaders that are focused on news suggestions. The overall implementation here works quite well, with the feed reader providing virtually all of the features you would need from a local feed reader. Whenever the browser finds an RSS feed as you are surfing the web, it will also highlight that in the URL bar, so subscribing to new feeds is about as easy as it gets. You can also subscribe to individual YouTube feeds (because even though YouTube doesn’t highlight this, every YouTube channel is still available as a feed).

“With feeds, it’s also about getting away from the [data] collection,” he said. “The news services now, they look at what you read and build profiles on you with the excuse that you then get more relevant news. But in my humble opinion, you subscribe to certain channels and that should be enough. We’re trying to basically give you — as a user — control over what you’re reading, what you’re subscribing to, and not learning about your habits or your preferences. Those are your habits and preferences and none of our business.”

All of this comes down to Vivaldi’s core philosophy of not being driven by advertising as its business model. “We have no need for or interest in collecting data on our users,” von Tetzchner told me (though it is collecting some basic aggregate data about how many users it has and where in the world they are). Indeed, he believes that collecting detailed telemetry about users only drives a company to build a product for the average user.

That’s also where the new translation feature comes in, which is hosted on Vivaldi’s own servers, so none of the data is shared with any third-party service. Vivaldi uses Lingvanex’s technology for this but hosts it on its own servers. The results are pretty good and for the most part, at a level comparable to Google Translate, for example (with the occasional subtle differences between the two where Google Translate would often offer the more precise translation).

One feature that very much acknowledges that everybody has different requirements from a browser — and that it might be nice to build an onramp to Vivaldi for non-power users, too — is Vivaldi’s new onboarding flow that allows users to choose between three default layouts. There’s an “essentials” view for those who only want a basic and very Chrome- or Edge-like experience, “classic” for those who want to use some of the browser’s more advanced features like panels and its status bar, and “fully loaded” for those who want access to every available tool. It’s this last view that also enables the new Vivaldi Mail, Feed Reader and Calendar features by default, too.

As of now Vivaldi isn’t profitable. It generates some revenue from preinstalled bookmarks and search engine partnerships. But von Tetzchner argues that Vivaldi just needs to increase its user base a bit more to become a sustainable company. He seems comfortable with that idea — and the fact that its per-user revenue is relatively low. “We’ve done this before and we’ve seen this work. It takes time to build a company like ours,” he said. “I hope people are liking what we’re building — that’s kind of the feel I get — people are really liking what we’re building. And then kind of gradually, we’ll get enough users to pay the bills and then we take it from there.”

Neobrokers — startups that are disrupting the investment industry by providing a platform for a wider range of consumers to partake in the stock market by offering them more incremental investment options and modern and easy mobile-based interfaces to manage their money — continue to see a huge amount of interest, and today comes the latest development in that story.

Scalable Capital, a Munich/Berlin startup that provides tools to monitor and manage portfolios for those investing in shares, manage trades and exchange traded funds for a flat fee of €2.99 per month, has raised over $180 million (around €150 million) to expand its business. The company confirmed to us that the investment, a Series E being led by China’s Tencent, is being done at a $1.4 billion valuation.

This is a huge jump — a lot of scaling, as it were — for Scalable Capital. It was only in July 2020, less than a year ago, that the startup raised a Series D of $58 million at a $460 million valuation.

Previous investors, including BlackRock, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and Tengelmann Ventures, also participated in this round. The company, founded in 2014 but commercially launched in 2016, has now raised more than $320 million in equity funding.

Part of the reason for the rapid fundraising is to strike while the iron is hot, and to give the startup some more fuel to grow at a time when other neobrokers are also seeing a lot of activity.

Scalable Capital itself now has 250,000 customers across Austria, Germany and the UK, more than three times the 80,000 it had back in July. At the same time, assets under management have ballooned to $5 billion (versus $2 billion in that last round). In another interesting turn, Scalable is also building out a business as a neobroker partner to many established banks, too, with the list of high-street names including ING, the British Barclays Bank, Siemens Private Finance, the digital subsidiary of the Santander Group Openbank, Oskar GmbH, and Targobank.

But while Scalable will be using some of the funding to continue expanding on the continent, it also seems that its UK business is no longer accepting new customers, We are asking whether that is temporary and Brexit-related, or another reason and will update when we have an answer.

Altogether, Scalable said that some 1,500 Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) available on the platform (these are the most popular vehicle: more than half of the assets on the platform invested in these). It also provides access to invest across some 4,000 different shares and 2,000 funds. All of these are set to grow, along with potentially launching new products, too.

“We see huge demand to invest money in the capital markets instead of leaving it in bank accounts. This comes against a backdrop of record-low interest rates, growing inflation and a widening pension gap”, says Florian Prucker, co-CEO and co-founder of Scalable Capital, in a statement. “Our clients can access fully managed globally diversified ETF portfolios and – in the same app – self directed trading in shares, ETFs, crypto currencies and funds. We also provide a market-leading offering of ETF, stocks and crypto monthly savings plans. We are planning to launch derivatives trading next. We will continue on our mission to make everyone an investor”.

In the meantime, the company is also bulking up at a time when others in the same space are doubling down, too. Last month, Trade Republic — another neobroker from Germany — announced a $900 million investment at a $5 billion valuation led by Sequoia. Other big European players that have also recently raised big expansion rounds include Amsterdam’s Bux ($80 million in April) and Vienna-based Bitpanda ($170 million in March).

Interestingly, Tencent also led that last round for Bux, a part of its bigger investment efforts both in fintech and in the region. Other big bets in Fintech have included Viva Wallet in Greece; Nubank in Brazil, which yesterday also announced a big round; N26; and Futu, a Nasdaq-listed Chinese neo-broker. It also has built out an extensive gaming empire with a string of major acquisitions, including Supercell.

“Tencent complements our existing long-term partners who already represent an international investor base. Our recent funding is a major step forward on our way to becoming the leading retail investment platform in Europe. The strong acceleration of our growth further validates our mission to empower investors”, says Erik Podzuweit, co-CEO and co-founder of Scalable Capital, in a statement. “Anyone thinking of investing money should think of Scalable Capital. Whether you want to invest yourself via our broker or want our wealth management solutions to do it for you.”

The fintech interest is particularly notable also given that Tencent is also the parent of China’s messaging behemoth WeChat, which has also made huge inroads among consumers around a range of financial services.

“Demand for accessible solutions of personal investing is increasing in European markets, particularly among millennials. Scalable Capital excels in offering its customers a convenient and cost-efficient investing experience. We are delighted to be an investor and participate in Scalable Capital’s growth”, says Danying Ma, Managing Director of Tencent Investment, in a statement.

Every startup is trying to fix something but Terraformation is tackling the only problem that must matter to all of us: Climate change.

This is why it’s in such a big huge hurry. Its mission — as a ‘forest tech’ startup — is to accelerate tree planting by applying a startup-y operational philosophy of scalability to the pressing task of rapidly, sustainably reforesting denuded landscapes — bringing back native trees species to revive former wastelands and shrinking our carbon emissions in the process.

Forests are natural carbon sinks. The problem is we just don’t have enough trees with roots in the ground to offset our emissions. So that at least means the mission is simple: Plant more trees, and plant more trees fast.

Terraformation’s goal is to restore three billion acres of global native forest ecosystems by scaling tree replanting projects in parallel, scaling the use of existing techniques, and working with all the partners it can. (For a little context, the U.S. contains some 2.27BN acres of total land area, per Wikipedia).

So far it says it’s planted “thousands” of trees — with live projects in North America, South America, Africa and Europe which it hopes will yield up to 20,000 replanted acres. It’s also in talks with partners about more projects that could clad hundreds of thousands of acres with carbon-consuming (and biodiversity-prompting) trees, if they come to full fruition.

That’s still a long way off the 3BN-acre-wooded moonshot, of course. But Terraformation claims it’s been able to achieve a forestry restoration work-rate that’s 5x the average already. And that’s definitely the kind of ‘gas stepping’ that climate change needs.

Its elevator pitch is also punchy: “Our mission is explicitly to solve climate change through mass reforestation,” says founder Yishan Wong — whose name may be familiar as the ex-Reddit CEO (and also a former early-stage engineer at PayPal/Facebook). “So it’s getting trees in the ground and getting faster at getting trees in the ground.”

It’s not going it alone, either. It’s just announced a first closing of a $30 million Series A funding round, led by Sam & Max Altman at Apollo Projects, the brothers’ ‘moonshot’ fund; plus several high-profile institutional investors (whose names aren’t being disclosed); along with nearly 100 angel investors, including Sundeep Ahuja, Lachy Groom, Sahil Lavingia, Joe Lonsdale, Susan Wu, and OVN Cap.

“The [Series A] was a bit larger than we anticipated and the idea is to get us to the next stage of planting orders of magnitude more trees every year,” says Wong. “So it’ll be used both for supporting forestry projects directly, as well as for the development and deployment of forestry acceleration products and technology.”

“The very, very nice thing about mass reforestation or mass restoration as a solution to climate change is that it’s extremely parallelizable,” he adds. “You can plant any tree at the same time as your planting some other tree. This is the primary reason why this solution can potentially be implemented within the timetable that we have left. But in order to do so we have to start and drive an enormous, decentralized reforestation campaign across multiple continents and countries.”

The funding follows a $5M seed last year, as the young startup worked to hone its approach.

Terraformation is targeting the main barriers to successful reforesting: Through early research and pilots it says it’s identified three key bottlenecks to large-scale forest restoration — namely, land availability, freshwater, and seed. It then seeks to address each of these pinch-points to viable reforesting — identifying and fashioning modular, sharable solutions (tools, techniques, training etc) that can help shave off friction and build leafy, branching success.

These products include a seed bank unit it’s devised, housed in a standard shipping container and kitted out with all the equipment (plus solar off-grip capability, if required) to take care of on-site storage for the thousands of native seeds each projects needs to replant a whole forest.

It also offers a nursery kit which also ships in a shipping container — a flat-packed greenhouse that it says a couple of people can put together, and where thousands of seedlings can then be tended and irrigated in pots until they’re ready to plant out.

A third support it offers to the replanting projects it wants to work with is expertise in building solar-powered desalination rigs so young trees can be supplied with adequate water to survive in locations where poor land management may have made conditions for growth difficult and harsh.

It goes without saying that planted trees which fail because of poor processes won’t help cut carbon emissions. Badly managed replanting is at best wasteful — and may be closer to cynical greenwashing in some cases. (Poor quality projects can be a known problem where claims of corporate carbon offsetting are being made, for example.)

Terraformation is thus zeroing in on repeatable ways to scale and accelerate the successful planting and nurturing of trees, from seed to sapling and beyond, to accelerate sustainable reforesting.

Ultimately, it’s the only kind of tree planting that will really count in the fight against climate change.

Its first pilot restoration projects begun in Hawai’i in 2019 — where it’s been able to plant thousands of trees at a site called Pacific Flight, reviving a native tropical sandalwood forest that had been logged unsustainably. To enable the young trees to grow in land which had also become arid as a result of cattle grazing, the team built the world’s largest fully off-grid, solar-powered desalination system to supply sustainable freshwater to the baby forest.

“The arid environment, high winds, and degraded soils meant that if a team could restore a forest there, they could do it anywhere,” is the pitch on its website.

The Series A will go toward spinning up lots more such native species forest restoration projects — working via partnerships, with organizations such as Environmental Defenders in Uganda, and other groups in Ecuador, Haiti and Tanzania — as well as on more R&D (additional products are in the pipeline, we’re told); and on expanding headcount so its team has the legs to run faster.

Interestingly, for a startup with Silicon Valley engineering pedigree at its core, the team’s approach is intentionally light on technology — leaning only on vital tech (like solar and desalination), rather than experimental bells and whistles (drones, robotics etc) to ensure the processes it’s packaging up for massive replanting parallelism remain as simple, accessible and reliable as possible. So they are able to scale all over the globe.

It’s clear that sci-fi robotic gadgetry isn’t the answer here. It’s sweating toil plus tried and tested horticulture processes, done systematically and repeatedly, in mass parallelism all over the world that’s required, argues Wong, whose years in tech have given him a healthy scepticism on the issue of over-engineering. (“The biggest lesson I learned was, you want to solve a big problem? You want to use as little technology as possible… Technology’s always breaking, it’s always got flaws. The biggest problem with technology is technology.”)

“I would say that the key contribution that ‘tech’ — if you think of a monolith or a culture or whatever — will make to climate change, is not in fact some new invention or some gadget or some sort of special magical technology… I think it really is the practice of scalability,” he goes on. “Which is an organizational end. A management way of thinking. Because that is actually something that has been carefully and painfully developed… over the past 20 years in Silicon Valley. How to take small working solutions, how to solve very big problems, how to scale them. And it isn’t a very glamorous thing — which is why I think it’s one of the more pure disciplines.

“It just has been less corrupt… Scalability is just people thinking hard and grinding it out to address really hard big problems. And I think that practice and all the little tips and rules that we have to doing that is the real contribution that tech is going to make — with one of those principles being use as little tech as you can.”

Terraformation is building software tools too — such as a mobile app to help with cataloguing and monitoring seeds. But the really critical technologies involved, solar and desalination, are very much at the ‘tried and tested’ end of the tech scale (“very, very reliable and refined”.).

Wong points out that a key development for solar and desalination is related to the unit economics — with falling costs allowing for scalability and thus speed.

Asked whether Terraformation is a business in the typical startup sense, Wong says it’s been set up in a familiar way — as a Delaware C Corp — but purely because he says that’s just the quickest way to be able to operate. Doing stuff as a non-profit would be way too slow, he says, describing it thusly as a “non non-profit” (rather than a business with a for-profit mission).

Aka: “It’s a corporate with investors but primarily the aim is to solve climate change.”

Startup investors are of course often betting their money on the chance of a quick and meaty return. But not here, confirms Wong. “When we raised funding all of our investors invested primarily because they wanted to see climate change solved,” he tells TechCrunch. “To many of them this was the first time that a plausible, full-scale solution to solving climate change had been presented.

“It’s still very, very hard. It’s very, very large. It’s really daunting. But it’s the first time someone has mapped out a path that could actually get us there. And so all of our investors invested because they want to see that happen.”

So how will a ‘non non-profit’ startup (even with $30M just banked) get its hands on enough land to plant enough trees? A variety of ways, per Wong. (Perhaps even, in some instances, landowners could end up paying it to turn their dirt into beautiful woodland.)

“The short answer is anywhere we can!” he adds. “The solution is structured to give us maximum flexibility, given that we can use a large variety of land. We don’t want to count on any particular land owning entity — and I use that very broad term to mean like people, communities, governments, municipalities — we don’t want to rely on any one particular land-owning entity wanting to work with us or allowing us to reforest the land, because you can’t guarantee that.”

He also notes that Terraformation’s plan to fix climate change is based on “worse case scenarios” — where “no one who owns any land that gets enough natural rainfall for forest restoration will allow it to reforest it”. “We use the least valuable land — basically desertified, degraded land,” he adds. “Is there enough of that? And it turns out there is.”

Even though personal financial upside clearly isn’t front of mind for Terraformation’s investors, Wong still believes there’s plenty of ‘value’ to be unlocked as a byproduct of spreading leafy-green goodness all over the planet vs funding more extractive exploitation.

“It turns out that solving climate change is actually a huge value creating act,” he argues. “My experience in Silicon Valley is if you have people who believe in you and believe in the thing that you’re creating is ultimately value-creating then it’s actually also wealth creating. If you do something that is fundamentally very, very valuable and you’re right next to it, you will be able to monetize it in some way. You will capture some of that value for your shareholders. So it’s a bet that if you really can solve climate change, that’s super valuable, both for the world and to the entity that’s [investing].”

Of course climate change is more than just a problem; it’s an existential threat to all life on Earth — one which affect humans and every other living creature and thing on the planet.

Given such terminal stakes, reversing climate change should be the highest global priority. Instead, humans have procrastinated — putting dealing with rises in atmospheric CO2 on the back-burner and worse (cutting down existing forests like the Amazon Rainforest, for one).

Set against that backdrop, Terraformation’s answer to humanity’s greatest crisis looks compellingly simple. Its bet is that climate change can be fixed by scaling the most proven technology possible (trees) to capture carbon emissions. Who can argue with that? 

But it does also seem clear that reforesting will need to go hand in hand with a mainstreaming of conservation, as a prevailing societal attitude, if the mission is to be pulled off — otherwise all these beautiful baby trees could just meet the same sad fate as all the Earth’s already lost forests.

Nonetheless, conservation is something Wong’s team is deliberately not focusing on.

Not because they don’t care. Rather their hope is that by building the baby forests, the protective partners will come — to watch over and get value from the trees as they grow. 

“I don’t want to make it seem like we don’t care about [forestry conservation] but one of the things that I try to do is figure out where people are already doing work and things are already moving in the right direction — and then go work on the thing that other people are not working on,” he says when we ask about this. “When I talk to people in the forestry world many, many people are working on avoiding deforestation, helping solve the broader socioeconomic issues that result in deforestation. And so I feel like there is momentum moving in that direction — so we have to work on this other issue that other people aren’t working on.”

Wong also argues that forests are naturally more valuable than the denuded waste/scrub ground they’re replanting — implying that pure economic interest should help these baby forests survive and thrive far into the future.

However the history of humanity shows that unequal wealth distribution can wreak all sorts of havoc on a resource-rich natural environment. And people who live in poverty may well be disproportionately more likely to like in a rural location, on or near land that Terraformation hopes to target for replanting. So if these forests can’t provide — in crude terms — ‘value’ for their local communities the risk is the same cycle of short-term economic harm will rip all this hard work (and hope) out of the ground once again.

Wealth inequality lies at the core of much of humanity’s counterproductive destruction of the environment. So, seen from that angle, reforesting the planet may require just as much effort toward tackling — root and branch — the wider socioeconomic fault-lines of our world, as it will washing, sorting and storing seed, watering seedlings and nurturing and planting saplings.

And that further dials up an already massive climate challenge. But, again, Wong is quietly hopeful.

“People aren’t cutting down trees because they’re evil, they’re cutting down trees because they need to make a living. So we have to provide them with ways to make a living that is more valuable than cutting down the trees. I think that recognition is moving in the correct direction — so I’m hopeful there,” he says.

Asked what keeps him up at night, he also has a straightforward answer to hand — one we’ve heard many times already from a new generation of climate campaigners, like Greta Thunberg, whose futures will be irrevocably stamped by the effects of climate change: Humanity simply isn’t moving fast enough.

“In order to do this we have to make order of magnitude improvements in both speed and scale — which is technically a thing that we know how to do but is among the most daunting things that you ever try to undertake. So… are we moving fast enough? Are we doing enough? Because time is running out,” warns Wong.

“The timeframe that we have left is very small when compared to the planetary scale of the problem. And so I think the only way that we’re going to get there is with proven solutions, moving, growing at exponential speed.”

“I am [hopeful],” he adds. “I’m a big fan of humans working together. People can really do it. I’m very I guess what you’d call pro-human. We have a lot of flaws, we fight amongst ourselves a lot, but I really think that when people work together they can really do amazing, amazing things… Trees gave us life and so now it’s our time to repay that debt.”

 

A young Indian startup that is betting that earned wage access solutions will take off in the South Asian nation said on Wednesday it has closed a new round from high-profile investors.

Bangalore-based Refyne said on Wednesday that it has raised $16 million in Series A from partners of DST Global and RTP Global. The startup also disclosed that it raised a $4.1 million seed round in December from Jigsaw VC and QED Investors and XYZ Capital, all of whom also participated in the new round.

TechCrunch reported last month that Refyne was in talks with RTP Global to raise money.

Refyne works with employers to let their workers access their earned salaries in real-time. For instance, an employee could see how much they have earned in a week and withdraw a fraction of it anytime they wish.

The idea, explained Chitresh Sharma, co-founder and chief executive of Refyne, is that many individuals in India run out of cash before their next payday and then some end up taking loans on not so favorable terms to make ends meet. “An employee should have the option to access their own earnings at any time,” he told TechCrunch in an interview.

It’s a concept that has taken off in several markets — with many major employers such as Uber and McDonald’s offering this flexibility to their workforce — but is yet to be tested in India. Earlier on Monday, Indonesian startup Wagely announced a $5.5 million fundraise to test this idea in the Southeast Asian market.

Sharma, a third-time founder, said Refyne’s plug-and-play software is aimed at all sizes of employers, and the platform can benefit blue-collar as well as white-collar workers.

“The need for financial inclusion is more important today than ever before. As the first company in India to provide earned wage access, Refyne can revolutionise the way millions of workers manage their money. By providing a real, affordable alternative to payday loans, Refyne will not only improve a person’s financial health, but it will add control for the consumer and dramatically reduce the stress on those who worry about meeting their financial obligations,” said QED Investors Managing Partner and Co-Founder Nigel Morris, in a statement. This is QED’s first investment in India.

Over 100 companies in India are already using Refyne’s platform, serving over 300,000 employees. Some of the clients include Rebel Foods, Cafe Coffee Day, Hira Group, and Chai Point.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

A young Indian startup that is betting that earned wage access solutions will take off in the South Asian nation said on Wednesday it has closed a new round from high-profile investors.

Bangalore-based Refyne said on Wednesday that it has raised $16 million in Series A from partners of DST Global and RTP Global. The startup also disclosed that it raised a $4.1 million seed round in December from Jigsaw VC and QED Investors and XYZ Capital, all of whom also participated in the new round.

TechCrunch reported last month that Refyne was in talks with RTP Global to raise money.

Refyne works with employers to let their workers access their earned salaries in real-time. For instance, an employee could see how much they have earned in a week and withdraw a fraction of it anytime they wish.

The idea, explained Chitresh Sharma, co-founder and chief executive of Refyne, is that many individuals in India run out of cash before their next payday and then some end up taking loans on not so favorable terms to make ends meet. “An employee should have the option to access their own earnings at any time,” he told TechCrunch in an interview.

It’s a concept that has taken off in several markets — with many major employers such as Uber and McDonald’s offering this flexibility to their workforce — but is yet to be tested in India. Earlier on Monday, Indonesian startup Wagely announced a $5.5 million fundraise to test this idea in the Southeast Asian market.

Sharma, a third-time founder, said Refyne’s plug-and-play software is aimed at all sizes of employers, and the platform can benefit blue-collar as well as white-collar workers.

“The need for financial inclusion is more important today than ever before. As the first company in India to provide earned wage access, Refyne can revolutionise the way millions of workers manage their money. By providing a real, affordable alternative to payday loans, Refyne will not only improve a person’s financial health, but it will add control for the consumer and dramatically reduce the stress on those who worry about meeting their financial obligations,” said QED Investors Managing Partner and Co-Founder Nigel Morris, in a statement. This is QED’s first investment in India.

Over 100 companies in India are already using Refyne’s platform, serving over 300,000 employees. Some of the clients include Rebel Foods, Cafe Coffee Day, Hira Group, and Chai Point.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

“It’s not a nail polish company,” says Fenton Jagdeo of Faculty, the startup he cofounded in 2019 with Umar ElBably. Though their Toronto-based company currently sells just three shades of nail polish along with a sleeve of nail stickers at its site — that’s it —  the products are a wedge to something much larger, says Jagdeo.

There will be merchandise, according to the former business management consultant. There will be men’s foundation, and eye shadow, and very possibly hair dye, all of which is focused around a “new wave of masculinity,” he explains.

Not that anything is available for purchase right now — by design. Why? First, this isn’t your everyday brand, found in the aisles of Sephora or CVS, suggests Jagdeo. Faculty is instead “going to be very selective about who we have conversations with. We’re imagining the the Essences of the world, the StockXs, the Kiths. That’s where our clientele is.”

He also says that in the same way that the prominent culture publication Hypebeast created a “desire for new product and newness,” Faculty has “mastered the drop model, which we’ve taken from street culture,” meaning that Faculty has and will continue to advertise a limited supply of a product before invariably selling out of that item.

If you find yourself wondering if Faculty aims to become a streetwear company or a cosmetics company, Jagdeo’s job is done. As he explains it, “essentially, our goal is to blur” that dividing line.

It’s utterly implausible and yet strangely alluring, which likely explains why the cosmetics giant Estee Lauder just led a $3 million seed round in the five-person outfit, joined by RareBreed Ventures, Maple VC, Debut Capital, Creative Connectors, AUFI, 10K Ventures, actress Maisie Williams and recording artist Iann Dior.

After all, there is little to separate one cosmetics brand from another, aside from storytelling and the ability to build up a loyal following. (See, for example, Glossier and its mega-valuation.)

Even Jagdeo readily admits that Faculty’s nail polish is “not, from a purely chemical perspective, different” from what’s widely available in the market already. Yet he sells the vision easily while insisting that ElBably, who attended the same business school as Jagdeo, is the better storyteller of the two.

Certainly, their pitch — that men need more ways through unconventional men’s products to express themselves — is a smart one. Consider that the men’s personal care market alone is expected to balloon to $75 billion over the next six years, according to Grand View Research, and there are few established grooming brands for millennials, even while plenty of outfits are trying. (SNL even came up with a skit recently about a new men’s cosmetics brand called “Man Stain,” which pokes fun at men who want to wear make-up but feel insecure about it.)

Meanwhile, streetwear market is even bigger — it was in the range of $185 billion in sales in 2019, according to PwC analysis — and new brands are breaking through all the time, including brands that, like Faculty, are the express opposite of hyper masculine.

Naturally, Estee Lauder’s imprimatur could make a difference here, too, particularly given that the cosmetics giant isn’t known to actively invest in startups or lead seed rounds. Indeed, while Jagdeo says the funding will help Faculty with its marketing, R&D, and operational expenses, he notes the real advantage to working with Estee Lauder is the mentorship it can provide, as well as its ability to open doors for Faculty.

Says Jagdeo, “It’s a lot easier for us to say, ‘Hey, you know, we’re working with Estee Lauder and Estee Lauder is one of our investors,’ versus, ‘We’re two guys with a dream.’

 

Earned wage access (EWA) platforms that allow workers to withdraw their earnings on demand instead of waiting until payday are proliferating around the world. Today, Indonesian EWA startup wagely announced it has raised $5.6 million in strategic funding, led by Integra Partners (formerly known as Dymon Asia Ventures). Other investors included the Asian Development Bank (ADB) Ventures, PT Triputra Investindo Arya, Global Founders Capital, Trihill Capital, 1982 Ventures and Willy Swandi Dharma, former president director of insurance company PT Asuransi Adira Dinamika.

Founded in 2020 by alumni of two of Southeast Asia’s largest tech companies, wagely expects to reach more than 250,000 users this year. Chief executive officer Tobias Fischer was former regional lending program manager at Grab Financial Services Asia, while chief technology officer Sasanadi Rukua served as vice president of engineering at Tokopedia.

Fischer told TechCrunch that after working at financial services companies in Southeast Asia, he and Ruka saw that “managing cashflow is the most pressing everyday issue for lower- and middle-income Indonesians.”

While the pandemic exacerbated financial hardships, Fischer said more than 75% of Indonesians already struggled to cover unexpected expenses between paychecks. Many borrow from family or friends, but if that option is unavailable, they may turn to payday lenders who can charge more than 360% annualized percentage rates, or pay overdraft and late fees to their banks until their next paycheck.

“This is the start of a vicious and costly debt cycle that has a long-lasting negative impact on individual financial well-being, which in turn impacts businesses with higher turnover, lower productivity and more employee loans,” Fischer said.

On average, more than 50% of employees at wagely’s enterprise clients use it multiple times throughout the month to track their daily earnings and access their earned wages. The company’s ultimate goal is “to build a holistic financial wellness platform for lower- and middle-income workers” that includes other financial services, including savings, insurance and smart spending products, Fischer said.

More companies around the world are allowing workers to pick when they get paid. Some notable EWA platforms include Gusto’s Flexible Pay; DailyPay, which recently hit unicorn status; Wagestream; Minu and Even. In Indonesia, wagely’s competitors include GajiGesa and Gajiku.

Fischer said wagely “created the earned wage access category in Indonesia,” and is the market leader with more than 50 large companies, including state-owned enterprises and multi-national conglomerates. Its new funding will be used to increase wagely’s sales team in order to close more enterprise deals. Wagely’s current customers include PT Bentoel Internasional Investama Tbk (British American Tobacco); PT Supra Boga Lestari Tbk (Ranch Market); beauty and wellness company PT Mustika Ratu Tbk; and renewable energy group PT Kencana Energi Lestari Tbk.

In a press statement, Wilson Maknawi, president director at PT Kencana Energi Lestari TBK, said, “wagely offers our employees financial stability in times of uncertainty. It is incredibly important and a crucial step for the long-term resilience of our business. With no changes to our payroll process, wagely’s solution has proven to increase our business savings and helped our employees to avoid predatory loans while providing savings and budget tools that increase their financial literacy.”

Former President Donald Trump today issued a statement supporting the Nigerian government’s decision to suspend Twitter activities in the West African country.