Author: azeeadmin

Joby Aviation is partnering with one of the country’s largest parking garage operators and a real estate acquisition company to build out its network of vertiports, with an initial focus on Los Angeles, Miami, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, the company said Wednesday.

The partnership with REFF Technology and Neighborhood Property Group will give Joby “access to an unparalleled range of rooftop locations across all key metropolitan areas in the US, as well as a mechanism to fund the acquisition and development of new skyport sites,” Joby said in a statement.

Building out a convenient, accessible and large network of locations to hitch a ride on an air taxi will likely be a key factor determining which companies succeed in attracting would-be riders to their service. The current infrastructure to support helicopters is limited, especially in urban areas, where electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) companies intend to launch.

The deal will give Joby exclusive access to the sites for a period, during which it said it can secure long-term leases within REEF’s real estate network.

Until now little has been known about the electric aircraft giant’s intentions regarding its aerial ridesharing network, although founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt has publicly talked about the benefits of using existing parking garages.

Such structures are typically in dense areas, they’re large, and they’re built out of robust material that can support multiple small aircraft. But perhaps most importantly, parking garages already house cars, another form of transportation that will likely work hand-in-hand with air taxis in serving first- and last-mile segments of a journey.

REEF, which began as parking lot management and servicing company ParkJockey, now operates around 4,500 mobility and logistics hubs that it says reaches 70% of the North American urban population. REEF raised $700 million from SoftBank, the Mubadala Corp. and others last November.

In addition to the new partnership, Joby said its vertiport network will use existing heliport and regional airport locations.

“This is a landmark deal on Joby’s path to building a transformational ridesharing service in our skies,” Bevirt said in a statement. “NPG and REEF have an unbeatable network of sites across the US and we’re excited to be working with them to identify sites that will become the backbone of our future service.

Take a close look at any ambitious startup and you’ll find pugnacity nestled in its core. Stubbornness and a bullheaded belief in the worth of what a company wants to bring to fruition is often the biggest driver of its success, and the people at such companies also tend to share this quality.

So it wouldn’t be too far off the mark to say the people at Expensify are a stubborn lot — to the company’s ultimate benefit. This group of P2P pirates/hackers that set out to build an expense management app stuck to their gut, made their own rules. They asked questions few thought of, like: Why have lots of employees when you can find a way to get work done and reach impressive profitability with a few? Why work from an office in San Francisco when the internet lets you work from anywhere, even a sailboat in the Caribbean?

It makes sense in a way: If you’re a pirate, to hell with the rules, right? And even more so when nobody can explain the rules in the first place.

With that in mind, one could assume Expensify decided to ask itself: Why not build our own totally custom tech stack? Indeed, Expensify has made several tech decisions that were met with disbelief — from having an open-source frontend and cross-platform mobile development to hiring contractors to train its AI and recruiting open-source contributors — but its belief in its own choices has paid off over the years, and the company is ready to IPO any day now.

How much of a tech advantage Expensify enjoys owing to such choices is an open question, but one thing is clear: These choices are key to understanding Expensify and its roadmap. Let’s take a look.

Built on Bedrock

I think another question Expensify also decided to ask in its early days was something like: Why not have our database on top of a technology that’s built for small-scale application software?

It may sound incredible, but Expensify actually runs on a custom database built on top of SQLite. This is surprising, because despite being one of the most widely deployed database engines, SQLite is known for running on small, embedded systems like smartphones and web browsers, not powering enterprise-scale databases.

This custom database is called Bedrock, and its architecture is as unique as they come. Expensify explains it as an “RDBMS optimized for self-healing replication across relatively slow, relatively unreliable WAN (internet) connections, enabling extremely high availability/high performance multi-datacenter deployments without any single point of failure.” RDBMS means relational database management system, describing SQLite and other row-based databases where entries are interconnected with each other.

But why would Expensify build this instead of going for any number of widely available enterprise database solutions?

To answer that question, we need to go back to the early days of the company, which was originally a side project for its founder and CEO, David Barrett. His initial idea was to develop a prepaid card for the homeless, but this required putting a server on the Visa network, which brought several strict requirements and challenges. “I would say one of the most difficult [parts] was that I needed the ability to automatically replicate and failover,” Barrett told TechCrunch when we interviewed him a couple of months ago.

This was no easy feat in 2007, but Barrett was up for the challenge. “I just hit a moment where the technology available off the shelf just wasn’t that good. And I happened to be a peer-to-peer software developer who had tons of spare time and really wanted to build this thing to put on the Visa backend,” he said. The P2P aspect was important, as Barrett had the skills to make it work. His first hires for Expensify, P2P engineers he had worked with at Red Swoosh and Akamai, were also unusually suited for the job.

For years now, the world of retail has been evolving. Whether it’s next-day delivery with Amazon Prime or subscription D2C services or on-demand delivery from Postmates, we’re growing increasingly accustomed to being able to buy something and have it arrive at our door relatively quickly.

Today, a new startup is launching in New York with a fresh take on on-demand delivery.

JOKR, founded by Ralf Wenzel (the same guy who founded FoodPanda, which later merged with DeliveryHero) promises delivery in 15 minutes or less, with no order minimums, and a selection of products that you might find in the local deli or convenience store.

The approach is centered around what JOKR calls micro-hubs, which are really just various storefronts on side streets in denser areas. The company uses data to forecast what customers will want, when, and where, to strategically organize these micro-fulfillment centers for speed.

For end users, there are no order minimums and no delivery fees.

data is the key ingredient of how we build the business to identify what customers need and put an emphasis of also on only what they need, but also when they need it. And what point of time, which day, which week which month, whether it’s in the morning or in the evening, and built a dynamic inventory and catalog management system is able to rotate inventory, provide inventory and pre forecast in suggests for customers, those type of consumer goods, and the corresponding time and if you presented and forecast the time.

JOKR procures the goods sold on the app directly from brands, manufacturers and wholesalers. In other words, you can think of the service as a sort of ghost kitchen for groceries and every day items.

“We are a platform that is not relying on any type of consumer charges,” said Wenzel. “Hence, the business is predominantly a business that generates revenue out of the respective product costs. Our ability to procure directly, and cut out middlemen in terms of wholesalers, distributors, supermarkets themselves, allows us to tap into a margin pool that is higher than that of traditional online marketplaces, which would only pick a product from existing stores, supermarkets, and then need to apply a delivery fee in order to make their proposition work.”

The company is working to increase its inventory, which currently includes more than 1,500 items.

In terms of the workforce, JOKR delivery people are full time employees.

JOKR has been operating in Latin America (Brazil, Lima, and Mexico City) and is now expanding into the U.S. market with its NYC launch.

According to TheRealDeal, JOKR has funding from SoftBank, as well as HV Capital and Tiger Global. It’s unclear how much the startup has raised.

As companies increasingly rely on data to run their businesses, having accurate sources of data becomes paramount. Stemma, a new early stage startup, has come up with a solution, a managed data catalogue that acts as an organization’s source of truth.

Today the company announced a $4.8 million seed investment led by Sequoia with assorted individual tech luminaries also participating. The product is also available for the first time today.

Company co-founder and CEO Mark Grover says the product is actually built on top of the open source Amundsen data catalogue project that he helped launch at Lyft to manage its massive data requirements. The problem was that with so much data, employees had to kludge together systems to confirm the data validity. Ultimately manual processes like asking someone in Slack or even creating a Wiki failed under the weight of trying to keep up with the volume and velocity.

“I saw this problem first-hand at Lyft, which led me to create the open source Amundsen project with a team of talented engineers,” Grover said. That project has 750 users at Lyft using it every week. Since it was open sourced, 35 companies like Brex, Snap and Asana have been using it.

What Stemma offers is a managed version of Amundsen that adds additional functionality like using intelligence to show data that’s meaningful to the person who is searching in the catalogue. It also can add metadata automatically to data as it’s added to the catalogue, creating documentation about the data on the fly, among other features.

The company launched last fall when Grover and co-founder and CTO Dorian Johnson decided to join forces and create a commercial product on top of Amundsen. Grover points out that Lyft was supportive of the move.

Today the company has five employees, in addition to the founders and has plans to add several more this year. As he does that, he is cognizant of diversity and inclusion in the hiring process. “I think it’s super important that we continue to invest in diversity, and the two ways that I think are the most meaningful for us right now is to have early employees that are from diverse groups, and that is the case within the first five,” he said. Beyond that, he says that as the company grows he wants to improve the ratio, while also looking at diversity in investors, board members and executives.

The company, which launched during COVID is entirely remote right now and plans to remain that way for at least the short term. As the company grows, they will look at ways to build camaraderie like organizing a regular cadence of employee offsite events.

Although it’s a truncated holiday week here in the United States, there’s been a bushel of IPO news. This morning, we’re going to sort through the updates and come up with a series of sentiment calls regarding these public offerings.

---

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. 

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

---

Here’s what’s in our basket of news items this morning:

• Marqeta‘s first IPO price range (fintech)
• 1st Dibs‘ first IPO price range (e-commerce)
• Zeta Global‘s IPO pricing (martech)
• The start of SoFi trading post-SPAC (fintech)
• The latest from BarkBox (e-commerce)

A brief note on why we care to do all this work:

We care because it’s worth knowing what current demand is for venture-backed shares on the public markets. The third quarter is expected by many in the private markets to be an active period for exits. So, for founders, investors, and a host of technology startup employees, we’re gearing up for a busy period.

And today’s IPO climate could be the on-ramp to that rush of unicorn liquidity. So let’s understand where we’re starting through the prism of debut updates en masse.

Marqeta

• First IPO price range: $20 to $24 per share
• Max IPO raise: $1,254,545,448
• Implied simple valuation range: $10.6 billion to $12.7 billion

The last known private-market value of Marqeta was set in May 2020, when the company raised $150 million at what PitchBook estimates was a $4.3 billion valuation. From that perspective, the company could up to triple its final private valuation in its public debut. There was some other money sloshing around the company since that May round, however, so its pricing could have shifted some in the intervening months.

Our read is that even if Marqeta does not raise its IPO range, its pricing is bullish, and if it does raise its range, it could become even more so. At a flat $12 billion price, the company’s Q1 2021 run rate puts it on a 27.8x revenue multiple. That’s rich.

1st Dibs

• First IPO price range: $18 to $21 per share
• Max IPO raise: $138,862,500
  
  

Think you’re living in a hyper-connected world? Huawei’s proprietary HarmonyOS wants to eliminate delays and gaps in user experience when you move from one device onto another by adding interoperability to all devices, regardless of the system that powers them.

Two years after Huawei was added to the U.S. entity list that banned the Chinese telecom giant from accessing U.S. technologies, including core chipsets and Android developer services from Google, Huawei’s alternative smartphone operating system was unveiled.

On Wednesday, Huawei officially launched its proprietary operating system HarmonyOS for mobile phones. The firm began building the operating system in 2016 and made it open-source for tablets, electric vehicles and smartwatches last September. Its flagship devices such as Mate 40 could upgrade to HarmonyOS starting Wednesday, with the operating system gradually rolling out on lower-end models in the coming quarters.

HarmonyOS is not meant to replace Android or iOS, Huawei said. Rather, its application is more far-reaching, powering not just phones and tablets but an increasing number of smart devices. To that end, Huawei has been trying to attract hardware and home appliance manufacturers to join its ecosystem.

To date, more than 500,000 developers are building applications based on HarmonyOS. It’s unclear whether Google, Facebook and other mainstream apps in the West are working on HarmonyOS versions.

Some Chinese tech firms have answered Huawei’s call. Smartphone maker Meizu hinted on its Weibo account that its smart devices might adopt HarmonyOS. Oppo, Vivo and Xiaomi, who are much larger players than Meizu, are probably more reluctant to embrace a rival’s operating system.

Huawei’s goal is to collapse all HarmonyOS-powered devices into one single control panel, which can, say, remotely pair the Bluetooth connections of headphones and a TV. A game that is played on a phone can be continued seamlessly on a tablet. A smart soymilk blender can customize a drink based on the health data gleaned from a user’s smartwatch.

Devices that aren’t already on HarmonyOS can also communicate with Huawei devices with a simple plug-in. Photos from a Windows-powered laptop can be saved directly onto a Huawei phone if the computer has the HarmonyOS plug-in installed. That raises the question of whether Android, or even iOS, could, one day, talk to HarmonyOS through a common language.

The HarmonyOS launch arrived days before Apple’s annual developer event scheduled for next week. A recent job posting from Apple mentioned a seemingly new concept, homeOS, which may have to do with Apple’s smart home strategy, as noted by Macrumors.

Huawei denied speculations that HarmonyOS is a derivative of Android and said no single line of code is identical to that of Android. A spokesperson for Huawei declined to say whether the operating system is based on Linux, the kernel that powers Android.

Several tech giants have tried to introduce their own mobile operating systems to no avail. Alibaba built AliOS based on Linux but has long stopped updating it. Samsung flirted with its own Tizen but the operating system is limited to powering a few Internet of Things like smart TVs.

Huawei may have a better shot at drumming up developer interest compared to its predecessors. It’s still one of China’s largest smartphone brands despite losing a chunk of its market after the U.S. government cut it off critical chip suppliers, which could hamper its ability to make cutting-edge phones. HarmonyOS also has a chance to create an alternative for developers who are disgruntled with Android, if Huawei is able to capture their needs.

The U.S. sanctions do not block Huawei from using Android’s open-source software, which major Chinese smartphone makers use to build their third-party Android operating system. But the ban was like a death knell for Huawei’s consumer markets overseas as its phones abroad lost access to Google Play services.

Jeeves, which is building an “all-in-one expense management platform” for global startups, is emerging from stealth today with $131 million in total funding, including $31 million in equity and $100 million in debt financing. 

The $31 million in equity consists of a new $26 million Series A and a previously unannounced $5 million seed round.

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the Series A funding, which also included participation from YC Continuity Fund, Jaguar Ventures, Urban Innovation Fund, Uncorrelated Ventures, Clocktower Ventures, Stanford University, 9 Yards Capital and BlockFi Ventures.

A high-profile group of angel investors also put money in the round, including NFL wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald and the founders of five LatAm unicorns — Nubank CEO David Velez, Kavak CEO Carlos Garcia, Rappi co-founder Sebastian Mejia, Bitso CEO Daniel Vogel and Loft CEO Florian Hagenbuch. Justo’s Ricardo Weder also participated in this round and Plaid co-founder William Hockey put money in the $5 million seed funding that closed in 2020 after the company completed the YC Summer 2020 batch.

The “fully remote” Jeeves describes itself as the first “cross country, cross currency” expense management platform. The startup’s offering is currently live in Mexico — its largest market — as well as Colombia, Canada and the U.S., and is currently beta testing in Brazil and Chile. 

Dileep Thazhmon and Sherwin Gandhi founded Jeeves last year under the premise that startups have traditionally had to rely on financial infrastructure that is local and country-specific. For example, a company with employees in Mexico and Colombia would require multiple vendors to cover its finance function in each country — a corporate card in Mexico and one in Colombia and another vendor for cross-border payments.

Jeeves claims that by using its platform, any company can spin up their finance function “in minutes” and get access to 30 days of credit on a true corporate card, noncard payment rails, as well as cross-border payments. Customers can also pay back in multiple currencies, reducing FX (foreign transaction) fees.

“We’re building an all-in-one expense management platform for startups in LatAm and global markets — cash, corporate cards, cross-border — all run on our own infrastructure,” Thazhmon said. 

“We’re really building two things — an infrastructure layer that sits across banking institutions in different countries. And then on top of that, we’re building the customer-, or end user-facing app,” he added. “What gives us the ability to launch in countries much quicker is that we own part of that stack ourselves, versus what most fintechs would do, which is plug into a third-party provider in that region.” 

Indeed, the company has seen rapid early growth. Since launching its private beta last October, Jeeves says it has grown its transaction volume (GTV) by 200x and increased revenue by 900% (albeit from a small base). In May alone, Jeeves says it processed more transaction volume than the entire year to date, and more than doubled its customer base. It says that “hundreds of companies,” including Bitso, Belvo, Justo, Runa, Worky, Zinboe, RobinFood and Muncher, “actively” use Jeeves to manage their local and international spend. On top of that, it says, the startup has a waitlist of more than 5,000 companies — which is part of why the company sought to raise debt and equity.

The shift to remote work globally due to the COVID-19 pandemic has played a large role in why Jeeves has seen so much demand, according to Thazhmon.

“Every company is now becoming a global company, and the service to employees in two different countries requires two different systems,” he said. “And then someone’s got to reconcile that system at the end of the month. This has been a big reason why we’re growing so fast.”

One of Jeeves’ biggest accomplishments so far, Thazhmon said, has been receiving approval to issue cards from its own credit BIN (bank identification number) in Mexico. It can also run SPEI payments directly on its infrastructure. (SPEI is a system developed and operated by Banco de México that allows the general public to make electronic payments.)

“This gives us a lot of flexibility and allows us to offer a truly unique product to our customers,” said Thazhmon, who previously co-founded PowerInbox, a
Battery Ventures-backed MarTech company that he says grew to $40 million in annual revenue in three years.

Jeeves says it will use the fresh capital to onboard new companies to the platform from its waitlist, scale its infrastructure to cover more countries and currencies as well as do some hiring and expand its product line.

A16z General Partner Angela Strange, who is joining Jeeves’ board as part of the investment, is extremely bullish on the startup’s potential.

Strange says she met Thazhmon about a year ago and was immediately intrigued.

“Not only were they working to provide the financial operating system within a country, starting in Mexico, they were designing their software platform to scale across multiple countries,” she said. “Finally — a multicountry/currency expense management & payouts platform, where increasingly companies have employees and operations in multiple countries from the start and can use a single company to manage their financials.”

Strange, who has been investing in Latin America for the past few years, notes that most companies in the region are unable to get a corporate credit card.

“That’s only the tip of the iceberg,” she told TechCrunch. “It’s cumbersome for companies to make bank to bank payouts, handle wires, and they usually also have expenses in the U.S. (and often other countries) so there is also FX. And they manage multiple bank accounts. Not only is paying hard, reconciliation on the backend takes weeks.”

As such, Strange said, with every country having their own bank transfer system, rules around who can issue a credit card, approved payment processors, currencies and bank accounts — payments and expense management across countries can be complex.

Jeeves, according to Strange, “gets as close to the networks/payment rails as possible” since it has its own issuing credit BIN versus needing to connect through legacy players.

Providing an orchestration layer on top of all the rails gives Jeeves the ability “to handle all the payment and reconciliation complexity” so “their customers don’t have to think about it,” she added.

 

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha dug into the burgeoning of sports media, sports gaming, and fantasy sports world today through the lens of some early-stage startups. Naturally, the Equity team is what comes to mind when you consider the correct and right people to discuss sports. We are here to back up your priors.

Jokes aside, we had a good time digging into the following:

• THE GIST raised $1 million. Both Natasha and Alex were very bullish on the company’s product, focus, and market. Especially in light of some recent media deals that have kept our hearts aflutter over the last few quarters.
• Blaseball raised $3 million. Whether it is blah-ZAY-ball, or BLACE-ball, the Equity team thinks that having fantasy fantasy sports is meta, good fun, and perhaps appeal-broadening the larger, somewhat hoary world of baseball. Also baseball could use more whimsy in general.
• And the fantasy talk continued as we got to cricket, which is a massively adored and obsessed over sport in India especially. Earlier this year, Dream11’s parent firm raised $225 million at an over $2.5 billion valuation to build an end-to-end sports tech company around the sport.

We’d venture out to say we are probably the only tech podcast this week that found an angle to riff on within sports and donuts, which is why we love our jobs and why we hope you love the show. Surprises keep things fun, and much love to our producers, Chris and Grace, for constantly sourcing creative material that may have flown under the radar otherwise.

Back Friday!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 7:00 a.m. PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

The bike had none of the usual signage when I took it for a spin around the chaotic and construction-filled streets of Manhattan. It very much looked like a prototype, with visible soldering on the joints and a not-quite-complete AV system. But it handled well, when merging in and out of traffic — and at the end of the day, that’s the most important thing.

Pilots for Lyft’s new e-bike begin this month. The ride-hailing service will begin offering units in cities where it operates, starting with San Francisco, then Chicago and New York. The locations will be somewhat randomized, as a kind of “Easter egg” system where users will randomly stumble on the shiny new electric bicycles. If you’re lucky enough to experience one in the wild, Lyft will shoot you an email, asking how your experience was.

Mine was pretty good, all told — but for that moment I got clipped by a delivery driver. But that’s life in the big city — and I was probably making too wide a turn, my first time on the 80-pound e-bike (20 pounds more than their predecessor). The weight of the thing (owing primarily to a massive new battery on the downtube) concerned me at first, but the bike handles surprisingly well. The pedal assist is smooth and seamless. At a cruising speed, I found that I only had to pump a few times per block.

The ride was limited — almost entirely on flat ground, meaning I didn’t get to experience many of the automated gear shifts, nor really put the pedal assist to test riding up a bridge on ramp or one of San Francisco’s notorious hills. All told, the gears shifted probably two or three times during the ride. It was noticeable, but fairly smooth.

The new bikes arrive not long after Lyft deployed their last e-bike fleet (though those were not without incident). Still, the company says it essentially built these from scratch.

“There are a ton of mom and pop as well as large-scale consumer vendors for e-bikes. But a fleet e-bike is a drastically different thing,” product manager Gary Shambat told TechCrunch. “They might look similar on the outside, but the wear and tear and the vandalism cases are so supremely different that you can’t just take an existing product, patch it up in a few ways, throw on a connected module and call it a day.”

The pedal assist is powered by a 500W motor and a pretty massive battery the company says is capable of a 60-mile range — meaning it should be able to get through a couple of rides without needing a full charge. All of that is monitored by a system of sensors designed to send out alerts when there’s an issue with the battery or breaks.

The white body is reflective and there’s an LED ring light up front that can change colors. The company says it’s testing different applications, beyond a simple headlight and bike locator. The ring is segmented and can turn various colors, so something like turn signals could make sense going forward. There are nice little touches throughout, as well — like the hand-bar grip, which is designed to look like tiny mustaches as a nod to that odd accoutrement from the service’s early days.

[gallery ids="2158975,2158973,2158972,2158971,2158969,2158967,2158963,2158962,2158961,2158960,2158959,2158958,2158957"]

Lyft currently operates bike-sharing in nine markets.

Synctera, which aims to serve as a matchmaker for community banks and fintechs, has raised $33 million in a Series A round of funding led by Fin VC.

The raise comes just under six months after the fintech raised $12.4 million in a seed round of funding.

New investors Mastercard and Gaingels also participated in the latest round, which included follow-on investments from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Diagram Ventures, SciFi Ventures and Scribble Ventures. Several angel investors put money in the Series A including Omri Dahan, Marqeta’s Chief Revenue Officer, Feedzai Chairman and CEO Nuno Sebastiao and Greenlight co-founder and CEO Tim Sheehan. 

Alongside the Series A, Synctera is also announcing its commitment to the new Cap Table Coalition – which includes funding from Gaingels, Neythri Futures Fund, Plexo Capital and over 20 angels – alongside other startups by allocating 10% of all funding rounds to “traditionally marginalized,” or underrepresented, investors via an SPV. (Fellow fintech Finix led the initiative earlier this year before forming this coalition but more on that later).

“This has exposed us to find great folks who we otherwise might not have known,” said Synctera’s co-founder and CEO Peter Hazlehurst. “That’s why we pledge to reserve 10% of this round and all future rounds to diverse investors.”

In a nutshell, San Francisco-based Synctera has developed a platform designed to help facilitate partnership banking. It was founded on the premise that some community banks and credit unions are actually turning down deals with young fintechs because the relationships can be too complicated or time-consuming to manage. Synctera’s goal is to connect community banks and fintechs to streamline the process with its “Banking-as-a-Service” (BaaS) platform.

TechCrunch recently caught up with Hazlehurst, who most recently served as former head of Uber Money and previously also led development of Google Wallet and products related to its payments system.

Put simply, Synctera wants to make it easier for community banks and fintechs to partner with each other. It examines banks’ needs and then sets them up with a fintech that is best suited to meet those needs. It claims to “do the work for both parties,” managing the partnership from its back-end platform, while dealing with issues like regulatory compliance, which can be a deterrent for some companies. The process of managing, reconciling and billing banks can result in “a lot of operational overhead and complexity,” according to the company.

The company says it’s built a “diverse” marketplace of banks and fintech companies so that it can apply a “personalized touch to each match” and make sure that the parties “align on geography, brand ethos, and desired business goals.”

So far, Synctera has signed three banks with plans to sign on three more this month. The startup has already paired Coastal Community Bank – a local bank serving the greater Puget Sound community – with One, a new digital banking platform, and Ellevest, a new fintech. 

By using Synctera’s platform, the company claims, banks can more freely allow their fintech counterparts to offer FDIC-insured mobile checking, debit cards, savings accounts or innovations in payments to their prospective customers, the company claims. They can also make more money doing so, Hazlehurst said, by bringing in more revenue beyond interchange fees.

“Like most small businesses, community banks have been hit hard by COVID-19,” he added. “We hope to further diversify community banks’ revenue streams.”

Banks can also more easily manage multiple relationships with various fintechs as the companies agree to adopt Synctera’s tech stack, the company claims.

“We build a single dashboard for a bank, so there’s a consolidated position across all fintechs,” Hazlehurst told me at the time of the company’s last raise. “It’s all about visibility for the bank.”

Currently Synctera has about 50 employees, including about two dozen engineers, most of whom are located in Canada, Hazlehurst said. The company plans to ramp up to 160 employees by year’s end with a focus on engineering, sales, marketing and customer success staff.

Looking ahead, Hazlehurst predicts that the fourth quarter will be “all about support for small business fintechs.”

“We want to create a neobank for gig economy workers, and want to add lending as a service,” he said. “But our next big phase is to onboard a lot of fintechs, and learn from them.”

Logan Allin, managing general partner and founder at Fin VC, believes that Banking-as-a-Service in general will transform legacy national and regional banks, credit unions, fintecs, corporate tech and retailers alike “as these players either seek to vertically integrate financial services or accelerate their digitization process.”

Synctera, he adds, has taken an approach with its tech stack that allows for integration with legacy community banks and their respective cores. This, Allin believes, will help ensure a “cloud native and scalable model” and made it an attractive investment. (Fin VC has also backed the likes of other fintechs such as Pipe and SoFi).

“Synctera’s peers are simply abstracting bank cores and serving as ‘API wrappers’ in a kludgy short-term approach and having come from the legacy bank and modern fintech worlds, we recognized that these players had not built sufficiently strong bridges across the ecosystem,” Allin told TechCrunch.

For his part, Finix Founder Richie Serna is thrilled that other startups are following his lead in the pledge to make their cap tables more diverse.

“After Finix announced our special purpose vehicle for Black and Latinx investors, the response was overwhelmingly positive,” he told TechCrunch. “Startups in every sector and at every stage have asked us how to recreate our SPV. In response, we started the Cap Table Coalition to make it as easy as possible for more high-growth startups, like Synctera, to take control over their cap tables,” said Richie Serna, CEO and co-founder of Finix. “We see this as an inflection point that will completely upend how the VC world functions.”

Meanwhile, Synctera is not the only player trying to help banks and fintechs forge partnerships. Last week, TechCrunch reported on Visa said it has expanded its Visa Fintech Partner Connect program, which is designed to help financial institutions quickly connect with a “vetted and curated” set of technology providers.