Author: azeeadmin

Obie, which has developed an insurtech platform for landlords, has raised $10.7 million in a Series A funding round led by Battery Ventures.

Thomvest Ventures, Funders Club, MetaProp and Second Century Ventures also participated in the financing.

If this sounds like a niche offering, that’s because it is. Obie’s software specifically targets small-to-medium size apartment landlords who own single-family rentals and/or larger apartment buildings.  

Chicago-based Obie — which also went through the Y Combinator program — says its platform stands out because it offers instant quotes (by instant, they mean in about three to five minutes). The company also claims to save policyholders up to 25-30% compared to other insurance premiums. Over the past year, Obie has secured insurance for over $3 billion worth of property.

Obie co-founders (and brothers) Aaron and Ryan Letzeiser have taken their respective backgrounds in insurance and real estate private equity to build out the Obie platform. They are operating under the premise that despite being the largest class of real estate investors in the U.S, this group of landlords “is significantly underserved.”

“Generally SMB landlords have been ignored in the market, and there’s 11 million of them,” Aaron said. “And we beat target premiums, on average, by 31.7%.”

The demand appears to be there. According to the pair, Obie saw its premiums climb to about $1 million in its first 12 months of being in business. Over the last 12 months, that number has climbed to about $10 million.

In conjunction with its funding announcement, Obie also announced today the extension of its property and casualty insurance to all 50 states.

So, how does it work? Landlords and investors answer a series of questions on Obie’s site. The platform extracts a few data points from client responses, which its technology then combines with public and private data points such as the proximity of the landlord to the property. (This can be an indicator of how quickly a landlord can conduct proactive and preventative maintenance and general attentiveness to tenant issues.) 

Once Obie runs its analysis, the platform uses a “proprietary” algorithm to match an application to carriers based on what they describe as “risk-appetite” profiles. For example, some carriers don’t want to cover properties built before a certain year. The platform then provides the landlords and property owners with a quote. If they’re OK with the quote, landlords can be “immediately underwritten,” according to the company. 

At its core, said Ryan, the brothers want to make Obie “the easiest way for landlords to get the insurance that they need.” 

The company plans to use its new capital to expand upon its product and “really try to own the entire vertical.”

“Historically, we’ve been an agency-based business but we are in the process of putting together our own product that is slated to roll out right at the end of the second quarter,” said Aaron. “Very similar to Lemonade and Hippo, and we’re doing it with a large insurer that’s backing us.”

In other words, Obie believes it has validated its brokerage model in the market and is now planning to use the data it’s been able to gather to become its own carrier. The company expects the rollout to take time, so until it gets approval in all 50 states, it will partner with other carriers.

“Our goal at the end of the day is to go from agency to eventually carrier,” said Ryan. “This is a tried and true path. Next has done it. Hippo has done it. Lemonade has done it.” 

The brothers believe their backgrounds allow them “to speak the same language” to their clients. 

“We have lived the pain points of our clients so we can understand how the price of the premium of coverage experience plays into the overall business strategy,” Aaron said.

Battery Ventures’ Michael Brown, who has taken a seat on Obie’s board, agrees the embedded nature of the startup’s offering gives them a competitive advantage.

“Allowing their end customers to buy professional liability or general liability or commercial auto right from the vertical software that is servicing their business is really interesting and a great distribution channel for Obie,” Brown told TechCrunch. “Landlords can go direct or through their channel partners.”

Brown says Battery — as long-term investors in the insurance sector — was also attracted to the fact that Obie is focused on commercial lines rather than personal because the firm believes “they are larger markets, less competitive and can probably drive higher value just given the overall size of the premiums involved.”

India said on Wednesday WhatsApp’s lawsuit challenging the new local IT rules is an “unfortunate last moment” attempt to prevent new regulations from going into effect in a clear act of defiance, and said the Facebook-owned firm didn’t raise any specific objection in writing to the traceability requirement after October 2018.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s Electronics and IT Minister, said WhatsApp’s refusal to comply with the guidelines, the deadline of which expired Wednesday, is a “clear act of defiance of a measure whose intent can certainly not be doubted.”

“Any operations being run in India are subject to the law of the land. At one end, WhatsApp seeks to mandate a privacy policy wherein it will share the data of all its user with its parent company, Facebook, for marketing and advertising purposes. On the other hand, WhatsApp makes every effort to refuse the enactment of the Intermediary Guidelines which are necessary to uphold law and order and curb the menace of fake news,” the statement read.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

Axle recently announced it raised $10m in Series A financing after a stellar year of growth. The round was led by Crosslink Capital with participation from FJ Labs, Flexport, Tribeca Early Stage Partners, and others including existing investors Anthemis Group, Techstars, and Plug and Play Ventures.

In a press release, the company points to the past 12 months of operations where it saw volume grow 850% on its payments and financing platform designed specifically for freight brokers and carriers. The company’s services allows incumbent operators to quickly modernize and compete against new startups. Axle says its solutions also automates carrier payments, involving, and collections, which allows operators to connect all aspects of their fright operations.

Axle anticipates using the new capital to expand operations, develop new services, and strength the company’s payment and financing platform.

Co-founders Bharath Krishnamoorthy and Shawn Vo founded the company in 2019. The company raised a $1.4 million pre-seed round from Trucks VC in 2020, followed by a $2.7m seed round from Techstars and Anthemis Group and a $27.7 million debt and equity round later that year.

CEO and co-founder, Bharath Krishnamoorthy, says in a released statement “Axle’s proprietary technology levels the playing field, so our customers can compete in a highly competitive market. With our financial platform, we’re empowering freight intermediaries to rapidly grow and differentiate their businesses in a cutthroat industry. We’re excited to partner with Crosslink to transform the freight and logistics industry.”

Crosslink Capital partner David Silverman says Krishnamoorthy and Vo established themselves as an industry leader in freight factoring and payment processing, and points to the company’s previous 12 month as being impressive. “We look forward to helping them scale operations,” he says.

APIs make the world go round in tech, but that also makes them a very key target for bad actors: as doorways into huge data troves and services, malicious hackers spent a lot of time looking for ways to pick their locks or just force them open when they’re closed, in order to access that information. And a lot of recent security breaches stemming from API vulnerabilities (see here, here, and here for just a few) show just how real and current the problem is.

Today, a company that’s building a network of services to help those using and producing APIs to identify and eradicate those risks is announcing a round of funding to meet a growing demand for its services. Salt Security, which provides AI-based technology to identify issues and stop attacks across the whole of your API library, has closed $70 million in funding, money that it will be using both to meet current demand but also continue building out its technology for a wider set of services and use cases for API management.

The funding is being led by Advent International, by way of Advent Tech, with Alkeon Capital, DFJ Growth and previous backers Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital, S Capital VC, and Y Combinator all also participating.

Salt, founded in Israel and now active globally, is not disclosing valuation but I understand from a reliable source it that it is in the region of $600-700 million.

As with many of the funding rounds that seem to be getting announced these days, this one is coming on the heels of both another recent round, as well as strong growth. Salt has raised $131 million since 2016, but nearly all of that — $120 million, to be exact — has been raised in the last year.

Part of the reason for that is Salt’s performance: in the last 12 months, it’s seen revenue grow 400% — with customers including a range of Fortune 500 and other large businesses in the financial services, retail and SaaS sectors like Equinix, Finastra, TripActions, Armis, and DeinDeal; headcount grow 160%; and, perhaps most importantly, API traffic on its network grow 380%.

That growth in API traffic underscores the issue that Salt is tackling. Companies these days use a variety of APIs — some private, some public — in their tech stack as a way to interface with other businesses and run their services. APIs are a huge part of how the Internet and digital services operate, with Akamai estimating that as much as 83% of all IP traffic is API traffic.

The problem, Roey Eliyahu, CEO and co-founder of Salt Security told me, is that this usage has outpaced how well many manage those APIs.

“How APIs have evolved is very different to how developers used APIs years ago,” he said. “Before, there were very few, and you could say they were more manageable, and they contained less sensitive data, and there were very few changes and updates made to them,” he said. “Today with the pace of development, not only are they always getting updated, but you have thousands of them now touching crown jewels of the company.”

This has made them a prime target for malicious hackers. Eliyahu notes Gartner stats that predict that by 2022, APIs will make up the largest attack vector in cybercrime.

Salt’s approach starts with taking stock of a whole network and doing a kind of spring clean to find all the APIs that might be used or abused.

“Companies don’t know how many APIs they even have,” Eliyahu said, noting that there some 40%-80% of the APIs in existence for a typical company’s data are not even in active operation, lying there as “shadow APIs” for someone to pick up and misuse.

It then looks at what vulnerabilities might inadvertently be contained in this mix and makes suggestions for how to alter them to fix that. After this, it also monitors how they are used in order to stop attacks as they happen. The third of these also involves remediation “insights”, but carrying out the remediation is done by third parties at the moment, Eliyahu said. All of this is done through Salt’s automated, AI-based, flagship Salt Security API Protection Platform.

There are a number of competitors in the same space as Salt, including Ping, and newer players like Imvision and 42Crunch (which raised funding earlier this month), and the list is likely to grow as not just other API management companies get deeper into this huge space, but cyber security companies do, too.

“The rapid proliferation of APIs has dramatically altered the attack surface of applications, creating a major challenge for large enterprises since existing security mechanisms cannot protect against this new threat,” said Bryan Taylor, managing partner and head of Advent’s technology team, in a statement. “We continue to see API security incidents make the news headlines and cause significant reputational risk for companies. As we investigated the API security market, Salt stood out for its multi-year technical lead, significant customer traction and references, and talented team. We look forward to drawing on our deep experience in this sector to partner with Salt in this exciting new chapter.”

This morning Clara announced that it closed a new, $30 million funding round and secured a $50 million revolving debt facility.

The startup, which provides corporate cards to Mexican companies, raised funds earlier this year when it was busy launching its product. Since then, growth has proven rapid for the Mexico City-based company.

TechCrunch learned that the company is valued around $130 million after this latest investment, according to sources familiar with its latest fundraising. The round added DST and monashees to Clara’s cap table; prior investor General Catalyst also contributed funds to the deal.

We spoke with Gerry Giacomán Colyer, a co-founder at the startup and its CEO, about why Clara raised more capital so quickly after it last closed a financing round. The short gist is that the company’s growth, and market, allowed it to raise easily. And that the startup has pretty big plans, so having more capital with which to hire is welcome.

Per Giacomán Colyer, since he last spoke to this publication the transaction volume (GTV) that Clara supports has grown by 100x. His company is managing 2x week-over-week growth at times, which is super rapid. That’s precisely the sort of usage growth that venture capitalists covet; and as Clara makes revenue from interchange fees that stem from transaction volume, the startup is likely seeing its revenue advance at roughly the same rate as its GTV.

That Clara was able to raise more capital is unsurprising. Not only is it growing quickly in its home market with designs on Brazil in the future, a U.S.-based player in the same space recently sold for north of $2 billion. Divvy’s sale was likely a shot in the arm for not only Clara, but also Brex and Ramp, two other well-known players in the larger corporate spend world.

Clara’s success in Mexico makes it likely that related startups also targeting markets that lack a modern corporate spend solution will see strong venture capital interest; I would not be surprised if we heard from a number of other companies attacking geographies with favorable interchange economics with a similar model, as it has proven to be so lucrative.

TechCrunch asked Giacomán Colyer about who his company is targeting in terms of customers; Brex famously got its start working with high-growth startups before moving to work with a broader array of companies. Clara is working with startups in the Mexican market, the company said, but also with larger firms as well. Its CEO said that its underwriting model is set up to support more traditional cash-flow modeling.

So far Clara has largely attracted customers via word-of-mouth, and is working to bolster its referral system. But now that it has lots more capital, it will be interesting to see if the startup builds out a more aggressive go-to-market motion.

And more than just equity capital, the debt that Clara also secured as part of its recent funding round will help it underwrite customers without having to work off of its own balance sheet. Giacomán Colyer said that even after the capital costs associated with the facility, Clara’s economics are still good. Interchange is a flexible beast, it seems.

To that end, TechCrunch asked Giacomán Colyer if his company intends to charge for software in time, or merely eat off of interchange. In the United States, Brex is now in camp one, along with Airbase, while Ramp is sticking to camp two. Divvy proved that you can get to nine-figures in top line without charging for software, though having some ARR in the mix along with interchange incomes could provide a margin-boost to interchange top line. Regardless, Clara appears happy to keep to interchange for the time being.

Let’s see how quickly Clara can keep scaling. We’ll check back with the company in a few months.

A decade before investing outside of San Francisco and New York became trendy, entrepreneurs Jewel Burks, Justin Dawkins and Barry Givens were betting on Atlanta. Each experienced first-hand the biases that disproportionately hurts Black founders – while also being living proof of the wave of Black innovation and opportunity in their city.

Last year, the trio saw opportunity in that disconnect and launched Collab Capital, a firm designed to invest explicitly in Black founders. It debuted with $2 million in capital and a massive end target: $50 million. Today, the firm announced that it has met that goal, with backers such as Apple, Goldman Sachs, Google, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Mailchimp, and PayPal, making it one of the largest funds closed from an entirely Black-led firm solely committed to Black founders.

“We really wanted to build a fund that was appropriate for the opportunity that we see [in Black founders],” Burks said. “And honestly I would say, it’s a small fund out there relative to the number of Black-led companies out there that are looking and seeking funding.”

With the new fund, Collab Capital plans to invest in 50 companies over a three-to-five-year period with check sizes between $500,000 and $750,000. The firm has also reserved up to $2 million per investment for follow-on bets. It is targeting ownership between 10% to 15% in each deal. To date, Collab Capital has backed six companies in the healthcare, edtech, and future of work spaces, including Music Tech Works and Hairbrella.

Internally, the team plans to stay based in Atlanta. Burks, who founded Atlanta-based PartPic, a TC Battlefield company that sold to Amazon, said that reinvesting in the community has always been a part of Collab Capital’s intention. Case in point? The firm’s first three deals were in Atlanta. As Zoom investing became more popular in the wake of the coronavirus, the team invested in startups from Kansas City, Washington, D.C., and Miami, as well.

“We’re excited to be able to support founders anywhere in the United States, but we’re really focused on cities that have a high concentration of Black innovators and a lower concentration of capital,” she said.

The world before June

While part of Collab’s focus is avoiding coastal cities, network matters. The firm’s ability to secure heavyweight investors such as Apple and PayPal gives it a key signal that validates its bet on Black founders.

Burks thinks part of the reason that investors might be more intentional about backing firms such as hers is the result of the racial injustice that was highlighted in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black people at the hands of police.

After Floyd and Taylor were murdered, there was a global movement spearheaded by Black Lives Matter in response to police brutality and racism in the United States. Burks says that Collab Capital had only raised a few million at that time, but then witnessed “a shift in the hearts and minds of capital allocators.”

Burks noted that when Collab Capital was first raising its fund, potential investors told them to have a “wider perspective” on what kinds of entrepreneurs to back. Some thought they should create a fund around underrepresented founders or multicultural founders. With general VC volatility in the early months of the pandemic, Collab Capital saw some of its LPs pull back or delay commitments.

“We were very adamant that the most important thing we wanted to solve was the funding gap for Black founders, so we were not willing to broaden the spectrum there because we saw that there were so many firms out there for diverse founders, and even in some of those, Black founders were still marginalized.”

While the majority of venture dollars are still managed by white men, Black-led venture capital firms are having quite the year. Collab Capital’s news is preceded by Harlem Capital, which closed a $134 million seed fund earlier this year, Cleo Capital, which set a $20 million target for Fund II, and MaC VC landing $103 million for its inaugural fund.

Beyond a broader understanding of the importance of diversity in tech, Burks pointed to Zoom as a value unlock.

“If you’d asked me a year ago [if] I think we’d be successful in raising $50 million over Zoom meetings, I would have said absolutely not,” she said. “But you can build meaningful relationships with people and not even have to be in person. That’s a big surprise — and, oh, the realization that you don’t have to travel so much.”

The high stakes game of chess (or, well, consolidation chicken) that is on-demand food delivery rolls on today with a little more territorial swapping in Europe: Barcelona-based Glovo has agreed to buy three of Berlin-based Delivery Hero’s food delivery brands in Central and Eastern Europe — with deals that it said are worth a total value of €170 million (~$208M).

Specifically, it’s picking up Delivery Hero’s foodpanda brand in Romania and Bulgaria; the Donesi brand in Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina; and Pauza in Croatia.

There’s some notable symmetry here: Last year Delivery Hero shelled out $272M for a bunch of Glovo’s LatAm brands, as the latter gave up on a region it had already started withdrawing from in its quest for profitability.

Glovo said then that it would be focusing on “key markets where we can build a long-term sustainable business and continue to provide our unique multi-category offering to our customers”.

Earlier this month the Barcelona-based ‘deliver anything’ app also announced it was picking up Ehrana, a local delivery company in Slovenia. So it’s been on quite the (local) shopping spree of late.

Its existing operational footprint covers markets in South West Europe, Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. So its attention here, on the Balkans, suggests it sees a chance to eke out profitable potential in more of Central Europe too.

Glovo said the transactions in Bosnia Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia are expected to close “within the next few weeks”, subject to fulfilment of closing conditions and relevant regulatory approvals.

While it said Romania will be completed following approval from the competition authority — but gave no timeline for that.

Its splurge on Central and Eastern European rival food delivery brands follows a $528M Series F funding round in April — so it’s evidently not short of VC cash to burn spend.

Commenting in a statement, Oscar Pierre, CEO and co-founder, said: “It’s always been central to our long-term strategy to focus on markets where we see clear opportunities to lead and where we can build a sustainable business. Central and Eastern Europe is a very important part of that plan. The region has really embraced on-demand delivery platforms and we’re very excited to be strengthening our presence and increasing our footprint in countries that continue to show enormous potential for growth.” 

In another supporting statement Delivery Hero made it clear it has bigger fish to fry (than can be served up to hungry customers in the Balkans) right now.

“Delivery Hero has built a clear leading business in the Balkan region in the last couple of years. However, with a lot of operational priorities on our plate, we believe Glovo would be better positioned to continue building an amazing experience for our customers in this region,” said Niklas Östberg, its CEO and co-founder.

A relevant, recent development for Delivery Hero‘s business is the decision to re-enter its home market of Germany — Europe’s biggest economy — under its foodpanda brand, starting in its home city of Berlin this summer (but with a national expansion planned to follow).

This is notable because back in 2018 it sold its German operations to another on-demand food delivery rival, the Dutch giant Takeaway.com — in a $1.1BN deal which included the Lieferheld, Pizza.de and foodora brands — temporarily stepping out of the competitive fray. (Meanwhile Takeaway.com has since merged with the UK’s Just Eat to become… Just Eat Takeaway so, uh, keep up.)

Delivery Hero is returning to Germany now because it can, and because the market is huge. A two-year non-compete clause between it and Just Eat Takeaway recently expired — allowing for reheating (rehashing?) of the competitive food delivery mix in German cities.

Speaking to the FT back in May about this market return, Östberg suggested Delivery Hero has girded itself (and its investors) for a long fight.

“We don’t see necessarily that we are going to go in and win the market in the next year or so. This is a 10-year game,” he said. “Of course we will definitely make sure we put in enough money to be the clear number two, the clear challenger [to Just Eat Takeaway.com].”

Winning at food delivery is certainly a(n expensive) marathon, not a sprint.

There are also of course multiple races being run in markets around the world, depending on local conditions and competitive mix — with the chance that the winner of the biggest and most lucrative races will reach such a position of VC-sponsored glory that it can buy up the top competitors from the smaller races and consolidate everything — maximizing economies of scale and gaining the ability to squeeze out fresh competition to grab a juicy profit for themselves.

Or, well, that’s the theory. Competition regulators are likely to take increasing interest in this space, for one thing. Rising awareness of gig economy workers rights is also putting pressure on the model.

For now, the thin-margin food delivery business needs the right base conditions to survive. The model only functions in cities and ideally in highly dense urban environments. Most of the players in this space also do not employ the armies of riders that are needed to make deliveries — because doing so would make the model far more costly. And in Europe political attention on gig economy workers rights could force reforms that raise regional operational costs, putting further pressure on margins.

Spain has its own labor reforms in train that will affect Glovo in its home market, for example.

Achieving sustainability (i.e. profitability without the need for ongoing VC funding injections) remains a huge hurdle for delivery apps. It will likely require massive market consolidation and/or convincing users to switch from making the occasional order of a hot meal on a weekend to relying on app-based delivery for far more of their local shopping needs — not just lunch/dinner but groceries and toiletries, and other fast moving consumers goods and household items.

It’s notable that super fast grocery delivery is a major focus for Glovo, for example — which has recently been building out networks of inner city dark stores to service in-app convenience store shopping.

Lots of other on-demand app players are also ramping up on that front. Including Delivery Hero — which has been paying more attention to groceries (picking up InstaShop last year in a deal worth $360M).

Glovo building out in Central Europe while exiting markets further afield suggests it believes it can use a concentrated market footprint to drive operational efficiencies and strong order margins through a tightly integrated meal delivery and dark store play.

If it can do that — and offer at least the whiff of profitability — it could make its business an attractive future acquisition target for a larger global giant that’s looking to up the ‘consolidation chicken’ stakes by bolting on new regions.

A larger player like Delivery Hero may even be a potential future suitor — having shown it’s happy to return to markets it left earlier. After all, it surely knows Glovo’s business pretty well since they’ve done a number of market swaps. But, for now, that’s pure speculation.

Zooming out, what the on-demand model of app-based urban convenience means for the future of urban environments is a whole other question — and one which both competition and urban regulators will need to ponder very carefully.

If the rush to scale delivery platforms drives unstoppable consolidation that sees smaller players gobbled up by a few global giants — that can then use their size and scale to outcompete local shops — it may spell even more dark times for the traditional High Street and its family-run bodegas which have already been hammered by Internet giants like Amazon.

Touch of a button convenience does carry wider costs.

 

Facebook has long been working on raising WhatsApp’s profile as a channel for businesses to interact with (and sell to) their customers. Today, a startup that has built a suite of tools for retailers and others to build and run those services over WhatsApp and other messaging platforms is announcing growth funding to address that opportunity.

Yalo, which describes itself as a c-commerce (“chat commerce”) startup building tools for businesses to use messaging apps as part of their customer outreach and sales strategies, has raised $50 million, funding that it will be using to expand its services with a specific focus on emerging markets like Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Yalo already counts big brands like Unilever, Nestle, Coca-Cola and Walmart among the customers using its platform for sales and marketing efforts. In total that speaks to potentially an audience of 350 million, although Yaho doesn’t disclose how many people are actually using Yalo services as a part of that.

The funding is being led by B Capital, with participation from other, undisclosed, investors. Yalo, which recently rebranded from Yalochat, is on a funding roll at the moment: the company’s last round was in August, a $15 million Series B. B Capital’s investment is interesting, given Yalo’s focus on building tools for businesses to better utilize Facebook apps to interact with customers: the VC firm was co-founded by Eduardo Saverin, one of Facebook’s co-founders.

CEO Javier Mata said in an emailed interview that the reason for the swift funding was because of how fast business has been growing in the last year, part of the bigger boom for e-commerce overall.

“Covid fast forwarded us into the future and with it the need for conversational commerce increased significantly,” he said. “It went from being [one] digital commerce channel to becoming the main one.” He said that some of Yalo’s customers are seeing 80% of their sales happening on top of (and inside) messaging apps, a huge shift when you consider how reliant some brands in the consumer packaged goods sector have in the past been on more physical retail channels, whether that was a supermarket, a corner shop or a vending machine. “The market demand increased and we raised to continue overdelivering to customers.”

He added that Yalo wasn’t looking for more funding, “but then we saw an opportunity to accelerate our growth, so we did it. Everything we do is to provide value to our customers and in this case we decided to accelerate our product development so that customers would get conversational marketing, payments, and the world would get no-code builder to create all kind of conversational app sooner.”

Yalo is not disclosing its valuation with this round, CEO Javier Mata said in an email interview. The startup has raised $75 million to date, with other past investors including NXTP from Argentina and Sierra Ventures.

Founded in Mexico, now based in San Francisco, and currently active in Mexico, India, Brazil and the U.S., Yalo’s strategy is to play into the role messaging apps have taken on for consumers in many markets, but especially emerging markets, where many people “live” when on their phones, using them not just to chat to friends, but to interact with a wide range of services.

This is also something that messaging companies like Facebook, taking a page from companies like WeChat and Line in Asia, have been looking to cultivate. Over the years, WeChat and Line have leveraged their success as basic messaging apps to build out wider “super apps” covering all kinds of other forms of communication, as well as a plethora of services like payments, shopping, entertainment and news, both build by the apps themselves as well as by third parties, and now used by hundreds of millions of people.

WhatsApp is Yalo’s biggest platform “by a lot,” said Mata, with SMS in second place, so this is where a lot of its focus is right now.

While WhatsApp has been building out the facility to provide more services, Yalo has built a platform that sits in between brands and the apps themselves in order to use them. Its service — which works with other apps as well (it describes itself as platform-agnostic and able to be embedded in any messaging app) — lets agencies or the brands themselves plan and run marketing and sales campaigns, offer helpdesk services and take payments, giving customers the option to create “micro apps” to live in various messaging environments.

The emerging market focus for Yalo seems to mirror the role that messaging and mobile have taken in these markets overall. In many cases, consumers in developing economies skipped straight over using traditional computers and went online for the first time with cheap smartphones. As a result, that paved the way for consumers, whose digital consumption was more focused on mobile screens, to being more receptive and likely to use messaging apps for more than just messaging.

Mata believes that while emerging markets may have paved the way, though, more developed economies will follow.

“We went from brick and mortar to desktop apps, from apps to web apps, from web apps to mobile apps, and now the future/present is about conversational apps,” Mata said. “Conversational apps are the future because they take advantage of the messaging app that people have already downloaded and they do not need users to install or learn a new ux. It is easier to adopt a new technology when you do not need to replace a lot of legacy technology and you can just leapfrog. That is exactly what emerging markets are doing.”

He believes that “the US and other markets will get there but they will take longer, and eventually the lines between e-commerce and c-commerce will blur. You are starting to see that with text marketing, which is only a tiny fraction of conversational and it is already huge. It’s not a surprise that China is further ahead in digital than the US and conversational commerce is the predominant way of commerce through WeChat. Emerging markets leapfrog when it comes to adopting new tech.”

In the meantime, BCG estimates that c-commerce is already a $35 billion market, and will grow to $130 billion by 2025 in emerging markets alone, accounting for 60% of all digital commerce.

The question will be, then, that if this really takes off, whether the likes of Facebook will try to own the integration experience as much as owning the platform itself, or whether those who have helped to build more interesting commerce experiences on the traditional web — companies like Shopify and Magento, but also Amazon — might try to own this space too, presenting more competition down the line for Yalo.

Not an issue for now, investors say.

“Yalo has become the leading conversational commerce company, revolutionizing the way large enterprises engage with their customers and enabling them to transact through chat applications. We have been impressed with their execution and are very pleased to expand our relationship with them by leading their Series C round.” said Saverin in a statement.

The relationships between banks and fintechs are multi-faceted.

In some cases, they partner. In many cases, they compete. In other cases, one acquires or invests in the other.

Well, today, an announcement by global payments giant Visa is aimed at helping facilitate banks and fintechs’ ability to work together.

Specifically, Visa said today it has expanded its Visa Fintech Partner Connect, a program designed to help financial institutions quickly connect with a “vetted and curated” set of technology providers. 

I talked with Terry Angelos, senior vice president and global head of fintech at Visa, to understand just exactly what that means.

“Global fintech investment last year was $105 billion,” Angelos said. “There were about 2,861 deals in venture, PE and M&A. So literally over $100 billion is going into fintech, which is more than the combined tech budgets of every bank in the U.S. As a result, a lot of innovation that is occurring in fintech is funded by venture dollars. We’re trying to bring that innovation to our clients, whether they are banks, processors or other fintechs.”

The program initially launched in Europe in November of 2020, and now is available in the U.S., Asia Pacific, Latin American and CEMEA (Central Europe, Middle East and Africa). Visa has worked to identify fintechs that can help banks and financial institutions (that are clients of Visa’s) as well as other fintechs “create digital-first experiences, without the cost and complexity of building the back-end technology in-house.”

Local teams will run programs in the respective regions, and vet and manage partners in the following categories: account opening, data aggregation, analytics and security, customer engagement and new cardholder services and operations and compliance.

So far, Visa has identified about 60 partners that offer a range of technologies — from back-office functions to new front-end services, according to Angelos. Those partners include Alloy, Jumio, Argyle, Fidel, FirstSource, TravelBank, Canopy, Hummingbird and Unit21, among others. Twenty-four are located in the U.S.

“So much of fintech focus and coverage is about disrupting existing banks. Everyone is trying to disrupt everyone, including fintechs like PayPal,” Angelos told TechCrunch. “Venture numbers are certainly very large. What we’re realizing is there is a significant opportunity to pair up a lot of venture-backed companies with our existing clients. It runs a little bit against us versus them approach you typically hear about.”

Visa clients can get in touch with program partners via the Visa Partner website and get benefits such as reduced implementation fees and pricing discounts. 

“The Fintech Connect program is about both helping to identify and curate interesting fintech companies and then create a favorable commercial partnership for our clients so they can engage with these Fintech Connect partners,” Angelos said.

So, what does Visa gain from all this?

“Our goal is that all of our clients are in a position to build better digital experiences for their consumers,” he told TechCrunch. “We would love it if every bank had the latest tools in order to onboard clients and build digital experiences.”

One of its partners, for example, is virtual card startup Extend. 

“There are fintechs that provide this today such as TripActions, Ramp and Divvy,” Angelos points out. “But what Visa is doing is looking at ‘How can we enable our banking clients to do something similar?’ So we’re bringing innovation into our ecosystem so that anyone can take advantage.”

It can also help companies such as TripActions, Ramp or Divvy with other complementary technologies for security posture, for example.

“The net beneficiary is to hopefully move more spending onto those rails,” Angelos said. “For example, if you look at B2B spend, there’s about $120 trillion of it annually. We believe about $20 trillion of that is card eligible. Today, Visa captures about $1 trillion of that. So, another $19 trillion is available for Visa to capture through our partners if our banks and fintechs can build these kinds of solutions to enable B2B payments.”

To be clear, Visa also invests in startups from time to time. But this initiative is distinct from those efforts, although a couple of its partners have been recipients of funding from Visa.

India has asked social media firms to provide specific details about whether they have complied with its new IT rules “as soon as possible” and “preferably today” even as the new regulations are being challenged by WhatsApp.

In a letter to “significant social media intermediaries” — which New Delhi defines as social media firms with over 5 million registered users in India — on Wednesday, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology asked the firms to share the names of their apps, websites, or services that will come under the scope of the new IT rules.

The letter, obtained by TechCrunch, also asks the firms to provide name and contact details of chief compliance officer, nodal contact person, resident grievance officer, and physical address of the office in India and share the compliance status of the rules. The new rules mandate that firms have several officials in India to address on-ground concerns.

The letter also implies that India doesn’t plan to give social media firms any extension on the deadline to comply with the new regulations.

f”If you are not considered as SSMI, please provide the reasons for the same including the registered users on each of the services provided by you,” the letter adds. “The government reserves the right to seek any additional information, as may be permitted within these Rules and the IT Act.”

Earlier on Wednesday, WhatsApp sued the Indian government challenging the second largest internet market’s new regulations that it said could allow authorities to make people’s private messages “traceable,” and conduct mass surveillance.

This is a developing story. More to follow…