Author: azeeadmin

Digital transformation is the name of the game these days, and companies that are enabling businesses to take a leap into the future, by helping them tackle their most complex operations, are reaping the rewards. In the latest development, OneStream, a startup that provides a toolkit of services to enterprises to help them run financial operations (for example, reporting, planning, tax and more), has raised $200 million in primary equity. The funding values OneStream at $6 billion.

D1 Capital Partners led the financing, with participation from Tiger Global and Investment Group of Santa Barbara (IGSB), the company said. Tiger Global and D1 appear to share at least one common backer, Tiger Management, which may be one reason why you see them together in many big deals.

The company plans to use the funding to continue building out the tools that it provides to customers, and to keep up with demand for its services as more customers replace legacy applications and very basic, spreadsheet-based operations.

“We remain sharply focused on delivering innovative planning, reporting and analysis solutions designed to help our customers succeed for today’s fast-paced and increasingly complex business environment,” said Tom Shea, CEO of OneStream Software, in a statement. “The valuation we received is great recognition of the value our employees and stakeholders have helped to create, as well as the exciting opportunities ahead for OneStream.”

To put these large numbers into some context, OneStream was valued at $1 billion only two years ago, when KKR took a majority stake in the company worth more than $500 million. The company’s CFO Bill Koefoed has confirmed to us that KKR will continue to be “substantially OneStream’s largest shareholder and remains a very supportive investor”. The company meanwhile appears to be holding off any plans for going public for the time being — despite some possible hints that it was considering that move.

“OneStream is currently focused on delivering 100% customer access, continuing to grow the business and creating value for stakeholders,” Koefoed said. “IPO is a potential exit and OneStream is preparing to be a public company. However, there is no specific timeline.”

The growth in valuation, meanwhile, reflects the surge of business that OneStream has seen in the last two years, and in particular in the last 12 months, as companies have been compelled to update their systems to work more efficiently and flexibly amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the impact it has had around in-person interactions. OneStream said annual recurring revenue grew 85% in 2020, with customers growing by 40% to 650 enterprises.

The company’s focus is specifically in the area commonly called corporate performance management (CPM), which includes a number of the financial corporate operations that a company runs behind the scenes to keep its business ticking.

Some of these would have fallen to a range of software providers, and much of the work would have been carried out by way of on-premise solutions, with companies like SAP, Oracle Hyperion, IBM dominating the space with all-in solutions, and others like Anaplan and Blackline providing point solutions addressing specific aspects of those functions.

But as with other areas of enterprise services, the advances of technology and software have created opportunities to take a lot of that functionality into the cloud and to run the processes across a single system to improve analytics and efficiency, and that has provided an opportunity to the likes of OneStream.

The impact of the pandemic should not be underestimated in this trend, and it was one that OneStream was able to nail because its software can be used across disparate teams and can draw a direct line to helping companies manage their finances better. And unlike a lot of tech companies that raise venture funding, one interesting detail with OneStream is that it has extended its customer base well outside the realm of technology companies and other early adopters. Those using its software include the likes of Fruit of the Loom, McCain (the frozen fries king), and AAA, but also Takeaway.com, the Carlyle Group and many others.

“The pandemic accelerated OneStream’s business given that it was a wake-up call for many companies that had not digitally transformed their key finance processes,” said Koefoed. “As a result, we have seen increased demand from companies who were using spreadsheets or legacy CPM applications to manage their financial close, consolidation, reporting, planning and forecasting processes… They are better able to keep their finance teams connected and collaborating while physically dispersed. In addition, we have seen many organizations increasing the frequency of their forecasting and scenario modeling from quarterly or monthly to weekly and daily in some cases, especially during the early days of the pandemic when modeling revenue and cash flow was critical.”

For investors, the interest more specifically was how OneStream managed to add more customers away from competitors in the last year.

“OneStream’s platform delivers exceptional customer value,” said Andrew Wynne, a principal at D1 Capital Partners, in a statement. “Management’s intense focus on customer success has enabled OneStream to capture significant market share from incumbents, while posting strong growth in both revenue and customer acquisition. We believe OneStream has both the vision and product required to be a dominant force in its industry.”

Going forward, it sounds like the company will continue to build on what it has already established. That will include more business into Asia Pacific alongside its current operations in North America and Europe, Koefoed said. It will also use its foothold in finance and providing services to the finance department to make inroads into other areas that link closely to money management: money spending and revenue generation, with tools to plan and operate in areas like HR, IT, sales, marketing, supply chain management “and other areas to ensure alignment and optimal resource allocations,” he added.

The European Union may investigate Facebook’s $1BN acquisition of customer service platform Kustomer after concerns were referred to it under EU merger rules.

A spokeswoman for the Commission confirmed it received a request to refer the proposed acquisition from Austria under Article 22 of the EU’s Merger Regulation — a mechanism which allows Member States to flag a proposed transaction that’s not notifiable under national filing thresholds (e.g. because the turnover of one of the companies is too low for a formal notification).

The Commission spokeswoman said the case was notified in Austria on March 31.

“Following the receipt of an Article 22 request for referral, the Commission has to transmit the request for referral to other Member States without delay, who will have the right to join the original referral request within 15 working days of being informed by the Commission of the original request,” she told us, adding: “Following the expiry of the deadline for other Member States to join the referral, the Commission will have 10 working days to decide whether to accept or reject the referral.”

We’ll know in a few weeks whether or not the European Commission will take a look at the acquisition — an option that could see the transaction stalled for months, delaying Facebook’s plans for integrating Kustomer’s platform into its empire.

Facebook and Kustomer have been contacted for comment on the development.

The tech giant’s planned purchase of the customer relations management platform was announced last November and quickly raised concerns over what Facebook might do with any personal data held by Kustomer — which could include sensitive information, given sectors served by the platform include healthcare, government and financial services, among others.

Back in February, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) wrote to the Commission and national and EU data protection agencies to raise concerns about the proposed acquisition — urging scrutiny of the “data processing consequences”, and highlighting how Kustomer’s terms allow it to process user data for very wide-ranging purposes.

“Facebook is acquiring this company. The scope of ‘improving our Services’ [in Kustomer’s terms] is already broad, but is likely to grow broader after Kustomer is acquired,” the ICCL warned. “‘Our Services’ may, for example, be taken to mean any Facebook services or systems or projects.”

“The settled caselaw of the European Court of Justice, and the European data protection board, that ‘improving our services’ and similarly vague statements do not qualify as a ‘processing purpose’,” it added.

The ICCL also said it had written to Facebook asking for confirmation of the post-acquisition processing purposes for which people’s data will be used.

Johnny Ryan, senior fellow at the ICCL, confirmed to TechCrunch it has not had any response from Facebook to those questions.

We’ve also asked Facebook to confirm what it will do with any personal data held on users by Kustomer once it owns the company — and will update this report with any response.

In a separate (recent) episode — involving Google — its acquisition of wearable maker Fitbit went through months of competition scrutiny in the EU and was only cleared by regional regulators after the tech giant made a number of concessions, including committing not to use Fitbit data for ads for ten years.

Until now Facebook’s acquisitions have generally flown under regulators’ radar, including, around a decade ago, when it was sewing up the social space by buying up rivals Instagram and WhatsApp.

Several years later it was forced to pay a fine in the EU over a ‘misleading’ filing — after it combined WhatsApp and Facebook data, despite having told regulators it could not do so.

With so many data scandals now inextricably attached to Facebook, the tech giant is saddled with customer mistrust by default and faces far greater scrutiny of how it operates — which is now threatening to inject friction into its plans to expand its b2b offering by acquiring a CRM player. So after ‘move fast and break things’ Facebook is having to move slower because of its reputation for breaking stuff.

 

Google Cloud today announced that it is joining the FinOps Foundation as a Premier Member.

The FinOps Foundation is a relatively new open-source foundation, hosted by the Linux Foundation, that launched last year. It aims to bring together companies in the ‘cloud financial management’ space to establish best practices and standards. As the term implies, ‘cloud financial management,’ is about the tools and practices that help businesses manage and budget their cloud spend. There’s a reason, after all, that there are a number of successful startups that do nothing else but help businesses optimize their cloud spend (and ideally lower it).

Maybe it’s no surprise that the FinOps Foundation was born out of Cloudability’s quarterly Customer Advisory Board meetings. Until now, CloudHealth by VMware was the Foundation’s only Premiere Member among its vendor members. Other members include Cloudability, Densify, Kubecost and SoftwareOne. With Google Cloud, the Foundation has now signed up its first major cloud provider.

“FinOps best practices are essential for companies to monitor, analyze, and optimize cloud spend across tens to hundreds of projects that are critical to their business success,” said Yanbing Li, Vice President of Engineering and Product at Google Cloud. “More visibility, efficiency, and tools will enable our customers to improve their cloud deployments and drive greater business value. We are excited to join FinOps Foundation, and together with like-minded organizations, we will shepherd behavioral change throughout the industry.”

Google Cloud has already committed to sending members to some of the Foundation’s various Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and Working Groups to “help drive open source standards for cloud financial management.”

“The practitioners in the FinOps Foundation greatly benefit when market leaders like Google Cloud invest resources and align their product offerings to FinOps principles and standards,” said J.R. Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation. “We are thrilled to see Google Cloud increase its commitment to the FinOps Foundation, joining VMware as the 2nd of 3 dedicated Premier Member Technical Advisory Council seats.”

The energy giant Shell has joined a slew of strategic investors including All Nippon Airways, Suncor Energy, Mitsui, and British Airways in funding LanzaJet, the company commercializing a process to convert alcohol into jet fuel. 

A spin-off from LanzaTech, one of the last surviving climate tech startups from the first cleantech boom that’s still privately held, LanzaJet is taking a phased investment approach with its corporate backers, enabling them to invest additional capital as the company scales to larger production facilities.

Terms of the initial investment, or LanzaJet’s valuation after the commitment, were not disclosed.

LanzaJet claims that it can help the aviation industry reach net-zero emissions, something that would go a long way toward helping the world meet the emissions reductions targets set in the Paris Agreement.

“LanzaJet’s technology opens up a new and exciting pathway to produce SAF using an AtJ process and will help address the aviation sector’s urgent need for SAF. It demonstrates that the industry can move faster and deliver more when we all work together,” said Anna Mascolo, President, Shell Aviation, in a statement. “Provided industry, government and society collaborate on appropriate policy mechanisms and regulations to drive both supply and demand, aviation can achieve net-zero carbon emissions. The strategic fit with LanzaJet is exciting.”

LanzaJet is currently building an alcohol-to-jet fuel facility in Soperton, Ga. Upon completion it would be the first commercial scale plant for sustainable synthetic jet fuel with a capacity of 10 million gallons per year.

The fuel is made by using an ethanol inputs — something that Shell is very familiar with. It’s also something that the oil giant has in ready supply. Through the Raízen joint venture in Brazil, Shell has been producing bio-ethanol for over ten years.

The company expects that its sustainable fuel will be mixed with conventional fossil jet fuel to power airplanes in a lower carbon intensity way. Roughly 90% of the company’s production output will be aviation fuel, while the remaining 10% will be renewable diesel, the company said.

LanzaJet’s SAF is approved to be blended up to 50% with fossil jet fuel, the maximum allowed  by ASTM, and is a drop-in fuel that requires no modifications to engines, aircraft, and infrastructure.  Additionally, LanzaJet’s SAF delivers more than a 70% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions on a  lifecycle basis, compared to conventional fossil jet fuel. The versatility in ethanol, and a focus on low carbon, waste-based, and non-food /non-feed sources, along with ethanol’s global availability, make  LanzaJet’s technology a relevant and enduring solution for SAF. 

 

Death, despite being one of the most inevitable of life’s events, can also be one of the most complicated and problematic. Fraught with emotional and religious complexities, for many families it can also come with financial and organizational ones. Today, a startup called Empathy is coming out of stealth with the aim of taking some of the stigma out of working on some of those challenges head-on, with an AI-based platform for families to help organize affairs (and thus indirectly help assist in those families attending to themselves) after a death.

“On average, a family can spend 500 hours dealing with the different aspects related to the death of a loved one,” said CEO Ron Gura, who co-founded the company with Yonatan Bergman. “We provide a digital companion in the form of native apps that are built to empower bereaved families.” He said he likens Empathy to a “GPS for the recently bereaved.”

The Israeli startup is launching first in the U.S. market, and it’s doing so with $13 million in funding co-led by VCs General Catalyst and Aleph.

Some 3 million people on average die in the U.S. each year — a number that has seen some spikes more recently due to Covid-19. And despite it being one of the more natural and predictable of things that we will all go through sooner or later, it’s not something that many people prepare for, whether it’s due to fear or religion or simply not wanting to dwell on morbid subjects. Ironically, that hasn’t been helped by the fact that it has in turn created a pretty significant stigma around building services to help people deal with it, either for themselves, or on behalf of others.

In very typical startup fashion, this spells opportunity, of course.

“I’ve been obsessed with this narrative for a few years,” said Gura, who previously worked with Berman at The Gifts Project and then later at eBay in Israel after it acquired the social gifting startup. “Death is one of the last consumer sectors that is untouched by innovation. It’s not because of technology or even a regulatory barrier. It seems it’s mainly because of the inherent optimism in us and our human nature that causes us to avoid talking about the inevitable truth of death and dying. So there is an unspoken sector that is not seeing transformation that pretty much every other sector is seeing these days.”

It’s also, I suspect, because death makes people incredibly vulnerable, and any enterprise based around vulnerability feels off.

Empathy’s approach is to make its help, and the building of a business around that idea, as transparent as possible. The company offers services for free for the first 30 days, and after that you pay a one-off fee of $65, which does not go up the longer you use the service, which could be five months or five years (or yes, longer).

After you fill in a few details about your particular circumstance, you are then guided through a step-by-step process of all of the different things one needs to deal with after a person dies.

These include things like the first, immediate arrangements you might need to make, how to inform others (and informing them), organising a funeral or other ceremony, procuring the right documents, dealing with the will, securing the deceased’s identity, dealing with his/her property, organising a probate, settling benefits and accounts, and bills, and other assets, taxes and perhaps bereavement counseling for ourselves. For many of us, not only are we upset, but we may have never had to go through these processes before, and it’s a surreal learning curve to be experiencing when you are already on a potential emotional rollercoaster.

The idea with Empathy is that while some of these will require some lifting from you, the platform will play the part of a “digital assistant” by helping prompt what you need to do next, and give you guidance for how to get through that. It doesn’t refer you to others; it doesn’t advertise other services and never plans to. The data that does go into the platform, Gura said, will not be used anywhere other than where you are channelling it for the purposes of settling affairs.

Empathy is not the first but the next in an interesting and slowly growing cluster of startups tackling this area. Others include Farewill in the UK, helping people write wills for themselves; Lantern to help open up the conversation about death and planning for it; and estate planning startup Trust & Will. Competition, perhaps, but at least for now showing that there can be helpful tech build even for the more difficult areas of life.

“The end-of-life industry is a large sector that has been untouched by the wave of digital transformation occurring in every other industry,” said Joel Cutler, MD and co-founder of General Catalyst, in a statement. “Empathy is unique in that it addresses both the emotional and logistical anguish of loss.  We believe this is the technology and experience that can greatly benefit every family.”

“The Empathy team is directing their vast experience in consumer software to significantly improve how people handle the burdens that come with death,” added Michael Eisenberg, partner and co-founder at Aleph. “When grieving, many families do not have the bandwidth to deal with tasks and bureaucracy. By combining financial technology and emotional understanding, Empathy has built a product for the next-of kin with compassion at its core.”

Longer term, Gura said that Empathy may look to tackle other aspects of the process, such as organizing affairs before the death of a loved one, or perhaps looking at other problematic life events, like divorce, that also spur a lot of obligations in their aftermath.

Historically, podcasts have been aimed at consumers. The value to be gained in the B2B world is something that has been largely untapped.

For Lindsay Tjepkema — who has been entrenched in the world of B2B marketing for more than 15 years — the opportunity was massive. So in 2019, she founded Casted, an audio and video podcast product aimed at B2B marketers.

And now Casted has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Revolution Ventures. 

Existing backers High Alpha Capital, Elevate Ventures and Tappan Hill Ventures also participated in the financing, which brings Indianapolis-based Casted’s total raised to about $9.3 million since its inception.

2020 was a good year for Casted. The startup quadrupled its revenue, tripled its customer base and doubled the size of its team during the course of the 12-month period. It has an impressive list of customers, including PayPal, HubSpot, Drift and ZoomInfo. Casted’s platform is also “the system of record” for Salesforce’s 25+ podcasting shows.

And to make things even more impressive, that revenue growth looks more like 8x year over year, according to Tjepkema.

She believes the company’s value prop goes beyond just giving companies a way to get their podcasts out there. Its ability to analyze data and turn that into intelligence for sales and marketing is what really sets it apart, she said.

“If you’re a podcaster, and you’re doing it to grow a large audience, monetize and sell advertising, the number of downloads is important,” Tjepkema told TechCrunch. “But when you’re a B2B company or an enterprise company, the number of downloads doesn’t help. You need to know who’s engaged, how are people interacting with the content and then how is that going to impact revenue and pipeline, and customer loyalty and lifetime value.”

For starters, Casted’s SaaS platform gives marketing teams a way to publish content. Once published, Casted provides access to a “fully searchable content archive” with transcription services and tagging. It then also helps the company amplify that content via cross-channel distribution. And finally — largely by integrating with digital marketing platforms such as HubSpot, WordPress and Marketo — Casted’s software provides analytics on what a specific user is paying attention to. Those data-driven analytics becomes valuable information for sales and marketing teams in terms of who to target and why.

“Because everything that’s in the platform is transcribed, there are ways to clip it up and share it across other channels and get that into the hands of your sales team so they can use it to make their conversations with their customers even easier,” Tjepkema said. 

Revolution Ventures Managing Partner David Golden said that marketing technology has been a difficult sector for his firm to invest in, considering the volume of companies providing a variety of services such as email optimization and sales automation and business intelligence.

“But what Lindsay and her team was building out was clearly a new category in this space and the sort of slap-your-forehead category. Of course, podcasting for B2B marketing makes all the sense in the world when you look at the evolution of tools that have been available to business marketers, such as blogs, white papers and webinars,” Golden told TechCrunch. “It was just going to be a matter of time before audio and video would be important pieces of that toolbox, and there was nobody doing it.”

Revolution estimates that B2B content makes up roughly just 15% of the podcasting content out there today.

“Given the growth on the consumer side, we think this could be up to a $20 billion market by five years from now,” Golden said.

The company, he added, is just one of a growing number of martech companies based in Indianapolis, including ExactTarget (which was acquired by Salesforce for $2.5 billion).

Looking ahead, Casted said the new capital will go toward expanding its 25-person team and scaling the platform with new integrations and partnerships. 

The venture capital scene in the North African tech ecosystem will be absolutely buzzing right now with the announcement of two large VC funds in the space of two days. Today, Algebra Ventures, an Egyptian VC firm, announced that it has launched its $90 million second fund.

Four years ago, Algebra Ventures closed its first fund of $54 million, and with this announcement, the firm has raised a total of $144 million. This means Algebra currently has the largest indigenous fund from North Africa and arguably in Africa.

According to the managing partners — Tarek Assaad and Karim Hussein, the first fund was an Egyptian-focused fund. Still, the firm made some selective investments in a few companies outside the country. The second fund will be similar — Egypt first, Egypt focused, but allocating investments in East and West Africa, North Africa and the Middle East.

Assaad and Hussein launched the firm in 2016 as one of Egypt’s first independent venture capital funds. It wasn’t easy to start one at the time, and it took the partners two years to close the first fund.

“Raising a venture capital fund in Egypt in 2016, in all honesty, was a pain. There was no venture capital to speak of back then,” Assaad told TechCrunch. “The high-flying startups back then were raising between $1 million and $2 million. We decided to take the bull by the horn and raise from very established LPs.”

These LPs include Cisco, the European Commission, Egyptian-American Enterprise Fund (EAEF), European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), International Finance Corporation (IFC) and private family offices. From the first fund, Algebra backed 21 startups in Egypt and MENA, and according to the firm, six of its most established companies are valued at over $350 million and collectively generate more than $150 million in annual revenue.  

Algebra says it’s sector-agnostic but has a focus on fintech, logistics, health tech and agritech. Although the firm has invested in startups in seed and Series B stages, Algebra is known to be an investor in startups looking to raise Series A investments.

Another appealing proposition from Algebra lies in the fact that it owns an in-house team focused on talent acquisition — in operations, marketing, finance, engineering, etc., for portfolio companies. 

The firm’s ticket size remains unchanged from the first fund and will continue to cut checks ranging from $500,000 to $2 million. However, some aspects as to how the firm handles operations might change according to the partners.

“One of the lessons learned in our first fund is that we see that there are more interesting opportunities and great entrepreneurs in the seed stage. And given that we’re more on the ground in Egypt, sometimes we wait for them to mature to Series A. But going forward, we might need to build relationships with those we find exceptional at the seed level and also expand our participation on the Series B level, too,” Hussein said on how the firm will act going forward.  

Hussein adds that the company will also be doubling down on its talent acquisition network. Typically, Algebra helps portfolio companies hire C-level executives, and while it plans to continue doing so, the firm might adopt a startup studio model — pairing some professionals to start a company that eventually gets Algebra’s backing and support.

The reason behind this stems from the next set of companies Algebra will be looking to invest in. According to Hussein, the partners at Algebra have studied successful businesses in other emerging markets for some time and want to identify parallels in North Africa where the firm can invest.

“In cases where the firm can’t find those opportunities, we may spur some of those in the network to start building those businesses and capture those opportunities,” he remarked.  

Before Algebra, Hussein has been involved with building some successful tech companies in the U.S. Primarily an engineer after bagging both bachelors and doctorate degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, respectively, he ventured into the world of startup investing and crazy valuations after working for a consulting company in the dot-com era.

He would go on to start Riskclick, a software company known for its commercial insurance applications. The founders sold the company to Skywire before Oracle acquired the company to become part of its suite of insurance services. After some time at WebMD, Hussein returned to Egypt and began mentoring startups as an angel investor. Alongside other angel investors, he started Cairo Angels, an angel investor network in Egypt, in 2013. 

“There was a massive gap in the market. We were putting in a bit of small angel money to these businesses but there were no VCs to take them to the next level. So I met up with Tarek and the rest is Algebra,” he said. 

Assaad is also an engineer. He obtained his bachelors in Egypt before switching careers by going to Stanford Graduate School of Business. He continued on that path working for some Bay Area companies before his return to Egypt. On his return, he became a managing partner at Ideavelopers, a VC firm operating a $50 million fund since 2009. The firm has had a couple of good success stories, the most notable being fintech startup Fawry. Now a publicly traded billion-dollar company, Assaad was responsible for the investment which realized a $100 million exit for Ideavelopers in 2015.

With Algebra, both partners are pioneering local investments in the region. Some of its portfolio companies are the most well-known companies on the continent — health tech startup Vezeeta; social commerce platform Brimore; logistics startup Trello; ride-hailing and super app Halan; food discovery and ordering platform Elmenus; fintech startup, Khazna; and others.

The firm’s latest raise and $144 million capital amount is one of the largest funds dedicated to African startups. Other large Africa-focused funds include the $71 million fund recently closed by another Egyptian firm, Sawari Ventures; Partech’s $143 million fund; Novastar Ventures’ $200 million fund; and the $71 million Tide Africa Fund by TLcom Capital.

These funds have been very pivotal to the growth of the African tech ecosystem in terms of funding. Last year, African startups raised almost $1.5 billion from both local and international investors, according to varying reports. This number was just half a billion dollars six years ago.

However, regardless of the period — 2015 or 2021 — African VC investments have always been largely dominated by foreign investors. But VC firms like Algebra Ventures are showing that local investors can raise nine-figure funds, thereby providing more startups with more funds and paving the way for indigenous and local VCs to at least increase their participation to nearly equal levels.

Two-year-old CRED has become the youngest Indian startup to be valued at $2 billion or higher.

Bangalore-based CRED said on Tuesday it has raised $215 million in a new funding round — a Series D — that valued the Indian startup at $2.2 billion (post-money), up from about $800 million valuation in $81 million Series C round in January this year.

New investor Falcon Edge Capital and existing investor Coatue Management led the new round. Insight Partners and existing investors DST Global, RTP Global, Tiger Global, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, and Sofina also participated in the new round, which brings CRED’s total to-date raise to about $443 million.

TechCrunch reported last month that CRED was in advanced stages of talks to raise about $200 million at a valuation of around $2 billion.

CRED operates an app that rewards customers for paying their credit card bills on time and gives them access to a range of additional services such as credit and a premium catalog of products from high-end brands.

An individual needs to have a credit score of at least 750 to be able to sign up for CRED. By keeping such a high bar, the startup says it is ensuring that people are incentivized to improve their financial behavior. (More on this later.)

The startup today serves more than 6 million customers, or about 22% of all credit card holders — and 35% of all premium credit card holders — in the world’s second largest internet market.

Kunal Shah, founder and chief executive of CRED, told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup intends to become the platform for affluent customers in India and not limit its offerings to financial services.

He said the startup’s e-commerce service, for instance, is growing fast. He attributed the early success to customers appreciating the curation of items on CRED and merchants courting higher ticket size transactions.

CRED will deploy the fresh funds to scale its revenue channels and do more experimentations, he said.

When asked if CRED would like to serve all credit card users in India, Shah said the selection criteria limits the startup from doing so, but he said he was optimistic that more users will improve their scores in the future.

The startup, unlike most others in India, doesn’t focus on the usual TAM — hundreds of millions of users of the world’s second-most populated nation — and instead caters to some of the most premium audiences.

“India has 57 million credit cards (vs 830 million debit cards) [that] largely serves the high-end market. The credit card industry is largely concentrated with the top 4 banks (HDFC, SBI, ICICI and Axis) controlling about 70% of the total market. This space is extremely profitable for these banks – as evident from the SBI Cards IPO,” analysts at Bank of America wrote in a recent report to clients.

“Very few starts-ups like CRED are focusing on this high-end base and [have] taken a platform-based approach (acquire customers now and look for monetization later). Credit card in India remains an aspirational product. The under penetration would likely ensure continued strong growth in coming years. Overtime, the form-factor may evolve (i.e. move from plastic card to virtual card), but the inherent demand for credit is expected to grow,” they added.

CRED has become one of the most talked about startups in India, in part because of the pace at which it has raised money of late and its growing valuation. Some users have said that CRED no longer offers them the perks it used a year ago.

Shah said CRED is addressing those concerns. A recent feature, which allows customers to use CRED points at thousands merchants, for instance, has made the reward more appealing, he said, adding that the startup is slowly incorporating that into its own e-commerce store as well.

“What will soon happen is that customers will realize that these points are asset and not a liability. They will start to see benefits of the points in more places,” he said, adding that the pandemic derailed some of the things CRED had planned for in the real world.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

Used-goods marketplaces, an online staple since the beginning of the internet as we know it, have really come into their own during the Covid-19 pandemic: they’ve been a place for people clearing out their domestic spaces to list items that they have that are still in good shape, making some money in the process; and for buyers, they are a resource for finding items at a time when shopping in person and spending money in uncertain economic times have both fallen out of favor. Today, MPB — a popular marketplace that specializes in used cameras and photographic equipment — is announcing significant funding to double down on the opportunity after seeing its platform “recirculate” some 300,000 items of kit globally each year.

The Brighton, England-based startup has snapped up £49.8 million (about $69 million at current exchange rates). It plans to use the money both to expand into more markets — it currently has offices in Brooklyn and Berlin — and into more product areas, specifically, extending the marketplace concept to serve content creators.

The Series D is being led by Vitruvian Partners, with significant participation from Acton Capital, and Mobeus Equity Partners, Beringea and FJ Labs also participating. Vitruvian is a new backer for MPB; the rest were already invested in the startup, which has raised around $91 million since 2011.

MPB did not disclose its valuation in a statement on the fundraise; we have contacted the company to ask and will update if / when we learn more.

For some context, this is the biggest-ever round raised by a startup out of the university-fueled town of Brighton, which has had some tech world focus — Brandwatch made a splash in February when it was acquired by Cision for $450 million; and it is well known for gaming companies and talent — but has largely been off the fundraising radar, perhaps in part because it is so close to London and its own gravitational pull for entrepreneurs and VCs. PitchBook put MPB’s valuation at $50.86 million in 2019; it’s likely to be significantly higher than this now.

“This funding round is a major milestone for MPB, culminating a decade of strong performance and a vision to make great kit accessible and affordable,” said Matt Barker, MPB’s founder and CEO, in a statement. “With the backing of Vitruvian Partners and those reinvesting in our business, we can accelerate our US and European growth strategy at scale, profitably. Photography and videography are intrinsic to societies and cultures all over the world, and at MPB we have created a circular model that offers everyone the chance to be visual storytellers and content creators in a way that’s good for the planet.”

Indeed, what’s interesting about MPB is how it touches on and addresses a number of themes that have been playing out across the world of e-commerce and wider digital society, and what’s probably made it successful has been its appeal to people on one or more of those fronts at the same time.

First, there is the platform it gives to people to sell and buy used camera equipment. The sale of used items gives owners an opportunity to make money off items they no longer need, and buyers a way to procure items at lower costs. And it has an obvious environmental angle to it, since circular economy operators encourage people to get more life out of electronics that might otherwise simply become part of landfill (or encourage more manufacturing of new goods in their place).

But on a more practical level, used-good sales also have often put people off in part because they are deprived of some of the guarantees that you would normally get on goods when buying from more established retailers.

MPB provides buying and seller security in its own way: by employing a team of people to vet and prepare items for sale, and providing a six-month guarantee on items sold over its platform.

(And more generally, used goods marketplaces are seeing some big attention from VCs at the moment in Europe: in February, Wallapop in Spain raised $191 million for its more generalised used-goods marketplace.)

Second, it touches on the bigger trend we’ve seen around the growth of communities focused on specific rather than general interests. It’s a clear way of conferring more authenticity, focus and signal in an otherwise very noisy world online, and in a specialized area like the sale of photography equipment, this can be especially critical and a unique selling point over more generic sales platforms like eBay: it means more attention paid by the platform to stock, as well as a more focused community of buyers and sellers.

Third, there is the focus of MPB in particular. We have most definitely seen the birth of a “creator economy” online, where people are making livings out of their own brands (ugh), or from their specific creative output, bypassing some of the more traditional middle-men in favor of newer ones (eg, network broadcasters no longer the sole gatekeepers for serialized video content and all of the work that goes into making it; YouTube conversely now makes a killing off it, and if Substack, Patreon and others like it play their cards right, they will soon, in their own areas of interest, too.)

What this might mean for companies like MPB is a surge of interest and attention on equipment for capturing those images, although it will be interesting to see how and if that can be leveraged on a wider scale, given how so much of that creation today is happening on smartphones, which themselves continue to get more sophisticated and eat into not just casual photographers’ buying patterns, but more serious ones, too.

In the question of scaling, MPB will have an interesting partner in the form of Vitruvian Partners, which backs second-hand clothes marketplace Vestiaire Collective — which raised $216 million last month, another sign of the times and how they have boosted the opportunities for used-good sales — alongside other marketplaces like Carwow, Just Eat, Farfetch, Skyscanner and Trustpilot.

“MPB has developed a unique tech-enabled platform to meet a market need, transforming access to photography kit to become a global leader in its field, whilst building a product that genuinely has a positive impact on the world,” said Tom Studd, partner at Vitruvian Partners, said in a statement. “Matt and the team have achieved strong and profitable growth through recent launches in the US and Germany, and we’re delighted to partner with them for the next step of the journey. Vitruvian looks to back exceptional teams with unique products in large markets, and we believe Matt and the team fit those criteria perfectly.”

Sebastian Wossagk, managing partner at Acton Capital, added: “It’s always a privilege to watch companies like MPB grow and excel in their field. Matt and his team have already taken the first steps into internationalisation by opening locations in Brooklyn and Berlin, and we’re excited to support them as they pursue further expansion in both the US and Europe.”

Something notable about MPB is that Barker once said that he founded it in part because he didn’t feel that the requirements of people in the photography community were being addressed well enough by more general sites like eBay or Gumtree. That may still be the case for those two sites (and countless other generic sales platforms), but it doesn’t mean that there are not a number of other players addressing the used-photography equipment market. They include the likes of Worldwide Camera Exchange, Park Cameras, Camera World, and many others with equally SEO-friendly names. That represents opportunities for consolidation, competitive threat, and hopefully innovation for better services, but also a sign that there is more to this market than might meet the eye.