Author: azeeadmin

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

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here.

If you are paying attention to Y Combinator’s demo day this week, our primer is here. And our Friday news roundup is here. With that, let’s get into the news:

• Ironsource is going public via a SPAC. It’s worth even more than eToro, which is also going public via a SPAC. It’s a big quarter for Israeli tech.
• Sivo is a hot startup that you’re going to hear more about. Also a lesson here for founders, if you want attention, share numbers.
• Deliveroo has a price for its IPO, and the company could be worth as much as £8.8 billion. Even more, the European delivery giant has seen huge demand gains thus far in 2021.
• On the month front, Nuvemshop has raised $90 million, M Capital Management has raised $30.85 million for a new fund, and Aldea Ventures has raised a €60 million investment vehicle.
• Remember Dispo? The hot photo-taking service? Read this.
• And finally. Happify Health has raised a $73 million Series D, while Clarify Health has put together a $115 million round of its own.

Coming Wednesday we are digging into equity crowdfunding. Which is going to be hot shit. Get ready.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) offer new ways for consumers to collect, wear and trade fashion online, and now that most fashion shows have scaled back or gone virtual, they may become an important tool for the industry.

Because some of the most profitable NFTs are produced by celebrities with teams, it makes sense that music corporations, fashion brands and designers are venturing into the NFT market as well. Just this month, sneaker brand RTFKT Studios garnered $3.1 million in seven minutes by selling crypto collectibles. In December 2020, NFT startup Enjin partnered with Netherlands-based fashion house The Fabricant on a virtual collection. Real-life fashion brands use NFTs for marketing in virtual worlds like Minecraft, plus several Atari and Microsoft video games.

“Brands are coming up with some creative solutions because the pandemic is persistent, and fashion is something that is so close to our identities,” said Bryana Kortendick, Enjin’s VP of operations and communications. “You can snap a photo of yourself wearing your Atari-branded NFTs. You’ll also be able to wear them in video games.”

Breakout NFT star Beeple said he imagines a future where fashion NFTs could be redeemed for specific items in physical stores, especially at luxury retailers like his former client Louis Vuitton.

“You can relate NFTs to clothing in new and interesting ways,” he said. “This will be seen as the next chapter of digital art history. This is a continuation of digital art history that started decades ago, by that I mean art made on a computer and distributed through the internet.”

Fashion designers like Schirin Negahbani are already creating NFTs that represent actual clothing. Precisely because multimillion-dollar NFT sales are breaking records, spectators have been prompted to question the role speculative trading plays in this trend.

Textile designer Amber J. Dickinson says fashionable NFTs shouldn’t primarily be viewed as speculative trading opportunities. “The way I think fashion translates to the digital world is to view an NFT as a collectible piece of the garment for history,” said Dickinson, known for hand-made silk scarves and her work with Alexander McQueen. “I would only buy art as a piece that I liked. Whether digital or in the real world, I don’t take an investor’s point of view.”

There are many fashion fans who disagree with Dickinson, preferring to invest through assets like Birkin bags. They may have a different approach to NFTs. The DIGITALAX crypto fashion platform, for example, is being built with a plethora of trading features. As for Dickinson, she said she is still looking for her tribe of crypto-savvy artists on Twitter.

Lost item finder Tile, the maker of the popular Bluetooth-powered tracker that can help you find your misplaced keys, bag, wallet or more, is bringing its tracking service to a wearable device for the first time with the launch of its Fitbit partnership. Starting today, all new and current Fitbit Inspire 2 users will gain access to Tile’s Bluetooth-finding technology at no extra cost, the company says.

As a result of the deal, existing Inspire 2 users will soon be prompted to update their device’s software via the Fitbit app, which will make the new Tile feature available. Once updated, users will be directed to download Tile’s mobile app for access to the lost item finding features. From the Tile app, Inspire 2 users will then be able to locate their misplaced Fitbit when they’re within Bluetooth range — for example, if the device has been lost somewhere inside their home. If the device is further away, users will be able to tap into Tile’s broader finding network which leverages the Tile app installed on all Tile users’ smartphones. When anyone with the app is near the lost item, its location is shared back through the network to the original owner.

At present, Tile says it’s locating up to 6 million unique items per day across 195 countries.

Tile’s service is made available for free to Fitbit users and other customers, but it monetizes through a combination of device sales, in-app subscriptions, and other partnerships. The Tile Premium subscription will also be available to Inspire 2 users as an optional upgrade from within the Tile app at $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year. This service, originally targeted towards Tile tracker owners, includes free battery replacements for Tile devices, access to 30-day location history, item reimbursements, and smart alerts that remind you when you’ve left home without important things.

“Now with Tile technology, we’re adding even more convenience and helpful tools to Inspire 2, our accessible, easy-to-use activity and sleep tracker,” said Larry Yang, Director of Product Management of Fitbit Devices at Google, which finalized its Fitbit acquisition in early 2021. “We’re excited to partner with Tile so our users can focus on building healthy habits without worrying about not being able to find their misplaced device, with the potential to bring Tile’s finding technology to more Fitbit devices in the future,” he added.

Tile’s partnership with Fitbit is now one of over 20 partners who are leveraging Tile’s technology in some way across audio, travel, smart home and PC categories. And while technically Fitbit is the first “wearable” partner, Tile has worked with others in the consumer electronics space, including headphone makers like Skullcandy, Bose and Sennheiser.

The company’s ability to expand its reach through industry partners may become even more critical to its future in the face of new competition from Apple, and to some extent, Samsung. Apple has been developing its own Tile competitor, AirTags, which the company accidentally disclosed in a YouTube video last year. These will leverage both Bluetooth and newer ultra-wideband technology to more precisely locate lost items. Meanwhile, Samsung’s newest Tile competitor, the Galaxy SmartTag, will also come in an UWB-powered version later this year.

This competition, specifically from Apple, could spell trouble for Tile, which has become a vocal participant in the U.S. antitrust investigations against Apple. The company has testified against Apple in congressional hearings about how its business has been negatively impacted by Apple in the past, and it pushed for third-party access to Apple’s “Find My” app as a means of evening the playing field between Apple’s upcoming trackers and its own. Tile also joined the Coalition for App Fairness, an advocacy group that’s now pushing for legislation to regulate the app stores in various U.S. states.

Partnering with Apple’s competitor, Google (by way of Fitbit), could be seen as another way for Tile to shore up a position for itself within a key section of the wearables market before AirTags arrive.

London-based fintech startup Revolut has announced that it is applying for a bank charter in the U.S. The company has submitted a draft application with the FDIC and the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation.

If the company manages to get a charter in California, it would let the company operate throughout the U.S. as an independent bank. The discussions are still ongoing, which means it could take a while before the authorities grant a charter to the company.

After obtaining a charter in the U.S., Revolut could start offering more financial services. In particular, it would open up more opportunities when it comes to lending and savings products.

Right now, Revolut partners with Metropolitan Commercial Bank in the U.S. — they handle your deposits and they are insured by the FDIC. They also issue cards for Revolut.

In the U.S., Revolut is also launching Revolut Business. These accounts let a company send and receive international payments more easily. Companies can also use the service for payments with virtual and physical debit cards. Revolut Business is available across all 50 states. There are 500,000 companies using Revolut Business in Europe.

Revolut currently has 15 million customers for its financial super app — most of them are in the U.K. and the European Union. The company recently announced that it was applying for a banking license in the U.K., its home country and its biggest market. In Europe, Revolut has a specialized license from the Bank of Lithuania — some customers are already moving their account to Revolut Bank.

Revolut isn’t the only fintech startup applying for a bank charter in the U.S. Last month, Brex announced that it would apply for a bank charter in Utah. Varo Bank also obtained its own bank charter last year.

It proves that leveraging another bank’s charter is great for growth. But at some point, if you want to launch new products and generate more revenue from those products, you have to get your own charter.

Berlin-based y42 (formerly known as Datos Intelligence), a data warehouse-centric business intelligence service that promises to give businesses access to an enterprise-level data stack that’s as simple to use as a spreadsheet, today announced that it has raised a $2.9 million seed funding round led by La Famiglia VC. Additional investors include the co-founders of Foodspring, Personio and Petlab.

The service, which was founded in 2020, integrates with over 100 data sources, covering all the standard B2B SaaS tools from Airtable to Shopify and Zendesk, as well as database services like Google’s BigQuery. Users can then transform and visualize this data, orchestrate their data pipelines and trigger automated workflows based on this data (think sending Slack notifications when revenue drops or emailing customers based on your own custom criteria).

Like similar startups, y42 extends the idea data warehouse, which was traditionally used for analytics, and helps businesses operationalize this data. At the core of the service is a lot of open source and the company, for example, contributes to GitLabs’ Meltano platform for building data pipelines.

“We’re taking the best of breed open-source software. What we really want to accomplish is to create a tool that is so easy to understand and that enables everyone to work with their data effectively,” Y42 founder and CEO Hung Dang told me. “We’re extremely UX obsessed and I would describe us as no-code/low-code BI tool — but with the power of an enterprise-level data stack and the simplicity of Google Sheets.”

Before y42, Vietnam-born Dang co-founded a major events company that operated in over 10 countries and made millions in revenue (but with very thin margins), all while finishing up his studies with a focus on business analytics. And that in turn led him to also found a second company that focused on B2B data analytics.

Even while building his events company, he noted, he was always very product- and data-driven. “I was implementing data pipelines to collect customer feedback and merge it with operational data — and it was really a big pain at that time,” he said. “I was using tools like Tableau and Alteryx, and it was really hard to glue them together — and they were quite expensive. So out of that frustration, I decided to develop an internal tool that was actually quite usable and in 2016, I decided to turn it into an actual company. ”

He then sold this company to a major publicly listed German company. An NDA prevents him from talking about the details of this transaction, but maybe you can draw some conclusions from the fact that he spent time at Eventim before founding y42.

Given his background, it’s maybe no surprise that y42’s focus is on making life easier for data engineers and, at the same time, putting the power of these platforms in the hands of business analysts. Dang noted that y42 typically provides some consulting work when it onboards new clients, but that’s mostly to give them a head start. Given the no-code/low-code nature of the product, most analysts are able to get started pretty quickly  — and for more complex queries, customers can opt to drop down from the graphical interface to y42’s low-code level and write queries in the service’s SQL dialect.

The service itself runs on Google Cloud and the 25-people team manages about 50,000 jobs per day for its clients. the company’s customers include the likes of LifeMD, Petlab and Everdrop.

Until raising this round, Dang self-funded the company and had also raised some money from angel investors. But La Famiglia felt like the right fit for y42, especially due to its focus on connecting startups with more traditional enterprise companies.

“When we first saw the product demo, it struck us how on top of analytical excellence, a lot of product development has gone into the y42 platform,” said Judith Dada, General Partner at LaFamiglia VC. “More and more work with data today means that data silos within organizations multiply, resulting in chaos or incorrect data. y42 is a powerful single source of truth for data experts and non-data experts alike. As former data scientists and analysts, we wish that we had y42 capabilities back then.”

Dang tells me he could have raised more but decided that he didn’t want to dilute the team’s stake too much at this point. “It’s a small round, but this round forces us to set up the right structure. For the series, A, which we plan to be towards the end of this year, we’re talking about a dimension which is 10x,” he told me.

It’s clear that automated workflow tooling has become increasingly important for companies. Perhaps that explains why Camunda, a Berlin startup that makes open source process automation software, announced an €82 million Series B today. That translates into approximately $98 million U.S.

Insight Partners led the round with help from A round investor Highland Europe. When combined with the $28 million A investment from December 2018, it brings the total raised to approximately $126 million.

What’s attracting this level of investment says Jakob Freund, co-founder and CEO at Camunda is the company is solving a problem that goes beyond pure automation. “There’s a bigger thing going on which you could call end-to-end automation or end-to-end orchestration of endpoints, which can be RPA bots, for example, but also micro services and manual work [by humans],” he said.

He added, “Camunda has become this endpoint agnostic orchestration layer that sits on top of everything else.” That means that it provides the ability to orchestrate how the automation pieces work in conjunction with one another to create this full workflow across a company.

The company has 270 employees and approximately 400 customers at this point including Goldman Sachs, Lufthansa, Universal Music Group, and Orange. Matt Gatto, managing director at Insight Partners sees a tremendous market opportunity for the company and that’s why his firm came in with such a big investment.

“Camunda’s success demonstrates how an open, standards-based, developer-friendly platform for end-to-end process automation can increase business agility and improve customer experiences, helping organizations truly transform to a digital enterprise,” Gatto said in a statement.

Camunda is not your typical startup. Its history actually dates back to 2008 as a business process management (BPM) consulting firm. It began the Camunda open source project in 2013, and that was the start of pivoting to become an open source software company with a commercial component built on top of that.

It took the funding at the end of 2018 because the market was beginning to catch up with the idea, and they wanted to build on that. It’s going so well that company reports it’s cash-flow positive, and will use the additional funding to continue accelerating the business.

Waterfund, an investment and trading firm that specializes in acquiring and managing water-related infrastructure assets, today announced a deal with Israel-based crowdfunding platform OurCrowd that will see the Waterfund team commit $50 million to build a water- and agtech-focused portfolio of 15 companies. The first of these investments is in Plenty, a well-funded vertical farming startup.

In addition to these direct investments, the two companies are also working together on a new water-focused platform called Aquantos, which aims to issue so-called Blue Bonds and other financial products related to the water industry. Comparable to Green Bonds that focus on projects with environmental benefits — and which have been around for more than a decade now — Blue Bonds are still a new idea and focus on projects that could benefit the oceans.

“We are working to issue Blue Bonds that can be both climate bonds-certified and backed by sovereign or sub-sovereign borrowers,” said Waterfund CEO Scott Rickards. “This new financial tool and others are being designed to enable water projects in the Middle East to acquire leading technologies to address water scarcity in a fundamentally new way.”

Rickards argues that a lack of private capital has held back innovation in the water sector and that this new partnership — and the equity and debt financing opportunities it brings with it — will help change this.

OurCrowd, meanwhile, currently has about $1.5 billion in committed funding and has made investments in about 250 companies across its 25 funds. Among the companies the platform has invested in are the likes of Lemonade, Jump Bikes and Beyond Meat. Its portfolio also includes a number of existing agtech startups and last November, OurCrowd partnered with Sprout Agritech (a company in its portfolio) to run a new agtech accelerator in New Zealand.

“The Abraham Accords present a huge opportunity to bring new water and agricultural technology to the water scarcity challenges of the entire Middle East,” said OurCrowd founder and CEO Jon Medved. “Alongside Waterfund, it is our mission to invest in and help build game-changing technology companies. We are excited to be working together with Waterfund to drive more private capital to address the critical challenges of water.”

The once untouchable semiconductor sector continues to attract fervent attention from VCs.

The latest news this morning is that Ajay Royan of Mithril Capital has led a $55 million Series D round of financing into Flex Logix, which builds chips designed to bring AI workflows to the compute edge. That follows on earlier rounds in the company totaling $27 million from the likes of Lux, Eclipse Ventures and Tate Family Trust, the investment vehicle of the company’s founder and CEO Geoff Tate.

This isn’t Mithril’s first foray into the chip investing world. The firm previously backed Nuvia, a promising entrant in the server chip market which was founded by several of the top chip designers of Apple’s A-line of processors. Mithril invested $240 million in Nuvia last September, just a few months before the company flipped over to Qualcomm in a $1.4 billion transaction announced in January.

Back to Flex Logix though: we last covered the company in October, when it announced the availability of its X1 AI chip. As I wrote at the time:

Flex Logix wants to bring AI processing workflows to the compute edge, which means it wants to offer technology that adds artificial intelligence to products like medical imaging equipment and robotics. At the edge, processing power obviously matters, but so does size and price. More efficient chips are easier to include in products, where pricing may put constraints on the cost of individual components.

Mithril in its statement noted the company’s strength in designing a competitive processor which meets tight power and cost requirements in a white-hot segment of semiconductors. It also was excited that Flex Logix has developed a strong well of intellectual property in the eFPGA space, where there has been energetic activity given increasing interest from customers for flexible processors that can adapt to application needs over time.

For more information on Flex Logix and its founding story, read our earlier profile.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to people everywhere shopping more online and Latin America is no exception.

São Paulo-based Nuvemshop has developed an e-commerce platform that aims to allow SMBs and merchants to connect more directly with their consumers. With more people in Latin America getting used to making purchases digitally, the company has experienced a major surge in business over the past year.

Demand for Nuvemshop’s offering was already heating up prior to the pandemic. But over the past 12 months, that demand has skyrocketed as more merchants have been seeking greater control over their brands.

Rather than selling their goods on existing marketplaces (such as Mercado Libre, the Brazilian equivalent of Amazon), many merchants and entrepreneurs are opting to start and grow their own online businesses, according to Nuvemshop co-founder and CEO Santiago Sosa.

“Most merchants have entered the internet by selling on marketplaces but we are hearing from newer generations of merchants and SMBs that they don’t want to be intermediated anymore,” he said. “They want to connect more directly with consumers and convey their own brand, image and voice.”

The proof is in the numbers.

Nuvemshop has seen the number of merchants on its platform surge to nearly 80,000 across Brazil, Argentina and Mexico compared to 20,000 at the start of 2020. These businesses range from direct-to-consumer (DTC) upstarts to larger brands such as PlayMobil, Billabong and Luigi Bosca. Virtually every KPI tripled in the company in 2020 as the world saw a massive transition to online, and Nuvemshop’s platform was home to 14 million transactions last year, according to Sosa.

“With us, businesses can find a more comprehensive ecosystem around payments, logistics, shipping and catalogue/inventory management,” he said.

Nuvemshop’s rapid growth caught the attention of Silicon Valley-based Accel. Having just raised $30 million in a Series C round in October and achieving profitability in 2020, the Nuvemshop team was not looking for more capital.

But Ethan Choi, a partner at Accel, said his firm saw in Nuvemshop the potential to be the market leader, or the “de facto” e-commerce platform, in Latin America.

“Accel has been investing in e-commerce for a very long time. It’s a very important area for us,” Choi said. “We saw what they were building and all their potential. So we pre-emptively asked them to let us invest.”

Today, Nuvemshop is announcing that it has closed on a $90 million Series D funding led by Accel. ThornTree Capital and returning backers Kaszek, Qualcomm Ventures and others also put money in the round, which brings Nuvemshop’s total funding raised since its 2011 inception to nearly $130 million. The company declined to reveal at what valuation this latest round was raised but it is notable that its Series D is triple the size of its Series C, raised just over six months prior. Sosa said only that there was a “substantial increase” in valuation since its Series C.

Nuvemshop is banking on the fact that the density of SMBs in Latin America is higher in most Latin American countries compared to the U.S. On top of that, the $85 billion e-commerce market in Latin America is growing rapidly with projections of it reaching $116.2 billion in 2023.

“In Brazil, it grew 40% last year but is still underpenetrated, representing less than 10% of retail sales. In Latin America as a whole, penetration is somewhere between 5 and 10%,” Sosa said.

Last year, the company transitioned from a closed product to a platform that is open to everyone from third parties, developers, agencies and other SaaS vendors. Through Nuvemshop’s APIs, all those third parties can connect their apps into Nuvemshop’s platform.

“Our platform becomes much more powerful, vendors are generating more revenue and merchants have more options,” Sosa told TechCrunch. “So everyone wins.” Currently, Nuvemshop has about 150 applications publishing on its ecosystem, which he projects will more than triple over the next 12 to 18 months.

As for comparisons to Shopify, Sosa said the company doesn’t necessarily make them but believes they are “fair.”

To Choi, there are many similarities.

“We saw Amazon get to really big scale in the U.S.. Merchants also found tools to build their own presence. This birthed Shopify, which today is worth $160 billion. Both companies saw their market caps quadruple during the pandemic,” he said. “Now we’re seeing the same dynamics in LatAm…Our bet here is that this company and business has all the same dynamics and the same really powerful tailwinds.”

For Accel partner Andrew Braccia, Nuvemshop has a clear first mover advantage.

“Over the past decade, direct-to-consumer has become one of the most important drivers of entrepreneurship globally,” he said. “Latin America is no exception to this trend, and we believe that Nuvemshop has the level of sophistication and ability to understand all that change and fuel the continued transformation of commerce from offline to online.”

Looking ahead, Sosa expects Nuvemshop will use its new capital to significantly invest in: continuing to open its APIs; payments processing and financial services; “everything related to logistics and logistics management” and attracting smaller merchants. It also plans to expand into other markets such as Colombia, Chile and Peru over the next 18-24 months. Nuvemshop currently operates in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.

“While the countries share the same secular trends and product experience, they have very different market dynamics,” Sosa said. “This requires an on the ground local knowledge to make it all work. Separate markets require distinct knowledge. That makes this a more complicated opportunity, but one that enables a long-term competitive advantage.”