Author: azeeadmin

Match Group, the parent company to Tinder, Match, OkCupid, Hinge and other top dating apps, announced this morning it’s made a seven-figure investment into nonprofit background check platform Garbo, with the goal of helping Match Group’s users make more informed decisions about their safety when dating online. The deal will see Match working closing with Garbo to integrate the background check technology into Tinder later this year, followed by other Match Group U.S. dating apps.

Image Credits: Kathryn Kosmides, via Match Group

New York-based Garbo was originally founded in 2018 by Kathryn Kosmides, a survivor of gender-based violence who wanted to make it easier for everyone to be able to have the ability to look up critical information about someone’s background that could indicate a history of violence.

Typically, background check services are run by for-profit companies and surface a wide variety of personal information — like drug offenses or minor traffic violations — that aren’t always relevant to matters of safety and abuse. Plus, those types of charges are often levied against members of more vulnerable communities, Garbo has pointed out, and aren’t correlated to gender-based violence.

Garbo instead offers low-cost background checks by collecting public records and reports of violence and abuse only, including arrests, convictions, restraining orders, harassment, and other violent crimes. To use the service, a user would enter either a first and last name, or a first name and phone number — often the only information a dating app users will have on one of their matches.

The service will then perform what it calls an “equitable background” check, meaning it will exclude drug possession charges form its results, as well as traffic tickets besides DUIs and vehicle manslaughter.

Last year, the nonprofit launched a beta test of its technology with 500 people in the NYC area, and soon grew its waitlist to over 6,000 more entirely by word-of-mouth. Garbo later pulled the test as the team realized the technology had the potential for national scale — something the team wanted to deliver before launching to the public.

As a small nonprofit without much in terms of financial backing, Garbo also realized a larger partner may be needed in that effort. After Kosmides was connected with Match Group’s new head of safety, Tracey Breeden, the two companies agreed to work together on bringing the technology to a broader U.S. audience.

“For far too long women and marginalized groups in all corners of the world have faced many barriers to resources and safety,” said Breeden, Match Group’s Head of Safety and Social Advocacy, in a statement about today’s news. “We recognize corporations can play a key role in helping remove those barriers with technology and true collaboration rooted in action. In partnership with Match Group, Garbo’s thoughtful and groundbreaking consumer background check will enable and empower users with information, helping create equitable pathways to safer connections and online communities across tech,” she added.

This is Match Group’s second investment in an outside safety technology provider to enhance its dating apps’ feature sets. In early 2020, the company invested in Noonlight to help it power new safety features inside Tinder and other dating apps following a damning investigative report by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism Investigations, published December 2019. The report revealed how Match Group allowed known sexual predators to use its apps. It also noted that Match Group didn’t have a uniform policy of running background checks on its dating app users, putting the responsibility on users to keep themselves safe.

Meanwhile, Tinder’s top competitor Bumble has been marketing itself as a more women-friendly alternative to traditional dating apps like Tinder, and has rolled out a number of features designed to keep users safe from bad actors — including, most recently, a way to prevent to prevent them from using the app’s “unmatch” option to hide from their victims.

Given that gaining a reputation for being an “unsafe” app could be significantly damaging to a brand like Tinder and the larger online dating industry as a whole, it’s obvious why Match Group is now directly investing to address this problem. With the Noonlight investment, for example, Match Group promised features like a discreet way to trigger emergency services inside the Tinder app, similar to the feature found in Uber and Lyft, plus other anti-abuse measures.

Match Group says Garbo will use the new investment to hire across product, engineering and in leadership — including a head of engineering and an initial team of five engineers. This team will work to build out Garbo’s capabilities, using technologies like natural language processing and A.I.

Garbo will also benefit from sizable contributions of time and resources from Match Group, as its gets its product fully operational and then rolled out across Match Group products, starting with Tinder. And Match Group will help Garbo make the nonprofit’s technology accessible to other platforms, as well — like ridesharing companies.

Once live in Tinder, the background check feature may not be free, however.

Instead, Match Group says it will work to determine the pricing based on things like what user adoption looks like, how many people want to use it, how many searches they want to perform and other factors. It also hasn’t yet determined how deep the integration may be — whether, for example, it will link outside the app to Garbo or make it seem more like an in-app feature.

Match Group doesn’t have any exact time frame for the feature’s launch beyond “later this year” for Tinder, to be followed by other U.S. dating apps. The company may consider looking into similar investments for its services aimed at international users in the months to come.

Last week, Elon Musk made $25 billion in one day. On Monday, he crowned himself “Technoking of Tesla.” In Musk-speak, this new title still translates into the Chief Executive Officer of the electric car company. 

The eccentric billionaire is nothing if not creative with his dubs (see: Offspring named X Æ A-Xii.) Zach Kirkhorn, the company’s Chief Financial Officer, has also been bestowed the title of Master of Coin. A nod to Game of Thrones? Honestly, who knows? 

The new appellations were announced via a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, which reads: 

“Effective as of March 15, 2021, the titles of Elon Musk and Zach Kirkhorn have changed to Technoking of Tesla and Master of Coin, respectively. Elon and Zach will also maintain their respective positions as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer.”

This title change follows Musk’s announcement last month that Tesla might start accepting bitcoin as a form of payment in the near future. The cryptocurrency’s stock price hit a new high of $61,788 over the weekend. 

Perhaps this is Musk’s not-so-subtle way of trying to let the world know who reigns supreme, especially after being bumped by Jeff Bezos as the richest person on the planet and after being sued by a Tesla investor for his continuous “erratic tweets” that potentially expose the electric vehicle company to fines and penalties that could drive its share price down. 

Musk’s announcement had a negligible impact on the stock price. Tesla’s stock is up 1.5% in morning trading. Tesla shares had an impressive 600% soar in 2020. However, the stock is now down 20% for the year from a high of $880.82 reached January 8. 

Tesla also disclosed on Monday that Jerome Guillen, president of automotive, will now take on the role of president of Tesla Heavy Trucking. In a 2020 Q4 earnings call, Musk said he expects deliveries of the Tesla Semi to begin this year. The engineering work on the freight-hauling truck with an all-electric powertrain is complete, but lack of availability to battery cells might halt production, Musk said during the call. 

Low-code and no-code tools have been a huge hit with enterprises keen to give their operations more of a tech boost, but often lack the resources to handle more complex integrations. Today, one of the startups that has been building low-code finance tools is announcing funding to tap into that trend and expand its business.

Genesis — which has to date primarily worked with financial services companies, giving non-technical employees the tools to create ways to monitor and manage real-time risk, high-frequency trades and other activities — has picked up $45 million. It plans to use to bring the tools it has already built to a wider set of verticals that have some of the same needs to manage risk, compliance, and other factors as finance — healthcare and manufacturing are two examples — as well as to continue building more into the stack. 

This Series B includes a mix of financial investors along with strategic backers that speak to who already integrates with Genesis’ tools on their own platforms.

Led by Accel, it also includes participation from new backers GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Salesforce Ventures, in addition to existing investors Citi, Illuminate Financial and Tribeca Venture Partners, who also invested in this round. To give you an idea of who it works with, Citi, along with ING, London Clearing House, and XP Investments, are some of Genesis customers.

Originally conceived in 2012 in Brazil by a pair of British co-founders — Stephen Murphy (CEO) and James Harrison (CTO), who cut their teeth in the world of investment banking — Genesis had raised less than $5 million before this round, mostly bootstrapping its business and leaning on Murphy and Harrison’s existing relationships in the world of finance to grow its customer base.

Today, Murphy lives in and leads the business from Miami — where he moved from New York just as the Covid-19 pandemic was starting to gain steam last year — while James Harrison (CTO) leads part of the team based out of the UK.

As you might imagine with so little funding before now for a company going on nine years old, Genesis was doing fine financially before this Series B, so the plan is to use the funding specifically to grow faster than it could have on its own steam. The startup is not disclosing its valuation with this round.

“We were not really fixated on valuation,” said Murphy in an interview, who said the funding came about after a number of VCs had approached the startup. “The most important thing is the future opportunity and where we could take the company with additional funding… this will help us hyper scale up.” He did note that the term sheets contained “some amazing numbers and multiples,” given the current interest in no-code and low-code technology.

Indeed, the vogue for no-code and low-code tech — other well-funded names in the crowded space include startups like Zapier, Airtable, Rows, Gyana, Bryter, Ushur, Creatio, and EasySend, as well as significant launches from Google and Microsoft and other bigger players — is coming out of two trends colliding.

On one side, we’ve well and truly entered an era in enterprise technology — with the same trend playing out in consumer tech, too — where smart developers are taking sophisticated and complex services and putting “wrappers” around them by way of APIs and simpler (low- or no-code) interfaces, so that those sophisticated tools can in turn be integrated and implemented in more places. This saves needing to build or integrate that complexity from scratch and expands access to the processes within those wrappers.

On the other side, the thirst for tech knowledge has become well and truly mainstream and as a result getting far more democratized. Working in a variety of applications, using different digital tools and devices, and seeing the fruits of tech pay off are all second nature to today’s working world — whether or not you are a technologist. So it’s no surprise to see more proactive, non-technical people looking for more ways to get their hands on these tools themselves.

“You now have a whole citizen developer world, for example business analysts who understand the solution you want but might not know how to get there,” Murphy said. “We play to seasoned developers first but the investment will help us put more low code and no code tools into place to widen the tools out to them.”

Starting out in finance made sense not just because that was where the two founders had previously worked, but also because of the history of how different software tools were already being used. Specifically, he noted that the ubiquity of microservices — which themselves are collections of services as apps — laid the groundwork for more low-code. “We saw that if we could build a low-code entry point to microservices, that would be powerful.”

On top of that, investment banks, he said, have a history of wanting to build things themselves to tailor to their specific needs. “Buying off the shelf means you are at the mercy of the vendor,” he said. These factors made financial services companies very receptive to what Genesis was offering.

While a lot of the no/low-code players are coming at the concept with specific verticals in mind — no surprise, since different verticals have very specific use cases and needs — so what’s interesting with Genesis is how the company is leveraging what it already knows about finance, and then looking at other industries that have similar demands, structures and rules.

Murphy said that Genesis will stay “very focused on financial markets for 2021” but that it’s identified a number of other verticals similar to it, and is actually already seeing some inbound interest from them.

“A number of people have already approached us from the world of healthcare,” he said, pointing out that these organizations, like financial services, face challenges around how to audit data and regulations around performing transactions. Manufacturing, meanwhile, has some parallels around the area of complex event processing similar to equity algorithmic trading, he said. (In short, this relates to how external events might trigger more transactions, not unlike how external factors affect manufacturing operations.)

The trend is one that analysts forecast will only grow in the coming years: Gartner, for example, says that by 2024, low-code platforms will account for no less than 65% of all app development activity.

“Low-code promises business users the autonomy to make their own technology usage and purchase decisions while enabling them to actually build their own applications without having to rely on IT,” said Andrei Brasoveanu, a partner at Accel, said n a statement. “By bringing one of the most transformative innovations in software development to financial services, Steve and the Genesis team are taking on a huge market of legacy vendors – and winning too – while delivering on the promise of low-code. The confidence they’ve gained from serving such large institutions is proof that there’s a real and urgent need for a purpose-built low-code solution for financial markets. We’re excited to partner with Genesis and support them in delivering this across the world.” Brasoveanu is joining the startup’s board with this round.

Volkswagen AG is gearing up to seize the top spot as the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer with plans announced Monday to have six 40 Gigawatt hour (GWh) battery cell production plants in operation in Europe by 2030.

To get there, the automaker put in a 10-year, $14 billion order with Swedish battery manufacturer Northvolt – and that’s only one of the six planned factories. A second plant in Germany will commence production in 2025.

The company also announced serious investments in charging infrastructure across China, Europe and the United States. It aims to grow its fast-charging network in Europe to 18,000 stations with its partner IONITY, 17,000 charging points in China through its joint venture CAMS New Energy Technology, and to increase the number of fast-charging stations in the United States by 3,500.

The company’s first dedicated battery event, a clear nod to Tesla’s Battery Day, also included a deep dive into novel battery chemistries that will reduce costs by up to 50%. The cell also paves the way for the transition to a solid-state battery cell, which the company anticipates for the middle of the decade. VW has made significant investments in solid-state battery manufacturer QuantumScape.

Volkswagen’s new Unified Premium Battery platform will be rolled out in 2023 and will be used across 80 percent of its EV models. The first to contain the new battery, the Audi Artemis, will be rolled out in 2024.

Scania AB, VW’s brand of heavy-duty trucks and busses, also has plans to increase its share of EVs. Departing from other major heavy-duty players that have opted for hydrogen fuel cells, company representatives on Monday said that it is unequivocally possible to electrify the heavy-duty transportation sector.

Looking to the battery’s end-of-life, VW said it will be able to recycle up to 95% of the battery through a process called hydrometallury.

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 — and make sure to check out Friday’s news-roundup with Danny and Natasha that included some neat notes on search startups. And their chances against Google.

So, what did we chat about this morning? Here’s the rough rundown:

• Stripe! Stripe raised new money at a new price and both were rather large. Would you believe that Stripe is still not public? It isn’t! But it should be. Perhaps this is the last time it will raise before listing.
• Also from the recent past, Megvii filed to go public, and Nimble Robotics raised.
• The Deliveroo IPO is happening, and the £1 billion raise could value the company at £5 billion, Reuters reckons.
• Oh, and TechCrunch has the most recent WeWork numbers.
• DeepSee.ai raised a Series A, and we have questions about its product — and hopes.
• Centrical also raised for its hybrid working software, which could come in demand after COVID ends.

Extra Crunch Live this week is Emmalyn Shaw from Flourish Ventures and Adam Roseman from Steady. That’s March 17th at 12 p.m. PDT and 3 p.m. EDT. See you there!

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!

Julia Collins is the first Black woman to co-found a venture-backed unicorn. So it should come as no surprise that investors lined up to bet on her latest venture, Planet FWD.

Investor Sarah Kunst says Collins’ branding skills are on par with Supreme, the ubiquitous lifestyle brand.

“The thing that Supreme has done incredibly well is the same thing I think some very exceptional founders like Julia can do very well, which is to build a brand that stands for something,” said Kunst. “Smart people know that the best time to get aligned with a great brand is at the drop. A Supreme shirt that costs $100 bucks in the store will cost $1,000 online. So, as an investor, I am just a kid on the street corner flipping sportswear.”

Kunst and Collins met well before Collins even had a clear idea for Planet FWD, but the duo knew they wanted to work together in the future. Kunst essentially told Collins that, whatever she was planning to do next, Kunst wanted to invest in it, sight unseen.

Kunst said Collins’ ability to “see around the corner” with Zume gave her the confidence to proceed. When Zume launched, there were a lot of naysayers, recalls Kunst.

“Now, you look at where the world is and there are multibillion dollar companies in the space,” she said. “Some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world, like Travis Kalanick, are leaning into ghost kitchens, which are just less efficiently delivered versions of Zume Pizza robots. To quote Wayne Gretzky, because I’m from the Midwest and therefore care about hockey a tiny bit, you want to skate to where the puck is going.”

The two formed a friendship and eventually, Collins started building out Planet FWD and prepping to raise. By then, the foundation was there. Kunst got in on Planet FWD’s seed round.

Fundraising is a process

Collins says one of the biggest lessons she learned from her time at Zume was to limit distractions and focus on one thing at a time.

“I felt this disorientation at times, and it was hard to navigate,” she said, noting that she not only was starting a company but also settling into the Bay Area. “Now, it’s much easier for me to cut through a lot of noise and focus on a single conversation, a single product’s development, a single thing that I need to get done.”

In that same vein, Collins has learned to be incredibly deliberate when it comes to fundraising. It’s also worth noting that she’s raised some $400 million+ in the last five years.

Bangalore’s fintech startup ecosystem is inching closer to delivering a new unicorn: CRED.

Two-year-old CRED is in advanced stages of talks to raise about $200 million at about $2 billion valuation, three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The new funding round, like this January’s Series C, will be largely financed by existing investors, the sources said, requesting anonymity as talks are private. The round is expected to close within a month, one of them said.

CRED, founded by Kunal Shah, has become one of the most talked-about startups in India, in part because of the pace at which its valuation has soared.

Backed by high-profile investors including DST Global, Sequoia Capital India, Tiger Global, Ribbit Capital, and General Catalyst, CRED was valued at $806 million when it closed its Series C round in January this year and $450 million in August 2019. (TechCrunch also scooped the Series C round of CRED.)

If the new deal goes through, CRED will be the fastest startup in the world’s second largest internet market to attain a $2 billion valuation. Prior to the upcoming Series D round, CRED had raised about $228 million.

Reached by TechCrunch early last week, CRED declined to comment. Sequoia Capital India didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Indian startup operates an eponymous app that rewards customers for paying their credit card bills on time and offers deals from online brands such as Starbucks, Nykaa, and Vahdam Teas. It had over 5.9 million customers as of January — or about 20% of the credit card holder population in the country.

The startup, unlike most others in India, doesn’t focus on the usual TAM of India — 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.

Consumer segmentation and addressable market for fintech firms in India (BofA Research)

CRED says it is trying to help customers improve their financial behavior. An individual needs a credit score of at least 750 to join CRED. In a recent newsletter to customers, CRED said the median credit score of its customers was 830 and at “any given point in time” more than 375,000 individuals are on the app’s waiting list, many of whom have demonstrably improved their score to join CRED.

“It’s easy to be responsible when you’re empowered. 80% CRED Protect members got visibility on extra interest charges and avoided late payment fees by tracking their dues on CRED. Ignorance is not always bliss. CRED members detected additional charges worth over ₹145 Crores [$20.1 million] on their statements. CRED members avoided over ₹43.5 Crores [$6 million] worth of late payment fees,” it wrote in the newsletter.

“With the help of regular bill payment reminders, and a seamless credit card management experience; 160,000 CRED members improved their credit scores last month. CRED members know it pays to be good as they earned cash-back worth ₹12 Crores [$1.65 million] by paying their bills on time. There’s always something to look forward to on CRED. Our members got access to over 750 new rewards and products.”

The startup makes money by cross-selling financing products — for which it has a revenue-sharing arrangement with banks and other financial institutions — and levies a similar cut from merchants who are on the platform, Shah, who is also one of the most prolific angel investors in India, told TechCrunch in an interview in January this year.

Anthony Geranio has played video games for the past thirteen years. The 26 year-old first time founder of 1v1Me, a new company that lets anyone gamble on their ability to win in a player vs. player game, tried to make it as a professional gamer, but when that didn’t work, he turned to the tech industry.

Geranio and his co-founder Alex Emmanuel bounced between companies like TextNow, Skillshare, and Grailed to combine both of their passions — gaming and entrepreneurship into a new company.

“The reason I got into programming was because I wanted to be my own boss one day,” Geranio said. And even though he was making $200,000 a year working at mission driven companies like SkillShare, Geranio said he still wasn’t fulfilled.

The COVID-19 pandemic finally convinced Geranio and Emmanuel to take the plunge. All of Geranio’s friends had started lockdown whiling away the hours by playing poker online for money. Then poker turned into Call of Duty, which turned into Madden, which became whatever else the kids play these days (my gaming days ended with Mortal Kombat II).

Geranio then went to OnDeck and, after graduating, began knocking on investors’ doors. The company managed to raise over $2 million from investors including On Deck, Erik Torenberg at Village Global, Turner Novak at GeltVC, Niv Dror at Shrug, SterlingVC, Ali Hamed at Crossbeam, Cody Hock and Cole Hock from UpNorth, Lightshed Ventures and BettorCapital. Notable angels also wanted in on the action including Justin Waldron, Brud founder Trevor McFedries, Ian Borthwick, Albert Cheng, Stephen Sikes and Anthony Pompliano.

The company is launching its app on the app store with an invite only approach, with the first invites going to content creators who already play games like Call of Duty. The longterm goal is to create content creators around wagering. “We’re trying to create a network where wagering is the engagement tool,” said Geranio.

For now, the company is only supporting bets on games like Call of Duty and Fortnite. The service acts as a marketplace which exchanges contact information on a PlayStation or Xbox. To win a wager, competitors have to link their bank accounts, settle on an amount, and 1v1Me puts that money in escrow. Gamers stream their game on Twitch and 1v1Me monitors the game to determine the winner. Once the competition is over, the winner gets the money transferred to their account.

The company is launching with gamers like  NoisyButters (who invested as well), Lunchtime, RLaw, and Vonniezugz.

To juice signups and invites, which can either be obtained through a creator or by following the company on Twitter where 1v1Me will give codes away, the company is also hosting a $500 challenge to whichever competitor wins the most games at the end of the week.

“When I worked at YouTube, I met many gaming creators that desired to entertain their fans and hone their skills, but it can be a struggle to make significant money along the way,” said Albert Cheng, Co-lead of Socially Financed and Director of Product at Duolingo. “1v1 is the most promising platform for esports gamers to make a living, and I’m thrilled to back them on their journey.”

Dominic Yap, chief operating officer and co-founder, and Ben Pfisterer, chief executive officer and co-founder of Zeller

Zeller, a payment and financial services startup founded by former Square executives, quietly raised a $25 million AUD (about $19.4 million USD) Series A last year, it announced today. The funding was led by Addition, the investment firm founded by former Tiger Global partner Lee Fixel, and included participation from returning investors Square Peg and Apex Capital. The Melbourne-based company said this is one of Australia’s largest pre-launch Series A rounds ever.

The startup previously raised a $6.3 million AUD (USD $4.9 million) seed round in June 2020. Zeller was was founded last year by Ben Pfisterer, Square’s former Asia Pacific and Australia head, and Dominic Yap, its strategy and growth lead. It has made 38 new hires over the past six months, growing its team to 50 people.

The funding will be used to grow Zeller’s product development and engineering capabilities, marketing and sales, and customer support teams as it prepares for its launch. A date hasn’t been set yet, but chief executive officer Pfisterer told TechCrunch it is “imminent.”

Zeller will offer a fully-integrated payments and financial services solution designed for small- to medium-sized businesses that currently rely on multiple providers for their payment terminals, point of sale systems, e-commerce payments, transaction accounts and credit cards. Zeller’s software is combined with a payment terminal, transaction account and business Mastercard, and intended to make it easier for businesses to accept and send payments, access funds and manage their finances. Zeller will have no lock-in contracts and one low fee for card payments.

“We don’t underestimate the challenges that come with scaling a new brand in an area dominated by entrenched banking incumbents, yet the opportunity is incredibly exciting,” said Pfisterer. “The industry experience our team has built up over the years means that we are well aware of the pain points business owners face when getting set up with a new banking or financial services provider.”

He added that despite the growth of e-commerce, about two-thirds of transactions are still processed in person. Zeller’s “sweet spot” is currently businesses that process up to $10 million AUD annually, mostly in face-to-face transactions.

“They may be sole traders or employ a team, may operate across one or multiple locations and come from a variety of verticals including retail, hospitality, fixed or mobile services, events, trades and many more,” said Pfisterer. He estimated that Zeller’s market opportunity in Australia includes just under 1.5 million merchants, and it is also designed to be scalable into other markets.

Other payment and financial services companies in Australia include Square, eWAY, PayPal, Ayden and Stripe.

Pfisterer said eWAY, Stripe and Adyen tend to focus on e-commerce payment processing, “yet this is just one element of what business owners need to manage their cash flow.” Most still need to accept in-person payments, which means going to a traditional bank for a merchant terminal and account. On the other hand, PayPal and Square focus mainly on micro-merchants. “The growing pains kick in when a business starts to expand and demands a wider variety of services.”

Zeller already has plans to introduce new payment and financial services products, and integrations with tools like point-of-sale and accounting software, to scale up with businesses as they grow, he added.

Northvolt, the Swedish battery manufacturer which raised $1 billion in financing from investors led by Goldman Sachs and Volkswagen back in 2019, has signed a massive $14 billion battery order with VW for the next 10 years.

The big buy clears up some questions about where Volkswagen will be getting the batteries for its huge push into electric vehicles, which will see the automaker reach production capacity of 1.5 million electric vehicles by 2025.

The deal will not only see Northvolt become the strategic lead supplier for battery cells for Volkswagen Group in Europe, but will also involve the German automaker increasing its equity ownership of Northvolt.

As part of the partnership agreement, Northvolt’s gigafactory in Sweden will be expanded and Northvolt agreed to sell its joint venture share in Salzgitter, Germany to Volkswagen as the car maker looks to build up its battery manufacturing efforts across Europe, the companies said.

The agreement between Northvolt and VW brings the Swedish battery maker’s total contracts to $27 billion in the two years since it raised its big $1 billion cash haul.

“Volkswagen is a key investor, customer and partner on the journey ahead and we will continue to work hard with the goal of providing them with the greenest battery on the planet as they rapidly expand their fleet of electric vehicles,” said Peter Carlsson, the co-founder and chief executive of Northvolt, in a statement.

Northvolt’s other partners and customers include ABB, BMW Group, Scania, Siemens, Vattenfall, and Vestas. Together these firms comprise some of the largest manufacturers in Europe.

Back in 2019, the company said that its cell manufacturing capacity could hit 16 Gigawatt hours and that it had sold its capacity to the tune of $13 billion through 2030. That means that the Volkswagen deal will eat up a significant portion of expanded product lines.

Founded Carlsson, a former executive at Tesla, Northvolt’s battery business was intended to leapfrog the European Union into direct competition with Asia’s largest battery manufacturers — Samsung, LG Chem, and CATL.

Back when the company first announced its $1 billion investment round, Carlsson had said that Northvolt would need to build up to150 gigawatt hours of capacity to hit targets for. 2030 electric vehicle sales.

The plant in Sweden is expected to hit at least 32 gigawatt hours of production thanks, in part to backing by the Swedish pension fund firms AMF and Folksam and IKEA-linked IMAS Foundation, in addition to the big financial partners Volkswagen and Goldman Sachs.

Northvolt has had a busy few months. Earlier in March the company announced the acquisition of the Silicon Valley-based startup company Cuberg.

That acquisition gave Northvolt a foothold in the U.S. and established the company’s advanced technology center.

The acquisition also gives Northvolt a window into the newest battery chemistry that’s being touted as a savior for the industry — lithium metal batteries.