Author: azeeadmin

The team behind Songclip thinks that social media could use more music.

Yes, music is a big part of the experience on a handful of apps like TikTok and Triller, but Songclip co-founder and COO John vanSuchtelen told me, “That is not the end of how music is going to be a feature, that is a beginning.”

He added, “In the next nine to 12 months … just like you never have a phone without a camera, you’re not going to have an app without music clips as a feature when you make videos.”

That’s what vanSuchtelen and his co-founder and CEO Andy Blacker are hoping to enable with Songclip, which announced today that it has raised $11 million in new funding.

The startup has created an API that, when integrated with other apps (current integrations include photo- and video-editing app PicsArt), allows users to search for and share music. VanSuchtelen said that like Giphy, Songclip plans to popularize a new media format — the short audio clip — and make it accessible across a wide range of services.

“If I were to say, I’m going to send you a four-minute song,’ it’s just not going to work that way, that’s not how we communicate anymore,” vanSuchtelen said. “How do you take the music and turn it into the bite that you want to use in a social context?”

To do this, Blacker said Songclip doesn’t just license music, it also does its own tagging and clipping, while offering tools for music labels to protect their intellectual property and providing data on how people are interacting with the music. And unlike Giphy, Songclip isn’t looking to build a consumer brand.

All of this involves a combination of human editors and technology. Blacker said the human element is key to understand the nuances of songs and their association, like the fact that Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” isn’t really about bridges or water, or that Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine” is a happy song even though it doesn’t have the word “happy” in it.

Songclip has now raised a total of $23 million. The new round was led by Gregg Smith of Evolution VC Partners. The Kraft Group, Michael Rubin, Raised in Space, Gaingels and ​Forefront Venture Partners​ also participated, as did industry executives Jason Flom and Steve Greenberg and the band AJR.

Zego, the insurtech that got its start by offering flexible motorbike insurance for gig economy workers but has since expanded with a range of tech-enabled commercial motor insurance products, has raised $150 million.

Leading the London-based company’s C round — giving it a $1.1 billion valuation and a unicorn status — is DST Global. Other new backers include General Catalyst, whose founder and MD, Joel Cutler, joins Zego’s board.

Notably, I’m told all existing investors followed on, including Wise’s Taavet Hinrikus, who is also on the Zego board, and Target Global, Balderton Capital and Latitude. Zego has now raised more than $200 million since launching in 2016.

The insurance company says it will use the funding to “rapidly expand across Europe and beyond”. It will also double its workforce, which currently stands at 265 employees, to over 500 employees by the end of 2021, and continue to invest in technology. Late last year, Zeho acquired telematics company Drivit.

Zego offers commercial motor insurance for businesses, from self-employed drivers and riders to fleets of vehicles, spanning pay-as-you-go insurance to annual policies. It combines tech with multiple data sources to offer insurance products that it claims save time and are more cost-effective. It earned its own insurance license in 2019, enabling it to build and sell its own policies, in addition to working alongside other insurers.

Technical/data integrations include those with companies in the ride-hailing space, such as Uber, Ola and Bolt, and in the delivery space, such as Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat. More recently, Zego has become a key partner in the U.K.’s burgeoning e-scooter rental market, partnering with companies like Tier, Voi and Dott.

Next up, the insurtech is betting big on offering insurance for fleets. “Over the past couple of years, Zego’s focus on powering opportunities for businesses has expanded to include not just self-employed drivers and riders, but also entire fleets of vehicles,” Sten Saar, CEO and co-founder of Zego, tells me, noting that 80% of new vehicles are now sold to commercial customers.

“This has been both a natural progression for the company, with the only real difference being distribution, as well as a focused effort, as Zego aims to capitalise on an ever-growing market currently underserved by the insurance sector”.

To date, Zego has provided more than 17 million insurance policies and covered more than 200,000 vehicles in five countries.

“While most traditional insurers price their insurance products based purely on factors such as age and vehicle type, and while others may use telematics-based driver behaviour data too, Zego is able to price policies based not only on traditional factors, but also driver behaviour data and working habits data,” adds Saar.

“In fact, overall, the information Zego can collect amounts to five times more data per vehicle than competitors, or 50 data points per second. This means that we have a much more comprehensive understanding of risk than competitors, enabling us to provide best-value insurance coverage, from policies ranging from one hour to one year”.

Cue statement from Tom Stafford, managing partner of DST Global: “The shift to digital is occurring across multiple industry categories and is increasingly occurring in the insurance industry. We are excited to partner with Sten and the team at Zego as they leverage internet, technology, telematics and data-driven decisions to provide the best insurance products at the best pricing for their customers.”

Spain’s Jobandtalent, a digital temp staffing agency startup which operates a dual-sided platform that matches temps with employers needing casual labor in sectors like ecommerce, warehousing, logistics and manufacturing, has grabbed €100 million (~$120M) in Series D funding from SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2.

Previous investors — including Atomico, Seek, DN Capital, InfraVia, Quadrille, Kibo and FJ Labs — also participated in the round.

The new raise fast-follows a $108M top up to Jobandtalent’s Series C round, which we reported on back in January. In total, the company has raised a total of €310M (just under $370M) since being founded back in 2009.

Today Jobandtalent is also announcing a ~$100M (€83M) in debt financing from BlackRock.

The startup tells us the mix of debt and equity will help it step on the gas and accelerate growth of its marketplace faster than if it took in less capital at this point, as well as enabling it to plough more resource into its product and tech development.

On the tech side its platform uses learning algorithms to match temps with jobs — speeding the hiring process up. It also offers a CRM for employers which bakes in analytics for tracking workforce performance in real time — which it says can help them monitor workplace satisfaction, reduce attrition and track metrics such as absences and late arrivals.

For temps there’s the promise of steadier and easy to obtain shift work — as Jobandtalent streamlines job application admin and payroll into a one-stop shop, and it suggests its marketplace/workforce-as-a-service model can provide temps with continuous employment (i.e. through consecutive temp roles).

Its marketing also talks in terms of offering these workers a level of job security and benefits typically associated with full time employment — such as pensions, sick and holiday pay, health insurance (in some markets) and training courses.

With the new Series D funds in the bank Jobandtalent is preparing to enter the U.S. market “in the next year”, per co-CEO and co-founder, Juan Urdiales — expanding out from the eight markets it’s currently operating in (namely: Spain, the UK, Germany, France, Sweden, Mexico, Colombia, and Portugal).

He confirms it’s also now eyeing entering two more markets in Europe: Italy and the Netherlands.

“We are not yet seeing any competitor operating in the US at large scale and in multiple states in the verticals where we operate (e-commerce, logistics, etc). This is one of the reasons why we believe that we have a great opportunity there,” Urdiales tells TechCrunch.

“The U.S. can be a very difficult market to break into. However, we are starting to see more and more European companies going to the U.S. and being successful (Spotify, Klarna, Adyen, etc),” he adds.

“We believe that in our case, after having operated our model in Europe with high standards on labour rights and complex regulatory environments, we are in a great position to launch our platform in the US and offer a great value proposition to workers and employers there.”

Jobandtalent’s platform will offer temps equivalent perks and benefits in the U.S. as it offers elsewhere, per Urdiales.

“The perks and benefits offered into our marketplace meet the same principles everywhere, all of them aim to bring to the workers a similar status as a permanent worker, with the same type of benefits and perks,” he says, adding: “There are some adaptations in every country to do this, and it would be the same with the US.”

In the past year Jobandtalent says that more than 80,000 workers have used its marketplace to find temporary roles (its website says it has 10M+ registered users) — while more than 850 companies, including the likes of XPO, Ceva Logistics, eBay, Ocado, Sainsbury’s, Bayer and Santander, have used its platform to locate temp workers.

The startup’s revenue run rate has grown from €5M in 2016 to €500M in 2020 — which it says has resulted in a positive EBITDA. It also touts a growth rate of over 100% year on year.

Commenting in a statement, Yanni Pipilis, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, said: “Jobandtalent is addressing a crucial challenge facing the modern workforce — how to balance flexibility with high quality, reliable job opportunities. The company has developed a data-driven platform that has a track record of providing high fulfilment and low attrition staffing for businesses with temporary roles to fill, while securing income stability and benefits for workers. We are incredibly excited to partner with Juan, Felipe and the team on the next phase of the company’s growth.”

Asked about its decision to take funding from SoftBank for the Series D — and whether it was largely about the scale the investor could offer or whether Jobandtalent also sees potential synergies with other SoftBank portfolio companies (in sectors like logistics) — Urdiales also tells us: “We believe the Vision Fund team can add a lot of value to the company in this new stage of our growth as they have a lot of experience with companies of our size. We can learn a lot from the companies and management teams that they have invested in over the past few years. They have an entrepreneurial mindset and a clear vision on how technology and AI is going to disrupt many industries, and we share the same vision around our category.”

Beyond Meat shares soared today on the heels of an announcement that Walmart is beefing up its relationship with the purveyor of meatless protein patties, sausages, and balls.

900 stores will now be stocking Beyond Meat’s hot Italian sausages and its party packs of beefless burgers — those grilling delectations for the omnivores, vegetarians and vegans who no longer want to ask “Where’s the beef?”

Beyond Meat’s increased distribution at Walmart stores is the second jump in production over the past year and part of the company’s efforts to lock down the market for plant-based meat substitutes.

The company’s foods are now sold in over 28,000 stores, and it’s also pulling ahead in the food service industry, where it recently announced deals with Yum Brands and McDonalds.

Shares of the company’s stock ended the day up 3.16% or $4.28 as investors ate up the news.

“We are thrilled by the continued growth with Walmart and the opportunity to offer Walmart customers increased accessibility to a larger selection of our delicious and better-for-you plant-based products,” said Chuck Muth, Chief Growth Officer, Beyond Meat. “As more households continue to buy our products and buy them more frequently, we’re excited to satisfy the growing demand through increased product offerings and distribution.”

The partnership with Walmart, which dates back to 2015 is significant, but not nearly as attention grabbing as the company’s elaboration on recent agreements with McDonalds and Yum! Brands — the brains behind KFC and the two franchises that launched America’s greatest fast food hip hop anthem.

In late February, Beyond Meat opened up about its deals with Yum! Brands and McDonald’s that would see the company work to co-create plant-based protein menu items for KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell along with the famous golden arches fo McDonald’s.

That details of the agreement withYum! included the expansion of testing the company’s Beyond Fried Chicken in other U.S. cities with KFC. And the launch of the Beyond Italian Sausage Pizza and the Great Beyond Pizza nationwide, becoming the first national pizza chain to introduce a plant-based meat pizza coast-to-coast, the company’s said in a statement at the time.

The McDonald’s announcement fleshed out the meatless details of a partnership that was previously announced when the fast food giant unveiled its McPlant sandwich — a kind of face plant for Beyond given that it couldn’t confirm the details of the agreement at the time.

Now, other plant-based menu items — including options for chicken, pork, and egg products, have been unveiled as part of the broader McPlant platform, the companies said in February.

“Our new McPlant platform is all about giving customers more choices when they visit McDonald’s,” said Francesca DeBiase, McDonald’s Executive Vice President and Chief Supply Chain Officer, said at the time. “We’re excited to work with Beyond Meat to drive innovation in this space, and entering into this strategic agreement is an important step on our journey to bring delicious, high quality, plant-based menu items to our customers.”

It’s been a busy year for the branding geniuses at Beyond Meat, who also inked a deal with Pepsi to develop protein enhanced snacks and beverages under the tragically named PLANeT Partnership.

Dropbox acquires a secure document-sharing startup, Sonos announces a new speaker and Google makes hotel listings free. This is your Daily Crunch for March 9, 2021.

The big story: Dropbox acquires DocSend for $165M

Dropbox already acquired electronic signature company HelloSign in 2019. By acquiring DocSend — which allows customers to share and track documents using a secure link — it’s giving its platform an end-to-end, secure document-sharing workflow.

“We’re announcing that we’re acquiring DocSend to help us deliver an even broader set of tools for remote work, and DocSend helps customers securely manage and share their business-critical documents, backed by powerful engagement analytics,” said Dropbox CEO Drew Houston.

One thing the two companies have in common: Both of them launched, years apart, at TechCrunch events.

The tech giants

Sonos goes full portable Bluetooth speaker with the $169 Roam — The smaller, lighter, more ruggedized and waterproof design puts it more in line with popular offerings from companies like JBL.

After similar moves for Shopping and Flights, Google makes hotel listings free — This change should give users a more comprehensive look into hotel room availability.

French startup lobby targets Apple with ‘privacy hypocrisy’ complaint — Apple is facing another privacy complaint in Europe.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Wefarm adds $11M to expand its network for independent farmers, now at 2.5M users — The startup has built a social networking platform to help independent farmers meet each other, exchange ideas and sell or trade equipment and supplies.

Entertainment payroll startup Wrapbook raises $27M round led by a16z — The money comes from noteworthy names in both the tech and entertainment worlds.

Eye surgery robotics startup ForSight raises $10M — ForSight looks to bring its offerings to international markets, pending the sorts of regulatory approvals that go into launching a robotic surgery platform.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Four ways startups will drive GPT-3 adoption in 2021 — The introduction of GPT-3 in 2020 was a tipping point for artificial intelligence.

Global-e files to go public as e-commerce startups enjoy a renaissance — The company’s business exploded in 2020.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Memes for sale — We talk to Chris Torres, the Nyan Cat creator who has organized an informal collection of meme originators into a two-week-long auction of their works.

Backstage Capital’s Arlan Hamilton discusses how to find the next unicorn — Hamilton joined us at TC: Sessions Justice to chat about how she vets founders, the changing role of venture capital and how raising money from the community versus institutional LPs can impact Backstage strategy.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Trufan, a startup selling tools helping marketers analyze their social followings and collect audience data, announced today that it has raised a $2.3 million seed round.

Despite raising a relatively small amount of funding ($4.1 million total), Trufan has already made two notable acquisitions. First, it acquired the SocialRank product and business in 2019, allowing to offer capabilities like showing brands their most valuable social media followers. Then last year, it acquired Playr.gg, which marketers use to run giveaways that consumers enter by providing information such as their email addresses.

Across its products, Trufan says it has more than 10,000 free users and more than 600 paying customers, including Netflix, NBA, NFL, Sony Music and United Talent Agency.

Next up, the startup plans to integrate the two main products and launch a consolidated, privacy-compliant customer data and audience engagement platform with new branding and pricing. Co-founder and CEO Swish Goswami told me that the platform should be particularly attractive as regulators introduce new privacy regulations, Apple and Google add new restrictions to ad targeting based on third-party data and as consumers become more sensitive to how their data is used.

Trufan founders Aanikh Kler and Swish Goswami

“People do not want to be tracked anonymously,” Goswami said. “People do not want their data taken away, but most of those people are attracted to the idea of data sharing if they get something in exchange.”

He added that it’s particularly important for brands to build up first-party customer data given the limitations of social networks: “You can have 50 million followers, but every time you post you don’t reach 50 million people.” If you’ve got 50 million email or phone numbers, on the other hand, you might actually reach most of those inboxes or phones.

The new funding comes from Moneta Ventures, with Moneta Partner Sabya Das joining Trufan’s board of directors. GP Ventures, Protocol Ventures and Athlete Technology Group also participated, as did angel investors including Innovative Fitness founder Curtis Christophsen, Utah Jazz forward Derrick Favors and Chicago Bulls forward Thaddeus Young.

“Trufan is miles ahead in recognizing and removing roadblocks in the customer data space,” Das said in a statement. “We are excited to be backing them because they truly are all-star founders with an incredible team alongside them, and we believe in their conviction and ability to solve the first-party data problem.” 

In 2008, I was moving to London as the global financial crisis slammed the brakes on growth for millions of businesses.

Five years earlier, I had been sent to Dublin from headquarters in Mountain View to help manage Google’s European expansion, and despite our incredible growth, the macroeconomic situation put us in an immediate defensive posture and led us to throttle back our ambitious plans.

Nearly one year ago, faced with the uncertainty of a global pandemic, companies across the world again moved into triage mode. Employees were laid off, budgets were slashed and growth opportunities were pushed down the priority list.

However, as we enter the spring of 2021, the world is a dramatically different place. Tech stocks are stronger than ever amid record-setting IPOs, vaccines are here and revenue growth is again a top priority for B2B SaaS startups.

There are ultimately three ways to drive growth in a technology startup: extend your product offering, move into new segments or expand into new markets. Developing new products or moving into new segments may seem like a more comfortable path, but scaling a high-performing business into new markets represents massive financial upside, particularly when well-executed.

Look at some of the top-performing SaaS businesses of the past few years — 31% of Zoom’s revenue comes from outside the U.S. International revenue is 38% for Slack, 39% for Asana and 48% for Dropbox. If your company survived the past year, now is the time to shift from defense to offense and prioritize international expansion.

Your best growth lever is Europe

At $27.5 trillion, EMEA represents 38% of the world’s GDP and is the largest addressable market outside of America. Europe is the world’s second-largest B2B software market, and for more than two decades has been the location of choice when U.S. companies look beyond their own borders. With the democratization of software distribution, it’s now common for companies to discover 10-12% of their business comes from Europe organically.

By IPO, however, these same companies average 30% of their revenue from Europe. What changes, and how do you capitalize on this massive growth opportunity in a cost-effective way? High-performing companies are making the investment today and prioritizing European expansion despite the lingering challenges of the past year.

For example, Figma, one of the most exciting companies of the past several years, announced its new EMEA headquarters in September. *Clearbanc expanded into Europe in Q4 and will be investing £500m into UK startups over the next year. Nearly all growth-stage CEOs made the decision to postpone international expansion plans over the past 12 months, and for many, “testing remotely” has been an effective tactic — but it’s only a temporary solution.

The best CEOs are globally ambitious, and they know that unlocking Europe’s growth potential remains a critical step on the road to IPO.

Expand the moment you’re ready

After months of focusing on survival, it’s not always easy to recognize the right time to invest in growth. However, the key indicators that the time is right to expand into Europe are easy to identify.

First, your customer and revenue growth have stabilized and are accelerating again.

Passion Capital, one of the UK’s first early-stage VCs, is to crowd-fund the final stage of its latest £45 million fund ($62.5m), Passion Capital Fund III. TechCrunch understands this is the first time retail investors have been invited to become LPs in a VC fund, at least in Europe.

Passion says it will use the Seedrs platform, which is normally used by startups themselves for crowd-equity funding campaigns. The move is a highly unusual one for a VC, where LPs are normally drawn from Pension funds and family offices, rather than the ‘person on the street’.

Seedrs was previously used by the Seedcamp venture accelerator in the UK to allow its founders to participate in a fund-raise, but this was allocated privately. What’s different about Passion’s move is that almost anyone will be able to become an LP in their new fund, albeit even a very small one.

A £350,000 allocation will be made available to the public. The offer may well prove tantalizing to retail investors as their single investment would be applied across a range of startups rather than through the direct single company investment traditionally made via Seedrs.

Any investors who self-certifies as ‘high net worth’ or ‘sophisticated’ will be able to invest in the fund. Passion Capital’s portfolio of 81 tech investments is worth an estimated £3 billion and includes Monzo, GoCardless, Butternut Box, Adzuna, and Marshmallow. 

Passion says it has already made 11 new investments from Fund III, which investors via the Seedrs platform will automatically become a part of, with a further 15-20 new investments planned.

Eileen Burbidge, Passion Capital partner said in a statement: “Investment into a private venture fund is usually reserved for institutions. We are throwing our doors open to a much wider range of investors in this unique collaboration with Seedrs as we look to diversify our investor base and increase access for investors who might be interested in partnering with us.”

Jeff Kelisky, CEO at Seedrs, added: “This is a very innovative collaboration for both the venture capital and the equity crowdfunding space… It presents our community with another avenue to participate in SME equity finance that delivers additional investment opportunities and the potential for exceptional returns, beyond the direct investment campaigns we also run.”

Speaking to me in an interview, Burbidge added: “We’d been seeing what’s been happening in the States, with Angellist Rolling Funds and then the SEC expanding the definition of qualified investors, and, basically, this democratization of retail investors finally getting access to venture funds and to GPs. It’s kind’ve breaking down these age-old dynamics of where institutional investors pick and choose these age-old fund managers, and the whole notion that venture has been this elite, inaccessible asset class for retail investors.”

Burbidge said she talked to Angellist about doing something similar in Europe and realized it wasn’t legally possible right now, so she asked Seedrs, who confirmed they could do it.

“We closed the fund first in August 2019, it was 25 million, then August 2020 with another 20, so 45 million, which is the same size as our second fund. And during the pandemic.” But, she says, after dealing with their LPs, they eventually found they had a £350,000 allocation left over, so this became the germination of the crowdfunding idea.

“I thought, we’ve got 350,000 left, why don’t we crowd-fund it. This whole movement of letting retail investors get access to venture funds and invest – to get that exposure to a whole portfolio- I just think is a really good thing. I think it’s great for everyone involved. Obviously, as long as they’re educated and they know that capital is at risk and it’s not pensioners putting their last savings in, and those usual kinds of warnings about crowdfunding. But I love the idea of people getting exposure to tech, and not having to do £150,000 as a minimum check.”

Although Burbidge declined to comment further on the subject, there is of course the implication that this allocation could be increased, if the crowd-funding takes off.

She added: “There’s not a retail investor in the world who wouldn’t want access to the latest Sequoia fund, or the Accel fund right or Andreessen Horowitz funds… we think it’s great to give retail investors exposure to a portfolio. I think it’d be great if more funds did it.”

Burbidge believes actions like Passion’s will “increase the diversity of the LP base. It increases inclusion and gives people more access. It just creates more participation and breaks down the old barriers. We’ll have the Seedrs platform for Q and A’s. It is going to be up to us how much we want to engage with that community, the same as Monzo does with its crowdfunded investors. Monzo holds a public event every year for all of its crowdfund investors. I would love to do an event… it’d be great to meet people who have invested in this fashion.”

The proliferation of fintech services across Africa remains in full swing as investors remain bullish about the opportunities that abound in the sector. Today we behold another unicorn: African payments company Flutterwave announced that it has closed $170 million, valuing the company over $1 billion.

New York-based private investment firm Avenir Growth Capital and US hedge fund and investment firm Tiger Global led the Series C round. New and existing investors who participated include DST Global, Early Capital Berrywood, Green Visor Capital, Greycroft Capital, Insight Ventures, PayPal, Salesforce Ventures, Tiger Management, WorldpayFIS 9yards Capital. 

The Series C round comes a year after Flutterwave closed its $35 million Series B and $20 million Series A in 2018. In total, Flutterwave has raised $225 million and is one of the few African startups to have secured more than $200 million in funding. 

Launched in 2016 as a Nigerian and U.S.-based payments company with offices in Lagos and San Francisco, Flutterwave helps businesses build customizable payments applications through its APIs.

When the company raised its Series B, we reported that Flutterwave had processed 107 million transactions worth $5.4 billion. Right now, those numbers have increased to over 140 million transactions worth over $9 billion. The company, which also helps businesses outside Africa to expand their operations on the continent, has an impressive clientele of international companies. Some of them include Booking.com, Facebook, Flywire, and Uber.

Flutterwave says over 290,000 businesses use its platform to carry out payments. And according to the company’s statement, they can do so “in 150 currencies and multiple payment modes including local and international cards, mobile wallets, bank transfers, Barter by Flutterwave.”

While its website shows an active presence in 11 African countries, Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola, also known as GB, told TechCrunch the company is live in 20 African countries with an infrastructure reach in over 33 countries on the continent.

Last year was a pivotal one for the five-year-old company. Its second investment came just in time before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Africa, negatively impacting some businesses but not payments companies like Flutterwave.

Agboola says his company grew more than 100% in revenue within the past year due to the pandemic without giving specifics on numbers. It also contributed to its compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 226% from 2018.  

According to the CEO, this growth resulted from an increase in activities in “COVID beneficiary sectors”  — a term used by Flutterwave to describe sectors positively impacted by the pandemic. They include streaming, gaming, remittance, e-commerce, among others. Agboola adds that the company plans to ride on these sectors’ growth and continue in that trajectory.

Besides, Flutterwave’s response in introducing the Flutterwave Store for merchants during pandemic-induced lockdowns was instrumental as well. The product, which went live across 15 African countries, helps over 20,000 merchants to create storefronts and sell their products online.

Image Credits: Flutterwave

Flutterwave wants to become a global payments company, and the Series C investment helps to reach that goal. The company says it plans to use the funds to speed up customer acquisition in its present markets. It will also improve existing product offerings like Barter, where it has over 500,000 users, and introduce new offerings. One such is Flutterwave Mobile, which in the founder’s words “will turn merchants’ mobile devices into a point of sale, allowing them to accept payments and make sales.”

In a statement, Agboola gives credit to the company’s more than 300 staff, investors, customers, and regulatory bodies like the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) for creating the backbone for Flutterwave’s success.

For some, it would come off as strange that the CEO mentioned the last stakeholder given the unfavourable and questionable regulations it has recently placed on fintechs in Nigeria.

However, Agboola thinks the reverse is the case. He makes a bold statement by saying that under the current CBN governor’s current administration, the Central Bank has shown a consistent regulatory framework that has allowed fintechs like Flutterwave to thrive.

“Flutterwave, for instance, launched when the governor just came in. We got our license and scaled our business because of a favourable regime that allowed it to be possible. There are so many trailblazing innovations that we don’t talk about a lot about Nigeria, like the BVN and the NIP system. Nigeria has consistently been at the forefront of payments innovation for over a decade, and all it was possible because of the forward-looking CBN policies,” he said.

On exits, acquisitions, and the billion-dollar club

One fintech company that has unquestionably championed payments in this timeframe is Interswitch. The payments giant is currently worth $1 billion after Visa acquired a 20% stake in 2019 and Flutterwave joins the company as the only fintechs in Nigeria to have reached that valuation. This number increases to four in Africa when including publicly traded African e-commerce company, Jumia and Egyptian payments company Fawry.

Flutterwave’s $170 million mammoth raise and its billion-dollar valuation represent a landmark achievement for the African startup scene. While the aforementioned companies’ valuations can’t be disputed, there are question marks on whether some are startups or others, African companies.

Interswitch, for instance, was founded in 2002, which doesn’t necessarily make it a startup despite still being private. Fawry was launched in 2007 but didn’t become a billion-dollar company until 2020, a year after going public. Jumia, albeit public, reached unicorn status as a private company in 2016; however, there are varying consensus if it is an African company or not.

Unlike the others, Flutterwave checks all the boxes of what a billion-dollar African startup should ideally look like — founded by Africans in Africa while reaching a $1 billion valuation in fewer than 10 years.

Most stakeholders in Africa’s tech ecosystem knew this would happen, but the timing expected was later rather than sooner. After raising $35 million in a Series B in 2020, who would have thought Flutterwave was going to raise almost five times that amount the following round and be valued at more than $1 billion the next year? Maybe just a few.

Well, these numbers rarely matter to Agboola, as I ask him what he thinks of Flutterwave’s new growth metric. “I’ll say valuation is both art and science. At some point, we were also the most valuable African company at YC, but it’s not really a metric we’re focused on at Flutterwave because they move up and down,” he smiles. “Our key metrics have always been revenue, customer growth and retention.”

Aptly said, but as the company continues to grow, questions around profitability and exit will become more frequent.

Paystack, another Nigerian payments company that is often compared to Flutterwave got acquired by Stripe for more than $200 million last year. At the time, there were also rumours of Flutterwave taking the same route, but this Series C raise suggests that the company is not looking to exit at the moment. However, if the YC-backed company indeed does, it might be through an IPO.

“Like every other startup, we’re thinking about ways to create exit tools for our investors. So, a listing is very much in our plans, but for now, we’re focused on giving the best value to our customers,” Agboola said. 

In the course of the company’s journey to this point, it has remained big on partnerships. In 2019, Flutterwave partnered with Visa to launch Barter and Alipay to offer digital payments between Africa and China. Then last year, the company announced a partnership with Worldpay FIS for payments in Africa.

Although Flutterwave has done this with bigger establishments, Agboola says the company will be looking to do the same with smaller companies, opening the doors to potential acquisitions.

“We believe in payments in partnership as you have to partner to scale. So, if in the course of making partnerships and scaling and we identify promising companies with a similar ethos and have our vision in mind, that is in making Africa a country, an acquisition isn’t off the table,” he said.

After capturing much of Sub-Saharan Africa, Agboola says Flutterwave’s next plan is to go live in North Africa. There, it will likely face competition from a local leader, Fawry, but that doesn’t matter. The African fintech market is large enough to accommodate multiple players.

That’s one reason why it has also been a popular bet with investors. The sector, which is both local and international investors’ top destination, attracted between 25% to 31% of the total VC funding last year from varying sources.

But from the information on their websites, this is the first time Flutterwave’s lead investors —  Avenir Growth Capital and Tiger Global — are backing an African fintech startup. For the former, Flutterwave represents the first African startup in its portfolio, but Tiger Global is known to have invested in Nigerian media company iROKOtv and South African e-commerce company, Takealot.

Via their partners — Jamie Reynolds of Avenir Growth Capital and Scott Shleifer of Tiger Global, both firms said they’re backing Flutterwave on its quest to build a global and world-class payments company.

Looking into the future, Agboola insists that the company’s focus remains to support its 290,000 merchants and help them build global businesses.

“We look forward to increasing our investments across the continent and deepening the impact our platform has on lives and livelihoods as we take more businesses in Africa to the world, and at the same time continue to bring more of the world to Africa,” he said.

Along with a more spacious cockpit, more storage and some upgraded cupholders, Audi has packed in some serious new tech into its upcoming all-electric Q4 e-tron compact crossover, including an augmented reality heads-up display (HUD) that’s reactive enough to accurately stick to a driver’s real environment. 

Audi revealed Tuesday the interior of the Q4 e-tron, the fifth electric vehicle in its lineup and part of the German automaker’s plan to launch more than 30 EVs and plug-in hybrids by 2025. The Q4 e-tron has been expected for some time; it was first revealed as a concept at the 2019 Geneva International Motor Show.

The exterior of the production version of the Q4 is still camouflaged, but we know its dimensions. The takeaway: an electric vehicle that fits in the larger compact SUV segment with a short overhang and wheelbase of 9.1 feet — a combination that gives it a rather stout look. However, that allows for an interior of 6 feet in length, the kind of space found in a large full-size class SUV.

The underlying architecture of the vehicle is based on its parent company VW’s modular electric drive toolkit chassis, or MEB platform. This flexible modular system, first introduced by VW in 2016, was developed to make it more efficient and cost-effective to produce a variety of EVs. It has also given designers more room to play with thanks to the flat floor. And they took advantage of that space, popping in center console with two cup holders, a 4.4-liter stowage compartment with a cover, two (or four as an option) USB-C sockets, and the Audi phone box (which charges wireless and boosts your phone’s signal) upon request.

Head-up-Display

The real story here is the tech – and most notably an option to add an AR-enabled windshield. The AR windshield provides a wider field of view, and more accurate and dynamic animations vs. a standard windshield HUD. The Q4 e-tron will break down important displayed information via two sections: one for status, and one for AR. The former, appearing about 3 meters ahead of the driver, will display the driving speed, traffic signs, the assist system and navigation symbols as static displays. 

With the AR section, the driver will perceive the floating symbols to be about 10 meters away. That’ll display information like lane departure warnings that superimpose a red line on the real-life lane marking, and a colored stripe over an active car driving in front when in adaptive cruise control.

“Heads up displays aren’t new,” states Audi. “This just takes the field of vision farther out so it enables more active use.”

The AR will also display navigation information. Audi calls the turning arrows “drones,” probably because the arrows fly ahead when driving straight and then disappear, reappearing before the next point of action. When the driver approaches an intersection, the drone announces the turn before steering the driver onto the road with precision.

Head-up-Display

On the software side of things, the Q4 e-tron’s processing unit, called the AR Creator, picks up raw data from the car’s front camera, radar sensor and GPS navigation to render display symbols at a rate of 60 frames per second and adapt them to the surrounding environment. The quality of these displays, shown via a bit of advanced smoke and mirrors on what Audi calls the EV’s ‘picture generation unit (PGU)’ – basically, a lot of mirrors – will obviously be key to how well it works in real life. With only simulations to show for it currently, it’s not clear how well Audi will pull this off. A wider frame with dynamic symbols must deliver on its promise to show up “just as clearly as their real-life environment” otherwise they’ll become a hindrance to the driver, and if they don’t pull off the depth effect exactly, they could even cause driver discomfort.

The Q4 e-tron also features updated natural-language voice control, activated by saying “Hey Audi.” The new car will also ditch physical buttons on the steering wheel in favor of touch-sensitive ones, but with a haptic feedback loop, it’ll still feel somewhat like you’re pressing a button. 

About 3% of the company’s sales in 2020, or 47,000 vehicles, were the electric e-tron SUV and the e-tron Sportback, a number that will surely increase as the company continues to roll out luxury EVs.