Author: azeeadmin

The murder of George Floyd last May ignited many things in the United States last year — one of which that was perhaps unexpected: a rise in the number of digital banks targeting the Black community.

Some members of the Black community took their belief that big banks are not meeting their needs and turned them into startup concepts.

One of those startups, First Boulevard (formerly called Theme), has just raised $5 million in seed funding from Barclays, Anthemis and a group of angel investors such as actress Gabrielle Union, Union Square Ventures John Buttrick and AutoZone CFO Jamere Jackson.

For co-founder and CEO Donald Hawkins, the genesis for the Overland, Kansas-bank came after Floyd’s murder, when he and friend Asya Bradley were talking about what they felt Black America “really needed to get out of a vicious cycle” of dealing with the same issues with no real solutions in sight.

“After viewing yet another tragedy engulf the Black community, and the all-too-familiar protests against persisting issues,” Hawkins said. “it was beyond clear to me that the solutions Black America needs must be financially-focused and developed within our community.”

The pair both had fintech experience. Hawkins had founded Griffin Technologies, a company focused on providing real-time, contextual intelligence to community banks and credit unions. And Bradley most recently was a founding team member and head of revenue at Synapse, a platform that built banking-as-a-service APIs to help bank the unbanked of America by connecting fintech platforms to banking institutions.

They discovered that there were only about 19 Black banks in the U.S., collectively holding about $5 billion in assets.

“And their technology was really behind the times,” Hawkins said. “We also took a hard look at some of the existing digital banks to really see who was really going about it  in the same way that we felt like America needed, and it was pretty clear at that point, that no one was really attacking the issue of helping Black America build some level of financial stability through the form of wealth-building play.”

The pair formed First Boulevard last August under the premise that Black Americans are “massively underserved consumers” of financial products and services despite having a collective spending power of $1.4 trillion annually. The startup’s mission is to empower Black Americans “ to take control of their finances, build wealth and reinvest in the Black economy” via a digitally-native platform.

Part of its goal with the new capital involves building out a Black business marketplace, which will give its members Cash Back for Buying Black. It also plans to use the money to expand its team, increase its customer base and grow its platform to offer fee-free debit cards, financial education and on developing technology to help members automate their saving and wealth building goals.

“History has proven that oppressed communities can succeed when their finances are centralized, and when it comes to financial services for the Black community, a centralizing force is long overdue,” Hawkins said.

The bank’s Cash Back for Buying Black program helps members earn up to 15% cashback when they spend money at black-owned businesses. 

“I believe the most recent stat but that also was that 41% of black owned businesses have closed since COVID-19 started,” Hawkins said. “We want to support them as much as we can.”

First Boulevard also is focused on passively building wealth for its communities.

“Black America as a whole has been blocked from learning how money works. We want to connect our members to wealth-building assets such as micro investments like money market accounts, high yield savings and cryptocurrency — things that Black America has largely been blocked from,” Hawkins said.

Bradley, who serves as First Boulevard’s COO, believes the current financial industry was not built to serve the needs of melanated people. Its goal is to take their understanding of the unique needs of the Black community to provide things such as early access to wages, round up savings features, targeted financial education and budgeting tools.

The pair aims to have a “fully inclusive” team that represents the community it’s trying to serve. Currently, its 20-person staff is 60% black, and 85% BIPOC. Two-thirds of its leadership team are women and 100% is BIPOC.

“We are very proud of that considering that in the fintech space, those are not normal numbers from a leadership perspective,” Bradley said.

For Katie Palencsar, an investor at the Female Innovators Lab by Barclays and Anthemis, said that her firm has always recognized “that access to financial services has long remained a challenge despite the digital evolution.”

“This is especially true for Black Americans who often reside in financial deserts and struggle to find platforms that truly look to serve them,” she said. “First Boulevard deeply understands the challenge.”

Palencsar believes that First Boulevard’s mission of helping Black Americans not just bank, but actually build wealth, is unique in the market.

“First Boulevard sees the wealth gap that continues to grow within the U.S. and wants to build a digital banking platform that addresses the systemic and structural challenges that face this population while enabling Black Americans and allies to invest in the community,” she said.

The company also recently announced a partnership with Visa, under which First Boulevard will be first to pilot Visa’s new suite of crypto APIs. First Boulevard will also launch a First Boulevard Visa Debit card.

First Boulevard is one of several digital banks geared toward Black Americans that have emerged in recent months. Paybby, a digital bank for the black and brown communities, recently acquired Wicket, a neobank that uses AI and biometric technology to create a personalized experience for users. Hassan Miah, the CEO and founder of Paybby, said the bank’s goal is to be “the leading smart, digital bank for the Black and Brown communities.”

Paybby, which started by offering a bank account and a way to expedite PPP loans, will soon be adding a cryptocurrency savings account for the Black and Brown communities.   

“Black buying power is projected to grow to $1.8 trillion by 2024,” Miah said. “Brown buying power is over $2 trillion. Paybby wants to take a good portion of this multi-trillion dollar market and give it back to these communities.”

Last October, Greenwood raised $3 million in seed funding from private investors to build what it describes as “the first digital banking platform for Black and Latinx people and business owners.”

At the time, co-founder Ryan Glover, founder of Bounce TV network, said it was “no secret that traditional banks have failed the Black and Latinx community.”

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

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. Before we get into this week’s show, make sure to check out all the news here about how Equity is expanding, and becoming even more of a thing in 2021! We are beyond hyped about it.

Coming on the back of such a wild news week, we had to cut and cut from the notes doc to get the show to size. So, here’s what made the cut:

• Coinbase filed to go public. Alex wrote about its S-1 filing here, and Danny riffed on a fascinating nuance regarding its cap table here.
• Hopin is raising more money, at an even larger valuation. Every time we cover the latest version of this story, we think it must be the last time. And then it happens again. So, check back here in October for when Hopin raises again.
• Reddit also picked up more money. Again. Our take is that the capital must mean that Reddit is a better business than we anticipated.
• Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian backed a new community tool proving the monetary value of the community. That led us into a conversation about a professional network for independent workers that is competing with LinkedIn, and a collaborative workspace for interior design fans. 
• Toast is said to be on the road to an IPO, and so we riffed on what Olo’s IPO can tell us about the Boston-based unicorn.
• Shippo raised more money after a big 2020; can the company double again in 2021?
• Finix raised $3 million through an SPV filled with over 80 Black and LatinX investors. 

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!

Wondering how to nail that virtual pitch meeting and raise VC funding? Or how to build a high-octane sales team? What about recruiting early team members that will fuel future growth? Managing the finances of a new company while also wondering about your own personal finances as a founder? Legal? Marketing? PR? Being a great leader?

The answer to every single one of these questions, and many more, will be at TechCrunch’s Early Stage events.

The event series takes place across two dates: April 1 – 2 and July 8 – 9.

Unlike other TechCrunch events, there is no ‘main stage.’ Each session is designed to tackle one of the many core competencies any startup needs to be successful. But this isn’t just about listening — every session includes plenty of time built in for audience Q&A. Essentially, it’s all breakout sessions, all day.

Our incredible speakers, who range from Zoom CRO Ryan Azus (‘How to build a sales team’) to Calendly founder Tope Awotona (‘How to bootstrap’) to Kleiner Perkins’ Bucky Moore (‘How to prep for Series A fundraising’), are making themselves available to answer your burning questions, on just about any topic.

What’s more — everyone who buys a ticket to TC Early Stage gets free access to Extra Crunch! Folks who buy a ticket to one of the two events get three months free, and folks who purchase a combination ticket (to both events) get six months free! An Extra Crunch membership includes:

• Weekly investor surveys
• Fundraising, growth, monetization, and workforce advice from startup experts
• Market analysis
• Late-deep dives
• Access to weekly Extra Crunch Live events
• EC Perks Program (save big $$$ on services and products you already use)
• The TechCrunch List

Of course, TC Early Stage dual event ticket holders will get access to both events (April 1 – 2 and July 8 – 9) and have access to all the content that comes out of the event on demand.

Mercenary CEOs know all too well that this is about the most bang you can get for your buck. Period.

Still on the fence? Take a look at a preview of some of the sessions at TC Early Stage 2021:

Fundraising

• Bootstrapping Best Practices (Tope Awotona and Blake Bartlett, Calendly)
• Four Things to Think About Before Raising a Series A (Bucky Moore, Kleiner Perkins)
• How to Get An Investor’s Attention (Marlon Nichols, MaC Venture Capital)
• How to Nail Your Virtual Pitch Meeting (Melissa Bradley, Ureeka)
• How Founders Can Think Like a VC (Lisa Wu, Norwest Venture Partners)
• The All-22 View, or Never Losing Perspective (Eghosa Omoigui, EchoVC Partners)

Operations:

• Finance for Founders (Alexa von Tobel, Inspired Capital)
• Building and Leading a Sales Team (Ryan Azus, Zoom CRO)
• 10 Things NOT to Do When Starting a Company (Leah Solivan, Fuel Capital)
• Leadership Culture and Good Governance (David Easton, Generation Investment Management)

Marketing:

• Keys to Nailing Product Market Fit (Rahul Vohra, Superhuman)
• How to Build Your Early Team for Future Growth (Sarah Smith, Bain Capital Ventures)
• How to Get Into an Accelerator (Neal Sales-Griffin, TechStars)
• Finding Your Product Market Fit (Sean Lane, OliveAI)
• How To Use Coaches To Your Advantage (Ted Wang, Cowboy VC)

A little less than three years ago at the Computer Science Museum in Mountain View, Calif. the founders of a young company hailing from Cambridge, England addressed a crowd of celebrities, investors and entrepreneurs at Y Combinator’s August Demo Day promising a revolution in food science.

Over the years, the event has become a relatively low-tech, low-budget showcase for a group of tech investors and billionaire industry insiders to take a look at early stage businesses that could be their next billion-dollar opportunity.

Sharing the stage with other innovation-minded budding entrepreneurs the Cambridge scientists boasted of a technology could produce a sweetener that would mimic not just the taste of sugar, but the caramelization and stickiness that makes sugar the go-to additive for the bulk of roughly 74% of packaged foods that are made with some form of sweetener. Their company, Cambridge Glycoscience  could claim a huge slice of a market worth at least a $100 billion market, they said.

Now, the company has a new name, Supplant, and $24 million in venture capital financing to start commercializing its low-cost sugar substitute made from the waste materials of other plants.

 

The bitter history of the sweetest ingredient

Sugar came into the human diet roughly 10,000 years ago as sugarcane, which is native to New Guinea and parts of Taiwan and China. Over the next 2,000 years the crop spread from those regions to Madagascar and eventually took root in India, where it was first refined in about 500 BC.

From there, the sweetener spread across the known world. By the first century AD Greek and Roman scholars were referencing its medicinal properties and, after the Crusades, sugar consumption traveled across Europe through the Middle Ages.

It was a welcome replacement from Europe’s mainstay, honey, and the early artificial sweeteners used by the Romans, which contained near-lethal doses of lead.

The cold climates of Northern Europe proved mostly inhospitable to sugarcane cultivation so the root took root in the more temperate South and the islands off of Europe’s southern coast.

Those regions also became home to the first European experiments with agricultural slavery — a byproduct of the sugar trade, and one that would plant the seeds for the international exploitation of indigenous American and African labor for centuries as the industrial growth of sugar production spread to the New World.

First, European indentured servants and enslaved indigenous people’s powered the production of sugar in the Americas. But as native populations died off due to the introduction of European diseases, genocidal attacks, and back-breaking labor, African slaves were brought to the new colonies to work the fields and mills to make refined sugar.

Sugar hangover

The horrors of slavery may be the most damning legacy of industrial sugar, but it’s far from the only problem caused by the human craving for sweeteners.

As climate change becomes more of a threat, fears of increasing deforestation to meet the world’s demand — or to provide cover for other industrialization of virgin forests — have arisen thanks to new policies in Brazil.

“Conventional cane sugar is heavily heavily water intensive,” said Supplant co-founder Tom Simmons in an interview. That’s another problem for the environment as water becomes the next resource to be stressed by the currents of climate change. And species extinction presents another huge problem too.

“The WWF number one source for biodiversity lost globally is cane sugar plantations,” Simmons said. “Sugar is a massive consumer of water and in contrast, there’s big sustainability pitch for what we do.. the raw materials are products of the current agricultural industry.”

And the quest for sugar substitutes in the U.S. has come with related health costs as high fructose corn syrup has made its way into tons of American products. Invented in 1957, corn syrup is one of the most common sweeteners used to replace sugar — and one that’s thought to have incredibly disastrous effects on the health of consumers worldwide.

The use of corn syrup has been linked to an increasing prevalence of diabetes, obesity, and fatty liver disease, in the world’s population.

Looking For A Healthier Substitute

As Supplant and its investors look to take the crown as the reigning replacement for sugar, they join a long line of would-be occupants to sugar’s throne.

The first viable, non-toxic chemically derived sugar substitute was discovered in the late 18th century by a German chemist. Called saccharine it was popularized initially during sugar shortages caused by the first World War and gained traction during the health crazes of the sixties and seventies.

Saccharin, still available in pink Sweet n’ Low packets and a host of products, was succeeded by aspartame (known commercially as Equal and present as the sugar substitute in beverages like Diet Coke), which was supplanted by sucralose (known as Splenda).

These chemically derived sweeteners have been the standard on the market for decades now, but with a growing push for natural — rather than chemical — substitutes for sugar and their failures to act as a replacement for all of the things that sugar can do as a food ingredient, the demand for a better sugar has never been higher.

Supplanting the competition 

“Not everything that we back is going to change the world. This, at scale, does that.” said Aydin Senkut, the founder and managing partner of Felicis Ventures, the venture firm that’s one of Supplant’s biggest backers. 

Part of what convinced Senkut is the fact that Supplant’s sweetener has already received preliminary approvals in the European Union by the region’s regulatory equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration. That approval not only covers the sale of Supplant’s product as a sweetener, but also as a probiotic with tangible health benefits he said.

So not only is the Supplant product arguably a better and more direct sugar replacement, as the founders claim, it also has health benefits through providing increased fiber in consumers who use it regularly, Senkut said.

“The European FDA is even stricter than the U.S. FDA,” Senkut said. “[And] they got pre-approval for this.”

Senkut and Felicis invested in Cambridge Glycosciences almost immediately after seeing the company’s presentation at Y Combinator.

“We became the largest investors at seed,” Senkut said.

Its selling points were the products extremely low glycemic index and its ability to be manufactured from waste plant fibers, which means that it ultimately can be produced at a lower cost, according to Senkut.

What’s the difference? 

Supplant differs from its competition in a number of other key ways, according to company co-founder Tom Simmons.

While companies like the Israeli startup DouxMatok or Colorado’s MycoTechnology and Wisconsin’s Sensient work on developing additives from fungus or tree roots or bark that can enhance the sweetness of sugars, Supplant uses alternative sugars to create its sweetener, Simmons said. 

“The core difference is they’re working with cane sugar,” according to Simmons. “Our pitch is we make sugars from fiber so you don’t need to use cane sugar.”

Simmons said that these other startups have been approaching the problem from the wrong direction. “The problem that their technology addresses isn’t the problem the industry has,” Simmons said. “It’s about texture, bulking, caramelization and crystallization… We have a technology that’s going to give you the same sweetness gram for gram.”

There are six different types of calorific sugar, Simmons explained. There’s lactose, which is the sugar in milk; sucrose, which comes from sugarcane and sugar beets; maltose, found in grains like wheat and barley; fructose, the sugar in fruits and honey; glucose, which is in nearly everything, but especially carbohydrate-laden vegetables, fruits, and grains; and galactose, a simple sugar that derives from the breakdown of lactose.

Simmons said that his company’s sugar substitute isn’t based on one compound, but is derived from a range of things that come from fiber. The use of fibers means that the body recognizes the compounds as fibrous and treats them the same way in the digestive tract, but the products taste and act like sugar in food, he said. “Fiber derived sugars are in the category of sugars, but are not the calorific sugars,” said Simmons.

Trust the process? 

Supplant’s technology uses enzymes to break down and fragment various fibers. “As you start breaking it down, it starts looking molecularly like sucrose — like cane sugar — so it starts behaving in a similar way,” said Simmons.

This is all the result of years of research that Simmons began at Cambridge University, he said. “I arrived at Cambridge intending to be a professor. I did not arrive in Cambridge intending to start a business. I was interested in doing science, making inventions and stuff that would reach the wider world. I always imagined the right way for me to do that was to be a professor.”

In time, after receiving his doctorate and beginning his post-doctoral work into the research that would eventually turn into Supplant, Simmons realized that he had to start a company. “To try and do something impactful I was going to have leave the university,” he said. 

In some ways, Supplant operates at the intersection of all of Simmons’ interests in health, nutrition, and sustainability. And he said the company has plans to apply the processing technology across a range of consumer products eventually, but for now the company remains focused on the $100 billion sugar substitute market.

“There’s a handful of different core underlying scientific approaches in different spaces,” he said. The sort of things that go into personal care and homecare. Those chemicals. A big drive in the industry is for both less harsh and harsh chemicals in shampoos but also to do so in a way that’s sustainable. That’s made form a sustainable source but also biodegradable.”

Next steps 

With the money that the company has now raised from investors including Felicis, Soma Capital, and Y Combinator, Supplant is now going to prove its products in a few very targeted test runs. The first is a big launch with a celebrity chef, which Simmons teased, but did not elaborate on.

Senkut said that the company’s roll out would be similar to the ways in which Impossible Foods went to market. Beginning with a few trial runs in higher end restaurants and foodstuffs before trying to make a run at a mass consumer market.

The feedstocks for Supplant’s sugar substitute come from sugar cane bagasse, wheat and rice husks, and the processing equipment comes from the brewing industry. That’s going to be a benefit as the company looks to build out an office in the U.S. as it establishes a foothold for a larger manufacturing presence down the line.

“We’re taking known science and applying it in the food industry where we know that it has value,” Simmons said. “We’re not inventing any brand new enzymes and each part of the process — none of it on their own are new. The discovery that these sugars work well and can replace cane sugar. That’s someone that no one has done before. Most sugars don’t behave like cane sugar in food. They’re too dry, they’re too wet, they’re too hard, they’re too soft.”

Ultimately the consumer products mission resonates highly for Simmons and his twenty person team. “We’re going to use these hugely abundant renewable resources produced all around the world,” he said. 

 

Online consumer intelligence and social media listening platform Brandwatch has been acquired by Cision, best known for its media monitoring and media contact database services, for $450 million, in a combined cash and shares deal. TechCrunch understands Brandwatch’s key executive team will be staying on. The move combines two large players to offer a broad range of services from PR to marketing and online customer engagement. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021.

Cision has a media contact database of approximately 1 million journalists and media outlets and claims to have over 75,000 customers. Brandwatch applies AI and machine learning the practice known as ‘social listening’.

Along the way, Brandwatch raised a total of around $65 million. It was Series A-funded by Nauta Capital, followed by Highland Europe and then Partech.

IN a statement, Giles Palmer, founder, and CEO of Brandwatch said: “We have always built Brandwatch with ambition… Now is the time to take the next step – joining a company of significant scale to create a business and a suite of products that can have an important global impact.”

Abel Clark, CEO of Cision said: “The continued digital shift and widespread adoption of social media is rapidly and fundamentally changing how brands and organizations engage with their customers. This is driving the imperative that PR, marketing, social, and customer care teams fully incorporate the unique insights now available into consumer-led strategies. Together, Cision and Brandwatch will help our clients to more deeply understand, connect and engage with their customers at scale across every channel.”

Brandwatch has been on an almost case-study of a journey from fundraising to acquisition to a merger, but less characteristically for a well-funded tech company, it did much of it from its home-town of Brighton, on the southern coast of England.

The financing journey began for Giles Palmer, with Angel funding in 2006. In 2010 Brandwatch raised $1.5m from Durrants, a marketing and PR firm, and Nauta Capital. In 2014 it raised $22 million in funding in a Series B round led by Highland Capital. That was followed by a $33M Series C financing led by Partech Ventures in 2015.

With the war chest, it went on to acquire BuzzSumo in 2017, a content marketing and influencer identification platform, for an undisclosed sum. And in 2019 Brandwatch merged with a similar business, Crimson Hexagon, creating a business with around $100 million in ARR. It also acquired the London-based SaaS research platform Qriously.

Brandwatch was recently named a leader in Forrester’s guide for buyers of social listening solutions.

AI-enabled synthetic media is being used as a tool for manipulating real emotions and capturing user data by genealogy service, MyHeritage, which has just launched a new feature — called ‘deep nostalgia‘ — that lets users upload a photo of a person (or several people) to see individual faces animated by algorithm.

The Black Mirror-style pull of seeing long lost relatives — or famous people from another era — brought to a synthetic approximation of life, eyes swivelling, faces tilting as if they’re wondering why they’re stuck inside this useless digital photo frame, has led to an inexorable stream of social shares since it was unveiled yesterday at a family history conference… 

MyHeritage’s AI-powered viral marketing playbook with this deepfakery isn’t a complicated one: They’re going straight for tugging on your heart strings to grab data which can be used to drive sign ups for their other (paid) services. (Selling DNA tests is their main business.)

It’s free to animate a photo using the ‘deep nostalgia’ tech on MyHeritage’s site but you don’t get to see the result until you hand over at least an email (along with the photos you want animating, ofc) — and agree to its T&Cs and privacy policy. Both of which have attracted a number of concerns, over the years.

Last year, for example, the Norwegian Consumer Council reported MyHeritage to the national consumer protection and data authorities after a legal assessment of the T&Cs found the contract it asks customers to sign to be “incomprehensible”.

In 2018 MyHeritage also suffered a major data breach — and data from that breach was later found for sale on the dark web, among a wider cache of hacked account info pertaining to several other services.

The company — which, as we reported earlier this week, is being acquired by a US private equity firm for ~$600M — is doubtless relying on the deep pull of nostalgia to smooth over any individual misgivings about handing over data and agreeing to its terms.

The face animation technology itself is impressive enough — if you set aside the ethics of encouraging people to drag their long lost relatives into the uncanny valley to help MyHeritage cross-sell DNA testing (with all the massive privacy considerations around putting that kind of data in the hands of a commercial entity).

Looking at the inquisitive face of my great grandmother I do have to wonder what she would have made of all this?

The facial animation feature is powered by Israeli company D-ID, a TechCrunch Disrupt battlefield alum — which started out building tech to digital de-identify faces with an eye on protecting image and video from being identifiable by facial recognition algorithms.

It released a demo video of the photo-animating technology last year. The tech uses a driver video to animate the photo — mapping the facial features of the photo onto that base driver to create a ‘live portrait’, as D-ID calls it.

“The Live Portrait solution brings still photos to life. The photo is mapped and then animated by a driver video, causing the subject to move its head and facial features, mimicking the motions of the driver video,” D-ID said in a press release. “This technology can be implemented by historical organizations, museums, and educational programs to animate well-known figures.”

It’s offering live portraits as part of a wider ‘AI Face’ platform which will offer third parties access to other deep learning, computer vision and image processing technologies. D-ID bills the platform as a ‘one-stop shop’ for syntheized video creation.

Other tools include a ‘face anonymization’ feature which replaces one person’s face on video with another’s (such as for documentary film makers to protect a whistleblower’s identity); and a ‘talking heads’ feature that can be used for lip syncing or to replace the need to pay actors to appear in content such as marketing videos as it can turn an audio track into a video of a person appearing to speak those words.

The age of synthesized media is going to be a weird one, that’s for sure.

 

There are big investment firms, and then there are big investment firms. Brookfield Asset Management, the Toronto-based 122-year-old outfit whose current market cap is $63 billion and that oversees $600 billion in assets, clearly falls into the latter camp. Think real estate, infrastructure, renewable power, private equity, and credit. If it falls into a defined asset class, Brookfield probably has it in its portfolio.

That’s also true of venture capital, though venture is new enough to Brookfield that founders who might like its capital are still getting the memo. Indeed, it was a little less than four years ago that Brookfield Technology Partners began investing off the company’s balance sheet and soon after recruited Josh Raffaelli — a Stanford MBA who cut his teeth as a principal with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, then spent another five years with Silver Lake — to lead the practice.

Its existence came as a surprise to him, actually. “I’ve been a tech investor in Silicon Valley,” says Raffaelli. “My entire professional career has been in a 15-minute drive from the house I grew up in. And I had never heard about Brookfield before they started this practice because it’s in businesses. It’s in real estate. It has done things that are not generally tech-enabled.”

Not until fairly recently, that is. Raffaelli and his team of now 11 have not only made dozens of bets to date but they’re currently investing out of a pool of capital that features third party capital in addition to that of Brookfield — which is a first. As for what they are looking for, the idea is help Brookfield reimagine how its many office towers, malls and other real estate might be used or developed or leased or insured. It’s to make Brookfield smarter, better prepared, and more profitable. In return, the startups get industry expertise and a major customer in Brookfield.

 

To date, its bets have varied widely, as with Armis, an IoT startup focused on unmanaged device security; Loanpal, a point-of-sale payment platform for solar and other home efficiency products; and Carbon Health, a primary care company that blends real-world and virtual visits. “”We’re getting our themes effectively from the Brookfield ecosystem,” Raffaelli says.

Pulling back the curtain a bit more, Raffaelli says his team writes checks from $25 million to $50 million dollars and that they look for companies with $10 million in revenue that are seeing top-line year-over-year growth of more than 100%. In terms of pacing, they jump into roughly one new deal per quarter.

The fund is also independent and has its own custom committee, but that the committee is made up of the senior managing partners from each line of Brookfield’s businesses. (“These are the people that actually help us translate our investment themes that we’re generating here,” Raffaelli notes.)

To highlight how the operation works, Raffaelli points to Latch, a smart access software business that announced last month that it’s using a blank-check company backed by the real estate giant Tishman Speyer to become publicly traded. Brookfield owns roughly 70,000 multifamily units in North America, “so we have a lot of doors that need a lot of locks,” Raffaelli says. Latch, of course, is not the only smart access lock out there, so Brookfield ran “what was almost like a mini [proposal process], reaching out to all different companies in the market to understand how they compete,” he says.

It was a “six-month exercise,” but ultimately, his group led Latch’s Series B round in 2018 and since then, Brookfield was bought about 7,000 blocks from the business. It’s a meaningful difference, considering that when Brookfield first invested, the company had less than $20 million in bookings and those 7,000 locks have since brought in an additional $10 million to $15 million in revenue, Raffaelli says. “When we buy a lot of things at that stage of a company,” he adds, “we’re meaningfully enhancing their trajectory.”

It’s not a foolproof strategy, doubling down. If Latch’s locks turned out to be lemons (they haven’t), Brookfield would be out a big check along with that capital expenditure. It’s why Brookfield takes its time, says Raffaelli, adding that if he has done his job right, his team is involved with a company well before it is raising a round and shown already that it is a “strategic partner that has another lever.”

Either way, Raffaelli says that while the commercial real estate market has been hard hit by the pandemic, it has, counterintuitively, been a productive time for his group given the stronger incentive it has given the real estate world to adopt tech tools faster. Among the bets about which Raffaelli sounds most excited right now is VTS, for example, a leasing and asset management platform that can show properties remotely, and Deliverr, an e-commerce fulfillment startup that Raffaelli describes as “Amazon Prime for everybody else.”

In fact, Raffaelli convincingly argues that while the use case for a lot of real estate is changing,  the so-called built world remains Brookfield’s strongest competitive advantage given the size of its footprint.  The way he sees it, its options going forward are plentiful. “You’re looking at retail locations becoming ghost kitchens; you’re looking at retail locations turning into distribution and logistics facilities. We can turn physical locations into healthcare sites for [our portfolio company] Carbon Health, and our mall locations into locations for urgent care and primary care clinics for testing and vaccinations.”

It will never be a completely seamless transition. Brookfield has to be “thoughtful” given the pandemic and its devastating impacts, too. But Raffaelli comes across as excited in conversation nonetheless. The idea of turning physical real estate into a “mechanism for change within technology businesses,” adds Raffaelli, is a “very powerful place to be.”

There are big investment firms, and then there are big investment firms. Brookfield Asset Management, the Toronto-based 122-year-old outfit whose current market cap is $63 billion and that oversees $600 billion in assets, clearly falls into the latter camp. Think real estate, infrastructure, renewable power, private equity, and credit. If it falls into a defined asset class, Brookfield probably has it in its portfolio.

That’s also true of venture capital, though venture is new enough to Brookfield that founders who might like its capital are still getting the memo. Indeed, it was a little less than four years ago that Brookfield Technology Partners began investing off the company’s balance sheet and soon after recruited Josh Raffaelli — a Stanford MBA who cut his teeth as a principal with Draper Fisher Jurvetson, then spent another five years with Silver Lake — to lead the practice.

Its existence came as a surprise to him, actually. “I’ve been a tech investor in Silicon Valley,” says Raffaelli. “My entire professional career has been in a 15-minute drive from the house I grew up in. And I had never heard about Brookfield before they started this practice because it’s in businesses. It’s in real estate. It has done things that are not generally tech-enabled.”

Not until fairly recently, that is. Raffaelli and his team of now 11 have not only made dozens of bets to date but they’re currently investing out of a pool of capital that features third party capital in addition to that of Brookfield — which is a first. As for what they are looking for, the idea is help Brookfield reimagine how its many office towers, malls and other real estate might be used or developed or leased or insured. It’s to make Brookfield smarter, better prepared, and more profitable. In return, the startups get industry expertise and a major customer in Brookfield.

 

To date, its bets have varied widely, as with Armis, an IoT startup focused on unmanaged device security; Loanpal, a point-of-sale payment platform for solar and other home efficiency products; and Carbon Health, a primary care company that blends real-world and virtual visits. “”We’re getting our themes effectively from the Brookfield ecosystem,” Raffaelli says.

Pulling back the curtain a bit more, Raffaelli says his team writes checks from $25 million to $50 million dollars and that they look for companies with $10 million in revenue that are seeing top-line year-over-year growth of more than 100%. In terms of pacing, they jump into roughly one new deal per quarter.

The fund is also independent and has its own custom committee, but that the committee is made up of the senior managing partners from each line of Brookfield’s businesses. (“These are the people that actually help us translate our investment themes that we’re generating here,” Raffaelli notes.)

To highlight how the operation works, Raffaelli points to Latch, a smart access software business that announced last month that it’s using a blank-check company backed by the real estate giant Tishman Speyer to become publicly traded. Brookfield owns roughly 70,000 multifamily units in North America, “so we have a lot of doors that need a lot of locks,” Raffaelli says. Latch, of course, is not the only smart access lock out there, so Brookfield ran “what was almost like a mini [proposal process], reaching out to all different companies in the market to understand how they compete,” he says.

It was a “six-month exercise,” but ultimately, his group led Latch’s Series B round in 2018 and since then, Brookfield was bought about 7,000 blocks from the business. It’s a meaningful difference, considering that when Brookfield first invested, the company had less than $20 million in bookings and those 7,000 locks have since brought in an additional $10 million to $15 million in revenue, Raffaelli says. “When we buy a lot of things at that stage of a company,” he adds, “we’re meaningfully enhancing their trajectory.”

It’s not a foolproof strategy, doubling down. If Latch’s locks turned out to be lemons (they haven’t), Brookfield would be out a big check along with that capital expenditure. It’s why Brookfield takes its time, says Raffaelli, adding that if he has done his job right, his team is involved with a company well before it is raising a round and shown already that it is a “strategic partner that has another lever.”

Either way, Raffaelli says that while the commercial real estate market has been hard hit by the pandemic, it has, counterintuitively, been a productive time for his group given the stronger incentive it has given the real estate world to adopt tech tools faster. Among the bets about which Raffaelli sounds most excited right now is VTS, for example, a leasing and asset management platform that can show properties remotely, and Deliverr, an e-commerce fulfillment startup that Raffaelli describes as “Amazon Prime for everybody else.”

In fact, Raffaelli convincingly argues that while the use case for a lot of real estate is changing,  the so-called built world remains Brookfield’s strongest competitive advantage given the size of its footprint.  The way he sees it, its options going forward are plentiful. “You’re looking at retail locations becoming ghost kitchens; you’re looking at retail locations turning into distribution and logistics facilities. We can turn physical locations into healthcare sites for [our portfolio company] Carbon Health, and our mall locations into locations for urgent care and primary care clinics for testing and vaccinations.”

It will never be a completely seamless transition. Brookfield has to be “thoughtful” given the pandemic and its devastating impacts, too. But Raffaelli comes across as excited in conversation nonetheless. The idea of turning physical real estate into a “mechanism for change within technology businesses,” adds Raffaelli, is a “very powerful place to be.”

Raena was founded in 2019 to create personal care brands with top social media influencers. After several launches, however, the Singapore-based startup quickly noticed an interesting trend: customers were ordering batches of products from Raena every week and reselling them on social media and e-commerce platforms like Shopee and Tokopedia. Last year, the company decided to focus on those sellers, and pivoted to social commerce.

Today Raena announced it has raised a Series A of $9 million, co-led by Alpha Wave Incubation and Alpha JWC Ventures, with participation from AC Ventures and returning investors Beenext, Beenos and Strive. Its last funding announcement was a $1.82 million seed round announced in July 2019.

After interviewing people who were setting up online stores with products from Raena, the company’s team realized that sellers’ earnings potential was capped because they were paying retail prices for their inventory.

They also saw that the even though new C2C retail models, like social commerce, are gaining popularity, the beauty industry’s supply chain hasn’t kept up. Sellers usually need to order minimum quantities, which makes it harder for people to start their own businesses, Raena co-founder Sreejita Deb told TechCrunch,

“Basically, you have to block your capital upfront. It’s difficult for individual sellers or micro-enterpreneurs to work with the old supply chain and categories like beauty,” she said.

Raena decided to pivot to serve those entrepreneurs. The company provides a catalog that includes mostly Japanese and Korean skincare and beauty brands. For those brands, Raena represents a way to enter new markets like Indonesia, which the startup estimates has $20 billion market opportunity.

Raena resellers, who are mostly women between 18 to 34-years-old in Indonesia and Malaysia, pick what items they want to feature on their social media accounts. Most use TikTok or Instagram for promotion, and set up online stores on Shopee or Tokopedia. But they don’t have to carry inventory. When somebody buys a product from a Raena reseller, the reseller orders it from Raena, which ships it directly to the customer.

This drop-shipping model means resellers make higher margins. Since they don’t have to carry inventory, it also dramatically lowers the barrier to launching a small business. Even though Raena’s pivot to social commerce coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic, Deb said it grew its revenue 50 times between January and December 2020. The platform now has more than 1,500 resellers, and claims a 60% seller retention rate after six months on the platform.

She attributes Raena’s growth to several factors, including the increase in online shopping during lockdowns and people looking for ways to earn additional income during the pandemic. While forced to stay at home, many people also began spending more time online, especially on the social media platforms that Raena resellers use.

Raena also benefited from its focus on skincare. Even though many retail categories, including color cosmetics, took a hit, skincare products proved resilient.

“We saw skincare had higher margins, and there are certain markets that are experts at formulating and producing skincare products, and demand for those products in other parts of the world,” she said, adding, “we’ve continued being a skincare company and because that is a category we had insight into, it was our first entry point into this social selling model as well. 90% of our sales are skincare. Our top-selling products are serums, toners, essences, which makes a lot of sense because people are in their homes and have more time to dedicate to their skincare routines.”

Social commerce, which allows people to earn a side income (or even a full-time income), by promoting products through social media, has taken off in several Asian markets. In China, for example, Pinduoduo has become a formidable rival to Alibaba through its group-selling model and focus on fresh produce. In India, Meesho resellers promote products through social media platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram.

Social commerce is also gaining traction in Southeast Asia, with gross merchandise value growing threefold during the first half of 2020, according to iKala.

Deb said one of the ways Raena is different from other social commerce companies is that most of its resellers are selling to customers they don’t know, instead of focusing on family and friends. Many already had TikTok or Instagram profiles focused on beauty and skincare, and had developed reputations for being knowledgeable about products.

As Raena develops, it plans to hire a tech team to build tools that will simplify the process of managing orders and also strike deals directly with manufacturers to increase profit margins for resellers. The funding will be used to increase its team from 15 to over 100 over the next three months, and it plans to enter more Southeast Asian markets.

Tim Hortons, the Canadian coffee and doughnut giant, has raised a new round of funding for its Chinese venture. The investment is led by Sequoia China with participation from Tencent, its digital partner in China, and Eastern Bell Capital. The round comes two years after Tim Hortons entered the Chinese market.

More to come…