Author: azeeadmin

Monetizable mood boards might sound like the moonshot idea that no one asked for, but when you think about it, the vision is already informally happening in various corners of the internet. A young generation of users shops with community in mind, whether that’s buying merchandise from your favorite influencers or giving into those Instagram advertisements after spending way too much time on the grid.

As more users think of shopping as a social, digital-first activity, The Landing, a seed-stage startup coming out of stealth, is hoping to win over those who have an affinity for designing homes and spaces. On The Landing, users can create, and shop from, room designs to help furnish their homes.

“There’s no contextually rich, visual shopping destination, where you could curate and discover and share and shop all in one place,” co-founder Miri Buckland said. The Landing hopes to be that destination.

Started by Buckland and Ellie Buckingham, The Landing is launching with $2.5 million in financing, in a round led by Aileen Lee at Cowboy Ventures. Lee will be taking a board seat. Other investors include Dara Treseder, the CMO of Peloton, Manish Chandra and Tracy Sun, the founders of Poshmark, Unshackled, Designer Fund, and Progression Fund.

The Landing began as a pandemic pivot. Buckland and Buckingham were always interested in solving the pain point of contextual furnishing for users, but began by physically moving people into apartments and helping them set up different furniture. Then, the pandemic hit and limited the ability to do high-touch services. Buckingham says that this was “potentially the best forcing function” to focus on what kind of business The Landing wanted to be.

“I don’t need to be the person moving into your apartment with a couch,” she said. “It was about the importance of empowering creativity and empowering individuals to create digital and physical spaces.” That’s when they dropped the moving service business, and instead used furnishing as a vector to solve the problem of contextual and social e-commerce.

It’s a smart idea that has not gone unnoticed. Houzz, a Sequoia-backed home improvement startup, connects users to products from third-party retailers as well as services from architects, designers, or contractors. There’s also Modsy, which has raised north of $70 million to date, which helps users virtually redesign their homes.

Buckingham worked for Modsy when she was at business school, where she first started noticing that she disagreed with the startups’ main thesis.

“Their motto was basically a digital rendition of an existing human service,” she said. “And I came away from the experience not super convinced that the service model was the scalable, future answer to consumerization of access to design.” She noticed that the younger generation was looking for a self-serve, customizable answer, instead.

The Landing is launching with creative tooling capabilities, which allow users to build and design spaces within its platform. In the coming months, the team is focused on adding a social layer atop the design tool, with features like profiles, discovery, fede, and commenting.

The Landing’s Slack channel is currently being used to discuss these features and what is most in-demand from early users.

The founders aren’t worried about a lack of demand, or only being a platform for the few times that people furnish their homes throughout their lifespan. As Buckland pointed out, people browse Zillow all the time, and have Reddit channels about dream homes, creating designs, and more. The startup is aiming to serve that population as well — the dreamers and not just the realists.

Coinbase’s S-1 publicly dropped this morning with much anticipation. My colleague Alex Wilhelm has the high-level details, but there was one major wrinkle for the crypto trading darling: two of its early investors seem to be cutting down their stakes pre-IPO.

The most notable case is Union Square Ventures, the prominent venture firm where Fred Wilson co-led the Series A round into the company back in 2013, which was the first investment made under the firm’s then newly christened blockchain thesis.

Over the past two years — which is the extent of disclosures that Coinbase includes in its S-1 filing — USV has been rapidly selling off its holdings in the company across multiple transactions, mostly selling to other venture firms around the cap table. Since late 2019, the firm has sold off approximately 28% of its holdings in Coinbase.

USV currently owns about 7.3% of Coinbase’s outstanding shares, or roughly 13.9 million of a total of 191.3 million based on Coinbase’s disclosed share count. As the following table indicates, USV has conducted four separately-dated transactions to sell nearly 5.5 million shares of its holdings in secondary transactions.

Fellow early-stage fintech investor Ribbit Capital, which joined USV in the Series A, also conducted a smaller secondary transaction in November 2019, selling a bit less than 5% of its outstanding shares (559,228 of 11,995,949 shares).

What’s interesting is not just that USV in particular is selling a large part of its holdings, but also the price they were willing to sell at. According to Coinbase’s filing, USV sold 3.35 million shares at $23 per share in late 2019, and later sold about 2 million shares at $28.83 per share in mid-2020.

Those prices are well-below Coinbase’s Series E price per share of $36.19, which it received in late 2019. It’s also below the price set by the secondary transactions of Coinbase CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong and Paradigm founder and Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, who received $32.57 for their shares in late 2018.

Now, there are a couple of nuances to consider here. The secondary sale of preferred shares will typically convert to common (even if the sale is to another preferred shareholder), which means that the shares sold would hold fewer investor rights and provisions, and therefore, are intrinsically worth less to investors. This was the case with Coinbase as it disclosed in its filing, and that may explain at least some of the gap in the price.

The timing of USV’s investment is also perhaps notable. The bulk of USV’s investment in Coinbase comes from its 2012 vintage fund, which if it follows default industry practice, has a targeted 10-year shelf life. That means that the fund is designed to pay out its returns by 2022 — which was quickly coming up for the firm back in 2019 and 2020. There may have been some pressure to sell at least some of the firm’s stake early to make the firm’s LPs happier.

It’s also useful to note that USV and Ribbit mostly sold to other, existing investors like A16Z and Paradigm, which shows that other investors deeply burrowed on the cap table were quite excited to put more money to work in Coinbase, even at a fairly late stage.

Nonetheless, it’s rare for an ambitious fund like USV to sell arguably its single most important investment of all time just a year or two before what may well be one of the largest blockbuster IPOs of 2021. At a valuation of $100 billion let’s say (which is what Coinbase priced at a recent private market transaction), USV’s stake would be worth about $7.3 billion. Yet, the shares it sold over the past two years would have been worth several billion at exit, and it sold them for about $140 million in cash.

The mystery here is perhaps solved a bit. Fred Wilson, in a blog post from early 2018, talked about “taking money off the table” in earlier USV investments like Twitter, where the firm “sold about 30% of our position in those two secondary transactions for about $250mm and returned 2x the entire fund to our investors.” Then referring to crypto, he said:

If you are sitting on 20x, 50x, 100x your money on a crypto investment, it would not be a mistake to sell 10%, 20% or even 30% of your position. Selling 25% of your position on an investment that is up 50x is booking a 12.5x on the entire investment, while allowing you to keep 75% of it going. I know that many crypto holders think that selling anything is a mistake. And it might be. Or it might not be. You just don’t know.

Clearly, he took money off the table. It’s a financially-astute, risk-adjusted approach, even if it left billions of returns behind. A16Z and Paradigm are, I am sure, quite pleased to have made the purchase.

Just ahead of its 2021 virtual investor day on Thursday, Twitter this morning announced its three long-term goals focused on user base and revenue growth, and a faster pace of shipping new features across its platform. The company said it aims to “at least” double its total annual revenue from $3.7 billion in 2020 to $7.5 billion or more in 2023. It also expects to reach at least 315 million mDAUs — that’s Twitter’s self-invented metric for “monetizable” daily active users — by the fourth quarter of 2023.

That would represent a roughly 20% compound annual growth rate from Twitter’s base of 152 million mDAUs reported in the fourth quarter of 2019, the company noted in a new SEC filing.

Active user growth has been difficult for Twitter — the growth tends to be slow or even flat, at times. Per Twitter’s most recent earnings, mDAUs in the fourth quarter 2020 had reached 192 million instead of the 193.5 million expected, for instance. Investors are used to Twitter under-delivering on this metric — or even inventing its own user base metric to hide that its monthly user growth sometimes declines.

In any event, Twitter’s longer-term plans indicate it believes it will finally be able to deliver on user growth — perhaps aided by its investment in new features.

In its filing, Twitter said it would “double development velocity by the end of 2023,” which means doubling the number of features shipped per employee that “directly drive either mDAU or revenue,” it said.

On this front, Twitter has been fairly active in recent months. Late last year, it launched its “stories” feature called Fleets to its global audience. It’s also now testing new features including a Clubhouse rival, Twitter Spaces, and a community-led misinformation debunking effort known as Birdwatch. And it acquired newsletter platform Revue, which is already now integrated on the Twitter website. The company has made smaller acquisitions, as well, to build out product teams, including with social app Squad, stories template maker Chroma Labs, and podcasting app Breaker.

New features may help to attract increased Twitter usage, but revenue growth will also come from diversification beyond advertising. Twitter has spoken several times about its plans to build out a subscription product, which the company said would begin in 2021 but wouldn’t impact Twitter revenue in the near-term. The company has also said it may investigate other areas of monetization, like tipping and various paid consumer-facing features.

Today, Twitter said publicly it plans to reach the $7.5 billion or more target by “growing our audience and gaining advertising market share in both brand and direct response.” But the company did not speak to its plans for subscriptions.

Investors are already responding favorably to Twitter’s announcements this morning. Twitter stock is up by nearly 7% as of the time of writing.

It’s essential for older companies to recognize changes in the marketplace or face the brutal reality of being left in the dust. F5 is an old-school company that launched back in the 90s, yet has been able to transform a number of times in its history to avoid major disruption. Over the last two years, the company has continued that process of redefining itself, this time using a trio of acquisitions — NGINX, Shape Security and Volterra — totaling $2.2 billion to push in a new direction.

While F5 has been associated with applications management for some time, it recognized that the way companies developed and managed applications was changing in a big way with the shift to Kubernetes, microservices and containerization. At the same time, applications have been increasingly moving to the edge, closer to the user. The company understood that it needed to up its game in these areas if it was going to keep up with customers.

Taken separately, it would be easy to miss that there was a game plan behind the three acquisitions, but together they show a company with a clear opinion of where they want to go next. We spoke to F5 president and CEO François Locoh-Donou to learn why he bought these companies and to figure out the method in his company’s acquisition spree madness.

Looking back, looking forward

F5, which was founded in 1996, has found itself at a number of crossroads in its long history, times where it needed to reassess its position in the market. A few years ago it found itself at one such juncture. The company had successfully navigated the shift from physical appliance to virtual, and from data center to cloud. But it also saw the shift to cloud native on the horizon and it knew it had to be there to survive and thrive long term.

“We moved from just keeping applications performing to actually keeping them performing and secure. Over the years, we have become an application delivery and security company. And that’s really how F5 grew over the last 15 years,” said Locoh-Donou.

Today the company has over 18,000 customers centered in enterprise verticals like financial services, healthcare, government, technology and telecom. He says that the focus of the company has always been on applications and how to deliver and secure them, but as they looked ahead, they wanted to be able to do that in a modern context, and that’s where the acquisitions came into play.

As F5 saw it, applications were becoming central to their customers’ success and their IT departments were expending too many resources connecting applications to the cloud and keeping them secure. So part of the goal for these three acquisitions was to bring a level of automation to this whole process of managing modern applications.

“Our view is you fast forward five or 10 years, we are going to move to a world where applications will become adaptive, which essentially means that we are going to bring automation to the security and delivery and performance of applications, so that a lot of that stuff gets done in a more native and automated way,” Locoh-Donou said.

As part of this shift, the company saw customers increasingly using microservices architecture in their applications. This means instead of delivering a large monolithic application, developers were delivering them in smaller pieces inside containers, making it easier to manage, deploy and update.

At the same time, it saw companies needing a new way to secure these applications as they shifted from data center to cloud to the edge. And finally, that shift to the edge would require a new way to manage applications.

While credit cards are commonplace in the United States, they are far less ubiquitous in many other countries, particularly those in Latin America. In Mexico in particular, cash remains the dominant method of payment with an estimated 86% of all payments being in the form of cash.

But card usage is growing as more people are shopping online than ever before. According to one recent study, Mexico topped the list of the world’s fastest growing e-commerce markets. Meanwhile, only 37% of Mexicans over 15 years old have a bank account, according to recent World Bank stats.

All these factors clearly make the country ripe for fintech innovation. 

And for the founders of Mexico City-based startup Stori, they spell opportunity.

Stori launched its credit card product in Mexico in January 2020 and has so far had more than 1 million customers apply for a card. 

Several members of the founding team spent years at Capital One honing their skills in underwriting underserved populations while others worked at the likes of Mastercard, Morgan Stanley, GE Money, HSBC and Intel in Mexico and the U.S.

Now the company has raised a $32.5 million Series B round with the goal of “becoming Mexico’s leading credit card issuer for the rising middle class.”

Lightspeed Venture Partners led the company’s financing, which brings Stori’s total raised since its early 2018 inception to $50 million. According to Lightspeed Partner Mercedes Bent, the investment marked her firm’s first large investment in the Latin American region “with more to come.”

Existing backers Vision Plus Capital, BAI Capital and Source Code Capital also participated in the round.

Stori provides credit cards with “a 100% mobile app-based experience” to the rising middle income population in Mexico. The team spent its first two years building out the startup’s infrastructure and platform. 

In January 2021, the fintech’s monthly new customer growth was 14 times than what it saw in January 2020 and 6 times the company’s monthly average for 2020, according to co-founder Bin Chen. He declined to reveal its current total of customers.

Because the Mexican market is so huge (the country has a population of nearly 130 million), Stori is currently only focused on serving the country.

Just as in other parts of the world, Stori saw tailwinds in the COVID-19 pandemic in that it fueled customer demand for a way to pay digitally. 

“Consumers in Mexico are increasingly using e-commerce and app-based services like ride hailing and delivery and credit cards are the preferred payment methods in those channels,” Chen said. “They’re experiencing more cash flow fluctuation and irregular expenses and need access to flexible credit that can meet short term needs.”

And of course, during pandemic-related lockdowns, more people are turning to digital financial offerings to avoid visiting bank branches in person.

One commonality among all of Stori’s co-founders, according to Chen, is that each “comes from a modest background.”

“We all experienced the feeling of being excluded from the traditional financial service world. As an international student pursuing my master’s degree in Illinois more than twenty years ago, I was relying solely on teaching assistantship to cover my study and living expenses,” Chen recalled. “I often ran out of money, and had a hard time to make ends meet – I received many rejections before I got my first credit card.”

Similar to TomoCredit’s mission in the U.S., Stori’s founders are working to give middle and low-income customers that are “new to the formal financial system” an opportunity to access credit.

The company plans to use its new capital to grow its customer base, boost headcount and invest in product design, technology infrastructure and underwriting, said Chen, who previously worked at Capital One and Mastercard in both U.S. and emerging markets. Today, Stori has 80 employees spread across offices in Mexico, U.S. and China, up from 40 a year ago.

“Our goal is to become a leading digital bank for the underserved population in the region,” he said.

For its part, Lightspeed first met the company’s founders over a year ago.

“We were struck by the depth of their experience. They navigated the pitfalls of Covid masterfully — without the benefit of a US style stimulus — and showed that their underwriting models were strong and improving,” Bent said. “That is a reflection of the quality of the team.”

Yiran Liu, a partner at China-based Vision Plus Capital, says the firm led Stori’s Series A round and “continues to be super pro rata in this round.”

“We have a structural thesis on digital fintech models and are investing in these models globally, particularly in emerging markets,” Liu said in a written statement. “We are impressed by the team’s execution and excited by the local market opportunity as evidenced by the rapid growth.”

 

 

Every business needs to track fundamental financial information, but the data typically lives in a variety of silos making it a constant challenge to understand a company’s overall financial health. DataJoy, an early stage startup, wants to solve that issue. The company announced a $6 million seed round today led by Foundation Capital with help from Quarry VC, Partech Partners, IGSB, Bow Capital and SVB.

Like many startup founders, CEO Jon Lee has experienced the frustration first hand of trying to gather this financial data, and he decided to start a company to deal with it once and for all. “The reason why I started this company was that I was really frustrated at Copper, my last company because it was really hard just to find the answers to simple business questions in my data,” he told me.

These include basic questions like how the business is doing this quarter, if there are any surprises that could throw the company off track and where are the best places to invest in the business to accelerate more quickly.

The company has decided to concentrate its efforts for starters on SaaS companies and their requirements. “We basically focus on taking the work out of revenue intelligence, and just give you the insights that successful companies in the SaaS vertical depend on to be the largest and fastest growing in the market,” Lee explained.

The idea is to build a product with a way to connect to key business systems, pull the data and answer a very specific set of business questions, while using machine learning to provide more proactive advice.

While the company is still in the process of building the product and is pre-revenue, it has begun developing the pieces to ultimately help companies answer these questions. Eventually it will have a set of connectors to various key systems like Salesforce for CRM, HubSpot and Marketo for marketing, Netsuite for ERP, Gainsight for customer experience and Amplitude for product intelligence.

Lee says the set of connectors will be as specific as the questions themselves and based on their research with potential customers and what they are using to track this information. Ashu Garg, general partner at lead investor Foundation Capital says that he was attracted to the founding team’s experience, but also to the fact they were solving a problem he sees all the time sitting on the boards of various SaaS startups.

“I spend my life in the board meetings. It’s what I do, and every CEO, every board is looking for straight answers for what should be obvious questions, but they require this intersection of data,” Garg said. He says to an extent, it’s only possible now due to the evolution of technology to pull this all together in a way that simplifies this process.

The company currently has 11 employees with plans to double that by the middle of this year. As a long-time entrepreneur, Lee says that he has found that building a diverse workforce is essential to building a successful company. “People have found diversity usually [results in a company that is] more productive, more creative and works faster,” Lee said. He said that that’s why it’s important to focus on diversity from the earliest days of the company, while being proactive to make that happen. For example, ensuring you have a diverse set of candidates to choose from when you are reviewing resumes.

For now, the company is 100% remote. In fact, Lee and his co-founder Chief Product Officer Ken Lee, who was previously at Tableau, have yet to meet in person, but they are hoping that changes soon. The company will eventually have a presence in Vancouver and San Mateo whenever offices start to open.

Sales and marketing are often considered a single category on a business plan, but ironically, when it comes to building apps and services to help with them, they usually become separate entities, and so too do the teams that address sales and marketing in organizations. Today, however, a startup called Terminus — which is building a platform that views sales and marketing in a more integrated way, through account-based marketing — is announcing funding and growth, a sign of how its approach is gaining more traction.

The startup has closed a Series C of $90 million, at a valuation we understand from sources to be around $400 million. This is a huge jump on Terminus’s valuation in its last round, which was $96 million post-money in 2018, according to PitchBook data.

Part of the reason for the hike is likely because of the huge focus that digital marketing has had especially in the last year — a time when, because of the pandemic, a lot of more legacy and traditional channels have ceased to be as visible). Account-based marketing alone was estimated, in 2018, to be a $458 billion market opportunity.

Another reason for interest in Terminus specifically is because of its customer record within that. It has around 1,000 enterprise customers, including divisions of IBM, Salesforce, Thomson Reuters, and more.

“We’re building the new marketing automation,” said CEO Tim Kopp in an interview. “We think account-based marketing is the most important thing to have happened in sales software. Teams are switching from lead-based to account-based approaches, and we’ve now moved into addressing all points of engagement, a modern B2B marketing cloud.”

The equity round is being led by Great Hill Partners, with previous investors Atlanta Ventures and Edison Partners, and new backer Hallet Capital also participating. The funding brings the total raised by Terminus — co-headquartered in Atlanta, GA and Indianapolis, IN — to about $120 million.

The world of marketing has seen a huge shift in the two decades, with the rise in internet consumption, and the proliferation of digital services, driving a big business in what is now collectively called “martech”.

The area that Terminus specifically focuses on within that is account-based marketing. In short, this is a way for B2B sales and marketing teams to conceive of potential targets at a business not as individual entities but collective groups. This means a more joined up effort to work across whole organizations, providing a way to market something to more than one person, increasing the chances of connecting with someone to then make the sale.

Terminus’ platform and approach, CEO Kopp points out, essentially brings the functions of sales and marketing together, instead of needing to hand off work from one to the other (eliminating the admin and cost of working across different software within those groups as part of that).

“We see an overwhelming opportunity in bringing together marketing and sales,” he said in an interview. “Marketing is joining in on sales meetings and sales has become a part of the client success, where you are marketing to your own customers. It’s an area where customers stink because they typically come at it from the sales or marketing side.”

Terminus’ platform today consists of a “data studio” that brings together sales intelligence, account information, and other data sources to help compile a list of would-be targets. On top of this, it also has been building out a marketing engine that includes the ability to build advertising, email and web campaigns, and chatbot management. Some of this has been built in-house, and some has come to the company by way of acquisitions (for example the chat functionality comes by way of its acquisition of Ramble last April).

Terminus is by far not the only company working in this area. Others include Marketo (part of Adobe), 6sense, Sendoso and many others. Terminus’s approach is to bring different aspects of the marketing and sales process (analytics, orchestration, automation and execution) into one platform.

Fittingly, the startup’s name was based on an early nickname for Atlanta, and used as a reference to its aim of being the single for its customers’ various marketing and sales activities.

This is one reason why investors have been knocking.

“Terminus continues to redefine how teams go to market, innovating how companies generate revenue in a digital-first environment,” said Derek Schoettle, a growth partner at Great Hill. “We’ve been so impressed with this team, the company’s significant growth over the last year, its continued product innovation, and the huge market opportunity ahead.”

Lob is a startup promising to help businesses deliver physical mail more quickly and affordably, and with more personalization.

The company estimates that its platform has been used to deliver mail to one in two U.S. households. And today, it’s announcing that it has raised $50 million in Series C funding.

CEO Leore Avidar told me he founded Lob with Harry Zhang nearly a decade ago to “allow people to send mail programmatically.” Over time, the company has become increasingly focused on enterprise clients — its 8,500-plus customers include Twitter, Expedia and Oscar Health — although Avidar said it will always offer a product for small businesses as well.

Avidar explained that in a digital age, there are two main categories of physical mail that Lob continues to support for its customers. First, there’s mail sent for “a regulatory purpose, a compliance purpose” — in other words, mail that businesses are legally required to send in printed form. Second, there’s direct mail sent as marketing, which Avidar said many companies are rediscovering.

“Marketing as a whole is always trying to find a unique channel in order to make their customer aware of whatever their call to action is,” he said. “Right now, social is really expensive, Google AdWords is super expensive, with email you can easily unsubscribe. No one’s been paying attention to direct mail, and the prices don’t scale with supply and demand.”

Lob says that it can reduce the execution time on a direct mail campaign by 95%, from 90 days to less than a day. For the actual printing and delivery, it has built out a network of partners across the country. And other companies like PostPilot and Postalaytics are building on top of the Lob platform.

The startup has now raised $80 million in total funding. The new round was led by Y Combinator Continuity Fund — Lob participated in the YC accelerator and the Continuity Fund also led the startup’s previous funding.

Avidar said the company is planning to triple the amount of physical mail delivered through the platform this year, which means the round will allow it to continue expanding the Print Delivery Network, as well as increasing headcount to more than 260 employees.

“Lob is leading the digital transformation of direct mail, a business process used by every company on Earth that has remained virtually untouched by software,” said YC Managing Partner and Lob board member Ali Rowghani in a statement. “Lob’s platform delivers exceptional value to some of the world’s largest senders of direct mail by lowering cost and improving deliverability, tracking, reporting, and ROI. Even for the most sophisticated senders of direct mail, Lob’s API-driven product is vastly superior to legacy approaches.”

Lob is a startup promising to help businesses deliver physical mail more quickly and affordably, and with more personalization.

The company estimates that its platform has been used to deliver mail to one in two U.S. households. And today, it’s announcing that it has raised $50 million in Series C funding.

CEO Leore Avidar told me he founded Lob with Harry Zhang nearly a decade ago to “allow people to send mail programmatically.” Over time, the company has become increasingly focused on enterprise clients — its 8,500-plus customers include Twitter, Expedia and Oscar Health — although Avidar said it will always offer a product for small businesses as well.

Avidar explained that in a digital age, there are two main categories of physical mail that Lob continues to support for its customers. First, there’s mail sent for “a regulatory purpose, a compliance purpose” — in other words, mail that businesses are legally required to send in printed form. Second, there’s direct mail sent as marketing, which Avidar said many companies are rediscovering.

“Marketing as a whole is always trying to find a unique channel in order to make their customer aware of whatever their call to action is,” he said. “Right now, social is really expensive, Google AdWords is super expensive, with email you can easily unsubscribe. No one’s been paying attention to direct mail, and the prices don’t scale with supply and demand.”

Lob says that it can reduce the execution time on a direct mail campaign by 95%, from 90 days to less than a day. For the actual printing and delivery, it has built out a network of partners across the country. And other companies like PostPilot and Postalaytics are building on top of the Lob platform.

The startup has now raised $80 million in total funding. The new round was led by Y Combinator Continuity Fund — Lob participated in the YC accelerator and the Continuity Fund also led the startup’s previous funding.

Avidar said the company is planning to triple the amount of physical mail delivered through the platform this year, which means the round will allow it to continue expanding the Print Delivery Network, as well as increasing headcount to more than 260 employees.

“Lob is leading the digital transformation of direct mail, a business process used by every company on Earth that has remained virtually untouched by software,” said YC Managing Partner and Lob board member Ali Rowghani in a statement. “Lob’s platform delivers exceptional value to some of the world’s largest senders of direct mail by lowering cost and improving deliverability, tracking, reporting, and ROI. Even for the most sophisticated senders of direct mail, Lob’s API-driven product is vastly superior to legacy approaches.”

MorphAIs is a new VC out of Berlin, aiming to leverage AI algorithms to boost its investment decisions in early-stage startups. But there’s a catch: it hasn’t raised a fund yet.

The firm was founded by Eva-Valérie Gfrerer who was previously head of Growth Marketing at FinTech startup OptioPay and her background is in Behavioural Science and Advanced Information Systems.

Gfrerer says she started MorphAIs to be a tech company, using AI to assess venture investments and then selling that as a service. But after a while, she realized the platform could be applied an in-house fund, hence the drive to now raise a fund.

MorphAIs has already received financing from some serial entrepreneurs, including: Max Laemmle, CEO & Founder Fraugster, previously Better Payment and SumUp; Marc-Alexander Christ, Co-Founder SumUp, previously Groupon (CityDeal) and JP Morgan Chase; Charles Fraenkl, CEO SmartFrog, previously CEO at Gigaset and AOL; Andreas Winiarski, Chairman & Founder awesome capital Group.

She says: “It’s been decades since there has been any meaningful innovation in the processes by which venture capital is allocated. We have built technology to re-invent those processes and push the industry towards more accurate allocation of capital and a less-biased and more inclusive start-up ecosystem.”

She points out that over 80% of early-stage VC funds don’t deliver the minimum expected return rate to their investors. This is true, but admittedly, the VC industry is almost built to throw a lot of money away, in the hope that it will pick the winner that makes up for all the losses.

She now plans to aim for a pre-seed/seed fund, backed by a team consisting of machine learning scientists, mathematicians, and behavioral scientists, and claims that MorphAIs is modeling consistent 16x return rates, after running real-time predictions based on market data.

Her co-founder is Jan Saputra Müller, CTO and Co-Founder, who co-founded and served as CTO for several machine learning companies, including askby.ai.

There’s one problem: Gfrerer’s approach is not unique. For instance, London-based Inreach Ventures has made a big play of using data to hunt down startups. And every other VC in Europe does something similar, more or less.

Will Gfrerer manage to pull off something spectacular? We shall have to wait and find out.