Author: azeeadmin

Many enterprise software startups at some point have faced the invisible wall. For months, your sales team has done everything right. They’ve met with a prospect several times, provided them with demos, free trials, documentation and references, and perhaps even signed a provisional contract.

The stars are all aligned and then, suddenly, the deal falls apart. Someone has put the kibosh on the entire project. Who is this deal-blocker and what can software companies do to identify, support and convince this person to move forward with a contract?

I call this person the Chief Objection Officer.

Most software companies spend a lot of time and effort identifying their potential buyers and champions within an organization. They build personas and do targeted marketing to these individuals and then fine-tune their products to meet their needs. These targets may be VPs of engineering, data leaders, CTOs, CISOs, CMOs or anyone else with decision-making authority. But what most software companies neglect to do during this exploratory phase is to identify the person who may block the entire deal.

This person is the anti-champion with the power to scuttle a potential partnership. Like your potential deal-makers, these deal-breakers can have any title with decision-making power. Chief Objection Officers aren’t simply potential buyers who end up deciding your product is not the right fit, but are instead blockers-in-chief who can make departmentwide or companywide decisions. Thus, it’s critical for software companies to identify the Chief Objection Officers that might block deals and, then, address their concerns.

So how do you identify the Chief Objection Officer? The trick is to figure out the main pain points that arise for companies when considering deploying your solution, and then walk backward to figure out which person these challenges impact the most. Here are some common pain points that your potential customers may face when considering your product.

Change is hard. Never underestimate the power of the status quo. Does implementing your product in one part of an organization, such as IT, force another department, such as HR, to change how they do their daily jobs?

Think about which leaders will be most reluctant to make changes; these Chief Objection Officers will likely not be your buyers, but instead the heads of departments most impacted by the implementation of your software. For example, a marketing team may love the ad targeting platform they use and thus a CMO will balk at new database software that would limit or change the way customer segment data is collected. Or field sales would object to new security infrastructure software that makes it harder for them to access the company network from their phones. The head of the department that will bear the brunt of change will often be a Chief Objection Officer.

Is someone’s job on the line?

Another common pain point when deploying a new software solution is that one or more jobs may become obsolete once it’s up and running. Perhaps your software streamlines and outsources most of a company’s accounts payable processes. Maybe your SaaS solution will replace an on-premise homegrown one that a team of developers has built and nurtured for years.

Nanit’s nursery camera pairs computer vision with specially-patterned clothing to help answer the question that most new parents ask themselves roughly every 90 seconds: “Is my baby still breathing?”

This morning the company is announcing that it has raised an additional $25 million in a Series C round led by GV.

As part of the deal, GV’s Frederique Dame will join Nanit’s Board of Directors.

The company raises this Series C on the momentum of a strong year. While declining to share exactly how many cameras the company had sold to date, Nanit CEO Sarah Dorsett tells me that camera sales were up 130% in 2020 versus 2019.

Earlier this month Nanit debuted the Nanit Pro, an upgraded model ($299 vs $249 for the Nanit Plus) that increases the camera’s resolution while improving things like the built-in night light and overall usability. It also launched a line of “smart sheets” complete with a custom black-and-white pattern the camera reads to help measure and record your baby’s height between doctor visits.

Dorsett tells me the company plans to expand its lineup into a broader ecosystem of nursery items, mentioning things like changing pads and nightlights as things “that exist today, but that [Nanit] could really amplify because of the app experience.”

This Series C brings Nanit’s total raised to $75M. While round-leader GV is a new investor here, it was backed by existing investors Jerusalem Venture Partners, RRE Ventures, Upfront Ventures, and Rho Capital Partners.

Retrofitting buildings to make them more energy efficient and better at withstanding climate change induced extreme weather is going to be a big, multi-billion dollar business. But it’s one that’s been hard for low-income communities to tap, thanks to obstacles ranging faulty incentive structures to an inability to adequately plan for which upgrades will be most effective in which buildings.

Enter BlocPower, a New York-based startup founded by a longtime advocate for energy efficiency and the job creation that comes with it, which has a novel solution for identifying, developing and profiting off of building upgrades in low income communities — all while supporting high-paying jobs for workers in the communities the company hopes to serve.

The company also has managed to raise $63 million in equity and debt financing to support its mission. That money is split between an $8 million investment from some of the country’s top venture firms and a $55 million debt facility structured in part by Goldman Sachs to finance the redevelopment projects that BlocPower is creating.

These capital commitments aren’t charity. Government dollars are coming for the industry and private companies from healthcare providers, to utility companies, to real estate developers and property managers all have a vested interest in seeing this market succeed.

There’s going to be over $1 billion carved out for weatherization and building upgrades in the stimulus package that’s still making its way through Congress

For BlocPower’s founder, Donnel Baird, the issue of seeing buildings revitalized and good high-paying jobs coming into local communities isn’t academic. Baird was born in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood and witnessed firsthand the violence and joblessness that was ripping the fabric of that rich and vibrant community apart during the crack epidemic and economic decline of the 1980s and early 90s.

Seeing that violence firsthand, including a shooting on his way to school, instilled in Baird a desire to “create jobs for disconnected Black and brown people” so they would never feel the hopelessness and lack of opportunity that fosters cycles of violence.

Some time after the shooting, Baird’s family relocated from Brooklyn to Stone Mountain, Georgia, and after graduating from Duke University, Baird became a climate activist and community organizer, with a focus on green jobs. That led to a role in the presidential campaign for Barack Obama and an offer to work in Washington on Obama’s staff.

Baird declined the opportunity, but did take on a role reaching out to communities and unions to help implement the first stimulus package that Obama and Biden put together to promote green jobs.

And it was while watching the benefits of that stimulus collapse under the weight of a fragmented building industry that Baird came up with the idea for BlocPower.

“It was all about the implementation challenges that we ran into,” Baird said. “If you have ten buildings on a block in Oakland and they were all built by the same developer at the same time. If you rebuild those buildings and you retrofit all of those buildings, in five of those buildings you’re going to trap carbon monoxide in and kill everybody and in the other five buildings you’re going to have a reduction in emissions and energy savings.”

Before conducting any retrofits to capture energy savings (and health savings, but more on that later), Baird says developers need to figure out the potential for asbestos contamination in the building; understand the current heating, ventilation, and cooling systems that the building uses; and get an assessment of what actually needs to be done.

That’s the core problem that Baird says BlocPower solves. The company has developed software to analyze a building’s construction by creating a virtual twin based on blueprints and public records. Using that digital twin the company can identify what upgrades a building needs. Then the company taps lines of credit to work with building owners to manage the retrofits and capture the value of the energy savings and carbon offsets associated with the building upgrades.

For BlocPower to work, the financing piece is just as important as the software. Without getting banks to sign off on loans to make the upgrades, all of those dollars from the federal government remain locked up. “That’s why the $7 billion earmarked for investment in green buildings did not work,” Baird said. “At BlocPower our view is that we could build software to simulate using government records… we could simulate enough about the mechanicals, electrical, and plumbing across buildings in NYC so that we could avoid that cost.”

Along with co-founder Morris Cox, Baird built BlocPower while at Columbia University’s business school so that he could solve the technical problems and overcome the hurdles for community financing of renewable retrofit projects.

Right before his graduation, in 2014, the company had applied for a contract to do energy efficiency retrofits and was set to receive financing from the Department of Energy. The finalists had to go down to the White House and pitch the President. That pitch was scheduled for the same day as a key final exam for one of Baird’s Columbia classes, which the professor said was mandatory. Baird skipped the test and won the pitch, but failed the class.

After that it was off to Silicon Valley to pitch the business. Baird met with 200 or more investors who rejected his pitch. Many of these investors had been burned in the first cleantech bubble or had witnessed the fiery conflagrations that engulfed firms that did back cleantech businesses and swore they’d never make the same mistakes.

That was the initial position at Andreessen Horowitz when Baird pitched them, he said. “When I went to Andreessen Horowitz, they said ‘Our policy is no cleantech whatsoever. You need to figure out how software is going to eat up this energy efficiency market’,” Baird recalled.

Working with Mitch Kapor, an investor and advisor, Baird worked on the pitch and got Kapor to talk to Ben Horowitz. Both men agreed to invest and BlocPower was off to the races.

The company has completed retrofits in over 1,000 buildings since its launch, Baird said, mainly to prove out its thesis. Now, with the revolving credit facility in hand, BlocPower can take bigger bites out of the market. That includes a contract with utility companies in New York that will pay $30 million if the company can complete its retrofits and verify the energy savings from that work.

There are also early projects underway in Oakland and Chicago, Baird said.

Building retrofits do more than just provide energy savings, as Goldman Sachs managing director Margaret Anadu noted in a statement.

“BlocPower is proving that it is possible to have commercial solutions that improve public health in underserved communities, create quality jobs and lower carbon emissions,” Anadu said. “We are so proud to have supported Donnel and his team…through both equity and debt capital to further expand their reach.”

These benefits also have potential additional revenue streams associated with them that BlocPower can also capture, according to investor and director, Mitch Kapor.

“There are significant linkages that are known between buildings and pollution that are a public health issue. In a number of geographies community hospitals are under a mandate to improve health outcomes and BlocPower can get paid from health outcomes associated with the reduction in carbon. That could be a new revenue stream and a financing mechanism,” Kapor said. “There’s a lot of work to be done in essentially taking the value creation engine they have and figuring out where to bring it and which other engines they need to have to have the maximum social impact.”

Social impact is something that both Kapor and Baird talk about extensively and Baird sees the creation of green jobs as an engine for social justice — and one that can reunite a lot of working class voters whose alliances were fractured by the previous administration. Baird also believes that putting people to work is the best argument for climate change policies that have met with resistance among many union workers.

“We will not be able to pass shit unless workers and people of color are on board to force the U.S. senate to pass climate change policy,” Baird said. “We have to pass the legislation that’s going to facilitate green infrastructure in a massive way.”

He pointed to the project in Oakland as an example of how climate policies can create jobs and incentivize political action.

“In Oakland we’re doing a pilot project in 12 low income buildings in oakland. I sent them $20K to train these workers from local people of color in Oakland… they are being put to work in Oakland,” Baird said. “That’s the model for how this gets built. So now we need them to call Chuck Shumer to push him to the left on green building legislation.” 

Netflix today is launching a new feature that aims to bring more offline content to users who opt in automatic downloads. With “Downloads for You” enabled, the Netflix app will download recommended TV shows and movies to your mobile device based on your tastes, as determined by your Netflix watch history.

After turning on the feature for the first time, you’ll be able to select the amount of storage space you want to dedicate to saving these recommended downloads on your device: either 1GB, 3GB, or 5GB. The downloads will then take place when you’re connected to a Wi-Fi network, and will contain a mix of recommendations that Netflix believes you’ll like. Typically, the app will download the first few episodes of a TV show — enough to get you started.

You can also cast the downloaded content to a nearby TV, where it will stream directly from your phone.

After you’ve watched the episodes or movies, you can delete them from the device to free up more storage space for the next time you’re connected to WiFi.

Netflix notes its full catalog is available for download, not just its own original content. However, there will be some titles with download limitations due to licensing restrictions.

The feature is an addition, not a replacement for Netflix’s existing offline access feature known as Smart Downloads. First launched in 2018 before becoming globally available, Smart Downloads allows users to pick which shows or movies they want to save for offline viewing.

Netflix says it began testing Downloads for You in late 2020, but is today making the feature available to all users worldwide, initially on Android. A version for iOS is in the works and will arrive later this year.

Offline downloads can make sense for those who are traveling — for example, by plane or underground train, where internet access is not a given. But it also makes sense for users in emerging markets, where access to a reliable cellular connection or bandwidth can be a concern.

During tests, Netflix notes it saw high usage of the feature in the U.S. But it considers the emerging market use case — where Android devices are more heavily used and connections are often unreliable — to be of particular importance. This especially true for countries like India and Brazil, and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region.

“We’re excited to introduce Downloads for You. People who choose this new feature will have shows or movies automatically downloaded to their devices, with recommendations based on their tastes,” said Patrick Flemming, Netflix’s Director of Product Innovation, in a statement. “We want to make discovering your next new favorite series or film even easier, whether you’re connected or not.”

David Baga is going to be getting a new paycheck, which is fitting all things considered.

Even, an “on-demand pay” startup that ‘evens’ out paychecks for workers to give them financial stability and flexibility, will announce later this morning that Baga is joining the company as its new CEO effective March 1, replacing co-founder and current CEO Jon Schlossberg. Schlossberg will remain full-time at the company as executive chairman.

Baga was most recently at Lightspeed Venture Partners, the prominent VC firm which he joined in late 2019 as chief operating officer. Prior to Lightspeed, Baga was chief business officer at Lyft and chief revenue officer at RocketLawyer.

Even was founded in 2014 by Schlossberg and a coterie of other co-founders focused on a mission of disrupting the payday loan industry with better tools for workers who increasingly live paycheck-to-paycheck. Workers who get dropped from a shift, for instance, often have to scramble to meet their upcoming financial obligations, forcing them to take usurious payday loans. Even’s product was designed to give workers better visibility and more control over their paycheck, offering tools like Instapay that offers an advance on their future earnings. Notably, Even works on a subscription model that is designed to align its incentives with its worker-users to avoid the predatory practices that plague the industry.

I last covered the company in 2018 when it raised a $40 million Series B from Keith Rabois, who was then at Khosla Ventures. Even has had significant traction, reaching 650,000 members today according to the company, and most notably, it has an extensive partnership with Walmart, which just this week announced it was raising wages for 425,000 of its in-store associates, or roughly a third of its workforce. Even said that 53% of its members use the product daily.

Schlossberg says that while the company has had significant success in building out a high-quality product, it needs to pivot to a greater focus on revenue growth. “I am a very product-minded CEO and what we needed in the zero-to-one phase,” he said, referencing the concept of reaching product-market fit. But, “I am not an enterprise-growth CEO. This opportunity and problem deserves someone who can massively increase the probability of making [Even] as ubiquitous as 401Ks.”

He said that the company began searching for a COO to add enterprise sales experience to the executive team, but came up empty-handed. “So we offered the top job to get better candidates, and it did and we found David,” he said.

For Baga, the Even story fits in with his own background. I “grew up around a lot of blue-collar, first-generation Canadians — I can relate to Even in a lot of [ways],” he said. He migrated down to the Valley during the dot-com bubble, taking on a variety of sales jobs at companies like Oracle. His first startup experience was at RocketLawyer when it was just 20 people. “RockertLayer was about making legal services affordable to all Americans,” a mission that resonated with Baga.

David Baga will join Even as CEO on March 1. Photo via Even.

From there, he said he eventually linked up with Logan Green and John Zimmer in 2012 when they were still operating Zimride, and would eventually join the rebranded company Lyft in 2015 when it was “thinking about a B2B version with large businesses.” He worked on enterprise and urban partnerships as well as Lyft Health, a rideshare product designed for non-emergency medical transportation.

Baga says that he wanted to stay at smaller orgs, and so as Lyft went public and grew to gargantuan size, he wanted to reset to a smaller company. He eventually landed at Lightspeed as the firm’s COO.

Baga demurred during our call to describe his time at Lightspeed or his reasoning for departing after a year and a half. Notably, Even is not a Lightspeed portfolio company. Instead, he connected with Schlossberg as Even was accelerating its CEO search and found that there was “strong values alignment” and that “they are addressing real pain points … but with a fair business model.”

In an email later, Baga stated that “It has been a privilege to work with Lightspeed Ventures and I will always be grateful for the opportunity to be a part of such a fantastic organization. At Lightspeed, I had a front row seat to entrepreneurs sharing their vision to change the world. They inspired me to heed the call to build again.”

Taking the reins on March 1, Baga said that his top priorities are to “help the team to get to know me, to understand the customers and our prospects, and to understand the product roadmap and strategy.” Schlossberg said that Even already has “a roster of pretty marquee referenceable customers across verticals of employment” and that “now is the time to scale it.” As Baga transitions into the role, Schlossberg said that the company is likely to raise a Series C round “sometime this year.”

Precarity isn’t going away in America anytime soon, yet as the last year has shown, there are tools that can help more workers find resilience in the labor they do. Even’s hope is that a well-built machine to improve pay can be rapidly expanded to make a difference in this economy.

SpaceX is now in the business of flying people to space, and if all goes to plan, it’ll be the first to provide a trip for a crew made up entirely of private space tourists later this year. Now, we know who will join billionaire and Shift4Payments founder Jason Isaacman on that trip – St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital employee, and former patient Hayley Arceneaux.

Arceneaux was already selected by Isaacman to be one of the four members of the crew for the mission aboard a SpaceX Dragon, which will include a flight to an unspecified orbit for a trip likely spanning a few days when it launches. The billionaire tipped that he “already knew” who he’d picked to represent St. Jude during a press call when the trip was originally announced earlier this year, but noted that he was saving the reveal.

Isaacman is running a months-long campaign around ‘Inspiration4,’ which is what he has named the flight. The remaining two seats will be given to winners chosen from two separate ongoing competitions: One pool includes anyone who makes a donation to St. Jude during the course of a fundraising campaign attached to the launch, and the other will be selected from entrepreneurs who build an online store on Shift4’s newly launched e-commerce platform.

As AP reports, Arceneaux is a bone cancer survivor who joined St. Jude last year as a physician assistant. She’s record a number of firsts and records when she gets to space on the upcoming flight, including becoming the youngest American ever in space at just 29, and also becoming the first to enter space with a prosthetic in place – she has an artificial knee and a rod in her thighs bone due to the bone cancer she was treated for at St. Jude when she was 10.

Isaacman is footing the entire bill for the SpaceX launch – including covering the tax obligations of the other winners selected for the St. Jude seats on the mission. He has also committed to donating $100 million to the hospital from his own funds, in addition to whatever is raised through the public donation drive that will be used to select one of the other crew members.

Gophr, a U.K.-based last-mile delivery provider, has raised £4 million in funding, as it looks to invest in its product off the back of 300% revenue growth during the last 12 months.

Leading the round is pan-European B2B investor Nauta Capital. The company had previously raised £1 million in two rounds, including £500,000 from publicly-listed Auctus Alternative Investments.

Noteworthy, Gophr’s co-founder and CEO, Seb Robert, tells me the 2015-founded company reached monthly net profitability around 3 years ago and was net profitable for the whole of last year. Like other delivery companies, Gophr has benefited from a pandemic bump, but fortitude aside, is aiming to step on the gas.

Gophr says it has completed over 2 million same-day deliveries to-date. Customers include leading consumer brands including HelloFresh, Boots, Co-Op and Selfridges. It claims 5,000 clients in total and operates in most U.K. cities.
On being net profitable and in relation to raising new funding, Robert says he felt it was an important proof point to hit, recalling how, just a few years ago, bar a couple of huge successes, we saw “a generation of delivery startups go up in flames along with their investors cash”. They included Jinn and Valk Fleet, to name just two.

“It was all very predictable to anyone who’d done their homework up front (I remember at the time DM’ing you specifically and naming the ones I thought would no longer be around in a year or two!) and as a result figured that a model that proved it could actually make money would have a better chance to raise going forward,” he says.

Furthermore, Robert notes that we are starting to see a renaissance in VC investment in the last-mile delivery space, but argues that, on the surface at least, these newer delivery startups are taking a similar approach to the previous generation.

“Getting a toothbrush to you in 15 minutes is great. But what do you do with the courier who’s now coming back empty handed? That takes time and it costs money. Only time will tell,” he says.

Though Robert doesn’t say it, that’s likely taking a swipe at a new crop of startups either following the Instacart model, such as Getir in Turkey, or the plethora of delivery-only ‘dark stores’, including Berlin’s much-hyped Gorillas, France’s Cajoo,, and U.K.’s Dija, Zapp, Weezy, and Fancy (currently in talks to be acquired by U.S.-based goPuff).

With all the hype around drones and autonomous vehicles, Robert says that people forget or don’t understand that the delivery business, particularly last-mile, is still a people business. This means building a service that works for the couriers that power it.

“Same day at scale is hard, so most players cut corners,” he says. “Legacy companies can deliver at scale, but the sophistication of the service is poor, and then only make money because they squeeze their couriers. Tech startups have great app experiences and big brand budgets, but they don’t know how to deliver sustainably so they burn through VC cash waiting for robots, drones, autonomous vehicles and bionic duckweed to shore up the bottom line”.

“The way we’ve managed to strip out the compromise is by creating a platform that maximises each individual courier’s ability to make money, in whatever direction they’re traveling in, whilst making sure the end customer gets their stuff on time with no issues”.

Gophr has also built a platform that Robert claims helps couriers “level up”. This required properly understanding the “complexity and variability of the delivery process,” including how individual couriers want to work, and how to best meet customer expectations, which varies per sector.

“I think with most delivery apps and at incumbent carriers the courier is kind of incidental, and seen as replaceable; we try to focus on how we can make them better, and we’re still working on it,” he says. “Being a great courier doesn’t just boil down to being on time — that’s the basics — it’s what works for different types of customer needs and expectations. You might get couriers who aren’t great at multi-drop but very good on the circuit, or that need to work on job management but more than make up for it through excellent communication. Sending or receiving a package is a bit of an emotional purchase when you think about it so we have to do our best to manage that in the best way possible. Having happy couriers is a good start”.

Meanwhile, Robert is not phased by last week’s Uber ruling that saw U.K. courts reclassify the worker status gig economy-style drivers, meaning that they are entitled to additional benefits and worker protections.

“I think it’s great news for shutting down bogus self-employment,” he says. “I don’t see how the incumbent U.K. delivery industry can continue to operate under anything else other than this new worker classification. If operators want to stay on the right side of the law, worker status is the one that’s closest to how they currently do business. In the short term they might be able to mitigate the impact through recent 3rd party solutions that have sprung up that provide cover for the new IR35 rules coming into effect later this year, but I can’t imagine that will last forever.

“Fundamentally, we’ve always considered the courier as ‘the talent’ and not a cost centre or a commodity, and that the important relationship to build is between the courier and client, with our platform as an enabler, not a gatekeeper. And that’s always been key to how we operate”.

This means that Gophr doesn’t penalise or sin-bin drivers for non-acceptance of work. Its app show the driver where they would be picking up and delivering to, what the consignment is and what they’ll get paid so they have all the relevant info before they accept a job”.

However, he says the rate setting aspect of the Uber case is interesting, because centrally imposed rates can actually work in favour of couriers as apposed to an entirely free-market. “We do set the rates they’re paid, but that’s because we looked at other solutions that enabled couriers to set their own price per mile and/or got them to bid for work and all it did was encourage a race to the bottom,” Robert says. “So it’s kind of ironic that that was one of the key parts of the ruling. This could become (quite literally) a law of unintended consequences”.

Vertical marketplaces continue to be a key lynchpin in the digital economy, a centralized place where people providing given goods or services can connect with those specifically looking to buy them — a position has become even more prominent in our pandemic economy. Today, a startup out of Denmark called Ageras Group, which has built a dual-purpose platform, providing both accountancy software and a marketplace for small and medium businesses to find accountants, is announcing a round of growth funding to expand its business.

The Copenhagen-based company has closed a round of $73 million from a single investor, Lugard Road Capital. Ageras has now passed 340,000 users across Denmark, the U.S., Sweden, Norway, Holland and Germany, and it says that the plan will be to use the funding to expand into what it generally describes as “growth markets” — new countries, new customer segments, and also adding more services to its software stack — both through organic growth and acquisitions.

“Ageras has established a market leading and best-in-class product offering that is optimally positioned for international expansion and the rising demand for automated business tools,” said Rico Andersen, Ageras’ CEO who co-founded the company with Martin Hegelund, himself a serial investor who has backed the likes of Slack. “This latest financing round will support our ongoing commitment to scaling the Ageras brand and bringing our software offering to new customers across the globe. We look forward to continuing the Ageras story in the years to come.”

Ageras is not disclosing its valuation, but this report in Danish publication Borsen pegs it at 1.5 billion Danish Krone, or around $244 million at today’s rates. We’ve asked an Ageras spokesperson to confirm the figure and will update this post as we learn more.

We’re also asking how much it has raised in the past. Founded in 2012, the startup was bootstrapped for its first five years, and PitchBook discloses only around $220,000 before this round. Previous investors include Investcorp — which took a majority stake in the company in 2017 — and more recently Rabo Bank.

The investment underscores the persistent popularity of the marketplace model for online business, made popular in e-commerce by the likes of Amazon and Alibaba but extended to a range of services as well.

Ageras is not the only company linking accounts and bookkeepers with others in the field including Upwork, Bark, Paro and more. In the area of online accounting services, meanwhile, there are a number of players including established companies like Intuit as well as newer entrants like Pennylane, TaxScouts, Zeitgold, and Stripe-backed Pilot.

The startup today follows a fairly typical labor marketplace model: SMEs seeking accountancy services submit their requirements in three areas — accounting, book keeping or auditing — and in return they receive three leads to contact. That model is one that Andersen and Hegelund know well, having previously built an online marketplace for home service professionals called “Fa det Gjort” (which translates to “Get it done!”).

Alongside this — and to further diversify the business model — the company has expanded into building accounting software, starting first with its own in-house Meneto suite, and then adding to it with two acquisitions, Billy in Denmark and Tellow in The Netherlands.

Lugard appears to be a VC affiliated with U.S. hedge fund Luxor Capital Group and it has also backed the delivery platform Glovo, inRiver, and others. Investcorp, meanwhile, continues to hold a significant stake in the startup as part of its bigger tech investment strategy, which has included acquiring and then selling security firm Avira, and recently taking a stake in India’s logistics startup Xpressbees.

“The combination of Ageras’ mission critical software, backed by a reputation for dependability, insights into the professional service market, an outstanding management team, paired with its cutting-edge research & development has ensured it has continued to grow its market position and deliver an accountancy ecosystem based on high quality recurring revenue,” said Gilbert Kamieniecky, MD and head of Investcorp’s technology vertical, in a statement. “The additional financing secured by Ageras will help to drive international expansion and support the continued innovation of its customer offering.”

Despite the market impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, retail investing is increasing in Indonesia, especially among people aged 18 to 30. Today, investment platform FUNDtastic announced it has raised a $7.7 million Series A to tap into that demand, with plans to launch new products for retail investors, reports DealStreetAsia.

The round was led by Singapore-based Ascend Capital Group, with participation from other investors including tech holding company Indivara Group. FUNDtastic plans to add retail bonds, insurance and peer-to-peer lending to its current roster of mutual funds and gold investment options.

FUNDtastic acquired Invisee, a mutual funds and securities portal, last year for $6.5 million, allowing it to sell mutual fund products directly.

Based in Jakarta, FUNDtastic was founded in 2019 by Harry Hartono, Franky Chandra and Medwin Susilo. While capital investing in Indonesia remains relatively low, with many preferring to invest in real estate instead, that number is gradually increasing as young professionals diversify their holdings. The Indonesian Stock Exchange is also launching initiatives to attract more retail investors.

Other startups focused on making retail investment more accessible to Indonesians include Ajaib and Bibit, which both recently raised funding.

Twitter recently held talks to acquire Indian social media startup ShareChat as the company explored ways to expand its presence in the world’s second largest internet market and build a global rival to TikTok, three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The American firm, which is already an investor in Bangalore-based ShareChat, offered to buy the Indian startup for $1.1 billion and had committed an additional investment of $900 million, two of the sources said.

The talks are no longer ongoing, two sources said, requesting anonymity as the matter is private. TechCrunch could not determine why the talks did not materialize into a deal.

Two sources said Twitter had expressed intention to take Moj, a short-form video app that ShareChat owns, to international markets and position it as a rival to Chinese app TikTok.

Twitter declined to comment and ShareChat did not respond to a request for comment.

India’s ban on TikTok last year prompted scores of local startups and international giants to try their hands at short-form video format.

Moj, with over 80 million users already, has emerged as one of the largest players in the category. Earlier this month, Snap inked a deal with ShareChat to integrate its Camera Kit into the Indian short video app. This is the first time Snap had formed a partnership of this kind with a firm in India.

With the buyout offer no longer being entertained, ShareChat has resumed talks with other investors for its new financing round. These investors include Google, Snap, as well as Tinder-parent firm Match Group, the sources said. TechCrunch reported in January that the Indian startup was talking to Google and Snap as well as some existing investors including Twitter to raise over $200 million. A potential acquisition by Twitter prolonged the investment talks.

ShareChat, which claims to have over 160 million users, offers its social network app in 15 Indian languages and has a large following in small Indian cities and towns, or what venture capitalist Sajith Pai of Blume Ventures refer as “India 2.” Very few players in the Indian startup ecosystem have a reach to this segment of this population, which thanks to users from even smaller towns and villages — called “India 3” — getting online has expanded in recent years.

In an interview with TechCrunch last year, Ankush Sachdeva, co-founder and chief executive of ShareChat, said the startup’s marquee app was growing “exponentially” and that users were spending, on an average, more than 30 minutes a day on the service.

Twitter, itself, has struggled to make inroads outside of bigger cities and towns in India. Its app reached about 75 million users in the country in the month of January, according to mobile insight firm AppAnnie, data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch. It inked a deal with news and social app Dailyhunt to bring Moments — curated tweets pertaining to news and other local events — to the Google-backed Indian app.

The American social network has broadened its product offering in the past year amid pressure from activist investors to accelerate growth.