Author: azeeadmin

This morning Monte Carlo, a startup focused on helping other companies better monitor their data inflows, announced that it has closed a $25 million Series B.

The round, which was co-led by GGV and Redpoint, comes mere months after its September Series A that was worth $15 million. Accel led the company’s Series A and Seed deals, participating in its Series B as well.

The round caught our attention not only for the speed at which it was raised following Monte Carlo’s preceding investment, but also because your humble servant had no idea what data observability, the startup’s niche, really was.

So we got Monte Carlo co-founder and CEO Barr Moses on a call to explain both her company’s space, and how it managed to attract so much more capital so quickly.

Data inflows

Big data was the jam a while back, but it turned out to be merely one piece in the broader data puzzle. We can see evidence of that in recent revenue growth at Databricks, which reached $425 million ARR in 2020 by building an analytics and AI service that sits on top of companies’ data.

Monte Carlo is another bet on the data space, sitting a bit earlier in the data lifecycle. Think of it this way: Snowflake can hold all your data, and Databricks can help you analyze it. But what’s checking to make sure that data flowing into your repositories is, you know, not bullshit?

Figuring out if data inflows are healthy and not bunk is what Monte Carlo does.

According to Moses, companies now have myriad data sources. That’s great in theory as more data is usually a good thing. But if one or two of those sources goes haywire, figuring that out before you collect, store, and analyze the bad information is pretty important.

So Monte Carlo sits upstream from the other data companies that are hot these days, keeping tabs on inbound data sources across a number of parameters to make sure that what’s actually arriving in your data lake is legit.

The startup does that, Moses said, by checking data freshness (how recent, or tardy the data in question is), volume (is there too little, too much?), schema (the data’s structure itself, to see if things have changed that could matter, or break downstream services), distribution (if data points suddenly jump from say, the single digits to the millions), and lineage, which can help find breakpoints in data inflows.

Hearing that Monte Carlo learns from a company’s particular data pipes to figure out what could be non-standard data inflow made me curious how long it takes to get the startup’s software set up and running; not long, per Barr, an hour to fire it up in many cases, and a week to learn.

A growing sector

Monte Carlo’s product is neat enough to warrant our attention by itself. But, fitting neatly inside the growth of the broader data space, and especially data tooling that isn’t directly concerning storage, makes it all the more worth considering.

And now with $25 million more, Monte Carlo can expand its current staff of 25, and keep attacking its mid-market and enterprise customer target. Let’s see how quickly it can scale, and how soon we can start squeezing the startup for growth numbers.

Polish video game maker CD Projekt, which makes Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher, has confirmed it was hit by a ransomware attack.

In a statement posted to its Twitter account, the company said it will “not give in nor negotiate” with the hackers, saying it has backups in place. “We have already secured our IT infrastructure and begun restoring data,” the company said.

According to the ransom note, the hackers said they would release the company’s stolen source code if it did not pay the ransom, since the company would “most likely recover from backups.”

But the company said for now that no personal data was taken. “We are still investigating the incident, however at this time we can confirm that — to our best knowledge — the compromised systems did not contain any personal data of our players or users of our services.”

It’s an increasingly hostile tactic used by ransomware actors. Hackers target high-value businesses and companies with file-encrypting malware and hold the files for a ransom. But since many companies have backups, some ransomware groups threaten to publish the stolen files unless the ransom is paid.

CD Projekt Red did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s questions, including what kind of ransomware was used to attack its systems.

It’s thought to be the second time in recent years that the company has been hit by ransomware. The game maker confirmed in 2017 that a hack resulted in the compromising of early work related to Cyberpunk 2077.

One of the original startups that set out to create a low-Earth orbit satellite constellation to provide a data network here on Earth is now open for business: Swarm, which now operates 81 of its sandwich-sized satellites on orbit, announced today that its network service is live and available to commercial customers.

Founded in 2017 by CEO Sara Spangelo and CTO Ben Longmier, Swarm has accomplished a lot in a relatively short time, culminating in its recent launch of 36 of its smalll satellites during SpaceX’s first ride-sharing rocket launch late last month. Now that those are all online and operational, Swarm is able to provide full global network coverage, with the ability to check in with connected devices on its network up to multiple times per day.

Swarm’s offering uses embedded modems also designed and built by the company – the Swarm Tile, a tiny, low-powered modem that’s designed for maximum compatibility. The network is low-power and low-bandwidth, meaning it’s ideally suited for situations that require relatively low amounts of data transfer, but on a regular frequency over very long durations. That describes a wide range of use cases, including in shipping in logistics, agriculture, and other Internet of Things (IoT ) deployments. The breadth of their customer base has actually been a surprise, and far outstripped the early vision for the startup.

“We actually started with the containership use case […] we talked a lot about how many containers there are in the world, how many ship there are in the world,” Spangelo told me in an interview. “We also knew that logistics, trucks, and agriculture would probably be interesting markets. But I’m frankly surprised not only how many verticals, this applies to – there’s a lot more in ag and global development and maritime than I probably ever anticipated – but also just the number of use cases within those industries.”

Spangelo is referring to the depth of the need for monitoring across the industries Swarm serves. So a client in green power wouldn’t want to just monitor the amount of power being generated by their turbines, but also to monitor the grid for power outgoing and power inbound. And in agriculture, industrial farms might want to monitor soil moisture levels, but also integrate Swarm connectivity in every single truck and tractor in operation in order to monitor their assets and their location. She also told me that vertically, she was surprised to discover just how many opportunities exist for low-bandwidth networks in construction, mining and in defense.

Swarm’s focus at this stage is strictly commercial, but Spangelo said that people have even approached the company to see if they can purchase a Swarm Tile and use it with an app with their phone for providing basic emergency connectivity while hiking. She says “they’re not quite” at the point where they have a commercially available product for consumers, but it’s an idea they’re working on.

One key aspect of Swarm’s business model is affordability: Its service is available for just $5 per month per connected device (with a one-time cost of $119 for each Swarm Tile itself), which is far below any other satellite service available today. Spangelo says that has meant they are seeing new customers not only in the form of switchers from other satellite network providers, but also from businesses entirely new to satellite connectivity – and for some of those, it’s changing what’s possible at a fundamental level.

“Take wineries – it’s a high-yield type of crop,” she said. “People want to monitor very accurately the moisture and soil. Traditionally, they’ve only been able to do that within cell range. So think of like Sonoma and Napa, cell connectivity is actually is really bad, because of the rolling hills. So now with Swarm you can have connectivity in those regions outside of cell, and provide that value, and much better knowledge and user data analytics to make much more informed business decisions, save water, save energy, save all those things.”

Some of these new use cases include projects like more finite weather and climate monitor to try to assist with efforts to control and contain wildfires, as well as providing detailed tracking of the cold storage chain required to safely and effectively transport COVID-19 vaccines. Spangelo says this is one of the most exciting aspects of Swarm reaching this commercialization stage – seeing what new opportunities are possible that just couldn’t be done before.

Discovery and research of new molecular compounds is an expensive business, with development costs exceeding $10 billion per substance in some cases. Part of that comes from the need to closely examine every relevant molecule, studying its chemical composition and interactions as well as its physical structure at the atomic level. Despite advances in software to help model these compounds and molecules, there are still challenges in fully understanding their shapes through a two-dimensional computer screen.

San Diego-based startup Nanome uses virtual reality to solve that problem. The idea for Nanome came out of CEO and Founder Steve McCloskey’s time in the nanoengineering program at UC San Diego, where he saw a need for a better understanding of three-dimensional molecular structures.

“Understanding structure empowers our users to understand how their designs function,” he wrote in an email. “Yet, the R&D process for drug discovery relies on 2D monitors, keyboard, and mouse, which limits the understanding of complex 3D structures or interactions and contributes to massive R&D costs averaging $2.5B per drug.”

Nanome recently closed a funding round led by Bullpen Capital for $3 million to establish new business partnerships, build up the company’s brand, and expand their science and engineering team. “Nanome is reimagining the way we interact with science at a time when innovation in collaboration is more important than ever before,” said Bullpen Capital General Partner Ann Lai in a press release. Formic Ventures, led by Oculus co-founder Michael Antonov, also took part in the round.

McCloskey thinks that Nanome’s platform has become even more relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic, as researchers might be forced to work remotely on occasion, limiting their access to in-lab technology and software.

“Nanome helps scientists get on the same page quicker,” he wrote in an email. “Traditionally scientists working with molecules use screenshots or screen sharing, and rely on the mouse cursor and Zoom to communicate their insights and ask for feedback from other team members.” Nanome streamlines this process by bringing researchers to the same virtual reality space to work on molecule development together.

So far, Nanome has worked largely on projects with companies in the food and beverage industry, as well as another to develop more sustainable batteries. But they have plans to use this new funding to expand into pharmaceutical chemistry, synthetic biology, and even education. Their next product update will feature what McCloskey calls ‘Spatial Recording,’ that will allow users to record their work for later review – basically a screen recording but with a VR experience. “This is not only an amazing feature for asynchronous collaboration among researchers, it is also useful for producing lectures and lessons,” he wrote in an email.

Emergency response services have been one of the unsung heroes of the last chaotic year, providing essential and urgent medical and other assistance during a period that has faced not just the usual run of natural and man-made disasters, but a global health pandemic to boot.

Today, a startup that is building tools to make it easier for emergency response teams to do their jobs by providing them with more immediate data about callers and their circumstances, is announcing a big round of funding as it continues to grow.

RapidSOS, which has built a data platform for emergency response services, has closed a Series C of $85 million, money that it will be using to build in more integrations to provide its customers with better and bigger data sets, and to continue expanding its operations after providing data to assist in addressing some 150 million emergencies in 2020 — which works out to some 400,000 emergencies per day.

These included not just responses to sudden downturns for Covid-19-stricken people, but also natural disasters and helping in related situations when other problems arose. For example, it stepped in to provide data when the Nashville bombing took out a portion of 911 infrastructure on Christmas Day, affecting 300 agencies.

The round is being led by Insight, with other unnamed investors participating. Valuation is not being disclosed, CEO and co-founder Michael Martin said, but it has now raised $200 million.

The round comes also on the heels of the company raising $21 million just in June of last year.

Founded in New York, RapidSOS has expanded in the last year to operations in Mexico, where it now covers some 70% of consumers working alongside first responders and partnerships with Google and Uber (which provide location and ride sharing data).

To add to that, today it is formally opening for business in the U.K., in partnership with MedicAlert, which has been working with the company quietly in the past year.

The opportunity it’s tackling in the U.K. is similar to what RapidSOS identified and built on in the U.S.

As in RapidSOS’s home country, the average home has 9 connected devices — from smartphones and smart watches through to alarm systems and smart speakers — and the idea will be to bring more of the data that these amass about a user’s location, medical statistics, and more to provide a basic level of data so that when people call 999 (the U.K.’s equivalent of 911) for an urgent service, the conversation can quickly progress to finer details in what is a very fragmented market for emergency information.

“Generally, you are going from a world where 911 didn’t even know your name, so giving responders a name or location can shave critical seconds off response times,” said Martin.

In the U.S., RapidSOS now works with over 4,800 emergency communications centers, which together cover some 92% of the population, integrating with whatever software they happen to use to manager their services (we covered one of its partners recently, Carbyne, which itself raised $25 million last month). Its platform brings in and consolidates data from some 350 million connected devices.

Martin likens the challenge that RapidSOS is setting out to address to that of an hour glass. “There are now close to 20 billion devices out there with critical information, and at the bottom is advanced software systems to work with that, but between is the 1960s voice infrastructure,” he said. “So the challenge is to get between one and the other, but also to be able to get on the phone with someone in need and have a coherent conversation.” 

The company is doing more than just connecting providers with data: it’s also trying to build a platform to make it easier for more of the companies holding data to contribute it in a more effective and useful way — a need that arose, Martin said, in the last year as companies approached RapidSOS asking how they could help.

That led to the startup working with the American Heart Association, the American Red Cross and Direct Relief, to launch the Emergency Health Profile, which will allow people (starting in the U.S.) to opt into sharing more background health information to first responders by creating a profile associated with a person’s mobile number.

This complement’s RapidSOS’s existing business model and sources of real-time diagnostic data, with the aim to provide a more complete picture of a person and his or her problems, which as we have said before is something of a Holy Grail in the medical world, providing obvious benefits but also many challenges in terms of data protection and privacy longer term.

“Insight has a history of backing category-defining companies, and RapidSOS has all the makings of one in the emergency response space,” said Nikitas Koutoupes, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. “We are excited to have our team of software ScaleUp and platform experts help drive RapidSOS’ mission.”

French startup Homa Games has raised a $15 million seed round led by e.ventures and Idinvest Partners. The company has built several in-house technologies that can take a game from a prototype to an App Store success. It partners with third-party game studios and has a few in-house game studios as well.

OneRagtime, Jean-Marie Messier, Vladimir Lasocki, John Cheng and Alexis Bonillo are also participating in today’s funding round. This is quite a big funding round, but Homa Games already has some impressive metrics.

For instance, the startup’s games have been downloaded 250 million times overall since the creation of the company in 2018. It has signed an IP partnership with Hasbro to launch a Nerf-themed game that has been working quite well. Other games include Sky Roller, Idle World and Tower Color.

Home Games has developed three products in particular to optimize mobile game creation. Homa Lab helps you learn more about the competitive landscape with market intelligence and testing tools. Homa Belly is an SDK that helps you iterate and manage your game. And Homa Data optimizes monetization using data for both in-app purchases and ads.

Third-party developers can submit their games and choose Homa Games as their publisher. Both companies agree on a revenue-sharing model.

In addition to third-party games, Homa Games has also acquired IRL Team in Toulouse and has in-house game development teams in Skopje, Lisbon and Paris. Overall, there are 80 people working for Homa Games.

Benoist Grossmann from Idinvest Partners and Jonathan Userovici from e.ventures are both joining the board of the company.

Four years ago when Zach Jones went to do due diligence on C-Zero, a startup out of Santa Barbara, Calif. commercializing a new approach to producing hydrogen, for the small family office he was working for, he had no idea he’d wind up as the company’s chief executive officer.

Or that the company would wind up raising money from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the billionaire backed investment vehicle focused on financing companies developing technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and some of the world’s largest industrial and oil and gas companies.

At the time, Jones was working for Beryllium Capital, a small investment office out of South Dakota, and had identified a potential investment opportunity in C-Zero, a company commercializing a new way of making hydrogen developed by Eric McFarland, a professor at UCSB.

There was only one problem — McFarland had the research, but didn’t know how to run a company. That’s when Jones stepped in. His firm didn’t make the investment, but when the former Economist science writer took over, the company was able to nab a seed round from PG&E and SoCal Gas, California’s two massive utilities.

The reason for their investments is the same reason Breakthrough Energy Ventures became interested in the young company. Even with renewable energy production coming on line at a breakneck pace, much of the world will still be using fossil fuels for the foreseeable future and the greenhouse gas emissions from that fossil fuel production needs to go to zero.

C-Zero is developing a technology that converts natural gas to hydrogen, a much cleaner source of fuel, and solid carbon as the only waste stream for use in electrical generation, process heating and the production of commodity chemicals like hydrogen and ammonia. 

“Our CTO talks about running a coal mine in reverse,” Jones said.

The company’s technology is a form of methane pyrolysis, which uses a proprietary chemical catalyst to separate the hydrogen gas from other particles, leaving behind that solid carbon waste. The process, which is neither waste free (there’s that solid carbon) nor renewable (the feedstock is natural gas), is cleaner than current low-cost methods of hydrogen production and far cheaper than the more renewable ways of making hydrogen.

Making renewable hydrogen requires making electricity to send a charge through water to split the liquid into hydrogen and oxygen. And it takes far more energy to pull a hydrogen atom off of an oxygen atom than it does to split that hydrogen from a carbon atom.

“The reason that hydrogen is interesting is that it is a great supplement to intermittent renewables,” said Jones. “It’s really about energy storage… when you look at long duration storage on a daily and seasonal basis… it becomes exorbitantly expensive. Having a chemical fuel is going to be critical part of decarbonizing everything.”

Jones describes the technology as “pre-combustion carbon capture”, and thinks that it could be critical to unlocking the benefits of hydrogen for a range of industrial applications including heavy vehicle fueling, utility power generation, and industrial power for manufacturing.

He’s not alone.

 “Over $100 billion of commodity hydrogen is produced annually,” said Carmichael Roberts, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the new lead investor in C-Zero’s $11.5 million funding. “Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of that production comes from a process called steam methane reforming, which also produces large quantities of CO2. Finding low cost, low emission methods of hydrogen production – such as the one C-Zero has created – will be critical to unlocking the molecule’s potential to decarbonize major segments of the agricultural, chemical, manufacturing and transportation sectors.”

Joining the Bill Gates-backed Breakthrough Energy Ventures in the new round is Eni Next, the investment arm of the Italian oil and gas and power company, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, and the hydrogen technology-focused venture firm, AP Ventures.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries already has an application for C-Zero’s technology. The company is in the process of re-powering an existing coal plant to run on a combination of natural gas and hydrogen by 2025. It’s possible that C-Zero’s technology could help get there.

Beyond the lower cost methods used in manufacturing hydrogen, C-Zero may be one of the first companies that could qualify for new tax credits on carbon sequestration established by the IRS in the U.S. earlier this year. Those credits would give qualifying companies $20 per ton of sequestered solid carbon — the exact waste product from C-Zero’s process.

Even as C-Zero begins commercializing its technology it faces some stiff competition from some of the largest chemical companies in the world.

The German chemicals giant BASF has been developing its own flavor of methane pyrolysis for nearly a decade and has begun building test facilities to scale up production of its own clean hydrogen.

And yesterday, two other big European corporations are also joining the hydrogen production game as the French chemicals company Air Liquide announced a joint venture with Siemens Energy to work on hydrogen production.

Jones acknowledges that the company’s technology is only a stopgap solution… for now. In the future, as the world moves to renewable natural gas production from waste, he envisions the potential of a potentially circular hydrogen economy.

“In 100 years will this technology be around? If it is it’ll be because we’re using renewable natural gas,” Jones said. There are a lot of steps that need to be traveled to get there, but Jones is confident in the near-term success of the project. 

“There’s always going to be  a need for a very energy dense fuel. Liquid hydrogen is the most energy dense thing that’s out there outside of something that’s nuclear in nature,” he said. “I think that hydrogen is here to stay. At the end of the day the lowest cost of energy that has the lowest cost for avoided CO2 is what’s going to win.”

SentinelOne, a late-stage security startup that helps customers make sense of security data using AI and machine learning, announced today that it is acquiring Scalyr, the high-speed logging startup for $155 million in stock and cash.

SentinelOne sorts through oodles of data to help customers understand their security posture, and having a tool that enables engineers to iterate rapidly in the data, and get to the root of the problem is going to be extremely valuable for them, CEO and co-founder Tomer Weingarten explained. “We thought Scalyr would be just an amazing fit to our continued vision in how we secure data at scale for every enterprise [customer] out there,” he told me.

He said they spent a lot of time shopping for a company that could meet their unique scaling needs and when they came across Scalyr, they saw the potential pretty quickly with a company that has built a real-time data lake. “When we look at the scale of our technology, we obviously scoured the world to find the best data analytics technology out there. We [believe] we found something incredibly special when we found a platform that can ingest data, and make it accessible in real time,” Weingarten explained.

He believes the real time element is a game changer because it enables customers to prevent breaches, rather than just reacting to them. “If you’re thinking about mitigating attacks or reacting to attacks, if you can do that in real time and you can process data in real time, and find the anomalies in real time and then meet them, you’re turning into a system that can actually deflect the attacks and not just see them and react to them,” he explained.

The company sees Scalyr as a product they can integrate into the platform, but also one which will remain a stand-alone. That means existing customers should be able to continue using Scalyr as before, while benefiting from having a larger company contributing to its R&D.

While SentinelOne is not a public company, it is a pretty substantial private one, having raised over $695 million, according to Crunchbase data. The company’s most recent funding round came in February last year, a $200 million investment with a $1.1 billion valuation.

As for Scalyr it was launched in 2011 by Steve Newman, who first built a word processor called Writely and sold it to Google in 2006. It was actually the basis for what became Google Docs. Newman stuck around and started building the infrastructure to scale Google Docs, and he used that experience and knowledge to build Scalyr. The startup raised $27 million along the way, according to Crunchbase data including a $20 million Series A investment in 2017.

The deal will close this quarter, and when it does Scalyr’s 45 employees will be joining SentinalOne.

Fabric, a startup powering e-commerce for companies like GNC and ABC Carpet and Home, has raised $43 million in Series A funding.

The announcement comes less than four months after Fabric announced its $9.5 million seed round. CEO Faisal Masud said Fabric hadn’t intended to raise more funding so quickly, but given its growth and investor interest, he  the startup’s leadership team had to ask, “Do we delay the growth or do we just go now?”

The answer is probably self-evident, since you’re reading this funding story. The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners, with Norwest’s Scott Beechuk joining Fabric’s board of directors. Redpoint Ventures and Sierra Ventures also participated.

“Fabric is the only headless commerce platform that combines the simplicity of drag-and-drop configuration with the power to create rich modern customer experiences, without the need for a large dev team,” Beechuk told me via email. “Most importantly, however, is the fact that Faisal (CEO) and [co-founder Ryan Bartley] are rockstar veterans of the e-commerce world from Amazon, eBay, Staples and Groupon. They empathize with their customers’ challenges and have the expertise to disrupt the mature e-commerce market with a significantly better product.”

E-commerce has grown rapidly during the pandemic, and there are a number of platforms offering a “headless” approach, which (as Masud explained in a blog post) separates the frontend and the backend of the shopping experience.

But Masud said there’s still “a large gap in the market today” when it comes to supporting large, growing brands, whether they’re direct-to-consumer or business-to-business.

“We like to say that Shopify Plus is our on-ramp and Salesforce Commerce Cloud is our off-ramp,” he said. In other words, Fabric serves businesses that have “outgrown Shopify Plus but don’t want to spend a fortune on Salesforce Commerce Cloud.”

To serve those customers, Fabric has built 32 separate applications which can be integrated with existing commerce tools, and which collectively cover everything from customer experience to product information and order management.

Masud argued that most other products billing themselves as headless e-commerce platforms are “jerry rigging themselves to become headless”.

“They were built in 2007, they’re not flexible or modular,” he said, adding that while older platforms might require 18 months to on-board a large customer, Fabric only requires weeks.

The startup isn’t discouraging its customers from having a presence on Amazon and other marketplaces, either. But Masud (who was previously director of AmazonBasics and AmazonWarehouse) said they need to build their own differentiated shopping experiences and their own direct relationship with consumers at the same time.

“I built AmazonBasics and AmazonBasics is coming for you,” he said. “We encourage them to differentiate and continue their journey as a marketplace, building a direct business with their customer.”

With the new funding, Fabric will be able to expand its sales and marketing team while also continuing to improve the product. Masud said he’s less interested in reaching larger or smaller customers, and more interested in expansion by “building out a bigger suite co-pilot apps,” for example by doing more to support order logistics and fulfillment.

The pandemic-fueled economic uncertainty of the last year has led many to project that the rate of credit defaults among consumers will continue to wobble into 2021. Today a startup that has built a platform to help consumers mitigate that situation is announcing some funding on the back of more demand for its services.

Symend, which builds behavioral analytics that integrate with customer engagement products to help identify customers having trouble paying bills, and then suggests payment alternatives to keep them from defaulting altogether, has picked up $43 million in funding.

The money is an extension to its Series B, closed in May of last year, bringing the total for the round to $95 million, and over $100 million for the Calgary, Canada startup since being founded in 2016.

Inovia Capital is leading this latest funding injection, with other unnamed investors participating.

Symend is not disclosing its valuation but Hanif Joshaghani, Symend’s CEO who co-founded the company with Tiffany Kaminsky (the startups CMO), said that it comes on the heels of a “massive uptick” among enterprises investing in solutions to help support customers finding it hard to meet payments.

“Customer uncertainty has been extremely high and service providers don’t have the capacity to support the mass volumes of inquiries in a way that effectively resonates with and empathetically reassures customers,” he said in an interview.

The startup has been working primarily with clients in telecommunications, financial services, utilities and media and claims to have two-thirds of the major telecommunications providers in North America, as well as a multinational bank, as customers.

Last year, Symend said it was on track to work with 100 million customers (that is, customers of its clients) by the end of 2020, and we are asking the company whether it has passed that number.

The startup’s aim is twofold: it identifies when their customers are having trouble paying bills, and offers those customers alternatives beyond simple deferrals, which for many just put off addressing the issue.

At the same time, Symend’s solution is not just about avoiding deferrals: the company’s solutions aim to provide assistance and alternatives to companies that are seeing an overwhelming amount of traffic in its customer service operations.

Deferrals, however, remain a key point: Most service providers have been offering deferral periods this past year as their first-line approach to avoiding defaults. But Joshaghani said he believes that deferrals “can provide a false sense of financial security for customers.”

That, in part, is because those customers are usually deferring more than one bill.

A survey the company conducted in July among 500 of its users found a 27% increase in people falling behind in bill payments between April and July 2020, with those falling behind typically doing so on an average of three bills: 55% on at least one loan; 37% were behind on mortgage/rent; 21% were behind on their line of credit; 52% were behind on credit card payments.

Missing payments, and any personal financial trouble, is usually tied in with more than simply not having money: there can be job losses, illness, family trouble, and much more behind why someone finds himself or herself missing a bill deadline.

Symend therefore tries to take a sensitive approach both to identifying when problems are arising, and addressing them.

“Given that Symend’s primary goal is to save customers from negative outcomes, we deployed strategies with our clients to ensure customers felt supported and empowered to act and avoid bills piling up through the deferral period,” Joshaghani noted. “By engaging customers with empathetic communications, self-serve tools and flexible repayment options, Symend has helped leading enterprises provide customers with a positive experience in an otherwise highly uncertain and stressful time. By empowering customers to act through digital tools, Symend alleviates pressure from overwhelmed call centres, increases customer satisfaction, lowers operating costs and helps customers resolve past due bills before they reach collections.”

As we have described before, Symend’s staff is around 25% behavioral science PhDs, but it does not go into a lot of detail about how it works, or the approach that it takes in evaluating customers. It uses data from businesses themselves, and combines that with third-party resources (not unlike the data trove that many AI-based fintechs might use to, say, weigh up the eligibility of a person for a particular loan at a particular interest rate).

Kaminsky notes that the last year of business has seen the company make more investments into its algorithms and analytics.

“Using our behaviorally informed algorithms, Symend can identify and distinguish between key variations in customer behavior to personalize and optimize interactions based on the unique preferences of the individual,” she said. “Symend’s AI/ML model takes this a step further by combining insights from customer interactions with historical data on actions taken. These insights help Symend discover underlying psychological and behavioral traits to determine which engagement strategies will positively shape behavior.”

Then to capture customer sentiment and further iterate on these strategies, she says that Symend uses NLP processing models to automatically categorize sentiment based on provided responses to communications and within self-serve tools. “Our metrics are shaped with the end goal of building a consistently positive brand experience that extends far beyond past due bills, which is why our AI/ML model uses sentiment analysis and engagement scoring,” she said. “This ultimately ensures that communications resonate with the customer’s unique and evolving needs, creating a consistently positive experience that retains customers.”

Going ahead, the company is going to use the funding to continue hiring, in particular internationally, with a focus on opening up operations in Latin Americas and Asia-Pacific regions. It’s also going to be investing in expanding its products to include customer retention and acquisition tools, alongside more investment in expanding its product to help people avoid defaults on bills.

“We are big believers in Symend’s mission to add lasting value to enterprises, by helping their customers avoid collections,” said Dennis Kavelman, Partner at Inovia Capital, in a statement. “Their approach is differentiated and effective because it combines behavioral science and data science to drive a personalized approach for each customer. With this new investment, Symend is well funded to execute its strategy of scaling globally, and to partner with large enterprises in many industries.”