Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Uncapped, the London-headquartered and Warsaw-based startup that offers “revenue-based” finance to European businesses so that founders don’t have to give up equity stipulated by venture capital, has raised £26 million in new funding.

The round was led by Mouro Capital (the recently spun-out fund previously called Santander InnoVentures), with participation from existing investors Global Founders Capital, Seedcamp and White Star Capital. Various angel investors have also backed Uncapped, including Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise), Christian Faes (LendInvest), David Nolan & Kevin Glynn (Butternut Box) and Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas (GoCardless).

Founded last year by “serial entrepreneur” Asher Ismail (who was most recently CEO of Midrive) and former VC Piotr Pisarz, Uncapped has set out to use various marketing, sales and accounting data to be able to offer finance for young businesses based on their current (and projected) revenue. It was born out of the pair’s own frustrations with the limited funding options available to European entrepreneurs, namely equity-based or traditional debt financing.

Framed as a third option, Uncapped provides what it terms “growth finance” in return for a flat fee as low as 6%. Businesses only repay the capital as they generate revenue, “with no set repayment date and no compounding interest, equity or personal guarantees”.

It was originally pitched as being particularly suited to revenue-generating companies wishing to invest in online marketing to grow sales more quickly, but has since widened its target to other scenarios.

“When we launched, we knew selling equity to buy Facebook and Google ads was a bad deal for founders,” says Ismail. “So this is where we focused and mainly funded companies for advertising and inventory. Since then we’ve set out to help companies get funding for any purpose including launching a new product, expanding internationally, or growing the team”.

Post-launch and through refining its technology, Uncapped has sped up the time it takes to make a lending decision from three days to a few hours. Once financing has been agreed, the startup can also now issue Visa cards so founders can start spending funds immediately.

“With this new investment round, we’ve also started funding earlier-stage companies with only six months of revenue history (previously our minimum was nine months),” says Ismail. “We’ve also doubled the amount we can advance at one time to £2 million. So now more companies can access funding for more use cases, and faster”.

Asked how the coronavirus pandemic has affected the way Uncapped evaluates risk, where past revenue performance may not be a reliable indicator going forward, Pisarz says a recession in some ways is the best time to build a credit model, “as everyone else’s models are now irrelevant”.

“Whereas other online lenders depend on personal guarantees and the founder’s own credit history as the main drivers of their risk models, we use live data about the company’s actual trading to make our decisions,” he tells me. “When the pandemic hit, we were able to access the real-time data about how our portfolio was performing, make quick decisions and continue to issue credit, where others were forced to pull back. Our number of investments and the returns have since grown exponentially”.

To boot, Pisarz says Uncapped has continued to upgrade its underwriting technology, and having now seen how different business models adjust to more challenging times, it has built more confidence in its underwriting.

“Unlike a VC, we need our whole portfolio to succeed, not just a few that make up for the losses of the others. So we need to have a lot of certainty in our decision making,” he concedes.

“Equity was the most expensive way to fund digital ad spend and repeatable growth, and as fundraising has become even harder due to the pandemic, it has only become more expensive,” adds Ismail. “So our sweet spot continues to be direct-to-consumer products and other fast-monetising startups that generate between £10,000-£2 million of monthly sales, have healthy unit economics and want to avoid diluting their founders and existing investors.

“For businesses that are still in the R&D stage or need more time to get to market, venture is still a good solution, but for businesses who are already live, have predictable customer acquisition costs, and repeatable growth, we know we are a better option”.

For the first time in more than 20 years since Apple began its operations in India, the iPhone-maker has started selling its products directly to consumers in the world’s second largest smartphone market.

Apple launched its online store in India on Wednesday, which in addition to offering nearly the entire line-up of its products, also brings a range of services for the first time to consumers in the country.

Consumers in India can now purchase AppleCare+, which extends warranty on products, and access the trade-in program to get a discount on new hardware purchases. The company said it will also offer customers support through chat or telephone, and let users consult its team of specialists before they make a purchase.

The company is also offering customers the ability to pay for their new purchases in monthly instalments. TechCrunch reported in January that the company was planning to open its online store in India in the quarter that ends in September. The company plans to open its first physical retail store in the country next year, it has said.

Jayanth Kolla, chief analyst at consultancy firm Convergence Catalyst, argued that the launch of the Apple’s online store in India is a bigger deal for the company than the consumers in the country.

Apple typically starts investing in marketing, brand building and other investments in a market only after it launches a store there, he told TechCrunch.

Apple does oversee billboards and ads of iPhones and other products that are displayed in India, but it’s the third-party partners that are running and bankrolling them, said Kolla. “Apple might provide some marketing dollars, but those efforts are always led by their partners,” he said.

In recent years, Apple has visibly grown more interested in India, one of the world’s fastest growing smartphones markets. The company’s contract manufacturers today locally assemble the latest generation of iPhone models and some accessories — an effort the company kickstarted two years ago.

The move has allowed Apple to lower prices of some iPhone models in India, where for years the company has passed custom duty charges to customers. The starting price of iPhone 11 Pro Max is $1,487 in India, compared to $1,099 in the U.S. The AirPods Pro, which sells at $249 in the U.S., was made available in India at $341 at the time of launch.

More to follow…

The September 20 deadline for a purported TikTok sale has already passed, but the parties involved have yet to settle terms on the deal. ByteDance and TikTok’s bidders Oracle and Walmart presented conflicting messages on the future ownership of the app, confusing investors and users. Meanwhile, Beijing’s discontent with the TikTok sale is increasingly obvious.

China has no reason to approve the “dirty” and “unfair” deal that allows Oracle and Walmart to effectively take over TikTok based on “bullying and extortion,” slammed an editorial published Wednesday in China Daily, an official English-language newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party.

The editorial argued that TikTok’s success — a projected revenue of about a billion dollars by the end of 2020 — “has apparently made Washington feel uneasy” and prompted the U.S. to use “national security as the pretext to ban the short video sharing app.”

The official message might stir mixed feelings within ByteDance, which has along the way tried to prove its disassociation from the Chinese authority, a precondition for the companies’ products to operate freely in Western countries.

Beijing has already modified a set of export rules to complicate the potential TikTok deal, restricting the sale of certain AI-technologies to foreign companies. Both ByteDance and China’s state media have said the agreement won’t involve technological transfers.

The Trump Administration said it would ban downloads of TikTok, which boasts 100 million users in the country, if an acceptable deal was not reached. It also planned to shut down Tencent’s WeChat, a decision just got blocked by a district court in San Francisco.

TikTok has collected nearly 198 million App Store and Google Play installs in the U.S. while WeChat has been installed by nearly 22 million users in the U.S. since 2014, according to market research firm Sensor Tower. Unlike TikTok, which has a far-reaching user base in the U.S., WeChat is mainly used by Chinese-speaking communities or those with connections in China, where the messenger is the dominant chat app and most Western alternatives are blocked.

Right before the proposed September 20 deadline for the app bans, China’s Commerce Ministry called on the U.S. to “give up its bullying acts” towards the video app and messenger or face Beijing’s countermeasures to “safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies.”

After the U.S. announced a series of detrimental curbs on telecoms equipment giant Huawei last year, China vowed to publish an “unreliable entity list” targeting foreign companies and individuals that “do not comply with market rules” and “seriously damage the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises,” but it has yet to reveal the list.

Dhruv Arora, the founder and CEO of Singapore-based investment platform Syfe

Syfe, a Singapore-based startup that wants to make investing more accessible in Asia, announced today that it has closed a SGD $25.2 million (USD $18.6 million) Series A led by Valar Ventures, a fintech-focused investment firm.

The round also included participation from Presight Capital and returning investor Unbound, which led Syfe’s seed funding last year.

Syfe serves customers based in 23 countries, but currently only actively markets it services in Singapore, where it is licensed under the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Part of its new funding will be used to expand into new Asian countries. The startup hasn’t disclosed its exact user numbers, but says the number of its customers and assets under management have increased tenfold since the beginning of the year, and almost half of its new clients were referred by existing users.

Other Valar Ventures portfolio companies include TransferWise, Xero and digital bank N26. In a statement about Syfe, founding partner Andrew McCormack said, “The potential of Asia as a region, with a fast-growing number of mass-affluent consumers aiming to grow their wealth, combined with the pedigree of the team and strong traction, makes Syfe a very compelling opportunity.”

Founded in 2017 by chief executive officer Dhruv Arora, Syfe launched in July 2019. Like “robo-advisors” Robinhood, Acorns and Stash, Syfe’s goal is to make investing more accessible. There is no minimum amount required to start investing and its all-inclusive pricing structure ranges from .4% to .65% per year.

Before starting Syfe, Arora was an investment banker at UBS Investment Bank in Hong Kong before serving as vice president of product and growth at Grofers, one of India’s largest online grocery delivery services. While at UBS, Arora worked with exchange-traded funds, or ETFs.

“I could see how a lot of institutions and some ultra-high-net worth individuals who are clients of the bank were using the product, and I thought it was a great tool for individuals, too,” Arora told TechCrunch. “But what I realized was that people are actually not very aware of how to use ETFs.”

In many Asian countries, people prefer to put their money away in bank accounts or invest in real estate. As interest rates and property prices stagnate, however, consumers are looking for other ways to invest. Syfe currently offers three investment products. The first is a global diversified portfolio with a mix of stocks, bonds and ETFs that is automatically managed according to each investor’s chosen risk level. The second is a REIT portfolio based on the Singapore Exchange’s iEdge S-REIT Leaders Index. Finally, Syfe’s Equity100 portfolio consists of ETFs that include stocks from more than 1,500 companies around the world.

Other Asia-focused “robo-advisor” services include Stashaway and Kristal.ai, and Grab Financial also recently announced a “micro-investment” product. Arora acknowledges that in the future, there may be more entrants to the space. Right now, however, Syfe’s main competitor is the mindset that banks are still the best way to save money, he added. Part of Syfe’s work is consumer education, because “it was culturally ingrained in a lot of us, myself included, to keep your money in the bank.”

Syfe differentiates with a team of financial advisors, including former employees of Goldman Sachs, Citibank and Morgan Stanley, who are on hand for user consultations. Arora said most Syfe users talk to advisors when they first join the platform, and about 20% of them continue using the service. Questions have included if people should use a credit card to invest, which Arora said advisors dissuade them from doing because of high interest rates.

“We definitely want to be a tech-first platform, but we understand there is a value, especially as you deal with some of the older audiences who are in their 50s and 60s, who are still adapting to these technologies,” he said. “They need to know that you know there is somebody out there to look after their products.”

While Syfe’s average user is aged between 30 to 45, one growing bracket is people in their 50s who are motivated to save for retirement, or want to create a supplement to their pension plan. Users typically start with an initial investment of about SGD $10,000 (about USD $7,340), and about four out of five users regularly top up that amount.

Some users have tried other investment products, like investment-linked insurance plans, but for many, Arora says Syfe is their first introduction to investing in stocks, bonds and ETFs.

“We’ve realized that a fair number of them are quite well-to-do professionals in their field, in their mid- to late 30s, who amassed a significant amount of wealth but never really had a chance to invest, or the right advice on how to invest,” said Arora. “I think this has been one of the biggest revelations for us and it made us realize we should have a human touch in our platform.”

The platform manages its products with a mix of an investment team and algorithms that help avoid human bias, said Arora. Syfe’s algorithms take into account growth versus value, the market cap of a stock, volatility and sector momentum. To balance risk, it also analyzes how individual assets correlate with other assets in the same portfolio.

Arora said Syfe is currently in advanced talks with regulators in several countries and expects to be in at least two new markets by the end of next year. It also plans to double the size of its team and create more consumer financial products.

During COVID-19, Arora said Syfe’s portfolios experienced significantly lower corrections than indexes like the S&P, so only a few users withdrew their money. In fact, many invested more.

“I feel people have been rethinking their finances and the future,” he said. “As banks cut interest rates across the world, including in Singapore, many of them have started looking at other options.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed Tuesday the Model S Plaid, the newest variant to the company’s flagship sedan that boasts some eye-popping performance and range claims, including the ability to travel at least 520 miles on a single charge.

The Model S with this more powerful “Plaid” powertrain won’t be available until late 2021.  Tesla, however, has already opened up orders for the vehicle that starts just a skosh under $140,000.

In September 2019, Musk tweeted that “the only thing beyond Ludicrous is Plaid,” a teaser to a higher-performing vehicle and a nod to the movie “Spaceballs.” At the time, Musk said the new powertrain would go into production in about a year, which is right about now.

However, during the reveal, which was tucked in among the company’s so-called Battery Day, Musk announced that the Model S Plaid would go into production in late 2021. The Tesla website, which requires a $1,000 refundable deposit, says deliveries will begin in late 2021.

This new Plaid powertrain will have three motors, one more than the dual-motor system found in today’s Model S and X. The end result is a faster, longer range and more expensive version of the Model S. The powertrain produces 1,100 horsepower, achieves a top speed of 200 mph and can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in under 2 seconds, Musk said.

Last year Musk had indicated the Plaid powertrain would also be available in the Model X and the upcoming Roadster. Musk made no mention of whether these models would receive the beefier powertrain.

Musk showed a clip of the Model S Plaid at the Laguna Sega raceway completing a lap in 1:30.3. That’s a six-second improvement over a test Tesla made on its Plaid powertrain and chassis prototype last year.

Image Credits: Screenshot/Tesla

Amid a packed afternoon of announcements from Tesla around innovations the company is pursuing to slash the cost of electric vehicle production and energy storage through better battery design, the company said it’s made new advancements in material science for anodes and cathodes — key components of the lithium-ion batteries that are the heart of all of its products.

Tesla took an all-of-the-above approach to improving its battery from the manufacturing process that is still under development to the materials used in cathode and anode, the basic building blocks of any battery system.

The upshot: a reduction in cost of the cathode and anode materials, while boosting performance that on its own could extend the range of its batteries by 20%, Tesla said.

On the anode side, the company is looking at ways to integrate more silicon into its batteries by using metallurgical grade silicon. One of the most abundant materials on earth, most of the silicon used in microchips, batteries, and even solar panels has been highly processed using expensive treatments to make it work for different applications. With batteries, the issue is its propensity to degrade when it’s fully charged with lithium.

“With silicon, the cookie crumbles and gets gooey,” said Elon Musk during the company’s “battery day” presentation. That gooeyness means that the material loses its energy retention and storage capacity. Every time a battery charges, the degradation means shorter life cycles for the battery.

That’s why most companies use some sort of treatment on silicon to make the material hardier — or use as little silicon as possible in their batteries. “They enable some of the benefits of silicon, but they don’t enable all of it and they’re not scalable enough,” said Andrew Baglino, the company’s SVP of powertrain and energy engineering.

Instead of throwing the silicon out, Tesla said it is working with a new treatment method that can take cheap, metallurgical grade silicon and incorporate that into its new battery designs.

“What we’re proposing is a step-change in capability and a step-change in cost and to go to the raw metallurgical silicon itself,” said Baglino. “Design for it to expand [and] think of it in the electrode design … If you use simple silicon it is dramatically less than the silicon that is used in batteries today.

Baglino expects that by using new treatment methods, the company could drop the cost to $1.20 a kilowatt hour.

That involves starting with raw, metallurgical silicon that’s stabilized with a low-cost, elastic, ion-conducting polymer that’s integrated into the electrode with a highly elastic binder. 

That innovation alone could increase the range of Tesla vehicles by 20%. “When we take that anode cost production, we’re look at a 5% dollar-per-kilowatt reduction at the battery pack level,” Baglino said.

But the company doesn’t intend to stop at the anode. It’s also looking at using different material science innovations to increase the efficiency of the cathode too.

Both the anode and the cathode need to be able to maintain their structure while having charged particles bounce off of them. They’re basically storage containers for electricity even as that electricity is moving around — charging and discharging.

Baglino and Musk likened the materials to bookshelves, where the charged particles are the books and the shelves are the cathodes.

Batteries in this analogy are basically libraries, where the cathodes store the books and the anodes are the librarians moving the books (energy) out into the world where they can be read or used (I think I’ve taken that analogy about as far as it can go).

“You need a stable structure to contain the ions. You want a structure that hold its shape with ion. As you move the ion back and forth you lose cycle life and your battery capacity drops very quickly,” said Musk. 

Several different materials can be used as cathodes, but the cheapest, by far, is nickel. It also has the highest energy density. But most batteries use cobalt because it’s a more stable material.

Tesla said today that it is working on a way to stabilize nickel for use as a more robust storage material. That means the nickel can store the energy (books) without the risk of toppling or degrading.

“We can get a 15% reduction in cathode dollar per kilowatt hour,” said Baglino.

Musk said that Tesla wouldn’t be throwing out its existing chemistries, but that the addition of new nickel-based batteries would enable the company to pursue some of its other goals.

“We need to have a three-tiered approach to batteries,” Musk said. “Iron — medium range, nickel manganese as medium-plus, and high nickel for the Cybertruck and the Semi.”

Amid a packed afternoon of announcements from Tesla around innovations the company is pursuing to slash the cost of electric vehicle production and energy storage through better battery design, the company said it’s made new advancements in material science for anodes and cathodes — key components of the lithium-ion batteries that are the heart of all of its products.

Tesla took an all-of-the-above approach to improving its battery from the manufacturing process that is still under development to the materials used in cathode and anode, the basic building blocks of any battery system.

The upshot: a reduction in cost of the cathode and anode materials, while boosting performance that on its own could extend the range of its batteries by 20%, Tesla said.

On the anode side, the company is looking at ways to integrate more silicon into its batteries by using metallurgical grade silicon. One of the most abundant materials on earth, most of the silicon used in microchips, batteries, and even solar panels has been highly processed using expensive treatments to make it work for different applications. With batteries, the issue is its propensity to degrade when it’s fully charged with lithium.

“With silicon, the cookie crumbles and gets gooey,” said Elon Musk during the company’s “battery day” presentation. That gooeyness means that the material loses its energy retention and storage capacity. Every time a battery charges, the degradation means shorter life cycles for the battery.

That’s why most companies use some sort of treatment on silicon to make the material hardier — or use as little silicon as possible in their batteries. “They enable some of the benefits of silicon, but they don’t enable all of it and they’re not scalable enough,” said Andrew Baglino, the company’s SVP of powertrain and energy engineering.

Instead of throwing the silicon out, Tesla said it is working with a new treatment method that can take cheap, metallurgical grade silicon and incorporate that into its new battery designs.

“What we’re proposing is a step-change in capability and a step-change in cost and to go to the raw metallurgical silicon itself,” said Baglino. “Design for it to expand [and] think of it in the electrode design … If you use simple silicon it is dramatically less than the silicon that is used in batteries today.

Baglino expects that by using new treatment methods, the company could drop the cost to $1.20 a kilowatt hour.

That involves starting with raw, metallurgical silicon that’s stabilized with a low-cost, elastic, ion-conducting polymer that’s integrated into the electrode with a highly elastic binder. 

That innovation alone could increase the range of Tesla vehicles by 20%. “When we take that anode cost production, we’re look at a 5% dollar-per-kilowatt reduction at the battery pack level,” Baglino said.

But the company doesn’t intend to stop at the anode. It’s also looking at using different material science innovations to increase the efficiency of the cathode too.

Both the anode and the cathode need to be able to maintain their structure while having charged particles bounce off of them. They’re basically storage containers for electricity even as that electricity is moving around — charging and discharging.

Baglino and Musk likened the materials to bookshelves, where the charged particles are the books and the shelves are the cathodes.

Batteries in this analogy are basically libraries, where the cathodes store the books and the anodes are the librarians moving the books (energy) out into the world where they can be read or used (I think I’ve taken that analogy about as far as it can go).

“You need a stable structure to contain the ions. You want a structure that hold its shape with ion. As you move the ion back and forth you lose cycle life and your battery capacity drops very quickly,” said Musk. 

Several different materials can be used as cathodes, but the cheapest, by far, is nickel. It also has the highest energy density. But most batteries use cobalt because it’s a more stable material.

Tesla said today that it is working on a way to stabilize nickel for use as a more robust storage material. That means the nickel can store the energy (books) without the risk of toppling or degrading.

“We can get a 15% reduction in cathode dollar per kilowatt hour,” said Baglino.

Musk said that Tesla wouldn’t be throwing out its existing chemistries, but that the addition of new nickel-based batteries would enable the company to pursue some of its other goals.

“We need to have a three-tiered approach to batteries,” Musk said. “Iron — medium range, nickel manganese as medium-plus, and high nickel for the Cybertruck and the Semi.”

A little more than a year ago, during Tesla’s 2019 shareholder’s meeting, CEO Elon Musk said the company “might get into the business of mining minerals used in electric vehicle batteries.”

Today, during Tesla’s so-called Battery Day event, Musk confirmed that the company is officially getting into the mining business.

Tesla has secured the rights to a 10,000-acre lithium clay deposit in Nevada, Musk said during the event.

The lithium mine is just one piece of Tesla’s broader plan to build a cheaper, more efficient battery that will ultimately allow it to lower the price of its vehicles. It’s also another example of Tesla bringing its supply chain closer to its home.

Musk and Drew Baglino, the SVP of powertrain and energy engineering at Tesla, laid out the company’s plans and progress to eventually have 10 to 20 terawatt hours of annual battery production. At the heart of that plan is a new tabless battery cell that the company introduced at the event. But Baglino and Musk outlined other pieces to this larger mission, including a new manufacturing system that is still under development and plans to build infrastructure to support it.

The lithium mine as well as a cathode facility, both of which will be in North America, will be two new additions to Tesla’s growing portfolio of factories and operations.

“We’re gonna go and start building our own cathode facility in North America and leveraging all of the North American resources that exist for nickel and lithium, and just doing that just localizing our cathode supply chain and production, we can reduce miles traveled by all the materials that end up in the cathode by 80%,” Baglino said.

Next to the cathode plant will be a lithium conversion facility, according to Baglino, who added that the company is working on a new sulfate-free process that he claimed will reduce lithium costs by 33%.

It’s unclear where the cathode plant will be located. However, if the aim is to bring the supply chain close together, it might end up being next to the plot of lithium clay that Tesla recently bought the mining rights to.

Mining the reactive alkali metal does have an environmental cost. But Musk claims the company has found a better process. Traditionally, mining lithium takes a lot of water. Miners will drill a hole in the land and pump brine to the surface where it’s then left to evaporate. What’s left is a mix of minerals like manganese and lithium salts. Those continue to be filtered until the lithium can be extracted.

Musk said they have a new process that can extract the lithium from ore using sodium chloride, or table salt.

“Nobody’s done this before, to the best of my knowledge, nobody’s done this,” Musk said, adding that all of the elements in the process are reusable. “It’s a very sustainable way of obtaining lithium.” He then said the land where the mining will take place “will look pretty much the same as before.”

Tesla held its ‘Battery Day’ event on Tuesday to discuss a variety of innovations it has developed and is pursuing in battery technology for its vehicles. At the event, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and SVP of Powertrain and Energy Engineering Drew Baglino detailed new anode and cathode technology it’s working on, as well as materials science, in-house mining operations and manufacturing improvements it’s developing to make more more affordable, sustainable batteries – and they said that taken together, these should allow them to make an electric vehicle available to consumers at the $25,000 price point.

“We’re confident we can make a very, very compelling $25,000 electric vehicle, that’s also fully autonomous,” Musk said. “And when you think about the $25,000 price point you have to consider how much less expensive it is to own an electric vehicle. So actually, it becomes even more affordable at that $25,000 price point.”

This isn’t the first time that Musk has talked about the $25,000 price point for a Tesla car: Two years ago in August 2018, he said that he believed the company would be able to reach that target price point in roughly three years. Two years on, it seems like the goal posts have been pushed out again – fairly standard for an Elon-generated timeline – since Musk and Baglino acknowledged that it would be another two or three years before the company could realize the technologies it presented in sufficient quantities to be produced effectively at scale.

Tesla detailed a new, tablets battery cell design that would help it achieve its goal of reaching 10 to 20 terawatts of global battery production capacity per year. The design offers five times the energy density of the existing cells it uses, as well as six times the power and an overall 16% improvement in range for vehicles in which it’s used.

TransferWise, a European fintech unicorn, announced the financial results of its fiscal year ending March, 2020.

The company posted strong growth, continued profit and new customer records. TransferWise was most recently valued at $5 billion during a secondary sale worth $319 million in July of this year.

On the results front, we can compare the company’s March 2020 year to its March 2019 year, the results of which we also have available. Here are the nuts and bolts, picking from the provided metrics to share the most material:

• TransferWise fiscal 2020 revenue: £302.6 million, up 70% from its fiscal 2019 result of £179 million. That’s a venture-level revenue result from a mature company that is self-powering.
• TransferWise grew more quickly in its March 2020 year than in its March 2019 year, when it managed a slower 53% growth rate per the company. Accelerating revenue growth at this scale is very valuable.
• TransferWise managed a fourth year of consecutive profitability, generating £21.3 million in “net profit after tax” for the March 2020 fiscal year. The company first started generating profit “since 2017” per its own release, which we presume means the year ending March 2017.
• The company reported that it now has 8 million worldwide customers, up from 6 million in the preceding fiscal year. That’s 33% growth.
• The pace at which business customers sign up for TransferWise appeared to include slower growth, moving from 10,000 per month in the March 2019 year to “over 10,000” in its most recent release.
• TransferWise processed £42 billion in “cross currency transfers,” or around 63% of its total processing volume of £67 billion.

Instead of merely shouting at this point that TransferWise should go public, as it is providing granular data on its performance we’re already somewhat sated. More notes on gross margins would be good, for example, but this level of transparency is still welcome.

Turning to future growth, TransferWise stated in a release that APAC is the company’s “fastest growing region.” Its U.S. business was worth around a fourth of its March 2020 year’s revenue. Europe was just over half for the same period.

The company’s ability to pay for its own growth means that it has not raised money for some time. Indeed, the last equity round that we have on the company is its November, 2017 investment. That capital was $280 million raised at a $1.3 billion pre-money valuation in a deal led by Merian Global Investors and IVP. Since then the company has sold secondary shares from time to time.

That should lessen internal demands for a traditional liquidity event, but not quash them altogether. The unavoidable question is why not go public when the firm already reports so much public performance data. On the other hand, when a company needs no capital, it need not accept advice, either.

Regardless, TransferWise shows that fintech can make money after all.