Betastore gets $2.5M to solve stock-outs, financing challenges for informal retailers in West and Central Africa

About 80% of household retail in sub-Saharan Africa is delivered through informal channels, which perennially face several challenges like stockouts, leading to an instability in earnings, and a lack of attractiveness to financiers. These challenges befall millions of micro-retailers across the continent, and Betastore, a B2B retail marketplace for informal retailers, is working to resolve in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Senegal.

The Betastore marketplace enables informal traders to source fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs) directly from manufacturers or distributors – which keeps the prices of the products competitive by eliminating interactions with sales agents. It also works with logistics partners to ensure the delivery of goods within 24 hours.

The Nigeria-based startup plans to provide these services beyond its current three markets by expanding to Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cameroon by the end of this year, after closing $2.5 million in pre-series A funding from 500 Global, VestedWorld, and Loyal VC. Betastore has to date raised $3 million in funding.

“What is really important for us is to be able to continue to scale by leveraging our asset-light model. We plan to enter new markets before the end of the year and to expand to 100 cities across Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Senegal. We are also planning to reinforce our technology and leadership teams, and to bring in new products and to improve existing ones,” said Betastore CEO, Steve Dakayi-Kamga, who co-founded the startup with Leo-Armel Tchoudjang mid 2020.

MarketForce raises $40 million Series A, introduces BNPL merchant stock financing

The asset-light model means Betastore does not have any capital and labor intensive assets like warehouses or its own fleet of vehicles for delivery. Dakayi-Kamga said that this has helped the startup to optimize its technology to ensure that retailers source goods from the closest distributors. On average, a retailer using Betastore makes 4.4 orders per month.

“Our technology enables retailers to order on demand, access a variety of products and solves logistics headaches for them too. With Betastore, they don’t have to close their shops to go get goods from distributors stores or the market, and do not have to lose close to half of the margins in in the logistics,” said Dakayi-Kamga, who previously worked for Jumia, where he led the e-commerce platform’s logistics, warehousing and marketplace fulfillment department.

The B2B ecommerce platform is set to introduce financing in July, a launch that follows a pilot program involving 200 retailers that the startup carried out last year.

The BNPL financing strategy, Tchoudjang says, will be based on retailers’ sales and will go a long way in helping them to grow the value of their shopping baskets, and ultimately their businesses. The startup plans to charge an interest based on product margins.

Betastore is currently integrating its technology into a network of financing partners including fintechs and banks.

“The mandate of some of the partners we have on board is to support the economy by financing small businesses, but are not able to lend to them because they do not have the data to inform decisions. We have the visibility of what is happening in this sector, and have data they can use to extend financing,” said Tchoudjang, who previously held executive and leadership roles within the IFC-backed AccessHolding AG network in Africa. He has also helped multinationals rollout fintech and microfinance products for emerging markets in the past.

Namibian B2B e-commerce retail platform JABU raises $15M led by Tiger Global

Retailers use the Betastore wallet to repay loans, deposit money for their operations, and to send, receive and save money.

“The wallet helps them separate their business money from their own money, and it is directly connected to the whole banking system, meaning that retailers can receive and send money to any bank, and load cash with any agency banking platform,” said Tchoudjang.

Since launch, the startup claims to have grown its customer base and revenues by 10 and 12 times, respectively. The startup anticipates greater growth especially after entering more countries and rolling out its buy now pay later (BNPL) product, as it taps the retail market in sub-Saharan, which was valued at $380 billion in 2021, contributing 20-50% of the region’s GDP on average.

“We want to simplify access to goods and services for the retailers and for the end consumer because we see the merchant as an agent able to make access to goods and services easier. We started out in Nigeria, and we are expanding within Francophone Africa on our way to being a pan African player,” said Dakayi-Kamga.

Amit Bhatti, the principal at 500 Global while commenting on the latest funding round said, “We believe Betastore’s talented team is creating market efficiencies that have the potential to boost the growth of Africa’s retailers. With Betastore, merchants can get greater transparency into wholesaler inventories and price points.”

Why web3 companies get hacked so often, according to crypto VC Grace Isford

On the Chain Reaction podcast this week, Lux Capital’s newest investor, Grace Isford, joined us to talk about the opaque but crucial world of web3 infrastructure. At Lux, Isford invests in the companies working behind the scenes to make sure crypto exchanges are secure and reliable enough to avoid being hacked.

Before joining Lux this February, Isford was an investor at Canvas Ventures focused on enterprise software and fintech. A data infrastructure investment she worked on at Canvas revealed to her the opportunity in the web3 space for companies to “share data immutably at scale,” motivating her pivot to crypto, she said.

“That led me down the rabbit hole, and then I ended up investing myself personally,” Isford said. “I got into yield farming, which coincided with my move to New York, where many of my friends are also in the crypto and VC ecosystem.”

Isford says her investing approach in web3 is rooted in what she calls her “circle of competence,” or the area where she can be competitive compared to others in the space.

“NFT investing is quite different than DeFi investing, which is quite different than crypto data infrastructure investing, and I would argue that any person who says they invest in web three shouldn’t invest in all of that — they should probably choose their sweet spot in their core competency,” Isford said.

Isford’s own “circle of competence,” based on her prior experience, is in enterprise and fintech infrastructure, so we asked her what she thinks some of the biggest challenges are for web3 infrastructure providers.

Compared to web2, Isford said, web3 lacks enterprise-level security solutions. Alchemy and Infura are the only two major node service providers in the industry, meaning that most of crypto is reliant on two infrastructure providers to manage their data.

“There seems to be a new security hack reported every week [in web3],” Isford said, citing the recent Metamask and Ethereum dApp outage that originated from Infura and February’s Wormhole bridge hack.

While a number of startups are working on developing security solutions, Isford said, the tech is “still quite nascent” when it comes to developer tools, data infrastructure monitoring, and storage.

Another major challenge is managing fraud and downside risk, Isford added.

“I think [that issue] is really keeping a lot of folks out of the crypto world right now [because they’re] afraid of losing all their money if they venture too deeply into crypto,” Isford said.

Isford is optimistic that through the massive inflows of investment into web3 startups in the past year, companies will be able to build more reliable solutions.

“I think TRM Labs, Chainalysis, and several other companies in this space have 10x potential in terms of compliance and monitoring because you just do not have that yet at scale in the same way that we’ve kind of created these sophisticated AML systems on the financial infrastructure side in the web2 world,” Isford said, referring to traditional financial institutions’ anti-money laundering technology.

Better fraud and risk management systems are a precursor to more institutional money flowing into crypto, Isford said. As companies like Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan continue to make strides into crypto, the market will mature she added.

“I think one of the biggest opportunities in crypto right now is still security, if you can build more reliable smart contracts at scale … but you can’t have a reliable system if it’s not secure, right? And you can’t run a system securely if you don’t know who’s within that system, so I think security is probably one of the most important pieces from a prioritization standpoint,” Isford said.

Should Oracle or Alphabet buy VMWare instead of Broadcom?

As expected, the Broadcom-VMware deal is a go. The chip giant intends to snap up the virtualization software company for $61 billion in cash and stock, along with taking on $8 billion in VMware debt.

It’s not an inexpensive transaction, but thanks to a “go-shop” provision that gives VMware 40 days to “solicit, receive, evaluate and potentially enter negotiations with parties that offer alternative proposals,” there’s market speculation that another bidder could enter the fray.

After chewing through analyst notes on the deal, Ron and Alex wound up on opposite sides regarding whether a higher price or another bidder would make sense. Ron’s view is that the company’s value is higher than its recent financial results may imply, while Alex feels the company is not sufficiently performative to deserve a higher price.

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We’ve long speculated who might buy VMware, and after Dell spun out the company, TechCrunch listed Amazon, Alphabet, Oracle, Microsoft and IBM as potential acquirers. The fact that we did not foresee Broadcom as a potential suitor underscores our view that we don’t fully grok if it’s the correct buyer for VMware.

So let’s talk about the pros and cons of the matter, ask what VMware is worth, and how it may have value over and above its recent quarterly results. Ron is taking point!

Ron’s take:

With $61 billion on the table, it’s hard to imagine anyone paying more, and research firm Bernstein agrees with the perspective. Before we put the idea to bed, though, it’s worth taking a moment to think about the value of VMware.

VMware’s value goes beyond what its balance sheet or its profit and loss statement tells us at the moment. While the company might not have had a perfect first quarter, it has a particular set of skills that could fit nicely with any of the big cloud infrastructure providers.

In fact, cloud infrastructure-as-a-service exists today only because the early crew at VMware figured out virtualization at scale in the early 2000s. Until then, people used servers, and if a server was underutilized, well, too bad. Virtualization lets you divide a computer into multiple virtual machines, paving the way for cloud computing as we know it today.

While cloud computing has changed some since its early days, virtualization remains a core tenet of the market. Imagine for a moment if one of the three or four cloud vendors — think Amazon, Microsoft, Google or even IBM (although this deal is a bit rich for its blood) — brought VMware into its fold.

VMware brings more to the table than virtualization, of course. Over the years, it has gained various capabilities by acquiring companies like Heptio, a containerization startup launched by Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda, two of the people who helped create Kubernetes.

Finix goes head-to-head with Stripe

Welcome to The Interchange, a take on this week’s fintech news and trends. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here.

We’ve all been keeping up with the recent drama of Stripe vs. Plaid. Rather than rehash all that here, I’ll point you to some of our recent articles on the topic and just summarize: The two fintech startups have recently grown (much) more competitive.

If things weren’t turbulent enough, another startup has very publicly emerged as a formidable competitor to Stripe: Finix.

Now, Finix is not coming out of nowhere. The SaaS startup — which started out in early 2020 by selling its payments tech to other businesses — raised a $35 million Series B led by Sequoia. In an unusual twist, Sequoia just 1 month later walked away from the deal in which it reportedly wrote the self-described payments infrastructure company a $21 million check. As TC’s Connie Loizos reported at the time, Finix told employees that  soon after issuing its check, Sequoia concluded that Finix competes too directly with Stripe, the payments company that represented one of Sequoia’s biggest private holdings and that in turn counted Sequoia as one of its biggest outside investors.

Fast-forward to last week. Finix announced that it was becoming a payments facilitator, in addition to enabling other companies to facilitate payments. This move puts it in direct competition with Stripe, something that CEO and co-founder Richie Serna is not shy about admitting.

In an interview this past week, Serna elaborated by noting that Finix indeed started out to build software that gave any software company a way to become their own payment facilitator.

“We were building technology that would take a three-year in-house build by dozens of engineers, with tens of millions of dollars of technical R&D and investment, and taking that down to a number of months by getting developer-friendly APIs to start monetizing their payments,” he said. “That was our biggest core offering. What we’ve done now is become the payments facilitator ourselves, so that we can not only provide the payments, but also all the back office requirements and compliance certifications, so that our customers can get up and running in a matter of days, rather than months.”

He says the move gives Finix the ability to work with companies and software platforms who have $0 in processing volume all the way up to companies with billions of dollars in processing volume.

“This allows these customers to get a better product experience and faster speed to market, and allows us to take on those non-technical aspects of rolling out and monetizing, and getting payments,” Serna added.

You see, historically, companies needed to hit a certain volume threshold before Finix could work with them. But now, according to Serna, they can start working with them in their earliest states.

“Customers can start working with us from day one, use finance APIs, and when they’re ready to take on more of that ownership and more of that responsibility around risk, underwriting and compliance operations, they can graduate and become their own payment facilitator,” he said, “since we’re still using the exact same APIs.”

Finix has also entered what the executive described as the “card present,” or in-person, payments space. This means that it is able to provide software for many types of businesses to accept credit card payments.

“If you think about a software provider for restaurants, they’re going to need a different set of devices than the device provider for gyms, or food trucks,” Serna said. “And so that’s something that we uniquely offer and bring to the market.”

So, in case you haven’t figured it out, Stripe did have reason to be concerned because Finix indeed is directly competing with it. So how are they different?

According to Serna, the answer lies in the fact that Finix has built “an open system and open architecture that is modular and configurable.” Stripe, on the other hand, he said, “continues to double down on that vendor lock in so it can continue to close their system and architecture.”

“We think about it very similar to iOS,” Serna told TechCrunch. “We think about ourselves much more like Android…And I think we’re just going to continue to see those characteristics magnified as we continue to build our products and build our companies.”

With just over 150 employees, Finix is powering over 12,000 merchants in the U.S. with its APIs today. It has raised about $100 million in funding from investors such as American Express Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Homebrew, Inspired Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Visa.

Meanwhile, in a recent Forbes article, Stripe co-founder John Collison told Alex Konrad, reportedly with a shrug: “We will compete with a bunch of companies, and we’ll partner with a bunch. Everyone just needs to be a grownup and well-behaved about it.” In that same article, sources told Alex that Stripe saw gross revenue of about $12 billion in 2021, up 60% year-over-year. It also reportedly posted net revenue of about $2.5 billion.

Weekly News

Speaking of Stripe, Ingrid Lunden reported on May 24 that the company debuted its App Marketplace, a new offering where Stripe will provide access to both third-party apps and scripts created by app publishers, users and Stripe itself, that incorporate those apps with Stripe. It potentially represents its biggest leap yet away from payments.

Swedish payment giant Klarna reportedly cut 10% of its workforce, or 700 jobs, this past week. The move came just after the Wall Street Journal reported that the company was going to cut its valuation in order to raise fresh capital.

One-click checkout startup Bolt is believed to have laid off as many as 240 employees across go-to-market, sales and recruiting roles. Earlier reports had cited that 100 workers would be impacted, but as details emerged, it appeared to be more. In mid-February, founder Ryan Breslow made headlines after announcing on Twitter that Bolt was offering every employee the chance to borrow money from the company to exercise their stock options. Now, it’s unclear what happens to the people who were laid off and borrowed money from the company. The company told Bloomberg that the number of affected workers that took out loans is in “the single digits.”

But not all fintechs are laying off. Fidel API says it “is rapidly growing” after its $65 million Series B announcement and is hiring for more than 60 roles across its engineering, sales and customer-experience teams. The fintech says it has doubled in size over the past 6 months and intends to double again before year’s end.

Peggy Mangot has left her role as operating partner at PayPal Ventures to serve as the new head of fintech partnerships for JPMorgan Chase Commercial Banking. At PayPal Ventures, Mangot helped lead investments  globally across fintech, commerce, infrastructure and crypto.

Both large and small companies are retaining their crypto optimism despite the recent market correction in the developing technology space. Mass adoption of blockchain technology and digital assets is going to happen sooner rather than later, according to Mastercard’s VP of new product development and innovation, Harold Bossé. Read more here.

Fundings and M&A

Seen on TechCrunch

Paddle acquires ProfitWell for $200M to bring analytics and retention tools to its SaaS payments platform

Founder alleges that YC-backed fintech startup is ‘copy-and-pasting’ its business

Revenue-based financing platform Bloom secures $377M Series A led by Credo and Fortress

Viola Credit closes $700M fund to provide asset-based lending to fintech startups

Roofstock founder closes on $90M fund to back early-stage proptech startups

Zip lines up $43M at a $1.2B valuation for its growing ‘concierge for procurement’

Nowports streamlines LatAm’s shipping to deliver a $1.1B valuation

Indian fintech Jar eyes $50 million investment

And elsewhere

Canaan leads $15M investment in Brazilian B2B payments startup Marvin, marking the firm’s largest LatAm investment to date.

equipifi, a fintech company providing banks and credit unions with a white label buy now, pay later (BNPL) solution, completed a $12 million Series A funding round.

That’s it for this week! If you’re reading from the U.S., hope you enjoy the rest of your long weekend, and for everyone else, have a great day and week ahead. And to borrow from my brilliant friend and colleague, Natasha Mascarenhas, you can support me by forwarding this newsletter to a friend or following me on Twitter.

Cannabis, sex tech and psychedelics startups deserve more than stigma

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Cannabis, sex tech and psychedelics are often lumped together under the “vice” category — a characterization that prevents many VCs from investing in these spaces. But does that make sense? Let’s explore. — Anna

It’s (not) a sin

Isn’t cannabis actually similar to coffee, wine and spirits? That’s the argument Emily Paxhia made on a Twitter Space hosted by TechCrunch+ earlier this week to discuss our latest U.S. cannabis investor survey.

Despite regulatory hurdles, these 4 US cannabis investors are planting seeds for tomorrow

A managing director at cannabis-focused hedge fund Poseidon Asset Management, Paxhia argued that marijuana-derived products have a lot more to do with wellness than with the “sin” category they often fall under.

“Sin clause” and “vice clause” are terms that venture capitalists use to refer to their inability to invest in certain business categories, from porn and gambling to alcohol and tobacco. When I explored fundraising strategies for sex tech startups earlier this year, I found out that this veto typically comes from the fund’s limited partners, or LPs.

It is understandable why investors wouldn’t want to put their money in certain types of businesses, let alone be known for doing so. But there’s a fine line between moral stances and stigma.

“I don’t identify with the word ‘vice’ at all,” Andrea Barrica told me. Barrica is the founder of O.School, which she describes as a media platform for sexual wellness. “Wellness” is a popular term in both the sex tech and cannabis industries — because it makes them more palatable, sure, but also because it truly reflects the impact that entrepreneurs are hoping to have.

It is worth keeping in mind that cannabis isn’t just about providing a recreational high. In Europe, we heard from investors, it is medical cannabis that has most of the momentum. It is the perspective of health benefits that drives many entrepreneurs, who deserve better than cheap laughs.

Similarly, a deep dive into psychedelics taught me that this is about much more than drugs and fun. With investors sometimes getting into this space after personal journeys with depression or burnout, and founders hoping to make a dent on the global mental health crisis, easy jokes quickly feel out of place.

Psychedelics startups are on a long journey to consumer markets, but these 5 VCs are taking the ride

Missing out

The vice clause applies only to certain types of investors, which is also problematic. The fund that is handling your pension might pass on cannabis investments, but many family offices aren’t. This means that returns from these potentially lucrative bets will be concentrated in the hands of the already-wealthy.

Some fund managers are also investing as individuals, Paxhia said — and it’s them who will get the upside. Meanwhile, fiduciaries are missing out on the returns and the impact they could have, for arbitrary reasons. After all, what’s legal is not always moral, and vice versa.

The most glaring paradox is that the tobacco, nicotine and alcohol industries are actually keeping close tabs on cannabis and whether consumption might shift. Would the shift be a net negative for society? Perhaps not. As for psychedelics, there’s research ongoing to use nonhallucinogenic derivatives to treat opioid addiction. With overdose deaths involving fentanyl and methamphetamine surging in the U.S., is this vice? I don’t think so. Do you?

Why Convoy’s Dan Lewis expects digital freight to go mainstream within the year

Dan Lewis, co-founder and CEO of digital freight company Convoy, didn’t start his company because he had a deep and abiding passion for trucking. At least, not at first.

The executive has a background in strategy and management consulting that progressed into a career in product development for top tech companies like Google and Amazon. But when he was struck by the urge to start a company, he researched the money-attracting industries of the world, and then, using AngelList, saw how many companies were trying to disrupt those industries.

His search yielded thousands of companies that were working on industries ranging from telecommunications and fashion to video games and food. Billions of dollars were going into trucking each year but fewer than 30 startups showed an interest in the field.

“I saw a massive opportunity and few people going after it,” Lewis told TechCrunch.

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Lewis and Grant Goodale co-founded Convoy in 2015, and since then, have brought on a series of high-profile investors. A couple of years after Convoy was founded, in a pivotal turn of events, the company secured its Series B from YC Combinator’s Continuity Fund, a fund that was usually geared toward earlier-stage companies.

More recently, Convoy secured a $260 million Series E, led by Baillie Gifford and T. Rowe Price, that brought the company’s valuation up to $3.8 billion. To date, the company has raised almost $1 billion to scale its platform, which connects the fragmented network of shippers, carriers and brokers across the United States.

Speed is a big feature of building a startup, and it’s also a big feature of not getting diluted, because you can show immense progress and then raise at a higher valuation based on that. Dan Lewis, co-founder and CEO of Convoy

We sat down with Lewis to talk about the importance of being customer-obsessed when starting a company, why compensation packages in the early days can help you avoid diluting your company too much in future fundraises, and how to set boundaries on the compromises you’ll make as a founder.

The following interview, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, is part of an ongoing series that focuses on founders in the transportation sector.

TC: YC’s investment in your Series B was notable because Convoy at the time was outside the Continuity Fund’s range of portfolio companies. What do you think made Convoy stand out?

Lewis: The YC culture is a really curious one, so they didn’t feel like they needed to stay in a particular lane, especially with the Continuity Fund, which was geared toward early growth-stage companies. When we met, I think the breakthrough was just the unique story. People don’t usually realize how fragmented, how large, how offline the trucking industry is. So YC viewed this as a major disruptive play.

We were excited to work with them because they’re an incubator and accelerator, so their whole system is designed around helping founders succeed. They had so many unique programs that helped us be successful and grow that I had never seen from other investors at the time.

You mentioned that a good way to decide on a direction for a startup was to compare industries where there’s lots of money against companies that are trying to disrupt those industries. Is that still a good method?

I think it is a really good method. It would be interesting to pull a list of industries and find out how much money is spent in those industries, and then see how many companies are going after those industries. AngelList is a great resource to find the newest, most innovative companies that are going after these spaces.

Before I ever started the company, I wrote this article in Quora that went viral and was published by Forbes. It was an answer to the question: How to come up with a startup idea. I wrote this really extensive theory, basically a playbook. So when I was going to start my own company, I was like, I should eat my own dog food. I went back and used my own process, and I can now say it’s credible because it works.

Sequoia is the latest VC firm telling you to take the downturn seriously

Sequoia takes things seriously. The storied venture firm is known to react to macroeconomic events with grand memos aimed at portfolio companies and sometimes the entrepreneurship scene at large.

Most recently, Sequoia created a 52-slide deck, first reported by The Information, titled “Adapting to Endure.” The document reads like a follow-up course to its infamously ill-timed “Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020” memo of March 2020.

The firm is not always right in its prognostications — maybe why it stuck to internal musings instead of a Medium post this time — but it does do a service in providing a snapshot of how one of the most weathered, and successful, VC firms of all time thinks about a looming downturn.

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“Our intention in gathering today is not to be a beacon of gloom,” the deck reads. “But we also believe that winning in the years ahead is going to depend on making hard, decisive choices confronting uncomfortable challenges that may have been masked during the exuberance and distortions of free capital over the past two years.”

Sequoia’s advice largely followed the same script that other venture firms have been using: extend runway, focus on sustainable growth and recognize that an economic recovery may be a ways away. There were, however, some tidbits that stood out, such as a subtweet that I’m guessing is meant for Tiger Global and a precise explanation of how founders should define fluff these days.

The capital provider blames capital itself — capitalism, huh?

One of the clearest subtweets within the deck is Sequoia’s commentary on cross-over funds. The firm says that “cheap capital is not coming to the rescue” at this moment:

Can Andreessen Horowitz prevent the next crypto winter?

Hey everyone, and welcome back to Chain Reaction.

Last week, we talked about the rough road ahead for Coinbase. This week, we’re talking a bit about Andreessen Horowitz’s multibillion-dollar bet on web3’s continued viability. Read on to check out the latest episode of the Chain Reaction podcast as well.

To get this in your inbox every Thursday afternoon, you can subscribe on TechCrunch’s newsletter page.

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$4,500,000,000

May hasn’t been the kindest month to crypto. Consecutive weeks of drops have left whispers of the “buy the dip” going cold as industry players buckle down for winter.

A brief moment of warmth came this week, when Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) announced that it has raised $4.5 billion for its fourth crypto fund, more than doubling the size of its last fund. It’s the largest institutional crypto firm to date and comes at an interesting time…

Amid crypto market turmoil, Andreessen Horowitz announces $4.5 billion web3 fund

While VC firms the world over have been pressing their portfolio companies to cut burn rates and buckle down for bad times, many crypto founders were already prepared for this moment, having raised stupid amounts of money from VCs solely for the purpose of not having to raise cash later. While tech broadly has not suffered a prolonged recession since the early 2000s, crypto startups have endured much tighter windows of boom and bust. Despite plenty of coffers being full, it’s fair to assume that a crypto winter will put plenty of venture-backed startups on ice.

A16z didn’t let too many details fly on their exact plans for this fund, but they did interestingly detail that they’re planning to devote at least $1.5 billion of the fund to seed deals. That’s an awful lot of seed deals — likely hundreds of them — coming from a single fund.

The question is whether the rest of the venture ecosystem around crypto sticks around. Plenty of hedge fund entrants to the markets have gotten burned and other traditional venture firms seemed to sheepishly poke their head into this cycle and may already be close to the door.

For a market that’s been frothing with dumb money for a couple years, any sort of pullback is going to leave startups in a lurch, and a16z’s focus on young companies with their new fund may be tough for companies eyeing growth dollars.

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neumann, new man?

Now that Lucas has given you the breakdown on a16z, it’s Anita here to get you up to speed on the latest episode of the Chain Reaction podcast, where we unpack the latest web3 news, block-by-block for the crypto-curious. 

We talked plenty about Andreessen Horowitz, which really said “what downturn?” this week, announcing the largest dedicated crypto venture fund ever. Granted, much of that capital was probably raised before the crypto markets started tanking, but we unpacked the storied firm’s strategy and discussed a somewhat questionable investment it just made in a well-known grifter’s new blockchain startup (hint: he kinda looks like Jared Leto).

For our guest, we had investor Grace Isford join us from Lux Capital to talk about the infrastructure that works behind-the-scenes to make web3 tech run smoothly.

Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple, Spotify or your alternative podcast platform of choice to keep up with us every week.

Does WeWork’s Adam Neumann really deserve his second chance?

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follow the money

Where startup money is moving in the crypto world:

1. Singapore-based metaverse app BUD closed $36.8 million in a Series B round led by Sequoia Capital India.
2. NFT-based social platform Primitives raised a $4 million seed round with Redpoint as lead investor.
3. NFT fraud detection startup Doppel scored $5 million in seed funding led by FTX Ventures.
4. DAO community management platform Common raised $20 million from Spark Capital, Polychain and others.
5. Carbon credit tokenization protocol Flowcarbon raised $70 million through a Series A round led by a16z as well as a private token sale.
6. Blockchain infrastructure provider StarkWare closed a $100 million Series D led by Greenoaks Capital and Coatue.
7. DeFi personal finance app Pebble raised a $6.2 million seed round led by Y Combinator.
8. Digital asset manager Babel Finance scored $80 million in a Series B round from Jeneration Capital, 10T Holdings, Dragonfly Capital and others.
9. NFT social marketplace Bubblehouse nabbed $9 million in seed capital from Cassius Family, SV Angel, angel investors Steve Aoki and David Guetta and others.
10. Crypto tax prep software ZenLedger nabbed $15 million in a Series B led by Parafi.

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the week in web3

Everyone’s been talking about a cooldown in the crypto markets, but as reporters covering the space, we’ve felt busy as ever. It seems like venture investors are keeping busy, too, trying to put massive amounts of capital to work that they raised largely before the markets went south. 

As for the firms currently raising new funds, they seem to have conviction that there are still lucrative opportunities out there in the crypto startup world, and that this downturn will simply separate the winners from the losers. (They’re hoping their portfolios already contain the winners.)

• A16z’s whopper of a web3 fund speaks to their commitment to the space, even if other firms pull back, investor Arianna Simpson told Lucas in an interview.
• Soona Amhaz’s Volt Capital announced a $50 million crypto fund, just over a year after it debuted its $10 million vehicle. Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon are amongst the familiar faces backing Amhaz. Lucas has the details here.
• Anita wrote about some Twitter drama that unfolded this week as the founder of fintech startup, Eco, took to the platform to accuse the founders of Y Combinator-backed Pebble of copy-pasting its business model. The battle between the startups, which both use stablecoins to provide yield, caused some to question the investment approach taken by accelerators like YC.

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TC+ analysis

Curated analysis that you can read on our subscription service TC+ (written by TC’s Jacquelyn Melinek): 

Terra’s community passes proposal to revive LUNA cryptocurrency following stablecoin-led implosion
Nine days ago, Terraform Labs (TFL) founder Do Kwon shared a plan to revive the Terra Ecosystem after its stablecoin and cryptocurrency nosedived earlier this month and brought down the crypto markets with it. Now, the plan has passed approval from Terra’s community for a new Terra 2.0, which not everyone is certain will succeed. Will history repeat itself? 

StarkWare quadruples valuation to $8B in 6 months, closing round in choppy market
Crypto markets may be choppy right now, but big players are still raising capital as demand for scalable blockchain infrastructure remains strong. The most recent example of that fact is StarkWare Industries, which just raised $100 million at a valuation of $8 billion, the company shared on Wednesday. The new capital came just six months after the unicorn closed a $50 million Series C, quadrupling its valuation from $2 billion to $8 billion.

Mastercard exec is bullish on crypto, sees mass adoption ‘sooner rather than later’
Both large and small companies are retaining their crypto optimism despite the recent market correction in the developing technology space. Mass adoption of blockchain technology and digital assets is going to happen sooner rather than later, according to Mastercard’s VP of new product development and innovation, Harold Bossé. But there are a number of challenges right now stopping corporations from entering the market, Bossé said, like lack of senior management understanding and regulatory concerns, among other aspects. 

Luna Foundation Guard adviser says Do Kwon hasn’t reached out since UST crash
There seems to be no shortage of news around Terraform Labs’ cryptocurrency LUNA and algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD (UST) imploding. Last Friday, one of the four advisers to Luna Foundation Guard (which was Terra’s Singapore-based nonprofit dedicated to protecting UST), told TechCrunch there have been no meetings with Terra founder Do Kwon since UST crashed. How does the adviser keep up with the Terra situation? Through Twitter like everyone else, he said. 

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Lucas and Anita

4 questions to ask before building a computer vision model

Eric Landau Contributor

Before Eric Landau co-founded Encord, he spent nearly a decade at DRW, where he was lead quantitative researcher on a global equity delta one desk and put thousands of models into production. He holds an S.M. in Applied Physics from Harvard University, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.S. in Physics from Stanford University.

In 2015, the launch of YOLO — a high-performing computer vision model that could produce predictions for real-time object detection — started an avalanche of progress that sped up computer vision’s jump from research to market.

It’s since been an exciting time for startups as entrepreneurs continue to discover use cases for computer vision in everything from retail and agriculture to construction. With lower computing costs, greater model accuracy and rapid proliferation of raw data, an increasing number of startups are turning to computer vision to find solutions to problems.

However, before founders begin building AI systems, they should think carefully about their risk appetite, data management practices and strategies for future-proofing their AI stack.

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TechCrunch+ is having a Memorial Day sale. You can save 50% on annual subscriptions for a limited time.

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Below are four factors that founders should consider when deciding to build computer vision models.

Is deep learning the right tool for solving my problem?

It may sound crazy, but the first question founders should ask themselves is if they even need to use a deep learning approach to solve their problem.

During my time in finance, I often saw that we’d hire a new employee right out of university who would want to use the latest deep learning model to solve a problem. After spending time working on the model, they’d come to the conclusion that using a variant of linear regression worked better.

To avoid falling into the so-called prototype-production gap, founders must think carefully about the performance characteristics required for model deployment.

The moral of the story?

Deep learning might sound like a futuristic solution, but in reality, these systems are sensitive to many small factors. Often, you can already use an existing and simpler solution — such as a “classical” algorithm — that produces an equally good or better outcome for lower cost.

Consider the problem, and the solution, from all angles before building a deep learning model.

Deep learning in general, and computer vision in particular, hold a great deal of promise for creating new approaches to solving old problems. However, building these systems comes with an investment risk: You’ll need machine learning engineers, a lot of data and validation mechanisms to put these models into production and build a functioning AI system.

It’s best to evaluate whether a simpler solution could solve your problem before beginning such a large-scale effort.

Perform a thorough risk assessment

Before building any AI system, founders must consider their risk appetite, which means evaluating the risks that occur at both the application layer and the research and development stage.

Foursquare founder banks funding for mystery 3D social network startup

The excitement around web3 and the metaverse have pulled plenty of entrepreneurs who defined the first generation of native mobile apps to begin questioning what’s next.

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley is on the co-founding team of a new startup called LivingCities, alongside Matt Miesnieks, who sold his most recent startup 6D.ai to Niantic for an undisclosed sum, as well as designer John Gaeta, who best known for his work on the Matrix Trilogy. The trio say they have banked $4 million in early funding led by DCVC for their project. Other backers include Eniac Ventures, Anorak and Matthew Ball.

“The big opportunity in the early days of Foursquare was really like, ‘Okay, let’s make some software that changes the way that people use physical space,’ and the way that we executed that is we tried to turn life into a game, we tried to turn spaces into a game, we tried to make it easier to meet up with people, and a lot of that was successful. But that was like 13 or 14 years ago, and technology has changed,” Crowley tells TechCrunch. “I think that the core idea that software can change the way that people interact with the world is still meaningful and unsolved in many ways, and that’s what keeps drawing me back to the challenge.”

Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley steps back from the company

The founding team doesn’t have an awful lot to say about what exactly they’re building, except that it’s a “social layer” for consumers based around interacting with virtual spaces that capture the “spirit” of real-life geographies and cities. The “mirror-world” platform will integrate elements of web3, though the team says they hope to build without succumbing to the “rampant speculation” that many associate with crypto.

CEO Miesnieks says the team is largely interested in building out a network that exists only on the web and mobile web, potentially sidestepping app stores and their associated fees, but that he’s not looking to build out another augmented reality startup or compete with mapping players like Niantic or Snap.

“We think that if you’re going to build something for consumers, you need to build on technology that’s widely available today,” Miesnieks says.

Just under a year ago, Crowley stepped down from his full-time role at Foursquare after more than a decade at the company. He tells TechCrunch that starting his new company has been the product of him and his co-founders asking themselves questions about what role new technology can play in bringing people closer together.

“What are the things that we want to see exist in the world? What are experiences that are only now recently possible because of what’s changed in how people use their phones or other devices? It has always seemed like there’s an opportunity to do more, to bring the digital and real world together in an interesting way,” Crowley says.

Niantic squares up against Apple and Facebook with acquisition of AR startup 6D.ai

Subscribe to TechCrunch’s crypto newsletter “Chain Reaction” for news, funding updates and hot takes on the wild world of web3 — and take a listen to our companion podcast!

A look at the nine teams that just presented at Pear’s latest demo day

TechCrunch has been covering the demo days of the seed-stage venture firm Pear VC since 2015. (There we are in the front row in 2016, surrounded by investors, typing away.)

A few things have remained true since that time. There are typically 10 or so companies that present and not many more. A lot of top firms show up, including from NEA, Lux Capital and Sequoia Capital. And the energy in the room reflects that of Pear’s founders, Pejman Nozad and Mar Hershenson, who year after year project the cheery demeanor of people eager to win you over. (They’re winning over investors, certainly; as we reported last Friday, Pear appears close to raising its biggest fund ever.)

Notably, the terms that Pear offers startups haven’t changed much over the years, either. In exchange for 14 weeks of help with everything from product-market fit to the go-to-market strategy a team should employ, the startups in Pear’s accelerator program give Pear the right to invest from $500,000 to $750,000 in each team at a valuation that it caps at $10 million. Pear lets the founders choose the check size. Founders who take $500,000 are selling 5% of their company, essentially; while those taking a bigger check are selling more.

Unlike the far bigger and more renowned accelerator Y Combinator, whose startup participants begin talks with investors nearly the moment they’re accepted into the program, Pear further tries to shield its startups from conversations with other investors until after its demo day, says Nozad. “We want to focus on building products and finding customers” while the startups are participating in its accelerator program, he insists.

Of course, some VCs still get an early look, in part by mentoring the startups. For example, Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures and Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures helped advise Pear’s newest batch of companies.

For the rest of you who missed Pear’s demo day this year, which took place last week in person at the outfit’s new headquarters in Menlo Park, California (Pear has taken over a former beer garden), herewith are the nine teams that presented.

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Spathios
What it does: A marketplace to book short-term space rentals for corporate events, meetings and productions
Founders: Pol Hevia (CEO), Joaquim Tresserra (CTO)
Founded in: 2020
HQ: Barcelona, Spain
The pitch: Spathios says it’s a marketplace to book short-term venues and spaces. Its platform aims to enable businesses to host meetings and events in some of the world’s most unique venues. It also says it allows multiple stakeholders to manage bookings, collaborate across teams and simplify their accounting. The market for corporate events is an estimated $600 billion, but most of the spend is currently through hotels and conference centers; Spathios thinks it can bring the untapped supply of unique venues like museums, historic locations and even palaces online for the first time. Already, it says, it has worked with large customers like Conde Nast, Sony Music and Google.

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FairStreet
What it does: Software platform powering independent Medicare agents
Founders: Sarah Jacobson (co-CEO), Tori Seidenstein (co-CEO)
Founded in: 2021
HQ: San Francisco
The pitch: FairStreet aims to help seniors enroll in the right health insurance by providing the software platform that independent Medicare agents can use to run and scale their businesses. Apparently, independent agents enroll 60% of all seniors into Medicare and are the fastest growing segment, and FairStreet is building what it describes as a full-stack software platform to cut their work in half and enable them to scale. As for traction, FairStreet says that in two months’ time, it has acquired 12 experienced Medicare agents, and that it has 90 more on its waitlist. FairStreet earns a recurring commission paid by the insurance company whenever one of their agents enrolls a senior into a Medicare plan.

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Menta
What it does: Embedded payments and financial infrastructure for B2B companies in LatAm
Founders: Virigina Folgueiro (CEO), Alejandro Quirno Lavalle (CMO), Santiago Lorenzo (CTO)
Founded in: late 2021
HQ: Argentina
The pitch: Menta says its tech infrastructure enables B2B companies to offer their own payment and financial services to retail merchants in their ecosystems. It says its network offers network effects, too — customers have access to all of the retailers on the platform. The service just launched, but its founders say it’s already live with three customers in Argentina and Mexico and that it has 10 other agreements signed.

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PemPem
What it does: Fintech and supply chain software for micro-enterprises in commodity supply chains
Founders: Joann de Zegher (CEO), JK Metwalli (CTO)
Founded in: late 2021
HQ: Montreal, Quebec
The pitch: PemPem is building mobile supply chain management software for micro-enterprises in commodity supply chains. They’ve built a mobile platform that provides full-stack financial and commercial solutions for the 500 million micro-enterprises that produce and trade the world’s commodities at an annual value of $2.7 trillion. With PemPem, micro-enterprises can discover prices, access supply chain financing for inputs, and soon, it says, be able to trade their commodities through PemPem’s marketplace. Already, it says, 5,000 monthly active enterprises have been using PemPem’s price discovery product. Its marketplace is launching this summer.

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Snout
What it does: Membership-based healthcare plans for pets
Founder: Emily Dong (CEO)
Founded in: 2020
HQ: San Francisco
The pitch: Snout is building a full coverage health plan for pets to address what it says is a big need in the market for it. According to Snout, there are 200 million pets in the U.S. and 47% of pet owners report having pet-related debt. Only 2% of these pets are insured because pet insurance doesn’t cover routine expenses — only paying out when catastrophic events occur — and while veterinary practices want to help pets and ease the financial burden on pet parents, as relatively small, cash-based businesses, they struggle to defer revenue. Snout’s solution is to provide both capital and software to veterinary practices to make healthcare plans financially feasible for both vets and pets. It’s launching this month and says it already has a waitlist of customers representing $1 million in annual recurring revenue.

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Rendition
What it does: Helping software teams build products faster by automating design code
Founders: Robert Nowell (CEO), Caleb Ouellette (CTO)
Founded in: 2020
HQ: San Francisco
The pitch: Rendition is an AI assistant for building user interfaces from designs. Why does that matter? The team says its product is five times faster than writing code by hand. Since launching last month, Rendition has onboarded five customers and is doing $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue; the plan (naturally) is to capture much more of the $100 billion annual front-end development market by automating the more than 1 billion hours of developer work that goes into UI development every year.

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Supercharge
What it does: Stablecoin payments infrastructure for web3
Founders: Ben Gusberg (CEO), Jim Zheng (CTO)
Founded in: late 2021
HQ: Stanford, California
The pitch: Supercharge builds stablecoin payments infrastructure for web3, allowing developers and merchants to access the $5 trillion stablecoin transaction market. In fact, it gives developers simple APIs to accept stablecoins in minutes, it says. Supercharge is launching next month in the Binance, Polkadot and Polygon ecosystems; the (immodest? laudable?) goal is to be the base layer that seamlessly brings all of web3 to the mainstream.

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BeyondTrucks
What it does: A vertical SaaS platform powering SMB trucking companies with workflow automation, smart data and embedded financial solutions
Founders: Hans Galland (CEO), Paul Xie (COO)
Founded in: 2019
HQ: San Mateo, California
The pitch: BeyondTrucks is building a vertical SaaS platform for SMB trucking companies to make growing their businesses easier. They’re focused on powering trucking companies with workflow automation, smart data and embedded financial services, helping them build their businesses in a more data-centric way. The company is chasing after what it says is a $1.7 trillion fleet-payments market, and it says it’s seeing traction. Launched in January, the outfit claims to be already serving 45 fleets with 280 trucks.

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Neura Health
What it does: Virtual neurology clinic for patients suffering from neurologic conditions
Founder: Elizabeth Burstein (CEO), Sameer Madan (CTO)
Founded in: 2020
HQ: New York
The pitch: Neura Health is a virtual neurology clinic with a mission to improve the access and quality of neurological care: increase convenience, improve outcomes and lower costs. There is a severe lack of neurologists in the U.S., resulting in wait times of up to six months, says the outfit. Meanwhile, Neura Health’s platform connects patients to neurologists with built-in neurology-specific symptom monitoring and condition-specific diagnostic tests. Patients also receive a mobile app with a dedicated concierge to ensure that all their care needs are met, creating (hopefully) a highly effective patient-provider relationship. The company’s longer-term vision, notably, is to find cures by learning from the experience of every neurology patient.

Pictured, top of page: Pejman Nozad and Mar Hershenson talking with guests at Pear’s demo day, last week in Menlo Park, Calif.

Daily Crunch: In one of the largest tech deals ever struck, Broadcom will buy VMware for $61B

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

It’s Thursday, May 26, 2022, and we have a busy day of news on the site today. Here are the gems sparkling in the spotlight of our journalistic gaze.

For later in the year, we’re pretty excited about this panel at TechCrunch Disrupt, where VCs will discuss how you can raise money when you’re not at one of the major tech hubs. We’re running a Memorial Day 2-for-1 deal, so you can get your ticket and bring a friend this weekend!  — Haje and Christine

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Confirmed: Broadcom made its proposed merging with VMware official, and with it comes a few kids in the way of some acquisitions VMware made along the way. As we noted earlier in the week, we are still not sure the two companies are a match made in heaven. However, while both are still getting the agreements signed, sealed and delivered, we raise our collective glasses in a toast that regulators will bless this union.
• Gucci, Gucci goo: How do you feed a need for fancier things? Look no further than Oura’s new collaboration with Gucci. The Gucci x Oura Ring is indeed a pretty thing and its charging station is one you’ll want to leave out in view so people can see how fabulous you are, or see that you’re $950 poorer — take your pick.
• Perhaps it paid to be slower: The quest to have the fastest delivery may have been the stone in some quick-commerce companies’ tires. Alex discusses how the race to create business models, like dark stores, to get closer to the customer worked for some, but not everyone, prompting even investors to call the industry “overhyped” in some regards.

Startups and VC

What is a reporter to do when they get a pitch from a company that had its name “stolen” by Apple, but it turns out the company failed to register a trademark because they thought it would be pointless? Well, if that reporter is Haje, he grabs it by its cautionary tail and holds it up to the light to see what other startups can learn from the experience. Spoiler: It boils down to “just get a damn trademark, you fools.”

We keep being surprised whenever another company raises money to do asteroid mining, but Aria reports that Y Combinator alum AstroForge thinks it has a fresh take on the trope, raising $13 million to zip up to a floating rock and bring back some sweet, sweet zero-G space minerals.

And a smattering of other goodies for you to snack on this afternoon. Buen provecho!

• Making you ’appier, one swipe at the time: Friendly Apps raises $3 million to build apps that make you more connected and happier, Sarah reports.
• One carbon, two carbon, three carbon: Consumer products have long been challenged to measure its actual carbon impact, but Planet FWD counted $10 million to help track — and eventually reduce — their carbon footprints, Christine reports.
• Just pollen the room on this real quick: Humble Bee Bio is on a mission to create a biodegradable alternative to plastics by synthesizing the biology of bees, raising $3.2 million to fulfill its mission, Rebecca writes.
• Building building startup startups: Early-stage proptech startups have a potential new source of capital in 1Sharpe Ventures, which recently closed its $90 million inaugural fund, Mary Ann writes.
• Up, up, and a tray: Vertical farming startup Bowery says its newest facility, built on a former brownfield lot in Pennsylvania, is its most technologically advanced to date, Brian reports
• Buy-nance? More like buy-crypto: A group of former executives from Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges globally, has created a $100 million venture fund, the team told Jacquelyn.

To fully embrace product-led growth, build a strong product ops team

Image Credits: Henrik Sorensen (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Product managers transform customer needs and business requirements into services and features that make money, but it’s a limited role.

Even though PMs interact with customers and internal stakeholders from sales, marketing and engineering, they’re rarely empowered to implement best practices, select tools or manage operational aspects of the product pipeline.

That’s changing as more companies carve out roles for product operations, writes Todd Olson, co-founder and CEO of software platform Pendo.

“It’s similar to how sales and marketing ops help their departments,” he says, and “it’s a critical function for any company that wants to make its product the ‘center of the wheel.’”

To fully embrace product-led growth, build a strong product ops team

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

There was a lot of “big tech news” today, so let’s jump in and start with a little regulatory and government intervention. Meta is doing us all a favor and rewriting and redesigning its privacy policy so, dare we say, we can understand it. Over at Google, U.K. officials are taking a look under the hood to determine Google’s role in some potential antitrust abuses around adtech. Meanwhile, Twitter agreed to pay a $150 million settlement with U.S. regulators over “allegations that the social media company misrepresented the ‘security and privacy’ of user data over several years.”

Continuing with the Twitter train for a moment, yesterday we brought you the news that former CEO Jack Dorsey left the board, AND news that the company’s stock jumped when Elon Musk said he still has plans to buy Twitter and finance more of the deal himself. Today, investors are not thrilled with Musk and are suing him over what they perceive as manipulation of the stock price in his favor. We’ll keep on this one.

In vroom, vroom news, Luminar nabbed itself a couple of executives from the likes of Apple, Nvidia and Tesla to continue developing its autonomous technology. Joby Aviation is one step closer to its goal of becoming a commercial aerial ridesharing service after receiving certification from the FAA to operate a commercial air-taxi operation.

Do you give up, or are you thirsty for more?

• Epic battle: Epic Games filed a new suit against Apple, challenging the tech giant’s use of third-party apps, saying it could compromise the iPhone’s security.
• That’s what friends are for: TikTok is making friends left and right with the likes of Sprout Social, Hootsuite and Sprinklr as part of an extension to its Marketing Partner Program that will enable marketers to manage their TikTok accounts without having to leave third-party content marketing platforms.
• Box-y earnings: Document-sharing platform Box reported its fifth straight quarter of increased growth, and Ron was there with CEO Aaron Levie to get all the details

Meta and Google’s Gradient back LatAm startup OlaClick

More than 80% of food delivery orders in Latin America are still made over phone calls and settled with cash. OlaClick, a young startup that is helping these restaurants sell online and collect money digitally, announced on Thursday it has received backing from scores of investors, including Gradient, Meta and Delivery Hero.

Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI fund, led OlaClick’s $4.4 million seed financing round. Meta, Delivery Hero, Tribe Capital, Caffeinated Capital and Graph Ventures also participated in the round.

OlaClick enables restaurants to facilitate direct-to-consumer e-commerce by providing them with point of sale (POS) and customer management (CRM) services and the ability to digitize menus.

Customers are then able to interact with these restaurants on WhatsApp and Instagram and place their orders, explained José Rico, co-founder of OlaClick, in an interview with TechCrunch.

“We are trying to solve a D2C problem in Latin America. There’s a huge space for restaurants in this region to sell directly to consumers,” he said. “We also have an administration panel that allows restaurants to offer discounts and run campaigns. And WhatsApp is the app we are using to reach consumers.”

As is the case in many emerging markets such as India, WhatsApp is widely popular in the Latin American region. “Everything happens on WhatsApp here,” said Rico, on a WhatsApp call. “In Brazil, Instagram is very popular, too, so many restaurants are using Instagram as a channel with us,” he said.

Rico co-founded OlaClick with three other entrepreneurs in 2020, all of whom are European immigrants (and pictured above). He said they all moved to, and have been living in Latin America, for over 10 years now and this startup is their attempt to give back to the region and create jobs for many.

“With OlaClick’s hassle-free technology, any restaurant can instantly open a digital storefront and leverage social media to sell their products online. This opens up a new revenue stream for businesses across Latin America and represents a huge opportunity for OlaClick,” said Zachary Bratun-Glennon, partner at Gradient Ventures, in a statement.

OlaClick, which also counts Y Combinator among its backers, today has a presence in more than 20 nations, but identifies Brazil, Mexico and Colombia as their core markets. Its platform is processing over 1 million orders each month from more than 45,000 restaurants.

Rico said the startup will deploy the fresh funds to expand its engineering and product team and broaden the offerings to restaurant partners. OlaClick currently allows restaurants to either use their own logistics to make the deliveries or customers pick them up from the eatery. The startup plans to partner with logistics startups to offer delivery services to restaurants.

OlaClick — which last year processed $35 million in commission-free orders, a figure it hopes to scale to $200 million this year — is also Meta’s maiden startup investment in Latin America.

“We’re thrilled to support OlaClick’s passionate and talented team as they help restaurants of all sizes across Latin America reach their customers directly, and optimize orders, on WhatsApp,” said Sunita Parasuraman, head of New Product Experimentation Investments at Meta, in a statement.

Revenue-based financing platform Bloom secures $377M Series A led by Credo and Fortress

While the likes of Pipe are reaching multi-billion valuations, European revenue-based financing is experiencing as much of a boom as it is in the U.S. U.K.-based startup platform Bloom has now secured a £300 million / $377 million financing round led by Credo Capital and Fortress Investment Group LLC (NYSE:FIG), making it one of the better-funded revenue-based lending businesses in Europe. It has now raised a total of £307 million.

Bloom competes with companies like Wayflyer in Ireland, which has raised a total of $636.2 million, according to Crunchbase, and Clearco in the U.S., which has raised $681.5 million.

The revenue-based lender says its pricing model and “pay-as-you-go” features set it apart from similar startups that have arisen in the last 18 months.

CEO James Hickson said in a statement: “We are not another revenue-based lender. We estimate that ecommerce merchants have incurred £125-£200 million in excess fees based on the current pricing status quo. That’s money that could have been used for more stock, increased ad spend, or customer incentives. We saw an opportunity to innovate rather than simply join the herd.”

Founded during the pandemic in Luxembourg by Hickson, Bloom concentrates its service on online commerce companies.

Christopher Dailey, Credo Capital added: “Demand for eCommerce lending has expanded in Europe. We wanted to make an investment in a platform that was moving the product forward and combined all of the great technology and analytics you expect with a really differentiated product and approach.”