Many Silicon Valley companies and fintech startups in India today share a common mission: They all want to bring their financial services to the next billion users. Dozens of fintech startups that we have spoken to in recent months have told us that they all want to address much of India, one of the last great growth markets globally, in the next few years.

So you can imagine our excitement when we learned there is at least one startup that is going after just a few million users in the immediate future. We’re talking about CRED, a nine-month-old, Bangalore-based startup that is building solutions to incentivize credit card users in India to become more responsible with money and thereby improve their credit score.

CRED has raised $120 million in a Series B financing round, Kunal Shah, founder and CEO of the startup, told TechCrunch on Monday. He declined to share more information. The startup, which has raised about $145 million to date, is now valued between $430 million to $450 million, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

According to a regulatory filing, existing investors Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital and DST Global’s Gemini Investments led the round, with participation from Tiger Global, Hillhouse Capital, General Catalyst, Greenoaks Capital and Dragoneer.

Hundreds of millions of Indians today don’t have a credit score because they have never taken a loan from a recognized entity nor owned a credit card. According to the government’s official figures, fewer than 50 million credit cards are in circulation in India currently, with industry reports suggesting that the actual number of unique credit card holders is about half of that.

“Nobody taught us about how to use money,” Shah told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “This has created a huge trust gap in India. If you look at developed markets, systematic trust is very high between all the entities. Members don’t have to rely on third-parties. In India, even if you wanted to rent a flat, you look for brokers, for instance.”

You can build that trust when you know how someone handles their money, and how they have handled it in recent history. “Our aim is to create a big membership community with high credit worthiness, therefore open up more opportunities for them,” Shah explained.

Shah is not going after the masses. He wants to focus on just the credit card users for now, and if he could win the trust of just half of those plastic card holders in India, he would consider it a success.

“Instead of chasing the mythological mass customers who are currently useful only on paper if you wanted to boast about your daily active user or monthly active user metric, our goal is to serve the existing users,” he said.

On CRED, users are offered a range of features, including the ability to better track their spending, get reminders and check their credit score, but more importantly, access to a range of lofty offers such as membership to a gym at a discounted price, access to good restaurants at low prices and subscription to various services at little to no charge. Users can access these features by earning points, which they can secure every time they pay their credit card bills on time.

Varun Krishnan, editor of technology news site FoneArena, told TechCrunch that he has found CRED useful in getting reminders to pay his bills and likes that he can pay them through a range of payment options, including UPI apps and debit cards. “I have several cards and it is hard to track amounts and due dates of payment for each one. They send all these alerts on WhatsApp, which is a blessing,” he said.

These are the reasons that attracted many people like Krishnan to join CRED. That, and some incentive to pay his bills — though he hopes that CRED expands the range of offers it currently provides to customers.

That wish may soon come true. In the coming months, CRED will enable these highly sought-after customers to access some financial services from banks in a single-click. Additionally, it is also exploring expansion to some international markets, the aforementioned source said.

CRED does not charge users any money for joining its platform, nor for availing any of the features it offers. But it is generating revenue from some of the partners that are supplying offers on the app.

It’s not a surprise that Shah, an industry veteran known for speaking the uncomfortable truths at conferences, has won the trust of so many investors already. He built one of the biggest payment apps in India, Freecharge, and sold it to e-commerce giant Snapdeal for a whopping $400 million in one of the increasingly rare exits that India’s fintech market has seen to date.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | India’s 9-month-old CRED raises 0M to help people improve their financial behavior

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1. Bedding startup Boll & Branch raises $100M

The company sells sustainably sourced sheets, pillows, mattresses and towels. Until now, it had only raised $12 million in outside capital.

This new funding comes from L Catterton. CEO Scott Tannen compared Boll & Branch to the firm’s previous investments The Honest Company and Peloton — companies that “have become the winner in the startup competition” and are ready to “really become household names.”

2. Nvidia and VMware team up to make GPU virtualization easier

Nvidia today announced that it has been working with VMware to bring its virtual GPU technology to VMware’s vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS.

3. Megvii, the Chinese startup unicorn known for facial recognition tech, files to go public in Hong Kong

Founded by three Tsinghua University graduates in 2011, Megvii is among China’s leading AI startups, with its peers (and rivals) including SenseTime and Yitu. Its clients include Alibaba, Ant Financial, Lenovo, China Mobile and Chinese government entities.

4. Watch the first look at ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ from Disney’s big fan event

This video goes really heavy on the nostalgia.

5. Experimental US Air Force space plane breaks previous record for orbital spaceflight

The Boeing-built X-37B space plane commissioned and operated by the U.S. Air Force has now broken its own record for time spent in space. Its latest mission has lasted 719 days as of today.

6. Is Knotel poised to turn WeWork from a Unicorn into an Icarus?

Knotel has reversed the WeWork “co-working” model. Instead of “WeWork” branding everywhere, Knotel simply leases buildings, takes a small office for its staff and then kits out the space in a way where a company can just move straight in and call it their own. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

John Vrionis of Unusual Ventures joins Equity to talk about why he thinks “stage-agnostic” investing doesn’t make any sense. And on Original Content, we review the Netflix movie “The Red Sea Diving Resort.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Daily Crunch: A big funding round for Boll & Branch

Y Combinator-backed startup Astranis is now set to launch its first commercial telecommunication satellite aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, with a launch time frame currently set for sometime starting in the fourth quarter of next year. Astranis aims to address the market of people who don’t currently have broadband internet access, which is still a huge number globally, and they hope to do so using low-cost satellites that massively undercut the price of existing global telecommunications hardware, which can be built and launched much faster than existing spacecraft, too.

Astranis satellites are much more cost-efficient because they’re smaller and easier to make, which changes the economics of deployment for potential carrier and connectivity provider partners. Its approach has already attracted the partnership of Microcom subsidiary Pacific Dataport, an Anchorage company that was formed to expand satellite broadband access in Alaska. This will be the goal of the company’s first launch with SpaceX, to deliver a single satellite to geostationary orbit that will add more than 7.5 Gbps of capacity to the internet provider’s network in Alaska, tripling capacity and potentially reducing costs by “up to three times,” according to Astranis.

This isn’t the first-ever satellite that Astranis has sent up to space — it launched a demonstration satellite in 2018 to show that its tech could work as advertised. Astranis’ approach is distinct from others attempting to offer satellite-based connectivity, including SpaceX’s own Starlink project, because it focuses on building satellites that remain in a fixed orbital position relative to the area on the ground where they’re providing service, as opposed to using a large constellation of low Earth orbit satellites that offer coverage because one or more are bound to be over the coverage area at any given time as they orbit the Earth, handing off connections from one to the next.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Satellite internet startup Astranis books first commercial launch on SpaceX Falcon 9

What can you do with virtual reality when you have complete control of the physical space around the player? How “real” can virtual reality become?

That’s the core concept behind The Void. They take over retail spaces in places like Downtown Disney and shopping malls around the country and turn them into virtual reality playgrounds, They’ve got VR experiences based on properties like Star Wars, Ghostbusters, and Wreck-It Ralph; while these big names tend to be the main attractions, they’re dabbling with creating their own original properties, too.

By building both the game environment and the real-world rooms in which players wander, The Void can make the physical and virtual align. If you see a bench in your VR headset, there’s a bench there in the real world for you to sit on; if you see a lever on the wall in front of you, you can reach out and physically pull it. Land on a lava planet and heat lamps warm your skin; screw up a puzzle, and you’ll feel a puff of mist letting you know to try something else.

At $30-$35 per person for what works out to be a roughly thirty-minute experience (about ten of which is watching a scene-setting video and getting your group into VR suits), it’s pretty pricey. But it’s also some of the most mind-bending VR I’ve ever seen.

The Void reportedly raised about $20 million earlier this year and is in the middle of a massive expansion. It’s more than doubling its number of locations, opening 25 new spots in a partnership with the Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield chain of malls.

I sat down to chat with The Void’s co-founder and Chief Creative Officer, Curtis Hickman, to hear how they got started, how his background (in stage magic!) comes into play here, how they came to work with massive properties like Ghostbusters and Star Wars, and where he thinks VR is going from here.

Greg Kumparak: Tell me a bit about yourself. How’d you get your start? How’d you get into making VR experiences?

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | The Void’s Curtis Hickman on scaling, creative IP and the future of VR experiences

Online education startup Udacity has hired former LendingTree executive Gabriel Dalporto as its new CEO, an appointment that follows months of layoffs and a restructuring directed by the company’s co-founder and executive chairman Sebastian Thrun.

Dalporto comes to Udacity after seven years at LendingTree, where he served in numerous positions, including chief marketing officer and chief financial officer. Dalporto stepped down as CFO in 2017 to join the company’s board and become executive advisor to the CEO. Dalporto left the executive advisor job in 2018, but remains on the board.

Thrun stepped in as executive chairman and took over operations at Udacity after Vishal Makhijani left the top post in October 2018. The CEO position has remained vacant since Makhijani left. Thrun will remain as executive chairman now that the CEO spot has been filled.

“He’s extremely strategic and pragmatic,” Thrun said in a recent interview, describing Dalporto.

Dalporto is known for his turnaround skills. But the new CEO says his focus at Udacity won’t be slashing costs and other activities often associated with that skill set.

“I was hired as a growth executive; I was not hired to be a turnaround executive,” Dalporto told TechCrunch.

Dalporto isn’t ready to provide details of his plans as CEO. Monday is his first day at the startup. But he will likely focus on growth areas such as the startup’s enterprise and government programs, as well as retaining and recapturing students into the Udacity ecosystem. Udacity’s enterprise clients include AT&T, Airbus, Audi, BMW, Capital One, Cisco and the Royal Bank of Scotland. It also has government relationships with Australia, the MENA region and New Zealand.

Dalporto is coming into a startup that is leaner and more productive, in terms of launching new nanodegrees, than it was a year ago.  It’s also cash-flow positive, according to Thrun, who has spent 2019 revamping the company.

When Thrun took over as executive chairman and assumed operations and a search for a CEO, he found a company that had grown too quickly and was burdened by its own bureaucracy. Udacity, which specializes in “nanodegrees” on a range of technical subjects that include AI, deep learning, digital marketing, VR and computer vision, was struggling because of runaway costs and other inefficiencies. Its nanodegree programs, which had grown in 2017, became sluggish in 2018. 

Staff reductions soon followed as Thrun sought to get a handle on costs. About 130 people were laid off and other open positions were left vacant. Thrun then cut further in April. About 20% of the staff was laid off and operations were restructured in an effort to bring costs in line with revenue without curbing growth. The company streamlined its marketing efforts and downsized and consolidated office space. As of April, the startup employs 300 full-time equivalent employees and about 60 contractors.

Other changes included the launch of a global technical mentoring program, switching its direct-to-student business from fixed to monthly subscription pricing to incentivize individuals to move through courses faster. Lalit Singh, who joined Udacity in February as chief operating officer, has been critical to the turnaround, according to Thrun.

Its productivity has also improved. In first six months of 2019, Udacity launched 12 new nanodegree programs compared to just 8 in all of 2018.

“In the three months since we’ve initiated these changes, the consumer business has grown by more than 60%,” Thrun wrote in a blog post Monday announcing the changes.

Udacity’s enterprise and government programs have also grown, with bookings increasing by more than 100% year over year.

Clarification: Thrun was never officially the CEO. He was at the helm of all activities at Udacity, but under the role of executive chairman, a position he is keeping. 

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Udacity names former LendingTree executive to CEO post

Boll & Branch, which sells sustainably sourced sheets, pillows, mattresses and towels, is announcing that it has raised $100 million in a strategic investment from L Catterton’s Flagship Buyout Fund.

This looks like a big change from the company’s previous approach to funding. It was self-funded for its first two years (resulting in what CEO Scott Tannen described as “a lot of maxed out credit cards and five mortgages on my house”), and even when it started looking at venture capital, it only raised a total of $12 million from a single institutional backer, Silas Capital.

In fact, when Recode wrote about Boll & Branch’s Series B last year, it described the startup as one “that wants to raise as little venture capital as possible.”

Tannen said that when he founded the company with his wife Missy, they wanted to “build a sustainable business from the ground up,” and that wasn’t just about the products — they didn’t want to build a company that was “ultimately designed from day one to be sold.”

As a result, he said, Boll & Branch has been profitable for the past four years and is now bringing in “nine-figure revenue.” He compared it to other L Catterton investments like The Honest Company and Peloton, companies that “have become the winner in the startup competition” and are ready to “really become household names.”

In a statement, L Catterton’s Nik Thukral described Boll & Branch as “one of the most beloved bedding brands” and said it “capitalizes on several compelling trends including the emergence of authentic, pure, and chemical free products that can be traced back to their origin, as well as consumers’ heightened focus on healthy living.”

The company’s next steps include expanding internationally — Tannen said that while the company doesn’t currently sell outside the United States, “It’s hard to imagine a country or market in the world that doesn’t make sense for Boll & Branch.”

It will also continue expanding the product lineup. Tannen hinted at “really interesting product introductions” coming in the next few months. They might not be the most obvious additions to the lineup, but he said these decisions come from asking, “What does the home goods brand of the future look like?”

He added, “That’s what we’re trying to be, versus trying to look in the shopping mall and just creating a new version of something [that already exists].”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Bedding startup Boll & Branch raises 0M