SpotHero, the Chicago-based company that has developed an on-demand parking app, has raised $50 million in a Series D round led by Macquarie Capital.

Union Grove Venture Partners participated in the round, along with existing investors, including Insight Venture Partners, Global Founders Capital, OCA Ventures, AutoTech Ventures and others, according to the company. SpotHero has raised $118 million to date.

The new capital will be used to expand its reach in the 300 U.S. and Canadian cities where it is already operating, build out its digital platform and strengthen partnerships with mobility companies, CEO and co-founder Mark Lawrence told TechCrunch.

SpotHero, which has operations in San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C. and Seattle, initially set out to develop software that connects everyday drivers to parking spots in thousands of garages across North America.

Its secret sauce is its software, which can sit on top of the 40 or so different point-of-sales systems used by parking garages. This acts as a single protocol, allowing SpotHero to bring some kind of standardization to an otherwise fragmented system. From this single protocol, SpotHero can add features that will allow for automated parking services, such as license plate recognition.

“We’ve built the pipes, so to speak, and this powers our consumer app,” Lawrence said in a recent interview. Now the company focus is on building out partnerships, features in the software and services, he added.

Capital will also be used to hire talent to support these new endeavors. SpotHero has 210 employees, and is working on hiring 50 more engineers this year.

In the eight years since its founding, SpotHero has expanded beyond its core consumer-focused competency. The company has added other services as urban density has increased and on-street parking has become more jumbled and confused thanks to an increase in traffic, ride-hailing and on-demand delivery services that take up valuable curb space. It has locked in more than 900 distribution partnerships and integrations, including Google Assistant for voice-enabled parking and Waze in-app navigation to parking. Other partners include Hertz and car2go for fleet parking, WeWork for commuter parking and Moovit for multi-modal parking.

Most recently, SpotHero launched a new service dubbed “SpotHero for Fleets” that targets shared mobility and on-demand services.

The service aims to be a one-stop shop for car sharing and commercial fleets to handle all that goes into ensuring there is access and the right number of designated parking areas on any given day within SpotHero’s large network of 6,500 garages across 300 cities. That means everything from managing the relationships between garage owners and the fleet companies to proper signage so car-sharing customers can find the vehicles, as well as flexible plans that account for seasonal demands on businesses.

Under the new service, customers are able to source and secure parking inventory in high-traffic areas across multiple cities and pay per use across multiple parking facilities on one invoice to streamline payments. 

The company has signed on car-sharing companies and other commercial fleets, although it’s not naming them yet.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | On-demand parking startup SpotHero raises million

The CareVoice, a Shanghai-based health insurance software startup with ambitions to expand throughout Asia, announced today that it has raised about $10 million in Series A funding.

The investment was led by LUN Partners Group and an undisclosed global investment manager that specializes in financial services, with participation from DNA Capital and returning investors SOSV and Artesian Capital. It will be used on research and development and to grow The CareVoice’s business in Hong Kong, which it entered last year. After that, the company plans to expand into other markets in Asia.

Founded in 2014, The CareVoice started as an app that let patients leave reviews about medical providers before focusing on software like its flagship product, an SaaS solution that makes healthcare and insurance products more accessible to customers on mobile, with the goal of increasing sales and retention. There are several other startups in China focused on simplifying the process of buying health insurance, like Instony, Datebao, eBaoTech and Bowtie, but a representative for The CareVoice says it focuses less on sales tools and is instead building an end-to-end platform for insurers that can integrate with their existing solutions.

The startup is currently used by 15 insurance providers in China and Hong Kong, including Ping An and AXA. While The CareVoice’s focus has been on improving the enrollment process, customer experience and how claims are processed, it is currently developing 10 new insurance products tailored for segmented consumer groups with health insurance partners, which the company’s founders believe will “revolutionize the way products are designed.”

The CareVoice also recently released a platform for insurers called CareVoiceOS, designed to enable insurers to create more customized plans and connect to other online healthcare services, and launched a new unit called StartupCare that allows startups to give founders and employees health benefits.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | The CareVoice raises million to develop better tech for insurance providers in Asia

Remediant, a startup that helps companies secure privileged access in a modern context, today announced a $15 million Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital and ForgePoint Capital.

Remediant’s co-founders, Paul Lanzi and Tim Keeler, worked in biotech for years and saw a problem first-hand with the way companies secured privileged access. It was granted to certain individuals in the organization carte blanche, and they believed if you could limit access, it would make the space more secure and less vulnerable to hackers.

Lanzi says they started the company with two core concepts. “The first concept is the ability to assess or detect all of the places where privileged accounts exist and what systems they have access to. The second concept is to strip away all of the privileged access from all of those accounts and grant it back on a just-in-time basis,” Lanzi explained.

If you’re thinking that could get in the way of people who need access to do their jobs, as former IT admins, they considered that. Remediant is based on a Zero Trust model where you have to prove you have the right to access the privileged area. But they do provide a reasonable baseline amount of time for users who need it within the confines of continuously enforcing access.

“Continuous enforcement is part of what we do, so by default we grant you four hours of access when you need that access, and then after that four hours, even if you forget to come back and end your session, we will automatically revoke that access. In that way all of the systems that are protected by SecureOne (the company’s flagship product) are held in this Zero Trust state where no one has access to them on a day-to-day basis,” Lanzi said.

Remediant SecureONE Dashboard (Screenshot: Remediant)

The company has bootstrapped until now, and has actually been profitable, something that’s unusual for a startup at this stage of development, but Lanzi says they decided to take an investment in order to shift gears and concentrate on growth and product expansion.

Deepak Jeevankumar, managing director at investor Dell Technologies Capital, says it’s not easy for security startups to rise above the noise, but he saw something in Remediant’s founders. “Tim and Paul came from the practitioner’s viewpoint. They knew the actual problems that people face in terms of privileged access. So they had a very strong empathy towards the customer’s problem because they lived through it,” Jeevankumar told TechCrunch.

He added that the privileged access market hasn’t really been updated in two decades. “It’s a market ripe for disruption. They are combining the just-in-time philosophy with the Zero Trust philosophy, and are bringing that to the crown jewel of administrative access,” he said.

The company’s tools are installed on the customer’s infrastructure, either on-prem or in the cloud. They don’t have a pure cloud product at the moment, but they have plans for a SaaS version down the road to help small and medium-sized businesses solve the privileged access problem.

Lanzi says they are also looking to expand the product line in other ways with this investment. “The basic philosophies that underpin our technology are broadly applicable. We want to start applying our technology in those other areas as well. So as we think toward a future that looks more like cloud and more like DevOps, we want to be able to add more of those features to our products,” he said.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Remediant lands M Series A to disrupt privileged access security

Earlier this year, the world turned very sour on a group of rich and famous parents who were exposed for having paid big money to get their not-so-academic offspring into competitive universities, using tactics like cheating on tests and more to get those offers. But even if you put illegal manoeuvres to one side, money and power have (frustratingly) long played roles in gaming the system to access higher learning.

Now, a startup that’s created an alternative route for those who are smart and willing to put in the work to get into those hallowed halls has raised some funding as it continues to grow. New Zealand’s Crimson Education, which has built a tech platform and consulting service to help students identify top schools and what they need to do in terms of academic and other activity to get in, has closed a $5 million round of funding. With this latest investment, the company is now valued at $245 million post-money, a big jump on the $160 million (NZ$220 million) valuation Crimson had in 2016 when Tiger Global invested $30 million.

This latest is a small but strategic round: The money is coming from Solborn Investment, the VC arm of the Korean holding company Solborn, and it’s specifically aimed at helping Crimson build out its business in that country (Korea has a huge population of young people who are very keen to study outside the country). The startup has raised $42 million to date, and from what we understand it’s quietly gearing up to raise another round to double down on another new market for the company: students in the U.S., looking for better guidance to get into schools in the U.S.

The leap in Crimson’s valuation is due to the startup’s success, both in terms of student achievements and the business model that has been built around this.

The company currently works with 1,500 tutors and has had 20,000 students use its platform to date. There have been more than 60 offers to Crimson students for places at Ivy League schools; a further 160+ to Oxford, Cambridge and other competitive schools; and more than 500 successful applications to the top 50 universities in the U.S.

As for the business model, pricing varies depending on the stage of the student (it offers programs for kids as young as 11), and what that student does — e.g. straight SAT tutoring or a full-service program that includes identifying schools, getting the right qualifications in order and applying — but in either case, it’s lucrative for Crimson. The average revenue per student in the U.S. ranges between $5,000 and $10,000. Tutoring starts at $80 per hour, and $2,000 per module for the younger program.

These costs are not small — you might even say it sounds like an extra year or two of college education — and indeed, some 15% of students get some form of financial aid to use Crimson.

Ivy League dogfooding

Crimson was started in 2014 after one of the founders, Jamie Beaton, decided he wanted to apply to top schools beyond his native New Zealand. He eventually ended up at Harvard, and on the way he identified a gap in the market for international students who wanted to do the same but found navigating how to map one country’s educational system and experience onto another’s. So, he decided to build his own experience and methods into a business with two equally ambitious co-founders (Sharndre Kushor, pictured below with Beaton, and Fangzhou Jiang). He was still a student at Harvard when the startup was incorporated, hence the “Crimson” of the name.

The company today is based around not just a network of human tutors, but a set of proprietary algorithms to identify what a student needs to do and the likelihood of achieving it, an app, a popular YouTube channel, a Q&A board and a “philanthropy” arm focused on providing financial aid to people to use Crimson, and to help Crimson students access and get scholarships and other financial aid to study.

Initially focused on international students who need help navigating the waters of applying to schools elsewhere, it turns out that domestic students need and want the same kind of advice and help, too.

Beaton is now 24, and unsurprisingly has become something of a poster child for Crimson because of his own grit-and-determination success.

But to be clear, Beaton was not your average high school student, and he isn’t even your average over-achiever.

Before he turned 18, he’d done some 10 A-Levels (somewhat akin to AP exams in the U.S., but more rigorous. Focused on the whole of your last two years of school and mandatory, most people take only three focused on what they eventually want to major in as an undergrad).

Beaton had made the effort to engage outside tutors for all the subjects that his New Zealand high school could not accommodate, and engaged others to help him prepare for U.S.-specific exams like the SAT, as well as work through the application process for the many schools whose admissions applications he filled out.

And since his undergrad years at Harvard, where he studied applied mathematics, he received a masters at Harvard in the subject, then an MBA and a masters of education at Stanford, and is now a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford studying public policy.

So as the company continues to grow, it will be worth watching how it navigates its brand, its message and the inevitable involvement of more than the early adopting high-achievers who have used Crimson to date.

That is to say, the company naturally attracts parents and kids who — even if they are only fractionally as self-motivated as Beaton seems to be — will already have a lot of focus and academic ability and may therefore be predisposed to succeeding through the platform. How will that change as it grows in popularity, and how will Crimson measure its success?

In answer to the question, Beaton said that there is already a lot of academic analysis in place to make sure that Crimson is not effectively an echo chamber, providing help to those who are already well along the way to academic success. “When we bring a student on board we do a lot of academic assessments,” Beaton said. “We then look at baseline achievement level, and we can use that to track our contribution.”

Similarly, the aim is not just for prestigious schools — even though that is essentially what it is right now — it’s to find the right school and right subject for the right person.

If Crimson can capture that successfully, there is a lot of potential for the company to transcend the university admissions use case and provide an effective platform to replace those slightly stilted, standardised careers quizzes that exist today to help wayward teenagers figure out what they might want to do, and how to get there.

“This is about helping to unlock future opportunities and providing advice,” Beaton said. “You can’t just push students into something.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Crimson Education, a platform to help students get into top universities, nabs M at a 5M valuation

Challenger bank N26 is announcing two things this week. First, the company lets you share sub-accounts with other N26 users in just a few taps. Second, after a limited beta test, the company is officially launching in the U.S. with open registration.

Shared Spaces could be seen as an alternative to joint accounts. The feature could be particularly useful for groups with more than two persons and situations that temporarily require a shared account. For instance, you could use Shared Spaces for a vacation, to split bills with your roommates, etc.

Only a small subset of the company’s user base can access the feature for now. N26 plans to gradually roll out Shared Spaces to all users.

The company is building this feature on top of Spaces. This feature has been around for a while. It lets you create a sub-account and set aside some money in that separate sub-account. You can set a savings goal and transfer money on a regular basis.

Shared Spaces is basically a multiplayer version of Spaces. When a user creates a Space, they can invite up to 10 other N26 users to that Space. While the original user remains the owner of the Space, other users can freely deposit and withdraw money from the shared account.

Sending an invite is the equivalent of granting a power of attorney on a Space. The admin of the Shared Space is the only person who can add and remove participants to the Shared Space. So it’s not technically a joint account, as joint accounts have multiple owners.

Interestingly, N26 is launching this as a premium feature. You need a premium N26 account in order to create a Shared Space, such as an N26 You subscription (€9.90 per month) or an N26 Metal subscription (€16.90 per month). You can invite free users, but free users are limited to two active Spaces. Those limitations will most certainly foster premium subscriptions.

Unfortunately, you can’t spend money from a Shared Space directly for now. Your card and bank transfers remain tied to your main N26 account. You have to tap on a transaction and tap on “Pay back from a space” to get your money back from a Shared Space.

N26 co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf told me that there could be a feature that lets you attach different cards to different Spaces in the future.

N26 started accepting customers in the U.S. in early July. And it looks like it’s been working well, as anyone in the U.S. can now download the app and open a bank account. N26 is also launching MoneyBeam in the U.S., a Venmo-like feature that lets you instantly send money to other N26 users.

N26 is also launching perks in the U.S. You’ll get small discounts on some monthly subscriptions if you pay with your N26 card. Current partners include Aaptiv, Blinkist, Luminary and Tidal.

I already covered the U.S. launch back in July, so head over to my previous article to learn more.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | N26 launches Shared Spaces and is now fully available in the US