Browsing Tag: Startups

Ampere, the chip startup run by former Intel President Renee James, announced a new chip today that she says is designed specifically to optimize for cloud workloads.

Ampere VP of product Jeff Wittich says the new chip is called the Ampere Altra, and it’s been designed with some features that should make it attractive to cloud providers. This involves three main focuses including high performance, scalability and power efficiency — all elements that would be important to cloud vendors operating at scale.

The Altra is an ARM chip with some big features.”It’s 64-bit ARM cores or 160 cores in a two-socket platforms –we support both one socket and two socket [configurations]. We are running at 3 GHz turbo, and that’s 3 GHz across all of the cores because of the way that cloud delivers compute, you’re utilizing all the cores as much of the time as possible. So our turbo performance was optimized for all of the cores being able to sustain it all the time,” Wittich explained.

The company sees this chip as a kind of workhorse for the cloud. “We’ve really looked at this as we’re designing a general purpose CPU that is built for the cloud environment, so you can utilize that compute the way the cloud utilizes that type of compute. So it supports the vast array of all of the workloads that run in the cloud,” he said.

Founder and CEO James says the company has been working with their cloud customers to give them the kind of information they need to optimize the chip for their individual workloads at a granular configuration level, something the hyper scalers in particular really require.

“Let’s go do what we can to build the platform that delivers the raw power and performance, the kind of environment that you’re looking for, and then have a design approach that enables them to work with us on what’s important and the kind of control, that kind of feature set that’s unique because each one of them have their own software environment,” James explained.

Among the companies working with Ampere early on have been Oracle (an investor, according to Crunchbase) and Microsoft, among others.

James says one of the unforeseen challenges of delivering this chip is possible disruptions in the supply chain due to the Corona-19 virus and its impact in Asia where many of the parts come from, and the chips are assembled.

She says the company has taken that into consideration and has been able to build up a worldwide supply chain she hopes will help with hiccups that might occur because of supply chain slow downs.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Ampere launches new chip built from ground up for cloud workloads

DocSend has become one of the most popular tools for sharing venture fundraise decks, not only because of the control it offers, but also because of the analytics it can provide founders on how VCs read decks and where they might get stuck as they are perusing from slide to slide.

The company has been generous sharing its data with us on what times are best to fundraise and how to structure a slide deck for best performance. Now the company has released a new report on the state of pre-seed funding, and it is chock full of interesting facts and figures.

You should read the deck, but I would point out three interesting patterns that arise from the company’s data.

First, there is a really fascinating pattern comparing the number of founders at a startup with the amount of money the startup eventually fundraises and how many meetings it takes to close a pre-seed round. I created a chart from DocSend’s data here:

What’s interesting is that there is (almost) a straight linear decrease in the number of meetings required to close a pre-seed round as the number of founders increases. This makes sense to some degree: given how early most of these rounds are, one of the best ways to de-risk an investment is to simply add more people early on. Theoretically, five people can get more work done than a “team” of just one person.

But despite what appears to be an easier time fundraising, the actual dollars coming in doesn’t reflect the potentially de-risked nature of having more co-founders. In fact, three founders is the peak for dollars invested into a company — at $511,522 — and it swiftly decreases as teams add one or two more co-founders.

I have hypotheses on why that might be, although without more data, it’s hard to answer them. But if you want to optimize your pre-seed fundraise and you are looking for a magic number, it definitely seems that three co-founders is what pre-seed VCs today are looking for.

A second interesting nugget in this report is what slides tend to be included in successful pre-seed fundraise decks. The typical ones are listed and are fairly uniformly included, such as Company Purpose, Problem, Solution, Market Size, Product, Business Model, and Team.

But “Why Now” slides are only included in 53% of successful pre-seed fundraise decks in DocSend’s dataset, and that seems absolutely nuts to me. With the number of startups plying their trade in all kinds of verticals, if something hasn’t been built yet, there usually is at least some reason why there isn’t an incumbent startup that has been successful. That’s usually what gets answered in a Why Now slide, but I guess a lot of pre-seed investors just sort of take it at face value that new startups are going to cut through the market no matter what has happened before.

What’s even crazier though is that only two-thirds of decks included a Fundraising Ask. This used to be Fundraising 101: you always included an “ask” at the end of the deck to make sure that investors knew what you were looking for in terms of capital requirements. But with the rise of complexity around seed, I can understand that the Ask slide is just becoming more and more complicated to include, particularly at pre-seed, and so founders are dropping it.

The third and final data point I thought was fascinating was around the number of investors contacted as part of a fundraising process. DocSend’s report has a handy graph, but my takeaway is that while some folks manage to fundraise with very little outreach to investors, a whole other group needs to contact upwards of 100, 150 or even 200 investors in order to raise their pre-seed.

I have repeated a mantra that pitching 100 investors per round is not uncommon for many startups, and that seems to be borne out here in the data. Yes, 100+ contacts is a large number, but ultimately, some fundraises are just tough, and the more people that potentially get a look at your company, the more likelier you are to succeed.

DocSend CEO Russ Heddleston told me that his own personal takeaway is that the quality bar has just gone up for many early-stage startups. “We used to say you could get funding with an MVPP (minimum viable PowerPoint), but VCs are spending a significant amount of time looking at the product pages of successful decks, and really expect a level of product readiness that we didn’t see five years ago,” he said.

There’s a lot more in the report, but those are some highlights. Definitely check out all of DocSend’s other data as well.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | DocSend’s new pre-seed data shows how many founders you should have and how many investors you should meet

iPrice Group, which helps comparison shoppers in Southeast Asia by pulling together prices from different e-commerce platforms, has closed a $10 million Series B. Led by ACA Investments, the round also included participation from Daiwa PI Partners and returning investors Line Ventures, Mirae Asset-Naver Asia Growth Fund.

The company’s last funding announcement, from Line’s venture capital arm, was in May 2018 and its new round brings iPrice’s total funding so far to about $19.8 million.

The company said it has more than 20 million monthly visitors and about 5 million transactions were made through its platforms in 2019. Its core iPrice unit accounted for about half of its revenue and operated at a 30% EBITDA margin, a level of profitability the company expects its other businesses to hit in the next two to three years.

iPrice will use its funding to develop product discovery features, including recommendations and professional product reviews. The platform currently partners with “super apps,” like Line and Home Credit, that offer a wide array of services, through one app.

iPrice began by collecting coupons and discount codes when it launched, before expanding into price aggregation to help consumers navigate the growing roster of e-commerce platforms in Southeast Asia, such as Zalora, Shoppee and Lazada.

The platform is divided into verticals, including electronics and appliances, fashion and automotive, and now claims to aggregate more than 1.5 billion products from more than 1,500 e-commerce partners. It says it is the leading product aggregator in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

In a press statement, ACA Investments chief investment officer Tomohiro Fujita said, “The e-commerce industry in Southeast Asia is at its emerging stage and we see huge potential. iPrice Group will play an important role, especially with its comprehensive coverage of markets in Southeast Asia. It’s the prime gateway to online shopping.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | iPrice, a platform for comparison shopping in Southeast Asia, raises million Series B

French startup Le Wagon has raised its first round of funding after many years of bootstrapping. The company closed a $19 million funding round (€17 million) a few months ago. Cathay Capital is leading the round with AfricInvest also participating.

“We’ve always bootstrapped since 2013 and we’ve always been profitable since day one,” Le Wagon co-founder and COO Romain Paillard told me. “Structurally, all of our metrics are doing well but we wanted to increase our resources.”

Le Wagon is an interesting story of a slow iteration of a successful product. The company has been laser-focused on a single course for most of its lifetime — a highly rated full-stack web development course. There are now 38 campuses around the world across two dozens of countries (but not the U.S.) offering this course.

But Le Wagon wants to go one step further. With today’s funding round, the startup hopes to widen its reach with both new courses and new countries. And it starts with a new data science course. It is only available in a handful of cities for now, but Le Wagon hopes to offer the new course across all its campuses.

The company has also been working on a new format. Instead of committing to a 9-week full-time bootcamp, you can apply to a part-time course on Tuesday night, Thursday night and Saturday. It takes longer to complete the course, but it could be particularly useful if you have a family and kids — maybe you can’t afford to leave your job or take a sabbatical.

Once again, part-time courses are live in a handful of cities for now. Le Wagon hopes to replicate the same offering across all its campuses.

Le Wagon Executive is another project that has been promising but is still underdeveloped. The company started offering courses to big corporate clients to train top talent. Clients include Axa, BNP Paribas, L’Oréal or LVMH. “For now, it’s only a small part of our business because it’s still the very beginning,” Paillard said.

As you can see, Le Wagon has a ton of ideas to grow its business, but it’s hard to iterate at a fast, global pace when you’re still bootstrapped. The company will now be able to reproduce things that are working well in Paris across all other countries much more easily.

And after that, you can expect more courses and more countries. But Le Wagon still wants to build a uniformized coding school and remain in control of its courses. That’s how Le Wagon managed to reach that scale in the first place.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Le Wagon raises million to build a global coding bootcamp

Popular music app publisher MWM has raised a $55.9 million (€50 million) funding round. Blisce/ is leading the round with Idinvest Partners, Bpifrance (Large Venture fund), Aglaé Ventures and Xavier Niel also participating.

Some of MWM’s apps include edjing Mix, Beat Maker Pro, Drum Machine, Beat Snap 2, TaoMix 2, Guitar and Drums. The company has slowly expanded to cover more grounds in the music space, from production to learning, gaming and utilities.

Up next, MWM wants to expand beyond music and tackle new verticals in the creative space. And the company seems well-positioned to reproduce some of its successes as MWM has attracted over 400 million app downloads over the years.

Some of those verticals are already quite busy, such as video and photo editing. But MWM hopes that it’ll be able to become a sort of Adobe for mobile creativity apps.

The startup has also launched hardware products. Its latest product Phase lets you turn good old turntables into digital DJ controllers. After plugging a receiver to your mixer, you just have to put two tiny receivers at the center of your turntables, on top of records.

MWM was founded in 2012. It has attracted $67 million (€60 million) of funding in total. The company currently has 70 employees across two offices in Paris and Bordeaux.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | MWM raises .9 million after generating 400 million music app downloads

Robinhood, the startup with a stock trading app valued upwards of at least $7.6 billion, suffered one of its worst outages on one of the busiest trading days of the year.

As the Dow Jones Industrial Average enjoyed the single biggest point-gain since 2009, Robinhood’s application fell prey to an error that locked users out of the service for the duration of Monday’s trading.

“We started experiencing downtime issues across our platform this morning at market open,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “We don’t have an estimate when the issue will be resolved but all of us at Robinhood are working as hard as we can to resume service.”

One potential cause of the outages could just be the high trading volumes that have accompanied highly volatile markets over the past month. While there were some early reports that the bug was caused by a Leap Day bug, the company has denied that a February 29th error was at fault.

The company’s mistake could cost its users lots of money as they sought to trade on stocks that were hit in last week’s string of losses due to investor worries over the impact the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, would have on the global economy.

This isn’t the first time that Robinhood’s code has got the company into trouble. Last year, faulty coding allowed users to borrow more money than the company intended, giving a potential windfall to would-be traders.

Back in 2013 when the founders of the company discussed their idea around TechCrunch reporter Josh Constine’s kitchen table, they envisioned the app as a way to share hot tips. That quickly morphed into a trading platform that the company says has more than 10 million users on its platform.

The secret to the company’s initial success was free stock trading — a pricing model which many of its competitors have since gone on to copy.

According to Apptopia, Robinhood is far and away the most popular of the free stock trading services, having far more volume and users than its legacy contenders. However, as today’s outage showed, that user base may be negatively impacted by not working with companies who have had their services stress tested over decades. Even so, the big trading houses have also experienced technical issues over the past week, as CNBC reported earlier today.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Robinhood suffers prolonged outage on the day the Dow enjoyed its biggest point gain since 2009

Sonantic, a U.K. startup that has developed “human-quality” artificial voice technology for the games and entertainment industry, has raised €2.3 million in funding.

Leading the round is EQT Ventures, with participation from existing backers, including Entrepreneur First (EF), AME Cloud Ventures and Bart Swanson of Horizons Ventures. I also understand one of the company’s earlier investors is Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin.

Founded in 2018 by CEO Zeena Qureshi and CTO John Flynn as they went through EF’s company builder programme in London, Sonantic (previously Speak Ai) says it wants to disrupt the global gaming and entertainment voice industry. The startup has developed artificial voice tech that it claims is able to offer “expressive, realistic voice acting” on-demand for use by game studios. It already has R&D partnerships underway with more than 10 AAA game studios.

“Getting dialogue into game development is a slow, expensive and labour-intensive task,” says Qureshi, when asked to define the problem Sonantic wants to solve. “Dialogue pipelines consist of casting, booking studios, contracts, scheduling, editing, directing and a whole lot of coordination. Voiced narrative video games can take up to 10 years to make with game design changing frequently, defaulting game devs to carry out several iteration cycles — often leading to going over budgets and game releases being delayed.”

To help remedy this, Sonantic offers what Qureshi dubs “dynamic voice acting on-demand,” with the ability to craft the exact type of character in terms of gender, personality, accent, tone and emotional state. The startup’s human quality text-to-speech system is offered via an API and a graphical user interface tool that lets its synthetic voice actors be edited, sculpted and directed “just like a human actor,” she tells me.

This sees Sonantic work directly with actors to synthesise their voices whilst also harnessing their unique skills in performance. “We then augment how actors work by offering them a digital version of themselves that can create passive income for them,” explains the Sonantic CEO.

For the games studios, Sonantic offers faster iteration cycles at a cheaper price because it cuts down logistical costs and has voice models ready to perform. Its SaaS model and API also makes it easier to create audio performances to test out potential narratives or to finesse a story, helping with editing and directing.

Meanwhile, Sonantic says it is gearing up to publicly reveal how its technology can capture “deep emotions across the full spectrum,” from subtle all the way through to exaggerated, which it says is usually something only very skilled actors can achieve.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Sonantic scores €2.3M funding to bring ‘human-quality’ artificial voices to games

Last week, I sat down with Connie Chan, a general partner with Andreessen Horowitz who focuses on investing in consumer tech. She joined the firm in 2011 after working at HP in China.

From her temporary offices located in a modest skyscraper with unobscured views of San Francisco, we talked about where she sees the biggest opportunities right now, along with how big of an impact fears over coronavirus could have on the startup industry — and for how long.

Our conversation has been edited for length. You can also find a longer version of our chat in podcast form.

TechCrunch: There’s so much money flowing into the Bay Area and startups generally from all over the world. What happens if that slows down because of the coronavirus?

Connie Chan: It’s interesting, I was just talking to a friend of mine who is an investor in Asia, in China. And she said that some industries are going to suffer significantly. Restaurants, for example, are hurting [along with] any store that relies on foot traffic [like] bookstores and so forth. Yet you see a lot of companies also doing really well in this time. You’ll see grocery delivery as something that’s in high demand. Insurance is in very high demand. People are spending more time at home, so whether it’s games or streaming or whatever they’re doing at home is doing well. Lots of my counterparts in China are also taking all their pitches via video conference. They’re still doing work, but they’re all just working from home.

Where do you think we’ll see the biggest impact most immediately?

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz discusses consumer tech’s winners and losers

One of the big, ongoing debates in VC and founder circles concerns whether to accept money from top-tier, later-stage venture capitalists during a seed round. Even as their funds reach monstrous sizes, more and more top funds are investing in the earliest stages of a startup’s life, intensifying the question for founders of so-called “signaling risk”: if a later-stage investor in your seed round doesn’t actually do your later-stage rounds, does that negatively signal to other potential investors that they should walk away from your company?

It’s a perennial debate largely because it’s hard to build a quality data set to definitively answer the question. But now, we might have some data that finally sheds light on this signaling risk.

AngelList’s data science team collected information from its Venture portfolio (which includes approximately $1.8 billion assets under management according to the company) to look at how signaling risk has changed over time according to the cohort performance of startups in their portfolio. The essential question was, “Does having a top-10 investor in your seed round improve or hurt your chances of a follow-on round 18 months later, compared to seed rounds without such an investor?” Their work produced this chart:

Two quick and important notes. First, AngelList processed its own data (given the need to protect confidentiality, I wasn’t given direct access to their data set for analysis). Second, AngelList supplied notes on its methodology, which I have attached at the end unedited for those curious how the data set and chart were constructed.

The short summary of the data is that in the 2015 and 2016 cohorts, having a top-10 VC investor in your seed round appeared to improve a startup’s chances to raise a follow-on equity round, particularly in 2016. However, that benefit seemed to reverse itself in the 2017 cohort, and the negative effect was magnified in the 2018 cohort.

The typical caveat emptor applies: correlations are not causations. That said, we know signaling is a real mechanism for VCs to make an investment decision, so there is at least some form of causal path here in the data.

My analysis (and it should be noted this isn’t endorsed by AngelList) is that top-10 investors like Sequoia or a16z have radically expanded their seed investment programs over the past two years in pursuit of more and more cap table access. As VCs scour the universe looking for the next great startup, those firms with the deepest pockets are choosing to invest in any round rather than to try to time their investment into a later round that would more properly fit into the thesis of their massive funds.

So for startups in the 2015 and 2016 cohorts, there was real selectivity (or at least, more selectivity) when it came to getting an investment from a top investor. Those startups may not have gone through the full due diligence process typical of a Series A investment, but they were typically well-vetted, and that sent a strong positive signal to other investors in later rounds.

Perhaps most importantly, and this is based on my own anecdotal data here, but most Series A and later firms that participated in a seed round in those years ended up getting toward the kind of equity ownership they normally target (let’s say 20% as a typical example). So the signaling risk was fairly mute, since if an investor already has their ownership locked in, it’s understandable they wouldn’t necessarily lead the next venture rounds of a company.

All that has changed in the last two years though. Large funds increasingly slosh money through the ecosystem, whether directly as a firm, through seed funds managed by GPs, through scout networks, or indirectly by investing in other seed funds. The exclusivity of these sorts of investments has markedly declined as the capital flood has flowed through the Valley.

Plus, these firms now write ever-smaller checks, and may even join party rounds as well, which means that their ownership post-seed is not nearly as high as it once was. If a top firm does part of your seed and owns 3%, there really is a legitimate question as to why they wouldn’t fund your Series A if they were indeed excited about your prospects and also had information rights to keep track of your startup’s development.

I’ve talked quite extensively about how there are now six stages of seed investing in 2020, and that founders should more carefully identify which stage they truly are in and reach out judiciously to the investors who actually fit those micro-stages.

I think this AngelList data would seem to indicate that big-firm investors can be complicated at the seed stage these days. I’ve generally argued that signaling risk is a relative myth these days, given the competition for deals, but AngelList’s data would seem to indicate that the signaling risk may be more important than I expected.

AngelList’s notes on methodology

We looked at all of the AngelList Venture seed deals (investments by syndicates and funds tagged as “Pre-Seed”, “Seed”, or “Seed+”) that closed in the given year-cohort. Then we looked at whether, after 18 months, those investments had been marked up and had not exited. We believe that is the best proxy in our data for “was an active Series A company”, because the AngelList valuation methodology is to only update valuations on priced equity rounds; companies that raised again with SAFEs would not trigger a markup, even if those SAFEs are at a higher cap. For 2018 deals, we did not consider deals after August 2018 because deals at the end of that year have not had 18 months to season.

After segmenting by year cohort, we further segmented based on whether those deals had the participation of a Top 10 Seed investor. That set of investors was not based on AngelList data but instead used an external data source for which Seed investors have surfaced the most “unicorn” deals. We use the loosest definition of participation: a deal where one of these firms led the seed deal, one of these firms co-led the seed deal, one of these firms wrote a 50k check while a different firm wrote a 500k check, or one or more of these firms participated in a “party round” would all be counted as having the participation of a Top 10 investor.

And adding one more note here that the top-10 investors included in the sample were ultimately Sequoia, a16z, YC, SV Angel, First Round Capital, NEA, Bessemer, Accel, Lightspeed and USV.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | New AngelList data set sheds light on the signaling risks of seed-stage investments

Podium, a Utah-based SaaS company focused on small business customer interactions, added payments technology to its product suite today. The move accretes a new income stream to the company’s quickly growing annual recurring revenue (ARR).

While I tend to stay away from product news, Podium’s decision to add payment technology to its service hit a number of themes that we’ve recently explored, like the rise of payments technology players (Finix, for example) and how it is increasingly common to see fintech and finservices solutions find their way into new places.

And Podium is one of SaaS’s fastest-growing companies. Cribbing from some prior reporting, Podium’s ARR reached roughly $30 million at the end of 2017. It expected to reach $60 million by the end of 2018, and had $100 million in its sights for 2019. Those figures, collected in November, are now decidedly out of date. But they illustrate how quickly Podium was growing before it added payments to its arsenal.

Update: Adding a little clarification here. The addition of payments to Podium’s tech allows its customers (the companies using its software) to collect payments from their own customers. This gives Podium customers the ability to charge folks for their goods and services in a manner that is integrated into the rest of the software company’s service. 

I wanted to dig into the news, so I emailed with Eric Rea, the company’s CEO. What follows is an email exchange (due to scheduling difficulties). We’ll chat after about what was said.

Context

TechCrunch: Did Podium build out its own payments tech or does it employ third-party tech like Finix?

Podium: Podium has a great relationship with Stripe, a fellow Y Combinator company, which was partnered with our own technology to make it work best for our customers. This was key in order to create a payment tool that actually works in the kinds of businesses we work with. [The] majority of businesses who operate from a physical location, from dentist offices and home services companies to larger retail stores, have very specific needs that haven’t been met by traditional card present or POS systems. As a result, many of them rely on mailing paper invoices or awkward conversations where someone gives their card info over the phone. Putting Podium’s platform technology alongside Stripe’s best-in-class processing tech was able to finally meet this need for the companies that create roughly a third of the US non-farming GDP.

TechCrunch: Does the majority of the economics (profit/margin) from the payments product accrue to the Podium client, or Podium itself?

Podium: The genius behind this product is just how immense the economic impact is for these companies. For many of them, they are able to create a whole new convenient way to serve their customers through conversational commerce, and in doing so, they are able to be more successful.

One of our major furniture retailers that participated in the beta of Payments told me about how there has been a completely new selling motion that has opened up for their stores through this product. One of their biggest leaks was when customers would come in and look at a couch or dresser, but didn’t know if dimensions would work in their home. Once they left, there was a steep drop off getting them back into the store to actually make the purchase.

Now, with Payments, they are able to give all the info to their customer, have them check it out in their home and then text them if it works or not. They can then use Payments to collect payment in the very same text conversation and the delivery crew can complete the purchase all in the same day without having the customer return to the store. So it’s not just shifting where they are processing their payments, but opening up new revenue that they would never have had before they started using Payments.

Then consider the ancient process that businesses are still using who invoice for services, like a dentist or a home services provider. A majority are still using mailed statements and invoices or phone conversations. Believe it or not, the expenses for these are immense. Not only that, but the turnaround and success rates are abysmal, meaning these businesses have to wait weeks to months in order to receive payment, if at all. With Payments, it is as quick as a seamless text.

In our beta, Payments tripled the conversion rates over invoices and reduced employee workload related to payment by 80%. In healthcare, for example, 40% of customers send payment within 48 hours. To get that same level through their legacy operations, it would take 14 days to get to that point. The economic impact on that speed and completion is astounding for these businesses.

On the processing, Podium sees the profit on the transaction cost.

TechCrunch: Does Podium anticipate that payments will provide material revenue over the next 18 months? 36?

Podium: Yes. We see this as being the second major phase of the Podium platform. We have been proud to have created one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history through our existing products. We have 43,000 businesses currently using Podium, and one of the biggest things they have all been telling us is how much they need a tool like this. Just in our existing customer base and verticals, they are creating more than $100B in gross processing volume annually in payments that are better suited to be done through this tool.

TechCrunch: How long did it take to build out the tech?

Podium: This product actually took the longest of all of our products to develop, given the unique expectations and requirements it took on the technology side. This product has been about a year in the making. When it comes to the business of making money and us being the facilitator of that, we take it very seriously to ensure the tool is secure and stable.

TechCrunch: What percent of Podium customers are good candidates to use the tech?

Podium: Almost universal. We gave a lot of intention behind making this a tool that would work across market verticals so that our customers could provide a better experience for their customers and get paid faster at the same time.

TechCrunch: What is the fee and cost structure?

Podium: We charge a flat rate for processing, which is intentional to allow transparency and consistency in their fees.

So what?

It’s not a surprise that Podium is taking the economics of the payment processing (with Stripe doing well at the same time). This means that Podium’s business itself will grow thanks to its addition.

At the same time, the clients using Podium’s platform also do well. If the feature can assist as many companies as Podium expects, then it could help a host of small, local firms boost their sales by improving their respective close rates. Even merely faster payments could help smaller shops better manage their cash flow.

So this feels a bit like a win-win. And it goes to show that the addition of payments to other bits of tech is more than hype (Finix will like that). Instead, it feels like adding the ability for transactions to flow directly through one’s platform is going to rise in popularity. Podium is not the first to the trend, and it won’t be the last. But it is a company that could accelerate the trend thanks to its scale and, so far at least, success.

What we’d love to see, frankly, is an S-1 from Podium this year; that would allow us to better dissect its business. Now at least we’ll have one more thing to look for when we do get the document.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Podium rolls out payments for its customer-focused local-business SaaS service