Browsing Tag: Startups

Though the social media landscape is dominated by a few major players, consumers still seem to want something new and different. Just look at TikTok.

Today, a new social app is launching. Called Friended, it is taking an altogether different strategy when it comes to connecting people online. Friended was started by Thumb co-founder and CEO Dan Kurani, Friended wants to give users a deeper and more meaningful connection to one another, which the company believes they crave.

On Friended, users can post to the community about what they’re thinking or feeling. But rather than catalyze a “town hall”-style group conversation, members of the community can respond privately to that post, offering their insights, anecdotes or advice.

The idea is to give people a chance to share how they really feel in a vulnerable, one-to-one setting. In playing around with the app, I had conversations with people about how to make friends in NYC and why it sometimes feel like others don’t care about us as much as we care about them.

Anyone can respond to a thread, and comments on threads can be liked by the poster or respondent, but from the moment a response comes through, that conversation is one-on-one and private.

“People feel more lonely now than ever before,” said Kurani. “Part of the blame is the social media algorithms that only promote people’s highlights for more ad impressions. It’s isolating to see everyone’s happy moments, and, then get silence when you share something vulnerable. But, it’s also just plain hard to open up and share your feelings because of the pressure to be perfect.”

Because Friended wants to be a place where you always have someone to talk to, the company has eliminated ads as a possible revenue stream. Instead, the company is working to implement a premium tier.

Right now, users can only post a conversation starter every eight hours. The premium tier, which costs $4.99/week, allows users to post as frequently as they want, and also includes a few other premium features, like the ability to talk to people in your location.

Friended has raised a $500K seed round from investors such as Jonah Goodhart, Dr. Lara Otte, Jared Fliesler and Bobby Goodlatte. Though the company won’t disclose monthly active user numbers, it did say that it has 500,000 registered users with an average of 11 sessions per day per active user during its beta. More than 2.5 million messages were sent last month.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Friended is a new social network that wants to get real

There are more seed funds than ever helping businesses get off the ground, but the Series A financing continues to be one of the toughest deals to close.

Not only will we welcome early-stage investors to teach entrepreneurs how to raise their first round of venture capital, we will have a group of investors intimately familiar with the Series A on deck at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin this December to offer their best tips and tricks.

Joining us onstage is Blossom Capital partner Louise Samet and Penta founder Jessica Holzbach .

Samet, for her part, joined Blossom Capital, a new European venture capital fund focused on leading Series A investments, earlier this year. Based in Stockholm, Samet’s career includes years of angel investing with standout bets including LendingHome, Bloom Credit and Stravito. Blossom portfolio companies include Duffel, Frontify, Fat Llama, Sqreen and Checkout.com. Before Blossom, Samet was the director of technical sales at Klarna, a high-profile European fintech startup.

Finally, Holzbach, who leads the digital-only banking platform for SMEs, Penta, has spent her career founding startups and working as a management consultant, supervising various CRM projects for financial institutions and insurance companies. Penta, where she is currently CCO, has raised millions in venture capital funding, including a €7 million Series A last year. She can speak to the process of securing funding and the challenges she faced as a founder.

Join us at Disrupt Berlin, running December 11 and December 12, to hear more from these experts on how to secure one of the most influential funding rounds in a company’s lifespan. Tickets to the show are available here!

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Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Learn how to raise your Series A at Disrupt Berlin

If the researchers, executives and investors behind Coda Biotherapeutics have their way, one day soon there really could be a cure for pain.

Co-founded by researchers Joseph Glorioso, from the University of Pittsburgh’s microbiology and molecular genetics department, and Dr. Nicholas Boulis, the founder of Emory’s Gene and Cell Therapy for Neurorestoration Laboratory, Coda uses gene therapies to treat neurological diseases starting with severe pain and epilepsy.

America is a country in pain. There are more than 19 million Americans who live with chronic neuropathic pain, according to Coda’s own statistics. And over the past 20 years the doctors treating those Americans and the drug companies developing therapies for them have managed to turn their treatment into a new epidemic — opioid addiction.

In 2017, 47,600 Americans died from opioid-involved overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Of those deaths, about 60% involved synthetic opioids.

“The incentives were there for people to prescribe more and more, particularly when they had already been convinced it was the right thing to do — the compassionate thing to do,” Keith Humphreys, a psychiatrist at Stanford University and a former White House drug-policy adviser, told the journal Nature.

As the pain epidemic and attendant opioid crisis began to skyrocket, several companies have been racing to find alternatives to the drug treatments that were now killing Americans by the thousands. Other approaches like electrical nerve stimulation can carry risks, and invasive surgeries are an unappealing last resort, according to Coda’s chief executive.

Coda’s experimental treatment is based on a science called chemogenetics, which uses a harmless virus to create new receptors in the sensory neurons that provide signals to the brain about physical stimuli. Those receptors can be unlocked by small-molecule drugs, which would instruct the sensory neurons to stop firing, thereby cutting off the signals of pain to the brain.

Coda’s virus on a neural cell (Image courtesy of Coda Biotherapeutics)

The idea behind chemogenetics is to engineer a receptor that when you put it in with a… gene therapy… it does nothing. We’ve engineered it so that it is no longer responsive,” says Michael Narachi, the president and chief executive officer at Coda. “Most of these receptors are naturally opened or closed by acetylcholine… We’ve engineered these receptors so that  they’re no longer responsive to acetylcholine, but they are responsive to a man-made drug.”

The company then draws from a portfolio of receptor small-molecule drug pairs that were developed and tested for their pharmacological and toxicological effects, but discarded because of a lack of efficacy, to create new therapies with receptors tailored to respond to those drugs.

“What we’ve done is flipped the whole paradigm on its head. We’re making the lock that can work with these keys,” says Narachi. 

So far, the company has raised $34 million as investors, including Versant Ventures, MPM Capital and Astellas Venture Management, have doubled down on their initial $19 million commitment to the new drug developer. 

“Since coming out of stealth mode last September, the CODA team has made tremendous progress in developing its gene therapy program that is tunable, durable and highly selective, which allows for better efficacy and safety with fewer off-target effects,” said Tom Woiwode, PhD, managing director at Versant Ventures and Coda Chairman, in a statement. “CODA’s platform holds great promise to significantly transform how we treat challenging conditions and disorders for which new therapeutic options are greatly needed.” 

Pain isn’t the only condition that Coda hopes to treat. The company is also working on therapies that can reduce the severity of epilepsy for the nearly 3.4 million people in the U.S. who have the condition. While the company can’t treat all kinds of epilepsy, Coda says that it could address focal epilepsy, which represents 60% of all manifestations of the condition, and is linked to a specific region of the brain.

By engineering neurotransmitter receptors that are activated by medicines that can be taken orally, Coda thinks it can control the activity of neurons responsible for both chronic pain and focal epilepsy.

The next step for the company — and part of the use of proceeds from its new $15 million cash infusion — will be to proceed with early animal trials. These clinical trials will be followed by human trials.

“This is a research platform,” says Narachi. “We have this portfolio of engineered receptors and we’re testing them in cells. The next step is to go into human clinical trials.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Coda Biotherapeutics is developing a cure for pain

These days it’s not enough to have meetings. Now tech companies need to have meetings about meetings — and to ensure that this can happen efficiently(?), a Los Angeles company called Parabol has just raised $4 million.

Founded in Brooklyn with a workforce that’s mostly virtual, the new-ish company managed to raise cash from three firms that know a thing or two about enterprise operations — CRV, Haystack and the Slack Fund.

Parabol’s software allows distributed and in-house teams to talk about how effective different processes and meetings have been.

The company says that more than 500 organizations use the company’s suite of software services.

Think of it as a programmatic view of structuring a meeting and feedback — “Robert’s Rules of Order” for the internet age.

“There are about 20 million engineers that run the agile development process today,” says Parabol founder and chief executive, Jordan Husney. “In the past everyone would show up to the same office and they would have these highly structured meetings. But as soon as great video conferencing software developed, people started thinking more openly about labor and started hiring people all around the world.”

These distributed workforces required even more organizational structure for their meetings as they collaborated on projects, Husney said. This is especially true for adherents to the agile development process, who break down work into sprints that then need to be assessed, he said.

“Parabol was created so that every meeting held amongst team members is actually worth the time invested. With the support of CRV and Haystack, we will make Parabol useful to more kinds of teams, and scale Parabol’s infrastructure to match our rate of growth,” said Husney in a statement.

The tools Parabol developed allow workers to conduct retrospective meetings and check-ins, the company said.

The software allows teams to work through five structured meeting phases, where teams evaluate their processes and make improvements at the end of a project, said the company.

“Parabol is transforming the way agile teams across industries work together,” said Izhar Armony, partner at CRV, in a statement. “We’ve been tracking the rapidly rising need for teams to collaborate at a distance, and believe in the way Parabol is enabling people to meet and work more effectively together.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Slack Fund, Haystack and CRV invest million in Parabol, the meta-meeting software toolkit

The countdown to serious savings continues here at TechCrunch, and this is a timely reminder that you have only four days left to save on early-bird passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019 (11-12 December). Kommst du nun, oder was — you are coming, aren’t you?

Pricing starts at €445 + VAT and, depending on which pass you buy, you can save as much as €500. Das ist gut! If you want to reap the savings, you need to buy your early-bird pass before the deadline: 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). 

Let’s talk about some of the reasons so many people attend Disrupt Berlin. It’s an opportunity to connect with and learn from an international community of early-stage startuppers — founders, investors, engineers, marketers and more. Be inspired by both your contemporaries and by the folks who’ve paved the way, achieved success and want to share their insights.

Don’t take our (admittedly biased) word for it. Here’s what some of your peers have to say about their time at Disrupt:

• “Disrupt Berlin was a massively positive experience. It gave us the chance to show our technology to the world and have meaningful conversations with investors, accelerators, incubators, solo founders and developers.” —  Vlad Larin, co-founder of Zeroqode.
• “I was very pleasantly surprised at the number of early-stage startups in attendance. Disrupt is a very good conference, and you’ll make a lot of connections very quickly that you wouldn’t be able to do otherwise.” — Michael Kocan, co-found and managing partner, Trend Discovery.
• “Disrupt helps you connect with the startup community. You can meet investors and bigger players in your industry to see if there’s an opportunity to work together. TechCrunch Disrupt is unique and incredibly valuable, because it brings everyone — all the industry touch points — together under one roof.” — Sage Wohns, co-founder, Agolo.

Get ready to hear from a stellar group of speakers on both the Main and Extra Crunch stages — or in our Q&A Sessions. Start planning now by perusing the Disrupt Berlin agenda, and don’t be surprised if we add a few more surprise speakers to it in the coming weeks.

You certainly won’t want to miss out on Startup Battlefield, our thrilling pitch competition with a $50,000 prize. And be sure to catch the Hackathon finalists on the Extra Crunch stage as they pitch products they designed, coded and created in roughly 24 hours. Who will win the $5,000 prize for best overall hack?

Disrupt Berlin 2019 takes place on 11-12 December, but you have only four days left to take advantage of early-bird pricing. Beat the deadline — 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST) deadline, buy your passes and save up to €500. Kommst du nun, oder was — you are coming, aren’t you?

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Only 4 days left for early-bird savings on passes to Disrupt Berlin 2019

Medopad, the UK startup that has been working with Tencent to develop AI-based methods for building and tracking “digital” biomarkers — measurable indicators of the progression of illnesses and diseases that are picked up not with blood samples or in-doctor visits but using apps and wearables, has announced another round of funding to expand the scope of its developments. It has picked up $25 million led by pharmaceuticals giant Bayer, which will be working together with Medopad to build digital biomarkers and therapeutics related to heart health. Medopad said it is also working on separate biomarkers related to Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Diabetes.

The Series B is being made at a post-money valuation of between $200 million and $300 million. In addition to Bayer, Hong Kong firm NWS Holdings and Chicago VC Healthbox also participated. All three are previous investors, with NWS leading its $28 million Series A in 2018, bringing the total raised by Medopad to over $50 million. It also comes on the heels of the company signing a high-profile deals totalling some $140 million with a string of firms in China, including Tencent, Ping An, and the Chinese divisions of GSK, Johnson & Johnson and more.

The world where medicine mixes with tech in the name of doing things faster, better and with less expense had a big knock with the rise and calamitous fall of Theranos, the blood-testing startup that claimed to have developed technology to perform a multitude of tests tracking biomarkers using only a few drops of blood — tests that used to require significantly more blood (and expense) to run accurately. Great concept, if only it weren’t a scam.

While Medopad also tracks biomarkers, it’s taking a very different, non-invasive route to building its solutions. The company constructs its algorithms and tracking working with pharmaceutical and tech partners to build the solution end-to-end, leaning on advances in software and hardware to fulfil ideas that have been unattainable goals for a long time.

“For the past 25 years, we have been talking about this connected healthcare, but no one has doe it,” CEO Dan Vahdat, who co-founded the company with Rich Khatib, said in an interview. “The nature of the concept has just been too challenging. The approach is established but the computing and device technology wasn’t able to detect and read these things outside of hospital settings.”

In one example, a classic Parkinson’s test would have required a patient to go to into a doctor’s office for a 30-minute assessment to determine how a patient is walking. In recent times, however, with the advent of advanced computer vision and far better sensors on devices, a new category of digital biomarkers, as Vahdat calls them, are being created — for example, by tracking how a person is walking — her/his gait and other metrics — to provide similar guidance to a clinician on the patient’s progress. “These can be collected, for example, based on how you walk and talk, along with other vital signs,” he said.

The startup is also working with teaching hospitals to build other clinical trials. For example it has a partnership with the Royal Wolverhampton to better track Aortic Stenosis, when heart valves narrow and restrict blood flow.

“This is a very exciting project and fits with our ethos of ‘proactive’ and ‘one to many care’ which, we think, will benefit patients and release valuable clinical time,” said Professor James Cotton at The Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, in a statement.

Longer term, it’s also working with Janssen (a division of Johnson & Johnson) a possible way of tracking early signs and progress of Alzheimers by way of cognitive tests that someone can take at home.

Medopad has a healthy approach to the work it is doing reminiscent of the kind of collaboration that is typical in the world of science, which perhaps is the aspect that sets it apart best from the vapourware of the world. “We won’t claim that we can do what others can’t, but we are using foundations that were built years ago, to discover and commercially deploy solutions via our channel.” He added that Babylon in the UK and Collective Health in the UK are two companies he admires for taking a similar approach in their respective fields of doctor/patient care and health insurance.

The fact that the company works so closely with Tencent and other Chinese companies is notable at a time when there is a lot of scrutiny of China and how its companies may be using or working with personal data in countries like the US and UK. Vahdat said that all patient data is only collected with consent, and if any data from Medopad is passed to its partners, it’s anonymised. A patient’s data, furthermore, does not leave the country in which it is collected.

The Tencent partnership, he added, was largely to help build the company’s AI engine, with China’s massive population providing a ripe background to train machine learning algorithms.

Medopad’s main asset, in any case, is not data, but the algorithms and methods it uses to collect and process digital biomarkers.

“We are a big believer in the fact that data is not our product,” he said. “That is something we are really proud of.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Medopad raises M led by Bayer to develop biomarkers tracked via apps and wearables

Gradeup, an edtech startup in India that operates an exam preparation platform for undergraduate and postgraduate level courses, has raised $7 million from Times Internet as it looks to expand its business in the country.

Times Internet, a conglomerate in India, invested $7 million in Series A and $3 million in Seed financing rounds of the four-year-old Noida-based startup, it said. Times Internet is the only external investor in Gradeup, they said.

Gradeup started as a community for students to discuss their upcoming exams, and help one another with solving questions, said Shobhit Bhatnagar, cofounder and CEO of Gradeup, in an interview with TechCrunch.

While those functionalities continue to be available on the platform, Gradeup has expanded to offer online courses from teachers to help students prepare for exams in last one year, he said. These courses, depending on their complexity and duration, cost anywhere between Rs 5,000 ($70) and Rs 35,000 ($500).

“These are live lectures that are designed to replicate the offline experience,” he said. The startup offers dozens of courses and runs multiple sessions in English and Hindi languages. As many as 200 students tune into a class simultaneously, he said.

Students can interact with the teacher through a chatroom. Each class also has a “student success rate” team assigned to it that follows up with each student to check if they had any difficulties in learning any concept and take their feedback. These extra efforts have helped Gradeup see more than 50% of its students finish their courses — an industry best, Bhatnagar said.

Each year in India, more than 30 million students appear for competitive exams. A significant number of these students enroll themselves to tuitions and other offline coaching centers.

“India has over 200 million students that spend over $90 billion on different educational services. These have primarily been served offline, where the challenge is maintaining high quality while expanding access,” said Satyan Gajwani, Vice Chairman of Times Internet.

In recent years, a number of edtech startups have emerged in the country to cater to larger audiences and make access to courses cheaper. Byju’s, backed by Naspers and valued at over $5.5 billion, offers a wide-ranging self-learning courses. Vedantu, a Bangalore-based startup that raised $42 million in late August, offers a mix of recorded and live and interactive courses.

Co-founders of Noida-based edtech startup Gradeup

But still, only a fraction of students take online courses today. One of the roadblocks in their growth has been access to mobile data, which until recent years was fairly expensive in the country. But arrival of Reliance Jio has solved that issue, said Bhatnagar. The other is acceptance from students and more importantly, their parents. Watching a course online on a smartphone or desktop is still a new concept for many parents in the country, he said. But this, too, is beginning to change.

“The first wave of online solutions were built around on-demand video content, either free or paid. Today, the next wave is online live courses like Gradeup, with teacher-student interactivity, personalisation, and adaptive learning strategies, deliver high-quality solutions that scale, which is particularly valuable in semi-urban and rural markets,” said Times Internet’s Gajwani.

“These match or better the experience quality of offline education, while being more cost-effective. This trend will keep growing in India, where online live education will grow very quickly for test prep, reskilling, and professional learning,” he added.

Gradeup has amassed over 15 million registered students who have enrolled to live lectures. The startup plans to use the fresh capital to expand its academic team to 100 faculty members (from 50 currently) and 200 subject matters and reach more users in smaller cities and towns in India.

“Students even in smaller cities and towns are paying a hefty amount of fee and are unable to get access to high-quality teachers,” Bhatnagar said. “This is exactly the void we can fill.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Gradeup raises M to expand its online exam preparation platform to smaller Indian cities and towns

Better than expected revenues couldn’t divert investor attention from the fact that Uber still managed to lose more than $1 billion in the most recent quarter as the company’s stock fell in after-hours trading.

There are bright spots in the latest earnings report, not least that the company managed to stanch the bleeding that had cost the company over $5 billion in the previous quarter.

Revenue grew to $3.8 billion, up from $2.9 billion in the year-ago period, representing a 30% boost. But even as Uber’s core business shows signs of stabilizing and its core markets continue to show growth, its other business units appear to be hemorrhaging cash at increasingly high rates.

“Our results this quarter decisively demonstrate the growing profitability of our Rides segment,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, the company’s chief executive, in a statement. “Rides Adjusted EBITDA is up 52% year-over-year and now more than covers our corporate overhead. Revenue growth and take rates in our Eats business also accelerated nicely. We’re pleased to see the impact that continued category leadership, greater financial discipline, and an industry-wide shift towards healthier growth are already having on our financial performance.”

Losses in earnings at the company’s Uber Eats business grew 67% to $316 million from $189 million in the year-ago period. And performance in the company’s freight division looks even worse. Losses in freight ballooned by 161%, growing to $81 million from $31 million in the same quarter of 2018.

Also contributing to the company’s losses for the quarter were stock-based compensation expenses, which added another $401 million to the tallies against the company.

Given that the lock-up period is about to end for institutional investors, that could spell even more trouble for the company — as institutional investors who bought into the company before its public offering may look to sell.

That said, Uber has taken a number of steps to correct its course and put the company on a path to profitability, which Khosrowshahi says should happen in the next two years.

In October, the company announced the last of three rounds of sweeping layoffs at the company that saw 1,185 staffers lose their jobs. Khosrowshahi called the layoffs a chance to ensure that the company was “structured for success for the next few years.” In an email to staff, he wrote, “This has resulted in difficult but necessary changes to ensure we have the right people in the right roles in the right locations, and that we’re always holding ourselves accountable to top performance.”

With the layoffs behind it, Uber can now focus on some of the big operational challenges it had set for itself through the reorganization that the company has announced. That includes adding new features and technologies to its Uber Eats delivery program (despite what recent losses at GrubHub may imply about the food delivery business) and pressing forward with another darling of the tech set these days — the company’s financial services platform.

The launch of this new platform, coupled with a slew of announcements from the company in September, show that Uber may have dialed back on its ambitions, but not by much. As Khosrowshahi said at the event, “We want to be the operating system for your everyday life…. A one-click gateway to everything that Uber can offer you.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Uber’s losses top billion, trumping better than expected revenues

Workday announced this afternoon that it has entered into an agreement to acquire online procurement platform Scout RFP for $540 million. The company raised more than $60 million on a post valuation of $184.5 million, according to PitchBook data.

The acquisition builds on top of Workday’s existing procurement solutions, Workday Procurement and Workday Inventory, but Workday chief product product officer Petros Dermetzis wrote in a blog post announcing the deal that Scout gives the company a more complete solution for customers.

“With increased importance around the supplier as a strategic asset, the acquisition of Scout RFP will help accelerate Workday’s ability to deliver a comprehensive source-to-pay solution with a best-in-class strategic sourcing offering, elevating the office of procurement in strategic importance and transforming the procurement function,” he wrote.

Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research says that Workday has been trying to be the end-to-end cloud back office player. He says, “One of their big gaps has been in procurement.”

Wang says that Workday has been investing with eye toward filling gaps in the product set for some time. In fact, Workday Ventures has been an investor in Scout RFP since 2018, and it’s also an official Workday partner.

“A lot of the Workday investments are in portfolio companies that are complimentary to Workday’s larger vision of the future of Cloud ERP. Today’s definition of ERP includes finance, HCM (human capital management), projects, procurement, supply chain and asset management,” Wang told TechCrunch.

As the Scout RFP founders stated in a blog post about today’s announcement, the two companies have worked well together and a deal made sense. “Working closely with the Workday team, we realized how similar our companies’ beliefs and values are. Both companies put user experience at the center of product focus and are committed to customer satisfaction, employee engagement and overall business impact. It was not surprising how easy it was to work together and how quickly we saw success partnering on go-to-market activities. From a culture standpoint, it just worked,” they wrote. A deal eventually came together as a result.

Scout RFP is a fairly substantial business, with 240 customers in 155 countries. There are 300,000 users on the platform, according to data supplied by the company. The company’s 160 employees will be moving to Workday when the deal closes, which is expected by the end of January, pending standard regulatory review.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Workday to acquire online procurement platform Scout RFP for 0M

Deserve, a credit card startup helping young people establish themselves, as well as a cloud-based credit card platform for businesses, has raised $50 million in a new round of Series C funding led by Goldman Sachs, the company announced today. Others participating in the round include existing investors Sallie Mae, Accel, Aspect Ventures, Pelion Venture Partners and Mission Holdings.

The funds will be put toward Deserve’s further development of what it calls its “Card as a Service” (CaaS) platform, which helps businesses, brands and others tailor credit card products to their own unique customer bases.

In doing so, Deserve will to some extent compete with other white-labeled and co-branded credit card issuers, like Synchrony Financial and Alliance Data, with its CaaS service aimed at businesses, fintech companies, consumer brands and universities that want to offer their own financial products.

Deserve’s turnkey, cloud-based and API-based Deserve Credit Platform promises partners the ability to set up a program in as fast as 90 days, instead of the typical 18 to 24 months. It also leverages technology like machine learning alongside traditional financial data and other alternative and proprietary data sources in order to underwrite a larger population — including those who may be new to credit.

This is particularly important as many younger consumers have been avoiding credit cards in the hopes of not being dragged down by debt. Those born in or after 1995, for example, make up only 5% of U.S. consumers who carry credit card debts, reports have said. But as these consumers enter the market for the first time, they’re often choosing credit cards over other credit products, a recent report from TransUnion found. However, without an established credit history, many younger users often fail to qualify for traditional cards.

That’s where Deserve can help. In addition to helping consumers quickly apply for credit right from their phones and get approved in minutes, the program also features financial education and other perks like cashback rewards, and incentive programs from Amazon (Prime Student), Mastercard (cellphone protection), Priority Pass (airport lounges) and others — like Deserve’s own cards offer.

Since its August 2018 fundraising round, Deserve has partnered with clients like Sallie Mae, the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Honor Society to help them launch credit cards designed for their specific audiences. Its overall platform today serves more than 100,000 consumers.

With its new investment led by Apple Card partner Goldman Sachs, Deserve plans to further build out its platform’s tools, APIs and machine learning capabilities with data science and engineering hires, while also expanding its B2B sales and marketing departments.

“Goldman Sachs is supportive of Deserve’s mission to expand access to credit, and to simplify the ability for organizations to offer their own bespoke credit card products,” said Ashwin Gupta, managing director, Goldman Sachs, in a statement. “We believe Deserve’s card platform will bring meaningful savings and new opportunities to institutions across a range of verticals.”

The funding brings Deserve’s total raise to date to around $100 million. The company is not yet profitable, but that could now change.

“This current round will lead us to profitability,” Deserve co-founder and CEO Kalpesh Kapadia claims.

Deserve declined to share its valuation.

Currently, Deserve is a team of 60, but it aims to grow to 100 over the next six months.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Goldman Sachs leads M round for credit card platform Deserve