Browsing Tag: Startups

DocPlanner, the Poland-founded healthcare booking platform that now processes 1.5 million bookings every month globally, has closed €80 million in Series E financing.

The round is led by One Peak Partners and Goldman Sachs Private Capital, with existing investors Piton Capital and ENERN Investments also participating, and brings total raised to date to around €130 million.

Founded in 2012, as it stands to day DocPlanner’s offering has two pillars: a consumer-facing marketplace and reviews site, and cloud software for private healthcare providers, including individual doctors, dentists and other healthcare professionals.

The marketplace operates in 15 countries and lists more than 2 million healthcare professionals. It has also garnered 2.4 million patient reviews.

The DocPlanner SaaS is designed to enable doctors and clinics to optimise their “patient flow,” reduce no-shows, and digitize the administrative side of their practices. The premise is that digitisation can reduce a provider’s non-patient facing workload and ultimately improve healthcare outcomes for patients.

Meanwhile, DocPlanner says the Series E will be deployed to help it continue penetrating core markets in Europe and Latin America with its SaaS-based marketplace offering. The company will also continue invest in R&D to offer additional software to doctors and clinics.

It currently has 1,000 employees globally across offices in across offices in Warsaw, Barcelona, Istanbul, Rome, Mexico City and Curitiba. A large recruitment drive is also underway, with over 100 openings.

Once again, DocPlanner is talking up the possibility of further acquisitions, too. The company says it is on the lookout for young, innovative cloud-based software companies to help accelerate growth. Previous acquisitions include buying competitors in Turkey and Spain, in 2014 and 2016, respectively.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Healthcare booking platform DocPlanner scores €80M Series E

Pleo, the Danish fintech that offers a “business spending platform” that lets companies easily issue employees with cards and manage expenditure, has raised a hefty $56 million in Series B funding.

Leading the round is Stripes, the New York-based growth fund, with participation from existing investors, Kinnevik, Creandum and Founders. I understand that the new funding values the company at a little under half a billion dollars and brings the total amount raised to $79 million.

Founded in 2015 by ex-Tradeshift early employees Jeppe Rindom and Niccolo Perra, Pleo aims to transform business expense processes so that employees aren’t left out of pocket waiting to be reimbursed or have to jump through too many bureaucratic hoops trying to make company purchases. The platform consists of “smart” company cards paired with software and mobile apps to automatically match receipts and track company spending in real-time.

The Pleo MasterCard is a prepaid card that can be charged up and handed out to employees, either physically or virtually. This is then coupled with Pleo’s backend system and apps. Features of the software includes the ability to categorise spending automatically and capture receipts associated with each transaction.

Pleo also eliminates expense reports and automates bookkeeping tasks via integrating directly with various accounting software providers. Meanwhile, the prepaid element means no waiting to be reimbursed for expenses and less waiting for approval, which is traditionally a real pain-point for employees and companies alike.

In a call, Pleo co-founder and CEO Jeppe Rindom tells me that the fast-growing startup is helping to create a whole new product category: Pleo is neither a business bank account or simply accounting or expenses management software. Instead, the company’s “business spending platform” has elements of both but is as much about enabling and embracing a change in company culture than simply better financial technology.

“We are helping to export Nordic company culture,” he says, in reference to a more flat company hierarchy where employees are empowered to take more responsibility and have greater autonomy. The Pleo platform’s features and the transparency it affords means that more employees can be given company cards underpinned by micro-budgets and spending limits for the things they need to purchase in order to get on with the job.

Likewise, Rindom says that forward thinking companies are also recognising that bestowing more trust with employees and less pain-points with regards to expense reimbursement is also a potential recruiting and retention tool. He says that while a company’s chief financial officer is typically the buyer of Pleo, the product itself is targeting employees, who remain its biggest advocate.

To that end, more than 3,500 companies have switched to Pleo across the U.K., Denmark, Germany and Sweden. Its customers include Airsorted, The Tab, Lyst, Yoyo, Pizza Pilgrims and Roskilde Festival amongst others, with “hundreds” of businesses joining Pleo every month.

Pleo says it will use the new funding to expand and more than triple its headcount, from 120 to 400 employees by the end of 2020. It also plans to accelerate product development with the aim to service “the entire purchase process” for SMEs across the whole of Europe. This will include adding credit, invoices, mobile payments, a vendor marketplace, VAT reclaims and more.

“While we are competing with banks in this one area we are not aiming to become one,” adds Rindom in a statement. “We remain committed to providing the best product in the market for business spending. We haven’t touched the funds from our Series A round less than a year ago, yet we see enormous potential and demand for Pleo”.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Pleo, the multi-card business spending platform, closes M Series B

Urban, the London-headquartered company that lets you book a growing range of wellness services on-demand — now including massage, osteopathy, facial, and nail services — has raised $10 million in Series B funding.

The round, which includes an earlier $4.5 million equity crowdfund, is led by Accelerated Digital Ventures (ADV). Two of Urban’s previous backers, Passion Capital and Felix Capital, also followed on.

In a call, Urban founder Jack Tang told me the fund raise will be used by the company to accelerate its goal of becoming a “one-stop shop” for on-demand wellness services, with new product categories planned, including fitness.

Tang has also talked about adding digital only well-ness offerings, harnessing the skills of its practitioners where a face-to-face booking isn’t needed, in addition to a planned content push. This, he believes, will help Urban to launch in further cities and countries in the future but with lower user acquisition costs since its brand will already be known. The company currently operates in several U.K. cities along with Paris.

Related to this Series B, Urban has already begun the process of recruiting a team of 30 engineers in Lithuania at its Vilnius office. The Lithuania team will work on all aspects of the platform, including the client-facing apps, the practitioner business software, Urban’s corporate offering and data science projects.

A security failing that left Urban’s customer database exposed was discovered in late 2018 (and subsequently plugged), and Tang says that much better systems have been put in place since to ensure nothing like that ever happens again. He also explained that by expanding the company’s engineering base, more people will be solely dedicated to security.

Meanwhile, Tang says that the move into wellness services beyond massage has helped Urban to get near to profitability and significantly improve unit economics. The new services have been well received by Urban’s customer base, with 80 percent of new service revenue driven by existing customers. Therefore, the fundraise, he says, isn’t about plugging gaps in revenue but about doubling down on the company’s mission to empower “city-dwellers” to prioritise their wellbeing.

With that said, Tang also cautioned that in the U.K. we are entering a “silent recession,” citing various macro economic data, including that related to consumer spending. Brexit, he thinks, is also a factor. Therefore, he says that it is important for Urban to remain in a strong position to weather any economic storm when discretionary spending will inevitably contract.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Urban closes M Series B in bid to become ‘one-stop shop’ for on-demand wellness services

It’s not looking great for ride-hailing giant Uber (NYSE: UBER). Today, Uber closed its second day of trading down more than 18.8% from its IPO price at $37.25 per share, with a market cap of $62.2 billion.

Uber, which was previously valued at $72 billion by venture capitalists on the private market, priced its stock at $45 a share for an $82.4 billion valuation last week. On day one, Uber closed at $41.57 a share.

In a memo obtained by CNBC, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees today that, “like all periods of transition, there are ups and downs. Obviously, our stock did not trade as well as we had hoped post-IPO. Today is another tough day in the market, and I expect the same as it relates to our stock.”

Moving forward, Khosrowshahi urged employees to focus on the long-term. He also pointed to the comebacks both Facebook and Amazon made post-IPO.

Lyft has similarly suffered on the public market since its IPO in March. Lyft closed the day at $48.15, with a market cap of $13.8 billion.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Uber had an abysmal second day of trading

In this section of my exploration into innovation in inclusive housing, I am digging into the 200+ companies impacting the key phases of developing and managing housing.

Innovations have reduced costs in the most expensive phases of the housing development and management process. I explore innovations in each of these phases, including construction, land, regulatory, financing, and operational costs.

• Reducing Construction Costs
• Reducing Land Costs
• Reducing Regulatory Costs
• Reducing Financing Costs
• Operations

Reducing Construction Costs

This is one of the top three challenges developers face, exacerbated by rising building material costs and labor shortages.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Market map: the 200+ innovative startups transforming affordable housing

Housing is big money. The industry has trillions under management and hundreds of billions under development.

And investors have noticed the potential. Opendoor raised nearly $1.3 billion to help homeowners buy and sell houses more quickly. Katerra raised $1.2 billion to optimize building development and construction, and Compass raised the same amount to help brokers sell real estate better. Even Amazon and Airbnb have entered the fray with high-profile investments.

Amidst this frenetic growth is the seed of the next wave of innovation in the sector. The housing industry — and its affordability problem — is only likely to balloon. By 2030, 84% of the population of developed countries will live in cities.

Yet innovation in housing lags compared to other industries. In construction, a major aspect of housing development, players spend less than 1% of their revenues on research and development. Technology companies, like the Amazons of the world, spend nearly 10% on average.

Innovations in older, highly regulated industries, like housing and real estate, are part of what Steve Case calls the “third wave” of technology. VCs like Case’s Revolution Fund and the SoftBank Vision Fund are investing billions into what they believe is the future.

These innovations are far from silver bullets, especially if they lack involvement from underrepresented communities, avoid policy and ignore distributive questions about who gets to benefit from more housing.

Yet there are hundreds of interventions reworking housing that cannot be ignored. To help entrepreneurs, investors and job seekers interested in creating better housing, I mapped these innovations in this package of articles.

To make sense of this broad field, I categorize innovations into two main groups, which I detail in two separate pieces on Extra Crunch. The first (Part 1) identifies the key phases of developing and managing housing. The second (Part 2) section identifies interventions that contribute to housing inclusion more generally, such as efforts to pair housing with transit, small business creation and mental rehabilitation.

Unfortunately, many of these tools don’t guarantee more affordability. Lowering acquisition costs, for instance, doesn’t mean that renters or homeowners will necessarily benefit from those savings. As a result, some tools likely need to be paired with others to ensure cost savings that benefit end users — and promote long-term affordability. I detail efforts here so that mission-driven advocates as well as startup founders can adopt them for their own efforts.

Topics We Explore

Today:

• Part 1. Innovations in the key phases of housing
  • Reducing Land Costs
  • Reducing Construction Costs
  • Reducing Regulatory Costs
  • Reducing Financing Costs
  • Operations

Coming Tomorrow:

• Part 2. Other contributions to housing affordability
  • Social Impact Innovations
  • Landlord-Tenant Tools
  • Innovations that Increase Income
  • Innovations that Increase Transit Accessibility and Reduce Parking
  • Innovations that Improve the Ability to Regulate Housing
  • Organizations that Support the Housing Innovation Ecosystem
  • This Is Just the Beginning
  • I’m Personally Closely Watching the Following Initiatives
  • The Limitations of Technology
  • Move Fast and Protect People

Please feel free to let me know what else is exciting by adding a note to your LinkedIn invite here.

If you’re excited about this topic, feel free to subscribe to my future of inclusive housing newsletter by viewing a past issue here.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Innovations in inclusive housing

The well-known tech startup routine of coming up with an idea, raising money from venture capitalists and other outside investors in increasing rounds as valuations continue to rise, and then eventually going public — or getting acquired — has been around for as long as the myth of Silicon Valley itself. But the evolution of Mailchimp — a notable, bootstrapped outlier out of Atlanta, Ga., that provides email and other marketing services to smaller businesses — tells a very different story of tech startup success.

The company is now closing in on $700 million in annual revenues for 2019, and it seems that it has no intention of letting up, or selling out: No outside funding, no plans for an IPO and no to all the companies that have tried to acquire it (interested parties have include private equity firms as well as big tech players). As Mailchimp has grown, it has been profitable from day one, a notable contrast not just to many other startups, but those specifically in the area of software-as-a-service for businesses. (As a point of comparison, Slack, which is poised to go public, brought in around $130 million last quarter; it is not yet profitable.)

This week, Mailchimp is unveiling what is probably its biggest product update since first starting to sell email services 20 years ago. It’s launching a new marketing platform that features social media management services, ad retargeting for Instagram and Facebook, domain sales, web development templates; and business intelligence.

There is still a lot of tech left for Mailchimp to tackle, and its model shows that you don’t always need outside funding to do it. The BI foray, as one example, marks an interesting move into artificial intelligence, and tapping the fact that the company is sitting on an intent and interest graph that spans some 4.5 billion people — the aggregation of all the emails that have been sent through Mailchimp’s platform. (Indeed, ‘small business’ for Mailchimp means ‘small number of employees’, but in our digital world, that small business might still be handling millions of customers.)

Adding in those new features will not come free: more pricing tiers, and higher pricing, that will take effect from Wednesday for new users. You can read more about that here.

And adding in those new features also comes with another twist: it will catapult Mailchimp into a new arena of competition. Today, some of the company’s notable competitors are the likes of SendGrid, Intercom and Drip. Tomorrow, that list could expand to include Marketo, Hubspot, InfusionSoft, Hootsuite and many more. While Mailchimp was an early mover and by the company’s own admission was coming into the market at a time when there was very little competition, it will be interesting to see if it can take some of the traction it has picked up to date and bring it to an adjacent — but still entirely new — product segment, and at a higher price, to boot.

I took the opportunity to speak with Mailchimp’s co-founder and CEO, Ben Chestnut — who started the company in Atlanta as a side project with two friends, Mark Armstrong and Dan Kurzius, in the trough of the first dot-com bust — on Mailchimp’s origins and plans for what comes next. The startup’s story is a firm example of how there is definitely more than one route to success in tech.

Ingrid Lunden: You’re launching a new marketing platform today, but I want to walk back a little first. This isn’t your first move away from email. We discovered back in March that you quietly acquired a Canadian e-commerce startup, LemonStand, just as you were parting ways with Shopify. (More on that acquisition here, and the Shopify changes here.)

Ben Chestnut: We wanted to have a tool to help small business marketers do their initial selling. The focus is not multiple products. Just one. We’re not interested in setting up full-blown e-commerce carts. This is about helping companies sell one product in an Instagram ad with a buy button, and we felt that the people at LemonStand could help us with that.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Mailchimp’s Ben Chestnut on bootstrapping a startup to 0M in revenue

After being crowned by Burger King as the first meat replacement patty to roll out nationally with one of the largest fast food chains, Impossible Foods has raised $300 million in capital.

The financing brings the company’s total equity raise to $750 million — and provides a sizable pool of funds to draw from as it continues to compete with its newly publicly traded rival, Beyond Meat.

Both companies are looking to provide plant-based replacements for animal proteins, but while Beyond Meat has focused on consumers in the grocery store, Impossible Foods has focused on restaurants and business-to-business sales.

That focus paid off earlier this year with the announcement of the Impossible Whopper, and its subsequent nationwide rollout only a month later.

The Impossible Burger is now sold in more than 7,000 restaurants in the U.S. and Europe and has been a top-selling item and a driver of new foot traffic, according to the company. However, since it’s actually driving new foot traffic to restaurants, the product’s impact as a meat replacement is arguable. There’s no data from the company on whether people are actually buying less meat, or whether new customers are entering stores.

Investors don’t seem to mind. And given the success of Beyond Meat’s public offering earlier this year, Impossible Foods has a benchmark it can reference to illustrate the appetite institutional investors have for meat replacement companies.

Indeed, even corporate America has taken notice, with Tyson Foods hatching plans to bring its own meat replacement product to market in the coming years.

Previous investors Temasek, the investment arm of the Singaporean government, and Horizons Ventures, the personal venture fund of Hong Kong multi-billionaire Li Ka-shing, led the new financing, which also included a host of celebrity investors.

Jay Brown, Kirk Cousins, Paul George, Jay-Z, Trevor Noah, Alexis Ohanian, Kal Penn, Katy Perry Questlove, Ruby Rose, Phil Rosenthal, Jaden Smith, Serena Williams, will.i.am and Zedd also joined the financing round, making Impossible Foods officially the coolest cap table I’ve ever seen (no offense to Beyond Meat backer Leonardo DiCaprio).

Institutional investors like Khosla Ventures, Bill Gates, Google Ventures, UBS, Viking Global Investors, Sailing Capital and Open Philanthropy Project also back the company.

The presence of Impossible Foods’ Asian investors point to the hunger for protein replacements on the continent where the quality of meat is an issue and rising demand is putting increasing pressure on companies looking to feed the continent’s newly wealthy consumers more high-quality protein.

There’s a compelling reason to hope that both companies succeed in their mission to reduce demand for animal protein around the world. Animal husbandry and industrial farming contribute heavily to rising greenhouse gas emissions (which is kind of a huge problem).

And it seems that the strategy is working in Asia. Sales across the continent are rising, according to the company, in restaurants across Hong Kong, Singapore and Macau.

Founded in 2011 by former pediatrician and Stanford biochemistry professor Dr. Patrick O. Brown, Impossible Foods’ plant-based burger may be the second greatest invention by a Doc Brown since the ’80s.

Impossible Foods is also hiring extensively in Oakland, Calif., where the company has its largest plant. It has already added to its executive team since the new funding, bringing on Sheetal Shah, a former chief operations officer at Verifone, to oversee the company’s manufacturing, supply chain and logistics.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Crowned by Burger King, meat replacement company Impossible Foods raises 0 million

Mailchimp, a bootstrapped startup out of Atlanta, Ga., is known best as a popular tool for organizations to manage their customer-facing email activities — a profitable business that its CEO told TechCrunch has now grown to around 11 million active customers with a total audience of 4 billion (yes, 4 billion), and is on track for $700 million in revenue in 2019. (Note: Slack’s previous quarter was around $133 million, and it’s operating at a loss.)

To help hit that number, Mailchimp is taking the wraps off a significant update aimed at catapulting it into the next level of business services. Starting today, Mailchimp will start to offer a full marketing platform aimed at smaller organizations.

Going beyond the email services that it has been offering for 20 years — which alone has led to multiple acquisition offers (all rebuffed) as its valuation has crept up reportedly into the billions (depending on which multiple you use) — the new platform will feature a number of new products within it.

They include technology to record and track customer leads; the ability to purchase domains and build sites; ad retargeting on Facebook and Instagram; social media management. It will also offer business intelligence that leverages a new move into the artificial intelligence to provide recommendations to users on how and when to market to whom.

The latter of these will be particularly interesting considering the data that it has collected and will collect on 4 billion individuals and their responses to emails and other services that Mailchimp now offers.

As of Wednesday of this week, Mailchimp also plans a pretty significant shift of its pricing into four tiers of free, $9.99/month, $14.99/month or $299/month (up from the current pricing of free, $10/month, $199/month) — with those fees scaling depending on usage and features.

(Existing paid customers maintain current pricing structure and features for the time being and can move to the new packages at any time, the company said. New customers will sign up to the new pricing starting May 15.)

The expansion is part of a longer-term strategic play to widen Mailchimp’s scope by building more services for the typically underserved but collectively large small-business segment.

Even as multinationals like Amazon and other large companies continue to feel like they are eating up the mom-and-pop independent business model, SMBs continue to make up 48% of the GDP in the U.S.

And within the SMB sector, the opportunity has totally changed with the rise of the internet.

“What’s really key is the role digital apps, digital publishing and social media have played,” said Ben Chestnut, Mailchimp’s co-founder and CEO. “We can have a 10-employee company with a customer base bigger than 1 million. That’s a combination you couldn’t achieve before the growth of online.”

And within that, marketing is one of those areas that small businesses might not have invested in much traditionally but are increasingly turning to as so much transactional activity has moved to digital platforms — be it smartphones, computers, or just the tech that powers the TV you watch or music you listen to.

In March, we reported that Mailchimp quietly acquired a small Shopify competitor called LemonStand to start to build more e-commerce tools for its users. And the new marketing platform is the next step in that strategy.

“We still see a big need for small businesses to have something like this,” Chestnut said in an interview. Enterprises have a range of options when it comes to marketing tools, he added, “but small businesses don’t.” The mantra for many building tech for the SMB sector has traditionally been “dumbed down and cheap,” in his words. “We agreed that cheap was good, but not dumbed down. We want to empower them.”

The new services launch also comes at a time when an increasing number of companies are closing in on the small business opportunity, with e-commerce companies like Square, Shopify and PayPal also widening their portfolio of products. (These days, Square is a Mailchimp partner, Shopify is not.)

Marketing is something that Mailchimp had already been dabbling with over the last two years — indeed, customer-facing email services is essentially a form of marketing, too. Other launches have included a Postcards service, offering companies very simple landing pages online (about 10% of Mailchimp’s customers do not have their own web sites, Chestnut said), and a tool for companies to create Google, Facebook and Instagram ads.

Mailchimp itself has a big marketing presence already: it says that daily, more than 1.25 million e-commerce orders are generated through Mailchimp campaigns; over 450 million e-commerce orders were made through Mailchimp campaigns in 2018; and its customers have sold over $250 million in goods through multivariate + A/B campaigns run through Mailchimp.

There are clearly a lot of others vying to be the go-to platform for small businesses to do their business — “Google, Facebook, a lot of the big players see the magic and are moving to the space more and more,” Chestnut said — but Mailchimp’s unique selling point — or so it hopes — is that it’s the platform that has no vested interests in other business areas, and will therefore be as focused as the small businesses themselves are. That includes, for example, no upcharging regardless of the platform where you choose to run a campaign.

“We are Switzerland,” Chestnut said.

Given that Mailchimp took 20 years to grow into marketing from email, it’s not clear what the wait will be for future expansions, and into which areas those might go. Surprisingly, one product that Mailchimp does not want to touch for now is CRM. “No plans for CRM services,” Chestnut said. “We are focused on consumer brands. We think about small organizations, with fewer than 100 employees.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Mailchimp expands from email to full marketing platform, says it will make 0M in 2019

Locus, an Indian startup that uses AI to help businesses map out their logistics, has raised $22 million in Series B funding to expand its operations in international markets.

The financing round for the four-year-old startup was led by Falcon Edge Capital and Tiger Global. Existing investors Exfinity Venture Partners and Blume Ventures also participated in the round. The startup has raised $29 million to date, Nishith Rastogi, co-founder and CEO of Locus, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Locus works with companies that operate in FMCG, logistics and e-commerce spaces. Some of its clients include Tata Group companies, Myntra, BigBasket, Lenskart and Bluedart. It helps these clients automate their logistics workload — tasks such as planning, organizing, transporting and tracking of inventories, and finding the best path to reach a destination — that have traditionally required intensive human labor.

“Say a Lenskart representative is visiting a house or an office to offer an eye checkup, and suddenly two more people there are interested in getting their eyes checked. The representative could attend these two new potential clients, or wrap things up with the first client and take care of his or her next appointment,” said Rastogi.

Locus looks at a client’s past data, identifies patterns and automates these kind of decisions on a large scale. In an example shared earlier with TechCrunch, Rastogi talked about how Locus had built a scanner for e-commerce companies for measuring products.

Rastogi said he will use the fresh capital to develop products and expand Locus in Southeast Asian and North American markets. The startup says half of its 110-person workforce is outside of India. Half of the IP it has built and the revenue it generates comes from its team outside of India.

He said the startup has spent the recent quarters studying these international markets, and has secured some anchor clients to expand the business. Locus is operationally profitable already and any additional capital goes into expanding its business, he added.

The logistics market in India has long been riddled with challenges. A growing number of startups, including BlackBuck — which raised $150 million last week — have emerged in recent years to tackle these problems.

The new funding also illustrates Tiger Global’s new strategy for the Indian market. The VC fund, which has invested in B2C businesses Flipkart and Ola in India, has made a number of investments in B2B startups in recent months. Last month, it invested $90 million in agritech supply chain startup Ninjacart, and weeks later, it gave cloud-based solutions provider Zenoti $50 million. It also participated in customer marketing service ClearTap’s $26 million round.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | India’s Locus raises million to expand its logistics management business