Startups

Web3 messaging infrastructure Notifi raises $10M seed round co-led by Hashed, Race Capital • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Crypto, crypto startups, Hashed, Race Capital, Startups, Venture, web3 messaging infrastructureNo Comments

Notifi, a communication infrastructure platform for Web3, said Tuesday it has raised $10 million in an oversubscribed seed funding co-led by previous backers Hashed and Race Capital. Other investors include Struck Capital, HRT Capital, Wintermute, Superscrypt founded by Temasek, bringing its total funding to $12.5 million. The ten-month-old startup wants to address the broken communication model in Web3, which is fragmented across multiple application and messaging platforms like Telegram, Discord and Twitter and across layer-1 and layer-2 blockchain ecosystems. Notifi provides communication infrastructure and software development kits (SDKs) for decentralized applications on blockchain platforms with simplified and customized notifications. Its platform allows Web3 developers to integrate multichannel communication into their applications without building the infrastructure themselves. “Notifi is similar to Twilio, but unlike Twilio, Notifi has built a Web3-native solution for blockchain developers that enables both on-chain and off-chain messaging across multiple layer-1 ecosystems,” co-founder and chief executive officer of Notifi Paul Kim told ZebethMedia. Kim and Nimesh Amin (CTO), who previously worked at Amazon Web Services and Oracle Cloud, founded Notifi in January. Kim said its team is comprised of builders of Web 2 infrastructure, so they understand the importance of building and running services at scale with reliability, security and performance. The startup targets the Web3 ecosystem and all Web2 addressable users. “We’re taking a pragmatic approach to solving the right customer and user pain point rather than building something no one asked for,” Kim continued. “This is why we support both on-and off-chain messaging. Not everything has to be decentralized. As Web3 goes mainstream, the next wave of users will want a simple text or email alert when something important happens.” Notifi, which launched its SDKs in April this year, has more than 25 customers, including Orca, one of Solana’s biggest DEXs; Zebec, treasury management for DAOs; SynFutures, Polygon’s largest derivatives protocol; Hyperspace, an NFT marketplace; Realms, Solana’s DAO governance platform, and more, Kim said. Notify will soon launch Notifi Hub, the Web3 inbox to aggregate cross-chain notifications and messaging into one single hub, which is currently in beta, to provide users with a centralized location to track and manage all of their messages and alerts across different blockchains, wallets and dApps. Image Credits: Notifi Notifi now supports Solana, NEAR and Ethereum and is expanding to Polygon, Avalanche, Aptos and Sui. The company’s initial launch partners include SynFutures and ZeroSwap on Polygon; Pocket Worlds on Avalanche; Pontem Networks, Aries Market, and Ethos Wallet on Aptos and Sui. The funding will help Notifi expand support into other layer ecosystems and provide developers with more tools to enable advanced user experience. In addition, it plans to hire and scale its team to meet new needs of its product lines, such as notifications as a service, chat as a service, customer relationship management (CRM) and analytics tools for product messaging, and more, Kim said. The company may face competition with XMTP and Dialect in the Web3 messaging space. Its differentiator is Notifi’s product is designed to allow for highly customizable experiences that dApps can implement and manage, Kim said, adding that the user experience developers can offer messaging and notification functionality within their native UI with a user experience that feels native to their app or platform. “Paul and Nimesh bring years of infrastructure experience from Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Oracle and Circle to Web3,” general partner at Race Capital Chris McCann said. “We at Race Capital could not be more thrilled to partner with them in this new round of seed funding and to support them on their mission to empower all Web3 builders to better communicate and interact with their users.” “Notifi has a bold vision to make communication as easy to set up and maintain as a web application,” said partner at Hashed Baek Kim. “They’ve built a clever, intuitive interface that simplifies the extreme complexities involved in building cross-chain messaging and have received many early accolades from layer 1 blockchains and Web3 developers.”

With new capital, Adapty is betting it can help app devs make more money • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Adapty, app revenue, app stores, Apps, mobile developers, StartupsNo Comments

Mobile developers earned more than $260 billion on Apple’s App Store between its launch in 2008 and the end of 2021. And yet, Apple doesn’t provide an easy way for companies to maximize how much they make from their apps — and neither does Google, which owns the rival Google Play Store. Enter New York City-based Adapty, which hopes to help developers earn more from their apps. So far, it has been doing this mostly by powering A/B testing for paywalls, but it has a broader road map, its co-founder and CEO, Vitaly Davydov, told ZebethMedia. It is never a good time to leave money on the table, but even less so when Apple moves to collect a 30% cut of even more mobile app trade and as overall mobile app spending might be declining, meaning that developers are likely hungrier than ever for additional income. Paywall A/B testing helps optimize revenue, by letting developers figure out which conversion screen will bring the best results. It is one of the main offerings of Adapty, but not its only one: The startup sees itself as growth-focused, rather than infrastructure-focused. Adapty is used by about 2,500 apps, up from 50 when it raised pre-seed funding in 2020. Its team has also grown to some 40 full-time employees, but there’s more hiring to come, according to Davydov, at a time when other startups are laying off staff or freezing hires. Having closed a seed round this year that brings its funding to date to $2.5 million, Adapty is focusing on two goals that require more headcount: geographic expansion and incorporating machine learning. The latter will be used to come up with features including a lifetime value (LTV) prediction tool. Growth2 Adapty’s round was led by Surface Ventures with participation from irrvrntVC, two funds with which the startup connected via 500 Startups. Adapty was one of the companies presenting at the accelerator’s 27th demo day in February 2021 — and one of ZebethMedia’s favorites at the time. Adapty has been “on track” since graduating from the program, Davydov said. Tracking is the word: The startup’s landing page claims “8 million monthly tracked events.” This tracking is done on behalf of Adapty’s clients and fed back to them in the form of analytics and dashboards, which can be used by developers and user acquisition managers alike. Image Credits: Adapty Adapty serves clients big and small, from solo developers on its free tier who may be able to learn from its community and content to larger clients attracted by its growth-focused features. Adapty’s decision to add an LTV prediction tool is inspired both by customer demand and by firsthand experience from Davydov and his co-founders, Kirill Potekhin and Dima Podoprosvetov. The team thinks it is now better placed to predict LTV than app owners themselves. “This is a thing that you are unlikely to be able to repeat internally, because we see a lot of data, and they are diversified — from all categories in the app store[s],” Davydov said. “And by design, we have more knowledge about the app market, while if you have only one application, it only shows your data. We believe we can build much more accurate models because of this.” Adapty isn’t alone in the mobile subscription management category, whose leader is arguably RevenueCat. But its road map connects two trends that seem to be on the rise — leveraging pooled data and applied machine learning. We will keep on tracking these, as well as the ongoing impact of Apple’s privacy policy changes.

Akamai leads $38M round in Macrometa as the two strike partnership • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Akamai Technologies, cloud computing, edge computing, Macrometa, StartupsNo Comments

Edge computing cloud and global data network Macrometa has raised $38 million led by Akamai Technologies, as the two announce a new partnership and product integrations. The funding also included participation from Shasta Ventures and 60 Degree Capital. Akamai Labs CTO Andy Champagne will join Macrometa’s board. Macrometa founder and CEO Chetan Venkatesh told ZebethMedia that its GDN enables cloud developers to run backend services closer to mobile phones, browsers, smart appliances, connected cars and users in edge regions, or points of presence (PoP). That reduces outages because if one edge region goes down, another one can take over instantly. Akamai’s edge network, meanwhile, covers 4,200 regions around the world. The partnership between Macrometa and Akamai means the two are combining three infrastructure pieces into one platform for cloud developers: Akamai’s edge network, cloud hosting service Linode (which Akamai bought earlier this year) and Macrometa’s Global Data Network (GDN) and edge cloud. Akamai Edge Workers tech is now available through Macrometa’s GDN console, API and SDK, so developers can build a cloud app or API in Macrometa, and then quickly deploy it to Akamai’s edge locations. Venkatesh gave some examples of how clients can use the integration between Macrometa and Akamai. For SaaS customers, the integration means they can see speed increases and latency improvements of between 25x to 100x for their products, resulting in less user churn and better conversion rates for freemium models. Enterprise customers using the joint solution can improve the performance of streaming data pipelines and real-time data analytics. They can also deal with data residency and sovereignty issues by vaulting and tokenizing data in geo-fenced data vaults for compliance. Video streaming clients, meanwhile, can use the integration to move their platforms to the edge, including authentication, content catalog rendering, personalization and content recommendations. Likewise, gaming companies can move servers closer to players and use the Akamai-Macrometa integration for features like player matching, leaderboards, multi-player game lobbies and anti-cheating features. For e-commerce players competing against Amazon, the joint solution can be used to connect and stream data from local stores and fulfillment centers, enabling faster delivery times. Macrometa will use the funding for developer education, community development, enterprise event marketing and joint customer sales with Akamai (Macrometa’s products are now available through Akamai’s sales team). In a statement about the funding and partnership, Akamai EVP and CTO Robert Blumofe said, “Developers are fundamentally changing the way they build, deploy and run enterprise applications. Velocity and scale are more important than ever, while flexibility in where to place workloads is now paramount. By partnering with and investing in Macrometa, Akamai is helping to form and foster a single platform that meets evolving needs of developers and the apps they’re creating.”

Equals secures $15M investment to supercharge spreadsheets • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Andreessen Horowitz, Apps, Craft Ventures, Enterprise, Startups, worklifeNo Comments

Equals, a New York-based startup ambitiously aiming to challenge Excel’s dominance with a supercharged spreadsheet, today announced that it raised $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Craft Ventures, Box Group, Worklife and Combine. Co-founded by Ben McRedmond and Bobby Pinero, two former Intercom employees, Equals claims its spreadsheet is one of the few with built-in connections to databases, versioning and collaboration features. Equals isn’t the first startup on a mission to kill the traditional spreadsheet. There’s Airtable, of course, plus upstarts like Spreadsheet.com, Actiondesk and Pigment — the last of which raised $73 million last November for its data analytics and visualization service. But Pinero, Equal’s CEO, claims that Equals is unique in that it doesn’t so much replace the spreadsheet as incorporate additional tools, like live data integrations. “Equals comes from a really simple and obvious insight: that the spreadsheet is the best way to do analysis,” Pinero told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “Excel was built nearly 40 years ago. Google Sheets 16 years ago. The way companies work today is meaningfully different. Our data is way more accessible. We should automate much of the painful, manual work of getting data into a spreadsheet. And we’ve learned so much about how teams better collaborate over the past decade. A spreadsheet should incorporate those learnings. That’s Equals.” Customers can tap Equals to build analyses with real-time data directly from a database or data warehouse, with or without using sequel query language. It supports standard formulas and offers templates for common use cases, like tracking recurring revenue and measuring user engagement. Image Credits: Equals Soon, Equals will be able to import scripts to allow users to connect spreadsheets to different APIs and internal tools with JavaScript or Python. Also on the way are pivot tables and connectors to business intelligence apps from Salesforce, QuickBooks, Stripe and Google Analytics. “Equals represents a massive opportunity to get business stakeholders — typically folks who are neglected from being able to get their own data — access to data. To be able to work with data in a tool they’re comfortable and already know how to use: a spreadsheet,” Pinero said. “No more manual spreadsheets that take hours to manually update across the team. No more dumping data from BI tools into spreadsheets to then do analysis.” That’s a lot to promise, but Pinero is well aware of the hurdles ahead. He doesn’t expect 10-employee Equals to be profitable for a while — the Series A proceeds will go mostly toward R&D, he says; Equals has raised $23 million to date — and the platform will remain gated behind a waitlist pending the next major product release. Pinero claims that “thousands” of people have signed up so far. “It speaks to the excitement and traction with Equals that in this market we’ve been able to raise a significant series A. At our current burn, we have eight-plus years of runway,” Pinero said. “We’re very well positioned to outlast this downturn, however long it may go. As the saying goes, generational companies are built during these downturns, and we plan on making Equals one of those.”

Next acquires Made.com’s brand and IP as the online furniture retailer enters administration • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Commerce, Made.com, next, StartupsNo Comments

We knew it was happening, but U.K.-based online furniture and home accessories retailer Made.com has officially entered administration, confirming previous reports with the appointment yesterday of PricewaterhouseCoopers as administrators. While Made.com had revealed that it was in discussions with potential buyers, nothing materialized in time and the company ceased taking new orders in late October, with none of the interested parties able to “meet the necessary timetable” for closing a deal. However, news did emerge today that Made.com’s domain names, intellectual property, and brand have been acquired by Next, a multinational retailer with physical and online stores substantively in the U.K. “Having run an extensive process to secure the future of the business, we are deeply disappointed that we have reached this point and how it will affect all our stakeholders, including employees, customers, suppliers and shareholders,” Made.com chair Susanne Given said in a statement issued today. “We appreciate and deeply regret the frustration that MDL (Made.com) going into administration will have caused for everyone.” Road to ruin Founded out of London in 2010, Made.com emerged as one of the U.K.’s most promising startups, raising some $137 million in investors’ money for a business that optimized the entire furniture design, manufacturing, and sales processes through forging close partnerships with partner companies. The company went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2021 at a valuation of around £775 million, though its share price has been in perpetual decline since IPO day last June, and with the company reporting growing losses and job cut plans throughout 2022, the writing has been on the wall. Reports suggest that Next paid just £3.4 million to acquire Made.com’s brand and IP. Cofounder and former CEO Ning Li, who left Made.com in 2017, posted an open letter stating that he had made three bids to buy the company back with his own cash and try to turn things around, but was ultimately rejected. “Unfortunately, my proposal wasn’t accepted,” Li wrote. “Apparently, it would be preferable to break the company up and sell it in pieces to generate a little more cash. It makes no sense to me. But I wanted you to know that I really tried.” It’s worth noting that Made.com recently stated that it wouldn’t be processing any requests for refunds for customers with pending orders, and it’s not clear at this juncture whether this will change in the future — at the moment, the administrators are concerned with selling all of Made.com’s remaining assets and making payments to its creditors. And the board said today that it eventually expects “any residual value” left after the administration process to be distributed to the company’s shareholders. It’s also not clear what Next’s plans are for the Made.com brand, and whether it plans to retain any of the 500 jobs currently on the line with Made.com entering administration.

Celonis can now map multiple processes and present them in subway-style map • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Celonis, Enterprise, process mapping, StartupsNo Comments

Celonis has made a big impact since it launched in 2011, raising $2.4 billion along the way. Its most recent investment, a $1 billion raise in August, was on a $13.2 billion post-money valuation, the kind of money you haven’t been seeing in 2022. The company has primarily made its reputation by using software for process mining, figuring out how work flows through a business and finding ways to make it more efficient. Until now, it has done pretty well by documenting one process at a time. But today at Celosphere, the company’s annual customer conference, it announced a major breakthrough in what the technology has been able to do: It introduced a new product called Process Sphere that shifts the product from a single process to more complex cross-departmental, multiple processes. Alex Rinke, CEO and co-founder at the company, says the new approach makes the whole process mining experience much more powerful. Image Credits: Celonis “We always talk about one individual process like audits, invoices or procurement, whatever the process is. We said, ‘how can we reinvent this and take it to the next level’? And that’s why we built a new processing technology, which is very revolutionary, and allows you to look at multiple processes at the same time because many times you have a lot of friction at the interface between say your sales process and your shipping process, or your shipping process and your billing process [and this allows you to see all that in a single view],” Rinke told ZebethMedia. They created a very compelling visual interface to display the various processes; it looks very much like a subway map, but instead of showing switching stations, it shows points in a process where it crosses over into a second or third process. “We call it a subway map, and each process looks like a subway line, and you look at the subway map of your business, you can zoom in and out and just look at specific lines. And it’s a really, really powerful engine, and we put a lot of work into making it clear and simple,” he said. He added, “It enables a lot of use cases, whether that’s in commerce, whether it’s in supply chain, whether it’s in financial operations, because you can understand what’s going on in an entire business at the intersection of multiple business processes.”

Plain is a new customer support tool with a focus on API integrations • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in customer support, Plain, Startups, supportNo Comments

Meet Plain, a new startup that wants to reinvent support tools. While the customer support space is a competitive industry with big tech companies like Intercom and Zendesk, Plain believes it has a different approach as it focuses on API integrations to make your company’s product and your support platform work hand in hand. Plain has raised a $6 million seed round co-led by Connect Ventures and Index Ventures. Many business angels also participated in the round, such as Soleio, Allison Pickens, Nicolas Dessaigne, Matt Robinson, Mike Hudack and Zack Kanter. According to Plain, a big issue for customer support agents is that there is a disconnect between products and support tickets. They often have to go back and forth between several backend tools. Even when there are some integrations in place to sync data between the support tool and product data, information is usually out of sync as it isn’t fetched in real time. While big customer support platforms offer APIs and a lot of customization options, development teams often have different priorities and can’t spend too much time on internal tools. That’s particularly true for support tools as they don’t often interact with these tools directly. Plain’s API strategy works in both directions. First, Plain can show live customer data in Plain directly. It makes calls to the backend to get relevant information, such as a subscription status, the name of the current plan, some usage metrics, etc. Data is cached and deleted after a while. If you go back to an old ticket, Plain fetches live data once again. Second, Plain is highly customizable when it comes to integrating support actions in your product. It doesn’t have to be a chat popup in the bottom right corner of the website. Developers can customize the user interface and create new interactions, such as early access requests, product feedback features and native contact forms. The startup has been trying to make it as painless as possible to start using Plain. The idea is that it shouldn’t slow down development teams. The company thinks getting started with Plain is as easy as building a Slackbot. “The fundamental problem we’re solving is context: Plain offers a single source of truth for customer interactions, powered by companies’ own systems and data – so when someone gets in touch with a problem, the company immediately knows who they are, what their order is, what’s happened so far – and can resolve it in a single click,” co-founder and CEO Simon Rohrbach said in a statement. Plain doesn’t have the same track record and integration ecosystem as Intercom and Zendesk. But its API-first strategy is an interesting one, especially if you are a startup building a modern product with a lot of API endpoints.

Kuda takes digital banking play to the U.K. with its remittance product • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in Fintech, Kuda, StartupsNo Comments

Kuda, the London-based and Nigerian-operating startup taking on incumbents in the country with a mobile-first and personalized set of banking services, is expanding to the U.K. by offering a remittance product to Nigerians in the diaspora. The digital bank has seen some success since launching in Nigeria in 2019. Kuda claims to have up to 5 million users, more than thrice the number it had last August during its $55 million Series B round, money it raised to enter into other African countries like Ghana and Uganda this year. From an administrative point of view, Kuda’s U.K. move is straightforward. The startup, founded by Babs Ogundeyi and Musty Mustapha, is a U.K.-based fintech that offers financial services to Africans (starting with Nigerians) within and outside Africa. As such, services provided to Nigerian users are done via its subsidiary, Kuda MFB Limited. On the other hand, Kuda EMI Limited is the other subsidiary in charge of the newly launched services — one of which is remittance — to Nigerians in the U.K. Second, there’s business sense to it. Nigeria is sub-Saharan’s largest inbound remittance market and among the top 10 largest globally. The remittance business is so massive that it accounts for nearly 4% of the country’s GDP as of 2020. Yet, sending money from places like the U.S. and U.K. to Nigeria remains invariably expensive. For instance, it costs the sender 3.7% of the sent amount to send money from the U.K. — which is the second largest sender of remittances to Nigeria, behind the U.S., and is estimated to transmit £3 billion yearly — to Nigeria, according to data. And while international money transfer operators still control the lion’s share of the transactions in the U.K.-Nigeria corridor, African consumer fintechs are holding down their own via the fees they charge, most of which are commissions of transactions. Some include Grey Finance, PayDay, Lemonade Finance and Kyshi. “I don’t necessarily think it’s crowded because obviously, there are still a lot of challenges in remitting money to Africa, especially to Nigeria,” said the chief executive officer Ogundeyi when asked about Kuda’s move to a relatively loaded money transfer space. “But for us, it’s not just a remittance play. There’s a user experience, convenience and price factor involved.” Kuda’s approach is different. The fintech says it’s entering the U.K. market charging a flat fee of £3 with a transfer limit of £10,000. And Kuda, which has raised more than $90 million from investors such as Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures and Target Global, expects its transaction range to fall between £250 to £500, Ogundeyi noted. In addition to remittance, Kuda intends to provide direct debits and local transfers to Nigerians in the U.K. The plan suggests that Kuda wants to take a small piece of other neobanks’ cakes, such as Revolut, Monzo and Wise. These platforms have built sticky features that have yielded strong adoption across various demographics, including Nigerians, the niche population Kuda is targeting with its launch; therefore, it remains to be seen if remittance, the low-hanging fruit, is sufficient to derive long-term value and if it has enough pull to get customers to use other services frequently. Unlike its remittance product, which might have been built in-house, Kuda, like many neobanks, will rely on a third party, usually a banking-as-a-service platform, to provide these financial services. The platform in question for Kuda is Modulr, an embedded payments platform for digital businesses to offer a mobile wallet, virtual and physical cards, local U.K. transfers and direct debits. “Ultimately, Kuda is building a one-stop shop for Africans, including other services outside of remittance. And our plan is not just for Africa, but for Africans everywhere,” said Ogundeyi of the expansion. “The U.K. is the first of the ‘outside of Africa’ destinations. We plan to be in other African countries and expand the remittance services to customers there and the diaspora market.”

Beekeeper, which helps companies engage with their ‘deskless’ frontline workforce, raises $50M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 9, 2022Posted in beekeeper, Enterprise, StartupsNo Comments

Beekeeper, a platform for businesses to engage with frontline workers, has raised $50 million in a Series C round of funding. Founded out of Switzerland in 2011, Beekeeper targets the estimated 80% of the global “deskless” workforce who don’t work from a fixed office-based location, spanning hospitality, retail, manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, among other industries. Beekeeper’s platform constitutes tools to support messaging, surveys, video and voice chats, FAQ chatbots, workflow automation (e.g. for onboarding new hires), shift scheduling, documents, forms, and more. Beekeeper platform Image Credits: Beekeeper On top of that, Beekeeper also packs analytics to serve managers with metrics around engagement. Beekeeper analytics Image Credits: Beekeeper Other notable players in the space include Connecteam, which recently closed a $120 million round of funding, while the likes of WorkStep, WorkJam and Skedulo have also raised sizable sums of VC cash in recent years. Collectively, they’re all setting out to solve a similar problem, vis-à-vis how best to connect with the millions of workers not tethered to a desk, and who may only sporadically be able to check-in online. “Beekeeper helps companies reach and connect with frontline employees who do not work at a desk, speak dozens of languages, work with their hands, and usually don’t have company email accounts,” CEO Cris Grossmann told ZebethMedia. “Our software allows organizations to streamline virtually every aspect of the frontline employee experience — from automating paper-based processes to distributing shift schedules to digitizing important resources like employee handbooks.” Beekeeper has amassed some big-name customers over its 10-plus years history, including hotel giant Hilton and food corporation Cargill. And as with just about every other technology that promises to benefit either remote or “essential” frontline workers, Beekeeper has benefited from the pandemic’s impact on the global workforce in terms of spurring companies to modernize how they liaise with their workforce. “As the public became more aware of the crucial role our frontline workforce plays in every aspect of human life, they began dominating news coverage and national conversations,” Grossmann continued. “Companies quickly discovered that they couldn’t communicate instantly or convey rapid updates to their frontline teams. The standard top-down, word-of-mouth communication channels, classical or social intranets, and bulletin boards they relied on for decades failed. Many had to implement new technologies to connect and empower their frontline workers — and they needed to do it fast.” Path to retention At its core, connecting and engaging is really all about retaining — countering the so-called “great resignation” and the vast swathe of existing unfilled jobs. Reducing friction and frustrations, and ensuring that concerns are addressed are pivotal to keeping frontline workers happy. “Organizations that rely on frontline labor to make, sell, and distribute their products are being forced to address long-standing pain points around pay, working conditions, and the employee experience for their frontline teams,” Grossmann said. “Forward-thinking organizations are taking action to address frontline disconnect and high turnover in a holistic way that solves it once and for all.” Prior to now, Beekeeper had raised around $81 million in financing, and with another $50 million in the bank, the Zurich-based company said that it plans to double down on product development and build on its recent growth which it said has seen its revenue rise by 100% since the start of the pandemic. Beekeeper’s Series C round included investments from EGSB, Kreos Capital, Energize, Thayer, SwissCanto, Keen Ventures, Alpana and Verve Capital.

Binance says it will buy FTX after smaller rival stumbles through ‘liquidity crunch’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 8, 2022Posted in Daily Crunch, Startups, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Today, we’ve been learning about what the hell a Mastodon even is, so the timing of Amanda’s piece ‘A beginner’s guide to Mastodon’ is all sorts of perfect. Give it a read, and come find us on Mastodon after. If you can — that’s another challenge. We have faith in your cyberstalking skills, but here’s a hint: Both of us are on Mastodon.Social. — Christine and Haje. The ZebethMedia Top 3 This surprise was off the chain!: In a surprise twist today, Binance announced its intent to acquire FTX in a move that will clear out some of the “liquidity crunches” that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried tweeted about, Manish reports. This comes after the two companies’ founders had a very public spat recently. (More on that in Big Tech Inc. below). Roll out: Over in ZebethMedia+ land, Becca writes about what Peloton co-founder John Foley has been doing. Apparently, he “is a rug guy now.” Also, as Becca points out, his new company, Ernesta, is another example of VCs investing in people they knew, even if their last company flailed some. A list that changes every day: Hey, fellow Twitter users, are you on Team Verify or Team Leave My Stuff Alone? Either way, Ivan has a list of features Elon Musk has promised to bring to Twitter. Startups and VC Though finance technology startups are having a moment when it comes to decreased venture capital deals and layoffs, Quona Capital, a venture capital firm that invests in emerging markets that accelerate financial inclusion, has found the appetite is still there for fintechs, Christine reports. The firm had its final close on $332 million in capital commitments for its Fund III, which focuses on financial inclusion. Also from Christine today (in addition to our resident Daily Crunch newsletter wrangler, she’s a post-writing machine!) is a piece about Doola, a company helping global founders start a limited liability company in the United States, even without a Social Security number. The company raised an $8 million round of funding, less than a year after it raised $3 million worth of seed funding. A handful more, because we love ya: Here’s the rundown on the Binance and FTX fiasco Image Credits: wenjin chen (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Today we learned that the world’s largest crypto exchange is bailing out the world’s third-largest crypto exchange. But why? In a detailed explainer, Jacquelyn Melinek wrote about how a CoinDesk report last Thursday on crypto trading firm Alameda Research led Binance to liquidate a mountain of tokens that backed many of Alameda’s loans. Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. As promised from above, Jacquelyn dives deeper into some of the things going on at FTX, including that the crypto exchanges withdrawals seemed to be sluggish. And that its potential new owner, Binance, was going to “slowly withdraw billions of its holdings in FTX’s native token, FTT.” Oh, you two! And we have five more for you: Who’s got a new trivia game?: It’s Netflix! The streaming service is trying its hand at a new trivia game — remember its venture into “Trivia Quest”? The new one is an interactive trivia experience called “Triviaverse.” Lauren has more. Video, email, calendar: Zoom is adding email and calendar to its features lineup, a move Ron reports is its chosen avenue, for now, as the company looks to expand its offerings. Stepping down: Grab Financial leader Reuben Lai is planning to leave the company at the end of the year, Catherine writes. It’s a party, a third-party, that is: Third-party merchants in India can now have Amazon-like logistics power thanks to the delivery giant opening it up to them, Manish writes. Don’t ever say you’re left out: European Union investigators now plan to take an even deeper dive into Microsoft’s $68.7 billion bid to acquire Activision and what it could mean for competition, Natasha L reports.