Month: April 2018

While smaller companies are seeing a lot of new options for distributed office space, or can pick up a couple offices in a WeWork, eventually they get big enough and have to find a bigger office — but that can end up as one of the weirdest and most annoying challenges for an early-stage CEO.

Finding that space is a whole other story, outside of just searching on Google and crossing your fingers. It’s why Jonathan Wasserstrum started Squarefoot, which looks to not only create a hub for these vacant offices, but also have the systems in place — including brokers — to help companies eventually land that office space. Eventually companies as they grow have to graduate into increasingly larger and larger spots, but there’s a missing sweet spot for mid-stage companies that are looking for space but don’t necessarily have the relationships with those big office brokers just yet, and instead are just looking through a friend of a friend. The company said today that it has raised $7 million in a new financing round led by Rosecliff Ventures, with RRE Ventures, Triangle Peak Partners, Armory Square Ventures, and others participating.

“If you talk to any CEO and you ask what they think about commercial real estate brokers, they’ll say, ‘oh, the guys that send an email every week,’” co-founder Jonathan Wasserstrum said. “The industry has been slow to adopt because the average person who owns the building is fine. They don’t wake up every morning and say this process sucks. But the people who wake up and say the process sucks are looking for space. That was kind of one fo the early things that we kind of figured out and focused a lot of attention on aggregating that tenant demand.

Squarefoot starts off on the buyer side as an aggregation platform that localizes open office space into one spot. While companies used to have to Google search something along the lines of “Chelsea office space” in New York — especially for early-stage companies that are just starting to outgrow their early offices — the goal is to always have Squarefoot come up as a result for that. It already happens thanks to a lot of efforts on the marketing front, but eventually with enough inventory and demand the hope is that building owners will be coming to Squarefoot in the first place. (That you see an ad for Squarefoot as a result for a lot of these searches already is, for example, no accident.)

Squarefoot is also another company that is adopting a sort of hybrid model that includes both a set of tools and algorithms to aggregate together all that space into one spot, but keep consultants and brokers in the mix in order to actually close those deals. It’s a stance that the venture community seems to be increasingly softening on as more and more companies launch with the idea that the biggest deals need to have an actual human on the other end in order to manage that relationship.

“We’re not trying to remove brokers, we have them on staff, we think there’s a much better way to go through the process,” Wasserstrum said. “When I am buying a ticket to Chicago, I’m fine going to Kayak and I don’t need a travel agent. But when I’m the CEO of a company and about to sign a three-year lease that’s a $1.5 million liability, and I’ve never done this before, shouldn’t I want someone to help me out? I do not see in the near future this e-commerce experience for commercial real estate. You don’t put it in your shopping cart.”

And, to be sure, there are a lot of platforms that already focus on the consumer side, like Redfin for home search. But this is a big market, and there already is some activity — it just hasn’t picked up a ton of traction just yet because it is a slog to get everything all in one place. One of the original examples is 42Floors, but even then that company early on faced a lot of troubles trying to get the model working and in 2015 cut its brokerage team. That’s not a group of people Wasserstrum is looking to leave behind, simply because the end goal is to actually get these companies signing leases and not just serving as a search engine.

from TechCrunch

Voicera wants to be the company that eliminates the need for human note taking once and for all. Their vision is an AI-driven voice recognition system that not only takes notes, but identifies speakers and summarizes key points and action items. Today, the company announced it had acquired a similar startup, Wrappup, an AI-fueled note taking app that fits in nicely with that vision.

The Wrappup team is joining Voicera immediately. Terms were not disclosed.

Voicera CEO Omar Tawakol certainly saw the fit. “Both companies approached the problem with meetings in synergistic ways. Wrappup’s mobile-first, in-person meeting product complements and extends Voicera’s initial focus on conference calls,” he said in a statement.

Wrappup’s special strength it turns out it is identifying the salient points in a meeting in a mobile context. To that end, the company also announced the launch of a new mobile app. Chances are this combining of these two companies has been in the works for some time, and is just being made official today.

Photo: Voicera

Wrappup CEO Rami Salman says joining forces with Voicera creates a more compelling and powerful solution for customers. “Our combined tech stack and AI algorithms more accurately identify and summarize important moments from all your meetings, regardless of where they are held,” he said in a statement.

Voicera’s voice recognition tool is a cloud service called Eva. It is designed to remove the task of note taking from the meeting experience. The company got a $13.5 million Series A last month from some big-time investors including e.ventures, Battery Ventures, GGV Capital and Greycroft. They also got some attention from enterprise corporate venture investors including GV (the investment firm affiliated with Google), Microsoft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Workday Ventures. The level of these investors shows the company is attacking a real pain point for meeting attendees.

Wrappup is based in Dubai and was founded in 2015. Its raised $800,000 to date. It works with existing meeting tools including GoToMeeting from Citrix, WebEx from Cisco, UberConference and Zoom.

from TechCrunch

AJ Brustein was out spending time with a member of his merchandising team when a nearby store ran out of stock of some goods — but there was no one on staff responsible for that location. Fortunately, the employee he was with had already showed him how to restock the shelves, and he offered to peel off and do it himself.

But that gap in the workforce may have just continued, leading directly to potential lost revenue for companies that sell products in those stores. That’s why Brustein and Yong Kim started Wonolo, a tool to connect companies with temporary workers in order to fill the unexpected demand those companies might face in those same out-of-stock situations. Wonolo employees sign up for the platform, and the companies that partner with the startup have an opportunity to grab the necessary workers they need on a more flexible basis. Wonolo today said it has raised $13 million in a new financing round led by Sequoia Capital, including existing investors PivotNorth and Crunchfund, and new investor Base10. Sequoia Capital’s Jess Lee is joining the company’s board of directors as part of the financing.

“There’s a big opportunity  helping people fill in their schedule with shifts,” Brustein said. “We really found there’s this huge untapped market of people who are looking for work who are underemployed. Let’s say Mary is a great worker and has a great job at the Home Depot, but no matter how good she, is she can only get 29 hours of work. It’s hard to manage schedules between different employers that want you to work the same hours. That’s the market we’ve really focused on, the underemployed market, which is a growing unfortunate trend in the U.S. That’s changed a little bit about the types of jobs we have on the platform.”

Wonolo is essentially looking to replace the typical temp agency experience, which helps workers find positions with companies that need a more limited amount of time. Meanwhile, those workers get an opportunity to fill in extra shifts that they might need for additional income on a more flexible schedule. Once a company posts a job to Wonolo, employees will get notified that it’s available and then get a chance to pick up those shifts, and when the job is approved those workers get paid right away.

While the jobs that Wonolo is suited for are more along the lines of merchandising, events staff, or more general labor, the hope is that the service will also expose those employees to a variety of companies who may actually end up wanting to hire them at some point. It allows them to get a good snapshot of all the work that’s available, and theoretically would help offer them an additional step on a career path that could get them to a direct full-time job with any of the companies from which they might end up accepting jobs.

“We thought we could address [the idea of being able to deal with unpredictability] better than temp staffing, and we realized the antidote was flexibility on the worker side,” Brustein said. “We could match them with these jobs that would unpredictably pop up. When we dug into it, we realized flexibility was something that was just completely lacking for workers. We took a very different approach to the way that people will often recruit talent for staffing agencies or their own employees. We are looking at character traits.”

Wonolo was born out of Brustein and Kim’s experience at Coca-Cola, where they had an opportunity to work with a major brand for a number of years. After a while, they got an opportunity to start working on a more entrepreneurial project, and that’s when that whole merchandising scenario played out and prompted them to start working on Wonolo. That part about character traits is an important part for Wonolo, Brustein said — because as long as someone can complete a job, they don’t have to be an absolute expert, as long as they are there ready and good to go.

There are, of course, companies trying to create platforms for temporary workers, like TrueBlue, and Brustein said Wonolo will inevitably have to compete with more local players as it looks to expand. But the hope is that aiming to tap the same kind of flexibility that made Uber so popular for temporary staffers — and potentially that pathway to a big career opportunity — will be one that attracts them to their service.

from TechCrunch

As fast-growing companies — or, dare I say, ‘scale-ups’ — add new headcount, the pace at which they are able to on-board new hires doesn’t always keep up. In fact, I’m told it is not unheard of for new employees to turn up on day one apparently unexpected, and to be passed from pillar to post as they attempt to get set up and be shown all of the things you need to be shown to actually start a new role.

Enter Personably, the London startup founded in late 2016 by Katerina Pascoulis and Lewis Blackwood, after the former Crowdcube and GoCardless employees spotted an opportunity to use software to streamline and in some instances automate aspects of the on-boarding process. Bootstrapped until now, the company is disclosing that it recently raised £500,000 in seed funding.

The round was led by GFC, the venture arm of e-commerce behemoth and company builder Rocket Internet’s GFC — which knows more than a thing or two about the teething problems scaling companies have — along with a number of angel investors. The latter includes Matt Robinson, co-founder of GoCardless and Nested (which I’m told are both early customers of Personably), and Caroline Sage, founder at Kea Consultants.

“Right now, on boarding people into fast growing companies is incredibly time-consuming,” Pascoulis tells me. “If you don’t onboard that person properly you’re losing out on the first 6 months of their time at the company. They’ll take longer to get up to speed which is expensive for the company and a poor experience for the individual, especially if they then leave sooner because of it”.

In researching the viability of a solution like Personably, Pascoulis says everyone her and Blackwood spoke to had their own story about something that had gone wrong in their first week that had stuck with them. “What Personably does to solve this is automating away a lot of those manual tasks that need to happen when someone starts,” she says. “Things as simple as sending welcome emails right up to automatically scheduling everything that new starter needs to attend.”

When a company is relatively small, these types of on-boarding tasks and the organisation around it tend to fall to one or two people and happens at a hiring pace that makes it manageable. However, if a company hits hyper-growth mode or simply becomes a much larger organisation with many more moving parts, the on-boarding process itself also needs to scale.

“When you’re hiring one person every couple of months it’s something you can handle. But when you’re hiring one or more people a week, you’re spending a lot of time doing these tasks that should just be handled automatically. We give teams that time back,” says Pascoulis.

As an example, imagine scheduling weeks of training across a company, involving lots of different team members. This might typically be handled through a combination of spreadsheets, email and task manager, but with Personably can be done with a single click and tracked all in one interface.

Meanwhile, the business model is typical SaaS. Companies pay a monthly subscription fee to use the product, and the pricing varies based on the volume of hires a company is making.

Pascoulis cites competitors as newer HR systems like CharlieHR and HiBob that have on-boarding features, but, she argues, don’t scale as well. There’s also traditional enterprise products like Workday that handle on-boarding on an enterprise level.

from TechCrunch

Funding Societies co-founders Reynold Wijaya and Kelvin Teo.

Funding Societies, a peer-to-peer lending platform in Southeast Asia, said today that it has raised a $25 million Series B led by Softbank Ventures Korea, the Japanese tech conglomerate’s early-stage venture capital unit. The round included returning investors Sequoia India, which led the Singapore-based startup’s Series A two years ago, Golden Gate Ventures and Alpha JWC Ventures, as well as new backers Qualgro and LINE Ventures.

Funding Societies also said it has raised credit lines from banks and financial institutions to lend to small- to medium-sized businesses. Founded in 2015 by Kelvin Teo and Reynold Wijaya, the startup’s name represents its “vision of financial inclusion in Southeast Asia.”

Its Series B was oversubscribed, says Funding Societies, which operates in Singapore, Indonesia, where it is called Modalku, and Malaysia.

When it announced its $7.5 million Series A in August 2016, Funding Societies had disbursed $8.7 million Singaporean dollars, a number that has since grown to $145 million SGD, chief executive officer Teo tells TechCrunch. Since its launch, the startup has increased its lender base to more than 60,000 and now claims a default rate of less than 1.5%, down from about 2% to 3% two years ago, thanks to improvements in its underwriting model.

In a press statement, Softbank Ventures Korea partner and managing director Sean Lee said the firm “has been actively investing across Southeast Asia. SME digital lending across Southeast Asia is where we saw huge growth potential. Among many players, we were most impressed with Funding Societies for what it has achieved in a short period of time and its potential to continue to become the number one player.”

Though Teo says Funding Societies is “always exploring other markets, there is still tons of work we need to do in our current three markets.” Despite its considerable growth over the past three years, the startup’s mantra is “slow and steady,” a phrase Teo repeated often during our interview.

“One of the key things we highlight is that it’s more important for us to grow slowly and steadily instead of fast and recklessly, because it’s a trust-based industry,” says Teo.

“We need to give out loans and be able to collect them back, so we focus on learning the market, understanding the market and solving key pain points instead of giving out a bunch of loans to chalk up high numbers and attract VCs.”

For example, though the platform may offer personal loans in the future, Teo said it currently only lends to SMEs because “we believe that we are strategically better suited to serving small businesses and, in terms of our company’s values, we think that serving SMEs is an expansionary effort. Consumer financing, in our personal view, is more consumptive finance. It doesn’t help grow economies.”

Many of the SMEs the company serves are very small. Some of its Indonesian borrowers, for example, make annual revenue of about $5,000 USD per year.

“Many of these borrowers are seeking their first business loan and do not have other sources of financing. A lot of financial institutions take a collateral underwriting approach and a lot of budding businesses would not be able to secure financing that way,” says Teo.

“But we also see some of them come to us as a form of top-up. They already have a bank loan, but it is insufficient for them, so they come to us because they are limited by the size of their collateral. Also, we are able to process financing faster than traditional institutions.”

Funding Societies was created to give SMEs, many of which had previously relied mostly on friends and family loans, access to more means of financing. The company points to a recent study by Ernst & Young, UOB and Dun & Bradstreet that says 65.2% of SMEs in Southeast Asia do not have easy access to traditional business financing, even though most are open to other options, including peer-to-peer lending platforms.

The company says it was the first online peer-to-peer lending platform in Malaysia and that based on third-party data, it is now the leading SME lending platform there, as well as one of Singapore’s three largest peer-to-peer lending platforms. It also holds sizable market share in Indonesia.

Though its platform uses algorithms for initial application screening, a significant portion of work, depending on loan size, is still done by Funding Societies’ employees, who have grown in number from 70 in 2016 to 165 now (Teo says the company is currently hiring in earnest and willing to pay relocation costs for promising talent). Almost all applicants talk directly to someone from the company. Micro-loans, which range in size from $500 USD to $40,000 USD, usually take about two business hours to approve and disburse, while applicants for larger loans may have to wait a few days to about a week.

“We’ve debated and discussed internally a lot if we leave too much money on the table, because our default rate is lower than certain banks in the markets we are serving, but given that we are still at a relatively nascent stage in the lending market and have no control over financial crises, it is more important to stay prudent than to grow recklessly,” says Teo.

This methodical approach is also important when entering new markets. Though many outside observers take the umbrella term “Southeast Asia” a little too literally, ignoring cultural differences between each country, Teo says it is still a fragmented market, so financial service companies need to localize carefully. When Funding Societies enters a new market, it can probably port about 50% of its tech and business model from its previous market, but the other half has to be built from ground up to account for economic and cultural differences, he adds.

“SME financing is a very localized business. With sufficient capital you can win the market and it’s really driven by subsidies and strong marketing,” Teo says. “But for SMEs, you really, really need to understand the local market.”

from TechCrunch