Fintech Brex bets big on software, lands DoorDash as a customer

The corporate spend space continues to heat up.

Today, decacorn Brex revealed that it is making a big push into financial software with the release of a new spend management product called Brex Empower. And it’s making the leap with one high-profile customer already signed up — DoorDash.

Now, normally, a startup announcing a new product is hardly fodder for a news story.

But in this case, it is.

Brex is one of a number of companies in the corporate spend management space that has grown increasingly crowded — and competitive — in recent years.

Originally, Brex was a startup focused on startups. Specifically, it provided corporate cards aimed mainly at startups and SMBs. Brex gradually evolved its model with the aim of serving as a “financial operating system” for companies. Historically, it has generated its revenue from interchange fees.

But now, the company is making a “big push” into software, which means its revenue generation will be more diversified as it will now be making money off of interchange fees and recurring revenue from subscriptions to its software. Brex is also placing greater emphasis on moving upmarket to serve larger customers, as evidenced by its landing DoorDash — a company with more than $36 billion in market capitalization and 9,000 distributed employees — as one of its first clients. While it will still serve startups, Brex wants to be able to support startups as they grow, as well as enterprises that are already huge.

“We’re very focused on signing up net new large enterprise customers and DoorDash is the first of many, with lots to come,” Brex co-CEO and co-founder Henrique Dubugras said in an interview. “It’s extremely important to us. The reason that DoorDash bought our product is that the entire software suite is very powerful. They don’t see Brex as a card or financial services company but as both a financial services and strong software company.”

He goes on to share the experience of a DoorDash GM who wanted to buy $1,000 worth of ice. The process took weeks and the GM had to create a purchase order and get it approved by the finance team first.

“This was five weeks of delayed testing, iterating on ideas — wasted,” Dubugras said. “Especially for a fast growing company.”

Brex’s growth has been swift and impressive. Earlier this year, Brex confirmed a $300 million raise that valued it at a staggering $12.3 billion. The company now has 1,100 employees, saw 100% YoY revenue growth in 2021 and has a customer base “into the 50,000s,” according to Dubugras. He declined to reveal hard revenue figures, but previously told TechCrunch Brex was still focused on growth and not yet profitable.

The majority of Brex’s revenue still comes from interchange fees, Dubugras said. But he expects that the proportion of SaaS revenue and “other revenue lines” will grow over time.

‘A much bigger push and bigger play’

In April of 2021, Brex said it had combined credit cards, business cash accounts and new spend management and bill pay software “together in a single dashboard” as part of a service called Brex Premium that cost $49 per month.

In announcing Brex Empower, the company said it was no longer offering Brex Premium. Currently, Empower’s first product is focused on spend management but will evolve over time to have “wider capabilities” such as travel, procurement, payments and banking access, Dubugras said. Empower is a very different model than Premium, the company said, in that it was built from the ground up to help companies grow at scale with a “trust and verify” approach.

“It’s a much bigger push and bigger play than Premium was,” the company said, noting that it would release pricing for the new product in “early summer.”

“We want to help companies build a culture of trust — but one of financial discipline so that it’s not a free for all. That way, companies can make decisions faster, and grow faster,” Dubugras told TechCrunch. “We want to make it super easy for employees to do the right thing. And we believe in increasing the speed of business.

Empower, the company says, will, for example, eliminate the collection of receipts. It automatically collects over 80% of receipts by “leveraging exclusive data from credit card networks, and integrations with thousands of POS partners,” according to Brex. A customer can’t use Empower without also using a Brex Card.

The company claims that it has also found a way to “visualize expense policies” so that its software is able to understand the business context for any expenses, across card, reimbursements and bill pay.

Its product also reverses the historical process of an employee making a purchase and then getting approval. Brex’s system gives companies a way to “manage by exception.” Because its software will be able to know what purchases are in policy, it can flag those that fall out of it or are over budget. It is working to introduce what it describes as “an anomaly detection model,” that will use ML to flag suspicious transactions based on data of tens of millions of transactions processed.

Empower, it said, also gives leaders the ability to create and request a budget for teams, trips, vendors and stipends (such as a work-from-home stipend). The product also gives finance teams real-time visibility into where spend is happening, Dubugras says.

The number of startups out there doing different aspects of what Brex does is growing rapidly. There’s Ramp, which in March announced a $200 million equity raise at an $8.1 billion valuation after an expansion into the travel space. There’s also Airbase, which recently landed a strategic investment from American Express; focused on the mid-market customer, it and has always hinged its future on making money off its software rather than on interchange fees. In fact, CEO Thejo Kote recently told TechCrunch that he sees software as a “higher quality, more durable” form of revenue.

Meanwhile, TripActions, which first focused on travel, continues to expand into general spend management. Divvy was snapped up by Bill.com last year in a $2.5 billion deal. Newer startups are emerging as well. Glean AI came out of stealth recently to offer “accounts payables with a brain.” But many agree it’s not a winner-takes-all space, considering that the number of companies needing spend management offerings is also growing.

And, coincidentally today, expense management software provider Emburse announced that, after building much of its nearly $200 million-in-ARR business in the enterprise, it is making a big push into the SMB space and going head-to-head with fast-growing startups like Ramp and Brex.

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Digital bank Umba raises $15M, plans to expand into three new African markets

There’s no shortage of digital banks in Nigeria and, in general, in Africa. As the region continues to experience rapid growth in mobile usage and the corresponding growing young population, these fintechs think this is the right time to provide financial services to every market category, from the banked to the unbanked.

We’ve covered a host of these platforms in the past. Their overarching pitch is to provide financial services to the underserved market, so their customers essentially overlap. In the latest development, Umba, a digital banking platform operating in Lagos, Nigeria, has raised $15 million in Series A funding. The news comes almost two years since the fintech raised a seed round of $2 million.

Umba said it brings a wide range of transparent and accessible financial products to those underserved by legacy banks across Africa — only 43% of the region’s population are account holders at financial institutions. 

Its features include free bank accounts, interbank transfers, peer-to-peer transfers and bill payments. These are standard features digital banks in Africa provide, whether they’re deposit-first like Kuda, credit-first such as FairMoney or Carbon, or both like Fintech Farm.

The company’s CEO, Tiernan Kennedy, told TechCrunch on a call that Umba operates the credit-led model pioneered by Nubank, where it first solves the problem of liquidity for customers before upselling them on a broad spectrum of banking products.

So, in addition to getting a no-fee current account, free payments and bill payments, Umba users can access loans. Kennedy said the company uses proprietary data generated by customers to offer credit products. The fintech company generates most of its revenues from charging consumers a monthly interest of 10%.

“I’d like to think that we’re the cheapest in the market. The reason is we’re collecting data, making automated underwriting and retraining models every month based on customer performance to deliver credit in seconds,” said Kennedy, who founded the company with CFO Barry O’Mahony in 2018. “Also, we’re best in class in terms of lending, which allows us to offer the lowest interest rates in the markets,” he claims. 

Interestingly, as part of this Series A round, Umba convinced a couple of Nubank executives to wire some checks.

“The Nubank guys saw what we’re doing and recognized it is the right model for emerging markets. Credit is the hardest problem to solve and to underwrite customers at scale in multiple markets is challenging. It took us 18 months to build that. But now it’s up and running and performing,” Kennedy added.

Other investors include Tom Blomfield, the co-founder of Monzo, and previous backers Lachy Groom and ACT Ventures. New investors such as Lux Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Banana Capital and Streamlined Ventures participated, while VC firm Costanoa Ventures led the round. The fintech has raised a total of $17.5 million to date.

Umba has been in operation for about two years now. Kennedy didn’t divulge hard numbers when asked to share some financials, only saying that the company has doubled its revenues every three months since launching 18 months ago with over 1 million installs on Google Play Store.

Kennedy acknowledged that the firm’s focus on engineering and customer experience has been key to this growth. He also said they’d be instrumental in Umba’s push to serve multiple markets, currencies and payment infrastructures.

“Typically, like a legacy bank, some startups will buy off-the-shelf banking systems and customize them for their customers. But they’re not thinking about the customer first. For us, we designed core banking systems from the ground up and can deliver a customized experience for the customer at the drop of a hat in both banking and mobile money markets,” said the chief executive.

“We can take in all that open banking data and underwrite at scale with these different fragmented payment types and data types. What that means for us, in practice, is that we’re multi-currency, we can go multi-country, we can do all different payment types. And that takes time. But then when you get your ability to move extremely fast against competitors.”

Establishing an interoperable digital banking experience across African markets is an arduous task, especially between banks and mobile money operators. And Umba is yet to actualize Kennedy’s claims, given its sole operation in Nigeria. Thus, it’s still early to say if the company can underwrite loans and provide financial services across various systems on the continent.

However, the new funding will allow the company to test this out as it prepares to launch in new markets, including Egypt, Ghana and Kenya, where mobile money is prominent.

Before Umba, Kennedy was the CTO of PearUp, a dating app, and led the engineering team at IoT firm Canary. O’Mahony, on the other hand, was the former head of operations for Tola Mobile, a U.K. fintech with operations in Uganda, Rwanda, Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya.

The founders told TechCrunch that they have made several key hires for Umba’s new phase of geographical growth, including the ex-CFO of Interswitch and senior staff from Zynga.

Umba will also make some expansions product-wise rolling out debit cards, savings accounts, and stock trading in the next 18 months.

“Right now, we’ve solved for credits and spending; what’s next is savings and investments, creating new markets opening up, that means hiring up staff in our three new markets,” added Kennedy.

Why Latin America’s decline in VC investment isn’t necessarily bad news

That global venture capital slowed down in Q1 2022 might no longer be news to you. But global numbers can hide diverging realities around the world, and a closer look at regional data shows us that it is indeed the case.

According to CB Insights’ latest State of Venture report, the amount of funding flowing into U.S.-based and Asian startups did decline, in line with the global trend. However, their European, Canadian, and African counterparts attracted more dollars in Q1 2022 than they did in the previous quarter. Finding out why will keep us busy over the week – but today, our focus will be Latin America.

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Latin America is an interesting place to dive into what might be coming for startups. Why? Because VC investment in the region didn’t start slowing down in the last few weeks: Dollar funding has now fallen for three consecutive quarters in the region. In other words, this mood swing precedes the war in Ukraine, the technology stock selloff, and signs of a global slowdown by several months.

Some of the questions raised by Latin America’s VC deceleration are the same as elsewhere: How can private investment into startups sustain an accelerated pace when interest rates are rising and public valuations are tanking? Other interrogations, however, are more specific to the region: Did valuations get too high, too fast compared to other regions? Did FOMO peak earlier in Latin America? Does long-term bullishness still make sense?

To appreciate what’s happening south of the U.S. border, we crunched some numbers, because this wouldn’t be The Exchange otherwise. We also pinged two investors with interesting perspectives on the region: Amy Cheetham, a partner at Costanoa, and Mexico-based Belgian VC Jonathan Lewy, co-founder and managing partner at Investo.

If you care how the sausage is made, you might be interested in knowing that our initial interpretation was met with some pushback from our experts – which always makes things spicier. Onto our numbers and analysis!

Beyond data

The Latin American section of CB Insights’ report starts with an overview of regional trends, followed by country-by-country breakdowns. This caught our attention, perhaps disproportionately. See the dollar volume evolution for yourself, comparing Q1 2022 with Q4 2021:

VC investment in Q1 2022, in dollar terms:

Latin America overall: $3 billion, down 25% from Q4 2021
Mexico: $258 million, down 59% from Q4 2021
Brazil: $1.5 billion, down 32% from Q4 2021
Colombia: $457 million, up 56% from Q4 2021
Argentina: $47 million, down 46% from Q4 2021
Chile: $182 million, down 17% from Q4 2021

Our first instinct was to dive deeper into the discrepancies between, say, Mexico and Colombia, but Lewy questioned this approach.

Announcing the agenda for TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility 2022

TC Sessions: Mobility is back, and this year we are bringing together the best and brightest founders, investors, engineers and experts on the future of transportation for a two-day, in-person event May 18 and May 19 in San Mateo, California.

An online day will follow on May 20 to give our audience, including those who were unable to attend, a chance to tune in online and catch highlights from the live event, network and watch the full sessions. We’re excited to announce Herbert Diess, Group CEO of the Volkswagen Group, will discuss his vision for the future of mobility during this online-only portion of the event.  

TC Sessions: Mobility will feature speakers on the main stage, a bevy of startup exhibits, demos, networking and a live pitch-off with a pretty sweet prize. We’re excited to give a first look of some of the folks — and vehicles — who will be on our main stage and what we plan to talk about. 

Who will be on our stage? We’re glad you’re asked. Let’s start with two vehicles that haven’t had an in-person public debut yet: an electric vehicle that Arrival is building for Uber and the custom-built Zoox robotaxi. 

Other topics on our list for this year include exploring the opportunities and challenges for urban air companies and cities, the dual paths companies are taking to commercialize autonomous vehicle technology, cybersecurity, micromobility, self-driving trucks and autonomous delivery.

Our guests include Aurora co-founder and chief product officer Sterling Anderson, Motional CTO Laura Major, Nuro co-founder and CEO Jiajun Zhu and Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov. Then there’s Bonny Simi, who heads up air operations and people at Joby Aviation, and Rebecca Yeung, corporate vice president at FedEx, who is responsible for the company’s robotics and autonomous vehicle initiatives, as well as cybersecurity phenoms Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek with Cruise.

Buy your general admission or early-stage startup demo package today before prices increase. We’ve also recently added two new ways to attend the event; Expo Only and Online Only passes ($75 and $45, respectively). 

May 18

How to Land Early-Stage Funding

with Yoon Choi (Muirwoods Ventures), Mar Hershenson (Pear VC) and Gabriel Scheer (Elemental Excelerator)

Spoiler alert: Uber for X is no longer a differentiator. Mobility isn’t a nascent vertical, and sector startups seeking funding should consider that advantage. Investors don’t need to explain the venture-sized opportunity in the transportation industry; instead they want to see contrarian growth — whether that’s a new angle on an old technology, or profitability. TechCrunch is bringing together three venture capitalists — Yoon Choi from Muirwoods Ventures, Mar Hershenson from Pear VC and Gabriel Scheer from Elemental — to talk about their investment strategies, what’s hot and what’s not.

Turning an AV Innovation into a Product

with Oliver Cameron (Cruise) and Laura Major (Motional)

Autonomous vehicle technology has evolved from the confines of academic research to living labs — aka testing on closed tracks and public roads. Now, a handful of companies, including Cruise and Motional, are trying to turn their innovations into a product that not only has the technical capability to navigate city streets, but is approachable and easy for people to use. Cruise VP of product and former Voyage co-founder Oliver Cameron and Motional CTO Laura Major will cover the technical and deployment challenges to creating a product people can and will want to use.

Vehicle Spotlight: Zoox

with Jesse Levinson (Zoox)

Zoox first debuted its custom-built robotaxi vehicle in December 2020 in a virtual event. That vehicle has been largely under wraps ever since, with testing occurring in areas away from the public. Now, the Zoox vehicle is ready for an up-close and personal debut at TC Sessions: Mobility. Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson will discuss the vehicle, the company’s progress and where we might see Zoox next.

How to Unlock Profits in Micromobility
with Alex Nesic (Drover AI), Janelle Wang (Acton) and speaker to be announced

Despite the vast sums of venture capital that has gone into shared micromobility, the industry has yet to reach unit economics favorable enough to turn a profit. But it’s getting close. We’ll sit down with Drover AI’s Alex Nesic, Acton’s Janelle Wang and one other panelist to talk about the new methods, and the new tech, that’s being deployed to help micromobility companies unlock profits.

The World According to Waymo

with Dmitri Dolgov, co-CEO of Waymo

Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving arm, has reached significant milestones recently, from launching a robotaxi service in San Francisco to securing partnerships with legacy logistics companies that will help it commercialize autonomous freight. However, challenges remain on all sides — political, technological, commercial and social. Dmitri Dolgov, co-CEO of Waymo, was there from the beginning. As one of the founders of Google’s self-driving car project, which began in 2009 and became Waymo in 2016, he’ll talk us through how far autonomy has come, and how far it still has to go. 

TechCrunch Mobility Pitch-off

The industry’s brightest entrepreneurs will take the stage in front of a live audience and a panel of industry experts, pitching revolutionary technologies. Founders — apply here.

How Urban Air Fits in Cities

with Gary Gysin (Wisk Aero), Cyrus Sigari (UP.Partners) and Bonny Simi (Joby Aviation)

What will it take to execute urban air mobility operations in cities? TechCrunch Mobility will sit down with Gary Gysin, president and CEO of Wisk Aero, Cyrus Sigari, co-founder and managing partner at UP.Partners, and Bonny Simi, head of air operations and people at Joby Aviation, to discuss both the challenges and opportunities in the urban air mobility space and what it will take to not just launch in cities, but to actually be of value to residents.

The Path to Commercializing Autonomous Trucks

with Sterling Anderson (Aurora Innovation) and Rebecca Yeung (FedEx)

Aurora has been running a pilot program with FedEx to haul goods between Dallas and Houston via self-driving Paccar trucks since September 2021. As with most other autonomous freight pilots, human safety operators are present in the vehicles, but Aurora’s goal is to operate its trucks fully autonomously by the end of next year. We’ll check in with Aurora co-founder Sterling Anderson and FedEx’s head of robotics and autonomous vehicle technology Rebecca Yeung, and discuss the pilot’s progress and implications for the future of autonomous trucking.

May 19

How Your Startup Should Think About Collaboration, Not Just Capital

with John Du (GM Ventures), Taylor Ogan (Snow Bull Capital) and Trina Van Pelt (Intel Capital)

The capital markets have a way of distracting even the most scrappy founders. However, as we’re starting to see, a well-priced funding round isn’t a replacement for a well-oiled operation. And startups should think more about strategic opportunities, and collaborations, when giving up those coveted cap table spots. We’re bringing together GM Ventures’ John Du, Snow Bull Capital’s Taylor Ogan and Intel Capital’s Trina Van Pelt to talk about partnerships in the mobility world – especially the ones that you’re probably not thinking about.

A Contrarian View on Deploying Autonomy at Scale

with Austin Russell (Luminar)

Luminar founder and CEO Austin Russell has a different view of how to deploy autonomy at scale from other AV developers in the industry, as well as Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Lidar sits at the center of Russell’s vision, but perhaps not in the way one might think. We’ll dig into Russell’s perspective and his strategy of how to bring autonomous vehicle to the masses at scale — without pulling the human out of the driver’s seat. 

The New Passenger Economy

with Nils Wollny (Holoride)

In anticipation of a future where autonomy is the norm and passengers will seek stimulating entertainment to break up the monotony of a commute, Holoride is offering an in-car VR system that turns every vehicle into a moving theme park. Only the Audi-spinoff isn’t waiting for full autonomy to commercialize its product and bring us into the new passenger economy. Holoride’s VR tech is coming to Audi cars as early as this summer. We’ll sit down with Nils Wollny, co-founder and CEO of Holoride, to talk about what place VR, blockchain, NFTs and crypto currency have in the automotive space.NEED TITLE

Securing Today’s Cars and Tomorrow’s Robotaxis 

with Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek (Cruise)

A new era in connected cars is here, and with that comes new security risks. And then there are robotaxis and other autonomous vehicles. Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, undisputed leaders in the cybersecurity industry, who both hold top security roles at GM’s self-driving vehicle subsidiary Cruise, will join us to discuss the dynamic and rapidly changing realm of automotive cybersecurity.

Vehicle Spotlight: Arrival 

with Avinash Rugoobur (Arrival)

Arrival announced last year plans to design and build an affordable, purpose-built electric vehicle for ride-hailing in partnership with Uber. Before the vehicle enters production in Q3 2023, Arrival will show it off here at TC Sessions: Mobility. Arrival President Avinash Rugoobur will talk about the process of designing and hopefully producing the vehicle, what the EV company is also working on and what may be right around the corner.

TechCrunch Mobility Pitch-off

The industry’s brightest entrepreneurs will take the stage in front of a live audience and a panel of industry experts, pitching revolutionary technologies. Founders – apply here.

Where is My Autonomous Car? 

with Yanbing Li (Aurora), Saswat Panigrahi (Waymo) and Sarah Tariq (NVIDIA) 

When it comes to moving people via autonomous vehicles, two paths are beginning to emerge: Robotaxi services and private vehicles with autonomous capabilities. Companies are moving toward commercializing robotaxis by aiming straight for full autonomy. Automakers, on the other hand, are rolling out personal vehicles that have lower levels of autonomy via advanced driver assistance systems today, with the end goal of slowly improving until they can offer personal vehicles with higher levels of autonomous functionality. We’ll sit down with the AV experts to discuss the stumbling blocks to each approach and which might deliver first at a mass scale.

Why EV startups should’ve hit the brakes before merging with a SPAC

The blank-check boom that made real many electric vehicle manufacturers’ dreams of going public may be nearing a close.

One such company, Faraday Future, is even in danger of being delisted, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last week.

Faraday Future, Lordstown Motors, Lucid Motors, Nikola, and Canoo — nearly all the EV manufacturers that took a shortcut to an IPO by merging with a publicly traded shell company — have faced SEC scrutiny, sending their once sky-high valuations tumbling.

Faraday makes for a cautionary tale. The beleaguered seven-year-old EV company, which has yet to launch a vehicle, went public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in July last year.

However, just months later, a report from activist short-seller Hindenburg Research led to an internal investigation that resulted in pay cuts for its top two executives and the dismissal of others. Hindenburg, a New York-based investment firm, has sounded alarm bells for several EV makers that took the SPAC route.

Chief among the investigation’s findings was Faraday had misled investors when said it had received more than 14,000 deposits for its long-awaited FF 91 vehicle. In fact, many of those reservations were actually unpaid, passive indicators of interest.

Last week, after the SEC subpoenaed several executives suspected of making other false claims, Faraday said the investigation could delay the filing of its 2021 annual report. Nasdaq said failure to comply with those guidelines puts the company in danger of being delisted from the stock exchange.

When boom goes bust

Over the past couple of years, a bevy of new EV companies – including startups yet to generate revenue or launch a commercial product – merged with SPACs to raise money to reimagine transportation and fulfill their visions of an electrified future. But analysts say that these once-promising businesses could soon be sold for parts — or fold altogether.

“Automotive manufacturing is not a business that’s friendly to new entrants,” said John Loehr, a managing director in the automotive and industrial practice at consulting firm AlixPartners. “You need significant production volumes to make money.”

Wagestream, a financial super app for waged workers, raises $175M, passes 1M users and doubles down on the U.S.

Front-line workers and those paid in hourly wages rather than salaries have become a prime target in the world of business IT, with a wave of apps helping them find jobs, do their jobs, communicate with each other better. In the latest development, a UK startup building what it describes as a financial “super app” specifically for waged workers and their financial well-being is announcing a round of funding to double down on its strategy. Wagestream, known best for working with employers to enable salary advances for employees by way of an app, has raised $175 million, money that it will use to continue adding in more features to the app, and to fuel a big push into the U.S. market.

“We are trying to solve workers’ financial pains,” said Peter Briffett, the CEO who co-founded the company with Portman Wills (CTO). “We’re building a positive route for frontline workers, who can now have $60,000 to $70,000 in savings for the first time.”

This is a Series C and it’s coming in the form of $60 million in equity and $115 million in debt.

The equity portion is being led by Smash Capital, funds and accounts managed by BlackRock; and the debt financing is coming from Silicon Valley Bank. Wagestream has raised about $257 million in debt and equity, and it is not disclosing its valuation with this round. Notable to the company’s structure and cap table — and one key way that it has differentiated itself from the cloud hanging over the concept of “payday lenders” in the UK and the U.S. — is that it is built on a social charter and is part-owned by UK-based financial charities and impact funds — specifically, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Barrow Cadbury Trust, Social Tech Trust, Big Society Capital, and the Fair by Design fund. Other backers in previous rounds have included Village Global, the social impact VC backed by the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

As a measure of how Wagestream is doing, the company has been on a roll in its growth. Currently more than 1 million workers across 300 employers have access to the app globally. It’s been seeing the strongest growth most recently in the U.S., where 250,000 retail, hospitality and healthcare workers have access to Wagestream through their employers (the deal is done with the latter but it’s up to the workers themselves whether they want to use it or not). Customers include big names like Burger King, Popeyes, Crate & Barrel and University of Chicago.

Other markets in addition the U.S. and U.K. where Wagestream is currently active include Spain and Australia.

The pain point that it’s addressing is a simple one: waged workers, partly because of how they are paid and how much they are paid, often find it very challenging to save money against spending it paycheck to paycheck.

Part of that is because of the sheer amount of money that they have, but part is also the cadence of how they get paid (weekly or bi-weekly versus monthly) and simply the tools that are incorporated into their pay to make it easier to save and use the funds for more than regular day-to-day living. The idea with Wagestream is not just to give those workers faster liquidity when they need it, but to give them the ability to use that money in different ways — for example with features to invest small amounts into stocks, and to bring in controls to save money incrementally in a way that makes the most practical sense for those users. There are also options to consult with a financial coach, and similar to other neobanks’ superapps, Wagestream “learns” about users to personalise further suggestions regarding a users’ finances.

What has been interesting, Wills said, was that employers themselves are “leaning in” to working with Wagestream more because they’ve started to see it as a sweetener when they are recruiting staff, and also to help with reducing employee churn, which is a persistent problem in the waged-working world.

He noted that there are currently some 12,000 jobs listed on Indeed.com (a commonly used recruiting platform in this sector) that advertise Wagestream as a benefit for those interested in applying.

“It’s hard to recruit people and we become a retention and recruitment benefit,” he said. “And we found that people actually do more hours of work if they have earlier access to the money they will be paid. It helps them budget their financial lives better.”

The move into the U.S. will bring a new set of challenges to Wagestream, but also potentially new opportunities. The U.K., where it has most of its customers today, has 11 major banks, and most people have bank accounts, not least because it’s completely free for them — no fees and so on — and so many people have their paychecks directly funneled there. This has meant that Wagestream hasn’t focused on building a “banking app” for U.K. users.

The U.S. on the other hand has no less than 4,300 banks, and yet it still has a massive population of “unbanked” and “underbanked” among waged workers because in fact a lot of banks charge a various set of fees, making it a cost many do not want to bear.

“Around 28% are using check cashing services” — rather than getting funds paid into accounts, Wills said. “This means a paper paycheck and paying someone 10-12% of net wages to cash a check. So a prepaid card product is very high on the roadmap in the U.S. for us.” This would give users the option of foregoing a check cashing service and the associated fees, and potentially using that cut for something else, like investments.

Covid-19 put a spotlight on frontline workers — the essential people who had to continue doing their jobs in tough circumstances while so many others were ensconced in home offices — and their ranks are definitely not going away, with an estimated 2 billion of them globally. It’s frankly great to see more being built to address their needs.

“The combination of financial exclusion and a rising cost of living have created severe financial stress for hard-working Americans,” said Brad Twohig, Managing Partner at Smash Capital, in a statement. “We’ve invested in Wagestream because its team has reimagined the world of work making it more accessible and rewarding for millions of people.”

Front-line workers and those paid in hourly wages rather than salaries have become a prime target in the world of business IT, with a wave of apps helping them find jobs, do their jobs, communicate with each other better. In the latest development, a UK startup building what it describes as a financial “super app”

Union.ai raises $10M to simplify AI and ML workflow orchestration

Union.ai, a startup emerging from stealth with a commercial version of the open source AI orchestration platform Flyte, today announced that it raised $10 million in a round contributed by NEA and “select” angel investors. CEO Ketan Umare says that the proceeds will be put toward supporting the Flyte community by “improving the accessibility, performance and reliability of Flyte” and broadening the array of systems that Flyte integrates with.

While companies find AI’s predictive power alluring, particularly on the data analytics side of the organization, achieving meaningful results with AI often proves to be a challenge. It’s true that AI can help to project revenue, for example, by identifying trends in buying and selling. But implementing and maintaining the data pipelines necessary to keep AI systems from drifting to inaccuracy can require substantial technical resources.

That’s where Flyte comes in — a platform for programming and processing concurrent AI and data analytics workflows. Union’s team, including Umare, helped to build Flyte while at Lyft, where it was used to help create a system to calculate the estimated time of arrival (ETA) for drivers to get from point A to point B.

“[Union’s] founders first met at Lyft, where we joined the team responsible for calculating the ETA for a Lyft driver to get from point A to point B,” Umare told TechCrunch via email. “Searching for the right solution led the team deep into machine learning techniques, which came with requirements to use large amounts of data and deliver robust models to production consistently … The techniques used were platformized, and the solution was used widely at Lyft.”

Lyft contributed Flyte to open source in 2020, granting the trademark to the Linux Foundation a year later. That’s when Union’s team saw an opportunity to layer paid services on top of the project in the cloud.

“A managed version of Flyte, called Union Cloud, will allow smaller teams and organizations to use the power of Flyte without the need to staff up on infrastructure teams,” Umare continued. “We [founded Union] because we believe that machine learning and data workflows are fundamentally different from software deployments. This is because software is more precise with a slower lifecycle while machine learning and data workflows start off being experimental and may need to be quickly productionized.”

Taking Flyte

Umare and Union’s other co-founders, Haytham Abuelfutuh and George Snelling, all have deep backgrounds in the tech industry. Prior to joining Lyft, Umare was a senior software engineer at Amazon and a principal engineer at Oracle, where he led development of a block storage product for an infrastructure-as-a-service and bare metal offering. Abuelfutuh spent seven years as an engineer at Microsoft and three as a developer at Google, where he helped to ship an internal software library for first-party apps including Google Photos. Snelling — also a Microsoft veteran — co-founded several startups (Westside, LabKey and Patchr) and spent time at Salesforce as a senior director of engineering.

With Union Cloud — the launch of which coincides with the release of Flyte version 1.0 — Umare says the goal is to reduce (and ideally eliminate) the unwieldy infrastructure that can crop up in data science projects and hamstring development. At their worst, messy abstractions can necessitate rebuilding infrastructure to deploy AI to production, Umare points out — negatively affecting the potential return on investment.

According to a 2021 Wakefield Research report, enterprise data engineers spend nearly half their time building and maintaining data pipelines. Sixty-nine percent of respondents to the survey — mainly data engineers — said that business outcomes would improve if their teams could contribute more to business decisions and spend less time on manual pipeline management.

“Production machine learning is still in its infancy at the moment, especially at companies outside big tech. Thus, most companies start off with DIY — that is our primary competition,” Umare said. “We took a radically different, first-principles approach to defining what a workflow means for machine learning and data scientists. We started with a goal to minimize human errors and try to help predict problems ahead of time [and worked] closely with extremely sophisticated and a diverse set of partners like Spotify, Gojek and Freenome [to help] refine the solution.”

Union Cloud inherits all of Flyte’s characteristics and capabilities, including connectors between computation back ends that record all changes to an AI pipeline. Union Cloud also stores a history of all a pipeline’s executions and provides a dashboard, command-line interface and API to interact with the computations.

Union Cloud — and Flyte — define workflows as multiple tasks. Workflows and tasks can be written in any programming language and stay on-premises, as does data moving through those components.

Cloud advantage

So what’s the value add with Union Cloud? Umare says that it adds “agility, reproducibility, and security” to Flyte by centralizing infrastructure management and maintaining “high” privacy and compliance standards. “Our products are built with zero-trust principles in mind and thus our users can use [it] to build a self-serve platform that still maintains high security standards,” he continued. “Data science is very academic, which directly affects machine learning. There is a lot of fantastic research and literature that is available in academia, which is hard to productionize. We need to bridge both these worlds in a structured and repeatable way.”

Umare also sees Union Cloud as a way to reduce the cost of developing new products and systems in a way that the open source Flyte project can’t accomplish. While he concedes that similar efforts from other vendors exist, like AWS Sagemaker, he believes that they fail to integrate well with the rest of the data science ecosystem.

“We have been at this problem for over five years, refining our solution and iterating based on real-world feedback and requirements,” Umare said. “The machine learning sector is already large and growing within traditional companies as well. We view growth potential to not be limited by the size of the current demand however, but rather by the experience we can deliver, which is why we’ve focused purely on customer success and open source adoption. This will lead to revenue growth in the near future.”

On the topic of growth, Union plans to double its 20-person headcount by the end of the year as it focuses on product buildout. Umare didn’t have statistics to share on Union Cloud interest or uptake, but reiterated that “thousands” of users across companies such as Lyft, Spotify, Toyota subsidiary Woven Planet, and biotech and finance brands have adopted Flyte.

Union.ai, a startup emerging from stealth with a commercial version of the open source AI orchestration platform Flyte, today announced that it raised $10 million in a round contributed by NEA and “select” angel investors. CEO Ketan Umare says that the proceeds will be put toward supporting the Flyte community by “improving the accessibility, performance