Zoom launches AI-powered features aimed at sales teams

Today during its second Work Transformation Summit this week, Zoom announced Zoom IQ for Sales, a product that uses AI to analyze sales meetings and deals to provide insights. It’s the company’s first explicit foray into sales automation software, a market that — according to Verified Market Research — could grow to $7.3 billion in size by 2028.

Sales changed dramatically during the pandemic, when lockdowns forced companies — and their sales teams — to adopt digital tools to get work done. According to a 2020 McKinsey report, almost 90% of sales moved to a videoconference/phone/web sales model in 2020, as business-to-business companies in particular began to see digital interactions as highly important. An unaffiliated study from Harvard Business Review found 82% of companies believe that, out of all technologies, AI has the potential to “significantly” improve alignment between sales and marketing by introducing accountability.

“Zoom is always searching for ways to help our customers elevate their end customers’ experience and Zoom IQ for Sales is the latest development in that journey,” Josh Dulberger, Zoom’s head of product, data and AI, told TechCrunch via email. “Zoom IQ for Sales … [can] identify opportunities, assess risks, and ultimately enable and improve sales team performance. It uses natural language processing models to process post-meeting transcripts and deal progress data, generating insights for sales reps and managers.”

In many ways, Zoom IQ for Sales is an outgrowth of Zoom’s increasing investments in AI. Zoom last May introduced an AI-powered feature that shows highlights from recorded meetings, automatically selecting the “best” parts of meetings based on keywords from audio transcriptions. The company more recently acquired Kites, a startup specializing in real-time translation and transcription.

Zoom IQ for Sales also marks the expansion of Zoom’s omnichannel contact center strategy, which arguably began with the launch of Zoom Contact Center in February. At the time, Zoom said it saw Zoom Contact Center as “supporting customer service use cases,” including upselling, by “combining unified communications and contact center capabilities [with Zoom].”

“Zoom has made strategic investments in homegrown speech recognition technologies and recruited a world-class team to produce high-fidelity transcription services that are a backbone for products like Zoom IQ …We’re developing domain-specific NLU (natural language understanding) using few-shot models to build features that will be more reliable and valuable to our users,” Dulberger continued. “Sales teams … want to focus on the customer, and managing the engagement rather than taking notes, but also so they can review their calls to pick up nuances, easily identify next steps, or solicit some guidance from a colleague. Managers and sales leaders can’t sit in on every call, but want to understand the selling climate, when to coach, and which reps are finding the right message.”

Zoom IQ for Sales generates an engagement score that aims to capture how attentive a given customer is based on “talk-time” ratio, the lag time between responses, and the number times that the customer speaks during the call. A separate metric, the sentiment score, measures “positive” and “negative” words and phrases used in meetings. Yet another score monitors the use of filler words like “oh,” “like,” “uh,” and “um,” which some studies show can have a negative impact on sales close rates.

Beyond this, Zoom IQ for Sales attempts to identify “good” questions by treating the length of customers’ responses as a corollary for engagement. Sales teams can also feed a list of product features to Zoom IQ so that the software can count the number of times each feature is mentioned in the call.

“Zoom IQ for Sales’ analysis covers customers’ reactions, conversational and selling skills, customer pain points, competitors, deal risk metrics, and more,” Dulberger said. “[Sales teams can even] view [the] Salesforce deal status associated with recorded meetings.”

The jury’s out on the accuracy of Zoom’s algorithms, particularly given the company’s history of deploying flawed AI. Sentiment analysis algorithms are especially prone to gender and race bias, and not every salesperson will necessarily agree with how Zoom measures engagement.

That aside, several platforms, including Gong and VoiceOps, already offer features similar to Zoom IQ for Sales — adding pressure on Zoom to demonstrate differentiation. Dulberger made a case for the strength of Zoom’s customer and product ecosystem, painting Zoom IQ for Sales as an opportunity for the company to bolster its broader platform.

Zoom is almost certainly feeling the pressure from investors to establish new lines of revenue. While the company’s earnings soared during the pandemic, guidance is down as customers begin to shift to hybrid and in-office work arrangements less reliant on videoconferencing.

“Half a million businesses choose Zoom and rely on it for internal and external conversations,” Dulberger continued. “The Zoom platform already has a strong foundation in this area with features such as transcription, recordings, and highlights. This also gives us an opportunity to expand this type of functionality across the Zoom platform such as Zoom Contact Center and within our meetings and events solutions to help presenters pace their speech, take notes, capture action items, or employ specific tactics.”

An external beta for Zoom IQ for Sales is currently ongoing. Alongside it, Whiteboard, Zoom’s virtual whiteboarding product, will be generally available beginning April 19. Two related features, Webinar Reactions (which lets webinar attendees use reactions) and Session Branding (which lets hosts customize webinar wallpapers), are available now, while the recently announced Zoom Events Backstage — a behind-the-scenes waiting space for webinar participants — is scheduled to launch in late April.

Today during its second Work Transformation Summit this week, Zoom announced Zoom IQ for Sales, a product that uses AI to analyze sales meetings and deals to provide insights. It’s the company’s first explicit foray into sales automation software, a market that — according to Verified Market Research — could grow to $7.3 billion in

Dear Sophie: I didn’t win the H-1B lottery. What are my next steps?

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie,

I earned my master’s degree in business analytics last year, and have been working for a company while on OPT since then.

My employer entered me in the H-1B lottery last month, but I haven’t been selected. I heard that my degree now qualifies as a STEM field, making me eligible to continue working under OPT.

How can I stay in the States?

— Astute Analyst

Dear Astute,

Appreciate you reaching out; your questions are all too familiar this time of the year. The U.S. is losing out on the world’s best and brightest talent because of the way the H-1B lottery system is currently set up, but please rest assured — you’ve got options! I shared my insights into available options for people in your situation in my recent podcast, Not Selected in the H-1B, now what?

Most of your visa options will require your employer to sponsor you, so please include your employer and the company’s immigration attorney when brainstorming and planning your next steps.

The way ahead

Keep in mind that you still can be selected to apply for an H-1B. In 2020 and 2021, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) did not receive enough qualified applications to meet the annual quota of 85,000 after the March lottery, even though employers registered a record number of H-1B candidates.

So, the USCIS conducted subsequent draws to meet the annual quota — and that will likely happen again this year.

Still, I suggest carefully monitoring your OPT expiration date and pursuing backup options.

The two-year STEM OPT extension

Yes, you are correct that business analytics is one of the 22 STEM fields of study added in January to the STEM OPT (Optional Practical Training) program, which extends Regular OPT for an additional 24 months. If you haven’t already, I suggest you meet as soon as possible with the designated school official (DSO) at your university to find out if you are eligible for reclassification to STEM.

BlueOcean raises $30M for its AI-based brand intelligence platform

The medium is the message more than ever these days, and brands are faced with a challenge — but also opportunity — to capture what consumers think about them and their products if they can harness and better understand those messages, via whichever medium is being used to deliver them. Today, a company called BlueOcean that has built an artificial intelligence-powered platform that it says can produce those insights is announcing $30 million in funding, money that it will be using to continue expanding its technology on the heels of rapid growth.

Insight Partners led the round, with FJ Labs also participating. Valuation is not being disclosed.

Digital life as it plays out these days has created a perfect storm (heh) for BlueOcean. We spend more time online than ever before, and the number of places where we might encounter a product or service has grown along with that: social media feeds are noisy with ads, content that feels like ads, lots of opinions; we do most of our news, information and entertainment sourcing online; we shop there, too; and many of us also spend our days working in cyberspace as well.

That’s a lot of real estate where a brand (or a brand’s competitors) might potentially appear, either intentionally or inadvertently, and more likely than not in a form that is outside of that brand’s control.

“Fragmentation is a huge driver,” Grant McDougall, the CEO who co-founded the company with president Liza Nebel, said in an interview. “There are silos all over the business and what we do sits over the top of that, to provide a common language to understand and talk to, for example, both to the CFO about revenue team as well as loyalty teams about messaging.”

At the same time, the tech industry that has built all of those online experiences has also built an enormous amount of tools to better parse what is going on in that universe. AI is playing a huge role in that navigation game: it’s too much for a single human, or even a large team of humans, to parse; and so a company like BlueOcean building tech to do some of that work for marketing professionals and others to have better data to work with becomes very valuable.

That has played out as a very significant evolution for the startup.

We last covered BlueOcean in 2020 when it was focused on a more narrow concept of digital brand identity: a company provided its website and a list of competitors, and one week later, for a price of $17,000, BlueOcean provided customers with brand audits that included lists of actionable items to improve or completely change. (As a point of contrast, typically brand audits for large brands can cost millions of dollars and typically do not come with specific pointers for improvement.)

Fast forward to today, and the company has expanded the scope of what it does for customers, and its overall engagement: its AI algorithms and big-data ingestion engine are now focused on providing continuous feedback to its customers, which subscribe to the service at fees starting at $100,000 per year. They use BlueOcean not just to measure their overall brand recognition in the market, but to track how specific products are performing; which launch strategies are working, and which are not; and the impact of different campaigns in different markets in real time so that they can change and respond more quickly.

“Lots has changed,” said McDougall. “We’re an AI powered brand intelligence platform. Access to insights and what competitors are doing are more relevant today than it’s ever been. What we do is collect information about brands out in public and help them understand performance relative to competitors, to help them take action to improve their brands to get market share.”

Interestingly, just as the Covid-19 pandemic has been a huge fillip to e-commerce and more generally online consumption of everything, so too has it played a strong role in the growth of BlueOcean and the approach that it takes. In the world of fast-paced and constantly changing and refreshed information, big-picture insights can be more meaningful than no picture at all, or one delayed for the sake of more detail.

“Covid has surfaced that speed is more important than accuracy,” noted Nebel. “We have data [to shape better] inclinations right now. It’s about making changes to capture opportunity.”

That concept has also clicked with its investors.

“Having invested in hundreds of the world’s most well-known brands, we know that having accurate and fast data is vital to brand health. We have extreme faith in BlueOcean and we’re excited to bring them into our investment portfolio,” said Fabrice Grinda, founding partner of FJ Labs, in a statement.

BlueOcean still also provides all-important competitive analysis but builds those lists of other companies and the data produced about them in conjunction with its customers, based in part on where the customer sees itself and would like to see itself; and also where it is as a brand in the real world.

It has also expanded its customer list: it now works with 84 brands, which may not sound like much except that these are some of the biggest companies in the world — they include Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Diageo, Cisco, Bloomingdales and Juniper Networks (and others that it cannot name) — and collectively represent what BlueOcean describes as $18 trillion in value and more than 6,000 brands — a list investors believe is poised to grow in line with how the internet itself is growing.

“After leading BlueOcean’s Series A round, we are proud to also lead their Series B to help them scale and serve even more brands,” said Whitney Bouck, MD at Insight Partners, in a statement. “As a former CMO myself, I know that marketing is constantly challenged to provide true ROI on brand marketing. BlueOcean gives marketing leaders quantifiable and actionable insights on brand performance for the first time, which we know is game-changing.”

Nurse-assisting robotics firm Diligent raises $30M

Moot channels $18M for a platform and toolkit to power e-commerce strategies for brands

E-commerce today is played out wherever a consumer sees something and wants it — be it on a company’s site or app, a social media feed, a marketplace, a search, or an advert. Today a startup called Moot that’s helping businesses and brands sell through all those channels in a unified way is announcing $18 million in a round led by Espresso Capital to expand its business both organically and via M&A.

On the first point, Moot is planning on doubling down on building more tech, including enhanced AI capabilities to help automate and analyze more of its customers’ activities. On the second point, Moot said it already has two deals underway.

With the boost that e-commerce has had in the last couple of years, the company — based out of Staffordshire in the Midlands of England — has been on a growth tear. It’s on track to make £100 million ($130 million) in ARR by the end of this year, after growing 300% year-on-year in 2021, with customers including fashion retailers like Timberland and Asos, media brands like House Beautiful, and dozens of others.

Moot got its start out of first-hand experience about the shortcomings of e-commerce solutions out in the market today. Nick Moutter, the founder and CEO, was building out an online housewares brand called Olivia’s, initially using Shopify to run it.

As the business grew, however, he found that the tech it was using to sell across different channels were too siloed, and thus made certain functions like inventory management and more unified logistics very clumsy. He and his team couldn’t find anything in the market that fit their needs — a platform that let the company manage selling across different channels in a unified way — and so they built it.

Over time, they were finding others approaching them to pay to use the tools, and eventually they decided to spin that business out. And thus Moot was born.

“We realized there was a huge demand in industry,” said Moutter, expecially among companies in “the second stage of growth, where they are hitting the ceiling of Shopify, and looking for more advanced solutions to scale.”

The company today lets a brand set up and sell through a variety of channels, including their own sites and apps, as well as third-party marketplaces, wholesales and more.

The key feature of the service is that there is a central database within the platform that can be updated to reflect activity across all of the different channels. Although e-commerce itself is a very fragmented experience — and so it should be, giving consumers lots of choice in the process — the idea with Moot is that it doesn’t need to be similarly fragmented at the back end.

This is not completely unchartered territory: companies like Shopify and WooCommerce are also building solutions to handle this for companies as they scale and expand; and arguably a wide variety of headless and semi-headless solutions in the market like Commercetools are also addressing this same pain point. But given the size of the e-commerce industry — eMarketer estimates it will be worth $5.5 trillion in 2022 — the e-commerce as a service industry will have room for all of these, and judging by Moot’s growth is likely in need of more.

That will see it bringing on more brands, but also a new wave of other companies that work with brands, such as the roll-up players, which themselves are growing by acquisition but in many cases are bringing in third-party technology to run those acquired brands more efficiently. That is where Moot would fit in.

“Moot is a leader in the fast-growing EaaS space. Their unique platform combining operational capabilities, advanced user experience, and customer acquisition technology is attracting a growing list of tier-1 global clients,” said Will Hutchins, MD of Espresso Capital, in a statement. “The rapid growth in e-commerce presents a terrific opportunity for Moot and we believe the company has the right team and technology platform to become a global EaaS leader, helping their clients provide highly differentiated e-commerce experiences. We’re excited to be partnering with them on this next exciting phase of their growth.”

Salsify secures $200M as the boom in e-commerce catapults its valuation to $2B

E-commerce is booming, but it’s become increasingly apparent over the years that the businesses that are able to capitalize on that trend — and contribute to that growth — are those able to grasp the right technology to navigate the space. Today, Salsify, one of the startups building e-commerce solutions to that end, is announcing a big round of $200 million, a sum that speaks both to the demand in the market, and its success to date.

“It’s been very busy,” CEO and co-founder Jason Purcell told TechCrunch in an interview. “The thing that catalyzed us in first place was the idea that multichannel commerce would become big, and in the last two years Covid has made that trend abundantly clear. We have doubled in size.”

Salsify’s platform is aimed at retailers, brands, and the various partners they work with to tap into centralised inventory and product information, data that can in turn be used to power more unified experiences wherever those products are sold. (Its favored term to describe this is the “digital shelf”, a reference point I think to the many companies it works with and their huge legacy businesses selling CPG goods on physical shelves.)

In 2021, ARR went up to $110 million and the company now has 1,200 customers, up from 800 when I last spoke with it in 2020. The list includes huge names like Coca-Cola, Libbey, KraftHeinz, Columbia and Mars.

This is a Series F and it values Salsify (named after the widely spreading wildflower) at $2 billion. That is a notable jump since the company didn’t disclose a number when it raised its Series E, a $155 million round in 2020 (PitchBook however puts it at $805 million, and before at $308 million in 2018). This latest round is being led by TPG, with Permira’s Growth Opportunities Fund, Neuberger Berman Funds, and Cap Table Coalition also participating. It has now raised more than $450 million.

In a venture market that is very active for e-commerce tech — just earlier today, another startup startup, UK’s Moot, that is building tech to help brands manage commerce across multiple platforms — announced $18 million in funding; last week another company in a similar space, Productsup, announced $70 million in funding — this round and valuation make Salsify one of the biggest contenders in this space.

And likely it is one attracting some attention from even bigger companies eyeing consolidation, although for now Salsify is focused on being the consolidator itself. Last year, US-based (HQ in Boston) Salsify acquired SKUvantage and Alkemics respectively to expand into Australia and France.

There have been dozens, probably hundreds, of tech companies built on the concept of arming the non-Amazons of this world with tools that help them compete with, and leverage, Amazon better. Salsify’s approach has been to tackle the problem as “experience management” (which it abbreviates to XM and attaches to each of its different product lines), and to look at it in the big picture, in terms of how it applies not just to brands but also retailers and the different companies that work in that complex supply chain, which all need information to do their jobs, but also potentially can provide critical insights (eg around inventory) to improve how the bigger process works.

That platform and wider integration functionality is also something that speaks to how bigger brands have seen that they need to work in modern times — gone are the days where their legacy supplier relationships and physical sales channels are enough in competition with newly emerging D2C competitors that leverage new platforms like social media apps and influencers to connect with new consumers.

It’s also why investors have come running to the company. Purcell described this latest round as “opportunistic,” in that the company still had capital from its last round in the bank but had been getting approached by investors looking to work with the company.

“As consumer behavior shifts increasingly towards digital and omnichannel, there has been an evolution in the way that brands think about their technology strategy and how they evolve their tech stack,” said Arun Agarwal, MD at TPG, in a statement. “Through its integrated platform, Salsify is optimizing the shopping experience for brands, retailers, and distributors, powering consumer interactions and enabling consistency, simplicity, and agility. TPG has a long track record of backing leading SaaS companies, and we look forward to partnering with Jason and his team to drive Salsify’s growth and market leadership further.”

8 cannabis investors share their outlook on the European market in H1 2022

Germany’s government created quite a buzz when it announced that recreational cannabis would be legalized during the current term. Does this mean that we’ll see recreational use of cannabis for adults becoming a common policy in Europe? It’s too soon to say.

After interviewing several active investors in cannabis-related startups, we learned that the regulatory and functional landscape in Europe is just as fragmented as it is in North America. Another important data point that connects both regions: the black market is a competitive factor. According to Europol, illicit spending on cannabis in the EU amounts to €9 billion each year.

However, things are moving on the legal side of the market — it appears medical cannabis still carries most of the momentum, and it is only accelerating. Around €354 million worth of unlicensed medical cannabis will be sold in Europe in 2022, according to market intelligence firm Prohibition Partners, and this number is expected to rise to around €2.3 billion by 2026.

Investments and M&A in the sector are also being spurred by Germany’s promised legislation.

“Our belief is that M&A will be front of mind for all legal cannabis operators. The difference in Europe is that there is opportunity for non-cannabis players to potentially get strategic and attempt to enter the market through an integration of cannabis as a CPG [consumer packaged good] or pharmaceutical-grade option,” said Todd Harrison, founding partner at CB1 Capital Management.

Also encouraging for producers and operators is the fact that medical cannabis isn’t verboten at a federal level across the EU, which lets companies legally sell their products across borders.

“This means that you can produce cannabis, for example, in Portugal, and sell to any EU country as long as you have export/import licenses. Hence, cross-border commerce in Europe is relatively fluid, meaning companies can scale relatively quickly if they know what they’re doing,” said David Bonnier, founding partner at Enexis AB.

We spoke with:

Todd Harrison, founding partner and CIO, CB1 Capital Management
Yoni Meyer, partner, Casa Verde Capital
Viken Douzdjian, managing partner and co-founder, Argonautic Ventures
David Bonnier, founding partner, Enexis AB
Will Gibbs, principal, Octopus Ventures
Oliver Lamb, co-founder and investment manager, Óskare Capital
Leah Fletcher, founder and director, Arbutus Innovation Centre
will.i.am, investor, Sanity Group

David Bonnier, founding partner, Enexis AB

What are some of the biggest challenges facing Europe’s cannabis industry right now?

Europe is largely a medical-only market right now. Unlike the U.S., medical cannabis in Europe is regulated as a medicine and falls under EU and national pharmaceutical regulatory systems.

As such, standards for production and distribution of medical cannabis are exceptionally high. Moreover, European doctors are generally more conservative and evidence-based. Therefore, it takes time to build the necessary infrastructure in order to get stakeholder buy-in.

Key challenges include (1) lack of education and buy-in from industry stakeholders such as physicians, research institutes, insurance companies, politicians, etc.; and (2) lack of downstream infrastructure such as research centers, specialized clinics, licensed wholesale distributors and manufacturers.

The good news is that since cannabis companies have to operate under pharmaceutical regulatory systems in Europe, we are seeing material accumulation of high-quality patient data.

Note that doctors in Europe can only prescribe a finished product to patients, unlike the U.S., where you only need a medical card. Patients must often follow up with doctors several times, which yields several valuable patient data points that can be used in real-world evidence studies.

As such, we believe Europe will most likely become a key leader on the research front for medical cannabis, which will further help lift the evidence base and general acceptance.

How are these issues informing your advice to your cannabis-related portfolio companies?

We are focused on companies that know how to navigate the European regulatory landscape and are filling key gaps in the market.

For example, we currently like the downstream part of the value chain, which has been underserved so far, including distribution companies, specialized clinics platforms, research and development centers, and companies that are accumulating patient data, which we believe will become very valuable over time. We also like ancillary businesses.

As in the U.S., legislation across Europe is fragmented but evolving. Are these situations comparable to you?

To an extent, albeit there are some key differences. Given that North America has already paved a pathway (starting in 1996 with medical cannabis in California, and again in 2012 with adult use in Colorado and Washington), legislation in Europe is accelerating at a faster pace.

While the Netherlands was first to legalize medical cannabis in Europe in 2003, the legalization wave really didn’t happen until much later, when Italy legalized, followed by Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom and many more. Currently, nearly 400 million Europeans now have legal access to medical cannabis in some form, which is more than in the U.S.

Also, Europe does not suffer from federal prohibition of medical cannabis like in the U.S. There is an EU-wide directive for production and distribution standards for medical cannabis products, which is interpreted by each country.

This means that you can produce cannabis, for example, in Portugal and sell to any EU country as long as you have export/import licenses. Hence, cross-border commerce in Europe is relatively fluid, meaning companies can scale relatively quickly if they know what they’re doing.

Which sector shows the most promise for growth in Europe this year: medical or recreational? Has the popularity of CBD products made investors more comfortable about recreational use?

While there is a lot of buzz around the use of cannabis by adults, it is still largely a non-existent market from a commercial standpoint. Malta has legalized (albeit it has a small population); the Netherlands is running a pilot program for legal production, which was previously illegal; Switzerland is running a commercial pilot program; and a few other countries have legalized home-grown cannabis for personal use.

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.