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Beauty and wellness businesses have come roaring back to life with the decline of Covid-19 restrictions, and a startup that&#8217;s built a platform that caters to the many needs of small enterprises in the industry today is announcing a big round of funding to grow with them.
<a href="https://www.fresha.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Fresha</a> &#8212; a multipurpose commerce tool for independent wellness and beauty businesses such as hair, nail and skin salons, yoga instructors and more, based first and foremost around a completely free platform for those businesses to schedule bookings from customers &#8212; has picked up $100 million.
Fresha plans to use the funds to expand the list of countries where it operates, to grow the categories of companies that use its services (mental health practitioners is one example; fitness is another), and to build more services complementing what it already provides, helping customers do their work by providing them with more insights and data about what they do already. It will also be making acquisitions to expand its customer base.
General Atlantic is leading this Series C, with Huda Kattan, Michael Zeisser of FMZ Ventures, and Jonathan Green of Lugard Road Capital also participating, along with past investors Partech, Target Global and FJ Labs.
Fresha has raised $132 million to date, and it&#8217;s not disclosing its valuation. But as a point of reference, when it <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/11/shedul-b-round/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">closed its Series B</a> (as Shedul; the company rebranded in February 2020), it was valued at $105 million.
Chances are that figure is significantly higher now.
Fresha&#8217;s current range of services include a free-to-use platform for booking appointments; free software for managing accounts; a payments service that includes both a physical point of sale and digital interface; and a wider marketplace both to provide goods to the businesses (B2B); and for the businesses to sell goods to customers (B2C).
The London-based company has 50,000 business customers and 150,000 stylists and professionals in 120+ countries (mostly in the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe), with some 250 million appointments booked to date.
And while many businesses did have to curtail how they operated (and in some countries had to stop operating altogether) Fresha found that it was attracting a lot of new business in part because of its &#8220;free&#8221; model that meant customers didn&#8217;t have to pay to maintain a booking platform at a time when they weren&#8217;t taking bookings, but could use Fresha to generate revenues in other ways (such as through the sale of goods, vouchers for future services, and more.)
So in a year when you might have thought that a company based around providing services to industries that were hard hit by Covid would have also been hard-hit, in fact Fresha saw a 30x increase in card payment transactions versus the year before, and more than $12 billion worth of booking appointments made on its platform.
In a market that is very crowded with tech companies building platforms to book beauty (and other) services and to manage the business of independent retailers &#8212; they include giants like Lightspeed POS, as well as smaller players like Booksy (which <a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/booksy-raises-70m-war-chest-to-acquire-salon-appointment-apps-expand-internationally" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">also recently raised</a>) and <a href="https://www.styleseat.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">StyleSeat</a> but also players like Square and PayPal, and many others &#8212; the core of Fresha&#8217;s offering is a booking platform built as a totally free product.
Why free? To attract more users to its other services (such as payments, which do come at a price), and because co-founders William Zeqiri (CEO) and Nick Miller (product chief) &#8212; pictured above, respectively left and right &#8212; think this the only way to build a business like this in a crowded market.
&#8220;We believe that software is a commodity,&#8221; said Zeqiri in an interview. &#8220;A lot of our competitors are beating each other on price to the bottom. We wanted to consolidate the supply side of the software, gather data about the businesses, how they use what they use.&#8221;
That data led, first, to identifying the need for and building out  single all the time and launch its B2B and B2C marketplaces, and the idea is that it will likely lead to more products as it continues to mature, whether its better analytics for its current customers so that they can better price or develop their services accordingly; or entirely new tools for new categories of users.
Meanwhile, the services that it already provides like payments have taken off like a shot, not least because they&#8217;ve served a need for any virtual transactions like selling vouchers or items.
Miller noted that while a lot of its customers actually interface with tech with a lot of reluctance &#8212; they are the essence of &#8220;physical&#8221; retailers when you think about it &#8212; they also found themselves having to use more digital services simply because of circumstances. &#8220;Looking back at what happened, tech adoption accelerated for our customers,&#8221; said Miller. He said that current customers usage for the point-of-sale systems and online payments is roughly equal.
Looking ahead, Fresha&#8217;s investor list is notable for its strategic mix and might shed some light on how it grows. Kattan, a &#8220;beauty influencer&#8221; and the founder of Huda Beauty, is investing by way of HB Investments, a strategic venture arm; while Zeisser&#8217;s FMZ focuses on &#8220;experience economy&#8221; investments today, but he himself has a long history working at tech companies building marketplaces, including years with Alibaba as head of its U.S. investment practice. These speak to areas where Fresha is likely interested in expanding its reach &#8212; more marketplace activity; and perhaps more social media angles and exposure for its customers at a time when social media really has become a key way for beauty and wellness businesses to market themselves.
“Fresha has emerged as a leader powering the beauty and wellness industry,” said Aaron Goldman, Global Co-head of financial services and MD at General Atlantic, in a statement. “William, Nick and the Fresha team have built a product that is resonating with the market and creating long-term value through the intersection of its payments, software and marketplace offerings. We are thrilled to be partnering with the company and believe Fresha has significant opportunity to further scale its innovative platform.”
“I’ve witnessed first-hand the positive impact Fresha has for beauty entrepreneurs,&#8221; added Kattan. &#8220;The company is a force for good in the growing community of beauty professionals around the globe, who are increasingly adopting a self-employed approach. By making top business software accessible without any subscription fees, Fresha lets professionals focus on what they do best — offering great experiences for their customers.”

Beauty and wellness businesses have come roaring back to life with the decline of Covid-19 restrictions, and a startup that’s built a platform that caters to the many needs of small enterprises in the industry today is announcing a big round of funding to grow with them. Fresha — a multipurpose commerce tool for independent […]

Ecommerce

Europe

Funding

Health

Beauty

Fresha

Marketplace

Wellness

Fresha raises $100M for its beauty and wellness booking platform and marketplace

Flying Eze

Pinterest has long positioned itself a source for inspiration that could ultimately lead to online purchases. And over the years, it has worked on features to better connect consumers with the products and services they want to buy, like shoppable pins, visual search, <a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/pinterest-launches-an-ar-powered-try-on-experience-for-eyeshadow" target="_blank">AR try-on</a>, product <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/24/pinterest-launches-a-today-tab-featuring-daily-recommendations-and-trending-topics/" target="_blank">recommendations</a>, and more. Today, the company is rolling out another feature aimed at turning users&#8217; saved Pins into purchases: a shopping list.
The new Pinterest Shopping list feature saves all your Product Pins in one place, so when you&#8217;re ready to purchase you won&#8217;t have to hunt around through your saved Pins and Boards to find the products you had been considering. Here, you&#8217;ll find the information you need, including an item&#8217;s price, reviews, and shipping info in an even grid so you can compare products and make decisions.
The feature, however, isn&#8217;t just an organizational tool &#8212; Pinterest says it will also send out notifications if the items you&#8217;ve saved have dropped in price &#8212; which could encourage users to make the purchase.
The Shopping List is available on your Profile page above your other boards, and will include the shoppable items you&#8217;ve saved as well as items you&#8217;ve recently viewed. When you&#8217;re ready to buy, you can click on the pin to visit the retailer&#8217;s website to complete the transaction &#8212; giving Pinterest the credit for the referral, of course.
The feature will launch first in the U.S. and U.K., and will later roll out to Australia, Canada, France and Germany later in the year, Pinterest says.
Alongside the Shopping List, Pinterest today is also expanding merchant tools with the debut of its Verified Merchant Program in the U.K., Australia, Canada, France and Germany, plus a merchant storefront on profile feature, and new product tagging in Australia, Canada, France and Germany.<a href="https://newsroom.pinterest.com/en/post/verified-merchant-program" target="_blank"> Launched last year,</a> the Verified Merchant Program offers retailers a way to sign up for a manual review to determine if they meet Pinterest&#8217;s qualifications for high-quality customer service experiences. If so, they receive a blue checkmark on their profile as a signal to consumers that they&#8217;re a trustworthy retailer.
<img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2162057" loading="lazy" class="vertical size-large wp-image-2162057" src="https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Shopping-List-US-GIF.gif?w=314" alt="" width="314" />Image Credits: Pinterest
In addition, the company is today launching a special two-week long Shopping Spotlight called &#8220;The Goods by Pinterest,&#8221; which offers users access to limited edition items sold by DTC brands including Brooklinen, Outdoor Voices, Clare Paint, Olive &amp; June, and Maude. And it&#8217;s running a &#8220;Shop the mood&#8221; campaign offering curated trends from its annual report, &#8220;Pinterest Predicts.&#8221;
Though Pinterest notes its users, on average, outspend non-users by 2x every month and have a 85% larger basket size, the way people want to shop online is rapidly changing.
Historically an image-centric idea board of sorts, Pinterest may be left behind as more consumers &#8212; and particularly younger shoppers &#8212; begin to more heavily rely on shopping via video (both recorded and live), including through influencer-driven content across platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Pinterest has only more recently expanded into this area, with the launch of <a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/pinterest-introduces-idea-pins-a-video-first-feature-aimed-at-creators" target="_blank">video-first &#8220;Idea Pins&#8221; last month</a> aimed at creators, and <a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/pinterest-to-test-live-streamed-events-this-month-with-21-creators" target="_blank">a test of livestreamed creator events</a> around the same time.
The new launches follow a Pinterest earnings beat in April on both EPS and revenue (11 cents vs 7 cents expected, and $485M vs $474M expected), <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/27/pinterest-pins-earnings-q1-2021.html" target="_blank">but slowing user growth</a>. The company reported 478 million monthly active users versus the 480.5 million expected, causing the stock to drop 10% after the report came out. The company blamed the decline in user growth and user engagement on the easing of Covid-19 restrictions, as consumers began to spend less time online.
With the new additions, Pinterest wants to better ensure those users who are on its site are not just idly browsing, but actually checking out.

Pinterest has long positioned itself a source for inspiration that could ultimately lead to online purchases. And over the years, it has worked on features to better connect consumers with the products and services they want to buy, like shoppable pins, visual search, AR try-on, product recommendations, and more. Today, the company is rolling out […]

Pinterest adds a Shopping List feature to round up your saved products

<a href="https://www.lightspeedhq.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Lightspeed</a>, has picked up two more companies in what is shaping up to be an acquisition spree for the Canadian point-of-sale software provider. The company today <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lightspeed-to-acquire-ecwid-and-nuorder-to-unify-commerce-ecosystem-and-ignite-business-creation-301306660.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">announced</a> that it would acquire e-commerce platform Ecwid for $500 million; and NuOrder, a B2B ordering platform servicing wholesales, brands and retailers, for $425 million.
Together, the two deals underscore the long-anticipated consolidation trend swirling around the fragmented e-commerce industry, at a time when digital transactions are playing an ever more critical role in the Covid-impacted global economy, and smaller players are looking for better ways to compete against behemoths like Amazon and Stripe with a mix of tools and services addressing the various needs of merchants, brands, suppliers and everything in between.
&#8220;By joining forces with Ecwid and NuOrder, Lightspeed becomes the common thread uniting merchants, suppliers and consumers, a transformation we believe will enable innovative retailers to adapt to the new world of commerce,&#8221; said Dax Dasilva, founder and CEO of Lightspeed, in a statement. &#8220;As economies reopen and business creation accelerates, we hope to embolden entrepreneurs with the tools they need to simplify their operations and scale their ambitions.&#8221;
Lightspeed will pay $175 million in cash and $325 million in shares for Ecwid; and it will pay $212.5 million in cash and $212.5 million in shares for NuOrder, the company said. Both deals are expected to close at the end of September, pending regulatory and other approvals.
Lightspeed is publicly traded and has a <a href="https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/LSPD?p=LSPD&amp;.tsrc=fin-srch" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">market cap of about $9.4 billion</a>. It has been on an acquisition march in the last several months, with the bigger picture being to build a complete, end-to-end, one-stop-shop for customers beyond the basics of the point-of-sale software that helped the company make its name. That has also included <a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/lightspeed-acquires-upserve" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">acquiring Upserve in a $430 million deal in December</a> to deepen its presence in the restaurant industry.
Ecwid itself has been around for years, initially making its name as a key partner of Facebook&#8217;s to help small businesses build commerce experiences on the social media platform, and eventually expanding to provide tools for merchants that use services like Square and Wix, as well as other third-party platforms like Instagram and Google &#8212; sometimes competing with but also potentially integrating with other e-commerce backends like Shopify.
The company &#8212; originally founded in Russia &#8212; had largely been under the venture radar until last year, when it <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/21/ecwid-raises-42m-from-morgan-stanley-and-peakspan/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">raised $42 million</a> from Morgan Stanley and PeakSpan Capital, to double down on growth.
And that growth has been good. It current has 130,000 paying customers across 100+ countries and Lightspeed said it had revenue of more than $20 million in the year that ended in March, with growth of 50% year-over-year.. The deal, which is subject to customary closing conditions and post-closing working capital adjustment, is expected to close during the quarter ended September 30, 2021 after the receipt of applicable regulatory approvals.
&#8220;The distinction between online and brick-and-mortar retail has disappeared. Lightspeed and Ecwid, two best-in-class platforms, will unite to truly empower businesses. By eliminating the barriers merchants face when selling online, we will only more rapidly achieve our common vision of democratizing retail for independent businesses worldwide and enrich the communities they serve,&#8221; said Ecwid CEO, Ruslan Fazlyev, in a statement.
NuOrder, meanwhile, will help Lightspeed deepen its role in supplier relationships and transactions &#8212; an essential cornerstone in how commerce works and one where Lightspeed had already been building a business, by way of its Lightspeed Supplier Network. NuOrder has 3,000 brand and 100,000 retailer customers &#8212; some of them include Canada Goose, Converse and Arc&#8217;teryx &#8212; and Lightspeed said that some $11.5 billion in orders were made through its platform in the year that ended in March.
Like Ecwid, NuOrder also posted revenues of $20 million in that period; its growth rate was 30% year-over-year.
&#8220;At NuORDER, we have been on a journey to revolutionize retail by building a global network for brands and retailers. The coming together of Lightspeed and NuORDER accelerates that vision exponentially. The power of connected commerce comes to life now,&#8221; said NuORDER co-founders and co-CEO&#8217;s Olivia Skuza and Heath Wells in a statement. &#8220;We are thrilled to join forces with Lightspeed to unlock transformative value for brands and retailers globally. This represents an inflection point in the history of retail.&#8221;

Lightspeed, has picked up two more companies in what is shaping up to be an acquisition spree for the Canadian point-of-sale software provider. The company today announced that it would acquire e-commerce platform Ecwid for $500 million; and NuOrder, a B2B ordering platform servicing wholesales, brands and retailers, for $425 million. Together, the two deals […]

Fundings & Exits

Commerce

Ecwid

Lightspeed

Nuorder

Point-of-sale

Lightspeed buys Ecwid for $500M; NuOrder for $425M in ongoing e-commerce consolidation play

In 2014 Alexis Patjane was at a local hookah bar in Mexico City with some friends and the bar ran out of tobacco. They thought maybe they could buy some online and have it delivered to the bar in real-time, but it turns out that service didn’t exist.
At the time, Patjane was running a food truck-making business, which was responsible for about 80% of all the food trucks in Mexico, so he had experience doing business in the region.
A couple of weeks later, to solve the instant delivery problem he had faced at the hookah bar, Patjane launched 99 minutos, a website that sold products and delivered them within 99 minutes, hence the name.
Today, 99 minutos announced a $40 million Series B from Prosus and Kaszek Ventures which it plans to use to grow its business in Latin America. 
The company currently operates within 40 major markets across Mexico, Chile, Colombia, and Peru and offers four services: less than 99 minutes delivery, same-day delivery, next-day delivery, and CO2-free delivery. 
What started as an e-commerce company with fast delivery quickly became a last-mile delivery service for other e-commerce companies.
“We started to build the API connections and plug-ins, and any e-commerce could add our delivery service to their business,” Patjane told TechCrunch.
99 minutos makes money by charging the customer a flat fee for delivery and then offering the driver a flat rate as well, but today, the volume is so large on each route, that it’s become very lucrative.
“We ship about 60-80 packages per route,” Patjane said, and from the consumer’s perspective, the delivery app works similarly to Waze. “You can pause the delivery, you can change the address. You can say, “Oh, I’m not at home, I’m at the Starbucks on the corner, can you drop it off there?”’ he added.
Patjane said that initially, the company offered delivery only within Mexico City, but it quickly grew to offer its services between cities and now operates between 21 cities in Mexico.
“E-commerce is growing quickly in Latin America, but it is still [the] early days. E-commerce penetration in Latin America is at 6%, while China is reaching 30% and the U.S. is at 20%,” the company said in a statement.
“When we hear big e-commerce players saying that 99 minutos is ‘their most reliable partner’ and that they are ‘the provider with the most potential,’ it tells us that the team is executing extremely well and is on a path to disrupt e-commerce delivery in Latin America,” said Banafsheh Fathieh, Head of Americas Investments at Prosus Ventures.
Part of the funds will also be to speed up their city-to-city deliveries. “We’ll be doing same day [delivery] from city to city and will be using small aircraft to connect the cities,” Patjane said.

In 2014 Alexis Patjane was at a local hookah bar in Mexico City with some friends and the bar ran out of tobacco. They thought maybe they could buy some online and have it delivered to the bar in real-time, but it turns out that service didn’t exist. At the time, Patjane was running a […]

Logistics

Business

Chile

Colombia

Delivery

Distribution

Driver

E-commerce

Economy

Food Trucks

99 minutos, Mexico’s last mile delivery startup, raises a $40M Series B

Venture capitalists continue to fund buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) startups, evidence of ongoing optimism regarding not only e-commerce, but the specific model for financing consumer purchases as well.
Evidence of continued investor confidence in the BNPL space cropped up several times in the second quarter. Divido, a startup that TechCrunch described as a &#8220;white-label [BNPL] platform for retail finance that integrates with e-commerce platforms,&#8221; <a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/divido-bags-30m-to-take-its-buy-now-pay-later-platform-to-more-markets" target="_blank">raised $30 million</a>. And Zilch <a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/uks-zilch-raises-80m-at-a-500m-valuation-for-its-direct-to-consumer-buy-now-pay-later-service" target="_blank">raised $80 million</a> for an &#8220;over-the-top&#8221; BNPL solution.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.  
Read it <a href="https://techcrunch.com/subscribe/?tpcc=theexchange" target="_blank">every morning on Extra Crunch</a> or get <a href="https://techcrunch.com/newsletters" target="_blank">The Exchange newsletter</a> every Saturday.

Zilch is now worth $800 million.
There are other examples, but those will suffice to get us into the correct mindset for today&#8217;s work as we look back at data points regarding the financial performance of more mature BNPL tech companies. So, <a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/as-bnpl-startups-raise-a-look-at-klarna-affirm-and-afterpay-earnings" target="_blank">as in February</a> when we were looking at Q4 2020 numbers, today we&#8217;re looking into the more recent performance of Klarna, Affirm and Afterpay.
<h2><a href="https://techcrunch.com/subscribe/?tpcc=theexchange" target="_blank"><img loading="lazy" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-1995213" src="https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/exchange-banner-sq-orng.jpg?w=300" alt="" width="300" srcset="https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/exchange-banner-sq-orng.jpg 900w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/exchange-banner-sq-orng.jpg?resize=150,150 150w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/exchange-banner-sq-orng.jpg?resize=300,300 300w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/exchange-banner-sq-orng.jpg?resize=768,768 768w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/exchange-banner-sq-orng.jpg?resize=680,680 680w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/exchange-banner-sq-orng.jpg?resize=32,32 32w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/exchange-banner-sq-orng.jpg?resize=50,50 50w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/exchange-banner-sq-orng.jpg?resize=64,64 64w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/exchange-banner-sq-orng.jpg?resize=96,96 96w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/exchange-banner-sq-orng.jpg?resize=128,128 128w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></a>Growth versus profitability</h2>
As startups scale, they focus a bit more on profitability. Super-early-stage startups aren&#8217;t often too worried about net margins, for example, as their revenues can be nascent and their costs rising as they staff up for a product launch or another similar event.
But as those same startups mature into unicorn territory, questions about their model&#8217;s profitability on a unit basis, operating cash burn and aggregate profitability will start to pop up. <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/28/how-to-estimate-a-companys-health-without-really-trying/" target="_blank">The Rule of 40</a> is a startup rubric for a reason.
And in the cases of Affirm and Afterpay, we&#8217;re in fact examining public companies. So we can safely care even more about their profitability than we might if they, like Klarna, were still waiting for an IPO.
For each, then, we&#8217;ll consider growth and profitability. Let&#8217;s start with Klarna:
Klarna&#8217;s <a href="https://www.klarna.com/assets/sites/15/2021/05/28054804/Financial-Update-Q1-2021.pdf" target="_blank">latest data</a>, dealing with Q1 2021, breaks down as follows:
<ul>
<li>Global GMV of $18.9 billion, +91% compared to the year-ago result

The BNPL space is flush with consumer interest but not yet awash in profits as major players battle one another for global spend share with a glut of smaller startups hot on their heels.

Payments

Startups

Affirm

Afterpay

Buy Now Pay Later

Ec Ecommerce And D2c

Ec Fintech

Klarna

The Exchange

Market Analysis

As buy-now-pay-later startups keep raising capital, a dive into Klarna, Afterpay and Affirm’s earnings

Early-stage startups are increasingly looking for alternative ways to access capital, meaning not every company wants to raise money from VCs or take on debt.
In recent years, a flurry of startups have emerged to give companies other options. (Think <a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/pipe-raises-250m-at-a-2b-valuation" target="_blank">Pipe</a>, for example.)
And today, San Francisco-based <a href="https://www.architectcap.io/" target="_blank">Architect Capital</a> is a new firm that is launching with over $100 million in funds to serve as an “asset-based lender” to “high-growth,” early-stage tech companies. Specifically, the new firm aims to provide non-dilutive or less-dilutive financing options to asset-rich fintech, e-commerce and SaaS companies in the U.S. and Latin America, but with an emphasis on the latter. The region, Architect maintains, does not have a plethora of institutional financing available against assets.
The firm is not out to replace traditional venture capital or venture debt, emphasizes founder and CEO James Sagan, but rather to offer asset-based products that will complement them.
For some context, Sagan is no stranger to the startup world, having co-founded and served as managing partner of Arc Labs, an early-stage credit fund focused on lending to technology-enabled businesses. He’s been investing in Latin America for years, and recognized the need for new forms of financing to fund “novel and underappreciated assets.”
Also, he believes the region is home to “the most prominent fintech ecosystem in the world.”
To Sagan, traditional forms of equity and debt financing in the venture world are vital for things like growing headcount, but he believes they are “not engineered to support the growth of a company’s underlying financial products.”
“VC is highly dilutive and should be used for ROI activities such as hiring engineers and building great teams,” Sagan told TechCrunch. “It’s expensive to use equity to fund assets. Equity should not be put in a loan book. We’ll fund the loan book.”
<img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2160604" loading="lazy" class=" wp-image-2160604" src="https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/James-Sagan-Architect-Capital.jpg?w=225" alt="" width="262" srcset="https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/James-Sagan-Architect-Capital.jpg 3024w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/James-Sagan-Architect-Capital.jpg?resize=113,150 113w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/James-Sagan-Architect-Capital.jpg?resize=225,300 225w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/James-Sagan-Architect-Capital.jpg?resize=768,1024 768w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/James-Sagan-Architect-Capital.jpg?resize=510,680 510w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/James-Sagan-Architect-Capital.jpg?resize=1152,1536 1152w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/James-Sagan-Architect-Capital.jpg?resize=1536,2048 1536w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/James-Sagan-Architect-Capital.jpg?resize=38,50 38w" sizes="(max-width: 262px) 100vw, 262px" />Image Credits: Architect Capital founder James Sagan / Architect Capital
Architect’s goal is to provide “tailored and less dilutive funding,” especially to companies that produce repeatable revenues, such as SaaS and subscription businesses. 
Sagan said he first discovered the strategy in 2015 when he was working for a multifamily office that was lending against a bunch of traditional assets.
“A colleague and good friend of mine started a business and raised some equity and venture debt, but he couldn’t find the asset-specific financing for the receivables he was generating,” Sagan recalls. “He was lending to small businesses and needed asset-specific financing against those receivables.”
Venture debt doesn&#8217;t really work for receivables-based lending because venture debt shops typically are underwriting assets, or rather, underwriting the quality of the investors in the company, Sagan believes.
“So we really tailor our underwriting towards those assets themselves right and those assets range from unsecured consumer receivables to secure small business receivables to real estate,” he told TechCrunch. “Essentially, we’re providing an additional instrument for asset-heavy businesses that will allow them to scale in a way that venture debt will not.”
Architect’s LPs are mostly large institutions, as opposed to traditional high net worth individuals. The firm’s average check size will land at around $10 million to $15 million.
“Our portfolio allocation is more concentrated in general,” Sagan said. “We expect to grow our AUM (assets under management) pretty precipitously.”
Architect Capital has invested in six companies since inception, including PayJoy, a company that delivers consumer financing and smartphone technology to customers in emerging markets; Forum Brands, a U.S.-based e-commerce marketplace aggregator; and ADDI, a fintech that aims to give Colombian consumers access to fair and affordable credit through point-of-sale-financing that recently <a href="https://www.fintechfutures.com/2021/06/colombian-bnpl-addi-raises-65m-in-series-b-funding-round/" target="_blank">raised $65 million</a>.

<blockquote class="wp-embedded-content" data-secret="Ddp7Fq5rUg"><a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/predicting-your-startup-revenue-some-principles-and-tools" target="_blank">With the right tools, predicting startup revenue is possible</a></blockquote>

Early-stage startups are increasingly looking for alternative ways to access capital, meaning not every company wants to raise money from VCs or take on debt. In recent years, a flurry of startups have emerged to give companies other options. (Think Pipe, for example.) And today, San Francisco-based Architect Capital is a new firm that is […]

Finance

Saas

Venture Capital

Architect Capital

Corporate Finance

Entrepreneurship

Latin America

Money

Private Equity

Real Estate

Architect Capital brings alternative capital to the early stage with new $100M fund

For years now, the world of retail has been evolving. Whether it&#8217;s next-day delivery with Amazon Prime or subscription D2C services or on-demand delivery from Postmates, we&#8217;re growing increasingly accustomed to being able to buy something and have it arrive at our door relatively quickly.
Today, a new startup is launching in New York with a fresh take on on-demand delivery.
<a href="https://www.jokr.it/" target="_blank">JOKR</a>, founded by Ralf Wenzel (the same guy who founded FoodPanda, which later merged with DeliveryHero) promises delivery in 15 minutes or less, with no order minimums, and a selection of products that you might find in the local deli or convenience store.
The approach is centered around what JOKR calls micro-hubs, which are really just various storefronts on side streets in denser areas. The company uses data to forecast what customers will want, when, and where, to strategically organize these micro-fulfillment centers for speed.
For end users, there are no order minimums and no delivery fees.
data is the key ingredient of how we build the business to identify what customers need and put an emphasis of also on only what they need, but also when they need it. And what point of time, which day, which week which month, whether it&#8217;s in the morning or in the evening, and built a dynamic inventory and catalog management system is able to rotate inventory, provide inventory and pre forecast in suggests for customers, those type of consumer goods, and the corresponding time and if you presented and forecast the time.
JOKR procures the goods sold on the app directly from brands, manufacturers and wholesalers. In other words, you can think of the service as a sort of ghost kitchen for groceries and every day items.
&#8220;We are a platform that is not relying on any type of consumer charges,&#8221; said Wenzel. &#8220;Hence, the business is predominantly a business that generates revenue out of the respective product costs. Our ability to procure directly, and cut out middlemen in terms of wholesalers, distributors, supermarkets themselves, allows us to tap into a margin pool that is higher than that of traditional online marketplaces, which would only pick a product from existing stores, supermarkets, and then need to apply a delivery fee in order to make their proposition work.&#8221;
The company is working to increase its inventory, which currently includes more than 1,500 items.
In terms of the workforce, JOKR delivery people are full time employees.
JOKR has been operating in Latin America (Brazil, Lima, and Mexico City) and is now expanding into the U.S. market with its NYC launch.
According to TheRealDeal, JOKR has funding from SoftBank, as well as HV Capital and Tiger Global. It&#8217;s unclear how much the startup has raised.

For years now, the world of retail has been evolving. Whether it’s next-day delivery with Amazon Prime or subscription D2C services or on-demand delivery from Postmates, we’re growing increasingly accustomed to being able to buy something and have it arrive at our door relatively quickly. Today, a new startup is launching in New York with […]

Apps

JOKR launches in New York with a different take on on-demand delivery

<a href="http://www.wayflyer.com/" target="_blank" target="_blank">Wayflyer</a>, a revenue-based financing platform for e-commerce merchants, has raised $76 million in a Series A funding round led by Left Lane Capital.
“Partners” of DST Global, QED Investors, Speedinvest and Zinal Growth — the family office of Guillaume Pousaz (founder of Checkout.com) — also put money in the round. The raise comes just after Wayflyer raised $100 million in debt funding to support its cash advance product, and 14 months after the Dublin, Ireland-based startup launched its first product.
With an e-commerce boom fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, Wayflyer is the latest in a group of startups focused on the space that has attracted investor interest as of late. The company aims to help e-commerce merchants “unlock growth” by giving them access to working capital (from $10,000 up to $20 million) so they can improve cash flow and drive sales. For example, more cash can help these merchants do things like buy more inventory in bulk so they can meet customer demand and save money.&nbsp;
In a nutshell, Wayflyer uses analytics and sends merchants cash to make inventory purchases or investments in their business. Those merchants then repay Wayflyer using a percentage of their revenue until the money is paid back (plus a fee charged for the cash advance). So essentially, the merchants are using their revenue to get financing, hence the term revenue-based financing. The advantage, Wayflyer says, is that companies make repayments as a percentage of their sales. So if they have a slow month, they will pay back less. So, there’s more flexibility involved than with other mechanisms such as traditional bank loans.

<blockquote class="wp-embedded-content" data-secret="LJjuSbMyrh"><a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/where-is-the-e-commerce-app-ecosystem-headed-in-2021" target="_blank" target="_blank">Where is the e-commerce app ecosystem headed in 2021?</a></blockquote>
<iframe class="wp-embedded-content" sandbox="allow-scripts" security="restricted" style="position: absolute; clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);" title="“Where is the e-commerce app ecosystem headed in 2021?” — TechCrunch" src="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/where-is-the-e-commerce-app-ecosystem-headed-in-2021embed/#?secret=LJjuSbMyrh" data-secret="LJjuSbMyrh" height="450" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>
Co-founder Aidan Corbett believes that in a crowded space, Wayflyer’s use of big data gives it an edge over competitors.
Corbett and former VC Jack Pierse spun Wayflyer out of a marketing analytics company that Corbett had also started, called Conjura, in September 2019.
“Jack came to me and said, ‘You should stop using our marketing analytics engine to do these big enterprise SaaS solutions, and instead use them to underwrite e-commerce businesses for short-term finance,’ ” Corbett recalls.
And so he did.
“We just had our heads down and started repurposing the platform for it to be an underwriting platform,” Corbett said. It launched in April 2020, doing about $600,000 in advances at the time. In March of 2021, Wayflyer did about $36 million in advances.
“So, it’s been a pretty aggressive kind of growth,” Corbett said.
Over the past six months alone, the company has seen its business grow 290% as it has deployed over $150 million of funding across 10 markets with a focus on the U.S., the United Kingdom and Australia. About 75% of its customers are U.S. based.
Wayflyer plans to use its new capital toward product development and global expansion with the goal of entering “multiple” new markets in the coming months. The company recently opened a sales office in Atlanta, and also has locations in&nbsp;the U.K., the Netherlands and Spain.
To Corbett, the company’s offering is more compelling than buy now, pay later solutions for consumers for example, in that it is funding the merchant directly and able to add services on top of that.
“There’s a lot more opportunity for companies like ourselves to differentiate because essentially, we focus on the merchants. And when we underwrite the merchant by getting data from the merchant, there’s a lot of additional services that you can put in on top,” Corbett explained. “Whereas with buy now, pay later, you get information on the consumer, and there’s not as much room to add additional services on top.”
For example, if a business requests an advance and either is not approved for one, or doesn’t choose to take it, Wayflyer’s analytics platform is free to anybody who signs up to help them optimize their marketing spend.
“This is a critical driver of value for e-commerce businesses. If you can’t acquire customers at a reasonable price, you’re not going to be around very long. And a lot of early-stage e-commerce businesses struggle with that,” Corbett said.
It also can pair up a merchant with a marketing analytics “specialist” to analyze its marketing performance or an inventory “specialist” to look at the current terms and price a business is getting from a supplier.
“Our focus from the very beginning is really supporting the merchants, not just providing them with working capital,” Corbett said.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Another way the company claims to be different is in how it deploys funds. As mentioned above, merchants can pay the money back at varied terms, depending on how sales are going. The company makes money by charging a principal on advances, and then a “remittance rate” on revenues until the total amount is paid back. 
“We tend to be more flexible than competition in this way,” Corbett said. “Also, some competitors will pay invoices on merchants’ behalf or give them a pre-charged card to use on advertising spend,” Corbett said. “We always give cash into a merchant’s account.”&nbsp;
Wayflyer recently inked an agreement with <a href="https://www.wayflyer.com/blog" target="_blank" target="_blank">Adobe Commerce</a>, a partnership it said would provide a new channel to further amplify its growth with the goal of funding 8,000 e-commerce businesses in the first year of the partnership.
For his part, Left Lane Capital Partner Dan Ahrens said that his firm was impressed by Wayflyer’s “nuanced understanding of what will drive value for their clients.”
“The team’s focus, specialization, and deep analytical expertise within the e-commerce market also drives superior underwriting,” he told TechCrunch. “Their explosive growth has not come about by taking on undue risk. We are big believers that their underwriting will only improve with scale, and that Wayflyer will be able to compound its competitive advantages over time.”
As mentioned, this is an increasingly crowded space. Earlier this month, Settle announced it had raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Kleiner Perkins to give e-commerce and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies access to non-dilutive capital.

<blockquote class="wp-embedded-content" data-secret="ZyhFLnvZAM"><a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/settle-raises-15m-from-kleiner-perkins-to-give-e-commerce-companies-more-working-capital" target="_blank" target="_blank">Settle raises $15M from Kleiner Perkins to give e-commerce companies more working capital</a></blockquote>
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Wayflyer, a revenue-based financing platform for e-commerce merchants, has raised $76 million in a Series A funding round led by Left Lane Capital. “Partners” of DST Global, QED Investors, Speedinvest and Zinal Growth — the family office of Guillaume Pousaz (founder of Checkout.com) — also put money in the round. The raise comes just after […]

Recent Funding

Adobe

Atlanta

Australia

Bank

Checkout.com

Dst Global

Dublin

Wayflyer raises $76M to provide ‘revenue-based’ financing to e-commerce merchants

&#8220;Headless&#8221; commerce &#8212; a set of tools that companies can use with their own customized front ends to build apps for selling goods and services &#8212; have become a huge business, not just because companies are seeing a bigger demand than ever before for people buying online, but because those companies are generally more focused in their own strategies around how and what they want to present to the world.
Today, one of the companies building headless tools is announcing a round of funding as it continues to expand its business.
<a href="https://commercelayer.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Commerce Layer</a>, which provides a set of APIs for businesses to build e-commerce apps with their own, customized front ends, has raised $16 million &#8212; money that it will be using to continue expanding its business and adding more commerce tools into its API library.
Currently Commerce Layer provides tools to build your own mobile, wearable and voice apps, point of sale solutions, subscriptions, and multi-vendor commerce models (as you might have in a marketplace), along with services like building your own shopping carts and turning print catalogues into interactive, &#8220;shoppable&#8221; digital experiences.
Filippo Conforti, the CEO and co-founder, said it plans to bring in a lot of new features. On the roadmap are new developer dashboard, a command-line interface (CLI) and order management system, and a hosted checkout application, metrics API, a reporting application, and better support for subscription and marketplace models.
This latest Series B round is being led by Coatue Management, with general partner Caryn Marooney (who has led comms at Facebook, among many other high-ranking comms roles) taking a seat on Commerce Layer&#8217;s board. Previous investors Benchmark and Mango Capital also participated. Benchmark led Commerce Layer&#8217;s <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/28/italys-commerce-layer-raises-6m-led-by-benchmark-for-its-headless-e-commerce-platform/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Series A about a year ago</a>.
That round came at a very key moment for the startup. Based just outside of Florence, Italy, and coming just on the heels of the first rush of Covid-19 cases in Europe &#8212; where for a time Italy was the epicenter of the pandemic &#8212; it was an early sign not just of how startups were able to keep working, but how investors were willing to back the best of them, even in times of uncertainty.
It also turned out that e-commerce became one of the big stories out of 2020, as more consumers went to digital channels to shop at a time when they couldn&#8217;t go to stores as easily, if at all.
That has definitely had a knock-on effect for Commerce Layer. Conforti told me that the company saw its revenues grow 6x in the last year &#8212; albeit it was starting from a small place, with only six customers on its books back in May 2020. It now has around 26 businesses using its tools, he said, including Chilly&#8217;s, Brioni, SumUp, Paradox Interactive and Coca Cola Embonor (a company that works under a Coca Cola license to make and distribute drinks in Chile and Bolivia).
The interesting thing about &#8220;headless&#8221; platforms is that they are becoming a much bigger part of the equation whe it comes to building and running e-commerce experiences. That seems to be a sign not just of how the sector continues to mature in terms of retailers and how they are looking for more than a plug-and-play, one-size-fits-most approach in their own strategies. It also speaks to the growing range of permutations of how and where people sell today, and the need for tools to address that.
While <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/21/commercetools-raises-145m-from-insight-for-shopify-style-e-commerce-apis-for-large-enterprises/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Commercetools</a> is one of the bigger &#8220;headless&#8221; commerce providers, and whose founder even coined the term &#8220;headless commerce&#8221;, there are a number of others now building tools to help companies build more unique e-commerce experiences, including the likes of <a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/spryker-raises-130m-at-a-500m-valuation-to-provide-b2bs-with-agile-e-commerce-tools" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Spryker</a>, <a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/headless-commerce-startup-swell-raises-3-4m" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Swell</a>, <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/09/fabric-series-a/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Fabric</a>, <a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/chord-series-a" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Chord</a>, and <a href="https://www.flyingeze.com/news/shogun-raises-35m-to-help-brands-take-on-amazon-with-faster-and-better-sites-of-their-own" target="_blank" rel="noopener" target="_blank">Shogun</a>. Even Shopify has stepped into the fray with Shopify Plus.
“eCommerce has become core to our everyday lives. As a result, big brands and enterprises need better ways to shift from retail and build exceptional online storefronts. We believe that Commerce Layer is building the API platform for this new category, and we’re incredibly proud to join them in pursuing their ambitious and exciting vision,&#8221; said Marooney in a statement.

“Headless” commerce — a set of tools that companies can use with their own customized front ends to build apps for selling goods and services — have become a huge business, not just because companies are seeing a bigger demand than ever before for people buying online, but because those companies are generally more focused […]

Commerce Layer

Headless

Headless Commerce

Italy’s Commerce Layer raises $16M led by Coatue for its headless commerce platform

Instagram today announced it&#8217;s adding a new feature to help connect online shoppers to product drops through its app. Drops, which are a newer e-commerce trend, help sellers create buzz for forthcoming products in the days and weeks leading up to their availability. The products themselves are often only available in limited supplies or for a short period of time, increasing demand.
On Instagram, drops will now have their <a href="https://www.instagram.com/_n/shopping_home?destination=drops" target="_blank">own destination</a> inside the app at the top of the Shop tab, where consumers can discover, browse and shop all the latest product launches as well as view upcoming launches. Shoppers can also sign up to receive reminders about products they&#8217;re interested in from here, and look through products and collections from other drops that recently took place on Instagram.
<img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2157687" loading="lazy" class="vertical size-large wp-image-2157687" src="https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9477.png?w=314" alt="" width="314" srcset="https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9477.png 1284w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9477.png?resize=69,150 69w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9477.png?resize=139,300 139w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9477.png?resize=768,1662 768w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9477.png?resize=314,680 314w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9477.png?resize=710,1536 710w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9477.png?resize=947,2048 947w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9477.png?resize=23,50 23w" sizes="(max-width: 314px) 100vw, 314px" />Image Credits: screenshot of Drops on Instagram
Like other online shopping offered through Instagram, consumers can make their <a href="https://www.instagram.com/_n/shopping_home?destination=drops" target="_blank">Drops</a> purchases directly in the Instagram app itself via Checkout on Instagram, not by visiting third-party websites. This model will eventually allow Instagram to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/business/help/223030991929920?id=533228987210412" target="_blank">collect fees</a> on purchases &#8212; something that&#8217;s become a more important part of Facebook and Instagram&#8217;s overall business model in the wake of Apple&#8217;s privacy crackdown on iOS apps that <a href="https://www.adexchanger.com/mobile/facebook-could-take-a-multibillion-revenue-hit-from-apples-idfa-changes/" target="_blank">impacts</a> Facebook&#8217;s ad revenues.
However, Instagram has temporarily waived its selling fees to both help businesses who are recovering from the last year of Covid. The move will also help it to gain ground in online shopping against new competitors, including TikTok.
Brands on Instagram had already been running drops before today, following Instagram&#8217;s release of a product reminders feature <a href="https://business.instagram.com/blog/new-testing-product-launches-for-instagram-shopping" target="_blank">back in 2019</a> that allowed consumers to get notified when an item they were interested in became available for purchase. To date, brands across fashion, beauty, streetwear and others have leveraged the feature, the company says, including <a href="https://www.instagram.com/hillhouse" target="_blank">Hill House Home</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/dragunbeauty" target="_blank">Dragun Beauty</a>, adidas, and others.
The new Drops location simply organizes the product launches in one place to make it easier to browse and shop. Instagram tells us it&#8217;s curating the featured drops in this section. To be considered, brands need to use the product launch feature which is available to businesses on Checkout with Instagram.
At launch, some of the drops available include today&#8217;s <a href="https://www.instagram.com/officialnocta/" target="_blank">Drake x NOCTA ‘Cardinal Stock’ collection</a> and upcoming drops like <a href="https://www.instagram.com/wrenandglory" target="_blank">Wren + Glory</a> hand-painted summer collection and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/ctilburymakeup" target="_blank">Charlotte Tilbury</a> Exclusive Pillow Talk Lips &amp; Dreams Lashes Kit. This week, there are five total drops available. This number will vary from week to week as Instagram continues to test the new feature, the company tells us.
<img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2157689" loading="lazy" class="vertical size-large wp-image-2157689" src="https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9478.png?w=314" alt="" width="314" srcset="https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9478.png 1284w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9478.png?resize=69,150 69w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9478.png?resize=139,300 139w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9478.png?resize=768,1662 768w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9478.png?resize=314,680 314w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9478.png?resize=710,1536 710w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9478.png?resize=947,2048 947w, https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_9478.png?resize=23,50 23w" sizes="(max-width: 314px) 100vw, 314px" />Image Credits: screenshot of Drops on Instagram
On an individual brand&#8217;s page inside Drops, consumers can view info like when the product became available, pricing, and other item details. They can also bookmark the item to add it to a wishlist or share the drop with a friend through Instagram&#8217;s direct messaging feature. From the top of the Drops page, users can return to their Cart or Wishlist at any time to complete the checkout &#8212; assuming they aren&#8217;t too late, of course.
In addition, the brand&#8217;s Live shopping can be scheduled to align with their product drop. When the brand goes live for a drop, there&#8217;s an on-screen countdown and confetti animation when the product becomes available.
The new feature is currently only available in the Instagram app in the U.S., and only on mobile devices (iOS and Android), not the web.

Instagram today announced it’s adding a new feature to help connect online shoppers to product drops through its app. Drops, which are a newer e-commerce trend, help sellers create buzz for forthcoming products in the days and weeks leading up to their availability. The products themselves are often only available in limited supplies or for […]

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