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Google UK will only run ads for financial products from sources approved by UK's financial watchdog, from Sept. 6, after being threatened with legal action — Google is tightening its ad screening rules in the UK after a steep rise in fraudulent adverts online during the pandemic. The search giant has
Turkey-based Dream Games, which makes the popular mobile game Royal Match, raises $155M Series B co-led by Index Ventures and Makers Fund at a $1B valuation — Where does your enterprise stand on the AI adoption curve? Take our AI survey to find out. — Turkey has another unicorn on its hands.
Kikoff, a personal finance platform aimed at helping consumers build credit, announced today that it has raised $30 million in a Series B round.
The capital is in addition to the $12.5 million the startup raised across previously unannounced seed and Series A rounds, which were both led by Lightspeed Venture partners.
Portage Ventures led Kickoff’s Series B, which included participation from Lightspeed, GGV, Coatue and Core Innovation Capital. Previous backers of the company include NBA star Steph Curry, Wex CEO Melissa Smith and Teresa Ressel, former CFO of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
CEO Cynthia Chen and CTO Christophe Chong co-founded the San Francisco-based company in late 2019 with the goal of helping consumers without a credit history establish one, and helping those with credit histories to continue building credit. The pair came from “low to moderate income” families, Chen said, and say they want to help others who also come from similar economic backgrounds. Chen grew up in Beijing before coming to the U.S. for college on a scholarship and says she was struck by the experience of her parents having to borrow money from family and friends in order to purchase a TV.
While the company declined to reveal hard revenue figures, Chen did say that Kikoff has “hundreds of thousands” of customers after being out of beta for half a year.
Kikoff’s product, the “Kikoff Credit Account,” is the first of a planned suite of offerings all aimed at improving consumers’ financial health.
“There are many Americans who don’t come from affluent families and have tons of student loan debt,” Chen said. “For them and so many others, we wanted to create a better way to build good credit than existing offers in the market.” While anyone can use its platform, Chen says the vast majority of its customers are millennials and GenZers as they are most in need of a way to build credit.
Image Credits: Kikoff
With Kikoff, the pair aim to give people not only a way to build a credit history, but also a way to increase consumer financial literacy. Rather than provide a debit or credit card that can be used anywhere, Kikoff restricts the use of its line of credit to an online store it’s created. Users can purchase things like e-books covering a variety of finance-related topics such as how to plan and budget, or profit from trading bitcoin. It also has a selection of courses that it has purchased resell rights for, covering topics such as personal finance education, or how to set up an e-commerce store or even how to learn Python programming skills.
“When a consumer purchases something from our store, [that] item is going to help that person improve his or her financial habits or help him or her make money by making smarter investments, or setting up their small business or learning skills,” Chen told TechCrunch.
The company also does not charge any interest on its credit line or fees for the financing.
“There’s no cost of borrowing money,” she said. Instead, Kikoff collects revenue by taking the margin between the wholesale price for the items it sells in its store and the retail price that customers pay.
To sign up, customers first apply for a $500 revolving line of credit that can be used for purchases at Kikoff’s online store. The company touts that within months, its customers “can become eligible for better interest rates, competitive credit cards and home mortgages,” among other things within a relatively short period of about 45 days.
Kikoff has intentionally worked to help its customers build credit in what Chen describes as “a very financially responsible way.”
“That’s why they are able to only use the product within our proprietary online store, and we have a number of affordable items in the store for them to purchase,” she told TechCrunch. “So it is relatively easy for them to not overspend or make any kind of impulse purchase that they later cannot really afford to pay.”
Lightspeed Partner Ansaf Kareem said he could empathize with the experiences of Chen and Chong in having to create and build credit for the first time, “especially as immigrants and first-generation Americans.”
“A credit score holds the keys to your financial future, yet so many Americans struggle with creating and building credit,” he said. “Adjacent products may let you check your credit score, but do not provide tools or guidance to improve it without charging fees or asking for a large up-front cash commitment,” he added. “Kikoff built a product that provides real value through a simple, no fee structure to initiate and build credit. And they are just getting started.”
Kikoff’s executive team certainly has an impressive background in fintech. Chen previously served as Figure’s Chief Risk Officer and she held senior executive roles at Capital One and OnDeck. Chong was former head of growth at Lime and led growth teams at Facebook and Square. Andrew Brix, Kikoff’s head of product was employee No. 15 at Credit Karma and served as its director of product management. He also was a senior product manager at E-Trade. Patrick Glover, head of marketing, worked at both Plaid and Square and Vinni Bala, head of operations, is former CMO and Chief Credit Officer at Deserve.
Other companies with similar goals that have raised venture funding as of late include Tomo Credit and Welcome Tech, among others.
FightCamp, an interactive at-home training system for boxing/kickboxing, is announcing this morning that it has raised a $90M round from a long list of investors, including quite the roster of famous fighters.
FightCamp pairs smart sensors (“punch trackers” worn under your boxing gloves) with a subscription-based stream of training videos. As you punch your way through a session, it’ll track things like punch count and speed over time. To oversimplify it a bit, think Peloton for punching.
The company tells me that this round was led by NEA and Connect Ventures — the latter a two-headed beast made up of NEA and the Hollywood talent firm Creative Artists Agency. Also investing: Supercell CEO Iikka Paananen, ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman, Usher, and Katheryn Winnick (star of the TV series Vikings, not to mention a ridiculously accomplished martial artist.) Oh, and of course, a bunch of folks who are very well known for punching: Mike Tyson, Floyd Mayweather, Georges St-Pierre, and UFC heavyweight champ (and thrower of the world’s hardest punch, no joke) Francis Ngannou.
While FightCamp is currently iOS only, that’ll hopefully change before too long; in a press release about the round, the company says it plans to put the funds toward international expansion, growing its subscription content library, and building an Android offering.
Image Credits: FightCamp
The company’s kit costs anywhere from $439 – $1349, depending on what you need. $1219 gets you a free-standing punching bag, a mat to go beneath it, boxing gloves, and the punch trackers. Already have the rest of the gym gear, and just want the trackers? That drops the price down to $439. The monthly membership, meanwhile, costs $39.
FightCamp started its life in 2016 as “Hykso”, focusing initially on the sale of the punch tracking hardware. As the company shifted focus to include subscription content in 2018, the “FightCamp” name took over; now it seems to be used almost exclusively.
The company tells me that they’d raised $8M before this round, bringing its total funding to $98M.
Gartner survey of public cloud services in 2020: AWS had $26.2B in revenue, up ~29% and a 41% share overall, followed by Azure with $12.7B in revenue, up ~60% — Amazon led the market with $26.2 billion of revenue in 2020 from IaaS public cloud services. — According to new data released …
Shogun, which helps e-commerce businesses build their storefronts on platforms like Shopify, raises $67.5M Series C led by Insight Partners at a $575M valuation — E-commerce marketplaces continue to play a major role in how consumers buy goods online and how retailers show off and sell goods …
Noname Security, which automatically discovers and remediates API vulnerabilities, raises $60M Series B led by Insight Partners, bringing total raised to $85M — Where does your enterprise stand on the AI adoption curve? Take our AI survey to find out. — Noname Security …
Sources: Didi raised at least $4B in its US IPO, giving it a market capitalization of at least $67B — IPO values China ride-hailing giant at over $67bn as its domestic dominance comes under scrutiny — China's ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing will make its debut on the New York Stock Exchange …
Seoul-based Mathpresso, maker of AI-based K-12 mobile learning app QANDA, raises $50M Series C from investors including GGV, bringing its total raised to $105M — Seoul-based edtech startup Mathpresso has raised $50 million in a Series C funding round from a group of investors …
Virgin Orbit is set to launch a payload that includes satellites it’s delivering for tis first commercial customers. The launch is set to happen sometime within a launch window that opens at 6 AM PT (9 AM ET) and continues through 8 AM PT (11 AM ET), taking off from the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.
This is the first mission following Virgin Orbit’s successful orbital demonstration launch in January, and also the first that the company will be live-streaming, providing never-before-seen views of its carrier aircraft and the mid-air launch of its LauncherOne two-stage rocket as they happen. Virgin Orbit’s launch system uses a modified 747 to carry its small rocket to a high altitude, where it releases the rocket from the aircraft’s wing, which then ignites its own engines and flies the rest of the way to its destination in low-Earth orbit (LEO).
Virgin’s approach is very different from the traditional vertical rocket launch employed by companies like SpaceX and Rocket Lab, and after years of testing and development, the company opened the door for commercial operations with its demonstration launch earlier this year. As it ramps operations, it’s hoping that its launch model will demonstrate flexibility, since it can launch from almost any traditional runway, while meeting all the needs of small satellite companies looking to get their spacecraft to LEO.
The launch livestream above is set to begin at around 5:30 AM PT (8:30 AM ET).
Istanbul in Turkey continues to prove itself as very fertile ground for casual gaming startups, which appear to be growing from small seedlings into sizable trees. In the latest development, Dream Games — a developer of mobile puzzle games — has raised $155 million in funding, a Series B that values the startup at $1 billion.
This is a massive leap for the company, which raised $50 million (the largest Series A in Turkey’s startup history) only 3.5 months ago. This latest round is being co-led by Index Ventures and Makers Fund, with Balderton Capital, IVP and Kora also participating. It also comes in the wake of a bigger set of deals in the world of gaming and developers in Turkey, the most prominent of which saw Zynga acquire Peak Games for $1.8 billion, amid other acquisitions. Dream is one of several startups in the region founded by alums from Peak.
The focus of the funding, and currently of Dream Games itself, is Royal Match, a puzzle game (iOS, Android) that launched globally in March.
The game has been a huge hit for Dream, with 6 million monthly active users and $20 million/month in revenues from in-game purchases (not ads), according to figures from AppAnnie. (A source close to the company confirmed the figures are accurate, but Dream did not disclose its revenue numbers or revenues directly.) This has catapulted it into the top-20 grossing games categories in the U.S., U.K., and Germany, the same echelon as much older and bigger titles like Candy Crush and Homescapes.
“The funding will be used for heavy user acquisition in every channel and every geography,” Soner Aydemir, co-founder and CEO, Dream Games, told me in an interview. He said Asia would be a focus in that, specifically Japan, South Korea and China. “Our main target is to scale the game so that it becomes one of the biggest games in the global market.”
The world of mobile gaming has in many respects been a very cyclical and fickle one: today’s hot title becomes tomorrow’s has-been, while for developers, they can go through dozens of development processes and launches (and related costs) before they find a hit, if they find a hit. The role of app-install ads and other marketing tools to juice numbers has also been a problematic lever for growth: take away the costs of running those and often the house of cards falls apart.
Aydemir agrees, and while the company will be investing in those aforementioned in-game ads to encourage more downloads of Royal Match, he also said that this strategy can work, but only if the fundamentals of the game are solid, as is the case here.
“If you don’t have good enough metrics, even with all the money in the world it’s impossible to scale,” he said. “But our LTV [lifetime value] is high, and so we think it can be scaled in a sustainable way because of the quality of the game. It always depends on the product.”
In addition to its huge growth, Dream has taken a very focused approach with Royal Flush, working on it for years before finally releasing it.
“We spent so much time on tiny details, so many tests over several years to create the dynamics of the game,” he said. “But we also have a feel for it,” he added, referring to the team’s previous lives at Peak Games. “Our users really appreciate this approach.”
For now, too, the focus will just one the one game, he said. Why not two, I asked?
“We believe in Pixar’s approach,” Aydemir said. “When Pixar started, it was very low frequency, a movie every 2-3 years but eventually the rate increased. And it will be similar for us. This year we need to focus on Royal Match but if we can find a way to create other games, we will.”
He added that the challenge — one that many startups know all too well — is that building a new product, in this case a new game, can take the focus away when you are a small team and also working on sustaining and maintaining a current game. “That is the most difficult and challenging part. If we can manage it we will be successful; otherwise we will fail because our business model is basically creating new IP.” He added that it’s likely that another game will be released out into the world at the beginning of next year.
The focus, in any case, was one of the selling points for its investors. “The Dream Games team’s deep genre insight, laser-focus on detail and team chemistry has helped create the early success of Royal Match,” said Michael Cheung, General Partner at Makers Fund, in a statement. “We’re excited to be on the journey with them as they grow Royal Match globally.”
In terms of monetization, Dream Games is pretty firmly in the camp of “no ads, just in-app purchases,” he said. “It’s really bad for user experience and we only care about user experience, so if you put ads in, it conflicts with that.”
Some of the struggles of building new while improving old product will of course get solved with this cash, and the subsequent hiring that Dream Games can do (and it’s doing a lot of that, judging by the careers section of its website). As more startups emerge out of the country — not just in gaming but also areas like e-commerce, where startups like Getir are for example making big waves in instant grocery delivery — it will be interesting to see how that bigger talent pool evolves.
“Since its launch in early March, Royal Match has become one of the top casual puzzle titles globally, driven by once in a decade retention metrics. It speaks to the sheer quality of the title that the Dream Games team has built and the flawless polish and execution across the board,” commented Stephane Kurgan, venture partner at Index Ventures and former COO of King. Index is also the backer of Roblox, Discord, King and Supercell, in a statement.
Enterprise API security startup Noname Security has raised a $60 million Series B funding round, just six months after closing $25 million at Series A.
The round was led by Insight Partners with Next47, Forgepoint, and The Syndicate Group (TSG) also participating, and brings Noname’s total funding to $85 million since emerging from stealth in December 2020.
The startup, which currently has a 70-strong workforce and offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, says it raised rapidly due to the fact the pandemic has fueled a growing dependence on APIs. Naturally, this proliferation of APIs has led to an increase in the number of API security incidents. Earlier this year, for example, an Experian API exposed the credit scores of nearly every American with one, and just weeks later a leaky Peloton API allowed anyone to grab users’ private account data directly from the company’s servers. Facebook, LinkedIn, Echelon, and Clubhouse have also fallen victim to scraping attacks that abuse access to APIs to pull in data about users on their platforms.
“The need for API security was so strong and got super emphasized during the pandemic,” Oz Golan, CEO of Noname, tells TechCrunch. “We want to help organizations to leverage APIs securely, and we want to eliminate all of the API vulnerabilities out there. We don’t want another Experian incident.”
The Silicon Valley startup provides a holistic security platform that uses AI and machine learning to enable enterprises to see and secure managed and unmanaged APIs exposed by the organization, consumed by the organization, or used internally, thereby eliminating the API security blind spots. The majority of these flaws often go unnoticed for years, according to Noname, giving anyone who can find them unfettered access to an organization’s most sensitive operations.
“Even seasoned security professionals often have no idea how exposed their systems are,” Golan says.
In its six months since launch, the startup has amassed 40 technology, reseller, and channel partners, as well as “hundreds” of enterprise customers either in production or trialing the platform.
“Because of the huge traction that we have seen, we want to accelerate – expanding our sales team, marketing team, customer success, R&D. Basically growth, growth, growth,” says Golan, who previously served as director of engineering at NSO Group.
Commenting on the funding round, Thomas Krane, principal at Insight Partners — which recently led a $75m Series C funding round in cybersecurity skills platform Immersive Labs — said: “The surging volume of APIs and the growing complexity of modern applications has led to an increase in cybersecurity obstacles. Noname came to market at just the right time with a fully realized, next-gen technology that’s making a big impact with global customers.”
API security is a hot ticket for investors right now. Last month, London-based 42Crunch raised a $17 million Series A, and just weeks later California-based Salt Security closed a $70 million Series C — bringing the total amount of funding the company has raised in the last year to $120 million.
E-commerce marketplaces continue to play a major role in how consumers buy goods online and how retailers show off and sell goods to those consumers, accounting globally for 47% of all e-commerce sales. But today, one of the startups that has built technology to help retailers build and run more direct relationships — by way of zippy websites of their own — is announcing a big round of growth funding, a sign that the marketplace model is not for everyone, and that those catering to those retailers are finding traction.
Shogun — a platform to help e-commerce businesses of all sizes built on platforms like Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce easily design and run their own responsive storefronts — has raised $67.5 million. This Series C values Shogun at $575 million, a “nice markup” on its previous valuation, said Finbarr Taylor, the company’s co-founder and CEO, in an interview.
He added that the capital will be used both to continue building out its two main products — Page Builder, a drag-and-drop page builder for Shopify merchants; and Shogun Frontend, an end-to-end headless commerce solution — as well as business development, and to build out new tech, specifically in areas like first-party data and personalization.
“We want to help companies build a destination where they can control the experience,” he said, comparing it to the physical world and the difference between Nike shoes sold at the brand’s own store versus at a big retailer like Walmart. “In a Nike store you can design an experience. In Walmart you cannot.”
Led by Insight Partners — a new investor in the startup — it also included Initialized Capital, Accel and VMG Partners. Accel led Shogun’s previous round — a $35 million Series B — announced less than a year ago, in October 2020. The startup has now raised $114.5 million.
The hike in valuation, and the rapid succession of its fundraises, are two signs of how Shogun has been doing in the last eight months — a time when e-commerce has continued to perform strongly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Another is the company’s actual growth based on the idea of making front-end tools that used to be cost-prohibitive into something affordable for even the smallest merchant.
One of the selling points for Shogun up to now has been that pages and sites built on its platform run fast: a very key detail in the world of e-commerce where shopping cart abandonment is rife and often hinges on how long people have to wait for something to load.
Page Builder — the mass-market, drag-and-drop site builder for those creating sites on top of Shopify — is now used by around 20,000 business, Taylor said, ranging from small startups through to Fortune 500 companies, with customers including brands like K-Swiss, Leesa, Rumpl, BeardBrand, MVMT and Fila. He said that merchants collectively are seeing GMV (gross merchandise value, or total amount sold) in the “billions of dollars” through their sites.
(For a point of reference, Shogun told me it had 15,000 customers back in October; growing 5,000 in the last eight months is the same amount of growth as last year.)
Shogun’s newer product, Frontend, designed for mid-market to enterprise customers and positioned as a “headless” solution aimed more at web designers and others building more customized experiences, now has hundreds of customers and grew . “Apple’s site is beautiful, but it cost millions to make,” Taylor said. “We want anyone to be able to build those exceptional e-commerce experiences.” Frontend has grown 10x in the last year, Taylor said.
GMV across all of Shogun’s business grew by 255% in the last two years.
The rise of services like Shogun’s underscores a swing we have seen among e-commerce companies that are looking for a more autonomy and control in how they engage with customers. Sites like Amazon have long been seen as a way to tap into a large population of shoppers, as well as solid fulfillment and shipping infrastructure to store, package, distribute and deliver products.
There has even been a sharp rise in “roll-up” plays like Thrasio to help consolidate merchants on these platforms to leverage even better economies of scale on details like marketing, customer analytics and manufacturing, which marketplaces like Amazon do not (yet?) handle.
But none of that still replaces the ability to set your own destiny.
Now, the rise of services like Shopify, BigCommerce and Spryker (also backed by Insight Partners) to help manage the backend; Stripe, PayPal and others to manage payments; and others like ShipBob to manage the logistics, have made it increasingly less difficult to build and run your own online experience. That takes on a stronger priority as your business grows, but even for smaller merchants, the idea of controlling your own customer experience is a compelling one.
Services like Shogun (and others like fit into that latter trend, such as Squarespace or Wix but also others like Duda), which give merchants the tools to build their own e-commerce experiences as they would like them to look, are the front ends for that strategy. Opting to take the “headless” commerce approach, apparently, is an increasing trend.
And that individualism is also where Shogun plans to double down and build more tools for its users, Taylor said.
“It’s all about direct relationships with customers,” he said, pointing out that newer changes in privacy regulation and cookies going away mean retailers can no longer rely on third-party platforms as they used to. “It’s about first party relationships. The future is way more personalized shopping online.”
That vision is also what interested investors.
“Our investment in Shogun underscores the market’s desire to see headless commerce become merchant-focused,” said Matt Gatto, managing director at Insight Ventures, in a statement. “More brands want to be able to build headless progressive web apps in a low-code environment. Those on the forefront of e-commerce want to enable web teams to build truly unique, memorable shopping experiences. Shogun is well positioned to make flexible frontends accessible to brands in a whole new way, and we’re excited to be a partner in this journey.”
