Tech Blog - Page 620 of 2385 - 1010Computers | Computer Repair & IT Support1010Computers

IDnow pulls in $40M growth equity for its identity verification platform

Published October 28, 2019

Identity Verification-as-a-Service (“IVAAS”?!) is a pretty tortuous phrase. But it’s now established as a key tech area for the tech industry as startups like Onfido, Jumio and others have proved with large funding raises in the last few years. Verifying ID is now also a key part of the gig economy.

Joining them today is a German startup that first emerged in 2014. It has announced a $40 million growth equity investment from Corsair Capital LLC, a private equity firm focused on the financial and business services industries.

IDnow lets consumers verify their identity online, using their smartphone, tablet or webcam via image recognition of their ID document.

Andreas Bodczek, CEO of IDnow, commented: “IDnow is well-positioned to capture greater market share in Europe and beyond, as we continue to lead the way in the growing digital identity verification space.”

Raja Hadji-Touma, partner at Corsair Capital, said: “Our investment is the result of a thematic focus on businesses that address new requirements arising from the digitalization of many financial transactions and processes, such as security. ”

Following the closing of the transaction, Raja Hadji-Touma and Edward Wertheim, principal at Corsair, will join the IDnow board of directors.

IDnow was the first startup to come out of JET A, the holding company set up by the former founder of Amiando, Felix Haas, (who is also co-founder and executive chairman) and his Amiando co-founders, Sebastian Baerhold, Dennis von Ferenczy and Armin Bauer.

All-electric Mini Cooper SE priced starting at $29,900 in the US

Published October 28, 2019

The new all-electric Mini Cooper SE, the first Mini designed from the ground up as an electric car, is going to retail in the U.S. starting at $29,900 (plus an $850 Destination and Handling fee) — before any tax incentives are applied. That puts final pricing as low as around $17,900 when you consider federal and state tax incentives, plus additional benefits that EV owners gain in certain states, including access to lanes typically reserved for high-occupancy vehicles.

BMW Group-owned Mini unveiled the Mini Cooper SE back in July, marking the company’s first foray into the purely electric category. The car provides between 146 and 168 miles of range, which is not on par with vehicles like the Tesla Model 3 obviously, but which provides a decent amount of range for around-city commuting, at a price point that’s quite a bit under what Tesla’s sedan can match, even with incentives.

The Cooper SE can manage a 0-60 mph time of 6.9 seconds, which will probably feel plenty fast and fun, too. At the base price, it’s pretty well-appointed, too, with a 6.5-inch in-dash display and Apple CarPlay compatibility, heated front seats, cruise control, auto wipers and headlights, up to 50kW DC-based fast charging and more.

With home charging at up to 7.4 kW, the car can go from empty to full in as few as four hours, but that fast-charging at compatible charging stations will net you as much as 80% charge in as few as 35 minutes for when you’re on the road. If this sounds like a good mix, you’ll be able to start buying the Mini Cooper SE in the U.S. as soon as March 2020.

Less than 2 weeks left for early-bird savings to Disrupt Berlin 2019

Published October 28, 2019

Entrepreneurs, founders, investors and all startup fans in between — take heed. The days for saving serious dough on tickets to Disrupt Berlin 2019 are seriously numbered. Right now, early-bird pricing starts at €445 + VAT and, depending on the type of pass you purchase, you can save up to €500.

But this bird takes flight for parts unknown on 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST). Get serious, beat the deadline and save. Buy your early-bird pass to Disrupt Berlin.

Now that you have your pass, you can start planning how to take in as much of Disrupt Berlin as possible. Two programming-packed days will keep you engaged and on the move — check out the agenda to find out all the knowledge that will be dropped. They’ve done the work, reaped the rewards and they’ll be on hand to share their hard-won experiences and insight on crucial topics facing startups.

Speaking of crucial topics, Brexit is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. We’re thrilled to have three experts take the Main Stage to share their up-close-and-personal experiences. Don’t miss hearing from Bindi Karia, an investor with deep ties to Europe; Glenn Shoosmith, a founder who’s expanding his startup internationally; and Volker Hirsch, a VC born in Germany but currently living in the U.K. All three will examine the Brexit landscape and discuss how to make the right decisions in the face of chaotic obstacles.

Be sure to experience the glory that is Startup Battlefield. Cheer on 15-20 outstanding startups as they pitch and demo their creation to a discerning panel of veteran VCs and technologists. Who will claim the Disrupt cup and win the $50,000 prize? Be in the room where future unicorns are born.

One of the best ways to save time at Disrupt — and connect with the people who share your interests and goals — is to network using CrunchMatch. Our free business match-making service takes the hassle out of finding and meeting with the right people.

And one of the best places to connect is Startup Alley, our exhibition floor. That’s where you’ll find hundreds of early-stage startups displaying their tech and talent. Whether you’re a founder, investor, engineer or startupper of a different stripe, you’ll find potential customers, funders, collaborators — you name it. Startup Alley is a networker’s paradise.

There’s plenty more we could mention in detail: The Hackathon, Q&A Sessions, workshops. Bottom line? You’ll find nothing but opportunity at Disrupt Berlin 2019 on 11-12 December. But it’s time to get serious. Buy your early-bird pass before 8 November at 11:59 p.m. (CEST), and all that opportunity will cost you a whole lot less.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt Berlin 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Kandji announces $3.375M seed for sophisticated Apple MDM solution

Published October 28, 2019

Kandji, a new Apple MDM solution that promises to go far beyond Apple’s base MDM protocol and other solutions on the market, emerged from stealth today with a $3.375 million seed investment. The product is also publicly available for the first time starting today.

The round, which closed in March, was led by First Round Capital with help from Webb Investment Network, Lee Fixel, John Glynn and other unnamed investors.

Company co-founder and CEO Adam Pettit says the company’s founders have a deep knowledge in Apple. They all worked at Apple before leaving to run an Apple IT consultancy for more than 10 years.

He said that while they were at the consultancy, they developed a proprietary stack of tools to help with highly sophisticated Apple device deployments at large organizations, and it occurred to them that there was an unserved market opportunity to turn that knowledge into a new product.

Two years ago they sold the consultancy, took that knowledge and built Kandji from the ground up. Pettit says the new product gives customers access to a set of management tools that they would have charged six figures to implement at that their old firm.

One of the key differentiators between Kandji and other MDM solutions, or even Apple’s base MDM functionality, is a set of one-click compliance tools. “We’re the only product that has almost 200 of these one-click policy frameworks we call parameters. So an organization can go in and browse by compliance framework, or we have pre-built templates for companies that don’t necessarily have a specific compliance mandate in mind,” he said.

The parameters have all of the tools built-in to automatically deploy a set of policies related to a given compliance framework without having to go through and manually set all of those different switches yourself. On the flip side, if you want to get granular and create your own parameters, you can do that too.

He says one of the reasons he and his partners were willing to give up the big-dollar consultancy was because they saw a huge opportunity for firms that couldn’t afford those kind of services, but still had relatively large Apple device deployments. “I mean there’s a big need outside of just the specific kind of sophisticated compliance work we would do [at our previous firm]. We saw this big need in general for an Apple MDM solution like ours,” he said.

After selling their previous firm, the founders bootstrapped for a year while they developed the initial version of Kandji before seeking funding. Today, the company has 16 employees and a set of initial customers that have been testing the product.

Stealthy search startup Searchable.ai snags $2M seed

Published October 28, 2019

Searchable.ai wants to solve an old problem around search in the enterprise. The stealthy startup announced a $2 million seed round.

Defy Partners led the round with a slew of other participants, including Paul English, co-founder of Kayak; Wayne Chang, co-founder of Crashlytics; Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot; Jonathan Kraft, president and COO of the Kraft Group and the New England Patriots; MIT Prof. Edward Roberts; Eric Dobkin, founder and chairman emeritus of Goldman Sachs Global Equity Capital Markets; and Susquehanna International Group.

The prestigious group of investors saw that Searchable.ai is trying to solve a big problem around findability. Company co-founder Brian Shin says that knowledge workers have been struggling for years trying to find a way to better utilize all of the information that exists within an organization.

“The problem we’re really solving is that there are a trillion documents created every year in Microsoft Office, Google Docs, etc., and it’s really difficult if you’re a knowledge worker to find what you need in terms of either a document, an asset like a slide or worksheet within a document or the actual answer to a question that you have,” Shin said.

The questioning part could be particularly valuable because it lets you ask a natural language question and find a specific piece of information within a document, rather than just the document itself. “Let’s say you have a giant spreadsheet, you could actually ask a question of all your spreadsheets and find the atomic unit of knowledge that you’re actually looking for,” he said.

The product itself is not quite ready for the big reveal, but if it works as described, it will be a huge boost to knowledge workers who have continually struggled to find a nugget of information they know is out there across the myriad documents in an organization.

Shin is an experienced entrepreneur who has helped launch and sell three companies. He reports he has raised $100 million in venture capital and most recently has worked as a venture capitalist himself, but he saw this opportunity and decided to jump back into the development side of things.

He admits he’s giving up a lot to go back to the startup lifestyle, but he and his co-founders decided this was worth it. “You know the draw, the compulsion to do another startup is is really what this is about. So my three other colleagues and I have have all started companies before and we’re all giving up big jobs to do this, and I’m so excited about the team and the massive opportunity.”

He promised more details about the company and the solution would be coming early next year.

Meet Utah’s next unicorn

Published October 27, 2019

Weave, a developer of patient communications software focused on the dental and optometry market, was the first Utah-headquartered company to graduate from Y Combinator in 2014. Now, it’s poised to enter a small but growing class startups in the ‘Silicon Slopes’ to garner ‘unicorn’ status.

The business announced a $70 million Series D last week at a valuation of $970 million. Tiger Global Management led the round, with participation from existing backers Catalyst Investors, Bessemer Venture Partners, Crosslink Capital, Pelion Venture Partners and LeadEdge Capital.

The company was founded in 2011 and fully bootstrapped until enrolling in the Silicon Valley accelerator program five years ago. Since then, it’s raised a total of $156 million in private funding, tripling its valuation with the latest infusion of capital.

Weave

“Our aim with this funding round is to exceed our customers’ expectations at every touchpoint, investing heavily in the products we create, the markets we serve and the overall customer experience we provide,” Weave co-founder and chief executive officer Brandon Rodman said in a statement. “We will continue to invest in our customers, our products and our people to build a solid, sustainable, and scalable business.”

Weave charges its customers, small and medium-sized businesses, upwards of $500 per month for access to its Voice Over IP-based unified communications service. Rodman previously launched a scheduling service for dentists and realized the opportunity to integrate texting, phone service, fax and reviews to facilitate the patient-provider relationship.

While his second effort, Weave, has long been targeting the dentistry and optometry market, Rodman told Venture Beat last year the opportunities for the company are endless: “Ultimately, if a business needs to communicate with their customer, we see that as a possible future customer of Weave.”

Based in Lehi, Weave added 250 employees this year with total headcount now reaching 550. The company claims to have doubled its revenue in 2018, too. While we don’t have any real insight into its financials, given the interest it’s garnered amongst Bay Area investors, we’re guessings it’s posting some pretty attractive numbers.

“Weave has some of the best retention numbers we’ve ever seen for an SMB SaaS company,” Catalyst partner Tyler Newton said in a statement. “We’re continually impressed by their accelerated growth and results.”

Utah’s Divvy raises $200M to eliminate expense reports

Startups Weekly: SoftBank is screwing up

Published October 26, 2019

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about All Raise’s expansion, Uber the TV show and the unicorn from down under.

Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here.

The SoftBank saga

According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, SoftBank plans to take a more conservative approach as it begins deploying capital from Vision Fund II. Why? The Japanese mega-fund’s track record is less than stellar. Not only has it lost billions on WeWork, but several of its other portfolio companies are suffering through layoffs, mismanagement and more.

Fair.com, a startup building a flexible car ownership business that is valued at $1.2 billion — backed by some $500 million in equity from SoftBank and others, plus billions more dollars in debt funding — said this week that it will be laying off 40% of its staff. On top of this, it’s removing its CFO, Tyler Painter, the brother of the CEO and co-founder (and car business veteran) Scott Painter. He’s being replaced in the interim by Kirk Shryoc. Read more from TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden.

WeWork, the co-working giant we’re all too familiar with at this point, has benefited from $18.5 billion from SoftBank, according to Marcelo Claure, a SoftBank executive who’s speech to WeWork employees was leaked to Recode this week. “We have guaranteed the future of WeWork, but more importantly is we’re putting the future back into our hands. There’s no more days needed to go fundraising …The size of the commitment that SoftBank has made to this company in the past and now is $18.5 billion. To put the things in context, that is bigger than the GDP of my country where I came from. That’s a country where there’s 11 million people.” Now nearly every single WeWork investor, particularly SoftBank, is entirely under water.

There’s more where that came from. Brandless, another … star of SoftBank’s portfolio, has struggled greatly with layoffs and a CEO shake-up, according to The Information. The dog-walking startup Wag raised $300 million from SoftBank, has also endured layoffs and management changes, and has failed to protect the safety of its pets, per this great report from CNN. And Compass, a real estate unicorn, has lost its CFO, CMO and CTO in what’s been labeled “Another SoftBank-Fueled Real Estate Exodus.”

BERLIN, GERMANY – DECEMBER 05: Clue Co-founder & CEO Ida Tin talks at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2017 at Arena Berlin on December 4, 2017 in (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch,)

Meet me in Berlin

The TechCrunch team is heading to Berlin again this year for our annual event, TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, which brings together entrepreneurs and investors from across the globe. We announced the agenda this week, with leading founders including Away’s Jen Rubio and UiPath’s Daniel Dines on tap for great talks. Take a look at the full agenda.

I will be there to interview a bunch of venture capitalists, who will give tips on how to raise your first euros. Buy tickets to the event here.

VC deals

Equity

This week, Alex was remote and I was in studio to chat about a new angel fund, the WeWork saga and Lime’s losses. Listen to the latest episode here.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on iTunes, Overcast and all the casts.

Startup Spotlight

Bespoke Financial wants to provide cannabis businesses with the same kind of financial services that other businesses get, but that dispensaries and growers can’t yet access.

The regulations around cannabis operations are so stringent at the local level — and so nebulous at the federal level — that national banks won’t give businesses in the cannabis industry the same basic services (like short-term loans).

That’s why one former Goldman Sachs banker has partnered with two entrepreneurs from the traditional agriculture industry to create Bespoke Financial. And it’s why the company has raised $7 million in financing led by Casa Verde Capital — the investment firm launched by legendary cannabis aficionado, Calvin Broadus (AKA Snoop Dogg). Read more by TechCrunch’s Jon Shieber here.

Tesla’s new Solar Roof costs less than a new roof plus solar panels, aims for install rate of 1K per week

Published October 25, 2019

Tesla has launched the third iteration of its solar roof tile for residential home use, which it officially detailed in a blog post on Friday and in a call with media. Tesla CEO Elon Musk kicked off the call with some explanatory remarks on the V3 Solar Roof, and then took a number of questions. The company says it’ll begin installations in the coming weeks (Musk says some installations have already begun) and that it hopes to ramp production to as many as 1,000 new roofs per week.

Tesla’s solar roof tiles — which are designed to look just like normal roof tiles when installed on a house, while doubling as solar panels to generate power — are something of a work-in-progress. The company is still tinkering with the product three years after announcing the concept, having done trial installations with two different iterations so far. “Versions one and two we were still figuring things out,” said Elon Musk on an earnings call earlier this week, adding that he thinks “version three is finally ready for the big time.”

Tesla’s Solar Roof website now includes a pricing estimator, which lists $42,500 as the total price for the average 2,000 square-foot home, with 10kW solar panels. It also lists $33,950 as the price after an $8,550 federal tax incentive. You can also enter your address and get an updated estimate that takes into account local costs and incentives, and add on any Powerwalls (with three as the default for a 2,000 square-foot roof).

“The solarglass roof is not going to make financial sense for somebody who has a relatively new roof, because this is itself a roof, that has integrated solar power generation,” Musk explained. He went on to note that Tesla has managed with this version three product to achieve a price point that is “less than what the average roof costs, plus the solar panels” that you would add on top of said roof.

“Figuring out how to install it effectively is very non-trivial. And we’re actually going to have […] ‘installathons,’ ” Musk said, which will pit two teams against each other to see who can roof one of two similar-sized/designed roofs faster. Musk reiterated later that there’s “quite a bit of R&D just in the installation process itself.”

Musk also said that while it’s hiring and training specialized installers at first, the plan is to ultimately expand installations to any third-party contractors as well. On the call, he and the Tesla team discussed how they focused on getting the installation time down to where it’s faster than installing traditional shingles, plus solar panels on top of that. Musk added that his ultimate goal is to install the solar glass tiles even faster than comparative shingles. This is a significant change from version two of the solar roof, Musk later said.

“We’re doing installations as fast as we possibly can, starting in the next few weeks,” Musk said about availability, adding that the goal is to “get to 1,000 roofs per week” sometime in “the next several months.”

A report from CNBC from September 2018 found that Tesla still hadn’t performed many actual installations of its solar roof tile, despite the two-year gap between announcement and the date of their investigation, and a January announcement about the initiation of solar roof tile production at Tesla’s Buffalo-based Gigafactory. During the company’s annual general shareholder meeting in June, Musk said that the third iteration of the tile was being worked on, and while he didn’t detail the actual number of installations, he did say that they were in progress in eight different states across the U.S. at that point.

Musk addressed some of the production delays to date, addressing the installation complexity of previous generations, but also citing the Tesla Model 3 production ramp, which he said “really stripped resources from solar for a year or a year-and-a-half.” Now that Model 3 production is in a good place, Musk said that that has unblocked significantly some of the company’s ability to focus on this challenge.

The total addressable market that Musk sees for this product is somewhere on the order of 100 million houses worldwide, and Musk stressed that the company does indeed intend to make this available worldwide.

While at launch there will be only one available look for the Solar Roof, the Tesla CEO also said that the company will roll out additional variants as quickly as it can, including tiles that resemble clay and other alternatives.

The tiles and roof installation carry a warranty of 25 years, which includes their protective weatherization (including 130 MPH wind resistance) and their power generation capability. On balance, the Solar Roof provides more energy generation than a similarly sized roof retrofitted with traditional tiles, though individually, the tile’s power-gathering cells themselves are less energy-efficient than a traditional solar cell. The Solar Roof is better performing, however, because it covers more surface area of a home.

Here’s where top gaming VCs are looking for startup opportunities

Published October 25, 2019

With cross-platform experiences like Fortnite and PUBG, in-game socializing environments, and subscription-based cloud gaming services from Playstation, Google, Amazon, and others, the gaming industry is entering a new era beyond mobile.

These days, the industry is at the center of social media and entertainment trends; gaming is expected to earn $152 billion in global revenue this year, up 9.6% year over year.

Given my recent writing on Unity, the most-used game engine, and ongoing research into interactive media trends, I wanted to find out how top gaming-focused VCs are assessing the market right now. I asked ten of them to share which trends they are most excited about when it comes to finding investment opportunities:

David Gardner, Partner at London Venture Partners
Henric Suuronen, Partner at Play Ventures
Samuli Syvähuoko, Partner at Sisu Game Ventures
Jay Chi, Partner at Makers Fund
Peter Levin, Managing Director at Griffin Gaming Partners
Gigi Levy-Weiss, Partner at NFX
Ethan Kurzweil, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners
Jonathan Lai, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz
Blake Robbins, Partner at Ludlow Ventures
Jon Goldman, General Partner at GC Tracker & Board Partner at Greycroft Partners

Amid the mix of predictions, there were several common threads, such as optimism about the rise of games as broader social platforms, opportunities to invest directly in new studios, and skepticism about near-term investments in augmented or virtual reality and blockchain.

Here are their responses.

David Gardner, Partner at London Venture Partners

“PC Games are back. Great place to start new IP to then migrate a success to multiple platforms. There is more innovation in business models and more open distribution on PC to facilitate audience growth without the punishment of mobile CPIs.

VR & AR remain out. We stood away from VR in the beginning and extend that to AR while the user experience for games remains a disappointment. Let’s hope those new Apple glasses do the trick!

Crypto remain a theological war zone, but honestly everything on offer has been available in the cloud world, but the real consumer benefit isn’t showing up.

We love games that are expanding audience demographics and are sensitive to less hardcore audiences. For example, women players are estimated to account for 1 billion gamers.”

Henric Suuronen, Partner at Play Ventures

“At Play Ventures, we believe we have just entered the golden era of mobile gaming. Who would have believed 10 years ago that Nintendo and games like Fortnite and Call of Duty would all be on mobile. Mobile is not just a games platform anymore, it is THE games platform of choice for casual and core players alike. Consequently, in the next 2-3 years we will invest in 30-40 mobile games studios across the globe.”

Samuli Syvähuoko, Partner at Sisu Game Ventures

“We at Sisu Game Ventures have been investing in many sectors since 2015 including free-to-play mobile games (especially big here in Finland), VR, AR, PC, console, instant messenger, hypercasual, audio and most recently cloud-native games as well. In addition to game studios, around a third of our investments are into games related tech/infrastructure.

We’ve so far not dipped our toes into blockchain or eSports and our appetite for doing more investments in VR and AR is nil. To me, the most interesting mega trends lie with the promise of cloud gaming when utilized to its full potential. Another term that encapsulates my excitement is games-as-a-social-hobby. Put this and the extreme accessibility of the cloud together and you’ll have a game with revolutionary potential.”

Jay Chi, Partner at Makers Fund

“We are looking closely at ‘Gaming as Media’ related content and platforms — the emergence of new interactive experience centered on ‘viewers as participants.’ Gaming as social media falls under this thesis. We are also looking for MMO and Metaverse enablers given increased demand for specialized, scalable and affordable technologies that empower lean startup teams to create and operate large-scale worlds and novel gameplays.

We also see potential for new start-ups to emerge in hypercasual games with midcore/social meta — no one has truly cracked this genre yet.”

Meet Bespoke Financial, a lender for cannabis companies backed by Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde Capital

Published October 25, 2019

Bespoke Financial wants to provide cannabis businesses with the same kind of financial services that other businesses get, but that dispensaries and growers can’t yet access.

In some ways, George Mancheril is the new face of the cannabis business. The former banker hails from Goldman Sachs and Guggenheim Partners and worked on the desks that dealt with alternative lending.

A transplant to Los Angeles roughly six years ago, Mancheril says he saw the migration of legally sanctioned cannabis begin for recreational use and knew there would be opportunities for new lending businesses.

“Cannabis will become a broad, mature industry just like any other, and if that is going to happen, there needs to be a debt structure that can support that,” Mancheril says.

The biggest impediment to the industry’s growth is the one that Bespoke Financial wants to tackle first — and that’s access to debt.

To build the company’s first product, Mancheril looked to his co-founder’s Pablo Borquez-Schwarzbeck and Benjamin Dusastre. Borquez-Schwarzbeck and Dusastre previously launched ProducePay, a fintech platform focused on produce farmers that has financed roughly $2 billion in perishable commodities throughout 13 countries. It’s backed by around $200 million in venture capital and debt financing.

What Mancheril and his co-founders have done is take ProducePay’s underwriting model and apply it to the cannabis industry. The financial instrument that they’re starting with is known “in the business” as factoring.

It’s basically advancing money to businesses for a contract that’s signed in exchange for a cut of the money once a company gets paid for the goods or services they’ve rendered.

“While the US legal cannabis market is forecasted to grow over 20% annually, reaching $23B by 2022, the industry’s true growth potential is limited by long cash flow cycles throughout the supply chain and a lack of scalable and efficient capital sources,” says Bespoke Financial co-founder and chief executive, George Mancheril, in a statement. “Our approach will dramatically improve cash flow cycles across the supply chain and provide scalable working capital to fuel our clients’ growth.”

The $7 million infusion from investors, including Casa Verde, Greenhouse Capital Partners and Outbound Ventures, will be used to build out the company’s business and establish its first credit lines with customers. Mancheril says it already has around $3 million worth of loans revolving through its business. Right now, the company is focused on California, but says it could expand to other regions that are embracing legalization.

“In general, in the cannabis industry overall, it’s difficult to access any part of the financial system,” says Karan Wadhera, a managing director at Casa Verde. “Now that we’re moving into a place where equity financing is getting expensive, a company like Bespoke plays an important and valuable role in the ecosystem to help young brands and mature brands get access to working capital when they need it the most.”