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Noogata raises $12M seed round for its no-code enterprise AI platform
Noogata, a startup that offers a no-code AI solution for enterprises, today announced that it has raised a $12 million seed round led by Team8, with participation from Skylake Capital. The company, which was founded in 2019 and counts Colgate and PepsiCo among its customers, currently focuses on e-commerce, retail and financial services, but it notes that it will use the new funding to power its product development and expand into new industries.
The company’s platform offers a collection of what are essentially pre-built AI building blocks that enterprises can then connect to third-party tools like their data warehouse, Salesforce, Stripe and other data sources. An e-commerce retailer could use this to optimize its pricing, for example, thanks to recommendations from the Noogata platform, while a brick-and-mortar retailer could use it to plan which assortment to allocate to a given location.
Image Credits: Noogata
“We believe data teams are at the epicenter of digital transformation and that to drive impact, they need to be able to unlock the value of data. They need access to relevant, continuous and explainable insights and predictions that are reliable and up-to-date,” said Noogata co-founder and CEO Assaf Egozi. “Noogata unlocks the value of data by providing contextual, business-focused blocks that integrate seamlessly into enterprise data environments to generate actionable insights, predictions and recommendations. This empowers users to go far beyond traditional business intelligence by leveraging AI in their self-serve analytics as well as in their data solutions.”
Image Credits: Noogata
We’ve obviously seen a plethora of startups in this space lately. The proliferation of data — and the advent of data warehousing — means that most businesses now have the fuel to create machine learning-based predictions. What’s often lacking, though, is the talent. There’s still a shortage of data scientists and developers who can build these models from scratch, so it’s no surprise that we’re seeing more startups that are creating no-code/low-code services in this space. The well-funded Abacus.ai, for example, targets about the same market as Noogata.
“Noogata is perfectly positioned to address the significant market need for a best-in-class, no-code data analytics platform to drive decision-making,” writes Team8 managing partner Yuval Shachar. “The innovative platform replaces the need for internal build, which is complex and costly, or the use of out-of-the-box vendor solutions which are limited. The company’s ability to unlock the value of data through AI is a game-changer. Add to that a stellar founding team, and there is no doubt in my mind that Noogata will be enormously successful.”
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Cyware nabs $30M to help organizations detect and stop advanced cyberattacks
Malicious hacking has become a pernicious and dogged fact of life for more organizations, and it’s a threat that has seemingly grown more complicated and sophisticated over time. One effective approach to tackling that has been collaboration: not just applying an array of services to address the issue, but creating environments to help those building cybersecurity to work better together. Today one of the startups building tools to do just that is announcing a round of funding, underscoring the opportunity and its own growth within that.
Cyware, a New York startup that has created a platform for organizations to build and operate virtual “cyber fusion centers” — spaces for people to share threat intelligence, run end-to-end security automation and orchestrate and execute 360-degree threat responses — has picked up $30 million in funding, a Series B that it will use to continue growing its business.
The funding is being co-led by Advent International and Ten Eleven Ventures. Advent made some waves in the cybersecurity industry last year when it partnered with Crosspoint to acquire Forescout for $1.9 billion. Ten Eleven, meanwhile, is a VC that specializes in cybersecurity startups. Prelude Fund (the venture practice at Mercato Partners), Emerald Development Managers, Great Road Holdings and cloud security firm Zscaler — a mix of financial and strategic investors — also participated. Before this, the startup had raised around $13 million, and it is not disclosing its valuation.
The story of the last year in the world of business has been about how everything has gone online: people and their companies have been working remotely; consumers are browsing, buying and entertaining themselves over the internet and with apps. Digital is where all the traffic is.
Unsurprisingly that has also played out in the world of cybersecurity: the threat landscape has grown, and so cybersecurity responses have grown with them. Cyware said that in the last year it saw 120% year-over-year growth in annual recurring revenue — although it doesn’t disclose actual revenue figures. Its customers are a mix of large enterprises, but also those that both collaborate with others to manage cybersecurity, such as information sharing communities (ISACs), as well as organizations that manage cybersecurity on behalf of a number of others, such as managed security service providers and computer emergency response teams.
Although many might have in their heads a stereotype of a malicious hacker who sits alone in a darkened room with a determined look in his/her eye, the reality is more likely to be a collaboration between a number of people, providing tips, technology and threads that are developed, and so on. Cyware, in its focus on providing a platform for collaboration and creating operations centers, seems to take the same approach in what it has built, a platform to make collaborating easier and part of the solution.
It does so through security orchestration, automation and response (known as SOAR), used by teams to collaborate better and make more informed threat scoring, and to respond better to threat alerts. Indeed, a key part of the challenge for a lot of security services is that they cross multiple parts of organizations, including IT, compliance, trust and safety, and indeed security itself. One aim of Cyware is to create a platform for these all to meet and exchange information that could be helpful to others in one place.
“Over the past decade, security operations teams have had difficulty with trying to sift through copious amounts of threat data and lacked the humans’ role as part of their security orchestration strategies,” said Anuj Goel, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Cyware, in a statement. “Our goal with our Virtual Cyber Fusion platform is to help our customers unite their security teams to efficiently respond to high-priority threats by connecting the dots in their environments, and the momentum we’re experiencing is proof that we are executing on that mission. This Series B financing will help us continue to overdeliver for customers, expand our team, improve our platform and truly revolutionize how security operations and threat intelligence teams work together.”
Goel, who co-founded the company with CTO Akshat Jain, cut his teeth in a big security team, as head of global cyber strategy for Citi. He is also an advisor for the Centre for Strategic Cyberspace in London and has worked with other organizations on collaborative approaches to the problem and consequences of malicious hacking.
Investors will have not just been looking at the company’s growth, but also the list of customers — themselves also leaders in cyber — that are trusting Cyware.
“In our increasingly connected environment, companies of all sizes are demanding new and innovative cybersecurity solutions,” said Eric Noeth, principal, Advent International, in a statement. “Cyware’s early traction among leading enterprises and major ISACs reflects its unique ability to bring together all key security functions to seamlessly anticipate, contextualize and remediate threats. We look forward to drawing on our experience in this sector to help the talented Cyware team make its Virtual Cyber Fusion platform the gold standard technology for enterprises around the world.”
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Sherpa raises $8.5M to expand from conversational AI to B2B privacy-first federated learning services
Sherpa, a startup from Bilbao, Spain that was an early mover in building a voice-based digital assistant and predictive search for Spanish-speaking audiences, has raised some more funding to double down on a newer focus for the startup: building out privacy-first AI services for enterprise customers.
The company has closed $8.5 million, funding that Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, Sherpa’s founder and CEO, said it will be using to continue building out a privacy-focused machine learning platform based on a federated learning model alongside its existing conversational AI and search services. Early users of the service have included the Spanish public health services, which were using the platform to analyse information about COVID-19 cases to predict demand and capacity in emergency rooms around the country.
The funding is coming from Marcelo Gigliani, a managing partner at Apax Digital; Alex Cruz, the chairman of British Airways; and Spanish investment firms Mundi Ventures and Ekarpen. The funding is an extension to the $15 million Sherpa has already raised in a Series A. From what I understand, Sherpa is currently also raising a larger Series B.
The turn to building and commercializing federated learning services comes at a time when the conversational AI business found itself stalling.
Sherpa saw some early traction for its Spanish voice assistant, which first emerged at a time when efforts from Apple in the form of Siri, Amazon in the form of Alexa, and others hadn’t really made strong advances to address markets outside of those where English is spoken.
The service passed 5 million users as of 2019 — customers using its conversational AI and predictive search services include the Spanish media company Prisa, Volkswagen, Porsche and Samsung.
But as Uribe-Etxebarria describes it, while that assistant business is still chugging along, he came up against a difficult truth: the biggest players in English voice assistants eventually did add Spanish, and the conversational AI investments they would make over time would make it impossible for Sherpa to keep up in that market longer-term on its own.
“Unless we did a big deal with a company, we wouldn’t be able to compete against Amazon, Apple and others,” he said.
That led the company to start exploring other ways of applying its AI engine.
It came on to federated privacy, Uribe-Etxebarria said, when it started to look at how it might expand its predictive search services into productivity applications.
“A perfect assistant would be able to read emails and know which actions to take, but there are privacy issues around how to make that work,” Uribe-Etxebarria said. Someone suggested to him to look at federated learning as one way to “teach” its assistant to work with email. “We thought, if we put 20 people to work, we could build something to read and respond to emails.”
The platform that Sherpa built, Uribe-Etxebarria said, worked better than they had anticipated, and so a year later, the team decided that it could use it for more than just triaging email: it could be productized and sold to others as an engine for training machine learning models with more sensitive data in a more privacy-compliant way.
It’s not the only company pursuing this approach: TensorFlow from Google also uses federated learning, as does Fate (which includes cloud computing security experts from Tencent contributing to it), and PySyft, a federated learning open-source library.
Sherpa is working with several companies under NDAs in areas like healthcare, and Uribe-Etxebarria said it plans to announce customers in other areas like telecoms, retail and insurance in the near future.
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Gumroad wants to make equity crowdfunding mainstream
Gumroad, a startup that helps creators sell their work, is raising $6 million at a $100 million valuation. While $1 million of that total is reserved for AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant and Basecamp founder Jason Fried, the remaining $5 million is being raised with a twist: anyone willing to fork over at least $100 bucks can invest in the round.
Founded by Sahil Lavingia, Gumroad is using a new SEC regulation, passed today, that increases the maximum amount of money that can be raised in an equity crowdfunding campaign. Now, investors and founders can raise up to $5 million per year from crowdfunding, up from $1.07 million the year prior.
The increase might not turn heads in a world of $90+ billion valuations, but Lavingia thinks the new rules could revitalize a path to raising capital for venture capitalists and founders alike. Unaccredited investors — whether its users, friends or non-accredited investors — could become the new limited partners.
“If this works, startup founders will start to be able to go direct more frequently,” Lavingia said.
Despite venture capital growing as an asset class, alternative ways to raise are becoming increasingly popular to help founders maintain ownership and to access capital.
Up until this point, Gumroad has raised more than $8 million from investors, including Kleiner Perkins, First Round, Max Levchin and SV Angel, as well as others, since 2011. But today marks what Lavingia views as a long-term shift in how Gumroad raises capital. If all goes well, Gumroad will continue raising via crowdfunding on an annual basis until it goes public.
Now that companies can raise $5 million per year through crowdfunding, platforms like WeFunder, StartEngine, SeedInvest and Republic, which Lavingia is using, have a better chance to shake up the modern fundraise.
So far, Gumroad has raised $3.4 million of its $5 million goal across commitments from 3,458 investors. Investors in the crowdfund include part-time creators on Gumroad, Lavingia’s Twitter followers, YouTubers, as well as Figma founder Dylan Field and partners from VC firms. In order to promote a diversity of investors, Gumroad has capped total investments from individuals at $1,000 for the first few days.
The startup is giving up 6% of ownership as part of the financing event, and the investors will only receive equity stakes once the SAFE note turns into a round. This process could take a year, Lavingia said. The conversion round to make it happen could be an IPO, acquisition or $10 million priced round. The priced round will likely happen next year through a Reg A round, the annual limit of which is $75 million, the founder said.
The SAFE’s cap is placed at a present-day 3.5x revenue multiple. In 2020, Gumroad brought in $9.2 million in net revenue, up 87% from the year prior, generating $1.08 million in net profit, up 286% from the year prior.
Background
The new, higher crowdfunding investing cap has some downsides, according to institutional investors. A simple one is that it is an administrative burden to give hundreds of people equity in your company for a small amount of money. Another issue, one investor told TechCrunch, is that institutional investors are sometimes experts in investment areas, which is helpful in a way hundreds of smaller investors might not be. Finally, the max of crowdfunding is still $5 million a year, so the method may be less effective for later-stage companies like, say, Stripe, which needs traditional investors to buy in.
Despite these concerns, the recent Gumroad raise is a continuation of two trends of which Lavingia has been on the forefront: building in public and the democratization of venture capital. He livestreams every Gumroad board meeting through Clubhouse and Zoom, and shares business metrics that most private companies decline to report, such as revenue and profit. (In fact, I knew about this plan to raise months ago after reading one of his newsletters.)
Readers will also remember that Lavingia was one of the first people to use the AngelList platform to create a rolling fund, which uses a 506(c) SEC regulation that allows investors to publicly solicit investments on an ongoing basis. The move was met with controversy at first, since venture capital funds have historically been raised behind closed doors.
“People were upset at the rolling fund, so imagine when they see that you are cutting out the whole industry [of venture capital],” Lavingia said, referring to a conversation he had with AngelList’s Ravikant.
One thing to be wary of, Lavingia says, is the Testing the Waters dynamic. Under Reg CF and A+, startups are able to differentiate between offering and selling securities. Offering simply allows a founder to “test the waters” and see if interest is there for a crowdfunded round. Despite this guardrail, commitments aren’t capital. For example, a startup could get $1 million in commitments but wind up only raising $100,000, Lavingia said. The conversion rate for intended buys versus actual buys could leave some founders in a thorny spot.
His way for combating this is to be obvious about red flags and transparent, which is already in line with Gumroad’s thesis.
“I preceded this fundraise with a blog post that I’m the only person who works on Gumroad as an employee,” he said. “I want to scare off anyone who is like this is weird [from investing].”
Other than Lavingia, Backstage Capital’s Arlan Hamilton has used Republic to crowdfund her firm’s operating fees. Hamilton made history earlier this month when she raised $1 million in eight hours for her fund. Today, she similarly opened up investments in her firm in light of the new cap and has already closed $2.4 million.
When Hamilton spoke about the raise at TC Sessions: Justice, she said she expects another asset class to be born because venture is a “broken” and “old” system.
“I’ll probably pivot Backstage, we’ll find ways and we’ve already started,” she said. “If you look at our raise we did in the Republic, it didn’t exist the way we wanted it to exist, this ability to go to the crowd as a fund.”
2014: income <$10,000
2016: raised first $1.2M fund
2020: deployed first $1M “check”
2021: raised $1M in 8 hoursDon’t give up.
— Arlan
(@ArlanWasHere) March 15, 2021
“The way it starts is not by a normal person doing it,” Lavingia said. “It’s by someone who is at the tip of the spear, someone who has an interesting angle, and then it gets sort of democratized over time.”
The fact that a founder turned part-time venture capitalist is using crowdfunding to raise money for his own company is a meta headache on its own. But the founder sees this as an opportunity to make crowdfunding mainstream and an attractive asset class.
Long-term, a public crowdfunding round in startups could be just a small drop in a startup’s financing pre-exit, but one that could empower thousands of normal people to own startup equity for the first time.
“I’m basically trying to become a private-market Chamath,” he said, referring to the billionaire behind Social Capital credited with the recent boom in popularity around SPACs. “I want to build a huge brand associated with investing in private equities, startups, and having an army of people that I can use and wield in different ways.”
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Airtable is now valued at $5.77B with a fresh $270 million in Series E funding
Airtable, the no-code relational database that has amassed a customer base that spans 250,000 different organizations, has today announced the close of $270 million in Series E funding. The valuation comes out to $5.77 billion post-money, more than doubling its valuation from September, when it raised $185 million in Series D funding.
This latest round was led by Greenoaks Capital, with participation from WndrCo, as well as existing investors Caffeinated Capital, CRV and Thrive.
The company says it plans to use the funding to accelerate the development of its enterprise product and growing the team. Also of note: Founder and CEO Howie Liu told Forbes that he was approached by Greenoaks, rather than actively seeking funding.
Airtable is a relational database that many describe as a souped-up version of Excel or Google Sheets. Being such, and having the infrastructure to support an app ecosystem on top of that, means that this no-code tool can actually be used to write software. In other words, the use cases are nearly infinite, and so is the potential customer base.
Greenoaks Capital partner Neil Mehta basically said as much in the press release:
We believe Airtable is chasing a massive opportunity to become the ‘residual’ software platform for every bespoke and custom use case that is either performed manually today or structurally underserved by rigid third-party software. By equipping business users with fundamental software primitives that can be assembled together into powerful business applications, Airtable has become central to its users’ everyday workflows but at the same time is scalable and extensible enough to support incredibly complex enterprise use cases like ticketing, content management, and CRM.
Airtable has raised a total of $617 million since inception, according to Crunchbase.
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Genesis raises $45M to expand its fintech-focussed low-code platform to more verticals
Low-code and no-code tools have been a huge hit with enterprises keen to give their operations more of a tech boost, but often lack the resources to handle more complex integrations. Today, one of the startups that has been building low-code finance tools is announcing funding to tap into that trend and expand its business.
Genesis — which has to date primarily worked with financial services companies, giving non-technical employees the tools to create ways to monitor and manage real-time risk, high-frequency trades and other activities — has picked up $45 million. It plans to use the funding to bring the tools it has already built to a wider set of verticals that have some of the same needs to manage risk, compliance and other factors as finance — healthcare and manufacturing are two examples — as well as to continue building more into the stack.
This Series B includes a mix of financial investors along with strategic backers that speak to who already integrates with Genesis’ tools on their own platforms.
Led by Accel, it also includes participation from new backers GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Salesforce Ventures, in addition to existing investors Citi, Illuminate Financial and Tribeca Venture Partners, who also invested in this round. To give you an idea of who it works with, Citi, ING, London Clearing House and XP Investments are some of Genesis’ customers.
Originally conceived in 2012 in Brazil by a pair of British co-founders — Stephen Murphy (CEO) and James Harrison (CTO), who cut their teeth in the world of investment banking — Genesis had raised less than $5 million before this round, mostly bootstrapping its business and leaning on Murphy and Harrison’s existing relationships in the world of finance to grow its customer base.
Today, Murphy lives in and leads the business from Miami — where he moved from New York just as the COVID-19 pandemic was starting to gain steam last year — while James Harrison (CTO) leads part of the team based out of the U.K.
As you might imagine with so little funding before now for a company going on nine years old, Genesis was doing fine financially before this Series B, so the plan is to use the funding specifically to grow faster than it could have on its own steam. The startup is not disclosing its valuation with this round.
“We were not really fixated on valuation,” said Murphy in an interview, who said the funding came about after a number of VCs had approached the startup. “The most important thing is the future opportunity and where we could take the company with additional funding… this will help us hyper scale up.” He did note that the term sheets contained “some amazing numbers and multiples,” given the current interest in no-code and low-code technology.
Indeed, the vogue for no-code and low-code tech — other well-funded names in the crowded space include startups like Zapier, Airtable, Rows, Gyana, Bryter, Ushur, Creatio and EasySend, as well as significant launches from Google and Microsoft and other bigger players — is coming out of two trends colliding.
On one side, we’ve well and truly entered an era in enterprise technology — with the same trend playing out in consumer tech, too — where smart developers are taking sophisticated and complex services and putting “wrappers” around them by way of APIs and simpler (low- or no-code) interfaces, so that those sophisticated tools can in turn be integrated and implemented in more places. This saves needing to build or integrate that complexity from scratch and expands access to the processes within those wrappers.
On the other side, the thirst for tech knowledge has become well and truly mainstream and as a result is getting far more democratized. Working in a variety of applications, using different digital tools and devices and seeing the fruits of tech pay off are all second nature to today’s working world — whether or not you are a technologist. So it’s no surprise to see more proactive, non-technical people looking for more ways to get their hands on these tools themselves.
“You now have a whole citizen developer world, for example business analysts who understand the solution you want but might not know how to get there,” Murphy said. “We play to seasoned developers first but the investment will help us put more low-code and no-code tools into place to widen the tools out to them.”
Starting out in finance made sense not just because that was where the two founders had previously worked, but also because of the history of how different software tools were already being used. Specifically, he noted that the ubiquity of microservices — which themselves are collections of services as apps — laid the groundwork for more low-code. “We saw that if we could build a low-code entry point to microservices, that would be powerful.”
On top of that, investment banks, he said, have a history of wanting to build things themselves to tailor to their specific needs. “Buying off the shelf means you are at the mercy of the vendor,” he said. These factors made financial services companies very receptive to what Genesis was offering.
While a lot of the no/low-code players are coming at the concept with specific verticals in mind — no surprise, since different verticals have very specific use cases and needs — what’s interesting with Genesis is how the company is leveraging what it already knows about finance, and then looking at other industries that have similar demands, structures and rules.
Murphy said that Genesis will stay “very focused on financial markets for 2021” but that it’s identified a number of other verticals similar to it, and is actually already seeing some inbound interest from them.
“A number of people have already approached us from the world of healthcare,” he said, pointing out that these organizations, like financial services, face challenges around how to audit data and regulations around performing transactions. Manufacturing, meanwhile, has some parallels around the area of complex event processing similar to equity algorithmic trading, he said. (In short, this relates to how external events might trigger more transactions, not unlike how external factors affect manufacturing operations.)
The trend is one that analysts forecast will only grow in the coming years: Gartner, for example, says that by 2024, low-code platforms will account for no less than 65% of all app development activity.
“Low-code promises business users the autonomy to make their own technology usage and purchase decisions while enabling them to actually build their own applications without having to rely on IT,” said Andrei Brasoveanu, a partner at Accel, said in a statement. “By bringing one of the most transformative innovations in software development to financial services, Steve and the Genesis team are taking on a huge market of legacy vendors — and winning too — while delivering on the promise of low-code. The confidence they’ve gained from serving such large institutions is proof that there’s a real and urgent need for a purpose-built low-code solution for financial markets. We’re excited to partner with Genesis and support them in delivering this across the world.” Brasoveanu is joining the startup’s board with this round.
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DeepSee.ai raises $22.6M Series A for its AI-centric process automation platform
DeepSee.ai, a startup that helps enterprises use AI to automate line-of-business problems, today announced that it has raised a $22.6 million Series A funding round led by led by ForgePoint Capital. Previous investors AllegisCyber Capital and Signal Peak Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the Salt Lake City-based company’s total funding to date to $30.7 million.
The company argues that it offers enterprises a different take on process automation. The industry buzzword these days is “robotic process automation,” but DeepSee.ai argues that what it does is different. I describe its system as “knowledge process automation” (KPA). The company itself defines this as a system that “mines unstructured data, operationalizes AI-powered insights, and automates results into real-time action for the enterprise.” But the company also argues that today’s bots focus on basic task automation that doesn’t offer the kind of deeper insights that sophisticated machine learning models can bring to the table. The company also stresses that it doesn’t aim to replace knowledge workers but helps them leverage AI to turn into actionable insights the plethora of data that businesses now collect.
Image Credits: DeepSee.ai
“Executives are telling me they need business outcomes and not science projects,” writes DeepSee.ai CEO Steve Shillingford. “And today, the burgeoning frustration with most AI-centric deployments in large-scale enterprises is they look great in theory but largely fail in production. We think that’s because right now the current ‘AI approach’ lacks a holistic business context relevance. It’s unthinking, rigid and without the contextual input of subject-matter experts on the ground. We founded DeepSee to bridge the gap between powerful technology and line-of-business, with adaptable solutions that empower our customers to operationalize AI-powered automation — delivering faster, better and cheaper results for our users.”
To help businesses get started with the platform, DeepSee.ai offers three core tools. There’s DeepSee Assembler, which ingests unstructured data and gets it ready for labeling, model review and analysis. Then, DeepSee Atlas can use this data to train AI models that can understand a company’s business processes and help subject-matter experts define templates, rules and logic for automating a company’s internal processes. The third tool, DeepSee Advisor, meanwhile focuses on using text analysis to help companies better understand and evaluate their business processes.
Currently, the company’s focus is on providing these tools for insurance companies, the public sector and capital markets. In the insurance space, use cases include fraud detection, claims prediction and processing, and using large amounts of unstructured data to identify patterns in agent audits, for example.
That’s a relatively limited number of industries for a startup to operate in, but the company says it will use its new funding to accelerate product development and expand to new verticals.
“Using KPA, line-of-business executives can bridge data science and enterprise outcomes, operationalize AI/ML-powered automation at scale, and use predictive insights in real time to grow revenue, reduce cost and mitigate risk,” said Sean Cunningham, managing director of ForgePoint Capital. “As a leading cybersecurity investor, ForgePoint sees the daily security challenges around insider threat, data visibility and compliance. This investment in DeepSee accelerates the ability to reduce risk with business automation and delivers much-needed AI transparency required by customers for implementation.”
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TaxDown banks ~$3M for tech that helps people get their taxes done
Madrid-based TaxDown, which automates income tax filing by calculating regional deductions due to users so they don’t have to navigate complex tax rules themselves, has raised €2.4 million (~$3M) in seed funding.
US-based FJ Labs has joined TaxDown’s investment board as it closes the seed round. It says all its previous investors participated in the round, including James Argalas (Presidio Union); Abac Nest, Abac’s venture capital business; Baldomero Falcones, the former Chairman at Mastercard; and the founders of Jobandtalent, Juan Urdiales and Felipe Navío (another Madrid-based startup).
For the past three years TaxDown been offering a service in Spain but is now eyeing international expansion, as well as further growth in its home market.
Last year, it says it managed more than €29M in taxes for users — delivering savings of €4M+ to users.
Its target is to hit 500,000 users in Spain this year. While international expansion is planned for the second half of 2021, with TaxDown saying it’s focused on other European and Latin American markets.
“From the beginning, our ambition has been to help people fill in their taxes all over the world. That is why we developed our proprietary software/tax language that allows a tax expert with no coding capabilities to translate the tax law into calculation and logic that can be interpreted by our backend seamlessly,” says Enrique García, CEO and co-founder. “This tax language allowed us to launch in Spain in 4 months with only one tax consultant. We are confident that we can launch a new country in only 6 months.”
“The tax filing process is far from being simple,” he goes on, explaining how its tech simplifies income tax filing in Spain. “Currently, when using the Spanish Tax Agency tax-filling tool, taxpayers need to manually apply deductions on their tax forms. The problem is, with national regional deductions being different in each region in Spain, taxpayers often do not even know they’re entitled to those deductions. Thus, by not applying them to their tax form, they lose money. What TaxDown does is leverage the advanced Spanish Tax Agency technology, which offers an API to request the financial data related to a taxpayer — always with prior authorization from the user — with 2.000+ datapoints.
“Once we have that, our algorithm ‘RITA’ is capable of understanding the user’s personal and financial data, select the optimum questions that the user needs to answer — an average of 9 over a database of 3.000+ – and precisely calculate the tax return, with no errors.”
“Technology is the heart of TaxDown,” he adds. “Besides our algorithm RITA that has been trained with over 40.000+ tax returns, today we also use AI to help our ‘taxers’ with tips on how to lower future tax bills, and we have started working on live income tax simulation for our users throughout the entire year.”
García says TaxDown calculated more than 42,000 tax returns last year with a team of just two in-house tax experts — thanks to proprietary internal tools which allow them to handle this scale (by being “80x more efficient than the Spanish average”, as he puts it). He adds that further efficiency gains are expected.
“We have developed a machine-learning tool that flags the tax returns that need to be reviewed before filing based on historical data. Thus, we continuously increase the percentage of tax returns that are automatically submitted with no manual intervention,” he tells TechCrunch, adding: “Thanks to this feature, we expect to improve our efficiency at least 5x versus last year.”
According to García, TaxDown has never had any filings rejected for inaccuracies because he says its algorithms continually run tests and validate the information with the authorities. “Furthermore, our technology can flag errors in real time in case that there is a discrepancy, so our tax experts can manually check the tax return form if needed,” he adds.
Its business model — currently — is a sort of twist on freemium, in that it will only charge users if the income tax savings it calculates for them exceed €35.
García says that so far an average of three out of 10 users see financial savings from using its tool — but he suggests it’s not only savings that motivate users; he says they also want reassurance that they are taking “the best approach with their taxes: doing them effortlessly, correctly, with all the guarantees, tapping for experts’ live help at any time, ensuring the best result they can get, and of course knowing that we have their backs in case of an audit”.
Given that wider relationship it’s building with users, TaxDown sees potential to evolve its business model by expanding to offer additional fintech services, such as financial advice, in the future.
“Our vision goes far beyond income tax return preparation, we believe that tax data is becoming one of the most valuable data assets for people (take Trump’s tax returns for example), and we want to assess our ’taxers’ based on the best and more qualitative information that we can get,” says García. “Therefore, in the future we want to be a trusted financial advisor not just for taxes, but for personal finances as well. We believe we are well positioned to be an intermediary between our users and financial institutions.”
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Arist adds $2M to its seed round to grow its SMS-based training service
This morning Arist, a startup that sells software allowing other organizations to offer SMS-based training to staff, announced that it has extended its seed round to $3.9 million after adding $2 million to its prior raise.
TechCrunch has covered the company modestly before this seed-extension, noting that it was part of the CRV-backed Liftoff List, and reporting on some of its business details when it took part in a recent Y Combinator demo day.
Something that stood out in our notes on the company when it presented at the accelerator’s graduation event was its economics, with our piece noting that the startup “already [has] several big ticket clients and [says it] will soon be profitable.” Profitable is just not a word TechCrunch hears often when it comes to early-stage, high-growth companies.
So, when the company picked up more capital, we picked up the phone. TechCrunch spoke with the company’s founding team, including Maxine Anderson, the company’s current COO; Ryan Laverty, its president; and Michael Ioffe, its CEO, about its latest round.
According to the trio, Arist raised its initial $1.9 million around the time it left Y Combinator, a round that was led by Craft Ventures at a $15 million valuation. Following that early investment, the company’s business with large clients performed well, leading to it closing $2 million more last December. The founders said that the new funds were raised at a higher price-point than its previous seed tranche.
The second deal was led by Global Founders Capital.
The company’s enterprise adoption makes sense, as all large companies have regular training requirements for their workers; and as anyone who has worked for a megacorp knows, current training, while improved in recent years, is far from perfect. Arist is a bet that lots of corporate training — and the training that emanates from governments, nonprofits and the like — can be sliced into small pieces and ingested via text-message.
For that the company charges around $1,000 per month, minimum.
Arist did catch something of a COVID wave, with its founding team telling TechCrunch that pitching its service to large companies got easier after the pandemic hit. Many concerns better realized how busy their staff was when they moved to working from home, the trio explained, and with some folks suffering from limited internet connectivity, text-based training helped pick up slack.
We were also curious about how the startup onboards customers to the somewhat new text-based learning world; is there a steep learning curve to be managed? As it turns out, the startup helps new customers build their first course. And, in response to our question about the expense of that effort, the Arist crew said that they use freelancers for the task, keeping costs low.
Recently Arist has expanded its engineering staff, and plans to scale from around 11 people today to around 30 by the end of the year. And while Anderson, Laverty and Ioffe are based in Boston, they are hiring remotely. The startup serves global customers via a WhatsApp integration. So Arist should be able to scale its staff and customer base around the world effectively from birth. (This is the new normal, we reckon.)
What’s ahead? Arist wants to grow its revenues by 5x to 10x by the end of the year, hire, and might share if it wants to raise more capital around the end of the year.
Oh, and it partners with Twilio to some degree, though the group was coy on just what sort of discounts it may receive; the founding team merely noted that they liked the SMS giant and deferred further commentary.
All told, Arist is what we look for in an early-stage startup in terms of growth, vision and potential market scale — the startup thinks that 80% of training should be via SMS or Slack and Teams, the latter two of which are a hint about its product direction. But Arist feels a bit more mature financially than some of its peers, perhaps due to its price point. Regardless, we’ll check back in at the mid-point of the year and see how growth is ticking along at the company.
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DataGrail snares $30M Series B to help deal with privacy regulations
DataGrail, a startup that helps customers understand where their data lives in order to help comply with a growing body of privacy regulations, announced a $30 million Series B today.
Felicis Ventures led the round with help from Basis Set Ventures, Operator Collective and previous investors. One of the interesting aspects of this round was the participation from several strategic investors including HubSpot, Okta and Next47, the venture firm backed by Siemens. The company has now raised over $39 million, according to Crunchbase data.
That investor interest could stem from the fact that DataGrail helps organizations find data by building connectors to popular applications and then helps ensure that they are in compliance with customer privacy regulations such as GDPR, CCPA and similar laws.
“DataGrail [is really] the first integrated solution with over 900 integrations (up from 180 in 2019) to different apps and infrastructure platforms that allow the product to detect when new apps or new infrastructure platforms are added, and then also perform automated data discovery across those applications,” company CEO and co-founder Daniel Barber explained to me. This helps users find customer data wherever it lives and enables them to comply with legal requirements to manage and protect that data.
Victoria Treyger, general partner at lead investors Felicis Ventures says that one of the things that attracted her to DataGrail was that she had to help implement GDPR regulations at a previous venture and felt the pain first hand. She said that her firm tends to look for startups in large markets where the product or service being offered is a critical need, rather an option, and she believes that DataGrail is an example of that.
“I really liked the fact that privacy management is such a hard problem, and it is not optional. As a business, you have to manage privacy requests, which you may do manually or you may do it with a solution like DataGrail,” Treyger told me.
HubSpot’s Andrew Lindsay, who is SVP of corporate and business development, says his company is both a customer and an investor because DataGrail is helping HubSpot customers navigate the complexity of privacy regulation. “DataGrail’s unique ecosystem approach, where they are integrating with key Saas and business applications is an easy way for many of our joint customers to protect their customers’ privacy,” Lindsay said.
The company has 40 employees today with plans to grow to 90 or 100 by the end of this year. It’s worth noting that Treyger is joining the Board, which already has 3 other women. That shows shows a commitment to gender diversity at the board level that is not typical for startups.
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