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Toca Football raises $40 million to fuel its budding chain of giant soccer and entertainment facilities
Toca Football, a nine-year-old, Costa Mesa, Ca.-based company that operates 14 sports centers across the U.S. that are focused on soccer training, has raised $40 million in Series E funding to roughly double the number of facilities that are now up and running in the U.S., as well as to open a site in the U.K. that CEO Yoshi Maruyama describes as a “highly themed game-experiences-based dining and entertainment facility focused on soccer training.”
Maruyama knows a thing or two about building destinations to which people gravitate. Before joining Toca — which was founded by the American former soccer player Eddie Lewis (“toca” refers to the first touch of the ball in soccer) — Maruyama spent six years as the global head of location-based entertainment for Dreamworks. He spent 14 years before that as an SVP with Universal Parks & Resorts.
Indeed, he was brought into Toca in 2019 to transform it from a manufacturing business that sells Major League Soccer teams a ball-tossing machine that Lewis had developed, to the services business it has become.
On its face, its new model seems like a pretty smart one, given soccer’s growing popularity in the U.S. According to Statista, the number of participants in U.S. high school soccer programs recorded an all-time high in the 2018/19 season, with more than 850,000 playing the sport across the country.
But Toca isn’t built just for kids, even if kids — and their parents –are its primary customers. According to Maruyama, there are several populations that are coming to its various centers throughout the day. In the morning, the centers feature a curriculum for children up to age six to introduce them to soccer; the afternoons feature largely one-on-one soccer training programs where Toca is able to employ its touch trainer; and during the evenings, Toca operates a leagues business for both children and adults.
Some of the centers are huge, by the way. Among Toca’s newest sites, for example, in Naperville, Illinois, outside of Chicago, it has built a 95,000-square-foot facility that features four indoor, full-size soccer fields, as well as one-on-one individual training spaces. (Maruyama suggests the company has been able to take advantage of a depressed commercial real estate market over the last year or so.)
Little wonder that investors see a big opportunity potentially.
The newest round of funding for Toca comes from earlier investors WestRiver Group, RNS TOCA Partners, and D2 Futbol Investors; they were joined by new investors, including angel investor Jared Smith, the co-founder and former COO of Qualtrics.
The company — which plans to expand into Asia as quickly as possible (China has been mandated by the country’s leadership to become “a first-class football superpower” by 2050) — has now raised $105 million in total funding.
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Duolingo’s S-1 depicts heady growth, monetization, new focus on English certification
Duolingo filed to go public yesterday, giving the world a deep look inside its business results and how the pandemic impacted the edtech unicorn’s performance. TechCrunch’s initial read of the company’s filing was generally positive, noting that its growth was impressive and its losses modest; Duolingo recently began making money on an adjusted basis.
While the company’s top-level numbers are impressive, we want to go one level deeper to grow our understanding of the company beyond our EC-1.
Duolingo is likely entering a period in which it will have to invest heavily in features like pronunciation, efficacy and new apps — which could come at a steep upfront cost.
First, we’ll explore the growth of Duolingo’s total user base, how much money it makes per active user, and how effectively the company has managed to convert free users to paid products over time. The numbers will set us up to understand what else can be learned about Duolingo’s business beyond our original deep dive into the company’s finances — specifically underscoring the pressure cooker it finds itself in when looking for new revenue sources.
Starting with Duolingo’s growth in total active users, guess how fast they rose from 2019 to 2020. Hold that number in your head.
The actual numbers are as follows: In 2019, Duolingo closed the year with 27.3 million monthly active users (MAUs); it wrapped 2020 with 36.7 million MAUs. That’s a gain of 34%. If we narrow our gaze to Q1 2021 numbers compared to Q1 2020, we can see that Duolingo’s MAUs rose from 33.5 million to 39.9 million, or growth of around 19%.
The bulk of Duolingo’s growth, then, came in early 2020 when we consider its pandemic bump. Put more simply, the company scaled from 27.3 million MAUs at the end of 2019 to 33.5 million MAUs at the end of Q1 2020; from then, the company added 3.2 million more MAUs throughout 2020 and 6.4 million during the next four quarters.
Another lens through which to view the numbers is simply a recognition that first-quarter results at Duolingo appear to be stronger than results in the rest of the year, perhaps due to New Year’s resolutions to learn a new language or brush up on a second language learned in high school.
Next, let’s examine Duolingo’s monetization efforts regarding converting free users to paying users.
Here we can see a very different growth story. While the company’s MAUs rose 34% from 2019 to 2020, the company’s paying users rose from 900,000 at the end of 2019 to 1.6 million at the end of 2020. That is a far sharper gain of 84% on a year-over-year basis.
So, while Duolingo did see material user growth during 2020, it saw turbocharged expansion in the users it was able to shake revenue from. Improved monetization, more than acceleration in user growth, was the pandemic’s effect on Duolingo.
What can we see in the company’s more recent results? From Q1 2020 to Q1 2021, Duolingo’s paid subscribers rose from 1.1 million to 1.8 million, a gain of around 64%. That was a slower pace than the company managed more generally in 2020, which matches Duolingo’s slower revenue growth in Q1 2021 than it recorded in 2020.
The number is still strong, we think. But not as impressive as the more than 100% revenue expansion that the company put on the board last year.
In percentage terms, 3.3% of Duolingo’s MAUs were paid subscribers in 2019. That figure rose to 4.4% in 2020. And in Q1 2021, it reached 4.5%. Duolingo rounds that number to 5% in its S-1, which feels somewhat aggressive to us, given the somewhat modest pace at which the metric is improving. Here’s the wording:
As of March 31, 2021, approximately 5% of our monthly active users were paid subscribers of Duolingo Plus. Our paid subscriber penetration has increased steadily since we launched Duolingo Plus in 2017 and, combined with our user growth, has led to our revenue more than doubling every year since.
A gain of 0.1 percentage point in a quarter is growth, we suppose.
Next, let’s chat about revenue per MAU. To get consistent numbers, we’ll divide quarterly revenues by MAU figures from the same period. So, we’ll compare Q4 2019 revenue at Duolingo with its year-end MAU figure. We’ll do the same for 2020, and for Q1 2021 we’ll use both numbers from that period.
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Forum Brands raises $27M Series A as crowded Amazon roll-up space continues to heat up
The number of startups acquiring e-commerce businesses, especially those operating on Amazon, to grow and scale is increasing as more people than ever are shopping online.
The latest such startup to raise capital is Forum Brands, which today announced it has raised $27 million in equity funding for its technology-driven e-commerce acquisition platform.
Norwest Venture Partners led the round, which also included participation from existing backers NFX and Concrete Rose.
Brenton Howland, Ruben Amar and Alex Kopco founded New York-based Forum Brands last summer during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its self-proclaimed goal was to use data to innovate through acquisition.
“We’re buying what we think are A+ high-growth e-commerce businesses that sell predominantly on Amazon and are looking to build a portfolio of standalone businesses that are category leaders, on and off Amazon,” Howland said. “A source of inspiration for us is that we saw how consumer goods and services changed fundamentally for what we think is going to be for decades and decades to come, accelerating the shift toward digital.”
Forum Brands founding team. Image Credits: Forum Brands
Forum’s technology employs “advanced” algorithms and over 60 million data points to populate brand information into a central platform in real time, instantly scoring brands and generating accurate financial metrics.
The M&A team also uses data to contact brand owners “in just three clicks.” But Forum says it already knows which brands meet its acquisition criteria before ever making contact with brand owners.
“The decision to acquire comes within 48 hours and once terms are agreed upon, entrepreneurs get paid in 30 days or less for their brand, with additional income benefits through post-acquisition partnerships,” according to the company.
Its apps leverage analytics to push recommendations to drive growth and financial performance for brands. Then, its multichannel approaches aimed at positioning the brands for “long-term category leadership.”
“We are using a lot of data science and machine learning techniques to build technology that allows us to eventually operate efficiently a large portfolio of digital brands at scale,” Kopco said.
The company is undeterred by the increasingly crowded space based on the belief that the market opportunity is so huge, there’s plenty of room for multiple players.
“We are very much in the day zero consolidation of the e-commerce space, and the market is very, very large,” Amar told TechCrunch. “And based on our data, 98% or 99% of all sellers are still operating independently. So, this is not a winner-takes-all market. There will be multiple winners, and we’ve built a strategy to be one of these winners.”
Norwest Venture Partners’ Stew Campbell believes that the number of sellers who reach a point where they have trouble scaling either due to the lack of resources or time is only going to grow. And Forum Brands intends to capitalize on that.
“There’s a continued need for more liquidity options for the entrepreneurs behind many Amazon-first brands. Forum helps entrepreneurs recognize value, which can be significant too many,” he said. ”After acquisition, the Forum team drives operational efficiencies and scale to create better customer experiences for shoppers on Amazon.”
Campbell emphasizes that his firm was drawn to Forum Brands’ team, which the company also touts as a differentiator.
Co-founder and COO Kopco worked in a variety of product roles for several years at Amazon and Jon Derkits, Forum’s VP of brand growth, is also ex-Amazon. Overall, three-fourths of its operating team are former Amazonians. Co-CEO and co-founder Howland was an investor for two years at Cove Hill Partners and is a former McKinsey consultant. Prior to founding Forum, Co-CEO and co-founder Amar was a growth equity investor at TA Associates.
Campbell says his firm has seen many other models in this market, “but the Forum team blends long-term mindsets and focus on technology, while bringing operational and M&A expertise.”
If this all sounds familiar, it’s because TechCrunch also recently covered the raise of Acquco, which has a similar business model to that of Forum Brands and also involves former Amazon employees. In May, that startup raised $160 million in debt and equity to scale its business. Thrasio is another high-profile player in the space, and has raised $850 million in funding this year. Other startups that have recently attracted venture capital include Branded, which recently launched its own roll-up business on $150 million in funding, as well as Berlin Brands Group, SellerX, Heyday, Heroes and Perch. And, Valoreo, a Mexico City-based acquirer of e-commerce businesses, raised $50 million of equity and debt financing in a seed funding round announced in February.
Also, earlier this month, Moonshot Brands announced a $160 million debt and equity raise to “acquire high-performing Amazon third-party sellers and direct-to-consumer businesses on Shopify and WooCommerce with established brand equity.” That company says that since its founding in 2020, it has achieved a $30 million revenue run rate. Among its investors are Y Combinator, Joe Montana’s Liquid 2 Ventures and the founders of Hippo, Lambda School and Shift.
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Zoom to acquire German startup to bring real-time translation to meetings
As companies expand worldwide and meet online in tools like Zoom, the language barrier can be a real impediment to getting work done. Zoom announced that it intends to acquire German startup Karlsruhe Information Technology Solutions or Kites for short, to bring real-time machine-learning-based translation to the platform.
The companies did not share the terms of the deal, but with Kites, the company gets a team of top researchers, who can help enhance the machine-learning translation knowledge at the company. “Kites’ talented team of 12 research scientists will help Zoom’s engineering team advance the field of [machine translation] to improve meeting productivity and efficiency by providing multilanguage translation capabilities for Zoom users,” the company said in a statement.
The deal appears to be an acqui-hire as the company adds those 12 researchers to the Zoom engineering group. It intends to leave the team in place in Germany with plans to build a machine-learning translation R&D center with additional hires over time as the company puts more resources into this area.
While the Kites website reveals little about it other than an address, the company’s About page on LinkedIn indicates that the startup was founded in 2015 by two researchers who taught at Carnegie Mellon and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology with the goal of building machine-learning translation tooling.
“The Kites mission is to break down language barriers and make seamless cross-language interaction a reality of everyday life,” the LinkedIn overview stated. It claims to be among a handful of companies, including Google and Microsoft, to have developed “leading speech recognition and translation technologies,” which would suggest that Zoom has acquired some key technologies.
It does not appear the company had a commercial product, but the site does indicate that there is a machine-learning translation platform that is in use in academia and government. Regardless, the fruits of the company’s research will now belong to Zoom.
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Late-stage capital is having a ‘cascading effect’ on European VC activity
Capping off our dig into the early-stage venture capital market, we’re taking a quick look at Europe this morning. Previously, The Exchange tucked into the United States’ early-stage market for startup capital, uncovering startups using abundant seed capital to get more done before raising a Series A, while others were using pedigree, team and market size to accelerate their first lettered raise.
For both cohorts, it appeared that a rapid-fire Series B could be in the offing, with VCs looking to get capital into winners early.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
The Latin American venture capital market for early-stage startups had a number of similar hallmarks. That shouldn’t have been surprising. According to Seth Pierrepont, a partner at London-based Accel, “fundraising dynamics are now no longer U.S.- or European-specific — they’re global.” Fundraising over videoconferencing services like Zoom has done more than make geographical distances less impactful inside of countries — it’s even made national borders and even oceans less meaningful.
Is the European startup market similar to what we’ve seen in Latin America and the United States — a cognate for the North American venture capital scene, given its outsized global weight by round count and amount invested?
Largely, yes, a trend that appears to be shaking up prices and the talent wars. This morning, we’re taking a final look at the early-stage venture capital market, this time through a European lens, with an assist from a few investors from the continent.
An influx of late-stage capital
Broadly, early-stage venture capital rounds in Europe are happening “earlier and are larger in size,” according to Draper Esprit’s Vinoth Jayakumar, an investor based in London. The correlate of larger rounds being raised while startups are younger is valuation expansion, according to Jayakumar, who said that prices are going up “because larger rounds are very dilutive to founders if done at normal — or in this case too low — valuations.”
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Digital greeting card startup Givingli raises $3 million seed round
While the digital revolution has transformed nearly every social interaction and communication type in the past couple decades, the humble birthday card has shown surprising resiliency.
Givingli, a small LA-based startup with an app aiming to challenge how Gen Z sends digital greeting cards, is picking up some seed funding from investors betting on their philosophy around modern gifting. The startup has raised a $3 million seed round led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, while Snap’s Yellow Accelerator also participated in the raise.
The wife and husband co-founding team stumbled into the world of digital greetings and gifts after abandoning physical invitations for their wedding and exploring how the digital greetings space had and hadn’t evolved. They’ve taken a mobile-first approach to tackling greetings for special events and moments where users just want to let someone know they’re thinking of them.
Image Credits: Givingli
“Initially, we thought it would mainly be birthdays and categories like weddings, graduation, etc., and I think we just threw in some ‘just because’ cards, but then that became the most popular category, by far,” CEO Nicole Emrani Green tells TechCrunch. “I think that it’s what kicked off our virality, because obviously with every Givingli sent you’re pulling someone else in and then the conversation continues.”
The app monetizes through a $3.99 monthly premium subscription that gives users access to a greater variety of digital greeting designs from the more than 40 artists that the startup has licensed work from. Alongside paying for premium subscriptions, users can also shop for digital gift cards to send along with their greetings. Givingli’s gift card storefront has more than 150 brands available including Amazon, Spotify, Nike and DoorDash.
A big sell for Givingli’s offering has been its customization. Although users are pushed to select from the hundreds of available greeting cards, they can also spice them up by adding photos or videos in addition to writing text. The aim is to create a moment that rivals messages that can be shared via email, text or on social media services.
“For a generation of digitally native users, it’s not surprising that the ability to like, swipe, upvote or shoot a quick text from our phones have become the predominant ways we connect with others,” said Ohanian in a press release announcing the seed round. “What first attracted me to Givingli is that Nicole and Ben acutely understood this evolution and built a platform that provides the creative tools needed to elevate those interactions and deepen connections. Whether it’s sending a digital birthday gift, or a note just because — it’s clear that Givingli has put snail mail on notice.”
One of the team’s big challenges has been highlighting the visibility of their native app that users download to send greetings. Last fall, the Givingli team debuted a partnership with Snap that brought their gifting service inside Snapchat via a bite-sized Snap Mini app integration. The rollout followed the startup’s participation in Snap’s Yellow Accelerator program.
Emrani Green says that partnership has helped bring more users to their platform, and that more than 5 million people have used Givingli to send greetings since the app launched in 2019.
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Beeflow raises $8.3 million to save the bees AND put them to work
Bees are absolutely critical to the health of our agricultural system, ecosystem, and overall wellbeing as a species here on Earth. And yet bee populations are decreasing and extinction concerns are growing.
Beeflow, a startup that today announced the close of a $8.3 million Series A round, is looking to both save the bees and help farmers be more efficient and effective at the same time.
The startup uses proprietary scientific technology that essentially makes bees healthier, particularly in cold weather. A wealth of research led the company to understand that certain plant-based foods and molecules, when fed to the bees, can reduce the mortality rate of bees by up to 70 percent, and help them perform better in colder weather.
You might be wondering what I mean by performance. That’s fair.
Bees are the planet’s natural pollinators. They turn flowers into fruit, spreading pollen from one landing spot to another. Many farmers will ‘rent out’ bees from beekeepers to hang out on their farms and pollinate their plants. In almost every way, the effectiveness of this can’t be measured, and the bees themselves can’t truly be controlled.
Beeflow’s technology ensures that the bees are healthy and strong, and can fly up to 7x more during colder weather than they’d be able to without it. This means that those bees are much more likely to effectively and efficiently pollinate crops for the farmers.
Beyond reducing the mortality rate of bees, the company also offers a second product called ToBEE, which trains the bees to target a specific crop, such as blueberries or almonds.
Combined, these Beeflow products have increased crop yields for farmers up to 90 percent.
Beeflow’s business model is two-fold. They have their own bees that they loan out to farmers for pollination, and also work with beekeepers to bring them into the Beeflow network. Bee keepers do not pay for Beeflow’s technology, but do hand over the rights to their relationships with farmers.
The startup was founded by Matias Viel, who is from Argentina, and is mostly operational in Latin America and the West Coast of the U.S., with plans to expand to the East Coast and Mexico.
“The greatest challenge is operational and around execution,” said Viel. “There is so much demand and we need to scale our team and our operations now.”
The financing round was led by Ospraie Ag Science, with participation from Future Ventures’ Steve Jurvetson, Jeff Wilke, Vectr Ventures, SOSV’s IndieBio and Grid Exponential.
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Construction robotics company Toggle raises $8M
New York-based construction startup Toggle this morning announced that it has raised an $8 million Series A. The round was led by Tribeca Venture Partners and featured Blackhorn Ventures, Point72 Ventures, New York State and Twenty Seven Ventures. It follows a $3 million seed round raised in late-2019.
Robotics in general have been a massively popular investment target during the pandemic. Construction startups have also begun to heat up. Early this month, Dusty announced a $16.5 million raise for its Field Printer device.
Toggle automates an entirely different part of the construction process. The company’s robotics technology specifically targets rebar, using robotics to assemble the foundational building material at a fraction of the time.
“At a time when global construction is accelerating to an unprecedented pace, Toggle offers a way to add capacity while saving time and cost on some of the largest types of projects,” cofounder and CEO Daniel Blank said in a statement, “We are especially grateful for our partners who are helping us to bring new tools and approaches to the fundamental building block of our built environment with a focus on renewable energy and sustainable urban development.”
Toggle says the new round will go toward expanding production on the tech. That includes increasing headcount and upgrading the production space to a new 50,000 square foot facility.
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SaaS-focused Acceleprise rebrands, raises $30M in new capital
TechCrunch has covered Acceleprise several times over the years, including a look at its mid-2020 accelerator startup batch from its three accelerators. The firm has long focused on business-to-business SaaS startups, helping them get their start in a competitive global software market.
As of today, Acceleprise is now Forum Ventures, according to the group’s CEO and managing partner, Michael Cardamone, and it has a bushel of funds to power its work. And befitting its new name, the company is now more than merely a collection of software-focused accelerators.
In addition to a new, larger $17 million fund for its pre-seed work, Forum Ventures has also raised its first seed fund. The new seed vehicle totals $13.2 billion, with Cardamone telling TechCrunch that the group intends to write checks ranging from $100,000 to $650,000 into rounds valued between $1 million and $4 million. It’s an actual seed fund, in other words.
While it’s interesting that Forum has put together a seed fund that will invest both in its accelerator graduates and other SaaS companies, the firm’s new pre-seed investing vehicle is noticeably larger than its preceding accelerator fund. Why is it so much bigger? Per Cardamone, the group added a third accelerator since its last fund, helping explain the size shift.
The technology market is also simply more expensive in every way than it was, and Forum has expanded its staff, so more capital under management makes sense.
There is synergy between the pre-seed and seed funds, of course. Forum can now better defend early ownership in standout companies from its accelerator batches. But why keep the door open to investing in other startups that it didn’t help incubate? It comes back to the company’s new name, it turns out. Cardamone and the team chose Forum Ventures because of the work it has done to build a SaaS community that from time to time spins up companies that didn’t go through Forum’s programs, he said, and it wants to invest in some of them.
Reasonable.
Undergirding Forum’s new raise are results from its earlier funds. Its first accelerator fund, deployed from the end of 2014 through the next two years, has returned “86% of committed capital to date and the rest of the fund is marked at 3.36X and growing with 18 companies still live at various stages,” the firm shared in an email.
Funds 2 and 3 are a bit nascent yet to have similarly concrete returns; we’ll have to wait a bit to see how they perform.
But TechCrunch did want to know, regardless, what impact COVID-19 had on Forum and its various funds and batches. Did they catch a COVID-induced wave? We wondered if some good recent results may have helped the firm raise not only larger funds, but two of them at the same time.
According to Cardamone, the answer is somewhat. In its most recent pre-seed fund, the CEO said that its accelerator cohorts are seeing more startups raise faster seed and Series A rounds. And, as TechCrunch has written lately, they are, at times, raising Series A deals at lower ARR thresholds than we might have expected. So, it’s a good time to be putting pre-seed dollars to work, we reckon, provided that you have the deal flow.
Forum is now 11 people, including six women and one nonbinary individual. That’s about as diverse in gender terms as we’ve seen in the SaaS venture capital world. From its new seed fund, 53% of Forum’s investments have had a woman or otherwise underrepresented founder. Not bad.
Now let’s see if Forum can replicate its early accelerator returns with more capital, more financial vehicles and more people.
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Orum raises $56M to help speed up interbank transfers
Orum, which aims to speed up the amount of time it takes to transfer money between banks, announced today it has raised $56 million in a Series B round of funding.
Accel and Canapi Ventures co-led the round, which also included participation from existing backers Bain Capital Ventures, Inspired Capital, Homebrew, Acrew, Primary, Clocktower and Box Group. The financing comes barely three months after Orum announced a $21 million Series A, and brings its total raised to over $82 million.
Orum CEO Stephany Kirkpatrick launched the company in 2019 after working for several years at LearnVest, a personal finance site founded by Alexa von Tobel that was acquired by Northwestern Mutual in 2015 for an estimated $375 million. Tobel went on to form Inspired Capital, a venture capital firm that put money in Orum’s $5.2 million seed round last August. Prior to that, the firm also provided Orum with an “inspiration check” that was the first money into the business.
As a certified financial planner, Kirkpatrick says she saw firsthand what she describes as “deep cracks” in this country’s financial infrastructure. The fact that it takes days for money to move from one bank to another is not only inconvenient for many, but unnecessary, she believes.
“Most Americans are not familiar with the intricacies of ACH [automated clearing house) or why it takes multiple business days to move money between accounts,” Kirkpatrick said. “But none of us can allow money to wait 5-7 days to hit our accounts. It needs to be instant.”
Her mission with Orum is straightforward even if the technology behind it is complex. Put simply, Orum aims to use machine learning-backed APIs to “move money smartly across all payment rails, and in doing so, provide universal financial access.”
Orum’s first embeddable product, Foresight, launched in September of 2020. It’s an automated programming interface designed to give financial institutions a way to move money in real time. The platform uses machine learning and data science to predict when funds are available and to identify any potential risks. Its Momentum product “intelligently” routes funds across payments rails and is powered by banking providers JPMorgan Chase and Silicon Valley Bank.
“They power the back end of our Momentum platform that allows the money to move on a multirail basis,” Kirkpatrick told TechCrunch. “They power our access to real-time payments.”
Orum says it serves a range of enterprise partners, including Alloy, HM Bradley, First Horizon Bank and Zero Financial (which was recently acquired by Avant).
The volume of transactions being conducted with Orum is growing 100% month over month, Kirkpatrick said. Most of its early growth has come from word of mouth.
The remote-first company prides itself on diversity — in both its employee and investor base. For one, 48% of its 55-person headcount are female, and 48% are “nonwhite,” according to Kirkpatrick. Orum also recently joined the Cap Table Coalition — a partnership between high-growth startups and emerging investors who want to work to close the racial wealth gap — to allocate over 10% of its Series B round to underrepresented founders. For example, the financing includes investors such as the Neythri Features Fund, a group of South Asian women investing in the next generation of female founders and diverse teams.
Jeffrey Reitman, partner at Canapi Ventures (a firm whose LPs mostly consist of banks), told TechCrunch that those bank LPs conduct hundreds of millions of ACH transactions annually,
“They need a path to achieving a state where funds can be transferred instantly,” he said. “Orum’s product paves the path for many players in financial services and fintech — and beyond — to partake in faster money movement without compromising key risk principles.”
To Reitman, the company’s major differentiators are its team, which he describes as consisting of “the best group of data scientists and engineers in the space.”
“Many of their customers consider the team to be instrumental in helping to set the risk dials on how they fund transactions by teasing out key data and insights from historical transaction data,” he said. “Second, Orum is building one of the densest and most comprehensive data sets around the risks of money movement. Better data means better risk models, and it will be hard for other offerings to match Orum’s approach to building this rich data set.”
Accel Partner Sameer Gandhi, who joined Orum’s board as part of the latest financing, agrees. He believes that in an 18-month period, Orum has built “game-changing technology and an exceptional team.”
“Orum is tackling financial infrastructure from its foundation,” he said.
The headline was updated post-publication to reflect the correct funding amount.
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