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China’s secret startup advantage: liquidity
This year’s rush of IPOs from Chinese tech companies has dominated headlines, but what’s more interesting is how quickly they got there.
Traditionally, “going public” represented the gratifying culmination of sleepless nights and missed birthdays that went into building a company. The peak of a lengthy climb, where founders and VCs would finally see the fruits of their labor.
However, Chinese companies appear to be reaching that peak much quicker than their American peers, heading to the public markets only a few years after initial venture investments, and often with little operating history.
Analyzing twenty of the most high profile Chinese tech IPOs this year, the average time from first venture investment to IPO was only around three to five years. Take e-commerce platform Pinduoduo, which pulled in $1.6 billion less than three years after its Series A. Or the recent IPO of EV-manufacturer NIO, which raised a billion dollars just three-and-a-half years after its Series A and having just delivered its first car in June.
China IPO data for 2018 compiled from NASDAQ, Pitchbook, and Crunchbase
That’s less than half the average 10-year timeline for venture-backed US tech companies that went public in 2018, including Dropbox, Eventbrite, and DocuSign, which all IPO’d more than a decade after their initial investments.
Differences in market maturity, government involvement, and support from large tech incumbents all undoubtedly play a factor, but the speed to liquidity for the Chinese companies is still astounding.
Faster liquidity can push cycle of returns, fundraising, reinvestment
Speed to liquidity is a critical metric for the health of a startup ecosystem. It creates a positive cycle where faster liquidity can drive faster fundraising, faster reinvestment, faster startup building, and faster public liquidity again. An accelerated cycle could be especially appealing for funds with LPs that require faster returns due to cash commitments or otherwise.
It’s important to note that venture returns are a function of capital and time, so quicker exits will also drive higher returns for the same amount invested. For example, a $1 million investment with a $5 million exit after ten years would generate an Internal Rate of Return (a commonly used metric to evaluate VC performance) of 20%. If the same exit occurred after five years, the IRR would be 50%.
Liquidity is a key consideration as China’s influence on the flow of global venture capital intensifies. As China’s tech ecosystem sees more of its darlings mature and more consistently deliver smashing exits, investments in China will have to be a more serious consideration for VCs, even if only to minimize the sheer amount of time, resources, and painstaking energy needed to build a company in the U.S.
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Meet the startups that pitched at EF’s 10th Demo Day in London
Entrepreneur First (EF), the company builder and “talent first” investor, held its tenth London Demo Day this afternoon. This time around the even had a decidedly more international bent as it combined pitches from the London and recently launched Berlin programs.
Once again, the pitches took place in front of a nearly overcapacity crowd at King’s Place in London’s King Cross area, and saw a 24 startups pitch their wares to investors, press and other actors in the European tech scene.
EF stands out from the many other demo days that the U.K. capital city hosts because of the way the investor backs individuals “pre-team, pre-idea” — meaning that the companies pitching only came into existence over the last 6 months and perhaps may never have done so without the founders bashing heads during the program.
Unusually, aside from the upstarts presenting on stage, there were no other EF announcements today, which is in stark contrast to most previous demo days. However, I’m hearing there could be some big EF news coming quite shortly and this is likely a case of EF lining up its PR ducks in a row and choosing to shoot them down one news opportunity at a time. Besides, the company builder has had more than its fair share of announcements over the last twelve months.
In addition to existing programs in London and Singapore, this year saw EF expand to Hong Kong and Paris, as well as Berlin. And almost exactly a year ago, EF announced a $12.4 million funding round led by Silicon Valley’s Greylock Partners, and that Greylock’s Reid Hoffman had joined the company builder’s board. The capital — to be used for operational purposes and separate from EF’s multiple investment funds — was raised to enable EF to scale its program in multiple tech startup/academic hubs around the world, and where it deemed the EF “secret sauce” can bring the most value.
Meanwhile, the themes for EF’s tenth London Demo Day continued to reflect the company builder’s focus on recruiting the best technical and domain expert talent — both recent graduates and also people already working at tech companies. They spanned AR headsets, “massive simulations,” genome sequencing, machine intelligence, and cryptocurrencies.
After tuning in to the live stream and enduring 24 rounds of ‘pitchlash’, my cursory 3 picks this time around are as follows:
With a mission to “empower people to build a new relationship with food, myLevels uses data from Continuous Glucose Monitors combined with its own Bayesian-based machine learning models to measure the impact that food has on an individual’s body and metabolism. This is because the effect different food has on a person’s blood sugar levels — and the sometimes horrible spike followed by craving — varies person by person, and until now it has been difficult to build a personalised understanding of this. Once you have that understanding it becomes easier to lose weight and increase higher energy levels and even concentration.
There’s gold in those microbiome, apparently. Juno Bio is “unlocking the potential of the microbiome” (bacteria that lives in our guts and other places, such as animals and soil), which the startup says has unprecedented potential to disrupt various industries such as the $195 billion fertiliser industry. More broadly, Juno Bio says there is an arms race for understanding and harnessing the information that microbiome hold. To that end, Juno Bio uses machine learning and state of the art bioinformatics to analyse and predict how best to manipulate microbiomes, significantly reducing the time and resources needed to improve their functionality.
Circuit Mind wants to use AI to automate the design of electronic circuits. The startup reckons that every year £40bn and 1.5bn hours are spent globally in “tedious and repetitive circuit board design” work, making building hardware even harder than it needs to be. To fix this, the company is building artificial intelligence that takes in the requirements for a circuit board and outputs the circuit board final design, ready for manufacture. “This means better circuits, designed orders of magnitude faster, at a fraction of the cost,” says Circuit Mind. Chalk this one up as another industry 4.0 play, of which EF already has a promising track record.
The full list of presenting teams (in their own words)
● Nodes & Links is taming the complexity of modern projects.
● CodeREG makes regulatory change in finance as simple as a software update.
● QFlow enables construction teams to track, analyse and respond to environmental
risks.
● Moonsift is the first platform for shoppers to create their own digital twin for product
discovery.
● Homewards is the next generation of home ownership.
● Popsure gives personalised insurance advice.
● Metomic is data privacy made simple.
● Teamflow unlocks the power of human intelligence in organisations to improve
productivity
● myLevels empowers people to build a new relationship with food.
● Phantasma Labs is helping self-driving cars understand humans better.
● Juno Bio is unlocking the potential of the microbiome.
● Magic Sandbox produces world class software engineers at scale.
● Faultless AI eliminates human error in manufacturing.
● Janus Genomics builds AI tools to enable biomedical data sharing while preserving
data privacy.
● Lumenora is the world’s first compact, high field-of-view Augmented Reality
headset.
● Donut enables increased crypto adoption through personalised portfolios. Fully
regulated.
● Juniper uses hybrid deep learning to empower oncologists.
● WILD AI empowers humans to reach their personal best through datalogy.
● Holotron unleashes the true potential of VR & humanoid robots.
● Data Hygge helps companies spot, prioritise and solve experience issues.
● Yo-Da is the personal data management platform making consumer data protection
quick, easy, and profitable.
● Insurami is removing friction in office space onboarding.
● Atlas ML is a development platform for machine learning.
● Circuit Mind is using AI to completely automate the design of electronic circuits.
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In-car commerce startup Cargo raises $22 million led by Founders Fund
Cargo, the startup that helps ridesharing drivers earn money by bringing the convenience store into their vehicles, has raised $22 million in a Series A round led by Founders Fund.
Additional investment came from Coatue Management, Aquiline Technology Growth and a number of high-profile entertainment, gaming and technology executives that include Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Twitch’s former CSO Colin Carrier, media investor Vivi Nevo, former NBA commissioner David Stern, Def Jam Records CEO Paul Rosenberg, Steve Aoki, Maria Shriver and Patrick and Christina Schwarzenegger.
To date, Cargo has raised $30 million in venture funding. As part of this latest round, Founders Fund partner Cyan Banister is joining the board.
Cargo provides qualified ridesharing drivers with free boxes filled with the kinds of goods you might find in a convenience store, including snacks and phone chargers. Riders can use Cargo’s mobile web menu on their smartphones (without downloading an app) to buy what they need. Cargo has previously partnered with Kellogg’s, Starbucks and Mars Wrigley Confectionery — companies looking for ways to market their goods to consumers.
“In just a few years, ridesharing has evolved from a niche service to an indispensable element of our global transportation system,” Banister said in a statement. “Founders Fund is excited to support Cargo in driving the next evolution: a better on-trip experience for riders and new revenue generating opportunities for drivers.”
The round follows Cargo’s partnership with Uber and an international licensing deal with Grab. The company, which was founded in 2017, has activated more than 12,000 drivers across 10 cities.
Cargo says it will use the capital to scale its business in the U.S. and internationally. It’s also working on new digital services — a development Banister eludes to — that will improve users on-trip experience. The strategic investments from gaming and entertainment executives is designed to help Cargo develop those digital services for riders.
“Our default behavior in an Uber is to shop, play games and listen to music on our phone. Riders have ordered more than two million products and today transact with us every five seconds,” Cargo founder and CEO Jeff Cripe said in a statement. “We brought riders instant commerce, now we’ll help them discover and enjoy games, music, and entertainment on one in-car platform.”
Existing Cargo investors participating in the round include CRCM Ventures, Rosecliff Ventures, Kellogg’s eighteen94 capital, RiverPark Ventures, and former Uber executives including Chief Business Officer Emil Michael, New York City General Manager Josh Mohrer and former West Coast General Manager William Barnes.
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Berkanan is a Bluetooth-powered group messaging app
A new messaging app is looking to give folks a way to communicate in situations with poor or no cellular connectivity.
Berkanan, founded by Zsombor Szabó, is a group messaging app that uses Bluetooth to send and receive messages. This means that Berkanan works in a plane, at a festival, camping, or anywhere else where cellular coverage is disappointing.
Imagine people on a plane asking each other for top movie recommendations from the in-flight entertainment system, or folks at a festival figuring out a rally point to meet up between sets. Public messages auto-delete after 24 hours.
Alongside group messaging, Berkanan also allows private one-to-one messaging, as well as audio calls placed over Bluetooth. The range for these calls and messages is about 50 meters, but if there are people between you and your intended recipient with the app installed, Berkanan can send messages further by going through other users devices.
Berkanan will also show users if they are getting closer or further away from the user they’re messaging with, without ever showing either person’s exact location.
Group chatting with strangers in your location might seem a bit icky at first glance, but group chatting with strangers is essentially the basis of Twitter. With Berkanan, however, a common location replaces the #topic.
Berkanan is entirely bootstrapped, but Szabo has implemented a somewhat unconventional method of generating revenue.
Inspired by games like Fortnite, which make money off of custom skins, dances, and other virtual items, Berkanan will charge users to edit their profile. When a user logs on, their profile will consist of the name they assigned to their iPhone and their profile picture will be their initials, similar to the iOS Contacts interface.
Users can pay to add their own profile picture and add a short bio to their profile.
To be clear, it’s already possible to send SMS via Bluetooth. But Berkanan offers a way to broadcast that message to everyone (with the app) in your location. Of course, user acquisition is critical for the app, which is why Szabó is considering ways for the enterprise to take advantage of the app.
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Rally Rd., the app that lets you invest in classic cars, raises $7M Series A
What happens when you bring together an entrepreneur, a product designer and an investment banker who all really love collector vehicles? You get Rally Rd., an app for buying and selling equity shares in classic cars.
Launched in 2016, the company’s SEC-compliant platform lets users purchase shares in Ferraris, Porsches, Lamborghinis and other classic models for as little as $50 per share. The company says it has 50,000 members that have invested millions. Currently, there are just 10 cars available to purchase stakes in, though Rally Rd. expects to have 100 available on the app by the end of 2019.
The New York-based startup has just closed its second round of funding, a $7 million Series A led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Anthemis Group, Social Leverage, WndrCo, Nas, Betterment co-founder Eli Broverman and Acorns co-founder Jeff Cruttenden. Earlier this year, it announced a $3 million seed round led by Columbus Nova.
Rally Rd.’s co-founders Chris Bruno and Rob Petrozzo told TechCrunch the crypto boom and bust really put digital asset investing in the mainstream, helping to bolster business that would have seemed pretty odd just a few years ago.
The pair plan to use the investment to open what they call a “live investing ecosystem,” a vehicle showroom where users can go to participate in initial car offerings in-person. The first will be in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, with other locations to follow in Los Angeles, South Florida and possibly Texas, where they have a strong user base.
“We want to create that Apple Store atmosphere where anyone can come in and learn about equity investing on the spot,” said Petrozzo, Rally Rd.’s chief product officer.
Through a subsidiary company, Rally Rd. purchases collector vehicles and holds the cars’ titles. The startup then hosts SEC-registered offerings, essentially an IPO for a car, where investors can buy one or more of 2,000 equity shares. The vehicles are registered for sale through a registered broker-dealer available in 32 states; the company is still working on obtaining licenses for the remaining 18 states.
Just like the regular stock market, after the initial offering, Rally Rd. holds regular trading windows for each vehicle where users can buy or sell their shares in an app-based secondary marketplace.
“They’ve literally recreated the NASDAQ or NYSE experience for these assets on the Rally Rd. platform,” Upfront partner Greg Bettinelli, who has joined Rally Rd.’s board of directors, told TechCrunch.
Bettinelli added that the reaction he has seen from Rally Rd. customers is similar to what he saw in the early days of the Amazon-acquired smart doorbell company Ring, mobile sneaker marketplace GOAT and ThredUp, an online consignment store that’s raised more than $125 million to date.
For now, Rally Rd. isn’t making money. They don’t take any management fees or share of the offering. Bruno says their plan to generate revenue is to adopt the Robinhood model and are building out a subscription service for those interested in premium access.
In early 2019, Rally Rd. expects to announce expansions into other verticals, including art and sports memorabilia. At some point, they plan to make the app available around the globe, beginning with Australia, Europe and Canada.
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Doctolib to open up telemedicine appointments
French startup Doctolib will take advantage of recent legal changes that will make telemedicine legal in France. Starting on January 1st, you’ll be able to book face-to-face appointments on Doctolib as well as remote appointments.
Doctolib is a marketplace with 60,000 practitioners using the platform to manage their calendars and let people book appointments through Doctolib’s website. Millions of people then browse Doctolib’s website and app to find practitioners and book appointments. Doctors pay a monthly fee to access Doctolib’s service.
While it’s still unclear how it’s going to work, Doctolib plans to tap its existing community of doctors to let them accept remote appointments too.
Doctolib is already testing the service with 500 practitioners. According to the legal framework, you won’t be able to hop on Doctolib, find an available doctor and start a video call with them.
The idea is that you don’t have to show up in person every time you need to see your doctor. Once in a while, a remote appointment is enough. That’s why you’ll only be able to book remote appointments with practitioners who know you already.
But the good news is that remote appointments will be reimbursed by the national healthcare system, just like any appointment. Details are still thin when it comes to the payment system and the communication platform.
In order to work on that new service, Doctolib plans to hire 150 engineers and open up a big office — the Health Tech Center. It’s not going to be limited to the Doctolib team as the company plans to invite officials, practitioners and more.
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Vinay Gupta to talk about Mattereum at Disrupt Berlin
Cryptocurrency speculation is over. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Vinay Gupta will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to talk about cool use cases that could make blockchain projects useful, beyond financial services.
Gupta worked on the initial release of Ethereum back in 2015. He contributed when it comes to project management. He then worked with the Consensys team on other cryptocurrency projects.
But he’s now 100 percent focused on his own project — Mattereum. As the name suggests, it’s all about bringing physical objects to the blockchain.
For instance, if you buy an expensive painting, you want to make sure that you sign a contract with the previous owner that says that you now own this painting.
Mattereum helps you set up self-executing smart contracts to transfer digital assets (including tokens that could prove the ownership of a painting).
But if you want to combine smart contracts with good old legal contracts, Mattereum has also worked on Ricardian contracts so that those contracts have a legal value. Finally, Mattereum also worked on a decentralized dispute resolution platform that can be enforced in a national court.
If you want to listen to Gupta talk about Mattereum himself, then you should come to Disrupt Berlin.
Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on November 29-30.
In addition to fireside chats and panels, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield Europe to win the highly coveted Battlefield cup.
Vinay Gupta
Founder, Mattereum Ltd.
Vinay Gupta is a technologist and policy analyst with a particular interest in how specific technologies can close or create new avenues for decision makers. This interest has taken him through cryptography, energy policy, defence, security, resilience and disaster management arenas.
He is the founder of Hexayurt.Capital, a fund which invests in creating the Internet of Agreements
. Mattereum is the first Internet of Agreements infrastructure project, bringing legally-enforceable smart contracts, and enabling the sale, lease, and transfer of physical property and legal rights.
He is known for his work on the hexayurt, a public domain disaster relief shelter designed to be build from commonly-available materials, and with Ethereum, a distributed network designed to handle smart contracts.
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YC grad The Lobby raises $1.2M to help job seekers break into Wall Street
Six months after completing Y Combinator’s 12-week accelerator program, The Lobby has closed a $1.2 million investment.
The startup connects job seekers to Wall Street bankers, venture capitalists and other finance “insiders” for advice and personalized career coaching. Founder and former investment banker Deepak Chhugani wants to help people who don’t come from elite backgrounds or have the network of an Ivy League graduate land high-profile finance roles.
“There’s a huge chunk of people that never get noticed,” Chhugani told TechCrunch. “The best opportunities are usually only privy to people that are from those wealthy networks.”
Chhugani, a Bentley University graduate who began his career at Merrill Lynch, believes he was only able to break into Wall Street because the firm had a hole in its Latin America M&A group and he’d grown up in Equador.
He and his other non-Ivy League friends who are or have been employed on Wall Street, in venture capital or private equity, are lucky, he says. Despite being perfectly able to succeed, many people of similar backgrounds have had no such luck navigating the finance job market.
“The Lobby is creating the real meritocracy that we tell ourselves the job market is –– or at least should be,” said Matt Mireles in a statement. Mireles, a scout investor at Social Capital, invested personally in the seed round alongside Y Combinator, Ataria Ventures, 37 Angels, former Travelocity CEO Carl Sparks and Columbia Business School’s chief innovation officer Angela Lee.
Using The Lobby, job seekers can connect with professionals over anonymous 30-minute phone calls. They can get the honest truth about what it’s like to work in finance, a sort-of real-life Glassdoor . Insiders, who are paid by The Lobby’s customers, can also give mock interviews and edit resumes.
As for the name, Chhugani says he can’t promise any of the startup’s customers a job, but he can promise to get them in the lobby.
“The ones who work really hard and deserve it will get up the stairs.”
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Farmer’s Fridge wants to make eating healthy food as easy as getting money from an ATM
Fast, healthy food is one of those concepts that just seems too good to be true. But Farmer’s Fridge, a Chicago-based startup that recently closed a $30 million Series C round led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, aims to make that a reality.
Farmer’s Fridge retrofits vending machines to serve up healthy foods — salads, sandwiches, granola, etc. — for people on the go, for anywhere from $5 to about $8. In order to ensure restaurant-quality food, Farmer’s Fridge has a chef on board who receives feedback from customers to constantly tweak the menu and the food. There’s also a large workforce in place to restock the food, which is prepared daily in Farmer’s Fridge’s kitchen, every morning. I tried the food while I was in Chicago, and I must admit that it was good. And this is coming from someone who generally dislikes salad.
While the amount of waste is low (about 5 percent left over) — thanks to its allocation algorithm that determines how much of each type of food to stock in each vending machine location — Farmer’s Fridge has a system in place to deliver leftover food to the Greater Chicago Food Depository, a food bank that works in partnership with 700 agencies, including soup kitchens, shelters and pantries.
“The hypothesis for the business is that it’s been done for ATMs, it’s been done for movies, and those things have nothing to do with each other. So the only connection would be that consumers generally want things that are faster and cheaper and more convenient, as long as they don’t have to sacrifice any quality from the experience,” Farmer’s Fridge founder and CEO Luke Saunders told me at the startup’s headquarters in Chicago.
Farmer’s Fridge founder and CEO Luke Saunders at the startup’s Chicago-based HQ
“So, renting a movie from a kiosk — there’s no difference,” he added. “It’s the same movie when you get home. With food, though, it was interesting because there’s a lot of businesses where the experience is supposedly the most important part, so ‘if you have really good service at a restaurant, could technology actually replace that experience’ was the core question of the business. Or is that an important sustained advantage for a restaurant versus our business model?”
So far, it’s been working. Since launching in 2013, Farmer’s Fridge has deployed 200 vending machines throughout Chicago and Milwaukee. Farmer’s Fridge vending machines can be found in airports, hospitals and in traditional retailers, like pharmacies, convenience stores and even the Amazon Go store in Chicago. Each location gets stocked at least five days a week, while the airport gets stocked seven days a week. Depending on the business partner, Farmer’s Fridge has a revenue model that ranges from subsidized accounts to revenue shares.
“Each vertical behaves really differently,” Saunders said. “In a hospital, they care more about having an amenity overnight for employees who don’t have access to a cafeteria than they do about profitability. At O’Hare International Airport, it’s a revenue share because of the traffic generated. For some retailers, it’s about the traffic Farmer’s Fridge brings to those places.”
The app is probably the least technologically interesting part about Farmer’s Fridge, but what it offers is an easy way to see where you can find a fridge, the inventory of said fridge and the ability to reserve food from that fridge ahead of time. The fridge itself is the real technological achievement. It’s an internet-connected device that runs firmware and features a graphical user interface and cloud infrastructure.
Next year, the plan is to expand regionally and launch in an additional region. In the nearer term, Farmer’s Fridge is expecting to grow from 130 employees today to about 200 by the end of next year.
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Stripe is now valued at $20B after raising another $245M led by Tiger Global
Payments startup Stripe has changed the landscape for how businesses can collect funds online by using a few lines of code, and today the company is announcing that it’s picked up more funding of its own. Stripe has raised $245 million, valuing the company at $20 billion.
This is a big jump on its previous round, two years ago, that valued it at $9 billion.
Led by Tiger Global Management, other new backers included DST Global and Sequoia, along with existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and Thrive Capital.
The company says it plans to use the funding to hire more people for what it describes as its “distributed global engineering team.” It now has hubs in San Francisco, Seattle and Dublin (its co-founders, John and Patrick Collison, hail from Ireland), and it’s also going to launch a new hub in Singapore.
Engineering has been at the heart of the company’s growth from the start, up to now. Recall the famous essay by Paul Graham about Stripe that served as a mantra of sorts for how startups should grow. Fast forward to today, and Stripe boasts that “all told, the company deployed more than 3,200 new versions of its core API over the past year.”
The funding underscores the continuing strong climate for raising money from private backers at increasingly staggering valuations. VCs and private equity firms have raised billions, and they are looking for fast-growing, promising startups where they can invest that money. A number of startups are foregoing, or delaying, going public in favor of staying private for longer, financed by them.
“We have no plans to go public,” said John Collison in an interview. “We’re fortunate to be in the position that the Stripe business is performing very well and the long-term opportunity is that we’re very optimistic to providing the richer stack to businesses. Strong businesses do not always tend to be dependent on outside funding.”
(Not all are following this route: a key competitor of Stripe’s, Adyen, had a very strong IPO debut earlier this year.)
Stripe itself is a prime target for VCs looking to park their money in fast-growing, outsized startups. The company says it now has “millions” of customers, including Google, Didi, Mindbody, Spotify and Uber. It is live in 130 markets for acceptance and 25 countries for originating the charges.
Carving a place out for itself as a faster, easier way to integrate payments infrastructure into websites and apps, by way of a few lines of code, Stripe’s pitch is that it replaces the more laborious, and often more expensive route, of working with banks and other payment providers in a complicated chain of players that includes gateway providers, credit card processors, merchant acquirers, specialized payment methods, wallets and more.
And although Amazon is one of the world’s biggest companies, and most retailers have a digital presence, e-commerce is still a relatively nascent area, with only about three percent of all transactions occurring online at a global average. That means a big opportunity for companies like Stripe, but also competitors like Adyen, PayPal and others.
“We believe in the contingency of progress,” said Stripe CEO and co-founder Patrick Collison, in a statement. “Better global payments infrastructure will increase economic output, encourage entrepreneurship and help upstarts compete with incumbents. By bringing Stripe into more markets and building out our capabilities for companies of all sizes, we hope to accelerate innovation around the world.” Stripe estimates there will be $4 trillion in online sales by 2020 globally.
While payments is Stripe’s bread and butter, the company has also been diversifying and now also includes Stripe Issuing, Stripe Terminal, fraud detection and potentially cash advances, among its various offerings. These help the company develop stronger ties with its customers, and also potentially increase its margins.
“No one else is going as deep as us on software and the technology stack as we are,” said co-founder and president John Collison.
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