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The team behind Cortado Ventures thinks there’s plenty of untapped investment opportunity in the Midwest. To change that, it’s raised $20 million in what appears to be Okalhoma’s largest venture fund to date.
The firm is led by partners Nathaniel Harding, David Woods and Mike Moradi. In a Medium post, Harding (an angel investor and former oil and gas entrepreneur) recalled how he an Moradi had been discussing the need for an Oklahoma-based venture capital fund back in 2017.
They’d planned to launch the firm — which makes seed and Series A investments — just about a year ago, and the pandemic only gave them a greater sense of urgency.
“With the pandemic threatening Oklahoma’s economy, more attention than ever was placed on the need to diversify our economy and create future-ready tech jobs,” Harding said. “There was also a sense that innovation and startups would multiply, and that technology disruption and adoption would accelerate. In fact, we contend that there has never been a better time to start a new company. Our investors sensed this too.”
Although the firm’s first fund only recent hit its cap of $20 million, it has already invested in nine startups including text marketing company RespondFlow in Tulsa, Dallas-based Socialwyze (which helps underemployed people find flexible work) and hybrid materials startup Mito Material Solutions in Stillwater.
Cortado was created with the thesis that the region was “underfunded,” but Harding told me it doesn’t have any geographic restrictions on investments.
“We look at companies from anywhere,” he said. “We care more about what the companies does and less about where they’re located.”
Harding suggested that Oklahoma is particularly rich in entrepreneurs with a background in traditional industries like energy, aerospace, agriculture and manufacturing. And being based in Oklahoma City hasn’t stopped Cortado from backing founders from diverse backgrounds — he said the majority of the portfolio is led by women, people of color and first-generation immigrants.
Asked whether the regional ecosystem will also need more later-stage firms to fund the growth of successful startups, Harding said, “Funding at the early stage is often very local, but funding at later stages, once you get to nine figure valuations — you’re a known commodity. Once you’re getting to a Series C and D […] you have a global market for investments.”
Zapp, one of a number of startups currently battling it out in London and beyond by promising to let you order everyday items on-demand from its own delivery-only stores, has quietly raised a new round of funding from leading VCs, TechCrunch has learned.
According to multiple sources, Silicon Valley’s Lightspeed and Europe’s Atomico (the VC firm started by Skype founder Niklas Zennström) have invested in Zapp’s unannounced Series A. Those same sources have also confirmed that Zapp has raised around $100 million in total, including via an earlier seed round.
In addition to Lightspeed and Atomico, other investors in Zapp include 468 Capital, and Burda, alongside notable angels such as Mato Peric, Christopher North (former Amazon UK CEO), and Stefan Smalla (Westwing CEO). One source tells me that the startup’s Series A is the first deal that consumer-focused partner, Sasha Astafyeva, has led on Atomico’s behalf since joining the London-headquartered VC firm.
“We’re relentlessly focused on delighting our customers and generally do not comment on our capital structure. We are excited to bring Zapp to millions of customers in London and beyond this year,” said Zapp, in a statement issued to TechCrunch when asked about the Series A and list of investors.
Started last summer, Zapp’s founders are Joe Falter, who was part of the founding team at Jumia where he led the on-demand services business through to the group’s IPO, and Navid Hadzaad, who most recently was a product leader at Amazon’s Seattle HQ after founding GoButler and scaling several ventures at Rocket Internet. The leadership team also spans ex-employees of Deliveroo, Just Eat, Dominoes and Tesco, to name just a few.
Zapp operates a vertical or “dark store” model, seeing it set up its own micro fulfillment centers. They include several locations in London already: Kensington, Chelsea, Fulham, Notting Hill, Hammersmith, Shepherd’s Bush, Shoreditch, Islington and Angel.
Shunning the gig economy model used by companyies like Deliveroo, Zapp employs its riders directly. It also emphasises sustainability and utilises an all-electric fleet.
From what we can glean online and through conversations with sources, Zapp also looks to be focusing less on fresh food/groceries and more on convenience a la goPuff in the U.S., thus targeting impulse purchases rather than trying to usurp the traditional grocery shop. This is in contrast to many of the other dark store competitors, although there is clearly cross-over in all of the offerings from a multitude of players.
Alongside Zapp, dark store operators in London alone include Getir, Gorillas, Jiffy, Dija and Weezy — with some also raising and deploying significant amounts of capital, including, in some instances, employing heavy discounting as the land grab accelerates.
Independent music distribution platform and tool factory UnitedMasters has raised a $50M series B round led by Apple. A16z and Alphabet are participating again in this raise. United Masters is also entering a strategic partnership with Apple alongside this investment.
If you’re unfamiliar with UnitedMasters, it’s a distribution company launched in 2017 by Steve Stoute, a former Interscope and Sony Music executive. The focus of UnitedMasters is to provide artists with a direct pipeline to data around the way that fans are interacting with their content and community, allowing them to connect more directly to offer tickets, merchandise and other commercial efforts. UnitedMasters also generally allows artists to retain control of their own masters.
Neither of these conditions are at all typical in the music industry. In a typical artist deal, recording companies retain all audience and targeting data as well as masters. This limits an artist’s ability to be agile, taking advantage of new technologies to foster a community.
While Apple does invest in various companies, it typically does so out of its Advanced Manufacturing Fund to promote US manufacturing or strategically in partners that make critical components of its hardware like silicon foundries or glass manufacturing. Apple does a lot more purchasing than investing, typically, buying a company every few weeks or so to supplement one product effort or another. UnitedMasters, then, would be a relatively unique partnership, especially in the music space.
I spoke to UnitedMasters CEO Steve Stoute about the deal and what it means for the businesses 1M current artists and new ones. Stoute credits Apple executive Eddy Cue having a philosophy aligned with the UnitedMasters vision with getting this deal done.
“We want all artists to have the same opportunity,” says Stoute. “Currently, independent artists have less opportunity for success and we’re trying to remove that stigma.”
This infusion, Stoute says, will be used to hire talent that are mission oriented to take UnitedMasters global. They’re seeking local technical talent and artists talent to build out the platform worldwide.
“Every artist needs access to a CTO,” Stoute says. “Some of the value of what a manager is today for an artist needs to be transferred to that role.”
UnitedMasters wants to provide that technical edge at scale, allowing artists to build out their fanbase at a community level.
Currently, UnitedMasters has deals with the NBA, ESPN, TikTok, Twitch and others that allow artists to tap big brand deals that would normally be brokered by a label and manager. It also has a direct distribution app that allows publishing to all of the major streaming services. Most importantly, they can check stream, fan and earnings data at a glance.
“Steve Stoute and UnitedMasters provide creators with more opportunities to advance their careers and bring their music to the world,” said Apple’s Eddy Cue in a release statement. “The contributions of independent artists play a significant role in driving the continued growth and success of the music industry, and UnitedMasters, like Apple, is committed to empowering creators.”
“UnitedMasters has completely transformed the way artists create, retain ownership in their work, and connect with their fans,” said Ben Horowitz, Co-Founder and General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz in a release. “We are excited to work with Steve and team to build a better, bigger, and far more profitable world for musical artists.”
We are currently at an inflection point in the way that artists and fans connect with one another. Though there have been seemingly endless ways for artists to get their messages out or speak to fans using social media and other platforms, the actual business of distributing work to a community and making money from that work has been out of their hands completely since the beginning of the recording industry. Recent developments like NFTs, DAOs and social tokens, as well as an explosion of DTC frameworks have begun to re-write that deal. But the major players have yet to make the truly aggressive strides they need to in order to embrace this ‘artist centric’ new world.
The mechanics of distribution have been based on a framework defined by DRM and the DMCA for decades. This framework was always marketed as a way to protect value for the artist but was in fact architected to protect value for the distributor. We need a rethinking of the entire distribution layer.
As I mentioned when reporting the UnitedMasters + TikTok deal, it’s going to be instrumental in a more equitable future for artists:
It’s beyond time for the creators of The Culture to benefit from that culture. That’s why I find this UnitedMasters deal so interesting. Offering a direct pipeline to audiences without the attendant vulture-ism of the recording industry apparatus is really well-aligned with a platform like TikTok, which encourages and enables “viral sounds” with collaborative performances. Traditional deal structures are not well-suited to capturing viral hype, which can rise and fall within weeks without additional fuel.
In music, Apple is at the center of this maelstrom along with a few other major players like Spotify. One of the big misses in recent years for Apple Music, in my opinion, was Apple’s failure to turn Apple Music Connect into an industry-standard portal that allowed artists to connect broadly with fans, distribute directly, sell tickets and merchandise but — most importantly — to foster and own their community.
A UnitedMasters tie up isn’t a straight line to that goal, but it’s definitely got the ingredients. I’m looking forward to seeing what this produces.
Image Credits: Steve Stoute
imToken, the blockchain tech startup and crypto wallet developer, announced today it has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Qiming Venture Partners. Participants included returning investor IDG Capital, and new backers Breyer Capital, HashKey, Signum Capital, Longling Capital, SNZ and Liang Xinjun, the co-founder of Fosun International.
Founded in 2016, the startup’s last funding announcement was for its $10 million Series A, led by IDG, in May 2018. imToken says its wallet for Ethereum, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies now has 12 million users and over $50 billion in assets are currently stored on its platform, with total transaction value exceeding $500 billion.
The company was launched in Hangzhou, China, before moving to it current headquarters to Singapore, and about 70% of its users are in mainland China, followed by markets including South Korea, the United States and Southeast Asia.
imToken will use its latest funding to build features for “imToken 3.0.” This will include keyless accounts, account recovery and and a suite of decentralized finance services. It also plans to expand its research arm for blockchain technology, called imToken Labs and open offices in more countries. It currently has a team of 78 people, based in mainland China, the United States and Singapore, and expects to increase its headcount to 100 this year.
In a press statement, Qiming Venture Partners founding managing partner Duane Kuang said, “In the next ten to twenty years, blockchain will revolutionize the financial industry on a global scale. We believe that imToken is riding this trend, and has strongly positioned itself in the market.”
