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Messaging platform Telegram, which recently passed 500 million monthly active users but still isn’t monetizing all the digital chatter it hosts — has taken in a little more funding to keep its engines ticking over.

Mubadala Investment Company, the Abu Dhabi-based sovereign investor, is throwing in $75M in exchange for 5-year pre-IPO convertible bonds of Telegram — with Abu Dhabi Catalyst Partners investing a further $75M, the pair said today in a press release.

The investment is touted as a strategic partnership, with Mubadala anticipating benefits for Abu Dhabi’s startup ecosystem by having a local Telegram presence drawing in skills and talent to the capital.

Per Reuters Telegram will be opening an office in Abu Dhabi following the investment — building out its regional presence from a Dubai, UAE base.

Commenting in a statement, Pavel Durov, Telegram founder and CEO, said: “We are honoured by the $150M investment into Telegram from Mubadala and Abu Dubai Catalyst Partners. We look forward to developing this strategic partnership to continue our growth in the MENA region and globally.”

To date, Telegram has been bankrolled over a seven+ year lifespan by Durov, who made ~$300M from selling his stake in the vk social network he also founded — aka Russia’s ‘Facebook’ — back in 2015.

But sustaining a messaging platform with half a billion users can’t be done through billionaire bootstrapping alone.

Some additional investment did come in via Telegram’s recent attempt to launch a blockchain platform. However the effort was derailed by US regulators last year — forcing it to refund most (but not all) of the money it had booked for the failed TON platform — so speculation over how Telegram will monetize its platform goes on.

In recent weeks Durov has responded to this chatter via his public Telegram channel to confirm he’s considering introducing ads for “large one-to-many channels” — but pledging he won’t do so in chats.

He has also rejected the notion of using user data to target ads — a move that would undermine the loud privacy promises Telegram repeatedly makes to users to put clear blue water between its platform and the (Facebook-owned) data-mining competition.

“Users will be able to opt out of ads, but I do think that privacy-conscious ads are a good way for channel owners to monetize their efforts — as an alternative to donations or subscriptions, which we are also working to offer them,” Durov wrote last month.

Telegram’s usage has, meanwhile, continued to swell this year — boosted by users switching from Facebook-owned WhatsApp over privacy concerns. So there’s limited room for copycat monetization, unless Durov is willing to trash his personal ‘pro-privacy, pro-user’ brand. To say that’s highly unlikely is an understatement.

Nonetheless, he has further limited his options by rejecting a series of investment offers in recent months.

A report in Russian press earlier this year said he’d rejected an investment offer for a 5%-10% stake in the company that had valued it at $30BN. We’ve also been told he rejected a higher offer that had valued Telegram at $35BN — and another of $4BN at a $40BN pre-money valuation.

“Durov is afraid of investors of any kind,” one source told us on why he refused to give up any equity.

Debt financing seems to be Telegram’s preferred route at this stage. Back in January The Information reported that it was discussing raising up to $1BN in debt financing from with banks and investors — which would convert to shares in an eventual public offering.

That debt route — via pre-IPO convertible bonds — is now taking shape with today’s investment news out of Abu Dhabi. Although $150M is a lot less than the rumoured $1BN so this may be just an initial tranche. (And may in fact be needed to pay back TON investors’ whose refunds are falling due.)

But with a couple of debt backers sticking their necks out to take a punt on Durov’s anti-establishment alternative — and on the chance of an Telegram IPO by 2026 — the company is in a better position to get buy in from other debt funders, including in the region as it deepens its geographical commitment to the Middle East.

One key attraction for Telegram backers is likely to be its agile product dev. There Durov has repeatedly shown he can deliver — growing usage of his platform with the help of a steady pipeline of user-focused features.

Efforts on the product side at this stage look geared towards pivoting into a Patreon-style platform for content creators to build communities of followers willing to pay for their content (which would thereby enable Telegram to monetize by taking a cut as commission).

“Our end goal is to establish a new class of content creators — one that is financially sustainable and free to choose the strategy that is best for their subscribers,” wrote Durov last month. “Traditional social networks have exploited users and publishers for far too long with excessive data collection and manipulative algorithms. It’s time to change this.”

Just over a month later his channel lit up again with more product news — this time capitalizing on the buzz around social audio with the announcement of the launch of a Clubhouse-clone on Telegram channels dubbed “voice chats 2.0”.

He also announced feature that lets admins of channels and public groups host voice chats for millions of live listeners — taking the cap off the earlier feature. “No matter how popular your talk gets, new people will be able to tune in. It’s like public radio reinvented fo the 21st century,” Telegram’s blog post enthused.

Durov had more developments to tease: One-to-many video broadcasts that will see the platform let users host their own ‘TV stations’ which he said will be coming this “spring”. So Telegram continues to evolve as the social app landscape shifts.

Commenting on the debt financing in a statement, James Munce, CFO and COO of Abu Dhabi Catalyst Partners (ADCP), lauded Telegram’s management team’s “unshakeable dedication to building a platform centred around privacy and user experience”.

“We believe this creates a strong value proposition and will be a focal point for social media platforms and a new era of messaging,” he added.

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Buying and selling residential real estate is a complex business, no matter where you live. A slew of startups in the United States are focused on streamlining that process for people. But in Brazil, where no MLS exists, the challenge of digitizing real estate is even greater.

One startup that has set out to serve as a “one-stop shop” for Brazilians to help them manage the home buying and selling process has managed to attract one of the largest — if not the largest — funding rounds ever raised by a Brazilian startup.

This morning, digital real estate platform Loft announced it has closed on $425 million in Series D funding led by New York-based D1 Capital Partners. A mix of new and existing investors also participated in the round, including Advent, Altimeter, DST, Silver Lake, Soros, Tarsadia, Tiger Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Caffeinated, Fifth Wall, Monashees, QED and Vulcan, among others.

The round values Loft at $2.2 billion, a huge jump from its being just near unicorn territory in January 2020, when it raised a $175 million Series C.

A round of this size is impressive for any startup, but especially for one that was founded just over three years ago in Latin America. The region has seen explosive growth as of late, with a maturing startup scene in Brazil in particular. São Paulo-based Loft too has seen major growth. While the company was less forthcoming about its financials as of late, it told me last year that it had notched “over $150 million in annualized revenues in its first full year of operation” via more than 1,000 transactions.

In 2020, Loft saw the number of listings on its site increase “10 to 15 times,” according to co-founder and co-CEO Mate Pencz. Today, the company actively maintains more than 13,000 property listings in approximately 130 regions across São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, partnering with more than 30,000 brokers. Not only are more people open to transacting digitally, more people are looking to buy versus rent in the country.

“We did more than 6x YoY growth with many thousands of transactions over the course of 2020,” Pencz told TechCrunch. “We’re now growing into the many tens of thousands, and soon hundreds of thousands, of active listings.”

The company’s revenues and GMV (gross merchandise value) also “increased significantly” in 2020, according to Pencz, who declined to provide more specifics. He did say those figures are “multiples higher from where they were,” and that Loft has “a very clear horizon to profitability.”

“Loft has adapted really fast to the new reality we’re living in, with COVID having only propelled or accelerated our growth,” Pencz said.

Pencz and Florian Hagenbuch founded Loft in early 2018 and today serve as its co-CEOs. The aim of the platform, in the company’s words, is “bringing Latin American real estate into the e-commerce age by developing online alternatives to analogue legacy processes and leveraging data to create transparency in highly opaque markets.” The U.S. real estate tech company with the closest model to Loft’s is probably Zillow, according to Pencz.

In the United States, prospective buyers and sellers have the benefit of MLSs, which in the words of the National Association of Realtors, are private databases that are created, maintained and paid for by real estate professionals to help their clients buy and sell property. Loft itself spent years and many dollars in creating its own such databases for the Brazilian market. Besides helping people buy and sell homes, it offers services around insurance, renovations and rentals.

In 2020, Loft also entered the mortgage business by acquiring one of the largest mortgage brokerage businesses in Brazil. The startup now ranks among the top-three mortgage originators in the country, according to Pencz. When it comes to helping people apply for mortgages, he likened Loft to U.S.-based Better.com.

The startup has also grown its number of employees in the past year, growing from 450 last January to 700 today. In particular, it’s significantly beefed up its tech team, according to Pencz.

Image courtesy of Loft

Notably, at the time of its series C, the investment marked the first and only investment in Latin America for Vulcan Capital (the investment arm of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen) and the first and only Brazilian investment for Andreessen Horowitz.

This latest financing brings Loft’s total funding raised to an impressive $700 million. Other backers include Brazil’s Canary and a group of high-profile angel investors such as Max Levchin of Affirm and PayPal, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and David Vélez, CEO and founder of Brazilian fintech Nubank. In addition, Loft has also raised more than $100 million in debt financing through a series of publicly listed real estate funds.

Loft plans to use its new capital in part to expand across Brazil and eventually in Latin America and beyond. The company is also planning to explore more M&A opportunities.

“We’re now going into this year extremely well-capitalized and I think that in addition to doubling down on the core business, there might be strategic acquisitions also on the horizon,” Pencz told TechCrunch. “We also plan to make Loft as much of a regional and potentially global business, following in the footsteps of some of the other Brazilian companies who recently have been expanding globally.”

Dan Sundheim, founder of D1 Capital, said that part of his firm’s approach as investors is identifying opportunities “at the confluence of structural shifts, secular trends and world-class management teams.”

“Analyzing Loft, we were particularly impressed by the team’s focus and relentless execution, which has allowed them to build scale as well as deep data and technology moats in a short amount of time,” he said in a written statement.

Insuretech startup Counterpart, has raised $10 million in funding led by Valor Equity Partners. Also participating was Susa Ventures and Felicis Ventures. Counterpart works in the ‘management liability’ insurance market. Counterpart will also partner with Markel Specialty, a specialty insurance division of Markel Corporation, to offer its management liability insurance products.

Insuretech startups like Oscar, Lemonade, and Root have made incursions into personal insurance. What has been less prevalent, says Counterpart, is startups tackling the $300bn corporate insurance market.

Counterpart is competing with Next Insurance which has raised $631M, and which also provides small business liability insurance, as well as the big insurance carriers, from AIG to Berkshire Hathaway.

Counterpart is used by some wholesale brokers in the United States to allow small to medium businesses get insurance coverage, because it digitizes much of the process, from application submission, coverage selection, binding, claims management, and loss prevention. Counterpart says this market has become less attractive to insurance carriers because of the increasing claims costs and severity, and their lack of digitization of the process.

Tanner Hackett, founder, and CEO, said in a statement: “The $1.2tn insurance industry is going through a digital revolution.. We saw an outsized opportunity with management liability, a critical insurance line in which we have unique expertise.”
 
Valor Equity Partners partner and Counterpart board member Jon Shulkin said: “Counterpart’s platform goes beyond the scope of a traditional insurer, layering in insights, tools, and services to help business stakeholders navigate this extremely challenging operating environment.”

Valor was an early backer of Tesla, SpaceX, Addepar, and GoPuff. Susa has previously backed Robinhood, PolicyGenius, and Newfront Insurance. Felicis has funded Hippo, Plaid, and Credit Karma.

Digital identity services — used as a key link between organizations to verify that you are who you say you are online and individuals logging into those services — have come into their own in this past year. The pandemic has precipitated a shift where many services we might have used in person are now accessible via the web and apps, but at the same time, the amount of cybercrime aimed at abusing that environment is on the rise, and both trends fuel a stronger demand for ID verification tools. Now, one of the companies that provides digital identity products is announcing a large round of funding, underscoring both the market size and its ambitions to be a central player in that space.

Jumio, which has built a platform that provides a variety of digital identity tools and technology — using biometrics, machine learning, computer vision, big data, and more to run checks on ID documents, log-ins, suspicious financial activity, prevent identity theft and more — has closed a $150 million round of funding, money that it will use to build more tools available on its platform, and to double down on customer growth after a big year for the company.

Currently, the company’s primary business is B2B: it provides tools to enterprise customers like HSBC to manage digital identity verification. Some of the areas where it will be investing include expanding its AI capabilities to do more anti-money laundering work, and to look at building a B2C product, using the data, tools and network of customers that it has to help individuals better manage their identities online.

“I think the big thing is that the foundation of the internet is identity not anonymity,” said CEO Robert Prigge in an interview, who said the trend of digital transformation has spurred that chane. “It’s been a big shift over the last couple of years. People wanted to originally hide behind anonymity, but now identify is the keystone. Whether it’s online banking or social networks, you need to be able to establish trust remotely.”

Of course, anonymity still is there, just in a different form: data protection regulations are all about making sure that we can stay private if we so choose as we use the tools that are now the norm. That presents the challenge and opportunity for a company like Jumio: how to navigate the push for identity while still providing a way to do that with privacy protections in mind.

The funding is coming from a single investor, Great Hill Partners, which will be joining Centana and Millennium as shareholders in the company. The valuation is not being disclosed but CEO Robert Prigge noted a few details that he believes point to the company’s position right now.

He confirmed that Jumio made $100 million in revenues last year; this is the first money the company has raised in nearly five years after bringing in a modest $16 million in 2016; and this looks to be the largest single round ever raised for a digital identity company.

However, given the market environment and the advances of tech, there has been quite a lot of momentum in the space, and a number of other digital identity and anti-money laundering (AML) prevention startups have been launching, growing and raising money — they include just in the last year ForgeRock ($96 million round), Onfido ($100 million), Payfone ($100 million), ComplyAdvantage ($50 million), Ripjar ($36.8 million) Truework ($30 million), Zeotap ($18 million), Persona ($17.5 million) — so I wouldn’t be surprised if this is not an outlier at the end of the day. Acquisitions like Equifax buying Kount earlier this year, meanwhile, point to encroaching competition from other areas like credit rating agencies.

Jumio is notable among this group for being one of the bigger and older players. Prigge said that currently has around 1,000 customers, including some of the very biggest enterprises like the banking group HSBC, United Airlines and the telecoms operator Singtel, and it is active in 200 countries.

It’s also notable for having developed a platform approach, where it offers a range of different kinds of tools. This is in contrast to many others, which — partly as newer entrants — are focusing on more specific technology or addressing a narrower aspect of what is a pretty complex problem. That said, the company’s earliest work seems to still be the mainstay of what it does. The number of documents that it can “read” to begin the process of verifying users now numbers about 3,500. That has propelled more than 300 million verifications made on Jumio’s platform.

“Almost all vendors verify you are who you say you are, not that it’s really you. That is why the biometrics is so important.
In our case we see it as a holistic onboarding,” Prigge said. “We are one of the only AML and KYC [know your customer] providers.” The AML tools came by way of an acquisition the company made last year, of Beam Solutions.

This funding round, nevertheless, is a big step up for a company that has, in fact, seen a lot of ups and downs.

To be very clear Prigge is very explicit when he says that the Jumio he runs has nothing to do with an older incarnation of the company.

Jumio the first came into existence around a decade ago and raised nearly $40 million in funding from investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Eduardo Saverin as an early player in mobile payments, with technology that could use the camera on a phone to scan cards and IDs to enable the payments. That business ran into a lot of hot water for mis-stating financial results and mostly likely other related things, and eventually it filed for bankruptcy in March 2016. Saverin apparently wanted to buy the business — if only to encourage other buyers to come out of the woodwork — eventually Centana did, at a bargain price of $850,000.

While that took a portion of the business (mainly branding, a business concept and some employees) out of bankruptcy, the legacy Jumio remained in a bankruptcy process is, almost exactly five years to the date, still ongoing, partly because the original founder is being accused of destroying documents needed to finally conclude that mess. 

The fact that Great Hill Partners is doing the investing here is notable. It’s mostly a PE firm that has been doing an increasing amount of investing in tech companies, which is part of a bigger trend, where more PE firms are getting involved in rounds for later-stage startups.

“Jumio has an incredible foundation – an expert management team, deep product roadmap and a global reach that is positioning the company for significant growth as the volume of online transactions and interactions, and associated fraud, is reaching record-highs. In particular, we have deep conviction in the company’s AI-enabled identity verification solution Jumio Go and KYC orchestration platform,” said Nick Cayer, partner at Great Hill Partners, in an emailed interview. “Jumio will need to both keep pace with incredible demand for online identity verification services, and of course outlast new and evolving competition in the space. We have strong conviction that Jumio has the right management team, innovative product roadmap and group of supporting investors to maintain leadership in the space.”