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Accounting isn’t a topic that most people can get excited about — probably not even most accountants. But if you’re running any kind of business, there’s just no way around it. Santa Clara-based Docyt wants to make the life of small and medium business owners (and their accounting firms) a bit easier by using machine learning to handle a lot of the routine tasks around collecting financial data, digitizing receipts, categorization and — maybe most importantly — reconciliation.
The company today announced that it has raised a $1.5 million seed-extension round led by First Rays Venture Partners with participation from Morado Ventures and a group of angel investors. Docyt (pronounced ‘docket’) had previously raised a $2.2 million seed round from Morado Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Westwave Capital, Xplorer Capital, Tuesday and angel investors. The company plans to use the new investment to accelerate its customer growth.
At first glance, it may seem like Docyt competes with the likes of QuickBooks, which is pretty much the de facto standard for small business accounting. But Docyt co-founder and CTO Sugam Pandey tells me that he thinks of the service as a partner to the likes of QuickBooks.
Image Credits: Docyt
“Docyt is a product for the small business owners who finds accounting very complex, who are very experienced on howto run and grow their business, but not really an expert in accounting. At the same time, businesses who are graduating out of QuickBooks — small business owners sometimes become mid-sized enterprises as well — […] they start growing out of their accounting systems like QuickBooks and looking for more sophisticated systems like NetSuite and Sage. And Docyt fits in in that space as well, extending the life of QuickBooks for such business owners so they don’t have to change their systems.”
In its earliest days, Docyt was a secure document sharing platform with a focus on mobile. Some of this is still in the company’s DNA, with its focus on being able to pull in financial documents and then reconciling that with a business’ bank transactions. While other systems may put the emphasis on transaction data, Docyt’s emphasis is on documents. That means you can forward an emailed receipt to the service, for example, and it can automatically attach this to a financial transaction from your credit card or bank statement (the service uses Plaid to pull in this data).
Image Credits: Docyt
For new transactions, you sometimes have to train the system by entering some of this information by hand, but over time, Docyt should be able to do most of this automatically and then sync your data with QuickBooks.
“Docyt is the first company to apply AI across the entire accounting stack,” said Amit Sridharan, Founding General Partner at First Rays Venture Partners. “Docyt software’s AI-powered data extraction, auto categorization and auto reconciliation is unparalleled. It’s an enterprise-level, powerful solution that’s affordable and accessible to small and medium businesses.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/25/docyt-raises-1-5m-for-its-ml-based-accounting-automation-platform/
The Coinbase S-1 is out! And hot damn, did the company have a good fourth quarter.
TechCrunch has a first look at the company’s headline numbers. But in case you’ve been busy, the key things to understand are that Coinbase was an impressive company in 2019 with more than a half-billion in revenue and a modest net loss. In 2020, the company grew sharply to more than $1.2 billion in revenue, providing it with lots of net income.
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The company’s Q4 2020 was about as big as its entire 2019 in revenue terms, albeit much more profitable because the sum was concentrated in a single quarter instead of spread out over four.
However, beyond the top-level numbers are a host of details to explore. I want to dig more deeply into Coinbase’s user numbers, its asset mix, its growing subscription incomes, its competitive landscape and who owns what in the company. At the end, we’ll riff on a chart that discusses the correlation between crypto assets and the stock market, just for fun.
Sound good? You can read along in the S-1 here if you want, and I will provide page numbers as we go.
Inside Coinbase’s direct listing
To make things simpler, we’ll frame our digging in the form of questions, starting with: How many users did Coinbase need to generate its huge 2020 revenue gains?
The answer: not as many as I expected. In 2019, Coinbase generated $533.7 million from what it describes as 1 million “Monthly Transacting Users” (page 14). That works out to $533.7 million in revenue per MTU for the year.
In 2020, Coinbase generated $1.28 billion in revenue off of 2.8 million MTUs, which works out to around $457 apiece during the year. That’s a bit lower, but not terribly so. And given that the company’s transaction margins ranged in the mid-80s percent during much of 2020, each Coinbase active trader was still quite valuable, even at a lower revenue point.
As we noted in our first look at the company’s economics, Coinbase’s metrics are highly variable. Its MTU figure is no exception. Observe the following chart from its S-1 filing (page 95):
Coinbase’s Q1 2018 was nearly as popular in MTU terms as its final quarter of 2020. And from that point in time, the company’s MTUs fell 70 percent to its Q1 2019 nadir. That’s a lot of variance.
The company itself notes in its filing that “MTUs have historically been correlated with both the price of Bitcoin and Crypto Asset Volatility,” though the company does point out that it expects such correlations to diminish over time.
The answer to our question is that it only takes a few million MTUs for Coinbase to be a huge business. But the other side of that point is that Coinbase has shown twice in two years (2018, 2019) that the number of traders on its platform can decline.
What assets do Coinbase users hold? This is a question that I am sure many of you crypto enthusiasts have. But first, what does the Coinbase user asset base look like? Like this, historically (page 96):
Holy shit, right? The chart shows two things. First, the rapid appreciation of cryptocurrencies overall, which you can spy in the upward kick of the black line. And then the blue bars show how the assets on Coinbase’s platform grew from $17 billion at the start of 2020 to $90 billion by year’s end.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/25/five-takeaways-from-coinbases-s-1/
The executive who built the financial services boutique for Paytm, India’s most valuable startup, from the ground is ready to do something similar all over again.
Pravin Jadhav, the former chief executive of Paytm Money, revealed on Thursday his own startup, Raise Financial Services.
This time, Jadhav — under whose leadership, Paytm had amassed over 6 million Money customers — is focusing on serving a different set of the population.
Hundreds of millions of users in India today don’t have access to financial services. They don’t have a credit card, banks don’t lend to them, and they have never purchased an insurance cover or invested in mutual funds or stocks.
Scores of large firms and startups in India today are attempting to reach these users by building an underwriting technology that can use alternative data to determine an applicant’s credit worthiness. It’s a tough and capital intensive business, built on pillars of uncertainties, assumptions and hopes.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Jadhav said Raise Financial Services is aimed at customers living in metro, tier 1 and tier 2 cities (so very much in and around urban cities). “They want financial products, they are literate about these products, but they are not being served the way they should be,” he said.
Pravin Jadhav, left, poses with Paytm founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma. Jadhav left Paytm last year.
He said his new startup will offer products across financial services including investing, financing, insurance, wealth, and payments. “Just not doing the banking part, as I believe that is more of an infrastructure play,” he said.
“The idea is to offer great exceptional products that are not being offered by anyone. Number 2: Focus a lot on tech-driven distribution. And third is that today the quality of customer service experience is bad across the market. So we are trying to solve that,” he said. “Over time, we will try to stitch all of this together.”
Jadhav also announced he has raised a Seed financing round. He did not disclose the amount, but revealed enough high-profile names, including: Kunal Shah (Cred), Kalyan Krishnamurthi (Flipkart), Amod Malviya and Sujeet Kumar (Udaan), Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari (PhonePe), Amrish Rau (Pine Labs, Citrus Pay), Sandeep Tandon (Freecharge), Jitendra Gupta (Jupiter), Girish Mathrubootham (Freshworks), Nischal Shetty (WazirX), Kuldeep Dhankar (Clevertap), Sreevatsa Prabhakar (Servify), and Amit Bhor (Walnut).
Jadhav himself is also investing, and venture investor Mirae Asset Venture is leading the round, with participation from Multi-Act Private Equity, Blume Ventures (via its Founder’s Fund) and US based early-stage investor Social Leverage, for which it is the first investment in India.
Ashish Dave, CEO of Mirae Asset Venture’s India business, told TechCrunch that even though he had known Jadhav, it was listening to him at various Clubhouse sessions that prompted him to reach out to Jadhav.
Jadhav said users can expect the startup’s first product to be live by the end of the year. (TechCrunch understands it’s shipping much sooner. Raise Financial Services’ offerings will have some similarities with SoFi and Goldman Sachs’ Marcus.)
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/25/pravin-jadhav-raise-financial-services-startup/
Dawn Belt has been working with top tech companies for two decades, most recently helping commercial electric vehicle company Proterra go public as a SPAC in January.
Now she’ll be joining us at TC Early Stage in April to talk about building a company in 2021, from however you incorporate to however you decide to maybe go public one day.
As a partner at Fenwick & West, a top Silicon Valley law firm, Belt works with startups of all ages, sizes and industries (two of her past IPOs include Facebook and Bill.com). She has also written legal perspectives on a wide range of other topics that startups face, including implications of the CARES Act, board diversity legal requirements and how to manage acquired startups successfully. She also co-authored the firm’s Gender Diversity Survey, an in-depth report on women’s participation at senior levels of public tech companies.
She’ll be at Early Stage to share her experiences old and new, to help you make better decisions now for your company. The talk is part of the two days of events that explore seed and Series A fundraising, recruiting and more for early-stage startups at TC Early Stage – Operations and Fundraising on April 1 & 2. Grab your ticket now before prices increase tomorrow!
Monetizable mood boards might sound like the moonshot idea that no one asked for, but when you think about it, the vision is already informally happening in various corners of the internet. A young generation of users shops with community in mind, whether that’s buying merchandise from your favorite influencers or giving into those Instagram advertisements after spending way too much time on the grid.
As more users think of shopping as a social, digital-first activity, The Landing, a seed-stage startup coming out of stealth, is hoping to win over those who have an affinity for designing homes and spaces. On The Landing, users can create, and shop from, room designs to help furnish their homes.
Image Credits: The Landing
“There’s no contextually rich, visual shopping destination, where you could curate and discover and share and shop all in one place,” co-founder Miri Buckland said. The Landing hopes to be that destination.
Started by Buckland and Ellie Buckingham, The Landing is launching with $2.5 million in financing, in a round led by Aileen Lee at Cowboy Ventures. Lee will be taking a board seat. Other investors include Dara Treseder, the CMO of Peloton, Manish Chandra and Tracy Sun, the founders of Poshmark, Unshackled, Designer Fund, and Progression Fund.
The Landing began as a pandemic pivot. Buckland and Buckingham were always interested in solving the pain point of contextual furnishing for users, but began by physically moving people into apartments and helping them set up different furniture. Then, the pandemic hit and limited the ability to do high-touch services. Buckingham says that this was “potentially the best forcing function” to focus on what kind of business The Landing wanted to be.
“I don’t need to be the person moving into your apartment with a couch,” she said. “It was about the importance of empowering creativity and empowering individuals to create digital and physical spaces.” That’s when they dropped the moving service business, and instead used furnishing as a vector to solve the problem of contextual and social e-commerce.
It’s a smart idea that has not gone unnoticed. Houzz, a Sequoia-backed home improvement startup, connects users to products from third-party retailers as well as services from architects, designers, or contractors. There’s also Modsy, which has raised north of $70 million to date, which helps users virtually redesign their homes.
Buckingham worked for Modsy when she was at business school, where she first started noticing that she disagreed with the startups’ main thesis.
“Their motto was basically a digital rendition of an existing human service,” she said. “And I came away from the experience not super convinced that the service model was the scalable, future answer to consumerization of access to design.” She noticed that the younger generation was looking for a self-serve, customizable answer, instead.
Miri Buckland and Ellie Buckingham, the co-founders of The Landing.
The Landing is launching with creative tooling capabilities, which allow users to build and design spaces within its platform. In the coming months, the team is focused on adding a social layer atop the design tool, with features like profiles, discovery, fede, and commenting.
The Landing’s Slack channel is currently being used to discuss these features and what is most in-demand from early users.
The founders aren’t worried about a lack of demand, or only being a platform for the few times that people furnish their homes throughout their lifespan. As Buckland pointed out, people browse Zillow all the time, and have Reddit channels about dream homes, creating designs, and more. The startup is aiming to serve that population as well — the dreamers and not just the realists.
